March was full steam ahead for Lagrange, and I ended up addressing a bunch of long-standing issues. The original idea of making page layout more flexible didn't really get worked on yet, apart from one new style option. However, many of the UI widgets underwent visual evolution.
I am happy to announce the first release of a project I've been working on for a while, Crabmail.
 Comic books have been an important part of popular culture and media for many decades now. Be it the depiction of web-slinging, superhuman strength, or just someone doing extreme things simply through their willpower, comic books have been an outlet of beautiful human creativity and will continue to be so.
With the digitization of everything else, comic books have to become available to users in digital formats. All you need is an application that can read the format of the comic book, and you can start your adventure.
The title of this post sounds like someone from the 1990s observing VCR distortion, or a 1970s audiophile worried about tape tension on their reel-to-reel machine. How does a track skip? What’s ripping a CD? How does doing the latter cause the former?
There are people using streaming services today who’ve never bought music, or ripped a CD, or browsed an HVM, Tower Records, or Sembawang Music. I’ve spilled enough electronic ink worrying about why that’s a bad thing for artists, so in this case I merely bring it up as a generational observation. Ripping CDs must seem as foreign as faxing a document, tuning in at a specific time on the TV, or having digital privacy.
Wait, ouch.
This past week was truly one for the blooper reel. A public cloud service provider let the great unwashed into the address ranges published as safe mailers via their SPF records, with hilarious if rather predictable results. Next up, we find an intensive advertising campaign for spamware aimed at our imaginary friends. And the password guessing aimed at an ever-expanding dictionary of non-existing users continues.
MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MariaDB on Arch Linux. The tutorial will install the database software using the Pacman package manager using the command line and some essential tips on securing MariaDB.
Developers are increasingly using application containers, but how do you make sure they are safe and properly tested for performance?
Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install DBeaver on Debian 10/Debian 11. DBeaver is free and open source universal database tool for developers and database administrators.
Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install DBeaver on Debian 10/Debian 11. DBeaver is free and open source universal database tool for developers
In this tutorial, we will show you the methods to copy the public ssh key to the server. The public-key authentication method requires you to copy your public SSH key to the server’s authorized_keys file. You might be wondering why we need to add the SSH key to the server as the reason to add ssh key to the server is to allow you to access a server via SSH without a password. Here are two methods to copy the public ssh key to the server.
Sometimes, you might want to run specific tasks instead of running an entire playbook file. This helps to reduce the total playbook execution time, especially when dealing with a large playbook file.
Fantasian is an Apple Arcade exclusive Final Fantasy style RPG. I liked it.
I first found out about the game a year ago, seeing some screenshots and reading articles about the art style, which relies on real world dioramas. It seemed intriguing, but it was Arcade exclusive, so I swore I'd never get to play it, because why would I ever sign up for that. Fast forward a few months, I'm tired of my crap Roku, I buy an Apple TV, and it includes a few months of free Arcade. Okay, I'll sign up.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a juxtaposition of high-tech lighting over low-tech visuals. The famously blocky Minecraft has official Nvidia-branded RTX support, and Nvidia rebuilt Quake II to show off what full-blown path tracing can look like. But the Doom mod is available for free to every PC player. It’s also particularly dramatic in Doom’s sci-fi setting, a Martian colony infested with hoards of ravenous demons. Realistically rendered shadows and reflections from fireballs, plasma ammunition, and pools of lava show off precisely how much good lighting can do, even for Doom’s incredibly basic polygon environments and sprite enemies.
It’s Monday, and Valve has sent its next weekly batch of Steam Deck order emails to people who have reserved one of the coveted handheld gaming PCs. But if you are still eagerly waiting for your email to come through, there’s good news: Valve says it’s “ramping up” Steam Deck shipments, sending more order emails every week, and “sometimes” plans to send them twice per week.
Among all the gaming genres, Zombie games always have a separate fan base. It’s because most of the zombie games are not just games with a lot of dead zombies. But they are the perfect combination of several genres like FPS, survival, horror games, adventure games, and so on. Even also, horror games lovers prioritize zombie games exceptionally. However, there are lots of exciting zombie games for Linux you can try. And today we will talk about some of them.
Bottles, a free and open source application for Linux (that works well on the Steam Deck), has another new release out bringing in major new features.
Since a previous version, it came with support for pre-configured environments (Gaming and Applications), which has been massively extended in version 2022.3.28. Now, you can setup your own configuration and share these environments with others, so in a way it's sliding closer to some capabilities of Lutris. These environments are configured with a YAML file making them easy to parse and read.
On top of that, there's improved support for Steam Play Proton directly. It's under heavy development and still experimental but Bottles can now read Steam Launch Options for games installed via Proton and deal with them in Bottles directly and configure certain settings in Bottles. This eventually might make it far easier than manually editing Steam launch options.
Project Hospital, a management sim from Oxymoron Games was recently upgraded to make playing on Steam Deck a better experience. Here's what's new.
Devolver Digital, Lucasfilm Games and Ron Gilbert have announced something huge for adventure game fans, with Return to Monkey Island on the way to release in 2022. A series adored by many, with this one taking place following on from Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
Technically, this was announced on April 1 on Gilbert's official blog post that stated: "For 18 years the Grumpy Gamer blog has been April Fools' day free because it's a stupid tradition.
Want to mod the Steam Deck? SteamOS Plugin Manager (covered here previously) has been renamed to just Plugin Loader and it's had a bit of a Python rewrite recently to make it better. As a result, it's now far easier to install too, along with having its first proper initial release.
Want to customize your Steam Deck look to match your style? Well, at least with dbrand now you can and they have some nice looking choices to mix together.
On their system you can order (each being separate and costing extra): a front skin ($19.95), back skin ($14.95), trackpad skins ($4.95) and tempered glass screen protectors (two pack $24.95). There's 28 different skin colours or patterns in total, so you can really make something wild — or nice and tame, whatever you want.
 Even before its release, Maui shell has been praised as the future of the Linux desktop user interface.
And, for all the right reasons...
It attempts to bring convergence to the mainstream, just like Canonical tried with Unity. Regarding looks, you get modern aesthetics inspired by various existing desktop experiences.
 It hasn’t been that long since GNOME 42 was released.
While it was an exciting upgrade over GNOME 41, you may not be able to find it on every mainstream Linux distribution (except OpenSUSE, Arch, and Clear Linux).
Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 should be the most popular options featuring GNOME 42 with their releases in the following weeks.
A Linux distribution cannot normally provide any kind of long term support for any kind of third party software if such software is no longer supported by upstream.
After a long break, we now have again a weekly LiveGUI ISO image for amd64 available! The 4.7 GB download, suitable for DVD burning or an USB stick, boots directly into KDE Plasma and comes with a ton of up-to-date software. This ranges from office applicactions such as LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Gimp all the way to many system administrator tools.
Now, we need your help! Let’s make this the coolest and most beautiful Linux live image ever. We’re calling for submissions of artwork, themes, actually anything from a desktop background to a boot manager animation, on the topic of Gentoo! The winning entry will be added as default setting to the official LiveGUI images, and also be available for download and installation.
