“Unlike Windows and Mac, Linux still provides lifelong support for older machines with its various distributions. This is what I like most about Linux and its distributions. Even if you cannot carry out larger tasks, you can still carry out normal day-to-day tasks such as web browsing, writing/editing word document, watching movies, or listening to music. So why throw your old machine if you can still make use of it? So, we will have a look at the best Linux distributions that can be easily used and installed on older computers with minimal hardware. Some of the Linux distributions listed here might be useful for beginners also.
So, let’s get started and have a look at lightweight Linux distros for an old laptop as in 2022.”
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” Cinnamon and some of the applications pre-installed.
SCaLE 19x was a ton of fun, and I was able to attend this years conference alongside Linode. In this video, I talk about my overall experience, in preparation for further videos that will be released that will show off some of the shenanigans that happened while I was there this year.
We debate the lies our tool makers tell us, if Clojure has a Rails-sized hole, and the secrets of a successful software engineer.
Are you looking for an open-source chat app for your Linux to keep your information and data safe and secure? Well, Speek is the solution for you. It’s an anonymous chat app that uses the Tor network. In recent times, there are so many messaging apps that promise to provide high security and privacy.
Speek stands out as the most feature-rich privacy-focused app for Linux. With this decentralized chat app, as a user, you don’t need to have an ID or a cell number. Everything will be anonymous for managing the safest online environment.
Into Linux podcasts? With so many great shows out there publishing new episodes regularly it can be hard to keep up, which is what a podcast manager like gPodder can help with.
This week a brand new version of gPodder was release. It’s the first significant update the podcast manager has received in over a year. Naturally, plenty of improvements are included.
For instance, in gPodder 3.11.0 you can double-click (or tap Enter) on a podcast in the sidebar to open the channel settings dialog. From there you can edit the name and description, and manage subscriptions on a per-podcast basis — a nice time-saver.
In this article you will learn how to use FFmpeg to effortlessly convert mkv to mp4, additionally, you will be acquainted with re-encoding video and audio using different ffmpeg encoders.
We will discuss converting mkv files to mp4; there is a high probability that you might be in situations that require having mp4 files, or you may want to use systems that do not support the mkv container format. In these situations, it is imperative to convert the video file to another system-friendly file extension, such as the mp4 video format.
Over the past ten years of Linux usage, I have frequently switched from Windows to Linux without properly restarting the Microsoft OS, which has caused me problems with NTFS/Windows partitions. To fix these problems, I was obliged to restart my Linux distro so that I could reboot the "hibernated Windows OS"; it was annoying.
One day I said there must be a way less painful, so I went to my favorite web browser, Firefox, and did a simple search to find the helpful "ntfsfix" tool that got me rid of that annoyance. To not be stingy, I decided to share with you how to use this small and powerful tool.
Bash is an acronym of Bourne-Again Shell, which is the successor of Bourne Shell distributed with most of the Linux and GNU operating systems. It comes with multiple advanced features from the previous version.
The PATH is an environment variable that stores the directories path containing the executable files.
The iptables and ip6tables commands are used to set up a Linux firewall. However, many new Linux sysadmins and users find it challenging to use iptables. Hence, the ufw program is for managing a Linux firewall and aims to provide an easy-to-use interface for the user. This page explains how to add a comment to your ufw firewall rules.
Hello readers, much awaited Linux Mint 21 has been released. It is a LTS release, means we will get support and updates till 2027. Vanessa is the code name for Linux mint 21 and it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
In this post, we will cover how to install Linux Mint 21 with Xfce desktop environment step by step.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileZilla on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, FileZilla is a free and open-source FTP client. It powerful client for plain FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Users can use it to copy files and folders via the Internet or local network from one PC to another computer. FileZilla is available for all popular OS such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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 FileZilla FTP client on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Learn the commands to install the Stremio desktop app on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the command terminal for streaming online videos.
Stremio is an open-source application that is available for all popular platforms including Ubuntu 20.04 Linux or its previous versions. The below-given commands will be the same for Linux Mint, Elementary OS, DeepinOS, Zorin OS & Debian as well. The project is available on GitHub for users to download or create an add-on for it. Different add-ons created by the Stremio community allow it to stream online video, music, movies, and the website from various sources such as YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Torrent, Hotstar, etc.
My previous article demonstrated that a socket-activated container can use an activated socket to serve the internet even when the network is disabled through the option --network=none for podman run. This article takes this idea one step further by also restricting internet access for Podman and its helper programs such as conmon and the OCI runtime.
