Once upon a time, way back in 2003, I had an idea. “Hey,” I said to myself, “I should write a Linux book. It will be for Linux users, rather than coders. It will cover the basic tasks that Linux users want to know about.”
I was so enchanted by this idea that I reviewed the notes I had collected during my Linux adventures and started writing an outline. I pitched it to O’Reilly Media, and wonder of wonders, they said yes. The writing process was long and horrible, because I had no idea how to write a book, but my editors were patient and amazing.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we are going to discuss what made us Linux Enthusiasts! Then we’re going to discuss some good news with Firefox’s latest release . . . it seems that the have been listening to DL. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
A new cheap Pi and a new version of Raspberry Pi OS, Firefox gets pretty new colours, a management shakeup at GitHub, Red Hat’s new dev hiring policy, KDE Korner, and more. With guest host Jim Salter from 2.5 Admins.
Another big tick in the box for switching over to Wayland from Xorg, with the release of XWayland 21.1.3. In the release announcement it was noted that it has no changes over the previous release candidate build.
With this release of XWayland, it brings in support for the latest NVIDIA 495.44 stable driver, released back in October where NVIDIA finally added support for the GBM API.
Compressing and decompressing files is a day-to-day activity of the system administrator and normal Linux users. Compression not only saves disk space but reduces data transmission and bandwidth.
Most of the time, it is really hard to find a compression tool that really meets your requirements. You can find all the best compression tools in almost all Linux distributions. Performance of compression tools is measured based on compression ratio, compression speed, and decompression speed.
I’ve been using ZFS for years on my Linux storage server. Recently I upgraded from Alpine 3.12 to 3.14, which included a ZFS 0.8 to ZFS 2.0 update. Not soon after, I started getting random file corruption issues. I didn’t see any SMART errors on the drives, but still assumed that my hard drive could be going bad. My storage had outgrown my previous backup drive anyway, so I purchased an additional drive. When I attempted to sync snapshots to the new device, I started to see I/O errors and kernel panics. I took a long journey through ZFS bug reports, attempted to switch to Btrfs and even migrated my storage to a different computer. In the end, ZFS saved me from what could have been disastrous amounts of data corruption due to faulty hardware.
I've come to think that there are two broad ways of viewing the world that are used by most common version control systems. Although the end result can be the same, these worldviews lead to different places and can give people different attitudes, and I happen to think that one is a better representation of reality than the other.
Last November, I put up a list of a bunch of "magic numbers" including some years in which time/date stuff is likely to break. There's 2036 for the NTP era rollover, 2038 for time_t requiring 32 bits in January *and* another GPS week rollover in November.
It turns out we have another one coming up far sooner, too: 2028!
When syncing with a remote host, rsync invokes ssh to spawn a remote rsync --server process. It interacts with it through its standard input and output. The idea is to recreate the same setup using SSH tunnels and socat, a versatile tool to establish bidirectional data transfers.
Networks are partitioned, and this is a Good Thing. Sometimes it’s possible to overcome some of the restrictions, which is good to know (it’s at least good to know the limits of the fences that are in place, anyway).
In this case, we’re assuming that all traffic to the outside is allowed through a web proxy, with the clear intent to allow… web traffic only.
Now Alice wants to connect with her laptop in the inside network to her server in the outside network, using SSH. Which is, as we saw, forbidden because all ports are forbidden for direct access.
In this case, Alice can try to convince the proxy to let her through with a little effort and some help from a few programs.
The gist of this technique is to make the SSH client “proxy aware” by means of a helper program, by means of the ProxyCommand option. Let’s see some examples.
In my calendar there is a yearly recurring item named 'backup restore test'. This is an article on my backup scheme and the yearly restore test, covering all aspects, such as data validation, backup scheme, time and cost involved. I started doing personal restore tests each year around 2012, when I did them for my first job. At work back then, the restore test was monthly, for my own backups I decided that yearly was okay enough, since the backup scheme, software and provider do not change. I'm using Azure cold storage for my (locally encrypted) personal backups, since it's both cheap and supported by my local NAS.
Have you done your backup restore test recently?
In part 1 I took a first look at fff, “a simple file manager written in Bash”, focusing on the main function, and learned a lot. In this part I take a look at the first function called from main, and that is get_ls_colors. I’m continuing to use the same commit reference as last time, i.e. the state of fff here.
In this article I will demonstrate you how to easily install GNOME extensions directly from your browser.
GNOME Shell is one of the most widely used desktop environment for Linux. Probably the most standout aspect of GNOME is that it looks nothing like anything you have experienced before.
Going one step further, GNOME has various extensions that offer additional customization options. Once installed, they will help you add extra functionality to your GNOME Shell desktop and help modify existing features.
Hi guys ! In this tutorial, we will show, how to forcefully redirect apache HTTP to HTTPS
If you are a website owner or system administrator, chances are that you’re dealing with Apache on a regular basis. One of the most common tasks you’ll likely perform is redirecting the HTTP traffic to the secured (HTTPS) version of your website.
Unlike HTTP, where requests and responses are sent and returned in plaintext, HTTPS uses TLS/SSL to encrypt the communication between the client and the server.
Hello, friends. Nginx is one of the most used web servers in the world along with Apache. So it is possible to find a lot of tricks on the internet to help us with that. In this post, I will show you a very convenient and useful one like increasing the timeout of the requests on Nginx. This will allow you more flexibility when configuring Nginx and adapting it to the needs of the various applications or websites you have.
Have you ever wondered what is responsible for supervising and managing just the exact number of pods running inside the Kubernetes cluster? Kubernetes can do this in multiple ways, but one common approach is using ReplicationController (rc). A ReplicationController is responsible for managing the pod lifecycle and ensuring that the specified number of pods required are running at any given time. On the other hand, it is not responsible for the advanced cluster capabilities like performing auto-scaling, readiness and liveliness probes, and other advanced replication capabilities. Other components within the Kubernetes cluster better perform those capabilities.
Linux kernel 5.15 is out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.15 kernel release further improves the support for AMD CPUs and GPUs, Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs, and brings new features like NTFS3, KSMBD (CIFS/SMB3), and further Apple M1 support, amongst many other changes and additions.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest 5.15 Linux Kernel on Debian 11 Bullseye using the Debian Experimental repository with APT pinning. In time, unstable (sid) and testing (bookworm) will receive the 5.15 kernel, much like the previous 5.14 did as well.
The tutorial will be updated to reflect the changes when this change of repositories occurs.
In this guide, you will learn how to install and configure FreeIPA server on Rocky Linux/Centos 8. This guide also works on RHEL 8 and other derivatives like Oracle Linux and Alma Linux.
FreeIPA is a centralized authentication, authorization, and account information system. FreeIPA stands for Free Identity, Policy, Audit and it is an open-source identity management solution based on an LDAP directory and Kerberos with optional components such as DNS server, certification authority, and more. It can manage a domain with users, computers, policies, and trust relationships. It is similar to Microsoft Active Directory.
FreeIPA can also set up a forest-to-forest trust with existing Active Directory forests and even live in a DNS zone below a zone managed by Active Directory, as long as they do not overlap. It consists of a web interface and command-line administration tools.
This goes over resetting ANY Linux password and two methods of doing so.
