Several months ago, the very popular free and open source audio editor Audacity was purchased by a company and begin making some very questionable decisions, such as adding telemetry and adding age restrictions to the software.
One year after Apple introduced the M1 SoC and the effort began to bring-up this Apple Silicon under Linux, the effort remains ongoing and more code is inching closer to the mainline kernel.
Recently work got underway on the new M1 Pro / M1 Max for Linux that fortunately isn't too invasive for changes over the original M1. With the Linux 5.16 kernel there is the M1 PCIe driver, Apple CD321X USB, and then ahead for Linux 5.17 already queued up is an Apple PMGR driver, PCIe clock gating, and DT updates.
Coming with future Intel CPUs is Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) to further enhance the security of virtual machines (VMs) and it's sounded a lot like AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) in many regards and in fact now for the Linux kernel Intel is looking at leveraging some of that SEV code to allow for more code sharing between these CPU features to improve virtualization security.
Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems i.e Linux, macOS, and BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls instantly eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to integrate Windows applications in your desktop.
In this tutorial, I will take you through the installation steps of Wine in Ubuntu 21.10/21.04.
Google Chrome is the best performing browser available today, but all that speed comes at a price. To work fast, it needs to use more CPU than other browsers – and more CPU means more battery consumption .
This is just one of the reasons for not using Chrome on a MacBook, for example. Its heavy dependence on the CPU means that it can affect the performance of other applications and cause your fan to make a lot of noise in an attempt to expel the extra heat. But if you like working with the Google browser , there are some tips that can help you reduce excessive CPU usage and other problems that can drain your computer’s power.
One of the keystones of any operating system is a properly configured firewall for complete system security. Debian uses IP tables; however, most users will opt to use software that works as a front end for it with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall).
Some of the great benefits of UFW are its simplicity, user-friendly and easy-to-use command line, making it great for beginners in Linux to the most advanced power users.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to install and set up UFW Firewall on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Prerequisites
The Metasploit Framework is an open-source project that provides public resources for vulnerability research and code development. It allows security professionals to detect intrusions into their network and identify threats and vulnerabilities in various areas such as software, systems, or networks. Metasploit comes jam-packed with existing exploits but gives the framework to create your own custom exploits.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenOffice on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache OpenOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite similar to LibreOffice and Microsoft Office suite. It was initially developed for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris and later distributed for other operating systems. The OpenOffice suite included multiple applications to perform various functions such as OpenOffice Writer package for a word processor, Calc package for spreadsheet tasks, Impress is used for presentation application, Draw is for drawing application and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the OpenOffice on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
When I flipped from WordPress to Jekyll, one thing I really missed was the ability to search my posts on-site. I’ve now added a proper search tool and this post will show you can do it too.
Today we decommissioned some internal DNS zones for things that we aren't using or aren't doing any more. Among them were three internal iSCSI zones, which makes sense since we haven't used iSCSI since we moved away from our OmniOS fileservers to our Linux fileservers. But when my co-worker doing the work told me about this, I was surprised that there were three iSCSI networks, since our Solaris and OmniOS fileservers only used two iSCSI networks.
This tutorial will take you through how to ship system logs to ELK stack using Elastic Agents. You might be so used to using Elastic beats such as Filebeat, metricsbeat, Winlogbeat etc. to ship log from your end points to ELK for visualization. However, Elastic has announced the general availability Elastic Agents. Elastic Agent is a single, unified agent that you deploy to hosts or containers to collect data and send it to the Elastic Stack. Behind the scenes, Elastic Agent runs the Beats shippers or Elastic Endpoint required for your configuration.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to detect changes to critical files in Linux using Auditbeat and ELK. Auditbeat is one of the elastic beats that according to Elastic page, collects Linux audit framework data and monitor the integrity of the files. It ships these events in real time to the rest of the Elastic Stack for further analysis. It enables you to find out who was the actor? What action did they perform and when?.
Are you trying to get character encoding of a file in Linux? Well, follow through this guide to learn some simple ways that you can use to find or get character encoding of file in Linux.
MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications that utilize it. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but its most used feature is a web database storage and management.
AlmaLinux comes with MySQL in its AppStream. However, as many know, it is not the latest release. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 using the AppStream or the latest Community version RPM from MySQL repositories on AlmaLinux 8.
Picture back to the time you were 19. Or 18. Or some other age in your teenage/young adult life where you tried to escape from home. You’re tired of your parents’ rules, you’re tired of them and your siblings, and you wanted to get away from the drama.
If you actually did that, there’s a probable chance that you suffered the painful consequences. You didn’t take the time to first sit down and calculate the expense as to what it’s like living in the real world. As a result, you found out that the world is a cold place, you were treated far worse than you were at home, and with the little money left in your pocket, you discover you can’t afford your own place. Then you learn that maybe home isn’t so bad after all.
In Hades, it takes that metaphor to a whole new level. You’re in control of a young prince and God named Zagreus, who lives in what is called the Underworld. Even though he may be a God, he’s not immortal. Like you, the reader, may have wanted to do at some point in your life, Zagreus wants to leave home and reach the surface in the hopes of finding more purpose in life and wanting to have nothing to do with the family. But he’s going to have to fight through hell and back in order to do that, making his way across the various chambers his father has laid down while slaying the enemies that are contained in each. And let me tell you, it’s not going to be easy.
[...]
I mean, Hades was one of the games showcased on the Steam Deck. What more do I have to say here? It works great out-of-the-box on Proton and Proton GE. There’s no video playback, no anti-cheat (it’s a single-player game), so no issues there. Gamepads work as expected. The game is rated Platinum over on ProtonDB.
