Are you a college student looking for ways to get ahead? Are you looking for an edge on your competition? If so, you should be using Linux! Linux is the best operating system for students since it offers a wealth of features and tools that can help you succeed in your studies.
In this article, we will discuss some of the ways that Linux can help you get better grades in college. We will also provide tips and tricks for using Linux to its fullest potential. So what are you waiting for? Start using Linux today and see how it can help you achieve success!
Based on the recently released Linux 5.17 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.17 kernel is here to update the cleaning up logic for the btmtk, bnx2x, mt7915, mscc, and tegra drivers, as well as for a newly introduced driver for x86 Android tablets, and adds a new logic for dts files used by various new AArch64 SoCs.
On top of that, the GNU Linux-libre 5.17 kernel comes with all the new features of the upstream Linux 5.17 kernel series, including a new “AMD P-State” subsystem for future AMD CPUs to provide them with a performance boost, a revamped fscache subsystem, and a new “page-table check” feature to better protect your GNU/Linux system from certain threats by detecting some types of corruption.
Arriving nine months after the last update in the KeePassXC 2.6 series, the KeePassXC 2.7 release is here to implement support for the KDBX 4.1 file format for storing passwords, which brings various new features like the ability to assign tags to groups, optional password quality estimation, the ability to remember the previous parent group when moving an entry/group into a different group, and more.
Among some other major changes included in KeePassXC 2.7, there’s a port of the crypto backend to the Botan C++ cryptography library, a new security option to enable copy on double click, the ability to select any open database in the unlock dialog, a new “Delete entry without confirm” functionality, the ability to lock only the current database by default, as well as improved security and better handling of attachments.
After a long time, KeePass XC gets an update that includes entry tagging, added features to leverage Window Hello and macOS Touch ID and many more.
Unlike applications or e-books, the experience of using the Web is not confined to content provided by one vendor. Instead, even if you start on one site, many of your activities on that site will take you to other sites. Consider, for instance, the experience of searching for something using Google. Once you execute the search, Google then gives you a set of links, many of which take you to another site. Google's relationship to those sites is arms-length at best: it doesn't control them and doesn't bear any responsibility for their content beyond some vague assertion that this might be something that was responsive to your search. The situation is the same for other big content platforms like Facebook and Twitter: just because you see some link there doesn't mean that the site endorses it.
In order for the Web to work successfully, people have to feel comfortable visiting arbitrary Web pages, even those controlled by the attacker. It's the browser's job to mediate that interaction so that it's safe. Back in 2011, my coauthors and I described this as the "core security guarantee" of the Web: users can safely visit arbitrary web sites and execute scripts provided by those sites.
The first option is straightforward. The way that the second option works is that you have some database that is basically a list of every item (the jargon here is stock keeping unit (SKU)), its description, maybe a picture or two, and the price or prices. Then when the user's browser requests a given catalog page, some code on your server goes through the database and renders it into an HTML page and serves it back to the browser.
It's important to realize that these two methods are interchangeable from the perspective of the browser; the server can switch between static and dynamically generated pages at will. It can also cache the dynamically generated pages—that is, temporarily store the output of what was generated—and serve that back to clients, thus saving run time and computing resources.
I know I keep making this point, but it really can't be overemphasized—as long as the data sent to the client is valid HTML, the browser doesn't care how it was generated. The point of having standardized network protocols is so that you can detach the implementation on each side from the messages they send to each other. This creates important implementation flexibility and allows new functionality to be added on either end without consulting the other. Part of what makes the Web so powerful is the combination of these standardized protocols with the ability to move implementation logic onto the client via JavaScript, as we'll see below.
Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project designed and maintained by Google. Google Chrome browser uses Chromium codebase and other proprietary components for additional features required to play games, music and movies protected by DRM. This page explains how to install Chromium browser on Ubuntu Linux 20.04 and 22.04 LTS desktop computers.
Monitoring Linux services is a basic task for a Linux professional. However, doing it effectively also requires tools that help the process. That’s why today I’m going to help you install Monit on Ubuntu 20.04, so you can monitor services comfortably.
Shared object files streamline programs by providing information applications need to do their jobs, but that don't have to be part of the application itself. To find out which of these files a Linux command calls on, use the ldd command.
Node.JS is an open-source, backend Javascript runtime environment built on Google’s V8 engine. It’s an asynchronous event-driven Javascript runtime environment tailored to build fast and scalable network applications and backend API services.
There are three ways that you can leverage to install Node.JS on Ubuntu and we will explore each of them.
Golang, also shortened as Go, is a free and open-source statically typed programming language that focuses on simplicity, efficiency, and reliability. It was originally developed for applications related to infrastructure and networking and was intended to replace server-side apps such as C and Java.
Over time, Go has become hugely popular. It is used to write command-line tools and is widely used in artificial intelligence, cloud-based, and server-side applications. However, Go really performs the best when it comes to infrastructure. Some of the popular DevOps tools such as Kubernetes and Docker.
Ubuntu 22.04 finally merged desktop icon settings into System Settings (Gnome Control Center). However, it only provides few options to toggle display ‘Home’ folder, change icon size and new icon position.
By right-clicking on desktop and select ‘Desktop Icons Settings’ from pop-up menu, it will bring up the ‘Appearance‘ settings page as the picture below shows...
Rust Programming Language is a new language from Mozilla and the Rust team that was designed to bring modern programming language features and high performance to systems programming. It has many new concepts, though it is still a work in progress, so do not expect it to be perfect.
Rust is a remarkable project, as its goal of creating one trustworthy compiler for safe code is slowly developing into reality. A responsible system programmer can trust Rust to provide them with an end-to-end system of compilation, analysis, and runtime support that’s free of undefined behaviors or other exploitable flaws.
Rust is not just a language, but also an ecosystem. Rust has tools and libraries that together make building fast and secure systems easy.
When it comes to Content Management Systems, WordPress reigns supreme. WordPress powers nearly 43% of all the websites hosted online followed by its competitors such as HubSpot CMS, Joomla, Drupal, Wix, and Shopify to mention a few. It is opensource and absolutely free to download and install.
In this guide, we will show you how to install Worpress on RHEL 8 with the Nginx webserver.
Normally, when you install Docker, it needs full permissions (root) on the host system. This creates a potential security problem because both containers and the (daemon) Docker service will work as root. In the rootless installation of Docker, only the Docker daemon runs as root while the containers run as normal users.
Why does it matter? Because if the service running in a container is compromised, the attacker may access the system files as well. There is no real isolation of the containers.
The open source Podman project was created to primarily run containers without root. This put pressure on Docker to support a similar feature so that containers run as normal users but the Docker service (daemon) works as root.
This rootless installation is now available from Docker itself and you don't need to use Podman just for this feature.
In this article, I will explain how to install Docker without root access. But before I show you those steps, let's first discuss the disadvantage of this mode.
Drupal is a free and open-source web content management system powered by PHP. It is a highly flexible platform for digital innovation. The reason why Drupal is so important is because of its availability and is free and open-source. No license is needed to operate it. It has a larger community meaning any time you experience an issue with the platform you can always turn to a ready-to-help community.
AnyDesk is a cross-platform Remote client that allows you to remotely control any desktop and it has numerous features like remote control, file transfer, group policies, address book, custom namespace, REST API support, whitelist, Two-Factor Authentication, and many more.
