This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos gushed about NASA’s live obliteration of minor planet Dimorphos using a probe outfitted with a camera. Spoiler alert: the probe reaches its rock-dappled rocky target just fine, and the final transmitted image has a decidedly human tinge.
Secure in the Crowd Information on Crowdsec...
 Making Linux work on an Apple silicon-powered device is what many of us want!
Thanks to Asahi Linux project, it is now a reality for testers. Sure, it is not ready for prime time, but if you are an advanced Linux user, you could try Linux on Apple M1/M2 devices right now.
Now, an exciting progress by Asahi Lina, a Linux developer, has all our attention.
We might have a working native GPU driver written in Rust sooner than expected.
The direct reason that you want access control for Loki is that Loki provides direct access to your logs, in full and basically raw form. All of your logs, from all of the systems that you're having feed in to Loki, with all of the potentially sensitive information that might be appearing in them. In many situations, you don't want to provide this sort of log access to everyone internally and you would be much more restrictive about who had access to read the logs on, say, a central syslog server. This applies both to direct access to Loki's HTTP API endpoints and to access to Loki through, say, Grafana's 'Explore' ad-hoc query system (which is a convenient way to poke through your Loki logs in a browser, instead of using LogCLI to do it from the command line).
It’s time to get me up on speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.
Since I switched my server from OpenBSD to NixOS, I was missing a feature. The previous server was using iblock, a program I made to block IPs connecting on a list of ports, I don't like people knocking randomly on ports.
iblock is simple, if you connect to any port on which it's listening, you get banned in the firewall.
In this post, you will learn how to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 22.04 The process is simple but can open many doors for the cloud.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to change the keyboard layout on Ubuntu 22.04. This is handy for users that wish to type in multiple languages.
DeaDBeeF is an audio player software for Linux, Android, and other Unix-like operating systems and is free and open-source software, except on Android. DeaDBeeF is small in size but significant in features, and its interface is customizable and supports themes. It can play music from CDs and files in many different formats, including MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV, along with other great features, including a built-in equalizer and support for plugins.
One of the best things about DeaDBeeF is that it’s not resource-intensive and can be used on older computers without any issues. If you’re looking for a lightweight but feature-rich audio player, DeaDBeeF is worth checking out.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install DeaDBeeF Player on Linux Mint 21 LTS using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.
TeXworks is a powerful open-source, free document editor with support for various typesetting engines. With TeXworks, you can generate PDF documents as your formatted output or configure your processing path to use DVI instead. TeXworks also has a built-in PDF viewer that supports source/preview synchronization, making it easy to see your changes in real time. TeXworks has the tools you need to get the job done right, whether you’re typesetting a simple document or a complex academic paper.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of TeXworks on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.
Valve snuck out another Steam Deck Beta Client update, this time with just a few more quick fixes to it. To try it yourself you need to be in either the Beta or Preview channels available in Settings >System >Steam Update Channel.
Developer poncle has now confirmed that Vampire Survivors will hit the 1.0 on October 20th. The sad news is€ their big game engine upgrade is not landing yet.
If you don't hear from me much over the next week it's because I've discovered Brotato. Another in the list of wave-based horde survival games and it's honestly great. Note: personal purchase.
Oh wow, I really need to check out Volcanoids again. The survival game that has you build and upgrade a big moving drill now has a lot more in it with some other big machinery.
As another month comes to a close, Valve has revealed what is currently popular on the Steam Deck based on the most hours played. With a bunch of obvious entries and some from last month, along with Cyberpunk 2077 making a triumphant return thanks to the new update and Anime.
 If you’re on your journey of finding that perfect distro for your system, the chances of ending up with Ubuntu-based distros are pretty high.
You may ask why.
Well, it is no surprise that Ubuntu is one of the most beginner-friendly Linux distros. It is also incredibly popular, which is why you will find a massive user community behind it. Not just that, it is also widely used on cloud servers.
So, having Ubuntu as the base for any Linux distribution should come with useful perks, right?
And that is why I came up with a list of the best Ubuntu-based distros in the hope for you’d find something worthy enough to stop distro hopping.
Based on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and powered by its long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel, the upcoming Linux Lite 6.2 release promises a revamped Lite Upgrade utility with a new end-user dialog and integration of the latest LibreOffice release.
Linux Lite 6.2 will also feature an updated Papirus icon set, the Shotcut video editor as a replacement for Openshot in Lite Software, a fix for a hostname bug and kernel removal in Lite Tweaks, a fix for a codename bug in Lite Sources, an improved Hardware Database to support more devices, and new wallpapers.
To resurrect their broken vintage NEC ProSpeed laptop, babtras added a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer and a modern LCD screen. Sometimes old components fail beyond repair and replacements are unavailable or prohibitively expensive. In such cases, it is worth reviving a vintage computer using modern hardware. That’s what Redditor babtras did by putting a Raspberry Pi into an ‘80s NEC ProSpeed 286.
Interoperability Assessment Tools (IATs) are comprehensive solutions that are implemented in the EU Survey.
This set of tools delivers insights into two directions:
They measure the current interoperability maturity of a digital public service based on a set of defined interoperability attributes and maturity stages;
They suggest how the digital public service can improve its interoperability maturity.
This is as massive paper: 119 pages. What surprised me is how approachable it is. I have relatively little background building database systems and more experience using them. Despite this, the paper was readable and I was able to take away quite a bit from it, which I've already put into practice in my redis-compatible KV store that I'm building to learn about database systems.
How do confidence intervals work?, In statistics, we’re frequently interested in calculating population parameters—numbers that capture some aspect of a population as a whole.
Connor Tumbleson recently shared Someone is pretending to be me where at another company, he caught a group of people impersonating him to hire someone in his name. A follow-up post came on orange site, (Ask HN: Have you experienced "hiring fraud?") and I'd like to share my experience too.
