Linux and Windows are the two most popular operating systems for personal computers. Both of the systems have different purposes and functionality. But each will help you with homework and inquiries like “write my papers” for academic purposes.
In this article, we will explore the features of the systems, their architecture, advantages, and disadvantages. There is no correct answer to the question of which operating system is better? Linux and Windows serve different aims and were designed with different purposes in mind.
Therefore, the best system is the one that fits your preferences.
"You need to fix things early, and that requires a certain level of disclosure for the developers," Torvalds stated, adding, "You also don't need to make a big production out of it."
Torvalds also says he doesn't care for labeling updates and changes to Linux as a security fix in a security advisory.
"What does the whole security labeling give you? Except for more fodder for either of the PR camps that I obviously think are both idiots pushing for their own agenda?" Torvalds wrote. "It just perpetrates that whole false mind-set" and is a waste of resources, he added.
Both Wooding and Beck took Torvalds' comments in good humor. "I don't know what Linus' beef is. He seems to be on the same page with respect to this issue. And the 'masturbating monkey' thing? Well that's just funny," wrote Wooding.
OpenBSD developer Artur Grabowski wrote on Thursday that Torvalds had been in touch with the OpenBSD community.
"I talked to Linus about this already, he was humble about it and said it didn't look like it from the outside that we shared the same view," wrote Grabowski. "We all had a laugh about it."
The Linux Foundation — the organization that effectively controls Linux and employs the creator of Linux — just published its yearly report for 2021.
The ENQCMD functionality that is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was disabled earlier this year for being "broken beyond repair". But now ahead of Sapphire Rapids beginning to ramp up in the coming months, Intel open-source engineers believe they have improved the code that the ENQCMD instruction usage could be re-enabled for the Linux kernel.
Display support for the Mediatek MT8192 SoC is expected to land for the upcoming Linux 5.17 SoC.
The Mediatek Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver changes were submitted this week for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off in January.
I bought a high refresh monitor to game on Linux so obviously I want to use and I didn't have any idea that it's be such a mess to get working under Xorg.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The format includes a subset of the PostScript page description programming language, a font-embedding system, and a structural storage system.
Over the years PDF has become an extremely important file format. If you want to create documents that can be viewed under all major operating systems, PDF is the ticket, as it maintains the overall look and feel of documents regardless of what platform they are viewed under.
There is a large range of PDF-related software available with many different applications available that can both output to and open files. Many open source software save documents to this format such as LibreOffice and GIMP.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Streama on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Streama is a free self-hosted media streaming server running on Java, that you can install on your Linux distribution. It’s like Netflix, but self-hostable. You can deploy it on your local system or VPS or dedicated server and stream the media files across multiple devices. The media files can be accessed from a web browser from any system on your network. If you have deployed on your VPS, you can access it from anywhere.
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 the Streama self-hosted media streaming server on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Lighttpd is a free and open-source web server that is built for high-performance environments. Lighttpd also provides security features such as the ability to execute scripts safely and the support for HTTPS protocols.
SSL provides a secure and encrypted communication channel between the client and the server. SSL traffic is served on port 443. This guide will discuss how to set up SSL on the Lighttpd server.
We have tested the instructions in this tutorial on a Debian 11 system and a self-signed certificate.
Redis is a free in-memory key-value database. As a key-value database, Redis works by mapping a specific string key to a particular type of value. Once you create a key in Redis, it will continue to exist unless you remove it manually.
However, Redis allows you to set a limited lifetime to a specific key. Using this functionality, you can tell Redis to create a key and delete it after a particular amount of time has elapsed. Volatility in keys is beneficial when you need to store temporary values.
In this guide, you will learn how to create keys with an expiration duration, how to set an expiration time on existing keys, and how to check the time remaining until a key expires.
To follow this tutorial, ensure you have Redis installed and running on your system. All the commands provided in this tutorial are tested on a Debian 11 server running Redis version 6.0.
Use the Redis CLI utility to get similar output as this tutorial shows to execute the commands.
The Redis INCR command is used to increment the value of a key by a factor of one. The value associated with the key must be an integer for this command to work. If the specified key does not exist, its value is set to 0 before the command executes.
Although the operation applies to integer values, Redis does not have a specific integer data type. Hence the value to be incremented is a string type that can be represented as a base-10 64 bit signed integer value.
Let us discuss how we can use this command.
Redis, unlike relational databases, does not support languages such as SQL. Instead, it uses simple commands and command options to manipulate databases and the information stored in them.
This tutorial will go over the basics of working with Redis commands and learn how to delete keys in a Redis data store.
When using Kubernetes, you may need to transport files in and out of pod-based containers. We utilized the cp command to transfer data to and from remote machines before containerization, and we used a tool like SCP to do so. Kubernetes, fortunately, has a comparable feature. The kubectl cp command completes the kubectl exec command, utilizing the exec subresource in the Kubernetes Pod API. Kubectl cp relies on the tar command, which is located in the container’s default execution PATH, and it does not examine the container’s file system directly. For a better understanding of the kubectl cp command, this guide will go over some examples.
The Ansible items plugin is a lookup plugin used to return the list of items provided to it with recursing. A lookup plugin allows you to access the data from outside resources. Data provided in the by lookup plugins are accessed via Jinja2 templates allowing you to load variables, templates, and more. This guide takes a look at the with_items plugin.
Firmware is a software utility that makes your hardware function. Like other computers, Raspberry Pi also has firmware that needs to be regularly updated to get its best. Since Raspberry Pi’s usability has increased rapidly, Raspberry foundation has been updating the firmware regularly. The updates in firmware include security patches and optimization for speed etc. Sometimes, there are vulnerabilities in the code which are later covered under updates.
Raspberry Pi firmware can be easily updated using your desktop PC or from the command-line interface. You can also use the command line or SSH for updating your Raspberry Pi firmware. The process is quite simple but can get troublesome if not followed properly.
In this article today, we will be learning how to install Raspberry Pi firmware step by step. Let’s start:
Managing services is one of the fundamental requirements for any user. With tools such as Systemd powering up all major Linux distributions, it is critical to understand how to manage services.
This tutorial will teach you to use the Ansible systemd module to start, stop, and manage services on any host using the Systemd Init service.
Fedora is one of the most stable and bleeding edge Linux distributions. It’s great for software development, web development, multimedia, office works, and many more.
Fedora Workstation 35 is the latest version of Fedora Linux distribution. Fedora Workstation 35 features the latest version of the GNOME Desktop Environment – GNOME 41. It also has lots of updated software packages.
In this article, I am going to show you how to install Fedora Workstation 35 on VirtualBox. So, let’s get started.
You will learn how to change a default namespace in kubectl in this post. All of Kubernetes’ resources are organized into namespaces, and Namespaces let you separate concerns for resources shared by different projects. If the namespace is not specified, all resources are produced in the default namespace, and this applies to all instructions directed at your cluster. If the -n argument is not used for a namespace in a kubectl command, the Kubernetes will give output from resources in the default namespace.
Namespaces are a Kubernetes feature that lets you divide groupings of resources within a cluster. Within a namespace, resource names must be unique, but not between namespaces. Namespace-based scoping is only applicable to namespaced items (such as Deployments and Services), not to cluster-wide objects (e.g., StorageClass, Nodes, PersistentVolumes, etc.).
Kubernetes utilizes a declarative API that creates our system extra strong. However, this shows that we utilize CLI or REST to construct an object that denotes the system’s preparation. To represent it, we have to describe API resource names, groups, versions, etc. But workers are muddled. The purpose of the misunderstanding is that we are not virtuous at recalling such things as human beings.
When we utilize Kubernetes and mention all the resources related to a particular namespace, we may list every resource separately using a single kubectl get command. We may mention all the objects in the Kubernetes namespace in the following ways:
This article will demonstrate the technique to enlist all the resources in the Kubernetes..
As we all know, there are a few Linux commands that are so important that as a Linux user, we just have to know them all by heart. Amongst these important commands is the alias command. In this tutorial, we will learn about the alias command.
It is always suggested that you execute some essential network setups while working on your operating system before utilizing the internet on any device. These settings are made to guarantee that your internet is running smoothly and with all of the protocols that you want it to. Also, if your Internet is slow or you’re having difficulties connecting to it, you should always check the network parameters to see if anything is wrong.
Similarly, as a network administrator, your major responsibility is to monitor several activities throughout a network, and network configuration allows them to trace any changes that influence the network’s performance. Administrators can decrease network downtime by using change tracking software. If a system upgrade degrades network performance, you can revert to a previous configuration that worked well.
Linux Mint is well-known for its power, reliability, and security. Network configuration is a comprehensive process that involves setting up network controls, managing network traffic, and operating the network to facilitate network communication. So this article will cover some of the basic details that are necessary to configure your network.
Redis is a free, open-source in-memory data store famous for its very low latency. It provides a set of commands for working with the Redis cluster and its data. In this tutorial, we will learn how to use these commands to change the startup settings for the Redis cluster.
Terraform is an Infrastructure as a Code utility that allows to provision and manage cloud infrastructure quickly, efficiently, and safely.
Using this tutorial, you will learn how to create an Amazon S3 bucket using Terraform.
Let’s get started.
For Kubernetes services, various distinct port configurations are available, including Port, TargetPort, and NodePort. The Kubernetes service is accessible through the cluster’s chosen port, and other pods can communicate with this server using the configured port. On the TargetPort, the service will send requests, and the pods will listen for them. This port will also need to be open for your container’s application. If the port field is not supplied, NodePort is used by default. We’ll go over how to expose ports in Kubernetes in this article. You need to understand Pod and Deployment to follow the hands-on exercises on this topic.
Make sure you have kubectl installed. You will also need a Kubernetes cluster, as well as the kubectl command-line tool configured to connect with it. To get started, open the minikube cluster, which is installed on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OS. To run minikube, execute the minikube start command on the command line.
Xsnow is an application that animates snowfall, Santa and some scenery on your desktop. Watch snow falling and Santa riding his sleigh with reindeer while you are using your system. Xsnow runs on most varieties of Linux and on most desktop environments and window managers.
To generalize, the purpose of the user runtime directory is to replace all of the various traditional uses of /tmp for session related files, subdirectories, and so on. A locked down, automatically managed per-user directory tree for this purpose is more secure and also allows for nicer naming of things; your DBUS session bus can just be at /run/user/<uid>bus instead of, say, /tmp/dbus-<big jumble> This also provides systemd with a place to put its own per-user stuff, such as some user systemd session information.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ajenti Control Panel on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Ajenti 2 is an open-source, web-based control panel that can be used for a large variety of server management tasks. With Ajenti you can also check server used Memory, CPU, Disk Space, etc. To monitor the server it has many add-on packages available for monitoring servers and services like MySQL, Apache, File System, Nginx, Samba, Munin, FTP, and many more.
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 the Ajenti 2 Control Panel on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Ever wondered how you can host several websites on the same server without using virtual machines or complicated setups? Nginx virtual hosts is what you're looking for.
This guide will look at how to configure a virtual web host on Ubuntu using the Nginx web server. Nginx is a highly performant web and reverse proxy server. It is lightweight, cross-platform, and open-source.
Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your local machine. Kubernetes quickly set up a local Kubernetes cluster on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Borderlands 3 is the third installment in the Borderlands action RPG FPS series. The game was developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games. Here’s how you can play it on your Linux PC.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 20.04
The Apache Kafka platform is a distributed data transmission system with horizontal scalability and fault tolerance. It is used in many worldwide environments and in clusters where this data transmission is needed.
Best of all, it is open source and we can examine its source code and implement it on our servers. Thanks to powerful documentation and a very active community, Apache Kafka has a very good reputation worldwide.
This is guide, howto install NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 11.5 on Ubuntu 21.10, 21.04, 20.04.3 LTS, 18.04.6 LTS / Debian 11, 10, Sid / Linux Mint 20.3, 20.2, 20.1. I assume here that you have installed NVIDIA drivers successfully using my earlier Install NVIDIA 495.xx Drivers on Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint Guide. You will need NVIDIA 495.xx drivers. As always remember backup important files before doing anything!
PS is a popular command tool, stands for “process status” comes pre-installed in the Linux systems to provide a snapshot of the running processes. However, if the user wants a real-time or constant update of the process list is desired, then the top tool should be used. Also, with pgrep , processes can be specifically searched for by name or a regular expression and with pstree you can display all running processes in tree form.
This process viewing command tool “ps” also offers various options in Linux to get the desired information of running processes. However, sometimes, in minimal Linux systems such as CentOS, Alamlinux, Ubuntu, or Docker running Linux containers you would not find the PS command by default. So, if you required, it can be installed using the based repository of your system, here we let you know how? Also, we will discuss some common PS command options that to get key information on what is going on inside the system.
