So this person recently left Windows for Linux. Lets see why and how they are adjusting to it!
In this video I discuss the tracking that Apple does in the App Store on iOS devices and the extreme tracking efforts apple services will use (such as bypassing VPNs).
This week in Privacy News, a new Australian bill suggests fines against tech companies over seas...for over seas customers. Also, police would get access to GPS data easier.
There are two pieces of good news for us in our particular environment (with Ubuntu 22.04 servers). The first is that in general our swap files are small; an extra GB for the moderate number of servers that we back up won't really break the bank, not when set against the amount of data from our fileservers. The second is that Linux doesn't update the modification time for swap files when they're used, so to a backup system these look like files that never change. Since they never change, they'll only be included in full ('level 0') backups, not in the much more common incremental backups that our backup system does.
Builder has been absolutely wonderful for a designer to dive in and fix up graphics assets for Application. It allows to easily build and test run patches before submitting a merge/pull request on apps hosted on gitlab or github. Ideally you’d press the run button and voilá.
What has been far from wonderful — doing even one line fixes for the GNOME Shell was very hard to test for anyone not building shell daily. getting the environment ready every release has been a chore. From virtual machines, jhbuild, toolbox, jhbuild in VMs to jhbuild in toolbox there was a dozen of way to fail building the latest shell.
The /etc/hosts file in Linux or any other operating system is used to map connections between IP addresses and domain names.
Quite a generic answer right? Well, this guide is going to get some feet deeper so everyone can benefit from its offering.
Darktable is a free and open-source photography application program and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image post-production. In addition to basic RAW conversion, Darktable is equipped with various tools for basic and advanced image editing.
These include exposure correction, color management, white balance, image sharpening, noise reduction, perspective correction, and local retouching. As a result, Darktable is an incredibly powerful tool for photographers of all experience levels. Best of all, it is entirely free to download and use.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Darktable on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux workstation using the command line terminal with CLI commands using two different methods of the default DNF repository or the natively installed third-party package manager Flatpak and utilizing the Flathub.
Opera is a free, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and is a solid option for users wanting to install a new browser on Fedora. It is based on the Chromium engine and offers a modern interface with its famous Turbo mode and renowned battery-saving mode, which are the best among all known web browsers by quite a margin. Also, one of the other popular features of the Opera browser is the VPN which is a big plus for users wanting an all-in-one solution for easier management.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux workstation desktop with optional branches stable, beta, or the nightly development version using the command line terminal with tips on maintaining and removing the browsers if required. Towards the end of the tutorial, I have also included a fix for users that cannot install their native language on the Opera browser, which works for all builds.
apt (Advanced Package Tool) is the default package manager used on Ubuntu, Debian, and all other Debian-based Linux distributions. It’s the go-to method for installing packages from repository, and can also install a local DEB file. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the apt command for package management on Ubuntu and Debian Linux systems.
GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a versatile open-source program that can be used for many different purposes. Its primary function is graphic design, but it is also capable of transcoding between various image formats, free-form drawing, and more specialized tasks.
In this post, you will learn how to install and use Chrony on Rocky Linux 9 / CentOS 9 Stream. So, you can use it to synchronize your server time with other NTP servers.
In very few words, chrony is an implementation of NTP that allows us to synchronize the time of our server with another server dedicated to it using the mentioned protocol.
TeamViewer is a versatile remote connectivity platform that provides access to devices all around the globe. It can be used for online meetings, file sharing between different computers, and remotely controlling instrumentation such as robots or industrial machinery.
LibreWolf is a popular Firefox web browser fork that focuses on privacy and security, which is a viable option to switch to for Fedora users unhappy with Firefox on Fedora Linux. One of the critical features of LibreWolf is the elimination of telemetry, which can be used to track your online activity and personal information. LibreWolf also includes increased protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques and security improvements. The team behind LibreWolf is committed to providing a safe and secure browsing experience for all users.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install LibreWolf Browser on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux. The tutorial will go over importing the official repository and gpg key and installing the browser using cli on the command line terminal, and how you would update and remove the browser.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Sendmail on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Sendmail is an opensource Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) which is used to route emails using a server or by using shell commands. It includes SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for mail-transfer and email delivery. Most of the system administrators preferred to use the Sendmail server as MTA over other MTAs. You can also use the Sendmail server to send email via external SMTP servers like Gmail, Amazon SES, MailChimp, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Sendmail on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
A quick guide on how to install the latest Java 17 in Ubuntu 22.04, 22.10 and Linux Mint 21.x.
A while back, Oracle announced the release of Java 17, the LTS version of this widely used programming language. This release gets support for 8-years, which includes security and performance updates and, of course, bug fixes. Java 17 is officially supported until 2029.