An important message from Damien Miller (djm@) turned up on mailing lists and elsewhere, saying, [...]
Thus one of the results of the incident is the "irresponsible disclosure" of the set of vulnerabilities Uber knows about and, presumably, would eventually have fixed. "Responsible disclousure" policies have made significant improvements to overall cybersecurity in recent years but developing and deploying fixes takes time. For responsible disclosure to be effective the vulnerabilities must be kept secret while this happens.
If you’re a programmer, you probably have. If you’ve been doing this for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten into a disagreement about whether you’ve successfully done so. Dependence is one of those words where everyone thinks they know what it means (Clean Code uses the word over 100 times without defining it). But as easy as it is to speak broadly about limiting dependencies, uncertainty about what it means leads into uncertainty in actual jobs.
By the end of this post, you will learn an objective definition of dependence for software engineering. This definition encompasses all places where engineers talk about dependence, from package management to performance engineering and even usability, and it’s sufficiently rigorous to be mechanically checkable.
I’ve posted here about my experiences with Go since 2013 and I guess it’s too late to stop now. This one is truly miscellaneous, just a bunch of things that built up in “should write about this” notes to myself while working on Quamina.
On the one hand, it's convenient that this works in general, and that there's nothing in the general design of virtual environments that blocks it. On the other hand, it's clear that you can have various corner cases (as shown with pipx and Django), so it's probably best to create your venvs in their final location if you can. If you do have to move venvs (for example they have to be built in one directory and deployed under another), you probably want to test the result and scan for things with the absolute path burned into them.
A similar set of logos will appear on cable plugs. As USB data rates and standards’ names became more complicated, the options for charging wattage have been distilled down to just two: 60 watts and 240 watts, with future USB chargers using the logos below.
This month, a sweeping retrospective of Boris Mikhailov’s photography opened at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, under the title “Journal ukrainien” – “Ukrainian Diary.” Mikhailov, a Kharkiv native, dedicated this 800-photograph exhibition to Ukraine and “to all those who suffer from the treacherous and inexplicable attack on our motherland,” “with immense sadness and boundless commiseration.” Anton Dolin, Meduza’s film and art critic, visited the exhibition and shares his thoughts about the celebrated art photographer and his work.
President López Obrador has confirmed that an international group of [crackers] stole thousands of emails from the IT system of the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena).
The messages and attached documents – some of which contain information about President López Obrador’s medical issues including a serious heart problem he suffered earlier this year – were leaked to the media outlet Latinus by the Guacamaya group of Central American [crackers].
Carlos Loret de Mola, a Latinus journalist, presented details about the leaked information during his online program on Thursday.
In a perfect world, all of our electronic devices would come with complete documentation, and there’d be open source libraries available for interfacing them with whatever we wanted. There’d never be arbitrary lockouts preventing us from using a piece of hardware in a way the manufacturer didn’t approve of, and the “cloud” wouldn’t be a black-box server in some data center on the other side of the planet, but a transparent and flexible infrastructure for securely storing and sharing information.
Color gradient filament is fun stuff to play with. It lets you make 3D prints that slowly fade from one color to another along the Z-axis. [David Gozzard] wanted to do some printing with this effect, and learned how to make his own filament to do the job.€
We speak with the award-winning filmmaker Reid Davenport about his directorial debut, “I Didn’t See You There,” in which he reflects on the portrayal of disability in media and popular culture. “Documentary film has traditionally subjugated disabled people, so I wanted to completely turn that on its head” by filming from his perspective without being seen, says Davenport. He says the title of the film is a phrase he has heard from others, and it’s “coded in apology” for ignorance of the way Davenport exists in the world, but that “ignorance is a choice at the end of the day, and an apology is only going to do so much.”
The lobby of DCTV’s new documentary film center in New York will be dedicated to the filmmaker Brent Renaud, who worked out of the historic firehouse alongside Democracy Now! for many years. Renaud was the first journalist to be killed in the Ukraine war after he was shot dead on March 13, 2022, while filming refugees near the capital Kyiv for a documentary series. We speak with Brent’s brother, filmmaker Craig Renaud, who was his partner in the field for decades, and feature some of their work in Iraq and about U.S. soldiers deployed there from the Renauds’ home state of Arkansas. “It’s still surreal at this point,” comments Renaud, who says the theater lobby “couldn’t be a better way to honor him.”
Opponents also pointed out that the wave park’s anticipated noise and lighting, much of it reflecting off the mountain behind it, would have damaged the quality of life of nearby residents as well as abundant wildlife like the nonchalant group of Bighorn sheep lounging under a tree I passed while touring the site.
A different sort of light, though one no less bright, has shone down on the production. The ill-will supposedly now blowing between the movie’s director Oliva Wilde and its brightest star Florence Pugh—brightest, that is, when it comes to the not-always-most-important matter of acting chops. (Playing her glamorous, pleasure-seeking and -giving, husband is Harry Styles, the pop supernova whose acting chops are decidedly underbaked, but whose global appeal maybe, just maybe is driving ticket sales even more than the concocted controversies swirling around the movie.)
When [Jak_o_Shadows] Siglent Oscilloscope died, he didn’t just mourn the loss, he saw an opportunity. See, he had a Raspberry Pi 400 already set aside for a cyberdeck build, and he just scored a novel case. Most of the insides of the old scope came out, but the screen and control knobs live on in the new build. An HDMI-to-LVDS adapter brought the screen back to life, and the control knobs are a work-in-progress. Added to the case are some fun goodies, like a LimeSDR, connected to the old scope inputs. A PL2303 is wired to the serial port, making that functional, too. It’s a very nice touch that the build retains the original scope’s functions this way.
