Today has been a pleasant experience. My old Acer Aspire 3681WXMi laptop has an Intel Celeron 32-bit CPU and only 512MB RAM. I bought it circa-2005. It has been in the closet for years.
I booted EasyOS on a USB-stick, and got a desktop, but lots of things broken. What I discovered is that it couldn't handle the "top level zram". I disabled that, went back to the old method of direct writes to the drive (that you can do via a checkbox via "save" icon on desktop), and everything came good.
Not enough RAM to juggle the extra requirement of the zram. The laptop has a swap-partition, which is required -- I checked and saw that it was being used.
Audio works, wi-fi works. Connected to the Internet, Firefox works and is surprisingly snappy. LibreOffice works, also surprisingly snappy. Really, this has given this old laptop a new lease of life.
Next up, I plan to put detection of RAM less than 1GB and automatically turn off "top level zram".
So, what are the lower-end specs that will work? I don't know if Easy will work lower than 512MB RAM, so set that as the minimum. The CPU needs to be 32-bit i686 -- 486/586 CPU is no good. The expansion bus needs to be PCI -- the predecessor is the ISA bus, and the kernel will not work with that.
I compiled the kernel, 5.15.57, for a single-core CPU, supporting 4GB RAM maximum. Also disabled EFI support in the kernel -- this is for BIOS computers only.
The Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) is switching from the UNIX-style centered, influenced structure of previous operating systems to a more workload and application-centric design. A flexible and secure platform with advancing concepts, as seen in both MicroOS and SLE Micro, along with the incorporation of other components, is evolving. This platform is designed to easily build, deploy and manage applications regardless of hardware or environment.
Kubernetes, the open source project for container management, has taken the software development world by storm. The platform is used by countless organizations using containers due to its high scalability, elasticity and reliability. According to the CNCF Annual Survey 2021, 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is a de facto option for container orchestration and scheduling. But it wasn’t always that way. It took great minds to construct Kubernetes within Google and others to evangelize its use throughout the software industry. And nowadays, new leaders are emerging to carry the torch forward.
Below, we’ll revisit the history of Kubernetes and check in with its original creators to see where they are today. We’ll also highlight several other prominent figures within the Kubernetes and open source cloud-native community to gauge where the inertia currently is.
Luxtorpeda is a banger of an app. It makes quick work out of native Linux gaming for Steam games that don't ship a Linux binary. It's a perfect companion for the Steam Deck and it doesn't get enough love. Here's how it works and how to use it.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Pardus 21.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Ubuntu MATE is a distribution of Linux that shares its foundation with Ubuntu itself, but defaults to the MATE desktop environment instead of GNOME.
The latest kernel release is out with Linux 5.19 and showing just how far Linux support for the newer Apple silicon MacBooks has come, Linus Torvalds did the release on one!
 If you’re using Ubuntu or an Ubuntu-based distribution you can now install Linux kernel 5.19 on your computer in case you need some of the new features or because your hardware is not fully supported by the default Linux kernel in your Ubuntu PC. But, if everything works well, you should stick to the default kernel. Whatever the case may be, installing Linux kernel 5.19 on Ubuntu or an Ubuntu-based distribution is quite easy with the Mainline tool.
 Based on the recently released Linux 5.19 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.19 (codename Uhura in memory of Nichelle Nichols) kernel is here to clean up the pureLiFi X/XL/XC and TI AMx3 Wkup-M3 IPC drivers, adjust the cleanup logic for the AMDGPU, Qualcomm WCNSS PIL, Realtek Bluetooth, Mellanox Spectrum, Marvell WiFi-Ex, Silicon Labs WFX, as well as Intel AVS, IFS, and IPU3-ImgU drivers, and clean up the blobs requested by several new devicetree files for Qualcomm AArch64 SoCs.
The latest release of Linux 5.19 has more of an Apple angle than usual, with Linus Torvalds releasing it using an M2 MacBook Air running a version of Linux ported to Apple Silicon.
Linux, like other operating systems, receives updates periodically, with the open source software being no exception. Linus Torvalds, the driving force behind Linux, recently released version 5.19 of the operating system, enabling maintainers of the different Linux variants to incorporate the changes.
Spotted by Asahi Linux, Torvalds has passed comment about the use of Apple products in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Posted on Sunday, Torvalds writes "the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop," referring to the use of Apple Silicon.
Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 5.19, and this time released a version of Linux from an Arm-based Apple MacBook running Asahi Linux.
Torvalds says Linux 5.19 contains "nothing really interesting" and a "lot of random stuff".
 Exploring an open-source password manager with a pleasing user interface, available cross-platform.
There are plenty of free and premium password managers for individuals and teams.
