Are you an avid Linux user who loves reading ebooks? If yes, you must know that the default document viewer on most of the Linux distros may not meet all your requirements for being a bookworm.
EPUB is a widely used open ebook format supported by most ebook readers. Thankfully, several EPUB reader apps are available in the Ubuntu software centre and other repositories that you can download for free.
In this article, we'll discuss the best EPUB readers for Ubuntu Linux that will enhance your reading experience. We'll also explore their features and benefits, so you can choose the one that suits your needs.
EndeavourOS Cassini Nova is here less than a month after EndeavourOS Cassini Neo and bumps the kernel packages to the latest and greatest Linux 6.2 series. The ISO image ships with Linux kernel 6.2.2, which is the latest kernel release at the moment of writing.
Other updated components in the EndeavourOS Cassini Nova release include the Mesa 22.3.6 graphics stack, Xorg Server 21.1.7 display server, NVIDIA 525.89.02 graphics driver, Calamares 3.3.0 Alpha 3 graphical installer, as well as Mozilla Firefox 110.0.1 web browser.
Canonical continues to expand its RISC-V offering with a new Ubuntu release that has been designed and optimized specifically for the world’s first RISC-V-based SoC FPGA, namely the PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit board created by Microchip Technology Inc.
Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit is a development board known for its real-time execution, low-power capabilities, and support for the rich set of peripherals of the PolarFire SoC FPGA, which are semiconductor devices that integrate programmable logic with hard processor cores.
We’re super excited to announce the first round of speakers for Hackaday Berlin!€ We’re set to convene on Friday night, March 24th for an evening warm up before the main show on Saturday, March 25. Featuring the triumphant return of Voja’s 4-bit badge, a crew of awesome speakers, lightning talks, workshops, music, food, badge hacking, and all the best of the Hackaday community, this will be a day to remember. And then we’ll chill out Sunday morning with a Bring-a-Hack brunch.
What makes a work of literature great? Why, to name but a few, are Hamlet, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, The Flowers of Evil, Don Quixote, Faust generally considered outstanding examples of world literature? What makes one work of literature superior to another? Why is some literature read for centuries, even millennia, while others languish in scholarly oblivion? What are the sacred secrets of Calliope?
It is my contention that there are at least ten essential powers of Great Literature. If a work of literature does not contain all ten; it might be good, even very good, but will not deserve the appellation “Great”.
At least two people were killed, and 16 others were injured after a train derailed north of Cairo on Tuesday, according to Egypt's Health Ministry.
The president’s plan to compensate wartime Korean victims starts with a recognition that any redress by Japan must be voluntary.
A long-running story in the world of electronic security has been the reconstruction of on-screen data using RF interference from monitors or televisions. From British TV detector vans half a century ago to 1980s scare stories about espionage, it was certainly easy enough to detect an analogue CRT with nothing more than an AM broadcast radio receiver. But can this still be done in the digital age? It’s something [Windytan] has looked into, as she reconstructs images using leakage from HDMI cables.
When it comes to lower-energy home heating, it’s accurate in all senses to say that heat pumps are the new hotness. But unless you happen to work with them professionally, it’s fair to say their inner workings are beyond most of us. Help is at hand though courtesy of [petey53], who made his own ground source heat pump for his Toronto house using a pair of window-mounted air conditioning units.
The desktop manufacturing revolution has been incredible, unleashing powerful technologies that once were strictly confined to industrial and institutional users. If you doubt that, just look at 3D printing; with a sub-$200 investment, you can start making parts that have never existed before.
The bills would tighten the current 15-week limit and offer narrow exceptions. Gov. Ron DeSantis said he welcomed “pro-life legislation.”
In the aftermath of last month’s toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, questions and concerns about the adequacy of rail safety regulations have resurfaced. The train, owned by Norfolk Southern, was transporting chemicals and other hazardous materials when an overheated wheel bearing led to a catastrophic derailment on February 3. The subsequent disaster response included a localized evacuation and a controlled burn of hazardous substances contained in the derailed tankers, including the carcinogenic chemical vinyl chloride, fouling the air and leaving residents worried about their health and safety upon return.
Nearly three years ago to the day, another disaster involving leakage of a hazardous material similarly sickened residents and forced the evacuation of a small town, this time in Mississippi. On February 22, 2020, a 24-inch pipeline transporting highly pressurized carbon dioxide (CO2) contaminated with a small amount of hydrogen sulfide ruptured in the town of Satartia, sending a large toxic plume into the surrounding area. Around 300 people were evacuated and nearly 50 hospitalized. More than 100 people were sickened, many of whom have had lingering symptoms like cognitive impairment, reduced lung capacity, PTSD, and chronic fatigue.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled a plan to extend Medicare's solvency into the 2050s by raising taxes on high-income Americans and cutting prescription drug costs, a proposal that Biden presented as an alternative to GOP attacks on the healthcare program used by tens of millions of seniors.
The Illinois Department of Human Services plans to dramatically reduce the number of patients with developmental disabilities who live at the embattled state-run Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center.
In an exclusive interview before an expected Wednesday announcement, IDHS Secretary Grace Hou outlined a “repurposing and restructuring” of Choate, located in rural Anna, about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis. That process will start with the relocation of 123 residents with developmental disabilities who entered the facility voluntarily — roughly half the current population.