A new Gnome extension was created a few days ago to revive the old fashioned ‘windows on fire’ compiz effect.
When you click to close an app window, it fires the window and burns it down quickly. This useless but cool feature is developed by Simon Schneegans, who also has a few other great projects including Fly-Pie, GNOME Pie, and Desktop Cube.
The Wine team has put out a second Release Candidate for what will eventually turn into a Wine 7.0 stable release in early 2022. This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton.
Since it's now in a code-freeze, no new features are being pulled in while they work through any bugs and regressions that appear. Wine 7.0 RC2 release notes mention 34 bugs solved including issues for: Weird Worlds: Launcher, Death to Spies: Moment of Truth, Shadow Warrior, Resident Evil 4 HD, Her Story, Borderlands GOTY Enhanced, Dark Souls: Remastered, Steel Division: Normandy 44, Final Fantasy XIV, Sonic Adventure DX and more.
The ability to run Linux on modern mainframes opens doors to doing all kinds of things on the platform. An Apache HTTP server? Easy! A database? Would you like SQL or NoSQL? Kubernetes? Sure! As I concluded in Linux on the mainframe: Then and now, all of the most popular Linux distributions for servers today have versions for the mainframe.
Kubifaktorium isn't as well known as a number of other building sims but it's certainly an interesting one and now it has left Early Access as a finished game. Developed by a small two-person indie studio based in Sankt Augustin, Germany. This is their second game following BossConstructor in 2016.
It's got quite a mixture of genres here and doesn't seem to really fit into any alone. There's city-building a little like Settlers and plenty of automation a bit like Factorio. Not surprising, as the developers mentioned those games (amongst others) as inspiration.
Valve are always tweaking something on Steam and their latest experiment is an upgrade to the Store Hubs, the areas on Steam where you can browse through all the random tags.
Now, when you click a tag on Steam (if you opt-in), there's a great big banner carousel at the top to go through some of the featured games. This shows off those titles that are new, top-sellers, discounted, recommendations from users and curators and more from their mighty algorithm. Below that you will get a list of recent and upcoming events, helping you to stay on top of everything.
Hi all, just wanted to briefly mention that Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade works well on Linux through Wine/Proton. It’s old news by now but it’s still worth talking about.
The game was released on PC a few days ago via the Epic Games Store. Awesome benefits that come with the PC port is higher framerates and resolutions (much better than the 30 FPS on PS4, but it still does have some issues). Potentially later on we could have mod support as well. Users have reported the game runs great with Heroic. Video playback and everything else works. In fact, Jason Evangelho from Linux4Everyone reported that the performance with Proton GE seem to be on par with Windows.
While there hasn't been much to talk about Unigine recently when it comes to Linux games and they seem to place less emphasis these days on Unigine as a game engine, this cross-platform SDK/engine continues to be visually quite stunning, their Linux support remains in good shape, and they appear to be enjoying very successful efforts on the commercial simulation side. Unigine 2.15 was released this week as the latest iteration of their engine.
Earlier, many of us, including me, thought Raspberry Pi was only for learning computers and building projects. This sounded quite boring, but it was not. Raspberry Pi supports multiple games that can be played without an emulator, and this doesn’t even require an emulator. A long list of games can be played on Raspberry Pi, but not all run as smoothly as they are bigger to handle.
You can play games like ABE, O.A.D, Doom, Beneath a steel sky, Quake III, and Hurrican on Raspberry Pi. Many other games can be played directly on Raspberry Pi.
This article lists games that you can run smoothly on your Raspberry Pi without using any emulator.
Yeah, Tok just has the “saved messages” room display as such instead of using your account's name and avatar. Not much, which is why it's getting lumped in here instead of in its own blog post.
Since years Wayland based compositors are promoted as the successors to the venerable X.org X11 display server.
In the embedded space it seems Wayland already has made a lot of progress and some distributions start to use it per default, too.
[...]
Two months ago, I tried Wayland once more on my Arch Linux machine after some short journey to FreeBSD ;)
And great, it worked out of the box. Not random crashing of the compositor, no strange fractals on my second screen, all fine.
Now that I can use KDE Plasma & Kate on my normal machine on Wayland every day, I started to get more drive to take a look at remaining Wayland issues.
Aleix Pol Gonzalez & David Edmundson did a fantastic job to help out with remaining issues.
Today’s post should have something in it for everyone! Early holiday gifts!
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.
KDE Wayland users have many reasons to be grateful this Christmas with yet more improvements having landed for the Plasma Wayland session. Plus KDE's Konsole terminal emulator can now scroll about twice as fast as previously.
[...]
- Various memory leak fixes that could cause KWin to crash under different conditions.
- Chromium-based web browsers now show their windows properly under the Plasma Wayland session.
- A variety of other KDE Plasma Wayland session fixes/improvements.
KDE is all about the Apps is one of the current goals of the KDE community. Since this goal was choosen and announced in 2019 (remember it’s last year that was ‘normal’), I got a new hobby and it’s improving our apps infrastructure (e.g. apps.kde.org) and developing new KDE apps.
I already talked previously about NeoChat (a Matrix client), Kontrast (a contrast checker), Koko (an image viewer) and Pikasso (a simple Rust-powered drawing app for the Plasma Mobile).
For most of our cross-platform code our Gettext-based KF::I18n Framework takes care of translating user-readable texts on Android as well. It doesn’t cover Android-specific files and/or Android-native code though. Fortunately it’s not hard to integrate that with KDE’s translation infrastructure as well.
Messages can then be referenced by their translation id, both in Java code and the various XML files including the Android manifest. The latter is probably the more commonly needed case for KDE’s apps, which have typically fairly little code written in Java directly.
Let's welcome Latte Dock v0.10.6 the 6th Official Bug Fix Release of v0.10.x branch!
And to celebrate, I'm going to release a new version of geewallet. It's not that I blog about geewallet releases often (or blog at all, lately), but this one is a special one for me. We decided to call it 0.4.300.0
In this blog post, we will be talking about the best Ubuntu dark themes or the best dark themes for Ubuntu-based operating systems. You might be wondering why dark theme or dark mode as switching from light mode to dark mode at 100% brightness saves an average of 39%-47% power.
Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux operating systems right now in the market. It is often considered as a bridging OS for the users shifting from Windows to Linux. Due to it’s easy to use feature and amazing graphics, it is one of the first choice of the Linux users.
Well without any further discussion, let’s have a look into some of the best Ubuntu Dark Themes available on the internet.
Just two weeks after the release of EndeavourOS Atlantis, all fans have reason to rejoice – EndeavourOS Atlantis Neo is here.
If you really want to run Arch Linux but can’t face or fathom the Arch Linux installation, what can you do? That’s where EndeavourOS comes in. It’s Arch-based distro but it isn’t Arch Linux.
EndeavourOS is a rolling release Linux distro, continuation of Antergos. The one which the developers stopped working on in May 2019, due to lack of time on the part of the volunteer developers. EndeavourOS uses the well-known Calamares installer and might be classified as a beginner friendly desktop variant of Arch Linux.
And now, only two weeks after the release of its latest stable release EndeavourOS Atlantis, all fans have reason to rejoice, because EndeavourOS Atlantis Neo brings some small but important improvements.
The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.14. As with every other release, we’re regularly noting improvements and updates to keep you in touch with what is being done in ReactOS. In this release, improvements range from FreeLoader fixes, Shell features, kernel fixes, NetKVM VirtIO bringup, further work on the Xbox port and support for NEC PC-9800.
Note that it took us over a year to get this release in shape and fix regressions. As such, ReactOS 0.4.14 does not contain the very latest developments we advertised in 2021 on our blog and on social media. They can be found instead in our nightly builds. Consider this a maintenance release, and stay tuned for what’s coming next!
ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system developed by the community with an aim for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows is out with a big update. The last release was ReactOS 0.4.13 all the way back in April 2020 while this week has been succeeded by the big ReactOS 0.4.14 update.
- The ReactOS kernel has better stability and a variety of other improvements. The kernel has seen work on improved memory management, initial work on Physical Address Extension (PAE) handling, CRT exception handling, better Plug 'n Play, and driver work.
- Various user-interface/shell improvements, including "Send To" support from context menus, "Open Command Prompt" support, and other additions.
Today I will explain how to establish an OpenVPN tunnel through a dedicated rdomain to only expose the VPN tunnel as an available interface, preventing leaks outside of the VPN. I did the same recently for WireGuard tunnels but it had an integrated mechanism for this.
Debian GNU/Linux 11.2 is here more than two months after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 11.1 “Bullseye” as yet another up-to-date installation and live medium that incorporates all the latest security updates and miscellaneous bug fixes released during this time for existing users through the main software repositories.
In numbers, this second point release includes a total of 94 updated packages, split into 64 miscellaneous bug fixes and 30 security updates. What’s important to note here is the fact that among the security updates included in Debian GNU/Linux 11.2, there’s a fix for the infamous Log4j vulnerability.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian 11 (codename bullseye). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 11 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old bullseye media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Debian 11.2 is out today as the newest point release to "Bullseye" that premiered earlier this year.
With Debian 11.2 it's another update to deliver the latest package updates primarily for bug and security issues. Making Debian 11.2 more notable is an updated Apache Log4j release due to its nasty security issue coming to light this past week.
We've more or less finished the release of the Debian CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and other media for Bullseye 11.2 release. This is one of the (roughly) quarterly point releases and roll-up releases.
Thanks firstly to the developers, users, helpers, bug filers who help to keep Debian moving and working and to the release team and press team who more or less finish their job before the media team start theirs.
Thanks to Sledge and RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge and to Schweer who single-handedly clears all the Debian-edu testing. This release run seemed to be a bit more slick, a bit faster, a few fewer problems and it's always a joy to work with colleagues who are like family.
To users who love testing out the latest features in newly released Linux distribution, well, you have reason to smile. Linux Mint 20.3 beta is out and available for the masses to download and test. This release comes only a few months after the Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma” release, packaged with many updated software refinements and new and improved features.
The Linux Mint 20.3 stable release is expected to launch around Christmas 2021. According to the chatter on the internet, that should lay between 18th to 25th December 2021. Additionally, we know Linux Mint operating systems are based on the LTS versions of Ubuntu, and they release a new version after every six months (specifically, Linux Mint 20 series is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS). This release comes only a few months after the Ubuntu interim releases. By doing the math and looking at the history of previous releases, Christmas is the best time we can expect Linux Mint 20.3 stable release.
The chip vendor partnered with Canonical to deliver Ubuntu software images built for IoT chips with adjustable hardware.
[Sebastian Staacks] came across his old Game Boy and was wondering (as you do) what happened to recent attempts at getting a WiFi interface wedged into a standard cartridge. After a while the conclusion was that people had been scuppered by approaching the problem in a way that made it too hard. Obviously that meant it was necessary to follow through and build something, which is precisely what he did with his WiFi Game Boy Cartridge.
Light detection and ranging, better known as LiDAR, is a method of taking photographs of 3D space using lasers and GPS. That sounds like science fiction—I can think of a few scenes in some movies that probably reimagined this technology without realizing it—but it's a technology that's existed for over 50 years.
LiDAR is useful for topographical surveying and archaeological recordkeeping, and it's useful for obtaining sources for 3D printing. I was introduced to it while working on a movie that needed to integrate an imaginary (or was it?) dragon with a real-world forest and foresting town.
For all of these things to appear seamlessly in the same movie, digital artists were tasked with recreating, with 3D models, a tree or building that actually existed. To get the real-world objects exactly right in the 3D-modeling application, the artists needed to essentially trace the real-world object, just as you might trace a photograph to produce an accurate drawing on tracing paper. Instead of photographs, the 3D-modeling artists used LiDAR scans, which allowed them to "trace" an object in all dimensions.
Just like with pre-touchscreen cellphones having fancy innovative features that everyone’s forgotten about, there’s areas that laptop manufacturers used to venture in but no longer dare touch. On Twitter, [Kiwa] talks a fascinating attempt by Dell to make laptops with user-replaceable CPU+RAM modules. In 2008, Dell released the Inspiron Mini 1210, with its CPU, chipset and RAM soldered to a separate board in an “extended SODIMM” form-factor – not unlike the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules pre-CM4! Apparently, different versions of such “processor cards” existed for their Inspiron Mini lineup, with varying amounts of RAM and CPU horsepower. With replacement CPU+RAM modules still being sold online, that makes these Dell netbooks to be, to our knowledge, the only x86 netbooks with upgradable CPUs.
