Seriously. LibreOffice met with Ethereum to talk about this.
Is this the end of Twitter?
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney review the literature on a hack-packed week of action. We’ll find a Linux machine inside just about anything, including curb-side TVs and surprisingly secure EV chargers. No Internet? No problem — just tunnel IP through WhatsApp! We’ll see that 3D printers can be repurposed for lab automation of the cheap, build the worst — but coolest — 2FA dongle of all time, and see how a teetering tower of cards can make your old motherboard think any ISA card is plugged into it. Worried that driving an EV is going to be a boring experience? Don’t be — maybe you’ll still get to jam through the gears. But if you do, rest assured there’ll be plenty of careful engineering done to see if it’s safe. Err, at least we hope so…
Want to display digital clock, system memory and CPU load in your Desktop? There’s new circular widget for Ubuntu 22.10, Fedora 37, and other Linux with GNOME 43.
There are quite a few tools to display system load widget in desktop. Here I’m going to introduce the one that has a Conky look alike circular widget for GNOME desktop.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP Stack on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, LAMP is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MariaDB/MySQL, and PHP. These tools work closely together to enable a server to host and run modern and dynamic web applications.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the LAMP Stack on Rocky Linux. 9.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OnlyOffice on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, OnlyOffice is a free software office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA. It allows users to edit text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations offline by providing access to the cloud-based OnlyOffice portals for efficient remote team collaboration.
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 OnlyOffice on a Fedora 37.
First announced by Kubuntu founder Jonathan Riddell in June 2016, KDE neon marked it’s traditional biennial update that follows every new Ubuntu LTS release on October 21, 2022.
The update to Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) makes KDE neon the best it’s ever been. It is light and fast, with virtually no bloatware. It ships with Plasma 5 Desktop – an actively developed project on a monthly update schedule.
The built-in file manager makes navigating your file system excessively convenient. The settings app is easy to use, and the Kdenlive editor helps you get started on video editing projects without a hassle.
Best part? If you find a bug, you can be sure it’ll get fixed within a month.
KDE Neon is one of the most popular Linux distros (2,24,475+ downloads between November 2021 – 2022), despite its perplexing marketing.
They are pushing it as a set of repositories that distributes software from the KDE community. The fact that disk images are available for you to install seems to be secondary.
It is designed to remain stable in heavy computation scenarios. You can install it in minutes without hassles, even if it’s your first Linux install.
In this simple and short post, you will learn how to disable APT News from your Ubuntu terminal.
In this post, you will learn how to install Sar and Ksar on RHEL-based distributions. The procedure is easy. Let’s go.
Sar is a tool that allows you to obtain system information. It works similar to a monitoring tool with the great advantage of being easy and simple to use.
Apache JMeter is one of the popular free and open-source software platforms by the Apache Foundation. It is meant to perform the load stress by developers on their Web apps or website to analyze and measure their performance before going public. Apart from performance tests; regression, stress, and database server tests based on different technologies can be performed to analyze system functional behavior.
JMeter is Java-based therefore cross-platform and the scripting language it uses is Groovy (an object-oriented programming language used for the Java platform).
Object storage makes it possible to store massive amounts of unstructured data that is written once and read many times. Object storage is used for housing videos and photos, music, and files for online collaboration. In object storage, data is sectioned off into units (aka “objects”) where it is stored in a flat environment.
While the blog has been quiet, the git commits have been flowing! The core pieces of our infrastructure are nearing the testing phase - a complete workflow for developers to submit and build packages and for them to become available in the Serpent OS repo. At this point we can get many more contributors involved in packaging while circling back to make it more automated and efficient for them.
By respecting the time of contributors, we can get more done in the same time, utilise and manage more contributions to reduce the workload on everyone. This also makes Serpent OS an attractive platform for new contributors and enables more users to get involved by making packaging so easy.
[Last Update: November 20, 2022] As a Linux user, you might be searching for the most secure distro to protect your operating system. If so, look no further! Here are the top 10 most secure Linux Distros options available, based on privacy and security concerns.
Linux Distro is important for a few reasons. First, it acts as the foundation that allows you to use and interact with all the other software and hardware on your computer. Second, it manages communication between different parts of your system, like the processor, memory, and storage devices.
If you use your computer without proper security, hackers can easily access and exploit your operating system. This gives them the ability to view files and see your internet history. Linux distros provide a lot of good options to select the best and most secure one for your system.
Six years after its last R10 release, the lightweight Linux distribution wattOS 12 arrived rebased to the stable Debian 11 branch.
Users choose lightweight Linux distributions because they can bring aging hardware back to life or simply because they offer a lightning-fast desktop environment.