However, when it comes to open-source solutions, it is often limited to a couple of good ones like Seahorse, KeePassXC, and Bitwarden.
If you have read through our list of the best password managers for Linux, you might already know some of them.
I stumbled upon another interesting open-source password manager that could make it to that list for its user experience, i.e., Padloc.
APT, DNF, and YUM are the three package managers Linux newcomers are likely to run into. So which one is better in terms of usability and performance?
Using the command line to add or remove programs on Linux isn't necessary, but it is faster than using a graphical application. Many people find that at some point in their Linux journey, they end up opening a terminal to install new apps or system updates.
APT and DNF are two of the most popular package managers for the job. These two programs are very similar, but they do have some differences in how they function. Let's dive in.
When running a project on a headless Raspberry Pi, it may not always be convenient to plug it into a monitor when you want to change something, but you don’t need to. You can access and control the Raspberry Pi remotely via SSH (Secure SHell) from another computer or even a smartphone on the same network. This guide will first show you how to enable SSH, then how to SSH into Raspberry Pi from another device.
In recent years, Cloud computing has increased rapidly, with 94% of all enterprises using cloud services. Many platforms provide cloud services, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc.
There are four cloud computing types: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and multi-clouds. Ubuntu fully supports all these clouds, making it the most popular Linux distribution for cloud platforms. This article will discuss AWS and installing AWS CLI (AWS Command Line Interface) on Ubuntu.
SELinux can help you secure your server from malfunctioning processes or applications. Developed by the NSA (National Security Agency) to secure government devices from attackers, the security enhanced (SE) Linux architecture uses security protocols to restrict access to system resources. Find out how you can use it for your own server.
Linux Kernel 5.19 was released! Ubuntu Mainline PPA has made the packages for testing purpose.
In this article you will learn how to use autojump to navigate easily between directories without specifying their full path or executing numerous cd commands.
tar is a very old command line utility from the seventies. tar stands for Tape ARchive, and it is used for creating and extracting archive files. Additionally, tar can be used to compress and decompress these archived files.
In other words, the tar program packs many files and folders into a single logical file for easy and fast transmission (e.g. FTP), optionally compressed. This essential tool is implementing various compression algorithms such as gzip, xz, and bzip2.
Tar comes with an enormous amount of options which are and can be confusing for even experienced Linux users.
However this article will cover only the subject of how to extract tar archives using special tar options to specify the target directory; in addition, we will mention other necessary tar arguments.
The sudo command allows any user within the sudo group to run commands as another user. By default, sudo will run as root, but you can specify any user you want. If you plan on using a Linux operating system, you will likely use this command quite a bit.
You will most likely use this command when you run a command requiring root or super user privileges. For example, many user administration commands will need the user to have root privileges to run. In less likely scenarios, you may need to use a different user to run a specific command.
Windows compatibility on Linux continues to improve thanks to Wine, with the latest development release out now with Wine 7.14 available. This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run various Windows applications and games on Linux (and forms part of Steam Play Proton). Once a year or so, a new stable release is made but the development versions are usually fine to use.
Valve recently released an update for the main Steam client, which amongst other things brings support in Steam Input for the Nintendo Online classic controllers. These are the special controllers Nintendo offers for playing their classics on Nintendo Switch, although Steam having support for them makes sure they have a whole lot more life.
There's a lot of places where developers can have their game logo across Steam, and some developers have been going pretty overboard with noisy images filled with extras. Valve is putting a stop to it.
MangoHud is probably one of my favourite open source projects giving Linux gamers a fancy HUD to display various performance metrics in a nice overlay. Version 0.6.8 is out now!
Razer make some pretty fancy hardware but, like a lot of vendors, don't exactly support Linux directly and so the OpenRazer project helps you out there. It's an open source driver and user-space daemon to control Razer lighting and other features on Linux, with version 3.4.0 officially out now.
We have released a major update to the Q4OS 4 Gemini LTS. The new Gemini 4.10 series receives the recent Debian Bullseye 11.4 updates, updated Debian stable kernel and important security and bug fixes. After a careful review and testing we have concluded to include the full upgrade of the Trinity desktop environment into this release as well, so Q4OS Gemini now features the most recent Trinity 14.0.12 version. For more details see the Trinity desktop environment website.
This release brings along improvements of Q4OS specific tools and cumulative upgrade covering all the changes from the previous stable Gemini release.
Welcome to anyone who would like to download the Gemini installation media images from the Downloads section of the Q4OS website. We are currently pushing all the changes mentioned above into the Q4OS repositories, automatic update process will take care about to upgrade for current Q4OS users.
