03.29.22
Posted in Free/Libre Software at 4:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0fed7e84f0d826392d2a625bf6a343f7
Using Gemini to Browse
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Simplicity of Gemini and insistence on a lack of features does not make it for ‘ricers’ or patronising geeks; au contraire — it makes it a lot more approachable to many more people
THE GEMINISPACE continues to expand and to keep track of new posts we’ve set up this ‘planet’, as demonstrated in the video above. It alludes to a misconception perpetuated in one of the 2 talks published earlier today by the FSF [1, 2].
The short story is, using Gemini is very easy. It’s a lot simpler than the Web and even writing for Gemini is a lot simpler. It’s hardly astonishing that mobile platforms are being targeted now [1, 2].
It’s reassuring to see all this discussed in the context of Software Freedom. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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The first common multitenancy model is based on namespace isolation, where individual tenants (a team developing a microservice, for example) are limited to using one or more namespaces in the cluster. While this model can work for some teams, it has flaws. First, restricting team members to accessing resources only in namespaces means they can’t administer global objects in the cluster, such as custom resource definitions (CRDs). This is a big problem for teams working with CRDs as part of their applications or in a dependency (for example, building on top of Kubeflow or Argo Pipelines).
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In the March 2022 survey we received responses from 1,169,621,187 sites across 272,177,331 unique domains and 11,877,217 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4.00 million sites, but a gain of 977,000 domains and 103,000 web facing computers.
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Microsoft saw declines in all metrics this month, losing 3.22 million sites (-7.13%), 156,000 domains (-1.75%), 118,000 active sites (-1.88%), and 7,620 computers (-0.57%). Microsoft also lost 1,000 sites from its share of the top million.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Have a lot of spare cash? NVIDIA want you to part with it. Today they’ve released the ridiculous monster that is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. With a price starting at $1,999 it’s not going to be a card for regular consumers at all, more for those who want power without compromises.
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Today a new version of Vulkan was tagged and in addition to the usual documentation additions, there’s two new extensions that are quite interesting. NVIDIA as usual have a new Beta driver for Linux ready.
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Applications
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A whiteboard is a kind of console that you can attach to your desktop computer and use to write down ideas very quickly. Writing directly on the screen makes it seem more like modern technology and thankfully, there are several different applications that you can use for this purpose.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When you run the lsblk -l or df -h command to list out the available block/storage devices, you may find the /dev/loop filesystem, especially if you are using the Snap package manager, and it’s quite common to find in Ubuntu distributions.
If you are keen on knowing what loop devices are and how to mount and unmount them from the system, then this article will be enough for you.
because it will cover all the necessary aspects of loop devices, like how to create a loop device, loop filesystem, mounting, and unmounting steps.
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Angular is a popular open-source web application framework developed by Google and maintained by the community. The language required to create an application using Angular Js is javascript/typescript, and other few mandatory languages require in web development.
Both Mobile and Web applications can easily be created using the angular framework. Angular Js command-line utility helps us quickly create, manage, build, and test Angular applications in your system.
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Games
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Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard is a very promising upcoming point and click adventure game, with a Linux demo available.
Developed by German-based WatchDaToast, it started off as a passion project that they’ve ended spending four years crafting into an adventure inspired by LucasArts and Sierra point & click classics. They said part of their plan for it is to return the genre to the “adventure” aspect, so it places some emphasis on exploring as well as inventory-based puzzles. Check out the trailer:
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I’m honestly quite hyped for the Mistlands update to Valheim, although it’s some time away still yet the teasers are great.
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If you love games that emulate a job or a hobby, this is the event for you. Steam Simfest: Hobby Edition is live until April 4.
Another event for you to jump in, find some demos and there’s plenty of discounts on games that are already available too. During the last few days of the event (April 1 – 4), there will also be a whole bunch of official talks and discussions taking place which will be live on the event page and likely directly on game pages on Steam.
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The Planet Crafter is a lonely and chilled-out open-world survival game about terraforming a hostile planet. It works great on Linux with Steam Play Proton, although due to a bug with Unity games, I had to set it to Proton 6.8.
Some have already started calling it Subnautica on Mars, and it’s not a bad description of it. It’s not been out long but it’s already jumped up to an Overwhelmingly Positive user rating. Not surprising though really, since it performs really well and the idea is great. A little basic in a number of ways mechanically but it’s so sleek it doesn’t really matter, it does it all quite well.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.24.4.
Plasma 5.24 was released in February 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds three weeks’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…
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KDE Plasma 5.24.4 is here three weeks after KDE Plasma 5.24.3 with more improvements for the Plasma Wayland session, such as better support for running the Plasma Wayland session in a virtual machine when clicking with the mouse cursor on things, a fix for the “RGB Range” feature to no longer gets disabled, as well as the ability to exit the Desktop Grid effect with a four-finger swipe down gesture.
KDE Plasma 5.24.4 also improves support for applying splash screens in System Settings and improves KRunner-powered searches to be case-insensitive when matching the text for System Settings pages to help you find things more easily.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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An update to the incredibly useful Extension Manager app is rolling out on Flathub.
Version 0.3 of this one-stop-shop for finding, installing, configuring, updating, and removing GNOME extensions on GNOME Shell intros a set of changes that, together, bolster the app’s capabilities.
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Zorin OS is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful Linux distributions available.
However, it is not just limited to how it looks. Compared to some other options available, it offers a nice user experience overall.
And, which is why, we also recommend it as one of the top choices for new users. Here, I shall highlight some of the reasons that make it an ideal pick for beginners.
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New Releases
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Coming almost seven months after Finnix 123, the Finnix 124 “Sturgeon Bay” release is here to celebrate 22 years from the first public release of Finnix on March 22nd, 2000, by adding new features and several improvements to existing tools, as well as updated and new components and improved hardware support.
Powered by the Linux 5.16 kernel series, Finnix 124 is the first release of the Debian-based distribution to add support for the RISC-V (riscv64) architecture. However, this is an unofficial port alongside i386, ARM64, ARMhf, ppc64el, and s390, as 64-bit (amd64) is the only officially supported architecture for Finnix.
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Shortly after the last one, the next release of IPFire is ready: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 165. It comes with various updates for the firewall engine that improve its performance and increase its flexibility, as well as with an updated toolchain, Python 3.10 and various more bug and security fixes.
Before we talk in detail about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support. IPFire is a small team of people and like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask you to help us out. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Fedora Linux 36 is the next major version of the popular GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat in active development and it should see the light of day later this Spring on April 26th, 2022, if everything goes according to plan.
Fedora Linux 36 ships with the recently released GNOME 42 desktop environment series for its flagship Workstation edition, if you wanted to get it for a test drive on your personal computer. It also includes the most recent versions of the KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE, SoaS, and i3 graphical environments of the supported Fedora Spins.
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This is guide howto install Fedora 36. I use here Beta image, but final version is released soon. I show quickly also just released GNOME 42 new features, like screenshot tool and new appearance settings.
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Fedora Linux 36 Beta Is Now Available For Download
Fedora Linux 36 Beta edition is now available for download. Fedora Linux 36 is supposed to be made available on April 26th, 2022.
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The final F36 day and night beta wallpapers are here! Take a look below and let us know what your thoughts are!
We last left off with the beta versions of the wallpaper that were created in Krita, which can be found on my blog with their design process explained.
We received a lot of great feedback including suggestions for a strictly night version with the moon glowing instead of a sunset, adding butterflies to the day version, as well as shifting some of the clouds around so they didn’t stack and make the right side of the wallpaper too heavy. The previous version is below in Day, Sunset, and Night mode.
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The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora Linux 36 Beta, the next step towards our planned Fedora Linux 36 release at the end of April.
Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site…
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The Fedora Project is pleased to announce Fedora Linux 36 Beta. This release continues the Fedora Project’s emphasis on delivering leading-edge open source technologies and includes updates to GNOME, Wayland improvements for NVIDIA users, and more.
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Many technology firms are turning to open source tools to accelerate innovation and growth. As these firms work to influence open source projects, governance practices sometimes shift from coordination among a small group of developers and firms to management by large communities of contributors and organizations, often with competing priorities.
Sustainable projects require sustainable communities. Adapting to a larger, more competitive open source landscape requires organizations to invest in community building. This demands a view of source-code availability that’s inextricably connected to the social engagements of contributors and organizations in open source projects. Many organizations now consider open source community engagement as both a social and a technical—or “sociotechnical”—investment.
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I’ve been using myrepos for a while – as someone who juggles a lot of repositories, both for personal projects and as a Fedora and CentOS packager, a ~/.mrconfig synced via Nextcloud really makes checking out repositories consistently, on different computers, straightforward.
As the number of tracked repos grow, however, trying to remember where each repo is checked out gets a bit time consuming – and also, keeping the configuration file organized as well; mr register on an existing repo would add the entry for that repo at the end of the file, and I was previously resorting to editing the file by hand to get it sorted – with a varying degree of success.
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Rate limiting is a popular technique to protect services from excessive demand. For example, you can use this strategy to limit how often a user can enter or reset their password. The example in this article builds rate limiting on a per-client basis into a Java-based service for a given time period. The application tracks requests from clients using a Redis in-memory data structure store and limits usage when a client’s demand exceeds the quota.
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This article covers the highlights of the C++ standardization proposals before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee’s Core and Evolution Working Groups last year. Read on to find out what’s coming in C++23.
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You probably already know some of the top challenges that IT leaders will face in 2022 – finding (and retaining) top talent, keeping up with security challenges, and managing remote teams.
But what if I told you that your biggest challenge this year might be yourself?
Leadership can be challenging, and leadership in IT has become especially so over the past two years. As an IT and finance leader navigating a global pandemic myself, I can say without a doubt that the past two years have been transformative – both in business and in my leadership style.
