This event shall not go unobserved when debating about the future of GNU/Linux. It is plausible to think that the enterprise strategy of companies dealing with GNU/Linux technologies will evolve well beyond the business on certifications, and make bold steps into more aggressive exploitation of their huge “market”, something once was a community and has lost that status.
Even the temporal context has a major role in this equation as this is all happening during the troubled beginning of a decade marked by pandemic: we are witnessing a boost in usage of ICT infrastructure due to COVID with growing investments from both public and private sectors into this market.
Until recently the only official way to use OBS on Linux was on Ubuntu but coming soon there will be another option and that option will be a flatpak which I'm very excited for
PFRUT should work very similarly to how you'd normally update a BIOS through Windows or Linux, where the updating process is done through the operating system instead of doing it through the system BIOS directly. But with PFRUT, the operating system will be responsible for executing the entire update process. Whereas, with normal BIOS updates, Windows or Linux will only be responsible for uploading the BIOS and preparing it before restarting and handing off the new BIOS to the motherboard for updating.
For those sticking to stable Mesa point releases, Mesa 21.3.3 is out today to close out the year. Notable with Mesa 21.3.3 is the large number of fixes for older ATI Radeon R300 through R500 (X1000 series) GPU fixes with the R300 Gallium3D driver.
Exciting vintage GPU enthusiasts earlier this month was word of a big performance optimization for R300 Gallium3D with that old open-source OpenGL driver for Radeon 9500 through X1000 series graphics cards. That work revolved around NIR-to-TGSI path for making use of the intermediate representation preferred by newer Mesa drivers. Those changes are in Mesa 22.0 for next quarter's stable release and not the current 21.3 stable series.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is the most popular open-source web browser developed by Google. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. It is a fast and solid browser with a good security record. It has some unique features and is generally pretty light on system resources.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Google Chrome web browser on a Fedora 35.
The HTTP methods are used to perform create, read, update, and delete (or CRUD) operations. The most common methods are POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. Its good practice to disable methods, which are unused and insecure like PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.
This tutorial explains, how to disable HTTP methods for an apache web server.
Hello, friends. With the death of CentOS, many people feel they have to start over. So today, in this short and brief post, you will learn how to enable the REMI repository on Rocky Linux 8.
PHP 8.1 is the latest PHP version released on 2021. In this guide you are going to learn how to install the latest PHP version which is currently 8.1 on your Debian system or server and configure it with Apache and Nginx. You will also learn how to upgrade your PHP version to latest.
This tutorial guides you to configure PHP INI settings, FPM settings, Pools, etc which is more useful for your application to run smooth.
The Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystem hosts several interesting Linux-based OS distributions. The OS pair AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux are exciting replacements for the discontinued CentOS distribution.
RHEL 8, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux systems are increasingly being sorted after by many Linux users due to the performance footprints they offer.
Everyone knows that Linux systems come with root user access and by default, root access is enabled for the outside world.
For security reasons, it’s not a good idea to have ssh root access enabled for unauthorized users. Because any hacker can try to brute force your password and gain access to your system.
As a Linux novice user, you learn about the permissions and ownership associated with the file and directories. Linux/Unix-like operating systems allow you to set a combination of nine bits permissions to prevent other users from unnecessary files/directory access. Similar to these are special permissions for executable files known as set UID, set GID, and sticky bits.
Understanding special permissions can be a bit overwhelming for aspiring Linux administrators. Here you'll learn a little background on the regular file permissions and explains how they differ from special permissions. We also demonstrate SetID, GetID, and sticky bits functionality with examples for a comprehensive understanding.
If you’re a netizen who likes to explore the depths of everything tech and non-tech, you may have heard about Linux. We saw a lot of tech trends in the year 2021, but Linux was the one topping the charts throughout the year. So, what exactly is Linux? Who uses it and why? Read ahead to clear out all the confusion.
Most people think Linux is an operating system, but no, it’s not. It’s a kernel, and it’s used in more than 80% of smart devices today. You’re probably reading this on a device that the Linux Kernel powers. It also fuels servers and every supercomputer in the world today.
UNetbootin is an open-source program to install on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is meant to create bootable USB drives using ISO images. Here we learn the commands to run UNetbootin on Debian 11 Bullseye.
The “Universal Netboot Installer” – Unetbootin for short – extracts ISO files and changes some of OS installation packages and saves them directly on a USB stick. For example, if you want to run Ubuntu in the Live environment from the USB stick or want to install the OS from the USB stick on the hard drive. Especially for users of laptops or netbooks without an optical drive, UNetbootin offers the option of installing ISO images. In the drop-down menu of this software, under “Distribution”, you will find a whole list of tools and distributions available. In addition to Ubuntu, it supports a large number of distributions, e.g. Fedora, Gentoo, Damn Small Linux, etc.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Krita on Elementary OS 6.0.
Today we are looking at how to install Wine 6.0.2 or newer on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Running Windows programs on Linux can be confusing and complicated. That’s where Bottles comes in. This program can make running Windows programs much more straightforward. Here’s how to use Bottles on your Linux PC.
Shift Debian users may have noticed in Today’s patch that was sent out earlier there was a Big Themes Patch on your System, This Patch made quite a few changes to Themes on the Debian Shift Build. Shift Debian runs on Gnome 41.5 Framework which is slowly moving bit by bit over to GTK4. Users may have noticed a select few Windows that they open did not have the system Theming but instead looked like the default Adwaita theme, this was because until now Makulu lacked GTK4 theme support. Don’t worry, most of the world is still missing GTK4 support, we aren’t alone. Many developers are rushing to add GTK4 support and Today we Delivered on that front.
I’d wager that most people find GNOME Shell easy to use out-of-the-box — after all, simplicity its part of GNOME’s calling card.
But is there room for improvement?
Always, and GNOME’s design team think so too. They’re exploring how to make accessing commonly used settings (like screen brightness, wireless network, and dark mode) in GNOME Shell even easier than it is now. They’ve produced a bunch of mockups and even an animation for the feature they call “quick settings”.
Here are the next set of GNOME Apps that is perfect for your GNOME Desktop. It ranges from games, utilities and productivity.
There are many Linux distros out there, but GoboLinux is a different kind of beast. It is an alternative Linux distribution that redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy.
GoboLinux is a Linux distribution which is built from scratch. It was created back in 2002 out of a desire to try new approaches in the Linux distribution design space. Unfortunately, nearly 20 years later, judging by the popularity of the distribution, we can conclude that the experiment was not successful.
Let’s start with the installation process. When you boot up the downloaded ISO file, you will see CLI interface. Then you need to write the startx command and the graphical user interface with the Awesome WM (it’s a tiling window manager) will appear.
I have an avidemux package in my (restricted) repository. But… it had not been refreshed since Slackware 14.0 (8 years old now) and its binaries stopped working on Slackware long ago. Looking back at the packaging work I did today, I guess the thing that kept me from updating that Avidemux package was the numerous dependencies that also needed an update (they all were stuck at an old Slackware 14.0 release).
