It is important to note that it is not that Linux does not have any disadvantages, however this operating system’s numerous advantages keeps it extremely appealing for all users around the world.
If you want to try using a Linux terminal and aren’t sitting anywhere near a Linux system, don’t despair. There are some services that will allow you to run a Linux terminal inside a browser. This post examines some of these and should give you a feel for what you can do and the performance you might experience.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss doomsday, how will it all end. It’s Linux related though we promise. We’re talking about Doomsday Commands you should never run! Then we’re going to discussing the latest release of Tails, the privacy advocate’s favorite amnesic distro. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
The Mars Helicopter might be on its way out but it’s still a hero, bad things are happening to the UK Internet and we blame the government, whether software can ever be finished, some great discoveries, KDE Korner, and more.
Have you ever needed to extract text from an image, maybe you took a screenshot of something or you need to get a transcript of a meme, well luckily for you Tesseract OCR exists to do exactly that.
The NBMiner team, or NebuMiner, has recently updated their mining software that allows users to access full mining capability on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR graphics cards. NiceHash & NebuMiner applications are closed-source, which is difficult to see the changes to the code made so that users can better understand how the NBMiner team unlocked the lite hash rate.
AMD recently submitted the company's Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) capabilities for use in the Linux perf subsystem and utility. This new submission by the company is the first official patch for the Zen 4 CPU series.
The Mesa Project has added an updated Radeon Vphoroniulkan driver, also known as RADV, which would allow the driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing on previous generations of AMD graphics cards and support the newest components company. The further support will allow Vulkan ray-tracing as far back as AMD GFX6 hardware that utilizes linear bounding volume hierarchy, or LBVH, such as the GCN graphics cards. While ray-tracing on older graphics cards is much slower, it will benefit prior generations with slightly better graphics output.
One of the ways that we propagate our central administrative filesystem to machines is through rsync; rather than NFS-mounting the filesystems, some machines instead use rsync to pull a subset of the filesystem to their local disk. This gives these machines resilience in case our NFS fileservers aren't available. This rsync is done (in a script) from cron, and so we'll get emailed any problems or odd output. This all works great until the rsync master machine is down, at which point we can count on a blizzard of emails from all of the rsync machines complaining that they can't talk to the master.
A couple weeks ago I updated my blog publishing workflow and wrote about it. Since then, I've made some very minor changes to make my life slightly easier. (Don't worry, everything is still static HTML!)
In case you missed it, this website is now generated with pure HTML & CSS. Well, I guess generated isn't the proper way to describe it anymore. More like written.
No more Markdown files. No more build scripts. No more Jekyll. Just clean, simple, static HTML & CSS. But more on that in a moment. First, I must apologize.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP Stack on Fedora 36.
LAMP stack is a known combination of Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP. Here Linux is an operating system, Apache is the popular web server developed by Apache Foundation, MariaDB is a relational database management system used for storing data and PHP is the widely used programming language.
With LAMP it is possible to develop and deploy web applications created in PHP.
Ubuntu 22.04 has been released by Canonical in what could be considered the release of the year because of how important this distribution is for the whole Linux world. That is why many people choose to install it from scratch. However, there are others who prefer to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 Well that’s what we will do in this post, as you will learn how to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04.
Magento is an ecommerce platform built on open source technology which provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.
Although not as popular as Linux, FreeBSD is an operating system with great features and a stable codebase. One of the many features of FreeBSD (and most BSD based systems in general) is the Port Collection is. FreeBSD has been offering users to build software from source long before Gentoo adopted it. However, using the ports system proves difficult when you have to use them for multiple machines. That’s where poudriere (pronounced poo-DRE-er) comes to the rescue. Poudriere is a collection of various scripts that use existing FreeBSD features like jails to build and manage packages. With Poudriere, we also make private repositories to be used by our various systems. Nevertheless, it can be also used on a personal machine if we want to use pkg as well as build packages from source with custom configurations. That way it’s less likely that conflicts will occur between our binary packages (from pkg) and the packages build from the ports tree. In this article, I will go over how I have setup and am using poudriere while learning about FreeBSD. This is by no means an exhaustive tutorial so you should definitely also check out the links in the references below.
The following articles lists some of the various tips and tricks I have learned about OpenSSH client from the internet. This is by no means an exhaustive list so feel free to suggest some more in the comments.
Learn how to configure a static IP address on ubuntu 22.04. This covers to setup static IP using the command line and from Ubuntu Desktop.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' Kade Engine 1.8 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.
Burp is one of the top-rated security suites for pentesting and ethical hacking. While there are paid professional and enterprise editions, you can install the community edition for free and even use it directly from Kali Linux.
The Burp suite is widely used by security professionals to perform advanced scans and various traffic interceptions (e.g., HTTP requests). The tool, maintained by PortSwigger, offers comprehensive documentation.
There are dedicated sections for the different editions. While the enterprise and pro versions are expensive, they provide additional features that may make sense for your organization, so don’t stick with the free community edition just because it’s free. Cybersecurity tools typically pay for themselves in the costs saved from prevented breaches, which can run in the millions for a single breach.
Zabbix is ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹a complex for monitoring your server. Zabbix will also allow you to track the status of a computer network and network equipment. Zabbix is ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹also often used to monitor web servers. In this article, we will look at how to put Zabbix on the lamp stack. Today, we learn how to install zabbix on Debian and Ubuntu Linux. Let’s proceed with the installation:
Anytime you're planning to do a lot of calculations on a Linux system, you can use the power of bash to create a quick function and then use it repeatedly to do the calculations for you. In this post, we'll look at how this trick works and what you need to be aware of to ensure that your calculations are correct.
