First up in the news: Ubuntu is out-fedoring Fedora; Linux 5.18 brings new optimizations; the Budgie has landed; Debian 12 has a projected birthday, and Asahi has its first Alpha;
In security and privacy, a new Spectre has arisen;
Then in our Wanderings, Bill gets “Jitsi with it”, Moss goes down the “pi-hole”, and Norbert hops onto the Fedora bandwagon
In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.6 and some of the applications pre-installed.
After my last blog post I was so exhausted I had to take a week off, but I’m back. In the course of my blog-free week, I remembered the secret to blogging: blog before I start real work for the day.
It seems obvious, but once that code starts flowing, the prose ain’t coming.
[...]
Some time ago I implemented dmabuf support for lavapipe. This is finally landing, assuming CI doesn’t get lost at the pub on the way to ramming the patches into the repo. Enjoy running Vulkan-based display servers in style. I’m still waiting on Cyberpunk to finish loading, but I’m planning to test out a full lavapipe system once I finish the game.
Also in lavapipe-land, 1.3 conformance submissions are pending. While 1.2 conformance went through and was blogged about to great acclaim, this unfortunately can’t be listed in main or a current release since the driver has 1.2 conformance but advertises 1.3 support. The goalpost is moving, but we’ve got our hustle shoes on.
On May 19, 2022 nVidia made a release of their OpenSource kernel modules for their newer GPU platforms (Turing and newer) with Risc-V system processor. Meanwhile we have (open)SUSE packages for simple testing available in the X11:Drivers:Video project of our openSUSE Build Service. If you want to give these a try you need to install nvidia-open-gfxG06 and kernel-firmware-nvidia-gsp packages.
Apple announced a slew of updates to Mac with macOS Ventura at WWDC this week, including a new feature that will let users take advantage of Rosetta inside ARM Linux virtual machines.
One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac.
Whether you are a movie lover or an animation series lover, you must need a good-quality video player to run the file on your Linux-powered PC. And most Linux users often face a problem finding the best Linux video players. While finding a video player for Linux, you should check the interface, file support, shortcut, subtitle support, and some basic features. And it should be clean and contain not so many features to make you confused. However, if you are looking for a Linux/Ubuntu video player, you can check this content.
apt-get command is used to manage package in Ubuntu and other Debian based distribution. You can install, remove software in Ubuntu, You can update upgrade ubuntu and other operating systems with help of this command.
If you want to install new software on the Linux operating system by apt-get command but you get the error “apt-get command not found“. This is really the biggest problem for the new user. Neither you can install new packages nor you can update and upgrade ubuntu.
apt-get is not working, how will you install a new package? If the problem only of installing new packages then it can be solved. You can use dpkg command to install deb files in ubuntu and derivatives.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Discord on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Discord is a platform that allows you to create chat servers where users who are fans of a particular topic can get together to talk in a kind of community. Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros and portable platforms such as Android and iOS and even directly in the browser.
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 Discord on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Hello geeks, booting Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) into rescue and emergency mode helps to reset the forgotten user password, fix the file system errors and disabling or enabling systemd service during boot.
In this post, we will learn how to boot Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system into rescue and emergency mode. Rescue mode is similar to single user mode where are all troubleshooting steps are executed. Rescue mode loads the minimal environment and mount root file system.
Whereas in emergency mode, we get the single user shell without starting any system services. So emergency mode is required when we can’t boot the system into rescue mode.
Wireguard is a modern VPN that employs cutting-edge cryptography. It was originally designed for Linux, but it is now a cross-platform tool that works flawlessly on all major operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, BSD, iOS, and Android.
Wireguard is simple to set up and use. It is faster than OpenVPN and other VPN tools because it is built into the Linux kernel. Unlike other VPN tools, the codebase of Wireguard is so small that it can be easily audited by a single person.
It employs cutting-edge cryptographic techniques such as the Noise protocol framework, Curve25519, ChaCha20, Poly1305, BLAKE2, SipHash24, HKDF, and secure trusted constructions. The modern design of wireguard makes the codebase unusually small, resulting in faster communication between server and clients.
In this article, I will show you how to install and configure Wireguard VPN on Linux. I’m going to use Ubuntu with 8GB of RAM and 4 vCPU for the demonstration. It is more than adequate for home users or small businesses with a few employees.
When searching a file using grep it’s often useful to be able to ignore the case of the text you are searching for. By default grep is case sensitive.
The security of your network — and the traffic flowing back and forth — is crucial to keeping your data and the data of your customers and clients out of the hands of bad actors. To that end, there are several tools you can use. One such tool is the open-source Maltrail traffic detection system.
Maltrail offers a web-based interface and works with publicly-available blacklists, reports, and user-defined lists to help security admins discover unknown threats on your network. Maltrail is run from the command line but offers a user-friendly web-based interface.
I want to walk you through the installation of Maltrail on Ubuntu Server 22.04, so you can start monitoring for malicious traffic right away.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GlassFish on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GlassFish is a free, open-source software application server developed by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). It implements technologies defined in the Java EE platform of this company and allows running apps that support this specification. It comes under two free software licenses Common Development and Distribution License and GNU General Public License.
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 GlassFish 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.
This tutorial continues Calc Basics IV and now we will learn two new formulas namely LEN and CONCATENATE. As an addition, you will also learn new skills called Paste Special and also Compare Sheets to help you copying formula and text to your needs. As a reminder, if you haven't followed this LibreOffice Calc series, read the first and second parts here. Now let's study.
