1:49 The News 10:37 Security Update 21:47 Bi-Weekly Wanderings 45:39 Announcements & Outro
First up in the news, Raspberry PI Zero 2 W, Xorg has something new, SUSE goes Edge, A new MX linux, and Microsoft Blunders
In security, an NPM library gets hijacked, Proton will not retain your data, Firefox implements GPC, and black Friday scams abound
Then in our Wanderings, Joe tries his hand at tv repair, Norbert plays with legos, Tony shops for a new pc, and Josh gets a new throne
As the first episode of the Linus Tech Tips Linux gaming challenge isn't on Youtube I can't talk about it yet but Linus and Luke did talk about their experience on the a recent WAN Show
Last month Apple announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs while already the very latest Linux patches originally written for the Apple M1 that launched last year paired with some small changes is allowing the open-source platform to boot on the M1 Pro MacBook.
Hector Martin with the Asahi Linux project has been working on bringing up Apple's newest hardware under Linux via crowd-funding. Today he was able to get Linux booted to a shell on the M1 Pro MacBook with working USB ports. With some changes on top of all the other Linux M1 work carried out over the past year by Hector and others, he was able to achieve this milestone relatively quickly.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Fedora come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
Steam is a video game cross-platform that Valve created. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games and expanded to include games from third-party publishers and now boasts a library filled with thousands if not tens of thousands of games across all gaming consoles.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Steam on your Fedora 35 desktop.
The wait is over! Fedora Linux 35 has been released! If you are a newbie who wants to install and test the latest version of Fedora, then we are here to help you in setting up the operating system. This step by step guide explains how to download latest the Fedora 35 workstation edition, and then how to install Fedora 35 with screenshots.
What's new in Fedora 35?
Fedora 35 comes with Gnome 41 and improves the support for power management. It ships with Linux Kernel 5.14 which improves the support of GPUs and USB4.
Improvements have also been made to pipe wire which is the default audio system since Fedora 34. The system libraries and the programming languages have also been updated to the latest versions, so the users have the latest packages ready to be used. For more details, check the Fedora 35 release announcement.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Linux Kernel 5.15 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Linux kernel 5.15 was released on October 31st, 2021, and it brings some interesting new features, such as a new NTFS file system implementation that doesn’t require you to rely on third-party software like NTFS-3G to fully manage your NTFS formatted external disk drives.
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 Linux Kernel 5.15 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.
Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language. Scala’s static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM and JavaScript runtimes let you build high-performance systems with easy access to huge ecosystems of libraries. So, you will learn how to install Scala 3 on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8
It is a strong statically typed general-purpose programming language which supports both object-oriented programming and functional programming
Installing Scala means installing various command-line tools such as the Scala compiler and build tools. In this tutorial we will use the Scala installer tool “Coursier” that automatically installs all the requirements, but you can still manually install each tool.
Coursier is a Maven/Ivy-style dependency resolver/fetcher that has been completely rewritten in Scala. It aspires to be quick and simple to integrate into various environments. Functional programming principles are at the heart of it. It’s main command is cs.
S3 Bucket is an Object Storage Service of AWS. We can use AWS S3 Bucket to host a static website. AWS S3 does not support server-side scripting, but AWS has other resources for hosting dynamic websites. To host a static website on Amazon S3, we need to configure an AWS S3 bucket for website hosting and then upload our website content to the bucket we created. When we configure a bucket as a static website, we enable static website hosting.
After we configure our bucket as a static website, we can access the bucket through the AWS Region-specific Amazon S3 website endpoints for our bucket.
To configure our AWS S3 bucket for static website hosting, we are going to use the AWS Management Console in this article.
Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and operates as a Chromium-based browser. Opera offers a clean, modern web browser that is an alternative to the other major players in the Browser race. Its famous Opera Turbo mode and its renowned battery saving mode are the best amongst all known web browsers by quite a margin, along with a built-in VPN and much more.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser on Fedora 35.
Telegram is a popular free cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging system. Telegram is famous for providing end-to-end encrypted video calling, VoIP, file sharing, amongst many other features. One of the main attractions of Telegram, it is unique in having no ties or shared interests with the big social media giants such as Facebook or Twitter. The application is also cross-platform, with app versions available for most operating systems for desktops and mobile/tablet devices.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Telegram client on Fedora 35.
The XFCE desktop environment is one among the several desktop environments that you can install on our Linux system to enhance user experience. It’s one of the earliest desktop environments that was first released in 1996 as a replacement for CDE (Common Desktop Environment).
[ You might also like: 13 Open Source Linux Desktop Environments ]
XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment with a small memory footprint and is easy on your computing resources. It takes up only a tiny fraction of the CPU and memory usage compared to its counterparts such as GNOME and KDE.
This is ideal when it comes to system performance as this avails the available resources to other processes. In addition, XFCE is highly configurable, stable and provides a myriad of built-in plugins to extend functionality.
In this article, we will walk you through the installation of XFCE Desktop on RHEL-based Linux distributions such as Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.
With new uses for computers being discovered every day, disk usage has grown exponentially. Where 40GBs of HDD storage used to suffice for personal computing, now even terabytes of disk storage fail to do the job. All the resources and cache files have started taking up more storage space to perform more functions, and with that, it has brought forth the need for smarter disk utilization. Unlike Windows, Ubuntu 20.04 comes with multiple built-in options to help you with that. Let’s explore those in order to help you start with effective and efficient disc usage management.
Whether you are an experienced Linux administrator or an elite Linux user, dealing with Linux file system errors can be a headache for anyone. However, this headache has a valid prescription if you can pinpoint or identify the filesystem partition that is causing your Linux OS to have performance issues.
Most Linux operating systems come preconfigured with the fsck (file system check) terminal-based utility. This file repair tool requires that the immediate Linux user be familiar with the basic understanding and usage of the Linux command line environment and its associated commands.
In this guide we will learn how to set up Authentication for Mongodb. This guide has been tested on MongoDB version 4.x and 5.x.
The default installation of Mongodb doesn’t have authentication enabled. Often times when you connect to the service you will get a warning like this: Access control is not enabled for the database.
MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented NoSQL database program that uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Server Side Public License. Instead of storing data in tables of rows or columns like SQL databases, each record in a MongoDB database is a document described in BSON, a binary representation of the data. Applications can then retrieve this information in a JSON format.
Most users have a lot of social media, email, and other accounts on the internet. It is very difficult for anyone to manage all their account and passwords. This is where the password manager comes into the picture. Team pass is an open-source password manager that helps you to store and manage all your passwords from the central location. It is a collaborative password manager that allows you to share all stored passwords with team members. You can also set access rights for each user to control them to access only a given set of data.
With FreeBSD’s ongoing migration to git from subversion, the system for updating FreeBSD from source has adapted. This guide will cover getting sources from git, updating them, and how to bisect those sources. It is meant as an introduction to the new mechanics for general users.
In this guide we are going to learn how to install MongoDB 5.0 Community Edition on a Rocky Linux/Centos 8
MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented NoSQL database program that uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Server Side Public License.
