We learned a lot about Kubernetes in 2022. It seems every year, Kubernetes gets better and better. For all those beginners out there, this year's coverage is wide-ranging and detailed, including a couple of new eBooks. This article covers what I found to be the best Kubernetes articles of 2022. From visual maps to personal journeys, these articles definitely shine a light on the power of Kubernetes. So let's get started with my favorite ones.
This special episode features two interviews we did at EuroBSDcon in Vienna this year. We talk with FreeBSD developers about how they got started, their current projects and more. Also, consider donating to your favorite BSD Foundation to keep the projects going.
A report from the syzbot kernel fuzz-testing robot does not usually spawn a vitriolic mailing-list thread, but that is just what happened recently. While the invective is regrettable, the underlying issue is important. The dispute revolves around how best to report bugs to affected subsystems and, ultimately, how not to waste maintainers' time.
Al Viro was apparently fed up with syzbot reports that involved the ntfs3 filesystem but that were not copied (CCed) to the maintainers of ntfs3. The syzbot message was sent to the kernel mailing list, but Viro shouted his reply that "ANY BUG REPORTS INVOLVING NTFS3 IN REPRODUCER NEED TO BE CCED TO MAINTAINERS OF NTFS3". That complaint had been relayed several times in the past, he indicated, without the problem getting fixed, so he was planning to stop looking at the reports. In fact, they will be "getting triaged straight to /dev/null here".
Each new kernel release fixes a lot of bugs, but each release also introduces new bugs of its own. That leads to a fundamental question: is the kernel community fixing bugs more quickly than it is adding them? The answer is less than obvious but, if it could be found, it would give an important indication of the long-term future of the kernel code base. While digging into the kernel's revision history cannot give a definitive answer to that question, it can provide some hints as to what that answer might be.
The 6.1 kernel was released on December 11; by the time of this release, 13,942 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline, growing the kernel by 412,000 lines of code. This is thus not the busiest development cycle ever, but neither is it the slowest, and those changesets contained a number of fundamental changes. This release will also be the long-term-support kernel for 2022. Read on for a look at where the work in 6.1 came from.
The work in 6.1 was contributed by 2,043 developers, of whom 303 made their first contribution to the kernel in this release.
I’m happy to announce the release of Tokodon 22.11.2 (and 22.11.1 who I released earlier this month and forgot to properly announce). These releases contain mostly bug fixes but also some welcome interface improvements.
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Finally I added support for custom emojis in many places inside the UI. Perfect if you want to show you true verified checkmark in your profile :)
Aside from the nice new improvements, I improved the spacing in the app and while not perfect yet, I hope this makes Tokodon more enjoyable to use. Joshua Goins has also made various improvements to our internal networking code and this should offer better reliability and less prone to crash code. And I fixed an important crash on start-up that was affecting a lot of users
Finally I started adding unit tests in Tokodon and added the infrastructure to mock a Mastodon server. We now have reached 12% unit tests coverage and I hope this number will grow after each release.
QtFM is a simple file manager that aims to provide the basic features of file management through a fast and intuitive interface. It's available for Linux, BSD, and macOS.
QtFM, as its name suggests, uses the Qt (canonically pronounced "cute") programming toolkit. I've worked with the Qt toolkit both in C++ and Python, and using it is always a pleasure. It's cross-platform, it's got multiple levels of useful abstraction so developers don't have to interact directly with vendor-specific SDKs, and it's highly configurable. From a user's perspective, it's a "natural" and fast experience, whether you're on the latest hardware or on an old computer.
Linhome is an open-source VoIP solution for building IP Intercom and video-based door entry systems.
BeeBEEP client is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, as well as Raspberry Pi and OS/2.
Flarum is a free open-source discussion board and forums solution for building better engagement platforms for communities.
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Flarum is open-source software licensed under the MIT License.
Here in this post, we present you several open-source alternatives for Microsoft Access, some of them are good for business and creating internal tools, others are ideal for personal use only.
Each command executed in your Linux terminal is being recorded by your shell (referring to Bash) in a separate file (like “~/.bash_history“) that you can view using the history command.
For most Linux distributions, the number of commands that should be recorded and number of results will be displayed on output is set using the “HISTFILESIZE” and “HISTSIZE” variables.
Execute the following command to check your history buffer.
Advanced-Copy is a powerful command line program that is very much similar, but a little modified version of the original cp command and mv tools.
This modified version of the cp command adds a progress bar along with the total time taken to complete while copying large files from one location to another.
This additional feature is very useful especially while copying large files, and this gives an idea to the user about the status of copy process and how long it takes to complete.
In this easy-to-follow guide, we will discuss some practical examples of the cp command. After following this guide, users will be able to copy files and directories easily in Linux using the command line interface.
As Linux users, we interact with the files and directories from time to time. One common operation users perform is copying files and directories. Certainly, we can use a graphical file manager to perform the copy operation. However, most Linux users prefer to use the cp command due to its simplicity and rich functionality.
In this beginner-friendly guide, we will learn about the cp command. As the name suggests, the cp command is used to copy files and directories at a given path.
QOwnNotes is an open-source plaintext notepad used for creating notes and comes with features like markdown and to-do-list manager. It has markdown support and a to-do list manager that works efficiently on different operating systems like Windows, macOS and Linux. With this notepad, you can easily sync your files with owncloud or nextcloud servers; thus, it’s an excellent option to access files from any device. It also has several customization options that enable users to work in the environment of their choice.
This article is a detailed guide to install the QOwnNotes on Ubuntu 22.04 system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ERPNext on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ERPNext is an open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that is built using the Frappé framework, which is written in Python. It is a web-based application that can be used to manage various business operations, including financial accounting, inventory management, and customer relationship management. ERPNext is designed to be easy to use and highly customizable, making it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.
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 ERPNext on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Scylla is a high-performance NoSQL database that is compatible with the Apache Cassandra database. It is designed to be highly scalable and able to handle large amounts of data and high levels of concurrency.
TeamViewer is a remote access and remote control computer software. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to import the DNF repository to install TeamViewer on Rocky Linux 9 and the Rocky Linux 8 series using cli commands to ensure you have the latest updated version at all times.
The SeaMonkey is an open-source internet application suite that provides browser, chat, email management, and web development tools in a single solution. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install SeaMonkey on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 desktop with the official Ubuntuzilla Repository APT repository using the command line terminal and instructions on updating and removing the software in the future if required.