A summary of the new features and beta download details of Pop OS 22.04 LTS from System76.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 729 for the week of March 27 – April 2, 2022. The full version of this issue is available here.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4S is an upcoming system-on-module based on the same Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor found in Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, but using the same SO-DIMM connector as found in earlier Raspberry Pi Compute Module boards, instead of the new board-to-board connectors.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4S is not launched yet, but we discovered it will be used on Revolution Pi S and SE series DIN-rail industrial computers via a tweet from Jeff Geerling and his post on Raspberry Pi forums.
Although it's slightly weird-looking, we’re fairly sure that the image above is not an April Fool prank. UK-based seller of useful things Pimoroni has taken to Twitter to announce the Servo 2040, an 18-channel servo controller “for making things with lots of moving parts”.
Servo 2040, as you might expect, is a standalone servo controller making use of the RP2040 microcontroller chip seen in the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are enough pre-soldered pin headers to connect up to 18 servos, current monitoring functionality to keep an eye on power consumption, and six addressable LEDs for visual feedback. You also get pin headers for up to six analog sensors for checking that you're not applying too much pressure to your test subject's head.
For some time now, we've wanted to have a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that we could use to demonstrate Drogue Device and Drogue Cloud. This is the first post in a series of post telling the tale of this journey.
Throughout these two blog posts, we've seen the steps we took starting from the initial drawing to a potential large scale manufacturing of a fully assembled PCB, including additional equipment to program the devices. A lot of trial and error is expected when trying something new, but we got something that worked in the end. With KiCad, there is a lot of open hardware
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going through a box, we came across the unusual circuit board below. At first, it looked like an IBM SMS (Standard Modular System) card, the building block of IBM's computers of the late 1950s and early 1960s.1 However, this board is larger, has double-sided wiring, the connector is different, and the labeling is different.2
Most ATX power supplies supply more 5V and less 12V than is needed for the Rainbow to power the system. However, the 12V supplies are in large part for the older disk technology in the Rainbow and if you are using emulators you can get by with a little less, though how much less is TBD.
A Philips Hue lamp is a LED lamp that can be controlled wirelessly. It always draws power for its control circuitry, also when the LED is turned off.
I wondered how much power it consumes in the off state. Doing some research, I found a couple of forums where people asked the same question, and getting answers that is was very little, varying from 0,01 A to 0,02 A.
Today is Antitrust Day, a day of action organized by Fight for the Future, dedicated to mobilizing support for two tech antitrust bills currently on the US Senate floor: the Open App Markets Act (OAMA), and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). Though these are two separate bills, their general focus remains the same: preventing large tech corporations from behaviors that that take away people's freedom. Chief among these is the common practice of some devices only allowing one specific app store, or making it very hard to use any app store but one. While much of the conversation around these bills is focused on promoting competition, that is not the key value for us. The key value is freedom, and in this case, the measures being targeted as anti-competitive are also measures that take away user freedom. Removing Apple's ability to block all app repositories but their own on the devices they produce would allow freedom-respecting ones to enter the scene, and provide users of these devices with the first step to their freedom.
We've written previously on the way "bad apples" like Apple and Google take great pains to restrict what users can and can't do with their devices. Platforms like these are skilled at giving users the illusion of autonomy and freedom. There's an app for every need, or so it seems, but there's a sinister reality behind the glossy finish. It's true that the overwhelming majority of these apps are nonfree software, which is overtly malware, but it's less common that users get to see the way corporations like Apple are pulling the strings behind the scenes, driving our use of technology further and further away from being in our control. Apple likes to present the gatekeeping they do as a form of quality assurance. The exact same quality assurance benefits could be had in a world where users had the freedom to to either stay with Apple or go to someone else they trust more to provide the same services without having to change their physical device.
We are very proud to announce that the GNU Health project has been declared a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA). GNU Solidario received the announcement this Sunday, April 3rd 2022.
The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, working to accelerate the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals in low-and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.
Hello! I'm Amin Bandali, and starting this month I'm taking over the GNU Spotlight from my fellow GNU hacker and free software activist Mike Gerwitz. Mike, thank you so much for all your work over the past four years for curating and preparing the monthly GNU Spotlight, which is a personal favorite part of the Free Software Supporter for me. I will do my best to continue in your steps in bringing exciting news on new releases of GNU packages to our dear readers.
In response, the Linux report showed that many hospitals are adding the SBOM requirements into their procurement contracts. However, many leaders don’t know how to examine an SBOM, the package manager listings, or open source licensing distribution lists to find risky elements.
As such, even if the PATCH Act passes and the SOMB requirement is added, it’s unclear whether the legislation would also add needed educational elements to make SOMBs more user-friendly. As Abrahamson explained, “Only the manufacturer of the device will have the engineering knowledge of the device required to make this determination.”
Despite these challenges, the FDA has advocated for continued transparency around device elements and risks through the SBOM. In its latest budget request, the agency asked for a $5 million budget increase to develop “a more comprehensive cybersecurity program for medical devices,” including identifying and remediating device flaws that pose a national security risk.
The proposed bills come on the heels of separate healthcare legislation introduced on Apr. 25, which would see the Department of Health and Human Services partnering with Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency to improve the sector’s overall infrastructure.
Fifteen major publishers, together representing an almost global monopoly on scientific papers, have announced a suspension of sales and services in Russia. The knowledge and information void left behind can still be filled by Sci-Hub but thanks to legal action by the publishers, not even that is straightforward.
The market power of academic publishers has been a concern for all those academic fields where publication in scholarly journals is the norm. For most non-economist researchers, the anti-trust aspects of academic publishing are likely confusing and opaque.
For instance, libraries and consortia are exempted from organizing tenders for their publication needs as each article exists only in one journal with one publisher. This is called the single or sole source exemption from procurement law and essentially means that academic publishers have monopolies on each of their articles and hence each of their journals.
At the same time, this conglomerate of monopolies is often referred to as the “publishing market“, where there is market consolidation or concentration, leading up to an “oligopoly“.
So which is it now, a market with competing providers or a conglomerate of monopolists?
 Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which developers produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software, without doing so manually. It enables team to get changes of all types such as new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a reliable and consistent way.
Following the automation of builds and unit and integration testing in CI, continuous delivery automates the release of that validated code to a repository. To have an effective continuous delivery process, it’s important that CI is already built into your development pipeline. The goal of continuous delivery is to have a codebase that is always ready for deployment to a production environment.
This is the fourth post in my toolchains adventures series. Please check the previous posts in the toolchains category for more context about this journey.
It's time to finish up our peephole optimizer, O, that we started in the previous post. This peephole optimizer, designed to be plugged into cproc and used to fix up QBE generated amd64 assembly, provides two optimizations that we found reduced binary size by between 2% and 3%: first, a one-line optimization converting mov_ $0, %___ into xor_ %___, %___ and a three-line optimization removing a useless register-to-register self-copy via a temporary register.
As writing software turned into a more and more complex engineering effort, ideas emerged to make writing software easier and more stable: it was the idea of identifying solution patterns when implementing commonly experienced problems. Actually, many problems in programming are raised over and over again. As a consequence, communities emerged to discuss such patterns in their meetings, workshops and conferences. Descriptions about design patterns were published as conference proceedings.
Over the years, the software development and programming community developed a common understanding of design patterns. A design pattern is a general solution designed to solve a repeatedly occurring problem when writing — or better, designing — software. This implies that if a design is new and has not been proven to work in production software, it cannot be a pattern. A pattern is an abstract concept covering multiple implemented solutions following that abstract concept. If there are no solutions already in place, such a pattern does not exist.
Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.
Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We're going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we'll do so when we think it's a good idea.
ZigBee is also an open standard, which makes it low cost compared to some other standards.
Welcome to the Smart Home Protocols Series, where we are going to be deep diving on protocols that our smart home devices use to communicate in our smart homes and we're going to be starting with WIFI!
This generation missed the “You’ve Got Mail” era, that brief, sunny time when email was still electronic mail: long, thoughtful letters that got delivered, miraculously, in a blink. Old-timers groused even then that email could never adequately replace condolence letters or thank-you notes, much less love letters, but that was just tradition talking. In truth, “You’ve Got Mail” was a movie about a 19th-century courtship correspondence conducted via a 20th-century pony express.
My children never got the chance to know the pleasure of a heartfelt exchange that traveled with the speed of a text but nevertheless carried the soul of the sender. All they have known is what email has devolved into: reply-all responses to bulk messages, shipping notifications, fund-raising pleas, systemwide reminders and, of course, spam. Email is now just a way to be at the beck and call of anyone, and any robot, with an internet connection.
A second front was opened about ten years ago now from an entirely different and mostly unanticipated direction. More than just flush with funds, but this time financed by academia herself, academic publishers started (escalated?) their own attack on science by gobbling up and developing digital surveillance technologies. To expand the sources of user data, these corporations bought digital tools covering all aspects of academic life, from literature search, data analysis, writing, citing or outreach, all the way to citation analysis for research assessment. These corporations formerly known as publishers are using their expanded digital surveillance network to accomplish two separate goals. First, a copy of the data is aggregated with private data from scholarly users and sold, either to advertisers, to law enforcement agencies not allowed to collect such intrusive data themselves, or to any authoritarian government interested in identifying potential opposition intelligentsia. The second goal is to expand the monopolies they enjoy on scholarly content, to a monopoly on all scholarly services, i.e., the mother of all vendor lock-ins. Packaging all the different tools in a single bundle and selling it to institutions akin to subscription “Big Deals”, would make it impossible for any institution buying such a package to ever switch to a different provider again. An analogy outside of academia would be a merger of Microsoft, SAP, Google and Facebook. There are two corporations so far that are standing ready to deploy such bundles, RELX (parent of Elsevier) and Holtzbrinck (SpringerNature, Digital Science). A related data analytics corporation specializing on scholarly data is Clarivate (Web of Science, ProQuest).
Both onslaughts aim to undermine independent scholarship and subjugate it for special interests, be it political or financial. To some extent, both have been quite successful already. In fact, in the use of journal rank and other citation metrics, the political and financial fronts have closed ranks and are cooperating. The worst outcome of succumbing to these attacks would be the destruction of publicly funded science. At best, loosing on both fronts would entail academia finding itself permanently strapped in neoliberal purgatory, with a vast precariate, cut-throat competition and results nobody can take seriously any more, in other words: Idiocracy.
We’ve looked at the WROOM-DA module before. It’s an ESP32 with two antennas, and [Andreas Spiess] says it is the ugliest ESP32 he’s ever seen. But beauty is only skin deep, after all. Did [Andreas] find beauty in the twin antennas? Watch the video below and see for yourself.
It seems like large-screen cheap meters are really catching on. [TheHWcave] does a very detailed review of a KAIWEETS KM601, which is exactly the same as a few dozen other Chinese brands you can get from the usual sources. You can see the review in the video below.
Around here we mostly enjoy slide rules. We even have our own collections including some cylindrical and circular ones. But [Mathologer] discusses a recent Reddit post that explains a circular slide rule-like device using a wheel and a stretchable rubber band. While it probably would be difficult to build the actual device using a rubber band, it can do wonders for your understanding of logarithms which still show up in our lives when, for example, you are calculating decibels. [Dimitri] did simulate the rubber band for you in software.
Above our heads, the atmosphere is a complex and unpredictable soup of gasses and charged particles subject to the influence of whatever the Sun throws at it. Attempting to understand it is not for the faint-hearted, so it has for centuries been the object of considerable research. A new project from the European Space Agency and ETH Zurich gives the general public the chance to participate in that research in a small way, by crowdsourcing atmospheric data gathering to a mobile phone app. How might a mobile phone observe the atmosphere? The answer lies in their global positioning receivers, which can track minute differences in the received signals caused by atmospheric conditions. By gathering as much of this data as possible, the ESA scientists will gain valuable insights into atmospheric conditions as they change across the globe.
Ultrasonic levitation — the practice of creating a standing wave between two ultrasonic sources and positioning lightweight objects such that they can float in the pressure minimums between them — has been a source of fascination to more than one experimenter. [Peter Lin] demonstrated this in the video below the break, by creating an ultrasonic levitation system using only the trusted chip of all true experimenters, the NE555. (Video, embedded below.)
Hi, my name is Dan and I’m a crimpoholic.
While the average computer user likely hasn’t given much thought to the lowly serial port in decades, the same can’t be said for the hardware hacker. Cheap serial-to-USB adapters are invaluable for snooping debug ports or programming chips, and if you ask us, you can never have too many laying around the bench. [Quentin Bolsée] loves them so much that he’s even figured out how to build a dual-port adapter with a SAMD11C14 microcontroller.
Republican and Democratic congressional negotiators on Monday are reportedly set to announce a $10 billion coronavirus funding package that contains no money to fight the pandemic globally, prompting outrage from public health experts who say the decision will prolong the Covid-19 crisis.
"Failing to fund the global fight against Covid-19 is a choice to extend the pandemic, to accept preventable suffering and insecurity for all, and to live with the knowledge that, deep in the time of the world's greatest need, the United States gave up," tweeted Peter Maybarduk, Access to Medicines director at Public Citizen.
A first-of-its-kind examination of the coronavirus pandemic's impact on low-income communities published Monday shows that Covid-19 has been twice as deadly in poor counties as in wealthy ones, a finding seen as a damning indictment of the U.S. government's pandemic response.
"The neglect of poor and low-wealth people in this country during a pandemic is immoral, shocking, and unjust, especially in light of the trillions of dollars that profit-driven entities received," said Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the national Poor People's Campaign, which conducted the new analysis alongside a team of economists and other experts.
Regular readers might be getting tired of my pointing out how there’s nothing new under the antivax sun in terms of deceptive arguments, conspiracy theories, and tropes designed to argue against vaccinating. However, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced these talking points to a much large audience than had ever seen them before so I considered it my duty to educate our readers and to point out that none of the antivaccine misinformation that has hit us like a tsunami since COVID-19 vaccines first entered large clinical trials in the summer of 2020 is anything new. It just seems new if you haven’t seen it before. Examples include, of course, misinformation claiming that the vaccine kills based on misinterpretation of the€ VAERS€ database; that it sterilizes our womenfolk; that it “sheds” and endangers the unvaccinated; and that it causes cancer, none of which are anything new. Even the claim that it “permanently alters your DNA”, although it might appear like a new talking point based on the fact that Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were the first successful translations of mRNA technology into a clinical product, if you look really hard, is not a new claim. (Transhumanism, anyone?) As€ Charles Pierce€ likes to say, history is so cool. In this case, though, I’d add: It’s only cool and useful if you know about it and can use it to counter the pernicious misinformation about vaccines of the sort published by, for example,€ The Wall Street Journal€ and€ deconstructed by Jonathan Howard a week ago. What I didn’t expect was to see common antivaccine tropes weaponized in a bioethics journal, but that’s exactly what I saw almost two weeks ago.