Hackers are quickly finding flaws in organizations' cloud infrastructure despite perceptions that the technology is ironclad against cyberattacks.
The big picture: Organizations have invested billions of dollars in recent years to move their digital data from traditional, on-premise enterprise storage solutions to the cloud.
This is a good survey on prompt injection attacks on large language models (like ChatGPT).
Abstract: We are currently witnessing dramatic advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are already being adopted in practice and integrated into many systems, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and search engines. The functionalities of current LLMs can be modulated via natural language prompts, while their exact internal functionality remains implicit and unassessable. This property, which makes them adaptable to even unseen tasks, might also make them susceptible to targeted adversarial prompting. Recently, several ways to misalign LLMs using Prompt Injection (PI) attacks have been introduced. In such attacks, an adversary can prompt the LLM to produce malicious content or override the original instructions and the employed filtering schemes. Recent work showed that these attacks are hard to mitigate, as state-of-the-art LLMs are instruction-following. So far, these attacks assumed that the adversary is directly prompting the LLM...
[Florian Gutsche of the VVN-BdA: An embarrassment to Germany’s reputation? Or a credit to it? And does his black shirt prove that he’s dangerous?]
On Friday, February 24th, Florian Gutsche, a German citizen and the national chair of the German Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime – Association of Anti-Fascists (VVN-BdA), was intercepted by German federal police at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, prevented from boarding a flight he had planned to take to Sofia, Bulgaria, and served with an order prohibiting him from leaving Germany for the duration of the weekend.
Formal parliamentary questions have already been submitted to the German government by a member of the Bundestag, asking by whom and on what basis the order prohibiting Herr Gutsche from leaving Germany was issued. These are important questions.
The commission is seeking an interview with Elon Musk, who has made major cuts at the company since acquiring it last year.
On a day Mr. Musk said the company was recovering from a sharp drop in ad sales, he found himself apologizing to a former employee with a disability he had disparaged.
Mexico’s armed forces are not authorized to spy on civilians, legal experts say, but the military has long wielded spying technology and has grown ever more powerful under Mr. López Obrador.
In a 2020 Defense Ministry report, unearthed last year in an extensive [breach] of the Mexican armed forces and reviewed by The New York Times, military officers described the details of private conversations between a human rights advocate and three journalists discussing allegations that soldiers just weeks earlier had executed three civilians in a confrontation with a cartel.
Four friends crossed the border on Friday, but within hours, they were abducted by gunmen and two of them were killed before the others were rescued Tuesday.
Section 702 was designed to allow intelligence agencies to collect the online communications of foreign intelligence targets. However, the program has drawn concerns over the years for the incidental collection of the data of U.S. persons in the process and how that data is later used by intelligence agencies without a warrant. Advertisement
LeBlanc, speaking in a personal capacity, expressed serious reservations about renewing the authority without significant reforms. He specifically pointed to concerns with the ongoing incidental collection of data belonging to U.S. persons, something that the National Security Agency currently does not collect data on.
A representative survey reveals that 66% of minors oppose internet providers scanning personal messages for suspect content, measures which are proposed for their protection in the EU’s CSA Regulation (CSAR), also called “ChatControl” proposal. 80% of underage respondents explain they would not feel comfortable to be politically active or explore their sexuality if their conversations were monitored or scanned. For this survey, the public opinion research company Episto polled more than 8,000 teenagers aged 13 to 17 in 13 EU Member States.
On its face, Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance inside the United States so long as the surveillance is directed at foreigners currently located outside the United States. It also prohibits intentionally targeting Americans. Nevertheless, the NSA routinely (“incidentally”) acquires innocent Americans' communications without a probable cause warrant. In fact, FISA Court judges who approve Section 702 surveillance never learn about, let alone approve, the targets of surveillance under Section 702, and they rely entirely on certifications from the executive branch that downplay the nature of incidental surveillance of Americans. Then, rather than “minimize” the sharing and retention of Americans’ data, as Congress required, the NSA routinely shares such data with the FBI, CIA, and National Counterterrorism Center, and all agencies retain it for at least five years. Since Section 702 was last reauthorized in 2018, it has only become clearer that this provision is a rich source of warrantless government access to Americans’ phone calls, texts, and emails.
In this way, Section 702’s mass surveillance of Americans and the availability of that information to law enforcement isn’t just “incidental”—it's the primary function of the program. What should we do about a program where the byproduct of the program becomes the primary benefit to the government?
As early as 2011, the FISA Court held that the NSA's collection of Internet communications violated the Fourth Amendment because, despite targeting foreign communications, the agency was still collecting approximately 56,000 American emails a year. And yet, this collection continued. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data to find Americans’ communications. Congress and the FISA Court have imposed modest limitations on these “backdoor searches,” but according to several recent FISA Court opinions, the FBI has engaged in “widespread violations” of even these minimal privacy protections.
The submission spotlights how data surveillance practices cause discrimination against vulnerable groups across the entire lifecycle of data processing: at the point of data collection; in the use of data for ad delivery and automated decision-making; and when corporate employees misuse data and thieves steal it.€
The unifying thread to this pervasive system is the processing of personal information about people from marginalized communities, and the subsequent discriminatory use by corporations and government agencies—exacerbating existing structural inequalities across society.€
One necessary approach to solving this problem is to reduce the amount of data that these entities can use to discriminate. To resist these civil rights abuses at their source, we need federal comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation.
