This week, Linux Out Loud chats about up-and-coming hardware using Linux. Welcome to episode 51 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we spend a show inventing topics which need a whole other show to talk about, we reminisce about Google Plus, and: [00:01:36] Twitter Blue, Meta Verified: the social networks go premium.
I'm announcing the release of the 6.2.2 kernel.
All users of the 6.2 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.2.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.2.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
In this guide, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of turning your Ubuntu system into a media center. We’ll cover everything from installing the necessary software to configuring your system for optimal performance. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a fully-functional media center that can stream all of your favorite content directly to your TV. So let’s get started!
Have you ever wished you could access your Ubuntu desktop or server from another location, such as your home or office? With remote access tools, you can easily and securely connect to your Ubuntu system from anywhere in the world. In this article, we will guide you through the process of setting up and using remote access on Ubuntu. We’ll cover various tools such as VNC, TeamViewer, SSH, and RDP, and show you how to use them to control your Ubuntu system remotely.
Server maintenance is an essential part of ensuring that your IT infrastructure runs smoothly and efficiently. By creating and following a regular maintenance checklist, you can ensure that your servers are operating optimally, reducing the risk of downtime and data loss.
Laravel is a popular PHP web application framework that simplifies the process of building modern, scalable web applications. One of the key features of Laravel is its ability to handle background jobs through its queueing system.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Forgejo on Debian 11. Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. It arose from the fact that Gitea was acquired by a company and this didn’t sit well with the community who preferred to make a fork.
Are you a Linux user that’s been wanting to try out Slack? Or are you already a developer who loves Slack and wants to use the app on your Linux machine? Either way, Slack is a satisfactory collaboration software choice for many professionals.
In this tutorial, you will install Vuls – an open-source and agent-less vulnerability scanner – on an Ubuntu 22.04 server. You will also set up Vuls by creating the configuration file and building Vuls databases via the command-line tools provided by Vuls.
FFmpeg 6 is a highly anticipated release of the widely-used open-source multimedia framework. This major update brings many new features and improvements, making it a versatile command-line tool for processing and converting audio and video files.
In recent years, the Linux community has seen an increase in the popularity of containerized software packaging formats, specifically Flatpak and Snap. These formats offer a range of benefits to developers, system administrators, and end-users alike, including increased flexibility, security, and ease of deployment.
BalenaEtcher is a popular open-source tool for writing images to SD cards, USB drives, and other storage devices. It provides a user-friendly interface and a simple, three-step process for creating bootable media. Unlike many other image writing tools,
The Snap packages has been around since Ubuntu 16.04. Just like the long-known deb format has its own commands to perform operations on .deb packages, there are commands dedicated to managing Snap packages as well. In this article we will learn how to perform basic management operations on Snap packages.
The popular FFmpeg multimedia library announced the new major 6.0 release yesterday. Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 18.04.
Python 3.7 is an earlier release of the Python programming language that more recent versions have surpassed. Nevertheless, it is still a reliable and well-respected release often used in various applications.
Avidemux is a free, open-source video editing software popular among video editors, filmmakers, and hobbyists. It is a simple yet powerful tool that offers a range of video editing capabilities, including cutting, filtering, and encoding. With its user-friendly interface and extensive features, Avidemux has gained a significant following in the video editing community.
Rust is a modern systems programming language designed to offer safe concurrency, high performance, and low-level control over computer hardware. It was created by Mozilla in 2010 and has since become increasingly popular, with a growing community of developers and an expanding ecosystem of libraries and tools.
This version of NuTyX includes the latest software updates, bug fixes, and security patches. It’s a great way to keep your system up-to-date and running smoothly.
If you are a Linux enthusiast looking for a powerful and flexible operating system, then Arch Linux is worth considering. Arch Linux is known for its flexibility, customization options, and minimalistic design.
However, setting up Arch Linux can be daunting, especially for beginners. That is why several Arch Linux-based distros are available that aim to make the installation and setup process easier and more user-friendly.
In this list of best Arch Linux distros, we explore the best ones available and see how they fit common users with the above pointers.
Digital business is here to stay, whether this means improving internal workflows or directly delivering capabilities that enhance the customer experience through applications hosted across the hybrid cloud. Once these solutions are built and deployed, smooth operation becomes the goal.
One of the distinctive features of Debian is its conservative approach to including software in its repositories. Unlike other distributions, Debian does not rush to include the latest software versions, instead preferring to thoroughly test and evaluate each new release before adding it to its repos. This approach has several benefits, including enhanced stability, reliability, and security.
On the other hand, however, this has its drawbacks. For example, if you use the distro as a desktop system, the versions of the applications and the desktop environments are not the most up-to-date. For example, the current stable version of Debian 11 relies on GNOME 3.38 and KDE Plasma 5.20. Given that these versions are far from the most up-to-date, it is expected that as a new stable release of the distribution approaches, one of the main topics to be how up-to-date the included software will be.
Anne Barela’s Floppy Thumb Drive project houses the Adafruit PyPortal internet display in a 3D-printed enclosure that looks like a 3.5-inch floppy disk, just a bit thicker. The computer-in-a-floppy-disk project runs CircuitPython code to list the first 12 files stored in the flash and can display photos or animations, play audio, or execute scripts.
If you use Arduino IDE frequently, the default interface can feel monotonous and boring. You can add more variety by customizing your Arduino IDE with different background themes, colors, and font schemes. As the following steps illustrate, it’s actually very easy to personalize your Arduino IDE experience.
Open source software is software that is released under a license that allows companies the right to use, study, change, and distribute the software for any purpose. Open source software can also be developed in a public manner.
SCALE or the Southern California Linux Expo is an annual conference that takes place in the Los Angeles area. SCALE 19x (July 2022) was the first event since the period that shall not be named.
SUSECON is entering it’s second decade of providing awesome technical content, and while the online editions of SUSECON have been amazing, we are excited to get back to our roots — bringing people together to learn, to share, and to come away knowing much more than when we arrived.
Brief: Write a Python program to add two numbers. It provides a step-by-step guide on how to write a program that prompts the user to enter two numbers, adds them together, and displays the result. Python is a popular programming language known for its simplicity and ease of use.
Shell scripting is a powerful tool for DevOps automation. It allows you to automate repetitive tasks, manage and configure your infrastructure, and streamline your deployment processes. However, writing effective shell scripts requires following best practices and using certain techniques to make your code efficient, modular, and maintainable.
Entrepreneurs and innovators gathered at Stanford on Feb. 23 for APARC’s conference on social tech futures. Keynote speaker YOSHIKI, leader of rock bands The Last Rockstars and X Japan, encouraged members of the Stanford community to pursue their dreams and make a positive impact.
Indian Minister of State Jitendra Singh Wednesday urged G20 member states to adopt strict anti-corruption stances in advance of the group’s 2023 New Delhi summit.
The first time I experienced heartbreak, I was 13 years old. But let me be clear — it wasn’t because my crush overlooked the rumor I started about us on our middle school’s Instagram confession page.
When Bridget Grant, the narrator of Gwendoline Riley’s new novel My Phantoms, was a child, her favored state was a dissociated one. She speaks with her mother as if from a script, presenting a series of prompts—about her mother’s childhood, her school uniform, her divorce—to which the other can quickly provide “the right answer, an approved answer.” Whenever Bridget and her sister Michelle are forced to spend time with their father, they learn “to sort of fade out of the moment” when he goes off on one of his comic routines, as if averting their eyes from a wild animal’s challenge.
