Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.
This chat lead to the inevitable topic of that time someone wrote an uninstaller that did something like "rm -rf $THING/", and sometimes $THING would be empty, so fun things happened. This generally put us in the mindset of "how can things go wrong", and "how can they can *be made* to go wrong, if you wanted to do that". The fact that a PATH was coming into play suggested system() or popen(), both of which run through a shell and thus introduce the possibility of injecting your own commands.
Here's yet another note-to-self on using jq, this time to transform a flat list of order totals and dates into a summary of total order values by year.
In doing some research for an upcoming live stream I was looking at the Northwind OData v4 service and in particular at the Summary_of_Sales_by_Years entity set. It is not what I initially expected; rather than be a summary of sales by year, it was a list of orders each with a shipping date, order ID and order total. There are over 800 entries, and I grabbed all of them and stored them in a single JSON file Summary_of_Sales_by_Years.json using a Bash shell script slurp that auto-follows the @odata.nextLink annotation trail on each chunk response.
Here is a way to get a high-quality PNG image with R: save it as SVG first, then convert the SVG file to a PNG file, with the rsvg package.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LibreWolf Browser on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, the LibreWolf web browser is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. LibreWolf is available on all desktop-based operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Linux distributions
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 LibreWolf Browser on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
If you are an editor and editing images is part of your daily life, then you should try the ImageMagick tool.
ImageMagick is a free and open-source tool to edit, create, compose, or convert digital images into other formats. It supports over 200 formats, including PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, SVG, PDF, DPX, EXR, and TIFF.
The very first major text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, is 46 years old this year. And, with the 3D re-make (by the legendary Ken and Roberta Williams, founders of Sierra) around the corner… now seems like a great time to revisit the original classic.
Wether you are new to Colossal Cave Adventure (often simply called “adventure” or “ADVENT”), or have simply not played it in some time, below you will find everything you need to experience the game in the most ultimate way possible.
Ready for another turn-based RPG with some rogue-lite mechanics, with the addition of a pretty strange storyline? The Hand of Merlin is out now with Native Linux support.
FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE has officially landed on Humble Store and Steam, and the good news is that it works on Linux plus it's Steam Deck Verified. Seems Valve were well aware to get it Deck Verified status right away, looks like we know why Proton 7.0-3 released recently then!
GOG have put up another game on a free giveaway for 72 hours, this time it's the rather great looking sci-fi adventure BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION.
An absolute gem of a game this and now perhaps a good time to go back and spend some proper time with it, as the rather large The Sunken Sea update is out now.
Got the need for speed? The F-14A Tomcat has landed in War Thunder with the major Danger Zone update out now.
Epic Games just announced a big upgrade to Epic Online Services, which will now include a full toolkit to enable developers to do cross-play.
 Plasma 5.26 will resolve a major pain point for users of the Wayland session with high DPI screens: you’ll now be able to choose how you want your XWayland-using apps to be scaled:
By the compositor–ensuring uniform scaling, but blurriness (this is the status quo) By the apps themselves–allowing them to use their pre-existing X11 high DPI capabilities, if they have them, but leaving apps without such capabilities at the wrong scale So if all the XWayland apps you use support high DPI scaling properly on X11, you can use this new setting to make them look nice and crisp at your chosen scale factor...
This week I mainly worked on making my apps REUSE compliant, a bit on Plasma and on some new apps.
This week’s BSD Now is depressingly honest in the title; no puns. Along with the normal links, there’s a Beastie Bit this week for Networks From Scratch.
An interesting thought: since HAMMER2 is intended to be a multi-master file system, it has to figure out – and quickly – which is the most up to date versions of any given file. That means you could have multiple versions of a file existing at the same time until that decision is made. That wouldn’t be visible from a user perspective.
FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor offers support for virtual networks connections. Beginning with FreeBSD13, bhyve also supports a netgraph backend for its virtual network devices.
Mixtile Blade 3 is a Rockchip RK3588 SBC with up to 32GB RAM designed for server applications, notably to build clusters through a U.2 edge connector with 4-lane PCIe Gen3, SATA 3.0 to interconnect multiple boards.
What was not clear so far is how multiple boards would be connected, as we were just shown two boards connected by a U.2 cable, which does not scale, and does not provide power as the 12V input also comes with the U.2 connector. The company has now provided more details showing how it’s done, namely through a breakout board that connects to the U.2 edge connector, and allows cluster design as shown below.
Ibase released a 3.5” single board computer (SBC) that is powered by the 11th Gen Intel Core processors (Tiger Lake H). The high performance IB956 SBC has quad-displays, dual GbE ports and dual SATA III.