As a key component of our commitment to privacy, we don’t collect “user analytics,” or other finely-grained data about how people use Signal. This is a principled choice we make over and over again, and one that makes understanding what people who use Signal want and need, and how they’re using Signal harder. Without in-app tracking on which features are used by whom and when, or data from third-party data brokers, we rely on other sources of information and the expertise and instincts of our team.
Our in-house User Voice team fields ideas, complaints, and crises experienced by people who use Signal and shares them with our leadership and development teams. Signal developers spend a lot of time working with the User Voice team to better understand issues, often going back and forth with people reporting these issues until we’re able to accurately diagnose and understand what’s going on. We view User Voice as the most valuable source of information about what different people want (and don’t) from Signal, and their work helps fill in some of the gaps that our rejection of user tracking leaves in our understanding. We also read feedback on social media and in our community forum as well as app store reviews and media (while recognizing that much of this feedback is often in English, and often from people who skew Western and technically-literate). And we are beginning to invest more in UX and market research to help deepen our understanding of how people want and need to communicate.
In the conflict-ridden realm of international relations, certain terms are particularly useful, and one of them is “Red Lines.” Derived from the concept of a “line in the sand,” first employed in antiquity, the term “Red Lines” appears to have emerged in the 1970s to denote what one nation regards as unacceptable from other nations. In short, it is an implicit threat.
Vladimir Putin, self-anointed restorer of the Russian empire, has tossed about the term repeatedly in recent years. “I hope nobody will get it into their heads to cross Russia’s so-called red line,” he warned in April 2021. “Where it will be drawn, we will decide ourselves in each specific case.”
Planning a trip to Mexico? If you read the news these days, you would think that Americans ought to be terrified of the popular tourist destination.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is now a protracted war that looks likely to devolve into a stalemate. Given what we know about the conflict’s combat dynamics and force structure, however, it’s unclear if either side would ever admit to being stuck. A definitive military victory looks just as unlikely for Ukraine as for Russia, but ending the war with a relative sense of success is far more probable for Kyiv and its Western partners, though it remains hypothetically possible for Moscow. Meduza explains why this is the case.
We in the West watch the slaughter in Eastern Europe as if it were a football game, rooting for an underdog team as it courageously stands up to a stronger adversary.
Will it stop standing, hopelessly swept to defeat by superior numbers of forces?
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko attacked Volodymyr Zelensky while talking about the airfield explosion that took place in Machulishchy on February 25.
Half (51 percent) of Russians disapprove or take a negative view of their compatriots who have left the country to avoid mobilization, according to new survey data from the independent Levada Center. Only 10 percent of respondents said they view these emigrants positively or “with understanding.”
The Havana Syndrome was first reported in Cuba in 2016. The mysterious malady initially afflicted US embassy staff in Havana, especially those attached to intelligence missions. It then spread to Canadian embassy officials. The sudden headaches, debilitating dizziness, and hearing excruciatingly painful sounds struck both at work and at home. Oddly, the Cubans themselves appeared immune to the pathology.
Soon other cases of what the US Defense Department called “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) were reported in Russia, China, Colombia, Uzbekistan, and then even in the US. This mass psychogenic illness was experienced mostly by US government spies, diplomats, and military personnel all over the world, according to Wikipedia. A “government-wide response” was precipitated with “support groups” established.
Garland has now passed the buck to special counsel Jack Smith, and the same people who told us that Bill Barr was going to be an honorable attorney general, or that Robert Mueller was going to be a dogged investigator, or that Rod Rosenstein was going to stand up to the Trump White House, now tell us that Smith is the perfect “closer” to bring Trump to justice. For what it’s worth, I actually believe that Smith will indict Trump for something, eventually, if only to justify his own existence.
But we are already in March of 2023. The Iowa caucuses are on February 5, 2024. The New Hampshire primary for Republicans is on February 13. Trump is the presumptive front-runner in both of those contests. Even if indictments come down today, it’s simply unlikely that the wheels of justice will spin fast enough to take us from charges to trial in less than a year. At warp speed, putting together a trial for a former president in under a year is daunting. Such a timeline is functionally impossible when you consider the inundation of motions, appeals, and requests for delays Trump’s legal team will throw up. Trump’s lawyers will try to bring all of those appeals to the Supreme Court, and we already have a mountain of evidence that this Supreme Court, stacked as it is with Republican culture warriors, is willing to go as fast or as slow as it needs to, depending on which speed helps the Republican Party the most. Remember, this Supreme Court ruled that February 2022 was “too close” to the November 2022 midterms to force Alabama to change its racist congressional district maps before the last federal election. The idea that these same people would do anything to hurt the Trump campaign within the penumbra of the 2024 election is magical thinking.
"The primary terrorism threat, the most lethal and persistent terrorism threat that we're facing now, is not from the al-Qaidas and the al-Shababs and the ISISes, though they remain a serious threat," he said. "But it's from the lone actors and the small groups who are ideologically driven here within the United States and motivated out of ideology to foment, conspire to and engage in violence."
