ROMA is an upcoming Linux laptop equipped with an unnamed quad-core RISC-V processor with GPU and NPU, up to 16GB RAM, 256GB storage, primarily aimed at software developers, and with Web3 technology integration.
The ROMA laptop will be born out of the collaboration between DeepComputing working on engineering and Xcalibyte taking care of system tuning, plus PW (assembly), ECP (security), XC (crypto), Rexeen (voice), and the LatticeX Foundation (PoS blockchain, NFT).
Microsoft SharePoint may be a powerhouse when it comes to project management and collaboration, but the best SharePoint alternatives prove Microsoft is far from the only option. From individuals to large businesses, productivity, collaboration, and project management apps are a must. SharePoint gives you all of this in one convenient platform, but it gets expensive quickly. Free SharePoint alternatives are ideal for saving money without sacrificing features.
By default, AlmaLinux does not come with Snap or Snap Store installed as this is a feature that was built by developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, and Snap packages are installed from a central SNAP server operated by Canonical.
Snap can be installed and, for the most part, work with most packages on AlmaLinux-based systems that are currently actively supported. There are a few conflicts with specific packages. The issue with Snaps VS DNF package manager is that Snaps are self-contained, which results in an increased .snap due to having all its dependencies included along with various degrees of slight performance degradation compared to a natively installed application. In contrast, DNF is much lighter than its snap counterpart because it does not need to bundle dependencies.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Snapd on AlmaLinux 9 with the terminal and GUI methods with basic tips on how to launch or install/remove packages with Snapcraft.
CMake is a well-known compiler that has gained much popularity in recent years. The main reason for its popularity is that it is open-source and cross-platform, so developers can use it on any operating system they want and don’t have to worry about licensing fees. Additionally, CMake can generate wrappers and executables in any combination, making it very versatile. While some compilers are designed for specific tasks, CMake can be used for various projects, making it a popular choice for many developers.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install CMake on AlmaLinux 9 workstation or server using the command line terminal.
Terraform is an open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, created by HashiCorp, that allows users to define and provide data center infrastructure with either HashiCorp’s declarative configuration language (known as HashiCorp Configuration Langauge) or JSON.
With Terraform you can define both cloud and on-premises resources, using human-readable configuration files that can be versioned, reused, and shared, to create a consistent workflow for provisioning and managing all of your infrastructure. Terraform can be used to manage compute, storage, networking resources, DNS entries, and SaaS features.
Rclone is a command-line utility for managing files in cloud storage in Linux. Using Rclone, users can sync files from a local storage to a cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Rclone allows users to backup, download, and synchronize files to over 40 different cloud solutions.
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite which comprises collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms along with PDF viewer. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to connect the ONLYOFFICE Docs and WordPress instances using an integration plugin (connector).
The problem of choosing between your N things is often considered sufficiently hard for people to deal with that systems go well out of their way in order to turn N things back into one as far as you're concerned. For example, HTTP load balancers turn N web servers back into one from an outside perspective, and RAID mirrors turn N disks back into one as far as everything above them is concerned.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. This makes it ideal for many mobile projects or those applications where we can easily move the database around.
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 SQLite database on CentOS 9 Stream.
MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install or upgrade MariaDB 10.9 on Debian 11 Bullseye using the command line terminal and some tips on how to upgrade your existing database if needed one exists.
Sublime Merge is a git client software with various features to help work with git repositories easier. One of its most valuable features is the syntax highlighting engine, which makes it easier to read code. The custom high-performance Git reading library is also helpful, allowing you to stage changes line-by-line.
Additionally, the build-in git search function lets you quickly find commits, and the themes allow you to customize the look of the software to match your preferences. The Command Palette and Commit Editing functions are also helpful, letting you quickly execute git commands and edit commits. Finally, the Submodule Management and Git Flow Integration functions make it easy to work with submodules and manage branches. Overall, Sublime Merge is a powerful git client that can significantly improve your workflow.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sublime Merge on Debian 11 Bullseye using the official Sublime APT repository or the alternative Flatpak method using the command line terminal and how to launch the software and remove it in the future if required.
OnionShare utilizes the Tor network to allow users to do four things with complete anonymity: share files, receive files, host a website, and chat. In this tutorial, we will go over the step by step instructions to install OnionShare on all major Linux distros. Then, you will see how to share files anonymously with OnionShare.
The ability to automatically install Ubuntu Linux would be useful to system administrators that must deploy the operating system to new physical or virtual machines on a regular basis. Automatic provision of these systems can save hundreds of man hours as well as decrease the likelihood of human error. Automation of installing Ubuntu involves supplying the operating system with the desired hostname, username, and password.
With this information, Ubuntu can install itself without the need for any user interaction. Once everything is done installing, you can boot into Ubuntu for the first time and have everything set up the way you planned.
In this tutorial, we will show you a couple examples of an Ubuntu autoinstall configuration. This will include generating an ISO file that can automatically install Ubuntu, as well as deploying an autoinstall to a new virtual machine with KVM.
Although it is not a common error, some users may encounter a black screen when using Ubuntu Linux. The error is most likely to occur when first logging into Ubuntu, and usually indicates that there is a missing video driver. In this tutorial, we will look at a solution to fix a black screen on Ubuntu.
The GNOME desktop environment is a popular graphical interface for just about any Linux system. When using GNOME, you may run into an error where it does not load. There can be many causes for this, such as a bad desktop extension, conflicting package or software update, etc.
These errors most commonly manifest as a blank, black screen, with the mouse cursor visible. Regardless of the cause, there are a few solutions that users can try in order to get their GNOME desktop loading again. In this tutorial, we will show several methods to fix a GNOME desktop environment installation that is refusing to load.
Having a reliable backup of our GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) secret key is not optional: the key represents our identity, and loosing it could potentially be a disaster. Creating a backup of our keys and sub-keys is quite a simple thing to do using gpg, and the resulting files can be easily backed up on one or more devices. Electronic devices such USB drives or hard disks, however, tend to fail, and usually in the most inappropriate times; therefore as an extreme resort, we may want to print our keys to paper.
In this tutorial we see how to export a GPG secret key in a format which can be easily printed on paper, and how to optionally generate a QR Code from its content.
As part of debugging an upstream connection problem I've been seeing recently, I wanted to be able to monitor the logs from my Turris Omnia router. Here's how I configured it to send its logs to a server I already had on the local network.
Vue.js is an open-source progressive JavaScript framework for creating user interfaces (UI) and single page applications. In this post, we will refer to it as Vue.
As you can imagine, Vue is a framework for the front-end. In this, it has a strong commitment to HTML and CSS, unlike others like React where JavaScript is the one that has all the protagonism.
cURL is a potent tool that can download and upload files. It has an easy-to-use interface, but it does require some getting accustomed to on the command line side of things if you don’t want your experience with this software limited by how much time you spend educating yourself about using curl’s features before realizing their potential in helping make systems more efficient!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of the cURL package using a well-known LaunchPAD PPA that provides the latest version for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using the command line terminal.
Bower is a package manager for front-end development that allows you to manage your dependencies and includes features like versioning, downloading from GitHub, and more. It’s popular among web developers because it makes managing project dependencies easy and efficient.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to install Bower on Ubuntu 22.04. We’ll also show you how to use it to install packages and manage your dependencies. Let’s get started!
My little Mele mini-PC has been sitting on a shelf, not setup due to lack of monitor, etc. And a lack of bench space. It is good, though, to have all the computers setup ready to use, for convenience when testing a new iteration of EasyOS.
So, unfolded the camp table and found all the parts to get the Mele going. Using my little 24 inch TV, used for camping, as it runs on 12v. That's when I discovered audio output via HDMI to the TV doesn't work.
“ng is a powerful command-line interface tool that allows you to manage your angular applications in simple commands. Using the ng command tool, you can carry out operations such as serving your applications and generating boilerplate code. The angular CLI is available by default with major releases of the angular package. Therefore, once you install it, you can access it from the shell and manage your applications.
Syncthing is an open-source file synchronization application used to synchronize files between multiple devices, such as smartphones, personal computers, or embedded devices like Raspberry Pi. It provides a secure platform to easily share your files to other devices without using any third-party application, thus making life relatively easy and fast. This article is a detailed guideline for synchronizing files on your Raspberry Pi device using Syncthing.
The Raspberry Pi configuration tool is beneficial for the users as it enables them to configure various settings on their Raspberry Pi devices. This setting includes keyboard layout, WiFi, serial interface, display options, performance options, and much more. You can configure anything you want right onto your terminal window.
If you are new to the Raspberry Pi device, you should need help regarding the Raspi-Config tool. This article will let you understand some of the important options used in the device configuration tool.
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool for network services, network hardware, servers and applications. In this tutorial, we show you how to install Zabbix 4.4 on the Ubuntu 18.04 server. We will install Zabbix with Apache web server, PHP and MariaDB server on the current Ubuntu 18.04 server.
Crypt of the NecroDancer from Brace Yourself Games is a truly wonderful mix of dungeon crawling and a rhythm game that released back in 2015. It just got a huge surprise update and more is on the way.
It seems at some point over the last month or two, GOG finally removed the "in progress" notice for GOG Galaxy coming to Linux.
AK-xolotl is an upcoming rogue-lite that answers the question of: what happens if you gave an axolotl an AK? Someone must have asked that somewhere.
Pugstorm and Fireshine Games have announced that their game Core Keeper has managed to hit 1 million sales only a few months after entering Early Access. This follows on from the rather large Sunken Sea Update that released in the middle of June.
Love some fast-paced first-person shooting action? Xonotic (a fork of the original Nexuiz) has a brand new release available with tons of improvements.
Two big updates have rolled out for the Steam Deck which includes an opt-in Beta SteamOS 3.3 upgrade, plus there's also a Steam Deck Beta Client update.
DIG is a one of the best emulator frontends for Android devices. DIG makes categorizing your video game emulators and ROMs easy and attractive. With support for Android, everyone can now take advantage of DIG to play retro games.
This week we’ve mixed in a lot of user interface polishing with our usual assortment of bugfixes!
