Easy steam installation on Makulu with Proton Support. just a few clicks …
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’ve got a community favorite. One of our most requested segments is back with Jill’s Treasure Hunt! Jill will go into her computer museum and show us a piece of amazing hardware she has hidden away. Then we’re going to discuss whether or not it is time to let go of DuckDuckGo? Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
A new Ubuntu LTS is here and it’s mostly great, the Steam Deck is a huge success, Brave proves that nuance isn’t dead, people flock to Mastodon, KDE Korner, and more.
In November 2020 Apple introduced the M1 processor – an Arm-based chip marking the beginning of the transition from Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon. Apple M1 machines can be good value despite the premium price if they save developers time, and the combination of excellent performance and high efficiency – leading to long battery life for those on a laptop – is a strong attraction.
The title might be a bit hyperbolic here, but we’re indeed exploring a first step in that direction with radv. The impetus here is the ExecuteIndirect command in Direct3D 12 and some games that are using it in non-trivial ways. (e.g. Halo Infinite)
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This functionality happens to be a subset of VK_NV_device_generated_commands and hence I’ve been working on implementing a subset of that extension on radv. Unfortunately, we can’t really give the firmware a “extended indirect draw call” and execute stuff, so we’re stuck generating command buffers on the GPU.
The way the extension works, the application specifies a command “signature” on the CPU, which specifies that for each draw call the application is going to update A, B and C. Then, at runtime, the application provides a buffer providing the data for A, B and C for each draw call. The driver then processes that into a command buffer and then executes that into a secondary command buffer.
Developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has a new blog post up about some of the work going into the radv AMD GPU driver on Linux, and they're taking steps towards doing "A driver on the GPU" which should help Halo Infinite get working.
One of the problems with Halo Infinite on Linux and Steam Deck with Proton, is to do with the Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer VKD3D-Proton and how a certain part of Direct3D 12 is being used in a "non-trivial" way. Getting that properly supported sounds like it has been difficult.
If you are a Linux user whose intuitions are strongly allied with web technology then the concept of MIME types should be imprinted in your DNA.
MIME types help identify file formats and formatted contents during their transmission across the internet or any other user-defined network.
While on a web browser and you receive a webserver-sent file via HTTP before the web browser chooses a suitable method for displaying the file, the web browser will first consult the MIME types to determine the file type it is about to handle.
Since it is already established that the Linux operating system is the jack of all computing trades through the numerous Linux command line tips and articles you have come across on this site.
It is time to further grow the reputation of this operating system. As part of Linux file management, we will be looking at ways to shuffle lines in a file residing under a Linux operating system environment.
Shuffling lines in a file on a Linux operating system environment can take two approaches. Under approach one, you might be looking to shuffle/rearrange the lines in a targeted file to appear in a specific required order. In such a case, a sort command is called upon.
Under a Linux operating system environment, the binary executables associated with the applications/programs you wish to run are directly linked with shared libraries loaded at runtime.
As a curious and evolving Linux user, you will be tempted to get an idea about these shared libraries involved/linked with the binary executables you are running during a normal program startup.
This article will walk us through several approaches to find out all shared libraries used by executables in Linux.
In today’s tutorial on Linux file management, we will be looking at valid approaches to joining multiple lines within a file into a single line. By the end of this article, you will have added some computing milestones to your Linux file management experience.
Once you enter the Linux operating system domain, the list of computing possibilities through the Linux command line environment will seem unending. It’s simply because the more you use Linux, the more you want to learn and this craving takes you through countless learning opportunities.
In this tutorial, we are going to look at counting and printing duplicate lines in a text file under a Linux operating system environment. This tutorial module is part of Linux file management.
The Linux command line or terminal environment is not new to processing input text files. It is so proficient in such operations that it is yet to encounter a worthy challenge under text file processing.
A Multipass virtual machine should be created according to instructions in the article Multipass virtual machine and authenticating using a private key . Note where the file containing the private key is stored.
The second prerequisite is Ansible. Instructions on how to install Ansible can be found in the official Ansible documentation.
This is another Kubernetes-related notebook entry in which I will document the procedure for setting up a Kubernetes cluster using K3S in virtual machines created with Canonical’s Multipass. In addition, I will describe how to configure kubectl, the Kubernetes command-line cluster management tool to manage the K3S cluster from outside of the virtual machines in which the cluster will run.
UNRAR is widely known and used amongst Windows users. RAR files are much smaller archives and compress better than ZIP for most files by compressing files “together,” saving more space. UNRAR does not come pre-installed natively on Ubuntu, but it is available to install from its repository.
The following tutorial will show you how to install UNRAR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish on a desktop or server, along with the most commonly used commands with the command line terminal.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snapcraft and snap-store on Rocky Linux 8.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users.
Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system.They are containerized software packages that are simple to create and install. They auto-update and are safe to run.
Snaps applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the latest stable version of Ubuntu that is now available in the market. Ubuntu Studio is a desktop environment that used to be the default desktop environment on the Ubuntu Studio distro. Now Ubuntu Studio uses the Plasma Desktop by KDE. Meanwhile, In this tutorial post, we will show you the steps to install the Ubuntu Studio desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Solution for the “There are no enabled repositories RHEL solution” error
In this tutorial, we will show you the reason and the solution for the there are no enabled repositories RHEL solution error. This occurs when you have not enabled your RHEL subscription.
Basically, everything in Linux is a file. But before you are able to edit a file, you must be able to locate it in your system.
We know that Linux applications are quite flexible in configuration. Concerning SSH, we can also configure it to our liking and not only important configurations but also information-oriented ones like a banner. That’s why today you will learn how to configure a custom banner in SSH.
Beekeeper Studio might be a perfect choice for those looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive GUI electron front end for database management. This open-source database GUI can easily connect with any MariaDB or Postgres and works well alongside other popular databases such as MySQL, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB. Currently, Beekeeper Studio only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not the Unix socket connections.
Beekeeper Studio comes equipped with all sorts of useful features you would expect in a quality SQL program: autocomplete functionality includes completable queries without having to make multiple trips back and forth between programs; there’s even live reflection on what your query will do right before it finishes running so that minor mistakes don’t go unnoticed while typing.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by importing the official repository and installing the application from it with the command line terminal.
With the new TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RRT (BBR) algorithm, Google has finally found a way to overcome many issues that were previously present in both Reno & CUBIC. This updated congestion control algorithm achieves significant bandwidth improvements, lowers latency, and is deployed by Google.com, Google Cloud Platform, Youtube, and others.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to enable TCP BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal with some configurations and screenshots.
Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, the next in the line of Long Term Releases for Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu LTS releases, is finally here and available for Pop!_OS users to upgrade to. The release has seen the Pop team focus more on building their resources and moving away from Launchpad PPA’s to their repositories with better packaging systems, hybrid graphics support, etc.
Liqourix Kernel is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. Liquorix Kernel is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.
For users seeking to have their Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel that may be for you.
Wordle—the online game that gives you six tries to guess a five-letter word—has gone viral recently, and while it’s fun, it can also be pretty hard. So, as a bash-scripting enthusiast, I figured I'd see if I could come up with a script that would help me cheat.
The game itself is fairly simple. After you enter a five-letter guess, the game indicates which of its letters are not in the mystery word by setting them off on a gray background, which ones are in the word but in the wrong location (orange background), and which ones are in the word and located in the right place (green background). Each guess must be a known English word, no capitals, no punctuation.
Every Linux admin must install and set up a database at some point. This can include deploying a dynamic website, such as for WordPress, or storing data for web applications as well as customer, client and employee records. Databases are crucial for every type of business.
Linux Kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking Unix-like operating system. It is the main component of a Linux operating system and is the core interface between the computer’s hardware and its processes. It makes communication possible between computer hardware and processes running on it and it manages resources effectively.
Linux 5.18 mainline was released recently by Linux Torvalds with better new features to try out. The mainline tree is maintained by Linus Torvalds and It is where all new features are added and releases always come from.
XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels before landing on most distributions. Most desktop users are not even into gaming but want a new kernel for better hardware support, making XanMod one of the more popular choices.
For more information on XanMod Kernel before installing, visit the XanMod Kernel features information page.
The Linux operating system is widely used in servers to host complex applications, which have very specific system settings. When you start a new Linux shell session, a certain system configuration is read and your computer is set up accordingly. These configurations and settings are controlled by the environment variables.
Vimscript is a well-designed language that is really tailored to extend Vim. Unfortunately, this language is not very powerful and quite clunky for general-purpose computing.