If you have several computers on your network, and you want to be able to share files and folders from your Linux operating system, the process isn't nearly as hard as you might think. And although some Linux distributions strive to make this a point-and-click affair, they tend to fall short of the mark.
That's when you need to turn to Samba and the terminal window. But fear not, I'm going to show you how this is done in plain and simple terms. Once it's finished, anyone on your LAN should be able to access those shared folders and files.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on Fedora 36.
Plex is a global streaming media service and a client–server media player platform, made by Plex, Inc. The Plex Media Server organizes video, audio, and photos from a user’s collections and from online services, and streams it to the players. The official clients and unofficial third-party clients run on mobile devices, smart TVs, streaming boxes, and in web apps.
Plex Media Server is a self-hosted media player system for storing your movies, shows, music, and photos. Over time Plex Media Server has grown much and now supports many platforms.
KDE Connect has been around for years as a companion Android app for connecting to Linux PCs, similar to Microsoft Link to Windows (formerly “Your Phone”). Now there’s finally a KDE Connect app for iPhone and iPad.
KDE Connect has quietly appeared on the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, seemingly without an official announcement (at least so far). Just like the Android version, it connects to a Linux PC running the KDE Connect application to a phone or tablet. You can then synchronize your clipboard across desktop and mobile, share files and links, and run commands on a PC from a phone. You can also use an iPhone as a virtual touchpad or presentation remote for a linked PC.
An official KDE Connect mobile client is now available on the Apple App Store.
The addition of this official iOS app means folks with an iPhone and/or iPad can benefit from a deeper set of integration between their mobile devices and their Linux desktop.
Robert McQueen describes some initiatives being taken by the GNOME Foundation to attract more users and developers to the platform.
Since my early days with FreeBSD I have been fascinated by VNET jails. The ability of recreating various hardware devices using their software interface counterparts is just stunning. The jails can even define their own firewall rules inside, use DHCP to get own IP address, etc. The administrator can assemble the network as they wish, using various switches (bridge interfaces) to segregate network segments from each other.
On Friday, the folks at AlmaLinux announced the beta release of version 8.6 “Sky Tiger.” This comes a little over a month after the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6, which means the folks behind the RHEL clone should be able to push a stable release out the door within hours after RHEL 8.6 is officially released later this month.
Debian appears to be wasting money on a trademark case that is doomed to legal failure. One member of the trademark team, Felix Lechner, has resigned in disgust. Therefore, who is advancing this vendetta?
The remaining two members of the trademark team are Taowa Munene-Tardif and Brian Gupta. Today we look at Taowa.
Taowa's contributor profile shows she is little more than a groupie who joined around DebConf17 in Montreal. She was only added to the Debian keyring in 2021.
As far as we can tell, Taowa has never met the volunteer she is attacking. She is not his employer, she is not one of his clients and she has no right to impose herself on him with silly demands. This is the stuff of a toxic woman.
Ubuntu is one of the most widely used Linux distros among software developers and other content creators. Ubuntu also powers many servers around the globe.
Canonical, the company responsible for developing Ubuntu, releases two versions of the distribution every year. There are two main types of Ubuntu releases, namely regular releases and long-term support releases. Let's take a look at some reasons why you should opt for LTS releases of Ubuntu.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 734 for the week of May 1 – 7, 2022.
The humble USB-C port has brought us so many advantages over its USB ancestors, one of which is as a handy display output for laptops. Simply add an inexpensive adapter and you can hook up everything from a mobile phone upwards to an HDMI display or projector. There’s a snag though, merely having USB-C is not enough as the device has to support the display feature. It’s a problem [Gunnar Wolf] had to face with a Lenovo ARM laptop, and his solution is unexpected. Instead of an adapter, he’s used a Raspberry Pi 3 and some software tricks.
A round of software news: New Chatty, Capyloon, DanctNIX releases, a Manjaro progress report, a new postmarketOS podcast episode and some more Linux App Summit talk recommendations!
Right now, many use different clients, which is not the most comfortable option for a number of reasons. For one, syncing is not supported between different programs, which means that tasks such as modifying the address book or saving tasks are not synced between clients.
I think SaaS (in general) will start to look more like cars. Cars need maintenance and aren't fixable or debuggable by the average person, yet we still own and lease them ourselves. You'll run your own SaaS, but maybe you'll need to take it in for routine maintenance every 15,000 hours.
Yet, this future of code managed services is already here but not evenly distributed. You'd need to be experienced at cloud infrastructure and DevOps to do it in a cost (time) effective manner. But the code that the batch of first adopters writes will be generic and reusable for anyone. That's when it gets interesting.
“Open Source JobHub not only covers jobs using open source technologies, but also other roles such as sales, marketing, and management at companies dedicated to open source. Our goal is to give the global open source community a specific platform through which to make career connections,” said Brian Osborn, CEO and publisher, Linux New Media.
Open Source JobHub now features job listings from launch partners CloudLinux, Collabora, SUSE, and TUXEDO Computers, among others. The site will also provide resources to help job seekers build their careers with open source, while employers can quickly upload listings and reach qualified candidates.