The first thing we are going to think if we talk about web servers is Apache and Nginx. And it is that these two web servers are the most used around the world thanks to the speed, stability, and flexibility that both provide. However, there are other solutions that we have to consider. Today, you will learn how to install Lighttpd on Linux Mint 20.
Let’s learn the commands to install Docker Compose on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish to automate the process of setting up containers with the help of various Docker Images.
What is Docker Compose?
Docker-Compose is a CLI tool that is installed with Docker. Similar to images, there is the file in which the individual steps are listed. However, the syntax is slightly different from the individual calls directly in the Docker CLI. Particularly charming is the fact that it automatically ensures that the containers can see each other on the net.
Why do we use Docker Compose?
The network is one of the most significant components of the modern information technology infrastructure. When your computer is connected to a network, other devices can communicate with your computer using the computer name, which is also known as the hostname. If your computer does not have a unique hostname in the network, then you must change it.
Over the “pinksterweekend” (Wikipedia informs me that’s Pentecost) the board of KDE e.V. met in real life for the first time in over two years. The board of directors meets weekly online, and we have regular – two or three times a year – weekend-long sprints to hammer out bigger issues and do administrative backlog. Since COVID, we have done these weekend sprints online as well, but we felt that at this point, the benefits of an offline, real life meeting outweighed the risks. The meeting was hybrid, with four people in the room and one virtual participant.
The time I have available to maintain GNOME Initial Setup is very limited, as anyone who has looked at the commit history will have noticed. I’d love more eyes & hands on this important but easy-to-overlook component, particularly to guide it kindly but firmly into the modern age of GTK 4 and the refreshed HIG.
I found that making a batch of 1–3 releases across different GNOME branches every few months was surprisingly time-consuming and error-prone, even with the pretty comprehensive release process checklist on the GNOME Wiki, so I’ve been periodically trying to automate bits of it away.
Philip Withnall’s gitlab-changelog script makes writing the NEWS file a lot quicker. I taught it to output the human-readable names of each updated translation (a nice additional contribution would be to also include the name of the human who updated the translation) and made it a little smarter about guessing the Git commit range to scan.
Beyond that, I added a Meson run target, maintainer-upload-release pointing at a script which performs some rudimentary coherence checks on the version number, tags the release (using git-evtag if available), atomically pushes the branch and that tag to GNOME GitLab, then copies the source tarball to master.gnome.org. (Apparently it has been almost 12 years since I did something similar in telepathy-gabble, building on the make maintainer-upload-release target that Simon McVittie added in 2008, which is where I borrowed the name.) Maybe other module maintainers may find this script useful too – it’s quite generic.
The new version of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is compliant with version 4 of Google's SLSA framework, which should help users combat vulnerabilities such as Log4j and upstream JavaScript library issues.
The company's online conference, SUSECON, is under way, and the first big announcement was SLE 15 SP4, an incremental change to this relatively slow-moving, business-friendly distribution.
SLE 15 appeared in 2018, and the company puts out a new version about once a year. For its enterprise distro, it calls this a "service pack," but for the free distro it's just a simple point release.
More often than not, sitting underneath enterprise applications running on-premises or in the cloud is a Linux operating system. Today at the SuseCon Digital conference, enterprise Linux vendor Suse today announced the latest update release of its namesake platform, with new features designed to help improve reliability, security and performance.
Among the new features in Suse Enterprise Linux 15 Service Pack 4 (SLE 15 SP4) is support for live patching, which will enable organizations to patch a running system without the need for a system reboot. The new Suse Enterprise Linux update also includes support for the latest AMD confidential computing capabilities. Suse is now also among the first enterprise Linux distributions to include open-source Nvidia GPU drivers, which will help to accelerate graphics and AI use cases on Linux systems.
Members of the openSUSE Brazilian community are getting together for a release party on June 15 for openSUSE Leap 15.4.
The team is developing a full schedule and will be doing live lectures and will give away a few items.
The event will be on YouTube and people are asked to sign up for a ticket to receive the participation link.
A quick Google search of the term “new normal” will return countless results outlining how life has changed as a result of the pandemic. Spanning virtually every industry and touching on numerous facets of our daily life, it’s safe to say that things will never return to the way they were prior to March 2020.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, particularly when it comes to the changes driven by our new reality.
When you think about COVID-19’s corporate impact, the remote work shift is likely one of the first things that come to mind. According to a February report from Pew Research, 59 percent of U.S. workers who say their jobs can be done remotely are continuing to work from home even as offices have opened back up.
Colleagues and job seekers often ask me, as a CIO, what I’m looking for when it comes to hiring. I tell them, “I’m looking for ranchers, not pet owners.”
My response, while blunt, speaks to the changing nature of IT and how digitization and worldwide governmental mandates are changing how we approach our roles. We no longer have the time nor the resources for one-time unique “pet” projects without repeatability or reuse components. We need solutions that are template-based, repeatable, and easily scalable to meet rapidly changing business conditions.
My advice to peers and colleagues is to hire candidates with the skill sets to focus on economies of scale. Interchangeable solutions that can be replicated to meet whatever level of service your business demands are essential.