In the midst of a full week of holidays and waiting for my rye/honey sourdough bread dough to ferment, I had plenty time to devote to the creation of a fresh package for Avidemux 2.8.0. This was recently released; yesterday actually! And not just avidemux needed some work on its SlackBuild script; I needed to update ageing scripts for aften, faac, faad2, libdca, libfdk-aac, opencore-amr, x264 and xvidcore, and added a x265 package before I could compile avidemux with full support for codecs and plugins.
Based on the imminent (fingers crossed) release of Slackware 15.0 according to Patrick himself, I decided to create these packages only for Slackware-current (soon to become 15.0). I also cleaned out ancient versions of all these packages. They are now removed for Slackware 14.1 and older. Note that faac and libfdk-aac just like avidemux contain patent-encumbered software (the AAC encoder) and due to that circumstance the three packages are banished to my ‘restricted repository‘ which is hosted outside the US of A so that the patent trolls won’t bother Pat.
After I built a fresh Avidemux (see previous post) I realized how many old packages I still have in my repositories. They are taking up space on many server mirrors.
I have decided that I will start a cleansing process, a purge if you want, of all the older stuff. The reason is not just disk space of course. It’s my realization that there may be vulnerabilities in these old packages that I never addressed; and I really hope that people have migrated their machines to Slackware 14.2 (servers or conservative desktop users) or went with -current (modern desktop users, let’s call those).
From time to time, you need to clean house. I myself am infamous for not throwing away anything… just take a look at my attic. So these packages will be gone from online servers, but live on in my own local package archive.
What do we in common is that we are seizing the opportunity to develop an alternative or, even better, we are sharing an opportunity with everyone out there who dares to differ. The investments are coming and the market is growing: the space is there for those who dare to take it and the risks aren’t so high all things considered.
5 Devuan: the anatomy of a fork
[...]
This project is to further evolve my research question on the assumptions laid down so far. Let us ask now: what are the traits for a (huge conglomerate) of algorithms to acquire the dimension of a sovereignty controlled by its participants? How does a socialised truth looks like, beyond the impossible assumption of universal neutrality? Beyond its mere execution, what in the design of an operating system generates or erodes the trust people put into it?
In this chapter I will describe at length the technical and socio-political conditions for the birth of a new GNU/Linux operating system. The widespread resistance to the introduction inside Debian of a new central framework for system management, called “systemd”, is an extremely interesting opportunity to explore such dynamics in details. I’ve engaged this project in first person and this chapter is mostly written in the form of participatory research, reporting various accounts contributed by people who involved themselves into the creation of a new system, a sort of independent exodus for half of the active Debian user population.
The analysis of this episode is important to provide an advanced answer to my research question. As demonstrated, the design and adoption of software algorithms has a close relation to the design and adoption of systems of governance. In the experience of Bitcoin, it is evident how the fundamental trait of such a governance is the concept of neutrality, which has much to share with the definition of truth.
The $8 version of the board has a Realtek RTL8723DS wireless chip with support for dual-band 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2.
Sipeed says the Lichee RV has at least some support for Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Tina Linux, RustSBI, and OpenWRT, but the only operating system that supports keyboard input so far is Debian, suggesting that some of the others are still very much works in progress.
Looking to keep an eye on the temperature inside his wood-fired pizza oven, [Giovanni Bernardo] decided to skip the commercial offerings and build his own high-temperature thermometer using a type-K thermocouple. The end result is a no-nonsense handheld unit with a surprisingly low part count that, at least in theory, can read temperatures as high as 1023.75€°C. Though we hope he’ll be pulling the pizza out long before that.
[...]
This takes the input from the thermocouple probe and converts it into a digital signal that can be read over SPI with an Arduino library from Adafruit.
Maybe we’re biased, but we think everyone has a use for a macropad. It’s just a matter of time before a highly personalized set of speed controls starts to sound like a great time-saving device to have around.
Trouble is, macropads are usually kind of expensive to buy outright, and not everyone feels comfortable building keyboards. Okay, so what if you didn’t even have to solder anything? That’s the idea behind [Jan Lunge]’s hand-wired macropad.
You will still want to open a window for ventilation if you build this one, because this macropad requires a lot of 3D printing. What it doesn’t require is glue or screws, because everything snaps together.
Independent developers have been doing a lot of work to bring support for mainline Linux kernel to devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processors, and in a report for TuxPhones, developer Caleb Connolly writes that the Shift6mq is already pretty close to being usable with GNU/Linux distributions like postmarketOS.
Shift sent Connolly a phone for testing, and before it even arrived Connolly was able to work with Shift developer Alexander Martinz to get postmarketOS with a mainline Linux 5.16 kernel booting on the Shift6mq.
WiFi and audio aren’t working yet, but the display, touch screen, and modem are already working. If development continues at this pace, it’s easy to imagine that by the time Android updates are no longer available for the phone, Linux might be a somewhat viable alternative… at least for some users.
Probably the main attraction is PINE64’s PineBook Pro ARM laptop, which now has official postmarketOS images with different interfaces, including the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops, as well as Sway, Phosh, and Console interfaces.
postmarketOS 21.12 ships with the usual mobile-optimized Phosh (GNOME), KDE Plasma Mobile, and Sxmo interfaces. As expected, these have been updated to support the latest and greatest upstream releases.
LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.
While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.
There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.
Network security is still a significant challenge facing APNIC Members, but tastes changed markedly in what they read on the blog between 2020 and 2021. Below are the top three posts related to security for 2021: [...]
A small but noteworthy change that landed today for the GCC 12 compiler itself is support for using the Mold linker.
Released last week was Mold 1.0 as a high-speed linker that can deliver better performance than GNU's old Gold linker and even LLVM's LLD. Mold was designed by Rui Ueyama who originally working on LLVM's linker.
13 new GNU releases in the last month (as of December 27, 2021):
artanis-0.5.1 global-6.6.8 gnun-1.2 gnupg-2.3.4 gsl-2.7.1 guile-sdl-0.5.3 jami-20211223 libmicrohttpd-0.9.75 librejs-7.20.3 nano-6.0 parallel-20211222 poke-1.4 serveez-0.3.0
With another year behind us, let’s review the progress that the Fortran-lang community has made. If you’re new to Fortran-lang, here’s a quick intro: We’re an open source community that aims to develop modern Fortran tooling and nurture a rich ecosystem of libraries, as well as to provide a friendly, helpful, and inclusive space for newcomers and experienced Fortran programmers to work together. We started in late 2019 and have been going ever since. If you’re first discovering (or re-discovering) Fortran through this article, welcome, and we hope it inspires you to try Fortran for one of your projects. In this article we summarize new developments from 2021, from flagship and new projects to community development and outreach.