Although Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" was released yesterday, the previous long-term release, namely Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana," will continue to receive support until 2025. The new version is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, will get updates until 2027, and comes with a wide range of visual changes, as well as improvements in performance, compatibility, and stability.
Linux Mint, the desktop user oriented variant of Ubuntu from Ireland, released its new computer operating system version 21 codenamed "Vanessa" late July. This is a list of download links to help you download all editions of it including the alternative mirrors, torrents and checksums so you can run your computer with Linux Mint.
I should start by notifying readers that is a slightly old post, initially written in reaction to first Fairphone, then Pine64 announcing their "true wireless headphones" in April. In spite of this draft staying on my laptop since then, the situation has not particularly changed.
Some days ago, I was sitting in a dark, neon-tinted, pleasingly nerdy computing club in Berlin, with several Linux hackers around me. Most of them either had a PinePhone or a PinePhone Pro, someone else had Librem 5s plugged into their laptop as they tested out new software. Most of them were developers of mobile Linux UIs, and what we all agreed on about the ecosystem was its general immaturity, none of us feeling it was complete enough to be advertised to the general world.
In this peculiar context, it was a long discussion on how the PinePhone appeared to many as just tangently open, but not per se "ethical", that encouraged me to polish the long draft, and finally publish this post. Because, in the end, it does not say anything too new.
The Banana Pi BPI-Bit Lite is a development board following the BPI-Bit. This tiny device is powered by the ESP32-S3 from Espressif and it features Goldfingers I/O connectors.
The microprocessor found on this device is the Xtensa Single-Core 32-bit LX7 with maximum frequency of 240MHz.€ Unlike the previous model, the BPI-Bit Lite includes 2048KB of PSRAM but it has less ROM (128KB) and RAM€ (320KB).€
Older readers and those with an interest in retrocomputing may remember the days when a computer might well have booted into a BASIC interpreter. It was simultaneously a general purpose device that could run any software it would load, and also a development environment. Not something that can be said for today’s development boards which typically require a host computer on which to write code. Have we lost something along the way? Perhaps an answer to that question can be found in [lurk101]’s self-hosted development environment for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
So far LILYGO’s ESP32 boards with an E-Paper display such as the TTGO T5 or Mini E-Paper Core featured smaller displays from 1.02-inch to 2.9-inch. But the company is now offering a larger 7.5-inch display that works with most of its T5 boards excluding the one used with a 4.7-inch display.
The black and white e-paper display offers a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, is Arduino programmable and backward compatible with earlier T5 E-paper solution, and should be one of the most cost-effective to way to make a wireless E-paper display.
The LibreOffice Quality Assurance (QA) Team is happy to announce that LibreOffice 7.4 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is available for testing!
LibreOffice 7.4 will be released as final in mid August, 2022 (check the Release Plan for more information), with LibreOffice 7.4 RC2 being the fourth pre-release since the development of version 7.4 started at the end of November 2021. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.4 RC1, 99 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 56 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2020 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in two different versions: low resolution (12.2MB) and high resolution (31.6MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.
The const keyword is one of the three ways you can declare a variable in the JavaScript language.
What differentiates JavaScript’s const keyword from the others is that once a variable is declared, it cannot be assigned a new value.
This is incredibly useful when you need to declare a value that should never be changed during runtime. In fact, as a general rule, you should declare a variable using “const” unless you expect the value to be changed.
By the end of this guide, you should have a good understanding of how to declare a variable in JavaScript using const.
Since a long time ago I’ve been a gitlab-ce user, in fact I’ve set it up on three of the last four companies I’ve worked for (initially I installed it using the omnibus packages on a debian server but on the last two places I moved to the docker based installation, as it is easy to maintain and we don’t need a big installation as the teams using it are small).
On the company I work for now (kyso) we are using it to host all our internal repositories and to do all the CI/CD work (the automatic deployments are triggered by web hooks in some cases, but the rest is all done using gitlab-ci).
The majority of projects are using nodejs as programming language and we have automated the publication of npm packages on our gitlab instance npm registry and even the publication into the npmjs registry.
To publish the packages we have added rules to the gitlab-ci configuration of the relevant repositories and we publish them when a tag is created.
Justin DeVuyst was able to release the 2022.07 Rakudo Compiler Release just before the end of the month. Which added inode, dev and devtype methods to IO::Path, and a new .snip method (inspired by Haskell’s span). And many other improvements and fixes! Updated Linux packages are now also available on rakudo.pkg, thanks to Claudio Ramirez.
The minimum requirements for Rust toolchains targeting Linux will increase with the Rust 1.64.0 release (slated for September 22nd, 2022).
We talk to Patrick Lawrence about Ukraine by diving deeper into his recent articles written for ScheerPost.
