Over the the past couple of decades of IT, most of the focus has been around taking disparate elements of an organisation’s infrastructure and bringing them together into something much simpler. But now, with greater focus on applications and containerisation, it can feel like we’re breaking them all up again.
However, it’s important to focus on the common thread that connects each big technology and infrastructure trend. The key thing in all this is that these changes have improved cross-functionality, communication, and collaboration across a business. So even if it feels a little like the latest trend is undoing something that’s already been done, in reality we’re moving forward and improving on what was there before.
VMware has stated that the Cloud Foundry-based Tanzu Application Service for Kubernetes did not meet its standards, but despite this Cloud Foundry Foundation said that its Kubernetes transition is alive and well.
The terminology is confusing, especially as VMware calls all its developer platform stuff Tanzu, so bear with us. Tanzu Application Service (TAS) is the Cloud Foundry-based platform that does not use Kubernetes. TAS for Kubernetes is that platform adapted to run on Kubernetes. Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) is nothing to do with TAS, but is VMware's latest effort to simplify deploying applications to Kubernetes.
We're in the middle of chapter 8 right now so that means all we're doing to do is compiling compiling and more compiling.
This is the first video I ever posted about Linux. I am being doxed by one sick person who attacks me every time I post a video. It's getting dangerous and so I must stop posting for a while. Instead of a long goodbye, lets just take a look back. Love to all! :)
The RISC-V architecture updates were sent out on Friday for targeting the nearly-over Linux 5.16 merge window.
The RISC-V updates for Linux 5.16 include support for RISC-V 32-bit "rv32" randconfig kernel builds for random configurations to stress the build system / different code paths, supporting the time namespace in the VDSO, improving the XIP port, DeviceTree clean-ups, and more.
In Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions, the terminal shell is also known as the GNOME terminal, which was built under the original Gnome project. The terminal shell is written in the C programming language that can interact with the hardware and the kernel. Most Linux users keep using the default terminal shell with the original screen, scheme, and settings forever like they actually don’t want to make their Ubuntu look fashionable. However, as Ubuntu is a free and open-source OS, it totally allows you to customize the Ubuntu terminal settings with new themes, screens, fonts, styles, and other settings. Updating the terminal doesn’t only make the shell good-looking, but it can also help you to be more productive.
Fedora Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update or rebase to Fedora Linux 35 on your Fedora Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert things if something unforeseen happens.
MariaDB is an open-source one of the most popular relational database management system (RDBMS) that is a highly compatible drop-in replacement of MySQL. It is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness, and MariaDB Foundation ensures contributions will be accepted on technical merit.
MariaDB was developed as a software fork of MySQL in 2009 in response to Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. MariaDB intends to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. It is part of most cloud offerings and the default in most Linux distributions.
In this guide we will learn how to install and configure MariaDB in Fedora 35 Server/Workstation.
In this article, we will learn how to install and configure freeipa client on Fedora 35.
This integrations allow a System Administrator to conveniently configure the server centrally, on the FreeIPA server. When a management command is executed on the Client machine, the FreeIPA client sends it to the server where it is executed.
openSUSE users currently, by default, are only limited to the Firefox Internet Browser. However, many alternatives can be installed. Microsoft Edge is one alternative that has been in development for over a year and has been getting quite a lot of good reviews amongst many Linux distribution communities and maybe an alternative compared to just switching to Google Chrome.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Microsoft Edge on openSUSE 15 Leap.
Linux package is a compressed file archive that contains all files belonging to specific applications. In some situations, you may need to find the package name belonging to a file.
In this tutorial, we learn how to find which package a file belongs to in the Linux system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TaskBoard on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, TaskBoard is a free, open-source, PHP-based, and self-hosted scheduling application that helps users to keep track of their important tasks. It provides a simple and user-friendly web interface for managing all your tasks. It is used by teams or organizations to represent work and its path towards completion.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of TaskBoard on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this guide we will learn how to configure FreeIPA replication on Rocky Linux 8. This guide will also work for RHEL 8 derivatives like Alma Linux or Centos 8 or Oracle Linux 8.
A replica is a clone of a specific FreeIPA server. The server and replica share the same internal information about users, machines, certificates, and configured policies. These data are copied from the server to the replica in a process called replication. The two Directory Server instances used by an FreeIPA server — the Directory Server instance used by the FreeIPA server as a data store and the Directory Server instance used by the Dogtag Certificate System to store certificate information — are replicated over to corresponding consumer Directory Server instances used by the FreeIPA replica.
Welcome to our tutorial on how to install Arkime (Moloch) Full Packet Capture tool on Debian. Arkime, formerly known as Moloch “is a large scale, open source, indexed packet capture and search system“.
Since the start of the pandemic, many companies have had to move a lot of their employees' work from office to remote settings, which in turn has brought on a need for workers to have secure and manageable desktops. To address this, one of the solutions companies have utilized is virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, where the desktop is hosted securely in a datacenter and accessed via a client at a remote user's location.
VDI provides a wide range of clients that can be used: from zero or thin clients, to laptops and mobile devices running a VDI native client. Thin and zero clients are dedicated to only running the software to connect to remote desktops, while VDI native clients run as an application on top of Widows, Linux or other OSes.
Today we are looking at how to install FL Studio 20 on a Chromebook with Crossover 21. 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.
Blog post you’re reading right now is privately hosted on Raspberry PI 4 Kubernetes cluster with its data coming from NFS share and MariaDB on a Synology NAS. Purpose of this post is to serve as an ultimate guide on how to build a (prod ready) RPI k8s cluster and deploy WordPress CMS to it. Also don’t worry if you don’t have a Synology device, as I’ll explain how to use alternative solutions to achieve the same result in terms of storage and accessibility.
Object storage has by far the most simplistic interface out there, with no need for complicated SCSI drivers, HBA drivers, multipathing tools, or volume managers embedded into your Operating System. All you need to do is point your application at an HTTP endpoint, and use a simple set of verbs to describe what you want to do with a piece of data.
Do you want to PUT it somewhere for safekeeping? Do you want to GET it so that you can do some work with that piece of data? Or do you want to LIST the contents of your bucket?
Perhaps these three verbs are an oversimplification of what is possible with object storage, but this is loosely where cloud object storage began. It was an initiative to make storage more economical by removing proprietary technologies and creating a simple scalable storage solution, without the complexities of legacy technologies. Uses of Object Storage
Firstly, when building a new application, you will need to build it with object storage in mind. Instead of relying on cluster-aware filesystems and quorum devices, the application will need to handle failover and data consistency itself to remain available during hardware failures. Alternatively, many off the shelf applications now have native deployment models for working with cloud native infrastructure, and most importantly with object storage. When your application has finished processing or creating a piece of data, it can be written to an object store for safekeeping, and can easily be retrieved as and when needed.
We can even use object storage buckets to trigger events. Imagine the scenario where you have a mobile app that uploads photos or video, and then some processing happens, before publication. Once a photo or video is uploaded to an object store, an event is triggered to let your application know that there is a new object to be processed. And once that object has been processed the output could be written to a bucket that triggers another job to push it to your Content Distribution Network (CDN).
Here's a description of how my monthly external backups are managed at a technical level. I didn't realise I hadn't written this all down anywhere yet.
A fresh Proton release is coming up with Proton 6.3-8 now seeing a Release Candidate ready for more people to test and report issues on.
At this point we’ve sent hundreds of dev-kits out to developers around the world, and are still shipping out more - but we unfortunately will be unable to serve the entire Steam developer community. There are ways around this though, and it is possible to develop for Steam Deck without a dev-kit, with the hardware you have available to you.
As an aside, the dev-kits that we are sending out are just prototypes of retail units. There isn’t anything special or different about them, no extra hardware or software that make them easier to develop for. So you really can just use available hardware to get a pretty accurate idea of how your game will run on Steam Deck. So let’s go through testing methods point-by-point using the main items our Deck Verified testers will be looking for.
Unfortunately the same supply chain shortages that led Valve to push back the ship date for Steam Deck customers means that dev kits are in short supply. So the company has released some suggestions for developers that want to test their games on similar hardware either by using their own computer or assembling one with an AMD Ryzen processor, Radeon Vega graphics, and Arch Linux-based software.
Windows 11 has been released, but the latest Microsoft system, far from meeting expectations, has ended up casting doubts due to its requirements and the problems that were initially detected with the AMD processors. Seeing that the Redmond giant is obsessed with putting up barriers, it may be time to start considering changing its technology for another that gives you more freedom.
When we talk about alternatives to Windows on compatible PCs, we always find the same option: Linux . And yes, this article is yet another one that invites you to replace Microsoft’s system with that of the penguin, but this time we are going to propose a distribution that can come in handy for those who are compulsive gamblers: Manjaro.
Manjaro is a fairly well-known distribution. Based on Arch Linux, it is also a rolling release , but contrary to the system from which it derives, Manjaro is very user-friendly, so much so that just installed it already brings everything you need to start using Steam.