The most recent episode of the PBS genealogy docuseries Finding Your Roots focused, in part, on the previously untraced family tree branches of activist and scholar Angela Davis. If you are on social media and have even a passing interest in this sort of thing, you’ve probably already watched the clip of host Henry Louis Gates Jr. announcing to Davis that she is “descended from one of the 101 people who sailed on the Mayflower.” The camera catches Davis reeling from the revelations, and the clip went viral, launching a million Twitter hot takes. But the snippet provides just one piece of the story of Davis’s ancestry unearthed by the show. Only in watching the rest of the episode is it made clear that her connection to that 10th great-grandfather was made during the Jim Crow era, through a previously unknown white paternal grandfather who had been her Black grandmother’s long-time neighbor. The episode also reveals that Davis’s mother, who grew up in foster care and never knew either of her biological parents, was fathered by a white Alabama lawyer, state representative, and senator named John Austin Darden. Through Darden, the show uncovered another of Davis’s ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War and later enslaved at least six Black folks in Georgia.
Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the once-funny comic strip “Dilbert,” has finally gotten what he always wanted. For a long time now, Adams has acted like that kid in third grade who craves negative attention. Now he’s got it. Adams reportedly said…
We’ve said many times that while woodworking is a bit outside our wheelhouse, we have immense respect for those with the skill and patience to turn dead trees into practical objects. Among such artisans, few are better known than the legendary Norm Abram — host of The New Yankee Workshop from 1989 to 2009 on PBS.
In this bonus “Dispatches from Project Censored,” Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon, two of the most acclaimed media literacy educators working today, offer no-nonsense tips for teens to protect themselves against surveillance. As technology floods into the classroom, teens often fall prey to invisible violations of their rights to privacy and free expression. These rights should not be left at the school’s doorstep, but today’s technology make snooping and spying in the classroom easier than ever. Butler and Higdon’s “Is Your Teacher Spying on You?” gives teens a primer for taking back their rights and protecting them into the future.
Though states are seeking to reduce the teacher shortage, the problem only seems to be getting worse. Recently, the National Education Association reported that 55 percent of teachers are planning to leave the profession earlier than they planned. This means that, if current trends persist, the gap between the number of working teachers and the number of open positions will widen significantly by 2030. This is where Bernie Sanders, the new Senate Chair of Health, Education, and Labor, comes in.
Topton is selling a mini PC based on the Intel Processor N100 Alder Lake-N quad-core processor with 8GB LPDDR5 RAM for $156.44 and up depending on the selected SSD capacity. But despite its low price, the specifications are not too bad with dual 4K video output thanks to HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort interfaces, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity, four USB ports including one USB 3.0 port, and an audio jack.
While bicycle gearboxes date back to at least the 1920s, they’re relatively unseen in bike racing. One exception is Honda’s race-winning mid-drive gearboxes, and [Alee Denham] gives us a look at what makes these unique drives tick.
Early home PCs usually had a floppy disk and a simple hard drive controller. Later, IDE hard drives became the defacto standard. Of course, these days, you are more likely to find some version of SATA and — lately — NVME connectors. But a standard predating all of this was very common in high-end systems: SCSI. [RetroBytes] recently did a video on the bus which he calls the “USB of the 80s.”
On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo unveiled a key new plank in the work-in-progress known as American industrial policy. After a decades-long trade regime that permitted private oligopolies to decide where and how to produce semiconductors, the Commerce Department launched a $39 billion incentives program to give grants, loans, and other financial support to businesses and nonprofits to build chip fabrication facilities in America.
Spurred by a statewide organizing effort by Our Revolution, the city council of Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday passed a resolution officially declaring support for legislation to expand Medicare to all U.S. residents, guaranteeing healthcare as a right.
US lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives Tuesday introduced legislation to expand railway safety precautions following the derailment of a train carrying toxic materials in East Palestine, Ohio.
UNICEF says it is prepared to provide support and assistance to Iran to help solve a growing crisis over a mysterious wave of illness that has put scores of schoolchildren in hospital and sparked speculation of a plot to force the closure of girls’ schools amid a wave of unrest following the death of a young woman while in police custody for allegedly wearing a head scarf improperly.
Some people might look in a grocery store’s dumpster and see garbage. But others are starting to see dollar signs. New facilities are popping up in the US to help tackle food waste using a process called anaerobic digestion, which uses microbes to break down organic materials. Divert, a company working to address food waste,…
Protesters marched for over two hours from Madrid Health Service Human Resources Directorate to Puerta del Sol square, where the regional government headquarters is.
Cooking continues to be the leading cause of residential fires, with almost a third of all building fires in Finland starting from cooking. According to the Finnish National Rescue Association, approximately 900 fires per year are caused by cooking. To raise awareness and prevent such fires, the association has released a guide to safe stove use, detailing the hazards of the kitchen and how to avoid them.
A recent study by the University of Turku’s Child Psychiatry Research Center and the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland has found that the number of new psychiatric diagnoses among young people increased by almost a fifth after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The diagnoses increased especially among girls, teenagers, and in the Helsinki metropolitan area, where restrictions and COVID-19 infection rates were higher than in other parts of the country. Eating disorders, depression, and anxiety diagnoses increased the most during the study period.
Among the most read stories in the NYTimes in the last few weeks was the one by tech reporter Kevin Roose about his unsettling experience with Bing, the updated search engine by Microsoft. Initially delighted by its capabilities and speed, he changed his mind after discovering that Bing’s Open AI Chatbot was creepy. After a brief, getting acquainted period involving online searches and basic questions about AI capabilities, Roose began to get personal. Posing his questions as hypotheticals, he put the bot on the couch, probing its inner life. He asked about his analysand’s desires, fears and animosities. After some resistance, Sydney (the bot’s emerging alter ego) opened up, and out poured a surprising series of confessions and professions.
My worst experiences are with sites that have artificial complexity requirements that cause my personal password-generation systems to fail. Some of the systems on the list are even worse: when they fail they don’t tell you why, so you just have to guess until you get it right.
[Note: MPS’s phrase “encryption event” appeared to be a ridiculous — and dare we say, sleazy– attempt not to call it a “ransomware attack.” The district still has not described it as ransomware attack.]
A man who was convicted of fraudulently obtaining the personal data of millions of South Africans is a wanted man after he skipped his sentencing.
Karabo Phungula failed to appear in the Specialised Commercial Crimes Court, sitting in the Palm Ridge Magistrate’s Court, for his sentencing on Wednesday.
It was the second time that he missed a scheduled court appearance in the case, in which he was accused of fraudulently obtaining a trove of personal and business data from data services firm, Experian, in 2020.
Phungula, the founder of Hi-Pixel Communications, was convicted in October last year. On 14 February, he failed to appear in court for sentencing, citing ill health.
College of the Desert has begun alerting the approximately 800 people who may be affected by a possible data breach during a malware attack last summer.
The malware attack occurred in early July. The attack took down the school’s phone and online services for nearly the entire month.
This week the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for HIPAA enforcement, announced the formation of three new divisions within the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”). The new divisions – Enforcement, Policy, and Strategic Planning – are intended to enhance focus and efficiency in conducting HIPAA compliance reviews, developing policies related to HIPAA and health privacy, promulgating regulations, providing technical assistance, and educating the public about health privacy and cybersecurity requirements.
