At Wacom, it is important that all of our users have their workflows as fully supported as possible. Over the years more and more enterprise users and creative professionals have been relying on Linux as part of their workflows. Many of these users already rely on Wacom to power their creative and business endeavors. In fact, Wacom devices are being adopted in many Linux enterprise environments beyond the creative industry. Finance, banking, medical, and public sectors are commonly adopting Linux solutions with pen-based workflows.
For decades, Wacom has made sure that all new devices are supported by the Linux kernel. In 2016, Wacom updated their kernel driver so it can readily support new Wacom products without patches. Today, Wacom’s Linux support is well established and has broad adoption.
 Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.
The table above shows our articles updated in March 2022.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
Browsing through the command line protects me from sensory overload. It makes me less angry, less anxious. It also makes me a better reader. Do the experience :ââ¬Â¯construct a small book where each page is of a completely different format from the others. Different fonts, different colours, pictures mixed with it. And print exactly the same content in a boring black and white. Which one is the more readable? Which one will allow you to get the information of the text?
Huginn is a free, open-source self-hosted task and service automation manager alternative to popular services as Zapier and IFTTT.
You can install Huginn at your server, create, and manage automation agents with less effort with a straightforward admin.
I hate it when developers try to make things "simpler," especially when something has been one way for a very, very long, LONG time. That's the case with the most recent Firefox 98.0.1. Developers, in their misdirected zeal to "simplify" the download workflow, managed to ROYALLY screw it up. Hey, I've been using it ONE WAY for so many years, and now the download workflow isn't doing what I expect or what I've become accustomed to. I literally have adapted Firefox's time-honored "download workflow" to the way I work, and the new way is a HUGE disruption to the way I work.
Cryptomator is a useful tool for easily encrypting any data that you may wish to store online. It allows you to create a securely encrypted folder, or vault, containing your files, that you can then upload to any online cloud hosting service. Cryptomator uses AES 256 bit encryption to ensure that your data is always kept safe and secure while stored in a vault.
Cryptomator has a sleek, modern user interface that's very easy to use. To the left side of the window is a panel from which you can select a vault from the list. Clicking on Add Vault brings up a small window giving you the option to create a new vault, or import an already created one into Cryptomator. To import a vault created with Cryptomator, you simply have to navigate to the directory where the vault is stored, and load in the masterkey.cryptomator file.
Calories is a command-line tool for tracking calories and weight using the Harris Benedict formula for calculating your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate).The program is written by Mario, a software Developer originally from Graz, but living in Vienna, Austria.
Calories app is written in the Go programming language, and it is available for Windows, Linux and macOS in 32- and 64-bit.
The Linux terminal is a powerful command-line tool that helps allows users to run multiple commands to do a specific task.
So, as a Linux system administrator, the user may need to know about various commands and how to execute these commands at once on the terminal.
Running multiple commands at once or in one line is a more productive and efficient way in Linux. Moreover, it also saves a good deal of time.
In this tutorial we will learn how to run multiple Linux commands in one line using AND (&&), OR (||), and Semicolon (;) operators.
Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Discord client on Fedora 36 Linux workstation desktop using three different methods of dnf package manager with rpm fusion, the natively installed flatpak manager or installing snapcraft package manager and installing the discord snap as a last resort using the terminal command line.
LEMP is a collection of open-source software commonly used to serve web applications. The term LEMP is an acronym that represents the configuration of a Linux operating system with an Nginx (pronounced engine-x, hence the E in the acronym) web server, with site data stored in a MySQL or MariaDB database and dynamic content processed by PHP that is popularly used for hosting extensive websites due to its performance and scalability.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install LEMP (Nginx, MariaDB, PHP) on Fedora 36 Server or Workstation. The tutorial will install various version choices with Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP using the command line terminal.
Liquorix Kernel is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel shipped with Fedora 36. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
Liquorix Kernel is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels. For more information about Liquorix before installing, check out their features page.
Spotify is a digital music streaming service with both free and paid features. It is the world’s largest music streaming service provider, with over 381 million monthly active users, including 172 million paying subscribers, as of September 2021. Spotify can give you instant access to a vast online library of music and podcasts, which is very popular as you can listen to the content of your choice whenever you feel like it.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Spotify on Fedora 36 Linux workstation desktop using two different methods with the natively installed Flatpak package manager or for users that seek an alternative option using Snapcraft using the command line terminal.
XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Fedora 36. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels before landing on Fedora.
Installing a third-party kernel may be for you for users seeking to have their system kernel up to date and not wanting to install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories manually.
Welcome to our guide on how to configure SSH Local Port Forwarding in Linux. In order to understand how SSH tunneling or simply put, port forwarding, works we are going to see the example usage in this guide.
Kali Linux is an absolute must for penetration testers and other types of admins looking to keep their systems and networks as secure as possible. With tons of pentesting tools pre-installed, this Linux distribution could easily be your one-stop shop for auditing system security.
I like to believe I have a pretty decent marriage. See, my wife is a Mac user. And with this comes the benefit of being able to interact with iMessage on her iPhone. So in the spirit of "one-upping" my smarter half, I decided to see what was available to PCLinuxOS users. After all, surely I could duplicate her ability to interact with her text messages on her computer!
After a few minutes of digging around, I realized that using a Linux tool called KDE Connect would fit the bill quite nicely.
As I wrote last month, I recently "discovered" podcasts. This has led me to renewing my "relationship" with MP3 files. Last month, I wrote about resampling a collection of MP3 files so they all fit on a 700MiB CD-R that I can play in my truck's MP3 CD player.
As you can imagine for something that is "new" to any noob, I have a lot of "catching up" to do when it comes to podcasts. So, I've spent some time exploring, downloading some to my computer, while adding others to my "lists" on the various services that offer podcasts.
One thing that I noticed is that some of the podcasts have each "episode" or "chapter" displaying the cover art for that particular podcast. Others, though, only display the bland "generic" MP3 icon in my file manager (Thunar). Hey! I want those to have pretty pictures on them, too!
I've been back to YouTube, watching tutorials! I found one from the channel Logos by Nick which has one called Vector Abstract Background. I thought I'd share it.
Create a rectangle for the background in your desired size. The tutorial used 1280 x 720 px. Choose Path > Object to path.
MX Linux is an incredibly flexible, mid-weight, Debian-based Linux distribution. It is light enough to bring old laptops back to life yet powerful enough to take full advantage of modern advanced desktop hardware. This well-rounded GNU/Linux operating system is equally well-suited for everyone, from first-time Linux explorers to veteran power users and developers.
When thinking about securing your server with firewall rules it may be interesting to find out which services are running at all on your system.
You can do this with the ss command. The following command shows you in the order of the options the running (-u) udp and (-t) tcp sockets, just for (-l) listening ports. It also lists the (-p) processes and does (-n) not use aliases, but port numbers for the shown ports.
Xtreme Download Manager (XDM) is a free and open-source download manager, here we learn the commands to install XDM on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.
Apart from the XDM Desktop application, users can also integrate this download manager with browsers such as Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi, and Opera. We can resume and schedule a download, bandwidth throttling, categorizing downloads, and downloading multiple files simultaneously. Downloads are possible via HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and various video stream protocols.
To download clips offered on video portals such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo, click on the corresponding button, enter the video’s Internet address, click on “Search” and the video can be retrieved onto your hard drive. After a successful download, they can be converted directly into other video formats using the integrated media converter. Due to the many other functions such as monitoring the clipboard and the automatic checking of a download by your virus scanner, XDM is unreservedly recommended.
Using the command line terminal is the most powerful way to administer a Linux system. Sometimes, though, a terminal can get hung up and become unresponsive. The terminal can also bug out if you try to read a binary file, filling your screen with strange characters.
In such cases, it is useful to reset the terminal. There are several ways to do this across all Linux systems. In this tutorial, you will see how to reset the terminal in Linux.