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Containers and Kubernetes have matured in recent years, enabling smaller and midsize organizations to tap the benefits of this powerful technology
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Debian Family
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Debian is the “mother of all Ubuntu-based distributions” and has recently received its third point release in the Bullseye series. This release comes a brief three months out from the last point release, which might surprise users who have grown accustomed to lengthier periods between releases.
This latest release includes plenty of bug fixes and security patches … and not much else. You won’t find new features but the .3 release does resolve several security issues that should have any Debian users upgrading immediately.
The security patches include fixes for the likes of…
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If you’re looking to buy a Linux tablet, you have some options out there today. In this article, we’ll compare the best options and guide you through the Linux tablet world.
After our Linux phone comparison, it’s only natural that we do a Linux tablet comparison. In terms of advancements and options in the market, Linux tablets are far behind Linux phones. Linux phones in general are far behind iPhones and Androids. So right from the start, manage your expectations.
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Kontron announced a “Pi-Tron CM4” industrial mini-PC (or SBC) based on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with GbE and 10/100 LAN, 3x USB, 2x COM, CAN-FD, DIO, HDMI 2.0, MIPI-DSI/CSI, 40-pin GPIO, and M.2 B-key.
Kontron unveiled an update to its Pi-Tron CM3+ industrial mini-PC. The Pi-Tron CM4 advances from a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ to a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4). Like the Pi-Tron CM3+, which launched as an SBC but now offers an enclosure option, the Pi-Tron CM4 will be available as either an SBC or an embedded computer.
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Today we’re going to design and laser cut some new Raspberry Pi cases from 3mm plywood using the Atomstack X7 40W. This is a new laser engraving and cutting machine from Atomstack which is largely the same as their flagship X7 Pro, but with a slightly lower power 40W laser module.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Some time ago, I mentioned my plans to write a review for the Librem 5. I still have that planned, but I did want to talk about one specific aspect of it now: usage flexibility.
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By every objective measure, with the possible exception of durability, today’s technology is superior to that of the past. That is certainly true of music players, with modern devices having the ability to stream almost every song ever recorded and the capability to do so with high fidelity. But old stuff looks cooler, which is why Redditor flatulentdisaster crafted this modern RFID music player that still delivers vintage charm.
One could be forgiven for assuming that this device is legitimately vintage, because the wood enclosure looks like something straight out of the mid-century. If you saw this sitting on your grandma’s shelf, you would think it had been there since the ’50s. But the electronics and functionality are all modern. Users select from one of several RFID cards, each with a cassette tape label associated with a specific playlist. When the user taps the RFID card on top of the wood music player, it starts the associated playlist.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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As we continue our Sailfish tour of World Heritage Sites, today we reached Vanha Rauma, the old heart of Rauma, a city that sits along the coastal road between Pori and Turku in the southwest of Finland and on the banks of the Rauma river. Vanha Rauma is a living monument to the enchanting style of old Nordic wooden construction. Home to 800 inhabitants, you’ll find beautiful examples of 19th Century Neo Renaissance-style exteriors alongside the immaculately preserved 15th Century Church of the Holy Cross. As the Visit Rauma site puts it, walking around the town is like “stepping into a fairy tale”.
We aim for the beautiful Sailfish user experience to bring a similar elegance and simplicity to an otherwise busy and distracting world. But the beauty on the surface has to be backed up with cutting-edge technology underneath which keeps up with modern standards and developments.
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Whether it is by pure experimentation or transforming a vision into something tangible, prototypes help assist in testing and building while preserving overall design consistency.
Clients are notorious for not accurately defining their requirements, in part because they don’t necessarily know what they need, or what would work best. Even when a client accurately describe their requirements, this doesn’t necessarily percolate to the developers. Besides the usual process of meetings, emails and phone conversations, a visual design can make a real difference. Step forward prototyping tools.
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Events
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PGConf.be 2022 will be held in Haasrode, Leuven, about 25km from Brussels.
The conference will take place on May 19th, 2022. Registration is open.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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In 2019, the German LibreOffice community sadly lost one of its most active members, Klaus-Jürgen Weghorn. In his memory, The Document Foundation (the non-profit foundation behind LibreOffice) has decided to support a student through the Deutschlandstipendium initiative…
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FSF
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Licensing/Legal
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After your project is named and you’ve chosen a repository in which to publish the code, it’s time to look at licensing options and important steps in setting it up. Marc shares nine popular OSI-approved licenses that lawyers and engineers are most familiar with. He also suggests considering whether you want a Copyleft license, which is designed to encourage users to produce and give back to the comments, or a Permissive license, which maximizes the number of people using the code with less restrictions on how they do it.
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Programming/Development
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I am considering making an RSS feed by hand, and even a Gemlog index by hand, on my flounder.online page, replacing the link to the problematic flounder’s Atom feed.
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Believe it or not, not everything is based on C. There are current, shipping, commercial OSes written before C was invented, and now others in both newer and older languages that don’t involve C at any level or layer.
Computer hardware is technology yet very few people can design their own processor, or build a graphics card. But software is a form of culture. Open source is created by volunteers, even if they end up getting paid jobs doing it. Even rejecting open source is a choice: paying for Windows or macOS instead reflects a preference.
This is especially visible when it comes to text editors, and even more so about programming languages. People get passionate about this stuff. So statements such as “C isn’t a programming language any more” can be upsetting. Most people live and work in the cultures that are Unix and Windows and if they are all you’ve ever known, or know best, then it’s easy to think they are the whole world.
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I am planning to add a few chapters on securing services in my Linux Command Line book. But, to make it practical & hands on, I needed one real application which the readers can deploy and secure. I needed something simple, say one single binary so that it becomes easier to convert it into a proper systemd service.
I decided to write one in Rust 
This also helps to showcase that one can write totally insecure code even in Rust (or any other language). Let me introduce Very Bad Web application. The README contains the build instructions. The index page shows the available API.
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As was so often the case, the cards occasionally failed and had to be replaced. A manual card index was used to keep track of things as broken hardware arrived and working kit was sent out. It worked about as well as you’d imagine. “We were quite proud if we only lost a few items a month,” said Philip, “but management weren’t quite so impressed by our finely honed skill.”
However, the operations manager had contacts in the US and managed to secure the services of a student for six months. “Brad” (also not his name) would come to the UK on what Philip now reckons looked a bit like a modern zero-hours contract and do various work experience at the facility.
“He was an enthusiastic employee and took it on himself to learn enough Visual Basic to make a rudimentary replacement to our card index.”
Like all too many quick and dirty Visual Basic/Access mash-ups of the time, it seemed to work pretty much perfectly after a few iterations. So much so that the business came to depend on Brad’s work and the old manual filing system was filed in the bin. Brad eventually returned to the US, but the fruits of his labor lived on after his departure.
“After some time – I forget what caused it – an update was required to Brad’s hard work,” recalled Philip, “and we, the lads who were reasonably proficient at working at code level, were asked to break open his source and make the change.”
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Hardware
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I was using the cheapest, nastiest Microsoft Mouse I’ve seen — in true Microsoft Fashion it’s called Microsoft Wired Basic USB Optical Mouse for Business. It’s flimsy and just like a real mouse, squeaks if you squeeze it too hard.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Redis servers under attack [Ed: The issue here is Redis, which is BSD licensed, but this article tries to blame "Debian", "Ubuntu", and "Linux"]
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Freexian has set itself new ambitious goals in support of Debian and we would like to expand our team to help us reach those goals. We have drafted a mission statement to clarify our purpose and our values, and we hope to be able to attract talented software developers, entrepreneurs and Debian experts from our community.
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CISA and the Department of Energy (DOE) are aware of threat actors gaining access to a variety of internet-connected uninterruptable power supply (UPS) devices, often through unchanged default usernames and passwords.
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Wired ☛ The Workaday Life of the World’s Most Dangerous Ransomware Gang [Ed: How on Earth could this article be published without even mentioning Windows? With Microsoft and Bill Gates bribing everything that moves -- even publishers -- the crimes get covered up and noise obfuscates]
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Privacy/Surveillance
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AccessNow ☛ Victory! FinFisher shuts down [Ed: Or it just renamed and moved under another shell]
Yesterday, Monday March 28, 2022, notorious German spyware purveyor FinFisher shut down operations and filed for insolvency. The surveillance technology company has a long history of selling its products to authoritarian regimes that surveil human rights defenders and journalists.
Years of civil society advocacy led to FinFisher’s collapse.
“The people victimized by FinFisher’s illegal exports will find a measure of justice in this corporate downfall, which comes as a direct result of concerted action by civil society,” said Peter Micek, General Counsel at Access Now. “We encourage German authorities to seize and destroy FinFisher assets and data, compensate its victims, and trumpet the power of export controls and criminal prosecution to hook spyware peddlers where it hurts.”
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Defence/Aggression
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President Zelenskyy of Ukraine is begging NATO for a no-fly zone they can’t risk providing. So I came up with another solution — $10 laser pointers.
Buy 100,000 laser pointers and give them to Ukrainian mothers (not kids — too dangerous). Even the puniest lockable laser pointer (notice the keys?) can temporarily blind a pilot at a distance of more than a mile, so what will 100 non-puny laser pointers do to the same aircraft? It would not only create an effective no-fly zone, it might kill hundreds of Russian pilots before they figure it out.
Though outdoor laser pointer pictures are usually shot at night so the beam is easier to see, they can do just as much damage during the day. In the United States, the actions I am proposing are against the law and can result in jail time plus an $11,000 fine per incident. But in the case of Ukraine, this is war and saving the nation is worth the risk and the effort.
