Atlassian is still scrambling to recover from a recent software script fiasco and is hoping no customer data gets lost, which may be more than Microsoft can manage if OneDrive, as some have reported, has been intermittently corrupting large uploads for at least two months.
Four days after some Atlassian customers began encountering problems with the cloud giant's collaboration software, recovery efforts continue and a few folks are worried they may not get their data back.
One wrote to The Register wondering about that possibility after the company, via Twitter, responded to a request to confirm that customer data is backed up and failed to actually do so.
"We expect most site recoveries to occur with minimal or no data loss," the biz said on Thursday.
 Adobe Acrobat Reader is a multi-platform PDF reader. It lets users view, print, sign and comment on PDF documents.
While Acrobat Reader is free to download, it’s proprietary software. And support for Linux was discontinued in 2014, although it’s possible to run the Windows software using WINE.
We recommend free and open source alternatives that run natively under Linux.
How To install NotepadQQ On Linux
Notepadqq is an amazing text editor. It is promoted as an editor designed by developers, for developers. Notepadqq is free to use and open-source text editor that has support for almost 100 languages. If you are looking for a perfect text editor for Linux then NotedpadQQ must be your choice.
Picture this scenario. You are managing a Linux server that is accessed by multiple users. All users have sudo rights. You want to test certain Linux commands with different users. How would you do that? Log in as one user and test the commands, and then log out and log back in as another user and test commands? Yes, It is one way to do it. However, there is a simple way to run commands as another user via sudo in Linux. Read on to find out.
The term cron job is a task that we need to do regularly, and we can schedule the tasks to be automatically done. In Linux, there are many built-in commands and online tools that might help you organize and initialize your tasks on your behalf on the system. With command line codes and online tools, you can link your tasks and assign the tools to perform tasks. One of the most used and useful syntax for cron jobs in Linux is the crontab (cron tables). To maintain these cron jobs in Linux, we can either write a script, use online tools, or use terminal commands.
If you’re a system admin where you need to perform multiple repeating and scheduled tasks in many different systems, the cron jobs can save your time and efficiently complete your tasks.
By default memcached on CentOS 7 is set to run on all IP address on the server. This allow attackers to abuse the service.
Supervisor is a program used to monitor and control programs. It can auto startup application on server boot time, restart if the application fails.
PHP ssh2 module allows you to connect to SSH servers. On Cpanel servers, this module is not available under EasyApache. You need to install using PECL. The PECL module installer in WHM does not list this module. The module is available to download from
On a Cpanel Server, when you visit a shared IP address used by multiple websites, you will see the website of the first VirtualHost entry. This is not good when you have multiple customer websites as your other customers may visit the IP and see the site associated with the first VirtualHost entry and complain about this. I had customers reporting that their site is hacked when this happened to them.
This topic has been discussed many times so i am going to write a complete guide to track your video conversion problem and fix it. I am using ClipBucket 2.0.9, if you have not already update to latest version, please download it from http://clip-bucket.com/latestAdding some of my Forum post content, here is what we are going to track our problem.
ACME (acme.sh) is a shell script for generating LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. acme.sh is written in bash, so it works on any Linux server without special requirements. For getting SSL, another popular option is to use certbot.
When you run this command, you will get DNS TXT entry that needed to be added to your DNS server. Login to your DNS provider, add the DNS entry, then run the following command to confirm the SSL creation.
I want to rsync files from one server to another server every 5 minutes, but only want to start the rsync if the previous rsync command has finished. Time for one rsync depends on how much data changed on the source server, so the time taken to finish rsync cronjob varies.
Imagine being able to scroll through your favorite images and watch them come alive on screen or view a slideshow of all the best moments in life. Ristretto is an innovative image viewer that allows you to scroll through images and view them in a slide show. You can also open multiple files with other applications like your computer’s built-in photo editor or use it as wallpaper on its own!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Ristretto on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the Ubuntu default repository or alternative flatpak installation manager for those that require the latest released version as Ubuntu’s releases can be behind due to stability factors in what long term releases are meant for.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Fedora come with an NVIDIA driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s, which lacks the latest graphics card hardware features, software technology, and support. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers with proper NVIDIA drivers is more beneficial than not. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Nvidia Graphic Drivers from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository RPM Fusion, giving you the latest software available on Fedora 36 Workstation, the command line terminal.
Tor, also referred to as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that permits anonymous communication when using online services like web surfing. The Tor network directs the web traffic through an accessible worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to search out more ways to stay their information and activities anonymous or as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years because it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
The Tor network is intended to protect the personal privacy of users and their freedom and ability from conducting communication without having their activities monitored, and data were taken without their consent and used to sum it up.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Tor Browser on Fedora 36 Linux workstation desktop using Fedora 36’s default repository or downloading the browser manually and how to install it manually with tips on registering the application icon.
PHP 8.1 is a significant update of the PHP language that was “officially” released on November 25, 2021. This is a standard upgrade going forward from the existing PHP 8.0 release. The new PHP 8.1 brings enums, fibers, never return type, final class constants, intersection types, and read-only properties, among new features and changes.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the Ondà â¢ej Surý PPA and install PHP 8.1 on your Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal.
Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.
The tutorial will look at installing the OpenJDK version instead of the default Oracle JDK. The difference between these two is licensing. OpenJDK is an entirely free, open-source Java with a GNU General Public License, and Oracle JDK requires a commercial license under the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement. Other differences are release schedules and other factors that come into play; however, performance is the same.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install OpenJDK 11 LTS or better known as Java 11 LTS, on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish with the standard APT installation from Ubuntu’s repository along with the PPA version, which may suit some users better. The tutorial will also demonstrate how to switch Java alternative default versions.
SciTE is an easy-to-use text editor that has many features for programming. Its footprint size and functionality make it perfect for installing on any system, even if you don’t have experience with Scintilla or GTK.
More valuable features include syntax styling, error indicators, and code completion. It also has a selection margin that can be filled with markers like those found commonly used by debuggers to indicate breakpoints or other vital points when exploring an application’s functionality (e). The user interface provides greater control than what you might find elsewhere; this makes it easier for developers who need these types of tools but don’t want something too complicated-looking while still offering plenty of ” Done deal!” style options if that more their speed!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install SciTE on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the Ubuntu default repository or alternative flatpak installation manager for those that require the latest released version as Ubuntu’s releases can be behind due to stability factors in what long term releases are meant for.
Firefox ESR is the perfect choice for enterprise users who need stability and security updates but may not have access to newer features. The Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) versions are officially supported by their respective organizations because they do not contain any bugs or unfinished products within their programmed functions! The Firefox extended support release is perfect for university or government networks where they need more support than just updated software.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Firefox ESR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.
The RawTherapee application is a powerful and versatile tool for processing raw photos. This program, which runs on both PC & Mac systems using GTK+ as its interface, uses patches of DCRAW with added support from their in-house team that enhances accuracy where needed most – ensuring every photo comes out beautifully regardless of the type or model device was used when taking them!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install RawTherapee on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the Ubuntu default repository or alternative flatpak installation manager for those that require the latest released version as Ubuntu’s releases can be behind due to stability factors in what long term releases are meant for.
Shotwell is a simple and easy-to-use photo organizer for the GNOME desktop. You can import photos from your camera or disk, organize them by date and subject matter, and ratings on how you want to present these memories in this application with its basic editing features, including cropping red eyes away!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Shotwell on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the Ubuntu default repository or alternative flatpak installation manager for those that require the latest released version as Ubuntu’s releases can be behind due to stability factors in what long term releases are meant for.
FreeTube is a free, open-source YouTube player that lets you watch videos without advertisements and prevents Google from tracking your browsing activity with cookies or JavaScript. Thanks to Electron, you can use it for Windows, Mac & Linux!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Freetube on Manjaro 21 Linux. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with yay AUR helper. Ideally, most users may be using some wrapper for Pacman; for new users, it is essential to install one to keep your packages up-to-date while you learn Arch/Manjaro.
I want to install Ubuntu for playing games on external SSD, so I don’t have to touch my boot loader. I got inspired by Ruben’s post. I decided to buy a new SSD external drive and install Ubuntu on it. I’m pretty sure I’ve told the Ubuntu installer to NOT override boot record on my main drive, but sadly the installer ignored my choice and happily installed GRUB on it. At this point, I was really scared of not being able to boot my FreeBSD anymore.
Okay, wow, my post about an empty file has generated a lot of feedback, mostly for the throwaway line at the bottom about an empty file being the smallest version of /bin/true possible.
QR codes are not inherently dangerous. They are simply a way to store data. However, just as it can be hazardous to click links in emails, visiting URLs stored in QR codes can also be risky in several ways.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pixeluvo on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Pixeluvo is an affordable image editor tool designed to transform the entire view of an image in Linux distributions. Pixeluvo contains a wide range of advanced features including non-destructive editing via adjustment layers, powerful color correction tools, full support for raw image formats, realistic pressure-sensitive drawing tools, and many image enhancement filters. To use it, you need a commercial license and a license for Pixeluvo full version costs $34 and includes all future updates for that major version number.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Pixeluvo image editor on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
When I was logging into the virtual machine via SSH connection, I was not prompted to enter the password and the connection terminated with the Connection timed out message.
At first, I thought maybe the IP address had changed, but it’s not possible because I have set the static address, even though the firewall is not implemented on the system. Still, I pinged the network and found the connection was unreachable.
So, I directly logged in to the VMware machine and checked the IP address. I found the IP address was the same. Then why is it not getting connected through SSH? Therefore, again, I tried to ping Reddit and found it was also not working.
Follow through this guide to learn how to install MariaDB 10.7 on Ubuntu 20.04. MariaDB 10.7.3 is the current stable release version of MariaDB.
Follow through this guide to learn how to install MariaDB 10.8 on Ubuntu 20.04. MariaDB 10.8.2 is the current RC release version of MariaDB.
Creating a new branch in a code repository is a pretty common task when working with Git. It's one of the primary mechanisms for keeping unrelated changes separate from one another. It's also very often the main designator for what gets merged into the main branch.