The night of the day Joan Didion died, I went scrounging around my bookshelves for a copy of Where I Was From. I’ve lived in California all my life, underneath the weight of its political contradictions and atop its ecological dramas, and of all Didion’s works, this one, which sets out to interrogate the foundational mythologies of California, her generational ties to the state, and what she views as its unfortunate decline, seemed most appropriate to put the author’s death and this place into perspective. Scanning my shelves, I saw only the spines of Slouching and The White Album, After Henry and Play Itââ¬Å , Run River and Miami, so I panic-texted a friend, a fellow California girl, who lives nearby. “EMERGENCY REQUEST,” I wrote her, “do you have a copy of Where I Was From that I could borrow TONIGHT?” She replied within minutes. “Found it,” my friend wrote, “and do you want South and West also?”
In December 1999, the Los Angeles Times profiled director Paul Thomas Anderson ahead of his third feature, Magnolia, under the headline “The New New Wave.” The article placed Anderson among an ascendant peer group of youngish white male directors like David O. Russell, Spike Jonze, and Darren Aronofsky, most of whom had recently released films. Crucially, however, it also positioned Anderson as the leader of this pack, someone whose talent was so widely recognized that he had the ear of Francis Ford Coppola and dined with Warren Beatty. The profile characterized him as a classic ’70s New Hollywood auteur, à la Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, someone with complete creative freedom and an exacting level of control over every aspect of the production and release of his films, down to editing the trailer himself.
But for normal people living normal lives, it’s a time to reflect not so much on what we lack or who to hate or blame for real or imagined transgressions, but to appreciate what we’ve had and have€ — our families and friends, having love in our lives, and the incredible beauty of Montana that greets us every day.
While that might sound corny to those caught in the churning maelstrom of the 24-7 news cycle, the fact is you’d probably be a lot happier if you turned it off for a few days. In reality, Congress is out, the White House is in “holiday” mode, Montana’s governor remains primarily invisible and, who knows, maybe even our attorney general has decided to go back up to his hometown of Culbertson to take a break from worrying about the Texas border for awhile.
I am an astronomer and the principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera – or NIRCam for short – aboard the Webb telescope. I have participated in the development and testing for both my camera and the telescope as a whole.
To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a fragile piece of equipment like this to space is no simple task. There have been many challenges my colleagues and I have had to overcome to design, test and soon launch and align the most powerful space telescope ever built.
Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people—probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind—that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.
Amid an ongoing lawsuit challenging what critics call deceptive Trump-era U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations for labeling genetically engineered foods, a leading advocacy group on Wednesday announced the launch of a consumer action campaign ahead of the new rules taking effect on January 1.
"These regulations are not about informing the public but rather designed to allow corporations to hide their use of genetically engineered ingredients from their customers."
Never in the history of humankind has the blindingly obvious been ignored with such obviously high risk. Never have the cautious and persistent warnings of medical and biological scientists been so spectacularly and swiftly vindicated.
It was a rumination of cynical Nazi slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free) placed on German concentration camps; in December 2021, anti-vaxxers held a Nazi-style torch rally at the house of a heath minister. Yet, German anti-vaxxers go back a long time.
In many German-speaking countries of course, Germany but also Austria, most of Switzerland, and some areas of northern Italy, there has been a long established distrust in vaccinations. Partly, this is because of 19th century German romanticism. But it is also because political failures and right-wing ideologies mixed with reactionary back-to-nature esoteric belief systems.
It wasn’t the hog nuts that made people sick. Nor was it the deer heart and noodles, elk meatloaf, turtle stew or any of the other fare served at the Swisher Men’s Club wild game feast in eastern Iowa in February 2019.
Matthew Arjes, an avid hunter, had gone to the event with some friends. It was for a good cause — the group raffled off rifles and fishing coolers to raise money for the local fire department.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday said that nearly two years after the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the public health crisis that shows no sign of coming to a swift end has brought into stark relief "the vulgarity" of the U.S.€ healthcare system, suggesting the political establishment must end its defense of the for-profit healthcare industry as he re-upped his call for Medicare for All.
The Vermont independent senator, whose decades-long push for single-payer healthcare was dismissed by President Joe Biden as not "realistic" weeks before Covid-19 was first detected in the U.S. in January 2020, wrote about the issue on social media shortly after the country recorded 800,000 known deaths from the disease.
Merck's anti-viral coronavirus pill has been heralded as a "gamechanger" in the fight against the deadly global pandemic, and the Food and Drug Administration decided last week to authorize the treatment on an emergency-use basis for certain segments of the U.S. population.
"We are potentially headed towards a world-class disaster."
As for the ventriloquizing of the teaching of Jesus on loving thy neighbour— this, by numerous accounts (including his own family), is perhaps a bit rich coming from someone who has only loved himself.
Coronavirus infections are surging in Britain as Omicron replaced Delta as the dominant variant.
This year, reporters at The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica investigated the impact of sugar cane burning in Florida. The harvesting practice helps produce more than half of America’s cane sugar, but it sends smoke and ash into largely low-income communities of color in the state’s heartland.
Anthony Weeks, his son, said that the family believes their vaccinated and boosted father was the latest indirect victim of the pandemic — and that he would have survived his sepsis diagnosis if he was immediately admitted to a larger medical center that had an open bed.
“The frustrating thing was not that we wanted him to get care that others weren’t getting, but that he didn’t get care when he needed it. And when he did get it, it was too late,” he said. “The question comes up of: ‘Who was in those beds?’ If it’s people who are unvaccinated with covid, then that’s the part where it really hurts.”
Owenson added: “The thing that bothers me the most is people’s selfish decision not to get vaccinated and the failure to see how this affects a greater group of people. That’s the part that’s really difficult to swallow.”
Last week, the company informed some engineers in silicon design, hardware, and select software and operations groups of the out-of-cycle bonuses, which are being issued as restricted stock units, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The shares vest over four years, providing an incentive to stay at the iPhone maker.
The bonuses, which came as a surprise to those who received them, have ranged from about $50,000 to as much as $180,000 in some cases. Many of the engineers received amounts of roughly $80,000, $100,000 or $120,000 in shares, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the program isn’t public. The perk was presented by managers as a reward for high performers.
Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded like? I’d guess probably not, because on the fact of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click… click-click… click-click…
Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a “hard drive”), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an unfiltered connection to the Internet. Naturally it ran Linux and an ssh server. As was common in those days, service logging was handled by a syslog daemon. The syslog daemon would sort log messages based on various criteria and record them somewhere. In most simple environments, “somewhere” was simply a file on local storage. When writing to a local file, syslog daemons can be optionally configured to use the fsync() system call to ensure that writes are flushed to disk. Practically speaking, what this meant is that a page of disk-backed memory would be written to the disk as soon as an event occurred that triggered a log message. Because of potential performance implications, fsync() was not typically enabled for most log files. However, due to the more sensitive nature of authentication logs, it was often enabled for /var/log/auth.log.