Having a spooky experience in a dark environment is always exciting and thrilling. In the reality, it’s not always possible. But lots of virtual games can provide you with an opportunity to experience a variety of spooky worlds. And Linux users can enjoy the thrilling experience of having a tour in such dark worlds as well. If you don’t know much about them, you are in the right place then. Here, you will learn about some of the best horror games for Linux.
What does the future of gaming look like? Launchers galore, Linux, and other things that make the current landscape look very messy.
Valve has again upgraded the Steam Deck Client software with new features, performance improvements and bug fixes. Plus, check out some of our recent videos.
The team behind the very popular and fantastic open source video capture software OBS Studio have done a Steam release. For Linux users though, you should just stick to Flatpak from Flathub.
With the Steam release it's only supported for Windows and macOS, and their official Steam FAQ post mentions they have "no concrete plans for providing a Linux build on Steam". Why though? They said they can just re-use existing builds for other platforms but for Linux it would need another additional build done. However, they also said they will "look into the feasibility of providing such a version" but they're quite busy.
While there is the popular OpenRCT2 for an open-source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, it does rely on the original data files, and so the FreeRCT project aims to be a completely free and open source inspired game.
Between 2022-03-15 and 2022-03-22 there were 15 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 238 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 6.3 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones...
Lightweight Linux distributions share similar characteristics with their desktop-oriented counterparts. They give us the best of both worlds, but with a slightly modified user experience.
They’re easy to install and use, but offer just enough customization to cater to the different needs of different users. In this list, we’ll be going over some of the tried and tested champions of the lightweight Linux distro world.
The Open letter about unsafe Codes of Conduct has kicked up some questions from people who are still not sure if there is a problem or not.
The email below from the debian-private gossip network gives us the opportunity to have a closer look inside the mind of an enforcer. One of the reasons these people are so sensitive about the leaks from debian-private is because they have often let their guard down and revealed the way they really think is entirely inconsistent with their public statements about being open and welcome to diversity.
The first key point in the email is that Enrico Zini is actively thinking about how he has the power to destroy people's lives simply by using his title to rubber stamp the vendetta of the day. We can see evidence of him following through on this conspiracy in the falsification of a rape charge. If you look at the message he sent to ITWire begging them to make their article more aggressive towards Appelbaum, what he does in practice is inconsistent with the words below where he pretends he doesn't want to do any harm.
The biggest threat patched in this new Linux kernel security update for Ubuntu systems is CVE-2022-0435, a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability discovered by Samuel Page in Linux kernel’s TIPC (Transparent Inter-Process Communication) protocol implementation, which could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash) on installations that have a TIPC bearer configured. This security issue affected all supported Ubuntu systems and kernels.
From a performance standpoint we know building a homebrew Raspberry Pi cluster doesn’t make a lot of sense, as even a fairly run of the mill desktop x86 machine is sure to run circles around it. That said, there’s an argument to be made that rigging up a dozen little Linux boards gives you a compact and affordable playground to experiment with things like parallel computing and load balancing. Is it a perfect argument? Not really. But if you’re anything like us, the whole thing starts making a lot more sense when you realize your cluster of Pi Zeros can be built to look like the iconic Cray-1 supercomputer.
A startling fact is that there are in excess of a billion people who have some type of disability. That represents approximately 15% of the world’s population with a physical, sensory or mental limitation that interferes with their ability to move, see, hear or learn. 350 million people in the world are partially sighted or blind. The faster computer technology evolves, the more excluded these individuals would become without development in computer software that seeks to address their needs.
Accessibility is the degree to which products, devices, services, or environments are available to as many people as possible whatever their circumstances. Accessibility can be viewed as the ability to access and benefit from a system or entity. Accessibility is paramount. Social inclusion is not an act of charity but a fundamental human right.
On Saturday’s opening of this year’s two-day LibrePlanet convention, the Free Software Foundation announced the recipients of the 2021 Free Software Awards. The awards are handed out each year at the FSF-hosted event, to groups and individuals in the free and open source software community who have made significant contributions to software freedom.
This year’s recipients are computer scientist Paul Eggert, a faculty member at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering, Emacs contributor Protesilaos Stavrou, and SecuRepairs, an information security association involved in “right to repair” issues.
The advice to use strong types or to put units in names is not limited to variables and function arguments, it’s applicable to APIââ¬â°s, metric names, serialization formats, configuration files, command-line flags, etc. And although duration values are the most common case, this advice is not limited to those either, it also applies to monetary amounts, lengths, data sizes, etc.
As a Product Manager, I'm constantly thinking about value. The benefit of a feature is often apparent, but how to measure it in Dollars, Yen, and Euros?
We've been recently working on a Value Analysis Tool for our customers. It's straightforward to calculate the value of cost savings for relative process improvements, waste reduction, and other enhancements where one shaves off 10% or 30% of the current expenses. Measuring the monetary value of user experience and employee satisfaction improvements is significantly more difficult, if not impossible, in the short term, even though they are of utmost importance in the long term. Hence, we built the analysis model using only tangible benefits with a direct, undebatable influence.
Most Americans know St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through television advertisements featuring Hollywood celebrities asking for contributions or the millions of fundraising appeals that regularly arrive in mailboxes across the country.
But a select group of potential donors is targeted in a more intimate way. Representatives of the hospital’s fundraising arm visit their homes; dine with them at local restaurants; send them personal notes and birthday cards; and schedule them for “love calls.”
Today’s New York Times has an op-ed by Margaret Renki about Thomas More.€ As a high school senior she saw a film production of “A Man for All Seasons” (Robert Bolt).€ She recently visited the Hans Holbein retrospective in Manhatten and its€ famous painting of More whose red sleeves are described in rhapsodies. € “The sleeve was ecstasy, the sleeve should be illegal, the sleeve was Utopia,” says one rhapsodist who says more than he knows.
We know the sleeve’s€ red came from Oaxaca where the cochineal was harvested from the prickly pear cactus.€ The little bug was crushed and, voilà, red!€ It became the color of power in Renaissance Europe, the color of cardinals, the color for Louis XIV, and the color of this Lord Chancellor, at least of his sleeves.€ But might it not have been blood?€ The blood from torturing the victims of Church and State?€ He did apply the torture.€ But blood is not dye, Macbeth notwithstanding.
Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said foreign equity restrictions would be "eased out" in several sectors, including telecommunications, shipping, airlines, railway and subways.
The amendments do not apply to sectors classified as public utilities, such as water and electricity distribution, where foreign equity remains capped at 40 percent.
The International Space Station was built not only in the name of science and exploration, but as a symbol of unity. Five space agencies, some representing countries who had been bitter Cold War rivals hardly a decade before the ISS was launched, came together to build something out of a sci-fi novel: a home among the stars (well, in Low Earth Orbit) for humans from around the globe to work with one another for the sake of scientific advancement, high above the terrestrial politics that governed rock below.€ That was the idea, at least.
Most consumer remote controls operate using infrared light. This works well assuming the piece of equipment has a line of sight to the remote. But if you have, say a receiver in a cabinet or closet, the IR remote signal can’t reach the sensor. Some equipment has remote receivers that you can leave poking out, but it is still not very handy. That’s why some equipment now uses RF remotes. [Xtropie] used a pair of inexpensive 433 MHz RF modules to convert an IR system to RF. You can see a short video about the project below.