In the realm of computers, machines do not use names in the same way that people do. They are identified by a series of numbers. All of these devices, including computers and phones, can identify and communicate with each other using these numbers, also known as IP addresses. In contrast, people know one another by their names, and it is difficult for us to recall long sequences of numbers. In order to overcome this communication gap between computers and people, architects have created a name system called as Domain Name System or DNS.
The purpose of DNS is to convert names to numerical values. Specifically, it converts URLs to IP addresses. If a user puts google.com into their browser’s address bar and presses enter, the DNS will resolve this URL to “112.250.167.167” by searching its database and matching the URL with the IP address. Once your device gets this IP address, it may connect to Google and show the contents of the page. To eliminate communication between your computer and the server and save load times, these entries are cached locally, i.e., in the DNS cache, on your computer.
Android Studio is a powerful and user-friendly IDE for developing apps on the Android platform. It features an intuitive interface, various built-in tools, and seamless integration with IntelliJ IDEA’s vast ecosystem of plugins and integrations. Thanks to its integration with IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio has everything you need to develop Android apps in one place. There are never any lost connections or forgotten source files again! Android Studio’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to work efficiently and get the most out of your development time. Whether you’re a seasoned Android developer or just getting started, Android Studio is the perfect IDE for developing great Android apps.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of Android Studio on Linux Mint 21 LTS series using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.
I am happy to announce new Slax release based on Slackware 15! Previous Slackware-based version dates back to 2013, I am sorry for the delay :)
OpenMandriva’s rolling release distribution technical preview has been released for testing purposes and adds some of the latest/greatest software into the mix.
Once upon a time, I hung out with the Mandrake Linux team at a Linux convention. That was back in the late 90s and things have changed quite a bit since then. Mandrake Linux is gone and, in its place, came Mandriva, which is a fusion of the Brazillian Connectiva Linux and Mandrake. From the ashes of Mandriva (which ceased being developed back in 2011) came OpenMandriva, which has since flourished.
Recently, the developers of OpenMandriva announced the latest technical preview release of their Lx ROME distribution, which is a rolling release take on the open-source operating system. One thing of note is that the developers have switched off the auto-updater tool for ROME because they’ve been making some major changes to the tool-chain/system packages in the Cooker branch. Because of this, updates are unsafe (which is why it was shut off).
Raspberry Pi 4 support in Fedora Linux is not a new thing. Users were able to run the Red Hat-sponsored distribution on the tiny computer, but some key features were missing, such as accelerated graphics, so the Fedora Project never officially supported it.
With the upcoming Fedora Linux 37 release, Raspberry Pi 4 support will get the “official” status due to the implementation of accelerated graphics using the Broadcom V3D graphics driver. Accelerated graphics are provided in Fedora Linux 37 using the V3D GPU for both OpenGL-ES and Vulkan.
Take a quick look at the Fedora 37 default wallpaper which features a night and dark theme with a nature theme.
The Citroën C-Zero is an electric city card sold in the European market. It is a rebadged Mitsubishi i-MiEV, which is based on the Mitsubishi i kei car platform. Kei cars, in Japan, are a special class that receive government and insurance benefits for being so small. As a result, the C-Zero is tiny and cheap, unlike the Tesla electric cars that are so popular in the US. One way that Citroën cut corners was by omitting infotainment and dash screens, which means there isn’t any way for drivers to see detailed data on their battery status. Pierre Muth wanted that information and so he used an Arduino to add a new battery gauge to his Citroën C-Zero.
The Citroën C-Zero may not show drivers detailed battery information, but the car’s computer does have that data. As with the car’s various sensor readings, statuses, and commands, that data flows through the CAN (controller area network) bus.However, Citroën (like most automakers) uses a proprietary protocol for their CAN bus and doesn’t publish its specifics. Users can access the CAN bus, but can’t read or inject messages without understanding the protocol. Fortunately for Muth, enthusiasts of the C-Zero/i-MiEV reverse engineered the CAN bus protocol and posted the details online.
A couple of weeks ago I was inspired by an old LTT video to try to make my own portable Bluetooth speaker. They used some 2ââ¬Â³ full-range Dayton Audio drivers and 1ââ¬Â³ tweeters along with an inexpensive Bluetooth amplifier module. They set themselves a goal of beating the $180 price tag that the LG XBOOM Go PL7 carried at the time. They came up with a pretty cool design, it had some quirks but overall performed reasonably well.
SB Components’ EncroPi is a USB key based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller that can be used to log data, encrypt data, or as a secure key, and it also features a DS3231 real-time clock with a backup battery to store the data and time.
In our current series of research seminars, we are exploring how computing can be connected to other subjects using cross-disciplinary approaches. In July 2022, our speakers were Professor Yasmin Kafai from the University of Pennsylvania and Elaine Griggs, an award-winning teacher from Pembroke High School, Massachusetts, and we heard about their use of e-textiles to engage learners and broaden participation in computing.