Without branches, everything would either have to be cherrypicked, or else all your work would be merged effectively as a squashed rebase. The problem is, branches inherit the work of the branch from which they're forked, and that can lead to you accidentally pushing commits you never intended to be in your new branch.
The solution is to always fork off of main (except when you mean not to). It's an easy rule to say, but unfortunately it's equally as easy to forget, so it can help to look at the reasoning behind the rule.
This quick tutorial explains how to download and install the latest GIMP application on Ubuntu or Debian Linux and friend using the CLI.
Hello, friends. On Debian and Ubuntu, it is effortless to enable mod_rewrite, which is an Apache utility to rewrite addresses in our applications. However, in the case of Rocky Linux 8 / Alma Linux 8 the issue is not the same. So, you will learn how to enable mod_rewrite for Apache in Rocky Linux 8 / Alma Linux 8.
For the past week I worked on getting a Ironic standalone to run on an Ampere AltraMax server in our lab. As I recently was able to get a baremetal node to boot, I wanted to record the steps I went through.
Our base operating system for this install is Ubuntu 20.04.
For many using Unix-derived systems today, we take for granted that /some/path and /some/path/ are the same. Most shells will even add a trailing slash for you when you press the Tab key after the name of a directory or a symbolic link to one.
However, many programs treat these two paths as subtly different in certain cases, which I outline below, as all three have tripped me up in various ways.
This blog post is prompted by a forum post by BologneChe, who set the tray width to full width of screen, by editing the "width" attribute in the "Tray" tag, but found that sometimes had to reset it...
The kernel is one of the most important parts of a system. In the case of Ubuntu or Debian, the kernel is rarely upgraded to major versions, although it is patched frequently. As with the entire system, it is also a good idea to check the kernel version because it will tell you more about the system and provide better support.
Wine is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux (plus also macOS and BSD). A new development release is out with Wine 7.6. It's a major part of what makes up Steam Play Proton and enables a ton of games to work on the Steam Deck. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.
We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since March 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks...
Godfall Ultimate Edition released onto Steam on April 7, a former Epic Store exclusive, and now thanks to the Steam release it runs very nicely on Linux and Steam Deck with Proton.
"Aperion is on the precipice of ruin. You are the last of the Valorian knights, god-like warriors able to equip Valorplates, legendary armor sets that transform wielders into unstoppable masters of melee combat. Ascend in Godfall, the first-of-its-kind, looter-slasher, melee action-RPG."
With their changes, it should now work out of the box! Released originally on Steam back in 2015, it went onto receive wide recognition with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating from 20,944 (at time of writing) user reviews. Always nice to see such a title running well on Linux and Steam Deck.
 Whether it is Windows, Linux, or macOS, you will find plenty of Indie games to play.
There are chances to find incredibly exciting games that are often underrated, which makes it exciting to explore Indie games.
But, here, I focus only on the best Indie RPG games (i.e. developed by small teams) available for the Linux platform.
Those finger-following touchscreen gestures have started to land, and we have a lot more than that too! This week is overflowing with positive visual changes that I think you’re all really going to like...
Georges wrote a great little app to configure Elgato Stream Deck buttons on non-proprietary platforms. I’ve been following Georges’ ventures into streaming. He’s done amazing job promoting GNOME development and has been helping with OBS a lot too.
To make Boatswain work great by default, rather than just presenting people with a monstrous shit work mountain to even get going, Georges needed some graphical assets to have the configurator ship with ready made presets.
This release switches scp(1) from using the legacy scp/rcp protocol to using the SFTP protocol by default.
Legacy scp/rcp performs wildcard expansion of remote filenames (e.g. "scp host:* .") through the remote shell. This has the side effect of requiring double quoting of shell meta-characters in file names included on scp(1) command-lines, otherwise they could be interpreted as shell commands on the remote side.
This creates one area of potential incompatibility: scp(1) when using the SFTP protocol no longer requires this finicky and brittle quoting, and attempts to use it may cause transfers to fail. We consider the removal of the need for double-quoting shell characters in file names to be a benefit and do not intend to introduce bug-compatibility for legacy scp/rcp in scp(1) when using the SFTP protocol.
Another area of potential incompatibility relates to the use of remote paths relative to other user's home directories, for example - "scp host:~user/file /tmp". The SFTP protocol has no native way to expand a ~user path. However, sftp-server(8) in OpenSSH 8.7 and later support a protocol extension "expand-path@openssh.com" to support this.
In case of incompatibility, the scp(1) client may be instructed to use the legacy scp/rcp using the -O flag.
Up until now, all installs of Raspberry Pi OS have had a default user called “pi”. This isn’t that much of a weakness – just knowing a valid user name doesn’t really help much if someone wants to hack into your system; they would also need to know your password, and you’d need to have enabled some form of remote access in the first place. But nonetheless, it could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials.
So with this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has now put the official Raspberry Pi OS on the basis of Debian Bullseye. This means that the operating system for the handicraft boards has an up-to-date substructure again. However, as in the past with such releases, the Foundation does not recommend a direct in-place upgrade.
the Name developers only a few visible changes. You highlight the switch to the GTK + 3 toolkit, which works with the Compositing Window Manager Mutter. This first renders the display in RAM and can display nicer windows with rounded corners, for example. However, this has the disadvantage that it only works with Raspberry Pis with more than 2GB of RAM. Smaller versions of the Pi keep the old GTK + 2 framework with OpenBox window manager. In the future, however, the development will move further away from the X Windows Manager towards Wayland, announces the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
An update to the Debian Bullseye-based Raspberry Pi OS is being rolled out with both quality-of-life improvements and one very important tweak: an overdue departure of the default user.
Previously, all installs of the Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) had a default user called "pi".
This was handy for quick setups and convenience but a bit of an open goal on the security front. "This isn't that much of a weakness," insisted the Pi team, pointing out that you'd need to know the password as well to get access (and you'd need to have enabled remote access for miscreants to do their dirty work anywhere but locally) but still.
There is no getting away from the fact that its presence could expose credentials and "potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier."
When and why are these tactics used in Debian? It usually involves questions about money. If you ask why a woman who had a shared travel history with the Debian leader received a $6,000 internship, you are almost certain to be subject to one of these secret bans/censorship too. Debian oligarchs do not want to draw any attention to these cases, not even on debian-private so they blackmail people to disappear quietly.
 MangoPi MQ Pro is an Allwinner D1 RISC-V SBC that offers an alternative to Raspberry Pi Zero W with the same form factor, and most of the same features including WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity
The board has been in the works for several months, but the MangoPi MQ Pro board can now be purchased for around $20 on Taobao with 512MB RAM, and I’d expect it to show up on Aliexpress and/or Seeed Studio within the next few weeks.
We know that readers are familiar with the global chip shortage and its effects on product availability. The Raspberry Pi folks haven’t escaped its shadow, for even though they’ve managed to preserve availability of their RP2040 microcontroller, it’s fair to say that some of their flagship Linux-capable boards have been hard to find. All of this has had an unlikely effect in the form of a new Raspberry Pi, but unexpectedly it’s one which few end users are likely to get their hands on.
My coffee-fuelled retrocomputing adventures have reached the point where I’ve realised these machines are not only older than people at school now, or at university, but even people I meet professionally. I then realise the 1990s weren’t “a decade ago”, and suddenly it makes sense why finding parts for these things is becoming more difficult.
Both the Windows Phone and Windows Mobile OS are long dead after an extended period of mockery. The once-loved Blackberry shut down its servers earlier this year, rendering handsets from what was formerly the most popular business choice finally obsolete.
I didn’t expect this, and this year I wasn’t asked ahead of time if I wanted to receive this gift. It is however something of a collector’s item that I find very enjoyable.
I received my GitHub contribution matrix printed in steel. This is my 2021 contribution skyline. (Click the images for higher resolution.)
Mozilla’s Firefox is one of the most popular open-source browsers which is the reason it is used as the default browser in many Linux distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu.
Recently, Mozilla released Firefox version 99.0 which brings new security and UI features to Linux.
Open source license compliance isn't glamorous. It has little to do with cranking out code. It's a messy, nuanced undertaking that is in no way amenable to a simple technical fix. But it's something we ignore at our peril.
Any open source user - or community - that fails to take software license compliance seriously is risking serious harm. It's worth reminding ourselves why that is, and what we can do about it.
A breakdown of selling 640 copies of my first product Deployment from Scratch.
[...]
You signed up for two jobs if you decided to write a book. Writing and marketing. And marketing is likely even more vital if you want people to find and read your work.
In its default configuration, KDE’s Gitlab CI will only consider compilation or license validation failures a failure of the CI job, which follows what the previous Jenkins-based system did. Unit test failures would be shown in the results of a job, but would not be considered fatal and stop integration.
In projects with reliable and maintained tests this is obviously not ideal, and therefore this can now be changed. The require-passing-tests-on setting controls on which platform(s) tests need to pass for the CI to pass. Making this a per-platform setting allows phasing this in gradually, without the least well supported platform holding everything back.
I am on a number of different compiler mailing lists. One of those is the mailing list for the Tiny C Compiler. Imagine my surprise when a recent email mentioned our latest series and suggested trying a similar approach to improve the code generator in TCC. I was interested to see if there were any low-hanging fruit that could produce similar gains as O provides for QBE.
A new release 0.3.3.9.2 of RcppEigen arrived on CRAN today (and already went to Debian). Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.
This update was (as it happens) requested by CRAN as R aims to bring the Fortran / C interface to best practices. We call dgesdd twice in one example and use a character argument, and the-powers-that-be now prefer better control over that character argument. So we did. Another change, kindly contributed by Mikael Jagan, switches row and column indices for R_xlen_t allowing for greater range. Plus some more small tweaks mostly to CI, see the NEWS entry below for full details.
Some of the magic of not having to do any chpwd hooks at all are clearly negated by this, but such is the world of working on multiple heterogenous projects.
For the roots of our contemporary attitudes toward travel we must go back to the eighteenth century, to the golden age of the Grand Tour, when extended journeys on the European continent were made not only by royals and aristocrats, whose families had long been embarking on extended trips abroad, but by ever larger numbers of middle-class travelers as well.