Ibase’s new SBCs offer support for three models of Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake “H” processor:
When it comes to 21st-century communication, nothing quite fits the bill like a Raspberry Pi-powered translator that flashes a light in Morse code when Telegram messages come through. At least, that’s what Dmytro Panin (also known online as Dr2mod) has come to develop with his latest project, and we couldn’t be more mesmerized!
Are you tired of opening Telegram to check for new messages? Panin decided that a visual notification system would be much more fun and opted to create this Morse code translation platform to get the job done. Linking up with Telegram, users can look at the light when a message comes through to get a glimpse at the recently received text.
This is one of many projects we’ve featured from Panin, who seems to do nothing in his spare time but make really cool Raspberry Pi projects. Some of his previous projects include an SDR airplane monitor and this flappy bird game played by an AI.
Check out these deals on Raspberry Pi Kits and accessories.
With more than 40 million units sold and a powerful community of makers and fans behind it, Raspberry Pi is more than a single-board computer; it's a huge platform with an even bigger ecosystem behind it. Whether you want to build your own robot, create an A.I.-powered security camera, or just set up a simple computer for programming and web surfing, the Pi is for you.
You can find deals on everything from Raspberry Pi cases to screens, kits and perhaps even add-on boards. These are great for your Raspberry Pi projects or to give as gifts for the maker in your life. Don't expect to find sales on the bare boards, though, as these never drop below the MSRP.
After Gregorio posted this image earlier this week, it sparked a fair amount of discussion on the interwebs about the memory transfer speed of a 6502 processor.
The 6502 on Commodore machines shares the clock with the video chip. Since dual ported ram wasn't financially feasible at the time, they chose a memory access trick that allowed both the video chip and processor to access memory during a single clock cycle. I think it's the same on most Commodores, but on the VIC-20, the processor accesses the memory on the low part of the signal and the VIC chip on the high part. Maybe that's backward... anyhoo, you get the point.
Early on when I started using linux in 2016 Purism announced their librem 5 phone. Like most people in the linux space, I was intrigued. Being 15 at the time, I wasn't ready to drop $400 on the initial preorder but it got me looking at mobile linux for the first time.
This is when I discovered that this was far from the first time linux on mobile had been attempted. There was Ubuntu touch and Sailfish OS which had preceded purism a few years prior, both of which are alive today but failed to reach a wide audience and only booted on a few devices. But more importantly they failed to be what I imagined as a linux phone; both prioritized the mobile interface over having access to the preexisting linux ecosystem. Sure desktop apps could somewhat run on Ubuntu touch with the libertine containers but describing that as buggy would be putting it lightly.
In a previous post about KDE Itinerary I mentioned Android platform calendar support for the KCalendarCore framework. This is meanwhile functional (code), and here are some more details about it.
KCalendarCore not too long ago got a plugin interface for abstracting access to platform calendaring solutions. For this we now have an implementation for the Android platform calendaring API.
When competing against a cloud hyperscaler, a database is an excellent place to start. Low churn (data gravity), expensive products (often not fully utilized), and naturally built-in net dollar retention (databases rarely shrink). A look at two separate but converging spaces of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) and backend-as-a-service (BaaS).
Ulrich Richter Morales, a criminal lawyer, initiated legal action against the multinational technology company in 2015 due to its hosting on its Blogger platform of a blog that linked him to drug trafficking, money laundering and the falsification of documents.
The blog, which remains online, but hasn’t been updated since 2014, was published under the title Ulrich Richter Morales y sus chingaderas a la patria (Ulrich Richter Morales and his despicable deeds against the homeland). The identity of its creator is not publicly known.
Mr. Lloyd claimed he was fired last year because he complained about the influence of the religious sect. His suit also names Advanced Systems Group, or ASG, the company that sent Mr. Lloyd to Google as a contractor. Most of the Google Developer Studio joined the team through ASG as contractors, including many members of the Fellowship.
The suit, which Mr. Lloyd filed in August in California Superior Court, accuses Google and ASG of violating a California employment law that protects workers against discrimination. It is in the discovery stage.
The New York Times corroborated many of the lawsuit’s claims through interviews with eight current and former employees of the Google business unit and examinations of publicly available information and other documents. These included a membership roster for the Fellowship of Friends, Google spreadsheets detailing event budgets and photos taken at these events.
In part 5, we presented the weighted inclusive Gregory method. In that part and all previous parts, during the distribution of preferences we have ‘skipped over’ any candidates who have already been elected, as we said that to give extra votes to any of those candidates would be a waste.
While it is true that to leave a candidate with more votes than the quota, while there are vacancies still to fill, would be wasteful, there is another option we could have taken, rather than skipping those preferences completely.