High street retailer WHSmith has reported it has been the target of a cyber attack with hackers accessing company data.
The company said information regarding current and former employees had also been accessed by hackers during the security breach.
Bosses of the established retailer said the situation does not impact its trading activities and stressed that the brand’s website, customer accounts and customer databases were all safe, as they were operated on a separate system.
If the victim of a cyberattack cannot determine whether data was accessed or acquired, should that increase the damages sought by plaintiffs in a class action suit? Or should it get the suit tossed out because the plaintiffs can’t prove any theft of their data?
Kelly Mehorter reports about a class action lawsuit filed against Lubbock Heart and Surgical Hospital over a 2022 breach. The hospital notified 23,379 patients about a July incident in September 2022, but then updated their report in December 2022. The updated report frankly admitted, “Our investigation could not determine whether the unauthorized party did, in fact,
access or copy any files but was unable to rule it out.”
The Little Rock School District is continuing to seek an attorney general’s opinion on the legality of holding private school board meetings when reacting to a cyber- or ransomware attack on a district’s electronic information systems.
Little Rock Superintendent Jermall Wright sent a lengthy letter in January to the attorney general’s office asking how to appropriately balance a school board’s obligations for disclosure under state law with the risk of harm to students and employees that public discussion of a cyberattack could pose.
Eric Walker, staff attorney for the 21,000-student Little Rock district that experienced a cyberattack late last year, said this week that the matter is pending.
A doctor has been suspended from clinical duties and reported to the police on suspicion of accessing medical records without their subject’s consent.
A spokesman for North District Hospital said in a statement published on Tuesday night that they discovered the breach after a member of staff reported that she suspected her medical records had been accessed improperly.
It said an investigation had found that a doctor had accessed the medical records of 29 individuals – including patients and healthcare staff – through the hospital’s Clinical Management System without their consent.
After discovering in December that an organized crime group had obtained thousands of replacement Texas driver licenses, state public safety officials waited more than two months to publicly reveal the breach and start notifying those swept up in the operation.
The criminal effort, disclosed to lawmakers Monday by Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, targeted at least 3,000 Texans with Asian surnames, whose replacement licenses were then sent to Chinese nationals in the country illegally.
In a refreshingly straightforward breach disclosure, Sentara Health in Virginia reports that on December 19, an anonymous individual called their Compliance Hotline to alert them that while searching for something online, the called had stumbled across an exposed file with patients’ Medicare billing information. Sentara quickly verified the caller’s report and determined that the file had been uploaded to Adobe Acrobat’s site by an employee of a Sentara business associate, Coronis Health. The employee uploaded the billing remittance file on October 17.
People hoping to take advantage of a Hong Kong scheme to give away half a million free airline tickets faced hours-long online queues on Wednesday, as the Asian financial hub bids to woo tourists back.
As a safety precaution, the tech company sometimes bans users because the company has discovered that they “are likely to travel” with another person who has already been banned.
Back in January, we noted that T-Mobile had recently revealed it had been hacked eight times over the last five years. But a new report by security expert Brian Krebs suggests it could be far worse than that. According to Krebs, hackers are making a compelling case that they’ve managed to compromise the wireless giant’s network and internal systems 100 times in just 2022 alone:
In 2022 as a whole, at least 188 people were injured in attacks against refugees, 21 of them children. Police have identified suspects for many of the crimes
Having used arms control to gain unilateral advantage over Russia, the cost to the U.S. and NATO in getting Moscow back to the negotiating table will be high.
Hungary has further delayed a vote on ratifying Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession bids, according to an updated schedule published on March 2 on the National Assembly’s website.
A delegation of Hungarian lawmakers plans to visit Sweden on March 7 to discuss the Nordic country’s bid to join NATO, a Swedish parliament spokesperson said on March 2.
Russian volunteers are searching through graveyards, archives and the internet to determine how many of the country’s soldiers have actually died in Ukraine. A database they helped build provides some astonishing insights.
“My country has been the target of 927 unilateral coercive measures and other criminal and illegal, direct and indirect, provisions,” the Boliviarian Foreign Affairs Minister recalled.
THE FINNISH PARLIAMENT on Wednesday reiterated its overwhelming support for joining Nato.
Members of the Parliament voted 184 for and 7 against a government bill regarding the membership, with one lawmaker casting a blank vote and seven being absent from the vote. President Sauli Niinistö has announced his intention to approve the national legislation without delay after the vote in the Parliament.
The Biden administration today issued its vision for beefing up the nation’s collective cybersecurity posture, including calls for legislation establishing liability for software products and services that are sold with little regard for security. The White House’s new national cybersecurity strategy also envisions a more active role by cloud providers and the U.S. military in disrupting cybercriminal infrastructure, and it names China as the single biggest cyber threat to U.S. interests.
Nowadays, few things are as hazardous to one’s reputational health as suggesting that Ukraine should make territorial concessions to Russia. The vehemence with which mainstream commentators reject such suggestions is awesome to behold.
Yet if we truly care about the Ukrainian people, we should at least be able to have a civil conversation about territorial concessions. In the quest to end this calamitous war – which has cost so many lives and could cost many, many more – no stone should be left unturned.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged his Russian counterpart to end the Ukraine war on the sidelines of G20 talks on Thursday, in their first face-to-face contact since the invasion.
Violence against South Sudanese civilians increased sharply at the end of last year according to the United Nations (UN) mission in the world’s youngest country. The latest quarterly brief compiled by UNMISS shows the number of civilians “harmed” was up 87% – without giving actual numbers- for last October/December compared to the same period…
The death in Mali of three Senegalese peacekeepers and wounds suffered by another five is condemned by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) which called for swift response from the West African country’s transitional government. The peacekeepers, part of MINUSMA, were attacked by unnamed assailants near Songobia, south-west of Bandiagara, late in February.
Businesses are increasingly witnessing the impact of protest movements and civil unrest on their operations, a trend that is forecast to grow according to insurance company Allianz Global.
In methods strongly reminiscent of the West’s first colonial era of the 17th and 18th centuries – inescapably linked to the era of genocidal slavery – Russia’s Wagner Group is blazing an increasingly murderous trail in Africa for loot, strategic resources and geopolitical influence, according to a new report.
The US has approved the sale to Taiwan of US$619 million in munitions for F-16 fighter jets, the Pentagon announced Wednesday, in a move likely to anger Beijing. The package includes 100 AGM-88B High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM), 200 AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles(AMRAAM), and launchers and dummy missiles for training…
The latest report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, is comprehensive and devastating.
The special rapporteur catalogues widespread, serious abuses, noting that the Taliban authorities have “normalized” the systematic violation of the rights of women and girls. He also suggests that their “discriminatory denial of women and girls’ fundamental human rights may amount to gender persecution, a crime against humanity.” The arbitrary detention of women protesters is highlighted, as well as edicts that have shut women and girls out of secondary and higher education, most jobs, and even the use of public parks.
The special rapporteur describes a country under the Taliban in which there is “very little tolerance for difference, and none for dissent.” Journalists are increasingly subject to surveillance, intimidation, violence, and detention.
Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov is calling on federal authorities to respond with “maximum severity” to the armed group that led a brief incursion from Ukraine into Russia’s Bryansk region on Thursday.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was at the top of the agenda of a critical meeting of G20 foreign ministers this week in New Delhi. The issue has caused deep divisions within the G20, which includes 19 major economies and the European Union. U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, spoke briefly on the sidelines of the summit on Thursday, though there was no diplomatic breakthrough between the two countries. The G20 meeting comes a week after China released a 12-point peace plan and as calls grow for a negotiated end to the fighting. To talk more about possible peace talks, we are joined by two guests: Vladislav Zubok, a Russian professor of international history at the London School of Economics, and Wolfgang Sporrer, a conflict manager and adjunct professor at the Hertie School in Berlin, who was head of human rights for the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission in Kyiv from 2014 to 2020.
Bryansk Governor Alexander Bogomaz reported Thursday that a Ukrainian military drone carried out a strike on the village of Sushany in the region’s Klimovsky District, causing a residential building to catch fire.
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.
In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be ultimately responsible for their country’s fate attempted to back away, but the pull of military schedules dragged them forward.” In a similar fashion, Beijing and Washington have been making military, diplomatic, and semi-secretive moves that could drag us into a calamitous conflict that, once again, nobody wants.
For nearly a year now, President Joe Biden has been trying to resolve the underlying ambiguity in previous U.S. policy toward that island by stating repeatedly that he would indeed defend it from any mainland attack.
Seymour Hersh joins Aaron Maté to discuss his report on how the Biden administration bombed the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which blew up not only a vital Russian-German infrastructure project but a key off-ramp to peace in Ukraine.
Tortuguita was killed by Georgia state police in a forest encampment in the outskirts of Atlanta on the morning of January 18th, 2023, in one of the highly militarized police raids that had become a regular feature of life for the forest-dwellers by then. Tortuguita was 26 years old, and by all accounts was one of the folks anchoring the movement based in the woods that the mayor of Atlanta is still intent on turning into a huge police training camp, which folks have nicknamed “Cop City.”
On February 16, a Guatemalan family contacted groups in southern Arizona about one of their family members who was lost in the Sonoran Desert after he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. They had his exact coordinates, they had a photo of him, and they had a photo of his ID. Martín (not his real name) had been walking for about six days with a small group of people but couldn’t continue because of chest pain. Around 9 p.m., volunteers from the Tucson-based Frontera Aid Collective—a search and rescue and humanitarian aid group founded about two years ago—got involved. One of its members, Taylor Leigh, contacted BORSTAR, the U.S. Border Patrol’s rescue, search, and trauma unit. Leigh hoped this unit could rescue the stranded man.
According to Leigh, BORSTAR agent Hector Acuña told her she needed to contact the Guatemalan consulate because they couldn’t start a search until the consulate sent them the information. But the consulate was closed for the night. Another member of the Frontera Aid Collective, Scott Eichling, called BORSTAR again. Eichling said he wanted to make a report, and the dispatcher asked if this was about Martín. When Eichling said yes, according to the phone log, the dispatcher laughed and transferred him to Acuña, who told him they were “working on it.” When Eichling asked if they would start a search that night, Acuña said they would send someone in the morning. These were the first of more than 40 phone calls made by different people over two days. That night alone, humanitarian aid organizations called BORSTAR, the Three Points Police Department, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and the Tohono O’odham Police Department.
The Nuclear “War” in Ukraine May Not Be the One We Expect
In 1946, Albert Einstein shot off a telegram to several hundred American leaders and politicians warning that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein’s forecast remains prescient. Nuclear calamity still knocks.
Whether it’s a good idea or not, the decision has been made. We will be acquiring nuclear submarines. An important question follows; who will be responsible for keeping the reactors safe? Rex Patrick examines the issue after new information was released by Government under FOI.
Thus far, the topic of nuclear safety has barely featured in public discussion about the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine program.
Speaking to the No2Nato meeting on Saturday, I had the challenge of telling a packed and highly motivated audience some things that they very much instinctively disagreed with, from a very different viewpoint to much of what they had heard from some excellent speakers all day.
The Ukraine conflict as catalyst: I wonder how many people who pay attention understood a year ago that Russia’s intervention and the West’s extravagant support for the Kyiv regime would prompt fundamental shifts in the global order such that the world is now a very different place […]
Two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Jürgen Habermas, perhaps Germany’s leading public intellectual, published a commentary that triggered one of the country’s most ferocious political debates in decades.
Regardless of whether the 84 percent enriched particles were accidental, this incident underscores the increased challenge in discerning Tehran’s nuclear intentions and the growing proliferation risk of Iran’s rapidly expanding nuclear program.
With the radical transparency that has marked a long and principled life, Daniel Ellsberg – patriot, truth-teller, whistle-blower, anti-war and anti-nuclear activist – has announced he has inoperable pancreatic cancer; doctors say he has three to six months to live. As Ellsberg stressed his “joy and gratitude” for “a wonderful life,” many others offered moving tributes to “an American hero” and “a light for mankind.” “You made the world a better place,” said one. “What a life you lived.”
Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaking of the Pentagon Papers and decades of anti-war activity have inspired generations of whistleblowers and activists, said Wednesday that he has terminal cancer, but that there’s “tons more” movement work for him to do before he’s gone.
There is a conflict between ecocentric people struggling for freedom, and anthropocentric people threatening that freedom. This conflict, which happens beneath the surface of most media, constitutes a “secret war” for what the future of Earth will be.
This secret war involves groups of people across the world using ecocidal pro-growth and inequitable family policies, as well as anthropocentric environmentalism, to quietly undo the progress that the world seemed to be making on multiple fronts: child equity, climate crisis mitigation, animal protection, as well as ensuring functional democracies. These groups involve many nonprofits that are knowingly undoing with one hand the success they claim to be making with the other. This last category of undoing—regarding our democracies—makes these family policies a secret war on freedom as well.
Between the political and technological hurdles to achieving a global energy transition, the climate crisis can often feel deeply overwhelming. But articulating a solution to what is arguably the greatest potential catastrophe humanity has ever faced is no problem for ChatGPT—or at least, so the chatbot makes it seem.
Climate organizations this week are calling out new legislation that would pour even more money into the “false solution” of carbon capture technology, which they warn is just a distraction by the fossil fuel industry that does nothing to address the climate crisis.
Over the past few years, Covid-19, climate change and Chinese economic coercion have catalysed rapid global economic, foreign relations and national security policy changes.
A major power outage crippled several of Argentina’s provinces on Wednesday, including parts of Buenos Aires, plunging millions of people into darkness for at least two hours as summer temperatures soared, officials said.
Last September, researchers in the UK launched a high-altitude weather balloon that released a few hundred grams of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, a potential scientific first in the solar geoengineering field, MIT Technology Review has learned. Solar geoengineering is the theory that humans can ease global warming by deliberately reflecting more sunlight into space.
The United States District Court for the District of Nevada Tuesday held that a county’s conditional permit regulations for housing exotic animals did not violate the US Constitution. Karl and Kayla Mitchell sued Nye County, Nevada, claiming that the conditions on their exotic animal permits were unconstitutional conditions and constituted a taking of property.
The January data on consumer expenditures released yesterday had a lot of people freaking out. The story is that the Fed is going have to get out the big guns to really shoot inflation down.
The restaurant manager refused a work permit because his salary was deemed too high to be believable has told The Local of the struggles he is facing as he battles to overturn the decision on appeal, while his lawyer has complained of his client’s ‘crazy’ treatment.
Some 150,000 people who work in retail in Denmark will see their pay increase after trade unions and employers’ organisations came to a new agreement on working terms.
AN AGREEMENT on the terms and conditions of employment for stevedores was reached on Wednesday.