ExifTool is a free, open-source software program for reading, writing, and manipulating metadata found in images, audio, and video files. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install ExifTool on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 releases using the default repository or manually downloading the latest archive and making and installing the application with cli commands and some additional common usage examples with ExifTool.
Rethinking the traditional database structure, RethinkDB is a powerful NoSQL document-based engine optimized for real-time web applications. The following tutorial will teach you how to install RethinkDB on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Linux with utilizing the command line terminal and importing the official RethinkDB APT repository with cli commands and installing the software directly from it.
Pulling in tons of improvements for desktop mode, along with a healthy dose of bug fixes elsewhere, the SteamOS 3.4 update for Steam Deck has been released. This means you can now check for updates on Stable to get it, or switch back from Preview to Stable (tested fine across two Steam Decks just today).
Valve has updated Proton Experimental for Steam Deck and Linux desktop with a few quick fixes so here's the usual run over what's new.
fheroes2 is a free and open source game engine reimplementation of the classic Heroes of Might and Magic II, and after many development releases they've finally hit the big 1.0.
A new on-rails survival rogue-lite shooter? Sign me up. Whisker Squadron: Survivor is from the same team as Race the Sun, and the first in the Whisker Squadron series. There's also a demo right now.
Well, I have to admit I am surprised that the takeover of YoYo Games (who develop GameMaker) by Opera has been largely positive with them making more moves towards open source.
Game store itch.io has their own big Winter Sale now on, where you can save big and support one of the smaller stores along with plenty of indie games.
Valve and Komodo have given an update on the shipping of the Steam Deck through Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Between 2022-12-14 and 2022-12-21 there were 35 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 321 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 10.9 % of total released titles.
It's time to say goodbye to 2022!
There were many distro releases in 2022, some more extraordinary than others.
With the trend shifting towards focusing more on the user experience and performance side of things, Linux distributions have significantly evolved over the past year.
As for you, the end-user, you now have several options, and there is usually something for everyone.
So, what can you expect in 2023?
Well, to answer that. Allow me to take you on a distro journey!
The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.12.0 and cards 2.6.3.
New toolchain gcc 12.2.0, glibc 2.36 and binutils 2.39.
The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.6, the Mesa 3D library in 22.2.3, Gtk4 4.8.2 and Qt 6.4.1
The python interpreter is updated to version 3.11.1.
The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.18.0.
The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version .
The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 43.0NuTyX GNU/Linux
The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.26.4, Framework 5.101.0 and applications in 22.12.0.
Available browsers are: Firefox 108.0.1, Chromium 108.0.5359.124, Epiphany 43.0, etc
Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 4.1.1, Thunderbird 102.6.0, Scribus 1.5.8, Libreoffice 7.4.3.2, Gimp 2.10.32, etc.
Core NuTyX ships with Long Term Support (LTS) kernels: 4.14.302, 4.19.269, 5.4.228, 5.10.160 and 5.15.84 and the latest stable version 6.0.14.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here.
Virtual-memory systems provide a great deal of flexibility in how memory can be mapped and protected. Unfortunately, memory-management flexibility can also be useful to attackers bent on compromising a system. In the OpenBSD world, a new system call is being added to reduce this flexibility; it is, though, a system call that almost no code is expected to use.
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A call to mimmutable() will render the mapping of the len bytes of memory starting at addr immutable, meaning that the kernel will not allow any changes to either the memory protections or the mapping in that range. As a result, system calls like mmap() or mprotect() that would affect that range will, instead, fail.
At first glance, mimmutable() looks similar in spirit to OpenBSD's pledge(), which restricts the system calls that the calling process may use. But, while pledge() calls appear in numerous programs in the OpenBSD repository, mimmutable() calls will be rare indeed. Most developers lack a detailed understanding of the memory layout of their programs and are not well placed to render portions of their address space immutable, but the kernel and the linker are a different story.
The details of how mimmutable() will be used are described in detail in this email from De Raadt. In simplified form, it starts when the kernel loads a new executable image; once the text, stack, and data areas have been mapped, they will be made immutable before the program even starts running. For static binaries, the C runtime will do a bit of fixup and then use mimmutable() to make most of the rest of the mapped address space immutable as well. For dynamically linked binaries, the shared-library linker (ld.so) performs a similar set of tasks, mapping each library into the address space, then making most of those mappings immutable.
According to several sources we queried, more than 33 percent of the world's web servers are running Apache Tomcat, while other sources show that it's 48 percent of application servers. Some of these instances have been containerized over the years, but many still run in the traditional setup of a virtual machine with Linux.
Red Hat JBoss Web Server (JWS) combines a web server (Apache HTTPD), a servlet engine (Apache Tomcat), and modules for load balancing (mod_jk and mod_cluster). Ansible is an automation engine that provides a suite of tools for managing an enterprise at scale. In this article, we'll show how 1+1 becomes 11 by using Ansible to completely automate the deployment of a JBoss Web Server instance on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 server.
A prior article covered this subject, but now you can use the Red Hat certified content collection for JBoss Web Server, which has been available since the 5.7 release.
Restartable sequences (rseq) are a Linux feature that can maintain per-CPU data structures in userspace without relying on atomic instructions. A restartable sequence is written under the assumption that it runs from beginning to end without the kernel interrupting it and running some other code on that CPU. It can therefore access per-CPU data without further synchronization.
Restartable refers to the fallback mechanism that kicks in if the kernel has to reschedule execution. In this case, control is transferred to a fallback path, which can retry the execution or use a different algorithm to implement the required functionality. It turns out that this facility is sufficient to implement a variety of algorithms using per-CPU data, especially if combined with an explicit memory barrier system call.
What’s on the horizon for IT automation in the New Year? In short: Plenty more of it.
Of course, the longer-form answer to that question includes more nuance and complexity than that. There are real business and technology issues driving the growth of automation through IT stacks and organizations.
With that in mind, we asked various IT leaders what’s on their minds in terms of automation now and in the year ahead. Automation is, of course, a big sweeping term – and so we’re treating it as such, covering everything from containerization and orchestration to security automation to AI/ML and more.
Looking to take your leadership skills to the next level in 2023? Having trouble navigating the world of hybrid and remote work? Or are you making a resolution to finally read the stack of books that’s been piling up on your desk? We’ve got you covered with our annual list of leadership must-reads.
