Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
We are excited to announce the release of Kubernetes 1.24, the first release of 2022!
This release consists of 46 enhancements: fourteen enhancements have graduated to stable, fifteen enhancements are moving to beta, and thirteen enhancements are entering alpha. Also, two features have been deprecated, and two features have been removed.
I often hear from users of Windows, Mac and ChromeOS tell me that they are thinking about trying out Linux, but they are not sure if Linux is right for them. Well, let me ask you a question...
The Steam Deck has been a popular launch but it's not been without it's flaws and turns out that a great feature that Valve added to steam worked completely opposite to what it was supposed to do.
With Linux, the primary method for obtaining debugging information of a serious error or fault is via the kdump mechanism. Kdump captures a wealth of kernel and machine state and writes it to a file for post-mortem debugging. But if kdump writes to a file that is on a remote server, and networking is down, then kdump can not work. (In this context, networking includes the guest’s network driver and stack, or the host’s network driver(s) and stack or the network hardware both on the host and in the surrounding data center.)
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I need a flipchart or a whiteboard while teaching, but during online sessions I resort to using a terminal and a text editor and quickly got tired of having to swap sharing different windows in Zoom, Big Blue Button, & co. (I share individual windows, not the whole screen.) I share a window of a Web browser with my presentation in one tab and an open terminal using gotty in the second, and can flip between the two with CMD-1 / CMD-2.
A wide variety of media players are MPRIS-enabled and can be queried using the above command, including media players running in the browser such as Airsonic.
Ok, the title is a bit misleading. Like most things in life, it really isn’t infinite. But I’m going to show you how you can use a very interesting Linux feature to turn one serial port from a microcontroller into a bunch of virtual ports. In theory, you could create over 200 ports, but the reality is you will probably want to stick with fewer.
The Linux operating system has transformed file archiving into a free, reputable, reliable, and secure file management process. By archiving your file(s) under a Linux operating system environment, you guarantee its integrity and security. Your files become free of compromise from both users and applications active in the system.
Originally created as a fork of the Nagios monitoring tool, Icinga is a free and open-source infrastructure monitoring and alerting solution that monitors your entire infrastructure and provides feedback about the availability and performance of your devices.
It also allows you to collect, store and visualize various metrics. You can then create reports using the data collected and visualizations that have been populated.
Icinga also sends alerts or notifications in case something goes wrong so that you can promptly attend to the issues and restore services in the least possible amount of time.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Budgie Desktop on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, The Budgie Desktop is one of the latest and most modern Gnome-based desktops that gives a minimal and elegant desktop experience and is available for all major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Budgie Desktop environment on Rocky Linux. 8.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Laravel on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework for developers looking to build modern web applications based on PHP. Its elegant syntax, advanced features, and robust tools help simplify web application development. Laravel is highly scalable and has built-in support for distributed cache systems.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Laravel PHP framework on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Linux has sadly many problems when it comes to Bluetooth, or at least, some specific distributions of it.
We have seen a case before where many Bluetooth devices were actually supported by the kernel, but an issue in USB power management caused these devices to not work for a very, very long time on various Linux distributions.
Today, it seems that there is another Bluetooth issue.
Some Bluetooth 5.0 adapters which use the rtl8761b firmware are not working correctly on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 (Possibly other Linux distributions too), because of a bug in loading the correct driver for these devices.
I realize not everybody’s going to ditch the Web and switch to Gemini or Gopher today (that’ll take, like, a month at the longest). Until that happens, here’s a non-exhaustive, highly-opinionated list of best practices for websites that focus primarily on text. I don’t expect anybody to fully agree with the list; nonetheless, the article should have at least some useful information for any web content author or front-end web developer.
My primary focus is inclusive design. Specifically, I focus on supporting under€represented ways to read a page. Not all users load a page in a common web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes and hands. Authors often neglect people who read through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine translators, “reading mode” implemen€tations, the Tor network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon browsers, to name a few. I list more niches in the conclusion. Compatibility with so many niches sounds far more daunting than it really is: if you only selectively override browser defaults and use plain-old, semantic HTML (POSH), you’ve done half of the work already.
One of the core ideas behind the flavor of inclusive design I present is being inclusive by default. Web pages shouldn’t use accessible overlays, reduced-data modes, or other personal€izations if these features can be available all the time. Of course, some features conflict; you can’t display a light and dark color scheme simultaneously. Personal€ization is a fallback strategy to resolve conflicting needs. Dispro€portionately under€represented needs deserve dispro€portionately greater attention, so they come before personal preferences instead of being relegated to a separate lane.
Another focus is minimalism. Progressive enhancement is a simple, safe idea that tries to incorporate some responsibility into the design process without rocking the boat too much. I don’t find it radical enough. In addition to progressive enhancement, I prefer limiting any enhancements to ones that have been demonstrated to solve specific accessibility, security, performance, or significant usability problems faced by people besides me.
This comprehensive step-by-step guide will show you how to install Slackware Linux to get started quickly on becoming a Slackware expert.
Slackware is the oldest actively maintained Linux distro. Its first release dated back in July 1993, almost 29 years ago. But what’s really amazing is that even after 29 years, Slackware is still Slackware. I mean that the installation process and wizard appear to be the same. The method of operation remains unchanged.
Cloudflare is a company based in America that deals with the security of the web. It is used to provide internet security for businesses, non-profit organizations, bloggers and others. However, the services are so good that they totally hide your real identity online, well sort off! Your IP address or server host gets hidden behind their service, below we share 3 methods which you can use to bypass them and locate the real information.
Django is a backend development language, it is a language for perfectionists. This is called so because it gives you many components out of blue. Whenever you want to develop an application, Django is the go-to language.
To start using Django, you need to be well conversant with Python language first. Begin by knowing all Python-related stuff such as variables, how to do looping in python, tuples, and dictionaries because this is what you encounter every time while working with Django.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Flowblade on Debian 11.
Sudo had many features to help blue teams in their daily job even before 1.9 was released. Session recordings, plugins and others made sure that most administrative access could be controlled and problems easily detected. Version 1.9 introduced Python support, new APIs, centralized session recordings, however some blind spots still remained. Learn how some of the latest sudo features can help you to better control and log administrative access to your hosts. You will learn about JSON logging in sudo, chroot support, logging sub-commands, and how to work with these logs in syslog-ng.
If anyone has a Google Hub device of some sort, they know how handy they can be for getting information when you ask a question. But there is another use that most people may not be aware of doing. Streaming music, not only to one speaker, to many.
Today we are looking at how to install Gacha Star 2.1 (Beta) on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
There are countless different Linux distributions available. Many of them try to cater to your exact needs and tastes.
But maybe you don't want to take the time to look through and test every single distribution, especially if there are well over 1,000 of them out there. That can be a time-consuming way to find a match made in heaven, with no guarantees. What better way to know you have the perfect match in your hands than to make the operating system yourself?
That's where Linux From Scratch comes in.
it’s been a little while since an updates post, but we are back and operating as normal. While our primary focus has been getting everything ready to release elementary OS 7, we’ve also released a handful of fixes and creature comforts for OS 6.
You like OpenBSD? Then, I'm quite sure you can contribute to it! Let me explain the many ways your skills can be used to improve the project and contribute back.
This is approximately as wise as taking off from Mars in a ragtop rocket, but don’t worry, the math all checks out.
My theory is that compiling less code will be faster than compiling more code, but first we must find the code so we know not to compile it.
syspatch71-001_wifi was somewhat broken (in terms of the housekeeping rather than the functionality of the patch).
We are especially proud to present you Tails€ 5.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian€ 11 (Bullseye). It brings new versions of a lot of the software included in Tails and new OpenPGP tools.
We added Kleopatra to replace the OpenPGP Applet and the Password and Keys utility, also known as Seahorse.
Tor Browser 11.0.11 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version includes important security updates to Firefox...
A few details and additional information about elementary OS 7 "Horus", with features, release dates and more.
 American based Axzez unveiled the Interceptor Power over Ethernet (PoE+) board which offers eight PoE+ ports to interface with their own Interceptor carrier board compatible with the RPI CM4. The Interceptor PoE+ board is ships for $59.
Early this year, Linux Gizmos reviewed the Axzez Interceptor Carrier Board which offers rich connectivity including 5x SATA slots, 4x GbE, 2x HDMI and 2x USB ports. The Interceptor carrier board is designed to support 2x Interceptor PoE+ boards via FCC connectors as seen below.
NXP i.MX RT1180 is the latest member of the company’s i.MX RT Series crossover MCUss with application processor-like performance. The 800 MHz dual-core Arm Cortex-M7/M33 microcontroller is specifically designed for industrial IoT communication with a Gigabit Ethernet port supporting time-sensitive networking (TSN).
Given how rapidly the security situation can change, and in light of the recent (and well-publicized) vulnerabilities in industrial networks such as PIPEDREAM as well as a Russian attack on the Ukrainian grid, I spoke to Marty Edwards, VP of OT security at Tenable, to find out why industrial security is getting so much attention. It turns out that a confluence of events — an active threat in the form of Russia’s war, more security researchers paying attention to OT security, and years of groundwork to help improve security documentation at industrial companies — is making industrial vulnerabilities more visible.
 This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products offered by Corel.
Corel MindManager is mind mapping software. MindManager can be used to manage projects, organize information, and for brainstorming. It’s not available for Linux.
What are the best free and open source alternatives?
Paul Brown examines social media alternatives including the popular Mastodon in this article from the Linux Magazine archives.