Launching an open-source company isn't easy. Even the biggest pure-play open-source company, Red Hat, got its humble start in founding CEO Bob Young's wife's sewing closet. More recently, when Appwrite, a Backend as a Service (BaaS) business, CEO and founder Eldad Fux literally had "his back to the wall." Luckily for him, Fux obtained seed funding at the last minute.
By April 2022, Appwrite has gotten $27 million in funding. Looking ahead, the open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform for web, mobile, and flutter developers with its integrated REST APIs future looks bright. With 27 full-time Appwriters and a community of over 150,000 developers, Appwrite may become a major developer success story.
I just made my first videogame, a pong clone. It's funny because I've done a bit of programming at work and even a text based game or two, but never something remotely graphical.
The whole thing was extremely easy to accomplish using Lua + Löve 2D, which I suggest you to try if the idea of coding some sort of videogame is in the back of your mind.
I lived in NYC for six years. I probably spent 1 minute/day on and waiting for elevators during that time. Spending at least 1.5 days of your life with elevators, one can't help to think about what they are doing.
Hard disk-seeking algorithms influenced many elevator algorithms (or maybe the other way around?). One way to think about it: hard disks need to read ("pick up") and write ("drop off") requests at different locations on the disk ("floors").
Here are some elevator algorithms, starting with the most naive and working towards better implementations.
The third benefit is that you communicate to everybody else that this part of the code is hard to understand and needed careful inspection. This can be the motivation the team needs to discuss a redesign, or it can help other people find smoking guns when trying to diagnose other failures.
So on the topic, I’ll share my opinion on the matter based on my experience as an OSS maintainer building on top of sequel versus an alternative built for rails (and therefore, activerecord).
It’s super rewarding when you finally figure out how to plot and visualize your data. But to show off your plot to the rest of the world, you need to first be able to save and export it from your R Studio workspace.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to prototype, save, and export your plots from R. (Note, I use the term ‘plot’ and ‘figure’ interchangeably to mean the same thing: a data visualization!)
Current known efforts are documented in the wiki. In an effort to keep volunteers coordinated, please look for a monthly call starting in May, and status updates reported out on the wiki. Or you can check in on the new #raku-doc IRC channel! Or the more old-fashioned mailing-list.
The documentation effort can always use volunteers for content creation, editing, as well as front end web development, and raku scripting. So if you have suggestions and/or would like to contribute to the documentation effort in any way, this is your chance!
Today (April 25th 2022), Twitter announced Elon Musk will be buying Twitter and taking it private. What does this mean for Twitter and myself on Twitter?
– One is not opposed to the other – a fellow communist might tell me.
A new study by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators highlights a sharp contrast between urban and suburban ways of thinking about coastal ecosystems.
The authors of the study used statistical and cognitive science techniques to analyze data from a survey of 1,400 residents across the U.S. East Coast. Their results, published in the journal npj Urban Sustainability, showed that surveyed residents of urban centers often held a more simplistic, and less realistic, understanding of coastal ecosystems than residents in suburban areas. The research also uncovered a lower propensity to take pro-environmental actions among urban populations. The study provides evidence for an issue the authors refer to as urbanized knowledge syndrome, which may be detrimental to natural ecosystems and hamper community resilience to natural disasters.
List of hard drives available for sale from Newegg.com, sorted by the price per TB.
What happens to old, neglected 1980s toy robots? According to the [Randi Rain], they turn to the dark side! Way back in the ’80s, Tomy had an entire line of robots — from keychain wind-up toys to rolling, talking machines almost 2 feet tall. Tucked into the middle of this line was Verbot. Verbot’s claim to fame is that it is a voice-controlled robot. More than that, it was speaker-dependent. Train the robot with commands like “go forward” and then watch as it responds to your every command.
Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures. This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the conclusion that photographic capability has become a basic feature of everyday carry, a necessity of 21st century life.
Aviation consists of two major groups. Airplane enthusiasts, and helicopter enthusiasts. The two groups rarely get along, each extolling the virtues of their chosen craft. Somewhere in between are autogyro folks. People who like vehicles that blend the best (or worst) of both airplanes and helicopters. Aviation master [Peter Sripol] has dipped his toes into the autogyro world, but not without some trouble.
The smartphone represents one of the most significant shifts in our world. In less than thirteen years, we went from some people owning a dumb phone to the majority of the planet having a smartphone (~83.7% as of 2022, according to Statista). There are very few things that a larger percentage of people on this planet have. Not clean water, not housing, not even food.
For the majority of workloads, fiddling with assembly instructions isn’t worth it. The added complexity and code obfuscation generally outweigh the relatively modest gains. Mainly because compilers have become quite fantastic at generation code and because processors are just so much faster, it is hard to get a meaningful speedup by tweaking a small section of code. That changes when you introduce SIMD instructions and need to decode lots of bitsets fast. Intel’s fancy AVX-512 SIMD instructions can offer some meaningful performance gains with relatively low custom assembly.
Printable sticky labels are a marvelous innovation, but sadly also one beset by a variety of competing offerings, and more recently attempts by manufacturers to impose DRM on their media. Fortunately they don’t have to rely on expensive printers or proprietary rolls of stickies, as [michimartini] demonstrates with the masking tape plotter. It’s a tiny pen plotter that writes your label onto the tape.