Tails, aka The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is a privacy-focussed Linux Distribution which uses the Tor network to protect you while browsing the web. Tails are based on Debian stable branch and come with many goodies such as an IRC client, Tor browser, email clients, and messengers to help you roam around on the web anonymously.
At a high level, Tails 5.8 includes significant redesigns of existing features, improved usability, and strengthened security. Also, bringing modern tech aligns with the changing times and needs of the hour.
This is what's new.
Smelling fresh and ready to invite you in, Linux Mint 21.1 is officially out now so here's what's new and improved. I covered the Beta release and so of course not a whole lot apart from some bug fixes has happened since then. Now is the time to jump in though, as it's better than ever.
For those looking to run software on Ubuntu, the AppImage tool provides a fast and simple way of doing so. Learn how to use AppImage on Ubuntu, step by step.
If you missed the Chumby, we’re sorry.€ They were relatively inexpensive Linux appliances that acted as a clock, Internet radio, and feed reader. The company went belly up, although there was some functionality remaining thanks to one of the founders and now, for a subscription fee, you can still keep your Chumby operating. However, [Doug Brown] bought one with the goal of using it for his own applications. But the 2.6.28 kernel is showing its age. So he decided to€ push a new kernel on the device.
Doing a reverse image search on Android is possible if you have the right tools. This post walks you through the options.
Every end of year calls for reflection. In 2022, censorship and control of information has increased all around the world. I’m thinking about how we’ve seen setbacks in the world’s fight for human rights coming from all directions, like the wave of attacks on reproductive rights that has placed millions of people at risk, and how privacy and freedom online have been critical lifelines for many.
In the midst of these setbacks, 2022 has also been a year of resistance. In the Tor world, we’re currently resisting a DDoS attack on the Tor network. During the time we have been working hard to protect the network and mitigate the impact of this attack, organizations and supporters have come together to demonstrate their support for Tor. Our community has raised awareness about the issue and collectively contributed necessary funds to hire more developers for our network team.
Tor Browser 12.5a1 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
Tor Browser 12.5a1 updates Firefox on Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux to 102.6.0esr.
Modern institutions are rife with tech that disenfranchises, dehumanises, excludes and even bullies students and teachers. It’s high time for a rethink, says Andy Farnell
A while ago, I blogged about our CMake deployment API that allows you to enhance the cmake --install step with instructions that deploy Qt libraries, plugins and assets. At the time of writing, Linux was not supported yet. But not anymore: Qt 6.5 comes with deployment support for Linux!
Static libraries and dynamic libraries comprise a group of compiled object files. An object file results from the compilation of a C program.
The object files are used for multiple programs. Static and dynamic libraries share a common purpose, which is to provide reusable code and data that are shareable with different programs.
Back in September, we looked at a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) to add "lazy" imports to the language; the execution of such an import would be deferred until its symbols were needed in order to save program-startup time. While the problem of startup time for short-running, often command-line-oriented, tools is widely acknowledged in the Python community, and the idea of deferring imports is generally popular, there are concerns about the effect of the feature on the ecosystem as a whole. Since our article, the PEP has been revised and discussed further, but the feature was recently rejected by the steering council (SC) because of those concerns; that has not completely ended the quest for lazy imports, however.
At a grassroots level, those disturbed by a changing America might begin to respond and create a new kind of democracy.
'Tis the season of sugar plums and gift-giving—including the time that Time magazine hands out its somewhat pompous annual "Person of the Year" award.
We’re a tad early for our annual season in which we point out that the NFL likes to play make believe as to its trademark rights for the Super Bowl. You can go read through the history of our posts on the topic, but essentially the NFL seems to think that its trademark rights allow it to control more strictly any commercial operations’ mere mention that this game exists than it actually can. The First Amendment is a thing, you see, and trademarks cannot keep every business from mentioning any reference to the Super Bowl without the NFL’s permission. Certainly it can pick official sponsors and exert some control over whether businesses can suggest an association with the league or the game, but it cannot, for instance, tell a local bar that it can’t tweet out a special on drinks during the Super Bowl on game day.
When you think of first person view (FPV) vehicles, aircraft might be what first comes to mind. However, [Limenitis Reducta] has brought a robot dog into the world, and plans to equip it for some FPV adventures.
Imagine that the BBC chose to ignore the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Cup hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and to instead devote an hour of programming to the moral—and physical—hazards of staging a part of that tournament in the US.
In the last decades of his life, the great Modernist architect Gregory Ain stopped designing buildings. Following a brief tenure as the dean of Pennsylvania State University’s School of Architecture, he is reported to have had a nervous breakdown. He returned home to Los Angeles at the age of 60 and moved into an apartment in Silver Lake designed by Rudolph Schindler, his former mentor, colleague, and friend; later, he would transition to Sunset Hall, a retirement community known for housing aging communists and leftists. It was not lost on Ain that the scholars who came to interview him at either location were generally not there to discuss his legacy but that of other practitioners, such as Schindler and Richard Neutra, with whom Ain had worked before establishing his own firm in the mid-1930s. The architecture critic Esther McCoy wrote that in his retirement, Ain—who despite a commitment to anti-capitalist politics had once indulged in collecting cars—“bought a bicycle” and “haunted bookstores.” Yet even in his state of diminished productivity, his inspiration was not extinguished. As McCoy wrote, “The Roman candles still burst from his mind.”
In 1995, The Nation was bought by a group of investors, including E.L. Doctorow, Victor Navasky, and my father, Paul Newman. A longtime reader of the magazine and sometime contributor, he understood the responsibility of having a public voice and chose his words carefully.
One chilly March afternoon, dozens of Navajo children spilled out of their middle school to play in the snow before heading home. Students in jackets and parkas can be seen on grainy security camera footage chasing and pushing one another to the ground.
Are you part of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools community? We’d like to hear from you.
When PricelessToolkit failed to find an affordable (indoor) irrigation system that works with Home Assistant and ESPHome, he built the DROPLET board based on ESP32 wireless SoC and supporting up to five micro-pumps and soil moisture sensors.
The board also comes with switches to manually control the pump, a built-in DS18B20 temperature sensor, a buzzer, and a I/O header to connect an expansion header for relay control, I2C, GPIOs, and an external DS18B20 temperature sensor.
