 VirtualBox 6.1.34 is the seventeenth maintenance release in the VirtualBox 6.1 series and comes three months after VirtualBox 6.1.32 with a lot of changes for Linux systems. First and foremost, it introduces initial support for the latest and greatest Linux 5.17 kernel series for both Linux guests and hosts, which means that you’ll now be able to run GNU/Linux distributions powered by Linux kernel 5.17 inside virtual machines, as well as to install VirtualBox on Linux 5.17-powered distributions
Almost a year in the works, QEMU 7.0 is here with major new features like support for logging guest events via the ACPI ERST interface, improved security label support for the virtiofs shared file system for virtual machines, improved flexibility for fleecing backups, including support for non-qcow2 images, as well as support for Intel AMX on the x86 platform.
I have been using serverless computing and storage for nearly five years and I'm finally tired of it. I do feel like it has become a cult. In a cult, brainwashing is done so gradually, people have no idea it is going on. I feel like this has happened across the board with so many developers; many don’t even realize they are clouded. In my case, I took the serverless marketing and hype hook, line, and sinker for the first half of my serverless journey. After working with several companies small and large, I have been continually disappointed as our projects grew. The fact is, serverless technology is amazingly simple to start, but becomes a bear as projects and teams accelerate. A serverless project typically includes a fully serverless stack which can include (using a non-exhaustive list of AWS services): [...]
While I was enjoying the last sip of my tea, I thought about ways to take advantage of the arbitrary file upload vulnerability. Of course, I could overwrite configuration files or upload HTML documents to trigger XSS. Yet, I had a better idea.
From the error message as mentioned above, we know that the webserver is Java-based. Accordingly, I guessed it must be possible to execute JavaServer Pages (JSP) files. JSP allows web developers to write HTML code containing dynamic Java parts executed on the server-side. This implies, an attacker in control of a JSP file that is loaded by the server can also execute arbitrary code on the server-side.
Tmux (TM) is an acronym that stands for Terminal Multiplexing. It is a free and open-source tool that allows you to open many terminals in a single desktop window by adding more than one terminal window. A “tabbed” interface (without actual tabs) is the result, allowing for tab flipping between windows without using the mouse.
Before diving into the cheat sheet, you must ensure that Tmux is installed on your Linux OS. We shall brush through this article, but if you need a detailed report on how to install and use Tmux on Linux, check this comprehensive article.
Although it is not recommended to do so, it may be useful to know how to install the latest kernel on Debian 11 and derivatives. Let’s go for it, it’s easy.
This post is about OpenCTI Installation with Portainer.
OpenCTI is an open source platform allowing organizations to manage their cyber threat intelligence knowledge and observables. It has been created in order to structure, store, organize and visualize technical and non-technical information about cyber threats.
The data is structured using a knowledge schema based on the STIX2 standards. It has been designed as a modern web application including a GraphQL API and an UX oriented frontend. Also, OpenCTI can be integrated with other tools and applications such as MISP, TheHive, MITRE ATT&CK etc.
If you click on the "www" icon on the desktop, then Firefox will run, in a container.
I received an email from Mike, he would prefer to run SeaMonkey. Given the browsing limitations of SM these days, I don't know why anyone would want to use SM for general web browsing. Unless you are only going to sites that SM can handle.
The org-mode extension to emacs is popular in part because it lets you create and follow hyperlink between files. This is useful for keeping notes organized.
Depending on your needs, you may not need org-mode for simple linked notes. That's because there is a standard emacs keybinding that lets you open the file path under your cursor.
Much like Linux, modern versions of OpenBSD are theoretically able to talk to a suitable local IPMI using the standard ipmi(4) kernel driver. This is imprecise although widely understood terminology; in more precise terms, OpenBSD can talk to a machine's BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) that implements the IPMI specification using one of a number of standard interfaces, as covered in the "System Interfaces" section of ipmi(4). However, OpenBSD throws us a curve ball in that the ipmi(4) driver is normally present in the default OpenBSD kernel but not enabled.
I wanted to get in on the OpenBSD/riscv64 bandwagon, but I don't have the money to spend on fancy new hardware. Fortunately, QEMU has RISC-V support. Unfortunately, I could not find any instructions to install OpenBSD on it. We'll just have to figure it out ourselves.
Additionally, my laptop for $DAYJOB is running Windows 11. It's also the fastest machine I have at the moment, so I'd prefer to use it for running my OpenBSD/riscv64 VM. It will also let me do some development work in my office.
Let's figure out how to set this all up.
list of new features and enhancements of the Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish".
Global smartphone shipments fell by 11% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2022 due to sluggish demand, the technology analyst company Canalys claims, but with no numbers to back it up.
Due to its open-source nature, this isn't the first app that lets you tap into its network, but it is the first official client released by the Mastodon team (via XDA Developers). Although this social network doesn't have the 200-million-strong user base that Twitter has, the fact that it's open-source means you won't have to worry about a growing plague of ads, and your feed will always remain in chronological order. It comes at a strong time for Mastodon, too. After Elon Musk's initial investment in Twitter, Mastodon saw a spike in new users that's only likely to grow now that it's officially available to the billions of Android users worldwide.
Did you know it’s actually possible to build a rich UI that runs completely in the terminal? Programs like htop and tmux use a terminal user interface (TUI) because they are often run on servers that don’t have access to a GUI. Many developer tools also a TUI since developers spend so much time in the terminal anyway. There are even a number of games that run entirely in the terminal. In this article we’ll use the Go programing language to create our own TUI.
Ansible and Jenkins offer features that support a DevOps approach to delivering quality software, but the products are geared toward different use cases. See how the DevOps tools' features compare.
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What is a script? Imagine a movie theater where different actors are performing. How do they know their part of acting? It’s because they have a script which tells them how to act. Similarly, a computer performs what a script dictates, and a bash shell performs what a bash script dictates.
