[Alyssa Rosenzweig] has been tirelessly working on reverse engineering the GPU built into Apple’s M1 architecture as part of the Asahi Linux effort. If you’re not familiar, that’s the project adding support to the Linux kernel and userspace for the Apple M1 line of products. She has made great progress, and even got primitive rendering working with her own open source code, just over a year ago.
A major update to open source drawing app Inkscape is now available to download for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Inkscape 1.2 is packed with a variety of new features that designers, artists, and other illustrative innovators are sure to love. Plus, this update features a swathe of stability improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes.
For some, the headline feature addition in Inkscape 1.2 is support for multiple page documents. Fulfilling this long-standing request from the client’s enthusiastic fanbase means users can now create new standard or custom-size pages within the same document. A brand-new page tool is included to make managing the multi-doc powers a little easier.
rmdir is one of those basic Linux commands that you'll learn in the beginning but hardly use.
In this article, I will demonstrate how the Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF) can be used together with Man In The Middle Attack (MITM) to hack web browsers.
In this post I’ll be focusing on getting GVT-g working on KVM. My main system runs Fedora 32 but this guide should also work on recent versions of Ubuntu or other distributions with recent kernel and Qemu versions.
On Linux and in any operating system, productivity-focused tools have a well-earned place in them. Especially when they are lightweight and terminal oriented, making them flexible and fast to use. Today, you will learn how to install Todoman on Debian 11.
Apache HTTPD is one of the most widely used web servers in the world. It is highly configurable, open source and well documented, which makes it strongly supported by the community.
Many novice developers prefer to use Apache as a web server for their projects. So let’s install it.
Super Hexagon Neo is the upcoming big upgrade for Super Hexagon from Terry Cavanagh, originally released in 2012 it's remained a rather popular title. Currently with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam from over sixteen thousand users, it's probably worth a look if you've still never played it.
Want to get some higher quality screenshots of all the awesome moments in gaming on the Steam Deck (or any Linux desktop?). Here's a quick-tip guide on what to do. This will also work on Windows too but of course the Steam Deck uses Linux, and so the path to certain folders is different.
If, like me, you're terrible at Chess, how about the chance to jump across the board with a Shotgun? That's exactly what you do in Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. Note: personal purchase.
Doom & Destiny Worlds is an open world turn-based RPG with crafting, building, farming, and 4 players local co-op option. Recently it was Verified for Steam Deck.
Heroic Games Launcher 2.3.1 is officially out now, bringing with it some big new features to help you manage games from Epic Games and GOG. I previously wrote about the last Beta but it has improved even more since then.
The openSUSE Project has entered the Release Candidate phase for the next minor release version of the openSUSE Leap distribution.
The upcoming release of Leap 15.4 transitioned from its Beta phase to Release Candidate phase after Build 230.2 passed openQA quality assurance testing.
Last week, Nordic Semiconductors introduced an Audio Development Kit (DK) equipped with their own nRF5340 System on Chip (SoC) and nPM1100 Power Management IC. Additionally, the nRF4340 Audio DK implements the Cirrus Logic’s CS47L63 high performance DAC and differential output driver enhanced for external loads (headphones w/ mono-only and direct speaker output).
The nRF4340 Audio DK features a dual core architecture that consists of an Arm Cortex M33 application processor (up to 128MHz) enabled to interface with audio codecs and an Arm Cortex network processor (up to 64MHz) to handle wireless protocols such as Bluetooth LE Audio.€
Network Time Protocol (NTP) is one of the best ways to keep networked computers synchronized to the same time. It’s simple, lightweight, and not only allows computers to maintain a time standard together, but it also allows some computer manufacturers to save some money on hardware costs. The Raspberry Pi is perhaps the most well-known example of a low-cost computer without the extra expense of a real-time clock (RTC). While the Pi sets up NTP essentially automatically, other microcontrollers like the ESP32 don’t, but it is possible to configure them to use this time standard with some work.
Scratch Week is a global celebration of Scratch that takes place from 15 to 21 May this year. Below, we’ve put together some free resources to help get kids coding with this easy-to-use, block-based programming language. If you’re not sure what Scratch is, check out our introduction video for parents.