Hibernation, also known as “suspend to disk”, is the most efficient power saving mode in terms of energy consumption. On hibernation, the state of the random access memory is stored on disk, and the machine is completely power down. Although efficient, hibernation is commonly not recommended if using a solid state drive, because each time the system enters this power state, a lot of data must be written to disk, which as we know, has a limited number of write cycles. For this and other reasons, as the the low number of machines on which hibernation works reliably on Linux, Fedora decided to disable this power state by default.
The partition table of a hard disk holds all the information about where each partition begins and ends. If the partition table gets deleted or becomes corrupt in some way, most likely your operating system will not be able to boot or you will face other hard disk issues. But there is good news: if your partition table is lost, it is possible to recover it using software such as testdisk.
In this tutorial, we will go over the step by step instructions of booting into recovery mode, installing testdisk, and recovering a deleted partition table on a Linux system. After successful recovery of the partition table, you should be able to boot back into your Linux distro and go about using the system as normal – at least if there are no other underlying issues.
The SSH protocol in Linux is used to manage remote systems. It works by allowing you to securely log in to a remote device, which could be another Linux system, firewall, router, etc. When you are finished with your remote administration, it will be time to disconnect from the SSH connection.
In this tutorial, you will see various ways to disconnect from an SSH connection on a Linux system. You will also learn the escape characters to exit from an SSH session, which comes in handy if you encounter a hung system that you have an SSH connection into and need to return to your local terminal.
Computer memory is allocated to processes as pages. Usually these pages are rather small, meaning that a process consuming a lot of memory will also be consuming a lot of pages. Searching through a multitude of pages can result in system slow downs, which is why some servers can benefit from enabling huge pages.
Huge pages is especially useful on systems like database servers. Processes like MySQL and PostgreSQL can make use of huge pages if they are enabled, and will put less strain on your RAM cache. In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to enable huge pages on a Linux system.
An impressive milestone has been hit just over a month after the release of the Steam Deck, with now over 2,000 titles being noted as Verified or Playable by Valve.
We know there's problems though, with some games being Verified or Playable where they shouldn't be, which is part of why Valve has a new feedback system in place. Overall though, it seems like a small minority of titles, the vast majority are being labelled correctly so it's still a good number to go by for players and potential buyers of the Steam Deck.
“Mist, our middleware tool, runs in a separate process, runs concurrently with RetroArch Steam, and functions as a bridge between this separate process interfacing with Steamworks and the GPL application itself running in an entirely different process.”
Lutris, the free and open source game manager for installing games on Linux from many stores, has a new version available as work continues to improve Steam Deck support.
While the headline feature from the developer is "Steam Deck support", it's not quite there yet. They've made plenty of steps towards it, but currently there's no Flatpak package that works properly, and so to install you still need to turn off the Deck's read-only filesystem (which we really don't recommend doing). Thankfully, work on the Flatpak is the priority for the next version! Additionally, there's a new "Create Steam shortcut" option to add games from Lutris to Steam so it can be used in Gaming Mode which sounds incredibly useful.
Steam Deck users will be pleased to know that they can use Lutris to download their favorite games, which was not possible before, and this is the first release since Steam Deck has been handed over to users.
And all of this is possible because Valve has provided the Steam Deck Developer Kit, which is the best collaboration to provide the SDK, which will eventually help them gain more consumers in the market.
ââ¬Æ After 15 months a new stable release of Xfce Terminal is out full of improvements for everybody to enjoy!
[...]
ââ¬Æ From 2016 until 2020, Terminal was in the capable hands of Igor Zakharov. It became unmaintained for a few months in 2021 until I took up its development in September. This is Terminal's first stable release with me as its maintainer, and I hope you will find it worthy of the quality standards set by my predecessors and the Xfce desktop environment as a whole.
 But first, let me mention up front that those touchpad gesture improvements I teased last week aren’t quiiiite ready, but they’re very close now. Hopefully next week! In their stead, we have an enormous number of Plasma bugfixes and UI improvements, tons of goodies for KWrite users, and finally a truly colossal number of enhancements for touch-friendliness when in Tablet Mode.
 Another month, another Nitrux release! Nitrux 2.1 is here still powered by the XanMod flavored Linux 5.16 kernel that was introduced in Nitrux 2.0, which has been updated to version 5.16.16, but it also adds support for the latest and greatest Linux 5.17 kernel series, which can be installed from the repositories.
As expected, Nitrux 2.1 also ships with some of the latest KDE Plasma updates, including the KDE Plasma 5.24.4 desktop environment released earlier this week.
The awesome Nitrux project announced Nitrux 2.1.0 which brings much-needed application stack updates and an important change for iOS devices.
This isn't the Editor! It's the Assistant Editor.
As you can imagine, sometimes we're all at a loss for words. So it is with this column. I don't think I could write a column every single month. Heck, I have trouble with the welcome column for the Graphics Special Editions, and I'm only working on my third! My point is, I want to congratulate parnote on his awesome writing from month to month. I don't think I could do it.
I registered on the PCLinuxOS Forum on August 23rd of 2006 (it was actually my birthday). I've been here ever since. I've met loads of wonderful people (on the forum, anyway), and I hope many of them are good friends. Many of the forum members that were here when I registered are still here, and very helpful to those of us who aren't quite experts yet. Yes, I've been here for nearly 16 years, and I still don't consider myself an expert! I knew next to nothing about computers when I started - I got my first computer in 1995 - and have learned a lot, but I'm still amazed at all the huge gaps in my knowledge.
Fedora Linux test days are events where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora before, this is a perfect way to get started.
SB Components PiSquare is a board following the Raspberry Pi HAT form factor, and based on Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller & ESP-12E Wireless module in order to control multiple Raspberry Pi HATs wirelessly without stacking them on their Raspberry Pi.
The PiSquare uses Socket programming to control multiple Raspberry Pi HATs wirelessly, and for instance, you could connect multiple HATs with SPI or UART without the expansion boards conflicting with each other since the physical interface is handled by the Raspberry Pi RP2040 on each PiSquare connected over WiFi (ESP8266) to the Raspberry Pi SBC.
ASUS provides both Android 9 and Debian images for the board. A board announced in 2019, and officially released around the end of 2020 should have pretty good support and documentation. So let’s have a look. The download page has a new Debian 10 image released on March 2022 (good), while the Android 9 image has not been updated since December 2020. Maybe most users go with the Debian images.
A group of Russian developers are planning a Google Play alternative for Android users that will give those based in the country access to paid apps and services lost due to sanctions.
Google suspended users' ability to purchase apps and games, make subscription payments and make "any in-app purchases" of digital goods using Google Play in Russia as of 10 March. It asked devs that make apps that offer "critical services" to make them free.
The F(x)tec Pro1-X is a smartphone with a 6 inch display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of storage. But it has a few features that make it very unusual for a smartphone in 2022: the phone has a slide-out keyboard, supports both Android and Ubuntu Touch operating systems, has a microSD card reader and headphone jack, and a repairable design – F(x)tec offers spare batteries and screens.
But while a crowdfunding campaign for the Pro1-X wrapped up in late 2020, the phone has yet to ship. F(x)tec said last year that supply chain issues interfered… and they haven’t really gotten much better since then. But now the company says the manufacturing facility has begun trials of the assembly processor, which means that mass production could begin soon (if no further problems are found). And that means the phones could begin shipping to backers soon.
After considerable pushback from the Plugin Review team, WordPress.org has removed a plugin called Zamir, which was created by a Russian developer to display the Z symbol in support of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The plugin gained attention after Gravity Forms founder and CEO Carl Hancock noticed that it was listed under the “New” list of plugins for WordPress.com customers.
Spending a lot of time with technology often means reading terms before hearing them pronounced aloud. The first time you read a word will stick in your head, but it’s not always correct. You’re probably saying some terms wrong.
It’s a phenomenon similar to the Mandela Effect. You’ve subconsciously convinced yourself that something is true, and you may never even consider the possibility that you’re wrong. That is, until the first time you hear someone say it. We’ll spare you the embarrassment.