The data measured is taken from Chartmetric’s data of Spotify’s public playlists. There are thousands of playlists on Spotify that track viral TikTok hits. That’s because someone will hear a 15 second song clip on TikTok and they’ll think, ‘I want to hear the rest of that.’ Which leads the person to search for the song on their preferred music streaming service to listen to the whole thing, rather than just a clip. This sort of activity gives some insight into the virality of clips on TikTok and how that correlates to success in the music streaming business.
The journalists pulled Chartmetric data from as many playlists archiving TikTok viral hits as they could find. The requirements were a song had to be added to a viral TikTok playlist between January through December 2020. They then ranked the songs by their popularity on TikTok, filtering out those with fewer than 100,000 posts.
NASA is scheduled to release the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12, 2022. They’ll mark the beginning of the next era in astronomy as Webb – the largest space telescope ever built – begins collecting scientific data that will help answer questions about the earliest moments of the universe and allow astronomers to study exoplanets in greater detail than ever before. But it has taken nearly eight months of travel, setup, testing and calibration to make sure this most valuable of telescopes is ready for prime time. Marcia Rieke, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and the scientist in charge of one of Webb’s four cameras, explains what she and her colleagues have been doing to get this telescope up and running.
[...]
After July 12, the James Webb Space Telescope will start working full time on its science mission. The detailed schedule for the coming year hasn’t yet been released, but astronomers across the world are eagerly waiting to get the first data back from the most powerful space telescope ever built.
So much about long COVID remains mysterious: The condition is hard to study, difficult to predict, and variously defined to include a disorienting range and severity of symptoms. But the numbers above imply ubiquity—a new plait in the fabric of society. As many as 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant. A similar number have acne, allergies, hearing loss, or chronic pain. Think of all the people you know personally who experience one of these conditions. Now consider what it would mean for a similar number to have long COVID: Instead of having blemishes, a runny nose, or soy milk in the fridge, they might have difficulty breathing, overwhelming fatigue, or deadly blood clots. Even if that 30 percent estimate is too high—even if the true rate at which people develop post-acute symptoms were more like 10 or 5 or even 2 percent, as other research suggests—the total number of patients would still be staggering, many millions nationwide. As experts and advocates have observed, the emergence of long COVID would best be understood as a “mass disabling event” of historic proportions, with the health-care system struggling to absorb an influx of infirmity, and economic growth blunted for years to come.
A federal appeals court on Friday issued a ruling on the weedkiller glyphosate that the coalition involved with the case called "a historic victory for farmworkers and the environment."
"EPA's failure to act on the science... has real-world adverse health consequences for farmworkers, the public, and ecosystems."
As food prices and hunger surge worldwide, hundreds of millions of people around the globe are "marching towards starvation"—increasing the likelihood of preventable deaths, civil unrest, and political violence in the months ahead—the United Nations food chief warned Thursday.
"We thought it couldn't get any worse, but this war has been devastating."
The FSA said the potential presence of small pieces of glass means they are unsafe to eat.
More than 330,000 people in the United States died during the pandemic because they were uninsured or underinsured. That grim statistic was reported this week by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health. In addition to that staggering, preventable death toll, in 2020 alone, our "fragmented and inefficient healthcare system," cost the U.S. $459 billion more than if we had genuine, universal healthcare. The Yale team prescription to prepare for the next pandemic: Medicare for All.
I’m tempted to file this under “everything old is new again when it comes to antivax lies,” but I know that some readers are irritated by my constant harping on how antivaxxers constantly have recycled the same sorts of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and misinformation to demonize COVID-19 vaccines. On the other hand, I never pass up a chance to laugh at Mike Adams when he does what he does so well, namely publish bad science so astoundingly stupid and ill-informed that actual experts in the field facepalm in unison. This time around, Mikey is engaging in misadventures in microscopy again to claim something very dire about blood clots, which he of course blames not on COVID-19 infection (which is known to cause blood clots) but on COVID-19 vaccines (one of which has been associated with a rare clotting disorder). The latest example of this occurred this week, when Adams published a “bombshell” on his conspiracy site Natural News entitled EXCLUSIVE: Shocking microscopy photos of blood clots extracted from those who “suddenly died” – crystalline structures, nanowires, chalky particles and fibrous structures, which he followed up yesterday with WATCH: Dr. Jane Ruby offers fresh insights about self-assembling “clots” and “nanowires” found in fully vaccinated cadavers.
So, you want to start reverse engineering MikroTik routers. Where do you start? As opposed to many routers which act more as a collection of independent binaries for each service, MikroTik devices implement a system of interconnected binaries which perform tasks for one another. Unfortunately, there is limited publicly available information about how this system-wide implementation works, and the good, technical information available is now a few years old. In that time, MikroTik released a number of minor version updates and one major revision software upgrade, making some of the technical details obsolete.