ÃŽbrahim noted that the Turkish state is uttering threats and mounting constant attacks against the region and annexing Syrian lands to its territory. She said: “The most dangerous policy is to cut off the water of the Euphrates, because water cut leads to power blackouts and agriculture also needs water.”
According to a Zachor statement, “more than two-thirds of the 505 ‘targets’ featured on the website are not Jewish institutions, but rather US security institutions, including the exact locations of 271 police stations, 9 US military bases and installations, and offices of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Secret Service, and US government-linked weapons manufacturers, all of which are pinpointed on a single interactive map.”
One of the leading problems of the globalized world that has increased over time is human trafficking. It has increased in all parts of the world specially Africa, Asia and Europe. It involves kidnapping, trapping or sending individuals from one place to another either within state or outside. [...]
India and China have been engaged in a military standoff since March April 2020 and have deployed heavily against each other on the LAC in Eastern Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh.
Algerian Islamist Abu Obeida Youssef al-Aanabi, the current leader of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), granted an exclusive interview to FRANCE 24 in which he officially confirmed his group is holding French journalist Olivier Dubois, who was kidnapped in Mali in 2021, and discussed the role of jihadism in the Sahel.
The seeds of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were germinating for decades, posits religion scholar Bradley Onishi in “Preparing for War.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger would like to terminate antisemitism and hate.
ADF STAFF Mozambican Minister of National Defense Cristóvão Chume was surrounded by a small group of reporters and Soldiers when he delivered a message to the people of Muidumbe village about the resilience of Cabo Delgado’s insurgent forces.
A group of watchdogs on Tuesday urged the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation into House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to exclusively hand more than 40,000 hours of security video from the January 6 Capitol attack to far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who is already selectively using the trove of footage to spin the insurrection as a largely peaceful event.
Messages and depositions from the network’s stars like Tucker Carlson revealed serious misgivings about claims of election fraud even as some of the hosts told their audiences of millions a very different story.
Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch told Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham may have "went too far" in pushing former President Trump's election fraud claims on the network, according to court documents made public Tuesday.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republicans pushed back on Fox News host Tucker Carlson's characterization of the deadly Capitol riot as "mostly peaceful chaos."
A trove of text messages, emails, and other material from Fox News executives and on-air personalities were made public Tuesday as part of Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion lawsuit against the right-wing channel.
Fox News is facing a defamation lawsuit launched by Dominion Voting Systems over its coverage of voter fraud conspiracies in 2020. The network hopes to defend itself with a 1964 Supreme Court decision that makes it difficult to sue media for libel.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is facing blow back from Republican leaders for peddling new falsehoods about the January 6 Capitol riot.
In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.
At a GOP leadership news conference, McConnell, R-Ky., said he wanted to align himself with the letter sent to the U.S. Capitol Police force by Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger, who denounced Carlson for spreading “offensive and misleading conclusions” about the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, including a “disturbing accusation” that Officer Brian Sicknick’s death had nothing to do with the [insurrection].
As the Labor Government seeks to get the “Safeguard Mechanism” through Parliament, the opposition to it is getting louder both inside and outside of Parliament. It’s complicated, they say. Or is it? What is the scam behind carbon offsets and credits?
When wanting to get away with a simple fraud or scam, make it look complicated. And that’s exactly what the Government and the fossil fuel industry want us to believe that it is. Fact is, carbon offsets and credits are not that complicated at all!
The 13-metre, 500-tonne,€ reactor pressure vessel arriving last month at Hinkley Point C. It was built at the notorious and scandal-ridden Le Creusot forge. The unfinished nuclear plant is shaping up to be the most expensive in history. (Photo: EDF)
Oops sorry. That two-reactor nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point C you thought would cost $19 billion? It’s going to cost $26 billion now. Actually, make that $35 billion. Wait, sorry, no, the actual number is closer to $40 billion. When will it be ready for operation? Um, well, currently says French contractor, EDF, maybe 2027? Ish?
This story is part of a DeSmog series on the influence wielded by the gas lobby in Europe and was developed with the support of Journalismfund.eu
Liquid gas companies are casting themselves as champions of rural communities in a bid to weaken proposals to slash the carbon emissions produced by heating Europe’s buildings, according to dozens of lobbyist emails seen by DeSmog.€
Researchers at the University of California San Diego will have the opportunity to dive deeper into such questions thanks to a $15 million gift made in USD coin (USDC) by the Balvi Filantropic Fund, directed by Vitalik Buterin, founder of one of the world’s leading blockchain networks, Ethereum. The gift establishes the Meta-Institute for Airborne Disease in a Changing Climate (“The Airborne Institute”) at UC San Diego.
Newly uncovered documents published last week by DeSmog reveal that the leading gas industry trade group knew over 50 years ago that cooking with gas stoves could harm human health and tried to cover up the evidence.