On the shortlist of workshop luxuries, we’d bet a lot of hackers would include an overhead crane. Having the ability to lift heavy loads safely and easily opens up a world of new projects, and puts the shop into an entirely different class of capabilities.
Among the many stories that Billy Wilder liked to tell late in his life was the one he recounted with great gusto the night he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1988 Academy Awards ceremony. Shortly after he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, Wilder had to cross the border into Mexico to renew his visa at the American consulate in Mexicali. He was particularly anxious about the procedure, since he had left behind nearly all supporting documents in his hasty departure from Nazi Germany and feared this might result in his automatic rejection. He explained his situation to the consular official, who seemed more concerned with enforcing US immigration policy than sympathizing with a foreigner’s plight. When asked what he did for a living, Wilder replied sheepishly, “I write movies.” After a tense moment of prolonged pacing, the official punched two stamps in his passport: “Write some good ones,” he said.
For the next 50-odd years, Wilder would write, and eventually direct and produce, quite a few good ones—more than 30 in all. In collaboration with his long-time writing partner Charles Brackett, he began with a string of highly successful, innuendo-laden screwball comedy scripts, including Ninotchka for Ernst Lubitsch, Wilder’s lifelong role model, and Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks. But he quickly turned to graver matters, using his experiences in that Mexican border town for the semi-autobiographical screenplay for Hold Back the Dawn, written in 1941, about a Romanian dancer, Georges Iscovescu, languishing in a shabby hotel with other Middle European refugees in the hopes of securing an entrance visa. Like Wilder himself, Iscovescu is “a man perpetually in transit.”
Viktor Tsoi: A Hero’s Path, the first major biographical exhibition about the co-founder and lead singer of the Soviet-era rock band Kino, opened at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg on January 15, 2022. It features Viktor Tsoi’s paintings and drawings, rare archival recordings, his favourite vinyl records and video cassettes, as well as personal items, many of which have been stored by the musician’s loved ones for thirty years. The exhibition was due to close on April 15, but has been extended until June 21, which would have been Tsoi’s sixtieth birthday. Meduza spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Dmitry Mishenin.
Lengthy automatic salutations can be tiresome (“I’m using Inbox When Ready to protect my focus” is simply too much information). If you want to cut a thread short, consider “Thank you in advance”. Yes, it may strike some as presumptuous. But it has the virtue of saving you from a follow-up email.
In the previous post, the intrepid Jesse Blum and I analyzed metadata from over 6,500 job descriptions for data roles in seven European countries. In this post, we’ll apply text analysis to those job postings to better understand the technologies and skills that employers are looking for in data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, and machine learning engineers.
To shed light on and, in our view, provide a large part of the answer to these fundamental questions, we offer an in-depth analysis of Sweden’s experience. The Swedish school system has gone through extraordinary swings in education policies, regulatory frameworks, and national curricula. These include a radical marketization of primary and secondary schooling that is currently unparalleled in any wealthy Western country.
In this book, we draw heavily on many years of our own research published in peer-reviewed journals, Johan’s Ph.D. thesis, and Magnus’s interdisciplinary project involving a professor of neuroscience (Martin Ingvar), a humanities professor (Inger Enkvist), and a Ph.D. student in the history of ideas and sciences (Ingrid Dunér, formerly WÃÂ¥llgren) as well as numerous popular essays and books in Swedish.
A line follower is a common project for anyone wishing to make a start in robotics, a small wheeled device usually with some kind of optical sensor which allows it to follow a line drawn on the surface over which it runs. In most cases they incorporate a small microcontroller or perhaps an analogue computer which supplies power and steering control, but as the Crayon Car from [Greg Zumwalt] demonstrates, it’s possible to make a line follower without any brains at all.
Yet another Day of the Chocolate Bunnies has passed by, and what did you do to mark the occasion? You likely kicked back and relaxed, surrounded by whatever you gave up for Lent, but good for you if you mixed chocolate and electronics like [Repeated Failure] did. They created a completely edible chocolate Easter bunny that screams when bitten.
Last time, I told you how to get started with the “Black Pill” STM32F411 board using the Mbed OS. The example program, admittedly, didn’t use many of the features of the OS, unless you count what the USB serial port driver uses behind the scenes. However, this time, we’ll make a practical toy that lets you adjust your PC’s volume level with a pot.
Intel initially manufactured dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). It was an inflection point in computing – by implementing memory in an integrated circuit, DRAM was cheaper, smaller, and faster than magnetic-core memory units.
The company grew insanely fast for a decade, growing to over $400M in sales by 1978. But Intel wasn't the only company manufacturing DRAM by then. Competitors like NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Mostek were growing just as fast.
As far as input devices go, the potentiometer is pretty straightforward: turn it left, turn it right, and you’ve pretty much seen all there is to see. For many applications that’s all you need, but we can certainly improve on the experience with modern technology. Enter this promising project from [upir] that pairs a common potentiometer with a cheap OLED display to make for a considerably more engaging user experience.
When it comes to sci-fi, it’s hard to go past€ Star Wars, and many submissions to our contest land in that exact universe. [Kevin Harrington]’s entry is one such example, with his animatronic Baby Yoda that’s exactly as cute as you’d hope it would be.€ €
Legalizing recreational marijuana lowers demand for prescription drugs through state Medicaid programs, according to a new study by researchers in New York and Indiana.
"Our results suggest substitution away from prescription drugs and potential cost savings for state Medicaid programs."