Consequently, we are left generally in the dark as to how MikroTik works, and digging into its dense, hand-rolled C++ binaries filled with custom library calls is a daunting task.
This blog post, which overviews our presentation at REcon 2022, outlines key knowledge and introduces tools that we created during our research over the past handful of months.
Sometimes, when I wanted to report a vulnerability to a product, service, or software project, I would be instructed to disclose my findings through a bug bounty platform such as HackerOne or Bugcrowd. When this happens, I might look around to see if any of the other programs interest me, but they rarely do.
As a consequence of this conduct, I’ve accrued a few thousand dollars over the years from both platforms. That may sound like a lot of money, but it’s basically a mobile phone bill’s worth of bounty money over 3+ years.
Kung will lead the 41-member NextGen Telecom Delegation leaving Taiwan Saturday (June 18). The group will take part in the Select USA Summit sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department, CNA reported.
This week’s show kicks off with another look at Ring’s potential to become a surveillance tool, this time prompted by a letter from Senator Ed Markey who wants Amazon to answer some questions. We then talk about a new capability for InfluxData’s time series database and explain why it matters before encouraging everyone who listens to the show or visits the site to get comfortable with doing things yourself. We then give a brief update on Insteon’s buyer and what it might mean before covering two industrial stories. First up is Siemens’ acquisition of Senseye, a company that provides predictive maintenance software, and then we discuss a remote factory experiment between Finland and South Korea. In smaller news we discuss the number of smart locks in U.S. households, Orro signing a deal with RTI for smarter light switches, and a new HomeKit enabled smart plug from TP-Link. We close by answering a listener question about the best smart lighting options to use in a new home.
There’s plenty of human work to be done, but there never seems to be enough humans to do it. When things need to be processed in bulk, we turn it over to hardware and software. It isn’t better. It isn’t smarter. It’s just faster.
Forces from Rwanda and a southern African regional bloc have helped retake towns from insurgents who’ve been wreaking havoc since 2017, largely securing a coastal stretch around Total’s project. But violence has recently spiked, spreading to new areas near Pemba, the Cabo Delgado province’s capital, and causing panic as IS disseminates photos of bodies it says were beheaded by its fighters.
Burkina Faso, particularly the north and east, has been the target of recurrent jihadist attacks since 2015 by movements affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, which have killed more than 2,000 people and displaced 1.8 million.
McGovern’s questions were spot-on. But they never really gained traction. The fall campaign focused on the Democratic nominee’s missteps and Nixon’s supposed accomplishments—Watergate was an afterthought. Though Democrats controlled Congress, it was not until February 1973 that the Senate established a select committee to investigate Watergate, with conservative North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin as its chair.
In the meantime, Nixon continued his presidency as the triumphal winner of a landslide reelection victory. The narrative of the era went askew. Politicians and pundits, many of them Democrats, came to accept the notion that nothing could have upended the Republican’s bid, and that Watergate only caught up with Nixon after he was well into his second term.
But what if accountability had become a priority in 1972?
The call came less than a day after The Washington Post reported that the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email communication between Ginni Thomas and Eastman. The sources, however, would not provide details of the correspondence.
With Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, we unbelievably find ourselves on the brink of a new Cold War, ironically as casualties of the last Cold War are running out of time to seek the compensation and justice they deserve.
A leading gun control advocate on Thursday led criticism of a newly released highly compact AR-15-style semi-automatic weapon being marketed as a tool to oppose government and Big Tech "censorship."
"Not-so-subtle language about buying this gun to use in some sort of holy civil war is right on their website."
Progressives responded with disgust after the Senate Armed Services Committee voted Thursday to tack an additional $45 billion on top of President Joe Biden's already massive military spending request, bringing the total proposed budget for the coming fiscal year to a staggering $857.6 billion.
"It's about funneling money into the military-industrial complex."
David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky discuss how George Orwell's doublethink became the way of the world.
But none of them went openly to the media. Sure, we remember the leaks to favored reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times, some of whom undersold what they were told, and saved the gory details for their books. We got “leaks,” but leaks are easily undermined. We needed whistleblowers, and we never got them.
What are all those streaks across the background? Satellite trails. [...]
"Sriracha is actually made from a very special type of pepper that only grows in the southern U.S. and northern Mexico," Murray Tortarolo said. "These red jalapeños are only grown during the first four months of the year, and they need very controlled conditions, particularly constant irrigation."
Irrigation, of course, requires lots of water, but northern Mexico is in its second year of a drought.
All three firms managed other peoples’ money. Celsius Network wooed retail investors. Babel Finance, which CNBC says has 500 clients, raised $80 million in a funding round a month ago. 3AC, which invested in crypto startups, managed $10 billion in assets in March, according to Fortune. The ripple effects from the firms’ woes are likely to affect the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Let’s make efficiency a metric again.