Arguably one of the most important pieces of software to have in your hardware hacking arsenal is a nice serial terminal emulator. There’s plenty of choice out there, from classic command line tools to flashier graphical options, which ultimately all do the same thing in the end: let you easily communicate with gadgets using UART. But now you’ve got a new choice — instead of installing a serial terminal emulator, you can simply point your browser to the aptly-named serialterminal.com.
There are several projects you can imagine where it would be useful to have a robot follow you. For example, we’ve always wanted luggage that would trail us at the airport and we’ve seen several coolers that will follow you. [Madmax95] apparently dream of having a medical cart following a patient, though, and that’s good too. But how do you do it? [Max’s] method was to strip down a Roomba and build a work table and electronics on it. An Arduino controls the motor and communicates with a PC. The PC reads video from a Kinect camera on the robot and uses special tracking software to follow the patient.
Scanning electron microscopes are one of those niche instruments that most of us don’t really need all the time, but would still love to have access to once in a while. Although we’ve covered a few attempts at home-builds before, many have faltered, except this project over on Hackday.IO by user Vini’s Lab, which appears to be still under active development. The principle of the SEM is pretty simple; a specially prepared sample is bombarded with a focussed beam of electrons, that is steered in a raster pattern. A signal is acquired, using one of a number of techniques, such as secondary electronics (SE) back-scattered electrons (BSE) or simply the transmitted current into the sample. This signal can then be used to form an image of the sample or gather other properties.
The retrocomputing community are experts at keeping vintage Apple iron running, but if you’re looking for a simpler way to pay homage to the original Mac, check out this Raspberry Pi powered ‘desk accessory’ by [John Calhoun], fittingly called ‘SystemSix’.
“What did you do during the War on Drugs, Daddy?”—that question terrified many a boomer parent. Especially since, in my case at least, the truthful answer would have been: everything. If you could sniff it, smoke it, snort it, swallow it, or inject it, then I probably did. Having passed between the Scylla of addiction and the Charybdis of HIV/AIDS—losing friends to both—into respectability, I can admit that dumb luck, and white privilege, had a lot to do with my survival. Like Tavian Crosland, who found that dealing weed was his only shot at economic independence, I also sometimes sold drugs. Because even on a full scholarship and with a work-study job, I needed the money just to pay my bills in college. Thanks to Nelson Rockefeller’s punitive drug laws, getting caught back then could mean life in prison.
If a single line endures from the psychedelic carnival of the 1960s, it’s probably Harvard psychologist and psychedelic cheerleader Timothy Leary’s catchphrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” A call to wake up, reject the norms, defy authority, protest the war.1
Today, there is a new psychedelic fervor, best captured in a very different sort of pithy quip: “I finally understood Bitcoin.”2
Annapolis Police Chief Ed Jackson was raised by a single mother in a Baltimore housing project. “Police officers weren’t seen as our friends,” he recalls. He and his five siblings were driven by “never wanting to disappoint” their protective mom, he adds—and this helped keep them in school and off the streets.1
Every so often over the years, I’ve discussed germ theory denial and how it is such an integral part of alternative medicine and the belief systems that undergird alternative medicine modalities. Germ theory denial, of course, is the denial that “germs” (i.e., microbes, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and all the microscopic nasties that can cause infectious diseases) are actually the cause of infectious diseases. Indeed, nearly 12 years ago, I wrote a post entitled Yes, there really are people who don’t accept the germ theory of disease, in which I also noted how large swaths of antivaccine beliefs are rooted in germ theory denial. (After all, if germs don’t cause disease, then you don’t need vaccines.) Ever since then, periodically I’ve been gobsmacked by more examples of germ theory denial, up to and including during the COVID-19 pandemic, when quacks have even misused Koch’s postulates to try to “prove” that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t cause COVID-19. But why are infectious diseases contagious? Germ theory explains why and how. Germ theory denial tries, but has far less explanatory power. That doesn’t stop “Dr.” Melissa Sells, who tells us that it’s all about the vibes—excuse me, vibrations—ma-an! Buckle up for some serious woo!
The White House on Monday urged private companies to bolster their cyber defenses, citing evolving intelligence suggesting the Russian government is exploring “options for potential cyberattacks” targeting U.S. critical infrastructure.
President Biden on Monday called on top business executives to build up their companies' capacity to deal with potential cyberattacks from Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the invasion of Ukraine.
The outage impacted some apps and people differently. In some cases, an app like the App Store would load but would hang or wouldn’t let you download an app. In other cases, the app won’t load altogether. It’s not clear what caused the outage and an Apple spokesperson declined to comment.
The claims by Lapsus$, a group that appears to be based in Brazil, are being taken seriously because its earlier claims about Samsung, and also Nvidia, were proved to be true.
Additionally, Microsoft has not made any categorical denial of the claim that its Azure DevOps servers were breached and data stolen.
The South American-based data extortion hacking group Lapsus$ has allegedly gained access to Microsoft's Azure DevOps source code repositories and stolen data from the company.
Unlike other cybercriminal groups which deploy ransomware on the devices of their victims, Lapsus$ instead prefers to target the source code repositories of large tech companies. After stealing their proprietary data, the group then tries to ransom it back to the companies themselves for millions of dollars.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday said he intends to reintroduce Medicare for All legislation in the U.S. Senate in the coming days as the Biden administration moves ahead with a Medicare privatization scheme and millions of Americans remain at imminent risk of losing their insurance once pandemic protections expire.
"In the midst of the current set of horrors—war, oligarchy, pandemics, inflation, climate change, etc.—we must continue the fight to establish healthcare as a human right, not a privilege," Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, wrote in a Twitter post. "I will soon be reintroducing our Medicare for All legislation."
And while sales figures are hard to come by, one report said that global purchases of dumbphones were due to hit one billion units last year, up from 400 million in 2019. This compares to worldwide sales of 1.4 billion smart phones last year, following a 12.5% decline in 2020.
Meanwhile, a 2021 study by accountancy group Deloitte said that one in 10 mobile phone users in the UK had a dumbphone.
The time has come for Congress and the states to ban the targeting of ads to us based on our online behavior. This post explains why and how.
The targeting of ads to us based on our online behavior is a three-part cycle of track, profile, and target.
This business has proven extremely lucrative for the companies that participate in it: Facebook, Google, and a host of smaller competitors turn data and screen real estate into advertiser dollars at staggering scale. Some companies do all three of these things (track, profile, and target); others do only one or two.
How the tables have turned. A high-level US delegation visited Venezuela on March 5, hoping to repair economic ties with Caracas. Venezuela, one of the world’s poorest countries partly due to US-Western sanctions is, for once, in the driving seat, capable of alleviating an impending US energy crisis if dialogue with Washington continues to move forward.
As people around the world were glued to their screens trying to make sense of the Russian-Ukrainian war, a Russian airstrike devastated a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol. Reports suggest that the Mariupol complex was hit by a series of blasts that shattered windows and ripped away the façade of one building. Clips from the scene show Ukrainian police and soldiers rushing to evacuate victims, including a heavily pregnant woman who is seen carried on a stretcher amidst burning cars and torched trees. A few days later the Associated Press reported that both the woman and her baby had died as a result of the attack.
Now that we know how the United States’ generation-long misadventure in Afghanistan ended, one Army officer’s experience in 2005, recounted in Craig Whitlock’s excellent and depressing The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, takes on an elevated salience. About four years into the conflict, Maj. Charles Abeyawardena, a strategic planner based at the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., flew to the war zone to study the ill-fated effort to create a modern Afghan army. The task was already proving to be difficult, but the US government remained hopeful—as it would, officially at least, for another 15 years—that the nascent Afghan security forces would eventually become capable of keeping the country stable on their own, enabling the United States to withdraw with honor.1
Can we stare into hell and refuse to see . . . an enemy?