MongoDB was built for people building internet and business applications who need to evolve quickly and scale elegantly. Companies and development teams of all sizes use MongoDB for a wide variety of reasons.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux is the upcoming Long term version from Canonical developers, set to be released in April 2022. Although while doing this tutorial to know the steps for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installation on VirtualBox, this Linux was in the beta stage. However, that doesn’t matter even the process will be the same for stable or any old versions of Ubuntu.
Most of the users would already be familiar with VirtualBox, if not, then it is an open-source project from Oracle to run virtual machines on all popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.
The Kubernetes ecosystem has inconsistent ways to expose Secrets to applications in order to allow them to connect to services. Many service providers have their own bespoke methods of binding an application to their services, which can slow down development teams considerably.
The Service Binding Operator remedies this by managing the binding process. This article walks through a simple example of service binding in action using the open source RabbitMQ message broker.
Virtualizor is a powerful web based VPS Control Panel using which a user can deploy and manage VPS on servers with a single click. Virtualizor supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ, Proxmox, Virtuozzo, LXC, etc with an inbuilt hourly billing system.. Virtualizor is designed for you to deploy and manage VPS on servers with a single click. As this module supports non-standard functions, end users can start, stop, restart and manage their VPS. Virtualizor is perfect for operations because it supports OpenVZ, Xen PV, Xen HVM, XenServer, and Linux KVM virtualization. So, in this tutorial we will learn, how to install Virtualizor on centos 8
The Raspberry Pi 4 uses an EEPROM to boot the system. For the best experience getting FCOS to run on the RPi4 please update the EEPROM to the latest version. To check if you have the latest version you can go to the raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom releases page and make sure the version reported by your Raspberry Pi on boot is from around the same date as the last release.
Fedora Linux is community-driven Linux distribution maintained by the Fedora Project which is mainly sponsored by Red Hat a subsidiary of IBM. Fedora is a free, user-friendly, and great Linux distribution to start learning.
Fedora Project brings Fedora Workstation - for laptop and desktops, Fedora Server - run application bare metal or cloud with a Linux server, Fedora lot - focussing for lot ecosystems and Fedora Spins - Alternative desktops for Fedora.
Fedora brings two major releases (stable) every year. Every Fedora release involves two development releases: Rawhide and Branched. Rawhide is the current development version, updated daily basis. Branched is a development branch for pre-release (beta) stabilization. Fedora release reaches End of Life (EOL) for distribution X after the Fedora X+2 release.
The term "cheat sheet" has long been used to refer to listings of commands with quick explanations and examples that help people get used to running them on the Linux command line and understanding their many options.
Most Linux users have, at one time or another, relied on cheat sheets to get them started. There is, however, a tool called "cheat" that comes with a couple hundred cheat sheets and that installs quickly and easily on Fedora and likely many other Linux systems. Read on to see how the cheat command works.
Today we are looking at how to install Synthesizer V Editor 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.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
NetBackup provides high-performance backups and restores for a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and Linux systems. So, in this post you will learn how to install Netbackup.
The collection of clients and media servers managed by a single master is called a NetBackup domain. NetBackup domains can be segregated based on geographic, organizational, performance, or administrative reasons. Sometimes you want to segregate clients into distinct collections for administrative or performance reasons. With NetBackup, you can put each of these separate client groups in its own NetBackup domain. Each domain has its own master and collection of media servers.
We already have the stable version of Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri, however, people looking for a long-term version hardly have switched to it. But don’t forget Impish is the one that going to set a foundation ground for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 – Jammy Jellyfish, the next long-term supported version from Canonical, set to be released in April 2022.
The upcoming Godot 3.4 release will provide a number of new features which have been backported from the 4.0 development branch (see our release policy for details on the various Godot versions). With this third Release Candidate, we have frozen feature development and are nearly ready to release the stable version.
If you already reviewed the changelog for RC 2, you can skip right to the differences between RC 2 and RC 3. It's short, as we mainly fixed a few new and old regressions, as well as input issues caused by changes in macOS Monterey.
Two bits of Vulkan news to cover this morning as there's a new Vulkan version up with a brand new and useful sounding extension for optimization. Plus, NVIDIA released a new Vulkan Beta Driver.
Melvor Idle is an idle / clicker game from developer Malcs and it's one of the most popular in the genre. Currently available in Early Access, it's set to hit 1.0 this month.
No exact set date has been given over than November but they did confirm a big update coming with a new skill, an in-game tutorial, more end-game content, an upgrade to the statistics system and translations to 12 languages. Lots of quality of life upgrades will arrive too including running from combat with loot, a 4th equipment set, all potions to work offline, custom bank sorting and more.
Valve has released another update to the Steam Client Beta and they continue improving Remote Play for Linux players, likely for the upcoming Steam Deck support.
In this release made on November 2, Valve added support for VA-API hardware encoding on Linux, with support for AMD and Intel. You can turn it off with a setting in the Remote Play advanced host settings. Also new is support for DMABUF PipeWire capture on Linux, enabled by launching Steam with -pipewire-dmabuf. It needs you to have the 32-bit libgbm.so.1 also installed. On top of that you can now capture up to 4K using PipeWire on Linux and there's a rare crash fix for streaming from a Linux PC.
DevilutionX is a source available game engine source-port of the classic Diablo and Hellfire, updated for modern platforms and there's a new release out.
The legal status of it remains pretty problematic though, since it was constructed thanks to debugging information left in an old port, which was used to reconstruct the code. With that in mind, it's not open source but both Devilution and DevilutionX seem to have been left alone by Blizzard and it also requires you own a legal copy (available on GOG.com) for the data files.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been doing lots of testing of NetBSD‘s build.sh cross-build system on lots of different platforms. Linux is readily available on AWS, as is FreeBSD. You will find NetBSD and OpenBSD in some AWS locations. It’s more difficult to get the BSDs onto AWS because the standard upload tools detect the filesystems and if they are not on the list, the image is not allowed. The BSD FFS and variants are not on the list.
Fortunately there are other tools and other ways to build images. It’s a little protracted. You need to first build a VM, convert it to VMDK, upload it to S3, create a snapshot and then convert it to an AMI.
Today we join the Knative community to celebrate the biggest milestone of the project. Knative 1.0 is generally available. In this blog post, we briefly retrace the history of Knative, discuss 1.0 features, highlight IBM and Red Hat contributions, and imagine possible future directions.
[...]
Knative as a project started at Google in 2018 to create a serverless substrate on Kubernetes. In addition to dynamic scaling (with the ability to scale to zero in Kubernetes), other original goals of the project include the ability to process and react to CloudEvents, and to build (create) the images for the components of your system.
While the two initial big components survived, the build aspect of Knative was folded into what is now the Tekton CI/CD open source software (OSS) pipelining project part of the CD Foundation. The rest of Knative continued to grow over the past two years, reaching 1.0 today.
In October I was assigned 1.25 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 28.75 hours from earlier months. I worked 14.75 hours and will carry over the remainder.
Canonical has released images of Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 and Ubuntu Core 20 that are optimized with the latest kernel patches for IoT features found on Intel’s Elkhart Lake and 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core CPUs such as TCC and TSN.