At the height of Covid, diaper banks across the US upped their diaper contributions to communities by 86%, and we have no intention of scaling back, because the need did not diminish alongside the daily positivity rate. There are new stressors on families, of course, like rising gas prices. But if paying another 50 cents a gallon for gas means that you can no longer afford diapers for your baby, the price of gas is not the problem. Removing federal and state taxes on gas might ease the pain incrementally, but it won’t end the ongoing crisis that is poverty.
The Linux Foundation announced on Friday that it’s taking applications for LiFT (Linux Foundation Training) Scholarships through the end of the month. The scholarships, that cover the cost for the foundation’s online training courses and certification exams, have been handed out on a yearly bases under a program the foundation began in 2011.
One of the best ways to jump start or improve a career in computer tech is through training and certifications. While there are plenty of venues offering certification programs, they’re not all created equal, and some are more valued by the people who make hiring decisions and hand out promotions than others, and certifications from the Linux Foundation are considered to be about as good as it gets.
But when an Office document is stored inside an ISO file, and that ISO has a ZoneIdentifier ADS, then Word will not open the document in Protected View. That is something I observed 5 years ago.
Various US government agencies have warned of imminent attacks, but the very few specifics they have offered generally amount to, “Do what every enterprise CISO knows they should have done years ago.”
The sample we’ll be looking at was first seen on March 1st, 2022. This particular malware presents itself as the banking app for BAWAG, a prominent financial institution in Austria. Upon first run, the app prompts the user to give “accessibility services” permission to the app. The accessibility services permission grants an app broad access to read the screen and mimic user interaction. Upon granting the permission, the app backgrounds itself. Any attempt by the user to uninstall the app is prevented by the app interrupting and closing the uninstall dialogues. Attempting to open the app again also fails—nothing happens.
The Android app manifest file contains a list of permissions, activities, and services that an app provides. If an activity is not listed in the app manifest, the app can’t launch that activity. Using an Android static analysis tool like jadx or apktool we can take a look at the manifest XML. The malware app’s manifest asks for a wide range of permissions, including the ability to read and send SMS messages (a common way for malware to propagate), request installation and deletion of packages, read contacts, initiate calls, and request the aforementioned accessibility service. In addition, a number of classes are referenced which are not defined anywhere in our jadx-reversed code:
It’s more difficult to choose your investors than your customers. Maybe this isn’t entirely NSO’s fault, but it certainly helped make it easier to sell powerful zero-click exploits to the governments most likely to abuse them. Here’s Kaye Wiggins and Mehul Srivastava for the Financial Times.
The courts in Massachusetts continue to set the standard for privacy protections. They have handed down several rulings that have expanded residents’ reasonable expectations beyond the baseline set by the Fourth Amendment and federal court rulings.
That’s why we recently sent a letter to the House Committee on the Judiciary in support of H.R. 7072, the Nondisclosure Order€ (NDO) Fairness Act. This bill takes important steps toward bringing transparency and accountability to the federal government’s use of sweeping gag orders accompanying requests for user data, and we appreciate Chair Nadler and the other co-sponsors for addressing these important issues.The legislation does away with indefinite gag orders, limiting the duration of nondisclosure orders to a maximum of 30 days and allowing the government to seek extensions only in 30-day increments. The NDO Fairness Act also requires courts to explain in writing why notice of the collection would be substantially likely to result in harm before issuing nondisclosure orders and to narrowly tailor orders to avoid complete bans on speech wherever possible. This is a much more demanding standard than the current requirement that courts find there be “reason to believe” that such harm “may” occur. And the legislation puts in place important measures to ensure greater transparency around the government’s use of these secretive orders, both for targeted individuals and the larger public, including by requiring the government to notify targets of surveillance that their communications were intercepted and to publish an annual report that provides information about the use of surveillance under Section 2703.€
These reforms are a welcome step forward in reforming the secrecy surrounding electronic surveillance and bringing the Stored Communications Act closer in line with constitutional guarantees. The bill would be even stronger if it provided a more accessible path for individuals to seek remedies for government violations of this law, and we look forward to working with the Committee to enact these and other reforms.
Never underestimate the ability of the baddies to exploit the good nature inherent to most people. That’s the takeaway from this latest depressing news that malicious people are abusing law enforcement tools to harvest personal information to exploit. Here’s William Turton, delivering the most recent bit of bad news for everyone everywhere.
The FBI had a crypto-messenger programmed that was fully intercepted. For legal reasons, the US authority received the intercepted communication via detours. Because of ââ¬Å¾hearsay court orders“, its use in German criminal proceedings is questionable.
The Italian authority imposed a fine of 20 million euros on Clearview AI, and ordered the company to delete all the data that it held relating to individuals in Italy. It also banned any further collection and processing of similar data. Since Clearview AI says that it does not have a place of business in Italy (or the EU), and does not have customers in Italy, it’s not clear whether the company will comply with the latest order.
A few years ago, Ken Crum started getting uncomfortable with how much of his life seemed to be online. The long-time computer programmer was particularly concerned by what companies appeared to know about him.
The amount of personal information was mind-boggling to the 66-year-old Texan, who recently moved from Dallas to the small town of Weatherford. Data brokers were collecting his personal details. Social media was targeting ads at him. Then one day, after shopping at a local home improvement store, he got an email from the company asking how his visit was. While he can't be absolutely certain, he's pretty sure the company used location-tracking on his work phone to find him.
He found it all unnerving.
That leads to problem No. 2: Once a TikTok video starts to get attention, there are no checks on its spread. This may seem true of all kinds of viral content on any social platform, but there are subtle differences. A viral tweet or Facebook post rarely gains its reach without assistance: Tweets may blow up only after they’ve been retweeted by accounts with big followings, or by tight-knit clusters of accounts (such as those belonging to MAGA Twitter or K-pop fans); Facebook posts may not catch fire until they’ve been shared to big pages or in super-active groups. On TikTok, you don’t need a middleman. You just need to perform well in front of the test audience you’re granted by default. As a result, whenever a potential villain starts to surface, a pile-on can form even faster than it might on other platforms.
Elon Musk appears to have a childlike understanding of free speech, especially with regards to how content moderation and free speech work together. But after running a silly poll a few weeks ago, many people assumed that the reason Musk was agitating to see if people felt that Twitter “supported” free speech, was that he might try to buy the company. It turns out, he was already in the process of trying to do so. On Monday it was announced that Musk has accumulated nearly 10% of Twitter’s shares, via some pocket change, making him the single largest shareholder in the company.
The purchase, equal to 9.2 percent of the company, appears to make Mr. Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder. His holding is slightly larger than Vanguard’s 8.8 percent at the end of last year, and it dwarfs the 2.3 percent stake of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive. The shares represent a fraction of Mr. Musk’s reported $270 billion-plus net worth.
Elon Musk recently purchased 9.2% of Twitter stock, according to a filing Monday, making him the largest individual shareholder in the company.
News of the purchase sent shares of Twitter (TWTR) soaring 20% in premarket trading. Musk did not disclose what he paid for the shares, but his stake was worth $2.9 billion as of the close of trading Friday, and $3.5 billion after the spike early Monday.