This week brings several exciting and long-awaited changes, including KHamburgerMenu in Okular, Primary Monitor on Wayland, and Centered window placement by default! Read on to find out the details...
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary each Saturday highlighting the accomplishments of this free software desktop project.
It's been another busy work in KDE land, especially with the continuous efforts around improving the Plasma Wayland session.
KDE Frameworks 5.88 is here to further improve your Plasma desktop environment and favorite KDE apps by fixing bugs or implementing new features. It also makes the Plasma desktop environment a bit faster and to use less memory every time it loads an icon, as well as when accessing files when the system’s /etc/fstab file contains entries identified with UUID and/or LABEL properties.
With this update, the Plasma desktop now saves any changes you made in Edit Mode when you exit it, the Plasma Wayland session now lets you paste arbitrary clipboard content into a file and no longer crashes when you repeatedly hover and un-hover Task Manager’s thumbnails, and you can now double-click on a Plasma spinbox’s number to select it.
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.88.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
Recently there’s been a lot of discussion within the open source desktop space about GNOME, LibAdwaita, and the future of “theming” on GTK-based platforms like GNOME and elementary OS. To help distill this information, Nick from The Linux Experiment interviewed elementary co-founder and CXO Cassidy James Blaede for his recent The FACTS about GNOME’s plans for THEMES video.
Below are the questions provided by Nick and Cassidy’s answers, lightly edited for spelling, grammar, and formatting. We hope they help share a bit of perspective on this topic!
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 05 to November 12.
System upgrade from Debian Bullseye repos as of November 12, 2021 Update Linux kernel to 5.10.0.9 Update Tor Browser to 11.0 Update Thunderbird to 78.14.0-1 Update tor to 0.4.5.10-1
BlueMail by Blix a free, beautifully designed, universal email app, capable of managing an unlimited number of mail accounts from various providers, allowing for smart push notifications and group emailing while enabling personalization across multiple email accounts. Updated to version 1.1.119.
Pale Moon is an Open Source, Firefox-based web browser available for Linux, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser! Updated to version 29.4.2.1.
The Fedora developers have released a new version of their Linux distribution. In Fedora 35, they worked intensively on stabilizing changes that had already been implemented in earlier versions – such as the “Pipewire” sound server introduced with Fedora 34 as a replacement for PulseAudio.
Gnome makes the step to version 41 as the primary desktop environment of this distribution, whereby its package management “Gnome-Software” now, if not all, integrates the most popular Flatpak packages from flathub.org via an additional repository. The “systemd-resolved” service, which has been responsible for name resolution for network connections since Fedora 33, has the ability to deal with “DNS over TLS” (DoT).
Another novelty: Fedora “Kinoite”, a modularized Linux system that maintains system partitions in read-only mode and updates them separately from installed applications.
Fedora 35 released a while back. And we feel this is the right time to have a quick review of the Fedora 35 Workstation edition.
AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the community owned and governed open source CentOS alternative, today announced delivery of its third stable release within 48 hours of general availability of the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux€® (RHEL) 8.5 release. AlmaLinux 8.5 has full feature parity with RHEL’s newest release including improvements that make it easier for DevOps teams to manage containerized workloads, as well as updated programming languages and security and compliance tools.
“The AlmaLinux community is highly motivated to deliver stable releases in sync with the RHEL release timeline to promote stability and continuity for those managing production workloads on AlmaLinux,” said Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux. “As CentOS Linux comes to end of life this year, we aim to deliver the same high degree of quality, robustness, and timeliness end users would expect from a CentOS successor to provide a free and reliable, enterprise-grade Linux alternative.”
Finally, the wait for the official release of Fedora Workstation 35 is over! The official stable release was made available for download after being pushed back to resolve some outstanding bugs.
The wait was definitely worth it! True to Fedora foundations of “First” & “Features,” the release includes the new GNOME 41, updated developer tools, new programming languages, new power management profiles, parental controls, and improvements in the management of other third-party apps. The release cycle also includes Fedora Kinoite, a new edition based on Fedora Silverblue’s OSTree technologies. In addition, the edition features the KDE Plasma desktop.
This article is a description of the new features and improvements in Fedora Linux 35.
IBM has finally cut loose its multi-billion-dollar managed infrastructure business, renamed to Kyndryl, sending 90,000 staffers into a life that is less big and less blue.
Lanner’s IP67 and MIL-STD-810G compliant “ISD-0370” 5G net appliance runs Linux on an up to 12-core Atom C3000 with up to 64GB DDR4, 64GB eMMC, and 3x M.2. USB, COM, and 6x GbE, including 2x with PoE, use M12 ports.
Lanner announced its first IP67-rated, outdoor-ready network appliance. The ISD-0370 offers 6x GbE ports and M.2 slots for 5G, WiFi/BT, and an SSD.
The ISD-0370 runs Linux on an Atom C3000. Other Lanner network appliances with this combination in include its compact NCA-1515, as well as its larger SFP-ready NCR-1510, both with 6x GbE. There is also a larger 8x GbE NCA-1515 with SFP, bypass, and extra security, among others.
We are now testing preliminary SIP support in our calls app. This allows users to make and receive calls from a SIP provider over an internet connection.To test it out today, enter the full SIP address after setting up your account.
October went fast, full of news and packed with interesting robotics applications. This month certainly doesn’t need an intro, so we will let the news take all your attention.
Kontron’s 3.5”-SBC-R39 board provides a 2.0GHz, hexa-core RK3399K with up to 4GB soldered LPDDR4, up to 32GB eMMC, 2x GbE, 5x USB, DP, HDMI 2.0, mini-PCIe, and M.2 B- and E-key slots.
Rockchip’s RK3399 has been seen on several Pico-ITX boards based on Rockchip’s RK3399, such as IEI’s Hyper-RK39, and many smaller SBC’s such as the Orange Pi 4 and over a dozen others in our catalog of 150 Linux hacker boards. Now, Kontron has released what appears to be the first 3.5-inch model. The 146 x 105mm 3.5”-SBC-R39 offers a choice of standard RK3399 with dual 1.8GHz Cortex-A72 and 4x 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 cores or the RK3399K, which ups the clock to 2.0GHz and 1.6GHz, respectively. Kontron used the RK3399K on its fA3399 SMARC module.
Android 12 (AOSP) source code was released last month, and a developer took the opportunity to port Android 12 to the Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer and derivatives.
More specifically, KonstaT created an unofficial build of LineageOS 19.0 for Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard PC, and Compute Module 4 working on systems with at least 2GB of RAM.
It has become commonplace in the software industry for programmers of all flavors to build careers writing code that releases to the commons with open source licenses. Industry headhunters often demand access to the code to vet future employees. Those that focus their career on open source development get rewarded. According to payscale.com, Linux sysadmins earn more than their Windows counterparts, indicating better pay and job security for jobs in open source software. There's also a good feeling (maybe even karma) that comes with sharing your work. You know you are creating value literally for the entire world. Historically, such opportunities did not exist for those of us that work in open hardware.
Twenty years or so ago, almost no one even knew what open source hardware was, let alone planned a career around it. In 2000, for example, out of the more than 2 million academic papers published that year in the entire world, only seven articles even mentioned "open source hardware" at all. When I first wrote Open-Source Lab, I'd collected every example (only a few dozen) and could easily keep up and read every open hardware article that got published to post them on a wiki. I am happy to report that is no longer physically possible. There have already been over 1,500 articles that discuss "open source hardware" this year, and I am sure many more will be out by year's end. Open source hardware is now a field of its own, with a few journals dedicated to it specifically (for example, HardwareX and the Journal of Open Hardware). In a wide range of fields, dozens of traditional journals now routinely cover the latest open hardware developments.
Controlling your computer with a wave of the hand seems like something from science fiction, and for good reason. From Minority Report to Iron Man, we’ve seen plenty of famous actors controlling their high-tech computer systems by wildly gesticulating in the air. Meanwhile, we’re all stuck using keyboards and mice like a bunch of chumps.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. As [Norbert Zare] demonstrates in his latest project, you can actually achieve some fairly impressive gesture control on your computer using a $10 USD PAJ7620U2 sensor. Well not just the sensor, of course. You need some way to convert the output from the I2C-enabled sensor into something your computer will understand, which is where the microcontroller comes in.
With the ever growing surveilling presence of advertisement giants like Google and Facebook on your personal and intimate devices like Phones and Tablets, it is time to deal with it.
You might be wondering why should you install a different Android based OS on your phone than what is already included. Let me give you a few reasons...
The OSPO Alliance, consisting of four non-profit open source organizations, has published the first version of the Open Source Handbook of Good Governance. OW2, the Eclipse Foundation, the OpenForum Europe and the Foundation for Public Code have jointly developed the manual as part of their good governance initiative. It offers know-how for introducing a professional management of open source software in organizations.