The mail is legitimate and has been sent out by the LastPass service. The location however was typically very far away from the user’s actual location, e.g. in a country like Brazil or India. Yet this isn’t merely an attempt to guess the password, as LastPass will only send a mail like this one if the correct master password is provided in the login attempt.
One affected user created a thread on Hacker News and at least a dozen others chimed in with similar experiences. This indicates that a large-scale attack is underway, with the total number of affected users being quite significant.
As online password managers go, a user’s master password is the most critical piece of information. So the important question is: how do the attackers know the master passwords? There are some explanation being discussed: credential stuffing, phishing, malware, LastPass compromise. As I know a thing or two about LastPass, I’ll write down how likely these are and why.
TL;DR: It appears that LastPass infrastructure has been compromised, all other explanations being rather unlikely. And, surprisingly, it isn’t given that the attackers actually know these master passwords.
LastPass is telling its users that there is no evidence to suggest their passwords have been compromised, after previously sending out emails to some users stating their master passwords have been compromised. So what exactly is going on? According to LastPass, the email warnings were "likely triggered in error."
LastPass is arguably one of the popular password managers, coming with various security features for users to protect their online credentials. However, it could have been exposed to a new security breach as many users have recently reported that their master passwords might have been compromised. Here are the details.
Many LastPass users report that their master passwords have been compromised after receiving email warnings that someone tried to use them to log into their accounts from unknown locations.
The email notifications also mention that the login attempts have been blocked because they were made from unfamiliar locations worldwide.
"Someone just used your master password to try to log in to your account from a device or location we didn't recognize," the login alerts warn.
Some users of the LastPass password manager revealed this week that they have received emails from LastPass stating that logins to their accounts using the account's master password were blocked. The first of these reports was published on Hacker News.
Password managers are a great way to improve your online security, but it would be a nightmare scenario if your password manager’s account were hacked. This week, some LastPass users report that their Master Passwords appear to have been compromised, but LastPass says things are technically working as they’re supposed to.
Years after they've become a go-to tool for law enforcement to work their way backwards to suspects, the Massachusetts Supreme Court is wrestling with the issue of cell tower dumps.
Adrian Furtuna:€ About seven years ago, I was working as a full-time penetration tester for one of the big four companies. Since I was doing a lot of manual work, I thought that much of this could be automated, so, as a pen tester, I could focus on more interesting work. In penetration testing, some parts of the work can be automated, but others can’t. I thought that I could have a much better use of my time focusing on the parts of the engagement that cannot be automated and leave the other parts to some tools to do the work for me. So this was the main reason why I started the Pentest-Tools, which right now has the main objective to make the life of a penetration tester much more simple and more effective.
As schools have shuffled students from in-person education to at-home learning and testing, then back again, the lines between “school” and “home” have been blurred. This has made it increasingly difficult for students to protect their privacy and to freely express themselves, as online proctoring and other sinister forms of surveillance and disciplinary technology have spread. But students have fought back, and often won, and we’re glad to have been on their side.€
Early in the year, medical students at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine were blindsided by an unfounded dragnet cheating investigation conducted by the administration. The allegations were based on a flawed review of an entire year’s worth of student log data from Canvas, the online learning platform that contains class lectures and other substantive information. After a technical examination, EFF determined that the logs easily could have been generated by the automated syncing of course material to devices logged into Canvas.€
When EFF and FIRE reached out to Dartmouth and asked them to more carefully review the logs—which Canvas’ own documentation explicitly states should not be used for high-stakes analysis—we were rebuffed. With the medical careers of seventeen students hanging in the balance, the students began organizing. At first, the on-campus protest, the letter to school administrators, and the complaints of unfair treatment from the student government didn’t make much of an impact. In fact, the university administration dug in, instituting a new social media policy that seemed aimed at chilling anonymous speech that had appeared on Instagram, detailing concerns students had with how these cheating allegations were being handled.€
Investigative genetic genealogy moves backward before it moves forward. That is, starting with the target’s genetic matches, you trace the matches’ ancestors and then those ancestors’ descendants, finding any points where the matches’ lines intersect with one another, closing in, ultimately, on possible candidates.
Additionally, we sent several General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, ger: DSGVO) inquiries to manufacturers of implantable cardiologic devices and hospitals, revealing non-conforming processes and a lack of awareness about patients’ rights and companies’ obligations. This, and the fact that many vulnerabilities are still to be found after many vulnerability disclosures in recent years, present a worrying security state of the whole ecosystem.
Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PLTR) announced today the Space Systems Command’s (SSC) Cross-Mission Ground & Communications Enterprise (ECX) awarded it a $43 million contract to continue its delivery of a data and decision platform to support national security objectives. This $43 million contract is an additional extension, expanding upon previous awards from April and August this year. The total cumulative face value of the contract is $91.5 million.
The US company Palantir, which specialises in data analytics and is known as one of the most secretive and controversial companies in the world, is on a mission to seduce French start-ups.
On Thursday, the company announced a partnership with Station F, the world’s biggest start-up incubator based in Paris.
China has approved plans to build four mega clusters of data centres in the country's north and west with the aim of supporting the data needs of Beijing and major coastal centres, according to the country's top state planner on Wednesday.
The clusters will be built in the northern Inner Mongolia region, northwestern Ningxia region, Gansu province and southwestern Guizhou province, the National Development and Reform Commission said in four separate statements.
The four locations can use their energy and environmental advantages to set up green and low-carbon mega data centres, the state planner said.
In this talk we will describe why some level of trust in the Tor network is needed to achieve its privacy properties. After going through some examples of large scale malicious Tor relay groups, and current issues with tackling them, we describe a new additional approach to reduce the risks of malicious Tor relays on Tor users. We aim to empower Tor users for self-defense without completely depending on the detection and removal of malicious Tor relays from the network.
In the final weeks of 2021, at least six Chechen oppositionists reported that their relatives had gone missing. All of these opposition figures live outside of Chechnya and have condemned regional head Ramzan Kadyrov and his cronies for human rights abuses. Several of them have faced threats in the past or even survived assassination attempts. Though their family members living in Chechnya have come under pressure before, they are now being abducted en masse — and not only in Chechnya, but also in other parts of Russia. Though some have been released, many remain missing at the time of this writing. For Meduza, journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky spoke with three Chechen dissidents whose relatives were targeted in the latest wave of repression.
+ 981: the number of people in the US shot and killed by police in 2020.
+ A Boston police cop sexually assaulted an intoxicated woman after she passed out. He was suspended without pay for a year, but when he returned, he was promoted. This year, he bragged about hitting BLM protesters with his patrol car.
The first United Nations Scientific Conference on the Environment, also known as the First Earth Summit, was held in Stockholm, Sweden, from June 6-15, 1972. Ãâ¢t established a Declaration of Principles and adopted an action plan with recommendations for the preservation and enhancement of the environment. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, it led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Following Presidents Biden and Putin talks this December, the Moscow Times reported that the Russian foreign ministry insisted that the United States should formally close the door to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. “In the fundamental interests of European security, it is necessary to officially disavow the decision of the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit that ‘Ukraine and Georgia will become NATO members,'” the Russian foreign ministry was quoted.
