Razer is primarily known for its gaming PCs and peripherals, but the company has also been known to dip its toes into the productivity space from time to time. The Razer x Lambda Tensorbook announced Tuesday sees Razer stepping even further out of its comfort zone. Made in collaboration with Lambda, the Linux-based clamshell focuses on deep-learning development.
Lambda, which has been around since 2012, is a deep-learning infrastructure provider used by the US Department of Defense and "97 percent of the top research universities in the US," according to the company's announcement. Lambda's offerings include GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances that train neural networks for various use cases, including self-driving cars, cancer detection, and drug discovery.
Tidelift co-founders Jeremy Katz and Luis Villa join Doc Searls and Aaron Newcomb on this episode of FLOSS Weekly to discuss how maintainers should be paid. You might think the answer would be different for every codebase, but not if there's a platform for doing it.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which intelligence is artificial, snaps are un-ned, and art is what you make it
The ideas that made Unix, hints for writing Unix tools, cron best practices, three different sorts of filesystem errors, LibreSSL 3.5.1 released, taskwarrior to manage tasks, and more.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.17.3 kernel.
All users of the 5.17 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.17.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.17.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
 Git is an open source distributed version control system which was originally designed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, in 2005 for Linux kernel development. This control system is widely used by the open source community, handling small to extremely large projects with an emphasis on speed and efficiency, but maintaining flexibility, scalability, and guaranteeing data integrity.
Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Other popular tools in this field include Subversion, Bazaar, Mercurial, Monotone, CVS, and SVN. However, Git is frequently regarded by many developers to be the finest version control tool available.
FileRun is a free, open-source, and self-hosted file share and sync application written in PHP. Learn to install FileRun on AlmaLinux 8 here.
If you’re a longtime Microsoft Office user, you might find trying out LibreOffice difficult because of the foreign interface. To make things more comfortable, you can give LibreOffice a look that’s similar to MS Office with a few simple tweaks.
Yclas (formally known as Open Classifieds) is a free, powerful, open-source web platform that allows users to easily create and build classifieds, advertisements, and listings sites. Let’s begin with the installation.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Git on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is designed for developers that need a pretty straightforward version control system. It helps with managing large projects efficiently. Git repositories are hosted on sites like GitHub and Bitbucket.
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 Git on Rocky Linux. 8.
I got a bunch of replies with tools I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d make a list here. A lot of people also pointed at the modern-unix list.
But I didn’t automate that to save time, I automated it to save focus. I need to think to write out my whole address. I don’t need to think at all to type ;adr. I don’t need to burn any of my limited focus on something menial anymore. It matters even more when automating something I don’t know by heart, like my Zoom URL or my EIN. Then it takes focus to find it and then copy it over.
Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK+, aiming to be useful for system administrators and travelers who need to work with many remote computers in front of either large monitors or tiny netbooks. It supports the following protocols: RDP, VNC, NX, XDMCP, and SSH. Among its features are Multi-Monitor support, Tabbed sessions, port forwarding, proxy support, and easy access to typical applications like Firefox or LibreOffice. Remmina also has a robust plugin system that can be used to extend its functionality.
Steam is a video game cross-platform that Valve created. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games and expanded to include games from third-party publishers and now boasts a library filled with thousands if not tens of thousands of games across all gaming consoles.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Steam Launcher on your Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish desktop using the command line terminal and APT package manager utilizing the standard default Ubuntu repository or importing the official steam repository, which you can then install the stable branch, or for users that want to see the next version release of Steam’s launcher, you can install the beta branch.
Vuze is a great way to download torrents without pesky ads or delays. It’s fast, free, and multi-platform! Plus, it has tons of features that will make your life easier when downloading – like searching through all kinds of files just by typing what you’re looking for in the search bar on desktop sites; creating bundles from multiple seeds with one click (so no need anymore waiting around), speech recognition capabilities so reading out loud while processing info simultaneously…the list goes.
Flatpak is a tool for deploying and managing software packages on the Linux operating system. It provides an isolated environment where users can run applications without affecting other parts of their computers.
With Flatpaks, installing an application is like pulling it into your local repository. Links have then generated that point from the right places in Filesystem to where you can find these files–these hard links will be efficient for disk space since they’re simple compared with doing things through traditional methods.
Most Linux Mint users know that the distribution focuses on stability over newer features, especially once the LTS has aged after its initial release with packages being frozen. For example, you may want to install the latest version of an application such as Discord, VLC, Spotify, or Linux Mint does not have the application together, making often third-party package managers use it as a backup.
Telegram is a free, cross-platform messaging app with end-to-end encryption. It’s famous for providing video calling and other missing features from Facebook or Twitter – one of its main attractions! The application also has no ties whatsoever between them (the big social media companies), meaning you can be sure your data won’t go unnoticed by anyone else besides whom it belongs too; this makes telegram more secure than ever before because there isn’t anything giving away how much information we share on our phones every day.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to install the Telegram Messenger on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three methods: apt package manager, flatpak package manager, and snapcraft package manager, with some tips for maintaining or removing popular messenger software in the future.
Element is a free and open-source software instant messaging client implementing the Matrix protocol. It supports end-to-end encryption, groups, and sharing of files between users on this platform! If you’re looking for an open-source, encrypted messaging client that offers group chats and file-sharing functions, then Element is one of the best options.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to Install Riot Desktop or better known as Element now, on Debian 11 Bullseye using the command line terminal to import the Riot or better known as Element.io official repository and gpg key and install the desktop chat client editor, along with how to maintain and remove the software if required in the future.
Bottles is a free and open-source application that simplifies creating “prefixes” of wine similar to those on Windows operating systems. The tagline for the software is “Run Windows in a Bottle.” Bottles work with “prefixes” of wine that imitate the file system hierarchy of the Windows operating system and can be used for storing software meant only compatible with this platform.
Another feature of using Bottles is supporting a large set of Windows video games on Linux. Once installed, you can gain immediate access to game stores (e.g., Epic Games Store, EA Launcher, Battle.net, etc.)
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox utilizes the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and future anticipated web formats and standards.
For the most part, Firefox is often up to date with the latest stable release on Ubuntu-based desktops; however, non-stable builds such as Next which is the beta build, or Quantum, which is the Nightly build, can give you the chance to test the new features or test your websites before the browser version hits the stable repository.
In the tutorial, you will learn how to add and install the beta and nightly build for Firefox using a PPA maintained by the Mozilla team on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal, along with how to remove and restore the standard version of Firefox if required.
Persepolis is a download manager and GUI for ARIA 2 written in Python. It can be used on any operating system that supports Python, including Linux/BSDs, macOS & Microsoft Windows! While Ubuntu users may be familiar with similar software such as the uGET download manager, the Persepolis download manager is a great lightweight alternative that is actively developed.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of the Persepolis on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository by the Persepolis Download Manager team to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.
Kdenlive is a free video editing open-source software part of the KDE Projects. The video editing software is based on the MLT Framework, KDE, and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002 and is now maintained by a small team of developers. With Kdenlive 15.04.0 in 2015, it became part of the official KDE Projects and accepts many audio and video formats, allowing you to add effects, transitions, and render into the format of your choice.
KeePassXC is an application that can be used by anyone who wants to have a high level of security for their data. The cross-platform feature can be used on any computer, and the light interface makes it easy to use. Additionally, the application is published under the GNU General Public License terms, which means that it is open source and free to download and use.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install KeePassXC on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three installations method of APT, Flatpak, and Snap using the command line terminal, along with some tips on maintaining the software into the future.
VSCodium is a fork of Microsoft Visual Studio Code Editor modified to have full open-source access. The source code for this product can be found on GitHub, where it is licensed under the MIT license and, therefore, will always remain free as long you don’t mind installing extra features via plugins or extensions from third parties like Telemetry transmitting your browsing habits across networks without permission.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VSCodium on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository and tips on updating and removing the IDE securely and adequately.
Many people don’t know about Mega, which is a cloud storage service based in New Zealand. One of its main attractions is that we get 20Gb for free when we sign up, and it has great support for Linux. So in this post, you will learn how to install Mega Client on Ubuntu Server 20.04.
Today we are looking at how to install Jump Force Mugen 2 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Java is one of the most important programming languages ever created. And it is still very popular even though good solutions have been created, such as Rust, Python, and others. Knowing how to install it is basic to work with the language, but if you add to this a robust operating system like Linux Mint, then you can have an ideal combination. That’s why we’ve prepared the following post, so you can install Java on Linux Mint 20.3.
This article will guide you step-by-step through the recommended and most efficient way to install Docker on AlmaLinux 8 or Rocky Linux 8.
Docker is a popular open-source platform for developing, deploying, running, and shipping applications using containers. They are similar to virtual machines and aid in separating applications from the system.
It is now simple to create an application, package it with all of its dependencies inside a container, and deliver it anywhere.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install UVdesk Helpdesk on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, UVdesk is one such open-source helpdesk ticketing system that you can rely on as you continue to build your business. UVdesk offers SaaS-based and helpdesk solutions to easier the overall support process to deliver the best customer service such as email piping, knowledgebase, Mailbox, E-commerce, and Multichannel Integration.
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 UVdesk Helpdesk on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Lumencraft is a brand new release from developer 2Dynamic Games that is going to suck up far too much of my time, and might be a new favourite run blast through on my Steam Deck. Note: personal purchase.