In the past years, Calligra has not been very active. Since a few months, we are trying to improve the situation and come back. We need great office suites. We need components we can reuse in our applications. We need a Plasma-mobile document viewer. This is what Calligra can be, this is what Calligra will be.
In order to show what is happening in the project, we will try to write monthly activity reports. Since it is the first one, it will convey the changes of the whole year.
The whole suite received huge code modernization. We were still using old constructions (especially old style connect) that are slower or less safe than new ones. Thanks to clazy and patience, a lot of these are gone now. We also started upgrading our minimum requirements in order to anticipate the future Qt 6 migration, with further upgrades in the pipe. As a side effect (and also some additional work), the compiler is complaining much less than before.
We also have some more specific changes in the various suite components, listed below.
Writer now has the start of linked character and paragraph styles. This improves DOCX compatibility, extends ODT and it’ll improve the style previews and the UI in the future, hopefully.
Mark your calendars; it’s almost time for State of the Word 2021!
State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event allows us to reflect on the project’s progress and the future of open source.This year will include that and more.
Due to the pandemic, we moved the State of the World online for the first time ever in 2020. This year, the event will be livestreamed from New York City .That will enable us to take as many folks as possible along for the ride!
Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2021, discusses the latest trends he’s seeing, celebrates the community’s amazing wins, and explores the future. Expect to hear about a range of topics, from WordPress 5.9 and Openverse to Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Date: November 13, 2021
Time: 10 am – 6pm PST
Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. EFF was honored to call him an ally and friend. His life was cut short in 2013, after federal prosecutors charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. With the threat of a long and unjust sentence before him, Aaron died by suicide at the age of 26.
He would have turned 35 this year, on November 8.
Aaron's death laid bare how federal prosecutors have abused the CFAA by wielding it to levy heavy penalties for any behavior they don't like that happens to involve a computer, rather than stopping malicious computer break-ins. EFF has continued to fight its misuses, including filing a brief in a recent Supreme Court case, Van Buren v. United States, in support of computer security researchers. In a victory for all internet users, the court recognized the danger of applying this law too broadly, and rejected the U.S. government's broad interpretation of it.
On October 19, 2021, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) sued Vizio, Inc. for alleged violations of the GNU General Public License covering software incorporated into certain Vizio smart TVs.
Use of open-source software has become increasingly popular in the development of proprietary commercial computer software, including software embedded in hardware devices such as consumer electronic devices. Open-source software can provide important and useful functionality, and is increasingly used by developers to reduce development time.
The licensing models under which open-source software is made available can be thought of as falling into two broad categories: permissive licenses and copyleft licenses. Permissive open-source licenses typically do not create significant obstacles to incorporating the open-source software into proprietary commercial software products. Copyleft licenses, however, can be extremely problematic for developers of proprietary software and hardware. The terms of such licenses may require that, if any software that incorporates or otherwise interacts with the open-source software and is distributed, then the distribution of such modified software is governed by the same copyleft license. For this reason, some refer to these types of open-source licenses as “viral”. This term is intended to refer to the licenses’ effect of capturing (some use the term “infecting”) an ever-growing amount of software code.
Pigs for the Ancestors is an iconic ethnography, taught for decades in introductory courses and graduate seminars alike. Rapport’s theoretical ambition, the richness of highland PNG life, the detail in the ethnography — it all works together to produce an ethnography whose life has exceeded its sell-by date for decades. And now, the University of California San Diego provides 420 new ways to teach it: a massive, open access collection of 420 photos taken by Roy Rappaport across the course of his career.
Photographs and sound recordings taken by American anthropologist, Roy A. Rappaport (b. 1926 - d. 1997), documenting research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where he studied the social life, rituals and ecology of the Maring-speaking people, particularly those belonging to the Tsembaga clan cluster living in the Simbai Valley of Madang Province. The photographs include agricultural practices, material culture such as house and bridge-building, and a year-long ritual cycle. Pig sacrifices, dance and music, ceremonial exchange, and elaborate feather headdresses and wigs are among the topics portrayed. Also included are photographs taken in the Adelbert Range of Madang Province, and images created in the context of archaeological work in 1960 in French Polynesia, particularly on Moorea and Tahiti.
The sound recordings were made during his fieldwork and are arranged in two groups. A) Reel-to-Reel: 16 recordings made during Rappaport's 1962-1963 fieldwork in New Guinea documenting linguistic exercises, Maring dialogue, recording instructions, chanting, drumming, and singing. B) Audio Cassettes: 29 cassette tapes recorded during Rappaport's 1981-1982 fieldwork in New Guinea. These tapes document court cases, religious ceremonies, popular songs, and interviews. The sound recordings were digitized through support by a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sound recordings are available upon request and registration.
Pseudocode quality correlates with project quality. The key to good pseudocode is getting as granular as possible. This is called “decomposition.”
To understand, let’s take a real-world example: if someone instructed you to cook a pot of spaghetti, you’d probably know what to do from past experience. When we think about it, however, this task is composed of about a dozen assumed steps. You need to get a packet of pasta, get a pot big enough for it, fill the pot with water…you get the idea.
When composing pseudocode, you must break your process down into these small, seemingly obvious steps. That’s because you’re doing something new and complex instead of habitual and simple. Once you decompose your process into its smallest parts, your granularity is just right.
There is a syntactic element that should be addressed, too.
Each one of your atomic steps should have its own line. Also, make your conditional and looping steps stand out. Typically, this is done using indentation.
For conditional statements, put the condition to be tested on the same level of indentation as the line above (unless it’s a loop or another conditional statement), and indent each step to be taken on satisfying that condition underneath it.
For looping statements, put the condition under which the loop iterates on the same level of indentation as the line above (unless it’s a conditional statement or another loop), and indent each step to be executed per iteration underneath it.
I created a very basic calculator using wxGlade and the Wx Perl module on CPAN.
I still remember the RFC number off the top of my head for the first multipart formdata spec that I implemented support for in curl. Added to curl in version 5.0, December 1998. RFC 1867.
Multipart formdata is the name of the syntax for how HTTP clients send data in a HTTP POST when they want to send binary content and multiple fields. Perhaps the most common use case for users is when uploading a file or an image with a browser to a website. This is also what you fire off with curl’s -F command line option.
RFC 1867 was published in November 1995 and it has subsequently been updated several times. The most recent incarnation for this spec is now known as RFC 7578, published in July 2015. Twenty years of history, experiences and minor adjustments. How do they affect us?
I admit to having dozed off a little at the wheel and I hadn’t really paid attention to the little tweaks that slowly had been happening in the multipart formata world until Ryan Sleevi woke me up.
AV1 is a high-efficiency, open-source video codec format that has a royalty-free license from Alliance of Open Media (AOMedia). Netflix is a founding member of AOMedia and one of its key contributors to its development of AV1. It began delivering AV1 in 2020 to its Android mobile app, which delivered improved viewing experiences for its members.
His most recent work, titled Tokyo Redux, maintains the standard his previous work has set. The final novel of the Tokyo Trilogy, Tokyo Redux is a tale about the investigation of one of Occupied Japan’s most notorious murders. Still unsolved to this day, the murder of the President of the Japan National Railways Shimoyama riveted the devastated-but-recovering nation of Japan in 1949. Found in several pieces after being struck by a train, Shimoyama’s death came while the railway workers union was up in arms because Shimoyama had been specifically appointed to lay off over one hundred thousand members of their union. The primary reason behind this move was the desire of the Occupation forces to destroy the union and, ideally, to privatize at least some elements of the public transit system in Japan. In other words, classic moves by the Pentagon and its corporate affiliates in a defeated and occupied nation. Naturally, the attack on the railway workers union enhanced the position of the communists in the union and throughout the country; a position that was already fairly strong given the uncertain political situation in most of Asia after the war. Of course, the right-wing elements among the US officers heading up the Occupation saw the communist workers not as workers angry at losing their jobs, but as tools of the Soviet empire intent on provoking a violent overthrow of the US and other anti-communist elements then ruling Japan.
In what can best be termed a classic David Peace narrative structure, the book is divided into three sections. The first is told through the eyes of Harry Sweeney, a police officer working as part of the US Occupation’s Public Safety Division. Sweeney is a classic detective, attentive to details, wary of the story being thrust on him by is superiors and skeptical of the media’s investigations. Sworn to detail and determined to seek the truth, his use of alcohol is both a salve and a trigger for violence. As the story reveals itself, it becomes clear he is running from something and someone in the States—a woman and a relationship that at the least confuses him. He makes friends among those he questions and uses his gangland connections to gather knowledge from those in the know who won’t talk to cops. Besides the reactionary military officers is a considerably more sinister element at work. Once known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), they have morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their mastery of subterfuge and subversion is just getting started. Sweeney knows there is someone who wants the world to believe Shimoyama’s death was a suicide, but he does not know who that is. Nor does he know who did kill him. His last words to his driver are “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Our country's landscape is dotted with toxic Superfund sites that impact the health and wellbeing of the lives of surrounding communities every day. These sites result from the disregard, neglect, malfeasance, capture and abuse by government agencies and corporations while under their stewardship. If and when these sites are cleaned up, it is only through the dogged efforts of local activists who make it happen.€
You might remember Canadian telecom giant Rogers. The company routinely found itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons during the net neutrality wars, after it repeatedly tried to abuse its gatekeeper power to disadvantage other companies. Rogers is like most heavily consolidated regional telecom monopolies: a lack of competition or competent regulatory oversight both created and protects the company thanks to relentless lobbying. As a result, the company never is really challenged, and is consistently allowed to mindlessly merge and grow larger and larger and larger as harms are dismissed.