Oregon’s largest gas utility has funneled nearly a million dollars of cash and in-kind contributions into a campaign to overturn a new electrification mandate in the state’s second-largest city.€
Just days after the Eugene City Council voted on February 6 to ban gas hookups in new low-rise residential construction, a group named Eugene Residents for Energy Choice was registered with the Oregon Secretary of State.€
Our National Mammal — the beloved, sacred American bison — is under attack.€ Of course, they have been since the dawn of colonization, yet despite the false narrative of “America’s greatest conservation success story”, the war against wild buffalo rages on along the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park, where the country’s last continuously wild herds still exist.€ Once numbering seventy million strong, spanning most of North America, wild, migratory bison today number fewer than 5,000 and occupy less than 1% of their native homelands.€ The Yellowstone herds represent the last of their kind and are in such dire straits that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is considering Endangered Species Act protection.€ With federal, state, and tribal governments taking actions that are destroying these special herds, ESA listing may be their only chance for survival.
This war has been going on for decades, with no end in sight.€ Though there have been changes, and some small, positive gains in habitat outside of Yellowstone, other elements of bison mismanagement are growing out of control.€ In addition to Yellowstone’s senseless capture-for-slaughter operations, state and especially tribal hunts are creating a killing frenzy whenever wild bison attempt to migrate into Montana, particularly in the Gardiner Basin.
The scene is unforgettable and unforgivable: an elected official, the deputy prime minister of Australia, cutting loose about a fish species introduced into the country by his ancestors, and demanding their annihilation.€ During the near-lunatic display by Barnaby Joyce, even his own colleagues betrayed embarrassment and alarm at the full-throated shrieks of “carp, carp”.€ With crazed eyes and crimson face, Joyce went on to assure fellow parliamentarians that viral weapons will be deployed against the common carp, otherwise known as Cyprinus carpio.€ The cannonade of ecological warfare had been announced, though preparations for the war had long been in progress.
In 2017, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece befitting the great terror pieces that fret and agitate at the unknown and unseen.€ “Today no one really knows how many are in the rivers of our eastern states and particularly the Murray-Darling, but if you were to say 10 million, few aquatic scientists would contradict you.”
Jackson residents have been reporting irregularly high water bills, with multiple households telling ABC Jackson affiliate WAPT that their bills are doubling, even quadrupling, in any given month.
Officials are aiming to establish a rate structure that enables the utility to run solely on local revenue sources and no longer require assistance from the federal government, Ted Henifin, the Department of Justice-appointed interim manager of the Jackson Water System, told community members during a town hall on Tuesday.
Rate setting in the U.S. is a challenge because utility companies around the country don't necessarily "charge what water's worth," rather setting prices for what is affordable for the lower 20% of socioeconomic demographics, Henifin said, adding that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a household "stressed" if it is spending more than 4.5% of its income on its water and sewer bill.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday accused Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell of unnecessarily risking large-scale layoffs and an economic recession by continuing to raise interest rates, a policy decision that the Massachusetts Democrat slammed as badly misguided and destructive.
In light of recent strong data, Jerome H. Powell said the Federal Reserve was likely to raise rates higher than expected.
Resistance to the government’s plan to push back the retirement age is not just about working longer. It springs from a deep sense of what defines France as a nation.
As the U.N. secretary-general blasts wealthy nations for rigging the global economy for their benefit, we speak with economist Joseph Stiglitz about how war, the pandemic and the climate emergency are causing economic crises across the globe. He also says interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve are making things worse for the Global South, as the cost of borrowing rises for many countries already struggling with debt. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Columbia University professor and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is also currently the chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute. His latest book is titled People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent. Professor Stiglitz joins us on Democracy Now! to discuss the current global economy.
Yalta International Economic Forum, a Kremlin-backed event held annually in Crimea since 2015, may have to take place in Moscow next September. The governor of the Russia-annexed region, Sergey Aksyonov, spoke to Interfax about the plans to move the forum.
Hundreds of thousands of French workers walked off the job Tuesday and marched against the government's effort, led by neoliberal President Emmanuel Macron, to raise the nation's retirement age from 62 to 64.
We examine the state of U.S. politics, Trumpism, journalism and more with Mehdi Hasan, host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC and Peacock. His new book is titled Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking.
Peter Obi, a candidate for Nigeria’s Presidential election, is by no definition a radical. Bernie Sanders, who was a candidate for the United States Presidency, was only a radical by his own definition. The issue I always had with Bernie was that he wasn’t radical enough (what does this even mean?) but more so that he never tried to win and therefore was not a relevant force in politics.
There is an argument that American politics are higher stakes than Nigerian politics. Marxists have attempted to make the argument that socialism must start in the most developed bourgeois democracies. But there are a couple of problems for the United States. The US is what I call the last second-world country. It has unchecked access to markets and can spend without consequence thanks to the supremacy of its military and therefore its currency. However it has no functioning government and any crisis whether that be toxic trains, guns, police murder, drug prices, college prices or polluted water, cannot and will not be solved by the government. The solution is to buy and work more and turn away from politics because there is no left represented.
Even as Elon first made his bid for Twitter, we highlighted just how little he understood about content moderation and trust & safety. And, that really matters, because, as Nilay Patel pointed out, managing trust & safety basically is the core business of a social media company: “The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation.” But, Elon had such a naïve and simplistic understanding (“delete wrong and bad content, but leave the rest”) of trust & safety that it’s no wonder advertisers (who keep the site in business) have abandoned the site in droves.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va) and John Thune (R-SD) introduced a bipartisan bill Tuesday giving President Biden greater power to regulate and sanction China-affiliated companies, including social media giant TikTok.