Originally launched back in 2011, the first version of the plug-in car grant offered up to €£5,000 off cars with CO2 emissions of less than 75g/km. The aim of the scheme was to increase the sale of low emission and fully electric cars – only 1,000 were recorded that same year.
Over the years, the grant has been updated and reduced. Most recently, in December 2021 the amount that drivers could benefit from was reduced from €£2,500 (for cars with an list price of €£35,000 or less) to €£1,500 (for cars with a list price of €£32,000 or less).
However, the government has now scrapped the scheme entirely with immediate effect.
According to Bank of Estonia (Eesti Pank), in 2021, Estonian e-shoppers' spending increased by more than 50 percent, to a total of €2.5 billion. In the same year, the volume of parcels delivered by the Estonian E-Commerce Union to parcel machines alone, rose to more than 12 million.
It is therefore fair to say that, E-commerce in Estonia has boomed, and it already accounts for more than 20% of total retail trade in the country.
Recession is likely. Share markets, bonds, property, crypto; it’s all falling, just as the cost of living is soaring and central banks around the world are hoisting rates to crush demand and curtail rising prices. Michael West checks out the outlook.
It’s not good. When you hear them saying “decisive action”, that is. That’s central banker jive for recession.
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe took the decisive action of appearing on TV last night to talk about decisive action, warning inflation could hit seven per cent by the end of this year. Rates are going up.
Lowe’s counterparts at the US Federal Reserve are about to take decision action too as inflation in the US hits 8.6%, its highest in 40 years. What does this mean for Australians? It means we will all be paying far higher interest rates on our mortgages, business loans, credit cards, the lot. It means we will all be poorer for a while as our superannuation and investments are worth less, indeed the value of property too.
Wall Street fell into bear market territory Monday, that’s 20% of its highs, dragging the ASX down with it. It failed to bounce last night. A “dead cat bounce” as they call it. On the ASX, shares are down only 14% from their record high last year. The US Federal Reserve is poised to hoist rates too, probably by 0.75%. The spectre of recession looms just as the cost of living soars.
Around the world, central banks are moving to crush demand and curtail inflation by lifting rates. Quickly now, finally. The thinking is that pain now means less pain later. They are literally forcing a recession and a fall in asset prices.
Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message: workers are exploited because the value they create is undemocratically taken by capitalists.
I've been fascinated by this exchange between Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and my friend and colleague Alex Lawson since I first saw it. I can't stop thinking about it, probably because it is one of the worst self-owns I've seen in a long time.€ Watching Romney fulminate is like looking at a yacht crash in slow motion (with a dog strapped to the top of the yacht).
Modern reviewers put modern televisions through a gamut of different tests to determine display brightness, quality, power consumption, and other factors. Samsung, apparently thought it would be a brilliant idea to try and cheat the benchmarking system used by many reviewers to give their TVs an unfair advantage in comparison.
Deepfakes are videos using a person's likeness to portray them doing something they never did.
New EU regulation, supported by the Digital Services Act (DSA), will demand tech firms deal with these forms of disinformation on their platforms.
Firms may be fined up to 6% of their global turnover if they do not comply.
“We must make our choice… We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
The European Commission has strengthened its Code of Practice on Disinformation, following guidance published in 2021 that it should be updated to take into account events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
The latest version builds on the original code of practice that was established in 2018, setting out a number of new commitments by both technology platforms and the broader industry to better fight disinformation online.
Demonetizing the distribution of disinformation; ensuring the transparency of political advertising; maximizing cooperation with fact-checkers; and providing researchers with better access to data are all amongst the pledges signatories have committed to.
The U.S. thinktank Atlantic Council released a report Wednesday on cybersecurity issues related to central bank digital currencies (CBDC). The authors provide a generalized discussion of CBDC security, but with a clear focus on the United States and issues specific to it.
Javed accompanied Omar on her recent controversial trip to Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied but Indian-claimed Azad Kashmir, a flashpoint territory that religious extremists rule.
His presence alongside the congresswoman indicates the continued growth of Pakistani influence operations and Islamist networks in the US. Similarly, Javed’s political connections lead to questions about his own agenda and influence, given the strict laws concerning foreign-sponsored lobbying in the United States.
India has been thrust into a diplomatic firefight with Islamic nations due to a controversy ignited by BJP spokespersons’ remarks on the Muslim prophet Muhammad. The furor began after two spokespersons of the ruling party, the BJP, made derogatory references to Islam and Muhammad, forcing New Delhi into urgently trying to appease neighborhood Islamic nations and hardline Islamists that demanded nothing less than punishment for both, particularly whom they deemed to be the serial offender, one Nupur Sharma. The fact that it was a Hindu woman insulting Islam must have come as particularly galling. Responding to blatantly offensive and Hindu-phobic insults against a Hindu deity during a television debate on the flagship Times Now television channel, Sharma made the cardinal mistake of rebutting said insult by referring to the deemed inappropriateness of the Muslim prophet’s relationship with six-year-old Aisha.