[...]
In the Linux world, there are two terms that get used a lot—“GNOME” and “GNU.” GNOME is one of a few desktop environments Linux users can choose, it is part of the GNU Project, which is an operating system.
Anyway, many words that start with “gn” are pronounced with a silent “g.” Like “gnats,” “gnarly,” and, well, “gnomes,” the garden ornaments. However, GNOME and GNU don’t follow those same rules.
GNOME is an acronym for “GNU Network Object Model Environment,” and since GNU is pronounced with a hard g, and it is the first word in the GNOME acronym, GNOME is also pronounced with a hard g.
GIMP refers to GNU Image Manipulation Program and is one of the most well-known alternatives to Photoshop. The best part is GIMP is good for both beginner photo editors and advanced photo editors too.
GIMP, popularly known as GNU Image Manipulation Program, it’s free to download and open source, making it work well with the community, and everyone can work on the source codes.
A US federal district court decision in California favoring database biz Neoj4 is incorrect and imperils free open-source software, according to the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Neo4j Enterprise Edition (EE) was at first offered under both a paid-for commercial license and for free under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPLv3). In May 2018, version 3.4 of the software was put under AGLv3 plus additional terms from the Commons Clause license, which is not an open-source license and explicitly says as much in its documentation.
The viability of Neo4j's AGPLv3+Commons Clause license is what's at issue, because taken as a whole, the AGPLv3 includes language that says any added terms are removable. That view has been rejected in court – which accepts Neoj4's right to craft custom terms and to resolve contradictions in those terms – and the Software Freedom Conservancy believes the court erred.
The “Source code” is the part of software that most computer users don’t ever see; it’s the code computer programmers can manipulate to change how a piece of software—a “program” or “application”—works. Programmers who have access to a computer program’s source code can improve that program by adding features to it or fixing parts that don’t always work correctly. Open-source code is widely used by software development companies to accelerate development and reduced costs. Open-source software is software with source code that is publicly available and anyone can inspect, modify and enhance.
Case summary: Luo Di developed the source code of an application called VirtualApp (VA) to be hosted on GitHub.com under the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLV3). The GPL is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. Luo Di stopped updating the code on (VA) to be hosted on GitHub.com under the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLV3). The GPL is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. Luo Di stopped updating the code on GitHub.com in December 2017 and assigned the code to plaintiff Luohe which he is a shareholder of for commercial use. Defendant TPOWER developed some paid WeChat-compatible applications using Luo Di's source code hosted on GitHub.com. The court found that TPOWER violated the GPL by abusing the free source sode owned by Luohe and ordered it to pay 500,000 yuan ($79,000) in damages to the plaintiff. The claims against the other three defendants serving TPOWER as payment collectors of its paid applications were dimissed.
Now that I'm using a slower laptop I've turned off JS by default in uBlock Origin. Pretty much every site that isn't a personal blog refuses to have even basic functionality without JS. An incomplete list of sites or apps that don't work at all (and I do mean that they don't work at all):
* Mastodon * Imgur * Youtube * Logging in to Google * Feedly
Write a Java program to get keys from the hashmap using the value.
In this tutorial, you will learn Java examples to get keys from a HashMap based on a defined value.
Another year passing vernal equinox, another time where clock skew at large can be observed. This year the artificial jet lag might play out for me just nicely --- due to my other not so well being I tend to go to sleep very early, 21h local time or even sooner. And recently this has led to me waking up an hour or so before the alarm clock (5:00h).
I have been increasingly encountering WebP graphics as I traipse around the web. Quite by accident, I discovered that GIMP and ImageMagick could see and work with WebP graphics, but not much else but my web browsers. Certainly, Scribus (which is what we use to layout the PDF of the magazine) cannot see or use images in the WebP format. So any WebP images that I needed to use had to first be converted either into JPG or PNG formatted images. One thing I noticed almost immediately was that the WebP images appeared to be high quality images, and they were typically significantly smaller file sizes then the JPG or PNG files I converted them into. It piqued my curiosity, to say the least.
If you recall, I recently got interested in podcasts. Most of the "cover images" for the podcasts I'd find and download were in the WebP format. But, to view them, I either had to load them into my web browser, or convert them to the much more common JPG or PNG formats.
So, I wanted to know more about this mysterious, "new kid on the block" graphical file format. What I discovered is contained here in this article, that I'm sharing with you.
For the fifth year in a row, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world by the United Nations-sponsored World Happiness Report. And for the fifth year in a row, I’m surprised. I lived in Finland for a year as a student in the Rotary Youth Exchange program from 2001 to 2002. It was a life-changing experience. I made incredible Finnish friends. I drank too much vodka. I pet a reindeer in Lapland. I saunaed, ice swam and rolled in the snow naked until my pink body looked like a honey-baked ham. It was certainly one of the happiest years of my life. But my Finnish friends? Well, I’m not entirely sure they’ve ever been that happy.
Beginning during his time at Illinois Institute of Technology while completing a master’s degree in computer science, Jack Dongarra (M.S. CS ’73) created code and led the development of concepts that allowed software to keep up with the exponential growth in hardware for more than 40 years. On March 30 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Dongarra its highest honor, the 2021 A.M. Turing Award, for “major contributions of lasting importance” to the field of computing. Dongarra also receives a $1 million prize, funded by Google.
Noise is an annoying but unavoidable part of any engineering project. Fixing noise issues is hard enough, but even just measuring how much noise an amplifier adds to your signal is tricky without proper equipment like a spectrum analyzer. One other thing that makes noise measurements easier is a good, stable noise source that can serve as a reference: you first measure your amplifier without any input, and then measure it again with the noise source connected. Using a few simple formulas you can then calculate how much noise the amplifier produced.
There are a lot of ways that stresses can show up, at least when discussing materials science. Cracks in concrete are a common enough example, but any catastrophic failure in a material is often attributable to some stress that couldn’t be withstood. If you’re interested in viewing those stresses before they result in damage to the underlying material, take a look at this DIY polariscope which can view internal stresses in glass and other clear objects.
Can you believe that Facebook turns 18 this year? One of the troubled teenager’s biggest problems is that not only are the young people still leaving in droves, many of the remaining denizens are 50 or over and susceptible to the various predators and sources of misinformation that plague the site.
[Oleg Kutkov] decided to build a wideband SDR – for satellite communication research and monitoring, you know, the usual. He decided on a battery of HackRF boards – entire eight of them, in fact. Two 1Ãâ4 and one 1Ãâ2 RF splitters and an LNA on their combined RF input made for a good start to the project, and from there, it only got more complex.
As the world begins to slowly pull itself out of the economic effects of the pandemic, there’s one story that has been on our minds for the past couple of years, and it’s probably on yours too. The chip shortage born during those first months of the pandemic has remained with us despite the best efforts of the industry. Last year, pundits were predicting a return to normality in 2022, but will unexpected threats to production such as the war in Ukraine keep us chasing supplies? It’s time to delve into the root of the issue and get to the bottom of it for a Hackaday report.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for your weekly review of the best projects, hacks, and bits of news that we can cram into 45 minutes or so. We’ll look at the latest developments in DIY air-powered engines, discuss the whimsical combination of GitHub’s API and a cheap thermal printer, and marvel at impressive pieces of homebrew biology equipment. We’ve also got an exceptionally polished folding cyberdeck, a bevy of high-tech cloud chambers, and some soda bottles that are more than meets the eye. Finally we’ll go over the pros and cons of today’s super-smart cameras, and speculate wildly about what a new EU law means for our battery powered gadgets.
A lot of first-time guitar builders focus on making the body and skip the neck, which has lots of tricky dimensions to get right to if you want a nicely playable instrument. However, [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing wanted to start with the hard part on his guitar building journey, and set about 3D printing a guitar neck in one piece.
