According to a SpaceX resources page, Starlink satellites run on the open-source operating system Linux.
Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish software engineer, in order to be a free, openly-shared operating system that could be tailored for users' specific computer hardware.
By its very design, Linux is easy to customize, making it ideal for specific use cases like Starlink satellites. In addition, Linux-based operating systems can draw upon a worldwide repository of open-source programs and tools, enabling rapid prototyping of new hardware and software.
From now on you can transform elements with the translate, rotate, and scale properties.
Let’s say you apply several transforms to an element, and on :hover and :focus you only want to change one of them, for example, scale.
Clicking Video Editor in the Blender splash screen will take you to a timeline where you can do basic video editing. It’s a bit different from other packages I’ve used, but I’ve cut together and exported a few things for work on it, and have been pleasantly surprised.
The idea is simple: virtually all of those sensors – many of them rated for outdoor use – use the unlicensed 433 MHz spectrum that can easily be captured using cheap RTL-SDR (software defined radio) USB dongles. With the data stream from these sensors captured, the open source rtl_433 project enables automatic decoding of these data streams for a wide range of supported sensors.
There are several ways to view your system’s IP address in Ubuntu. In this tutorial, you will learn how to find your IP address from the command line and GUI.
In the Linux system, it is a critical administrative task to manage users, add them, remove users, or assign new user privileges. In Linux, numerous users can simultaneously work on the same system. But security measures must be made to stop breaching other users’ private data. Information related to the local users is stored in the path “/etc/passwd”. In which, every row indicates the data of a single user that may contain the name of the user, user Id, directory of the user, and login details. When it comes to the listing of the user in Linux, there are multiple ways to list them, we will discuss some of these in this tutorial.
Determining the filesystem type in Linux can be useful in various scenarios, such as when you want to mount a filesystem, when you want to create a new filesystem, or when you want to format a disk. There are several ways to determine the filesystem type in Linux, such as using the df, mount, or the lsblk command. In this article, we will explore these different ways to determine the filesystem type in Linux.
There are several ways to determine the filesystem type in Linux.
Learn how to install Python on Debian 11 Bullseye, from either Debian repo or the latest stable release or pre-release from Python download.
QOwnNotes offers many attractive features for users who wish to keep all their essential information organized in one place. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install QOwnNotes on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using an official dedicated LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to QOwnNotes to install the latest version using the command line terminal.
Scribus is a powerful, free desktop publishing and formatting tool for desktop operating systems. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Scribus on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using an official dedicated LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to Scribus to install the latest version using the command line terminal.
Ubuntu Cleaner is a free and open-source application that provides users with a graphical interface for removing unnecessary files on Ubuntu desktops to keep systems running smoothly. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Ubuntu Cleaner on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using an official dedicated LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to Ubuntu Cleaner to install the latest version using the command line terminal.
This post covers how to install PostgreSQL 15 on RHEL 9 system step by step.
PostgreSQL is an open-source, multi-platform, robust and highly extensible database server based on the SQL language. It provides the features like data integrity, build applications and create fault-tolerant environments.
Do you have to work with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations and need to repeat complex tasks over and over again? For example, you need to highlight duplicate values in a sheet or remove shapes from the slides of a presentation.
If this is the case, it might be challenging for you as a Linux user. Performing such tasks manually is meaningless. A lot of different operations can be easily done automatically with VBA macros in Microsoft Office. However, there is a serious problem – they don’t natively run on Linux machines.
Linux supports the creation of containers, which act as virtual machines but are separated from the system process. Containers are lightweight, and unlike virtual machines, they don’t need CPU hardware virtualization support. Hence, you can quickly create multiple containers on one server. The containers can be created and managed using LXD.
This guide discusses everything about LXD. We will see how to install LXD and create and manage containers.
Steam Replay is Valve's new highlight page going over a bunch of fun stats about your gaming year, something made popular by the likes of Spotify Wrapped and similar events from numerous other places.
Xfce 4.18 was released on December 16, 2022.
The lovely desktop environment has been around for around 25 years now (since 1997!). A lot of Linux and other Unix-like systems users like Xfce for how lightweight and straightforward it is.
It just doesn’t get in the way of the user like some other desktops do. It helps the user to do what he/she wants to do.
Perhaps the consistent user experience and familiar traditional design were the main selling points of this desktop, allowing it to last for more than quarter a century.
In today’s article, we will examine the current state of the Xfce desktop, as well as some important feature highlights in the latest 4.18 release. We will also discuss some possible improvement points in the mouse-driven desktop.
[...]
Xfce is a very functional desktop for Linux and other Unix-like systems, it is enjoyed by many, and won’t be going away any time soon.
