With Kubernetes 1.24 the gRPC probes functionality entered beta and is available by default. Now you can configure startup, liveness, and readiness probes for your gRPC app without exposing any HTTP endpoint, nor do you need an executable. Kubernetes can natively connect to your your workload via gRPC and query its status.
You might be excused if you think most Linux and open-source leaders are, ah, rude.
If you follow open-source at all, you know the stories about Linux's founder, Linus Torvalds, giving Nvidia the finger for its lack of Linux support and his stomping all over developers on the Linux Kernel Mailing List when they blunder.
Gaming on Linux has always been a bit more complicated than on Windows (or game consoles), and one reason for that is Nvidia’s poor driver support on Linux. That’s now changing, though it’s unclear how much the situation will improve.
Nvidia announced on Wednesday that it has published its Linux graphics kernel modules as open-source software, under a dual GPL/MIT license. In other words, anyone can now look through Nvidia’s code, and developers can submit fixes and new features to improve the drivers. Canonical (developers of Ubuntu Linux), SUSE, and Red Hat (developers of Fedora Linux) applauded Nvidia’s decision to finally open-source its Linux graphics drivers.
Nvidia said in its blog post, “In this open-source release, support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs is alpha-quality. GeForce and Workstation users can use this driver on NVIDIA Turing and NVIDIA Ampere Architecture GPUs to run Linux desktops and use features such as multiple displays, G-SYNC, and NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in Vulkan and NVIDIA OptiX.”
For years people have wanted Nvidia to open source there Linux drivers and finally they've done so however it's not that simple and big parts of the driver stack will remain proprietary including the CUDA, Vulkan and OpenGL support.
After years of hinting, Nvidia announced yesterday that it would be open-sourcing part of its Linux GPU driver, as both Intel and AMD have done for years now. Previously, Linux users who wanted to avoid Nvidia's proprietary driver had to rely on reverse-engineered software like the Nouveau project, which worked best on older hardware and offered incomplete support at best for all of Nvidia's GPU features.
"This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS, and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back," says a blog post attributed to several Nvidia employees. "For Linux distribution providers, the open source modules increase ease of use. They also improve the out-of-the-box user experience to sign and distribute the NVIDIA GPU driver. Canonical and SUSE are able to immediately package the open kernel modules with Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Distributions."
The relationship of NVIDIA with Linux has never been good. The company, a leader in graphics processing and in sectors such as artificial intelligence, has tended to clash with just about everyone for its consistent refusal to adopt standards. However, the situation could start to turn 180 degrees, as NVIDIA has published a Official Open Source driver for Linux. Yes, as you are reading it, but it would still be better to contain the euphoria.
NVIDIA has provided support for Linux for two decades through a proprietary driver that it has developed to share as much code as possible across all supported operating systems, including Windows, Solaris, and the BSD spectrum. This driver has always been closely tied to X11 and in recent years it has been a victim of the company’s bad decisions, some bad decisions that within the Linux desktop have placed it as the last in terms of quality of support, especially when we talk about of Wayland.
The developer has made it very easy to install this program. The project’s GitHub repository hosts packages for Ubuntu/Debian, Arch and Arch-based distros.
If you’re running a different distro, we recommend using the project’s AppImage. AppImage is a universal software format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application.
AppImage doesn’t really install software. It’s a compressed image with all the dependencies and libraries needed to run the desired software.
As Moosync is open source software, you can compile the source code.
Pop!_OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. If you are looking for an easy and stable linux distribution to use it daily then pop!_os it's a great choice.
In this tutorial you will learn how to install Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS on your computer.
In this article, I am going to go through the process of setting up sound in FreeBSD (13.1-RC6, to be precise). All of the credits goes to the FreeBSD Handbook. I am merely just documenting the process.
I’m currently a member of the Chinese Text Layout Task Force | ä¸Âæââ¡Ã¦Å½âçâ°ËéÅâ¬Ã¦Â±â, and we have monthly calls to discuss issues and work related to the Requirements for Chinese Text Layout. There were a number of interesting things discussed in the most recent one, enough for me to want to write about them.
The ERTMS is one of those technical things rail nerds and industry insiders hear about every few years, but it never seems to go anywhere. It’s been off the rails. It hasn’t got traction. It’s been station-ary. Engines.
Integrating Europe’s railways into one cohesive, interoperable network with common signalling, communication, electrical, and management systems sounds great; even inevitable. Europe has integrated in other areas, so it stands to reason transport would also benefit, both for passengers and freight.
Paradox Interactive has released the major Stellaris: Overlord expansion, along with a free Stellaris 3.4 version update. Let's go over what's new.
Probably one of the most important creatures on Earth and now you'll be looking after them in APICO on May 20, 2022. Developed by the brotherly duo that is TNgineers, along with publishing from Whitethorn Games, this is the next big cozy indie game you need to keep on your radar.
Have you burned out on Vampire Survivors and want something new? Or perhaps you just prefer spaceships? Gunlocked is here to give you more action.
Core Keeper is another big indie hit and for good reason, it's a total gem and it's expanding to become a lot bigger.
The Garden Path is an upcoming casual chilled-out life sim that looks gorgeous. Now you can get access to it with the early bird limited access system on itch.io.
The Jackbox Party Starter has been announced to launch this "Summer", which will be the perfect entry to get the party started with more languages supported.
Another absolutely huge update for the Steam Deck just landed, with Valve clearly taking on lots of feedback to make it the best handheld gaming device around.
It’s been a while since we dedicated an article to KDE Connect, one of the best inventions from the project responsible for the well-known and powerful desktop environment. Far from being stagnant, it has been expanding its domains to recently reach iOS and iPadOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and definitively establish itself as a true multi-platform remote control solution.
Although it is good news that KDE Connect is coming to iOS, it seems that the application has some limitations compared to the Android version, and the worst part is that these limitations probably cannot be resolved. You don’t have to be a lynx to imagine that the reason for this possible scenario is the tight control that Apple exercises over its own ecosystem and therefore its operating systems, since the Cupertino giant is not exactly a lover of freedom.
One thing I really want to be able to do is to load YouTube and put it in background as my work music. On OpenBSD the playback performance is a meh. Espically on Chromium. Opening a 720p 60FPS YouTube video yeilds ~10% frame drop in YouTube stats. Beyond that, the actual rendering rate feels more like 15 FPS. I tried different flags in Chromium but nothing seemed to boost it back to 60FPS. I turned back to Firefox and it was better then Chromium immediately. At ~5% frame drop and a much better real rendering rate.
And so I looked into `about:support` and `about:config` and to figure out how can I make GPU acceleration work. FireFox GPU acceleration works on Linux. And OpenBSD borrows Linux's display stack and uses the same X11 architecture. There's hope that I can make it work.
More than 10 years ago (2010) aboutbsd.net was created for scratching my need for BSD related news, in a one-stop site convenience. It’s also an exercise for me to explore how to maintain a public facing server. Fast forward, LIFE have outgrown my spare time, slowly but surely. I no longer find the spare time for aboutbsd.net anymore. Sad to announce that aboutbsd.net will be shutting down by May.
Two days ago the wireplumber package was made to replace pipewire-media-session as the latter session manager for PipeWire is considered dead upstream and will see no more releases. Unfortunately, this step was premature.
A tutorial on how to install and use Fedora Media Writer to download, create bootable USB with formatting guide.
Advantech, leading provider of industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and automation technology, has announced its industry-proven UNO Embedded Automation Computer platform now has enhanced security and edge features with the pre-installation of Canonical’s Ubuntu Operating System (OS). Advantech’s UNO-2271G-V2 Edge IoT gateway is pre-loaded and certified for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Core 20 to streamline time-to-market for users, while also offering top-of-the-line security.