SK Hynix is reportedly considering forming a consortium to acquire UK chip designer Arm, however, the idea is said to be at a very early stage of planning, and Hynix may not actually proceed with the move.
The potential purchase was disclosed in comments from SK Hynix vice chairman and co-CEO Park Jung-ho following the firm's annual general shareholders meeting held at its headquarters in Icheon, South Korea.
ICOP EB-3362-I fanless mini PC powered by DM&P Vortex86DX3 x86 processor coupled with 2GB DDR3 of memory and designed to be mounted on the back of a VESA compatible display or monitor, a wall, or even a DIN rail through an adapter.
[...]
Supported operating systems highlight the legacy focus of the device with Windows 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7, Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Embedded CE6.0, Windows XP Professional, Windows Embedded 2009, Linux, DOS, POS Ready (WePOS), QNX, VxWorks, and FreeBSD. Specific applications include data/webs server, industrial automation, process control, automotive controller, medical device, and machine control.
Research professor and author Brené Brown wrote about a “crisis of disconnection” in the U.S., in a€ 2017 article€ in Fast Company. That same year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who also held this position under the Obama administration,€ referred€ to the problem of loneliness as an “epidemic.” In a 2021 article, psychotherapist Colette Shade detailed the€ isolating effects of the life structures of capitalism, and researchers have been tracking the health impacts of isolation for decades. Recent studies have found that the health effects of loneliness rival€ obesity€ and€ smoking.
Loneliness is a symptom of our greater culture of disconnect, and€ toxic American individualism. And, as with many problems (like food and housing insecurity), the pandemic has exacerbated the preexisting issues of disconnect in our society.
As America approaches 1 million confirmed Covid-19 deaths, and a new subvariant becomes the dominant strain in the US, Congress remains apathetic to the public health catastrophe. Our elected officials have let the government run out of billions of dollars in pandemic relief funding, with the uninsured already losing access to free coronavirus tests and treatment, and next week, losing access to free vaccines. Congress isn’t just stalling, either—they’re actively shrinking the funding package.
Drug policy reform advocates and progressive lawmakers on Friday celebrated the U.S. House of Representatives' approval of a bill to decriminalize marijuana nationwide, expunge federal cannabis convictions and arrests, and provide resources for communities targeted by the war on drugs.
"Now, it's up to the Senate to finish the job."
We’ve made remarkable progress on the first half of that equation; humanizing those with problematic or recreational drug use. This is a golden age of drug policy reform, and the dignity and respect given to victims has strengthened familiar tools—education; Medically Assisted Treatment, social services, and the gold standard, Overdose Prevention Sites, also known as Safe Consumption Sites.
But the life-saving potential of these proven approaches is thwarted, because while our reaction to drug users has evolved, our reaction to the drugs themselves remains clouded in hysteria. The chemicals are fetishized as irresistible, radioactive temptations.
Public health advocates said Thursday that they plan to resume litigation against the Environmental Protection Agency after the Biden administration announced it would uphold former President Donald Trump's decision to not regulate drinking water levels of a chemical used to make rocket fuel and explosives.
Former President Barack Obama's administration proposed limits for perchlorate after finding in 2011 that drinking water for 16 million people may have unsafe levels of the contaminant, which poses a risk to the development of children and fetuses.
When last I wrote about ivermectin, the antihelminthic (anti-worm) medication that COVID-19 conspiracy theorists have been portraying (and some selling) as a miracle cure for COVID-19, I compared the drug to acupuncture. Specifically, I noted how, now that large quantities of high quality clinical evidence from various studies has failed to find even a whiff of a hint of a signal that it works, ivermectin advocates have pivoted to citing lower quality studies. I further pointed out one study in particular being touted by ivermectin believers. It is an observational study that I used to illustrate how, now that a number of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) exist that have failed to show a benefit using ivermectin to treat COVID-19, RCTs trump uncontrolled observational evidence. Again, I used that study to make an analogy with acupuncture, where, as higher quality evidence increasingly shows that it is nothing more than a theatrical placebo, advocates increasingly cite lower quality evidence.
The document above contains a log of what looks like the attack on Sitel, and detail a login over RDP followed by a Bing search for "Privilege escalation tools on GitHub" from a compromised machine. There's also evidence of malware downloads, termination of security software processes, and further skulduggery.
Yesterday, we wrote about a bug in the VMware Spring product, a project we described as “an open-source Java toolkit for building powerful Java apps, including cloud-based apps, without needing to write, manage, worry about, or even understand the ‘server’ part of the process yourself.”
SentinelOne this week detailed a handful of bugs, including two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, it found in Microsoft Azure Defender for IoT.
These security flaws, which took six months to address, could have been exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to compromise devices and take over critical infrastructure networks.
You’ve probably heard of Zlib, but even if you haven’t, you’ve almost certainly used it.
Zlib’s unashamedly 1990s-style website describes the product as A Massively Spiffy Yet Delicately Unobtrusive Compression Library (Also Free, Not to Mention Unencumbered by Patents).
Data compression software (and, of course, the matching code to decompress it later) has always been handy to have around, as anyone who has ever used software such as PKZIP, WinRAR, 7-Zip and any of a great number of archiving tools will attest.
As you can imagine, the primary purpose of data compression is to save space, such as reducing the storage capacity needed for backups or cutting down on the bandwidth used for data transfer.
Security firm SentinelOne says malware known as AcidRain was likely used to take down Viasat's satellite internet network during Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Last week, news made the rounds about a new Google Chrome zero-day bug. Essentially, there is potential for executable code to be injected into your browser. Google Chrome received a patch last week to address this, but Chromebooks had to wait until yesterday. That’s when a Chrome OS 99 Stable Channel update became available. My Chromebook got the Google Chrome update last week though, showing the benefits of the Lacros browser.
GitLab on Thursday issued security updates for three versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that address, among other flaws, a critical hard-coded password bug.
The cloud-hosted software version control service released versions 14.9.2, 14.8.5, and 14.7.7 of its self-hosted CE and EE software, fixing one "critical" security vulnerability (CVE-2022-1162), as well as two rated "high," nine rated "medium," and four rated "low."
Authored by Senator Bob Wieckowski, S.B. 1189 requires private entities to obtain your opt-in consent before collecting your biometric information. Biometric information is incredibly sensitive and, by its very nature, is tied immutably to our identities. While you can change a password, you can’t change easily change your face, the rhythm of your walk, or the ridges of your fingerprints. Despite this, some companies collect and share this information without asking first—by, for example, taking faceprints from every person who walks into a store. They may then go on to share or sell that information.
This is wrong. People should have control over who they trust with their biometric information. And companies must be held accountable if they break that trust. Like the landmark Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), S.B. 1189 gives individuals the right to sue companies that violate the law. This is the same type of provision that allowed Facebook users in Illinois to take the company to task for collecting their faceprints without permission. That case ended in a $650 million settlement for Illinois’ Facebook users.
This bill has the support of a broad range of both California and national organizations active on surveillance issues, which speaks to the importance of implementing this privacy protection. The Greenlining Institute, Media Alliance, Oakland Privacy, the Consumer Federation of California, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Action and Fairplay are all in support. If you'd like to join them in supporting this bill, take our action to support S.B. 1189.
With silent SMS, cell site analysis and IMSI catchers, German authorities can pinpoint the location of a mobile device to within a few metres. Now there are numbers of deployments for 2021.
To be perfectly honest, things seem to have been really quiet on this front lately. All of the data worth vacuuming up has already been assimilated, or media outlets just aren't reporting on them as much as they were. I'm not sure which it is. This section of the Short Topix article last month wasn't included, because there really wasn't anything to report, which in some ways, is news in and of itself. So, we got one month off, but now there are some new "threats" to your privacy for this month.
