Mac computers come with macOS, of course, but Apple has made it possible in the past to install other operating systems, including Linux and even Windows. While the M1 processor brought changes that eliminated the easiest option, developers have been working on alternate solutions and a Linux installer is now available that works with Apple's latest Mac and MacBook computers. This is an early release and most users shouldn't bother, although it is still interesting to see how far it has come.
In 2006, Apple introduced a surprising new feature for Mac computers. Known as Boot Camp, this utility has the ability to create a separate partition on the primary or external drive, formatted and ready to install Windows and other operating systems. Apple also included Windows drivers to interface with the Mac hardware. This ran at full speed on the Mac's Intel processor and behaved just like Windows would on a PC. The only drawback is that the user had to pick which OS to load at startup and it required a full reboot to switch. Modern computers are ready quickly, but it took several minutes to restart a Mac in 2006. With the new Apple Silicon Mac and MacBook computers, Boot Camp is no longer available.
Just an FYI, the alpha version of Steam is only available on a small number of Chromebooks. You’ve got to have the right hardware—at least 8GB of RAM and an 11th-gen Core i5 or i7 processor, a rare combination for often-modest Chromebooks, many of which often run Arm-based processors instead. Check out our roundup of the best Chromebooks if you want to learn even more about these low-cost laptops.
When I first saw the Badger 2040 on Hacker News, I knew I had to get it. It seemed like a great little package to hack on, with an e-ink screen, buttons, and an LED, all for a good price. And finally I'd get my hands on an RP2040, which has interested me since it first came out.
Back in grad school, we biology students were talking shop at lunch one day. We “lab rats” were talking about the tools of the trade, which for most of us included things like gel electrophoresis, restriction endonucleases, and polymerase chain reaction. Not to be left out, a fellow who studied fire ants chimed in that his main tool was a lawn chair, which he set up by a Dumpster in a convenience store parking lot to watch a fire ant colony. Such is the glamor of field biology.
Melvin Conway famously said that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. But how about Conway’s Law applied to the entire industry rather than a single company?
The tech industry, and open source (OSS) in particular, are mostly shaped now around the dominating communication structure — GitHub. Nadia Eghbal’s book “Working in Public” does a great job at explaining how OSS’s centralization around a big platform mirrors what happened everywhere on the internet, with us going from personal websites to social networks.
Using open source plays a central role in allowing European public administrations to deliver their services. Sadly, some of the software and tools that public administrations use to build their business applications, could be in a critical state of health – that is software in danger of discontinuation, ongoing software updates and bug fixes. Recent examples such as the log4j vulnerability highlight the need for alertness on heavily relied upon software. There is a clear and urgent need to identify such critical software, and strengthen the communities and or explore other mitigation solutions.
Nextcloud and MariaDB announce a new partnership to bring Nextcloud customers a better database experience. With MariaDB, users are guaranteed to have a reliable, scalable, high-performance database solution. Nextcloud customers will now be able to perform large deployments without hesitation and have a flexible, open source enterprise database.
It’s not that British stuff can’t be funny (Discworld, Smack the Pony), it’s fine, the problem was more the disparaging of every other genre of comedy.
My own fave kind of humor is nothing special either. Latter Barks (Scrooge/Gyro era), Archie, Nancy, Blondie… I’ve been into the same kinda comedy all my life. Simple & straightforward. Or, Japanese comics like Mr Bride. Maybe it’s because I liked American comics that made me so touchy about the purported superiority of Fry, Cleese, Atkinson &co.
I’ve heard people (I think it was Stephen Fry) describe it as how American humor is about smart-alecks and British humor is about self-deprecation. Problem for me is that a lot of the “self”-deprecating jokes punch not only at self, but down and all around, hitting everyone who shares traits with the character. Or worse— there’s this episode of Misfits where the joke is that a guy has sex with an old woman and that that’s gross. And the joke is “self-deprecating“ for him, the comedian, but it’s also really disparaging her and by extension, older women in general.
In short, classrooms have become emotive enclaves of a stark student-centered universe. This pivot towards the teacher-cum-protector role has colossally diminished the authority of the everyday classroom teacher because it has transformed the way students look at us. They are difficult to impress these days because the things that once commanded respect and imbued authority—intellectual achievement, virtuous behavior, classroom dynamism, prodigiousness, substantive life experiences—no longer attract the high regard they once did.
Look around campus these days and it is not rigor and pedagogic élan that shine—it is chic activism and avant-garde teacher attitudes parading themselves as classroom instruction. This is one of the main culprits behind parental frustration with the American education system. It explains why so many parents are up in arms, confronting school boards, with interest surging in charter, parochial, and classical schools.
What’s the worst thing about LEGO? Most would agree that it’s the fact that those bright and colorful pieces of ABS are somehow the most evil thing that can come between your bare feet and solid ground. [Unnecessary Inventions] have done a one-eighty from their handle and made a quite useful invention —€ a LEGO-sorting vacuum cleaner called Suck It.
Most of us either own or have used a laptop at some point. For traveling, as a student, or even for browsing Hackaday on the couch in front of the TV, they are pretty much indispensable. They do tend to have a sharp performance reduction compared to a desktop though thanks to the thermal and battery limitations of a portable form factor. [Scott Yu-Jan] wanted to solve that in his own life by building a custom Mac laptop with none of these downsides.