Reflow hotplates are a wonderful tool for PCB assembly if you can keep your designs single-sided. The 946C hotplate in particular has been on hackers’ radar for a while – a 200x200cm working surface hotplate available for under $100 is a decent investment. As with other reflow tools, it was a matter of time until someone made a replacement controller for it. This one, you’ll want to keep in mind – it’s a replacement controller project by [Arnaud Durand] and [Elias Rodriguez Martin], called Reflow946.
The Vancouver-based physician said that ad is “terrible and misleading” because dozens of scientific studies suggest that children who grow up breathing the fumes from gas stoves have a heightened risk of asthma — a potentially 42 percent increased risk, according to one meta-analysis.€ € €
There's no denying the impact of porn on the developing brain. Peer-reviewed studies show that adolescents who watch “hardcore porn” tend to experience less capacity for intimate connections and healthy relationships, and more depression, risky and unsafe sexual behaviors, sexual coercion, and dating violence, among other harms. Simply telling young people not to watch it isn't the answer, but arming them with the tools to navigate both ethical and unethical porn — including the reality of racial and identity stereotypes — could save them from negative experiences with long-term effects.
“If we don't want young people to use porn as the backbone of their sex education, then we need credentialed educators to teach them,” Fonte says. “It's like watching The Fast & The Furious and assuming that's how you're supposed to learn to drive.” This analogy is a common refrain amongst sex educators, and they're onto something. We learn at a young age that Hollywood is different from reality, so why wouldn't we have that expectation set with porn?
Firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. As a national coordinating center, the U-M institute will collaborate with teams across all three research sites to centralize their collective efforts, addressing disparities in firearm violence and evaluating the effectiveness of community-level prevention strategies.
Hospitals typically employ all sorts of specialists who focus on critical organs like hearts, lungs and kidneys — or who treat systemic or chronic diseases of the immune system or the brain. There are specialists for children, for mental illness, for childbirth and hospice.
But if your illness is an addiction or a condition related to drug or alcohol use, there are few hospitals where patients can see a clinician — whether that be an M.D., nurse, therapist or social worker — who specializes in addiction medicine.
Their absence among hospital personnel is particularly striking at a time when overdose deaths in the U.S. have reached record highs, and research shows patients face an increased risk of fatal overdose in the days or weeks after they are discharged from a hospital.
On CBS’s 60 Minutes in late September, President Biden announced: “The pandemic is over.” With more than 400 deaths each day all summer, Covid is still among the leading causes of death in America. The United States still leads the G7 industrialized nations in per capita Covid mortality and excess deaths, and with life expectancy in the US declining due to the disease, these basic health metrics do not support the president’s contention. Things may not be as bad as they were in 2020 or in the darkest days of the Omicron surge, but the current status quo bakes a staggering amount of death and suffering into a surrender to the virus.1
Google is shutting down it's streaming game platform, Stadia. They are refunding all Stadia purchases – both hardware and software (most likely to break the meme).
While Google’s Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a€ disappointing thud.
The vulnerabilities were reported to Microsoft through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). Microsoft has now published a blog post to inform customers that it is investigating two reported zero-day flaws.
The tech giant says one of the flaws is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) issue tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and the second is a remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-41082. The security holes have been found to impact Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019.
Microsoft Corp. is investigating reports that attackers are exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server, a technology many organizations rely on to send and receive email. Microsoft says it is expediting work on software patches to plug the security holes. In the meantime, it is urging a subset of Exchange customers to enable a setting that could help mitigate ongoing attacks.
The only way to be sure you can read, listen to, or watch stuff you care about is to archive it. Read a tutorial about yt-dlp for videos. Download webcomics. Archive podcast episodes. If you don’t care, that’s fine. If you do, you should.
Venafi surveyed 1,101 security decision makers (SDMs) in firms with more than 1,000 employees and found that eighty-one percent of companies have experienced a cloud security incident in the last year. Forty-five percent have suffered at least four security incidents in the same period. More than half of security decision makers believe that security risks are higher in the cloud than on-premise.
Twenty-four percent of the firms have more than 10,000 employees. Ninety-two percent of the SDMs are at manager level or above, with 49% at c-suite level or higher.
One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-36934 and rated ‘critical’, is an integer overflow issue that affects WhatsApp for Android prior to 2.22.16.12, Business for Android prior to 2.22.16.12, iOS prior to 2.22.16.12, and Business for iOS prior to 2.22.16.12.
According to WhatsApp, an attacker can exploit the vulnerability for remote code execution during a video call.
Police analysts often select a probe photo from a video still or a cell phone camera, which are more likely to be low quality. The characteristics of the chosen image, including its resolution, clarity, face angle, lighting, etc. all impact the accuracy of the subsequent algorithmic search. Shockingly, analysts may also significantly edit the probe photo, using tools closely resembling those in Photoshop in order to remove facial expressions or insert eyes, combining face photographs of two different people even though only one is of the perpetrator, using the blur effect to add pixels into a low quality image, using the cloning tool or 3D modeling to add parts of a subject’s face not visible on the original photo. In one outrageous instance, when the original probe photo returned no potential matches by the algorithm, the analyst from the NYPD Facial Identification Section, who thought the subject looked like actor Woody Harrelson, ran another search using the celebrity’s photo instead. Needless to say, these changes significantly elevate the risk of misidentification.
Pretextual stops are an unfortunate side effect of American law enforcement. When cops want to question people or root around in their cars, they’ll find another reason to make the stop and hope the eventual searches make it all worthwhile.
The Indian government's ban this week of the Popular Front of India (PFI), an Islamic organization that says it fights for the rights of minorities, has received mixed reaction in the country, with Hindu groups welcoming the move and Muslim groups, opposition leaders and rights activists criticizing it.