RICHMOND, VA: NEW RESEARCH FROM HIVE SYSTEMS FINDS ANY 8-CHARACTER PASSWORD CAN BE CRACKED IN LESS THAN AN HOUR. In its most recent research in password security, Hive Systems found that any 8-character password can be cracked in less than an hour through brute force. Further, any password containing less than seven characters can be cracked instantly. These are just two major findings from extensive research conducted by the cybersecurity firm.
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GOOGLE'S DIALER AND MESSAGING APPS HAVE BEEN COLLECTING AND SENDING DATA TO GOOGLE WITHOUT SPECIFIC NOTICE OR CONSENT, possibly in violation of Europe's GDPR, according to an article on The Register. The data collection does not appear to have an ability to "opt out," either. Google has countered that the data is stored in a hash, and is ONLY used for internal diagnostics to help figure out problems with the services. (Anyone want to buy a bridge in Brooklyn I'm trying to sell?)
Instead an inordinate amount of focus has been put on where the blame for the conflict should be placed and on attempts to see through the fog of war and get an accurate picture of the true situation on the ground in Ukraine. These distractions not only take valuable time and effort away from developing peaceful solutions, they also serve to increase the hostility within a movement that is already too fragmented. At the risk of spending even more time on what’s wrong with the peace movement, it’s worth looking at the breakdown, if only to understand the divisions in an attempt to find common ground.
Three major ideological groups have emerged within the peace movement in regard to who is at fault for the tragedies taking place in Ukraine.
My expectation has been that the many items that have soared in price over the last year will see prices stabilize and fall when the supply chain crunch eases. I have repeatedly used the case of televisions as an example. Television prices had been on a downward path for decades, but the CPI index for televisions rose 8.7 percent between March and August of last year. The index then turned around, and has since dropped by 6.3 percent, reversing most of the prior increase.
Used cars provide another example. Used car prices soared in 2020 and 2021, with the index rising by more than 50 percent between February 2020 and January 2022. However, prices began falling in February. In one private price index, by the middle of March, used car prices had fallen almost 6.0 percent from their January peak.
Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.
MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has benefited the wealthy class in the United States?
Moldova has received thousands of Ukrainian refugees since the beginning of the war. According to the UN Refugee Agency, since February 24, more than 390,000 refugees from Ukraine have arrived in the country. For most of them, Moldova is a way station on the road to other European countries. However, according to UNICEF data, more than 100,000 Ukrainians are currently planning on staying there. The majority of these refugees, about 93 percent of them, are women with children, pets, and hopes of returning home in the future. Today, most of them come to Moldova from Odesa. This is the third wave of Ukrainians fleeing the war — the first two were from Mykolayiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson. In a Meduza exclusive, photographer Sergei Stroitelev made the journey from the Moldovan-Ukrainian border to various refugee centers and talked to those fleeing Russia’s war.
Since the moment Vladimir Putin became president of Russia, the Kremlin has kept information about his health secret. At first, no one really noticed. But later, when, from time to time, Putin disappeared from public view, many suggested (without presenting conclusive evidence, mind you) that he might be undergoing some kind of medical treatment. What’s more, Putin has been accompanied on all of his trips by a sizeable retinue of doctors. In a new report, the investigative outlet Proekt looks into the health of the Russian president (Meduza’s special correspondent Svetlana Reiter contributed reporting). We’ve summarized the investigation’s findings here.
In late March, Russia promised to reduce its military activity in Chernihiv and Kyiv; in fact, this was one of the main outcomes of the talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. Despite that, the Russian army has been laying siege to Chernihiv for almost a week. According to volunteers and local officials, Russian troops have been firing at civilians who try to evacuate the city. Meduza correspondent Lilia Yapparova was in Chernihiv in the final days before the siege began. Below is her account of a city on the verge of humanitarian catastrophe.
One girl fascinated me more than the rest. She was a couple of grades below me, and her name was Violetta. She looked a bit like a young Anna Karina only her porcelain skin was marked by these mysterious scars. Somehow this disfigurement only made her more beautiful to me, like a cracked porcelain doll. Maybe it was that she looked the way I felt on the inside. Growing up trans I often felt like a broken girl inside a male nesting doll, but to me these imperfections only made her more perfect. I used to sing that old Pavement song “Loretta’s Scars” softly to myself, changing the lyrics to suit my lesbian loneliness- “How can I, how can I, make my body shed for you? How can I make my body shed around your metal scars, Violetta’s scars!” I never spoke a word to her. I don’t know why.
Somehow Violetta’s scars came to embody the entire Russian spirit to me. She wore those painfully permanent objects like accessories that gave her glamour a deep sadness but also a resilient strength. The Russian people have always carried their tragic history with them like crosses without ever lowering their chins. I found all of this to be fascinating, but my other classmates didn’t seem to share my fascination with these people and instead treated them like lepers. When I would ask my friends why they hated these people so damn much when they never seemed to be the least bit interested in getting to know them their response was always blank stares. They seemed perplexed upon frustration as to why I would even ask such a question. I never got a straight answer out of a single one of them. At a certain point it became disturbingly clear to me that they had no idea why they despised these total strangers and perhaps even more frightening, they didn’t even seem to want to know why. There was just something about Violetta’s scars that frightened them, and they took a perverse kind of pride in this fear. It had somehow come to define them.
A leading international human rights group said Thursday that if genuine, unverified videos showing Ukrainian troops shooting Russian prisoners of war would depict war crimes, while calling on Ukraine to "ensure an effective investigation" into the alleged abuse.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement that "if confirmed, the beating and shooting of captured combatants in their legs would constitute a war crime, and Ukraine needs to demonstrate that it is able and willing to prevent and punish serious violations of international humanitarian law."
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a catastrophe for the people living there and an inflection point for the peace movement. In the last five weeks, thousands of people have been killed and millions have fled their homes to escape the violence. Billions of people all over the world are now living under the greatest threat of conflict between nuclear-armed states in a generation. Beyond the immediate suffering, events taking place right now in Eastern Europe will have an impact on peace issues and defense policy for years to come. Woefully, the peace movement in the United States, limited in its influence already, has been unable to unite around a message to oppose calls for more militarization.
There, Cuban transplants (like the Mantanzas-born Cruz, whose family emigrated to Miami’s Little Havana in 1970) have established an old school-style cigar factory. To break the sheer monotony of long days, often in stifling heat, spent rolling the handmade cigars, “lectors” were hired to read books aloud to the hardworking proletarians. As Tropics opens, a new lector, Juan Julian (Jason Manuel Olazábal) arrives at Tampa and the first novel he has chosen to regale the cigar rollers with is none other than Anna Karenina.
As this drama with some lighter moments unfolds, Cruz cleverly works plot points and themes from Tolstoy’s classic into his two-act work, reset in Florida. In particular, Conchita (the always outstanding Tania Verafield, who provocatively poses smoking a stogie on the playbill’s cover), who has been betrayed by her unfaithful husband Palomo (Matias Ponce), romances the dapper lector. Conchita, of course, mirrors Tolstoy’s title character, while Olazábal’s Juan suggests a more literate version of Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, the dashing army cavalry officer Anna has an adulterous affair with.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres made that clear in an angry March 21st address blasting world leaders scrambling for yet more oil and gas. “Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil-fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil-fuel use,” he said, adding, “This is madness.”€ He linked obsessive fuel burning with the endpoint toward which today’s clash of world powers could be pushing us, using a particularly frightening term from the original Cold War. “Addiction to fossil fuels is,” he warned, “mutually assured destruction.”
He’s right. In this all-too-MAD moment, we’re facing increasingly intertangled threats of the first order and can’t keep looking away. To achieve mutually assured protection against both global broiling and global war, humanity will have to purge oil, natural gas, and coal from our lives as quickly as possible, a future reality the Ukraine disaster seems to be making less probable by the day.
In a world where the US believes it makes the rules and the rest of humanity must follow its orders – what President Biden euphemistically calls the “rules-based order” – Washington has now even appropriated the prerogative to tell other countries who they may appoint as their ambassadors. As a consequence, Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab is fighting for his freedom before the 11th District Circuit Court in Miami.