You could try and get yourself one of these laptops or replacement CPU modules nowadays, if you like tinkering with old tech – and don’t mind having a subpar experience on even Linux, thanks to the Poulsbo chipset’s notorious lack of openness. Sadly, Dell has thoroughly abandoned the concept of x86 system-on-module cards, and laptops have been getting less modular as we go – we haven’t been getting socketed CPUs since the third generation of mobile Intel boards, and even RAM is soldered to the motherboard more and more often. In theory, the “CPU daughterboard” approach could improve manufacturing yields and costs, making it possible to use a simpler large board for the motherboard and only have the CPU board be high-layer-count. However, we can only guess that this wasn’t profitable enough overall, even with all the theoretical upsides. Or, perhaps, Google-style, someone axed this project internally because of certain metrics unmet.
There is many a comment on these here pages along the lines of “Why did you use a microcontroller, when you could just have easily used a 555 timer!” And, yes, we sometimes agree with the sentiment, but when a chance comment seen by Hackaday.io user [Tim Böscke] suggested turning it around and building a microcontroller out of 555 timers, the gauntlet was well and truly thrown down. Now let’s be clear, this is not the first time we’ve come across this idea, there was a breadboard 555 based build ten years ago, but this is the first time we’ve seen it done by leveraging open source synthesis targeting a PCB!
This is a simple guide, part of a series I'll call 'How-To Guide Without Ads'. In it, I'm going to document how I set up bcache on a Raspberry Pi, so I could use an SSD as a cache in front of a RAID array.
The gaming and live streaming industry is a lucrative and rapidly growing commercial sector with a unique understanding of copyright and intellectual property, and many parties with conflicting interests and access to different economic resources.
The understanding of intellectual property among gamers and the companies which serve them differs substantailly from that of free software, and literacy in the values and philosophy of free software among this community is very low. It is then of little surprise that we see abuse of free software from this community, namely in the recent (and illegal) commercial forks of a popular FOSS streaming platform called OBS Studio by companies like TikTok and StreamElements.
These forks are in violation of the software license of OBS Studio, which is both illegal and unethical. But the “why” behind this is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, there is a legitimate means through which commercial entities can repurpose free software projects, up to and including reskinning and rebranding and selling them. The gaming community also has an unusual perspective on copyright which colors their understanding of the situation. Consider, for instance, the modding community.
Game modifications (mods) exist in a grey area with respect to copyright. Modding in general is entirely legal, though some game companies do not understand this (or choose not to understand this) and take action against them. Modders also often use assets of dubious provenance in their work. Many people believe that, because this is all given away for free, the use is legitimate, and though they are morally correct, they are not legally correct. Additionally, since most mods are free (as in beer),1 the currency their authors receive for their work is credit and renown. Authors of these mods tend to defend their work fiercely against its “theft”. Modders also tend to be younger, and grew up after the internet revolution and the commoditization of software.
The Picard team is happy to announce that the final version 2.7 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.
This release brings many changes, including a completely new naming script editor, scripting improvements and AcousticBrainz submission. See below for the highlights.
Safari is a graphical web browser. It is primarily based on open-source software properties, and mainly WebKit.
However, this freeware browser is not available for Linux. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
Fortunately, there are tons of open source web browsers available for Linux.
MySQL Workbench is a visual tool used for the designing and modeling of MySQL databases and is available for all operating systems including Mac, Linux, and Windows. In this write-up, we will understand what the MySQL workbench is. After understanding the MySQL workbench, we will list some of the alternatives of the MySQL workbench.
Access-to-PostgreSQL is a program to migrate Microsoft Access databases to PostgreSQL or Heroku server. Depending on privileges on the target PostgreSQL server, you can export MS Access data into new database or overwrite an existing PostgreSQL database.
TikTok has been accused of “stealing” from OBS to make their live streaming platform TikTok Live Studio, and now a representative from OBS has responded.
TikTok began testing its new streaming software TikTok Live Studio on December 15.
Live Studio was created to allow users to stream directly to TikTok from other devices like gaming consoles or computers, looking to become a competitor to the bigger platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming.
Within days, however, the freshly premiered streaming software generated some buzz on social media for allegedly ripping off their software from a competing company.
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OBS business developer Ben Torell gave some clarity on the situation and said, “We have a commitment to dealing with GPL violations in good faith, and in the case of TikTok/Bytedance we would be happy to have a friendly working relationship with them as long as they comply with the license.”
Most of you have heard of "Conway's Law", the pithy observation that the structure of things that people build reflects the social structure of the people that build them. The extent to which there is coordination or cohesion in a system as a whole reflects the extent to which there is coordination or cohesion among the people that make the system. Interfaces between components made by different groups of people are the most fragile pieces. This division goes down to the inner life of programs, too; inside it's all just code, but when a program starts to interface with the outside world we start to see contracts, guarantees, types, documentation, fixed programming or binary interfaces, and indeed faults as well: how many bug reports end up in an accusation that team A was not using team B's API properly?
At the time of the report, I was finishing my blockchain security apprenticeship at Trail of Bits, where I learned more about Slither’s capabilities. I immediately wondered whether it was possible to create Slither detectors for these vulnerabilities. The answer is yes! Today, we are releasing two new open-source detectors that can detect the Opyn and MISO vulnerabilities, respectively: msg-value-loop and delegatecall-loop.
We are proud to announce the release of it-depends, an open-source tool for automatic enumeration of dependencies. You simply point it to a source code repository, and it will build a graph with the required dependencies. it-depends currently supports cargo, npm, pip, go, CMake, and autotools codebases, packages in their associated package managers, and Ubuntu apt.
A string refers to a sequence of characters typically used to store and work with text information in a program.
PHP is a popular and influential programming language that supports the creation and use of string types.
This guide will teach us how to work with strings and various methods to make working with strings in PHP easier and more efficient.
PDF or Portable Document Format is a file document widely used in the modern world. Developed by Adobe, PDF files allow users to add text, images, and other supported file types into a compressed format readable by a PDF reader program.
This guide will teach you how to use the PHP programming language to create a PDF file.
The PHP update statement allows you to update existing records in the database’s table. The Update clause is mainly used in combination with the WHERE clause to perform modifications and updates to the records selectively.
In this guide, you will learn how to use the Update statement to perform modifications to a MySQL table.
PHP and MySQL are two highly compatible technologies. They are both rich in features and are easier to work with for any developer. In such as case, PHP contains a collection of built-in functions for working with and manipulating MySQL databases.
In this tutorial, you will learn some fundamental PHP MySQL functions and perform various operations on a database.
RPMs of PHP version 8.1.1 are available in remi-php81 repository for Fedora 33-35 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 8.0.13 are available in remi repository for Fedora 35 and remi-php80 repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.4.26 are available in remi repository for Fedora 33-34 and remi-php74 repository Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
Over the next few days, all Horde libraries and apps in the maintaina-com organization will be whitelisted for PHP 8x. in their FRAMEWORK_6_0 branch development versions. One next step will be a flavour of the OpenSUSE based containers and deployments which runs off PHP 8.0. While some few libraries have been enabled for PHP 8, it is almost certain that horde as a whole will not run correctly. Main culprits are the horde/rpc and horde/form packages and their user code, but there are some other ugly places that need attention.
[...]
Code in the maintaina-com repo will stay compatible with PHP 7.4 – at least for the time being. Decisions at Horde LLC may override that at some point or time may just march on. PHP 7.4 has been released two years ago, has ended active support 20 days ago and will be EOLed for upstream security support on November 28th 2022 – roughly 11 months to go. Linux distributions have a tradition to follow their own schedules and backport security fixes. OpenSUSE LEAP 15.3 ships with PHP 7.4 while openSUSE Tumbleweed has switched to PHP 8.0.13 – with PHP 8.1 versions becoming available from official repos soon.
This is a tough decision as PHP 8 and 8.1 have some really interesting features which would allow us to develop more elegant, more readable and more efficient code. For software that is not intended for this audience, I will immediately allow using 8.x-only features as soon as we are confident with Horde’s compatibility. This is going to be a major theme of January and possibly February.
The weakness of password management systems is a need to save passwords in a warehouse, which may be hacked. It would be hard to hack them if they were not kept in a warehouse.
In this case, the weakness of modern password management systems will be removed. Therefore, we have the following problem: How to use and manage passwords without saving them in electronic or paper form?
Passing arguments to a program is one of the common operations across any language you use. Similarly, in this article, we are going to see how to parse arguments in bash scripts using bash builtin getopts function.
It was Christmas Eve in the Workhouse and Santa was getting worried about how the weight of all those presents would reduce the height of his sled’s flighpath. Would he be able to clear the height of the tallest Christmas trees on his worldwide journey?
He asked one of his helpers to whip up a quick script to see how much danger he would be in and in stepped p6elf to do the job.
Naturally p6elf (pronounced “Physics Elf”) wanted to show off his raku skills to grow his reputation with Santa, the reindeer and all the other elves (knowing how much Santa is into the whole raku thing). So he started by picking up two modules and mixing them together. To share with the others so that they could see how they could easily make their own models so he used Brian Duggan’s cool Jupyter notebook module.
Security researchers have warned users that attackers are attempting to exploit a critical vulnerability in the Java logging library Apache Log4j. Log4j is a widely used java library that logs error messages in applications used by enterprise software applications as well as custom built applications intended for in-house usage.
The flaw, which was found to allow unauthenticated remote code execution and access to servers, was discovered first in Minecraft on December 9th, but experts are warning cloud users may also be at risk. There is a variety of software that is potentially vulnerable to being exploited since Log4j is a part of so many different forms of enterprise and open-source software, ranging from email services, cloud platforms, and web applications. The severity of this risk has been deemed a 10 out of 10 after exploits began on the 1st of December. Back in 2013, however, the code was first introduced into the codebase that has now been exploited since December 1st, nine days after public disclosure.
The use of information created in zoning and building permit procedures is changing. The built environment information system to be introduced in 2024 will bring this information together in a nationally interoperable and machine readable form.
Russian rapper Noize MC dropped the second part of his new album “Exit to the City” (“Vykhod v gorod”) on December 17, adding another ten tracks to the first ten released last month. Exit to the City is the 36-year-old musician’s tenth album — and it’s his most serious and tragic record to date. Since the very beginning of his career, Noize MC (whose real name is Ivan Alexeyev) has been actively involved in public life, showing support for political prisoners and speaking out on current affairs — and paying for it in concert cancellations and threats of criminal prosecution. In a review for Meduza, the rapper’s contemporary and long-time acquaintance, journalist Alexander Gorbachev, interprets Exit to the City as an honest look at the fate of the generation that grew up in Russia in the 1990s — and an attempt to find some value in this experience.
Today, stuck at the bottom thanks to endless road work, I try to remember what these hillsides looked like before the Dixie fire torched them in a furious 104-day climate-change-charged rampage across nearly one million acres, an area larger than the state of Delaware. They were so green then, pines, cedars, and graceful Douglas firs mixed with oaks pushing through the thick conifer foliage in a quest for light and life. Today, I see only slopes studded with charred stumps and burnt trees jackstrawed across the land like so many giant pick-up-sticks.
Dixie did far more than take out entire forests. It razed Greenville, my hometown since 1975. It reduced house after house to rubble, leaving only chimneys where children once had hung Christmas stockings, and dead century-old oaks where families, spanning four generations, had not so long ago built tree forts. The fire left our downtown with scorched, bent-over lampposts touching debris-strewn sidewalks. The historic sheriff’s office is just a series of naked half-round windows eerily showcasing devastation. Like natural disasters everywhere, this fire has upended entire communities.
My train for Drama (in many ways) left at 15:20 from the main Thessaloniki station, which was a twenty-minute walk from the seafront and what’s left of the Jewish quarter. In the cold rain I cut through some housing project courtyards and jaywalked across some wide boulevards, fearing I might roll up late for my train, the last of the day toward the east.
I made it to the station by 15:01, which was enough time to buy water and snacks in a kiosk for the four-hour train ride. Then, still soaking, I climbed aboard the train, where I sat alone in an empty car until, just before the train departed, about twenty refugees climbed aboard and took seats all around me, as if maybe I was their sponsor.
A while back, [Heavydeck] remembered stumbling across the worst CAD package ever, which is a schematic editor whose existence was purely intended for use to make quick circuit sketches for documentation, presentations and the like. All good. But, being based on low quality JPEG graphics, which when blown up to projector size on a big screen, they look really rough. After deciding that the original nasty, clunky interface was just nasty and clunky enough, [Heavydeck] then proceeded to reimplement the idea over the course of an afternoon, and came up with Kludge (possibly the second worst CAD package ever) making an actually useful tool even more useful.
Steam turbines are at the heart of all manner of industrial machinery, particularly that used for power generation. [Integza] decided he needed to better understand this technology, and decided to build one himself – using 3D printing, at that.
First, a steam source was needed, with a pressure cooker on an electric stove pressed into service. The steam was passed out via a nozzle printed in resin, which better resists heat than most FDM-printed parts. Similarly, a turbine wheel was printed in resin as well, with the steam outlet pointed directly at its vanes.