Blending together a Tower Defense game, with a top-down shooter and destructible environments, it has all the makings to be the next indie hit and I get a slight Deep Rock Galactic vibe from it too. Blasting through the tutorial and then some of the first sandbox map, well over an hour vanished in the blink of an eye — that's the kind of game I like to see.
Welcome to another Godot showcase interview! This time, we interviewed Leszek Nowak from 2DynamicGames about their latest release Lumencraft.
No Man's Sky, a Steam Deck Verified title that also works great on Linux desktops with Steam Play Proton recently got another massive free update. Hello Games have well and truly shown how to recover from a rough launch, it's now such a completely different game.
Quite a lot is new with this update adding in the likes of overhauled space combat, a new pirate underworld, a new solar ship class (the first new ship class in a long time), you can hire wingmen, smuggle around naughty goods, there's new and more impressive explosions, pirate raids, frigate fleets that will fly overhead, an overhaul to warp and engine effects of all frigates and freighters, in-atmosphere combat and much more.
Want to get more info behind the scenes on how Steam for Chrome OS works? It uses Linux but it's a little bit complicated and Google has put out the first in a series of blog posts to talk more about it.
The good news of course for normal Linux desktop fans, is that developers will need to ensure their games work on Linux directly. Either through a Native build, which should work out of the box, or ensuring and testing their Windows builds with Proton. Although, Steam Play Proton is not turned on by default for Chrome OS as there's various issues right now.
How does it work then? Through the magic of virtual machines! Using work they've done in the past with Crostini, an already existing way to run normal Linux apps on Chrome OS and "Chrome OS's own virtual machine monitor (VMM), crosvmâ ". They say running Steam and games in a container like this "provides another layer of security above normal Linux systems" that's used for Crostini, Android, and Parallels.
It’s been a few weeks already that our now former colleague, Mark Dougherty, has decided to venture on a solo mission to create his own Linux dedicated website, called Linux Gaming Central. Now that the site has quite a few articles (and a logo) under its belt, it’s a good time to feature what you can find on it.
Some of the best projects are the ones that take an already-existing product and recreate it from the ground up using easily accessible components. Jithin Sanal set out to do just this by designing and building a USB controller that can be used for a variety of tasks.
The joystick is based around the Nano RP2040 Connect, which means that it not only contains a powerful dual-core Arm microcontroller, but also an accelerometer, gyroscope, an RGB LED, and a microphone. The ample amounts of memory and flash can enable small machine learning models to run as well for more advanced processing of motion/input data. Apart from the Arduino, the controller houses a pair of potentiometers, a two-axis joystick, and four buttons that act similar to a D-pad.
 Looking to get stuck into some great, free Linux-friendly games? We've got the list for you. Let's dive in.
If you’re looking for a way to maximize and simplify your Linux gaming experience, Flatpak games are the way to go.
With simple, straightforward installation and no need for extra configuration, today’s free Flatpak games are changing the Linux gaming landscape. Here are eight of the best ones.
Someday after using some KDE apps I noticed that the loading screens weren’t consistent, each app was implementing its own solution so I created this LoadingPlaceholder component for Kirigami.
This component will replace the various non-standard implementations previously found in many applications, therefore improving our consistency!
Just wanted to share this little component, less than 70 lines of code can already improve our platform so much, every little contribution matters.
Security experts warn that advanced threat actors are already stealing and storing encrypted data for a future when quantum computers are capable of cracking all known encryption algorithms and the latest moves by OpenSSH is meant to proactively address these risks.
According to notes published alongside the release of OpenSSH 9.0, the open-source group will now use the hybrid Streamlined NTRU Prime + x25519 key exchange method by default, a move that includes a backstop against future discoveries of flaws in the NTRU algorithm.
In the mid-2000s, an upstart Linux distribution became both the most exciting and the most popular version around: Ubuntu.
But around two decades later, much of the excitement has gone away. The Ubuntu of today doesn't have the same spirit as the Ubuntu of yore. Now a different distro is drawing people for many of the same reasons Ubuntu did in the past, a distro that is ironically a year older: Fedora.
Is Fedora the new Ubuntu? Here are five reasons the answer is increasingly yes.
Custom build script in COPR is a versatile. With a couple sed commands, you can modify Fedora SPEC files and port it to RHEL/CentOS Stream with a little effort.
However, when I was porting the keepassxc-2.7.X a few days ago, COPR keeps complaining xcb.patch is missing. While I myself does not need the patch for Wayland, I am curious why other packages are fine but not this one.
Later today, I’ll submit a contentious Change proposal to the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. Several contributors proposed deprecating support for legacy BIOS starting in Fedora Linux 37. The feedback on the mailing list thread and in social media is…let’s call it “mixed”.
The bulk of the objections distill down to: I have old hardware and it should still work. Indeed, when proprietary operating systems vendors (both in the PC and mobile spaces) embrace varying forms of planned obsolescence, open source operating systems can allow users to continue using the hardware they own. Why shouldn’t it continue to be supported?
Nothing comes for free. Maintaining legacy support requires work. Bugs need fixes. Existing code can hamper the addition of new features. Even in a community-driven project, time is not unlimited. It’s hard to ask people to keep supporting software that they’re no longer interested in.
The Great Resignation may be a myth or reality, depending upon your viewpoint. But one thing is clear: The labor shortage is real.
But it is likely not due to a decline in the participation rate. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the post-pandemic labor force participation rate has not declined dramatically. In fact, the core ages of the workforce, 25-54, saw a dip at the onset of the pandemic that was mild compared to other age groups – especially workers 55+.
In late 2019, as the news media reports about an unknown respiratory disease began to increase it would have been nearly impossible to predict how the following year would play out. Yet, a global collaboration between various public health stakeholders supported by a technological solution for global collaborative detection of threats to public health, their verification and assessment of risks was already in place, led by the World Health Organization (WHO).
A month after the major release 0.2.0 bringing pub/sub and other goodies to our RcppRedis package, a new version 0.2.1 arrived on CRAN yesterday. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads for several years now.
This release updated the rredis suggestion by adding an Additional_repositories entry as Bryan decided to retire the rredis package. You can still install it via install.packages("rredis") by setting the addtional repo, for example repos=c("https://ghrr.github.io/drat", getOption("repos")) as documented in package and at our ghrr drat repo.
A new minor release of drat arrived on CRAN today. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. See below for a few custom reference examples.
Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Properly rolled-up releases it is. Just how CRAN shows us: a model that has demonstrated for two-plus decades how to do this. And you can too: drat is easy to use, documented by six vignettes and just works. Detailed information about drat is at its documentation site.
After listening to an episode of the 2.5 admins podcast, I realized there was some sort of low-hanging fruit I could pick to better tune my WiFi at home. You see, I'm kind of a fraud in WiFi: I only started a WiFi mesh in Montreal (now defunct), I don't really know how any of that stuff works. So I was surprised to hear one of the podcast host say "it's all about airtime" and "you want to reduce the power on your access points" (APs). It seemed like sound advice: better bandwidth means less time on air, means less collisions, less latency, and less power also means less collisions. Worth a try, right?
Much of this is obvious; the bit that may not be is that 'focal' is the code name for Ubuntu 20.04. Every sources.list line needs to say what distribution release it's for, and it had better be right, which is to say it had better match the distribution release you're actually running.
summary of new features, package updates in Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS which releases soon.
Spring is here, the flowers are blooming and the makers are tinkering. It’s been an exciting month in the Raspberry Pi community and choosing projects to feature is never easy. That said, we’re giving ten Pi projects another chance to shine this month and have plenty to inspire everyone from novice creators to the most experienced developer.
These projects are some of the best around and we’ll be sure to share all of the juicy details about how they work and what you’ll need to make them at home, if you can. You don’t always need the best Raspberry Pi accessories and HATs to make an incredible project but they sure can help add a variety of features to your creation.
Interpilot is a program that replaces some of the keys in the Intl keyboard tab and adds a "7" key (written from the upper dash) to Graffiti and to the keyboard, that when superceding a character alters it to become its "AltGr" counterpart (\u017c from z, \u017a from x, ...). See the previous post for links. As I wrote in the previous post, I couldn't find downloads for Interpilot's successor PiLoc, so that's why I went with it. Interpilot ships with a demonstration product registration code "democode" by default and I don't have a proper one so I keep being annoyed with a dialog titled "Reminder" saying "Your Interpilot is not registered" and "Dismiss" that sometimes comes up extremely often. The most recent versions of Interpilot, as I remember them from the past, are said to work with specifically version 1.2 of the Palm Keyboard driver.
We see tons of projects with the infamous “Blue Pill” STM32 boards. They are cheap and plentiful and have a lot of great features, or at least they were before the chip shortage. I recently picked up a “Black Pill”, which is very similar but has an even more powerful processor. For a few bucks, you get an ARM CPU that can run at 100 MHz (but with USB, probably 96 MHz). There’s 512 kB of flash and 128 kB of RAM. There’s a USB type C port, and even a button and an LED onboard. The thing fits on a breadboard and you can program it with a cheap STLink dongle which costs about $10.
If there’s one thing audiences love in sci-fi, it’s a cute robot companion that follows the heroes around. If you want one of your own, starting with this build from [mircemk] could be just the ticket.
I reluctantly connected an ESP32 to a breadboard and wired the SPI flash IC to the ESP's hardware SPI peripheral. Thankfully, the fantastic SPIMemory Arduino library by @Marzogh exists.
Using the SPIMemory library, I implemented a very simple Arduino program, which would erase the whole flash, read 4096 bytes from the UART, write them to a flash page and repeat this for the whole 8MiB.