It’s never been a secret that Orac is not a fan of€ Dr. Mehmet Oz. It’s hard not to have encountered him before, given his fame and now his full embrace of President Trump for his€ campaign to become the Republican nominee€ for the Senate from Pennsylvania. As you might recall, Dr. Oz was a young rising star in academic cardiothoracic surgery in the 1990s, and even I have to admit that his achievements back then were impressive. Then something happened. Dr. Oz embraced reiki, founded Columbia University’s integrative medicine program, and ultimately, after having met Oprah Winfrey and been featured on her show periodically as “America’s Doctor” (which led me to start referring to him as “America’s Quack” beginning years ago), hosted€ The Dr. Oz Show, which ran for nearly 13 seasons; that is, until Dr. Oz cut the last season short a few months ago and ended his show to run for the Senate for Pennsylvania. Of course, Dr. Oz being the long-time quack and grifter that he was, it didn’t faze him in the least that he had lived in New Jersey, not Pennsylvania, and worked in Manhattan for decades; he voted absentee in 2020 using his wife’s parents’ address in the Philadelphia suburbs. When€ last I discussed him, unsurprisingly Dr. Oz was pulling a common quack trick by challenging his critics (in this case, specifically Dr. Anthony Fauci) to a “debate”.
One year ago, the Colonial Pipeline was hit by a disruptive ransomware attack forcing it to shut down operations for nearly a week.
The incident, which caused gas shortages in several states as fuel prices spiked, was a major wake-up call for critical industries to start taking cyber threats seriously and invest more in cybersecurity.
However, experts say that the war in Ukraine has put even more pressure on companies to expedite the investments they had begun a year ago as cybersecurity became front and center – both domestically and globally.
While Musk has proposed many changes, many in the cybersecurity community have critiqued his desire to make Twitter’s algorithm open-source. In particular, media analysts have pointed out that this could invite malicious actors to “game” the algorithm and make Twitter a target for more intense cyber-attacks.
Looking into the matter for Digital Journal is Cybersecurity expert Derek E. Brink, Vice President & Research Fellow at Aberdeen Strategy & Research.
Brink is not adopting the same line as other cybersecurity commentariat, noting: “The idea that algorithms should be open and transparent has been considered best practice for nearly 140 years. It’s called Kerkhof’s Principle, which holds that trying to keep the algorithms secret — which many refer to as “security by obscurity” — is the wrong approach to maintaining security.”
Facebook is discontinuing several services that tracked your real-time location — including Nearby Friends, weather alerts, location history, and background location — due to “low usage,” as spotted by 9to5Mac. In a notification sent to people who’ve used the feature in the past, Facebook says it will stop collecting data associated with these features on May 31st and will wipe any stored data on August 1st.
Facebook parent company Meta confirmed the news to The Verge. “While we’re deprecating some location-based features on Facebook due to low usage, people can still use Location Services to manage how their location information is collected and used,” spokesperson Emil Vazquez said in an emailed statement.
Last week the recently formed California Privacy Protection Agency held “pre-rulemaking stakeholder sessions” to solicit input on the regulations it intends to promulgate. I provided the following testimony on behalf of the Copia Institute.
U.S. lawmakers should "reject the notion that Congress must choose between antitrust and privacy reforms" when seeking to rein in Big Tech's anti-competitive behavior, a letter from 26 public interest organizations to Democratic legislators asserted Monday.
"Voters from both parties support breaking up monopolies and imposing stronger regulations on the largest tech companies."
A historic settlement filed in court on Monday highlighted the power of Illinois' strong privacy law and will result in new nationwide restrictions on a controversial technology company infamous for selling access to the largest known database of facial images.
"This represents one of the biggest victories for consumers to date."
There are several reasons law enforcement agencies would take care not to associate themselves with Clearview.
The union issued a blog post about the decision, stating that “Thomson Reuters contracts with ICE have a total value exceeding $100m USD. The contracts are to provide data brokerage services that help the U.S. agency target undocumented immigrants for detention and deportation. The company, via its Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR) software, amassed data from private and public databases on individuals, like social media information, names, emails, phone data, license plate scans, utility bills, financial information, arrest records, insurance information, employment records, and much more.”
In addition, the CLEAR program provided Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) data collected by Vigilant Solutions to ICE. EFF has long been monitoring the widespread use of Vigilant Solutions and ALPR data by law enforcement. We find the use of ALPR data to further human rights abuses a particularly troubling use of this invasive technology.
BCGEU’s capital markets advisor Emma Pullman told the Verge: “[Thomson Reuters] has realized that investors are quite concerned about this, and that the public are increasingly very concerned about data brokers. In that kind of perfect storm, the company has had to respond.”€
"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?' ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."
Now, however, an unusually large group of states is actively assisting investigations into atrocities in Ukraine, which many expect will eventually lead the ICC to indict Putin. The intensity of these investigations is greater than anything I have seen in nearly three decades of work in the field of international justice.
The landscape of global justice is changing with warp speed. And a convergence of several key factors in Ukraine has fueled this shift.
Why has the United States already become so heavily invested in the Russia-Ukraine war? And why has it so regularly gotten involved, in some fashion, in so many other wars on this planet since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001? Those with long memories might echo the conclusion reached more than a century ago by radical social critic Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the state” or recall the ancient warnings of this country’s founders like James Madison that democracy dies not in darkness, but in the ghastly light thrown by too many bombs bursting in air for far too long.