Dr. István Körmendi turned 98 in the summer of 2021, but he is still working as a general practitioner – and did so throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. He started attending medical university in 1941 – but had to do so in secret because of being of Jewish descent. (At the time Hungary had a law which did not permit Jews to attend university.) The Second World War interrupted his studies, but he finished them after the war. Today, he has patients he has known for 70 years. Subtitles: Dominic Spadacene
I will admit that the headline for this post is a question that I never thought I would ever ask for any reason at all at any time ever. Since the pandemic hit, Carlson has, of course, become one of the foremost purveyors of COVID-19 misinformation and antivaccine talking points in the US while promoting ivermectin and other COVID-19 “miracle cures” long after science had shown them to be quackery. He is also almost certainly the foremost propagandist for white supremacist and fascism in the US, at least in terms of his popularity, reach, and nightly opportunity to promote such ideas to a wide and devoted audience. Given the veritable panoply of conspiracy theories, quackery, COVID-19 disinformation, and antivaccine pseudoscience that Carlson has spewed over the last couple of years, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised about anything I’ve seen from him.
Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization issued a statement warning that the COVID-19 pandemic remains a "public health emergency of international concern" as cases continue to rise worldwide. The day after, the cases globally reported were over the 500-million threshold.
The organization said that some countries have decided while facing such circumstances to lift their anti-COVID mandates due to gloomy economic outlooks, a deficient policy of implementation, and general fatigue to strike the virus. The WHO explained that the pandemic is far from its end as the COVID-19 remains to spread worldwide.
Mizelle, 35, was only eight years out of law school at University of Florida when Trump appointed her to the lifetime position in 2020. The Daily Beast noted at the time that her only trial experience was as an intern, and that she held four clerkships, including one for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Mizelle was rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association prior to her appointment, citing her lack of experience.
The Biden administration on Tuesday signaled a willingness to challenge a U.S. judge's decision to strike down its mask mandate for public transportation if federal health officials determine the policy is still necessary at this stage of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released a statement from spokesperson Anthony Coley after Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, appointed by former President Donald Trump to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, declared the mandate unlawful.
Yeah, I’ll admit it: I’m a Windows person. Two years ago this summer, I traded in an overworked Windows 7 laptop that was literally screaming in pain for a SFF Windows 10 box as my main machine. But 10 might mean the end for this scribe, who has used Windows since the late 1980s. Admittedly, it’s for a fairly petty reason — Microsoft have gotten rid of alternate-location taskbar support in Windows 11. As in, you can have the taskbar anywhere you want, as long as it’s the bottom of the screen.
The company said it had issued updates for the stable branch of Chrome for the Windows, Mac and Linux ports. But, as usual, it did not provide details about CVE-2022-1364.
The frequent security issues are bound to have a negative effect on Google as it tries to paint Microsoft as a more of a problem in the security space than its own products.
Android apps have, historically speaking, never been good on large displays. There's a reason Google is dedicating so much of its time trying to make tablets good again. From basic UI elements to poor app support, Android software has never been much fun on large slates and Chromebooks.
Of course, Windows is an entirely different beast. When Microsoft announced Android apps support for Windows 11 last year, it was unclear exactly what purpose it would serve. What gap would Android software fill on such a robust platform with decades of support from developers? The answer, it turns out, remains pretty unclear.
The analysis focused on ten major ransomware families and the goal was to encrypt nearly 100,000 files with a total size of approximately 54 Gb. The files were stored on four hosts — two running Windows 10 and two running Windows Server 2019. In addition to encryption speed and duration, the researchers also looked at how the ransomware used system resources.
They measured the encryption time for Avaddon, Babuk, BlackMatter, Conti, DarkSide, LockBit, Maze, Mespinoza (PYSA), REvil and Ryuk, with 10 samples analyzed for each malware family.
But Meta’s plan immediately drew blowback from developers — who pointed out NFT marketplace OpenSea takes a 2.5% cut of each transaction while LooksRare charges 2% — and some pointed comments from antagonist Apple AAPL, -0.13%.
The Google Project Zero blog is carrying a report on zero-day vulnerabilities found to be exploited during 2021.
There is a growing recognition that forced arbitration agreements impede the defense of fundamental rights. The U.S. Supreme Court hears three cases on forced arbitration this session, and the President recently signed a bill preventing victims of sexual assault and harassment from being forced to settle their claims through forced arbitration. Such clauses trapped these victims by requiring them to waive their rights to a day in court before they could possibly know there would be any reason to sue. More lawmakers should follow suit in recognizing forced arbitration violates our rights. In fact, they should go beyond recognition: they should put it in their laws.€
EFF already believes that for data privacy legislation to be effective, it must have a private right of action, which expressly allows people to sue companies that violate their rights.€ In line with that principle, we also support bills that bar forced arbitration agreements, also known sometimes as pre-dispute arbitration agreements.
Pre-dispute arbitration agreements provide that the parties to a contract must resolve any future legal disputes about that contract through arbitration and not court. The original intent was to create an efficient way for businesses with comparable bargaining power to negotiate and agree upon an alternate means of conflict resolution. In 1925 Congress enacted the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) to mandate enforcement of some of these agreements.€
DataSkop is a collaborative project involving AlgorithmWatch, scientists from University Viadrina Frankfurt, Paderborn University, the University of Potsdam, and mediale pfade, an association for media education. It was developed to help users having a better understanding of applications that are based on data. This includes YouTube’s collecting of their data and processing it for recommendations.
Semenets has posted updates of the AirPods’ journey on his Instagram page, even if he is unlikely to retrieve them. The Find my app can trace devices if they connect to the internet, or if they come close enough to other devices to connect via Bluetooth.
Clearview AI describes itself as ‘The world's largest facial network’. However, a quick search online would reveal that the company has been involved in several scandals, covering the front page of many publications for all the wrong reasons. In fact, since New York Times broke the story about Clearview AI in 2020, the company has been constantly criticised by activists, politicians and data protection authorities around the world. Read below a summary of the many actions taken against the company that hoarded 10 billion images of our faces.
In the midst of the atrocious war currently being waged by Russia on Ukraine, on 14 March 2022 Reuters reported that Clearview AI, the infamous online surveillance company, had offered its services to the Ukrainian defense ministry. A day later in an interview for TechCrunch, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister for Digital Transformation confirmed that the partnership with Clearview AI was “currently in very early development”.