Here’s a little eye-opener for you: next time you’re taking a walk, cast your eyes to the ground for a bit and see how far you can go without spotting a carelessly discarded face mask. In our experience, it’s no more than a block or two, especially if you live near a school. Masks and other disposal artifacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have turned into a menace, and uncounted billions of the things will be clogging up landfills, waterways, and byways for decades to come.
There was an odd era at the start of the 1990s when CDs had taken the lead from vinyl in pre-recorded music, but for consumer recordable formats the analogue cassette was still king. A variety of digital formats came to market to address this, of which Sony’s MiniDisc was the only one to gain significant traction outside the studio. These floppy-disk-like cartridges held a magneto-optical medium , and were the last word in cool until being swept away around the end of the decade by MP3 players. [Nava Whitford] has disassembled a MiniDisc optical head to document how the physical part of the system worked.
We invited [Jay Doscher] to give us a view into his process designing 3D printed parts for the impressive array of cyberdecks we’ve covered since 2019.
[Jamie] aka [vector76] hit us with a line-tracing plugin for OctoPrint that cuts out whatever 2D shape you draw on a piece of wood. The plugin lets you skip the modeling step entirely, going straight from a CNC-mounted webcam that reads your scribbles and gives you a Gcode toolpath in return. The code is on GitHub and there’s a demo video embedded below.
Today, there is a hostile takeover underway in the field of psychedelic drugs. Since the early 1970s, when the Nixon administration kicked off its War on Drugs, substances like LSD and psilocybin have been on the list of highly restricted “Schedule One” drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. For the past 50 years, pioneering psychiatrists, scientists, and other researchers interested in the potential medical uses of psychedelics found themselves fighting an uphill battle to conduct studies and trials.
New York State Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes saw firsthand the disastrous impacts of the War on Drugs on Black Americans when she was a county legislator and community activist in Buffalo. She saw how Black people arrested for consuming or possessing small amounts of marijuana would pay an outsize price through incarceration—a price with ripple effects in their lives and the lives of their families. She says that New York’s landmark legalization law, which she authored and former Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law last March, “could have been passed sooner,” but that she was committed to making sure that the law the state eventually passed addressed both equity and mass incarceration head-on.
Contrary to popular belief, the government€ can€ take measures to protect Americans from exorbitant prices for€ drugs€ that were invented with U.S. taxpayers' dollars. It can, for example, march-in on the drug's patents and license them to a generic manufacturer, if the drug is not available to the public at a reasonable price. Not surprisingly, some businesses and trade associations would prefer to maintain unfettered control over their prices, and thus their profits, and simply do not want to accept this reality.
A team of toxicologists found microplastics in nearly 80% of the healthy adult blood samples it analyzed, marking the first time that tiny polymer fragments—measuring less than 5mm in size—have been detected in human blood, The Guardian reported Thursday.
"Are these levels sufficiently high to trigger disease? We urgently need to fund further research so we can find out."
Bolstered by pandemic relief subsidies, the ACA was instrumental in blunting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Americans’ health insurance coverage. Ultimately, however, the ACA was only a promising first step, and the US health care system remains deeply flawed. Ensuring comprehensive coverage for every American will require more fundamental overhauls.
The ACA made important changes to the way health insurance operates in the US. The law established marketplace exchanges where individuals could purchase qualified health care plans, with subsidized rates available for low-income people. Exchanges could be operated through the federally run HealthCare.gov or independently by states. Insurers were barred from rejecting applicants or charging them extra based on preexisting health conditions or demographic characteristics besides age, and insurance plans were required to meet cost-sharing and coverage standards.
Although Republicans and a handful of Big Pharma-funded Democrats have undermined congressional efforts to rein in skyrocketing drug prices, a progressive coalition on Thursday reminded the Biden administration that it already has the power to make lifesaving medicines affordable and improve millions of lives today—and urged the White House to do just that.
"Seniors and families can't wait any longer for Congress to lower drug prices."
A coronavirus vaccine hailed as a potential solution to unequal access in poor countries is actually making the crisis worse as its U.S.-based manufacturer sends millions of doses to rich countries first, angering public health campaigners who say vaccine shortages in the developing world are prolonging the deadly pandemic.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that Novavax, Inc.—a biotechnology company headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland—has "sent tens of millions of doses" of its two-dose coronavirus vaccine to wealthy nations such as Australia and the Netherlands "but provided none yet to the U.N.-backed effort to supply poorer countries."
ProPublica’s analysis, which used data processing software and modeling tools developed by the EPA, found over a “thousand hotspots of cancer-causing air” across the United States. Many of these are in southern states such as Texas and Louisiana, where environmental regulations are weak. Although EPA policy sets an acceptable cancer risk limit of 1 in 10,000, this number can still be dangerous, according to experts with whom ProPublica consulted. Moreover, the modeling computed that “256,000 people are being exposed to risks beyond this threshold and that an estimated 43,000 people are being subjected to at least triple this level of risk.”
In anticipation of U.S. President Joe Biden's expected Friday announcement about sending more gas to the European Union, green groups this week have warned him and other world leaders against doubling down on fossil fuels in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"Proponents of expanded LNG exports are cynically trying to capitalize on the current crisis and use it to justify a massive, long-term expansion of fossil fuel development and exports."