This plan is just not that hard to do. Training takes less than a minute (push button, aim, and don’t shine the thing in your eye) — especially if there are 100 other people trying to do the same thing to the same aircraft at the same time. Only one of those needs to hit the bullseye to destroy a $10 million weapon by sending it out of control.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In 2011, journalist Tanul Thakur created the Dowry Calculator, a satirical website on the dowry system. In 2018, the website was blocked by the Government of India, which was challenged by Mr. Thakur in November 2019 before the Delhi High Court, as illegal and unconstitutional. The case came up for hearing on 21st March 2022, and the Court recorded Mr. Thakur’s submissions that he was not given an opportunity to be heard before the website was blocked. It has directed the Union of India to provide the entire case record, and asked the Union of India to consider giving Mr. Thakur a post-decisional hearing, including an opportunity to take corrective measures, if necessary.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Software Patents
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Globe Newswire ☛ Maersk Joins the Open Invention Network Community [Ed: Open Invention Network (OIN) is not a community, it is a corporate patent pool trying to pull the actual community into the cartel that 'normalises' software patents, distracting from actual solutions]
Open Invention Network (OIN), the organization formed to safeguard open source software (OSS) and the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced today that A. P. Møller – Mærsk A/S (Maersk) has joined as a community member. Maersk is a leading integrated container logistics company and the global leader in shipping services, operating in more than 130 countries. As a user of open source, Maersk considers OSS an enabler of advanced supply chain management platforms.
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Copyrights
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This photograph of Tesla, produced for The Century Magazine, shows the inventor seated beneath his giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing 22-foot-long bolts of electricity.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 1:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: This talk was reuploaded* 2 minutes ago; we mentioned it weeks ago in relation to Gemini and other alternatives to the Web (even Gopher)
Licence: CC BY SA 4.0
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* Last night they uploaded the wrong audio and video files. "Taking back the Web" mentions this talk at around 18:50.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF at 12:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: This talk was uploaded 7 minutes ago
Licence: CC BY SA 4.0
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Posted in Site News at 9:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 1c379c5d8e0cd49c4673ec6d3f18737d
Coming Up
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: We’re going to recognise the demise of the Web (along with social control media and bursting of the “clown” bubble) as we focus more on exposing corruption, resisting censorship, and moving videos away from the grip of pseudo-’free’ video hosting (no such thing)
THE past few days have been calm but very productive. After the EPO strike we took the liberty to regroup and organise better for the future. I’ve moved everything to a new ‘office’ (actually a dining room) and I set up a new machine, which will likely to be part of the future recording pipeline.
“EU authorities and EPO administrators became a hub of corruption when it comes to patent law.”Meanwhile, the EPO is bracing for another survey that will almost certainly expose the degree/extent of the EPO crisis. “On Wednesday morning,” the union wrote this week, “invitations (as well as reminders) for the Technologia survey will be automatically emailed to ALL active SUEPO members as well as non-SUEPO members who have signed up to participate in the survey.”
We expect that almost 0% of staff will express a positive opinion. Maybe literally zero, not just “almost” zero. It did happen before. EPO management is just about as corrupt as Team UPC, which is closely connected to it. Read all the comments here. EU authorities and EPO administrators became a hub of corruption when it comes to patent law. Same in trademarks. I simply cannot believe this is happening in Europe!
“After Wednesday we’ll be publishing more articles again.”Anyway, we’re going to focus a lot more on Gemini and we’ll explore better ways to get the message out there; social control media is approaching “end of life” (even Facebook itself has reported loss of active users) and the Web is increasingly broken. I give some examples of that in the video above.
As we’ve just noted in Daily Links, some GNU/Linux distros belatedly realise that there’s no such thing as “free” hosting and Microsoft GitHub is a force of occupation. There’s nothing free about it and it certainly doesn’t respect freedom, either.
After Wednesday we’ll be publishing more articles again. Until then we might focus on giving greater exposure to newly-released (since last night) LibrePlanet 2022 videos. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Cloudflare “server” is third ahead of the traditional third (Microsoft IIS) – I somewhat knew that Cloudflare was hosting a lot of stuff, but I somehow didn’t expect to see it there at all for some reason
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Oh and of course, the two first most popular web servers, regardless of the source, are package in Debian. So while we’re working on statistics and just making stuff up, I’m going to go ahead and claim all of this stuff runs on Linux and that BSD is dead. Or something like that.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be talking about running open source on your mobile device. Our love for open-source doesn’t just stop with the desktop. We’re going to hook you up with our favorite apps. Then we’re going to check out GNOME 42. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
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The Mars helicopter continues to excel, Linux arrives on M1 Macs, Canonical’s hiring methods cause a stink, Graham eats his words about MDM, KDE korner, and more.
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There is some weird software for Linux out there and some of the weirdest are in the file manager and file viewer space especially when you start looking at the older software which hasn’t been updated in years and fsv is one of those
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Instructionals/Technical
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Monit is a small popular Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. M/Monit builds on Monit’s capabilities and provides monitoring and management of all your Monit enabled hosts via a modern, clean and well designed user interface which also works on mobile devices.
M/Monit can monitor and manage distributed computer systems, conduct automatic maintenance and repair and execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.
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MariaDB has earned its stripes as a reputable database management system due to its feature-rich and performant nature. It being a MySQL fork implies that MariaDB offers similar features and performance metrics with the advantage of being free and completely open-source.
Therefore, for users that are invested in web-based or desktop-based application development projects, the input that mariaDB brings to the table cannot be ignored.
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Let’s learn the simple and quick steps to install the Lighttpd web server on Rocky Linux 8 using the command terminal.
The long-established Apache is one of the most popular web servers in the world. But there are now several web servers that can hold a candle to Apache. Lighttpd is one of those.
lighttpd (pronounced “lighty”) is a web server that requires far fewer resources than Apache, for example, and is therefore particularly well suited for very large loads or very weak systems. It was developed by Jan Kneschke and can be expanded with modules. For example, FastCGI allows you to run PHP code. SCGI adds Ruby or Python to lighty.
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The btrfsck command is a filesystem-check command like fsck, but it works with the btrfs file system.
First a little bit about btrfs. As the name implies, btrfs uses a B-tree data structure that is self-balancing and maintains sorted data, facilitating searches, sequential access, insertions, and deletions. It is also often referred to as the “better file system”. Oracle developed it and first used it about 15 years ago. By November 2013, it was declared adequately stable and began to be used by other distributions as well, and now its use is quite common.
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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Roundcube webmail on Ubuntu 22.04. Roundcube webmail is a free and open source web-based IMAP email client. It is written in PHP and works just like any other email client. It provides a handful of features;
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Is it best practice to include usage in every Bash script that you create. This gives the user an idea of what options the script is expecting, so they can use it as intended. It also gives the script some error checking ability to make sure that the user has supplied arguments in the expected way.
In this tutorial, you will learn a couple of different methods to show Bash script usage, check which user is executing the script, and check the current number of arguments on Linux.
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Stacer is one such app created to optimize your Linux PC in a sense better that it packs a list of features generally expect from an optimizer and more to give the system a refresh whenever you feel the need. An open-source system optimizer and application monitor that helps to manage the system with different aspects, it’s an all-in-one system utility.
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Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 5 with the MetaQuotes Broker on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to set kernel boot parameters in Linux. When a user boots their Linux system, the GRUB boot loader can set various parameters as it loads the Linux kernel. You can think of these parameters as arguments, the same type you are probably accustomed to using with commands in your terminal.
Kernel parameters can be set either temporarily or permanently, and will modify the behavior of your system as it boots up. Modifying kernel boot parameters can have a big impact, such as allowing you to reset the root password, or they can do minor things like show the logo of your Linux distro when your computer boots up.
Follow along with our step by step instructions below to see how to set kernel boot parameters either temporarily or permanently on Linux. Temporary parameters will only survive one boot, and then be erased for subsequent reboots. Permanently setting a parameter will ensure that it persists across all future reboots of the system.
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In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Couchbase Server on CentOS/Rocky Linux. According to the documentation, Couchbase Server is an open source, distributed, JSON document database. It exposes a scale-out, key-value store with managed cache for sub-millisecond data operations, purpose-built indexers for efficient queries, and a powerful query engine for executing SQL-like queries.
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Apache Tomcat is a free and opensource web server which is widely used for hosting web applications written in Java programing language. It is an implementation of Jakarta Servlet and Jakarta Expression Language (formerly Java Servlet and Java Expression Language) and other Java websocket technologies.
Apache Tomcat is not exactly a web server in the sense of Apache or Nginx. It’s an application server that provides a pure Java HTTP ecosystem and Java-based logic to serve Java code.
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In this guide, We will show you how to install Trimage tool for image compressor on Ubuntu 20.04
Trimage is a cross-platform tool for losslessly optimizing PNG and JPG files for web.
Trimage is a cross-platform GUI and command-line interface to optimize image files for websites, using optipng, pngcrush, advpng and jpegoptim, depending on the filetype (currently, PNG and JPG files are supported). It was inspired by imageoptim. All image files are losslessy compressed on the highest available compression levels, and EXIF and other metadata is removed.
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Let’s learn the simple and quick steps to install the Lighttpd web server on AlmaLinux 8 using the command terminal.
The long-established Apache is one of the most popular web servers in the world. But there are now several web servers that can hold a candle to Apache. Lighttpd is one of those.
lighttpd (pronounced “lighty”) is a web server that requires far fewer resources than Apache, for example, and is therefore particularly well suited for very large loads or very weak systems. It was developed by Jan Kneschke and can be expanded with modules. For example, FastCGI allows you to run PHP code. SCGI adds Ruby or Python to lighty.
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In this article we will learn How To Visualize Disk Space Usage With Vizex. We can visualize graphical output of disk usage using Vizex. Its Output contains total size, total used space, free space and percentage of used space of each partition in graphical form.