The American media’s approach to war coverage needs to be fundamentally reimagined. We need more reporting on forgotten conflicts—and more stories that spotlight how war ravages people and leads to atrocities.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought immense suffering to the people of that land, while sparking calls for increased military spending in both the United States and Europe. Though that war may prove to be a tragedy for the world, one group is already benefiting from it: US arms contractors.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a televised address late Monday that his country will continue to fight back as Russia ramped up its assault on eastern Ukraine with the goal of fully capturing the Donbas region, a more limited military campaign that comes after Moscow's forces failed to seize Kyiv and other major cities.
"It can now be stated that Russian troops have begun the battle for Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time," Zelenskyy warned Monday night. "A very large part of the entire Russian army is now focused on this offensive."
The meeting was not only important due to its timing or the fact that it reaffirmed the growing ties between Moscow and Beijing, but because of the resolute political discourse articulated by the two top diplomats.
In Huangshan, there was no place for ambiguity. Lavrov spoke of a new ‘world order’, arguing that the world is now “living through a very serious stage in the history of international relations” in reference to the escalating Russia-Ukraine/NATO conflict.
A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit aiming to disqualify GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from congressional office over her role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection can proceed, a decision that allows Georgia voters to challenge the Republican's reelection bid under the 14th Amendment.
Ratified in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bars from public office any member of Congress who, after swearing to support the Constitution, engages in "insurrection or rebellion" or gives "aid or comfort" to insurrectionists.
That conclusion emerges from the recent World Happiness Report-2022, published by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Based on Gallup World Polls conducted from 2019 through 2021, this extensive study provides a revealing look at how roughly 150,000 respondents in 146 countries rated their own happiness. The study’s findings underscore the limited levels of happiness in the world’s major military-economic powers.
There is little doubt about which nations belong in this category. In 2020 (the latest year for which accurate figures are available), the world’s biggest military spenders were the United States (#1), China (#2), India (#3), and Russia (#4). Collectively, they accounted for nearly 59 percent of the world’s military spending and the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons.
The inevitable worldwide impacts of the climate crisis make the idea of war—for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine—feel particularly irrational and anachronistic. At a time when scientists around the globe agree that the€ future of life for our species will require€ immediate worldwide actions to restore the planet, an aggressive invasion of a smaller nation by a large world power like Russia (and whispers of the unthinkable, like a third world war or nuclear violence) is recklessly out of context with the realistic priorities of our times. Large-scale war stands in stark contrast with the one thing the world should be giving critical consideration to presently: cooperation.
Research by peace and conflict studies professors at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, anthropologists Geneviève Souillac and Douglas P. Fry (who are married), has the potential to support the sort of large-scale cooperation and peace our world so desperately needs. The two coauthored€ a study published in the journal Nature€ in 2021 that theorizes how humanity can realistically stop war: develop peace systems. Peace systems,€ defined as existing clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, already exist around the world, on both small and large scales.
And this week on the Project Censored show, we look at the reality behind Uncle Sam’s particular brand of saviorism – talking US economic warfare – also known as US sanctions – which as of 2021 affect a third of humanity with more than 8,000 measures impacting 39 countries. First, we sit down with Code Pink’s Latin America coordinator Leonardo Flores to discuss the sanctions against his home country of Venezuela and how recent US thirst for Venezuelan oil could translate into the much needed lifting of some of the most oppressive sanctions. Next, we sit down with Jacquie Luqman, organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace and radio host to discuss the economic warfare against Afghanistan – which analysts suggest could prove to be deadlier in one year than 20 years of active war on the ground – and also what our role is in combating these acts of violence, as children of the empire.€
Mass flight from this great zone of conflict, which stretches from Mali to Afghanistan and Turkey to Somalia, will go on as long as the conflicts that first set the exodus in motion continue. These are the true generators of the immigration crisis that has engulfed Europe over the past 10 years or more, and has done so much to toxify its politics. Boris Johnson’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is only the latest bid to gain political advantage from the anti-immigrant reaction.
Political choices made by the West
As the war in Ukraine heads for its third month amid a rising toll of death and destruction, Washington and its European allies are scrambling, so far unsuccessfully, to end that devastating, globally disruptive conflict. Spurred by troubling images of executed Ukrainian civilians scattered in the streets of Bucha and ruined cities like Mariupol, they are already trying to use many tools in their diplomatic pouches to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to desist. These range from economic sanctions and trade embargoes to the confiscation of the assets of some of his oligarch cronies and the increasingly massive shipment of arms to Ukraine. Yet none of it seems to be working.
World War II demonstrated this ugliness in the Holocaust and in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Hiroshima and the Holocaust rose two mighty movements, one for peace and against the perils of further nuclear attacks, and the other for an end to the divisions of humanity and for a nonalignment from these divisions. The Stockholm Appeal of 1950, signed by 300 million people, called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. Five years later, 29 countries from Africa and Asia, representing 54 percent of the world’s population, gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, to sign a 10-point pledge against war and for the “promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.” The Bandung Spirit was for peace and for nonalignment, for the peoples of the world to put their efforts into building a process to eradicate history’s burdens (illiteracy, ill health, hunger) by using their social wealth. Why spend money on nuclear weapons when money should be spent on classrooms and hospitals?
Despite the major gains of many of the new nations that had emerged out of colonialism, the overwhelming force of the older colonial powers prevented the Bandung Spirit from defining human history. Instead, the civilization of war prevailed. This civilization of war is revealed in the massive waste of human wealth in the production of armed forces—sufficient to destroy hundreds of planets—and the use of these armed forces as the first instinct to settle disputes. Since the 1950s, the battlefield of these ambitions has not been in Europe or in North America, but rather it has been in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—areas of the world where old colonial sensibilities believe that human life is less important. This international division of humanity—which says that a war in Yemen is normal, whereas a war in Ukraine is horrific—defines our time. There are 40 wars taking place across the globe; there needs to be political will to fight to end each of these, not just those that are taking place within Europe. The Ukrainian flag is ubiquitous in the West; what are the colors of the Yemeni flag, of the Sahrawi flag, and of the Somali flag?