Despite what it may seem, despite its promise of unbridled communication possibilities and its supposed gift of giving voice to the traditionally voiceless, current social media is a walled garden at best, although a slimy cesspit with bars over the top would be a more apt description.
The problem with the current social media status quo is that the platform does not have your interests at heart. The companies that run proprietary social media platforms gradually introduce more and more restrictive terms of service, package your personal data and sell it off to other companies and governments, make their algorithms more manipulative, and so on.
As you can imagine it's just gotten harder and harder to slide the the right holes. So now we have a kind of a new problem... What happens when you have a lie that works for 95% of sites, but fails on, say, a few Alexa top 1k sites, or important properties you or your partners own?
Well, you lie differently to those ones.
That's right, there are many levels of lies. Your browser will send different UA strings to some domains, straight up spoofing another browser entirely.
Why? Because it has to. It's basically impossible to slip through all the cracks, and that's the only way to make things work for users that's in the browser's control.
What if the lie isn't enough? Well, you special case another kind of lie. Maybe you force that domain into quirks mode. You have to, because while the problem is on the site, that doesn't matter to regular users - they'll blame your "crappy browser". Worse still, if you're unlucky enough to be a newbie working on a brand new site in that domain, surprise! It doesn't work like almost anything else for some reason you can't explain! So, you try to find a way, another kind of workaround... and on and on it goes.
Firefox is arguably the most popular open-source browser that’s not based on Chrome, available for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
While we know that Chrome-based browsers dominate the market share, Firefox was introduced way before Google Chrome came into existence.
Version 100.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. New features include video caption display on various proprietary sites, multiple-language spelling checking, invisible scrollbars, and more.
The Mozilla Foundation has released version 100 of its flagship web browser Firefox.
There's no link in the above paragraph because, strangely, at the time of writing, the new browser is not officially mentioned anywhere on Mozilla's website. However, you can download it from Mozilla: it's already on the foundation's FTP site. You can choose between versions for macOS, and both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux.
If you're not into the flat look of recent versions of Windows, it will run on Windows 7 too, but you will need to install the official Microsoft update KB4474419 first. (Yes, Mozilla's support site does concede that the new version exists.)
The biggest change is an extra digit in the version number. Version 100 is not an extended support release – the next one of those is currently planned to be version 102 next June.
Access Now and civil society organisations from across Europe have laid out the concrete steps Members of the European Parliament must implement to ensure the IMCO-LIBE Draft Report protects people’s rights, and outlines where the text needs to go further.
“MEPs have a unique chance and responsibility to push for strong protections for people’s rights in the Parliament’s position,” said Fanny Hidvegi, Europe Policy and Advocacy Director. “There’s a lot of talk about making the AI Act human-centric, but so far we’ve not seen the safeguarding of rights, or empowerment for affected people — this must change to protect millions of people from abuse and exploitation by AI systems.”
[...]
“The addition of a partial ban on inherently discriminatory predictive policing systems in the AI Act is laudable, but there are other equally problematic systems that need to be included in the list of prohibited practices,” said Daniel Leufer, Senior Policy Analyst at Access Now. “We’ve seen a proliferation of utterly indefensible AI systems that claim to do everything from predicting sexual or political orientation from your facial features, to detecting lies from facial microexpressions — we need comprehensive red lines to stop the ones that irremediably undermine our fundamental rights.”
The IMCO-LIBE Draft Report is an important first salvo in the Parliament’s work to safeguard fundamental rights, but Access Now demands braver, bolder proposals to ensure that the AIA genuinely works. All eyes are on the rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs to beef up protections for people’s rights so the AIA can do what it’s supposed to — protect millions of people from abuse and exploitation by AI systems.
Qt for MCUs 2.1.1 has been released and is available for download. As a patch release, Qt for MCUs 2.1.1 provides bug fixes and other improvements, and maintains source compatibility with Qt for MCUs 2.1.0. It does not add any new functionality.
When I left my React focused role behind I expected to find the transition hard, and miss what React had to offer. I've ended up finding the transition easier than expected and have come to really relish working closer to the platform’s primitives and maintaining more control over the software I write and in this blog post I’d like to share why that is.
There was a project announced this week that lets you write python scripts in HTML and have them execute in the browser (pyscript). Here's an example.
Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change (Harper Wave), weaves together scholarly research and astute political insights with the particularities of her own experience as a Filipina American woman, mother, and daughter to examine the history, the pandemic-wrought present, and the possible future of care work in the United States. I spoke with Garbes about her explorations of labor and care and what our bodies tell us about trauma, healing, and pleasure.
For most of her 78 years, Kathy Boudin, who died on May 1, was a frontline activist and creative political thinker. Confronting white racism and supporting the Black freedom struggle defined her life, with some serious consequences along the way. Coverage of her passing has been defined by her presence in, and survival of, the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in March 1970 and her support role in the October 1981 Brinks robbery. Three Weather Underground comrades died in the former, and a Brinks guard and two Nyack, N.Y., police officers were killed in the latter. Kathy regretted both—and served 22 years in New York State prison for her support role in the robbery.
In Jennifer Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad, “time is a goon.” It is time that steals youthful promise and dashes hopes. Time that makes people unrecognizable to themselves. In it, time derails the life of kleptomaniac Sasha Blake; it disillusions her record producer boss, Bennie Salazar, and diminishes record executive Lou, once so vital to his teenage girlfriend Jocelyn. Music is good, we are told.
Baseball jokes aside, holograms have been a dream for decades, and with devices finally around that support something like them, we have finally started to wonder how to make content for them. [Mike Rigsby] recently entered his stop-motion holographic setup into our sci-fi contest, and we love the idea.
Samples taken from the girl's wounds were used to confirm that the animal that bit her had been killed, California Department of Fish and Wildlife Capt. Patrick Foy said.
In the novel “Harassment,” the protagonist navigates unwanted attention from her boss. The story’s author, Kira Yarmysh (the longtime press secretary of imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny), wrote most of the book in Moscow while under house arrest as a “restraining measure” for violating Russia’s draconian pandemic lockdown restrictions. Last summer, Yarmysh left Russia; she now lives and works abroad. Meduza literary critic Galina Yuzefovich spoke with Yarmysh about her new book, Navalny’s role in her literary career, and what she believes opponents of the Kremlin’s policies should do now.
So I recently moved to using a smartphone after being a basic-phone only person for multiple years, and my experience has been actually positive. To the point where I would write a provocatively titled blog post about it for the clicks from annoyed FOSS and permacomputing people at me liking an objectively trash device. And yes, smartphones are objectively trash. They're hard to repair, built for minimum life and maximum profit, and generally suck (as all devices invented by modern capitalism do). But after having lived without one for so long, I want to talk about having one again.
Shit, I learned my lesson tonight I guess. Appon the release of spartan functionality in lagrange, I decided I'd play around with making a spartan server. So, here's the ironic part: I decided to cp my root-gemini directory into a backup directory named 'gemini'. But my root-gemini directory was already named 'gemini'. Being tired and not thinking, I deleted what I thought was a backup thinking I still had my main directory.
Researchers will work to deliver the first-ever optical communications from a 1U CubeSat based on the technology behind Western Australia’s Binar-1 spacecraft as the result of a new partnership between Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre and laser communications company Chascii.
If you’re writing a screenplay or novel, there will likely be points along the way at which you can’t get enough encouragement from friends and family. While kind words are kind, acts such as [scubabear]’s can provide a push like no other. By commissioning another 3D designer friend to model a character from the first friend’s screenplay so he could print and animate it, [scubabear] fed two birds with one scone, you might say.
While this is still good for longer texts, I don’t use this very often anymore for blog-length texts because I often just do it mentally instead. I imagine the underlying tree structure skeleton without having it explicitly written out and then move things around in my head to guide my prose editing.
I use the path through the text as a test for “does this work”. The reader is going to experience the “tree” of ideas as a depth-first tree-walk and if nodes don’t fit together, I need to reorder, move things around, or even remove or add nodes.
When you need a super-zoomed out view, “left” and “right“ is fine. That’s how I feel about the many political camps.
A lot of the time, we need more nuance, and that’s great, too. It’s fine to discuss topics, both separately and in the context of larger frameworks.
Today is my birthday. I turn 70. I’ve learned a few things so far that might be helpful to others. For the past few years, I’ve jotted down bits of unsolicited advice each year and much to my surprise I have more to add this year. So here is my birthday gift to you all: 103 bits of wisdom I wish I had known when I was young.
Beginning Wednesday, May 3, readers can loan joint tickets to Tallinn City Museum and Tallinn Literary Center from Kalamaja Library and Kadriorg Library.
The joint tickets provide access to all seven museums under the Tallinn City Museum umbrella as well as all three museums under the Tallinn Literary Center umbrella.
According to Tallinn City Museum director Heli Nurger, that their goal is to provide city residents with a comprehensive cultural experience.
With the huge popularity of retrocomputing and of cyberdecks, we have seen a variety of projects that use a modern computer such as a Raspberry Pi bathed in the glorious glow of a CRT being used as a monitor. The right aesthetic is easily achieved this way, but there’s more to using a CRT display than simply thinking about its resolution. Particularly a black-and-white CRT or a vintage TV has some limitations due to its operation, that call for attention to the design of what is displayed upon it. [Jordan “Ploogle” Carroll] has taken a look at this subject, using a 1975 Zenith portable TV as an example.
Despite being a computer with some extra chips, synthesizers today are still quite expensive. They used to cost far more, but we tend to think of them as instruments instead of computers. And just because it is an instrument doesn’t mean someone like [Peter Sobot] can’t crack it open and patch the OS inside.
