As of late, MINISFORUM has been focusing on a few powerful mini PC builds that are not exactly affordable, but the budget models are still an important profitable part of the portfolio, so much so that the company is now releasing its most affordable mini PC yet in the form of the DeskMini UM350. This is MINISFORUM’s second Manjaro Linux system that is powered by AMD’s Ryzen 5 3550H processor with Vega 8 iGPU. Sure, the APU might be relatively old, but for a price tag as low as US$299, you can hardly find something faster these days.
Now, the lowest price only gets you a system without RAM and just 256 GB of SSD storage preloaded with Manjaro Plasma Edition. However, you can add 8 GB of DDR4 RAM for only US$40 more, while the 16 GB RAM + 512 GB SSD version costs US$399. Users can also add their own 2.5-inch HDD. The case measures 5 x 5 x 2 inches and features ports like 1x USB-C 3.1 Gen 2, 3x USB-A 3.1 Gen 2. 1x USB-A 3.0, HDMI + DisplayPort video outputs, 2.5 GbE jack and an audio jack. Connectivity is ensured through a Wi-Fi 6 + BT 5.1 card.
User Controlled Authorization Networks (UCANs) are just one of the many new and useful approaches to decentralization that James Walker, of fission.codes, shares with Doc Searls and Dan Lynch. If you want a detailed dose of pure optimism about Web3 working for you and me, this is the episode for you on FLOSS Weekly.
This week, Linux Out Loud chats about what it is like for us to be content creators on the Tux Digital Network.
Welcome to episode 14 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
Have you ever felt like Linux was just missing something but not sure what it was missing, well maybe it was missing a really annoying watermark telling you to activate your system everytime you use it.
New Linux users often are confused with why more intermediate-to-advanced users gravitate to the terminal rather than just using GUI apps for the same task. There are reasons why newer users hate the terminal and longtime Linux users love the terminal.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.17.9 kernel.
All users of the 5.17 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.17.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.17.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
LWN does its best to provide comprehensive coverage of the free-software development community, but there is far more going on than our small staff can handle. When expressed that way, this problem suggests an obvious solution: make the staff bigger. Thus, LWN is looking to hire a writer/editor.
Hi list,
I'd like to announce that mesa 21.1.0 is finally available.
This release brings with it a lot of greate featurres, including (since rc5) additional kopper backports for zink, and support for Intel's Alchemist DG2 platform.
See you all in two weeks with 22.1.1.
Cheers, Dylan
 New features in the Mesa 22.1 series include support for Intel’s Alchemist DG2 platform, D3D12 GL4.2 support, Vulkan 1.3 support on Lavapipe, and Kopper interface backports for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver to provide some minimal amount of display server info.
It also introduces several new OpenGL and Vulkan extensions, including GL_NV_pack_subimage, VK_EXT_depth_clip_control on Lavapipe and RADV (Radeon Vulkan) drivers, and VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d on ANV and Lavapipe drivers.
Session is an end to end encrypted messenger that focuses on anonymity and the prevention of metadata collection. I've been trying it out over the past week in my quest to eventually collect every private messenger out there and I have some thoughts on it.
Now the question of how to use different sized disks with ZFS comes up reasonably often, and the answer is invariably "you don't", quite often followed by: [...]
The calculator is one of the basic tools of any operating system. The Linux operating system also includes a calculator application, which is perfectly sufficient for basic use. You can solve both simple and complex mathematical equations. By default, the calculator application in Linux appears in a simple mode. However, to perform more advanced calculations, you can switch to different modes, such as advanced mode, financial mode, and programming mode.
If you use the calculator regularly, you may find ways to start it with a method that best suits your needs. In this article, we’ll explain 5 different methods you can use to open an application in your Linux operating system. The methods described include opening the application both from the GUI and from the terminal.
Notepad++ is one of the best text and source code editors developed for the Microsoft Windows platform. Notepad++ is an open-source code editor that is much better than the standard Windows text editor. It supports various features like syntax highlighting, multi-document view, bracket matching, macro recording, auto-completion, color codes, etc. But it is not available for Linux. If you go to the official website of Notepad++, you will notice that there is no link to download Notepad++ for Linux distributions. Fortunately, however, there is a way to use Notepad++ on Linux distributions, as it is available as a snap package for Linux users.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Brave Browser on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Brave browser is an open-source browser based on the Chromium web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that sets itself apart from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Brave browser on a Fedora 36.
Being characterized as a Linux user does not necessarily imply that we are constrained to a technical lifestyle. The advantage of using Linux as the go-to operating system has contributed to the career growth of content creators, video producers, and even online video streamers. Whether it is project-related or work-related, dealing with videos will always redirect us to the issue of video resolution.
The IP address is a numerical label, for example “192.0.10.1” that logically and hierarchically identifies an interface on the network of a device that uses the Internet Protocol or corresponds to the network level of the TCP/IP model.
This is why many people need to know what their IP address is to perform network-related configurations.
For an experienced user, this should not be a problem, but for a newcomer, it can be a bit of a challenge. Let’s get to it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is an open-source, free HTTP server software. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, Nginx can also function as a proxy server. Whereas Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority that provides free SSL certificates for websites. Let’s Encrypt supports auto installation of certificates on Apache, Nginx, Plex, and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Let’s Encrypt SSL with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
I provide here an opinionated way of configuring what I would consider a reasonably secure gemini server with a minimum of fuss. It isn't so easy as running the process from your own login shell with `nohup`, but it does get you things like read-only file system access from the server process, hides home directories, a dynamic user without any special privileges, a private tmp directory, and automatic restarts. I will be using gmnisrv, systemd, and firewalld.
Let's dive right in. These instructions assume you start from a basically blank slate of a Debian-like system (Debian, Raspbian, Ubuntu). I don't walk you though setting up "sudo" but that's about the only prerequisite here.
After you have installed the FreeIPA identity management system, you will need to enroll and add client machines to the FreeIPA server. In this tutorial, learn how to add an Ubuntu system to the FreeIPA server.
FFmpeg is an open source software to manipulate multimedia files. It can play, record, convert, and stream video and audio files. It comes packaged with leading audio and video codecs.
Many enterprises use FFmpeg in their core processing of their applications. Many consumer applications use FFmpeg as well.
In this tutorial we will install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 22.04 and use a few of its most frequently used features.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use FFmpeg, check out are accompanying in-depth tutorial on FFmpeg which has many more examples to use and details about how it all functions and it’s terminologies.
This 374 pages book covers the main features of Impress, the presentations (slide show) component of LibreOffice. You can create slides that contain text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, clip art, and other objects. Impress comes with prepackaged text styles, slide backgrounds, and Help. It can open and save to Microsoft PowerPoint formats and can export to PDF, HTML, and numerous graphic formats.
Are you looking for information related to the Linux input-output redirection? Then, read on. So, what’s redirection? Redirection is a Linux feature. With the help of it, you are able to change standard I/O devices. In Linux, when you enter a command as an input, you receive an output. It’s the basic workflow of Linux.
The standard input or stdin device to give commands is the keyboard and the standard output or stdout device is your terminal screen. With redirection, you can change the standard input/output. From this article, let’s find out how Linux input-output redirection works.
Screen tearing can be frustrating when scrolling through articles, playing a game, or doing just about anything in the graphical user interface (GUI). It can hamper your Linux experience and drive you into thinking of switching to Windows or macOS.
Hold those thoughts because, fortunately, there's a fix for screen tearing that doesn't involve migrating to another OS. Let's dive into the process of fixing screen tearing on your Linux desktop.
When you have running containers, there might be a time when you have to connect to that container to run a command or handle some maintenance. Of course, you can always access the running container using the docker exec -it CONTAINER_ID bash command (where CONTAINER_ID is the actual ID of the container). But how do you SSH into those containers? And should you want to? That’s the rub.
The problem is that because there are so many moving parts, containers can be insecure. Because of that, you won’t want to allow SSH connections to containers in production environments, but for development and testing environments, this can be a real help.
With that said, I’m going to show you how to set up SSH connections for a Docker container. I’ll demonstrate using the latest Ubuntu image.
