Here's everything that happened last week in open source software. Lots of open hardware news from the Pine64 team, a new Linux Tablet, and some releases from projects.
iber is a free, secure calling and messaging program for all popular mobile platforms and operating systems.
It has a rich set of features such as voice/video calls, text messages with GIFs, stickers, photos, and videos. In addition, Viber features group chats, group calls and disappearing messages.
Here's how to install and use it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GPU-Viewer on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, The GPU-Viewer is a free, open-source project to create an easy-to-use interface for glxinfo, vulkaninfo, and clinfo. The program will be developed using Python 3 with GTK3 to display all the crucial details extracted from these programs on one page alongside other valuable tools like grep or AWK.
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 GPU-Viewer on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
CPU-X is a free and open-source software designed for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD for system profiling and monitoring application that provides detailed information on the hardware components of a computer system. CPU-X gathers information from the system’s CPU, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, and more, then displays this information in an easy-to-read format. This makes it a valuable tool for troubleshooting hardware issues or simply for getting a better understanding of the inner workings of a computer system.
In addition to displaying essential information about hardware components, CPU-X also provides an overview of the system’s overall performance. This can help determine whether or not a particular component bottlenecks a system. Overall, CPU-X is a versatile and helpful application for anyone who needs to gather information about their computer system.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install CPU-X on Manjaro 21 Linux. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with the yay AUR helper. Ideally, most users may be using some wrapper for Pacman; for new users, it is essential to install one to keep your packages up-to-date while you learn Arch/Manjaro.
When installing Rocky Linux in a VMware virtual machine, you will definitely want to install VMware Tools as well. The VMware Tools software will give you better graphics support in the guest operating system, as well as the ability to drag and drop files between the host and guest system, and configure shared folders.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Olive video editor on Linux Mint 21.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Bash scripts and if statements to check whether or not a file or directory exists.
Email encryption is a technique that disguises an email so that only the sender and intended recipient can access its contents, preventing unauthorized individuals from intercepting the signal and reading the message.
Most email doesn’t have this level of protection. Content is sent as regular text and open to data security risks. However, you can step in with proper end-to-end encryption, for instance, to secure your confidential email easily.
In this method, email is encrypted on the sender’s system using a public encryption key that scrambles the email and any attachments. The email is then sent to the recipient, who has a private key that can be used to decrypt the message. This technique is so secure that the message cannot be read by any email services, banking institutions, Internet service providers (ISPs), or hackers.
Just before the weekend hit, a new development release of the Windows compatibility layer Wine went up with version 7.19. This is part of Steam Play Proton, which allows you to play tons of Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux desktops. Once a year they make a big new stable release, and eventually Proton updates to it too.
Love your point and click adventures and want to see more? Zid Journey is a new one from the team behind Zniw Adventure. It's a classic 2D point 'n click adventure game, developed in a tiny team from Poland. Just like the first game, it will have full Native Linux support.
The Steam Deck is a fantastic system€ for indies, AA, AAA and everything in between but it's also great for emulation too. EmuDeck is software that can help automate the entire process of setting emulators up, and a huge new release is out now.
Indoorlands, a somewhat unique theme park building sim has left Early Access as a finished game ready for you to get clicking around. What's the different about this one then? Well, as the name hints towards, you're building everything inside. An indoor amusement park, that you build up using these massive connected rooms. It comes with Native Linux support too.
LOST EMBER is an adventure game all about the power of nature. Released back in 2019, it seems recently that went back to it to ensure it works nicely on Steam Deck (and so Linux too).
Valve are preparing to launch the latest update to Steam Play Proton, the compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux and Steam Deck.
Although new Switch models are harder to hack than the original ones, Switch hardware mods (and therefore, hacks) are a possibility. For these models, hacker CTCaer has shown significant progress on Linux L4T and Android support, with a release ETA of “Soon”.
L4T Ubuntu running on Switch OLED
L4T (Linux for Tegra) is the package of choice for the Nintendo Switch which runs on the NVidia SoC. The Switchroot team have adapted it for the Switch and coupled with Ubuntu, in particular thanks to work by CTCaer. The team has also ported Android to the console.
Until now, L4T Ubuntu for Switch was only compatible with original Switch models, and support of new models have been a “work in progress” for quite some time. It seems this is going to change soon, making the newer Models (2019, Switch Lite, and OLED) even more interesting.
The screenshot showcases Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS (Bionic Beaver) running on the console, but CTCaer also hints that the team are bringing Android and Lakka (a Linux-based distribution specialized in emulation)
The main reason for pushing out this release, is it has the Android drivers in the kernel, so we can have a got at running Anbox and/or Waydroid.