Intel-based devices running Ubuntu represent a major chunk of the Internet of Things market, but not all the IoT features found on Intel’s latest processors make it into the Linux kernel. To save embedded developers the trouble of patching and optimizing Ubuntu, Canonical has released a pair of Ubuntu images that are tailored for Intel’s 10nm Elkhart Lake (Atom x6000, Pentium, Celeron N/J) and more powerful 11th Gen Tiger Lake platforms. Optimized images are now available for download for Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 and the more embedded-focused Ubuntu Core 20.
[Michael Lynch] has been a solo developer for over three years now, and has been carefully cataloguing his attempts at generating revenue for himself ever since making the jump to being self-employed. Success is not just hard work; it is partly knowing when the pull the plug on an idea, and [Micheal] has been very open about his adventures in this area. He shares the good news about a DIY project of his that ended up becoming a successful product, complete with dollar amounts and frank observations.
There was a time, not quite so long ago, when a computer was a beige box that sat on your desk. Before that, computers were big enough to double as desks, and even farther back, they took up a whole room. Today? Well today it’s complicated. Single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi put a full desktop experience in the palm of your hand, for a price that would have been unfathomable before the smartphone revolution increased demand for high-performance ARM chips.
[...]
But of course, nothing keeps you from using the WiFiWart for non-security purposes. That’s what has us particularly excited, as you can never have enough open hardware Linux boards. Especially ones this tiny. Removed from its wall charger disguise, the brains of the WiFiWart could be used for all kinds of projects. Plus, not only is the final design open source, but [Walker] made sure to only use free and open source tools to create it. Keeping his entire workflow open means it will be easier for the community to utilize and improve upon his initial design, which in the end, is the whole idea behind the open hardware movement and efforts such as the Hackaday Prize.
At the core of this project is the Raspberry Pi, specifically the 3 B+ model, though with the computational demands of computer vision you might want to bump it up to the latest-and-greatest Pi 4. From there you need to load up OpenCV and a model trained for face detection, which as luck would have it, tends to be a fairly common application for this technology.
The system relies on four VL53L1X time of flight sensors, which have a 16Ãâ16 scanning array and communicate over the I2C bus. Controlling the show is an Arduino MKR1010, though the project should be achievable with a range of other microcontrollers, too.
Naturally, you hop on the web to get answers. If you want to keep your random web browsing separate and private, Firefox Focus is THE companion phone app for all those forget-about-it moments online.
An updated version 0.2.2 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself) is now on CRAN.
I should dub this the ‘due to Brian Ripley’ release. He sent me a detailed five-point email a few days ago which detailed a change I could not have tested (“no access”), a change I would not have known (“somewhat obscure C language bit-level manipulation”), a change I had missed (how my build setup failed for M1mac), another advanced C level fix, and one more simple fix I actually knew. Speechless. The man (I presume) does not sleep and is just so generous with his time and expertise.
Throughout his fiction and nonfiction, Francisco Goldman has mapped the many border lines that pervade his life. Some of his novels have mined his Central American family connections. His journalistic work has uncovered the genocidal policies of the US government and its Guatemalan government collaborators. Sometimes he has adopted the detached demeanor of a forensic investigator looking into horrible crimes.
Since then, attitudes and laws about homosexuality have changed. High-profile figures in business, politics, show business, education, the media, the military and sports have come out of the closet.
Athletes in three of the five major U.S. male team sports – the NBA, NFL and MLS – have come out while still playing, with NFL player Carl Nassib and NHL prospect Luke Prokop coming out in summer 2021. Meanwhile, according to OutSports magazine, at least 185 publicly out LGBTQ athletes – 90% of them women – participated in this summer’s Tokyo Olympic Games, more than in all previous Summer Olympics combined.
Like an increasing number of Internet service providers who have shut down their newsgroup servers, Duke decided to retire its aging Usenet server based on low usage and rising costs.
The decision prompted a handful of calls to the OIT Service Desk and even some chatter in the blogosphere. Duke users can still access Usenet archives -- the largest collection of posted online messages -- through Google Groups.
Some lives have a resolute, earnest design. On the Night of All Souls, in€ two thousand and nine Three elderly women, and two ancient men Prayed in the light of the full moon, and then Cut a hole in a chain-link fence, stepped through the space And onto the€ Kilsap-Bangor Naval Base.
There was Sister Montgomery, now eighty-three “Who’ll€ take on€ this work if we don’t?”€ declared€ she. “That’s what religions were set up to do Though the spirit’s been lost through the ages, it’s true”.
ack during the 2019 Superconference in Pasadena, I had the chance to go to Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach campus to get a look at the James Webb Space Telescope. There is the high-bay class 10,000+ cleanroom in building M8, my wife and I along with fellow space nerd Tom Nardi got a chance to look upon what is likely the most expensive single object ever made. The $10 billion dollar space observatory was undergoing what we thought were its final tests before being packaged up and sent on its way to its forever home at the L2 Lagrange point.
Sadly, thanks to technical difficulties and the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be another two years before JWST was actually ready to ship — not a new story for the project, Mike Szczys toured the same facility back in 2015. But the good news is that it finally has shipped, taking the very, very slow first steps on its journey to space.
Both the terrestrial leg of the trip and the trip through 1.5 million kilometers of space are fraught with peril, of a different kind, of course, but still with plenty of chances for mission-impacting events. Here’s a look at what the priceless and long-awaited observatory will face along the way, and how its minders will endure the “30 days of terror” that lie ahead.
Discourse about race in America often takes on a kind of black-white dichotomy, and the panic over “critical race theory” is no different. We’ve seen images of angry white parents at protests, demanding bans on the teaching of CRT—in every grade from kindergarten to college. We’ve seen bans on teaching Martin Luther King’s writing, or reading books about Ruby Bridges—essentially any discussions of historical or current racism.
“Nearly 40 percent of respondents had never heard of e-rate,” chat messaged meeting attendee Miriam Jorgensen, research director of the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona, referencing an Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, & Museums (ATALM) survey of tribal libraries.
“Many of those who had felt that the program was too complicated to apply for,” she said.
So far, McFadden continued, the university has not offered any research or data to justify the unprecedented departure from normal student housing standards, historical trends, and basic sustainability principles. “Rather,” he said, “as the ‘vision’ of a single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.”
McFadden explains he felt compelled to step down from the Design Review Committee (DRC) after it became clear during an October 5 presentation that the dorm’s plans were already set in stone. “The design was described as 100% complete, approval was not requested, no vote was taken, and no further submittals are intended or required,” he said. “Yet in the nearly fifteen years I served as a consulting architect to the DRC, no project was brought before the committee that is larger, more transformational, and potentially more destructive to the campus as a place than Munger Hall.” This kind of outlandish proposal is exactly why the committee exists, he said.
"The doctors were waiting for the fetus to die. They waited and watched for the fetus' heart to stop beating. She also had a heart that kept beating!"
Public health campaigners on Tuesday accused Pfizer of putting profits over human life after the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant raised its coronavirus vaccine sales projection to $36 billion for 2021, a move that came as the company faced backlash for denying shots to pandemic-ravaged poor countries.