Sometimes a network connection doesn’t seem to function how we expect them to. And it doesn’t matter how much you troubleshoot the issue, the problem doesn’t go away. You’ve configured a static IP address, you know that configuration is solid and you can ping your gateway, but something is causing that Linux server from reaching the outside world in the manner you expect.
One problem could be the DNS cache. DNS is a crucial aspect of networking for all machines, as it translates names to IP addresses. When something goes wrong with DNS, your machine might have trouble reaching the outside world. I have experienced, on a few occasions, a DNS cache to be the problem. When that happens, what do you do? You flush the DNS cache.
This is a good task to undertake now and then, as your DNS cache can not only grow too large, but it could also contain corrupt entries (which can cause problems with connections). So, how do you flush the DNS cache on Ubuntu Server?
In this article we’ll cover the cause of the Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock – open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable) error, and two methods on how to solve it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bpytop on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Bpytop is a Linux command-line utility for resource monitoring that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network, and processes.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Bpytop system monitor tool on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
In this tutorial, we are going to explain some basic cat commands in Linux, that are applicable on various distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, AlmaLinux and etc.
The “cat” command is a shortcut of the word “concatenate” and is a very useful command that is frequently used, by system administrators and DevOps engineers. With this command you can easily view files, create them, filter information from them, display line numbers in files and etc.
In this post, the cat command will be explained with real examples on Ubuntu 20.04. You can use the Linux distribution of your choice. Let’s get started!
With the big Sentinel update to Path of Exile out now, I gave it a spin on my Steam Deck to get a feel for the controls and it really does work nicely.
Gamescope, an open source project from Valve that's part of what powers the Steam Deck, now has support for NVIDIA Image Scaling. So it now supports both FSR 1.0 and NVIDIA Image Scaling for various GPUs.
Do you love pixel art and survival horror? Have a look at Lamentum from Obscure Tales and Neon Doctrine, as they have just released an official Native Linux build. The game is also currently Steam Deck Verified!
A collection of RPGs, grand strategy and more modern spiritual successors to legendary PC games of yore apparently. Humble have an interesting bundle of titles in the Battles of Yore Bundle.
Godot Engine 3.5 is getting close to release with a first Release Candidate available for developers to test the next version of this open source game engine.
Up for helping to improve Ubuntu Linux and get it into shape for more gaming? Now is your chance, as Canonical are hiring exactly for that. They did say only recently that they were going "all in" with gaming on Ubuntu, when they announced their testing Snap package for Steam and of course there was more to come.
Canonical is on the hunt for software engineers to join an ‘Ubuntu Gaming Experience’ team.
That the maker of Ubuntu is advertising roles like this is not unexpected. Canonical said it was going “all in” on gaming when it unveiled the Steam Snap app for testing in April. And with this job posting now live, it seems they’re intent on doing exactly that.
Anyone applying for the “Software Engineer” position as listed on the Canonical careers site will need to know their way around the tech integral to modern Linux gaming, e.g., experience in sound, graphics, input, and have some familiarity or interest in OpenGL, Vulcan, MESA, Wine, et al.
When Portal came out in 2007, developers Valve chose not to release the groundbreaking title on an obsolete Nintendo console long out of production. Nobody cared at the time, of course, but [James Lambert] is here to right that wrong. Yes, he’s porting Portal to the N64.
This being a report in my continuing saga to deploy a Raspad as a daily driver information prosthetic, it is meet that I preface with my general feelings and observations at this juncture.
The Raspad is a solid bit of kit. The mother-daughter board connexions yet hold fast. Solders feel stolid and not done hastily cold. The plastic shell is certainly not as durable as the aluminium of an iPad. But it isn’t meant to be. Permeability is a virtue in tinkerer context. I already contemplate gluing a 40 pin ribbon cable jack at the provided chassis divot for outside GPIO access, drilling the box for a camera kit, &c.
In search of more answers, his own curiosity piqued, Vidak was kind enough to ask the Fediverse for input on the issue. Some kind soul immediately replied that I might check the /root/config.txt for a variable named “ARM_SPEED”. This one could set to any integer in reasonable orbit of 700 MHz as one pleases.
Swapping MicroSD cards between Ubuntu MATE for Raspi and RaspiOS, I found that the solution only applies to the latter OS. It does indeed work to under or overclock the CPU. I tried the CPU on 200Mhz and found it pitiably slow, but emphatically cooler. Poking at the config.txt revealed several other bits to flip for services on the Raspi.
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 provides flexibility, stability, and reliability to support hybrid cloud innovation. Deploy applications and critical workloads faster with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private and public cloud and edge deployments.
Rocky Linux, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone and legacy CentOS replacement, announced on Tuesday the release of Rocky Linux 8.6. The release comes five days after the release of AlmaLinux 8.6 and about a week after the release of RHEL 8.6 at last week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston.
Rocky and Alma are both vying for dominance in the space abandoned by Red Hat at the end of 2021, when the open source giant quit supporting CentOS as a downstream clone of RHEL and repurposed the brand to sit upstream of Red Hat’s flagship distro, where it essentially serves as RHEL’s nightly build. CentOS was being widely used by enterprises as a way of running RHEL without having to pay for Red Hat support, which created a need for a CentOS replacement.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 is available and delivers exciting new features and many more improvements. Here's what is new!
As automation expands to cover more aspects of IT, more administrators are learning automation skills and applying them to ease their workload. Automation can ease the burden of repetitive tasks and add a level of conformity to infrastructure. But when IT workers deploy automation, there are common mistakes that can wreak havoc on infrastructures large and small. Five common mistakes are typically seen in automation deployments.
This article gives you the top 10 essential Ubuntu apps in 2022 (part 1) that you may use for your daily workflow.
The new Charmed Operator covering the Capsule Kubernetes extension allows users of Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes distribution to automatically install and integrate Clastix Capsule Multi-Tenancy as part of the Kubernetes cluster deployment process.
Supporting up to four Raspberry Pi CM4 or Jetson Nano modules, the Turing Pi 2 is the newest cluster module from the same company that launched the Turing Pi V2 last year. Unlike its predecessor, the Turing Pi 2 is enabled to support Rockchip based computer modules.
According to the company the Turing Pi is a great platform for users to build their own homelabs, learn about self-hosting, running cloud-native apps (Kubernetes) and even machine learning applications. As shown below the Turing Pi 2 provides SO DIMM slots to interface with various computer modules.€
One of virtual reality’s largest unsolved challenges is allowing players to interact with a virtual environment beyond just video and audio. This is why a team of researchers from the National Chengchi University in Taiwan came up with the FingerX project as a way to get physical feedback when touching objects in a real and VR settings simultaneously.
Whereas other ideas revolve around constricting finger motion or using pins to generate rudimentary shapes, FingerX incorporates a single extender module that rests upon each fingertip and extends when certain conditions are met. When touching virtual objects that rest on a flat surface, the shape of the virtual object is intersected by the hand’s position and causes the extenders to mold around the form. Entirely virtual objects can also be held in the player’s hand using this same principle while also being able to fold away the extenders when grasping a physical object.
Before the advent of digital cameras, people used film to capture their most cherished memories. And nowadays, there is a rush to convert them into a digital format before they inevitably degrade and become unrecognizable. Film slides in particular have a major drawback in that they are separate, individual pieces of film placed onto small cards which makes scanning them manually a very long and expensive process. In order to digitize his family’s collection of film slides, Hackster.io user Chris was able to create a robot that automates this tedious task.
In an internal memo called "Why hiring is hard right now" written at some point in 2021, a recruiting leader at the company described how engineering teams are fighting a massive imbalance between high demand for new recruits and low supply. The memo, published in full below this story, provides detailed insight into how Facebook calculates its recruitment needs and explains how the company is deeply dependent on successfully recruiting thousands of engineers every year to meet its product development and content goals. The memo also shows Facebook was determined to invest in engineers outside of the Bay Area, but that managers often failed to do so because they were more interested in hiring quickly.
With the 2022 midterm elections kicking into gear, and what is sure to be a heated presidential election cycle just over the horizon, star journalists are in high demand. But while TV anchors and correspondents have seen their profiles (and compensation) rise for decades, the past few years in particular have turbocharged that shift.