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 57, down from 59. 0 added, 1 found to already be fixed, and 1 resolved:
When using screen scaling with the on-by-default Systemd startup in Plasma, the wrong scale factor is no longer sometimes used immediately upon login, which would cause Plasma to be blurry (on Wayland) or everything to be displayed at the wrong size (on X11) (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25.2)
In the last blog, I gave a laconic overview of my tasks for GSoC 2022.
We are halfway through the third week of the coding period, and my first activity, The Comparator, is fully equipped with the key features. However, some finishing touches to polish the features are left before it is finally ready to be merged. The Merge Request for the same is here.
The main features were those of adding datasets and improving the UI/UX components of the activity. The functioning of the Delegate Model in QML is one of the major takeaways from this week’s work.
Apart from this, I also found it a tad bit challenging to maintain the smooth flow of communication with my mentors as the implementation of each feature begins with a tiny change in a day, which might not seem considerable to us as rookie contributors, but for the mentors it is significant. As one of my mentors, Johnny, rightly said, ” You never make a small change. You make a change, and we need to know what it is. “
This week I mainly programmed random things and haven’t finished any of them, some stuff did get merged though.
This paper focuses on one research question: how can Guix and similar systems allow users to securely update their software? Guix source code is distributed using the Git version control system; updating Guix-installed software packages means, first, updating the local copy of the Guix source code. Prior work on secure software updates focuses on systems very different from Guix—systems such as Debian, Fedora, or PyPI where updating consists in fetching metadata about the latest binary artifacts available—and is largely inapplicable in the context of Guix. By contrast, the main threats for Guix are attacks on its source code repository, which could lead users to run inauthentic code or to downgrade their system. Deployment tools that more closely resemble Guix, from Nix to Portage, either lack secure update mechanisms or suffer from shortcomings.
Our main contribution is a model and tool to authenticate new Git revisions. We further show how, building on Git semantics, we build protections against downgrade attacks and related threats. We explain implementation choices. This work has been deployed in production two years ago, giving us insight on its actual use at scale every day. The Git checkout authentication at its core is applicable beyond the specific use case of Guix, and we think it could benefit to developer teams that use Git.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
The 6th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2022: – Linux kernel updated up to 5.18.8 & 5.15.51 LTS – Added to repos: NotepadNext text editor, WineZGUI a Zenity based simple GUI for Wine – Created a new community on Mastodon – APTus installs virtualbox-6.1 Oracle deb, instead of Debian Sid debs on Sparky 7 now; it makes less problems with dependencies and building vbox module – Added Sparky Linux kernel LTS to repos (amd64 only) – Removed Sparky Linux kernel RC from repos – Removed Sparky Linux kernel 686pae Latest from repos
It means, no more Sparky 686pae in Sparky repos, but, added a new LTS kernel to repos; the Sparky’s Latest and LTS kernels can be installed on amd64 machines only now. There are 2 reasons to make such changes: 1. The 32 bit architecture is not much popular, so the default Debian kernel is perfect to keep your 32bit machine running; anyway, Xanmod still provides i686 kernel, which can be installed via APTus AppCenter; 2. The LTS kernel (now 5.15) is good choice if your machine require newer kernel than 5.10 but older than 5.18 (via backboard) on Sparky Stable 6; it is also good choice on testing line of Sparky 7, if you can not compile some external modules on the latest kernel (now 5.18)
In June I was not assigned additional hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but carried over 16 hours from May and worked all of those hours.
I spent some time triaging security issues for Linux. I tested several security fixes for Linux 4.9 and 4.19 and submitted them for inclusion in the upstream stable branches.
Last month we got negative feedback about systemd-oom. After investigating some of the issues we decided not to add it to Linux Mint 21.
Home directory encryption continues to be available in the installer.
The decision was made to keep os-prober enabled by default to guarantee proper dual-boot detection out of the box.
Webp support was added to xviewer and thumbnailers.
Blueman 2.3 is in and replaces Blueberry.
In rsync mode, Timeshift now calculates the required space for the next snapshot and skips it if performing that snapshot lead to less than 1GB free space on the disk.
When it comes to building a mobile robot, often maneuverability is more important than outright speed. The MasterPi robot demonstrates this well, using fancy wheels to help it slide and skate in any direction needed.
Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we cuss and discuss all the gnarliest hacks from the past week. We kick off this episode with a gentle reminder that the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest ends this Monday, July 4th, at 8:30 AM PDT. We’ve seen a ton of cool entries so far, including a new version of [Peter Lyons]’ Squeezebox keyboard that we’re itching to write up for the blog.
The eDM-SBC-iMX8Mm is a Single Board Computer (SBC) which comes in a small Pico-ITX form factor and it’s powered by NXP’s i.MX8M Mini System on Chip (SoC). This compact device was designed to run 24/7 to suit applications such as kiosks , digital signage displays, smart home appliances etc.
DATA MODUL has designed this SBC to be coupled with NXP’s i.MX8M Mini Dual Cortex-A53 (up to 1800 MHz) or its Quad-core version. Both CPU models integrate a GCNanoUltra GPU with a 2D/3D accelerator and they include up to 512KB L2 in Cache memory.
Removing the GPIO pins around the antenna was tempting because it would free up space: “Antennas like space,” explains Dominic while showing us the trapezoidal-shaped feature. “And getting rid of the bottom GPIO pins would have made it easier to connect the wireless chip,” but it would have been a huge change for current users. “I didn’t want to lose any of the peripheral GPIO pins to the end-user,” says Dominic. People can add Pico W to an existing project without having to change anything and gain instant access to wireless technology.
The app and the source code is released under the GPL 3.0 License which is is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
I'm very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
In data science and Statistics, it is a regression model if the dependent variable results in categorical values like True/False, Yes/No, or 0/1. Usually, the logistic regression model is binomial. However, it can be extended. It measures the probability of the successfulness or failure of an event as a dependent variable which is based on a mathematical equation. This equation relates the dependent variable (response variable) with the independent variables (predictor).
We can say that logistic regression is a generalized form of linear regression but the main difference is in the predicted value range is (-âËž, âËž) while the range of predicted value in logistic regression is (0,1). In this post, we will learn about logistic regression and how to implement it in the R programming language.
This is a writeup of a talk I gave in December for my previous employer.
One lesson I’ve learned the hard way is that keeping lots of assets in sync is an absolute nightmare. So this version has a lot more software managing that for me. In particular, I built a pipeline for handling spec assets. I have several XML spec templates that represent “sequences of iterations” on a spec. A python script unpacks the template into a set of .tla files. After I put in appropriate metadata, a second script cleans up each spec into a “presentable” form, loads the metadata into the appropriate files, and places the asset in the appropriate path.
Given two integers N and K and a range [L, R], the task is to build an array whose elements are unique and in the range [L, R] and the median of the array is K.
Given two arrays arr1[] and arr2[] of length N and M respectively, the task is to check if the two arrays are equal or not.
In honor of World Give Up GitHub day, here’s a quick guide to how to serve up your own git repos.
For each of these changes, we need to dig into version control history to find why they were needed in the first place, verify if they are still needed, and if so potentially rework them to meet upstream coding standards. This requires an understanding of the problem domain to be able to explain the rationale behind the changes while submitting patches and writing relevant commit messages.
While some of those patches are NetBSD specific, we still need to ensure we are not breaking other operating systems. Ultimately, vanilla binutils should be able to produce working binaries on NetBSD without requiring any local patches. Once this goal is reached, we need to ensure it keeps building, investigate test suite failures, and setup buildbots for continuous builds on key architectures.
Discussion: This configuration provides a decent all-around compromise between complexity and performance. Torque control is available and velocity control is good outside of ultra-slow regimes. The position is absolutely known to within one rotation of the rotor, across power cycles.
A few days ago, I received an email from someone who appears to be Perl hacker and asked me a question.
Seaborn is a Matplotlib-based visual analytics library. It has a high-level framework for defining the visually appealing analytical graphs. Matplotlib package is the foundation of the Seaborn module. To visualize the statistics and regression analysis, we use the regplot() function.
To evaluate the regression model, there are many other interrelated contradictory approaches. Whenever the predicted output is a continuous as well as a cumulative value, it is referred to as a prediction model. Numerous other approaches can be employed. The most basic of which is the linear model. It integrates the values to the optimal higher dimensional space that passes through all of the vertices. The regplot() function is used to create the regression plots.
Regression Analysis is a technique used for evaluating the associations between one or more independent factors or predictors and the dependent attributes or covariates. The variations in the requirements in correlation to modifications in specific determinants are analyzed through the Regression Analysis. The criteria’s declarative requirement is dependent on the indicators, which give the new value of the dependent attributes whenever the data points are updated. Evaluating the intensity of covariates, anticipating an outcome, and estimating are the three important applications of a regression model.
Heatmaps are colored maps that display data in a two-dimensional format. Color variation is achieved by using hue, saturation, or brightness to portray the varied information on the color maps. This color variation provides the readers with visual information about the size of quantitative values. Heatmaps substitute numbers with colors since the human mind understands views better than the textual data. Considering that humans are primarily visual, it makes sense to present the data in any manner. Heatmaps are simple-to-understand visual representations of data. As a result, data visualization tools like Heatmaps are becoming increasingly popular.
Heatmaps are used to display patterns, variance, and anomalies, as well as to depict the saturation or intensity of the variables. Relationships between variables are depicted via heatmaps. Both axes are used to plot these variables. By observing the color shift in the cell, we can look for the patterns. It only takes numerical input and shows it on the grid, with different data values displayed by the varying color intensity.
Many various color schemes can be used to depict the heat map, each with its own set of perceptual advantages and disadvantages. Colors in the Heatmap indicate patterns in the data, thus the color palette decisions are more than just cosmetic. The finding of patterns can be facilitated by the appropriate color palettes but can also be hindered by the poor color choices.
Colormaps are used to visualize heatmaps since they are a simple and effective way to see data. Diverse colormaps could be utilized for different sorts of heatmaps. In this article, we’ll explore how to interact with Seaborn heatmaps using the colormaps.
In this article, we will cover how to create a Numpy array with zeros using Python.