Mostly it works just fine, the thing people love about it is that it works just fine for years without a breaking change for the user experience. However, some areas are still in need of improvements like we have seen together.
Sadly, it feels like the development team is overwhelmed with tasks and to-dos. It could help a lot if you can donate to the project or help fix some issues by yourself, if you know how to.
Linux distros are the most popular operating systems for programming and other development-related work. Whether you are a programmer or a system administrator, Linux distros can maximize your productivity.
Linux operating systems also provide power, flexibility, stability, and more features. However, the massive range of Linux operating systems may confuse programmers, whether they are experts or beginners. So, in this guide, we will explain the best Linux distros for programmers in 2023.
If you have a low-end device, it can be hard to smoothly use the operating system. That’s why Linux contains various types of lightweight and portable distros. Portable distros provide a convenient approach to using Linux from a USB flash drive. You can carry these fully functional operating systems in a USB and connect them to your machine.
It also comes in handy when you want to use someone else’s device but only works on your OS. However, the wide variety of these types of Linux distros sometimes confuses the beginners. This blog will give you a complete information on the best Linux distros for USB.
Various types of Linux OS are available to fulfill different users’ requirements. Linux operating systems like Arch Linux, Gentoo, and Kali Linux are the most suitable for advanced users. Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc., are best for beginners. Although experienced users know which OS they should use, this is different for beginners. Some new users are always confused about which Linux OS is best for them. So, if you are also a beginner, this guide will briefly compare Pop!_OS and Linux Mint.
[...]
Pop!_OS and Linux Mint are best for beginners and provide a fresh experience to the users. However, there is always an argument between users that Linux Mint is not optimized enough. Linux Mint uses Cinnamon, which feels a bit outdated, so many users think it is old. On the other side, Pop!_OS is completely based on Ubuntu with the latest MESA drivers making it simple for Nvidia lovers.
Sipeed also mentioned that support for operating systems such as Debian, Android and OpenWrt will be released around Q1 2023. Although, the company will provide support for more OSes in the future.
It also seems that the company will release other commercial products built around the Lichee 4A, for instance, the Lichee Cluster 4A, the Lichee Router 4A and the Lichee Pad/Phone 4A.
The award-winning project, “Research and Extension for Unmanned Aircraft Systems in U.S. Agriculture and Natural Resources,” evaluates and identifies the most reliable, cost-effective, and user-friendly drone platforms and sensors for monitoring and managing stressors in agriculture and natural resources. To maximize the accuracy of the data collected, project members developed hardware, software, and detailed protocols for calibrating and using drones.
Maria Balota, a professor in the School and Plant and Environmental Sciences and Tidewater Agricultural Research and Extension Center; Daniel Fuka, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering; Cully Hession, a professor and graduate program director in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering; and Joseph Oakes, the superintendent of the Eastern Virginia Agricultural Research and Extension Center, represented the university on the team of scientists.
The project is built around a Raspberry Pi 4 but you could easily recreate the concept using a Pi 3 or even a Pi Zero W. The Pi needs to have GPIO to control the Christmas lights, which in this case is a strip of individually addressable WS2812b LEDs, as well as an Internet connection to help host the web server interface.
The free software library RetroPie, for example, lets people relive the Amstrad CPC, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Master System, Neo Geo, Oric, TRS-80 and Vectrex among many, many other machines. Raspberry Pi has also effectively become a near-perfect Amiga thanks to the distro Amibian.
Recently, however, our heads were turned by a new tool created by Jarosà âaw “Jaromaz” Mazurkiewicz called MacintoshPi. This open-source project allows users to run full-screen versions of Apple's Mac OS 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 (operating systems released between 1991 and 2001) and it does so complete with sound, an active internet connection and modem emulation.
[Ted Fried] wrote in with not one but two (2!) new drop-in replacements for widespread old-school CPUs: the Zilog Z80 and the Intel 8088. Both of the “chips” run in cycle-accurate mode as well as in a super turbo mode, which can run so fast that you’ll need to use the Teensy’s internal RAM just to keep up.
For a while now, my IPFS node has complained about resource limits being exceeded. Sadly, I’ve not had any time to look into the issue. Speaking of, what kind of miserable bastard would spend their Christmas holiday troubleshooting an IPFS node? Ah yes, that would be me.
This is a LibreOffice Calc calendar of 2023 made ready for you to download, import as template and print. We offer it as editable OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) files and PDF. We use a template by Claus Kofoed Nielsen from Denmark. Feel free to download and make yourself more productive!
LibreOffice 7.5 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2023 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.5 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 7.5 started in mid June, 2022. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.5 Beta1, 213 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 70 issues got fixed. Check the Release Notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 7.5 RC1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard version.