On Monday, the Pentagon announced the US will soon begin training the Ukrainian military in using howitzer artillery in an unnamed country. Presumably this will be in a NATO member state. If Russian intelligence found out where, might it attack to stop the howitzers from being deployed against Russian forces in Ukraine? Almost assuredly not, as that would trigger a wider war, invoking NATO's self-defense provision, which would be catastrophic for Russia.
Some U.S. officials are considering whether to issue a formal apology to the Marshall Islands, a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean that the United States subjected to years of nuclear testing and human experimentation during the Cold War.€
As Russia ramped up its war on Ukraine with a focus on capturing the Donbas region, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday called for a four-day "humanitarian pause" later this week, leading up to when Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians will celebrate Easter.
"Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance."
They call her “the conscience of St. Petersburg.” For twenty years now, 76-year-old Yelena Andreyevna Osipova has been protesting war and the Russian government. An artist and teacher by training, Osipova spent her career teaching children to draw. These days, she brings her anti-war posters out to St. Petersburg’s central streets. In March 2022, she was arrested several times and footage of Osipova surrounded by riot police went viral online. In an interview with Meduza, Yelena Osipova talked about political protest, art, the Putin regime, and Russia’s future. This is her story in her own words.
On Tuesday, April 19, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment said that Russian bombardment had destroyed Mariupol’s Azovstal plant “almost completely.” The metalworks plant was serving as a Ukrainian stronghold, where the Azov Regiment and 36th Marine Brigade continued to defend the besieged city. What’s more, according to Ukrainian authorities, at least 1,000 civilians (including children) were hiding in underground shelters at the industrial complex at the time of the Russian assault.€ Here’s what we know so far.
An analysis of the sad reality of Donbas, including: – How Donbas was made a pretext for Russia’s invasion – Economic analysis of the region – Actions by Moscow and Kyiv – Illustration of the rapid and severe de-industrialization – Human rights violations – DPR and LPR as mirrors of Russian political and economic system – Workers’ resistance – Donbas as a Russian neo-colony – Political opposition crushed by both sides – Population loss, collapse of political and econ systems
The loss of form and balance was the central target of Mumford’s often blistering criticism of modern society.€ The city, the pinnacle of human creation, expressed what he saw as a general sickness of a civilization given to the pursuit of endless expansion.
Mumford tracked the philosophy of unlimited expansion to the interrelated rise of capitalism and the nation-state in Europe from the 1300s on, shattering what had been a more balanced development of localities and city states in the middle ages. The previous installment of this series covers that.
Ukraine’s president says Russia has started a major offensive to seize the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine while launching missiles at targets across the country. We go outside of Kyiv to get an update from Peter Zalmayev, director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative. Facing a stronger resistance from Ukrainian defenses than anticipated, Russian President Vladimir Putin is practicing “scorched-earth tactics” and “venting his anger on Ukraine,” says Zalmayev. “His goal remains controlling all of Ukraine, or at least making it a failed state.”
Divers who inspected the hull of a tanker loaded with 750 tonnes of fuel that sank off southeast Tunisia detected no leaks on Sunday, officials said.
The Equatorial Guinea-flagged Xelo, which sank Saturday in the Gulf of Gabes, has settled on its side at a depth of almost 20 metres (65 feet), the environment ministry said.
The Secret Service has reportedly seized more than $100 million in cryptocurrency since 2015 in an effort to crack down on fraudulent digital currency transactions.
David Smith of the Secret Service told CNBC that his office has been tracking the flow of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the blockchain to prevent and combat fraudulent activities.
The U.S. Secret Service is cracking down on illicit digital currency transactions, seizing more than $102 million in cryptocurrency from criminals in connection with fraud-related investigations.
David Smith, assistant director of investigations, said agents and analysts actively track the flow of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the blockchain, similar to an old-fashioned surveillance. Best known for protecting presidents, the Secret Service also conducts financial and cybercrime investigations.
Netflix has 222 million “paying households,” but it estimates the service is shared with over 100 million “additional households,” 30 million of which are in the US and Canada. That indicates there is a massive swath of people who aren’t paying Netflix directly for the ability to stream their favorite shows.
In January, Netflix announced its first monthly subscription increase in two years. Today’s earnings report contains the aftermath: Netflix says it lost 600,000 customers across the US and Canada and that this was “largely the result of our price change which is tracking in-line with our expectations.”
The Biden administration is issuing orders to expand the amount of liquefied natural gas (LNG) that it exports by over 50% as Europe seeks to reduce its reliance on Russian gas. However, by doing so we are decreasing our own energy security, while increasing climate-harming methane emissions and diverting capital expenditures away from green energy to yet more new fossil fuel infrastructure. There are better ways to aid our European allies in their time of energy need.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that climate lawsuits filed by a half-dozen California municipalities seeking to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for damages they knowingly caused should proceed in state court.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit marked the third time this year that a federal appeals court has rejected industry attempts to shift jurisdiction over climate liability lawsuits from state courts to federal court.
In late March, the Alberta government ran a series of ads on Facebook promoting an oil sands pipeline expansion that could have a climate footprint surpassing that of the entire country of Panama.
“Once completed, the Trans Mountain Expansion will allow more responsibly-produced Canadian oil to reach key markets in Asia and beyond,” claimed one ad from the Canadian Energy Centre, which according to Facebook analytics reached an estimated audience size of over one million people. “And with global demand for oil soaring, the pipeline project is more important than ever.”