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration run by DigitalOcean to celebrate and give back to open source projects and software. The initiative is open to everyone, and the goal is to encourage everyone in our global community to contribute to open source. In this article, I'll answer frequently asked questions about how to participate. I'll also discuss how to contribute to both code and non-code issues.
This article guide walks users through the installation and basic usage of Node.js on AlmaLinux 9 and AlmaLinux 8 releases using AppStream and NodeSource Repositories.
Before working on ToolJet, I worked with a few enterprise clients as a consultant. Many of these clients were large enough to build and maintain dozens of internal tools. Despite the constant requests from sales, support, and operations teams to add more features and fix the bugs in their internal tools, engineering teams struggled to find the bandwidth to work on the internal utilities.
I tried using a few platforms to build and maintain internal tools. Most of these tools were very expensive, and frequently, they didn't really fit the requirements. We needed modifications, and most utilities didn't support on-premise hosting.
As a Ruby developer, I primarily used ActiveAdmin and RailsAdmin to build internal tools. Both utilities are amazing, but making them work with more than one data source is difficult. I then realized there is a need in the market for a framework that could build user interfaces and connect to multiple data sources. I believe any tool built for developers should be open source. Most of the tools and frameworks that developers use daily result from people from all over the world collaborating in public.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
The RcppSimdJson package was just updated to release 0.1.8 today.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
While JSON files are preferred for storing data in human-readable form, it is good enough to give headaches when they are minified.
Google Research has been working on its own Rust-based operating system called KataOS and designed to secure embedded systems that run Machine Learning (ML) applications.
There has been a lot of talk about the Rust programming language in recent times, since it offers about the same level of performance as C programming but helps programmers write more secure code with built-in prevention against buffer overflows for instance. It has gained a lot of traction over the years, and Linux 6.1 will be the first kernel release to include Rust code.
As Democratic Representative Timothy Ryan and venture-capitalist mascot J.D. Vance faced off in Youngstown last night for their final debate before the midterm election, an all-encompassing taking of offense ensued. Each candidate harped on the phoniness, the inauthenticity, and the bought-and-paid-for policy positions of his opponent; each candidate offered carefully presented “commonsense” positions on divisive controversies, and assured the Ohio electorate that he was the candidate most in touch with their struggles and sensibilities.
Nadira’s first feature film as Producer, Winners, won the Audience Award for best film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival to our (frankly surprised) delight. It will play in London at the Raindance Film Festival on Saturday 29 October at 8.30pm, at the Genesis Cinema in Bethnal Green.
Hubbard did not launch his career by disparaging psychiatrists as individuals or psychiatry as a profession. In fact, given his early enthusiasm for Freudian therapy, his extensive borrowings from both psychology and psychoanalytic theory, and his desire to contribute to the sciences of mental health more broadly, the virulence of his campaign against psychiatry in his subsequent books and speeches is striking and surprising. The isolated criticisms of psychiatry that can be found in Hubbard’s early work are by contrast almost models of rhetorical constraint.
How do you build a practical tank-driving simulator in the 1970s, when 3D computer-generated graphics are still just a fantasy of the future? If you’re a European tanker school, the solution is to use a large CNC machine to drive a camera around a miniature terrain model (German, translated). In the video after the break, [Tom Scott] takes it for a test drive.
You don’t think much about the power company until you flip the lights on and they don’t come on. The same can be said of soldering flux. You don’t think much about it, usually, until you try soldering without it. Flux has a cleaning action on metal surfaces that allows for a proper solder joint. The problem is, do you have any idea what’s in the flux you are using? We don’t either. [Catsndogs] has a recipe to make your own flux and then you’ll know.
Smart Communications, a for-profit Florida company that sells phone, videochat, and email-like services to prisons and jails, told at least one sheriff’s department that it can live “the resort life” on a trip to Florida.
A pity that she’s now beneath the soil. She rests in peace, where one can never reach her. For otherwise I’d surely take delight In asking that they can my Latin teacher.
Re “Justice for the People,” by Elie Mystal [September 5/12]: This is an excellent detailing of what Sonia Sotomayor is doing on the Supreme Court. Acting not out of ideology as much as duty, she represents the near future of what needs to be done across the federal branches. Thank you, as well, for reiterating at length the horrors of the shadow docket. Unless it is reined in, the right will use it to try anything. It won’t stop unless more of the public knows about it.Walter Pewen
Among the most creative and influential scholars of the past 50 years, the protean Bruno Latour was variously described as a sociologist, a philosopher, and an anthropologist. But just as his work questioned the making of categories, he himself transcended categorization. For decades, Latour worked at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at the Paris School of Mines. In 2007 he became a dean at the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences Po), where he elevated the role of research by establishing its Médialab, a unique experimental space for transdisciplinary work, and integrated environmental concerns—especially climate change—throughout the Sciences Po curriculum.