US economic war against Venezuela
In the months leading up to the war in Ukraine, I got the idea of traveling through Russia with a bicycle. Now the idea seems daft, even to me, but for many months during the pandemic shutdown, the only country open for me to visit—I live in Switzerland—was Russia. Nearby France (I can see it from my bedroom window) and Germany were off-limits, and Brexited England was lost over the horizon; but Russia’s golden doors remained wide open.
I first went to Russia in summer 1975, and since then I have been back often, mostly to ride the trains, visit the museums, brood about Tolstoy, and walk off the battlefields. (I needed a stroll around Borodino to make headway with War and Peace.) I don’t think much of Russia’s politics or corporate culture, but then I often feel the same way about those in the United States.
Not Putin and the Kremlin
Certainly NOT the fascistic dictator Vladimir Putin and those who back his ugly invasion of Ukraine. His assault on a country directly proximate to his own is nothing on the scale of the United States’ arch-criminal assaults on nations far from its own shores – Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia in the last century and Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the current one – but it is a war crime nonetheless. It is chilling to witness the sheer impunity with which the sheltered, super-opulent Russian ruler has sent many thousands of Russian soldiers off to death along with (conservatively) more than a thousand Ukrainian civilians, including hundreds of children.
Hundreds of climate campaigners engaged in direct action at 10 major oil facilities across the United Kingdom in the early hours of Friday morning, vowing to continue blocking the sites until the U.K. government agrees to immediately end new fossil fuel investments—which scientists have said is necessary to avoid the planetary emergency's most disastrous outcomes.
The protests, located at terminals near London, Birmingham, and Southhampton, were organized by Extinction Rebellion U.K. and the Just Stop Oil coalition. Operations were reportedly stopped at four sites, and more than a dozen people were arrested.
In the weeks since Putin invaded Ukraine, investors have ditched stakes in Russian oil and gas with unprecedented speed.
The financial sector is finally acting on the calls campaigners have been making for years.€ Banks, pension funds and investors are unshackling themselves from problematic investments in companies and states complicit in destruction in Ukraine – and they’re doing it fast.€
While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shock waves 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 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.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s deputy director.
The price of gas soared due to Biden’s sanctions. That’s because Russia is one of the world’s biggest energy exporters. Sanction Russia and you have to find new sources of oil and gas or pay through the nose. And most rational politicos do not want to tell their people they have to choose between buying an iPhone and filling their car’s tank with gasoline.
So the hunt for more fossil fuels is on, with American right-wingers screaming that we need to drill and frack more and bashing anyone who objects on environmental grounds. How does this bashing go? If you support renewables over more fossil fuels, you are a left-wing, Marxist Democrat inflationary fool. That’s what our homegrown reactionaries say. They claim renewables jacked up prices at the pump. This is hogwash, because it’s sanctions on Russia that did that. But that won’t stop the nonsense from being repeated ad nauseam. And though there’s usually a lag time of a few weeks before such imbecilic hyperbole taints the mainstream media, now with inflation being very real and very dramatic, expect to see the “ditch renewables at once” rash break out any day, on the face of the body politic.
The fabled rainforest contains cedars of up to 12-15 feet in diameter and up to 2,000 years old. Its extraordinarily rich ecosystem is home to 2,400 plant species and numerous wildlife species. It is one of only three inland temperate-boreal rainforests in the world. The others are in southern Siberia and Russia’s Far East.
Of significant concern, according to criteria by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) BC’s inland rainforest is endangered, susceptible to ecological collapse within only one decade, assuming current logging rates continue. Remarkably, a study found that 95% of the rainforest’s “core habitat” has been lost since 1970. (Source: Brian J. Barth, Burning Up: The Controversial Biofuel Threatening BC’s Last Inland Rainforests, The Whale, 2022)
A cache of recently released documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows the Forest Service spent at least $17,500 to contract GYC to lead a collaboration that supports the Greenhorn Project in Southwest Montana’s Gravelly Mountains. Astoundingly, this 16,000 acre logging, burning, and roadbuilding project includes Inventoried Roadless Areas in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
It’s worth noting the Greater Yellowstone Coalition advertises itself to foundations and donors as the leading conservation advocate for the lands, waters, and wildlife surrounding Yellowstone National Park. Yet conservation groups that supported more wilderness and less logging, roadbuilding, and livestock grazing were specifically excluded from participation in GYC’s “stakeholders” collaborative.
This was our life under Israeli military occupation in Gaza. The tactic of holding Palestinians hostage to Israel’s water charity was so widespread during the First Palestinian Intifada, or upirising, to the extent that denying water supplies to targeted refugee camps, villages, towns or whole regions was the first measure taken to subdue the rebellious population. This was often followed by military raids, mass arrests and deadly violence; but it almost always began with cutting Palestinians off from their water supplies.
Israel’s water war on the Palestinians has changed since those early days, especially as the Climate Change crisis has accelerated Israel’s need to prepare for grim future possibilities. Of course, this largely happens at the expense of the occupied Palestinians. In the West Bank, the Israeli government continues to usurp Palestinian water resources from the region’s main aquifers – the Mountain Aquifer and the Coastal Aquifer. Frustratingly, Israel’s main water company, Mekorot, sells stolen Palestinian water to Palestinian villages and towns, especially in the northern West Bank region, at exhorbitant prices.
"The water is back," one family member would announce in a mix of excitement and panic, often very late at night. The moment such an announcement was made, my whole family would start running in all directions to fill every tank, container or bottle that could possibly be filled. Quite often, the water would last for a few minutes, leaving us with a collective sense of defeat, worrying about the very possibility of surviving.
During a 2016 broadcast of Democracy Now, Reich reiterated this promise: “[We must] elect Hillary Clinton and for four years develop an alternative, another Bernie Sanders-type candidate with an independent party to take on Hillary Clinton…and develop the infrastructure of a third party that is a true progresssive party.”
Fast forward six years and there is still no serious third-party challenge to the current duopoly.
U.S. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders announced Friday that next week he will hold a hearing to expose how corporate profiteering in the midst of multiple global crises is driving inflation.
As prices increase, corporate profits hit a record high of nearly $3 trillion in 2021, up 25% in a single year.
What if $10 billion were raised over ten years for civic action to transform Congress and make it do what it should be doing for the people (See: Think Big to Overcome Losing Big to Corporatism 1/7/22)? In a more recent column, Facilitating Civic and Political Energies for the Common Good 2/2/22, I started a series of columns to outline how $1 billion per year could be spent lobbying Congress for a people's agenda.
I’ve had to learn a lot about poverty over the years — the endless toil, the insufficient health care, the exposure to polluted environments. It grinds down the body and the spirit. But I’ve also learned that suffering can be transformed into powerful movements for change.
One lesson is that€ working hard often just isn’t enough to escape poverty. And being poor certainly doesn’t mean you aren’t working.
Puppet has emitted its seventh annual DevOps salary report, and there is good news: the gender wage gap appears to be narrowing.
According to Sherman, the contract could see four suppliers – Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services – each score a share of the project's substantial budget.
First $100 million per year would be used to get through Congress long-overdue legislation such as full Medicare for All, with emphasis on prevention of ailments and price gouging, a living wage, reducing corporate abuses, etc. The second $100 million would be devoted to creating facilities to make it easy for people to band together in their various roles (e.g., workers, consumers, patients, savers) so they could counter corporate bosses who band together their investors and many lobbying trade groups.
The third article dealt with the $100 million per year to make Congress change the disgracefully unfair, wasteful, and inefficient tax laws (See: Going for Tax Reform Big Time 3/11/2022).
They’re introducing these bills in virtually every state, but three — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — are especially worrisome. These swing states, along with Pennsylvania and Michigan, helped decide the last presidential election. Each flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020.
But now, in these states and elsewhere, Republicans want to make it harder to vote by mail, get rid of same-day voter registration and ballot drop-off boxes, limit early voting, reduce the number of voting booths at polling locations, and much more.