Roughly 17 million people in the U.S. live within a mile of an oil or gas well — putting them at higher risk of health problems like heart disease, breathing issues, anxiety and depression, and complications during pregnancy, a growing body of research shows.
But all is not equal when it comes to who exactly lives near oil wells — and intentional racial discrimination in federal mortgage policies, reflected in a practice known as “redlining,” may have played a role, according to a new study published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.
While welcoming the White House's move Tuesday to repair some of the damage that the Trump administration did to a federal law known as "the Magna Carta of environmental legislation," green groups also urged President Joe Biden to go even further.
"I'm glad this administration... is moving forward to restore the protections that have helped protect our environment while promoting sustainable development for decades."
In a 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, Walt Kelly's Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
The World Food Program warns an estimated 20 million people in drought-affected parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia could face catastrophic levels of hunger if the region is hit with a fourth consecutive year of drought.
The rains have failed to come to the Horn of Africa nearly a month into the current rainy season, which lasts through May. The past three years of drought have taken a heavy toll. The World Food Program reports crop failure in Ethiopia has plunged 7.2 million people into acute hunger and killed more than a million livestock.
Federal officials say it may be necessary to reduce water deliveries to Colorado River users to prevent the shutdown of a huge dam on the Arizona-Utah border.
Glen Canyon Dam supplies hydropower to some 5 million customers across the U.S. West.
Twenty years ago, 97% of the water in the world was seawater and 3% freshwater. Two-thirds of the freshwater was stored in glaciers. The remaining freshwater was split between surface water and groundwater, with groundwater constituting almost 99%. During the past 20 years, glaciers have melted at an average of 13% per decade. Also in the past 20 years, Utah’s neighboring states, including Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho and the coastal states of California, Washington and Oregon have been in severe to extreme drought.
The Interior Department has proposed holding back water in the lake to maintain Glen Canyon Dam's ability to generate electricity amid what it said were the driest conditions in the region in more than 1,200 years.
An analysis released Monday shows that the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the United States made 254 times more than their median employees in 2021 as executive bonuses and stock awards grew significantly.
According to the latest edition of the Equilar 100, an annual report that spotlights executive pay at leading U.S. companies, median total CEO compensation at top firms soared to $20 million in 2021, a nearly 31% increase from 2020.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged the House Democratic leadership on Tuesday to hold a vote on legislation that would expand Social Security benefits by making wealthy Americans contribute more to the beloved New Deal-era program.
"Republicans are against expanding Social Security, even as millions of seniors are struggling to survive."
No wonder everybody hates tax season: It’s easy to screw up, and nobody wants to get audited, especially while making low wages. It’s a shame (and not just for my mental health, ha ha, lol), because I’m generally pro-taxes. Wealth redistribution is good! We just have a terrible system in place. Proof positive: The average taxpayer — the median U.S. household income is about $67,500, per 2020 Census data — pays an average rate of 13% in federal income tax. Let’s contrast that with how we tax the rich (spoiler alert: not enough).
As ProPublica recently reported, using a trove of IRS documents on the uber-wealthy over the span of 15 years, “The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year,” in spite of our “progressive” tax system. The piece ticks off Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla, and other wealthy men such as failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and philanthropist George Soros as among those who evaded federal income tax for whole years.
The conditions of nearly 90% of the International Monetary Fund's pandemic-related loans are forcing developing nations suffering some of the world's worst humanitarian crises to implement austerity measures that fuel further impoverishment and inequality, an analysis published Tuesday by Oxfam International revealed.
"The IMF must suspend austerity conditions on existing loans and increase access to emergency financing."
Tom Cotton doesn’t seem to be aware That right to counsel’s needed to be fair. To teach him, Harvard wasn’t the solution. So maybe he should read the Constitution.
The progressive caucus of North Carolina's state Democratic Party is revoking its endorsement of state Sen. Valerie Foushee, citing her acceptance of thousands of dollars from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the anti-Palestinian rights group which has been influential in U.S. politics for decades
The caucus said Sunday it had unsuccessfully urged Foushee to reject $165,000 in funding from individuals associated with AIPAC due to its support for more than three dozen Republican politicians who objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, which former President Donald Trump and his allies continue to baselessly claim were fraudulent.
In reviewing the arguments for Section 230 repeal, Coy left out what I considered the most important, the downsizing of Facebook and Twitter. In their current mode of operation, these companies depend on not being held responsible for defamatory items in third party content. If they were subject to the same sort of liability as their competitors in print and broadcast media, they would have to spend far more money in viewing and moderating posts and ads.
It would be impractical for Facebook and Twitter to moderate the billions of daily posts as they went up, but they could face takedown rules, similar to what is required with copyrighted material under the Digital Millennial Copyright Act. This would mean that they could be subject to defamation suits, if they did not remove potentially defamatory material in a timely manner, after they were notified.
With endearment, I address you Secretary Deb Haaland as an auntie, as my Indigenous relative. As you visit Alaska, I would like to offer a different opinion than many may give. I am an Iñupiaq community member, mother, and human. I am also the director of a small Iñupiaq led organization but I am not writing with that hat on. I am, as a constituent, requesting this administration keep its word. To protect our most vulnerable and transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
Smoke billowing over the U.S. Capitol. Rioters marching through the halls, carrying the Confederate battle flag. A gallows, with a noose hanging from it, erected just steps from the Capitol. Police officers beaten and tased.
Immigration justice advocates on Tuesday demanded that federal lawmakers reject a legislative package they derided as the "Stephen Miller bill," which would codify a rule that has expelled more than 1.7 million asylum-seekers since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Texas-based group RAICES dubbed the proposal—officially called the Public Health and Border Security Act—the "Stephen Miller bill" after a chief architect of former President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda, including the use of Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act to refuse entry to asylum-seekers, supposedly in the name of mitigating the spread of Covid-19.
