 Linux terminal is not as scary as you think.
Of course, it could be intimidating in the beginning but once you know the terminal better, you start loving it.
You are likely to use the terminal for serious work. But there are many fun stuff you can do in the terminal as well.
One of them is experimenting with ASCII art. You can display predefined or random messages, play games, or run some animation in ASCII format in the Linux terminal using various command line tools.
Spanish manufacturer (and KDE patron) Slimbook has just released their new KDE-themed Slimbook ultrabook.
The KDE Slimbook 4 comes with a Ryzen 5700U processor and KDE's full-featured Plasma desktop running on KDE Neon. It also comes with dozens of Open Source programs and utilities pre-installed and access to hundreds more.
The KDE Slimbook 4's AMD Ryzen 5700U processor is one of the most efficient CPUs for portable computers in the range. With its 8 GPU cores and 16 threads, it can run your whole office from home and on the go, render 3D animations, compile your code and serve up the entertainment for you during down time.
The Slimbook starts Plasma by default on Wayland, the state-of-the-art display server. With Wayland, you can enjoy the advantages of crisp fonts and images, framerates adapted to each of your displays, and all the touchpad gestures implemented in Plasma 5.25.
Issue 19 of our free magazine Hello World, written by and for the computing education community, focuses on the interaction between sustainability and computing, from how we can interact with technology responsibly, to its potential to mitigate climate change.
Guitar amplifiers have a hard life, and as anyone who’s run a venue can tell you, they often have significant electrical issues after a life on the road. [Dsagman] had a Vox amplifier with fried internals, and rather than repair the original he rebuilt it with a Raspberry Pi inside to provide a fully-loaded array of effects.
If you like the 1970s aesthetic but think bell-bottoms, big hair and psychedelic wallpaper are a bit too much in this day and age, you might want to have a look at [Pierre Muth]’s latest build, The Absurd Notifier. It’s a useful desk accessory that adds just a little bit of ’70s flair to your office: housed inside what looks like an orange TV standing on shiny metal feet is a little gadget that can tell you if you’ve got important email messages waiting or an appointment coming up.
Mr. President grew out of “Political Beggars,” a short story that Miguel ÃÂngel Asturias wrote in December 1922 before leaving Guatemala for Europe. The novel was first published in 1946 in an edition full of errors that Asturias corrected for the second edition (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948). Indeed, he worked longer on this novel than on any other of his published books, even though he had abandoned the manuscript for long periods of time. The novel carried this annotation: “Paris, November 1923–December 8, 1932.” According to most critics, and the author’s own account, this novel was inspired by the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled as lord and master of Guatemala for 22 years, from 1898 to 1920.
Every year on July 4, to much fanfare and revelry, the United States marks its 1776 independence from Britain.
Wired and SCMP are reporting on interesting trivia from the realm of chip shortages. Apparently, some large conglomerate out there is buying new washing machines and scavenging the chips they can’t obtain otherwise. My imagination pictures skilled engineers in a production room, heavy-duty electric screwdrivers and desoldering toolkits on the floor next to them, and a half-torn-down washing machine about to reveal its control board with an STM32 right in the middle. This might not be the most skilled job, but it’s a change of pace, and hey, as long as the rate stays the same?
It seems there will never be an end to the number of ways to show the time. The latest is the LumiClock from [UK4dshouse], and it uses the seldom-seen approach of a sheet of luminous paper excited by a strip of UV LEDs that pass over it guided by a lead screw.
After a four-year hiatus and a cancelled event, it was time earlier this month for British and European hackers to return to their field in Herefordshire. A special field, Eastnor Castle Deer Park, venue for the Electromagnetic Field 2022 hacker camp. I packed up an oversized rucksack and my folding bike, and set off to enjoy a few days in the company of my fellow geeks.
As the digital photographic revolution took off, and everyone bought a shiny new film-less camera, there was a brief fad for photo printers. The idea was you’d have the same prints you’d always had from film, but the media for these printers would invariably cost a fortune so consumers moved on pretty quickly.
If you’re a clock aficionado and have ever visited Berlin, you’re probably familiar with the Berlin Clock on Budapester Straße: a minimalist design of yellow and orange lights that displays the time in a base-5 number system. This clock has been telling the time to the few that can read it since 1975, and is but one of several unusual clocks that can be found in the city.
In May and June of 2022 two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combatting Covid-19.
