This week has been really amazing for Linux news and releases! Fedora Linux 37 finally arrived with lots of goodies, Steam Client finally got that long-anticipated Big Picture mode from Steam Deck UI, Firefox 107 arrived with more new features for Linux users, and KDE Frameworks 5.100 is out for Plasma fans with many improvements.
On top of that, I tell you all about the latest security updates for Ubuntu, I show you how to install the Unity7 desktop environment on Arch Linux, and take a first look at Linux Mint’s Cinnamon 5.6 desktop environment on Arch Linux. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for November 20th, 2022.
Coming up in this episode
Internet woes, part deux. Knocking them over, one at a time... Angry Birdsite? Knock knock. What's the password? We get the explanation.
Time for another Delve! Here we look at the newly released Fedora 37 and checking out the latest improvements to Gnome 43. Besides the latest desktop goodness and some sundry back-end lib updates, not much has changed in Fedora 37.
Fedora 37 was released in November of 2022, and with it comes Linux kernel 6.0 as well as GNOME 43. In this video, Jay will give you his thoughts on this release. Is Fedora 37 worth checking out?
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The problem with the modern internet is ads, sponsored posts, and pay walls. Enter RSS feeds as a solution.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) will host a conversation with the Sourceware overseers, and the Software Freedom Conservancy on the current Sourceware infrastructure and future plans.
This event will be an opportunity for the community to get more information about the current and ongoing plans for the Sourceware infrastructure, and ask questions. The public meeting will be hosted on BigBlueButton and made available to the wider free software community via livestream.
The latest version of Firefox could be, quite possibly, their most boring release they've ever had.
I wrote a script generating an image gallery suitable to be included in web pages. Since it can be generally useful I cleaned it up and published it, of course as free software; you are welcome to download a copy of make-gallery from https://git.ageinghacker.net/make-gallery. The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence version 3 or later; the generated code is in the public domain.
I hate the web
I have never made a mystery of my personal dislike for the web with its gratuitous ever-growing complexity, inefficiency, lack of expressivity, hostility to the developer and to the general user.
htop is a popular command-line tool to help monitor the system’s resources and performance on Linux.
It’s better than top, often available by default out of the box.
With htop, you can filter and sort processes to understand things better, get a tree view of the processes running, and kill processes when needed.
I use htop over other system monitoring tools because it displays what’s essential to me and allows terminating rogue/frozen processes when I need to take control of running services.
But, if you want something else that displays more info or looks different, what are some htop alternatives? Let’s take a look.
XFCE (XForms Common Environment) is a Linux desktop environment that started in 1996 with the main focus on speed rather than looks.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Odoo on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Odoo is a business management tool that comes as a suite with numerous applications to help organizations in management and ease the day-to-day company operations. Odoo works as a central application that allows you to manage business-related tasks from one single web application dashboard. It is user-friendly, scalable, customizable, flexible, and helps you manage businesses and organizations with a CMS.
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 Odoo ERP Software on Rocky Linux. 9.
On most Unix-like operating systems, the xxd command helps users read a file as its hexadecimal values. The ASCII representation of the files is also shown, and users can edit them as necessary.
The command was first developed in 1990 by Juergen Weigert and has been a valuable part of Linux-based systems since.
Even programmers don’t work with their code on the bits-and-bytes level – at least not daily. However, there are easy ways to use the xxd hex dumper to explore files at that level if required.
We’ll walk you through using the hex dumper in this post.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Snap package manager is a free and open-source software used to install and manage snap packages. The purpose of Snap packages, just like Flatpaks, is to distribute sandboxed and self-contained applications. Snap can be installed and, for the most part, work with most packages on Fedora-based systems that are currently actively supported.
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 Snap on a Fedora 37.
The Linux ecosystem is enjoying a boom in new apps that run flawlessly on its desktops. But there are still holdout apps that prevent Linux from being on par with Windows and macOS.
The Adobe Creative Suite is one major set of apps that lacks a native Linux port. This puts creative professionals off from trying Linux since Photoshop and other Adobe apps are the bread and butter of their work.
Still, this hasn't stopped other creatives from running Photoshop on their Linux desktops. Let's look at the ways Linux users are bringing the power of Adobe Photoshop to Linux.
File Browser is a file managing application which provides a modern interface within a specified directory to upload, delete, preview, rename and edit your files. It also allows creation of multiple users and and assign each user their own directory. With this application you can eliminate the use of chroot setup which is used for managing files alone.
In this guide you are going to learn how to install File browser on Ubuntu 22.04 and configure it with Nginx reverse proxy. We will also create a configuration file to specify the root directory and a systemd file to start file browser as a service using a specific user which Nginx uses www-data.
This tutorial shows you how to easily set up a web, email and DNS server with ISPConfig 3 using the ISPConfig auto-installation script....
Garuda Linux is a user-friendly and visually appealing Linux distribution that is popular among gamers. It is a rolling distribution based on Arch Linux that is designed to offer exemplary performance while focusing on offering an immersive user experience with beautiful and elegant desktop themes.
Garuda Linux offers its users a wide selection of vibrant desktop environments including Plasma KDE, GNOME, LXQt-win, Xfce, and Qtile to mention a few. Like Arch Linux, it uses Pacman as its default package manager and ships with a huge collection of software packages.
A website works with several key elements, which include a frontend, a web server, and a network. Apache web server is a free and open-source web server. A web server serves content to different types of users who request multiple site pages. Therefore, you need a reliable solution. Apache has been the first choice for many organizations.
Apache enables organizations to serve content to users as per demand and improves the browsing experience. The latest versions of the web server come with advanced security features. However, is SSL certification necessary for the Apache servers? WHY?
As anyone who has used Rocky Linux Stream for any time knows, one of its primary focuses is stability. This can often mean that the distribution is relatively stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of new features. For example, at the time of this writing, Rocky Linux features kernel 5.14, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, among many other things. While this focus on stability is admirable, it can be frustrating for users who need the latest and most significant features that newer kernels often provide. Fortunately, there are a few ways to work around this issue.
For most users, the best option is to use the ELRepo repository, which has an excellent reputation amongst EL9 and EL8 distributions such as AlmaLinux, CentOS, Oracle, etc. The following tutorial will show you how to import the ELRepo for Rocky Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 8 desktop or server using cli commands for the users that require to update their kernel for better hardware support.
Homebrew installs packages to their directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. This means that we don’t have to use sudo or have root privileges to be able to install certain applications from their large catalog.
For example, thanks to Homebrew we will be able to get recent versions of curl or wget because the application downloads, compiles, and installs from source code using formulas which are scripts made in Ruby.
The way Homebrew works is summarized in Git and Ruby, so hack away with the knowledge that you can easily revert your modifications and merge upstream updates.
VSCodium is a powerful, open-source code editor that can be used for various programming tasks. The source code for this product is available on GitHub under an MIT license, making it accessible to anyone who wants to use it. While VSCodium is free to use, some features may require third-party plugins or extensions. These plugins and extensions can sometimes transmit data without the user’s permission, so it’s important to know what they are before installing them.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install VSCodium on Debian 11/10 Linux. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository of VSCodium and tips on updating and removing the IDE properly and securely for those seeking a more privacy-focused IDE over the default Microsoft Visual Studio Code Editor.
Visual Studio Code is a free and powerful source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. VSCode offers many features such as support to debug applications, embedded Git control which helps you with code completion or refactoring when needed (it even has snippets!), plus much more! You can find extensions in this extensive library that further enhance your software development experience.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to Install Visual Code Editor (VS CODE) on Debian 11/10 using the command line terminal to import the Microsoft official repository and gpg key and install the IDE editor, along with how to maintain and remove the software if required in the future.
We are excited to announce that the Godot Engine will attend the 2023 Game Developers Conference (March 20-24).
The Game Developer Conference is a yearly event in San Francisco, California. It is the world's largest professional game industry event, with over 26,000 attendees. The conference features over 700 lectures, panels, and workshops on a variety of game development topics, as well as a large expo floor with over 500 exhibitors.
Victorian steampunk England, where crazed police and hooligans roam the streets after some sort of mind control device goes haywire, with only some clowns, fire dancers, and other circus performers standing in the way of all-out chaos. Oh, and the show must go on: these very same performers have to keep the crowds entertained to put food in their bellies and bandages on their wounds from fighting the good fight.
Between 2022-11-14 and 2022-11-21 there were 131 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use a number of techniques to achieve this list of Best Steam Deck Games such as popularity, ratings, and a few other features. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones, split in Verified and Playable categories.
Want to make your own dynamic wallpaper pairings to use in GNOME 42 and above?
If you do you’ve probably come across Dynamic Wallpaper. It’s a super-simple GTK app tool that lets create a background pair that changes based on the light/dark mode setting.
A new version of the app landed this past weekend. Dynamic Wallpaper 0.1.0 delivers a new design that, to my eyes, is a much better fit for the modern GNOME desktop and libadwaita apps. That’s not to say the old UI was bad, but this one is better.
Feature wise nothing else has changed: you open the app, select an image to use as the wallpaper when ‘light mode’ is active, select an image to use when ‘dark mode’ is active, assign your creative coupling a name, then hit ‘create’ to save it.
Once saved, you head to Settings > Appearance to apply it. You can spot your creation easily as these dynamic wallpapers display a split thumbnail previewing the two images, light mode on the left, dark mode on the right.
Pop!_OS is a Ubuntu Linux-based derivative developed and created by American computer manufacturer System76 for their lines of hardware devices. System76 sells high-end servers, desktops, laptops and other peripherals. And all of their runs on the Ubuntu variant Pop!_OS.
Since its inception, the Pop!_OS team has had a different vision of the customized Ubuntu and the default desktop GNOME.
Here are the few reasons why System76's Pop OS is the best all-rounder Ubuntu-based Linux distribution.
A little later than originally intended, Fedora 37 was finally released on November 15th. Like always, there are a lot of different Fedora 37 images to choose from. The official versions are Workstation, Server, IoT, Cloud, and CoreOS. The experimental versions are Silverblue and Kinoite, which feature the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments respectively. There are also a selection of "spins" featuring different desktop environments and "labs" that focus on specific functions.
For this review, I will be looking at Workstation and Silverblue, which both use GNOME 43 as their desktop environments. All variations of Fedora 37 ship with version 6.0.7 of the Linux kernel and a plethora of updated packages providing up-to-date development tools for many programming languages.
In a recent message to the tech mailing list, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) summarized the state of the new memory protections work. The thread also includes a followup from Otto Moerbeek (otto@) on consequent changes to the memory allocation mechanisms.
As more edge devices appear on enterprise networks, sysadmins need the knowledge and tools to support them.
Artificial intelligence (AI) already impacts our daily lives in ways we never imagined just a few years ago – and in ways that we’re unaware of now. From self-driving cars to voice-assisted devices to predictive text messaging, AI has become a necessary and unavoidable part of our society, including in the workplace.
Early in my 40-year IT executive search and technical recruiting career, I noticed that when candidates made decisions about which jobs to accept, their evaluation criteria often differed from what they initially told me.
Over time, a pattern emerged, which led me to create a construct I call the “6 C's,” a tool to help candidates clarify their priorities and make more rational, objective decisions.
Graphics processing units (GPU) have become the foundation of artificial intelligence. Machine learning was slow, inaccurate, and inadequate for many of today's applications. The inclusion and utilization of GPUs made a remarkable difference to large neural networks. Deep learning discovered solutions for image and video processing, putting things like autonomous driving or facial recognition into mainstream technology.
The connection between GPUs and OpenShift does not stop at data science. High-performance computing is one of the hottest trends in enterprise tech. Cloud computing creates a seamless process enabling various tasks designated for supercomputers, better than any other computing power you use, saving you time and money.
Radxa E25 is a modular router with two 2.5GbE ports based on the Radxa CM3 Industrial (CM3I) system-on-module equipped with a Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor, and optional support for WiFi 6 and 4G or 5G cellular connectivity.
I got an early sample of the Radxa E25 carrier board in January, but the company has now refined the design with version 1.4 of the board and will launch the Radxa E25 as a complete router with an enclosure similar to NanoPi R5S and LinkStar H68K we’ve covered previously.
Last week, e-con Systems introduced their first FPD-LINK III camera module for embedded vision applications. The NeduCAM25 integrates an AR0234 2MP sensor able to capture fast-moving scenes at 120 frames per seconds.
Topton is offering a Mini-PC sold as barebones or configured with up to 64GB DDR4/2TB NVMe. The TP-X4F also offers triple 4K @60Hz displays, three M.2 2280 NVMe for SSD storage and an it integrates an active cooling system.
Hello everyone and welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics. This week, we have a brand new audio-based kit, the Qwiic Speaker Kit! This simple box of goodies provides you with just what you need to get started with stereo audio via a simple Qwiic interface! Following that, we have a new version of our Micro OLED Breakout, but with pre-soldered headers.
Air32F103 is yet another clone of the STM32F103 microcontroller that can be faster if needed with a clock of up to 216 MHz instead of 72 MHz for the original STMicro STM32 Arm Cortex-M3 microcontroller.
The first SKU of the family is the Air32F103CBT6 whose peripherals and hardware design are compatible with equivalent STM32F103CBT6 parts and offered with 32KB RAM and 128KB flash. There’s also a Bluepill-like development board, but with a different pinout, made by LuatOS.
Raspberry Pi boards, including the popular Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi 3B, and the Pi Zero W, are often sold without cases or covers to house your builds. That means if you want to protect it from the elements or make it look more polished, you’ll either have to buy or make your own case. This article will help you decide what options are available and which case is best for your Raspberry Pi.
Rosetta 2 is the ahead-of-time compile translator that’s part of macOS Big Sur (and later) that, upon launch of an x64 Intel binary, translates it to 64-bit ARM code for execution on ARM-based Apple Silicon processors before execution. It is not a real-time emulator. It translates the entire binary — once — at launch time, making best-guess choices along the way. Dougall delves into various aspects of Rosetta 2 in an effort to explain why it is so performant; in many instances the translated binary runs faster on Apple Silicon than on the fastest Intel machines that Apple has ever released. It’s impressive.
Rosetta 2 translates the entire text segment of the binary from x86 to ARM up-front. It also supports just-in-time (JIT) translation, but that is used relatively rarely, avoiding both the direct runtime cost of compilation, and any indirect instruction and data cache effects.
Other interpreters typically translate code in execution order, which can allow faster startup times, but doesn’t preserve code locality.
The holidays are a wonderful time of the year where we are happily shopping for unique gifts for loved ones online. It also means we’re sharing our personal information online like giving out email addresses or phone numbers to sign up for discount programs or creating new accounts. Whenever we go online, we are asked to give our personal information, which can end up in the wrong hands. Once our information is out there and publicly available it’s even tougher to get it back.
Here at Mozilla, a mission-driven company with a 20-year track record of fighting for online privacy and a healthier internet, we get that. Our privacy products, Firefox Relay and Mozilla VPN, have helped people feel safer when they go online and have blocked more than 1.5 million unwanted emails from people’s inboxes while keeping their real email addresses safe from trackers across the web. So, wherever you go online with Mozilla’s trusted products and services, your information is safer.
Mastodon, along with many of the fediverse projects run on instances, that is a website / server that runs that software. Usually, the person (or group) that creates the project runs the first instance, after that it is up to volunteers to run their own instance.
It’s best if there are more instances, for decentralization, but there are some people who won’t (or can’t run a instance). Here are some potential reason why, [...]
The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 6.16. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 28 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.
We're pleased to announce the availability of Datasentinel for PostgreSQL version 2022.11
Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2023 (P2D2 2023) will be held on January 31 - February 1 in Prague, Czech Republic. The conference focuses on topics for PostgreSQL users and developers. For more information about the event, please see the website at https://www.p2d2.cz/
We are now accepting proposals for talks and trainings in both Czech and English. As in previous years, the conference is a single-track event with a mix of talks in Czech and English.
There have been two high profile hacks in Australia recently, Medibank and Optus. Optus is one of the largest mobile phone networks in Australia. Hackers obtained details of identity documents for millions of Optus customers. The situation is so bad that all Australian states are reprinting driving licenses.
The first thing that came to my mind was my experience with Matthias Kirschner and his FSFE. In 2017, the community elected me as the Fellowship representative in FSFE.
Within a few days, I received concerns from John Sullivan, the Executive Director of the real FSF. He told me that the FSFE, the fake FSF, was impersonating the FSF, in other words, behaving like common garden variety identity thieves...
Lars Wirzenius generously offered to teach Rust basics in a few free trainings for programmers who already contribute to free and open source projects via code. I got a lot out of an intro-to-Python workshop many years ago (curriculum), and I've been meaning to get going learning Rust, so I decided to sign up, and I participated in one today. Lars asked that participants "tell others what you thought of the course" even if it was highly critical, so here's my report.
The last time around I learned that Go 1.21 may have a clear builtin partly because you can't delete map entries that have a floating point NaN as their key. Of course this isn't the only weird thing about NaNs as keys in maps, although you can pretty much predict all of them from the fact that NaNs never compare equal to each other.
This library can turn SVG path data to tagged sexp format (compatible with SXML). You can switch between absolute and relative coordinates, and turn it into a minified string.
The procedures work on both this library’s own tagged format and on path data strings.
Recently I noticed an interesting Go change in the development version, which adds type checking of a 'clear' builtin function. This was the first I'd heard of such a thing, but the CL had a helpful link to the Go issue, proposal: spec: add clear(x) builtin, to clear map, zero content of slice, ptr-to-array #56351. The title basically says what it's about, but it turns out that there's a surprising and interesting reason why Go sort of needs this.
On the surface you might think that this wasn't an important change, because you can always do this by hand even for maps.
Add Significance Level and Stars to Plot in R, In this article, I’ll show you how to use the R programming language’s ggsignif package to annotate a ggplot2 plot with significance levels.
In Haskell, for any type T (for example Double), there is a corresponding type Maybe T. An object of this type either has form Just x, where x is of type T, or is Nothing. Thus one can use the Maybe T type to extend the type T to a type allowing missing values. One can test whether a Maybe T object y is not “missing” with isJust y, and, if so, one can extract its T value with fromJust y, which returns the object x of type T such that y equals Just x. There is also the function isNothing, whose name is explicit.
There is something similar in C++, available since C++ 17: the type std::optional<T>. I used it with Rcpp to allow missing values in vectors of lazy numbers.
In this guide you will learn how to fetch your marketing data and apply a Marketing Mix Model to elucidate which source presents the best marketing performance. Marketing Mix Modelling is a statistical analyses such as multivariate regressions on sales and marketing time series data to estimate the impact of various marketing tactics on a given variable related to reward (e.g., number of clicks).
Our aim will be to elucidate which marketing platform presents the highest number of clicks per spend for the last year. More concretely, we will consider Facebook and Google Ads data.
A riddle about leap years: a solar year consists of approximately 365.24217 mean solar days, which is why there is a leap year approximately every four years. Approximately because the Gregorian calendar plans 97 and not 100 leap years over 400 years. Is this the optimal solution? No, since the Gregorian difference is 3.3 10âÂȉ´ day per year, or 0.132 day per 400 years, while using 85 leap years over every 351 years leads to a difference of 4.76 10âÂȉ¶ day per year, or 0.002 day per 400 years… (With a further gain by a factor 4 with 116 leap years every 479 years.)
A recent C++ standard (C++17) introduced new functions to parse floating-point numbers std::from_chars, from strings (e.g., ASCII text) to binary numbers. How should such a function parse values that cannot be represented exactly? The specification states that the resulting value rounded to nearest. This means that 1.0000000000000000001 and 0.999999999999999999 become exactly 1.0.
The C language has its own functions (strtod/strtof). I could not find a reference in the standard as to how it should round, but the source code suggests that the functions round according to the current floating-point rounding mode, as determined by the fegetround() function. One can round toward zero, up, down or to nearest. I wrote a small command-line utility to test it out.
It was a long time ago that I added a recipe to build arp-scan in OpenEmbedded.
[...]
Have changed the package-list in woofQ so now will build with the arp-scan from OE.
If I say "summer school" to you then you'll probably think of extra sessions in summer holidays for children; depending on where you grew up, you might expect such sessions to be either exciting non-academic activities or catch-up lessons. What about summer schools for research students (what I'll call "research summer schools" for the rest of this post, though in research circles they're unambiguously referred to as just "summer schools")?
I've co-organised four in-person research summer schools, most recently as part of the Programming Language Implementation Summer School (PLISS) series, and spoken at two others, and one thing that I've realised is that many people don't really know what they involve. Indeed, I didn't fully realise what they are, or could be, even after I'd been involved in several! This post is my brief attempt to pass on some of what I've learnt about research summer schools.
I played around with 0x, a command-line tool for producing an interactive flamegraph from a Node process. I wanted to write about how to profile code and look for bottlenecks but I wanted to show a real-life example by finding an optimization in an open source library.
I profiled the svelte compiler and found a potential micro-optimization. Specifically the clone utility adapted from lukeed/klona. In my tests it was slower than both JSON stringifying and parsing, and structuredClone. But making the code change isn't straight forward as the clone utility "[skips] function values in objects when cloning, so we don't break tests". I also didn't want to waste a maintainer's time by opening a PR without confidence it was actually a good idea.
When I talk to people about Git, almost everyone has a strong reaction to the git rebase command. This command has caused many people to change directory, remove the repository, and just re-clone to start over. I think this comes from misconceptions about how branching actually works, a pretty terrible default interface, and some merge conflicts mucking things up.
As a technical writer working for ATIX, my tasks include creating and maintaining documentation for Foreman at github.com/theforeman/foreman-documentation. Git helps me track versions of content, and to collaborate with the open source community. It's an integral part of storing the results of my work, sharing it, and discussing improvements. My main tools include my browser, OpenSSH to connect to Foreman instances, Vim to edit source files, and Git to version content.
This article focuses on recurring challenges when taking the first steps with Git and contributing to Foreman documentation. This is meant for intermediate Git users.
Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework. The difference between Bootstrap is that Tailwind does not provide predefined classes for elements such as tables or buttons. It makes it easier to write and maintain the code of your application. You don’t have to switch back and forth between CSS and your main HTML template.
Flowbite enables us to build websites faster with components on top of Tailwind CSS. It’s open-source and it’s built with utility classes from Tailwind CSS that can be used as a starting point when creating user interfaces.
In this tutorial, I will show you how you can create a beautiful Django UI using Tailwind CSS and Flowbite.
Rails CRUD processes is very easy to create, this makes it easy to work on something else. Compare to Django CRUD operation, I can say for Django you need to have sort of a hacking mentality to go through it, but for Rails its just one command and everything is created on a fly.
In this article, we will be using tf.estimator.LinearClassifier to build a model and train it on the famous titanic dataset. All of this will be done by using the TensorFlow API.
When we wish for things to be simpler, we usually mean we want products and services to have fewer steps, fewer controls, fewer options, less to learn. But at the same time, we still want all of the same features and capabilities. These two categories of desires are often at odds with each other and distort how we understand the complex.
The rest is history. Three decades of friendship, comradery, and solidarity that I will cherish forever.
Last April, I did what I always do when I visit Youngstown: I visited Staughton and Alice at their Niles home, the only home they have ever owned and where they have lived for over 40 years. Also, as always, I stopped to take with me vanilla ice cream for Staughton, a favorite of his, and grapes for Alice, who can’t eat ice cream. Alice met me at the door, and we took up our seats as usual, in the corner adjacent to the kitchen where a few chairs and a reading couch are cozily facing each other. Staughton, who would ordinarily have been at the front door with Alice to greet me, was not there. Alice said he would join us in a moment.
From the start of September to the start of November, Russia’s prison population had its largest decrease since at least 2010, according to the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona.
These days, sending a picture to someone else is as simple as pulling out your smartphone and sending it by email or text message. It’s so simple a child can do it, but that simple user experience masks a huge amount of complexity, from the compression algorithms in the phones to the huge amount of distributed infrastructure needed to connect them together. As wonderful and enabling as all that infrastructure can be, sometimes it’s just too much for the job.
Indeed, the story of how one lone scholar from the Soviet Union managed to convince the wider world that he had cracked the code of the Maya without actually setting foot in the Americas is now the stuff of academic legend, not least because -- like the ancient culture he studied -- Knorozov's life is shrouded in mystery, particularly when it comes to his formative years in Ukraine.
There are two ways to present statistical process control: one for the practitioner, and one for the statistician. This is the practitioner’s version. In this version, the reason behind some things will be given as, People have relied on these tools to increase quality and decrease costs for over 80 years. Trust me, it works.
The world of microwave RF design appears to the uninitiated to be full of unimaginably exotic devices, as engineers harness the laws of physics to tame radio signals to their will. Among the weapons in their arsenal are materials of known dielectric properties, from which can be made structures with the desired effects on RF that encounters them. This has traditionally been a difficult and expensive process, but it’s one now made much easier by the availability of 3D printer filaments with a range of known dielectric values.
The past few weeks, I talked somewhat in depth about kerosene lanterns and why you should buy one. This week, I’m covering a related technology - kerosene heaters. They’re a very useful thing to have around for when the power grid goes down in the winter, and you’d like to avoid freezing. I’m also going to do a teardown of a reasonably modern one, just so you can see what makes them tick inside. They’re quite simple!
For those that don’t know, Gaggia is a company that produces a line of affordable “entry-level” espresso coffee makers that offer good quality consumer espresso machines at reasonable prices. The entry level machines don’t offer fine grained control over temperature, pressure and steam which is where the Gagguino project comes in.
When it comes to repairability of electronic devices, much depends on how helpful the original manufacturer is. Some make repairs very easy by publishing detailed service manuals and selling spare parts. Others keep everything under wraps to protect their intellectual property, turning even a supposedly simple fix into a reverse engineering ordeal. When [BuyItFixIt] got his hands on a FLIR multimeter-thermal camera combination instrument with a broken display, he quickly found that FLIR was firmly in the “all our designs are top secret” camp and wouldn’t even tell him what kind of display they had used.
There’s no shame in admitting you’ve been burned by a cheapo USB cable — ever since some bean counter realized there was a few cents to be saved by producing “power only” USB cables, no hardware hacker has been safe. But with this simple tester from [ÃÂlvaro Prieto] in your arsenal, you’ll never be fooled again.
We love retrocomputing and tiny computers here at Hackaday, so it’s always nice to see projects that combine the two. [Eivind]’s TinyLlama lets you play DOS games on a board that fits in your hand.
According to Sophos the evolving economics of the underground has not only incentivised the growth of ransomware and the “as-a-service" industry, but also increased the demand for credential theft-andwith the expansion of web services, various types of credentials, especially cookies, can be used in numerous ways to gain a deeper foothold in networks, even bypassing MFA. Credential theft also remains one of the easiest ways for novice criminals to gain access to underground marketplaces and begin their “career.”
Security updates have been issued by Debian (graphicsmagick and krb5), Fedora (dotnet6.0, js-jquery-ui, kubernetes, and xterm), Gentoo (php and postgresql), Mageia (php-pear-CAS, sysstat, varnish, vim, and x11-server), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, binutils, dpkg, firefox, frr, grub2, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kubevirt stack, libpano, nodejs16, openjpeg, php7, php74, pixman, python-Twisted, python39, rubygem-loofah, sccache, sudo, thunderbird, tor, and tumbler), and Ubuntu (flac, git, linux-azure-fde, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, and linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-raspi).
Cybersecurity continues to be a hot topic. More and more organizations are getting hit by ransomware attacks, critical open software vulnerabilities are making news, and we’re seeing industries and governments coming together to discuss initiatives to improve software security.
A company offered recovery services based on this break, but was reluctant to advertise because it didn’t want Zeppelin’s creators to fix their encryption flaw.
Detective Eric Matthews decided Jessica Logan probably killed her baby before he talked to a single eyewitness or collected almost any evidence. At that point, on Oct. 9, 2019, the coroner hadn’t yet announced a cause of death. What Matthews did have€ was a recording of Logan’s 911 call from two days earlier.
The detective scribbled notes as he listened.
As several media reports pointed to the imminent release of the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 (DPDPB, 2022) and the draft Digital India Bill, we wrote to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) on November 17, 2022, urging them to hold transparent and deliberative public consultations for both. Given the importance, urgency, and wide impact of these pieces of legislation, we recommended other steps that the Ministry may adopt to further improve public participation in the decision making process.
To Meity, with concern
Both the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Shri Ashniwi Vaishnaw and the Minister of State (MoS) for Information Technology, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar made statements covered in the media regarding the introduction of a draft Digital India Bill (see here and here), as well as the draft DPDPB (see here and here). On November 19, 2022, the DPDPB, 2022 was released by MeitY for public consultation. The Ministry has invited feedback on the DPDPB, 2022 in a chapter wise manner by December 17, 2022. While we appreciate that a draft bill has been put out for public consultation, we would have preferred if the Ministry had made available a white paper underlining the issues it considered while developing the “comprehensive legal framework”, of which the DPDPB, 2022 will be a crucial part. This is one request we raised in our letter to MeitY, one day before the DPDPB, 2022 was made public.
Today, Public Knowledge joined the Yale Law School Technology Accountability and Competition Project, a division of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, in filing comments in the Federal Trade Commission’s proceeding on the prevalence of commercial surveillance and data security practices that harm consumers. The agency seeks comment on whether it should implement new trade regulation rules concerning how companies collect, use, and retain consumer data, as well as transfer, share, sell, or otherwise monetize that data in unfair or deceptive ways.
Public Knowledge urges the agency to go beyond codifying the current failed notice and choice framework and build a data protection regime predicated on data minimization, data access rights for consumers, and protection of civil rights. Furthermore, Public Knowledge cautions the agency against over reliance on consent or anonymization techniques to solve for consumer harms that arise from data collection, use, and sale mechanisms. Public Knowledge also encourages the FTC to use its “truth in advertising” expertise as a foundation for building rules governing AI; in other words, the algorithm has to effectively and accurately do the thing the creators claim it can do.
Grindr, which launched in 2009, reported roughly 11 million daily users per day last year. Users sent a combined 260 million messages in that same period, and spent an average of 61 minutes per day on the app. In the same announcement, Grindr estimated the value of its "highly engaged user base in a large and untapped addressable market" at $4 billion.
World leaders did not agree to phase down fossil fuels
“The Islamists are impressively well-organized. Time has come for anti-Islamists to emulate them. The Salzburg meeting got us off to a great start,” he said.
According to its website, the coalition “stands for peace, democracy, liberty and secular governance,” and is “deeply concerned by the continuing threat posed to these values by the actions and demands of Islamists in various places around the world.”
Participants in the forum, which ended on Oct. 30, agreed that radical Islamists’ influence is increasing in North America and Western Europe through infiltration of local and central governments.
Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said during an interview with French news agency AFP that beginning negotiations with Russia now, given the current situation at the front, would amount to capitulation.
Marcel Proust died a century ago on November 18, 1922, leaving behind one of the most remarkable literary investigations into human nature and society.
With Kiev exposed for a lie that could have triggered a third world war, it is time to examine past deceptions that Western media promoted.
In the Ukraine War, where accurate information has almost ceased to be relevant (unless you believe the sludge from any one side), the latest shock and shudder came in the form of a missile that fell on Polish territory.€ As a result, two farmers lost their lives in the village of Przewodów.
The farmers, as the pencilled in victims of a broader power play, almost ceased to be relevant.€ Discussions moved on to a potential violation of Polish territory and the prospect of NATO engagement.€ The missile had been “Russian-made”, which tickled those keen to push a widening of the conflict.€ Never mind that Ukraine has its own share of Russian and Soviet-era weapons systems.
The Ukrainian state, like Russia, is rightwing. But unlike any other country in the world (at least since the fall of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain), Ukraine has organized Nazi and fascist groupings overtly incorporated into its Armed Forces. One of these is the Azov Battalion, who have massive (and growing) influence within the Zelenskyy regime.
However, it should not be so surprising that the Ukrainian state remains committed to honoring contemporary fascists. From 2014 (after the U.S. supported overthrow of the previous government) through the winter of 2022, countless monuments were constructed honoring WWII era fascist leader Stepan Bandera; a man who collaborated with the Nazis and played a hand in the holocaust (1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered in death camps and by firing squad during the Second World War). This is the man that the Ukrainian state, ruling class, and growing fascist movement chose to elevate to national hero status.
Meanwhile, the M23 rebels—backed by Rwanda—have expanded their attacks in the DRC. In retaliation, the DRC expelled Rwandan Ambassador Vincent Karega. The M23 with the assistance of Rwanda troops captured Kiwanja and Rutshuru, two towns in the DRC’s North Kivu province. Rwanda argues that it was the DRC that violated agreements leading to the fighters being reinstated.
In August, a leaked report from the United Nations showed that Rwanda had backed the M23. It was difficult for Rwanda to deny the details in the report, particularly after U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood, alternate representative for special political affairs, told the UN Security Council that his government calls “on state actors to stop their support for these groups, including the Rwandan Defense Forces’ assistance to M23.” The M23 is a recent entrant into the wars in the DRC’s eastern provinces, which have been ongoing since the early 1990s. A UN report from August 2010 details several hundred violent incidents that took place in the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003, with “deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people”; one estimate, based on studies conducted in 2000 and 2004, suggests that more than 3 million people have died in the conflict since 1998.
Instead, most are spending enormous sums on expanding their arsenals, and publicly announcing their plans for the “first use” of their H-bombs. All of them could be called “suiciders” in this context, the way Western writers deride the religious fundamentalists who tie explosives to their bodies turning themselves into bombs.
Yet it is possible that the military and scientific authorities in control of nuclear weapons know that they must not explode them. It could be that nuclear attack planners know that the effects of such detonations recoil and return like boomerangs to poison and kill the forces that unleash them, contaminating the sought-after territory.