We can customize the output as per our need using different flags. we can visualize the disk usage of a specific partition and can exclude some partitions as well. You can save the output of Vizex command information in a csv or json file. We can also display the battery usage information of the machine using Vizex. Using Vizex also we can also print the directory contents like its size, file types, and last modified date.
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In this guide, we will install Tasksel in Ubuntu 20.04
Tasksel package provides a simple interface for users who want to configure their system to perform a specific task. This program is used during the installation process, but users can also use tasksel at any time.
Tasksel is a Debian/Ubuntu tool that installs multiple related packages as a co-ordinated “task” onto your system.
This function is similar to that of meta-packages, and, in fact, most of the tasks available from tasksel are also available as meta-packages from the Ubuntu package managers (such as Synaptic Package Manager or KPackageKit).
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Chatwoot on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Chatwoot is a free, open-source, and real-time messaging platform. It provides a simple and live chat for your website and integrates it with other apps. Chatwoot is an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Chatwoot on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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The sed command is an overused command by sysadmins around the world. It is basically used to replace text by text in a text file with a single command. That’s why, today, we are going to present you the Top 20 sed commands. For this, we will look at the most useful and common ones.
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Copying and pasting text into the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 22.04 can help any Linux user when following any kind of Linux tutorial which requires the user to copy specific commands from the tutorial into the terminal.
In this tutorial, you will learn various methods that can be used to copy and paste text to and from the terminal on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux.
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Games
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Between 2022-03-22 and 2022-03-29 there were 20 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 217 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.2 % of total released titles.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 42 is here, but its new look and feel doesn’t yet include all of the environment. This is already causing rumblings of discontent.
This release is significant because soon it will be the default desktop of the next Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. That means a lot of people will be looking at GNOME 42 every day until 2024.
GNOME 42 will also be the default in Fedora 36, though Fedora doesn’t have LTS versions. A new version comes along twice a year so Fedora 37 will almost certainly have GNOME 43. If the GNOME-using members of the Red Hat community don’t like the look of 42, they won’t have to put up with it for long, but Ubuntu users must, or switch to the short-term support channel, which may not be viable for everyone.
As we mentioned in the GNOME 42 preview, the new look isn’t just an easily changed theme. Like many modern desktops, GNOME uses a lot of web technology.
GNOME themes were described using CSS. Since GNOME 3, the default GNOME theme was Adwaita, and it was easy to install new ones, and there were lots to choose from.
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Barry Kauler ☛ puppylinux.com is down [Ed: PuppyLinux outsourced to Microsoft, Microsoft suspends site of GNU/Linux distro]
In case you have come here, hoping that I might know something; I don’t really, except that it is being worked on.
The account is hosted, I think, by github.com, and they suspended puppylinux.com without any notification or explanation. If that seems a bit rude, yes, it is. A decent host provider should give an explanation.
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the releases:
3.12.11
3.13.9
3.14.5
3.15.3
These releases include a security fix for zlib’s CVE-2018-25032.
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BSD
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In this post, I will talk about how I modified my pkg configuration so I don’t have to modify it after upgrading a host/jail from one version of FreeBSD to another. You might say that you don’t have to do that. Perhaps you have a different configuration and aren’t doing what I’m doing.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Overall I give this computer 4 out of 5 Geekos on running openSUSE Tumbleweed. There is not so much of an issue with openSUSE itself but the capabilities baked into Plasma in handling the touch screen interface. The handling of rotating the screen causes the input digitizer to not be synchronized with the screen and the lack of onscreen keyboard as a part of Plasma that works with the login screen but isn’t available within the Desktop environment itself. If it could be exposed while using the desktop as you would expect on a smartphone, this would change the experience of Plasma on the Tablet mode from okay to absolutely fantastic.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Conky is a system monitoring program for Linux and BSD that runs on the GUI. It monitors various system resources to report the current usage of CPU, memory, disk storage, temperatures, users logged in, currently playing song, etc. in a sleek little widget on your screen. This way, you’re able to see at a quick glance how your computer’s components are being utilized.
Conky is lightweight and highly configurable, so you’re able to run it without having a negative impact on your system or seeing it stick out like it doesn’t belong. We’ll show you how to get it installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and some configuration options to get it looking nice.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 728 for the week of March 20 – 26, 2022. The full version of this issue is available here.
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Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announces that Firmus, the Australian cloud infrastructure provider that is revolutionising data centre technology, has built its ultra-efficient and sustainable public cloud on Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack and Charmed Kubernetes.
Data centres are responsible for a staggering 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that number is rising. This is largely due to the inefficiency of traditional data centre designs. The worldwide average for data centre energy efficiency is 1.59 power usage effectiveness (PUE), which means that for every megawatt that is spent powering computers, an additional 590 kilowatts are required to run cooling systems. This value has been stagnant for some time, resulting in inefficient data centres that are costly to operate, costly to access, and costly to the planet.
Firmus is solving the data centre efficiency and sustainability issue with an innovative new immersion cooling solution: submerging servers in a bath of non-conductive, biodegradable fluid that is approximately 1000 times more effective at wicking away heat than air.
The immersion cooling technology has led to what is arguably the most efficient data centre design in the world, coming in at just 1.03 PUE. This is enabling Firmus to offer a public cloud service, Supercloud, at a price point significantly lower than the rest of the market. What’s more, Firmus’ data centre is located in Tasmania where it is powered by genuine grid connected renewable energy.
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Waveshare has introduced a new Raspberry Pi 5G HAT kit with a Quectel RM500U-CN 5G module, four antennas, and other accessories that sells for under $200, Raspberry Pi SBC not included.
On the face of it, it looks like an incredible deal, considering we’ve previously covered two other 5G development kits for the Raspberry Pi, namely Waveshare SIM8200EA-M2 HAT with a Snapdragon X55 5G modem and Sixfab “Raspberry Pi 5G Development Kit” that sold for about $400 to $600. What’s the trick? It’s designed for the Chinese market.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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For those who are not into prog rock in the 70s or old radio shows from the 40s, the Theremin may be an unfamiliar musical instrument. As a purely electronic device, it’s well outside the realm of conventional musical instruments. Two radio antennas detect the position of the musician’s hands to make a unique sound traditionally associated with eeriness or science fiction.
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Cyntech has been on the Raspberry Pi scene since the early days. It co-created Pibrella, an early 26 pin GPIO based add on board and has released numerous products over the first decade of Raspberry Pi. Cyntech’s latest product is a combo of case and heatsink for the Raspberry Pi 4. The case retails for $6 and the heatsink for an additional $7, so for $13 how much protection and cooling do we get? Can it compete with the products on our list of best Raspberry Pi cases? The only way to find out is to put them on the bench and see how they perform.
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Having your windshield wipers move to the beat of your favorite song can be a fun moment while driving, which is why YouTuber Cranktown City wanted to ensure this would always be the case by adding some intelligence to his truck’s wiper blades. The idea is simple: have a microcontroller “listen” to the music currently being played, analyze the beat, and then move the wipers accordingly.
To begin, the truck’s wiper blade control unit was ripped out and replaced with an Arduino Uno along with a new DC motor driver and motor encoder for determining its absolute position. The Uno is able to listen to the music thanks to a tiny MSGEQ7 spectrum analyzer module, which takes the incoming analog music signal and splits it up into seven different bands of frequencies. When the average amplitude of the frequency that is correlated with drums goes above a specified threshold, the position variable for the motor flips from 0 to 180 and vice versa.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Computers Are Bad ☛ VoWiFi
I haven’t written for a bit, in part because I am currently on vacation in Mexico. Well, here’s a short piece about some interesting behavior I’ve noticed here.
I use a cellular carrier with very good international roaming support, so for the most part I just drive into Mexico and my phone continues to work as if nothing has changed. I do get a notification shortly after crossing the border warning that data might not work for a few minutes; I believe (but am not certain) that this is because Google Fi uses eUICC.
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FSF
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Licensing/Legal
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The technical components of e-CODEX are open source building blocks, mainly consisting of a connector and a gateway. The Domibus Gateway as well as the Domibus Connector are freely available under a European Union Public Licence (EUPL v1.2). The installation of the gateway ensures a secured connection with a gateway in another Member State while the connector carries out the adaptations required for receiving encrypted data by the corresponding service provider in another Member State.
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Programming/Development
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In the modern world, the demand for computer scientists continues to grow. Everything around us is transforming, undergoing a digital makeover. With so many people becoming a part of this field, it comes as no surprise how much technology has expanded and the rate at which it is developing. Computer science itself is divided into various sub-fields, each of which has its own set of specialized workers. However, one thing common to almost all these fields is the process of writing instructions in the form of code, commonly referred to as programming. This sits at the heart of computer science and gives it the power to create and remove things. With the number of existing programming languages reaching the three-digit mark, and as each programming job has its own specific set of requirements, it can be extremely daunting to figure out which language to learn.
To make your job easier, this article provides a list of the best programming languages to learn in 2022.
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and, five years on, no Shock and Awe ineluction; Clinton’s doctrine
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There had been conflicts both theological and political before between the Pope in Rome and the Archbishop of Constantinople but the rift had always been smoothed over. The Great Schism was caused by a number of basic disagreements: there was the Western practice of using unleavened bread for the Eucharist for example, but the main theological disagreement was over the relative positions of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in the Trinity – known as the filioque controversy that resulted from the Latin Church’s tinkering with the Nicene Creed.
The actual events on the ground that immediately triggered this dramatic split are the stuff of silent comedy with the Papal Legate and the Archbishop of Constantinople hurling excommunications around like Jovian thunderbolts. But, this time there would be no turning back. The result has been a painful fissure in the structure of European society that continues to this day and that even underlies the current crisis in Ukraine.
