I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.10 kernel.
All users of the 5.16 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.16.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.16.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Lorinda Cherry, a long-time member of the original Unix Lab died recently. Here is a slightly edited reminiscence that I sent to the president of the National Center for Women and Information Technology in 2018 when they honored her with their Pioneer in Tech award.
As Lorinda Cherry's longtime colleague at Bell Labs, I was very pleased to hear she has been chosen for the NCWIT Pioneer Award. At the risk of telling you things you already know, I offer some remarks about her career. I will mainly speak of things I saw at first hand when our offices were two doors apart, from the early '70s through 1994, when Lorinda left Bell Labs in the AT&T/Lucent split. Most of the work I describe broke new ground in computing; "pioneer" is an apt term.
I am pleased to announce the release of Xwayland 22.1.0.
Some notable changes since Xwayland 21.1 (previous stable branch of Xwayland standalone) include:
* DRM lease support * Enables sRGB fbconfigs in GLX * Requires libxcvt * Refactoring of the present code in Xwayland * Implements support for touchpad gestures * Support for xfixes's ClientDisconnectMode and optional terminate delay
The only change compared to the second release candidate from two weeks ago is a trivial fix for the cursor color.
Olivier Fourdan (2): xwayland: Fix cursor color Bump version to 22.1.0
git tag: xwayland-22.1.0
XWayland, the way to run older games and applications that don't yet have native Wayland support has a brand new release out, bringing new features. XWayland is needed, as a large amount of software will take time to move from X11 to Wayland, and some might never do it.
Back in November 2021, NVIDIA released their free and open source Image Scaling SDK for game developers to add in a spatial upscaler that can run on any modern GPU - and they've continued improving it.
What is it exactly? As NVIDIA describe "The NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK provides a single spatial scaling and sharpening algorithm for cross-platform support. The scaling algorithm uses a 6-tap scaling filter combined with 4 directional scaling and adaptive sharpening filters, which creates nice smooth images and sharp edges. In addition, the SDK provides a state-of-the-art adaptive directional sharpening algorithm for use in applications where no scaling is required."
Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake chips are some of the best CPUs on the market. It turns out that if you'd like to get the best performance out of the processors, you may want to give Linux a try. Linux recently received an update to version 5.16. According to benchmarks by Phoronix, that update pushes Linux above Windows 11 in several areas.
Phoronix performed 104 benchmark tests on a system with an Intel Core i9-12900K chip, an ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E GAMING Wi-Fi motherboard, and 32GB of DDR5-4400 memory.
The tests compared the performance of several Linux distributions and Windows 11. Since Linux 5.16 improves hybrid handling and other aspects of the operating system, the latest Linux kernel performed much better than Linux 5.15. Those improvements were enough to push Linux past Windows 11 in over 85% of benchmarks.
Hello everyone. My name is Yasin and I live in Turkey. I am 28 years old and have used Fedora Silverblue for two months and I am an active Fedora Kinoite user. I want to share the information I’ve learned in the process of using the systems. So I’ve decided to write this article. I hope you like it. Let’s get started.
When one says Fedora Linux, the first edition that comes to mind is Fedora Workstation. However, do not overlook the emerging editions Fedora Silverblue (featuring the GNOME desktop environment) and Fedora Kinoite (featuring the KDE desktop environment). Both of these are reprovisionable operating systems based on libostree. They are created exclusively from official RPM packages from the Fedora Project. In this article, I will demonstrate some common steps you might take after a clean installation of Fedora Silverblue or Fedora Kinoite. Everything listed in this article is optional. Exactly what you want to install or how you want to configure your system will depend on your particular needs. What is demonstrated below is just meant to give you some ideas and to provide some examples.
In this video, I demonstrate a variety of different commands for shutdown and reboot on a Linux computer. Why would you need to know commands for shutdown and reboot when you could just hit the shutdown/reboot icons in your desktop environment?
In this post, I show you how to build a Docker image with a Jenkinsfile workflow and publish the image to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). Jenkins will trigger a deployment to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
Advanced package tool, or APT, is a package management tool on Debian-based operating systems. In Ubuntu, the apt command is used to install or extract the packages from the particular repositories. Mostly, you won’t have any issues while using the apt command to install the packages but sometimes you might come across the error something like “add-apt-repository command not found”.
About a month ago, I got this wacky idea in my head. After one too many frustrating headaches with the cloud, I decided, well, I was going to show them. As anyone who is relatively normal probably doesn’t know and anyone who isn’t has probably known for years, it is possible to run a cloud service on your computer. There is software out there that is designed to do just that. And well, you can make it your own. But, having spent time trying to do this for a little while, I’ve started to realize why normal people don’t do this. It’s really hard to get started. So let me, as an average person, try to explain this to you. How can you self-host your life, no middle-man needed? In today’s Tedium, let’s discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of self-hosting your own cloud setup.
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Now, I’ll be realistic here—telling other writers to come edit documents with me on cloud storage seems like a bit of a tough sale, so I fully admit that I’m going to stick with Google for things like email and document editing-style things where I need to share with a friend. But I could invite someone to a locally hosted cloud if I so wanted.
Some other things that I considered important for me included the ability to use integrations to help automate processes like file upload, something I traditionally have used Zapier for.
Additionally, there was the debate about where to host this thing. One concern I have is, well, if I’m self-hosting, do I try do so locally, knowing the not-unrealistic odds of a power outage knocking my stuff offline, or do I take my chances with a low-cost cloud platform like Vultr or DigitalOcean? And do I host the files locally, on a VPS server, or rely on object storage from a cloud file hosting platform, like Amazon’s S3?
One interesting angle of the S3 approach: In recent years, S3-compatible cloud storage platforms have emerged as viable alternatives to Amazon Web Services, and their costs are such that it’s actually somewhat reasonable to Dropbox or Google Drive … if it works. Two that come to mind for this use case are Wasabi and Backblaze’s B2, which each charge less than $6 a month for a terabyte of storage. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Backblaze’s primary product is actually a good alternative to Dropbox for backing things up, if not sync capabilities.)
Theoretically, if I can find the right cloud storage platform and the right VPS, I could get a result that’s cost-competitive with both Google Drive and Dropbox … if it works.
So, here’s what I learned.
Dealing with remote news servers can be a pain for the frequent USENET reader. More often than not, these servers can be slow and unreliable. Furthermore, if you access free providers too frequently, such as with AIOE, they can limit your connection and ban your IP address. These factors can make the USENET experience painful to some.
Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and operates as a Chromium-based browser. Opera offers a clean, modern web browser that is an alternative to the other major players in the Browser race. Its famous Opera Turbo mode and its renowned battery saving mode are the best amongst all known web browsers by quite a margin, along with a built-in VPN and much more.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser stable, beta, or developer (nightly) on AlmaLinux 8 Workstation.
Ubuntu Budgie is a desktop environment that is free and open-source that uses GNOME technologies such as GTK (> 3.x) and is developed by the Solus project, which also contributes to its design through contributors from numerous communities, including Arch Linux; Manjaro; openSUSE Tumbleweed – among others.
For users seeking an alternative to GNOME that is lightweight and sleek with a simple UI instead of focusing on eye candy, then Budgie is worth checking out.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Budgie Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
Every time you use echo, it adds a newline character at the end. Here's what you can do if you want to use echo without newline.