This is the deep, haunting need that is now required, as we clutch tomorrow, hold it tight, vow to protect it with our lives. But it’s far too easy, instead, to surrender to a certainty that the other guy — Russia, with the smirking face of Vladimir Putin — is 100 percent wrong, acting solely out of greed and delusional grandeur, which is something€ we€ would never do (and have never done). And it goes without saying we are blameless in all this. On with the show!
These days, when Hoyle isn’t at the Marsh, or in his studio—a converted garage behind his house in ungentrified Oakland—he’s out and about talking with and listening to people. Call it “deep hanging out” and “deep listening.” The anthropologist, Clifford Geetz, coined the term, “deep hanging out” which he practiced with gangs and tribes around the world. The Bay Area author, Malcolm Margolin, who founded Heyday Press and who has published a great deal about California Indians, is a master of deep hanging out. His new book is titled€ Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California€ (2021). Like Margolin, Hoyle knows the thrill of wonderment.
“It’s an extraordinary time for cross-cultural connections,” Hoyle tells me on St. Patrick’s Day, which has made converts to the Irish and their causes around the globe for more than 100 years. Sometimes, the words and expressions that Hoyle hears on the streets of his own neighborhood, and in “old school working class bars,” as he calls them, make their way through the creative process to the monologues he delivers to audiences who come, he says, for “comedy and catharsis.”€ An habitual traveler, Dan has left comfortable niches and wandered far afield—to Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and the South Bronx— his ears to the ground, his eyes searching for the telling detail.
The justification for rehabilitating MBS is that more Saudi oil is needed to combat President Vladimir Putin by freeing Europe from dependence on Russian crude.Johnson’s visit to Riyadh this week was preceded by the execution on a single day of 81 prisoners, many of whom said that they had been tortured into making false confessions, but, even so, the Prime Minister brazenly claimed to see signs of positive progress in the Saudi kingdom.
Great dollops of hypocrisy are visible here because, despite their different political backgrounds, MBS and Putin became political untouchables in similar ways. In March 2018, agents from Russian military intelligence tried to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok. The Skripals survived the attack, but Dawn Sturgess died some months later after accidentally spraying her wrist with Novichok contained in a discarded perfume bottle.
On March 12, the Saudi Ministry of the Interior announced the execution of 81 Saudi and non-Saudi nationals, bringing the total of those put to death by Riyadh in 2022 to 92.€ The last grand bout of killing was in 2019, when 37 people, including 33 Shi’a men, were put to death after being convicted by customarily dubious trials.
Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, claimed that this orgy of state killing was “all the more chilling in light of Saudi Arabia’s deeply flawed justice system, which metes out death sentences following trials that are grossly and blatantly unfair, including basing verdicts on ‘confessions’ extracted under torture or other ill-treatment.”
As a Syrian American, it is difficult to acknowledge such a grim milestone without feeling a profound sense of anguish over the nearly 500,000 lives lost, the displacement of over 13 million people, and the destruction of its cultural relics.
I often wonder whether Syrians and Palestinian refugees I’ve met during my visits there are still safe. I cling on to my pre-war memories, like my euphoric first trip to Aleppo to discover my ancestral roots. I also still remember that tranquil day in 2004 when I basked in the splendor of the impressive Roman ruins at Palmyra, years before ISIL terrorists badly damaged the ancient city.
Kamran Manafly is a 28-year-old schoolteacher in Moscow. Or rather he was until recently, when he lost his job after refusing to follow state guidelines on how to discuss Russia’s “special military operation in Ukraine” with students. The final straw for the administrators was a photograph Manafly shared on Instagram from an antiwar protest where he wrote that he “doesn’t want to be a mirror of government propaganda.” The school fired him for “immoral behavior,” and a security guard later attacked him when he tried to retrieve his belongings from his office. Within days, the principal even threatened to have him prosecuted for “betraying the Motherland.” Meduza spoke to Manafly about his dismissal and subsequent decision to leave Russia altogether. What follows is his story, told in his own words.
Working in exile, Alexey Navalny’s team of anti-corruption activists have released a new investigation linking a $700-million superyacht to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The luxury vessel, officially registered to an offshore company in the Marshall Islands, is allegedly crewed by members of Russia’s Secret Service (the FSO). Navalny’s team published the investigation on the eve of the Kremlin critic’s sentencing in yet another criminal trial. Navalny, who is currently serving more than 2.5 years in prison, could see his term extended to 13 years behind bars on new charges of fraud and contempt of court.
Russian troops have been shelling Kharkiv nonstop for over three weeks now. The city’s residential areas and historic center are completely destroyed, and necessities like food and medicines are difficult to come by. More than 100 civilians have been killed, while hundreds of thousands of others have fled the city. Meduza spoke to some of the people who remain about what life is like in Kharkiv and what’s motivating them to stay.
Ukrainian authorities on Monday rejected Russia's demand that they drop their arms and surrender the strategic port city of Mariupol, where relentless Russian shelling and artillery fire has sparked the worst humanitarian crisis of the three-week war.
On Sunday, Russian military officials promised to allow "Ukrainian armed units and foreign mercenaries" to leave the city along a specified route Monday morning—provided that they agreed to stop resisting Russia's incursion into the city. Those who opted to continue fighting, Russia warned, would face "military tribunals."
Peace activists climbed atop and occupied the roof of a Raytheon facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Monday to protest the massive military contractor's war profiteering in Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine, and elsewhere across the globe.
"Raytheon profits multiply as bombs fall on schools, wedding tents, hospitals, homes, and communities."
Recently the maintainer of a popular open source Node JS package “node-ipc” released a new plugin called “peacenotwar.” A Node JS package is publicly-available JavaScript code used by developers to add functionality to applications. According to the maintainer, this plugin would display a message of peace on users’ desktops, serving “as a non-violent protest against Russia’s aggression.” Some versions of the node-ipc package, a networking tool that has been downloaded millions of times, will automatically run this protest-ware. Then a post on Github claimed that some versions of the node-ipc package were deleting and overwriting all files with the heart emoji if the package was installed on a computer with a Russian or Belarusian IP address.€
If the accusations are true, this is a terrible idea which could result in all sorts of horrible and unintended outcomes. What if a Russian human rights or anti-war organization, or a Russian hospital, was using this particular software package? This action—although conceived of as a simple nonviolent protest by the package creator—could result in the loss of important footage of protests or war crimes, loss of medical records, or even the deaths of innocent people.€
The trend of half-baked hacktivism involving everyday internet users is now growing into sites and games that encourage users to become part of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against some Russian digital assets. For the same reasons mentioned above, randomly sending attacks without thinking through the consequences and potential collateral damage are feel-good actions that amount to shooting in the dark. Also unknown are the consequences for users that were part of this campaign. Are users aware that they could have their IPs logged by a potentially aggressive and vindictive target? It’s an incredibly irresponsible action that gives tools to ordinary users without the due diligence it deserves, putting innocent lives at risk on all sides.
Scott Johnston — who worked on the team that helped plan the Ellipse rally — says that’s just not so. He claims that leading figures in the Trump administration and campaign deliberately planned to have crowds converge on the Capitol, where the 2020 election was being certified — and “make it look like they went down there on their own.”
