More and more people are migrating from Windows to Linux for very valid reasons such as better privacy, better security, open source, and to avoid all the crap that Microsoft is pulling with Windows 11. But the gaming industry is actually holding people back. I know many people, young as well as old, who wouldn't dream of using Windows where it not for the gaming aspect. Some use a multi-OS setup which 2 different hard drives, one for Windows and another for Linux and they then only use Windows for gaming, some still dual boot, but many just don't bother with Linux because they mainly game. It's not that they don't want to use Linux, it's just too much of a hassle to run both OS's when they mainly game.
One of the things that goes wrong in shutdown on systemd based systems is when some daemon (more generally, some service or even a session) refuses to shut down immediately. On systemd based systems, things that don't shut down trigger what is by default a 90 second timeout (this is system.conf's DefaultTimeoutStopSec). As covered in TimeoutStopSec, systemd will wait this long before forcefully killing the service's processes and letting the reboot continue. In other words, the reboot takes an extra minute and a half (at least), so your machine is out of service for an extra minute and a half (at least).
Ah, ray tracing. Although it’s been around for a long time in the film industry, it’s still a rather perplexing term, especially where video games are concerned. Essentially, it’s a technique that makes light behave in a realistic way. The idea is to make games more realistic and immersive. Wouldn’t you be spellbound by the light bouncing off of objects in a natural way? The indistinguishable line between reality and fantasy is no doubt appealing.
If you’d like to better understand ray tracing and its impact on games and a computer system, at a high level rather than descending too deeply into tech gobbledygook, keep on reading.
The default desktop setup of XFCE comes with a panel instead of a dock. However, XFCE is highly customizable and gives you the liberty to install a dock to your system to imitate the desktop layout of GNOME or macOS.
In this article, we'll explore how to install and set up Cairo Dock and the Plank dock, two of the most-used custom docks on XFCE.
Running Ubuntu laptop without power supply? It’s wise to keep an eye on the battery percentage. And, here’s how to make Ubuntu 22.04 display the info in top-right corner just besides the battery icon.
Apache Tomcat, also known as Tomcat Server, is an open-source web server with the Servlet container to launch Java-based web applications. Tomcat includes JavaServer Pages (JSP), WebSocket, Java Servlet, Java EL, etc., for an entirely Java HTTP web server environment to run the Java code.
The great community of skilled developers maintains the Tomcat server under the management of the Apache software foundation. Therefore, the Tomcat server provides excellent accessibility to work on the Java-based application efficiently. Cross-platform support means that it's available for both Windows and Linux. The latest version of Apache Tomcat is 10.0.18, so in this guide, we will explain how to install Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 20.04.
If you are a website admin, you know full well how important it is to keep your sites free from malware. After all, you don’t want to be serving up malicious code to unsuspecting users. So, what do you do? Do you rely on a typical malware scanner and hope it is capable of doing specific scans for specific file types on your web server’s document root (or your site’s data directory)? And what if your websites are being served up on the Linux platform (which they probably are)?
Need a simple-to-use GUI to help manage your MongoDB databases? Jack Wallen shows you how to install Adminer for just that purpose.
Today we are looking at how to install Firestorm Second Life on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
Linux has a growing number of screenshot apps. While some of these apps deliver well on the performance front, they fall short on features and functionalities.
Flameshot comes in as an exception here. It's a free and open-source screenshot app that manages to strike the right balance between features and performance. So if you're on the lookout for a screenshot app for your Linux desktop, Flameshot makes for the perfect choice.
Keep reading as we check out Flameshot and the instructions to install and use it on Linux.
If you’re a web admin, one of your constant challenges is optimizing sites so they perform their best. After all, a slow website could easily turn off clients and customers. To optimize those sites, you might want to first benchmark them to know how well (or poorly) they perform.
Linux Kernel 5.17 has been released with support for recursive id-mapped mounts; CO-RE support that creates compiled BPF programs more portable; a replacement P-state driver for contemporary AMD CPUs; the random number generator switched to BLAKE2s and got much faster; a replacement Real-Time Linux Analysis tool; the fscache networking caching backend was rewritten; new fanotify flag to interchange some inotify patterns; support for giving names to anonymous memory mappings.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by XnView
Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. Let’s see the steps to upgrade to the newly released Fedora 36 Beta, and how to revert if anything unforeseen happens.
Let’s manage our downloads by installing FireDM on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 LTS using the command terminal.
FireDM is an open-source (Internet Download Manager) for Windows and Linux operating systems. It is developed in Python, hence we can install it using the PIP package manager. As per the developers of this program, it can handle multi-connection and offers a high-speed engine to download general files and videos from youtube and tons of other streaming websites. It requires “LibCurl”, and “youtube_dl” to work properly.
Have you ever thought of running Android applications on your Linux system? Well, that’s what we will show you in this article.
If you have used the Windows operating system or macOS, you must have encountered Bluestacks or Nox, which allows you to run Android applications on your PC.
Unfortunately, they don’t have any releases for Linux platforms – that’s where Anbox comes into play.
Deepin is an advanced screenshot tool, I use it personally on my Ubuntu system. It takes screenshots easily and it also includes drawing tools to enhance the images.
This tutorial shows you how to install and use Deepin on Ubuntu 20.04. But they should work on the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 as well.
The purpose of this tutorial is to configure a static IP address on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. When it comes to IP addresses on Ubuntu 22.04, you have two main options for how you configure your network interfaces. You can either obtain an IP address automatically with DHCP, or configure the system to use a static IP address, which never changes.
In this tutorial, we’ll show how to configure a static IP address on Ubuntu 22.04. This can be done either through GUI or command line, and we’ll be going over both methods. Once a static IP address is configured, it won’t change again unless you manually change the IP address later, or turn DHCP on.
PostgreSQL is a database management system, similar to MySQL in many respects but with some key differences. Like MySQL, it’s commonly hosted on Linux. In this guide, we’ll show how to run a PostgreSQL server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, as well as installing the client version in case you just need to connect to an external PostgreSQL database.
IPv6, Internet Protocol version 6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is a communications protocol which is used for identification and location for computers on networks. Its purpose it to route traffic across the Internet. This tutorial will show you how to temporarily or permanently disable IPv6 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
This guide describes how to install and use ClusterSSH on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04. ClusterSSH is a cluster administration tool that allows system admins to manage multiple Linux servers from a single administration console for example running a similar command across a cluster of systems. When run, ClusterSSH opens up an administration console and xterm terminals on every other host in a cluster. Any text typed into the administration console is replicated to all terminals. One can also type into all the windows directly. This tools is so handy in the sense that it reduces the laden of having to run similar commands on each host.
When it comes to tidying up your hard drive on a Linux system, either to free up space or to become more organized, it’s helpful to find the largest directories on the system. In other words, the directories that are consuming the most storage space.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to find the largest directories on Linux, through both command line via the du command, and through a GUI application as well.
The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to remove a directory and all of its contents on a Linux system. Being able to delete directories (sometimes called folders) is an essential part of managing your file system. Linux allows us to remove any directory that our user has permissions on.
While this is a pretty basic function, there are some important caveats to keep in mind. In this tutorial, you will see how to remove a directory and all of its contents from command line and GUI. You will also see how to deal remove directories that you do not have write permissions on by using root privileges.
Developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and originally meant to be used on the latter, the Snappy package manager is a free and open source software used to install and manage snap packages. The purpose of Snap packages, just like flatpaks, is to distribute sandboxed and self-contained applications (applications are packaged together with their dependencies).