We often get a complaint that Plasma Mobile is laggy. Today I wanted to debug it, one of the best way to debug this is to check if something is making use of system resources when it should not.
Learn how to upgrade Kali Linux 2021.3 to 2021.4. Kali Linux 2021.4 has just been released.
BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.
I wanted to write this text for some time, a list of VPN with encryption that can be used on OpenBSD. I really don't plan to write about all of them but I thought it was important to show the choices available when you want to create a VPN between two peers/sites.
I have uploaded a set of new packages, both for Chromium 96.0.4664.93 and its “un-googled” variant.
I am lagging a bit behind on the source release which happened last monday, but my mind is occupied with all the stuff that is needed to get ready for out-of-the-box SecureBoot support.
The official stable release for Fedora 35 was made available for download on Nov 2, 2021, after being pushed back to resolve some outstanding blocking bugs. However, the wait was worth it! The release cycle includes Fedora Server, spins, IoT, and Fedora labs with curated software packages to suit niche requirements. In addition, it features GNOME 41, updated developer tools, new programming languages, power management profiles, improved software management of other third-party apps.
This article is a software developer’s insight into new features, development tools, Fedora Labs, and improvements in Fedora Linux 35.
Ubuntu Web is a free, privacy-focused alternative to Chrome OS. You can use this community-developed Ubuntu Remix to create a Chrome OS-like web experience on any computer.
While still young and under development, Ubuntu Web is giving users a choice with a full suite of privacy-respecting, open-source alternatives that stand up well against Google’s notoriously information-hungry web OS and apps.
If you want a web-based OS that doesn’t feed on your personal information, Ubuntu Web is it. In this article, we’re going to show you where to get it, how to install it, and what you can do with it.
ESP32-S series chips like ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3 come with a USB OTG interface, and Espressif unveiled the ESP32-S3-USB-OTG board last September in a post entitled “ESP-USB: Espressif’s Wireless Communication Solution“, where they mostly focused on USB code samples with documentation in Chinese only and provided few details about the board itself.
But I browsed the company’s official Aliexpress store earlier this week, and I noticed ESP32-S3-USB-OTG board was up for sale for $35 plus shipping, with additional information now available, so let’s have a closer look.
Biohacking projects are not new to Hackaday and it’s certainly a genre that really piques our interest. Our latest biohacking device comes courtesy of [Manivannan] who brings his flavor of a wearable biosensor with some security elements built-in through AWS.
The hardware is composed of some impressive components we have seen. He has an AD8232 electrocardiogram front end, the MAX30102 integrated pulse oximeter IC for determining blood oxygen and heart rate, and the ever-popular LM35 for measuring body temperature. Either of these chips would be perfect for your next DIY biosensor project though you might try the MAX30205 body temperature sensor given its 0.1-degree Celsius accuracy. However, what really piqued our interest was the use of Microchip’s AVR-IoT WA Development Board. Now we’ve talked about this board before and also mentioned you could probably do all the same things with an ESP-device, but perhaps now we get to see the board a bit more in action.
This phone is successful at its main goal: being un-addictive.
I’m overall happy with it and hope it’ll last me for a long, long time.
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sounds with a technique called FM synthesis, producing complex, harmonically-rich sounds. Each note was implemented with one of 32 different patterns of modulation and summing, called algorithms. In this blog post, I look inside the sound chip and explain how the algorithms were implemented.
Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.
Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic. For example, AfterShot Pro has an up to date Linux version albeit its proprietary software.
This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products offered by Corel.
make it no secret that I love Lego, but I've moved far away from my Lego collection, and shipping a closet full of classic Lego sets all the way around the world is currently a problematic proposal. I've done a lot of virtualization to solve this problem, from building models in Lego CAD to styling models with a Lego texture in Blender. Recently I discovered Goxel. This shockingly easy 3D modeling application makes no conceit of being Lego-based or even Lego-adjacent. Yet, the sensation of building models with 3D pixels is surprisingly similar to the satisfaction of building with Lego bricks. You can think of Goxel as a pixel paint program, but in 3D.
Kallisti5 fixed some minor problems with the PowerPC port to keep it building and simplify it a bit. Kallisti5 and waddlesplash also continued cleaning up the RISC-V sources and fixing various minor issues there.
As a result of too much coffee and twitter before breakfast, I'm organizing a conference on strange and unusual applications of data-centric ideas.
LibreOffice allows the users to write macros in several interpreted languages, one of which is Python. PyUNO is the component that gives users access to the application programming interface (API hereinafter by its acronym Application Programming Interface) of LibreOffice with Python.
All Python examples are stored as PC-based personal macros, as opposed to product Python scripts or document-based scripts. Any example in this guide assumes that you save in this place.
release notes:
Quite a few years since the last release. Here's to another decade of GNU Serveez updates!
README excerpt:
GNU Serveez is a server framework. It provides routines and help for implementing IP-based servers (currently TCP, UDP and ICMP). It supports named pipes for all connection-oriented protocols.
We think it is worth the effort because many people need server functionality within their applications. However, many people experience problems with select(2) or poll(2) loops, and with non-blocking operations.
GNU Serveez demonstrates various aspects of advanced network programming in a portable manner. It is known to compile and run on GNU/Linux systems, as well as on other 32-bit and 64-bit flavours of Unix and on Microsoft Windows (9x/ME/NT/2000/XP).
You can use it for implementing your own servers or for understanding how certain network services and operations work.
NEWS for 0.3.0 (2021-12-06):
- distribution no longer in .xz format
The .lz tarball works fine, 'nuff said.
- many portability tweaks
GNU Serveez now compiles and passes "make check" on a 64-bit system with Guile 2.2.7 installed. There are also changes for Guile 2.0 in the mix.