The HP-16C Computer Scientist is much beloved as the only dedicated programmer’s calculator that Hewlett-Packard ever made. Most surviving examples in the world are well-used, and you haven’t been able to order one from HP since 1989. Thus, [K Johansen] set about building a tribute to the HP-16C using modern hardware.
[Ben Conrad] received an interesting tool as a gift that purported to be a better mousetrap. It was a crescent wrench (made by the Crescent company, even) that didn’t have a tiny adjusting wheel like a traditional wrench. Instead, it had a slide running down the length of the handle. The idea is that you would push the slide to snug the wrench jaws against the bolt or nut, and that would be fast and easy compared to a conventional wrench. As [Ben] notes, though, it doesn’t work very well. Most of us would have just dumped it in the back of the tool chest or regifted it. [Ben] tore his apart to find out what was wrong with it.
Old-school filament-based Christmas lights used to be available in twinkling form. LEDs, with their hard-on and hard-off nature, aren’t naturally predisposed to such behavior. To rectify this, some time ago, [Mark Kriegsman] built an Arduino program that makes LEDs twinkle beautifully.
There are a number of ways to efficiently and elegantly limit an LED’s brightness, but [Tommy] found that using a light pipe or diffuser can integrate better with a device, especially when the device itself is mostly 3D printed in the first place.
In a major victory for pollinators and other wildlife, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Wednesday ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's registration of the bee-killing insecticide sulfoxaflor is unlawful.
In response to a legal challenge brought by the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Biological Diversity, the court argued that the EPA's 2019 decision authorizing the expanded use of sulfoxaflor across more than 200 million acres of pollinator-attractive crops violated the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The court gave the agency 180 days to collect public comment and issue a new decision on the insecticide, which is produced byââ¬Â¯Corteva,ââ¬Â¯formerly Dow AgroSciences.
As Congress prepares to boot millions of people off of Medicaid, landmark research published this week revealed that expansion of the government healthcare program—which some GOP decision-makers have blocked in their states—is tied to higher cancer survival for adults under 40.
"Our study shows a survival benefit of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act for young adult patients with cancer."
In recent years, ads from companies such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA have become a staple on television and social media. They promise customers a chance to find out family secrets through DNA collection. What’s rarely emphasized is that the real DNA data gold mine is selling the information gathered by customers to big pharma, which can then be better positioned to sell its products.
“Abortion is a popular issue” has been a common refrain in the airwaves as pundits and politicians recount the winners and losers of the midterm elections. Abortion was certainly a motivating factor for voters, who backed ballot measures protecting abortion access in five very politically different states.
At the basic level, methods of blood pressure monitoring have slowly changed in the last few decades. While most types of sphygmomanometer still rely on a Velcro cuff placed around the arm, the methodology used in measurement varies. Analog mercury and aneroid types still abound, while digital blood pressure monitors using electrical sensors have become mainstream these days.
Take the current shortage of antibiotics and other medications. Axios reported that “Parents have been calling [pharmacies and other health care providers], distraught over the trouble they’ve had securing everything from Children’s Tylenol to amoxicillin to Tamiflu.” Hospitals are also running out of drugs. The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry, which operates adjacent to the health care industry, functions on thin margins, producing just enough inventory based on projections in order to maximize profits and not overproduce items that may remain unsold. But when a crisis hits, the projected supply is outstripped by demand.
Another example is that of Ascension, a company most of us have never heard of but one that the New York Times described as “one of the country’s largest health systems.” Although it is technically a nonprofit company, Ascension operates like a for-profit corporation, cutting costs by cutting staff. This has left existing staff overstretched and exhausted, leading to mass resignations of nurses and other medical staff. According to the Times, “When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.”
Staff at The Guardian newspaper have been told not to come into the office and to work from home for the rest of the week due to a suspected ransomware attack which struck late on Tuesday.
The attack has impacted a number of business services at the 200-year-old news organization, but not its online site and apps which will continue to publish stories.
An email sent to The Guardian’s employees on Wednesday and seen by The Record tells staff: “The issues affecting Kings Place, the VPN, and the wires are ongoing, and our IT and engineering teams are working to resolve them.”
It is not yet clear what if any data the attackers may have accessed or stolen, but the sensitive information held on newsroom systems could cause a significant data protection breach if one has taken place, alongside potentially exposing sources.
Microsoft has released emergency out-of-band (OOB) Windows Server updates to address a known issue breaking virtual machine (VM) creation on Hyper-V hosts after installing this month’s Patch Tuesday updates.
A few weeks ago, The Verge discovered that Anker, the maker of popular USB chargers and the Eufy line of “smart” cameras, had a bit of a security issue. Despite the fact the company advertised its Eufy cameras as having “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi€ found it was pretty easy to intercept user video streams.
There are all kinds of stalkerware out there. Some of it is actually deployed by government entities — like the spyware that infests computers used by remote workers and school students. Some of it is deployed by parents led to believe that if they don’t shoulder surf by proxy, their kids will become the sort of degenerates that actively wonder where they’ll get their next First Amendment fix.
California’s standing rules are different, and far more protective. But a recent state appeals court decision may change those rules, closing the courthouse doors to victims of corporate violations of data privacy laws. This week, EFF filed an amicus letter with the California Supreme Court, urging it to review that decision and keep those doors open. Our co-amicus is the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and we had assistance from Hunter Pyle Law and Feinberg, Jackson, Worthman & Wasow.
The case, called Limon v. Circle K Stores, alleges the company violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), by presenting a prospective employee with a confusing request for “consent” to run a background check on them. The plaintiff initially sued the company in federal court, but the case was dismissed under federal standing doctrine. The plaintiff then sued the company in California state court, but the case was dismissed again. Worse, when a California appellate court affirmed this dismissal, it imported restrictive federal standing requirements into California’s law. The plaintiff is asking the California Supreme Court to take another look and fix this dangerous mistake.
EFF has filed many amicus briefs in federal court in favor of broad standing to bring data privacy lawsuits. So has EPIC. A recurring question in federal court is whether the plaintiff’s injury is sufficiently “concrete” to satisfy the U.S. Constitution’s limit of federal litigation to “cases and controversies.” It should be enough to suffer a deprivation of one’s legal right to data privacy, without having to prove more, such as an economic or physical injury. After all, American law has historically recognized causes of action for the loss of control over what other people know about us, including claims against intrusion upon seclusion and publication of private facts.