The Snappy package manager and its infrastructure landed on distributions other than Ubuntu. In this tutorial we see how to install it and used it on the latest version of Fedora.
In this very short tutorial we’ll enable copy/paste for a VMware virtual machine.
I struggled a bit to get copy/paste to work using VMware Workstation.
The official docs gave an accurate solution, but it didn’t get to the point so I assumed they wouldn’t address my issue.
As you may have noticed in recent days, my domain registrar (HostFast) suspended cnx-software.com domain for what I believe are dubious reasons, meaning the site was inaccessible to the outside world and myself. I cannot do much about the latter and I’m held hostage to what the domain registrar’s will, but I was able to access my own website with my domain name after installing a DNS server through dnsmasq on my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop.
The past few days have been spent giving Manjaro on Raspberry Pi a go. I have had a Raspberry Pi 4 kicking around mostly acting as a noiseless bridge between my PC and Icom IC-705 for digi-modes. It feels like a waste for all those times I am not playing with amateur radio.
Kate & KWrite always existed as pair in the last 20 years.
KWrite was there first, a SDI editor already shipped with very early KDE versions.
Kate was started by me to have a MDI variant of KWrite.
KWrite was kept untouched, more or less, over the last 20 years beside minor improvements and bug fixes.
Naturally a lot features slipped in due to the fact that it uses KTextEditor as editor component.
I will not consider small dependent Linux distributions, small BSD variants, or one-man projects, because the question almost becomes irrelevant in very small projects. Often they simply cannot keep up with upstream security updates if their project has even a small amount of third party packages.
Regarding the major Linux distributions and BSD variants, such as e.g. Debian Linux, Arch Linux, Artix Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, generally speaking, a package maintainer or ports maintainer is not a programmer and as such he or she cannot do any coding. The package maintainer is only responsible for making sure that the package is installable and working and that it is updated according to the project guidelines.
Deepin 20.5 is here a little over two months after Deepin 20.4 and introduces a ground-breaking new feature that no other GNU/Linux distribution currently offers, facial recognition to unlock your computer, as well as to authenticate in various apps that require sudo authentication.
Another interesting feature in the Deepin 20.5 release is the ability to pin screenshots to the desktop, which will remain sticky on top of windows.
This is the release announcement for IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 166. It fixes the recently introduced backup issue and patches a security vulnerability in zlib.
zlib memory corruption on DEFLATE CVE-2018-25032 has been assigned to an issue that allowed an attacker with some chosen content to crash the compressor. We do not believe that this is exploitable in IPFire.
A total of four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were delivered this week to rolling release users.
Tumbleweed has consistently been releasing daily snapshots; a four-day period between two snapshots this week is the longest duration between snapshots since the fall of last year. Impressive.
The most recent snapshot, 20220320, updated just one package. The tiny update of perl-Mojolicious to version 9.23 enabled gzip compression by default with the Mojolicious renderer.
What I don't understand is why these projects aren't open and clear about the problems they are facing rather than writing this misleading information to their users!
Stop saying that you focus on security. Stop saying that you provide long term support. Stop lying to your users, because it is a lie.
These Linux project could learn a lesson from both OpenBSD and FreeBSD in which all the maintenance problems of both the operating systems themselves and third party packages are out in the open. In OpenBSD, prior to version 6.5, no third party package would receive any kind of bug fix or security update unless you where running with OpenBSD current. Since 6.5, the normal release also gets important bug fixes and security updates, but OpenBSD has always been very open about how that is handled: [...]
Canonical today announced the general availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Beta and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This new version of OpenStack sets a foundation for next-generation, highly performant infrastructure as needed by telco NFV, media streaming, traffic analysis and HPC services, using SmartNIC cards and integrating them with the Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver. With OpenStack network components running on SmartNICs, users benefit from lower latency, higher throughput, and better quality of services.
The world is moving toward nanotechnology. Did anyone ever think that we could use computers the size of an SD card, which we use in DSLRs to capture photos? The first IBM hard disk stored 3.75 MB of data, and metaphorically, it was compared to approximately the size of two medium-sized refrigerators.
Recently, MangoPI SBC shared an image on Twitter where they compared their product with the size of SD card, and new hardware of MangoPi is smaller than an SD card. Surprisingly, it’s running on Tina-Linux.
The fabless processor designer SiFive has another feather in its cap. It’s become the first startup focused primarily on the open source RISC-V processor specification to reach unicorn status. A couple of weeks back the company announced that it had raised $175 million in a Series F financing round, which values the company at over $2.5 billion, which is well over the $1 billion valuation needed to be considered a unicorn.
Actually, the successful fundraising round, led by the investment firm Coatue Management, was the least of the good financial news coming from the seven-year-old Silicon Valley startup this month. Two days earlier it announced it was selling its OpenFive connectivity business to Alphawave for $210 million, in order to focus on its RISC-V CPU cores.
Chen Ruihua has no aeronautic or engineering qualifications, but has so far built three home-made helicopters, he says
SerenityOS, which started out as a one-man project in 2018, has now got to the point where its creator proudly announced that its web browser passes the Acid3 browser test.
This is a remarkable achievement for a very small, hobbyist project. Acid3 is relatively old now – it dates back to 2008. However it was and is quite demanding, testing Javascript, the Document Object Model and more.
Its creator and lead developer, Andreas Kling, started the project as a distraction while coping with substance withdrawal, a growing issue in the tech industry even before COVID-19. Its name is a tribute to the "Serenity Prayer" used in several 12-step programs. Last year, though, he was able to quit his job to work on it full time.
A year ago I published an offer to review the README of free and open source projects. I didn’t expect much interest, but someone posted the link to Hacker News, and I got enough requests that it was a little overwhelming. I’ve now reviewed 196 READMEs, my queue is empty, and I’m suspending the offer for now, even if it has been fun.
I especially wanted to help people new to FOSS development, and I know that for one’s first project it can be scary to open oneself up for critique. Thus I made it possible to request a review in private, and sent my feedback in private, and I haven’t published the projects I reviewed. However, I feel it might be of interest to read a summary of my experience doing this.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the READMEs were. People put in a lot of effort into them. There might be some selection bias here: someone who doesn’t care about making a good README probably won’t ask for a review, either.
This blog post does not take sides in that debate, or advise where and when to use Generics in Go. Instead, this blog post is about the third side of the generics conundrum: It’s about systems engineers who are not excited about generics per se, but about monomorphization and its performance implications. There are dozens of us! Dozens! And we’re all due for some serious disappointment.
I’ve been using perlimports a lot at $work. I’m generally quite happy with perlimports, but it can get confused by modules which are being dynamically used. Consider the following case, where we are using a function to create new objects.
We’ll be using Git::Helpers::CPAN to look up the Git repository for a CPAN module (or distribution).
Two hundred thousand boys and girls will be in uniform when Dixie Youth Baseball begins its 66th season this spring. Everyone will stand for the national anthem. Players will be introduced by name before the home team takes the field. The players’ parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters will fill the bleachers and cheer as families have done for decades—and the players’ uniforms will never again be as white as they are before the first game.
