workstation. I go over my overall impressions, the Linux support, and the performance of the machine.
As mentioned in a previous post, I bought this machine with the FreeDOS option. The OS I actually use day to day is Fedora Workstation and that is what this review is based on. When I initially got the machine I installed Fedora Workstation 35, in the meantime 36 has come out and that is what is currently installed on the laptop.
The last couple decades we’ve gone from fighting to install Linux on a laptop to having multiple vendors focused on Linux laptops such as System76, Tuxedo Computers, Framework, and many others. Larger vendors have been offering Linux laptops for developers for a while as well. You can buy a Linux machine from Dell, Lenovo, and soon HP.
This new announcement by HP should signal that the industry is kinda listening. That they’re accepting that at least the development audience wants good Linux machines, and are responding positively by launching specific SKUs. Still, what you see every time one of such laptops reach the news is a gazillion complaints. I’m not saying that the complaints are not valid, heck, one is free to complain about whatever they want. What bugs me is that there appears to be no winning scenario. There is no endgame for such complaints, I’m starting to believe that there is no way to make this audience truly happy. Or maybe rants get more engagement and people are ranting mostly to feel good.
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the latest Linux kernel version 5.18, bringing with it the usual masses of improvements and new hardware support. Seems like it was a quiet one when it comes to releasing, with Torvalds jokingly calling it "boring old plain 5.18".
While the situation has improved a little for NVIDIA and Wayland, they're not really there yet and so NVIDIA are now keeping a public list of the issues split between drivers and either protocol or compositor limitations. This follows on from the huge splash they made recently with their new open source Linux GPU kernel modules, which also improved Wayland support a little too with the 515.43.04 driver that went up at the same time.
This release contains a huge amount of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. It is worth noting that v2.0 Postgres delta backups are not backward-compatible with the pre-2.0 versions. It means that the v2.0 delta backup can't be restored with the v1.1 or earlier versions. Also, this release introduces the initial support for Greenplum physical backups.
WAL-G for MySQL now supports the parallel backup-push/backup-fetch and has an optimized binlog upload mechanism. WAL-G for SQLServer now supports the backup encryption and compression as well as the external storage backup import/export.
 When operating on the Linux command line, it is easy to get disoriented, which can have disastrous consequences. I once issued a remove command before realizing that I'd moved the boot directory of my computer. I learned to use the pwd command to know exactly which part of the file system I was in (and these days, there are command projects, like trashy and trash-cli, that serve as intermediates when removing files).
When I was new to Linux, I had a cheat sheet that hung over my desk to help me remember those commands as I managed my Linux servers. It was called the 101 commands for Linux cheat sheet. As I became more familiar with these commands, I became more proficient with server administration.
Here are 12 Linux commands I find most useful.
Recently, I came across an animation prototype on a button hover state and wanted to see if I could build it with just CSS. To explain in words, when you hovered over the pill-shaped button, the background changed from a plain white background to a nice coloured gradient, and there was a light sweep effect across the button.
I have a standard approach to building any design with CSS, and that is to break things down into smaller bits. First, there’s the button itself when nobody is interacting with it. Then, there’s that gradient transition, and the final flourish is the light sweep effect.
It is highly probable that all users of the internet have or are still using mailing platforms to communicate with one another from electronic gadgets like laptops. With a stable internet connection, Linux users on different Linux distributions can instantaneously send and receive electronic messages.
One of the primary reasons why most users resort to Linux as their primary operating system is how specific it is with its error messages. Whether you are running an installation command for an application package or trying to configure something on the operating system environment, computing errors are bound to occur. Using a Linux OS ensures that you will always be pointed to a fixable cause of such errors.
However, not all errors are straightforward. Some require a bit of technical expertise in order to solve them. This article will walk us through the “no space left on device” error and also evaluate possible solutions to fix it in Linux. We are bound to run into this error even if we are certain our Linux system has plenty of disk space left.
Finally, the stable release of RHEL 9 has been released which has brought some of the major changes for better security, and usability, and with the same stability which you can expect from any release of RHEL.