NB: Guile 2.x "auto-compilation" is suppressed during configure and build phases. To manually disable it for testing, use: "make check GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=0".
Contributions for OSX and other BSDs have been installed (but not tested by the maintainers). THANKS to Julian Graham.
- miscellaneous bugfixes
Some of these relate to 32- vs 64-bit assumptions. Others are to appease the ever more stringent demands of modern C compilers (i.e., GCC). Some are related to the portability tweaks, above.
One in particular addresses CVE-2019-16200. THANKS to Austin James Gadient.
- shell used for "make check" can be specified
You can do "make check CHECKSHELL=/my/spiffy/sh", for example. THANKS to Eric Bavier.
- bootstrap/maintenance tools
upgraded:
Guile-BAUX 20211106.0154.1368008 GNU Texinfo 6.8 GNU Automake 1.16.5 GNU gnulib 2021-12-06 00:16:10 GNU Autoconf 2.71
as before:
GNU Libtool 2.4.6
release notes:
Tested w/ Guile 2.2.7 and SDL 1.2.
README excerpt:
Guile-SDL is a set of modules that provide bindings for various Simple DirectMedia Layer (http://www.libsdl.org) libraries.
Most of the SDL functions are wrapped, with the exception of a few functions that are too C-centric. The SDL threads, audio and network functions are not included. However, there are (optionally configured) bindings for SDL_mixer and SDL_ttf.
Also included is SDL_gfx 2.0.22 (by Andreas Schiffler) source code (LGPL 2.1) and bindings for it.
This is alpha code (pre 1.0 release), tested with various, but not all, versions of Guile and SDL. It may have bugs, and the interfaces may change from version to version.
NEWS for 0.5.3 (2021-12-11):
- distribution now .tar.lz only
If you have GNU tar, you can use "tar xf" and it will DTRT. If not, you can use "lzip -dc TARBALL | tar xf -" to unpack it.
- configuration changes
- Guile "auto-compilation" suppressed
During configure script execution, ‘GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=0’ is in the environment. This disables the on-the-fly compilation of .scm code to .go files. During "make", it's up to you to do the same, should you desire.
- new option: ‘--enable-sed-scripts-installation’
The distribution includes sed scripts to help transition client code from pre-0.5.0 interfaces to 0.5.0 (2013-07-19) and later. Since it's been several years since the previous release, it's unlikely that these will still be useful. For new Guile-SDL installations, you don't need, and can safely ignore, them.
- new option: ‘--disable-embedded-gfx’
This causes module ‘(sdl gfx)’ to be built to load the installed (system) SDL_gfx dynamically (if possible) instead of embedding it statically, the default. See README.
- intermittent crash fixed (but maybe not so smoothly)
In recent systems, XCB (an underlying technology of the X Window System) has become particular about threads and their sequence numbers. This was evidenced by a crash in test/cursor.scm, on occasion.
Guile-SDL now does a preventative call to ‘XInitThreads’ on load of module ‘(sdl sdl)’, at the earliest possible moment. This solves the crash issue, but at the cost of violating abstraction (not all SDL installations run over X).
If you encounter problems building or running Guile-SDL as a result of this, please report it and we'll find Another Way.
- Guile "auto-compilation" suppressed for "make check"
This works like for the configure script, by setting env var ‘GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE’ to "0".
- test/mixer.scm more graceful
During "make check", test/mixer.scm tries to output sound (assuming ‘INTERACTIVE=1’ in the environment). If your sound device is busy, it used to fail. Now it simply skips the test (exit 77).
- bootstrap/maintenance tools
upgraded:
Guile-BAUX 20211106.0154.1368008 GNU gnulib 2021-12-06 00:16:10 GNU Autoconf 2.71 GNU Automake 1.16.5 GNU Texinfo 6.8
as before:
GNU Libtool 2.4.6
Aside from the separate work around experimental Vulkan Video decode support, thanks to Intel recently there have been a number of Vulkan improvements to the FFmpeg code around new accelerated filters.
Last year saw early Vulkan support landing in FFmpeg and that has continued since for this widely-used multimedia library. Thanks to Intel engineers there have been some recent Vulkan additions in FFmpeg Git.
All software is made on top of the shoulders of giants. Consider something as basic as running an SSH server on the Linux kernel. In the mix you would have at least 10 vendors (assuming a minimal Alpine Linux system in its default configuration), which means that there are at least 10 separate organizations that still have bills to pay with actual money dollars regardless of the number of users of the software they are giving away for free. Alpine Linux is also a great example of this because it is used frequently in Docker contexts to power many, many companies in production. How many of those companies do you think fund the Alpine Linux project? How many of those companies do you think even would even THINK about funding the Alpine Linux project?
I've had this kind of conversation with people before and I've gotten a surprising amount of resistance to the prospect of actually making sure that the random smattering of volunteers that LITERALLY MAKE THEIR COMPANY RUN are able to make rent. There is this culture of taking from open source without giving anything back. It is like the problems of the people who make the dependencies are irrelevant.
On the other hand, dataframe is organised dataset with named columns. It offers much better optimizations and computations and still resembles a typical table (as we know it from database world). Dataframes can be constructed from arrays or from matrices from variety of files, SQL tables, and datasets (RDDs). Dataframe API is available in all flavours: Java, Scala, R and Python and hence it’s popularity.
One Git usage pattern that I think is underused is the “branchless” workflow. The idea here is pretty intuitive if you’ve used trunk-based development: there’s just one “main” branch that everything gets merged into. No feature branches, no release branches, no hotfix branches.