Although this guide tested for ongoing supported Ubuntu and Linux Mint releases, however, should be applicable for other Debian-based distributions in the coming days. Because the PPA that is used in this guide is periodically updated to meet the needs for past and future releases.
Installing Java 17 is not that straightforward without a PPA. Because it’s a licensed product, you don’t get it in the Ubuntu official repo. There are other alternatives to Oracle Java, such as OpenJDK, which is easier to install. But they lack certain functionalities due to terms and conditions from Oracle and may not be suitable for your needs.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install HPLIP 3.22.10 on Ubuntu 22.04, RHEL 9, Linux Mint 21, Suse 15.4, and Mx Linux 21.2.
The Wine development release 7.21 is now available.
What's new in this release: - OpenGL library converted to PE. - Support for multi-architecture PE builds. - More preparation work for Vulkan 32-on-64 support. - Support for creating import libraries without dlltool. - Locale data updates. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available at:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.21.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Valve has done another weekend drop here, with a Beta version of SteamOS 3.4 now available for the Steam Deck. This is easily one of the biggest updates they've done to the system since release, and there's so many changes that improve the experiences across the whole device.
M2H and BlackMill Games have released another update to the WW1 shooter Isonzo, this time it's better news for the Native Linux version.
Call of the Wild: The Angler from developer Expansive Worlds launched on Steam on August 31, and sadly it was broken but now they've fixed it. This is the same team that made the rather good€ theHunter: Call of the Wild, and while it hasn't been reviewing as well it's still good to see it getting updated.
Currently rated as Unsupported on Steam Deck by Valve, A Plague Tale: Requiem from Focus Entertainment and Asobo Studio has a new update out to help.
Tetris Effect: Connected, the reinvention of one of the most popular puzzle games of all time, has a big new update out that should solve some Linux and Steam Deck problems.
Google has announced that they've now begun the process to refund years of Stadia game purchases, as the service is shutting down.
After the recent issue dbrand had with their Killswitch magnets causing issues with some Steam Deck fans, they've issued an update on how it's going and other changes due to Dock compatibility.
Two areas that could use some love are being tweaked, with a new Steam Deck Client Beta available now with various fixes and upgrades.€ This is available in Beta and Preview. To change over you can find it in€ Settings >System >Steam Update Channel.
Push notifications are a mechanism to support applications that occasionally need to receive some kind of information from their server-side part, and where receiving in a timely manner matters. Chat applications or weather and emergency alerts would be examples for that.
Technically applications can achieve this by keeping a long living network connections to their respective server. This is however neither efficient nor robust, especially on resource-constrained or battery powered devices. Each additional network connection costs energy to be kept alive, and all this only works as long as the application is actually running, which conflicts with aggressive suspending of (background) applications to conserve resources.
KMenuEdit and the properties dialog now make it easy for you to set environment variables when opening your apps. This was always possible, but you had to know the secret special syntax (e.g. Exec=env FOO=1 kate); now the UI makes it easy and explicitly supported (Dashon Wells, Frameworks 5.101 and Plasma 5.27.
We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2022.11, code-named 'MalGuckes'!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bookworm. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2021.07 and 2022.11(-rc1) have a look at the official release announcement.
Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and rely on, and report back, so we can complete the stable release soon. If no major problems come up, the next iteration will be the stable release, which is scheduled for end of November 2022.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Last week the Community Design Team chose the second sketch I created to finalize for the blog post so I added two extra people to the design, and I lined and colored the visual in. Jess suggested the ‘Community Design Team’ text have a drop shadow like the ‘introducing the...’ box drop shadow.
The UbuCon Asia organizers invite you to UbuCon Asia 2022 (November 26–27) in Seoul, in-person for the first time, where the autumn leaves are beautiful and ripe.
UbuCon Asia is an event by Ubuntu Communities in Asia that brings together hundreds of Ubuntu users, developers, contributors, enthusiasts and many other interested people.
It is a place to share experiences and discussion around Ubuntu, as well as being a festival that Ubuntu and other open source communities can enjoy.
The law focuses on federal procurement, but officials across the government have been looking to harden cybersecurity for consumer IoT devices. Plans are afoot to develop a cyber labeling system "for products that meet U.S. government standards and are tested by vetted and approved entities" according to a White House fact sheet published last month.
Electric vehicles have become quite common over the past few years. Here in Norway, they make up over half of all new car sales. The chargers that support EVs have effectively become critical infrastructure that we rely on for everyday life. At the same time, the publicly available information about how they work is limited.
Out of curiosity we decided to purchase the Zaptec Pro. This model was intended for larger, networked installations like parking lots and apartment buildings. The Zaptec Pro was among the most prevalent chargers on Norwegian roads at the time this post was written.
A few days ago, Orange Pi announced their new Single Board Computer based on the Octa-core Rockchip RK3588S SoC. Starting at $60, the new Orange Pi 5 includes up to 32GB RAM, [email protected] 60fps display support, one M.2 module for NVMe SSD.