We’re going to make a USB keyboard you can use to enter text quickly and unobtrusively, even in the dark. The keyboard has a key for each finger, and you type by pressing down ’chords’ – combinations of different keys. There are lights in the keys to help you learn the combinations for each letter and a teaching game you can use to practice your typing skills. You can plug it into a USB port on a computer and use it as you would any other keyboard.
A further description, including information on how to register, is forthcoming.
The CI is probably one of the best things with GitLab which I also really enjoyed using on the self-hosted instances. I therefore looked forward to using CIs on my private repositories. But before running CI, GitLab wants to verify my identify by giving them my credit card information. The CI is still free to use, but I really do not like giving them my credit card information as I believe such information should stay always-offline (or rarely-only in some and well-though-through cases). I could also self-host a runner, which I also did on the universities GitLab on a university server. But this would also make the CI not-free as I currently do not have a suitable server for that. Well, I guess I have to live without CI for now.
[...]
Search unusable
Yesterday I wanted to integrate GitLab into mastersearch. But I figured out that the search was pretty much unusable, only returning some matching results. This is because only projects from paid accounts are indexed, which pretty much removes the majority of projects from the search. Therefore, I find GitLab search pretty much unusable and not worth the time integrating into mastersearch. There is also a issue open for that, lets see when this will be fixed.
Lars Knoll announced the release of Qt 6.3 with many new improvements to this vital development tool for user interfaces.
Qt 6.3 is the third point release of the Qt 6.0 series that brings many new features, bug fixes and underlying performance improvements.
Following The Qt Company's decision to withdraw support for the Russian market, KDAB's geolocation block of its website and Upwork stopping its operations in Russia, there's a likely need of Qt support in the country.
[...]
Whether you are a company or a Qt expert with some free time to spare and you'd like to work with me, you are very welcome to drop me a line. We can try to find a solution for those companies who need Qt support, and create a network of professionals who can commit to do some Qt work.
One of the most gratifying parts of learning a new programming language is finally running an executable and getting the desired output. When I discovered the programming language Go, I started by reading some sample programs to get acquainted with the syntax, then wrote small test programs. Over time, this approach helped me get familiar with compiling and building the program.
The build options available for Go provide ways to gain more control over the build process. They can also provide additional information to help break the process into smaller parts. In this article, I will demonstrate some of the options I have used. Note: I am using the terms build and compile to mean the same thing.
When you write source code, you're writing code for humans to read. Computers can't execute source code until the code is compiled into machine language, a generic term referring to any number of languages required by a specific machine. Normally, if you compile code on Linux, it runs on Linux, and if you compile code on Windows, it runs on Windows, and so on. However, Java is different. It doesn't target an actual machine. It targets something called the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and so it can run on any machine.
I’ve learned so much from watching other people code. It’s never a thing I’m specifically trying to learn. It’s more like someone is walking me through a problem, and they do something I didn’t know could be done. Maybe they just have a low friction way to exploratory test some set of services, where I could only test things by deploying to staging, or they use some shortcut I didn’t know about, and I have to ask them how they did that.
Over a year ago, I left the role of software engineering* behind to become a site reliability engineer* at Honeycomb.io. Since then, I've been writing a bunch of blog posts over there rather than over here, including the following: [...]
Given a binary tree, a target node and a positive integer K on it, the task is to find the sum of all nodes within distance K from the target node (including the value of the target node in the sum).
News reports were everywhere that an autonomous taxi operated by a company called Cruise was driving through San Francisco with no headlights. The local constabulary tried to stop the vehicle and were a bit thrown that there was no driver. Then the car moved beyond an intersection and pulled over, further bemusing the officers.
When Madison Shanley took the mic to sing the national anthem ahead of the Portland Timbers’ April 3 match against the LA Galaxy, she wore a red shirt emblazoned with the phrase “YOU KNEW” in white letters, an allusion to the club’s front office being informed about—but failing to properly act on—serious charges of sexual misconduct against former Portland Thorns coach Paul Riley and allegations of domestic violence against Timbers player Andy Polo. For those unfamiliar with the latter case, in February, Génessis Alarcón, Polo’s ex-partner, went public with allegations that Polo had physically attacked her and that the Timbers tried to cover it up. “He pulled my hair. I fell to the floor,” the mother of Polo’s children said on a Peruvian TV show. “He slapped me in the face and gave me a black eye.”
Ohio US Senate candidate J.D. Vance took time out from trivializing Russia’s murderous assault on Ukraine last week to comment on the presidential election in France.
Emmanuel Macron (La République en Marche, LREM) and Marine Le€ Pen (Rassemblement National, RN) have made it into the second round – in the same order as five years ago, making it the second time the duel will take place. The last and only time this happened in France was when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (RPR) twice faced off against François Mitterrand (Socialist Party), first in 1974, when the right-wing candidate won and then again in 1981, when the socialist candidate triumphed.
Such stability is largely linked to the main candidates’ clout. Already in the game five years ago, Macron and Le€ Pen have been able to retain a loyal electoral base. Over the past weeks new voters have rallied around them, prioritising a so-called strategic vote (“vote utile”) over partisan considerations.
Two bus routes go that way: line 1 halts at every bus stop from here to campus, and runs along the route that takes it through the town centre. Line 72 is a direct bus that runs a few times to uni in the morning and a few times from uni in the afternoon. It takes all the stops on this side of town, but then takes a route around the town centre and skips all stops after that until it reaches campus.
Line 1 usually takes about 30 to 35 minutes from here to uni. Line 72 typically takes 18 to 22 or something like that.
both have various issues, one being that many file formats are known by multiple names. MIME is also often overly lengthy, and also names things strangly. for example, the default type for the whole system is "application/octet-stream".
A deep learning algorithm can remove city noise from earthquake monitoring tools, potentially making it easier to pinpoint when and where a tremor occurs.
Astroscale, Japan’s space debris removal company, claims to have carried out “the world’s first commercial mission to prove the core technologies necessary for space debris docking and removal.”
Comprising two satellites tied together – one designed to remove debris from orbit and one to simulate a piece of debris – it was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in March 2021. The “test capture” demonstration was completed in August 2021.
With conflicts raging over masks, books, and curriculums in the nation's public schools, you'd be forgiven for missing a noteworthy new proposal from the U.S. Department of Education.
Let’s look at an updated example. You and your team have two weeks to complete a relatively simple bug fix. Realistically, it should only take a few hours.
But because you know you have more than enough time at your disposal, the project grows in scope. While you’re looking into that bug, you decide to check into a few related issues, as well. That prompts questions about what’s causing those issues in the first place. While those diversions may ultimately prove to be useful, they don’t get you any closer to achieving your object of handling the bug fix.
Ultimately, the thing that should’ve really been a simple undertaking becomes something that actually requires the two weeks to complete. That’s Parkinson’s Law in action.
How to Use Parkinson’s Law to Get More Done in Less TimeParkinson’s Law—the amount of work expands to fill the time available for its completion—means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour task, then (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to fill that week[2]. It may not even fill the extra time with more work, but just stress and tension about having to get it done.
At their best, small non-elite colleges can spur innovative ideas and foster great minds, but too often they compromise standards and dilute the value of a degree by producing underqualified graduates.
A spectrum visualizer is always a fun project, but we really liked [Yannick99]’s take on it since it uses seven IN-13 Nixie tubes for the display. The tubes, of course, need high voltage so part of the project is a high voltage power supply. The spectrum part is a little more ordinary using an op amp and an MSGEQ7 filter IC.
Many of us have read about Stirling engines, engines which form mechanical heat pumps and derive motion from the expansion and contraction of a body of air. A very few readers may have built one, but for many they remain one of those projects we’d rather like to try but never quite have the inclination. The YouTube channel of [Geral Na Prática] should provide plenty of vicarious enjoyment then, with the construction of a range of Stirling engines from commonly available materials. We have Coke cans, PVC pipe, and nebuliser cartridges forming pistons and cylinders, with wire wool serving as a regenerative heat store. The latest video is below the break, an amazing 10-cylinder rotary device.
We are used to dealing with warping when printing with thermoplastics like ABS, but metal printers suffer from this problem, too. The University of Michigan has a new technology, SmartScan, that promises to reduce this problem. You can see a video about the technique, below.
I first wrote about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) not long after it was first published, way back during a time that now seems like ancient history, October 2020. At the time, I likened the GBD to similar “declarations” and petitions issued by other science deniers, such as HIV/AIDS deniers and climate science deniers, because “magnified minority” documents like this are designed to provide a patina of apparent scientific legitimacy to their antiscience declarations. Science deniers accomplish this by recruiting useful idiots in the form of scientists who are true believers in the declaration (in this case the GBD) write the declaration and then enticing physicians and scientists, the vast majority of whom have little or no expertise in the relevant scientific fields, sign the document, the more the better. The result is a document that other believers can cite as evidence for scientific support for their views. Basically, the GBD, and other documents like it, follow a script that was first pioneered by tobacco companies trying to show that their products were not causing cancer and all sorts of other health problems.
I've been an active Play-By-e-Mail role player for many years, pretty much exclusively in the Star Trek fan scene. We usually call our games "sims" or "simulations" and they take place on Star Trek ships or stations. Some games organise themselves in fleets, where several simulations help each other recruit and administrate resources like mailing lists and websites.
Most of the sims I've been on have had a disclaimer at the footer on their website saying something like "Star Trek is owned by Paramount. This is a fan site. No infringement intended."