The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered over 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this is written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”
About 1 in 4 LGBT adults (26%) lived with children under age 18, compared to just over one-third (36%) of non-LGBT adults. Among those living with children, LGBT adults were younger on average than non-LGBT adults, but had similar levels of education.
Just over 4 in 10 LGBT adults (41%) lived with a child under age 5 who was unable to attend childcare in the last four weeks before being surveyed, compared to 3 in 10 non-LGBT adults living with a young child.
A community in West Virginia is planning to appeal a ruling handed down Monday by a federal judge who concluded that three pharmaceutical companies are not liable for the vast damage done to the area by their shipments of millions of opioids.
Cabell County and the city of Huntington argued in court last year that AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson had created a "public nuisance" by distributing more than 81 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills in the area over an eight-year period, saying the companies made no effort to ensure the pills were fulfilling legitimate prescriptions and wouldn't be sold on the black market.
Defenders of Social Security on Tuesday urged the U.S. Senate to block President Joe Biden's little-noticed nomination of Andrew Biggs—an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow with a history of supporting Social Security privatization—to serve on the independent and bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board.
Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, is leading the charge against Biggs, highlighting his role in the George W. Bush administration's failed attempt to privatize the New Deal program in 2005. At the time, Biggs worked on Social Security as an associate director of Bush's National Economic Council.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, advocates for privacy and reproductive health have expressed fears that data from period-tracking apps could be used to find people who’ve had abortions.
They have a point. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA, does not apply to most apps that track menstrual cycles, just as it doesn’t apply to many health care apps and at-home test kits.
An increasingly important theme around here is how various laws to regulate the internet are often in conflict with each other. Privacy law is leading to less competition, for example. And from TorrentFreak, we have another, somewhat amusing example. The incredibly aggressive Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has yet another hare-brained scheme to try to prevent copyright infringement: forcing ISPs to send threatening letters to those accused of large scale infringement.
In a recent TV interview, the celebrated U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama made what struck me as possibly the most foolish remark ever uttered on TV. And I know that’s a high bar.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Monday that Congress must take far more ambitious legislative action to combat the scourge of gun violence in the United States in the wake of the mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
"Today's terrible shooting in Highland Park is the latest reminder of our nation's deadly gun violence epidemic," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter. "Grocery stores. Schools. Churches. Fourth of July parades. Places everyone should feel safe. Congress must do more NOW to protect our people."
We shoot each other.
Around 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 3, residents of Belgorod were woken by the sound of explosions. The Russian authorities accused Kyiv of launching missiles at the border city — and not for the first time. In April, Russia leveled accusations against Ukraine after a Rosneft oil depot in Belgorod went up in flames. And in May, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported two deaths allegedly caused by shelling from Ukrainian territory — one in the village of Solokhi and another in Zhuravlyovka. The explosions on Sunday night damaged dozens of apartment buildings and private homes, killing at least five people and wounding four others. In this joint dispatch, Meduza and Russian news outlet 7x7 report on how Belgorod residents are picking up the pieces after the deadly blasts.€
The Moscow branch of United Russia, the country’s ruling party, has prepared a set of “recommendations for covering the special operation” for candidates planning on running on the party’s ticket in the September municipal elections.
In May 2022, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed a law making any attempt to commit a terrorist attack punishable by death —€ and terrorism is exactly the charge being brought against a number of Belarusians who stand accused of damaging the country’s railroads. Belarus's "railroad war" began before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when the Russian and Belarusian armies began conducting joint exercises; since then, there have been dozens of attacks. At Meduza’s request, Belarusian journalist Anya Perova reports on Belarus’s railroad guerrilla fighters.
Jake Johnson reports on Bernie Sanders' response to the most recent mass shooting in Illinois.
Uvalde, Texas, school district police chief Pete Arredondo has resigned from his new position on Uvalde’s City Council after facing widespread criticism over his handling of the May 24 school massacre when an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 fourth graders and two teachers. State authorities say Arredondo was the incident commander who ordered officers to wait in the school’s hallway for over an hour instead of confronting the gunman. We speak with Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, which has led an investigation into the failed police response to the school shooting. “The heavy militarization of the region raises profound questions about why the police and law enforcement response was so lacking,” said Chan. We also feature the Tribune’s video report on a 1970 Mexican American student-led walkout that took place in Uvalde.