This guide will show you how you can easily upgrade from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 with minimum effort and complexity involved. So let’s start with what the new release has to offer in the first place.
Another fresh interview for you today, this time with Ken VanDine who is responsible for leading the way for Ubuntu on the desktop at Canonical. This will form part of a mini-series€ — the first already up with Aaron Honeycutt from System76.
Valve has put up their latest little festival to grab some more games with the Steam Racing Fest. It also comes with a new Steam feature with a mini-trivia game. If you play their racing trivia game you can end up with one of those cool looking profile badges.
A member of the Lunduke Journal Community recently discovered the joy of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) — the on-line, multiplayer, text-based role playing games (typically played via the Telnet protocol).
Which made me realize: The Lunduke Journal simply has not spent enough time talking about the joy of MUDs.
To help rectify that, let’s take a little stroll back to the 1970s… as we explore the history of the very first MUD — and, in fact, the very first multiplayer, online role playing game on the Internet: MUD1
After a bit of an accidental early start that was taken down, iFixit have now actually properly launched their Steam Deck replacements parts and various guides for each part to fix or replace yourself.
Well, this is quite a story. Meg's Monster is the next and biggest game so far from developer Odencat, where you need to help a lost little girl get home. The problem is, she has some awesome power and might just cause some kind of monster apocalypse.
Bonfire Peaks, one of the nicest puzzle games released in 2021 is getting an expansion in Lost Memories plus an update is out now with new features.
 Linux has a prodigious library of free games many of which are released under an open source license. A large proportion of these open source games are eye catching. Popular games often have full motion video, vector graphics, 3D graphics, realistic 3D rendering, animation, texturing, a physics engine, and much more. Early computer games did not have these graphic techniques. The earliest video games were text games or text-based games that used text characters rather than vector or bitmapped graphics.
The idiom ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ can be extended to ‘don’t judge a computer game by its graphics’. Whilst many of the games featured in this article have unremarkable graphics, they have many redeeming qualities, including challenging gameplay, and stretching the brain.
Great news for RedHat lovers! Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 is now generally available (GA). This announcement was made on 18th, May 2022. The latest release is crafted to meet the needs of a hybrid cloud environment and can be readily deployed from the edge to the cloud.
RHEL 9 can seamlessly be provisioned as a guest machine on a hypervisor such as KVM, and VMware, on a physical server, on the cloud, or run as a container built from Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBIs).
AMD launched the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit which is built around the Kria K26 Zynq UltraScale+ XCK26 System-on-Module (SoM) that entered the market last year. The KR260 has similar specs as the Kria KV260, however, the former is optimized for industrial applications instead of vision AI applications.
In addition to the Kria K26 SoM, the robotic platform provides 512 Mbit QSPI for primary boot and a microSD slot for a second stage bootloader. The connectivity interface consists of four Gigabit ethernet ports and four USB 3.0.
 Digi IX30 is a 4G LTE cellular router for industry 4.0 designed for distribution and automation, remote machines and sensor monitoring in industries such as oil and gas production, water utilities, smart cities, and outdoor signage.
The Digi IX30 is a rugged device able to operate in harsh environments, and the US model supports FirstNet nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety in the event of an emergency (e.g. terrorist attack). The network is designed for first responders, city services, and infrastructure, as well as drilling and gas wells, Internet-connected irrigation systems, waste disposal, and septic tank services among others. A future version will also support the Anterix Band 8 (900 MHz) for critical infrastructure/mission-critical private LTE networks.
Lichen is the simplest possible CMS for the web that is friendly enough for non-technical users. It is extremely lightweight.
Join us June 4th at 1900 UTC for new and prospective Tor relay and bridge operators on the basic "sysadmin foo" required to contribute to the network!
## Sysadmin 101 for new relay operators
So you want to contribute to the open-source Tor network by running a relay or maybe a bridge?
The Tor network is the most important tool for evading surveillance and bypassing internet censorship. And Tor relays and bridges are vital to the health and integrity of the Tor network. Millions of users rely on relays and bridges to stay safe, and how you configure and maintain that relay or bridge is critical.
Once we’ve got our document, we can process it through the schema to recover the true meaning of the data.