The period spawned a huge travel literature, much of it unpublished journals like those of Boswell and Edward Gibbon. But books flooded the market, too, from personal accounts such as Joseph Addison’s€ Remarks on Several Parts of Italyof 1705, to general travel guides like Thomas Nugent’s four-volume The Grand Tour, the first of its many editions printed in 1749. These books were re-issued continuously in the course of the eighteenth century to feed the appetites both of those intent on making the journey themselves, or for stay-at-homes eager to experience it vicariously.
If you want to get valuable information, why would you try to locate it at a place that is mainly occupied by childish, immature, hostile and selfish people?
This is not unique to Reddit, but it generally relates to most social places on the Internet, especially those with point based voting. By the very nature by which these places work, they not only attract, but often nurture the most hollow and miserable people. Reddit and other places like it are often toxic and superfluous.
Occasionally you will find something useful by someone who stands out from the crowd, but in most cases, it's a complete waste of time. People mainly spend their time with empty, personal, emotional, and myth based discussions and statements.
Before this happened, I did not self-identify as any kind of active feminist, let alone the “radical” kind. However, I could not ignore the harms that gender-identity ideology was inflicting on women and children. And over the last six years, I’ve written and spoken on the issue of gender; organized large events about gender-identity ideology; hired lawyers to prevent the Vancouver Public Library from cancelling one such event; attended a human-rights tribunal and court hearings involving the notorious grifter formerly known as Jonathan Yaniv; been investigated and threatened with arrest by police when the aforementioned grifter falsely accused me of rape and voyeurism in a courthouse bathroom; faced hundreds of protesters—some of them former friends—chanting at me and my six-week-old infant, “Save the baby from the TERF”; received threats of death and sexual violence; had my Member of Parliament refuse to speak to me; and, with a former friend, helped erect a Vancouver billboard expressing support for my fellow “TERF,” J.K. Rowling.
Fellay’s concerns are a microcosm of one of the world’s biggest technological problems. The inability to safely share data hampers progress in all kinds of other spheres too, from detecting financial crime to responding to disasters and governing nations effectively. Now, a new kind of encryption is making it possible to wring the juice out of data without anyone ever actually seeing it. This could help end big data’s big privacy problem – and Fellay’s patients could be some of the first to benefit.
Boaler said after his retweet that she contacted Nelson via email, notifying him that police and lawyers were taking up “the sharing of private details about me on social media.”
“I was shocked to see that you are taking part in spreading misinformation and harassing me online,” she wrote to him in an email.
This is not the first time that Boaler has received threatening messages in response to her work in education. In 2012, Boaler took to the Internet to call out “harassment and persecution” by two mathematics scholars amid a national debate about the future of education policy. In October, Boaler’s photo and personal details were posted on Fox News in an attempt to ridicule her work, which she said resulted in death threats.
A report by the organization revealed that, in several countries, boys are at greater risk than girls of repeating years of schooling, as well as the level of learning, although they insist that girls face more disadvantages in this area.
In addition, UNESCO considers that among the elements identified with school dropout are severe discipline, corporal punishment and other forms of violence in schools. This is in addition to school closures, loss of learning and economic hardship arising from the pandemic.
Tesla vehicles have a charging port that is under a cover that only opens on command from a charging station. Well, maybe not only. [IfNotPike] reports that he was able to replay the 315MHz signal using a software defined radio and pop the port open on any Tesla he happened to be near.
You probably don’t want to lose a leg, but if you have to there are many options now that were unthinkable not long ago. That is, if you can afford them. A microprocessor knee — a prosthetic with some smarts in it — can run anywhere from $25,000 to well over $100,000. However [Lucas Galey], a PhD candidate at the University of Texas El Paso in a recent paper claims to be able to produce a comparable artificial knee for under $1,000. If the paper is too long to read, Amplitude has a good summary including what it means to people who need them.
You probably never imagined you’d be reading about new software getting developed for Nokia’s infamous N-Gage handheld game system in 2022, and we certainly never thought we’d be writing about it. But here we are. Of course, we aren’t talking about a commercial title — this is an unofficial port of Wordle by “taco phone” superfan [Michael Fitzmayer].
If you read about the history of personal computing, you hear a few familiar names like Microsoft, Apple, and even Commodore. But there were a host of companies that were well known and well regarded back then that are all but forgotten today. Godbout computing, Ohio Scientific, and Southwest Technical Products (SWTP). SWTP is probably best remembered for having a relatively cheap printer and “TV typewriter”, but they also made a 6800-based computer and [Adrian] takes us inside of one.
Thanks to the relatively recent rise of affordable board production services, many of the people reading Hackaday are just now learning the ropes of PCB design. For those still producing the FR4 equivalent of “Hello World”, it’s accomplishment enough that all the traces go where they’re supposed to. But eventually your designs will become more ambitious, and with this added complexity will naturally come new design considerations. For example, how do you keep a PCB from cooking itself in high current applications?
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we spend an hour or so dissecting some of the more righteous hacks and projects from the previous week. We’ll discuss a DIY TPM module that satisfies Windows 11, argue whether modern guts belong in retrocomputer builds even if it makes them more practical, and marvel at the various ways that sound has been encoded on film. We’ll also rock out to the idea of a 3D-printed guitar neck, map out some paths to defeating DYMO DRM, and admire a smart watch that has every sensor imaginable and lasts 36+ hours on a charge. Finally, we’ll sing the praises of RS-485 and talk about our tool collections that rival our own Dan Maloney’s catalogue of crimpers.
Just over a month into year three of the Covid-19 pandemic, research revealed Thursday that life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2021—which followed a well-documented drop in 2020 and contrasted a recovery trend in other high-income countries.
"The life expectancy gap between the United States and its peer income countries is now over five years, which is an incredible gap."
Children process grief differently than adults, but signs of emotional suffering are easy to miss when you don’t know what to look for. Nelson believes the longer a child has to wait for help, the harder the treatment will be. Lack of early intervention may account for social, emotional, and cognitive challenges down the road and can also lead to childhood depression and anxiety. The physiological effects of trauma and stress can be equally devastating, often causing chronic conditions. While these are all highly sought out issues to aid in America, only ten percent of bilateral funding, one government transferring funds to a recipient country, is invested toward vulnerable and orphaned children.
Noting that homelessness is “not an identity” but, instead, an “experience” and an “indicator of other vulnerabilities,” Merohtra reported that students of color, students with disabilities, English learners, and students who are LGBTQ+ are among the vulnerable groups that experience homelessness at “disproportionate rates.”
The most recent School Health Promotion study found that up to 43 percent of students in grades 10-12 and 67 percent of vocational school students have used a tobacco product at least once last year, with snus becoming increasingly popular.
The survey also showed that roughly one in three snus users got hold of the product via social media platforms.
The new document is still just a draft, and device makers won’t start using it until it’s finalized after another round of feedback. But it includes a few significant changes from the last go-around — including an emphasis on the whole lifecycle of a device and a recommendation that manufacturers include a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) with all new products that gives users information on the various elements that make up a device. An SBOM makes it easier for users to keep tabs on their devices. If there’s a bug or vulnerability found in a bit of software, for example, a hospital could easily check if their infusion pumps use that specific software.
Over the last several months, the Insikt Group, the threat research division of Massachusetts-based Recorded Future, said it has collected evidence that hackers targeted seven Indian state centers responsible for carrying out electrical dispatch and grid control near a border area disputed by the two nuclear neighbors.
The group primarily used the trojan ShadowPad, which is believed to have been developed by contractors for China's Ministry of State Security, leading to the conclusion that this was a state-sponsored hacking effort, the group reported.
The majority of ShadowPad samples analyzed by CTU researchers were two-file execution chains: an encrypted ShadowPad payload embedded in a DLL loader. ShadowPad DLL loaders are [installed] by a legitimate executable vulnerable to DLL search order hijacking. The DLL loader then decrypts and executes the embedded ShadowPad payload in memory using a custom decryption algorithm specific to the malware version. Table 1 lists legitimate executable and malicious DLL pairs that CTU researchers observed in analyzed samples.
Screens on devices at the council’s car parks are meant to show its website, but some featured explicit images instead.
Founded in 2012, Nord Security is now valued at 1.6 billion dollars. This makes the company Lithuania’s second unicorn, after the clothing resale platform Vinted.
According to one of the founders, Eimantas Sabaliauskas, Nord Security is now striving to become the world’s biggest cybersecurity company.
I am a software & web developer - and Linux is a toolbox, full of highly polished tools, crafted over decades by software developers, for software developers. Windows is… not that. It’s a commercial OS, aimed at users of Word, Excel & Outlook, pretty much. You can feel this difference all the time that you’re using it - it pervades everything.
Non-composable Software
The command line tools (echo, cat, grep, sed, awk, find, cut, sort, curl, ssh, etc…) which make up the standard Linux/Unix toolbox are all composable and general purpose. You can join them together like Lego bricks, in whatever combination you like, to make new tools on the fly. You do this on the command line, by piping streams of text from one tool to another and using them to transform it however you need.
Sadly, nobody has ever really figured out how to make GUI software like this - general purpose & composable. Windows has always focussed heavily on the GUI, to the almost complete exclusion of the command line - which means that it doesn’t have this foundation of composable software tools. Almost everything is a special purpose piece of GUI software. Which you have to go and find. And then download and install.
While AI scientists have no problem designing systems that make accurate predictions on all sorts of business outcomes, they are discovering that to make those tools more effective for human operators, the AI may need to explain itself through another algorithm.
The emerging field of “Explainable AI,” or XAI, has spurred big investment in Silicon Valley as startups and cloud giants compete to make opaque software more understandable and has stoked discussion in Washington and Brussels where regulators want to ensure automated decision-making is done fairly and transparently.
The websites of Finland's defence and foreign affairs ministries were out of service on Friday, the ministries announced in separate tweets at just before 1pm.
The defence ministry said its website was taken down by a denial of service (DoS) attack and that it was investigating the matter.