The “branchless” workflow is, in a nutshell: You work in a stack of atomic commits which are all eventually intended to be merged into a single trunk branch. Each commit can become a pull request, and each pull request consists of a single commit.
The Ethereum blockchain is essentially a transaction-based state machine. We begin with a blank state, before any transactions have happened on the network, and move into some final state when transactions are executed. The state of Ethereum relies on past transactions. These transactions are grouped into blocks and each block is chained together with its parent.
Transactions are processing by own Turing complete virtual machine – known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The EVM has its own language: EVM bytecode. Typically programmer writes the program in a higher-level language such as Solidity. Then the program should be compiled down to EVM bytecode and commited to the Ethereum network as the new transaction. The EVM executes the transaction recursively, computing the system state and the machine state.
The EVM is included into the Ethereum node client software that verifies all transactions in each block, keeping the network secure and the data accurate. Many Ethereum clients exist, in a variety of programming languages such as Go, Rust, Java and others. They all follow a formal specification, it dictates how the Ethereum network and blockchain functions.
In this article we will consider Geth as the basic Ethereum node software.
You may have seen Ovid's recent post on his discussions with the Perl Steering Committee about moving forward with implementing an initial subset of the Corinna proposal in the Perl core.
One of the issues that came up during those discussions was the best way to provide private methods in Corinna.
A new patch for Linux advances support for Rust as a second language for kernel development. Besides updating the infrastructure and providing new abstractions around kernel features, the new patch sets the base for more frequent submissions, writes Rust for Linux project lead Miguel Ojeda.
The new patch comes a few months after the initial contribution setting the stage for using Rust for drivers and modules and taking advantage of its superior memory safety model.
With the new submission, Rust for Linux moved to using the latest stable release of the Rust compiler, version 1.57.0. The objective here is not relying eventually on any unstable language features and being able to declare a minimum Rust version required for kernel development. The new infrastructure also includes a number of new diagnostics and clippy lints to ensure stricter checks.
Comet. Wallpaper illustation by Margo de Weerdt
Mr. Gault shot on 35-millimeter nitrate film, which was rare for a hobbyist because it was a very professional and higher-resolution medium, Mr. McManus said. The downside is that nitrate is also unstable and flammable, which makes the film hard to preserve.
“First of all, these are amateur films shot 100 years ago that, fortunately, nobody ever threw out,” Mr. Byrne said. “Films like these are disappearing. They’re a huge, single unique copy on a combustible, flammable, deteriorating film base. Fifty years from now, this film would not exist at all.”
We doubt you could really live in [Pena’s] PVC submarine, but now the song’s stuck in our head anyway. Although the post is in Portuguese, you can get a pretty good idea of how it works, and translation software is better than ever. Transcending the language barrier, there are videos of just about every step of the construction. We didn’t, however, find a video of the vehicle in the water.
The plumber’s delight has modified motors for thrusters, and a camera as well. Epoxy potting keeps things waterproof. We’ve seen candle wax used for the same purpose in other builds.
Activists with CodePink, in solidarity with Hawaii-based water protectors, on Friday projected images on a submarine tower outside the Navy museum in Washington, D.C., calling for a shutdown of a military fuel storage facility associated with contamination of Oahu drinking water.
Messages displayed on the USS Balao Conning Tower included "Shut down Red Hill tanks," "Demilitarize Hawaii," and "Navy is poison."
On the morning of December 7, € the chief prosecutor’s office had requested the waiver of the immunity of member of parliament Pál Völner, secretary of state in the minister of justice.
Such a high-ranking politician, who incidentally is a key player in the Pegasus surveillance scandal, has never been found in such an unpleasant situation in the government of Viktor Orbán.
An Australian-led study finds that aiming to wait just 60 seconds to clamp the umbilical cord of very premature babies at birth continues to have benefits two years on - decreasing the child's risk of death or major disability.
Vaccine misinformation spreads on TikTok and WhatsApp, and in evangelical churches where pastors warn that the shot “contains the mark of the beast.”
“No matter how educated people are, if their pastor says don’t trust the vaccine, they don’t trust,” said Dr. Morton Zuze, the clinical care coordinator at Chongwe District Hospital, where seven staff members sat idle in an empty vaccination tent.
As in the United States, there are false rumors in Zambia that the vaccine causes female infertility or erectile dysfunction. Zambians have heard AstraZeneca is not being used in many countries because of reports of blood clots in a very small number of people who received that shot. “It’s a global village and everyone can switch on CNN,” Dr. Zuze added.
Tank District Police Officer (DPO) Sajjad Ahmed told Dawn.com that police and FC personnel were guarding the polio teams in the Chadrar area situated on main Wana Road when gunmen opened fire.
The militant group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Saturday claimed responsibility for an attack on a team offering polio vaccinations to children.
Gunmen riding a motorcycle shot at two police officers who were guarding the medical team, killing one and wounding the other, officials said.
Debian security is pretty good, but there’s always scope for improvement. Here are some ideas that I think could be used to improve things.
On Friday December 10 morning a new exploit in “log4j” Java logging framework was reported, that can be trivially exploited. This vulnerability is caused by a new feature introduced in log4j 2.x versions where a specific string embedded in messages logged by log4j would be interpreted by log4j to connect to remote sites and even execute code directly.
In 2021, we spent our leisure time for the following improvements and changes on infosec-handbook.eu:
Revising our content: Frequent readers know that we removed most of our content in July. This is an ongoing effort to update our articles accordingly. We think, 3-year old guidance to configure certain software doesn’t help our readers and may not improve their security at all. We republish updated articles as soon as possible.