Despite what it looks like in the movies, it is hard to communicate with astronauts from Earth. There are delays, and space vehicles don’t usually have a lot of excess power. Plus everything is moving and Doppler shifting and Faraday rotating. Even today, it is tricky. But how did Apollo manage to send back TV, telemetry, and voice back in 1969? [Ken Shirriff] and friends tell us part of the story in a recent post where he looks at the Apollo premodulation processor.
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
Ever since the world decided to transition from mechanical ball mice to optical mice, we have been blessed with computer pointing devices that don’t need regular cleaning and have much better performance than their ancestors. They do this by using what is essentially a tiny digital camera to monitor changes in motion. As we’ve seen before, it is possible to convert this mechanism into an actual camera, but until now we haven’t seen something like this on a high-performance mouse designed for FPS gaming.
[Johnny] had a monitor that he was particularly fond of. The whole monitor appeared dead, and he decided to open it up and find out what could be wrong. He wound up fixing it — sort of — using a hairdryer. While we think his explanation of the problem is unlikely, we hate to armchair quarterback, and we applaud that he opened it up and got it working.
These days, mass storage for computers is pretty simple. It either uses a rotating disk or else it is solid state. There are a few holdouts using tape, too, but compared to how much there used to be, tape is all but dead. But it wasn’t that long ago that there were many kinds of mass storage. Tapes, disks, drums, punched cards, paper tape, and even stranger things. Perhaps none were quite so strange though as the IBM 2321 Data Cell drive — something IBM internally called MARS.
Last winter’s sports season had just begun, and the epidemiology staff at Nevada’s second-largest health district were busy calling the parents of high school athletes who’d tested positive for COVID-19.
A state mandate required unvaccinated or traveling athletes to get tested weekly. A nasal swab for an on-site antigen test produced rapid results in 15 minutes; a second swab was sent to an out-of-state laboratory for a more sensitive PCR test. Parents of students who tested positive on the rapid tests would get phone calls from the health district.
I’m back. My grant application is (almost) done; so by Wednesday or so I should be back to a normal blogging schedule. In the meantime, I’ve updated a discussion from elsewhere about how, every so often, there will arise a myth that can be expressed as a sound bite. The most effective ones during the pandemic are associated with a statistic or a percentage that is passed around as though it were a fact. In August 2020, for example, as the death toll from COVID-19 was skyrocketing, there arose a myth that “only 6%” of the reported deaths due to COVID-19 were actually due to COVID-19, with the rest being people who died “with COVID-19,” not “of COVID-19.” It was an utter distortion of CDC statistics at the time, but it was highly effective. Indeed, it became what I like to refer to as a “zombie stat,” a bite-sized piece of viral disinformation that, no matter how many times it’s debunked, keeps rising from the dead, although maybe I should refer to it as a “slasher” stat, because, like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers and a host of supernatural slashers, every time it appears to be dead it always reappears in the next installation of the franchise, often in a different and more powerful form (for example, Jason didn’t even don his iconic hockey goalie mask until the third installment of Friday the 13th). Even now, early two years later, I still see this slasher statistic popping up again and again and again to kill again.
For their entry, Harrison, Kit and the team wanted to explore how students at Williams Middle School, and likely every other middle and high school in the country, interact on social media. Specifically, when they go on a platform like TikTok or Instagram and create anonymous accounts to share things about school and their classmates.
When it comes to reproductive care, Mississippi has a dual distinction. The state spawned the law that likely will lead to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade. It is also unique among Deep South states for doing the least to provide health care coverage to low-income people who have given birth.
Maybe it’s occasionally OK to shoot the messenger. You know, maybe one to the knee to help determine whether or not they can be trusted.
With the Supreme Court poised to rip away a constitutional right that’s been the law of the land for nearly half a century by overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s time for the gloves to come off in the encryption debate. For a quarter of a century, it has been an unspoken prerequisite for “serious” discussion that American laws and law enforcement must be given a default presumption of legitimacy, respect, and deference. That was always bullshit, the end of Roe confirms it, and I’m not playing that game anymore.
Global EU-based provider of biometric technology solutions Innovatrics and Blaize, the AI computing innovator of edge computing, have announced a technology partnership to deliver ready-to-use facial recognition solutions designed for access control and public security applications leveraging SmartFace Embedded and Blaize edge computing devices.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) on Monday revealed that Google and other internet giants are processing and passing people's data billions of times per day via real-time-bidding (RTB) system for tracking and ad targeting.