In this article, let’s learn how to do a train test split using Sklearn in Python.
Train Test Split Using Sklearn
The train_test_split() method is used to split our data into train and test sets.
First, we need to divide our data into features (X) and labels (y). The dataframe gets divided into X_train,X_test , y_train and y_test. X_train and y_train sets are used for training and fitting the model. The X_test and y_test sets are used for testing the model if it’s predicting the right outputs/labels. we can explicitly test the size of the train and test sets. It is suggested to keep our train sets larger than the test sets.
The new Wi-Fi 6E network enables download speeds of 500-600 megabits per second even in high-density areas. This is up to three to five times faster than the prior network — enough bandwidth for attendees in the largest lecture halls and auditoriums to simultaneously stream high-definition video.
Elif Batuman’s witty, searching, and relentlessly quotable Selin is one of the most memorable fictional protagonists in recent memory. Readers have followed Selin through Batuman’s 2017 novel, The Idiot, and a new sequel, Either/Or, as she navigated all kinds of physical and emotional terrain traveling from Cambridge, Mass., to Turkey. Having first met Selin as a freshman at Harvard, we reunite with her and begin the second leg of her story as she enters her sophomore year of college, off the heels of a disappointing and unfulfilling summer abroad in Hungary (“I hadn’t learned anything at all”). This was, in no small part, a result of her freshman-year e-mail love affair with a Hungarian senior named Ivan. Since its dissolution, Selin has grown more determined to crack the code of human experience and to understand, with humorous precision and analysis, what it will take to finally write a novel. For her, that includes Kierkegard, Fiona Apple, more e-mails, tears, and finding the elusive meanings behind “love” and “having sex”—all in the name of understanding the human condition so that she might write about it one day.1
There is much in Hemingway’s life and writing to admire, and much to reject.
If you’ve ever used a home computer from the late 1970s or early 1980s, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the slow speed of their user interfaces. Even listing the contents of a BASIC program from RAM could take several seconds, with the screen updating one line at a time. Video games were completely optimized for speed, but could still handle just a few slowly-moving objects at the same time. Clearly, playing anything resembling full-motion video on hardware from that era would be absolutely impossible – or so you might think.
Ongoing litigation on behalf of journalist Thomas Brewster and Forbes Media has revealed a few more details about how computerized reservation systems (CRSs) collaborate with the US government to surveil travelers. It has also prompted new denials by some of those CRS companies that range from misdirection to out-and-out lies.
In 2020, Forbes published a report by Mr. Brewster based on a Federal court order (found by Mr. Brewster in the public court docket, but later “sealed” by the government) that directed Sabre, one of the three major CRS or “global distribution system” (GDS) companies, to provide ongoing real-time reports€ to the FBI on any reservations made for travel by a specified person of interest. The court docket for a separate case in a different Federal district showed that at least one similar order had been issued to Travelport, another of the three globally dominant CRS companies.
Petitions by Mr Brewster and Forbes to “unseal” and make public these and related court records remain pending. Oral arguments€ in two of these cases are scheduled to be heard€ by a 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on August 12, 2022.
As someone who does a lot of writing, I have been asked how to write about things. I have been asked about it enough that I am documenting this here so you can all understand my process. This is not a prescriptive system that you must do in order to make Quality Contentââ¢ï¸Â, this is what I do.
I spend a great deal of time looking for interesting topics to write about, which turns out to be a rather inefficient process. Only a small portion of the writing process is spent actually writing; most of it is dedicated towards braionstorming and research. But what if there were some way to effectively rehash existing content to produce fresh content? Here, I've employed state-of-the-art Markov chain technology to generate original blogposts, and the results are stunning. Scroll down to see for yourself…
On laughably bad uses of computers in mainstream movies and shows, starting with the virus upload in Independence Day.
Exactly 26 years ago this week, the world got its first look at what it would look like for an Apple PowerBook to hack the computer system of an alien spaceship. Like some of the other scenes of Independence Day, it was heavily exaggerated, and the result it represented an infamous plot hole in a piece of pop culture that millions of people know and remember. It’s a key example of bad computer use of the kind that has dominated movies for 40 years. This week, I was watching a show on Hulu, The Bear, that appears to do an excellent job of realistically portraying the process of running a restaurant, and it got me thinking: What about technology makes it so hard to correctly display on screen like that, when it gets so many other walks of life so correct? And is there room to fix it? Today’s Tedium ponders how we might actually upload a virus to the aliens.
In the winter of 2001, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)—an organization established by trade unionists and health and safety activists to promote the implementation of the 1970 Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA) in the workplace–visited the Village Voice to measure the electromagnetic fields in some of the work areas.
In 1979, Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper’s groundbreaking study had found a compelling association between childhood cancer and the “electrical current configuration” of houses in Denver, Colorado–it was followed by other studies with similar results. In the succeeding decades, EMFs received a fair amount of media attention. Those directly concerned with the problem—such as public health advocates and residents of communities where children lived near power lines—complained no action was being taken. The utilities countered with ridicule and accusations of fearmongering.
For an industry so obsessed with peer review, it appears that academic journals are mighty reticent to retract or even warn readers about fraudulent articles.
As Science magazine reports in a fascinating story, a recent study found that although journals were made aware of nearly 90 instances of papers that had cited work that was documented to be fraudulent in the field of nutrition studies, few warnings or notices of retraction were ever posted. In other words, don't trust everything you read — even if it's been published in a peer reviewed journal.
These days, camera lenses aren’t just simple bits of glass in sliding metal or plastic housings. They’ve often got a whole bunch of electronics built in as well. [Dan K] had just such a lens from Sigma, but wanted to get it working fully with a camera using the Canon EF lens fitting. Hacking ensued.
Until the COVID-19 pandemic forced a total cessation of my activity and direction in life, I was only dimly aware of the true extent of my psychological condition. Not really. I was too lost at sea within my unconscious emotional through-line continuum ever vacillating between sublimated anxiety and terror to grasp it all. I had learned long ago about staying busy to keep one step ahead of it. And anxiety, after all, is the health of the economy and of the state. If I was feeling bad, as many a life-coach in that cottage industry of capitalist folklore would be quick to remind me, it had to be that I just wasn’t working hard enough or smart enough to fulfill my dreams and live up to my potential. An adjustment of “attitude” was all that was required. That’s all. My bad.
On some level, though I’m loath to admit it, somewhere along the way, I had internalized that obscene and distinctly American psychological mythology of meritocratic bullshit. It’s virtually impossible not to absorb it to some degree through osmosis because that thinking is so pervasive and absolutely fundamental to the arrangement of our entire economic order. It is a foregone conclusion that informs an unspoken thematic narrative of our education system, politics, our journalism, our entertainment, much religious instruction and alleged “self-help” culture, and consequently it is the lens through which many have a popular understanding and view of mental health itself.
Gates is considered the largest private owner of farmland in the country with some 269,000 acres (108,860 hectares) across dozens of states, according to last year’s edition of the Land Report 100, an annual survey of the nation’s largest landowners. The Microsoft co-founder owns less than 1 percent of the nation’s total farmland.
Gates' firm, Red River Trust, purchased $13.5 million worth of land in two counties from wealthy northeastern North Dakota potato growers Campbell Farms.
COVID is airborne. The virus particles exit the infected person’s mouth or nose, then float through the air like smoke, and you can get infected when you breathe enough of them in.
Ventilation is when indoor air is replaced with outdoor air, so when you have good ventilation, it removes those virus particles and replaces them with virus-free outdoor air.
Just like how COVID travels from one person to another, CO2 or carbon dioxide can too. CO2 is a gas that we are always breathing in and out. Unlike carbon monoxide, it isn’t deadly in small concentrations, but allows you to measure how much air is being rebreathed from other people instead of breathing clean air – it’s gaseous backwash.
Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access. General mentions of abortion pills, as well as posts mentioning specific versions such as mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly spiked Friday morning across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TV broadcasts, according to an analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.
By Sunday, Zignal had counted more than 250,000 such mentions.
The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19. Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities—as well as the inequality that exists between countries—are tearing our world apart. This is not by chance, but choice: “economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most. Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality. We can claw back extreme wealth through progressive taxation; invest in powerful, proven inequality-busting public measures; and boldly shift power in the economy and society. If we are courageous, and listen to the movements demanding change, we can create an economy in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which inequality no longer kills.
Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.
First, some background. My mother and my brother don’t believe in vaccines, or most medicine in general. Yes, she’s a nurse.
They both voted for Donald Trump twice, even when it was clear that he was grossly incompetent and telling his followers to literally commit suicide to try to boost his approval ratings going into the 2020 election.
Mom repeated pretty much all of the Trump/Republican propaganda about COVID-19. That it was overblown, that the Democrats were making it all up. That the vaccines were dangerous, and “don’t work anyway” despite evidence to the contrary that they were at least a lot better than nothing.
I begged with her, I pleaded with her. She wasn’t having any of it. She’s a Christian, and in her church they believe some pretty far out stuff, like that if you grow long hair you can cast out demons and shit. It’s….appalling, it’s hardly believable that in the 21st century that so many people like this exist, but they do. They’re out there. And they’re the reason why the United States of America has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the whole world.
And she doesn’t just attack COVID vaccines, she attacks ones that have been around for decades and prevent some pretty terrible stuff, like Hepatitis A and B, and Pneumococcal Pneumonia.
In fact, when she called me yesterday to say our vacation was off, leaving me with an expensive two bedroom condominium that I can’t get refunded, so I might as well go and enjoy it now with my spouse, she said that she also has the flu. I suppose it goes without saying that she never gets vaccinated for the flu either.
In early 2022, we investigated one such IIS backdoor: SessionManager. In late April 2022, most of the samples we identified were still not flagged as malicious in a popular online file scanning service, and SessionManager was still deployed in over 20 organizations.
SessionManager has been used against NGOs, government, military and industrial organizations in Africa, South America, Asia, Europe, Russia and the Middle East, starting from at least March 2021. Because of the similar victims, and use of a common OwlProxy variant, we believe the malicious IIS module may have been leveraged by the GELSEMIUM threat actor, as part of espionage operations.