In the previous article, we have seen how to install openlitespeed server on ubuntu. In this tutorial, we will see how to add VirtualHost to the server.
Finding hardware information on HPUX is always easy when you use the right commands.
In this guide, we will show you how to check the CPU details of the server such as sockets, cores and logical processors.
The following commands are not limited to show only CPU information and shows most of the hardware information about the HP-UX server.
In this tutorial i will show you how to install Nginx on Fedora 35.
Nginx is a fast and lightweight web, http load balancer, reverse proxy and http cache server. Its scalability and efficiency makes Nginx both suitable for small and high traffic servers. It can also function as a proxy server for email IMAP,POP3 and SMTP.
Nginx has proved to be ideal web server for many web task because it can handle a high volume of connections. Nginx is frequently placed between clients and a second server to serve as an SSL/TLS terminator or web accelerator. Dynamic sites build with languages like PHP, node.js deploy Nginx as content cache and reverse proxy to reduce load on application servers and make the most effective use of the underlying hardware.
If you've read my take on kanban boards, you might be at a place where you're anxious to start making use of this amazingly efficient task management tool. If you want to deploy a kanban solution to your data center, you have options ... lots of them. Some of those options are even open-source. And that's what I want to look at today, an open-source kanban solution that you can deploy to your data center and have your teams using in no time.
After having a few early releases available on the web and itch.io, Dragon Evo is entering the next stage of its life as a free to play competitive card battler on Steam and itch.io in Early Access.
"Dragon Evo is a unique tactical card game blending a touch of RTS with the thrill of RPGs and the best of deck building games. With our favourite elements from role playing, strategy and deck building / card games, it's a game like no other - a truly unique experience spanning across genres."
Windows Media Audio….
The proprietary competitor to Ogg Vorbis and MP3 from 20 years ago that you figured you’d never hear about again, apparently actually is used in some Windows games.
At least Fallout 4.
When I tried to get it working in Wine 6.19, it would crash with assertion failed and mention something about FAudio (which, itself, apparently reimplements some DirectX audio APIs), but specifically that it couldn’t play back WMA audio.
It would make it through the launcher and then crash as soon as it got to the main menu.
It seems that it generally runs okay in the “Glorious Eggroll” version of Wine 6.16 as provided in a Lutris package. I made a Wine prefix for it, and everything works.
I noticed that in the Wine 6.21 news that they made some changes to FAudio in relation to some video games, including Skyrim SE, another Bethesda title, which uses the same engine as Fallout 4.
So I ran the game in Wine 6.21. The performance is a little better, but there is no music or “radio” on the PIP Boy.
This seemed like the missing GStreamer MP3 codec problem that occurs in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and TES: Oblivion, except I know I have codecs for WMA installed. They should be part of “gstreamer1.0-libav”, which is now using ffmpeg, which I know has a WMA codec.
ChimeraOS (previously called GamerOS) is a Linux distribution aimed at full-screen devices and console styled couch-gaming, much in the same way that SteamOS is.
In the years since Valve stopped updating SteamOS 2, ChimeraOS has plugged a rather nice gap for such devices and the developer continues to make improvements. ChimeraOS 27 just rolled out with the usual assortment of main software tech upgrades including Linux 5.14.15, Mesa 21.2.4, NVIDIA 495.44, RetroArch 1.9.11 and more.
Celebrating Polish creativity in gaming, GOG's Made in Poland sale is live and it's yet another chance to save lots of pennies on some great games.
After many months a fresh release of the rather good Minigalaxy is out. It's a free and open source client for GOG, helping you manage your game library from the DRM-free store. Yet again, the community building what a company won't for Linux, since GOG still have no clear plan for Galaxy on Linux officially.
Minigalaxy version 1.1 is the biggest yet, including numerous needed enhancements to make it go from good to great.
Do we need another desktop environment? There's already KDE Plasma, GNOME Shell, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon and the list goes on for a while. System76 at least seem to think another is needed, one they control.
The news tip comes courtesy of System76 engineer Michael Murphy, who mentioned on Reddit their plans for it to be "its own desktop" and that it won't be based on GNOME like their most recent attempt with Cosmic but instead "it is its own thing written in Rust".
I feel elementary OS would be far more usable in general – not to mention more familiar for folks just coming over from macOS or Windows – if we were to replace the default task switcher with Catts.
[...]
To cut a long story short, Catts was brought into elementary OS as the default Window Switcher last week and should be in November’s operating system updates.
The openSUSE Project is seeking nominations and applications for openSUSE Board candidacy. The projecct also looks to gain more members leading up to the elections.
A notice was sent by the election committee informing project members of the timeline for the election process.
There are two seats open for this election cycle. The call for nominations and applications will continue until Monday, Nov. 22. If you would like to nominate a member from the openSUSE community or declare yourself as a candidate, please send an email to the election committee at election-officials@opensuse.org.
It's been a while, but the Raspberry Pi OS has had a major version bump, taking this flavour of Linux for the diminutive computer to Debian Bullseye.
Debian Bullseye debuted in August, and the Raspberry Pi team admitted that getting its eponymous operating system updated had "taken a bit longer than we'd hoped".
Bullseye will be supported for five years, and makes use of version 5.10 of the Linux kernel. It came just over two years since the last major Debian release, Buster. As well as the changes under the hood, the Raspberry Pi OS incarnation has a number of tweaks in support of the computer's hardware and the OS's desktop environment.
It's that time! The Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) has done a major upgrade moving the package base from Debian buster to Debian bullseye.
A long time coming, since bullseye was released back in August. Supported for at least five years, this brings with it tons of major upgrades to all the internals. Not only that though, the RPi team also updated their desktop (based on LXDE) with a number of extra tweaks to make it look and feel better.
While it's been around for years now, this release has only just done the jump from GKT+2 to GTK+3. This is the toolkit used for actually drawing the interface giving you buttons, menus and everything else in the form of widgets. In the announcement post the team grumbled a bit that GTK+3 took a while to move to, as it's more difficult to use and it "removed several useful features which we relied upon" but they've found workarounds for a few bits they wanted.
This release also moved their window manager from Openbox to Mutter which comes with visual effects, rounded corners, shaded borders, window animations and more. In other words, it's all a bit more modern looking and feeling. On top of that it also makes it easier for them to support Wayland in future too although they're still "quite a long way" from switching to Wayland. A drawback though, is that the OS now needs at least 2GB RAM.
Available for Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri), Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), and the Ubuntu 16.04 and 14.04 ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) release, the new security updates address CVE-2021-3759, a vulnerability that could allow a local attacker to cause a denial of service (memory exhaustion). This flaw is affecting all supported Ubuntu releases.
The company behind Ubuntu have updated Multipass to verison 1.8, a release that introduces support for setting up and running Ubuntu virtual machines on Apple M1 MacBook devices with minimal effort.
In fact, Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
Today, we’re going to be taking a look at the ClonerAlliance UHD Pro video capture box which was sent to me by the team at ClonerAlliance to review and share with you.
I often get asked on my Raspberry Pi tutorial videos why I’ve used the full desktop version of Raspberry Pi OS when the project is intended to be run without a monitor or external display connected once it has been set up. There’s actually quite a simple answer. I use a screen recording utility, typically SimpleScreenRecorder, running in the background to capture the screen contents for the tutorial.