"That Pfizer has been able to earn billions of dollars in revenue in the last three months alone, while failing to provide vaccines to billions of people, is a failure of catastrophic proportions,"€ Patrick Wilcken, head of business and human rights at Amnesty International, said in a statement Tuesday. "Not only has the vast majority of its vaccines gone to high and upper-middle-income countries, but Pfizer has also consistently refused to waive its intellectual property rights and share vaccine technology."
After an FDA advisory panel authorized Pfizer/BioNTech’s pediatric dose for kids ages 5–11 in a 17–0 vote (with one abstention), USA Today (10/28/21) responded with the headline, “Weighing the Risks of Vaccines for Kids: Unknowns Will Make It a Tough Decision for Some.”
If you recall, the U.S. spent much of 2020 freaking out about TikTok's threat to privacy, while oddly ignoring that the company's privacy practices are pretty much the international norm (and ignoring a whole lot of significantly worse online security and privacy problems we routinely do nothing about). More recently there was another moral panic over the idea that TikTok was turning children into immoral thieving hellspawn as part of the Devious licks meme challenge.
In fact, skeuomorphism has been around for quite some time, the first commercial personal computers sporting Graphical User Interface (GUI) was introduced to the world in the 1980s. The Xerox Star, Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh all showcased graphical elements such as a piece of paper with a folded corner to represent a document, a folder to represent a folder (duh), a box containing spreadsheets to be a file, and of course the iconic trash can where deleted files are stored.
A number of publications in September warned about the emergence of “Groove,” a new ransomware group that called on competing extortion gangs to unite in attacking U.S. government interests online. It now appears that Groove was all a big hoax designed to toy with security firms and journalists.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) Cyber Awareness Act would require the SBA to issue a report on its cybersecurity capabilities and notify Congress in the event of a cybersecurity breach potentially compromising sensitive information.
The legislation, sponsored by Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) and Young Kim (R-Calif.), was previously approved by the House in 2019 but failed to be signed into law during the last Congress. It was unanimously passed Tuesday by a vote of 423-0.
The quest to escape commoditisation is pushing the industry towards services. IT has always been a lumpy business, with customers paying large sums of money for new wares once every few years. At the same time hardware and even some software have become low-margin businesses. Subscriptions to services, by contrast, bring more predictable revenues and higher profits. Services are good for buyers, too, argues Pierre Ferragu of New Street, an equity-research firm. In the past a customer might have had to buy an oversized network switch for $10,000. Now it can be had for $3,000, plus $2,000 a year for services. “Everybody is happier,” he explains.
The Daily Mail's report about the attack said among the customers was the current crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and also the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid.
[...]
The attackers behind Conti appeared to be upset about the data of people from the Gulf states being among the victims, saying they would delete all information about the Graff attack from their website.
"Conti guarantees that any information pertaining to members of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar families will be deleted without any exposure and review. Our team apologises to His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman and any other members of the royal families whose names were mentioned in any publication for any inconvenience," it said.
The gang said no further information about the attack had been published, adding that it would implement a more stringent process in future when publishing data after attacks.
In spite of being illegal under international human rights law, actors involved in illegal surveillance are almost never held accountable.
Subjecting students to surveillance tech is nothing new. Most schools have had cameras installed for years. Moving students from desks to laptops allows schools to monitor internet use, even when students aren't on campus. Bringing police officers into schools to participate in disciplinary problems allows law enforcement agencies to utilize the same tech and analytics they deploy against the public at large. And if cameras are already in place, it's often trivial to add facial recognition features.
Digital rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed Facebook's announcement that it plans to jettison its facial recognition system, which critics contend is dangerous and often inaccurate technology abused by governments and corporations to violate people's privacy and other rights.
"Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people's privacy."
Here, the EFF Organizing Team talks to three members of PDX Privacy about how they started, and what they’ve learned fighting for privacy through both advocacy and popular education.
Zoom will start showing ads to users on the video conferencing platforms’ free model as part of a new pilot program, the company said Monday.
For the initial pilot program, ads will only be shown on the browser page users see once they end their meeting using the “free Basic” model.
Only free Basic users will see the ads if they join meetings hosted by other free Basic users, according to Zoom’s blog post.
If Zuckerberg manages to pull this off, it will be the greatest corporate pivot of all time. You could argue Netflix's DVD-to-streaming move was the previous record holder in this department.
But if he doesn't pull it off and Facebook doesn't end up cornering the metaverse market (Epic Games and Roblox are looking pretty well situated right now in that respect), this will be Zuckerberg's New Coke moment.
Last year, Facebook also settled a long-running legal dispute about the way it scans and tags photos.
The case has been ongoing since 2015, and it was agreed the firm would pay $550m (€£421m) to a group of users in Illinois who argued its facial recognition tool was in violation of the state's privacy laws.
Commercial use of face recognition technology presents its own range of privacy and security concerns.
Facebook’s discontinuing of this program, including the reported deleting of over one billion face prints, makes it one of the largest face recognition programs to be ended since the technology was invented. As Facebook wrote in its statement, “This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history. More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.” An earlier version of Facebook’s program collected faceprints from its users without their consent, which violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The company settled a BIPA lawsuit by paying its Illinois users $650 million.€
Facebook says that it will maintain the use of face recognition in “services that help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device.” Also, the company imagines a future in which the technology could be reintroduced to make the platform more accessible. But for now, it has weighed that use against the ongoing social harms of face recognition technology.€
Facebook will also delete the templates for the more than a billion people, more than a third of the platform’s daily active users, who opted into the Face Recognition setting, according to the blog post.
Facebook’s facial recognition technology was used to allow users the option to be automatically notified when they appear in photos or videos posted by others and suggest users to “tag” in photos and videos they post. Those features will no longer be available as part of the update.
Meta artificial intelligence VP Jerome Pesenti calls the change part of a “company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products.” The move follows a lawsuit that accused Facebook’s tagging tech of violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law, leading to a $650 million settlement in February. Facebook previously restricted facial recognition to an opt-in feature in 2019.
Dropbox is adding a feature that will let you add automation to folders so new files are automatically renamed, grouped into subfolders, or more. The feature is called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Automated Folders, and Dropbox says it can help you (and any co-workers you share files with) stay organized with standardized names and tags.
On February 1, 1941, less than 10 months before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the U.S. found itself in a global war, Henry Luce, in an editorial in Life magazine (which he founded along with Time and Fortune), declared the years to come "the American Century."€ He then urged this country's leaders to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit."
HagÃÂ¥tña, Guam—To get onto her family’s land, Monaeka Flores drives through a gate guarded by US military security, then continues up to a booth, where an officer scans her special military-issued ID and waves her through. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Mishaps often snarl the trip. Sometimes security mixes up her personal information with her family’s. Other times she’s barred from the land outright. In July, she missed a family barbecue because her ID, which needs to be renewed annually, had expired, and she hadn’t made it to the security office in time to get a new one. Hosting is a crapshoot, too, since the military requires visitors to get cleared before entering. Flores said a friend had recently been turned away because the background check program was down when they went to the security office. This article was published with support from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights and the Gumshoe Group.