They rely on the good faith of Paramount Pictures and a kind interpretation of the fair use clause of American copyright law. I consider the need for this faith in a corporation a sad state of affairs. As long as this is the case the entire Star Trek sim community is in danger of being entirely shut down by a whim from a faraway legal department.
Microsoft has released an advisory to address CVE-2022-26809, a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Remote Procedure Call Runtime Library. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.
This attempted attack involved a wide variety of malware, according to ESET, including the recently discovered CaddyWiper. ESET also found a new piece of malware, which it calls Industroyer2. The original Industroyer was used in a successful 2016 cyberattack that cut off power in parts of Kyiv, according to the security firm, probably by the same group behind this month’s foiled attack. Industroyer isn’t widely used by [crackers] — ESET notes that it’s only seen it used twice (earlier this month and in 2016), which implies that it’s written for very specific uses.
CISA, the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), warning that certain advanced persistent threat (APT) actors have exhibited the capability to gain full system access to multiple industrial control system (ICS)/supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices using custom-made tools.
In an explainer on the situation, ESET said it also saw the attackers use several other destructive malware families including CaddyWiper, ORCSHRED, SOLOSHRED and AWFULSHRED.
For some customers, JIRA and some other Atlassian products have been down for an entire week. Some are reporting that Atlassian is saying that it could be another 2 weeks until the products are back up and running. Chalk that up worse than Roblox's 3 day outage back in October 2021. Why so many outages?
Sony Group Corporation’s billion-dollar investment in the Harmonix owner Epic Games arrives one year after the Japanese company fronted $200 million for a different Epic funding round yet. And while this April of 2021 raise brought with it a $28.7 billion equity valuation, today’s round (which also includes a $1 billion contribution from The Lego Group owner KIRKBI) came with a post-money valuation of $31.5 billion.
(Significantly, Sony previously came up with $250 million for a 2020 round from Epic Games, which was then valued at a comparatively modest $17.3 billion.)
Regarding Epic’s plans for this newest capital influx, founder and CEO Tim Sweeney emphasized the perceived potential (for both players and brands) of building an all-encompassing metaverse social platform.
Surprisingly, there is very little history available online about the DOS versions of LapLink, and I’m not sure when its parallel cable was actually introduced. The “LapLink cable” Wikipedia page mentions 1983, but that seems strange, as LapLink 2.15 from 1987 does not have any way to configure the software for using a parallel port cable. LapLink 3.00 from 1989 does.
For the purpose of this article, I decided to use the latest DOS version available, which appears to be LapLink 5.00, released in 1993. It comes with an improved UI using redefined characters including cute files and folder icons, along with some subtle animations. I’ve been using the standard color theme.
CISA has added 10 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the "Date Added to Catalog" column, which will sort by descending dates.
Nephio aims to deliver carrier-grade, simple, open, Kubernetes-based cloud native intent automation and common automation templates that materially simplify the deployment and management of multi-vendor cloud infrastructure and network functions across large scale edge deployments.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the first round of keynote speakers taking the stage at Open Source Summit North America, June 21-24, in Austin, TX and virtually.
For several years the Identity Project has been engaging with the Port of Seattle over its expansion of automated facial recognition to track travelers at Sea-Tac Airport.
Today we made yet another (virtual) visit to the Port of Seattle Commission to give the following comments (PDF) on the latest test of the new International Arrivals facility at Sea-Tac, scheduled to open€ next week:
Comments of the Identity Project to the Port of Seattle Commission for the Commission meeting of April 12, 2022, re: signage for travelers about the collection of facial images at the International Arrivals Facility at Sea-Tac Airport
Most people file online, making this month a virtual playground for cybercriminals trying to steal your identity or financial info. Tax season is frustrating enough—don’t let a cybercrook turn it into a living nightmare.
Zuckerberg calls AR goggles a “holy grail” device that will “redefine our relationship with technology,” akin to the introduction of smartphones. During the special effect-laden video announcing Facebook’s corporate rebrand to Meta last October, they acted as the connective tissue for his metaverse pitch, letting people play games and work with virtual humans Star Trek-style. At one point, Zuckerberg wore them while fencing with a hologram. “Don’t be scared to stab,” his virtual sparring partner quipped.
These young people of draft age all told me they were fleeing their country to avoid being drafted to fight in a war against their countrymen in eastern Ukraine, a majority Russian region of Ukraine. “I have nothing against those people in Donbas,” one young man told me, “and I don’t want to be forced to kill them and get killed myself.”
They had all gone to Finland because of short-term agricultural work visas available to people willing to pick blueberries, which cover the forest floor above the Arctic Circle at that time of summer.
Students of war psychology are familiar with a process in which public opinion moves by stages from a position of indifference or opposition to a war to one of passionate partisanship and active involvement in the military struggle.€ A key element in this movement is the accusation that a hostile power is committing war crimes and atrocities against civilians – particularly women and children.
The accusations often contain a dose of truth, since most wars are far more indiscriminate than “surgical” in their effects.€ There is no doubt that Russian activities in Ukraine have taken too many civilian lives.€ But war crimes charges tend also to be exaggerated. The United States entered World War I in 1917 on the heels of reports that the German invaders of Belgium were butchering babies while German U-boats sank ships filled with innocent passengers.€ (In fact, the Allies were attempting to starve Germany into submission by blockading European ports,€ and the doomed liner Luisitania was carrying a large cargo of weapons bound for Britain.)
There is nothing wrong with that. When government officials or military personnel engage in war crimes, they should be prosecuted.
What’s weird though is that you don’t read any calls in the U.S. mainstream press for criminal prosecutions of U.S. officials and U.S. military personnel for war crimes committed with respect to the U.S. invasions and long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, including the bombings of many wedding parties in which brides, grooms, bridal assistants, parents, brothers, sisters, relatives, and friends were killed or maimed.
The latest developments, including: – How US declared financial war on Russia – The US Dollar as a weapon – How 9/11 gave the US government power to wage financial war – Key architects of US/EU financial war – Russia’s debt default – Turkish drones in Ukraine – The truth of Bucha’s atrocities
NATO didn’t add Ukraine, which was attacked. Therefore every country or at least lots of them should be added to NATO.
Russia has a bad government. Therefore it should be overthrown.
Most coverage failed to levy any criticism at all of Albright’s actions in government, despite her presiding over a critical turning point in the American Empire. For the foreign policy establishment, the ’90s under Albright solidified the US self-image as the “indispensable nation,” ready and able to impose its will on the world, a position with repercussions that still echo today. Instead of critically exploring this legacy, corporate media opted for celebration and mythmaking.
The Pentagon on Wednesday is set to convene a classified meeting of some of the largest arms makers in the U.S.—from Lockheed Martin to Raytheon—as the Biden administration looks to ramp up weapons shipments to Ukraine, even as critics warn that continuing to pump advanced military equipment into the war zone could prolong the deadly conflict.
"It is within Putin's power to wind down this war, but what NATO does matters as well."
Disarmament campaigners warned Wednesday of "a further undermining of prospects for global peace" following reports suggesting an air force base in the U.K. is once again going to be storing U.S. nuclear weapons.
The development, said Kate Hudson, general secretary of the London-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, would again make Britain "a forward nuclear base for the U.S. in Europe."
Every April, as income-tax returns come due, I think about the day 30 years ago when I opened my rented mailbox and saw a business card resting inside. Its first line read, innocently enough, “United States Treasury.” It was the second line—“Internal Revenue Service”—that took my breath away. That card belonged to an IRS revenue agent and scrawled across it in blue ink was the message: “Call me.”
After a gunman opened fire on a subway train during morning rush hour Tuesday, with 10 people shot and another 13 injured, we speak with New York City public advocate and gubernatorial candidate Jumaane Williams, who says “the answer to the gun violence problem cannot be solely sending police,” adding that New York must respond with a comprehensive plan to beef up social services and programs. He also speaks about the resignation of Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin — who was arrested on bribery charges — and recent news that disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo may run in the November election.
On March 27, as herders converged upon the central Malian village of Moura (population: 10,000) for the weekly Sunday livestock market, helicopters carrying Malian soldiers accompanied by men believed to belong to the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group flew in and started firing. They sealed shut the exits to the village and raked their way through it in a counterterrorism operation that lasted for five days and left between 200 and 400 people dead. Human Rights Watch deemed it “the worst single atrocity reported in Mali’s decade-long armed conflict.” Armed actors have proliferated in Mali since separatist northern militants rebelled in 2011, only to be sidelined by an Al Qaeda affiliate. The Malian army, in a statement describing the same event, claimed to have neutralized 203 terrorists in a manner consistent with international law. Eyewitnesses, however, described indiscriminate killing and targeting based on ethnic appearance or dress.
As Russia pulls its forces back to concentrate them in the Dombas eastern region of Ukraine, those of us who oppose Russia’s invasion, as well as NATO’s problematic actions in the years leading up to it, must call for an immediate ceasefire and serious diplomacy for a negotiated end to this disastrous war.
The new appointee is General Alexander Dvornikov, who was sent to Syria in September 2015 when Russia intervened directly in the war to stop a rebel offensive backed by Saudi Arabia which was making ground against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.
Russian air support for the Syrian army was of crucial assistance for the Assad government and continues to this day with 182 Russian air strikes since the start of April according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced an even-larger-than-expected $800 million military aid package for Ukraine, which has been under attack by Russian forces since late February.