The Linux Foundation announced its AgStack Project, which will host an open-source code base, along with a fully automated, continuous computation engine that will maintain a global dataset of boundaries for agricultural fields. The AgStack Asset Registry dataset will aid food traceability, carbon tracking, crop production, and other field-level analytics.
This ‘registry’ is designed to continuously update using data from satellites and real field registrations that contain boundary information, which will train machine learning models to ascertain more boundaries, among other capabilities.
A collection of articles on various branches of Open Science dedicated to Stein Høydalsvik DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/rt.39
The scientific community builds upon open access and open information. Recalling the famous quote in a 1675 letter by Isaac Newton: "if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." The scientific community has built our collective knowledge of the world around us on the information shared by those who came before us, and that is still the case today.
Looking back at the past year examining open source science and sustainability here on Opensource.com, many of the top articles on this topic touched on aspects of climate change. And that’s a good thing to see. We’re all in this together when solving this global problem. No one benefits when the solutions to climate change are locked up in proprietary solutions. In order to succeed, we need to spread the solutions far and wide to enable a truly global effort to fight back and save our planet.
Without further ado, here is a look back at some of the highlights from this year in science and sustainability.
Often thought of as ‘the last good place on the internet’, Wikipedia plays a key role in the online information ecosystem by linking its entries to current and historic research papers. But, after following these links, how much of this research is openly accessible? Presenting evidence from a recent study, Andy Tattersall, finds that around 50% of research linked to Wikipedia from the White Rose Universities of Sheffield, York and Leeds, is openly accessible. As Wikipedia’s stated aim if for its sources to verifiable, he argues openness should be central to the use of research on Wikipedia.
The C++ language has many inbuilt methods for programmers. We just need to access those methods by importing the required libraries. Strings play a vital role in coding and C++ provides plenty of built-in functions for strings. Strings are arrays of characters. It can store one or more than one characters. The difference between character arrays and strings is that character arrays can be of fixed size but mostly we do not define the size. And in strings, we do not need to limit the size. There are many methods used for strings. We can find the length of strings, we can concatenate two or more strings, and many more methods for strings are available for programmers to use. One of these built-in methods is string copy, denoted by the term strcpy(). This function is used to copy one string in another. These methods are pre-built in the C++ library so that we do not have to write the entire piece of code over and over again for the operations we carry out for the majority of the time when we code. To use this strcpy() function, we need to import the specific library that contains this method. For this function, we have to import any of the below command.
In the C language, establishing a client-server connection through a socket requires several steps and functions. Some of these are used to retrieve data from the server you want to connect to, others are used to create the socket or convert addresses.
Although there is no particular order, this series of steps and function calls must be done in an order because their results are used in the input arguments of the subsequent function.
In this Linux Hint article, you will learn how to use the connect() function and create a socket from scratch to connect remotely to a server.
We begin with a description of the syntax, the input and output arguments that make up this function, and a theoretical explanation of how it works. Then, we will look at an example that shows step-by-step process on how to create and connect a socket.
Generating random strings in Python is a common task that can be useful in various scenarios, such as when you need to create unique identifiers, when you want to generate random passwords, or when you want to create random data for testing purposes. In Python, you can use the random module and the string module to generate random strings. The random module provides functions for generating random numbers, and the string module provides functions for generating random strings.
[...]
In conclusion, generating random strings in Python is a useful task that can be easily accomplished using the random module and the string module. The `random` module provides functions for generating random numbers, and the string module provides functions for generating random strings. By combining these two modules, you can generate random strings of any length and complexity. Understanding how to generate random strings in Python can be helpful in various scenarios, such as when you need to create unique identifiers, when you want to generate random passwords, or when you want to create random data for testing purposes.
In Python, you can generate a random password using the secrets module, which is part of the Python standard library. The secrets module provides a secure way to generate random strings, numbers, and other values that can be used for various purposes, such as generating passwords, tokens, or unique IDs.
In Bash, the && operator is used to perform a logical AND operation. It allows you to execute a command if and only if the preceding command executes successfully.
The UNIX/Linux shell is a command-line program that creates a bridge between the terminal emulator and kernel to allow users to enter commands, execute programs, and perform various other tasks by typing commands at the command prompt.
Once the shell has finished executing the user assigned program, it will send the output to the user on the terminal screen, which is the standard output device.
Note that the shell is not just a program but a whole programming language like Python or C/C++. You can write your own program, utility, or script that contains the if-else logic, loop statement, functions, variables, object, etc.
