Active capsules (net gain) increase by about 5 per day
Summary: On January 26th we celebrated 2,000 Gemini capsules and less than 3 weeks later we already see the addition of another 100 to Lupa’s field of vision; if we add 100 capsules every 18 days (on average), Geminispace will have doubled by year’s end
Related: The EPO’s Balkan Express Keeps Chugging Along Despite Predictions of Derailment | EPO Corruption Under António Campinos: Part 1 – António and the Balkan Express Connection | ‘Balkan Express’ Teaser: EPO’s Željko Topić, Kuterovac, Campinos, Gurry, Battistelli and the DKPTO (Kongstad)
Summary: Napoleonic crusades in Eastern Europe (closely coordinated by French candidates Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos) have turned the EPO, once upon a time an attractive employer for scientists, into a hub of European corruption and financial fraud
As of today (Sunday), this series is complete:
Series parts:
Benoît Battistelli and Jesper Kongstad have been replaced by António Campinos and Josef Kratochvíl.
But has anything of substance really changed? EPO insiders remain sceptical
Summary: The concluding part of this very long series explains that Battistelli’s departure has solved almost nothing and delegates from member states aren’t doing anything to tackle the EPO’s deepening crisis
With this part we have finally reached the finishing line of our marathon series about the EPO’s “Strike Regulations” – a key component of Battistelli’s sinister plan to deprive EPO staff of their fundamental right to freedom of association.
From ILOAT Judgment No. 4430, it is very clear that the “Strike Regulations” proposed by the President of the Office in CA/57/13 [PDF] of 7 June 2013 were incompatible with the obligations of the EPO’s member states to uphold and protect the fundamental rights of EPO staff.
“It took just over eight years until justice was finally done when Battistelli’s “Strike Regulations” were struck down by the ILOAT on 7 July 2021.”But due to Battistelli’s nefarious influence over the organisation’s governing body, these inherently flawed regulations were rubber-stamped by the Administrative Council – which gave its "unanimous" endorsement to decision CA/D 5/13 [PDF] on 27 June 2013.
It took just over eight years until justice was finally done when Battistelli’s “Strike Regulations” were struck down by the ILOAT on 7 July 2021.
There can be little doubt that the judgments of the ILOAT’s 132nd and 133rd Sessions amount to a damning verdict on “le Système Battistelli” and the toxic management culture which held sway over Europe’s second largest international organisation between 2010 and 2018.
As the EPO staff union SUEPO put it succinctly:
“What was once a model organisation for Europe has revealed itself as an institution that has breached the fundamental rights of its employees – for more than eight years.”
The European public sector union USF reported on the ILOAT Judgments of the 132nd Session which confirmed serious and persistent breaches of the fundamental rights of EPO staff over a period of eight years.
“However, at the 168th and 169th meetings of the Administrative Council in October and December 2021, there were no signs that the gravity of the situation had registered with the Council delegates.”The ILOAT judgments which rescinded the EPO’s “Strike Regulations” and “Social Democracy” have belatedly revealed the severe deficiencies in the organisation’s governance and management culture and finally exposed them to the light of public scrutiny.
However, at the 168th and 169th meetings of the Administrative Council in October and December 2021, there were no signs that the gravity of the situation had registered with the Council delegates.
At the meetings of the Administrative Council which took place in October and December 2021, there were no signs that the gravity of the situation had registered with the Council delegates.
This may be due to the zealous efforts of the EPO’s internal “spin doctors” who have been doing their best to paper over the cracks.
The current “PR strategy” appears to be to depict the “Strike Regulations” and “Social Democracy” as unfortunate blunders by a “rogue President” who has long since departed.
“The current “PR strategy” appears to be to depict the “Strike Regulations” and “Social Democracy” as unfortunate blunders by a “rogue President” who has long since departed.”But this is an unacceptably simplistic and sanitised narrative. It conveniently omits any mention of the pivotal roles played by the Administrative Council and the EPO’s dysfunctional internal justice system in this grotesque fiasco.
In the meantime, many of the Council delegates responsible for the adoption of Battistelli's "Strike Regulations" in June 2013 and “Social Democracy” in March 2014 are gone.
Some have sailed off into the sunset of retirement while others have been promoted to new positions in the civil service of their home countries and are no longer responsible for European “IP” affairs.
It should also be recalled that some of the delegates responsible for rubber-stamping these Orwellian measures have been prodded into early retirement or resignation after becoming implicated in serious irregularities on their home pitches.
“With the passage of time, a lot of new faces have appeared on the Council.”Those who remain from the “old guard” of the Battistelli era seem to be busy covering their tracks and insisting to anybody who will listen to them that there is nothing amiss and that everything is hunky-dory in the never-never land of EPOnia.
With the passage of time, a lot of new faces have appeared on the Council. However, it is extremely doubtful as to whether these newcomers – in particular the fresh faces from the EPO's "captured states" – are adequately briefed and properly informed about the mess that their predecessors have left behind for them to clear up.
One thing is certain: Battistelli’s inglorious exit from the EPO in 2018 did not resolve the organisation’s governance crisis which continues to fester under his anointed successor, António Campinos.
Battistelli’s inglorious exit from the EPO in 2018 has not resolved the organisation’s governance crisis.
As Kluwer Patent Blog put it in a recent posting which reported on some EPO-related judgments of the ILOAT’s 133rd Session:
Years after the departure of president Battistelli at the EPO, the ILOAT cases keep unveiling details about the climate of fear and harassment under his presidency which have been so often described by staff members. Although he was succeeded in July 2018 by António Campinos, one of Battistelli’s closest allies Elodie Bergot, who used to be Battistelli’s principal director for human resources, is currently chief corporate policies officer. Some have linked the recently announced reshuffle at the EPO, in which Bergot will apparently face a considerable loss of influence, to the ILOAT decisions.
Over at the EPO, well-informed insiders predict that Battistelli’s “tarnished” legacy – many would consider “toxic” to be a more accurate descriptor – will continue to plague the organisation as it slowly gears up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the European Patent Convention on 5 October 1973.
Preparations are underway to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the EPC, but as long as Battistelli’s “toxic” legacy continues to plague the organisation, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to celebrate.
In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether the members of the Administrative Council will continue to adopt the “ostrich position” at the upcoming 170th Meeting scheduled for 22 March 2022 (warning: epo.org link), or whether they will finally manage to pull their heads out of the sand and begin to tackle the manifold problems facing the European Patent Office after more than a decade of chronic mismanagement and cronyism.
“One thing is certain: Battistelli’s inglorious exit from the EPO in 2018 did not resolve the organisation’s governance crisis which continues to fester under his anointed successor, António Campinos.”If the Council fails to step up to the plate, it is more than likely that the EPO will soon find itself engulfed by a new wave of unrest – especially now that the ILOAT has confirmed that staff of international organisations enjoy the fundamental right to “freedom of association” and do not need to beg permission from their employer to engage in “industrial action”! █
Slackware 15 has [still] been released, and in this episode, thanks to feedback from Hackerdefo and Blackernel, Klaatu lists all the ways you can install it.
How discord is still missing an overlay on Linux after all these years baffles me but luckily the open source community saves the day and after a few rewrites we now have an incredibly good discord overlay with as much tweaking as you could want.
One of the most common questions that I get from programmers and developers who are discovering the free and open source movements is: “Is it possible for me to make money selling open source?” Can a developer actually earn a living if there code has to be open source and publicly available?
Last month, the Linux kernel turned 30. If you’re someone who’s been immersed in the Linux world since Y2K like me, it may feel a bit surreal that so much time has passed since the kernel’s inception.
As a training architect at A Cloud Guru (ACG), I teach courses about all things Linux and specialize in hands-on, lab-based learning. Before joining ACG, I worked as a Unix systems engineer at GE and IBM as well as Technical Account Manager and customer advocate for Red Hat. I’m hugely passionate about Linux because of its importance to my career, just like to the careers of so many other engineers and Linux enthusiasts.
Want to bulk convert videos on Linux? Install one of these eight free video converter apps to get the job done.
There’s a common misconception among Linux users that all quality video converters and encoding software come at a premium cost.
It might come as a surprise that you can access some of the best free and fastest video converters on open-source Linux distros. These video converters are geared toward giving their premium alternatives a run for their money.
Let’s get cracking with the best free, open-source video converters for Linux.
An interactive whiteboard is an instructional tool consisting of a large interactive display in the form factor of a whiteboard. The whiteboard can be a standalone touchscreen computer used independently to perform tasks and operations, or a connectable apparatus used as a touchpad to control computers from a projector.
The instructor can manipulate the elements on the board by using his finger as a mouse, directly on the screen. Items can be dragged, clicked and copied and the instructor can make handwritten notes, which can be transformed into text and saved.
The hardware is used in many environments, including classrooms at all levels of education. Interactive whiteboards let teachers draw on the screen from the front of the room and save their lessons. They offer the opportunity to teach differently while using current teaching tools.

Written using the Kirigami framework, Kalendar is a calendar application that uses Akonadi to sync with external services like Nextcloud, Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Open-Xchange Groupware, Kolab Groupware, as well as the iCal and DAV calendar data exchange standards.Kalendar lets you add, edit and delete calendar events from local and remote accounts (see supported formats above). It uses the KDE Frameworks libraries and the KDE PIM personal information management tool to deeply integrate with your KDE Plasma desktop environment on both desktop and mobile so you won’t miss an important event.
GnuCash comes with a lot of features, too.
apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released.
So you want to start developing for Kubernetes, but you don’t want to have to exert the effort to deploy a full-blown Kubernetes cluster to do so. That’s a pretty common problem. And with Kubernetes retiring the support for Docker, you might find a lot of documentation on deploying a Kubernetes cluster to no longer function. On top of that, you might only have a single machine to work with (so deploying an entire cluster can be a challenge).
What do you do? When you only have a single desktop machine, and you need to get this up fast, you can always turn to Microk8s, which is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation-certified upstream Kubernetes platform that you can run from a workstation. Microk8s is easy to get up and running, so you won’t have to waste precious time deploying multiple servers.
Pritunl is an open source enterprise OpenVPN, IPSec, WineGuard VPN Server. It provides a reliable interconnection between multiple VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) networks like AWS, ORACLE, GCP. It is one of the most reliable VPN Servers in the world and also offers multiple layers of protection. Including 2FA, Mobile Authentication, User PIN etc. It has a simple web interface which allows creating complex gateways, site-to-site links etc. To install the Printunl server follow the tutorial below. It also receives daily updates as well.
In the world of electronic user productivity and consumption devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktop workstations, everything is about using and managing files. The operating system is based on system files, your movies and music are all files, and the content you create, like letters, presentations, drawings and administration, are stored as files. In this article as part of my free Zorin OS beginner tutorial series I will discuss how to manage your files and folder structures in Zorin OS with the included Gnome Files file manager.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Unrar on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, RAR is the most popular tool for opening, extracting, uncompressing, or unraring an archive file. UNRAR does not come pre-installed natively on AlmaLinux and is not featured in its repositories.
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 Unrar on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
You can still load discs into a dedicated player like a caveman if you want, but we live in the age of streaming. Almost every piece of media you could ever want is at your fingertips… as long as you can figure out which streaming service it’s currently on. If you care about control, you can manage your own media library with Plex, and the first step in that journey is to decide what kind of hardware will run your Plex server. You can just use your PC, but a dedicated piece of hardware like a NAS box is more efficient. What’s a movie buff to do?
As crazy as it may sound, it has been more than four years since we unearthed the container project that would eventually be responsible for bringing Linux to Chromebooks. It has also given us new tools such as Windows on Chrome OS thanks to the efforts of Parallels. When Google first announced Linux on Chromebooks and the ability to leverage the integrated GPUs on Chrome OS devices, my thoughts immediately went to video editing.
Linux can run alongside ChromeOS on your Chromebook, bringing a wide range of apps. Here’s the easy way to set it up.
Apache Maven is an open-source tool that allows the building automation of your java projects. It can also be used for projects in C#, Ruby, etc. Its most popular usage would likely involve Java development! The maven project comes from the Apache Software Foundation, where they were previously part of the Jakarta Project before moving on their own clutches.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Apache Maven on Fedora Linux 35.
In literary terms, we can say that the pipeline is a workflow with a group of events or jobs that are chained together and work in a sequence. In other words, its mechanism is similar to a pipe and every pipe has an inlet and an outlet. But what exactly is pipeline still remains a question. The answer to which is that a pipeline will consist of multiple sections of a pipe and can have multiple inlets and outlets where every section processes something and this processing in our case is done by jobs.
This time you will learn how to install Sensu Go on Ubuntu Servers.