My younger brother and I grinned at each other from the back seat of my grandpa’s Jeep. I was 11 and we were making a rare trip to Burger King. We had been living in the United States for four years after emigrating from South Korea,€ and most of the time, my mom preferred that we eat her home-cooked Korean meals. I looked forward to a break from rice and my mother’s kimchi jjigae—a spicy stew.€
On May 13, the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga published an in-depth investigation into a new method the city's police have devised for suppressing protests: shortly before planned protest rallies, security officials use bomb threat charges to detain large groups of activists and hold them in detention facilities for 48 hours, causing them to miss the protests. On March 5, just one day before a nationwide protest rally against the war, St. Petersburg police used this method to arrest dozens of people; the same technique was used to curtail protests on Victory Day. Read Meduza’s summary of the investigation in English below.
The first step of Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine ended with the creation of an occupied bridgehead in the south of the country that's adjacent to Russian-annexed Crimea on one side and to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic on the other. Russia’s military has captured the majority of the Kherson region and part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In the occupied cities, Russian occupants and their collaborators have set up “civilian-military administrations,” hiding the imperial nature of the new regime. Now, the Kremlin is trying to engineer a repeat of what happened in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 — but whether it succeeds will depend on what happens on the battlefield.
In response to reports of the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead and three injured, New York Representative Elise Stefanik issued a pro forma statement saying she was “very saddened to hear the tragic news.”1
As you’ve no doubt heard, on Saturday there was yet another horrific shooting, this one in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding more. From all current evidence, the shooter, a teenager, was a brainwashed white nationalist, spewing nonsense and hate in a long manifesto that repeated bigoted propaganda found in darker corners of the internet… and on Fox News’ evening shows. He also streamed the shooting rampage live on Twitch, and apparently communicated some of his plans via Discord and 4chan.
In the past, we’ve talked about how much of politicians’ obsession with regulating internet companies seems to stem from it being an easy way to deflect attention from their own policy failings. So many aspects of the complaints about social media are really just because social media has shined an extraordinarily bright light on the inability of the government to actually deal with underlying societal issues around mental health, social safety nets, criminal law… that then bubble up elsewhere. And it’s a lot easier for politicians to just point the finger at social media, rather than to admit their own failings.
Pres. Joe Biden lamented, “A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation.”€ He added: “Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America.”
The shooter livestreamed the attack on the streaming service Twitch and apparently issued a 180-page manifesto both of which have been withdrawn. The manifesto’s first page was marked by the neo-Nazi symbol known as a “sonnenrad” (aka “sunwheel” or “black sun”).
A hate-filled 18-year-old murdered 10 and wounded 3 African-Americans in Buffalo on Saturday, having penned a rambling screed about replacement theory. The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French Right wing, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid white workers. Notoriously, the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 against the removal of Confederate statues chanted "Jews will not replace us."
Indeed, there is a growing sense that a new global agenda is forthcoming, one that could unite Russia and China and, to a degree, India and others, under the same banner. This is evident, not only by the succession of the earth-shattering events underway, but, equally important, the language employed to describe these events.
The Russian position on Ukraine has morphed throughout the war from merely wanting to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine to a much bigger regional and global agenda, to eventually, per the words of Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, “put an end to the unabashed expansion” of NATO, and the “unabashed drive towards full domination by the US and its Western subjects on the world stage.”
Kalynivka, Ukraine—When Alexsander Doroshenko and his wife arrived in Kyiv after fleeing their home in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014, he thought they were finally finished with war. Then, at 2:30 in the morning on March 24, he awoke to a phone call from the owner of the fish processing plant in Kalynivka, a small town southwest of Kyiv, where he worked as the head engineer. There had been a fire, and he was needed right away. He hopped in his car to make the roughly 20-minute drive from his home, in another suburb of Kyiv.
Since early April, Kremlin propaganda has celebrated “Granny Anya” as a symbol of supposed Ukrainian popular support for Russia’s “special military operation.” Anna Ivanovna Ivanova, a 69-year-old woman who lives in Velyka Danylivka (a town outside Kharkiv), became an icon in Russia after appearing in a viral Internet video where she greeted a group of soldiers with a Soviet flag and said she was praying for Vladimir Putin. More recently, however, Ukrainian officials released an interview with Ivanova, revealing that the war had forced her and her husband to flee their home. Correspondents from BBC Russia met with Ivanova (who’s returned to Velyka Danylivka) and learned that she opposes Russia’s invasion and wishes only for peace. Meduza summarizes what Anna Ivanova told the BBC.
The leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held a summit in Moscow on Monday, May 16. The meeting, which took place in the Kremlin, was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon, President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov, and Belarusian head of state Alexander Lukashenko. CSTO Secretary General Stanislav Zas was also present.€
Moscow has yet to confirm the exact number of Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine. According to various estimates, Russia’s full-scale invasion has involved up to 100,000 troops. In interviews with Meduza, several relatives of contract soldiers said that it’s impossible for them to resign from military service — those that attempt to quit are threatened with criminal charges of desertion and treason. Meduza correspondent Sasha Sivtsova reports on how Russian soldiers are being sent into Ukraine and how they’re forced to stay there.
This is not the time to make decisions in a moment of historical hysteria and panic, writes Jan Oberg.
After kamikaze drones for the army, the Ukrainian navy is getting unmanned naval systems from the government in Washington. They could be dangerous for Russia in the Black Sea.
I am in Turkey because, if there is to be movement in ending the war in Ukraine, it will happen here. President Erdogan’s firm stance on a potential veto of Swedish and Finnish NATO membership is framed in public only in relation to perceived support by those countries for Kurdish resistance groups. But of course it goes much deeper.
An Associated Press poll this month found that one in three American adults believes there’s an organized push “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. And people who mostly consume right-wing media—like Fox News, One American News Network, and Newsmax—were more likely to believe that than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.
12) We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquest—will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.
Speech (10 April 2006)
This trend was also noted by late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, who said in 2006, “We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquest—will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
Greater Manchester Police are facing criticism for failing to intervene in what Ms Kovacevic claimed to be a minute-long scuffle, which saw her pushed on to a stone ledge by the rival group, as she held a suffragette flag aloft.
I made a few improvements to Chilly Weather, my Gemini weather service that uses emoji to present a more readable interface.
WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas explained, “The 1.5 degree Celsius figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
In 2015, the likelihood of reaching that threshold within five years was nearly zero. In 2017 it was 10 percent, and today it is 50 percent. As we continue to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in dizzying amounts, that percentage spikes with every passing year and will soon reach 100 percent certainty.
South Asia is now into its third month of extreme heat, with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius day after day. And it’s not just South Asia that is sweltering. In March, both the Arctic and the Antarctic were 30 degrees Celsius and 40 degrees Celsius above their usual average temperatures, respectively. Ice is melting, and sea levels are rising. Thirty million people were displaced by climate shocks in 2020. And these shocks store up more strife to come by wrecking harvests.The supply chains that connect the world’s farms, mines, factories, shipping lanes, ports, warehouses, delivery networks and consumers are already massively disrupted, even before the full effects of climate breakdown are felt. In the heavily integrated global capitalist economy, disruption spells disaster. Already, more than 800 million people—1 in 10 people of the entire world’s population—go to bed hungry.
The price of wheat has doubled already this year. And it could rise further as the effects of Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s resulting partial economic isolation are felt across the globe.
After being sentenced to four to six months in a county jail and thousands of dollars in fines for participating in a coal train blockade in New Hampshire more than two years ago, four climate campaigners say they will be "undeterred by these sentences" and will continue to fight the use of fossil fuels by powerful profit-driven corporations.
The activists are members of the grassroots No Coal, No Gas campaign in New England, which organized a blockade of a train that was shipping 10,000 tons of coal to Merrimack Station power plant in Bow, New Hampshire in December 2019.
With wildfires raging in key parts of the United States on Monday, a new model revealed where the risk will increase in the coming decades as the climate emergency worsens.
First Street Foundation released its "Wildfire Model," which the New York-based nonprofit said is "the only nationwide, probabilistic, climate-adjusted, peer-reviewed, property-specific wildfire risk model for properties in the contiguous United States."
In a decision Monday that liberal Justice Elena Kagan warned will further corrupt the nation's money-dominated political system, the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority struck down a campaign finance regulation limiting federal candidates' ability to use campaign funds to repay personal loans.