The US blames Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, for creating the botnet as a way to spy on company networks. Back in February, federal officials warned that a new strain of Linux-based malware, called Cyclops Blink, had been found targeting vulnerable routers and firewall devices from PC maker Asus and network security provider WatchGuard.
A botnet is an example of a distributed computing system operating over the internet—a fairly early example of this idea's widespread real-world use. The people or teams who run a botnet, called controllers or herders, need to recruit unwilling computers into their army and then coordinate their activity for profit. There are a number of components to the architecture that helps botnets form and perpetuate themselves.
“To hide the malicious activity, the ransomware displays a fake window update screen, cancels specific processes and services, and completely disables the task manager, windows error reporting, machine firewall and windows defender of the compromised system.
The first cyber threat is ransomware ‘Lokilocker’, capable of wiping data from all versions of Windows systems or platforms. It causes data loss and denial of service (DoS) which reduces user productivity.
The Windows botnet has been active since late 2017, it was mainly used to mine cryptocurrency, but it was also involved in DDoS attacks in 2018. The DirtyMoe rootkit was delivered via malspam campaigns or served by malicious sites hosting the PurpleFox exploit kit that triggers vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, such as the CVE-2020-0674 scripting engine memory corruption vulnerability.
The operations behind the DirtyMoe botnet rapidly changed since the end of 2020, when the malware authors added a worm module that could increase their activity by spread via the internet to other Windows systems.
A wide variety of new approaches are vying for popularity. WebAuthn removes passwords and instead uses keys that are managed by the browser. Email “magic links” use the ability to receive email as authentication. SSO delegates the problem to another provider. However these approaches all have major downsides. Let’s take a quick look at some of these and try to squeeze them into a pass/fail score, ignoring most of the nuance.
Firewalls. You know, boring old IT stuff. So why are we talking about them at Techdirt? Well, one thing we regularly talk about is how companies tend to respond to exploits and breaches that are uncovered and, far too often, how horrifically bad they are in those responses. Often times, breaches and exploits end up being far more severe than originally reported, and there are some companies that actually try to go after those reporting on breaches and exploits legally.
The recently disclosed critical Spring4Shell vulnerability is being actively exploited by threat actors to execute the Mirai botnet malware, particularly in the Singapore region since the start of April 2022.
Nearly every rumor about NSO Group has been proven true, despite plenty of early denials by the (oh, I guess we’ll be nice…) “embattled” malware merchant. The world’s foremost purveyor of zero-click exploits capable of completely compromising phones of targets is still in damage control mode. The damage can no longer be controlled, though. So, it’s basically just NSO admitting the nasty things said about have been mostly true.
Revenues from surveillance advertising drive the lobbying efforts against regulation. Media corporations argue that targeted advertising—and, by extension, the siphoning of user data—has become necessary due to declining revenues from print sales and subscriptions. However, despite a decline in print sales, surveillance advertising profits have soared for most media conglomerates over the last decade. While non-digital advertising revenue has decreased from $124.8 billion in 2011 to $89.8 billion in 2020, over the same time period digital advertising revenue has risen from $31.9 billion to $152.2 billion, according to Pew Research.
According to more than 50 publicly available documents examined by Reuters, dozens of entities in China have over the past four years bought such software, known as "one person, one file". The technology improves on existing software, which simply collects data but leaves it to people to organise.
"The system has the ability to learn independently and can optimize the accuracy of file creation as the amount of data increases. (Faces that are) partially blocked, masked, or wearing glasses, and low-resolution portraits can also be archived relatively accurately," according to a tender published in July by the public security department of Henan, China's third-largest province by population.
Only weeks after the groundbreaking decision by the Austrian Data Protection Authority that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) ordered three French websites to comply with the GDPR. All these decisions are based on noyb's 101 model complaints which were filed after the Court of Justice ruling invalidating Privacy Shield. noyb expects similar decisions by the other authorities.
Mr. Musk’s ultimate aim in acquiring 73.5 million shares, worth about $3 billion, isn’t clear. Yet in late March Mr. Musk, who has 80 million Twitter followers and is active on the site, questioned free speech on Twitter and whether the platform is undermining democracy.
A police reform group says the cameras cops are using to automatically detect and report gun shots should be taken down, citing their proclivity for picking up the sound of slamming doors instead.
According to a new Axios report, Campaign Zero is lobbying local city governments to stop using the tech, called ShotSpotter, after a year-long study. The group says ShotSpotter doesn’t significantly reduce gun violence, rarely leads to physical evidence a gun was fired, increases the likelihood of police violence, and costs tax payers millions.
The internet, as well as the threats that cybercriminals use to exploit their victims, are constantly evolving and often users will fall short in implementing best practices. Tracking users online is not only seen as a marketing strategy for websites, it is often a resource for third parties to buy your information. Once this information has gotten into the wrong hands, there is a strong possibility of eventually facing a phishing or ransomware attack. Because of this, it is important to have as many safeguards in place as possible and change methods frequently to protect yourself online. Consider Tor and Tor Browser (based on Firefox), a web browser that anonymizes your web traffic when using the Tor network, making it easy to protect your identity online. This can be very appropriate for navigating without being tracked at specific times.
Apple's ramp up in iOS privacy measures has affected small data brokers, yet apps can still collect group-oriented data and identify users via device fingerprinting, according to a study out of Oxford.
What's more, the researchers claim, Apple itself engages in and allows some forms of tracking, which serve to strengthen its control over the iOS market.
In a paper titled, "Goodbye Tracking? Impact of iOS App Tracking Transparency and Privacy Labels," due to be published in June for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2022, Oxford academics Konrad Kollnig, Max Van Kleek, Reuben Binns, and Nigel Shadbolt, with independent US-based researcher Anastasia Shuba, describe what they found after analyzing 1,759 iOS apps from the UK App Store, both before and after the introduction of iOS 14.
"While Apple’s changes make tracking individual users more difficult, they motivate a counter-movement, and reinforce existing market power of gatekeeper companies with access to large troves of first-party data," they state in their paper.
The soul of humanity cries out from the crowded streets of Moscow, from steps near the Kremlin, as a man—an artist in the deepest sense—brings the slaughter of civilians in Bucha back to the home country...not by killing a bunch of Russians, but by posing, publicly, as dead himself, with his hands tied behind his back.
A Russian missile attack on Friday reportedly killed more than 30 people at a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, where civilians gathered to flee escalating violence in the region.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, said in a statement that "thousands of people were at the station during the missile strike, as residents of Donetsk region are being evacuated to safer regions of Ukraine."
The United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday, a resolution that accused Russia of committing human rights abuses in Ukraine. We speak with human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck about the apparent double standards and weaknesses in the current international criminal justice system in light of the U.S. committing similar crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nations like the U.S. have refused to submit themselves to any kind of international jurisdiction because “they want to lead their wars,” says Kaleck. “The International Criminal Court will only get off the ground in the near future if Western states agree to apply universal standards.”
The Moscow offices of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other groups were shuttered by the Kremlin on Friday—a move that comes amid widespread condemnation of abuses and possible war crimes that have taken place during Russia's ongoing attack on Ukraine.
"Amnesty's closing down in Russia is only the latest in a long list of organizations that have been punished for defending human rights and speaking the truth to the Russian authorities," said Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, in a statement.
As the Russian attack on Ukraine has come to dominate global news feeds, so has a previously little-known outlet called The Kyiv Independent. Since its inception in November of last year, the Independent’s profile has risen rapidly and has been promoted and endorsed by both social media giants and the corporate press.
Excuse me if I wander a little today—and if it bothers you, don’t blame me, blame Vladimir Putin. After all, I didn’t decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed. If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, I evaded Ukraine.
On a recent snowy day in Moscow, a figure held a poster of a peace sign across the river from the Kremlin. Unlike other protesters, this one was not arrested, because it stood only a few inches tall and was made of plasticine clay.
The war in Ukraine resuscitated a certain dangerous fascination for war. Notions such as patriotism, democratic values, the right side of history, or a new fight for freedom are mobilized as imperatives for everyone to take a side in this war. It is not surprising then that a large number of so-called foreign fighters are willing to go to Ukraine to join one side or the other.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization declared Friday that "supporting agricultural resilience in Ukraine and around the world has never been more important to avert a global food crisis" and reported that food commodity prices just hit their highest levels ever.
The FAO's Food Price Index—which tracks monthly international price changes in food commodities—hit a new high in March, surpassing February's record level.
In early April, shocking video surfaced revealing the brutal murder of civilians by an occupying army. The year was 2010, however, not 2022, in Iraq, not Ukraine, and the soldiers were American, not Russian. On April 5th, 2010, Wikileaks, the whistleblower website, released a classified U.S. military video it called "Collateral Murder." The video was recorded on July 12, 2007 aboard a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship as it fired on a crowd in Baghdad. Two Reuters employees were killed, along with at least eight others, and two children were seriously injured. The video includes audio of U.S soldiers laughing and swearing as they kill, as well as radio transmissions authorizing the attacks from their chain of command. Ultimately, only one U.S. soldier was prosecuted: Army Private Chelsea Manning was court martialed, not for participating in that attack on civilians, but for revealing it to the world.
China is beating the pants off the United States in the burgeoning new energy vehicle market, out-producing and out-selling America with regard to plug-in vehicles by a massive margin. Whereas the Chinese government is supporting this new industry, the US government is still subsidizing fossil fuels and is spending $728.5 billion a year on the Pentagon at a time when the US is not even at war. The result is bloated and problematic engines of destruction like the failed F-35.
On April 6, the New York Times reported that its journalists had verified a video that appears to show Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops. This footage surfaced on April 4, amid the international outcry over the civilian killings revealed in Bucha following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region. Pro-Russian media outlets, which have been pushing false narratives about the atrocities in Buch being “staged” and/or a “false flag” (despite ample evidence of war crimes), already claim to have identified the Ukrainian troops seen in the video. The Ukrainian authorities have yet to confirm the authenticity of the video, but earlier promised to investigate alleged war crimes against Russian forces.