A mass shooting that killed at least five people and injured at least 18 late Saturday at an€ LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado will be investigated as a hate crime, a local district attorney told reporters Sunday.
Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin says that, during the past two months, the bodies of more than 700 Ukrainians have been discovered in the liberated territories of Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Kherson.
A fire broke out in central Moscow, in an area near three train stations, sending black smoke, which was visible from many different districts, over the city.
The Russian Ministry of Defense says that Ukrainian artillery fired during the night of November 19 and the morning of November 20 fell on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), which Russian troops have captured.€
The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency repeated a demand that the area surrounding the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine be established as a demilitarized zone on Sunday, after at least a dozen shells exploded at the plant.
Reports of the shellings were "extremely disturbing," Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in a statement.
Bolivian lawyer and professor Gabriel Villalba Pérez spoke to Peoples Dispatch about the political conflict at the center of the anti-government strike called by the conservative opposition.
A decadeslong pressure campaign by policymakers and advocates in the Global South was credited Sunday with pushing wealthy nations to finally drop their opposition to a "loss and damage" fund to help developing countries that face some of the worst climate impacts, allowing the financing plan to be included in the final agreement out of the meeting.
"Through people power, Global South movements made climate reparations and a fossil fuel phase out front-and-center issues of COP27."
"Yes, Greenland's Ice Is Melting…"
The volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka in Kamchatka has started erupting, reports RIA Novosti, citing the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Electricity demand varies throughout the day. When demand is higher, electricity prices go up. Most UK consumers are insulated from this variability - we pay a fixed price per kWh no matter what the actual wholesale cost.
But it doesn't need to be this way. Exposing users to the immense variability in pricing is probably too dangerous - as seen in Texas recently. Imagine if your electricity provider could say "hey, prices are going to be high tonight. We'll pay you to use less electricity!"
The embattled firm, which filed for bankruptcy in the US last week, says it owes about $1.45bn to its top 10 creditors, but has not named any.
The collapse of the world's second largest [cryptocurrency] exchange shook confidence in the already troubled cryptocurrency market.
The cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents filed late Saturday night.
The Bahamas-based platform filed for bankruptcy earlier this month after the company, run by 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed. The company saw its value soar to a peak of $32 billion in January.
This week saw the cancellation of the Australian Stock Exchange’s long-running effort to build a blockchain-based trading system. Which, oddly, has me thinking of 2016, when AWS decided not to make a strategic investment in blockchain, with my input a contributing factor. It felt like a good story while it was happening.
Since I left AWS in 2020, I’ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can’t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong feelings about the ethics. This story, though, doesn’t reflect poorly on anyone and I’m pretty sure nothing in it is material to any business plans at AWS or elsewhere.
Over the years, Norway has served as a relatively good model of meaningful humanitarian and medical aid. This is especially true if compared to other self-serving western countries, where aid is often linked to direct political and military interests. Still, the public humiliation of poor, hungry and diseased Africa is still disquieting.
The same images and TV ads are omnipresent everywhere in the West. The actual tangible value of such charity aside, campaigns to help poor Africa do more than perpetuate a stereotype, they also mask the actual responsibility of why natural resource-rich Africa remains poor, and why the supposed generosity of the West over the decades has done little to achieve a paradigm shift in terms of the Continent’s economic health and prosperity.
That path, despite the oft-used slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” has been a restructuring of the economy toward capitalism, albeit a gradual entry on Chinese terms and keeping the “commanding heights” of the economy in state hands. If we attempt to grasp the meaning of the communiqués and reports issued surrounding the party’s 20th National Congress, it would be better to observe through a holistic lens rather than fixating on personalities.
To read this article, log in here or subscribe here. If you are logged in but can't read CP+ articles, check the status of your access hereIn order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.
On a sunny and cool September Saturday in 2011, hundreds of activists and protestors took to Zuccotti Park in New York City's Financial District. They set up tents, mutual aid stations, and more, occupying the space to protest inequality and corporate corruption. Occupy Wall Street brought the terms "the 99%" and "the 1%" into the mainstream American consciousness. When police raided Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night that November, the movement's flagship occupation came to an end. But what it sparked lives on today.
Across the country, the biggest winner of this year’s elections was not the Republicans who regained the U.S. House, nor the Democrats who held on to the Senate. The biggest winner was affordable housing.
Number of previously Democratic U.S. House seats Republicans captured in this year's midterm elections by drawing congressional districts rigged to their advantage, with the chamber now under GOP control while counting is still underway in some races more than a week after Election Day: more than 12
Iger has agreed to serve as CEO for two years, according to the press release. He previously served as CEO from 2005 to 2020.
There's been talks of the imment demise of Twitter due to how many employees chose severance over Elon Musk's "Twitter 2.0" ultimatum. Will Twitter fail?
How it could fail: [...]
The e-petition is officially hosted by the Parliament of Victoria. The legislature was formed in 1851 using the British system as a model for Australian democracy. The state itself is named after Queen Victoria. Therefore, if these DoS attacks are from monarchy supporters, it is ironic that they are attacking the very heart of a democratic system based on the tradition of constitutional monarchy.
By official vote counts, Kazakhstan's incumbent President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev was the clear winner in Sunday’s snap elections, earning 81.3 percent of the vote, according to the country’s Central Election Commission.
There are calls for Ron DeSantis, fresh from an effortless re-election as Governor of Florida, to replace Trump as the Republican standard bearer. Absurdly, the Democrats are doing victory laps despite losing control of the House of Representatives and barely holding the line elsewhere.
Normally, it is election losers who minimise their failure and point to dubious silver linings. On this occasion, however, it is the Republican leadership talking up defeats in order to blame them on Trump and discredit him as a vote loser. Former Trump acolytes shamelessly turn their coats overnight and denounce him as a political liability.
But first, to avoid exaggeration or a misleading picture, we must recognize that the problems of misinformation and disinformation that enable twenty-first century politics to “build a bridge to the 19th century” are bigger than Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok. The traditional media has also failed us in important ways.
To take just one example, a poll by Data for Progress found that voters in West Virginia — one of America’s poorest states — supported the landmark Build Back Better legislation proposed by Democrats in 2021 by a margin of 43 percentage points. They supported its individual components by similar or larger margins: investing in long-term care, expanding Medicare coverage, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, extending health insurance subsidies, and clean energy investments. This bill would have changed the United States arguably as much as the New Deal, which put Democrats in power nationally for almost all of 1932 to 1980. And it would have transformed the lives of West Virginians, like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security did. But their senator, Joe Manchin, blocked it.
Critics say the need for these evasive neologisms is a sign that TikTok is too aggressive in its moderation. But the platform says a firm hand is needed in a freewheeling online community where plenty of users do try to post harmful videos.
Those who run afoul of the rules may get barred from posting. The video in question may be removed. Or it may simply be hidden from the For You page, which suggests videos to users, the main way TikToks get wide distribution. Searches and hashtags that violate policies may also be redirected, the app said.