When talking about POWER I’m sometimes accused that I’m beating a dead horse. As you can see from just a small selection of talks at the OpenPOWER Summit 2021, the community around POWER is quite lively. Curriculum, new instructions and various new hardware are under development. If all goes well, POWER will be a lot more accessible to users and developers hopefully already next year!
What makes it even rarer is the fact it is encased in koa wood -- a richly patinated wood native to Hawaii. Only a handful of the original 200 were made in this way.
Apple-1s were mostly sold as component parts by Jobs and Wozniak. One computer shop that took delivery of around 50 units decided to encase some of them in wood, the auction house said
"This is kind of the holy grail for vintage electronics and computer tech collectors," Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen told the Los Angeles Times. "That really makes it exciting for a lot of people."
More than a year in the works, Tor Browser 11 web browser is finally here, ready to be used by those who want to protect their privacy by staying anonymous online while surfing the World Wide Web.
Based on the Mozilla Firefox 91 ESR (Extended Support Release) web browser series and the Tor 0.4.6.8 open-source and free software for enabling anonymous communications, Tor Browser 11 introduces a brand-new look borrowed from Firefox 91.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody from watching your Internet connection and learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.
The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained.
Tor Browser 11.0 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and our distribution directory. This is the first stable release based on Firefox ESR 91, and includes an important update to Tor 0.4.6.8.
Office is not unique in this sense. Most of us are not aware of all the features in tools we use on a daily basis, especially if it's big and extensive like PostgreSQL. With PostgreSQL 14 released just a few weeks ago, what a better opportunity to shed a light on some lesser known features that already exist in PostgreSQL, but you may not know.
Communications of the ACM, November 2021, Vol. 64 No. 11, Page 7 10.1145/3485446
My career started when I joined Kodak in the U.K. in 1959, where I was taught to program by Conway Berners-Lee, father of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW inventor. At that time, we only knew of about 300 stored program computers in the world, although there were probably 300 more in 'secret' places like the military or government.
After a dinner in 1973, she asked if we would like to see the new computer Univac had loaned her. She dived into her handbag and brought out an object the size of a cigarette packet. We all stared, amazed, as she opened the box and picked up an even smaller object. Grace proceeded to tell us the impossibly small computer had a 64-kilobyte COBOL complier. We wanted to see it in action, so someone brought over a teletype with a printer, and from the side of the device Grace pulled out a fine cable the width of a human hair and a transformer with an adaptor for the fine cable to plug into as the power supply.
The group watched as Grace ran a simple COBOL program. We didn't know it then, but we had just witnessed an early silicon chip-based computer. In Grace's opinion, the mainframe was dead and would be replaced by 'multitudes of minicomputers' that would be linked by telephone lines, all working together. It was quite possible she had seen a demonstration of the U.S. Department of Defense's ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet.
Rapid progress is being made on the next release of Libreboot. The overall goal of this upcoming release is stability; development was intentionally frozen after the Libreboot 20210522 testing release, to allow time for people to submit lots of bug reports. Sure enough, people submitted reports.
I’ve been fixing bugs and polishing up what’s there, ready for another release. You can already build Libreboot from the latest Git repository, and it’s known to be stable on all currently supported laptops. Desktops still require a bit more polishing and tweaking.
UK universities should not fear being cut off from Elsevier journals if the stand-off over a new deal with the publisher continues into next year, according to the University of California’s lead negotiator.
They were well placed to cope with not having access for an extended period, said Jeff MacKie-Mason, who co-chaired California’s task force when it walked away from negotiations with the Dutch publishing giant in 2019, leading to nearly two years without direct access to Elsevier content until an open access deal was struck in March 2021.
“If UK universities prepare, as we did, they should be able to sustain as long, or longer, a subscription stand-off,” Professor MacKie-Mason told Times Higher Education.
So how do you spend your free time? Do you write more code? Do you try to explain what you wrote, how you wrote and why? Or do you spend your time on some other activities? I, for examples started to read a lot more than I did in the recent years. And sure, I'll even share my recommendations with you. (See below.)
Life is not a competition, however many times we are told that it is. That notion is an agreement that needs to be reexamined and discarded. Use defines value in a way that does a disservice to the reality that nature in all its manifestations exists for its own purposes, regardless of the infinite number and/or intensity of human desires.
“The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries.” C.J. Jung, Letters Vol. II, p. 81 (1975)
So for years we pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive. One, it killed off a lot of local, community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with your community -- and a lot of additional impressions and engagement -- to Facebook. Despite the downsides everybody ran with the idea that comment sections were utterly irredeemable and unnecessary.
The opening line of Omar El Akkad’s new novel, What Strange Paradise, flashes an image from the year 2015 before the mind’s eye. It is an image that brings the plight of migrant refugees—escaping their untenable present in the face of war back home and in search of a stable and better future far away—to center stage. “The child lies on the shore,” writes El Akkad, taking the reader back to the Greek island of Kos, where memories of a drowned 3-year-old Kurdish Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, lie buried, only to come alive again when we learn of a similar tragedy .
There was a bit of excitement recently at the Naro Space Center on Outer Naro Island, just off the southern coast of the Korea Peninsula. The domestically developed South Korean Nuri rocket departed on its inaugural flight from launch pad LB-2 at 5pm in the afternoon on Thursday, 21 Oct. The previous launch in the KSLV-2 program from this facility was in 2018, when a single-stage Test Launch Vehicle was successfully flown and proved out the basic vehicle and its KRE-075 engines.
This final version of the three-stage Nuri rocket, formally known as Korean Space Launch Vehicle-II (KSLV-2), is 47.2 m long and 3.5 m in diameter. The first stage is powered by a cluster of four KRE-075 sea-level engines having 3 MN of thrust. The second stage is a single KRE-075 vacuum engine with 788 kN thrust, and the final stage is a KRE-007 vacuum engine with 69 kN thrust (all these engines are fueled by Jet-A / LOX). In this maiden flight, the first two stages performed as expected, but something went wrong when the third stage shut off prematurely and failed to gain enough velocity to put the 1400 kg dummy satellite into orbit.
Let’s rewind to what now seems like ancient history, April 2019. It’s hard to believe that that was not even three years ago, but since the pandemic hit that time seems like an entirely different world. I realize that it seems almost quaint now in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, but back then the biggest concern with respect to infectious disease and vaccines was that measles was making a resurgence in multiple areas in the US. The reasons boiled down to the usual reasons for measles outbreaks: pockets of low vaccine uptake, fueled by vaccine hesitancy, which was fueled by antivaccine misinformation promoted by antivaxxers. Some of this misinformation was targeted at insular religious groups, like some communities of ultra-orthodox Jews, which led to my writing a post about how the situation was more complex than that.
According to the NYSE PR Dept. they’ll IPO nature: “To preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” What? Really?
And, according to NYSE COO Michael Blaugrund: “Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.”
npm (and yarn) will execute arbitrary code when you install a package via install scripts. A valid use-case is to build native code on installation, or do some other environment-specific setup, though these scripts have also been used to show ads and, of course, as an attack vector. In fact, install scripts were the most popular route for malware as of 20192.