The package—which comes despite fears from anti-war voices that such weapons transfers will just further fuel the conflict—expands the type of weaponry the United States is sending to Ukraine.
On Wednesday, April 13, a district court in St. Petersburg jailed artist Sasha Skochilenko until May 31, pending trial on charges of spreading “knowingly false information” about the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine.
On March 18, Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon published a video message addressed to Ukrainians living in territories occupied or surrounded by Russian troops. He warned that there are “two types of humanitarian corridors” — those organized by Ukraine and those organized by Russia, and he urged people not to use the latter.
In early March, the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) published hyperlinks to a large data leak from the office of Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor (RKN), in the Republic of Bashkortostan. With help from colleagues at The Intercept, Meduza downloaded and indexed hundreds of gigabytes of these data and learned that RKN started monitoring protest sentiment back in 2020, sharing daily reports with various government agencies (including the national security apparatus) about “the destabilization of Russian society.”
As a concept for integrating cyberwarfare systems, the US Cyber Command created the Joint Cyber Operations Architecture (JCWA) to guide cyberwarfare acquisition and investment decisions, with the aim of enabling cyber forces to execute command and control decisions, as well as training in having access – through a unified platform – to the broad tasks of the system. Since 2021 the US military has continued to use the JCWA as a guide and rely on various services to develop and improve cyberwarfare systems and tools.
In August 2021 the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded to the cybersecurity firm Forescout-Active Defense for the Enterprise of Things a 115 million US dollar contract to promote a zero-trust security model. Also known as zero-trust architecture (ZTA), zero-trust network architecture (ZTNA) or perimeter-less security, it describes an approach to designing and deploying IT systems. The main concept behind the zero-trust security model is “never trust, always verify,” which means that devices should not be trusted by default, even if they are connected to an authorized network such as a corporate LAN and even if they were checked and verified before.
The US Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center, in collaboration with Texas-based Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), has developed a new Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to protect military ground vehicles from cyberattacks for more connected and automated self-propelled vehicle networks so as to achieve cyber resilience. The new IDS technology uses algorithms and fingerprints to detect anomalies in the communication systems embedded in ground combat vehicles. System algorithms will transmit information via the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol to identify unknown or invalid nodes connected to the vehicle’s network.
The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) has created a new capability matrix for ABMS, which includes six categories: 1. security processing; 2. connectivity; 3. data management; 4. applications; 5. sensor integration; 6. integrated effects. The Air Force plans to use more contracted tools to leverage commercial technologies, infrastructure and proven applications to get ABMS off the ground in a secure military digital network environment.
NATO is developing new cloud technologies to establish technical standards in the field and ensure interoperability among Member States. The current cloud technology project that has attracted much attention is the Firefly system, developed by French company Thales. The system will deploy NATO’s first deployable scenario-level defence cloud capability and enable its own forces to receive, analyse and transmit data between static headquarters and in real time across theatres of operation. Firefly uses an all-in-one system architecture, including application management, IT networking and security, and hence it represents a holistic approach to deployable command and control resources for the Atlantic Alliance.
Nevertheless, there don’t seem to be much “objective” data available that would either support or invalidate these reports besides a BGP-level view of prefixes announced by different Ukrainian ISPs, which is provided by some internet monitoring tools (this, however, can’t tell us much about actual reachability of individual internet-connected systems).
The attack was scheduled to begin on the evening of April 8 as civilians returned home from work, Ukrainian officials said, and could have made it impossible for them to go about their daily lives or gain access to information about the war. The breach targeted several electrical substations in the country, and had it been successful, it would have deprived roughly two million people of electricity and made it difficult to restore power.
In recent weeks, American officials have warned that Russia could try to expand its cyberwarfare — perhaps even by disrupting American pipelines and electric grids in retaliation for the sanctions that the United States has imposed on Moscow.
But thanks to these three As, no prime minister in Pakistan has been able to complete his full term. Imran was no exception. In fact, he also became the first PM in the country's history to be removed through a no-confidence vote.
The trial is explosive because the accused had contact with the later Vienna attacker via chat groups. He is one of the twelve men who were arrested immediately after the terrorist attack in Vienna. So far, no evidence of a concrete contribution to the crime by the 24-year-old community service worker could be found.
Elsheikh, who was stripped of his citizenship by Britain, is charged with the murders of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and relief workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.
To make a long and complex story much shorter, Montana allocates water rights based on the€ Doctrine of Prior Appropriation€ — which means those who divert water from rivers, lakes, and streams for beneficial uses have rights to the water that are prioritized as “first in time, first in right.” Simply put, those who claimed their rights first have “senior” rights to the “junior” rights that were claimed later.
It’s no secret that Montana’s rivers, like most of the West, are over-appropriated — meaning more water rights have been claimed than there is water in the river. During the severe drought that gripped the state last year and has worsened this year, the senior water rights holders can “put a call” on their rights and legally require upstream junior users to cease diversion until the senior rights are fulfilled.
A new poll reveals widespread concern among U.S. teens for the climate, with a strong majority saying that action is needed now to save planet Earth.
Conducted by The Harris Poll for the National 4-H Council and first reported by Axios, the national survey of 1,500 13-19-year-olds reveals most youth have already witnessed environmental changes and expect a changed environment to impact their lives in the years to come.
In short, we are killing our earth’s environments and ecosystems and threatening the very existence of present and future generations. And, our leaders are allowing this degradation to take place.€ Worse, they are encouraging it.
Keep in mind that pursuant to Article III, section 3 of Montana’s Constitution, every legislative, executive, judicial and ministerial official in this State takes an oath (i.e., their appeal to God to witness the truth) to, among other things, support, protect and defend our Constitution.
The deeply condescending treatment endured by a British climate activist during a Tuesday television interview bore what many observers are calling an eerie resemblance to a scene from the dystopian Netflix film Don't Look Up.
"The budget for Don't Look Up was $75 million. Turns out, they could have saved all of that money by just playing this interview."
Over two dozen scientists on Wednesday glued scientific papers and their own hands to the windows of a U.K. government building in London to demand an end to fossil fuels.
"Releasing reports is no longer enough. We must take actions they cannot ignore."
That energy storage is a hot topic is hardly a surprise to anyone these days. Even so, energy storage can take a lot of different forms, some of which are more relevant to the utility provider (like grid-level storage), while others are relevant to business and home owners (e.g. whole-house storage), and yet other technologies live in this tense zone between utility and personal interest, such as (electric) vehicle-to-grid.
A powerful US biomass lobby group is pushing for a raft of changes that would weaken European renewable energy rules geared to better protect biodiversity and tackle climate change, DeSmog can reveal.€
Leaked documents shared with DeSmog show that Yorkshire wood-burning power plant Drax is at the heart of the effort to water down EU sustainability criteria.€
Following efforts by the US and others to address cryptocurrency standards, UK officials this week said they want Britain to lead the world and create their own government-backed digital token for international trade.
Tesla solar panels and Megapack batteries are being deployed in Texas in order to mine bitcoin with 100 per cent renewable energy.
The electric car maker partnered with payments firm Block and blockchain firm Blockstream to build a 3.8 megawatt (MW) facility that will begin operations later this year.
Indigenous activists on Tuesday welcomed a promise from leftist Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to immediately revoke far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's policies, including laws that opponents say facilitate the destruction and exploitation of native lands.
"Nobody is going to tamper with Indigenous land without your agreement."
Yet the privatization of water is expanding across the globe, and with devastating effects: waste dumping in the Global South, sewage leakages into water bodies supplying poorer communities, and ongoing shortages — all during the greatest climate crisis humans have ever seen. Fresh water supplies are drying up rapidly, with climate change as a driving force behind the rising sea levels and altered physical borders. Meanwhile, water demand is expected to increase by 55 percent by the year 2050 — made particularly alarming at a time of worldwide water shortages due to the increased demand for water and sanitation services during the pandemic. Service providers require a continuous supply of chemicals needed for water and wastewater testing and treatment, posing challenges in countries where wastewater treatment remains limited. In Arab countries such as Yemen, water stress has risen, owing to increased allocation of water resources to the agriculture sector to offset lower food exports by food-producing countries.
Why it matters: Climate change, border conflicts, cyber threats and inefficient agricultural practices threaten humanity’s future supply. External conflicts over water pose a threat to national security, as well as international relations.
A proposed White House action plan would link global water security with national security for the first time.
The United Nations warns a record 7.74 million people, or two-thirds of South Sudan’s population, are likely to face hunger during this year’s lean season between May and July. This is the dangerous period between planting and harvesting when food stocks are at their lowest.
Among the millions at risk of hunger are an estimated 87,000 people who will face catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity during the lean period.
A U.N. analysis of the food situation in South Sudan released last week warns many of these people will likely die of starvation.
The state’s rainy season typically ends April 1, and for Fukada and his team, who manage water distribution to 230 farms in Tulare County, it’s shaping up to be an even more challenging year than the last few.
Snowpack in the mountains melts in spring and runs down canals into the Valley. But a snow survey conducted by the Department of Water Resources on April 1 – when the snow is often at its highest – showed levels at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada had “plummeted” to 38 percent of the annual average since the start of the year.
The real success story, though, lay in the ground beneath Terranova. In a typical year, that’s where most of the farm’s water comes from. Cameron and his neighbors do not hold rights to any nearby river, or to the supplies piped in through government projects; they either buy from people who do or, more often, pump what they need out of the aquifers. A system of natural subterranean reservoirs stretches beneath the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, which together form the Central Valley. The region is pincushioned with more than 100,000 wells. People and businesses have pumped out so much water that whole towns sink into the hollows.