Nadav Lapid has the uncertain honor of being the most acclaimed Israeli film director. A perennial favorite at festivals around the world, his autobiographical works explore the machismo of the Israeli regime, the moral predicaments of its artists, and the “sickness” in the souls of its citizens. Lapid wants to be seen as the state’s enfant terrible, a so-called critic whose characters launch epithets at their home: “odious,” “repugnant,” “fetid,” “obscene,” “vulgar.” But Lapid’s art also betrays a tortured affinity for Zionism, complicating his christening as an Israeli punk and perhaps explaining why he has thus far been unwilling to cross the one line that would render him an enemy of his state. His most recent film is Ahed’s Knee, and it is about the knee of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl named Ahed Tamimi.
A watchdog investigation published Thursday revealed that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy owns stock in the manufacturer of rapid coronavirus tests that the U.S. Postal Service has been delivering to households as part of the Biden administration's pandemic response.
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) discovered DeJoy's€ Abbott Laboratories holding in an examination of the scandal-plagued postmaster general's financial filings, which the group notes "show no evidence of him having fully divested that stock," leaving him positioned to profit off Abbott's partnership with the White House.
During the first pandemic year, I wrote my own song about an Eleanor: Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, who died on this day, March 31, 1898. I found myself reading Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution€ which tells the epic story of Karl, his wife Jenny von Westphalen, and their daughters, Laura, Jenny (Jennychen), and Eleanor. There were others too — Karl and Jenny in fact had seven children but only three survived into adulthood. All three daughters — and their spouses — played a role in the socialist movement, but it was Tussy who was closest to Marx and Engels and the most active politically.
From Rachel Holmes’ biography, I learned that Eleanor Marx had done the first English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and figured it was high time I read that too. The novel was scandalous for its depiction of adultery and the newspaper that serialized it was tried for obscenity in 1857. It created a stir in England too, where it was secretly blacklisted even into the 1950s, with government files showing that police constables were under orders to purchase and destroy copies they found.
Her followers often pitch her Wikipedia pages to feature, but these days it’s hard to find an entry that will impress Ms. Rauwerda. “If it’s a fun fact that’s been on the Reddit home page, I’m definitely not going to repost it,” she said. “For example, there are only 25 blimps in the world. I’ve known about that for a long time, and it went around Twitter a couple days ago. I was shocked. I was like, ‘Everyone knows this.’”
She is choosy in large part because many of her followers rely on @depthsofwikipedia for unearthing the hidden gems of the [Internet].
In the late 1970s, as a young researcher at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, Jack Dongarra helped write computer code called Linpack.
Linpack offered a way to run complex mathematics on what we now call supercomputers. It became a vital tool for scientific labs as they stretched the boundaries of what a computer could do. That included predicting weather patterns, modeling economies and simulating nuclear explosions.
I'm first-generation college graduate. I'm not sure I would have been accepted if it weren't for my test scores. I didn't have an impressive list of extracurriculars or any athletic achievements. I came from a public school that rarely sent students to my college. A local college would have paradoxically been much more expensive (my college provided full need-based financial aid). For graduate school, testing came in handy again.
We’ve seen this funky dual disk polar printer already recently, but [Heinz Loepmeier] has been busy working on it, so here’s an update. The primary focus here is nozzleboss, a blender plugin which enables the surface textures of already sliced objects to be manipulated. The idea is to read in the gcode for the object, and convert it to an internal mesh representation that blender needs in order to function. From there the desired textures can be applied to the surfaces for subsequent stages to operate upon. One trick that nozzleboss can do is to create weight maps to tweak the extrusion flow rate or print velocity value according to the pixel value at the surface — such ‘velocity painting’ can produce some very subtle surface effects on previously featureless faces. Another trick is to use the same weight maps and simply map colours to blender text blocks which are injected into the gcode at export time. These gcode blocks can be used swap tool heads or extruders, enabling blending of multiple filament colours or types in the same object.
The first electronic digital watches were admired for their pioneering technology, if not their everyday practicality, when they were introduced in the 1970s. Their power-hungry LED displays lit up only when you pressed a button, and even then the numbers shown were tiny. Their cases were large and heavy, and they drained their batteries rather quickly even when not displaying the time. Still, the deep red glow of their displays gave them a certain aesthetic that’s hard to replicate with today’s technology.
When you’re driving around, you might occasionally notice your indicators or windscreen wipers sync up fortuitously with the music. [Cranktown City] wanted to ensure his wipers would always match the beat, however, and set about making it so.€
YouTuber [Linguoer] has a knack, and it’s one that we don’t often see on the pages of Hackaday: rewinding and rebuilding dilapidated motors and generators. In the video below, you’ll see [Lin] take a hydroelectric turbine and generator that looks like it’s been sitting at the bottom of a lake, and turn it into a working unit, all while wearing her trademark blue and yellow denim jumpsuit.
We are always impressed with something so simple can actually be so complex. For example, what would you think goes into an analog computer? Of course, a “real” analog computer has opamps that can do logarithms, square roots, multiply, and divide. But would it surprise you that you can make an analog device like a slide rule using a Wheatstone bridge — essentially two voltage dividers. You don’t even need any active devices at all. It is an old idea and one that used to show up in electronic magazines now and again. I’ll show you how they work and simulate the device so you don’t have to build it unless you just want to.
As a quantified-self experiment, [Ayan] has tracked several daily habits and moods for a couple of years and discovered some insights. Too much coffee is followed by anxiety while listening to music leads to feelings of motivation and happiness. There was a strong correlation in the data, but [Ayan] wondered if external factors like the weather and air quality also played a role.
[Hal Rodriguez] and [Sahrye Cohen] of Amped Atelier focus on creating interactive wearable garments with some fairly high standards. Every garment must be pretty, and has to either be controllable by the wearer, through a set of sensors, or even by the audience via Bluetooth. Among their past creations are a dress with color sensors and 3D-printed scales on the front that change color, and a flowing pantsuit designed for a dancer using an accelerometer to make light patterns based on her movements.
As progressives in Congress cast attention on Medicare for All legislation this week, research published Thursday highlighted that Americans are frustrated and struggling due to the for-profit U.S. healthcare system.
"We must begin to change this trajectory with smarter policies that put patients over profits."
After the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill to cap insulin prices, a leading patient advocacy group renewed its call for broader action to limit the costs of prescription drugs.
"In order to deliver on their promises to all patients—including those who depend on insulin—the Senate must act urgently to approve the broad provisions already passed by the House."
New York state has failed to provide children on Medicaid with the mental health care they are entitled to by law, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday by two adolescents acting on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid-eligible kids.
As a result, the lawsuit alleges, young people with serious mental health conditions suffer unnecessarily, ending up in hospitals and residential treatment programs because they don’t have access to services that would keep them safe at home.
With COVID-19 coverage ending for the uninsured, we look at how uninsured people and communities of color will bear the impact of the end to free COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccines, and how the pandemic has led to a renewed push for Medicare for All. We are joined by Dr. Oni Blackstock, primary care and HIV physician and founder and executive director of Health Justice, and Dr. Adam Gaffney, critical care physician, professor at Harvard Medical School and immediate past president of Physicians for a National Health Program.
The House is set to pass legislation on Friday to legalize marijuana nationwide, an effort that has unprecedented levels of support in both chambers of Congress.
The bill is likely to pass the lower chamber largely along party lines, with most Republicans expected to oppose it.
On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and is now asking technology companies and federal agencies for information about the frequency of such schemes.
Exploitation could allow an attacker to read kernel memory and this could the enabling of apps to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.
Apple wants to take this instalment thing even further and are reported to be working on a hardware subscription service. The service is expected to launch later this year or early 2023. They want to sell the iPhone and other Apple devices as subscription services.
