The rise of RISC-V continues apace, we bust a recent ZFS myth, hybrid tiling in Plasma, Stadia departs with a nice gift for people, Joe draws an old skool mucky jpeg and ruins KDE Korner, and more.
A video covering my concern with the way news stories are written about Microsoft and its blatant attack on open source code and the theft of open source code. Please take a look and let me know what you think in the comments below.
Recently, the Linux 6.0 kernel series introduced a significant bug in 6.0.16. The bug was introduced when a later kernel change was backported to 6.0.16 with an accidental omission (cf). There are a number of things you can draw from this issue, but the big thing I take away from it is that backporting changes is hard. The corollary of this is that the more changes you ask people to backport (and to more targets), the more likely you are to wind up with bugs, simply through the law of large numbers. The corollary to the corollary is that if you want to keep bugs down, you want to limit the amount of backporting you do or ask for.
The Chumby 8/Insignia Infocast 8 has a built-in AzureWave AW-GH321 802.11g module. This is a pretty old module that doesn’t even support 802.11n, so it maxes out at 54 Mbps and the link is an archive.org link because it’s nowhere to be found these days. The module makes use of the Marvell 88W8686 chipset, which connects through the SDIO bus. SDIO is basically just the same as SD, except it’s for I/O devices like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules instead of SD cards. This wireless chipset is supported by a Linux driver called libertas.
Brief: This guide shows how to install scrcpy an application that helps you connect, display and control an android device from your Linux desktop computer.
Scrcpy (pronounced “screen copy“) is a free, open-source, and cross-platform application used to display and control an Android device from your Linux desktop computer. It works on Linux, Windows, and macOS, and allows you to control a device connected via a USB or wirelessly (over TCP/IP).
This post differs from most of the other posts because it’s not about modern CSS, but about CSS fundamentals. When I was writing about custom properties and especially about container style queries, I realized that I had to understand some of the basics of the language first before I could comprehend how certain properties and rules worked.
The final value of a property in CSS is the result of a multi-step calculation. In this process, the actual value of a property can come from different sources, take on different forms, and undergo adjustments.
After encountering a rare instance where processing a FreeBSD commit caused FreshPorts to run low on resources, I want to investigate how limiting a jail might help this situation.
On day 66, I’ve introduced you to individual transform properties. An interesting detail about these properties is the order in which transforms are applied compared to the transform property.
I’m encountering this issue with net/mosquitto on FreeBSD.
I won't go into specific cases in this blog post. This is a general guide on how to gather the necessary information that will help you to get your problem fixed.
In this post, I'll use a Linux client and server as a reference.
In my previous blog post, I described how subdomain enumeration and subdomain brute force in particular could be enhanced by taking the DNS status code into account, rather than relying on the existence of A or AAAA records only.
This follow-up post describes what techniques exist to enumerate subdomains in a DNSSEC-enabled zone and what countermeasures exist to prevent it. DNSSEC itself is not explained further, however, some relevant record types are briefly described.
Linux operating system is a popular choice for servers – and for multiple reasons. First, it’s free (with exception of a few commercial distributions such as RHEL and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ) and open-source. Its open-source nature implies that developers can view its source code, modify it and redistribute it according to the laid-out license terms. In addition, Linux is generally considered stable, versatile, and more secure than Windows. Furthermore, it can easily be deployed across various platforms such as bare-metal, virtual, and cloud environments.
This happens for more or less the reasons I mentioned above. BMCs naturally accumulate very large uptimes because they don't normally reboot when your server reboots; if you don't do anything special, your BMC will normally stay up for as long as the server has power. In many places this can amount to years of uptime, and it's a rare set of software that can stand up to that even if you don't use them much. Server vendors typically don't want you to think about this, and I don't believe 'BMC uptime' is generally exposed anywhere.
(Routinely querying the BMC's sensor readings via IPMI may actually make this worse, since then the BMC's software is active to answer those queries. I should probably make our metrics system notice when a server decreases the number of IPMI metrics it exposes without a reboot.)
Modern BMCs can generally reboot themselves without rebooting their host (the actual server), although you may want to test this to be sure since apparently some vendors can do that differently.
Google Chrome, a widely used web browser for its speed, security, and features, can be installed on OpenSUSE, a free and open-source operating system available in two different versions: OpenSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed. This article will provide an overview of how to install Google Chrome on both versions of OpenSUSE, as the commands used for the installation process are similar for both.
We know that downloading videos from YouTube is something very frequent and common these days, although we have to be careful not to violate the rules of the author. So today you will learn how to install Tube Converter on Linux using Flatpak.
or many computer users, the most stressful part of working with a Linux system is having to back up their data. The good news is that there is a simple solution to this problem: set up an automatic rsync backup script that will automatically keep your data safe. In this article, we will go over the tools and steps that you need to take to set up an automated backup system on a Linux system with rsync. You will learn how to use rsync to automatically create backups of files, how to keep these backups up-to-date, and how to restore them in the event of data loss or corruption.
If you regularly perform backups on your Linux system, chances are you already know about rsync, a command-line utility that can be used to back up and synchronize files and directories. However, if you’re new to rsync, it might come as a surprise that this simple command is capable of backing up your entire Linux system. In this guide, we’ll show you how to use rsync to back up your Linux system using different strategies.
Return to€ Part 1: Dumpster Diving
Want a Tabletop Simulator like experience but prefer free and open source games? Keep an eye on Tabletop Club. One I've been meaning to give a shout-out to for a little while, as I dig through a bunch of my missed items from before the holiday season.
Breachway looks like one to watch, a game the blends together the deck-building of Slay the Spire and space antics of FTL. Two of my favourite indie games right there, and I must admit Breachway looks pretty good.
Regulator City is an upcoming action rogue-like from developer Orangepixel, where you're tasked with stopping the spread of a strange powerful alien substance.
Popular rogue-lite 2D platformer Skul: The Hero Slayer recently got a big upgrade with The Dark Mirror and it looks pretty great.
It seems the season of leaks is continuing with Steam developer Valve now having a bunch of content from their games leaked online. Not the first though, as a Left 4 Dead prototype was leaked earlier.
ChatGPT is a popular chatbot that can interact with its users as if they are having a conversation.
Recently, ChatGPT has been in the news, sometimes for the wrong reasons.
You see, there are two sides to the ChatGPT saga. In fact, for any artificial intelligence implementation.
On one side, the potential of this tool has impressed many. But on the other side, it has led to quite a ruckus in the tech world for its abuse/misuse.
So much so it has led its creator, OpenAI, to develop a tool to detect its use.