While Terranova stood firm, its aquifer was in trouble. Cameron and his neighbors had taxed the ground so heavily over the years that there was a 230-foot-deep dry zone, or “cone of depression,” in the water table beneath the ranch. But after the 2017 flood, after the last of the rain and snowmelt had trickled down into the aquifer, the water level rose 40 feet. Cameron swore that when the next flood came, he would be ready to gulp down even more.
Cameron didn’t come up with the idea of using floodwater to refill aquifers, but he did earn a reputation as the godfather of the practice. In a valley dotted with ponds and basins built for the sole purpose of holding extra water as it percolates down into the ground, he was the first farmer foolhardy enough to experiment on his own harvest. His work earned him state and county prizes for innovation. In 2018 he was appointed president of California’s agriculture board. He thought—hoped—that on-farm recharge might become one piece of the future-proofing necessary to save the country’s most productive agricultural region from near-certain death.
Major international organizations issued an appeal Wednesday for urgent measures to deal with rising food insecurity in poor countries, including financing to support farmers and increase food supplies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Western sanctions on Moscow, have sent energy and food prices soaring in recent weeks, while rising natural gas prices also have impacted fertilizer production, which in turn hurts farmers.
Russia’s catastrophic attempt to gain re-entry into the league of great powers, after its re-entry into capitalism reduced the country to a raw materials supplier to stronger economies, calls to mind Kalecki’s remark about the fascist promise to humiliated nations after the First World War, that ‘roads to glory lead to war.’ In the violence into which this latest ‘road to glory’ has descended, it is sometimes forgotten that Russia may possess the largest army in Europe (and possibly in the world, depending on how much weight is given to reserve soldiers). But economically it has not recovered from the loss of the peripheral republics of the old Soviet Union, and the ‘shock therapy’ of economic liberalization after the Russian government abandoned socialism. The World Bank estimates that Russia now is merely the 11th largest economy in the world, not only after the United States, China, and Japan, the European behemoths of Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but also the ‘emerging markets’ of India and South Korea.
Secret IRS files reveal the top US income-earners and how their tax rates vary more than their incomes. Tech titans, hedge fund managers and heirs dominate the list, while the likes of Taylor Swift and LeBron James didn’t even make the top 400.
Periodically, we get a glimpse into the financial lives of the ultrarich. A pro athlete signs a huge contract, a tech CEO sells a boatload of shares in their company, or a billionaire heir unloads a Manhattan penthouse. Based on these nuggets of information, the media speculates as to how much income the rich might bring in every year. But nobody actually knows.
It must be tax season, because here we are yet again talking about Intuit and the company’s skullduggery when it comes to offers for “free” tax filing. You can go back and look at the plethora of posts we have done on all of this. The quick summary for you is that Intuit has deceptively advertised “free to file” programs for those it later says don’t qualify for free filing once the customer is nearly done inputting tax information, and that Intuit has had a long history of doing everything possible to hide the actual free options available to consumers in order to instead milk money from low-income taxpayers and military veterans. Notably, Intuit participated in the IRS’ free filing program, though the IRS actually announced plans to cut out the third parties in part because of Intuit’s bullshit practices.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Judy Chu on Wednesday demanded that the Internal Revenue Service halt its disproportionate targeting of low-income Americans and instead focus its attention and resources on "wealthy tax cheats."
"Lower-income Americans are audited by the IRS at five times the rate of everyone else."
The U.S. Labor Department said Tuesday inflation in the United States rose to 8.5% in March — the highest in four decades. Meanwhile, Oxfam is warning over 260 million people around the world could be pushed into extreme poverty by the end of year due to the pandemic and rising energy and food costs. For more on the growing inflation crisis, we speak with economist Jayati Ghosh, who says prices of essentials are soaring much higher than can be explained by oil prices and supply shortages alone, because of what she calls “feverish speculation” in financial markets and corporate profiteering. She also speaks about how the Global South sees the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as deeply hypocritical when compared to the growing humanitarian crises in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, and calls on the International Monetary Fund to reverse practices of pushing austerity in less wealthy countries and instead focus on massive public spending to combat existential crises like inflation and climate change. Her recent article is titled “Putin’s War Is Damaging the Developing World.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday urged debt relief campaigners to keep pushing President Joe Biden to broadly wipe out student debt, saying he's talked extensively with the White House about debt cancellation for millions of Americans via executive action.
The New York Democrat said he and other advocates on Capitol Hill are "making progress" in convincing the president to cancel at least $50,000 per borrower, which Biden could direct Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to do instead of relying on Congress to pass legislation.
ProPublica's latest exposé of inequitable taxation€ shows that the 400 most lavishly paid people in the U.S. don't pay the highest income tax rates—a finding that progressives say demonstrates the need to overhaul the nation's tax code and make the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.
"Because our tax code favors wealth over work, billionaire money managers can pay lower rates than affluent doctors, lawyers, and manufacturers."
The federal regulator that oversees consumer finance is suing TransUnion, one of the top credit-reporting agencies in the U.S., for deceptive marketing practices and using "dark patterns" on its website to trick consumers into signing up for recurring charges.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed the complaint in federal court on Tuesday, accusing the company, two of its subsidiaries and former executive John T. Danaher of violating a 2017 settlement agreement over similar claims.
His dream home was not owned by a person but by a tech company. Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listings site, had begun buying up homes in 2018, predicting it could create a “one-click nirvana” for purchasing real estate. It estimated returns of $20 billion a year. Zillow Offers, its “instant buying” business, followed startups like Opendoor and Offerpad, which had pioneered “iBuying,” the so-called “high-tech flipping” model, which uses data systems to price houses and investor cash to buy them before fixing them up and selling them.
Such instruments were drafted with an express purpose of targeting that nastily cruel weapon of choice for white insecurity and supremacy.€ Nearing the end of March this year, US President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, its name taken from the teenager murdered in 1955 by a mob for supposedly flirting with a white woman.€ In being designated a hate crime, those responsible for its infliction, resulting in either death or injury, can face up to three decades in prison in addition to time for other charges.
Lynching had a defining role of keeping Black Americans in their place, a vigilante method of control that received more than a little bit of support from local policing authorities. It symbolised the fangs and threat of Jim Crow and its sheer durability, initially justified as a form of popular sovereignty in the face of tardy justice.€ Such a form of terror was seminal in compelling the migration of millions of Black Americans from the Southern States to the north and enforcing insidious racial hierarchies.
Currently Russian leader Vladimir Putin is demonstrating one version of this; he is calling his invasion of Ukraine, massacre of civilians, and wanton disregard for human rights (that some are calling genocide) a “special operation.”
His ability to control Russian propagandizing media and punish truth-telling are weapons every bit as dangerous as the munitions exploding in civilian apartments, children’s schools, and community hospitals.
Why not?
The above actions are punitive. They hold Russia accountable for what they are doing and have done. But the punitive measures have not changed behavior, as if sending a child to bed without supper will change her behavior the next time at the table. “How many times have I told you to…?” is a repeated refrain from frustrated parents who ratchet up the punishment with little results.
As I have written before, the U.S. Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy driven by a growing public perception that the court is a political institution dominated by conservative activists masquerading as impartial guardians of the Constitution.€
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday endorsed progressive firebrand Nina Turner's campaign for the U.S. House seat in Ohio's 11th Congressional District, calling her a "real leader who fights for higher wages, Medicare for All, and affordable prescription drugs."
"Nina knows the job is more than just voting the right way. It's about leadership."
I think we can now say the obvious: The Republican Party has gone bull-goose bonkers. Its leaders have turned the once-proud GOP brand into an unprincipled gaggle of corporate profiteers, hatemongers and screwball conspiracy theorists. They're so far-out that the Hubble Space Telescope can't find them!
With just over a month to go until Pennsylvania's primary election, progressive state Rep. Summer Lee holds a 25-point lead over her two Democratic opponents in the race to succeed Rep. Mike Doyle in the 12th Congressional District.
"It's clear the voters of PA-12 are fired up and ready to send a working-class champion from their community to Washington, D.C."
Steve Irwin, a Pittsburgh attorney and the establishment favorite in a high-profile Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, has spent much of his career defending corporations and their interests in court. For a decade, he led the Labor and Employment division of Leech Tishman, a law firm that provides union-busting services and describes itself as being “predominantly management-side.” Before joining Leech Tishman, filings show, Irwin defended corporations against wage and discrimination complaints, and represented companies against Disability Act lawsuits.
The term “neoliberalism” is often used to condemn an array of economic policies associated with such ideas as deregulation, trickle-down economics, austerity, free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. As a political movement, neoliberalism is seen as experiencing its breakthrough 40 years ago with the election into office of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And since the 2007–08 financial crisis, an explosion of academic work and political activism has been devoted to explaining how neoliberalism is fundamentally to blame for the massive growth in inequality.
A bit over 40 years ago the UK and the United States—followed within a few years by most of the rest of western Europe—embarked on a radical experiment in governance and economics.
As the GOP pushes—and passes—broad laws to prohibit books, discussions or mental health services on issues of gender identity or sexual orientation, under the absurd guise of preventing sexual abuse, the Washington Post is laying out a welcome mat for the party's anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.
Mental health programs for children and adolescents will get a major infusion of funds in New York state’s new $220 billion budget, which passed Saturday after contentious negotiations over criminal justice issues.