It would work like Netflix does. On Netflix you pay $9.99 a month and get to browse through their video catalogue but you don’t own any of the videos. If you fail to pay in a particular month, you are cut off.
Imagine that for a phone. You would lease an iPhone from Apple and pay your ‘rentals’ each month. The phone would never become yours, you’d merely be paying for the privilege of using it.
On an almost daily basis, the business networking company — helping professionals connect and show off their work history — has informed me that execs from Dell, JP Morgan, Metlife, and Philip Morris International have been checking out my info. I’m in demand and can probably expect to receive unsolicited offers for jobs with a six-figure salary any day now.
€¿Dónde están mis datos?" (“Where Is My Data?”) evaluated seven leading internet and cell phone companies: Claro (América Móvil), Movistar (Telefónica), Tigo (Millicom), ETB, DirecTv, Emcali,€ and Avantel. Karisma also included satellite internet companies Hughesnet and Skynet for their role in connecting rural areas.
Today’s report is Karisma’s seventh annual €¿Dónde Estan Mis Datos? for Colombia—an assessment of telecommunication companies’ commitment to transparency and user privacy. As in prior years, Karisma looked at whether companies’ transparency reports provide detailed information about government requests for user data and content blocking, how strong their data protection policies are, and whether they adequately disclose content blocking practices and data breaches.
In these categories, Colombia’s internet and cell phone companies were steady, mostly meeting, or exceeding, levels achieved in the last few years. Movistar was the overall top performer, with 15 out of a possible 16 points, followed by Tigo with 13 points, and Claro and Avantel, each with 10 points. ETB scored 8 points, DirectTV earned 7 points, Hughesnet and Emcali each earned 5 points, while Skynet earned 3.
An EU proposal to force browsers to accept web certificates created by the bloc risks “upsetting a carefully curated set of rules and technologies that undergird almost all privacy and security online”, according to a leading cybersecurity expert.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, distinguished technologist at the Internet Society, is among 38 signatories to an open letter addressed to the European Parliament that criticizes the plans.
Other signatories include academics, security engineers, and security researchers in the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany.
Americans “need to imagine their vote has an impact on policy, an illusion the media encourages them to believe in.”
While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began — the heating of the Earth’s climate — is now looming larger still. The reason is simple enough: a war-induced rush to boost oil and gas production has significantly undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Canberra establishment got antsy: What were those wicked freedom-hating representatives of the Middle Kingdom up to?€ This was, after all, part of the Australian backyard they were poking their noses in.€ The response was predictable and quick: a promise of AU$20 million in extra aid, the creation of a spanking new radio network, budget support and an extension of the Solomons International Assistance force.
Spoon-full measures about sovereignty were readily distributed through the press outlets and public.€ Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan, the sober side of government paranoia, suggested that The Solomons was at risk of losing its sovereignty to China.€ Australia, in contrast, had made sure that everything it had done enhanced “the sovereignty of Pacific nations, to make sure everything we’re doing is to help and support them when it comes to their sovereignty.”€ The great regional helper, and local hope.
They’re both feeling the strain of a warming planet.
“Is the earth going to get so hot that we can’t survive?” my young son asked me last summer as we plodded through the woods behind our Maryland home. I wasn’t certain, I replied hesitantly. (Not exactly the most reassuring answer from a mother to a question I ask myself every day.) We had just left my younger child at home, because she started wheezing when she stepped into that already more than 100-degree July morning.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said yesterday that “Russia would only use nuclear weapons in the case of a threat to his country.” As ominous as this sounds, during € the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the use of nuclear weapon to defend one’s country mirrors United States’ nuclear weapons policy.
Nuclear weapons have not been detonated in war for seventy seven years. During that period The United Nations adopted as Article 1 its first official act, calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Various other international treaties have called for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the banning of nuclear weapons testing, banning nuclear weapons in space, the banning of missile defense systems (no longer in effect) and the banning of entire classes of missile delivery systems (no longer in effect).
The cruel truth, however, was that Joseph McCarthy never made a successful case against anyone; he managed to push several people out of their jobs and influenced public opinion by selling lies.
There is a general expectation that politics is a dishonest practice; even Donald Trump’s legendary “30,573 false or misleading claims” (as tracked by Washington Post) seemed to fall within allowable limits given his ability to lie and keep his base.
President Biden has called President Putin a war criminal because under the law of war it is a crime to invade another nation. That is correct: wars of invasion are criminal. President Putin, apparently offended by the charge, has called US diplomats in to challenge the charge.
The facts are clear. A war of invasion has occurred, so what possible challenge could President Putin seek to assert? It has been said “truth is the first casualty of war,” so maybe the truth of this crime is dying unmourned in some bomb crater?
Braving frigid ocean temperatures off the coast of northern Denmark, Greenpeace activists on Thursday attempted to block a Russian oil shipment and urged countries around the globe to stop buying the fossil fuels that are funding Moscow's war on Ukraine and to pursue an ambitious clean energy transition for "peace and safety."
"We shouldn't just switch to using more oil, coal, and gas from other countries."
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday that Russian forces have almost entirely left the site of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, where officials said they were exposed to "significant doses" of radiation since taking over the site in late February.
The BBC reported that some soldiers are being treated in Belarus for radiation sickness, which can cause a range of symptoms depending on the level of exposure including nausea, vomiting, skin damage, and seizures or coma in extreme cases.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine drags on, calls have grown for the United States to impose a “no-fly zone” over the country.€
Earlier this week, the Russian Defense Ministry announced a shift in its stated military objectives in Ukraine. Russian forces, the ministry’s spokesman claimed, would “drastically reduce” their assault on Kyiv and Chernihiv (this has yet to materialize) and concentrate on seizing the Donbas. According to Meduza’s sources, this decision was made for both military and political reasons. For one, Russian officials aren’t sure how the country can survive under harsh Western sanctions.€
The war in Ukraine is in its fifth week, with casualties on both sides continuing to mount. Unexpectedly stiff resistance by the Ukrainians has so far prevented Russian forces from seizing Kyiv and other key cities. One danger of the current stalemate—that Russia’s frustration will lead to escalation—can be seen in the relentless bombardment of Mariupol. But Russia’s failures on the battlefield also create real opportunities for peace, possibly involving some form of regional autonomy for the Donbas along with neutrality for the whole of Ukraine.
When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs.
But over the past two years, St. Louis has quietly lowered its murder count in another way: classifying more than three dozen killings as what are termed justifiable homicides, sometimes in apparent violation of FBI guidelines for reporting crimes, a ProPublica/APM Reports investigation found.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Wednesday Russia is preparing a major offensive in the eastern Donbas region. This comes just two days after Kremlin officials announced plans to “fundamentally” cut back military operations near Kyiv and the city of Chernihiv, though attacks have continued on both cities. We speak with Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Simon Schlegel, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, who say the future of peace largely hinges on the fate of the Donbas region. Schlegel also speaks about the growing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, where now a quarter of the population is displaced, and Lieven talks about the domestic backlash President Vladimir Putin faces from ultranationalists opposed to any peace talks.
In response to continued questions from reporters, however, Price acknowledged that the latest U.S. statements about Putin’s activities are based on open-source information, not necessarily on intelligence assessments.
“Right now we’re speaking to public reports,” Price offered. “I am not speaking to intelligence in this case.”