This week, Microsoft released an AI-based tool for writing soft€ware called Git€Hub Copilot. As a lawyer and 20+ year partic€i€pant in the world of open-source soft€ware, I agree with those who consider Copilot to be primarily an engine for violating open-source licenses.
The campaign comprises at least four pieces of malware, three of them written from scratch by the threat actor. The first piece is the MIPS-based ZuoRAT, which closely resembles the Mirai internet-of-things malware that achieved record-breaking distributed denial-of-service attacks that crippled some Internet services for days. ZuoRAT often gets installed by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in SOHO devices.
Once installed, ZuoRAT enumerates the devices connected to the infected router. The threat actor can then use DNS hijacking and HTTP hijacking to cause the connected devices to install other malware. Two of those malware pieces—dubbed CBeacon and GoBeacon—are custom-made, with the first written for Windows in C++ and the latter written in Go for cross-compiling on Linux and macOS devices. For flexibility, ZuoRAT can also infect connected devices with the widely used Cobalt Strike [cracking] tool.
Claro made strides compared to previous reports thanks to its parent company, America Móvil’s publication of a global transparency report in 2021. This year, the provider finally received scores for publishing this type of report and for providing some insight about the procedure and legal framework the ISP follows when responding to government requests for user data.
Still, Tigo is once again the best ranked company. It was the only provider receiving full marks in two out of the seven of the report’s categories: judicial authorization and digital security. This year's edition added two new parameters related to digital security. This time, the report checked whether companies have a protocol to inform their customers about data breaches and whether they make available digital security-related content to their users. Only Tigo scored well in these new parameters.
IPANDETEC has also made its evaluation of ISP data protection policies more strict. Now, to earn a full star, companies must provide information on data protection-related rights—known as “ARCO” rights (access, rectification, cancellation, and opposition to data processing)—and how users can exercise them. In this case, Tigo fell short along with Digicel.
On our latest IoT Podcast episode, we take a question that Gregg left on our IoT Voicemail Hotline. Gregg uses Apple HomeKit and is looking for occupancy sensors, which he correctly says are not the same as motion sensors. Unfortunately, we’re right on the cusp of having a range of accurate occupancy sensors in the smart home, so current options are fairly limited.
We recently reviewed the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium, which does actually have an occupancy sensor in it. Ecobee is using millimeter wave radar for this purpose, which is much more accurate than older passive infrared (PIR) motion detection solutions.
[...]
Our estimate is that sometime next year we should see some of the advanced, accurate products that will detect occupancy and integrate with our smart homes. The current chip shortage and production backlogs aren’t helping, so these products could even slip into 2024. We should have a better idea of what to expect and when in January’s Consumer Electronics Show, however.
Mathieu Gorge: I had been working in cybersecurity for a few years, primarily on network security and content security. So, my original security background was in selling VPNs, firewalls, intrusion detection, content, security, and so on.After a few years, I felt that the folks that we were talking to didn’t necessarily understand the basics of cybersecurity or data protection. I decided to start my company, VigiTrust, to talk about privacy and security on an ongoing basis as opposed to merely trying to address the problem by buying more technical solutions.
It’s kind of weird that in some convoluted way, the NSA may be killing Google Analytics, at least in the EU. You may recall that back in 2020, Max Schrems won his second big data privacy effort against the EU/US Privacy Shield agreement, which allowed data from people in the EU to be transferred to US companies under certain conditions. The “Privacy Shield” was a concept the EU and US cooked up after their earlier setup, the EU/US “safe harbor” framework was tossed out in an earlier case brought by Schrems. In both cases, a key underlying issue was the NSA’s ability to conduct mass surveillance on the internet. The failure to fix that between the safe harbor framework and the Privacy Shield meant that the Privacy Shield was doomed from the start.
In 2018, the Supreme Court declared warrantless access to historical cell site location information unconstitutional, given the privacy implications of being able to track someone’s movements over days or weeks without bothering to secure a warrant. Prior to this decision, cell site location info (CSLI) was treated as a third party record, requiring neither a warrant nor probable cause to obtain.
on new rules subjecting cryptocurrency transfers to the same money-laundering rules as traditional banking transfers.
A much bigger move was expected as EU negotiators hammer out the final details late Thursday on a separate deal for a sweeping package of crypto regulations for the bloc’s 27 nations, known as Markets in Crypto [sic] Assets, or MiCA.
Yesterday, the European Parliament and the Council made a deal on the rules for crypto assets. Anonymous payments will effectively be prohibited, interfering with the fundamental characteristics of decentralised finance. Even the €1000 limit for anonymous transactions proposed by the EU Commission has been abandoned. All users of hosted wallets will need to identify, as well as users sending unhosted funds to hosted wallets. Crypto exchanges will have to be extra diligent regarding their dealings with unregistered or unlicensed entities outside of the EU.
Transfers of crypto-assets will be traced and identified to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing, and other crimes, says the new legislation agreed on Wednesday.
We’re also moving to a new area, and the local community has a Facebook group. In order to be involved, I’ve had to open a Facebook account. I’ve taken steps to keep it anonymous, but still, it makes me feel dirty.
German news website netzpolitik.org leaked a record of internal discussions regarding the EU‘s proposed online child abuse law (dubbed “chat control”) which is much criticised for resulting in mass surveillance and undermining secure encryption. According to the leaked record, the EU Commission expects that 1 in 10 private conversations flagged by “artificial intelligence” algorithms for potential “child grooming” would be falsely exposed to a Europol-affiliated authority without any criminal relevance. The Commission confirmed that communications providers would not be obliged to check the machine-generated reports of flagged conversations before they are being sent. It also admitted the envisaged algorithms are “high risk” technology.
It’s now up to the Biden administration to propose a replacement. It will be severely limited in its ability to do so thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday.
Elena Kagan authored the dissenting opinion. “Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change,” the liberal justice wrote. “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I’ve dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax perhaps and standards too slack, because Johnny and Janey often couldn’t or wouldn’t read a book, though they sure could text, tweet, take selfies, and make videos.
On June 18 the government of Lithuania acted on a decision by the European Commission that goods and cargo subject to European Union sanctions could be prohibited from transiting between one part of Russia to another, so long as they passed through E.U. territory.
As NATO Summit Begins In Madrid, NATO is set to agree on an expansion of its forces in Eastern Europe.
If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs.
The day after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter to Google warning it to be on alert for “exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities,” and calling on the company to audit its advertising business’s compliance with economic sanctions.
But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia’s largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.
How disregarding our mainstream press and broadcasters prove as they purport to inform us of the crisis in Ukraine. The coverage on both sides of the Atlantic is a riot of defactualization at this point, and it appears to worsen the more obvious it is that the€ Kiev regime is losing a conflict we so recently read it was winning.€
Identity of Ali Hassan Harb's murderer under Israeli gag order, but revealed here
We survived that proverbial bullet to the gut, but it wounded us badly.
Trump’s true colors emerged as never before during Tuesday’s blockbuster hearing of the House panel that has methodically been gathering information about the former president’s behavior with respect to the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol that disrupted confirmation of Joe Biden as the next president.
Mayor Eric Adams, expressing his opposition to the ruling, suggested that the court’s decision would turn New York City into the “Wild West.” Contrary to the imagery of the Wild West, however, many towns in the real Old West had restrictions on the carrying of guns that were, I would suggest, stricter than the one just invalidated by the Supreme Court.
Support for gun rights among Republicans played an important role in determining the contents of the the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first new gun reform bill in three decades. President Joe Biden signed it into law just two days after the Supreme Court’s decision was released. In order to attract Republican support, the new law does not include gun control proposals such as an assault weapons ban, universal background checks or raising the purchasing age to 21 for certain types of rifles. Nevertheless, the bill was denounced by other Republicans in Congress and was opposed by the National Rifle Association.
Before giving his inflammatory speech, Hutchinson testified, Trump was told his supporters were armed with guns, knives, spears, and flagpoles and were wearing body armor.
“I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me,” she heard Trump say, urging the Secret Service to turn off metal detectors. “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”
A new book proves it. Jefferson Morley’s Scorpion’s Dance, the President, the Spymaster and Watergate, details decades of CIA funny-business, and there was loads of it. Indeed, if you ever wonder how the world got to be such a mess and who’s responsible, read this book. And there’s no reason to believe the nonsense has stopped or that somehow, despite the Taliban, the CIA is just quietly minding its own business and watering its poppy fields in Afghanistan.
No. The CIA trained terrorists throughout the greater Middle East and Nazis in Ukraine. They’re still at it, though their adventures on Russia’s border make for by far the most deadly possible disaster in a history riddled with them, for the simple reason that the Russia caper could go nuclear at any time. From the way they’ve behaved, it’s almost as if that’s what the CIA wants. If Biden can control the agency and avert nuclear winter and radioactive global mass death, I’ll be very impressed.
The latest developments, including: – Ukraine’s successful attacks on Russian gas platforms – Russian missile strikes on Odesa – Black Sea heating up as new theater of conflict – Putin denies Russian responsibility for food crisis
Brigadier General Bailey of AFRICOM had met with Zambia’s President Hakainde Hichilema during his visit to Lusaka. Hichilema’s government faces serious economic challenges despite the fact that Zambia has one of the richest resources of raw materials in the world. When Zambia’s total public debt grew to nearly $27 billion (with an external debt of approximately $14.5 billion), it returned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in December 2021 for financial assistance, resulting in an IMF-induced spiral of debt.
Two months after Hichilema met with the AFRICOM team, he hosted IMF Deputy Managing Director Antoinette M. Sayeh in June, who thanked President Hichilema for his commitment to the IMF “reform plans.” These plans include a general austerity package that will not only cause the Zambian population to be in the grip of poverty but will also prevent the Zambian government from exercising its sovereignty.
Decisions taken at the summit include inviting Sweden and Finland to join as NATO’s 31st and 32nd member states, an increase in “high readiness” forces to more than 300,000, more money in general, and of course more money for non-member state Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
None of these, of course, will “preserve peace” or “prevent conflict,” and given the last 30 years of the alliance’s history, even the notion that they’ll “protect” the people of NATO member states is dubious. That’s not what NATO does these days.