For the past few days, Viktor Orbán has been traversing the country and campaigning hard. The events are kept secret from the press, and are only announced in closed circles. Afterwards, the prime minister's speeches are published for all to see on his Facebook page. The short videos are all very similar: Orbán meets an enthusiastic crowd, and speaks to them about pro-peace Fidesz and the pro-war opposition. After trying in vain to contact the prime minister through official channels, we went to two such events to ask him about current events.
For the fourth time, I sit through a program where people talking over one another discuss how the West is to blame for the invasion of Ukraine and how the Mariupol theater was not actually bombed by Russians but by Ukrainians themselves. A guy in a bow tie furiously insists on freedom of speech and denounces the West's obstruction of any meaningful dialogue about the war in Ukraine. I just sit there staring, and I reflect on how if someone were to only get their information from Russia Today they wouldn't have the slightest idea about what exactly is going on in Ukraine – rather, they would simply be subjected to the same series of images over and over again. For an entire day, I watched the news on the Russian TV network RT. Translated by Dominic Spadacene
About a month ago, three conservative candidates for school board seats in the west Wisconsin city of Eau Claire stoked controversy about a teacher training program that they claimed could exclude parents from conversations about their children’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
Right-leaning groups across the country seized on the issue, portraying it as another example of schools usurping the role of parents. A few weeks later, the school board president received a death threat.
A bipartisan group of senators announced a bill this week aimed at curtailing the risk of improper influence when companies do work for both the federal government and businesses or other clients. Under the legislation, federal agencies would require prospective contractors to disclose business relationships with “public, private, domestic, and foreign entities” that might pose a conflict of interest.
Existing federal rules already require the disclosure of actual or potential conflicts, which U.S. government agencies rely on to determine whether the situation can be mitigated or should disqualify a company from working on a given project. But most attention has focused on conflicts arising from work on different federal government projects. The question of how the existing rules apply to a contractor’s corporate clients is an issue that has received scant attention until recently, experts in contracting law say, and the new legislation seeks to remove any ambiguity around whether companies have to disclose possible conflicts arising from private-sector work.
It also pushes into the background other crises that still are with us. Principally, Covid-19. Many Americans think that plague is behind us, even as China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Ecuador, and now Western Europe continue to reel from its effects. Then there is Covid’s observed pattern of running on a three-month cycle. So, who knows what is around the corner?
Amidst it all, the nation is still beset, as it always seems to be, by periodic cynical behavior committed by groups who can’t think beyond their own ideological borders. So, it might come as a relief to some readers to be drawn away from Ukraine’s madness of artillery fire and overfilled hospitals to take up a case of plain old American perfidy.
Key Republican and Democratic senators on Thursday reportedly reached a deal on Covid-19 aid that slashes proposed funding to combat the pandemic outside the United States, a decision that public health advocates condemned as short-sighted and potentially catastrophic for developing nations.
"Such a move would be unconscionable, cruel, and stupid," Public Citizen president Robert Weissman said in a statement. "Not only would it consign poorer countries, especially in Africa, to more death and disease, it would invite a resurgence of the pandemic in the United States. How could this lesson not be learned?"
Putin's attack on Ukraine is producing a series of crises which are going to, in all probability, bring a period of great pain and instability to the world and to America in the near future.
As Russian and Ukrainian negotiators expressed cautious optimism following this week’s peace talks in Turkey, it is clear that we face two distinct challenges: stopping this war and resetting international relations to prevent World War III.€
The committee followed up that€ hearing—during which the executives disingenuously denied funding such a campaign—with another€ hearing€ on February 8 focusing on the oil companies’ inadequate plans to cut their carbon emissions. The€ next round€ is slated to feature board directors from the same four oil companies testifying on their companies’ climate pledges, followed by€ testimony€ from social media companies and advertising agencies about the part they have played in manufacturing doubt about climate change.
But before the committee wraps up its investigation, it would be sorely remiss if it didn’t haul in libertarian industrialist Charles Koch, the Daddy Warbucks of climate disinformation, for questioning.
Imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is “crumbling” physically and psychologically, says journalist Chris Hedges, who last week attended Assange’s wedding to his longtime partner Stella Moris at London’s Belmarsh prison. Assange has been behind bars for nearly three years awaiting a possible extradition to the United States on espionage charges for publishing documents revealing war crimes committed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hedges says Assange exposed the “most important information” of this generation, along with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
YouTube has deleted the entire archive of “On Contact,” an Emmy-nominated television show by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges which was hosted on the Russian government-funded news channel RT America. We speak with Hedges, who connects the YouTube censorship of his show to a growing crackdown on dissenting voices in American media. “There’s less and less space for those who are willing to seriously challenge and question entrenched power,” says Hedges, who says “opaque entities” like YouTube shouldn’t have the power to take down outlets like RT America, despite the channel’s source of funding. “Are we better off not hearing what Russia has to say?” asks Hedges.
The win for Public Resource—represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with co-counsel Fenwick & West and David Halperin—in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia reinforces the critical idea that our laws belong to all of us, and we should be able to find, read, and comment on them free of registration requirements, fees, and other roadblocks.
“This is a crucial victory for the public as well as Public Resource,” said Corynne McSherry, EFF’s legal director. “We are pleased that the court recognized and affirmed that no private entity should be able to dictate how we learn about and comment on the law.”
The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), National Fire Protection Association Inc. (NFPA), and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) are among organizations that develop private sector codes and standards aimed at advancing public safety, ensuring compatibility across products and services, facilitating training, and spurring innovation. ASTM, for example, has developed more than 12,000 standards used in fields ranging from consumer products to construction to medical services and devices. Federal, state, and local governments have incorporated by reference thousands of such standards into law, making them binding upon everyone.
I have to admit that it’s been somewhat amusing watching Truth Social flop. After months of rumors (and a variety of competitors targeting the Trumpworld), Trump announced plans for his own Twitter clone, Truth Social, in October of last year, using a sketchy financial instrument to fund it. He found a perfect dupe in Congressman Devin Nunes to run the operation, whose only relevant experience seems to be suing Twitter accounts that mocked him. The promise of a “free speech” supporting, Trumpist world, social media dissolved into obvious parody as Nunes promised the site would be heavily moderated with a ridiculous set of rules. There were already reports that the site was having difficulty attracting users, perhaps because Trumpist “influencers” were whining that it’s no fun if they’re not upsetting the right people.
Mann’s work reveals that at the root of religion, beneath the exoteric layers, there is invigorating vision, like this, so inclusive it includes the slave’s owner! The wondrousness of such vision, informed inwardly by the invisible “Holy Ghost,” is that it relies only upon human imagination. Its perennial, indigenous truth is always the same, at once liberating and inclusive, never robbing from nor excluding the other, neither his/her vitality nor dignity. Speaking this truth can cause alarm in those not ready to hear it, even though the motive be not primarily to convert but to defend the “life-quick,” the integrity of the passionate heart. Once upon a time, speaking it could get you crucified. But today, our imaginations so reduced, this “glad tidings” instead struggles against absorption into banality.
As the world now waits in helpless terror for the superpowers to decide the fate of life on earth in the war over Ukraine, D.H.’s talk about “life-quick” and the “Holy Ghost” may seem like absurd, superfluous concerns. True, they’re useless against Putin. But, these are the only concerns that can support our stand for humanity against western liberal banalizing reality that refuses to see American bombings of brown civilians are as evil as Putin’s. Completely within our individual power, the change to an imaginative basis restores individuality to the disconnected individualism of our isolated me-first lives under capitalism. Passion is ignited that cancels banal existence. Even if inward change cannot alter the fate of the earth, it can restore the reality of our humanity, neglect of which has brought us to this terrible point when honest people must ask if, morally speaking, western civilization deserves to continue.