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If only Brittney Griner had slapped Chris Rock, then maybe people would be saying her name. The near-silence surrounding Griner’s unjust detention in Russia has long seemed both sadly predictable and somewhat curious. It is sadly predictable that a sports world awash in NFL takes and that ignores women’s sports would erase regular updates on Griner’s existence as a political prisoner. Griner is a Black, queer woman in a league that receives reservoirs of disrespect. The sports world, as has been said often, would be in an uproar if this were Tom Brady. They aren’t, and it’s damning.
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One of the fundamental difficulties in doing policy advocacy, including, and perhaps especially tech policy advocacy, is that we are not only speaking of technology, which can often seem inscrutable and scary to non-experts, but law, which itself is an intricate and often opaque system. This complicated nature of our legal system can present challenges, because policy involves an application of law to technology, and we can’t apply it well when we don’t understand how the law works. (It’s also hard to do well when we don’t understand how the technology works, either, but this post is about the law part so we’ll leave the issues with understanding technology aside for now.)
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The Nation ☛ Ghosts
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A peculiar mix of political extremism and ideological malaise characterizes post-2016 American politics. While factions abound, few of them have anything new to say. Instead, the most outré cliques on both the left and the right have resorted to nostrums that reached the height of their appeal in the middle of the last century. It is as if everyone showed up to a party wearing their parents’ ill-fitting hand-me-downs.
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Many years ago Feedburner was a useful service. It proxied the RSS feed of your blog and gave you analytics of what happened with it. Now feeds using Feedburner randomly give HTTP error 404s. The Feedburner Twitter account is inactive and recommends that people Tweet at Google instead. It seems that Google wants to get rid of the service and random 404s probably aren’t a high priority for them.
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Science
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What is elliptic curve cryptography and how does it work? The technology keeps your iMessages encrypted but also powers Bitcoin and Ethereum and just about every major website you visit.
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a type of public-key cryptographic systems. This class of systems relies on really difficult “one-way” math problems – problems that easy to compute one way and intractable to solve the “other” way. Sometimes these are called “trap-door” functions – easy to fall into, extremely difficult to get out of.
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Education
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Therefore, arguing that allowing Muslim girls to wear hijab would grantee their education is a farce and doesn’t represent ground realities.
Sadly, many Muslim girls are taken out of school and must give up their education to be married off at the age of puberty. This regressive practice is in clear violation of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, which states the minimum age of marriage for a woman is 18.
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Hardware
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The wildly successful PDP-11 minicomputer was a major influence on the evolution of computing throughout the 1970s. While fondly remembered in modern day emulation, there’s nothing like booting up the real thing, as [Jerry Walker] explores in his series on restoring a PDP-11/34. Examples of PDP-11 hardware are becoming increasingly rare, which makes restoration and preservation of remaining equipment even more critical. [Jerry] has gone to exhaustive lengths to restore his PDP-11/34 to working condition, painstakingly troubleshooting wire-wrapped backplane and replacing suspect ICs across the entire system. With scant documentation on some of the cards, it was often a matter of sheer will and technical know-how that saw the system eventually come back to life.
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A sauna is a great place to feel warm and toasty and refreshed, but few of us have one at home. [Linus Strothmann] decided to build his own, using an old boat as the perfect base for his steamy build.
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Looking like it dropped out of an alternate reality version of the 1980s, the Joopyter Personal Terminal is a 3D printed portable computer that includes everything you need for life in the retro-futuristic fastlane: a mechanical keyboard, a thermal printer, and the obligatory tiny offset screen. It’s a true mobile machine too, thanks to it’s onboard battery and a clever hinge design that lets you fold the whole thing up into something akin to a PLA handbag. You won’t want to leave home without it.
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Air engines are a common occurrence here on Hackaday. They’re relatively novel and reasonably easy to 3D print without requiring any fluids or supporting machinery. For example, [Tom Stanton] took a previous air engine design, did away with the air compressor, and instead used gravity and water to create just a few PSI to run the engine.
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What is a photograph? Technically and literally speaking, it’s a drawing (graph) of light (photo). Sentimentally speaking, it’s a moment in time, captured for all eternity, or until the medium itself rots away. Originally, these light-drawings were recorded on film that had to be developed with a chemical process, but are nowadays often captured by a digital image sensor and available for instant admiration. Anyone can take a photograph, but producing a good one requires some skill — knowing how to use the light and the camera in concert to capture an image.
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Join us on Wednesday, March 30 at noon Pacific for the PCB Thermal Design Hack Chat with Mike Jouppi!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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I’m getting tired of writing about ivermectin as a “miracle cure” for COVID-19, just as in 2020 I got tired of writing about hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID-19. Oddly enough, as high-quality evidence accumulated that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work, it faded in importance such that by early 2021 it was no longer the preferred wonder drug among COVID-19 conspiracy theorists. Ivermectin rose to replace it, or, as I like to say, ivermectin became the new hydroxychloroquine. These days, though, it reminds me more of acupuncture.
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Moshe was in the hospital for the fourth time, and his mother, Rae, was desperate.
It was the spring of 2021. Moshe was 12 years old, and he’d been admitted to a psychiatric unit for children at South Oaks Hospital, not far from his home on the North Shore of Long Island.
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The more time girls aged between 11 and 13 spend on social media, the less likely they are to be satisfied with life a year later, a study suggests.
The UK study, in Nature Communications, shows the same pattern for boys aged 14 to 15, and 19-year-old boys and girls.
Scientists speculate the vulnerability to social media at particular ages may be linked to brain, hormonal and social changes during adolescent development.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Security
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Many organizations are apprehensive about the security of edge deployments. As data becomes more and more valuable, security threats create increasingly serious concerns. No organization wants to be in the news explaining why they were exposed to the latest security threat, nor do they want to account for sensitive information being stolen. These security threats can damage an organization’s credibility and ultimately impact their bottom line.
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Google has recently released an updated Google Chrome due to the recent high-severity exploit experienced. The tech giant encourages its billions of users around the world to download the Google Chrome security update as soon as possible.
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Cyber security is a huge topic, and through the years the industry changes rapidly to keep up with current threats and related challenges. As a result, some of the beliefs and mindsets we’ve adopted in the industry have changed as well.
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One of the toughest jobs I have, is to assess if a reported security problem is indeed an actual security vulnerability or “just” a bug. Let me take you through a recent case to give you an insight…
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A new set of vulnerabilities has been disclosed in the nftables subsystem; these lead fairly easily to a local system compromise, on some configurations at least. Fixes for these vulnerabilities were present in the March 28 stable updates; upgrading seems like a good idea.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Several weeks ago, an EFF supporter brought her car to a mechanic, and found a mysterious device wired into her car under her driver’s seat. This supporter, who we’ll call Sarah (not her real name), sent us an email asking if we could determine whether this device was a GPS tracker, and if so, who might have installed it. Confronted with a mystery that could also help us learn more about tracking, our team got to work.
Sarah sent us detailed pictures of the device. It was a black and gray box, about four inches long, with a bundle of 6 wires coming out of one end. On one side, the words “THIS SIDE DOWN” were printed in block letters, next to three serial numbers.
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We want to change that, so we sued DHS today under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for records about the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative (VLVI). We want to know what VLVI does, how it works, and what information DHS is gathering.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, seeks records on the current status of the program, including whether the government is monitoring people’s social media profiles and for what purpose, how this impacts visa approvals and denials, and details about a $4.8 million transaction last spring.
EFF opposes the U.S. government’s monitoring of anyone’s social media accounts and internet activity, and in this case, the government is targeting potential immigrants who risk being unfairly labeled a threat and denied access into the U.S. EFF previously urged DHS to abandon any such vetting program because social media surveillance invades privacy and violates the First Amendment by chilling speech and allowing the government to target and punish people for expressing views it doesn’t like. Any vetting based on speech on social media would be ineffective and discriminatory.
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The NYT story is a rehashing of a story published by the American tech website TechCrunch back in 2019, where the reporter, Zach Whittaker, said it offered “new insight into the scope and scale of the Russian surveillance system… and how Russian authorities gain access to the calls, messages and data of customers of the country’s largest phone provider, Mobile TeleSystems”.
A Nokia spokesperson said, in a detailed rebuttal, that the NYT had confirmed that the documents used as source material for the story were the same as those used by TechCrunch.
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In an extensive article (siirryt toiseen palveluun), NYT described how the Finnish firm played a “key role” in helping to connect the System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM) to Russia’s largest telecom service provider MTS, which is in turn monitored by Russia’s principal security agency Federal Security Service (FSB).
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For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.
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Security firm UpGuard released a report detailing how it found 1.7TB of data owned by Nokia and related to Russian operator MTS that reveal details about the network infrastructure in Russia and the SORM (System for Operative Investigative Activities) installations used by law and intelligence agencies.
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Defence/Aggression
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Rebuffing progressive lawmakers’ calls for Pentagon spending cuts, President Joe Biden on Monday is set to unveil a budget blueprint for the next fiscal year that includes a record $813.3 billion in funds for the U.S. military apparatus, a $31 billion increase from the current level.
“We’re being robbed of resources to feed the endless hunger of the military-industrial complex.”
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said ahead of the latest round of in-person talks between Kyiv and Moscow on Monday that his country is prepared to declare neutrality from NATO, a move that would fulfill one of Russia’s long-standing demands.
“Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” Zelenskyy said in a video call with several Russian reporters ahead of a fresh round of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian diplomats in Turkey. The four Russian journalists involved in the call were reportedly ordered not to publish the Ukrainian president’s remarks.
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As the death toll from Russia’s war on Ukraine continued to grow, particularly in key cities like Mariupol, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday called for “an immediate humanitarian cease-fire to allow for progress in serious political negotiations” on a peace agreement.