Hours after the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs issued the ban on the PFI on Wednesday, accusing it of "terrorism" and "anti-national activities," the organization declared in a statement that it had disbanded itself.
Russia’s two houses of parliament need to ratify the annexations.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies breakdown some of the statements from world leaders at the UN General Assembly who called for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine.
Today’s official annexation of four Ukrainian regions by Russia is the most serious act of escalation since the start of the Russian invasion. Its purpose is clear: the Kremlin would like to draw a new “red line” that cannot be crossed by the Kyiv leadership and Ukraine’s western partners. Earlier today, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said in his annexation speech that Russia will “defend its land” and “its people” on territories that Russia now claims to be its own. But the Kremlin has no tools for making its opponents respect this new revision of Russia’s state borders. What’s very clear instead is that Kyiv is fully prepared for an escalation, with the assurance of support from countries in the West. The United States has already committed to increasing its arms supplies to Ukraine. The Ukrainian army is likely to continue its offensive, and it’s fully determined to regain control over occupied territories. The Kremlin, as as a result, is likely to up the ante.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 22, European countries tried to end their energy dependence on Russia, but the process has been slow. Oil embargoes will come into effect no earlier than 2023. Meanwhile, European cargo companies continue to freely transport Russian oil and petroleum products by sea. It’s big business, even for companies whose leadership has repeatedly and publicly denounced the war in Ukraine. And while European imports of Russian energy have generally decreased since the invasion, a few European companies have increased Russian oil imports ahead of winter. This trade brings Russia hundreds of millions in income daily. An investigative project by Investigate Europe and Reporters United, with Meduza’s participation, explains what’s going on.
Mays, 21, had stood trial on charges of aggravated arson and willfully hazarding a vessel for the four-day blaze that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship, in 2020.
"De facto, we have already made our way to NATO," Zelenskyy said in a statement, making his case for officially joining the alliance whose members have pumped billions of dollars worth of high-tech weaponry into the war zone.
In a ceremony at the Kremlin, Putin signed decrees to annex Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—four Ukrainian territories wholly or partially controlled by Russian troops. Residents of those areas will "be our citizens forever," he said, claiming that this represents "the will of millions of people."
Russian president Vladimir Putin has signed decrees “recognizing the state sovereignty and independence” of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine.
As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see.€ Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts.€ Yet that's exactly what the U.S. military and many of America's senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people.€ And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they've suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will in coming weeks close several circles of evidence in ways that confirm the deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021, as “the culmination of a coup attempt” carried out at the behest of former President Trump. The committee’s upcoming—and potentially final—hearing should remove any doubt that Trump must be held to account for attempting to halt the transfer of power to his legitimate successor.
Since the launch of its counteroffensive in late summer, the Ukrainian army has managed to liberate about 8,500 square kilometers (about 3,280 square miles) of its territory from Russian occupation, mostly in the Kharkiv region. On September 11, Ukrainian forces reached the Russian border, capturing a checkpoint just outside Russia's Belgorod region. Meduza reports on how the views of Belgorod residents have changed since the war began —€ and since it started affecting them directly.
President Vladimir Putin spoke today in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, in front of members of Russia’s parliament. His speech addressed the “results” of Russian-staged “referendums” in the self-proclaimed “DNR” and “LNR,” as well as the occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, explaining their annexation by Russia as historic “fate.” Putin said that he is “certain” that the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the Russian parliament) will “support the constitutional laws on the acceptance and constitution within Russia of four new regions,” “because it is the will of millions of people.”
At the Kremlin on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the heads of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics,” and the leaders of the occupation administrations in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions signed a treaty on Russia’s annexation of the four partially-occupied regions.
Ukraine will officially apply for expedited accession to NATO on September 30, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced.
Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an order on simplified procedures for granting citizenship to foreigners who sign a contract to serve in the armed forces of the Russian Federation. The document has been published on the official web portal for legal information.
Russia's first administrative lawsuit against a military commissariat and draft commission has been filed in a St. Petersburg court. The plaintiff claims the draft commission’s decision to conscript him is unlawful and demands to be made exempt from mobilization, according to St. Petersburg’s court press service.
In the speech he made before signing the decree to annex Ukraine’s partially-occupied territories into Russia on Friday, Vladimir Putin blamed “the Anglo-Saxons” for carrying out the attacks that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea earlier this week. Other parts of Putin’s speech suggest he was referring first and foremost to the U.S.
Science journalist Asya Kazantseva, who previously participated in protests, said on Facebook that she had been arrested at Pionerskaya metro station “by cameras” (the facial recognition system installed in the Moscow metro - notes Meduza).
MPs from the parliament of the Republic of Bashkiria have prepared and submitted a bill to the State Duma which establishes a legal basis for sending convicts to war. This was reported by Interfax, citing the speaker of the State Assembly, Konstantin Tolkachev. This bill was not in the State Duma database at the time of writing.
More than $2 billion dollars. That's how much dark money eclipsed the 2020 elections, OpenSecrets estimates—an increase of over $1.8 billion from just ten years prior.
Kevin Gosztola writes on how prominent media and government individuals commented on Snowden being granted Russian citizenship by Putin.
Fossil Free Penn is far from alone—it is just the first of dozens of youth-led organizations occupying college campuses to demand an end of universities’ investment in fossil fuels. Over the summer, students across the globe connected under End Fossil, an organization coordinating indefinite occupations of educational institutions beginning this fall. The expected pushback will ensure that the students are in for a long semester. Fossil Free Penn members have already faced intimidation by school administrators and campus security, reinforced by the crushing weight of the fossil fuel industry. But the movement spans four continents and hundreds of student organizers, each with their own school-specific demands to advance climate justice.