There is a wide range of options in this niche, and users have a lot of choices, such as MX Linux, Sparky Linux, Linux Lite, Lubuntu, antiX, GeckoLinux, and so on.
We are happy to announce the release of the test images of Mageia 9. These are available to early testers to help with the development towards a stable final release of Mageia 9. There have been large scale updates of all packages as well as new features implemented to improve what Mageia already offered.
A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media.
For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here. As always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.
This website may be called "BetaNews," but today, we have some Alpha news to share with you. If you aren't familiar, an Alpha release of software is even earlier than Beta, and as a result, it is often quite buggy. And so, such a release should never be used for anything but testing.
With all of that said, today, Mageia 9 Alpha becomes available for download. Yes, you can begin testing the pre-release Linux-based operating system immediately. If you have a 64-bit computer, you can choose from three desktop environments at installation -- KDE Plasma, GNOME and Xfce. 32-bit machines are limited to Xfce
"We are happy to announce the release of the test images of Mageia 9. These are available to early testers to help with the development towards a stable final release of Mageia 9. There have been large scale updates of all packages as well as new features implemented to improve what Mageia already offered," says Filip Komar, Mageia Developer.
Keyboards are necessary to work with a computer system whether it's for coding, writing, or moving around items in a spreadsheet. They allow access to a computer's peripherals and are used to get deep into the operating system of any computer. Keyboards come in all shapes and sizes. Some are more comfortable to use than others. We asked our community members to share the best (and the worst) keyboard they'd ever used. Some of the answers might surprise you!
Peppermint OS, a Debian- and Devuan-based Linux distro, is out again with its newest updates, and it packs a power punch with each element. On November 6, 2022, Peppermint’s developers announced a series of changes to the existing distro, making it an excellent addition to the current set of features.
If you are already using this Debian-based Linux distribution, it’s time to update to the newest version to make the most out of this fresh set of changes.
Canonical has announced that it’s now possible to pause or stop automatic updating of snap packages on Ubuntu if you're on the snapd edge channel. By default, these packages update on their own in the background to ensure you have the latest software, but if you need more control, you’ve now got it. Unfortunately, you’ll need to get your hands dirty in the terminal.
The new hold feature lets you pause all snap updates or updates for select packages. It also lets you set a time limit for the pause to take effect for, or you can leave the time absent and have the hold set permanently.
To hold snap updates for VLC for three days, for example, you’d enter the following command snap refresh --hold=72h vlc and then the output would read something like General refreshes of "vlc" held until 2022-11-17T12:04:59Z. To pause all snap updates, just enter snap refresh --hold=48h and to stop all updates permanently type snap refresh --hold.
There have been a lot of rumours and false accusations about the Codes of Conduct at FOSDEM and FSFE, who are the FSF imposters.
The only way to step on rumors is to publish the emails so everybody can agree who said what.
FOSDEM is committed to be free and open. We are a community, not a company. Therefore, it is not really clear why these mailing lists are hidden in the first place.
GIMP image editor got a new update for its 2.99 development release this Friday. Here’s the new features as well as how to install guide for Ubuntu users.
GIMP 2.99.14 is the 7th development release for the next major 3.0 release. It reworked the Align and Distribute tool to make it easy to use. Target items to align or distribute are now the selected layers and/or paths. For layers in particular, a new option “Use extents of layer contents” is available to align or distribute target layers based on their pixel contents.
Doing HTTP operations with Qt is relatively straightforward, but there are also a few pitfalls, unexpected default settings and low-hanging performance improvements around it worth keeping in mind.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to bootstrap a project to use Docker. I have loved to dockerize my application from the start because it gives me freedom from using a virtual environment. It saves you a lot if you are a DevOps person. You don’t have to install many dependencies every time for any programming language you are working on.
Before you can start any project, we need to create the following files, if you are looking to dockerize your environment.
As countless record covers confirm, musicians’ faces are crucial to eliciting feeling, conjuring a sense of connection with the performer or composer, with the sounds we hear on LP, in the concert hall, or in our heads. Annette Richards’ The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle is a magisterial, yet intimate study of portraits of musicians that looks searchingly at faces for their crucial, if often elusive meanings. Her visual sensitivity is matched by her sharp hearing for the music associated with these faces and the social worlds they inhabited. Just as any picture can be viewed from different angles and in different light and will say different things to us at different times, this book presents diverse and thought-provoking perspectives on musicians’ portraits, constantly reminding us that music is an activity that brings people together in thought and deed and feeling.
Her magnificent, sumptuously-produced book paints an admiring, illuminating portrait of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, the most famous member of his celebrated family in the 18th€ century, more renowned than his father, Johann Sebastian.