Fortunately, it is possible to use other languages in your Vim plugin. For example, Python.
Python is very easy to prototype in, and fast to write and its extensive standard library is a great help when writing Vim plugins. Thus, it is a good choice for our plugins.
Smap now brings all required features on hand to network admin or penetration tester without overgoing to shodan.io. Smap and Nmap are identical and generate the standard output, except Smap will also fetch public open port data from shodan.io as an addon to standard Nmap.
Let’s keep it simple recently, I tried to install one package using golang and got an error message claiming that golang can’t load the package, as shown below.
Between 2022-04-19 and 2022-04-26 there were 29 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 226 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 12.8 % of total released titles.
Valve has released a huge upgrade for the Steam Deck that includes some much requested features, that should dramatically improve the overall experience. The update comes in multiple parts (Client and OS), and should be done via Gaming Mode (the main Deck UI), not Desktop Mode.
Valve has just released a new update for Steam, the OS and firmware for the Steam Deck. Podiki has had to chance to upgrade his Steam Deck following this announcement, so we can share some more details beyond the simple changelog.
The massive-scale space RTS AI War 2 has a new expansion out with AI War 2: The Neinzul Abyss, and it seems Arcen are now finished with the game and moving onto their next project.
Arcen say this expansion is bigger than some standalone games, and the game has lost the "Beta" status for multiplayer as it seems to all work fine now. On the game as a whole, they're not working full-time on it now and consider it pretty much done. However, they will be around watching over it to put out bug fixes whenever they're needed.
Work that has been ongoing for some time now, OpenRCT2 the free and open source reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 version 0.4.0 is out now and it's big. If you want to play it easily on Linux from Steam, you can do so with Luxtorpeda. I have a guide on using that on the Steam Deck in a previous article. Or, you can use the version from Flathub.
With the huge change being to the save file system, one of their time previously told me that it "significantly raises pretty much all the limits the original sv6 format had and is probably the biggest milestone we have hit since OpenRCT2 started over 7 years ago".
Fancy a fresh take on building up a space station? orbit.industries from LAB132 and Klabater is out now. So far so good, with it having a number of positive user reviews on Steam.
"Jump into 3 modes: Campaign with missions set in the orbit of far flung alien worlds, Endless mode where resources are limited but time is not, or Creative mode where you can let your imagination run wild in the orbital sandbox with no constraints. Orbit.industries blends inspiration from classic science fiction literature, movies, and popular space-opera TV series with actual knowledge and progress achieved in the field of space exploration, space engineering, and orbital stations development."
Learn how to locate, read, and use Linux system documentation with man, info, and /usr/share/doc files.
The first time I heard about 21unity was when I read the announcement: 21unity Joins OpenPOWER Foundation. I immediately became interested in the company, as it combines two things I am interested in: POWER and open source. Among others 21unity has its own cloud based on the POWER platform and provides Nextcloud as a service. I tried to refresh my German knowledge and read their website, but the more I read the more interesting it got and the more questions I had. I have seen from the reactions on Twitter, that many people were happy to learn about a new company working with POWER. So, instead of a few quick questions in private, I asked for an interview. Chris Branston of 21unity answered my questions.
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We decided, the only way to deliver consistent services with full control of what happens where and how data is handled and how secure these systems are, is to build our own data center, which is not connected to any of the big 3s networks. This idea might sound a bit crazy at first, but it has one big benefit when you build stuff from scratch: There are no messy integrations, upgrades or other legacy issues that come up, but you get to build exactly what you need and want.
Our websites are our face to the Fedora Linux users and the community members. We started with a successful Council objective proposal to revamp the websites and applications. As part of that, we want to revitalize and organize the community that maintains them. Allow me to share with you the things that we have been up to so far.
The traditional CPU-centric system architecture is being replaced by designs where systems are aggregated from independently intelligent devices. These systems have their own compute capabilities and can natively run network functions with an accelerated data plane. The new model allows us to offload to accelerators not only the individual subroutines but whole software subsystems, such as networking or storage, with cloud-like security isolation and architectural compartmentalization.
One of the most prominent examples of this new architecture is the data processing unit (DPU). DPUs offer a complete compute system with an independent software stack, network identity, and provisioning capabilities. The DPU can host its own applications using either embedded or orchestrated deployment models.
The unique capabilities of the DPU allow for key infrastructure functions and their associated software stacks to be completely removed from the host node’s CPU cores and to be relocated onto the DPU. For instance, DPU could host the management plane of the network functions and part of the control plane, while the data plane could be accelerated by dedicated Arm cores, ASICs, GPUs, or FPGA IPs. Because DPUs can run independent software stacks locally, multiple network functions could run simultaneously on the same devices with service chaining and shared accelerators to provide generic in-line processing.
Agile used to have a stigma as being "only suitable for small teams and small project management." It is now a famous discipline used by software development teams worldwide with great success. But does agile really deliver value? Well, it depends on how you use it.
My teams and I have used agile since I started in tech. It hasn't always been easy, and there's been a lot of learning along the way. The best way to learn is to make mistakes, so to help you in your own agile journey, here are five agile mistakes I've made.
The upcoming release of version 12 of the GCC compiler is naturally causing quite a stir for C developers working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other platforms. In one of our most popular articles this month, David Malcolm breaks down the state of static code analysis in GCC 12. C++ specifically is getting more support in this version of the compiler, and Marek Polacek outlines the new features.
Meanwhile, C++ is advancing on other fronts, with updates to the core standard. Jason Merrill has the highlights.
IT leaders can still use a helping hand, however, in navigating the massive scope and scale of AWS while making sure their cloud strategy is tightly focused and aligned with business goals.
A painful issue for Linux distros that are built on free software is firmware. This especially affects Debian, as outlined by former project head Steve Mcintyre here, and it's getting worse with time.
Firmware is only called that for historical reasons now, which we'll go into below. It's no longer "firm" at all, it's just files on a disk, like the rest of the OS – but it's unlike OS code in two important ways.
Firstly, it doesn't execute on the CPU. It's uploaded into a peripheral device's RAM, and there it runs on the processors inside the graphics card, or network controller, or radio controller, or whatever.
The second difference is only important if the OS in question is built from open source. Most firmware is proprietary software, usually supplied by hardware vendors, in the form of binary large objects (blobs). Generally, hardware vendors provide it free of charge because you've already bought their device – they've made their money. But you need it for your hardware to function properly.
We give you easy steps to upgrade to Pop OS 22.04 LTS from Pop OS 21.10.
After staying in beta for three weeks, System76 has finally released the stable version of Pop!_OS 22.04, which is based on the recently-released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. While the update doesn’t bring a massive overhaul to the OS, some QoL improvements make this best Ubuntu-based distro even better. Here’s everything new in Pop!_OS 22.04.
Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS by System76 is now available for download.
Based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS is powered by the newer Linux 5.16 kernel. You can find tons of new features and improvements in Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS. Some of the notable new features and improvements that you will get on the new version of Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS are...
Now that Canonical has released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, we’re starting to see Ubuntu-based Linux distributions release their own updates. Case in point: Linux PC maker System76 has released Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS which brings kernel, desktop environment, and app updates, along with some new features that are specific to Pop!_OS.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 732 for the week of April 17 – 23, 2022.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (codename: Jammy Jellyfish) is jam-packed (hey hey!) with new features for everyone’s favourite credit-card sized computer. We’ve put together some of the Raspberry Pi highlights below, but for a full overview of Jammy Jellyfish check out the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS press release and release notes.
Cincoze announced today their new series of ruggedized and compact computers designed for smart manufacturing applications. These computers offer support for several Intel latest generation processors. The GM-1000 and the GP-3000 series are capable of supporting one and two GPU respectively cards while the DS-1300 offers extensive industrial I/O interfaces.
The GM-1000 is a GPU computing platform that supports 1x MXM 3.1 GPU type A/B form factor. Its design is based on the Intel Coffee Lake processors (up to 8 cores) and it includes support for dual DDR4-2666 SO-DIMM memory (64GB max). The GPU system comes in a compact design (260 mm x 200 mm x 85 mm) optimized to operate in harsh environments (-40C to 70C).
The company also says the Gallery 3 will have an improved resolution of 300 pixels per inch instead of just 150ppi and operate in 0 to 50€°C temperature range like black and white eReaders. The new display will also support pen input in black and white, plus a few colors, with an update time of 30 ms. E Ink Gallery 3 will also feature the new ComfortGaze front light to reduce the amount of blue light reflected off the surface of the display and already found in Kaleido 3 ePaper display.