"This was nothing less than an assassination for terrorist purposes," he said, noting it was "carried out because of a warped and twisted and violent ideology.
"It was a murder carried out by that young man (Ali) who for many years had been planning just such an attack and who was, and is, a committed, fanatical, radicalised Islamist terrorist."
The closure of over 800 McDonald’s restaurants particularly stands out: McDonald’s was the first American restaurant to openin Russia, in 1990. Its arrival symbolized Russia’s new pro-Western era.
That era is rapidly ending, giving way to a quickly spreading revival of Russian nationalism. Such nationalism is a direct outcome of the country’s economic suffocation through sanctions and the West’s broad rejection of Russia and its war with Ukraine.
Congress — which is not only interested€ in “the Benjamins,” that is, Israel Lobby contributions — is surely operating in what Yakov Hirsch calls “hasbara culture,” according to which anyone who objects to any action of the state of Israel, especially where the Palestinians are concerned, is without question an anti-Semite. In this view, the presence of anti-Semitism is a certainty; the only question is how it manifests itself in any given situation. (The resemblance to critical race theory is striking.)
How do hasbara culturalists know that Israel’s critics are anti-Semites?
A full-out containment of China
Amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Frank Kendall, US Secretary of the Air Force, highlighted the US foreign policy behind its military deployment, at the Air Force Association’s Annual Air Warfare Symposium, “Russia and other threats will not be discounted. But China, with both regional and global ambitions, the resources to pursue them, will be our greatest national security challenge”. He pointed to seven “operational imperatives” that he believes are necessary for the forces to address possible conflicts, including an “invasion” of Taiwan.
Fake news is as prevalent in Europe as it is in the United States, in Latin America, Africa and Asia.€ Patently false narratives, false flag operations and bogus incidents are concocted by governments in order to justify their policies, a compliant corporate media acting as echo chambers of the propaganda issued by governments.€ Purportedly independent journalists (with their own agendas) have no hesitation to print evidence-free allegations, referring to anonymous officials or witnesses, supported by “secret intelligence”. Thus emerges “fragmented truth”, and no one really knows what truth is, everyone clings to his own views, refusing to consider alternative versions of the facts. When it comes to access to reliable information, freedom of opinion and expression, we live in an increasingly polarized, intolerant, intransigent world.
Only reluctantly we must acknowledge that “fake news” have always been around, the difference being that in the past only governments were purveyors of fake news, only governments could successfully manipulate public opinion, whereas today anybody with access to the internet can also weigh in. From experience we also know that all media – CNN, BBC, DW, NYTimes, Washington Post, The Times, The Economist, Le Monde, Le Figaro, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, El Pais, El Mundo, RT, Sputnik, CGTN, Asia Times, Telesur – all slant the news in a particular way.€ They cite their favourite spin doctors and distort the facts, lying here and there, suppressing inconvenient facts and opinions, or shamelessly applying double-standards.
Internet researchers who document extremists have tracked Hoeft for years, pulling alarming images allegedly from his social media feeds, as well as from local police scanners. How did the Dispatch miss Hoeft’s extremism? According to a top editor, the paper’s due diligence, which included a criminal background check, simply failed to turn up his alias.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules today that could require companies to update investors annually on how much planet-heating pollution they’re pumping out and how that pollution could ultimately affect their earnings.
A slew of companies from Apple to Amazon have pledged to become carbon neutral in coming decades. Consistent updates on how much pollution they generate help ensure that climate pledges aren’t just greenwashing or making false promises. The proposed rules are also supposed to protect investors as companies cope with disasters linked to climate change, like more extreme weather.
Due to this unprecedented and unstoppable rise in urbanization, the world’s use of sand has tripled within the last two decades at around 40 to 50 billion tonnes of sand consumed yearly. Experts are now referring to the situation as one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century.
It's not all sand that is in demand, however. Angular sand is what is used in the construction of urban buildings everywhere because it binds more and forms stable concrete. This type of sand is created by the erosion of water.
Sand is the primary substance used in the construction of roads, bridges, high-speed trains and even land regeneration projects. Sand, gravel and rock crushed together are melted down to make the glass used in every window, computer screen and smart phone. Even the production of silicon chips uses sand.
Yet, the world is facing a shortage — and climate scientists say it constitutes one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century.
Rubber producers are facing climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, a destructive fungus and the fight for shipping containers. “We could be on the cusp of a rubber apocalypse,” Ohio State University professor Katrina Cornish told CNBC.
Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.
A nonpartisan organization representing more than 1.5 million veterans, military families, and their civilian supporters launched a nationwide ad campaign on Monday condemning the fossil fuel industry for attempting to exploit Russia's war on Ukraine to expand its drilling operations on U.S. public lands.
"Extraordinary profits and deceptive spin are just more of the same from oil and gas CEOs."
Snow began falling on December 24th, big fluffy flakes that made lace on mittens before melting. Within hours it had coated the ashes, the brick chimneys that the flames had left behind, and the jagged remains of roofs strewn across my burned-out town. White mounds soon softened the look of charred cars that are everywhere, while even the scorched trees that stretch to the hilltops were coated in a forgiving winter wonder.
"The 1.5-degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care."
So said United Nations Secretary-General€ António Guterres on Monday, as he stressed that a swift and just transition to clean energy is necessary to meet the Paris agreement's objective of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5€°C above preindustrial levels—and warned against using Russia's deadly assault on Ukraine as an excuse to ramp up fossil fuel production worldwide.
Environmental advocates celebrated Monday after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released a€ draft rule that would require publicly traded companies to assess how their activities contribute to the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis and disclose how worsening extreme weather and efforts to mitigate and adapt to it are likely to affect profitability—though they emphasized the need for further improvement.
"Protecting our financial system from climate-induced risk protects us all."
Universities in the U.S. and U.K. on Monday faced a demand from over 500 leading climate experts and academics to reject any environmental or energy research funding from the fossil fuel industry.
"To all universities, at this moment of extreme crisis, we urge you to heed our call and cut damaging research ties with the fossil fuel industry."
So can I invest in cryptocurrencies without risk? No, it is possible to invest in cryptocurrencies without volatility, but there are other risks. We are talking about technology, so, as always, we do not recommend investing in something that is not understood and, if it is done, always in small amounts that one can afford to lose.
Bitcoin uses more renewable energy than most countries
Bitcoin mining is currently estimated to account for about 0.5% of global electricity consumption
Now Bitcoin has a carbon footprint equivalent to Greece
Only seven mining companies own almost 80% of all computer power on the network
Bitcoin mining currently uses 66 times more electricity than in 2015
In 2009 the cost of mining took a few second’s worth of household electricity, in 2021 the cost was worth 9 years of household electricity
A single Bitcoin transaction results in the same carbon footprint as a traveler flying from New York to Amsterdam.
Cryptocurrencies could remake our financial systems, but question marks remain over their green credentials. Now a new analysis suggests their environmental impact has gotten even worse after a mass exodus of miners from China.
The power consumption of cryptocurrencies is a contentious subject. For a start, accurately measuring the amount of energy used by a decentralized system spread across several continents using a wide diversity of hardware configured in innumerably different ways is fraught with difficulties.
A team of researchers from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany has found that as Bitcoin miners have moved from China to the U.S. and other countries, their carbon emissions have increased. In their paper published the journal Joule, the group reports that as Bitcoin miners have been forced out of China, they have moved to places with fossil-fuel-based electricity sources, thereby increasing their carbon emissions.