Everyone, everywhere, has to deal with some kind of rejection. It’s what we’re taught about culture. It’s all-American. It’s something we’re all used to. Rejection can be between two people. It can be between thousands of people all at once. But ultimately, some kinds of rejection are more public than others. Currently, Elon Musk is dealing with rejection. He was told by nearly all of his remaining employees at Twitter that they did not want to “be extremely hardcore” after he gave them an ultimatum, that they would rather not be “part of the new Twitter,” and would instead take severance than stay at a job that would never appreciate them more than they would appreciate it. If you ask me, leaving the world’s richest man high and dry with no job lined up is pretty hardcore. But I digress. For Today’s Tedium, I want to share a four-parter on rejection. I have done similar pieces about repetition, randomness, and reflection, and the parts will each be completed MidRange-style, meaning that each part will have a strict 30-minute limit. Anyway, I hope you don’t reject this.
Streets in cities and towns across Italy were filled Friday with university and high school students who marched against Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's plans for the country's education system, saying the far-right leader and her fascist Brothers of Italy party are intent on discriminating against students.
After a coalition formed by the Brothers of Italy and two other political parties won a snap election in September, Meloni announced the Italian Education Ministry would be renamed the Ministry of Education and Merit, leading critics, including many students, to express concern that the government will not serve the needs of all students.
Most RC cars replicate real-world race cars or fantastical off-road buggies for outdoor escapades. [diorama111] is an expert at building tiny desk-roaming models, though, and built this exquisite micro semi-truck and trailer.
[Mark Dufour]’s TACO VR project is a sort of robotic platform that mimics an omnidirectional treadmill, and aims to provide a compact and easily transportable way to allow a user to walk naturally in VR.
No matter how advanced your design skills, the chances are you’ll need to spend some time chasing bugs in your boards after they come back from the assembly house. Testing and debugging a PCB typically involves a lot of cross-checking between the board, the layout and the schematic, which quickly becomes tiresome even for mildly complex designs. To make this task a bit easier, [Ishan Chatterjee] and colleagues at the University of Washington have designed the Augmented Reality Debugging Workbench, or ARDW for short.
We love projects that make you do a double-take when you first see them. It’s always fun to think you see one thing, but then slowly realize everything is not quite what you expected. And this faceless analog clock is very much one of those projects.
What’s a Scramblepad? It’s a type of number pad in which the numbers aren’t in fixed locations, and can only be seen from a narrow viewing angle. Every time the pad is activated, the buttons have different numbers. That way, a constant numerical code isn’t telegraphed by either button wear, or finger positions when punching it in. [Glen Akins] got his hands on one last year and figured out how to interface to it, and shared loads of nice photos and details about just how complicated this device was on the inside.
So for quite some time I have a QNAP TS-873x here, equipped with 8 Western Digital Red 10 TB disks, plus 2 WD Blue 500G M2 SSDs. The QNAP itself has an “AMD Embedded R-Series RX-421MD” with 4 cores and was equipped with 48G RAM.
Initially I had been quite happy, the system is nice. It was fast, it was easy to get to run and the setup of things I wanted was simple enough. All in a web interface that tries to imitate a kind of workstation feeling and also tries to hide that it is actually a webinterface.
Naturally with that amount of disks I had a RAID6 for the disks, plus RAID1 for the SSDs. And then configured as a big storage pool with the RAID1 as cache. Below the hood QNAP uses MDADM Raid and LVM (if you want, with thin provisioning), in some form of emdedded linux. The interface allows for regular snapshots of your storage with flexible enough schedules to create them, so it all appears pretty good.
In our series of fanless firewalls, we have seen two regular requests. One is for 10GbE units, and the other is for reviews of units based on AMD. Today, we have the AMD Ryzen 7 5825U-based machine that has been a hot topic with its 4x 2.5GbE ports. As we reviewed this unit, we found a lot to like but also many funky features that we did not expect. We found enough that we changed our publishing order to get this review out earlier than planned.
"Cancer does not wait, nor should cancer patients have to wait for years for their government to act."
That's the message patient advocates reiterated in a Friday letter asking the Biden administration to help them secure a lifesaving prostate cancer drug that costs nearly $190,000 per year despite its development being 100% taxpayer-funded.
Pediatric health experts are sounding alarms regarding a surge in respiratory viruses among children, with more than three-quarters of pediatric hospital beds now full as respiratory syncytial virus cases hit more than double the number of infants who were affected last year.
In a letter to President Joe Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra American Academy earlier this week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association (CHA) called on the administration to declare a public health emergency, which would give hospitals flexibility to free up beds.