The new Orange Pi 5 implements the 8nm Rockchip RK3588S seen in other recently launched SBCs (i.e. NanoPi R6S, Khadas Edge2).
NanoPi R6S is a Rockchip RK3588S powered device that can not only work as a router with two 2.5GbE ports, but also as a mini PC with HDMI and USB ports, and an Edge AI computer thanks to the 6 TOPS NPU found in the processor.
FriendlyElec has just sent me two samples of the NanoPi R6S for review. Today, I’ll start with an unboxing, a teardown, and install OpenWrt 22.03 to run some iperf3 benchmarks. I’ll try other features with either Debian or Ubuntu Desktop in a few weeks.
The Malayalam serif font RIT Rachana and its sans-serif counterpart MeeraNew have enjoyed a wide array of improvements in the past months; and are available now for download and use.
[...]
… kerning improvements and many more tweaks and fine tuning. As usual, both typefaces are free & open source software, available at Rachana website. They will be available shortly in Fedora 36 & 37 as an update.
While Mastodon is busier than ever before, it still has few of the big names from politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home for journalists in particular. Few know comic Jan Boehmermann – Germany’s answer to John Oliver – outside his country, but climate activist Greta Thunberg is globally known.
For Rochko, the project’s only full-time employee, programming at his home in a small town in eastern Germany for a modest 2,400 euro monthly salary, the work continues.
Explaining the cultural dynamics that have led Mastodon to have a search engine that barely works by traditional standards.
As Twitter has a public meltdown, Mastodon is having a quieter one. Its decentralized nature appeals to those who hate Musk’s unilateral control over Twitter, but that key feature is also working against it—Mastodon was not prepared to host millions of people in a short span of time. Some of the most popular servers that feed users into the network are overloaded with the fury of new activity, and volunteer administrators of the more than 4,000 instances, or servers, cannot keep up with new user requests to join and the volume of posts. Plus, new users are hitting a steep learning curve.
“What the platform owners and the instance administrators need to make sure is, it’s somehow sustainable,” says Aravindh Raman, an internet measurements researcher with the telecommunications company Telefónica who has studied Mastodon.
Our Twitter and Facebook feeds, however, are automatically delivered from our RSS (using dlvr.it)—if we had to manually post each item, we'd constantly forget or err. Do any of you know whether it's possible to easily set up an automatic feed to a Mastodon account? Thanks!
Mastodon is an open-sourced Twitter alternative running as part of something called “the Fediverse.” Unlike platforms like Twitter or Facebook, Mastodon is federated. That means it’s decentralised. There isn’t just one central site where you can go and sign up, like you do for Twitter; instead there are lots of sites all of which talk to each other using a protocol called ActivityPub.
You can sign up to any Mastodon site — which are called instances — and you can follow folks who are on your own, or on any other, instance which is part of the fediverse. Instances all talk to each other, so which instance you’re on doesn’t generally make much of a difference to who you can follow, or who can follow you.
However, your instance is your “local community.” The instance you join could be for you and your friends, or it could be about what you do in your spare time, or for work. For instance, there are communities built around special interest groups like open-source software or cyber security, and geographical ones, like Scotland.
Hello DNS enthusiasts and other developers,
After three earlier successful and packed DNS devrooms at FOSDEM 2018, 2019, and 2020, we are happy to announce a half-day DNS devroom at FOSDEM 2023.
As with the previous events, we hope to host talks anywhere from hardcore protocol stuff, to practical sessions for programmers that are not directly involved with DNS but may have to deal with DNS in their day to day coding or system administrators responsible for DNS infrastructure.
To fund further development of GNU Taler, Taler Systems SA is still looking for investors. Our chief moral officer has recorded a special business pitch for those that are interested.
As you may know, American English and British English have some differences. Not only in terms of just outright different words, but also in how they’re used – Matt Richardson, Community Engagement Manager at Raspberry Pi, informs us that, for robots that are remote-controlled and not autonomous, it’s much more proper to call them rovers in the US. Which makes sense!
While visiting Maker Faire Tokyo a few years back, the style of projects on display was very different than those in the UK or US. Here, folks’ creativity was on show, with weird and wonderful robots and contraptions that wouldn’t look out of place in a Rube Goldberg machine. In comparison, Westerners seemed to be making stuff with practicality and usefulness in mind.
Neither way is better, however it would be cool to see people here experiment with more artistic projects just for the fun of it.
I’ve seen a little gem pass by in a Go cryptography code review and I want to share it because I think it’s a pattern that can be reused.
Let’s start with a problem statement: crypto/x509 Certificate values take a bunch of memory, and for every open TLS connection you end up with a copy of the leaf and intermediate certificate, and sometimes of the root too.[1] That’s kind of a waste of memory, a big one if you open a lot of connections to the same endpoint or to endpoints that use the same roots.