The childcare and universal pre-K provisions included in a $1.75 trillion package passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in November would hugely benefit not only families but also the American economy, businesses, and state governments.
"It's arguably the single most important thing we can do for families emerging from the pandemic and returning to work."
In Mexico and other poor countries and regions, companies are taking water from aquifers, springs, rivers, and lakes, and putting it in plastic bottles or turning it into flavored and sugary drinks, then dumping their used and dirty water back into water sources. That, along with other industrial pollution which is disproportionately disposed of into rural, Indigenous, and poorer communities, means locals are not able to drink tap water and end up paying extortionate prices to the European and US corporations.
In exchange for taking Mexico’s water, Mexicans give water bottling corporations US$66 billion a year. Coca Cola, Pepsi, Danone, Nestle, Bimbo, and other bottling and junk food companies extract over 133 billion liters of water, and then dump at least 119 billion liters of contaminated water back into water basins and aquifers.
Texas has spent billions of state tax dollars on border security for nearly two decades. Last year, state lawmakers approved a budget that included an unprecedented $3 billion for such initiatives.
As the state puts more money into border security measures, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune are seeking to better understand how the funding is used, what the investment is accomplishing and how the initiatives affect border residents.
Thomas King-Randall had been waiting for two hours to drop his daughters off at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Midland, Texas. It was 10:30 on a school night in August and it was her turn to care for the two girls.
The ex-girlfriend showed up drunk and was arguing with her new boyfriend in his truck, police later wrote in a report. King-Randall, who is Black, said in an interview that the woman’s Latino boyfriend called him a racial slur, which led to a fight.
What has happened to P&O workers is exactly how deregulated Britain is meant to operate. With British regulations abolished or inoperative and EU regulations void, predatory international capitalists are free to treat workers like property, to be picked up or disposed of at whim, with no consideration at all other than the profit of the company.
RIO DE JANEIRO – Former Brazilian president, and frontrunner in the upcoming October 2022 presidential election, Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva is putting four of his one-time accusers of corruption and money laundering in the dock. The initial charges and inquiries — all 25 of them — were completely dismissed earlier this month.
As expected, the March 15th celebrations turned into major campaigning events last week. Fidesz-KDNP wanted to show their strength with the Peace March, while the opposition also took to the streets with the leader of the European People's Party and former Polish Prime Minister. The war is still the main topic of the campaign, but this week saw a new subject come to the fore: teacher discontent. In this week's analysis, we'll be taking a look at Péter Márki-Zay's first public TV appearance as well as addressing why we will go yet another campaign cycle without seeing a debate. The campaign in 5 points. Translated by Dominic Spadacene
Most Americans outside the Washington Beltway, I’m willing to wager, couldn’t give a rip whether good policies come out of the legislative or executive branch. They just want government to work for them and their families.
It's important now, in light of both world events and the way the Republican party has been captured by a small group of rightwing billionaires and white supremacists, to introduce Americans to an 18th century word that is new to most people alive today, at least in the context of partisan politics.
A super PAC supporting corporate Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb in his U.S. Senate run appears to be gearing up for an attack on his primary challenger Lt. Gov. John Fetterman—who's commanding a 30-point lead—over his support for widely backed progressive proposals.
Documents obtained by Politico reveal the super PAC, Penn Progress, attempting to blame Lamb's (D-Pa.) position well behind Fetterman on voters' lack of understanding that the candidate supports forward-thinking policies.
Progressive advocacy groups and other backers of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court renewed calls for senators to swiftly confirm her as the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday kicked off four days of hearings.
"Jackson's sterling judicial credentials and her lived experience make her uniquely qualified for a seat on the highest court of the land."
Progressives on Monday were joined by critics from across the political spectrum in denouncing Republican senators' attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's record as a public defender and on the federal bench at her confirmation hearing to join the U.S. Supreme Court, as lawmakers including Sen. Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley suggested Jackson is overly sympathetic to accused and convicted criminals, including child abusers.
On the first day of the judge's confirmation hearings, Hawley listed a number of cases that Jackson heard involving child pornography possession, accusing her of flouting federal sentencing guidelines and recommendations by prosecutors when she decided the offenders' punishment.
It’s confirmation week for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s pick to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. Jackson happens to be a Black woman, so that means we will see more concentrated racist innuendo and overt bigotry from the Republican Party this week than at any time since Donald Trump attempted to rile up a mob to depose the incoming administration. If the Democrats were good at optics, they’d hand out a dog whistle to everyone in the hearing room and instruct them to blow it every time a Republican levied a racist attack.
The fight over the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court is powerful evidence that our political system is broken like never before. There is no plausible basis for opposing Jackson, who has impeccable qualifications and about whom nothing controversial has been discovered.
A Russian court on Monday banned Facebook and Instagram as "extremist", part of sweeping efforts by Moscow to crack down on social media during the conflict in Ukraine.
The Russian authorities have accused US tech giant Meta -- the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp -- of tolerating "Russophobia" since President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine on February 24.
Facebook and Twitter have been inaccessible in Russia since early March and Instagram was blocked in the country a week ago.
Global Witness, a rights group, submitted eight paid advertisements containing different versions of hate speech to Facebook. The social media giant approved all eight ads, Global Witness said in a release.
The advertisements were pulled before they were published but showed that Facebook's controls did not properly detect or stop calls for violence or hate speech even in simple tasks such as monitoring paid advertisements.
Specifically, the ads contained language from the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar's report to the Human Rights Council, The Associated Press reported.
In an exclusive interview, we speak with prominent Sahrawi human rights activist Sultana Khaya in occupied Western Sahara. Moroccan authorities have held her and her family under de facto house arrest for nearly 500 days, where she has been subjected to harassment and sexual abuse. A delegation of U.S.-based activists arrived at her home last week to break the siege and ward off police surveillance. The Moroccan government has targeted advocates like Khaya for their work defending the region’s Sahrawi people and advocating for an independent Western Sahara. Sahrawi people have been waiting “a long time for a referendum” to decide their future, says Khaya. U.S. delegation members plan to stay “for as long as we need to be” to ensure the family’s safety, says peace activist Adrienne Kinne.
While the Biden administration has condemned the Russian invasion of a sovereign, independent Ukraine, it has refused to similarly recognize or support Western Sahara, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1975. Human rights groups have documented brutal suppression of pro-independence activists and the Indigenous population, known as Sahrawis. The disparity between U.S. treatment of the two countries reveals Western hypocrisy and discrimination when it comes to countries that are not white, Christian and European, says Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. He adds that U.S. policy on Western Sahara emboldens Putin’s claims on Ukraine, as it shows the U.S. lacks principled opposition to illegal territorial expansion. “When Biden says that Russia has no right to unilaterally change international boundaries, that countries cannot expand their territory by force, he’s certainly correct. But he seems to think it’s OK if you’re a U.S. ally like Morocco.”
President Biden reportedly warned Chinese President Xi Jinping via video call Friday that China would face “consequences” if it provided material support to Russia amid the war in Ukraine. The call was part of U.S. efforts to minimize an emerging Sino-Russian alliance, which threatens U.S. influence over the Eurasian landmass, says Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As U.S. global power declines, China and Russia “are going to emerge as the new centers of global power on the planet,” he adds.
When it comes to online disinformation, does it make sense to fight fire with fire using paid social media ads?