"When they give money to repay the victor's loan, they know he will be in a position to perform official favors."
This past January, student loan company Navient was made to cancel $1.7 billion in federal student debt in a federal settlement judged by Attorney General Maura Healey. The settlement, which also required Navient to distribute $95 million in restitution to approximately 350,000 federal loan borrowers, came after a long fight against the company's predatory lending practices, which promised to help students in need of tuition assistance, and instead steered them towards repayment plans that piled on unnecessary interest. Navient also participated in risky subprime lending without consideration for borrowers and their families, leaving hundreds of thousands of students in crippling debt that the company knew they would not be able to pay back. These shady practices have been going on for at least two decades with little government intervention. The settlement provided loan forgiveness for students who had borrowed between 2002 and 2010. During this time period, Navient, now privatized, was still known as Sallie Mae, an entity created by Congress to service federal loans. As Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren put it: "Navient cheated students who borrowed money to pursue their dreams and allowed them to be crushed by avoidable debt, all while the U.S. Department of Education turned a blind eye."€
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Monday echoed recent criticism of the Biden administration's secretive attempts to limit student debt cancellation based on income and instead called for full loan forgiveness for federal borrowers.
"Cancel it, don't means test it!" tweeted the Minnesota Democrat, pointing to Politico reporting from Friday.
Notes: William I. Robinson teaches Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara campus. His previous books include Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity and The Global Police State. Peter Phillips is Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. He’s also a former director of Project Censored, and the cofounder of the Project Censored Show. His most recent book is Giants: the Global Power Elite.
The house is now entirely my sister's property, and I have no way to repossess it, but she can't sell it without repaying the paper loan with real cash. She's planning to live there for the rest of her life, so she's repaying it in monthly instalments instead, but she could choose not to, and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Fortunately, there's a lot of trust between us. It's very clearly not rent, though, and the levels set mean there's no profit, which is a big deal for me.
We're not yet sure how to prevent the price of the house bouncing back to "market" levels post-mortem, or if she changed her mind and decided to sell. That bounce would be hers, or her estate's, of course, but it would be awesome to have a class of houses that didn't appreciate like "normal" houses do.
Although Biden no longer calls them the ‘troika of tyranny’ like Trump did, the governments of these three countries are still ostracized by Washington. But in Latin America, Biden’s threat to exclude them from the party has not gone down well. While it might be Washington’s turn to host the summit, the invitation list is supposed to include every state in the two continents, regardless of political disposition. Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, one of those threatening to stay away, asked ‘how can a summit be “of America” without all the countries of America?’ He’s now been joined by several other countries calling on Biden to reconsider. Even Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro says he’s not going to Los Angeles, although this may be more to do with US criticisms of his attempts to undermine Brazil’s October elections.
So far, the summit lacks not just an invitation list but also an agenda. Biden’s priorities seem to be threefold. One is to find ways to stem the flow of migrants crossing the Rio Grande. While he might reach some sort of agreement that he can offer to a skeptical US public, the chances of it having any effect on migration numbers are slim. A year ago, Kamala Harris was charged with producing a migration strategy that would address its “root causes”, but nothing that would achieve this has yet emerged. For example, concern about numbers arriving from Cuba has not triggered any easing of US sanctions, even though Cubans are leaving because of harsh economic conditions caused partly by the US embargo and made worse by the pandemic and its effect on tourism. If anything, Biden has stepped up the pressure on Cuba by making trade, financial dealings and travel even more difficult.
Forty years later the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein faced a somewhat similar choice: either to give up his territorial ambitions in Kuwait or launch a surprise invasion, which was to have predictably disastrous results for himself and Iraq.
These two gigantic gambles have a common feature in that by any rational calculation they were probably going to fail, but they still happened, propelled by hubris, misinformation and the perpetrators’ belief that they could not retreat.
My friends, war has been openly declared on the growing progressive wing of the Democratic Party—on the millions who rallied to the agenda of economic and social equality that Bernie Sanders and progressive candidates across the country are advancing.
Following 10 months of debate at 103 plenary sessions, Chile's constituent assembly over the weekend finalized a new draft constitution that, if approved by a majority of the nation's adults later this year, will replace the current neoliberal charter implemented by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's right-wing military dictatorship.