If you’re a radiation enthusiast, chances are you’ve got a Geiger counter lying around somewhere. While Geiger counters are useful to detect the amount of radiation present, and with a few tricks can also distinguish between the three types of radiation (alpha, beta and gamma), they are of limited use in identifying radioactive materials. For that you need a different instrument called a gamma-ray spectrometer.
In 2020, [Eddie] found himself with a few hundred RGB LEDs left after a pandemic-interrupted project, and a slew of emotions he wanted to express – so he turned to the language of hardware, and started sculpting his feelings into an art project. He set out to build an LED tree around a piece of wood he picked for its cool shape, and trying out a long-shelved idea of his, while at it – using different resistors to mix colors of the RGB LEDs. The end result, pictured above, has earned “The Most Important Device” spot in our recent Sci-Fi contest, fair and square.
Samsung Electronics has unveiled its first Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0 solution based on the company’s 7th-generation V-NAND and a proprietary controller allowing speeds of up to 23.2 gigabits per second (Gbps) per lane or double the previous UFS 3.1 solutions.
In more practical terms, Samsung UFS 4.0 storage will deliver a sequential read speed of up to 4,200 MB/s and a sequential write speed of 2,800 MB/s, corresponding to about 2x and 1.6x faster speeds over UFS 3.1 storage.
Owning a home remains a key part of achieving the American dream. People in the United States are taught to believe that homeownership is a sign of success, and this dream is about more than personal fulfillment. Homeowners traditionally enjoy significant economic benefits like tax breaks for mortgage payments, capital gains exclusions, subsidies, and other financial tools that are not available to those who rent their homes. Home equity credit also allows homeowners to draw on the value of their property for liquidity in times of crisis, such as a health emergency or unemployment.
Amongst the substantive provision of the EO is a directive for the secretaries of agriculture and interior to “define, identify and complete an inventory of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands,” and to make it public within one year. Following the inventory, the agencies are directed to “develop policies with robust opportunity for public comment to institutionalize climate-smart management and conservation strategies that address threats to mature and old-growth forests on federal lands.”
The EO also instructs multiple government agencies to submit a report identifying opportunities for greater deployment of nature-based solutions to the climate crisis. All of these actions are significant, but none has immediate conservation impact.
Abortion is health care, and health care is a human right.
On Monday, Politico published a leaked majority draft opinion from the Supreme Court that revealed the justices have privately voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has kept basic abortion rights legal since its 1973 ruling. Should the Court go through with electing to overturn the landmark court case, the ruling’s protection of the federal right to an abortion would be destroyed, leaving abortion rights an issue subject to state governments.
The news has caused a wave of condemnations from celebrities across the entertainment industry.
Abortion rights are popular with Americans; the Democrats are making it harder than it needs to be to mobilize around it, while Republicans have wasted no time building a bigger and bigger movement based on targeting the marginalized. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi (CA) are endorsing anti-choice candidates in races where pro-choice ones like Jessica Cisneros are running. We can't be surprised; Pelosi's been leaving the Democratic “big tent” open to anti-abortion candidates for years. But, right. It's the voters' faults.
News of the opinion was greeted with jubilation and horror by activists on either side of America’s long-running abortion war. “Today is a day for courage and hope”, tweeted Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion organisation. Within hours abortion-rights protesters had gathered outside the Supreme Court. Some wept; others swore through a megaphone at Justice Alito. Nancy Northup, the president of the Centre for Reproductive Rights, said overturning Roe would be “the most damaging setback to the rights of women in the history of our country”.
With abortion and contraceptives to be curtailed in America, The Guardian says that “births outside of hospitals” are up, not citing a reason.
I’d like to go with “While the Republicans are saying that rape is an opportunity to have the baby you never wanted, the Democrats have failed to contain healthcare costs and you might get a bill for the birth that is $550,000 dollars, and includes a $39.99 surcharge for holding the baby” for $1,000.
It’s not like the Republicans winning an election (or a violent overthrow) is going to help Americans afford healthcare. So this situation isn’t going to get better.
The Russian hacking group behind the SolarWinds hack, Nobelium, is setting up new infrastructure to launch attacks using old tricks, researchers at Recorded Future found. The findings, published Tuesday and shared first with CyberScoop, demonstrate how the group has evolved in recent months in an effort to avoid researcher detection.
Researchers identified more than four dozen domains the group used in phishing attacks, some of which attempted to emulate real brands. The tactic, in which hackers register potentially misspelled versions of real brand domains to trick targets, is known as “typosquatting.”
Last year we danced in court with a Patent Troll and they eventually backed off. This year SparkFun is a victim of Identity Theft. Yes - a company can also get its identity stolen. Let me explain.
There is a website www.sparkfunn.com that was privately registered on January 8th and updated on January 10th, 2022. Notice the extra n in funn. Cute right? It reminds me of when I tell people my name is spelled with two n’s, not one. Close but that’s not my name or SparkFun’s.
With the domain sparkfunn.com officially registered, these scammers are sending emails using this domain with actual names of SparkFun employees to get other companies to ship them product. The email address is a digital sleight of hand to get in the door, but the actual PO attached to their email is pretty brazen.
Activist groups called on Twitter advertisers Tuesday to boycott the service if it opens the gates to abusive and misinformative posts with billionaire Elon Musk as its owner.
The Tesla chief's $44-billion deal to buy the global messaging platform must still get the backing of shareholders and regulators, but he has voiced enthusiasm for dialing back content moderation to a legal minimum and no longer banning people for using the platform to instigate real-world harm.
"Your brand risks association with a platform amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy theorists," said an open letter signed by more than two dozen groups including Media Matters, Access Now and Ultraviolet.
Business and government users on Twitter may need to pay a "slight" fee to stay on the social media platform, Tesla boss Elon Musk has said.
It comes after the board of Twitter agreed to a $44bn (€£34.5bn) takeover offer from Mr Musk.
However, Mr Musk said the site would always be free for "casual users".
“The most epic troll ever.” That’s how one Twitter employee described Elon Musk’s offer to buy the platform, and how it has largely been covered—as the latest entrepreneurial romp in the billionaire’s ever-growing cult of personality. A self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who sees Twitter as the “de facto public town square,” Musk did what any zillionaire with a savior complex would: purchase the town square, for $44 billion.
Armis researchers have discovered five critical vulnerabilities in the implementation of TLS communications in multiple models of network switches. Collectively dubbed TLStorm 2.0, the vulnerabilities stem from a similar design flaw identified in the TLStorm vulnerabilities expanding the reach of TLStorm to millions of additional enterprise-grade network infrastructure devices.
[...]
In March 2022, Armis first disclosed TLStorm, three critical vulnerabilities in APC Smart-UPS devices that allow an attacker to gain control of them from the internet with no user interaction, resulting in the UPS overloading and eventually destroying itself in a cloud of smoke.
“Once UNC3524 successfully obtained privileged credentials to the victim’s mail environment, they began making Exchange Web Services (EWS) API requests to either the on-premises Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft 365 Exchange Online environment,” the Mandiant researchers wrote. “In each of the UNC3524 victim environments, the threat actor would target a subset of mailboxes….”
As per Trend Micro’s recent international Cyber Risk Index (CRI) findings for the second quarter of 2021, 76% of those surveyed anticipate a breach within the next 12 months. While this represents a 10% decline, it still indicates critical security holes. Over one-third of organizations experienced seven or more impactful cyberattacks in the preceding 12 months, a 10% rise from the previous year.
As you may know, Thunderbird offers email encryption and digital email signatures using the OpenPGP technology and uses Ribose’s RNP library that provides the underlying functionality.
To strengthen the security of the OpenPGP implementation, a recent update of the RNP library had included changes to refuse the use of several unsafe algorithms, such as MD5 and SHA-1. The Thunderbird team had delivered RNP version 0.16.0 as part of the Thunderbird 91.8.0 update.
Unfortunately, this change resulted in some users no longer being able to use their OpenPGP keys. We learned that the affected users still depend on keys that were created or modified with OpenPGP software that used SHA-1 for the signatures that are part of OpenPGP keys.
The government of India still claims to be a democracy, but its decade-long assault on the internet and the rights of its citizens suggests it would rather be an autocracy.
Eight years ago, prompted by the Snowden revelations (and Senator Ron Wyden’s persistent questions), then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper finally provided the public with some insight into the FBI’s warrantless searches of Americans’ data collected (supposedly inadvertently) by the NSA.
Spain's fragile coalition government was on the defensive Tuesday over its announcement that the mobile phones of the premier and defence minister were tapped using Pegasus spyware.
Felix Bolanos, a cabinet minister, told a news conference on Monday that the phones of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Defence Minister Margarita Robles were hacked last year using the spyware made by Israel's NSO Group.
So, instead of importing the public key from a keyserver, fetch it from the smartcard with the following commands: [...]
In a live interview with the Washington Post last week, New York-based Clearview AI's co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That addressed questions about the ethical and legal implications of his software, which became first known to many Americans when a billionaire used it to identify his daughter's dinner date, and for the involvement of far-right individuals in the creation of the company. Pressed on questions about the legal and ethical choices his firm has made while creating a searchable database of 20 billion facial images, Ton-That repeatedly brought up examples where the use cases of Clearview AI's technology would look better in the public eye, mentioning its use in helping catch criminals in child pornography and child abuse cases. Ton-That also pointed to the use of Clearview AI's technology by the Ukrainian government to identify dead Russian soldiers, for notifying their families of their passing.