Bucha and Borodyanka are two small towns in the vicinity of Kyiv that were recently occupied by Russian troops. The images of murdered civilians in Bucha sent shockwaves around the world after journalists arrived in the village following its liberation. According to Kyiv authorities, upwards of 400 people died in Bucha while it was under Russian control. However, Iryna Venediktova, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, has said that the situation in liberated Borodyanka may be even worse. Meduza spoke to people from Borodyanka and a few other Kyiv suburbs about how they survived the occupation.
The Kramatorsk train station in eastern Ukraine was hit by a missile strike, Ukrainian state railway company head Oleksandr Kamyshin reported on Friday. According to Kamyshin, two missiles were fired at the station. He published photos and videos of wreckage from the strike on Telegram.
Thousands have left Russia in response to Moscow launching an all-out war against Ukraine. While Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia have been the most popular destinations for émigrés, others fleeing repressions and economic sanctions have found themselves in former Soviet republics, including Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Kazakh journalist Daniyar Moldabekov spoke to newly-arrived Russians in Almaty about how they chose their path, whether they planned to return to Russia, and how they envision their futures.
In early April, Denis Seleznyov, a blogger from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), posted a new video on his YouTube channel: an interview with Marianna Vyshemirskaya (who also goes by her maiden name, Podgurskaya). Marianna is a beauty blogger from Donetsk who caught the world’s attention after AP journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Yevgeny Maloletka photographed her at a maternity hospital in Mariupol immediately after it was bombed on March 9, 2022. The Ukrainian authorities reported that the hospital had been hit by a Russian airstrike.
Borodyanka was once a quiet little town about 50 kilometres west of Kyiv until Russian forces took control of it in the first few days of the war. The town, is not too far from Bucha – which has been mentioned due to potential war crimes having been committed there – and it was under Russian occupation for a month. We arrived just a few days following the sudden, overnight retreat of the Russian forces.
A recent piece by its Assistant Director, Brian Garvey, provides an astute analysis of the ideological differences in the progressive part of the US peace movement and properly criticizes its inability to unite around a common program. He asks the two crucial questions:
“What do we do now? and
How did it come to this?
Having worked in war zones, I have wondered if that violence could happen again here. One way to prevent it is to understand how conflict escalates.
Yes, a tight oil market and inflationary prices are good for electric car production. But the oil and gas industry is doing even better, not just because of high gas prices, but also because they can demand more access to public lands for drilling—and blame the administration for the high gas prices if the companies don’t get to drill more. This is a false argument on five counts.
Drill, Baby, Drill
Lest anyone has doubts as to Putin’s racist and imperialistic vision, he was quoted as saying:
“The United States continues to receive more and more immigrants, and, as far as I understand, the white, Christian population is already outnumbered … White Christians have become a minority, less than 50 percent now. … Russia is a vast territory, from its western to eastern borders, it is a Eurasian space. But as regards culture, even language group and history, this all is undoubtedly a European space, as it is inhabited by people of this culture. … we have to preserve all this to remain a significant centre in the world.”
“You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” says US president Joe Biden. “Well, the truth of the matter — we saw it happen in Bucha — he is a war criminal.”
What actually happened in Bucha is uncertain€ and may remain so forever. The Ukrainians claim that Russian soldiers murdered the civilians. The Russians seem to alternately claim the entire scene was staged, or else that the victims were suspected Russian sympathizers/collaborators killed by fellow Ukrainians.€ Probably mass murder, but who did it?
Not long ago, any ordinary crisis worked its way through the United Nations with some predictability: A meeting of the Security Council was announced. Official briefings took place and predictable speeches were made. A resolution may or may not have been passed, or a presidential statement issued. Not a lot of global media reported on these events.
Lviv, Ukraine—Before the war came, the commuter town of Bucha, near Kyiv, was well-known as a glass-making hub. In the last week, as pictures of mass graves and bodies left to rot on its streets have begun to circulate, it has taken on a grimmer renown. According to the mayor of the town, at least 300 civilians were executed by Russian troops. (The Russian government has called the allegations “fake” and insists Ukrainian troops killed the civilians as part of a false flag operation.)
One may explain Israel’s political significance to the Russian-Ukrainian talks based on Tel Aviv’s strong ties with Kyiv, as opposed to Russia’s trust in Israel. This is insufficient to rationalize how Israel has managed to acquire relevance in an international conflict, arguably the most serious since World War II.
Immediately following the start of the war, Israeli officials began to circumnavigate the globe, shuttling between many countries that are directly or even nominally involved in the conflict. Israeli President Isaac Herzog flew to Istanbul to meet with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The outcome of this meeting could usher in “a turning point in relations between Turkey and Israel,” Erdogan said.
I spoke with Heidi by Zoom yesterday.€ Here is the edited transcript of the interview.
John Hawkins: You are part of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Can you say more about the project and what your role has been?
I do not wish to overestimate the consequences of the GA decision.€ Obviously, it is a blow to Russia’s prestige, and adds to the general atmosphere of Russophobia that we have seen over the decades. We can expect in the future that efforts will be made to exclude other countries from membership in the Human Rights Council – one could think of excluding several NATO countries for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by their forces during the wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria.€ We could think of excluding Saudi Arabia because of its genocidal war against the people of Yemen. We could think of excluding India for its systematic war crimes and gross violations of human rights against the people of Kashmir, including widespread extra-judicial executions.€ Another credible candidate for suspension would be Azerbaijan because of its aggression against the hapless Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh during the Blitzkrieg of September-November 2020, where war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed, including torture and execution of Armenian prisoners of war. We could think of excluding Colombia because of its lethal para-military activities and consistent pattern of killing human rights defenders, social leaders, syndicalists and indigenous peoples.
Let us not shed too many tears over the Human Rights Council, whose authority and credibility are questionable, and whose resolutions are routinely ignored by many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Since its creation in 2006 the Human Rights Council has not served human rights well – but it has certainly served the geopolitical and informational interests of the United States and the European Union
While there are calls for independent investigations into those allegations, the US and NATO member state governments have been pushing the claim that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine including the major war crime of invading another country, the unasked question in the US media is: Why hasn’t the US been kicked out of the Human Rights Council for similar war crimes that aren’t at all allegations, but are well-documented fact? Why indeed, for all the accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin is himself a war criminal responsible for all these crimes, haven’t a number of US presidents still living been accused of war crimes?
Let’s look at some of those crimes...
CP published part of this list of headlines in 2012, but in view of continuing U.S. wars and the outpouring of legitimate, agonized of grief for civilian victims of Russia’s illegal war, an updated compilation is in order.
The U.S. military has a long record of apparent atrocities during its attacks and its unprovoked wars of aggression or occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Like Russia in Ukraine today, the crimes include bombing hospitals, desecrating corpses, attacks on civilians and civilian objects, attacking allied troops, torturing and executing prisoners, and using banned cluster bombs.
Studying American history, one inevitably notices that the white supremacist philosophy which underlaid both the genocide of Native Americans and the Transatlantic slave trade was expressed openly at the time – constantly, in fact, and by everybody from US Presidents to Sunday school teachers to fur traders. The same is true of the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma and other minority groups in mid-20th C. Europe. Preceding the Holocaust, blithely antisemitic, genocidal language was used in Germany for years – in public speeches and newspaper editorials, in legislation and in children’s books. This was also the case surrounding the genocide which occurred in Rwanda in 1994. As the BBC details, in the months leading up to the campaign of terror against the Tutsis, “The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the cockroaches’ meaning kill the Tutsis. The names of prominent people to be killed were read out on radio.” We appear to be witnessing a similar phenomenon today when the Russian state speaks about its the war in Ukraine.
On April 3, 2022 – the same day the world learned of the apparent war crimes and atrocities carried out the Russian army in Bucha and other cities north of Kiev – the prominent Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti published an article titled “What Should Russia Do with Ukraine?” The piece is openly genocidal in its language. That is, it promotes and seeks to justify “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” – which is how the United Nations defines the crime of genocide. The conceptual device which author Timofey Sergeytsev employs in order to make his demented argument is the that the pursuit of Ukrainian national identity is indistinguishable from Nazism. Given what is at stake, it is important to examine the article’s at once turgid and terrifying prose.
Exploring the newly emerging evidence of a Russian atrocity in the village of Bucha and debunking the fraudulent narratives of the Kremlin disinformation army on the Left.
In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.
Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.
This malodorous silence, whiffling through our press and TV, means no focus, ever, on western machinations to engineer regime change. That skullduggery may be alluded to as the wild charges of some unreliable non-western politico, but that’s it. They’ll tell you that Pakistan’s president, Imran Khan, who is not very friendly with Washington, faced a no-confidence vote and to get out of it precipitated a constitutional crisis and that Kazakhstan foiled a foreign agent’s attempt to kill President Kassym Jomart Tokayev, but they’re strangely reluctant to draw lines of causality between the likely shadowy culprits, and those who pull their strings, namely Washington’s rulers.
Pakistan prime minister Khan told a huge crowd on March 27 that “foreign powers are engineering a regime change in Pakistan.” He claimed to have proof in a letter and, based on that, later the Foreign Office reprimanded the U.S. ambassador. The letter mentions a no-confidence motion against Khan, according to an April 2 article in the Cradle, “about eight times.”
Most of what I did on my first day in Moscow was get the hang of bicycle riding in traffic that is a perpetual motion machine.
I had read that Moscow, as a way of alleviating its car congestion, had laid down some bicycle lanes around the city, but when I went in search of these segregated paths I found that many ended abruptly at the steps of underground passages that pedestrians use to pass beneath the city’s multi-lane boulevards. In order to cross busy streets, I often had to carry the bicycle down and up long staircases, as if portaging a canoe from one Wisconsin lake to another.
The INL caught my eye because this was one of the agencies I examined in my book Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border around the World, which traces U.S. border externalization from the Americas and the Caribbean to East Africa, the Philippines, and the Middle East. The armored vehicles caught my eye too, because the INL transferred similar equipment to newly formed border forces in Central America and to fortify Mexico’s border with Guatemala in the 2010s. The INL—an agency whose goal is to counter crime, illicit drugs, and instability abroad “to keep Americans safe”—works in 90 countries across the globe, often orchestrating U.S.-instigated border enforcement in places like Guatemala and Ukraine.
