Buzzword games?
They keep making up new terms
Summary: European software patents are increasingly being granted by the EPO; grant rate grew five-fold under Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos wants to take this much further, in effect inviting far worse applications and granting monopolies regardless
Series parts:
The current grant rate at the EPO is around 69% (2020). Historically, grant rates have been subject to significant fluctuation and they also vary widely across technical fields. Source: Haseltine Lake Kempner.
Summary: EPO management is trying to grant a lot of software patents to make up for the collapse in patent grants overall; this necessarily means a profound decline in compliance with the European Patent Convention, or EPC
The overall “grant rate” at the EPO is the ratio of granted patents to applications averaged across all technical fields. This currently stands at around 69% (based on the published data for 2020).
Historically, EPO grant rates have been subject to significant fluctuation but have tended to hover somewhere between 55% and 65%.
At one point during the 1990s the grant rate rose to a peak of 72% (1997) before dropping back closer to the 60% mark during the early years of the new millennium.
“At one point during the 1990s the grant rate rose to a peak of 72% (1997) before dropping back closer to the 60% mark during the early years of the new millennium.”In 2007, under the presidency of Alison Brimelow, the EPO was reportedly “faced with public perception that the barrier to patenting is too low”. This led to the initiation of a process of “strategic renewal” aimed at “raising the bar on patent quality”. (warning: epo.org link)
As a result of Brimelow’s “raising the bar” initiative, grant rates dropped to a historic low in 2009 – 42% according to official EPO figures from 2016 or 44% according to other sources.
According to official EPO figures, the grant rate started to rise again slightly under Benoît Battistelli from 2010 onwards, coming back close to the 50% mark in 2012, where it remained for a number of years thereafter.
Official EPO grant rate figures between 2006 and 2015 (compiled in 2016).
After 2015, the grant rate began to rise again, beginning with the “unprecedented surge” of 2016. Since then it has continued its upward trend, reaching the 69% mark in 2020.
Of course it needs to be borne in mind that the overall grant rate only provides a limited amount of information because it is an “average” figure calculated across all technical fields.
“As we shall see in a later part of the series, one director recently saw fit to point out to his subordinates that grant rates of 99.6% are par for the course in some fields (predominantly in the mechanical sector).”In other words, it conceals the fact that grant rates vary widely across technical fields.
As we shall see in a later part of the series, one director recently saw fit to point out to his subordinates that grant rates of 99.6% are par for the course in some fields (predominantly in the mechanical sector).
Other areas have significantly lower grant rates. For example in 2020, it was reported (warning: epo.org link) that the grant rate in the Biotech sector was around 30%.
Low grant rates are also typical for many areas within the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) sector.
In a puff-piece about “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) published in 2021, IAM reported [PDF] that the number of grants in the this area (CPC class G06N) was increasing but remained significantly lower than in other fields:
The 40% grant rate for AI (G06N) applications in 2020 [is] well behind the EPO’s overall 69% grant rate in the same year, while the 16% refusal rate in 2020 was far higher than the overall 4% EPO refusal rate.
An area of ICT with even lower grant rates is the one covering computer-implemented business and administrative methods (CPC class G06Q), or so-called “business related inventions” as they are referred to at the Japanese PTO.
In book entitled “Patent Law for Computer Scientists: Steps to Protect Computer-Implemented Inventions”, authored by EPO insiders Daniel Closa, Alex Gardiner, Falk Giemsa, Jörg Machek, the grant rate in this area was reported to be around 7% at the time of publication in 2010.
In 2010, EPO insiders Closa, Gardiner, Giemsa and Machek reported on grant rates of around 7% in the area of computer-implemented business and administrative methods (G06Q).
According to the official EPO statistics for “IT methods for management”, even lower grant rates prevailed during the period between 2012 and 2015.
During this time the grant rate remained relatively stable, hovering somewhere around the 2% mark.
In the wake of Battistelli’s “unprecedented surge” of 2016, grant rates in this area rose significantly between 2016 and 2020, reaching a peak of just over 10% in 2020. The latest figures for 2021 indicate that the grant rate remains in the vicinity of the 10% mark.
“During this time the grant rate remained relatively stable, hovering somewhere around the 2% mark.”The point here is that, notwithstanding the “surge” from 2016 onwards, grant rates for G06Q still remain at a very low level compared to the EPO’s overall grant rate of 69%.
However, rumours currently circulating inside the EPO indicate that things may be about to change dramatically in this area.
Despite a significant “surge” from 2016 onwards, grant rates in the G06Q area remain quite low, currently around 10%. However, rumours on the EPO grapevine suggest that this could be about to change dramatically.
In the earlier parts of the present series it was explained how EPO management is currently faced with a deflating “grant bubble”, a development which threatens future cash-flow from the lucrative EPOnian “Dukatenesel”.
EPO management thus has a demonstrable “vested interest” in trying to maintain a high level of grants.
“Under these circumstances, it is not at all surprising that Team Campinos is being forced to explore alternative strategies for propping up the “grant bubble” created by Battistelli.”However, there are limits to the management’s ability to squeeze more “products” out of an already “sweated” workforce.
Under these circumstances, it is not at all surprising that Team Campinos is being forced to explore alternative strategies for propping up the “grant bubble” created by Battistelli.
One idea which has been touted in management circles is to push for a “harmonisation” of grant rates across different technical fields. It goes without saying that the “hidden agenda” here is a push for “upward harmonisation” in areas which historically have low grant rates. A particular focus of attention in this regard is the ICT sector.
The managerial thinking on this score is that, if examiners working in such areas could be “persuaded” to issue less refusals and more grants, this could help to prop up flagging grant numbers.
So far the desire for increased “harmonisation” of grant rates has remained an unfulfilled managerial fantasy.
However, certain personnel changes connected with an EPO-wide “reorganisation” in April of this year [PDF], suggest that efforts are now afoot to transform this managerial “fantasy” into reality.
“So far the desire for increased “harmonisation” of grant rates has remained an unfulfilled managerial fantasy.”More precisely, in the context of the EPO’s latest internal “reorganisation”, the three “Chief Operating Officers” (COOs) responsible for different technical sectors within the Patent Examination Directorate DG1 were replaced by a single COO with global responsibility for all DG1 examination “Operations”.
Previously, examination directorates were grouped into three main technical sectors – Mechatronics & Mobility, Healthcare, Biotechnology & Chemistry and Information & Communication Technology (ICT) – with a separate COO in charge of each sector.
Now there is a single COO who is responsible for all technical sectors from “Agri-Food”, through “Mobility and Space Technologies”, “Electronics and Physics” to “Materials and Production”.
BEFORE
Previously there were three COOs, each in charge of a distinct technical sector.
AFTER
Now there is only a single COO with global responsibility for all sectors.
According to EPO insiders, this is a clear sign that management is gearing up for a concerted drive towards increased “harmonisation” across disparate technical fields.
Reliable sources are predicting a managerial-driven “push” for an increased grant rate which will target selected areas that are perceived as “under-performing” – that is to say, “below average” when it comes to generating national renewal fee cash-flow via granted patents.
The ICT sector is rumoured to be one of the main targets of this managerial initiative, in particular the area of computer-implemented “business and administrative methods” (CPC class G06Q).
In the upcoming parts we will take a closer look at some of the leading protagonists in this affair, starting with the EPO’s new “Chief Operating Officer Operations”. █
This post is not a tutorial or a walkthrough or comprehensive introduction or anything else that would probably be beneficial or helpful to those you reading it.
Instead, it’s a bit of a waffle.
I’ve just spent a few hours playing with something very cool on my over-powered and under-used Acer Chromebook Spin 13. I’ve scratched an itch I’ve had for the longest time and it’s so satisfying. So, a bit like when I resurrected an ancient Chromebook, I want to tell someone about it — but this time without any weird spooky gifs
A Linux distribution (distro) is an operating system based on the Linux kernel.
Operating systems require many programs other than the kernel to be functional, and Linux distributions typically rely on tools released by the GNU Project.
GNU founder Richard Stallman has long contended that Linux distros should be referred to as GNU/Linux systems.
However, his suggestion never caught on, and “Linux” remains the widely-used shorthand for these operating systems.
Linux distros are attractive because they are free to use, open-source, and often have lower hardware requirements.
Many Linux distros also allow users to preview the operating system by booting it from a USB drive before committing to installing it.
Here are some of the most lightweight Linux distributions that could breathe life into even some of the oldest laptops.
Google is rolling out ChromeOS Flex as an enterprise option to replace operating systems on old Macs and PCs, letting users turn their aging hardware into Chromebooks.
[....]
With ChromeOS Flex, Google hopes to help businesses keep older computers around for longer. The lightweight operating system is designed to work well on older hardware to extend the life of a product, which can lead to reduced e-waste.
The OS can be quickly deployed via a USB stick or over a network connection. Systems running ChromeOS Flex can be managed via a Chrome Enterprise Upgrade using the Google Admin Console.
Google has approved 295 devices so far for ChromeOS Flex. However, it can be installed on other hardware, but non-certified hardware may run into performance issues.
People are looking for shortcuts in aspects of life, and there is no exception while operating computers. Shortcuts are usually applied by the keyboard, which saves more time for inputting commands in another way. We are familiar with keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac computers that help our everyday tasks easier and faster. Similarly, you can use keyboard shortcuts on Chrome OS. A few Windows reliable keyboard shortcuts can work on Chrome OS, but there some many commands set differently here. We have listed 30 essential Chromebook keyboard shortcuts to navigate better and operate Chrome OS.
Learn about Chrome OS keyboard shortcuts for text editing, taking a screenshot, faster lock screen, web browsing, and more to produce your work more quickly. So bookmark this keyboard shortcut ultimate guide to decreasing cumbersome tasks of moving the mouse and increasing your productivity.
The company reported earlier this month that it is working on patches for the Meteor Lake graphics driver inside the unreleased Linux 5.20 kernel. Readers will remember that Meteor Lake is the successor to Raptor Lake, which will be released later this year.
AMD is reported to publish the last feature updates planned for the AMDGPU and AMDKFD drivers to the DRM-Next for Linux 5.20 to prepare for RDNA 3′s release. The merge window will open later this month, so companies such as AMD and the recently reported Intel additions are being finalized to prepare new generations of graphics for the two tech giants.
[...]
The Linux AMD pull updates also saw the integration of DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST), numerous audio patches, and the modification of the GART size on recent APUs to add Scatter and Gather display support. Finally, AMD also integrated the querying of the GFXOFF status for VanGogh series APUs, enhanced buffer object domain pinning, and a few AMDKFD modifications.
This article features four quick ways to fix the everlasting Laptop brightness problem in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu plus most of the Linux distributions always had issues with Laptop brightness. The default hardware controllers never in the Laptop keyboard worked most of the time after a fresh install.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx Web Server on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx (short for Engine X) is a free and open-source web server that serves as a reverse proxy, HTTP load balancer, and email proxy for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP. Thanks to its ability to handle massive numbers of connections, it is the preferred web server of many websites that deal with high traffic.
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 Nginx web server on Rocky Linux. 9.
Samba is a fantastic tool; with it, Linux desktops, laptops, and servers can host Windows/Mac OS compatible file shares. This guide will show you how to install and configure Samba on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Note: this guide assumes you are using Debian 11. However, the instructions should be the same if you use Debian 10 or older. Feel free to follow along.
Sound does not work in your Ubuntu 22.04, and happen to have Everest ESSX8336 sound card in your machine? This tutorial may help!
ESSX8336 is one of the common used chips in recent laptops and tablets, such as Huawei Matebook D14~16, Gemini Lake laptop, and Chuwi Hi10X tablet. But, the current Linux Kernel does not support this sound card, though there seems to have patches (here and here) for it.
Until Linux Kernel officially adds the device support, you may build Kernel manually with the patch. Or use yangxiaohua’s custom kernel files to fix the issue.
Cinnamon is a desktop environment for the Linux operating system that offers advanced features and a traditional user interface. It is available for download from the Cinnamon website. It is based on the GNOME desktop environment and includes a number of features that make it more user–friendly and customizable than other desktop environments.
A desktop environment’s importance is tuning an OS to suit a user’s needs. From accessing the menu, managing applications, selecting folders, performing a search, and opening and closing a program.
So, an environment helps to efficiently manage our files and apps, keeping our desktop organized and enabling the user to incorporate less effort and time to navigate the desktop.
This article will look at how we can install the Cinnamon environment on a Debian 11 OS. There are three ways we can install a Cinnamon desktop environment on Debian.
Getting another IP address has many advantages. If you have many IP addresses, you can operate multiple apps in just a single port. Running apps can sometimes be conflicting, especially if they are tied to one IP address. This way, you can avoid this hassle and access them with ease.
If you’re having problems with web content servers, you might want to address this through a reverse proxy. This particular server places the content in other locations under one port.
This guide is about how to install and configure Logstash 8 on Ubuntu/Debian as a continuation of our guide on how to setup Elastic Stack 8. We have already covered the installation of Elasticsearch and Kibana.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Emacs Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU Emacs is a programmable text editor. It is a very comprehensive and platform-independent editor that can be expanded with its own Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. This makes Emacs highly extensible and users can add new functionality by writing their own Emacs Lisp code or installing packages that add new features.
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 Emacs Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Want to secure remote access to a private network? In this series of technical posts, we will share step-by-step instructions to create a Linux bastion host and create an audit trail by logging SSH commands.
System76 released the Pop OS 22.04 LTS on April 25, 2022. We unwrap the new features and updates in this post.
System76’s POP OS is based on Ubuntu releases, and the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release is just released. Following the release schedule, the Pop OS 22.04 is now available for download and upgrade. You can now do some hands-on and find out the new features.
Smart locks are a highly convenient way to secure a house, and they can have their number of connectivity options expanded even further by connecting them to an IoT home assistant service such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.
Jithin Sanal’s project uses Amazon’s Alexa skill to automatically secure a custom door locking mechanism without the need for Bluetooth or a fingerprint. It is based around a Nano RP2040 Connect, and due to its onboard connectivity suite, can talk with the Arduino Cloud. Other than the Nano, Sanal designed a simple PCB with pads for a buzzer, voltage regulator, and several LEDs for monitoring its current status. The circuit also includes a relay that applies power to a solenoid which acts as a deadbolt when power is applied.
CANduino v3 is the third revision of MassiveButDynamic’s CAN bus board with Arduino Nano form factor based on Microchip ATmega168PA 8-bit AVR microcontroller, Microchip MCP2515 CAN controller with an SPI interface, and Microchip MCP2551 CAN transceiver suitable for 12V and 24V systems.
The CANDuino v3 board is now slightly narrower in order to give access to two rows on each side when installed on a breadboard, comes with a USB Type-C port to reduce the number of cables needed, and the CAN bus function can be deactivated via a jumper in order to use the CANduino as a normal Arduino Nano.
A big chunk of Fuchsia-related code has been removed from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) this week, but Google’s two operating systems are still set to have an intertwining relationship.
In its most public form, Google’s in-house operating system, Fuchsia, powers two of the company’s smart displays, the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max. But having watched it develop over the last few years, we know that Google has much larger ambitions for the Fuchsia project.
Easily the most ambitious of these is a clear intention for some Fuchsia devices to be able to run apps from other operating systems like Android and Linux. This could — in theory! — allow a Fuchsia-powered device to seamlessly replace a Chromebook or Android phone, keeping older apps running as normal.
There are a few ways to achieve that goal, one of Google’s earliest attempts was to run a full instance of the Android operating system in a virtual machine. This is how Chrome OS and Google Play Games for PC bring support for Android apps, but it comes with some potential performance drawbacks.
GNU rush version 2.3 is available for download. This is a bug-fixing release.
This is the first major release of the INN news server package since 2015. It incorporates tons of work on just about every part of INN, ranging from a brand new overview backend contributed by Bo Lindbergh through Cancel-Lock support contributed by Julien ÉLIE to numerous smaller changes in configuration files, protocol support, and overall simplification.
Well GSoC’22 coding period actually started from 13th June, 2022, but at the same time my end semester exams started too. What a time to give exams ! Well because of that I had to take 2 weeks of break from my project. During community bonding period, I gathered resources and jot them down at one place, so as soon as my exams were over, I would get back to my project easily.
During community bonding period, I went through all the content written on the site and made a rough draft of FAQs section. I also checked out the images which we are supposed to include in the website to make the pages more relevant. Changed a few CSS styles, updated outdated packages and fixed a few accessibility errors.
Currently I am developing a form for the website which allows users to easily create profiles and add themselves to the website. Since the site is based on Jekyll, a static site generator, the challenge here was how to make it easier for the newcomers to add themselves easily and save the fuss of navigating through the file system, make merge requests according to content formatting standards, required fields and all sorts of stuff. They might even need to spin-up the site locally, to ensure the content looks right.
We were using the mailman2 instance provided by Dreamhost for many years as the mailing list for dgplug. But, over the years many participants had trouble with receiving emails. In the last few years, most emails were landing in spam.
The 1.62.1 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for July 19. Release notes can be found here.
A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, but web-based approaches are in the running, and of course there’s always the temptation to just build a new one. And every couple or months or so, a post appears with a new GUI toolkit.
This post is something of a sequel to Rust 2020: GUI and community. I hope to offer a clear-eyed survey of the current state of affairs, and suggestions for how to improve it. It also includes some lessons so far from Druid.
The piece is largely about Rust, but Raph Levien’s blog post about Rust GUI toolkits contains some of the most thoughtful writings on GUI toolkits that I’ve seen in a while, regardless of language. Recommended.
Nestled among the impressive domes and spires of Yale University is the simple office of Daniel Spielman. His shelves are lined with tall black notebooks, containing decades of handwritten notes, and against a wall sits a large, comfortable couch that looks particularly well used.
“I’m sort of built for sitting still and thinking,” he admitted.
What he thinks about, amid the gothic grandeur of the campus, is a slightly more modern topic: computer science. And over his career, Spielman has produced a slew of influential results, although as he describes it, failure has been his most common outcome. “The key point is you have to enjoy the process of working,” he said. “As long as I enjoy that process, then it’s OK — as long as there’s success once in a while.”
Tiny robots made of metallic powder stuck to plastic tape and controlled by magnetic fields could one day crawl inside internal organs and repair injuries
Me not being a “real person” then, I couldn’t agree more.
In my humble opinion paying cash is a nice puzzle piece of resistance. I routinely pay cash for almost everything, that I buy locally. I have bought a number of fairly expensive things (for my personal definition of fairly expensive, that is) and payed several of them cash, e.g. a new motorcycle, an old car, a vinyl turntable plus amplifier and speakers. Fortunately none of those vendors objected to cash. The point is: paying cash does to my knowledge not neccesarily produce a digital record of who pays how much for what to whom and where. Even more so, if this is a second hand deal from a private person. The authorities do not need to know, whether I spend my cash on more or rather less questionable things. The assumption always seems to be “more questionable things”, like weapons, hard drugs and child porn. Well, I don’t. And I estimate more than 95% of folks don’t. But of course, if you jail them all, the questionable 5% will be with them. Don’t get caught by this flawed reasoning!
Arduino libraries are particularly egregious when it comes to coupling. The SPI code is mixed in with the device logic. I’m also lukewarm to the “abstract interfaces” approach. People tend to overdo the C++-isms wrt classes, so you end up with a lot of “onion skins” (you peel back one layer of the onion only to reveal another, with the result that you end up confused and crying. As some wag put it: you can solve every problem in computing by adding a layer of abstraction, except for the problem of having too many layers of abstraction).
[...]
If you look at the standard C library, it is remarkable that the libraries have little coupling. That’s not 100% accurate, as under the hood print functions might need memory allocations. What I do when writing the equivalent functions for mcus I try to not use any memory allocations at all. If you use mallocs, then you are effectively saying that my buffers might be of unbounded size. Well, you don’t have unbounded memory. Figure out what is reasonable, and use that. If you found that assumption too narrow, then increase it. It may be iffy in a general-purpose computing environment, but you are likely to yield much greater simplicity when writing for memory- or time- contrained environments.
Stupid is as Stupid Does
I’ve been, stupidly, using an email account that came with a free web page account. I figured – what harm could it be, it’s free, it’s been around… Now I want to get rid of it, but I am away from home, and there are some accounts I can’t access to update the email address… So I am stuck.
I’ve been using a webmail client, maybe roundcube (why nonsensical names?). Somehow the interaction of the webmail client with my browser causes repeated logins with a wrong (or no) password. Bahm, my account gets locked out by whatever security software they run. I don’t know about it until a few days later, when I can’t log in.
The recovery process involves going on Discord and begging the disgruntled sysop to unban my IP address. That usually takes a whole day, sometimes two, and involves some groveling.
[...]
Top shows that, running in the background with automatic email fetching shut off — in other words, doing absolutely nothing — it eats up about 5% CPU and 5% memory. That is a ridiculously large fraction of my machine — for doing absolutely nothing. I have 8GB RAM), so the sleeping beauty needs 400 MB to do nothing. Is this a bad joke?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Summary: Chairman Sir Paul Mahoney (OBE) explains the workings of the EPO‘s Internal Appeals Committee to a new member
I want to love the “Linux Desktop”. I really do. But I’ve come to the realization that what I love is the idea of the Linux Desktop. The community. The security and core focus on open source. The customizable environments. Tweaking as much or as little of the operating system as I please!
I just can’t stick with it. I always end up back on macOS. And I’m starting to understand why.
Today I learned something that I could have noticed if I’d paid enough attention, which is that the default ‘iptables -L’ output doesn’t show you interface matches that are part of rules. In order to see this in ‘iptables -L’ you have to make it verbose (with -v), which also shows you the volume counters. There is a story here.
It’s hard for me to work in total silence. I need some kind of background noise, preferably some familiar music. My music-listening needs are pretty simple: I just need a music player that plays my library of MP3 music and streams from a few websites I like to listen to.
IMAP is deliberately a high level protocol; it gives you abstract access to your mailboxes. One of the decisions in the protocol is that it should avoid round-tripping data through the client as much as possible. For example, to copy messages from one IMAP folder to another, your client doesn’t download them and then upload them to store them in the new folder; instead, it issues a COPY command that tells the IMAP server ‘copy these messages to this folder’. If you’re telling the server to copy (or MOVE) a bunch of messages, your network traffic is low but the server’s IO traffic is potentially high (if they’re big messages). The IMAP protocol is full of commands where the client asks the server to do a lot of work on its behalf. Often this will result in a lot of server disk IO for relatively little network traffic to and from the client.
While accessing your remote server from your host machine, you may encounter an error that states: “WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!” with a long message like the attached screenshot.

Metasploit is one of the essential tools that every penetration tester should have. It can help you to perform various tasks, such as creating and testing exploits on the target system.It is officially available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. However, beginners interested in security may not have a PC. In that case, you can take the help of your Android device by installing the Termux terminal emulator.
BIND or Berkeley Internet Name Domain is free and open-source DNS Server software. It’s one of the most popular DNS server software used by more than 70% of DNS on the Internet. This guide will teach you how to install DNS Server with BIND on Ubuntu 22.04 server. This tutorial will show you how to set up Master-Slave BIND DNS server installation using two Ubuntu servers.
In this guide, we will show you how to install FreetuxTV on Ubuntu systems.
FreetuxTV is a VLC -based program for receiving Internet TV and radio in various languages. Recording of current programs and time-shift viewing are some of the useful program features. The program is still under development, but many well-known radio and television stations can already be used. The list continues to grow.
The irealpro player has become an indispensable tool for practicing a tune. Since I play saxophone, the fact that irealpro will give me a full rhythm section to play against makes working on a tune far more possible than it was for me in the past.
I recently got a new phone and went to reinstall the set of songs that I use. They come from a collection called the Jazz 1400. This snuck up slightly in number from the last time I imported, and it must have hit a threshold, because my phone refuses to import it.
RPM Fusion is a repository of add-on packages for RHEL type distributions and EL+EPEL that a group of community volunteers maintains.
This tutorial will explain in step by step how you can install Kubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish”. It will start with requirements, continuing with 10 steps to install, finished with restart and the final result. Let’s install it!
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Glances on CentOS 9 Stream.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to speed up the DNF package manager on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, DNF is the default package manager for Rocky Linux 9 and newer versions, RHEL 9 and its clone CentOS 9 Stream, AlmaLinux 9, and Fedora 36. One of the benefits of using DNF is that it can be used to download packages from multiple repositories, including Rocky Linux’s official repositories, third-party repositories, and your own local repositories. However, some users may find the download speed slow compared to other distributions. This can be frustrating after you download and install many packages. Most users do not realize that some minor tweaks to some configuration files can increase your download speed immensely.
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 increase DNF download speed on Rocky Linux. 9.
In this guide, we will show you how to install SMPlayer in Ubuntu systems.
SMPlayer is a cross-platform graphical front-end for MPlayer and mpv and forks of Mplayer using GUI widgets offered by Qt.
SMPlayer is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.SMplayer has been localized in more than 30 languages.
SMPlayer is built with Qt and is based on MPlayer. This makes it quite portable, since MPlayer and Qt are already available on all major operating systems. On the operating systems on which SMPlayer has not yet been ported to, it is likely possible to run the application through binary compatibility with another Unix or Linux.
In this article, we will show you how to install PhotoQt on Ubuntu systems.
PhotoQt is a simple yet powerful and good looking image viewer, based on Qt/QML, published as open-source, and completely free.
It is an image viewer that relies on an interesting operating concept inspired by smartphones. While the motif is displayed full-screen, all edges except the right one serve as a trigger (when touched with the mouse pointer) for a control implemented in other programs via menus and toolbars. For example, the left edge is used to display the metadata , while the lower edge shows a bar with a preview of neighboring images. This leaves plenty of space for the actual image. On the other hand, if you prefer keyboard control, you can use various pre-configured key shortcuts that can be reassigned if necessary.
The Wine development release 7.13 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
– Gecko engine updated to version 2.47.3.
– USB driver converted to PE.
– Some theming improvements.
– Various bug fixes.The source is available at:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.13.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Looks like Linux is truly becoming a gaming platform for the masses now, as AYANEO are throwing their hat in the ring with AYANEO OS on their hardware with the AYANEO AIR. While their new IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign focuses on it being a Windows handheld, they’re also developing their own full Linux distribution for their hardware which will be available to download “in the future”.

Current number of bugs: 52, down from 53. 0 added and 1 resolved…Dolphin, Gwenview, and Spectacle now use the XDG Portals interface for dragged-and-dropped files, which allows them to successfully drop files into sandboxed apps without punching a hole in the sandbox by giving it access to your entire home folder or the system’s temp folder (Harald Sitter, version 22.08 of these apps)

Nautilus is GNOME’s default file manager application, and you may have seen it in many Linux distributions.It’s a good file manager with plenty of features. However, you can enhance your experience by employing some tweaks and tips.
I am going to share such tips and tweaks in this article. Some tweaks may require installing additional Nautilus plugins, while some are built-in but lesser-known features. A few tips are purely cosmetic and just change the look and feel.
GNOME HIG CSS Library project aims to design, develop and publish a unified CSS library incorporating the revised Human Interface and Visual Identity Guidelines allowing developers to update the existing GNOME websites and create new ones with a congruent visual identity.
CP/M was special because it separated the physical I/O system (now called BIOS – Basic I/O System) from the disk operating system (at the time, called the BDOS – Basic Disk Operating System). CP/M was the start of program portability: before CP/M, programs were required to run on exactly the same underlying hardware.
Before I started my research for writing this entry, I would have said that kernel support for ‘#!’ was added in 4.2 BSD. That’s certainly where it first appeared and where it became well known, but according to the history section of Wikipedia’s page on #!, it was first introduced by Dennis Ritchie in 1980, after V7, although it might have been suggested to him by someone else. It didn’t become known through later releases of Research Unix because those were never very widely spread, unlike V7.
OpenBGPD-portable is known to compile and run on FreeBSD, and the Linux distributions Alpine, Debian, Fedora, RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu. It is our hope that packagers take interest and help adapt OpenBGPD-portable to more distributions.
In a statement, the IBM-owned company says Hicks, who previously served as Red Hat’s executive vice-president of products and technologies, succeeds Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman of Red Hat.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

According to the product page, the Debix Model A seems to support Android 11, Yocto, Ubuntu and Debix OS.The company is also offering an I/O expansion board and a LoRa board compatible with the Debix Model A. See the spec list and the images below for more details.
Specifications listed for the Debix Model A Single Board Computer include…
That’s code for “I built a fancy case for my Raspberry Pi (3B+)” if you didn’t know.
[Jeff Geerling] has been following the various open source time projects for some time now, and is finally able to demonstrate a working and affordable solution for nanoseconds-accurate timekeeping in your local lab. The possibility of a low-cost time server came about with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi CM4 compute module back in Oct 2020, whose Broadcom network chip (BCM54210PE) supports PTP (Precision Time Protocol, IEEE-1588) 1PPS output and hardware-based time stamping. Despite the CM4 data sheet specifying PTP support, it wasn’t available in the kernel. An issue was raised in Feb last year, and Raspberry Pi kernel support was finally released this month.
Typically one installs whiny siren-like server fans that spin at 5000+ rpm, and don’t worry much about noise. But I do.
The Debix Model A from Polyhex is a Single Board Computer (SBC) built around the i.MX 8M Plus Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU industrial-grade processor. This SBC integrates a 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit and expandable storage to target industrial automation, multimedia, and other IoT applications.
The Debix Model A was designed by Polyhex Technology and it’s based on the NXP NPU i.MX 8M Plus industrial processor with maximum frequency of 1.6GHz. By default, this device comes with 2GB of LPDDR4 but can be upgraded to 4GB or 6GB. The default storage interface provides support for an SD Card but can also be customized to provide eMMC support from 8GB up to 128GB.
Say what, now? I won’t deny, that’s a good opening line… but… *ahem*…
In the beginning… IBM was The Evil Empire. And, if Steven is talking about the early days of Microsoft… they were not the Evil Empire at that time. Not by a long-shot.
In fact, Microsoft was (in those early days) primarily a maker of software and hardware for a variety of computer platforms made by other companies. Commodore, Apple, Tandy, and so many others.
Leaf Node Monitoring is my own open source (GPLv3), paid, network monitoring program for Windows, Linux & Android. Written in C++ & Qt 5. Perfect to run on your desktop and monitor your servers. Simple setup, auto-detects running services, runs checks concurrently, open port scanning and alerting. I’ve recently released the first version, and this post goes over the features that will come in the next release.
sqlite3 is a fantastic embedded database for rapid prototyping and resource-constrained environments, given its lack of dependencies or a server. You open one file with a CLI tool, and that’s it. You probably interacted with several today without realising it.
SQLite has two equality operators: = and IS (= can also be written as ==). They’re very similar, except when NULL is involved.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 6 high quality free JavaScript-based Linux WCMS. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wishes to manage a website.Here’s our verdict. All the software featured here is published under an open source license.
Consequently, to make up for these delays, teams are pressured to deliver the next feature in less time than they originally estimated.
When that happens, teams face two choices: cut scope or cut corners. Because the all-knowing long-term plan deems scope immutable, engineers will cut corners, leading to more bugs and creating a vicious cycle of delivering broken features.
This cascade of broken features will eventually bring the team to a halt because they’ll be too busy draining the flood to actually fix the leak that’s causing it.
A further problem with the assumption that nothing will go wrong is that it implies there will be no mistakes to learn from. Therefore, teams will continue operating with broken, costly, inefficient processes.
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
The pattern matching feature is, on the whole, pretty reasonably designed, and people will expect it to behave in reasonable ways. Whereas __subclasshook__ is extremely dark magic. This kind of chicanery might have a place in the dark beating heart of a complex library, certainly not for any code your coworkers will have to deal with.
zshbrev allows you to mix zsh code and brev code. Not for polished li’l “eggs” but for your own duct tape and chewing gum hacking and automation. Quick and dirty♥.
In 2015, Richard Seymour’s entire world was in flux. The London-based author, editor of Salvage, a socialist magazine that covers art and politics, and contributor to the New Left Review had recently left the Socialist Workers Party; his long-term relationship had fallen apart; and then, on Christmas Day, he noticed how eerily warm the weather was where it should have been crisply cold. As Seymour explained, all this contributed to a “deep crisis” in which he rethought everything from his “tough-minded militant” persona (the “political ego ideal,” he says) to actual politics, specifically where the overlapping crises of the climate and environment fit into his decidedly class-focused worldview. During this period, Seymour came to understand the climate as “the problem of problems” because, as he says, “the biosphere is the precondition for everything else.”
This solemn field spreads itself literally at the center of Germany—its historical consciousness, its politics, its culture, its crimes. The Nazi Chancellery was here and Hitler’s bunker nearby, though the exact location is not marked and therefore not available as a site of pilgrimage for Fascists.
The sprawling American embassy is across the street from the memorial, and just beyond it the Brandenburg Gate. With its cool beige stone, glass and steel, the embassy’s neo-Art-Deco-ism seems an ironic nod to the Good Old Days of the Cold War, when America’s power was ascendant. I think of the building as a diplomatic diner serving up Marshall Plan burgers, NATO fries washed down with the chocolate shake of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Here is a draft for a protocol named PTPDT, an acronym standing for Pen To Paper Data Transfer. It comes with its companion specification Paper To Brain.
The protocol describes how a pen can be used to write data on a sheet of paper. Maybe it would be better named as Brain To Paper Protocol.
Americans have a really hard time talking about so many topics. Given the ubiquity of social media, you might think I’m being deliberately obtuse. I don’t think I am; race, gender, LGTBQ+, politics, among others are widely discussed but anyone that’s spent any time online knows that almost all those conversations happen in echo chambers or they quickly fall into chaos. Admittedly, trying to have a “reasonable” conversation with someone who believes you have fewer rights over your body (whether reproductive or simply the right not to have your teeth kicked in by law enforcement) is all but impossible. However, one topic that almost all Americans, regardless of political persuasion, are loath to discuss is the subject of class. Today’s Tedium is looking at one of the most iconic sketches in the history of British comedy to understand the lack of discussion around class in America and what it says about even the most “cynical” of Americans.
We appreciate a good kitchen hack, and we have always liked TV personality and chef [Alton Brown]’s McGuyver-ish approach to these things. So for anyone who hasn’t seen it, let’s take a moment to highlight how to make (and use) Alton Brown’s Cardboard Box Smoker.
It’s hot and hazy as July rolls around. Growing up in the Baltimore swamplands, we used to say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Meaning that the humidity was harder to deal with than the feverish temperatures. At some point in my family, the phrase morphed into: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.” At the time, we meant the antics of people when it gets hot, including public drunkenness, mishaps with fireworks, and fights over slights. (These days, sadly enough, you’d have to add to that list slaughtering people at a July 4th celebration with an AR-15-style rifle.)
Everyone should know by now that we love to follow up on projects when they make progress. It’s great to be able to celebrate accomplishments and see how a project has changed over time. But it’s especially great to highlight a project that not only progresses, but also gives back a little to the community.
The resulting observation is called Hotelling’s law – that rational producers will tend to make their products as similar as possible. You can think of this as the opposite of product differentiation. Through the lens of game theory, both A and B have reached Nash Equilibrium by situating themselves in the middle of the beach.
In a 2021 national survey of 1,200 classroom teachers conducted by the Teacher Salary Project, a nonpartisan organization, 82% of respondents said they either currently or previously had taken on multiple jobs to make ends meet. Of those, 53% said they were currently working multiple jobs, including 17% who held jobs unrelated to teaching.
When building electronic assemblies there is quite often the need to construct custom cables to hook things up. It’s all very well if you’re prototyping by hand, or just building one or two of a thing, but if you’re cranking them out using outside help, then you’re going to want to ensure that cable is described very accurately. [Christian Nimako-Boateng Jr.] presents for us the first version of wirely, a wiring harness tool. This is a web-based tool that allows one to describe the cable ends and connectivity between them, producing a handy graphic and exports to excel in a format that should be easy to follow.
The average person’s perception of a ham radio operator, assuming they even know what that means, is more than likely some graybeard huddled over the knobs of a war-surplus transmitter in the wee small hours of the morning. It’s a mental image that, admittedly, isn’t entirely off the mark in some cases. But it’s also a gross over-simplification, and a generalization that isn’t doing the hobby any favors when it comes to bringing in new blood.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around talking like they weren’t thousands of miles apart. And we mean that literally: Kristina just got an up/down desk, and it turns out that Elliot’s had the exact same one for years.
A first-of-its-kind proposal in the California Legislature aimed at holding social media companies responsible for harming children who have become addicted to their products would no longer let parents sue popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
The revised proposal would still make social media companies liable for damages of up to $250,000 per violation for using features they know can cause children to become addicted. But it would only let prosecutors, not parents, file the lawsuits against social media companies. The legislation was amended last month, CalMatters reported Thursday.
I’ve written about the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) on a number of occasions, dating all the way back to 2006. The first time I discovered AAPS, I described the organization as a “medical John Birch Society” in that it is in reality a political organization disguised as a legitimate medical professional society. More than that, AAPS is a crank medical organization every bit as much a bunch of far right conspiracy theorists as the John Birch Society ever was and has been around a long time, having been founded in 1943. This makes unsurprising to me that earlier this week AAPS announced that it was suing three medical specialty boards that had announced measures to strip physicians promoting COVID-19 misinformation and other health misinformation of their board certifications.
Chrome OS, Google’s Linux-based operating system for its Chromebook devices, has been around for more than a decade, but the company has made a small but notable branding change: it’s now called ChromeOS, with no space in between. James Croom, Google’s senior director of marketing for ChromeOS, confirmed the change to The Verge.
More people, more often, are finding themselves dealing with the output of Machine-Learning (ML) software. With even a little practice you can spot when it’s happening. It makes me wonder what the future of human/ML interaction looks like. Herewith a few personal experiences.
The recommendations are categorized into four main focuses — addressing the continued risks of Log4j, adopting industry-accepted practices for managing vulnerabilities, building a more proactive model of vulnerability management and making investments for the country’s digital security in the future.
Delhi Police issued a notice to Razorpay under Section 91 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973 (“Section 91”) while it was investigating Mr Mohammad Zubair, a fact-checker and founder of Alt-News. In compliance with the notice, Razorpay shared the personal information of donors of Alt-News without informing Alt-News or the donors. In this #Privacyofthepeople post, we explain the scope of Section 91 notices, how they may impact your right to privacy and what remedies you have under law. Since IFF uses Razorpay to receive donations, we also explain the steps we are taking to protect donor privacy.
The findings, which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data.
When you visit a website, the page can capture your IP address, but this doesn’t necessarily give the site owner enough information to individually identify you. Instead, the hack analyzes subtle features of a potential target’s browser activity to determine whether they are logged into an account for an array of services, from YouTube and Dropbox to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Plus the attacks work against every major browser, including the anonymity-focused Tor Browser.
If approved, the draft ordinance would also allow SFPD to collect historical video footage to help conduct criminal investigations and those related to officer misconduct. The draft law currently stands as the following, which indicates the cops can broadly ask for and/or get access to live real-time video streams: [...]
Just a few weeks back we talked about how the US’s unwillingness to fix the way the NSA collects internet data could basically mean that most of the big US internet services cannot work in the EU. That article was about Google, and it goes through the background and history of the various US/EU privacy data sharing agreements, and how each one has been tossed out by EU courts in large part because of the NSA surveillance techniques brought to light by Edward Snowden. But much less attention has been paid to what this all means at a practical level.
A newly published report marks the conclusion of a yearlong investigation launched in 2021 by then-Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. The inquiry was initiated after concerns were raised into the use of the messaging service WhatsApp and private email accounts by former health secretary Matt Hancock and his deputy, James Bethell, at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) during the height of the pandemic.
The report found that official information had been shared through 29 WhatsApp accounts, 17 private text messaging accounts, eight private email accounts and one LinkedIn account.
As part of the test, some Facebook users will have the ability to create up to four additional profiles tied to their original account. The idea is that additional profiles can be used for different purposes, like one for friends, one for co-workers, and others for interacting with interest groups and influencers. Users will still have one account but be able to switch between profiles with a few clicks.
The company has provided videos to law enforcement, without a warrant or device owner consent, 11 times already this year. This admission comes in response to a series of critical letters from Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). Markey chastised the company over many of the same privacy problems that EFF has brought up, including the far-reaching audio capabilities of Ring devices, and the company’s refusal to commit to not incorporate facial recognition technology into their cameras.
Amazon must consider the danger these products pose to the public by creating a growing web of surveillance systems that are owned by individuals, but are de-facto operated by law enforcement.
Police are not the customers for Ring; the people who buy the devices are the customers. But Amazon’s long-standing relationships with police blur that line. For example, in the past Amazon has given coaching to police to tell residents to install the Ring app and purchase cameras for their homes—an arrangement that made salespeople out of the police force. The LAPD launched an investigation into how Ring provided free devices to officers when people used their discount codes to purchase cameras.
Courts (with the rare exception) are in agreement: there’s a First Amendment right to film cops. With every citizen carrying a camera these days, there’s a lot more filming happening. And those recordings have often proven key when cops face criminal charges for violating rights or, you know, murdering people.
The coalition agreement of the Reform Party, Isamaa and the Social Democratic Party (SDE) aims to prohibit citizens of Russia and Belarus from owning guns in Estonia. Incoming interior minister Lauri Läänemets said the change will take months to implement and that repealing the weapons permits of other unfriendly people should also be considered.
A watchdog says the U.S. Secret Service deleted many of the text messages sent during a two-day period surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, told Congress the messages were deleted after his office asked for them.
The discovery was made as part of the watchdog’s investigation into the deadly siege last year and will likely play into the probe being led by the House select committee investigating the attack.
Thursday reporting by The Intercept that the Secret Service deleted text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 “shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications” has elicited many questions and concerns about what evidence regarding last year’s deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol was destroyed.
The Secret Service claims that the messages were erased as “part of a device-replacement program.”
There is no oversight over where the ‘western’ weapon deliveries to the Ukraine go to…We can only guess where those weapons will end up.
Cedric Harrison is a tall man with a long view. He leads heritage tours in Wilmington, N.C., the site of the nation’s only successful white supremacist coup.
The latest Jan. 6 committee hearing on Tuesday examined the role of conspiracy theory communities like 8kun[.]top and TheDonald[.]win in helping to organize and galvanize supporters who responded to former President Trump’s invitation to “be wild” in Washington, D.C. on that chaotic day. At the same time the committee was hearing video testimony from 8kun founder Jim Watkins, 8kun and a slew of similar websites were suddenly yanked offline. Watkins suggested the outage was somehow related to the work of the committee, but the truth is KrebsOnSecurity was responsible and the timing was pure coincidence.
Maybe it was seeing the former Oath Keeper wearing a Descendents T-shirt when testifying before the January 6 committee, but I think it’s past time we reckoned with Generation X. The backbone of Trumpist alt-right support comes from my generation. Learning that polls show people born between 1965 and 1980 are the foot soldiers and ideological minders of the new fascism has been jarring, because I’ve always considered Gen X underrated. There has been much ink spilled about the culture wars between boomers and millennials, skipping right over us. It seemed unfair. After all, we were the generation of grunge, some of the best hip-hop ever made (defined by the revolutionary sounds of Public Enemy), and the last generation to read newspapers (that matters to me, for some reason). We should be recognized. We launched movements and challenged the two-party duopoly.
On July 13, Live City, a movement dedicated to preserving St. Petersburg’s cultural heritage, published a letter from film director Alexander Sokurov to city governor Alexander Beglov. In it, Sokurov accuses the city authorities of taking advantage of the “difficult military and political situation” to dismantle the movement to preserve St. Petersburg’s historic buildings. According to the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga, the government has spent the months since the start of the war reorganizing and eliminating the city’s oldest preservation advocacy groups, demolishing monuments, and changing laws to benefit commercial developers. With Bumaga’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of the investigation.
When announcing the February invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin said that one of Russia’s aims was to “denazify” the country. In the months since, Kremlin propaganda has continuously pushed the notion that Russian troops are “destroying” and capturing “nationalists,” “Banderities,” and “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine — painting all Ukrainian soldiers as far-right radicals and eliding the fact that thousands of innocent civilians have died as a result of the invasion. What the Kremlin’s propagandists have conveniently ignored, however, is the fact that several avowed ultra-right nationalists are actually fighting on Moscow’s side. Meduza tells the story of how Russian neo-Nazis were drawn into Vladimir Putin’s war to “denazify” Ukraine.
As U.S. President Joe Biden met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Friday, a top official at Human Rights Watch implored the American leader to not lift a ban on the sale of certain weapons to the repressive monarchy as it continues waging an atrocity-laden war in Yemen.
Responding to reports that the Biden administration is considering ending its vague proscription against the transfer of “offensive” weaponry to Saudi Arabia, Michael Page, Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Middle East and North Africa deputy director, warned that such a policy reversal “could lead to fresh rights violations in Yemen.”
Making a mockery of his own campaign vow to treat the repressive Saudi kingdom as a “pariah,” U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday greeted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—who intelligence agencies believe approved the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—with an amiable fist bump as he arrived at the royal palace in Jeddah.
Already furious over the president’s decision to meet with the crown prince despite his role in the brutal 2018 murder of Khashoggi and subsequent cover-up attempt, human rights defenders responded with outrage to the greeting, which the Saudi regime swiftly blasted out on social media.
The truth is that Biden is arriving in Jeddah with hat in hand to ask the Saudis to increase oil production. That, of course, would lower oil prices and help the Administration to get a hold on inflation. But the Saudis (and the Emiratis and the Kuwaitis) already have said that their oil industries are operating near maximum capacity.
The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.
The revelation came in a letter obtained by the Jan. 6 committee that was sent by Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General — which oversees the Secret Service — to the House and Senate homeland security committees. The letter notes that the DHS IG’s office requested the Secret Service’s electronic communications from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 before being informed that the communications had been erased. The letter reportedly notes that the erasure took place after the request was made. Secret Service has claimed the communications were deleted as part of a “device-replacement program.”
The Secret Service erased text messages from both Jan. 6 and the day before the attack on the Capitol after the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog requested records of electronic communications tied to the insurrection, according to a letter sent to congressional committees that was obtained by NBC News.
Several countries across Europe are enduring the dangerous hot conditions that climate scientists have longed warned of and meteorologists project the brutal heatwave could last in some areas through next month.
Spain and Portugal have faced high temperatures since last Friday. According to CNN, at least three Spanish cities set records this week: Ourense at 43.2°C (109.76°F); Soria at 38.7°C (101.66°F); and Zamora at 41.1°C (105.98°F).
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia informed Democratic leaders Thursday that he will not support any new climate spending or tax increases targeting the wealthy and large corporations, sinking his party’s revived push for renewable energy investments and further undercutting the country’s ability to rein in carbon emissions.
While Manchin’s refusal to endorse green energy funding may have been entirely foreseeable given his close ties to the fossil fuel industry and his role in tanking the Build Back Better package just months earlier, climate advocates nevertheless voiced dismay at the power one individual has been able to exert over a process with implications for billions of people across the planet.
President Joe Biden on Friday faced calls to respond forcefully to Sen. Joe Manchin’s latest climate obstruction by canceling a fracked gas pipeline in the right-wing Democrat’s home state of West Virginia, a move that would prevent around 90 million metric tons of new greenhouse gas emissions from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.
“West Virginians would be better served by pursuing clean energy projects than climate-polluting pipelines.”
Due to the existing huge demand all across Europe, illegal breeders have been overbreeding dogs in Hungary. These animals then grow up amidst poor conditions and are not given proper medical care. Once they are sold, many of them get sick with serious illnesses, and a large percentage of them die young. Our documentary traces the system of dog trade in Hungary, and shows how it has been built up over the last decades, as well as some of those who are taking part in this illegal business.
On Juneteenth weekend, tens of thousands of people walked up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the U.S. Capitol as part of the epically titled Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. (Priti Gulati Cox and I traveled via Amtrak from Kansas to join in.) Although we were following the footsteps of a mob that had stormed the Capitol seventeen months earlier, this march embodied the polar opposite worldview. At the rally ending the march, Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. William J. Barber II made that clear, saying that the event was not a violent insurrection but rather “a resurrection” of people power against violence.
“[T]he monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us … like an overgrown standing army, has become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.”—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Later-no-harm is a criterion for preferential voting methods which provides that ‘Adding a later preference to a ballot should not harm any candidate already listed’ [1]. The most well-known voting systems which comply with later-no-harm are the single transferable vote (STV), and its single-winner variant, instant runoff voting.
In Australia, 2 jurisdictions make use of the weighted inclusive Gregory method of the single transferable vote (STV). The weighted inclusive Gregory method of STV is one of 2 systems recommended by the Proportional Representation Society of Australia as part of a gold standard electoral system.
Each of the 2 jurisdictions, however, has interesting quirks in the drafting of the legislation giving the specifications for the weighted inclusive Gregory method, which are worth exploring.
The auction, of the 694-790 MHz frequency range, is set to take place in autumn, following the conclusion of the current, ongoing auction involving Telia, Tele2 and Bite.
Two telecoms firms will be eligible to bid.
The Reagan presidency was their first major victory; in eight short years he cut union membership in America almost in half, dropped the taxes on billionaires from a top 74% bracket down to 27%, and slashed thousands of protective regulations, particularly around guns and the environment.
Over the 40 years of the Reagan revolution, we’ve gone from having about the same gun-ownership density as Canada (around 15 guns per 100 people) to the most in the world (over 120 guns per 100 people). We’re now drenched in blood: Guns kill more American children than drunk drivers or any other cause.
When last we checked in with right-wing propaganda network One America News (OAN), it was suffering some kind of embolism for being kicked off of DirecTV. Despite a lot of attention, not that many people actually watch the channel, so DirecTV finally kicked it aside. This was distorted by OAN and numerous key Republicans into a claim that the conspiracy theory floating outlet was being “unfairly censored.”
Over the last few months we’ve been covering this bizarre story of how Republican politicians, pushed by their preferred spamming provider (which misrepresented a study on how email providers treat political spam), have been falsely claiming that Google is “censoring” their political emails. They’ve also been pushing a law that would require email providers not to label politician emails as spam. In response, Google caved a bit and proposed a new offering that would whitelist political campaigns, keeping them out of the spam filter (but including a button at the top asking the recipient if they want to unsubscribe from that mailing). Google asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to bless this idea (and specifically to note it wouldn’t be deemed to violate any campaign finance laws).
When workers at Michigan’s SKLD Bloomfield Hills Nursing Home launched a strike for improved working conditions last Monday, they did not stand alone. Their represen, Andy Levin, was right there with them. And it wasn’t just a quick stop on the picket line for Levin. He came to march, wearing his “Unions For All” T-shirt and jeans. He raised a clenched fist, jumped in behind the Service Employees International Union’s “Respect Us! Protect Us! Pay Us!” banner, and joined the chant of “Ain’t no party like a union party, ’cause the union party don’t stop.” Finally, he told the crowd, “The whole community stands with these of workers in the name of dignity, respect, and good patient care.”
The adherents of the neo-conservative movement now dominate positions of rank within the Executive branch, and exercise intellectual hegemony among members of the foreign policy community more generally.
A new New York Times/Siena College poll is generating a lot of attention. It showed that 64% of Democratic voters say they would prefer another Democratic candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign. One-third (33%) of Democrats say that their biggest concern is that Biden, who is 79, is too old to run for re-election. Another one-third (32%) say that his “job performance” hasn’t been good enough to warrant another run for the White House.
Today I spoke with the foreign policy aide of a United States Senator in a scheduled lobbying call for our antiwar organization. Rather than use the standard lobbying points about wasteful Pentagon spending, I asked for a frank discussion regarding ways our organization might find a successful strategy to cut the Pentagon budget. I wanted the perspective of somebody working on the Hill for a conservative senator.
The United Nations has called the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Yet even that designation hardly captures the full extent of misery endured by its people over seven years of violence and unrelenting war.
The collapse of the short-lived Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid validates the argument that the political crisis in Israel was not entirely instigated and sustained by former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus on Friday released a blueprint for legislative and executive actions to protect reproductive freedom in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and endangers other civil rights.
“These concrete steps constitute a whole-of-government response to expand access to essential healthcare.”
While reproductive rights advocates and many Democrats on Friday welcomed the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of a bill protecting the right to travel for abortion care, Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr. called out GOP lawmakers who opposed the legislation.
“Today 99% of House Republicans made clear they support forcing raped children to give birth to their rapist’s child,” declared the New Jersey Democrat after the House approved the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act in a 223-205 vote.
As some campaigners urged activists to intensify their organizing to counter U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s latest act of climate obstruction, a leading congressional progressive on Friday called for “institutional, systemic reform” to ensure one lawmaker can’t hold their party’s priorities hostage.
“Progressives have fought tooth and nail for the president’s and the Democratic Party’s agenda. Unfortunately, the senator from West Virginia has consistently worked to undermine it, blocking action on a number of priorities from child care, to housing, and now climate change,” Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said after Manchin (D-W.Va.) revealed he would not currently support any new climate spending or tax increases targeting the wealthy and corporations.
Marín’s “sex in the sumidero” video also went viral and as a result caught the eye of the federal government’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas, which denounced the improper use of the national park. It said that the filming of pornographic content in the park damaged “the image of an icon that represents the pride of Chiapas” and exceeded “moral limits.”
For decades, Central Asian governments have kept a tight grip over information. State media dominate and serve as government mouthpieces rather than the public. The few independent outlets face growing financial pressures and efforts to stifle their reporting through a variety of means — assaults, threats, arrests, and prosecution. Self-censorship is pervasive among journalists and bloggers.
Even in Kyrgyzstan, which boasts a vibrant and pluralistic media environment compared to its neighbors, press freedom has been on the decline. Independent journalists have been detained or harassed by trolls on social media. The ongoing trial of investigative journalist Bolot Temirov on drug charges bears the signs of political persecution, according to his colleagues.
As social media increasingly becomes the main source of news [sic] for citizens — especially young people — the governments seek to gain more control over those outlets, too. Internet shutdowns and website blocking are widespread, particularly during anti-government protests.
As part of Creative Commons’ key strategic goal of Better Sharing, we have taken a firm stance against mandatory content filtering on the internet. In new proposed legislation, the U.S. Congress is now raising mandatory content filtering again as a tool to eliminate infringement of copyrighted works. For those who are new to the discussion, mandatory filtering would require that all information providers enable software that prevents the distribution of materials claimed by rightsholders. If you’ve ever uploaded videos to YouTube, you’ve seen content filters at work: videos are scanned for copyrighted audio like popular music before they are published, and sometimes videos are blocked even when they are legal to share. Policy that forces every digital publisher, platform, and service provider to adopt similar filters would make this broken model universal. CC has long stated that the effects of mandatory filtering are devastating to free speech, as well as the sharing of culture and knowledge. CC has also spoken out against filtering mandates and opposed their introduction in the European Union.
State-sponsored [crackers] from China, North Korea, Iran and Turkey have been regularly spying on and impersonating journalists from various media outlets in an effort to infiltrate their networks and gain access to sensitive information, according to a report released on Thursday by cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.
The report reveals that government-backed [crackers] used various tools to target journalists, including sending phishing emails to gain access to reporters’ work emails, social media accounts and networks.
Proofpoint data since early 2021 shows a sustained effort by APT actors worldwide attempting to target or leverage journalists and media personas in a variety of campaigns, including those well-timed to sensitive political events in the United States. Some campaigns have targeted the media for a competitive intelligence edge while others have targeted journalists immediately following their coverage painting a regime in a poor light or as a means to spread disinformation or propaganda. For the purposes of this report, we focus on the activities of a handful of APT actors assessed to be aligned with the state interests of China, North Korea, Iran, and Turkey.
A petition arguing in favour of two home-office days per week for any employee in Luxembourg gathered the necessary 4,500 signatures in the span of just a few hours, meaning that it will be discussed in the Chamber of Deputies.
Eight new petitions were published on Wednesday morning. If a proposal gathers a minimum of 4,500 signatures, it must be debated by MPs in the Chamber of Deputies.
The most popular petition by far argues in favour of two weekly home office days, specifically for cross-border workers. On Thursday morning it had already garnered over 7,500 signatures.
In one recent post, I linked to an archived Nitter mirror showing that a company called FAMA doxxed a man’s Twitter account for “bad language”, “risky likes”, etc, and sent his employer a 350+ page printout.
[...]
Many lawyers advise their Social Security clients to either delete Facebook and Twitter, or at least make their profiles “Friends Only”, so the government can’t go combing through them.
The problem with the “Friends Only” advice is that the government is the government, and if Facebook or Twitter have information on you, the government is going to get it. It’s only a matter of time.
On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” Michelle Wilde Anderson speaks to Robert Scheer about how four working class towns struggling with poverty and broke governments still managed to progress.
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in the Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization of abortion law represented by Roe, Christian nationalists, motivated by a desire to protect school segregation and tax exemptions for Christian schools, selected abortion as a way to united conservatives across denominational barriers, by providing a “focal point for anxieties about social change.” Phyllis Schlafly wrote a whole book (How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life) about the work involved in forcing the Republican party to center abortion as a cause—which then became the longer term effort to reframe “religious liberty” as exemption from law. The names Paul “I don’t want everybody to vote” Weyrich and Bob Jones Sr.—who called segregation “God’s established order”—may also mean something to you.
Another school has learned it can’t discipline students for off-campus behavior, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s “fuck cheer” decision.
For two decades, Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversaw the illegal arrests and detentions of more than a thousand children in her Rutherford County courtroom.
Her decisions eventually caught up with her: The county settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, and an investigation by Nashville Public Radio and ProPublica brought to light what had been happening for years, unchecked. Tennessee lawmakers called for her ousting, the governor asked for a review, and Middle Tennessee State University cut ties with the judge, who taught criminal justice at the school. There were nationwide calls for reform.
The release of the first images from NASA’s new flagship James Webb Space Telescope brought renewed attention to the controversy over naming the telescope after James Webb, who led NASA ahead of the Apollo moon landings in the 1960s. He also played a key role in purging LGBTQ+ people from NASA in what was known as the “lavender scare,” and before that at the State Department under President Truman. We speak with Lucianne Walkowicz, one of four astronomers who led a petition to rename the telescope. Although the petitioners value the insights the telescope contributes, “the way that NASA has dug in its heels about naming the telescope after James Webb has really cast a pall over that,” says Walkowicz. They are also the co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, which made a new documentary about the push to rename the telescope. We feature an extended excerpt from “Behind the Name: James Webb Space Telescope,” which also examines the push to name the telescope after Harriet Tubman, who “observed the night sky and used the stars for celestial navigation in the service of … people’s freedom.”
Bishop William J. Barber II on Friday reiterated his support for Brittney Griner while calling on Russian and U.S. authorities to allow faith leaders to visit the jailed U.S. Olympian and Women’s National Basketball Association superstar in Russia to help secure her release.
“We are asking the U.S. government and the U.S. and Russian embassies to allow faith leaders to travel to Russia as part of a humanitarian effort to gain her release.”
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mondaire Jones on Thursday led a group of progressive lawmakers in sending a letter to Democratic leaders urging them to support restricting the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over statutes codifying abortion and other civil rights imperiled by the court’s reactionary majority.
“Congress must use its powers to restrain the court and protect our fundamental rights—once and for all.”
We’ve long noted how U.S. broadband maps are a bit of a dumpster fire. U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $350 million for FCC broadband maps that overstate broadband availability and speeds, downplay widespread monopolization and consolidation, and can’t even be bothered to measure affordability, one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption.
Netflix is in major financial crisis. They’re doing huge layoffs. They’ve spent years mismanaging the platform and have only themselves to blame.
Even though the DRM is malicious, and encourages people to be jerks who can’t share with their friends, it’s not the cause of their financial problems.
Back when it wasn’t so expensive and had shows that people wanted to watch, people would pay the money to subscribe and then keep paying, usually even if there wasn’t anything on that they wanted to watch that month.
Monopolies are slowly killing rural America—and driving up the price you pay for food.
Google began to delist pirate sites from local search results last year. The search engine voluntarily complies with court orders targeted at third-party Internet providers. This is also true in the UK, where The Pirate Bay initially remained unblocked. A recent wave of removal requests corrected this initial oversight and hundreds of Pirate Bay domains have since been removed.
A Las Vegas company and its owner have been named in a DISH Network lawsuit targeting pirate IPTV service VNest TV. DISH says the service offered more than 5,000 channels including some obtained from its satellite feeds and others from Sling TV’s online broadcasts. DISH believes VNest TV obtained channels from Nitro TV, a service recently hit with a $100m+ judgment.
It’s no secret that Techdirt believes YouTube’s copyright enforcement program is an absolute mess. On the one hand, it’s difficult to be too hard on the company. After all, it is trying to figure out how to enforce draconian copyright laws in countries like America at a scale that is absolutely absurd. On the other hand, the way it works today is so wide open for fraud and abuse, that it’s literally a challenge to pick out which of a ton of stories I want to link to in order to show the history of fraud, mistakes, and nefarious copyright claims taken for reasons that fall completely outside of any interest in copyright law or protection.
As the victim of a three-year-long harassment campaign, during which my name has been slandered, attacked, and dragged through the mud, I’ve come to understand a few vital points on the nature of just how effectively the Internet can be used to spread disinformation and hatred. I believe comparing smear campaigns to viruses or pathogens is apt- like any disease, negativity is more appealing to the human psyche than positivity, and has a tendency to become more widely recognized and discussed.
[...]
Reddit, I’m convinced, is one of the worst websites ever created, and for the past three years of pure Hell it has been used by these people in order to blackmail me, harass me, rile up mobs against me, and threaten my life and family. Reddit does not only allow this harassment to continue, they endorse it, banning anyone who goes against the narrative these bad actors wish to present. It is a farce, a kangaroo court, a crime against everything the Internet should represent.
Reddit is doing this, I’m sure, to save face, as they are currently one of the most disliked websites of all time. They are known for having hosted vile and reprehensible material on their website throughout much of the early 2010s- potentially illegal material, even- all under the guise of “free speech,” and now in the later 2010s and early 2020s have done a complete 180 to save face and now ban and censor the least offensive content imaginable without a second thought or any form of justification. I arrived on the site at an interesting period in its history- during the transitional phase, when it went from a no-holds-barred anarchist chaos arena to an authoritarian police state. As such, I was able to witness, firsthand, in a microcosm, the transformation of the Internet.
I predicted, in 2019, that the public’s opinion toward the site would soon shift and Reddit would be viewed for what it has become- an outright circus. At the time, the general public’s opinion was mostly positive. However, as the years went on, my prediction came to fruition. Reddit became embroiled in multiple scandals which would put the follies of Facebook to shame- for instance, the debacle during which they knowingly hired a sex offender and then banned anyone who dared post about it. They are now one of the most censorship-heavy websites on the Internet, deleting a huge fraction of all content submitted. Programmers have wasted hours trying to create facsimiles of the website without censorship, such as “Removeddit,” all to no avail.
The case of Reddit is a good example of just how quickly negativity can spread. What exists on Reddit today is a false sort of toxic positivity to counteract the outright negativity which persists in groups such as the one which has targeted me. Reddit has become nothing more than 90% pictures of adorable cats with no substance and 10% hate groups which masquerade as righteous causes while spewing ableist and racist rhetoric. The people who attack me do so with no checks, no balances, no restraint, and they are, for no reason whatsoever, hellbent on seeing my failure, to a compulsive, even sociopathic, degree.
The first response is right on point: OCD is, by definition, not rational.
I can relate with the OP’s son in that I have contamination obsessions and wash my hands probably more than the average person, and definitely way more than necessary. These obsessions aren’t as bad as they used to be, but they’re still there. Yet I can go days without showering.
One possible explanation I’ve had, and which might be the case for others, is that some instances of contamination obsessions are–for lack of a better term–self-serving. What I mean is that it’s about keeping yourself quarantined from anything external, and you’re not /quite/ as keen about not contaminating others. (I’ve personally been making an effort to be more considerate about this.) Since I’m mostly reclusive, not showering isn’t putting up any “contamination!” red flags in my brain, at least not until I start to feel and smell gross enough.
So because of Ingress, and because my brain was probably not functioning, I’ve walked the most in a day yesterday.
[...]
Underestimating yourself is good in the sense that you’re not trying to act like a higher up, but that doesn’t mean to not make commitments. In fact, the fact that we always “suck” means that we should also have the mentality of “suck less”, so that we can have the mindset for improving yourself.
It’s also worth noting that I’ve done all this stuff because of outward forces, so for someone like me who just can’t do commitments for self, try finding people or events that drives you to actually do some stuff. Even if the person you’re looking for ended up being “bad”, at the end of the day all the improvementd you’ve been trying to make are going to benefit you, and looking back at it, you’ll realise it’s worth it.
So a little while back, I applied for and was accepted to a conference about youth work!
This is actually a great description. I consider advertising to be a kind of psychological warfare. It feels like an aggressive attack. I also blame it for the sharp rise in attention deficit issues over the last several decades.
We gave up cable TV in 2012, mainly because we moved out of a place where we had free cable. Paying money to be subjected to all that advertising was just ludicrous. Now, whenever I’m around a television, I feel like I’m in some kind of distorted reality a la The Twilight Zone. I really noticed it when I was in the hospital recuperating last year.
It’s not just the advertising. It’s also the “news” media, some of which is itself just a thinly veiled form of promotion. They talk and talk and talk, saying much and conveying little. Both advertising and news seem to be targeting our most primitive and strongest instincts: the instincts to fight, flee, and accumulate. It plays to fear, be it the fear of missing out on the latest product from Apple or the fear of the terrorist.
In my circles there’s been an increasing interest in “Links” pages as a way to help people discover interesting content by looking at what people you like like. For a long time I’ve had a “favourites.gmi” page on my capsule, but it’s been pretty neglected. This file is being removed and replaced.
I believe we need UBI.
It’s one of the few policy proposals I’ve seen in many years that has the option to make life drastically better and safer for millions of citizens.
You might, like me, have some long term qualms about this. I’ve long seen UBI as maybe more of a short-term “patch” solution (it doesn’t fix all externalites and environmental problems of market economies), but a desperately needed one.
If it also does end up working out long term, that’d be gravy.
Old computers along with old CPUs, are becoming a better offer by the day, not only because of consumerism and planned obsolescence, but because of security.
From cca. 2008, Intel CPUs have Intel ME built in, with AMD having its counterpart, AMD PSP. Both are management engines, translated from non-corporate speech, that means both are backdoored. Intel PSP can be controlled remotely, several vulnerabilities have been found in it. Luckily, it can be cleaned with ME cleaner, which purges the most dangerous parts from it, although it is a tedious process. AMD PSP cannot be controlled remotely, at least according to what is known, and some motherboards can disable it.
[...]
Now yet another backdoor is coming, Microsoft Pluton. Obviously being touted as a “security enclave” that’s built into the CPU, it’s a bright idea by Microsoft to secure computers, when they haven’t even resolved the malware issue on their own operating system. They partnered with Intel and AMD, Pluton being present in all new CPUs. The firmware of Pluton can be updated from Microsoft’s operating system, which, at the moment, seems like the same process as updating CPU microcode, although it might be reserved for them only.
Last week, an article on Phoronix reportedly showed that one of the laptops with Pluton cannot boot GNU/Linux, all because of it not being “secure.” Seemingly can be disabled, probably the same process as secure boot. Microsoft isn’t to be trusted, knowing their anti-competitive practices, can only imagine in what ways Pluton will be abused.
Out of curiosity I hooked up a small 0.96″ OLED display to an amperemeter to measure its current draw. I was fiddling around with it, connected to the I2C bus of a Raspberry Pi, and wanted to get it up and running without using any of the existing libraries. Thus I had to send all the commands ‘by hand’ and stumbled over all the initialisation options mentioned in the datasheet of the driver chip. There are several voltages, frequencies and divider ratios to play around with, and I wondered how they would influence the power consumption of the display. After all, it might come in handy to know exactly what to do to trim the current draw to an absolute minimum, should this be necessary.
NASA released revolutionary new images of the cosmos this week that were taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space observatory to date. Launched in 2021, the JWST was designed to study star and planet formation with exponentially more accuracy and detail than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. “We can actually essentially watch the formation of stars,” says astrophysicist Katie Mack. “There’s a chance that it might find signatures consistent with life in the atmospheres of other stars.” We feature NASA’s new images, like the Southern Ring Nebula, and Mack discusses what humans can learn from the new science about the cosmos, and ourselves.
The first video from [3DPrintedLife] attempting to make a liquid piston engine was… well… the operative word is attempting. The latest video, though, which you can see below gets it right, at least eventually.. He has a good explanation of the changes that made the design better. Turns out, one change that made a difference was to turn a key part of the engine inside out. You can see the video below.
AuraGem Music is a free music hosting service that will let you upload mp3′s via Titan to your own *private* library so that you can play them from the capsule using your identity certificate. Because of limited storage, there is a quota system, which you can find more information about on the capsule.
[...]
Currently only mp3s are supported. However, support for ogg’s will be added later. Files that are identical, excluding audio header and footers, as well as tags, will be deduplicated to save on space. This ensures that users have full advantage of as much space as is possible. The quota system will take deduplication into account by splitting the quota of identical songs between all users who have uploaded that song. It is assumed that uploaded music has been purchased, unless other evidence can be shown, within a DCMA request, to prove otherwise.
[...]
Lastly, AuraGem Music will always remain free to use. However, because this service is run solely by one individual, it cannot be guaranteed that the service will not shut down in the future due to financial issues, server issues, etc. I do not ever intend to sell this service to any companies unless they are FOSS-Oriented and non-profit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Here’s a neat little feature of git that I just learnt about. It turns out that git branches can have associated descriptions, although they are local only. All you have to do to set one is to run the command `git branch –edit-description` which will open your editor, just like writing a commit message.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Video download link | md5sum 652c8ad54777128b03dad22911b6c763
Abusing Granting Authority at EPO
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: A sort of “patent racket” based around Germany* is threatening Europe; to make matters worse, it’s creating a financial calamity, but few actors profit from this calamity and coordinate the agenda
THE above video concerns the latest part in a series [1, 2, 3, 4] about an imploding bubble at the EPO. Crime seems to be the last resort now; the only way the EPO can sustain its existence, given the severe damage done over the past decade, is deliberate violation of laws, constitutions, and treaties. The general idea is, misuse the granting authority to grant hundreds of thousands if not millions of illegal patents. Who benefits? NPOs**. It is all connected.
“Of course the corporate media is never mentioning any of that!”Just before recording the above video I opened the front page of the EPO’s Web site (a source of endless lies) and later I noticed that a couple of days ago, this page had been updated to congratulate António Campinos, who merely continues the illegal plans of Benoît Battistelli, aiming to bring an illegal kangaroo court to authorise fake European Patents, including European software patents that should never have been granted in the first place.
If the EPO plans to attack the law (EPC) and then celebrate its 50th anniversary (adding insult to injury next year), then citizens of Europe should at least be fully aware, properly informed. The same people who staged a coup at the EPO (turning a patent office into a bank) are now staging a coup against patent courts all across the EU, seeking to replace them with plaintiff-friendly kangaroo courts, presuming validity of patents granted by de facto bankers. Today’s EPO is run by managers with no grasp of patents. It’s all nepotism and destruction for personal gain. Patent examiners are rightly unset and the uproar results in industrial actions and strikes. Of course the corporate media is never mentioning any of that! █
_________
* As this article from yesterday put it: “The European Union is run on a day-to-day basis by Germany for German interests. Except when it’s kowtowing to American interests.” This is what's happening in EPO for sure, never mind the EU.
** EPO staff trusts them even less than it trusts Campinos. Based on the latest survey as well as prior surveys.
Slide from the EPO Staff Survey which ended a couple of months ago
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
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Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmdVCZ22xUbZkpsSDmSDMrnFTMypCGWw1f2punvumLq2NJ
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