The GNU Debugger (GDB), a popular free and open source tool for C and C++ programmers, offers a Text User Interface (TUI) to split the console into multiple windows and display different content in each window. One window will always be a command window, in which you enter the usual GDB commands, but you might also have a source code window, a register contents window, or a disassembly window. Since GDB 11, you can use a Python API to add new window types. This API can be incredibly useful, allowing you to customize GDB to visualize your application's data in new ways.
Note: The Python API for adding TUI windows was actually added to GDB 10. Unfortunately, prior to GDB 11, the gdb.TuiWindow.write call had some bugs that were not resolved until GDB 11.
In this article, the first in a two-part series, you'll learn how to create a window and load it with dynamic content. The real power of the TUI will be shown in the second article, which shows how to display useful information from GDB.
Many companies use the Python programming language for data science applications, machine learning models, and other types of analytical tasks. Since Python is often only used for specific projects, many businesses have to integrate it into their workflow programmatically. This means they need a way to automate the process so it runs independently when needed and on a schedule. Fortunately, there are ways to integrate Python with cron jobs to automate execution as frequently as necessary.
In this article, you will learn how to schedule Python using cron and some useful examples of when and how you might use these practices in your organization.
Hydrogen has long been touted as the solution to cleaning up road transport. When used in fuel cells, the only emissions from its use are water, and it eliminates the slow recharging problem of battery-electric vehicles. It’s also been put forth as a replacement for everything from natural gas supplies to laptop batteries.
Garrity grew up in Helena, Montana as one of six kids and, as he puts it: “Because I was part of a big family, a cheap form of entertainment for my parents was to take us hiking and backpacking since that was basically free. We ran around in the woods all day up on McDonald Pass where my grandfather had built a cabin and it was heaven for little kids. Spending so much time out in nature was probably the primary influence on my decision to be a dedicated wildlands advocate.”
Indeed, his father was a plaintiff’s attorney who “represented people against corporations and tried to make the world a better place,” says Garrity, who has followed in those footsteps, not by becoming an attorney, but by having no qualms whatsoever about using the judiciary to hold the federal government land management agencies to the letter and intent of the laws intended to protect the rich natural legacy of the Northern Rockies ecosystems.
Boston is now known as the City of Champions because of the success of its professional sports franchises over the last few decades. But when I moved to a Boston neighborhood (Southie) as a kid in the early 60s from suburban Kansas City, it was a pathetic little town of losers. The Bruins had languished at or near last place for a loooong time, albeit there were only the original 6 teams at the time. The Boston Patriots sucked, and had trouble even finding a stadium they could call home, from season, renting out the fields of universities — Harvard, BC, BU, any one of which could have beat the “sissies” in a game, we reckoned — or fucking up the turf in vain at Fenway Park so badly that it resembled the stockyard outside the abattoir in nearby Brighton. You felt for the groundskeeper.
And the Red Sox, who I would listen to on the radio, could unman you, even as a boy, with their endless string of heartbreaking losses –early, late, and often — that had you wishing that relief pitcher Dick “The Monster” Radatz would just wind up and clock someone with an intimate chin music fastball (a repeated wish that might have led to local hero Tony Conigliaro’s karmic beaning), they were so laughably bad. Back then, many of us were a little bit like Sox star Jimmy Piersall, who pulled a nutty with a bat one season, threatening teammates, and was a real lip-doodler who could have been the straitjacketed mascot of the team, given their performance on the field.
Bokeh is a photography term that’s a bit difficult to define but is basically soft, aesthetically pleasing background blur, often used to make a subject stand out. Also called “background separation” or “subject isolation”, achieving it optically requires a fast lens with an aperture below 2.8 or preferably lower. These lenses can get very expensive, but in the video after the break [Matt] from [DIY Perks] blows all the commercially available options out of the water. Using an old episcope projector, he built a photography rig with background separation equivalent to that of a non-existent 35mm f0.4 lens.
If you were holding your breath for the release of Batgirl, I hope your brief moment of unconsciousness was divine. Part of a big corporate culture shift on the part of its studio Warner Bros. Discovery (one that has already sidelined cable stars Joe Pera and Samantha Bee), the $90 million film isn’t getting released, despite being nearly finished. (Word on the street, per The Wrap, was that the film wasn’t a tentpole movie.) This, of course, got me to thinking about films that were basically complete but never saw release. The most infamous recent one was the Louis C.K. vehicle I Love You Daddy, which … let’s not talk about it. But over the years, there have been numerous others, each with different reasons for shelving. Today’s Tedium digs into ten.