The press release only mentions Kailedo 3 in passing, saying that both technologies would offer customers several new color options to adopt into their devices. Let’s try to find some of the differences. Under the hood, the technology is different. E Ink Gallery 3 relies on E Ink ACeP (Advanced Color ePaper) technology while Kaleido 3 relies on the Print Color ePaper technology “where a color filter array (CFA) is used in conjunction with E Ink’s Carta black and white ink film, creating a full-color device for a more fully realized eBook shopping and reading experience”.
LoRaWAN network provider Senet said this week that it has expanded its relationship with the Helium network, a distributed peer-to-peer LoRaWAN network. Senet had started letting its customers roam onto the Helium network in September of last year, but with this move Senet has expanded the deal to include Helium’s global hotspots. And that means Senet customers can roam onto Helium’s network anywhere in the world.
Amid the bankruptcy of Sigfox and the creation of an alternative Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) with Amazon’s Sidewalk, Senet has been plugging away, trying to build out a viable LPWAN business connecting IoT devices at prices that make sense. Helium has become a valuable part of that effort.
If you haven’t seen [Ken Shirriff]’s teardowns and reverse engineering expeditions, then you’re in for a treat. His explanation and demonstration of the Apollo digital ranging system is a fascinating read, even if vintage computing and engineering aren’t part of your normal fare.
 Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more individuals based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.
There are so many different instant messaging clients available, some software supports multiple protocols, others confine themselves to supporting a single protocol only.
This chart provides our recommendations. We only feature open source software here.
 I recently had the opportunity to speak at different events on the topic of API strategy for the latest open source software and cloud-native technologies, and these were good sessions that received positive feedback. In an unusual move for me, on this occasion, I put together the slides first and then the article afterward. The good news is that with this approach, I benefited from previous discussions and feedback before I started writing. What makes this topic unique is that it’s covered not from the usual API strategy talking points, but rather from the perspective of discussing the latest technologies and how the growth of open source software and cloud-native applications are shaping API strategy.
I'll start by discussing innovation. All the latest software innovations are either open source software or based on open source software. Augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous cars, AI, machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), blockchain, and more, are technologies that are built with open source software that use and integrate with millions of APIs.
SIVIC is an open-source, standards-based software framework and application suite for processing and visualization of DICOM MR Spectroscopy data. Through the use of DICOM, SIVIC aims to facilitate the application of MRS in medical imaging studies.
I like to look at the Emacs subreddit and something I’ve noticed recently is people asking “should I start by writing my own Emacs config, or should I use this or that prepackaged one?” There is also this new config generator published by Philip Kaludercic. I find implicit in these the idea that one’s init.el is a singular product. To start using Emacs, newcomers seem to think, you need to couple it with a completed init.el, and so there is the question of writing your own or using one someone else has written. I think that an appropriate analogy is certain shell scripts. If you want to burn backups to DVDs you might download someone’s DVD burning shell script which tries to make that easy, or you might write your own. In both cases, you are likely to want to tweak the script after you’ve started using it, but there is nevertheless a discrete point at which you go from having part of a script and not being able to burn DVDs, to having a completed script and now being able to burn DVDs. Similarly, the idea that you can’t start using Emacs until you couple it with an init.el is like thinking that there is a process of producing or downloading an init.el, and only after that can you begin using Emacs.
This thinking makes sense if you’re developing one of the large Emacs configuration frameworks like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs. The people behind those projects are seeking to build something quite different from Emacs, using Emacs as a base, and for many people using that new, quite different thing is preferable to using Emacs. Then indeed, until you’ve finished developing your configuration framework’s init.el to a degree that you’re ready to release version 0.1 of your framework, you haven’t got something that’s ready to use. Like the shell script, there’s a discrete point after which you have a product, and there’s lots of labour that must precede it. (I think it’s pretty cool that Emacs is flexible enough to be something on its own and also a base for these projects.)
What makes open source rather uniquely western is its dependence on certain cultural and legal abstractions. Apart from free speech and a rule of law of unprecedented rigor, there is for example a very western notion of privacy that in some ways runs counter to the interests of an empire, and a fairly modern notion of individuality and personal realization. Ideas such as l'art pour l'art and the long march through the institutions have surely played their part as well.
A short explanation might be in order: I'd like to think I'm not overly naïve. There are several examples of corruption, mismanagement and even tyranny carried out by and in the west - but as far as open source goes, I have a hard time placing it in another political framing. As such, I do believe it's the nominal values of the empire that's enabled it. It's an implementation of ideals the imperial elite may have paid mere lip service to and that may have resulted in tyranny in some of its client states, but which has at least earnestly (and perhaps sometimes foolishly) been shared by the citizens at its core. At risk of sounding pompous, it's an echo of grand founding phrases, even though they in our current trying times can feel like hollow mockeries: Liberty, equality, fraternity. All public power emanates from the people. Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago, I worked for a company. It was a very prestigious company, and it was a glorious and frustrating time. The company did amazing things. Literally unbelievable achievements - from my point of view anyway. But this was coupled with levels of chaos that led to inefficiency, wasted opportunity, and needless headaches.
One thing that does not make shell scripts slow is the basic Unix commands themselves that you use in shell scripts. Those Unix commands generally perform pretty well, and their processing speed is probably close to the fastest you could get if you wrote what they're doing in your language of choice. Your program is unlikely to improve on the sorting performance of sort, the text transformation performance of sed, and so on. And the shell itself generally performs internal things more than fast enough for most cases. Instead, what causes shell scripts problems is the cost of starting separate programs. Sed may transform text very fast and sort may sort data very fast, but starting sed or sort is comparatively expensive. The more times you start programs and the more programs you have to start for each thing you want to do, the slower your shell script will run.
Every time this Representative from Rhode Island’s D-26 copycats legislative hatred, she continues to show her district and the state just how devoted she is to being the most ineffective representative in our legislature.
Representative Morgan had undoubtedly slipped the privileged spoon in her mouth with a hefty heap of performative pablum, when she made what amounts to rather offensive, highly inflammatory comments about critical race theory over the alleged loss of her Black friend. € Moreover, she just recently doubled down by introducing more hurtful, bigoted legislation (H7539) aimed at public education teachers.
On the evening of April 24, Mariupol cinematographer Olga Novikova wrote in a Facebook post that her son, Alexey, had been taken prisoner — and that his captors were demanding 5,000 euros ($5,356) in return for his release. The kidnappers had contacted Novikova through Alexey’s Facebook account and sent her a video of him being interrogated. They promised to kill Alexey if they didn’t receive the money “by tomorrow.” Meduza spoke to Olga Novikova.
Since the war in Ukraine began, more than 30 thousand Ukrainian couples have officially tied the knot. In mid-April, the Ukrainian Justice Ministry simplified the marriage registration process — soldiers can even get married over Zoom now. One wedding — that of dentist Anton Sokolov and nurse Anastasia Gracheva, both from Kharkiv — has become famous far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Photos of the couple in their wedding outfits in front of the wreckage that now makes up Kharkiv have been shared by media outlets around the world, including France24, Euronews, and Africanews. Meduza spoke with Anastasia Gracheva about she and her husband’s decision to get hitched in wartime — and how they used the wedding to help the war effort.
And don’t try to deny it! What a mess! (And yes, I do think this moment is worth more than a few exclamation points!)
Admittedly, I’m not an active, thoughtful 93 year old.€ I’m a mere 77 and feel like I’m floundering in this mad world of ours. Still, like my generation, like anyone alive after August 6, 1945, when the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a single American atomic bomb, I’m an end-of-the-worlder by nature. And that’s true whether any of us like it or not, admit it or not.
“All you can write is what you see.”—written on the first draft of “This Land Is Your Land,”dated February 23, 1940
“What method, what power, what labyrinthine perfection is displayed!” So wrote Pliny the Elder, marveling over nature’s design for the mosquito in his Natural History. But the rest of us—or at least the approximately 4 billion people regularly exposed to the deadly diseases the mosquito carries—are more likely to agree with Edmund Spenser, who bemoaned its “sharpe wounds, and noyous iniuries” in The Faerie Queene.
Who knew everyone wanted to go to a concert so bad! It’s not like the whole city’s been cooped up at home for two whole years climbing up the walls!
Well, certainly not Tivoli, which was blown away by the interest in its concert on Friday: the second of its FredagsRock series – almost literally, but the walls held firm once it decided to close its gates.
Toni Reid, after 24 years at Amazon, is joining YouTube as VP of product management to lead the video platform’s Emerging Experiences and Community team.