Sensu Go is a free open-source cross platform infrastructure and application monitoring tool. It can be used to monitor servers, applications, services. It has support for email alerts and you can be easily notified by via email. It collets basic data metrics, like CPU, Memory, Disk. It has support for custom triggers on which you can setup or execute custom scripts when there is a problem. It automates the registration and de-registration of containers, server , apps etc. Lets get started with the tutorial!
Install and use the Budgie Desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal using the command terminal.
The Budgie desktop environment has been in development since 2014 (originally and primarily for the rolling release distribution Solus, (formerly Evolve OS Linux). However, it is published under GPL license, hence, any Linux distro users can install it on their own systems such as Arch, Debian, Gentoo, and OpenSuse. Although, officially there is a Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu Budgie that comes with a pre-installed Budgie desktop, however, if you already have the one with some other GUI, then here are the commands to switch it with Solus’s GUI.
Are you tired of manually updating your Ubuntu or missing out on the important updates like security patches and other critical updates then this Ubuntu tutorial post is for you as we will show you steps to set up automatic updates on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? This tutorial is also valid for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Pip is the standard package-management system that is used to install and manage software packages written in Python. In short, Pip is the package installer for Python. From Ubuntu 20.04, Python 3 is included in the base system installation but you still have the option of installing Python 2 from the universe repository.
The apt is the package management tool or command. The functions of apt in Linux are the upgrading of the Linux (Ubuntu), installation of new software packages, removing of the packages, upgrading of existing software packages, updating of the package list index, and many more.
The Python development team has released the latest version of Python 3.10. This includes more new features, security patches, and many other improvements. This version includes a new feature that is Parenthesized context managers. Using enclosing parentheses for continuation across multiple lines in context managers is now supported. For more details read the complete changelog.
This tutorial will help you with the installation of Python 3.10 on all Fedora versions and CentOS/RHEL 8 Linux systems. The tutorial will compile and install Python 3.10 source code on your system.
The Python development team has released the latest version of Python 3.10. This includes more new features, security patches, and many other improvements. This version includes a new feature that is “Parenthesized context managers”. Using enclosing parentheses for continuation across multiple lines in context managers is now supported. For more details read the complete changelog.
This tutorial will help you with the installation of Python 3.10 on Debian 11/10 Linux systems. The tutorial will compile and install Python 3.10 source code on your system.
Hello Techies, in our previous articles we have learned how to Install Docker on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 and Docker on Ubuntu 20.04.There are thousand of docker images available on docker hub registry which we can easily pull and spin up container using those images.
But there are some circumstances and use cases that we want to make some configuration or changes in the docker image and those changes should be present whenever we run container. This can be achieved by building a docker image with Dockerfile.
Dockerfile is a text file which contains keywords and set of Linux commands which are executed automatically whenever we build the Docker Image. Creating docker image using Dockerfile is similar to template concept of virtualization world.
In this post, we will learn how to build docker image with Dockerfile. It consists of keywords and Linux commands that are executed during docker build.
PhpMyAdmin is a web-based application for interacting with MySQL database server. This tool provides you with a user interface to make MySQL operations so you don’t have to use the command line interface.
In this guide you are going to learn how to install PhpMyAdmin with Nginx on Debian 11 and secure it.
Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK, to use other remote desktops remotely from a tiny screen or large monitors.
Remmina supports multiple network protocols in an integrated and consistent user interface. The protocols currently supported are X2Go, RDP, VNC, and SSH.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install remmina on Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Linux Mint 20.3.
This tutorial will be useful for beginners to download and install darktable 3.8.1 on Ubuntu 20.4 LTS, Fedora 35, AlmaLinux 8, RockyLinux 8, and OpenSUSE.
darktable is an open-source photography workflow application and non-destructive raw developer.
darktable team released a new version 3.8.1 with new features, bug fixes, and users are recommended to upgrade to the latest version.
Setting up a mail server can be quite tedious since you need to configure many components to have everything up and running. Luckily, there is a much easier solution – iRedMail.
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iRedMail is an open-source email server that supports the latest IMAP, SMTP, and POP3 standards. It also supports modules such as Antispam and Antivirus to keep your inbox spam-free and virus-free.
It is a reliable and scalable solution for businesses of any size. You can use it to send and receive emails with your employees, clients, and customers.
You can also use iRedMail with your website to combine your online identity with your email address for a seamless user experience. iRedMail is designed with usability in mind. The interface has been simplified to help you get started without any IT background or special training.
As said by Sweeney, the company can’t handle the amount of cheating that occurs in Fortnite especially if it is in a Linux-based OS like in the Steam Deck. Adding to that, the Steam Deck’s OS is based on the Arch Linux system. If you don’t know Linux is an open-source OS and is currently the largest open source project to be used. That means cheaters who have experience with Linux can easily bypass various anti-cheat systems. They can do that if they find a loophole in the Steam Deck.
Valve had previously announced that games that rely on Epic’s own Easy Anti-Cheat system can run on the Steam Deck. Not only that, Heroic, another open-source Linux game launcher can help in running games from the Epic Games Store. So, in a sense, Fortnite can run on the Steam Deck easily and can prevent cheating.
Valve seems to be completely dedicated to making Steam Deck as open and customizable as possible. On top of making its handheld gaming PC run a custom version of GNU/Linux, Valve has now taken things a step further still, as the company has officially released the device’s CAD files for anyone and everyone to peruse.
When Valve’s Steam Deck begins shipping to customers later this month, the handheld gaming PC will be running a Linux-based operating system called Steam OS. And that could give gaming on Linux a bit of a boost.
As we hit less than two weeks until the Steam Deck launch on February 25, Valve appear to be doing well on the testing front with 520 games now either fully Verified or Playable.
Each day now a good bunch seem to trickle in together. At this rate of progress per-day, we’re perhaps going to see close to 1,000 either Verified or Playable by launch. That is, unless this is all still early testing of their processes and we might see a bigger bump closer to launch which is entirely possible. Either way, it’s already a rather nice number. The amount only tells so much though, quality over quantity of course and there’s a lot of good picks already.
After collecting individual predictions for Linux gaming in 2022, let’s try to look at what the combined predictions look like as well, as we typically see that combining predictions among several people provides better accuracy on average (i.e. the concept known as the wisdom of crowds).
Note that this can only work if everyone has developed their predictions independently from each other’s, which is precisely why we did this time again. Last year we had 7 predictions that stood out, and this year we have 5 of them:
Ready to test some more awesome open source software? Lutris 0.5.10 Beta 1 is out, so this is your chance to help make the next release a polished one. What is Lutris? It’s a free and open source application that helps you manage games from Steam, GOG, Humble Store, Emulators, Wine and much more.
You may have seen/heard about the word GNOME when researching Linux. People often refer to it as one of the best Desktop Environments, but what exactly is it? In this article, let’s look at GNOME and its history.
I’m Victoria Martinez de la Cruz, but you can call me Vicky. First time I heard about the open source concept I was pretty young, I’d say, 12 years old. At that time it was quite common to use IRC to chat with friends and to get to know people. And it was precisely in those forums I initially heard the term. I didn’t understand it too well at the time, just knew that there were communities that would work together to deliver quality software and that such software was free to use, read and modify by anyone who wanted to do so. I started learning about different open source software, starting of course by understanding Linux and all the different tools that it constitutes.
When I finished high school, I went to college and signed up to get my degree in Computer Science. Before graduating, I was looking for internship opportunities to get some real world working experience. That’s when I heard about the Gnome Outreach Program for Women (Gnome OPW), nowadays known as Outreachy. I submitted my application to contribute to the GNOME Vinagre project. I didn’t succeed in that opportunity but I applied again the next year, this time for both GNOME Shell and for OpenStack-a fairly new cloud computing project. That is when I started contributing with code to OpenStack.
Like most beginners, I faced so many challenges but I got a lot of help and worked pretty hard to get to success. And it felt really good when I did, considering the amount of work I dedicated for it to happen. My first big win which I don’t take for granted was to be confident enough to pursue the career I wanted. I got several blockers in my path and managed to overcome those, and did that because I was convinced on what I wanted to achieve.
Version 3.4 marks a radical departure from the desktop User Interface (UI) of EasyOS, Quirky and Puppy, right back to the first puppies in 2003. They all have icons on the desktop, since around mid-2005 managed by ROX_Filer — ROX is not just a file manager, it is also capable of managing desktop icons and wallpaper. ROX-Filer has served us well over the years, in company with the JWM window manager — the latter managing windows, the system-tray and the menu.
There have been some puppies based on other desktop managers, such as XFCE, however, most of the mainline official pups have been based on the ROX-JWM combo.
For some time I have thought about reducing ROX-Filer to just a file manager. Also, have wondered how the UI could be implemented without desktop icons. EasyOS has desktop icons to launch apps, containers, and mount/unmount drive partitions. If they are eliminated, it means that all of that functionality would have to move into the system tray (or trays).
Early this morning I announced the release of EasyOS 3.4, with radical icon-free desktop. Well, radical for the mainstream EasyOS/Quirky/Puppy releases anyway.
Having been in beta testing, the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (previously known as Raspbian) is now ready for a wider audience to try out. This will enable users to run 64-bit Linux applications and allocate more memory to individual processes. It also offers improved performance for CPU-intensive tasks.
To use the 64-bit operating system, you will need a Raspberry Pi model with a 64-bit processor. We’ll reveal which models you can use and how to install the OS.
Most recent Raspberry Pi single-board computers have 64-bit processors, but up until recently the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s custom Linux distribution designed for the small, inexpensive PCs was only available in a 32-bit version. But last week saw the official release of Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit, which is compatible with the Raspberry PI 3 and newer devices.
Since March/April 2000 I was deeply involved in Debian m68k and operated multiple m68k autobuilder for over a decade. In fact my Amiga 3000 named “arrakis” was the second buildd for m68k in addition to the Debian owned Amiga 3000UX named “kullervo”.
Back in that time there was some small website running on Kullervo to display some information about the Debian autobuilder. After some time we (as m68k porters) moved that webpage away from Kullervo to my root server. Step by step this site evolved to Buildd.Net and extended to other archs and “suites” beside unstable like backports or non-volatile. The project got more and more complex and beyond my ability to do a complete necessary rewrite.
What a way of starting the year! Setting milestones, helping those in need, and daring to dream. January 2022 starts with one of the biggest technological conferences — CES. So, in this piece, you will find a breakdown of three robots in our usual style. But there’s more… we also bring a story to inspire you all.
It’s a great experience writing this blog, where every month news are abundant. Thank you all for contacting us and sharing your stories.
RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization, today announced that Intel Corporation has joined RISC-V International at the premier membership level.
“This move demonstrates Intel’s strategic investment in open collaboration and support of the open RISC-V architecture and highlights numerous deep RISC-V member partnerships with Intel,” RISC-V said in its announcement. Bob Brennan, Vice President of Customer Solutions Engineering for Intel Foundry Services, will be joining both the RISC-V Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee.
All too often, people run into the issue of having many remotely controlled devices scattered around their house, with each requiring its own unique controller. The idea behind how they operate is simple: a single action corresponds to a number and pressing a button on the controller causes that number, along with some extra data, to be modulated via an infrared LED which reaches the device’s receiver. Finally, this value is decoded and the action is executed.
You have a few choices if you want to use a probe to level your 3D printer bed. Rarely, you’ll see optical or capacitive probes. More commonly, though, your probe will sense a metal print or uses a physical probe to touch the print bed. [Design Prototype Test] has long used a BLTouch which uses the latter method. However, putting it in a heated build chamber prevented it from working so he set out to make his own simple design using an Allen key.
We’ve seen Allen key sensors before, but usually, they use a microswitch. We’ve also seen microswitches used to directly probe the bed. But, in this case, a 3D printed fan shroud uses an optical sensor to note when the Allen key hits the bed.
When you need to keep your Raspberry PI aware on where is the North, surely an HMC5883L magnetometer is better that instructing the RPI to look at North Star 🙂
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to wire, configure and calibrate a magnetometer (HMC5883L) with Raspberry PI computer boards. Please note that if you want to use the Raspberry PI Pico instead, you can refer to my Magnetometer Compass with Raspberry PI Pico: GY-271 HMC5883L wiring and use with MicroPython tutorial.
Shenzhen Xunlong Software previously launched the Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS router board powered by Rockchip RK3328 quad-core processor last November for $27.99 on Aliexpress.
As expected, albeit with some delays, the company has now introduced a metal enclosure for the Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS board transforming it into a complete router or gateway. You can get it as part of a kit for $35.99 plus shipping, or if you’ve already purchased the board previously, get the enclosure only for $9 plus shipping.