Stop wondering how long your system has been running. Just check its uptime with uptime command.
SSHFS (SSH File System) is an implementation of a File System in User Space (FUSE) that enables clients to mount remote filesystem over SSH connection. SSHFS uses the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to mount the remote file system to the client machine, and connections between client and server are secure and encrypted.
SSHFS can be used as an alternative to the traditional FTP protocol. It's secure by default through SSH connection and no additional packages or configurations are needed. The SSHFS works with a simple default SSH configuration.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to mount a remote directory in a secure way using the SSHFS between two Linux machines (client and server). This guide also includes how to set up chroot on SSHFS that will prevent users from accessing other users' directories.
Grafana is a free and open-source data visualizing tool that is used to monitor metrics from other hosts. It is written in Typescript and Go and allows you to create and edit both log and data graphs and create metrics. It can generate graphs and dashboards from a time-series database including Graphite, InfluxDB, or OpenTSDB and allows you to share them with other users.
Most Linux Distributions use open-source fonts to substitute Microsoft’s iconic typefaces like Arial, Courier New, and Times. Red Hat created the Liberation family to replace these similar-looking but different sizes — all you have to do is select your preferred font when editing documents so that they’ll be readable without any disruptions!
For users who want to install Microsoft fonts and want the option to use them in LibreOffice, the following tutorial will teach you how to install Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
GNOME Flashback is a free open-source session for GNOME 3, which was initially called “GNOME Fallback” and shipped as a stand-alone session in Debian and Ubuntu. It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2 desktop but uses the newer GTK+ 3 toolkit and associated technologies. The project aims to keep the functionality of GNOME 2 available until all significant applications have been ported to GTK+ 3.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the GNOME Flashback desktop environment on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
The Google PageSpeed module, also known as mod_PageSpeed, is an open-source Apache HTTP or Nginx server-level package with modules that helps optimize your site using various filters to pages that optimize server stylesheets, JavaScript, and HTML files and images through caching and rewriting among the top features.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and do a basic setup with Nginx Pagespeed on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Modules make writing Python applications easy and straightforward, but when you use someone else's code (which are what modules are), it's always best to check regularly for published vulnerabilities. This article shows you how to use the pip-audit tool to find CVE advisories issued for Python modules you're using in your project.
Snap packages are not everyone’s favorite but they are an integral part of the Ubuntu ecosystem.
It has its pros and cons. One of the negatives is that Snap packages are usually bigger in size and take a lot of disk space.
This could be a problem if you are running out of disk space, specially on the root partition.
Let me share a neat trick that you could use to cut down the disk spaced used by Snap packages.
Do you want to use “Microsoft fonts” on your Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy or 20.04 Focal Linux? Then here are the commands to install it on your system.
System fonts are usually installed on the start-up volume or a primary storage medium (eg a hard disk) during the initial installation and during updates (software updates) of the operating system by the respective manufacturer. Well, Linux is an open-source operating system, hence the fonts it uses are also open-source rather than some proprietary now.
System fonts can be divided into primary and secondary system fonts, with the primary system fonts being the minimum requirement for an operating system. Primary system fonts cannot or should not be deleted or changed since they or parts of them are required by the overall software architecture. Whereas, the secondary system fonts are essentially a kind of “add-on” from the manufacturer, intended to enable uncomplicated text communication with a microcomputer. They are primarily used for visual text and office communication via application software, e.g. for writing a letter in Microsoft Word, viewing a website in an Internet browser. For example– Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, and more…
Learn the steps to install KVM – Kernel-based virtual machine on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using command terminal. KVM or kernel-based virtual machine is one of the most popular technologies used for VPS virtualization today. Up to 94 percent of server managers use KVM in their virtualization.
Most of the time when we need to run a virtual machine on our existing PC or computer, we go for either VirtualBox or Vmware Player. However, both are Type- 2 hypervisors without direct access to hardware. However, KVM runs at almost native speed like any other host operating system with direct hardware access because it is a virtualization technique integrated into the Kernel of Linux systems.
That’s the reason we don’t have KVM on Windows machines. With the Linux server kernel, KVM can have better performance and capacity upgrade capabilities (scalability). When there is a traffic spike, the server can remain stable. Well, this is nothing more than a normal Linux such as Ubuntu, etc. on which the hypervisor is installed. For this reason, some believe that KVM belongs to type 2, however, we still can argue about this.
Hence, in short- KVM/QEMU is a Linux-based open-source hypervisor for virtualizing Linux/Windows and other operating systems. The kernel-based virtual machine is implemented as a loadable kernel module that turns the Linux kernel into a bare-metal hypervisor.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 21.10.
Apache ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing synchronization, and providing group services. It enables highly reliable distributed coordination.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Zookeeper in Ubuntu 20.04, see the alternatives to ZooKeeper.
This tutorial will help you to find recently modified files in Linux via command line .
The find command allows us to define duration in Minutes or Days. The minutes are define with -mmin and the days value can be defined with -mtime
You can also define the search criteria to find files modified within or before specified duration. For example, to search files modified before, use “+” (positive) with duration (eg: +1, +24 etc). To search files modified within duration use “-” (negative) sign with duration value (eg: -1, -24) etc.
Image capture (taking screenshots) is a powerful feature, especially when it comes to sharing technical guides, blogs, tutorials, and workarounds over the Internet. Ubuntu ships with a standard image capture tool, Screenshot, but it lacks many useful features. Also, the keyboard-focused screen printing utility is very basic and lacks many features needed to create a custom screen. An alternative to these tools in Ubuntu is a much more powerful tool, the Shutter tool.
In this guide, we will explain how to install Shutter Screenshot Tool and list some basic functions you can perform with Shutter. The commands and procedures mentioned in this article are for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileRun on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, FileRun is a web-based file and sharing application. It is a very good alternative to Google Drive self-hosted. It allows you to share and sync files, access via WebDAV and even connect to them with the Nextcloud mobile app.
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 FileRun on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Opera Browser on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and operates as a Chromium-based browser. Opera has built-in plugins to block advertisements and you can run this browser on many devices in which IOS, Java ME enabled ones and Android are included. The main features of the Opera web browser are accessibility, security, and usability. This browser runs on various operating systems such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, and macOS.
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 Opera Browser on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
PostgreSQL, also referred to as Postgres, is the leading object-relational database system. It’s popular because of its high level of compliance with the SQL standard and inclusion of additional features that simplify working with complex datasets at scale.
PostgreSQL uses a traditional client-server architecture so you need to run it independently of your application’s code. In this guide, you’ll deploy a PostgreSQL server instance as a Docker container. This avoids adding packages to your host machine and helps to isolate your database from the other parts of your stack. Make sure you’ve got Docker installed before you continue.
On all newer Ubuntu installations, Ubuntu activates the Apport Error Reporting Service by default at boot time. This means that from time to time, a large number of internal errors will appear on your Ubuntu screen. These pop-ups are a function of the internal debugger, which automatically generates reports for all your system packages that have crashed.