Musk's filing did not disclose the purpose of the purchase or any plans for the company. But he has been a high-profile critic of Twitter policies in the past. Last month he said he was giving "serious thought" to creating a new social media platfor
The final reason a local smart home is better is for security reasons. With cloud connected devices your data is being sent out to someone else's servers which means that it’s up to them to protect and secure your data. Now these companies do have lots of resources at their disposal and you would like to think that they are doing everything possible to keep your data secure but, unfortunately, this also makes them more lucrative targets. Also, just being a big company doesn’t necessarily mean they are following good security practices - the lawsuit against Amazon’s Ring video products are a perfect example of that.
Now, again, you may not care if someone can control your lights - although that could get pretty tedious quickly - but think about when it comes to security cameras; doorbells, baby monitors even. You probably don’t want anyone being able to view those whenever they want.
No matter how hard we try to be dispassionate and logical, our thinking is affected by our own experiences, by the background knowledge we have and by the assumptions they generate. In discussing Ukraine – which arouses understandably high passions – I want to explain to you some of the experiences which affect my own thinking.
For years, Russia’s official ideology has revolved around the myth that the country is in danger and its enemies are trying to destroy it. The war in Ukraine is the logical continuation of this myth. To learn how deep the historical foundations for this conflict go, Meduza turned to Andrei Zorin, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies the history of Russian state ideology and the cultural and political myths that support it.
For the third day in a row, international media remains flooded with horrifying reports about hundreds of civilians killed in Bucha, Ukraine. Russian forces began occupying this and other satellite cities of Kyiv in early March, but have since retreated from the Kyiv region altogether. In their wake, independent journalists have recorded haunting scenes: in Bucha, the lifeless bodies of civilians were left lying in the streets — some of the victims had their hands tied behind their backs. Predictably, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the photos and videos emerging from Bucha were “staged” by the authorities in Kyiv. Meduza compiles eyewitness accounts of life in Bucha under Russian occupation, as told to journalists.
After the Russian army’s retreat from Ukraine’s Kyiv region, dozens of civilians were found dead in the city of Bucha, some of them with their arms tied behind their backs. As of April 4, 410 civilian bodies have been removed from the recently liberated towns. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the images and videos from Bucha were “staged by the Kyiv regime” —€ this is Russia's standard reaction to both statements from the Ukrainian authorities and materials from independent journalists reporting on the war. To learn what life was like under Russian occupation, Meduza spoke to Bucha City Council Deputy and Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces volunteer Kateryna Ukraintseva.
On April 2, the Internet was flooded with photos showing dozens of murdered civilians on the streets of Bucha and other towns in Ukraine’s Kyiv region that were recently freed from Russian occupation. Since then, new eyewitness accounts and official reports of the crimes committed in the occupied territories have appeared; meanwhile, the Russian authorities have declared the images and accounts “fake” and a “provocation.” Meduza has compiled the world's reactions to the news so far.
Ouch!
Peter Isaacson, writing in Fair Observer, seems to be saying . . . oh my God, democracy is a cliché, a big sham. I stand up, put my hand on my heart, pledge allegiance to the flag. This is America, land of the empowered voter. Then I read about our president’s latest budget proposal, which includes $813 billion for “national defense” — pushing the Pentagon budget’s already record-setting enormity further into outer space — and I feel myself collapse (yet again) into nothingness.
Washington’s troubled relations with its Middle Eastern allies have become particularly pronounced since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. Though all the Middle Eastern countries that are American allies—Saudi-led Gulf states, Israel, Egypt and Turkey—condemned Russia at the UN Resolution in March for starting a war with Ukraine, only Israel has implemented sanctions, albeit minimally. The reluctance to impose sanctions by the United States’ allies in the Middle East reflects their intention to avoid antagonizing Russia, which is increasingly influential in the region, and also reflects their dissatisfaction with Washington and confirms the perception that its influence in the region is waning.
U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia began to deteriorate notably in 2015. The Iran nuclear deal implemented by former President Barack Obama caused considerable alarm in Riyadh, while Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen, which also began that year, received only lukewarm U.S. support. Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump, took a more pro-Saudi approach upon entering the White House in 2017, traveling to Saudi Arabia on his first foreign trip as president and increasing weapons salesto the country.
The United States said on March 24, 2022, that it would welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.
The Ukrainian refugee situation continues to overshadow another refugee crisis. That crisis stems from the U.S. military’s official withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
The threat to the dollar hegemony is only one part of the fallout. The complex supply chains, built on the premise of a stable trading regime of the World Trade Organization principles, are also threatening to unravel. The United States is discovering that Russia is not simply a petrostate as they thought but that it also supplies many of the critical materials that the U.S. needs for several industries as well as its military. This is apart from the fact that Russia is also a major supplier of wheat and fertilizers.
Seizing Russia’s funds means that the faith in the United States as the world’s banker and in the dollar as the global reserve currency is in question. Why should countries maintain any trade surplus and bank it abroad if that surplus can be seized at will through sanctions imposed by the West? The promise of a dollar as the world’s reserve currency was that all surpluses in dollars were safe. With the seizure of the Afghan central bank’s $9.5 billion, and allocating $7 billion out of it, the United States has shown that it considers the dollar reserves of another country, held by the United States’ central bank, as its money. It may be an economic asset in the books for a country to maintain its currency reserves with the U.S. central bank. But it is effectively a political liability, as the U.S. government can seize this asset at will. The United States has earlier shown its capability of imposing sanctions against countries such as Iraq, Libya and Venezuela and seizing their assets that resulted in far-reaching negative impacts for these countries. The seizure of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves by a handful of Western countries—ex-colonial and settler-colonial states—shows that the so-called rules-based order is now based on weaponizing the dollar and the West’s control over the global financial system.
While U.S. President Joe Biden echoed human rights defenders on Monday by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin "a war criminal" in response to what Ukrainian officials described as a "deliberate massacre" in Bucha, the American leader's remarks also highlighted a refusal by his government to acknowledge or face consequences for the United States' crimes abroad.
Recalling his remarks from mid-March, Biden told reporters outside the White House on Monday that "you may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal. Well, the truth of the matter—you saw what happened in Bucha... He is a war criminal."
In Western military circles, it's common to refer to the "balance of forces"—the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win. Based on this reasoning, most Western analysts assumed that the Russian army—with a seemingly overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment—would quickly overpower Ukrainian forces. Of course, things haven't exactly turned out that way. The Ukrainian military has, in fact, fought the Russians to a near-standstill. The reasons for that will undoubtedly be debated among military theorists for years to come. When they do so, they might begin with Moscow's surprising failure to pay attention to a different military equation—the "correlation of forces"—originally developed in the former Soviet Union.
Democracy defenders on Monday warned of ominous consequences as right-wing Hungarian President Viktor Orbán was overwhelmingly elected to his fourth term in a contest progressive observers said was unfairly stacked against the opposition.
"Hungary seems to have reached a point of no return."