The kernel team is working on final integration for Linux kernel 5.18. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week now through Sunday, June 05, 2022. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Packit shows basic information about allowlisting in the status description when your namespace is not allowed. (packit-service#1533)
We’re pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.5, which is designed to help organizations streamline the management of cloud-native workloads and hybrid cloud. This latest release enables customers to extend their existing tools and skills to simplify operations, while providing greater visibility into how they can further optimize Kubernetes management.
As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) one of the best parts of the job is the regular contact with our customers, talking to them frequently and helping them solve interesting problems.
One of our customers came to me with an interesting challenge. The team creates a new Gold Image every month and they wanted to provide release notes for the image, automatically generating a list of CVEs that had been fixed in this version of the image.
Red Hat publishes release notes for new product versions which include details of CVEs and RHSAs which have been fixed in a release, such as in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 now offers convenient (but unsupported) access to RPMs from two of the largest and most popular code repositories: The Python Package Index (PyPI) for Python and the RubyGems collection for Ruby. This new offering makes it easier to use thousands of community libraries in your projects. We'll look at the repositories in this article.
Hello all,
As of the 7th of June 2022, Fedora 34 has reached its end of life for updates and support. No further updates, including security updates, will be available for Fedora 34. All the updates that are currently in testing won't get pushed to stable. Fedora 35 will continue to receive updates until approximately one month after the release of Fedora 37. The maintenance schedule of Fedora releases is documented on the Fedora Project wiki [0]. The Fedora Project wiki also contains instructions [1] on how to upgrade from a previous release of Fedora to a version receiving updates.
Tomas Hrcka
It turns out that it is not just a whole lot of money at stake. When you involve lawyers, everybody's dirty laundry has to come out. Serious people quit and new people will be reluctant to replace them. Carter has demonstrated with his own words, above, that he did not calculate the real cost of this extreme act of bullying. Therefore, the only act of leadership remaining for this Debian Project Leader is to apologize and resign or prove that some other party, like Google, blackmailed him to do this.
Carter has the option to withdraw the claim from WIPO. Some lawyers would provide very strong reasons to do so. If Carter withdraws the claim then that is an admission of both failure and cowardice and he must simultaneously resign.
Chris Lamb attacked the privacy of my family at a very painful time. He violated a holiday season. Lucy Wayland died a death that may have been avoidable in a healthier organization. Chris Lamb's complete resignation from Debian would be a helpful act of leadership that will encourage future Debian Project Leaders to live up to that particular title.
Both Debian and Ubuntu are often considered outstanding choices to meet your desktop and server needs. But what are the differences and similarities, and which is right for you?
If you’ve ever asked a seasoned Linux user what desktop distribution is best for a new user, chances are pretty good you might be told Ubuntu. If you ask about server distributions, you might hear the same answer. You might also hear Debian added into the mix.
Although there are a lot of similarities between these two open-source operating systems, there are also differences. Let’s take a look at both and see if we can determine which might be the best fit for your needs.
Texas Instruments has just launched the new Sitara AM62 family with AM623 and AM625 single to quad-core Cortex-A53 processors designed to provide IoT gateways and HMI applications with AI processing at low power, in some cases with up to 50% reduction in power consumption.
The AM623 processor specifically targets Internet of Things (IoT) applications and gateways that may benefit from object and gesture recognition, while the AM625, equipped with a 3D GPU, should power HMI applications with edge AI and up to two full-HD displays.
If you ever wished you could bring the accessibility, simplicity and power of the Arduino ecosystem into your work environment, you’re not alone.
Whether you’re a Gen Z or a Millennial engineer, developer or entrepreneur, and whether you’re beginning your first job, founding a startup or progressing in your career, you’re bringing to the table a wide range of skills previous generations were never taught or encouraged to explore. What’s more, you likely have a whole different approach to work, change and innovation. At Arduino, we like to think we might have had a little something to do with that.
As you probably know, Arduino was born in Italy at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, as an easy-to-use tool for fast prototyping, aimed at students with no background in electronics or programming. The platform was meant to enable creatives through technology. Little did we know we’d fire up the maker movement, and soon expand to offer tools for education and professionals as well.
Goldman Sachs open sourced the code and contributed its internally developed Legend data management platform into FINOS in October 2020. Legend provides an end-to-end data platform experience covering the full data lifecycle. It encompasses a suite of data management and governance components known as the Legend Platform. Legend enables breaking down silos and building a critical bridge over the historical divide between business and engineering, allowing companies to build data-driven applications and insightful business intelligence dashboards.
Is your business looking for an easy way to create database applications, without having to worry about writing complicated code? If that sounds like you, you might want to invest a bit of time with a new platform called NocoDB.
NocoDB claims to be an Airtable alternative, and it can be deployed to your network via a Docker container. What’s special about NocoDB is that it offers a very user-friendly means of creating database-driven applications with point-and-click simplicity.
I’m going to show you how to deploy NocoDB with the help of Docker so you can get started building your first database application.
Welcome, June --we're opening the month with another great week. Here's what the Apache community has been up to...
Machine Translation is an important tool for expanding the accessibility of web content. Usually, people use cloud providers to translate web pages. State-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are large and often require specialized hardware like GPUs to run inference in real-time.
If people were able to run a compact Machine Translation (MT) model on their local machine CPU without sacrificing translation accuracy it would help to preserve privacy and reduce costs.