The popular open-source live streaming app OBS Studio released v27.2 with exciting new features! Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via different ways.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install qutebrower on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, Fedora 35, Debian, Void Linux, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, and AlmaLinux 8 via the official repository and via Flatpak also.
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qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused lightweight browser with a minimal GUI. It is based on Python and PyQt5 and it is free software licensed under GPL.
It is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems.
The last time we saw a stable Proton release was 6.3-8 back in November. Today, we have yet another noteworthy release, with many more games being playable.
As you can figure out by the name of the release version, Wine has been upgraded from 6.3 to 7.0. This release comes with new themes, support for more graphics cards (RX 5500M/6800 XT/6900 XT, Van Gogh — what the Steam Deck uses — Intel UHD Graphics 630, and NVIDIA GT 1030), better joystick support, Apple M1 support, improved Windows compatibility and multi-display support, and so much more. Wine 7.0 incorporates a year’s worth of contributions, after all. Read the release notes for more info.
The Steam Deck plays Windows games on a decidedly non-Windows operating system. How does that work and should I be worried about the compatibility of my library?
Seems if you want to do a little space exploration and building, No Man's Sky might be the place to be - with the Sentinel update out now. This brings with it enhancements for the Steam Deck.
There is of course a huge amount of other changes, but we have a special interest right now for obvious reasons. Hello Games noted that it will "support Steam Deck from launch" plus it has: a number of specific Steam Deck optimisations, support for Steam Deck controls and support for Steam Deck touch input. So they've clearly put some effort in on this one.
All aboard the Steam Deck hype train! You want more games being upgraded? You got it! Valheim has a public Beta now available on Steam with lots of goodies. To try it out you can use the password "yesimadebackups" in the Steam Beta menu for the game, keeping in mind that it is a Beta and there are issues - try at your own peril.
Bottles is the very promising free and open source application to help you directly manage installing things with Wine, the compatibility layer to run Windows apps and games on Linux. It's going through constant change right now, with lots of big new features being added in.
Continuing to pull in impressive numbers of backers, Yacht Club Games have blasted through more stretch-goals on their crowdfunding campaign for Mina the Hollower - this includes a Linux port too.
The 2016 release of Thumper from developer Drool is yet another that has been tweaking for the Steam Deck, and there's a fresh patch out now ready for it.
What is it? "Thumper is rhythm violence: classic rhythm-action, blistering speed, and brutal physicality. You are a space beetle. Brave the hellish void and confront a maniacal giant head from the future. Scream down the endless track and crash through punishing obstacles with simple, airtight controls. Hurtle forward, master new moves, reach overwhelming velocities, and survive epic boss battles. Every crushing impact is interwoven with a pounding original soundtrack. To reach synesthetic bliss, you must go through rhythm hell."
Their latest game, and the only one in their list that doesn't offer a native Linux build so you'll be running this through Steam Play Proton on Linux and the Steam Deck.
Valve has today released a huge upgrade to Proton, the compatibility layer for Linux that allows Windows games to run.
Proton 7.0 pulls in Wine 7.0 which it's based upon along with: upgrades to DXVK 1.9.4 for DirectX 9 / 10 / 11, newer VKD3D-Proton for DirectX 12 to Vulkan and wine-mono to 7.1.2. It also brings over some changes from Proton Experimental like performance improvements around input, windowing, and memory allocation.
Valve has today released Proton 7.0 – an open-source custom version of Wine that enables Linux users to run Windows games directly from Steam using Steam Play.
As you know, in the past, playing PC games on Linux required you to run Steam games through Wine, which was not always an easy task, especially in a technical sense. To facilitate the process, Valve worked with CodeWeavers developers to build Proton as a fork of Wine, then baked the technology right into Steam itself as part of Steam Play.
The verification dance continues for the Steam Deck. We have now passed 600 titles (616 at the time of writing) after some continuous additions over the past few days.
The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to €µtorrent. qBittorrent is an advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible. qBittorrent is a truly Open Source project, and as such, anyone can and should contribute to it.
Earlier this week, Neil McGovern announced that he is due to be stepping down as the Executive Director as the GNOME Foundation later this year. As the President of the board and Neil’s effective manager together with the Executive Committee, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on his achievements in the past 5 years and explain a little about what the next steps would be.
Since joining in 2017, Neil has overseen a productive period of growth and maturity for the Foundation, increasing our influence both within the GNOME project and the wider Free and Open Source Software community.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York. They sell computer hardware, middleware and software employing over 370,000 people.
IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. But you can trace IBM’s history of open source far further back. They were one of the earliest champions of open source, backing influential communities like Linux, Apache, and Eclipse, advocating open licenses, open governance, and open standards.
Benjamin Franklin high school is a wonderfully diverse, urban public school in New Orleans, Louisiana where I teach Introduction to Engineering classes. Recently, we collaborated with Red Hat for an electrical engineering project where students, led by Red Hat members, built Conversation Machines made from LEDs and buttons. I wanted to share a few takeaways that really stood out to me from the process and the lasting impact that it had on our classroom and our students.
The actual machines the students built have now become a part of our daily classroom routine. They are an amazing way to get instant, easy to see feedback from all students. High school students are perpetually afraid to speak up, minus a few brave ones, so having a nonverbal way to give quick feedback is priceless. We use the machines to answer review questions, to say if they are ready to move on or need help, and to guess a fun fact about a classmate each day. The machines make it easy for them to participate, but also serve as a more meaningful way because the students built them on their own.
So far, my work on the MIR project has focused on making a fast JIT compiler that generates decent machine code for a few major targets: x86-64 Linux and macOS, aarch64, s390x, riscv64 Linux, and ppc64 big- and little-endian Linux.
The project in its current state is a method JIT compiler that can be effectively used for statically typed programming languages such as C, which is the most widely used statically typed language. We've developed a C-language JIT based on the C-to-MIR compiler.
The original goal for the MIR project was to implement a better Ruby JIT compiler. (Specifically, I'm focusing on CRuby, the default Ruby interpreter, which is written in C.) Ruby is a very dynamic programming language—it is so flexible that you can even redefine the plus method for integer numbers.
This post summarizes our current progress on making first coreboot port for POWER platform*, including Heads as a payload. It will also show how You can test it without having to actually flash firmware to PNOR permanently. Description of OpenPOWER boot process and coreboot’s place in it can be found in previous post under OpenPOWER tag. *) there is already a target for qemu-power8 that compiles successfully, but it executes just a single instruction: b .
It’s hard to believe, but it wasn’t long ago that CIOs were fighting for their “seat at the table” for important business decisions. Now CIOs are seen as advisors to peers across the business, and leading drivers of business innovation. How will the role of the CIO continue to evolve to rise to the challenges of the year ahead?
We asked CIOs who recently won the 2021 St. Louis CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards what leadership opportunities they are most excited about in 2022 and beyond. The awards were presented by the St. Louis CIO Leadership Association, a professional community that annually recognizes CIOs for their excellence in technology leadership.
The past month I decided to have a look at Blender, an open-source, 3D rendering application. I followed a tutorial on Linked In Learning called Blender 2.91 Essential Training by David Andrade. It was very thorough and well explained, with a mini project for each section. The course took me around two weeks to complete (around other work).