Public funding for the anti-Castro industry in the United States seems inexhaustible. In the last year, at least 54 organizations have benefitedfrom the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID programs for Cuba. In the last 20 years, this agency has given Creative Associates International, a CIA front, more than $1.8 billion for espionage, propaganda and the recruitment of agents of “change” including on the island. One of its best-known projects, the so-called “Cuban Twitter” or ZunZuneo, resulted in a superb failure that unveiled a plot of corruption and flagrant violations of U.S. law. ZunZuneo cost the USAID director his job, but Creative Associates International continues to operate, only now undercover.
The American researcher Tracey Eaton, who for years has followed the route of these funds, commented in a recent interview that many of the financing programs for “regime change” in Cuba are so stealthy that we will probably never know who all the recipients are or what the total amount is, and judging by the known millions, the subsidy must reach an even greater figure. According to letters from the State Department and USAID that Eaton has received, “democracy-building” strategies are considered “trade secrets” and are exempt from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
At Hotel Cecil, Balfour presided the conference dinner attended by universities delegates, heads of colleges, and “men prominent in educational and scientific work.” After the customary toasts, Balfour delivered a speech in which he celebrated the foundation of the new British-colonial academic alliance and explained why this was a remarkable political achievement: “It is not merely, or simply, or chiefly that there are here in this room representatives of scholarship, of science, of all the great spheres of activity in which modern thought is indulging itself. It is that we are here representing what will turn out to be, I believe, a great alliance of the greatest educational instruments in the Empire—an alliance of all the universities that, in an increasing measure, are feeling their responsibilities, not merely for training the youth which is destined to carry on the traditions of the British Empire, but also to further those great interests of knowledge, scientific research, and culture without which no Empire, however materially magnificent, can really say that it is doing to share in the progress of the world.”
In Balfour’s mind, the new academic alliance was a crucial tool for cementing Britain’s global dominance. But it was also a key instrument for affirming a sense of a racialised Anglo-Saxon unity: “We boast a community of blood, of language, of laws, of literature,” the ecstatic Chancellor-PM exclaimed at the conference dinner.
[...]
After ending his tenure as Prime Minister in 1905, Balfour withdrew for almost a decade from the centre-stage of imperial foreign policy, before making his return in 1916 as Foreign Secretary. But in those ten years, the Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh continued to construct British academic space as an imperial project.
Dozens of groups called on U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday to restore diplomatic relations with the Iranian government by assisting with humanitarian efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic and rejoining the Iran nuclear deal.
"The U.S. can get a win-win that boosts our diplomats at the negotiating table and saves lives."
The Conservatives must watch their years-long push to arm drones from the opposition now
For the first time, drones are flying on behalf of an EU agency with rescue equipment on board. On the high seas, the actually useful technology could encourage illegal refoulements to countries like Libya. Perhaps the new function will only be used for minor maritime emergencies in European waters.
IS-Khorasan has intensified attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban took control of the country in mid-August. The violence has mainly targeted Taliban fighters and members of the minority Shi’ite community, killing and injuring hundreds of people.
A mob objecting to the election victory of Democratic President Joe Biden broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6 as members of Congress met to certify the results. Most of the participants had just come from a nearby rally where Trump accused Democrats of stealing the election. At least five deaths have been connected to the attack, including the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who was among a badly outnumbered force trying to fight off the intruders.
The Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forests and Land Use also includes Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its signatories account for about 85% of the world's forests.
At the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, Lumumba Di-Aping, former chief negotiator of the G77 bloc — composed mostly of climate-vulnerable nations — spoke with clarity and understanding of the gravity of the situation: “We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.” He called 2€°C “certain death for Africa,” and said that these actions constituted a type of “climate fascism imposed” on Africa by wealthy, high carbon-emitting countries.” Over a decade later, these words are still very relevant for all of us in MAPA.
After young birds hatch, the chicks often become entangled and entrapped in the sticky bunches, weighing them down and keeping them stuck to the tree.
The trees are also responsible for killing adult birds, with only a handful of seeds weighing them down and stopping them from flying.
We speak with Brianna Fruean, an activist from Samoa, who implored global leaders at the U.N. climate summit to consider how small islands like Samoa, Tutuila and Tonga might drown without urgent action against rising sea levels. She told the audience, “If you’re looking for inspiration on climate leadership, take a look at young Pacific people.” Many Pacific islands are in danger of vanishing in the next decade if sea levels and global temperatures continue to rise. “If we are able to save the islands, we are able to save the world,” Fruean tells Democracy Now!
A new ad released by the United Nations Development Program shows a computer-generated dinosaur speaking in the U.N. General Assembly hall, warning diplomats that “going extinct is a bad thing” and calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies. The dinosaur is voiced by Jack Black.
From the urban sprawl of Houston to the riverways of Virginia, air pollution from industrial plants is elevating the cancer risk of an estimated quarter of a million Americans to a level the federal government considers unacceptable.
Some of these hot spots of toxic air are infamous. An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana that’s thronged with oil refineries and chemical plants has earned the nickname Cancer Alley. Many other such areas remain unknown, even to residents breathing in the contaminated air.
Using the EPA’s data, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing industrial air emissions down to the neighborhood level. Look up your home to see if you and your loved ones are living in a hot spot.
You may be one of millions of people across the country who has lived in an area with an increased estimated cancer risk because of the chemicals industrial facilities release into the air.
A number of residents have asked for more information about what this means, what the laws are, and what — if anything — they can do to protect themselves and their communities when the regulatory system does not. To answer their questions, we spoke to health experts and academics who study toxic air pollution, government officials and other residents who have lived in hot spots for decades. We also dug into reports and data.
ProPublica spent two years analyzing billions of rows of EPA data to visualize the spread of toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in the U.S. The result is the most detailed map of cancer-causing industrial air pollution ever published.
We’re reporters with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization. We’re working on stories about industrial facilities that emit chemicals into the air and elevate the estimated cancer risk for surrounding neighborhoods. Help us do this work by submitting a tip below.
We are eager to hear from communities, workers and regulators across the country to help shape and inform our upcoming investigations. These are our current areas of focus, but we still want to hear from you even if you do not have any connections to these locations or subjects:
Blinken’s sentiment was echoed by a report on the impact of climate change and migration from the White House earlier this month, one of a slew of reports as the U.S. prepared for the United Nations summit on climate change that begins in Glasgow on October 31. According to the report, “The current migration situation extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into Central America presents an opportunity for the United States to model good practice and discuss openly managing migration humanely, [and] highlight the role of climate change in migration.”
Hypothetically, these words might reassure the more than 1.3 million Hondurans and Guatemalans displaced in 2020 by climate-induced catastrophes such as droughts, hurricanes, and floods. But the lofty rhetoric is contradicted by another story, one told by the U.S. government’s budgets.
Countries attending the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow have made new pledges to cut their emissions, but activists say it’s not enough to avert the worst of the climate crisis. India has vowed to reduce its carbon emissions to net zero by 2070. Over 100 leaders have agreed to end deforestation by 2030. The United States is announcing a new plan to reduce methane emissions, among other measures. Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, is in Glasgow for the talks and warns the heavy focus on “net zero” rather than absolute carbon reductions suggests leaders are not planning to make serious changes. “It’s a continuing war against Mother Earth, against Father Sky,” says Goldtooth. “It is an issue of life and death to many of our Indigenous peoples, from the North to the South.” Climate campaigner Bill McKibben says the movement to divest from fossil fuels has had a major impact but that business interests are still holding back a transition to renewable energy. “Money is the oxygen on which the fires of global warming keep burning,” says McKibben.