Optimizing our theme: Thanks to further optimization by Jakub, your web browser loads more and more files only if needed. For instance, instead of putting all CSS in a huge file, we split it in numerous files and tell your web browser when to load the rest. This approach results in less network traffic and even faster loading speed of our website (which is already really fast).
Experimenting with a JavaScript-based search feature: The InfoSec Handbook comes without any search feature at the moment. While you can use the Sitemap, tags, categories, and navigation to access all content, no easier way to search for it exists. Currently, we experiment with a JavaScript-based search feature. It may provide an optional way to search for content in the future. If readers block JavaScript, they can access our website without any limitation.
New virtual server: We migrated our content to a new virtual server that consumes less power.
Surprisingly there are no pre-symptomatic screening methods for the common cold or the flu, allowing these viruses to spread unbeknownst to the infected. However, if we could detect when infected people will get sick even before they were showing symptoms, we could do a lot more to contain the flu or common cold and possibly save lives. Well, that’s what this group of researchers in this highly collaborative study set out to accomplish using data from wearable devices.
Participants of the study were given an E4 wristband, a research-grade wearable that measures heart rate, skin temperature, electrodermal activity, and movement. They then wore the E4 before and after inoculation of either influenza or rhinovirus. The researchers used 25 binary, random forest classification models to predict whether or not participants were infected based on the physiological data reported by the E4 sensor. Their results are pretty lengthy, so I’ll only highlight a few major discussion points. In one particular analysis, they found that at 36 hours after inoculation their model had an accuracy of 89% with a 100% sensitivity and a 67% specificity. Those aren’t exactly world-shaking numbers, but something the researchers thought was pretty promising nonetheless.
The company, owned by China's Geely, "has become aware that one of its file repositories has been illegally accessed by a third party," it said.
"Investigations so far confirm that a limited amount of the company's R&D property has been stolen [sic] during the intrusion," Volvo added.
As Salvadorans this weekend mark 40 years since nearly 1,000 rural villagers were murdered in El Mozote and nearby hamlets by troops from an elite U.S.-trained army unit, the pursuit of justice by survivors and victims' families is being threatened by El Salvador's right-wing president—who critics say is trying to derail the prosecution of the massacres' perpetrators in a bid to protect the armed forces and solidify his power.
"The people who have been on the side of the victims will continue to be relentless in the pursuit of justice."
As special interests in Washington, DC pared President Joe Biden's Build Back Better package from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over ten years, the $768 billion annual Pentagon budget sailed through the House of Representatives. That's equivalent to about $8 trillion over ten years, significantly larger than Build Back Better, passed with bipartisan harmony. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is now in the Senate, where additional spending amendments are being pushed for this "must pass" legislation. If budgets indicate a society's values, then it's clear what's important to the United States: weapons and war.
Tuesday's€ New York Times€ ran a story that has gotten much attention: "Ahead of Biden's Democracy Summit, China Says: We're Also a Democracy."€
After a 5-month hiatus, indirect negotiations between the U.S. and Iran resumed last week in Vienna in an attempt to revise the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). The outlook isn't good.
For many [insurrectionists] who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, self-incriminating messages, photos and videos that they broadcast on social media before, during and after the riot are influencing even the sentences in their criminal cases
The files cover judicial proceedings by the French police and military forces during the 1954-1962 war of independence.
They are likely to confirm widespread use of torture and extra-judicial killings by French forces.
A Canadian citizen accused of being the English-speaking narrator on multiple recruitment videos for the Islamic State (ISIS) pleaded guilty to aiding the terrorist organization on Friday.
Saudi-born Canadian citizen Mohammed Khalifa, 38, pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, resulting in death, at a hearing in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., according to a release from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III accepted Khalifa's plea.
Kinetic projectiles are a seldom-used weapon of war, consisting of heavy metal slugs dropped from a great height by aircraft. On the way down to the ground, they pick up enough speed to kill enemy troops and even penetrate light armor. [i did a thing] tried to replicate this simple technology using a consumer drone.
The kinetic projectiles were made on a lathe, using 1045 steel as a good balance between hardness and machinability. Simple mild steel is far too easy to blunt, while tool steel was beyond the machining capability of the tools on hand. Simple fins were added using materials sourced from the local hardware store.
Adindo and its competitors have long operated in the region. For years, they cut down large swaths of ancient trees to make way for tree plantations. The wood is transported to mills, where it is dissolved into pulp and spun into a breathable fabric that has become ubiquitous across the U.S.: viscose rayon.
Viscose rayon is used in clothing ranging from couture dresses to t-shirts to sportswear. It has been touted as eco-friendly because it comes from a renewable resource: trees.
But it is also among the products that have driven the destruction of rainforest in Indonesia. The plantations built on the cleared land create a continuous supply of new wood or goods like palm oil, often from a single species of tree.
As Senate Democrats continue to negotiate pared-back climate provisions in the Build Back Better reconciliation package in a bid to win the support of right-wing Democratic senators, activists from the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Friday warned against easing the bill's proposed carbon capture threshold.
"Power plants that disproportionately harm Black, brown, and working-class neighborhoods already get billions in tax credits, with little to show for it."
Rescue efforts are underway after over 30 tornadoes including a potentially historic quad-state twister ripped across multiple states in the South and Midwest late Friday, causing catastrophic destruction and scores of deaths.
"The devastation is unlike€ anything I have seen in my life,"€ said€ Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, "and I have trouble putting it€ into words."
And yet American politicians are not all as obsessed with cars as they were. Madison, the liberal college city hosting the monster-trucks rally, boasts about how many of its people walk, take public transport or cycle to work. A series of city leaders elected across America have promised to nudge people out of their cars. For many owning a car is no longer the great aspiration it was. In that, America is gently following a pattern established in Europe for decades, and now accelerating. On both continents city leaders want to reduce car ownership, so as to cut congestion and pollution.