Most users are familiar with the Bash shell (the successor to the traditional “sh“), but there are many other shell implementation programs that provide different features and functionality, which we will explore in this article.
Why does Davina want her colleagues to know more about the virtual consoles, the terminal, and the shell?
I don’t know any developer who doesn’t use a terminal, a shell, and some CLIs. I definitely use them all the time. They are the central building bricks of my Mouseless Development Environment.
So, since it’s so useful, let’s look a bit deeper what’s this shell, console, and terminal. More precisely, we’ll see, in this article: [...]
Rust is consistently voted one of the languages people most want to learn. In 2022, Opensource.com had a few articles to help you get started.
Rust is a fairly new language, but it's grown quickly. The general excitement about it goes beyond interest in a new language to try. Rust has genuinely useful features, like the ability to allocate data to the heap (instead of the stack) using the Box data type. There's no separate garbage collection required, and you don't have to manually manage memory yourself. Additionally, the Crate.io infrastructure for library management and installation makes it easy to find and use functions contributed by the Rust community.
Rust is a programming language focusing on speed, concurrency, and safety. Thanks to its integration with online registries, its helpful compiler, and its almost intuitive…
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program released in 1979 for the Apple II computer. It was easy to use and allowed for data sorting and storing in tabular rows and columns. VisiCalc was created to address and replace the manual spreadsheet management method. Changing a single value meant modifying the entire spreadsheet because changes made to one cell were automatically applied to all connected cells with VisiCalc. This program was one of the most critical factors in making personal computers more appealing to everyday customers and companies instead of hobbyists and techies.
This web site, www.bricklin.com, includes lots of information about VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program as we know them today. It has material directly from Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the co-creators of VisiCalc, including scans of original photographs from VisiCalc's development days, a working copy of the program, and other things from Software Arts, Inc., Dan and Bob's company. Additional material is constantly being added, so researchers, computer historians, and teachers should check back periodically.
January 2, 1979: Entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston incorporate their company Software Arts to publish a little program called VisiCalc.
The first spreadsheet for the Apple II, the $100 VisiCalc ultimately becomes personal computing’s first “killer app.” It helps transform personal computers from “cool to have” toys into “must have” business accessories.
In 1979 Dan Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, and Bob Frankston wrote VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. It helped dispel the notion that the Apple II was only a toy for hobbyists. The PC version of VisiCalc was called "the first killer app" for the PC.
Process9, India's leading language technology company, has released the latest version of its cloud-based neural machine translation technology - MoxWave. This new Made in India SaaS product can translate content into 13 Indian languages, including a popular mix of Hindi and English (Hinglish). More Indian and global languages are being added to the product. One of MoxWave's key features is its ability to be tailored for particular domains like BFSI, e-commerce, Govt/PSU or chatbots. With customization, the translation caters to the target audience by using words that are specific to the industry. Companies and individual translators can even use their own data to train the software so that it can produce an output of higher quality.
By now, you’ve surely seen the AI tools that can chat with you or draw pictures from prompts. OpenAI now has Point-E, which takes text or an image and produces a 3D model. You can find a few runnable demos online, but good luck having them not too busy to work.
Everyone’s all, “Wow, chatGPT, amazing, a real milestone, everything will change from now on”. And they’re right – but probably don’t realize that this is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact there’s been wave after wave of computing technological innovation ever since the industry got started in the 1950’s. Here are some of the waves I’ve experienced personally.
With the proliferation of biometric access to mobile devices, entering a password on your desktop can feel so passé. [Snazzy Labs] decided to fix this problem for his Mac by liberating the Touch ID from a new Apple keyboard.
The Unified Program and Debug Interface (UPDI) is Microchip’s proprietary interface for programming and on-chip debugging, and has become the standard on AVR MCUs after Microchip’s purchase of Atmel. Being a proprietary interface means that even entry-level programmers like the Atmel-ICE are rather expensive at over $100. That’s when for [Scott W Harden] the question arose of whether the much cheaper MPLAB Snap board (~$34) could be used as well for AVR UDPI purposes.
Stabilizing an inverted pendulum is a classic problem in control theory, and if you’ve ever taken a control systems class you might remember seeing pages full of differential equations and bode diagrams just to describe its basic operation. Although this might make such a system seem terribly complicated, actually implementing all of that theory doesn’t have to be difficult at all, as [Limenitis Reducta] demonstrates in his latest project. All you need is a 3D printer, some basic electronic skills and knowledge of Python.
There’s a mystique in audiophile circles about tube amplifiers. They can have a very nice sound which is attributed to their even-harmonic distortion, but they are often portrayed as requiring rare and expensive components. You don’t need matched gold-plated tubes and special transformers would by Japanese monks with oxygen-free silver wire when the tube you’d have found in a TV back in the day paired with a repurposed mains transformer will do. [Mikremk] demonstrates this with a simple but effective amplifier using a PCL82 triode-pentode.