A simplistic 18th century math formula, not the latest complex Big Tech algorithm, is the greatest growing threat to our democracy. This formula got scratched out using a quill pen in 1787. Then it was used in 1789 to elect George Washington as our first president. This enduring presidential algo is found in Article II, Section I, of the U.S. Constitution.
A stallion purportedly owned by the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov was stolen from a private stable in the Czech Republic’s KrabÃÂice municipality.
Intel was expecting roughly 40% of its Germany project to be subsidized, under the EU's Chips Act, but is now also open to other sources of government aid including tax breaks or energy subsidies, the report added.
The latest wave of global Chinese brands have taken a different approach. Many initially eyed the domestic market, before the covid-19 pandemic and China’s draconian response to it forced them to look abroad for growth, says Jim Fields, a marketer who works with Chinese brands in America. Companies such as Shein, Temu and TikTok may grab the headlines but hundreds of Chinese firms have been making similar inroads in America, Europe and Japan—using similar strategies.
The job market in the U.S. remains strong overall, but recent high-profile layoffs at technology and media companies and predictions of a recession later this year have raised concerns about job security
Move raises concerns that policy could be being made behind the scenes with no public record and against transparency rules
Haraldur Thorleifsson (a.k.a., Halli), said in a tweet yesterday that his work computer was locked nine days ago with the group of roughly 200 Twitter employees laid off at the end of February. He said he received no confirmation of his lay-off, and reckoned even HR didn't know the answer.
In Mapping the wider fediverse I showed how a new table added to the Mastodon plugin — mastodon_domain_block — enables queries that find which servers are moderating which other servers. For example, here are servers on nerdculture.de‘s list of offenders.
The November cuts were a surprise, but another round of firings has been widely anticipated by the Meta workforce. Zuckerberg has dubbed 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency,” and the company has been communicating that theme to employees during performance reviews, which were completed last week, the people said.
Hours later, Thorleifsson said he was formally told that he had been fired.
Fresh off a surprisingly successful and confrontational State of the Union address that doubled as a preview of his reelection campaign, President Joe Biden launched a national tour to tout some signature projects in his landmark infrastructure bill. He presided over ribbon-cutting ceremonies for multimillion-dollar initiatives to restore bridges and highways and to phase in fleets of electric buses. All the while, he chided Republican political leaders for blocking progress on these key arenas of national economic renewal.
The EU Commission today launched the updated Schengen Information System (SIS). Following a renewal of the Regulation, this largest European security and border management database will be expanded to include new categories of alerts. In the fight against crime and terrorism, it will be possible to search for ââ¬Å¾unknown wanted persons“ on the basis of their fingerprints.
A bipartisan group of 12 senators unveiled a proposal Tuesday to grant the Commerce Department wide-ranging powers to review and potentially ban the U.S. operations of tech companies such as TikTok and others that officials deem a national security threat.
CAIR had TV station WSB mischaracterize a court transcript in order to reverse a legal decision. In the second of two broadcasts about Sharon Dickson, WSB credits itself with influencing the city of Sandy Springs, Georgia to reverse the ruling of Municipal Court Judge Sharon Dickson. After Dickson went to take another job in a different city, WSB broadcast CAIR’s demand that she be pushed out of that position as well.
CAIR was not voicing an opinion; it was trying to get Dickson fired.
Is it fair to characterize Twitter's bias as against the right and indifferent to the left given how little we know about which documents have been turned over by Elon Musk and why?
In the midst of a fierce copyright dispute last evening, Twitter CEO Elon Musk intervened. He declared that accounts engaging in "repeated, egregious weaponization of DMCA on Twitter" will receive temporary suspensions. The problems began when a popular user tweeted a stunning video owned by a professional photographer, who responded by sending a DMCA takedown notice. That sounds straightforward, but this dispute is a lot more complex than that.
On Monday, I saw Elon Musk tweet the following, and initially thought that he might have actually made a good policy decision for once, and planned to write up something about Elon doing something right (contrary to the opinion of some, I’m happy to give him credit when it’s due):
On March 7, Georgia’s parliament passed in the first reading a bill to establish a “foreign agents” registry. The bill, titled “On transparency of foreign influence,” received votes from 76 deputies and was opposed by 13, according to the news site Novosti-Gruzia. The proposed legislation would require all non-commercial legal entities and media agencies that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents.”
Any criticism of left-leaning YouTube commentators should begin with a basic endorsement of civil liberties. Many people now get much of their news and views from social media, and not from the older legacy media of newspapers and TV broadcasts. Since the barriers to participation in new media are less restrictive, the YouTube shows and platforms (ranging across a wide political spectrum) can be considered as a real extension of free speech and democracy.
Left commentators on YouTube periodically raise alarms about the algorithmic bias on YouTube that favors right wing outlets and broadcasters. The algorithm is not a mysterious ghost in the machine, but is instead an outcome of dominant corporate interests and investments. Indeed, the left leaning YouTubers often criticize right wing disinformation campaigns, offering their own commentary as a more truly informative counterbalance. They encourage viewers to press the Like button, of course, and to become not just subscribers but financial donors.