Mass racial justice protests broke out this weekend in Akron, Ohio, after police released multiple body-camera videos showing eight officers chasing and killing 25-year-old Jayland Walker after a minor traffic violation on June 27. Walker was an unarmed Black man. The video ends with the police firing about 90 rounds and shooting Walker about 60 times, according to an autopsy report, and lawyers for the family of Walker say police handcuffed him after the attack before trying to provide aid. “The video shows that a Black man was spotted driving at night in an area he probably shouldn’t have been spotted, was profiled, was then chased and gunned down like he wasn’t human at all. Any other narrative is a disgrace to what we’ve seen in the video,” says Ray Greene Jr., executive director of the Freedom BLOC, a Black-led collective based in Akron that pressured the state to release the video. We are also joined by former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner.
Six people were killed and at least two dozen injured when a rooftop gunman armed with a high-powered rifle attacked a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park on Monday morning. The police eventually arrested Robert Crimo III, a 21-year-old white resident of Highland Park and aspiring musician, whose music videos depicted mass murder and school shootings. We speak with Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator and national co-chair of the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, who says mass shootings in the U.S. are partly fueled by racism, sexism and “toxic masculinity” that equates gun ownership with manhood. “We have neglected to deal with a violent past and a violent present in the United States of America,” says Turner.
Congressional Republicans on Tuesday threw cold water on a proposal by their Democratic colleagues that would cut off funding for the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba via a Pentagon funding bill, with one GOP senator defending the notorious extralegal lockup as an "absolutely vital institution."
Last month, House Democrats advanced proposed legislation to close the 20-year-old prison—a symbol of the brutality and lawlessness of the so-called War on Terror—as part of a larger military spending package.
Dr. David Baum, an obstetrician based in Highland Park, Illinois who was attending the Fourth of July parade there on Monday, ended up helping to treat injuries he called "unspeakable" after a gunman killed at least six people and injured 26 others.
The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Crimo III, allegedly used a legally purchased "high-powered rifle," according to the New York Times, in the attack at the Chicago suburb's annual July 4th celebration.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman on Tuesday voiced support for a federal ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines following multiple shootings over the long holiday weekend, including one that left six dead and dozens wounded in a Chicago suburb.
"Gisele and I are heartbroken for the victims of these shootings and their families," Fetterman said in a statement. "We wish both law enforcement officers who were injured in the Philadelphia shooting a safe and quick recovery."
The 6-3 Supreme Court decision stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of much of its power to regulate U.S. industries that are pumping out greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The court held that EPA had no authority to cap coal’s contribution to national electricity generation at 27% by 2030. The goal had been announced in Obama’s 2014 Clean Power Plan that never took effect, but still made its way to the court’s docket in 2022.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the 6-member right-wing bloc. By keeping drafting in his own hands, he was able to steer the language, if not the effect, of the decision in his preferred incremental fashion.
In the days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, when millions of Americans travel by car, Republicans sought to blame President Biden and congressional Democrats for high gas prices. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, in the midst of a tough reelection fight, blamed $5-a-gallon gas on “the elite Democrats that support President Biden’s environmental policies.” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) accused Biden of “waging a holy war against American fossil fuels.” And Utah Representative Chris Stewart claimed that “President Biden’s energy policy is one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in our nation’s history.”
Tom Engelhardt reflects on the many political fires in the U.S. and around the globe, including the climate crisis.
The Supreme Court decision to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants set off widespread worries that federal agencies won’t be able to protect Americans from harm.
The 6-3 ruling, announced last week, triggered immediate questions at ProPublica, which had spent more than a year reporting on where Americans are exposed to dangerous levels of hazardous air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act, the same law at the heart of the Supreme Court case. In a 2021 series, ProPublica showed how industrial polluters have turned neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones” where some 250,000 Americans breathe in carcinogens that expose them to cancer risks the EPA has deemed unacceptable. A lack of air monitoring and enforcement left communities ill informed about the risks they faced, ProPublica found. In the wake of our reporting, the agency stepped up its enforcement and pledged to do more. Did this ruling put those reforms at risk?