We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.-- Winston Churchill, Radio broadcast to the French people October 21, 1940
Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended his invasion of Ukraine, saying it was a necessary blow against NATO. His remarks came during Russia’s annual Victory Day celebrations on May 9 marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, are increasingly describing the fighting in Ukraine as a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia. We speak with the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven, who says the war can only end through negotiations, and aggressive U.S. rhetoric risks prolonging the fighting. “That is a recipe for this war going on essentially forever, with colossal suffering for Ukraine,” says Lieven.
Every year, Drone Wars UK counts the number of countries that have medium-altitude, long-endurance armed drones. Some of them, however, do not use them at all. Another six governments are planning to procure them, including Germany and Poland.
On May 4th, General Dynamics held its annual shareholder meeting. This meeting took place virtually, possibly in response to last year when shareholders were able to directly engage with the General Dynamics Board and ask how they justify the destruction and death their weapons cause.
On the morning of May 9, anti-war articles filled the homepage of the Russian pro-government outlet Lenta.ru. Journalist Ilya Shepelin first called attention to the protest, posting screenshots of the articles on his Telegram channel.
Instead of officially declaring war against Ukraine in his speech at Moscow’s Victory Parade on Monday as many anticipated, Vladimir Putin used the occasion to play many of the old hits, including accusing the West of plotting to undermine Russia’s “traditional values,” claiming solidarity with World War II veterans across the world, and leaning into the idea of Russia as a multiethnic haven. Read Meduza’s translation of an excerpt from the speech below.
What’ll happen at 1.5C?
It’s not as if droughts are not a normal feature of the climate system. They are, but the problem nowadays is highlighted by reports from NASA and NOAA stating that earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat is it did in 2005 described as an “unprecedented increase amid the climate crisis.” This trend is described as “quite alarming.”
As governments slowly shackle the [cryptocurrency] industry with regulations and obligations, Portugal is increasingly isolated in Europe -- a place with few rules that investors describe as a [cryptocurrency] paradise.
"You don't need to do anything else because you already have a perfect system, with zero percent tax on bitcoin," said Didi Taihuttu, a prominent [cryptocurrency] enthusiast who shifted his family to Portugal from the Netherlands.
Fossil fuel companies have access to an obscure legal tool that could jeopardize worldwide efforts to protect the climate, and they’re starting to use it. The result could cost countries that press ahead with those efforts billions of dollars.
The latter view has been rejected by the National Health and Medical Research Council, which found “no consistent evidence that wind farms cause adverse health effects in humans” though it accepted at the time “that further high quality research on the possible health effects of wind farms is required.”€ Literature examining the nature of wind farm complaints also notes “large historical and geographical differences in the distribution of complainants in Australia.”
Current Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is another figure who never misses a chance to question the broader use of wind power.€ In New South Wales, where his electorate is based, he has warned the NSW government to “be careful” about using more turbines.€ “It’s not a bowl of cherries in this space,” observed the Nationals leader in characteristically gnomic fashion, “and that’s why you’ve got to keep your base load power going.”
In drawing from the language and history of FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s, climate activists have hoped to join together two strands of the progressive movement: environmentalism and economic justice. The United States needs to radically reduce its carbon footprint and, at the same time, create well-paying jobs, especially for those workers leaving economic sectors associated with dirty energy. As with FDR’s program, the Green New Deal relies on government direction and funding to advance this major economic transformation.
Since the original resolution, other Green New Deal bills have emerged on education, housing, and cities. U.S. cities, too, have established Green New Deal initiatives, and many civic organizations continue to champion the GND as a radical vision for a reoriented U.S. society.
NW Natural, a gas utility based in Oregon, is seeking to raise gas bills on its customers in order to pay for millions in executive bonuses, higher returns to shareholders, and a larger advertising budget. It is also hoping to saddle ratepayers with costs associated with the utility’s political activities, in which the company engaged in “misleading” marketing to perpetuate the use of gas at a time when the state is attempting to electrify homes and businesses, a coalition of environmental organizations led by Earthjustice argue in a formal proceeding.
The utility has formally asked Oregon’s public utilities commission (PUC) for a rate increase of more than $70 million, a roughly 12 percent hike over current rates. This comes on the tail of a 13 percent bump that was enacted late last year. If the new increase is approved, Oregon gas customers will see their rates jump 25 percent over 12 months.€
The economy added 428,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate remained flat at 3.6 percent. The unemployment rates for white workers (3.2 percent), Blacks (5.9 percent), Asians (3.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.1 percent) were all virtually unchanged from the previous month.
Labor Force Participation Gains Slowed, Still Approaching Pre-Pandemic Levels
That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can’t be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out. But we do have a serious debt problem, and it is largely structural. Governments have delegated€ the power to create money€ to private banks, which create most of the circulating money supply as debt at interest. They create the principal but not the interest, so more money must be repaid than was created in the original loan. Debt thus grows faster than the money supply, as seen in the€ chart from WorkableEconomics.com€ below. Debt grows until it cannot be repaid, when the board is cleared by some form of market crash such as the 2008 financial crisis, typically widening the wealth gap on the way down.
Today the remedy for an unsustainable debt buildup is called a “reset.” Far short of a Jubilee, such resets are necessary every few decades. Acceptance of a currency is based on trust, and a “currency reset” changes the backing of the currency to restore that trust when it has failed. In the 20th€ century, major currency resets occurred in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was instituted following a major banking crisis; in 1933 following another catastrophic banking crisis, when the dollar was taken off the gold standard domestically and deposits were federally insured; in 1944, at the Bretton Woods Conference concluding World War II, when the US dollar backed by gold was made the reserve currency for global trade; and in 1974, when the US finalized a deal with the OPEC countries to sell their oil only in US dollars, effectively “backing” the dollar with oil after Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard internationally in 1971. Central bank manipulations are also a form of reset, intended to restore faith in the currency or the banks; e.g. when Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised the interest rate on fed funds to 20% in 1980, and when the Fed bailed out Wall Street banks following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09 with quantitative easing.