There are two ways to deal with improving ham radio receivers, or — for that matter — any sort of receiver. You can filter and modify the radio frequency including the radio’s intermediate frequency, or you can alter the audio frequency output. Historically, RF and IF techniques have been the most valued because rejecting unwanted noise and signals early allows the rest of the radio to focus on the actual signal of interest. However, audio filters are much easier to work with and until recently, DSPs that could handle RF frequencies were expensive and uncommon. However, [watersstanton] shows us how to make what could be the cheapest audio enhancer ever. It is little more than a modified cardboard box, and you can see and hear the result in the video below.
RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Drives (or Disks), is a phrase for information storage techniques that partition and copy data over several hard drives. RAID could be built to improve the validity and reliability of data or I/O efficiency, albeit one purpose may damage the other. RAID systems are software-based and hardware-based, and supported by Linux. You may utilize a variety of RAID levels, each with its own set of benefits, shortcomings, and overarching goals. This comparative article will compare RAID 5 (which employs a parity crisscross method for fault-tolerant) and RAID 10 (which also utilizes mirroring for redundant information). Certain RAID levels offer resilience, allowing them to withstand certain device failures. This article demonstrates well how to test software-based RAID systems composed of two or maybe more physical devices. So, let’s get started. Here comes the command we can use in our command-line shell to check the supported RAID configuration in our Ubuntu 20.04 system.
In our drawers, there’s gonna be quite a few old devices that we’ve forgotten about, and perhaps we ought to make them work for us instead. [Jonatron] found a Nook Simple Touch in his drawer – with its E-ink screen, wireless connectivity and a workable Android version, this e-reader from 2011 has the guts for always-on display duty. Sadly, the soft touch covering on the back disintegrated into a sticky mess, as soft touch does, the LiIon battery has gone flat, and the software support’s lackluster. Both of these are likely to happen for a lot of tablets, which is why we’re happy [Jonatron] has shared his story about this e-reader’s revival.
As New York City declares monkeypox a public health emergency, and California and Illinois have also declared states of emergency over the rapid spread of monkeypox, we speak with LGBTQ+ scholar Steven Thrasher, author of the new book, “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide,” which explores how social determinants impact the health outcomes of different communities. “This disease is one that in theory can infect anyone, but it has worked its way particularly into communities with men who have sex with men,” says Thrasher. “This does not mean that it’s a 'gay disease,' and shouldn’t be stigmatized that way, but we shouldn’t be ashamed to think about who it is affecting and how it is affecting people and to deal with it with a great sense of urgency.”
Campaigners frustrated by the international response to the rapid spread of monkeypox—in the midst of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic—on Monday interrupted a global AIDS conference in Montreal.
"We're in a worsening outbreak that could have easily been prevented."
The American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS) and the Linux Foundation welcome Jefferson Braswell as the new Executive Director of the openIDL Project.
With the recent demise of several popular “proxy” services that let cybercriminals route their malicious traffic through hacked PCs, there is now something of a supply chain crisis gripping the underbelly of the Internet. Compounding the problem, several remaining malware-based proxy services have chosen to block new registrations to avoid swamping their networks with a sudden influx of customers.
Security is a journey, not a destination So after making a couple videos showing how to increase performance in desktop computers running Linux, I was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of comments worried about mitigations.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (389-ds-base, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, kernel, postgresql, python, python-twisted-web, python-virtualenv, squid, thunderbird, and xz), Fedora (ceph, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, and kubernetes), Oracle (firefox, go-toolset and golang, libvirt libvirt-python, openssl, pcre2, qemu, and thunderbird), SUSE (connman, drbd, kernel, python-jupyterlab, samba, and seamonkey), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-5.14, linux-oem-5.17 and ntfs-3g).
As container environments grow in complexity, container security requires a different security approach. Container security must consider everything from the applications running in containers to the infrastructure on which those containers run.
The security of the base image is critical to ensure that any derived images are trustworthy. Building security into a container pipeline involves starting with trusted images, managing access with a private registry, integrating security tests to automate deployments and continuously securing the infrastructure.
Governments love targeting Twitter for user data requests, but apparently now more than ever. The latest Twitter transparency report says new records are being set in the data request sector.
As you may have heard, a few days ago, the FTC announced that it was seeking to block Meta’s acquisition of Within Unlimited, a maker of a popular VR fitness app. I believe this is the first case in which the Lina Khan-run FTC has stepped in to block an acquisition by one of the big internet companies. In many ways, this seems like a test from all sides.
Chinese warplanes took to the skies and U.S. warships were on the move Tuesday as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ignored warnings from Beijing, the Biden administration, and peace activists by becoming the highest-ranking American official in 25 years to visit Taiwan.