So there you have it: Supercharged QR codes that can hold arbitrary structured data! Neat!
Some time ago a colleague left my team, so I inherited the project he was working on. He was working on two big features at the same time in that project that was the result of collaboration with two other teams. He had two branches, one per feature, that were branched out of the main branch months ago and have significant changes in each of them, many of those changes on the same files. The task that he left before leaving was to integrate all that code back to master. There were all types of conflicts: files moved and/or renamed, different versions of dependencies, different competing changes on the same lines… This is where the merge hell started.
It seems to me that when people discuss functional programming, they spend much time discussing side effects and how to avoid them. Sometimes, they almost forget that non-deterministic behaviour is also something to avoid.
On the other hand, we've known for a long time that we should eradicate non-determinism in tests. Martin Fowler's article, however, mostly discusses false positives: Tests that fail even when no defect is manifest.
Unit tests may also exhibit false negatives. This can happen for a variety of reason. In my article Tautological assertion I describe one example.
The passing of time, however, has a tendency to introduce decay. This may apply to test suites as well. If a test or the System Under Test depends on the current time, a test may over time transition from a proper test to one that still passes, but for the wrong reason.
Part of Unix shell scripting is that Unix has a number of little languages (and interpreters for them) that are commonly embedded in shell scripts to do various things. Shell scripts aren't just written in the Bourne shell; they're effectively written in the Bourne shell plus things like sed and awk, and later more things like Perl (the little language used by jq may in time become routine). However, not all languages become used on Unix this way, even if they're interpreted and otherwise used for shell script like things. Recently it occurred to me that one factor in this is how embeddable the language is in a shell script.
There's this minimal English vocab list out there called "Ogden's English", or something. You can look it up. Anyways, it's like less than 900 words, just the important ones.
After over two years of virtual meetings, EFF's Cooper "Cybertiger" Quintin returned to the stage, live and in-person! Friends reunited, suspicions that all our coworkers were actually holograms were assuaged (for now), and the tacos were delicious. So, so, delicious.
After some much needed comradery, the competition was on! Five teams put their tech know-how to the test, all vying for the chance to win an EFF prize pack, the new championship trophies, and perhaps most importantly, the bragging rights.
A few weeks ago we posted a build of an avid motorcycle enthusiast named [fvfilippetti] who created a voltage regulator essentially from the ground up. While this was a popular build, the regulator only works for a small subset of motorcycles. This had a large number of readers clamoring for a more common three-phase regulator as well. Normally we wouldn’t expect someone to drop everything they’re doing and start working on a brand new project based on the comments here, but that’s exactly what he’s done.
The idea of a cyberdeck is simple. A relatively portable case that is primarily a keyboard with some screen attached. Cyberdecks often try to hit a particular aesthetic or vibe rather than focusing on usability or practicality. [Carter Hurd] took a step back and asked himself what would be a cyberdeck-like system that he could practically use every day.
A new study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the Robert Butler Columbia Aging Center, and Université Paris-Dauphine–PSL, found that having three or more versus two children may have a negative effect on late-life cognition. This effect was strongest in Northern Europe, where higher fertility decreases financial resources but does not improve social resources. This is the first to study the causal effect of high fertility on late-life cognition.
A focus on the fast-growing software as a service (SaaS) sector looks to comprise the Government's tech-related spending in Budget 2022, with $20 million allocated to boosting SaaS companies and marketing Kiwi tech to the world.
On Feb. 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, a prolific ransomware gang called Conti made a proclamation on its dark web site. It was an unusually political statement for a cybercrime organization: Conti pledged its “full support of Russian government” and said it would use “all possible resources to strike back at the critical infrastructures” of Russia’s opponents.
Perhaps sensing that such a public alliance with the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin could cause problems, Conti tempered its declaration later that day. “We do not ally with any government and we condemn the ongoing war,” it wrote in a follow-up statement that nonetheless vowed retaliation against the United States if it used cyberwarfare to target “any Russian-speaking region of the world.”
The anonymous message board app Yik Yak is designed in a way that it is possible to get the precise location of a user’s post, and see users’ unique IDs, potentially allowing someone to dox and stalk users, according to a researcher.