In the role, she’ll oversee YouTube Shorts — the TikTok-like short-form video format YouTube has seen gain major traction — as well as YouTube Gaming, livestreaming and community products.
Magazine publisher and media company Condé Nast has bolstered its global communications leadership team with the appointments of Thrive Global’s Monica Lee as senior VP of communications and Vice Media Group’s Nina Joyce as VP of communications for the U.K.
There are plenty of rocket experimenters toying with various liquid-fueled contraptions at the moment, and [Sciencish] is one of them. He grew tired of using air-pressurized fuel delivery systems in his experiments due to safety reasons, and decided to create something approximating more grown up rocket designs. The result was a 3D-printed turbopump for fuel delivery.
The DNA Doe Project, working with the Michigan State Police, determined the jaw bone belonged to Ronald Wayne Jager of Fruitland Township. The DNA Doe Project is an all-volunteer, California-based group whose mission is to identify John and Jane Does and return them to their families.
The Australian dingo’s genome is substantially different from modern dog breeds, suggesting the canines have never been domesticated in the past, a detailed analysis reveals.
The dingo is a type of dog that arrived in Australia around 5000 to 8500 years ago and now roams wild in most of the country. Some researchers believe it is descended from an ancient domestic dog breed that was introduced by Asian seafarers and then turned wild. Others, however, question whether dingoes’ ancestors were ever domesticated.
Learning anything new, especially so broad and far reaching as electronics, can be hard. [IMSAI Guy] knows this because he gets asked regularly “how do I learn electronics?” Many of you reading this will have a few ideas to pass along (and we encourage you to share your take on it in the comments below) but there is an even greater number of people who are asking the same question, and [IMSAI Guy]’s take on it is one that this particular Hackaday writer can relate to.
The intensely local, personal way that Arkansas Game and Fish approached this challenge is difficult, time-consuming and perhaps not always the most practical. But it shows the kind of intensity it takes to communicate an urgent problem, and may provide lessons for how to approach the next big problems — whether that’s another pandemic, an ecological disaster or something bigger and more existential, like climate change.
If you’re a 3D printer user you’re probably familiar with that dreaded feeling of returning to your printer a few hours after submitting a big job, only to find that it threw an error and stopped printing, or worse, turned half a spool of filament into a useless heap of twisted plastic. While some printers come with remote monitoring facilities, [Kutluhan Aktar]’s doesn’t, so he built a device that keeps a watchful eye on his 3D printer and notifies him if anything’s amiss.
Join us on Wednesday, April 27 at noon Pacific for the Software Defined Instrumentation Hack Chat with Ben Nizette!
Welding is often a hot and noisy process. It generally involves some fancy chemistry and proper knowledge to achieve good results. Whether you’re talking about arc, TIG, or MIG, these statements all apply.
My SSD is probably pretty fast, but maybe a faster one would let me compile a kernel even quicker by reducing the time spent waiting for I/O to complete. First though, I need to determine its latency, and the benchmark tool available to me, dd, measures throughput not latency. We need to go deeper.
To measure latency, we’ll have to write some code to build a custom tool. By which I mean somewhere on the order of a dozen lines, taking advantage of the capabilities of dt, btrace, and bt.
Taiwan dominates the world's semiconductor manufacturing industry – controlling 48 per cent of the foundry market and 61 per cent of the world's capacity to build at 16nm or better - according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.
In 2021, Taiwan won 26 per cent of the world's semiconductor revenue, and accounted for 64 per cent of foundry revenue.
In 2022, Trendforce predicts the global foundry market to increase by 20 per cent, to $128.7 billion, and Taiwan's share of that revenue will increase two points. Local hero Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will increase its share from 53 to 56 per cent and another Taiwanese firm, United Microelectronics Corp (UMC), will be steady at seven per cent while lesser-known local Powerchip Semiconductor (PSMC) will lose a point of revenue share.
Attempts to recover ESA's stricken Sentinel-1B satellite are continuing and one of the failure scenarios engineers are considering will be familiar to some of us: possible leakage of a ceramic capacitor.
The satellite, launched in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Arianespace facility at Kourou in French Guiana, remains under control. However, power problems have rendered its C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR) instrument pretty much useless, thus defeating the point of the spacecraft.
Sister spacecraft, Sentinel-1A, has continued to collect data despite recently having to dodge some debris.
The€ federal transportation face mask mandate€ is over. A federal judge in Florida struck it down last week, citing an€ overreach of statutory authority by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a violation of administrative law. All the major airlines quickly responded by dropping the mandate on their flights, leaving passengers to fend for themselves on whether to wear a face mask when traveling by air. While the€ ruling is being appealed by the Department of Justice, the€ White House encourages people to continue to wear face masks when traveling. The ruling also ended the face mask mandate on trains (like€ Amtrak) and€ public transportation, impacting millions of people each day.
Activists and scientists have found alarming levels of radioactivity in samples collected along the road and soils outside Austin Master Services, an oilfield waste processing facility with a history of sloppy practices in eastern Ohio. The facility is located just down the street from a high school football stadium and less than 1,000 feet from a set of city drinking water wells, raising public health concerns from a nuclear forensics scientist about the extent of possible radioactive contamination.€
Last November, members of two advocacy groups, Concerned Ohio River Residents and Mountain Watershed Association, collected soil samples from outside the Martins Ferry, Ohio facility of Austin Master Services, a Pottstown, Pennsylvania-based company that operates in 10 states. Both groups are concerned about the handling of radioactive oilfield waste in their region, which has seen over a decade of intensive fracking development in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.€
If there’s one thing about the€ COVID-19€ pandemic that’s surprised pundits and my colleagues in the medical profession, it’s just how many vaccine-hesitant and outright antivaccine healthcare professionals there are out there. You would think that an antivax physician or nurse would be incredibly rare, but the pandemic has demonstrated that they are, unfortunately, far from rare. I’m not saying that the medical profession is dominated by antivaxxers, as in general vaccine acceptance is still higher among physicians and nurses than among the general public. However, there is a much more sizable minority of physicians and nurses out there than my colleagues would have previously guessed whose views range from vaccine-hesitant to outright antivax conspiracy theorist, as a new survey shows.
Countries that allow economic inequality to increase as they grow richer make their citizens less happy, new research shows.
In most of 78 countries studied people were less satisfied with their lives as their country became less economically equal.
The fall in life satisfaction occurred even where the economy had grown as a whole and people from all classes were generally richer, Dr. David Bartram will tell the British Sociological Association's online annual conference on Thursday 21 April,
It failed to even do what Microsoft and its partners were obviously hoping, that is “scare” or “bully” people into getting a new PC for Windows 11. Data for Q4 2021/Q1 2022 suggest that there was no sales boost to speak of, the traditional effect a new Windows version usually has on the PC market.
RIA Cyber ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹Incident Handling Department (CERT-EE) director Tõnu Tammer said that: "At the same time, we must be prepared for attacks to continue for some time, while their volume may increase. We cannot rest on our laurels, but rather consider how to better mitigate the success of such attacks."
While sites are still under attack, malicious queries are being intercepted before they can negatively affect the systems, RIA says
RIA says the attacks which had begun Thursday last week continued through Saturday.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added seven vulnerabilities to its list of actively exploited security issues, including those from Microsoft, Linux, and Jenkins.
In recent months, a lot of attention has been paid to private companies who assist governments with surveillance. Most of this has been focused on companies like Clearview (a company that scrapes the public web for data to sell to its customers) and NSO Group (an Israeli company that sells powerful cell phone exploits to a variety of human rights abusers). Other reports have focused on data brokers who use info harvested from phone apps to provide location data to US law enforcement, allowing them to circumvent the protections erected by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision.
Running relays is a significant contribution to our project and we've designed that process so that the barrier of entry is low, making it possible for a variety of people with different backgrounds to participate. This openness is important as it makes our network (and the privacy guarantees it offers) more robust and resilient to attacks. However, that low threshold of contributing to our network also makes it easier for malicious operators to attack our users, e.g. via Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks at exit nodes.
This blog post explains what we're doing to detect malicious actors (and remove their relays), how we developed these strategies, and what we're working on to make it harder for bad operators to run attacks. Additionally, we want to shine some light on this part of our day-to-day work at Tor. Because this is an arms race, we have to balance being transparent with effective detection of malicious actors. In this post we hope to offer more transparency about our approach without compromising the methods we use to keep our users safe.
PM Modi exhorted people to switch from cash payments to digital transactions in the latest edition of his radio broadcast Mann Ki Baat on Sunday, saying this will not only boost the country’s digital economy, but will also lead to an environment of honesty and transparency.