"This is an ecological and equal constitution with social rights at its very core," María Elisa Quinteros, president of the 155-member assembly, told The Guardian on Monday, prior to a formal presentation of the draft at a ceremony in the port city of Antofagasta.
The causes of the incident at the Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana on May 6 were immediately known, although the investigation is still ongoing: it was a gas leak from a tanker truck servicing the hotel building, which was preparing to reopen during the second week of May. With no guests, the rooms were locked tight, and a simple click of the light switch would have been enough for the mass of accumulated gas to cause the shock wave that shattered the glass, marquetry and ornately decorated facade of green and white stucco, which was originally from the 19th century.
It is not the first time that Cuba has mourned tragedies like this. An accident like this might seem even minor in a country that has suffered more than 30 major hurricanes in half a century, dozens of deaths during the CIA sabotage of the steamship La Coubre in the port of Havana in 1960, the blowing up of a commercial airliner with 73 passengers in 1976, a chain of bombs in hotels and restaurants in the 1990s, the eternal blockade imposed by the United States government, a “rogue action,” as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador calls it—that has naturalized the shortage of almost everything and made the pandemic more desperate, just to cite a few dramatic examples.
Millions of people across the United States who purchase health coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges could soon see their premiums soar if Congress doesn't extend subsidy programs that Democratic lawmakers enacted as part of their response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The nonprofit group Families USA estimates in an issue brief published Monday that "health insurance premiums are slated to shoot up by more than 53% next year for 14 million people who buy their own insurance from health insurance marketplaces."
More than 16 months into Joe Biden's presidency, his Department of Justice and other agencies continue to defend and advance legal positions held by the Trump administration, an analysis by a leading government watchdog revealed Monday.
"One-third of the way through Biden's presidency, it's becoming clear how long a shadow the Biden administration is willing to let Trump-era legal positions cast."
While she defended the role of Section 230 of the Telecom Act for Parler and others, Peikoff criticized what she described as Twitter’s collusion with the government. Section 230 provides immunity from civil suits for comments posted by others on a social media network.
The European Union recently unveiled plans to introduce a chat monitoring mechanism, designed to regularly scan private messages for child pornographic material, a move that Luxembourg's Chaos Computer Club has now criticised in a press release.
With my instructions being to increase our follower count, I dutifully studied Instagram’s “Insights” feature (accessible to “creator” accounts), to learn which posts reaped the highest engagement. I quickly learned that the key to reaching legions of viewers is to post content that evokes strong emotional responses. In a saturated market, extreme views drive out more nuanced takes.
Georgia on Monday jailed for over three years an owner of the nation's most popular television station critical of the government, further raising concerns over media freedom in the country.
Nika Gvaramia, an anchor and owner of the pro-opposition Mtavari TV, was found guilty of harming financial interests of a television station he had earlier run, a judge of the Tbilisi city court said.
He was sentenced to three and a half years behind bars.
What should you do if a public official blocks you on social media? The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has created new tools to help people recognize censorship by public officials and take steps to address it.
Censorship by public officials “has been a point of concern in that we have heard of government officials across the country inappropriately blocking people,” said Veronica Fowler, the communications director for the ACLU of Iowa. “As we explain in the materials, that is not constitutional.”
Authorities in Iran have arrested a university professor on security charges and "suspicious foreign links," Iranian media reported on Monday.
The semiofficial Mehr news agency identified the professor as Saeed Madani but did not provide details or say when and where he was taken into custody. The report said the academic had met with allegedly suspicious foreign citizens and carried messages from them to local activists in Iran.
Madani, a sociology professor at Tehran's government-run Allameh University, was also an activist, said Mehr. He was summoned by the courts several times in the past and was once banned in 2019 from traveling abroad.
osborne is after the big q: 'what kind of time does 'modernity' inscribe?' (5). however, osborne is not interested in a naive historicist account of modernity, since 'there is a tension between the use of modernity as an empirical category of historical sociology and its inherent self-referentiality, whereby it necessarily denotes the times of its utterance, whenever the question of change within the present is at issue' (4). osborne is trying to do two things: to historicize temporality and to temporalize history.
a number of factors make the concept of the modern possible. the usual suspects: 'the temporality of capital accumulation' (13), 'the temporalization of the founding geopolitical difference of colonialism' (21), etc. osborne points out, however, that modernity ('neuzeit' or 'new-time' comes into usage in 1870) is the result of the obsolescence and residual structure of christian eschatology. that is, modernity--'an abstract temporality of qualitative newness which could be of an epochal significance, because it could now be extrapolated into an otherwise empty future, without end'--is, in effect, 'a combination of the christian conception of time as irreversible with criticism of its corresponding concept of eternity' (11). more pointedly, modernity is the secular version of a 'historical sublime' (11).