The Bergamot project is a collaboration between Mozilla, the University of Edinburgh, Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Tartu with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It brings MT to the local environment, providing small, high-quality, CPU optimized NMT models. The Firefox Translations web extension utilizes proceedings of project Bergamot and brings local translations to Firefox.
In this article, we will discuss the components used to train our efficient NMT models. The project is open-source, so you can give it a try and train your model too!
The wait for this year’s major new Thunderbird release is almost over! But you can test-drive many of the new features like the brand new Address Book, Matrix Chat support, import/export wizard, and refreshed visuals right now with the Thunderbird 102 Beta. Better still, you might be directly responsible for improving the final product via your feedback and bug reports.
Below, you’ll find all the resources you need for testing the Thunderbird 102 Beta. From technical guides to a community feedback forum to running the beta side-by-side with your existing stable version, we’ve got you covered.
She holds an engineering degree in computer science and has been working as a test engineer for more than 10 years. In the last couple of years her main focus is automation in testing, finding ways to improve testing process and tools that will support testing activities.
Zaklina will be the primary contact for our History of Testing project where we are compiling a database of people who influenced or made important contributions to our professional field.
In 2020, the city of Bühl in Germany launched "Palim! Palim!", a video conferencing platform based on the Free Software "Jitsi Meet". The city offered the platform to citizens who needed it, and the initiative was well received. Two years later clubs, citizens, and the city itself use "Palim! Palim!" daily.
Interview with German administrations which use Free Software. May 2022.
Other municipalities have also shown interest in the solution. An association of nine administrations that use 'Palim! Palim!' have jointly modernised the administration, based on Free Software. Re@di – regional.digital is an inter-communal cooperation of nine southern German cities. Their common needs are met through synergy effects in collaborative development. In an interview, Alexander Gabriel and Eduard Itrich shared that the administrations could use their resources cost-efficiently thanks to cooperation and sharing Free Software.
Don't you just hate it when you get nerd sniped?
I don't either. It is usually quite fun. Case in point, some time ago I came upon this YouTube video:
It is about how a "500 piece puzzle" usually does not have 500 pieces, but instead slightly more to make manufacturing easier (see the video for the actual details, they are actually quite interesting). As I was watching the video I came up with an idea for my own math-themed jigsaw puzzle.
You can probably guess where this is going.
The idea would not leave me alone so I had to yield to temptation and get the damn thing implemented. This is where problems started. The puzzle required special handling and tighter tolerances than the average jigsaw puzzle made from a custom photo.
“From scratch” is a bit of a murky expression. How scratchy does it get? Are you just baking your bread yourself or are you growing your own wheat? Rolling your own solar installation probably doesn’t involve manufacturing your own photovoltaic cells. But when it comes to making the frame to hold your panels, why not machine your own brackets and harvest the wood from trees nearby?. That’s what [Kris Harbour] did with his over-engineered 8.4kW solar stand.
We have released Qt 5.15.10 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.10 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
You can add Qt 5.15.10 in the existing online installation by using the maintenance tool or do a clean installation by using the Qt Online Installer. Offline installers are available in the Qt Account download area.
The Python Software Foundation has released the results of its fifth annual Python Developers Survey, done in collaboration with JetBrains. The study, performed in late 2021, surveyed more than 23,000 Python developers and enthusiasts globally, according to the announcement. Here are a few highlights from the survey.
“Python is being used by the vast majority (84%) of survey respondents as their primary language,” the announcement says, and it is an important tool for many others.
Automatic Garbage Collection (GC) is one of the most important features that makes Java so popular. This article explains why GC is essential. It includes automatic and generational GC, how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) divides heap memory, and finally, how GC works inside the JVM.
I was talking to @frotz@freeradical.zone since he's thinking of adapting Halberts to a science fiction game of his, which is funny because Halberst is a translation of Helmbarten which is a variant of Traveller for Fantasy. Full circle!
[...]
Also makes me think about Burning Wheel where you have two "skills" for wealth and circles/contacts: if you need to talk to a certain person, or get a certain thing, you roll that skill and that determines whether you can get it using your networks. One of the rewards could be +1 to either of these two, for example.
If it's a skill we could model scouts having no resources and no networks, merchants having lots of resources, navy people having no resources but lots of contacts, stuff like that.
Those old enough to have encountered punch cards in their lifetime are probably glad to be rid of their extremely low data density and the propensity of tall stacks to tip over. But obsolete as they may be, they’re a great tool to show the basics of binary data storage: the bits are easily visible and can even be manipulated with simple tools. As an experiment to re-create those features in a more modern system, [Michael Kohn] made a punch card-like system based on LEGO bricks that stores machine code instructions for a 65C816 CPU, the 16-bit successor to the venerable 6502.
As part of [Erich Styger]’s recent kitchen overhaul with more power-efficient machines, he came across the ‘AutoDos’ feature of the new Miele G 27695-60 dishwasher. These are essentially overpriced containers of dishwashing powder that go into a special compartment of the machine, from which the dishwasher can then dispense the powder as needed. The high price tag and purported single-use of these containers led to the obvious question of whether they can be refilled.
The inconvenience of having to walk to your mailbox to check for mail has inspired many hackers to install automated systems that let them know when the mail has been delivered. Mailbox monitors have been made based on several different mechanisms: some measure the weight of the items inside, some use cameras and machine vision, while others simply trigger whenever the mailbox’s door or flap is moved. When [Gary Watts] wanted to install a notification system for his 1940s brick letterbox, his options were limited: with no flap or door to monitor, and limited space to install mechanical contraptions, he decided to use a LIDAR sensor instead.