A new report from The Wall Street Journal claims that the movements of users of the gay dating app Grindr were collected from an advertising network and made available for sale.
The report says the information has been for sale since at least 2017 and that historical data may still be obtainable. However, Grindr cut off the location data available to ad networks two years ago.
Like it or not, location tracking is here to stay. There’s money in the tracking device industry, yet plenty of scorn, as these devices – specifically the AirTag – are used to stalk people. Even a government agency can use location data for less than honorable reasons. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) obtained location data specifically to track COVID cases and compliance.
Last week, over 500 cryptographers from around the world gathered in Amsterdam for Real World Crypto 2022, meeting in person for the first time in over two years.
As in previous years, we dispatched a handful of our researchers and engineers to attend the conference, listen to talks, and schmooze observe the themes currently dominating the nexus between cryptographic research and practical (real world!) engineering.
As a general rule, when people keep doing something wrong, they're actually right and your system is wrong. Put another way, "if your system depends on humans never making errors, you have a systems problem". If it takes extra steps and extra attention to add monitoring, people will keep forgetting to do so and then they will get burned by it. TLS certificates are an obvious case, but there are lots of other ones. How many systems ship with default monitoring that tries to let you know if the local disk space is getting alarmingly low, for example?
When he began his writing career in the 1920s and 30s, Mumford was in sharp variance with the general view of pioneer as hero. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner had lionized the pioneer in his 1893 essay, one of the most influential in U.S. history, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” € Turner was still alive in Mumford’s early writing days, living until 1932. In Turner’s analysis, the frontier created the spirit of democratic individualism and expansive opportunity that was the essence of the U.S., and the pioneer was its progenitor. € Today we have a far more nuanced view of the pioneer. € Aware of the history of native displacement and the environmental destruction that accompanied the settlement of the U.S., the general view is in many ways closer to Mumford’s than Turner’s.
Mumford placed the U.S. pioneer in the context of the half-millennium of European expansion over the entire earth. “€ . . . the great era of exploration and colonization, which opened in the sixteenth century, introduced a period of terrestrial neglect. In the act of seizing all the habitable parts of the earth, the colonists of Africa and the Americas systematically misused and neglected their possession; First, perhaps, out of ignorance, but no less because, even when better knowledge existed, an imperious government, a rapacious economic corporation or individual, would set no bounds to greed or to momentary needs.”[1]
If the reader thinks the current conflict will somehow end with a different outcome, they need to revisit the history of war, especially war of the modern kind. You know, where civilian populations are bombed, conscripts are forced to kill and die in the thousands; where international bankers make loans to all sides until the battle begins. All the while generals and politicians talk nonsense about the principles being defended as if most of them had any principles that couldn’t be purchased.
It’s becoming clearer to more and more people that this war is truly a proxy war and that Ukrainians are being sacrificed by Washington and its clients (including the government in Kyiv) while Russians are being sacrificed by their government. Neither position—Ukrainian or Russian—is one to be envied. As an acquaintance and Vietnam Veteran Against the War member pointed out on Facebook, this is the perfect war for the US-dominated military-industrial complex. There are no body bags coming home, no anti-war demonstrations, and virtually no pressure to negotiate. Indeed, a substantial part of what usually constitutes the US antiwar movement is actually cheering on the Ukrainian military in this conflict. In short, this is a dream situation and Washington and its minions will fight to the last Ukrainian to keep the war industry’s profits rolling in.
We opened a bottle of wine, summoned mountains overlooking ancient cities, & cities, those pits of unease, & we left your mother’s illness alone—your mother, who insists you don’t return to her.
We cut the cheese & washed the grapes, & our friend repeated the story of her father’s funeral, how she wept to the man with the diseased eye who wanted to confiscate her camera outside the church, how she pretended she was shooting, not the street, but Christ & his mother— how many times have we believed in God to avoid a small death? How many times have we sat in the pews to elude our mothers’ fears? How many times have we bent our bodies without love?
This natural beauty was so evident that I forgot the constant drumbeat of war coming out of Eastern Europe and Ukraine, from Syria, from Yemen and elsewhere. I let the issues of the laws of war and civilian deaths and aggression and imperialism and NATO and the chance of nuclear war take a rear seat for a little while.
And then my wife Jan and I met Sarah on a country road. Sarah walked her two dogs, both great and beautiful dogs, and I crossed the street to greet them and we began a conversation as Sarah crossed the street.
In a desperate attempt to understand why Honiara courted Chinese interest in defiance of Australian wishes, opposition Labor figures pointed the finger at climate change.€ Australia’s sniffly approach to such a vital issue was key in pushing the country into the arms of Beijing.€ According to the Shadow Education Minister Tanya Plibersek, Canberra had “left a vacuum” on the matter.€ Senator Penny Wong stated the obvious in remarking that Pacific leaders had been less than impressed by the Morrison government’s indifference to climate change as the “number one economic and national issue”.
The indifference, even contempt shown by Canberra to that most existential of concerns has made itself present on several occasions.€ In September 2015, banter ensued between Immigration Minister Peter Dutton waiting alongside Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Social Services Minister Scott Morrison.€ Abbott recalled the rather casual approach to punctuality that had taken place at a Pacific Islands Forum meeting the previous day in Papua New Guinea.€ “Time doesn’t mean anything,” remarked Dutton, “when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.”
In 1919, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book that would prove controversial indeed. In it, he warned that the draconian terms imposed on defeated Germany after what was then known as the Great War—which we now call World War I—would have ruinous consequences not just for that country but all of Europe. Today, I've adapted his title to explore the economic consequences of the (less than great) war now underway—the one in Ukraine, of course—not just for those directly involved but for the rest of the world.
War in Ukraine
Re “Putin’s Invasion,” by Katrina vanden Heuvel [March 21/28]: At multiple decision points, the United States had the opportunity to stop this march toward war. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, besides the original sin of NATO expansion, despite being warned at the time of the possible consequences, the US began working toward regime change in Ukraine, once again sticking its nose in the affairs of another country. Then, in the Euromaidan uprising in 2013-14, Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, openly supported the ouster of a democratically elected president—a coup—making it clear that the State Department’s ultimate goal was to bring Ukraine into NATO. Since then, the Ukraine government has shown that it has no intent to follow the protocols of the Minsk II agreement and provide autonomy for the Russian-speaking Donbas. It continued to pressure the Donbas with the ultimate goal of folding it into the central Kyiv government, which would pave the way for NATO.
The latest developments, including: – FM Lavrov’s anti-Semitic comments – What the Russia-Israel relationship tells us about the current situation – The role of Jewish diaspora in shaping Israeli policy on Ukraine – Putin’s invasion of Ukraine pushes Finland and Sweden into NATO – Use of technology in Ukraine war (Turkish drones, Clearview AI facial recognition, Elon Musk’s StarLink, etc.)
That raises an important question for the American people, one that the U.S. mainstream press is loathe to ask: Is Putin’s accusation correct? Are U.S. officials simply using Ukraine as a way to weaken or even destroy Russia without directly participating in a war against Russia?
It certainly would not be the first time that the U.S. national-security establishment used a proxy army in an attempt to disguise its own role in a war against a foreign regime. Recall U.S. officials’ use of a proxy army to attack and invade Cuba. In order to disguise the fact that it was the United States that was waging a war of aggression against Cuba, U.S. officials used a proxy army consisting of Cuban exiles to undertake the invasion.€
That $20 billion, on top of billions of dollars in military aid already provided, is an amount equal to a third of Russia’s entire 2021 military budget, and is about four times the size of Ukraine’s entire military budget in 2021.
What will Ukraine do with all that deadly largesse? Blow stuff up, and sell what’s left on the global black arms market.
A principal lesson of the war in Ukraine is that the Cold War never ended. German reunification, the Soviet Union’s collapse, new entries in NATO, democratic springs in Poland and Hungary, Ukraine’s independence, the removal of nuclear weapons from eastern Europe, including Ukraine—all these events once augured a new era in Europe. Russia would embrace perestroika and glasnost, globalization would fully integrate the eastern European economies with the European Union, and demilitarization would free up funds for social well-being and environmental rehabilitation. American triumphalism was at its height, with President George H.W. Bush proclaiming a “new world order” after the Iraq intervention, and Frances Fukuyama prophesying “the end of history.”
Those dreams were shattered by subsequent events in the Middle East, the rise of China, and, in Europe, developments both unforeseen—such as large-scale immigration from the Middle East and north Africa, and the resurfacing of Russian authoritarianism—and unwise, such as the unequal impact of globalization on working classes and NATO’s eastward expansion.
As President Biden seeks $33 billion more for Ukraine, we look at the dangers of U.S. military escalation with Medea Benjamin of CodePink and George Beebe of the Quincy Institute. He is the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. The massive spending in Ukraine that outweighs public funding to combat the coronavirus pandemic shows that “there are very few things that the Biden administration thinks are more important right now than defeating Russia, and I don’t think that accords, actually, with the priorities of the American people,” says Beebe. “To support the people of Ukraine and stop the fighting, we need not to pour billions of dollars of more weapons in, but to say, 'Negotiations now,'” says Benjamin.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response of imposing sanctions on Russia are forcing a reckoning as far as global energy policy is concerned. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that the ongoing war and the U.S. sanctions may together reduce Russian oil exports by at least 3 million barrels per day—more than 4 percent of global supplies, which is a huge chunk of the delicately balanced world energy market. Some energy analysts are forecasting that oil prices could spike up to $200 per barrel later this year, exacerbating inflation and triggering a global recession. We’re facing the biggest energy crisis in many decades, with supply chains seizing up and products made from or with oil and gas (notably fertilizers) suddenly becoming scarce and expensive. Scylla, therefore, calls out: “Drill more. Lift sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. Beg Saudi Arabia to increase output.” But if we go that route, we only deepen our dependency on fossil fuels, aggravating the climate monster Charybdis.