"Are you here to support Taiwan or to provoke a war? What the hell are you doing here, Pelosi?"
Peace campaigners on Tuesday decried the Biden administration's approval of more than $5 billion in missile sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a move that came weeks after U.S. President Joe Biden visited the leaders of both countries despite pleas from human rights defenders.
The U.S. Department of Defense said the U.S. State Department approved the $3.05 billion sale of 300 Raytheon Patriot MIM-104E missiles to Saudi Arabia, as well as 96 Lockheed Martin Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles worth $2.25 billion for the UAE.
Indeed, it should be a clear tenet of political analysis
that stated goals are frequently not actual goals. US war planners used rhetorical concerns over non-existent Iraq WMDs as a pretext for invasion. Alleged human rights preoccupations were falsely heralded as the rationale for NATO bombings in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya.
President Biden claimed Monday a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan. Trained as a surgeon in Egypt, where he was born into a prominent family, al-Zawahiri was a key figure in the jihadist movement since the 1980s. The U.S. has long accused al-Zawahiri of being a key 9/11 plotter along with Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan in 2011. The Taliban has since criticized the attack, saying the drone strike was a “violation of international principles.” For more, we’re joined by Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary and national security expert Karen Greenberg, who say the Taliban’s apparent sheltering of al-Zawahiri in a prominent Kabul neighborhood was shocking. “This is a strike inside the heart of Kabul in an area that is very, very well known to the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies,” says Sarwary, whose sources report at least 12 Arab nationals were killed in the strike despite Biden announcing there were no civilian casualties.
President Joe Biden, to his credit, did not come out swaggering at his press conference announcing that the CIA had just killed al-Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri. But he did make the dubious assertation that the assassination somehow "made us all safer."
Yet, the U.S. just illegally put nukes into a 6th nation (and virtually nobody in the U.S. can name either it or the other five that the U.S. already illegally had nukes in), while Russia is talking about putting nukes into another nation too, and the two governments with most of the nukes increasingly talk — publicly and privately — about nuclear war. The scientists who keep the doomsday clock think the risk is greater than ever. There’s a general consensus that shipping weapons to Ukraine at the risk of nuclear war is worth it — whatever “it” may be. And, at least within the head of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, voices are unanimous that a trip to Taiwan is worth it too.
Trump tore up the Iran agreement, and Biden has done everything possible to keep it that way. When Trump proposed talking with North Korea, the U.S. media went insane. But it’s the administration that hit the height of inflation-adjusted military spending, set the record for number of nations simultaneously bombed, and invented robot-plane warfare (that of Barack Obama) for which one must painfully now long, as he did the ridiculous-but-better-than-war Iran deal, refused to arm Ukraine, and didn’t have time to get a war going with China. The arming of Ukraine by Trump and Biden has done more for the chances of vaporizing you than anything else, and anything short of all-out bellicosity by Biden has been greeted with blood-thirsty howls by your friendly corporate U.S. news outlets.
Why am I not really surprised at these phenomena? First and foremost because the mainstream media has done a great job of presenting NATO’S side in this war to the public. There are virtually no sources reporting any side but NATO’S side in the mainstream US media. Even on social media, any reports that leak through presenting another view are tagged as being controlled by the Russian government. This tagging would be bearable if the same thing occurred anytime a western news story showed up in the feed, but it doesn’t. Even antiwar pieces in alternative media that oppose all the governments participating in this war are attacked. This one is certain to suffer that fate.
Then there’s the Russophobia of the west. This antagonism towards Russia goes back centuries and is informed by an assumption in certain western European circles that the Slavic peoples east of the steppes are inferior to the “true” European. Vladimir Putin’s version of Russian nationalism has apparently revived these prejudices, at least to a point where enough of the west’s population can be convinced that anything Russia says or does cannot be trusted. While I have never been a fan of President Putin, the absurd caricatures of him and his government are reminiscent of the hate filled and hysterical representations of the German people during World Wars One and Two. As anyone who has understands how wartime propaganda works knows , the impetus behind these mischaracterizations is to render the enemy to subhuman status. The fact that this indoctrination has occurred so easily says something about the ignorance and lack of curiosity of the US public.
Then terrorism became the fixation, the magic slate that allows everything else to be erased. In the first hour after the 9/11 attacks, British civil servants received a message from a special advisor to transport secretary Stephen Byers telling them, ‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.’ They could just use what would soon become known as the ‘war on terror’ to obscure any bad news, even if it had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. Today the Russian government blames everything on Western ‘plots’; in the West it’s always ‘Moscow’s fault’.