It’s summer time in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means campfires for cooking hot dogs, keeping the mosquitoes away, and of course, making s’mores. For our far-flung friends, that’s a fire roasted marshmallow and a square of chocolate smashed between two graham crackers. So called because when you’re done, you’ll want s’more. It’s an easy enough recipe that any child can tell you how to make it. But what if you’re not a child? What if you don’t even have hands, because you’re an€ industrial robot? This is the challenge that [Excessive Overkill] has taken on in the video below the break.
Want to add a bit of visual flair to 3D printed parts that goes maybe a little more than skin-deep? That’s exactly what [volzo] was after, which led him to create a Python script capable of generating a chunk of Perlin noise, rendered as an STL file. What does that look like? An unpredictably-random landscape of hills and valleys.
Imagine the days when you’d pick up your phone, dial and get through to a human being. You couldn’t be waylaid by the evasive robotic operator who gives you the “press one, or two, or three or four” drill. Unfortunately, when you select “one” you often get another automatic recording. At some point you get a€ voicemail€ opportunity which is really€ voicefail.
Oh, say the younger people – what about trying email or text messaging? Clutter, filters, distractions and sheer overloads can’t adequately describe the ways Callees can keep you from getting through to a human. The more difficult it is, the more people repeat their attempts, and the more overload there is for the digital gatekeepers. Call this the Callees’ power plays.
Bicycles need at least two wheels to be rideable, but [The Q] realized you don’t necessarily need the wheels to be in one piece. As long as you have at least two points of rolling contact with the ground, you can spread the load across multiple partial wheels. He demonstrated this by splitting the rear wheel of his bike first in half and then thirds to create an absolute head turner.
If Nintendo is known for anything outside of their characters and admittedly top-notch video games, it’s being merciless to fans when it comes to using their intellectual property. They take legal action against people just for showing non-Nintendo hardware emulating games of theirs, and have even attempted to shut down the competitive scene for games like Super Smash Bros. To get away from the prying eyes of the Nintendo legal team extreme measures need to be taken — like building your Nintendo console clone behind the Iron Curtain.
Intel is ending its Optane product line of persistent memory and that is more disastrous for the industry than is visible on the surface.
The influence of ideas from the late 1960s and early 1970s is now so pervasive that almost nobody can imagine anything else, and the best ideas from the following generation are mostly forgotten.
Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but because of this legacy view, this technical debt, few in the industry realized just how radical Optane was. And so it bombed.
To get to the heart of this, let's step back for a long moment and ask, what is the primary function of a computer file?
The first computers didn't have file systems. The giant machines of the 1940s and 1950s, built from tens of thousands of thermionic valves, only had a few words of memory. At first, programs were entered by physically wiring them into the computer by hand: only the data was in memory. The program ran, and printed out some results.
For years, the private insurance company lobby has falsely claimed that California can’t afford quality and universal healthcare. But a comprehensive new study shows we simply can’t afford not to adopt a universal healthcare system that will save California families and businesses over $100 billion per year.
I have multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system. The myelin sheath that surrounds the nerve endings hardens during these attacks, preventing nerve impulses from traveling where they should. These hardened nerve endings, or lesions, accumulate on the brains and spinal cords of people with MS. Because the central nervous system regulates the other bodily systems, MS lesions can cause an endless list of debilitating symptoms including fatigue, numbness, spasticity, pain, incontinence, blindness, cognitive dysfunction, paralysis, difficulty swallowing and breathing, and death. MS is unpredictable, progressive, and there is no cure. Frankly, it's terrifying.
Google has linked up with chip fabrication company, SkyWater Technology, on an open source chip technology program with funding from the US Department of Defense (DoD) to build a reliable source of components for defense applications.
SkyWater announced it has received $15 million in funding from the DoD to develop open source design capabilities for its 90nm production process. To enable this, the company has turned to Google to provide the compute resources and other expertise to realize the project.
It seems the pair have some history in this respect, with Google working with US-investor-owned SkyWater in 2020 to enable open source design of custom ASICs to be manufactured on its 130nm mixed-signal CMOS process.
Buildroot is an easy-to-use and popular embedded Linux build system, used by many as an alternative to Yocto/OpenEmbedded. Bootlin has expertise in both build systems, but as in particular been a long time contributor to the Buildroot project. Bootlin CEO’s Thomas Petazzoni is one of the co-maintainers of the project, to which he has contributed over 5000 patches.
From July 23 to July 27, four members of the Buildroot community gathered in the sunny south of France for a 5-day long hackathon on Buildroot: Yann Morin, Romain Naour from Smile, Arnout Vandecappelle from Mind and Thomas Petazzoni from Bootlin.