The IEA was created in the aftermath of the 1970s oil shocks to inform policymakers in times of energy supply crisis. The agency recently issued a 10-point emergency plan to reduce oil demand and help nations deal with looming shortages owing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its advice includes lowering speed limits, instituting car-free Sundays, encouraging working from home, and making public transport cheaper and more widely available.
As Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on, stories continue to appear in the press about Russian soldiers refusing to perform military service to avoid joining the fight. The most recent, high-profile case occurred in early April, when a local publication reported that around 60 soldiers from Pskov were refusing to go to war. Since then, these soldiers have been discharged and threatened with criminal prosecution. A few dozen of these “objectors” are being advised by lawyer Maxim Grebenyuk, who runs the online community Military Ombudsman. Meduza sits down with Maxim Grebenyuk to talk about why Russian soldiers are refusing to fight in Ukraine.
For more than two months now, many Russians have openly supported the Kremlin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine — choosing to close their eyes to executions and rapes, the shelling of peaceful cities, unthinkable destruction, and millions of people losing their homes. Journalist Shura Burtin spent several weeks talking to Russian citizens about their thoughts and feelings about the war. For Meduza, Burtin recounts how fear and a sense of humiliation defeated Russians’ humanity.
Under pressure from the U.S., Chinese suppliers have had difficulty sending the pills straight to America, experts said. However, those suppliers have come up with an alternative plan that includes more pit stops.
Trump continues to use the propaganda and radicalization technique known as "stochastic terrorism" to amplify his threats of political violence against Democrats, liberals and others deemed by his movement to be a poisonous "enemy within" and a threat to America. This dangerous language echoes the eliminationist rhetoric that led to genocide in places like Nazi Germany, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere: [...]
A pro-junta militia that recently claimed responsibility for the slaying of opposition party members is now openly threatening to kill journalists and their families over content the military regime has dubbed “destructive to the state.”
Last week, eight members of the deposed National League for Democracy (NLD) and their supporters were found brutally murdered with badges or cards on their bodies displaying the insignia of a group calling itself the Mandalay branch of the Thway Thauk, or “Blood Comrades,” militia.
A social media post on the group’s Telegram account last week also called for the deaths of reporters and editors working for news outlets in Myanmar including The Irrawaddy, Mizzima, Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) and The Irrawaddy Times — as well as their family members.
The island is located in the Baltic Sea near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which houses the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet and various military defense equipment.
Aiming to boost its military capabilities, Sweden has decided to take this step when it is considering joining the U.S.-led military alliance together with Finland. However, a final decision on the matter has not yet been made.
It began on Easter weekend. In response to a rally in Ãârebro, Sweden, by Stram Kurs, a Danish party that opposes Islamic immigration and whose members threatened to burn copies of the Koran, mass violence broke out in Stockholm and several other Swedish cities, with scores of Muslims - mostly young men, both also women and children - throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at cops and setting cars, buses, dumpsters, and buildings on fire. Injuries resulting from these disturbances - widely dubbed the “Koran riots” - were in the mid two figures, with police officers the hardest hit. Further Stram Kurs events had been planned, but the party’s appropriately named leader, Rasmus Paludan, paladin of Denmark’s anti-Islamization movement, canceled them on the grounds that Swedish police had shown themselves to be “completely incapable of protecting themselves and me.” By the end of the month Swedish police had forbidden any further public gatherings by Stram Kurs.
The imam, in his 60s, was arrested following his publication of content last week that contained incitement and support of violence and disturbances, according to the police spokeperson.
After two years in the court system, Greenpeace USA announced Tuesday that 22 activists who suspended themselves from a Texas bridge in a daring 2019 protest targeting key fossil fuel infrastructure reached an agreement that will allow them to be cleared of all federal charges.
"We can either take the bold actions necessary to stave off the climate crisis today or suffer the radical consequences of climate-fueled disasters."
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's conservative government came under fire Tuesday for its refusal to impose a windfall tax on oil and gas giants after BP posted its highest quarterly earnings in more than a decade.
The London-headquartered energy company announced an underlying replacement cost profit of $6.2 billion for the first three months of 2022, well above the $2.6 billion it posted the same period last year and beating the $4.5 billion expected by market analysts.
Scared of being left in the digital dust, private equity investors are stampeding towards crypto projects - blockchain-based apps and platforms fuelled by cryptocurrencies that are native to the virtual economies of the metaverse and Web3.
VC investment in such projects totalled $10 billion globally in the first quarter of this year, the largest quarterly sum ever and more than double the level seen in the same period a year ago, according to data from Pitchbook.
A trickle has become a torrent: the full-year totals for 2019, 2020 and 2021 were $3.7 billion, $5.5 billion and $28 billion.
“If you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it?” Buffett told the news outlet. “I’d have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything. The apartments are going to produce rent and the farms are going to produce food.”
Even bitcoin enthusiasts tend to regard the cryptocurrency as a passive asset that investors buy and hold and hope to see increase in price over a long period. Buffett himself commented that there's "nobody" that's short bitcoin, everyone is a long-term holder.
Sri Lanka has run sizeable trade deficits for decades. As the debts matured, the years after 2020 were expected to see high levels of debt-servicing. In 2022, the government was scheduled to repay an amount equivalent to 90% of its entire budget spending.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns Wikipedia, said it will no longer accept cryptocurrency as a means of donating. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is run off reader donations.
"We began our direct acceptance of cryptocurrency in 2014 based on requests from our volunteers and donor communities," the foundation said on Sunday. "We are making this decision based on recent feedback from those same communities. Specifically, we will be closing our Bitpay account, which will remove our ability to directly accept cryptocurrency as a method of donating. We will continue to monitor this issue, and appreciate the feedback and consideration given to this evolving matter by people across the Wikimedia movement."
The Izembek Refuge is one of the blue areas is on the Alaskan Peninsula which connects the Aleutian Islands to the main part of Alaska.
The debate about a road pits Alaskan Aleuts against the legal mandate of the Wilderness Act to preserve wildlands and protect wildlife. The 315,000-acre Izembek Wildlife Refuge is a critical stopping ground for migratory waterfowl. Its eel grass lagoons are considered of International Importance.
Not all climate change/global warming news is negative. Positive pushback to global warming is real and happening right under our collective noses.
Still, climate scientists wring their hands in despair over the failure of the corporate-controlled world to come to grips with climate change’s biggest bugaboo, which is too much fossil fuel emitting too much CO2 creating too much warmth that eventually brings on excessive heat. Ergo! Ecosystems fail! Droughts accelerate!
In fiscal year 2021, according to a recent issue of the Dartmouth College’s alumni magazine, the endowments of the Ivy League Colleges increased an average rate of 42% for a total of about $57 billion.[i]€ Below is a table provided in that magazine showing the rate of return and the current value of the endowments of each Ivy League College as of the end of the fiscal year.
Dartmouth currently enrolls 6,761 students which means its endowment comes to more than $1.25 million per student. Here is the endowment value per student using the above totals for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Colorado lawmakers passed a bill Monday aimed at protecting residents in disputes with their homeowners associations.
House Bill 22-1137 limits HOAs from seeking foreclosure against homeowners who accumulate fines for violating community rules known as covenants. The bill also stops HOAs from assessing those penalties on a daily basis and limits them to $500. The legislation now heads to Gov. Jared Polis, whose office said he plans to sign it into law.
A global press freedom watchdog group warned Tuesday in its annual report that media polarization within and between countries—driven by the rapid spread of right-wing disinformation on social media and the proliferation of pro-authoritarian propaganda—is "fueling increased tension" and escalating the likelihood of violence.
"The trio of Nordic countries at the top of the Index—Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—continues to serve as a democratic model where freedom of expression flourishes."
You ran again and then you ran again, And still the French did not elect Le Pen. They knew you could have done a lot of harm If number three turned out to be the charm. We hope the fourth is something you don’t do, Because we’re glad to see the back of you.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among those condemning Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on Tuesday for reiterating her defense of the legislative filibuster, a Senate rule that is impeding congressional action on abortion rights as the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.
"The filibuster is not protecting democracy. It's undermining it. End the filibuster now."
Conversely, there are examples of prominent journalists who have served the interests of foreign aggressors by downplaying their evil actions.€ Ukraine has been at the center of this perfidy with the€ New York Times€ downplaying Stalin’s “Holodomor” in the early thirties and now€ Times’ columnist Ross Douthat dismissing obvious acts of genocide in Ukraine today.€ Douthat compounds the error that so many politicians and pundits make in defining genocide by the number of slaughtered civilians.€ The key to defining genocide is intent, and there is no question that Russia’s Vladimir Putin—like Stalin before him—is trying to decimate Ukrainians, denying€ Ukrainian nationality and identity.
In response to the question “Is Putin committing genocide,” Douthat concluded€ “Not yet, folks….”€ € In doing so,€ Douthat ignores mounting evidence of€ Putin’s fratricidal warfare to destroy or at least traumatize a€ country and its people. € The Russian army is making no effort to hide crimes that include summary€ executions and booby traps that will target children in their playgrounds. € Putin€ displayed his intent to do so months€ before the war, when he signed an essay€ (“On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”) that denied the€ existence€ of Ukraine and Ukrainians. € The essay is required reading in the Russian armed forces. Several days€ before the invasion, Putin declared that Ukraine is an “inalienable part of our own history, culture, and€ spiritual space.”