A growing Advantech and Canonical collaboration means deployment-ready IoT devices are more market accessible and ensure developers have the best out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience. The rapid growth of IoT technologies comes with massive amounts of data from numerous systems and devices. This brings challenges in collection, storage, latency, and resiliency when relying only on the cloud.
Well, the new 64MP 'Hawk-Eye' Pi camera takes the same autofocus system and straps it to an ultra-high-res 64 megapixel sensor (rumored to be Sony's excellent IMX686), then glues it to a board that fits in most places the official Pi Camera Module goes.
This revision supports two alternate footprints for the CAN-FD transceiver to better support component availability and refines the power stage for the DRV8353 gate driver. moteus r4.8 was the first version to use the DRV8353 because of, once again, component availability issues. However, it was developed on a very abbreviated schedule. With r4.11 the EMI is much improved over r4.8 and r4.5, and the efficiency is much better than r4.8 at all input voltages and PWM frequencies.
Intel latest processors have new instruction sets (AVX-512) that are quite powerful. In this instance, it allows to do the decoding without any branch and with few instructions. The key is the vpcompressd instruction and its corresponding C/C++ Intel function (_mm512_mask_compressstoreu_epi32). What it does is that given up to 16 integers, it only selects the ones corresponding to a bit set in a bitset. Thus given the array 0,1,2,3….16 and given the bitset 0b111010, you would generate the output 1,3,4,6. The function does not tell you how many relevant values are written out, but you can just count the number of ones, and conveniently, we have a fast instruction for that, available through the _popcnt64 function. So the following code sequence would process 16-bit masks and write them out to a pointer (base_ptr).
At least two readers (Kim Walisch and Jatin Bhateja) pointed out that you could do better if you used the very latest AVX-512 instructions available on Intel processors with the Ice Lake or Tiger Lake microarchitectures. These processors support VBMI2 instructions including the vpcompressb instruction and its corresponding intrinsics (such as _mm512_maskz_compress_epi8). What this instruction does is take a 64-bit word and a 64-byte register, and it outputs (in packed manner) only the bytes corresponding to set bits in the 64-bit word. Thus if you use as the 64-bit word the value 0b11011 and you provide a 64-byte register with the values 0,1,2,3,4… you will get as a result 0,1,3,4. That is, the instruction effectively does the decoding already, with the caveat that it will only write bytes. In practice, you often want the indexes as 32-bit integers. Thankfully, you can go from packed bytes to packed 32-bit integers easily. One possibility is to extract successive 128-bit subwords (using the vextracti32x4 instruction or its intrinsic _mm512_extracti32x4_epi32), and expand them (using the vpmovzxbd instruction or its intrinsic _mm512_cvtepu8_epi32). You get the following result: [...]
Raspberry Pi Pico is a low-cost microcontroller that can be connected to another computer to be programmed using MicroPython. We think it’s a great tool for exploring physical computing in classrooms and coding clubs. Pico has been available since last year, amid school closures, reopenings, isolation periods, and restrictions for students and teachers. Recently, I spoke to some teachers in England about how their reception of Raspberry Pi Pico, and how they have found using it to teach physical computing to their learners.
Looking for the best time to order your Librem 14 laptop? Librem 14 is one of the most secure laptops we’ve built so far.€ The laptop is designed chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security, and freedom. Standard orders ship within 10 days. All you have to do is€ enter the coupon code, L14SUMMER in the ‘Promotion Code’ box, at this link, to claim $100 off on your final order.
In this article we will describe how we enabled basic telephony support on the Pinephone.
Having dealt with implementing dark mode myself, my second reaction was: wait, this should be part of the browser! “As a user, I want to override my color scheme preference for the website I’m looking at but not be required to do it via the OS-level preference.”
These colors weren’t really any safer since they’d be double-quantized on different palettes. Thankfully this dumb “web safe colors” myth died when 24-bit displays became affordable.
The developers of ONLYOFFICE Docs, an open-source office suite, have released a new version of their software. Version 7.1 comes with a lot of useful improvements in text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and fillable forms. Let’s have a quick look at what’s new around the office suite.
Starting from version 7.1, all the editions of ONLYOFFICE Docs (Community, Enterprise and Developer) are compatible with the ARM architecture that offers high performance, energy efficiency and integrated security.
The ARM-compatible version of the office suite is available as a separate build and comes with several installation options, including Docker images, deb and rpm packages.
And, in fact, anyone with any proximity to software development has likely heard rumblings about Agile. For all the promise of the manifesto, one starts to get the sense when talking to people who work in technology that laboring under Agile may not be the liberatory experience it’s billed as. Indeed, software development is in crisis again—but, this time, it’s an Agile crisis. On the web, everyone from regular developers to some of the original manifesto authors is raising concerns about Agile practices. They talk about the “Agile-industrial complex,” the network of consultants, speakers, and coaches who charge large fees to fine-tune Agile processes. And almost everyone complains that Agile has taken a wrong turn: somewhere in the last two decades, Agile has veered from the original manifesto’s vision, becoming something more restrictive, taxing, and stressful than it was meant to be.
[...]
As to why I haven't left yet? Because it seems this “Agile” movement has invaded everywhere and things would be “more of the same” elsewhere. At least here, I'm not forced to use Windows [4].
AWK is a text-processing language with a history spanning more than 40 years. It has a POSIX standard, several conforming implementations, and is still surprisingly relevant in 2020 — both for simple text processing tasks and for wrangling "big data". The recent release of GNU Awk 5.1 seems like a good reason to survey the AWK landscape, see what GNU Awk has been up to, and look at where AWK is being used these days.
The language was created at Bell Labs in 1977. Its name comes from the initials of the original authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. A Unix tool to the core, AWK is designed to do one thing well: to filter and transform lines of text. It's commonly used to parse fields from log files, transform output from other tools, and count occurrences of words and fields. Aho summarized AWK's functionality succinctly: [...]
Ah, this takes me back. I got my first computer back in 1984, and if I wanted to know anything about it I was on my own. Google didn't exist (the public Internet didn't exist at the time). I didn't have anyone I could ask about computer related things. I did have books and magazines. So between experimentation and learning to read between the lines, I picked up programming.
So when it came time to write a metasearch engine [2], there were no tutorials. There were no open source metasearch engines to download and use. There was only the problem of writing a metasearch engine, in a language I didn't even know [3] (and which itself was less than a year old at the time).
In programming, in contrast, we rarely talk about our influences, other than a frequently expressed allegiance to a single programming language. This seems a shame to me, because it denies new people to our field helpful pointers to programmers and systems whose style might be a useful influence.
As a modest attempt to rectify this situation, I'm going to show how one particular system, OpenBSD, has had a big influence on my programming style over time. It's far from the only system that's influenced me – not to mention various programmers and communities who've also been an influence [1] – but I need something concrete to use as an example.
Why do we need this in the first place? Unfortunately standard AWK doesn’t have a way to handle CSV files with quoted fields, which is very important for processing real-world CSV files.
As I’ve been saying every year for the past seven years or so, I am learning Python. (It’s been a journey.)
Python packages like pandas have several ways to work with data. There are several options for indexing, slicing, etc. They have a lot of flexibility but also a lot of conventions to remember.
I am familiar with the grammar of the tidyverse, which provides a consistent set of verbs to solve common data manipulation challenges. I investigated ways to port tidyverse-like verbs to Python (hopefully making Python a little easier to grasp).
Here are three packages that do just that.
The EA Falcon took Ford’s popular Australian sedan line into the 1990s, even if it gave way to the EB Falcon by the end of 1991. Few would call it high tech, but it introduced several innovations to the platform that were very of its time. One hacker, however, has taken a humble EA Falcon and given it a set of homebrewed modern upgrades.