According to the report, Zuckerberg is focused solely on metaverse content creation but says the project will take a decade or more to complete, likely requiring improvements to the Oculus Quest 2, also called Meta Quest 2 since Facebook purchased Oculus and later changed its name. Despite the project’s scope, Zuckerberg isn’t giving employees a clear strategy, but he still wants to inform every department company-wide about the pivot to focusing on the metaverse.
Facebook has renamed itself Meta. Last year, it lost $10 billion on its Reality Labs segment, which handles metaverse projects. It intends to spend that much this year, too, and possibly for many years to come. Zuckerberg has said the metaverse is a long-term project that won't be fully developed for a decade or more.
So far, there's little to show for so much money spent, according to another employee who recently left. "There's still not much to touch or look at, much less use," the person said, "for all of its metaverse proclamations."
Luckily, Sharod had a secret weapon: Airtags.
He'd bought three of the Apple products, which emit tracking alerts via Bluetooth, and hidden one in each suitcase.
"I did it because our itinerary was quite robust -- we were traveling through multiple airports," he says. "It was more for security on the way down -- the wedding dress and suit weren't in our cases, but it was for peace of mind."
So he and Helen had watched in real time, relieved, as their cases arrived planeside at Frankfurt. Just one problem -- when they checked again, the cases had moved to a gate area at Frankfurt. They'd never been loaded onto the plane.
Face it, we're living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he's seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a "grim cloud" of advancing fascism. His comment on our present situation: "We're approaching the most dangerous point in human history."
Campaigners with the international group Greenpeace risked arrest Monday when they blocked a Russian tanker from delivering 95,000 tons of fuel near Oslo, Norway, calling for a ban on tthe import of fossil fuels from the country that is waging war in Ukraine.
Several of the climate advocates unfurled banners reading "Oil fuels war" and "Stop fueling the war" as others pulled a small boat up to the tanker and chained themselves to the vessel, which was leased by Russian oil company Novatek.
The Russian FSB claims to have foiled an alleged assassination plot against prominent Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov and other state television personalities. According to a statement released on Monday, April 25, FSB agents arrested a group of “neo-Nazis” who Ukraine’s Security Service (the SBU) allegedly hired to carry out the murders.€
Global military expenditures surpassed $2 trillion for the first time ever last year, with the United States spending more on its war-making capacity than the next nine nations combined, according to new data published Monday.
"Spending 12 times as much on our military as Russia didn't prevent a war in Europe. It just deprived us of resources at home."
But it should already be clear that the end of the war, if it comes at all, is more likely to be brought about by politicians – as difficult as that might be – and not by soldiers because the chances of either Russia or Ukraine winning a decisive victory have already disappeared.
The key question now is how and when the fighting will cease – or have the chances of a compromise peace already been overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of military conflict and the hatred it inspires?
The phrase "War on Terror" invokes many different feelings and images depending upon one's position in America and the world. While many understand it merely as a descriptor for a new frontier in American foreign policy and war, for others it has meant a new set of violent interventions and disturbances to their way of life.
Lawyers representing Melissa Lucio vowed to "continue fighting" to prove her innocence after a Texas appeals court on Monday granted the mother of 14—who advocates say was wrongfully convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter in 2007—a stay of execution, two days before she was scheduled to be killed by lethal injection.€
"All of the new evidence of her innocence has never before been considered by any court."
Officials in the traditionally neutral Nordic nations of Sweden and Finland confirmed Monday that the countries will simultaneously apply to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization amid increased public support for the move as Russia continues its brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Two newspapers—Finland's Iltalehti and Sweden's Expressen—reported that the countries' applications could occur as soon as the middle of next month. The Swedish daily Aftonbladet reported that Sweden has received concrete promises from the United States and the United Kingdom regarding protection and political support during the NATO application process.
We all knew Sean Hannity was doing the bidding of the Trump administration. We found out Monday he was doing it literally.
CNN on Monday published a slew of text messages between Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and prominent Republican lawmakers and conservative figures — including Hannity. The Jan. 6 committee has already released several texts exchanged between Meadows and Hannity, but the ones released Monday are particularly striking, demonstrating just how firmly the White House had Hannity secured under its thumb.
A new tranche of text messages published Monday between former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and allies of former President Donald Trump, sent in the months after the 2020 election, offers new insight into the efforts to overturn Joe Biden's election victory.
The text messages, which were obtained by CNN, help illuminate how far the Trump White House and its allies secretly tried to go to overturn the 2020 election, including failed efforts by Meadows to contact Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
It's a phenomenon familiar in the history books: Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Russia in 1812 was famously slowed by the mud, as were Hitler's armies, which invaded the then-Soviet Union in 1941 and encountered the same logistical problems posed by the mud and inhospitable terrain that Russian troops have faced in the last few weeks.
Former Republican lawmakers and experts say the measure — based on unverified claims the election was stolen in Michigan — is unconstitutional and wouldn’t change the election outcome even if it somehow passed.
Multiple attacks this week in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Libya, Uzbekistan, and other locations have been claimed by the group since the announcement of the campaign, which comes amid Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In the first three days of the campaign, 42 attacks were reported in nine countries.
The video shows shocking images: Raging young people – apparently of Arab descent – loudly insult a reporter from the “Bild” newspaper who was reporting on the scene. The pro-Palestine protesters shout “dirty Jew” and “Jews out”. 600 people had come to this march through the Kreuzberg district of Berlin.
MP demands to know how Egyptian-born Dr Omar Abdul Kafi, who has also given sermons about getting 'revenge' on Jews, was allowed into the UK to speak at Finsbury Park mosque in north London.
A man who set himself on fire in front of the US Supreme Court to protest climate change died this week, according to an NBC report published yesterday.
Metro Police identified the man as Wynn Alan Bruce of Boulder, Colorado. Police said he died from his injuries on Saturday. According to NBC, Bruce started the incident at around 6:30 pm. Within minutes a medical helicopter took him to a local hospital, but he did not survive. The man’s friends posted memories and farewells on his Facebook page in response to recent posts.
With a few hundred tomato and lettuce plants getting acclimated to the soil in the high-tunnel structure other seedling signaled the need for re-potting. Such were my sketchy contributions to Earth Day….. that, and writing this column.
The original Earth Day occurred in a simpler time, before Business-as-Usual became utterly hegemonic. Inspired by a 1969 UNESCO conference, Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed a “nationwide environmental teach-in be held on April 22, 1970.”€ (Wikipedia) So-called “teach-ins” had become an organizing/educational activity stateside during the€ U.S. war against Vietnam. The notion struck a chord. “More than 20 million people poured out on the streets, and the first Earth Day remains the largest single-day protest in human history.“ (Wikipedia)
A small German village was the site of a large demonstration over the weekend, when thousands of activists gathered to protest the slated demolition of Lützerath that would allow for the expansion of the already gargantuan Garzweiler open-pit coal mine.
Lützerath is slated to suffer the same fate as other nearby villages that have been destroyed in western Germany as the country's major power producer RWE, which operates the mine, continues to dig up the lignite, also known as brown coal.
In a statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said that as part of the [cryptocurrency] scheme, Fowler “helped process hundreds of millions of dollars of unregulated transactions on behalf of numerous cryptocurrency exchanges, skirting the anti-money laundering safeguards required of licensed institutions that ensure the U.S. financial system is not used for criminal purposes.”
Prosecutors also alleged that Fowler lied to AAF executives by claiming he controlled bank accounts with tens of millions of dollars from real estate investments and government contracts that he could use to invest in the league.
Research out Monday reveals that CEOs from 28 of the top oil and gas companies enjoyed a combined $394 million in total compensation in 2021, including through "eye-popping" bonuses that together topped $31 million.
The analysis from Accountable.US, first reported by The Guardian, comes as inflation-hit consumers see gas prices soaring while fossil fuel companies stand accused of making "gobs of money" off the global energy crisis triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger walked free Monday after 993 days of detention stemming from his decades-long legal fight with Chevron, which deployed its vast resources in a campaign to destroy Donziger after he won a $9.5 billion settlement against the fossil fuel giant over its pollution of the Amazon rainforest.
"Corporations must not be allowed to continue abusing the U.S. justice system to silence and intimidate human rights defenders."
The river begins at Crater Lake and flows about 200 miles to the sea by Gold Beach. The river passes through lands administered by both the BLM and Forest Service. The existing Wild Rogue Wilderness encompasses 36,453 acres. The proposed addition would include the Zane Grey Roadless Area, the largest forested BLM roadless area in southern Oregon and northern California.