“A cessation of hostilities… will save lives, prevent suffering, and protect civilians.”
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The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power.
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Regardless of whether we agree with him or not, President Biden’s statements that Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power and that Putin is a war criminal have compounded already complex negotiations to end Moscow’s devastating and nationally self-defeating war of aggression.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has left Americans on edge, according to a recent poll which found a majority of people in the U.S. are worried that the war has made the impending use of nuclear weapons more likely.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents told the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that the invasion has increased the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used anywhere in the world.
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Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to “walk back” his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia. They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president’s top underlings could stuff it back in. “We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change.
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On March 7, Russia stated three aims for its invasion of Ukraine: official Ukrainian neutrality, recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, and recognition of the independence of pro-Russian separatist regions in Luhansk and Donetsk. The United States and NATO have not spoken publicly about a final diplomatic settlement, and, with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government focused on maintaining national unity and armed resistance to Russia, Ukraine has publicly stated its positions only in somewhat contradictory bits and pieces. But Zelensky, in consultation with the US and Europe, which are backing Ukraine’s war-fighting capacity, should formulate and state what a reasonable peace settlement would look like.
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The Kurds had been assured by President George W Bush and Tony Blair, along with the rest of the world, that the Iraqi dictator was hiding his weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Fifteen years earlier in 1988, Iraqi forces had used mustard gas and nerve agents to kill 5,000 Kurdish civilians in the town of Halabja – the largest direct use of poison gas as a weapon against a civilian target in history. No wonder people in Erbil and other Kurdish cities, none of them that far from Halabja, were frightened that the calamity would happen again.
Much of the population fled from urban areas to camp out in the plains and mountains or crammed into tiny villages. Those staying behind bought plastic sheeting, often in inappropriately festive red, blue and yellow colours, which they pinned over the doors and windows of their houses and shops in a pathetic hope that this would keep out the deadly gas.
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The address by Tokayev was made four days before the holiday of Nauryz, which fell on March 20 and is a new year festival celebrated by people in the belt that runs from the Kurdish lands to the Kyrgyz lands. Households across Kazakhstan were preparing for this celebration, although inflation of food prices—which predated the Russian intervention in Ukraine and the resulting Western sanctions imposed on the Kremlin—had already dampened the mood of the festivities in the country; by mid-March, the National Bank of Kazakhstan had reportedthat prices of food products such as baked goods, cereals, vegetables and dairy—the important components of a Nauryz meal—had increased by 10 percent.
“Kazakhstan is facing unprecedented financial and economic difficulties in our modern history due to the escalation of the geopolitical situation,” President Tokayev said. The “harsh sanctions” imposed on Russia by the West are already impacting the global economy, he said, adding, “Uncertainty and turbulence in the world markets are growing, and production and trade chains are collapsing.” Rising food prices and financial turbulence—a result of both the Western sanctions on Russia and of the integration of national economies—have set the alarm bells ringing and seem to have heightened the urgency to resolve these issues in Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted an exodus of nearly 4 million people and an outpouring of support for many of the refugees. But a new report finds dozens of nonwhite people who fled Ukraine are being held in long-term detention centers in Poland and Estonia. We speak with Maud Jullien, investigations editor at Lighthouse Reports, which just published a series of reports in collaboration with The Independent, Der Spiegel, Radio France and others on the detention of African students fleeing Ukraine. She describes how the European Union’s temporary protection directive sets a double standard by permitting the safe entry of Ukrainian citizens into neighboring countries while withholding protection to third-party nationals escaping the same conflict.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he is open to Ukraine becoming a neutral country but said such a decision could only be made by a nationwide referendum after Russian troops withdraw. This comes as the White House quickly tried to walk back President Biden’s remarks made during a speech on Saturday in Poland during which he appeared to endorse regime change in Moscow. We get responses from Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna and Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich. “The responsibility to negotiate with the Russians, to come to a settlement that is agreeable to Ukrainians, that belongs to President Zelensky,” says Bacevich, who called Biden’s comments “reckless and damaging.” Khanna adds that while “the American president does have a leadership role” in resolving the crisis, Biden’s remarks were not representative of U.S. policy, saying the president “was speaking from the heart.”
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The situation in Ukraine is first and foremost a humanitarian crisis, and the food security and wellbeing of the people of Ukraine should be our immediate concern. However, because of the dominant roles of Russia and Ukraine in global food, fuel and fertiliser markets, there are also massive knock-on effects for people around the world. This is particularly true for the supply and cost of food. Here are three ways that the invasion of Ukraine leads to potential risks to food security in other countries.
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For the past 28 days of the war Russian President Vladimir Putin has waged on Ukraine, there has been a wave of resistance. In an earlier installment, The Nation summarized the earliest days of February’s opposition. Here’s a new report about the past month of protests and the government’s retaliation.
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As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine rages on, long-deepening foreign policy divisions in the GOP have been brought into sharp relief. As expected, the conservative establishment has been pushing President Joe Biden toward more aggressive, escalatory, and interventionist responses. They are joined in this by hawkish voices in the liberal establishment.
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Perhaps, finally, the breakthrough moment of rethinking energy consumption is upon us. At least it’s dawning in Europe, where using less energy, in particular Russian hydrocarbons, now obviously serves geopolitical, energy security, and climate aims. To be sure, energy efficiency and the reduction of energy consumption have long been cornerstones of Europe’s climate-change mitigation strategy. After all, using less checks all sorts of boxes: Emissions decrease; prices drop as demand lessens, energy poverty sinks, overburdened power grids are eased, and fewer renewables are required to decarbonize a smaller energy system.
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On Sunday, March 27, Volodymyr Zelensky gave his first extensive interview with Russian journalists since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Zelensky spoke over Zoom with Meduza editor-in-chief Ivan Kolpakov, Dozhd editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko, writer and journalist Mikhail Zygar, and Kommersant special correspondent Vladimir Solovyov (not to be confused with the Russian propagandist who shares his name). Read Meduza’s translation below.
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Having exhausted their efforts at action, they eat the food they’ve prepared and purchased, give thanks and pray before “dying neighborly” – to borrow a phrase coined by poet and writer Langston Hughes in 1965.
“Dying neighborly” was something of a common refrain in the small number of stories told by those writers and artists in the 1960s and 1980s who recognized the dangers of nuclear war but were unwilling or unable to accept the only measure recommended by the government: to buy or build your own shelter and pretend that you’d survive.
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The Islamic State (IS) in a recent video claimed that they have prepared at least three modules in India. In the video, the Islamic State fighters are seen taking membership in 3 different groups. The 4-minute long video has been released by ISHP (Islamic State Hind Province).
The video was released on encrypted messaging platform Telegram at 1 pm on March 25, claiming that 3 different groups of IS fighters pledged jihad in India in the name of the IS caliph.
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A teenage ISIS supporter allegedly plotted to travel to Chicago with two others during spring break and kill worshipers at a Shia Muslim mosque, according to federal court records unsealed Friday.
“If they had not encountered law enforcement at that point, they would continue on to another Shia mosque or Jewish synagogue and execute the same plan,” one filing states. “They did not have a plan to escape but rather their plan ended with them being shot by law enforcement.”
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The militant Islamic State group claimed responsibility on Monday after a pair of Arab gunmen killed two people and wounded four in central Israel before they were killed by police.
The two killed in the Sunday night attack were Israeli police officers, authorities said.
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Environment
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Startlingly large amounts of methane are leaking from wells and pipelines in New Mexico, according to a new analysis of aerial data, suggesting that the oil and gas industry may be contributing more to climate change than was previously known.
The study, by researchers at Stanford University, estimates that oil and gas operations in New Mexico’s Permian Basin are releasing 194 metric tons per hour of methane, a planet-warming gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. That is more than six times as much as the latest estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency.
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An increasing number of state and local jurisdictions place limits on how long trucks may sit idle with the engine running. Unnecessary truck idling is a significant contributor to local air pollution and results in additional greenhouse gas emissions to boot.
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A few weeks ago East Antarctica’s temperatures soared by 50F to 90F above normal. (Ref: Antarctica Crushes Records, March 23, 2022)
A couple of weeks later East Antarctica’s Conger Ice Shelf (1,200 sq km) completely collapsed and two additional calving events occurred at other glaciers, all in the same week.
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Writers are well aware that Cuban approaches are adapted to the unique geography and history of the island. What readers should take away is not so much the specific actions of Cuba as its method of studying a wide array of approaches and actually putting the best into effect (as opposed to merely talking about their strengths and weaknesses). The book traces Cuba’s preparedness from the threat of a US invasion following its revolution through its resistance to hurricanes and diseases, which all laid the foundation for current adaptions to climate change.
Only four years after the revolution, in 1963, Hurricane Flora hit the Caribbean, killing 7000-8000. Cubans who are old enough remember homes being washed away by waters carrying rotten food, animal carcasses and human bodies. It sparked a complete redesign of health systems, intensifying their integration from the highest decision-making bodies to local health centers. Construction standards were strengthened, requiring houses to have reinforced concrete and metal roofs to resist strong winds.
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As governments meet this week to approve a summary of part three of the United Nations’ landmark climate assessment, which focuses on mitigation, hundreds of environmental justice groups from around the globe shared an open letter Monday imploring reviewers to emphasize the need for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels to avert the climate emergency’s most disastrous outcomes.
“The stakes could not be any higher, the science any clearer, or the imperative for immediate action any greater.”
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Once upon a time, the tutelary gods of nationalism and internationalism met for a chat. They had a superb perch above the clouds. From there, they could see everything happening on the Earth below and they set to arguing, as they so often did.
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“Magical thinking isn’t going to solve the climate crisis.”
“There is no fixing fossil fuels, we need to ditch them to protect our climate.”