For Washington, the post-9/11 strategy of pushing out the border has become an overlooked yet fundamental part of its enforcement scheme. According to former CBP commissioner Alan Bersin, there has been a “paradigm shift” toward this emphasis on international enforcement. Bersin is the same high-ranking official who in 2012 said, “The Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border.” While much of the U.S. border externalization does occur in the Western Hemisphere, its scope is far wider. It has followed the spirit of the 9/11 Commission Report, which stated, “The American homeland is the planet.”
Similarly, when authorization was given by the ICC to investigate crimes by the United States in Afghanistan, the decision was denounced as void because the U.S. was not a party to the Rome Statute governing the operations of the ICC. The Trump presidency went so far as to impose personal sanctions on the ICC prosecutor, presumably for daring to challenge the U.S. in such a manner even though her behavior was entirely respectful of her professional role and consistent with relevant canons of judicial practice.
Against such a background, there is a typical liberal quandary when faced with clear criminality on one side and pure geopolitical hypocrisy on the other side. Was it desirable after World War II to prosecute surviving German and Japanese political leaders and military commanders at the ‘legal’ cost of overlooking their criminality because there was no disposition to investigate the dropping of atom bombs on Japanese cities or the strategic bombing of civilian habitats in Germany and Japan? I am far from sure about what is better from the perspective of either developing a global rule of law or inducing respect for the restraints of law. The essence of law is to treat equals equally, but world order is not so constituted. As suggested, there is ‘victors’ justice’ imposing accountability on the defeated leadership but complete non-accountability for the crimes of the geopolitical winners. Beyond this, the UN Charter was drafted in ways that gave a constitutional status to geopolitical impunity by granting the victors in World War II an unconditional right of veto, and this of course includes Russia. In these respects, liberalism defers to geopolitical realism, and celebrate the one-sided imposition of legality, with the naïve hope things will be different in the future. Yet the post-Nuremberg record shows that geopolitical actors go on treating restraints on recourse to war as a matter of discretion (what American liberals called ‘wars of choice’ in the course of the debate about embarking upon a regime-changing attack on and occupation of Iraq in 2003) rather than an obligation. When it comes to accountability double standards are still operative, illustrated by the execution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes after a war of aggression against Iraq.
What needs to be done? Nothing less than a revolution in the way the world’s economy functions and the fuels that drive it. What can be done? Not much. What will be done? Almost nothing. That’s my read on the latest (and reportedly the final) consensus report from the IPCC, a document reads less like the Book of Revelations than an after-bombing damage assessment. The bottom-line is that the 1.5C warming goal set by the panel in 2015 is obsolete. It’s unattainable. Defunct. Moreover, it’s always been unattainable. The international plans to slow global warming from Kyoto to Paris would not have been able to keep the climate below that threshold, even had they been fully-implemented. Needless to say, they haven’t been fully implemented. Far from it.
Consider this: the average annual greenhouse gas emissions over the last 10 years were the highest in … human history. In 2019, carbon emissions were about 54% higher than in 1990. Sixty percent of all historical emissions were produced in the lifetime of the average American, who is 38. Almost€ 90 percent€ were produced since the birth of Joe Biden in November 1942.
From Micanopy, Florida to Kyiv, Ukraine is 5,559 miles, almost a quarter way around the world, but the war feels dangerously close. Putin, however, is criminal not crazy and the Russian policy on first use is little different from ours, so the likelihood of a nuclear attack is small. But for anybody who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the shadow cast by the mushroom cloud is hard to evade.
I was only a child, on October 22, 1962, but I can remember the dread silence in our Forest Hills apartment the evening we watched the president announce his plan to stop, by force, if necessary, the installation of missile launchers in Cuba. A little more than a year later, we gathered again – two parents, three children and three grandparents — to watch Kennedy’s funeral on the same black and white TV. This time, the silence was broken by sobs. For the children, it was just as before: something big and distant threatened to destroy what was intimate and close. The Russian war against Ukraine, far away though it is, resurrects that traumatic memory, albeit dimly.
A jury on Friday acquitted two men of all charges in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer but couldn't reach verdicts against the two alleged leaders, a stunning defeat for the government after a weekslong trial that centered on a remarkable FBI sting operation just before the 2020 election.
Whitmer did not immediately comment on the outcome, though her chief of staff was critical, saying Americans are "living through the normalization of political violence."
A US federal jury has acquitted two men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan's governor and failed to reach a verdict for two other defendants.
But again, this pattern extends far beyond the Mitten State, as conservatives desperate to whitewash the revolting spectacle of bat-wielding, police-beating Capitol insurrectionists who shared the same anti-government ideology as the Michigan men engage in Houdini-level logical contortions.
The acrobatic effort has welded together some of the strangest bedfellows in American history. Carlson, a backer of the police’s thin blue line if there ever was one, has been ridiculing and downplaying the seriousness of the alleged plot for more than a year. He has given a platform to a variety of activists who have made a cottage industry of comparing the Michigan case to what they now call the “entrapment operation” of the Capitol insurrection. Such claims are amplified across the right-wing echo chamber. (Osama bin Laden’s niece Noor bin Laden even wrote a letter to the U.N. on behalf of the jailed Jan. 6 “political prisoners.”)
Virtue signaling is a placebo, not a remedy. It’s increasingly clear that the Biden administration has not learned any lessons from its mistakes.
"They are attacking many jihadi strongholds,” Nasr continued. "But the thing is, the jihadis aren't resisting, or at least they weren't – up til the beginning of last month. They counter-attacked after absorbing the new force, which is the Russians actually, and counter-attacked in Mondoro, causing the deaths of more than 40 Malian military. In the last two months, the Malian military lost up to 160 men in this region."
The security situation on Mali’s borders with Burkina Faso and Niger has deteriorated to the stage where the UN mission in the landlocked west African country notes “significant” population displacement.
“Attacks by armed terrorist groups have a devastating impact on an already distressed civilian population, resulting in dozens of deaths and significant displacement of populations in Gao and Ansongo towns,” a MINUSMA statement reads.
Taherzadeh allegedly provided rent-free apartments, iPhones, surveillance systems, a flat screen television and other items to win over Secret Service agents and one employee of DHS. He also offered what he called "official government vehicles" and offered to purchase a $2,000 assault rifle for the Secret Service agent assigned to the first lady, the affidavit said.
Every year on 22 April, the world marks Earth Day. It is an occasion to raise awareness and show support for the protection of the environment, with actions organised worldwide around a common message: save the Earth.
Almost 2 million children under the age of five die every year due to environmental factors like pollution. One in three people do not have access to safe drinking water. And things are only getting worse. The temperature on Earth will rise by 2.7€°C this century, even if we meet our 2030 climate targets, affecting food supplies, lives and livelihoods.
Time is running out: every action counts, and every second counts.
Recent news of another (the 6th) bleaching event at the Great Barrier Reef is but one more example in a long list of recent climate-related events that depict a scenario that can only be described as triple-alarm climate emergencies, as ecosystems breakdown across the world.
But, those breakdowns are not happening where people live. Therefore, other than scientists, who sees cascading ice sheets, crumbling permafrost, tens of thousands of Alaskan and Siberian thermokarst lakes bubbling methane, Greenland’s Helheim glacier cascading into the sea, or depleting ocean kelp forests amongst horrendous loss of prime fishing stock at crucial northern latitudes?
There are a couple of points here worth noting. First, the projected impact of this sort of additional supply would not be all that trivial. The short-term demand elasticity is usually estimated to be quite low, typically around -0.15. That would imply that a 1 percent increase in the supply of oil should lead to a roughly 7 percent decline in oil prices. If we apply that to the current price of gas, that would be a drop of more than 25 cents a gallon.
A price increase of that size would likely be sufficient to prompt a raff of news pieces about how higher gas prices were bankrupting families. A price decline of this size should be equally momentous.
To celebrate this past International Women’s Month, Pipeline Equity’s CEO Katica Roy has been promoting the company’s proprietary SaaS platform using artificial intelligence to assess and address intersectional inequity (the overlap of multiple identities- race, gender, sexuality, etc) in business hiring, pay, and promotion practices.
In its promotional materials, Pipeline announced that its customers saw a “65% increase in their intersectional equity progress” within the first three months of using their platform. The company cited a “massive economic opportunity to the tune of $12 trillion globally” for companies when addressing workplace intersectional inequity- for every 10% increase in intersectional gender equity, an increase of 1-2% in revenue.
Students and alumni of Pennsylvania State University—my school and Pennsylvania’s flagship land-grant institution—recognize that the climate crisis is personal. The Keystone State accounts for nearly 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and is expected to warm nearly 6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, after already sustaining hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure damage.
In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.
"With at least ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips under public control, the necessary phaseout of fossil fuels as an energy source could advance in an orderly fashion."
Climate campaigners are charging that the federal budget unveiled Thursday by Canada's Liberal government fails to deliver on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's three-year-old promise to bring about a "just transition" from fossil fuels and instead caters to polluters.
"This federal budget is stuck in the mindset of more highways and fossil fuel subsidies."
"New York, a clean ride for kids is coming your way!"
So declared the Electric School Bus Initiative at the World Resources Institute (WRI) on Friday after Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced an agreement on a budget that includes a historic plan to fully electrify the state's fleet of school buses.
When Russia's invasion of Ukraine drove up gasoline prices, members of Congress from oil and gas producing states called for increased fossil fuel production. In his March 31 speech, President Biden also seemed to put most of his emphasis on increasing the oil supply. But a growing number of voices are saying that we should use this occasion to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
China is the world’s biggest fish producer and has the largest distant-water fleet (CDWF) — officially 2,701 vessels but likely thousands more — many of which engage in high instances of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, according to an NGO, the Environmental Justice Foundation.
The group’s report this week found that some 90% of Ghana’s industrial trawl fleet is actually owned by Chinese corporations using local “front” companies to register as Ghanaian and get around the law.