He was, in effect, proposing that someday killings, disappearances and dispossessions would be gone. And no longer would elections be the exclusive province of oligarchs. € Real democracy would replace the hollow version of Colombian democracy regularly proclaimed by U.S. officials.
The Historic Pact campaign scored well in primary elections held on March 13. Of 5.6 million Colombians voting in the coalition’s primary, 4.5 million of them chose Petro as presidential candidate. Significantly, 783,160 of them opted for Francia Márquez for the same office. Later, of course, Petro selected her as his vice-presidential running mate.
President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law on Tuesday, culminating efforts to make lynching a federal crime that started over a century ago. We’re joined by Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., who was 16 years old when he witnessed Till’s abduction from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, prior to his brutal killing. Parker recalls the night of Till’s abduction and says, almost 70 years later, he is “thankful” for the new law, while acknowledging that “it shouldn’t have taken that long.” We also speak with author and public historian Michelle Duster, who spoke at Tuesday’s bill signing and is the great-granddaughter of the pioneering investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. “Finally, in 2022, we have justice. We have laws put in place that were fought for so long ago,” says Duster, who thinks the law is “better late than never.”
The problem with electing abusive assholes is you may not know they’re abusive assholes until after you’ve elected them. Then you have a problem on your hands, at least until the next election cycle. Until then, rights get violated and people get victimized. And while these abusive officials spend tax dollars getting “I didn’t choose the thug life, the thug life chose me” tattooed across their lower abdomen in 36-point stylized Times New Roman, residents are subjected to vindictive bullshit — forced to put up with until a court says otherwise.
Sheena King is relieved to remove her mask, though she wonders if it’s too soon.
Cops lie. It’s a fact. It’s called testilying and it happens so often hardly anyone can even be bothered to act surprised when these lies are exposed.
The US Department of Justice has entered into many consent decrees with many, many abusive law enforcement agencies. These decrees have the force of law, supported by court orders. They’re contractual obligations with the federal government — agreements that swear local agencies will comply with directives and do their part to respect not only the Constitution, but the people they’re supposed to be serving.
We are witnessing a historic moment. For the first time in our nation’s history, the president has nominated a Black woman to sit on the United States Supreme Court.
More than 50 civil society organizations on Friday accused Republican senators of engaging in "baseless and harmful attacks" on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kentanji Brown Jackson during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings last week.
"The work of public defenders and criminal defense lawyers is critical."
Immigrant rights advocates on Friday welcomed the Biden administration's announcement that it will stop deporting migrants under the Title 42 public health provision—responding to a demand that's been made by rights groups and health experts alike for two years—but warned that the plan to phase out the expulsions in the next several weeks does not go far enough to secure justice for immigrants.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, the U.S. government has invoked Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act to expel more than 1.7 million migrants who have attempted to enter the country, mainly at the southern border. The vast majority of people who have been deported under Title 42—which states that the government can prohibit "the introduction of persons" from foreign countries where there is a communicable disease that could spread in the U.S.—have been expelled since President Joe Biden took office.
President Biden signed The Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law on Tuesday, culminating efforts to make lynching a federal crime that started over a century ago. Michelle Duster, the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, the legendary anti-lynching activist and pioneering African-American journalist, said at the signing ceremony,
Amnesty International on Friday released findings from an on-the-ground investigation showing Russia's "siege tactics" in multiple Ukrainian cities amount to violations of international law.
"Launching indiscriminate attacks that kill or injure civilians constitutes a war crime."
It’s hard to believe, but Congress just passed meaningful legislation: In February, lawmakers approved the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Emerging from the Me Too movement and stories of women being forced into private arbitration instead of getting their day in court when they brought sexual harassment claims against their employers, the law will ban businesses from including such provisions in employment contracts.
According to press reports, actor Will Smith has resigned his membership from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, following his onstage outburst at the Oscars. Before accepting his Best Actor award for his role in the film King Richard, he walked up onstage and slapped comedian Chris Rock, who told a joke about Smith's wife's hair.
"I have directly responded to the Academy's disciplinary hearing notice, and I will fully accept any and all consequences for my conduct," Smith wrote in a statement. "My actions at the 94th Academy Awards presentation were shocking, painful, and inexcusable. The list of those I have hurt is long and includes Chris, his family, many of my dear friends and loved ones, all those in attendance, and global audiences at home."
Progressives hailed Friday's unionization vote by employees at an Amazon warehouse in New York City as a historic victory for workers across the United States and an inspiring call to action for others seeking to organize.
"This is the catalyst for the revolution."
Amazon was not able to prevent Staten Island warehouse workers from securing a historic union election victory on Friday despite pulling out all the stops—including hiring a Democratic Party-aligned pollster whose effort to help kill the unionization effort was decried by progressive critics.
Amazon "tapped an influential consulting and polling firm with close ties to Democratic political groups" to help the retail giant defeat a union drive at the JFK8 fulfillment center in New York City, CNBC reported Thursday night.
Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York won their election Friday to form the retail giant's first-ever union in the United States, a landmark victory for the labor movement in the face of aggressive union-busting efforts from one of the world's most powerful companies.
According to an initial tally released by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), there were 2,654 votes in favor of recognizing a union and 2,131 against. The number of disputed ballots, 67, is not nearly enough to change the outcome.
The best thing about arrogant bosses is that they underestimate the intelligence of their workers. Leaked company documents, originally given to Vice, reveal what Amazon’s general counsel, in a meeting Jeff Bezos attended, said of the activist Chris Smalls, whom the company had just fired after he helped lead a walkout early in the pandemic over Covid-related health and safety issues.
Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York appear on track to form the first-ever union at the retail behemoth in the United States after the opening round of vote counting ended Thursday with the pro-unionization side holding a significant lead.
"A union victory today in Staten Island would be historic for the whole world."
One year ago today, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project. The decision provided a reset to a seventeen year long legal dispute over the FCC’s media ownership rules that had its inception in the Third Circuit in 2004.
I have heard film podcasts discuss the incident. I heard sports podcasts cover the event. Pieces about it were written in the Atlantic, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and CNN.
Celebrities, academics, and public servants weighed in. Hell, even my mom had an opinion, and she doesn’t care about the Oscars.
Will wakes up. He’s gripping the Oscar, sliding his hand up and down on it.
WILL: Who the fuck is calling me at 6 a.m. I’m Will Smith. I just won an Oscar—
Back at the 2017 Academy Awards a supposedly unsuspecting busload of tourists was ushered into that same auditorium thinking they were being guided around the usual Tinsel Town sights. Suddenly visitors found themselves—as if in a dream or nightmare—amongst the movie gods and goddesses. Denzel Washington even officiated an impromptu wedding for an awestruck couple.
These representatives of Middle America were likely all trained actors, but whatever their credentials, their appearance in the Oscar broadcast did little to bolster either ratings or any connection between the movie moguls and the plain and trusting folk of the Heartland, that is, the people meant to worship the stars and pay their salaries at the box office or, increasingly, through streaming service subscriptions.
For decades now, a favorite DC lobbying tactic has been to create bogus groups pretending to support something unpopular your company is doing. Like “environmentalists for big oil” or “Americans who really love telecom monopolies.” These groups then help big companies create a sound-wall of illusory support for policies that generally aren’t popular, or great for innovation or markets.
Strike 3, the most prolific 'copyright troll' in the United States, is suing an individual said to have pirated its movies using BitTorrent. While that is nothing out of the ordinary, the currently anonymous defendant is now in a battle to prevent Netflix and Google from handing over masses of personal data that the adult movie company somehow claims is relevant to its case.
Last weekend "CODA" won the Best Picture award at the Oscars. The Apple film is the first streaming release to receive the prestigious prize, which must feel like a slap in the face to Netflix. The win will undoubtedly have boosted the streaming numbers and data collected by TorrentFreak shows that "CODA" piracy surged to an all-time high.
I’d like to share with our community a congratulation and a heartfelt farewell to staff in the Creative Commons legal team.