We’ve all marveled at the videos of SpaceX rockets returning to their point of origin and landing on their spindly deployable legs, looking for all the world like something pulled from a 1950s science fiction film.€ On countless occasions founder Elon Musk and president Gwynne Shotwell have extolled the virtues of reusable rockets, such as lower operating cost and the higher reliability that comes with each booster having a flight heritage. At this point, even NASA feels confident enough to fly their missions and astronauts on reused SpaceX hardware.
With so many of us working from home over the last two years, it’s really become apparent that people generally dislike sitting all day with pants on. Until such a utopian time when all clothing is considered unisex, and just as many men as women are kicking it in loose, flowing skirts and dresses, you may want to remember to actually wear something on your lower half, uncomfortable though pants may be. But there is another way — you could build [Everything Is Hacked]’s pants filter and continue to be a chaos agent. Check out the video after the break.
Some biographies not only fail to enrich our understanding of their subject but actively impoverish it, as in the case of Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art, by the critic Parker Tyler. In his 1963 biography of the pioneering modernist and feminist painter, Tyler committed nearly every critical mistake imaginable, from conjecture to contrivance. He later admitted as much to Stettheimer’s family lawyer, saying he used his “overactive imagination to fabricate readings of Stettheimer’s personality, work and intentions.” As a result, we often think of her as an outsider artist who was permanently embittered by the poor reception of her willfully naive paintings. In reality, she was a student of history and a known quantity in the New York art world—an insider through and through. Stettheimer’s work, like her personal life, has suffered from a dearth of rigorous, good-faith appraisals, and because it isn’t easily lumped in with the era’s major movements, it was written off as lovely but ultimately unclassifiable and therefore a blip in art history. Barbara Bloemink’s new biography, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, rectifies this by engaging with the work on its own terms, rather than by stretching it to fit prefabricated discourses on American modern art.
In those years, for instance, Perry Mason was a much-loved staple from coast to coast. In each episode, Perry, that intrepid, tall, dark, kindly genius of a defense attorney, would face off against Hamilton Burger, a small-boned, pointy faced, sanctimonious prosecutor — and justice would always be served. He had what seemed then to be an all-American knack for uncovering exactly the right evidence of misdeeds that would lead justice directly to the doorstep of the true perpetrator of any crime and bring him or her to account. The takeaway caught the mood of the time: the courts and the legal system were powerful platforms for serving justice, sorting out right from wrong, punishing the criminals, and exonerating the innocent.
A few years later, Colombo would portray a police investigator whose reputation resided in his ability to sift through misleading facts and intentional subterfuge, unearth reliable evidence as well as the true culprits in any crime, and — without fail — bring them to justice.
No matter your project or field of endeavor, simulation is a useful tool for finding out what you don’t know. In many cases, problems or issues aren’t obvious until you try and do something. Where doing that thing is expensive or difficult, a simulation can be a low-stakes way to find out some problems without huge costs or undue risks.
In each case the key is the collaboration. A software engineering generalist might understand and get involved with the whole process using multiple technologies, but that does not mean that they do all of the work in isolation themselves. You don’t replace your whole team, but you do (hopefully) improve the cohesiveness of the whole team’s activity.
The actual quality of the courses was a bit of a mixed bag. The periphery computing stuff like databases and networking, while not having the richest part of the curriculum and clearly pieced together from other things, was taught well. “Soft” stuff like project management was harder for me to judge, especially due to the fact circumstances required a substitute for much of the term. The actual programming courses I found were the weakest part, but I’m not sure if this was due to my context revealing flaws more so there, or if the actual instruction/resources being taught from were poor. It was clearly the part other students were struggling with.
Let’s talk about a career in tech, but not the usual boring stuff about salary or how to pass the interview process at the place with the most oversized comp packages. Instead, let’s talk about how your relationship to how the company accomplishes its goals influences what your job is like and what skills and strengths you’ll develop there.
In short, Academentia describes a state of organisational insanity in which university academics can no longer function as academics and scholars. Academentia occurs in neoliberal universities run by faceless crypto-corporate apparatchiks of Managerialism. These crypto-corporate apparatchiks are managers who have taken on the ideology of Managerialism. Their entire existence depends on the managerial apparatus, e.g. the marketing of the PR-University – not on supporting research, teaching, and academics.
As enforced by these corporate apparatchiks of Managerialism, university academics are obliged to compete by means of publishing in the so-called top journals, and to stockpile (quantity over quality) ever greater numbers of publications than their peers.
Every generation has an instrument which defines its sound, and for those whose formative musical years lie in the 1980s, a very strong contender to the crown is the Roland TR-808 percussion synthesizer. Its sounds can be recognized across a slew of hits from that era and every decade since, and though the original instrument wasn’t a commercial success it remains accessible through sample packs, emulations, and clones. The 808 was an all-analogue device that didn’t use samples, thus [Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell] has been able to reproduce its distinctive cowbell sound with reference to some of the original circuitry.
Anyone who’s ever assembled a PCB full of tiny SMD parts will have found that tweezers are not always the best tool when it comes to accurate positioning. Thin, flat components like microcontrollers can be awkward to pick up securely, while small resistors and capacitors have a tendency of snapping out of your tweezers’ grip and flying off into the sunset (or your carpet). Vacuum pickup tools can be a great help, but the most convenient models, with an electric air pump and a foot switch, can be a bit expensive. [sjm4306] shows that it doesn’t have to be that way: he built his “VacPen” mostly from reused components.
Nine years ago, MakerBot was acquired by Stratasys in a deal worth slightly north of $600 million. At the time it was assumed that MakerBot’s line of relatively affordable desktop 3D printers would help Stratasys expand its reach into the hobbyist market, but in the end, the company all but disappeared from the hacker and maker scene. Not that many around these parts were sad to see them go — by abandoning the open source principles the company had been built on, MakerBot had already fallen out of the community’s favor by the time the buyout went through.
Take Bill Gates. Forget all the conspiracy theories about Gates and vaccines – it's bizarre that people bother to make up those fairy-tales when the truth is so much worse. Gates has an absolute ideological commitment to the idea that profit-based production is the most efficient way to produce and allocate goods.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
It's what prompted him to declare war on free/open software, what caused his foundation to block patent waivers for AIDS drugs in sub-Saharan Africa and other poor nations, and it's what led him to strong-arm the Oxford university team to kill its plan to release its vaccine into the public domain, opting instead to license it to Astrazeneca.
"Moms have said in the comments that there are some TSA agents that made them throw away their breast milk supply, because it wasn't frozen," she said. "Multiple people have said that TSA agents have made them test their own breast milk to prove that it was safe."
This made her feel, she said, like it wasn't "just an isolated incident."
Johns Hopkins University reported 999,053 U.S. COVID deaths as of Thursday morning.
As world leaders gathered Thursday for a second White House-led coronavirus summit, a group of conservation, public health, and infectious disease experts called for a collaborative global effort focused on preventing—as opposed to just containing—the world's next pandemic.
"We have solutions already available at our fingertips—which carry massive return on investment—that would immediately help lower the risk of pandemics."
Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to lead a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Medicare for All on Thursday as the coronavirus pandemic continues to lay bare the deadly dysfunction and greed at the heart of the United States' for-profit healthcare system.
The hearing, scheduled to begin at 11:00 am ET, will feature testimony from a number of experts and advocates, including former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, critical care physician Dr. Adam Gaffney, and National Nurses United executive director Bonnie Castillo.
The United States is the only high-income nation to insist that health should be determined by markets and profits rather than rights and dignity. The result is that the prohibitively high cost of American health care causes tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year.