In recent weeks, a newly emboldened right-wing Supreme Court struck down a more than century-old New York law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons and a nearly 50-year-old precedent on abortion.€ Meanwhile, the January 6th Committee has been laying out in graphic televised detail how our last president tried to subvert the 2021 election.€ Inflation, of course, continues to run riot; gas prices have soared to record levels; the brutal war in Ukraine proceeds neverendingly; the Biden administration looks increasingly hapless; and the president himself ever older and less on target. In sum, our world seems to be in headline-making disorder, while our fate here in this country — thank you, (in)justices Alito and Thomas, not to speak of The Donald and crew! — remains remarkably up for grabs by the worst of us all. €
Talk to fossil fuel execs, government ministers, and industry reps these days and they’ll all tell a similar story: Blue hydrogen is the clean fuel of the future that will help Canada and the world get to net-zero emissions. It’ll power everything from airplanes to long-haul trucks and will even heat our homes.
Canadian media has called blue hydrogen, which is produced from natural gas and has its emissions captured, “a key part” of the nation’s emissions-reduction strategy and “fairly clean” — a claim that echoes an infographic from ATCO, a major Canadian energy company, that said blue hydrogen produces “nearly zero emissions.”€
A freight industry lobbyist and climate science denier who claimed road-block protests by green activists were “risking lives” has been acting as an unofficial spokesperson for motorists causing delays on major roads over the price of fuel.€
Howard Cox, founder of the FairFuelUK campaign against fuel duty, which is funded by the Road Haulage Association, has been touring media studios this week as motoring groups caused traffic jams with “go-slow” protests.
Hydrogen is the future of net-zero — at least that is what the governments of Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and the European Union believe.€
Mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, however, has slammed key elements of these governments’ plans at a recent hydrogen summit in London, calling the movement towards blue hydrogen, a process that turns natural gas into hydrogen and carbon monoxide and dioxide and then sequesters the CO2 emissions using carbon capture and storage, an ineffective greenwash.€
Conservation groups applauded a federal district court ruling Tuesday that reinstated protections for endangered species which the Trump administration had severely weakened in 2019, calling the decision "a win for wildlife protection."
The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California "spoke for species desperately in need of comprehensive federal protections without compromise," said Kristen Boyles, an attorney at Earthjustice, which filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump-era rules on behalf of groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and Wild Earth Guardians.
“Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of negative rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day,” — tweet from Bill Gross, the ‘bond king’, in 2016.
The PGII is not the first attempt by the U.S. to match the Chinese infrastructure investment globally, which initially took place bilaterally, and then after 2013 happened through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2004, as the U.S. war on Iraq unfolded, the United States government set up a body called the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which it called an “independent U.S. foreign assistance agency.” Before that, most U.S. government development lending was done through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was set up in 1961 as part of then-President John F. Kennedy administration’s charm campaign against the Soviet Union and against the Bandung spirit of non-alignment in the newly assertive Third World.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush said that USAID was too bureaucratic, and so the MCC would be a project that would include both the U.S. government and the private sector. The word “corporation” in the title is deliberate. Each of the heads of the MCC, from Paul Applegarth to Alice P. Albright, has belonged to the private sector (the current head, Albright is the daughter of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright).
The persistent problem of veteran suicide has provided big firms with an opportunity to demonstrate their concern about the health and well-being of former military personnel, including those they employ. Unfortunately, at companies like Amazon, this performative patriotism does not involve improving working conditions or changing any management practices that might actually make them better employers, even while they pledge to hire more employees with military backgrounds.
A recent report by Brown University’s Cost of War Project found “that four times as many men and women who have served in the U.S. military have died by suicide than were killed in post 9/11 wars.” Cost of War researchers estimate that the total suicide toll among veterans and service members during the past two decades is more than thirty thousand. According to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), veterans are 1.5 times more likely to die by suicide than nonveterans, while female veterans are 2.2 times more likely to die by suicide than civilian women.
Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India—Every night for three months in 2020, Kalpana Kamble, a community health care worker in India’s Maharashtra state, waited nervously for her phone to buzz. “These were the scariest notifications,” she told me. At 10 pm, the district health department would send her a PDF file with Covid test results for her region. “Already our village lacks adequate health care facilities,” Kamble said. “A Covid-positive case meant a community transmission was inevitable, because rarely people in the village followed Covid protocols, nor did they trust the Covid report.”
I have been a working animation and comic strip artist since college. But when art failed to pay the bills, I went to law school, passed the bar, and moonlighted as a Capitol Hill aide. My Plan B included an extended stint as staff counsel and press secretary for Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank. Excerpted from Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank, by Eric Orner. Published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt. Copyright ۩ 2021 by Eric Orner. All rights reserved.