The company said Friday that it will separate its segment that sells Band-Aids, Listerine and over-the-counter medicines like Tylenol from its pharmaceutical and medical device business.
It probably won’t come as much surprise to find that a blast of hot plasma can be used to sterilize a surface. Unfortunately, said surface is likely going to look a bit worse for wear afterwards, which limits the usefulness of this particular technique. But as it turns out, it’s possible to generate a so-called “cold” plasma that offers the same cleansing properties in a much friendlier form.
While it might sound like science fiction, prolific experimenter [Jay Bowles] was able to create a reliable source of nonthermal plasma for his latest Plasma Channel video with surprisingly little in the way of equipment. Assuming you’ve already got a device capable of pumping out high-voltage, all you really need to recreate this phenomenon is a tank of helium and some tubing.
VHDL and Verilog are hardware description languages, used to describe and define logic circuits. They’re typically used to design ASICs and to program FPGAs, essentially using software to define hardware. However, [Tim] has done something altogether quite creative, creating tools to take VHDL and Verilog and spit out PCB designs for discrete logic.
Yes, you read that correctly. The basic idea is to take VHDL source code, and then make a PCB layout that implements the desired logic using resistor-transistor logic. From there, the PCB design files can be shipped off to a manufacturer for pick-and-place assembly at a fraction of the cost of producing a bespoke ASIC.
These days, there are tons of RC controllers out there of all shapes and sizes. However, if you want to build something with just the right amount of buttons and sticks for your application, you might want to design something yourself. That’s precisely what [Sebastian] did.
The project actually began some time ago, with [Sebastian] sharing his process for building a custom ergonomic enclosure through the use of clay and photogrammetry, which we’ve covered before.
The show began with a video welcome from Attorney General Rob Bonta. Introducing the clip, Gieringer described Bonta as “one of the state officials who have done so much over the years to help make Prop 215 actually work.” That blunt assertion was antithetical to the POV of Dennis Peron, the prime mover, who made futile trips to Sacramento in the years after 215 passed to testify against the “enabling legislation” by which Democratic politicians from State Sen. John Vasconcellos to Jerry Brown to Gavin Newsom and Rob Bonta have effectively modified the measure. According to Dennis, all that was needed to make Prop 215 work was for Law Enforcement to respect the letter and spirit of the law.
A co-author who agreed with Dennis, Dr. Tod Mikuriya, has been gone since 2007. So the Prop 215 origin story presented at Fort Mason was one-sided, except for a video€ statement by Dennis€ that his friend Davie Smith recorded in late ’95.
Think of it this way: what we don't know will hurt us. And water—yes, water—is an example of just that. Even at a time of such angry political disputes, you might imagine that, in a wealthy country like the United States, it would still be possible to agree that clean water should be not just a right, but a given. Well, welcome to America 2021.€
Documents released Friday reveal how in early 2020 the Trump administration downplayed the deadly danger posed by the nascent Covid-19 pandemic, silencing and sidelining top health officials who tried to warn the public and destroying evidence of political interference while issuing rosy declarations that the outbreak was "totally under control" and would soon be over.
"The Trump administration's use of the pandemic to advance political goals manifested itself most acutely in its efforts to manipulate and undermine CDC's scientific work."
Local restrictions had reappeared in recent days in Norway, with daily cases at around 1,500 in a country of 5.4 million people.
Europe is facing a sharp deterioration in the epidemic situation, especially in Germany and central and eastern Europe. Non-vaccinated people are the most affected.
The World Health Organization has warned that Europe is once again the "epicentre" of the pandemic.
An email marketing company claiming to hold details on a million UK teachers and school admin personnel was potentially exposing those to the public internet thanks to a misconfigured error page on its website.
Not only that, but the Schools Marketing Company (SMC) seemingly dismissed the findings of the infosec company which spotted the flaw when the infoseccers tried to draw its attention to the problem.
An email shown to The Register by Pen Test Partners, described by the firm's consultant Andrew Tierney as "the most arrogant response I've ever had to a disclosure," said the company wasn't interested in hearing about the vulnerability.
Labour's main website at labour[.]org[.]uk appears to be a WordPress CMS running a custom frontend theme built by an American company called Wide Eye Creative. We have asked Wide Eye whether it has suffered a cyber attack within the last month and will update this article if we hear back from the firm.
We have also asked Nationbuilder, a popular vertically integrated website and political campaigning tool, whether it suffered any data breach affecting Labour members' data within the last month.
Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 research team has said criminals using tools accompanied by Chinese instructions gained access to high-interest networks and stole passwords after exploiting at least 370 password management services in the US.
"As early as September 17 the actor leveraged leased infrastructure in the United States to scan hundreds of vulnerable organizations across the internet," wrote Unit 42. "Subsequently, exploitation attempts began on Sept. 22 and likely continued into early October."
In a major ransomware bust US and European authorities on Monday announced separate but related indictments and arrests linked to extortionware attacks on IT service provider Kaseya and other firms.
Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed 14 critical vulnerabilities in the BusyBox Linux utility that could be exploited to result in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and, in select cases, even lead to information leaks and remote code execution.
The security weaknesses, tracked from CVE-2021-42373 through CVE-2021-42386, affect multiple versions of the tool ranging from 1.16-1.33.1, DevOps company JFrog and industrial cybersecurity company Claroty said in a joint report.
Dubbed "the Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux," BusyBox is a widely used software suite combining a variety of common Unix utilities or applets (e.g., cp, ls, grep) into a single executable file that can run on Linux systems such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), and remote terminal units (RTUs).
That’s good news. As we’ve previously explained, this feature would have broken end-to-end encryption in Messages, harming the privacy and safety of its users. So we’re glad to see that Apple has listened to privacy and child safety advocates about how to respect the rights of youth. In addition, sample images shared by Apple show the text in the feature has changed from “sexually explicit” to “naked,” a change that LBTQ+ rights advocates have asked for, as the phrase “sexually explicit” is often used as cover to prevent access to LGBTQ+ material.€
Now, Apple needs to take the next step, and stop its plans to scan photos€ uploaded to a user’s iCloud Photos library for child sexual abuse images (CSAM). Apple must draw the line at invading people’s private content for the purposes of law enforcement. As Namrata Maheshwari of Access Now pointed out at EFF’s Encryption and Child Safety event, “There are legislations already in place that will be exploited to make demands to use this technology for purposes other than CSAM.” Vladimir Cortés of Article 19 agreed, explaining that governments will “end up using these backdoors to … silence dissent and critical expression.” Apple should sidestep this dangerous and inevitable pressure, stand with its users, and cancel its photo scanning plans.
Apple: Pay attention to the real world consequences, and make the right choice to protect our privacy.
A Register reader triggered a kerfuffle for Samsung after asking the electronics biz if he could disable large and intrusive adverts splattered across his new smart TV's programme guide.
Ross McKillop bought the telly from UK retailer John Lewis but felt distinctly undersold when he turned it on to find the internet-connected device displaying advertising on its electronic programme guide menu.
Real-time surveillance of reported COVID infections has been key to the global pandemic response. Many tools, devices and apps have been used to support surveillance. China, South Korea and Malaysia developed some early in the pandemic and many others were created by other countries later on.
Some of these platforms will also have a role to play in a post-pandemic world. Enhancements in digital technology, mobile phone networks, and the potential in telehealth systems could help reshape what healthcare looks like in resource-poor settings.
The Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has disabled its online passport application tracker, citing a "data privacy issue" and hinting that information could have leaked.
"The DFA's IT Unit is currently investigating the circumstances surrounding this issue and is taking appropriate measures to secure the data that may have been exposed," states a notice on the DFA website. "An internal audit will also be conducted to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future."
The Philippines requires citizens to use the site, which launched only a couple of months ago, to apply for a passport – walk-in applications are allowed only under exceptional circumstances. However, at time of writing, the tracker is returning a 404 error. Citizens therefore have no way knowing when or if passports will be approved and/or dispatched.
I have been close to gun violence my entire life. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I’ve seen my classmates carry firearms to keep themselves and their families safe from harm. And I later represented some of those same individuals in court—being prosecuted for firearm possession—when I started work as a public defender.
I wrote numerous articles for FFF on the Afghan war. My first article, “Drug Laws: Terrorists Best Friends,” in February 2002, attacked the Bush administration for perpetuating the war on drugs while promising to rid the world of terror. That article noted:
Afghanistan produces about 70 percent of the world’s opium. Revenue from opium production helped finance both the Taliban government (until production was banned) and the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Because narcotics are illegal, they tend to attract violent, ruthless people and organizations to carry out their production and marketing. The only reason that opium is more profitable for terrorists than beer is that governments criminalize the possession and distribution of opium while tolerating the possession and distribution of beer.
The four-year war, fought not to “defend democracy” as our national mythology tells us, but as a cat-fight among colonial empires fighting for bigger shares of each other’s collapsing empires, ended up killing 10 million soldiers (116,000 of them US troops, who only entered that war during its final year) and wounding another 20 million — many of them grievously.
As the first “modern” war, fought with industrial-scale killing machines and weapons like machine guns, tanks, enormous cannons, aerial bombings of cities, and the use of various types of poison gas, it also caused millions of civilian deaths.
Update: As this article went to publication, Jimmy Cherizier announced a temporary lifting of the FRG9’s blockade on the Varreux gas terminal for a one week period, deeming it a “truce for a week of reflection.” The truce will end on November 18, 2021, the anniversary of the Battle of Vertières, which marked the end of Napoleon’s bid to restore slavery in Haiti. Cherizier laid out nine demands; among them was Acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s resignation, the withdrawal of police forces from neighborhoods controlled by the FRG9, and the return of gasoline to its pre-blockade price. The government is unlikely to fulfill any of the demands, portending a resumption of the stand-off at the Varreux terminal following the anniversary.
Rep. Ilhan Omar unveiled a resolution Friday aimed at blocking a Biden administration-approved sale of $650 million worth of missiles and other military equipment to the Saudi government, which has been bombing Yemen—often with U.S. weaponry—since 2015.
"Congress has the authority to stop these sales, and we must exercise that power."
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor, when Indonesian troops armed with U.S. M16s fired on a peaceful memorial procession in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, killing more than 270 East Timorese. Indonesia had invaded East Timor in 1975 and maintained a brutal occupation until 1999, when East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in a United Nations referendum. The massacre on November 12, 1991, sparked widespread outrage against the Indonesian government led by dictator General Suharto, a staunch U.S. ally, and marked a turning point in international public opinion. We play an excerpt of “Massacre: The Story of East Timor,” a 1992 documentary produced by Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn, who witnessed and survived the killings after being severely beaten by Indonesian troops.
The 150 page report talks about Neo-Nazis engaging in military-style war games. These self-appointed killer squads are furnished with weapons, explosives, armory, etc. One reported list includes secret locations for shooting and killing practices in the state of Hessen, where Neo-Nazis like to use remote forests. Yet, German Neo-Nazis also conducted such killing practices with their associates in Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Years ago, some of these Neo-Nazi gatherings laid the foundation for what was going to come: the NSU-network, that killed ten people: nine migrants and one policewoman.
Today, we know – and comes to know that despite what the government and much of Germany’s media have told us – that the NSU was not only three people. The NSU-network was never just Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, as German officials have liked to pretend for years. Instead, the NSU has always been a network of enablers, supporters, weapon suppliers, drivers, employers, financiers, hideout providers, ideology purveyors, etc. The NSU’s killings were made possible by a substantial network of Neo-Nazis. Some people estimated the immediate NSU-network to consist of is up to 130 hard-core Neo-Nazis.
Vigilantism, extrajudicial killings by federal authorities, violent insurrections, threats and harassment of public officials, and rejection of election results and the democratic process are all hallmarks of authoritarian movements. Coddling the gun fetishists and allowing right-wing extremism to fester over many years has brought us to the point when we must ask ourselves if we're no longer a country where politics is war by other means — it's just plain old war.
Welcome to the state of affairs in 2021’s MAGAfied GOP, where House Republicans who voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill find themselves on the receiving end of death threats.
Steve Bannon was criminally charged on Friday for defying a subpoena issued by the House committee investigating Jan. 6. The charges were announced not long after Bannon very emphatically reminded listeners of his War Room podcast that the he and the right are trying to do away with democracy by “taking over elections” and overturning Trump’s loss last November.
Bannon faces two criminal counts for refusing to provide documents and testimony to the House lawmakers probing the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion.
He was summoned to testify on what he knew about plans for the protest that ended with the storming of Congress.
The House of Representatives voted last month to send the case to the justice department, which opted on Friday to prosecute Mr Bannon, 67.
He could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 (€£74,500) fine.
Trump supporters raided the US Congress building on 6 January as lawmakers were meeting to certify the election result.
The U.S. Justice Department revealed Friday that Steve Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress after failing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House panel investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
"Steve Bannon's indictment should send a clear message to anyone who thinks they can ignore the select committee or try to stonewall our investigation: No one is above the law."
Climate advocates warned Friday that "the fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry" are all over a COP26 draft decision text released in the waning hours of the summit in Glasgow, Scotland, where campaigners and scientists have implored world leaders to take ambitious steps to curb planet-warming emissions.
The new text—released on the last official day of a conference swarming with oil and gas lobbyists—dampened lingering hopes of a firm international commitment to phase out the use of fossil fuels, the primary driver of the global climate emergency.
As the COP26 climate summit draws to a close following two weeks of talks and pledges in Glasgow, a new report out Friday details five wealthy nations'€ life-threatening plans to expand fossil fuel production, exposing the utter emptiness of their professed commitments to decarbonization.
"Coal, oil, and gas production must fall globally by 69%, 31%, and 28% respectively between now and 2030... Projections suggest that the Fossil Fuelled 5 will... actually increase oil and gas production by 33% and 27%."
Only 15 percent of people in a dozen countries around the world thought the United States was doing a good job of addressing the pandemic. That sharply contrasted with how Americans felt: 47 percent praised their own government’s management of COVID-19.
What’s astonishing is that people outside the United States had a much better understanding of what was going on inside this country. By all objective standards, America was doing a terrible job back in 2020. We had the highest number of infections and the highest number of deaths. We had critical shortages of personal protective equipment, and hospitals in a number of cities and rural areas were completely overwhelmed. Contact tracing was sporadic and masking requirements inconsistent. The federal government was incoherent, to put it mildly, and states veered off in very different directions, some of them suicidal.
"The wealthiest have said that their coffers are empty, treating climate finance as if it were some loose change to be found down the back of the sofa."
As the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow concludes, activists staged a walkout Friday in response to late decisions made by negotiators to severely weaken commitments in the final agreement. While the earlier draft of the unbinding Glasgow Agreement called for “phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels,” the new draft calls for the phaseout of “unabated coal power and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels.” We get an update on the walkout from one of its leaders: COP26 Coalition lead spokesperson Asad Rehman. “We should not call it a Glasgow pact, we should call it the Glasgow suicide pact for the poorest in the world,” says Rehman. “They’re ramming through so many loopholes that it makes a mockery of these climate negotiations.” Rehman was part of a group of members from U.N. constituencies that took over one of the main negotiation rooms inside COP26 this morning to issue a “people’s declaration” in light of the weakened language.
Health leaders are warning governments of “unimaginable” health consequences from the climate crisis if world leaders don’t take decisive action to decarbonize. This week at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, the Global Climate and Health Alliance presented a letter to the COP26 president signed by 46 million health workers who are calling for global climate action on health. Meanwhile, a delegation of mothers from Brazil, Britain, India, Nigeria, Poland and South Africa attended COP26 to deliver their own letter to the summit’s president that was signed by about 500 parent groups from 44 countries and calls for limits on air pollution. We go inside COP26 to speak with Jeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance and co-chair of the World Health Organization’s Civil Society Working Group to Advance Action on Climate Change and Health, and medical student Amit Singh, a member of Students for Global Health. “Climate change is a threat multiplier,” says Miller. “Increasingly, we’re recognizing that we can’t care for the patients and the communities that we serve if we don’t step outside the clinic and address this driver of health impacts, which is climate change.”
Neo-liberalism is an extreme form of capitalism, like its founding ideology but darker, even more unjust and brutal. It sees every aspect of life – waterways, forests, the air, people, you name it – as a potential product to be exploited, profited from, drained of all value and discarded. The “free market” (does such a thing exist, anywhere?), and its power to regulate supply and demand, is a cornerstone, as is competition and private ownership of everything, including health care, education, even prisons. Whatever area, the aim is the same, maximize production limit costs and generate wealth for the business, most importantly the shareholders, no matter the impact on the environment and society.
A value system and integrated way of life has evolved consistent with the ethos of this poisonous ideology: individual ambition – personal success over group well-being; greed or excess; sensory pleasure; materiality; tribal nationalism (strengthened by competition); distrust of others who are different, and a fabrication of individuality. True individuality is impossible within the constraints of the doctrine which demands conformity, assimilates and dilutes creative expression to the mechanics and trends of the machine, and like all ideologies, moves towards crystallisation, maintains itself supreme and claims there are no viable alternatives.