The main growth in quit rates is coming from more tenured workers in industries like finance and tech.
An Ohio House committee passed legislation Tuesday prohibiting social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from “censoring” their users.
The legislation would block the companies from removing posts or expelling people from their platforms based on the “viewpoint” of users or ideas expressed in their posts. It wouldn’t apply to speech already illegal under federal law like harassment or inciting violence.
János ÃÂder, Hungary’s stone-faced president is leaving his post. Following his election in 2012, the former Fidesz group leader tried to annoy Orbán and his gang at times, but after a while he simply signed any law that was placed before him. He never had to work under another government, not once did he listen to the voice of protesters, he preferred to keep quiet about sensitive issues, and chose fishing instead of confrontation. He won’t have a reason for sadness from now on either: he has a renovated villa and a nice pension to look forward to. A look at ÃÂder’s ten years as President of Hungary.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Sunday that no nation in the Western Hemisphere should be left out of the upcoming Summit of the Americas, directly refuting Washington's attempt to bar Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from the U.S.-hosted meeting.
"Nobody should exclude anyone," López Obrador said during a public event in Cuba, according to Reuters.
As you probably recall, former President Donald Trump sued various social media companies for kicking him off their platforms, claiming (absolutely ridiculously) that private companies deplatforming the President of the United States violated his 1st Amendment rights, and claiming that Section 230 was unconstitutional. As we noted at the time, this is not how any of this works. The lawsuits have not gone very well. While they were filed in Florida, they were quickly transferred to the proper venue in California, and now Judge James Donato has tossed out the lawsuit against Twitter, and done so easily — though he does allow Trump to try again with an amended complaint (something that will almost certainly be coming).
We’re still pretty much in the dark about Elon Musk’s real plans for Twitter. He had talked a little about changing how Twitter’s subscription product worked, and then the only other idea that had leaked was a weird one about trying to charge media organizations to quote or embed tweets. However, late last week, the New York Times published a story with some of the details of what Musk put in a presentation that was sent around to a variety of investors, and somehow convinced some pretty high profile investors to cough up another $7 billion for his Twitter purchase.
By creating a framework of laws and norms for setting priorities and making decisions, governments help different groups interact with each other. Because government plays this role, low trust in government is linked with greater prejudice and polarization.
It’s a vicious circle. We’re cynical about government, which lowers our trust in other people, which further lowers our trust in government, because some of those other people are the government.
In a historic victory, the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party has won the most seats in Northern Ireland’s parliament for the first time ever. Sinn Féin is the former political wing of the IRA — the Irish Republican Army — and favors reunification with the Republic of Ireland. The party won 27 of 90 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly, while the Democratic Unionist Party, which wants to remain in the United Kingdom, dropped to second place for the first time in decades with 24 seats. We speak with journalist and political activist Eamonn McCann, who says Northern Ireland was founded over a century ago so that “it could be guaranteed that there would always be a unionist majority.” That arrangement has now been shattered, he says, and the calls for Irish reunification are likely to increase if Sinn Féin wins government in the next election in the south. “The more the tide toward a united Ireland increases, the more alarmed the unionists will become,” says McCann. We also speak with Sinn Féin lawmaker Mairéad Farrell, who represents the Galway West constituency in the Republic of Ireland parliament and who says the party’s victory came after a “positive campaign” focused on people’s everyday needs.
But when it comes to studios earning box office revenue — which has been a significant struggle since the COVID-19 pandemic — are their efforts on TikTok actually driving Gen Z to theaters? Though the exact answer is hard to quantify, Yang does know that the film industry is becoming a stronger presence on TikTok because studios are seeing significant return on the time and money they spend to promote their films on the platform.
Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Australia's Curtin University, said the figures in the misleading tweet were a "gross exaggeration" and seemed to assume that only one type of electric vehicle battery was available.
The event was specifically a response to Ohio House Bill 327, which would seek to prevent the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public institutions.
Cultural authorities in Hanoi have shelved an exhibition commemorating the watershed 1954 Vietnamese Communist military victory over France at Dien Bien Phu because a painting of a scrawny soldier with a ragged flag was deemed offensive.
News reports of out Zimbabwe said the pair were interviewing voters about a water crisis affecting a town on the outskirts of Harare.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Zimbabwe immediately deployed lawyers to represent the journalists, who were also charged with disorderly conduct.
We spoke with reporters who said they repeatedly received harassing phone calls from readers. In some cases, scary, accusatory messages would arrive by the hundreds on Twitter, Instagram, and by email. Women appeared to bear the brunt of these attacks.
What's especially discouraging is that science journalists can be subjected to messages that show little, if any, regard for facts. Journalists we spoke to said they had been targeted by people who deny the existence of Covid-19 or climate change, or who otherwise uphold anti-science views or believe in conspiracies. One person we spoke with described being messaged in an accusatory tone, "like, I'm just pushing the, the liberal narrative. And that I'm part of the conspiracy about climate change."