Back in 2014, the Chicago PD’s chief of detectives had this to say about Apple’s plan to roll out device encryption by default...
The Samaria Regional Council, which exposed the vandalism, reacted harshly to the repeated attacks on the site.
Yossi Dagan, head of the council, defined it as the eradication of the Jewish heritage: “The Israeli government has forsaken the Jewish nation’s most important heritage sites. It is unacceptable that rioters are vandalizing the Jewish nation’s history in the heart of the State of Israel. This is an attack on Israel’s heritage. This is irreparable damage,” he said.
A once-thriving Dewsbury pub is set to be turned into an Islamic education centre and prayer room.
The Pentagon's stated commitment to transparency on civilian casualties was questioned Tuesday in an Intercept report noting that the Department of Defense has failed to respond to a group of House Democrats who set a three-month deadline to explain the U.S. military's role in a 2017 Nigerian airstrike that killed more than 160 noncombatants.
"It sends a worrisome message that, at minimum, the Defense Department is unwilling to engage on an issue affecting countless lives."
Taking inspiration from the storied holiday fighting pause in the early months of the First World War, more than 1,000 faith leaders in the United States have signed onto a statement calling for a Christmas truce and ceasefire in Ukraine in the hopes that such a gesture would open the door to substantive diplomatic negotiations.
"As people of faith and conscience, believing in the sanctity of all life on this planet, we call for a Christmas Truce in Ukraine," reads the statement, which was signed by Bishop William J. Barber II, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Dr. Cornel West, Rev. Liz Theoharis, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Sikh leader Valarie Kaur, and hundreds of other religious leaders representing believers from every major tradition.
Driven significantly by dramatically reduced fossil fuel imports following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, solar production soared nearly 50% in the European Union this year—with even greater growth forecast for 2023, a report published this week by an industry group revealed.
"We're building a secure, green, prosperous Europe on a foundation of solar."
The Biden administration is expected to announce a roughly $2 billion military assistance package for Ukraine on Wednesday—one that includes Patriot missile systems and misleadingly named "precision bomb kits"—as the war-ravaged nation's president visits Washington, D.C. in his first trip outside of his country since the start of Russia's invasion 10 months ago.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is set to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House to accept the latest aid package, which comes on top of the nearly $45 billion in assistance Congress is poised to approve as part of its year-end omnibus spending bill. Later Wednesday, Zelenskyy is expected to speak to the press and deliver a primetime address to a joint session of Congress.
The deputies of the State Duma have passed in third reading a bill to pause legal proceedings and the enforcement of sentences against Russian troops serving in Ukraine. The deferral applies to mobilized troops, army volunteers, and contract soldiers, as explained in the announcement on the official Duma website.
Evgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company (PMC), visited the high-security penal colony in Russia’s Vladimir region where opposition politician Alexey Navalny is serving a nine-year prison sentence. The purpose of Prigozhin’s trip, according to Navalny, was to recruit prisoners to serve as mercenaries in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Alexey Navalny’s investigative team has published a new exposé of corruption in the upper echelons of Russian power. This time, the story revolves around Svetlana Ivanova — a well-known lioness of the Russian beau monde since the turn of the millennium, who left her first husband to marry, back in 2009, Russia’s now Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov. In the years since, Ivanov has distinguished himself by overseeing the Defense Ministry’s construction contracts and, it turns out, converting profits from projects like the Russia’s “reconstruction” of Mariupol into a spectacular lifestyle for Svetlana. Last summer, in advance of the EU sanctions against Ivanov, Timur and Svetlana divorced. The only practical consequence of the divorce, however, is that she continues to travel freely around Europe, while her “ex-husband” cannot.
At a Defense Ministry Board meeting on December 21, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced several structural reforms to the Russian army. Among other things, the reforms will change who is subject to conscription under Russia’s universal (with many exceptions) mandatory military service, raising the eligibility age range from 18–27 to 21–30. The reforms will also increase the maximum size of Russia’s army by 490,000 people, and they’ll make it possible for those who are conscripted to sign up immediately as contract soldiers (a different classification of military service, which pays soldiers relatively well, but dramatically increases the chances they’ll be sent into combat). Meduza unpacks Shoigu’s announcement to explain why now, what the Russian army hopes to get out of the changes, and what it all means for draft-age men in Russia.
Organized crime emerged as a potent force in Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Criminal groups exploited flawed economic privatization measures to amass significant economic power, while the collapse of the Soviet security state allowed armed criminal factions to replace government authority and entrench themselves permanently.
These developments were mirrored in many former Soviet states in the 1990s, including Russia. But after Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency in 2000, he and his allies in Russia’s intelligence community reestablished a strong security apparatus and clamped down on many domestic organized crime syndicates.
Just because the mainstream media decided to ignore them doesn’t mean the files aren’t newsworthy—or important.
We finally have an interesting edition of the Twitter files!
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Climate Integrity’s Richard Wiles about the lies of the fossil fuel industry for the December 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
More than 190 countries agreed Monday on a plan to preserve 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by 2030 in order to protect biodiversity, which is rapidly declining due to human activity. The agreement was reached at a United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal, Canada, known as COP15. The United States did not formally participate in negotiations because it is not a signatory to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. The landmark agreement seeks to halt the Earth’s sixth major mass extinction event, and Indigenous communities will have an increased role in protecting wildlife as part of the deal. For more on the historic agreement, we speak with Leila Salazar-López of Amazon Watch and Eriel Tchekwie Deranger with Indigenous Climate Action.
In the spring of 2020, the European Union announced an ambitious plan to overhaul farming practices in fields and valleys across the continent. Named Farm to Fork, it calls for less fertiliser and pesticide use, and more organic production.
Veteran sustainable food and farming experts welcomed the strategy as one that just might have a genuine shot at transforming the agriculture sector and result in better public health, contribute to ending the vertiginous decline of biodiversity, and lower greenhouse gas pollution.
The Biden administration recently moved to ease some sanctions on Venezuela and gave Chevron the green light to resume oil production in Venezuela. Venezuela has faced a years-long economic crisis in part due to harsh U.S. sanctions. Miguel Tinker Salas joins us to discuss shifting U.S.-Venezuelan relations, as well as their impacts on Venezuelan migrants to the U.S.