National leaders however tend to want to add to it, to help the car industry. The result is clashing policies, where people are encouraged to buy ever more cars, but find that they are increasingly unable to use them as they would like. Car ownership is becoming political.
Banksy’s work “Love is in the Air” will be digitally shredded into 10,000 pieces and sold as NFTs at a January auction on platform Particle.
“NFTs require transactions on a blockchain—to create NFTs, to bid, to pay for the NFT after winning the bid, or to transfer the ownership,” Köhler says. “So you could associate the share of transactions NFTs need to their share of electricity consumption and associate environmental footprint. With an increased interest in NFTs and more people buying and selling NFTs, their associated impact increases.”
The energy used for these transactions is a problem, too, as Köhler says miners are generally incentivized to use cheap electricity to maximize profits (like fossil fuels). There’s also the topic of the technology used: “Production and recycling of the hardware only makes up a small share,” she adds. “That being said, using specialized computers for mining that can become unprofitable within a few years creates large amounts of e-waste.”
Two years ago, Joanie Lemercier, a French artist known for his perception-bending light sculptures, took on a new role as a climate activist. He attended protests against coal mining, projecting lasers onto excavators and government offices with dramatic effect, and began a campaign demanding Autodesk stop selling its design software to fossil fuel operations. He also took a closer look at his own energy use, which included a hefty heating bill for his studio in Brussels, electricity for the high-end computers to render his creations, and dozens of flights each year to exhibitions around the world. He tracked it all down to the watt and vowed to reduce his energy use by 10 percent each year, a goal he had successfully met. Then, a few months ago, in the course of a few minutes, his progress was erased.
The culprit was Lemercier’s first blockchain “drop.” The event involved the sale of six so-called nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which took the form of short videos inspired by the concept of platonic solids. In the clips, dark metallic polyhedrons rotate on loop and glisten—a reference to Lemercier’s installations in the physical world. The works were placed for auction on a website called Nifty Gateway, where they sold out in 10 seconds for thousands of dollars. The sale also consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as he later learned from a website called Cryptoart.WTF.
And we’ve barely begun to talk about it. But we need to. Because while NFTs might seem like a fad now, allowing them to become established as the standard for ownership of digital artwork and collectibles could create a massive source of energy consumption for years to come.
In February, the French artist Joanie Lemercier was moved to cancel a release of several works after discovering just how substantial the environmental costs were. “My release of 6 CryptoArt works,” Lemercier wrote on his website, “consumed in 10 seconds more electricity than [my] entire studio over the past 2 years.”
SATAKOLKYT-project began in 2019 and was originally planned to end in December 2021, but received an extension for next year through an additional grant. "We are very happy that we can continue the work for the Baltic Sea and the beach clean-ups", says project coordinator Karoliina Eronen. "Next year, the project will focus especially on young people," Eronen continues. The project will continue until the annual Baltic Sea Day in late August 2022.
There have been individuals, school classes, groups of young people and organizations involved in the clean-up. Many companies have also participated as part of the staff wellbeing days. "Especially during the pandemic, the importance of urban nature has grown in the daily lives of many people. The littering of the Baltic Sea worries many people, which has certainly inspired them to take action", Eronen says. "According to the feedback from the volunteers, collecting rubbish is rewarding, as you can immediately see the work you have done", Eronen continues.
Much has been said about the 'post-pandemic world', the one that would rise from the ashes in the aftermath of the pandemic, hopefully less materialistic, more sustainable, more supportive, and feminist. But a new wave of infections and the emergence of variants seem to be pushing back this 'post-Covid-19' once again, and we are entering the third year of the health crisis. As the world commemorates€ 'International Human Rights Day' on 10 December, hypocrisy and cynicism remain the order of the day, particularly on the part of rich countries, which pay lip service to the issue while at the same time contributing to the denial of basic human rights to the majority of the world population.
That includes a request Apple reportedly received in 2014 or 2015 about a small group of uninhabited islands that China and Japan apparently have a dispute over in terms of who owns them. Going by either the Senkaku Islands or the Diaoyu Islands, depending on which side of the argument you’re taking, they inspired a request from China to members of the Maps team to make them appear larger, even when viewers are zoomed out on the map. According to The Information, not only did Apple eventually make the change, but even today, for viewers using its map from within China, the islands are still shown at a larger scale than the territories around them.
The report also details disputes over everything from iTunes and iCloud to Apple Pay. The figure that looms over everything is a 1,250-word memorandum of understanding that The Information says Tim Cook signed during a publicized trip to China in 2016. The way it’s laid out, Cook went to China because of repeated regulatory actions affecting Apple’s business. By signing a five-year agreement (with an option to extend to a sixth year) promising investments, business deals, and training in China, worth an estimated $275 billion, the aim was to avoid further disruptions.
The listing of the Top “Censored” Stories of 2020-2021is also accessible on the Project website.
But experts say the legislation is political theatre because it won’t do anything to stop most forms of online bullying. Instead, it could undermine individuals’ privacy and fuel the current trend of government MPs suing their social media critics.
If the proposed Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill is passed, it will allow Australians who feel they have been defamed on social media to request court orders forcing providers to disclose the real names, country locations, phone numbers and email addresses of users who have allegedly defamed them. The idea is to unmask trolls who have been hiding behind anonymous user names so that legal action can be launched against them, as long as they are also in Australia.
A special Customs and Border Protection unit used sensitive government databases intended to track terrorists to investigate as many as 20 U.S.-based journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, according to a federal watchdog.