I enjoyed my first evening back at the Hotel Volgograd, in which I sometimes felt that I was the only guest, a commissar on a provincial inspection tour. There was a buffet in the dining room, and after dinner, when I was studying my maps and celebrating my bike rides around Volgograd, a friend of mine called from New York on my cell phone (thinking I was home at my desk), and we chatted for thirty minutes as if having cognac in the hotel bar.
A Streetcar Named Traktorny Zavod
The State Environmental Inspectorate of Ukraine, a government agency, has documented more than 300 cases of what it calls "environmental crimes," carried out by Russia since its invasion began in late February. The actual number is believed to be closer to 1,500, it says, but many sites are still occupied by Russia or made inaccessible by the fighting.
Fires at fuel depots. Blown-up reservoirs of dangerous chemicals. Damaged gas pipelines. Disruptions and wildfires at the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone. Destroyed vessels in the Black Sea area. These are the most immediate concerns identified by the state agency.
But the environmental impacts of Russia's invasion may reach far beyond Ukraine's embattled borders.
In a blow to climate activism, the Supreme Court on Thursday severely limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to place emission caps on power plants. In the case, West Virginia v. EPA, several states led by West Virginia and fossil fuel companies fought against the regulations imposed by the Obama administration under the Clean Air Act. The 6-3 ruling by the court’s conservative justices ultimately weakens the federal agency’s authority to limit carbon emissions and combat the worst effects of the climate crisis. We look at the decision’s impact on vulnerable communities, particularly lower-income, Black and Brown residents who live close to coal-fired power plants, as well as the climate emergency more broadly. “They’ve put people’s lives in danger, and they have also put in place steps that will accelerate the climate crisis,” says Mustafa Ali, formerly head of the environmental justice program at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The ice caps are melting, the reefs are bleaching, the rainforests are burning, and the oceans are turning into rising pools of caustic acid. The only thing proliferating faster than failed states are the cold wars needed to justify their existence just long enough for World War 3 to reduce us all to radioactive vapor. Capitalism is devouring its own gangrenous limbs as it rapidly runs out of wasteland to expand upon with the global debt now more than 300% larger than the global GDP.
And as these malignant institutions that have defined a civilization that brought us the miracles of artificial intelligence, the Holocaust, and the hydrogen bomb enter a final state of freefall, the lumpenproletariat raised in the shadows of its skyscrapers and smokestacks are reacting with an epidemic of random acts of unspeakable brutality, pushing little old ladies beneath subway trains and shooting up elementary schools. I honestly don’t know how many more plagues you people need. The Pharaohs only needed ten.
All of which prompts a provocative question: What if the Marine Corps publishes a landmark study that claims recipients of the US government defense budget are collectively responsible for accelerating the danger of climate change to very dangerous levels, in fact, to unlivable levels?
As of June 2022, that’s precisely what’s happened.
A trade advisor to the UK government has repeated a baseless claim that protests against fracking were funded by the Kremlin.€
Economist Catherine McBride, a member of the government’s Trade and Agriculture Commission advising on trade deals, said on GB News this week that Russia has given “billions of pounds” to green groups to “go and protest against fracking”.€
“From Commons to NFTs” is an (expanded) writing series initiated by Shu Lea Cheang, Felix Stalder & Ewen Chardronnet. Cautioned by the speculative bubble (burst) of NFTs, the series brings back the notion of commons from around the turn of the millennium to reflect upon and intervene in the transformation of the collective imagination and its divergent futures. Every last day of the month Makery publishes a new contribution of these “chain essays”. Fourth text by Denis ‘Jaromil’ Roio.
“The Tyre Extinguishers have disarmed SUVs in New York City for the first time, with 40 SUVs disarmed last night. Using leaflets in American English (‘Tire’ rather than ‘Tyre’), 40 SUVs had their wheels deflated in the Upper East Side, home to the greatest concentration of individual wealth in NYC,” explain the people that are part of the movement.
We are people from all walks of life with one aim: To make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4x4 in the world’s urban areas. We are defending ourselves against climate change, air pollution and unsafe drivers.
A new direct action group calling itself the Tyre Extinguishers recently sabotaged hundreds of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) in various wealthy parts of London and other British cities. Under cover of darkness, activists unscrewed the valve caps on tyres, placed a bean or other pulse on the valve and then returned the cap. The tyres gently deflated.
Why activists are targeting SUVs now can tell us as much about the failures of climate policy in the UK and elsewhere as it can about the shape of environmental protest in the wake of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain.
As you’ll recall, a year and a half ago, much of the world who didn’t live on the WallStreetBets forum were introduced to the concept of meme stocks. As we discussed at the time, much of the embrace of such stocks by retail investors was really about people who were fed up with feeling like the entire financial system was rigged against them, and in favor of those already rich and powerful. The underlying concept that drove much of the meme stock effort was about every day investors trying to assert some pushback on the underlying system.
Over the past twelve months this uncertainty has assumed many forms. There have been reports of shutdowns of factories in Asia, with workers reluctant to return to their jobs, ships backed up by the dozen at American ports, a shortage of truck drivers, and exploding wealth for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Obviously, the immediate trigger to the crisis would appear to be a mix of COVID and as a result Americans greatly increasing their online shopping. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, e-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020, and 50.5 percent since 2019. Overall, online sales now account for 19 percent of retail. Given the $400 billion in government stimulus and much of the outdoor service economy locked down (i.e. restaurants, movies, sports events, etc.), Americans spent nearly $1 trillion more in goods in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic times. Hard to see any supply chain not getting strained. Still, in May 2022 only 11 percent of shipments from Asia arrived in North America on time, down from 59 percent in May 2020.
By the end of 2021 the cost of shipping from Asia to the west coast of the U.S. had risen 330 percent in one year. According to the Freightos Baltic Index, as of June 22nd the average global price to ship a 40-foot container was $7261, down from a peak of over $11,000 in September 2021, but still five times higher than before the pandemic. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimated that higher shipping rates during the lockdown raised the inflation rate by 1.5 percent.
Increasing numbers of us, however, respond to the growing extremity of the moment by avoiding the latest headlines and civic engagement, fearful that some trauma will befall us, even by witnessing “the news.” As a psychotherapist who works with veterans and military families, I often speak with folks who have decided to limit their news intake or have stopped following the news altogether. Repeated mass shootings in places ranging from schools to houses of worship combined with the increased visibility and influence of militias at theoretically peaceful demonstrations can be more scarring than the wounds soldiers once sustained in combat zones.
I must admit that my family and I have sometimes practiced a similar form of political avoidance. Recently, I considered taking my two young children to the March for Our Lives gun-control event on the National Mall in Washington. However, my spouse, an active duty servicemember, urged me to reconsider. If extremists showed up, it might prove difficult for me alone to get our children out of danger. I thought better of it and stayed home.
But the plaintiffs didn’t like the district court’s answer and so they appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. The Copia Institute then filed its amicus brief to explain to the court what is at stake if it reversed the decision to find that Section 230 didn’t bar these claims in order to try to help this very sympathetic plaintiff. The upshot: much more trouble for future sympathetic plaintiffs, who will lose their ability to speak online safely, if not entirely, as platforms go out of business, refuse more user expression, or stop moderating any of it, which would leave their communities cesspools of even more abuse. And we know this dire prediction is true because we’ve already seen it happen where Section 230 has been weakened before or otherwise unavailable. As we’ve seen play out in the wake of FOSTA in particular, Section 230 does critically important work staving off this sort of dire future where vulnerable people lose all ability to safely use online systems to strengthen their position or even just call for help.
The time to think about liability is now—right as AI becomes ubiquitous but remains underregulated. Already, AI-based systems have contributed to injury. In 2018, a pedestrian was killed by a self-driving Uber vehicle. Although driver error was at issue, the AI failed to detect the pedestrian. Recently, an AI-based mental health chatbot encouraged a simulated suicidal patient to take her own life. AI algorithms have discriminated against the resumes of female applicants. And, in one particularly dramatic case, an AI algorithm misidentified a suspect in an aggravated assault, leading to a mistaken arrest. Yet, despite missteps, AI promises to revolutionize all of these areas.
In sharp contrast to such acquiescence, Crary pushes for the radical reassessment of what it means to think critically about ‘digital futures’ and the like. For example, speaking up against the tentative hopes now being expressed by some tech critics for the possibility of re-engineering more humane, caring, progressive forms of digital living, Crary instead concludes that no such alternatives are feasible. In short, there cannot be a ‘better’ internet, a digital commons, or any other progressive take-over (or take-back) of digital technology.
Similarly, Crary is dismissive of ambitions to instigate ‘cleaner’ and ‘greener’ forms of carbon-neutral digital technology and renewable energy – what he dismisses as desperate attempts to prolong the profitability of fundamentally ‘devastating’ products and practices. In short, Crary reasons that tech critics need to lose any illusions they might have about different forms of digital technology proving to be instrumental to radical change. Instead, we need to accept that all current forms of digital technology “are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth, or egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life”.
On most Fridays, Hungary’s prime minister gives an interview on one of the state-owned radio stations. Since the independent media has not had a chance to interview him for many years, these weekly radio interviews are the only opportunity to find out what the leader of the country thinks about current events, how he sees his opponents and any issues at hand.
"Threats to democracy in Hungary are real, and merit our determined attention,” David Pressman, nominee for ambassador to Hungary told Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In his testimony, Pressman expressed concerns over press freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. “Human rights, media freedom, and the rule of law are not nice-to-haves in Hungary – or anywhere else. They are fundamental foundations for sustaining democracy and liberty and meeting people’s most basic needs. Today in Hungary, we see deeply troubling trends in each of these areas. If confirmed, I will support efforts to advance and protect these fundamental rights and transatlantic values,” he said. Pressman stated that the obvious influence of Russia and China in the Center European country and on its government is ‘cause for serious concern’.”Not just for the United States’ interests, or Europe’s, but the people of Hungary,” he added.