U.S. Sen Ed Markey on Wednesday led a group of upper chamber lawmakers who urged the Biden administration "to fulfill its commitment in the Glasgow Statement by publicly releasing a plan for ending public financing of unabated international fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022."
"To date, the United States has not made public its plan for meeting these pledges by the end of the year."
The European Commission on Wednesday approved the German government's €28 billion ($29.69 billion) plan to rapidly expand clean energy production.
According to Reuters: "The scheme pays a premium to renewable energy producers, on top of the market price they receive for selling their power. Small generators can receive a feed-in-tariff providing a guaranteed price for their electricity."
I live in South Louisiana on the front lines of the climate crisis and cover the fossil fuel industry and impacts related to the warming planet, so facing gaslighting is a regular occurrence for me.€
So it resonated with me that Merriam-Webster€ dictionary chose “gaslighting” as the word of the year. This year saw a 1,740 percent increase€ in lookups for€ gaslighting, according to a post by the dictionary company, which defines€ gaslighting€ as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” I would add to that,€ that gaslighting is a driver of disorientation and mistrust, and a common practice used by the fossil fuel€ industry — one€ that DeSmog is€ committed€ to countering by drawing connections to those funding€ misinformation.€
In Montana, less than 1% of the people in the state actually trap wildlife. There is no money to be made, fur prices are at all-time lows and it is a barbaric practice. But our Governor sees trapping as something to preserve and fight for, despite the fact that every year people are injured and family pets are killed, not to mention the 150,000 innocent animals that are caught in traps, which like land mines, dominate our public lands, without signs or warnings.
But it goes far beyond trapping; our Governor has made a war on wolves’ part of his personal mission. Wolves are being slaughtered in Montana, with traps, guns and arrows. Bait is being placed on the border of Yellowstone to draw wolves out of the park to their death.
Farrah Hassen reports that 2022 was sadly the first year to see over 100 million people displaced worldwide
Late Monday afternoon, Congressional leaders announced their long-awaited omnibus spending package which will fund the government through September 2023. The good news: the bill does not include needless corporate tax giveaways. The bad news: it also leaves out any expansion of the Child Tax Credit.
Anti-hunger advocates and economists are lauding the permanent food assistance program for children in summer months—included in the $1.7 trillion spending package unveiled Tuesday—as an historic victory in the fight against food insecurity, while also noting that the funding mechanism for the plan will sharply reduce federal pandemic-era food benefits for people across the country.
The omnibus spending legislation that's being debated by the U.S. Senate Wednesday would create a "Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer" (EBT) debit card program for low-income families, providing a monthly $40 per child grocery benefit that would be adjusted for inflation over time.
The Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee said Wednesday that former President Donald Trump's tax returns—portions of which a House panel has voted to make public—likely resemble those of many other wealthy people in the United States who use accounting gimmicks to lower their tax bills or avoid taxes altogether.
In a statement, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said that "Donald Trump's tax returns exemplify the shortcomings of our tax code and consequences of Republicans' decadeslong fight to gut the [Internal Revenue Service]."
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit's prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.
A new analysis released Wednesday shows that earnings inequality in the United States has risen dramatically over the past four decades and continues to accelerate, with the top 0.1% seeing wage growth of 465% between 1979 and 2021 while the bottom 90% experienced just 29% growth during that same period.
"This growing inequality isn't inevitable—it is a result of policy choices to reduce worker power."
In the end, Musk and Bankman-Fried may end up doing a public service, by tarnishing the legend of the genius entrepreneur, which has done a great deal of harm. For now, however, Musk’s Twitter antics are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place some of us went for information from people who actually knew what they were talking about. And a happy ending to this story seems increasingly unlikely.
Oh, and if this column gets me banned from Twitter — or if the site simply dies from mistreatment — you can follow some of what I’m thinking, along with the thoughts of a growing number of Twitter refugees, at Mastodon.
A human rights group on Wednesday denounced Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for pulling "another political, inhumane stunt" by deploying National Guard troops to El Paso and "further militarizing the southern border, terrorizing border residents and vulnerable migrants."
The Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) was referring to Abbott's decision to use "state resources to promote a racist, anti-refugee, xenophobic agenda" after Democratic El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser declared a state of emergency last Saturday in an effort to prevent unhoused asylum-seekers from freezing to death.
While U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has declined to say whether she'll run in 2024 since leaving the Democratic Party earlier this month, political consultants are already making plans, with some firms now declining to work with the Arizona Independent, HuffPost revealed Wednesday.
"Consequences for Kyrsten Sinema? Finally."
What were the most important issues for swing voters in this year’s midterm elections? You probably won’t be surprised to hear that two of them were abortion and inflation. The third, which got far less media attention, was Social Security and Medicare.
The Biden administration is conducting a first-of-its-kind federal investigation into book banning by a school district, stepping up its response to nationwide right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ people and the libraries and schools that seek to create a welcoming environment for the community.
"By choosing to open this investigation in response to our complaint, the federal government is signaling that remedying discrimination against LGBTQIA+ students is a top priority."
So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter). Meta seems to be collapsing into its own gravity. Twitter has been taken over by the equivalent of a stoned ChatGPT (very confident, but very wrong) and seems to be rapidly driving the company off a cliff. Turns out maybe we didn’t need antitrust reform: we just needed two obscenely rich tech CEOs to be totally out of touch with humanity.
Arizona is ground zero for the wackiest theories and craziest political candidates.
Since its founding, political Zionism has had two distinct and contradictory personas. One portrayed it as a national liberation movement that was liberal, democratic, tolerant, and inclusive. This was the face its adherents saw when they looked in the mirror, and it was how they wanted to be seen by the rest of the world.
A cozy dinner at Mar-a-Largo between Donald Trump, and two Hitler admirers, Ye (formerly Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes, coupled with the massive increase of anti-Semitic tweets in recent weeks, (driven in part by Elon Musk’s invitations to formerly banned neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin to rejoin the site), have sent anti-Semitism back onto America’s front pages. Many American Jews are understandably in a panic over the apparent return of a particularly gruesome version of the traditional “socialism of fools” into mainstream discourse. This recent outburst of attention comes, however, after decades when American Jewish organizations chose to underplay this constant problem among right-wingers in exchange for their rock-solid support for Israel. Today, we are finally witnessing the cost of that cynical calculation
Speaking before the Defense Ministry collegium on December 21, President Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian military has unlimited financing...