Storage isn’t just storage. There is block storage, file storage and, more recently, object storage. And only two of those three are Posix-compliant.
That’s not something most users ever need to know or understand, as long as they can access their data. But it makes a difference to designing and procuring IT infrastructure, especially with the prevalence of the cloud, which is largely based on non-Posix-compliant object storage.
Since the Android build tools already generated a debug signing key for us, we can get the convenience of debug builds for release builds if we configure the build process to sign release builds with our debug signing key. This functionality should be opt-in to avoid signing release builds intended for production with debug keys (see “WARNING” section below) so we’ll add a configuration option to enable this in the uncommitted local.properties file that Android Studio generates.
Software neglect forces perfectly good hardware obsolete. I was suprised it could strike such basic devices as an ethernet switch.
Few years ago I bought a TP-Link gigabit switch for home network. TL-SG2216 model ticked all the boxes: 16 ports, 2 SFP slots (if I ever get FTTH), VLANs, IPv6 support and remote management, 5 years warranty. Although ssh required strange dances since the beginning (ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -oCiphers=aes256-cbc -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-dss …), the HTTPS interface worked fine. Until it broke last year.
Firefox was adamant – SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP. Chromium threw similar tantrum: ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH. HTTPS management UI on my switch ceased to be secure enough for modern browsers. The world rushed forward, obsoleting and disabling old, unsecure algorthms and protocols. In the meantime my switch stood still. Eventually the world surpassed what was possible with TP-Link.
From my perspective, the web UI broke. I bought a switch with HTTPS management, and this feature stopped working. So, in the last days of my warranty coverage, I reported the issue to TP-Link. Long story short, it was denied on a technicality. I should have opened the issue through the distributor who sold me the switch, not directly with TP-Link. I’ve got this information after the warranty lapsed, which ended the story.
Firefox is a fantastic open-source web browser. Considering it comes pre-installed with most Linux distributions, it does not take rocket science to assume that it is a popular choice among Linux users and privacy enthusiasts.
However, nothing is ever perfect.
Whether it is Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Brave, or any of the best browsers available for Linux. Every option has a trade-off.
In this second part, we will learn the most basic Calc formulas namely IF, SUMIF and COUNTIF after previously we learned about SUM, COUNT and AVERAGE by examples. These are kinds of formula which often used for decision making, such as making student’s grade based on score, and stuffs around that. This tutorial is part of our LibreOffice Calc learning by practices for the formulas often used in jobs. Let’s start!
LibreOffice 7.3 was released on 2 February 2022. Here is the official blog post about it. In addition to interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, it includes new features targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office, to simplify the transition. Help has been improved, and change tracking includes new features.
LibreOffice 7.3 is available natively for new Apple computers using Apple Silicon, in addition to those using Intel processors. The minimum operating system requirement for Apple computers is macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and for Microsoft Windows 7 SP1.
I am liking using this new release, but I encountered a bug that caused my MacBook Pro (2017, running macOS 12.2 Monterey) to crash frequently. The problem is easily solved by disabling Skia graphics rendering. Go to LibreOffice > Preferences > LibreOffice > View and uncheck “Use Skia for all rendering” (as shown in the illustration below). This bug does not affect computers running Windows or Linux, and it will be fixed in version 7.3.1.
The new major release of the LibreOffice 7.3 Community, based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, offers a lot of improvements focused on users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice or exchanging documents between the two office suites.
There are three different kinds of interoperability improvements.
There are performance improvements when opening large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, and new rendering speed improvements when using the Skia backend introduced with LibreOffice 7.1. Development of new features, such as the new handling of change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which have a positive impact on interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.
The Open Library Foundation has invited the Library Data Platform (LDP) to be the first open source project to participate in its Project Incubation Program. The program is designed to support early-stage open source projects and communities that are developing the balanced and robust mix of technology, governance, resourcing and community engagement required to be self-sustaining.
Godot’s code base is split into independent modules that can be enabled and disabled at will. However many games require custom native code and thus need to define their own modules. The simplest way to do this (which, I’m told, game developers quite often do) is to fork the upstream repo and put your your code in it. This works and is a good solution for one-off projects that write all extra code by themselves. This approach also has its downsides. The two major ones are that updating to a newer version of the engine can turn into a rebasing hell and that it is difficult to combine multiple third party modules.
Ideally what you’d want to do is to take upstream Godot and then take a third party module for, say, physics and a second module written by completely different people that does sound effects processing, combine all three and have things just work. Typically those modules are developed in their own repositories. Thus we’d end up with the following kind of a dependency graph.
Addressable LEDs are wonderful things, with products like Neopixels making it easy to create all kinds of vibrant, blinking glowables. However, for those without a lot of electronics experience, using these devices can seem a bit daunting. [Bhavesh Kakwani] is here to help, with his tutorial on getting started with Neopixels using the MicroPython environment.
The tutorial flows on from [Bhavesh’s] Blink example for MicroPython, and is aimed at beginners who are learning for the first time. It explains the theory behind RGB color mixing that allows one to generate all manner of colors with WS2812B-based LED strings, and how to code for the Raspberry Pi Pico to make these LEDs do one’s bidding.
Apache Software Foundation president David Nalley told a Senate hearing Tuesday that “none of the automated tools on the market today” would have caught the Log4j vulnerability prepublication or even very recently.
NetBeans is a development environment written entirely in Java for the programming language developed in Java, languages such as C, C++, and Fortran are also supported. The architecture of the software is completely modular and can be expanded using so-called modules or plugins. In addition, there are so-called packs, which expand the IDE with larger function packages. Furthermore, NetBeans can be used as a platform for your own applications. Numerous developments and functions from NetBeans were later adopted by other IDEs, e.g. B. by Eclipse. The main focus in the development of NetBeans was on functions that make developers more productive and support them in the technologies that they actually use. The goal is an IDE “from a single source”. For programming, you also need Java SDK here.
When you’re building a quick prototype or a one-off project it’s nice to be able to securely mount the various modules and development boards. Sometimes these boards have mounting holes, but often they don’t. As an example from the latter category, digital music instrument maker and performer [DIYDSP] shows us how to build a simple socket to mount an STM32 Nucleo-32 module.
The socket is built on a standard pad-per-hole piece of vector board cut to the desired size. Pairs of female pin header strips are soldered down to the board. The inner pair of headers is for the module, the outer pair is for your interconnections. The headers are connected up with short solder bridges, and [DIYDSP] recommends you extend the outer pair several pins longer than necessary. These extras can be used for additional power or ground points, or on some boards they could connect to the debug header pins. He prefers to use female sockets because that lessens the odds that an accidentally bent pin will short something out.
2022 is a good year for puzzles, and if you’re getting tired of Wordle, you might be after a new challenge. This color puzzle from [Sebastian Coddington] could be just what you’re looking for.
[Sebastian] describes the 4×4 Color Dot Puzzle as a sort of combination of the ideas behind the Rubik’s Cube and the 15 puzzle. The aim is to arrange the 16 colored tiles on the board to form four single-colored 2×2 squares in the overall 4×4 board. The puzzle is 3D printed, using 6 colors of filament – black for the body of the puzzle, white for the control sticks, and yellow, green, red, and blue for the individual tiles.
My son was into “Secret Coders“, a graphic novel series wherein a pair of kids discover and thwart a plot to take over the world by learning to program in the LOGO computer language. When I told him that these “turtle bots” were originally actually real physical things, he wanted one. So we built one out of some nice geared DC motors I had lying around.
A turtle bot has essentially three jobs: move forward in a straight line a controlled distance, turn a given number of degrees, and raise and lower a pen. If you’re already screaming “use stepper motors!” at your screen, well, you’re probably right. But I had these nice Faulhaber/Micromo geared motors with encoders that were just collecting dust in the closet, so I used ’em. And because of that, the robot stumbles on two of its three goals in life — the servo pen lifter works just fine.
Chromebook shipments collapsed in calendar Q4 as the channel – with an eye on market saturation – ordered in lower volumes and PC makers moved available components to higher-margin builds running on Windows.
Now 2 million more Americans are at risk of losing their job because the McDonalds Clown (Trump) that my parents voted for let COVID spiral completely out of control in 2020 when something could have been done about it, and Biden isn’t going to issue any executive action requiring large employers to keep sick leave without points for people diagnosed with COVID.
The advantages of OpenBIM can be extended through open data formats allowing professionals to use their preferred software without constraint
In 2016, a group of companies banded together to address a key storage management challenge that they and their customers were facing – managing a heterogenous storage footprint that was hampering the deployment of storage and data services.
At the time, the group, comprising Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, Intel and Vodafone, formed the OpenSDS (open software-defined storage) project, an open source project incubated under the Linux Foundation to build a community to address those issues in a generic and standardised way.
On Jan. 25, the Qualys Research Team publicly disclosed a memory corruption vulnerability in PolKit (pkexec), a component included in every major Linux distribution. The exploit, known as PwnKit, is now tracked as CVE-2021-4034.
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.
The European Commission’s Open Source Programme Office has decided to offer bug bounties on popular open source software. What better way of acknowledging OSS’s importance than by a state driven sponsorship?
Open Source Software powers everything, from modern servers, to IoT, to the desktops at work and, as it seems, is at the heart of European Union systems too. While this EU bug bounty initiative is welcome, it is not something new; I covered the origins of the program in 2019, see “EU Bug Bounty – Software Security as a Civil Right”.
Reverse Resources is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with a mission to help the industry use its secondary resources as new raw material and thereby reduce its dependency on virgin materials on a large scale
Alexis Hill was shocked when reading through the legal documents to buy a house in Reno to find they said the property couldn’t be sold to – or even occupied by – anyone who wasn’t white.
“We thought there’s no way we can agree to these racist covenants,” the Washoe County commissioner recalled. “We asked our Realtor if we could not sign that part, and she said no, it wasn’t allowed.”
As AI-powered tracking of phone calls in U.S. prisons and jails spreads to more states, leading digital rights groups want federal action to rein it in
Web3 shows how our online lives are increasingly being monetized. It’s time to take democratic control of the internet — turning the platforms we all use into free public services.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, announced the launch of Wiki Unseen, a collaboration with artists aimed at expanding the visual representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in Wikimedia projects and advancing knowledge equity.
When you upgrade from Istio 1.12.x to Istio 1.13.0, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.13.0. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.12.x.
The LFS nightmare is back again and here to last
SAS Institute Inc. (“SAS”) is an American multinational developer of analytics software based in Cary, North Carolina. The company has around 14,000 employees.
SAS started as a project at North Carolina State University to create a statistical analysis system used mainly by agricultural departments at universities in the late 1960s.
SAS is the name of their software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. It has more than 200 components covering areas including statistical analysis, econometrics and time series analysis, an interactive matrix language, data mining and much more.
By itself, DKIM simply creates an attestation that some domain (or host) has touched an email message, in the form of a DKIM signature that names that domain (really a DNS name) in its ‘d=’ parameter. If you have an email server that handles (outgoing) email for a bunch of host and domain names, and you think of yourself as primarily one of them, say, ‘cs.toronto.edu’, then you can have your email server generate DKIM signatures using this primary domain regardless of which one of your assorted historical and current domains someone is using for their email today. You can even sign email that passes through you that is from other, outside domains to attest that it genuinely came through you, if you want.
Second and more broadly, there is the question of what does ‘good performance’ mean on modern solid state disks and how much performance most people can use and care about. If ZFS has good (enough) performance on modern solid state disks, exactly how big the numbers are compared to other alternatives doesn’t necessarily matter as much as other ZFS features. Related to this is the question of how does ZFS generally perform on modern solid state disks, especially without extensive tuning, and how far do you have to push programs in order for ZFS to be the performance limit.
There are essentially four ways you can implement passwordless SSH access. SSH certificate-based authentication, SSH key-based authentication, SSH host-based authentication, or using a custom PAM module that supports out-of-band authentication. If you want to live dangerously, there’s also a fifth method of passwordless access — disable authentication at all. But that’s not who you are!
This post will discuss passwordless authentication methods available for SSH access and evaluate the pros and cons of each method. If you are curious about why you should implement passwordless access, our previous blog post on why you have to get rid of passwords for your infrastructure is a good place to start.
Table of Contents
Cut a video without re-encoding…
Encode to 8 bit unsigned PCM WAV Mono
“Fix bad video”
Configuration?
Online documentation
Most Linux Distributions use open-source fonts to substitute Microsoft’s iconic typefaces like Arial, Courier New, and Times. Red Hat created the Liberation family to replace these similar-looking but different sizes — all you have to do is select your preferred font when editing documents so that they’ll be readable without any disruptions!