Under the Obama administration, Pressman, an international human rights lawyer, served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs.€
The Biden White House loves to use Vice President Kamala Harris as a human shield to take the flak for their failures. On Monday, her mission was to go on CNN and deliver the bad news that the administration would not squeeze Senate Democrats to get them to kill the filibuster with the goal of codifying abortion rights into federal law. “Right now, given the current composition of the Senate, the votes aren’t there,” Harris said, before reverting to the uninspiring message of voting more. She added, “The reality of it is, we don’t even get to really answer that, in terms of what happens or not, if we don’t have the numbers in the Senate.”
Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced—a story that has largely flown under the nation's political radar—that they'll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.
On June 29, the Moscow Culture Department dismissed the heads of three of the city’s theaters. At the Gogol Center, artistic director Alexey Agranovich and director Alexei Kabeshev will be replaced by Anton Yakovlev and Alexander Bocharnikov (and the theater will revert to its old name, the Gogol Theater). At the Sovremennik Theater, a new artistic council will replace artistic director Viktor Ryzhakov, and Yury Kravets will replace director Tatyana Baranova. Iosif Raikhelgauz is out at the Modern Play School theater, to be replaced by Dmitry Astrakhan. The official reason for the personnel changes is simple contract expirations —€ but the timing suggests otherwise. Meduza gives a rundown of who’s out and who’s in on the Russian theater scene.
On June 30, Russia's Interior Ministry reported that state investigators had arrested Vladimir Mau, the rector of RANEPA (the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration). Mau was named a suspect in an ongoing felony case against former Deputy Education Minister Marina Rakova and Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences Rector Sergey Zuev, and is being charged with large-scale embezzlement. Meduza takes a look at the case and its implications.
What is clear is that Petro has left his revolutionary past behind him. The group of which he was part – M-19 – negotiated pardons from the Colombian government for its members before becoming a political party in the late 1980’s. Since then, Petro himself became firmly committed to electoral politics, serving as mayor of Bogotá twice, and running for President of Colombia three times before winning in his last attempt.
What is not so certain is Colombia’s political future.
Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers in Indiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia have introduced bills that read a lot like the Texas anti-divestment law, and legislators in a dozen other states have also expressed support for the legislation’s objective.
Mere coincidence? Not at all. The template for the bill, titled the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, was supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobby group backed by corporations and right-wing foundations that provides state lawmakers with ready-made, fill-in-the-blank sample legislation drafted by, or on behalf of, ALEC’s private sector members, including tobacco, fossil fuel and electric utility companies.
NetBlocks metrics confirm the disruption of internet service on multiple providers across Sudan after 8 a.m. local time Thursday 30 June 2022. The incident came as protesters took to the streets to call for a civilian-led government in opposition to the military junta that took power in the October 2021 coup. Service was restored after some 20 hours.
The Russian-Ukrainian war has undermined the integrity of the global [Internet], both by Russia’s actions and the actions of technology companies in the West. In an unprecedented move, social media platforms have blocked access to Russian state media.
The [Internet] is a global network of networks. Interoperability among these networks is the [Internet]’s foundational principle. The ideal of a single internet, of course, has always run up against the reality of the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity: Unsurprisingly, most users don’t clamor for content from faraway lands in unintelligible languages. Yet, politically motivated restrictions threaten to fragment the [Internet] into increasingly disjointed networks.
Though it may not be fought over on the battlefield, global interconnectivity has become one of the values at stake in the Russian-Ukrainian war. And as Russia has solidified its control over sections of eastern Ukraine, it has moved the digital Iron Curtain to those frontiers.
Many Russians downloaded virtual private network software to try to access blocked sites and services in the first weeks of the war. By late April, 23% of Russian Internet users reported using VPNs with varying regularity. The state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has been blocking VPNs to prevent people from bypassing government censorship and stepped up its efforts in June.
In February, DW and VOA said they would not apply for licences in Turkey as requested by the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) under the country's media regulation law, which critics say aims to increase censorship.
Ilhan Tasci, an RTUK board member from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), said on Twitter on Thursday that access to DW's Turkish-language service, DW Turkce, and VOA had been blocked by a court decision.
DW had not complied because licensing would have allowed the Turkish government to censor editorial content.
DW Director General Peter Limbourg: "We had outlined in an extensive correspondence and even in a personal conversation with the chairman of the media control authority why DW could not apply for such a license. For example, media licensed in Turkey are required to delete online content that RTÃÅK interprets as inappropriate. This is simply unacceptable for an independent broadcaster. DW will take legal action against the blocking that has now taken place."
VOA and Deutsche Welle "reported on many issues that were followed by millions and that the national press could not bring to the agenda," and "with the last decision of the judiciary, [that] has been blocked. The judiciary turned its face not to justice but to the government in Turkey,” Guleryuzlu added.
Yaman Akdeniz, a cyberlaw professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, told VOA Turkish “complete access blocking to these news websites can only be described as censorship.”
In February RTÃÅK set a 72-hour deadline for three international news agencies — the Turkish edition of VOA, the US state-owned international multimedia broadcaster; Germany’s state-run broadcaster Deutsche Welle; and the Lyon-based Euronews — to apply for online broadcasting licenses.
The move has been described by media outlets as an attempt at censorship and at expansion of the Turkish government’s control over domestic media to foreign outlets, which are the only source of free and independent journalism for some people in Turkey, where the majority of the media is controlled by the government.
Canadian courts have set their sights on online defamers. In LeBlanc v City of Fredericton, the Court of Queen’s Bench of New Brunswick referred to the “wild west” nature of the internet and the need for courts to “tame” online defamation. In Caplan v Atas, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice created a new online harassment tort when a defamation defendant proved judgment-proof. Frustrated by the law’s limitations, some courts are ordering unwarranted or overly broad injunctions – essentially unjustified state censorship.
Devin Nunes’ campaign to intimidate and silence his critics with a flood of SLAPP suits has hit another stumbling block. While he and his lawyer, Steven Biss, had mostly avoided filing lawsuits in states with strong anti-SLAPP laws, including his “home” state of California, for some reason in the fall of 2020 he sued Twitter and someone named Benjamin Meredith in California state court.
Some days, it has got to suck to be a judge. Well, actually a lot of days. Most judicial work is tedious, including contractual disputes or bankruptcy proceedings or maritime law or any dozens of other aspects of litigation that would put most people to sleep.
Australian-born Assange's legal team have lodged an appeal against that decision at the High Court, his brother Gabriel Shipton confirmed. The court must give its approval for the appeal to be heard, but it is likely the legal case will take months to conclude.
"We also urge the Australian government to intervene immediately in the case to end this nightmare," Shipton told Reuters.
In a last-ditch effort to avoid extradition to the United States, lawyers for jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Friday appealed to the United Kingdom's High Court to block the transfer.
"We also urge the Australian government to intervene immediately in the case to end this nightmare."
It would be foolish to imagine that, in this more complex information age, the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services’ influence over journalists has diminished. Both Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Mason’s cases illustrate how intimate those ties still are.€
The North Carolina Green Party's presumptive U.S. Senate nominee accused the state's Democratically-controlled Board of Elections of "a corrupt, lawless, and blatantly partisan attack on democracy" after it voted Thursday against certifying Green Party's petition for its candidates to appear on the November ballot.
"It's a slap in the face to the thousands of people who signed, to our grassroots organizers who worked tirelessly to collect thousands of signatures during an ongoing pandemic, and to everyone who believes in democracy itself," Matthew Hoh, a longtime anti-war activist, said in a statement.
Racial justice advocates on Thursday denounced a proposal by a panel of Texas educators to describe slavery as "involuntary relocation" in the state's revised second-grade social studies curriculum as part of an effort to comply with a law restricting how the United States' history of white supremacy is taught.
The Texas Tribune reports a working group of nine educators proposed the change as the Texas State Board of Education considers curriculum changes in the wake of the passage of what critics have called the "white discomfort" law.
But despite losing stable housing, losing mental health care, being forced to withdraw from class, and possibly being marked as ineligible for unemployment due to the nature of her firing, Chambers says she would do it all over again. Jacobin’s Will Shattuc spoke with her about her experience taking on the megacorporation.
The case isn't the first time that Iranian authorities have punished supposed signs of immoral or Western behaviour. In 2019, police beat teenage girls who were playing with water guns in a park. The same year, a woman was sentenced to prison after singing at a historical site. In 2018, the tourist attraction Margoon Falls was closed to visitors after women were seen dancing there, which is forbidden in public.
It is worth noting that the above scenario has played out countless times in Egypt: whenever a church is built, legalized, or repaired—or is merely rumored to be built, legalized, or repaired—local Muslims riot and attack the Copts. Authorities frequently respond by appeasing the rioters and rescinding the church’s legal status, effectively shutting it down.
Reveal found the driving force behind arrests often isn’t proactive police enforcement, but residents reporting that a person is making them feel unsafe, refusing to leave the area, or leaving trash and other items behind. In Portland, Reveal’s analysis shows at least 60% of calls that police dispatchers categorize as “homeless-related” aren’t explicitly about crimes.
Over the past several decades, corporate lawyers, right-wing activists, Republican officials, and dark money groups with deep pockets have been laying the groundwork for a far-reaching legal assault on the federal government's ability to regulate U.S. industry—including the oil and gas sector threatening the planet.
On Thursday, their investments bore major fruit.
Renowned environmentalist and author Naomi Klein argued Thursday that over the past week, the United States experienced the early stages of a "rolling judicial coup" as the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to abortion rights, gun control laws, and the federal government's authority to tackle greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the global climate emergency.
"We have witnessed a shock-and-awe judicial coup," Klein wrote in a column for The Intercept, pointing also to the right-wing high court's decisions to weaken Indigenous sovereignty and further undermine the separation of church and state.
Last week's Supreme Court rulings on abortion and guns shook the country. Both rely on a radical approach to how to read the Constitution: making major social policy by purporting to use "originalism." Together they show how flawed that can be. Liberals must find their voice and put forward a better way to explain the Constitution and how it works—or we can expect more weeks like this one every June as we wait for oracles in robes to consult the vapors of history and tell us our fates.€ €
The violence of the irony: Those Supreme Court justices hand-picked by Mitch McConnell’s dark-money donors oversaw the evisceration of Roe v. Wade only days after the death of Paula Rego.