When tyrannies are appeased, they tend to grow. That seems to be one of the more reliable lessons of history. Yet, societies continue to appease aggressors in the hope that, maybe this time, appeasement will work.
The last surviving suspect in the November 2015 attacks in and around Paris apologised to the court on Wednesday, saying he chose not to detonate his suicide belt that night but felt ashamed for not doing so: "I was afraid of the looks from the other jihadists," he said.
According to the UN Commission, sexual violence has been instrumentalized as a reward and entitlement for youth and men participating in conflict.
The goal is to inflict maximum disruption of the fabric of communities, including through their constant displacement, the report continues.
Former moderator Khaled Hassan, 31, who was employed to identify extremism in Arabic language videos until two months ago, accuses YouTube of “shirking its legal and moral responsibilities”.
“Keeping 1.5 alive requires a 45 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by mid-century”, he said, highlighting how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatened to become a huge setback for the concerted effort to speed up climate action.
India has refrained from condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, even as the West has imposed sanctions. But big Russian banks have been cut off from the SWIFT messaging system used for cross-border transactions and American measures have largely blocked the use of dollars, complicating trade. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, was due to visit Delhi on March 31st, after we wrote this. One item on the agenda was expected to be finding ways to work around sanctions to enable Russian oil sales to India.
Oil-and-gas firms in the two countries already work together. ONGC Videsh, the Indian government’s overseas oil-and-gas exploration and production arm, is involved in three projects in Russia, for instance; Rosneft, a Russian state-owned giant, owns 49% of Nayara Energy, a Mumbai-based firm with 6,000 filling stations and a large refinery in Gujarat.
Some theories suggest that this “Arctic greening” will help counteract climate change. The idea is that since plants take up carbon dioxide as they grow, rising temperatures will mean Arctic vegetation will absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ultimately reducing the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
But is that really happening?
Will the report even mention regulating a phase out of fossil fuel production?€ Despite the increasing severity of climate impacts and the daunting timeline for mitigation needed to have even a fifty-fifty chance of staying climate safe?€ Or will supply-side pathways and policies and their supporters remain€ outside the fence as they were at COP26€ ?
The third IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), this time on climate mitigation, is scheduled to be released in early April. Mitigation is crucial. There is a new appreciation of how close human induced warming is taking us to ‘dangerous climate change‘, a potential€ cascade of feedbacks, and even as a threat multiplier in a nuclear armed world. Effective mitigation – the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – is imperative. The Working Group III (WGIII) report on the science of climate mitigation is eagerly awaited.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shaken many long-held Western assumptions about the foundations of peace in Europe. Among other things, it has renewed policymakers' focus on energy dependence as a key strategic issue.
What do a 6-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war?
President Joe Biden's Thursday announcement of a record release from the nation's strategic petroleum reserve alongside a boost in domestic oil production was denounced as a disastrous response to soaring U.S. gasoline prices by advocates of urgent climate action.
"Biden is tragically missing the moment to fully deploy his authority under the Defense Production Act to turbocharge renewable energy."
Environmentalists and Indigenous communities are sounding the alarm on President Joe Biden's plan to use his executive authority to boost U.S. production of minerals for clean energy storage—a move officially announced Thursday after a week of reporting on its development.
"The government should use its purchasing power to maximize reuse of recycled content and build a circular materials economy."
As President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered the release of one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for six months in a bid to reduce surging gas prices, Public Citizen released a report that details how Big Oil is intentionally creating "pain at the pump" to boost profits.
"Numerous executives have emphasized that shareholder profits, rather than expanding domestic production, is their top goal."
Toward Africa in particular, Beijing has signaled equally significant shifts. At the December 2021 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation ministerial, China substantially reduced its infrastructure investments in Africa for the next three years. It also cut its assistance in agriculture, climate, health, peace and security, and trade promotion by 80 percent and in capacity-building by 90 percent. At the same time, the Vision 2035 document released in conjunction with the ministerial promised “a new green growth model for common eco-development of China and Africa.”
At an off-the-record meeting with representatives of African NGOs, three experts on Chinese law, investment strategies, and energy transition connected to Africa shared their insights on this evolving relationship. They offered different ways of interpreting the new Chinese policies and provided recommendations for how African civil society could advance their agendas with respect to various Chinese entities: the state, multilateral financing institutions, and enterprises.
Flaring — or the burning of stranded natural gas directly at an oil well — is one of the drilling industry’s most notorious problems, often condemned as a pointlessly polluting waste of billions of dollars and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.
In early March, oil giant ExxonMobil signed up to meet the World Bank’s “zero routine flaring by 2030” goal (a plan that — when you look just a bit closer — doesn’t entirely eliminate flaring but instead reduces “absolute flaring and methane emissions” by 60 to 70 percent.)
Algorithms, data tools, sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, machine learning, and data mining approaches have all advanced dramatically. As a result, it has been demonstrated that big data analysis can give a data-driven approach in: [...]
“For the first time, we’re going to take ownership of our data, and also the messaging and how the data is going to be interpreted,” said Stranger-McLaughlin.
The crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending the global political order and underlying trade structures.
This is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. (For those not familiar with football, when a team is ahead, it generally uses running plays to take lots of time off the clock. They run because they are winning, they don’t win because they run.) This distinction is important when considering various predictions for a recession in the current environment.
There are many features of an economy that we commonly see before a recession. For example, we typically see higher prices for oil, wheat, and other commodities before a recession. We also often see an inverted yield curve, where the interest rate on short-term Treasury debt (e.g., 90-day or 2-year notes) exceed the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds.
Federal data released Wednesday shows that U.S. corporate profits jumped 25% to record highs in 2021 even as the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the nation's economy, disrupting supply chains, hammering low-wage workers, and helping to push inflation to levels not seen in decades.
"Megacorporations are cashing in and getting richer—and consumers are paying the price."
The promise of 300 million jobs in care as a key feature of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is a tempting invitation for investors seeking new profit opportunities, especially if more public monies are committed. Mature segments of the care sector that have received massive private investments—such as health care, nursing homes, and long-term care—tell us that we need democratised finance to build a care economy that ensures alignment of women’s rights, workers’ rights, and care receivers’ rights.
While Elon Musk often crows about his disdain for subsidies, Musk companies routinely hoover up billions in government assistance. For example, Starlink gamed the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) subsidy auction to nab nearly a billion dollars to deploy broadband to areas that didn’t need it: including some airport parking lots and a few parking medians.
We have long advocated for single-payer national health insurance. By eliminating private insurers and simplifying how providers are paid, single-payer would free up hundreds of billions of dollars now squandered annually on insurance-related bureaucracy. The savings would make it feasible to cover the uninsured and to eliminate the cost barriers that keep even insured patients from getting the care they need. And it would free patients and doctors from the narrow provider networks and other bureaucratic constraints imposed by insurance middlemen. We still urgently need this reform.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed during the 2020 presidential race to implement an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” which would pull in $3.75 trillion over 10 years. “Think about how that money could be used,” her campaign said. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders upped the ante with his proposed “Tax on Extreme Wealth,” which aimed to establish a graduated wealth tax for billionaires.
Economists and workers' rights advocates on Thursday condemned the latest setback for working people dealt by right-wing Democratic lawmakers, three of whom joined every Republican senator in opposing President Joe Biden's nominee to lead the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division after being aggressively lobbied by business interests.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) voted against allowing Dr. David Weil's nomination to move forward Wednesday evening, several months after the former Obama administration official was first nominated for the top wage regulatory role.
Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema faced fresh backlash from civil rights groups on Wednesday after the Republican governor of her home state of Arizona signed into law a bill that could purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls.
"Sinema and Manchin are directly enabling the erosion of civil rights and liberties by right-wing governors."
Meanwhile, under pressure from a public beginning to notice the striking correlation between membership in Congress and a sharp eye for the best investments, Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced bills to ban members and their families from buying and selling stocks while in office.
The€ overlap of these two sets of ethics problems — a judge’s possible prejudice in favor of his spouse’s views and affiliations versus an elected official’s potential ability to trade (or have a spouse or child trade) stocks based on inside legislative scoop — is the family angle. That creates a third ethics problem running in the other direction.
Gaffy Duck Joe was back with two mal mots. First, he tried to come off as JFK to the Berliners (we now know how that ended). Then he’s quacking to the 82nd Airborne, the famed special forces outfit, that for some unidentified reason finds itself lunching in NATO’s Poland on kielbasa, one spop seemingly ecstatic about his sausage dressing. Quack, quack. He begins (source: White House),
Only the developmentally disabled — MAGAs and anti-MAGAs alike, intentionally dumbed down by the MSM and pols trash talking — believe the Old Joes any more. For fuck’s sake , he comes from a tax haven state for banks that make fortunes off debt slaves. Probably half the soldiers in front of him joined for a better life — the military being America’s one certain growth industry. Plenty of work ahead. Power of our example?
Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism "a motivating factor" in the GOP-backed legislation's passage.
"Today's decision is a huge win for Florida voters."
Nearly 100 congressional Democrats on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to extend a pause on federal student loan repayments through at least the rest of the year, while calling on him to ultimately "provide meaningful student debt cancellation" for millions of indebted Americans.
"Your administration must act as quickly as possible to extend the pause and make clear to the American public your intention to cancel a meaningful amount of student debt."
The influence of dark money, which cannot be easily traced, presents a major challenge to the swift functioning of the judicial nomination and confirmation process, and the American government as a whole. Dark money deeply influences political decisions in favor of select individuals’ or groups’ agendas rather than in support of the American people’s best interests. Most recently, dark money groups were heavily involved in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, donating money to politicians such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who were key players in advancing Judge Barrett’s confirmation. Critics called Judge Barrett’s confirmation process unusually quick, making the interference of dark money all the more unsettling.
Trying to decide whom to trust when the choices are between Donald Trump and his former neocon-hawk adviser John Bolton can induce a political shame spiral. Why are these my choices? Why do I have to care about these has-beens? And why am I the one feeling shame, when both men should have been shamed off the public stage decades ago? I don’t trust either.
A reader of Atlatszo.ro, the Romanian edition of ÃÂtlátszó, found some 30 filled out ballots in Transylvania, near Jeddar, which were undoubtedly cast for opposition parties.
Pictures taken from the ballots show a bunch of ballot papers cast for opposition parties United for Hungary and the Mi Hazánk opposition party, along with the envelopes in which they should have reached the counting centers.
This is yet another journalist who has been taken in by Biden’s February 4, 2021 promise to end US support for “offensive operations” in Yemen.€ Biden has done no such thing.€ At most, Biden has merely reduced US support for the bloodbath that Yemenis call the “Saudi-American war.”€ Far from ending US support for the Saudi-UAE coalition, the US need for cheap oil following Biden’s March 8 ban on imports of Russian crude may give Saudi Arabia an ideal opportunity to pressure Biden to return US military assistance to its previous level.
Biden has betrayed Yemen.€ During the November 20, 2019 Democratic presidential debate, Joe Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”; vowed to make the Saudis “pay the price” for the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi; and vowed to sell no more weapons to the kingdom.
The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.
Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments.
It has been left to independent media, therefore, to provide some modicum of balance and nuance in the face of this growing tide of Russophobia and willful distortion. Thankfully, many others have addressed issues such as: president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s integration of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group into Ukraine’s national armed forces; NATO encroachment onto Russia’s borders; the West’s failure to honor agreements that Ukraine would not join NATO in the post-Cold War era; the fact that Putin’s actions are supported by (overwhelmingly Russian-speaking) secessionist movements in Ukraine’s eastern provinces due to the Kiev government’s failure to honor the Minsk Agreements; and, perhaps most importantly, the incredible hypocrisy of US sanctions policy given Washington’s not just passive ignoring but active enabling of similar wars waged by its allies such as Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, not to mention its own disastrous debacles in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.
But one aspect of the situation that has seemingly received little attention is the background of how and why a man like Putin could have become Russia’s leader in the first place. My intention is not to defend Putin nor to discount the many criticisms one might have of him and his actions in Ukraine. But there is nonetheless a historical context that created the conditions that led to his rise to power. In order to understand this context, we must travel back much further in time than those pushing the Western narrative dare go. We must examine the formation of the present Russian state, which took shape in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic conditions that prevailed in its wake.
An entire sack filled with thrown out and partially burned Hungarian election ballots was found at a landfill near Târgu MureÃâ¢, Romania. A report from our colleagues at Transtelex.
Enormous amounts of money are spent in politics on online ads. In Hungary, on Facebook alone, billions of forints have been spent on pushing the various parties’ messages. There are various ways to do this. In this article, we are introducing one which has remained hidden up until now. We have found a total of 45 Facebook pages, specifically created for smear campaigns against opposition candidates. Most of them are followed by negligibly few people which makes the large amounts of money spent on attacking their targets hard to justify. Translation by Dominic Spadacene.
The united opposition held its local campaign closing event in Pécs on Wednesday evening. Other than the local opposition candidates, Péter Márki-Zay, as well as vice president of DK, ÃÂgnes Vadai were present.
In addition to posts flagged by fact-checkers, the internal investigation found that, during the bug period, Facebook’s systems failed to properly demote probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The issue was internally designated a level-one SEV, or site event — a label reserved for high-priority technical crises, like Russia’s ongoing block of Facebook and Instagram.
Theranos, Uber, and maybe WeWork could be described as technology companies, but insofar as they represent “tech” to the viewing public, it’s because they were capital-driven start-ups. All three companies raised investment wildly disproportionate to their revenues, as “angels” and venture capitalists bet on their plans and forked over the cash to realize them. To get to the next level of funding—from millions to tens of millions, to hundreds of millions—founders didn’t need to demonstrate corresponding income; they just needed to spend the previous round and tell a good story about where it went. Instead of growing by pouring profits back into their companies, they looked to take bigger and bigger tranches from professional asset managers before (hopefully) making an initial public offering and handing over the bag to retail investors. Expensive parties look less cumbersome on start-up balance sheets than employee benefits do, so people who threw expensive parties rose to the top. Like market mechanisms come to life, these founders found shortcuts (bluffing, cheating, and fraud).
Late last year, a coordinated messaging campaign emerged on the anniversary of the repeal of net neutrality. Numerous pundits and right-wing news outlets all simultaneously issued reports on the same day claiming that because the Internet hadn’t exploded in a rainbow, that the FCC’s extremely unpopular 2017 decision to gut oversight of predatory telecom monopolies must not have mattered (it mattered).
Internal emails, apparently seen by the Washington Post, allegedly suggested Targeted Victory's campaign aimed to show TikTok "as a danger to American children".
Facebook Inc.-owned parent Meta Platforms Inc. paid a prominent Republican consulting company to smear its rival TikTok, according to a report published by the Washington Post today.