For users who want to install Microsoft fonts and want the option to use them in LibreOffice, the following tutorial will teach you how to install Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
Kali Linux comes pre-equipped with all the tools necessary for penetration testing. One such tool is the Metasploit framework that allows red teamers to perform reconnaissance, scan, enumerate, and exploit vulnerabilities for all types of applications, networks, servers, operating systems, and platforms.
Even though the main functionality of Metasploit focuses on pre- and post-exploitation pentesting tasks, it is also helpful in exploit development and vulnerability research.
The backup issue is always critical to keep our data safe in case of loss. So in this post, you will learn how to install RClone on Linux.
Today we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on a Chromebook in 2022. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
The previous blog post talked about the community workshops taking place in the Juju and Charm community. Normally the community workshops take place every Friday at 10:00 am CET. The details for these workshops can be found in the public channel on Mattermost. In one of the workshops, Erik Lönroth held a tutorial on how to build a minimal Charm.
Darkhttpd might not have the webserver strides and reputation like Apache, Nginx, and Lighttpd but it is every front-end web developer’s best friend. It is the perfect web server for web developers or users in a hurry. It is lightweight, easy to set up, and launch.
This tutorial guide will walk us through the installation and configuration of Darkhttpd on your Linux operating system distribution.
As a Debian Developer I have a discount on using Gandi and I’ve been using it for quite a long time and have been very happy with it. I’ve been using it for registering domains. For example this blog’s domain is managed by my Gandi account.
Now that I fixed hibernation to resume at all, I found another thing I had added to my old install long ago.
The “problem” is, that resume from hibernation is very quiet. So all you see is the GRUB messages “loading kernel”, “loading initrd”, then nothing, just the disk light may be blinking for quite some time, and if resume is successful, you’ll see the unlock prompt of your screenlock.
That’s a bit too little “user interface” for my taste.
The KDE devs enabled the famous backports PPA for you to install/upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.24 in Kubuntu 21.10. Here’s how.
Here’s another small update on the progress around KDE Frameworks 6, a lot has happened again since last month’s post. Only a few modules aren’t building yet, and the vast majority of building modules now also has passing unit tests.
Note that this is only about compilation, this doesn’t automatically mean things are also expected to run yet, especially for QML code that isn’t the case yet.
Plasma 5.24 was released a few days ago, and so far it’s been the smoothest release in memory. There have been a few regressions, but fewer than other recent releases. I’m sure all of you who have experienced new issues will speak up in the comments, of course. But overall it has gone quite well!
The seventh edition of Unix was released in January of 1979. This version greatly improved system reliability and introduced an improved file system. It also included new tools, including awk, make, sed, tar, uucp, the Bourne shell, an improved C compiler, and a FORTRAN 77 compiler. According to the October 1983 issue of Byte Magazine, “Many of the previous rough spots had disappeared, the maximum file size had grown to 1 gigabyte, and a standard I/O (input/output) library had been introduced”.
During the 1975/1976 academic year, Ken Thompson worked as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. While there, he introduced the students to Unix and they worked together to create new tools for it. The Unix tools created by Berkeley students included the C shell, vi, the Berkeley Fast File System, sendmail, a Pascal compiler, and virtual memory management on the new Digital VAX architecture. These tools were packaged with Unix and released as the Berkeley Software Distribution. The first full version for the VAX was 3BSD, released in December of 1979. From there, BSD would grow on its own and eventually overshadow its progenitor.
EasyOS 3.3 was built with both Firefox and SeaMonkey builtin. Previously, there was just SeaMonkey, and menu entry to download Firefox. That menu entry also enabled updating Firefox.
However, now that Firefox is builtin, there is no menu entry to install or update. In theory, you could update FF yourself; however, I intend to ship each new release of Easy with the latest FF.
I have been regularly compiling the Linux kernel since 2003. In 2021 and now 2022, EasyOS Dunfell-series uses the 5.10.x kernel, and I have been quite happy with it …until now.
I earlier reported that when I compiled the 5.10.94 kernel, got filesystem corruption in my HDD partition at bootup, that cause a hang. I had to hold down the power button to power down.
It also output a lot of text to the screen, which is new, as I have set the log-level to output nothing to the screen. So, handling of log levels has changed.One thing about that failed bootup. I booted with /firmware folder empty. This is the way I always do it when compile a kernel. Compile it, then with /firmware empty, reboot with the new kernel. It does mean that some kernel modules won’t load, but that is OK, the kernel has everything builtin needed to bootup and run.
Over the last two years much of the Global workforce has experienced remote working first-hand. Sound familiar? For many, this was a ‘career first’, changing their views on the effectiveness of remote working. The desire to be office based has reduced dramatically with people wanting to avoid time-consuming commutes. In a recent survey, a staggering 91% of US workers wanted home working to persist post pandemic. There is a consensus that remote working is now proven to be highly effective, with physical location no longer the key driver in creating an efficient workplace. The survey also identified 2 out of 3 workers feel that remote working will have no effect or a positive effect on workplace culture. (Source: Gallup, 2021)
Today we have noticed that, in some organisations, opinions are still split. Employers are actively encouraging their people back to the office citing ‘true collaboration and culture’ as the justification. However their people see things differently and are frustrated by the lack of flexibility. There is a great divide on how to attract, manage and retain top talent and companies often put themselves first.
Welcome to Part II of this three-part blog series on adopting the low latency Ubuntu kernel for your embedded systems. In case you missed it, check out Part I for a brief intro on preemptable processes in multiuser systems and memory split into kernel and user space.
The low-latency Ubuntu kernel ships with a 1000 Hz tick timer granularity (CONFIG_HZ_1000) and the maximum preemption (CONFIG_PREEMPT) available in the mainline Linux kernel. Consequently, it services most low-jitter and low-latency workloads and is a good fit for industrial embedded applications with latency requirements in the milliseconds’ range.
If the above makes perfect sense to you, stay tuned for Part III of this three-part blog series, where we will explore the considerations behind adopting low-latency Linux for your industrial embedded application. If preemption in the Linux kernel caught you off guard and you need a quick refresher, keep reading.
If you are familiar with open source, you know that the community is what drives a project and gives its purpose, keeps it alive and thriving.
So, it is important to support that community, and provide tools and encouragement to help it grow. Today, we would highlight the community behind Juju and Charmed Operators and Charmed Operators workshop sessions of 2021. If Charming sounds like an interesting project to take on, you will find the first steps to get started at the end of the article!
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-701 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world’s first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera was the brainchild of Dr. Edwin Land, a genius who co-founded Polaroid, invented polarized sunglasses, helped design the optics for the U-2 spy plane, and created a theory of color vision. The camera used self-developing film2 with square photos that came into view over a few minutes.3 The film was a complex sandwich of 11 layers of chemicals to develop a negative image and then form the visible color image. But the film was just one of the camera’s innovations.
Universal remotes are a handy tool to have around if you have many devices that would all otherwise have their own remote controls. Merging them all into a single device leads to less clutter and less frustration, but they are often not truly “universal” as some of them may not support every infrared device that has ever been built. If you’re in a situation like that it’s possible to build a truly universal remote instead, provided you have a microcontroller and a few infrared LEDs on hand.
This was the situation that [Matt] found himself in when his Amazon Fire TV equipment control feature didn’t support his model of speakers. To get around this he programmed an Arduino to essentially translate the IR codes from the remote and output a compatible set of codes to the speakers.This requires both an IR photodiode and an IR LED but little else other than the codes for the remote and the equipment in question. With that all set up and programmed into the Arudino, [Matt]’s remote is one step closer to being truly “universal”.
Collectors and museums face a unique challenge when it comes to how they manage their collections.
The limitation of free, open-source cataloging and collection managers solutions, put many collectors at the mercy of expensive programs.
So, we provide you with an enterprise-grade open-source solution: CollectiveAccess, the right app for collectors and museums.
[...]
CollectiveAccess is released under GPL-3.0 License.
The project’s primary license is GPL-3.0 License.
Managers of open source communities have to be aware of the 5 levels of transparency that they can provide. These 5 levels of transparency are important for building a thriving open source community.
This article describes each level, its goals, and why they are important. But first, I revisit why transparency is important for open source ecosystems.
LibreOffice 7.3 was released on 2 February 2022. Here is the official blog post about it. In addition to interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, it includes new features targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office, to simplify the transition. Help has been improved, and change tracking includes new features.
LibreOffice 7.3 is available natively for new Apple computers using Apple Silicon, in addition to those using Intel processors. The minimum operating system requirement for Apple computers is macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and for Microsoft Windows 7 SP1.
In my earlier post on selling GPL software I outlined a few points that make it hard to sell GPL software. One of them is the availability of the source code. You could put it online but then everyone has access without paying. Other options like putting it behind a login or sending a link after purchase require extra systems and saving more user information, lots of extra hassle for me and the users. One of my ideas for ‘solving’ this issue is by shipping the actual source code directly inside the application. This article shows you how to do that, by creating an archive of the current source code on every build with qmake and embedding that inside the application using qrc, including a button to save the archive locally to disk. It works on the desktop as well as Android, including the required permissions.
But consider this: of the complete set of combinations of all possible instructions, only a tiny fraction are actually useful programs. A much tinier fraction still, actually achieve the task you’ve set out to do.
However, if you’re going to be doing this a lot with arbitrary strings, Perl FAQ section 4 advises turning the array into the keys of a hash and then checking for membership there. For example, here’s a simple script to check if the colors input (either from the keyboard or from files passed as arguments) are in the rainbow: [...]
I’ve just wrapped up my shift at BurgerBoy and I don’t have much time before the weekly self-criticism session at town hall. This hour with my diary is precious, especially when I have to make a big decision. Writing used to be my job, but it’s so much more difficult after eight straight hours on my feet. It’s been more than a year since the disastrous 2024 election and I can’t overestimate how much I miss my old life.
+ Biden doesn’t seem to be listening to Burns now, having sidelined him in favor of the Russia hawks Victoria Nuland and Tony Blinken, with predictable consequences.
+ Maj. King Kong: “Well, I’ve been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.”
Lego Technic is a wonderful thing, making it easy to toy around with all manner of complicated mechanical assemblies without needing to do any difficult fabrication. [touthomme] recently posted one such creation to Reddit – a walker design that is rather unconventional.
The design dispenses with individually-actuated legs entirely. Instead, the two front legs are joined by an axle which pivots the legs about the body, which is shaped like an oval track. The rear legs are the same. A motorized carriage then travels along the oval track. When the weighted carriage reaches the front of the oval track, it forces the body to tip forwards, pivoting around the front legs and flipping the entire body over, swinging the rear legs forwards to become the front. The cycle then repeats again.
So, a long time ago, on the last two days of January 2020 I had reached zero unread mails in my inbox and all mailing lists and then… some stuff kept me distracted for a (too) long time…
And then two weeks ago on the 29th of January 2022, I’ve reached inbox zero again, and again on the 30th and then I had a hardware issue and couldn’t really use my computer for two days (one day trying to fix, the other copying data around…) and thus only on February 2nd I’ve hit zero unread mails again and again and again, every day for the last 9 days up until today. Yay!
[...]
…and then email is too easy to be used as a todo list. Narf. So I guess I need to improve those workflows eventually as well. And offline days, do you remember those? Fully offline even, and by choice?!!
Nanoleaf light panels are a popular product for creating glowing geometric designs on walls. However, for those that like to avoid IoT devices that integrate with big cloud services, they’re not ideal, and involve compromising on one’s privacy, somewhat. [Viktor] decided to build something of his own instead to avoid this problem.
The design is that of an equilateral triangle, which allows the panels to tesselate well. Each panel consists of two 3D printed parts. The black PLA base holds the WS2812B LED strips, cabling, and ESP8266 controller, while a white PLA cover goes over the top, which acts as a diffuser to spread the light from the individual LEDs. Each triangle contains 24 LEDs, and six triangles together consume around 1.6 amps when in use.
There’s a deep love many humans feel for fire; it’s often cited as one of the most important discoveries that led to the founding of civilization. The work of French artistic duo [Pinaffo-Pluvinage] definitely hits upon that, combining pyrotechnics with paper to make what are probably the most exciting posters you’ve ever seen, as reported by Heise Online.