“News talent in the last five years have become stars in their own right,” says UTA co-president Jay Sures, noting his agency’s clients: “The likes of Don Lemon, David Muir, Anderson Cooper, Bret Baier, Jake Tapper, Norah O’Donnell. They are stars. They are walk-down-the-street stars. And as a result of that, they are compensated in a commensurate way with what they bring to their respective employers, which is a real trusted source in news — people enjoy watching them for different reasons.”
The problem with good inventions is that we usually end up with way too many of that particular widget lying around, which can cause all kinds of problems. Take the car tire, for instance. They were a great invention that helped spell the end of buggy whips and broken wagon wheels. But there are so many used-up tires about today that some people end up burning them in large piles, of all possible things.
Self-service checkouts have become a common feature in supermarkets the world over, a trend accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. While some may lament the loss of human contact, others relish the opportunity to do their own scanning: with a bit of practice, self-service can provide for a very fast checkout experience. Assuming, of course, that the machine recognizes each product, the built-in weight sensor works correctly, and you don’t get selected for a random check.
In the early history of Oregon, ferries were important part of its infrastructure. Roads were built to connect towns to the ferries. The names of such roads still remain to this day: Scholls Ferry Road, Taylors Ferry Road, and Boones Ferry Road.
lefebvre continues the idea of valorizing the everyday through 'a scientific theory of social labour,' 'this totality of labour' which 'has modified and transformed the face of the world' (154). in this there is nothing hidden but that which does often go unperceived.
This is Day 2 of "balcony sitting" - sitting out on my balcony all day, in the nice Spring weather, hammering away text on my phone, enjoying the birds and sunshine (and rain, should it ever arrive), and just basking in the ambiance of it all.
[...]
I saw a video a bit ago called "Alabama Spitfire" about the relationships Truman Capote had with Harper Lee when they were children, and how they would sit in a treehouse at Harper Lee's house and overlook their neighborhood and try to "solve mysteries" and "fight crime", much like the Sherlock Holmes novels they were both avid readers of.
There is perhaps no better setting for a workplace novel than outer space. With the exception of time taken for the necessary evils of sleep, nourishment, and hygiene, astronauts are always on the clock. In notable works of sci-fi—Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity—our heroes are marooned on their ships, surveilled either by faceless colleagues in mission control or by an all-seeing operating system. Glimpses of their humanity appear only fleetingly, through flashbacks of children on Earth or a beloved object from home floating in space. As representatives of their country, their planet, and their species, they have an almost military commitment to decorum. This image of a highly efficient and restrained workplace, functioning even under the most distressing conditions, is not just genuinely fictional; it is also a manager’s ideal. It is only when work subsumes life that a person’s labor can be truly optimized.
Each year, CBP agriculture specialists intercept tens of thousands of “actionable pests” – those identified through scientific risk assessment and study as being dangerous to the health and safety of U.S. agricultural resources. All travelers entering the United States are required to declare meats, fruits, vegetables, plants, seeds, soil, animals, as well as plant and animal products (including soup or soup products) they may be carrying. The declaration must cover all items carried in checked baggage, carry-on luggage, or in a vehicle.
"We do our best to do this secretly," says the female teacher, "but even if they arrest me, they beat me, it's worth it."
We all want to be guitar heroes, but most of us have to settle for letting a MIDI board play our riffs using a MIDI controller. [Joris] thinks a MIDI controller should look like a cool instrument and thus the Ni28 was born. Honestly, we first thought we were looking at wall art, but on closer look, you can see the fretboard and the soundhole are festooned with buttons.
Motors are all well and good for moving things, but they’re all about the round-and-round. Sometimes, you need to move something back and forth, and for that a linear actuator will do the trick. While they can be readily sourced for under $50 online, [Michael Rechtin] genuinely felt like reinventing the wheel, and managed to whip up a 3D-printed design that costs under 20 bucks.
That account (now suspended) was just one of many Twitter users sharing bloody footage of the Buffalo rampage, typically beginning as the gunman exited his vehicle and trained his rifle on shoppers at the Tops supermarket. Rolling Stone discovered more than half a dozen examples on Monday, using basic search terms like “Buffalo video” and “Buffalo vid.” The images of the massacre appeared to be in wide circulation on Twitter, with users complaining of being traumatized: “Stop putting the fucking Buffalo shooting video on my timeline,” wrote one.
The conflict has cut-off supplies from Ukraine's ports, which once exported vast amounts of cooking oil as well as cereals such as maize and wheat.
This has reduced the global supply and caused the price of alternatives to soar. Global food prices are almost 30% higher than the same time last year, according to the UN.
The city council of Denton, Texas passed a resolution Tuesday endorsing federal Medicare for All legislation, the 100th local government to do so as millions across the United face rising insurance premiums, skyrocketing drug costs, and imminent loss of coverage.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who just last week introduced the latest version of his Medicare for All legislation, applauded Denton lawmakers, the progressive advocacy group Public Citizen, and others involved in building support for the nonbinding resolution, which endorses the single-payer bill that Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) unveiled in March 2021.
One summer night last year, air began flowing into a steel canister across the street from the Little Bo Peep Child Development Center in Calvert City, Kentucky. The pollution monitor hummed into the morning as parents dropped off their toddlers and later into the day as the kids played outside. Within a month, a lab analysis would reveal that the canister had captured a troubling concentration of ethylene dichloride, which has been linked to pancreatic and stomach cancers and leukemia.
No one, however, raced in to warn parents or alert nearby residents that the air they sucked in with every breath was laced with a poisonous chemical. No one took immediate steps to stop the stream or sue the offending polluter into compliance.
While I was…indisposed…writing a grant application that was due yesterday, something came to my attention that I just knew I had to write about to get the blogging circuits firing again after over a week away. Basically, it came in the form of a Tweet thread a couple of days ago featuring two out of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) appearing on a discussion panel with antivax tech bro Steve Kirsch, who has repeatedly—and falsely—claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than they have saved and Robert “inventor of mRNA vaccines” Malone. Indeed, as you can see, he claims that COVID-19 vaccines have killed a half a million people!
The World Health Organization, ever that herald of dark news, has offered a revised assessment across of the SARS-CoV-2 death toll associated either directly or indirectly with the pandemic.€ Between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021, the global health body suggests that the mortality figure is closer to 14.9 million, with a range of 13.3 million to 16.6 million.
The number considers excess mortality, the figure reached after accounting for the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred, and the number expected in the absence of the pandemic.€ It also accounts for deaths occasioned directly by COVID-19, or indirectly (for instance, the pandemic’s disruption of society and health systems).
According to the report, 72% of surveyed organisations had partial or complete attacks on their backup repositories, restricting their ability to recover data without paying the ransom.
Almost all (94%) of attackers tried to destroy backup repositories, showing their business acumen. Worryingly, though not surprisingly, 80% of successful attacks targeted known vulnerabilities.
The majority (76%) of those attacked paid the ransom, but approximately one-third of those were unable to recover their data.
Senior cyber coordinators from NATO held their first-ever meeting in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss the cyber threat landscape following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The coordinators also reviewed the progress they’ve made in cyber defense, including efforts to build resilience against cyber threats.
Ransomware — and particularly the Conti ransomware gang — has become a geopolitical force in Costa Rica. On Monday, the new Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chaves – who began his four-year term only ten days ago – declared that the country was ”at war” with the Conti cybercriminal gang, whose ransomware attack has disabled agencies across the government since April.
In a forceful statement made to press on May 16th, President Chaves also said that Conti was receiving help from collaborators within the country, and called on international allies to help.
Proofpoint says that while CISOs around the world spent 2021 coming to terms with new ways of working, Australian CISOs fell behind global counterparts when it came to feeling in control of their environment, with 77% of Australian CISOs saying their organisation is unprepared to detect, deter and recover from a cyber attack – the highest in 14 countries surveyed and up 21% from 2021.
Proofpoint’s comments come as it released its annual Voice of the CISO report, which explores key challenges facing chief information security officers (CISOs) in Australia and around the globe.
Regrettably, these kinds of fees are far beyond what I can afford, given that I rely on donations from my users to make ends meet: even the $4,500 fee is well beyond what I could find on an annual basis. Google do not mention these fees anywhere else I have seen during the development process - only when you move to the publication stage do they appear — they are a kind of "sting in the tail", as it were.