When addressing somebody unknown to you with an uncommon name e.g. in an email you might not know whether this person is male or female. In this post, we make it a little fun project to let R help us with that, so read on!
Of course, R cannot figure out the gender just by looking at the names, we need some data! A very impressive dataset can be found here: Gender by Name Data Set.
Below, I provide a simple example of a Dirichlet regression in PyMC. This form of generalized linear model is appropriate when modeling proportions of multiple groups, that is, when modeling a collection of positive values that must sum to a constant. Some common examples include ratios and percentages.
For this example, I used a simplified case that was the original impetus for me looking in this form of model. I have measured a protein’s expression in two groups, a control and experimental, across $10$ tissues. I have measured the expression in $6$ replicates for each condition across all $10$ tissues. Therefore, I have $10 \times 6 \times 2$ measurements. The values are all greater than or equal to $0$ (i.e. 0 or positive) and the sum of the values for each replicate sum to $1$.
I want to know if the expression of the protein is different between control and experiment in each tissue.
The awesome TidyModels team have been working hard to populate the tidymodels package and make it even easier to get your foot in the door when it comes to development of models in R.
I have been planning this workshop for a long time with my good old colleagues at the NHS-R Community, and we thought it apt to do this workshop in the run up to the awesome NHS-R Conference 2022, which sadly I cannot make this year due to work commitments.
A post about Haskell vs. Python readability came onto my radar the other day. It compares the implementation of a trie structure, and after looking upon the Python version I wanted to make my own attempt. I didn't make it to necessarily compare or "battle" against the other solutions, it's more of an exercise in the vein of "how would I do it".
I made a decision recently that I wanted to learn more Python so I could improve my instructional skills and broaden the horizons of my students. In the process, I have discovered these excellent resources that have me learning new code and improving my understanding of Python in general.
We tend to think of modern JVMs as highly optimized runtime environments, in many cases rivaling more “performance-oriented” languages like C++. While it holds true for the majority of workloads, we were reminded that performance of certain workloads running within JVMs can be affected not only by the design and implementation of the application code, but also by the implementation of the JVM itself. In this blogpost we described how we were able to leverage PMCs in order to find a bottleneck in the JVM’s native code, patch it, and subsequently realize better than a threefold increase in throughput for the workload in question. When it comes to this class of performance issues, the ability to introspect the execution at the level of CPU microarchitecture proved to be the only solution. Intel vTune provides valuable insight even with the core set of PMCs, such as those exposed by m5.12xl instance type. Exposing a more comprehensive set of PMCs along with PEBS across all instance types and sizes in the cloud environment would pave the way for deeper performance analysis and potentially even larger performance gains.
Discrimination is, unfortunately, about as old as human civilization. Of the grotesque flavors of discrimination developed by humans over the millenia, employment discrimination is especially strange. Certain jobs that are clearly necessary for society to function, or at least jobs that people value, are worked by those society values least. Hard labor jobs, like ditch digging or working in commercial laundries, have often been performed by those viewed as having no other value, even if what they do is vital. Of course, little has changed in the 21st century. Society still venerates doctors and corporate executives while continuing to undervalue construction workers and cleaners. But there is a job that appeals to a certain type of person that craves freedom and unique experiences, though it is an endangered profession. Today’s Tedium is offering a sequel of sorts to our September piece on e-bike delivery drivers by looking at their artisanal colleagues that use leg power to deliver goods. Oh, and we get to check out one of the wildest competitions out there. Buckle up, you know, metaphorically anyways.
I wrote recently about the way I use my phone, and how I have over a hundred apps but rarely use most of them. It would be interesting to see what a more refined phone setup would look like.
After spending 2020 watching every episode of Frasier, we thought we'd binge watch its predecessor sitcom "Cheers".
It's a tough watch.
It obeys all the familiar tropes of a sitcom - a static location, characters drawn in broad strokes, and whacky banter. On paper, it's great. But on screen...
Here is how the temperature evolved when I put a can with cold water (around 12€° C) in the USB fridge: [...]
[...] In The Titanium Economy, North America managing partner Asutosh Padhi, Gaurav Batra, and Nick Santhanam examined more than 80 industrial technology companies and identified the 35 leading the American economy into a new era of sustainable, inclusive growth. Hear more from the authors below, and learn why the sector could boost US GDP by $275 billion to $460 billion while adding up to 1.5 million jobs.
When asked to clarify that statement, she acknowledged Microsoft won't classify the flaws as security problems. Rather, the behavior of Word 2007 is a feature, not a bug. "In fact, the behavior observed in Microsoft Word 2007 in this instance is a by-design behavior that improves security and stability by exiting Microsoft Word when it has run out of options to try and reliably display a malformed Word document," the spokeswoman said.