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has proposed changing the age range during which Russian men can undergo mandatory military service by raising both the minimum and maximum ages at which men can be drafted.
State Duma deputies voted unanimously to pass, in third reading, a bill for amending the Russian Criminal Code and its article on disruptive activities classified as “Sabotage.”
Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman labels this theory as a “hyper-literal interpretation”€ of Article I, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” North Carolina Republican State Legislators initiated the Moore v. Harper case before the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to argue that a state legislature can violate its state’s Constitution in congressional elections.
If SCOTUS were to uphold ISLT, a state legislature could overturn any federal election’s popular vote if they believed it was critically unfair. They could ignore their€ state’s supreme court order to adhere to the recorded vote. In a close electoral count, Feldman points out that “a rogue state legislature could determine the outcome of a presidential election” by reassigning electors to the losing presidential candidate.
The collection of 22 stories is edited by Mykaela Saunders, a Koori and Lebanese writer, teacher, community researcher, has won numerous prizes for her fiction and poetry. Her story, “Terranora,” is included in the volume. Of Dharug descent, and working-class and queer, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community.
In the Overture to the collection, Saunders writes that “Short story anthologies are like mixtapes, and I want you to think of this book as a burnt CD from me to you, a way for you to sample new worlds, a mishmash of styles gathered together that speak to similar themes, and an opportunity to find exciting writers you might not have otherwise come across.” In her choices she went with the eclectic: “I always leant more toward the experimental, outlandish, surreal and satirical, rather than the traditional, predictable, conventional and solemn.”€ Of First Nations people, she asserts that “We are post-apocalyptic and not yet post-colonial, so all those violent histories of invasion and colonisation must be read as apocalyptic by any standard” There’s an elegant symmetry to the mixing. Saunders has the stories talking to one another “like neighbors.”
With winter descending on the capital, all this struck me as particularly cruel when it came to those unfortunate enough to be unhoused. That sense of cruelty was heightened by the knowledge that legions of policymakers, politicians, and lobbyists — with the power to pass legislation that could curtail evictions, protect tenants, and expand affordable housing — travel through Union Station regularly.
When I left D.C., I headed for my hometown, New York City, where Penn Station has been made similarly unwelcome to the homeless. Entrances are closed; police are everywhere; and the new Moynihan terminal, modern and gleaming, was designed without public seating to ward off unwanted visitors. Worse yet, after a summer spent destroying homeless encampments and cutting funding for homeless services, New York Mayor Eric Adams recently announced that the city would soon begin involuntarily institutionalizing homeless people. Rather than address a growing mental health crisis among the most marginalized in his city with expanded resources and far greater access to health care, housing, and other services, Adams has chosen the path of further punishment for the poor.
That wasn't the only surprise. Though Hentschel has done freelance work for ABC, she was not there for the network.
At the time, a political consulting firm called Matrix LLC had paid Hentschel at least $7,000, the firm's internal ledgers show. And Matrix billed two major companies for Hentschel's work, labeling the payments "for Florida Crystals, FPL." (Florida Crystals is a huge sugar conglomerate. FPL is shorthand for the giant utility Florida Power & Light.)
Both companies could have benefited from her efforts to undermine Overdorf and his promises to resolve environmental issues in the district he was vying to represent. Florida Power & Light has pushed back against efforts to bring solar panels to the Sunshine State, while runoff from the sugar industry is a major source of water pollution in Florida.
In late 2021, the right-wing site Conservative Beaver published a story falsely claiming the FBI had arrested Pfizer’s CEO for fraud.
It wasn’t Conservative Beaver’s first brush with fabricated news. The site had falsely claimed Barack Obama was arrested for espionage, Pope Francis was arrested for possession of child pornography and “human trafficking,” and the Pfizer CEO’s wife died after being compelled to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As Conservative Beaver pumped out these and other lies, Google placed ads on the site and split the revenue with its then-anonymous owner.
“We’ve come to this place where you can’t even go near a topic, certain topics, without the mob coming after you,” Dawkins said.
He alleges that all criticism of Qatar’s strict Sharia law is racist, so we must ignore the fact that in Qatar, unmarried women are banned from receiving sexual health and prenatal care. This would also ignore that in Qatar, sex between people of the same gender is illegal and can include a maximum penalty of death by stoning.
Judge Abdullahi Sarki Yola found Kabara guilty of blasphemy after he had been in custody since his arrest and subsequent arraignment in February last year.
“This court has established all the charges brought against you and hereby sentences you to death in accordance with Sharia provision on blasphemy,” Yola said during the hour-long judgement.
A security guard also got a good beating. This incident shows how important this kind of information is. We wish Michael Stürzenberger a speedy recovery. And those who know him know that he is only now really getting going, because he knows how dangerous this political Islam is for our survival: [...]
It’s the latest high-profile case of the Iranian government’s crackdown on protesters, with Amir Nasr-Azadani, a former professional soccer player, facing a possible death sentence for participating in what Iranian police claim was a group that killed a police colonel (Fifpro, soccer’s player’s union strongly condemned the arrest).
"Medical care denial is a passive torture many times accompanied by different forms of physical and psychological tortures," Shahla, an Iranian activist and protester who did not want to be identified for security reasons, told ABC News. "Tortures reported by prisoners vary from beating and keeping prisoners in extremely cold temperature to humiliation, solitary confinement and incarceration in psychiatric wards."
Today, no one should throw the word around, it doesn’t necessarily apply to a Jew who might simply hold odious political opinions. To truly cross the Rubicon into the territory of ultimate traitor is to actively use your Jewish status as a tool for those promoting supremacy and fascism. Zionist Organization of America President Mort Klein stands apart in the Israel lobby as a kapo as the ZOA has feted Steve Bannon and Donald Trump since the 2016 election, even as other Jews protest their blatant antisemitism (Ha’aretz, 11/15/16; 11/14/22). Musician Gilad Atzmon, by virtue of embracing self-hatred to the benefit of Klansman David Duke (DavidDuke.com 12/4/13; Hatewatch, 1/27/15), is a kapo.
Bari Weiss, former New York Times opinion writer and founder of the Free Press, was once merely a feature of the conservative anti-cancel culture brigade, a media solider in a campaign to classify racial and economic justice as some kind censorship against tradition.
The Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to temporarily keep in place Title 42 until after December 27. The Trump-era pandemic policy has been used to block over 2 million migrants from seeking asylum in the country. Meanwhile, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42, siding, at least for the moment, with a group of U.S. states with Republican attorneys general who want to keep Title 42 in place. According to Human Rights First, over 13,400 accounts of murder, torture, kidnapping, rape and other violent attacks on migrants and asylum seekers blocked in or expelled to Mexico under Title 42 have been reported since President Biden took office.
Donald Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, for which he has now been referred to the Department of Justice on sedition and other charges by the January 6 Committee of the House, evoked in me a powerful feeling of déjà vu. It reminded me of Algeria 1991.
Very likely, the reader is wearily familiar with one of the memes that American right wingers endlessly repeat. It's called the Great Replacement: the claim that shadowy but apparently omnipotent elites are deliberately replacing the old stock (meaning white) American population with Third World foreigners.
The 20-year-old was initially sentenced to death by stoning, sparking an international outcry.
Without federal labor protections, domestic workers seek legal rights through cities and states.
Merrick Garland’s recent memo was an important first step, but only Congress can fully end the sentencing disparities.
Six people in Atlanta have been charged with domestic terrorism for taking part in protests against a massive new police training facility known as Cop City. The protesters were taking part in a months-long encampment in a forested area of Atlanta where the city wants to build a $90 million, 85-acre training center on the site of a former prison farm. Conservationists have long wanted to protect the area, the South River Forest, from future development. Protesters are also urging the city to invest in alternatives to more policing. “This is basically a boondoggle that’s been given to the police to make them feel better,” says Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, which is a part of a coalition trying to stop the construction of Cop City in Atlanta.
In a throwaway society, many people try to exercise their creative powers in other ways, ignoring what might be gained from repair. Hobbies, crafts, and side businesses are the usual outlets. All of these can give people pleasurable opportunities, ones not afforded by their day jobs, to think, design, invent, collaborate, and work unbossed. And so it’s no mystery why some people work harder on their own projects on the weekend than for an employer during the week. Compared to these alternatives, what’s so special about repair?
One answer is that repair starts with a problem that compels us to learn more about the material world we otherwise take for granted. When a thing or device upon which we depend breaks down, we’re stuck, unable to act as expected. It then becomes necessary to figure out what’s wrong and enter a new relationship with the broken object. We ask,€ How does it work? How is it supposed to work? Why isn’t it working?€ Now we need to awaken analytic faculties that a neatly functioning world has lulled to sleep.
When the salmon are running up the Columbia River, Native people are there with them. They live, eat and sleep at the river. Their children grow up at the river. They catch salmon for subsistence, for ceremonies and for their living.
With wars raging in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, Roe v. Wade overturned and our resources being wasted on militarism instead of addressing the climate crisis, it can be hard to remember the hard-won progress being made. As we end a difficult year, let's pause to remind ourselves of some of the positive changes that happened in 2022 that should inspire us to do more in the year to come. While some are only partial gains, they are all steps towards a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.
After cheat maker EngineOwning was sued by Activision in January 2022, online taunts suggested that some of the defendants would never be found. Nearly a year later, around 30 names are on the docket, together facing allegations of copyright infringement and racketeering. For some of those defendants, the clock is already ticking toward a mid-January deadline.
The U.S. Copyright Office has completed its public consultations on the use of technical measures to identify and protect copyrighted content online. The inquiries triggered responses from a wide variety of stakeholders, both for and against tools such as 'upload filters'. The Office cautions lawmakers against drastic decisions and sees more benefit in small tweaks and voluntary agreements.
One of the biggest topics underlying the hype bonanza since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT two weeks ago has been: What does this mean for Google search?
But it was only on Tuesday evening that Google appeared to finally weigh in on the topic: CNBC reported that employees raised concerns at a recent all-hands meeting that the company was losing its competitive edge in artificial intelligence (AI) given ChatGPT’s quick rise.
But despite its recently published guidance, a spokeswoman the IPO told Newsweek "copyright law remains unchanged," and there are "a range of provisions in criminal and civil law which may be applicable in the case of password sharing where the intent is to allow a user to access copyright protected works without payment."
"These provisions may include breach of contractual terms, fraud or secondary copyright infringement depending on the circumstances. Where these provisions are provided in civil law, it would be up to the service provider to take action through the courts if required," the IPO spokeswoman said.
Henson, however, died in 1990 of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome. Speaking to The Guardian in a new interview, Oz claimed: “The Disney deal is probably what killed Jim. It made him sick.
“[Then-Disney boss Michael Eisner] was trying to get Sesame Street, too, which Jim wouldn’t allow,” Oz continued. “But Jim was not a dealer, he was an artist, and it was destroying him, it really was.”
Speaking about the current-day iterations of the Muppets and Sesame Street, he said: “The soul’s not there. The soul is what makes things grow and be funny. But I miss them and love them.”
He also claimed there is “a demarcation line between the Jim Henson Muppets and the Disney Muppets”.
Disney finally managed to buy the Muppets – but not Sesame Street – in 2004, and to Oz’s mind, there’s a “demarcation line between the Jim Henson Muppets and the Disney Muppets”: “There’s an inability for corporate America to understand the value of something they bought. They never understood, with us, it’s not just about the puppets, it’s about the performers who love each other and have worked together for many years.”
Oz hasn’t worked with the Muppets since 2007, and I assumed he’d retired. I assumed incorrectly: “I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me, and Sesame Street hasn’t asked me for 10 years. They don’t want me because I won’t follow orders and I won’t do the kind of Muppets they believe in,” he says. He can’t bear to watch the Muppets or Sesame Street today: “The soul’s not there. The soul is what makes things grow and be funny. But I miss them and love them.”
In spite of occasional bright spots like the 2011 film The Muppets and the new Disney Plus series Muppets Now!, some elusive Muppets recipe has been lost to time. The Muppets were and are an ensemble act of puppetry masters, but the heart of their early success was the unique, compelling chemistry between Jim Henson and Frank Oz, who performed and voiced the most iconic Muppet characters, from Kermit the Frog to Miss Piggy to Animal. But while the Muppets are now immortalized as brands, the performers that brought them to life were just people. Creative chemistry can’t become intellectual [sic] property [sic].
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.