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Dozens of progressive advocacy organizations launched a new campaign on Monday with the goal of pushing congressional candidates and incumbent lawmakers to embrace the Green New Deal and eschew funding from the powerful fossil fuel industry.
Known as the Green New Deal Champions Pledge, the new initiative aims to set “a new bar of what it means to fight for climate justice in Congress” by pressuring candidates and current representatives to back a specific slate of legislation that includes:
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Energy
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While the fact that Mr. Manchin owns a coal business is well-known, an examination by The New York Times offers a more detailed portrait of the degree to which Mr. Manchin’s business has been interwoven with his official actions. He created his business while a state lawmaker in anticipation of the Grant Town plant, which has been the sole customer for his gob for the past 20 years, according to federal data. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians.
Records show that several energy companies have held ownership stakes in the power plant, major corporations with interests far beyond West Virginia. At various points, those corporations have sought to influence the Senate, including legislation before committees on which Mr. Manchin sat, creating what ethics experts describe as a conflict of interest.
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Cruelling somewhat the Budget pitch euphoria in corporate media today, The Australia Institute has sallied forth with its annual analysis of hand-outs to coal and gas multinationals, state and federal, finding they cost the public $11.6b in 2021-22, or $22k per minute.
It’s a $1.3b (12%) increase on last year thanks to the feds. Across all budgets there is $55b committed, which is 11 times the balance of Australia’s Emergency Response Fund ($4.8b in Dec 2021), while $11.6b in 2021-22 is 56 times the budget of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency.
The subsidies cost the Federal government more than it spent on public schools in the same year ($9.7b). Now *that’s* a scam … and we are yet to see the Budget.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Overpopulation
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It has now been 11 years since I wrote “Wilderness and Overpopulation” (Wilderness Watch Blog, March 2, 2011). A few readers took vitriolic issue with that essay, but I stand by it. Since then, the global human population has grown from about 6.9 to 7.9 billion, now increasing at roughly 75 million additional hominids each year. In the U.S. during the last 11 years, the population grew by about 20 million to 333 million today. Twenty million additional humans is roughly equal to the total populations of New York State or Florida. And although population growth in the U.S. has recently stagnated in the wake of Covid, it is likely that without a concerted effort and policy to stabilize and reduce our population, we’ll be back on track toward 400 million before long.
I am no demographer. My passion is wilderness and wildlife. Yet I’ve been alarmed about the growing human hoards since I first read “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich back in the late 1960’s. I am still alarmed, now more than ever, both because of our still-increasing numbers and the direct link between population growth and the destruction of wildlife and wilderness.
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Following the three driest months in California’s history, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued an executive order on Monday calling for stricter local conservation measures while proposing a ban on decorative turf irrigation.
The executive order calls on local water suppliers to shift to “Level 2” of their individual Water Shortage Contingency Plans, which involve taking preparatory actions for water shortage levels of up to 20 percent, the governor’s office said.
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More than half the world’s population faces water scarcity for at least one month every year. Meanwhile, some people have to deal with too much water, while others have access to only poor water quality. That’s billions of people living with drought in Africa and India, facing flood risks in Bangladesh or lacking clean water due to excessive fertilizer use in the United States, Brazil, China and India.
Climate change exacerbates global water insecurity because it contributes to more frequent and severe droughts, floods and extreme rainfall, accelerated glacier melt, rapid declines in groundwater and the deterioration of water quality. These water-related risks of climate change have negative repercussions for agriculture, energy production, water infrastructure and economic productivity, as well as human health, development and well-being around the world.
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Finance
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The White House is unveiling a new tax plan that would establish a minimum 20% tax rate on all U.S. households worth more than $100 million. “It’s high time that people who have made billions of dollars pay the same taxes … as people who are in service jobs, and this is the first step towards that,” says California Congressmember Ro Khanna. The Democratic lawmaker also talks about the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax, his bill aimed at curbing profiteering by oil companies.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday criticized President Joe Biden’s request for an $813.3 billion military budget in the next fiscal year as excessive, noting that the United States already spends more on national security than “the next 11 countries combined.”
“We do not need a massive increase in the defense budget,” Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement. “Now that the president has done his job, it is up to Congress to review it, pass the proposals that make sense, and improve upon it.”
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As Putin’s war shakes up the world economy, the Fed last week raised interest rates by a quarter point and penciled in six more increases by the end of the year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell says he’s ready to do whatever it takes to bring inflation down, including following the example of his predecessor Paul Volcker, who increased interest rates to 20 percent in 1981.
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Last year ProPublica, drawing on a trove of IRS data, gave the public its most extensive view ever of the taxes of the wealthiest Americans. The first article in the Secret IRS Files series put real numbers to a core truth about the U.S. tax system: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett can easily shield their fortunes from taxation by avoiding the sorts of income captured on a tax return.
A proposal released today by the Biden administration takes direct aim at this issue. The policy, if enacted, would, for a sliver of the very wealthiest, close that escape hatch. Vast increases in wealth would result in owing taxes.
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Two weeks later, the international aid organization Oxfam America released a report consistent with this finding, that millions of American workers continue to earn less than $15 an hour. People of color and particularly women of color are disproportionately impacted—as is always the case.
But, pro-corporate coverage paints a rosy picture about the U.S. economy—one that requires no intervention because things are apparently humming along just fine on their own.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Following the attack carried out by the hacker group “Anonymous” against Hungarian pro-government news sources on Monday, the Justice Minister is worried. But the freedom of the press has been an issue in the country for a while. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai
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On Sunday morning, Viktor Orbán started the day at state-owned Kossuth radio, where – among others – he spoke about the Russian-Ukrainian war, the sanctions against Russia, as well as the criticism he had received from the Ukrainians. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai
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While there are only a few days to go until the elections, the final campaign sprint is barely even perceptible: news of the war and economic fallout continues to drown out everything else. Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán concentrated on affairs related to the EU and NATO and traveled to Brussels, whereas Péter Márki-Zay took his campaign to Transylvania. Tibor Szanyi’s party cursed out a Democratic Coalition MP. Here’s the penultimate campaign week in five points. Translated by Dominic Spadacene
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What is certain is that, on that Saturday in 1922, leaders representing 73 militant political associations of workers founded the party: Astrojildo Pereira (journalist), Cristiano Cordeiro (lawyer), Joaquim Barbosa (tailor), Manuel Cendón (tailor), João da Costa Pimenta (printer), Luís Pérez (sweeper), Hemogêneo Fernandes da Silva (electrician), Abílio Nequete (barber) and José Elias da Silva (bricklayer). The research says that the meeting ended with everyone singing softly, for safety reasons, The International.
About Cristiano Cordeiro, it is great to remember an act at the Santa Isabel Theater, documented indirectly in popular music. In 1933, Cristiano Cordeiro launched on the stage of the theater the slogan “Trabalhador, ocupa teu posto” (Worker, occupy your post), which later served as inspiration for the composer Nelson Ferreira to compose the frevo “Coração, ocupa teu posto” (Heart, occupy your post). A success sung until today in the carnivals of Pernambuco:
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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have just finished a weeklong visit to former British colonies in the Caribbean. Their trip comes after Barbados cut ties to the monarchy and became a republic last year. During the so-called charm offensive to the British Commonwealth countries, the royals were met with protests calling for reparations for slavery. We speak with senior Jamaican Member of Parliament Lisa Hanna, who met with the royals during their visit and has critiqued the couple for not putting forward an action plan to redress the crimes of slavery committed by the British monarchy against the Jamaican people, adding that any British “condemnation [of slavery] without action is hollow.” Hanna outlines how Jamaica could swiftly break ties with the monarchy through referendum or a change in the Constitution.
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A U.S. federal judge on Monday found that former President Donald Trump and legal adviser John Eastman probably committed felony obstruction in their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The government watchdog group American Oversight said the ruling is a “clear call for accountability and further investigation of the attempt to subvert the election.”
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We’ve covered some of the difficulties Trump’s Truth Social is having getting users to actually use the platform, and the same appears to be true for the various other Trumpist Twitter wannabes like Parler and GETTR. NBC News has a somewhat hilarious story in which its reporters went to talk to “conservative influencers” to get their thoughts, and they all seem unenthusiastic about those other platforms, whining that they’re all just “echo chambers.”
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s actions have invited an impeachment inquiry into what he knew about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and how he acted upon that knowledge. Thomas has always been a controversial justice. During his more than 30 years on the high court, he has regularly faced criticism for abusing his position. Up to this point, the court’s longest-serving justice has avoided accountability. But Thomas’s scandalous approach to his responsibilities has caught up with him. E-mails reveal that his wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in efforts to overturn the 2020 president election in the weeks leading up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. That insurrection is the subject of a congressional inquiry that former president Donald Trump has tried at thwart at every turn. In January, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to block the release of presidential records to the House committee leading that investigation.1
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The arc of coverage of 2020 congressional redistricting went from speculation that Republicans would end up with a massive advantage—because they controlled significantly more state legislatures—to surprise that Democrats managed to gerrymander their way to roughly the same number of seats as Republicans. This result was deemed good news, as announced for instance in this news “analysis” from the New York Times (3/10/22): “A Potential Rarity in American Politics: A Fair Congressional Map.”
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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s foundation poured money into the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy over the past year, according to a report from Politico. The foundation’s close ties with the office raised ethics concerns with internal watchdogs.
Schmidt held a number of roles at Google and parent company Alphabet, including CEO, executive chairman, and technical advisor. He stepped down from that last role in 2020. Now, he sits on the boards and invests in tech companies, including a number focused on artificial intelligence. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directs science funding and helps steer AI policy — one of the reasons Rachel Wallace, then the office’s general counsel, raised concerns about his financial involvement, according to emails obtained by Politico.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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My tweet began to spread around the world. “Mehr Ironie geht nicht,” one user wrote above it. “La smentita si sta diffondendo molto più lentamente dello studio fallace,” another posted. I don’t speak German or Italian, but I could tell I’d struck a nerve. Retweets and likes gathered by the hundreds.