In the wake of the bombshell leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion likely signifying the reversal of Roe v. Wade, progressives on Tuesday blasted the three ranking House Democrats for voicing support for reproductive rights while continuing to back anti-choice Rep. Henry Cuellar's bid for reelection in Texas.
"Clyburn is literally traveling to San Antonio for a fundraiser and rally with Cuellar tomorrow—it's shameful."
A leaked draft opinion published Monday by Politico strongly suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority will soon strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling enshrining the constitutional right to abortion.
"It's time for the millions who support the Constitution and abortion rights to stand up and make their voices heard. We're not going back—not ever."
After a leaked draft ruling provided the most concrete evidence yet that the Supreme Court's right-wing majority is set to end the constitutional right to abortion, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez late Monday said Democrats in Congress must pull out all the stops to enshrine Roe v. Wade into federal law as "people's futures and equality are on the line."
"We need all of the above. This is an emergency."
Abortion rights advocates geared up to mobilize in the nation's capital and across the United States on Tuesday following the leak of a draft decision signaling that the Supreme Court's right-wing majority is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.
"People should take to the streets across the country."
This first appeared in Ms.€ magazine.
US Securities and Exchange Commission recently have proposed amendments in Exchange act of 1934 with an objective of standardizing disclosures regarding cyber security risk management, strategy, governance, and incident response by the listed companies. Though there were guidance from SEC on disclosure requirements for cyber security risk and incidents in 2011 and 2018, these disclosures were very few. SEC has taken note of this and has proposed these changes to help the investors understand the cyber preparedness of the companies and take those informed decisions.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Tuesday that it will close to double its cryptocurrency enforcement division, adding another 20 positions to the [Cryptocurrency] Assets and Cyber Unit — which has been newly renamed from the “Cyber Unit.” The total number of staff will rise from 30 to 50, increasing the agency’s ability to prosecute securities law violations related to new [cryptocurrency] products.
In a press release, the SEC cited a booming period for [cryptocurrency] markets and a corresponding responsibility to keep investors safe from the growing risk of fraudulent investment schemes.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a self-styled moderate who postures as a defender of reproductive rights, has said repeatedly in recent years that she would not support a Supreme Court nominee who demonstrates "hostility" to Roe v. Wade.
But late Monday, Politico reported that right-wing Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—Trump picks who Collins voted to confirm—supported a 67-page draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito that, if finalized, would spell the end of Roe v. Wade and imperil abortion rights across the United States.
Trump “judge” deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association was the one that threw out the face mask mandate.
When they can, the Republicans have usually put activist judges on the bench who can at least formulate a legal thesis that runs for dozens of pages laying out how the law actually allows them to come to their decision…..then when they run out of those, they promote bad lawyers who pretend that the Constitution doesn’t imply any rights whatsoever at all (How can one be secure in their person and papers if there is no right to privacy?), and when they run out of merely bad lawyers to promote to the bench, the Republicans move to install incompetent hacks that are half a notch above being disbarred, but at least have _some_ experience at trial.
Then when they run out of those, they apparently promote people such as U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle who barely made it through law school and drew most of their legal experience from having slept in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
It is well known that distrust of science is the sine qua non of science denial, and that distrust extends to all of the institutions, mechanisms, and trappings of science that do not tell them what they want to hear. That quacks and antivaxxers have a pathologic distrust of big pharma is unsurprising, but they also distrust a number of other pillars that support science, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Part and parcel of that distrust is a narrative that applying for and successfully obtaining NIH funding for your scientific research represent an intolerable financial conflict of interest (COI), every bit as severe as the more commonly accepted financial COI of accepting funding from pharmaceutical companies or policy think tanks. Before the pandemic, I used to hear this sort of nonsense mainly from people who had never received an NIH grant or served on an NIH study section. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case any more.
The New Yorker magazine is famous for its fact checking effort. Indeed, the New Yorker itself has written multiple pieces about how ridiculously far its fact checking team will go. And when people want to present the quintessential example of how “fact checking” should work, they often point to The New Yorker. Of course, I don’t doubt that the magazine does more of a form of fact checking than most any other publication out there, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily that good at it. Remember, it once published an article that heavily implied that a game I helped create to better understand the role of technology in elections, was actually created by a billionaire nonsense peddler to relive the glory of influencing elections.
Authoritarian Tech is a weekly newsletter tracking how people in power are abusing technology and what it means for the rest of us. Also in this edition: Mexican court axes biometric mobile registration scheme; Russia’s quiet cyber war
In early March, as Russia’s war in Ukraine intensified, the country’s state regulator blocked access to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Soon the last remaining global social media platform in the country, TikTok, decided to take action. On March 6, the company announced plans to “suspend livestreaming and new content to our video service in Russia,” citing the Kremlin’s law criminalizing “fake news” about the war in Ukraine.
The decision did not shut the platform down completely, but it effectively stopped the clock on March 6, and cut Russian users off from seeing any content that had been posted by accounts based outside of the country. Within a few days, Russian creators soon found themselves in a bubble dominated by pro-war content, with war propaganda videos becoming more and more popular. This is significant in Russia, where the platform is hugely popular — it had 29 million users as of 2021.
It would be nice if we could go at least a day or two without Republicans playing absolutely pathetic victims over made up moral panics. A few weeks ago, we debunked the nonsense story making the rounds in Trumpist media that a new study “proved” that “Gmail censored conservatives” by catching their campaign emails in their spam filter. The actual study showed that Gmail’s spam filter did, in fact, catch more Republican campaign emails than Democrat ones, but also that the reverse was true for Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook email programs, which flagged more Democratic campaign emails than Republican ones.
Courthouse News Service, as its name would imply, relies heavily on court documents to create content. Over the past few years, however, random court clerks around the nation have suddenly decided the old way of doing things was no longer acceptable.
Despite the threat of military censorship, getting arrested, or facing criminal prosecution for spreading “false information” or “discrediting” the Russian military, many Russians openly oppose Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. According to Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin, officials in Putin’s administration are particularly “concerned” about the influence of celebrities who have spoken out against the war. And as special correspondent Andrey Pertsev learned, the Kremlin plans to do something about it.€
Over the past few days, several independent news outlets and journalists have had their PayPal accounts abruptly canceled and their funds frozen by the company for unspecified offenses. These outlets also happened to have dissented in various ways from official orthodoxy on the Ukraine war. Since the Russian invasion, a series of extreme, wartime-like information-control policies had already been taken up in the West. The latest news suggests the trend is getting dramatically worse.
In a legal opinion for the campaign group Index on Censorship, Millar said that the bill would lead to algorithms deciding what people could say online. He dismissed the bill’s attempts to protect free speech and journalists as “extremely limited”.
A blasphemy case was registered against former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan last week, drawing sharp condemnation from his supporters and stoking concerns that the move would deepen political polarization in the country.
The charges come after the nation's new Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharifand his delegation were heckled by some Pakistani pilgrims during a recent official visit to Saudi Arabia.
Spotify’s plans for enhanced content moderation came to light in a report from the Irish Independent. Several of the appropriate jobs are based out of Dublin – a decision that execs may have made based upon stateside Spotify employees’ much-publicized qualms with The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) as far back as 2020.
But other criticism of Spotify podcasts (and chiefly JRE, for which the Stockholm-based company paid a reported $200 million) has come from non-employees and musicians. Astonishingly, this pushback has carried on through 2020’s second half – Spotify and Rogan finalized their deal that summer – as well as all of 2021 and 2022’s first third.
Spotify has likewise had to grapple with threats of employee strikes, stiff competition, and decidedly underwhelming content output as it’s looked to establish a foothold in podcasting.
What totalitarianism represents at its core is an attempt to use the state's monopoly on force to control not just the martial, physical domain, but also culture. What is so significant about this is that the instant that this becomes a goal, the distinction between dissent and defiance disappears. After all, speech is culture; if the domain which a state seeks to control is not physical but cultural, the act of dissent itself is by definition an act of defiance. To the totalitarian government, there is genuinely no distinction between dissent and trying to blow up a government building; it sees no difference between the physical and cultural domains, both of which are objects of its control. Psychoanalytically, a totalitarian government genuinely sees no difference between dissent and punching it in the gut; in fact, if the totalitarian government considers control of culture to be of greater urgency than control of the physical domain, it may even prefer that its enemies try to bomb its buildings, or assassinate its leaders; better that than to openly dissent against it.
To summarise, I define totalitarianism as a) the attempt to use the power of the state to dictate, rather than reflect, culture, and b) the loss of any distinction between dissent and defiance that necessarily and inevitably results from this.
Most interesting of all, however, is that we now see that totalitarianism need not be implemented by the state. What we see now is the rise of social totalitarianism.
Led by the Kremlin's example, a global rise in disinformation and propaganda is having a disastrous effect on independent news around the world, a new report finds.
In its 2022 World Press Freedom Index released Tuesday, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Russia's invasion of Ukraine has contributed vastly to the spread of fake news and propaganda.
The journalism watchdog group said its findings are worrying, as they show deep divisions among media within countries and between countries at the international level.
Okay, one more post that’s vaguely on the topic of “free speech”, and then I promise I’m done for a while.