A new report by Reality Team, a nonprofit digital marketing group, suggests that social media ads can help reach people who aren’t closely watching topics like climate change or vaccine science and are often targeted by disinformation campaigns.
Multiple social media posts purport to show a photo of a Ukrainian farmer stealing a Russian rocket. However, the image has been doctored. The original photo was taken by NASA in 2018 and shows a rocket towed by a train, not a tractor.
Russia has released a video of Ben Wallace obtained by state hoaxers purporting to show him discussing Ukraine’s nuclear ambitions.
The video was released on YouTube just hours after Downing Street accused Vladimir Putin’s Russia of hoaxing the Defence Secretary and Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, through impostors posing as Ukrainian politicians in calls with the pair.
It’s that time of year — March Madness — when tons of people have filled out brackets and are watching college basketball. Way back in 2020 I had jokingly suggested on Twitter that we should set up a bracket for the most frequently misunderstood legal concepts, and people seemed to really like the idea. Of course, then I got busy and did nothing with it… until now. Introducing the inaugural Techdirt March Madness to determine what is the most misunderstood legal concept.
Over the last few years we’ve seen this ongoing bizarre infatuation with “cancel culture” despite little evidence to suggest that it’s a serious issue. As we wrote nearly two years ago, in response to Harper’s trying to sound some sort of vague alarm about cancel culture, so much of the debate conflates a variety of different things. There certainly are some cases of a mob of voices misunderstanding or overreacting to something mostly innocuous said or done by someone, and sometimes that leads to consequences that lots of people feel are exaggerated or undeserved. But the issue is that a huge percentage of the people using the term “cancel culture” or arguing that there’s some great silencing happening are hiding behind those extraordinarily rare examples to really say that they don’t like being criticized for their opinions.
The new proposal, cynically titled the SMART Copyright Act, gives the Library of Congress, in “consultation” with other government agencies, the authority to designate “technical measures” that internet services must use to address copyright infringement. In other words, it gives the Copyright Office the power to set the rules for internet technology and services, with precious little opportunity for appeal.
First, a little background: One of the conditions of the safe harbors from copyright liability included in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—safe harbors that are essential to the survival of all kinds of intermediaries and platforms, from a knitting website to your ISP—is that the provider must accommodate any “standard technical measures” for policing online infringement. Congress sensibly required that any such measures be “developed pursuant to a broad consensus of copyright owners and service providers in an open, fair, voluntary, multi-industry standards process.” As a practical matter, no such broad consensus has ever emerged, nor even a “multi-industry standards process” to develop it. There are many reasons why, and one of the biggest ones is that the number and variety of both service providers and copyright owners has exploded since 1998.€ These industries and owners have wildly varying structures, technologies, and interests. What has emerged instead are privately developed and deployed automated filters, usually deployed at the platform level. And some influential copyright owners want to see those technologies become a legal requirement for all levels.
This legislation seeks to accomplish that by setting up a new process that jettisons the whole notion of consensus and fair process. Instead, it puts the Librarian of Congress in charge of designating technical measures—and requires virtually every service provider to comply with them.
What a task! Some groups will consider a word to be a slur, while others will use it as a term of affection. Actually, it’s even more confusing: some groups consider some words to be slurs when used by outsiders, but not by insiders, which means that a moderator has to understand which participants in a single group are considered insiders, and who is considered an outsider.€
Mods have to make this call in languages they speak imperfectly, or not at all, assisted by a machine translation of unknowable quality.€
Small wonder that trust and safety experts can’t agree when to remove content, when to label it, and when to leave it be. Moderation at scale is an impossible task. Moderators don’t just miss a torrent of vile abuse and awful scams, they also remove Black users’ discussions of racism for being racist, suspend users who report dangerous conspiracy-fodder for pushing conspiracies, punish scientists who debunk vaccine misinformation for spreading misinformation, block game designers ads’ because they contain the word “supplement,” and remove comments praising a cute cat as a “beautiful puss.”
Mr Ratcliffe has been prolific in the British media since his wife’s imprisonment in Iran in April 2016, after she was accused of training journalists in the country - a claim he has always denied.
He has completed two hunger strikes since her internment in an attempt to persuade ministers to do more to secure her release.
The Iranian regime finally agreed to allow her to leave the country this week, after Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, negotiated a deal involving the UK repaying a decades-old debt of €£400million.
According to prosecutors, he was working out in the prison gym when Franck Elong Abé, 35, a former jihadist serving time for terror offences, allegedly launched his attack.
Abé tried to suffocate Colonna with a bin bag after hearing him "blaspheming" and mocking the prophet Muhammed, investigators say.
Ferrell hoped her experience organizing a campaign against book challenges might be instructive to others who similarly oppose what she views as a politically-driven campaign at children's schools.
Well, it finally happened (we’re kind of surprised it didn’t happen sooner): The Babylon Bee has been locked out of our Twitter account.
The satirical article that offended the Twitter overlords? “The Babylon Bee’s Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine.” For the simple offense of labeling a biological man a man, through a satirical headline, we have lost access to all 1.3 million of our followers on Twitter.
A world where you can state a simple biological fact and face censorship, the loss of revenue and your livelihood, and excommunication from the public square for stating truth, no matter how satirical tongue-in-cheek your tone is, is a scary one indeed. As the famous Ron Paul saying goes, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”
On March 14, during a live broadcast on Russian state television network Channel One, a station employee named Marina Ovsyannikova ran out on stage behind the news anchor, unfurled an antiwar sign, and shouted antiwar slogans. After the broadcast, Ovsyannikova was immediately arrested; she was later convicted of participating in an unauthorized protest and fined 30 thousand rubles (about $250). The authorities are now conducting a preliminary inquiry into Ovsyannikova. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter spoke with Ovsyannikova about her start at Channel One in the 2000s —€ and why this war was her breaking point.
As the war against Ukraine grinds on, Russia’s state television networks continue to rack up resignations. Last week, Channel One employee Marina Ovsyannikova staged a one-person antiwar protest on a live news broadcast; special correspondent Zhanna Agalakova resigned from the network at the same time. Shortly after, Dmitry Likin, who has worked as Channel One’s art director for over 20 years, submitted his resignation as well. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter spoke with Likin about his decision.
“Who are we to judge?,” say federal court judges. That’s the questionable conclusion reached by an otherwise solid reading [PDF] of the constitutional implications of one of law enforcement’s favorite new tools: “reverse” warrants. (h/t Orin Kerr/Volokh Conspiracy)
In previous work, we found that Apple moderates content over its engraving services in each of the six regions that we analyzed: the United States, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. Across these regions, we found that Apple’s content moderation practices pertaining to derogatory, racist, or sexual content are inconsistently applied and that Apple’s public-facing documents failed to explain how it derives their filtering rules. Most notably, we found that Apple applied censorship targeting mainland Chinese political sensitivity not only in mainland China but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Following our report, Apple responded that its censorship rules are largely manually curated and that “no third parties or government agencies have been involved [in] the process.” Moreover, Apple indicated that their rules depend on each region’s local laws and regulations.
In this report, six months later, we perform a similar experiment to see what changes Apple has made to their engraving filtering since our previous study. Notably, we find that Apple has eliminated their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan. However, Apple continues to proactively apply broad, keyword-based political censorship in Hong Kong, despite human rights groups’ recommendations for American Internet companies to resist censorship pressures and law enforcement requests to block content. As other major U.S-based tech companies such as Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter do not apply, proactively or otherwise, similar levels of political censorship in Hong Kong, we conclude our report by assessing possible motivations Apple may have for performing it, including appeasement of the Chinese government.