Mozilla has released a security updateââ¬Â¯to address a vulnerability in Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Mozilla security advisory for Thunderbird 91.6.1 and make the necessary update
Both Firefox and Chrome are racing toward releasing version 100 in the near future, and developers for both browsers are worried that web sites with naive code to parse the version number out of the user-agent string will break.
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean. All “This Week in Glean” blog posts are listed in the TWiG index).
Mozilla’s approach to data is “as little as necessary to get the job done” as espoused in our Firefox Privacy Promise and put in a shape you can import into your own organization in Mozilla’s Lean Data Practices. If you didn’t already know, you’d find out very quickly by using it that Glean is a Mozilla project. All of its systems are designed with the idea that you’ve carefully considered your instrumentation ahead of time, and you’ve done some review to ensure that the collection aligns with your values.
(This happens to have some serious knock-on benefits for data democratization and tooling that allows Mozilla’s small Data Org to offer some seriously-powerful insights on a shoestring budget, which you can learn more about in a talk I gave to Ubisoft at their Data Summit in 2021.)
Donations to The Document Foundation help us to grow our community, run our infrastructure, organise events and share knowledge. And as a result, LibreOffice keeps on improving for all users! Many thanks to all of our supporters.
I have always wanted a computer that was open enough that it can be inspected for security, and also simple enough that I could analyze it in practice. Precursor is a step towards that goal.
The raku Physics::Unit and Physics::Measure module family (“rPM”) was built to make the most of the raku’s unique blend of innovative programming language features. During the build, I had the opportunity to use a lot of raku capabilities and principles, both within the module code and in the way it is used.
These raku modules took inspiration from the perl5 Physics::Unit module on cpan written by Joel Berger, in particular the smart handling of type derivations in math operations and parsing, but otherwise were written ‘blind’ without reference to other languages’ support for units of measurement.
Unix and, by extension, Linux, has a mantra to make everything possible look like a file. Files, of course, look like files. But also devices, network sockets, and even system information show up as things that appear to be files. There are plenty of advantages to doing that since you can use all the nice tools like grep and find to work with files. However, making your own programs expose a filesystem can be hard. Filesystem code traditionally works at the kernel module level, where mistakes can wipe out lots of things and debugging is difficult. However, there is FUSE — the file system in user space library — that allows you to write more or less ordinary code and expose anything you want as a file system. You’ve probably seen FUSE used to mount, say, remote drives via ssh or Dropbox. We’ve even looked at FUSE before, even for Windows.
But Miaow (or Miao) – not exactly the most original of names – was an astonishingly beautiful feline.€ Siamese, noisy, at times almost irritatingly loquacious.€ Lean to the point of being bony, milk white, with rings of black on her tail.€ To see her move was to drink in the spectacle of a four-legged dance.
Metronomically, she was guided by movements in the kitchen, the point at which she acknowledged you, a mere serving human, as relevant.€ The fridge opened; the plates readied; the cat, at the ready, making a sharp pleading sound that wafted across the street to the neighbours.€ Drawers opened, cutlery rustled.€ A pose would be assumed beside the bowl: that of the Sphinx.€ There were no riddles to be solved here, though.€ The solution was food, pure and simple.
Bleach saved Maia Szalavitz’s life. It cleans a used needle of potential infectants, Szalavitz was told by an acquaintance in 1986, information that was a godsend to an injection drug user like herself. So when she was short of clean needles, she knew how to protect herself from catching HIV, which had infected over half of all those who injected drugs in Manhattan at the time.
The game was the game, with the Los Angeles Rams eking out a 23-20 victory over the underdog Cincinnati Bengals and becoming Super Bowl champions at their home stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Like the last six remarkable NFL playoff games, this one came down to the final minute. The league has had a ridiculous run of good luck in the quality of these nail-biting contests, proving the old axiom that running an NFL franchise is like being a bartender during spring break: You have to be epically incompetent to lose money.
For decades I grappled with one puzzle. Why would we homo sapiens, supposedly the brightest species, be creating a world together that as individuals none of us would choose? I'll bet no one turns off the alarm in the morning and begins plotting to worsen world hunger or heat the planet.
Sometime in the summer of 2023, the musical genre and lifestyle known as hip-hop will officially hit the half-century mark.
Ocean levels along the U.S. coastline are projected to rise by an average of 10 to 12 inches over the next three decades, worsening the threat of flooding in dozens of highly populated cities, according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal agencies.
"The fact that there's this locked-in sea-level rise is not a reason to throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do about this, because there absolutely is."
It feels odd to admit this, but I miss the stillness of the first few disorienting and terrifying weeks of the pandemic, when the noise and hustle of my world quieted down. In March and April of 2020, spring somehow seemed more riotously colorful and gratuitously lush. Choruses of birds replaced the sounds of cars in my neighborhood of Portland, Ore. Gone was a traffic-filled commute and the energetically grueling weekday rituals of my past 17 years teaching at a large public high school. My house and my family became the locus and focal point of my day. Our tiny universe contracted, as we navigated the first year of the pandemic together, an island of three.
The classic iPod was the MP3 player to beat back in the day, loaded with storage and with its characteristic click-wheel interface. [Ellie] had an iPod Video laying around, one of the more capable models that came out near the end of the product’s run, and set out upgrading it for duty in the pandemic-wracked badlands of 2022.
[...]
After the hardware modifications were complete, the iPod needed to be restored with iTunes to start working again. She then installed the open source Rockbox firmware, which opens up the capabilities of the hardware immensely. Perhaps best of all, it can play DOOM! Alternatively, you can use the clickwheel to control the volume on your MacBook if you so desire.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox and thunderbird), Debian (librecad, libxstream-java, and zsh), Fedora (expat, util-linux, varnish-modules, xterm, and zsh), Mageia (Intel-nonfree, kernel, kernel-linus, and microcode), openSUSE (zabbix), Red Hat (kernel, kpatch-patch, Red Hat Virtualization Host, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cryptsetup).
Continuing my series on OSINT techniques you can use for reviewing your own corporate OpSec, one of the most common services available in a modern corporate office is of course wireless. How do we go about finding wireless access points and what can they tell us?
[...]
We have spoken about Wigle.net many times before, its awesome and allows you to hunt for access points by name and location, which is really useful for us when performing OSINT.
Through analysis of the corporate website we can usually identify any office addresses. From that address we can search with Wigle.net.
Google’s Project Zero is reporting that software vendors are patching their code faster.
For nearly ten years, Google’s Project Zero has been working to make it more difficult for bad actors to find and exploit security vulnerabilities, significantly improving the security of the Internet for everyone. In that time, we have partnered with folks across industry to transform the way organizations prioritize and approach fixing security vulnerabilities and updating people’s software. To help contextualize the shifts we are seeing the ecosystem make, we looked back at the set of vulnerabilities Project Zero has been reporting, how a range of vendors have been responding to them, and then attempted to identify trends in this data, such as how the industry as a whole is patching vulnerabilities faster. For this post, we look at fixed bugs that were reported between January 2019 and December 2021 (2019 is the year we made changes to our disclosure policies and also began recording more detailed metrics on our reported bugs). The data we'll be referencing is publicly available on the Project Zero Bug Tracker, and on various open source project repositories (in the case of the data used below to track the timeline of open-source browser bugs). There are a number of caveats with our data, the largest being that we'll be looking at a small number of samples, so differences in numbers may or may not be statistically significant. Also, the direction of Project Zero's research is almost entirely influenced by the choices of individual researchers, so changes in our research targets could shift metrics as much as changes in vendor behaviors could. As much as possible, this post is designed to be an objective presentation of the data, with additional subjective analysis included at the end.