On the third day of the COP26 climate conference, Surangel Whipps Jr., president of the Pacific island nation of Palau, reprimanded the leaders of wealthy countries, telling the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters: "You might as well bomb our islands."
"We see the scorching sun is giving us intolerable heat, the warming sea is invading us, and the winds are blowing us every which way," Whipps said Tuesday. "Our resources are disappearing before our eyes and our future is being robbed from us."
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.
It's been a heavy week for those of us who want to preserve life on earth. Somehow, the latest, greatest hope for a livable future is in the hands of one man—a€ senator, not even a€ king! Given how few Americans voted for him, it's absurd that Joe Manchin has so much national influence. But when you factor in the scale of U.S. power and its historic and current responsibility for the climate crisis, it's downright grotesque.
The United States on Tuesday rejoined an alliance of countries pushing for ambitious climate action including limiting Earth's warming to 1.5€°C.€
The development was first reported by The Guardian.
While rich country leaders pushed what critics called false capitalist fixes to the climate crisis during Monday's sessions of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, Bolivia's socialist president warned that true solutions to the planetary emergency require moving beyond capitalism to an "alternative model" that centers living "together in harmony with Mother Earth."
"The solution to the climate crisis is not going to be achieved with more green capitalism and more global carbon markets."
Environmentalists warned Tuesday that the Biden administration's newly unveiled rules targeting methane emissions aren't strong enough to sufficiently curb one of the most potent contributors to the global climate crisis.
"Swiftly reducing methane emissions will result in significant and much-needed near-term climate progress."
Is climate collapse close to being averted? How close are we to winning? Is the climate justice movement organized to win? Are current strategies and tactics enough? What else do we need to try and how fast? The€ Glasgow Agreement, People's Climate Commitment, is a global platform of grassroots and social movements for climate justice. It is planning on going after French multinational Total simultaneously all around the world this November, in an action called€ Collapse Total, and organising climate justice caravans in all continents next Spring.
As U.S. President Joe Biden professed€ Washington's alleged commitment to decarbonization during the ongoing COP26€ climate summit,€ the White House on Tuesday authorized€ more fossil fuel pollution—advancing its plan to sell oil and gas leases on public lands even after concluding that the resultant emissions could generate billions of dollars in social and ecological damage.
"While President Biden is talking a good talk on climate action, the reality is his administration is actively working to fan the flames of the climate crisis by selling more public lands for fracking."
As a global climate summit continued in Glasgow, Scotland on Tuesday, an international coalition of advocacy groups warned world leaders that corporate polluters are pushing for "nature-based solutions" to capture planet-heating emissions so they can "keep burning fossil fuels, mine more of the planet, and increase industrial meat and dairy production."
"The purported solutions will result in 'nature-based dispossessions.'"
Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over $80 a barrel—the highest price in seven years. Newspaper columnists are asking whether people in Europe and Asia who can't afford high fuel and electricity prices might freeze this winter. High natural gas prices are causing fertilizer prices to spike, which will inevitably raise costs to farmers, with eventual catastrophic impact on people who already have trouble paying for food.
The report, which relies on previous findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other scientific bodies, assumes that by 2030, a 1.5ÃÅ¡C rise in global temperature will be reached—the red line set by the Paris Agreement.€ To change that trajectory, “the IPCC estimates that global emissions would have to drop sharply in the next decade and reach net zero by around 2050 to limit warming to 1.5ÃÅ¡C, or reach net zero by about 2070 to limit warming to 2ÃÅ¡C.” Such a dramatic reversal of current trends is extremely unlikely, according to the NIE.
The “Key Judgments”
Today’s eco-conscious consumer is no stranger to net zero pledges. There are “net zero” pensions, “net zero” fuels, even “net zero” mobile networks.€
Thousands of companies have hitched themselves to the carbon-neutral bandwagon, from fossil fuel producers like BP and Shell, to other household names including United Airlines, Dell, Burger King, and Vodafone. Some companies say they’ll decarbonise by 2040, others as early as 2022.
By Paul D. Thacker
By the late 1970s, the petroleum industry had spent about two decades collecting information from their own scientists and outside experts and knew that burning fossil fuels would create catastrophic climate change. In the minds of the fossil fuel executives, this point must have been hammered home when federal scientists published a report on carbon dioxide and climate change in 1979. That report announced, “We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change.”
More than half of the electricity produced in Finland last year came from renewable energy sources, according to preliminary figures released by Statistics Finland on Tuesday.
This marks the first time the share of renewable sources has risen above 50 percent, the number-crunching agency noted.
The new design, created by researchers at the Institute of Technical Sciences at Wuhan University, uses air and electricity instead of gases like xenon. Testing has shown that the engine is capable of producing an impressive amount of thrust that may, one day, find applications in modern aircraft.
There are two key reasons for why I see the report as largely positive. First, there were extraordinary and temporary factors that prevented the growth from being considerably more rapid. Second, we need to get a fuller picture in assessing growth. In the pre-pandemic period, no one would have considered 2.0 percent growth particularly bad. It averaged 2.5 percent in the three years preceding the pandemic. We are already above the pre-pandemic level of GDP, although somewhat below the trend rate of growth, which means we are through the period where we would ordinarily anticipate extraordinary growth.
The Temporary Factors
What do former Health Minister, Allan Rock; Senator Mohamed-Iqbal Ravalia; former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, David Onley; professional dancer, Luca Patuelli; 'Mincome' economist Evelyn Forget; best-selling author, Tara Ross; the CEO of Community Foundations of Canada, Andrew Chunilall; singer-song writer, Christa Couture; disability activists, Ali Mohammed and Meenu Sikand; several order of Canada recipients, noted physicians and academics—along with most major disability organizations from across the country—all have in common?
Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Karen Dolan about Build Back Better for the October 29, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
U.S. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called reports that congressional Democrats are considering lifting the cap on the state and local tax deduction—a move that would largely benefit wealthy individuals—"beyond unacceptable," while imploring his party to find a way to protect middle-class workers without furnishing "tax breaks for billionaires."
"Democrats campaigned and won on an agenda that demands that the very wealthy finally pay their fair share, not one that gives them more tax breaks."
Real-world problems don’t just happen. The political economy is never inevitable. Yet as their poll numbers slump, Joe Biden and his administration have mostly whimpered that they are the victims of circumstance. We can expect a similar refusal to accept the buck from Terry McAuliffe should he lose to failed private equity mogul-turned-Trump dog whistler Glenn Youngkin in Virginia tonight.”
Democracy defenders expressed concern Tuesday in response to new reporting on a Federal Election Commission ruling that affirmed foreign entities—including overseas corporations—can fund U.S. state-level ballot campaigns.
"This is egregious," tweeted former Ohio congressional candidate Nina Turner. "A complete attack on our democracy."
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont reportedly asked his Democratic colleagues a pointed question on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday: "So we drop what's most popular?"