It’s the same with the falling standard of living. President Joe Biden constantly attributes soaring inflation in the US to ‘Putin’s tax on both food and gas’. Emmanuel Macron claims his poorest compatriots’ problems are due to the ‘war economy’. But if that’s true, France must have been at war for the last 40 years, because the indexation of wages to prices ended in 1982, when François Mitterrand and his finance minister Jacques Delors gave business owners their biggest ever gift in the form of letting prices (and profits) overtake average income; there was no such gift for their employees, whose purchasing power was permanently slashed.
Anti-war campaigners on Tuesday applauded news that the United Nations-brokered truce in Yemen had been extended for another two months and called on U.S. lawmakers to help ensure more permanent peace by passing the Yemen War Powers Resolution.
Both the Saudi-led military coalition, which receives backing from the U.S. government, and the Houthis have been accused of violating the four-month ceasefire, but anti-war groups and civilians report that access to fuel and freedom of movement since the United Nations brokered the truce in April have helped people return to some semblance of normalcy, as reports of civilian casualties have dropped.
Yikes.
In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.
Behind the story of missing text messages from the U.S. Secret Service and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is a bigger scandal: Former President Donald Trump placed his loyalists in key executive branch positions for a reason. Many are still there.
On August 26, 2019, at 1:30 am in rural Georgia, two men stopped a car 100 yards away from Telfair State Prison, a closed-custody facility that backs into a forest of cypresses and oaks. Inside a duffel bag, the men had a 1.9-pound Storm Drone 4, a Radio Link UAS controller, a Spektrum video monitor with DVR headset, 75 grams of loose tobacco, four rounds of loose ammunition, and 14 cell phones.
Their plan, plotted out for over a month, was simple: To fly the drone over the prison’s walls, where it would drop the payload and soar off, undetected, into the night. But when they switched off the car lights, they caught the attention of deputies from the Telfair County Sheriff’s office stationed nearby.
One of the deputies approached the vehicle to question the driver, who told him he was with two other men. Later identified as Nicolas Lo and Cheikh Hassane Toure, the men, who had fled to the woods, were taken into custody, and later indicted in the US District Court on grand jury charges for a plot to smuggle contraband into the prison. They were sentenced to 12 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to their roles in the scheme.
The worst-case outcomes of an unmitigated climate emergency—civilizational collapse or even human extinction—are "dangerously underexplored" scenarios requiring further study, an analysis published Monday asserted.
"There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such 'endgames' at even modest levels of warming."
The Koch network, headed by billionaire oil and gas tycoon Charles Koch, is mobilizing its vast resources in an effort to convince holdout Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to tank the Democratic Party's new reconciliation package ahead of a possible vote this week.
Since the deal was announced last week, Sinema (D-Ariz.)—a frequent obstructionist of her own party's agenda—has been completely silent about the bill, a hodgepodge of renewable energy investments, tax provisions, oil and gas industry giveaways, drug price reforms, and other measures. The bill was negotiated principally by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), another right-wing Democrat.
As fires and floods wreak havoc across the United States—from California to Kentucky—activists armed with a 16-foot inflatable globe and nearly half a million petition signatures gathered outside the White House on Tuesday to yet again demand that President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency.
"Biden can take sweeping action to protect our climate and curb fossil fuels where Congress is failing to do so."
Private equity is seemingly inescapable. From housing to hospitals and fisheries to fast food, equity investors have acquired a host of businesses in recent decades. Private equity firms control more than $6 trillion in assets in the U.S. But what makes them different from any other type of investor putting their money into a business?
Private equity investors — typified by firms like Bain Capital, Apollo Global Management, TPG, KKR and Blackstone — are different from venture capitalists, who provide a cash infusion to small startups and hope they blossom into the next Facebook. Nor are they stock traders making split-second decisions to buy or sell shares in public companies. Rather, private equity funds aim to take control of a business for a relatively short time, restructure it and resell the company at a profit.
The return of Chris Cuomo to television is the latest reminder that there is little accountability to speak of in corporate news media. Chris was ousted at CNN in late 2021 amidst an ethics investigation that claimed he utilized his position at the cable news juggernaut to consult his brother, then governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. At the time, the governor was facing a series of sexual misconduct allegations. Chris was using his professional connections to identify what reporters knew about the allegations, and then using that information to consult Andrew on how to respond, all while hosting Andrew on his daily CNN program. In July 2022, Cuomo returned to television to promote his podcast The Chris Cuomo Project. Cuomo appeared on Dan Abrams show on NewsNation (where Cuomo recently secured a position and I have served as an expert guest) and Real Time with Bill Maher.
A coalition of watchdog organizations on Tuesday urged Democratic congressional leaders to "expeditiously" bring a ban on lawmaker stock trading up for a vote, warning that a proposal with broad support from the U.S. public is at growing risk of dying as the Senate prepares for August recess and the midterms loom.