All the makings of democracy seem to be in place in Hungary: the government meets weekly, there is also a regular government press conference, questions can be asked in Parliament – but these are all simply the props of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal theatre. In this video, we will show the gradual shrinking of the public sphere in Hungary, as well as how the space where the critical press can maneuvre has been shrunk. In comparison, we will look at the relationship of the government and the public in neighbouring Slovakia. (English subtitles available)
In an address to Asialink prior to attending the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Osaka, Morrison was again found talking about the Indo-Pacific, which “embraces our Pacific family with whom we have special relationships and duties, our close neighbours, our major trading partners, our alliance partners and the world’s fastest growing economies.”
Such language had all the resonances of white European paternalism, ever watchful over the savage dark races who would only ever advance with the aid, and management, of civilised powers.€ It was a sentiment reflected in the views of British explorer and anthropologist William Winwood Reade, who opined in his 1872 work The Martyrdom of Man that, “Children are ruled and schooled by force, and it is not an empty metaphor to say that savages are children.”€ While he accepted slavery as “happily extinct”, he thought it wise for a European government “to introduce compulsory labour among the barbarous races that acknowledge its sovereignty and occupy its land.”
If the Democrats were not fundamentally committed to sucking, here’s what they might do:
1) abolish Congressional vacations for the next 8 months
Republican leaders in nearly two dozen U.S. states are attempting—potentially in violation of federal law—to use coronavirus relief funds approved by Congress last year to finance tax cuts instead of devoting the money to combating the ongoing pandemic and its economic consequences.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that GOP officials are working to subvert a provision in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) that bars states from using money from a $350 billion Covid-19 aid program "to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue."
Some months after the Debacle in Dallas, I drove Lindequist to San Diego. Jerry and Abbie, with typical Yippie exaggeration, had boasted that a million young people would occupy that city at the 1972 Republican National Convention to protest the Vietnam War. I too was seeing red—the bloody kind. By then more than three million Indochinese had been poisoned, burned, maimed, or killed, and more than 50,000 Americans had sacrificed their lives. The war at home raged on.
In March or April of 1972, I arrived in the offices of the anti-war San Diego Convention Coalition to this news: Paula Tharpe, a 22-year-old spokesperson for the Coalition, had been shot and wounded that January. City officials confirmed to the New York Times that “right-wing vigilantism has plagued San Diego’s small radical community for several years, and that no arrests have ever been made.”
A little over a week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision decisively overturned over 50 years of precedent established by Roe v. Wade, thereby delivering a death blow to the reproductive freedom of women across the country, from sea to shining sea. That this represents an assault on women's rights, and on democratic citizenship itself, is widely understood by many Americans. At the same time, for the minority of Americans who have energetically sought this result for decades, the decision, perversely, represents not a defeat but a triumph of not simply "life" but "women" and "democracy" itself.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. € That to protect these rights, we institute governments that derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.
Paraphrasing those words of the Declaration of Independence, they seem uniquely fitting in a week just preceding the anniversary of their adoption 246 years ago. A week when the Supreme Court of the United States limited the power of the Environmental Protection Administration to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from power plants. The ruling in West Virginia v. EPA has many technical ins and outs that do not bar this power entirely. But it shifts critical carbon-reducing decisions to a Congress that has so far failed to act on climate. Thus, in practical effect, the court has become destructive of rights. It has undermined a vital protection for the life of people across a nation and planet already suffering and dying from a disrupted climate.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday sued Arizona in a bid to block a recently enacted law forcing residents to show proof of citizenship in order to vote in federal elections.
"Arizona is a repeat offender when it comes to attempts to make it harder to register to vote."
After the U.S. Supreme Court's deeply€ unpopular€ reactionary majority spent its latest term carrying out an assault on fundamental constitutional rights, Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Tuesday reiterated House progressives' demands to reform the nation's chief judicial body, including by adding seats.
"We do not have to simply accept the devastation of these rulings."
By setting out new responsibilities for online platforms, the Digital Services Act (DSA) was supposed to rein in the power of Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon and both better educate and empower users, but many of its approaches were initially quite problematic. The final bill avoids transforming social networks and search engines into censorship tools, which is great news. It also retains important principles under the previous internet rules that helped to make the internet free, such as allowing liability exemptions for online platforms for the speech of others and limiting user monitoring. And it improves things as well, by imposing higher standards for transparency around content moderation and creating more user control over algorithmically-curated recommendations.