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is pushing back against Elon Musk’s concerns around spam and bots on the platform, saying that Musk’s suggestion to measure the problem by performing a random sampling of 100 accounts wouldn’t work. “Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5 percent,” Agrawal wrote on Twitter today. His defense comes after Musk suddenly sprinkled some doubt on his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter by tweeting that the deal was “temporarily on hold” over spam concerns.
According to Musk, the hold was put in place pending details to support the service’s estimate that less than 5 percent of its measured daily active users are bots or spam accounts. Specifically who needed to be convinced, and why, was left unclear, and the price of the company’s shares dived amid the confusion.
As you’ll recall, last Wednesday, the 5th Circuit surprised lots of people by immediately reinstating Texas’s ridiculous content moderation law that basically creates an open season to sue large social media sites for any moderation choices those sites make. The surprise wasn’t necessarily the judges’ decision, which had been telegraphed two days earlier via the judges’ (plural) extremely confused questions regarding the law (including saying that Twitter was not a website, which it is). The bigger surprise was that they reinstated the law just two days later, without any written opinion, or giving the plaintiffs (trade groups that represent many large internet companies) a chance to appeal. That’s just weird.
Despite the human rights organization’s description of the prosecution as “devastating for press freedom and for the public," it is not immediately clear why Amnesty has not granted Assange prisoner of conscience status.
The execution of Abu Akleh was not an accident. She was singled out for elimination. Whether this killing was ordered by commanding officers, or whether it was the whim of an Israeli sniper, I cannot answer. Israelis shoot so many Palestinians with impunity my guess is the sniper knew he or she could kill Abu Akleh and never face any consequences.€
Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera reporter with more than two decades of experience covering armed conflicts, knew the protocol. She and other reporters remained last Wednesday in the open, clearly visible to Israeli snipers about 650 feet away in a building. Her flak jacket and helmet were emblazoned with the word "PRESS."
Tens of thousands took to the streets across the U.S. Saturday to protest threats to abortion rights as part of a coordinated day of action, under the banner “Bans Off Our Bodies.” We speak with Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of pro-abortion group We Testify, about the racist history behind anti-abortion movements and the failure of Democrats to protect reproductive rights over the years. “Abortion restrictions were really to push white people to have more babies and restrict and … control the fertility of Black and Brown people across this country,” says Sherman. Her new piece for Time magazine is headlined “Voting Won’t Save Abortion Rights.”
When it comes to reproductive care, Mississippi has a dual distinction. The state spawned the law that likely will lead to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade. It is also unique among Deep South states for doing the least to provide health care coverage to low-income people who have given birth.
Mississippians on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, lose coverage a mere 60 days after childbirth. That’s often well before the onset of postpartum depression or life-threatening, birth-related infections: A 2020 study found that people racked up 81% of their postpartum expenses between 60 days and a year after delivery. And Mississippi’s own Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that 37% of pregnancy-related deaths between 2013 and 2016 occurred more than six weeks postpartum.
In the wake of Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s tempting to blame the pro-choice movement. Blaming ourselves: Isn’t that what we progressives, especially women, love to do? Somehow, it’s our fault—for being too white/middle-class/respectable, too beholden to the Democratic Party in return for too few crumbs. Always throwing money at unwinnable races, allowing abortion to be stigmatized (“safe, legal, and rare”), maintaining bloated organizations that lumber and creak and resist change. It’s all true—I’ve written that piece many times. But today I’m not so sure any of that would have mattered. The truth is, Donald Trump came to power despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million, enabling Mitch McConnell to ruthlessly engineer the current right-wing Catholic anti-abortion Supreme Court majority, and here we are. The crisis of abortion is a crisis of democracy.