We speak with Bishop William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, about plans for Saturday’s Moral March on Washington and to the Polls to demand the government address key issues facing poor and low-income communities. The march will bring together thousands of people from diverse backgrounds to speak out against the country’s rising poverty rates, voter suppression in low-income communities and more. “To have this level of poverty that’s untalked about too often … is actually morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, politically insensitive and economically insane,” says Barber. Theoharis says the lack of universal healthcare in the U.S. is a major source of economic insecurity and has contributed to the COVID-19 death toll. She asks how a rich country “that spends more money on healthcare than any other nation with a comparable economy still has [these] kind of poor health outcomes.”
So far, the hearings are less about the specific acts committed on that day, and more about the disinformation campaign Trump waged before and after the 2020 election. This campaign told millions of Americans a lie, convinced them it was true and inspired hundreds to attempt to violently disrupt the country’s democratic process. The hearings have shown how Trump continued to promote the “Big Lie” even as his advisers told him it was nonsense, dozens of court cases attempting to prove fraud were dismissed, and investigators failed to find any evidence of fraud. The hearings have centered on the systemic rot of Trump’s denialism, and how that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack. The focus of the hearings is twofold: the disease of misinformation, not just the symptoms of its malignancy, and how that disease, when left unchecked, can devolve into a violently destructive force.
Bizarrely, the Guinness book of world records lists the “first microcomputer” as 1980’s Xenix. This doesn’t seem right to me: [...]
The European Commission on Thursday released an overhauled set of rules designed to stem the flow of disinformation. The EU's strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation will hold signatories to the code liable for failing to take action by fining them up to 6% of their global revenue. Tech giants Meta, Google, TikTok and Twitter are among the signatories.
Commissioners VÃâºra Jourová and Thierry Breton said in a press conference that the updates address previous shortcomings. The revised rules cover "manipulative behaviors," including deepfake videos, bots and fake accounts, but also aim to eliminate financial incentives for the spread of disinformation by ensuring that disseminators of problematic content don't benefit from advertising revenue. Platforms have also been asked to give users new tools to recognize, understand and flag disinformation.
There's zero ambiguity on this score. Prosecutors revealed that Mateen had originally planned a Disney-themed terror attack.
Some of the team members will move to Reddit and work on ML projects like how Reddit customises ad placements and keeps its communities safe.
He became the epitome of a fighter for freedom of expression. Fearlessly, he criticised the fanaticism of religions. With consequences: He was refused a Catholic funeral in Paris. But today he is almost more persecuted than he once was by the Catholics. Muslims have been opposing the performance of his play “Mahomet the Prophet” for thirty years now. A poetic statement against religious fanaticism and against the hypocrisy and arbitrariness of the powerful, it was influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. In the Arab world, Voltaire is a bogeyman for doing so, summarises the “FAZ” in an article.
The findings of a growing number of surveys, based on interviews with thousands of students around the country, reflect this duality in the way students think and feel about the state of campus speech. According to one recent study by the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit devoted to promoting viewpoint diversity, almost all students believe passionately in the need for an open culture of debate. About nine out of every 10 students agreed that “colleges should encourage students and professors to be open to learning from people whose beliefs differ from their own.” Nearly as many believe that “colleges should welcome students and professors with a lot of different points of view.”
A street artist nicknamed "ðzinsiz" (Turkish for unpermitted) stood trial for "openly degrading the Turkish flag" and "insulting the president" because of a mural.
The ðstanbul 20th Penal Court of First Instance acquitted the street artist for degrading the flag, MLSA Turkey reported.
We’ve written a couple times about Andy Parker, whose story is truly tragic. His daughter, a local TV news reporter, was murdered on air by a former colleague, in the middle of a live news broadcast. Truly horrific stuff. Parker has now spent years trying to remove the video of his daughter’s murder from social media. We first wrote about him in response to a very weird 60 Minutes episode, in which they used Parker’s story as an example of how social media websites like YouTube were unwilling to take down damaging content… even though the very same report admitted that YouTube not only has taken down that video repeatedly, but that it now prioritizes reports about that video and certain other content to remove as quickly as possible.
Social media censorship is threatening our press freedoms, the First Amendment, and at the horizon what remains of our democratic polity.