The breakthrough in the collective bargaining negotiations signals the end of a strike that had effectively suspended the loading and unloading of cargo ships at ports across Finland since 15 February, confirmed Ismo Kokko, the chairperson of the Finnish Transport Workers’ Union (AKT).
When Donald Trump wanted to spend $2.5 billion in Pentagon money that Congress never appropriated to build his border wall, the Supreme Court of the United States, without explanation, acquiesced. Environmental groups had contended that under constitutional and federal law, the president couldn’t “irretrievably commit taxpayer funds” to a project that would wreak havoc across habitats and public lands along the Southwest border—let alone do so without Congress’s blessing. Hiding behind the shadow docket, the five conservative justices who sanctioned this scheme didn’t bother to put in writing why this disruption was justified. One year later, the same justices agreed to let Trump’s border construction continue undisturbed.
In his appearance at the Robodebt Royal Commission yesterday, Stuart Robert wants us to believe that not only was he the one that finally put a stop to the illegalities of income averaging, but that he knew it was wrong all along. However, the pesky Westminster system stopped him from speaking out.
A ventriloquist could not speak out of both sides of his mouth like former LNP Government Minister Stuart Robert. In his combative performance at the Robodebt hearings, Robert appeared to blame it all on the public service who kept advice from him for months. At one stage, he earned a rebuke from Commissioner Cathy Holmes when wanting to “put something” to the unflappable Senior Counsel Assisting, Justin Greggery, making it clear to Mr. Robert who was asking the questions.
A coalition of 403 progressive advocacy groups on Thursday outlined conditions they say must be met for a pending Indo-Pacific trade pact to achieve important labor and environmental objectives and urged the White House to promote them during upcoming negotiations.
Citing the “soaring cost of essentials” that have “pushed hardworking New Yorkers to the brink,” Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday proposed rules to strengthen enforcement of the state’s anti-price gouging law.
The U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday that there are limits to a president’s immunity from lawsuits filed over their performing of official duties—namely, that immunity does not extend to allegations that former President Donald Trump incited violence leading up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy picked a bad time to go all in with Tucker Carlson and Fox News, providing them “exclusive” and supposedly “unfettered” access to 44,000 hours of US Capitol video from the January 6 riot. For the last two weeks, we’ve been learning that Carlson, along with other marquee hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, plus Fox News’s controlling owner Rupert Murdoch, all knew Trump and his minions were lying about 2020 election fraud, but kept featuring said minions, as well as the entire bogus fraud story, out of fear of losing audience and risking the firm’s toxically swollen stock price.
Fascism in its different forms has always thrived on attacking teachers, schools, critical ideas, democratic values, and allegedly unpatriotic groups while stifling dissent in the alleged name of freedom. Ron DeSantis is a religious, political, and ideological demagogue whose view of power is as ruthless as it is opportunistic. He views academic freedom and freedom of speech as liabilities to be stamped out, not unlike what happened in Nazi Germany. He has weaponized the government to punish industries such as Disney who challenged his “don’t say gay” bill. The dangerous nature of this precedent should be clear, particularly regarding how it resonates with tactics used in repressive regimes in the past.[1] He has signed into law Bill 233 which requires Florida’s public colleges and universities to conduct annual surveys of students’ and faculty members’ beliefs in order “to determine the institutions’ levels of ‘intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity’.” One can only assume that those with views at odds with DeSantis’s view of history, politics, and authority will be labeled as “unpatriotic” and will be pressured to conform to his indoctrinating pedagogy and policies or lose their jobs. This is not unlike what happened in the witch hunts conducted during the McCarthy era by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s in which a number of faculty were fired for having alleged subversive views.[2] In addition, DeSantis’s banning ideas, and entire fields of study–such as gender and race studies– aims to turn learning at the college and university levels into a form of stupidity, one whose ultimate goal is to undercut the ability of young people to think critically, learn from history, and make power accountable.
Every level of education is under siege in Florida. Regarding public education, DeSantis intensifies and expands a policy of erasure and manufactured ignorance that is endemic to the GOP which provides the driving momentum for a nationwide banning of books and restrictions on teaching about race and gender in public schools. As Julianne Malveaux notes, “More than 1600 books have been banned in 138 school districts in 33 states so far, as the momentum for ignorance is increasing. Among the banned books – Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved; and Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale.”[3] In addition, as Sarah Schwartz points out in Education Week: “Since January 2021, lawmakers in 44 states have introduced bills or other policies that would restrict how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen states have imposed these bans.”[4]
As the U.S. House Committee on Ethics announced an investigation into embattled Congressman George Santos, progressives on Thursday renewed calls for the New York Republican to be expelled from office over his elaborate lies and controversies.
Sweden’s ‘racial ideology’ movement carried out more activities last year than in 2021, and viewed the Sweden Democrats as a party representing its interests to a greater degree, according to a new report from the Expo Foundation.
When Chicago elected Harold Washington as its mayor in 1983, it was a transformational moment for not just the nation’s third-largest city but all America. Washington was the city’s first Black mayor. He was also a street-savvy political maverick who had broken with the city’s powerful Democratic machinery to beat incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne in a primary and then prevail in one of the most contentious general elections in the history of American urban politics. And he was a progressive who was willing to take on reactionary forces by building a multiethnic, multiracial rainbow coalition that challenged the conventional wisdom of American politics in an era of deep divisions and a narrow understanding of what was possible.
“Nicaragua Frees Hundreds of Political Prisoners to the United States,” the New York Times (2/9/23) reported. In an unexpected move on February 9, the Nicaraguan government deported to the United States 222 people who were in prison, and moved to strip them of their citizenship. The prisoners had been convicted of various crimes, including terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government, requesting the United States to intervene in Nicaragua, economic damage and threatening the country’s stability, most relating to the violent coup attempt in 2018 and its aftermath.
Nicaraguan political leader and historian Dora Maria Téllez is free! After 20 months of imprisonment in Managua’s brutal El Chipote prison, Tellez—a legendary figure in the Sandinista revolution jailed since before the country’s November 2021 elections—was one of 222 political prisoners who were released by the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo government on February 9 and immediately sent to Washington, D.C., on a charter flight after the United States agreed to provide asylum to the exiles.
An annual report released Thursday by researchers in Sweden sounds the alarm about countries that are “undergoing autocratization” but also highlights how people around the world “have reclaimed democracy and stopped negative trends.”
Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project.
Their videos get huge amounts of clicks and profits on YouTube. And their vlogs show a Syria that has turned the page on years of civil war. But these so-called “apolitical” travel influencers are shown around the country by regime-sponsored guides that shape the narrative. One guide who appears in a number of travel vlogs even has family ties with the Syrian deputy minister of tourism.
Censorship is never innocent, made worse for its strained good intentions. For those responsible for setting and policing such policies, the inner judge comes out, stomping on assumed meanings, interpreting and removing things to ensure the masses are not corrupted.
Google has removed 13 URLs with IP addresses, directing to unlawfully published copyright-protected content, from its search system at the request of the Radio and Television Commission of Lithuania (LRTK).
Every day this week, the police visited Cathedral Square in Vilnius, where a destroyed Russian tank has turned into a scene of political battles. Pro-Russian people turn up there carrying flowers and candles, while Ukraine supporters throw them away, and fights break out.
In January, a federal court dismissed a sexual assault lawsuit filed against Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner) by one Ashley Morgan Smithline, who last month admitted that she’d “spread publicly false accusations of abuse” after being “manipulated” by Evan Rachel Wood.
A women’s rights group in Hong Kong is set to stage a march ahead of next Wednesday’s International Women’s Day, after the organiser said it had secured “verbal” approval from the police. The Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association said on Thursday that police had approved their application to organise a demonstration on Sunday to promote […]
The June 2022 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary majority to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, which has enabled Republican lawmakers to prohibit or restrict abortion in more than half of the states, unleashed a life-threatening crisis and should be condemned as a violation of the country’s obligations under international law.
Jewish-led peace groups on Wednesday called on the Biden administration to bar Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering the U.S. ahead of a planned visit over his recent comments about the Palestinian town of Hawara, which was the target of a deadly rampage earlier this week by Israeli settlers.
Rarely does the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations make an official remark expressing happiness over any UN proceeding concerning the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Indeed, the Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour is “very happy that there was a very strong united message from the Security Council against the illegal, unilateral measure” undertaken by the Israeli government.
On Sunday, Israeli settlers ransacked and torched Palestinian homes in Huwara, near the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, killing at least one Palestinian resident and injuring dozens of others. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of backing a pogrom in Huwara. Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said Wednesday that Huwara needs to be “wiped out” and that the state of Israel should do it. In response, 22 Israeli international law experts sent a letter to Israel’s attorney general demanding an immediate investigation against Smotrich for potential war crimes. U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price also condemned Smotrich’s comments, though he framed the conflict as bilateral by referencing the need to condemn Palestinian “incitement to violence.” Meanwhile, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called on the U.S., as the Israeli government’s most powerful international ally, to take action to stop its violence. For more on this latest escalation of the Israeli occupation, we’re joined by Saddam Omar, a Huwara resident who witnessed the settler attacks, and Gideon Levy, an award-winning Israeli journalist and columnist for Haaretz.
They came at dusk, wearing masks. They carried automatic rifles, pistols, knives and clubs. They swung chains. They hauled cans of petrol. They descended out of the Samarian hills bent on revenge, 400 riotous Israeli settlers. They came with the intent of making the villagers of Huwara pay for the deaths of two Israeli settlers, killed that morning on the road to the settlement of Har Bracha, a settlement built on lands seized from Palestinians in 1983. They came shouting slurs and “Death to the Arabs.” They came to make Huwara burn.
The IDF knew they were coming. Shin Bet knew they were coming. Benjamin Netanyahu knew they were coming. None of them moved to stop the raid that was destined to happen, the mayhem and destruction members of Netanyahu’s own coalition government had called for. Hours before the raid, settler Davidi Ben-Zion demanded “erasing Huwara today” and for showing “no mercy” to its villagers.
Progressives expressed anger Thursday after U.S. President Joe Biden said that he would sign a Republican-authored resolution repealing criminal justice reforms recently approved by the elected leaders of the District of Columbia.
Colorado lawmakers are considering two bills that would reform the way family courts in the state handle cases involving allegations of domestic abuse, saying ProPublica’s reporting on the issue has catalyzed efforts to change the state’s custody evaluation system.
Rep. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat and the chair of the state House Judiciary Committee, praised ProPublica’s investigation, which found that four custody evaluators on the state-approved roster last year had been charged with harassment or domestic violence. In one case, the charges were dismissed. One case — that of psychologist Mark Kilmer — led to a conviction. In the two others, it is unclear how the charges were resolved.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and revoke the federal constitutional right to abortion continues to have life-altering and life-threatening consequences. With more than a dozen states banning abortion, a climate of fear and confusion has loomed over health care providers, abortion funds, helpers, and anyone seeking to end their pregnancy in recent months.
Beyond exerting direct control over our bodies and our health, abortion bans and other criminal laws give prosecutors license to investigate, arrest, and prosecute people who provide necessary health care. In some instances, bans and laws can be used or misused to target patients and other people who help them get the care they need. In state legislative sessions across the nation, legislators continue to push for more ways to restrict abortion and criminalize those who provide abortion care.
The ACLU has a long history of seeking transformational change in our criminal legal system and protecting people’s reproductive freedom. In this moment of crisis, we have brought together our expertise in both areas to launch the Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative (ACDI), which I am proud to lead.
The PR folks at Germany-based Nextcloud, the open source platform that allows individuals and organizations to host their own cloud, were working overtime on Wednesday issuing two major announcements. The first was that they’ve released a ready-for-prime-time SharePoint replacement, complete with migration services for their enterprise customers. The second was was that Nextcloud Office is now available to users of Deutsche Telekom’s MagentaCLOUD.
While the suits at Microsoft and Google would scoff at the suggestion, neither of these announcements is good news for either company.
Vaccine equity campaigners said Thursday that a new peer-reviewed study published in a major medical journal should put to rest the pharmaceutical industry’s “false narrative” that its own investments were responsible for the rapid development of mRNA vaccines to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
For the time being, TCL may not sell devices in Germany that use a video coding method protected by a GE Video Compression patent, which is a member of the Access Advance patent pool.
On February 28, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 9,497,469, owned and asserted by Velos Media, an NPE.
A TTAB judge once told me that you can predict the outcome of a Section 2(d) case 95% of the time by just looking at the goods/services and the marks. Maybe he or she was referring to ex parte cases only, but let’s see how you do with the three oppositions summarized below. Answer(s) in the first comment.
In his introduction, Ted Davis notes the decline in litigation under the Lanham Act, related state statutes, and the common law of unfair competition. In any event, a number of interesting cases have arisen involving the intersection of trademark law and the freedom of speech protection of the First Amendment, with the “Bad Spaniels” dogfight drawing the most attention as it heads to the Supreme Court. The Court will also be reviewing, in the Hetronic case, the nagging issue of the extraterritorial reach of the Lanham Act. The TRUMP TOO SMALL case may also make its way before the Court, the question being whether Section 2(c)’s requirement of consent is unconstitutional when applied to criticism of government public officials or public figures. Meanwhile, the failure-to-function refusal seems to be gaining in popularity at the TTAB, although not so much with trademark practitioners. And two Board decisions indicate that the once formidable claim of fraud on the USPTO is recovering from the near knock-out punch landed in 2009 by the CAFC’s Bose decision.
OK, everyone knows RST sucks compared to Markdown or even org-mode (and that’s a low bar since org-mode’s format sucks. Org-mode is a wonderful app that I love, but the app is good in spite of its format, not because of it), but they can’t help it since RST preceded Markdown by three years and org-mode by two. RST came out before these good formats and it was all they had to work with at the time.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, is trying to launch Bluesky, a “decentralised Twitter” and people are wondering how it compares to Mastodon.
I remember when Jack started to speak about “project bluesky” on Twitter, years ago. ActivityPub was a lot more niche and he ignored any message related to it. It definitely looked like a NIH syndrome as he could, at least, have started to discuss ActivityPub pros and cons. I was myself heavily invested in decentralised protocols (from blockchain to ActivityPub). It was my job to keep an eye on everything decentralised and really tried to understand what BlueSky was about.
[...]
If we don’t want to consider the hypothesis that “bluesky decentralisation” is simply cynical marketing fluff, I think we can safely assume that Jack Dorsey has hit his mental glass ceiling. He doesn’t get decentralisation. He doesn’t have the mental model to get it. He will probably never get it (he became a billionaire by “not getting it” so there’s no reason for him to change). The whole project is simply a billionaire throwing money at a few developers telling him what he expects to hear in order to get pay. A very-rich-man’s hobby.
THE Microsoft Stabber Joseph Cantrell’s diary contains even more disturbing “thoughts” on pedophilia.
He also admits to Nazi views throughout and confesses that he supports Donald Trump and the Republican Party with these views.
This is the second post about the diary. See Part I.
Honestly, his thought process is so messed up from the drugs, that he starts out like there’s a non-defense defense for it and then he keeps going.
By his second entry, it’s pretty clear he’s extremely homophobic, and by his third post, he’s claiming that Steve Jobs was a pedophile who died of AIDS and that cancer was just a cover story.
In part of the diary I won’t post here, he claimed further that Steve Jobs acquired it from contacts at Disney and “Star Wars” who hooked him up with a 14 year old girl. (I don’t know.)
Then he accuses Tim Cook of being a pedophile and says “There are lots of pedophiles at Apple.”.
When I searched for “pedo” in the diary I got 31 matches.
Honestly, everything in here is so weird that you may find yourself going weird too if you even try to read it. this is sort of why you shouldn’t get too deep into it. The writings of a madman left behind as some sort of manifesto. Like he was going to kill others and himself at some point and wanted to leave this behind.
The impotent Nazi did barricade himself in his apartment, according to the police, but they managed to talk him out and arrest him. It’s relatively easier to live with a lot of depressive and suicidal thoughts than to take action on them.
He left his coworker (that didn’t die) for dead and then had no plan for what to do next. Like all of the hookers he admits he paid, he couldn’t finish.
July 26, 2020: In response to some random anti-pedo shit on my Facebook feed: Why is everyone so obsessed with exposing pedophiles? I get it, you like to protect the children and shit. Some people strike me as the type of people who should work for the FCC. I don’t support pedophilia, but the truth is, most of these people are born with an attraction to children much like how most people are born with an attraction to the opposite sex. Also, about 10% of people are attracted to the opposite sex, and other animals are gay too. I’m straight and attracted to intelligent dark-skinned women (especially girls who speak foreign languages like Spanish), but I accept that there are people who are different than meand move on. I mean, you shouldn’t let children be harmed, but what’s the point in going out of your way just to ruin someone’s day? Honestly, I’m sure there’s some kind of genetic or drug therapy that could remediate pedophiles to be more in line with the values of general society in the future. Honestly, there are tons of natural remedies for ailments (like DMT for ADHD {don’t tell anyone!}), so there may be some plant or fish already out there to fix pedophiles. Maybe a swordfish? Well shit, if there’s some cure, then they’ll start forcing the gays in China to convert too haha. Lol
August 16, 2020: Meh, I’ve always been a fan of a rehabilitation first policy for things beyond people’s control. Most pedophiles have a disorder in their brain, much like gay folk. Some are merely wicked folk and deserve to be punished with prison.
August 27, 2020: Hillary Clinton conspires with pedophiles. Lock her up! I won’t say a thing, but she should be locked up.[...] Steve Jobs got tested positive for HIV on Setember 1, 2004. He was negative for chlamydia and gonorrhea. Steve Jobs got HIV by being a pedophile with Disney in late 2003. Sombitch. I bet there’s more pedophiles at Apple.I bet Tim Apple Cook is a pedophile… Damn son. [...] I saw Steve Jobs in 2004, and he basically admitted to being a pedo on meth. He said, “Most people don’t want to watch movies on their PC, and they can stream it to their television.” The camera cuts there on the upper part of his trousers as he shakes hands with this fat guy with a big nose. What the fuck yo. Steve Jobs might have been a gay pedo. That’s gay. Fuck Tim Apple and fuck Steve Apple.
Like I said, I don’t want to paste everything he put in his diary here.
I trimmed as much of his garbage as I could to give you a sampling of this part of his ideology.
Again, this was all posted on his public Web site, both before and after he was hired at Microsoft, and I found it in under ten minutes.
Along the way, I searched for the word “applied” and there were over 100 hits.
Each hit resulted in multiple listings where he applied that day. He applied at several hundred tech companies before Microsoft hired him (for $165k plus benefits).
Along the way he rambles at length about government conspiracies to knock him off the Internet and make him homeless.
He blames the hiring managers quite frequently for his own mistakes, and he says they have a conspiracy going between them to make sure he remains unemployed.
Interspersed, he talks about all of the amphetamines and other illegal drugs he’s taking.
He’s quite obviously not sleeping if he can put in this many job applications in this short of a time period. But the drugs and lack of sleep appear to be causing him to get sloppy and make the mistakes he blames on the “conspiracy” of hiring managers and the government.
As I mentioned in my last post, he eventually learns that if he says he has a disability, called “Neurodivergence”, he can take advantage of one of Microsoft’s “Social Justice Programs” called “Neurodivergent Hiring Program” and land a job at Microsoft, after at least 200-300 other companies across the United States turned him down.
Microsoft hires a lot of people who have no idea what they’re doing. They’re utterly incompetent.
Joseph Cantrell was rejected by hundreds of top companies before he started working in Microsoft Azure, which has had hundreds of data breaches.
Microsoft hides the incompetence somewhat by having proprietary software you can’t see, and a lot of it runs on computers you don’t control. And when you put your software in these systems, bad things happen. The Pentagon got breached the other day due to Azure.
Microsoft ALWAYS blames their customers in the end. This time they didn’t go straight to that, but they claim there’s an “investigation” and then it all went silent.
Meanwhile, Cantrell and four other people who collectively cost Microsoft over a million dollars a year were asking how to fix a bug on Stack Exchange and laughing about a bogus error message that they had planted in the Azure code (see my first post about the Diary, linked at the beginning of this post).
Stack Exchange was one of the companies he says he had applied at.
October 17, 2021: 7:41 p.m. – I don’t trust these Indian run corporations like Google and Microsoft anymore. Look at what their products have become. They’re full of glitches and new annoyances that never, ever get fixed. Does Bill Gates even use Windows anymore? Does that Google guy still even use Google?
“I don’t trust these Indian run corporations like Microsoft.”
Gets a job at Microsoft.
Good job, Microsoft.
There’s some mentions of his mother in here. She died in 2016.
October 25, 2016: My mother is in a hospice. There are many more cancerous masses than originally believed, and the number is at least eleven. I’m assuming she has less than six months to live as that’s the only way the government will pay for it (and of course there’s no other way to afford it). She’s still in constant pain and can’t get up by herself. She’s taking morphine. She’s in a comfy hospice with lots of recreational activities and a view of a lake. Well. The hours remain. A Petrichor by Sulphur is soon to come. It just might be true.
October 27, 2016: My mother has 1-2 months to live according to the doctor. He said she will be gone by Christmas, and lucky to make it to Thanksgiving. Well. Fuck. I worked out. That was great. Showered, brushed my teeth, smoked a vape bowl (.3 grams), and took a 200 mcg tab of acid. I didn’t set a timer this time for the first time in a while, so I don’t know when it will hit me. But I think I can start to feel it; an interesting tingling in my body (although maybe this is from the weed and preworkout). Well, acid will speed up my heart a little, but it’s been over five hours since I took the preworkout. I benched 270 for six sets and bent over rowed 227 for 4 sets (I did warmup sets of 245 and 225, respectively). Well, a good day so far. Kinda. My mother wants to go home when she has to die, but the house is fucked up and needs to be fixed. Friends and family are fixing it. That’s great. Fuck this situation, I’m going to play Overwatch.