This won't change much for NSO Group, but at least it helps the Israeli Police rehab its image a bit. An "initial investigation" has (mostly) cleared the Israeli police of wrongdoing in one of the latest surveillance scandals tied to NSO's malware.
ID.me -- the facial recognition company that has managed to snag several lucrative contracts -- has gotten the brushback from perhaps its most lucrative government partner, the IRS. ID.me promised government agencies better control over distributions of unemployment benefits and other payments to the public, citing its own (unexamined) prowess at recognizing faces as well as an astounding claim that governments have been duped out of $400 billion in unemployment benefits by fraudsters -- a claim it has yet to back up with actual evidence.
Biometric information is easy to collect, immutable, and a ripe target for identity thieves. That’s why EFF works to defend and enforce the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)—on which S.B. 335 is based—as a necessary means to protect our biometric privacy from intrusion by private entities. It is also why we have encouraged other states and the federal government to follow this model of legislation.
We are encouraged to see Maryland recognize the harms that unconsented collection can inflict on people as they go about their daily lives. And we were particularly encouraged to see Finance chair, Sen. Delores Kelley, and the bill’s sponsor, vice-chair Sen. Brian Feldman, push back on those advocating to eliminate perhaps the most important piece of this bill: the private right of action.
As we said in our testimony, laws are often only as good as their enforcement. This is why it is a top priority for the Electronic Frontier Foundation to include private rights of action in privacy laws, including those that protect biometric privacy. Consumer enforcement is part of EFF’s “bottom-up” approach to public policy. Ordinary technology users should have the power to decide for themselves whether to bring a lawsuit to enforce their statutory privacy rights.
For some Israeli lawmakers, a Palestinian’s home is the perfect place to set up a makeshift office. All it takes is a tent, a plastic folding table, and an entourage of armed Jewish settlers. That’s what happened over the weekend when Israeli member of parliament Itamar Ben-Gvir decided to “move” his office from the Knesset to a yard in Sheikh Jarrah, my neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem. The yard belongs to the Salem family, which is threatened with forced expulsion in the coming weeks.
Vox (2/5/22) recently published a piece titled “How to Understand the Recent Coups in Africa,” interviewing Joseph Sany from the Africa Center at the US Institute of Peace, a US government research center. The article had much to say about the potential causes of African conflict and instability, but pointedly left out any reference to the role of US training programs in constantly generating coup leaders.
In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win that must now be counted as a loss because its promise was so quickly discarded.
When I respond that you (the U.S. government) could ban capital punishment, stop arming and funding the world’s top executioners from Saudi Arabia on down, join the world’s major human rights treaties, sign onto and support the International Criminal Court, and then — from a credible position — seek to impose the rule of law in Afghanistan, sometimes people think that over as if none of it had ever occurred to them, as if basic logical steps had been literally unthinkable, whereas starving millions of little kids to death for their human rights had somehow made sense.
I also have yet to run across a single person in the United States not engaged in peace activism who doesn’t believe that the United States needs to stop “aggression” by “Putin” in Ukraine. Maybe I don’t interact enough with Fox News viewers who want a war with China or Mexico and think Russia is a less desirable war, but it’s not clear to me that such a person would dispute the spontaneous irrational Putinesque plot against Ukraine so much as just not care about it.
Talk of a possible war is terrifying. It is even scarier when they talk about it for a long time. For the last few weeks I have felt that I’m watching a horror film in which Russia and America accuse each other and discuss the possible consequences of conflict. Even though it is clear that there will be nothing left after a nuclear war, and there will be no winners. No one. This is a real nightmare. The film doesn’t stop. This is the situation we are all in.
Russia has announced plans to pull back some troops from the Ukrainian border in a possible effort to deescalate the standoff over Ukraine but still intends to continue with military exercises in Belarus and the Black Sea. This comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated on Monday the country may drop its bid to join NATO and the U.S. continues to urge U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine, warning a Russian invasion could come as soon as Wednesday. We speak with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, who says the U.S. is continuing to escalate the crisis by directing U.S. funds to weapons and loans for Ukraine. “It seems the United States is more anxious for Russia to invade than Russia is to invade,” says Benjamin.
Units of Russia’s Western and Southern military districts are preparing to return to their bases after completing military drills, Interfax reported on Tuesday, February 15, citing the Russian Defense Ministry.
By the time that the scientists at the top-secret Manhattan Project had developed the atomic bomb and the US military had worked out the logistics for deploying it, World War II was for all intents and purposes over. By early May 1945, Germany had unconditionally surrendered; in large part due to the efforts of the Red Army defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, but at the horrific cost of 27,000,000 Soviet lives. The Japanese too had been defeated militarily and had agreed to “unconditional surrender” with the one caveat that Emperor Hirohito be spared.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might come “any day now,” the Biden administration warns, with intelligence rumors marking Wednesday as a likely date. If Russia does invade, the United States and its allies have pledged to impose “severe economic sanctions” on Russia. The result would be horrible casualties in Ukraine, and, with Russia now supplying as much as 40 percent of Europe’s natural gas, significant economic disruption in both Russia and Europe, that would surely affect the rest of the world as well.
Putin wants Russia to be taken seriously as an international player, recalling the era when it was the core nation in the USSR. It is still a nuclear superpower, though otherwise the Kremlin today rules a much-shrunken state with a population of 144 million or half that of the Soviet Union. The Russian economy is only a 15th the size of that of the US, while the Soviet economy was a third as big.
The Kremlin will be greatly gratified by the flood of Western leaders who have made their way in the past few weeks to Moscow where they can stand tall and issue stern warnings against a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Nine families of victims killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre announced Tuesday that they have reached a $73 million settlement with Remington Arms—the first time a U.S. gunmaker has been held liable for a mass shooting.
The settlement comes nearly a decade after a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle murdered 20 children and six staff members at the Newtown, Connecticut school, and just a day after survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Florida mass shooting marked its four-year anniversary with demands that President Joe Biden and Congress do more prevent gun violence.
More than 1,000 doctors, nurses, and medical students from across the United States demanded Tuesday that President Joe Biden harness the "full power" of his office to bolster global coronavirus vaccination efforts, which have been marred by deeply unequal distribution of the lifesaving shots.
"The United States must help expand global vaccine, diagnostic, and treatment production immediately."
The head of the United Nations on Monday implored Western powers, Russia, and Ukraine to urgently ramp up diplomatic negotiations amid heightened fears of a military conflict and loudening drumbeats of war amplified by U.S. corporate media outlets.
"We simply cannot accept even the possibility of such a disastrous confrontation," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters during a press conference. "My message is clear: There is no alternative to diplomacy. All issues—including the most intractable—can and must be addressed and resolved through diplomatic frameworks. It is my firm belief that this principle will prevail."