The main goal of this hackathon was to reduce the backlog of patches accumulated in the project’s patchwork, the tool used in the Buildroot community to record all contributed patches and make sure all of them are handled: reviewed, accepted, or potentially rejected.
The 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has announced its schedule. The conference will be held in Dublin, Ireland, September 12-14.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (booth, libpgjava, and thunderbird), Fedora (3mux, act, age, antlr4-project, apache-cloudstack-cloudmonkey, apptainer, aquatone, aron, asnip, assetfinder, astral, bettercap, buildah, butane, caddy, cadvisor, cheat, chisel, clash, clipman, commit-stream, containerd, cri-o, darkman, deepin-gir-generator, direnv, dnscrypt-proxy, dnsx, docker-distribution, doctl, douceur, duf, ffuf, fzf, geoipupdate, git-lfs, git-octopus, git-time-metric, glide, gmailctl, gnutls, go-bindata, goaltdns, gobuster, godep, godoctor, godotenv, gojq, golist, goloris, gomtree, google-guest-agent, gotags, gotun, grafana, gron, grpcurl, hakrevdns, hcloud, htmltest, httprobe, hulk, ignition, jid, kata-containers, kiln, kompose, kubernetes, libldb, manifest-tool, mass3, meg, meshbird, micro, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-poppler, moby-engine, mqttcli, nats-server, nebula, netscanner, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, ohmybackup, onionscan, open-policy-agent, origin, osbuild-composer, podman-tui, popub, powerline-go, reposurgeon, restic, runc, samba, shellz, shhgit, skopeo, snapd, snowcrash, source-to-image, subfinder, syncthing, sysutil, terrier, thunderbird, tiedot, toolbox, vgrep, vultr, vultr-cli, webanalyze, webkit2gtk3, weldr-client, wgctrl, xe-guest-utilities-latest, xen, xq, yggdrasil, yubihsm-connector, and a vast number of golang packages), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2.0, python-ujson, and webmin), Red Hat (firefox and thunderbird), Slackware (gnutls), and SUSE (chromium, firefox, mozilla-nss, rubygem-tzinfo, samba, and xen).
In today’s computing environment, firmware can mean several things, ranging from an entire operating system in embedded devices to a small flash program in a hardware component that tells your operating system (OS) about that hardware’s capabilities. In this blog post, we will focus on the vulnerabilities in the latter type of firmware popularized by the Uniform Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). I will explore how these vulnerabilities are a lucrative target for high-profile attackers, such as nation-states that are seeking vulnerabilities in the less-visible portions of today’s computing environment.
First, to get our footing, it is important to understand what UEFI really is. UEFI replaces the legacy Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), interfacing hardware to the OS and provides an extensible intersection between hardware and the OS itself. The UEFI standard also identifies reliable ways to update this firmware from the OS. In essence, in today’s computers, there is another layer of software that can help the OS understand and use available hardware. Of course, this essential layer of software faces all the challenges of today’s software: bugs, security issues, patching, and maintenance. It also lacks visibility, making it hard for defenders to protect this part of their computing environments from ever-increasing threats.
Meet Pal. Pal is a senior developer working at PalBank. For the next 6 months, Pal will be responsible for leading the development of the bank’s web application client, which will be used daily by millions of customers.
Pal invests considerable effort into designing and implementing the most secure app reasonably achievable: tightly controlled and secure development, build and deployment pipelines, static code analysis, pentesting by external parties, multi-factor authentication to access the app and encrypting data at rest. And the list goes on!
Pal’s the best, isn’t he? Unfortunately, while such efforts are essential, they are insufficient! And even if we assumed, for the sake of argument and humour, that the PalBank’s client web app is completely free of all known and unknown software vulnerabilities, the app’s security guarantees are bound to be threatened once consumers run it on their endpoint devices. They will be threatened by the millions of lines of code which comprise the platform’s privileged system software, if it becomes either malicious or compromised. Within this context, system software includes the operating system, virtual machine manager and all the platforms’ firmware embedded within.
To put it differently, it matters little if a user chooses a perfectly strong unique password, when their operating system is infected with a keylogger leaking it to malicious third-parties. Similarly, it matters little if your code has no buffer overflows, if your operating system is backdoored and simply decides to leak all your customers’ data to malicious third parties.
So why does the security of user-level applications depend on the security of its underlying system software? The reason is the hierarchical architecture of commodity devices: privileged system software gets unrestricted access to all the resources of unprivileged user-level applications, because it controls its execution, memory, and access to the underlying hardware. Indeed, it’s a feature, not a bug!