The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do.
This is the fourth instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project.
We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as a recent ones about ARDC and the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST). Today, however, we will be talking with Jan Nieuwenhuizen about Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix.
CISA has issued Emergency Directive (ED) 22-03 and released a Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) in response to active and expected exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in the following VMware products: VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
The software supply chain is a critical element in the lifecycle of applications and websites. The interdependencies and components common in modern software development can increase the attack surface and sometimes allow hackers to bypass robust security layers you’ve added to your infrastructure.
Specifically, the report reveals that between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI queried the data of potentially more than 3,000,000 “U.S. persons” without a warrant.€
Although Section 702 is intended to facilitate the surveillance of foreign people who are the targets of national security investigations, the collection of all of that data from U.S. telecommunications and internet providers results in the€ “incidental” capture of conversations€ involving a huge number of people in the United States.€
But this data isn’t “incidental” to the program’s operation at all. As the transparency report shows, each agency’s “targeting” and “minimization” rules allow access to Americans’ communications caught in the 702 dragnet. And based on the staggering number of times the FBI searches the 702 database using queries related to individual Americans, 702 has become a routine part of the Bureau’s “law enforcement mission.” The IC lobbied for Section 702 as a tool for national security outside the borders of the U.S., but at its core is instead the ability to conduct domestic, warrantless surveillance on Americans, including for run-of-the-mill crimes. This is the government’s favorite feature of Section 702—it’s not a bug.€ €
Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me.
Google’s market share and capacity to gather billions of data points has made it the most popular target for so-called warrants that seem to elude both particularity requirements and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Carpenter case.
Vladimir Putin is “weaponising” global food supplies by stealing grain and destroying agricultural equipment as part of his war in Ukraine, Western officials have said.
The Kremlin is believed to be dismantling infrastructure needed for food production and blocking ports that are vital in shipping cereals out of the country, which is known as the “breadbasket of Europe”.
Officials fear Russia has embarked on a “deliberate policy” of disrupting food supplies, sparking a global crisis and raising the prospect of starvation in developing countries.
Vladimir Putin's army has destroyed silos and other food production infrastructure in cities including Kherson, Luhansk and Donetsk, according to Western sources.
“The pillion rider wearing a Burqa walked to the window of the wine shop and dropped a grenade inside the shop through the porthole window and thereafter fled away on the bike from the spot,” he said.
“Four employees of the said shop got injured. Among them one succumbed to his injuries,” the spokesman said.
Problems weren’t hard to find in Koro before the dialogues. The jihadists’ arrival had poisoned ties between the region’s marginalised Fulani herders – who had joined the militants in large numbers – and members of Guindo’s Dogon group who had joined the militias.
With support from the state, the Dogon militias massacred and besieged Fulani villages. The jihadists and Fulani defence groups then did the same to Dogon communities, which hold a mix of Muslim, Christian, and traditional beliefs.
It was during this period that the teacher, a Dogon, was kidnapped. He was fetching animal feed outside his village when he bumped into jihadists. His friend had a gun and pulled the trigger; the militants, who were Fulani, fired back and shot him dead.
Boudin was at the center of the debate of nonviolent direct action against war versus violent action.
Boudin’s life followed a trajectory of a small group of the radical New Left, a minuscule cohort of those who began as liberals, usually liberal students at the inception of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the early 1960s, and became increasingly radical as the killing in Southeast Asia grew exponentially through the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and finally Nixon. The movement ended in the cul-de-sac of violence that culminated in the plan to kill soldiers and their guests at a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and finally with the deaths of a Brink’s guard and two policemen during a robbery in Nyack, New York. By the time of the Brink’s robbery in October 1981, the last vestiges of the Weather Underground had formed an alliance with the Black Liberation Army.
No U.S. personnel will be held accountable for a March 2019 airstrike that killed scores of Syrian civilians including women and children, the Pentagon said Tuesday in announcing that an internal investigation into the massacre found that no laws of war were broken and that there was no cover-up of the incident as alleged in a New York Times exposé.
"The investigation says the reporting was delayed... None of the worker bees involved believe it was delayed. We believe there was no reporting."
These tactics are horrific, but far from rare. There is a long history of military aggressors forcibly transferring enemy children from their home countries as a means of sowing chaos and terror and weakening resistance.
In the U.S., the government conducted child abductions to quell the military resistance of America’s Indigenous peoples and prevent future opposition.
This is a story about two dogs I know. It is also a story of the U.S. Navy, aviation, and nuclear weapons. Sometimes it is easy to see things in dogs or other people, but hard to see those same things in ourselves. It’s a good thing that dogs can’t read (that we know of) because this is a bit of an embarrassing story for Doc. He’s a sweet good-natured dog and he’s a rather large labradoodle. He occasionally visits another usually good-natured dog, Rocky — a sheltie who is much smaller than Doc.
Amid the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine, rising gas prices, and the existential threat of climate change, policymakers in Washington have a long list of crises to address. But there's one step that could help mitigate all of them: reducing our dependence on oil—and the giant oil and gas companies who profit from it.
As congressional lawmakers prepare to vote on a bill aimed at curbing Big Oil profiteering, an analysis published Wednesday by a trio of advocacy groups shows how fossil fuel companies "continue to generously reward their investors while consumers pay sky-high prices."
"Big Oil is turning humanitarian disaster and consumer pain into Wall Street profits."
110 US/NATO free-fall B61 nuclear bombs were removed from Lakenheath in 2008, following sustained protest at the base by CND and the Lakenheath Action Group. US nuclear bombs had been located there since 1954.
Their return – assigned to NATO – will increase global tensions and put Britain on the front line in a NATO/Russia war. B61s have continued to be sited in five other countries across Europe – Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey – in spite of strong opposition within some of the ‘host’ countries.
As Russian forces continue to brutalize Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee their country. Most have fled to Europe, but thousands have also made their way to the United States by way of Mexico.
The Ukraine crisis proves to be Europe’s crucible and Europe proves a profound disappointment.
Since the shooting in Buffalo, articles and commentaries have been appearing that condemn the shooting, but which include the name and personal history of the shooter. Why would anybody do that? He's nobody.
Mike just wrote about how, in the wake of the abhorrent mass shooting that occurred in upstate New York over the weekend, some of our leaders have begun the normal cleansing ritual: blame the things we already hated for the new bad thing that happened whether that makes any sense at all or not. In the case of the previous post, both public servants and buffoonish Sunday news talk hosts discussed how this was all the fault of Section 230 (€¯\_(ãÆâ)_/€¯) and everyone’s favorite boogeyman, social media. It is abundantly clear to anyone with a brain that these two scapegoats were already targets for those now blaming them. Apparently, these people were simply lying in wait looking for a trigger so that they could shout “Social Media! Section 230!” and they decided that 10 people losing their lives in a racist attack was just that sort of thing.
After a white supremacist shooter murdered 10 Black people in Buffalo, many have pointed to the institutionalized racism behind the attack.
Reading Stephen Cohen’s War with Russia: from Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate (2022) is required if we are to going to strip fictional narratives away from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In this third article of diving for pearls from our intrepid scholar, we are zeroing in on his penetrating analysis of conflicting narratives on the Ukrainian crisis. In “Four years of Maidan myths,” written on January 3, 2018, Cohen names the crisis the “seminal political event of the early 21st century” (p. 143).
I agree: it is seminal because, essentially, the conflict is not about Ukraine per se, but, rather, whether America will have its way with determining who will rule the world. Everyone is to submit, assume their designated place in the hierarchical order of being. America is the Big Teacher; the rest of us immature pupils. But this teacher carries a mighty club to bash us into smithereens if we do not play by the rules.
Since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Georgian citizens have enthusiastically supported Ukraine: thousands of people have attended anti-war rallies in Tbilisi, the city is covered in Ukrainian flags, and some Georgians have even chosen to fight alongside Ukrainians as volunteers. Despite all that, official relations between the two countries remain strained. Ukraine withdrew its ambassador from Georgia a month ago and has criticized the country for imposing insufficient sanctions against Russia, while the Georgian government has rejected Ukraine’s calls for it to open a “second front” and reclaim its occupied territories from Russia. The conflict has started to affect Georgia’s domestic politics as well€ — its ruling party is facing accusations of cowardice and of supporting Russia. At Meduza’s request, Georgian journalist Iya Barateli reports on how her country is trying to walk the line between Ukraine and Russia.