To really stress test the parts, more steam was required. To achieve this, hydrogen peroxide was pumped through a manganese dioxide catalyst impregnated into steel wool to create steam. This made an absolute mess, but the printed parts nevertheless survived.
Branding can be done on wood with just about any old bit of hot metal, but if you want to do it well, properly-crafted tooling will go a long way. [Wesley Treat] has built just that with this modular branding iron design.
The branding tooling itself is machined out of brass on an X-Carve CNC router, using [Wesley]’s own logo. The part is sanded after machining to remove tooling marks. A smaller brass slug is then machined with the numerals for various years with which [Wesley] may wish to stamp his projects.
Rather than hacking something sloppy together, the iron itself is assembled with a beautifully wood-turned handle of his own creation and a steel backing plate to hold the tooling. The date is separately removable from the main logo itself for easy changes in future. Naturally, the tool graphics are done in reverse so as to register the right way around when burned onto wood.
The tool is used with a torch to heat the brass up such that it can leave its impression on wooden surfaces. The final results are solid, if not quite perfect; getting the temperature across the tool perfectly matched would be key to getting the cleanest results. An electric heating element running in closed loop could be a way to achieve this.
I don't know what the future is going to look like, but a rewarding avenue of experiment is to take the tools and techniques developed in the database world and recombine them in new ways and on new problems - redrawing the lines between operating system, database and programming language.
But those lines are still encoded in the structure of our fields. Database people go to database conferences. Programming language people go to programming language conferences. Game engine developers are not going to either of those conferences.
What if we tried to get all these people in the same room?
[rctestflight] recently purchased a big CNC router, and that meant it was time to arrange for some dust extraction in the workshop. Naturally, he set about building this himself!
Using a shop vac is fine at smaller scales, but they can quickly be filled up on bigger jobs. To stop it getting filled up as quickly and wasting vacuum bags, [rctestflight] wanted to build a 3D-printed cyclonic separator to catch and dump the heavier-than-air particles from the routing process into an attached bucket.
When viewed from the far future, the early years of the 21st century will probably be seen as the end of a short era in human technological development. In the beginning of the 20th century, most everything was mechanical. There were certainly some electric devices, but consumer products like gramophone players and “movie” cameras were purely mechanical affairs. You cranked them up, and they ran on springs. Nowadays, almost every bit of consumer gear you buy will be entirely electronic. In between, there was a roughly 50 year period that I’m going to call the Electromechanical Era.
Jenny List’s teardown this week of an old Fuji film movie camera from 1972 captures the middle of this era perfectly. There’s a small PCB and an electric motor, but most of the heavy lifting in the controls was actually put on the shoulders of levers, bearings, and ridiculously clever mechanisms. The electrical and mechanical systems were loosely coupled, with the electrical controlled by the mechanical.
The basic concept of a coaxial line is this: a center conductor is surrounded first by a dielectric (typically air in earlier lines with separation achieved by means of wrapping a non-conductive fiber cord around the center conductor) and then by cylindrical metal outer conductor. Unlike open-wire lines, the outside conductor is connected to ground. This system has two particularly useful properties: first, because the signal is carried through the internal space between the conductors which is effectively a capacitor, the system acts much like the old loaded telephone lines (but more effective) and can carry very high frequencies. Second, the skin effect causes the outer conductor to serve as a very effective shield: undesired RF energy follows the outside of the outer conductor to ground, and is thus kept well isolated from the RF energy following the inside of the outer conductor. Coaxial lines can support a high bandwidth with low noise, and for this reason they are still the norm today for most RF applications.
We probably don’t have to tell most Hackaday readers why the current wave of low-cost software defined radios (SDRs) are such a big deal for hackers looking to explore the wide world of wireless signals. But if you do need a refresher as to what kind of SDR hardware and software should be in your bag of tricks, then this fantastically detailed account from [RK] about how he hacked his La Crosse WS-9611U-IT weather station is a perfect example.
[...]
In the end, [RK] is not only able to receive the data coming from the wireless sensors, but he can transmit his own spoofed data that the weather station accepts as legitimate. Getting there took some extra effort, as he had to figure out the proper CRC algorithm being used. But as luck would have it, he found a Hackaday article from a couple years back that talked about doing exactly that, which help put him on the right path. Now he can make the little animated guy on the weather station’s screen don a winter coat in the middle of July. Check out the video below for a demonstration of this particular piece of radio prestidigitation.
These pages have not been exactly devoid of home-built computers, with those constructed on solderless breadboard less frequent, but still not rarities. But what is more of a rarity is this ground-up 8-bit 74xx logic-based computer (video, embedded below) with full source, an emulator, assembler and test suite. [JDH] spent a solid couple of weeks working late into the night to build this, and the results show for themselves.
Leaders are sticking their heads into the sand of reality on Omicron. Unless they take needed steps, the results may be catastrophic.
Omicron is on its way, and it loves to infect people who've been previously infected with other variants of Covid, the unvaccinated, and even people who think they're fully vaccinated (but not boosted).
A growing chorus of voices is€ sounding the alarm about the Covid-19 pandemic's likely trajectory in the United States, where hospitals—already overwhelmed by a post-Thanksgiving spike in Delta cases—are bracing for a massive surge in infections driven to a growing extent by the even more contagious€ Omicron variant, which is running rampant ahead of major holiday gatherings.
"Whether out of complacency or exhaustion, we ignore this at our own peril."
Already dealing with the economic fallout from a protracted pandemic, the rapidly rising prices of food and other key commodities have many fearing that unprecedented political and social instability could be just around the corner next year.
One particularly pernicious myth going around in the US is the notion that “natural immunity,” gained from contracting Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, is preferable to getting vaccinated. One prominent politician, Sen. Rand Paul (R.–Ky.), has declared that he refuses to get vaccinated, because of his belief that he has “natural immunity” since he’s “already had the disease” (Slate, 5/23/21).
The abortion liberation movement received some much needed good news Thursday: The Food and Drug Administration announced that it would modify its outdated and medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, the first of two pills used in a medication abortion, lifting the requirement to obtain the drug in person. (Under previous guidelines, providers had to distribute the medication in person, while the second medication, misoprostol, is taken up to two days later outside of the clinic setting.) Getting rid of in-person dispensing is good because it allows for the expansion of telehealth medication abortion, and it expands the pool of clinicians who want to provide medication abortion. And in this moment, the lifting of any barrier to abortion care is a welcome reprieve from the current crisis. However, the truth is that the people who need access to abortions the most may never reap the benefits of this decision.
Cases of nutmeg poisoning are rare, but they happen. At least 120 have been reported to the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) every year since 2017. In 2020, 274 were reported, 90 of which came in April, during the height of a viral "nutmeg challenge" on TikTok. The related hashtag has since been censored by the service, and the videos scrubbed. Almost all cases documented by the AAPCC involved this kind of self-administration — people, usually young, purposefully swallowing large quantities of the spice to achieve a risky high.
Sir Alexander Fleming in his Nobel lecture in 1945 said, “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily under dose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” Today in 2021, doctors warn us against the misuse of antibiotics and how antibiotic resistance is a worldwide threat.
What is antibiotics misuse?
Misuse of antibiotics refers to consuming antibiotics without medical advice, re-using old prescriptions, not completing the prescribed course or shortening treatment duration, taking less than the prescribed dose, or failing to comply with the right frequency.
He explained that there are some laid-down regulations but they are not properly implemented.
“We want to reduce non-evidence-based, no-guidance use of antimicrobial from antiparasitics, anti-malaria to antivirals, antibiotics, to antifungal. We want more sustainability testing to guide our use of antimicrobials.
In the wake of World Antimicrobial Awareness Week observed this month, it is opportune to remind the government to implement its AMR National Action Plan of 2017, enacted in line with the WHO’s One Health policy that is based on the idea of the consanguinity of humans, animals and the environment and how the health of each group is dependent on the other — as demonstrated by the XDR typhoid outbreak that was concentrated in an area where sewage water had contaminated the drinking water supply.
Equally important, the government should regulate the unchecked sale of antibiotics by pharmacies and fine retailers who sell antibiotics without a prescription. Measures on a war-footing are needed if the government wants to avert a health catastrophe potentially worse than the pandemic.
Misuse and overuse of antibiotics has long been viewed as a potential threat that could lead to the emergence of so-called superbugs with resistance to existing treatments, a problem that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
In particular, antibiotic resistance is a major concern, often driven by the over-use of these drugs.
According to a press release, the week was observed from November 18 to 24. The theme for this year was “Spread awareness. Avoid resistance”. Awareness on the misuse and abuse of antibiotics that could lead to antimicrobial resistance was stressed upon.
Classes on antimicrobial resistance was conducted for MBBS students, nursing staff and technicians, while placards on antimicrobial resistance were also put up.
The experts have appealed one and all to consult a doctor or certified physicians before taking any medicine instead of opting for self-medication.
Encouragingly, only 10 per cent of participants explicitly asked their doctor for antibiotics. The vast majority of respondents were aware they should not keep leftover antibiotics or share them with others; antibiotics should only be used as prescribed by a qualified healthcare professional.
Private foundations’ resources tend to be more dependent on the stock market and other investments and could have financial interests that run contrary to their stated missions. This has been the case for the Gates Foundations, which was once a big investor in fossil fuels, and is true of some of Bill Gates’ personal investments, which include farmland that sells its produce to fast food chains.
20n Bio (20n), an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drug discovery company focused on designing new proteins for therapeutics, has raised a $3.3 million in seed funding. 20n said it will use the proceeds to expand its scientific team, establish a discovery platform, and start multiple early studies in oncology and other genetic diseases.
Apple stock rose a stunning 36% this year, adding to the gains it saw in 2020 even as the COVID pandemic threw countless challenges the company’s way, including serious supply chain issues. Cook estimated the chip shortage cost Apple around $6 billion, which was bad news ahead of the crucial holiday season. But not even that could stop the iPhone maker.
Better was loved by over 40,000 people on iOS and 15,000 people on Mac. It passed away following a tragic bout of fruit poisoning.
Better is survived by two screeching voices of the minority, Laura Kalbag and Aral Balkan, working to create a better web in its memory.
Apple has updated a webpage on its child safety features to remove all references to the controversial child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection feature first announced in August. The change, which was spotted by MacRumors, appears to have taken place some time between December 10th and December 13th. But despite the change to its website, the company says its plans for the feature haven’t changed.
Two of the three safety features, which released earlier this week with iOS 15.2, are still present on the page, which is titled “Expanded Protections for Children.” However references to the more controversial CSAM detection, whose launch was delayed following backlash from privacy advocates, have been removed.
A decade and a bit ago during my tenure at Pfizer, a colleague's laptop containing information about customers, healthcare providers and other vendors was stolen from their car. The machine had full disk encryption and it's not known whether the thief was ever actually able to access the data. It's not clear if the car was locked or not. Is this a data breach?
Some years later, an outsourcing provider of the Australian Red Cross Blood Service copied a database from production and backed it up to a web server facing the world. Someone stumbled across it, downloaded it and then sent it to me. It was the largest incident of it's kind in Australia and it included my own personal data. No security controls were breached by the person who downloaded it, they simply accessed a publicly available file. Same question again - breach or not?
Our list below names the most common tasks to complete for getting your tech gifts into a truly ready state. It’s not just PCs, Xboxes, and PlayStations—even low-key items like fitness trackers can use this kind of attention. For example, Fitbits sometimes have firmware updates that can take upward of 40 minutes to complete. (Seriously.)
Of course, some individuals love the setup process and see it as part of the ownership experience. If your giftee is type this person, hold off on updates. Same too if there’s a chance you may have to exchange your present for something else. (Check the store’s return policy on opened items first.) But most people appreciate this gift of time.
A bit of welcome news as the war on encryption continues around the globe. Germany's new government has said that it plans to come out more strongly in favor of end-to-end encryption and against backdoors. According to a report in Euractiv:
Recently, a proposal was brought to Berkeley City Council concerning an alleged crime problem, for which a number of technological responses were offered. Some meetings were held to convince neighborhood people that surveillance technologies, cameras and license plate readers, were necessary to help prevent crime. A few shootings had occurred which the police guessed were gang related, and one guy in South Berkeley fired off a couple of rounds at a car, the way the cops do when they want to stop a driver from leaving. As Christmas approached, a wave of “smash and grab” robberies occurred. But they were focused on fancy stores, not low income neighborhood parks. Crime shifts its class orientation with the seasons.
The media response amounted to fear-mongering: “We must hire more police, and institute more surveillance, in order to protect ourselves.”
Cell-site simulators (CSSs) mimic cell-phone towers to trick any nearby phones into connecting with them. Police use this technology to gather information on people’s phones or to track people in real time.
Whenever police use surveillance tools like CSSs, they inevitably sweep up innocent people’s private data. Because these tools are so invasive, there are legitimate questions about whether law enforcement should have deployed them in that particular investigation.