Following these best practices will help you secure your PHP applications and protect them from attack. Remember to always keep your software up to date, properly configure your web server and your PHP, and be sure to perform regular security audits to identify any vulnerabilities that may have slipped through the cracks. We hope you found this article useful and we hope you check out our other articles that may help in keeping your systems secure!
More than 10 million people rely on Ring video doorbells to monitor what's happening directly outside the front doors of their homes. The popularity of the technology has raised a question that concerns privacy advocates: Should police have access to Ring video doorbell recordings without first gaining user consent?
Amazon has revealed that it gives police videos from its Ring doorbells without a warrant and without user consent.
Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the police state is determined to ferret them out.
In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.
Ever heard of Aerochrome? It’s a unique type of color infrared film, originally created for the US military and designed for surveillance planes. Photos taken with Aerochrome film show trees and other vegetation in vivid reds and pinks, creating images that aren’t quite like anything else.
Calling out Sen. Pat Toomey by name, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday said Republicans blocking a bill aimed at providing care to veterans exposed to toxic chemicals overseas should not have voted to fund the wars that created the health nightmare for millions of people.
"I say to Senator Toomey, if you don't believe we can afford to take care of our veterans suffering from toxic burn pit exposure, then you should not have approved funding to go to war," said Sanders (I-Vt.), who voted to authorize the U.S. war in Afghanistan but against the Iraq invasion.
Katie Halper and Ben Norton discuss what exactly the CIA and Special Ops are doing on the ground in Ukraine.
It is difficult to talk about happenings in the world other than the continued, appalling Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Chicagoland, and elsewhere. Then, there is the Supreme Court which continues down a judicial road of eroding personal rights and towing the conservative party line. I don’t want to take attention away from those outrages. However, the shadow of one tragedy is not dispelled by the light of another.
But of course: no one should be surprised by that.€ If the US bases and/or the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) bases in Okinawa are used to launch attacks on the Chinese mainland or at Chinese ships at sea, China will have the right under international law to retaliate, transforming Okinawa into a war zone.
“War zone” doesn’t simply mean, a place where war is going on.€ It means a place where war is legal.€ By this I don’t mean, “ought to be legal”, I mean “legal in fact”.€ Think: if somebody exploded a bomb inside a building full of people in Okinawa today that would be understood as a horrendous crime, and people would be arrested.€ But if Okinawa becomes a war zone,€ and a missile lands on a building full of people, someone might say “Oops, sorry”, but no one will be arrested.
First, US-China tensions over Taiwan are running high. Both sides are responsible for that. President Biden has done his part by consistently misstating the US commitment to Taiwan—there is no security treaty, Mr. President—and by authorizing increased military assistance to Taiwan. To the Chinese, these steps look like a US effort to erode its official policy of “One China” and move closer to China’s red line: Taiwanese independence. Meantime, China’s air force patrols are more regularly intruding in Taiwan’s air defense zone, on occasion causing Taiwan’s air force to scramble. A military incident that could spark serious fighting becomes more likely with each passing week.
Second, Xi Jinping is expected to be given another term as party leader at a national congress this fall. A high-level trip to Taiwan by a key US political figure in advance of that party congress could be seen as a personal provocation, particularly since Xi wants to be seen as the leader who will complete China’s national unification by “recovering” Taiwan. He may feel compelled to act.
The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world's geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi's plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward.
Oil giant Shell has just posted record profits for a second consecutive quarter, smashing its previous record from earlier this year.
As he leaves for work each day, Jeff Kelly, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Fish and Game Department director looks out at the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) crossing the Missouri River near his home. “I pray that the pipeline does not break today,” he often says to himself, thinking of the more than 500,000 barrels of oil that flow underneath Lake Oahe daily.€
In Northern California, the McKinney Fire became the state's largest wildfire so far this year on Sunday, having burned through more than 51,000 acres in just two days and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes.
About 3,000 people were under evacuation orders in Siskiyou County on Sunday, a day after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to allow easier access to federal aid and so out-of-state emergency workers could "assist California crews in battling the fires."
The launch of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) at the recent G7 summit is another example of the Biden Administration's relentless push to try to undermine the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has not said yet whether she will support the Inflation Reduction Act, the $739 billion package hammered out by Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and announced last Thursday, but as she reviewed the 725-page bill over the weekend, reports suggested she is likely to object to a $14 billion provision taking aim at the preferential tax rates for wealthy investors—who make up a large portion of her donor base.
"The new reconciliation bill will lower the cost of prescription drugs. Sen. Sinema is holding it up to try to protect ultra-rich hedge fund managers so they can pay a lower tax."