"We fear that without your strong leadership and advocacy, this critical good government reform will stall," reads a letter that 22 groups, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Public Citizen, sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) on Tuesday.
At some point U.S. regulators effectively declared that it was okay to rip off consumers with a dizzying array of bogus fees, letting companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock you with a bunch of additional surcharges when the bill comes due. That’s particularly true of the cable and broadband industry, which has saddled consumers with billions in fees for decades, with little real penalty.
Initiatives linked to Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), a Russian Orthodox bishop said to be Vladimir Putin’s personal confessor, have received more than 20 billion rubles ($332 million) from the Russian government and state-owned companies, according to a new report by the investigative outlet iStories.€
As shocking, as wildly insulting as that€ pussy-grabber€ winning the presidency was to American women and girls, it was just the beginning of what appears to be a long season of sadism.
Who Let the Dogs Out?
However, the election of Donald Trump, a corrupt businessman, to the presidency in November 2016 brought to a head decades-long boiling undemocratic forces in America. January 6, 2021 was a dark day during which Trump launched an unsuccessful coup.
Like an experienced tyrant, Trump invited his followers from all over America to Washington. He was determined to keep his power. He told his followers to go to the Capitol in order to prevent Vice President Mike Pence and the Senate from certifying the popular victory of Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. He kept telling the angry mob that the Democrats had stolen the election.
Since April there have been protests against extensive shortages of food and fuel, as well as a profound crisis of trust in Sri Lanka’s political institutions, primarily parliament and the presidency (both have faced repeated charges of corruption and nepotism for decades, a situation unable to be surmounted by a cowed judicial system).
The heart of the anti-government movement, at this point, was a demand for the resignation of the strongman president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a member of a successional political family.
Environmentalists raised grave concerns Monday over newly reported details of a side deal between the Democratic leadership and Sen. Joe Manchin that would reform the permitting process for energy projects and clear the way for final approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would carry fracked gas through West Virginia.
The agreement was reached as part of an effort to secure Manchin's support for the Inflation Reduction Act, a proposed budget reconciliation bill that includes renewable energy investments, drug price reforms, and a number of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. Because its provisions fall outside the bounds of reconciliation, the side deal must be passed as separate legislation.
Last week, Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator whose decisive vote in the evenly split upper house has led some to brand him 'President Manchin', and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer surprised even the most clued-in political junkies by announcing support for a climate bill that had been declared dead just several weeks before.
The follow€ing is adap€ted from oral testi€mony€ given Thursday€ before the United States House Commit€tee on Admin€is€tra€tion.
In July, the Putin administration distributed two new messaging guides to Russia's pro-government media outlets and politicians. Both documents give detailed instructions for how to create parallels between Russia’s current war in Ukraine and well-known historical events in the public imagination. The first one focuses on the 988 “baptism of Rus,” when Kyivan Rus ruler Volodymyr the Great is said to have baptized the people of Kyiv after converting to Orthodox Christianity himself. The second is about the 1240 Battle of the Neva, when Prince Alexander of Novgorod is believed to have defeated Swedish invaders on the banks of the Neva River. The guides instruct the media to use these events to portray Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine as a preemptive war launched to protect Russia from a godless, resource-hungry West, as well as from Ukrainian Satanists who make ritual human sacrifices. These arguments have already begun appearing in state media —€ sometimes verbatim. Meduza has summarized their contents.
Whether you’re trying to block websites to protect children from seeing inappropriate videos or minimize distractions, we’ve got you covered. With our simple guide, you’ll learn how to quickly create blocklists on iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, as well as on various browsers, and routers.€
Is it too much to ask that politicians try to live in reality? The obsession over the past few years that anything bad that people say on the internet is the fault of the internet (rather than the people using it) and must be outlawed is already problematic enough. But the politicians and their “solutions” are reaching ever more ridiculous heights.
Shadowproof was launched seven years ago. With many crises facing our world, we are proud to still be publishing independent journalism.
Since our last birthday, Shadowproof has published several articles from freelance journalists at our website and as part of The Dissenter, our newsletter focused on whistleblower stories and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case.
We go to Kansas, where voters today are deciding whether to pass a constitutional amendment that would override a 2019 state Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. If the amendment passes, it will clear the way for Republican state lawmakers to ban the procedure, which they have vowed to do. Kansas is the first state in the country to vote on the right to abortion and one of the last states in the region to still allow abortion, with clinics there having reported an influx of patients from neighboring states, including Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, after the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade. Republicans are “strategically using tactics of voter suppression” to ensure the amendment passes by requiring strict registration guidelines and drafting “incredibly confusing” language in the amendment, says reproductive health reporter Amy Littlefield. Despite this, she says the abortion rights community feels “cautiously optimistic” that the enormous grassroots mobiliziation in response to the overruling of Roe “might just be enough” to strike down the amendment.