The public should be able to answer those questions by reviewing the public records that reflect how law enforcement justified using CSSs, what types of crimes merited their use, and what training and expertise officers had when deploying them. But in San Bernardino County, Calif., the public has been shut out of accessing these details despite EFF’s effort to make court records public.
To be fair, that is the most extreme implementation of BusKill. TechCrunch reports that the full drive option is only available via the paired software on Linux. On Windows and MacOS, the application can only lock your PC. Future options might let it automatically shut down, which would put one more layer of encrypted protection between would-be data thieves and their prize.
In July 2021, European Union (EU) member state ministers reached an agreement with the European Parliament to pass a new law, creating a temporary exception (derogation) from certain parts of the 2002 ePrivacy Directive. This derogation allows electronic communications services, like chat or webmail services, to conduct the automated scanning of everyone’s private communications, all of the time, instead of limiting surveillance to genuine suspects and in line with due process. Such generalised scanning practices can constitute a form of mass surveillance. They pose a serious risk to everyone’s fundamental rights because they treat each one of us as suspicious.
The derogation will expire in August 2024, and the European Commission intends to replace it with a long-term version which they will put forward in 2022. The purported goal of these derogations is to allow companies to detect online ‘CSAM’ (child sexual abuse material). Yet the temporary derogation allows companies to conduct the mass scanning of everybody’s private messages and chats, instead of limiting surveillance to those against whom there is reasonable, lawful suspicion. Worse still, the Commission has indicated that the long-term law might make generalised scanning of everyone’s personal communications mandatory. If passed, such sweeping and disproportionately-invasive measures would likely do far more harm than good.
A team of researchers discovered an old cloud account full of customer data belonging to Sennheiser. The account has not been used since 2018, but over 28,000 Sennheiser customers had their data leaked. The data may be old, but it contains personal, private information that is valuable to online criminals.
Researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar of VPNMentor contacted Sennheiser to disclose the discovery on October 28, 2021. According to the team, Sennheiser was using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket to store data collected from the public.
Sennheiser failed to implement any security measures on this S3 bucket, leaving the contents exposed and easily accessible to anyone with a web browser. Researchers were able to identify Sennheiser of the owner of the data due to files with the company’s name and Sennheiser employees listed in the bucket’s infrastructure.
Getting ready for 2024, the Georgia GOP legislature has stripped the election-certifying Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, of his authority to oversee future election certifications. The legislature has also given itself the unbridled authority to fire county election officials. With Trump howling his lies and backing his minion candidates, they created a climate that is intimidating scores of terrified election-precinct volunteers to quit.
Added to this are GOP-passed voter suppression laws and selectively drawn election districts that discriminate against minorities – both before the vote (purges, arbitrary disqualifications), during the vote (diminishing absentee voting, and narrowing dates for their delivery), and after the election in miscounting and falsely declaring fraud.
Seven men were killed, including Namir. Chmagh was critically wounded. As he tried to crawl to safety, a van approached the scene. Three men got out and tried to help Chmagh into the van, prompting one of the Apache crew members to yell: “Looks like they’re possibly picking up bodies and weapons!” The helicopter began strafing the van, killing Chmagh and the three men who tried to save his life, and wounding two children, a boy and girl, who were inside the van. One of the pilots was recorded saying, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle.”
Army investigators later ruled that the civilian van was “fair game under Army rules.” The Pentagon also blamed the Reuters reporters for their own deaths, asserting that Chmagh and Noor-Eldeen’s “furtive attempts to photograph the Coalition Ground Forces made them appear as hostile combatants.”
On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry published two documents asking for legally binding security guarantees: a bilateral treaty with the United States and a multilateral agreement with NATO members. The proposal follows weeks of escalating tensions between Moscow and the West, precipitated by a large build-up of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. Western analysts say the military maneuvers signal Moscow’s intentions to expand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the Kremlin says it is merely responding to Kyiv’s new deployments in the Donbas.
The first time many Americans learned that a large pro-Donald Trump protest in Washington was planned for January 6 was 18 days earlier when the 45th president tweeted about it—"Will be wild!"
The latest drama in Israeli politics comes in the form of a split between the country’s extreme Right and radical Right over what constitutes “settler violence.” As Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif said to me during an interview I conducted with him in Jerusalem, the vast majority of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, represents extreme right-wing Zionists. About half of those make up the Israeli government and the other half are in the opposition, awaiting the moment they can seize power.
Urging President Joe Biden to seize "a pivotal moment," nearly 700 hundred scientists and engineers including Nobel laureates called on the administration to take a number of steps to lower the risk of nuclear war including slashing the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons.
"We already have enough weapons to end all human life; it is unnecessary to build more."
At the level of national policy, nuclear derangement is so normalized that few give it a second thought. Yet normal does not mean sane. As an epigraph to his brilliant book€ The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg provides a chillingly apt quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”
Now, some policy technocrats for the USA’s nuclear arsenal and some advocates for arms control are locked in a heated dispute over the future of ICBMs: intercontinental ballistic missiles. It’s an argument between the “national security” establishment — hell-bent on “modernizing” ICBMs — and various nuclear-policy critics, who prefer to keep the current ICBMs in place. Both sides are€ refusing to acknowledge the profound need to get rid of€ them entirely.
We look at the life and legacy of trailblazing Black feminist scholar and activist bell hooks, who died at the age of 69 on Wednesday. We speak with her longtime colleague Beverly Guy-Sheftall, professor of women’s studies at Spelman College, who remembers her as “a person who would sit with young people and community people and students and help them understand this world in which we live, which is full of all kinds of domination.” Working in the tradition of intersectionality and Black radical feminism, hooks’s critiques of “imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy” called attention to the interlocking systems of oppression in hopes of eradicating them, Guy-Sheftall says.
Unlike Christianity, Islam carries a political dimension from the very beginning. It is not just a religion, but a code that regulates the essentials of life. The Christian will not be able to derive any clear political commandments from the Gospels. Muslims, on the other hand, will always find politics in their sacred texts: Discrimination between Muslims and non-Muslims is already enshrined in the Charter of Medina dictated by the Prophet. The distinction between Muslims and dhimmis is highly political, as is that between men and women, which is detailed in all treatises of Islamic law.
The spokesman of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan added that Pakistan's rulers prioritize economic interests over Islam. This is the first time that the Taliban talked against Pakistan's government and question its political system, reported Khaama Press.
This report is based on a total of 67 interviews, including 40 in-person interviews conducted in Ghazni, Helmand, Kunduz, and Kandahar provinces. Human Rights Watch’s research indicates that Taliban forces have killed or forcibly disappeared more than 100 former security force members in just these four provinces in the three months since their takeover of Kabul, the Afghan capital, on August 15. They have also targeted family members of former security force members.
I work in Southern California, a region long famous for its temperate climate. For the past two years, my colleagues and I at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research have been surveying a representative internet panel of 1,800 Los Angeles County residents to better understand how social and environmental factors such as climate change affect people’s well-being.
For areas of the U.S. that have yet to feel the full force of rising temperatures, the results of our latest USC Dornsife-Union Bank LABarometer survey show what kinds of challenges they can expect. In Los Angeles the climate crisis is already reducing the quality of residents’ lives. And our findings clearly show that its impacts are falling disproportionately on residents who are young, poor, Black and Hispanic.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s deputy director.
Devastating tornadoes hit Kentucky and neighboring states as darkness descended on Friday. The supercell thunderstorm tore a 200-mile path, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The National Weather Service had been issuing warnings and severe weather alerts for over 36 hours. At the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, workers on the evening shift were scared. NBC News reported that managers told them they'd be fired if they left to seek shelter elsewhere (a charge the factory owner disputes). Eight workers there were killed and many injured when a massive EF4 tornado flattened the factory. An Amazon warehouse in Illinois was flattened, killing six workers. The death toll across six states is now at least 90. The wreckage and loss of life from this storm is yet another symptom of how our fossil fuel addiction heats the planet and drives disasters.
This is new information, and it’s a real shocker if only because it’s happening so quickly, much sooner than expectations. It could collapse. And, it’s big, 80 miles across with up to 4,000 feet depth with a 28-mile-wide cracking ice shelf that extends over the Amundsen Sea.
Meanwhile, and of special interest because of the underlying threat posed by Thwaites, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) COP26 meeting in November 2021 held in Glasgow was panned by scientists as one more sleepy affair, failing to come to grips with Western Civilization’s biggest challenge since the Huns trampled Rome. This outrageous failure by the world’s leaders, evidenced by weak-kneed proposals, is decidedly threatening to coastal cities throughout the world, especially with Thwaites glacier showing signs of impending collapse.
Whether your memory stretches as far back as the Great Depression and hyperinflation, or even the 2008 global financial crisis, the public is wary of bankers and financial markets seemingly getting away with blue murder and poor behaviour that would be criminal if you or I engaged in it (token gestures like Bernie Madoff notwithstanding). The general public don’t know the differences between monetary or fiscal policy, or how the complex web of manipulation, government bonds, and the terms of trade dictate exchange rates and the value of currencies. All most people have now is cynicism.
Sony, Universal, and Warner will seek to halve their carbon emissions by 2030. The three labels will have until 2050 to reach a goal of net-zero emissions. Several independent record labels have already started realigning their business to be carbon neutral. The Music Climate Pact is also joined by the Secretly label group, Beggars Group, Warp, and Ninja Tune.
The pact seeks to address carbon neutrality for activities like touring, vinyl manufacturing, and music streaming. All three of these activities are unsustainably carbon-intensive at current levels.
Part o the pact also focuses on measuring carbon emissions across the industry to encourage artists to help address the climate crisis. Some artists like Coldplay have already pledged not to tour due to environmental concerns.
Under the law that established the USFWS, 16 U.S. Code ۤ 742(b):
Note that the provision requires both “scientific education”€ and€ “experience.” President Biden’s nominee for the job, Ms. Martha Williams, a lawyer, has three years of experience as Director of the Montana Department of Wildlife, which meets the experience requirement. However, she lacks the requirement of “scientific education” in the “principles of fisheries and wildlife management.” Her official resume cites a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Juris Doctor from the School of Law at the University of Montana. The subject matter of her bachelor’s degree has not been revealed by the Biden Administration, but in an€ interview with the Missoulian€ (Jan 21, 2017, Updated Feb 28, 2017), she acknowledged she is “not a biologist.”€ Ms. Williams appears to lack the “scientific education” prong of the two-prong legal standard.
The first four addressed whether the animal’s nervous system could support sentience. We wanted to find out whether it can detect harmful stimuli and transmit those signals to the brain. And also whether the signals were processed in integrative brain regions - parts of the brain that bring together information from many sources. Finally, it was important to understand whether anaesthetic or painkillers changed the nervous system response.
Our four remaining criteria focused on the animal’s behaviour. Could they trade-off risks of injury against opportunities for a reward? Did individuals tend to the specific site of an injury, and could they learn to avoid stimuli associated with injury, for example? We also investigated whether they valued anaesthetics or painkillers when injured. This behaviour, which distinguishes rigid and reflex reactions to injury, such as withdrawing a burnt hand, from flexible responses, is taken to be evidence of pain.
As a result, the business of bleeding horseshoe crabs is thriving. Today, American biomedical companies capture some 500,000 horseshoe crabs a year, a practice overseen by the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission. But there are few laws or regulations in place to protect or limit the take of horseshoe crabs. And although the horseshoe crabs are eventually returned to the sea, conservation groups estimate that up to 30 percent of them die in the process. Due to pressure from the biomedical industry, along with habitat loss and the harvest of horseshoe crabs by commercial fishermen to use as bait, populations both in the US and worldwide have plummeted in recent decades.
In the Delaware Bay, home to the largest population in the US, horseshoe crab numbers have declined from 1.24 million in 1990 to less than 334,000 in 2002. Although the population appears to have stabilized, conservationists worry that increased demand for American horseshoe crab blood by the pharmaceutical industry could force it to go the way of the Asian horseshoe crab, Tachypleus tridentatus, which is rapidly disappearing in China and which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists as endangered. Currently, the American horseshoe crab is listed as a vulnerable species.
In a video that recently went viral on social media, AIMIM District President Ghufran Noor was heard suggesting that Muslims should not adopt family planning measures as advocated by modern society, as it is 'against' Sharia law. He also linked having more children to gaining votes and electing the desired PM.
Child advocates kicked off a grim countdown Friday as Democrats appeared unable to find a way of passing an extension of the child tax credit, without which nearly 10 million children are at risk of falling back into poverty.
With talks regarding Build Back Better stalled, the party has less than two weeks to pass an extension of the child tax credit (CTC), which was distributed as monthly payments in the second half of 2021 and offered millions of families up to $300 per child, as well as making the lowest-income households eligible for the full credit.