The Wild Rogue Conservation and Recreation Enhancement Act establishes a 98,000 National Recreation Area and expands the existing Wild Rogue Wilderness by 59,000 acres.
Nearly nine in 10 young Americans want the government to address the student loan debt crisis, with a plurality—but overall minority—supporting full cancelation, according to the results of a national survey published Monday.
The survey, conducted by Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics (IOP), found that 85% of respondents under age 30 "favor some form of government action on student loan debt."
Thus far, the numbers stack up as follows: a trading unit of JPMorgan Chase borrowed $6.19 trillion from the Fed’s repo loan program from September 17, 2019 through March 31, 2020. (Those are cumulative, term-adjusted figures.) A significant chunk of that money was borrowed at interest rates as low as 0.10 percent. The loans were collateralized with mostly treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
A trading unit of JPMorgan Chase also borrowed $400 billion in cumulative, term-adjusted loans from the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) during 2020. All of those loans were made at a fixed rate of 0.25 percent even though the Fed accepted lower-grade collateral, such as asset-backed securities, for some of the loans.
Rights advocates, public health€ experts, and media critics were among those on Monday who warned that the purchase of€ Twitter by mega-billionaire Elon Musk, the world's richest person, creates a direct threat to democracy and the common good by putting the outsized power of the social media platform used by hundreds of millions worldwide into the hands of one man.
The social media company accepted Musk's offer to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share—leading some critics to note other ways the enormous sum of money could have been spent rather than on what Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) called "a vanity project boondoggle to silence" Musk's critics.
Twitter is reportedly on the verge of announcing a deal as soon as Monday to sell the company and its massive social media platform to mega-billionaire Elon Musk—the richest man in the world—for around $43 billion in cash, a move that critics say could have dangerous implications for free expression and democracy itself.
Reuters reported that "Twitter may announce the $54.20-per-share deal later on Monday once its board has met to recommend the transaction to Twitter shareholders." The outlet, whose reporting was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal and other sources, stressed that "it is always possible that the deal collapses at the last minute."
The core reality is this: Twitter and other social networks play an increasingly important role in social and political discourse, and have an increasingly important corollary responsibility to ensure that their decision-making is both transparent and accountable. If he wants to help Twitter meet that responsibility, Musk should keep the following in mind:€
Musk has been particularly critical of Twitter’s content moderation policies. He’s correct that there are problems with content moderation at scale. These problems aren’t just specific to Twitter, though Twitter has some particular challenges. It has long struggled to deal with bots and troubling tweets by major figures that can easily go viral in just a few minutes, allowing mis- or disinformation to rapidly spread. At the same time, like other platforms, Twitter’s community standards restrict legally protected speech in a way that disproportionately affects frequently silenced speakers. And also like other platforms, Twitter routinely removes content that does not violate its standards, including sexual expression, counterspeech, and certain political speech.
Better content moderation is sorely needed: less automation, more expert input into policies, and more transparency and accountability overall. Unfortunately, current popular discourse surrounding content moderation is frustratingly binary, with commentators either calling for more moderation (or regulation) or, as in Musk’s case, far less.
With it looking almost certain that Elon Musk will own Twitter in the very near future, a lot of people are freaking out, and I did think it was worthwhile to explore ways in which this might actually be good. At this point, I think it’s quite clear that Elon Musk’s comments about Twitter show an incredible disconnect from how any of this works, and he’s about to discover that his ridiculously naïve ideas about how Twitter should work, will not work in practice. I stand by the idea that his beliefs for how Twitter should work are unlikely to be good in the long run, if implemented in the manner he claims to want them implemented. And, of course, Musk’s reputation for how he treats workers at his companies remains reprehensible. His views towards many marginalized groups seems equally disgraceful, and I know many people are — for good reason — fearing that they will be put at risk. Other tech companies are going to lead a feeding frenzy on Twitter’s best employees, and a ton of important and useful institutional knowledge is going to rush out the exits. And a lot of it is going to be the institutional knowledge that could help Musk realize why he’s wrong on so much of this.
Updated 4/25/2022 4:45 p.m. EDT: The New York Times and CNN are both reporting that the deal is done and that Elon Musk is buying Twitter. Says the Times:
Please take our poll anyway as it’s still relevant.
The past two years have seen record job growth, rising wages, and increasing bargaining power for workers. But for millions of Americans, the enormous burden of debt is overshadowing those gains—and the struggles are more intense for women, and for Black and brown borrowers.
In the wake of the acquisition, Twitter imposed a temporary ban on employees making any changes to its platform, Bloomberg reported. Product changes will require approval from a vice president to avoid staff who may be unhappy about the deal from “going rogue".
Parag Agrawal, who took over as Twitter's chief executive from founder Jack Dorsey last year, now faces uncertainty about his position. Mr Musk has said he does not have confidence in the company’s management, although the announcement did not say what would happen to its executives.
Musk, who is already the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, and the founder of the underground tunnel company the Boring Company, now adds the social media giant Twitter to his stable. Musk’s commitment toward Twitter was never fully established until now. His on-again, off-again stance begun in 2018 with a tweet Musk issued that claimed that he was securing financing to buy Twitter and take it private, a tweet he later said was a joke after an SEC investigation. Of course, those are the very actions Musk took today.
Layoffs aren’t planned “at this time,” Agrawal said, according to a person who heard the remarks and who asked to remain anonymous. Agrawal also said that he’d remain as CEO until the deal’s close, but he didn’t comment about what would happen after that. The company’s board will dissolve once the deal closes, said Brett Taylor, the board’s independent chair.
At the same time, many Twitter employees receive half or more of their compensation in stock. At an all-hands meeting on Monday afternoon, they were told that employees will not receive equity once the company goes private. As a result, one person told me, “group chats are scrambling to see if working at Twitter makes economic sense first and foremost.”
Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock once the transaction closes. It's a 38 percent premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1 — the last trading day before Musk disclosed his approximately 9 percent stake in Twitter.
Once the deal is completed, the richest person in the world will own arguably the most influential social platform in the world, though from a business and user standpoint Twitter is significantly smaller than companies like Facebook or TikTok.
The social media company has always had influence far beyond its user base (which is small compared to platforms like Facebook and Instagram) and beyond its revenue (which is meager compared to tech competitors like Netflix, Google or Amazon), and Disney thought owning that influence could be powerful.
By that point, the platform had made addicts of its power users, among them politicians (including one notable former president in particular who has since been banned from the platform), journalists, entertainers and executives. That included Iger himself, who has long tweeted regularly on the platform (on Dec. 31, his last day at Disney, he tweeted his goodbye note).
That would set Dorsey up for a $978 million cash payout should the deal be completed.
With Twitter headed toward private ownership, here are seven outside opinions on how the billionaire should serve as caretaker of the speech rights and safety concerns of millions of the service’s users.
Once the deal competes, which is supposed to happen by the end of 2022, Twitter will cease to exist as a publicly listed company. Instead, it will become a private company fully owned by Elon Musk. Only time will tell which way Twitter will go, but as far as Musk’s plan is concerned, he wants to turn it into a true town square where everyone can debate and say things without risking censorship or blocking.
Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Monday announcement, it's difficult to say precisely how a Musk-led Twitter will differ from its shareholder-owned iteration. Musk's statement announcing the go-private deal hinted at several possible changes, including "authenticating all humans," defeating spam and "enhancing the product with new features," but details remain to be clarified.
The move comes as Twitter faces growing pressure from politicians and regulators over the content that appears on its platform. It has drawn critics from left and right over its efforts to mediate misinformation on the platform.
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is the new owner of Twitter after his offer to buy the company for US$54.20 (A$75.55) a share made on 14 April was unanimously approved by the board on Monday.
Elon Musk reached an agreement to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion on Monday, promising a more lenient touch to policing content on the platform where he promotes his interests, attacks critics and opines on social and economic issues to more than 83 million followers.
The outspoken Tesla CEO, who is also the world’s wealthiest person, has said he wanted to buy and privatize Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for free speech.
Musk said in a joint statement with Twitter that he wants to make the service “better than ever” with new features, such as getting rid of automated “spam bots” and making its algorithms open to the public to increase trust.
Elon Musk is set to become the new owner of Twitter, after a fast flurry of negotiations left the company’s board with no choice but to accept the multibillionaire’s $44 billion takeover proposal.
Under the terms of the deal, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of the company’s common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Musk, who is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.