After Kansas residents across the state received a misleading, anonymous message in recent days regarding an abortion rights referendum, pro-choice advocates doubled down on their calls for people to vote "no" Tuesday on a proposed constitutional amendment that would clear the way for an abortion ban in the state.
An unknown group sent text messages warning voters, "Women in Kansas are losing their choice on reproductive rights."
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a law that allows all of the state's registered voters to submit their ballots by mail, rebuffing an effort by Republican lawmakers to overturn a statute they supported years earlier.
In its ruling, the court's majority declared that "we find no restriction in our constitution on the General Assembly's ability to create universal mail-in voting." The court's two Republican justices, Sallie Updyke Mundy and Kevin Brobson, dissented.
Reproductive freedom advocates across Kentucky and beyond vowed to keep fighting after a judge on Monday night allowed the GOP state attorney general to enforce a trigger law and six-week abortion ban.
"It is irresponsible and dangerous to prevent people from accessing the care they need."
In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton famously predicted that the judicial branch of government would "always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them." In retrospect, Hamilton could not have been more wrong.
The Supreme Court's attack on long-standing privacy rights via the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade comes at the same moment corporate lobby groups are pushing to restrict data privacy protections through a slate of new international trade agreements. If Big Tech gets their way in these pacts, many who seek and provide abortion services will be at increased risk of surveillance and criminal prosecution.
ProPublica’s journalism is propelled by the people who share their observations, advice, expertise and inside knowledge with us. Public defenders and defense attorneys have long been important to our work.
As our staff grows, we are experimenting with better ways to stay in touch. This is one of them: If you are a current or former public defender or criminal defense attorney, we invite you to add your name to our list of volunteer sources. We may contact you with questions about your expertise and the intricacies of the criminal justice system. We will also share occasional updates about stories in the works.
Forty members of Congress on Monday asked the IRS and the Treasury to investigate what the lawmakers termed an “alarming pattern” of right-wing advocacy groups registering with the tax agency as churches, a move that allows the organizations to shield themselves from some financial reporting requirements and makes it easier to avoid audits.
Reps. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., raised transparency concerns in a letter to the heads of both agencies following a ProPublica story about the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian think tank based in Washington, D.C., getting reclassified as a church. Thirty-eight other lawmakers, including Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., signed onto the letter.
It’s an election year, and like clockwork, legislators around the country want to show they care about protecting kids online. This pre-election frenzy leads performative bills that won’t actually help any kids. Today I’m blogging about one of those bills,€ California AB 2408, “Social media platform: child users: addiction.” (For more on how the California legislature is working to eliminate the Internet, see my posts on the pending bills€ AB587€ and€ AB2273).
For the last few months we’ve been writing a lot about AICOA, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, being pushed for by Senator Amy Klobuchar. It’s an antitrust bill, but not an antitrust bill designed to fix the whole host of problems we have today with industrial consolidation and anticompetitive practices. No, it’s just a bill to target a few specific practices of a narrow slice of the tech industry. And, it only has bipartisan support (barely) for one reason, and one reason only: because Republicans believe that the vaguely worded law will be a tool they can use to batter companies for content moderation decisions they disagree with. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. This is literally what the Republicans themselves are saying. Out loud. Over and over again.
Internet provider Bright House has resolved its legal dispute with several RIAA-backed record labels. The ISP stood accused of turning a blind eye to pirating subscribers and faced millions of dollars in potential damages. The parties reached an agreement at the last minute as the trial was scheduled to start tomorrow.
To reduce piracy on the Switch console, last week Nintendo used a DMCA notice to target a popular 'sigpatch' repository on Github. While the coding platform ultimately took the repo down, it appears there was a difference of opinion over what type of infringement they represent. So what are 'sigpatches', why do they even need to exist, and why might they breach copyright law?
In 2006, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of a Silicon Valley startup company called Theranos, was featured in Inc magazine’s annual list of 30 under 30 entrepreneurs. Her entrepreneurship involved blood, or more precisely, testing blood. Instead of the usual vials of blood, Holmes claimed to be able to obtain precise results about the health of patients using a very small sample of blood drawn from just a pinprick.
The promise was enticing and Holmes had a great run for a decade. She was supported by a bevy of celebrities and powerful individuals, including former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, James Mattis, who later served as U.S. secretary of defense, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Not that any of them would be expected to know much about medical science or blood testing. But all that public endorsement helped. As did savvy marketing by Holmes. Theranos raised over $700 million from investors, and receive a market valuation of nearly $9 billion by 2014.
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