Ukrainian officials are accusing Russia of committing war crimes for killing civilians. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and EU leaders condemned images of dead civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where corpses were found littering the streets after Russian troops withdrew from the area, some with their hands bound behind their backs. On Friday, Amnesty International also published a report that independently verified Russia has violated international law in using banned cluster munitions and other weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians. “What’s been going on during the entire more than a month now of conflict merits serious investigation and accountability for the perpetrators,” says Joanne Mariner, crisis response director at Amnesty International, who co-authored the report. “Given this relentless bombardment of civilian neighborhoods and districts, we’re calling for the establishment of safe humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to escape.”
In Western military circles, it’s common to refer to the “balance of forces”—the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win. Based on this reasoning, most Western analysts assumed that the Russian army—with a seemingly overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment—would quickly overpower Ukrainian forces. Of course, things haven’t exactly turned out that way. The Ukrainian military has, in fact, fought the Russians to a near-standstill. The reasons for that will undoubtedly be debated among military theorists for years to come. When they do so, they might begin with Moscow’s surprising failure to pay attention to a different military equation—the “correlation of forces”—originally developed in the former Soviet Union.
The Islamic State terrorists who kidnapped American journalist James Foley never made serious attempts to negotiate a ransom before brutally executing him, family members testified Monday.
Foley's brother and mother took the witness stand at U.S. District Court in Alexandria at the terror trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, a Briton accused of played a leading role in a hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of Foley and three other Americans — Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.
A United Nations report on the climate emergency—released Monday after negotiations spilled into overtime—sparked a fresh wave of calls for bolder and scientifically informed action to rapidly and dramatically reduce planet-heating emissions for the sake of all life on Earth.
"This monumental climate report is distressing but it is not surprising."
Journalist Timothy Gardner at Reuters has gotten an advance look at a White House Office of Management and Budget document that concludes that by the end of this century, when Olivia Rodrigo would be 100 if she has the long life we wish for her, the annual cost of the climate crisis we are causing will amount to $2 trillion a year in today’s dollars.
Scientists from around the world on Monday mobilized to demand a "Climate Revolution," holding rallies and staging acts of civil disobedience with the goal of making the planetary emergency "impossible to ignore."
With a kick-off timed to coincide with Monday's release of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), researchers across the globe this week will participate in the Scientist Rebellion, staging strikes and occupations at universities, research institutes, and scientific journals to demand that the community speak out forcefully against continued fossil fuel emissions to highlight "the urgency and injustice of the climate and ecological crisis."
The publication of the third and final part of the United Nations' latest comprehensive climate assessment, originally scheduled for early Monday morning, was postponed by several hours after a contentious weekend of negotiations in which wealthy governments attempted to weaken statements about green financing for low-income nations and fossil fuel-producing countries objected to unequivocal language about the need to quickly ditch coal, oil, and gas.
The landmark report by Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—written by dozens of climate scientists from around the world who synthesized the past eight years of relevant research—is expected to call for a rapid global phaseout of fossil fuels to avoid the planetary emergency's most dire consequences.
“At that time, most of my peers in urban organizing weren’t even discussing climate change,” says Nube. “Once we started digging into it, we realized our peers organizing in Miami might be underwater 50 years from now, and that climate change was a symptom of a much deeper set of interlocking crises rooted in industrial extractivism.”
In 2006, Nube and his colleagues co-founded the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project to create an analytical foundation for organizers interested in the relationship between ecology and social justice, and as a hub for strategic organizing efforts through workshops, retreats and campaign development.
CEOs of major oil and gas companies have been called to testify before at least three congressional committees about their record profits as Russia wages an unjust war in Ukraine and gas prices remain volatilely high, disproportionately affecting low-income and fixed-income families. The oil and gas industry has been in the spotlight for its role in the humanitarian catastrophe whose effects are rippling across the globe. It's no wonder these companies are spinning up a PR campaign to promote their businesses as the answer to our problems, publicly withdrawing from Russia, and showing up at the White House to offer support to the Biden administration's efforts to end the invasion and limit its economic fallout.
Following the publication of a key United Nations climate report on Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres took aim at governments and corporations—whom he accused "a litany of broken climate promises"—while defending the activists fighting for a future free from fossil fuels.
"The truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness."
Travis Dardar, an indigenous fisherman in Cameron, Louisiana, has a front-row view of the expansion of the liquified natural gas (LNG) industry’s export capacity on the Gulf Coast — and it isn’t pretty. “It disgusts me what man is doing to the planet,” Dardar told me as I photographed flares at the recently built Venture Global Calcasieu Pass LNG export facility from his boat out in the Calcasieu Ship Channel, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
I met Travis and his wife Nicole Dardar on March 17, before attending an air quality permit hearing held by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) in Cameron for another proposed LNG export project by Commonwealth LNG, a Texas-based company.
Europe has big plans to phase out fossil-fuel cars. In July, the European Union proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035. The bloc wants to replace those cars with electric vehicles, built with locally produced raw materials like lithium. The top lithium producers are currently Australia, Chile, and China. But Europe has ambitions to produce more of the materials it needs for electric cars at home. These materials “are extremely expensive to ship and are transported across the world several times over,” says Emily Burlinghaus, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany. “So it's much cheaper and much safer to have these operations close to battery manufacturing plants or auto manufacturing plants.”
For Europeans it’s also a security issue. “We cannot allow [the EU] to replace [its] current reliance on fossil fuels with dependency on critical raw materials,” said Maroš Ã Â efÃÂoviÃÂ, the commission vice president for inter-institutional relations, in 2020.
On a bright spring day in 1979, before thousands who were propelled to Washington, D.C., by the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown, I pronounced nuclear power’s rapid expansion disastrously unaffordable. My remarks drew on years of work chronicling reactors’ skyrocketing capital costs.
We are looking down the barrel of a loaded gun with our water resources in the West. Rather than investing in body armor, we’ve been hoping that the trigger won’t be pulled. The current water monitoring and modeling strategies aren’t sufficient to support the increasing number of people that need water. I’m worried about the next week, month, year, and about new problems that we’ll inevitably face as climate change continues and water becomes more unpredictable.
Las Vegas is all about light. Despite its desert location and the sunsets that turn the surrounding mountains and red-rock canyons all colors of delicate pink, the lights for which Las Vegas is most renowned are electronic, the kind that blur the line between night and day and leave visitors to Las Vegas always feeling that they have, somehow, stepped outside of normal time. Huge television screens, some the size of 10-story buildings, illuminate both the insides of casinos and the edifices of their exterior. Inside, gambling palaces are filled with countless thousands of blinking slot machines, alongside malls and food courts and bars and theaters all flooded with a fluorescent glow that creates an endless afternoon.
On March 28, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival brought together a diverse coalition of participants in Madison, Wisconsin, to march for the rights of poor and low-wage workers across the United States. A parallel event took place in Raleigh, North Carolina; both were part of a buildup to a national march planned for June 18 in Washington, D.C.
Hundreds of people converged in Washington, D.C. on Monday for a national day of action to demand that the Biden administration cancel all outstanding federal student loan debt via executive order.
"All he needs to do is sign an executive order. What is Biden waiting for?"
A homeless man allegedly pushed 40-year-old Michelle Go in front of an oncoming train at a New York City subway station on January 15, killing her. The high-profile attack received worldwide coverage, with widespread reporting emphasizing crimes committed by people without homes in New York and around the country.