What follows is both a small introduction for newcomers and a friendly reminder for all you veterans out there. Regardless of your preferred equipment (skis obviously being cooler than snowboards), if you find yourself lucky enough to embark on winter holidays despite Covid-19, use this quick read to freshen up on the basics!
Teeth are organs with their own blood supplies and delicate nerve structures, which “people don’t understand,” Winters said. By whittling away the hard, protective enamel that covers the surface of a tooth, “you’re basically giving yourself a deadline for how long that tooth can last.”
The latest development is the decision by Republicans and Democrats in Congress to include a measure banning TikTok from devices used by federal employees in the $1.7 trillion year-end omnibus bill setting out federal funding for the next year.
It follows similar moves by a host of state governments to keep TikTok off devices held by state government workers.
On December 24, RansomHouse threat actors added the government of Vanuatu to their leak site, claiming to have locked them on October 6 and exfiltrated 3.2 TB of files. A proof pack includes files that do appear to be consistent with government files. The evidence pack did not include particularly personal or sensitive files.
From what this blogger has seen, lack of insurance does not reduce the likelihood of an entity becoming a victim in the k-12 education sector. How many school districts have we seen that were hit and did not have any cyberinsurance to pay any ransom demands or just refused to pay ransom? Vice Society even told this blogger that the absence of cyberinsurance is not a factor for them or deterrent, and when asked about one of their recent attacks on a k-12 district, a Hive spokesperson told this blogger that they had no idea whether the victim had cyberinsurance to pay as they hadn’t checked. So maybe that approach is not likely to be as effective as some might hope.
Nearly 90 per cent of the ransomware victims were small and midsized enterprises, and only 41.8 per cent of them had systems that could defend against ransomware attacks, the data added.
In this post I will go into technical details on what attackers could do with the stolen encrypted vaults, specifically how they could use tools like Hashcat to crack vault passwords and get access to sensitive log-in credentials.
To simulate the stolen data, I will use my test Lastpass account to extract an encrypted vault from the Chrome Browser extension on macOS. Following this, I will use a wordlist attack to bruteforce the vault which has a weak and guessiable password.
If you have an account you use to store passwords and login information on LastPass, or you used to have one and hadn’t deleted it before this fall, your password vault may be in hackers’ hands. Still, the company claims you might be safe if you have a strong master password and its most recent default settings. However, if you have a weak master password or less security, the company says that “as an extra security measure, you should consider minimizing risk by changing passwords of websites you have stored.”
That might mean changing the passwords for every website you trusted LastPass to store.
MSG Entertainment — the company running New York’s Madison Square Garden and other venues — has chosen to turn over its doorman duties to facial recognition tech. Setting aside the fact (for the sake of argument) that this tech tends to subject minorities and women to higher rates of false positives/negatives, recent events at MSG Entertainment-owned venues suggest maybe it’s not a wise idea to do certain things just because you can.
The data, that were allegedly scraped due to a vulnerability, include email, name, username, follower_count, creation_date, and phone_number. The seller provides a sample on the forum that involves well-known individuals.
Since then, EFF has joined with those in the labor community to learn more about surveillance in the workplace and on work devices, and the effect it has on employees. Particularly as regulators start to pay more attention, and legislators include workers’ privacy in general consumer privacy bills, it’s important to understand the ways that the workplace presents unique challenges in this arena.
Bossware has Real Effects on Workers
As white collar remote workers felt bossware breathing down their necks, there was€ more coverage than ever of how employers are monitoring the workforce, and the lasting effects it has on workers' health, safety, livelihood, and collective bargaining rights. Even for remote staff, these stresses affected their mental health and family responsibilities. But it is workers across all fields that have increasingly felt the heat of surveillance, and some of the coverage was propelled by blue collar workers who fought back, from meatpacking facilities to service workers to delivery drivers who experienced increased surveillance as a form of retaliation for wage demands. Neither the ineffectiveness nor the impact on real people calmed employers' desires for increasing means to monitor and control worker behavior, with some even floating a database on worker productivity. Courts and agencies in other countries, like the Netherlands, have been quicker to take on U.S. firms who they allege have violated the human rights of foreign remote workers with demands on their acquiescence to invasive monitoring.
A similar pattern is detectable in the digital world.€ The slavers have replaced their human product with data and information. The ubiquitous sharing of information on social media platforms has brought with it a fair share of dangerous ills. A $2 billion lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, which was filed in Kenya’s High Court this month, is a case in point.