Yahoo News, which published an extensive report on the investigation, also found that the unit, the Counter Network Division, queried records of congressional staffers and perhaps members of Congress.
Jeffrey Rambo, an agent who acknowledged running checks on journalists in 2017, told federal investigators the practice is routine.
It has been 75 years since a journalist last won the Nobel Peace Prize. Back in 1936, Carl von Ossietzky couldn’t accept the honour in person because he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. The fact that today’s winners, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, both made it to the Oslo award ceremony might be a sign of progress. But in a year when a record number of journalists have been jailed, dozens killed, and countless more threatened, intimidated or forced to flee their homes, the spotlight their prize shines on the world is grim. It shames so-called liberal democracies, too, including Britain, that claim to stand for press freedom.
Nobel Peace Prize winners Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa have warned that a rise in authoritarian governments requires a continued commitment to independent reporting.
The two journalists received the award for 2021 at Oslo City Hall on December 10, an honor they won for their separate battles to uncover the truth in countries -- Muratov in Russia, Ressa in the Philippines -- where freedom of expression and the media have faced growing attacks, and even killings, from hostile regimes.
It was partly for Reuters that he had investigated certain aspects of the “war on drugs” launched by President Rodrigo Duterte, especially that fact that mainland China was the one of the major sources of drugs entering the Philippines.
On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova harshly criticized the decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales to approve the extradition of WikiLeaks Julian Assange to the United States.
Washington challenged the decision made in January that the 50-year-old Australian would be a suicide risk if he was transferred to the US justice system.
Assange is wanted to face trial for the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of classified military documents relating to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A two-day hearing was held in October where US lawyers argued that the original judge had not given sufficient weight to other expert testimony about Assange's mental state.
We will fight. Every generation has an epic fight to fight, and this is ours, because Julian represents the fundamentals of what it means to live in a free society. Of what it means to have press freedom. Of what it means for journalists to do their jobs without being afraid of spending the rest of their life in prison.
The UK imprisons journalists. They are imprisoning Julian on behalf of a foreign power which is taking an abusive, vindictive prosecution against a journalist. And this is what it is about. I urge everyone to come together and fight for Julian. Julian represents all our liberties and all our rights.
The US Department of Justice, Pentagon and CIA are determined that Assange rots in jail for revealing their crimes. Assange faces 18 criminal charges for publishing thousands of classified files and diplomatic cables in 2010 exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The charges against Assange carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
Similar store has been put in the 11th hour turn by the media to formally oppose Assange’s extradition. But the truth is that whatever hand-wringing editorials and opinion columns these organisations can bring themselves to publish, the sentiment in the editorial offices of the Guardian and the New York Times will be one of smirking satisfaction. They spent years paving the way for yesterday’s verdict. They will now hope that Assange, who threatened to upset their cosy relationship with their respective ruling classes, can at last be put out of mind.
Earlier this week, workers rejected a five-year contract offer that would have provided 3 percent raises, among other benefits. The union argued that the company’s two-tiered system of wages pays newer workers at the plants less and provides them with fewer benefits as well as little opportunity to move up.
After plunging to a historic low in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession, Americans’ support for unions is now around 68 percent, according to Gallup polling, a level not seen since 1965.
Unions aren’t just for blue collar factory workers or public service employees any more. Organizing attempts have succeeded or been attempted at digital and legacy media organizations in recent years.
The commission proposed rules that, if enacted, would affect up to an estimated 4.1 million people and give the European Union some of the world’s strictest rules for the so-called gig economy. The policy would remake the relationship that ride services, food delivery companies and other platforms have with workers in the 27-nation bloc.
Labor unions and other supporters hailed the proposal, which has strong political support, as a breakthrough in the global effort to change the business practices of companies that they say depend on exploiting workers with low pay and weak labor protections.
Amnesty International has launched a Persian-language website, saying it aims to increase access to information on abuse in Iran amid "an all-out assault on human rights" by the authorities, including arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial executions.
The new website, launched on Human Rights Day on December 10, includes, among other things, research and legal analysis of "shocking" human rights violations, as well as recommendations to the international community to tackle "this crisis of impunity," the London-based human rights watchdog said in a statement.
There once was a time when broadcasting the decision to quit a job might have seemed unwise, or at least uncouth. Career coaches traditionally advised their clients not to disparage former employers online. Though there was always a subset of workers who quit loudly on principle, recruiters often raised their eyebrows at candidates who’d gone public about negative experiences in their previous roles. But after over a year of laboring through a pandemic, protests over racial justice and all the personal and societal tumult that followed those events, some workers are ready to reject stale professional norms and vent.
After Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the US forcibly displaced 120,000 people of Japanese origin into 10 internment camps in the western United States. Eight decades on, our correspondents went to meet survivors, who reflected on their ordeal.
The Internet Society supports people like Bumpy who want to build community networks, through partnerships, or through the Internet Society Foundation. This is why we are happy to announce that we’re funding three communities in North America through a one-time tribal grant.
The Yurok, Hoopa Valley, and Bear River Band communities will use the resources to build, expand, and improve connectivity, bringing many new opportunities for those connected and growing the Internet to those who need it the most. Learn more about their projects below.
Basically Netflix doesn’t give enough time for series to grow, because of that it becomes impossible to develop a fandom. Without a fandom, there is no sustainable engagement with that property, and the series gets cancelled. I’m breaking this cycle, I will go back to books and other services, I’m tired of this broken relationship with Netflix’s original series.
The Federal Circuit’s recent ruling in MaxPower Semiconductor Inc. et al v. Rohm Semiconductor USA, LLC highlights the interplay between the liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (“PTAB”) authority as an agency tribunal having a broad role to protect the public interest in ensuring the quality of patents.