On a January day in 2021, a fountain of fracking wastewater unexpectedly erupted from deep underground in Noble County, Ohio. Instead of remaining thousands of feet beneath the Earth’s surface, where the corrosive brine had been pumped for disposal, it had migrated into an idled oil and gas production well over two miles away. There, the liquid waste spewed out of the ground for four days, releasing an estimated 40,000 barrels of toxic slurry into eastern Ohio streams and killing hundreds of fish.
This incident represents the growing problem with fracking waste injection wells in Ohio, a state that has become a dumping ground for oil and gas industry waste.€ €
Reproductive rights advocates, attorneys, and family members of people who have died as a result of Poland's stringent abortion ban were among those who testified before the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday, calling on the body to take every available action to protect Polish people from "conservative politicians" whose ban has led to at least six deaths so far.
Barbara Skrobol, the sister-in-law of the late Izabela Sajbor, who died of sepsis in September 2021 because doctors refused to terminate her nonviable pregnancy, described Sajbor's harrowing last moments to European Union lawmakers.
Moscow, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, will celebrate the New Year without fireworks or large outdoor concerts. The city’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, made the decision based on the results of a survey of Muscovites.
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine on Friday sharply criticized President Joe Biden's administration for claiming in a federal court filing that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman "enjoys head-of-state immunity" in a civil case brought by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The Virginia Democrat is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairs its subcommittee on human rights, and has been outspoken about the 2018 killing of Khashoggi, who lived in his state but disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
A diplomat from a NATO country told Financial Times that Ukraine is 'openly lying' as Zelensky still denies a Ukrainian missile hit Poland
Regional authorities are building defense fortifications in the Russian-annexed Crimea. This was reported by Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed head of the region.
Alexander Lukashenko spoke before the Belarusian industrial farmers. In a passing comment on the closing of McDonald’s restaurants in Belarus, the president said that its place should be filled by local entrepreneurs:
Earlier this month, a group of Novosibirsk women told the press about their husbands’ efforts to get released from serving on the frontline in the Ukrainian war. The soldiers’ stated reason for refusing to fight was that they had no training or preparation for serving in the frontline units. They claim that they were sent there without any knowledge of where they were going — and for the time being, they are living in tents, in a forest camp where their command is pressuring them to return to combat. It has now emerged that one of them had already spent eight years serving in a “volunteer” unit in the self-proclaimed “LNR,” and that he was discharged from that service only last summer. Come fall, he was drafted again. Here’s the story of the man named Pyotr, uncovered by the journalists at Novosibirsk Online.
The gallery staff at the Boris Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg were shocked when they realized that their contract security guard, the 63-year-old Alexander Vasilyev, had “improved” an abstract painting loaned to the center by the Tretyakov gallery. Anna Leporskaya’s “Three Figures,” painted in the 1930s, was in Yekaterinburg as part of the traveling exhibition “The World as Objectlessness.” Vasilyev mistook the paintings on loan for children’s drawings and put a ballpoint pen to the “Three Figures” to fill in the “missing” eyes. The case caused a furor in the Russian art media, but the court of appeals has now cleared Vasilyev of his charges — partly because, as a veteran of two Russian wars, he suffers from mental health problems.
Nearly 50 percent of Ukraine’s energy system is offline as a result of Russian missile strikes, Denys Shmyhal, the country’s prime minister, said at a briefing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the permanent members of the Security Council.
Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales.
As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt was extended until at least Saturday, campaigners, scientists, and others expressed alarm and frustration over the "gridlocked" negotiations dominated by rich countries and fossil fuel lobbyists.
"Nothing short of a complete transformation of our economic system and phaseout of fossil fuels is needed to avoid complete climate breakdown."
We continue our coverage from the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with prominent Russian environmentalist Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense and winner of the 2021 Right Livelihood Award for defending the environment and mobilizing grassroots opposition to the coal and nuclear industries in Russia. Slivyak says the Russian war in Ukraine, especially the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, should serve as a warning to immediately transition to renewable energy sources, not nuclear energy, and to stop relying on fossil fuels. “As long as the United States and European Union continue to pay Vladimir Putin for uranium or fossil fuel, that means that this money will be used for the war in Ukraine. That means more people will die in Ukraine,” he adds.
We speak with prominent Ukrainian climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska at the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, about how the Russian war in Ukraine has intensified calls to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Krakovska is the head of the delegation of Ukraine to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. “Fossil fuels: it’s a root, it’s an enabler of the Russian war on Ukraine,” says Krakovska, adding that she feels hopeful that the conference will bring politicians and scientists together to instill positive change.