The Global Academic Integrity Network, founded by Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) and Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa), aims to improve data sharing and collaboration between quality assurance and regulatory bodies.
At launch, the United Nations-backed initiative also brings together bodies from France, Hungary, Italy, South Africa, Ukraine, the UK and Zambia.
Being a parent is hard work. You need to prepare your child to operate in the world. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to make good choices are just the beginning. They also ought to know regular expressions and Unix pipes. [Jackdoe] can help with that last one, thanks to their Unix pipe card game.
The story of humankind is largely a tale of conflict, often brought about by the uneven distribution of resources. For as long as we’ve been down out of the trees, and probably considerably before that too, our ancestors have been struggling to get what they need to survive, as often as not at the expense of another, more fortunate tribe. Food, water, land, it doesn’t matter; if They have it and We don’t, chances are good that there’s going to be a fight.
Even in technical disciplines such as engineering, there is much we can still learn from nature. After all, the endless experimentation and trials of life give rise to some of the most elegant solutions to problems. With that in mind, a large team of researchers took inspiration from the humble (if rather annoying) wasp, specifically its nest-building skills. The idea was to explore 3D printing of structures without the constraints of a framed machine, by mounting an extruder onto a drone.
Working on retro computers is rarely straightforward, as [ukmaker] recently found out while designing a new display interface. Their oscilloscope was having trouble triggering on the video signal produced by older video circuitry, so they created the Video Trigger for Retrocomputers.
I know people who have 3D printers that are little more than appliances. They buy it, they print with it, and they don’t change much of anything. That doesn’t describe me and, I’m guessing, it doesn’t describe you either. This does lead to a problem, though, when it comes to slicers. You have to keep changing profiles and modifying them. It can be hard to keep things straight. For example, if you have profiles for different nozzles, you get to make a choice: keep one profile and edit the parts that change, or keep multiple profiles and any common changes have to be propagated to the other profiles.
A constant influx of bad news — pandemic, shootings, inflation, natural disasters, political turmoil — can feel, at best, soul-crushing. Now, a new study from Spain confirms the negative toll constantly being plugged into the news cycle can take.
The researchers looked at how people were best able to manage feelings of anxiety and depression at the height of the pandemic, finding that one of the most effective methods was to take breaks from the barrage of bad news.
Doctors For Assange wrote to US and UK officials warning of health concerns if Julian Assange stays in prison. He tested positive for COVID.
"We have allowed pharmaceutical companies to set the agenda, and that is coming at the cost to our patients."
According to reporting by the Guardian, the new Waterkeeper Alliance analysis "found detectable PFAS levels in 95 out of 114, or 83%, of waterways tested across 34 states and the District of Columbia, and frequently at levels that exceed federal and state limits."
Technology giant Microsoft has sacked around 1,000 people in a fresh round of layoffs, according to US news website Axios.
This is the third round of layoffs at the Big Tech firm since July. Microsoft had fired nearly 1% of its 180,000-strong workforce across offices and product divisions in July as part of a ‘realignment’.
Details: Microsoft declined to say how many jobs had been cut, but a source said the layoffs numbered under 1,000.
On Tuesday, shares of Microsoft fell slightly after the layoffs were reported. First quarter results for Microsoft’s next fiscal year is set for release on Oct. 25.
The Moto E20 from Lenovo phone uses a Unisoc T606 SoC. In common with all Unisoc SoCs, this uses a customised U-boot bootloader as a secondary bootloader which then loads Android. The bootloader can be communicated with using the Android fastboot protocol.
Analysis of the bootloader showed that there was an undocumented fastboot oem subcommand, pull, that could read data from the phone (i.e. could upload data from the phone to the fastboot client).
[...]
As the userdata partition is encrypted, PII cannot be stolen through method 2 by default. It is useful to extract the contents of the bootloader or Android to reverse engineer potential vulnerabilities. The uboot_log and miscdata partitions can contain information useful for potential future attacks.
Method 3 can allow cold boot attacks – where the device is booted into the bootloader and the RAM is then examined to look for confidential information from the Android operating system.
As a proof of concept, some canary values were set in the Android Settings and Contacts app. The device was booted into bootloader mode. 2 GB of memory was extracted from address 0x80000000 (which usually maps to RAM on ARM cores) and examined. All canaries were found within the memory, including a wireless PSK. Showing it could be possible to compromise user data.
Although this was discovered on the version of the firmware described above, the same command has been identified on other versions and software channels for the Moto E20.
The Istio control plane, istiod, is vulnerable to a request processing error, allowing a malicious attacker that sends a specially crafted or oversized message, to crash the control plane process. This can be exploited when the Kubernetes validating or mutating webhook service is exposed publicly. This endpoint is served over TLS port 15017, but does not require any authentication from an attacker.
An update for firefox is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impactof Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score,which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerabilityfrom the CVE link(s) in the References section.
Global networking giant Cisco has tied up with the University of Canberra to address the shortage of cyber security skills, with the focus to be on defence and critical infrastructure.
A statement from Cisco said the partnership would expand the National Industry Innovation Network which is focused on how digital technologies can help in Australia’s economic and social challenges.
"Cyber security is a major challenge for us at every level, and certainly for industry, government and universities – therefore, it is equally a major source of new jobs and innovation," University of Canberra vice-chancellor Professor Paddy Nixon said.
"There is enormous scope for Australia to improve its resilience against cyber attacks including the use of advanced digital technologies.
When people banking in the United States lose money because their payment card got skimmed at an ATM, gas pump or grocery store checkout terminal, they may face hassles or delays in recovering any lost funds, but they are almost always made whole by their financial institution. Yet, one class of Americans — those receiving food assistance benefits via state-issued prepaid debit cards — are particularly exposed to losses from skimming scams, and usually have little recourse to do anything about it.
In a federal criminal complaint filed in Kansas on Monday, the government says Mohammad Rafi Mohammadi communicated with, funded, and, in one case, sought to secure the release of recruiters for ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) both before and after he worked for the U.S. as a linguist in Afghanistan.
A Justice Department release on Tuesday states that Lafarge S.A., located in Paris, and its subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria S.A., located in Damascus, pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide support and resources to ISIS and the al-Nusrah Front (ANF), both of which the United States has designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
Court documents state that the firms planned to pay ISIS and ANF in exchange for permission to operate a cement plant in Syria from 2013 to 2014.
EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell showed the West’s neocolonial mentality claiming “the world needs Europe” as a “beacon” and beautiful “garden” to civilize the barbarous “jungle” in the Global South. He also called for regime change to create a “post-Putin Russia.”
Russian forces shelled multiple Ukrainian cities on the morning of October 18. Ukrainian authorities declared an air raid alert for the entire country.
A growing number of Russians have started purchasing falsified law enforcement ID cards and other documents indicating they hold military or law enforcement ranks, Kommersant reported Tuesday. Cybersecurity experts have reportedly observed a flood of document forging services on the dark web and on Telegram since the start of Russia’s mobilization campaign.
Russian troops have kidnapped two employees of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power company.
Day after day, the Russian president talks of using nuclear weapons. The American president says it’s been awhile since we “faced the prospect of Armageddon” like this. The UN secretary general says we’re all “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the highest ranking US military officer—says Vladimir Putin is like “a cornered animal” and therefore “we need to back off that [Armageddon talk]” and urgently engage in real diplomacy before it all goes horribly sideways.
Three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a speech claiming that “the foundations of the international order are under serious and sustained challenge.” Yet Blinken passed over the invasion quickly: “Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a clear and present threat…[but] China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”1
We strongly condemn the letter submitted on October 9th by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the UN Security Council, proposing the deployment of a foreign, armed occupation force to Haiti. And we denounce theBiden Administration’s drafting of a UN Security Council Resolution calling for the immediate deployment of a foreign “rapid action force” in Haiti, as reported on October 15th.
The Kremlin had never expected mobilization to be “popular” with the Russian people. This is the often-cited reason for Russia’s delay in declaring even a “partial mobilization.” Recent urban focus groups, commissioned by the Kremlin itself, have made clear that practically no one approves of the war in Russia’s larger cities. Only some of the very elderly people, who would never have to go to the front, still approve of the “special operation.” Perhaps even more dismaying to the Russian President’s Office is the the growing “frustration” with Vladimir Putin himself. Meduza’s special correspondent Andrey Pertsev interviewed sources close to the Kremlin about how the government gauges political temperatures around the country, and how it tries to keep the society from reaching a boiling point.
Vladimir Saldo, head of the Russian occupation administration of Kherson region, announced the “organized transfer” of civilians in four municipalities from the right bank to the left bank of the Dnipro River. The measure is necessary, he said, because Ukraine is “assembling forces for a wide-scale offensive” and there is an “immediate danger that the territory will be flooded due to the planned destruction of the dam at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant."
All current Kherson residents willing to leave their region for Russia will receive housing vouchers from the Russian government, said Marat Khusnullin, the government’s deputy chairman.
Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has declared that “the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria” is a territory “temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation.” 287 Rada deputies voted in favor of the resolution that says so, and also condemns “the genocide of the Chechen people.”
On October 17, a Su-34 bomber plane crashed near a nine-story apartment building in Yeysk, a Russian town in the Krasnodar Region. The plane struck the building and fell apart, reported the local emergency service. Spilled aircraft fuel then caught fire, which spread to the building and soon engulfed it in flames. It took six hours to extinguish the massive fire, which damaged a total of 72 apartments. Rescue teams have now finished searching for people under the rubble. 13 people are reported dead, including three children. Three of the victims died after jumping from the top floors as they tried to escape the fire, said Anna Minkova, the region’s deputy governor. 19 more people have been injured, including five children and two pregnant women. Four of the people who have been hospitalized are still in intensive care. A three-day mourning period has been declared in Yeysk. Meanwhile, experts are beginning to probe what might have caused the crash.
Prosecutors are demanding a five-year prison sentence for Pavel Krisevich, the Russian performance artist who stands accused of ‘hooliganism’ in the Red Square. Pavel Chikov, the founder of Agora, a human-rights advocacy group, reported this on his Telegram channel.
"Saudi Arabia's paid advisers have included retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, a national security adviser to President Barack Obama, and retired Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who led the National Security Agency under Obama and President George W. Bush," the Post reported, citing more than 4,000 pages documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings.
Black residents in Kansas City, Missouri, say police ignored their warnings that a murderer was targeting Black women, until one of his captives escaped earlier this month. A 22-year-old Black woman in Excelsior Springs, just outside Kansas City, said she broke free from the basement where a white man held her captive for a month. She also claimed there were more victims, all of them Black women, who were similarly sexually abused. Timothy Haslett Jr. is now in police custody and faces rape, kidnapping and assault charges. Prior to his arrest, the Kansas City Police Department said concerns about a possible serial killer were “completely unfounded” rumors. “This speaks to the violent silencing of Black women specifically, of the Black community at large here in Kansas City,” says Ryan Sorrell, founder of the Black-led independent newspaper Kansas City Defender, which reported on the missing Black women. “This is ongoing. We have cases back in the ’90s where Black women have been murdered,” notes Justice Gatson, executive director of the Black women-led group Reale Justice Network in Kansas City, Missouri.
With midterm elections three weeks away, a new report links reported hate crimes against Asian Americans to anti-China rhetoric used on the campaign trail. This issue is also examined in a new PBS documentary, “Rising Against Asian Hate,” which explores the fight against anti-Asian racism following the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021, when a white gunman targeted multiple Asian-owned businesses and killed eight people, six of them Asian American women. At the time of the killing spree, hate crimes against Asian Americans had been on the rise after then-President Trump blamed the outbreak of the coronavirus on China, calling it the “kung flu.” “We felt that we had to document this moment,” says executive producer Gina Kim, “and make sure that people recognize that this is an issue that we need to confront as a nation.”
As nuclear powers ratchet up tensions around the Ukraine war, the U.S., NATO and Russia are carrying out nuclear war games. Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists are calling on lawmakers and world leaders to “Defuse Nuclear War.” Their calls come on the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “The Kremlin is making nuclear threats that are completely reckless. At the same time, there are things that the U.S. government can and should do that would reduce the chances of nuclear war,” says Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders “are simply going along with this autopilot heading towards a precipice of nuclear annihilation globally.” His recent piece for Common Dreams is headlined “Don’t Just Worry About Nuclear War—Do Something to Help Prevent It.”
Sweden's coalition government was announced on Friday after Kristersson penned a deal with his partners and the nationalist and anti-immigration Sweden Democrats which pledged to support the government in exchange for policy commitments, especially on immigration and crime.
"The defendants have known for decades that use of fossil fuels is a major cause of climate change."
"The push for investment in fossil fuels is likely to perpetuate the triple injustices of energy, social, and environmental crises."
The crises of the past few years have done a number on our economy. From rising rent, to climbing grocery bills; from a deadly pandemic to climate-fueled natural disasters.€
Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual electric passenger cars won’t get us far enough down the road to ending greenhouse-gas emissions and stanching the overheating of this planet. Worse yet, the coming global race to electrify the personal vehicle is likely to exacerbate ecological degradation, geopolitical tensions, and military conflict.
The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court, states that the companies knew about climate change for decades and actively sought to conceal that information from the public. Instead, they funded PR campaigns aimed at confusing and misleading the public.
In late September, the now-familiar "debt ceiling showdown" was avoided when Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., pulled his permitting reform legislation from the stopgap spending bill because it did not have the votes. Not only was a government shutdown avoided, but this was also a near-miss for anyone who cares about the future of our planet, as the senator's legislation would have fast-tracked the construction of a new natural gas pipeline through the mountains and rivers of Appalachia.
Hundreds of thousands of wildfires have burned through nearly seven million acres of land across the West so far this year, but a study released Monday shows the devastating impact the blazes can have across the country as the rising heat causes other extreme weather events as far as 1,500 miles away.
As early voting gets started in some states, Republicans are focusing their closing argument on the economy, American voters’ biggest concern and the subject of the majority of GOP ad buys. The Democrats’ closing argument, meanwhile, features abortion, the stripping away of women’s right to choose.
With the Fed's next policy meeting just two weeks away, the Groundwork Collaborative on Tuesday cataloged more than a dozen recent comments from economists, fund managers, and other observers cautioning that aggressive rate hikes are already taking their toll on workers, economic growth, the housing market, and other key areas without tackling the core drivers of inflation—many of which are out of the central bank's control.
Politically, the G7 and likeminded countries around the world have adopted a war footing to stop Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin violated the most fundamental principle of international law by launching an unprovoked attack on another member of the United Nations—an institution created explicitly to prevent such aggression. The dangers of appeasement should be obvious. Even a little empathy should make us shudder in horror at the prospect of having to live under Putin’s rule.
In an interview with Punchbowl News Tuesday, the California Republican outlined plans to use the expected fight over the raising of the debt ceiling next year as leverage to pass several austerity policies and block additional aid for Ukraine, as well as blocking pandemic-related spending.
In his new role at Spotify, Thoensen will lead the Talk Creator Content and Partnerships team where he will oversee content strategy and acquisition, business development, partner management and creator community development. He’s also tasked with driving Spotify’s exclusive podcast strategy through strategic initiatives and partnerships.
Most recently, Thoensen was head of content partnerships at short-form video app TikTok, where he led TikTok’s relationships with top global public figures and worked with media brands such as the NFL, NBA, Condé Nast and NBC. At TikTok, he was also dedicated to building and supporting diverse creator communities.
TikTok’s former U.S. head of content partnerships, Bryan Thoensen, has joined Spotify to oversee the company’s content strategy and partnerships with individual audio creators, known as the talk creator content and partnerships team.
Thoensen will report up to Max Cutler, who was promoted earlier this year to lead Spotify’s partnerships with creators and now holds the title of vp of talk creator content. In his new role at Spotify, Thoensen will also oversee the team’s business development and acquisitions as part of the audio giant’s larger exclusive podcast strategy.
The streamer will still report global and regional membership numbers, but will not provide guidance for them starting in January 2023, when it reports fourth quarter earnings. The company will still provide guidance on revenue, operating income, operating margin, net income and earnings per share.
Amid great fanfare in late September, the Republican Party, under the direction of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, debuted its pitch to seal a new majority in the next Congress beneath a rubric redolent of the overtures of a bad boyfriend: “A Commitment to America.” Modeled on the landmark 1994 Contract With America pulled together by Newt Gingrich (speaking of bad romantic partners), the 2022 GOP program is mostly a grab bag of harum-scarum cultural resentments papering over a singularly anemic policy wish list.
When some of the people blacklisted during the McCarthy era left the United States to find work in the United Kingdom, they might have thought they had left their troubles behind them. But they were wrong. The FBI passed its files on to MI5, the British Security Service, which seems to have accepted the bureau’s judgments without question.
Trump threw his unquestioning support behind law enforcement. He did it right after he was elected, promising to elevate cops above the people they served. He claimed the “anti-police atmosphere” police had created themselves was “dangerous” (he didn’t specify to whom, however) and that he, the newly-elected dumpster fire, would get this fixed.
Turkey continues to fall back in the freedom field. Or maybe it’s surging ahead in the oppression field! Maybe that’s the list it wants to top.
The contrast between Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker and the state’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Stacey Abrams, could not be more stark. I’m not talking about intelligence or integrity, though there’s that, but the expectations that political pundits and the media generally set for the two candidates in advance of their first debate.
As we reflect on the disastrous Supreme Court term of 2022, we must acknowledge that this Supreme Court is a threat to the rights of Asian American communities and must be reformed.
A Moscow appellate court has rejected an appeal from jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s lawyers, who sought to have his nine-year prison sentence for embezzlement and contempt of court overturned.
Journalists from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tajik service have identified the family of one of the possible perpetrators of the mass shooting at a military training ground in Russia’s Belgorod region on October 15. The man in question is a 24-year-old named Ehson Aminzoda. The Russian authorities have not officially named him as a suspect, but several days after the incident, Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy published a photo of an official military document listing Aminzoda as a private along with photos of the shooting victims. Shariy didn’t indicate whether Aminzoda was one of the gunmen or one of the victims.
On Tuesday, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian President's Office, told Ukrainians to prepare for power, water, and heating to be cut off throughout the country.
Republicans are pulling ahead in the polls right now because of the issues of the economy, crime, and homelessness, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll published just yesterday. More than a year ago, I wrote about this very danger in an article titled, "A Crime Wave Could Take Down the Democrats in 2022" (among others).
Through public records requests, the Tampa Bay Times obtained several videos of arrests of people who were accused of voting illegally by DeSantis' new Office of Election Crimes and Security, which was established earlier this year.
Amidst all the conversation around regulating social media, algorithmic amplification, and disinformation, one idea that tends to get a lot of broad support is mandating editorial transparency. After all, it sounds nice, since transparency is usually a good thing. But in fact, there are huge legal and conceptual problems with mandated transparency. Santa Clara Law’s Eric Goldman has written papers on the constitutionality of the idea and an important Supreme Court case related to this question, and this week he joins the podcast to discuss why mandated transparency isn’t as good (or as constitutional) as many people claim.
The newspaper, quoting the son Ibrahim, said that Almadi, who is 72, was sentenced on October 3 to 16 years in prison with a travel ban of another 16 years after that.
The son told the newspaper that his father had expressed only "mild" opinions with tweets mentioning corruption in Saudi Arabia and the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the US-based columnist who was dismembered in 2018 after being lured into the kingdom's Istanbul consulate.
The United States said Tuesday it was raising with Saudi Arabia a prison sentence handed to a US citizen over tweets critical of the kingdom, another source of tension between the historic allies.
Saudi Arabia has long faced criticism over human rights. Blogger and rights activist Raif Badawi served 10 years in prison through March and was publicly lashed 50 times for charges over content on his website.
WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange will take his own life if he is extradited to the US, his lawyer Jennifer Robinson says, adding that the situation is very serious and the Australian Government needs to act on it immediately.
She told the ABC 730 program on Tuesday: "...the situation is incredibly urgent. Julian's health is declining in front of our eyes. He has already suffered a mini stroke. He has got COVID right now in prison, which doctors say could be life -threatening for him."
Asked by 730 host Sarah Ferguson if the argument that Assange should be brought back to Australia after his sentencing so he could serve out any term in his own country had any merit, Robinson replied:
"The problem with that solution, it is no solution. He would have to go to the US, be convicted, exhaust all appeal processes, and we're talking about another decade of legal process. He won't last that long. The medical evidence makes clear he won't last that long.
Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist from Indian-administered Kashmir, said Tuesday on Twitter that she had been stopped by immigration authorities in New Delhi from boarding a flight to New York to receive her award.
The legislation — the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act and a federal anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) bill — would, respectively, block federal law enforcement from subpoenaing journalist records and protect media against certain lawsuits.
No Iranian prison is as notorious as Evin. For 50 years it has been the holding pen, interrogation centre and gallows of the state’s political prisoners. It lies at the base of the Alborz mountains, casting a shadow over the capital below. The fire billowing inside it lit up the city and evoked the torching of the Rex Cinema, back in the summer of 1978, when the death of more than 470 people in the building as a result of an arson attack triggered the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah.
The human rights groups said the evidence suggests a disturbing pattern of security forces deliberately firing live ammunition and metal shells at protesters and bystanders, including children.
The statement says more than 200 protesters have been killed during the demonstrations, including at least 23 children, while more than 1,000 protesters, activists, journalists and students have been arbitrarily arrested.
A later Instagram post on an account attributed to Rekabi described her not wearing a hijab as "unintentional," though it wasn't immediately clear whether she wrote the post or what condition she was in at the time. The Iranian government routinely pressures activists at home and abroad, often airing what rights group describe as coerced confessions on state television.
Rekabi left Seoul on a Tuesday morning flight, the Iranian Embassy in South Korea said. The BBC's Persian service, which has extensive contacts within Iran despite being banned from operating there, quoted an unnamed "informed source" who described Iranian officials as seizing both Rekabi's mobile phone and passport.
When migrants arrive at the southern border and ask for asylum, they currently face two possibilities: Either they’re turned away and shut out of the asylum system under Title 42, the Trump-era public health order Biden has kept in place despite lifting other pandemic restrictions, or they’re admitted into the country and allowed to pursue their cases in immigration court. Those lucky enough to be exempted from Title 42 and admitted into the country—people Mexico won’t accept because of their nationality, including Cubans, Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians—then face a second set of possibilities. Depending on whether they have children with them, family members or other sponsors in the United States, and the availability of beds in detention, as well as other factors, they may be detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, subjected to electronic monitoring under ICE’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, or simply told to report to immigration court on their hearing date. The latter option is becoming increasingly rare: An unprecedented number of noncitizens have been enrolled in ATD under the Biden administration. While Biden has reduced the overall number of migrants in ICE detention, his administration has also presided over a significant expansion of electronic monitoring—a scheme that advocates say harms migrants, even as it claims to be more humane than traditional detention.