Potential scenarios proposed by both the CIA and Trump Administration included crashing into a Russian vehicle carrying Assange in order to grab him, shooting the tires of an airplane carrying Assange in order to prevent its takeoff, and engaging in a gun battle through London. US officials requested that “their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed,” Yahoo News reported, on the basis of testimony by one former senior administration official. Senior CIA officials went so far as to request “sketches” or “options” detailing methods to kill Assange.
It wasn’t long after the United States declared war on Japan that Takemura and other people of Japanese ancestry were stripped of their rights and shipped off to incarceration camps scattered in small remote towns like Hunt, Idaho, and Delta, Utah. Scorching heat and dust storms added to the day-to-day misery.
Takemura’s incarceration began on May 12, 1942, just a week before he could harvest his lettuce.
Authors of a new study published Tuesday warn accelerated growth of Antarctica's€ two native plant species reveals that the climate crisis is dramatically changing the continent's fragile ecosystem in ways that could have major implications for biodiversity.
Researchers at two universities in Italy and the British Antarctic Survey found that Antarctic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort have spread between five and 10 times faster in the past decade than they did in the first five decades scientists were studying them.
In 1999, Massachusetts and 11 other states petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide as pollutant under the Clean Air Act, because its climate impacts were damaging to human health. The EPA denied the petition. The states took it to court. In 2007, the Supreme Court took the states’ side in the Massachusetts v. EPA decision. In 2009, under a new administration, the EPA affirmed that CO2 should be regulated under the Clean Air Act, setting in motion the Clean Power Plan, the 2015 Obama Administration Initiative to reduce coal plant pollution.
In 2002, California passed legislation to cut CO2 pollution from cars. A 1967 federal law gave the state the power to set its own tailpipe pollution standards because of its unique conditions. California’s regulation preceded passage of the federal Clean Air Act. The new CO2 law withstood court tests and went into effect in 2006. Average California cars and light trucks put 30% less CO2 in the air in 2016 than they did in 2004.
In recent years, there have been more than a thousand lawsuits filed around the world — including a few in the United States — challenging corporate or governmental negligence about climate change and ecosystem damage.
That’s not the secret. This is the secret: These lawsuits, especially as they continue and grow in number, come with consequences beyond comprehension. They are infinitely larger than “the law” they are humbly summoning in order to address specific issues — a construction company dumping rubble in Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River, loggers and farmers destroying the Amazon rainforest, the state of Montana promoting the fossil fuel industry — and are pushing the social and legal status quo well beyond the abstractly linear world it presumes to control.
The hearing was entitled “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Examining Big Oil’s Climate Pledges.” Lawmakers were interested in whether companies were actually enacting their widely touted climate actions and were following up from a hearing last fall organized by the same committee which focused on the corporate cover-up of the climate crisis. The top oil executives did show up to that hearing in what was considered a historic appearance, and were subjected to a rare level of interrogation during which they generally refused to take responsibility for their actions.
We can only assume they did not want a repeat of such harsh scrutiny at the February hearing. Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) explained in her opening statement that these companies “have spent millions to advertise these plans [to combat climate change] and greenwash their images.” Surely, they would want to publicize the work they were supposedly doing to mitigate the climate crisis. But, according to Maloney, “when the committee invited board members of these companies to come in today and explain their pledges, they declined to appear on the date we requested.” She added, “[n]one of them showed up today. Not a single one.”
Aside from Senator Manchin, and Representative Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN), who owns up to $5.2 million worth of stock in oil and gas pipelines, many of the other most invested Congress leaders are Texas Republicans, including Representative Van Taylor, who owns up to $12.4 million worth of fossil fuel assets.
In its home state of Ohio, Kroger had the third-most employees—behind only Walmart and McDonald’s—on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, the federal government’s food-purchasing aid program for people with low- or no-income.
A report published Tuesday by a pair of nonprofits shines a light on the "Wall Street heavyweights" at private equity firms who "burnish their reputations through hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropy, even as their investments help drive climate catastrophe."
"The private equity industry largely evades public scrutiny, despite investing billions in fossil fuel investments."
These countries tend to be in the hottest parts of world, and their risk of dangerous heat waves is rising as the planet warms.
In a new study, our team of climate scientists, economists and engineers found that the poorest parts of the world are likely to be two to five times more exposed to heat waves than richer countries by the 2060s. By the end of the century, the lowest-income quarter of the global population’s heat exposure will almost match that of the entire rest of the world.
In an extensive interview with The New Yorker published Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said President Joe Biden, faced with right-wing Democrats and Republicans in Congress who have blocked legislation to materially improve working people's lives, must swiftly use his executive power to cancel student loan debt as a politically and economically wise move.
The New York Democrat warned that the White House appears overly eager to leave the responsibility for making a difference in constituents' lives with the U.S. Senate and House. Congress has so far been unable to pass Biden's economic agenda, the Build Back Better Act, largely due to objections from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and the Republican Party.
Belgium announced Tuesday a package of labor reforms that includes affording workers the right to request a four-day work week.
"With this agreement, we set a beacon for an economy that is more innovative, sustainable, and digital," Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said at a press conference after the seven-party coalition government reached the agreement. "The aim is to be able to make people and businesses stronger."
A 2017 study published by the Economic Policy Institute found that one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations (paying workers less than minimum wage)—cost US workers an estimated $15 billion annually and impacted an estimated 17 percent of low-wage workers.
I’ve just wrapped up my shift at BurgerBoy and I don’t have much time before the weekly self-criticism session at town hall. This hour with my diary is precious, especially when I have to make a big decision. Writing used to be my job, but it’s so much more difficult after eight straight hours on my feet. It’s been more than a year since the disastrous 2024 election and I can’t overestimate how much I miss my old life.
On Tuesday, February 15, Russian lawmakers voted to adopt a resolution that calls on President Vladimir Putin to formally recognize the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine.€
There's a pronounced lack of consensus among UN member states about what constitutes a "cybercrime" and how expansive the treaty will be.
Most states agree on the inclusion of so-called “pure” cybercrimes like network intrusion or interference with the operation of a computing system. But a broader range of ‘cyber-enabled’ crimes— such as fraud or drug trafficking that do not inherently target information and communications technologies but where Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) occasionally play a significant role—are also on the table. Other states warn that the treaty must remain focused on cybercrime and avoid delving into broader issues of national security, cybersecurity, or cyberwarfare.€ Our analysis of early submissions to the UN Ad Hoc committee from interested UN Member States begins to paint a picture of what this treaty might ultimately include.€
A number of states have expressed concerns that the treaty might ultimately include everything from cyberwarfare, to national security, to a new set of rules for internet governance. These concerns have prompted comments that the treaty should remain focused on crime and law enforcement.
You must manufacture an existential threat. Terrorists at home. Russians and Chinese abroad. Expand state power in the name of national security. Beat the drums of war. War is the antidote to divert public attention from government corruption and incompetence. No one plays the game better than the Democratic Party. The Democrats, as journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford said, are not the lesser evil, they are the more effective evil.