******************************************************************************* Version 23.1 Release date 16/Jan/2023 *******************************************************************************
Linux Kernel not updated because of hang problems with NVidia graphic cards.
Fixed 32 bit size of time on 32 bit systems. Problems with gnutls gnutls_x509_crt_get_activation_time. Causing "The certificate has not yet been activated" on wget.
Build tools / update-os.tar.gz: To update glibc, also a static build for ARM added.
Filezilla removed for 32 bit because of compile problm with the current GCC. _Float16 is not supported on this target
EFI directory to uppercase. Added EFI image to ISO. EFI/efiboot.img
Build scripts updated. 183 packages updated. See Changelog-Packages.txt.
Try both. I preach this all the time, but the distro I use should make no difference on the distro you choose. I have a hardware setup that is different than yours, and yours is different than someone else’s. That means that every distro is going to run differently on your hardware. As for Arch VS. Fedora, the big difference comes down to package managers and versioning of software. Arch will have slightly newer software than Fedora, and it has the AUR. Fedora is a more traditional release-based distro, but it still has newer software than something like Debian.
EDATEC CM4 Sensing is a compact industrial computer based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) with multiple RS485, RS232, and CAN bus interfaces, an HDMI port, two USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and optional WiFi, Bluetooth, and/or 4G LTE connectivity.
The industrial mini PC can operate in the -25 to 70€°C temperature range, supports 8 to 28V DC wide voltage input, includes an RTC, and the single board computer also features a MIPI DSI interface to connect the official Raspberry Pi 7-inch display as well as an FPC interface with HDMI and USB touch.
A few days ago, Beacon EmbeddedWorks presented a Dev-Kit and a System-on-Module (SoM) integrating the RZ/G2 Arm-Cortex multicore processors from Renesas. These embedded devices are equipped with a 3D Graphic Engine, a VPU Decoder/Encoder, up to 64GB of eMMC storage and many other peripherals.€
Even though I'm a Power ISA bigot through and through (typed on ppc64le!), to this day I still have an enduring sweet spot for Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC "Precision Architecture" because it was my first job out of college. It doesn't hurt that it was one of the saner RISCs, with a fairly clean instruction set except for its odd deficiency with atomics, and was quite a piledriver in its day due to its cache arrangement and early adoption of SIMD. We ran HP-UX 10.20 on a big K250 where I developed database applications on Informix, later upgrading it to an L-class something or other (I think an L2000). When I was still consulting for the university one of my tasks was even setting up a Visualize C3750 workstation, which was a stupid fast machine at the time and I'm sure served very well for them doing protein visualization. Heck, if Commodore had stuck around longer, we might really have had a PA-RISC Amiga instead of the modern third-party PowerPC systems. (I've got some other wacky PA-RISC machines around here I might introduce you to later.)
The screen is from Pimoroni, the HyperPixel 4.0 Square. This 4 inch square of IPS goodness packs a 720 x 720 resolution and a full 60fps. Oh and its also a touch screen! Under the screen is a removable Blackberry keyboard. To be specific it is a BBQ20KBD from Solder Party, aka Arturo182. The keyboard connects to the Pi via a USB-C interface using a USB breakout board. The keyboard also features a Stemma QT connector, in case you fancy adding sensors or additional components. If gaming is more your thing, then pdrift is working on a gamepad that takes the place of the keyboard.
For any given processor it’s generally easy to find a statistic on the number of transistors used to construct it, with the famous Intel 8086 CPU generally said to contain 29,000 transistors. This is where [Ken Shirriff] ran into an issue when he sat down one day and started counting individual transistors in die shots of this processor. To his dismay, he came to a total of 19,618, meaning that 9,382 transistors are somehow unaccounted for. What is going on here?
We say it often, but it’s worth repeating: this is the Golden Age of making and hacking. Between powerful free and open source software, low-cost PCB production, and high resolution 3D printers that can fit on your desk, a dedicated individual has everything they need to make their dream gadget a reality. If you ever needed a reminder of this fact, just take a look at the€ ZSWatch.
Significant investment continues to pour into the open source ecosystem, from individual contributors worldwide and from companies like Meta, Anaconda, NVIDIA, Google, and more. The pursuit of innovation across the data community is remarkable – and we are grateful for the spirit and energy toward constant improvement and innovation.
Voltron Data contributes to numerous open source projects including Apache Arrow, Substrait, Ibis, RAPIDS, Velox, and more. We deeply believe that supporting open source standards will ensure freedom and flexibility for the future of data systems.
As we look ahead to 2023, we want to spotlight 12 open source projects that are paving the way for innovation in the data analytics ecosystem. Some of these projects are well-established and others are emerging. All are on a mission to tackle pain points developers and engineers face in data science, machine learning, and other corners of today’s complex data analytics landscape.
To generate this list, we pooled insights and perspectives from Voltron Data’s leadership, product, engineering, and developer relations teams. We dug deep into project pages, community forums, and GitHub to identify the projects we think will fundamentally change the way we work with data. This list is not intended to be exhaustive. We hope it inspires you to discuss, honor, and uncover other exceptional work happening in the open source data community.
After 1.5 months in development, Apache ShardingSphere 5.3.0 has been released. Our community merged 687 PRs from contributors around the world.
The new release has been improved in terms of features, performance, testing, documentation, examples, etc.
The 5.3.0 release brings the following highlights:
Additionally, release 5.3.0 also brings the following adjustments...
Our food system is broken. As with so many systems of the 21st century, power is concentrated in the hands of very few companies, often geared toward exploiting people and the planet, under the premise of maximizing profit. Under such a mindset, feeding people is a secondary goal. When it comes to something as important as food, we can and should aim for more than this as a society. What if the goal became getting high-quality, nutritious, and ecologically regenerative produce from farms to plates of every person in the world?
We believe getting food to everyone is not a radical concept. But getting there requires radical thinking. It requires putting the people most involved in the food system (producers, eaters, and communities) at the heart of the food system. It means putting collaboration above intellectual property. It means creating a commonwealth of knowledge and resources. This is the approach we are taking at the Open Food Network (OFN).
For this guide on Postgres LIKE, you will use the example of Quotes from the Node.js PostgreSQL post. It is expected that you know about relational databases and PostgreSQL. You should also know about running the database server and running queries on that server.
Teaching is hard.
But exactly what about it is hard? How could technology help?
To investigate the pain points that CS instructors face and their workarounds, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 32 computer science instructors. Their institutions range from large research universities to small liberal arts colleges and community colleges across 7 different countries.