This study found that the Arctic Ocean’s acidification rate is correlated to the speed of sea-ice loss, which is driven by climate change. The Arctic Ocean’s rapidly melting sea ice results in waters that are more exposed to the atmosphere and thus more easily absorb the air’s increased levels of carbon dioxide, which causes acidification. Scientists say that if sea ice continues to melt at its current rate, the rapid acidification of the ocean will intensify in the next few decades until there is no sea ice left in the Arctic Ocean.
"President Biden, declare a climate emergency. If not now, when?"
Heathrow has been called the second most-polluting airport in the world. The airport is pushing ahead with plans for a third runway, even though experts warn that the expansion may lead to the release of several million additional tonnes of carbon emissions into€ the atmosphere.€
David Gerard of Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain fame attended a conference in Nashville last week, where he talked with senior-level American state and provincial regulators about this brave new world in which we live.
I thought this was a helpful reminder next time you get bogged down talking about the utility of someone’s chosen cryptocurrency: [...]
The latest figures from the Bureau for Economic Analysis show that the profits of the U.S. coal and oil industry increased 340% between the first and second quarters of 2022. Companies selling petroleum and coal products made an estimated $49.7 billion in profits from April to June, compared with $11.3 billion from January to March.
"We at Chevron believe there is nothing more precious than life," the voiceover says over footage of a newborn baby and mother. "And the most precious life of all is the dead kind, that has been compressed for hundreds of millions of years under massive rocks until it magically becomes oil."
In 2023 and 2024, the 0.1% of Spanish taxpayers who own more than €3 million ($2.9 million) in assets will be subject to a new wealth tax.
The campaign, whose roots lie in the trade union and tenants' rights movements, has outlined five specific demands of the U.K. government as renters have seen their average monthly housing costs skyrocket by 11% on average since last year and household energy bills approaching $4,000 (€£3,582) per year.
Author and columnist Zachary€ Karabell, who has extensive experience in writing about China and doing business there,€ joins Scheer Intelligence to remind us of the extensive economic relationship that exists between the two world powers.
For human beings, life without freedom is not worth living. Safety has become a keyword for tyrants to violate our liberties. By safety, the dictators mean “keep being alive” and that’s wrong. Safety has a lot of meaning and is multi-dimensional.
Economical safety, emotional safety, health and environmental safety, humanitarian and freedom safety, and protection against anything that can take these away are kinds of safety a human needs, and without any of them, you’re not safe.
A right is a right when you have it, if anything can take it away, it’s just a privilege and an illusion. Safety is a keyword for that illusion to make you emotionally prepared to lose your rights. And when you lose any of your rights, absolutely any, you’re no longer free.
A court case in Delaware in mid-October will decide whether he will be allowed to walk away - or forced to buy the company.
But the messages show that the relationship between Twitter's CEO and Mr Musk had broken down far earlier.
They also suggest that if Mr Musk is made to buy Twitter - Parag Agrawal will need to look for another job.
The false pageantry with which Russia has announced the annexation of further Ukrainian territories forms part of the cynical 'political technology' framing rhetoric of the restoration of the Soviet Union. At the core of this deception, Russia's leaders are depriving their people of a future and forcing them to live in the darkness of the past.
We will never assent to the illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory and we will never recognize the lawfulness of such a step. Depressingly, and regrettably, this is Russia demonstrating to the entire world yet again the cruelty and callousness with which it breaks international law and the UN Charter.
Tokenisation is a process by which card details are replaced by a unique code or token, generated by an algorithm, allowing online purchases without exposing card details, in a bid to improve data security.
The Texas law – H.B. 20 – would limit the ability of large social media companies to remove user speech from their platforms based on viewpoint. Supporters of the law say it will prevent platforms such as Twitter from discriminating against conservative political speech.
H.B. 20 was initially blocked by a federal judge last year, but the Fifth Circuit upheld the bill earlier this month. The plaintiffs say they will soon file a petition for a writ of certiorari at the Supreme Court. Thursday’s motion attempts to prevent H.B. 20 from taking effect before the High Court weigh ins.
Lots of people are still trying to mentally process the bizarrely confused 5th Circuit ruling that has reinstated Texas’ social media content moderation law. I wrote an initial analysis of the ruling here, and then a further analysis of just some of the most egregious problems with it over at The Daily Beast. This week I’ve been at the TrustCon conference, where multiple people who actually have to implement the law have been repeatedly telling me that they have no idea how anyone even thinks it’s possible to follow the law. Because it is, quite clearly, impossible.
Following the first successful union election by staffers of outgoing Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.)—who led the related resolution—the offices of Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) voted to form unions.
It is impossible to predict, as Iran is closed to the world’s press. Anger is certainly more widespread than ever before. The unrest has drawn in young and old. It has encompassed Iranians from every corner of the country, including Kurds and other minorities. So far it is women who have shown the most exhilarating bravery. But if Iran’s men weigh in with equal valour, the removal of a vile system, though still unlikely in the short run, may no longer be inconceivable.
As the midterms inch closer, Democratic candidates and organizations are finally in sync on messaging about reproductive rights in the wake of the Dobbs ruling overturning abortion rights protections. Many groups finally place abortion in the context of freedom because, as we saw in primaries nationwide, it is a winning issue. Voters understand that if they can’t control when and if they want to parent and are forced to endure a pregnancy they don’t want or are not ready for, they are not completely free.
Across the Atlantic just over a week later, King Charles III addressed Britain and the world about his 96-year-old mother’s death and his preparations to take over the solely symbolic role of British monarch. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all presumably found it more newsworthy than the President’s remarks, because they carried it live (MediaMatters, 9/9/22). (CNN and MSNBC carried both Biden’s and Charles’ speeches.)