I jumped the gun: The “Tucker Carlson Original” mockumentary hilariously titled The End of Men did not air Monday night, as advertised. Tuckums was a bit sneaky: The show introduced a whole new season of his mockumentaries, which will stream on Fox Nation, and the episode featured little more than the long version of the trailer people made short work of on social media all weekend, with its many homoerotic montages of shirtless white men getting all manly by wrestling with one another. Oh, and with large tires. And maybe a cow? Also: swinging axes and drinking egg yolks? I couldn’t catch everything; it went by fast. But not fast enough.
“Regardless of how brilliant he is, Emmanuel Macron just didn’t understand,” Sébastien Nadot said of his former boss. “He’s a talented manager, who’s gone from opportunistic move to opportunistic move—and I’m not saying that in a dismissive way. I became an MP for [Macron’s party] En Marche out of opportunism too!”
The ruling class, made up of the traditional elites that run the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, is employing draconian forms of censorship on its right-wing and left-wing critics in a desperate effort to cling to power. The traditional elites were discredited for pushing through a series of corporate assaults on workers, from deindustrialization to trade deals. They were unable to stem rising inflation, the looming economic crisis and the ecological emergency. They were incapable of carrying out significant social and political reform to ameliorate widespread suffering and refused to accept responsibility for two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East. And now they have launched a new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadowbanning. De-platforming.
In early 2020, Peter Brimelow, the founder of the incredibly sketchy site VDARE, sued the NY Times for calling him an “open white nationalist” among other similar things. Brimelow and VDARE have only spent two decades or so pushing for “ethno nationalism,” that “America is not a melting pot,” and that we need to “preserve and celebrate the distinctive culture of America.” Also “diversity per se is not a strength, but a vulnerability.” It also claims that it’s fighting to “keep America American.” Those all come from his website.
The Ministry of Interior filed a complaint against ðbrahim Haskoloßlu, a journalist who shared ID cards allegedly belonging to President Recep Tayyip Erdoßan and National Intelligence Organization (MðT) Chair Hakan Fidan on Twitter.
After the complaint, the ðstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office launched an investigation against the journalist for "illegally obtaining personal information."
The Russian authorities have begun using arrests, raids and fines to harass journalists accused of publishing “false information” about the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns this witchhunt and the growing climate of impunity for attacks on journalists, and calls for the withdrawal of laws establishing censorship.
The writer Lauren Rankin opens her book Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America with a story from her own experience as a clinic escort. One day several years ago, outside an abortion clinic in northern New Jersey, a cab pulled up. Protesters descended on the car, screaming, before Rankin, with the help of a security guard, could extract the patient inside. Shielding her from protesters who were screaming “Don’t murder your baby!,” Rankin guided the patient to the door. Only once inside did she discover that the patient was a terrified teenage girl. The girl collapsed onto Rankin, sobbing.
After Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a draconian bill, SB 8, into law last year, empowering bounty hunters to sue abortion providers, those seeking care fled to the neighboring states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
But GOP leaders were ready for them. Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt on April 12 signed the nation’s strictest abortion ban into law, ending all abortions in his state except in cases of danger to the pregnant person’s life. Now, reports are emerging of Oklahomans turning to the neighboring state of Kansas for abortions.
For more than a year, Abbott’s been burnishing his reputation as America’s top immigration authoritarian. In March of 2021, he launched “Operation Lone Star,” mobilizing his state’s National Guard for various border-related theatrics, and hosting units from states whose Republican governors want their reputational tickets similarly punched (and are willing to treat taxpayer money and the troops’ time as campaign contributions for the purpose).
For nearly a year, Abbott’s petty stunts — such as abducting immigrants in Texas and busing them to Washington, DC (“thanks for the ride, Greg!”) — mostly inconvenienced undocumented immigrants, National Guard troops, and Texas taxpayers. The rest of us, not so much.
My attempts to engage concerned Bishops and others within the Catholic hierarchy within the Catholic Church in England and Wales on the topic of racism have thus far led to non-listening and a lack of interest in engaging in dialogue with me. It is either because they have not wanted to engage in dialogue with me since my Voice is unimportant to them or because the hierarchy is so disconnected from grassroots that it wishes to remain disconnected.
Regrettably, the Catholic hierarchy within the Catholic Church in England and Wales does not regard me as a dialogue partner on the subject of racism, nor does it believe God is at work in my life. They have produced sufficient documents on the subject of racism, but what they need to do is listen to individuals like me about the problems of racism and rethink and act to confront racism both within and beyond the church.
Inquiring minds at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) want to know if officers or agents of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or other components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have tried to stop you from taking photographs, filming, or recording publicly-visible scenes and events at US land border crossing points.
As we’ve noted many times in this blog, and as as has been established in court cases in which we have participated, you have the right to photograph and record Transportation Security Administration staff and contractors at TSA checkpoints at airports.
We haven’t talked about land “ports of entry” as much as airports, but you also have the right to photograph and record at land border crossings, at least if you do so from places accessible to members of the public who aren’t crossing the border. (We don’t mean to suggest that you don’t also have the right to record or livestream what happens to you as you cross the border. We think you do, but that hasn’t yet been litigated as extensively.)
Praise be to the various gods! (Shout out to Tiamat!) The DOJ is back in the busting up local PD business, something it largely abandoned while Donald “A Police State Is The Best State” Trump held office for a single term.
A few weeks ago, Rene Ebersole drew the curtain back on law enforcement forensic training, showing the public that their tax dollars were being blown on forensic education handed out by Dr. Arpad Vass — someone who in the year of our lord two thousand twenty-two is teaching cops how to utilize witching to locate dead bodies.