Most people I talked to about buying expensive products are aware of “the law of diminishing returns”. When you buy a product, the more you pay for it the less extra quality you get for the extra spending. However, not many people recognize that the same can be said of most human activities. It is a lie that “just a little more effort” will lift you from above average to the top, as the law of diminishing returns hits even harder. You can have all the money in the world, but time - that is limited.
The law of diminishing returns
I am a HiFi maniac, so I am affected greatly by this law. I can choose to buy a pair of headphones for $20, $200, or for over $2000. There is probably a 2-3x quality increase in sound between the $20 and $200 headphones. The difference in quality is even less noticeable from $200 to $2000. I try to convince myself that my Sony WH 1000XM3 or my Sennheiser HD300Pro are good enough. They are more expensive and of better quality, than what most people use around me. I am happy with them, but unfortunately, I can hear the difference between them and the $1000+ category. Thankfully, I am not this picky when it comes to many of my other interests. :-)
Two years ago, just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to radically transform day-to-day life for nearly everyone on the planet, the United States Postal Service decided to protect cops from passive criticism. One month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin personified America’s omnipresent racism by kneeling on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd until he was dead, the USPS stepped in to seize a shipment of face masks containing phrases like “Stop killing Black people” and “Defund police.”
Security updates have been issued by Debian (glib2.0, librecad, and php-horde-mime-viewer), Fedora (vim), and Ubuntu (freerdp2, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, and vim).
Owl Labs has released security updates to address a vulnerability (CVE-2022-31460) in Meeting Owl Pro and Whiteboard Owl. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information.
Looking to secure the Joomla website? Here are some of the best practices to prevent the Joomla website from getting hacked by cyberattackers in 2022.
Access Now is encouraged by the introduction of the discussion draft of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, and its potential to defend human rights and combat data-driven discrimination. The legislation brings civil rights protections into the digital age.
Last week, U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone, Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker released a draft of a comprehensive national data privacy and security framework. The bill would require companies that collect data to conduct annual civil rights assessments on their algorithms’ impacts and submit those reports to the Federal Trade Commission. It would also prohibit disparate impact ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹in AI algorithms, limit the amount of information entities collect about people online, hold companies to high standards of data security, and give people the power to sue companies for privacy violations.
Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association's (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting. Two decades as a reporter in war zones, however, resulted in a deep aversion to weapons. I saw what they did to human bodies. I inherited my grandfather's guns and gave them to my uncle.
With senators negotiating a gun control package that is expected to leave out a reinstatement of an assault weapons ban and expanded background checks on gun purchases, Rep. Don Beyer is proposing a unique method of keeping AR-15s and similar semiautomatic weapons out of people's hands.
The Virginia Democrat said late Sunday that he's drafting a proposal to impose a 1,000% excise tax on firearms like the ones used by numerous perpetrators of mass shootings in recent years.
Mexico's leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Monday that he is skipping the Summit of the Americas, following through on his threat to boycott the upcoming meeting if the White House refused to invite officials from all nations in the Western Hemisphere.
The Biden administration's decision to bar the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from this week's gathering in Los Angeles was made final on Sunday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's devastating and illegal invasion of Ukraine, launched in large measure to compensate for strategic vulnerabilities caused by NATO's expansion, has triggered the most tumultuous and potentially dangerous transformation of the geopolitical disorder since the end of World War II. Internationally, there is a near-complete absence of trust and cooperation between the world's most powerful nations even as we face the existential threats of nuclear, climate, and pandemics. We are cursed with the near-complete absence of arms control agreements with the exception of New START which will soon expire. And hopes that global warming can be limited to 1.5C have evaporated.
An anti-war coalition based in the United Kingdom warned Monday that the British government's decision to follow in the Biden administration's footsteps and supply Ukraine with longer-range rocket systems risks extending—and potentially intensifying—Russia's deadly war.
The move, announced Monday by U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, could usher in "a wider and still worse conflict," said Andrew Murray, deputy president of the Stop the War Coalition.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has unleashed a battle not only between two armies and two societies, but also between two generations of leaders. Indeed, a striking age gap divides Russia and Ukraine’s top brass. Vladimir Putin’s close associates and key officials were largely born in the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas the most important positions in the Ukrainian leadership and on Volodymyr Zelensky’s team are, for the most part, occupied by people born in the 1970s and 1980s. But there’s also another clash of generations, one occurring not at the interstate level, but inside Russia itself. Putin’s contemporaries are afraid to relinquish power and bequeath it to those who should be their successors. Instead, they’ve worked to bring the younger generations of would-be leaders to heel, pushing them to the margins of public space or driving them out of the country altogether.€
Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine has been deadly for reporters. The Ukrainian Institute of Mass Information has recorded 243 crimes against journalists and the media committed by Russian troops since the start of the full-scale invasion (as of the end of April). At least 32 journalists have died while reporting on the war or fighting on the front lines. Reporters have been tortured and kidnapped, and as of the end of April, at least 15 Ukrainian media workers had gone missing. Over 100 regional Ukrainian outlets have had to shut down due to threats from Russia. In early May, the Pulitzer Prize committee dedicated a special award to all Ukrainian journalists —€ for “their bravery, resilience, and commitment to truthful coverage” of the Russian invasion. Five Ukrainian journalists told Meduza about what it’s like to live and work in these unprecedented circumstances.