The Russian Ministry had already argued in 2018 that the “verbal promise to Soviet President Gorbachev not to expand NATO to the East, in exchange for the Soviet leader’s consent to the annexation of East Germany (GDR) by Western Germany, was fragrantly violated and is the source of much of the present conflict between Russia and the West.”
August 15, 2021, is a day Afghanistan will never forget.
On a sunny late summer day in 2013, I ambled to downtown Washington to hike with a bunch of friendly folks in a jaunt starting on the National Mall and heading towards the World War Two Monument and points beyond. But the hike was vexed from the start because someone invited along a “licensed tourist guide.” That short, pudgy fellow proceeded to bludgeon us with every known detail about the history, architecture, and rest room renovations of the Smithsonian Castle. He followed that up with a “Wikipedia on Amphetamines” rendition on the National Museum of Natural History and then commenced rattling at high speed about the National Museum of American History.
And that was when I was summoned by a cheap cigar. That dude’s twaddle was another reminder of the peril of any government licensing program and gave me more sympathy than ever before for Washington tourists.
We go to New Delhi, India, to speak with acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy about the pandemic, U.S. militarism and the state of journalism. Roy first appeared on Democracy Now! after receiving widespread backlash for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At the time, her emphatic antiwar stance clashed with the rising tides of patriotism and calls for war after 9/11. “Now the same media is saying what we were saying 20 years ago,” says Roy. “But the trouble is, it’s too late.”
China’s recently announced decision to appoint an adviser for Macao’s national security matters is an act of China’s “publicized participation into the city’s national security affairs,” according to an expert.
A Dec. 3 report published by the official Xinhua news service said the director of the liaison office in the city, a mainland official appointed by Beijing, would also become the adviser to the Committee for Safeguarding National Security of the Macao Special Administrative Region.
Fu Ziying, the current liaison office director, will be “in charge of supervising, guiding, coordinating, and supporting the Macao SAR in safeguarding national security,” the notice said using the abbreviation for “special administrative region.”
The committee will also have three new national security technical advisers, the report said.
As parts of Alaska obliterated high-temperature records earlier this week, meteorologists and climate scientists warned that extreme heat and rainfall are the new normal in the nation's largest state and other Arctic and subarctic zones.
"In and around the Arctic... temperatures have been rising around twice as fast as the rest of the planet."
Global heating caused by human activity could warm oceans enough to fuel hurricanes and tropical storms that strike cities as far north as Boston, a new study published Wednesday projects.
"This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change," Joshua Studholme of Yale University, the study's lead author, said in a statement. "This research predicts that the 21st century's tropical cyclones will likely occur over a wider range of latitudes than has been the case on Earth for the last 3 million years."
This year we saw some of the consequences of the climate crisis devastating rich countries in the Northern Hemisphere. This didn't lead to any political changes, though. Institutions remain the grease for the engines of capitalism. The COP26 in Glasgow became the primary space to project the new forms of capital accumulation, using the climate crisis as an excuse for new land grabs. This was also the year of space penises, inaugurating the space race of idiots while a new global bubble of speculation grows in the form of cryptocurrency. Climate degradation will always be accompanied by growing alienation, as the Capitalocene moves into full throttle.
Despite these efforts, economic growth remains at the heart of virtually every government’s national policy. Even the various Green New Deals that have been put forward around the world are wedded to notions of economic expansion. At the heart of these more recent attempts to bring carbon emissions under control is the concept of “green growth,” which has become the current mantra. So, inevitably, advocates of degrowth have addressed this new version of “sustainable” economic expansion.
“We have to continue to pound away with articles and social media to dispel that fuzzy and oxymoronic notion of ‘green growth,’ that there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment,” observes Brian Czech, the founder of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) in Washington, DC.
Our oceans are in trouble and this holiday sea/sun is not a time to be shellfish about how we respond. Abalone you might say but I still believe giving beach receiving. It's time to give back to the ocean. Too often when I talk to marine scientists and look into their faces I sea otter despair. But surrender is not an option we can float. Better we tuna into the problems we face and wrasse the alarm. I'd argue, herring no objections, that we find a new porpoise for the coming New Year, to protect and restore the blue in our red white and blue.
Emmy-nominated director Susan Gray's timely documentary, Earth Emergency, is not only a wake-up call to policymakers and the public, but a sort of "Extreme Weather for Dummies" that explains the fatal factors wreaking havoc on our environment.
Wolf killers and torturers Oh to be manly Brash loud proud Ignorant of their vacuity and shallow depths
Terrify Inflict pain on Annihilate Those who are better than they Put their fear into the noble and majestic Never knowing their own cowardice, their pretending to be men Never knowing how pitiable they are
When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.
Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.
From Robert’s Episode notes: “Stephan Kinsella joins me to discuss the nature of centralized law legislated by fiat in comparison with decentralized law discovered through the observation of human action across time.”
Yves here. Wolf is correct in his depiction of the effects of Covid economic policy, even if he is a bit off base as to the causes. One wag said something like: “White collar employees got to stay home while low-income workers brought them stuff.” Super low interest rates, which is what the Fed likes to use in crises because fast and easy, benefitted the rich, particularly leveraged speculators (private equity, real estate, hedge funds) and not much ordinary folks. At the same time, officials have adopted a “Let ‘er rip” policy even when making some gestures otherwise. That results in supply chain disruptions which increase prices, particularly of essentials like food. The fact that bad weather (often credibly climate change driven) are also goosing ag prices does not help.
While we have been discussing the way mainland China's plan to slow-creep the end of democracy in Hong Kong has turned into more of a sprint, it's also quite true that what is occurring there hasn't gotten nearly enough media burn as it should. Plenty of folks have chalked up China's aggressive attitudes towards Hong Kong to the 2019 pro-democracy protests, but the real sprint began once it became clear that Donald Trump stood a good chance of losing the White House to Joe Biden. Trump showed little willingness to push back on China when it came to its treatment of Hong Kong and the theory was that Biden would reverse course and show some backbone. That he generally hasn't is one of geopolitics great ironies. Beijing has taken such steps as to try to erase the CCP's own bloody history, to censor all kinds of Hong Kong pro-democracy culture, and to arrest of all kinds of pro-democracy lawmakers and media.
On Monday, December 27, the Belarusian authorities unveiled a new draft of the country’s constitution. According to head of state Alexander Lukashenko, the document may see changes following public debate and will be put to a referendum by late February 2022. This will mark the third referendum on amending Belarus’s constitution since Lukashenko came to power in 1994. Changes made to the constitution in 1996 and 2004 broadened the powers of the president —€ and the draft amendments have the potential to not only keep Lukashenko in power, but also permanently shield him from prosecution. Here’s what you need to know.€
Yuri Khovansky, the video blogger charged with the felony offense of “justifying terrorism” because of a song he performed years ago, has been released from pretrial detention after roughly six months behind bars. State investigators in St. Petersburg made the request without any explanation, initially asking the court to wait until January 8 to free him. They later endorsed his immediate release.