In 2010, I coined the term “Nobel disease” to describe Nobel laureates who in their later years succumbed to pseudoscience, quackery, bad science, and even conspiracy theories. (At least, I think I coined the term; it’s possible that someone else did before me and I just used it enough that it became associated with me.) Although I mentioned other famous Nobel laureates who descended into nonsense years after winning their Nobels, such as Louis Ignarro (who became a pitchman for HerbaLife), Linus Pauling (who peddled quackery touting vitamin C as a cure-all for the common cold and cancer), and the like, my prime example was Luc Montagnier, who received the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and, beginning in the late 2000s—and likely earlier—started promoting quackery such as homeopathy, antivaccine pseudoscience, and, most recently COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
Have you ever seen a Wilson cloud chamber — a science experiment that lets you visualize ionizing radiation? How hard would it be to build one? If you follow [stoppi’s] example, not hard at all (German, Google Translate link). A plastic bottle. some tape, a flashlight, some water, hot glue, and — the only exotic part — a bit of americium 241. You can see the design in the video below and the page also has some more sophisticated designs including one that uses a CPU cooler. Even if you don’t speak German, the video will be very helpful.
Twisting stranded wire with your fingers in preparation for tinning and/or soldering is almost a reflex for folks making electronic assemblies. But what if the wires are too close to get your fingers around, or you have the fingers of a sumo wresters? Well [DIYDSP] has a solution for you (see video below the break) that’s easy to make from a shish kebab skewer that’s probably rolling around your kitchen drawer. The reason that [DIYDSP] wanted to twist such closely spaced wires was to solder a length of 0.1 in O.C. stranded ribbon cable directly onto a PCB pin header pattern.
One of the positive things of this week is how it showed that this is a great time for microprocessors done right, in the right places.
First, Intel announced that it will invest a lot of money in open-source RISC-V processors. In the same round, Intel also announced a billion-dollar fund that will, among other things, “enable modular products with an open chiplet platform”.
This shows that a colossus like Intel “sees a future in which ARM, x86, and RISC-V all play major roles.”
Equally good, in a different but related way, is yesterday’s news that nVidia failed to buy the firm that designs ARM microprocessors, in what would have been “the largest semiconductor deal on record.”
[...]
just consider that OPEN system-on-chips are good for everybody, because every part of the world, not just the EU (finally!) or India should have their REGIONAL microprocessors. Because what is concretely “eating the world” may be software, but software cannot exist without microprocessors that run it.
SECO ICARUS is a Pico-ITX single board computer based on Intel Atom x6000E, Celeron, and Pentium Elkhart Lake processor that’s designed for edge IoT, AIoT, and computer vision applications.
The SBC ships with up to 16GB DDR4 IBECC (in-band error-correcting code) memory, eMMC flash and/or SATA storage, supports up to three independent displays, features two Gigabit Ethernet ports with TSN support, M.2 sockets for WiFi/Bluetooth and cellular connectivity, several USB ports, serial ports, and other I/O interfaces.
Seco unveiled a Linux-ready “Icarus” Pico-ITX SBC and “Atlas” Qseven module built on Elkhart Lake with up to 16GB soldered LPDDR4-3200 IBECC and triple display support. Seco recently launched an Elkhart Lake-based “Halley” SMARC module.
Seco Edge, the embedded unit of Italian hardware manufacturer Seco, has announced two products that run Yocto-flavored Linux or Win 10 IoT Enterprise on Intel’s 10nm Elkhart Lake Atom x6000 family. The Icarus is a 100 x 72mm Pico-ITX board and the Atlas is a Qseven module. In late 2021, the company also announced a Halley SMARC module based on Elkhart Lake (see farther below).
Once upon a time, making a superconductor required extremely cold temperatures. Scientists understood why superconducting materials could move electrons without loss, but the super cold temperatures were a problem. Then in 1986, a high-temperature superconductor was found. High temperature, of course, is a relative term. The new material works when cooled to a frosty temperature, just not a few degrees off of absolute zero like a conventional superconductor. Since then, the race has been on to find a room-temperature superconductor that doesn’t require other exotic conditions, such as extreme pressure. Department of Energy scientists may have found a different path to get there: X-ray light.
The problem is that scientists don’t fully understand why these high-temperature superconductors work. To study the material, YBCO, scientists chill a sample to it superconducting state and then use a magnetic field to disrupt the superconductivity to study the material’s normal state. The new research has shown that a pulse of light can also disrupt the superconductivty, although the resulting state is unstable.
In the old days — we are talking like the 1960s and 1970s — computers were often built for very specific purposes using either discrete logic or “bit slice” chips. Either way, more bits meant more money so frequently these computers were made with just enough bits to meet a required precision. We don’t think that was what was on [Mad Ned’s] mind, though, when he decided to implement a 9-bit CPU called QIXOTE-1 on an FPGA.
Like many hobby projects, this one started with an FPGA board in search of a problem. At first, [Ned] had a plan to create a custom computer along with a custom language to then produce a video game. A quick search on the Internet led to that being a common enough project with one guy that we’ve talked about here on Hackaday before knocking it out of the park.
[Ned] then thought about just doing a no-software video game. Too late to be the first to do that. Not to be deterred, he decided to duplicate the PDP-8. Whoops. That’s been done before, too. Wanting something original, he finally decided on a custom CPU. Since bytes are usually — if not technically — 8 bits, this CPU calls its 9-bit words nonads and uses octal which maps nicely to three digits per nonad.
The U.S. health care system has buckled under the strain of the pandemic. COVID-19 hospitalizations reached a peak in early January, nearly two years in. According to the American Hospital Association, “we’re facing a national emergency” as health care facilities simply don’t have enough workers to keep up with these surges.
With worker shortages now plaguing hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term care facilities, states have turned to the National Guard for relief. So too have school districts, child care facilities, and communities reeling from natural disasters.
The email arrived in Elliot Malin’s inbox from his cousin’s mom.
“Scott needs a kidney,” the subject line read.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency Friday, two weeks into demonstrations in Ottawa by right-wing factions who object to Covid-19 mitigation measures, that have sibce grown to disrupt international supply chains and shut down several bridges at the U.S.-Canada border.
Ottawa residents have for several days questioned whether the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” in which a small minority of Canadian commercial truckers and their supporters have occupied the city, is truly a peaceful protest, considering reports of “violence, harassment, intimidation, and hate speech.”
Comedian Joe Rogan has come under fire for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, using racial slurs and other harmful rhetoric on his Spotify podcast. Musicians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have pulled their music from the platform in protest of his $100 million contract reportedly paid by Spotify, raising questions how responsible audio platforms should be over hateful content. “He’s made it clear that he doesn’t have any intention of changing the lies and hate he spreads on his podcast, and it’s far past time that Spotify came to the plate and actually moderated the content on its platform,” says Alex Paterson, a self-described “Joe Rogan watchdog” and senior researcher for the LGBTQ Program at Media Matters.
Meanwhile news industry giants, many serving as pentagon mouthpieces, are totally onboard with this media blitzkrieg. One of the most atrocious instigators is the New York Times. Take its so-called coverage of China’s superior covid policies, “reporting” so slanted you could roll a truckload of innuendos down it.
Unlike the incompetent, murderous, free-market, anti-public health non-system in the U.S., which has killed 900,000 people in a population of 330 million, China, population 1.4 billion, has contained covid deaths to a mere several thousand. These statistics reflect very poorly on our vaunted capitalist arrangement. Indeed, many Americans have been shocked by the comparison of their inept, homicidal health care scheme to communism’s stellar success. So, in jumps the Times January 13 with a crude philippic, trashing China for saving lives from the virus and, drumroll…you got it, suggesting China’s Zero Covid policy can be compared to the Holocaust.
After causing havoc throughout 2020, the operators of the FritzFrog botnet have returned with new attacks in 2022 after ceasing any activity last year.
First spotted in January 2020, the FritzFrog botnet operated by using SSH brute-force attacks to gain access to remote servers and deploy cryptominers.
A Russian court has sentenced three Siberian teenagers for terrorism Thursday for activities including plotting to blow up a virtual Federal Security Services (FSB) building in the popular online game Minecraft.
Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko and Bogdan Andreyev from Kansk, a town in Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk region, were arrested in June 2020 for hanging up political leaflets on the local FSB office that included slogans such as “the FSB is the main terrorist” and support for Azat Miftakhov, an anarchist who was sentenced to six years in prison. All three suspects were 14 at the time of their arrest.
The three boys were 14 when they were arrested in 2020 while distributing leaflets to support Azat Miftakhov, a mathematician, who was in custody at the time and later sentenced to six years in prison in January 2021 on terrorism charges that he and his supporters called politically motivated.
After their arrest, investigators confiscated their telephones and said later they found chats in the phone that “had proven” that the trio planned to add the FSB building to the Minecraft game and blow it up there.
The investigators also said that the boys criticized the FSB in the chats, read banned books, fabricated firecrackers, and blew them up in abandoned buildings in their native city of Kansk.
A military court in Siberia sentenced the boy, 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov, to five years for the charges — which stemmed from anti-government leaflets he’d handed out and videos on cellphones belonging to Uvarov and at least two others.
Authorities also said they’d uncovered a plot by the teens to blow up a virtual building belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, that they’d built in the block-building game Minecraft.
The FSB is the top intelligence and security service in Russia and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
Police took their phones and said they found an exchange about plans to blow up an FSB building that they created in the popular block-building game Minecraft.
Unknown attackers have been exploiting a 0-day attack against the Zimbra e-mail suite. Researchers at Volexity first discovered the attack back in December of last year, detected by their monitoring infrastructure. It’s a cross-site scripting (XSS) exploit, such that when opening a malicious link, the JavaScript running on the malicious page can access a logged-in Zimbra instance. The attack campaign uses this exploit to grab emails and attachments and upload them to the attackers. Researchers haven’t been able to positively identify what group is behind the attacks, but a bit of circumstantial evidence points to a Chinese group. That evidence? Time zones. The attacker requests all use the Asia/Hong_Kong time zone, and the timing of all the phishing emails sent lines up nicely with a work-day in that time zone.
[UPDATE] On February 4, 2022, Zimbra provided an update regarding this zero-day exploit vulnerability and reported that a hotfix for 8.8.15 P30 would be available on February 5, 2022.
dontgo403 is a tool to bypass 40X errors.
NSO Group — the embattled, extremely controversial Israeli phone malware developer — finally has some good news to report. It may have a white knight riding to its rescue — a somewhat unknown American venture capital firm that could help it pay its bills and possibly even rehabilitate its image.
Toward the end of last summer, some neighborhood meetings were held, called by councilmembers from allegedly crime-targeted areas, to discuss what people were potentially facing – shootings, gang warfare, low-level theft, etc., were mentioned. It was fairly ordinary stuff for stressed and depressed low income areas. These meetings were also to discuss proposals for increased surveillance technology, as means of preventing crime. There was skepticism about that. Surveillance technology can aid in solving crimes, but only changes in social conditions will be preventative. And the problem with surveillance technology — license plate readers and lamppost cameras, for instance – is that they will be pointed at all of us, and thus serve to enhance police social control capacities. Lamppost cameras make our daily lives part of a database, recording who we hang out with in parks, when we play chess (if we do), or to whom we pass little pieces of paper. It gets recorded for future use, but by whom?
A usual response to surveillance goes: “I’m not doing anything wrong. I have nothing to fear from it.” But one is powerless over its future use. People have ended up in prison for having been on the wrong street corner at the wrong time, thereby becoming suspects without alibi with respect to a nearby criminal event. In many ways, surveillance pushes the Constitution aside (e.g. violation of privacy without warrants). For example, we know about programs like “Echelon,” which records and stores surveillance data collected globally. It reads all electronic communications, including cell phones, Wifi, email, internet pages and podcasts, etc., all without warrants. Electronic communications cross national boundaries (via satellites, etc.), which thus evade the limits of the juridical. In that contra-constitutional sense, the surveillance itself sounds like a “crime wave” all its own.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the dangerous EARN IT bill. We’re disappointed to see the committee advance this misguided bill. If enacted, EARN IT will put massive legal pressure on internet companies both large and small to stop using encryption and instead scan all user messages, photos, and files.
Mayor London Breed recently introduced a proposed ballot initiative that would create massive exceptions to the law’s requirement that police get permission from democratically elected Supervisors before using or acquiring any new surveillance technology.
The letter is signed by Amnesty International USA, the Coalition on Homelessness, the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Bay Area chapter, the Black Movement Law Project, and many others. It explains that surveillance is often a precursor to police abuse:
After years of fighting against police lawlessness and unfettered access to invasive surveillance technologies, we need more community control over the San Francisco Police Department, not less.
Thousands of people took action in the days before the Digital Services Act (DSA) vote in the EU Parliament, asking Members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) to end surveillance advertising. As part of the Platform Power campaign, we have coordinated with many civil society organisations and raised our voices for stronger laws against the business model of Big Tech online platforms. Together, we succesfully pressured law-makers to put people at the center of the debate.