Working families are getting hammered by inflation while corporate leaders and politicians are calling for belt-tightening. But there's one group of Americans that's actually profited from increasing prices.
With all this concern over inflation, one wonders why so little heed has been paid to another “i” word: inequality.
For€ decades, government officials, media pundits, mainstream economists, politicians, and others were content to allow and even enable money to flow upward, enriching the already wealthy. They paid little heed to increasing inequality, beyond shrugging their shoulders and lamenting the injustice of it all.
I had always been taught that the final withdrawal of the legions from Britain was the result of civil wars and barbarian invasions threatening other parts of the empire. But a Byzantine historian called Zosimus had written in the early sixth century that the Britons, fed up with the chaotic state of things, “revolted from the empire, no longer submitted to Roman law and reverted to native customs”.
Getting back control turned out to be a dangerous illusion from the point of view of the Britons as they were swiftly targeted for ethnic cleansing by incoming invaders.
Here are 10 of the most widely believed – but completely bogus – things ever "said" by political figures.
The plan to kidnap Alinejad in the US allegedly included hiring private investigators to conduct multiple days of surveillance during which she and members of her household were photographed and recorded on video at and around her Brooklyn home.
Alinejad is a well-known Iranian writer and dissident who last year was the alleged target of a kidnapping plot by Iranian agents, the FBI said. Iran has denied wrongdoing, calling the past kidnapping allegations “baseless.”
Last year, Federal prosecutors charged four foreign agents with attempting to kidnap Alinejad. The defendants live in Iran and were never apprehended. The plan, according to the indictment, was to lure Alinejad to another country where she would be kidnapped.
The undersigned civil society organizations condemn the blocking by the Egyptian authorities of three links to access the Al-Manassa website within approximately 72 hours, starting from Thursday, 14 July. The blocking occurs as part of a series of continued restrictions on the website, which is one of the few independent news sites operating from inside Egypt. The undersigned organizations call on the authorities to lift the blocking of Al-Manassa, stop its repeated targeting, and bring to an end the censorship imposed on other news websites.
Egyptian authorities blocked the Al-Manassa website on the evening of 14 July. First, they blocked the IP address of the hosting company responsible for the website’s domain. An alternative address was then blocked on the morning of 16 July, only three hours after it was launched. A third address was repeatedly blocked, bringing the total number of times access to the website has been blocked to 15.
Following a report highlighting Meta’s failure to remove hate speech from the Facebook platform, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission threatened to suspend Facebook for “contravening hate prevention guidelines.” Disinformation and hate speech around the election period is a very serious issue in Kenya, but preventing people from using major communications platforms is not a proportionate or effective way to stem it. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition commends the government of Kenya for once again committing not to shut down the internet and social media platforms.
“Internet shutdowns are not a solution to preventing the spread of misinformation or disinformation,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has underscored that blocking major communications platforms not only attacks the rights to free expression and access to information and exacerbates violence and unrest, but also contributes to the spread of disinformation and hate speech, because it instills uncertainty and doubt.”
As the Kenya general elections draw closer, there is legitimate fear over whether major online platforms can successfully combat hate speech and disinformation. Investigators and civil society are raising the alarm about content on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. However, these reports should prompt additional investment and work by the platforms in question to ensure election “preparedness,”not serve as a justification to deprive Kenyans of vital pathways for communication. In Meta’s case, this should include direct communication with Kenyan civil society regarding the exploitative way in which it engages its content moderators in Africa, which directly conflicts with the company’s own human rights policy.
The German linksunten.indymedia, founded in 2008, was banned under the Associations Act, and the entire technical infrastructure and funds of a left-wing center were confiscated. Seized storage devices apparently could not be decrypted.
In the context of Assange, Britain has been a willing jailor from the start, guided by the good offices of Washington and none too keen in seeing this spiller of secrets released into the world.€ Bail has been repeatedly, and inexcusably, refused, despite the threats posed by COVID-19, the publisher’s own deteriorating health, and restrictions upon access, at regular intervals, to legal advice from his team.€ Just as some banks are deemed too large to fail, Assange is considered too large a target to escape.€ Let loose again, he might do what he does best: reveal government venalities in war and peace and prove the social contract a gross deception and mockery of our sensibilities.
The UK legal system has been the ideal forum to execute the wishes of Washington.€ Each legal branch that has examined the extradition case has assiduously avoided the bigger picture: the attack on press freedom, exposing war crimes, illegal surveillance of a political asylee in an embassy compound, the breaches of privacy and legal confidentiality, the encroachments upon family life, the evidence on proposed abduction and assassination, the questionable conflicts of interest by some judicial members, the collusion of State authorities.
"Womb Service," a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, looks at the future of women’s rights and sees the past.