Two years after the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly left an estimated 14.6 million Americans without employer-sponsored health insurance due to economic shutdowns and layoffs, the House Oversight Committee next week will hold the first hearing since the pandemic began on Medicare for All, with witnesses expected to testify on numerous ways the public health crisis has made the need for such a system clearer than ever.
Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) will be joined Tuesday by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in leading the hearing, which will be the third congressional ever to focus on Medicare for All.
Doomscrolling can promote feelings of anxiety and depression. For example, consider how sad and exhausted you may feel when watching a drama with tragic events and sad music in the background. In contrast, if you watch a funny film or romantic comedy with lively music, you may feel upbeat and energised. This is due to two psychological phenomena: “mood induction” (an intervention that can change our mood) and empathy.
This is the seventh group in our series, America in Focus, which seeks to hear and understand the views of wider cross-sections of Americans whose voices are often not heard in opinion journalism. We conducted the discussion with Margie Omero, a veteran focus group leader. (Times Opinion paid her for the work; she does similar work for political candidates, parties and special interest groups.) This transcript has been edited for length and clarity; an audio recording and video clips of the session are also included.
The Trans European Services for Telematics between Administrations (TESTA) is the data communication network service lying at the digital core of the EU4Health Programme, and interoperability is the key tool that makes it work.
Lapsus$ has taken responsibility for some major security breaches at tech companies, including Nvidia, Samsung, Ubisoft, Okta, and Microsoft. On Wednesday, reports surfaced indicating an Oxford-based teenager is the mastermind of the group. City of London Police did not say if this teenager was among those arrested.
"Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with this investigation and have all been released under investigation," Detective Inspector Michael O'Sullivan of the City of London Police said in a statement to Reuters.
Along with Unit 221b, a separate security consultancy, the Palo Alto researchers said they had identified the "primary actor" behind Lapsus$ in 2021 and had been "assisting law enforcement in their efforts to prosecute this group".
According to a BBC report, one of the arrested teenagers, a 16-year-old from Oxford, had been accused of being the leader of Lapsus$.
The City of London Police, who made the arrests, did not confirm if this teen was one of those taken into custody.
The police said: "Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with an investigation into a hacking group. They have all been released under investigation. Our inquiries remain ongoing."
Unfortunately, at least the Apple TV does this goofy thing where it also (by default, I'm pretty sure) advertises itself to anyone nearby. This means if you are in a relatively high-density environment like an apartment building, a condo tower, or just have one of those houses with paper-thin walls and no side yards, you are probably going to see your neighbor's devices.
Average ransom demand rose 144% to $2.2 million. Average payment rose 78% percent to $541,010. Posts on name-and-shame Dark Web leak sites climbed 85%.
Formed less than a month after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the TSA has yet to get a firm grip on “transportation security,” the thing that makes up two-thirds of its acronym. Audit after audit has found TSA screeners are incapable of finding explosives and other dangerous contraband. If auditors can rack up a 90-95% success rate smuggling in explosives, no doubt terrorists can do it, too.
For literally more than a decade researchers have been warning that global satellite telecommunications networks were vulnerable to all manner of attacks. These attacks vary in nature but allow an intruder miles away to both intercept and disrupt satellite communications. In 2020 hackers again clearly demonstrated how these perpetually unresolved vulnerabilities were putting millions of people at risk.
Mission statements are always trite and often as short as a sentence or two. But somewhere around 2015, a new sort of statement began to be generated by the people at Human Resources. The idea of diversity was now augmented by “belonging”: full and constant participation in a common enterprise. If, half a century earlier, authenticity was said to spring from a rooted sense of self, belonging was, instead, a gregarious sense of connection owing to the togetherness of the group. The school or team or corporation was conceived as a home away from home, and perhaps more homelike than home.
In addition to a Surveillance Camera Commissioner, the UK has a Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, which it has updated recently. In a letter from Sampson to relevant UK government bodies, he explained that the Code applied to overt surveillance camera systems such as the UK’s Automatic Number Plate Recognition system, facial recognition technology, body-worn video cameras, drone-borne cameras, helicopter-borne cameras and CCTV systems (both static and mobile), where these are used by certain categories of government authorities. Other operators of CCTV surveillance systems, for example in the private sector, are encouraged to adopt the code voluntarily.
Too many schools across the state continue to use remote proctoring at its most invasive settings.
California’s Student Test Taker Privacy Protection Act (STTPPA) will correct this. It is put forward by Senator Dr. Richard Pan (S.B. 1172) and sponsored by EFF and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.€
The TTPPA directs proctoring companies to follow reasonable data minimization practices, meaning they cannot collect, use, retain, or disclose test takers’ personal information except as strictly necessary to provide proctoring services. In the event a student’s data was processed beyond what was required to proctor the exam, the student has the opportunity to take the proctoring company to court. This allows the courts to decide, narrowly and thoughtfully, what data is actually required to collect for proctoring services, how long it needs to be be held, and how it needs to be used and disclosed. It’s a simple bill that should give the people harmed—test takers—the opportunity to protect their data and privacy. A summary of the bill is here.