It’s no secret that the Russian government has been working overtime to try to block out accurate information about its invasion of Ukraine from reaching the citizenry. That’s part of why we found it so frustrating that some supporters of Ukraine sought to make it even more difficult for Russian’s to reach the wider internet.
Republican leaders in the US state of Florida have floated an idea to directly involve trustees in faculty hiring, exploiting what experts see as a major vulnerability for institutions nationwide in an era of deepening partisan interference.
Trustees of US universities have long been understood as boards of prominent citizens who meet on occasion to provide oversight while typically leaving institutions to manage their own affairs.
The emerging idea in Florida is to appoint trustees with significantly more partisan orientations and then encourage them to more aggressively exercise the explicit or de facto powers they already hold over university operations, down to the level of faculty hiring decisions.
In a blow to press freedom, the United Kingdom has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges related to the publication of classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Home Secretary Priti Patel signed off on the transfer after the U.K. Supreme Court denied Assange’s appeals earlier this year, part of a years-long legal battle that rights groups have decried as an attack on journalism and free speech. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison if convicted for violations of the Espionage Act, and his case represents a “once-in-a-lifetime fight for press freedom,” says Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s half-brother.
British Home Secretary Priti Patel on Friday signed an extradition order to send Julian Assange to stand trial in America. WikiLeaks€ called it a “dark day for press freedom” and said “the decision will be appealed.”
The Assange persecution is the greatest threat to Western press freedoms in years. It is also a shining monument to the fraud of American and British self-depictions.
Describing it as “shameful,” Reporters Without Borders international campaigns director Rebecca Vincent said the decision represented “another failure by the UK to protect journalism and press freedom, bringing Julian Assange a step closure to extradition.”
As supporters of Julian Assange held a news conference Friday at the United Kingdom's consulate in New York to demand freedom for the jailed WikiLeaks founder, a trio of leading leftist figures decried the British government's approval of the ailing Australian's extradition to the United States.
"Shouldn't we expect Western democracies to behave better?"
The British home secretary has formally approved the extradition of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the United States, in the latest development in a dangerous and misguided criminal prosecution that has the potential to criminalize national security journalism in the United States.
The U.K. government on Friday formally approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges, a decision that human rights groups condemned as a dire threat to journalism worldwide.
Assange, who has been detained in a high-security London prison since 2019, is expected to appeal the move by U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel, whose office insisted that the publisher's extradition to the U.S. would not be "incompatible with his human rights, including his right to a fair trial and to freedom of expression."
Patel’s decision to hand over a journalist to the US government for prosecution was immediately condemned by human rights and press freedom organizations. The Assange legal team planned to submit an appeal in the High Court of Justice challenging the political nature of the case and how extradition law was interpreted.Describing it as “shameful,” Reporters Without Borders international campaigns director Rebecca Vincent said the decision represented “another failure by the UK to protect journalism and press freedom, bringing Julian Assange a step closure to extradition.”
This is a dark day for Press freedom and for British democracy. Anyone in this country who cares about freedom of expression should be deeply ashamed that the Home Secretary has approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, the country that plotted his assassination.Julian did nothing wrong. He has committed no crime and is not a criminal. He is a journalist and a publisher, and he is being punished for doing his job.It was in Priti Patel’s power to do the right thing. Instead, she will forever be remembered as an accomplice of the United States in its agenda to turn investigative journalism into a criminal enterprise.Foreign laws now determine the limits of press freedom in this country and the journalism that won the industry’s most prestigious prizes has been deemed an extraditable offence and worthy of a life sentence.The path to Julian’s freedom is long and tortuous. Today is not the end of the fight. It is only the beginning of a new legal battle. We will appeal through the legal system; the next appeal will be before the High Court. We will fight louder and shout harder on the streets, we will organise and we will make Julian’s story known to all.Make no mistake, this has always been a political case. Julian published evidence that the country trying to extradite him committed war crimes and covered them up; tortured and rendered; bribed foreign officials; and corrupted judicial inquiries into US wrongdoing.€ Their revenge is to try to disappear him into the darkest recesses of their prison system for the rest of his life to deter others from holding governments to account.We will not let that happen. Julian’s freedom is coupled to all our freedoms. We will fight to return Julian to his family and to regain freedom of expression for us all.
After consideration by Westminster Magistrates Court and the High Court, the decision was passed to Patel; Assange now has 14 days to appeal. In a statement, WikiLeaks described the move as marking a “dark day for press freedom and British democracy”. They confirmed their founder’s intention to lodge an appeal.
In a statement, WikiLeaks said: "This is a dark day for press freedom and for British democracy. Anyone who cares about freedom of expression should be deeply ashamed that the Home Secretary has approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the US, the country that has plotted his assassination."
After Australia elected a Labor government in May, there have been hopes that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would intervene in the case and try to get Assange sent back to Australia.