Challenging the validity of a patent through the inter partes review (IPR) process at the PTAB is a conventional alternative to litigating invalidity in federal court. MaxPower addressed the question of whether the PTAB will defer to an agreement to arbitrate that did not expressly preclude the parties from proceeding before the PTAB.
On Wednesday, November 3, 2021, the White House announced President Biden’s nomination of Judge Leonard P. Stark (U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. If approved, Judge Stark will succeed Judge Kathleen M. O’Malley, who recently announced that she will retire in March 2022.
In case noï¼Ë2021ï¼â°Ã¦Åâ¬Ã©Â«Ëæ³â¢Ã§Å¸Â¥Ã¨Â¡Åç»Ë322å· recently highlighted by China’s Supreme People’s Court on November 2, 2021, the Court ruled that an unintentional short payment of a patent annuity caused termination of the patent. A patentee received a “Patent Termination Notice” issued by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and sued CNIPA at the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, claiming that it had paid the annuity of 600 RMB, and the CNIPA nonetheless terminated its patent right. However, the 600 RMB was insufficient to cover the annuity and late fee due.
In In re: SurgiSil, L.L.P., No. 2020-1940 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 4, 2021), the Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s decision affirming an examiner’s rejection of Surgisil’s design patent application.
In a decision dated October 21, 2021, the Zhejiang Provincial Market Supervision and Administration Bureau fined a Hangzhou, China patent firm 20,000 RMB for not withdrawing abnormal (irregular) patent applications in decision no. æµâ¢Ã¥Â¸âçâºâå¤â罚ãâ¬â2021ãâ¬â¢3å·. The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) has defined abnormal applications in the Measures Regarding the Regulation of Patent Applications (Ã¥â¦Â³Ã¤ÂºÅ½Ã¨Â§âèÅÆçâ³è¯·ä¸âå˩è¡Å为çšâ办æ³â¢) and includes filing multiple same patent applications among other actions.
On September 30, 2021, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress issued the draft Several Provisions on the Establishment of a High-level Intellectual Property Protection System in Pudong New Area, Shanghai (上海å¸â浦ä¸Åæâ°åź建ç«â¹Ã©Â«Ë水平知è¯â 产æÂÆä¿Â护å˶度èâ¹Â¥Ã¥Â¹Â²Ã¨Â§â定ï¼ËèÂâ°Ã¦Â¡Ëå¾Âæ±âæâÂè§Â稿ï¼â°). Article 6 of the Provisions proposes to increase punishment for irregular (or abnormal) patent applications and malicious trademark applications to up 150,000 RMB ($23,280 USD) and 50,000 RMB respectively. The Provisions also provide for IP protections at exhibitions, specify increased punitive damages for intentional infringement as well as fines for repeated patent infringement.
Increasingly, companies are using artificial intelligence to invent new methods and products. But can a named inventor be a non-human machine under the law? That depends on which country’s laws are being applied.
South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has fined Dolby more than $200,000 after finding it abused the advantageous bargaining position its ownership of SEPs reading on AC-3 gave it when dealing with a local set-top box maker
Austria became the 13th country to join the protocol on a European Unified Patent Court (UPC) on provisional application (PPA) when the second chamber of the Austrian parliament (Bundesrat) approved the PPA unanimously on December 2, 2021. The Austrian government is expected to formally deposit its ratification shortly. As expected, Austria followed Slovenia as the last of the 13 EU Member States that were required to ratify in order for the PPA to take effect. This group mandatorily included Germany, Italy and France (i.e., the three Member States in which the most European patents were in effect in 2012).
The EU “unitary patent” took a step closer to being established on 2 December when the upper House of the Austrian parliament (the Federal Council) approved the Protocol for Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). The Unitary Patent (UP) is intended to be a single patent right having effect in the territory of participating EU members, overseen by the Unified Patent Court (UPC). Austria is now in a position to become the 13th state to deposit its instrument of ratification of the PPA, perhaps in early 2022, if not before the end of 2021. As reported here, the Preparatory Committee of the UPC reports that Austria depositing its instrument of ratification of the PPA will allow the phase of provisional application of the UPC agreement officially to start, meaning that the UPC can be set up as an institution before the UPC system itself is fully operational.
Austria became the 13th country to join the protocol on a European Unified Patent Court (UPC) on provisional application (PPA) when the second chamber of the Austrian parliament (Bundesrat) approved the PPA unanimously on December 2, 2021. The Austrian government is expected to formally deposit its ratification shortly.
As expected, Austria followed Slovenia as the last of the 13 EU Member States that were required to ratify in order for the PPA to take effect. This group mandatorily included Germany, Italy and France (i.e., the three Member States in which the most European patents were in effect in 2012).
A recent step taken in Austria brings a new Unified Patent Court (UPC) closer to reality and should prompt businesses to consider how best to protect their innovations and enforce their patent rights across Europe in future, an expert has said.
The draft legislation enabling Austria to ratify the Protocol on the Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) completed its passage through parliament on 2 December, when the Federal Council voted unanimously not to raise any objection to the National Council’s approval on 19 November. The Federal Council’s decision followed the unanimous vote on 30 November of its Committee on Innovation, Technology and the Future not to raise any objection. The final steps to promulgation of the law are authentication by the Federal President, countersignature by the Federal Chancellor, and publication in the Federal Law Gazette.
Manga publishing giants Shogakukan, Shueisha, Kadokawa and Kodansha have a new batch of pirate sites in their collective crosshairs. In one action they have asked a US court to help them obtain the identities of several 'pirate' operators pulling in a few million visits per month. In another, just two domains are pulling in a staggering 290 million visits per month.