When it comes to basic water supplies, that’s hardly an outlandish thought. After all, back in 2015, our government, along with other members of the United Nations, embraced the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, the sixth of which is universal access to safe drinking water. Despite modest progress globally — 71% of the world’s population lacked that simple necessity then, “only” 61% today — nearly 900 millionpeople still don’t have it. Of course, the overwhelming majority of them live in the poorest countries on this planet.
The United States, however, has the world’s largest economy, the fifth-highest per-capita income, and is a technological powerhouse. How, then, could the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have given our water infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations, reservoirs, and purification and recycling facilities) a shocking C-grade in their 2021 “report card”? How to explain why Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation?
“These same 139 climate-denying members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil and gas industries,” according to the Center for American Progress last March. Climate deniers “still include the majority of the congressional Republican caucus.” One wonders what exactly the senate’s most conservative Dem, Joe “I Just Don’t Give a Shit” Manchin thinks, though that is largely irrelevant. What counts is what he does. And if it comes to a choice between his wallet and the long-term survival of the human race, as it did with the Build Back Better bill, guess which Manchin picked? It sure wasn’t future generations.
Coal baron Manchin singlehandedly pulled the teeth out of Biden’s climate program, embedded in his now neutered reconciliation bill. Too bad the Dems didn’t strip Manchin of his committee assignments and chairmanship and, as suggested recently in CounterPunch, stop the massive flow of federal funds to West Virginia. That’s what Lyndon Baines Johnson would have done. But then, to do all that today the Dems and Biden would have actually WANTED to succeed, which, in truth, they’re allergic to.
As the COP26 summit stretched into overtime on Friday—with diplomats in Glasgow, Scotland unable to finalize an international climate accord by the scheduled deadline due to sharp disagreements over fossil fuel language, the pace of emissions reductions, and aid for developing countries—progressives in the U.S. implored President Joe Biden to take ambitious climate action through the executive branch.
"The fate of climate action does not rest on a handful of recalcitrant senators or world leaders."
There is an astonishing statistic in a Pew research study released in 2020 on perceptions of how different countries handled COVID-19.
This COP was as disappointing as any of the previous one. The inclusion of the words "fossil fuels" into the final declaration seems to be the only "advancement" it represents compared to the past. It is meaningless. What is overwhelmingly meaningful is the announcement that the two next COPs will be in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. This means only one thing for the climate justice movement: there is no possible fiction in which any of us can actually entertain the idea that the COP is a process in any way different from the World Trade Organisation and the G20. The COP is an organisation of global capitalist plans for the intensification of exploitation. It needs to be€ dead to us, as€ our presence there legitimises a process that is simultaneously against us and against the planet—that is why the€ Glasgow€ Agreement€ was created in€ 2020.
Undoubtedly, we are better off for all the agreements, but are we any safer? Is a coming 2.6-degree rise in average global temperatures better than a 2.8-degree rise, when low-lying island nations, at-risk river deltas, and even coastal cities such as Miami will still be swamped, precipitating a migrant crisis unlike we have ever seen? None of us have a crystal ball, but it is well past time to heed the warnings.
Nor do any of us have a magic wand, but some solutions are certainly within our means. Let’s hope that green thinking becomes green reality before it’s too late. Of course, we have had photovoltaic (PV) solar power since Bell Labs engineer Russell Ohl first cut up a piece of baked silicon and shone a flashlight on it in 1939, his colleague Walter Brattain and inventor of the transistor exclaiming, “this was the first time that anybody had ever found a photovoltaic effect in elementary material.” Wind power? — that’s been around since forever.
In the heart of West Virginia, somewhere along a 22-mile stretch of the Elk River, swims one of the world’s rarest fish, the diamond darter. This tiny partly-translucent fish buries itself beneath grains of sand and gravel in the river-bottom during the day, just its black eyes peeping out as it perhaps hunts or hides from predators itself. The darter’s silvery sides sparkle when it emerges in the evening, giving rise to its gem-inspired name.
It used to be that, if you were lucky and eagle-eyed, you might encounter a diamond darter in many places along the Ohio River Valley, not just this tiny stretch of the Elk River. But in the intervening decades, the region’s rivers were dammed or channeled and the fossil fuel era dawned across Appalachia. Meanwhile, the diamond darter’s numbers dwindled to the point that up until 1980, when biologists rediscovered the Elk River population, the fish was believed extinct.
A bioenergy declaration signed by Drax during COP26 is further proof of the company’s “greenwashing”, campaigners have claimed.
The Yorkshire-based biomass giant is among over a dozen signatories to an industry-backed document that claims bioenergy could increase its output to nearly threefold, and reduce net global emissions by over one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050.€
A fabric made of engineered silk keeps skin about 12.5€°C cooler than cotton clothing and provides relief from hot weather.
Approximately 15 per cent of global electricity goes towards keeping us cool. To reduce this energy demand, scientists have been searching for passive ways of cooling us that don’t require electricity.
The false prophet of this story is Allan Savory (founder of the “Savory Institute”), who spent his most productive years€ training and fighting with “guerrilla gangs”€ against indigenous groups in Rhodesia, and€ spurring government efforts€ to kill more than 40,000 elephants on misguided ecological pretexts (a decision he later stated he regretted). How fitting, then, that this former employee of the British Empire’s Colonial Service would become a hero to the American livestock industry, which itself is substantially responsible for clearing away (and wiping out) Indigenous peoples and exterminating native wildlife to make way for their own hoofed empire. Ranching is an ongoing colonialist conquest of nature spanning both hemispheres and trying desperately to maintain its dying grasp on the 21st€ Century by reframing it as a solution, rather than a cause, of the climate and biodiversity crises.
As a nation, we shouldn’t sacrifice native species and healthy lands to make the West safe for non-native, invasive cattle and sheep, so we can benefit a tiny, economically insignificant fraction of the population.
So, here you have good people in green uniforms who joined the Forest Service to do good and now they find themselves in the tender tendrils of an agency that needs to increase its budget as all agencies must do, and it promotes and rewards the employees most adept at bringing home the bacon: funding from Congress, or locally, revenue the Forest Service gets to keep when it sells the trees to people who cut them down with huge machines then drag them off on new and “restored” roads. These roads then allow invasive exotic plants into the forest which then have to be sprayed with herbicide then burned again for good measure. All this fire, of course dries out the soil, kills slow animals and warms the planet while further injuring a still recovering forest.
Since Congress gives the agency lots to do but not enough resources to do those things like research or maintenance, that don’t include some payback to some corporate donor to the Congressperson’s political campaigns, ambitious managers are looking for projects that build budgets. Enter FIRE. There is no doubt a large caldron full of gleaming coins in an office in Washington DC into which regional Forest Service offices can dip so their constituent national forests can dip so each ranger district can dip; but all this dipping requires PROJECTS ever larger projects with ever more FIRE.
As Senior Vice President of MomsRising, she’s helped mobilize more than€ 870,000 calls and emails€ to lawmakers advocating for paid leave and other pro-family benefits in the Build Back Better legislation.
As the daughter of a cancer patient, she’s seen up close how the lack of paid leave benefits ravages families.
Last Friday Congress passed the Biden “Infrastructure” Bill which will be signed into law post haste says the White House.€ The bill, designed to upgrade roads, bridges, transport and broadband, is a bricks and mortar affair and will benefit industry and commerce. It is the first of two bills that have been the center of attention for months now.
The second bill is the Build Back Better Bill.€ € This bill has provisions for child care and preschool, eldercare, healthcare, prescription drug pricing, immigration and curbing greenhouse gas emissions. This might be described as a bill for people not for bricks and mortar.€ It has been the darling of progressives in Congress.€ The White House once promised it would come up for a vote by the week of November 15.
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 percent in 2018 to 7.7 percent in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1 percent.) 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.
Neumann pauses for a moment, gathers his thoughts and tells a story about a friend named Barbara who was having dinner with the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. When the conversation turned to Palestine she asked, “How do you have hope?” Ginsberg banged his fist on the table Khrushchev style and shouted, “It’s not about hope. You have to do what you have to do.” Neumann agrees with the teenage Swedish activist,€ € Greta Thunberg, who wants people not to hope but to panic and do something about issues such as climate change and global warming.
What Neumann does weekly if not daily is to help the homeless in Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, and also in Oakland where Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in 1966 and issued a ten-point program. Point four called for€ “Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter of Human Beings.” So what happened? Why didn’t that come to pass? Neumann isn’t the only 1960s, 1970s rebel asking that question. It’s on the lips of every thinking survivor from Berkeley to Brooklyn, N.Y. and beyond. Neumann hopes to write a book that will provide some answers, but right now he’s awfully engaged as a lawyer fighting for the rights of the homeless. The book, which would be his third, will have to wait.