Google announced on Thursday its latest plans for using smartphones to monitor health, saying it would test whether capturing heart sounds and eyeball images could help people identify issues from home.
The company, a unit of Alphabet Inc, is investigating whether the smartphone's built-in microphone can detect heartbeats and murmurs when placed over the chest, head of health AI Greg Corrado told reporters. Readings could enable early detection of heart valve disorders, he said.
Google announced on Thursday it is partnering with providers such as CVS Pharmacy to allow people to schedule health care appointments through its search engine.
The new feature will allow Google users to search for appointment availabilities at some health care providers in their area.
At the same time, as the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley explained on the CounterPunch podcast two weeks ago Putin embodies “classic fascism…ethno-nationalism linked to religion used in a way to justify colonialist enterprise, characteristically carrying out an imperial war.” Asked for his general impression on the Ukraine invasion, Stanley elaborated as follows:
Stanley identifies various ways in which the great white Russian strongman Putin’s political posture and rhetoric match each of the ten main fascist political narratives and characteristics in Stanley’s important and widely read 2018 book How Fascism Works: the mythic notion of a grand national past that must be redeemed from humiliation at the hands of treasonous liberal and left elites and racial, ethnic, and/or cultural minorities; a propaganda of projection wherein the rulers call their enemies what they themselves are (“if you’re a fascist you call other people fascists”); an assault on intellectuals, free thought, and independent media; unreal conspiracy theories and other attacks on truth and coherent thinking; a strong attachment to social hierarchy and inequality, with a superior “Us” standing over an inferior “Them;” bitter and angry claims that one’s favored and superior group is being unjustly victimized; a fierce and curiously lawless commitment to “law and order” aimed at crushing the corruption and anarchy of the evil Others and their elite liberal and left/Marxist allies; hyper-masculinist fear of and hostility to feminism and gay and transgendered rights; an anti-urban sense of the rural countryside as the source of true national and social virtue; exploitation of the populist notion that hard-working people/producers are being shafted by a globalist parasitic financial beast.
Technically, Venezuela is not a poor country. In 1998, it was one of the leading OPEC members, producing 3.5 million barrels of oil a day (bpd). Though Caracas largely failed to take advantage of its former oil boom by diversifying its oil-dependent economy, it was the combination of lower oil prices and US-led sanctions that pushed the once relatively thriving South American country down to its knees.
In December 2018, former US President Donald Trump imposed severe sanctions on Venezuela, cutting off oil imports from the country. Though Caracas provided the US with about 200,000 bpd, the US managed to quickly replace Venezuelan oil as crude oil prices reached as low as $40 per barrel.
Before this country succumbs to calls for a return to Cold War-style Pentagon spending, it’s important to note that the United States is already spending substantially more than it did at the height of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or, in fact, any other moment in that first Cold War. Even before the invasion of Ukraine began, the Biden administration’s proposed Pentagon budget (as well as related work like nuclear-warhead development at the Department of Energy)€ was already guaranteed to soar even higher than that, perhaps to $800 billion or more for 2023.
Here’s the irony: going back to Cold War levels of Pentagon funding would mean reducing, not increasing spending. Of course, that’s anything but what the advocates of such military outlays had in mind, even before the present crisis.
Trying leaders for war crimes does not lack merit, even if law remains, at best, a blunt instrument all too readily concealing a vengeful motive.€ Butchers should never escape under the comfortable veil of state responsibility, claiming sovereignty as an all-dispensing reason to commit atrocities.€ But any war crimes procedures are riddled with claims of bias, partisanship and self-interest.
Many voices from the noisy tribes of accountability are calling for Putin to face legal proceedings as soon as possible.€ Former UK Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Sir John Major have added their names to a petition calling for a Nuremberg-styled model similar to that used in 1945 by the victorious Allies against Nazi Germany.
There are good reasons for casting the conflict in these terms, but in our own country there are also reasons for using the term “democracy” with some measure of caution. Our democracy stands on unsteady feet. Congress continues to investigate the January 6 attack that sought to block the peaceful transition of power. Watchdog organizations like the U.S.-based Freedom House and the Stockholm-based International Institute for Electoral Assistance have raised alarms about the state of U.S. democracy, once considered one of the most robust in the world.
A recent Freedom House report cites racial injustice, the outsized influence of money in politics, and the intense polarization of American society as causes for the downgrading of American democracy.
Both of us know he is lying when he blames: “These are President Biden’s prices.”
Petro Online, an oil industry news source, reports that on average it takes a month for oil to get pumped from the ground to complete the refining process (if it does not become part of reserves). I remember working on oil production equipment on September 11th when my boss said, “you better fill up before the prices go up.” They did.
Nepal’s acceptance process was long and tortuous due to the country’s layered, fractured, and unwieldy political system.€ China’s government opposed the MMC funding.
Massive protests unfolded outside the parliament building in Kathmandu prior to parliamentary approval. Joining the demonstrators were those representing student and peasant groups and sections of the Nepal’s two Communist Parties. They were protesting the government’s alleged disrespect for Nepal’s sovereignty.
What does the research tell us about who owns guns in the United States and why?
Garen Wintemute: The traditional population of gun owners are white, non-Hispanic men. But for several years, the demographic profile of gun owners in the United States has been broadening as women and members of underrepresented groups started purchasing firearms. People buy guns more for protection than for all other reasons put together. The second-biggest reason is use in sport hunting and target shooting and so on.