If the European ââ¬Å¾Entry/Exit System“ (EES) goes into operation as planned in four months, all travellers will have to provide fingerprints and facial images when crossing an EU external border. This database is now to be used increasingly by security authorities. The EU interior ministers want to adopt conclusions on this in the Council. The British civil rights organisation Statewatch has published a draft of these conclusions.
The coveted data will be stored in a ââ¬Å¾Common Identity Repository“ (CIR), which, according to current plans, will be launched in a year’s time. The planned conclusions call on member states to enact laws allowing biometric searches, ââ¬Å¾in particular for the purpose of facilitating the correct identification of persons“.
TLS certificates for servers are not normally signed directly by the Certificate Authority's root certificate (for various good reasons); instead, they're signed by an intermediate certificate that chains up to the CA's root certificate (in modern usage, there generally is only one intermediate certificate between the server certificate and the CA's root certificate). In theory the server is supposed to send the intermediate certificate with its own certificate in a certificate chain, but in practice servers don't always send intermediate certificates and this can cause mysterious problems.
On February 23, four members of an Orthodox youth movement in Kharkiv set out on a four-day pilgrimage. Their plan was to return home on February 28. At 5:00 a.m on February 24, they got off their train in Kyiv and learned that Russia’s invasion had begun. Ever since then, they’ve been living in a Ukrainian Orthodox monastery in the Kyiv region. Some of them have nowhere else to go because€ their homes have been destroyed; others have made the decision not to leave for religious reasons. Meduza asked Iryna, a journalist from Kyiv who found herself living in the same monastery, to write about the new lives these young people are building in the monastery.
A court in Kyiv has sentenced Russian soldier Vadim Shishimarin to life imprisonment for killing 62-year-old civilian Oleksandr Shelipov in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region.
Switzerland made non-alignment look almost sexy, with its ski resorts, excellent chocolates, and secure banking system. Then there was Sweden, which refused to join NATO or subordinate its military policy to Moscow, offering instead to broker peaceful compromises between east and west as well as north and south. Austria, divided into four occupation zones after World War II just like Germany, embraced neutrality as the last foreign troops exited the country in 1955. It has sent peacekeepers around the world and offered Vienna as a neutral place for negotiations, like the ones that produced the Iran nuclear deal.
During the Cold War, non-alignment emerged as a third path between Soviet-style communism and American-style capitalism, between two nuclear superpowers, between a poorly delineated East and West. So many countries were eager to go down this path that they formed a new bloc, the Non-Aligned Movement, at the Bandung Conference in 1955, with Yugoslav leader Tito as one of its prime movers.
The Western military alliance is stationing five Global Hawks in Sicily. Germany is the main contributor, provides a quarter of the personnel and opens a flight corridor. The drones were even seen in a triple mission with US Global Hawks.
All this is just another huge lie. Or rather a huge macabre fraud which only serves the Great Russian propaganda of the present regime. And this is why. First of all, all these dead commemorated were not Russians but… first and foremost Soviet civilians and military. The difference is not insignificant and the first person who should agree with it is Mr. Putin himself, who knows something about the abyss that separates the cursed Soviet Union from his Russian Federation, since he usually loses his temper in public when he talks about the October Revolution, Lenin and his Bolsheviks.
But let’s see if there is a grain of truth in Mr. Putin’s propaganda. Were the Soviet citizens and servicemen who died during and because of the Second World War only Russians? The answer is given by the following table borrowed from the relevant Wikipedia article (in French and English), which is based on Vadim Erlikman’s study:€ Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik, Moscow 2004 (ISBN 5-93165-107-1) pp. 23-35.
Let’s tighten restrictions on poisonous hate speech on social media. It’s imperative we conduct threat assessments. Absolutely, more gun control regulations. We must deconstruct racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynist, white supremacist manifestos. But if we do all that and continue to minimize or ignore how these murderous men were socialized as boys and men, mass shootings will continue to plague us.
We have to start in preschool, carefully attending to how boys are socialized. We must cultivate their emotional intelligence. Who would deny the value of educating boys to examine their inner lives; to talk about their feelings?