The US, burdened by de facto tax boycotts by the rich and corporations, is sinking in debt, the highest in our history. The US government budget deficit was $2.77 trillion for the 2021 budget year that ended Sept. 30, the second highest annual deficit on record. It was exceeded only by the $3.13 trillion deficit for 2020. Total US national total debt is over $30 trillion. Household debt grew by $1 trillion last year. The total debt balance in our government Ponzi scheme is now $1.4 trillion higher than it was at the end of 2019. Our wars are waged on borrowed money. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that interest payments on the military debt could be over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s. None of this debt is sustainable.
An alliance of grassroots advocacy groups, progressive lawmakers, and high-profile celebrities kicked off a new $25 million campaign Monday with the goal of ending the subminimum wage and raising the base pay of millions of workers in 25 U.S. states, from Michigan to Massachusetts to California.
"A strong majority of all Americans support ending the subminimum wage and raising the overall minimum wage."
The story of Soria is one among millions; in Uruzgan Province, in southern Afghanistan, measles cases are rising due to lack of vaccines. The thread to the tweet about Soria from UNICEF Afghanistan was a further bleak reminder about the severity of the situation in the country and its impact on the lives of the children: “without urgent action, 1 million children could die from severe acute malnutrition.” UNICEF is now distributing “high energy peanut paste” to stave off catastrophe.
The United Nations has, meanwhile, warned that approximately 23 million Afghans—about half the total population of the country—are “facing a record level of acute hunger.” In early September, not even a month after the Taliban came to power in Kabul, the UN Development Program noted that “A 10-13 percent reduction in GDP could, in the worst-case scenario, bring Afghanistan to the precipice of near universal poverty—a 97 percent poverty rate by mid-2022.”
Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.
Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden's withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.
President Biden is facing mounting criticism for seizing $7 billion of Afghanistan’s federal reserves frozen in the United States. Biden is giving half of the money to families of September 11 victims while Afghanistan faces a humanitarian catastrophe. We speak to two of the founders of a new campaign called Unfreeze Afghanistan, a women-led initiative to lift sanctions and other economic restrictions on Afghanistan, and a woman who lost her son in the World Trade Center attack, who says the money should stay in Afghanistan. “The suffering of the Afghan people at the hands of the United States and its allies is reprehensible. This is adding insult to injury,” says Phyllis Rodriguez, a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, whose son Greg was killed in the World Trade Center attack and who says 9/11 families want “information, not remuneration.” Afghan American activist Masuda Sultan says continued lack of access to money and basic services in Afghanistan will inspire a new wave of underground terrorism in the country, “endangering the entire world.” Biden’s order is gravely hypocritical, adds Medea Benjamin, critiquing the administration for “putting themselves forward as these great saviors of Afghanistan” for releasing Afghan-owned assets as “aid” while taking no punitive action against Saudi Arabia, whose citizens led the 9/11 attack.
The ad intensely promotes the Ezra Klein Show! – a€ New York Times€ Podcast featuring their newest star.
Mr. Klein, formerly from the€ Washington Post€ and€ Vox,€ holds forth with interviews that range far and wide but not as far and wide as reality would seem to demand from such a well-read, inquiring young mind of 37 years. This repetitive full-page ad, once you get beyond his portrait, the top of his black t-shirt, and the American flag, tells you what to expect, to wit....
Two competitive congressional races are heating up in Texas. Former labor organizer Greg Casar and immigrant human rights lawyer Jessica Cisneros have both gained national endorsements from progressive lawmakers like New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who traveled to the state to campaign for them this past weekend. “We have a real opportunity for big progressive change here in the heart of the state where we’ve seen so many oppressive laws be pushed through the pandemic,” says Casar, who is running in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, which covers eastern Austin and eastern San Antonio.
Early voting in the first 2022 primary elections kicked off Monday in Texas with extreme new anti-voter laws in effect. The Republican-enacted restrictions have already caused Texas voters issues, with some 40% of ballots in Houston rejected. We speak with Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, one of 30 civil rights groups who sent a letter to the Texas secretary of state on Monday calling for stronger action to ensure voters have access to the ballot leading up to the state’s March 1 primary. He describes how the laws are also facilitating right-wing efforts to intimidate Black and Brown voters at the polls.
As early voting continues in Texas' primary election, pro-democracy advocates are sounding the alarm over the high rate at which mail-in ballots are being rejected as a result of the GOP's newly enacted voter suppression law.
Election officials in Harris County€ said€ they had returned almost 2,500 of the 6,548 mail-in ballots received as of Saturday due to cumbersome new ID rules—a rejection rate of nearly 38% in Texas' most populous county, a Democratic stronghold that includes Houston and more than 2.4 million voters.
Activists and Democratic senators were outraged Tuesday after some Senate Republicans skipped a key committee vote, delaying the confirmation of President Joe Biden's five Federal Reserve nominees to protest his pick for the top banking regulator.
"The Federal Reserve is at a critical juncture where it must have the expertise to tackle the compound crisis of Covid, inflation, and unemployment, and the realities of the climate crisis in our communities."
Let’s start from the beginning.
In what is now a widely-reported case, Neil Young demanded the removal of his catalog from Spotify as a form of protest against Spotify’s deal to be the exclusive platform for the extremely popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, on the grounds that the podcast€ is spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Soon after, other musicians including Joni Mitchell, India Arie, and Nils Lofgren also asked that their content be removed . Best-selling social psychologist, Brene Brown, initially refused to tape new podcasts, but she recently returned, citing “few options.” Even the White House weighed in. All of this followed an open letter last month to Spotify from 270 U.S. health experts expressing concern about medical misinformation on The Joe Rogan Experience, calling it a “menace to public health.”
The response from Spotify has been two-pronged. First, Daniel Ek, its CEO, published a blog where he committed to “do more to provide more balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities.” And, second, Spotify further announced that podcasts discussing the COVID-19 virus would now come with content advisories. This seems to be an effort by Spotify to ensure that the small movement Neil Young started will not extend to artists that are more popular (and more important) for Spotify such as Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny or BTS.€
We've talked about so many problems with the EARN IT Act, but there are more! I touched on this a bit in my post about how EARN IT is worse than FOSTA, but it came up a bit in the markup last week, and it showed that the Senators pushing for this do not understand the issues around the knowledge standard required here, and how various state laws complicate things. Is it somewhat pathetic that the very senators pushing for a law that would make major changes impacting a wide variety of things don't seem to understand the underlying mechanisms at play? Sure is! But rest assured that you can be smarter than a senator.
So begins Ray Bradbury’s€ Fahrenheit 451, the story of a fireman named Guy Montag whose job is to burn books. “It’s fine work,” he says. “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
Fahrenheit 451€ is often found in the science fiction section of bookstores; yet again, its dystopian future is not too far off from America’s outlook. Just on February 2nd, a€ Tennessee pastor€ held a book burning, where copies of€ Harry Potter€ and€ Twilight€ were fed to the flames. Their fight against “demonic influences” was live streamed on Facebook, perfectly literalizing the subtitle of Chris Hedges’ 2009 book: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. €
This is our reality now, this week, like it or not (and I sure don’t).€ All of this stuff is intimately related, but it generally gets siloed off into different discussions.€ This happens partly for perfectly innocent reasons, and partly for completely nefarious ones.€ It’s often innocent because many people can understand the basic principles of free speech vs. censorship, but they don’t understand where social media algorithms, and perhaps even corporate wealth and power, fit into the picture.€ Often it’s nefarious, because other people understand full well that the issue of rampant disinformation is rarely one of free speech vs. censorship, but they frame it that way, in order to attempt to distract us from the elephant in the living room, the wizard behind the curtain, the naked emperor (insert allegory here).