Slamming the current U.S. healthcare system as a morass of waste, dysfunction, and profiteering, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced Medicare for All legislation that would eliminate out-of-pocket insurance costs and provide comprehensive coverage to everyone in the country.
"Medicare for All will save the average family thousands of dollars a year."
Medicare For All legislation is being introduced on Thursday by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Pramila Jayapal in the House of Representatives. This legislation affirms life—not because it ensures an ongoing "domestic supply of infants" (to borrow a newly-coined phrase) but because it guarantees that every infant, as well as every child, adult, and senior, will receive the medical care they need when they need it.
Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judge's ruling.
One particularly maddening aspect of our current politics is that Democrats feel beholden to rules that Republicans feel entitled to burn. Democrats creatively interpret rules in ways that inevitably frustrate their ability to wield power, while Republicans creatively use their power to get around the rules. Democrats invent constraints on themselves, ostensibly to restrict Republicans, while these same Republicans long ago decided to use maximal power to achieve their goals.
Finland's possible Nato membership application may increase cybersecurity threats from Russia, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom warns.
Referring to events including a wave of cyber attacks in Estonia some 15 years ago in the wake of the removal of a Soviet soldier statue in Tallinn, Traficom's cybersecurity director Sauli Pahlman said that an increase in such attacks by Russia is very likely.
QR codes have been in the news recently, and for good reason; we've spent years honing our suspicious link recognition instincts, only for them to be utterly sidestepped by our QR code scanning obsession. This has given rise to new versions of familiar old attacks with terrible names like "quishing". Today, we're going to be looking at how scammers are exploiting Discord's QR code login feature.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says it is investigating reports that hackers gained unauthorized access to an agency portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the alleged compromise is tied to a cybercrime and online harassment community that routinely impersonates police and government officials to harvest personal information on their targets.
Notwithstanding its exit from the European Union, the British police will remain a member of a Standing Heads of Lawful Interception Units based at Europol. The UK is represented there by the National Crime Agency. This was confirmed by the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, in her answer to a parlamentary question by the pirate Patrick Breyer. The UK is thus the only third country in the group, which otherwise consists exclusively of EU members and the Schengen states Norway, Switzerland and Iceland.
The working group of the departments on telecommunications surveillance had once been founded as a strategic ââ¬Å¾5G Expert Group“ on the initiative of the German Federal Criminal Police Office. It was supposed to give the authorities access to the new telephone standard, which was actually tap-proof. After this was successfully pushed through in the European and international standardisation bodies ETSI and 3GPP, the group was given a new name and new tasks in October 2021. It is now to ensure that the needs of law enforcement agencies are taken into account when amending surveillance laws at EU level and in the member states.
The GnuPG command line tool gpg is the most popular implementation of the OpenPGP specification. The Sequoia PGP project produces the corresponding sq tool, and that tool is very much in its early stages. In the long run, we want sq to become so capable it has a comparable feature set to gpg. This blog post is a comparison of what the two tools can do.
This comparison is not a detailed feature comparison table, comparing option to option and command to command. Such a comparison would be interesting, but not necessarily meaningful: the two programs have such different approaches that a comparison table is hard to produce, and would be hard to make sense of. Thus, the approach taken here is to describe both programs at a higher level.
The goal of this exercise is to get an actionable list of changes to sq to make it better suited as an everyday tool for cryptography. The comparison is meant to be a short-cut to extensive user studies.
The comparison is divided into four parts: a short description of gpg, and of sq, a discussion of the differences, and a list of concrete proposals for changing sq.
For this blog post, we assume the reader has at least a basic understanding of OpenPGP.
People look at this and go “oh wow yeah this looks so clean & stripped down from all the bloated pages out there” but that’s not what this is. This is a tear down of browser defaults. This is a screed against minimalism, a “you coulda done at least this much, ya primitive screwheads”. (And “at least this much” includes track & spy apparently.)
And it’s wrong.
We often need to share a photo with someone special, but what usually goes unnoticed is the amount of metadata that is embedded in every pic we shoot.
Even worse is the fact that many apps that we have on our phone work against us and steal these little pieces of information (the metadata) to generate a profile about us and how we interact with things without us even knowing it.
That’s why this tip comes in hand.
Today, May 11, EU Commissioner Ylva Johannson announced a new law to combat online child sex abuse. This has an overt purpose, and a covert purpose.
The overt purpose is to pressure tech companies to take down illegal material, and material that might possibly be illegal, more quickly. A new agency is to be set up in the Hague, modeled on and linked to Europol, to maintain an official database of illegal child sex-abuse images. National authorities will report abuse to this new agency, which will then require hosting providers and others to take suspect material down. The new law goes into great detail about the design of the takedown process, the forms to be used, and the redress that content providers will have if innocuous material is taken down by mistake. There are similar provisions for blocking URLs; censorship orders can be issued to ISPs in Member States.
Jurisprudence on warrantless long-term surveillance is still all over the place. On one hand, some courts feel anything observable by passersby shouldn’t be off limits to law enforcement officers who haven’t secured a search warrant.
What the actual fuck, EU? While they pretend to be all about protecting privacy, they then push out this bit of utter nonsense: a bill to “protect the children” by literally requiring online services scan all messaging all the time. In some ways, the bill is similar to the EARN IT Act in the US, but it’s bizarrely even worse than that.
The weapons of the United States military—drones, mobile command centers, sound cannons, and more—have been handed off to local law enforcement for years. The transfers have equipped police departments with the ability to redirect surveillance tools and the weapons of war designed for foreign adversaries toward often-faultless targets on U.S. soil. For police departments getting the gear, the process is often secretive. If you don’t think your local law enforcement really needs an aerial surveillance system, or for that matter an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle), there hasn’t been too much you can do to stop these from joining the arsenal at your neighborhood police department.€
A.B. 481, a new California state law, went into effect at the beginning of May 2022 for equipment already in agencies’ possession and at the beginning of this year for new technologies. It requires democratic control of whether California state or local law enforcement agencies can obtain or use military-grade tools, whether they are received from the federal government, purchased, or utilized via some other channel. Through their elected officials, the public can say “no” to military surveillance and other technology, and it won’t be allowed to come to town.
Eight soldiers were killed and 13 wounded in an attack in northern Togo on Wednesday, the government said, marking potentially the first deadly raid on its territory by Islamist militants who have killed thousands in neighbouring countries.
At least eight soldiers have been killed and 13 other security forces members wounded in an ambush by extremists in northern Togo near the border with Burkina Faso, the government said.
The incident was a worrying sign that jihadis who are staging increasing attacks in neighboring countries are expanding their activity into Togo.
But it appears that Jalali’s very ties to Sweden are what landed him in an Iranian prison.
In Iran, some foreigners are pawns, both in Tehran’s internal political rivalries and in tensions between Tehran and Western capitals, analysts say. A pattern of Westerners being picked up has grown increasingly visible since the collapse of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
We speak with renowned Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, president of PEN Ukraine, about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its third month. “The war looks like the war against Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian history and Ukrainian identity,” says Kurkov. He says daily life in Kyiv is “coming back but very fragile” as Russia is said to be preparing a second attempt to occupy the capital.
In an unprecedented move, the congressional committee investigating the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol spurred by then-President Donald Trump on Thursday subpoenaed five Republican House lawmakers, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, after they ignored the panel's request for voluntary cooperation.
"It's hard to imagine witnesses with more directly relevant evidence for our committee and more important information for the American people."
The House of Representatives May 10 approved $40 billion of aid to Ukraine 368-57. All Democratic representatives voted yes.€
Russia warned Thursday that it would not hesitate to retaliate should Finland join NATO, heightening fears that the war in Ukraine could escalate into a direct confrontation between nuclear powers.