Kevin Gosztola reviews Roger Waters' "This Is Not A Drill" show, which is touring North America from August to October. It is a revolutionary concert experience. The audience is in the round, which means they surround the stage where Roger and his band performs. Every song performed in the "This Is Not A Drill" show is packed with urgent messages that appeal to our humanity and plead with us to no longer be so comfortably numb. Two of the songs performed are featured in the video—"Déjà Vu" [19:35], which was on Roger's 2017 album "Is This The Life We Really Want?", and "Two Suns In the Sunset" [39:45], which is from Pink Floyd's 1983 album "Final Cut" and about a nuclear holocaust. Each song is about ten minutes.The performance of "Déjà Vu" is where Roger incorporated a clip from the "Collateral Murder" video released by Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks and urged the audience to join him in demanding that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be freed from prison. You may also watch the full review of Roger Waters' "This Is Not A Drill" here.
Libelous Red Baiting and “Cult”-Charging
Still, it’s bracing and a little bizarre in 2022 to see an anti-Communist jihad launched from “the left” (see below) against an organization that has been fighting to defend something commonly identified with mainstream liberalism: the right to an abortion.
Public Knowledge has the pleasure of inviting you to a multifaceted program focused on training and developing the next generation of tech policy experts and public interest advocates that reflects the diversity of voices and experiences in our society.
Please join us for our monthly Career Breakfast Series. This event is designed for students & recent graduates to learn about tech policy and public interest work, careers, and its community. This month you will have the opportunity of having a great conversation with Larry Irving.
Larry Irving is the President of the Irving Group, a consulting firm providing strategic planning and consulting services to international telecommunications, media and technology companies, non-profit organizations, and philanthropies. Irving is also an operating partner and chief public policy, ESG, and DEI advisor to ZMC, a private equity firm.
Why this bill? Because the term “Net Neutrality” polls well among those who don’t bother to look into the details.
Why now? Because Democrats are playing every card in the deck as they cast about for ways to stem their likely bleeding in this November’s midterm elections.
You wouldn't steal a car, right? So why are you pirating? With this 2004 message, the movie industry hoped to turn illegal downloaders into paying customers. This campaign eventually turned into a meme and it's not the only anti-piracy advert to miss the mark. A new research paper identifies several behavioral insights that explain common mistakes made in these campaigns.
Every week copyright holders and their anti-piracy agents issue instructions for content to be removed or blocked. Most of these requests are made in good faith but malicious takedown requests are still a problem. A draft law tabled in Russia envisions financial compensation for those affected.
The amount of travel I engaged in during the month of July left me very little time to work on the chess service. As a result, I did not meet my target of having it back online by today. I have one more weekend trip coming up in the near future, but beyond that, my afternoons and evenings will now be free. My revised target date for having the chess service back online is 2022-08-15.
One of the trips I took in July was to attend EAA's AirVenture aerospace show in Oshkosh, WI. Many key companies in the American aerospace industry had pavilions at the show, and I had the opportunity to meet several recruiters with those companies. My hope is to get a job in aerospace, an industry I'm very passionate about.
I found the solution to “climate anxiety”, and today I want to share it with you.
The key to overcoming climate anxiety is understanding that the climate apocalypse is not a looming threat that will soon be upon us. It’s here — you and I are living through it right now. People are dying in heat waves and storms who wouldn’t be dying if we had averted climate apocalypse. But we didn’t. So here we are: living through the apocalpyse.
Look — I’m not going to sugar coat this. Things are bad, and because of the way that the climate works, things are going to get worse before they get better, no matter what. Once you pull this uncomfortable knowledge down, through your brain and into your heart, the anxiety will dissipate. You’ll probably feel sad and angry instead, at least sometimes. Cut yourself some slack because you are living through an apocalypse.
When I set this site up I chose a logical, grown-up, and kind of boring domain name. If you're looking for logical, grown-up, and kind of boring domain names you'll find that a whole lot are taken. Either by someone with a good reason to have it or by some company that squats on it in the hopes that someone will pay them a lot for it.
But if you're in the market for a silly, weird, and strange domain name I have a few for you that are still (as of writing this) up for grabs!
There is a Russian proverb that translates roughly as 'if you are a bad dancer, your own testicles will get in the way'. While gendered, and somewhat offensive, it describes my relationship with bash -- it feels like I get tangled up in my balls every time I use it.
I am primarily a Common Lisp programmer, and bash makes zero sense to me.
Bash has syntax (yuck) and it is really inconsistent - or at least, I can't figure out how or why things are done without looking up numerous examples. I don't know why I still use it - I guess every system I've used defaults to it... Why in the world does it exist?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.