Installing a single malicious package is enough to get reasonably pwned. The risk is mitigated by npm’s moderation of the registry — they’re quick to remove malware once discovered. This works pretty well, though I worry about the day someone uses this to publish a self-replicating worm.
This attack vector isn’t unique to npm. Other package managers like pip and RubyGems allow for the same thing. As developers, we’re not as cautious when installing packages from these registries as when we use curl | bash, though we should be3.
Researchers at the Universities of Maryland and Colorado Boulder were credited with the TCP development, while the second was credited to security firm NexusGuard and named Black Storm.
The TCP attack targets devices between a client and a server: firewalls, load balancers, network address translators, and deep packet inspection tools, many of which could interfere with a TCP connection.
Both Godzilla and NGLite were developed with Chinese instructions and are publicly available for download on GitHub. We believe threat actors deployed these tools in combination as a form of redundancy to maintain access to high-interest networks. Godzilla is a functionality-rich webshell that parses inbound HTTP POST requests, decrypts the data with a secret key, executes decrypted content to carry out additional functionality and returns the result via a HTTP response. This allows attackers to keep code likely to be flagged as malicious off the target system until they are ready to dynamically execute it.
A [cracking] group with potential ties to China has breached nine global organizations as part of an ongoing espionage effort mostly targeting the defense sector, findings made public Sunday revealed.
According to a report from cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, the [crackers] targeted at least 370 organizations running potentially vulnerable Zoho servers in the U.S. alone, successfully compromising at least one, as part of a wider global campaign.
Europol on Monday announced the arrests, which took place Thursday, saying that the two individuals arrested are alleged to be behind more than 5,000 cyberattacks and are accused of having gained more than half a million Euros in ransomware payments made by victims.
The arrests were the latest in a string of operations pursued by a coalition of international partners against REvil, with Europol saying Monday that three other individuals associated with REvil, along with two others associated with a linked cyber crime group, have been arrested since February.
The U.S. Department of Justice today announced the arrest of Ukrainian man accused of deploying ransomware on behalf of the REvil ransomware gang, a Russian-speaking cybercriminal collective that has extorted hundreds of millions from victim organizations. The DOJ also said it had seized $6.1 million in cryptocurrency sent to another REvil affiliate, and that the U.S. Department of State is now offering up to $10 million for the name or location any key REvil leaders, and up to $5 million for information on REvil affiliates.
Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a Ukrainian national arrested last month in Poland, and Yevgeniy Polyanin, a Russian national who remains at large, face charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. Vasinskyi was charged in connection with his alleged role in carrying out the devastating July 4 ransomware attack against the software firm Kaseya, which in turn affected hundreds of companies within the U.S.
New Delhi, During peak festive season in the last 18 months 77 per cent of organisations in India experienced downtime due to cybersecurity risk, while 81 per cent of global organisations experienced increased cyber threats during Covid-19, a new report revealed on Tuesday.
According to McAfee Enterprise and FireEye's report titled 'Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of Covid-19', the top three most threatening cyber risks that were detected are malware attacks (47 per cent), data breaches (43 per cent), ransomware and cloud jacking (33 per cent each), over 30 per cent of the IT professionals also experienced vulnerabilities in their 'Internet of Things' devices.
The attacks came to light in December 2020 when American cyber security firm FireEye announced that it had identified a global campaign to compromise public and private sector bodies through corruption of software supply chains.
FireEye is now known as Mandiant, taking on the name of a company that it acquired some years ago after selling its network, email and cloud security products, as well as the FireEye name, in June this year.
The investor group will acquire all outstanding shares of McAfee common stock for $26 per share in an all-cash deal that values McAfee at about $12 billion on an equity basis.
Let's just get right into this and let Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) harvest some accolades and encouragement to continue to deploy its particular brand of intrusive transparency on historically secretive entities.
A couple of Israeli spyware purveyors have finally gotten themselves disinvited from the good graces of the federal government of the United States. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security has amended its export regulations to hand NSO Group and the more mysterious Candiru a "presumption of denial," meaning they'll have to prove they're trustworthy again before US entities will be able to do business with them.
In her investigative journalism work, Maria exposed the manipulation of social media platforms by savvy actors for the purpose of undermining democracies, harassing opponents, spreading misinformation, and faking the popularity of political actors. She is primarily known for her criticism of Facebook, which she has dubbed “the murderer of democracy”.
Activists from Palestinian groups recently designated "terrorist organizations" by Israel's government expressed outrage and resolve Monday following revelations that their phones were hacked with Pegasus spyware, and amid the exposure of a sweeping facial recognition surveillance campaign in the West Bank by Israeli occupation forces.
"It's part of a systematic attack on human rights defenders and the values of democracy and freedom."
The article XMPP: Admin-in-the-middle shows the perspective of an XMPP server administrator. While some people continuously praise XMPP as the “privacy-friendly alternative” to other messengers, we think users should be aware of its downsides: A server-side party (e.g., administrators, attackers, law enforcement) can transparently modify, log, and monitor nearly everything when users communicate via XMPP. We neither say XMPP is the worst communication protocol nor its downsides don’t apply to some other protocols.
Trading platform Robinhood said Monday that personal information for more than 7 million customers was accessed during a data breach on November 3rd. The company said in a news release that it does not appear that Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers were exposed, and no customers have had “financial loss” due to the incident.
As part of the Lithuanian visit, the PAARNG cyber security team visited the Regional Cyber Defence Centre (RCDC) which started operating last summer.
The conference was organised following reports that hundreds of irregular migrants in Belarus are moving toward the Polish border. Lithuania's border guard chief previously said that Lithuania was getting ready to react to any developments on its own border with Belarus.
“We are following what is happening on the border between Poland and Belarus and, obviously, we can expect similar incursions and attacks. So our institutions are on maximum alert, our officers and military forces are regrouping,” Bilotaitė told reporters.
EU officials, including Estonians, hold the Minsk regime responsible for facilitating and enabling irregular migration, calling it "hybrid aggression" against the European Union.
Hundreds of migrants are moving towards the Polish-Belarusian border in the Kuznica region on Monday, LRT reported.
Minister of Interior: "This is no longer a hybrid attack"
The European Union, to which Poland and Lithuania both belong, accuses Minsk of encouraging migrants from the Middle East and Africa to cross into the EU via Belarus, as a form of hybrid warfare in revenge for Western sanctions on President Alexander Lukashenko's government over human rights abuses.
Poland said it had withstood the first attempts on Monday by the migrants to force their way across the border.
NATO on Monday also hit out at Minsk, accusing the government there of using the migrants as political pawns, while the European Union called for fresh sanctions against Belarus.
Brussels says Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has encouraged the migrant flow in retaliation for existing EU sanctions imposed over its dismal human rights record.
EU and Nato members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have all seen a surge in the number of people trying to enter their countries illegally from Belarus in recent months. Many of them have come from the Middle East and Asia.
Government spokesman Piotr Muller said up to 4,000 migrants had gathered near Poland's eastern border and told reporters that at some point they expected "an escalation... which will be of an armed nature".
Amnesty International says Eritrean soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed civilians in the northern Tigrayan city of Axum, "opening fire in the streets and conducting house-to-house raids in a massacre that may amount to a crime against humanity."
NPR has independently verified reports of sexual violence in Tigray, speaking with witnesses and victims, including one woman in the rebel capital of Mekele who was held captive for about a month by government forces. The woman told NPR that she was chained up for nine days and gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers.
A jury found him guilty of penning a book titled “Provisions on the Rules of Jihad” which referred to targeting foreign nationals, promoted assassination including within Australia and was published on a website supported by al-Qaeda.
The 110-page book was described as a “practical guide to achieving martyrdom”.
Sami Yousafzai, a veteran journalist who has reported on the Taliban since its emergence in the 1990s, says by praising suicide bombers, the Taliban is alienating both the Afghans it hopes to rule and the international community it needs to fend off an economic and humanitarian crisis, the report said.
"Instead of trying to unite Afghans with a narrative of peace after claiming to have won the war, they want to bask in what they view as their glory and celebrate tactics such as suicide bombings that killed and maimed many Afghan civilians," he says.
Seeking a fifth four-year term, Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski lost Tuesday to challenger Ghalib, a health care worker who won with 68.5% of the vote, while Majewski received 31.5%. Four years ago, Majewski defeated Hassan, 61% to 38%. In 2017, Majewski got the support of some Yemeni Americans to win, but this time, the community came out for Ghalib, an immigrant from Yemen.
The mayor in Hamtramck has always been Polish-American Catholic since it became incorporated as a city 100 years ago. But today, the city is only 6.8% Polish, according to 2019 census data.
While the Israeli government said the attack was linked to “Iranian terror,” Cypriot officials have previously rejected the idea of Tehran’s involvement.
The New York Police Department is undermining investigations into police abuse by refusing to give full access to body-worn camera footage, according to a new report by a city watchdog agency.
The NYPD began rolling out body-worn cameras to officers in 2017, nearly four years after a federal judge found that the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional and ordered the NYPD to begin piloting the use of body cams.
Still, even at 1.5 degree Celsius of warming, scientists warn that storms, heat waves and droughts will be more extreme. And they caution that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming isn't a tipping point. For every tenth of a degree the planet gets hotter, the impacts get worse. But on the flip side, every tenth of a degree that's prevented can be crucial in limiting the extent of future damage.
At COP26, we are being told that the answer to this problem is to trust “market-based solutions.” The conference has even given Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos a platform to talk about what his vanity space travel expeditions taught him about climate change. Clearly, for those of us interested in preventing this crisis, few answers will be found in Glasgow.
The real fight against climate change will come from below, grassroots organizing that forces change to the polluting system which benefits the world’s most powerful interests. But here we have a problem: whether it is Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, or Green New Deal Rising, climate movements are using a mobilization strategy which aims to maximize disruption which then increases media coverage and thus public awareness of the issues.
This is a strategy for a problem we are not facing. The problem that exists, the barrier to change, is not a lack of knowledge or concern on the population’s part, but a deficit of power. The Left’s strategy must reflect this, or we risk frenetic campaigning activity that ultimately changes little.
Solving global warming is humanity’s greatest challenge. It can be done, but it is exceedingly difficult as it requires a fundamental restructuring of the world economy.
A group of over 100 climate justice advocates and creators on Monday publicly called on the world's largest public relations firm—Edelman—to drop ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies as clients.
"Advertising for fossil fuel companies obstructs urgently needed government action on climate change and impedes climate justice solutions."
While welcoming the global fashion industry's new climate commitments unveiled Monday as part of the United Nations summit in Glasgow, Scotland, campaigners urged bolder action that more adequately addresses issues with the full clothing supply chain.
"In a time when the climate crisis is accelerating to unprecedented levels, we need the real economy to lead on climate action."
The Glasgow U.N. climate summit is inundated with fossil fuel lobbyists, according to a recent report published by Global Witness that found “if the fossil fuel lobby were a country delegation at COP, it would be the largest with 503 delegates — two dozen more than the largest country delegation.” We speak with Louis Wilson, senior adviser at Global Witness, and Andrea Ixchíu, a Maya K’iche’ leader, journalist and human rights defender based in Guatemala, about the vast presence of the fossil fuel industry at COP26 and the subsequent greenwashing taking place. “We don’t allow tobacco lobbyists into health conferences, so it begs the question why fossil fuel lobbyists are being allowed into the most important climate conference in a generation,” says Wilson.
Eighteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg called COP26 a “failure” when she addressed the Fridays for Future rally in Glasgow, which drew around 25,000 demonstrators. Her address comes after Thunberg dismissed climate leaders a month prior to the U.N. climate summit for political inaction. “The COP has turned into a PR event where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains the governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action,” said Thunberg on Friday. “This is not a conference. This is now a Global North greenwash festival.”
As a new analysis revealed Monday that fossil fuel industry lobbyists have a larger presence at the COP26 than any country, global campaigners criticized the first draft of the final decision text for the United Nations climate summit for failing to even mention phasing out coal, gas, and oil.
"What the hell have they been doing? We are out of time. Glasgow must mean a total and immediate fossil fuel phase-out."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York warned Sunday that if congressional Democrats ultimately fail to approve the Build Back Better Act after passing a limited—and deeply flawed—bipartisan infrastructure bill, the U.S. will be at risk of throwing away its "biggest chance to combat climate change."
The New York Democrat characterized the Build Back Better (BBB) reconciliation package—a roughly $1.8 trillion bill containing a range of climate and safety-net investments—and the $550 billion infrastructure measure (BIF) as "interlocking policy" rather than two separate pieces of legislation, stressing that the potential benefits of the latter will only be realized if the former becomes law.
A major new investigation from the Washington Post has found "a giant gap" between the greenhouse gas emissions nations are reporting to the United Nations and what their planet-heating emissions actually are.€ €
Published Sunday, the investigation is being heralded as "a must-read story" based on "amazing" and "incredibly helpful" reporting.
The dinner was the modern-day equivalent of “let them eat cake,” the phrase (inaccurately) attributed to the epitome of frivolous luxury by the ruling class (and the last queen of France before the French Revolution), Marie Antoinette. The leaders of the G20 nations, who had gathered under the banner of “People, Planet, Prosperity,” appear to have disproportionately focused on the third rung of their agenda and limited its scope to the prosperity of elites like them. On the three critical issues of climate change, global corporate taxation, and COVID-19 vaccines, the world’s wealthiest nations looked out for themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.
In contrast to the United Nations General Assembly, which represents all the world’s nations, the G20 is a self-selected private club of the top tier of global wealth, only one step below the even-more-exclusive G7 club. Its members are mostly economic powerhouses, with a handful of exceptions of developing nations such as India, China, South Africa, Mexico, and Argentina.
More than 100,000 people took to the streets of Glasgow this weekend in a pair of climate rallies outside the U.N. climate summit. The first protest was organized by Fridays for Future, an international movement of students which grew out of Greta Thunberg’s climate strike outside the Swedish parliament in 2018. We hear from climate activists Evelyn Acham, Mikaela Loach, Raki Ap, Helena Gualinga and Jon Bonifacio. In her address, Loach slammed the leaders of rich nations at COP26: “[They] steal our sacred words and use them to defend and uphold the oppressive systems of capitalism and white supremacy.” Gualina also spoke about the increasing violence against environmental defenders: “Behind every murder that happens in the Amazon, every killing that happens to a land defender, there is a company behind that, there is a government behind that, there is a name behind that.”
Saturday’s massive climate rally outside of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow was led by Indigenous frontline activists. We hear from Kathy JetnÃâil-Kijiner, a poet and climate change activist from the Marshall Islands, and Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. “We did nothing to contribute to this crisis, and we should not have to pay the consequences,” said JetnÃâil-Kijiner. “We will survive climate change. We refuse to leave. We refuse to go anywhere. And our sovereignty is not up for debate.”
Activists held a memorial in Glasgow for those unable to attend this year’s U.N. climate summit: 1,005 land and environmental defenders who have been murdered since the 2015 Paris Agreement. One in three of those defenders killed was an Indigenous person. This comes as 2020 was the most dangerous year on record for environmental and land defenders. We speak with Andrea Ixchíu, a Maya K’iche’ leader, journalist and human rights defender based in Guatemala. Ixchíu says that the Guatemalan government, influenced by transnational corporate interests, has launched an assault on Indigenous land defenders: “They [Indigenous leaders] are not allowed to be in their communities defending their land and their territory because of the militizariation.” Speaking on COP26, Ixchíu says, “We do not just want to be observers,” and “If you want to create more solutions to the climate crisis, it’s really important to give land back to Indigenous communities.” We’re also joined by Global Witness senior adviser Louis Wilson, who helped organize the memorial and discusses the cases of murdered South African activist Fikile Ntshangase, who was a leading force in the fight against the Tendele coal mine before she was killed last October, and Ãâscar Eyraud Adams, a Mexican water activist killed last September as he fought for the water rights of the Indigenous peoples impacted by the excessive use of aquifers by large beer and wine companies.
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. The author is CCNow’s co-founder and executive director.
"The fact rich countries have consistently blocked efforts to set up a loss and damage fund to deal with this injustice is shameful."
Electric vehicle (EV) sales are booming in Oregon: we've gone from around 300 sold a decade ago to over 12,000 sold in our tiny state last year. € And EV owners are saving a ton of money on their daily commutes—as much as half the cost of gasoline—by just plugging into their homes every night to recharge.
A coalition of watchdog groups estimated Monday that fossil fuel industry representatives have a larger presence at COP26 than officials from any single country, a finding that further intensified environmentalists' concerns about the legitimacy of the high-stakes climate summit.
"If we're serious about raising ambition, then fossil fuel lobbyists should be shut out of the talks and out of our national capitals."
Several top oil-producing countries stacked their delegations to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow with oil and gas industry executives and officials from their oil ministries. In some cases, oil personnel represented significant portions of their overall country delegation, according to a DeSmog analysis.
The UK organizers of the COP26 climate conference very publicly declined to offer international oil companies any slots in the conference or any formal role in the event, and oil companies without credible climate programs were also barred from sponsoring events at the high-stakes international talks currently underway.
More electric cars are expected to be sold in the UK than diesel models next year, in what experts say will be a “watershed moment”.
Fully electric battery cars have already outsold diesel cars for several months this year, but 2022 is now projected to be the first time it happens across a year.
A total of 260,000 electric cars are expected to be sold in 2022 versus 221,000 diesel models, according to figures published yesterday by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), the UK automotive trade body. The figures do not include hybrid models.
Why it matters: The two companies don't own and operate EV fleets or a charging infrastructure, and they rely on contract drivers who operate vehicles of their own choice.
That business model could prove antiquated in the Electric Age, as new companies entering the fray are choosing to manage their own fleets from a central hub and count their drivers as employees.
But now Guyana is trading in its green halo in exchange for something far more profitable: oil revenue.
Companies had long suspected there was oil off Guyana's shores — the country is located right next to oil-rich Venezuela — but no one ever found any.
Then Exxon decided to take a gamble and look in deeper waters. The discovery the company announced in 2015 was extraordinary: One Exxon executive compared it to a "fairy tale." Since then, even more oil has been found in Guyana's waters.
Guyana is determined to develop this oil as fast as it can.
Growth like that screams bubble, of course, and many [cryptocurrency] enthusiasts will admit that the NFT market is in one. The hype around big, expensive NFTs — like Beeple’s $69 million sale earlier this year — has flooded the market with scammers and opportunists who are trying to make a quick buck. And while it’s entirely possible that NFTs will play some role in the future of art, it’s hard to argue with a straight face that a picture of a rock should sell for $1.3 million, or that a New York Times column’s fair-market value is more than $500,000. (Although, trust me, I have tried.)
What I saw is essentially legalized vandalism. For example, if I were to tear down a Forest Service sign, I could be fined or perhaps even arrested, but you can easily replace a sign. This ecological damage is much more severe and long-lasting, yet the Forest Service does nothing to preclude it.
Incredibly, the “range cons” who are supposed to monitor and manage the livestock grazing here can somehow look at themselves in the mirror in the morning and still accept taxpayer-supported salaries while allowing this vandalism to occur.
Today, Defenders of Wildlife, The Wilderness Society, the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, San Juan Citizens Alliance,€ WildEarth€ Guardians and the Western Environmental Law Center filed two lawsuits against€ the United€ States Forest Service€ over its newly revised land management plan€ for the Rio Grande National Forest. Over the past six years, conservation groups provided€ science-based recommendations and concrete solutions for protecting species and their diverse habitats in the€ Forest.€ € But in the face of these needed steps, the Forest Service’s plan slashes protections for the threatened Canada lynx and the endangered Uncompahgre fritillary butterfly in violation of the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act and the Forest Service’s own regulations.
The€ lawsuit filed€ by Defenders of Wildlife€ challenges the rollback of critical protections for lynx habitat in the€ Rio Grande National Forest.€ The€ Canada lynx relies€ heavily on the Rio Grande€ National Forest€ in the€ Southern Rocky Mountains,€ which contains more than half the locations in Colorado where lynx€ are€ consistently found.€ But the€ population€ is in dire straits, and€ federal scientists predict that the lynx may disappear from Colorado altogether within a matter of decades. The Forest Service’s new plan has now opened€ the extremely important€ lynx habitat€ in the forest€ to logging, one of the€ biggest threats to the cat.
Warning that more than 45 million people around the globe—but most acutely in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East—are in imminent danger of starvation, the head of the United Nations World Food Program on Monday urgently appealed to political leaders, the superrich, and people in the Global North for help.
"When there's $400 trillion worth of wealth on the Earth today, shame on us that we let any child die of hunger."
The effects will be most profound for the young in poorer countries. In Africa, where the population is growing at twice the rate as in South Asia or Latin America, and is expected to double by 2050, the number of youths being born into a warming climate is booming. Almost half of the populations of many African countries, including Niger, Mali, Uganda and Congo, are younger than 15. Those youths are already living through the crisis. Cyclones have torn through the south; desert locusts have endangered the food supply in the east; the Nile’s water supply is unsteady.
In addition, each country would be entitled to share in the revenue generated by the tax, which€ should raise a total of $150 billion.€ The increase in funds will allow developing countries to better pay for the effects of the covid pandemic, although€ the deal will not take effect until 2023.