On 20 January 2022, the Members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) decided BigTech platforms should no longer be allowed to use surveillance ads on children and have significantly limited surveillance ads for adults. More, the EU Parliament voted BigTech platforms should be prohibited from using ‘dark patterns’, so called manipulative interfaces.
CNIL said Google Analytics breaches article 44 of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, and the tech giant hasn’t done enough to ensure data protection. It added that Google doesn’t provide users with enough information on what happens to their data and how it’s being used and doesn’t offer enough avenues for recourse if people do think their data has been misused.
On its website, CNIL reported that the Austrian-based European Center for Digital Rights had received 101 complaints from 27 E.U. member states as well as three other European Economic Area states, regarding Google’s transfer of data to the U.S.
When the Hungarian data protection authority concluded their investigation into the Pegasus scandal last week, they came to a surprising result: The surveillance of journalists and lawyers was supposedly legal, but those who helped uncover it should be investigated. Áron Demeter, head of Amnesty Hungary, talks about loopholes in the Hungarian judicial system.
Only two weeks after the groundbreaking decision by the Austrian Data Protection Authority that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) follows this decision and orders a French website to comply with the GDPR. Both decisions are based on noyb’s 101 model complaints which were filed after the Court of Justice ruling invalidating Privacy Shield. noyb expects similar decisions by the other authorities
This entire program is completely separate from the NSA surveillance that Snowden exposed back in 2013. Then, the NSA contended that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act authorized the mass collection of Americans’ phone and internet metadata to gather information about potential terrorists. It sought (and received) blanket permission from the FISA Court. In 2015, after Snowden’s whistleblowing, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which banned the government from collecting the data in bulk and set tighter rules for access.
This CIA surveillance is governed by Executive Order 12333, which was first issued in 1981, and is not under the purview of the FISA Court. Nevertheless, there are supposed to be precautions to ensure that the CIA is not secretly reviewing private data sent by Americans domestically. The PCLOB report explains that as part of its financial intelligence gathering on the operations of the Islamic State, CIA employees were able to collect (intentionally or not) significant amounts of data from domestic communications.
The ACLU was among those expressing grave concern Thursday night after a pair of Democrats in the U.S. Senate revealed troubling evidence that the CIA has conducted bulk surveillance of the American people without their knowledge and with little oversight.
“As disturbing as the CIA’s bulk surveillance of financial transactions is, the other bulk surveillance program is so secretive the CIA won’t even tell the public what kind of information it is sweeping up.”
When most people think of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), they think of a foreign-facing spy agency with a long history of state sponsored coup attempts (some successful!), attempted assassinations of foreign leaders, and putting the US in the torture business. What most people don’t assume about the CIA is that it’s also spying on Americans. After all, we prefer our embarrassments to be foreign-facing — something that targets (and affects) people we don’t really care about and governments we have been told are irredeemable.
According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The CIA collects a vast amount of data, often on U.S. persons, without any clear guidelines about data retention and without substantial oversight
The whos, whats, whys, and hows of this semi-disclosed CIA program are still unknown, and the public deserves the right to know exactly what damage has been done. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich are already pressing for the release of even more information. In a partially-redacted letter sent to the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director on April 13, 2021, the senators have called for the public release of the full report about the CIA’s surveillance, which remains classified. The senators’ letter also demands answers about how the agency collects the data, what data is being collected, and the rules governing its storage and retention.
The report examines the policing and security provisions of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), approved by MPs in December 2020 and MEPs in April 2021. The report, Brexit: Goodbye and hello – the new EU-UK security architecture, civil liberties and democratic control, is available here.
Under the TCA, the UK has the ability to opt in to an extension of the ‘Prüm’ system, which enables cross-border searches of national police databases holding biometric and other data; and a system for the mass surveillance and profiling of air passengers, which officials have indicated they are keen to extend to rail, road and sea transport.
The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota is temporarily ending the use of no-knock warrants following the killing of 22-year-old Amir Locke by Minneapolis police officers. The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, has placed a moratorium on these warrants until the policy can be reviewed by Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University and anti-police violence activist DeRay McKesson.
The sun had not yet risen on January 21 when 30 Israeli soldiers arrested 12-year-old Ammar at his home in the Naqab. His alleged crime: protesting against the most recent push in a government-backed forestation plan—or “greenwashing,” as many put it—that would uproot thousands of Palestinian Bedouins and replace them with pine trees. Ammar was released after a few hours of detention and put under house arrest—even though, his parents said, he was at home during the protest. Al Jazeera reported that he had not spoken a word since he returned home.
Equally remarkable is the zeal with which the blockade is still being enforced. Two recent news reports, selected as coinciding with the blockade’s 60-year anniversary, testify to the U.S. government’s still-remaining commitment and serious purpose.
Argentinian Graciela Ramírez works in Cuba as a correspondent for resumenlationameriano.org, an important Buenos Aires news outlet. She directs both the Cuba branch of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity and its English language website. Ramírez is co-coordinator of the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity, based in Oakland, California. She is a public figure whose undoing would gratify U.S. reactionaries.
Tell that to Senator Angus King (I-ME). King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Armed Services Committee, appeared on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on February 8 to warn of Vladimir Putin’s baleful intentions towards Ukraine.
King posed the rhetorical question: Why is the US concerned about Russia, a country half a world away? King had the answers: “Number one is 1938. If Putin is allowed to go into Ukraine without serious opposition, what about Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, [and] the other countries that are on his border.”
In my field of conflict transformation starvation deaths are an example of structural violence because social structures are what cause the inequality in health outcomes, wellbeing, and death. Sometimes, like in Yemen, where a US backed Saudi-led blockade was responsible for humanitarian crisis the culprits are clear. Biden deserves some credit for pulling the backing that had been provided by Trump, but falls short because he still provides too much cover for what the UN calls “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”
Across the globe, however, much of the problem of access to resources and inequality that leads to tragic outcomes like malnutrition and starvation come from things like failing infrastructure. Whole regions may lose access to basic human needs when an overloaded truck, flooding, or a hurricane cause a vital bridge to collapse. Building bridges is one of the successful noncombat operations the US military regularly engages in—building bridges is a life sustaining practice.
As Ontario’s premier on Friday declared a state of emergency over an ongoing trucker-led protest that has paralyzed commerce and transportation at a key crossing on the U.S. border, a judge in the Canadian province granted an injunction aimed at breaking the blockade.
“We’re dealing with millions of dollars of damage each and every day.”
Despite repeated warnings from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the U.S. is driving the rise of tensions at Ukraine’s eastern border, the U.S. Air Force has deployed four B-52 bombers with nuclear capabilities to the U.K., where one official acknowledged that the deployment is at least partially connected to Russia’s recent military activities.
“In 1991 they hit Baghdad from Fairford, flew on to Diego Garcia, refueled and rearmed, bombed Baghdad again on the way back, and returned to Fairford.”
Western leaders insist that any sovereign nation like Ukraine has the right to choose whichever alliance it wishes to join. Russians counter that the doctrine of the indivisibility of security means that if Ukraine joins NATO, it will be a threat to Russia.
The West argues for Ukrainian national autonomy. Countering, Russia cites Article 8 of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s 1999 Istanbul Document signed by leaders of 54 states including President William Clinton: “We reaffirm the inherent right of each and every participating State to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance, as they evolve. Each State also has the right to neutrality. Each participating State will respect the rights of all others in these regards. They will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States.” (Italics added)
This month marks 55 years since the assassination of an NAACP leader. The new documentary “American Reckoning” seeks justice in the cold case of murdered civil rights activist and local NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson Sr. in Natchez, Mississippi. No one was ever charged with his 1967 murder, despite evidence pointing to the involvement of the inner circle of the local Ku Klux Klan. It’s one of many unsolved crimes targeting civil rights activists. “The fact that no one has been indicted for Wharlest’s case or for these other cases shows the limits of the justice system,” says co-director and co-producer Yoruba Richen. Wharlest Jackson Sr.’s daughter, Denise Ford Jackson, recalls how her mother received redacted documents when trying to get to the bottom of her husband’s murder. We also speak with Brad Lichtenstein, the film’s co-director.
During the American war in Afghanistan, outside donors (including the U.S.) came to dominate the government, providing the majority of its funds—almost 80%– used to pay teachers, health care workers, civil servants, and the many others who made the country run. With the U.S. and NATO departure from Afghanistan in August, this money completely dried up, as did access to the international banking system. The economy went into free-fall, the government could not pay workers, banks closed, and people had no money to buy food or fuel for the harsh winter. NPR reports that families are selling their children in order to obtain money to buy food to prevent the rest of the family starving to death.
The U.S. spent roughly $2.3 trillion on the Afghanistan war, much of which went to contractors who made enormous profits. While 2,324 American military members died in the war, Afghans suffered far more. Brown University’s Cost of War project found that 69,095 soldiers and national police and an estimated 46,319 civilians were killed; thus, over 115,000 Afghans died as a result of the war. But for the people of Afghanistan, the war has not ended, nor has the killing. The new economic war is expected to kill more Afghans in four months this winter than did the “kinetic” war in twenty years. No one expects the leaders of the Taliban to suffer. But everyone agrees that hundreds of thousands of babies will die. In fact, Afghanistan in 2022 is shaping up to be one of the worst, possibly the worst, humanitarian catastrophe on record, for any country.
Known as “Che’s Last Soldier,” Peredo died last year in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. His life was marked by the popular struggles that shook Bolivia throughout decades. He was born on February 4th, 1941 in Beni, in the eastern lowlands of the Oriente, a region of the country that is often considered a bastion of conservatism. But it has also produced many of the country’s important socialist leaders and intellectuals.
Chato was a true revolutionary who, up to the last moment of his life, kept his revolutionary principles firm. Proof of this is that he entrusted his children to have his ashes sent to Cuba so that he can rest next to the legendary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his brothers Inti and Coco Peredo, who died in Che’s guerilla in Ñancahuazú, Bolivia.
The Iron Curtain of the 1940s and ‘50s was ostensibly designed to isolate Russia from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration. Today’s sanctions regime is aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other Western allies from opening up more trade and investment with Russia and China. The aim is not so much to isolate Russia and China as to hold these allies firmly within America’s own economic orbit. Allies are to forego the benefits of importing Russian gas and Chinese products, buying much higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms.
The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup. But such a buildup cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.
Exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden on Friday joined global critics who are decrying news outlets for encouraging war with their coverage of rising tensions between the United States and Russia—where he has lived since 2013—over Ukraine.
“With talk of war in Ukraine rising to a fever pitch, U.S. media outlets are once again beating the drums.”
The border agency in Warsaw could deploy drones, vessels and personnel. It would be the first mission in a country that does not directly border the EU. Mauretania might be next.
Last November, for example, President Biden announced at the UN climate talks in Scotland that the U.S. will lead “by the power of our example” when it comes to transitioning off fossil fuels and cutting emissions.
Then, just two weeks later, his administration announced the largest sale of offshore drilling leases in U.S. history. They’ve sold some 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico out of a staggering 81 million acres on offer.
Global warming is the culprit of this deeply disturbing disheartening affair, and it begs the question of whether any nation/state or unified nations can do anything about it. After all, “save the whales” and “save the oceans” have been rallying cries in grocery store parking lot signature gatherings, indicative of the broad reach of public concern, for decades now but to no avail; in fact, over time as the signatures piled up, it’s only gotten worse and worse and now scary.
Deadly marine heatwaves that repeat over and over again within short sequences carry a massive destructive punch. These events are new to the scene, starting in the 21st century when anthropogenic warp speed that impacts and alters the climate system inadvertently kicked into gear.
Claims that legions of young girls are trafficked in for major sporting events persist, yet year after year this myth is disproven. In reality, the persistence of Superbowl human trafficking myths leads to more arrests of consenting adults than it does to rescues of real victims.
As police departments play up their arrest numbers to a receptive press, a startling discrepancy appears between the media narrative and the actual data. During last year’s Super Bowl, Florida’s Hillsborough County authorities celebrated a “record” human trafficking sting for the precinct. Yet they only made 75 arrests, and many of those were arrests of consenting adults working in the sex industry.
By Chris McGreal, the Guardian. This article by the Guardian is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.
The influential rightwing lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is driving a surge in new state laws to block boycotts of the oil industry. The group’s strategy, which aims to protect large oil firms and other conservative-friendly industries, is modelled on legislation to punish divestment from Israel.
Less than three months ago I commented the potential of battery-powered trains. Now, there has just been an important development in that direction: “Union Pacific Will Buy 20 Battery-Electric Locomotives”.
This is important because Union Pacific is a Class I railroad, that is a member of the “club” of largest rail carriers in the United States!
Earlier this week, far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert went on a diatribe against Greater sage-grouse conservation efforts but neglected to mention that her husband raked in nearly $1 million over a two-year period from a fossil fuel corporation that stands to lose out if the Biden administration strengthens federal protection of the threatened bird species’ sagebrush habitat.
“Her behavior is the epitome of corruption.”
While mostly welcoming the Australian government’s decision to officially list the koala as endangered in parts of the country, conservationists on Friday reaffirmed the need for legislation to truly protect the iconic marsupials and—even more importantly—the imperative to address the root causes of species loss.
“What we need is a Koala Protection Act.”
Delegates elected to rewrite Chile’s constitution must consider whether to enshrine the rights of nature after a citizens’ initiative gained enough signatures to merit discussion at the constituent assembly currently underway.
“This constitutional mandate would redefine and rebalance the relationship of government and citizens with the natural world by recognizing nature as a legal entity with its own rights and interests.”
Pssst . . . here’s a little secret. Don’t tell anyone, OK? It might cause trouble.
Or to be more precise, he coined the word to describe the quintessential principles of a human activity that goes back to the dawn of history: the sustainable use of natural resources. Although it may not have been called sustainability until Carlowitz, societies had practiced it for a long time as a vital part of cultural or religious practices. Ancient Egypt pursued sustainable systems for more than 3,000 years. The Maya, according to anthropologist Lisa Lucero, practiced a “cosmology of conservation.” The literature of ancient India is brimful with references to the preservation of the environment.
On the other hand, there are ancient civilizations that may have collapsed because they despoiled the natural world that gave them life. The earliest example may be found in the ancient Mesopotamian “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the first version of which dates back to 2000 B.C. Clay tablets tell the tale of vast cedar forests cut down by the eponymous hero in defiance of the gods, who punish him by cursing the land with fire and drought, turning the region into a desert. Nothing grew any more, forcing the Sumerians to flee to Babylon and Assyria.
Recently, I re-read through various discussions about the “dot-com bubble.” Surprisingly, it sounded all too familiar. I realized there are many similarities to today’s techno-optimism and techno-pessimism around Web3 and Blockchain. We have people hyping up the future promises, while others express concerns about the bubble.
Progressive officeholders and candidates across the United States this week shared their support for an ongoing wave of unionization efforts by Starbucks workers.
“Nothing goes better with a cup of coffee than a strong union.”
As U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday led condemnation of a reported Biden administration plan…
Humanitarians—including those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks of 2001—responded with condemnation Friday after it was reported that President Joe Biden has decided to permanently seize $7 billion of currently frozen Afghan assets even as the people of the war-torn and poverty-stricken nation suffer a broken economy, a collapsed healthcare system, and widespread starvation.
“I cannot describe for you in words how outrageous this is.”
A coalition of 17 progressive advocacy groups on Thursday sent a letter urging U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to immediately stop opposing individuals who are seeking to discharge their student loan debt in bankruptcy court.
“[The DOE] should be a leading voice for students, and should refrain from taking legal positions that raise the bar for distressed borrowers.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if some philosophy professors think that popularizing books like this make their work seem dumb. I don’t disagree. I just think very little effort is needed in that regard. Worse than dumb, I think such books, just like the more academic versions, are lacking in morality.
How can a book that surveys all the basic concepts of Ethics 101 be itself unethical? How can Ethics 101 be unethical? Michael Schur begins with an example of how someone might try to do good one day and discover difficulties. This person picks up litter, but, Schur tells us, it will end up in the ocean anyway. They eat veggie patties, but those were shipped from far away creating a large carbon footprint. They buy milk from “organic” and “grass-fed” cows, but those words on the packaging were basically lies. They go running, but their sneakers were made by workers getting 4 cents an hour. They watch a good documentary, but do so on a streaming service owned by a company also making killer drones for the North Korean air force. Etc.
Union representation leads to better pay and improved conditions in every kind of workplace, but especially in high-pressure settings where hours are long and demands are intense. Yet workers in congressional offices are not unionized, since provisions in the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 which would have cleared the way for organizing drives were never implemented. That’s something that needs to change, as a new study from the Congressional Progressive Staff Association reveals.
Twitter is mean to The New York Times, both as an institution and as it’s represented by its most prominent and well-remunerated reporters. Sometimes this bothers me, because some of it is still the standard old racist garbage the paper has been targeted by since the civil rights movement, from way before I was born, through today.1
Late last month, former Ohio state senator and Bernie Sanders ally Nina Turner announced that she would run again for congress this year. The decision comes less than six months after her loss against Marcia Fudge protégé Shontel Brown in the special election for the same seat.
On February 7, the US Supreme Court “froze” a lower court ruling invalidating Alabama’s new district map, allowing its use while it hears a suit over the map’s details.
The plaintiffs’ argument, as reported by CNN, is that the new map “dilutes” the power of black voters because it includes only one, rather than two, districts where black voters comprise a majority and therefore “have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.”
The main point of his book, at least for me, is that contemporary evangelical Christianity is not, as followers of Polanyi and might claim, a counterbalance to the ruthless market, but a handmaiden of the market. More than that, he believes thast neoliberalism would not be viable without religious reinforcement. This is not really a new or startling idea. While few and perhaps none of the major neoliberal thinkers were religious believers, from very early on F. H Knight, Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan, at least, realized that market freedom was not self-sufficient way of life, but needed political, cultural, and perhaps religious support. (To my knowledge they do not mention Plato’s cave metaphor or the Noble Lie, but that’s the kind of thing they’re talking about).
Kotsko’s thesis is that contemporary evangelical and conservative Christianity is not an anachronism which will soon disappearand, far from being an adversary of neoliberalism, is an integral part of the neoliberal transformation of society. Likewise, the state (which Polanyi also spoke of as a counterbalance to the markett) is also in its neoliberal form subordinate to the market – and this is not the minimal caretaker state of the classical liberalism, but a state as strong as market society needs it to be, all the way up to authoritarian dictatorship.
All that’s good grist for the mill. But did you also hear former President Trump admit that he’d intended to have Mike Pence overturn the 2020 election? In a statement, Trump asserted that Pence had the power to “change the outcome” and should indeed have “overturned the election.”
Or, here’s a bad one: Did you hear that the Trump administration actually drafted orders for federal law enforcement to seize voting machines before his loss could be certified?
The festive atmosphere of Xiomara Castro’s inauguration lit up Honduras’ capital city Tegucigalpa, as thousands of supporters of Castro and her Libre party, waving red party flags and the turquoise flag of Honduras, filled the National Stadium and surrounding streets for the ceremony on Thursday, January 27.
“A complete festival is taking place at this time of night in the surroundings of the National Stadium of Tegucigalpa, prior to the inauguration of Xiomara Castro as president,” reported Honduras’ TN5 outlet.
I have a beloved 4-year-old granddaughter. If I lived in Afghanistan, my family would be facing the likelihood that she would die. My heart breaks in pieces thinking of this. The UN estimated a million children under the age of five in Afghanistan will die this winter from malnutrition and starvation, a situation brought on primarily by the U.S., through economic sanctions and the freezing of Afghan assets in U.S. banks. How did we get to this point?
Last week (FAIR.org, 2/2/22), I suggested that a new ABC News/Ipsos poll (1/30/22) was a poster child for what is wrong with many media-sponsored polls these days. Instead of a serious effort to measure what the public is thinking about any specific issue, the poll glided superficially across a whole range of subjects, never stopping long enough to provide understanding of any one of them—creating an illusion of public opinion that is either misleading, biased or simply inaccurate.
In 2021, the European Union (EU) institutions responsible for making laws agreed to pass the temporary derogation from certain provisions of the ePrivacy Directive. This new law allows certain companies to scan everyone’s private messages and chats, even though such practices may be incompatible with the EU’s human rights and data protection laws.
In the first part of this blog series, we explored how changes to definitions in the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) led to a situation of panic, which may have enabled the European Commission to push through the temporary law despite so many concerns having been raised.
The temporary derogation will expire in August 2024, and the EU wants to replace it before then with a ‘long term’ version. The long-term proposal is currently scheduled for 30 March 2022, although its publication has already been pushed back several times, meaning that time is ticking. In this blog, we take a look at what could be coming up in the new proposal, and how the investigation of online CSAM should be done in order to meet the standards required by EU law.
In July 2021, European Union (EU) member state ministers reached an agreement with the European Parliament to pass a new law, creating a temporary exception (derogation) from certain parts of the 2002 ePrivacy Directive. This derogation allows electronic communications services, like chat or webmail services, to conduct the automated scanning of everyone’s private communications, all of the time, instead of limiting surveillance to genuine suspects and in line with due process. Such generalised scanning practices can constitute a form of mass surveillance. They pose a serious risk to everyone’s fundamental rights because they treat each one of us as suspicious.
The derogation will expire in August 2024, and the European Commission intends to replace it with a long-term version which they will put forward in 2022. The purported goal of these derogations is to allow companies to detect online ‘CSAM’ (child sexual abuse material). Yet the temporary derogation allows companies to conduct the mass scanning of everybody’s private messages and chats, instead of limiting surveillance to those against whom there is reasonable, lawful suspicion. Worse still, the Commission has indicated that the long-term law might make generalised scanning of everyone’s personal communications mandatory. If passed, such sweeping and disproportionately-invasive measures would likely do far more harm than good.
For St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov, 2022 didn’t get off to a good start. The politician, who has faced near-constant criticism for his poor handling of the coronavirus epidemic, has now proven inept at resolving issues related to snow and garbage removal. What’s more, it seems as though local residents aren’t the only ones getting fed up with Beglov — St. Petersburg’s elites are losing patience with him, too. With Alexander Beglov under more pressure than ever, Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev looks into whether his departure is imminent and who might take up his post.
In June 2021, the Moscow City Court declared Alexey Navalny’s political movement and anti-corruption nonprofits “extremist organizations.” Since then, the Russian authorities have been busy launching administrative cases against the Kremlin critic’s supporters for “displaying banned symbols” — including, but not limited to, logos associated with Team Navalny. Because Russia doesn’t maintain a list of extremist symbols, these proceedings rely on assessments from expert witnesses. According to lawyers and human rights activists, Russian courts have recently been turning to one witness in particular — 22-year-old Danila Mikheev, a purported forensic expert who has been denouncing opposition activists since his university days.
Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai.
To provide some context. Jimmy Savile was for a long time a ‘national treasure’ in Britain, a celebrity of immense wealth and influence who had hosted a variety of prime-time television programmes including ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ which saw the gregarious Savile take written requests from deprived, disadvantaged and often seriously ill children; wishes which the programme would, if the child was selected, attempt to translate into reality. It was a charming concept, and one which was imbued with hope. But behind the sunny façade of childhood’s dreamscape, a darker shadow lurked.
For, during his period as a ‘benevolent’, cheery and somewhat cheeky entertainer, bringing ‘magic’ to children’s lives, Savile was also one of the most prolific paedophiles Britain has ever seen. And yet, because of his wealth and connections (personal access to many significant political figures including a direct line to the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself) – he was able to operate under-the-radar for decades. Rather than be prosecuted for his crimes (the rumours about which had abounded for the best part of half a century) Savile was knighted. He died in 2011 having never been held to account.
Stupid and Selective Censorship Concerns
The comments sections of mainstream US news Websites are abuzz with angry Amerikaners’ hatred of Neil Young. Young stands idiotically accused of “censorship” for making the personal moral and business decision to tell Spotify to take down his music if the company insisted on maintaining its contract with the racist podcaster and mediocre blowhard Joe “Planet of the Apes” Rogan, a self-described “moron” who has offered platforms to fascist propagandists (e.g. Andy Ngo and Gavin McInnes) while helping spread mass murderous anti-vax misinformation on Covid-19.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about the Arizona election “audit” for the February 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
For right-wing and libertarian media, Joe Rogan, host of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, has become a symbol of resistance to censorship (New York Post, 2/2/22; Fox News, 2/2/22; Reason, 2/2/22; The Hill, 2/1/22).
Notably, the ire is rarely directed at a corporate media machine that systematically rewards and praises the purveyors of misleading propaganda, and continues to flood the country with information sewage.
This selective outrage is a huge problem — because the only way to systematically combat misinformation is to construct a Fourth Estate that develops some trust with the audience. That trust will never be rebuilt if liberals pretend to hate misinformation while they patronize a media establishment that fortifies the pathologies that originally created a credibility crisis.