The petitioners, Kenyan rights group Katiba Institute, and Ethiopian researchers Fisseha Tekle and Abrham Meareg, argue that Meta failed to employ sufficient safety measures on the Facebook platform which would have prevented the incitement of lethal conflict.€ Most notable were the deaths of Ethiopians arising from the Tigray War, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and seen the displacement of 2.1 million Ethiopians.
The Swedish Migration Agency found a third of all Pakistani master’s students dropped out and took up full-time work as soon as they hit the 30-credit or one-semester threshold to be eligible for a work permit under Swedish law.
This year began with a report that elucidated what police are doing with drones. Answer? Not much for now. A law in Minnesota mandates police departments report€ all of the times they deployed drones and for what reason. We’ve suspected that police have few clear uses, other than invasive surveillance. The Minnesota report reveals that drones were mostly€ just for training purposes.
One purpose Axon was hoping to find for drones this year was to stop school shooters. The company announced they were developing a drone that came with a mounted taser for the purpose of subduing people in dangerous situations. The backlash was immediate. After a majority of Axon’s ethics board resigned the company paused the project.
In Oakland and in San Francisco, activists defeated municipal plans to authorize police to use deadly force with remote-controlled robots. In Oakland, police hoped to use a shotgun-mounted robot-–a plan which received so much backlash the proposal was pulled in just a few days. In San Francisco, it took a little longer. After the Board of Supervisors voted 8-to-3 to authorize police to use robots strapped with bombs to deploy deadly force, an EFF-led coalition mobilized. After one week, which included a rally and international press attention, the Board of Supervisors reversed course.
A Khabarovsk military court is hearing a case against service member Daniil Frolkin. He’s been charged with spreading known falsehoods, created by a group of people with selfish motives, about the Russian army. Human rights media project OVD-Info called attention to the case.
Authorities in the city of Izyum, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, have decided to rename 19 streets in order to “de-Russify toponyms,” according to the city’s deputy mayor Volodymyr Matsokin.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry released a statement saying that Russian joined the United Nations (UN) illegally, occupying the place held by the USSR on the UN Security Council.
In fact, though Hunter Biden came up in this deposition 36 times, Chan’s testimony was that Hunter Biden came up in just one briefing with social media companies, one in which someone from FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Laura Dehmlow, refused to comment in response to a question from Facebook about the already-published NY Post story.
On the southern coast of Africa, local community groups and environmental activists have been celebrating a significant legal victory over a major oil player. In September a South African court prohibited Shell’s controversial plan to conduct seismic exploration for oil and gas deposits off the Wild Coast in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. But, the battle is far from over, Shell is appealing the ruling, and it has the resources and government support to take the case through the country’s court system to get the decision it’s after.
Thanks to fresh scrutiny this year from state politicians, water activists and journalists, the Saudi agricultural giant Almarai has emerged as an unlikely antagonist in the water crisis. The company, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, has been buying and leasing land across western Arizona since 2014. This year The Arizona Republic published a report showing that the Arizona State Land Department has been leasing 3,500 acres of public land to Almarai for a suspiciously low price.
The case has prompted calls for an investigation into how a foreign company wound up taking the state’s dwindling water supplies for a fee that might be as low as one-sixth the market rate. But the focus on the Saudi scheme obscures a more fundamental problem: pumping groundwater in Arizona remains largely unregulated. It’s this legal failing that, in part, allows the Saudi company to draw unlimited amounts of water to grow an alfalfa crop that feeds dairy cows 8,000 miles away.
However, there are companies which went to the cloud with great enthusiasm; however, they are now struggling with bloating costs of running their business in comparison to their in-house infra.
What is cloud repatriation?
Cloud repatriation means a reverse migration from public cloud by large enterprises to on-premises IT infrastructure. This is a remarkable trend that is gaining momentum with respect to public cloud these days.
Gregory Ain wanted to create social housing in Los Angeles. Dogged by the FBI, his hope for more egalitarian architecture never came to be.
The mandatory distribution requirement is based on life expectancy at your current age. This means, for example, if your life expectancy at 72 is ten years, then you have to withdraw (and pay taxes) on roughly 10 percent of the money in your IRA or 401(k). The actual calculations are somewhat more complicated, but this is the basic story.
Anyhow, the ostensible justification for raising the age for mandatory withdrawals was that people are worried about outliving their retirement funds. It is important to realize that this is not really the issue with mandatory withdrawals.
If Santos seemed almost too good to be true, it’s because almost his entire biography and résumé was a fiction. As the Forward reported on Wednesday, “Congressman-elect George Santos’s emotional narrative of having Jewish grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be untrue, like much of the rest of his campaign biography, according to genealogy websites reviewed by the Forward.” It’s an open question whether Santos is even Jewish at all.