Google was scheduled to appear before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage yesterday to discuss Bill C-18 and its test of the removal of links to Canadian news services for a small percentage of its users, but the meeting was postponed due to technical difficulties. That ensured that the big Bill C-18 news of the day did not come from the hearing, but rather from an exceptional Ricochet Media article featuring comments from Senator Paula Simons that should heighten concern about the government’s intent with Bill C-18. Senator Simons, a longtime journalist and Trudeau appointee to the Senate, raises many concerns with the bill (and a great line that “honest to god, I feel that this is written by people who have never used the Internet”), but I think this is the key passage, which opens the door to targets beyond Google and Facebook: [...]
“ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹As of yesterday, March 6th, 2023, the certificate has expired – meaning that the onion site is no longer available seemingly with no plans to renew,” Pavel Zoneff, director of strategic communications at the Tor Project told Motherboard in an email. The Tor Project is the non-profit that helps maintain the Tor anonymity network. Users can route their internet activity through Tor to bypass censorship, such as when domestic internet service providers block access to certain websites. Website administrators can also create Tor onion services—also generally known as sites on the dark web—which provide extra protections to Tor users. Facebook launched its own Tor onion service in 2014.
[...] Critics say it mirrors Russian legislation that has restricted the work of independent journalists and democratic institutions there. [...]
Last week, El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele posted a typically divisive video on Twitter. To the sound of thrilling fast-paced music, it showed hundreds of detainees being transferred to a new "megaprison" officially named the Center for Confining Terrorism. Constructed last year to host the Central American country's burgeoning prison population, it is the largest prison in the Americas, with capacity for 40,000 inmates.
In a word, the ongoing union organizing drive that has swept the coffee giant Starbucks can be described as ‘unprecedented.’ Never before has a mass unionization effort of this magnitude gripped a fast food company in the United States. The humble origins of the barista-led Starbucks Workers United can be found in the Rust Belt city of Buffalo. It is there where the nation-wide unionization effort was publicly launched in August 2021.€
As Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) expands from shop to shop, workers face an onslaught of union busting tactics from the company. But union fever is spreading rapidly nonetheless as Starbucks workers at over 400 locations have filed petitions for union elections, with more planning to do so.€
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Thursday that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has relented to pressure and agreed to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee later this month, news that came just 24 hours before the panel was set to vote on whether to subpoena the billionaire executive.
Three of every four athletic directors across the NCAA are male. But in one conference, women are the majority.
"Everything Everywhere All at Once" features a dizzying array of plot twists as failing laundromat owner Evelyn Wang learns she's actually a superhero fighting to save her family and the world.
The agency said it was opening a special investigation because the railway has had several significant accidents since late 2021.
The proposal from the Conservative government particularly targets those arriving by irregular means across the English Channel, most of whom are asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution.
Women's rights continue to be seriously violated and they continue to be marginalized and excluded from decision-making in matters of peace and security, said a document.
The report identifies at “least a half dozen” active gangs and cliques — and names them: the Executioners, the Banditos, the Regulators, the Spartans, the Gladiators, the Cowboys, and the Reapers.
These groups pose a threat to the general public — deputies hoping to prove themselves worthy of gang membership routinely seek out violent encounters with the public, the investigation reports — as well as to the internal command-and-control structure of LASD. The gangs “undermine supervision, destroy public trust, are discriminatory, disruptive, and act contrary to … professional policing,” the report concludes.
In a Facebook ad, a woman with a face identical to actor Emma Watson’s face smiles coyly and bends down in front of the camera, appearing to initiate a sexual act. But the woman isn’t Watson, the “Harry Potter” star. The ad was part of a massive campaign this week for a deepfake app, which allows users to swap any face into any video of their choosing.
A headline and a blurb on earlier versions of this article mischaracterized the status of some remarried women in Afghanistan by saying that Taliban law had voided thousands of divorces and that they had become outlaws as alleged adulterers. The new headline and blurb correct this error to specify that these remarried women fear arrest for adultery because their divorce proceedings under the previous Afghan government do not comply with the version of Islamic law adopted by the Taliban. The article has been revised to clarify that the Taliban has not declared that these prior divorces are void or that women who have remarried are committing adultery. Additional changes to the article modify a reference to potential imprisonment, making clear that a woman from western Afghanistan feared she could be jailed, and provide more detail on how judges and lawyers have quantified these cases.
Five Texas women are scheduled to speak on the steps of the state Capitol on Tuesday about the life-threatening risks posed by the state's abortion ban and their struggles to obtain necessary healthcare since it went into effect, a day after filing an unprecedented lawsuit challenging the law.
Several women who say Texas' abortion bans posed significant risks to their health have sued the state this week, opening a new front in the legal battles that have emerged since the Supreme Court overturned national abortion rights protections last year.
But I think even this is still too rigid under some circumstances. Customer-facing roles like mine will necessarily be constrained to regular business hours, and people working in teams will need dedicated times to collaborate and pool ideas. But otherwise it should be sufficient to deliver projects not track time. Creative people especially don’t get bursts of inspiration on a predictable schedule.
Working four days instead of five—with the same pay—leads to improved well-being among employees without damaging the company’s productivity. That’s the recently reported result of a four-day workweek test that ran for six months, from June to December 2022, and involved a total of 61 U.K. companies with a combined workforce of about 2,900 employees.