Since the example of the USSR arming Vietnam is being used as a reason to support arming Kyiv by some on the left who support NATO arms shipments, I think it is useful to turn that comparison upside down, as it were. This argument understands that Ukraine’s history is much longer than South Vietnam’s was and that it does meet criterion for a nation (we’ll leave my distaste for nationalism out of the conversation). However, it rejects this element of the left’s argument that the war is a Ukrainian anti-colonial struggle.
I would argue that modern Ukraine’s situation is closer to that of what Washington named South Vietnam than Vietnam in general That country was nominally independent, but fiercely determined to stay in the sphere dominated by Washington. In fact, its very life depended on Washington’s largess. Modern Ukraine has a different genesis, having been established in the wake of the disintegration of the USSR. Since then, its government has switched back and forth between favoring the Russian economic sphere and that of the US-dominated west. Since the US-assisted overthrow of the elected government in 2014, the government in Kyiv has given itself to the latter. It is firmly in Washington’s grip, even making its desire to be part of NATO an article in its most recent constitution. Of course, this came with a price. While it seems unlikely that Zelenskyy and his government knew that the price would include the destruction of many of its cities and the deaths of thousands of Ukrainians, there were certainly those Ukrainians who understood this possibility.
The Vladimir Putin record in Ukraine may be as bad as his worst enemies proclaim, but even at that it is well within the norm for war, the selective indignation about him notwithstanding. War and crimes go together. A question larger than the one about Putin’s war crimes concerns the origins of the war itself. Who or what caused the war? From that first cause ineluctable consequences of a criminal character followed.
On the principle that historical analysis requires an attempt to understand the motives of all sides in a war, the Russian argument deserves a fair hearing. Roy Medvedev, one of Russia’s most distinguished historians and long a supporter of Vladimir Putin, gave an interview on March 2, 2022, to the Corriere della Sera. The ninety-six-year-old Medvedev succinctly expressed the Kremlin view of the Ukraine crisis as a clash involving far more than Putin’s concern about NATO expansion to his country’s borders. The metastasizing of NATO illustrated but did not define for Russia the fundamental issue, which had to do with the failure of America to understand that the unipolar moment of its rules-based order had ended. The time had come for a paradigm shift in international relations.
A Kyiv court began the first war crimes trial for a Russian soldier on May 13. On Wednesday, May 18, the accused, 21-year-old Vadim Shishimarin, pleaded guilty to fatally shooting a civilian in Ukraine’s Sumy region. Meduza interviewed Shishimarin’s mother Lyubov, who lives in the town of Ust-Ilimsk in Russia’s Irkutsk region (she asked that her surname, which isn’t the same as her son’s, not be disclosed).
Russia has been waging a full-scale war against Ukraine for nearly three months. Photographer Petr Kamanin has spent this time taking pictures of Moscow and Muscovites, in an attempt to capture how ordinary, everyday scenes have changed since February 24. Meduza shares these snapshots of the Russian capital along with the photographer’s commentary.
In a rare interview from the frontlines of the Russian invasion, we speak with American journalist Billy Nessen in the Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk. It is the easternmost city still held by Ukrainian forces after almost three months of war. He says Russian troops have devastated the city with heavy shelling. The interview with Nessen was interrupted when a shell landed in the building next door. Nessen speaks about the Ukrainian resistance, the Azov Battalion and more, including the U.S. and NATO’s role in the conflict, especially as the U.S. Senate is expected to approve an additional $40 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine. “Obviously the West is determined that Ukraine has to win this war,” says Nessen.
It doesn’t look good for the Russian military in Ukraine. Better-supplied and -motivated Ukrainian troops are pushing-back Russian forces even in Donbas— Moscow’s more modest pivot objective after failing to take Kyiv. What gives? Could Ukraine actually win this war? Could Russia actually lose? Or could Putin even be deposed by a coup?
Probably not.
That’s because, while everyone outside of Moscow was gloating over Russia’s lack of military success, Putin was quietly playing his asshole card.
Yes, his asshole card.
The idea for this programme and the Palau Pledge both came about in 2015, by which time tourism had reached 150,000 visitors annually – more than seven times the country's population – many of whom didn't understand the fragile ecosystem or how important sustainability was to residents. While Palauan culture values hospitality and treating visitors with respect, locals could see how under-educated visitors were eroding their environment.
The confluence of war in Europe, a worsening hunger crisis, an ongoing pandemic, skyrocketing inequality, and unabated global warming has pushed the world to a "boiling point" that is threatening billions of lives and livelihoods worldwide.
That urgent warning was issued Wednesday by the research director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), which along with the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW) published a detailed new report charting humanity's difficult—but, with sufficient political will, attainable—path away from present emergencies and toward a just and livable future.
By Amy Westervelt, The Guardian. This story was originally published by the The Guardian and is part of “Climate Crimes,” a special series by The Guardian and Covering Climate Now focused on investigating how the fossil fuel industry contributed to the€ climate crisis and lied to the American public.
Accused of misleading the public for decades on the promise of plastic recycling, oil and chemical companies are pushing a new idea: “advanced recycling.” Environmental advocates, however, say it’s more of the same old greenwash and litigators hope holding companies accountable for past lies might prevent the spread of a new one.
The [cryptocurrency] slump has been brutal. In November the total market value of cryptocurrencies was almost $3trn. That fell to $2trn by mid-April before plunging by another 35% to just $1.3trn now. Bitcoin has briefly dipped below $29,000, its lowest since late 2020. [Cryptocurrency]’s detractors have long maligned it as useless—unless you are a money-launderer or con-artist—and predicted its demise. The rout raises the question of whether they are right. In fact the picture is rather different: a process of sorting is taking place as the dodgiest parts of the [cryptocurrency] world are exposed, while other parts prove more resilient.
Miners of currencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum are rewarded with cryptocurrency which fluctuates in value compared with traditional currencies, so although mining costs may be predictable, income varies. On 8 November last year, the price of bitcoin was above €£50,000, while on 15 May this year, it was slightly less than half that at €£24,244. Ethereum has dropped from €£3567 to €£1647 over the same period.
While these companies might have taken steps to cut down on pollution within their own operations and supply chains, the financial institutions they bank with still funnel Big Tech’s profits into heavily polluting industries. Emissions associated with that financial activity are so significant that they actually far exceed emissions from each company’s operations, the report finds.
That pollution has flown under the radar because it isn’t typically included in companies’ assessments of their emissions. But if emissions associated with the cash holdings for Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce were taken into account, it would increase their carbon footprints by between 91 and 112 percent, the report says.
The head of a leading green group on Wednesday joined a coalition of environmental organizations in opposing the extended operation of an aging California nuclear power plant slated to shut down by 2025 but given a new lease on life this week by the Biden administration.
Reuters reports the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced Wednesday that it was extending by 47 days a deadline for two nuclear plants—Entergy Corporation's Palisades plant in Covert, Michigan and PG&E's Diablo Canyon plant in San Luis Obispo County, California—to apply for federal funding to keep running.
"Woefully inadequate." "Entirely reckless." "Frankly unacceptable."
That's how climate campaigners responded Wednesday to a new plan from the European Commission—the E.U.'s executive arm—to ditch fossil fuels from Russia, which has been waging war on Ukraine for nearly three months.
Major car and airline companies are using adverts that greenwash their business while continuing to push highly polluting products that put the world’s climate goals at risk, DeSmog can reveal.
A DeSmog investigation, commissioned by Greenpeace Netherlands, analysed more than a thousand Facebook and Instagram adverts placed by ten well-known European transport brands in the last year
Everyone who owns a gasoline-burning car has noticed that fuel prices have shot up in recent weeks. And most of us have read headlines about high energy prices driving inflation. But very few Americans have any inkling just how profound the current energy crisis already is, and is about to become.
The head of the United Nations on Wednesday criticized the "broken" global energy system that's leading humanity "ever closer to climate catastrophe" and urged world leaders to instead grab onto "the lifeline... right in front of us"—a transition to renewable sources.