Moscow's threat came just hours after Finnish leaders said that the historically neutral Nordic country, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, should apply immediately for membership in the U.S.-led military alliance.
According to Russian officials, roughly 1 million people have been forced to evacuate from Ukraine into Russia since Moscow began its full-scale invasion on February 24. In many areas, evacuating civilians into Ukrainian-controlled territory is simply impossible due to Russian shelling. Left with no other way to safety, refugees are being forcibly deported to Russia via the Kremlin-controlled€ “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR) and occupied Crimea. Along the way, they are subjected to a lengthy “filtration” process run by Russian troops, which often involves spending several days in camps. In interviews with Meduza, Ukrainian refugees gave firsthand accounts of how this system works.
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.
Has the former MSNBC analyst dropped his media gig and really gone off to battle the Russians in Ukraine?
Noting Israel's "long history of targeting journalists" one Palestinian rights advocate called on the FBI to launch an independent investigation into the Al Jazeera correspondent's death.
Palestinians are holding a state funeral in Ramallah for Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran journalist who was one of the best-known television journalists in Palestine and the Arab world. Abu Akleh, who was a U.S. citizen, was wearing a press uniform and covering an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank when she was fatally shot in the head on Wednesday. Israel initially claimed she may have been shot by a Palestinian gunman, but later said it was unclear who shot her, after witnesses, including other journalists, said she was shot dead by Israeli forces. “People are shocked all over Palestine, all over the Arab world, actually,” says Rashid Khalidi, professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. Israel’s “colonial army” has “systematically targeted” Palestinian journalists, says Khalidi. “It’s really important to Israel that nobody see what’s going on in the Occupied Territories.”
As the funeral for slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh began Thursday in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he will turn to the International Criminal Court to seek justice for the Al Jazeera reporter allegedly shot dead by Israeli forces while working on Wednesday.
"They committed the crime and we do not trust them."
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is home to several gangs. Even though the current sheriff, Alex Villanueva, thinks this is up for debate (via a threatened lawsuit against the LA City Council), enough evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) points to deputies forming cliques that turn the Thin Blue Line from defensive to offensive.
Biden initiated this round of loose lips by seeming to suggest regime change in Moscow—Putin “cannot remain in power,” he proposed—was part of US policy.
His secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, said while in Kyiv that weakening Russia’s ability to invade its neighbors was a US objective.
A year later, they moved into a place built by the government to a new set of standards aimed at making rural homes more resilient to extreme weather and tackling the tree loss that worsens damage from climate change impacts like floods.
Across the Horn of Africa, three consecutive failed rainy seasons, and a slow start to a fourth one, have pushed parts of Somalia, Ethiopia, and northern Kenya to the brink of famine amid the worst drought in 40 years. And the 20 million people in the region who could require urgent food assistance by year-end face a double blow: Russia’s war in Ukraine – a key global exporter of grains – is pushing food prices to record levels.
As a fast-moving brush fire near Laguna Beach, California destroyed well over a dozen homes on Thursday—including five multimillion-dollar mansions—a prominent environmental researcher and advocate warned that the wealthy are not immune from the disastrous effects of the climate emergency, even as the fossil fuel-driven crisis harms the poor disproportionately.
"No matter how rich you are, you are not safe from Earth breakdown," tweeted Los Angeles-based climate scientist Peter Kalmus, a member of Scientist Rebellion.
The top national guaranteed rate for a 5-year bank CD is currently 3.15%, so clearly eliminating the bank middleman who seems to be taking a 35% cut means a blockchain CD guaranteed by middleman Hex.com is a winner with no additional risk!
Below the fold I look this gift horse in the mouth.
The new chairman of GB News has a history of sharing articles that dismiss the threat of climate change, sharpening concerns about the TV channel’s role as a platform for opponents of climate action.€ €
Between 2013 and 2017, United Arab Emirates-based investment manager Alan McCormick tweeted numerous articles by climate science deniers, including one calling on readers to “celebrate carbon dioxide”.
However, the latest evidence confirms that nuclear plants large and small will be enormously expensive to build for years to come. Until that changes, there’s no sense in making Utahns or all taxpayers bear the brunt of the costs for one bad idea.
Claiming to have a climate solution, nuclear industry developers are asking cities and towns throughout Utah to buy into a massive project using new, unproven technology that relies heavily on taxpayer subsidies. The industry’s bold claims, however, have a long history of falling flat, and public funds should not be used to support the precarious project.
While welcoming the Biden administration's decision to cancel three oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, conservation and climate groups on Thursday also renewed demands for an end to all offshore drilling in U.S. waters.
"We need to end new leasing and phase out existing drilling."
The solution, or so it has been sold to us, is to release sheep, goats and cows across the landscape in greater numbers to mow down invasive flammable cheatgrass with the goal of lessening fire intensity if and when fire visits. Recent stories on intensive sheep and goat grazing efforts have recently made headlines across Nevada, celebrating “fuels reduction” programs and partnerships underway around Carson City, Reno and other communities. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are also experimenting with intensive grazing programs with the stated purpose of reducing cheatgrass and mitigating wildfire in more remote areas far away from the wildlands-urban interface.
Cut through the propaganda propagated by the livestock industry and you will discover that the fuels problem is actually caused by grazing itself. For nearly one hundred and fifty years, under our system of settler colonialism, domestic livestock have been ravaging our native ecosystems while introducing cheatgrass both directly and indirectly into previously resilient deserts, sagebrush steppes, and grasslands.
A congressional report published Thursday revealed that meat processing companies worked with and lobbied the Trump administration to continue operating during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the danger to workers in the high-risk industry.
"The devastating impacts of the Covid crisis on workers in these industries should push lawmakers and the Biden administration to crack down on the meatpacking giants."
Mortimer doesn’t theorize or expound; she lacerates, instead, with description. Her 64-year-old novel is, through its atmosphere and circumstance, one of the most compelling arguments for freedom of reproductive choice that I’ve ever encountered. Without choice, she suggests, we’re condemned to follow tramlines of predestination that punish everyone involved. Without choice, everyone suffers, including the children born not out of love but resentment. (In the novel, Angela has always sensed how differently both her parents seem to regard her compared with her two younger brothers, both born by choice.) Ruth’s psyche in the book is inexorably stunted by her inability to define herself before she had children. Reading Mortimer, I was reminded again and again of Merritt Tierce’s 2021 New York Times essay—published decades after Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting was written—outlining what getting pregnant at 19 had cost her. “My personhood was erased,” she wrote, “and overwritten with MOTHER before I even knew who I was.”
As United Nations and other experts gather in Côte d'Ivoire's largest city for a major conference on fighting desertification, an agency of the world body published a new report warning that humanity is "at a crossroads" in drought management, and that mitigation must proceed "urgently, using every tool we can" if the planet is to avert catastrophic consequences.
"The facts and figures of this publication all point in the same direction: an upward trajectory in the duration of droughts and the severity of impacts."
Advocates pushing to raise California's minimum wage to $18 an hour heralded a key development Thursday as they began submitting more than one million signatures to get the Living Wage Act on the November ballot, easily surpassing the roughly 623,000 required.
"We're going to set a new bar for working people all over the country."
Crop insurance premium subsidies in the Mississippi River region cost taxpayers almost $39.5 billion between 2001 and 2020, a new Environmental Working Group analysis of Department of Agriculture data finds.
Total premium subsidies increased during that 20-year period by almost 260 percent – from $656.7 million to $2.3 billion. The USDA’s Crop Insurance Program is a massive initiative whose price tag has skyrocketed since the 1990s, in part due to more frequent and severe bouts of drought and rain linked to the climate emergency. Premium subsidy costs will almost certainly continue to increase as the crisis intensifies.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday led the introduction of new legislation that would enable federal regulators to forcefully crack down on corporate price gouging, a practice that progressive lawmakers and economists say has played a major role in driving U.S. inflation to a 40-year high.