When people on TikTok believe their videos have been suppressed from view because they touched on topics the platform doesn’t like, they call it “shadow banning,” a term that also has had currency on Twitter and other social platforms. It is not an official term used by social platforms, and TikTok has not confirmed that it even exists.
In early October 2022, acting in this role,€ Greenblatt called for Jewish American organizations€ to do battle against anti-Zionists (that is, those who oppose the discriminatory nature and policies of the Israeli government). Because Zionists consider Israel a state representing world Jewry, being opposed to Israel, for whatever reason, seems to them to be anti-Semitic. Greenblatt has dutifully conformed to this position. He has declared that anti-Zionism is “obviously” anti-Semitism. Then he went a step further and said that “We must reckon with the fact that there are anti-Zionists within the Jewish community. The reality is that just because you are Jewish doesn’t exempt you from trafficking in anti-Zionism.”
Now Mr. Greenblatt may or may not have always been a thick-headed fellow but, as the leader of a Zionist organization, he is now led to think like one. He has committed the classic mistake of conflating two different things: anti-Semitism and standing against Zionist ideology. This may well be a purposeful attempt to set up a “red herring” argument—one that diverts attention from a central concern, for example, the bigoted practices of Zionist Israel, with the flawed claim that being against Zionism means you are against the Jews, even when asserted by Jews—a strange position to take.
Reporter Rasmus Tantholdt is having a pretty difficult time in Qatar. Less than a week before the 2022 World Cup starts, the TV2 journalist experienced an issue with security officers during a live TV broadcast.
Tanthold was interrupted by two Qatari security officers while on air. They told him his team wasn’t allowed to film in the area and covered the camera lens. The correspondent showed the men the accreditations given to him and his crew by FIFA, after which it is believed that the guards smashed the camera.
Here is the detailed argument we submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg...
In this episode, I will bring on a very dear friend, Don Damond, to help us answer that question. In 2017, Don’s life was torn apart by the tragic killing of his fiancee, Justine Ruszczyk Damond, at the hands of Minneapolis Police. Justine called 911 to assist someone she thought was being assaulted and, instead, ended up becoming a victim herself. While standing in her alley, barefoot and in pajamas, she was shot and killed by a police officer.
But Pirfalak’s mother blamed security forces who she said "shot repeatedly at" their car, killing her son and wounding her husband.
By Marcus Barnett / Labor Notes In Britain today, anyone asking a worker about the direction the country is headed will be unlikely to receive a printable answer.€ Stumbling from crisis to crisis, the country is on its third prime minister of the year. Energy bills have€ skyrocketed by 96 percent€ since last winter, and rent has […]
How will this competition play out in the end? That’s what I want to know. The World Cup will have lasted four weeks by the end of the competition on December 18 by which time 32 teams will have competed across 64 matches. Children will be glued to their phone screens or on the edges of seats. Older fans may celebrate with a slice of Dundee cake. Excited truck drivers will pound their wheels at traffic lights. Women, as ever, will be better informed than men. Despite the fact the Qataris, very last minute, 48 hours before the tournament began in fact, were demanding FIFA remove sales of alcohol from actual stadiums, lakes of the stuff will have been consumed, if people can afford it, in the vast specialist Qatari tents — oceans, elsewhere in the world.
So why are some of us who truly love the sport — football, as we of course call it here, footie, the beautiful game, call it what we will — not happy? I would have thought the reason for the magic and excitement and thrill of this world-unifying event feeling so tarnished was obvious by now. So many lives have been lost building the infrastructure — The Guardian was reporting last year that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died since Qatar won the right to host the event in 2010. Obviously the figure will be larger now. Also, the human rights record of Qatar when it comes to LGBTQ+ is atrocious — basically homosexuality is illegal in Qatar and punishable by imprisonment. A new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report has documented alleged cases of beatings and sexual harassment. Annoying many here are the likes of former England player David Beckham receiving a reported €£10 million to act as a Qatar World Cup ambassador in the face of such abuses.
But is overprovisioning the only way to ensure resilience? We don’t think so. To understand the alternative approach we’re championing, though, you first need to recall how the Internet works.
[...]
The real problem is not so much the volume of content being passed around—it’s how it is being delivered, from a central source to many different far-away users, even when those users are located right next to one another.
While industry players commenting on the release of the National Broadband Map on Friday praised the Federal Communications Commission for its efforts, several critics said that its inaccuracies are too many to be corrected before the map becomes the basis used to allocate tens of billions of dollars of federal broadband funding.
Published early on Friday, the FCC’s new map contains nationwide, location-level availability data submitted by service providers and layered over a dataset of broadband serviceable locations. The FCC has acknowledged that this initial version of the map will contain inaccuracies.
A class action law firm has filed a suit against Apple and Amazon, accusing the companies of price-fixing Ios devices through an agreement that blocks third-party sellers from Amazon unless they're authorized by Apple. The suit should be a slam-dunk – but even more, the conduct it accuses Apple and Amazon of should never have been permitted in the first place.
Banksy, the mysterious English street artist, won a trademark case over one of his most famous images and will be able to maintain his anonymous identity.
The E.U. Board of Appeals recently overturned a 2021 decision which found Banksy’s trademark of his well-known graffiti monkey to be invalid.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the victory is that Banksy can remain as he has always been: mysterious. A previous dispute over the copyright to Banksy’s “Flower Thrower” found that “if Banksy could not be identified as the ‘unquestionable owner’ of his graffiti, as his identity is a secret, ‘it further cannot be established without question that the artist holds any copyrights to a graffiti.’”
“This is a significant victory for Banksy, or more accurately Pest Control Office Limited, which enables Banksy to conceal his identity,” Lee Curtis, a trademark specialist at the law firm HGF Limited, told The Art Newspaper. “The fact that [Banksy] may have said on two occasions that ‘copyright is for losers’ should not impact on the validity of his trademark registration.”
In a comprehensive ruling published last week, the board of appeal challenged the claim that the mark was made in bad faith, arguing that: “All the arguments, facts and reasonings provided by the cancellation applicant taken as a whole cannot justify or explain clearly a dishonest behaviour from the EUTM proprietor (Pest Control) when he filed the contested mark and, consequently, the presumption of good faith is still valid and the cancellation applicant failed to prove the contrary.”
The mark is linked to a work created by Banksy in Brighton in 2002, depicting a monkey with a sandwich board hung around its neck, reading "Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge". The recent decision clarified that, just because a trademark might also be a work of art subject to copyright protection, it should not mean that it cannot act as a trademark or brand.
Banksy's mark representing his 2002 graffiti of a monkey strapped with a blank sign, which in the original artwork reads "Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge" - has just been declared valid by the EUIPO Board of Appeal.
Pest Control Office Limited, the company handling Banksy's legal affairs, had filed an EU Application for the mark in 2018, covering goods in Classes 9, 16, 25 & 28 and services in Class 41.
A few months after the mark registered, Full Colour Black Limited, describing themselves as "a contemporary Art Licensing company specialising in the commercialisation of world famous street art" filed a request for a declaration of invalidity, claiming descriptiveness/non-distinctiveness and bad faith.
The Board of Appeal has now cancelled this decision, by highlighting the following: [...]
MindGeek is the owner of popular adult sites including PornHub, YouPorn, and Redtube. While these services had issues with rightsholders in the past, their parent company transformed itself into one of the largest online copyright enforcers. MindGeek subsidiary MG Premium is currently listed as the most prolific sender of DMCA notices to Google, with well over 121 million complaints this year alone.
The graffiti artist posted a photo of the Regent Street store in London, and suggested shoplifters should visit.
He wrote on Instagram: "They've helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?"
The shop featured Banksy's Flower Thrower graffiti plus clothes bearing his images. Guess has not commented.
CRTC Chair Ian Scott returns to the Standing Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications tomorrow for yet another appearance on Bill C-11. According to multiple sources, the appearance came at the Scott’s request, who is seeking yet another chance to “clarify” his earlier remarks. I’m hardly one to criticize multiple committee appearances, but the continued effort to clarify earlier comments smacks of political involvement. Indeed, when combined with the controversial Section 7(7) of the bill, it suggests that the government envisions a permanent erosion of the independence of the broadcast regulator in Canada.
Scott’s adventure with Bill C-11 started with an appearance before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on May 18th, when he was asked about user content regulation by MP Rachael Thomas:
Thomas: So all these individuals are individual users creating content. It would appear that the bill does, or could in fact, capture them, correct?
Scott: As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.
Two weeks, later Scott was back before the committee with Liberal MP Chris Bittle asking Scott to clarify his comments on user content regulation:
Mr. Scott, to clarify comments from a few weeks ago at committee, you said that proposed section 4.2 would give the CRTC the power to regulate user-generated content. What did you mean by the term “regulate”?
The little village where I come from has one pub and one church. The pub's doing fine, but the church is in decline. People don't go any more, so the collection plate doesn't see much.
Love in a Time of Low Expectations by Sahara Hotnights is my fave record of the last five years, when Hiss Spun by Chelsea Wolfe came out, although that album lives and dies by its best track, “Twin Fawn”, whereas Love in a Time of Low Expectations is all killer.
Sahara Hotnights have made quite a journey, it seems like, starting out in the nineties with the most perfect seventies raw rock, veering into a retro 50s dansband sound, and now here they are with a polished, soft, smooth post-punk sound, sort of like a rounder and cleaner Joy Division or Warpaint.
I know I shouldn't hold myself to a post schedule cus that's unhealthy, but yeesh all my posts are so far apart. Anyway, if you're reading this from Cohost, hi! The link to the full blog is in my bio. If you're reading this from my website or gemini capsule, wow. I'm astonished. If you're reading this from Tumblr, then someone is impersonating me because I am now using Cohost as the CMS for this log!
I once again have an operational Pinephone (Piney)! Piney's screen got messed up, with a distortion around the edges, that over time started working its way inward. The distortion had to have something to do with the touch layer, because once it covered part of the keyboard, those letters would not work anymore. It was really frustrating. Due to that, I let Piney sit in a drawer for awhile, not updating it with the latest Mobian, not charging it, and just using a desktop instead when I was on the computer.
Well, no more! I know someone who had a Pinephone with a different problem - the SD card reader was no longer working, nor the SIM slot. So we did what any self-respecting tech geeks do in these situations, and cannibalized the phones to create one complete, working phone. Basically the internals from my Pinephone, and the screen and case from the other, were put together! The result - Piney lives again, and I am typing on it right now.
Brooks is famous for many things. Many people know him best as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, his musings on software engineering and why it’s so very hard. Some of his prescriptions seem quaint todayââ¬â°—ââ¬â°no one these days would print out documentation on microfiche every night to distribute to developersââ¬â°—ââ¬â°but his observations about the problems of development remain spot-on. But he did so much more. [...]
He was also a lead on a failed project, the IBM 8000 series. He tried to resign from IBM after it failed; [CEO Thomas] Watson replied, “I just spent a billion dollars educating you; I’m not letting you go now!”
Brautigan’s poem inspires and terrifies me at the same time. It’s a reminder of how creepy a world full of devices that blur the line between life and objects could be, but there’s also something appealing about connecting more closely to the things we build. Far more insightful people than me have explored these issues, from Mary Shelley to Phillip K. Dick, but the aspect that has fascinated me most is how computers understand us.
We live in a world where our machines are wonderful at showing us near-photorealistic scenes in real time, and can even talk to us in convincing voices. Up until recently though, they’ve not been able to make sense of images or audio that are given to them as inputs. We’ve been able to synthesize voices for decades, but speech recognition has only really started working well in the last few years. Computers have been like Crocodile Sales Reps, with enormous mouths and tiny ears, great at talking but terrible at listening. That means they can be immensely frustrating to deal with, since they seem to have no ability to do what we mean. Instead we have to spend a lot of time painstakingly communicating our needs in a form that makes sense to them, even it is unnatural for us.
It got far more attention, and demanded far more of mine, than I had expected. It already has 223 links. I have been actively curating it, trying to impose a fairly uniform style on the link descriptions, and making agonising decisions on how to cut the directory into categories, and on where to place the various links in that hierarchy.
Dividing Geminispace, and hence in particular human endeavour, into disjoint categories is of course a fool's game. But it seems I decided to play it anyway. Any categorisation will be arbitrary and unsatisfying, and there will always be cases which resist unique classification. Borges imagined a classification of animals into those "(a) Belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, ... (g) stray dogs, ... (l) et cetera, ... (n) that from a long way off look like flies", and I'm not sure that the classification of Geminispace I've arrived at so far is much better justified. But let me try to justify it.
rgsrv is my first rust project. It's just for learning purposes and it's based on the webserver developed in the rust book. I used parts of int80h's gemserv and looked up a lot of things from his code. I hope he doesn't mind :-).
The code is in a very early state and just an experimentation with rust. It only serves static files and doesn't support cgi or client certificates, although I've planned to implement those features in future.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
I used the Gopher in the 90s and watched it vanish in the dark near
the Tannhäuser Gate.€ Then I saw it on the rise once again around
2010, again fading away several years later with the rise of Gemini.
Now I see people coming from Gemini to Gopher, wondering why things
are the way they are.
I was on Twitter back when it was operated via text messages. In the
time when there was a saying that Facebook is the people you went to
school with, Twitter is the people you wish you went to school with.
My capsule has now officially become my 'home' on the web. I've moved whatever pieces I had from my http blog over to a new part of my capsule and will continue writing my longer thought pieces there in the future.
It's kind of crazy how far my capsule's come since I booted this baby up earlier this year. Once in a while I'll take a second and go through the different pages and folders on my capsule and see how much I've written. Now that this is my official 'home' on the web, I plan to add even more content, from current projects to more pages of interest and reviews.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.