The victory of Giorgia Meloni's far-right coalition in Italy's election is yet the starkest evidence of the dramatic consequences that the neoliberal policies of the European Union (EU) are having on the member states. Indeed, the return of old demons in Italy and the spread of far-right movements and parties across Europe are directly linked to the reactionary economic dogmas and shallow integration strategies pursued by the euro masters in Brussels and Frankfurt.
In late October 1922, thousands of fascists marched on the Italian capital in what proved to be a successful coup d’état. Rather than mobilizing the army against the squadracce (fascist mob), the king of Italy called their leader Benito Mussolini to form a government, marking the beginning of 20 years of dictatorship. Exactly a century later, it’s tempting to view Italy as poised for a historical rerun. The September 25 parliamentary elections saw the triumph of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party. The Italian and international media have found the coincidence impossible to ignore: Does Meloni’s victory on the centennial of the infamous March on Rome presage a plunge back into fascism?
The normalization of Giorgia Meloni has already started, a remarkable process considering that the strong showing of her Fratelli d’Italia (FDI) party, now set to be the dominant faction in the new Italian government, is a terrifying victory for right-wing extremism. Much of the commentary on her political rise is rightly focused on the many warning signs that she’s a political fanatic: The FDI has roots in Italian neo-fascism, Meloni herself has praised Mussolini and autocrats like Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, and her current politics are based on demonizing immigrants and LGBTQ people.
Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro faces former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s presidential election. Lula is a former union leader who held office from 2003 through 2010. He’s running on a leftist platform to uplift Brazil’s poor, preserve the Amazon rainforest and protect Brazil’s Indigenous communities, and is supported by a broad, grassroots alliance, explains Brazilian human rights advocate Maria Luísa Mendonça. Polls show Lula has a strong lead over Bolsonaro, but it is unclear if he will win the majority of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. This comes as Bolsonaro and his party appear to be attempting to prepare to stage a coup if he loses the election, says reporter Michael Fox, former editor of NACLA and host of the new podcast “Brazil on Fire.” Despite fear over a coup, Fox says people in Brazil “are really hopeful that they’re going to see change on Sunday.”
Authoritarianism, once seen as a trend to watch, can now be considered an invasive species. It has been on the rise in different parts of the globe, fueled, among other things, by anti-rights rhetoric that is pervasive, deceptive and coordinated, and made visible through disinformation campaigns, attacks on journalists and constant erosion of civic space. It continues to spread.
In the past two weeks, Congress has made major progress in repairing flaws in 19th-century laws governing the presidential election process, including a dangerous loophole that former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to exploit as part of their plot to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump’s Supreme Court has rolled back and modified a number of important rulings, writes Dan Siegel.
The New York City firehouse studio that housed Democracy Now! from 2001 to 2009 has reopened as a movie theater devoted to documentary films. The opening of Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film comes as Downtown Community Television celebrates 50 years of media activism and training. “We wanted to build something that really respected and paid tribute to documentaries,” says DCTV’s co-founder Jon Alpert, who says the theater is “completely interactive” and will “serve the community.” DCTV is also part of a broad alliance in the Chinatown neighborhood to stop the development of a new jail — a 300-foot-tall “jailscraper” — that Alpert says would likely be “the physical end” of DCTV. Alpert just won the News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Crime and Justice Documentary for the last part of his HBO trilogy, “Life of Crime: 1984-2020.”
Russia has imposed a series of regulations on the media since it invaded Ukraine in February, including directives to call the war a “special operation,” and a new law penalizing spreading “false news” about the army. A violation of the latter carries a 15-year prison sentence.
Several news organizations ceased operations and others had licenses revoked, including Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, is the 2021 Nobel Peace laureate. Authorities on September 5 stripped Muratov’s independent news outlet of its license.
Others, including VOA and the BBC, saw access blocked to their Russian-language content.
QAnon is still alive and kicking, and this week's mad revelation — brought to us by two GQP candidates who lost in 2020 — is that the magical deep state used "weather manipulation technology" to power up Hurricane Ian. The reason? To punish Gov. Ron DeSantis. (See video below.)
While many people found her words strongly objectionable, if not offensive, the singer broke no laws, and the controversy revolved around the boundaries of free speech. The outrage directed toward the group in the wake of Maines’s 10-word statement was from other U.S. citizens exercising the same right to free speech. The vigor of this discussion, short of making credible threats, points out the importance of maintaining protection for unpopular speech.
The uproar, however, did not limit itself to words. Boycotts of the Dixie Chicks’ American tour were announced. Country radio stations, including all outlets of the Cumulus Broadcasting Company, removed the group from their play lists. During a demonstration protesting the singer’s statement, protesters publicly destroyed copies of the Dixie Chicks’ recordings. Many in the audience of the Academy of Country Music awards that May booed when the group’s name was read as a nominee.
Some punishments fit the crime, while others spiral out of proportion. We get it, there are actions that deserve to be cancelled, but for some people, the slightest slip-up can be life-ruining. With Cancel Cancel Culture, Refinery29 will examine the implications of "cancelling" public figures whose fuckups — major or minor — were put on trial in the court of public opinion. We'll also pose the question: Is it finally time for cancel culture to be cancelled, too?
Verizon's ban included a ban on "female-presenting nipples" – a canonically hard-to-define category – but included exceptions for non-sexual nipple images. Hard to imagine that any serious, disinterested computer scientist promising that an algorithm could cleave "female-presenting nipples" from "male-presenting" ones, let alone decide which ones were "sexual" or not.
I posted an image of a hand producing a fingerprint. Tumblr's filter blocked it. I posted a followup about Tumblr's idiotic filter. Tumblr's filter blocked that. I did it again. The filter did, too.
Verizon was not good at running Tumblr, which isn't a surprise, because Verizon's core competencies are lobbying and union-busting. Eventually the company wrote down its online media assets, taking a $4.6B loss: [...]