Unfortunately, detractors are throwing around so many distortions that it’s hard to keep track of what’s actually in the legislation, also known as the budget reconciliation bill.
Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democratic swing vote from West Virginia, is a good starting point for straightening out some of the misconceptions. Perhaps more than any other person in this world, he will determine how much Americans’ lives will change over the decade ahead.
For most of his life, Ernest Block has managed to stay one step ahead of homelessness. When he was 9, his parents scrambled to find a new place to live after his grandmother sold the family ranch. As an adult, when his rent surpassed his income, he found friends willing to take him in as a housemate. And at other times he obtained shelter by providing live-in care for an ailing family member.
Then, about 10 years ago, he found Nystrom House, in the shadow of downtown Reno’s Sands Regency Hotel Casino. The rent was affordable. For $450 a month, he had a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom.
A series of sharp knocks on his driver’s side window startled Jason Burt awake.
It was the middle of the night on a Saturday in 2016. Burt was sleeping in his pickup truck in the parking lot of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, where his 5-year-old daughter was being treated for brain cancer. He’d driven more than 500 miles from his home in Central Texas to visit her.
His schedule is not fixed in either job, and his hours are not guaranteed. Some weeks he works back-to-back eight-hour shifts. Some weeks he works fewer than 30 hours. Neither job offers sick leave, vacation time or health insurance.
Chase shares an apartment with three other people, something he finds stressful. And he is not always confident that he can make his portion of the rent. Between the two jobs, Chase earns less than US$16,000 a year. While it may not sound like a lot, that places him well above the federal poverty line for a single person: $12,760.
The progressive bloc extracted a written promise from five key centrists to vote for the Build Back Better bill assuming that the Congressional Budget Office verifies the math behind the spending.
The question grassroots progressives are asking themselves is: is trust wise? Will the corporatists deliver? Or are we just rubes who about to get rolled again?
I had come to Bitola to inspect the landscape of the 1918 battle that might well have determined the outcome of World War I. Although now it is forgotten, Monastir (now Bitola) was once at the center of the Allied attacks aiming to break the Axis grip on Southeast Europe.
To see the contours of this Verdun of the Balkans, I had reserved the services of professional guide and historian, who was waiting in his car outside the Hotel Theatre just before 8 a.m.
The death of apartheid's final state president FW de Klerk was met with the contradictions that characterised his political life.
On the one hand, he was almost universally lauded for his "courageous" - as President Cyril Ramaphosa labelled it - role in dismantling the brutal apartheid state and ushering in the dawn of South Africa's democracy.
These differences have proven stark with the late FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president.€ “De Klerk,” suggested Mac Maharaj, formerly official spokesperson for President Jacob Zuma, “was a man of the moment and [Nelson] Mandela was a man of history.”€ The late Colin Eglin went one better in his observation of the two men.€ “A relatively conservative Afrikaner leader decided to negotiate before he had lost, and an imprisoned leader of a liberation movement decided to negotiate before he had won.”
It was De Klerk who began to take the screws out of the edifice of apartheid and open the pathway to negotiations with other parties.€ Serving in the governing white National Party, which had introduced apartheid in 1948, De Klerk held ministerial positions till becoming party head in February 1989.€ Between 1984 and 1989, he served as education minister, overseeing the notorious Bantu education program.€ On replacing PW Botha, De Klerk downgraded the State Security Council, primarily staffed by military and police, and restored civilian rule by cabinet.
+1. The Fascist Beast is Uncaged and Chomping at the Bit for Vengeance
For details on the distinct likelihood of the fascist Trump’s distinctly possible and tragic if absurd return to power along with an absurdly Republican-Amerikaner Congress and Supreme Court, please see my latest Counterpunch commentary. The deeply conservative and gas-emitting octogenarian Joe Biden’s approval rating is down to a pathetic 38% ten months into his ill-fated presidency. Biden’s horrific vice president Kamala “Do Not Come” Harris has sunk below Dick Cheney to 28%. Republican voter suppression and nullification ducks are being lined up in a nice authoritarian row across Red State America. Seven in ten USAers say the nation is on the wrong track. The Amerikaner Party of Trump (the GOP) is posed to take back Congress in 2023, also helping grease the skids for Trumpzilla II: The Revenge of Malignant Orange. The Trumpenstein is chomping at the bit to come back and unleash white armed male rage like never before. The Mar a Lago crime boss is already beating Biden in match-up polls. So what if he was rightly impeached twice during a monumentally corrupt and white-supremacist presidency that included, among other terrible things:
A new analysis of Democrats' proposed Build Back Better plan shows that it would deliver a tax cut for about two-thirds of U.S. millionaires.
The average tax cut for those making over $1 million would be $16,760, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC) analysis released Thursday.
Democrats were sleepwalking toward disaster in the 2022 midterm elections before they got the proverbial wake-up call on November 2. The party’s off-year election losses in the supposedly blue state of Virginia, along with setbacks in other regions, confirmed the very real prospect that next year’s voting could cost Democrats control of Congress and multiple statehouses. But President Biden and his partisan allies in D.C. and the states face more than the indignity of a disempowerment along the lines of what Bill Clinton experienced in 1994 and Barack Obama confronted in 2010. If they fail to get their act together, Democrats will suffer a defeat that increases the likelihood of Donald Trump’s return to the White House as a full-blown authoritarian.1
Noting the "global phenomenon" of violence against women in politics and warning of the potentially deadly consequences of "vicious and vulgar messaging," 60 U.S. House lawmakers on Friday introduced a resolution to censure Rep. Paul Gosar for posting an edited anime video depicting him killing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden with swords.
"As the events of January 6 have shown, such vicious and vulgar messaging can and does foment actual violence."
The united states senate was a bad idea from the start. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, populous states like Virginia supported the idea of a unicameral national legislature, with representation based on the population of each state. That’s the kind of system one would expect in a representative democracy.
Tariq Ali, a Marxist theorist and historian of note, lecturer across continents, an editor of€ New Left Review, longtime contributor to CounterPunch€ and so on, happens also to be very much a participant in the regional events around the Indian subcontinent and nearby Afghanistan. He is Pakistani by origin—or rather in the part of India that would become Pakistan—as everyone knows. Far away from his homeland more than a half-century, apart from visits, he commands intimate knowledge of the people of the region, the contradictions, hopes and despair marking the post-colonial era. All this is part of him.
Here is a source, if by no means the only source, of his unique insights. There is no “Afghanistan Question” without a “Pakistani Question.” The flow back and forth across the borders artificially created by the colonial powers has not ceased, but rather accelerated with the internal strife, the blundering Russian effort to perpetuate a buffer state against Western instrusions, and the following catastrophe of US invasion and occupation.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, joined by seven Democratic colleagues, sent a letter Friday to Kaiser Permanente chair and CEO Greg Adams in support of tens of thousands of healthcare workers planning to strike on November 15 unless negotiations for a fair contract improve.
"These employees are heroes and heroines and should be treated as such."
I still think that the power of targeted advertising is somewhat overblown (and that neither Google nor Facebook want to admit that). Relatedly, I think that bad targeted advertising creeps people out way too much, and that's a problem. However, given all that, Facebook's newly announced plans to remove certain forms of targeting from its targeted advertising program seems kind of weird.
Ignoring concerns about the influence of Big Pharma, U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday nominated former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf to reclaim the post—which he held during the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president.
"The Senate... must reject Califf's nomination and demand that Biden nominate an individual who has been dedicated to advancing public health."
President Biden has selected Robert Califf as his pick for the next head of the Food and Drug Administration, the White House announced today. Califf is currently a senior advisor for Verily Life Sciences and Google Health, two divisions of parent company Alphabet. He was brought on in 2019 to lead health strategy and policy for the groups.
Califf, a cardiologist, previously served as the FDA commissioner during the last year of the Obama administration. He also founded the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which runs clinical trials.
Human rights groups say that Facebook is narrowing the scope of and delaying the process for an independent report commissioned to investigate hate speech on the tech giant’s platform in India.
Representatives for the groups told The Wall Street Journal they provided hundreds of examples of inflammatory content and suggested ways the platform could better moderate content in India to the firm Facebook commissioned in mid-2020 for the report, but said the tech giant is stifling the independent report.
The following interview between Slavoj Žià ¾ek and Leonardo Caffo was recently published in the Italian magazine Sette—the weekly supplement of the daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera. It has been translated for Public Seminar by Thomas Winn.
Huawei is one of the largest global providers of 5G equipment, but recently reported large sales decreases due to the U.S. government measures taken against it. These losses have been exacerbated by the Commerce Department effectively blacklisting Huawei and ZTE.
The United States said Friday it would set up an interests section in Afghanistan under Qatar, creating a more direct way to assist US citizens and engage with the Taliban after the embassy in Kabul was shuttered.
The step marks the latest diplomatic win for Qatar, the wealthy Gulf state that has increasingly positioned itself as the pivotal US ally on Afghanistan.