Human rights advocates were incensed Thursday after lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice informed representatives for hundreds of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border that they were walking away from talks over compensating the families, as President Joe Biden had promised.
Instead of settling more than 900 claims, the administration signaled it will go to court to determine what compensation is owed to the families, many of whom were forcibly separated for several months by the Trump administration under its so-called "zero tolerance" anti-immigration policy.
With Democrats' Build Back Better package hanging in the balance, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Thursday called out fellow Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for "acting like Republicans" as they continue to withhold support from their party's popular legislative agenda.
"They've got to come forward to the American people and say, 'Hey, we don't think you need help.'"
The Congressional Progressive Caucus on Thursday demanded that the U.S. Senate stay in session through its looming holiday recess if necessary to pass the Build Back Better Act, which is on the brink of total collapse as right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin refuses to support the bill—and attempts to gut it further.
"The House did our work, and now it’s time for the Senate to do theirs. They must stay in session."
One attempted justification argues that obscene wealth is society’s reward for those people making crucial contributions to social welfare and progress. Billionaire Elon Musk, for example, contributed the electric car, some would argue; billionaire Jeff Bezos offered the speedy ordering and delivery of goods. But Musk’s electric car was a late step in a long evolution of electricity, batteries, and automobiles. Constituting that evolution were many contributions by many people along the way. Musk’s contribution was impossible without—and thus dependent on—all those prior contributions. Rewarding contributions and contributors justly would entail rewarding them all, not exclusively Musk. Doing the latter is manifestly unjust and unjustifiable.
The relevant parallel here is a village battling to escape flooding from a nearby river’s impending overflow. A subset of villagers gather to dig sand, acquire sandbags, fill them with sand, and then pass them forward, from person to person, so that the last person standing closest to the river, named Elon, can pile bags on the river’s bank. A grateful village collects $10,000 to reward those responsible for the happy outcome: no flood. The check for $10,000 is handed to Elon. Rewarding in this way—rather than sharing the reward among all those who collaborated to produce the outcome—is more of an incentive to position a single person in a particular place rather than to work alongside all the fellow villagers who contributed to the outcome.
U.S. consumer prices have risen by an average of€ 6.2 percent€ in the past year, the sharpest increase since 1991. Although Americans are supposedly — in the words of the€ New York Times€ — “flush with cash and jobs,” they are also€ deeply unhappy€ with the state of the economy.
It’s no wonder Republicans are thrilled and are€ drawing a line€ between inflation, public anxiety about the economy, and Joe Biden’s presidency.
The Democratic political strategist Don Calloway does not strike me as a street-fighting warrior. Last October, he went on MSNBC to explain why it was politically futile for congressional Democrats and the Justice Department to enforce subpoenas against Steve Bannon and other January 6th€ organizers defying the House of Representatives on the order of the Orange Fascist Insect (OFI) in Mar-a-Lago. Calloway explained that it was up to the Republifascist Party to police its own and that Democrats would lose moderate white votes if they dared to go after Bannon and other leading Nazified coup plotters. “Arrest[ing] folks,” Calloway told liberal cable viewers, “is really not something we should have to do in the interest of going through the discovery process of democracy. …We’re trying to win elections, we’re trying to appeal to a middle of the road white voter, and what does that look like if I drag a bunch of white guys and to perp walks with them, take them off out of their country clubs?” For Calloway, harsh “political realities” trumped the desire to use the power of the state to investigate and punish the leaders of an attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election to keep the OFI in unjust power. So, surrender, play along to get along.
Now, two months later, Calloway is talking about “civil war.” He went on MSNBC last Monday to calmly explain that 2022 will be a “do-nothing year” for Congress because House of Representatives members will be caught up in campaigning for the mid-terms and don’t want to take any risks with an election coming up. He foresees “total chaos” because of the gerrymandering and voter suppression measures being introduced by the Republican Party at the state level and because Congress has failed to pass the For the People voting reform bill. He sees no chance for the Build Back Better bill or anything else before the end of the year “because the Democrats have failed to reign in the Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema clown show.” And he agrees with Charles Blow that the USA is at an inflection point on the path to “Civil War,” adding (and I was really struck by these accurate comments, which I am roughly paraphrasing) that US-American “democracy” and has always been fundamentally scarred and poisoned by white male supremacism and patriarchy.
Freud’s psychological discoveries begin with the human body. First question: how does the Israeli body politic treat the Palestinian body?
The impetus of this article is the ICC investigation of Israeli war crimes and the highly publicized criticism of Israel for charging six human rights NGOs with terrorism. Six months prior to charging the NGOs, six other Palestinian and Israeli NGOs demanded that Israel provide Covid vaccines to Palestinians. This demand was about the health emergency due to Israel’s withholding vaccines from Palestinians. At the time Israel was also killing Palestinians with yet another massacre in Gaza, there was an upsurge of vigilante killing in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and all this killing was on top of Israel’s continuous covert ways of killing Palestinians (which Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls incremental genocide). The human rights situation in Israel is of course dire, but why so often has there not been comparable attention and unambiguous condemnation of Israel’s endemic killing, its entitlement to kill?
In sight of US duplicity and subterfuge, the warped, destructive relationship that exists between African states and pernicious imperial powers has once again been revealed. Pre-existing feelings of mistrust and anger are being strengthened and the realization of an old truth, that to become truly independent, nations within the continent must unite; only then will exploitation, manipulation and injustice be brought to an end.
As Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana famously said: “If we [African nations] do not formulate plans for unity and take active steps to form political union, we will soon be fighting and warring among ourselves with imperialist and colonialists standing behind the screen and pulling vicious wires to make us cut each other’s throats for the sake of their diabolical purposes in Africa.”
Even two top Black anchors for CNN and MSNBC confessed that they’re prohibited from making some points. This muting of Black voices is also happening in publishing. Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl, has a character complain about how White authors have a better chance of getting their proposals to write about Black subjects accepted than Black authors.
I haven’t experienced such restrictions from Baraka Books or the CBC network where I have been interviewed. Moreover, it’s because of my visiting Montreal and Toronto on a book tour that I learned facts about John Wilkes Booth that were not covered in my education.
The Senate parliamentarian, an unelected functionary tasked with interpreting the upper chamber's rules, advised Democrats late Thursday to exclude an immigration reform plan from their faltering Build Back Better package—a recommendation that progressives and rights groups said should be readily dismissed.
"Democrats must overrule the parliamentarian to pass immigration reform."
Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia implored conservative members of his party to stop obstructing voting rights legislation in a powerful speech on the floor of the Senate Tuesday. While Warnock did not name Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two have come out against doing away with the filibuster in order to allow Democrats to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Warnock said there was no chance of Republicans joining the effort to safeguard democracy and that only a change to the filibuster could secure passage of the bills. “Who is being asked to foot the bill for this bipartisanship? And is liberty itself the cost?” Warnock said.
Political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya warns that reforms recently adopted by the State Duma to further the centralization of power in Russia’s federal government could endanger the entire political system by pinning too much on the presidency and the Kremlin’s “subjective and closed insider logic.” “Constitutional Putinism” is supposed to weed out remnants of the destabilizing “opportunism” elevated in Russia’s “Yeltsin Constitution,” Stanovaya argues in a recent essay for the Carnegie Moscow Center, but Putinism could prove to be even more prone to opportunism if it is incapable of accommodating the multiple power centers that would emerge in a serious political crisis (for example, the loss of United Russia’s parliamentary monopoly or a severe decline in the president’s popularity).
Web3 is only about adding an additional layer of complexity in the name of justifying the underlying cryptocurrencies. The web browser is augmented with a cryptocurrency wallet and part of the computation and storage is shifted from my server to the decentralized cryptocurrency infrastructure. When a user wants to use my service they will pay some amount of cryptocurrency to perform the cryptocurrency-side computation, with any remaining transferred to me as a fee for my service. So does the new infrastructure provide anything useful? Lets focus primarily on Ethereum, but the same problems appear regardless of the underlying cryptocurrency.
The 57-year-old former university professor leads a coalition of five parties spanning his fiscally conservative Civic Democrats to the more liberal Pirates party which is entering government for the first time.
The coalition, which analysts expect to be more pro-Western and more engaged with the European Union than its predecessor, takes over at a time of soaring costs for households and a wave of coronavirus infections straining hospitals.
Turkey, which has growing recognition in the world as a military power and had successes to show in Iraq, Syria, Libya and lately Azerbaijan, said it welcomed the Nigerian government’s decision to buy naval ships from their shipyard, noting that discussions are ongoing on how to strengthen the capacity of the Defence Industries Corporation (DICON) in Kaduna in line with an agreement signed during President Erdogan’s last state visit.
Although I’ve mentioned Dr. Robert Malone, self-proclaimed “inventor of mRNA vaccines,” a few times on this blog, I realized this week to my surprise that I had only written one post featuring him as the primary topic. That was in July, and at the time Dr. Malone was whining that Wikipedia was “erasing him” because edits had been made to the Wikipedia entry about mRNA vaccines so that it no longer featured him as a prominent figure in the history of this new technology. In reality, as I described, part of what had happened is that his wife Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, using the ‘nym Glasspool1, had been editing the entry on mRNA vaccines to feature her husband as the “inventor of mRNA vaccines.” Basically, Wikipedia’s editors appropriately and quickly shut that nonsense down right away, as well they should have. More recently, Dr. Malone has been assisting the antivaccine movement targeting Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn with disinformation, as well as promoting the conspiracy theory that Pfizer’s recently FDA-approved mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty is not the same as the vaccine that it had been distributing under an emergency use authorization before. (It is.)
Three days after Hurricane Ida slammed ashore on Aug. 29, leveling homes and knocking out power along the Louisiana coast, Craig Curley Sr. maneuvered through a packed crowd at Home Depot to reach the aisle with portable generators.
Curley, 50, snagged one of the last units in stock, a 6,250-watt Briggs & Stratton, and drove it to the home of his ex-wife, Demetrice Johnson, in Jefferson Parish.
The committee has been scrutinizing Mr. Waldron’s role in spreading false information about the election since a 38-page PowerPoint presentation he circulated on Capitol Hill was turned over to the panel by Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s last chief of staff, who denied having anything to do with it.
“The document he reportedly provided to administration officials and members of Congress is an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee, said.
Last month we wrote about adults completely freaking out about supposed viral "TikTok challenges" to do violence in schools. We highlighted a truly excellent Reply All podcast episode and a thorough debunking at Curbed, both of which showed that while there may be some kids doing some stupid stuff on TikTok (because kids and because TikTok) there's no evidence that any of the really bad stuff actually happened, and what little stuff did happen didn't appear to actually go viral. What did go viral were adults -- school cops ("School Resource Officers") and administrators -- spreading weakly sourced claims about such challenges.
In its statement, TikTok said it had only found videos discussing the rumours and urging others to say safe - not direct threats. It said it was "working to remove alarmist warnings that violate our misinformation policy."
State and local police around the country have said credible threats have not been found in the social media trend but are still taking precautions, according to the AP.
On Thursday, officials across the country were responding to viral posts on social media saying schools would be the target of shootings on December 17th. Some canceled classes or allowed kids to stay home. Others said they would increase police presence on campus. And some simply said they were monitoring the situation. But just about everyone was united in one message: the threats officials were hearing about were deemed to be not credible.
TikTok, meanwhile, was awash in videos: “POV your parents are making you stay home because of the December 17th trend,” reads one post. “Guys stay safe; I’m staying home,” says another. “Hope everybody is okay.”
TikTok said on Twitter that the warnings violated its misinformation policy, which prohibits the spread of hoaxes or warnings about hoaxes that treat them as real. After searching “exhaustively,” Tiktok said it had not found content on its platform promoting violence at US schools on Friday, despite the widespread but unsubstantiated rumors.
Russia’s censorship agency is threatening to restrict access to YouTube after the video platform shut down yet another German-language channel run by the Russian state-controlled television network RT (Russia Today).
Let me be clear upfront: I'm a huge fan and supporter of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. After all, just last week, that organization stepped up to defend my rights after Representative Thomas Massie decided to trample on them. The Knight Institute was also the publisher for my Protocols, Not Platforms paper, and their guidance and editorial support with that paper were tremendously helpful. I've been involved in a few other projects with them as well, and have found every one of them worthwhile.
On a party-line 219 to 212 vote, the House on Tuesday passed the Combating International Islamophobia Act, which is co-sponsored by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu). The bill calls upon the president to appoint a “special envoy” to fight “Islamophobia”; this envoy will head up a State Department that will monitor the phenomenon. Omar’s bill, however, is wrongly focused in all kinds of ways, not least of which is the fact that it will combat efforts to “promote racial hatred” against Muslims, even though Islam is not a race and there are Muslims among people of all races. Meanwhile, the raucous House debate raised other problems with the bill as well, including the likelihood that it will inhibit counterterror efforts.