A group of Senate Democrats on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to exercise his authority to boost production of fossil fuel-reducing technologies like heat pumps to simultaneously slash "dependence on Russia and other authoritarian petrostates" while addressing the climate emergency.
The demand was delivered in a letter to Biden led by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and also signed by Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
Exactly a month after Russian President Vladimir Putin began his military invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president who has garnered international recognition for his wartime leadership, called on the global community to speak out in unison against Putin's attack.
"Come from your offices, your homes, your schools and universities. Come in the name of peace," Zelenskyy said in a video address that he posted on social media. "Come with Ukrainian symbols to support Ukraine, to support freedom, to support life. Come to your squares, your streets. Make yourselves visible and heard."
In response to the rising brutality of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, some Americans say they support making Ukrainian airspace a "no-fly zone" for Russian war planes.
“I am deeply disappointed,” said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The people of Yemen need the same level of support and solidarity that we’ve seen for the people of Ukraine. The crisis in Europe will dramatically impact Yemenis’ access to food and fuel, making an already dire situation even worse.”
With Yemen importing more than 35% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, disruption to wheat supplies will cause soaring increases in the price of food.
As the Saudi-led war in Yemen enters its eighth year, international humanitarian groups on Thursday expressed concern about the state of crisis gripping Yemenis—reporting that civilian deaths are on the rise, millions are facing severe hunger and malnutrition, and three quarters of the population are in urgent need of humanitarian support.
"Without peace the cycle of misery will continue and deepen. Until then, adequate funding for humanitarian aid is critical."—Ferran Puig, Oxfam
NATO, the G7 and the European Council held unprecedented emergency meetings in Brussels Thursday as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second month. NATO has announced plans to send even more troops to Eastern Europe, where its troop presence has already doubled from last month to 40,000. We speak with Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who says that as the war becomes a prolonged stalemate, the U.S. and other countries should be doing everything possible to facilitate an end to the fighting. “There is something deeply immoral in trying to wage a war of this kind at the expense of other people if a reasonable peace settlement is on the cards,” says Lieven.
Former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in 2018 launched an investigation into former President Trump’s financial practices, specifically whether he lied about the value of his assets to help him obtain loans. But when Alvin Bragg took over for Vance earlier this year, he decided to not pursue charges, prompting the resignation of Mark Pomeranz and Carey Dunne, two prosecutors who had been working on the case.
The New York Times on Wednesday published Pomeranz’s resignation letter, in which he states a belief that Trump is “guilty of numerous felony violations.”
In the months before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an oligarch with Russian ties allegedly paid for locals to paint swastikas around Kharkiv, sources say. The effort, according to the sources, was part of a false flag operation to exaggerate Ukraine’s Nazi presence at a time when Putin was using it as a pretext for war.
The alleged plot, according to multiple sources, involved Pavel Fuks, a real estate, banking, and oil magnate who, the sources claim, was co-opted by Russian security forces to participate. Through intermediaries, Fuks allegedly offered between $500 and $1,500 for street level criminals to vandalize city streets with pro-Nazi graffiti in December, January, and February.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to hear from Ed about what’s going on in Russia right now? What’s the low-down among the hoi polloi?€ Are they for the war? Agin it?€ Is Putin looking vulnerable in 2024?€ What are the latest real polls?€ Is he the Pinochet enforcer Greg Palast recently called him? How is Ed personally doing? How’s family life in exile? Any projects on the burner?
Last year, through a news feed I got from Freedom of Press Foundation, where Snowden is the president of the board of directors, Snowden was busy raising funds for Julian Assange’s release with a crypto-currency effort (Etherium) — AssangeDAO. In a tweet, Snowden explained the effort this way: “”Its prime purpose is to raise funds to bid on the Censored NFT by Pak, whose proceeds will benefit Assange’s legal defense fund.” He raised almost $50 million for Assange’s defense.
I’ll let her have the final words: “I started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war and it’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels,” Krakovska said in the interview. “Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to adapt to. And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels, they don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way, it will destroy our civilization.”
An unassuming mountain of iron-rich basalt, the vestige of ancient lava flows, conceals the single largest fuel repository in the world — but not for long. Seeping through the same volcanic rock, the only reliable freshwater source on the Hawaiian island of O'ahu, contamination of the Southern O'ahu Basal Aquifer was perhaps inevitable. In November 2021, it finally happened: an estimated 19,000 gallons of fuel and water burst from a fire suppression line and seeped underground, poisoning the aquifer.
Now, after an understandable uproar among hundreds of thousands of affected citizens, the United States will decommission the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility. For indigenous activists like the Kaûohewai Coalition and the Oûahu Water Protectors who have long fought to have the fuel storage facility decommissioned, the victory is bittersweet: It took jet fuel running from the tap for people to demand change, despite billions of dollars in economic activity at stake.
Central banks and policymakers should address the significant global threats the biodiversity crisis poses to financial stability, according to a report released Thursday that asserts "healthy ecosystems provide resilience to growing climate shocks."
The financial sector "should align itself with the transformations that are necessary to deliver a global economy that is positive for nature."
Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way:
Tornadoes hit fast and hard, as those in the path of the tornado that hit Arabi in the New Orleans metro area experienced firsthand. The tornado — which spun up at speeds up to 165 miles per hour, hitting EF3, the third strongest on the tornado rating scale — badly€ damaged 150 homes€ and killed a young man and his dog.€ A few minutes after images of the tornado began spreading on social media, I got my gear together to go to Arabi to document the damage.€ But first I had to calm my nerves and take stock of how lucky I was to be safe and unharmed.€ My past experiences with extreme weather — including living through Hurricane Ida, which damaged my home last year, and a likely EF1 tornado in 2014 that spun my house at the time in Deposit, NY — seem to raise my blood pressure when new extreme weather threatens to head my way.€
A few minutes before the tornado touched down,€ I was in my attic checking to see if a new roof I got after Hurricane Ida destroyed my old one was handling the heavy downpour. It was raining hard in St. Tammany Parish, where I live, north of New Orleans.Before I got to check an area that I am concerned might be leaking, my phone turned into a tornado siren. The warning told me get into my basement and take cover.€ Basement? I don’t have one. Like most in South Louisiana, I live just above sea level, so I don’t have a cellar.€ No one in Arabi had a cellar either, but many heeded the tornado warning and got in their closets or bathrooms, small areas inside homes that offer the best shelter from tornadoes. This practice saved many lives.€
Two problems therefore stand out. First, the geopolitics of shrinking the oil industry are fraught. As Western firms withdraw for environmental reasons and in response to high costs, the market share of OPEC plus Russia will rise from 45% to 57% by 2040, giving them more clout. Higher-cost producers such as Angola and Azerbaijan face a shock as they are squeezed out. The world map will be peppered with distressed ex-petrostates.
Second, the emerging electrostates face their own battle with the resource curse. Spending on green metals will surge amid a two-decade-long build-out of electric infrastructure. The windfall may be worth over $1trn a year by 2040. Some beneficiaries, such as Australia, are well-equipped to deal with this. More fragile states, including Congo, Guinea and Mongolia, are not. Mountains of cash distort economies and feed grievances. Mining was a source of discord in recent elections in Chile and Peru. Global mining firms are nervous that their property rights will be buried. A resulting lack of investment has sent the price of a basket of green metals up by 64% in the past year. All this is compounded by China, which is hunting for the same resources, but is more tolerant of bad governments.
The Ukrainian vice prime minister directly called for the blocking of Russians from crypto exchanges. Same as he directly contacted Elon Musk asking for Starlink internet, however the crypto exchanges are not playing ball. They are sticking to the ideals on which crypto was founded.
And in the process of simply existing, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, one of the most popular, use astonishing amounts of electricity.
We’ll explain how that works in a minute. But first, consider this: The process of creating Bitcoin consumes around 96 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by the Philippines, a nation of about 110 million.
The Limestone mine operates day and night, growing louder at night and on weekends when Bitcoin’s electricity-hungry computers can take advantage of downtime and lower prices on the electricity grid and ramp up their algorithmic-solving power.
“We couldn’t have people over to gather in our front yard because we could hardly hear one another talking,” said Preston Holley, whose home sits across the street from the mine.
Australia’s electricity systems face several key challenges, including ageing infrastructure, increasing complexity, and the need for investment in transmission and distribution, according to Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO.
Yesterday marked 100 days until the start of the Tour de France, which is for the first time in history starting in Denmark. Ahead of the Grand Départ, Wednesday’s celebrations concerned the inauguration of a 31 km cycle path: one of the country’s so-called cycling super-highways.
The new Roskilderuten passes through the municipalities of Roskilde, Høje-Taastrup, Albertslund, Glostrup, Brøndby, Rødovre, Frederiksberg and Copenhagen. The honour of officially opening the new path was given to none other than the general director of the race, Christian Prudhomme.
Central banks have underestimated the significant threat posed by biodiversity loss, a new report said Thursday, warning that financial institutions and businesses were destroying the natural assets that they depend on.
While climate change is increasingly factored into calculations of systemic economic risks, the report by central bankers, financial supervisors and academics said the comparable threats from the biodiversity crisis had only recently begun to be appreciated.
Two years ago I was panicking, making hundreds of phone calls to postpone my wedding that was a few days away. It was March 2020.
The government needs to do something about inflation, but it’s not clear what. Fed Chair Jerome Powell inched up the interest rate, but a wide swath of economists has cautioned not to undermine the pandemic recovery before it even turns expansionary relative to the historical trend. And yet people are hurting, especially at the gas pump—and if Democrats can’t come up with a compelling narrative, they’re likely to face the electorate’s ire in November. The consensus is that they’re screwed. If there’s a way out of this trap, policy-makers need to stop treating inflation like an angered deity to be appeased through sacrifice and more like an aggregation of different price trends.
Despite every advance humankind has produced since the cave, none are more fundamental to survival than a place to call home.
Since the 2020€ election, the nation's voting systems have been under unprecedented attack from multiple angles. Laws that make it harder to vote. Legislation that sabotages the electoral process. Threats and harassment directed at election officials. Extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering.
The Arizona Senate on Wednesday passed a Republican-authored bill that advocates warn could prompt "the most extreme voter purge in the country" by requiring state residents to retroactively provide proof of citizenship to stay on the rolls.