Soon after Elon took over Twitter and fired everyone, we wondered (somewhat jokingly) if there was anyone left at the company who was aware of the FTC’s consent decree with the company, signed originally in 2011, but which runs for 30 years, and which was updated back in May of 2022. These documents have some fairly strict requirements for the company around protecting the privacy of its users, and also limiting employees access to certain data.
Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn’t help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city’s homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs everywhere announcing that you needed a ticket to be there. Other warning signs indicated that you could only sit for 30 minutes at a time at the food-court tables, while barriers had been placed where benches used to be to make it that much harder to congregate, no less sit down.
In 2020, I published a book about the Posadists, a communist sect from Argentina who believed that the extraterrestrial pilots of UFOs had come in peace to help us overcome the suicidal capitalist order that rules Earth. The Posadists were an apocalyptic cult with absurd ideas about nuclear war and comradeship with dolphins, but their party line on aliens was pretty sound.
Russian President Vladimir Putin named Dmitry Medvedev, currently the deputy chairman of the Security Council, to another post — the first deputy chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission of the Russian Federation. Putin’s decree on the matter has been published on the official web portal for legal information.
For Ukrainians, they will confirm the official Ukrainian perspective that, with the world’s preeminent military power irrevocably committed to offering unlimited miltary and economic support, perpetuating the war will be worth all the sacrifices which doing so will entail.
For Russians, they will confirm, dramatically, the official perspective that Russia is at war with the United States and NATO, not with the manipulated “brotherly people” of Ukraine, that this war is existential for Russia and that Russia cannot afford to lose this war.
We have requested Netflix and ITN remove any labels that state or imply that this series is a factual documentary or docuseries, reclassify the series as “science fiction," and to balance the deleterious content in the show with scientifically accurate information about our human past.
(2) Netflix identifies and advertises the series as a “docuseries,” a genre that implies its content is grounded in fact when the content of the show is based on false claims about archaeologists and archaeology; and [...]
From the United States to Brazil and Israel, a barrage of election-related misinformation hammered voters around the world in 2022, but many pushed back against the conspiracy-laden Trumpian tactic of sowing distrust in the democratic process.
A tsunami of falsehoods flooded Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube -- from "deep fake" videos to doctored photos seeking to manipulate voters -- with pro-democracy activists accusing the platforms of doing too little to combat the menace.
The bevy of bad internet regulation proposals coming out of Congress hasn’t stopped. In 2022, the EARN IT Act was re-introduced. This wrongheaded bill would have allowed states to strip away critical legal protections for any websites, apps, or platforms, as long as state lawmakers linked their proposals to child abuse. If passed, the EARN IT Act would encourage censorship and prod companies away from using encryption.
Either way, in October, we again wrote about another story by Baker-White, now at Forbes, talking about how ByteDance appeared to use TikTok data to try to spy on certain US citizens, though the details were vague. As we said at the time, this seemed like the sort of thing that should spur people to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law, not that that’s happened. Instead, we’ve just been getting more and more performative nonsense focused exclusively on TikTok, rather than on the underlying problem.
Now, Baker-White has the third piece in this trilogy that ties them all together. Apparently one of the US citizens ByteDance was trying to spy on… was Baker-White herself, and it was because of the original Buzzfeed article, as the company sought to track down how the initial info was leaked. It’s quite a story and you should read the whole thing, though here’s just a snippet.
With an entire newsroom in exile, over a dozen media licenses revoked and more than 120 journalists fleeing, journalists and analysts say Nicaragua is witnessing one of its worst periods for press freedox
Mr. Chagutah says Zambia has become the 25th country in sub-Saharan Africa to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.
The regression of women’s rights is the latest in a series of moves made by the Taliban in line with their hardline interpretation of Sharia law. The Taliban were in power in Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when they were forced out by a U.S.-led invasion. After two decades of occupation, U.S. forces left Afghanistan in August 2021, with large majorities of Americans “expressing negative views of the Biden administration’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan,” according to Pew Research Center. Disapproval largely centered around criticism that Biden should have started the evacuations earlier or in a more orderly manner. Within ten days of the American troop withdrawal, the Taliban had laid siege to the country, regaining power with shocking speed.
A hundred days after they began, the longest running anti-government protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution have shaken the regime, but at a heavy cost to the people.
More than 500 protesters, including 69 children, have been killed, according to the Human Rights Activists' News Agency (HRANA). Two protesters have been executed and at least 26 others face the same fate, after what Amnesty International calls "sham trials".