Calls are growing for the release of imprisoned Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who launched a hunger strike on April 2 to protest the harsh conditions he is held under at Cairo’s Tora prison. Abd El-Fattah, who became a leading voice of the Arab Spring revolution, has been in and out of prison for nearly a decade for his human rights activism. His family recently obtained U.K. citizenship for him in the hopes of pressuring Egyptian authorities to release him, and they warn that his condition is rapidly deteriorating behind bars. We speak to his sister, Sanaa Seif, who was also imprisoned on similar charges of disseminating “false news” before being released in December. “Now is a critical time where it finally might be possible for Alaa to be free,” says Seif. “What keeps us going is that we as a family want to survive and want to unite in peace.” We also speak with Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who is joining Seif on a U.S. tour with Alaa’s new book, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.” As the pair advocate for Abd El-Fattah’s immediate release, they also discuss more recent government crackdowns on prominent Egyptian voices, such as TikTok influencer Haneen Hossam. “It seems that prison is the government’s answer to any problem with a citizen,” says Kouddous.
The nationwide wave of labor organizing by Starbucks workers continued to bear fruit Tuesday as employees at five of the coffee chain's Richmond, Virginia stores overwhelmingly voted to unionize.
"Within 48 hours we had 70% of the store signed up for union cards."
President Joe Biden nominated media activist Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission in October, to fill a Democratic seat vacant since January 2021. He renominated Sohn this January. Why has she not been confirmed yet? Advocates suspect the corporate media lobby is trying to sink the nomination of the staunch consumer advocate.
We just got done noting how the telecom industry has been pushing misleading editorials in Arizona to derail the nomination of popular and well-qualified telecom and telecom reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. The editorials are full of false claims that Sohn has a terrible track record on media diversity, shoveled by organizations with longstanding financial ties to AT&T.
The long-running dispute in hiQ concerns LinkedIn’s attempts to stop hiQ from scraping public information from LinkedIn user profiles as part of hiQ’s data analytics services. LinkedIn tried to block hiQ’s access and threatened to sue for violation of the CFAA, on the theory that hiQ’s access violated the website’s terms of service and LinkedIn’s explicit wishes. But hiQ sued first and obtained a preliminary injunction to preserve its access.
The key question for the Ninth Circuit on appeal was whether access to a public website can ever be “without authorization” under the CFAA. According to an earlier Ninth Circuit precedent, Facebook v. Power, merely violating a website’s terms of service is not enough to be a violation of the CFAA, but individualized notice in the form of a cease-and-desist letter can revoke a user’s prior authorization. However, the court noted that the phrase “access without authorization” implies that there is a baseline requirement of authorization, and public websites like the LinkedIn profiles at issue do not require any permission to begin with. As a result, the court held that access to public information online likely cannot be a violation of the CFAA. (Because it was considering an appeal from a preliminary injunction, the holding was discussed in terms of the “likely” outcome of a final ruling.)
Then, in Van Buren, the Supreme Court answered a different question interpreting a different term in the CFAA, holding that an police officer did not “exceed authorized access” by using a law enforcement database for an unofficial purpose that violated the department’s written rules and procedures. The Court held that the CFAA does not encompass “violations of circumstance-based access restrictions on employers’ computers.” Rather, it adopted what it called a “gates-up-or-down approach,” writing that violations of the “exceeds authorized access” provision are limited to someone who “accesses a computer with authorization but then obtains information located in particular areas of the computer—such as files, folders, or databases—that are off limits to him.”
ISPs, looking to undermine, FCC authority managed to frame the whole net neutrality debate as “partisan” as to sow dissent, prevent consensus, block reform, and justify the 2017 repeal. But the idea was never really partisan. Despite headlines and DC rhetoric, a massive bipartisan majority of Americans actually supported the rules.
It can always get dumber. As you’ll recall, last year Florida man governor Ron DeSantis, as part of his big push to become the new populist leader of ignorant people, pushed for a law to force social media websites to host political content they didn’t want to host. He convinced the subservient Florida Legislature to pass that bill, but not before his staff personally teamed up with lawyers from Disney to insert a buffoonish theme park exemption, that said the law didn’t apply to you if you owned a theme park in Florida. The bill’s author admitted flat out on the floor of the Florida Legislature that this was done to protect Disney from having to worry about the law.
So much of the debate about Section 230 is based on an incorrect understanding of its procedural benefits, and the completely false idea that it’s a special gift to “big tech”. A new paper (which we wrote about yesterday) by Elizabeth Banker from the Chamber of Progress dives deep into the real benefits and beneficiaries of Section 230, and this week she joins us on the podcast to discuss how the law protects small companies, individuals, and free speech.
Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1 and expects to lose another 2 million in the current second quarter, the streamer said in its first-quarter 2022 earnings release Tuesday.
In January, Netflix reported it had 221.84 million subscribers at the end of 2021. During the three-month period that ended March 31, a time span that included the debuts of “Bridgerton” Season 2 and “The Adam Project,” Netflix says its total fell to 221.64 million subs.
Netflix is preparing to crack down on password sharing around the world, with the company telling shareholders Tuesday that it is a “big opportunity” for the streaming giant to help turn around its fortunes.
The company reported a quarterly subscriber loss Tuesday, ending Q1 of 2022 with 221.64 million subscribers, down from 221.84 million in Q4 of 2021.
The streaming giant reported a drop of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter of 2022. The company last reported a loss in subscribers in October 2011, according to Reuters.
Last week we noticed that several high-profile "pirate" sites were unfindable in DuckDuckGo's search results. It wasn't clear why these domains had been 'removed' but after some back and forth, Bing is now mentioned as the culprit. DuckDuckGo is working hard to mitigate the problem, which is more widespread than we initially reported.
Over the years, software players have been developed to play various media types. VLC, for example, is a content-agnostic tool that can play most media, regardless of the source - legal or pirated. Interestingly, a report has been submitted to the European Commission naming 85 IPTV players as illegal piracy tools, despite most (if not all) carrying no pirated video content.
Creative Commons’ Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture is open until 30 April 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to remix existing art and turn it into something fresh and exciting under the theme “Love Culture? Share Culture!”