The report states that the firm, Targeted Victory, was hired by Meta to taint the reputation of the Chinese social media app, planting op-eds, news stories and letters in newspapers around the U.S. with the message that TikTok was a danger to the well-being of the young people who use it.
This news comes just after Meta announced a disappointing first quarter that included a large stock loss and, for the first time in 18 years, a reduction in monthly active users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg tried to put a positive spin on matters, but the lack of growth at the company worried investors.
The Nashville-based company announced Wednesday that it plans to invest at least $100 million over the next three years into live-action and animated kids’ content. The right-wing outlet’s first content targeted at children is supposed to launch on Daily Wire’s subscription platform in the spring of 2023; it didn’t detail any kids’ shows or movies that it may have in the works.
Americans are “tired of giving their money to woke media companies who want to indoctrinate their children with radical race and gender theory,” Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing said in announcing the initiative. “But they want to do more than just cancel them. They want alternatives.”
Facebook's owner Meta has hired a consulting firm to carry out a US campaign denigrating its fierce rival TikTok, according to a Washington Post report Wednesday partially confirmed by AFP.
The campaign reportedly includes placing letters in major US news outlets and promoting negative stories about TikTok, allegedly using the type of tough tactics familiar to Washington politics.
Now, it turns out that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth company was so jealous of TikTok’s success with younger audiences that it started paying one of the United States’ largest consulting firms to wage a media war on the competition, according to a new report published this morning in the Washington Post.
“My 11-year-old was extremely frightened yesterday and asked whether there was going to be war soon,” said one parent online.
Their mouthpieces are a website called “Ukraine News”, a Chinese edition of state news agency Ukrinform, and channels on messaging app WeChat and YouTube.
It is for the consumption of a Chinese audience otherwise fed a limited diet of broadly pro-Russian news on the invasion of Ukraine, in a country whose leaders are among Moscow’s few remaining friends.
RFA’s Vietnamese Service interviewed Natalya Zhinkyna, interim representative of the Ukraine Embassy in Hanoi about her country’s struggle under the Russian invasion and her work in the capital of Vietnam, a traditional ally of Russia, a number of whose people have turned out to support Ukraine. In a wide-ranging interview, she thanked the Vietnamese public for participating in recent charity events that raised more than $100,000 for humanitarian relief. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Waterville, Maine Morning Sentinel says “Waterville man, 18, planned to use explosives for ‘mass murder’ at Chicago mosque.” Chicago’s WLS reports “Maine teen recruited 2 others to help commit ‘mass murder’ at Chicago area mosque: feds.” CNN has the same slant: “Maine teen accused of plotting to attack a Chicago area mosque.” But the real story is that the chief perpetrator, Xavier Pelkey, and his fellow plotters are Sunni Muslims who were planning a jihad massacre at a Shi’ite mosque.
The author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the revolt at the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971 sued New York state prison authorities on Thursday, saying they've unconstitutionally banned her book behind bars.
Author Heather Ann Thompson, a University of Michigan professor, brought the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court over the treatment by New York State Department of Corrections officials of her book: "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971," published in 2016.
Named as defendants were the department's acting commissioner and a second official with decision-making authority regarding censorship determinations.
According to the minister, the use of these symbols would first and foremost be a misdemeanor. "We will not be defining which symbols are banned and which are symbols of aggression," she explained. "Symbols can change over time, and the use of symbols is very precisely dependent on the context in which it is used."
A Cuban man who staged a rare protest over the detention of a dissident rapper has been slapped with a five-year prison term for disobedience and "enemy propaganda," according to a sentencing document seen by AFP on Wednesday night.
In December 2020, Luis Robles took to a central street in Havana with a handwritten sign reading: "Freedom, no more repression / free Denis" -- referring to the jailing of Cuban rapper and activist Denis Solis over a music video about repression on the island.
Partitioning the Internet closes off that traffic and loses us the opportunity to hear common voices. It is tempting in a moment of crisis to close off anything that you can, as a demonstration that you have done something. But this action empowers those who want the world to act in darkness and feeds the endless hunger of autocracy for control. Simply put, partition hands control to those who want their people to have no independent vision of current events or independent access to other voices. It will not silence governments; it will silence everyone else.
Last year, lawmakers in dozens of states introduced bills to restrict companies from enforcing their terms of service related to the removal of content on their platforms. This was an impulse reaction by conservative lawmakers seeking to punish digital services for taking action against former President Trump’s accounts for violations of terms of use on January 6th. Opponents cautioned that these bills would make it more difficult for companies to remove inappropriate, misleading, or even dangerous information, and that they violated platforms’ First Amendment rights by forcing them to host all user-generated content, regardless of what risks that content presented. Despite warnings, policymakers in Florida and Texas proceeded to pass legislation and both states are now wasting taxpayer dollars fighting — and losing — legal battles over the constitutionality of bills.
This year, a similar situation is playing out in Minnesota, where, in an effort to protect children online, lawmakers are pressing forward with legislation that they have been warned might in fact do just the opposite. A bi-partisan sponsored bill to prohibit the application of algorithms used to select which content to share with users under 18 is quickly making its way through the Minnesota legislature. While nearly all Americans can agree that it is absolutely critical for companies to take additional steps to protect youth online, the state’s approach is shortsighted in that it aims to restrict companies from using the very tools they rely on to keep their users safe.
Republican lawmakers are about to advance a bill that will waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars while making the Internet less safe for Georgians. The ‘Common Carrier Non-Discrimination Act,’ which passed in the Senate earlier this month, is part of a broader effort by Republican legislators to punish digital services for enforcing their policies with respect to the social media accounts of former President Trump.
This bill would force digital services to carry all users’ content neutrally, irrespective of what risks that content creates. By doing so, it would put Georgians at greater risk to everything from foreign disinformation and propaganda from Russian agents and extremist content from anti-American jihadists, who, according to the Senate bill, all deserve equal treatment.
This law would bind digital services’ hands, preventing them from standing between American Internet users and the torrent of foreign disinformation, Communist propaganda, and extremism propagated by adversaries abroad. Digital services need the flexibility this law would take away to fight those evolving online threats.
Some Georgia lawmakers appear to believe private businesses have to give access to any speaker. But Internet services have made commitments to their users to try and protect them from certain problematic content, and that is itself a speech interest. A digital service saying “we don’t want to host Nazi Party candidates” is exercising its own First Amendment rights, and Internet users can choose services whose communities and norms best align with their own preferences.
Human rights advocates were stunned but not surprised Thursday after a Turkish prosecutor asked a court to move the trial of 26 Saudi men accused of murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia—whose Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is widely believed to have ordered the assassination.
"Turkey will be knowingly and willingly sending the case to a place where it will be covered up."
Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed by Saudi agents inside the country's consulate in Istanbul.
The head of Amnesty International accused Turkey of "betraying" him.
Khashoggi's former fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said in a statement that she was "heartbroken" by the prosecutor's request, according to Reuters news agency.
"No good will come of sending the case to Saudi Arabia," she warned. "We all know the authorities there will do nothing. How do we expect the killers to investigate themselves?"
he Turkish prosecutor in the case against 26 Saudi nationals charged in the slaying of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi made a surprise request Thursday that their trial in absentia be suspended and the case transferred to Saudi Arabia, raising fears of a possible cover-up.