In the message, seen by the ABC, he said, "When slavery comes back, I'm buying her".
In her defense of voting rights, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brilliantly turned the tables on the right by crafting her own originalist argument to defend taking race into account when drawing district maps.
Late last year, a trove of records was obtained by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secret (DDoS). Those records showed what the Washington DC Metro PD hoped to hide: that the internal disciplinary process was apparently irreparably broken.
Retention in the division had been a chronic problem, but in the spring of that year, it became acute. About a dozen young and midcareer cyber agents had given notice or were considering leaving, attracted by more lucrative jobs outside government. As the resignations piled up, Comey received an unsolicited email from Andre McGregor, one of the cyber agents who had quit. In his email, the young agent suggested ways to improve the Cyber Division. Comey routinely broadcast his open-door policy, but senior staff members were nevertheless aghast when they heard an agent with just six years’ experience in the bureau had actually taken him up on it. To their consternation, Comey took McGregor’s email and the other cyber agents’ departures seriously. “I want to meet these guys,” he said. He invited the agents to Washington from field offices nationwide for a private lunch. As news of the meeting circulated throughout headquarters, across divisions and into the field, senior staff openly scorned the cyber agents, dubbing them “the 12 Angry Men,” “the Dirty Dozen” or just “these assholes.” To the old-schoolers — including some who had risked their lives in service to the bureau — the cyber agents were spoiled prima donnas, not real FBI.
"We're proud of the brave workers in upstate New York who stood up in the face of a vicious anti-union campaign to challenge a trillion-dollar corporation."
Over the summer I got a copy of the new book from Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, two formerly staunch 1st Amendment supporters who have apparently decided to go back on their earlier views, with a collection of essays by a variety of authors about “social media, freedom of speech, and the future of our democracy.” Much of the book is maddening, because there are many essays from very famous people who should know better, but seem more than willing to reject the 1st Amendment because people said bad stuff online.
We’ve noted several times how telecom and media giants are running a sleazy smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, in the hopes of keeping the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press, and accuse the highly popular and qualified candidate of everything from hating police to being an enemy of rural America.
As noted previously, I’ve got some mixed feelings on the Biden COVID relief and infrastructure bills’ plan to throw more than $50 billion dollars at U.S. broadband. Mostly because we still haven’t mapped U.S. broadband properly (meaning we don’t know where money should be prioritized), and the U.S. has a rich history of failing to police subsidy fraud by the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies.
In a partnership with the streamer, PBS was allowed to air the specials in 2021. But this year, PBS no longer has the rights, and confirmed that it won't be airing the Halloween show.
In the initial run-up to Windows 11's launch, much controversy centered on its requirement for TPM 2.0 and a relatively recent CPU. Microsoft wants users to have at least an Intel 8th gen or AMD Zen 2 processor, but the company is considering allowing some Intel 7th-gen chips and Zen 1s. According to Lansweeper, those requirements are the main roadblock for ineligible systems.
The RAM requirement isn't a problem – 92 percent of surveyed workstations meet it. Conversely, only 57 percent of systems meet the CPU requirement, and 64 percent have the necessary TPM. Many of those workstations may be compatible with TPM 2.0 but might not have enabled it since some systems must engage the feature manually. While not great, these numbers represent a 12 percent improvement over 2021.
PrimeWire had outmaneuvered several Hollywood blocking injunctions but a complaint in the U.S. tightened the screws and never let go. An MPA investigation to identify the site's operator was met with sophisticated countermeasures. It ended at a UK property that has been publicly linked to other crimes worth billions of dollars. And a site called KickassTorrents.
Earlier this year, former Megaupload executives Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk signed a plea deal to avoid extradition to the United States. They remain defendants in civil lawsuits filed by the MPA and RIAA but their guilty pleas will undoubtedly change the course of these battles.
Feeling so depressed.
I can’t even handle the smallest problems in my life
I have been interested in RISC-V for a while. I played a bit with RISC-V cores on FPGA but it is quite hard to find RISC-V cores on general-purpose computers. Fortunately, the company ClockworkPi is making the DevTerm R-01[1], a handheld computer with a RISC-V processor. The DevTerm R1 is a handheld computer featuring an RV64IMAFDCVU single core RISC-V processor.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.