We asked open-ended questions about lecture structure, availability of resources such as TAs and software, time spent on various activities, techniques used to improve learning experiences, the most painful aspects of running courses, and potential solutions to their pain points.
Thanks to SFC's incredible base of Sustainers and supporters, our original fundraising match goal of $104,759 was met in just over a month, and we quickly met an extended goal of an additional $12,030 — for a total of $116,989 matched and $156,730.91 contributed by you! Thanks to your sustaining contributions to our organization, we'll be able to continue the community driven work we have become known for. Our commitment to software rights and freedom remains as strong and ever. This support from individual contributors empowers and motivates us for the year to come.
I’m in the middle of a programming retreat at the Recurse Center (W2’23), and one of the projects I’ve been working on is an interpreter for a language I designed called nodots.
It’s called nodots because I had some trouble in a previous language when it came to mutating via dot access. So I decided: no dots this time (okay, fine, you can use dots for floats).
It’s a dynamic language with strong types. It’s got variables, functions, logic, and a few more things — but no for loops (yet).
In order to fully discuss security issues, their common root causes and useful prevention or mitigation techniques, you will need some common ground on the security model of the web. This, in turn, relies on various terms and techniques that will be presented in the next sections.
Feel free to skip ahead, if you are familiar with some of the following concepts.
C++ Programming Language is a powerful, versatile, and compiled language, which means the source code is converted into machine language before the execution. In order to make your code as efficient and effective as possible, you should be aware of the following tricks and techniques. Hence, it’s better to know some C++ tricks and tips to reduce a few lines of code.
Even if this particular solution was just a fluke of my network architecture or the system being modeled, it made me even more impressed by the power and versatility of gradient descent and similar optimization algorithms. The fact that these very particular patterns can be brought into existence so consistently from pure randomness is really amazing to me.
This is a big lesson. As a field, we still have not thoroughly learned it, as we are continuing to make the same kind of mistakes. To see this, and to effectively resist it, we have to understand the appeal of these mistakes. We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.
One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.
I've been thinking about the learning curve for Rust lately, and why it feels so hard to learn. I think the reason is because the complexity is all front-loaded, and the resources generally don't actively reduce that front-loading1.
There are two well-trod paths for learning Rust: read long books, or learn by example.
These work for some people, but they have harsh learning curves. The books are quite long and generally you have to get through all of it before you can do things that are generally useful2. On the other hand, learning by example generally works only if you're already quite familiar with low-level programming and just need to learn the syntax and other little Rust-y bits.
Reduce the risk of breaking a CI pipeline for all of a project’s developers by using the flagon CLI to query Feature Flags, opting developers into and out of new CI features and processes by targeting groups of developers or branch naming patterns.
Real-world data is often messy and full of missing values. As a result, data scientists spend the majority of their time cleaning and preparing the data, and have less time to focus on predictive modeling and machine learning. If there’s one thing all data preparation steps share, then it’s dealing with missing data. Today we’ll make this process a bit easier for you by introducing 3 ways for data imputation in R.
My personal path, a hobbyist, was focused at first on interpreters for Brainfuck, Scheme, lower-case forth, and lower-case lisp. I had a bit of "formal" undergraduate training in one PL course and one compilers course I took before I dropped out, but for the most part I hacked on stuff since then for fun and education.
You write that you're a self-taught frontend developer who would like to be able to work on more complex systems like databases. You asked about my learning path (since my site mentions I started with jQuery and PHP).
First off, ambition/desire is a powerful thing! I was a manager for a while and I'd watch folks across all apparent experience and talent levels. When they said they wanted to do something I'd see it gnaw at them until they did it.
The history of HF radio and its many interesting military and intelligence aspects could fill a book, and probably will over time on this blog. I have mentioned, for example, HAARP. That of course means that ionospheric heaters and the military-intelligence mission of HAARP are now on my list of topics to address, along with the ubiquitous HAARP conspiracy theories. First, though, I had a reader email me in response to the OTH posts. They asked about CFS Masset: a Canadian Forces Station on Graham Island, off the west coast of BC and a good ways north of Vancouver Island. I've never been to Graham Island but it's on my list, and CFS Masset is one of the reasons. The CFS consists mostly of one of few operating examples of a fascinating artifact of HF radio and military intelligence: the CDAA or Wullenweber antenna.
"Sonu did the [livestream] when the plane crashed in a gorge near the Seti River," Mukesh Kashyap, Jaiswal's friend, told reporters.
Seconds later, the phone lost focus but a deafening crash and screaming could be heard. Then, it kept recording.
Basically, the paradigm in telephony is a “smart network” and a “dumb edge.” All the “intelligence” of an application on telephony is on the network side of things—the “edge” here being the device the end user interacts with. In the old days, this was an on-off switch, a microphone and a speaker. Later models this device included a tone generator. So any features needed to be handled on the network side because the end user device (the “edge”) was incapable of doing much at all. If a person wants a new feature, they have to get it implemented on the entire network, or it's effectively not supported at all (because there's not much one can do with an on-off switch, speaker, microphone and a tone generator).
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs, the new acronym for UFOs doesn’t have a classy ring to it. The Pentagon’s decision to rename UFOs as UAPs is a big letdown. UAP is dull, unexciting, hard to remember, who really cares?. It’s an ugly acronym that takes the fun and sport out of ufology.
But they’re still out there! UFOs.
Ornithopters have been — mostly — the realm of science fiction. However, a paper in Advanced Intelligent Systems by researchers at Lund University€ proposes that flapping wings may well power the drones of the future. The wing even has mock feathers.
When it rains at night there is always a distinctive dripping sound coming from beneath the eaves as the water hits the bedroom window ledge below. The fact there is a bird’s nest seems secondary as this is so silent and snugly self-contained as to be invisible. I also love the resonance of rain hissing from the rubber tyres of the vehicles at the front of the building. This is as cars zip from the busy roundabout and race towards the heath. There is always something cinematic about vehicles in the rain, especially with the windscreen wipers going. A recent example of this is at the beginning of Santiago Mitre’s ‘Argentina, 1985’. When I watch from the kitchen window, I am oddly comforted by the dreamlike quality such scenes evoke. In the bedroom meanwhile there is the sound of foxes starting up in a neighbouring back garden. It is a peculiar noise they make, not unlike dogs learning how to bark, though I have long been an admirer of our many urban foxes as I always feel them essentially undying. People say I wouldn’t feel so inclined if I was a farmer. Well, I am not a farmer, I like to tell them. There is also the small matter of the leak in the bathroom roof, which, despite many efforts, will not seem to go away. When it rains like this we have various receptacles about the place, rather like the containers put out by Brendan Gleason’s Frank in ’28 Days Later’.