Legislators approved significant reimbursement rate increases for community-based mental health programs, as well as bonuses for frontline workers. The budget also includes $10 million to address staffing and capacity shortages at state-run psychiatric hospitals, though it does not earmark funds to reopen beds that were shut down under a “Transformation Plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. A measure proposed by the state Senate that would have committed New York to restore 200 state-run beds died in budget negotiations.
With the death of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Kremlin seeks someone to replace him as the leader of the political party LDPR, the nation’s loyalist right-wing alternative to United Russia. At the moment, the main candidate for Zhirinovsky’s role appears to be LDPR’s acting leader in the State Duma, Leonid Slutsky (the same politician whom multiple women journalists have accused of sexual harassment). Meanwhile, sources told Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev that the Putin administration is considering a gradual “disposal” of the party altogether.
While the DFEH’s attempts to block the settlement didn’t seem to be motivated by the settlement’s size (or relative lack thereof), it did seem to want to pursue harsher penalties than the EEOC proposed. Now with the DFEH’s top two lawyers gone, allegedly at the behest of the California governor, it seems like political forces (who could have a vested interest in Activision’s board or even Microsoft’s) have decided Activision Blizzard has properly atoned. In an email to The Verge, DFEH deputy communication director Fahizah Alim said, “DFEH does not comment on personnel matters. DFEH will continue to vigorously enforce California’s civil rights and fair housing laws.”
Except there’s no mention of grooming in the law. Instead, it prohibits “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade, “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
So if casting those who oppose this law as “pro-grooming” is not rooted in evidence, what is it rooted in? In part, it’s a dog whistle to the party’s most extreme, conspiracy-minded base. The foundation of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that there is a mass, secret, underground ring of Satanic pedophiles whose members consist of Democratic leaders and Hollywood elites. Painting anyone who opposes Florida’s law (i.e., mainly Democrats) as being pro-grooming fits neatly into that narrative and winks at QAnon adherents without requiring politicians on the right to actually endorse the outlandish theory.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently spoke with The Atlantic about his views on religion, politics, and economics. The heir to the Saudi throne emphasized Islam as the fundamental foundation of the state, denounced Islamist extremism, and insisted that he aims at returning Saudi Arabia “back to pure Islam.”
The interview is important for several reasons. The crown prince (often known by his initials, MBS) is arguably among the most powerful and influential Muslims of our day, and Saudi Arabia is the most cherished place on the planet for billions of Muslims. It is the heartland of Islam, where Muhammad presumably lived and preached. Moreover, Saudi Arabia is the epicenter of Sunni Islam—a version commonly followed by more than 85 percent of Muslims worldwide.
A month ago, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a “Notice of Inquiry” (NOI) around a subject close to our hearts: secure Internet routing. In this NOI, the FCC asked a series of questions to the public about how data is routed around the Internet, and what kinds of security controls, standards, and efforts exist to protect those routes. (Note that the FCC is not proposing regulations currently, just asking for more information.)
We worked with our community to submit comments in this proceeding. We’ll describe the high notes here.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene disparaged the 1.33 million active-duty U.S. Department of Defense members, including the 481,254 active-duty U.S. Army members by declaring that joining America's Armed Forces is "like throwing your life away."
“As a global community of civil society actors, we do not demand a one-size-fits-all approach to responding to human rights crises,” the groups said in the statement. “What we are asking platforms to do is to invest more time and effort in improving their operations now, not when unfolding violence gets into the media spotlight and it is often already too late to act.”
It has become increasingly clear that platforms have followed the same playbook in Ukraine as they have elsewhere: surface-level or extractive relationships with civil society; insufficient support for local language and lack of understanding of context; and responsiveness to media pressure, not civil society pressure or human rights concerns. The Russian invasion of 2022 was a re-escalation of events that began in 2014, and platforms should have been better prepared.
The statement issued Wednesday calls upon platforms to be better prepared going forward, and urges them to address structural inequalities in how they treat different countries, markets, and regions. Specifically, the statement calls upon platforms to provide:
A study conducted by News Guard analysts reported that when a new searcher looked up information about the war, TikTok search results were rampant with false information in its top 20 results. By the time they kept scrolling the feed, it gave miscellaneous information which was hard to sort as reliable or unreliable – thereby potentially making it more challenging for users to access the reliable information about the war.
Social media has largely affected how people, governments and institutions react to the Russia- Ukraine war and has played a major role in shaping public opinion. There have been quite a few instances in which videos on TikTok were proven to be fake: [...]
In wartime, supporters of one side or another share "military success" videos of combat footage, often set to music. Besides the moral and ethical issues of spreading such explicitly violent content, there is another problem: Often such videos show military footage from completely different conflicts. This DW fact check examines one example from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war to see how it stands up to the claims made by the account that posted it. We will also share the methods and tools we used to verify the footage used.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded but independent news organization founded decades ago, is trying to push its broadcasts deeper into Russia. Its Russian-language articles are published on copies of its websites called “mirrors,” which Russian censors seek out in a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole. Audience numbers have surged during the war despite the censorship.
American organizations are also promoting the use of software that allows Russian citizens to leap over the nascent firewall erected by the Kremlin to control internet access.
Former Brown University professor and current president of Heterodox Academy John Tomasi is hoping to see that direction change. He says the academy’s latest national survey, the Campus Expression Survey, shows that 65% of students self-censor in the attempt to avoid offending others with their opinions.
EU co-legislators agreed ‘in principle’ on a ban on adverts targeting minors and utilising sensitive data, in the DSA. The EU Council accepted this inclusion in the text as part of the broader package deal on the Digital Markets Act. Still, the proposed compromised text revealed by EURACTIV left the Parliament and NGOs unsatisfied as the part on sensitive data merely referred to the GDPR. Moreover, the Council’s text included these provisions in the recitals, whereas lawmakers want it in an article. The European Commission offered to draft a new compromise. Still, Parliament’s leading negotiator Christel Schaldemose slammed the EU executive’s previous text as unsatisfactory and put it on MEPs to come up with a proposal possibly as soon as next week.
Schaldemose got through her proposal on recommender systems, but everything else was sent back to the technical level, including dark patterns. The part on risk assessment got blocked, and the Commission is now working on a new compromise. Although the waiver system will likely get killed in the end, centre-right MEPs are standing in asking for exemptions for SMEs, even though left-to-centre lawmakers are actually closer to the Council position than theirs. In terms of supervisory fees, the Commission estimated it would total around €20 or €30 million, which seems to suggest €1 million per very large online platform since 20/30 VLOPs are expected in total. The crisis management mechanism will include a sunset close as a safeguard against what was considered excessive executive power by the European Commission. No technical meeting has been scheduled for next week (plenary) or the following one (green week). The most likely date for the next trilogue seems to be 27 April, but it is yet to be confirmed.
Reforming Section 230 won’t help with content moderation on online platforms, observers said Monday.
“If we’re going to have some content moderation standards, the government is going to be, usually, the worst person to do it,” said Chris Cox, a member of the board of directors at tech lobbyist Net Choice and a former Congressman.
The UK and US governments rightly express outrage over reports of war crimes in Ukraine. Yet while doing so, they make an example of Assange for revealing, with definitive proof, their own war crimes. While the media decries the spread of disinformation and attacks against journalists, most stay silent as an actual journalist slowly dying in prison for doing his duty of informing the public.
Police in Somalia's breakaway Somaliland region arrested at least seven journalists Wednesday, including a VOA reporter, as they covered a prison scuffle in the region's capital, Hargeisa.
VOA Somali stringer Sagal Mustafe Hassan was freed after a short detention, but the other journalists remained in custody at Hargeisa's central police station.
Among the journalists arrested were BBC reporter Hassan Gallaydh, local MM TV journalist Mohamed Ilig and Ahmed Mohamud Yusuf of Saab TV.
Appalled human rights defenders condemned Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday after the first bus of migrants he sent from the U.S.-Mexico border to the nation's capital arrived outside an office building that houses€ Fox News, which quickly provided glowing coverage of the far-right official's latest effort to demonize immigrants.
"Of course Greg Abbott ordered the bus with migrants on it to show up in front of Fox News headquarters here in D.C.,"€ Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, wrote on social media. "It's an incredibly dehumanizing and cynical stunt."
A startling revolutionary intrusion in ancient times that shifts our attention beyond the local and parochial—a “Greek male refuses the invitation to define himself by lineage, city, social class, even free birth, even gender. He insists on defining himself in terms of a characteristic that he shares with all other human beings, male and female, Greek and non-Greek, slave and free. And by calling himself not simply a dweller in the world but a citizen of the world, Diogenes suggests, as well, the possibility of a politics, or an approach to politics, that focuses on the humanity we share rather than the marks of local origin, status, class, and gender that divide us. It is the first step on the road that leads to Kant’s idea of the ‘kingdom of ends,’ a virtual polity of moral aspiration that unites all rational beings (although Diogenes, more inclusive, does not limit the community to the ‘rational’), and to Kant’s vision of a cosmopolitan politics that will join all humanity under laws given not by convention and class but by free moral choice” (p.2). Kant, the cosmopolitan visionary, never travelled more than thirty miles from his home, yet he dreamt of world entirely peaceful.