As President Biden and U.S. national-security reports announced, China was seen as the major enemy. Despite China’s helpful role in enabling corporate America to drive down labor’s wage rates by de-industrializing the U.S. economy in favor of Chinese industrialization, China’s growth was recognized as posing the Ultimate Terror: prosperity through socialism. Socialist industrialization always has been perceived to be the great enemy of the rentier economy that has taken over most nations in the century since World War I ended, and especially since the 1980s. The result today is a clash of economic systems – socialist industrialization vs. neoliberal finance capitalism.
That makes the New Cold War against China an implicit opening act of what threatens to be a long-drawn-out World War III. The U.S. strategy is to pry away China’s most likely economic allies, especially Russia, Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia. The question was, where to start the carve-up and isolation.
Far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is closing in on President Emmanuel Macron's lead, according to poll numbers released ahead of Sunday's first-round presidential election.
Polling data collected by French journalist Alexandre Léchenet this week showed that as of Thursday, centrist Macron is leading the presidential field with more than 25% of respondents saying they would support him on Sunday, while Le Pen's support hovers in "the low 20s."
We’ve noted for a while that Trump’s alternative social media platform, Truth Social, isn’t doing particularly well. Being a Trump product, the platform (surprise!) began with a lot of money slushing around that wasn’t spent in any coherent way. It’s also just generally glitchy and terrible. And it’s not helped much by the fact that after all of his whining about social media “censorship” (read: minimal accountability for saying stupid and sometimes dangerous things), Trump doesn’t even use the product.
Will the U.S. and Iran revive the 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration? President Biden is facing heat from lawmakers in both parties who oppose the deal, which would relax U.S. sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program. At the crux of the debate is the Iranian request for Biden to lift the designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, which would have a high political cost for the administration. With threats between the two nations mounting, a deal becomes more urgent to avoid the situation spiraling into military confrontation, says Trita Parsi, author of multiple books on U.S.-Iran relations.
A month ago, we wrote about a bizarre, nonsensical, Twitter rant from Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma that followed a bizarre, nonsensical appearance at the CPAC conference in which he lashed out at “big tech” for supposedly “censoring conservatives.” This fact-free grievance has been an item of blind faith among the Trumpist set, that big tech is somehow out to get them. The smart ones know it’s not true, but it plays well to the base, so they play it up. The dumb ones truly believe it, even as the evidence shows that Twitter and Facebook both have actually bent over backwards to give Republican politicians more leeway to violate the rules and not face any enforcement actions.
Libraries reflect and validate the cross cultural character and€ personality of the towns and cities where they’re located. This is as true for San Francisco, where I live, as it is for other places which I have known, whether Oaxaca, Mexico, London, England, Saint-Sulpice sur Tarn in France, and Huntington, Long Island where I was born and raised. In my hometown, books with titles such as€ Labor’s Untold Story€ (1955)€ by Herbert Morris and Richard O. Boyer,€ were removed from the shelves in the days of the Red Scare. My father, who was a civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, saved€ Labor’s Untold Story€ from€ a bonfire that would have made it unavailable in Huntington.
Lefty books matter, and so do books by Latin, Asian, African, Black and LQBTQ writers. Theirs is one of literature’s untold stories over the past half-century. Libraries have changed because readers have signed petitions, marched, demonstrated and demanded books that weren’t on the shelves. Too often libraries purge old books to make room for new books especially in the US where the new is king, queen, jack and ace. Store them, don’t get rid of them.
Why build a league or union of communes? That is, what is the role of a commune in Venezuela and why try to unify them? Communes became important during Hugo Chávez’s last years when he developed a strategy of advancing toward socialism by using these grassroots spaces of self-managed production and substantive democracy as its basic cells. Since the president’s death, the communal project has faced numerous challenges, including the post-Chávez government’s rightward turn under the pressure of sanctions and hybrid war. Despite these challenges, commune-building goes forward in an almost miraculous way in the country, driven by grassroots bases whose commitment can be explained by a combination of loyalty to the former president, the pressing necessity to produce food, and their political consciousness. Sown across the country and without much support, Venezuela’s functioning communes are embattled outposts, weakened by their isolation. However, there have been attempts to build unity and coordinate these efforts. The most important of these is the Communard Union (Unión Comunera).
The urgent need to overcome the isolation of communes and accumulate forces in the popular movement is both the€ raison d’être€ for the Communard Union and explains the huge draw of its first Congress. Hosted in Lara state by El Maizal Commune, the Foundational€ Congress brought together – so the organizers said – almost 500 delegates from 48 communes. Since March is always dry and hot in this low-lying region, the organizers had a constant, more or less Sisyphean battle against heat and dust. To this effect, they initially seated delegates under the roof of El Maizal Commune’s machinery shed, before the event migrated to a huge thatched€ caney€ that had been expanded to provide shade for the participants. Despite the torrid atmosphere, the congress was kicked off with a great deal of “mística,” a passionate interchange of slogans, and the intoning of revolutionary songs. Among the slogans, the most common was “Commune or Nothing!” This slogan was also employed in an expanded form: “Commune or Nothing, that is the mission, as Chávez said in Golpe de Timón!”
In March, I spent a few hours talking to Díaz-Canel, who—born in 1960—has€ lived€ his entire life as Cuba struggled against the suffocating policies from Washington to shape its socialist path. Raised by a teacher and a factory worker, Díaz-Canel saw firsthand the Cuban Revolution’s comprehensive program of social justice in which millions of members of the working class, peasants, Black people, and women began to access for the first time on equal terms the right to work, study and live with dignity. Díaz-Canel’s generation grew up in a period under Fidel Castro’s leadership in which, despite the existence of a U.S. blockade, most Cubans saw their standards of living and quality of life rise significantly due to national development plans, favorable trade relations with the Soviet Union and a growing network of support in the nonaligned world. Díaz-Canel studied electrical engineering at the Central University of Las Villas, but early on in his career teaching engineering there, he devoted much of his time to local activism with the Young Communist League. That led him to an internationalist mission in Nicaragua where, along with thousands of Cuban doctors and teachers, he served among the poorest, often in remote corners of this Central American country that was then€ trapped€ under a U.S.-funded war of counterinsurgency.
Díaz-Canel returned from Nicaragua in 1989 as the USSR neared its final days and as the U.S. government seized the opportunity to tighten restrictions on Cuba. In 1991, Cuba entered a€ Special Period€ as trade fell by€ 80 percent. Cubans were eating less (caloric intake decreased by€ 27 percent€ from 1990 to 1996), long queues for food became common, electricity became a rare occurrence, and millions took to riding bicycles as the island faced a severe oil shortage under an intensified blockade. Díaz-Canel was one of those on a bicycle. Cuba’s resilience during the Special Period shaped his view of the world.
In all three suits, the plaintiffs claim that the politicians are disqualified from seeking office because their support for rioters who attacked the Capitol made them “insurrectionists” under the Constitution and therefore barred them under the little-known third section of the 14th Amendment, adopted during Reconstruction to punish members of the Confederacy.
That section declares that “no person shall” hold “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath” to “support the Constitution,” had then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
After my last post about an COVID-19 contrarian surgeon echoing old antivax and other science denial tropes about the “scientific priesthood,” which was even longer than my usual posts, I thought I’d slow things down and try something that I’ve been meaning to try for a while. I’ve repeated the refrain that there is nothing new under the sun in antivaccine rhetoric, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories. Antivax rhetoric about COVID-19 just seems new to most people because they never paid much attention to it before and are discovering it for the first time, much as I did in the late 1990s. (I will concede, however, that since the pandemic the antivax rhetoric has assaulted us in a more concentrated form than I’ve ever seen.)
A new global report on the state of journalism has been published by Creative Commons (CC) which identifies the growing challenges of combatting disinformation and the disconnect between the public and the media.
Applebaum: In a way, this is the dark side of globalization, namely that we all now live in the same information market. Whereas in the past the Russians or the Soviet Union would have had to try and get something going in the Indian market and then the Italian market and then somehow seed that into the American market, it’s now essentially one market. There’s an ease with which they can, first of all, study American politics and understand it in a way that wasn’t possible before, because they can use the same microtargeting and research tools that marketers use. They can tailor messages to different groups in specific ways, again, in the same way that marketers use. The people who are selling soap powder or washing machines—they also have ways of targeting particular audiences, changing the message whether you’re in Illinois or Florida or Wyoming, or whether you’re rich or poor. And the Russians took those tools and they used them to target Black Lives Matter activists in one part of the country and immigration activists in another part. Of course, it’s important to understand that what they did was no different from what American political campaigns do. The tools were available. And where those kinds of tools, in the past, wouldn’t have been available to outsiders or foreigners, now they are because everything’s available. They can reach into our markets and send whatever messages they want.
According to the report obtained by The Verge, the technical problem dates back from 2019 and began causing a noticeable surge in disinformation in October 2021 and was not fixed until last month. Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne claimed in a tweet that the bug had no “meaningful long-term impact” but provided no evidence to support this claim.
With Elon Musk now Twitter’s largest shareholder, and joining the company’s board, there have been some (perhaps reasonable) concerns about the influence he would have on the platform — mainly based on his childlike understanding of free speech, in which speech that he likes should obviously be allowed, and speech that he dislikes should obviously be punished. That’s not to say he won’t have some good ideas for the platform. Before his infamous poll about free speech on Twitter, he had done another poll asking whether or not Twitter’s algorithm should be open sourced.
A report published Thursday by the free expression group PEN America details an "alarming" and unprecedented surge in book banning across the United States, with 86 school districts in 26 states prohibiting more than 1,100 titles in classrooms and libraries over just the past eight months.
"Book challenges in American schools are nothing new, but this type of data has never been tallied and quite frankly the results are shocking."
Local politicians across the political spectrum are trying to force websites to moderate their content in a manner the politicians want. Some (mainly Democrats) are trying to push for companies to remove more content. Some (mainly Republicans) are pushing companies to stop removing certain kinds of content. In both cases, trying to force specific editorial stances — either hands on or hands off — raises serious Constitutional issues. And this is partly why Congress, wisely, decided in 1996 with Section 230 of the Communications Decency that no state could pass a law that interfered in the editorial decision making process of websites. Because without that, websites would have to deal with a confusing and contradictory patchwork of laws — some of which demanding certain types of content not be hosted, with others demanding certain types of content must be hosted.
Russia’s last remaining independent media outlets in the country were forced into closure or exile and much of the foreign press corps decamped abroad as a new law signed last month effectively criminalized reporting on the conflict, banning the use of the words “war” or “invasion.”
As a digital iron curtain descends on Russia, Western governments and free press advocates are scrambling for ways to punch through it and reach average Russians with accurate reporting on the war—in methods that vary from the creative to the high tech to the antiquated.
Major Western media outlets are publishing their stories on Telegram, a popular messaging app in Russia that hasn’t been banned. The free media advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders set up a system allowing Russians to access independent news if they type Russia’s constantly changing national lottery numbers into Twitter’s search bar, a move that redirects them to mirrored news sites blocked by the Russian government.
There’s even a push among some U.S. broadcasting officials to revive Cold War-era radio infrastructure to beam U.S.-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, into Russia for any Russians with shortwave radios.
The Istanbul court's decision comes despite warnings from human rights groups that turning the case over to the kingdom would lead to a cover up of the killing, which has cast suspicion on the crown prince.
It also comes as Turkey, which is in the throes of a deep economic downturn, has been trying to repair its troubled relationship with Saudi Arabia and an array of other countries in its region. Some media reports have claimed that Riyadh has made improved relations conditional on Turkey dropping the case, which had inflamed tensions between two countries.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is deeply shocked by Istanbul High Criminal Court's decision to send Jamal Khashoggi murder case to Saudi Arabia. This transfer dashes the remaining hopes of criminal justice for the 2018 assassination. RSF will keep on challenging by all means this unacceptable impunity.
Today, the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) publishes the report “Controlling the Message: Challenges for independent reporting in Greece”, which details the findings and recommendations of its online fact-finding mission to Greece. The mission, involving interviews with more than thirty local stakeholders, was implemented by the MFRR together with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in December 2021. The partner organisations conclude that challenges to the independence of the media and the safety of journalists are systemic in the country. While the problems are not unique, their intensity is highly problematic and sets it apart from most other EU Member States.
The result of this crisis is that news that is inconvenient or unflattering for the government, which includes reporting on serious human rights violations, does not get reported in many outlets. This creates a significant obstacle for the public’s access to information and, subsequently, their informed participation in the democratic process.
Anti-abortion legislation is sweeping the U.S., including in Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. We speak with Michele Goodwin, author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” about the links between current conflicts between state and federal law and their historic precedents, such as Brown v. Board of Education and the Fugitive Slave Acts. “Bounty hunter” provisions in Texas’s new abortion restrictions are “plucked right out of antebellum slavery,” says Goodwin. “These are horrific times for reproductive liberty.”
The state of Pennsylvania has agreed to pay $865,000 to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that its state troopers routinely and unconstitutionally pulled over Latino drivers, demanded their “papers” and held them and their passengers for pickup by federal immigration authorities — a practice that escalated markedly after President Donald Trump took office in 2017.
The complaint, filed by the Pennsylvania ACLU and drawing in part on a 2018 series of ProPublica articles published in collaboration with The Philadelphia Inquirer, detailed cases of state troopers stopping and then detaining immigrants under the auspices of federal immigration laws, which it alleged they had no authority to enforce. The immigrants were engaged in ordinary, legal activities, according to the complaint: traveling to see family members, driving to or from work, buying a soda in a state police barracks, awaiting medical help following a traffic accident or, in one case, returning from a job interview accompanied by a wife who was nine months pregnant.
More than 4,500 nurses at Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children's Health in Northern California voted on Friday to authorize a strike, capping off dozens of negotiating sessions that have stretched on for 13 weeks, including this past week when the healthcare workers completed their jobs without any contract in place.
The nurses' union, the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement (CRONA) said that out of its 5,000 members, 93% voted in favor of going on strike to combat management's insistence that nurses work with inadequate resources and staff support, all while being forced to pick up extra shifts and having their benefits cut.
Cops lie.
[“Secure Flight” process flow used by the TSA for airline passengers and being tested on Amtrak passengers. The red box at right center is the “black box” for algorithmic profiling, blacklist/blocklist enforcement, and fly/no-fly decision making.]Amtrak has reportedly given the Transportation Security Administration several months of€ archives of Amtrak passenger reservations and frequent rider profiles. At Amtrak’s request, the TSA has used these records to test the TSA’s ability to extend to Amtrak passengers the ID-based profiling and blacklisting algorithms the TSA already applies to air travelers.
If you aren’t allowed to travel by air, the right to travel by train is critical. And while all common carriers have an obligation to transport all would-be passengers, Amtrak as a government agency should be most strictly held to that obligation.
The plans to run a batch of historical Amtrak reservations through the TSA’s “threat assessment” black box were disclosed in a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) quietly posted on the Department of Homeland Security website last December, and first noted in a news report by Mark Albert of Hearst Television earlier this week.
In the fall of 2020, Daniel Muessig was urging everyone he knew to get out and vote. He lived in the swingiest of swing states and, while he’d supported Bernie in the primaries, he was now convinced of the importance of carrying Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.
The idea of the human mind as operating akin to a machine, as a recording device with a given amount of storage space, is a belief which only comes into its own in the 19th€ century, at the time of the industrial revolution when those ‘dark satanic mills’ were springing up in and around the great cities; such a doctrine takes shape in a society where technological production has been ratcheted up to its zenith, its product effectively measured and quantified according to the relentless rhythms of the conveyer belt, and where human labour itself has been inexorably fused with the pistons and levers of the factory monolith.
Perhaps the first human ‘thinking machine’ was Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes who appeared in the 1880s, a product of the Victorian epoch. Conan Doyle was at pains to emphasise not only the brilliance of his seminal detective but also the way in which Holmes’ mind had a given quantitative capacity which could be tweaked and refined in much the way one might refine a sophisticated piece of machinery in order to yield its optimum capacity.€ € Doyle has his eponymous detective describe how:
United States “democracy” is plagued by the presence of an elitist liberal mis-leadership class that fears the “mob” and “rabble” – everyday citizens and the working-class majority – more than it worries about right-wing (now neofascist) rule. This liberal “elite” is militantly opposed to popular movements. It rejects popular demands and indeed sees “demand” as a bad word. It maintains a dogged faith in existing bourgeois-“democratic” and constitutional rules, methods, institutions, and procedures no matter how completely those rules, methods, institutions, and procedures have been subverted and captured by the right. It is doctrinally committed to lobbying and litigation, work by professionals, which they see as the only safe and effective way to “get things done.” It works to tamp down rank-and-file energies and channel popular anger into the nation’s regular candidate-centered major party electoral extravaganzas. The liberal mis-leadership class, loaded with Ivy League graduates, will let the nation go fascist before it will mobilize masses by the millions to fight for human rights, equality, and decency.
The Right-Wing Campaign to Kill Roe Hits the Jackpot
The U.S. Senate voted 53-47 on Thursday to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. She will be the first Black woman and first former public defender to serve on the country’s top court. While Jackson’s confirmation was a “monumental moment in United States history,” it was undercut by the “shameful spectacle” of Republican senators behaving disrespectfully toward Jackson, says law professor Michele Goodwin. The confirmation process remains broken more than three decades after Anita Hill faced hostile questioning, she adds.
The days of broad bipartisan support for the confirmation of US Supreme Court nominees are, by every indication, behind us. But it still matters that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to serve on the court Thursday with a 53-47 Senate majority that included both Democrats and Republicans. And it is worth noting that two of the three Republican votes came from senators who represent states where election systems have been reformed to allow for ranked-choice voting.
The confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court occasions a look back at some of the media coverage of her hearings. While media reported GOP senators’ grandstanding harassment and aggressive repetition of baseless accusations, their need to always be signaling “balance” led to some mealy-mouthed avoidance tactics, like C-SPAN‘s tweet (3/23/22) describing a “heated exchange between Supreme Court Nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sen. @LindseyGrahamSC on child pornography sentencing”—when anyone watching would tell you only one side was heated.
Recognizing what is officially retaliation and what is generally a toxic workplace is tricky, especially since they can overlap. And not knowing the difference feels like another obvious advantage for exploitative workplaces, because if we don’t know how to recognize retaliation, we’ll assume this is just what work is.
But there are real differences to unpack. “The workplace in modern America is a terribly imbalanced place when it comes to the power dynamic,” says Benjamin Dictor, a labor lawyer. (Disclosure: Dictor is counsel for the News Guild of New York, which represents workers at several publications owned by Teen Vogue publisher Condé Nast.) “Unfortunately, there's no law that says that your boss is not allowed to be an asshole.” That means not everything they do is going to be an act of unlawful retaliation.
At a rare press conference, where he answered questions of both Hungarian and foreign journalists, Orbán talked about the price cuts on utility costs, told the opposition to pull themselves together, and described at length why he changed his policy towards Russia – a Telex video summary.
Viktor Orbán has been re-elected the Hungarian prime minister, a win for the global far-right movement. Now the European Union’s longest-lasting leader, he has served as prime minister since 2010.
For years, we’ve noted how telecom and media giants have been trying to force “big tech” to give them huge sums of money for no reason. The shaky logic usually involves claiming that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on telecom networks, something that’s€ never actually been true. This narrative has been bouncing around telecom policy circles for years, and recently€ bubbled up once again€ thanks to€ telecom industry BFF and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.
GitHub received 1,828 valid DMCA takedown notices last year, which resulted in the removal of 19,276 projects. Less than one percent of these projects were reinstated following retractions or counter-notices. The developer platform uses automated tools to scan for abuse, but this technology is not used for copyright infringements.
Major Hollywood studios and Netflix have asked the European Commission for assistance in their global anti-piracy fight. While many pirate IPTV, torrent and streaming sites are named directly, the MPA believes that greater pressure needs to be applied to other players in the ecosystem that help pirate services stay online and generate revenue.