Albanese hinted before the election that Assange's protracted judicial proceedings should be ended. When he was asked about it recently, he responded that diplomacy was not conducted over a megaphone.
The Home Office said his extradition had now been approved but he could still appeal the decision. WikiLeaks said he would.
He can launch an appeal at London's High Court which must give its approval for a challenge to proceed. He can ultimately seek to take his case to the United Kingdom Supreme Court. But if an appeal is refused, Assange must be extradited within 28 days.
The deportation was approved Friday by U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel following a series of failed legal battles in the U.K. courts. However, a number of appeal routes remain open to Assange, who has 14 days to appeal the decision.
Temur underlined that the journalistic activities of each of his clients were questioned during the interrogations and said as lawyers we witnessed eight days of unlawfulness, we see is that journalism is in danger.
"There is no interrogation regarding the actions of 16 journalists, it is journalism in question."
"There might be more arrests, detention warrants. The public and professional press organizations have a great responsibility. Freedom of the press should be protected."
Dicle Müftüoßlu, co-chair of the DFG, said: "You have not succeeded with all the methods of repression you tried since the 90s to silence the free press. You will not succeed with these operations either. You will not be able to deprive our colleagues of their freedom with copy-paste decisions. As we did not accept this decision, we will continue the protests until our friends are released."
Hakkñ Boltan,“Journalism is a must in this region. People are aware that there is no life without journalism. They know that freedom and rights are directly connected to press. The government does not understand that.”
California legislators finally lifted the opacity shrouding police misconduct records in early 2019. The new law eliminated exemptions, making police misconduct and use-of-force records available to records requesters for the first time in decades.
Non-profit organizations and academic researchers seeking to ensure the openness and transparency of broadband data collection efforts have created an organization, the National Broadband Mapping Coalition, seeking to gather resources on data and mapping.
Shepherded by the Marconi Society, this National Broadband Mapping Coalition has filed comments before the Federal Communications Commission and is ramping up its efforts to be a leading voice for open and transparent broadband data.
The group is led by Dustin Loup, of the public interest group Marconi Society. Loup has been actively involved in the internet governance and policy space for years. Together with Measurement Lab (which is led by Lai Yi Ohlsen), a non-profit group that has been collecting broadband speed data since 2008, these two organizations are poised to promote the vital role of open broadband data as the U.S. Commerce Department implements the largest expenditure of federal broadband funds in history.
The Wall Street Journal has offered up a helpful report (outside the paywall, for now) on the giant mess that is U.S. broadband subsidy efforts. Like many previous studies, it points out how we’ve spent just countless billions of dollars on expanding broadband access with decidedly mixed results. Also like many previous mainstream stories of this type, it focuses pretty much exclusively on government dysfunction.
OneView, Roku’s ad-buying platform for TV streaming, will have the exclusive ability to activate and measure shoppable TV ads. And marketers will use Roku Brand Studio to design creative and branded content built for TV streaming and shopping.
The World Trade Organization's complete failure on Friday to lift intellectual property barriers that have hindered vaccine and treatment access throughout the Covid-19 pandemic led nearly 300 civil society groups from across the globe—including Zambia, India, Bolivia, and Brazil—to call on governments to "outright defy" WTO patent rules if necessary to combat the still-spreading virus.
"A few wealthy countries promoting pharmaceutical corporation interests have been able to block the use of the WTO's waiver mechanism to temporarily suspend such barriers despite more than 100 WTO member countries supporting a waiver," the organizations said in a joint statement Friday. "This outrageous situation underscores that governments must take immediate actions to bypass the WTO’s prioritization of pharmaceutical monopolies over human lives."
The effort to curb the allegedly unauthorized use of music in apps – and to prompt action from Google and Apple – came to light yesterday, in a speech delivered by National Music Publishers’ Association president and CEO David Israelite.
Speaking at the NMPA’s annual meeting in New York, Israelite highlighted songwriter and publisher revenue in the U.S. in 2021, touched upon his organization’s “legal recoveries,” and reiterated the deals that were struck last year with Twitch and Roblox after much-publicized confrontations.
After obtaining broad injunctions to take down pirate sites, Israel-based media companies accused Cloudflare of failing to take action, in contempt of court. Cloudflare has now fired back, describing the move as a legally unstable "power grab," but that's just the beginning. Overnight, Google, EFF, and industry group CCIA intervened to express concern over the scale of the injunctions.
The National Music Publishers’ Association has announced a crackdown on apps that use music without a proper license. The industry group filed a lawsuit against the music video maker Vinkle and sent cease-and-desist letters to nearly 100 other infringing apps. Meanwhile, Google and Apple are put on formal notice and requested to take swift action.