As I was finishing my article about Odessa, I got a call from my editor. “If you don’t hurry up, we won’t be able to put it up on the website,” she said. “They just passed a new law.” This was the statute saying that publishing anything contradicting information from the Ministry of Defence would be punishable by up to 15 years in prison. She told me that we weren’t covering Ukraine any more.
“What do you mean, not covering it?”
“Have you seen the law? How are you going to cover it?”
I told her I didn’t care if they put me in prison, but she said, “Look at the way it’s formulated. They’re not just going to put you in prison. They’re going to imprison a whole long line of people along with you.” I read the law and it was true. They’ll take everybody who’s worked on the article: proofreader, editor, designer, accountant, HR department. My editor told me that if I finished the piece quickly, they could put it on the site, then take it down after the law went into effect at midnight.
A week after Taliban militants swarmed into the Afghanistan capital last August, journalist Hujatullah Mujadidi received an urgent email.
A French flight was available to get Mujadidi and his family safely out of Kabul the very next day, it said. Two more encouraging emails from the French embassy followed.
But Julian himself has not yet appealed to the High Court, and he can do so, once the matter has been sent back to Baraitser by Patel. His appeal will be against those grounds on which Baraitser initially found in favour of the United States. These are principally:
the misuse of the extradition treaty which specifically prohibits political extradition;
the breach of the UNCHR Article 10 right of freedom of speech;
the misuse of the US Espionage Act;
the use of tainted, paid evidence from a convicted fraudster who has since publicly admitted his evidence was false;
the lack of foundation to the hacking charge.
The case of Julian Assange has been particularly scrutinised. The Wikileaks founder has been in detention since April 2019 in the UK. Press freedom groups consider the US extradition proceedings, based on the US 1917 Espionage Act, as a global threat to national security reporting and whistleblowing, especially relating to actions taken by the military in situations of conflict that might amount to war crimes.
Members of the German Bundestag
Lithuania rose to number nine, up 19 spots, in this year’s World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Tuesday.
Last year, Lithuania ranked 28th.
Some of my colleagues-turned-friends — women investigative journalists — in Africa, have fled their countries to safer spaces in Europe and the United States, for fear of their safety, while others are in the process of doing the same.
Politicians aren't the only perpetrators: So are citizens and even security personnel who ought to provide us with protection.
It is darker than you could imagine. And more grim than I could even begin to explain.
The Mossad – operating in Iran – apprehended and interrogated an Iranian national who was leading a plot to kill an Israeli diplomat and a US general, sources have confirmed.
An audio recording released on Saturday showed a photo of Mansour Rasouli admitting he had been ordered to establish a cell to assassinate a worker at the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul, a US general stationed in Germany and a journalist in France.
Given the global nature of the attack on freedom of thought, the response also needed to be global. Thus spread news reporting beyond borders.
Dictators may gang up so they can develop tactics to suppress opposition and freedom of the press; but now, we all collaborate in order to reveal their secret bank accounts, dirty war tricks, and nasty tactics such as tapping opponents' telephones or poisoning rivals.
A global network of journalists grows by the day. The struggle to defend the freedom of the press and the freedom of information expands across the globe in defiance of growing repression and censorship.
It may well be this tug-of-war that will determine the future of the world.
In places such as Cameroon, Guinea Bissau, Rwanda or post-coup Mali, the media's vigilance extends well beyond issues that matter to the public. Journalists are forced to watch their own backs — and data, too.
By the time his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, was published in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois was already a rara avis—a prominent Black activist-intellectual in the midst of Jim Crow. Dapper and diminutive, and nattily clad in suit and tie, he was renowned throughout the country. The first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, Du Bois cofounded the NAACP in 1909 and thereafter helped organize a pan-African movement that bedeviled European colonizers. But what distinguished his close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. Du Bois had been exposed to Marx’s penetrating analytical framework in the early 1890s in Berlin, then the site of what was probably the most advanced socialist movement in the world, and became a member of the Socialist Party in the United States about two decades later. But Black Reconstruction was his first extended effort to shine Marxism’s sweeping floodlight on the tortured history of his homeland. Infusing Marx’s materialism and class analysis with his own anti-racism, the book also offered a solid foundation for the emergence of like-minded scholars, from Eric Williams to Philip S. Foner and Walter Rodney. Black Reconstruction also revealed the shortcomings of the popular and scholarly consensus on the era, preparing the ground for subsequent revisionary texts that thoroughly rewrote this complex history. In the wake of Du Bois’s book, our view of Reconstruction would never be the same.1
In 1905, the dancers of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg went on strike. Their demands: higher wages, a five-day workweek, training in how to apply theatrical makeup, the right to wear their own pointe shoes. They elected a small delegation, which included star pupils Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, to represent them in negotiations. This modest political action at the Mariinsky Theater proved that the spirit of the Revolution of 1905 had seeped into nearly every crevice of Russian society. That year, a crushing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War left Czar Nicholas II vulnerable to the calls for change—calls that were now growing louder and more militant across the country. Russia had become awash in peasant uprisings, labor strikes, and military defections. These revolutionary impulses would soon be quelled—at least temporarily—by liberal reforms, but not before the dancers had staged their own revolt. The strikers were met with retaliation: Some were expelled from the company, others passed over for plum roles. Suddenly the possibility of taking their work abroad, in a nascent ballet company run by an art critic who seemed more preoccupied with set design than pirouettes, did not sound half bad.
This upstart company would sap the Imperial Ballet of its best people. In 1909 in Paris, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had its first season. Drawing from the luminaries of Russian modernism, the impresario amassed an unprecedented—and perhaps not since replicated—collection of talent, and not only from the world of dance. In addition to poaching Pavlova and Nijinsky, Diaghilev commissioned Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to compose new scores for his ballets. At a time when the set design for ballets revolved around paintings of castles or flowery landscapes, Diaghilev hired artists from the avant-garde to create his backdrops, calling on the Russian Cubo-Futurist Natalia Goncharova and—later—Pablo Picasso. The costumes designed by Leon Bakst were colorful and ornate, made from gauzy, transparent fabrics meant to evoke the Orient. Others were designed by Diaghilev’s good friend, Coco Chanel.
Forced-birth advocates are finally about to achieve something they’ve worked toward for decades. It now appears certain that the Supreme Court will revoke abortion rights and return pregnant people to the status of second-class citizens: mere incubators who lack the right to control the fate of their own bodies.
By now her curricula have touched more than 30,000 students, many of them in her home state of Florida. Tanner also went to bat against the Florida Schools Safety Portal, a project to amass enormous amounts of data about students in an effort to predict and avert school shootings – and a proposal rife with potential biases and abuses.
Tanner speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley on teaching young people about the algorithms that surround them, and how they can make themselves heard to build a fairer, brighter tech future.
EFFECTOR 34.3 - How to Prevent Twitter from Going the Way of the Dodo
Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it's posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression.€
Social science research can influence policy. Sharing Black mothers’ stories in their own voices may ultimately lead to more compassionate policies. My work is part of a small body of descriptive research, mostly by researchers of color, countering negativity and victim-blaming in earlier studies of Black families.
My research partner, sociologist BarBara Scott, lives in Chicago, where I grew up. In our studies of Black mothers there, we’ve explored parenting in violent communities and living with inadequate health care. In 2019, before COVID-19 hit, we were preparing to study parenting practices.
Protesters took to the streets outside of the Supreme Court of the United States on Monday night, following a€ report from Politico that the court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade, a€ development that would eradicate the federal right to abortion. People across the country are calling for mobilizations to continue, citing the devastation and death that would certainly follow such a€ ruling.€
The draft opinion leaked from the U.S. Supreme Court Monday night portends future attacks not just on Americans' right to obtain abortion care, said critics on Tuesday, but also on anyone whose rights the court's right-wing majority does not view as "deeply rooted" in U.S. history.
"As written, the draft is quite blithe and unflinching in its disdain for the constitutional basis of gay rights."
Thousands of reproductive rights defenders took to the streets of cities across the United States on Tuesday, one day after a leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade will likely be overturned sent shockwaves across the nation.
"Beyond protests, we will need mass meetings to plan next steps for the movement including direct action and even strikes."
"I am angry because the United States Congress can change all of this," Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared with passion Tuesday on Capitol Hill as she responded to news that the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has voted in favor of a draft decision that, if finalized, would€ overturn€ Roe v. Wade.
Warren's fury was visible as she warned that the damage the high court is preparing to do will fall disproportionately "on the poorest women" and those who are most vulnerable.
Although it is shocking that someone in the Supreme Court leaked a purported draft of the opinion overruling Roe vs. Wade, no one should be the least bit surprised that it is what the justices are about to do.
As all eyes were on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday after a leaked draft majority opinion indicated it is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ProPublica spoke with journalist Joshua Prager, who spent 11 years dissecting the landmark case that guaranteed abortion rights for women across the country. For his acclaimed book “The Family Roe: An American Story,” Prager interviewed upwards of 500 people including key figures on both sides of the case, most notably its plaintiff, Norma McCorvey, who was better known as Jane Roe. In delving into the untold story behind her life, those of the children she gave birth to and the monumental case, Prager unfurled the decadeslong history of the American war over abortion.