As condolences for the loved ones of Harry Reid poured in following his death Tuesday at the age of 82, progressives recalled the former Senate majority leader's vocal condemnations of the upper chamber's filibuster rule and urged Democrats to honor the late Nevada lawmaker by eliminating it for good.
"In a chamber where too many Democrats can be afraid of their own shadow, Harry Reid was willing to deliver for the American people and didn't care what it took," tweeted Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) following news of Reid's passing. "They should learn from his example and abolish the filibuster."
A day after Russia’s Supreme Court dissolved the Memorial International Historical Educational Charitable and Human Rights Society, the Moscow City Court similarly ordered the closure of the Memorial’s Human Rights Center, granting a petition by city prosecutors who argued that the organization’s financial activities are “non-transparent.” The authorities also accused Memorial of demonstrating a “steady disregard of Russia’s Constitution and laws.”
Even when judged against the other miseries of 2021, the dissolution of Memorial’s historical research society and human rights center is an extraordinary, monstrous event.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has issued an interim measure telling Russia to suspend the dissolution of the International Memorial Society and the Memorial Human Rights Center, Interfax reported on Wednesday, December 29.
Senator Amy Klobuchar really is taking to her role as the Senator most eager to set up a Ministry of Truth in the government. Klobuchar has always been terrible on tech/internet issues, but she's really taken it to a new level in the past year or so. Over the summer, she released a blatantly unconstitutional bill that literally would empower the Director of Health & Human Services to declare what counts as health misinformation and make social media websites liable for it (imagine how that would have played out under a Trump administration -- because Klobuchar apparently can't remember that far back).
The D.C. Circuit Appeals Court decided Tuesday in a unanimous ruling to uphold the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to free up the 6 GHz band for next-generation Wi-Fi, the U.S.’s first gigabit Wi-Fi.
In its opinion Tuesday, the court stated that petitioners had not provided a basis for questioning the commission’s conclusion that such actions will sufficiently protect against risk of harmful interference with presently unlicensed devices. The commission ruled on the matter in April 2020.
The court accepted only one petition for review from licensed radio and television broadcasters using the 6 GHz band.
It remains somewhat surprising to me how many people who have ideas for Section 230 reforms clearly do not understand the law and how it works. Perhaps much more surprising is that, when experts try to highlight where their analysis has gone wrong, these "reformers" double down rather than correct their previous faulty assumptions. Dean Baker is a fairly well-known economist whose views on copyright we've highlighted in the past for being quite insightful. Unfortunately, Baker seems to feel that his insight in these other areas allows him to skip the basics on Section 230, defamation law, internet business models and the like. A year ago he wrote two separate very wrong and very confused blog posts advocating for the full repeal of Section 230. Both of them misunderstand how 230 works, its interplay with the 1st Amendment, and how defamation law works.
India's Information Technology Act has been problematic since its inception. Almost a decade ago, it was deployed to justify the arrest of an Indian citizen who'd done nothing more than criticize a politician, insinuating the politician had used his position to amass personal wealth.
The ability to express oneself fully—including the expression of one’s sexuality—is a vital part of freedom of expression, and without that ability, free speech is an incomplete and impotent concept.
To be clear, we are talking here about legal sexual expression, fully protected in the US by the First Amendment, and not the limited category of sexual expression, called “obscenity” in US law, the distribution of which may be criminalized.
Here is a tiring and non-exhaustive list of the ways Internet platforms have taken it upon themselves to undermine free expression in this way in 2021.
The ruling by Moscow’s City Court will close the Memorial Human Rights Center, which keeps a tally of political prisoners. On Tuesday the country’s Supreme Court ordered the shuttering of Memorial International, which was founded in 1989 by Soviet dissidents to preserve memories of Soviet repression.
Together, the shutdowns reflected President Vladimir V. Putin’s determination to control the narrative of some of the most painful and repressive chapters in Russian history and keep dissidents at bay. Since January, the Kremlin has accelerated a campaign to stifle dissent, clamping down on independent media, religious groups and political opponents.
Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can’t say the words “Belarus,” “Myanmar” or€ the Chinese tennis star “Peng Shuai”€ fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime.€ PEN America€ only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government, which routinely censors and jails Palestinian€ journalists€ and€ writers€ in Israel and the occupied West Bank, for the literary group’s annual€ World Voices€ festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end PEN America’s partnership€ with the Israeli government. The signatories€ included€ Wallace Shawn,€ Alice Walker,€ Eileen Myles, Louis Erdrich, Russel Banks,€ Cornel West,€ Junot Díaz€ and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.
PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer,€ listed as a “contributor”€ to The Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as Vice President of US Business Development for Bertelsmann.€ Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position of the CEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York City and€ resigned€ from the organization, which that same year had given me€ its First Amendment Award, to protest Nossel’s appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership which I accepted.
In an exclusive interview with VOA's Russian Service, Muratov spoke about the struggle to defend and uphold media freedom in Russia and how the threat of violence and legal action affects reporting.
This interview has been translated from Russian and edited for length and clarity.
Question: In your Nobel speech, you called journalism an antidote to tyranny. But in Russia, 15 years of freedom after the end of the Soviet Union have given way to censorship, persecution and killings, and a rollback of civil liberties and democracy. Why is this antidote not working in Russia?
A vocal pro-democracy website in Hong Kong shut down Wednesday after police raided its office and arrested six current and former editors and board members in a continuing crackdown on dissent in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.
Stand News said in a statement that its website and social media are no longer being updated and will be taken down. It said all employees have been dismissed.
The outlet was one of the last remaining openly critical voices in Hong Kong following the shuttering of the Apple Daily newspaper, which closed after its publisher, Jimmy Lai, and top editors were arrested and its assets frozen.
In 1971, Susan DeMarco, Susan Sechler and I teamed up in a Washington-based public interest group (rather wonkily named Agribusiness Accountability Project) to launch a muckraking foray into the little-examined, multibillion-dollar labyrinth of America's farm and food policies. But other progressive activists back then were bewildered by us. They were all working on big, high-profile issues like ending the Vietnam War and urban poverty. So, they asked, why were we talking about tomatoes, land-grant colleges, Earl Butz and such arcane concepts as oligopolies?
In “America is now in fascism’s legal phase,”€ Guardian, December 22, 2021, Jason Stanley delineates the march toward fascism in the US that is apparent today. The militarism of the police, the mobilization against the Black community, the attacks against women, the far-right move of all three branches of the federal government, with Trump and other fascists in its midst, and the attacks against those who speak out and protest against all the deadly mayhem of the right and mayhem of this government are targets. The January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C., was anything but a dress rehearsal of the worst element of fascist aggression. It is foolish to keep one’s head in the sand while this system of government tumbles. To trust the three branches of the federal government, and some state and local governments to protect our rights and dignity, is a chimera. It can happen here, as it did in Germany and Italy prior to World War II.