The Uncensored Unofficial Oberlin Alumni Discussion Group has silenced the voices of the three Oberlin Committee members working for Mahallati’s dismissal, in effect aligning themselves with the efforts of the Oberlin administration to protect him. The group has also shown that its claims of unbiased moderation, transparency, and open discussion are empty ones. Moderation is arbitrary and vindictive, rules are optional, and hostility abounds.
Meanwhile, many of the same media outlets that were informing us about the Nobel ceremony made no mention whatsoever of the fact that a journalist imprisoned in London, England had just become one step closer to being extradited to the US, where he faces a potential 175-year prison sentence.€ On the very same day as the Nobel ritual, the judges of the Royal Courts of Justice declared that they trusted the promises of the lawyers from the Biden administration who assured them that Julian Assange would not be tortured in prison.
If the rulers of the western world weren’t still fighting the Cold War — and Cold War 2.0, the War On Terror — then Julian Assange would long ago have received the Nobel Peace Prize for which he was already previously nominated.€ And he wouldn’t be in a British prison, facing extradition to the US, either.
Dayee, 33, who had been associated with RFE/RL since 2008, reported on the dangerous security situation and its impact on civilians in his native province, where the Taliban and government forces are in near-constant battle. Dayee also covered social and cultural issues and gave Radio Free Afghanistan, known locally as Radio Azadi, some of its most incisive reports on the drug trade in Helmand, which is the source for most of the world’s illicit opium production.
A case involving the first criminal suspect to be notified by the DOJ that evidence against him was derived from Section 702 surveillance has just reached an end. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court has decided there's nothing wrong with the government's FISA-enabled warrantless surveillance programs. It also says the word "speedy" can be redefined at will by the government's national security concerns, changing the definition to "however long it takes."
For many of us, these were significant transformations that need to continue. Trump supporters and many conservatives, on the other hand, have launched a counteroffensive. A key battleground today concerns “critical race theory” (CRT), a term latched onto by opponents of BLM to villainize open discussion of racism. So afraid are conservatives of the racist history of the United States being publicly told, more than 17 states have introduced or passed legislation that would forbid teaching CRT. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton introduced federal legislation banning CRT trainings from the US military, and as similar bill prohibiting public service workers from training in CRT was quickly introduced. On August 11, 2021 the Senate approved a bill introduced by Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Kevin Cramer, and Mike Braun that prohibits federal funding to promote “divisive concepts, such as Critical Race Theory.” [1]
Across the country, Republicans are gerrymandering electoral districts, infiltrating school boards and launching legislation to prevent open discussion in classrooms and public spaces of the many-sided history of this country. Running primarily on a platform to ban CRT from classrooms, newly elected Virginia governor Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated former governor Terry McAullife. His backroom supporters operated more than 1,300 “local news sites” that attacked CRT. Republican legislatures are stepping up attacks on women’s rights, seeking to overturn Roe and restricting family support items in the budget at the same time as nearly three women are murdered every day by intimate associates.[2]
Born six weeks after the stock market crash of 1929, Harris was a child of the Depression and € of the Church. His mother Bessie was pianist for the family’s Baptist congregation in Detroit and gave him his first lessons at four years old.€ Throughout his life Harris preached the gospel of jazz. For decades his pulpit was the Jazz Cultural Theater he founded in Manhattan in the early 1980s. There he held classes every day of the week open to all for a few dollars a head: not just students who played the piano but any instrument, as well as those who brought only their fascination for his teachings and the music he nourished.
Rightly counted among the Founding Fathers of bebop, Harris played as young man with Charlie Parker whenever he came through Detroit. Harris began touring with another founder, the drummer Max Roach in 1956, the year after Parker’s death. The pianist moved to New York in 1960.
It is this latter case that is the subject of a recently-republished text by Robert L. Allen and Chude Pamela Allen titled Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States. Originally published in 1974, this new edition features a forward by Jamelle Bouie and a 1983 postscript which addressed the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even though there is nothing on the last forty years of US social reform movements, the text remains a useful, even essential history of the movements it does discuss.
Reluctant Reformers is a rewrite of the history of US social reform movements. Beginning with an examination of the movement to abolish slavery and the moral outrage which fueled it, the text informs the reader that many of the white abolitionists did not consider Black men and women to be their equal. For these readers and those already aware of this fact, the authors go deeper, examining various personalities in the movement—William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and the Grimke sisters foremost among them. They look at Garrison’s high-minded morality and his disagreements with Frederick Douglass when Douglass moved beyond Garrison’s sponsorship and began publishing his own abolitionist newspaper, The North Star. This section also describes the various views of the abolitionist movement in regards to the enfranchisement of Black men and the faction of the movement wishing to repatriate freed slaves back to Africa.
In 1994, Congress passed a law (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act) that ordered the Department of Justice to "acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers" and publish an annual report. The DOJ immediately handed this responsibility off to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, which produced a single report in 2001 and has done nothing since.
More damning information about last week's deadly workplace disaster at an Amazon building in Illinois emerged on Friday when a delivery driver shared records of a conversation she had with her boss, which revealed that the e-commerce giant threatened to fire her if she didn't keep delivering packages even as tornado sirens blared.
"If you decide to return with your packages it will be viewed as you refusing your route, which will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning."
Progressive cheers went up far and wide Friday after Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant officially defeated a right-wing recall effort, which the Socialist Alternative lawmaker called "part of the nationwide backlash" by billionaires and Big Business targeting lawmakers and others fighting for social justice and working people.
"The ruling class in the United States is afraid of these kinds of movements and so we should not be surprised by the reaction."
By the way, the fact that you are still reading, and that this piece was published in the first place, is in further evidence of this trend. The show sets up a subtle but poignant contrast between the values of capitalist and socialist values. The actions of the individual characters that either make the team better or help each other out in some way are the result of socialist ethics. Whereas the type of actions or attitudes that bring people down or make the team less cohesive are the result of self-interested, self-serving ethics. That is because capitalist ethics prioritize the individual over the community. Recall Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing” as society, but only “individual men and women”.
From a capitalist perspective, people are seen as inherently self-interested, seeking to maximize their own individual well-being even at the expense of their community. The interests of the individual are often seen as directly in conflict with those of the community. This is why the ideas behind the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (whose author, by the way, was a eugenicist and white supremacist and whose ideas have been thoroughly debunked) are so popular with the advocates of capitalism. From this paradigm, relationships are seen as transactional, with each individual seeking to improve their own lot. Since the gains an individual makes come at the expense of another, there is also a necessary emphasis on hierarchies and statuses.
Last week, after decades of organizing, 17,000 student researchers across the University of California (UC) won recognition of our union, Student Researchers United–United Auto Workers (SRU-UAW). Spanning 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, we’re now the largest academic student employee union in US history, following one of the biggest new organizing drives in any sector in this century. But it wasn’t easy. For months after we petitioned for union recognition with supermajority support, UC administration refused to respect our democratic choice to unionize, despite overwhelming public and legislative pressure. Finally, 10,890 of our coworkers voted by 97.5 percent to strike unless UC dropped its trumped-up legal objections to our union—and we won.
Faced with a choice in Honduras between a sterling socialist candidate who just won an election in a landslide and a loser associated with the previous narco-dictator, the U.S., to its credit, did not foment a coup. It gulped down its pride and grumbled congratulations to Xiomara Castro, the new leader. She’s the wife of Manuel Zelaya, you know, the slightly left former Honduran president, kidnapped in 2009 by the military at night and flown out of the country in his pajamas.
The Hillary Clinton state department’s unforgettably awful performance at that time included tacit support for this coup and for the thugs who installed themselves in power. Those goons later made such a mess of the nation with drugs, gangs, death squads, privatizations and other forms of rank criminality, that Hondurans set new records, fleeing the country by the thousands to the U.S. border, where they were not, to put it mildly, exactly welcomed by the nation that helped wreck their country.
At the end of the Civil War, the Union extended a broad amnesty to those who fought for a white supremacist rebellion. But those pardoned Confederates did not abandon their cause when they left the battlefield, as The Nation documented at the time. Thousands joined the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1865 and by 1870 had chapters in every state. Many other former Confederates wormed their way into political and academic institutions, using their positions to create systems that would achieve the ends of the Confederacy.
You captured the minds and hearts of many with your simple but not simplistic writing in Talking Back. Thinking feminist, thinking black. with its lovely lucid essays on various topics and the pain felt with regard to multiple oppressions and the intersections of race, gender (including sexual orientation and the scourge of homophobia) and class. The same applies to her acclaimed Feminism from Margin to Center arguing for intersectionality with other oppressions to do justice to the struggles of women. You found a kindred spirit in Paulo Freire despite what you call his “phallocentric paradigm of liberation”. The two books by him you cite over and over again are Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness. You never got to do a ‘talking book’ with Paulo even though you admitted that this would have been a consummation devoutly to be wished. What a great conversation this would have been. You shook the foundations of white feminist politics with your initial Ain’t I a woman which incurred the wrath of many but won the admiration of others. I recall your writing that you had a hard time finding a publisher for this book which came with the subtitle ‘Black women and feminism.
Your Teaching to Transgress with your landmark essay on Freire, first published around the same time in a memorable anthology of essays on the Brazilian educator (Paulo Freire: A critical encounter) by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, is to be treated as de rigueur when analyzing Freire. What a coincidence you departed in Freire’s birth centenary year. You broached many topics such as the blonde white feminine hegemony embraced by Madonna which you piercingly decried in Outlaw Culture.
Across the country, some law enforcement agencies have deployed controversial surveillance technology to track cellphone location and use. Critics say it threatens constitutional rights, and members of Congress have moved to restrain its use.
Nonetheless, in 2019 the Boston Police Department bought the device known as a cell site simulator — and tapped a hidden pot of money that kept the purchase out of the public eye.
Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court has jailed Pussy Riot activists Maria Alyokhina and Lyusya Shtein (a municipal deputy) for 15 days and 14 days, respectively, under the administrative article prohibiting the display of Nazi symbols.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday addressed a Michigan rally of striking Kellogg's union workers and their supporters, calling on all corporate CEOs to "create an economy that works for all" and reading a letter of solidarity from President Joe Biden, who implored the strikers to "keep the faith."
"Working people in this country want dignity, they want respect, they want to be able to raise their families with a decent middle-class income, and they don't want to work 100 days in a row."
I will be in Battle Creek, Michigan this Friday with workers who have been on strike for over two months against Kellogg's. Let me tell you why I'm going.
When I was studying political science at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois, during the early 2000s, the Pope’s full-throated excoriation of the West was a routine matter of discussion in theology, philosophy, and political science courses. As a pro-choice leftist, I always took critical aim at the Catholic Church’s position against women’s medical freedom and bodily autonomy, as well as its refusal to support the terminally ill’s right to die with dignity. Despite my disagreements with its application, the simple and brutal phrase, “culture of death,” has never left my memory.
It is now as clear and ominous as a cancer diagnosis that the United States has descended into a “culture of death.” The value of human life has become fodder for partisan debate, and mass fatalities, whether the result of gunfire or widespread infection from a deadly disease, receive blasé shrugs of indifference from the general public. As the American death toll from Covid-19 climbed into the hundreds of thousands (it currently stands at over 800,000), the Republican Party obstructed minimal efforts to reduce loss of life, touting a childlike notion of “freedom” over the safety of human beings. Teachers, workers, the elderly and disabled, and even children were worthy of sacrifice, according to elected officials like Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for the health of the stock market, or the preservation of something called, “the American way of life.” 800,000 Americans cannot enjoy any way of life, nor can they applaud the profit maximization of the rich, because they are dead.
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) affiliated€ “Psychology PAC”€ certainly isn’t in the same boat when it comes to political giving. That’s some measure of good news. But a little research reveals that this PAC does have a history of making some highly questionable choices when it comes to deciding where to direct its financial resources.
As background, Psychology PAC is the political action committee of€ APA Services, Inc.€ (APASI). The APA and APASI are companion organizations; the former is a 501(c)(3) and the latter is a 501(c)(6). They have the same CEO and the same individuals serve as members of both boards of directors. All APA members are automatically members of APASI as well, and APASI’s€ bylaws€ specify that “The Corporation shall not undertake activities that may adversely affect the American Psychological Association.”
The county of Williamson, Texas, has announced a settlement of $5 million in the wrongful death of Javier Ambler II in 2019. The 40-year-old Black man died after being repeatedly tased by police during a traffic stop. Police bodycam footage showed Ambler telling officers, “I have congestive heart failure,” and “I can’t breathe,” as they continued to tase him. This comes as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act languishes in Congress and activists urgently demand lawmakers to vote to stop the nationwide police killings of people of color. “We must see action,” says Benjamin Crump, attorney for Ambler’s family. “If not, don’t expect action from us to come to the polls.”