"We must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition, before we incinerate our only home," said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
Despite outcry from local leaders and the Japanese public and warnings from environmental campaigners, Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority on Wednesday gave its approval for a plan to discharge contaminated water from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, a move critics say will pose a major threat to marine life.
After spending several months reviewing the plan announced by then-Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's administration last spring, the NRA said discharging more than 1.2 million tons of treated wastewater will help the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) secure space needed to decommission the plant, where three reactors melted down in March 2011 after a tsunami.
Standing alongside the road with a hundred other people watching, say, a bear rototilling up the ground in search of roots, voles, or perhaps truffles, I noted that every person was enthralled and excited to see a grizzly in its natural habitat. Yet, all of the folks stood at a respective distance from the bear.
When a park ranger came to ask people to move a dozen feet further from the bear, he didn’t order them. Instead, he said politely, “could you please move a bit further away from the bear.” Unfortunately, such civility is seemingly rare today.
Conservation groups€ sued the U.S. Forest Service today€ to stop a large timber sale in the Kootenai National Forest that threatens a small and imperiled population of grizzly bears near the Montana-Canada border. The groups notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of their intent to sue it, as well.
The Knotty Pine Project authorizes the logging of more than 5,000 acres with massive clearcuts — at least one the size of 170 football fields — and allows for more than 45 miles of roads to be constructed or rebuilt in crucial grizzly bear habitat. In approving the timber sale, the Forest Service failed to disclose the damaging impacts of logging and new roads on the struggling and isolated grizzly bear population.
"America is at its best when we invest in the backbone of our Nation: the hardworking people in every community who make our Nation run," states President Biden's budget request. And yet€ the budget, released at the end of March, includes $813 billion dollars on weapons and war. While the country stares down a pandemic, massive educational debt, a stumbling economy, and urgently needed environmental reform, prioritizing fear-based military spending only speaks to the values of special interest groups—not everyday Americans, and especially not young people.
Walmart shares suffered the biggest one-day drop since the eve of the Black Monday stock market crash after the company, cut its earnings guidance following a quarter in which it was wrongfooted by the rapid pace of inflation in the US.
The share price reaction, a particularly severe one by the standards of typically less volatile consumer staple stocks, came after the company revealed profits in its latest quarter had taken an “unexpected” hit owing to higher wages, a jump in fuel costs and softness in general merchandise sales at its US businesses.
The pandemic dramatically accelerated digital transformation for companies and consumers, bringing many of the most basic elements of modern life – working, learning and shopping for goods and services – into the digital realm more than ever before.
While DEI initiatives have raised the profile of digital accessibility, for the estimated 135 million people in Europe who are living with one or more disabilities, the shift to digital underscored what they’ve known for years: there are still widespread barriers to access in the online world. Despite rising awareness, private sector companies have been making slow progress on accessibility. According to WebAIM, which surveyed the home pages for the top one million websites, “…significant work remains to be done to make the web accessible to everyone.”
Google said that the packages curated by the Assured OSS service are regularly scanned and analysed for vulnerabilities and are built with Cloud Build including evidence of verifiable SLSA-compliance
Elon Musk's pausing of his bid to buy Twitter due to questions over "bots" has put the artificially-operated accounts at the heart of the proposed deal's latest controversy.
Here's a closer look at bots: [...]
Imagine there is a public speaking square in your city, much like the ancient Greek agora. Here you can freely share your ideas without censorship.
But there’s one key difference. Someone decides, for their own economic benefit, who gets to listen to what speech or which speaker. And this isn’t disclosed when you enter, either. You might only get a few listeners when you speak, while someone else with similar ideas has a large audience.
Would this truly be free speech?
The “Internet for All” moniker is the new umbrella web site of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration for its three programs under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: the Broadband Digital Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, the Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program, and the State Digital Equity Act programs.
These programs are part of the administration’s goals of bridging the digital divide and achieving universal broadband by 2030.
Voting rights advocates expressed anger and disappointment Wednesday after the Kansas Supreme Court upheld the state's new Republican-drawn congressional map despite claims of partisan and racial gerrymandering.
"As a result of this decision, minority voters and Democratic voters will have their voices diluted for the next 10 years."
About 5,600 miles to the west as the jetliners fly, America – the self-advertised beacon of democracy – is breaking apart during an attempt by a minority of the population for more than a year to install an autocracy fueled by lies and the restriction of freedoms to vote, read, learn history, mind your own body and to be who you want to be.
At the same time, the separation of church and state, a tenet of American democracy, seems to be threatened.
It is good at times to conduct a reality check on what this country supposedly stands for, and what it actually does. The preamble to the US Constitution, attributed to James Madison (though he refused to take full credit for it and there were other authors and sources) in 1787, reads as follows:
The easiest way to browse through Reels without a problem is to disconnect from Wi-Fi and use your mobile data. Because your phone isn’t reaching Instagram through the school network, the firewalls can’t block it.
Everyone these days seems to want to regulate social media. I mean, the reality is that social media is such a powerful tool for expression that everyone wants to regulate that expression. Sure, they can couch it in whatever fancy justifications they want, but at the end of the day, they’re still trying to regulate speech. And this is across the political spectrum. While, generally speaking, the Republican proposals are more unhinged, it’s not like the Democratic proposals are actually any more reasonable or constitutional.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman handily defeated Rep. Conor Lamb in the Democratic primary for the battleground state's open U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday, pitting the progressive against whichever right-wing candidate prevails in the deadlocked GOP contest between Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick.
"We're going to win in November the same way we won tonight—by fighting for every county, and every vote."
"I think for me the struggle to defend the truth is a precondition for defending our democracy, and the struggle to defend our democracy is a precondition for taking the effective action that needs to be taken in order to meet the climate crisis in a serious way and turn it around." —U.S. House member Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
Summer Lee declared victory late Tuesday in the Democratic primary race to represent Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House, voicing confidence that the remaining uncounted votes will favor her campaign over corporate attorney Steve Irwin's.
"We built a movement in Western Pennsylvania that took on corporate power."
Not every left-leaning candidate was victorious in Tuesday's primary contests, but on the whole, the Democratic Party's progressive wing had a successful showing despite the best efforts of the party establishment and millions of dollars in right-wing super PAC money.
While progressive candidates came up short in North Carolina, their counterparts in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Kentucky notched important wins that set them up to take on Republican opponents in the fast-approaching November 8 midterms, with control of Congress on the line. Below is a breakdown of key progressive triumphs, losses, and races that remain too close to call.
A group of progressive House Democrats led by Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Ayanna Pressley sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Tuesday urging the White House to use all available executive authorities to end the nation's pressing baby formula shortage, which has been€ driven€ by corporate monopolization.
"President Biden must use every power available to him to end this shortage now and to prevent a near-monopoly such as this one from creating another crisis in the future."
Former President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Wednesday to encourage far-right U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to "declare victory" in Pennsylvania's Republican primary even though the race between Oz and ex-hedge fund manager David McCormick remains too close to call.
"Dr. Oz should declare victory," said Trump, urging his endorsed candidate to emulate what he did during the 2020 presidential contest, when he baselessly claimed while votes were still being counted that "frankly, we did win this election."
Democracy defenders are cheering passage of a bill in Rhode Island that expands access to the ballot—a measure its proponents say is especially notable in light of nationwide attacks on the franchise.
“Like an honest and accurate public education, expanded access to voting is foundational to society and critical to our democracy."
We look at the Democratic Party’s opposition to progressive challengers such as Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator who earlier this month lost her congressional primary challenge after facing massive spending and attacks by super PACs. Turner says the corporate wing of the Democratic Party seeks to consolidate the existing leadership’s power while shutting down champions of progressive policies like Medicare for All. “The Democratic Party as a whole has to make a decision: Is it the party of the corporatists, or is it the party of the people?” says Turner.
Jake Johnson reports on a Pennsylvania primary unlike any other.
As a progressive Democrat running for an open congressional seat, Summer Lee faced down a brutal smear campaign that claimed she was not enough of a party loyalist to merit a place on its ballot line. And early Wednesday morning, as she pulled ahead of her opponent in the primary for Pennsylvania’s 12th district, Lee declared, “The people took on the corporations and the people won. We built a movement in Western Pennsylvania that took on corporate power, stood up for working families, and beat back a multimillion-dollar smear campaign.”