An Indonesian preacher who was denied entry to Singapore on Monday (May 16) said he will not give up trying to visit Singapore, describing the country as Malay land similar to Riau where he is from.
In a YouTube video on Wednesday, Abdul Somad Batubara said people in Riau see Singapore as part of their land because Singapore was part of the Temasek Malay kingdom.
The identity of the attacker is not revealed yet. According to local reports, the 40-year-old attacker was already known to the police and was taken into custody.
Col. Hassan Sayad Khodayari was shot dead Sunday outside his home by assailants on motorcycles, in a killing Iran blamed on “elements linked to the global arrogance,” its term for the United States and its allies including Israel.
In the same letter, Eric Le Dissès called on the other mayors of France “not to give in to the pressure of pro-burkini associations”, whom he accused of wanting to impose “the extreme Islamisation of France, which many French Muslims do not approve of”.
I’ve seldom found big US media terribly useful in understanding€ how the world works. Coming of age during the Vietnam “conflict” encouraged a certain skepticism of the dominant media “narrative.” There was a history if one looked and, perhaps more impressive to we —-the impressionable— were the stories told by€ vets returning from “The Nam.” Guys we knew.
There was something else going on.
A Russian diplomat on Monday issued a rare public rebuke of President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, resigning in protest of the invasion which has killed more than 3,000 civilians, displaced more than six million, and garnered worldwide condemnation.
Boris Bondarev, a longtime diplomat to the United Nations in Geneva who has worked on disarmament issues, confirmed in a letter to his colleagues that he had resigned from his position, writing that he "simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless, and absolutely needless ignominy."
The war in Ukraine has already caused massive death and destruction, with more undoubtedly to come as the fighting intensifies in the country’s east and south. Many thousands of soldiers and civilians have already been killed or wounded, some 13 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, and an estimated one-third of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Worse yet, that war’s brutal consequences have in no way been limited to Ukraine and Russia: hunger and food insecurity are increasing across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East as grain deliveries from two of the world’s leading wheat producers have been severed. People are also suffering globally from another harsh consequence of that war: soaring fuel prices. And yet even those manifestations of the war’s “collateral damage” don’t come close to encompassing what could be the greatest casualty of all: planet Earth itself.
The distribution of new alternative fuels to replace fossil fuels plays a key role in enabling the green transition in transport. In order for households and businesses across Finland to switch over to electric and gas-fuelled transport, there must be an easily accessible public charging and refuelling network that covers the entire country.
A bike is a game changer when exploring a new city: It’s cheap, speedy and a fun way get in some exercise while on vacation.
From a 1,300-foot climb in Bogotá to a 22-mile, best-of-Paris loop (don’t worry, there’s wine and ice cream at the end), seven writers offer their favorite rides in cities known for their urban trails.
In 2020, about 1 in 6 kids, 16% of all children, were living in families with incomes below the official poverty line – an income threshold the government set that year at about US$26,500 for a family of four. Only 10% of Americans ages 18 to 64 and 9% of those 65 and up were experiencing poverty, according to the most recent data available.
The official child poverty rate ticks down when the economy grows and up during downturns. It stood at 17% in 1967 – just about the same as in 2020. In many recent years the rate hovered even higher – around 20%.
McDonalds has announced that it is leaving the Russian market after 32 years of doing business there. Since mid-March, operations have been suspended at McDonalds’ 850 restaurants across Russia. On May 16, the company confirmed that it will sell its Russian business. Existing locations will be rebranded, and the iconic Golden Arches will vanish. According to the state news agency TASS, the new restaurants could open as soon as mid-June. Before the invasion, McDonalds employed 62,000 people at its franchises. The company continued to pay these staff even after suspending business in Russia. Meduza spoke to a handful of McDonalds workers to learn their thoughts about the chain’s departure from Russia, and to find out what they plan to do next.
Our Forefathers Had Some Innovative Solutions
Fortunately for the United States, our national debt is in U.S. dollars. As former Federal Reserve Chairman€ Alan Greenspan once observed, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”
Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc will share more data on targeting choices made by advertisers running political and social-issue ads in its public ad database, it said on Monday.
Meta said it would also include detailed targeting information for these individual ads in its "Facebook Open Research and Transparency" database used by academic researchers, in an expansion of a pilot launched last year.
On Thursday the Department of Justice announced a policy shift in that it will no longer prosecute good-faith security research that would have violated the country’s federal hacking law the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
The move is significant in that the CFAA has often posed a threat to security researchers who may probe or hack systems in an effort to identify vulnerabilities so they can be fixed. The revision of the policy means that such research should not face charges.
The much-abused Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (passed in 1986) will no longer be abused quite as much… at least by the Department of Justice.
Lynch discusses why he thinks Wintour is an agent of change, rather than the old guard. They talk about how management has handled negotiations with the company’s various unions. And they consider how publishing gatekeepers have been usurped by online ones like YouTube and TikTok. And Kara asks him to weigh in on the perennial media question: Is print dead?
Three of the biggest news stories in the United States are the erosion of reproductive freedom (with the Supreme Court on the cusp of ending the constitutional right to abortion), the surge in racist violence (with the myth of a “great replacement” of white people by immigrants evidently fueling the alleged shooter in the massacre in Buffalo that left 10 people dead), and the increasing authoritarianism of the GOP (with Republican primaries elevating many candidates who echo former president Donald Trump’s election lies and are committed to thwarting future elections). These might seem like distinct issues, but they are in fact strands of the same rope, the cord that could strangle American democracy.
Jay Stone grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago ward politics, the son of a longtime city alderman. But his own forays into politics left him distrustful of Chicago Democrats.
When he ran for alderman in 2003, he was crushed at the polls after party leaders sent city workers out to campaign against him. Even his own father didn’t endorse him.
That reckoning was made in traditional inner-city seats that have never known anyone other than conservative members.€ It was part of a “teal” electoral tsunami, comprising candidates who would not necessarily wish to vote for Labor or the Greens, but who had found the Liberal-National government of Scott Morrison impossible to stomach on matters ranging from gender equality to climate change.
In the Melbourne seat of Goldstein, held by the Liberal Party’s Tim Wilson, former ABC journalist Zoe Daniels stormed through.€ It was a showing most fitting: the electorate is named after Vera Goldstein, feminist and women’s rights campaigner who, in 1903, was the first woman to stand for election in a national parliament.€ “She ran as an independent several times,” Wilson said in a telling reminder, “because she was so independent that she couldn’t bring herself to run for either of the major parties.”
I am not referring to the malfunction, intended or unintended, of 1,000-plus voting machines. I am not alluding to the massive release of billions of pesos for vote buying that made the 2022 elections one of the dirtiest in recent years. Nor do I have in mind the decade-long online campaign of disinformation that transmogrified the nightmare years of martial law during the senior Marcos’s rule into a “golden age.”
Undoubtedly, each of these factors played a role in the electoral result. But 31 million plus votes — 59 percent of the electorate — is simply too massive to attribute to them alone.
Ending the Troubles required compromises between Catholics and€ Protestants, nationalists and unionists, British and Irish governments –€ and ultimately between Britain and the EU. A rickety but potentially stable€ balance of power was created in Northern Ireland which is now€ unravelling thanks to the crass manoeuvres of the British Government.
It is€ a depressing spectacle€ as Johnson and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss€ hack away at what was one of Britain’s greatest diplomatic achievements.€ Wallowing in hypocrisy, they claim to be riding to the rescue of the peace€ process while in fact undermining it by unilaterally revoking key parts of€ the Northern Ireland protocol designed to preserve the GFA in a post-Brexit world.
I like to think that I’m plugged into social media, at least about the topics that I care about, such as medicine, quackery, vaccines, and, for the last couple of years, COVID-19. Occasionally, however, I realize that I’m not, which is what happened over a week ago, when I saw this Tweet from outspoken Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves Tweeted a link to an article by Dr. Lucy McBride:
In April, EFF told California’s Sixth Court of Appeals that the Santa Clara Superior Court was correct to dismiss a lawsuit by Prager University against YouTube and its parent company, Google. The lawsuit claimed€ that€ Google’s€ content moderation was illegal censorship. Prager University is an educational and media nonprofit with a conservative perspective, which sued under California state law after its arguments were rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2020. The Ninth Circuit correctly held€ that, contrary to Prager’s arguments, YouTube is not a government actor bound by First Amendment limits simply because it hosts a forum for public speech.€
Under a California Supreme Court decision in Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center, there is a narrow public forum test for a privately-owned space’s ability to curate speech. In our brief, we emphasize that even if the law were applied to non-physical spaces, it does not transform YouTube’s curation of Prager’s videos into prohibited censorship. YouTube and other social media platforms that moderate content are primarily, if not exclusively, expressive venues. Unlike a shopping center or grocery store, an online platform’s editorial vision is often at the core of its business. Additionally, social media platforms are not functionally public forums: they are not open to the public to come and go as they please. YouTube’s action against Prager is one of millions of decisions it made and continues to make. Those decision are part of the editorial discretion that platforms€ have as to which users and what content they allow. Prager’s broad interpretation of the law would upend those legal protections—to everyone’s detriment.
Well, well. As we still wait to see what the Supreme Court will do about the 5th Circuit’s somewhat bizarre, and reasonless reinstatement of Texas’ ridiculously bad social media content moderation bill, the 11th Circuit has come out with what might be a somewhat rushed decision going mostly in the other direction, and saying that most of Florida’s content moderation bill is, as the lower court said, unconstitutional. It’s worth reading the entire decision, which may take a bit longer than the 5th Circuit’s one sentence reinstatement of the law, as it makes a lot of good points. I still think that the court is missing some important points about the parts of the law that it has reinstated (around transparency), but we’ll have another post on that shortly (and I hope those mistakes may be fixed with more briefing).
The research shows how censorship efforts in one country can bleed over and impact users in others. The findings come after Bing censored image searches for the infamous “tank man” even from the United States last June. At the time, Microsoft blamed that issue on an “accidental human error.” The new research indicates more widespread censorship of politically sensitive searches, and especially names of certain people.
Noor Khan Baloch* is a digital rights activist and professional from Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s volatile Balochistan province. As a Pashtun-Baloch woman, Noor personifies the intersection of many identities that are marginalized in the country, and she has actively sought to address the multipronged power imbalances in the digital sphere. However, there’s a major part of her identity that she can neither strive to safeguard, nor unveil: atheism.
“As an atheist I fear that if I post something on Islam, someone will lodge a police complaint, or I’ll become the target of a mob,” Noor said to the Daily Dot. “I’ve stopped expressing my own views online because even condemnation of killings over blasphemy, or criticizing the law, can be fatal.”
The Osun State Chapter of the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has urged the security agencies and well-meaning Nigerians to act on the alleged misdemeanours of one Pastor Akintaro Joshua Ojo, over his recent utterances, which are capable of plunging Osun State and the entire South West Nigeria into chaos and religious war.
Reacting to the dastardly act, Imam Maqari claimed that there are some red lines in Islam which must not be crossed, adding that if issues of blasphemy against the prophet are not addressed by the authority, the Muslims would do so themselves.
Soyinka has now accused the Islamic cleric of instigating his followers to take laws into their hands in the name of religion.
A representative of Russia’s Attorney General explained the agency’s decision to block independent television channel Dozhd (TV Rain), saying its work presented a threat to the “stability of the constitutional structure and Russia’s security.” The statement, according to RIA Novosti, was made during a review of Dozhd’s appeal to challenge the blockage in Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court.
The investigative news website Proekt has published a database of information about Russian military units currently fighting in Ukraine. In total, the database names 166 commanding officers, offering varying degrees of detail about each individual’s activities and biography, as well as information about their income, property, debts, and any recorded fines. Nearly two dozen of the officials identified were born or raised in Ukraine.
On Wednesday evening, more than a dozen units allegedly responded to a Target in Kissimmee in response to a suspicious vehicle with covered or unmarked license plates. Officers watched two men get out of the car wearing “masks and hoodies” and enter the store, according to the affidavit written by Deputy Cole Miller. Miller talked to the store’s Loss Prevention Supervisor on the phone, who told him that the men were leaving the store without paying for a pizza and multiple packs of Pokemon cards.