The Historical Context of State’s Trying to Control Capital€
As a medical anthropologist who has spent the past 20 years studying how the Chinese government reacts to infectious disease, my research can provide insight into how countries, including the U.S., can better prepare for disease outbreaks.
Researchers agree that a good response starts with a strong public health system. But this is something that has been sidelined by the United States’ neoliberal system, which places more value on free markets and deregulation than public welfare.
A scathing report
A draft copy of the report, which circulated this morning — and was confirmed by various sources — is alarming for the president. Although the Commission does not have prosecutorial capabilities, its conclusions will likely result in further inquiries by the nation’s prosecutor (an investigation is already in its preliminary stages). The first part of the report establishes the role of capital flight and tax evasion in the Ecuadorian economy. It highlights the extensive web of offshore entities by the president and the Ecuadorian elite, and reveals conflicts of interest between public office and billionaire politicians.
Mega-billionaire Elon Musk's latest stunt—a Twitter poll asking whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock—was accompanied by a candid admission of what progressives have long seen as a fundamental flaw of the U.S. tax system: For the super-rich, paying income taxes is effectively optional.
After promising to abide by the results of his poll—which attracted more than 3.5 million votes and closed with 57.9% endorsing the sell-off—Musk noted that he does "not take a cash salary or bonuses from anywhere."
When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that “trickle-down economics have never worked” and that it was time to build the economy “from the bottom-up.” This came after the first reconciliation bill of the pandemic included the child tax credit that — combined with an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other emergency programs — reduced the poverty rate from 13.9% in 2018 to 7.7% in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1%.) All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments.
The economy added 531,000 jobs in October, as the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent, a level not reached following the Great Recession until February 2017. The jobs numbers for the prior two months were also revised upward by 235,000 to bring the three-month average to 442,000.
It’s also worth noting that private sector employment grew even more rapidly, adding 604,000 jobs. The hours-worked index, which only measures private sector employment, has risen by 1.2 percent in the last three months, which would translate into 498,000 private sector jobs per month if there were no change in hours. Many employers who are unable to hire are likely increasing the hours for the workforce they have.
CBC News, Toronto Stock Exchange Launches World’s First Bitcoin ETF
In a stirring speech on Saturday, Charles Booker, a former Kentucky state representative and now€ a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate running to unseat Republican incumbent Rand Paul, shed light on the persistence of poverty in the Bluegrass State and made the case for why "Kentucky needs a New Deal" to curb runaway inequality and create a society that works for the many, not just the wealthy few.
"We've been getting screwed. We've been getting robbed. We have been receiving a bad deal."
Ever since the two the bills—Infrastructure and Reconciliation— were first raised together last March 2021, progressives in the Democrat Party have been steadily driven into making concession after concession, reducing their proposals in a vain attempt to get the party’s corporate wing (represented in Senate by Manchin & Sinema and in the House by Cuellar and friends) to agree to some reduced cost Reconciliation bill. From an original bill with $3.5 trillion in social safety net and climate investments in the Reconciliation bill, progressives pared down their proposals to $1.75 trillion.
At each step the corporate wing of the party—represented by its point persons Manchin and Sinema—refused to counter the progressives’ offers.€ In fact, each time the progressives cut their proposals it only hardened the corporate wing’s opposition, encouraging them to refuse to make any counter proposals.
If ever there were the walking, talking embodiment of hypocrisy in modern American politics, surely Josh Hawley would be a viable avatar for such a creature. There are few better at saying one thing and doing another than he. He's a free speech advocate... who thinks social media sites should be sued for their choices on speech on their platforms. Josh Hawley loves to talk about how much he's been canceled... despite being a sitting US Senator and being given pages in massive newspapers in order to say all of that. Josh Hawley hates discriminating against folks over their politics... except when it's against the folks who's politics he doesn't like. And, finally, Hawley is a "constitutional lawyer" who, by some measure, participated in an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow an election.
On February 17, 1941, less than 10 months before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the United States 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.”
With Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win, this pattern has held in 11 of Virginia’s past 12 elections for governor. The exception was McAuliffe’s narrow win in 2013, a year after Barack Obama was re-elected as president. This time, McAuliffe was unable to overturn this pattern for a second time.
Youngkin is the first Republican to win statewide in Virginia since 2009. He prevailed by running what amounted to a “smoke and mirrors” campaign, aided by the fact that not having been in any kind of political office before, McAuliffe could not focus his campaign on Youngkin’s political history— obviously, the novice politician had none.
On the fight down to Nicaragua a few days ago to be one of 225 international official election accompaniers from 27 countries, the expat Nicaraguan woman sitting next to me was hostile to the current Sandinista government. She said there will be an election but no vote, because only one person is on the ballot. At the polling station in the colonial city of Leon this election morning, November 7, candidates from six political parties standing for president were in fact on the ballot: PLC, FSLN, CCN, ALN, APRE, and PLI.
Some of these parties included elements that tried in 2018 to violently overthrow the Nicaraguan government in a US-instigated regime change endeavor. All the perpetrators had been granted amnesty, despite such heinous acts as rape, torture, and even burning people alive, not to mention destruction of billions of dollars worth of public property.
Less than a week before Nicaragua’s presidential election, social media giant Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the ruling left-wing Sandinista government, a top Washington target for regime change.
Facebook is facing a political and regulatory siege on every conceivable front. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 46 states are challenging the company's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—with divestiture being the sought-after remedy. The company's global head of safety testified to Congress in September to explain the company's recent efforts to attract more children to its digital properties. Merely a week later, whistleblower Frances Haugen proved to be a far more compelling witness and revealed the true extent of Facebook's knowledge of the harmful effects its products have on children and its fervent desire to collect data and extend its active user base to this "valuable but untapped audience." All these events also take place against a backdrop of the most significant congressional antitrust investigation in decades, five proposed antitrust bills in the House of Representatives seeking to deconcentrate the technology sector, and other repugnant acts the company has committed over the past decade. News scandals detailing Facebook's actions appear as an almost daily occurrence.
Indivisible on Monday launched a national endorsement program "dedicated to protecting and expanding the number of progressives in public office," and began by formally backing seven candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, including three current members.
"So much is at stake and these are the candidates who will help deliver real progressive change."
Citing "unprecedented and coordinated" Republican efforts to undermine public trust in the U.S. electoral system, nearly 60 advocacy groups warned Monday of the need defend democracy ahead of the 2022 midterm elections—including by passing the Freedom to Vote Act.
"We have already seen tragic consequences in the form of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6."
Journalist Siddique Kappan has been in prison since October 2020. He has been charged under India’s sedition law and the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for trying to report on the Hathras gang rape and murder case. In Hathras, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped by upper-caste Thakur men and later died in the hospital. She was hurriedly cremated by the Uttar Pradesh Police in the middle of the night without the consent or the presence of her family. The gruesome violence and the police complicity in protecting the perpetrators made headlines in India. Kappan and three others—two student activists, Atikur Rahman and Masood Ahmed, and their driver, Aalam—were arrested. After his arrest, Kappan was tortured€ by the police and denied medication for diabetes.
Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of the news web site shadowproof.com. He has covered the Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from the beginning, as well as other major press-freedom and whistleblower cases.