Prager said indicators of the justices’ leanings were clear while observing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case challenging a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting most abortions after 15 weeks’ gestational age, which is the subject of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion. Though the Court confirmed the authenticity of the document published this week by Politico, the final vote and decision are still pending. Prager discussed why he believed the road to this week’s revelation was paved, in part, by decades of mistakes and missed opportunities made by the pro-choice movement. (In his book, Prager refers to those who support the right to abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-choice,” and those opposing abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-life.” We adhered to these conventions during our interview. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
The Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a leaked draft opinion published by Politico. In it, Justice Samuel Alito writes for the majority that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” We speak to two reproductive rights advocates: attorney Kathryn “Kitty” Kolbert, who argued the landmark 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey case, and law professor Michele Goodwin, author of “Policing the Womb.” The reproductive rights movement must not only stir public outcry and depend on the courts to protect these rights, but also focus more on state-level elections to vote out anti-abortion politicians, says Kolbert. Where Roe v. Wade didn’t go far enough, passing legislation such as the Women’s Health Protection Act can enshrine abortion rights, says Goodwin.
The recent string of elections started in Bessemer, Alabama, when the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union attempted to organize Amazon’s BHM1 facility, which had around 5,800 workers at the time. In 2021, the workers voted resoundingly against unionizing, but the union successfully petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a redo, claiming that Amazon had interfered by installing a mailbox at its own facility. The second election saw lower turnout, but much closer results, though the large number of contested ballots left the results hanging in the balance.
Voting will begin on June 2nd and end on June 4th. The election will be in person, meaning workers cannot mail in ballots. All regular full- and part-time employees, roughly 100 people in total, will be able to vote in the election. Roughly 70 percent have signed authorization cards in support of the union, according to The New York Times.
Hammond gave Beckwith the information "on background," and it was only to be reported once the opinion came down from the court. But the ruling was slightly delayed, and that week's magazine ended up hitting newsstands a few hours too soon.
Tsering — the Sikyong or elected head of Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration — began his visit on Tuesday with talks held with Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues. The Department also hosted a lunch for Tsering attended by ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries.
According to the prosecution, the victim tried to emancipate herself from her restrictive husband, which Samad Q. did not accept. In addition, the Afghan is said to have rejected his wife’s western lifestyle.
He noted that during the period, Hisbah guards would patrol areas to ensure the arrest of those who engaged in immoral activities.
In America, anti-age discrimination laws discriminate based on age.
An Indiana Dollar Tree manager has been fired after a story of a “Now Hiring” sign that he put up which specifically said he wouldn’t hire anyone too young to be a “baby boomer” ended up all over the news.
The problem is that there was nothing illegal about what he did, and a company can even make it a policy that someone of a certain age can’t have a job there, so long as they don’t discriminate against people over 40.
The federal law, and the corresponding state laws (usually) say that age discrimination is only illegal against people over 40, and it’s not just in employment.
In Illinois, you also can’t file a housing discrimination lawsuit if the landlord says he won’t rent to you because you’re, say 20, and he doesn’t rent to anyone under 30. Even if you catch him saying it on camera.
Obviously, this issue should be revisited. A law that protects some people and not others, cannot be allowed to remain.
We’ve€ noted for a while now€ how Elon Musk’s Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service isn’t going to have the impact many think. For one thing, the service can currently only provide service to a maximum of around€ 800,000 subscribers€ globally. For context, around 20-40 million people in the U.S. lack broadband, and 83 million live under a broadband monopoly (usually Comcast).
Ok, silly title but after a long day, I am not very focused but still wanted to get something up on my capsule because it has been such a long time.
Someone posted the above title as a "one-liner" on a network my BBS is connected to.
I can understand why this was done—to simplify the grammar as the various `path-` rules generally end with `*( "/" segment )` allows one to end a URI with a trailing slash or not. I don't think the intent was to allow long strings of slashes, but that's the end result of a lax grammar. Martin is also correct that multiple slashes are treated as a single slash on POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) (basically, any Unix system), that's not the case across all operating systems. One exception I can think of AmigaOS (Operating System), where each slash represents a parent directory. This command, `cd ///` on AmigaOS is the same as `cd ââ¬Â¥/ââ¬Â¥/ââ¬Â¥` on a POSIX system. Crazy, I know. And maybe not even relevant these days, but I thought I should mention it.
These blackouts are “an agonizing indicator of the willingness of government authorities to disconnect and deepen the suffering of their own people.”
I have set up an instance where I from now will be running the latest Antenna code from dev/feature branches, and I would be absolutely delighted if you would try it out. Do you want to try insertion attacks or blocklist evasions? Just see if something is broken, or if new features are available?
So many bots, and the ratio of bot vs human traffic is continuing to increase. The same report tells that 29% of all web traffic is just malicious bots, while 23% are benign. The latter of course includes search engine crawlers and feed fetchers, for example.
One kind of bot that neither the article nor report mention is the kind that fakes ad clicks. Looking at the numbers reported that sort of bot must be much less than 1% of web traffic. The size of a rounding error.
Or maybe it's just indistinguishable from human traffic. That is, after all, the very idea. Farms of smartphones pretending to be humans surfing the web and clicking ads so that site owners get ad income.
Apple has been sent a statement of objections in which regulators detailed how it has abused its dominance position in markets for mobile wallets on iOS in contravention of Article 102 of the TFEU.
Apple Pay has access to the NFC Input APIs, which the company does not make available to third-party payment firms. However, other platforms do permit third parties to access NFC tech to make such payments.
The EU statement says it "does not take issue with the online restrictions nor the alleged refusals of access to Apple Pay for specific products of rivals that the Commission announced that it had concerns when it opened the in-depth investigation into Apple's practices.”
At issue is Apple Pay, a contactless-payment service introduced in 2014. Apple Pay uses a specialised radio called a Near-Field Communication (NFC) chip to allow an iPhone to work like a contactless credit card. Users who have loaded their banking details onto their phones can wave them at contactless-payment terminals—or even other iPhones—to pay for things. Apple collects a fee from the user’s bank for each transaction.
The EU's top executive body said on Monday that it has found that Apple is infringing EU Competition rules with its Apple Pay system.
The EU Commission finding follows a months-long preliminary investigation.
The Commission oversees competition in the EU's single market and has the power to issue fines to companies it deems have damaged consumers' interests.
Apple Pay is a digital wallet that allows users to make contactless payments.
Its preliminary view is that the firm is restricting competition by preventing mobile wallet app developers from accessing the necessary hardware and software on Apple devices. Mobile wallets use near-field communication (NFC) which uses a chip in the mobile device to wirelessly communicate with a merchant's payment terminal.
The Commission holds that Apple is restricting competition in the mobile wallets market on iOS by limiting access to NFC, a standard technology used for contactless payments with mobile devices in stores.
Global health justice advocates on Tuesday rejected the World Trade Organization's corporate-friendly alternative to India and South Africa's widely supported motion to waive the intellectual property monopolies that are undermining the ramped up production of lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics by generic manufacturers.
The WTO's alternative proposal—leaked on March 15 and submitted formally on Tuesday—"not only fails to remove intellectual property barriers standing in the way of global access to Covid vaccines, tests, and treatments, it actually imposes some new ones," Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of the Trade Justice Education Fund, said in a statement. "The fact that it took the WTO over a year to come up with this completely backwards proposal shows just how broken and out of touch the corporate-centered institution remains."
The Canadian government plans to extend the term of copyright from the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years to life plus 70 years without mitigation measures that would have reduced the harms and burden of the extension. The Budget Implementation Act, a 443 page bill that adopts the omnibus approach the government had pledged to reject, was posted late yesterday by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s department and could be tabled in the House of Commons as early as today. Page 328 of the bill features the shoehorned amendments to the Copyright Act, including an extension of the term of copyright. While the government is not making the change retroactive (meaning works currently in the public domain stay there), no one seriously expected that to happen. What many had hoped – based on the government’s own committee recommendations and copyright consultation – was to introduce mitigation measures to reduce the economic cost and cultural harm that comes from term extension. Instead, Freeland, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez have chosen to reject the recommendations of students, teachers, universities, librarians, IP [sic] experts, and their own Justice Minister.
Claiming that criminals use encryption to stay anonymous, last year a parliamentary committee urged the Indian government to ban VPNs. While that didn't happen, new security-focused directions published by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology look set to make effective online anonymity a thing of the past.
Piracy is on the rise. New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by nearly 30% compared to last year. The publishing category is growing particularly hard, mostly driven by manga piracy. The United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers.
To better integrate our community and communications, we are now bringing them together into one common practice. I’m excited to announce that our next move in this direction is to welcome Nate Angell as our new Director of Communications and Community.
Nearly the entire online-game-playing world hates the fact that cheating in online games exist. The cheaters don’t, obviously. Nor do those that make money by selling cheats and hacks for online games. Given the majority/minority situation here, it’s perhaps not terribly surprising that efforts to combat online cheating very often go way, way too far. There are countries out there that have actually criminalized the practice of cheating in online games. More common in America, another tactic has been the publishers and developers of these games arguing in court that using or selling these cheats and hacks constitutes one form of intellectual property infringement or another. Epic infamously targeted minors in lawsuits over their use of cheating tools. Riot Games and Blizzard also participated in this bastardization of copyright law, arguing that cheating breaks the game’s EULA, and that therefore meant playing the game in an unauthorized state, therefore copyright infringement. It’s a really dumb legal theory that unfortunately hasn’t received nearly the pushback it deserves.
For those that run online video game services, there have been plenty of ways to deal with those who cheat in-game. Some, like Blizzard, look to twist copyright law into a pretzel to argue that cheating in an online game somehow constitutes infringement. Other companies have gone for more creative options. Cheaters in Pokémon Go suddenly found themselves unable to find any but the most common Pokémon. Rockstar dumped cheaters in Max Payne 3‘s multiplayer into a cheater-only server where all the cheaters cheated against one another.