Cybercrime takes many forms, including identity crime, computer [cracking], phishing, botnet activity, computer-facilitated crime, and cyber intrusion directed at private and national infrastructure. However, in 2021, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) labelled ransomware as the most serious of the cybercrime threats to Australia due to its high financial impact and other disruptive impacts to victims and the broader community (p. 16).
Ransomware is malicious software used by threat actors to look for vulnerabilities in the IT systems of individuals or organisations and deny them access to their files or devices (by locking up, encrypting or exfiltrating data) until a ransom is paid. If a ransom demand is not met within the designated timeframe, then the threat actors may sell, publish or delete the exfiltrated data. This makes the threat of ransomware attacks both a national security and personal privacy issue.
The Morrison Government introduced a number of policy and law reform initiatives during the latter part of the 46th Parliament, some of which lapsed on prorogation. The Albanese Government’s appointment of the first dedicated Minister for Cyber Security, and its commitment to a ransomware strategy while in Opposition, suggest that this issue may again be on the agenda in the early months of the new Parliament.
Cyber criminals in Russia are behind a ransomware attack on one of Australia’s largest private health insurers that’s seen sensitive personal data published to the dark web [sic], the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said Friday.
In a short press conference, AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw told reporters investigators know the identity of the individuals responsible for the attack on health insurer Medibank, but he declined to name them.
The wiretapping centre planned in Leipzig by five German states will be delayed for at least another two years. This was reported by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) in the run-up to last week’s meeting of the East German interior ministries in Erfurt. According to MDR information, the current status of the €15 million project will be presented there. As a central service provider, it is to take over telecommunications surveillance tasks for police forces and secret services.
The facility trades as the Joint Competence and Service Centre (GKDZ). The states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia want to bundle their telecommunications surveillance there. The plans for this date back to 2015, since then the project has been delayed again and again. Most recently, it was said that operations could begin in 2021.
Given all we learned from Edward Snowden, this feels like a minor coda. There’s nothing really interesting in the IG document, which is heavily redacted.
Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, nonprofit Firefox and others allow the company, TrustCor Systems, to act as what’s known as a root certificate authority, a powerful spot in the internet’s infrastructure that guarantees websites are not fake, guiding users to them seamlessly.
The company’s Panamanian registration records show that it has the identical slate of officers, agents and partners as a spyware maker identified this year as an affiliate of Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which public contracting records and company documents show has sold communication interception services to U.S. government agencies for more than a decade.
An investigation into the matter, which hasn’t been previously reported, found that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard” and violated numerous rules and possibly the law, according to a 2016 report by the NSA’s Office of Inspector General. The agency released the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
A spokesman for the company confirmed that it scans messages to filter out spam and phishing websites. This explanation does not appear to fit the facts, however. Spam and phishing sites are not usually found on HTTPS pages. By contrast, Skype leaves the more commonly affected HTTP URLs, containing no information on ownership, untouched. Skype also sends head requests which merely fetches administrative information relating to the server. To check a site for spam or phishing, Skype would need to examine its content.
The report is based on further documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who previously worked for the NSA. These appear to show that the PRISM surveillance programme provided the authorities with access to emails sent using Microsoft's Hotmail, Live and Outlook.com services before the emails were encrypted. Microsoft is also reported to have worked with the FBI to make it easier for the organisation to access data stored on its SkyDrive online storage service. According to the Guardian, the FBI acted as the interface between the security services operating PRISM and IT companies. The NSA documents state that PRISM's extended data collection capabilities were the result of collaboration between the FBI and Microsoft.
Apple plays a key ongoing role in Chinese state surveillance and oppression. Like most tech giants, Apple depends on access to low-waged Chinese factory workers with weak labor protections to hold down the wage bill for its manufacturing.
Apple also relies on selling phones and computers and services to the titanic Chinese middle class, a category that's loose enough that estimates of its size range from 350m to 700m – but even the lower figure is larger than the entire US population.
Apple's dual reliance on poor Chinese workers and rich Chinese consumers gives the Chinese state enormous leverage over the company. The Chinese government can order Apple to participate in its digital surveillance and dissent-suppression efforts and threaten the company with the loss of revenues and manufacturing if it balks.
Meanwhile, terrorists, non-state armed groups and criminal networks often pursue different agendas and strategies, fueled by smuggling, human trafficking, and other methods of illicit financing - sometimes impersonating legitimate armed forces.
The newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws reported the suspect had gone to a police station Thursday morning warning that he would kill an officer. The ACV police trade union said in a Facebook post that it had information a person had gone to police earlier in the day threatening an attack. It added that the judicial authorities did not arrest him.
The European Union is to strengthen its cyber defence capabilities, including the development of ââ¬Å¾active defence capabilities“. These are then to be deployed jointly in the event of a digital attack on a member state. This is according to a communication on the ââ¬Å¾EU Policy on Cyber Defence“ issued by EU Foreign Affairs and Security Commissioner Josep Borrell and the Commission on Wednesday. The justification given is the ââ¬Å¾deteriorating security environment“ following the Russian attack on Ukraine. The EU, its citizens and infrastructures need to be strengthened against a growing number of cyber attacks, the document says. Examples are attacks on energy networks, transport infrastructures and space assets.
According to police, the as yet unknown man shouted his threat loudly and repeatedly in an underground train on the U8 line at around 11 am on February 19, 2022. The police are now searching for him in public for disturbing the public peace by threatening to commit a crime.
Even more disturbing, two sources from the Ministry of Education confirmed without further details that a teacher had been videotaped without her knowledge. According to a police source, a Chechen student who was caught putting her headscarf back on in class allegedly told her teacher, who called her to order, that she was a “racist”. She then gave her a speech saying “you will see what you will experience here”, referring to her father and brother. “The conversation was recorded by the student and circulated via TikTok,” our police source reported. At the end, she makes statements like “she will see what Allah will do to her”.” (…)
For Germany, that debate has already begun in earnest as higher temperatures and longer droughts have taken an increasing toll on its economy by making already difficult natural bottlenecks on the Rhine practically unnavigable more often and for longer stretches of time.
The challenge of the riverbed “optimization” project, as it is known, is to deepen the river at those critical points — without causing unwanted side effects.
Campaigners pushed back Friday after U.S. President Joe Biden touted his administration's "bold agenda" to tackle the climate emergency during a speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Egypt.
"Disturbingly, Biden was silent on loss and damage, the most critical issue at COP27."
The modus operandi of the crypto-bros in responding to criticism and calls for regulation is to talk about "innovation" and gaslighting about hypothetical future benefits, to deflect attention from the actual current costs of their favorite technology (see also autonomous vehicles). Below the fold I point out an egregious example of the genre.
What we see as I write this is that the anti-regulation forces (Binance) have destroyed the pro-minimal-regulation forces (FTX): [...]
A new Oxfam analysis finds the investments of the world’s richest people are emitting 3 million tons a year — more than a million times the average person’s output. The report, titled “Carbon Billionaires,” suggests a wealth tax could help fund urgent climate action in developing countries. The analysis shows “how much power and control a few people have over our economic system and, beyond that, our way of life, our survival as humanity,” says Ashfaq Khalfan, climate justice director at Oxfam America. Khalfan also responds to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s new carbon offset proposal, which he calls a “distraction” that will delay action on public financing of climate action.
Stanford professors and experts on Monterey Bay shared insights into Monterey’s ecological collapse and recovery and emphasized the importance of ecological restoration at a Wednesday event hosted by the Woods Institute for the Environment, a branch of the Doerr School of Sustainability.
Dutch photographer Frans Lanting and writer Chris Eckstrom kickstarted the event by sharing insights on the biodiversity and history of Monterey Bay, based on their recently published book “Bay of Life: From Wind to Whales.”
Proposals for the Cloud Hosting Service III contract are due to Interior by Dec. 19. Companies have until Nov. 18 to submit questions and Interior will post the answers "on or about" Dec. 5, the department said in a Sam.gov notice Tuesday.
Critics have said for years that Facebook is a monopoly that can only be killed by federal regulation. Meanwhile, the platform bleeds users, its stock price is plummeting, and it just announced its first-ever round of layoffs.
Since then, Republicans have doubled down on their outreach efforts. On September 24, the Minnesota GOP held a Somali Republican Dinner at the Doubletree hotel in Minneapolis. Attendees, who heard speeches from party notables such as state auditor candidate Ryan Wilson and Minnesota GOP Chairman David Hahn, celebrated months of unprecedented collaboration between Somali Muslims and the Republican Party.
It’s no mystery why Labor wants its industrial relations changes to pass before parliament adjourns on December 1. Even though union influence has withered, the party of the worker has always wanted to put its stamp on the system early in its term. Under Gough Whitlam, the public service became the pacesetter of wage rises. The rampant inflation and resulting unemployment of the 1970s led to a more cautious approach when Labor returned to government in 1983 under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Labor enacted an innovative structure known as the Prices and Incomes Accord to lessen strikes and to fight inflation. Under the Accord, wage claims were moderated because of the provision of the ”social wage”, which including improved government benefits. And with the rise of Kevin Rudd in 2007 came the abolition of John Howard’s WorkChoices. Now Labor is edging the IR system back towards industry-wide bargaining, a substantial modification of the system brought in by Keating. But many employers remain opposed to a return to anything resembling pattern bargaining, where one wage award sets a trend for other workers in the same industry.
On Wednesday morning, amid mounting concerns from advertisers that the new Twitter would not prove to be a safe home for brands, Elon Musk held an hour-long Spaces call designed to reassure them.
Joining Musk on the call were his head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, a seven-year veteran of the company who had served as a steady hand during a tumultuous transition; and Robin Wheeler, the company’s de facto head of sales, who had spent a decade selling ads for the company across several key roles.
On the call Musk performed his usual routine, offering a scattershot set of product announcements that were almost certainly news to the people who would soon be called upon to build them. Soon the timeline would comprise mostly tweets from paid subscribers, he said, with the rest relegated to a zone comparable to Gmail’s spam filter. The site would soon enable … longer video downloads?
Gough Whitlam made his election policy launch 50 years ago, but it reads today as an address to the Australians of 2022. Mark Sawyer looks at the enduring changes and the enduring challenges wrought by the reforming Labor leader.
Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of a historic day in Australian life. Gough Whitlam delivered Labor’s policy speech for the 1972 federal election at the Blacktown Civic Centre in Sydney’s west on November 13, 1972. The speech is rightly remembered as one of the greatest in the nation’s history.
”Men and women of Australia!” it began, the same ringing declaration harnessed by wartime Labor prime minister John Curtin in 1943.
There is no justification for the racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry that Trump has cultivated since he entered politics. But there is a reason why it suddenly has so much appeal, and it’s not just that a Black guy (who many of them voted for) became president. I will again make the case here.
Let’s Imagine a World Where the More Educated Screwed the Less-Educated
Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America is now available in the CounterPunch Store.
The Brazilian people have voted a monster out of the presidency, and now have a chance to restore the democracy that they had lost. Bolsonaro mismanaged the pandemic, spreading massive COVID misinformation that contributed to Brazil’s death toll of more than 600,000 people. Deforestation of the Amazon accelerated: the amount deforested in 2021 was over 70 percent more than when he took office in 2018. He also praised and defended Brazil’s past military dictatorship and said they didn’t kill enough people. Like Trump, Bolsonaro threatened to reject the election results if he lost.
We speak with Congressmember-elect Delia Ramirez, who won her election for Illinois’s newly redrawn 3rd Congressional District Tuesday, making her the first Latina elected to Congress from Illinois. Ramirez is a progressive Democratic state representative who is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants and the wife of a DACA recipient. She campaigned on expanding healthcare and housing access for working people, as well as passing the DREAM Act. “I represent an electorate that is growing — an electorate that expects us to deliver to all people and put the politics to the side and make working families a priority,” says Ramirez. “We understand the importance of multicultural coalition building for all working people.”
But the mid-term elections were hard to avoid, and I naturally paid attention to the news and commentary regarding them.
Here are my top twelve takes on the whole mess...
Voters in Nevada and a handful of cities across the United States appear poised to expand the use of ranked-choice voting in the aftermath of Tuesday’s midterm elections. The election method allows voters to select multiple candidates in descending order of preference. It is used in many other countries, and supporters say it can reduce polarization and give more voice to independent voters. “The forces for ranked-choice voting are people who really care about our democracy,” says George Cheung, director of More Equitable Democracy, who says ranked-choice voting “allows for truer representation of who we are as a community.”
The man was accused of knowingly making and sending offensive comments on Islam at 2.30 pm on April 4, 2020, using his Facebook account ‘Tham Thamsarak’, with the intention of hurting the feelings of others.
Why is billionaire Kerry Stokes funding the media defamation action of Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith against Nine Newspapers? He gave the reason to Callum Foote, directly and in person at today’s Seven annual meeting.
“Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent, deserves legal representation and that it’s scumbag journalists who should be held to account and quote me on that”. That was Kerry Stokes immediately after the Seven West AGM held in Seven’s offices in Eveleigh this morning.
Attending the Seven West annual general meeting (AGM), held in one of Seven’s labyrinthine sound stages, MWM was able to ask the chairman and majority shareholder Stokes and the board of the company questions directly. MWM was the only one present to ask questions, attending as a proxy shareholder, with the meeting being broadcast on Seven’s website.
This isn’t to say the prognosis is all bad, in fact, the good news is the number of donations we have received thus far is higher than last year, which was a record year for us.
Nonetheless, average donation amounts are down considerably, which is why we haven’t reached our goal.
In February 2021, the Guardian said 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since it won its World Cup bid.
The number is based on figures provided by the countries' embassies in Qatar.
Afghan women were stopped from entering amusement parks in Kabul on Wednesday after the Taliban’s morality ministry said there would be restrictions on women being able to access public parks.
A top Iranian actress has posted an image of herself on Instagram without a headscarf to signal solidarity with anti-government demonstrations.
In reaction to recent scenes widely shared on social media showing thousands of young Saudi citizens celebrating the once-banned Halloween holiday in the capital city of Riyadh, Muslim clerics as well as Western Islamists harshly condemned the Saudis for taking part in a "paganist" holiday in the birthplace of Islam and accused the Saudi government of reinstating polytheism and apostasy in the Arabian Peninsula and of altering Muslims' identity. Some Salafis who condemned those who celebrated the holiday agreed that it is impermissible to celebrate it while downplaying the reactions and accusing those who criticize the Saudi government of encouraging Saudis to rebel against their rulers. Some Saudi commentators responded that the outrage was exaggerated.
A federal court in Seattle has dismissed the hacking and DMCA circumvention claims filed by AimJunkies against game developer Bungie. The cheat seller filed the claim in a retaliatory move after it was sued for copyright infringement relating to Destiny 2 hacks. The order is a clear win for Bungie, but the legal dispute is not over yet.
Italy's Polizia Di Stato reports that a huge operation targeting an IPTV piracy network is still ongoing after being launched nationwide overnight. The currently unnamed network reportedly serves 900,000 users and reportedly generates millions of euros in monthly profits. Video seems to confirm a raid on a location where Sky content was being captured for illegal redistribution.
I was reading a book about D&D and the book mentioned some of the racism that was foundational in some of the game’s structures. You’re part of “the civilization” carving your way through the lands of “the savages”, looting as much you can carry. It’s pretty messed up, and given all the more horrific realization when considering Gygax’ twisted view on, for example, the Sand Creek massacre.
With Signal announcing their intent to drop support for SMS in their Android app[1], a decent chunk of users are discussing possibly dropping it when that happens. I'd love to see everyone pivot to something more decentralized, but that doesn't seem to be the goal. Many came to Signal because the SMS support made it seamless to pick up and use. They were never really willing to put any effort into using something like Signal, but if they could just install an app and and call it a job well done, that was easy enough. Barely.
[...]
They'll use just about anything with no concern for privacy implications (obviously, or they wouldn't so easily fall back to SMS), so from their perspective, it only needs to be easy to use with minimal set up for individual users. We've got people connecting from multiple devices on a variety of OS's, so we've got people using Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS, and all cases will need a viable client. I and a couple others, however, would prefer something more private, where our data isn't collected or, at least, any collection is minimized. End-to-end encryption should be a requirement, then, and metadata should be protected to whatever extent is reasonable to achieve without an oversized commitment, which means it would be best to avoid a centralized service. I'm perfectly willing to set up a server for something if need be, but I am intrigued by more fully peer-to-peer options.
[...]
The Tox protocol[7] is peer-to-peer, so no servers, and it uses Tor at least to find friends for intial connections, but I think connections are direct afterwards. Also has clients for a variety of platforms, and there seems to be some variety in choices for clients. Lack of support for multiple devices is problematic, though. Lack of offline messaging is also a bit problematic. Possibly usable, but it's still experimental, and it seems a little rough around the edges for some of my less tech-oriented friends.
Everyone in the house went to sleep early and it was raining out so I couldn't get on my radio. With that free time I could either level up in the MUD I play on sporadically or I could move my FreeBSD VPS from 12 to 13. The VPS was at the point where it was all working but anything new I wanted to do on it would require an upgrade and the LTS on that build was up. So I opted for the less fun choice and started the upgrade process.
I had seen a dip in cloud cover forecasted for the morning hours, so I got up about 3am AKST and went outside with the AZ60-M (60mm refractor). There were a few (altocumulus?) clouds moving through, and a wispy cirrus cloud, but at least 2/3rds of the sky was unobscured, so I gave it a try.
There has been lots of discussion on Gemini lately on 'gatekeeping' Gemini. Worse, this term is tossed around as if it were a bad thing, a bug. It is not. In Gemini and in the broader world, gatekeeping is a feature not a bug. There are exceptions, for sure, like in most concepts.
Still with me after that one? Then let's dig in, my open-minded friend.
[...]
To be fair, intelligence is not equal to tech skills and vice versa. So this approach does ensure Gemini content stays tech-centric. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more non-tech content. With that thought, maybe a high barrier but not necessarily a highly technical barrier would be best?
By way of contrast, a lower barrier would just bring a deluge of migrants, radically shifting the cultural landscape, alienating and ultimately supplanting those who contributed to it in the first place. This will lead to less of all of the above, except decentralization.
Do we really want the general public invading, bringing along their web-centric culture? Isn't that what Gemini is trying to get away from? Now if the newcomers assimilated into Gemini's thoughtful longform essay culture, then I'd welcome them. Would they, though? Meh, maybe? Gemini isn't exactly extensible, therefore comparing to other influx-laden scenarios of the day may be apples-to-oranges; perhaps those who prefer the web would simply return to it? Nonetheless, it should be considered.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.