Upon completion of the transaction, expected sometime in 2022, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Let’s start here: Twitter is a key part of our news [sic] media infrastructure. Just count how many times I use the word(s) “tweeted” or “on Twitter” in this article. Indeed, think back to the aftermath of the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, when Twitter was the first to ban Donald Trump, influencing the decisions of Facebook and other digital platforms.
The larger import of McMorrow’s courageous pushback should not be lost: Democrats need to respond, with controlled anger and potent language, to the deliberate lies and bullying the far right is using these days to win power.
Democrats seem to think facts speak for themselves. Any intelligent person can surely see through the baseless far-right charges. But polls suggest that most conservatives want to believe them, must believe them if their candidate is to succeed.
"America needs something more right now than a 'must-do' list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story… the leaders, and thinkers, and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people."€ —Bill Moyers, "A New Story for America" (2006)
Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law is part of a nationwide push by Republicans to score political points by attacking gay and transgender students. We speak with Democratic Florida state Senator Shevrin Jones, Florida’s first openly gay state senator, about how the controversial measure, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for children in kindergarten through third grade, is considered another effort by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to drum up support for his anticipated 2024 presidential run by marginalizing gay and transgender students. We also feature the viral speech from Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow denouncing her opponents for accusing her of “grooming” children, and remarks by Missouri state Representative Ian Mackey, who spoke out against a bill to allow school districts to vote on whether to ban trans student athletes from youth sports.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed into law a gerrymandered voting map that virtually guarantees Republicans four more seats in Congress while likely cutting the number of Black Democrats elected. The measure passed along party lines Thursday but was delayed when Black Florida lawmakers staged an impromptu sit-in protest. “Republicans cannot continue to disenfranchise Black voters,” says state Senator Shevrin Jones, a Democratic member of Florida’s Legislative Black Caucus who took part in the protest and who calls the gerrymandering part of a larger suite of “racist tactics” enacted by Republicans across the country.
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts delivered a sharp warning to members of her party on Sunday: "If we don't get up and deliver, then I believe that Democrats are going to lose."
Warren's remarks to CNN came months out from the 2022 midterms, elections that will determine whether Democrats maintain control of Congress or relinquish it to the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party, which has unified over the past year to obstruct action on coronavirus relief, renewable energy investments, voting rights, and more.
Russian parliamentarians have drafted a new bill on “foreign agents.” The proposed legislation, titled “On monitoring the activities of individuals under foreign influence,” was submitted to the State Duma on April 25. RBK and Izvestia have reviewed the bill’s text.
This post has been updated.
New York Attorney General Letitia James marked a "major victory" in her case against former President Donald Trump Monday as a state judge held Trump in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena.
On March 28, 2022, a federal judge found that former President Donald Trump and attorney John Eastman engaged in "a coup in search of a legal theory." The court concluded that, more likely than not, their efforts to overturn the presidential election were federal crimes.
Despite the Biden administration's pledges to be tougher on corporate crime than its business-friendly predecessor, a new report published Monday shows that corporate prosecutions reached a record low in 2021, continuing a decline that accelerated under former President Donald Trump.
"The Trump administration's soft-on-corporate-crime enforcement policies are having a holdover effect."
French President Emmanuel Macron's re-election by a comfortable margin against an opponent with whom he shares a mutual dislike almost obscured a certain co-dependence between their political camps. Macron and his opponent, the far-right Marine Le Pen, may loathe each other, but they have developed a type of political symbiosis that provides crucial insights into the current predicament in France, Europe, and beyond.
French President Emmanuel Macron won a second five-year term on Sunday, triumphing over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen and becoming the first French president since 2002 to be reelected. Macron beat LePen by a 17-point margin, though over a quarter of voters abstained from voting and Macron’s victory was much narrower than in 2017 — pointing to growing support in recent years for Le Pen’s openly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform. “The 17 percentage point margin of Macron isn’t really as comfortable of a margin as it looks,” says Paris-based journalist Cole Stangler, citing a “tremendous amount of dissatisfaction” among working-class immigrant voters. “Some people, frankly, are struggling to see the difference between Macron and Le Pen,” continues Stangler, who says Macron has enacted a “very right-wing policy program.”
There is a completely crazed article by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian – worrying its “most shared” – calling for “direct, in-country military support” by western powers in Ukraine against Russia.
In the run-up to the Hungarian parliamentary elections held in early April, burnt Hungarian election mail-in ballots were found at a landfill near the Romanian town of Târgu MureÃâ¢. One of the first journalists to report on this was Boróka Parászka of transtelex.ro. Since then, maszol.ro (the Hungarian-language news site in Romania supported by the Hungarian government) has been carrying out a defamation campaign against Parászka, who has even received death threats.
His commitment is getting a mild test thanks to a fellow tech billionaire / rocket enthusiast / media mogul. Jeff Bezos quoted a New York Times reporter’s tweet pointing out that Tesla’s business interests in China could give the government leverage over Twitter via its new owner, saying, “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?.”
Not content with the raft of imperfect and terrible filters voluntarily used by Big Tech platforms, a new proposal would change the copyright regime online, mandating filters and removing speech at all levels of the internet. This would be good only for a terrible cadre of the biggest companies in the country: the monopolistic ISPs like AT&T and Comcast, Big Content like Warner and NBC-Universal, and the Big Tech companies that already have filters like Google and Facebook.
For the rest of us, for internet creators, users, and small to medium businesses, this would be a disaster. Tell your senators to stand against big corporations and with free expression and reject the Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies Copyright Act.
Following today’s announcement that Elon Musk will acquire complete ownership of Twitter in a cash sale of around 44 billion USD, pending shareholder approval, Access Now urges Twitter’s Board, employees, and shareholders, along with Elon Musk and investors backing the sale, to take immediate steps to affirm and strengthen Twitter’s commitments, policies, and practices to uphold human rights on the platform. Unless the necessary human rights protections are included in the terms of the sale — which are yet to be disclosed — Twitter shareholders should vote against the agreement in defense of the platform’s most vulnerable users.
Musk plans to take Twitter private immediately following the sale, asserting privatization is the only path forward for Twitter’s growth and future as a platform for free speech. In practice, however, this move reduces opportunities for transparency and accountability, including on matters of content governance, data protection, and corporate governance. “Spyware companies and other sections of the tech industry with troubling human rights records have used this type of regulatory darkness to act with impunity,” said Peter Micek, General Counsel at Access Now.
Unless you’ve stayed away from social media and the news the past few days, you’ve undoubtedly heard that Elon Musk bought Twitter. Frankly, if you haven’t heard, you probably don’t care. Many that do care seem to be taking part in a mass exodus. After the Twitter deal was finalized, the servers at competitor Mastodon hit a traffic surge, and Twitter employees started asking questions.
Twitter users flooded the site with pictures of Elon Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell after the Tesla CEO bought the social media giant, taking the company private in a deal valued at roughly $44 billion.
On Monday, users rushed to post a 2014 photo of Musk and Maxwell, who was convicted on charges tied to Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring last year, poking fun at Musk and suggesting that Twitter's new owner would soon ban the image from the platform.
"Post this image while you still can" and "Post this f**kin photo as much as you can," users wrote alongside the picture.
The deal, which is expected to close this year, is the height of a weeks-long saga between Musk and Twitter.
In the span of less than a month, the billionaire became one of the company's largest shareholders and was also offered and turned down a seat on its board.
The plaintiffs, Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Human Rights Watch, The Internet Archive, Alex Andrews, and Eric Koszyk, have been challenging the law since it was enacted in 2018. The district court hearing their challenge dismissed the case last month, ruling that FOSTA did not violate the First Amendment.
The plaintiffs are disappointed in the district court’s ruling and disagree with it. As they have repeatedly argued, FOSTA is one of the most restrictive laws governing online speech and it has resulted in significant harm to sex workers and their allies, depriving them of places online to advocate for themselves and their community.
FOSTA created new civil and criminal liability for anyone who “owns, manages, or operates an interactive computer service” and creates content (or hosts third-party content) with the intent to “promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law also expands criminal and civil liability to classify any online speaker or platform that allegedly assists, supports, or facilitates sex trafficking as though they themselves were participating “in a venture” with individuals directly engaged in sex trafficking.
Google has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
To deflect attention away from this debacle, the union activists then launched a smear campaign against the WSWS over its article, “‘Activists’ promote Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham in Arriva London South pay dispute.”
The purpose of their hysterical response was to spread confusion over the 2021/2 pay claim at Arriva London South in order to make respectable a below inflation deal and legitimise censorship of the WSWS.