My mind is at its most lucid in the middle of the night. I had two operations recently and though pretty much recovered, it does get one thinking. For what it’s worth, I go to bed early these days and often wake around two or three in the morning like this. I haven’t drunk alcohol for six and a half years and I don’t smoke. I am running every two days and try most days to walk at least four miles. Had I met myself ten years or so ago I would have privately yawned. In fact, there was a time when the city for me would be at its most interesting this time of night. Perhaps it still is. After one particularly intense trip abroad, I remember few things more resuscitating than central London when it was buzzing like a stickler’s hive. It was as if mainstream media, or government, or whatever, even tomfoolery, had all slipped off to bed, and it was now left for the true mischief makers to crack their knuckles in preparation for good conversation.
Using Bayes’ rule in its commonly stated form requires arithmetic and probability estimation that can be difficult to apply mentally on the fly. Stating Bayes’ rule in its lesser known odds form makes it significantly more usable for on the fly calculations.
Houard’s team tuned their laser so that it formed this electrically conductive pathway just above the tip of the tower. This allowed the tower’s lightning rod to intercept a bolt snagged by the laser before it zipped all the way down to the laser equipment.
Leitner assumed the post of Secretary General of IFLA in June 2016 and was responsible for IFLA’s strategic and operational management and financial administration. His contribution to the development of the Library Federation has without doubt been significant. In 2017, Leitner initiated IFLA’s Global Vision project, which took the form of an online survey in 216 countries and was called €«a conversation across the global library field€». The aim of the project was to develop a shared strategic vision for the world’s librarians and libraries. This resulted in the strategy document €«IFLA Strategy 2019-2024€» (available for download here in 15 different languages.)
Already from the above brief description, anyone could conclude that IFLA is currently going through a crisis. How deep is the crisis? Obviously, the answer will depend on the degree of the observer’s loyalty to the Governing Board of the organisation. But then it is not just a question of whether the Board did right or wrong in dismissing Leitner. Leitner’s management alone …
… is not a sufficient criterion for assessing the responsibility of the rest of the management, i.e. the Board. The question of substance, IFLA’s strategy and worldwide activities during Leitner’s time in management, must also be taken into account. The crisis is therefore about more than what has happened and is happening at headquarters in The Hague. At this point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that IFLA’s strategy and activities are also in crisis.
Eliptech, a company that used to be a part of Sber, one of Russia's largest state-controlled bank and cloud service providers, has developed a motherboard based on the BE-S1000 server-grade system-on-chip featuring 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores at 2.50 GHz at 120W. The SoC has six 72-bit memory interfaces supporting up to 768 GB of DDR4-3200 ECC memory in total (i.e., 128GB per channel), five PCIe 4.0 x16 (4x4) interfaces, one USB 2.0 controller, two 1GbE interfaces, and various general purpose I/O. While on paper this thing may look good, it will hardly ever enter our list of best CPUs for workstations.
We wanted to see what the Hackaday crowd was up to in first-person view tech, and you didn’t disappoint! Commercial FPV quads have become cheap enough these days that everyone and their mom got one for Christmas, so it was fantastic to see the DIY spirit in these projects. Thanks to everyone who entered.
When you are a life long carpenter with an amazing workshop, you’re going to make a lot of saw dust, and managing its collection and storage poses quite a challenge.€ [Russ] from [New Yorkshire Workshop] built an impressive Briquette press€ to handle the problem.
Finding space to dry clothes can be challenging in smaller spaces. [Tom Parker] solved this conundrum in his one bedroom apartment by putting a drying rack in his stairwell.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. It has been targeted by critics who say the Chinese government could access user data, such as browsing history and location. U.S. armed forces also have prohibited the app on military devices.
TikTok is consumed by two-thirds of American teens and has become the second-most popular domain in the world. But there’s long been a bipartisan concern in Washington that Beijing would use legal and regulatory power to seize American user data or try to push pro-China narratives or misinformation.
The announcement from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) follows ramped-up state testing for PFAS in the Great Lakes, after Wisconsin regulators in 2020 discovered high levels of the “forever chemical” in Lake Superior smelt.
Both orders cite China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law as justification for banning the applications. The law and its provisions have been interpreted to suggest that Chinese technology companies like ByteDance and Tencent may be compelled to hand over data from foreign countries in the interest of national security. Article 7 of the law reads:
An organization or citizen shall support, assist in and cooperate in national intelligence work in accordance with the law and keep confidential the national intelligence work that it or he knows.The state shall protect the individual or organization that has supported, assisted in or cooperated in national intelligence work.
Drugmaker BioNTech and the German government pushed Twitter to "hide" posts by activists calling on Big Pharma to temporarily lift patents on Covid-19 vaccines—a move which would have given people the Global South greater access to the lifesaving inoculations, a report published Monday by The Intercept revealed.
Tens of thousands marched in Madrid, Spain on Sunday to stop the right-wing regional government's ongoing attack on the public healthcare system.
Every Sunday about a dozen high school teenagers gather without their iPhones on a little hill in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, USA. They form a circle and quietly start to read serious books (Dostoevsky, Boethius) (paperbacks or hardbacks), or draw in sketchbooks, or just serenely sit listening to the wind.
As the€ New York Times reporter Alex Vadukul wrote last month€ these youngsters have had enough of the addictive Internet Gulag run by corporate incarcerators. “Social media and phones are not real life,” said Lola Shub a senior at Essex Street Academy. She expressed the group’s consensus: “When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed. I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person.”
Her site had been in the hands of cloud hosting provider Gridhost, which shut down in November. Mrs Brown never received notifications about the switch-off because her blog had been set up by a third-party business, which had stopped trading.
And she had no access to the backup for her blog either, since it had also been hosted in the cloud by Gridhost. Days of stress ensued. Many tears flowed.
Neither Twitter nor Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has publicly commented on the API going down, but The Information reported Saturday that internal Slack messages show that Twitter intentionally suspended the API and hence access to services such as Twitterbot. The report also said staff were discussing internally when Twitter will announce the decision.
It does stand to reason, though, that it is possible Twitter may be killing off third-party clients. These clients generally do not bring any ad revenue for the platform, something that Musk has made clear is a priority in his tenure so far. Just this week a report from The Information revealed desperate measures to keep ad buyers on board, and many Twitter users have noted major increases in the number of ads and frequency of ads seen on the platform. Twitter also recently forced users on iOS to view the “For You” tab by default rather than the “Following” tab that actually shows what accounts they are following.
The data, much of which appears to be related to the transit agency’s police department, was posted to a leak site controlled by Vice Society.