According to a one-page summary released by Warren's office, the Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022 would "prohibit the practice of price gouging during all abnormal market disruptions—including the current pandemic—by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to enforce a federal ban against unconscionably excessive price increases, regardless of a seller's position in a supply chain."
The Verge obtained the email Agrawal sent to staff about the changes. (Note: “Bluebird” is what Twitter calls its consumer product team, and “Goldbird” is the team that builds revenue-generating products. “Staff” refers to Twitter’s senior leadership team.)
Here is Agrawal’s memo to employees in its entirety: [...]
The treaty was designed to help law enforcement authorities obtain electronic evidence related to service providers, subscriber information and traffic data associated with global criminal activity, the Justice Department said.
The paper proposes Nine Pillars of Digital Justice, the first three of which are preconditions, and the the latter are rights. I thought it was worth taking a look.
The problem with this approach, explains Fisher, is that it complicates our international partnerships.
"If we did that, we'd have to send him back to Germany. And if we sent him to Germany, then the US can't extradite him and they would be really unhappy."
For this reason, the New Zealand Government is allowing the court system to run its full course.
A deal has been cut between two of the Megaupload accused and the United States in the world's biggest copyright case - and it means the website's visionary founder Kim Dotcom is the only one of the original accused left facing extradition from New Zealand.
Lawyers acting for former Megaupload coders Bram van der Kolk and Mathias Ortmann say the deal will see the pair facing equivalent charges in New Zealand courts and the extradition dropped once those have been heard.
In a statement issued through their lawyer Peter Spring, Ortmann and van der Kolk said the continuing uncertainty of the case had taken a heavy toll on their lives and the time had come to move on.
“Accordingly, we have reached an agreement with the New Zealand Government and the United States of America under which we have agreed to be charged in New Zealand for offenses similar to those we face in the United States.”
The pair added that New Zealand was now their home “and we want to stay here.”
Two men charged by U.S. prosecutors with racketeering and other crimes for their involvement in the once wildly popular file-sharing website Megaupload said Tuesday they have reached a deal that will see them avoid being extradited to the U.S. in exchange for facing charges in New Zealand.
The deal by former Megaupload officers Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk means that only Megaupload's flamboyant founder Kim Dotcom, who also lives in New Zealand, still faces the possibility of extradition to the U.S. in the long-running case.
Following the Russian invasion on February 24, Ukraine's fibre optic or cellular communication infrastructure connections were severed. SpaceX, along with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) delivered about 5,000 starlink terminals to the war-torn country.
Long ago, in another America, you had to turn to the underground press if you wanted to conjure up images of wholesome Disney cartoon characters fornicating. In 2022, Republican lawmakers now provide that service. In 1967, The Realist, a gleefully subversive journal founded by Paul Krassner, published Wally Wood’s “The Disneyland Memorial Orgy,” a two-page spread that showed Mickey Mouse and the gang, impeccably rendered, engaged in all manner of X-rated activity. Krassner and Wood were countercultural anarchists, but by some strange alchemy, what they presented as satire is now a part of Republican rhetoric.
It is certainly something of a turning point when Sinn Féin becomes the first nationalist party in the history of Northern Ireland to win more votes and representatives than the largest unionist party. This is so significant because the Northern Irish statelet was created 101 years ago specifically in order to guarantee a unionist and Protestant majority permanently in power.
No wonder Sinn Féin and the nationalists are cock-a-hoop after they won 27 Assembly seats and polled 250,388 first-preference votes compared with the DUP’s 25 seats and 184,000 votes. Sinn Féin can now claim the post of First Minister in any new Executive in the unlikely event of the DUP failing to veto its formation.
The LIV Golf Invitational Series is set to run from June to October and promises to be an extravaganza played on three continents.€ The chief executive of the enterprise is the man of the eternal tan, golfer turned businessman Greg Norman, while LIV Golf Enterprises is itself majority owned by the Public Investment Fund, which operates on behalf of that inglorious institution known as the Saudi government.
Norman claims to have sent invitation letters to 250 players of the top-ranked players to compete in the tournament.€ “Our events are truly additive to the world of golf,” he claims in justification.€ “We have done our best to create a schedule that allows players to play elsewhere, while still participating in our events.”
A recent piece in the New York Times (5/9/22) tells the story of two New York Cities and of two visions of the Democratic Party, one old school and pragmatic and the other€ one of idealistic hopes of millennials. The former, as the Times tells us, is embodied in Mayor Eric Adams, and the latter’s public face is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The two have not been friendly with each other, and in the paper’s deep dive into their rivalry, we are treated to reporting on the differences in their public styles of politics.
But this piece oversimplifies an important struggle going on in Democratic Party politics today, as socialists and progressives attempt to move the party leftward. And by boiling this struggle down superficial differences like generational personality types the paper is distracting readers from very real issues at hand, because there is wide skepticism about Adams’s so-called pragmatism as he wages a class war against his own residents and continues to raise eyebrows with his potentially corrupt administration.
On the heels of Senate Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin blocking federal abortion rights legislation, a reproductive freedom coalition on Thursday demanded that Democrats stop claiming they are defending women by keeping in place the filibuster.
"Again and again, the rotten structures of our democracy deny our federal legislature the ability to enact the will of the people."
As a powerful storm rolled across the Cincinnati hills, the Langsam Library at the University of Cincinnati was eerily silent. The library served as one of many polling locations across the city for Ohio’s midterm primary elections. Only a day before, Politico released a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade, suggesting it will be overturned this summer. The polling place—located in a glass-lined conference room on the library’s first floor—was vacant, aside from the workers who were trading anecdotes and discussing summer vacation plans. One, who was hunched across a desk and had his baseball cap pulled down, had fallen asleep. Although the poll workers declined to be interviewed, they directed me to a piece of paper taped to the door: “No voters have checked into this precinct.”
You wouldn't know it from the mainstream press, but one of the most important elections of 2022 is happening in the southern part of Western Oregon this week. The people of the 4th district have an opportunity to choose climate activist and lawyer Doyle Canning as the Democratic Party nominee in the race to succeed retiring Rep. Peter DeFazio. If Doyle were to win the primary and the general election in this "likely blue" district, she would be as strong a climate advocate as has ever served in the US Congress.
With Novák Katalin taking office this week as Hungary’s first female president, the country has also gained a first gentleman – for the first time in its history. This will be the title of István Veres from now on, who will – along with his wife – join a small group in European and world politics. In spite of his new position, however, Veres is not expected to spend much time sipping tea with first ladies.
Political preference among Hungarians has a considerable impact on the perception of Russia and Ukraine – Median Institute's latest polls show. The survey conducted on a sample of 1,000 Hungarian citizens, was commissioned by 444.
The figures from this new survey show that the perception of Western countries is stagnating (compared to a study made in 2018 by the same institute), but Hungarians have become distrustful of world superpowers. In the case of Russia, the result was predictable because of the invasion of Ukraine. But the 10-point drop in the perception of the United States is quite remarkable. No survey was conducted on Ukraine in 2018, but Median measured a low, 33-point approval rating this year. One explanation for the low numbers in the case of the US may be the new administration and the narrative (strongly supported by the Hungarian government) that suggests the United States was actively involved in the triggering and the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.
I need to believe that the world isn’t full of people eager to create more pain for a bereaved parent, despite the evidence I’ve seen to the contrary. Perhaps people were looking to comfort themselves by directing fault at me, as though unexpected loss doesn’t happen every day. Perhaps they feel unsettled by the uncertainty surrounding changing pandemic recommendations so they want to cast an easy villain, like the vaccines or Big Pharma. Perhaps they felt that they were amplifying an untold story that people needed to hear, without considering whether the subject had any say in the story being told or whether it was true.