Assange’s case is notorious and grotesque enough: held in Belmarsh for three years without charge; facing extradition to the United States for a dubiously cobbled indictment bolted to the Espionage Act of 1917 – a US statute that is being extra-territorially expanded to target non-US nationals who publish classified information overseas.
Collaery’s is less internationally known, though it should banish any suggestions that Assange would necessarily face much fairer treatment in the Australian justice system.€ The barrister is being prosecuted under section 39 of the Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Cth) for conspiracy to reveal classified information.€ He was consulted by now convicted former intelligence officer Witness K, who was responsible for leading a 2004 spying operation conducted by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) that led to the bugging of cabinet offices used by the East Timorese government.
I immediately point out that the documentary maker Carlos Alberto Jr. is a filmmaker. This is not so obvious. I mean: the shots he makes, the places where he takes Anselmo,, the scenes he films, are those of a movie man. At the beginning of the first episode, when Anselmo refers to the codenames he used to infiltrate and deliver militants to their deaths, he laughs. This is definitive as a presentation of the traitor’s cynicism. Masterful.
Carlos Alberto is a journalist who did his homework, studied, researched, what journalism had not done until today with Corporal Anselmo. Examples of this are the terrible liar’s book “Eu, Cabo Anselmo”, by Percival de Souza and all previous interviews.€ But for the viper that Carlos Alberto saw and interviewed, for the documented serpent, there are, even so, restrictions to the filmmaker’s method: if the interviewers before Carlos Alberto Jr. sinned by ignorance of the great liar of the agent of repression, in Carlos Alberto there was what I would call excessive respect to the lies of the interviewee. I mean: Carlos Alberto doesn’t interrupt him, except rare times, because he lets the lie go. Even if the documentary maker counters Anselmo’s statements with statements that contradict him in a cut with other interviewees, Calos Alberto doesn’t interrupt him with his own voice, which would be very interesting to show Anselmo’s contradictions alive in his own speech.€ € This is clear when Anselmo visits the headquarters of the former Deops in São Paulo, today Memória da Resistência. There, in an unfortunate chance for the traitor, he passes in front of a wall where the six murdered in the Granja de São Bento in Pernambuco are displayed with photos.€ There, in front of two planes, with images of the press that published what the repression ordered, as here.
I was raised on a rural route at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. I didn’t know a single rich person growing up; we were all varying degrees of middle-class and poor. Still, I knew at a young age that some of the kids at my school went without some of the most basic necessities, let alone such extras as a new outfit from Walmart to start the school year. But it would be years before I fully realized the harshness of rural poverty — in particular, the ways isolation exacerbates financial challenges, as well as the lack of medical and social service providers and long distances necessary to travel to find them, often without any form of reliable public transportation. When poverty persists in a region, other problems take root.
After spending several years reporting in other states, in 2014 I returned to the region I had long called home. Since then, I’ve heard about how child abuse rates are higher in rural Southern Illinois than any other part of the state. And I wondered why these trends persist.
Notes: Valena Beety teaches law at Arizona State University, and previously worked at Innocence Projects in two states (Mississippi and West Virginia). Geoff Davidian is a reporter with over 40 years’ experience, including at the Milwaukee Journal, Arizona Republic, and Houston Chronicle. Margaret Flowers is a retired pediatrician and a long-time advocate for universal single-payer health coverage. She’s a member of the steering committee for HealthOverProfit.org, a group that campaigns for “a national improved Medicare for All healthcare system.”
Feeling the crunch of this economy? Why not leverage government power to create a sustainable revenue stream? That’s the plan in Vietnam, a country not unfamiliar with regular deployments of censorial efforts by the government.
Droids and robot assistants are still not really a part of our daily lives, even if they started showing up in movies many long decades ago. [Rudy Aramaryo] perhaps hopes that will change one day, and is pursuing this goal with their own droid build named R.O.B.
Apple is working with anti-union lawyers at Littler Mendelson in an escalating fight with retail workers in Atlanta who have filed for a union election. Though the company has not publicly stated its stance on Apple Stores unionizing, the move sends a strong signal that it plans to oppose workers organizing for better pay and working conditions.
Littler is currently representing Starbucks in its efforts to fight off worker organizing. It previously helped McDonald’s avoid responsibility in a 2014 case that alleged the company, as a joint employer, violated labor laws by retaliating against workers who participated in the Fight for $15 campaign.
The Kuala Lumpur Shariah High Court today sentenced Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin Abdullah to one week in jail for contempt of court over her statement that had reportedly “insulted” the Islamic judicial system.
Free Malaysia Today reported that the decision was over Maria’s statement on September 5, 2019, in which she remarked that Muslim women in Malaysia are still being discriminated against under the shariah judicial system here.
Both demonstrations expressed the widespread anger and disgust of the public toward the brutal execution-style killing that was captured completely on smartphone video by the passenger, who was in Lyoya’s car when he was pulled over at 8:10 a.m. in a residential neighborhood on the southwest side of the city in western Michigan.
We’ve noted for a long time how data makes it clear that, contrary to claims by telecom monopolies, community broadband networks are hugely beneficial. They generally offer faster speeds at lower prices with better customer service than regional monopolies, and they also tend to push said monopolies to try a little harder to compete on price, and expand and improve service.
For many, many, many years we’ve been talking about the idea of advertising as content and content as advertising on Techdirt. The basic idea is that in today’s world, where there are so many things competing for our attention, rather than trying to force annoying ads on people, advertisers should look to turn their advertising into good content that people actually want to see. And the related concept of “content is advertising” is that any good content advertises something else in some way or another (whether it wants to or not). But the key point is that rather than relying on the idea of a captive audience, it makes sense to focus on trying to create advertising that people want to see.
Europe's Digital Markets Act – near-finalized legislation to tame the internet's gatekeepers – contains language squarely aimed at ending Apple's iOS browser restrictions.
The Register has received a copy of unpublished changes in the proposed act, and among the various adjustments to the draft agreement is the explicit recognition of "web browser engines" as a service that should be protected from anti-competitive gatekeeper-imposed limitations.
Apple requires that competing mobile browsers distributed through the iOS App Store use its own WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of its Safari browser. The result is that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on iOS are all, more or less, Safari.
That requirement has been a sore spot for years among rivals like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. They could not compete on iOS through product differentiation because their mobile browsers had to rely on WebKit rather than their own competing engines.
That’s why EFF, along with the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, and the assistance of Columbia Law School’s Science, Health, and Information Clinic has filed a motion to intervene and unseal documents in a patent case, Uniloc v. Google, in the Eastern District of Texas. When Google filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the parties filed their briefs and documentary exhibits entirely under seal, keeping even basic facts about those documents (like their length) secret. Worse, the parties did not file any sealing motions or make any other attempt to justify their excessive sealing requests. This conduct violated the public’s access rights under the Constitution and common law as well as the standing order of the presiding judge, Judge Rodney Gilstrap. It also undermines earlier efforts by EFF to ensure greater transparency in patent cases in this Texas federal court, which has one of the largest dockets of patent cases in the country.
These sealed documents are important: they go to whether Uniloc has a legal right, known as standing, to bring lawsuits based on these patents. As one of the country’s most prolific patent litigants, Uniloc’s right to sue affects the freedom of countless technology makers and users.
Many of the documents that Uniloc filed under seal in Texas were already unsealed in another case—yet in Texas, they remain sealed in their entirety. There is no justification for that. Once information is public, it cannot be sealed. Hoping the parties would recognize that as well, EFF and PIPLI asked Google and Uniloc to unseal those already public records and to file motions to seal any information they could justify keeping sealed.
The RIAA and the US Government's National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate public and private sector efforts to disrupt online piracy. Criminal prosecutions for music piracy are relatively rare, so the partnership may signal changes ahead.
The EU has reached an agreement on the final text of the Digital Services Act (DSA). The new legislation sets clear guidelines for how online platforms and services must prevent abuse and the spread of illegal and harmful content. The DSA will help to keep "big tech" accountable and also comes with some new rules and requirements for takedown notices.
We’ve written numerous posts about the€ EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some press publishers to make sites like Google pay for the privilege of displaying and linking to newspaper publishers’ material – an assault on the Web’s underlying hyperlink technology. The second element is the€ upload filter, probably the worst development in the copyright world of the last few decades.
According to official press releases outlining the contours of the agreement, these services will have to take measures to protect their users from illegal content, goods and services. This includes transparent advertising and rules to mitigate disinformation. In short, what is illegal offline is also illegal online – a principal [sic] Creative Commons (CC) fully endorses.