The movement amounts to the most serious challenge to the regime’s control of the country since the early days of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The protests are also the longest running since the Green Movement arose after the disputed 2009 presidential election. Unlike the earlier revolt, however, the current movement is leaderless—and more explicitly revolutionary in character.
Freya was planning a Christmas vacation to a small seaside town when she received a notification: Airbnb had not only canceled her booking but also suspended her account. When she asked why, Airbnb asked her to verify her identity, which she did by submitting her photo ID.
This happens every two years when a Democratic President is in office. And finally the US news media seems to be getting a clue as to why. More about that in a moment.
Notwithstanding Fox “News” hysteria about a “caravan” of immigrants heading for the border during Obama’s last year as president, in the months leading up to the 2016 election, by that time, as Politico noted:
In other words, in less than seven hours on the first workday of the New Year, that CEO will have made as much as the average U.S. worker will make all year.
I took a look at the even wider disparities for various types of essential workers. My calculations are based on average S&P 500 CEO pay of $18.3 million in 2021 (the most recent figure available), which works out to $8,798 per hour, or $147 per minute.
"How Christian of you, Greg Abbott," Rep. Joaquin Castro said sardonically. "Being a heartless POS isn't going to make you the next Republican president."
Ed Yong, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer at The Atlantic, talks about his recent book, “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.”
In this special broadcast, we speak with Reed Brody, the international human rights lawyer who has been called “the dictator hunter” for his role in bringing historic legal cases against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and others. Brody’s new book is just out, titled “To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré.” Habré, a former U.S. ally, was convicted in 2016 by the Extraordinary African Chambers in the Senegalese court system and sentenced to life in prison.
For the millions of people incarcerated in the U.S., freezing temperatures amid failing infrastructure can be deadly.
The DSA overhauls the EU’s core platform regulation, the€ e-Commerce Directive, and is intended to be an important tool in making the internet a fairer place by setting out new legal responsibilities for online platforms and educating users on why content is removed and what they can do about it. The powers of Big Tech are also reined in as the DSA subjects “very large online platforms (VLOPs)” to comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform. These risks cover a variety of aspects, including the dissemination of illegal content, disinformation, and negative impact on fundamental rights. VLOPs also face oversight through independent audits, which will assess whether platforms respect the obligations under the DSA.
Whilst the obligations placed on intermediary services depend on the role, size, and impact of the service in the online ecosystem, the DSA introduces all-encompassing protections on user rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted advertising based on sensitive user information, such as ethnicity or sexual orientation. More broadly, the DSA€ increases the transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the ad and other details. Despite being in its infancy, this provision is already inducing tension as companies like Twitter – whose primary source of income is obtained through ad revenue – have publicly affirmed their intention to further amplify targeted ads on the platform, in potential contravention of the DSA.
The DSA’s emphasis on greater transparency and user rights also includes requirements on platforms to explain their content curation algorithms in more detail and in user-friendly language. This aims to ensure that users can better understand how content decisions – which should be non-arbitrary – are made, and how they can pursue reinstatement should platforms make mistakes.€ The DSA also requires platforms to give users the option to choose a content curation algorithm that is not based on profiling.
The NFL will now take in $120 billion over the next decade, not only from legacy TV companies like NBC, CBS, Disney and Fox, but arguably the three most powerful companies in technology today: Apple, Amazon and Google.
The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office published new piracy guidance this week claiming that Netflix password sharing is illegal.
As I said, much of this statement reflects what was on the site before, but now it covers the music as well as the lyrics. He’s also basically put up everything you need. You can download the music as MP3s, you can stream albums, you can download lyrics as PDF files. It’s… pretty comprehensive. And pretty impressive.
Of course, there’s also this semi-ominous warning: [...]
With the addition of more than a dozen new members, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) will soon close the book on a record year and a string of coalition successes. Through agreements with domain registries, collaboration with governments, and partnerships with enforcement agencies, including Interpol, ACE hopes to continue down this path in the year ahead.
For services that prefer not to be overwhelmed by DMCA notices or taken offline unexpectedly, 'offshore hosting' is usually considered a positive step. For a major anti-piracy group tackling pirate IPTV providers, 'offshore hosting' enforcement challenges warranted a recent "call to action" at the UN-mandated Internet Governance Forum.
when i seen anyone sewing with an overlocker (serger) i am amazed at what these do: securing the seam, the fabric edge, and cutting off excess fabric.
i reached the tipping point and bought a Bernina L460. another contender was a Bernette air threading overlocker. i stuck with the L460 decision because it has the same motor control as my Bernina 570QE - stitch by stitch from the foot controller, quieter operation.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.