I heard a host on NPR the other day refer to the world’s most popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, as a podcast “distributed by Spotify.”€ I kept listening to the national radio story, waiting perhaps for the host to be corrected by a producer or something, for her to say, “sorry, I meant hosted exclusively by Spotify at a cost of $100 million,” or even just “hosted” rather than “distributed,” but that correction never came.
“It’s not a crime to fulfill a diplomatic mission. It’s not a crime to evade sanctions that are harming an entire country. It can’t be illegal to help a people.” Camilla Fabri Saab made these impassioned remarks when explaining the situation behind the illegal arrest and extradition – the kidnapping, in essence – of her husband, Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.
Knight and Armstrong’s investigation of the case revealed that, dating back to 2014, Rutherford County “locked up kids in 48% of its cases,” during a period in which the statewide average was five percent. A lawyer representing the families in a class action suit against the county compiled samples of juvenile arrest and detention records over an 11-year period, suggesting that 500 children had been wrongly arrested by the sheriff’s department alone. The same data suggested that the juvenile detention center’s “filter system” had improperly locked up children an estimated 1,500 times, Knight and Armstrong reported in their first report.
One of the worst offenders is Clearview AI, which extracts faceprints from billions of people without their consent and uses these faceprints to help police identify suspects. For example, police in Miami worked with Clearview to identify participants in a Black-led protest against police violence.
Clearview’s faceprinting violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires opt-in consent to collect someone’s faceprint. Clearview now faces many consolidated BIPA lawsuits in federal court. It also faces another suit, brought by the ACLU and ACLU of Illinois, in state court. In both federal and Illinois courts, Clearview argues that the First Amendment bars these BIPA claims. We disagree and filed an amicus brief saying so in each case.
This week, the judge in the federal cases rejected Clearview’s First Amendment defense, denied the company’s motion to dismiss, and allowed the lawsuits to move forward. This is an important victory for our privacy over Clearview’s profits.
Some senators are getting all angried up about proposed police reforms President Biden possibly might deliver as an executive order. Reporting earlier this month indicated Biden had something planned, but no one involved in breaking the news appeared to have any details.
Russia’s latest criminal trial of jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny got underway on Tuesday, February 15. Already serving a nearly three-year prison sentence, Navalny now stands accused of fraud and contempt of court — charges that could prolong his incarceration by up to 15 years. In a strange twist, Moscow’s Lefortovsky District Court held Tuesday’s hearing offsite, at the penal colony in the Vladimir region where Navalny has been in custody since February 2021. In the following explainer, Meduza asks and answers key questions about the proceedings.
U.S. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders revealed Tuesday that Sen. Elizabeth Warren will testify this week at the panel's hearing on "Wall Street greed and growing oligarchy in America."
"The sacrifices made by the miners saved the company an estimated $1.1 billion over the past five years. Meanwhile... Warrior Met has rewarded over $1.5 billion in dividends to its wealthy shareholders."
“It’s not a crime to fulfill a diplomatic mission. It’s not a crime to evade sanctions that are harming an entire country. It can’t be illegal to help a people.” Camilla Fabri Saab made these impassioned remarks when explaining the situation behind the illegal arrest and extradition - the kidnapping, in essence - of her husband, Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.
An earlier version of EARN IT fortunately failed to pass in 2020 after civil liberties groups brought heavy public pressure to bear against it.€ It’s time go break out the torches and pitchforks again.
EARN IT is a one-two punch against freedom and privacy that would effectively destroy the Internet we’ve come to know and love (and, yes, hate) over the last 30 years.
In October 2021, ProPublica published a gutting and outrageous narrative of a juvenile court judge who oversaw a system that jailed children at extraordinary rates, and a county full of officials who collaborated or looked the other way.
In one particularly egregious case that reporters Meribah Knight and Ken Armstrong found, several Black children were arrested at school and jailed for a crime that didn’t even exist. Two police officers who were sent to arrest them couldn’t help but wonder: If the kids had been white, would any of this have happened? A lot of readers wondered, too. Counterfactuals like that bring up a point worth flexing some investigative muscle on, even if they are challenging to answer definitively.
For years now, wireless carriers have struggled to make fifth generation wireless (5G) interesting to consumers. While the technology does provide faster, lower-latency connectivity, that's more of an evolution than any kind of revolution. But in a bid to excite consumers (and justify high prices), wireless carriers have been pouring it on a little thick for years, trying to insist that 5G will somehow revolutionize the future, cure cancer, solve climate change, and generally turn America's urban landscape into the smart cities of tomorrow. And don't get me started on the "race to 5G."
Are you well organized? Do you have a garage full of well-labeled bins or a pantry full of neatly labeled jars? Do you ship a lot of stuff and print labels? If so, you probably own and cherish your label maker. What’s not to like?€
Well, if you’re a Dymo label maker owner, there’s a new scam that might convince you to switch brands - if it doesn’t scare you off labels altogether, that is.
For a certain kind of corporate executive, the printer business is a source of endless temptation. After all, printers go through lots of “consumables.” That means that printer manufacturers don’t just get to sell you a printer, they also have a chance to sell you ink, forever.
Regular Techdirt readers will not be shocked when I say that DC Comics has a long and often ridiculous history when it comes to "protecting" its intellectual property. From trademark bullying over a barbeque joint, to trying to bully a Spanish soccer club for having a bat in its logo, up to waging a brief battle with the family of a dead child because they included the Superman logo on the headstone of the deceased: DC Comics will fight anything remotely like the use of its imagery or naming conventions.
John Grisham & Scott Turow have renewed their calls for service providers to do much more to combat online piracy. On the heels of an extremely complicated legal win over a number of pirate eBook platforms, the best-selling authors say that search engines including Google should delist pirate platforms completely and the government needs to step up funding for criminal enforcement.
The UK High Court has ordered six of the country's largest ISPs to block access to Mixdrop.me and Mixdrop.co. The injunction was requested on behalf of Netflix and several major Hollywood studios. The Motion Picture Association notes that this is the first blocking action in the UK that's aimed at a cyberlocker service hosting movies and TV shows.
In this 20th anniversary year of the CC license suite, we are pleased to be renewing our commitment to license stewardship. Creative Commons has always taken its stewardship responsibilities seriously, engaging in multi-year consultation processes for versioning the tools, publishing official translations of the licenses into dozens of languages, and working to educate people about how the licenses work within the law and with new technologies.
Our upcoming ResiliArt x Mondiacult webinar will explore how open access to cultural heritage materials encourages artists to discover, share, and remix such materials. We will hear from artists and heritage professionals firsthand as they share their vision for better sharing of cultural heritage to support contemporary creativity in the digital space. They will also consider how better sharing can act as an engine for sustainable cultural development, through fair remuneration and open business models. Our panelists will examine the power of open licensing and the importance of Creative Commons’ infrastructure as a catalyst for the dissemination and revitalization of culture.