Sinclair Lewis got it right many decades ago in€ It Can’t Happen Here€ (1935)! The attacks against the right to vote and the attacks and minimizing of those on the left are of special importance. White supremacy is clearly on the rise and their targets are people of color and those who make credible indictments of these systems of government. The attacks on teaching€ of Black history and the right of people of color to vote in many states is more of the dress rehearsal of fascism. Indeed, the stage is being set for fewer people to vote in both 2022 and 2024 to usher in fascists at the local, state, and national levels of government. Besides voting, the right is turning the gerrymander into a national cause célèbre where it can get away with it, it being stealing elections and allowing for the rise of the far right both in the offices of government and on the streets. The right, and especially right-wing media, already demonized leftists on the streets, screaming that the anti-fascists are to blame for insurrectionist violence. Look to the attacks against the Black Lives Matter movement and the blocks€ to access of left writing on the Internet. Books are banned in schools. The right attacks teaching about the history of racism in the US.
A bill proposed by a Republican state senator in Oklahoma would empower parents to have books that discuss gender identity removed from public school libraries—a measure that rights advocates warned could have life-threatening consequences for LGBTQ+ children across the state.
Under Senate Bill 1142, introduced earlier this month by state Sen. Rob Standridge, just one parent would have to object to a book that includes discussion of "sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity" and other related themes in order to begin the process of removal.
It’s that time of year when we all need a little strength. Elections, holidays, the change of the season, we need fortitude to get through it. The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis would say that we need fierce love too, and she knows about resilience. A year ago, her church burned down, a church that had already been through its own history of near-death experiences. Lewis is senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan’s East Village. In her latest book, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World, she weaves together autobiographical anecdotes with theological reflections and practical tools to show what underlies and inspires change.
According to a poll published in September, a staggering 83 percent of parents support the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools. Or to be more specific—because they are never granted modifier-free descriptors, as their white peers are—83 percent of Black parents are in favor of CRT in their children’s schools. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll, 71 percent of Asian parents and roughly 60 percent of Hispanic parents said CRT should be part of the curriculum in their children’s schools. A Fox News survey conducted in Virginia—the state that is home to the Loudoun County School District, where some of the most visible battles over CRT have taken place—revealed that among Black parents with more than a passing familiarity with CRT, more than twice as many approved of it as opposed it. These polls didn’t specify to parents that critical race theory is a 40-year-old legal framework for analyzing the ways racism is embedded in American institutions, not a lesson plan that’s actually used in K-12 classrooms today. But we can assume that those parents regard CRT as a concept that includes the study of slavery and anti-Black racism and support teaching those topics in our schools. In a small poll of parents of New York City schoolchildren, a group that is more than 80 percent people of color, over three-quarters of respondents supported the idea that students should learn about the “damages of white supremacy,” while 79 percent supported teaching about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Dan Bookhout was accustomed to fighting over almost everything in his dealings with Florida’s Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, the program underwriting care for his severely disabled daughter, Arwen. The program’s “no, no, no culture,” he said, was “exhausting.”
So Bookhout thought it seemed “fishy” when administrators offered, without a fight, to buy or lease a nearly $30,000 robotic device to help his then-5-year-old walk. And when administrators asked for his help to promote the device to other parents.
This has been quite a year for Palestine. What started as one neighborhood’s rallying cry against dispossession translated into a unity uprising that situated the Palestinian cause at the center of the international news cycle. For a brief yet unprecedented moment, decades-old Palestinian analysis about Israeli settler-colonialism triggered worldwide epiphanies and gave language to the usual out-of-context photographs of weeping Palestinian mothers and razed buildings. Journalists challenged sanitized state language and called ethnic cleansing by its name. Newspapers ran articles about Israeli war crimes inside the besieged Gaza Strip and plastered photos of murdered Palestinian children on their front pages. TV channels showed the Israeli military dropping bombs that reduced residential and media towers to rubble. Social media networks exploded with images of Palestinians—dead and alive—pulled from under the wreck. And, to a certain degree, Palestinian voices steered the global conversation.
Acclaimed poet Martín Espada recently won the National Book Award for Poetry for his anthology “Floaters.” He became just the third Latinx poet to win the award. “Floaters” is titled after the photo of the Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande in June 2019 trying to cross into the United States, one that sparked outrage at the humanitarian crisis at the U.S. southern border. Espada discusses U.S. immigration policy and reads the poem “Letter to My Father: October 2017,” which looks back at his father’s native Puerto Rico.
A New York jury on Wednesday found British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell guilty of child sex trafficking and four other counts in connection with her procurement and grooming of minors to be abused by her close friend, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
"The verdict screams loud and clear—if you make it easier for another to sexually abuse children, you, too, will be held accountable for your role in that abuse."
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died on Sunday at age 90, had a genius for speaking truths that the powerful tried to avoid hearing. When he delivered his 1984 Nobel Lecture, for instance, it was understood that the Anglican priest would condemn the apartheid system that codified racial hatred and violence in his homeland of South Africa—and similar systems of racial, social, and economic injustice globally. But Tutu didn’t stop there. He seized the platform to decry the international military-industrial complex that extended from, underpinned, and maintained that injustice.
In a fair society, there would be no billionaires. Bernie Sanders says they shouldn’t exist and Elizabeth Warren sells mugs of their tears. I’m talking about billionaires and making the case that an economic system that allows them is immoral.
We have arrived at an obscene inequality crisis, in which wealth is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, at the cost of crippling hardship, precarity, and compromised well-being for the many. When a single billionaire can accumulate more money in 10 seconds than their employees make in one year, while workers struggle to meet the basic cost of rent and medicine, then yes, every billionaire really is a policy failure. Here’s why.
The father of teenager accidentally shot dead by US police in a department store, demanded jail time Tuesday for the officers involved in her killing.
The death of 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta is the latest at the hands of law enforcement in a country where guns abound and police readily resort to deadly force.
[...]
There is no official national record of fatal shootings by US police officers, and reporting of incidents by police departments is voluntary.
The last two years where pretty darn terrible, but one of the things that provided hope was a growing solidarity between workers. Sadly this was also met with enormous repression. In this talk I want to show why we need unions and how we're prevented from getting them.
Which brings me back to my point: How are we as a society going to make it right going forward for those who have been homeless if we do not recognize the harm inflicted on them in the past?
As a new veil descends over Afghan women’s rights, and women in all parts of the country are forced to stay behind closed doors, I feel the same suffocation I did as a teenager beneath the thick, scratchy fabric of the dark burqa. It feels as if the whole of Afghanistan wears that heavy burqa which I hated so much, and that, underneath it, all Afghan women are choking.