On the last day of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued an opinion that gutted the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate power plants and take meaningful steps to address climate change. West Virginia v. EPA was grounded in the "major questions doctrine," an interpretive approach that dramatically weakens the ability of government to actually do things, while just as dramatically strengthening the ability of the judiciary to intervene. That combination poses serious threats to American self-governance and democracy itself.
On Friday, June 24, 2022, a Judicial Coup led by a Gang of Five radical, religious, right-wing Supreme Court Injustices hit “delete” on the reproductive rights of millions, directly thwarting the will of the majority of Americans, endangering women’s and other pregnant people’s lives, setting the stage for further degradations, and just generally pooping on our party (what’s left of it).
Coup Anon
The details of President Joe Biden's deal with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to nominate an anti-abortion lawyer to a lifetime federal judgeship came into clearer focus on Friday, sparking fresh calls for top congressional Democrats to block the proposed agreement.
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern reported Friday that "McConnell will allow Biden to nominate and confirm two U.S. attorneys to Kentucky"—positions that are term-limited—if the president nominates Republican lawyer Chad Meredith to a post on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
One of the nation's leading reproductive rights advocacy groups on Friday endorsed Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman for that state's open U.S. Senate seat, describing him as a candidate who will "boldly fight for abortion rights and access" if elected later this year.
"I will vote to eliminate the filibuster and protect the right to an abortion. I will vote to protect abortion rights, and my opponent, Dr. Oz, will not. It's that simple." —Lt. Gov. John Fetterman
As the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican-controlled state legislatures void the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, Sierra Leone on Friday joined the growing list of African nations that have moved to protect the health and rights of pregnant people by decriminalizing the medical procedure.
"Despite recent setbacks in the United States, feminist movements are stronger than ever and ready to persevere in the global struggle for democracy and reproductive justice."
But with the Supreme Court’s€ Dobbs€ decision overturning€ Roe v. Wade, there ain’t no bright side.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading non-partisan research organization on sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion soon as a result of the ruling. In fact, some states’ anti-abortion laws have already gone into effect.
Later, Keyes tells Neff: “They’ve committed a murder. And it’s not like taking a trolley ride together where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other, and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.” Neff knew it himself. The night of the crime, he reflected: “Suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong…. I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.”
That’s what six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court should have heard today. In West Virginia vs. Environmental Protection Agency, they voted to limit the authority of the EPA to issue rules stopping or limiting the release into the air of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are rapidly heating the planet. Instead of the E.P.A. — established by law in 1970 to protect the environment — it would be Congress, according to the ruling, that must issue these regulations. Invoking an entirely fictitious “major questions doctrine”, Chief Justice Roberts, speaking for the majority, claimed to be curing a “recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.” In fact, as Justice Eleanor Kagan argued in dissent, Congress expressly empowered the EPA to act to protect the environment because legislators cannot – they lack the time or expertise to draft complex rules. That’s what government agencies are for. As Kagan wrote (with some snark): “It is EPA (that’s the Environmental Protection Agency, in case the majority forgot) acting to address the greatest environmental challenge of our time.”
This month, the Supreme Court of the United States rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, made it easier to carry concealed guns in public places, and sharply limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate heat-trapping emissions from power plants. There is clear and copious scientific evidence showing that these rulings will put people’s lives and the health of our planet in danger.
New research published Thursday by experts at the University of Colorado Boulder estimates that a nationwide abortion ban of the kind Republican lawmakers are intent on pursuing would increase maternal mortality in the United States by 24%.
Released just days after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion—triggering total bans in a number of GOP-led states—the analysis uses newly available data from 2020 to show that the "increased exposure to the risks of pregnancy" caused by a federal abortion ban "would cause an increase of 210 maternal deaths per year (24% increase), from 861 to 1071."
Nearly 200 abortion rights advocates were arrested in Washington, D.C. on Thursday as they railed against the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last week that destroyed the protections afforded by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and demanded lawmakers act urgently to codify those rights into federal law.
Organized by the Center for Popular Democracy and Planned Parenthood Action, the demonstration that ended with civil disobedience in the streets featured prominent civil rights leaders like Rev. William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign and Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-Calif.).
The United States Supreme Court has overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion for half a century. The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is devastating in its own right, but also foreshadows how this extremist rightwing majority on the Supreme Court could destroy more than a century of progress. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the heavily criticized majority opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Four of these five were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, three by President Trump and one, Alito, appointed by President George W. Bush.
Today the Supreme Court—again, with the 6 Republican appointees on one side and the 3 Democratic appointees on the other—limited the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. This ruling deals a major blow to America's (and the world's) efforts to address climate change. Also—as with its decision reversing Roe v. Wade—today's ruling has far larger implications than the EPA and the environment.
"Push," a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, portrays the wholesome, storybook-simplicity of post-Roe America.
There is a national epidemic of missing girls and women. This is the story of a friend who has become one of these grim statistics.
As activists across the U.S. are mobilizing to defend reproductive rights, we speak to the Dutch physician Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who has dedicated her life to circumventing anti-abortion laws, including providing abortions on ships in international waters and sending abortions pills around the world. She also discusses navigating censorship on social media platforms, telemedicine, the future of contraception and more. “This is not the moment anymore to stay within the law,” says Dr. Gomperts, referring to the end of Roe v. Wade. “This is the moment to make sure that women have access to safe abortions despite the law, because this is such an unjust law that is creating so much social inequality and that will affect, really, the most poor women in the country.”
We go to San Antonio, where 53 migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. died earlier this week after being confined to a sweltering tractor-trailer. Human rights advocates blamed the tragedy on restrictive immigration policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as MPP or the “Remain in Mexico” program. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Biden has the power to end the Trump-era policy, which forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to stay on the Mexican side of the border in unsafe conditions while their cases were resolved in the U.S. “Every single migration-related death is preventable by policy that actually focuses on welcome and care,” says Claudia Muñoz, co-executive director of Grassroots Leadership.
I was outside the big iron fence surrounding the illegitimate Supreme Court when the ruling that ended women’s fifty-year constitutional right to an abortion was handed down by the Donald Trump-appointed Christian fascist majority on the most powerful judicial body in the world’s most powerful nation. It felt like when a loved one who has long been gravely ill finally dies. You know it’s coming, but it still hits you in the gut.
Two reporters asked me if I was surprised by the decision. Not at all, I said, no more than I was surprised by the January 6th Capitol Riot. Anyone who paid remotely close attention to Trump’s statements as president knew that he would never admit defeat and that he had no intention of permitting the peaceful transfer of power after he lost. The Trump Hall Putsch was both shocking and entirely predictable.
+ Biden doesn’t want to expand the Court. Won’t pressure Sinema and Manchin to back eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe. Doesn’t want to use federal facilities as abortion clinics. Doesn’t back statehood for DC or PR. But does want to nominate an anti-abortion activist and Federalist Society lawyer to a lifetime position on the federal bench as a favor to Mitch…?
+ Only 20 percent of Chicago voters turned out to vote in this week’s primaries, the lowest turnout since 2014. Who is going to be motivated to vote for a party that repeatedly says it’s helpless to do anything and doesn’t have any ideas on “what” to?
I originally authored this column in August 2015, back when Donald Trump was merely a television caricature parading his wares about the Obama Birther conspiracy theory and Hillary Clinton’s election seemed absolutely certain.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and affords the film critic a certain pause not afforded other journalists. Films change over the years because we change as viewers. In hindsight, I wish I had been less foolhardy and self-assured in 2015-17 about the likelihood of Roe’s overturn. I operated for a few years under the assumption that this would not come to pass and that we had more time and opportunities. I do not regret my electoral politics strategy but I do wish it had more seriously interrogated the likelihood of this occurrence.
If the US were a real democracy, there would be a courageous leftist people’s party to resist this grotesque situation. Instead we have the Democratic Party, a collection of wealthy, campaign bribe-grasping, gutless and smug career politicians, ready to compromise any principle to stay in office and serve those willing to pay the most for their support.
How else to explain not only the Democrats’ continuing support of candidates and of hack politicians seeking re-election who have no interest in doing what the public wants (cancellation of student debt, access to abortions and contraception, free government-funded healthcare for all, a much smaller and non-interventionist military, real action on climate change, more funding for public schools, more generous Social Security, a liveable minimum wage, etc., etc.
But we shouldn’t be surprised — this far-right court has been chipping away at democracy itself for years. And as€ Justice Clarence Thomas has made clear, the court’s newly emboldened conservatives want to take away more rights — including your right to family planning and the right to marry the person you love.
This is nothing short of a constitutional coup to impose extreme, minority views on our nation.€ But I still have hope. We can restore our rights if we stay disciplined and focused in our defense of democracy.
In doing so, the court set a dangerous precedent — that a person’s rights can be taken away.
Overturning€ Roe v. Wade€ was a triumph of politics and ideology over constitutional principles. It diminished the power and equality of women, along with transgender men and non-binary people, to make informed decisions about their own bodies without fear of government intrusion.
The next morning we left for the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) where the amphitheater was to host a lineup of great jazz stars, to take up our seats at the “small tent” venue, a choice that’s become rather automatic over our years of attending such festivals.
This year, the reasonableness of our choice came home to me. On Sunday afternoon we left the small tent where we’d by then seen a variety of exciting, often adventurous performances, to take a seat on the grass above the amphitheater to catch Kurt Elling. We could have climbed down closer, but opted to stay above, our location well beyond “nosebleed;” in effect we were watching TV. Big stars like Elling are perhaps compelled to play such venues, where a smaller “in-person” big-ticket audience extends to a vast unseen one, little different than putting out the art on CD’s or on TV. Around us some people were attentive to Elling and the Charlie Hunter Trio, but many engaged in uninterrupted conversation, as tuned out as I am when in a bar surrounded by TV’s. In such a context, the “scene” established by celebrity power and screen hyper-reality, what does it mean to “be there?”