This is worth noting, because the news media have filled their pages and broadcasts with stories of workers who are suffering because of the rise in gas prices and inflation more generally. There are undoubtedly many workers who are seriously suffering, but this is always true. Since labor income is higher today than it was before the pandemic, we can reasonably infer that many more workers were having trouble making ends meet in 2019 than today. If we hear more stories of hardship now, it is because of the decision by the media to give us more stories of hardship, not because more stories exist in the world.
For those who want a picture of how labor income growth since Biden took office compares with prior years, here’s the picture since 2010.
I was struck at the time by Putin’s cold smile and athletic stride, both self-consciously geared to conveying an impression of business-like authority. I wondered what the man was really like, as did many Russians curious about his public persona. One joke in Moscow, adapted from a jibe often directed at Soviet leaders in the past, asked: “Will there ever be a Putin personality cult? No, because to have such a cult you must first have a personality.”
This put-down probably underestimated Putin. And in any case, his control of the Russian media enabled him to pose as a competent “tough-guy” national leader. But for me he always remained an elusive figure, expert in the mechanics of gaining and keeping power in Russia while making a broad-brush appeal to Russian nationalism.
Very well. But first, in order not to rewrite history without contextualizing the time, one must not rewrite the days of the calendar. For in the coup propaganda, the first of April 1964 was always brought forward to the 31st of March. Trying to avoid the joke, the universal day of lies, they lied in anticipation. They said that everything was done on March 31. And the revolution was decreed.
In doubt, so as not to fall into historical revisionism, look at the Brazilian newspapers of April 2nd, 1964:
The so-called child protection referendum held on Sunday, at the same time as the parliamentary elections has been declared invalid. From the appoximately 3.5 million valid answers which were submitted, 3.2 million people voted “no”. But if so many people gave the answer the government has been pushing, and if the Fidesz-KDNP coalition won yet another two-thirds majority, then how is it possible that they were not able to get enough valid votes that had four “no” answers to the questions asked. The answer is simpler than one might think.
Now that the votes are almost all counted, we present the key results of the 2022 parliamentary elections. The bottom line: Viktor Orbán and Fidesz-KDNP won by two-thirds for the fourth time, the opposition coalition did much worse than forecasted in all preliminary polls – winning almost exclusively in Budapest's constituencies. Finally, Our Homeland Movement made it into parliament. Translation by Dominic Spadacene
Well above the five percent threshold, with a list vote share of 6.3 percent and over 310,000 list votes, Mi Hazánk (Our Country) has entered parliament as the third parliamentary force, if we consider the opposition coalition as a bloc. After the 2018 elections, the party of the more radical MPs who broke away from the Jobbik party, can send a total of 7 MPs to Parliament. Translation: Dominic Spadacene
The stock-buying revelation comes as Musk emerges as one of the loudest and most prominent critics of Twitter's moderation efforts, which in recent years have cracked down on everything from harassment and death threats to misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The State Department launched its new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy on Monday in what it says is a modernization of the agency aimed at emerging technology issues in diplomacy.
A statement issued by the department said the bureau will address “the national security challenges, economic opportunities, and implications for U.S. values associated with cyberspace, digital technologies, and digital policy.”
It will consist of three policy units, including international cyberspace security, international information and communications policy, and digital freedom.
Finland's digital compass is based on the EU’s Digital Compass, which was presented in spring 2021. Finland's digital compass sets the level for Finland’s national ambition with respect to the objectives presented by the EU and sets national objectives that go beyond those of the EU.
In line with the EU Digital Compass, Finland’s digital compass revolves around four cardinal points: skills, digital infrastructure, the digital transformation of businesses, and digital of public services. The compass includes prioritised national objectives for each of these points up to 2030. The compass also defines the measures required to reach these objectives as well as progress indicators that will be updated regularly.
The Commission will provide an assessment of the implementation of the digital principles in the annual State of the Digital Decade report. The Commission will also conduct an annual Eurobarometer survey to monitor the follow-up measures in the Member States. The Eurobarometer will collect qualitative data, based on citizens’ perception of how the digital principles are put into practice in various Member States. The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union will discuss the proposal before adoption.
In spreading these exaggerations and unfounded claims, Dr. Malone joins medical professionals and scientists, like Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Judy Mikovits, whose profiles have grown during the pandemic as they spread misinformation about mask-wearing and convoluted conspiracy theories about virus experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci
Some 30% of UK adults who use the internet – 14.5 million – are unsure about or do not even consider the truthfulness of the information they see online, the regulator’s annual survey found.
A further 6%, or about one in every 20 internet users, believe everything they see online.
Both adults and children overestimate their ability to spot misinformation, Ofcom found.
The close of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, on February 20, was a key moment in trying to decipher Russia’s Ukraine invasion plans. Russian President Vladimir Putin would wait until after the Games, the theory went, so as not to distract from the Olympics and to avoid jeopardizing any support Moscow would need from Beijing.
Putin did wait, finally launching an invasion on February 24. But China has not gone all-in on Putin’s Ukraine war, despite Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin declaring there were “no limits” to their friendship.
Instead, the Chinese government has tried to toe a careful line. It has not condemned Russia’s invasion. But though China has criticized Western sanctions on Russia, it has not really moved to help Russia evade them, and it looks like it’s trying to avoid running afoul of the penalties. At the same time, what it says and does outwardly may be a lot different from what’s happening behind the scenes.
Regular readers may have noticed CNX Software was inaccessible for several days, and the reason was that my domain was suspended. I’m a bit late for April Fools’ day, but I’ll show how you can get your domain suspended too in five easy steps! I’ll also provide some background to what happened, and several errors of judgment made along the way
What happened?
On March 28, as I woke up I noticed I could not access the website and I had also received several emails and mentions on social networks that the website was down. I first tried to restart the LEMP stack of the server nginx, mysql, php, but it did not help. I quickly figured out there was a problem with DNS, so I went to the Cloudflare dashboard which is where I manage the DNS records, but I did not see any problems there. Eventually, I saw the domain name servers were changed to: ns1.suspended.com and ns2.suspended.com, and I could not change anything. So my domain was suspended. CloudFlare is not managing the domain registration, I only use it for the DNS records, and they were not involved in this case at all.
Note that I did not receive any email or phone call from the reseller where I purchased the domain in 2010. I first tried chat support but was told to open a ticket, which was handled by the “billing” department. I open the ticket on March 28th, 2022 (21:25) (some US timezone), and received an answer on March 29th, 2022 (05:54) saying the domain was suspended because of phishing. I know I’m not running some phishing scam, so either the server was hacked, or somebody had made a fake report to take my domain down. I was not given the exact reason yet, but a case was opened and was told I would receive an email soon (to an email from my suspended domain).
I replied I was probably the victim of fraud, and so I had to refresh the ticket from time to time, and on Tuesday, March 29th, 2022 (23:38), or 26 hours after opening the ticket I was given a screenshot showing “definitive proof of my abusing ways” (I make that up).
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's historic nomination to the United States Supreme Court cleared a minor hurdle Monday after the U.S. Senate overcame a deadlocked Judiciary Committee via a procedural vote in the upper chamber, where her confirmation is all but guaranteed.
"I dream of a day where Black women don't have to be overqualified, jump through hoops, and face misogynoir just to get to the jobs they already deserve."
It’s your right to request records from public agencies. That fact cannot be disputed. The Freedom of Information Act guarantees it in regards to federal agencies and every state has their own laws that guarantee access to public records.