"Maybe—just maybe—Congress should respond to the demands of the American people and finally expand Medicare."
As the debate rages over President Biden’s social spending bill, with several long-sought progressive ideas tantalizingly close to reality, there’s been little attention paid to the woman who’s helped lead the push for them throughout her career: Senator Elizabeth Warren.
But is the question as settled as it appears?
In the book€ Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West, author Marlene Laruelle, a professor at George Washington University and director of its Illiberalism Studies Program, has the temerity not only to ask the question but also to answer it.
Defiant still is Stephen Bannon, Who could be nut-right’s loosest cannon. Contempt, which Congress now has cited, May very well get Steve indicted. If Steve’s convicted, fair and square, No pardon’s coming: Trump’s not there. So Steve can say he’s made his point, Although he’s speaking from the joint.
In May, the secretive Christian right Council for National Policy (CNP) celebrated its 40th Anniversary at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Florida with a Black Tie Gala following its spring meeting.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) led two panel discussions on state legislation at the CNP gathering, in which it claimed credit for helping to push and pass a host of laws to make it harder to vote, block public schools from teaching about racism in America, and protect employers from COVID-related lawsuits, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) first reported.
I've mocked the NY Times for its repeated failures to understand basic facts about internet regulations such as Section 230 -- but the organization also deserves credit when it gets things (mostly) right. Last week, Farhad Manjoo wrote up a great opinion piece noting that, even if you agree that Facebook is bad, most regulatory proposals would make things much, much worse.
The documents revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen are full of important information — but the media hasn't been doing the best job of covering that information and all its nuances. There are plenty of examples of reporters taking one aspect out of context and presenting it in the worst possible light, while ignoring the full picture. This week, we're joined by law professor Kate Klonick to discuss the media's failings in covering the Facebook Papers, and the unwanted outcomes this could produce.
This is not mere hypocrisy. The Republican Party now poses a clear and present threat even to the values it once espoused.
As President Biden addressed the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow on Monday, warning that “climate change is already ravaging the world,” back home his climate agenda was dealt a major setback when Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia criticized the slimmed-down $1.85 trillion Build Back Plan. “The air went out of this conference” when Biden showed up with no major climate legislation passed, says Bill McKibben of 350.org in Glasgow. “It makes it extremely difficult to proceed when the world’s carbon champion — the country that’s poured more carbon into the atmosphere by far than any other — won’t provide leadership.”
As part of that Biden framework compromise, both sides in negotiations (progressives in the US House and Manchin-Senate in the Senate) would vote on the $1.75 Trillion ‘Reconciliation Bill’—formerly known as the ‘Build Back Better’ bill—and the $1.1T Infrastructure bill.
Over the weekend House progressives had conceded to Biden’s ‘compromise’ that would further reduce spending on human infrastructure and climate change in their Reconciliation bill. That compromise was reduced to $1.75T, dramatically cut from the progressives’ July $3.5 trillion original position.
As Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives continued to signal they intend to vote this week on the bipartisan infrastructure bill and Build Back Better package, progressives outside Congress warned Tuesday that trusting a pair of corporate-backed senators "would be a terrible mistake."
"The two conservative Democrats holding the nation hostage with unreasonable and ever-shifting demands have proven themselves to be unreliable negotiating partners."
Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri blasted Sen. Joe Manchin on Monday for once again threatening to tank the Build Back Better Act, a safety net and climate proposal that the West Virginia lawmaker and other corporate Democrats have already watered down by removing key provisions and slashing funding for the remaining programs.
"We cannot leave anyone behind. Senator Manchin must support the Build Back Better Act."
Despite not even leaving the bench, Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter was the one drawing the headlines in their season opener at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The 6’10” Turk sported shoes emblazoned with the words “free Tibet.” “Under the Chinese government’s brutal rule, Tibetan people’s basic rights and freedoms are non-existent,” Kanter said in a video posted on social media, explaining the move.
The nationally syndicated talk show host’s comments came as his company PragerU continues to wage a long legal battle against Google’s YouTube.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled unanimously against Mr. Prager‘s claim of illegal censorship of conservatives. But Mr. Prager continues to allege that YouTube prevents PragerU from advertising videos due to unexplained violations of community guidelines, restricting other videos as likewise inappropriate and adding a disclaimer that the content may be factually incorrect.
Sometimes it's difficult to get across to people "the scale" part when we talk about the impossibility of content moderation at scale. It's massive. And this is why whenever there's a content moderation decision that you dislike or that you disagree with, you have to realize that it's not personal. It wasn't done because someone doesn't like your politics. It wasn't done because of some crazy agenda. It was done because a combination of thousands of people around the globe and still sketchy artificial intelligence are making an insane number of decisions every day. And they just keep piling up and piling up and piling up.
In addition, from Monday onwards, Sudan’s internet services as well as several telecommunications services have been severely disrupted, as reported by the international digital rights groups Netblocks and Access Now. Although the lines were on air shortly on October 27 between 4 pm and 5:30 pm, Netblock reported, the internet has now been disrupted for more than 64 hours already.
The government has announced plans to table a “disinformation” law that is likely to result in the further criminalization of freedom of expression and independent journalism online. Although a draft of the law has not yet been published, meetings with journalists and MPs confirmed that it is expected to introduce criminal penalties – and possibly jail sentences – for those who spread “disinformation” online. The law would cement the government’s control over one of the last major spaces for free expression in Turkey and, in combination with last year’s social media law, increase pressure on social media companies to become complicit in Turkey’s censorship regime.
While government officials have stated that the law would be modeled on measures passed in other countries, particularly Germany, this comparison is false: the German NetzDG law does not regulate – let alone criminalize – “disinformation”. Moreover, even as press freedom groups have criticized German legislation regulating social media platforms, Germany’s independent judiciary can offer redress in the case of rights violations. Turkey’s courts, meanwhile, are not independent and do not provide protection against the abuse of such laws.
Many of the Yahoo's services were largely blocked in China, where Yahoo has operated since 1999. Since 2005, following a partnership deal with Alibaba Group Holding, Yahoo's services have slowly been phased out, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company provided an early, stark example of the challenges U.S. internet firms faced operating in foreign countries, particularly China.
In 2004, Yahoo's China unit gave the Chinese authorities data that led to the imprisonment of at least two dissidents. Lawmakers and activists criticized the firm. Yahoo apologized for its role and settled a lawsuit brought by families of several Chinese activists.
The withdrawal was largely symbolic, as many of the company's services were already blocked by China's digital censorship. But recent government moves to expand its control over tech companies generally, including its domestic giants, may have tipped the scales for Yahoo.
Just days after a pair of journalists were killed in Mexico, a trio of press freedom groups kicked off a six-month tribunal in The Hague on Tuesday in what they called "an unprecedented effort to achieve justice" for members of the media who face a rising threat of violence and even death for their work while their attackers and killers often face no consequences.
"The frequency of grave violations committed against journalists coupled with prevailing high levels of impunity is alarming."
He was gaunt and emaciated, his eyes hollow and the thinness of his arms was emphasized by a yellow identifying cloth tied around his left arm, an evocative symbol of institutional control.