For years the broadband industry has successfully convinced the U.S. government to remain fixated exclusively on broadband coverage gaps, not the overall lack of broadband competition. That's in part because they've known for decades that substandard maps mean policymakers have never really known which areas lack or need access. That's helped create an ecosystem where we throw billions upon billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies at regional monopolies every year, in exchange for broadband networks that are routinely half-completed.
China will improve copyright protection livestreaming, ecommerce and sports events by 2025, the country's copyright regulator said on Wednesday.
Copyright protection will be strengthened and improved in new industries and new areas, according to the 14th Five-Year Plan for Copyright Work issued by the National Copyright Administration.
DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) is an artificial intelligence (AI) system created by Dr. Stephen Thaler. It reportedly conceived two separate inventions without any human intervention and therefore, was designated as an inventor on patent applications related to those inventions. The idea of assigning inventorship to an AI-machine not only brought new legal challenges but also left the global intellectual property (IP) community divided regarding whether an AI-machine can/should be allowed to be named as an inventor on patents related to AI-created inventions.
The Federal Circuit's refusal to let Apple appeal its Patent Trial and Appeal Board loss against Qualcomm because it had a temporary license to the challenged patents is a "red flag" that the U.S. Supreme Court must address, according to Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Darrell Issa.
The Democratic senator from Vermont and Republican representative from California on Monday said in an amicus brief Monday the Federal Circuit is undermining the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act — which they both sponsored — by taking away Apple's ability to appeal inter partes review decisions upholding Qualcomm's patents, especially as Apple has been accused...
According to article 1 of the European Patent Convention (EPC), “a system of law, common to Contracting States for the grant of patents for inventions is established by this Convention.”
So, at first glance, it would appear that the European Patent Organisation was meant to be an International Institution governed by the rule of law. In particular, by the text of the EPC and by the provisions of the Implementing Regulations which, according to article 164, form part of the EPC.
However, as is well known, over the years, the need to address practical matters has led the organs of the European Patent Organisation to use some instruments that have placed it at some distance from the rule of law.
One such instrument is the “Communications from the President of the European Patent Office (EPO). For example, on 13 May 1992, the President of the EPO, for the purpose of reducing the workload of the Spanish Patent Office, published a “Communication” “strongly encouraging” applicants, in the case of patents affected by Spain’s Reservation excluding the patentability of pharmaceutical products until 7 October 1992, to file a separate set of claims for Spain. Here we have an organ of the European Patent Organisation (the president of the EPO) prompting a result explicitly prohibited by article 118 of the EPC: the grant of a European patent with a text not identical for all Contracting States. Article 167 (Reservations) did not allow the EPC to deviate from that principle. What article 167 stated was that, if a European patent whose text had to be identical in all Contracting States (article 118) protected the chemical or pharmaceutical product as such, then that patent could be revoked or would have no effect in Spain. Readers will not find any article of the EPC stating that a European patent may have a non-identical text in the Contracting States that made a Reservation under article 167.
Whereupon I do the rare original episode. In November I debated Richard Epstein in New York, at the Soho Forum, on intellectual property (patent and copyright).
[...]
Patent and Copyright Law Should Be Abolished
Just a few days before Holidays season, the Legal Board of Appeal announced its ruling in the cases J 8/20 and J 9/20, thus confirming the decisions of the Receiving Section of the European Patent Office, both of which has refused the DABUS applications EP 18 275 163 and EP 18 275 174. These well-known applications designated an artificial intelligence system as the inventor. The applicant argued in the application that inventions had been autonomously created by DABUS.
In order to provide for all alternative scenarios in respect of AI innovation, the applicant submitted an auxiliary request according to which a natural person was indicated to have "the right to the European Patent by virtue of being the owner and creator of" the artificial intelligence system DABUS. The Board of Appeal also rejected this request.
[...]
The DABUS patent applications have been submitted in several jurisdictions, contextualizing the debate on the patentability of AI-originating inventions within the patent registration process in various jurisdictions. To read more on previous stages of this saga, see the IPKat posts here, hereand here.. With the exception of South Africa, which granted the DABUS application, and Australia, which provided that the rights to the DABUS patent could be assigned to Dr Thaler, UK, US and EPO have all refused the patent applications.
As AI-originating innovations are sure to stay, the question remains: Will the patent system ultimately have to adjust?
We look forward to reading the ruling of the Board of Appeal in its entirity.
With the new year approaching, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Wednesday that the end of the coronavirus pandemic will remain out of reach as long as low-income countries are denied the ability to widely vaccinate their populations.
Tedros lamented during his weekly press conference that 92 out of 194 WHO member nations are set to miss the 40% end-of-year vaccination target established by the international agency due to "a combination of limited supply going to low-income countries" and donated vaccine doses arriving "close to expiry and without key parts—like the syringes!"
December 9, 2021, WIPO announced that the Kingdom of Cambodia has joined the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, with effect from March 9, 2022. This is, of course, very important for the creative communities of Cambodia. Internationally, it may not be a major event, since a very high number of countries have already ratified or adhered to the Convention. With the joining of Cambodia, the number of Member States of the Berne Union has reached 180. There is, however, a broader significance of that adherence, namely the final obsolescence of the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC).
The UCC was originally adopted in Geneva in 1951 and later revised in Paris in 1971. It was originally adopted in response to the problem that a significant number of countries, not least in the Americas, considered the demands for protection under the Berne Convention too strict. For the USA, for example, the prohibition against formalities as precondition for protection were not compatible with the system that applied under her national law. It foresaw both registration of the work at the Copyright Office, deposit of copies, attachment of a copyright claim (€© [year of first publication] by [name of owner of rights]), and, in certain cases, manufacture of the copies within the country. Instead, international protection of works originating in the USA was obtained in various ways: through bilateral agreements; by means of “backdoor protection” where works were first or simultaneously published in Berne Union countries; and through multilateral conventions. In particular, a string of regional copyright conventions were adopted and revised along the way in the Americas, including in particular the 1910 Buenos Aires Convention (the Panamerican Copyright Conventions).
Adult content producer Strike 3 Holdings wants an alleged movie pirate to share a copy of his hard drive and cloud hosting accounts. This evidence is crucial to proving the copyright infringements, the company argued. The court agreed that the data is important but put the privacy rights of the defendant first.
Two new DMCA subpoena applications filed by the Motion Picture Association and anti-piracy partner ACE reveal that as 2021 comes to a close, dozens more domains connected to illegal streaming sites and pirate IPTV providers may soon experience legal troubles.
The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the online world, the endgame is where copyright holders get to check and approve every single file that is uploaded, with the power to block anything they regard as infringing. That digital dystopia moved much closer two years ago, with the passage of the EU Copyright Directive. At the heart of the Directive lies precisely these kind of upload filters – even though the legislation's supporters insisted that they would not be needed. When the law was safely passed – despite voting issues – only then did they admit that upload filters would indeed be required.