“Yes, Greenland’s Ice Is Melting…”
A leak that erupted at a methane storage facility in western Pennsylvania on November 6 spewed massive amounts of the highly potent greenhouse gas for a week and a half, reigniting demands on Friday to better regulate and eventually euthanize the fracking industry as part of a crucial transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Thursday morning, before venting was stopped:
Over the past few months, activists around the country and the world have laid the blame for climate disasters at Wall Street's feet. In a wave of escalated actions under the name "Blame Wall Street," dozens of groups have called out the financial industry for their financing of fossil fuels and complicity in the climate crisis.
The United Arab Emirates has been criticised for promoting oil and gas as a clean source of energy, and for backing “false solutions” such as carbon capture technology, at the UN COP27 climate summit in Egypt, ahead of hosting the event next year.€
The Gulf petrostate’s pavilion features displays touting its “decarbonisation efforts” and its “climate action journey” – including a stand run by the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the world’s twelfth largest oil producing company.
As the second-largest donor to the Democratic Party, Sam Bankman-Fried had reason to be proud on election night on November 8 as his preferred party outperformed expectations. Still only 30 years old, Bankman-Fried (popularly known as SBF) had amassed a net worth estimated in the neighborhood of $24 billion thanks to his founding of FTX, a crypto currency exchange based in the Bahamas. His wealth turned him into an instant power player. SBF had donated at least $40 million of his own money to the Democrats in the midterms. Colleagues at FTX had also spent $70 million lobbying Washington on pet causes, including beefing up pandemic prevention and crypto deregulation.
Twitter workers reportedly quit by the hundreds Thursday after refusing to agree to billionaire CEO Elon Musk's demand that they work longer hours as part of his self-described "extremely hardcore" plan to overhaul the social media platform.
As a result, the company that Musk purchased for $44 billion just weeks ago is in chaos as the mass exodus of employees and the billionaire's earlier decision to fire roughly half of Twitter's workforce are threatening basic, day-to-day operations at the platform used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been difficult to satirize. The company is losing revenue (Reuters, 11/7/22), thanks in large part to the $1 billion in additional debt payments Musk has saddled it with. His idea to sell blue-check verifications for $8 was widely ridiculed (Variety, 11/2/22)—predictably resulting in a flood of fake posts from “verified” accounts—and mass layoffs have put the website’s infrastructure in jeopardy (MIT Technology Review, 11/8/22). A lockdown of the company offices had many wondering if Twitter would survive the pre-Thanksgiving weekend (Daily Beast, 11/17/22).
Former President Donald Trump on Friday told Fox News Digital that he won't "partake" after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for two ongoing criminal investigations involving the GOP leader, who recently announced his 2024 campaign.
"I have been going through this for six years—for six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it anymore," said Trump,€ who faces various legal issues at the state and federal level. "And I hope the Republicans have the courage to fight this."
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that he has appointed Jack Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor, as special counsel to oversee ongoing investigations into former President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents and his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The announcement comes days after Trump formally launched his 2024 presidential bid as he faces a number of state and federal probes into his conduct as president and as head of his real estate and business empire.
The surge in crime was supposed to be the Republicans' ticket to a landslide in the 2022 midterms. For a variety of reasons, mainly the general awfulness of the Republicans running for office, this challenging issue that generally works for the right wing did not come through for them. It may also be due to the fact that the primary Republican solution to crime—lock away all Black men—is cruel, racist, and, of course, ineffective. It may also be that the Republicans have a hard time calling themselves the party of law and order when their top man—Donald Trump—is a white collar criminal, and they complain endlessly about the FBI doing the job they were hired to do. In fact, Republicans do not even consider white collar crime real—as so many of them commit these offenses.
In this year’s midterm elections, voters showed a strong level of support for progressive ballot measures across the country. These victories were tempered by the defeat of worthwhile ballot measures in some states and the uncertainty of progress under a divided Congress. Nonetheless, voters across the country approved minimum wage increases, protected access to abortion, supported cannabis legalization, and approved measures to increase housing affordability and promote good union jobs.
Is Donald Trump's 2024 bid for the White House finished just as it's started? That seems to be the new conventional wisdom. After last Tuesday's "red wave" failed to materialize—with Trump-endorsed candidates and other election deniers losing winnable seats—many experts have been predicting Trump's inevitable crash-and-burn.€
The midterm elections are about over. The Democrats will retain power in the Senate and the Republicans won the House.
This November, voters stood up and rejected a host of anti-democratic candidates all across America. Although the GOP eked out a victory in the House of Representatives, dimming prospects for further progress on climate and other issues for at least a couple of years, the nation managed to avoid a much worse fate.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending much more time using Mastodon, and shifting much of what I used to use Twitter for to that other platform. It’s not an exact replacement, nor is it meant to be, but it’s been growing incredibly rapidly as Twitter seemingly crumbles under Elon Musk. Lots of people keep insisting to me that Mastodon can’t succeed — and it’s entirely possible that it won’t. I have no crystal ball. And some people insist that it will only attract “tech” folks who are able to go through the (marginally) more complicated steps to signing up for Mastodon. Indeed, some people (mostly on Twitter, naturally) seem positively angry at me for suggesting that it’s even possible that Mastodon could reach critical mass.
A wave of people have announced that they're leaving Twitter to check out something called Mastodon, and that leaves many wondering, what is Mastodon anyway? More importantly, what is the “fediverse” and what is “ActivityPub”? This explainer will help you make heads or tails of this new approach to communications and social media.
Federation is a broad term that means a group that has smaller groups within it that retain some measure of autonomy within that whole. In internet terms, the most well-known federated system is our old friend, email.
No matter how much you love or hate email itself, it is a working federated system that’s€ been around for over a half-century. It doesn’t matter what email server you use, what email client you use, we all use email and the experience is more or less the same for us all, and that’s a good thing. The Web is also federated – any web site can link to, embed, refer to stuff on any other site and in general, it doesn’t matter what browser you use. The internet started out federated, and even continues to be.
Earlier this week, we wrote about how the EU seemed to practically be salivating over getting its hands on Elon Musk now that he owned Twitter. The first half of that post was about how he was at risk of running afoul of his GDPR commitments, potentially allowing the jurisdiction over GDPR enforcement to fall away from just the Irish data protection authority and to any other EU authority. That’s notable because many people believe that the Irish DPC is way too friendly to the companies they regulate. For the time being, Musk may have staved off the GDPR issue by naming an “acting data protection officer” (DPO) to be the main point of contact with the Irish.
The Mississippi head of a legal advocacy organization has filed a formal complaint with the state judicial commission against a municipal judge whose no-knock search warrants have been challenged in court.
Cliff Johnson of the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center said he filed the complaint with the state Commission on Judicial Performance to push the state Supreme Court to clarify that judges must hand all search warrants they sign over to local court clerks.
When pollsters said voters were energized to elect Republicans in the midterm elections, they were not wrong. Turnout for Republican candidates surpassed 2018 numbers in states across the country. But in more places than almost anyone predicted, Americans were even more motivated to elect Democrats, who held onto dozens of House seats that were considered vulnerable and flipped an open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
Britons mourned the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and understandably so. The outpouring of affection for their long-serving monarch was more than commendable, it was touching. Yet count me among those mystified that so many Americans also professed to care. With all due respect to Queen Latifah, we decided way back in 1776 that we’d had our fill of royalty.
The U.S. Senate voted to advance a bill that protect same-sex marriage by a wide margin– thanks to support from 12 Republicans. Same-sex marriage isn’t the partisan issue it once was.
A coalition of health and privacy advocates filed a petition Thursday asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to create rules barring social media platforms and app developers from intentionally deceiving children and teens into spending more and more hours on the internet, where their sensitive data is sold to profit-seeking advertisers.
"The hyper-personalized, data-driven advertising business model has hijacked our children's lives."
Matt Orfalea didn't lie, alter clips, or remove key context. He made edits faithful to reality and just got a strike for it. Welcome to post-Trump America, where truth is a censorable offense.
This week, both Yale Law School and Harvard Law School announced that their schools will no longer participate in the U.S. News and World Report annual ranking of best law schools. In a statement, Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said the rankings are “profoundly flawed” and that they “stand squarely in the way of progress.” This isn’t a mere squabble that will only affect elite institutions in a never-ending game of one-upmanship. Untethering legal education from U.S. News is a necessary (if not sufficient) step toward making legal education more democratic, more accessible to low-income students, and, over time, and more diverse.
Although a US investigation into Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder will unlikely lead to accountability, Israel’s refusal to cooperate should raise questions about the US/Israeli relationship.
Galina Timchenko, Meduza’s co-founder, executive director, and publisher, has been awarded the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Committee’s 32nd annual International Press Freedom Awards dinner was held on November 17, in New York.
The family of imprisoned British Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah visited him on Thursday for the first time since he ended his full hunger and water strike, which they say occurred after he collapsed inside his prison shower last week. El-Fattah had intensified his strike on the first day of the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh to draw international attention to the country’s human rights violations and protest his seemingly indefinite imprisonment. We go to Cairo to speak with his aunt, Ahdaf Soueif, who was among the visitors and says El-Fattah may resume his hunger strike if the British government does not more aggressively demand his release. “It really breaks my heart to think of him going back on hunger strike when he is so thin and so weak,” but the campaign so far “has left no one in any doubt that Alaa should be free,” she says.
Ukrainian climate activist Svitlana Romanko joins us after she was suspended from the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, when she accused Russian officials of war crimes and genocide at an event on Wednesday. Romanko is the founder and director of Razom We Stand, an organization demanding a total permanent embargo on Russian oil and gas. “It has been very clear that fossil fuels fund dictatorships all over the world,” says Romanko, who has since left Egypt for her own safety. “We wanted to use our freedom of speaking and freedom of attending public gathering to confront people who came from the country which is in open war and … destroying our people.”
The National Labor Relations Board issued a dire warning Friday about the state of its long-starved budget, warning members of Congress that it does not have enough funding and staff to "keep up with an increasing workload" as the agency fights back against aggressive union-busting by some of the most powerful and deep-pocketed corporations in the world.
"The agency's current funding level is impairing our ability to maintain staff capacity, both in headquarters and across 48 field offices," NLRB chair€ Lauren McFerran and general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo wrote in a letter to the heads of labor panels in the House and Senate. "At this point, the agency has exhausted its ability to absorb cost increases through staff attrition and operational efficiencies."
The United States—whose military has killed more foreign civilians than any other armed force on the planet since the end of World War II—on Friday joined 79 other nations in signing a declaration aimed at protecting civilians from explosive weapons in populated areas.
"It is time for all states to endorse and implement the declaration€ to€ help civilians and their communities during and after conflict."
The Biden administration said in a U.S. federal court filing on Thursday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be granted sovereign immunity in a civil case brought by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a stance that human rights advocates condemned as a betrayal of the president's vow to hold the Saudi leader accountable.
Lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in the new filing that the White House "has determined that Defendant bin Salman, as the sitting head of a foreign government, enjoys head-of-state immunity from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts as a result of that office and is entitled to immunity from the court's jurisdiction of this suit while he holds that office."
The Scottish Parliament is under the untrue impression that Scottish prisons run under the fairly liberal Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 laid before parliament by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill MP on 14 September 2011. In fact the Scottish Prisons Service totally ignores them and is absolutely a law unto itself.
This week, I testified remotely before the Colombian Constitutional Court in the case of Esperanza Gómez Silva c. Meta Platforms, Inc. y Facebook Colombia S.A.S. Expediente T-8.764.298. In a procedure I don’t understand, the court€ organized a public hearing€ to discuss the issues raised by the case. (The case involves Instagram’s termination of an adult film star’s account despite her account content allegedly never violating the TOS). My 15 minutes of testimony was based on€ this paper.
Writing about the terrible ideas Congress has is often like babysitting a toddler bent on sticking his finger in a socket. At a certain point there is the temptation to say, “Fine! Learn the hard way!”
The Chinese government hates its Muslim residents. It won’t even pretend otherwise. The Uyghur Muslim population has been targeted for years, resulting in disappearances, violence, oppressive surveillance, and other efforts that demonstrate that finding the country’s “EXIT” sign isn’t even an option.
Supply-chain workers are fed up. Many of them told me that they’re forced to work overtime even when they’re exhausted, that they can’t truly relax because they must be ready to work at a moment’s notice, that they’re forced to miss doctor’s appointments, and that they’re afraid of losing their jobs.
Fifty years ago, the Senate passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, providing protections against sexual harassment and other gender-based discrimination at educational institutions. Any school that received federal funding was now legally required to give equal treatment, including in cases involving sexual misconduct. Today, years after the rise of the #MeToo movement, students are still working to hold their schools accountable.
Following an 18-month investigation, a subcommittee in the United States Senate released a report that further confirmed whistleblower allegations that female detainees in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were subject to invasive, harmful, and often unnecessary gynecological procedures. Women in custody at the Irwin County Detention […]
For Indigenous nations across Turtle Island, as we call North America, land is inextricably tied into our identity as peoples who thrived for millennia before the arrival of Europeans. It is no secret that a genocidal campaign of conquest—fueled and justified by the Doctrine of Discovery that declared all land not occupied by Christians as terra nullius (nobody’s land)—dispossessed millions of Indigenous peoples from their homelands in the name of the United States’ policy of western expansion and Manifest Destiny.
Telecom monopolies have spent decades trying to kill off public broadband efforts. Whether it’s outright lies about what municipal broadband will do or shitty protectionist laws specifically designed to undermine the will of voters, U.S. telecom monopolies have long been absolutely terrified of your long-neglected town or city voting to build its own broadband network.
In Chicago, fall lasts roughly fifteen minutes. That means that it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and this morning we woke up to 2 inches of snow on the ground and more of it gently falling to Earth. It looks like Christmas already, which is appropriate as I also woke up to an update on Mariah Carey’s attempt to register a trademark for herself as the “Queen of Christmas.”
A coalition of anti-monopoly advocates cheered Friday after reporting confirmed that the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster.
"We are thrilled to see the Department of Justice Antitrust Division investigate Live Nation-Ticketmaster's ongoing monopoly abuse of fans, artists, venues, and live events professionals,"€ the Break Up€ Ticketmaster€ Coalition said in a statement.
After Z-Library was targeted by U.S. law enforcement, a group of anonymous archivists worked around the clock to get a shadow library search engine online. This week, the 'team' behind the Pirate Library Mirror launched "Anna's Archive" which offers a gateway to various book resources. A brazen move, but one where risks and privacy were carefully considered.
In the Harry Potter books, there is a small bit in the story where the currency of the society is described. The names are a bit weird, but ultimately, it's a parody of the old pounds, shillings and pence where there is a medium unit in between and none of them are powers of ten.
The creator of this system clearly hasn't really appreciated how the system works, because the numbers are not really chosen particularly intelligently. The system in particular is that there is 29 *shillings to the *pound, and then also 17 *pence to the *shilling. I think it's utterly remarkable how the creator of this system managed to stumble on not one but two intensely jagged prime numbers, making this a system completely impossible to occur in any realistic manner.
For a while i've been referring to a particular strand of feminism as ‘Cosmo feminism’, but i've not actually written down what i mean by this.
‘Cosmo’ is a reference to the magazine “Cosmopolitan”, founded by Helen Gurley Brown, which is where i first observed this form of feminism. That said, i've also observed it in the content of e.g. the Australian Web site “Mama Mia”.
To a first approximation, Cosmo feminism feels like a ‘feminism lite’, one strongly influenced by radfem analyses and politics, but without the underlying theoretical depth.
I started reading Deleuze earlier this year, when I was really demoralized. I saw a world dominated by powerful, fixed institutions with an unlimited capacity for cruelty, and a world in terminal decline, with no foreseeable capacity for escape. And on a personal level, I felt bound by routine, kind of vaguely anhedonic, stuck on a fixed path that led nowhere. This was near what we I guess consider to be "the end" of COVID, a 2 year period that really fucked me up. The way this period of time affected me sometimes makes me feel insane and alone -- it didn't seem to affect others in the way it affected me, or at least they didn't show it.
Reading philosophy is an eccentric thing to do, and I find it difficult to relate these ideas to others sometimes. I don't want to "dumb down" the rich insights of Deleuze and Nietzsche, but I don't want to get lost in academic jargon. It took me a long time to get where Deleuze is going, and how the seemingly-incomprehensible language served a purpose. It took me a while to understand how reading Deleuze, and philosophy, could really, fundamentally, change me for the better, and how this wasn't just some academic exercise, but a conceptual map to change yourself and the world, and that his work is really capable of doing that.
It has been a bad week. Work wise and family wise have actually been pretty good. But my VPS...it is a harsh mistress.
Finally got the replacement up in time for a client of mine to freak out that their website was pulled from an old backup. For as meticulous as I am about backing up the code I write (I run my own git server with a stupid amount of repos for every little bit of code), the page he needed apparently never made it into a backup. Ended up spending a night reinventing that solution. In the process, however, I did find that my old VPS would eventually boot up properly and I gained ssh access. Doing a backup now where I can access files, rather than relying on a snapshot from AWS.
after being away working for a few weeks, and waiting for a dry day, i was at last able to upgrade my pv alpha frame to rc1 standard.
a bit of a struggle on my own due to the weight of the panels and the frame. i removed one of the panels to reduce the weight and get it done, then i replaced the panel.
Just some quick rant about how Trantor does it's SSL stuff. For thoes who don't know. Trantor is a TCP library that I also maintain as a part of the Drogon web application framework. Personally, I think trantor is easier then boost::asio to use, and it's also more efficient. It also comes with integrated SSL support using OpenSSL or LibreSSL. However, the code for that is just.. yeiks.
I'm not just writing a blog to complain about stuff. I'm also thinking trough why the current design is bad and how I'm going to fix it. So, let's start with the current design.
I find the fedi a bit overwhelming at the moment. It is great that people are coming here and getting away from the influence of Elon and a locked environment. And yet…
We are neurons of a collective brain.
We soak up the happenings in our lives until some threshold is reached, and then we transmit a signal and it goes out to other neurons adding to their thresholds. Sound familiar? Isn't that pretty much how our own brains work?
But these neurons (us - plus AI now) trigger across the internet (and elsewhere, but the main thing is the internet), not across synapses.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.