We look at Tuesday’s primary elections across five states, which could set the tone for this year’s midterm elections in November. Progressives won in some primary elections despite opposition from within the Democratic Party, as well as deep-pocketed outside groups. “What you’ve seen is a surprising backlash at the voter level to all of the money that flooded in,” says investigative journalist David Sirota of The Lever. “It’s been a pretty good night for progressive candidates, despite all that money.”
According to The Guardian, Rogan's false claims sprung from a Facebook post that suggested that Daniel Andrews, an Australian politician and the 48th Premier of Victoria, was passing a bill prohibiting civilians from growing their own food.
One Twitter user (here), whose post has been shared more than 13,000 times, wrote: “Australia is passing a bill that will prevent people from growing their own food. Totally normal.”
Similar posts can be seen elsewhere on Twitter (here), Facebook (here, here, here, here and here) and Instagram (here).
The claims pertain to the Agriculture Legislation Amendment Bill 2022 (here), a draft piece of legislation drawn up to make changes to 11 separate acts of parliament. Such acts include the Catchment and Land Protection Act 1994, the Dairy Act 2000, and the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act 1981.
The Biden administration has put plans for a controversial “disinformation” board under the Department of Homeland Security on “pause” after the board’s formation caused a widespread backlash.
Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22).
In fact, among innumerable possibilities of illegal use of short videos and webcasts, the regulations single out “undermining national religious policies,” “promoting harmful information about religion,” and “spreading xie jiao and feudal superstitions.”
There is a clear reference to the national regulations on religion and the Internet that came into force on March 1, 2022. These regulations declare any reference to religion on the web illegal, unless it comes from bodies connected with the five authorized religions that have obtained an ad hoc license and submit their content to the government for preliminary control. For all the others, even posting the image of a statue of Buddha is now illegal.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, China's ruling Communist Party moved quickly to control information, revving up its censorship machine as media outlets and local residents raced to the crash site.
It has maintained its tight grip over the narrative, with the preliminary probe leaving key questions unanswered.
After the fatal descent near the southern city of Wuzhou, authorities swiftly cordoned off a huge area and China's internet regulator announced it had scrubbed vast amounts of "illegal information" on the crash from China's tightly controlled web.
Lahore Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Monday arrested Muhammad Usama Shafiq and Maisam Abbas on a complaint that they had allegedly insulted the Prophet and defiled the holy Quran on Facebook and WhatsApp groups.
Pakistan's intentions to crumble the minority Ahmadiyya community in the country has been intensified as their hatred towards the community continues to grow. In an attempt to step over the 'inferior sect of Muslims,' Pakistan Telecast Authority (PTA) on Wednesday urged Facebook to remove over 700 URLs related to the Ahmadiyyas, claiming that it pertains to blasphemy in the country. However, the social media giant denied the request and reminded Pakistan that the action pertains to a human rights violation.
Facebook reportedly told PTA that the company has refused their request as it was against the commitments made by the social media platform to the international community and further reminded the Imran Khan-led government that Islamabad is also a signatory to 'Conventions on International Human Rights,' and their demand is contradictory to their commitments under the provision.
People criticising the government from coastal provinces near Taiwan and Hong Kong have been called separatists. Those who appear to be getting online from abroad, even if they are using a VPN that cloaks their location in China, are treated as foreign agitators and spies. After being reported by the trolls, some accounts are deleted by the platforms for violating “community regulations”. Blau Wang, a Chinese student living in Germany, said she had held back from posting critical views since the changes, in part out of fear of being reported by trolls as a foreign spy. Away from the online fights, many have expressed alarm at the policy shift. One hashtag calling for the feature to be revoked accumulated 8,000 posts and was viewed over 100 million times before it was censored in April. Despite the pushback, authorities have signalled the changes are likely to last and are necessary to “cut off the black hand manipulating narratives behind the [Internet] cable. ”
Schoolbooks have embraced Communism, threatening young Americans’ patriotism and sexual morality. And behind it all lies a shadowy cabal of big businessmen, bent on demolishing the very system that enriched them.
Last week a bizarre one-line order from the Fifth Circuit lifted the injunction on Texas’s social media law, allowing it to go into effect, despite all the massive problems with it – including the extent to which it violates the First Amendment and Section 230.
As editor-in-chief of U.S.-based website Slavic Sacramento, Gurzhiy for months has been working from his desk in California to provide news and analysis on the invasion of Ukraine to a large Russian-speaking diaspora.
His coverage has not gone unnoticed. Moscow’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, blocked access to Slavic Sacramento in Russia earlier this year, along with several other news networks, including VOA’s Russian service and the BBC.
At the initiative of PCP MEPs in the European Parliament (EP), 45 MEPs from various EP political groups call for the immediate release of Julian Assange.
The attached text appeals to the UK Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Ms. Priti Patel, to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange to the US and to the US Attorney General, Merrick B. Garland to drop the charges against Julian Assange with a view to his immediate release.
Many other digital media companies, including Vox Media and Vice Media, were looking to BuzzFeed’s public debut as a sign of whether there was a real appetite among investors for digital media. Following BuzzFeed’s poor post-debut performance, other media companies seem to have decided that sticking to consolidating and gaining scale privately was the better move.
It was like any other day for Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent in the occupied West Bank, and our friend and colleague. Early in the morning of May 11, she sent an e-mail to her coworkers letting them know she was going to report in the field. “[Israeli] occupation forces storm Jenin and besiege a house in the Jabriyat neighborhood,” she wrote. “On the way there—I will bring you news as soon as the picture becomes clearer.” But she never had a chance.
The work of the rights commission, which included documenting civilian casualties of Afghanistan’s two-decade war, was halted when the Taliban ousted a US-backed government last year and the body’s top officials fled the country.
Will racism ever be over in the United States? Nah. We’re just too damn good at it.
That question led two Pennsylvania state representatives to begin drafting a law to hold impregnators accountable. Legislation proposed by Rep. Emily Kinkead (D-Pittsburgh), and Rep. Christopher M. Rabb (D-Philadelphia), focuses on “the civil offense of wrongful conception.” If enacted, it would require inseminators to pay half of all costs related to pregnancy.
“Making it a civil offense for wrongful conception would allow pregnant people to financially recover 50 percent of all pregnancy-related costs,” Rep. Kinkead said. “Not just medical bills, but also the cost of maternity clothes, increased food expenses, birthing classes, doula care, mileage for travel to medical appointments, nursery furniture and supplies, and many other expenses that occur during pregnancy.” It would also cover other pregnancy-related costs postpartum because, “the costs of pregnancy do not stop after birth,” Rep. Kinkead added. “Postpartum, a new parent can have pregnancy-related costs for up to a year. Impregnators must be held responsible to equally cover all expenses.”
As thousands marched this Saturday, in opposition to the Supreme Court’s threatened overturn of Roe vs. Wade, the news broke that another young, armed, white man had shot up a grocery store in Buffalo New York, killing 10 and injuring 13, almost all of them African American. The weekend also marked the 74th anniversary of the expulsion of Palestinians from the newly formed state of Israel, an anniversary that took place, this year, amid anger over the killing of Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh whose last report before being killed by Israeli forces was on one of the more than 500 villages from which Palestinians were expelled in 1948.
A Supreme Court assault on reproductive equity, another racist slaughter, and more Palestinian death. It’s a lot.
Educational Attainment of AAPI Labor Force
Since 1965, US immigration policy has favored immigrants with higher levels of education
And now we learn that the immigration police state has added another weapon to its arsenal. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement has crafted a sophisticated surveillance dragnet designed to spy on most people living in the United States, without the need for warrants and many times circumventing state privacy laws, such as those in California, according to a€ two-year investigation€ released Tuesday by the€ Georgetown€ Law Center on Privacy & Technology.”
According to the Georgetown investigation, ICE spent an estimated $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on surveillance. That would be U.S. taxpayer -funded money of course. And that is billions with a “b,” not millions with an “m.”