"This bill places a disproportionate—and often insurmountable—burden on older, minority, and low-income voters."
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has died of cancer at the age of 84. She served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 until 1997, when President Bill Clinton nominated her to become the first female secretary of state. Albright was a staunch supporter of U.S. power and a defender of authoritarian leaders around the world like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Indonesia’s Suharto. She was a key architect of NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia in 1999. Albright also repeatedly defended the Clinton administration’s devastating sanctions against Iraq, infamously saying in a 1996 “60 Minutes” interview that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions were “worth it.” Democracy Now! confronted Albright on those comments in 2004, when she acknowledged it was a “stupid statement,” but she denied the sanctions on Iraq laid the groundwork for the Bush administration’s invasion.
MPs at Westminster voted on Tuesday night to reinstate the requirement for a US-style visa waiver for non-Irish EU citizens crossing the Border as part of proposed new British immigration laws.
A majority of 298 MPs to 216 voted to back the UK government’s challenge to an amendment introduced in the House of Lords, which would have exempted Northern Ireland from the legislation.
Russian troops have been violently waging their government’s so-called special mxilitary operation for over three weeks now in Ukraine. But on the homefront, state police and state prosecutors are waging a more intangible conflict.
The domestic casualties, so far, are mainly the thousands of Kremlin-critical voices, especially in the media.
Editor’s note: This article was edited in order to conform with Russian legislation criminalizing references to Russia’s current action in Ukraine as anything other than a “special military operation.”
“I can’t breathe.“
In his delightful encyclopedia of invented Hitler sympathizers, Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño talks of a large estate located south of Chile’s capital—“at the end of the world”—called Colonia Renacer (Rebirth Colony), which at first glance seems like many other immigrant communities in the region. But upon a closer look, one finds important differences. “To begin with, Colonia Renacer has its own school, medical clinic, and auto repair shop,” Bolaño writes. “It has established a self-sufficient economic system that allows the colony to turn its back on what Chileans, perhaps over-optimistically, like to call ‘Chilean reality,’ or simply ‘reality.’ Colonia Renacer is a profitable business. Its presence is unsettling: the colony’s members hold their festivities in secret; no neighbor, be they rich or poor, are invited. The colonists bury their dead in their own cemetery.” But “perhaps the most vital,” Bolaño continues, is the ethnic origin of its inhabitants: They are all, without exception, German.
In the early days of the Russian invasion, the European Union took an extraordinary action: It granted the hundreds of thousands—soon to be millions—of Ukrainian refugees the automatic right to live, work, and move freely within the bloc for at least a year.
Well, our inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstanding March Madness is off to quite a start. Round one ended with most of the matchups getting thousands of votes, so now we’re on to round two. You can still see the official bracket to see how it matches up with your own personal bracket.
Two years ago, when the pandemic first upended life as we knew it, many progressives believed Covid-19 would make a forceful case against the inhumane US health care system and galvanize support for Medicare for All. But after dominating the 2020 presidential primary, the idea of establishing a national, single-payer health insurance program has all but disappeared from mainstream political discourse.
As the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday began its fourth and final day of hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticism of how Republican senators have conducted themselves—and what that behavior reveals about their party—continued to grow.
"They're trying to craft perfect 20-second clips of owning libs for Fox News."
Anti-abortion bills are sweeping the U.S., with the Guttmacher Institute reporting that 82 restrictions have been introduced in 30 states in 2022 so far. On Wednesday, Idaho signed into law a six-week abortion ban, and lawmakers in Oklahoma passed a near-total ban on abortions — each modeled after a Texas “bounty hunter” law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year, in which a Mississippi abortion facility is challenging the state’s restrictive abortion law. If Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the new justice, will it affect the court’s ruling? “Abortion rights don’t fall within that framework of constitutional rights that the Supreme Court feels that it has an obligation to uphold,” says Imani Gandy, senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group. “It is presumed that Roe is going to be reversed in a couple months,” says Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and senior legal correspondent for Slate.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson appears poised to become the first Black woman and the first former public defender on the Supreme Court, having weathered attacks from Republicans with little support from Democrats during the third leg of her confirmation hearing on Wednesday. We speak with legal analysts Imani Gandy and Dahlia Lithwick. Republican senators’ behavior was “shocking” in how they embraced and perpetuated misinformation, says Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and senior legal correspondent for Slate. Gandy, senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group, says Republican attacks consisted of “white men trying to flex their power over a Black woman, knowing that she could not respond in the way that, for example, Brett Kavanaugh responded in his hearings.”
For me, it was the pause. I knew that the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson would produce a lot of insults and smears from Republicans trying to be racist enough for Fox News viewers to get the message but not so racist that The New York Times would have to acknowledge it. Jackson surely knew it too. And despite over 20 hours of questioning over two days, during which Republicans yelled at her and grandstanded and repeatedly insinuated that she was a terrorist and child-sex-trafficker sympathizer in front of her daughters and parents, she never once lost her cool.
The gang scandal within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has flared up again, with the county’s top watchdog accusing LASD brass of stonewalling its investigation into tattooed gang members within the department, and the department accusing the inspector general of an “unhealthy obsession to attack” the LASD.