GitHub has taken down a popular Pirate Bay proxy information portal from Github.io. The developer platform took action in response to a takedown request sent by City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit. The takedown notice concludes that the site, which did not link to any infringing content directly, is illegal.
Many of the [cracks] appear to relate to UK court cases. Information stolen by Jain’s gang was used as evidence in the London courts and the targets have included several British lawyers. Some of the [cracker’s] private investigator clients have been contracted by major law firms with bases in the City.
A striking feature of the English legal system is that a judge will accept [cracked] emails as evidence in court in the interests of justice unless persuaded to exclude it. Peter Ashford, a London solicitor and expert in the admissibility of evidence, claims the English system is “the most liberal”. He added: “Even if you’ve done the hacking, you’ve still got a pretty good chance of getting it in [to the court].”
The GPU industry is so broken right now and to make things worse, MSI thought it would be a good idea to do a lottery for a chance to win the ability to buy a GPU. I had to do a triple-take to make sure I was reading it right.
What would happen if the internet suffered a prolonged and serious outage, reason irrelevant (cyberattack, zero days, P = NP with a simple and fast algorithm, solar superstorms, major vendor compromise, AWS KMS shredded from attack or mistake, total BGP meltdown, take your pick), but we still had electricity, gas, mail, mostly functioning government, and basically everything we used to have in the ~80s, in most areas?
Well, besides the obvious awful consequences on basically everything in every industry, I can sure think of some extremely low-cost, easily preventable technical consequences which would make rebuilding unnecessarily difficult: [...]
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a standards development group for the advertising industry. Their members love tracking users. They want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're buying, and what you think. All so they can convince you to spend slightly more on toothpaste. Or change your political opinions. Either way, they are your adversaries.
The IAB's tech lab is working on a system called UID2. It's a more advanced way to track you no matter what you do and no matter what steps you take to avoid it.
I saw the stick figures on a fall detection-and-person-tracking lamp from a company called Nobi and in demos from at least two companies trying to sell cameras to retailers so they could track where in the store customers paused. And as I saw these stick figures I wondered if they were the key to bringing more privacy in a world determined to put cameras everywhere.
The new release of Steampipe is all about relationship graphs. Our blog post shows how these graphs provide contextual awareness for devops and security pros who can now see all the resources related to an EC2 instance, or determine at a glance whether the permissions related to an IAM role are properly scoped. As always, developers can explore and remix the code that builds these graphs to adapt them for their own purposes. And as always this is general-purpose tech that can be applied in any domain.
These relationship graphs are driven by SQL queries that define nodes and edges. Such queries can use any column of any table provided by any Steampipe plugin to form nodes, and then edges between nodes. If you want to see connections among the people and objects represented by diverse APIs, you can now use SQL idioms to graph them. The only limit is your imagination.
A huge turnaround has made several political parties angry. Five days before the General Election on November 1, Venstre (V) representatives said Denmark’s borders should not be opened to quota refugees.
The warning echoes concern from the International Monetary Fund. Also speaking to the BBC, its managing director Kristalina Georgieva said the world should "move attention today to fertilisers, because this is where we see particular threat for food production and therefore food prices in 2023".
According to the Agency, 330,000 irregular entries were recorded in 2022. The number of Syrian nationals has practically doubled to 94,000. “This is the second consecutive year with a sharp increase in the number of irregular entries,” Frontex said in a statement, adding that Syrians, Afghans, and Tunisians together accounted for 47% of irregular entries in 2022.
In 2022, around 330 000 irregular border crossings were detected at EU’s external border, according to preliminary calculations*. This is the highest number since 2016 and an increase of 64% from the previous year.
In memory of the victims of Russia’s January 14 missile strike on a residential building in Dnipro, which killed at least 40 civilians, people in Moscow have placed flowers, toys, and a photo of the destroyed building next to a statue of Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka in the Russian capital.
Authorites in the annexed city of Sevastopol say that eight drones were shot down on January 16.
A former Wagner Group fighter named Andrey Medvedev has crossed into Norway and requested political asylum, according to Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net. Medvedev reportedly served as the commander of the unit that included Yevgeny Nuzhin, a Wagner mercenary who was murdered by the group with a sledgehammer in a video that surfaced online in November.
More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the U.S. Army War College and many other military institutions across the world. A passage from it describing an ultimatum Athens gave a weaker power has stayed with me all these years. And here it is, loosely translated from the Greek: “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.”
According to the latest official data from the Dnipropetrovsk regional administration, 40 people have been killed due to the January 14 Russian missile strike on Dnipro, which resulted in the collapse of two sections of a nine-story building.
Harvard’s Kennedy School’s denial of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, because of his criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza is only the latest example of the corporate role played by Harvard’s most prestigious think tank on public policy.€ Roth, who has spent the last three decades at HRW defending human rights around the world, was offered a senior fellowship at the School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.€ It was quickly withdrawn.
The school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, blocked the appointment following pressure from donors and supporters of Israel and its apartheid policies.€ Hundreds of Harvard affiliates have now called on Elmendorf to resign as Dean.€ The critics of Elmendorf include former Harvard president Lawrence Summers.
Former US president Donald Trump supposedly absconded from the White House with reams of classified documents, stored them at his Mar-a-Lago home, responded first lackadaisically then combatively when called upon to hand them back over, finally resorting to weird claims about having declassified those documents by “thinking about it.”
Former US vice-president (now president) Joe Biden supposedly absconded from his official residence at the US Naval Observatory with reams of classified documents, which ended up in a closet at a private office, in a garage at one of his homes, and possibly elsewhere. He began returning them of his own volition, but apparently discovered them before, and waited to mention them until after, the 2022 midterm elections.
"So if you look at ice coverage prior to 1998, most years we had moderate to heavy ice cover,"Austin said. "Then '98 itself was an El Niño year with very low ice coverage and we've had lots of those extremely low coverage years since then.
"It does really appear the atmosphere sort of shifted into a different mode in 1998 and we've never seemed to shift back," he said.
A group of climate leaders from across the globe issued a "cease and desist notice" on Monday directed at fossil fuel CEOs attending this week's World Economic Forum, which environmentalists warn will likely be used by oil and gas interests as another PR opportunity for their planet-wrecking business.
This is a quick summary about the newly published paper "Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections" by Professor of Environmental Science and Policy Geoffrey Supran, Professor of Physics of the Oceans Stefan Rahmstorf and Professor of the History of Science Naomi Oreskes. It leverages a thread tweeted by Geoffrey Supran shortly after publication on January 12, 2023. Please note that the full paper will only be available open access for two weeks after publication.