What could be more convincing than that? The words are part of Samuel Alito’s€ majority opinion€ in the recent SCOTUS ruling overturning a woman’s right to an abortion. Apparently human evolution stopped in . . .1789. We — in particular, women, people of color — are prisoners of the past, when slavery was the law of the land, when women couldn’t vote. America, America, land of white male dominance and ignorance. Thank God for the constitutional originalists, who do what they must to keep that ignorance viable, to keep us anchored to the certainties of the old days.
These are the certainties that shape the world, that keep militarism alive, that keep the prison system alive — speaking of which, 11 states still allow the barbaric practice known as “shackling” within the system: handcuffing and chaining incarcerated pregnant women, including when they are, God help us, in labor. The cruel absurdity of this practice is almost beyond comprehension. And it hasn’t been that long ago that it was situation normal throughout the country.
There’s a part of me that finds it almost impossible to believe that we are back to this situation in 2022, fifty years after the woman’s right to choose was decided. I remember reading jill johnston’s fascinating essays and the ads in the Village Voice placed by doctors providing abortion services when I lived in the Bronx in 1973 and 1974. However, when I look around the nation and recall its history since the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down, I’m actually more surprised it took so long to overturn it. After all, the return to the white capitalist paradise that was partially undone in the 1960s and early 1970s was already well underway by 1982, ten years after Roe v. Wade. Ronald Reagan and his band of troglodytes were making certain of that. They were setting the stage for the future to come. On top of that, there really weren’t too many laws protecting LGBTQ people on the books back then. By the end of the decade, Reagan and his crew of corrupt crackers were intentionally letting gay men die, as they denied and even fought the reality of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Ronnie didn’t care. His god was on his side.
In the past couple years, some companies and public agencies have begun to address systemic racism in the United States. These efforts came as a result of the summer of protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Like virtually every other effort along these lines, the seminars, workshops and discussions such efforts feature leave out the most important aspect of this racism—the economic element. In other words, they address the racism, the history of racism and the nature of racism. However, they don’t tell the participants that this nation’s economic development was founded in the kidnapping, trading and breeding of Black Africans and their descendants. Slaves were not just work animals, they were actual collateral, with a cash value that enabled slaveowners to get mortgages, begin businesses, and conduct trade in goods they produced. It was not only the slavers (owners, traders, etc.) that made a profit from this trade. Banks in the north and the south of the United States accumulated wealth because of the business of slavery. By not acknowledging this essential economic foundation, we can pretend that US capitalism can eradicate white supremacy. In a similar manner, we can also pretend that it can eradicate an even older oppression—the oppression of women.
“I was just flabbergasted that a house like this, in an area like this, could possibly have never been wired for Internet,” Mr Cohn told the outlet.
As the home is “in the middle of Seattle, it didn’t even dawn on me that that was possible,” he said.
The injunction was issued in the matter of Crystal Web (Pty) Ltd vs AFRINC & Eddy Kayihura.
Currently there are 39 court cases involving AFRINIC.
Agriculture on any scale involves many tasks that require lifting, hauling, pushing, and pulling. On many modern farms, these tasks are often done using an array of specialized (and expensive) equipment. This puts many small-scale farmers, especially those in developing countries, under significant financial pressure. These challenges led a South African engineering firm to develop the Kotonki, a low-cost hydraulically powered utility vehicle that can be customized for a wide variety of use cases. Video after the break.
For literally twenty-five years now, telecom monopoly executives the world over have been trying to force big tech companies billions of dollars for no coherent reason. It began with AT&T’s attempt to double dip on Google; which spurred the entire net neutrality war. The complaint by telecoms has long since moved global, as they try to get gullible politicians to try and force tech giants to give them billions.
Sigh, here we go. Back in 2014, Wreal LLC filed a trademark infringement suit against Amazon. Why? Well, Wreal has a product called FyreTV that it describes as “the Netflix of porn.” Amazon has a streaming service for decidedly non-pornographic content called Fire TV. Wreal came into court armed with a couple of social media posts basically poking fun at the two names and tried to paint that as real or potential confusion in the marketplace. The case has gone through many twists and turns over the past 8 years, including the district court tossing the suit in 2019 because of the stark differences in the products and types of services being offered. From there, Wreal appealed.
Amazon owned Audible ceased selling individual audiobooks through their Android app from Google Play a couple of weeks ago. This will prevent anyone from buying audio titles individually. However, Audible still sells subscriptions through the app and will continue to offer credits for exiting members. Around the same time that Audible announced their new policy shift, Barnes and Noble announced they will no longer do business with Google at all. They ceased offering audiobooks, ebooks or subscription purchases through their flagship Nook App. This not only affects users who downloaded the app on their smartphone, but also people who bought a Nook Tablet.
Seven people behind a pirate IPTV and card-sharing operation have been sentenced to prison for fraud offenses. Two leaders of the network received 44-month prison sentences and the other five were ordered to serve between 9 to 18 months. After the defendants gave up around one million euros of the amount they generated from the fraud, a court suspended their custodial sentences.
With millions of dollars at stake, the legal battle over the Pulp Fiction "NFT" copyrights is heating up. Quentin Tarantino recently asked the court to dismiss the case because he still owns the rights to the screenplay. However, Miramax now argues that the movie director's 'limited rights' only apply to print publications and not NFTs.
First of all, the grass isn’t necessarily that green on this side of the fence since I often write these essays when I’m procrastinating on other things. It’s a way for me to chill out and relax and be social, so I’m OK with it, or I’d have to make some big changes to my GTD routine. These last few months, I’ve already found myself overly SOFA-prone, nerd-snipeable, and driven by the latest and loudest instead of doing deep, deliberate work. I pretty much spend my days reading and blogging instead of hanging out with other people and doing real things.
Other things that help is that I never worry if an article is too long or too short, and I edit both before and after I post. I write a sloppy first draft and I fix it before the initial publication, but I’m also super willing to keep polishing old posts. Simon has a “don’t look back! onto the next!“ policy for his blog while I have more of a wiki mindset. Although our policies are opposite, both have the same purpose: to help us get over the hesitancy to hit “publish”. And both seem to work well.
When I first started playing D&D as a player, before I started my own group, we were doing Labyrinth Lord (one DM used the AEC, the other didn’t) and he would draw a map for us on grid paper. Ten feet was a five millimeter square (that’s about a fifth of an inch).
I don't think those kids are ever coming back for their free dictionary. And now, there's my anger again, down my nose and through my teeth. It's the end of the line for that bus my shadow drives. So everyone off!
i don't write that much anymore. not even for myself. hardly because i have nothing to say either. i guess i just don't think it matters; in the sense that a social anything comes from it. sending random words into the ether just feels like it's a waste of time and energy.
I use the Rasberri Pi Pico Microcontroller which uses the RP2040. I was in the process of writing a gemlog post about my recent adventures in code optimization in Mecrisp Stellaris Forth, but I got hung up on a few ancilliary questions about how Mecrisp's memory model works on the RP2040 platform. Since I put so much energy into figuring that out, I thought I would first post some basic information about it.
The big difference between the RP2040, and most (all?) of the other ARM microcontrollers used with Mecrisp Stellaris, is that RP2040 does not have any onboard flash memory. Rather, flash memory is provided over a serial link to external QSPI Flash modules. The Rpi Pico happens to include 2 MB of QSPI flash memory. As far as onboard volatile memory, RP2040 includes 264 KB of SRAM, not including SRAM for registers and data buffers.
[...]
Just keep in mind though that reading from and writing to flash is slow, and writing to flash wears out those memory cells. So you might not want to do it too often.
On RP2040, SRAM is mapped at 20000000h and up. For more information on the memory mapping of registers, see the RP2040 data sheet. For more information about how Mecrisp uses SRAM, see the "rp2040-ra/README" file in the mecrisp-stellaris download.
My idea is this: a lot of sites have a search API. That means my search engine could send your query to multiple different sites and collate the replies into a set for you to peruse.
But how accurate would a search like that be, and how should the results be weighted and presented? A model for each API called would have to be created and maintained, because Wikipedia and StackExchange have different APIs. And speaking of accuracy the latter actually say in their documentation that their search function isn't super and that you should use a "proper" search engine to get better results. On their own site.
Could quality results be found this way? Searching for "How to upgrade Ubuntu" will probably only turn up results from a couple of sources. It's not feasible to propagate the search to hundreds of sites; maybe only five or ten at most.
As you might imagine, not everyone was happy with my post the other day discussing another paper by Peter Doshi attempting to “prove” that the randomized controlled trials used to justify the emergency use authorization (EUA) for mRNA-based vaccines actually showed more serious adverse events than the placebo group. Of course as I discussed, it took p-hacking, cherry picking of data, and comparing apples and oranges to reach that conclusion, making the preprint by Peter Doshi and at least two other “COVID-19 contrarians” (Joseph Fraiman and Patrick Whelan) highly suspect at best, disinformation at worst.
Lightning is one of the more mysterious and fascinating phenomenon on the planet. Extremely powerful, but each strike on average only has enough energy to power an incandescent bulb for an hour. The exact mechanism that starts a lightning strike is still not well understood. Yet it happens 45 times per second somewhere on the planet. While we may not gain a deeper scientific appreciation of lightning anytime soon, but we can capture it in various photography thanks to this project which leverages machine learning to pull out the best frames of lightning.
i'm not aware of any widespread convention for designating tags on a gemlog post - if there is one, please let me know! Otherwise, at the risk of creating standard 15[a], here's what i'm going to start using on my own gemlog.
In the process, I intentionally misrepresent how the judicial system works: I portray the system the way people like to imagine it works. Please don’t make any important legal decisions based on anything I say.
[...]
GitHub is enabling copyleft violation âŨat scaleâŨ with Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make derivative works of source code without complying with the original code’s license. This facilitates the creation of permissively-licensed or proprietary derivatives of copyleft code.
Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub’s parent company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget probably ensures their victory, and they likely already have a comprehensive defense planned. How can we determine Copilot’s legality on a level playing field? We can create legal precedent that they haven’t had a chance to study yet!
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.