A lengthy quotation: but it corrals the elemental features of the cosmopolitan vision of one humanity; it follows that this moral vision might engender a cosmopolitan politics and a world organization beyond competing and warring nation-states. James Ingram (Radical cosmopolitics: the ethics and politics of democratic universalism (2013) puts it this way: “Cosmopolitics is an attempt to realize the importance of universalism—to grasp the human world as one and ourselves, to at least some extent, is connected to, and therefore at least to some degree responsible for, all of it. Cosmopolitics, as I will use the term, is the attempt to act politically in the world on the basis of this understanding” (p. 24). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “World government” (2012) defines world government as “the idea of all humankind united under one common political authority. Arguably, it has not existed so far in human history, yet proposals for a unified global political authority have existed since ancient times—in the ambition of kings, popes and emperors, and the dreams of poets and philosophers” (p. 1).
We speak with Starbucks Workers United organizer and barista Jaz Brisack on the growing Starbucks union drive that has swept across 30 U.S. states since she helped successfully organize the first U.S. unionized location in Buffalo, New York, last December. Starbucks Workers United has now successfully unionized over a dozen Starbucks shops, and about 200 stores have filed for union elections, covering 5,000 workers in 30 states. This all comes despite an aggressive union-busting campaign from the Starbucks Corporation that includes firing pro-union workers and forcing employees to attend anti-union meetings — a practice the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel has argued is illegal under federal law. Meanwhile, the NLRB says it’s planning to formally accuse Starbucks of illegally firing a group of seven employees who were fighting to unionize their Starbucks store in Memphis, Tennessee. Brisack also talks about Amazon’s first union in Staten Island, New York, saying the move “shows we as workers and as the labor movement can take on 15 baristas in a tiny Starbucks or 8,000 workers in an Amazon warehouse as long as we are standing together.”
Coming of age in a rural, conservative-leaning town of 500 is in itself no easy feat. Growing up queer in such an environment is much harder. Supporting queer youth, regardless of one’s own political and religious beliefs, is crucial.
One of the many symptoms of the many, deep-rooted, law enforcement sicknesses is how often officers decide to “help” people by harming them. That’s why some cities have chosen to redirect mental health issues to mental health professionals, rather than to armed officers who view anything they can’t immediately address with yelling and pointing of weapons as a threat that must be violently subdued.
For years, we’ve noted how one of the greasier lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of civil rights groups to provide the illusion of broad support for what’s often awful policy.
The loud music woke up Santa Ana City Councilman Jonathan Ryan Hernandez, among other neighbors, the video shows.
An officer is seen in the video telling Hernandez they were playing the music because the person recording them wasn’t allowing them to conduct their investigation.
When Hernandez asks officers again about the music, the officer says “because he will get copyright infringement,” the video shows.
Lewis was one of more than 50 gig workers killed while driving for companies like Lyft, Uber and DoorDash since 2017, according to a new report from the advocacy group Gig Workers Rising.
And while it is hard to know what companies could have done to prevent the deaths, the worker advocates say there was a lack of support in the aftermath of the killings.
Forty women who were detained on Women's Day have been indicted for "attending an illegal demonstration unarmed and not dispersing despite a warning."
The women were battered and detained near Kadñköy Pier, where they went to cross the city's European side by ferry to attend the Feminist Night March in Taksim.
Prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, speaking on behalf of Lyoya's family, on Wednesday called for the officer in the shooting to be fired and prosecuted.
Civil rights groups on Wednesday responded to the release of video footage showing a Grand Rapids, Michigan police officer fatally shooting unarmed 26-year-old Black motorist Patrick Lyoya earlier this month by condemning what they called excessive use of force and demanding the killer be identified and brought to justice.
"An unregistered license plate should not be a death sentence."
Here we go again. It’s a plan that almost never works but one that legislators and the special interest groups pushing for it continue to believe will shower them with untold riches from billion dollar tech companies that they blame for the destruction of local content creation.
On any given day you can find a stellar array of phenomenal reporting in the pages of the New York Times. On any other day you can also find a rotating crop of terrible gibberish, from COVID coverage that large swaths of the medical community say borders on journalistic malpractice, to numerous examples of “view from nowhere” reporting that often normalizes and amplifies authoritarian rhetoric and its harms.
As Mike noted the other day, state after state has been playing “fuck around and find out” with all sorts of bills that fundamentally interfere with the First Amendment and Section 230. So far Florida has already wasted over $700k in taxpayer dollars trying to defend their indefensibly censorial law. And now Texas is setting fire to the public treasury as well, as it appeals the injunction of their stupid attempt to control what people can say on the Internet.
About a month ago, I was checking my webserver logs when I noticed mutiple requests to pages that have long been marked as gone. The webserver has been returning HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) status code 410 Gone [1], in some cases, for over fifteen years! At first I was annoyed—why are these webbots still requesting pages I've marked as gone? But then I started thinking about it—if I were writing a webbot to scan web pages, what would I do if I got a “gone” status? Well, I'd delete any references to said page, for sure. But when what if I came across the link on another page? I don't have the link (because I deleted it earlier) so let's add it to scan. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So there's a page or pages out there that are still linking to the pages that are long gone. And upong further investigation, I found the pages—my own site!
Sigh.
As I've been cleaning up blog entries [1] (the first few years also have some pretty bad formatting issues) I've noticed something—I used to write a lot more back then. I think part of that is that the whole “blogging” thing was new, and after twenty-plus years, I've covered quite a bit of material. There have been multiple instances w
And it's not like it's a single web robot making these requests—no! It's *three different web robots!*
Data released today by IT asset management platform provider Lansweeper indicates that upgrades to Windows 11 have almost tripled over the past three months, but the overall adoption rate remains miniscule.
The survey of more than 10 million Microsoft devices by Lansweeper’s PC management software showed 1.44% now run Windows 11, an increase from the 0.52% of PCs that ran the OS in January.
The Offeror will announce the preliminary percentage of the Shares validly tendered during the Subsequent Offer Period on or about April 29, 2022 and the final percentage on or about May 3, 2022. The offer price will be paid to each shareholder who has validly accepted, and not validly withdrawn, the Tender Offer during the Subsequent Offer Period in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Tender Offer, on or about May 4, 2022. The offer price will be paid in accordance with the payment procedures described in the terms and conditions of the Tender Offer. The actual time of receipt of the payment to each shareholder will depend on the schedules for payment transactions between financial institutions and the agreements, if any, between the shareholder and its account operator, custodian or nominee.
Netflix is set to acquire Finnish gaming company Next Games. The streaming giant's takeover bid has been accepted by shareholders who hold a 94 percent stake in Next Games.
Netflix's share in the company would rise to 94.5 percent when taking stock options into account. The agreement allows for the remaining shareholders to accept the offer at a later stage.
The company found itself on the EU competition enforcer's radar again after German software provider NextCloud, France's OVHcloud (OVH.PA) and two other companies filed complaints about Microsoft's cloud practices.
"The Commission has information that Microsoft may be using its potentially dominant position in certain software markets to foreclose competition regarding certain cloud computing services," the questionnaire said.
Cook was talking about the Open Markets Act, which would forbid app stores with more than 50 million domestic users from requiring app developers from using in-app payment options controlled by the application store owner — in this case, Apple.
In a scathing letter on Wednesday, more than 300 public health experts, academics, labor leaders, and activists accused rich countries of denying the world an "early exit" from the coronavirus pandemic by continuing to stonewall efforts to expand vaccine production and distribution in low-income nations.
Addressed to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the new letter calls on the two leaders to reject a recently leaked compromise proposal that departs dramatically from South Africa and India's popular original plan to waive coronavirus-related patents for the duration of the pandemic.
The website will serve as a gateway to the CCB before the full opening of the board to users of copyrighted materials later this spring. The U.S. Copyright Office says the website is dedicated to helping everyone understand the mission and processes behind the Copyright Claims Board. Once the CCB starts hearing claims later this year, the website will be the primary location for information about filing and responding to claims, opting out of a proceeding, and accessing the CCB’s handbook.
Brand executive Rich Santiago has joined Vice Media Group as senior vice president of brand strategy and creative experience, Variety has learned exclusively. He will report to Nadja Bellan-White, Global Chief Marketing Officer, VICE Media Group, who announced the news on Wednesday.
Santiago joins the company from Meta (formerly Facebook), and will partner with Vice’s existing creative and editorial teams.
All writing elides, to a greater or lesser degree, the way it came to be what you read. How many times did I start that last sentence? Five times. But four of them are no more. Had I penned those words in ink, however, scribbling away on a sheet of paper, traces of each false start would remain, and you would see my thinking in a way that, reading me now, you do not. Composition in digital media has, in this way, made for a special kind of frictionless world of sublated erasures, deleted deletions, and endless, invisible recompositions. In the affecting work of sensory history that follows, Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first. We write, now, of course, with light, looking at glowing screens. But it is a strangeness of our monitors that we erase what we have written with still more light: a blinking cursor, backing over the words. What is Goethe supposed to have said upon his deathbed? Mehr Licht! More light! And he was erased. What follows, too, reaches for light — but the light will not be grasped.
Japanese publishing giant Kadokawa is known for aggressively responding to copyright infringers. The company is currently engaged in a massive lawsuit against Cloudflare and court documents filed in the United States show that Kadokawa is also prepared to go after smaller players, in this case seven people who uploaded manga to YouTube.
Josh Hawley sucks. I disagree with him on about just about everything. And I am appalled by his support of the rioters who invaded the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. It’s disappointing and shameful that a United States Senator would endorse a riot, especially a riot intended to challenge the indisputably legitimate election of the President of the United States. But the First Amendment says Hawley is entitled to his opinion, and he’s entitled to express it. And he’s entitled to quote other people to make his point.