The manual recommends that activists locate C.P.C.s near abortion facilities, choose neutral-sounding names and show women a slide show that includes misinformation about the health risks of abortion. It includes example scripts to help employees and volunteers deceive women about whether the C.P.C. performs abortions: [...]
[...]
Many of the strategies that Pearson recommended are still used by C.P.C.s.
Once inside a C.P.C., women can be greeted by volunteers or staff members wearing lab coats or hospital scrubs who, despite their appearance, are usually not medical professionals. These representatives might try to frighten women by falsely claiming that abortions lead to breast cancer, mental health issues or infertility. They are also likely to suggest that abortion is much more dangerous than it is — in reality, women are almost 15 times as likely to die because of childbirth as from an abortion.
Today, C.P.C. volunteers increasingly use ultrasound machines in order to further appear as if they provide medical care. Women who’ve visited C.P.C.s have reported that volunteers underestimated how far along their pregnancies were. Other women say C.P.C. volunteers overstated natural miscarriage rates — so they might delay seeking an abortion and miss the window in which they are legally allowed to have one.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has found that major U.S. meat processors made “baseless” claims about meat shortages in order to convince the Trump administration to issue an executive order to keep plants operating as Covid-19 was ravaging the nation in the spring of 2020.
Late last month, the Joe Biden administration publicly confirmed that a “Disinformation Governing Board” working group had been created within the Department of Homeland Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America.
A coalition of more than 120 civil rights, pro-democracy, and other public interest groups on Thursday implored social media giants to stem the tide of election disinformation on their platforms ahead of this fall's fast-approaching midterms.
"Every day that passes without these essential fixes is another day disinformation takes hold and weakens democracies here and abroad."
Today, the European Commission presented publicly for the first time an EU draft law on mandatory chat control. With the stated intention of fighting against “child pornography”, the Commission plans to oblige all providers of e-mail, chat and messaging services to search for suspicious messages in a fully automated way and disclose them to the police. This requires them to monitor and scan the communications of all citizens. End-to-end encryption would have to be undermined by “client-side” scanning on all mobile phones.
E-reader apps haven’t replaced printed books, which schools and libraries often still buy because they own the paper versions, whereas e-books are licensed from publishers for a set period of time. But schools and libraries sign up with apps such as Epic, Hoopla and OverDrive because readers say they like the convenience of e-books and teachers get more options for assignments — especially during pandemic-related school closings.
The apps often market themselves to schools and libraries as a way to quickly diversify their digital shelves, especially after racial justice protests in spring 2020 drew attention to the lack of diversity in many traditional institutions.
But convenience is a double-edged sword. In years past, parents might not have been able to find out what’s in a library collection, giving students a certain measure of freedom to roam the stacks. Now, they can easily search digital collections for books with content they object to and ask school administrators to censor or limit access with a few mouse clicks.
Florida and Texas both passed blatantly unconstitutional laws limiting the ability of social media websites to moderate. Lawsuits were filed challenging both laws. In both cases, the district courts correctly blocked the laws from going into effect, noting that it was obviously a 1st Amendment violation to tell websites how they could and could not moderate. Both states appealed. A few weeks back there was a hearing in the 11th Circuit over the Florida law, where it became quite clear that the judges seemed to grasp the issues, and had lots of really tough questions for Florida’s lawyers. However, they have not issued an actual ruling yet.
So, I already had a quick post on the bizarre decision by the 5th Circuit to reinstate Texas’ social media content moderation law just two days after a bizarrely stupid hearing on it. However, I don’t think most people actually understand just how truly fucked up and obviously unconstitutional the law is. Indeed, there are so many obvious problems with it, I’m not even sure I can do them adequate justice in a single post. I’ve seen some people say that it’s easy to comply with, but that’s wrong. There is no possible way to comply with this bill. You can read the full law here, but let’s go through the details.
At Telex, we regularly report about what we have been up to, and all that we have been able to accomplish thanks to our readers’ support. Here’s a summary of what happened in April.
The IFJ said the young Afghan journalist was accused of posting content critical of the Taliban, including his radio broadcasts, on Facebook. It quoted Qaderi telling the court, "I realized my errors, and I deleted the posts from my Facebook page."
The IFJ denounced what it said was "the arbitrary sentencing" and urged the Islamist Taliban to cease their persecution of journalists for their independent reportage. This would be the first reported case of a journalist being tried by a military court since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last August.
Volume 1 of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report said approximately 19 Federal Indian boarding schools accounted for the more than 500 deaths. The number of recorded deaths is expected to rise as the department continues investigating the 408 boarding schools that were operated in 37 states.
Body camera footage from Georgia deputies who stopped a Delaware State University women's lacrosse team bus late last month directly contradicts Tuesday statements by the sheriff who defended the stop.
In a public address, Liberty County Sheriff William Bowman said "no personal items on the bus or person(s) were searched" during the April 20 stop. But the bodycam footage, which Delaware Online/The News Journal has obtained and made publicly available without editing, shows deputies rifling through players' backpacks and bags – something those on the bus have said for days.
B Nagaraju, 25, who was stabbed to death at a busy crossing in Hyderabad Wednesday night over his marriage to a Muslim woman, had sold his gold chain to take his wife, Ashrin Sultana Syed, Eid shopping.
Narrating the brutality of the incident, Sultana told ANI, “I begged my brother to spare her husband`s life, he was ready to convert to Islam for me, but my brother did not listen to me and killed him.”
A 21-year-old Dalit woman filed a complaint with Nallur Police in Tamil Nadu's Coimbatore district stating that her partner, with whom she was in a live-in relationship, was torturing her and forcing her to convert to Islam.
This investigative report is a significant step by the federal government to comprehensively address the facts and consequences of its federal Indian boarding school policies—implemented for more than a century and a half—resulting in the twin goals of cultural assimilation and territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the forced removal and relocation of their children. It reflects an extensive and first-ever inventory of federally operated schools, including profiles and maps.
The investigation found that from 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 federal schools across 37 states or then territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii. The investigation identified marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 different schools across the school system. As the investigation continues, the Department expects the number of identified burial sites to increase.
A report released Wednesday by the Department of the Interior on the impact of Indian boarding schools has left many Oklahomans appreciative but wanting more answers.
Initially commissioned in June by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the report released Wednesday found that the United States either directly operated or provided support for 408 boarding schools nationwide that targeted Indigenous children between 1819 and 1969 as part of a federal assimilation policy.
With 76 campuses, Oklahoma had more boarding schools than any other state listed in the report. They include more than two dozen sites within 90 minutes of Tulsa.
Spalding and her partner went to the FBI. High-ranking Chicago officials responded by trying to make the investigation disappear. They targeted Spalding and Echeverria, who were reassigned to desk duty for the CPD. Both were later “sent to the police academy and separated.” When the Justice Department became involved, the chief of internal affairs allegedly tried to convince Spalding to commit perjury. “I can’t – and I won’t – protect you,” the chief said. Spalding responded to the retaliation by filing a whistleblower lawsuit after her immediate supervisor in the Fugitive Apprehension Unit said, “I’d hate to one of these days have to be the one to knock on your door and tell your daughter you’re coming home in a box.” The lawsuit resulted in retaliation that was more severe. Spalding was arrested and placed under investigation on “phony federal charges.” She went on extended leave as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that was caused by what she endured as a whistleblower. Spalding’s story is one of several whistleblower stories that appear in GAP’s report that examines the “Blue Wall of Silence” within police departments throughout the United States. The Blue of Wall of Silence is defined by GAP as a “social control within police culture that deters reports of misconduct and enforces conformity through fear of retaliation."“Protection of fellow officers can often be valued over the protection of the public," the report further describes. "Broad cultural norms of peer solidarity are continually promoted and sustained through a sense of obligation to comply with this unwritten code of honor."Police whistleblowers face retaliation that whistleblowers working in other professions tend to endure: “making the position part-time, changing the job title, reducing salary, and denying promotions or raises, “inciting isolation or ‘mobbing’ harassment by peers, attempting to terminate the employee, increasing or decreasing the employee’s workload, abolishing the whistleblower’s position, giving poor performance reviews, and/or accusing the whistleblower of the same misconduct” they have disclosed.