But then, wait a second—I was wrong. Within a few hours of my post, Kupferschmidt tweeted that he’d made a mistake. Later in the afternoon, he wrote a careful mea culpa and Science issued a correction. It seemed that Kupferschmidt had misinterpreted the work from Juul and Ugander: As a matter of fact, the MIT study hadn’t been debunked at all.
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Devereaux plays Europa Universalis and likes it. But the fact that video-game developers, rather than professional historians, were responsible for shaping so many young people’s understanding of history deserved greater examination, he thought. The games made by Paradox Interactive, the Swedish studio that produces Europa Universalis, are among the most popular strategy titles in the world. Millions of people own the games, which allow players to take control of a historical nation or individual and guide the course of history. The average Europa Universalis player spends hundreds of hours on it. Some spend thousands.
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Yet every single rural utility-scale wind and solar project needs local or state approval to get built, says Sarah Mills, who researches rural renewable energy at the University of Michigan. And she says it’s in those often-fractious discussions about approval that misinformation is sometimes halting and stalling the installation of the renewables the climate needs. “At the end of the day, if local governments are not setting rules that allow for the infrastructure to be sited, those policies cannot be achieved,” Mills says.
Misinformation gets mixed up in decisions over renewable projects
Last year, a Department of Energy study found that setback regulations now represent the single-greatest barrier to securing locations for wind projects in the U.S. Setbacks limit how close wind projects can be to buildings, and Mills says they often make sense to reduce things such as noise and “shadow flicker,” the moving shadows and strobing sunlight that turbines can cast onto buildings. But she says misinformation can fuel setbacks that are more stringent than needed and sometimes act as outright bans on renewable energy.
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But Fergen says that these same types of misleading and false posts about wind and solar energy pop up in a network of Facebook groups around the country, feeding a conflict between rural communities and energy developers.
Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says as resistance to wind and solar projects spreads on social media, the dangers of misinformation from these anti-renewable Facebook groups is growing.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Press freedom advocates on Monday called on the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin to end media censorship after what’s being described as the country’s last independent newspaper said it was shutting down for the duration of the invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia’s draconian censorship tactics must stop.”
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Dozens of prominent figures from the world of entertainment have come together to support hip hop artist and political campaigner Lowkey, after he was subject to a smear campaign and an attempt to remove his work from music streaming platform Spotify.
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In the second half of the show, we learn about the iconic, pathbreaking civil-rights activist, lawyer, clergy, and feminist, Pauli Murray (1910-1985), from Simki Kuznick, author of a newly-published Murray biography. That which Murray fought for foreshadowed and impacted many of the civil rights campaigns that continue to this day.
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It was a remarkable moment in the war in Europe: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a 90-minute-long Zoom interview on Sunday to four prominent journalists from Russia, the country invading his.
Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement notified the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview.”
Journalists based outside Russia published it anyway. Those still inside Russia did not. The episode laid bare the extraordinary, and partly successful, efforts at censorship being undertaken in Russia by President Vladimir V. Putin’s government as his bloody invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, along with Mr. Zelensky’s attempts to circumvent that censorship and reach the public directly.
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But lynchings over offenses to Islam, real or imagined, are far from new in Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death. Rights activists say lynch mobs exploit anti-blasphemy laws to take matters into their own hands.
In recent years these episodes have risen to an alarming level, with increasing cases of fatal violence.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The proposal looks simple enough. A huge portion of the regulations we all live by (such as fire safety codes, or the national electrical code) are initially written — by industry experts, government officials, and other volunteers — under the auspices of standards development organizations (SDOs). Federal, state, or municipal policymakers then review the codes and decide whether the standard is good broad rule. If so, it is adopted into law “by reference.” In other words, the law cites the code by name but doesn’t copy and paste the entire thing into law (useful when the code is long and detailed). For example, if a regulation requires compliance with a provision in the National Fire Safety Code, it might simply refer to that provision, rather than copying it in directly. But that doesn’t make compliance any less mandatory.
Currently, SDOs have to make such incorporated codes available to the public somehow, in keeping with the basic principle that everyone has a right to know the law that binds them. But the requirements are far out of date. For example, a hard copy of a standard that is incorporated into federal law by reference must be deposited with the National Archives in Washington, DC – not exactly an easily accessible location.
The main provision of the Pro Codes Act pretends to address this problem by requiring that
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It seems that each week another ridiculously unconstitutional “content moderation” bill pops up in another state. Beyond the fact that nearly all of these bills are preempted by federal law (and are unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment) it seems that state legislatures feel the need to score political points. And it’s not just one party. As we’ve detailed, Republican legislatures are pushing bills trying to limit the ability of websites to moderate, while Democratic legislatures are pushing bills to force companies to moderate more. Both are unconstitutional.
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The FBI owes its oversight — and the public the oversight serves — plenty of answers. But let’s set our expectations any higher than reality dictates. The FBI is not exactly a paradigm of complicity.
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During an interview with reporters last week, Indiana Senator Mike Braun went beyond the usual Republican line that decisions about abortion rights should be left up to the states. The question of interracial marriage, too, he said, should be left to the states to decide.
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Monopolies
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U.S. regulatory enforcement and punishment for companies that rip consumers off with sneaky fees is not what you’d call… consistent. For example, the telecom and cable industries have long exploited a wide array of bullshit fees to jack up advertised prices with only fleeting penalties. The same can be said for the banking, airline, hotel, and numerous other industries that happily nickel-and-dime users.
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The chairman of a congressional subcommittee has asked Apple and Google to help stop fraud against U.S. taxpayers on Telegram, a fast-growing messaging service distributed via their smartphone app stores. The request from the head of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis came after ProPublica reports last July and in January revealed how cybercriminals were using Telegram to sell and trade stolen identities and methods for filing fake unemployment insurance claims.
Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., who chairs the subcommittee (which is part of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform), cited ProPublica’s reporting in March 23 letters to the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The letters pointed out that enabling fraud against American taxpayers is inconsistent with Apple’s and Google’s policies for their respective app stores, which forbid apps that facilitate or promote illegal activities.
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Patents
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The highly uneven global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines is exacerbating deadly inequalities between—and within—countries, threatening to undermine socio-economic gains throughout the developing world, the United Nations warned Monday.
“The speed with which the world gets vaccinated in 2022 is critical to avoid more lost ground in contexts where progress is needed the most.”
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A group of current and former government officials from five nations on Monday implored world leaders to reject a reported U.S.- and European Union-led “compromise” proposal on lifting Covid-19 vaccines patent protections.
“Vaccine apartheid continues and it kills. It prolongs the pandemic, threatening lives—vaccinated as well as unvaccinated—all over the world.”
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Copyrights
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While finding Creative Commons images is difficult enough, it’s even harder to find videos you can legally use as your own. In fact, many videos can not be shared with just a simple copy and paste due to copyright protections and other rules. Even so, here are some of the best websites where you can find Creative Commons videos to be sure you’re sharing legally.
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Cox Communications believes that key information was held back during the 2019 piracy lawsuit filed by several record labels, which led to a $1 billion verdict in their favor. While the court recognizes that some evidence was created after the fact, it sees no reason for a do-over, concluding that the ISP already received a full and fair trial.
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A little over a week ago a number of Destiny content creators had DMCA notices filed against their videos on YouTube, claiming that they infringed copyright. Bungie denied having anything to do with the claims and promised to investigate. A copyright lawsuit filed in Washington now reveals that Bungie is serious about making an example of the culprits.
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Coodie Simmons has said that his four-and-a-half-hour, three-part documentary about the life and times of Kanye West was supposed to be a kind of hip-hop version of Hoop Dreams, the acclaimed 1994 documentary that chronicled the various social and economic obstacles facing two Black Chicago high schoolers as they strove to make it to the NBA. The first hour and a half of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, titled “Act I: Vision,” primes us for such a journey. At its opening, we meet a baby-faced West at the 1998 birthday party of Atlanta record producer Jermaine Dupri, seemingly happy just to be a plus-one. Simmons had heard about Kanye while covering Chicago hip-hop for his public-access cable show Channel Zero. The young producer’s name had become ubiquitous on the scene, and in West’s bid to surpass local renown and infiltrate the still relatively coastal mainstream rap world, Simmons saw a canny parallel to a high school hopeful trying to make it to the league.
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I’ll give Nintendo this much: the company certainly is an absolute master at enforcing copyright in the most extreme, pettiest manner possible. I’ve already had some fun comparing Nintendo to Disney, in that the way the company is handling shutting down older game stores and making those games no longer available in most places is akin to Disney’s long history of “vaulting” movies to control their availability. Combine that with Nintendo’s practice of attempting to take down absolutely every instance of fans sharing bits of its content, taking down game music that isn’t available anywhere else, and its killing off emulation sites so it can sell trash versions of old games, and you’re left with the impression that business success is entirely secondary to its desire for control.
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Reflecting on the trilogue deal, CC CEO Catherine Stihler stated,
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, Patents at 3:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Summary: This talk was uploaded 13 hours ago; the outline says: “This talk is titled “The state of software patents in 2022,” and was presented at LibrePlanet 2022 by Panos Alevropoulos. Panos is, among other things, volunteer member of the FSF Licensing & Compliance Lab, End Software Patents Wiki admin, Certified by Creative Commons. This talk is about software patents, and how they are legal instruments designed to curtail the freedom of developers for the sake of multinational companies’ interests.”
Licence: CC BY 4.0
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:40 am by Needs Sunlight
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