For all but the two hours of my visit, he was confined to a solitary cell in a wing known as “healthcare”, an Orwellian name. In the cell next to him a deeply disturbed man screamed through the night. Another occupant suffered from terminal cancer. Another was seriously disabled.
Dennis: Welcome Alice Walker. Let’s start with the good news which is that you have a new children’s book, Sweet People are Everywhere. And with a lifetime of travel under your belt, you’re convinced; the research is compelling, you are sure – that there are in fact sweet people everywhere?
Alice: There are. They absolutely are. And I wanted younger people to know that before they travel, because then they might not want to kill the people when they get there. That’s kind of the short answer.
Barbara Trionfi, the executive director of IPI, stated in a press release that the decision to prosecute poses a serious threat to the ability of journalists to work freely in Finland.
“It is unacceptable and absurd that journalists in a European democracy like Finland are facing imprisonment for doing their job and reporting on an issue of massive public interest, which the discussion about the activities and powers of Finland’s security agencies was,” she said.
“The investigation itself – which has dragged on for years – had already cast a shadow over Finnish reporting on national security issues. These charges will now worsen this chilling effect, jeopardising the public’s right to be informed on issues of tremendous importance to society. IPI calls on Finnish authorities to swiftly drop all charges against the journalists in this case and offer reassurance that upholding press freedom remains a priority in Finland.”
Today, on October 29, 2021, nearly four years after the publication of the story, prosecutors announced charges for disclosure and attempted disclosure of state secrets against Halminen and journalist Tuomo Pietiläinen as well as Kalle Silfverberg, who was head of Helsingin Sanomat’s political news department at the time. Niemi as well as managing editor Esa Mäkinen were not charged. The three charged journalists face four months to four years in prison.
"Why are we calling this a labor shortage? I think it is a dignified job shortage."
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases involving the Texas law banning abortions, Senate Bill 8. The first was a challenge by abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health. The second was an argument by the Department of Justice. Despite the intense media attention on these cases, neither argument was actually about abortion, the rights of pregnant people to access health care, or the constitutionality of the Texas abortion ban.
Robin Rue Simmons had been very curious about the truth of American life as a young person. But it was only after she finished high school, left her native Evanston, Ill., and returned as an adult—ready to buy a house in the historically Black neighborhood in which she grew up—that she delved deep into her city’s history and fully understood the policies that had kept Black residents poor while enriching their white neighbors. Of course, this isn’t the kind of history that’s taught in school, even if today’s students do sometimes learn unsavory truths about the American empire. Local history is different, perhaps because it can be especially uncomfortable to examine how that empire’s economic plunder shaped our present-day communities. Yet experiencing such discomfort may be preferable to any alternative—and I write this as a white person.
New York City’s Rikers Island has long been a hellhole and a national disgrace. For decades, the jail complex has been plagued by violence and chaos, but conditions have deteriorated dramatically in the past year as the Covid-19 pandemic has raged across the nation. Calls to close Rikers have continued to grow, but the timeline city officials have proposed stretches into the distant future, with mass decarceration completely off the table. But mass decarceration is exactly what’s needed to ensure that people aren’t simply being shuttled from one inhumane situation to another.
PBS supposedly doesn’t run ads, but immediately preceding “The Cannabis Question” on Channel 9 was a 25-second trailer for a coming attraction in which knights of olde slay each other with swords. Next came a warning in white letters against a black screen: “The following program contains content that may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.” Unspoken message: swordplay okay, pot maybe not.
The Koch Brothers are the main funders of PBS these days, and we’re told up-front, “Major funding for The Cannabis Question was provided by the David H. Koch Foundation For Science.”€ € The budget was ample and the production values are top-notch.
The ballot initiative would have amended the city's charter to remove a requirement that the police department maintain a minimum of officers.
We look at Monday’s Supreme Court oral arguments on the constitutionality of Texas’s near-total ban on abortions with legendary lawyer Kathryn “Kitty” Kolbert, who argued the 1992 landmark Supreme Court case credited with saving Roe v. Wade. “'Save Roe' has been our mantra for so many years, and it no longer works because of the ultraconservatie nature of this Supreme Court,” Kolbert says. Instead, people must protect abortion rights by “electing people who will preserve women’s rights, and begin to think of that as our most important task.”
Because Netflix is big, it draws lawsuits. It has been sued for defamation, copyright infringement, and, oddly, defamation via use of a private prison's logo in a fictional TV show. It has also been sued for supposedly contributing to a teen's suicide with its series "13 Reasons Why," which contained a lot of disturbing subject matter that teens deal with daily, like bullying, sexual assault, and -- most relevant here -- suicide. The final episode of the first season contained a suicide scene, one that was removed by Netflix two years after the show debuted.
Cipher, Unified Patents, RPX, Aon, and Google Patents will be offering the SPIF patent identification format via their platforms in a move designed to bring more efficiency to patent transactions and portfolio management. SPIF uniquely defines patent assets so that they can be used in patent analytics, M&A, transferring patent information between firms, and buying and selling patents.
On November 1, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,398,209. The patent is owned by Xperi Holding Corporation, an NPE. The '209 patent relates to a method of tracking faces in an image stream. The method includes receiving images from an image stream including faces, calculating corresponding integral images, and applying different subsets of face detection rectangles to the integral images to provide sets of candidate regions.
Software Freedom Conservancy has had several exemptions granted that it requested to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by the US Library of Congress for activities of interest to free-software developers: [...]
While Springsteen has been with Sony Music’s Columbia Records since he first signed with the label in 1972, he acquired the rights to his music as part of a contract renegotiation at some point in his career; such moves are rarely reported but become evident in the fine print on a release.
Selling the rights to their music is anathema to many artists, but as they reach or pass standard retirement age and begin estate planning, a sale is an attractive option — especially today, as song catalogs are hitting previously unimagined valuations and artists consider the realities of leaving their heirs with a valuable but cumbersome asset; song catalogs in particular require extensive management to optimize their value.
It's well known that YouTubers can lose their channels and videos when they're repeatedly accused of posting copyright-infringing material. Interestingly, the senders of questionable takedown notices are also at risk. A few days ago, YouTube terminated the "Musical Creator" channel on suspicion of sending a fraudulent copyright claim.
A copyright holder recently filed a complaint that resulted in a URL being added to Russia's anti-piracy register for alleged TV show piracy. While that's nothing out of the ordinary, the URL in question was Yahoo.com, one of the world's most-visited domains. As a result, Yahoo's entire platform was added to Russia's blacklist where it remained for four days.
So, here's the thing: I get accused of picking on Nintendo a whole lot. But please know, it's not that I want to pick on them, it's just that they make it so damned easy to. I'm a golfer, okay? If I have a club in my hand and suddenly a ball on a tee appears before me, I'm going to hit that ball every time without hesitation. You will recall that a couple of years back, Nintendo opened up a new front on its constant IP wars by going after ROM and emulation sites. That caused plenty of sites to simply shut themselves down, but Nintendo also made a point of getting some scalps to hang on its belt, most famously in the form of RomUniverse. That site, which very clearly had infringing material not only on the site but promoted by the site's ownership, got slapped around in the courts to the tune of a huge judgement against, which the site owners simply cannot pay.