Editor’s Note: After publication, we were alerted the that key story about the councilwoman, was actually from a few years ago, not recently. We regret the mistake and will make efforts to avoid such mistakes in the future. We’re leaving the original article below.
In a recent statement released by Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP or Alliance for Change), the regional party founded by Sara Duterte, daughter of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, activist-scholar Professor Walden Bello was unfoundedly and maliciously labeled as a “narco-politician.”
Prof. Bello is currently running for Vice President under Laban ng Masa (Fight of the Masses), a left-wing electoral coalition of democratic socialist and progressive groups, against Sara Duterte and several other candidates for the May 2022 Philippine National Elections. Last March 20, 2022, in a televised debate, Prof. Bello called out the issue of illicit drug trade in Davao City, dubbing it the “Drug Center ” of Southern Philippines. Prof. Bello questioned why the former aide of Sara Duterte (Davao City’s incumbent Mayor) was exonerated and freed despite clear involvement in a recent drug bust in Davao. Prof. Bello also pointed out that Sara Duterte’s refusal to attend the said debate displayed a glaring lack of public accountability in confronting the said issue, against the backdrop of thousands killed in the Duterte administration’s deadly “war on drugs”.
For the past year, thousands of Texas National Guard members and state troopers have been sweeping through brush along the Rio Grande and cruising border-town roadways. Their eyes scan the horizon for the cartel operatives and smugglers whom Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to hold at bay when he launched his multibillion-dollar campaign to secure the border.
But more often, the troopers arrest men like Bartolo, a Mexican farmworker who came to the United States looking for work, according to his lawyers. They’ve also slapped cuffs on asylum-seekers like Gastón, a human rights attorney who said he fled Venezuela after being targeted by the Maduro regime for defending political opponents.
When I first moved to the US from London, I asked an American journalist what kind of reception I might expect as a Black Briton. “Well, when they hear an English accent, Americans usually add about 20 points to your IQ,” he said. “But when they see a Black face, they usually don’t.” Recalling that the authors of the book The Bell Curve had claimed that Black people have an IQ 15 points lower than whites, I figured that, at the very least, I would still come out at least five points ahead.1
To the surprise and consternation of scholars, history has recently emerged as a battlefield in the ongoing culture wars. Generally, historians welcome public debate about the past. But new state laws banning from classrooms any discussion of the history of racism have been accompanied by so much demagoguery and misinformation on the part of legislators, school board officials, and agitated parents that one is tempted to believe it would be more edifying to ignore history altogether for the time being.
Berlin—This was once the fault line between East and West in Europe. Almost 35 years after the momentous change brought about by the fall of the Wall, Germany still feels tied to two regions, two histories. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is viewed and spoken about in a very different way here than it is in the United States.
In the wake of its historic victory in the election to unionize Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union demanded over the weekend that the company begin collective bargaining negotiations in early May and immediately halt any changes to employment policies in the meantime.
"As you are aware, the Amazon Labor Union has decisively won the union election," Christian Smalls, the president of ALU, wrote in a letter to company management. "We are available to meet anytime on May 2, 3, 4, or 5 of 2022 for collective bargaining negotiations. Please provide your available dates and times before close of business on April 8, 2022."
On the heels of a major organizing win for Amazon workers in New York City last week, The Intercept revealed Monday that the e-commerce giant is considering a ban on various union-related terms for a planned internal messaging application.
"In November 2021, Amazon convened a high-level meeting in which top executives discussed plans to create an internal social media program€ that would let employees recognize co-workers' performance with posts called 'Shout-Outs,'" according to journalist Ken Klipperstein.
The “auto bad word monitor” reportedly blacklists profanities and inappropriate terms but also targets terms related to organized labor including “union,” “grievance,” “pay raise,” “compensation” and more.
We speak with the two best friends who led a drive to organize workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and made history Friday after a majority voted to form the first Amazon union in the U.S. We speak with Christian Smalls, interim president of the new union and former Amazon supervisor, about how he led the effort after Amazon fired him at the height of the pandemic for demanding better worker protections. “I think we proved that it’s possible, no matter what industry you work in, what corporation you work for,” says Smalls. “We just unionized Amazon. If we can do that, we can unionize anywhere.” We also speak with Derrick Palmer, who works at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island and is the vice president of the Amazon Labor Union, about intimidation tactics the company used. Reporter Josefa Velásquez covered the union drive for The City and discusses what the victory means for the broader labor movement.
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) scored a historic victory on April 1st when it became the first-ever union to successfully organize Amazon employees. Christian Smalls, a fired worker motivated by what he viewed as poor treatment, rallied his co-workers through the process and, in January 2022, got just enough votes to qualify for a formal election. On Friday, the workers of Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse voted to unionize, 2,654 to 2,131.
It was a hard-won victory, coming after years of work, and labor activists are already hoping to apply the same tactics to the hundreds of thousands of Amazon warehouse workers across the rest of the country. After the RWDSU’s stumble in the Bessemer election last year, the newly formed Amazon Labor Union is pointing to a different path forward — and forcing Amazon to take a hard second look at working conditions in many of its fulfillment centers.
In 2019, a pseudonymous hacker called Solderpunk launched the Gemini network, a much simpler anti-commercial alternative to the web. Gemini has less than 1% of the complexity of the web, but can still do the stuff that matters: delivering simple hypertext documents. Further, it is designed deliberately to never be able to do the things enlightened users generally don’t want, like tracking or complex scripting on what should just be documents. The web itself has become so complex that there may never be another web browser written from scratch, but Gemini was designed to be simple enough that any reasonably competent programmer could write their own Gemini browser in a weekend, so there are already dozens. Gemini has exploded into a thriving scene of blogs and social media, proving that it is possible for any reasonably competent tech-prophet to overcome the network effects of the metaverse borg with their own niche alternative. It further demonstrates an exemplary case of the higher intentions of the software architect attempting to structurally prevent later commercial adulteration.
We live in a world that increasingly requires us to be online. The promise of all this technology was that barriers would be lowered, allowing more people to exercise their rights—especially rights related to speech. For those who work in securing rights for others, activists and journalists, for example, this has been an invaluable change.
More than 100 advocacy groups were joined by some of Silicon Valley's smaller tech companies Monday as they launched Antitrust Day, a day of action aimed at pressuring federal lawmakers to pass legislation that would rein in tech giants which advocates say "pose an existential threat to democracy" as they stifle competition and disempower consumers.
Groups including Fight for the Future, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Demand Progress are joining with Yelp, Patreon, DuckDuckGo, and other internet companies to push for the passage of two bills that would "increase competition, giving tech users more control over their digital lives, and reduce the monopoly power of Big Tech giants, which has been abused as a choke point for censorship and human rights violations," according to organizers.
Florida federal Judge Darrin Gayles has dismissed Content ID-related antitrust claims against YouTube. The allegations were part of a piracy lawsuit filed against the streaming platform last year by movie tycoon Carlos Vasallo. While the lawsuit has been slimmed down, YouTube still has to defend itself against copyright infringement claims.
The North West Regional Organised Crime Unit and Lancashire Police report that three men have been arrested on suspicion of criminal copyright infringement offenses. All from the north of England, the men were arrested in connection with the supply of pirate IPTV services providing unlicensed access to movies, TV shows and live sports.