[...]
As in our previous report, we use asterisks (*) in keyword filtering rules to document observed keyword wildcard matching behaviour. For instance, *POO would match “SHAMPOO” but not “POOL”, POO* would match “POOL” but not “SHAMPOO”, and *POO* would match “SHAMPOO”, “POOL”, and “SPOON”. See our previous report for further elaboration of Apple’s wildcard matching system.
We found that nearly all of these keywords referenced political issues considered sensitive by the Chinese government and that the remaining keywords that we had found filtered in Taiwan were not political in nature. Two possible exceptions are *央* (Central) and *屎* (feces), which may have been removed for being overly broad. Although *屎* is no longer filtered, we newly observed the rules *Ã¥ÂÆ屎* (eat shit) and *屎窟* (shit hole). Using our methodology, we are unable to determine if these rules were newly added or if they always existed but only newly detectable due to being previously subsumed by the broader *屎* rule.
Despite Apple eliminating their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan, we did not observe any reduction to Apple’s political censorship in Hong Kong. However, like with Taiwan, we did see the removal of the two rules *央* (Central) and *屎* (feces). Like with Taiwan, we also newly observed *Ã¥ÂÆ屎* (eat shit) and *屎窟* (shit hole). Thus, it is again likely that that *央* and *屎* were removed from Hong Kong’s filtering for being overly broad.
Remember when the cable and broadcast industry insisted that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV subscriptions) wasn’t actually a real trend? Or how, once they finally acknowledged it was a real thing, insisted that it was just a temporary fad that would abate once Millennials started having babies?
In early March, the Telegram channel ZaTelecom published several government documents, which seemingly hinted that the Russian authorities were preparing to disconnect the country from the “external” Internet. The authenticity of these memos has yet to be confirmed. At this writing, Russia remains connected to the global Internet — but could the authorities really pull the plug? For answers to this and other key questions, Meduza turned to lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan, the co-founder of the digital rights group Roskomsvoboda.
Karl Bode recently wrote about Netflix’s new password sharing policy, which mostly amounts to test-running an upcharge should Netflix discover that passwords are being used “outside the home” of the subscriber. While this pilot program is only going to be run in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, Netflix’s announcement was completely silent on how it’s going to track this sort of thing. Most assume it’s by IP or MAC addresses, though that obviously opens up a whole host of other questions. What about mobile devices? What about if you have a display at your workplace you want to stream to? What about VPNs? What about if you travel?
Unlike all of Apple’s other M1-powered computers, the Mac Studio’s storage isn’t soldered onto the mainboard, as Max Tech’s teardown over the weekend discovered. Getting to the SSD is a tricky business, involving removing the rubber ring on the bottom of the device, unscrewing the panel, and pulling out the unshielded power supply. But as it turns out, those expandable SSD hardware slots are for naught: even if you can take apart your Mac Studio to get to it, Apple appears to be blocking any additional or swapped storage on a software level.
Ian’s Take: After Apple’s announcement that they were going to allow users to repair their iPhones with genuine Apple parts, I had hoped that Apple would allow upgradeability. While I am disappointed in this move by Apple, it is certainly not without precedent. Apple currently solders the SSDs in all of their other computers with Apple silicon making upgradability impossible. In the Mac Studio, the SSD isn’t soldered and could be upgradable…but Apple has locked it in software.
Microsoft drastically altered the hardware requirements for Windows 11—requiring users to have an ultra-modern CPU, a Trusted Protection Module, and more—and announced the changes in a disastrous fashion. Things got so confusing that we eventually penned an article titled “The Windows 11 hardware fiasco keeps getting worse” in exasperation. Fortunately, Microsoft relented and eventually let users install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware (though some limitations remained in place).
It’s clear that’s not what Microsoft wants, though. Shortly after introducing the workaround, the company warned that Windows 11 PCs on unsupported hardware might not receive updates, including security patches—a mighty big gotcha, though things have been going hunky-dory so far. The company also booted users running unsupported hardware out of the Windows Insider preview program (which makes sense, to be fair).
This week on our podcast, we talk to Zach about the importance of student access to an open internet, why learning to code can increase equity, and how school's online security and the law often stand in the way. We’ll also discuss how computer education can help create the next generation of makers and builders that we need to solve some of society’s biggest problems.€
EFF has been analyzing and reporting on the bill since its earliest stages in the Brazilian Congress. The latest text, which has been approved by a working group in the Chamber of Deputies, still contains dangerous language for free expression and digital rights. The Brazilian digital rights groups coalition Coalizão Direitos na Rede has published a relevant analysis€ of improvements in the latest draft. It also identifies the serious challenges that remain, including the expansion of data retention obligations. Beyond what’s in the text of the current bill, there is also persistent political pressure to revive the unsettling traceability mandate for private messages.
Just as dangerous, however, is the “remuneration obligation” for publishers, an unrelated legislative initiative that has been shoehorned into one article of this bill without the thoughtfulness, consultation, or nuance that such a proposal warrants. We fear that, for the big media companies who have advocated for this measure, that lack of consideration and nuance is a feature, and not a bug.
In a nutshell, this€ provision compels platforms to compensate media companies for use of "journalistic content." While it exempts from its scope some of the exceptions and limitations established in Brazil's copyright law, it’s not clear whether that exemption would extend to user links on social media that automatically import just a few sentences from the beginning of an article as a preview. Would courts consider such a link a non-infringing quotation? Although Brazilian case law has settled that Brazilian copyright law’s exceptions and limitations should be broadly interpreted, this is still an open question.
A pair of leading economists and the pan-Africa director at Oxfam sent a letter Monday calling on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to reject a "compromise" on a long-awaited Covid-19 intellectual property waiver.
"This text reflects the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies in preserving the deadly status quo."
It still amazes me how unwilling many copyright system supporters are to admit that copyright is regularly used for actual censorship, using the power of the law to suppress speech. The latest example is particularly galling. Over the weekend, a somewhat ridiculous video went viral of a Tesla doing a jump over a hill in Echo Park, and then losing control, smashing into garbage cans and, eventually, a parked car. YouTuber Alex Choi was there and had a whole video about the incident, which I’m not going to link to for reasons I’ll explain down below.
U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy have introduced the SMART Copyright Act of 2022. The bill requires online hosting services to implement standard technical protection measures, designated by the Copyright Office. Rightsholders see the proposal as a great step forward to protect creators, while opponents classify it as a filtering tool that will censor free speech.
In 2018, a court in the Netherlands ruled that companies selling access to a pirate IPTV playlist acted illegally, even though they weren't the suppliers of the infringing streams. The decision was a win for Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which later demanded a cash settlement from the companies' directors. They ultimately refused to pay so BREIN filed a full lawsuit and has now come out on top.
I guess ten years is long enough that Senator Pat Leahy thought everyone had forgotten about the SOPA/PIPA disaster that he was a leading reason for. Senator Leahy is on his way out of the Senate, and apparently has at least one last gift in store for Hollywood lobbyists (which includes his daughter) who make sure that Leahy gets a role in every Batman film. The latest from Leahy (and Senator Tom Tillis, who seems to clearly want to take over Leahy’s role as Hollywood’s favorite senator), is to introduce a bill to effectively require filters on every website.