Congresswoman Lucy McBath on Wednesday shared her own difficult experiences to point out how attacks on abortion rights by right-wing judges and legislators could impact what treatment doctors can provide to patients who, like her, endure miscarriage and stillbirth.
The Georgia Democrat's comments came during a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing entitled "Revoking Your Rights: The Ongoing Crisis in Abortion Care Access," an event held as the country prepares for the Supreme Court to issue a final ruling expected to reverse Roe v. Wade.
A leaked draft of a majority opinion authored by Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito strongly suggests that the court will rule to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two landmark cases that have upheld the right to an abortion nationwide for the last half century. If the final ruling largely follows what is sketched out in the leaked draft, abortion services will be drastically curtailed, if not outright banned, in over half the country.
As Americans contemplate a possible future without Roe v. Wade, it is worth taking a close look at the recent abortion rights revolution in Latin America. After centuries of living under some of the most draconian abortion laws imaginable—such as denying victims of rape the right to terminate a pregnancy and sending women to prison under the suspicion that they had an abortion rather than a miscarriage—millions of women in Latin America now have access to legal abortion in countries like Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. Such a radical transformation in Latin America’s abortion landscape has people thinking what until recently was unthinkable: Women from Texas and other states along the US-Mexico border will be traveling to Mexico to have a legal abortion, rather than the other way around.
Bioethicist Frances Kissling, 78, the president of Washington’s Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy, has spent most of her professional years thinking about and working on issues of women’s rights and reproductive health.
Sinn Féin topped the first-preference vote with 29%, and won 27 seats, enabling its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, to become the north of Ireland’s first minister-designate.
O’Neill is the first nationalist to hold this position in a momentous blow to Protestant-oriented Unionism.
The FCC has announced that it would be backing a plan to put WiFi on school busses in an attempt to bridge that pesky rascal ambiguously called the “digital divide.” According to the plan, the proposal would use the dwindling money available in the FCC’s E-Rate program to deploy hotspots on busses, allowing them to aid students and be used as portable hotspots on demand.
The NOFO contains a strong emphasis on the deployment of open-access infrastructure designed to facilitate competition and meet the growing needs of communities. Lastly, it promotes affordability key priority outcome of the many projects that will get financed with federal tax dollars. Let’s dive into the details here.
Congress was explicit in the bipartisan infrastructure law that it did not want the NTIA to implement a program that built broadband access solutions that would only be good enough for today and unprepared for tomorrow. Learning from past federal policy failures that squandered billions of federal dollars on outdated broadband infrastructure that will need to be replaced entirely, Congress emphasized a priority on projects that can “easily scale speeds over time” while meeting “evolving connectivity needs” and support “deployment of 5G” and “other advanced services” under Section 60102(a)(1)(I) of the bill:
In our filing to the NTIA, EFF provided technical analysis explaining how fiber-optic wires meet these objectives laid out by Congress and where alternatives fall short in one or more of the above categories. This wasn’t because of any type of favoritism towards on last-mile transmission medium over another, this was just plain old physics driving these results. In its explanation of the “priority broadband project,” the NTIA agreed and acknowledged that “only end-to-end fiber” (on page 42 of the NOFO) will meet these policy objectives.
My selfhosting setup has evolved over the years but the general trend has been to move to lower power and less complexity. The previous server was a DIY mini-ITX 4 bay NAS machine. It was an x86 machine with a RAID storage configuration but I decided it really was overpowered for my needs. In terms of both processing power and power consumption. My personal trend towards less complexity in my computing in general was also a factor in needing less processing power. My current setup has been in service for I think over 3 years at this point.
There’s a conversation flowing through geminispace about “sinere conversations”, and it’s reminded me of a thought I’ve been meaning to flesh out. It’s not quite there yet, but I thought I’d offer it up; I’d love your feedback.
These days, many new cars come with some variant of an “auto-stop” feature. This shuts down the car’s engine at stop lights and in other similar situations in order to save fuel and reduce emissions. Not everyone is a fan however, and [CGamer_OS] got sick of having to switch off the feature every time they got in the car. So they employed a little robot to handle the problem instead.
“Based on our Hulu experience, we actually have more AVOD [ad-supported video-on-demand] than SVOD [subscription VOD] subscribers,” Disney CFO Christine McCarthy said, speaking Wednesday at the 9th Annual MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Summit. “We expect about the same percentage for both Disney+ and Hulu, just based on the experience curve that we’ve witnessed.”
A few years ago, Hulu revealed that 70% of its viewers were on ad-supported plans with the remainder on the pricier ad-free tiers. McCarthy said Disney+ ad inventory will be sold at a premium, which will “enhance” the average revenue per subscriber it expects to generate. “We really feel good about this opportunity,” she said.
As the number of cancellations overall has grown, The Information reports that new users are accounting for a smaller share of them — another indicator that Netflix is struggling to retain users for longer periods of time. In the second quarter of 2021, people surveyed who subscribed to the platform for less than one year made up 70 percent of cancellations, while long-term subscribers accounted for six percent. 60 percent of cancellations were made by newer subscribers last quarter.
Streaming giant Netflix is laying off an additional 150 employees as of Tuesday, the company confirmed to NPR. The labor restructuring is the latest signal of a major shift within the company as it reported a decline in subscribers for the first time in a decade.
The layoffs represent 2 percent of the streamer’s total workforce, with most of the cuts happening in the United States. Netflix is also making changes to its animation division, resulting in the elimination of 70 roles in that unit, as well as reducing contractor roles in its social media and publishing channels.
A source familiar with the situation tells The Verge the cuts include at least 26 contractors working on the company’s fan-focused Tudum website, which serves as a supplement to Netflix’s content. Prior to this recent round of layoffs, Netflix cut around 25 marketing roles, including close to a dozen who worked on Tudum. The 26 workers laid off today were informed of the move in a mass email, which Netflix spokesperson Erika Masonhall said was sent by the contracting company.
Netflix has pink-slipped about 150 staffers, mostly in the U.S., as it works to rein in costs with its top-line growth having slowed down.
The cuts come across departments and are driven by the need to reduce expenses rather than the performance of individual employees, according to the company. The layoffs represent roughly 2% of Netflix’s U.S. workforce.
To prevent such illegal content leakage, Netflix and other OTT services (Ref. #2) protect the contents by using technologies called ‘DRM’ and ‘watermarking’.
In this article, we will divide into two parts and discuss what we call ‘Multi-DRM’ and ‘Forensic Watermarking’ respectively.
But DRM technology alone can not completely protect content from illegal distribution.
The authorized user’s device needs to convert the encrypted DRM content to its original form through the decryption process for playback. In this playback process, there are technical limitations that make someone can leak the content.
Therefore, ‘forensic watermarking’ technology is needed to keep track of who leaked the content and prevent further leakage.
European cloud companies complained to the European commission, the EU's antitrust regulator, accusing Microsoft of limiting customer choice.
They also said the user experience was made worse and that there are incompatibilities with certain other Microsoft products when not running on Azure, the company's own data operating system.
Microsoft president Brad Smith's statement on Wednesday about the change came in the wake of a complaint filed by German software provider Next Cloud, France's OVHcloud, Italian cloud service provider Aruba and an association of cloud service providers from Denmark, Reuters reported.
The anti-trust suit was filed in December last year against Microsoft for allegedly forcing companies to use its file-hosting service One Drive on Windows.
A statement from NextCloud at the time said: "OneDrive is pushed wherever users deal with file storage and Teams is a default part of Windows 11," the statement said.
For several years now there’s been an endless amount of clamor in DC about how we “need to regulate big tech.” Unfortunately, many of the solutions on this front have ranged from incoherent to performative, failing utterly to actually shore up genuine problems in the sector (catch and kill tactics, mindless consolidation, vast privacy and surveillance issues).
Cloudflare is urging the EU Commission not to turn its bi-annual piracy watchlist into a summary of copyright holder grievances and extralegal demands. The CDN provider's letter is a response to various rightsholder groups that called out the company for not doing enough to stop online piracy on its network.
PrimeStreams is one of the most recognizable pirate IPTV brands but after dealing with a hacker attack in 2019, more serious troubles lie on the horizon. The operators of PrimeStreams are now being sued in the United States, with potential damages easily running to tens of millions of dollars.