The rare earths are the lanthanides — lutetium and all 14 elements between lanthanum and ytterbium across one row of the periodic table — plus scandium and yttrium, which tend to occur in the same ore deposits and have similar chemical properties to the lanthanides. These gray to silvery metals are often malleable with high melting and boiling points.
Their secret powers lie in their electrons. All atoms have a nucleus surrounded by electrons, which inhabit zones called orbitals. Electrons in the orbitals farthest from the nucleus are the valence electrons, which participate in chemical reactions and form bonds with other atoms.
I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.
For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.
May Mobility, backed by Toyota Motor Corp. and other big-name corporations, plans to take the safety driver out of its AVs this year and expand outside the three cities where it’s currently operating. Unlike other AV companies, May is focused on contracting with governments and businesses instead of going directly to consumers. The strategy is less costly and the feats aren’t as extreme, but that doesn't mean the technology isn't capable.
It's not like the carriers can't afford to improve things. After pulling in $54 billion in covid relief, the airlines are swimming in cash, showering executives with record bonuses and paying titanic dividends to shareholders. Southwest has announced a $428m dividend.
This isn't a new problem. Trump's Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was a paragon of inaction and neglect, refusing even to meet with consumer advocacy groups. This is bad, because under US law, state attorneys general are not allowed to punish misbehaving airlines – that power vests solely and entirely with the Secretary of Transport.
Progressives on Monday reacted with outrage and disbelief after U.S. climate envoy John Kerry backed the appointment of Sultan al-Jaber to lead the the United Nations' annual conference on the climate emergency, saying the CEO of the United Arab Emirates' state-run oil company was not only qualified to preside over the summit, but that his background strengthened the case for his presidency.
The way was cleared for the complete demolition of the German village of Lützerath and the expansion of a coal mine on Monday after the last two anti-coal campaigners taking part in a dayslong standoff with authorities left the protest site.
"The truth is, most politicians would distance themselves from Dr. King's stunning (and spot on) indictments of capitalism."
As the world's corporate and political elite convened in Davos, Switzerland for the first winter World Economic Forum in three years, an analysis published Monday by Oxfam International found that the global rich have captured nearly two-thirds of all wealth generated since 2020—a period marked by a devastating pandemic, worsening costs of living crises, and continued fallout from the climate emergency.
In an effort to "create an economy of full employment for all regardless of race, gender, or religion," 10 leading U.S. economic advocacy groups on Monday launched a new campaign calling for a federally subsidized jobs program targeting communities plagued by high unemployment.
Republican Rep. Rick Allen of Georgia suggested last week that he would support raising the Social Security retirement age—a policy change that would slash benefits across the board—because people have approached him and said they "actually want to work longer."
Amazon is laying off more than 18,000 workers. Salesforce is shedding 8,000, and Twitter has let go thousands more.
While we should never minimize the difficulties of people facing an unexpected layoff, these announcements by major tech companies are not a large-scale tragedy for the American economy. What would be very bad news is if we saw a marked slowing of the economy, leading to far more layoffs by large and small businesses in a wide variety of sectors.
Unintended consequences of the Online Safety Bill mean a trio of surveillance, prior restraint of speech, and restriction on access to online content and services.
Swedish telecommunications equipment provider Ericsson has set aside 2.3 billion kronor (US$211 million) to settle a breach levelled against the company by the US Department of Justice with regard to its activities in Iraq some years ago.
In a statement issued on 13 January, the company said it had not yet reached a resolution with the DoJ over breaches of a deferred prosecution agreement which was agreed to in 2019.
Ericsson, one of the three big telecommunications equipment providers, said any fines it paid in connection with these alleged breaches would be booked in its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2022.
The DPA was reached in connection with alleged bribes paid by Ericsson to the terrorist groups Al Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq to facilitate its business activities.
Swedish telecommunications equipment provider Ericsson has set aside 2.3 billion kronor (US$211 million) to settle a breach levelled against the company by the US Department of Justice with regard to its activities in Iraq some years ago.
Denying the provision’s protections for platforms “could have devastating spillover effects,” Google argued in the brief. “Websites like Google and Etsy depend on algorithms to sift through mountains of user-created content and display content likely relevant to each user. If plaintiffs could evade Section 230(c)(1) by targeting how websites sort content or trying to hold users liable for liking or sharing articles, the [Internet] would devolve into a disorganized mess and a litigation minefield.”
What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.
But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person.
Personally, I’m done. And with a vengeance.
Any reports of a conflict between the Russian Defense Ministry and the Wagner mercenary group are simply a “product of media speculation,” Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
The spectacular unmasking of alleged bribery in the EU Parliament has attracted limited attention in Britain, despite police in Brussels discovering suitcases stuffed with hundreds of thousands of euros in cash and a vice president of the Parliament landing in jail.
Qatar and Morocco are accused of buying up Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in a scandal that revolves around a vote on a resolution criticising Qatar during the World Cup. The Greek MEP Eva Kaili is now suspended as vice president of the Parliament with many pointing derisively to a speech she made last year, saying “the World Cup in Qatar is proof actually of how sports diplomacy can achieve a historical transformation of a country with reforms that inspired the Arab world”.
In recent years an old idea has reappeared in U.S. political life. Seemingly settled at the end of the Civil War, the concept of secession from the Union is emerging from across the political spectrum.
Perhaps the best known movements are in states that already have a virtual national identity as realms unto themselves, Texas and California.
I don’t follow left media infighting. I hope you don’t either. But it is hard to miss this “Force The Vote” stuff coming up again. Needless to say, I disagree with both sides equally. There are cases in life when both sides are correct and this causes us to agonize over which side to choose. These sorts of decisions often lead to depression as we are divided between two good values that cannot coexist at the same time. Thankfully for us Force The Vote can only depress us if we pay attention to it. I don’t want to get into too many details about it. If you know it you know it all too well. If you don’t know it then you should make sure you never ever find out about it.
I am taking a lot of heat for defending Zizek but given the current lack of depth of political arguments how can Zizek’s advice of “don’t do, think” not be seen as prescient? The argument raging online about whether progressives in the House should have forced a vote on Medicare For All in 2020 (leveraging Nancy Pelosi’s bid for Speaker) has risen up again amidst the Republican holdouts for Speaker McCarthy.
Russian national Artem Uss, who was arrested in Italy on sanctions evasion and money laundering charges at the request of U.S. authorities in October, has asked a Milan court to extradite him to Russia, according to La Repubblica. Uss is the son of Krasnoyarsk Krai Governor Alexander Uss.