We’ve said it over and over again, if libraries did not exist today, there is no way publishers would allow them to come into existence. We know this, in part, because of their attempts to stop libraries from lending ebooks, and to price ebooks at ridiculous markups to discourage libraries, and their outright claims that libraries are unfair competition. And we won’t even touch on their lawsuit over digital libraries.
Posters that satirize the 2022 Winter Olympic Games by calling attention to the Chinese government’s human-rights abuses sparked a free-speech firestorm at George Washington University over the weeken.d
Well, an interesting series of events played out over the past week, and it almost led to dang laying down the banhammer on my account—and I wanted to convey a bit of the story in hopes it can help people who don’t get to frontpage on HN but want to, to know how to do it without risking the wrath of the HN community (and/or a permaban)!
Last week, I posted a video and blog post that complained of four issues I had with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet service. In the video itself, I even mentioned how discussing any Musk-related venture is—and I quote—”risky business.”
That video quickly racked up more comments than any other video I’ve posted. The comments quickly separated into either “you are an entitled young white guy so stop whining” or “I totally agree that Starlink is evil and has no redeeming qualities” (I’m not even paraphrasing here…). Welcome to modern online discourse, I guess.
Attempts to curtail content promoting violence, drugs, self-harm and suicide, as well as introducing an age verification law preventing children from accessing online porn, have been welcomed, but the plans go further and could censor Christian teaching.
Ministers say the Online Safety Bill will restrict legal content that it deems ‘harmful’, with the definition of what constitutes ‘legal but harmful’ to be decided by the Government, Ofcom and private tech companies such as Google and Facebook.
Last week, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was highlighted and documented in a ground-breaking human rights report. Even before the report was released, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which calls itself a civil rights organization, issued a statement saying it “demonizes Israel” and “would likely spark antisemitism.” The organization offered no substantive engagement with the contents of the report—only an accusation of antisemitism. Let me offer some context.
India, which placed Kashmir under its direct rule in 2019, ending the region’s special autonomous status, ranks 141st out of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index. But press freedom and independent media voices are under attack around the globe, the index shows, from violent assaults across the Americas and Europe to jail sentences imposed by an array of governments eager to suppress critical and investigative reports.
The threat to Mexican journalists – particularly local reporters – comes from organized crime hit-men, local government officials, and other, often anonymous, sources. The intimidation scares some journalists out of the profession, and forces others to self-censor, limiting what Mexicans can read and see about their country.
Cops are out there giving each other bad advice. An instructor for Street Cop Training — a New Jersey based provider of officer training programs — is telling officers it’s ok to run facial recognition searches during routine traffic stops, when not encouraging them to go further with their potential rights violations.
In the days since Justice Stephen Breyer announced he will retire, there has been much discussion of whether President Joe Biden should look for a nominee who would mirror Breyer’s background and approach. But as a civil rights lawyer, I see this as an opportunity for the President to appoint someone who would bring to the nation’s highest Court a perspective and background similar to two of the best Supreme Court justices in our nation’s history: Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Police of Finland employs only a limited number of information and communication technology experts and its outdated systems are beginning to pose a threat to information security. Shortcomings in the technology are also reflected in other operations, as poorly functioning systems can become an obstacle to efficient operations.
Despite the unpredictable events that lead to fatal shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people annually — nearly 1,000 — since The Post began its project. Probability theory may offer an explanation. It holds that the quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership.
In an interview discussing solidarity and her work, the famed activist and scholar explained how her release from possible death row in the 1960s heavily depended on the combined agigation of people across the globe, from protests in Soviet Union to parts of Latin America.
“And, of course, my own trial on charges that initially carried the death penalty ended in victory largely due to the vast international campaign that touched people in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America,” she stated.
The news that tends to be beamed out about Indigenous peoples, if not as crude as Bolsonaro’s views, tend to present them as dirt poor, backward, victims, quaint, exotic, or, in the artistic domain, set pieces aestheticising brutality and tragedy in a photograph by, say, Sebastião Salgado. The approximately 13,000 Munduruku people, who live along the Tapajós River in fourteen “Indigenous lands” in various phases of recognition by the state of Brazil, defy all the cliches. To begin with, they’re sending a powerful message to the government, the present one and the one that wins the elections in October this year: they’re not to be messed with, they understand and are exposing the rot at the heart of the system that wants to destroy them and, in doing so, have shown that history, as told today, is wrong.
The Munduruku—“fire ant people”, an allusion to their ancient fierce, swarming battle strategy—who call themselves Wuujuyû (“we are the people”) mostly live in some 130 villages along the banks of the upper reaches of the Tapajós River and its tributary, the Cururu River, in western Pará state. Their river and its tributaries, separately named on official maps made for the purposes of colonial exploitation, has one name: Idixidi, and their territory extends to where Idixidi flows because these waters are one, brought into being by the creator Karosakaybu when he threw three tucumã husks. The river is the essence of Munduruku life, providing food, water, transportation and, in particular, the centre of their cosmology. Any struggle against interference or invasion of their territory is about much more than just the land they live on. But this is how it is always presented by outsiders, who started to occupy the zone after the first recorded contacts in the second half of the eighteenth century and, especially, a hundred years later with the first missionaries in the area and the rubber boom, which catapulted the Amazon region into the world capitalist market and brought in thousands of non-Indigenous people who worked as semi-slaves in the plantations.
Coincidentally, a study I began working on in the spring of 2020 was published online in the Review of Black Political Economy mere hours before Flores’ lawsuit went public. My colleagues and I used data on all NFL offensive and defensive coordinators since the 2003 introduction of the Rooney Rule, which required all NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for vacant head-coaching jobs.
We wanted to determine what factors were correlated with a coordinator’s probability of becoming a head coach. Our results identified many factors that have impacted a coordinator’s chances of landing a head-coaching job. One of those factors was the coordinator’s race.
In January 2008, I found myself in an event room of a Dave and Buster’s in Austin, Texas to watch the Super Bowl. My dad’s Army reserve unit was in town doing something, and their commanding colonel arranged for his executive staff to watch the game together, complete with free food and non-alcoholic drinks. Being a poor college student and big fan of my dad, I jumped at the opportunity when invited. It had been a while since I had been around a large group of soldiers so I forgot to stand for the national anthem. Fortunately, my dad nudged me to attention before anyone seemed to notice. After Jordin Sparks hit the final notes and we were finally seated, I turned to my dad and asked, “Do we still have that Whitney Houston tape?” Today’s Tedium, ahead of this year‘s Super Bowl and yet somehow hitting on the 10th anniversary of Whitney Houston’s passing, is looking at one of the most iconic performances ever of a national anthem, and the role it played in the corporatization of American patriotism.
[...]
According to University of Southern California professor John Carlos Rowe, the “Vietnam Effect” is a phrase, “Popularized first in the late 1970s to refer to poor military and foreign policy decisions by the U.S. in the conduct of the War … [and] referred to the defeatist mentality caused by our first loss in a major military conflict.” Though the United States had engaged in successful military action following Vietnam, most notably in Granada and Panama, uncertainty of American military might was still something of a question at the time. And the U.S. government was eager to prove what its war machine was really capable of.
Those who remember the Persian Gulf War as the decisive American victory it was might forget how hyped Iraqi military prowess was before combat operations began. Sadam Hussein had amassed the world’s 4th largest military by 1991 that included a sizable number of veterans of Iraq’s decade long war with Iran. Add to this, an impressive number of tanks and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) along with a comprehensive radar defense network and Sadam’s forces were nothing to take lightly.
To counter the dictator’s threat to Saudi Arabia, and eventually drive him from Kuwait, the United States assembled a coalition of 35 countries. Along with most of western Europe, the U.S. had support from large swaths of the Middle East, including Oman, Pakistan, and Morocco. Internationally, America’s actions were met with widespread support, even getting rare approval from the UN Security Council and China.
At home, Americans were not so convinced. A 2001 Gallup retrospective on the 10th anniversary of the war noted, “Four polls conducted between mid-August and November 1990 showed a divided public on whether the situation was worth going to war over or not. On average, 47 percent thought it was, while 43 percent thought it was not. And when Americans were first asked—in a Gallup poll conducted right before Thanksgiving 1990—about U.S. forces being used to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, they opposed such action by 51 percent to 37 percent.”
Part of this lack of support, especially in the minds of conservatives, was the lingering “Vietnam effect”. Rowe, the USC professor, writes, “Conservatives argued that Vietnam was a war we ‘won’ on the ‘battlefield’, but ‘lost’ in the mass media, domestic politics, and the Paris Peace Talks.” Even though American support for the war soared following the UN Security Council resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to remove Hussein from Kuwait, the U.S. government—led by Republican president George H.W. Bush—wasn’t going to take any chances.
James Muldoon is author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, a manifesto for digital technology run on noncapitalist lines. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the power of the tech giants and how we could remold our online lives on more democratic bases.
The essence of the web—universal accessibility to information for everyone—is what both “imperils and blesses” it. That kind of reach undoubtedly tempts us to find a way to monetize every transaction, turning the global “information highway” into an information toll-road. And yet, the ethos imbued into the web from its origins—however buried in trends, monetization strategies, or snake oil—hints at “a mystery greater than our failures”.
You can more easily have a single carrier/distributor than a monopolistic publisher. For example, the same delivery service provides me my newspaper as well as a range of competing newspapers. The delivery man does not much care for the content of my newspaper. A few concentrated Internet providers support diverse competing services.
If you haven’t been a long time Techdirt reader, you’ll probably hear me say that there is a copyright infringement court case in Denmark and immediately wonder, “Yeesh, what did Disney do now?” But this is not a story about Disney. This is a story about the heirs of Edvard Eriksen, creator of a bronze statue of The Little Mermaid, inspired by the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and their inability to let anyone in any way depict the statue or anything similar without being accosted in copyright actions. Most of the bullying actions by Eriksen’s heirs have been, unbelievably, against other towns throughout the world for creating their own Little Mermaid statues: Greenville, Michigan and the Danish city of Asaa for example.
In recent months, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young and others who sold millions of albums to Baby Boomers have sold their recordings, songwriting catalogs or both. Buyers typically get the permanent right to use the artist’s songs or recordings in commercials, movies, television shows and other formats.
Italian anti-piracy group Digital Content Protection has launched a new service that helps rightsholders to police NFT platforms, Web 3.0 projects, and metaverse precursors. The company, which works with major music industry partners including Sony, Universal and Warner, stresses that there are large financial interests at stake.
A man from Sweden has been convicted for selling subscriptions to pirate IPTV service MacIPTV. The 21-year-old served around 3,000 customers and came to the attention of local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance in 2019, which prompted a police investigation and criminal prosecution.
Many of the worst ideas in recent copyright laws have been driven by some influential companies’ fear of the transition from analog to digital. Whereas analog formats – vinyl, books, cinematic releases of films – are relatively easy to control, digital ones are not. Once a creation is in a digital form, anyone can make copies and distribute them on the Internet. Traditional copyright industries seem to think that digital versions of everything will be freely available everywhere, and that no one will ever buy analog versions. That’s not the case with vinyl records, and a recent post on Publisher’s Weekly suggests that analog books too, far from dying, are going from strength to strength:
Summary: The EPO‘s regime, which started under Benoît Battistelli about a decade ago, perishes in courts outside the EPO's governance loop
Video download link | md5sum 793482420398e0cd8a2886626fe02992
EPO Crisis as ILOAT Overturns AC or Member States
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The critical state that the EPO has entered might be conveniently overlooked by media sponsored by the same litigation fanatics who bolstered an institutional coup, but the facts speak “loud and clear”; there’s a crisis unfolding and EPO management is trying to distract from it while silently looking to settle 'on the cheap' and never tackling the underlying issues (just optics or PR)
THE 49th part of the series was published this morning and the last part, Part 50, will be published tomorrow. It has fast become apparent that the EPO has a governance crisis (Board 28 privately called it a "crisis"), albeit it’s only being recognised by courts outside EPOnia and thus not inside the pockets of Benoît Battistelli, Team UPC, and multinational corporations (or their lobbyists).
“Following the decisions of ILOAT one can hope that the EU will take steps to remediate…”With the EPC approaching its fiftieth anniversary it certainly seems like it’s just some ‘fossil’ of a document — one that EPO management is more than eager to discard, only to be replaced by a totally unlawful system, not even authorised by nations that are named in it.
Following the decisions of ILOAT one can hope that the EU will take steps to remediate, though given the extent of the infiltration [1, 2] it seems unlikely at this point. Will the court of public opinion step up? █
Summary: “By the Stalinist era of the 1930s, it was clear that the party and government made the rules and that the trade unions were not permitted to challenge them in any substantial way,” Wikipedia says
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