Smart TVs are smart enough to stream 4K movies and TV shows from Over the Top or OTT platforms. However, if you have high-quality 4K ripped movies or TV shows you want to watch, it may not play. Even if it manages to play, you might have issues with the audio.
We used an 8-year-old retired laptop that was lying around with a 100Mbps LAN port and converted it to a media server. And guess what, the 4K movies played flawlessly with surround sound audio on a TV over a Wi-Fi network.
Here's how you can achieve the same results by installing Plex Media Server on your old laptop or PC.
About a month ago, I suddenly had the urge to learn how to create my own GTK application. In a community poll, I asked my viewers if I should do this using Haskell, and a large portion of the community wanted me to do it in Python instead. So ultimately, I decided to do it both ways--once in Haskell, and then again in Python.
Considering the pace Valve has been pushing out Steam Deck Verified games anyone looking at this situation can see that something is going to go wrong and Valve is looking for your feedback to identify incorrectly verified games
I break down the most interesting features of Intel Arc dedicated graphics on laptops, and tackle some questions about Linux compatibility.
A Quick overview of KDE neon 20220210.
We just watched Revolution OS before the show, so we reflect on the audacity of their vision and the new revolution we see brewing.
The MirageOS Core Team is thrilled to announce the release of MirageOS 4.0. MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance, low-energy footprint applications across various hypervisor and embedded platforms. Since the first release of 2013, MirageOS has made steady progress towards deploying self-managed internet infrastructure. The project’s initial aim was to self-host as many services as possible to empower internet users to securely deploy infrastructure to own their data and take back control of their privacy. MirageOS can securely deploy static website hosting with “Let’s Encrypt” certificate provisioning and a secure SMTP stack with security extensions. MirageOS can also deploy decentralized communication infrastructure like Matrix, OpenVPN servers, and TLS tunnels to ensure data privacy or DNS(SEC) servers for better authentication.
A new Linux kernel patch from a Google engineer resolves a problem caused by a condition that many of us might quite like to experience – having too many NVMe drives.
The problem is caused by the relatively long time it takes to properly shut down a drive: apparently, as much as four-and-a-half seconds.
Remember Sun's X4500 storage server, originally codenamed Thumper? It was truly radical when it appeared: a 3U dual-processor server, but with a stonking 48 drive bays. These days Google has a bunch of boxes with a still-fairly-impressive 16 NVMe drives attached to each one. And when they have to reboot, they take a long time.
If you have a storage server with 16 drives, that's 72 seconds of wasted time hanging around every time it reboots. Hardly an eon, but still annoying – because it's totally unnecessary.
 This article explains all that you need to know about KernelCare. But before studying about KernelCare, let’s do a quick recap of the Linux kernel. It’ll help you understand KernelCare better. The Linux kernel is the core part of Linux OS. It resides in memory and prompts the CPU what to do.
Now let’s begin with today’s topic which is KernelCare. And if you’re a system administrator this article is going to present valuable information for you.
 Now backed by the latest and greatest FFmpeg 5.0 open-source multimedia framework, Shotcut 22.03.30 adds multi-threading support for all implicit video scaling, as well as for various video filters, including Blur: Box, Blur: Gaussian, Color Grading, Invert Colors, Mask: From File, Old Film: Grain, Old Film: Scratches, Old Film: Technocolor, Reflect, Sepia, Sketch, Spot Remover, Threshold, Vignette, and Wave.
While basic advice for compression is simple—enable it!—recordsize is a more challenging topic. Before we can begin discussing how to tune it, let’s run through a quick refresher on what recordsize actually means.
Traditionally, Ubuntu has always used orange and aubergine accent colors. If you want to add a different color theme without changing the Yaru theme, the option is provided with a third party theme called Yaru colors.
But this is changing with Ubuntu 22.04. Starting with the new upcoming LTS, you’ll be able to change the accent color of your Ubuntu desktop without any additional tool.
SciTE is an easy-to-use text editor that has many features for programming. Its footprint size and functionality make it perfect for installing on any system, even if you don’t have experience with Scintilla or GTK.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FlareGet on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, FlareGet is a popular open-source download manager and accelerator for Linux systems. It has some great features such as browser integration, threading, 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 the step-by-step installation of the FlareGet Download Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this article, we will discuss another popular command for the Linux/Unix platform. It is called 'du', which stands for "Disk Usage". It is a standard command used to estimate space usage (meaning, in the terminal we can find the exact size each directory and file takes up). There are multiple ways we can generate various types of output in Terminal using the 'du' command with various options. It is usually used by all System Administrators to find unwanted files, files with unused large sizes, or archive files that can be deleted/cleared in order to provide sufficient free space for servers.
My favorite and most used service for developers is the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). This is where I build syslog-ng packages first, before anywhere else. OBS is open source, highly flexible software to build software packages, and the instance at https://build.opensuse.org/ is free to use for anyone to build open source software. Best of all, it supports multiple architectures, including POWER.
I mentioned the Wordle craze, including the extant ports to the Commodore 64, in our KIMdle sorta-Wordle for the KIM-1. But the Commodore 64, and I suspect this was actually a PET game originally, had a five-letter word game before that. Jim Butterfield's Jotto isn't Wordle — it tells you merely how many letters matched — but it's undeniably an ancestor concept. Jotto appears in the Commodore 64 user's guide on page 145 and is believed to be public domain. It is reproduced in its entirety in this scanned image.
The openSUSE project has announced the adoption of a new code of conduct: "We hope that by having a clear and concise Code of Conduct for the project, the openSUSE Community can continue to grow and prosper in the years to come".
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.10.4 is generally available as of March 29, 2022.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
For businesses utilising public clouds, choosing an open source platform offers considerable advantages. Open source solutions can help reduce costs, provide access to the most leading-edge enterprise-grade features, and eliminate risks such as vendor lock-in, lack of support, or long-term security maintenance.
Just like any other applications, open source solutions must be kept up-to-date and secure. Furthermore, organisations with industry-specific regulatory requirements can only utilise those solutions that meet compliance and hardening demands. These are the challenges that Ubuntu Pro is designed to solve. Ubuntu is already the world’s most popular Linux distribution and the most widely used operating system across major public clouds thanks to its ease-of-use, performance, and stability – with each Ubuntu LTS release benefiting from up to 5 years of standard security maintenance. Ubuntu Pro goes a step further by extending security coverage to the entire collection of software packages that ships with Ubuntu for 10 years, while also providing certified components to run across multiple compliance regimes spanning federal government, finance, healthcare, and more.
Matter, which I introduced in the previous blog of this series, is a new smart-home standard championed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). It will certainly make a big splash, but widespread adoption will take time. While some companies will be able to update their devices to be Matter compatible, there are millions of devices in the field, and it’s likely that most cannot be upgraded. Companies that have already committed to another technology will face the decision of continuing to support their current devices, leaving them behind, or facing the increased costs of supporting both legacy devices and new Matter-compatible ones. Until Matter has proven itself as the new standard, this decision may not be clear-cut. Some companies may also see an advantage in retaining their proprietary technology, hoping their offerings are compelling enough to be a competitive advantage they can keep to themselves.
The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) recently announced a release in the delay of specification of Matter, the royalty-free connectivity standard suited for smart home devices. Formerly Project Connected Home over IP, or Project CHIP, Matter is an IPv6-based connectivity standard defining the application layer deployed on devices with Wi-Fi support, Thread, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Although the Matter specification is proprietary, i.e., licensed by the CSA, the code is open-source.
Citing additional tests and the Alliance’s Specification Validation Event to date, Matter’s SDK will be feature complete this spring, with Version 0.9 of the specification available to all Alliance members towards mid-year. Earlier in the year at CES 2022, Matter made great strides in staking a claim in what had, so far, appeared to be a melting pot of incompatible devices.
When there's a disagreement in open source projects, there's the potential for a fork. One set of developers disagrees with the direction of a project and creates a (often permanently) divergent version. This is the hard fork – and any open source project can be forked.
'Getting forked' is as bad as it sounds. Developers, users, and all other sorts of resources are split. New users might be confused which project is the canonical project.
This is a short article about 3 different tools I authored for my needs at Mozilla.
I worked on AMO for almost 4 years and created various libraries like pino-mozlog, pino-devtools or an ESLint plugin to name a few. These libraries have been created either to improve our developer experience or to fulfill some production requirements.
This isn’t the kind of projects I want to focus on in the rest of this article, though. Indeed, I also wrote “non-production” tools, i.e. some side projects to improve my day-to-day work. These tools have been extremely useful to me and, possibly, other individuals as well. I use most of them on a weekly basis and I maintain them on my own.
While the author suggests there’s more to math than “rigour and proofs”, I tangentially suggest there’s more to design than data and rationality. Design can be much richer when intuition and the intangible is factored into decision making. Too often, design is boiled down to what appears to be a material science: create something—anything really—put metrics in place to measure its success, then determine its ultimate value by purely numerical outcomes.
The first part of this series appeared back in 2018. It describes how you can use gnuplot to build a simplified GIS. I wasn't intending to do any more with this idea, but I was tinkering with animated map GIFs of Tasmania and realised that the gnuplot approach had some advantages. This post and the next one explain what I did. You don't need to refer to that 2018 post, since I'll repeat and update the information here.
In the English dictionary, to mutate means to have a new form. And so, a mutator, though not found in the English dictionary, means something that causes a change into a new form. A private variable is a field or property of a class in Java. There is no predefined method called mutator in Java. Instead, a mutator is a method in a class, and this method is meant to change the value of a private variable of the class. By convention, the programmer should begin the method name with “set”. So the method may be something like setAge(), setPrice(), setName(), etc.
Telecom giants are no strangers to helping governments spy on journalists, activists, and their own citizens. AT&T, for example, is effectively so bone-grafted to the NSA here in the States, you literally cannot physically tell where the government ends and the telecom giant begins.
Chief executive Borje Ekholm told a Swedish newspaper an internal probe started in 2019 had found serious failings by staff and contractors.
Money was paid to access areas in Iraq that were controlled by IS, he told Dagens Industri.
Shareholders in Swedish telecom giant Ericsson on Tuesday sanctioned the company's board and chief executive over its handling of a corruption scandal involving possible payments to the Islamic State group in Iraq.
Investors publicly rebuked Ericsson (ERICb.ST) Chief Executive Borje Ekholm and the telecom equipment maker's board on Tuesday over a scandal involving potential payments to Islamic State.
Ekholm's handling of an internal probe into Ericsson's operations in Iraq has come under scrutiny after the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said the company was in breach of a 2019 deferred prosecution agreement for failing to inform U.S. authorities of potential misconduct it had uncovered there.
One of the advantages of having been a blogger for over 17 years is that you start to get a sense of history and perspective. You see the same things (or similar things) pop up over and over again. Indeed, that’s one reason why I frequently say about antivaccine conspiracy theories in the age of COVID-19 that “everything old is new again” and “there is nothing new under the sun in antivaxland” (e.g., misusing and misrepresenting VAERS); none of the conspiracy theories that have popped up since COVID-19 hit and shocked and surprised my colleagues are new. I don’t want to dwell on that, because the current topic is more general (although certainly COVID-19 cranks are involved). I’m referring to attacks on evidence-based medicine (EBM) as an “illusion” or somehow hopelessly compromised, for whatever reason (most commonly, corruption by big pharma).
Scientists said that these cryovolcanoes -- numbering perhaps 10 or more -- stand anywhere from 1 kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) to 7 kilometers (4-1/2 miles) tall. Unlike Earth volcanoes that spew gases and molten rock, this dwarf planet's cryovolcanoes extrude large amounts of ice -- apparently frozen water rather than some other frozen material -- that may have the consistency of toothpaste, they said.
Worse than McCarthyism, which only targeted individual dissenters, today’s repressive measures invade the curriculum and the classroom and threaten to deprive students of the rigorous examination of real-world problems that citizens of a democratic society need. While these educational gag orders originally focused on K-12 education, colleges and universities have also come under attack. And professors are fighting back as never before.
Displaying an unprecedented solidarity, the academic community is mobilizing to confront what its members rightly perceive as an existential assault on their professional work and values. Faculty organizations, learned societies, even student groups are forming new coalitions and strengthening old ones as they engage in collective action to stem the tide of repressive legislation—and stiffen the spines of university administrators.
Arm says heterogeneous compute architectures – those with a mix of CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, and other processor types – pose a challenge for software developers, and greater multi-architecture support is needed to address this.
Specialized processing, as the chip designer refers to it, will likely succeed Moore's Law for driving innovation. System builders will focus on attributes such as performance, efficiency, and optimization for the task at hand rather than clock speed when combining CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, and other devices, Arm said.
But this specialized processing model upends business as usual for software developers, according to Bhumik Patel, Arm's Director for Software Ecosystem Development. He says in a blog post that the answer is to enable a frictionless experience for developers to achieve multi-architecture support for the software they code.
A malicious software command that immediately crippled tens of thousands of modems across Europe anchored the cyberattack on a satellite network used by Ukraine’s government and military just as Russia invaded, the satellite owner disclosed Wednesday.
The owner, U.S.-based Viasat, issued a statement providing details for the first time of how the most serious known cyberattack of the Russia-Ukraine war unfolded. The wide-ranging attack affected users from Poland to France, getting quick notice by knocking off remote access to thousands of wind turbines in central Europe.
The Luxembourg-based company, with offices in 18 countries worldwide, didn't mention Lapsus$ in its Wednesday announcement. It just stated that there had been "unauthorized access" to "a limited section of company's code repository," which was associated with "a very limited number of clients." The clients weren't named, but Globant didn't find "any evidence that other areas of our infrastructure systems or those of our clients were affected."
The company did not blame any particular entity for the breach, but the Lapsus$ group, which has been in the news recently, claimed on its Telegram channel on Wednesday that it has broken into Globant's servers and filched some 70GB of customer source code.
The Globant statement said: "According to our current analysis, the information that was accessed was limited to certain source code and project-related documentation for a very limited number of clients.
Right now one issue is the same one we had with attachment types, where we didn't know what sort of attachments our users got, both in legitimate email and in spam. Today we don't know what sorts of things are in the Microsoft Office files our users receive. How prevalent are macros, embedded OLE objects, macros with suspicious attributes, and so on? Since it seems unlikely we'll be able to get a Microsoft Office scanning tool (either open source or commercial) that gives us a carefully curated 'good' or 'bad' answer, we're going to have to work that out based on our usage patterns, and that means learning what the usage patterns are.
On March 25th the Belarus railway system was sabotaged (again) as part of the ongoing campaign by partisans to hamper Putins war effort. These attacks have been ongoing since at least earlier this year, when the Cyber Partisans (BCP) hacked the railway’s network and began trashing it. First in a ransomware attack, and then in subsequent attacks by wiping critical hardware.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a Private Industry Notification (PIN) to warn U.S. election and other state and local government officials about invoice-themed phishing emails that could be used to harvest officials’ login credentials.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (expat, firefox, httpd, openssl, and thunderbird), Debian (cacti), Fedora (kernel, rsh, unrealircd, and xen), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), openSUSE (apache2, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, openvpn, and protobuf), Oracle (openssl), Red Hat (httpd:2.4, kernel, kpatch-patch, and openssl), SUSE (apache2, java-1_7_1-ibm, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, openvpn, protobuf, and zlib), and Ubuntu (chromium-browser and paramiko).
Researchers Nir Ohfeld and Sagi Tzadik join The Hacker Mind to talk about their presentation at Black Hat Europe 2021 on the ChaosDB vulnerability. It’s about how they started with a deliberately misconfigured version of CosmosDB and ended up with complete unrestricted access to the accounts and the databases of thousands of Microsoft Azure customers.
Google has released Chrome version 100.0.4896.60 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned federal agencies about an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability in Google’s Chrome browser.
Tracked as CVE-2022-1096, the high-severity security hole was identified in Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and impacts all Chromium-based browsers.
Google issued an emergency fix for this bug on Friday, and Microsoft followed suit the next day, updating its Chromium-based Edge browser.
Apple has previously found itself in the hot seat over cyberstalking involving its AirTags trackers.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Such portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda.
FBI agents have raided a Hazel Park home while investigating threats to the judge and defense lawyers in the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping conspiracy trial, The Detroit News has learned.
Agents are investigating threats directed at several people, including Chief U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker and defense lawyers Josh Blanchard and Christopher Gibbons, according to two sources familiar with the investigation who were not authorized to speak publicly about the probe. Jonker is presiding over the trial and the attorneys represent accused plot ringleaders Barry Croft and Adam Fox, respectively.
Jonker is presiding over the Grand Rapids trial of accused plot ringleaders Barry Croft and Adam Fox, and Blanchard and Gibbons are their attorneys.
A law enforcement official confirmed to NBC News that it was Jonker, Blanchard and Gibbons who received threats.
El Shafee Elsheikh, a British citizen, is charged with involvement in the killings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.
The documents reported by The Washington Post and CBS reflect a call that Trump had with then-Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at 11:06 a.m., with the next call listed at 6:54 p.m. through the White House switchboard to get Trump aide Dan Scavino on the phone.
Some details of that day's phone calls listed in the log — and some of those missing from the log — have also been previously reported.
The clip of Trump asking Putin for help was published by a news website founded by John Solomon, a pro-Trump journalist whose previous coverage about the Bidens' ties to Ukraine has been discredited. He told CNN that the interview was taped on Monday at Mar-a-Lago.
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.
Translation: In two hours, it will be exactly two years since Timothy Bonnet was stabbed to death in the street by Afghan migrant Sultan Marmed Niazi “because he did not read the Quran”.
Two terrorists killed in an encounter between terrorists and security forces at Rainawari area in Central Kashmir's Srinagar district have been identified as Rayees Ahmad Bhat and Hilal Ahmad Rah, officials said on Wednesday.
Police said Rayees Ahmad Bhat had been a journalist previously running an online news portal while Hilal Ahmad Rah, a categorised terrorist, belonged to Bijbehara in South Kashmir.
Two senior British judges resigned from Hong Kong's highest court on Wednesday as part of a broader British rebuke of the territory's claim that its courts are independent of political interference.
In a prepared statement released by Lord Robert Reed and his colleague Lord Patrick Hodge, the judges cited the territory's Beijing-imposed National Security Law (NSL) as central to their decision, which followed discussions with Dominic Raab, the U.K. lord chancellor and justice secretary.
The changes are taking different forms — from cardboard to six-pack rings made with leftover barley straw. While the transitions can be a step toward sustainability, some experts say that simply switching to different packaging material could be the wrong solution or not enough, and that more plastic needs to be recycled and remade.
One of the largest and fastest-growing oil production sites in the US is emitting far more methane than previously measured. It’s well known that oil and natural-gas production is a significant source of the powerful greenhouse gas: methane that is trapped underground leaks out from wells and pipelines, and it can also be released intentionally through venting and flaring, or burning. But an aerial survey of the Permian Basin in New Mexico revealed more leakage than even the highest estimates had suggested to date.
Russia had demanded "unfriendly" countries pay for its gas in roubles from 31 March, but the EU, which mainly pays in euros, rejected the idea.
Moscow later appeared to soften its stance, saying on Wednesday rouble payments would be introduced gradually.
But Germany and Austria have taken the first steps towards gas rationing
The executive order was an excellent first step in the right direction. It required the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with industry and other partners, to develop a new framework to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain. As a direct response, in February 2022, NIST published Recommended Criteria for Cybersecurity Labeling of Consumer IoT Products and Recommended Criteria for Cybersecurity Labeling of Consumer Software. The publications recommended cybersecurity labeling for consumer software and consumer internet connected devices that will give the public a clear indication of whether a device or software meets cybersecurity criteria.
As reported by The Washington Post, Meta has paid a “right of center” marketing firm, Targeted Victory, to lead a campaign that has included placing op-eds and letters to the editor in local papers to promote anti-TikTok sentiment, especially when it comes to children using the app.
Targeted Victory allegedly worked with local operatives to promote the negative coverage around purported trends on TikTok harming children to compel lawmakers to take action; the firm also sought to promote positive coverage about Meta and use the anti-TikTok pieces to deflect from government antitrust and privacy concerns leveled against the Facebook parent company, according to the Post‘s reporting.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been paying one of the most prominent Republican consulting firms to run a nationwide campaign to sow distrust about one of the company’s top competitors, TikTok, according to a new report from The Washington Post on Wednesday.
The firm, Targeted Victory, reportedly planted op-eds and letters to the editor in major local and regional newspapers across the country. A Targeted Victory director told staff that the firm needed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to emails obtained by The Post.
In a statement to the Washington Post, Mr Trump said that he had never heard of the term "burner phone" and had no idea what it was.
His assertion was quickly contradicted by John Bolton, the president's former national security advisor, who told CBS News that he and Mr Trump had spoken in the past of how burner phones could allow people to avoid having their calls scrutinised.
As China continues to assert its economic might, it is using the global social media ecosystem to expand its already formidable influence. The country has quietly built a network of social media personalities who parrot the government’s perspective in posts seen by hundreds of thousands of people, operating in virtual lockstep as they promote China’s virtues, deflect international criticism of its human rights abuses, and advance Beijing’s talking points on world affairs like Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Some of China’s state-affiliated reporters have posited themselves as trendy Instagram influencers or bloggers. The country has also hired firms to recruit influencers to deliver carefully crafted messages that boost its image to social media users.
The worldwide campaign of support for hip hop artist and political campaigner Lowkey is growing. Following the publication of Monday’s open letter backing the British-Iraqi rapper’s right to freedom of speech, more than 100 academics, journalists and other public figures have signed a letter of public support, denouncing what they see as a “coordinated smear campaign to demonize, defame and deplatform him.”
In Marvel news, even with the TV-MA Netflix Marvel shows on Disney Plus, it appears there's censorship happening on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. [...]
Burundi's media authority announced Wednesday that it would lift a nationwide ban on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), nearly three years after the broadcaster was forced to stop operating in the East African country.
The National Communication Council withdrew the license for the broadcasting giant in 2019, accusing it of breaching press laws and unprofessional conduct.
Public school districts in multiple U.S. states are grappling with — and, in some cases, acquiescing to — demands by small but vocal groups of parents to rid school libraries of certain books about sexual minorities and racism in America. The desire of some parents to shield students from what they regard as immoral, sexually explicit or racially contentious content is drawing a sharp reaction from defenders of the free flow of ideas and information.
"At this time we are looking into the matter. While we cannot comment on individuals, this will be reviewed in line with our policies and procedures and the appropriate robust action taken as necessary."
The killings sent a chilling message to secular bloggers in Bangladesh, where a bitter cultural battle has raged over whether the country is, or should be, a Muslim state.
Here is a longer than usual blog-post to share with you what I have in mind since the start 2022 and what I have been working on. All started after I have realized that many part of Pepper&Carrot were still designed for Internet as it was when I started the project in 2014 and forgot to evolve and embrace the new rules of the Internet as set by the giant proprietary social-medias of 2022. I'll try to explain at first my diagnosis, and then explain how I plan to adapt and changes I'll put into action.
From 2026, electronic legal transactions should be possible completely without paper, but this could cause problems for defendants in custody.
Apple and Facebook parent company Meta turned over user data last year to [frauds] pretending to be law enforcement officials, Bloomberg reported, citing three people familiar with the matter.
The companies provided user details such as addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses in mid-2021 to the [frauds], sources told Bloomberg. The [frauds] had requested the information via forged "emergency data requests," which do not require court approval like typical warrants or subpoenas do.
It's unclear how much data was turned over.
Iran has once again denied women entry to a soccer stadium to watch an international match, leaving hundreds of ticketed fans locked out, Iranian media said Wednesday.
The World Cup qualifier against Lebanon on Tuesday night, won 2-0 by Iran, was played at the Imam Reza stadium in the northeastern city of Mashhad.
Police won't release body cam footage of disputed incident for 45 days. Kaun Green may have saved some lives. When a brawl broke out in a San Jose, California, restaurant last weekend, the 20-year-old Contra Costa City College student and football player was able to get a gun away from one of the men who had started the fight.
For his good deed, Green wound up being shot multiple times by local police.
The Joint Visit Report from HART, the International Organisation for Peace Building and Social Justice UK (PSJ-UK) and Christian Solidarity International (CSI) said that the perpetrators of these attacks "are rarely, if ever, brought to justice".
In her foreword to the report, "Breaking Point in central Nigeria? Terror and Mass Displacement in the Middle Belt", Baroness Cox said she had visited Nigeria many times, but during her visit earlier this month she was advised for the first time to fly from the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to Jos, the capital of the Plateau state, rather than travel by road.
This was "due to the increased frequency of killings and kidnappings – another indication that security is worsening in central states".
The latest target of Iran’s compulsory hijab law: a statue recently installed on a street in Gorgan, in the northeast of the country. On March 25, city officials removed the sculpture because of a woman whose veil and dress was deemed inappropriate.
Tunisian authorities should immediately scrap plans for new restrictions on civil society organizations, 13 Tunisian and international rights groups said today.Those plans, if carried out, would reverse a major gain for freedom of association following the country’s 2011 revolution. They would constitute another blow to human rights safeguards by President Kais Saied since his July 2021 power grab.“Tunisians know from experience the dangers that restrictive laws can pose to civil society and public debate,” said Amna Guellali, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International. “During the deeply repressive Ben Ali era, the authorities used restrictive regulations on associations and cumbersome administrative procedures as key tools to smother dissent.” A draft law to regulate civil society organizations was recently leaked. It would give government authorities overly broad powers and discretion to interfere with the way civil society organizations are formed, their functions and operations, their funding, and their ability to speak publicly about their work and to express their views.In a videotaped speech on February 24, President Saied accused civil society organizations of serving foreign interests and trying to meddle in Tunisian politics, and said he intended to ban all funding for such groups from abroad.“In the 10 years since Ben Ali’s ouster, nongovernmental organizations in Tunisia have played a crucial role in providing essential services to the public and holding the government accountable,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Their work should be promoted and protected rather than threatened.”Under Decree-Law 2011-88, both Tunisians and resident foreigners may freely establish civil society organizations, carry out a broad range of activities, lobby the authorities regarding laws and policies, speak publicly about their work and opinions, and receive foreign funding without government authorization.The authorities have not formally confirmed that they are amending the existing law, nor have they released a draft law, and it remains unclear whether it has been modified since being leaked. Draft laws in Tunisia have not been made public or subject to formal debate by parliament since President Saied suspended the body on July 25, 2021. Under a presidential decree issued on September 22, 2021, all laws are currently enacted as decree-laws issued by the president.
In a small but notable change, digital media providers with “reader” apps in Apple’s App Store — such as Netflix and Spotify — will now be able to provide links in their iOS apps to let customers sign up for and manage accounts on the companies’ own websites.
Previously, Apple prohibited app developers from including any links to account sign-up pages. For purchases made within the app itself, Apple will still require developers to use Apple’s in-app payment system — under which Apple takes a 30% cut of subscriptions in year one, with that dropping to 15% starting in the second year. (Netflix and Spotify, among others, do not allow such in-app payments.)
This emphasis on competition refers back to the simple fact that as content (rather than service) providers, legacy publishers currently enjoy monopolies on their content, as, e.g., the European Commission has long recognized: In at least two market analyses, one dating as far back as 2003 and one from 2015, the EC acknowledges the lack of a genuine market due to the lack of substitutability: [...]
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