"The family created a story to convince them to come to Pakistan for a couple of days," said Gujrat police spokesperson Nauman Hassan.
"Preliminary investigations show this is a case of honour killing, but it is still developing and the investigation is ongoing," he added.
In a tweet he posted on May 19, Harris County Sheriff Ed Conzalez reported: “It appears an estranged husband showed up at his wife’s apartment this morning. The male shot his wife, 4-yr-old daughter and his mother-in-law, then turned the gun on himself. All four were pronounced deceased at the scene. A pistol has been recovered. South Asian family, husband.”
The scene is medieval in its horror: a woman stoned, beaten and set on fire by a mob shouting 'Allahu Akbar'. But this didn't happen hundreds of years ago: it took place a week ago in Nigeria.
At some point U.S. regulators effectively declared that it was okay to rip off consumers with a dizzying array of bogus fees, letting companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock you with a bunch of additional surcharges when the bill comes due. That’s particularly true of the cable and broadband industry, which has saddled consumers with billions in fees for decades, with little real penalty.
The bill would amend the newly created grant program for funding broadband access in unserved areas by prohibiting the California Public Utilities Commission from requiring providers to offer affordable services to all residents, as well as by forcing the state to treat AT&T's inferior wireless offerings on equal terms as 21st-century-ready fiber infrastructure. Such provisions run contrary to established goals of the Biden Administration’s infrastructure effort that center on delivering affordable fiber broadband to rural Americans.
“At a time when everyone is suffering from record inflation, legislation that will raise people’s prices for broadband infrastructure must be flatly rejected,” said Ernesto Falcon, EFF Senior Legislative Counsel. “California made a historic investment to deliver 21st-century fiber infrastructure to all residents with passage of the state’s infrastructure law last year. Local county governments have already started charting out their infrastructure plans to connect everyone to fiber while committing to affordable prices. AT&T, which opposed the law from the beginning, is now trying to convince legislators to unwind that promise while padding their profits with taxpayer dollars by setting monopoly prices in rural markets.”
Netflix plans to deal with “password sharing”, perhaps next year.
I guess first they need to:
1. Finish figuring out how many employees to fire.
2. Set how much the annual *f*** yourself” price hike for their customers is.
3. Figure out how many subscribers they’re already hemorrhaging this year, and under-report their estimate to keep the stock fraud going a while longer.
4. Sort out which good shows that cost some money to write and make effects for to cancel.
It’s always good to set priorities because otherwise you’ll never get a thing done.
It’s too bad that we didn’t have some sort of “digital disc” that was “versatile”, so that we could just own movies and TV shows, and borrow them from a place our tax money supports.
If we had, then certainly this disaster of “streaming” wouldn’t have happened.
Retailers nationwide reported supplies of baby formula were out of stock at a rate of 43% during the week ended May 8, 2022, compared with less than 5% in the first half of 2021. In some states, such as Texas and Tennessee, shortages were over 50%, which has prompted parents to travel long distances and pay exorbitant sums of money to grab dwindling supplies of formula for their babies.
News that the Food and Drug Administration and Similac-maker Abbott have reached a deal to reopen the formula factory in Sturgis, Michigan, is welcome news for desperate parents, but it will do little to alleviate the shortage anytime soon. This is in no small part because of the very nature of America’s baby formula industry.
Game developer Bungie has refiled its lawsuit against cheat seller AimJunkies.com, which offered the popular 'Destiny 2 Hacks' suite for sale. The amended complaint, filed at a federal court in Seattle, includes more details on the alleged copyright infringements. AimJunkies, meanwhile, reports that it will be taken over by the Ukrainian company Blome Entertainment.
In response to a complaint filed by the leading Spanish football league LaLiga, the country's National Police has carried out a large-scale operation against a supplier and end-users of pirated live sports broadcasts. Coordinated inspections targeted 166 commercial premises in 13 regions, leading to the dismantling of a piracy distribution network and the identification of its operators.