A new letter to Sheriff Alex Villanueva from Los Angeles County Inspector General Max Huntsman reveals that Huntsman’s office is investigating at least 41 deputies for their alleged membership in tattooed “law enforcement gangs.” The letter cites a “partial list of deputies whom the Sheriffs Department itself has identified as allegedly being tattooed members,” a list that includes “eleven alleged Banditos and thirty alleged Executioners.”
She pauses, overwhelmed with emotion, before continuing, "Our revenge on the people who did this, will be continuing our education. We want to succeed in our lives, so we can fulfil the dreams of our martyrs."
As they entered the classrooms, the students wiped the dust off the desks but already some of the teachers were murmuring that, unexpectedly, the school would have to shut down again.
The local Taliban education official, who had given us permission to film at the school earlier this week, forwarded the headteacher a WhatsApp message, saying girls' secondary schools would in fact remain closed until further notice.
Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who has been imprisoned for nearly half a century for the murders of two FBI agents he has always maintained he didn't commit, is hopeful he'll have a chance to clear his name before he dies.
Peltier, 77, wants President Joe Biden to review his case and grant him clemency so he won't die in prison.
He's not looking for a presidential pardon, because it would be granted for a crime he insists he is innocent of.
Instead, he wants a new trial.
New York City has been a battlefield for Uber’s war with the taxi industry for years. The company’s arrival in the city a decade ago triggered a slow-motion decline of the yellow cab business. Taxi owners argued that Uber flouted regulations but have watched helplessly as riders, and drivers, flock to the platform. Medallion prices in New York and elsewhere plummeted, and lenders who made a living by financing the taxi industry went out of business. Meanwhile, the taxi industry has tried its hand at replicating Uber’s success: Flywheel, Sidecar, GetTaxi, Hailo, and Taxi Magic are some of the apps that tried — and mostly failed — to match Uber’s model.
The impact in New York City was particularly acute. Nearly a thousand drivers have filed for bankruptcy, with at least six drivers dying from suicide. Meanwhile, efforts to regulate Uber and Lyft have resulted in a driver shortage, sending fare prices soaring.
There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.
Data collection is a scourge for every internet user, regardless of age.€
When someone asks me what DRM is, my answer is very simple: it’s anti-piracy software that generally doesn’t stop pirates at all, and, instead, mostly only annoys legitimate buyers. Well, then why do software and video game companies use it at all? Couldn’t tell you. Businesses really want to annoy their own customers? Apparently, yes. Timothy, when you say this doesn’t really stop pirates, you’re exaggerating, right? No, not at all.
Netflix has long said that it will continue gradually increasing its price relative to the value it provides. That means churning out more TV shows and movies — and now video games — and dumping truckloads of money on bringing that content to life. Short of adding an ad-tier, which Netflix hasn’t indicated it’s planning to do any time soon, Netflix has got to find money for that content from somewhere. Intermittent price increases and its as-of-yet experimental password crackdown are two ways of going about it.
A lawsuit that accused Amazon of violating antitrust laws when it allegedly used third-party sellers’ data to help increase the sales of its own products was dismissed on Friday.
The EU has unveiled its biggest ever legislative effort to balance competition in the tech world. The new Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is intended to rein in the power of the largest tech corporations and allow smaller entities to compete with the mostly US-based firms. So far, the EU has tackled antitrust issues on a case-by-case basis, but the DMA is intended to introduce sweeping reforms that will address systemic issues in the whole market.
The former head of the United Nations penned an op-ed in one of India's largest daily newspapers on Thursday demanding the rejection of a compromise patent waiver that would leave major barriers in the way of equitable global access to coronavirus vaccines, test kits, and therapeutics.
"The Global South will not accept half-measures when our lives are on the line."
Czech file-sharing and hosting platform Uloà ¾.to has millions of users. In addition to the site, some people use the official app on Android devices. However, following an allegation of widespread piracy, Google has decided to remove the application from the Play Store. Uloà ¾ believes the complaint is ungrounded and filed a counternotice to get the app restored.
The operator of YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com has announced that he will appeal the piracy verdict, where the RIAA won $83 million in damages. According to his attorneys, the legal process has gone off the rails, as the music companies didn't have to prove a single instance of copyright infringement.
The European Union is working on a number of important new digital laws. These includes the€ Digital Services Act, the€ Digital Markets Act, and the€ Data Act. A new€ press release€ about the last of these contains the following section:
We just wrote about Senators Leahy and Tillis and their “SMART Copyright Act” and its dangerously problematic setup, that would enable Hollywood to petition the Copyright Office to get what it has long desired: mandatory upload filters for websites hosting 3rd party content. Professor Eric Goldman has explained how this bill is “a thinly veiled proxy war over mandatory filtering” while the EFF has called the bill “an unmitigated disaster.”
Welcome to episode 16 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, Neal Stimler, President of Stimler Advantage and Consulting Executive Advisor at the Balboa Park Online Collaborative. With international experience at the intersections of business, culture, education, and technology, Neal brings critical thought leadership with market-driven insights and trends.
Welcome to episode 15 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, Rebecca Giblin, an ARC Future Fellow and Professor at Melbourne Law School, and the Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Her work sits at the intersection of law and culture, focusing on creators’ rights, access to knowledge and culture, technology regulation and copyright.