The National Historical Heritage Protection Foundation, an organization whose founders include Russian State Duma First Deputy Speaker Ivan Melnikov, has proposed amending Russia’s Criminal Code to allow the state to seize the property of people and entities who authorities have dubbed “foreign agents.”
NewsGuard rates websites on a point scale of 0-100, assessing them using objective and apolitical weighted metrics related to credibility and transparency. The standard worth the most points (22) assesses whether a site avoids repeatedly publishing false information. The following list represents the 10 websites that have failed NewsGuard’s standard for repeatedly publishing false content and that have the greatest social media engagement (likes, shares, and comments) on Facebook and Twitter, according to data from media-monitoring company NewsWhip.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Salon, we discussed their plans for "NewsHour" as the United States barrels toward the 2024 presidential election as well as the challenges they face in delivering the news at a time when misinformation is rampant.
Swedish prosecutors have decided not to launch a criminal investigation into the hanging of an effigy of Turkish President Erdoßan, which showed him dangling by his legs from a rope in Stockholm.
We’ll still see teachers targeted. We’ll see certain Twitter pages send harassment to overworked, underpaid teachers and librarians, which will continue to decimate both fields of incredibly talented and passionate people. We’ll see more and more bills clamping down on everything related to art and creativity if it doesn’t fall within the moral boundaries of white, cishet Christian conservative values. It won’t “just” be Drag shows but include any and everything these groups can lump under the umbrella of “indoctrination” and “pornography” and “grooming.”
The Sneetches€ was published in 1961. The veiled lessons about race from€ 1961€ are now too risky for a classroom. By the way, three different economists had recommended it to Beras for this podcast episode.
The fact that this is about a Dr. Seuss book is particularly interesting. In 2021,€ Republicans were beyond outraged when the company that publishes Dr. Seuss'€ books€ decided to stop publishing six racist ones. It was a private business decision made because those six€ books “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” but then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy claimed it “outlaw[ed] Dr. Seuss,” and Sen. Marco Rubio described it as “an example of a depraved sociopolitical purge driven by hysteria and lunacy.”
Just to review, the book is about two kinds of Sneetches: Some have stars on their bellies, and others have none upon thars. The star-belly Sneetches are unduly privileged, and won't let the plain-belly Sneetches come to their weenie roasts, ever. A shrewd huckster, Sylvester McMonkey McBean, shows up with a machine that'll put stars on a Sneetch's belly — for a fee.
Unwilling to tolerate all that passing, the star-bellied Sneetches pay McBean to remove their stars so they'll know who's really the elite, and after much foolishness they all realize how stupid it all is and decide that everyone should be treated equally, and the story ends happily. At least until John Roberts rules that plain-bellied Sneetches don't need their voting rights protected anymore.
"The Sneetches," published in 1961, is a book about two kinds of Sneetches: those with stars on their bellies and those without stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches are judged negatively by their appearance, so capitalist Sylvester McMonkey McBean makes money selling them stars for their bellies. Meanwhile, the Star-Bellied Sneetches don’t like associating with the Plain-Belly Sneetches, so they start paying to have a machine take their stars off.
The Seuss family has said the book was intended to teach children not to judge or discriminate against others because of their appearance and to treat people equitably.
If you can’t win the debate with rational arguments, then it’s “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (Qur’an 47:4).
A 37-year-old father of four was killed on Jan. 2 after participating in a Christian-Muslim debate in eastern Uganda at which 13 Muslims put their faith in Christ, sources said.
Later in the show, independent journalist Sam Husseini speaks with Mickey about working to uncover the truth when both politicians and corporate media circumvent or suppress it. Husseini notes an unwillingness among reporters to ask tough but important questions about major topics. Among the examples he cites include the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the nuclear weapon ban treaty from a Trump/Putin press conference in Helsinki, and the possible origin of the coronavirus in a Wuhan lab. He notes how these and other pertinent questions are either not asked, or become distorted into a Trump-vs-Democrats type of argument that is then often dismissed.
On Martin Luther King Jr Day, rather than embracing a sanitized, deradicalized King, we remember a committed foe of not only racism, but economic inequality and militarism.
There were three separate TV newscasts about the city of Hamtramck, Michigan passing an ordinance permitting the ritual slaughter of animals at private residences. All three of these news reports included a statement from the Director of Safe Spaces for the Michigan chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nour Ali.
Some people were apparently aware of some of the possible darker implications. Warikoo somehow summoned up the minimal decency to note that “some residents and animal rights advocates have expressed opposition to the ordinance changes, saying they will lead to animal cruelty and sanitation problems in Hamtramck, one of the most densely populated cities in Michigan. They said they worry about people being traumatized by seeing the throats of goats, lambs and cows being slit in backyards, with blood splattering and entrails falling out.”
The all-Muslim city council voted 3-2, with Mayor Amer Ghalib casting an additional vote in favor making it 4-2, to amend a city ordinance to allow religious sacrifice of animals at home. After the vote to approve, applause broke out from members of the public, who packed the meeting to speak out before the vote.
Iran has turned into a boiling pot with protesters in the country resisting the regime for more the two months over the death of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini in police custody and the arrests as well as subsequent executions of those agitating. Voicing concerns of people, especially women, in the Islamic state Masih Alinejad, journalist and activist, said: “We deserve to have secular, democratic country.”
Anticipating an increasingly activist Supreme Court and wary of further incursions on LGBTQ+ and other rights, Democrats sprung into action. A unique combination of factors—a lame-duck session of Congress, fear of a future attack on Obergefell v. Hodges, and a turning tide of public opinion on marriage equality—paved the way for the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act on December 13.
To mark Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, leaders of a modern iteration of the slain civil rights champion's final campaign called on U.S. politicians from both sides of the aisle—many of whose policies and actions are like those King condemned as the "evil triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism"—to step up and meet the needs of the country's poor and low-income people.
Foreign policy is a blind spot for Americans. This became part of Martin Luther King’s message.
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on the significance of his life and work. It is particularly important to do so this year, with unapologetic racism on the rise and a Cold War atmosphere permeating Washington.
In his absorbing profile of the writer Alex Haley (author of "Roots" and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X") in the New York Times Book Review a year ago, Michael Patrick Hearn made a familiar mistake. He wrote: "Politically [Haley] he was a moderate, philosophically more Martin than Malcolm."
You’ve seen the photos from Ukraine. The bombed out schools, the ghostly writing left behind on blackboards, desks turned over and posters in tatters. As Russian attacks mercilessly drum on, innocent Ukrainian families and children flee westward.
Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was born January 15, 1929. He was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just 39 years old. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War. We play his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which he delivered at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” that he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated.
Fewer and fewer people remember his charisma, the marches, lack of fear facing institutionalized violence, including the American government’s infiltration of the movement, their smear of his ethics and its guiding ember. It would be nice to say his dream lives on and go forward, character over race, on the Left side of history — equal and up to the task, perhaps a prequel to a time like The Tempest full of grace — shipwrecked, but one, with all the monsters gone. What are we going to do? It’s so dark. AIs have more life than our fading spark.
Ours is an age beset by conspiracy theories, with the fascist QAnon cult at the center of much public lunacy. These completely implausible ideas, apparently taken seriously by millions of people, have been enabled by the internet, by social media, and by the rise […]
Ours is an age beset by conspiracy theories, with the fascist QAnon cult at the center of much public lunacy. These completely implausible ideas, apparently taken seriously by millions of people, have been enabled by the internet, by social media, and by the rise of a new, militant billionaire class that funds them. Indeed, with the turn to such conspiracies by new Twitter owner Elon Musk, that site has seen an explosion of hate speech, calumny, and wacky but dangerous ideas. Just to refresh our memories, QAnon accused Hillary Clinton and other high officials of running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. At one point these vicious lies even led to the pizzeria being shot up. This conspiracy theory was believed and broadcast by Gen. Michael Flynn, the former U.S. National Security Advisor! More recently, QAnon acolytes were involved in the January 6, 2021, attempted coup d’etat.
The court will likely rule in “Glacier Northwest” that the union’s strike activity isn’t protected by federal labor law.
Witness Against Torture continues to serve as a visible reminder to a forgetful U.S. public that Guantánamo is still a crime and an affront to humanity.
I had already observed in August 2022 that, if finding a job has become harder, the fault may be less of actual robots stealing human jobs, than it is of “robot recruiters”. There is, that is, too much use and abuse of “artificial intelligence” software that rejects too many job applications for all the sad, dumb reasons explained in that post.
“total time spent using social apps rose 17% year-over-year, now surpassing 2 trillion hours on Android phones in 2022.”
Blogger (now part of Google) has continuously hosted this blog for 20 years, for free. I'd like to thank Blogger and Google for providing this platform for two decades. It's tough to find extant self-hosted security content that was born at the same time, or earlier. Bruce Schneier's Schneier on Security is the main one that comes to mind. If not for the wonderful Internet Archive, many blogs from the early days would be lost.
The start of a new year often means a fresh start and for the CRTC, it meant welcoming a new chair, as Vicky Eatrides officially took over as chair a few days into 2023. Eatrides comes to the Commission at a particularly busy time with wireless competition concerns top of mind for many Canadians and the government set to ask the Commission to play a pivotal role in implementing Bills C-11 and C-18.
Konrad von Finckenstein is someone who knows quite a bit about the challenges faced by new CRTC chairs, having served in the role from 2007 to 2012. He was recently appointed to the Order of Canada for his many contributions to public life and he joins me on the Law Bytes podcast to reflect on those experiences in the context of the CRTC. Our conversation reflects on what is involved in launching entirely new programs, ensuring public engagement, and developing policies that enjoy both public support and can withstand potential legal challenges.
So how does this agreement let Deere control repair? The major critique of the MOU is the vague nature of the document – and the lack of any enforcement mechanism to hold Deere to its word. The lack of specificity and teeth in the agreement give Deere many avenues to avoid allowing a true right to repair their equipment.
He then told NBC News four years later: "I must confess, that dream that I had that day has, at many points, turned into a nightmare." King cited persistent discrimination, poverty and the Vietnam War for his pessimism.
Although we can celebrate the wonderful works that have finally entered the public domain in places like America after being locked up behind copyright’s walls for so long, we should be outraged that two countries have just taken a massive step backwards in this respect.
We passed it a couple of days ago, but it has been 10 years since the strip "On Fire" which became the meme "This is Fine" was posted originally on my webcomic Gunshow.
Now after 10 years of using the famous dog in his comics to project his own thoughts and feelings, Green tells NPR that he might be ready for a new chapter.
At the beginning of the year, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! We’re calling on game designers of all stripes to build analog or digital games based on the works that have entered the public domain this year, including:
One of the interesting side effects of the internet is that more people than ever are aware of copyright. Pretty much everyone online has seen some version of the “this media is no longer available due to a copyright claim” notice on something they wanted to see. Copyright affects everything from what entertainment we see to which of our devices we can repair. This is why we must fight for copyright law and policy that serves everyone.
Eleven years ago, a diverse coalition of Internet users, non-profit groups, and Internet companies defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), bills that would have forced Internet companies to blacklist and block websites accused of hosting copyright infringing content. These were bills that would have made censorship very easy and harmed legitimate speech, all in the name of copyright enforcement.
Last year there were a bevy of bad copyright and copyright-related proposals in the U.S. Because thousands of you spoke up, none of them made it into the year-end, must-pass bills in Congress.
My weight went down by just under a pound this week. I tried to focus on exercise this week and tried to do at least one extended cardio session each day. Unfortunately I gave into the temptation to eat several cookies the evening before my weigh-in; I suspect my registered weight would have been even lower without them. The exercise clearly helped, though, and my weight is at least moving in the right direction.
[...]
I've been able to keep up with my pocket planner better than I thought I would. Already it's reminded me of a few commitments I would have completely forgotten about if I hadn't recorded them well ahead of time. The planner also doubles as a food journal: as part of my weight loss, I'm not necessarily counting calories, but I am trying to take note of what I'm eating and how much. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I kept another food journal, and it helped quite a bit in the long run.
For reasons, I'm doing some research into the history of FTP (File Transport Protocol) when I come across an RFC (Request For Comments) for SFTP. Only this isn't the SFTP (Secure File Transport Protocol) [1] that is used today, but instead the Simple File Transfer Protocol [2] from 1984. Unlike TFTP (Trivial File Transport Protocol), it uses TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), and unlike FTP, it only uses a single network connection.
Hey, everyone. What you are looking at now is a manual mirror of my website over on Neocities, hosted by the good people of Flounder.
I've been reading up on the Gemini, Finger, and Gopher protocols on Mastodon, and I want in on this "small web" action. It sound utopian, especially in comparison to the ads, the paywalls, the hate, and the "please update your browser" you get on the web.
Right now I am writing my first entry, and I am going to tell you why I how I found out about this place. I was going inside my brothers room, because why not, and I saw him writing here and it looked interesting. By the way, if you want to see my brother's blog he is danielonit. So I just came here and made an account.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.