As a retired rapporteur I have endeavoured to remain informed and active.€ From time to time I give interviews, publish op-eds, most recently concerning President Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” and concerning the disgraceful ruling of the UK court in the case of Julian Assange.€ This activity has brought me more insults and one particular assault on my convictions – I have been called “unpatriotic”, even a “traitor”.
Reflecting on this surge in social media hostility, I jotted down some thoughts on the meaning of patriotism, loyalty to one’s country, community and values.
1. Statement of Facts
Now a member of the city's oversight board is demanding answers. "What I want to know are: What are the rules? And did this woman break them?" Brandon Friedman, a member of Dallas's Community Police Oversight Board, said to a local CBS affiliate. He added: "It's not my business why someone's carrying $100,000 at the airport unless it's illegal, and from everything we've seen it doesn't seem to be."
A Dallas Police Department spokesperson told the station last week that "travelers are not allowed to board a plane with more than $10,000 of cash without declaring it, even on domestic flights." But there is no law, either state or federal, that says that. It's just that police are allowed to seize cash or other property merely on the suspicion that it was involved in illegal activity, and the owners must go to court to prove it wasn't. And in Texas, the law requires only a "preponderance of the evidence" before the police can take private property.
The former Minnesota police officer Kim Potter, who faces manslaughter charges for fatally shooting 20-year-old Black man Daunte Wright during a traffic stop, is expected to take the stand in her own defense Friday. Potter claims she reached for her Taser and drew a pistol by mistake. “Black people should not be killed in America over misdemeanor, pretextual traffic stops,” says Benjamin Crump, attorney for Wright’s family.
Former police officer Derek Chauvin has pleaded guilty to violating George Floyd’s civil rights, marking the first time he publicly admitted to his role in Floyd’s death. Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, killing him with the excessive use of force in 2019. Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for social justice protests and calls to defund the police across the country. Chauvin also pleaded guilty for violating the civil rights of a 14-year-old juvenile in 2017. “To be held accountable on both levels, on state level and federal level, we believe, sends a very clear message that the deliberate indifference and the denial of constitutional rights of marginalized people of color won’t be tolerated,” says Benjamin Crump, attorney for multiple families of victims of police brutality.
In exchange for his guilty plea, Chauvin, 45, is expected to be sentenced by Judge Magnuson to a prison term of 25 years. The arrangements with prosecutors stipulate that the federal sentence would run concurrently with his state sentence of 22.5 years. This means Chauvin would serve an additional 2.5 years in prison beyond the sentence that was imposed following his conviction in a jury trial last June.
The plea agreement also provides for Floyd’s murderer to serve out his jail term in a federal prison. According to the New York Times, federal prison is preferred by Chauvin because it is “generally considered to be safer” and could separate him “from prisoners he may have arrested.” Another provision of the deal would prevent Chauvin from ever working as a police officer again.
Støjberg’s initiatives, then, offended media hacks and ivory-tower buffoons. But they also made her a national heroine, and arguably the most popular politician in Denmark.
Now, confronted with the child-bride issue, Støjberg didn’t disappoint. At first she decided to offer the girls - 23 in all - the option of divorce. Then, realizing that many of the girls, if offered a choice, would likely be under immense family pressure to stay with their “husbands,” she ordered that all of them - except for five who were between the ages of 15 and 17 - be severed at once from their so-called spouses and granted instant divorces. Between February 10 and March 18, eighteen “couples” were separated.
But Støjberg’s swift action on child brides landed her in hot water. Immigration officials and other government bureaucrats maintained that she had no power to end marriages, even if they involved minors. The European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child were both cited - not, mind you, in favor of saving girls from statutory rape, but in favor of allowing child molesters to keep on molesting.
A happy though also rare ending. Over the years, Coptic Christian girls have been and increasingly continue to be abducted, sexually abused, and forced to convert to Islam and marry their kidnappers—and the majority of them are never seen again. Moreover, in the few cases that they, like Marna, are recovered, no legal action is, per precedent, ever taken against the abductors, even though Egyptian law is extremely harsh in such matters (up to 25 years imprisonment for abducting a minor female). But such is the reality of Egypt’s “justice” system when it comes to the non-Muslim Copts.
Farrokhzad's grisly murder was widely seen as part of what became known as the "chain murders" -- a string of assassinations and disappearances of dozens of Iranian intellectuals carried out by Iranian intelligence from 1988 to 1998.
Nearly three decades after Farrokhzad's murder, however, the crime remains officially unsolved, and German law-enforcement authorities have declined to comment on the case or its alleged political context, citing the ongoing investigation.
But a new investigation by RFE/RL's Persian-language service, Radio Farda, reveals that German police thought that Farrokhzad's murder bore the hallmarks of an Iranian government operation and that the perpetrators appeared to have used one of the singer's acquaintances to carry out the killing.
School textbooks in Kuwait are rife with antisemitic tropes ranging from the ancient slander that Jews are inherently treacherous to the denial of the Holocaust, according to new research by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL analysis of Kuwaiti textbooks noted that Kuwait’s Emir, Nawaf Al Saba, who succeeded to the Gulf state’s throne in Sept. 2020, had called on the Kuwaiti nation to practice “adherence to the teachings of our tolerant religion, which urges us to unify ranks and spread kindness and compassion.”
However, the Kuwaiti ministry of education “is continuing to reuse state-published textbooks from past years that teach horrific antisemitism,” the ADL observed. “In addition, some lessons include ideas that are intolerant or confrontational toward Ahmadi Muslims, Baha’is, and Christians.”
New York’s attorney general is investigating the death of a 29-year-old man who was badly burned when he was shot with a stun gun after dousing himself with hand sanitizer during an altercation with police officers, officials said on Thursday.
Very worried about the possible restoration of net neutrality at the Biden FCC, the telecom sector has taken to using telecom industry-friendly news outlets to parrot things you may be surprised to learn aren't actually true.
The Canadian legislative plan, which will apply a three per cent tax on revenues from four sources (online marketplace services revenues, online advertising services revenues, social media services revenues, and user data revenues), violates this agreement. Not only is the legislation incredibly complex, potentially capturing real-space retailers such as the Bay or Walmart, but is likely to anger allies across the OECD. Companies must pay their fair share of taxes and an international agreement on the issue is long overdue. But Canada’s decision to violate its own commitment on the issue made just two months ago is yet another puzzling move that creates significant political, trade, and economic risk.
In a 2013 study, the internet’s annual carbon footprint was measured at 830 million tons of carbon dioxide. This would put the web’s electricity output at roughly the same level as the aviation industry. “If the internet were a country, it would now rank sixth in the world for its electricity demand,” states a 2014 article in the Guardian by Gary Cook, a senior IT analyst with Greenpeace.
Meanwhile, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic leading to people working remotely from their homes and increasingly relying on at-home entertainment, some countries reported a 20 percent increase in “internet traffic” since March 2020, according to a January 2021 article in Science Daily. Extrapolating that data through the end of 2021, the “increased internet use alone would require a forest of about 71,600 square miles—twice the land area of Indiana—to sequester the emitted carbon,” according to the study, which was conducted by researchers from Purdue University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Timmerman, whose UTOPIA Fiber operates an open access model in Utah and southern Idaho, said his company has seen success with open access fiber infrastructure being a sustainable and scalable model to meet whatever demands future technology may place on consumers and businesses.
The partnership begins in January, with Lee and 40 Acres represented in this negotiation by ICM Partners and Lawrence Shire and Peter Grant at the Grubman Shire law firm.
A leading government accountability watchdog demanded Friday that U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo immediately release copies of her calendars due to concerns about the former venture capitalist's "fealty to Big Tech."
"Prompt disclosure of Raimondo's calendars is critical for understanding the muscle which business interests are wielding to influence the U.S. government's trade and economic policy."
An intense international debate is now underway at the World Trade Organization (WTO) concerning a proposed temporary waiver of intellectual property protections for COVID vaccines and treatments. As the latest Omicron variant starts to spread around the world, this debate calls into sharp focus the rights of corporate monopolies on crucial technology and their drive for maximizing profits versus the needs of countries with large vulnerable unvaccinated populations that continue to be the source of pandemic spread.
This kind of temporary waiver was introduced by India and South Africa as a WTO resolution in October 2020, and has gained the support of about 100 countries. € It is currently still under consideration by the WTO council on intellectual property rights. What happens next is still in doubt. As Deborah James, an international trade expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, observes:
As far as 's pages go, Hershey, the company behind all kinds of candy and sweets brands, doesn't come out of the wash clean. The company has been known to lean on IP laws quite aggressively, even absurdly. For instance, it sued a furniture company for having vehicle wraps that looked like a couch being unwrapped like a chocolate bar. Pretty dumb. It also sued Mars for having its own peanut butter chocolate candy, but for which the trade dress was totally different compared with Hershey's Reese's property. Also dumb.
Streaming copyright protected content on UGC platforms without permission can be a recipe for disaster. Certainly, popular music and movies present a serious risk of copyright strikes but thanks to a new tool called Tenami, it is now possible for Twitch users to 'stream' Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max content and more, without incurring the wrath of the DMCA gods.
So, what exactly does this mean? Will you be able to distribute your own copies of Fantasia, sell unlicensed Disney merchandise, and so on? Not so fast. While it is true that Mickey will soon be accessible to all, it is crucial to understand which version of Mickey Mouse will become publicly accessible and which ones will still be under lock and key in the “Disney vault.” It is only the rendition of Mickey Mouse that is in the film Steamboat Willie — and also The Gallopin’ Gaucho, released in the same year — that will be free from copyright protection. While this may seem like a minor technicality, it is important to consider that the iconic Mickey Mouse character design with which we are all familiar today — the one featured in commercials for the Disney theme parks, displayed on Disney-branded backpacks, and at the forefront of classic movies like Fantasia — is not the same version of Mickey featured in his 1928 debut. In the accompanying images, the image on the left is from Steamboat Willie, and the image on the right is the more contemporary permutation of Mickey that is featured, with only minor variations, across many of Disney’s publications and marketing materials today.
Instead of waiting a few more years for copyrights on works from 1923 to expire, MSCHF is taking a decidedly modern approach and selling the idea for its artwork now, tied to a token that buyers can redeem in 2024. The name is still copyrighted so for now this is just a “Famous Mouse,” find out more in the FAQ here.
“Disney is a true multinational behemoth, able to change national laws to suit the interests of a cartoon mouse,” explains MSCHF in its “manifesto” on the token. “Disney is a massive all-swallowing conglomerate, with a desire for both industry dominance and cultural hegemony. It is ever-growing, all-encompassing, risk-averse and society-blandening. We must leap at the chance to take back even the scant morsels available to us. At the slightest chance we must eat them alive.”
Of course, Disney’s legal team might succeed in keeping Walt Disney’s famous character and Mouse House mascot from becoming rights-free like other iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Dracula.
From the days of Steamboat Willie, Walt’s debut of his little pay, Mickey Mouse, has been the mascot of Disney. Now it seems that Disney is at risk of losing the rights to the character! According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The copyright for Walt Disney’s 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie — which introduced the world to Mickey Mouse — is set to expire and enter the public domain in three years.” The rights would include the Mickey Mouse that we saw in the film, which is different from other iterations of the character as time progressed.
In recent years, the dominance of streaming has prompted a number of big-name artists to sell the rights to their music. Royalties from streaming songs represent a fraction of what artists used to collect from physical album sales; meanwhile, streaming platforms brought in 10 times the revenue of physical sales in the US last year (pdf), according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
“Streaming stole my record money,” singer-songwriter David Crosby tweeted a few months before he sold both the masters and publishing rights to his entire music catalog for an undisclosed sum this March. “I have a family and a mortgage and I have to take care of them so it’s my only option.” Prince rejected most streaming platforms altogether because of his views of their business practices, and the lack of income for artists.
We especially want to take the opportunity to thank our contributors to this statement:Ana Lazarova (CC Bulgaria), Thomas Margoni (KU Leuven), Ariadna Matas (Europeana), Sarah Pearson (CC), Julia Reda (Shuttleworth Foundation), Brigitte Vézina (CC), Kat Walsh (CC), and Stephen Wyber (IFLA).€
Regular readers here need only hear the name Malibu Media to get their eyes rolling. This copyright troll that emerged from pornography producer X-Art has made quite a name for itself by attempting to shake down hundreds of accused copyright infringers, often using all kinds of shady tactics. Expert witnesses that nobody is quite sure even exist, failing to serve defendants, attempts to quickly dismiss cases against those who are willing to fight back: it all paints the picture of a shady operation looking to use shady tactics in order to collect shady infringement settlements. All, mind you, in the name of law and order in the realm of copyright law.