We now live in a country where the government cannot force you to wear a mask on a plane during a pandemic but can force you to carry a pregnancy to term against your will. It is a country where the government won’t ban certain kinds of assault rifles but will ban certain kinds of medical care. We live in this country because five justices in thrall to a fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy have taken control of the Supreme Court—and because the majority of Americans who reject that orthodoxy have too often ceded the moral ground to the monsters who claim to have legitimate, enforceable interests over women’s bodies.
The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that could destroy Roe v. Wade (Politico, 5/2/22) reportedly has the support of three justices appointed by Donald Trump. That’s important for a number of reasons.
As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to get an abortion. But, almost instinctively, all of the worst-case scenarios that I could think of popped into my head. It was March 2020, and the pandemic was raging. What if I had to travel out of the state for the abortion? What if I couldn’t get it in time and had to carry the pregnancy to term?
With reproductive rights defenders staging rallies and other events in response to a draft U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, a new NBC poll finds record-high support for abortion rights.
Released Sunday, the survey of 1,000 adults reveals that 60% say abortion should be legal at least some of the time. Thirty-seven percent say it should be legal all the time, and 23% say it should be legal most of the time. That combined amount of support marks the highest level since the poll first asked the question in 2003.
Amid widespread concerns about systemic and targeted attacks by Islamic State’s Khorasan Branch on Shias, Sikhs and Hindus, International Christian Concern (ICC), a U.S.-based non-government organization, says Afghan Christians are particularly under threat.
“ICC is in direct communication with a number of families currently hiding from the Taliban. Some are in quite a serious situation, with the Taliban conducting sweeps of entire neighborhoods or districts,” Claire Evans, ICC’s Middle East program manager, told VOA.
Urge Parliament to call for Alaa’s release
Latin American countries have a choice to make in the coming months—whether to accede to a new set of rules for coordinating and cooperating with each other and nations around the world on criminal investigations. Opened for signature on May 12, the Protocol has already more than 20 signing States, pending their ratification. Chile and Colombia are part of the list.
The 10,000-word Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Cybercrime Convention aims to make cross-border exchanges of electronic evidence, including personal data, faster and more efficient,€ but it’s heavier on mandates increasing law enforcement€ powers and lighter on mandatory human rights protections.
To help countries in the region garner an understanding of the Protocol, EFF, with the collaboration of Al Sur, today released a€ guide providing an overview of the new treaty. The guide examines how the Protocol was drafted and highlights some of its weaknesses, which include bypassing independent vetting of foreign police orders for personal data, failing to recognize that subscriber data can be highly revealing of people's lives and habits, and mandating law enforcement powers while making most human rights protections optional.
We’ve long discussed how if you really want to understand how the highly monopolistic U.S. broadband industry€ really€ works, you should look at regional phone monopoly Frontier Communications. Especially in€ states like West Virginia, where the company has spent decades lagging on fiber upgrades and DSL and phone repairs under a regime of€ regulatory capture€ that rarely holds them accountable for fiber under-investment,€ outright ripping off taxpayers, or failing to adhere to even basic quality standards.
Those keycaps arrived, and I like them a lot. They're nice and tall, and really feel good to type on. Gaming will be another thing, but if people played Spacewar on big keys, I can play games on these.
[Adrian] has a lot of retrocomputers, so he uses an RGB to HDMI converter to drive modern monitors. In particular, he has a box that uses a programmable logic chip to read various RGB signals and ships them to a Raspberry Pi Zero to drive the HDMI output. Sounds great until, of course, something goes wrong.
Conde Nast has shown itself to be heavy-handed in the past when it comes to IP laws. And like any other large publisher, Conde Nast makes a habit of policing its IP, including its trademarks. But when you do that policing, you really do have to commit to at least having the bare minimum of common sense, or else you look really, really foolish.
The DMCA allows rightsholders to identify anonymous copyright infringers but can also be weaponized to intimidate critics and stifle free speech. This is the story of how one of the world's most powerful religions weaponized copyright law to attack an anonymous man, only to face a divine intervention that would end four years of legal purgatory and expose additional abuse.
Private torrent tracker BaconBits is pulling the plug after serving torrents for well over a decade. The site was relatively small but has a unique history, as it initially launched as a tracker exclusively for Reddit users. A near-catastrophic technical failure in 2017 hit the site hard. While the site returned, it never reached its old highs again and staffers lost their motivation along the way.