A common antivax claim that encountered not long after I first started paying attention to the antivaccine movement is that vaccines cause cancer. I’ve encountered a number of variations of this claim throughout the years, but the most common and persistent claim is that the polio vaccine was contaminated with SV40 virus. While it is true that back in the late 1950s, batches of polio vaccine were contaminated with a monkey virus known as SV40, which can cause cancer in experimental animals, as I discussed in my usual excessive depth when analyzing what I like to call this “zombie meme,” there’s no evidence of an increase in cancer rates attributable to the polio vaccine. Completely unsurprisingly, more recently antivaxxers have been trying to blame COVID-19 vaccines for causing cancer, sometimes (as is their common practice) totally misrepresenting unrelated research to make their false claims. They’re still at it, of course, packaging this old lie in a new form. Specifically an Idaho doctor and anti masker, Dr. Ryan Cole, is claiming that he’s seeing a huge increase in endometrial cancer since the vaccines have rolled. Sure, he was doing this two months ago, but now he’s being amplified again, which led me to decide that it’s worth discussing, given that I missed addressing this bit of misinformation when it first surfaced.
In a TikTok video that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, Dr. Carrie Madej outlined the ingredients for a bath she said will “detox the vaxx” for people who have given into Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
YouTube account was suspended for one week starting Friday for uploading content violating the platform’s policy against COVID-19 misinformation.
The video that triggered the suspension was a roundtable discussion in which the lawmaker falsely claimed that coronavirus vaccines are unsafe.
While we wait for Congress to get around to protecting journalists, critics, and others facing bogus defamation lawsuits with a federal anti-SLAPP law, it's good to know at least one federal agency is doing something to protect journalists from litigation deployed solely to silence them.
Months ago, Senate Democrats let Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough kill their chance to pass a $15 minimum wage. When MacDonough, the unelected staffer who interprets the rules of the chamber, decided that a plan to gradually increase the minimum wage didn’t fit Senate rules, Democrats could have ignored the nonbinding opinion or fired her for standing in the way of their agenda, as Republicans have done in the past. Instead, they did nothing about it. Now, as the party rushes to resolve its social spending bill, Democrats are hiding behind the parliamentarian again. This time, they could blow their last chance to establish protections for undocumented immigrants, a promise they’ve campaigned on for decades.
The media though has been the ones promoting the concept of a dysfunctional Democratic Party. The alternative media are known as the Trumpenleft also peddles the same obsession with only one of the corporate duopoly parties. For them, it’s only the Democrats to blame, at times even especially the progressive Democrats. This like much of their misinformation will make a real-world impact but they don’t care as long as the checks keep coming in.
So if their predictions of a return of the Right come true, they are to blame.
Copyright as we know it goes back to the Statute of Anne of 1710. A law that old is clearly going to struggle to cope with the enormous changes in technology that have taken place since then – notably the Internet. But even relatively recent copyright laws were framed in ways that have become unworkable for the digital world we live in.
And conservative white America has been losing for quite some time — losing control of the future, that is. The good old days of unabated white supremacy aren’t coming back; racism can only maintain a public forum, and political relevance, if it’s wrapped in political correctness. In other words, racism can’t (openly) be racism anymore. That’s where Karl Marx comes in.
Excuse me, I mean Critical Race Theory: the enemy, the sower of hatred among children. CRT is an academic concept that almost no one had ever heard of, which has been turned into the scapegoat of the moment.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Black Alliance for Just Immigration’s Nekessa Opoti about Haitian refugees for the November 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
If€ Trump’s name goes down in history for anything of substance rather than mere flash, it€ should probably be for his bizarre claim that€ people who aren’t executives anymore retain€ “executive privilege” over information pertaining to their time in office.
The concept of “executive privilege” appears nowhere in the US Constitution, but instead developed over history in court decisions, culminating in 1974’s US v. Nixon.
To say that abortion bans, like those recently passed in Texas, are part of a war on women is true. But to say they are a war on women alone is to erase the harm experienced by the transgender, intersex, nonbinary and gender expansive individuals whose lives are also deeply impacted by access to abortion and reproductive healthcare.
In the nearly 50 years since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, there has perhaps never been a more consequential moment for abortion rights than the one we are in now. This fall, the nation’s highest court is hearing not one but three cases that could upend the fundamental promise at the heart of Roe: that pregnant women in the United States have a right to an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, which is around 24 weeks. On November 1, the court heard the first two of these cases, Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, which addressed Texas’s near-total abortion ban, the law known as SB 8. And on December 1, the court will hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which takes on the 15-week abortion ban passed by Mississippi in 2018. In that case, the state has made a direct appeal to the Supreme Court to overrule Roe.
I didn’t see any Democratic candidates seeking the endorsement of Ibram X. Kendi or campaigning on trans rights, black reparations or defunding the police. Certainly not Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe was so “woke”; he regularly directed his limo driver to ferry him to the northern Virginia home of Bill Kristol to plot campaign strategy.
Yet, the refrain is always the same. The Democrats loss a narrow off-year election in a southern state because of their obsession “identity politics,” alienating that mythic demographic of white male “blue-collar” voters, even though increasingly most of the factory workers in Virginia these days are recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America toiling on the unforgiving killing floors of slaughterhouses and industrial chicken and hog confined feeding plants.
Earlier this week, a friend texted me this prediction about the outcome of Kyle Rittenhouse's murder trial: "Kyle Rittenhouse walks or only [gets convicted] of minor charges and gets probation."
Two former Oklahoma police officers face up to 10 years in prison after being convicted of murder for using their stun guns more than 50 times on an unarmed man who later died.
A Carter County jury last week convicted former Wilson police officers Brandon Dingman, 35, and Joshua Taylor, 27, of second-degree murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. They each face up to 10 years in prison when they’re formally sentenced next month.
Once again, DITIB board members are attracting attention with anti-Semitic and unconstitutional Facebook postings. The national association regrets the comments and distances itself.
It is the comments of individuals. But the Facebook postings by board members of the DITIB mosques in Osnabrück, Hildesheim and Hanover raise questions. Researchers from the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research found the posts in random samples on social networks.
Governor Roy Cooper said in a statement announcing the pardon that he had carefully reviewed the case, and those who have been wrongly convicted like Mr Sharpe "deserve to have that injustice fully and publicly acknowledged".
We were just discussing how Denuvo's inability to renew one of its domains suddenly prevented lots of paying customers from playing several of their paid-for video games. While we can laugh at Denuvo's ineptitude, the real point in all of that is once again how DRM in video games tends to prevent nothing when it comes to piracy, yet paying customers tend to get impacted for a variety of reasons. DRM, in other words, almost universally functions to punish paying customers, which is stupid.
The multinational pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca drew immediate backlash Friday for announcing an end to its pledge not to profit from its publicly funded coronavirus vaccine until the end of the pandemic, which is still killing more than 7,000 people worldwide each day.
"Corporations will always put profits first if you give them control over who lives and who dies."
The CC Copyright Platform was established as a discussion space to strategize on copyright reform as a complementary action to developing and stewarding CC licenses. Over the last few months, each working group has discussed, researched and dissected these issues, and produced four Position Papers encapsulating their outcomes, available now on the CC Medium Publication.
A new report published by Synamedia shows that soccer is the number one gateway sport to other forms of sports piracy. This is also true for the US where soccer has a relatively smaller audience. India is the only exception in the researched countries, with cricket as the main piracy gateway. In the Middle East, meanwhile, pirated camel racing streams are thriving.
The Publishers Association, Elsevier and Springer Nature have obtained permission to expand their anti-piracy campaigns in the UK. Major ISPs are now required to block even more domains that help to facilitate piracy, including those that assist people to access the infamous Sci-Hub and Libgen, platforms that are already subjected to intensive blocking.
When you let ownership and copyright culture fester, breed, and expand, eventually it gets out of control. While that might sound like an obvious sort of thing to say, allowing it to happen produces unexpected but also obvious results. For instance, allowing this to happen creates a culture of fear around what those creating new content can do with existing content. While readers here will be familiar with the importance and practical usage of fair use, caution often causes creators to shy away from that affirmative defense.
Phew. Earlier this year, I wrote about a case I witnessed down in LA, in which the print-on-demand website RedBubble was deemed by a jury to have infringed on the trademark rights of the clothing store Brandy Melville, despite not actually selling any items that matched Brandy Melville's trademarks on clothing that Brandy Melville sells -- and being extraordinarily proactive in taking down things once alerted to the fact that certain designs might be infringing. Again, as noted, I served as an expert witness in that case and filed a report, but did not need to testify. The very same law firm, representing a few different plaintiffs, has been busy suing RedBubble and other print-on-demand businesses, apparently trying to carve out a niche. Since that ruling, there has been a lot of back and forth between the parties (some of it quite... emotional), but as it stands now, the ruling has been appealed to the 9th Circuit, where it should be an interesting one to watch.