Ardern's United Nations speech, available in full on the UN 's official website and on YouTube, discussed a number of topics from global warming, to COVID-19 to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
During the course of her speech, Ardern also began to refer to the threat posed by "mis and disinformation" online.
[...]
The arguments being made about Ardern's speech, in the rough, appear to be that any type of online censorship or regulation, from any authority, is damaging to the principle of freedom of speech, no matter how it manifests. Instead what she was referring to is the weaponization of free speech societies and platforms by misinformation agents.
However, the manner in which this has been expressed, that Ardern considers [Internet] freedom a "weapon of war," that she wants "a new [Internet]", or that she sees "dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow" patently misrepresents both the content and the sentiment of her speech.
That is the same rationale used by authoritarian countries like China, Iran, and Russia to censor dissidents, minority groups, and political rivals. What is “hateful” and “dangerous” is a fluid concept that government have historically used to silence critics or dissenters.
Ardern is the smiling face of the new generation of censors. At least the old generation of censors like the Iranians do not pretend to support free speech and openly admit that they are crushing dissent. The point is that we need to be equally on guard when censorship is pushed from the left with the best of motivations and the worst of means.
Footage of the New Zealand prime minister’s speech went viral on Wednesday, with many commentators condemning her remarks.
Independent journalist and The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald called out Ardern on Twitter.
“This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it’s the mindset of tyrants everywhere,” Greenwald wrote. “This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow.”
Twitch streamer Kaitlyn "Amouranth" Siragusa is railing against practices by Twitter that she believes are basically censorship by hiding content it deems inappropriate. The incredibly popular Twitch content producer believes that even if the website isn't actually blocking this content, making it harder for users to see it and share it is essentially the same as banning it entirely.
In making her argument, Siragusa shared a tweet that had been hidden by Twitter from an adult content website. The irony of the post being hidden was that it, in turn, was demanding that Facebook parent company, Meta, answers for “unfairly” singling out certain creators with bans, what's known as shadow-bans, and various suspensions. It was when one of Amouranth's followers then claimed what she was pointing to was not actually censorship that she further explained her position.
Halper's segment was prepared for Hill TV's morning program "Rising"—for which she worked as a guest co-host—but executives at the publication blocked the monologue from airing on the platform, an intervention that another Hill TV co-host, Ryan Grim of The Intercept, described as unprecedented for the show.
The Michigan Democrat—and first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress—shared an image of the boy, Rayyan Yaser Suleiman, tweeted by the nonprofit Institute for Middle East Understanding.
Juan Cole writes about the irony behind the Israeli foreign ministry to saying that Russia shouldn’t be annexing land from its neighbors.
Nazish told VOA that although CFWIJ has been able to confirm the location of several of the imprisoned journalists, "we don't even know which authorities took" the others.
In Iran, she said, "journalists are being imprisoned and then they just disappear."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which is also tracking arrests, has said that many are taken from their homes at night by agents who do not provide court documents or arrest warrants. Many of those detained have not been formally charged.
The journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky has been arrested in Makhachkala, Dagestan, according to Dagestani publication Novoye Delo.
She expected Mark Kilmer, the Colorado “parental responsibility evaluator” appointed to her parents’ custody case, would want to hear about the incident that had led to her father being charged with felony child abuse and pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault. The 14-year-old was surprised, then, as she talked to Kilmer on the front porch of her mother’s suburban Denver home in October of 2020, that he didn’t seem interested in learning about it.
Parents of children killed in May's Uvalde, Texas, school shooting are entering day three of a protest outside of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD). The parents, who are blocking the building’s entrance, say that the school district has failed to investigate the school resource officers (SROs) who didn’t enter the classroom for a reported 77 minutes after the shooter began firing. They’re concerned that those SROs are still guarding children; Uvalde's school police chief, Pete Arredondo, was fired at the end of August.
Afghans aren't riding bikes to cut down on their carbon emissions, which are barely a global blip. They aren't on a health kick. It is a reflection of how badly the country's economy has unraveled. Even Afghans fortunate enough to be working are now often unable to afford a comfort once taken largely for granted: a ride in a bus or a shared cab. (Private cars have long been prohibitively expensive for most Afghans.)
The Iran Atrocities (Aban) Tribunal, which was convened by various human rights groups, heard evidence from over 250 witnesses as it investigated whether the Iranian regime broke international law in its response to the demonstrations.
The protests, of a magnitude rarely seen in Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution and being repeated across the country in recent weeks, erupted nationwide in November 2019 after a sudden hike in fuel prices.
Many children in the United States will never meet a Palestinian in person, and if they do, they may need to overcome the negative images and stereotypes that pervade popular culture: terrorist, religious extremist, misogynist, etc. For this reason, books are a critical if underused opportunity for kids to learn about the people of Palestine.
The deal, which still must be ratified by union members, came after around 1,000 restaurant, coffee shop, and bar workers at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) walked off the job to demand better wages and conditions, temporarily shuttering the operations of many of the airport's food and drink spots.
If you thought the GOP's war on immigrants couldn't get any more twisted or depraved, think again. A new level of depravity was reached on September 14, when approximately fifty Venezuelan migrants were lured by false promises of employment, housing, and educational opportunities to board two private chartered jets that flew them from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.€
The Vatican and the Chinese government are planning to renew a deal in October that they signed in 2018. That agreement, which has never been made public, is believed to give the Chinese government the power to choose bishops and the Vatican the ability to veto them.
The Rev. Frank Edward Watkins, a tremendous activist and a wonderful human being, died on September 16, one day shy of his 80th birthday.
In September 2019, La Quadrature du Net started an initiative called “Technopolice” to collect information about the progressive outbreak of automated surveillance in France. This action reached a new milestone this Saturday, September 24 as a collective complaint against the Minister of the Interior, carried by of 15,248 people, was filed before the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, the French data protection authority). The complaints require to ban surveillance cameras, facial recognition and massive police databases. You can read the complaints here (in French): TAJ file, TES file and videosurveillance.
In a 2000 essay, the software developer Eric S. Raymond describes the “benevolent dictator” model of open-source coding. In it, suggestions for improvements flow from a community of volunteers toward a single decider. Mills, receiving these suggestions, could be warm and enthusiastic but also obstinate and dismissive. “I am considered by most to be somewhat [of] a carmudgeon [sic] and I apologize in advance for my shortcomings,” he wrote, in an e-mail to an N.T.P. mailing list, in 2005. At the same time, he argued, “there are really important principles behind the design of this monkey.”
Poul-Henning Kamp, a developer who operated the briefly beleaguered Danish N.T.P. server, told me that, though Mills welcomed contributions to the more obscure elements of N.T.P., he grew harder to convince as collaborators “edged closer to the ‘crown jewels’ ”—the protocol’s core time-deciding algorithms. When Kamp first began engaging in the small N.T.P. community, in the late nineties, Mills struck him as a “jolly old elf, with a lot of wisdom to share and many interesting tales.” Still, Kamp understood the exhaustion and exasperation others felt. “You had to climb a very steep mountain to get anywhere at all with Dave,” he said. It wasn’t enough to come up with a patch that fixed a problem; Mills wanted “a mathematical analysis proving that it would do so in all cases.” Few other benevolent dictators expected this level of exactitude from their volunteers. As a result, almost no one else gained full insight into how N.T.P. worked. “I had a reason for doing this instead of that, but I wasn’t able to communicate in language that others in the crew would appreciate,” Mills recalled.
Everyone’s got a hunger for data. Constitutional rights sometimes prevent those with a hunger from serving themselves. But when they’ve got third parties on top of third parties, all Fourth Amendment bets are off. Data brokers are getting rich selling government agencies the data they want at low, low prices, repackaging information gathered from other third parties into tasty packages that give US government agencies the data they want with the plausible deniability they need.
We’ve noted how, as Netflix gets bigger and more powerful, it has increasingly behaved more like the cable giants (Comcast) it used to disrupt. For example, once it was big enough to pay telecom giants their pound of flesh, it stopped caring about stuff like net neutrality.
The great majority of Uniloc’s previously secret court records are now public. For instance, a list of Uniloc’s trolling victims, which Uniloc sought to keep entirely under seal, is now more than 80% unredacted. The list of the amounts those companies paid is now more than 70% unredacted. Several other key documents—like the contract between Uniloc and a private equity firm that allowed for this patent trolling expedition in the first place—are entirely public.
When I say “invest,” I don’t mean when a fan is invested in your success, as in they want to see you reach your goals. I mean invest as in, they’re putting their money where their heart is.
I’m talking about when a fan gives you their money and expects something in return. An ROI, if you will. And this ROI, what the fan gets as an investor, is more than just your awesome music – it’s either something exclusive just for investors or an actual return on their money.
So what does it look like when your fans invest in you and your music career?
Adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek owns many tube sites including Pornhub. While the company itself has a piracy history, today it's one of the most protective copyright holders in the industry. With a sweeping court injunction, it hoped to take Daftsex.com and several related services offline. However, the court slammed the brakes on the request, at least for now.
Arcom, France's Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority, has been sending positive signals about its fight against piracy since January 1, 2022. Among many claims, the latest report from president Roch-Olivier Maistre is a real attention grabber. According to him, In just six months, live sports piracy in France has been cut by 50%.
We keep pointing out that publishers hate libraries. Oh, they’ll pretend otherwise, and make broad platitudes about libraries and the good of society. But, it’s clear in how they act that they think of libraries as dens of piracy. They’re now using the ebook revolution as a chance to harm, or even wipe out, libraries. The biggest battle on this front is the big publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive.
I was in Stockholm over the day yesterday. The plane down departed at 06:45 and I came back at 22:10 in the evening. Though I was offered a taxi ride by my employer I turned it down in favour of biking.
It's about 8 km from my home to the airport, a little longer by car I believe. Taking the bike is actually quite a breeze, because there's a protected bike lane all the way. While I do cross some roads it's really just streets with very little traffic. And bikes have the right of way in almost all of those places. The airport even has dedicated bike parking, with a somewhat protective roof.
Today I am returning home from a visit to the company office. My scheduled flight was to have one connection, but the first flight was delayed, leaving me too little time to make the connection.
To my surprise, the terminal agents knew this ahead of time and informed me at the check-in counter, before I even passed through security. The news was certainly unwelcome, but I was impressed that they could calculate my missed connection so early, and that they wouldn't risk me being stranded in the airport without a definitive route home.
Well, almost. Yesterday they put the scaffolding up, delivered the panels, and got to putting them on the roof. Six are up there, but the remaining three are sheltering in the garage because they didn't bring enough of the railings that connect panels to roof.
Of course they didn't.
The scaffold is now up until at least Wednesday, which is the first day they can come back with more railing to complete the job.
One of the core features of the scientific community is the concept of “peer review” where any claims made by a scientist are open to be analyzed and reproduced by others in the community for independent verification. This leads to either rejection of ideas which can’t be reproduced, or strengthening of those ideas when they are. In this community we typically only feature the first step of this process, the original projects from various builders, but we don’t often see someone taking those instructions and “peer reviewing” someone’s build. This is one of those rare cases.
Some people around here get really annoyed if you express the desire to not read content you dislike. Not even “let’s censor this content”, just “let’s make our own spaces without this content”. Ironic, when the smol web movement is entirely *about* making a space without shitty corporate content and garbage web bloat.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.