Now that we’re encountering mass shootings in America on what appears to basically be a weekly or so clip, all the tired, made-up, bullshit talking points that get trotted out to shift blame are coming off as even more tired and made-up than they did previously. We’ve now had three mass shootings that have been all over the media in the past 3 weeks — while, by definition, there have already been over 200 mass shootings that have occurred just this year in America — all of which used a common AR-15 long-rifle weapon. Beyond that, there aren’t a ton of similarities in the shootings. One appears to have been a racist attack on an African American neighborhood, another the random desire of a sick individual to specifically shoot up an elementary school, while the most recent in Tusla thus far looks to be a more targeted killing event for reasons unknown at the time of this writing.
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (appointed by a Republican President) wrote in 2019, "District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution, is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench."
A survey published Sunday shows that nearly half of Republican voters in the United States believe mass shootings of the kind that took the lives of 19 young children Uvalde, Texas last month are "unfortunately something we have to accept as part of a free society."
"I'm sorry, but living with the threat of random mass violence isn't freedom."
The House committee investigating the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its first public hearing on Thursday after 10 months of meeting in private. The hearing will be the first of eight and is expected to draw on roughly 1,000 depositions and interviews. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Will Bunch says the success of the hearings will hinge on whether the committee can convince the public that the January 6 attack “wasn’t just a one-off event” but rather “part of an ongoing threat to democracy.” Bunch also speaks about the Pennsylvania Senate race, which he says “is life or death for democracy,” as well as the mass shooting in Philadelphia on Saturday, which left three dead and 11 injured.
A leading peace group on Monday said a new report detailing the depth of U.S. support for Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen—hundreds of which have been called war crimes by international legal experts—shows the need for Congress to pass a recently introduced measure to end American complicity in the one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
"Our ongoing complicity is a stain on our nation's soul. Just further reason for Congress to pass the newly introduced Yemen War Powers Resolution."
Ten days ago, late on a Friday afternoon, May 27, 2022, the contractor's assessment of the repairs needed in the US Navy's Red Hill Jet Fuel Storage Area was delivered to the Hawai'i Department of Health. The redacted report made available to the public shed light on how badly managed and maintained the massive 80-year-old, 20 storage tank, 250 million gallon facility located a mere 100 feet above Honolulu's water supply, had become.
U.S. officials claim the sale will support national security objectives by improving Nigeria’s ability to fight the extremist group Boko Haram. But sales of weapons like these come with major human rights risks for the Nigerian population — risks U.S. officials should be taking more seriously.
U.S. lawmakers in Congress had a 30-day window, through May 14, to stop the administration from issuing a Letter of Offer and Acceptance. But they can still adopt legislation to block or modify the sale at any time up to the point of delivery of the military equipment.
Once upon a time, long, long ago—actually, it was early in the year 2000—I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It had been written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself "a spear-carrier for empire." And he described the origins of his book's title this way:
Every year, as the calendar flips from May to June, I feel a sense of dread sink into my chest. By June 1 each year, the West’s rainy season is long over, hurricane season is likely to have kicked off, and the grim annual parade of heatwaves has begun. While summer is still summer and we on the climate team at UCS look forward to ice cream and late sunsets as much as anyone, there’s something we need to tell you: Climate change has transformed summer into our country’s Danger Season, and we’d best start seeing it as such so that we can adequately prepare.
A major renewable energy bill never got a vote before the New York State Assembly's session ended early Saturday, leading its supporters and political observers to call out the Democratic speaker and cast doubt on the party's commitment to climate action on a national scale.
Noting that it only takes 76 votes to pass a bill in the chamber and 83 members confirmed their support for the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), the Public Power NY Coalition on Friday pushed Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-83) to hold a vote before lawmakers left Albany for the year and charged that "failure to do so is unequivocally climate denial."
The White House announced on Monday executive actions to help "create a bridge" to a "clean energy future" including invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of U.S.-made solar panels.
The actions, first reported by Reuters, come as the Build Back Better's climate provisions remain stalled in the Senate and amid the threat of new tariffs the solar industry has blamed for dampening domestic projects.
The economy added 390,000 jobs in May, while the unemployment remained unchanged at 3.6 percent for the third consecutive month. The May report showed clear evidence that the labor market is normalizing with wage growth continuing to slow.
The annualized rate of wage growth comparing the last three months (March, April, and May) with the prior three months (December, January, and February) was 4.3 percent, down from the 5.2 percent year-over-year increase. This is only moderately higher than the peak 3.6 percent year-over-year rate hit in February 2019. This means that if we are concerned about underlying inflation rather than supply shocks, most of the Fed’s work has been done.
Low-wage workers, union presidents, and progressive faith leaders on Monday urged President Joe Biden to meet with a handful of the millions of Americans living in poverty before the Poor People's Campaign rallies in Washington, D.C. on June 18 to demand an economy and democracy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few.
"It is time for the president to act on his pre-election promise to address poverty. More jobs alone, with a $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage, equal more poverty."