The panel of judges made no ruling on the prosecutor's request but said a letter would be sent to Turkey's Justice Ministry seeking its opinion on the possible transfer of the file to Saudi judicial authorities, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. Trial was adjourned until April 7.
The development comes as Turkey has been trying to normalize its relationship with Saudi Arabia, which hit an all-time low following Khashoggi's grisly October 2018 killing. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in an interview on Thursday that Saudi authorities were more cooperative on judicial issues with Turkey, but did not elaborate.
Over the past five years, American Oversight has filed FOIA requests with more than 75 federal agencies or offices and has been forced to go to court dozens of times to compel the release of records after those agencies failed to comply with the law. Through that experience, we have identified several common agency practices and legislative barriers that make it difficult for FOIA to best serve its central purpose of making government records promptly available to the public.
Chinese Australian journalist Cheng Lei went on trial in Beijing on Thursday on espionage charges, with diplomats denied permission to attend the proceedings.
Australian Ambassador Graham Fletcher told reporters outside the court that he was told he could not be present on the grounds that the trial involved state secrets.
Tsaplienko hadn't expected the area he was in to be targeted. The village didn't appear to have any military target, he added. Just civilians.
In tech policy, as with any policy, we often talk about liability. Basically, should X liable to Y, why, and with what consequence? Figuring out good policy is often a matter of figuring out how those questions should be answered. Because sometimes it might be good for society if X could be held liable for certain actions – after all, if a harm has occurred, we might want it to be remediated, and one reason we have the legal notion of liability is to find a way to cause such remediation to happen. On the other hand, sometimes it might be bad for society if liability could too easily attach, because liability isn’t entirely about righting a wrong: it is often about deterring behavior through the fear of potential liability.
Courthouse News Service (CNS) is (again) suing to block court administrators from deliberately withholding filed documents from the press. CNS has sued several other state court systems over the same misbehavior by clerks and the administrators overseeing them.
For decades, local law enforcement agencies have blown off requests from the FBI and DOJ to report use of force incidents by officers. This has led to a very incomplete picture of force deployment in the United States — a form of proxy opacity that has allowed agencies to ignore problematic cops and problematic actions.
Along with Roxy’s Law, New Mexico has recently taken other meaningful steps toward protecting wildlife. In 2019, the state banned gruesome coyote-killing contests, events that reward indiscriminate and senseless massacres. Currently, the state is rolling out its plan for projects to protect wildlife from vehicle collisions along heavily used movement and migration corridors.
These are signs of a new era across the Land of Enchantment. An era in which coexistence is the norm, exploitation and cruelty are waning, and native foxes, bobcats, beavers, badgers, and wolves are revered for their ecological roles and honored for their intrinsic value, not persecuted as inconveniences. We are leaving behind nearly two hundred years of primarily viewing wildlife as merely something to slaughter and sell.
For more than two centuries, the Barbary countries of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli had been harassing Christian ships, seizing cargo and capturing citizens. Algiers once boasted more than 30,000 Christian slaves, including one Miguel Cervantes, before he wrote Don Quixote. European powers in the 1500s and 1600s fought ferocious battles against Muslim pirates like Barbarosa. However, over time, a cynical system of appeasement had developed. The nations of Europe paid tribute — in money, jewels, and naval supplies — to remain at peace. England and France — in endless wars — found it cheaper to bribe the Barbary pirates than to devote a squadron to perpetually trawling the sea off Africa. At its core, expediency outweighed national honor.
When the thirteen American colonies split off from mother England, they lost British protection. The United States found itself lumped in the pile of potential Barbary victims, alongside the likes of Sardinia and Sicily. (From 1785 to 1815, more than six hundred American citizens would be captured and enslaved. This nuisance would prove to be no mere foreign trade issue but rather a near-constant hostage crisis.)...
Following a U-turn over re-opening girls’ secondary schools in Afghanistan on Wednesday, the UN human rights chief shared her “profound frustration and disappointment” that six months after the Taliban seized power, high school girls have yet to return to the classroom.
“The de facto authorities’ failure to adhere to commitments to reopen schools for girls above the sixth grade – in spite of repeated commitments towards girls’ education, including during my visit to Kabul two weeks ago – is deeply damaging for Afghanistan”, High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said in a statement.
The internet had barely escaped the lab in 1990, when the Soviet Union was awarded .su as its country code, joining domains like France’s .fr and the United Kingdom’s .uk. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was dead.
But not its country code.
Thirty years later, the Soviet Union endures in the imagination of a former KGB officer now in the Kremlin—and on the internet, where you can still register a domain like stalin.su. As you might expect, the domain is a nostalgia zone for fans of Communism and a favorite haunt of those who oppose a democratic and independent Ukraine and use the .su domain to express their hopes for Ukraine’s future incorporation into Greater Russia. Big .su users also include spammers and other cybercriminals who like the lack of actual government supervision. Given its lack of positive value (and the happy end of Communist terror) it is long past time for the .su domain to be consigned to the digital graveyard.
Amid ongoing criticism of deeply uneven access to Covid-19 vaccines, a new index measuring G20 nations' commitment to global equity for the life-saving jabs shows the world's wealthiest countries have fallen well short of sufficient action.
"The fair global distribution of vaccines isn't about charity; it is about justice... it is about doing what is right."
Top civil society groups on Wednesday denounced a potential deal on Covid-19 vaccine intellectual property rights, calling on the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and U.S. President Joe Biden to reject the proposal.
"Your goal of saving lives worldwide from the ravages of Covid-19 will not be furthered by accepting this text."
The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the€ upload filter€ of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not just on creativity in the EU, but also on freedom of speech there, as algorithms block perfectly legal material. The other concerns the “snippet tax” of Article 15, more formally known as ancillary copyright..
Welcome to episode 18 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, we hear from Stacy Allison-Cassin, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the LIS program at the University of Toronto. Her work is centred in the areas of knowledge organization, metadata, and knowledge equity. A Citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, she engages in work and research related to Indigenous matters in libraries and the larger cultural heritage sector. With a deep interest in increasing access and visibility for non-textual materials and marginalized knowledge, Stacy is a passionate advocate for change in information structures and metadata systems within the library profession and across the wider GLAM sector.
Welcome to episode 17 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, we hear from Patricia Díaz Rubio, a Chilean social communicator (Universidad de Chile) passionate about collective work and social impact. Since 2018, she has been working at Wikimedia Chile, promoting local and open content on the Internet.
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has obtained a new blocking order in the Netherlands targeting 1337x, LimeTorrents, YTS, RARBG, Kickasstorrents and EZTV. The order was issued against the local ISP Delta but, as a result of a blocking agreement, other ISPs will follow suit. The same order will likely trigger Google to take action as well.
Russia's site-blocking systems aimed at restricting access to copyrighted content and anything else deemed undesirable are not performing to the standards the government demands. Blocking access to internet resources requires lots of hardware but due to sanctions, there are fears in Russia that a breakdown in systems operations may be just months away.
We’ve already detailed why the latest bill from Senators Thom Tillis and Pat Leahy, the SMART Copyright Act, is dangerous to the future of the internet. You can read that earlier article, but the short summary is that it would deputize the Copyright Office every three years to arbitrarily bless certain “technological measures” that websites, that host 3rd party content, would need to use. The not so hidden agenda here, pushed by Hollywood basically since the internet came on their radar, is that the Copyright Office will say that any site hosting user uploaded content will need to purchase an upload filter to scan each upload to make sure it doesn’t include any of Hollywood’s content.