However, the DSA is not a panacea for all problems users face online and the final deal isn’t all good news: It gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers. The DSA obliges platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks, but there is a lot of ambiguity about how this will turn out in practice. Much will depend on how social media platforms interpret their obligations under the DSA, and how European Union authorities enforce the regulation.
“There’s a lot to like in the Digital Services Act. Far too many proposals launched since work on the DSA began in 2020 posed real risks to free expression by making platforms the arbiters of what can be said online and the DSA avoids many of them,” said Christoph Schmon, EFF’s International Policy Director. “That being said, we can expect a highly politicized co-regulatory model of enforcement with an unclear role of government agencies, which could create real problems. Respect for the EU’s fundamental rights charter and inclusion of civil society groups and researchers will be crucial to ensure that the DSA becomes a positive model for legislation outside the EU.”
This isn’t the kind of response one expects from a firefighter arriving at the scene of a fire. (via Courthouse News Service)
When Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador meets with United States President Joe Biden on July 12, he plans to once again urge the US government to drop the charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Obrador is one of the few presidents in the world, who has expressed genuine support for Assange and even offered to engage in talks about asylum in Mexico.
The nation's largest nurses union on Tuesday urged U.S. senators to "take a stand for reproductive health justice" following the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade by suspending the filibuster and passing a bill codifying abortion rights.
"The U.S. Senate has a solemn obligation to take immediate action to restore these rights and benefits by passing the WHPA. Lives hang in the balance."
With Republicans clamoring to impose a federal abortion ban if they gain control of Congress in November, Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington stressed Monday that€ more lawmakers committed to protecting reproductive freedom must be elected in the upcoming midterms to prevent such a€ deadly outcome.
"Let's be clear: Republicans WILL ban abortion nationwide if they take control of Congress," Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote on social media. "We can't give them that chance. We must elect a REAL pro-choice majority in the Senate."
After attendees had piled their plates high with chicken and waffles in preparation for the evening's competition, the teams set their sights on the coveted Cyberlaw Quiz Cup. EFF's staff joined forces to craft the questions, pulling details from the rich canon of privacy, free speech, and intellectual property law to create six rounds of trivia.
After welcoming everyone to the event, EFF's Alberto Villaluna began the evening's activities by introducing our intrepid Quiz Master Kurt Opsahl, and our judges Cindy Cohn, Mitch Stoltz, and Mukund Rathi. The judges donned their very authentic robes and wigs, grabbed a drink, and the competition was on!
Now that the Supreme Court has given states the freedom to police women’s bodies, it only makes sense that police are out there literally policing women’s bodies.
From the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade to the persecution of whistleblowers, this July 4th exploded with reasons not to celebrate.
This past week, a liberal Israeli daily newspaper, Haartz, quoted a senior US official in Jerusalem who said that concern with Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Palestinian-Americans seeking to enter the West Bank was unrelated to Israel’s petition to enter the US Visa Waiver Program. They were two different issues, the official stated.
On July 4, as a raucous parade passes my house with someone singing “Old Time Rock and Roll” on a makeshift float, it’s difficult to not think about what Brittney Griner is enduring while friends and neighbors drink gustily to their own freedom. The WNBA all-star, who has been in a Russian prison since February, gave us a degree of insight into how she was feeling. In a handwritten letter delivered to President Joe Biden delivered on Independence Day, Griner wrote, “As I sit here in a Russian prison, alone with my thoughts and without the protection of my wife, family, friends, Olympic jersey, or any accomplishments, I’m terrified I might be here forever.”
On Monday June 27, just three days after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization extinguished the constitutional right to abortion, a doctor in Ohio came face to face with the harsh reality of the new legal regime. He had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Under Ohio law, there can be no abortions after six weeks. The doctor scrambled to find a colleague in neighboring Indiana, where laws are only slightly less restrictive, who could help the patient.1
We’ve talked about the unfortunate bipartisan attacks on free speech, which are best understood as attempts to control the narrative. Republicans have been attacking free speech in multiple ways — from trying to ban books and take away teacher autonomy to trying to compel websites to host content against their will. Democrats, on the flip side, have focused on ridiculous attempts to force websites to monitor and control speech. Both of these are bad in their own ways and both are attacks on free speech. In both cases, they seem to be about trying to force others to view the world the same way they do, and that’s the whole reason that we have the 1st Amendment around: to prevent that sort of nonsense.