But this time it happened in Mexico, under a government that has promised to be governed by human rights, compassion and sovereignty. The videos of the Aug. 28, 2021 operation by the National Migration Institute with the National Guard against a caravan of migrants, mostly Haitians, on the Tapachula-Arriaga highway caused indignation and rage. They show National Guardsmen dressed in riot gear, pushing a Haitian man with his child in his arms and hitting another while his young son tries to save him. Another agent kicks a migrant man in the head as he lays helpless on the ground. The scenes captured on video are but a small part of the violence against the migrant caravan–many people are reported injured in acts that were not recorded.
Despite the bad image of Mexico generated by the brutality exposed on Aug. 28, two days later, the Migration and the Guard launched another operation against the group in Mapastepec, resulting in more people injured and detained. This video shows a hunt, people scattering, screams, men subjected to force and crying babies.
Though Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar has already twice declared victory in Texas' 28th District, progressive primary challenger Jessica Cisneros announced Monday that she plans to formally request a recount for the May 24 runoff election.
"Our movement was never just about the one politician—it was about taking on an unjust system."
The Altered States Series began in 2016, during the presidential primary election cycle, as a comment on the decline in discourse. Since then, it has evolved to explore the yawning chasm between the ideals of a nation and the brutality of its practice. These flags have been used in protests and demonstrations; they come to life outside of the gallery walls.
Third parties have a political impact far greater than their electoral successes. They are the research and development wing of the political system. Only once, during the exceptional rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, has a third party gained enough support to actually contend for power, but there are plenty of cases where the two major parties have liberally borrowed issues and ideas from upstart rivals. Lincoln’s Republicans themselves took their stance against the expansion of slavery from the earlier Liberty Party and Free Soil Party. The Democrats under William Jennings Bryan filched (and watered down) the agenda of the People’s Party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was similarly light-fingered in borrowing ideas from the Socialist Party and other left formations. In a more sinister vein, Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and dog whistles about “law and order” were motivated by a desire to steal the thunder of George Wallace, who ran in 1968 as the nominee of the American Independent Party.
Once upon a time, long, long ago—actually, it was early in the year 2000—I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It was written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself “a spear-carrier for empire.” And he described the origins of his book’s title this way: Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.
More than 40 civil rights and racial justice groups on Monday called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to ensure that the U.S. Senate votes to reinstate the monthly enhanced Child Tax Credit, which last year was credited with slashing child poverty by 30%.
Restoring the payments, which ended in December after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced he would not support his party's signature Build Back Better Agenda, would be "the most immediate, meaningful response to higher prices that Congress can deliver to 36 million families" who previously benefited from the Child Tax Credit (CTC), said the groups, including ParentsTogether Action, NAACP, and People's Action.
Including offenses based on harmful speech in the treaty, rather than focusing on core cybercrimes, will likely result in overbroad, easily abused laws that will sweep up lawful speech and pose an enormous menace to the free expression rights of people around the world. The UN committee should not make that mistake.The UN Ad Hoc Committee met in Vienna earlier this month for a second round of talks on drafting the new treaty. Some Member States put forward, during and ahead of the session, vague proposals aimed at online hate speech, including Egypt, Jordan, Russia, Belarus, Burundi, China, Nicaragua, Tajikistan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Algeria, and Sudan. Others made proposals aimed at racist and xenophobic materials, including Algeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Burkina Faso, € Burundi,€ India, Egypt, Tanzania, Jordan, Russia, Belarus, Burundi, China, Nicaragua, and Tajikistan.
For example, Jordan proposes using the treaty to criminalize “hate speech or actions related to the insulting of religions or States using information networks or websites,” while Egypt calls for prohibiting the “spreading of strife, sedition, hatred or racism.” Russia, jointly with Belarus, Burundi, China, Nicaragua, and Tajikistan, also proposed to outlaw a wide range of vaguely defined speech intending to criminalize protected speech: “the distribution of materials that call for illegal acts motivated by political, ideological, social, racial, ethnic, or religious hatred or enmity, advocacy and justification of such actions, or to provide access to such materials, by means of ICT (information and communications technology),” as well as “humiliation by means of ICT (information and communications technology) of a person or group of people on account of their race, ethnicity, language, origin or religious affiliation.”
As we have previously said, only crimes that target ICTs should be included in the proposed treaty, such as those offenses in which ICTs are the direct objects and instruments of the crimes and could not exist without the ICT systems. These include illegal access to computing systems, illegal interception of communications, data theft, and misuse of devices. So crimes where ICTs are simply a tool that is sometimes used to commit an offense, like the proposals before the UN Ad Hoc Committee, should be excluded from the proposed treaty. These crimes are merely incidentally involving or benefiting from ICT systems without targeting or harming ICTs. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) highlighted in January that any future cybercrime treaty should not include offenses based on the content of online expression:
Human rights and press freedom defenders on Monday called on the Brazilian government to do everything possible to find an Indigenous activist and a British journalist after the pair went missing in a remote area of the Amazon rainforest just days after receiving threats.
The Guardian reports Bruno Araújo Pereira, a former Brazilian government official tasked with protecting the country's uncontacted tribes, and longtime Guardian contributor Dom Phillips were last seen over the weekend in the Javari region of Amazonas state. According to the British paper, Pereira has long received threats from the loggers and miners seeking to invade and exploit Indigenous lands.
A judge on Spain's highest court has summoned former U.S. Secretary of State and Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo to testify about an alleged Trump administration plot to kill or kidnap jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a report published on Friday.