The first part of the trial against Ola Bini took place in January. In this first stage of testimony and expert evidence, the court repeatedly called attention to various irregularities and violations to due process by the prosecutor in charge. Human rights groups observing the hearing emphasized the flimsy evidence provided against Bini and serious flaws in how the seizure of his devices took place. Bini's defense stressed that the raid happened without him present, and that seized encrypted devices were examined without following procedural rules and safeguards.
These are not the only problems with the case. Over two years ago, EFF visited Ecuador on a fact-finding mission after Bini’s initial arrest and detention. What we found was a case deeply intertwined with the political effects of its outcome, fraught with due process violations. EFF’s conclusions from our Ecuador mission were that political actors, including the prosecution, have recklessly tied their reputations to a case with controversial or no real evidence.€
Ola Bini is known globally as someone who builds secure tools and contributes to free software projects. Bini’s team at ThoughtWorks contributed to Certbot, the EFF-managed tool that has provided strong encryption for millions of websites around the world, and most recently, Bini co-founded a non-profit organization devoted to creating user-friendly security tools.
Yet divisions were deepened in March, on the eve of the new school year, when Akhunzada issued a last-minute decision that girls should not be allowed to go to school after completing the sixth grade. In the weeks ahead of the start of the school year, senior Taliban officials had told journalists all girls would be allowed back in school.
Akhunzada asserted that allowing the older girls back to school violated Islamic principles.
A prominent Afghan who meets the leadership and is familiar with their internal squabbles said that a senior Cabinet minister expressed his outrage over Akhunzada's views at a recent leadership meeting. He spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely.
Echoing this absurd PC claim, a€ Black woman whose family owns the Hollingworth Cannabis Company fed the KIRO reporter an absurd line:
Does the beautiful, musical word€ marijuana€ really “trigger” people who have been in prison? € To do what? Want some? Or did Ms Hollingsworth see a chance to plug her brand when the reporter from Channel 7 called seeking a comment on the PC name change?
Child trafficking is a widespread phenomenon. Children make up 27 % of the 40 million victims of trafficking worldwide. Two out of every three identified child victims are girls. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report states that the number of child victims of sex trafficking in the United States increased 55% compared to 2019.
That is just what happened following my address in June 1980 to the Michigan Trial Lawyers Association. I spoke of a gap in trial practice which needed to be filled. There was a pressing need to bring cases against the many corporate abuses, which included non-enforcement of regulatory laws. Without the prospect of a contingent fee after a successful outcome, trial lawyers were unlikely to take on these uncertain cases or structural reform cases on behalf of tenants, farm workers, or cruel prison conditions.
I noted the assault of corporations on “the biosphere, personal injury law from trauma to toxics.” The corporate lobby was blocking legislative proposals to strengthen consumer class action rights, digging deeper for unconscionable corporate welfare payments and funding corporatist politicians. To challenge these damaging corporate power plays, I suggested a full-time core of public interest attorneys supported by a sabbatical program for trial lawyers who wanted to take a year off from their regular practice and come to Washington, D.C. to advance justice and refresh themselves.
The numbers speak for themselves.
The protest movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd is now regarded as the largest mass mobilization in the history of the United States, and, significantly, as the philosopher OlúfẹÃÂmi O. Táíwò points out, was distinctly global in scope. From the old colonial capitals of Europe to cities across the Global South, people took to the streets to protest not only wanton police violence in the United States but also local appendages of the global machinery of white supremacy and state violence. As Táíwò puts it, people around the world were “fighting on their own front[s] in the same struggle.”
Emails, documents, and slide decks, recently obtained through Freedom of Information requests made by a team of activists of which I am a part, include a new set of speaking notes received the day after publication here of “War” Preparations: the City of Toronto’s Approach to Homelessness. They strongly appear to back Matlow’s view that Mayor John Tory had to be involved “in every step of the decision making process,” and suggest that the Mayor and City Managers’ offices were prepared, even at this early stage, to ignore their legislated human rights obligations
The speaking notes for Slide 9 of a deck, discussed in two meetings with City Managers, the Mayor, and his top aides on back-to-back Fridays and then again four days later with the Interdivisional Encampment Steering Committee, present the following “Concern”:
In 2017, ProPublica and NPR launched a project shedding light on maternal deaths and near-deaths in the U.S. We explored better ways to track and understand preventable deaths, and the intergenerational trauma caused by childbirth complications and chronic racial disparities in who suffers from them. We heard from more than 5,000 people who endured, or watched a loved one endure, life-threatening pregnancy and childbirth complications, often resulting in long-lasting physical and emotional effects.
These people who sent us their stories frequently told us they knew little to nothing beforehand about the potentially fatal complications that they or their loved ones faced. They wanted to help others. So we decided to publish some of their wisdom.
The contradictions of pro-life narratives aren’t new: for all their moral pretences, pro-lifers want to get government off people’s backs, and into their wombs. They maintain militant ignorance regarding the lives, right or freedom of the mothers, or the circumstances under which conception takes place. They don’t care about the child once it’s born, especially if it’s working class, female, not white, or wants to live in a world with hope for a future without hereditary class privilege, corporate capture of politics or ecocide. They are raging militarists who support imperialist wars of aggression. They shoot abortion doctors. They’re joyless moralists who suck all the oxygen out of the room; ‘that pro-lifer was hands down the life of the party’ said no-one ever.
We find then that the American Taliban exhibit the same haughty aristocratic attitude as everything they claim to oppose. They justify themselves by arguing the need to speak to others in a language they understand—most conveniently the one they had already decided on. This also appears to be why they need to demonise the left; the project of class society rests on the narrative of a protection racket, scaring the public with what H.L Mencken described as ‘imaginary hobgoblins,’ and then offering safety and token privileges in return for obedience, loyalty and tribute through submission to class and social hierarchies.
Democrats are generally disinclined to discuss religion, much less debate it.
Now, pro- and anti-abortion advocates are gearing up for a new phase of the abortion conflict.
While many people may think that the political arguments over abortion now are fresh and new, scholars of women’s, medical and legal history note that this debate has a long history in the U.S.
Travis County, Tex., District Attorney José Garza reacted to the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade with an announcement that his office would not prosecute women for their health care choices. “In Travis County, we know our community is safer when women and families can make personal healthcare and reproductive decisions without interference from the state,” said Garza, whose jurisdiction includes Austin and surrounding communities. “I promise to continue fighting for the rights of women and to use my discretion to keep families safe.”
The leaked draft of an apparent majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, revels in shaming and punishing women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them. It is the crowning achievement of a Christian nationalist movement that has come to dominate American politics, consolidating its power in the Trump era. Centered on what it claims are biblical imperatives about sexual purity, this movement represents a minority view in the country as a whole, but a majority of the Supreme Court and legislatures in red states. This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations.
Notes: Alan MacLeod is a media critic, a senior staff writer at MintPress News, and has also contributed to many other publications. Steve Macek is chair of Communications and Media Studies at North Central College in Illinois, and is co-coordinator of Project Censored’s Campus Affiliates Program. Shealeigh Voitl is a Journalism graduate of North Central College, and a research associate at Project Censored. The Macek/Voitl article can be found here.
Democratic state attorneys general and candidates are gearing up to play a key role in the fight for abortion rights in the wake of Politico revealing a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade amid the GOP plotting to pass a nationwide ban if they regain control of Congress.
"While this decision is not yet final, this is a moment we've been preparing for and we're already fighting back."
In the wake of last week's leaked Supreme Court draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday laid out a roadmap for ensuring reproductive freedom, vowing "to do everything I can" to prevent right-wing ideologues from rolling back hard-fought human rights.
"The Republicans have planned long and hard for this day, and we can't wait a second longer to fight back. We need action."
As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer makes preparations for a vote this week on legislation that would codify the abortion rights that the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority appears poised to overturn, progressives on Monday reiterated that the filibuster must be eliminated for the bill to pass.
"The Senate can end the filibuster and pass legislation to codify Roe v. Wade. It isn't too late to save the right to an abortion."
The Democratic Party – which had 50 years to write€ Roe v Wade€ into law with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama in full control of the White House and Congress at the inception of their presidencies – is banking its electoral strategy around the expected Supreme Court decision to lift the judicial prohibition on the ability of states to enact laws restricting or banning abortions.
The Biden administration announced on Monday that 20 internet companies have agreed to provide discounted service to people with low incomes, a program that could effectively make tens of millions of households across the U.S. eligible for free service through an already existing federal subsidy.
The $1 trillion infrastructure package passed by Congress last year included $14.2 billion funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides $30 monthly subsidies ($75 in tribal areas) on internet service for millions of lower-income households.
Media justice groups on Monday warned that the Biden administration's new program offering discounted internet service to people with low incomes isn't "nearly enough" to help households facing barriers to broadband access and denounced the White House for celebrating the program with the same companies currently blocking the confirmation of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission.
"These companies don't need a White House ceremony, they need the oversight and regulation that only a complete FCC can provide."
The Trump FCC spent four years being a giant rubber stamp for giant U.S. telecom monopolies. That included€ rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting€ FCC consumer protection authority, and€ demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules€ crafted with broad bipartisan consensus, and stripping away your town and city’s ability to stand up to giant carriers.
The latest version of NebuTech's NBMiner software has fully cracked Nvidia's Lite Hash Rate (LHR) limiter anti-mining technology on both Windows and Linux, enabling [cryptocurrency]-miners to unlock 100 percent of the cryptocurrency mining capabilities of Nvidia's RTX 3000-series GPUs. The news comes a couple days after Nicehash's Quickminer managed to bypass the LHR limiter on Windows, enabling miners to use the full potential of their GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics cards to mine Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies on Windows-based systems.
NBMiner (NebuMiner) team unlocks 100% of crypto mining performance on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series LHR-gimped graphics cards.
Companies behind popular movies such as "Tesla", "The Expendables 3" and "The Protege" are using a DMCA subpoena shortcut to expose alleged BitTorrent pirates. This option is much cheaper than filing regular lawsuits. While a clerk at a federal court in Hawaii signed the subpoena, this strategy is not undisputed.
A man who earned 300,000 euros from two 'pirate' lyrics sites and an unlicensed radio station portal has been handed a suspended six-month prison sentence by a court in Finland. The 37-year-old must also pay 250,000 euros in compensation to plaintiffs including Warner Music and Universal Music Publishing for copyright infringement offenses.
Like other EU Member States, Finland is grappling with the problem of how to implement the EU Copyright Directive’s Article 17 (upload filters) in national legislation. A fascinating post by Samuli Melart in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice reveals yet another attempt by the copyright industry to€ make a bad law even worse. As Melart explains, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture has come up with not one, but two attempts at transposition, with diametrically opposing approaches. The first version:
