Python comes to Arduino, a look at the new version of Fedora Silverblue, Linux helps Windows work with old printers, running your own Mastodon instance, remastering Ubuntu ISOs, and more. With guest host Alan Pope (popey).
Here we review the upcoming changes to the Cinnamon Desktop by the Linux Mint team.
There has been a lot of recent discussions in the Linux sphere about Linux "distro reviews" and whether they are good content. Some have asserted that distro reviews are pointless. Some have even stated that such videos are harmful. As someone who has made literally hundreds of these kinds of videos, I'll share with you my thoughts and some of my experiences.
NVIDIA 515.86.01 is a small release that only brings an updated nvidia-settings control panel, which now correctly limits the allowed values for the GPUTargetFanSpeed option to match existing valid fan speed ranges on supported NVIDIA graphics cards. According to NVIDIA, valid ranges are 30%-100% for Ampere or newer GPUs, and 1%-100% for older NVIDIA GPUs.
In addition to the updated nvidia-settings control panel, the NVIDIA 515.86.01 release also improves support for the Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered video game by addressing a bug where the game could crash with “Xid 13” errors on Turing and later NVIDIA graphics cards. This issue only affected Linux users.
Zulip is a free and open-source team communication platform that offers a range of customization options, unlike Slack.
We looked at it last year, and it seemed like a promising open-source alternative to Slack with its features and accessibility.
It is free to get started using its official hosted version on the web but comes with certain restrictions (like message history retention limit and no custom branding).
VLC 3.0.18 is here more than eight months after VLC 3.0.17 and introduces support for the RISC-V hardware architecture, DVBSub support inside MKV files, Y16 chroma support, as well as a major adaptive streaming update, notably for multiple timelines and WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks Format).
This release also brings various enhancements to the application to improve seeking in OGG files, seeking in some fragmented MP4 files, playback of some FLAC files, SMBv1 and SMBv2 behavior, and FTP compatibility.
Both the Linux zip and zipcloak commands can create encrypted zip files, but they have some important and interesting differences. Here’s what you need to know about how they work and what you should understand when using them.
Let’s say you want to swap the background image of an element based on a certain condition, like whether it’s pressed, using custom properties.
To view your digital images and pictures, Raspberry Pi comes with a built-in Image Viewer application, which allows users to view their digital gallery, use various features like rotate, zoom in, zoom out, flip, and adjust the size of the image, and many others. This tutorial will provide a guide on how to use Image Viewer on the Raspberry Pi system.
This simple tutorial shows how to reboot your machine into another OS or grub boot menu entry directly from Ubuntu.
Say you have Ubuntu dual- or multi-boot with other operating systems, and want to reboot directly into a specific OS when working done in current Ubuntu. Or you want to reboot with another Kernel or maybe recovery mode without any keyboard press while booting. This tutorial may help.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Lua Programming Language in Ubuntu systems
Lua is a lightweight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded use in applications. Lua is cross-platform, since the interpreter of compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C, and Lua has a relatively simple C API to embed it into applications.
Lua originated in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. It provided the basic facilities of most procedural programming languages, but more complicated or domain-specific features were not included; rather, it included mechanisms for extending the language, allowing programmers to implement such features. As Lua was intended to be a general embeddable extension language, the designers of Lua focused on improving its speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development.
qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client that is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to €µTorrent. It uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and the libtorrent-rasterbar library. qBittorrent has been around for over a decade and has seen many new features added, such as support for IPv6, a new search engine, an improved Web UI, an integrated torrent search engine, and much more.
For Debian users, qBittorrent is probably one of the best options for users seeking a balanced torrent client with advanced features without an over-complicated UI while keeping bloat to a minimum; as most know, Debian excels in keeping itself as lean as possible.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qBittorrent on Debian 11, 10, or even Sid desktop GUI version or install qBittorrent-nox, which can be installed on a desktop or headless server using the command line terminal to access the WEB UI, which can be accessed remotely and set up on a VPS if required for a seedbox.
The Linux Kernel is the heart of any GNU/Linux operating system. It manages the communication between the software and hardware and provides a platform for running applications. The default kernel provided with Ubuntu is good for most users, but it lacks some features and options that are available in other kernels. XanMod is a free, open-source alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu. It features custom settings and new features that are designed to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
For users who would benefit the most using XanMod, it is popular among Linux users who want better gaming performance, streaming quality, or ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux kernels before landing on most distributions. Most desktop users are not even into gaming but want a new kernel for better hardware support, making XanMod one of the more popular choices. I would recommend for more information on XanMod Kernel before installing, visit the XanMod Kernel features information page.
Since you'll be adding their repository to the system, you'll also get updates on the installed Node.js version directly from the source.
You can also use Snap to get Node on Ubuntu. I'll discuss that method in the later sections of this article.
Sounds good? Make up your mind about the Node version you want to install and follow the instructions below.
Oh, wait! You need to make sure that curl is installed on your Ubuntu system.
Memcached can be extremely useful for speeding up response times on dynamic websites. Because the software resides in RAM and not on external storage devices, it can take advantage of when your website needs information quickly without waiting. When used correctly, Memcached can significantly improve the user experience on your website by reducing latency and increasing the overall speed of response times. Additionally, because Memcached is open-source, anyone can use it without paying licensing fees. However, because Memcached relies on RAM, it can be expensive to scale up if you have a large website with a lot of traffic. Overall, Memcached can be a great way to improve the performance of your website, but you need to carefully consider whether or not it is the right solution for your specific needs.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install and configure Memcached on your Ubuntu 22.10, 22.04, and 20.04 Linux system and some basic configuration examples.
In this guide, we will show you how to install uGet Download manager in Ubuntu systems.
uGet is a lightweight yet powerful Open Source download manager for GNU/Linux developed with GTK+, which also comes packaged as a portable Windows app.
So in this article, we will show you how to install Tabby Terminal in your Ubuntu systems.
Tabby (formerly Terminus) is a highly configurable terminal emulator, SSH and serial client for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Tabby is an infinitely customizable cross-platform terminal app for local shells, serial, SSH and Telnet connections.
In this guide, we will show you how to install Papirus Icon Theme on Ubuntu systems.
Papirus is a free and open source SVG icon theme for Linux, based on Paper Icon Set with a lot of new icons and a few extras, like Hardcode-Tray support, KDE colorscheme support, Folder Color support, and others.
You are familiar with the history command in Linux. It lets you see which commands you ran in the past.
But there is one issue. By default, the history command does not show when the command was executed (with date and time).
This could be helpful in some cases to know the time when a certain command was executed last.
And in this quick tip, I will show you how you can enable timestamps in the history command.
When running containers, you may have files that you need to copy from the host machine into the container. This can be for a number of reasons, such as configuration files that are specific to your environment and cannot be sourced from standard locations or if you want to leverage a private registry like Atlas as part of your workflow. If this sounds like something you need in your workflow, continue reading this blog post to learn more about how it’s done! There are multiple ways of doing this but the following is the most common. Keep reading to learn more…
In this tutorial, we are going to learn about Linux Volume Management. We will see what is LVM in Linux, advantages of LVM, how to create Volume group and Logical volumes in Linux with examples.
We feature a large number of game console mods here, because enhancing the experience of using a classic machine often involves some really clever work. But here’s one that’s a bit different, instead of upgrading his Game Boy Advance, [Wenting Zhang] has downgraded it from a colour screen to a monochrome LCD. Take a look at the video below the break.
With the recent release of DXVK 2.0, the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan translation layer, it pulled in DXVK-Native for Native Linux builds and so Valve has upgraded Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2.
Possibly one of the most promising retro-styled FPS games coming to Linux, Selaco is getting a huge demo upgrade next month. Built with GZDoom, it's ridiculously impressive with so much going on it's hard to believe it's using that game engine.
Another developer attempting to turn the classic Chess into something weird and wonderful. Chess Survivors takes set pieces and moves from Chess, sticks it into a blender and out came a grid based, quick-turn, roguelike.
WaterField Designs, maker of various luxury accessories for different types of hardware, has announced their "Complete Case for Steam Deck" ready for all your travelling.
Broforce Forever is the name of a new free update coming to the crazy action-platform Broforce, sometime in early 2023.
OpenRazer, the project that aims to build up a collection of Linux drivers for various Razer devices version 3.5.0 is out now. Razer are a typical hardware vendor, not supporting Linux directly and so€ OpenRazer has ended up pretty essential to get the most out of your Razer devices.
Hello readers! Way back in 2015, I wrote a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game using Twitter.
I think it is fair to say that it is the best computer game I've ever published. And probably the only time I'll ever be reviewed in The Guardian and Kotaku!
One thing I do not do is lie. Yes, that is installed. Supports UEFI, syslinux (non UEFI) secure boot, line it up. It is online. Smokes the breaks of Ultimate Edition Linux, yes it is Arch based. Does it have Ultimate Edition Linux software built in? The answer is yes again. Repostorm took care of that & yes it is built in. Does it have a GUI based installer? Once again yes.
What is a Rolling release? There is no Ultimate Edition 7.7 release, it just keeps rolling. Software automatically updates. I went though hell to ensure that is exactly what happens.
Still powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, Alpine Linux 3.17 is here six months after Alpine Linux 3.16 and comes with OpenSSL 3.0 as the default OpenSSL implementation, Rust support on all available architectures, and support for the latest GNOME 43 and KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environments.
Alpine Linux 3.17 also ships with some of the most recent GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies like GCC 12, LLVM 15, GNU Bash 5.2, Kea 2.2, Perl 5.36, PostgreSQL 15, Node.js 18.12 LTS and 19.1, Ceph 17.2, Go 1.19, Rust 1.64, and .NET 7.0.100.
We are pleased to announce the release of Alpine Linux 3.17.0, the first in the v3.17 stable series.
Members of the openSUSE Project will gather tomorrow in the project’s online meeting room at 14:30 UTC for a Work Group to discuss high-level ideas, and the group will seek to idenfity requirements needed for consuming community software with SUSE’s Adaptable Linux Platform.
“We’re in a different position than with Leap 15 as ALP is developed fully in the open, therefore we can build on top of something which is already public,” wrote openSUSE Leap Release Manager Lubos Kocman in an email to the project. “We’re not looking for any implementation details, but rather high-level ideas and requirements.”
All attendees are asked to make themselves familiar with the current state of the ALP prototype, the work of the D-Installer and other aspects associated with development. The Work Group is for those who have tried ALP or for those who want to follow along.
This is simply my experience with this laptop, including my attempts to overcome certain issues with workarounds. If you find something that’s factually wrong about any part of this post, then please reach out!
Synced with the upstream software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series and still powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, Tails 5.7 is here to introduce a new tool that promises to let you clean metadata from your files. The tool is called Metadata Cleaner and comes as a drop-in replacement for MAT, which it uses as a backend, supporting the same file formats and offering the same level of security.
Focused on security, Tails 5.7 comes with an updated Tor browser and Metadata Cleaner, a tool to view and clean metadata in files.
Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian-based distro that differs from all other Linux distributions in that it is a live system solely focused on privacy.
The distribution is intended for security paranoids looking for maximum personal security and anonymity on the Internet. But, of course, this has its drawbacks.
For example, your changes don’t get saved because it is primarily designed to run from a USB stick. So, as soon as you reboot, everything goes to default.
When we switched to MAT 0.8.0 in Tails 4.0, MAT lost its graphical interface and was only accessible from the contextual menu of the Files browser. It became especially hard for new users of Tails to learn how to clean their files. Metadata Cleaner fixes this by providing a simple and easily discoverable graphic interface to remove metadata.
Metadata Cleaner works on the same file formats and is as secure as MAT because Metadata Cleaner also uses MAT in the background to do the actual cleaning.
In previous blog posts, we’ve covered digital twins in the automotive industry and how they can help further the development of autonomous vehicles, among other use cases. We’ve also explored how to speed up development in distributed engineering teams cost effectively with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with virtual graphics processing units (vGPUs), like those from NVIDIA.
3D models are a key component for building digital twins. You might be convinced that virtualisation is great and that vGPUs are your best option for handling graphically intensive operations like 3D models, but first, what are vGPUs exactly? And how can they help you build and simulate your 3D projects?
The pandemic has accelerated the trend toward remote working environments but it also pushed governance and security issues to the top of the priority list for IT departments within financial institutions. Employees, and developers in particular, need the technological agility to work remotely given the hybrid workplace model being adopted by the majority of organisations. For financial institutions, it’s key to have a reliable and performant remote desktop solution that is easy for mobile workers to use, yet highly secure. Business and technology leaders at financial institutions are increasingly taking a cloud-first approach to remote work applications, including hyperscale-based desktop as a service solutions.
I think this will end up being the last of the keropunk series for now - though I reserve the right to write more of them in the future! This week’s post is going into a bit more detail about the kerosene heaters, doing my usual thermal imaging, and looking at some of the economics of various heat sources.
If you are curious to know how and why it matters where your phone is manufactured, CNBC’s new short documentary is for you.€ “Purism is one American company that has been able to do what many are calling the impossible” it says.
CNBC wanted to find out why tech giants aren’t making smartphones in America. Take a look at Purism’s effort to make electronics in the USA. The video takes you into our factories to show you we produce Librem 5 USA,€ privacy-first phone with€ Made in USA electronics. They also published a news article here.
There was a time when, if you were handy with a soldering iron, you could pretty easily open up a radio or TV repair business. You might not get rich, but you could make a good living. And if you had enough business savvy to do sales too, you could do well. These days there aren’t many repair shops and it isn’t any wonder. The price of labor is up and the price of things like TVs drops every day. What’s worse is today’s TV is not only cheaper than last year’s model, but probably also better. Besides that, TVs are full of custom parts you can’t get and jam-packed into smaller and smaller cases.
For as visionary as he was, [George Carlin] vastly underestimated the situation with his classic “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” bit. At least judging by [Ben Eater]’s reverse engineering of the “TVGuardian Foul Language Filter” device, it seems like the actual number is at least 20 times that.
Perhaps there was a time when fancy laser effects were beyond those without the largest of bank accounts, but today they can be created surprisingly easily. [Corebb] shows us how with a neat unit using an off the shelf RGB laser module and mirror module, driven by a ESP32 with software designed to make it as easy as possible to use.
That has since changed, with 86% of IT leaders in the financial services industry now endorsing enterprise open source at a time when flexibility and innovation was needed most, according to Red Hat’s 2022 state of enterprise open source report.
Indeed, to Singapore’s OCBC Bank, the need for flexibility and innovation had been behind its decision to embrace open source as it faces more competition from emerging fintech firms and neobanks.
As I learned today, curl has an option to support this sort of mismatch between the server's official name and where it actually is. Actually it has more than one of them, but let's start with --resolve: [...]
I’ve been doing this for months already using GPT-3, and I’m completely stunned by what it can do with, say, a security news story. I can give it the body of an article and it can tell me who the attacker was, who the defender was, what technique they used in their attack, and tons of other important analysis. It’s insane. And to the point of my previous article, it’s precisely what we thought could only come from an AGI.
Have you ever found a bug in code and needed to know when it was first introduced? Chances are, whoever committed the bug didn't declare it in their Git commit message. In some cases, it might have been present for weeks, months, or even years, meaning you would need to search through hundreds or thousands of commits to find when the problem was introduced. This is the problem that git bisect was built to solve!
The git bisect command is a powerful tool that quickly checks out a commit halfway between a known good state and a known bad state and then asks you to identify the commit as either good or bad. Then it repeats until you find the exact commit where the code in question was first introduced.
This "mathmagical" tool works by leveraging the power of halving. No matter how many steps you need to get through, by looking at the halfway point and deciding if it is the new top or bottom of the list of commits, you can find any desired commit in a handful of steps. Even if you have 10,000 commits to hunt through, it only takes a maximum of 13 steps to find the first offending commit.
Why call C functions from Rust? The short answer is software libraries. A longer answer touches on where C stands among programming languages in general and towards Rust in particular. C, C++, and Rust are systems languages, which give programmers access to machine-level data types and operations. Among these three systems languages, C remains the dominant one. The kernels of modern operating systems are written mainly in C, with assembly language accounting for the rest. The standard system libraries for input and output, number crunching, cryptography, security, networking, internationalization, string processing, memory management, and more, are likewise written mostly in C. These libraries represent a vast infrastructure for applications written in any other language. Rust is well along the way to providing fine libraries of its own, but C libraries—around since the 1970s and still growing—are a resource not to be ignored. Finally, C is still the lingua franca among programming languages: most languages can talk to C and, through C, to any other language that does so.
Q. What should be used instead of local?
Using my in all Perl programs is recommended strongly.
my $foo;
This is called a lexical variable. This is strange name we don't usually hear in daily life.
In backlash to the chaos of ‘Black Friday’, consumers are taking to social media to fight back against the spending day. Using the hashtag #buynothingday, consumers are boycotting the post-Thanksgiving shopping day, where retailers infamously cut prices in order to free up space for holiday merchandise and rack up sales. The “Buy Nothing Day’ campaign is now in its 24th year.
Buy Nothing Day encourages consumers to not spend anything for 24 hours, and instead, use the time and energy to spend time with friends and family. The pointed campaign now exists in 60 countries.
This is not to say that it’s never ok to want or need things – I myself am an object enthusiast. But it is an opportunity to re-evaluate how much and what we buy, and think about alternative ways of accessing them beyond buying new all the time.
So here are 7 activities for you to try on Buy Nothing Day this year that can be carried over into your year-round relationship with things (jump to a section: declutter, swap, repair, make, borrow, bake, donate).
One morning he wakes, sees the phone under his pillow, digs it out and reads the time. A few pages further on, the same sentence reappears, only this time Chong provides the near precise time on the phone: almost eight a.m. The identical sentence shows up again and again and again and again with one or two slight variations.
What’s going on? A reader might ask. Can’t Chong write the sentence and leave it be? One answer might be that Brandon is a creature of his phone and addicted to it. When the author wants to convey information he shows rather than tells. Also, when he infuses his novel with ideas, he usually allows the characters to express them rather than convey them directly to the reader in his own voice. One protagonist says, “There is so much goddamn corporate obfuscation around buzzwords and meaningless lingo.” He adds, “Our planet is dying. We no longer have the resources to sustain our growth.”
Let's be honest.€ € € At best, school vouchers are a failed education policy experiment.€ € At worst, they're an attempt to normalize bigotry.€
A coalition of 225 organizations on Monday pressured the Biden administration to extend a pause on federal student loan repayments that is set to expire at the end of this year given GOP lawsuits targeting the plan to cancel up to $20,000 in debt per borrower.
"These borrowers deserve more than another broken promise."
Everyone who writes bare-metal code for microcontrollers probably know the joys of looking up the details of specific registers in the reference manual, including their absolute address. Although the search function of the PDF viewer can be helpful, it’d be rather nice if there was a way to search only the registers, and have the offset calculations performed automatically. This is basically what [Terry Porter]’s Svd2db tool enables. As the name suggests, this tool turns the SVD hardware description files that come with ARM-based MCUs into a database file.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company founder Morris Chang appears to have had a complete change of mind about setting up new chip units in the US, announcing on Monday that the company would manufacture 3nm semiconductors at a new factory in Arizona.
Reuters reported Chang, now in his 90s, made the announcement in Taipei after he returned from attending the APEC summit in Thailand, adding that plans were not yet completely finalised.
The 3nm plant would be located at the same site in Arizona as a 5nm plant announced in May 2020, according to Chang.
On two occasions in the past, Chang has expressed serious doubts about the chances of success were TSMC to set up another chip plant in the US.
Before the pandemic,€ acupuncture was a frequent topic on this blog because it was a perfect example of what I mean when I distinguish between€ evidence-based medicine€ (EBM) and€ science-based medicine (SBM). In evidence-based medicine,€ randomized controlled clinical trials€ (RCTs) and meta-analyses of RCTs are at the very top of the pyramid of evidence. In general, this is a reasonable pyramid of evidence with a caveat: The treatments being tested need to have biological plausibility as well as preclinical (cell culture and animal studies) and early clinical evidence, such as small preliminary clinical trials, to justify RCTs. Where this concept breaks down is for what is now known as “integrative medicine“, having been€ rebranded€ from its previous name, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). The reason is that the treatments being “integrated” into “integrative medicine” by and large tend to be treatments that have very low biological plausibility and/or are based on prescientific mysticism and belief, such as homeopathy,€ reiki€ and other forms of “energy medicine“, and, yes, acupuncture, particularly for conditions for which the primary endpoints are subjective and therefore very prone to placebo effects; for example, pain due to aromatase inhibitors used to treat breast cancer, a topic that I’m revisiting for this post.
The global population is estimated to reach around 9.6 billion people by 2050. This is triple the number of humans on the planet just a few decades ago, having to exist with the same amount of water, not taking into account the nonhuman animals and plants that also rely on water to survive.
More than a third of the planet’s population living without access to clean, safe water live in sub-Saharan Africa. And nearly two-thirds—some four billion people—live in water-scarce areas. With this number set to steadily rise, the United Nations predictsthat around 700 million people across the world might be “displaced by intense water scarcity” by 2030.
The labor council of the Austin, Texas AFL-CIO has passed a resolution urging the Biden administration to terminate a Medicare privatization scheme that is quietly moving ahead despite vocal opposition from doctors, seniors, and progressive lawmakers.
The pilot program, which inserts private middlemen between patients and healthcare providers, was unveiled with little notice during the final months of the Trump administration despite internal concerns about its legality. The experiment has since been largely upheld by the Biden administration, which announced mostly cosmetic changes earlier this year, winning applause from industry groups that lobbied against complete elimination of the program.
Declaring her intent to "right the wrongs of a flawed, inequitable, and outdated criminal justice system," outgoing Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown on Monday pardoned tens of thousands of people convicted of simple marijuana offenses.
"Oregonians should never face housing insecurity, employment barriers, and educational obstacles as a result of doing something that is now completely legal."
Measuring air quality, as anyone who has tried to tackle this problem can attest, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Even once the nebulous term “quality” is defined, most sensors use something as a proxy for overall air health. One common method is to use volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as this proxy but as [Larry Bank] found out, using these inside a home with a functional kitchen leads to a lot of inaccurate readings. In the search for a more reliable sensor, he built this project which uses CO2 to help gauge air quality.
In a statement, researchers from Avanan, a company owned by Check Point Software, said the attackers were using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to send these links.
The company claimed to have seen a dramatic increase these attacks in recent weeks, with attackers using spoofed scanner notifications to send malicious files. However, when asked to quantify "dramatic increase", Avanan could not offer any specifics.
We have released the cgi gem version 0.3.5, 0.2.2, and 0.1.0.2 that has a security fix for a HTTP response splitting vulnerability. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2021-33621.
Cybersecurity researchers are increasingly looking at Mastodon now that the decentralized social media platform’s popularity has soared, and they have started finding vulnerabilities and other security issues.
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he made a series of significant changes, including firing staff and modifying features, which have had a negative impact on the platform’s security. This has led to a Twitter security chief resigning and the FTC saying that they were deeply concerned.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ntfs-3g), Fedora (krb5 and samba), Gentoo (firefox-bin, ghostscript-gpl, pillow, sudo, sysstat, thunderbird-bin, and xterm), Red Hat (firefox, hsqldb, and thunderbird), SUSE (cni, cni-plugins, and krb5), and Ubuntu (isc-dhcp and sqlite3).
However, in October, Marc Hansen, Minister Delegate for Digitalisation, explained that it would probably not be possible to use this license in Europe.
The most notable change in this release is support for v3 signatures.
RFC 4880 says: [...]
All of this is published, videoed, livestreamed, etc. It's a real "defense in depth" situation where you'd need a very big conspiracy to subvert all the parts of the system that need to work in order to steal underlying secrets. Yes, bottom line, you're still trusting people, but in part you're trusting them not to be able to all keep a secret from the rest of us.
The process for determining which CAs are trusted by your browser is a lot less transparent and, judging from experience, a lot less thorough. Many of these CAs have proven to be manifestly untrustworthy over the years. There was Diginotar, a Dutch CA whose bad security practices left it vulnerable to a hack-attack: [...]
In our comments, EFF and other privacy advocates, criticized several changes to the regulations that “appear to set up additional barriers to consumers' ability to exercise their rights” under California’s landmark privacy law. These include several changes that loosen requirements for companies to pass on consumer requests to delete, opt-out of sale, or limit the use of sensitive personal information. We also raise concerns about the way the rules, as written, allow businesses to complicate how they process opt-out preference signals.
“This framework threatens to make the opt-out preference signals an unusable mechanism to communicate a consumer’s privacy choices,” the comments said.
This is the second time that privacy groups in California have filed joint comments on the Agency’s proposed rules. You can find comments on the most recent changes here.
EFF laid out many of its core principles on data privacy regulation in ways that fall in line with the FTC’s authority to address unfair and deceptive practices and protect the competitive process.
The comments urge the Commission to pay attention to specific issue areas and industries, including worker privacy, student privacy, the privacy of daycare apps, stalkerware, and location data brokers.
The comments also emphasize the need for the FTC to play a active role in protecting Americans’ privacy. “[T]here are many places in which American’s data privacy is not adequately protected by any current privacy law,” the comments said. “The Commission must issue new rules to place new limits on companies that violate our trust and strengthen the general privacy landscape. As the federal government’s privacy enforcer, the FTC must be the vanguard for privacy protections.”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has the power to implement regulations that protect people’s data through new “Commercial Surveillance and Data Security” rules that must put human rights first. Access Now applauds the Commission’s initiative to reevaluate surveillance technology rules, and, through expert submissions, is working to support the FTC and help ensure its frameworks are user-centric and focus on safeguarding and strengthening rights while delivering precise and predictable rules for public and private entities. The ongoing use of this dangerous technology not only damages consumer confidence and public trust, but it disproportionately harms Black and Brown people. The FTC must act.
“Protection from commercial surveillance is critical to human rights and civil rights,” said Willmary Escoto, U.S. Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Collecting data, particularly biometric data, and its exploitation to track and influence people’s choices creates a myriad of harms. Especially when we know data breaches are more problematic for Black and Brown people living on fixed or low incomes. Organizations need to take data minimization and data integrity seriously.” “
In the latest submission to the Commission, Access Now details how human rights harms are inevitable when society allows companies to sell flawed technologies. To prevent the unchecked proliferation of this pseudoscientific technology, a robust process to validate the claims made by corporations selling these systems must be in place.
Access Now welcomes the U.S. Solicitor General’s amicus brief, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to deny NSO Group’s petition to review its sovereign immunity claim.
In a strong rebuttal to NSO’s arguments, the Solicitor General stated that “NSO plainly is not entitled to immunity here.” According to the Solicitor General, not only did the U.S. government decline to support NSO’s claim, they clearly indicated that NSO’s activities present a threat to the U.S. national security interests by adding NSO to the Commerce Department’s Entity List for “develop[ing] and supplyi[ng] spyware to foreign governments […] to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.” The fact that NSO has been placed on the Entity List “for the very type of activities allegedly at issue in this case” further sets NSO apart from any other companies that might seek such immunity in the future, said the Solicitor General.
The new draft of the Data Protection Bill is impervious to criticisms against it since the first draft years ago, and even introduces new provisions that would undermine people’s right to privacy
Five years ago, the Supreme Court recognised privacy as a fundamental right under the Constitution. Since fundamental rights can be directly enforced against the state and not private actors, the SC highlighted that a privacy law would enable citizens to seek legal recourse against private players, including BigTech for instance, for privacy violations.
Around the same time, the Justice Srikrishna Committee was established to develop a data protection framework. Since then, the draft data protection Bill went through multiple iterations, active engagement across stakeholders groups, and scrutiny by parliamentary committees, before it was withdrawn in August 2022 with the promise of a revamped draft. This new draft—the Digital Data Protection Bill, 2022 (Draft)—was released for consultation last week.
It can show you a bus route or update you on weather - but tech experts and rights groups say Egypt's mobile app for COP27 has a far more sinister side as it can spy on delegates and track their talk, texts and emails.
"It is a spying tool," said Frans Imbert-Vier, head of UBCOM, a Swiss-based cybersecurity company that performed a technical analysis of the app.
"It is an opportunity for the government to collect and update all this data from all these people for free, without any effort, in two weeks," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Paris.
The app lists schedules at the climate talks and carries speaker profiles; it also asks for the user's name, email, mobile number, nationality and passport number, and requires that location tracking be turned on.
Soldiers tend to have a better balanced sense than politicians about the way in which advantage in war can swing backwards and forwards. They ought to have after their grim experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, in both of which the US thought at one point that it had won a total victory.
Milley may well be right, but it is difficult to see why Ukraine should negotiate while it is winning victories on the ground. As for President Vladimir Putin, he will scarcely want to talk until his army has achieved something other than stage shambolic retreats and lose territory captured in the first days of the invasion.
The Bataysk municipal court in Russia’s Rostov region has fined Olesya Shishkanova, the sister of a recently drafted soldier, for publishing a video, in which conscripts from her brother’s unit complained about their conditions in the Russian army.
A video showing military police dragging away two Russian soldiers circulated on social media on November 20, appearing on both Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels. The pro-war channel Veteran’s Notes (Zapiski Veterana), which was among the first to publish the footage, indicated that it had been recorded in the Belgorod region. Legal experts told Meduza that this demonstration was designed to intimidate Russian soldiers who might resist being sent to the frontlines in Ukraine.
Alexander Sapozhnikov, the head municipal manager of the Siberian city of Chita, has resigned from his post to go to war in Ukraine. He announced his decision on his Telegram channel, writing:
In the 270 days since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army has fired more than 4,700 missiles at Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky said during a video address to members of the International Organization of Francophonie on Sunday.
A gunman wearing body armor and armed with an AR-15-style rifle attacked an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs late Saturday night, killing five people and injuring at least 25. Two Club Q patrons managed to disarm the shooter, a 22-year-old suspect with ties to an extremist family, before he was taken into police custody. The attack came on the the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, and police are investigating the attack as a potential hate crime. “This was an intentional act to push LGBTQ people back into the shadows,” says Denver mayoral candidate Leslie Herod, who is the first LGBTQ+ African American to hold office in the Colorado General Assembly and considers Colorado Springs her hometown. Herod describes a “clear connection” between hateful anti-gay rhetoric and violence toward the LGBTQ community.
A court in Tyumen has reopened an administrative case against a woman accused of “discrediting” the Russian army after she wrote an anti-war message on one of the city's main public squares, according to local media reports.
For months now, Russian students and teachers who oppose the war in Ukraine have had to deal with an education system that increasingly prioritizes the proliferation of pro-Kremlin narratives over traditional subjects like math and science. In addition to requiring teachers to give weekly lessons called “Conversations About What’s Important” (where students are taught about topics like “love for the Fatherland”), administrators have begun cracking down on even the smallest expressions of anti-war sentiment. The independent Russian outlet iStories recently spoke to several parents and teachers about what strategies they’ve been using to keep their kids safe while not completely denying them intellectual autonomy. Meduza summarizes the article in English.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov reported Monday that a traffic safety officer had been attacked with a knife in central Grozny.
NATO Parliamentary Assembly has adopted a resolution urging member of the alliance to designate Russia “under the current regime” as a terrorist state.
Waldemar Masicz is a direct descendant of Vladimir Surovikin, a fighter pilot who served in the Russian Far East during the Korean War and died in a plane crash in 1966: when his engine failed, he tried to steer his aircraft away from the houses below, leaving himself no time to eject. Surovikin was posthumously awarded a Lenin medal. Today, a memorial plaque in the Siberian city of Ussuriysk commemorates his act of gallantry. To the chagrin of Surovikin’s great-grandson, in a recent post on his Telegram, state media reporter Alexander Sladkov presented Vladimir Surovikin as the father of another Surovikin in the Russian military — namely, “General Armageddon,” who took command of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this fall. The pro-Kremlin media were quick to pick up this story, building on General Surovikin’s supposedly heroic lineage. Masicz suspects that state propagandists are exploiting his great-grandfather’s act of courage to add flair to Sergey Surovikin’s biography. As someone who openly opposes the war in Ukraine, Masicz doesn’t want his ancestor’s name to be tarnished by this newfound “connection.”
In addition to advancing longstanding U.S. geo-strategic aims, it seems the proxy war in Ukraine is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia.
Noam Chomsky, Jill Stein, Vijay Prashad, Medea Benjamin, Brian Becker, Eugen Puryear and Claudia de la Cruz spoke on the need for negotiation, not escalation at a People’s Forum/ANSWER Coalition event in New York.
Russia's deputy FM says the talks could lead to higher-level negotiations.
Two Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts on Sunday demanding answers after a New York Times report suggested Justice Samuel Alito discussed the outcome of a 2014 high-profile contraception case before the court released its opinion.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who sit on the Senate and House Judiciary committees, respectively, asked Roberts and the Supreme Court’s legal counsel if the court opened an investigation into the allegations.
In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.
Conditions in the rest of the world are not that much better than the fierce effects of ceaseless global warming in the United States. On November 7, 2022, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General who is champion for climate sanity, pretty much repeated his angry remarks to 110 prime ministers and presidents who showed up for the opening of the 27th UN climate summit in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. He said to them their indifference to the rising climate chaos bordered on the criminal and suicidal. He said:
“We are in the [climate] fight of our lives.€ And we are losing.€ Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing.€ Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.€ We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.
By then, in fact, a distinctly unseasonal heat wave that, the previous week, had hit the country from the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast was spreading across the Eastern U.S. from Tallahassee, Florida (a record-tying 88 degrees) to Burlington, Vermont (a record 76 degrees). Temperatures ranged from 15 to 25 degrees above normal. And yet, in a sense, this was nothing new. The worst megadrought in 1,200 years has held the West and Southwest in its grip for what seems like eons now and has evidently been moving toward the middle of the country (with the Mississippi River becoming an increasingly dried-up mud puddle).
Meanwhile, Nicole, a rare November hurricane that formed in the Caribbean, would, sadly enough, spare Mar-a-Lago. However, a distraught Donald Trump, riding it outthere (despite state evacuation orders), would react angrily to the political hurricane that clobbered Florida on November 8th when Ron DeSantis swept to a resounding victory amid chants of “two more years!” Meanwhile, thanks in part to already rising sea levels, Nicole would further erode Florida’s coastline in a telling fashion.
The idea has a basic logic, that the towering challenges that face us – climate and general ecological deterioration, wealth inequality and social justice, war and peace – have common and systemic roots. We are unable to successfully address any one issue on its own because they are woven together by the realities of who has power in society. Only a unified movement of movements capable of carrying a coherent and broad-ranging vision for systemic transformation can overcome those realities and accomplish real change.
The climate crisis certainly provides evidence for that proposition.
Tom Engelhardt reflects on how climate change, the existential crisis of our times, didn't make it into the midterm elections.
They induced victims to enter into fraudulent equipment rental contracts with the defendants' cryptocurrency mining service called HashFlare.
They also caused victims to invest in a virtual currency bank called Polybius Bank. In reality, Polybius was never actually a bank, and never paid out the promised dividends.
Environmental and climate campaigners decried Monday's announcement that the Biden administration—which promotes nuclear energy as part of its solution to the climate emergency—will give more than a billion dollars to California's largest utility to keep the state's last nuclear power plant operating.
"Our state and our nation need to be laser-focused on building an efficient energy system powered by renewable sources."
Storing energy can be done in many ways, with the chemical storage method of a battery being one of the most common. Another option is a thermal battery, which basically means making something hot, and later extracting that heat again. In this video by [Robert Murray-Smith] the basic concept of a thermal battery that uses sand is demonstrated.
Before Bankman-Fried’s transition from financial genius to possible financial criminal, he received little scrutiny in the media.
The talk was about how the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is involved in a major change of its “rules” and “guidance” to reduce government regulations for what the nuclear industry calls “advanced” nuclear power plants.
Already, Lyman said, at a “Night with the Experts” online session organized by the Nuclear Energy Information Service, the NRC has moved to allow nuclear power plants to be built in thickly populated areas. This “change in policy” was approved in a vote by NRC commissioners in July.
While the drafting of the agreement is still in its early phases, the shape of the main conflicts is already clear. The public health advocates, who want to ensure widespread access to these products, are trying to limit the extent to which patent monopolies and other protections price them out of the reach of developing countries. On the other side, the pharmaceutical industry wants these protections to be as long and as strong as possible, in order to maximize their profits. As Pfizer and Moderna know well, pandemics can be great for business.
The shape of this battle is hardly new. We saw the same story not just in the Covid pandemic, but also in the AIDS pandemic in the 1990s, when millions of people needlessly died in Sub-Saharan Africa because the U.S. and European pharmaceutical industry tried to block widespread distribution of AIDS drugs.
America's oceans are in serious decline due to decades of mismanagement, overexploitation, climate change, acidification, habitat damage, and pollution. Many marine species are threatened or endangered, and entire marine ecosystems (Arctic sea ice, coral reefs, mangroves, etc.), are severely threatened. Ocean ecosystems will have increasing difficulty retaining functional integrity through the climate crisis this century, and these ecosystems urgently need the strongest protections we can provide.
Bill Gabbert summarizes recent studies that show very small PM2.5 particles produced by wildfire smoke can lead to many diseases.
Satellite images show a sudden surge in deforestation in areas settled by Mennonite communities in Peru’s Ucayali and Loreto regions.
Those cases are among the rare instances of large-scale forest loss that has occurred in the Peruvian Amazon.
Environmentalists worry this could just be the beginning of the Mennonite invasion in Peru. Satellite images show land clearing for another settlement, also in Loreto, a vast Amazon region the size of Germany. A 2021 study in the Journal of Land Use Science says Mennonites have 200 settlements across seven countries in Latin America and collectively occupy more land than the Netherlands.
Peru lost a record 2,032 sq km of Amazon to deforestation in 2020, a figure almost four times the 548 sq km it lost in 2019, according to its environment ministry.
In the eyes of ecologists and now the Mexican government, which once welcomed their agricultural prowess, the Mennonites' farms are an environmental disaster rapidly razing the jungle, one of the continent's biggest carbon sinks and a home to endangered jaguars.
Smaller only than the Amazon, the Maya Forest is shrinking annually by an area the size of Dallas, according to Global Forest Watch, a non-profit organisation that monitors deforestation.
For many Somali families in Minnesota, the barriers to home ownership have long seemed insurmountable: reluctant lenders, low incomes, short work histories, little credit.
Members of the East African Muslim community encounter an additional, unique challenge: Because of the principles of their faith, many avoid paying or profiting from interest. This means they typically won’t apply for traditional mortgages. As a result, the conventional path to buying a house — and the accompanying hope of building generational wealth — has been nearly impossible.
After five years of plummeting relations between the US and China, Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden met at the G20 summit in Bali last week. It was their first in-person meeting since Biden took office nearly two years ago. The aim, according to US national security adviser Jake Sullivan, was to “build a floor for the relationship and ensure that there are rules of the road that bound our competition.” Early indications are hopeful: the Xi-Biden meeting reportedly went well, and both sides seem genuinely interested in reducing the acrimony that now dominates. But the “guardrails” that the Biden administration has promoted to prevent open conflict are no match for the forces pushing the two countries into confrontation. A more ambitious agenda—in which the two countries work together to reform the global system—is needed to resolve the structural drivers of conflict.
By Eve Ottenberg / CounterPunch Neither the red wave nor the blue one materialized in the latest election, which removes some of the impetus for the coming congressional Sinophobic rampage. Some, not all. The relatively good results for Biden mean that for the moment he no longer needs the Beijing boogeyman and could afford to […]
By Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China On November 14, 2022 local time, President Xi Jinping had a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia. After the meeting, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi briefed the media on the meeting and answered questions. Question one: President Xi Jinping […]
It looks set to be a business case study for the ages: a testament to how hubris and arrogance can destroy a brand in a month. And that destruction doesn’t come from the departure of the likes of Osman and Lewis. It’s about the people who have helped to keep them there.
Social media platforms are more like ecosystems than “tech products” like iPhones or laptops. We all think social media is about the dopamine rush of someone liking our posts. It’s a lovely theory, but it doesn’t survive contact with Twitter. Most tweets don’t get any engagement at all.
In the wake of his mother’s death in 2014, Ashton Politanoff began consulting the digital archive at the public library of Redondo Beach, Calif., the coastal city in southern Los Angeles where she’d lived. (Politanoff, a professor, still resides there.) The resultant findings, gleaned from local newspapers—photographs, advertisements, instances of violence, recipes, industrial disasters, and other ephemera—comprise Politanoff’s debut, You’ll Like It Here, a sort of nonfiction collage that locates the seeds of contemporary catastrophe deep within a surreal regional history. “I felt most drawn to the years from 1911 through 1918,” he notes in the introduction, “during which time I saw a town come to life and recognized an era strangely analogous to our own.” Politanoff has modified these selections, prizing dramatic effect over historical accuracy. Appearing at the rate of about one entry per page, these fragments of the archive read like the microfictions of Lydia Davis or the poetic reclamations of Susan Howe: cryptic, grimly funny, self-contained. Neither novel nor social history, the book is partly about the tensions that exist between such categories. Here the myth of California is wrung from the headlines. As ever, reality flees its own reporting.
This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputably more important. I’m talking about Twitter, and its vast store of tweets that have been written over the last 16 years of its existence.
We have rather taken Twitter and its key role in modern culture and public discourse for granted. But the recent purchase of the company by Elon Musk, and his idiosyncratic decisions since doing so, have (a) raised the possibility that Twitter will go bankrupt, as Musk himself has allegedly said, and (b) made people realise how much of value would be lost if that happens.
There is no ongoing independent backup of Twitter. There was to begin with: the US Library of Congress (LoC) signed an agreement allowing it to create a complete Twitter Archive for a while. That ran for 12 years, during which time billions of tweets were collected. As an update on the Twitter Archive explained in 2017, the decision not to collect everything thereafter was taken because of the dramatic increase in the number of tweets; the fact that the Library of Congress only received text, but many tweets were more visual than textual; and the increase in potential tweet length from 140 to 280 characters. The LoC also noted that its partial collection already “documents the rise of an important social media platform”, and that in any case, it does not aim to “collect comprehensively”. As a result, it started adding tweets on a more selective basis.
He didn’t elaborate on the circumstances of his departure and declined to say how many people Twitter employed in France either before or after Musk’s takeover of the company last month.
According to Reuters, Viel confirmed that he was indeed leaving Twitter but did not explain why.
Viel is the latest senior executive to resign from Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform in late October.
Despite the ban on her personal account, Greene did retain her official congressional. She used that one to celebrate her return, writing, “I’m the only Member of Congress the unelected big tech oligarchs permanently banned. On January 2, 2022, they violated my freedom of speech and ability to campaign & fundraise crying ‘covid misinformation.’ My account is back.”
There are a variety of myths about how the world works that get people really screwed up when they make big bets on trying to “fix” things. I think Elon Musk has fallen prey to a few of them in how he’s trying to run Twitter. First, he falsely believes (as was the widespread myth among many, especially in right wing circles) that Twitter’s content moderation/trust & safety efforts were driven mainly by extreme “woke” employees who were seeking to silence opinions and viewpoints they disagreed with. As we’ve discussed repeatedly, that’s never been the case. Twitter had a far more free speech-supporting position than any other site, and the trust & safety decisions were made based on what they believed was actually best for the site, which means trying to minimize hate and harassment as that drives both users and advertisers away.
Going to put this up front, because I expect a bunch of people to not read and assume something very incorrect: I think there are valid arguments (even pretty strong ones) for why it makes sense for social media platforms to allow Donald Trump on them (there are also valid arguments against it). But, conducting a poll is the stupidest possible way to make that decision. It’s Musk’s platform, and he’s free to run it however he wants, even making the stupidest possible decisions. But it should raise questions among its users whether or not they wish to embrace such a platform, and just how much damage Musk will do in pursuit of stunts.
Here’s a growing list of celebrities who’ve decided to no longer use Twitter… all because of Musk.
In a fascinating new paper in the Sociological Review, Robert Dorschel examines the sensibilities and self-identities of current tech-workers. At its heart, the paper suggests that many IT professionals in the 2020s are driven by a politicised subjectivity that raises possibilities for collective push-back against the worst excesses of digital capitalism. In short, while we might despair at the hegemony of ‘Big Tech’ titans such as Google, Meta and Amazon, perhaps change might be possible from within these corporations – i.e. change that is led by the people that these corporations employ.
Day by day Twitter is sinking deeper into quagmire. It appears two thirds of the workforce has left the company. (We don't know the exact figure for the layoffs were so thorough that the section which should be reporting such details exists no more.) How much the remaining staff can handle is an open question.
Now, The Washington Post has discovered at least one Arab country engaged in lobbying our government, often to the detriment of our foreign policy. In a front-page story, “U.S. intelligence report says key gulf ally meddled in American politics,” the Post reported the United Arab Emirates has engaged in “illegal and legal attempts to steer U.S. foreign policy in ways favorable to the Arab autocracy.” The UAE has exploited U.S. “vulnerabilities in American governance, including its reliance on campaign contributions, susceptibility to powerful lobbying firms and lax enforcement of disclosure laws intended to guard against interference by foreign governments.”
According to Pascoe Sabido of Corporate Europe Observatory/Brussels: “These findings underline the extent to which this COP has never been about the climate. It’s been about rehabilitating the gas industry and making sure that fossil fuels are on the agenda. This is part of the bigger problem which is linked to the overall corporate capture of the U.N. climate talks… We need to kick the big polluters out.” (Source: Fossil Fuel-Linked Companies Dominate Sponsorship of COP27, DeSomg, Nov. 16, 2022)
Of course, fossil fuel interests sponsor big pavilions, like showtime at Las Vegas conventions. Dubai’s racy, futuristic colorful pavilion was a standout as an effective ploy to convince the world of their serious intentions for net zero. Oh, please! Hopefully, a massive worldwide movement to Stop COP28 Dubai can effectively reverse the embarrassment of holding next year’s COP in the kingdom of oil. It’s an insult to climate scientists. Is Saudi Arabia next?
If dying young appeals to you, here's a simple bit of advice: move to a state or county controlled by Republicans.
Rep. Ilhan Omar on Sunday vowed to continue "fighting for more equitable, more just, and more humane policies" after Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threatened to remove her from the chamber's foreign affairs committee if he becomes speaker in the next Congress.
In a statement, Omar (D-Minn.) said that "McCarthy's effort to repeatedly single me out for scorn and hatred—including threatening to strip me from my committee—does nothing to address the issues our constituents deal with."
Believe me, it's strange to be an old man and feel like you're living on a new planet. On November 7th, the day before the midterm elections, I took my usual afternoon walk in New York City and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt! That was a first for me. And no wonder, since it was 76 degrees out—beautiful, but eerie. After all, that's just not November weather.€
Some people have argued against the need for, or timing of, the appointment of a special counsel in the federal investigations of former president Donald Trump. But we welcome the announcement of veteran federal prosecutor Jack Smith in that role. Whether or not it was necessary under the regulations, the appointment was the best means to reduce even the appearance of political influence in the ongoing investigation. Based upon the exhaustive model prosecution memo (“pros memo”) we co-authored concerning the Trump documents and obstruction investigation, we believe this development at the Justice Department will likely lead to criminal charges against the former president. That said, whether Special Counsel Smith indicts or not, justice demands he move expeditiously, and we are confident he will.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis appears to believe he’s the successor to Donald Trump’s short-lived throne. While Trump was president, DeSantis did everything he could to appeal the same voter base. Trump rather listlessly announced he’ll run again in 2024, but it’s a fair bet DeSantis will try to become Trump 2.0 if it appears the Republican base isn’t ready to ride Trump’s presidential Vomit Comet for another four years.
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: Senator Josh Hawley is not a Good Person. The former attorney general had the chance to be a good person, but instead became the poster boy for insurrection by raising his fist in support of Trump fans on their way to raiding the Capitol building in hopes of illegally keeping an un-elected president in office.
During the announcement of his new movement, the former TV personality said that it was “the greatest movement in the history [ruminative pause…] of our country.” Those who didn’t share his opinion wanted to leave the room, but when they tried to do so found out that it was surrounded by a narrow pond of water full of crocodiles. Horrified, they returned en masse to the event. The resultant stampede seriously injured 27 persons, including one 9-year-old child who, while crying inconsolably, said that he was brought to the event by his mother against his will and with false promises. Trying to calm him down, his mother gave the child a MAGAGA hat, which made him cry even louder.
How can one explain that after all the damage that Trump has done –and still does—to the world he can believe that he really can make America great and glorious? Because memory is fragile let me remind the reader that his nonchalance towards the Covid pandemic has probably caused hundreds of thousands of lives. He discredited his own scientific advisers and promoted false and dangerous cures for the disease. His behavior was faithfully copied by his admirer Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, with whom he shares several personality traits. Both of them are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided with appropriate and timely actions.
That’s a good thing, but let’s not make it more than it is. The long title of the bill reveals its true purpose:€ “A bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and ensure respect for State regulation of marriage, and for other purposes.”
The bill has two core provisions.
Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi represented me in Congress for roughly a quarter-century, but I didn’t vote for her when first given a chance. In the 1987 special election to replace the late Sala Burton (who succeeded her late husband, the legendary Phil Burton), I voted for Supervisor Harry Britt, the Democratic Socialists of America leader who himself succeeded Harvey Milk after his assassination. San Francisco lost a lot of leaders in that decade from 1978 to 1988, after the political murders of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, the deaths of the aged Burtons, as well as all the lives lost to the AIDS crisis in those years.
With just over a month until Republicans officially take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, a committee chair on Monday warned outgoing Democratic leadership against reviving the "dirty deal" on permitting reform that was defeated in September.
"Manchin's legislation is a harbinger for the permanent silencing of environmental justice communities in the permitting process."
Rich countries agreed to establish a “loss and damage” fund at the close of the two-week-long U.N. climate summit in Egypt to help the Global South deal with the worst effects of the climate catastrophe. The fund is a major breakthrough for Global South countries, which have been demanding a similar mechanism for the past 30 years but faced opposition from the United States and other large polluting nations. Climate justice activist Asad Rehman says the fund is a “glimmer of hope” despite the summit ending with a massive expansion of carbon markets and delegates making “no progress” to phase out fossil fuels.
Despite mountains of iron-clad evidence that extracting and burning more coal, oil, and gas will exacerbate deadly planetary heating, negotiators at the United Nations COP27 climate conference failed yet again to directly confront the fossil fuel industry whose insatiable quest for profits is putting the future of humanity in jeopardy.
"More fossil fuels equals more loss and damage."
In recent years, communities across the United States increasingly have turned to the courts to hold oil and gas companies accountable for alleged fraud — which has worsened the climate crisis — and now those lawsuits are inching towards trial. Despite dogged attempts from industry lawyers to force the litigation into federal courts, where they see an easier path to dismissal, they continue to strike out as judges from California to Connecticut rule that state courts are the appropriate venues for these climate accountability lawsuits.
The latest addition to the fossil fuel industry’s long procedural losing streak came on November 12 when a federal district judge decided that the District of Columbia’s climate liability lawsuit belongs in the local court, where it was originally filed in June 2020. As with other climate liability lawsuits, lawyers for the oil and gas companies in the District of Columbia case devised a multitude of arguments claiming that only federal courts have the jurisdiction or authority to handle such lawsuits. But federal courts have not been buying these legal theories.
Turkey summoned the Swedish ambassador on Monday after images that allegedly insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and served as Kurdish militant propaganda were projected on the Turkish Embassy building in Stockholm, Turkey’s state-run news agency reported.
It’s not every day that officials of the Central Intelligence Agency open up about their operations but on the occasion of the Yahoo! News report, it was clear that Assange had driven a number to sheer distraction.€ Had these security types caught the bug of transparency?€ Unlikely, but it might have been a slight rash of irritation doing the rounds in the clandestine community.
Having first designated WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service” in April 2017, Pompeo evidently thought that the laws of engagement would have to change.€ The publishing outfit would have to be subject to “offensive counterintelligence”, while Assange himself would be given special treatment.
By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter Sweden’s parliament adopted a major espionage law expansion that will permit the country’s police to investigate journalists, publishers, and whistleblowers if they reveal secret information that “may damage Sweden’s relationship with another state or an international organization.” Journalists, publishers, or whistleblowers found guilty of revealing such “damaging” information could […]
The couple was arbitrarily detained as they travelled to Bamyan to explore. No reason was given by the Taliban for arresting the boy and the girl at the time they were apprehended. Taliban Supremo Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, in a meeting with court judges, said that "they must not hesitate in giving Hadd and Qisas punishments as per Islamic law," Khaama Press found. Under the laws imposed by the Taliban, Hadd crimes are punishable by death or amputation of limbs and other harsh punishments.
After an awkward run up, the FIFA World Cup is finally underway in Qatar—a country mired in scandal and run by a deeply corrupt organisation. Usually in the weeks leading up to soccer's showcase tournament, excitement is on the faces of people in every country represented. This World Cup feels different. The excitement has been subdued by allegation after allegation—ranging from 6,500 migrant workers dying during a ten year construction boom to Ecuador players being offered $7.4 million to throw the opening match. Evidently the bribe wasn't accepted as Ecuador ran out clear winners in the first opening World Cup game ever to end in defeat for the host nation. Additionally, LGBTQ supporters fear for their safety in a country where homosexuality is a crime, and perhaps the biggest concern for many fans is that they will now be forced to stay sober for a full 90 minutes after Qatar banned alcohol sales inside stadiums just two days before the opening game. This has led many to push for a boycott of games and to calls from many footballers and politicians alike to put pressure on the hosts to carry out deep reforms. Qataris seem perplexed by all the controversy, and maybe they are right to be so.
As the World Cup begins, we look at the host country of Qatar’s labor and human rights record. “This is the deadliest major sporting event, possibly ever, in history,” says Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch, who describes how millions of migrant workers from the world’s poorest countries have faced deadly and forced labor conditions working on the $2 billion infrastructure. By one count, 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since 2010, when it was awarded the right to host the games. “These are unprecedented labor rights abuses,” says Worden, who claims “there’s no ability if you’re a migrant worker in Qatar to strike for your basic human rights.”
Human rights defenders and sports fans worldwide condemned a decision by the world football governing body FIFA to ban any shows of support for LGBTQ+ rights by players during the World Cup that kicked off in Qatar on Sunday.
"LGBTQ+ people are criminalized in Qatar just for being themselves."
The largest railroad workers union in the United States announced Monday that its members voted to reject a contract negotiated with the help of the Biden White House, once again raising the prospect of a major strike or lockout as employees revolt over profitable rail giants' refusal to provide adequate paid sick leave.
"SMART-TD members with their votes have spoken, it's now back to the bargaining table for our operating craft members."
Over 100 rights organizations on Monday pressured U.S. President Joe Biden to end the mass detention of migrants, describing the practice as inhumane, unjust, unnecessary, and fiscally irresponsible.
"Inhumane conditions and treatment are rife across the immigrant detention system."
Thankfully, Congress just passed a bill that will change that.
The Safe Connections Act (S. 120) was introduced in January 2021 by Senators Brian Schatz, Deb Fischer, Richard Blumenthal, Rick Scott, and Jacky Rosen. It would make it easier for survivors of domestic violence to separate their phone line from a family plan while keeping their own phone number. It also requires the FCC to create rules to protect the privacy of the people seeking this protection. This bill overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress and was sent to the President’s desk on November 18, 2022.€
Telecommunications carriers are already required to make numbers portable when users want to change carriers. So it should not be hard for carriers to replicate a seamless process when a paying customer wants to move an account within the same carrier. EFF strongly supports this bill.
With the 2022 midterm elections in the books, and Donald Trump back in the running for the presidency, the American commentariat is palpably longing for a return to normalcy—a moment when civility and bipartisan alliances become thinkable once more, and the ugly confrontational politics of the past six years can be mothballed. Right-wing culture trainspotter David Brooks sounded the emerging elite pundit consensus, as he reliably does, in a post-election New York Times column announcing “The Fever Is Breaking,” hailing the results as a “triumph of the normies” and a resounding repudiation of “performative populism” on the right and left alike. In short order, Yascha Mounk struck the reassuring note of antiphonal neoliberal harmony with an Atlantic column explaining “How Moderates Won the Midterms.” ”Traditional right-wing outlets such as National Review and the New York Post joined in, via high-profile efforts to throw cold water on the next Trump run with dismissive and derisive coverage.
On Friday, 10 days before her trial was scheduled to begin, Tracy McCarter received some welcome news: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had announced that his office would no longer proceed with prosecuting her for murder in the death of her estranged husband.
Looking back on the confident predictions of an impending “red wave” offered by Republican strategists in the days before the midterms, the overriding question now becomes: Were they lying? Or were they just deluded?
Early on the morning on August 18, 2022, the Israeli army raided seven prominent Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations in occupied Ramallah, damaging property and confiscating files and equipment. The army welded the doors of these organizations shut and affixed military orders demanding their closure. Al-Haq was one of those raided; I am the general director. Following the raids, I was summoned for interrogation by Israeli intelligence officers and threatened with imprisonment and other measures should our organization continue operating.
We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. doesn’t actually have any idea where broadband is or isn’t available. The FCC’s past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and excluding a key metric of competitiveness: price.
DOJ was tracking multiple efforts to repeal or frustrate 47 U.S.C. €§ 230 (Section 230), including implementation of then-President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional Executive Order and the department’s own proposed amendments to the law. Although all of those efforts were public, the fact that the DOJ was closely monitoring them was not.
DOJ also developed a series of talking points about Section 230 reform efforts. Those talking points included a claim that because “the Constitution treats criminal content and lawful speech differently, so too should platforms.” That statement ignores that many users of platforms do not want to see a host of awful but protected speech that platforms regularly moderate. In addition, online intermediaries have their own First Amendment rights to decide what speech they want to host. Those rights don’t rise and fall depending on whether the moderated speech is protected. Just as a newspaper can decide for itself what articles and opinions it publishes, websites and apps can as well.
Taken together, the documents reflect a concerted push by DOJ to either amend the law or undermine it via Trump’s Executive Order. Fortunately, neither DOJ nor Trump’s efforts succeeded.
The anti-monopoly movement is having a moment. Gone are the days of associating evil market dominance with Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel, Bill Gates' petulance during deposition, or how it feels to desperately mortgage Marvin Gardens because you landed at the hotel on Park Place.
Progressives in the United States welcomed news that a federal judge on Friday filed a nationwide cease and desist order against Amazon, which stipulates that the e-commerce giant must stop firing workers for organizing and otherwise impeding their participation in pro-union activities.
The court order, filed in the Eastern District of New York by District Judge Diana Gujarati, instructs Amazon, the country's second-largest employer, to immediately stop "discharging employees because they engaged in protected concerted activity" and "in any like or related manner interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed to them by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act."
The European Commission published the Data Act proposal earlier this year, as a continuation of its EU’s overall data strategy. The goal of the Act is to ensure the vast array of data created today — and often held by private entities — is shared in ways that serve societal interests, while respecting and protecting privacy. Of particular interest to us at CC are provisions that: [...]
In developing this collection of artworks, we posed this question to 12 prominent global open advocates...
Z-Library has responded to the U.S. criminal indictment against two of its alleged operators and associated domain name seizures. The remaining team members still haven't confirmed the involvement of the two Russians but say they are determined to keep going. Z-Library also promises to take the complaints of authors seriously and asks for their forgiveness.
In May 2022, Italian police claimed that thousands of people had unwittingly subscribed to a pirate IPTV service being monitored by the authorities. When users tried to access illegal streams, a warning message claimed that they had already been tracked. With fines now being received through the mail, police are making some extraordinary claims about how this was made possible.
One of the wonders of a digital world is that art preservation in many forms suddenly gets much, much easier. For all kinds of art, be it video games, music, drawings/paintings, etc., at the very least an uploaded digital simulacrum of the art means that it can’t be easily lost due to the pernicious lack of care by the creators of the art itself.
One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling€ Copyright Directive€ – the worst copyright law so far – are being taken up elsewhere. One I didn’t include, because its story is still unfolding, is€ Canada’s Bill C-18: “An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada”. Here’s the key idea, which will be familiar enough to readers of this blog:
This one is about running the game, or maybe: phrases to use that improve your game.
The internet connects people across the world into a global village. Wasn't that what they used to say in its early days? It's still kind of true, with some necessary provisos. There's a great firewall and new digital Berlin walls are being constructed, there are gated communities and paywalls.
Here are some of my experiences, from the perspective of never having been active on anything usually considered a social media platform.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.