As there is no reliable information about who carried out the attacks and the chemicals used, it is reported that at least a thousand students have been poisoned in the attacks. Most recently, a new chemical attack killed 4 more children, including a student named Karin Alamdari.
The Federal Shariat Court (FSC) has dismissed a petition challenging the vires of the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act 2013, which set the minimum age of marriage for both girls and boys at 18 years in the province.
Telecom and media giants (News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, mostly) have spent big bucks to scuttle the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn. That’s involved seeding all kinds of bullshit claims in the press (with the GOP’s help) about how Sohn hates rural America, police, puppies, and freedom. Some of the most recent attacks have been grotesquely homophobic.
The Biden administration said it would request talks with Mexico over a brewing trade fight.
In Jack Daniel’s Properties v. VIP Products, Jack Daniels claims that a company infringed and diluted its trademarks by selling a parody dog toy that looks like a Jack Daniels whiskey bottle and has punny text like “BAD SPANIELS – 43% POO BY VOL.” The Ninth Circuit held that the defendant’s use of Jack Daniels’s trademarks was “expressive,” requiring application of what’s known as the Rogers test. Jack Daniels is now asking the Supreme Court to take the extreme position that no special test should apply to expressive uses of trademarks at all, essentially arguing that there’s no need to consider whether forbidding a trademark use would deprive someone of their First Amendment rights. We filed an amicus brief urging the Court to reject that argument, explaining why and how the law must protect our ability to use trademarks to critique and comment on their owners and the things they represent.
In most trademark cases, courts apply a set of six to ten factors meant to assess the likelihood that consumers will be confused—things like how well-known the plaintiff’s trademark is and how similar the plaintiff’s and defendant’s uses are. That’s consistent with the consumer protection purpose of trademark law: trademarks provide information about goods and services, so the law polices their use to prevent people from thinking they’re buying one thing but actually getting another.
But there are a few problems with applying this standard test to parodies or other expressive uses of trademarks—i.e., cases where a trademark is being used to communicate something other than the source of a product. First, the test treats avoiding confusion as the only goal, without recognizing a competing interest in free expression. Second, certain factors may be unhelpful or awkward to apply to expressive uses, or lead to counterintuitive results. And third, the many subjective factors make the outcome unpredictable and difficult to resolve early in the case, which translates to uncertainty about your legal rights and expensive litigation.
The DMCA lends itself to abuse. The intent of the law was to limit copyright infringement on services hosting user-generated content by providing safe harbors for service providers who made good faith efforts to respond to DMCA complaints.
The legal dispute between a group of filmmakers and Reddit is heating up. The movie companies want Reddit to identify several users so they can provide evidence for a lawsuit against Internet provider RCN. Reddit refuses to do so, citing the right to anonymous speech, but the filmmakers suggest that's a disingenuous defense.
Bear with me here, because this is going to take some explaining as a matter of throat-clearing for this post, which is actually the entire problem.
Last week, we announced the winners of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! We strongly encourage everyone to go check out all the submissions, but as in past years, I sat down with Mike and our game design partner Randy Lubin for an episode of the podcast all about the winning games in all six categories, and some of our other favorite entries.
Twenty questions is a game where one person things of something secret and the other person has twenty yes-or-no questions to narrow down who it can be and finally guess it. “Is the person alive today?” “Yes.” That sort of thing.
The way we play it these days, it’s almost more like a puzzle or co-op experience because of the first rule, which is that the person who came up with the secret should aim for something that will be discovered by question number 17 or thereabouts. If they find the secret a lot sooner, you came up with a too easy secret, and if they don’t find the answer within 20 questions, you came up with a too difficult secret. For that reason, you obviously should pick something that you believe they are aware of.
With the current state of brokenness in commercial search engines, especially with the implosion of the commercial social media platforms we have an opportunity to re-think search on a more personal level.
My favourite library from childhood still exists but has been refurbished so many times there's almost nothing left that child-me would recognise. The shape of the building silhouetted against orange sunset clouds, perhaps, but the sounds and the smells are all modern and entirely without soul.
My old high school just got a new science building. To achieve that they leveled the old science building, the canteen (aka cafeteria), the hall, half the language department, and swallowed a huge chunk of the remaining green space. It took two years to put the new building in. Where did the kids do assembly or get their sausage rolls in the meantime?
The desiccating corpse below the ground is slowly emptied of water. It no longer needs its water or water from elsewhere. It's DONE, vole! Watering the grave with the sun's rays is a method of display, though also of outer decay, as the tomb itself will erode with time. I've probably mentioned it before, but when I kick it, just dump me in the river. Which river? Well, the closest will do.
I tried the first incarnation of this chip. I do like a few things. It featured 8 cores, each had access to all external pins. Each had a set of clock/counter registers. There were no interrupts --- one core would be dedicated to react to a specific event (edge on a pin). The assembly language I found nice. Someone even built a Forth for it. However, the software to assemble code was buried behind a proprietary software tool box, so I abandonded it at some point. It seems that the second incarnation does feature Forth and Assembly language, and open source tools, but I haven't checked for quite some time.
Over the past few months I've been getting increasingly reliant on a small corner of Gemini: the utilities by Acidus available at gemi.dev
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.