The Supreme Court’s decision to say “fuck it” to reproductive rights has resulted in plenty of firmly protected First Amendment expression. People are angry and have decided to let the Supreme Court, along with the rest of the federal government, know that they aren’t happy.
We’ve spent years laying out mountains of documented evidence on how the U.S. broadband is a heavily monopolized mess largely protected and pampered by captured lawmakers and regulators. The impact of this lack of meaningful competition is everywhere, from historically terrible customer satisfaction rates, to high prices, slow speeds, and spotty coverage.
There’s a fascinating article by Rebecca Jennings on Vox which explores€ the vexed question of plagiarism. Its starting point is a post on TikTok, entitled “How to EASILY Produce Video Ideas for TikTok.” It gives the following advice:
TPB AFK followed the co-founders of The Pirate Bay during their infamous trial in Sweden and 10 years later, legendary Indian piracy phenomenon Tamilrockers is set to make its own screen debut. A teaser for the new Sony thriller series lifts the veil on the shadowy world of torrent site operators as they take on battalions of cops, beautiful women, and chaotic gunfights in the street.
Several major record labels are attempting to hold Internet provider Bright House legally responsible for the pirating activities of its subscribers. Before going to trial, both parties sought summary judgments in their favor, hoping to gain an early advantage. The court isn't siding with any party at this stage, however, and has instead ruled that the myriad of issues deserve to be heard at trial.
Sometimes I think I should make a writing style guide for the sole purposes of communicating that some of my style decisions are deliberate, including some that are 180ÃÅ¡s from my own previous policies (for example, I’ve become less hesitant towards starting paragraphs with “But” since I find that can increase clarity and reduce misunderstanding).
Another more recent change that I’m trying to adapt is moving parentheticals to after one step up in the syntactic structure. For example, putting them at the end of a sentence or clause as opposed to my previous policy of jamming them in just after the phrase they’re modifying. My old style would often lead to (like in this deliberately bad example) straggler words after the parenthetical. My new style would move that parenthecal to the end of the sentence (like this).
Can you imagine? I want an actual salary increase, which means at least keeping up with inflation.
I bet any employer would choke if you ask for a 10% increase. Though I did actually get that high of a raise in 2021 so I guess it's not impossible.
Running servers at home is something I've long refused as being not worth the hassle. For starters, an ADSL2 internet connection was about all I could expect to have, and it would be shared with housemates.
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I started considering how it might look if I were to self host more of this stuff. I would need to isolate my dev machine from the server workloads somehow. Vitalisation is a tidy solution to that (and Docker is not for you fanboys). If I adopt VMs, a Hypervisor will need to sit at the bottom of the stack. I can imagine running a handful of VMs with different workloads. I could containerise my apps and run them in one VM, but that isn't boring enough. If I'm running more than a couple of VMs I'd like centralised monitoring and logging and configuration management of some sort. I could also imagine needing to share data between multiple VMs. For that I'd probably need NFS on the hypervisor. At a high level, it all seems fairly straight-forward. It doesn't need much tech I haven't used before (though I haven't used some of it in over a decade).
Red Hat Network doesn't exist any more, thank God. But let me tell you what it was and why it absolutely and totally sucked.
In 2014 I started my first real sysadmin job. I'd been doing devops for three years already but never worked this close to the OS and hardware. Now I would be managing a bunch of virtual machines we used for building and testing. This was old school; there was hardly any automation in place for stuff like that and the project in question was winding down to be replaced by a complete re-write of the system so there wasn't much point in spending too much time fixing it either.
We had two releases a year if I recall correctly, and some patch releases in between. For every new release we set a baseline of packages to be installed on the host machine (and of course all test servers). This was the setup we would support.
Updates have also been made to the YouTube proxy so that the video download defaults to the highest quality video it can get with audio attached. If it cannot find 1080p (which is almost always the case), then it tries 720p, then medium-quality, then tiny quality. It will do the same process for the audio, but prioritizes the better video quality over the audio quality.
i was also trying to avoid using the English word ‘tags’, because (even though i'm a native English speaker) i'd prefer a signifier that was language neutral.
Which means i like the idea of ‘ðŸÂ·’! This possibility didn't occur to me, but since others are using it, i'm happy to join in.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