We speak with Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, which recognized his “uncompromising and compassionate” writing about colonialism and the refugee experience. He is the first Black writer to win the award since Toni Morrison almost 30 years ago and the first Black African writer to win the prize since 1986. Gurnah discusses his work, which explores displacement, migration and “historical moments that create us.” His latest novel is titled “Afterlives” and will be published in the United States in August 2022.
Celeste Matthews spent last summer’s 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in a panic at her cousin’s house in Uptown New Orleans as another monster storm, Hurricane Ida, roared through the city. With every gust, she was terrified the windows would shatter.
The next day, she returned to her home in the Gert Town neighborhood to find part of the roof torn off. With the electricity out, she had to sleep with the windows open. Mosquitoes swarmed around her bed.
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was widely condemned Thursday for his joint statement with the National Border Patrol Council complaining about the Biden administration feeding migrant children in U.S. custody amid a national shortage of infant formula.
"I can't come up with the words to describe how despicable and inhumane this is."
"Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.'"—Genesis 2:18. RSV
Fivek points to barriers of male prejudice and of misplaced disparagement of women’s work, both in the workplace and in “social reproduction.” Not only do woman work for relatively low wages “in the productive sphere of the economy,” but, as she claims, “they are also€ working unpaid€ in the reproductive sphere” and, indeed, are “35% more likely than men to live in poverty.”
She points out that, “[w]omen’s economic well-being is often tied to their role as primary laborer in a male-dominated household” and economic dependency may lead to “difficulty in leaving abusive relationships.” Fivek attributes women’s hesitancy to act politically to the assumption by most women, shared by society at large, that as care-givers “the major site of their oppression — the interpersonal or reproductive sphere … [is] ‘private’ and ‘personal.’”
This argument is not explicitly made in “Hope”.€ Indeed, I don’t know if Pat Hynes, the author, intended to make this point, or in this way.€ But I could not help but to come to this understanding as I read “Hope”’s compilation of Pat’s columns and essays in which she examines our deepest existential challenges.
In writing about our environment, climate emergency, gross economic inequity, refugees, COVID and war, she continually refers to ways in which the plight of women, and children, are systematically ignored and how women are exploited, often viciously and without fear of consequence, particularly when it comes to war.
Employees at two Starbucks locations in Santa Cruz, California won union elections on Wednesday, scoring the rapidly spreading movement's first victories in the nation's most populous state even as management intensifies its efforts to stamp out worker organizing.
The groundbreaking victories, like many of the Starbucks union's wins thus far, were nearly unanimous. The Ocean and Water location in Santa Cruz voted 13-1 in favor of joining Workers United—the national union representing Starbucks workers—and the Mission and Dufour shop voted 15-2 in support of unionization.
As far as efforts to discourage workers from supporting union drives go, the move by Starbucks appears pretty blatant. And it comes as the coffee chain sees a massive surge of union activity.
Since its first victory at two stores in Buffalo in December 2021, Starbucks Workers United has now filed for union elections at over 250 stores – comprising over 6,600 employees – in over 30 states, according to the National Labor Relations Board. Moreover, the union has won 54 of the 64 elections conducted to date, many by overwhelming margins.
We’ve noted repeatedly that despite a steady stream of breathless rhetoric about America’s “dedication to bridging the digital divide,” U.S. government leaders€ still don’t actually know where broadband is or isn’t available. It only takes a few minutes perusing the FCC’s $350 million broadband map to realize government data completely hallucinates both speeds and competitors, and ignores a major metric: price.
Rich governments' persistent refusal to share key coronavirus vaccine and treatment technology was in the spotlight Thursday as world leaders convened for the second United States-led Covid-19 summit, an event that comes as roughly 85% of people in poor nations remain unprotected from the deadly disease.
Ahead of the virtual gathering, public health campaigners warned that the World Health Organization's goal of achieving 70% vaccination against Covid-19 in each country by September is falling further out of reach as wealthy countries—including the U.S.—fail to meet their modest donation pledges and obstruct progress on a temporary patent waiver.
Others, however, will not. Netflix already raised prices earlier this year, and with inflation at a 40-year high and a recession all but certainly on the horizon, it’s worth considering how many subscribers would balk at another monthly fee increase. A recent report from Kantar noted that Netflix’s January price hike had a significant effect on subscriptions, with the higher cost cited as the reason for 15 percent of Q1 cancellations and nearly 30 percent of planned Q2 cancellations.
In the clip, the rapper wields the controversial technology to transform into Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, O.J. Simpson, Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle. It’s unlikely the celebrities consented to being in the video, raising the question of whether Lamar and production house pgLang are legally in the clear for using their likenesses.
The Right of Publicity concerns itself with the right to control the commercial use of one’s identity. Yet, as soon as a definition is on the table, questions arise. For whom? What does control mean? Are there limitations? Can it be used by a personality to achieve censorship? What is a commercial use? Are there exceptions to commercial use? What does identity encompass? How does Right of Publicity relate to deep fakes and NFTs? What is the taxable value of the right in an estate context? These inquiries have answers. Ultimately, the Right of Publicity provides necessary protection not adequately addressed in other areas of the law.
Welcome to episode 29 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from€ Philippe Rivière, head of digital strategy at the Art Explora Foundation. Beyond developing strategy, Philippe also leads the design and implementation of various digital resources and contributes to the setting up of national and international partnerships. Over his career, Philippe has held many key roles in the digital world of some of Paris’ cultural institutions. More recently, he was deputy development manager and head of digital services and communication at Paris Musées.
In this episode, we hear from Julia Pagel, secretary general of NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations.€ Before starting to work for NEMO, Julia worked as project manager at the German Museums Association. Julia was a member and Vice-President of the Executive Committee of Culture Action Europe, a major European culture umbrella network. Since 2019 she is a member of the EU Commission Expert Group on Cultural Heritage, and since 2021 she is an Advisory Board member of Europeana. Julia has initiated numerous international cooperation projects in the museum field around capacity building and organizational transformation.
Disney is looking for a senior paralegal to expand its anti-piracy team in Burbank California. The ideal candidate will join the Digital Media Antipiracy Group to monitor and respond to the latest piracy threats, including websites and apps. Over in the UK, Disney also hopes to add a new analyst to its anti-piracy force.
The Italian telecoms regulator AGCOM already has tools at its disposal to fight piracy but legislation winding its way through the corridors of power will move things to a new level. In addition to making it easier for copyright holders to disable access to identified infringing content at the ISP level, similar powers will enable urgent and precautionary blocking even before an infringement takes place.
Our own Glyn Moody has written several posts about how exceptions that have been made to copyright laws throughout the world have picked up steam, but also appear to have left the visually impaired hung out to dry. That finally began to change in 2013 with the Marrakesh Treaty, which was specifically designed to restore the rights of the blind and visually impaired by carving out copyright exceptions so that literary works and the like could be translated either into braille or in such a way so as to be accessible on mediums and devices designed for those who cannot navigate the originals.