On November 1, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs gave Vennink, Moscow correspondent for Dutch daily newspaper de Volkskrant, written notice that his residence permit and visa were revoked with immediate effect citing “administrative violations,” gave him three days to leave the country, and barred him from re-entering Russia until January 2025, according to his employer, a report by Reuters, and Vennink, who communicated with CPJ via email. Vennink said he left Russia on November 3.
The secrecy surrounding all things national security-related continues to thwart lawsuits alleging rights violations. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just dumped a complaint brought by Abdulaziz Ghedi, a naturalized American citizen who takes frequent trips to Somalia, the country he was born in. According to Ghedi's complaint, rejecting the advances of one federal agency has subjected him to continuous hassling by a number of other federal agencies.
This happened on Oct. 21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the set of the movie€ Rust. Despite the enormity of coverage the incident has gotten, I remain bewitched with incredulity over one unanswered question. Baldwin, the star of the movie, a Western, and one of its producers, was practicing his gun draw, using a prop gun he’d been given — except the gun wasn’t a prop. It was real. And it was loaded.
My question, of course, is: Why?
When Arundhati Velamur was in the fourth year of her education PhD program at New York University, she often had conversations with her colleagues about how their department seemed to only hire external candidates for faculty positions. “It was something we kept talking about, and a lot of us were wondering how we could bring this issue up to our department,” said Velamur, who went to the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. “So we went to the graduate student union and asked how they could help us.” This story was produced for Student Nation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email€ protected].
The Institute for Justice managed to kill off most of Philadelphia's severely abused civil forfeiture program in 2018. Litigation resulted in a consent decree that banned law enforcement from seizing cash amounts less than $250 and seizures of less than $1,000 were forbidden unless accompanied by criminal charges or if the seizure was to be used as evidence in a trial.
Before Terry McAuliffe became the Democrat whose repeat gubernatorial ambitions were thwarted by angry parents, he was the savvy pol who successfully lured Amazon to Virginia.
And now a Border Patrol agent was screaming at them. “Get back!” the agent yelled after forcing Garcia out of his truck. They were standing in the secondary inspection area at a Border Patrol checkpoint near the small town of Three Points, just outside the reservation, about 40 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Nearby stood a group of armed employees of G4S, a transnational company with headquarters in the UK. They wore gray uniforms and black boots. One of them tossed the apple he was eating to the ground, Garcia told me afterward*, as they advanced behind the green-uniformed Border Patrol agent. What sparked the border agent’s anger, and led the battalion of G4S agents to advance, was that Garcia had said, “We don’t consent to a search.”
Congress is at it again, trying to legislate without bothering to understand the problems they are ostensibly trying to fix. This time it's with the INFORM Consumers Act, S.B. 936, which, instead of debating further, some of its sponsors are trying to ram through as an amendment to the must-pass NDAA. Which itself is a clue that there's something wrong with this bill, because if the only way to become law is to avoid further scrutiny, then that's exactly when such scrutiny is needed.
Voters in Minneapolis rejected a measure that would have transformed the city's policing 18 months after the killing of George Floyd thrust the city into the forefront of the police reform debate.
Sh. Fazaga: "Generally speaking, when a person converts to Islam, they really are taken into the community as new members. So the tendency is that people will embrace them, literally embrace them. You get lots and lots of hugs when people come in … the assumption here is that people have made a lot of sacrifices and potentially they have lost their social support system. So the community tries to compensate for that."
The video shows a security guard, a police officer and another person carrying a woman on a stretcher to an elevated ledge ... in an attempt to bring her down onto a street where go-carts were waiting to take victims to a medical tent on the premises.
“Their calm response bugged me out a little. I tried again, telling them, ‘I’m not trying to be an asshole, but there’s people in there who are probably dying,’” he recalled. “I was basically told to fuck off. Just no urgency at all.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran sentenced an Iranian man and woman to death for adultery after a father-in-law urged the judiciary to execute his son-in-law.
According to reports in the Persian language US government news organizations Voice of America and Radio Farda, Iran’s regime imposed the death penalty on a 27-year-old married man and his 33-year-old female lover named Sareh. The married man’s wife sought to withdraw the complaint against her husband in a last-ditch effort to spare his life, but her father overruled her attempt and demanded the death penalty.
Non-Muslims will be allowed to marry, divorce and get joint child custody under civil law in Abu Dhabi according to a new decree issued on Sunday by its ruler, state news agency WAM said.
According to his lawyers, he was abused during his detention because of his Jewish religion and his homosexuality. “I was attacked by a prisoner who had come to the cell two days earlier. He poured a kettle of hot water on my body, my face and shouted Allah akbar. Obviously someone had told him I was Jewish or gay,” he recounted. Today “I feel much better than when I was imprisoned. I am relieved and happy to be with my loved ones, my family and my friends,” he said. I still don’t quite understand that. It’s like a soft landing.
Ms Hammadi, who has a Yemeni father and an Ethiopian mother, has worked as a model for several years and acted in two Yemeni TV series. She sometimes appeared in photographs posted online without a headscarf, defying strict societal norms in the conservative Muslim country.
Last evening the web was alive with angry players who couldn't play their games due to an unexpected error. While the situation is still not completely clear, it appears that someone allowed a domain used by Denuvo's anti-piracy technology to expire, meaning that players of some big games couldn't enjoy what they had paid for.
India's second biggest retail outlet, Future Retail, has been asked to submit details of a deal with Amazon to the Enforcement Directorate, an Indian law enforcement agency.
That transaction has been put on hold by an arbitrator and Indian courts after Amazon argued Future had violated its contracts with the U.S. company by entering into the sale. Future denies that, and says Amazon is illegally exerting control over the Indian firm's business decisions.
In a confidential notice dated Oct. 28, the Enforcement Directorate agency asked a Future unit to submit all correspondence including emails between Amazon and the Indian group in respect of the investment the U.S. firm made in Future two years ago. Reuters has reviewed a copy of the notice.
Computer programs can be protected by European patents, provided that they have a technical character (ie, they produce a technical effect) and they involve an inventive step. In this interview, Samuel Denis, European patent attorney, discusses the patentability of software and provides some advice to applicants on how to get their applications in the best possible shape.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Bryant’s questioning also came at a time when Sony was already in the process of evaluating how “to do right by its legacy artists.” “When Fonda Bryant came to [Sony] concerned that [her father’s account] was still unrecouped, her timing was right,” says the source, who asked not to be identified. “If it had been 10 years ago, or even seven years ago, [Sony] may not have done the same thing.” (Sony declined to comment for this story.)
In June, nine months after its decision on the Taylor account, Sony Music shocked the industry when it declared that it “will no longer apply existing unrecouped balances to artists.” The financial structure of the record industry has long been centered around the idea of an “advance”: An artist receives a substantial payment upfront, and then is essentially in debt to their record label until their recordings earn enough money to pay back the advance.
The International Center for Law and Economics believes that cloud hosting providers and related services should do more to deter illegal activity. Responding to an inquiry from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the research center further notes that anonymous online activity through proxy servers, VPN's, the Onion network (Tor), and even 8chan, can complicate law enforcement.
Open Science No Text. By: Greg Emmerich. CC BY-SA 3.0