Spain's ABC reports National High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz issued the summons, which compels Pompeo to testify as part of an investigation of alleged illicit spying on Assange by Spanish security firm U.C. Global while the Australian was exiled in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
We speak with the chair of the California Reparations Task Force, which is the first in the United States and has just released a landmark report calling for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression. While the state report is unprecedented, reparations are “first and foremost a federal responsibility,” says attorney Kamilah Moore.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson faced tough questioning during the Senate confirmation hearing on her nomination to the Supreme Court. Everyone expected that. What came as a surprise was the sudden focus on a picture book, Anti-Racist Baby, written by Ibram X. Kendi. Held aloft in accusation by Texas Republican Ted Cruz, the gesture was indicative of an election-year assault on public education, especially anti-racist education and the sort of mud throwing we’re likely to see more of. How to respond? Kendi is professor in the humanities at Boston University, where earlier this year resurrected the abolitionist paper, The Emancipator, in collaboration with The Boston Globe. He’s also the author of five number one New York Times bestsellers, including Stamped: Racism, Anti-racism, and You, which was number two on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books in 2020. His next two books coming out in June are How to Raise an Anti-Racist and the picture book, Goodnight Racism. He was interviewed by Laura Flanders with Mitra S. Kalita and Sara Lomax-Reese, the cofounders of URL Media, on The Laura Flanders Show on April 6. Listen to the full, unedited conversation by subscribing to the Laura Flanders Show podcast at Lauraflanders.org.
McAllen, Tex.—Sister Norma Pimentel, the Catholic nun who directs the Humanitarian Respite Center in the Rio Grande Valley, surprised me when I asked about right-wing commentators and politicians using the baby formula shortage to vilify immigrants. Fox News, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and others claim that “illegal” migrant kids are getting formula while American children are not. “Our guests don’t want baby formula,” Sister Norma explained. “They’ve spent months walking and riding buses through Central America and Mexico, and their kids got used to drinking ordinary milk.”
Starbucks workers are accusing company management of illegally retaliating against labor organizing by moving to shut down an Ithaca, New York shop that voted to unionize in April.
Workers United, an€ SEIU affiliate representing Starbucks workers, filed a complaint Friday urging the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to pursue a court injunction to prevent the store closure, which is not the first time Starbucks has halted operations at a shop engaged in union activity.
For more than a decade (see our articles from 2012 and 2018), we’ve been monitoring the saga of Yonas Fikre, a US citizen who was placed on the US government’s “No-Fly List” and blacklisted by his government as a “suspected terrorist” while he was overseas on business.
Last week, after nine years and counting in the courts, Mr. Fikre “won” a second successive favorable decision on pre-trial appeals to the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, but his quest for justice remains unfulfilled. The history of this case to date is a case study in the lack of accountability or judicial review for no-fly decisions and decision-makers.
The US government didn’t tell Mr. Fikre when it blacklisted him, but did tell airlines and other governments who it hoped would take action against him — as in fact they did. Mr. Fikre’s placement on a widely-disseminated US government blacklist of alleged terrorists (euphemistically and misleadingly described by the US government as a mere “watchlist”) resulted, among other consequences, in his being arrested and tortured by authorities in the United Arab Emirates who told him they were acting at the request of the FBI.
In the final days of Missouri’s legislative session in May 2019, lawmakers turned their focus to a bill that would outlaw abortion in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The abortion ban passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Mike Parson remains in limbo, at least for now. A leaked draft opinion suggests the high court is preparing to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling, which would trigger bans in Missouri and about a dozen other states.
Access Now supports UN human rights experts’ condemnation of the Myanmar military’s efforts to cement a “digital dictatorship,” and backs the call for UN Member States and international donors to support civil society initiatives to counter internet shutdowns, censorship, surveillance, and increasingly throttled internet access in Myanmar. For more than a year, civil society has been calling for international intervention.
“Access Now welcomes the UN experts’ strong statement that shines a spotlight on the deteriorating digital rights situation in Myanmar,” said Wai Phyo Myint, Asia Pacific Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Day by day, more people are being forced into the dark. If they are not already shut out from communications via shutdowns, they struggle to maintain access because of deliberate sky-rocketing of internet service costs. Any access is controlled and manipulated through sweeping website and platform bans.”
In Parker vs. Delaware (1950), the famed attorney Louis Redding argued before the Delaware Court of Chancery that denying Black students admission to the University of Delaware was unconstitutional and violated the "separate but equal" provisions set forth in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
“She’s begging for total global humiliation. She’s gonna get it… I have no mercy, no fear, and not an ounce of emotion or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market… I’m so fucking happy she wants to fight this out!!! She will hit the wall hard!!!”
While it got lost under the obsession with “big tech,” California has been doing a lot of interesting stuff in a bid to counter “big telecom.” The state not only implemented new net neutrality rules requiring that telecom monopolies behave, it’s building a massive new open access fiber network that should go a long way in driving broadband competition to market, expanding broadband access and lowering costs.
As a new mother, I’ve spent the last few weeks terrified of running out of food for my 2-month-old baby, who was born six weeks early and has struggled with breastfeeding. But the thing that scares me as much as the prospect of running out of formula is the knowledge that this shortage is a preview of what is to come if governments fail to transition off fossil fuels and limit global warming.
Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital.