This week was all about Ubuntu as Canonical launched the final release of Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) along with all the official flavors, including the newly accepted Ubuntu Unity flavor, and all Ubuntu users received new kernel security updates that patched the recent Wi-Fi stack vulnerabilities.
On top of that, Mozilla released the Firefox 106 web browser with a plethora or new features and the KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment got its first point release to fix important bugs. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for October 23rd, 2022.
We had a good a good week in the world of Linux releases with the release of Ubuntu 22.10 and all it's flavors.
Here is everything that has happened in the open source world this week. Ubuntu 22.10 is here, Automattic, the WordPress parent company has open sourced their popular podcast app, and Google announced a couple of things.
Josh and Kurt talk about stories detailing tech working with multiple jobs. This raises some questions about fairness, accountability, and the future of work. As an industry we are very bad at measuring what we do, which is a problem shared with many jobs currently working from home.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Godot game engine on Linux Mint 21.
Playing some #Persona5royal on the #steamdeck!
Should you ever mark issues and pull request as stale and then close them, well maybe, but I don't think this process should be automated as the way it will be done so lacks a lot of incredibly important context.
Hmm. Usually rc2 is a pretty quiet week, and it mostly started out that way too, but then things took a turn for the strange. End result: 6.1-rc2 ended up being unusually large.
The main reason is fairly benign, though: Mauro had screwed up the media tree pull request during the merge window, so rc2 ends up having a "oops, here's the part that was missing" moment. Since it had all been in linux-next (yes, I checked, so nobody else should try that trick), I ended up pulling that missing part during the rc2 week.
But if you ignore that media tree portion, things look pretty normal for an rc2.
Anyway, ignoring those media changes, we have a little bit of everything in here - arch updates, drivers (gpu, device mapper, networking), EFI, some core kernel fixes (mm, scheduler, cgroup, networking). The full shortlog is appended (and that shortlog does include the media pieces).
Please do go test, Linus
The second 6.1 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Usually rc2 is a pretty quiet week, and it mostly started out that way too, but then things took a turn for the strange. End result: 6.1-rc2 ended up being unusually large."
In my previous post I talked about the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension that had just been released for Vulkan, and in which I had participated by reviewing the spec and writing CTS tests. Back then I referred readers to external documentation sources like the Vulkan mesh shading post on the Khronos Blog, but today I can add one more interesting resource. A couple of weeks ago I went to Minneapolis to participate in XDC 2022, where I gave an introductory talk about mesh shaders that’s now available on YouTube. In the talk I give some details about the concepts, the Vulkan API and how the new shading stages work. Just after me, Timur Kristóf also presented an excellent talk with details about the Mesa mesh shader implementation for RADV, available as part of the same playlist.
As an additional resource, I’m going to participate together with Timur, Steven Winston and Christoph Kubisch in a Khronos Vulkanised Webinar to talk a bit more about mesh shaders on October 27. You must register to attend, but attendance is free.
Back to XDC, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to participate in the event was definitely tiring, but I had a lot of fun at the conference. It was my first in-person XDC and a special one too, this year hosted together with WineConf and FOSS XR. Seeing everyone there and shaking some hands, even with our masks on most of the time, made me realize how much I missed traveling to events. Special thanks to Codeweavers for organizing the conference, and in particular to Jeremy White and specially to Arek Hiler for taking care of most technical details and acting as a host and manager in the XDC room.
In Emily M. Stark's Certificate Transparency is really not a replacement for key pinning, one thing that Stark notes is that Certificate Transparency doesn't really have strong security properties. You can say some fuzzy things about security properties that CT perhaps offers (although they get fuzzier when you look at the details), but there's very few concrete security claims you can make (or that people try to make, for example in RFC 9162). Having been thinking about this for a while, I think that Stark is correct here, and that Certificate Transparency is not about security as much as it is about improving the 'Web PKI' ecology
In this tutorial I am going to use Void Linux to "replicate" how FreeBSD is utilizing ZFS snapshots for boot environments. I am going to use a MBR based setup with a native ZFS encrypted root mirror. With a ZFS root mirror we not only get the benefits of ZFS snapshots, but we also get the benefits of ZFS' ability to auto repair any corrupted data (from things like bit rot). And in case one of the hard drives fail, we can quickly replace the broken disk with a new disk and have everything up and running again in a very short time.
I was fascinated recently by “Why we’re breaking up with CSS-in-JS” by Sam Magura. It’s a great overview of some of the benefits and downsides of the “CSS-in-JS” pattern, as implemented by various libraries in the React ecosystem.
What really piqued my curiosity, though, was a link to this guide by Sebastian MarkbÃÂ¥ge on potential performance problems with CSS-in-JS when using concurrent rendering, a new feature in React 18.
In this article, we will learn how to use the encrypted password in a bash script.
In IT service, many times we don’t know the hardware models of the computer to be serviced or configured. Therefore, it is useful to know how to get your CPU using the terminal.
Although a user with some technical knowledge can find out what CPU a computer has by checking the box it comes in, others may not know how to do this. Or even in a professional environment where you have to access remotely, it is another factor to consider.
On the other hand, knowing the exact model of the CPU can help us in configuration scripts where we need it.
Let’s go for it.
If you've got a lot of images that you want to turn into a photo mosaic, consider installing Polyfoto, a CLI tool to generate photo mosaics on Linux.
Photo mosaics make thoughtful gifts, and can brighten up plain walls with beautiful images of vacations, childhood memories, or even pop culture. It's easy to make a photo mosaic from the Linux command line. Here's how.
Today we are looking at how to install Speed Dreams 2.2.3 on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
The GameDev industry in Vilnius presents opportunities for further growth – it generated over 200 million euros in revenue over the last few years, includes around 115 companies, and employs over 2,500 people, according to data from Invest Lithuania, a public sector agency that provides free support for international companies.
The Tournament will be played on Sunday, October 30 at 18:00 CET (summer time end on same day!) on special Tournament servers in every DDNet location! No one has seen the map yet and the first finish will win!
The aim of this feature is to enable users to create multiple different profiles. A profile is just a combination of preferences.
This allows the user to quickly switch between predefined profiles when the need arises. As a use case scenario, let us consider the following example. One might want to have one particular tab transparent. So one can just create a new profile and change the transparency value on that profile. Then proceed to switch the profile by selecting the desired profile form the newly added "Profiles" menu.
Kubuntu 22.10 was released earlier this week on October 20th, and it shipped with the KDE Plasma 5.25.5 desktop environment rather than with the latest KDE Plasma 5.26 release. It also shipped KDE Gear 22.08 and KDE Frameworks 5.98 software suites.
But, thanks to the Kubuntu Backports PPA repository, which is actively maintained, you can now install the latest KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment on your brand-new Kubuntu 22.10 machines, along with the latest KDE Gear 22.08.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.99 software suites.
XeroLinux is an Arch Linux-based distribution with KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop. Some of the features of the distribution include the Calamares installer, various under-the-hood tweaks and optimisations, built-in support for community-built AUR packages as well as Flatpak packages, and the availability of various desktop and boot loader themes developed in-house.
The distribution offers one edition and its install media is 2.6GB in size. This install media can be booted in both Legacy BIOS and UEFI modes. However, users will soon notice the count down timer for the boot menu in UEFI mode beeps the PC speaker loudly every second for around 15 seconds. It's strong incentive to pick a boot option quickly.
XeroLinux's live media boots to the Plasma desktop. A medium-sized, transparent panel is placed across the top of the display. At the bottom we find a dock for launching and switching between applications. A CPU usage monitor sits on the dock.
We review the popular Endless OS as Linux Desktop with the new features and updates of the latest version 4.0.
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Endless OS is a OSTree based free and open-source Linux Distribution. This Linux distribution is packaged from Debian/Ubuntu, but not directly based on it. OSTree is an atomic upgrade system for Linux-based OSes. This is a unique way to provide package updates to Linux-distribution, where OSTree packages everything in a server and then replicates to the client.
The main advantage is that your underlying Linux operating system always remain intact, and it is read-only. OSTree only operates in user space.
In that sense, Endless OS never breaks, and it remains fresh as you install for the first time. Today, only very few Linux Distribution are based on OSTree technology – such as Fedora SIlverblue and Fedora Kinoite.
That said, let take a deep dive on the Endless OS as a whole and check out the updates to the new version.
I choose to build SBCL in a jail, so that it would not touch my system. This way I can do a kind of test-install, and if everything works fine, I can adopt it to my main system.
With ZFS creating a new jail is a piece of cake and a matter of seconds. So I setup a new jail by cloning a snapshot I made earlier from a default jail install.
As the semiconductor industry made unrealistic progress in the last few decades, microcontrollers like Arduino and ESP32 are readily available for multiple projects. Both these projects come a long way and an ideal choice for embedded system projects. Home computers have high power, but they can’t replace microcontroller applications especially if the project demands battery backup or doesn’t need much hardware power. Let’s compare some basic functionality of both Arduino and ESP32 boards.
The melody side of the Commodordion runs Qwertuoso. The accompaniment side runs a custom application for playing chords and loops, which I'll describe here. Technically both C64s load exactly the same program, but it's possible to switch between the two applications with a special key combination.
Once the accompaniment mode is up and running, the left-hand side is operated with single keypresses only—no key combinations are required. Commonly used keys are close together and, where possible, near the outer edge of the keyboard. It's nevertheless hard to reach some of the functions with the left hand, especially when setting up a loop. I'll return to the matter of ergonomics later in this article.
When hackers found and developed ways to order PCBs on the cheap, it revolutionized the way we create. Accessible 3D printing brought us entire new areas to create things. [Matt Venn] is one of the people at the forefront of hackers designing our own silicon, and we’ve covered plenty of his research over the years. His latest effort to involve the hacker community, TinyTapeout, makes chip design accessible to newcomers – the bar is as low as arranging logic gates on a web browser page.
Two weeks ago, I posted some details of my collection of kerosene lanterns, and this post continues along the same lines with more more detailed information about my lanterns, looking at light output, fuel burn, and some thermal images. I know what the spec sheets say - but I like to make my own numbers when I can. And here, I most certainly can!
To participate and receive the tools: share your idea through a video or a PDF and be part of this incredible project. The best ideas will receive the Nicla Sense ME and a K-Way jacket to create the project,, starting the competition on November 24th. The full terms & conditions can be found here.
Ricardo is an experienced musician who was looking to replace some of the functions from his Roland MC-101 with something that had better sound quality and the ability to support audio input. It also had to have compatibility with his Groovebox, a digital instrument designed to make electronic loops. Ricardo also needed the unit to be completely portable and turned to our favorite SBC to create his own.
Recently several WLAN security bugs were fixed in the linux kernel (oss-sec list, phoronix). This service pack brings related CVE patches to all devices in postmarketOS stable.
Usually service packs are for carrying features over from edge to stable, and security fixes are backported directly to stable without waiting for a service pack. However this time the fix was not a trivial patch (like the one for dirtypipe), and we decided to just upgrade the kernel to version 6.0.2 where possible. This needed additional time for packaging and testing, and it made sense to bundle this all in a service pack and have a proper announcement around it. So here we are!
As of writing, 6.0.3 is out already. But this is fine, the point is to bring a version we tested on the devices to stable, it doesn't need to be the very latest one as long as the important security bugs are fixed in the release we ship (in this case the WLAN CVEs, which are fixed in 6.0.2).
And obviously a lot more, including that GNOME Web 44 is going to be GTK4-based and Nemo Mobile is moving things to Qt 6.
Firefox 106 is out, with PDF editing, the "Firefox View" feature for finding previous content on both your own desktop and any Firefox Sync-connected devices, and a big update to WebRTC. Of course, that only happens if you build with WebRTC on, and if you do you'll still need Dan Horák's patch from bug 1775202 or the browser won't link on 64-bit Power ISA (alternatively put --disable-webrtc in your .mozconfig if you don't need WebRTC). Otherwise the build works with the .mozconfigs from Firefox 105 and the PGO-LTO patch from Firefox 101.
An new version 0.2.4 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself along with other contributors) is now on CRAN.
This release comes ten months after the previous release 0.2.3. It is once more related to R and requested CRAN changes as clang-15 brings additional warnings concerning -Wstrict-prototyping. This make use of C more solid, but it was a metric ton of work (see pull request #8).
So on Scheme and other Lisps, you don’t have to write “return” to return from functions, they just instead automatically return the value of the last expression.
If you wanna return multiple values, though, that’s when you can write (values foo bar).
As we all know, when Go code uses modules, you specify a version of the module, and the Go tooling will record its take on this version in places like go.mod. The exact details are covered in the "Versions" section of the documentation and the definition of canonical version. Since Go modules came in, I've seen a number of modules with a (canonical) version that included '+incompatible', and encountered Go generating them itself when I tried to experimentally modularize a non-modular third party Go program by hand. However, for a long time I didn't really understand what it meant and what you could do with this. The short version is that it's there to deal with a corner case for pre-modular packages.
The previous release had ~100 commits, and this one has 149 since previous feature release!
Definitely a big release, with some big features. Let’s dive in!
Pillow is used for simple operations on images, like resizing, converting to other file formats, and so on. It also can be used to generate custom graphics like infographics or composites of multiple images - memes, infographics, and more. Let's take a look at how it can be done.
If you want to level up your programming skills now or in the future, then learning Python is the best option. Python is a general-purpose, high-level modern programming language that is used almost in every field, including AI and computer science. Most big brands, like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc., are utilizing this language for their development.
Python is a modern, easy-to-learn, and highly recommended language for new users or programmers. The simplicity of Python is attracting many developers worldwide right now, especially when it comes to developing web applications, games, and GUI applications.
So, if you already know the basics of Python and want to learn advanced concepts or looking to master your Python skills, then this tutorial is for you.
This write-up provides an in-depth overview of the 10 best books for experienced programmers.
In this how to, we will use two Python modules to create a GUI application that will remove the background from an image. The first module, rembg from Daniel Gatis will remove the background from any image presented to it. The second module, easygui provides a means to create dialogs and menus using the operating system’s toolkit. So a file open / save dialog box will look exactly like those used in many other applications.
The Raspberry Pi Pico W was released with a robust MicroPython firmware, but CircuitPython, our favorite microcontroller Python release, was sadly missing support. It may have taken a few months but down to the hard work of @jeffepler we now have CircuitPython 8 Beta 2 which offers Wi-Fi support for the Pico W, while retaining the familiar CircuitPython ecosystem.
To celebrate this milestone we put together a project to highlight CircuitPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico W. We’ll be working with live data from an RSS news feed, converted to JSON and then displayed on a tiny OLED screen.
Trainor has perfected the TikTok formula, balancing music promotion with giving a real, intimate look into her personal life. It’s something only some artists have been able to do naturally: She posts silly videos about parenthood with her husband Daryl Sabara, skits with her TikTok bestie Chris Olsen, and TMI clips about “the MiraLax finally kicking in.”
Rather than offering up a repository of personal correspondence, notes and items for public research and inquiry, as other influential figures have done, Ms. Powell Jobs, who did not respond to requests for comments, said at a conference last month that the Steve Jobs Archive would be devoted to “ideas.” Those ideas are primarily Mr. Jobs’s philosophies about life and work.
The result, for now, is more of a tribute website than an archive. More than a dozen archivists and scholars who spoke to The New York Times questioned even calling it an archive. It has worried historians who fear it may inspire other wealthy and influential figures to curate the historical record about them just as ordinary people curate their lives on Instagram.
Muse makes a variety of wearable devices aimed at measuring brain and body activity, and [Becky Stern] did a detailed teardown of the Muse S model, revealing what goes on inside the device.
We’ll always have a soft spot for circuit sculpture projects; anything with components supported on nice tidy rows of brass wires always captures our imagination. But add to that a little bit of light and a lot of sound, and you get something like this hybrid synthesizer sculpture that really commands attention.
Wow, my RC batch is one-third done. I've just finished my fourth week, and there are eight weeks left. Time is flying by. I feel like I've settled into a decent groove.
Taking a step back, it is setting in how much I've learned so far and how much I've accomplished. In these four weeks, I've learned about the architecture of databases and managed to write a key-value store that has durable storage and still outperforms redis on my machines. (It's multithreaded against redis's single thread, but that's their design choice.) I've also learned about how chess engines work and wrote one that, using a standard technique, can beat me.
Invisible and relentless, sound is seemingly just there, traveling through our surroundings to carry beautiful music or annoying noises. In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated.
I love to participate in radio amateur contests. I never will have a chance to win such a contest, but it is a great chance for a QRP station because there is much activity on the bands and there are many stations with “big ears” (= big antennas) who will be able to hear you even with low power.
Last weekend there were two contests, the “Worked All Germany Contest” contest in SSB and the “JARTS World Wide RTTY Contest” in RTTY and I took part in both of them.
Star and Crown casino directors manage to avoid any civil or criminal sanctions after facilitating money laundering.
More than 1.5 million square feet in Kips Bay will be transformed into “state-of-the-art teaching and commercial facilities” on Hunter College’s Brookdale Campus. The project will further a career pipeline in life science for local students, in addition to rebuilding a pedestrian bridge that will connect East 25th St. to Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.
Some of the key takeaways from my perspective is there is a hunger for intelligent yet easy to use solutions. There is an inherent high mix, and, at times, harsh environment. It is now at the point where collaborative robots – power and force limited manipulators – are now appearing in several job shops, and large manufacturers around the world. Caterpillar shared their experience in taking advantage of leveraging collaborative hardware-based systems to realize flexible and agile welding capability.
Nearly half of the smartphone users in India say they are planning to buy new devices, the technology analyst firm Counterpoint Research claims, adding that these findings come as the country gets set to build its first 5G network.
However 5G capability was only third on the list of attributes that users sought in future purchases, the survey found, while it was ranked 10th in importance for current purchases.
Many Indians buy new devices at this time of the year, as one of the country's main festivals, Diwali or the festival of lights, falls in October.
The survey was published on the same day that another analyst outfit, Canalys, published figures that showed India, the world's second largest smartphone market, had shipped 6% less devices year-on-year in the third quarter of 2022, a figure of 44.6 million units. This drop was attributed to a lacklustre low-end segment.
The microprocessor feature which probably most enables the computing experience we take for granted today is protected mode. A chip with the required hardware can run individual software processes in their own environments, enabling multitasking and isolation between processes. Older CPUs lacked this feature, meaning that all the resources were available to all software. [Andy Hu] has done the seemingly impossible with a Zilog Z80, enabling a protected mode on the chip for the first time in over four decades. Has he found an elusive undocumented piece of silicon missed by every other researcher? Not quite, but it is a clever hack.
Heat-set inserts are a great way to embed mechanically-strong, threaded parts into a 3D print. For installation, all that is required is an economical soldering iron; something most of us already have.
Hackaday has been reporting on belt printers for around a decade now, since MakerBot released (and then quickly pulled) an automated build platform for their very first Cupcake printer. Turns out that not only has the concept been difficult to pull off from a technical perspective, but a murky patent situation made it tricky for anyone who wanted to bring their own versions to market. For a long time they seemed like the fusion reactors of desktop 3D printing — a technology that remains perennially just outside of our grasp.
She realized many of those reporters not only had little experience in the field, but they also had not received any training to approach survivors in a sensitive and caring way. Some training and debriefing after the fact, she said, would help protect both the journalists and the people they talk to.
DataBreaches has not found any ransomware group publicly claiming responsibility for the attack, and the city has not named the threat actors. There is no notice on the housing agency’s website, even though it is weeks since the attack, and people are still impacted.
The source code has been released by Microsoft under the open-source MIT license, but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this proprietary license. This small distinction matters a lot and is the primary mechanism that Microsoft uses to fork open-source communities.
[...]
VSCodium does an extremely good job at disabling data collection, but due to not being licensed by Microsoft under the proprietary license VSCodium is not able to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Code Marketplace and suffers from the ecosystem fracture by design problem...
The lawsuit, filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of California Friday evening, accuses Gmail of "discriminating" against the RNC by unfairly sending the group's emails to users' spam folders, impacting both fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts in pivotal swing states.
The RNC said that for most of the month, nearly all of its emails end up in users’ inboxes but at the end of the month, which is an important time for fund-raising, nearly all of their emails end up in spam folders.
Google denies the RNC’s allegations. ”As we have repeatedly said, we simply don’t filter emails based on political affiliation. Gmail’s spam filters reflect users’ actions,” Google rep José Castañeda said in a statement to Reuters.
Details: The RNC argues in the lawsuit that despite discussing the email issue with Google for more than nine months, it remains unresolved, alleging Google is sending emails to spam on purpose due to political bias.
After reportedly committing to nearly double its budget for salary hikes in May in order to retain employees, Microsoft this week laid off close to 1,000 employees, according to reports from Axios, Business Insider, and other news organizations.
A report by The Washington Post said that Microsoft employee and industry veteran Greg Chapman had confirmed the dismissal of some of the employees in his Studio Alpha team on Twitter before making the account private. Studio Alpha develops gaming techniques to address government and military issues.
Microsoft confirmed Monday evening that it cut jobs across the company, citing its business priorities. The tech giant would not say how many people had been laid off, nor which departments were impacted. One current employee told The Washington Post layoffs have also affected the Xbox gaming division.
What happens when protocols are used for wildly different purposes than their intended ones?
Based on our experience and this Google support article, a hub isn’t required to link Wyze devices to Google Home. In other words, you can use Wyze devices without a dedicated hub. You can easily control a Wyze lock by voice or through either the Google Nest or Wyze mobile apps. However, without a hub, you’ll need to use the Wyze mobile app to view any footage from the Wyze cameras. That’s because even though you can voice control certain Wyze devices using Google Assistant on a phone or tablet, camera views aren’t available for Wyze devices in the Google Home app.
What if we could take the internet out of the Internet of Things? Or at least take the internet out of some of the things? That’s the idea behind Useful Sensors, a startup created by Pete Warden, the former technical lead of the TensorFlow Micro team at Google, and previous founder of Jetpac, a deep learning technology startup acquired by Google. With Useful Sensors, Warden wants to solve the problem plaguing the Tiny ML community — namely that there are few celebrated use cases outside of automatic wake word detection.
But the promise of Tiny ML is huge. By embedding machine learning on the sensor itself engineers can design smart products that don’t need an internet connection, can save power and can boost privacy because the data stays locally on the device. Those benefits can accrue to any machine learning that takes place on the edge, such as a phone or a smart speaker, but Tiny ML is designed for constrained computers without much power or memory.
The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices.
In a series of tweets Friday, Baker-White noted that even if TikTok does not use GPS data (a detail she acknowledged was omitted from the Forbes articles), that “does not mean they could not use [an IP address to get an] approx location to monitor certain individuals.” She also wrote, “I’m glad they say TikTok hasn’t been used to ‘target’ some specific groups. I am nonetheless concerned that they planned to use it to monitor specific Americans, which is what we reported. Also, FWIW, they didn’t answer this question when we asked it to them on Wed.” According to Baker-White, TikTok has not requested any updates to the Forbes story.
The recent Pegasus and #CatalanGate scandals have shown the huge risks at stake when people’s devices and communications are compromised without a legitimate and lawful reason. In Catalonia, a total of 65 direct victims, and thousands of collateral ones, were put under permanent surveillance with the Pegasus programme – spyware from the Israeli company NSO Group – for the past five years. In many regions of the world, this spyware was used to limit political dissent, expression, organisation and journalism. Despite the numerous examples showing that encryption must not be tampered with, the latest political debates and policy developments on encryption in Europe are highly concerning. That’s why the EDRi network found it imperative to revise our 2017 paper “Encryption Workarounds. A digital rights perspective” with updated accounts of the current political context.
A Su-30 multirole fighter jet crashed into a two-story home in Irkutsk, report government and emergency services in the region.
A Hong Kong pro-democracy protester, whom local media identified as Bob Chan, was then dragged into the consulate grounds where he was held to the ground and beaten by four people for more than a minute before a policeman pulled him away from his attackers, he told RFA on Tuesday.
● A pro-Kurdish news agency released a video allegedly showing two PKK members suffering from exposure to chemical weapons
● The HDP called on the OPCW and the UN to investigate the incident
● The OPCW said only a member state of it can trigger an investigation
Roman Starovoyt, governor of the Kursk region, says that construction on two reinforced defensive lines is complete in the Kursk region.
The founder of the WarGonzo project Semyon Pegov was wounded near Donetsk, reports the project’s Telegram channel.
On October 19, occupation authorities in the Kherson region announced that Ukrainian Armed Forces were starting a new offensive in their direction. They urged residents to leave, saying the Ukrainian army would be “shelling residential areas.” Occupying authorities themselves evacuated the region. The city of Kherson was not included in initial evacuation orders, but on October 22, Russian authorities ordered residents to leave “immediately.” There are reports of delays for Kherson residents trying to cross to the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro, though Russian authorities 25,000 people have already made the crossing. They claim to have plans to relocate 50,000 to 60,000 people in total deeper into annexed Kherson or into other regions of Russia.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukrainian foreign affairs minister, reacted on Twitter to the idea, which Russia is currently spreading, that Ukraine has plans to detonate a nuclear bomb on its own territory and blame it on Moscow. “We have no ‘dirty bomb’ and we don’t plan to get one,” he wrote. “Russians often blame others for things they plan to do themselves.”
Karen Greenberg considers what lessons might be drawn from America’s Global War on Terror now as the conflict in Ukraine continues.
The conventional wisdom among Westerners is that Russian military commanders are targeting civilian infrastructure to lower morale, for revenge, because their guidance systems are compromised as a result of sanctions limiting component supplies, and/or because they don’t give a shit. I wouldn’t pretend to know either way; nothing about this war makes sense to me, either for the innocent Ukranians being killed, or the Russians dying to protect the big ego of a small man.
If the American West has been suffering through water shortages for years, the Midwest has not seen conditions this bad since 2012.
"It's even worse than 2012," said Tucker. "Much worse."
Her husband, whose grandfather farmed these same fields, says things have not been this bad since the so-called Dust Bowl days of the 1930s.
"The overview effect is a cognitive and emotional shift in a person's awareness, their consciousness and their identity when they see the Earth from space," White told NPR. "They're at a distance and they're seeing the Earth ... in the context of the universe."
This context was what struck Shatner the most.
"It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white," he said. "And I realized one was death and the other was life."
The increase in Bitcoin energy consumption comes as the network’s hashrate increased 8.34% in Q3 2022 and 73% YoY, despite fewer blocks being produced and downward price pressure.
Founded in 1754, Munich-based Bankhaus von der Heydt has been talking to potential buyers after a deal to sell itself to crypto-derivatives exchange BitMEX fell through, the people said. A sale may value the bank at around ââ¹20 million ($19.6 million), the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information.
To determine the environmental costs of the trade-off, trade organizations and universities have conducted life cycle analyses, or L.C.A.s: comparisons between the amount of greenhouse gases created from the production, use and disposal of a B.E.V. and the gases from a gasoline-powered vehicle of a similar size.
The good news: Studies have found that, though it’s true that the production of a B.E.V. causes more pollution than a gasoline-powered counterpart, this greenhouse-gas emission difference is erased as the vehicle is driven.
Iran's Atomic Energy Organization said Sunday a [cracking] group broke into a subsidiary's network and had free access to its email system.
A statement issued Sunday described the content in the emails as "containing technical messages and routine and ongoing everyday exchanges."
The Federal Government's decision to sign on to a pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% on 2020 levels by 2030 has come in for criticism by the Opposition.
Shadow Climate Change and Energy Minister Ted O'Brien said in a statement that the decision reflected a broken promise, adding that it been announced quietly on a Sunday under the cover of budget week.
He pointed to two statements made by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese prior to the May 2022 election, both in response to questions from the media.
Albanese government out-Barnabys-Barnaby with a big Budget gift for fossil fuel donors to build the Middle Arm port and petrochemicals project just 3k from the Darwin suburb of Palmerston. Michael West reports.
They leaked the story to Rupert Murdoch’s NT News. As you do.
Thanks for the scoop. “$2.5bn bonanza for the Territory …”. A glowing report ensued. No word the new Port might be underwater by turn of century, a climate bomb spewing toxic chemicals through the air to residents of the Darwin suburbs nearby.
We will be hearing a lot about “jobs, jobs, jobs”; abundant greenwash and hogwash about “sustainability” in the corporate media. The reality is a bizarre $2bn subsidy for the government’s corporate donors, the Big Gas Mates, to open up the Beetaloo Basin further inland for gas fracking.
Santos gets its cut, Inpex too. Even Texas oil billionaire Bryan Sheffield. His fracking start-up, Tamboran Resources, is another winner.
It's that time of year again, with the annual UN climate meeting (the conference of the Parties) or COP, just a couple of weeks away. This year's meeting, COP27, will take place from 6-18 November 2022 at the luxury resort of in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
Editors at Nine Entertainment and the ABC have been diagnosed with Acute Journo’s Ear Syndrome and possible Craniorectal Inversion following reports of an $8 billion Medicare fraud. Callum Foote reports.
The investigation by The Age, SHM and ABC’s 7:30 into Medicare fraud has exposed serious allegations of GP service fraud, in one case from one of the country’s largest tele-health companies, Phoenix Health, however the claim that up to $8 billion is defrauded from our Medicare system each year does not appear to stack up.
This is not to say that fraud doesn’t happen – no doubt it is significant, as the National Audit Office has posited greater than $2bn a year. Yet the total Medicare system costs $28bn of which General Practitioners account for $9bn in Medicare payments – just $1bn more than the alleged fraud figure.
GPs billed roughly $4.4bn from Medicare Benefits Schedule last year in time-based consults (one of the main scams highlighted in the reporting). GP billings have been in decline for a number of years.
Sometimes it's hard to know why prices are going up. Between the oil shock, a tight employment market and the climate polycrisis, is it even possible to tell if companies are using the widespread belief in inflation to hike prices? Uh, yeah, as it turns out, we absolutely can.
Yes, it's hard to peer into the minds of executives at large companies and know whether their price hikes are due to greed or necessity. But we don't have peer into their minds! We can just dial into their investor calls, where top execs of giant companies brag about hiking prices under cover of inflation...
The alliance's final stops in Durham and Asheville came on the first weekend of early voting in North Carolina, quietly home to one of the most important U.S. Senate races of this midterm cycle. Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley is looking to defeat Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), a Wall Street ally and Trump loyalist—and recent surveys indicate she is closing in on her GOP opponent with the election just over two weeks away.
There has always been a€ fundamental tension in the organized labor world between people who think that unions exist to counteract the self-serving tendencies of businesses, and people who think that unions should copy the self-serving tendencies of businesses. The gap between the view that unions should change capitalism and the view that unions should just help working people get their piece of capitalism is not just fodder for theoretical arguments—billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and the entire direction of the post-neoliberalism economy could ride on it. We're seeing that tension painfully demonstrated right now, at the grocery€ store.€
Musk agreed to pay $44 billion for Twitter in April, before the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in a bid to fight inflation. This made the acquisition financing look too cheap in the eyes of credit investors, so the banks would have to take a financial hit totaling hundreds of millions of dollars to get it off their books.
Also preventing the banks from marketing the debt was uncertainty around the deal's completion. Musk has tried to get out of the deal, arguing Twitter misled him over the number of spam accounts on the platform, and only agreed to comply with a Delaware court judge's Oct. 28 deadline to close the transaction earlier this month. He has not revealed details on Twitter's new leadership and business plan, and many debt investors are holding back until they get more details on that front, the sources said.
The media landscape has shifted dramatically over the years. Print businesses have moved to digital, and scale has become increasingly important as competition in the industry continues to ramp up. One argument that could be made about the reunification of News Corp. and Fox is that its Murdoch’s way of scaling his advertising and news businesses, all while cutting costs and creating additional efficiencies within the company in anticipation of a rough macroeconomic environment that will be hanging over the planet for a while.
EDRi has published its position paper which lays out key concerns and encourages policymakers to pursue ideas put forward by child rights groups for whole-of-society solutions to tackle the horrendous crime of child sexual abuse, rather than a harmful surveillance approach.
The EDRi network argues that the proposed CSAR lacks a sufficient legal basis, contradicts substantial portions of EU law, in particular fundamental rights law, adds significant complexity to existing processes which could hamper current national efforts to remove CSAM, and is technically impossible for service providers to implement in a way that respects rights and is effective to achieve its stated aims.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, a voter analytics firm called PredictWise came up with a novel approach to help Democratic campaigns target persuadable Republicans: “Covid concern” scores.
To create the scores, the company first analyzed an immense data set showing the cellphone locations of tens of millions of Americans during the initial lockdown months of the pandemic. Then it ranked people based on their travel patterns.
Employees’ fears were stoked on Thursday when The Washington Post reported that Mr. Musk planned to cut Twitter’s staff by as much as 75 percent in the coming months, reducing its work force to little over 2,000 people. Workers have also been worrying over how their compensation might change once Mr. Musk transforms the company from a publicly traded firm into a private one, said five employees who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Late on Thursday, Twitter tried to calm some of the concerns. In a memo to employees after the report of job cuts, Sean Edgett, the general counsel, said there were no plans for layoffs.
In the face of great upheaval, the United Nations has a critical role to play — defending the Charter, championing human rights, advancing sustainable development, and holding accountable those who violate international law. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, an overwhelming majority of United Nation member states sent a resounding message unequivocally condemning the war and Russia’s policies of fear and coercion. Today, the United Nations and countries around the world are providing life-saving aid to the Ukrainian people, supporting refugees, responding to health emergencies, and affirming Ukraine’s right to sovereignty and territorial integrity — core principles of the United Nations Charter. Likewise, the United Nations is playing an essential part in our common effort to address the global challenges of the twenty-first century, including tackling the climate crisis, strengthening global health security and pandemic preparedness and response, advancing human rights and gender equality, and feeding the world.
By working to end extreme poverty, reduce inequalities, and rescue the Sustainable Development Goals.
By safeguarding our planet, including by breaking our addiction to fossil fuels and kickstarting the renewable energy revolution.
24 October marks United Nations Day, the anniversary of the day in 1945 when the UN Charter entered into force. In the past 77 years, the UN has worked to maintain international peace and security, promote social progress, improve living standards and support human rights. None of these goals can be achieved without tackling the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.
On December 7, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Moore v. Harper, a case which could dramatically and dangerously rewrite American democracy.
Recently my wife Janet and I splurged on tickets to a spellbinding concert by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The music was memorable, but a comment by orchestra leader and trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis proved even more so. Marsalis introduced a blues number with the seemingly off-hand suggestion that the blues should be America’s national anthem.
"I am worried about the level of voter turnout among young people and working people," Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told CNN's Jake Tapper. "What Democrats have got to do is contrast their economic plan with the Republicans'. What are the Republicans talking about? They want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills."
In total, NPR found that "more than $1.6 billion has been spent or booked on TV ads in a dozen Senate races, with $3 out of every $4 being spent in six states—Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Ohio."
From the Boston Tea Party to the Montgomery bus boycott to the boycott of apartheid South Africa, politically motivated consumer boycotts have long been part and parcel of American politics. But are they protected by the First Amendment? For 40 years, the answer has been an unequivocal "yes." But in a recent case from Arkansas, a federal court of appeals ruled otherwise. If the right to boycott is to be preserved, the Supreme Court must step in.
Researchers found that they were “easily able to bypass” some safeguards that Facebook has in place to prevent people outside the United States from posting political ads. In one test involving a dummy account in Britain, Facebook approved three of the false or misleading ads in English and two of those in Spanish. An account in the United States got two of its English-language ads past Facebook, along with five of its Spanish-language ones.
Four years and 620,000 deaths later, slavery had been abolished anyway and the South had been defeated — on the battlefield, that is. In the equally important war of public relations, the South slowly yet assuredly won a considerable victory: They created a romanticized myth about their defeat known as the "Lost Cause" narrative. Coined by Southern author Edward Pollard in 1866, the phrase "Lost Cause" referred to a narrative that refused to acknowledge how Confederates committed treason and were primarily motivated by a desire to preserve slavery, in a war catalyzed by a refusal to accept a lost election. The Confederates and their sympathizers insisted on being told they had fought a valiant and heroic crusade for "states' rights" against unprovoked aggression from the North. The Lost Cause narrative was given a boost when the controversial 1876 presidential election proved so close that, to prevent a second Civil War, Republicans and Democrats struck a so-called "Compromise of 1877." This agreement ended the remaining federal attempts to dismantle systemic racism in the South in return for allowing Republican Rutherford Hayes to win the presidency. Before long, all mention of slavery related to the Civil War was downplayed or rationalized away, at least in mainstream culture; the focus, perhaps best epitomized by Hollywood epics like the 1930s novel and film "Gone with the Wind," was on a supposedly chivalrous golden age tragically lost. Blacks, by contrast, were depicted as the enemies of both northern and southern whites, a notion that underpinned discriminatory racial laws and laid the foundations for a strong trend toward racism among police officers. Even though Black Americans had suffered as slaves for more than two centuries, Lost Cause advocates claimed that they had actually liked slavery. Some even perpetuated the myth that there had been Black Confederates.
In other words, the South and its supporters engaged in large-scale psychological manipulation against the rest of America so they could save both their dignity and their white supremacist society — and it worked like a charm.
Rushdie has been under a death sentence since 1989 for his novel, The Satanic Verses. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa, saying the novel insulted Islam and offering a bounty of $3 million for its fulfillment of the death sentence.
Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, has been incarcerated after pleading not guilty to attempted murder and assault in the Aug. 12 attack on Rushdie as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution, a rurally located center 55 miles (89 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo that is known for its summertime lecture series.
Literary agent Andrew Wylie told the Spanish language newspaper El País in an article published Saturday that Rushdie suffered three serious wounds to his neck and 15 more to his chest and torso in the attack, which left him unable to see from one eye and unable to use one hand.
Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, has lived with a bounty on his head, and spent nine years in hiding under British police protection.
While Iran's pro-reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa in the late 1990s, the multimillion-dollar bounty hanging over Rushdie's head kept growing and the fatwa was never lifted.
Mr Rushdie has long faced death threats for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
Some Muslims regard the book as blasphemous. The man charged over the attack, US-born Hadi Matar, 24, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder.
Rushdie, 75, spent years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Over the past two decades, Rushdie has traveled freely.
Author Salman Rushdie lost vision in one eye and was left "incapacitated" in a hand after he was stabbed in the United States in August, his agent said in an interview published this weekend.
The 75-year-old writer, who had received several death threats after the publication of his "The Satanic Verses", was stabbed several times in the neck and abdomen before he was due to give a talk in the state of New York.
The singer widely known by her first name was prosecuted after a video showing her joking about the county's religious vocational schools (imam-hatip) began to circulate on social media in late August.
In the video excerpt from a concert she gave in April, she about a member of her band, calling him "a pervert because he is an imam-hatip graduate."
Mehmet Emin Kurnaz, the politics editor of the daily BirGün, has been given a deferred prison sentence for "insulting the president" and "insulting a public official" because of an issue of the newspaper's weekend supplement entitled "Rule of the Gangs" (Ãâ¡etelerin ðktidarñ).
The front page of the supplement featured a photo of President Recep Tayyip Erdoßan and Sedat Peker, who is accused of leading a criminal organization and is currently in exile, and a photo of Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Chair Devlet Bahçeli with Alaattin Ãâ¡akñcñ, who served nearly 20 years in prison for various offenses, including leading a criminal organization.
A teachers’ union in Iran has announced two days of public mourning over the "unjustly shed blood of justice seekers and the heinous killing of Iranian students."
The Coordinating Council of Teachers Syndicates said in a statement on October 20 that, during the “systematic repression” of recent anti-government protests, authorities have “so far taken the dear lives of a number of students and children in the most brutal way.”
In fragile democracies and autocratic countries, independent media are under great pressure: the fact that they often have little money is not even their biggest problem. Editor in chief Eric Smit learned this lesson from his Hungarian colleague ÃÂkos Maróy. Follow the Money wants to support media in other countries; in this article, Smit explains how we are going to do that. Our members, too, can lend a hand.
The “NoisyLeaks!” show at the Projektraum 145 gallery in Berlin “aims to collectively expose and celebrate the historical and cultural heritage of WikiLeaks,” say the organizers. CN Live! reports.
Days after the competition in Seoul, Rekabi was reported missing, with a cryptic post on her Instagram account explaining that she was traveling back to Iran with her team members and would explain the whole situation soon (and adding that the removal of her headscarf was an accident). It was then reported that Rekabi’s passport and mobile phone had been seized, worrying many of her supporters. However, when Rekabi returned to Iran on October 19, she was greeted with a hero’s welcome.
Editor’s note: Teen Vogue provided questions to Neda’s English and Farsi-speaking cousin. The cousins spoke over WhatsApp and the U.S.-based cousin recorded the conversation and translated it into English. This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Chanting crowds marched in the streets of Berlin, Washington DC and Los Angeles on Saturday in a show of international support for demonstrators facing a violent government crackdown in Iran, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of that country's morality police.
Two women in black veils grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her into a van full of a number of other women. Anoush says she was then berated by the morality officers, who accused her of being paid by the West to dress like a whore and damage Iran. "I couldn’t stop crying,” she says.
She was kept at the station for five hours on that occasion, she says. The police filed a criminal complaint and took photos of her, with the sign she was forced to hold reading: "insufficient hijab." Ultimately, she was given a choice: Either she could sign a document saying that she would never again do such a thing and call her parents so that they could bring her long, Islamic clothing. Or she could opt for jail.
To show solidarity with Iranian protesters, the Human Rights Film Festival has bestowed its Honorary Award for Freedom and Democracy to 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Iranian human rights activist, Shirin Ebadi.
In a video address, Ebadi said she wanted to donate the award to the family of Jina Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish student whose death triggered the wave of protests that have been ongoing for the past five weeks.
So, it appears that funding reflects gender demographics in a reasonably predictable way, and demonstrates a clear move toward gender equality. Moreover, to address any further misconceptions about gender imbalances, the NHMRC CEO Anne Kelso added last year that funding rates for men and women were nearly equal in regards to the NHMRC’s entire $1.1 billion budget. (Those concerned about sexism at NHMRC should bear in mind that, of its CEO, general manager, and three executive directors, only one is a man.)
In a letter sent to Telco subscribers, a data price increase of up to 61% was approved by POTRAZ for November 2022 for all Telecommunication operators. This price increase is affecting ZW$ pricing which is not really moving with the official rate.
I have had a personal server with the domain ageinghacker.net since 2011. At the beginning I was sharing hosting costs with two or three other people, each of us running a virtual machine inside a Virtual Private Server. By 2016 my requirements had grown, I wanted stability and so decided to rent a VPS by myself. Around that time I had also decided to run a Tor exit node for the benefit of the global community, and more in general wanted my server to be in a country that allowed some freedom of speech; since I did not, then like now, even remotely trust the US and EU I looked for a hosting provider in some place I had a better opinion about, and eventually chose OrangeWebsite in Iceland.
My server runs the web site https://ageinghacker.net plus a good number of other services, mostly not intended for the public: a small IRC server, a VPN, NFS (only for myself over the VPN), git and bzr; you may have seen the git web interface I use for GNU Jitter at https://git.ageinghacker.net/jitter. Sometimes I use my server to pass large files around. I have my own Mumble server; Mailman mailing lists. A wiki that few people have seen but I occasionally use for private projects; Gopher and Gemini, because I despise the web and like toying with alternatives.
'I Know What You Download' has been tracking BitTorrent users for years. It has a database of more than nine million torrents and detects more than 100 million instances of sharing every day. It is not a pirate site, it's a service that tracks BitTorrent users. Unfortunately, fellow piracy tracking companies - including some of the most prominent in the world - have no ability to tell the difference.
Ralph Lauren has pledged that all new products using Indigenous designs going forward after its Summer 2023 collection will be created under a model of "credit and collaboration."
We discuss ways other countries approach work-life balance for creatives and beyond; Santigold notes that “America’s losing.” “I don’t know any other job that you have to pay to do your job and end up in debt,” she says. “That’s telling all these new generations of brilliant, amazing potential artists: Don’t choose this job. And they won’t, and we’re going to lose out culturally from that.”
I hate to say this about a post that somebody clearly spent a good amount of time thinking about and writing, but this is one of the most asinine things I’ve ever read.
Vegetarianism and veganism aren’t incompatible with death positivity. We are all going to die; that doesn’t mean we have to actively contribute to other beings’ deaths. Nobody would argue that since we’re all going to die, it’s foolish to abstain from murder and cannibalism. Cows, pigs, and other creatures we as humans farm and eat? Those are sentient creatures with emotions. That’s why I don’t want to kill them. Not because I believe in any rubbish about immortality or eternal youth.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.