October 28, 2016: Waking up for philosophy sucked. I couldn’t fall back asleep, and then it turns out my mother is probably going to die today. I was asked the question of resuscitation and asked for it, but later recanted after speaking with Crystal, Vickie, and the nurse. Damn. I went to Columbus to see her. That was it. She couldn’t speak when I got there. My last moments with my mother and she barely had the strength to open her eyes to see me. She opened her eyes for two seconds, jerked her hands up in excited acknowledgement, and laid back to rest with her eyes closed. My last words were never able to be returned, unfortunately. Whatever.
October 29, 2016: My mother died at 16:26. I left back for Atlanta, smoked some weed and passed out.
“Whatever.”? “I smoked some weed and passed out.”?
Really great job, Microsoft. A Nazi that doesn’t even love his own mother.
I think it goes without saying that any normal person would be so disturbed by what’s going on with their mother being in the hospice with cancer that even if they had a rocky relationship, they’d be taking time to grieve. He keeps going to class, playing games, and using illegal drugs, and plays the entire thing off. Very shortly after his mom’s death, he goes right back to writing in the diary as-if nothing happened.
January 18, 2018: I recently got my first dog myself, a fluffy German Shepherd named Breezy. Some people, including my cousin Hayden, were scared of dogs. An aggressive breed can be conditioned. Nonaggressive breeds can be conditioned to synergize for collective benefit. This is why marginal capitalism with a safety net is better than pure communism.
Interesting thoughts on the welfare state.
I wonder which “breed” it is that is “aggressive” and can be “conditioned” that he had in mind.
June 24, 2022: 6:19 p.m. 10:07 p.m.: I don’t think I’ve ever written this down, but given my history with groups of black people, I am a white supremacist. I think white people should maintain the upper echelons of power [...] I think it’s dangerous to give a minority group power [...] I think the majority, whites, should retain control of the government, especially the military and prisons, lest the minority groups begin weaponizing those industries like the careless needle that was used by that fat black jailhouse nurse in my tuberculosis test.
November 26, 2022: 11:20 a.m. – It’s weird how n*****s celebrate Juneteenth, and then for the next 100 years after Juneteenth, niggers were shuffled from the back of the bus to be lynched from the trees.[...] My mom was a racist and would be about sixty today. That means about 20% of white people are still racist.
January 25, 2023: 12:38 p.m. – Monday when I walked the mile into the office as usual, I threw away a bear with a red sweater reading “Veritas” on it. I also threw away a cheetah with a blue vest saying “FAST” on it. They were there waiting to taunt me, sitting on the windowsill behind my desk at Microsoft. I kept them on my desk until now. On Friday, I left the red bear up on the light so I could remember ask people about it, but then I decided I didn’t want to interact with those fucking n*****s and just threw it away. I asked if I could work from home, and after arriving, my manager asked me to stay working from home until I get the doctor stuff sorted out on Valentine’s Day.
Which party is he with?
Given limits on immigration, this is a stretch, but the Chinese and more importantly the allegedly “democratic” Indians have four times as many people as the United States such that they could replace our entire population and overrule our democracy if we let them.Unchecked immigration from Mexico and south of Mexico (“south Mexico”) can also further this goal of destabilizing the United States. These companies claim the talent pool in the United States is small enough to justify hiring expatriates, but I’m proof these companies are simply not even trying. The United States should further restrict its immigration policy like Japan’s difficult naturalization process, and as such I support Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Pine64 has followed up its original attempt at a Linux tablet with the new PineTab 2. The company is claiming the successor to the PineTab comes with better specs and features. For instance, there is the faster Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor that renders service from under the hood. There is 4 GB of LPDDR4 memory and 64 GB of storage for the entry-level model and 8 GB of memory and 128 GB of storage for the top-end version. Both models feature LPDDR4 memory and eMMC storage for enhanced performance characteristics.
I recorded a 15-minute long tutorial demonstrating how to automate the production of graphics from a CSV file or spreadsheet (basically a mailmerge type deal for graphics) in Inkscape. It uses the Next Generator Inkscape extension from Maren Hachmann.
You can watch it on the Fedora Design Team Linux Rocks PeerTube channel (PeerTube is open source!) or the embedded YouTube video below:
In this article, I provide some context for how this tutorial is useful. I also include a very high-level summary of the content in the video in case you’d rather skim text and not watch a video.
With the availability of huge amounts of data for research and powerful machines to run your code on with distributed cloud computing and parallelism across GPU cores, Deep Learning has helped to create self-driving cars, intelligent voice assistants, pioneer medical advancements, machine translation, and much more. Deep Learning has become an indispensable tool for countless industries.
Old Photo Restoration is a project that uses deep learning to restore old photos via deep latent space translation. This research project lets you restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. It uses a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs.
Blender is a free and open-source 3D modeling software for creating 3D models, visual effects, 3D animations and interactive 3D apps. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and BSD systems.
Ubuntu 21.04, nicknamed “Hirsute Hippo” was released in April 2021. The Ubuntu family of operating systems is renowned for its stability and ease of use, and Hirsute Hippo is no exception.
But it’s always better to test it on your existing operating system before installing it as a primary or secondary operating system.
Applications, images, documents, and other files of all sorts are most commonly shared across the internet in the RAR format. It is a compressed archive format, and you need to unpack or “unrar” the archives to access the files within them.
Linux and FreeBSD operating systems do not have the “unrar” command preinstalled. Most UNIX-like systems also do not come with the command preinstalled.
Yii is an open-source, high-performance, flexible, efficient, and secure PHP framework for rapidly building modern Web applications. It is a generic and full-stack web programming framework for writing code in an object-oriented fashion and provides many proven and ready-to-use features. It comes with a number of reasonable defaults and built-in tools that help you write solid and secure code.
wc (short for word count) is a command line tool in Unix/Linux operating systems, which is used to find out the number of newline count, word count, byte and character count in the files specified by the File arguments to the standard output and hold a total count for all named files.
When you define the File parameter, the wc command prints the file names as well as the requested counts. If you do not define a file name for the File parameter, it prints only the total count to the standard output.
With the Steam Deck recently having a first anniversary, no doubt many are thinking on what’s next — I certainly am. Valve don’t exactly need much to make a Steam Deck 2 a success either.
Feral Interactive have now upgraded their Linux (and macOS) ports of Total War: WARHAMMER III to the latest 2.4 release — which is a big one. It was first released for the Windows version earlier in February, so it’s nice to see the wait for those sticking to the Native Linux build wasn’t particularly long this time.
This is a bit of an odd one. The Legend of Heroes: Kuro no Kiseki has been released on Steam, for the second time and now it has Steam Deck optimizations too.
This week openSUSE Tumbleweed users learned of the performance optimizations gained with changes for x86-64-v3 and received a few snapshots.
Some of the packages to arrive this week included software for KDE users, gamers and people beginning their Linux journey.
Snapshot, 20230301 delivered a new major version of a 3D graphics library. Mesa 23.0.0 was announced by Dylan Baker, who highlighted all the community’s improvements, fixes and changes for the release. A major Link Time Optimization leak was fixed in the release and several Radeon (RADV) drivers and Zink Vulkan fixes became available with the release. AppStream 0.16.1 updated is documentation and fixed some behavior with the binding helper macros. Flatpak 1.14.3 introduced splitting an upgrade into two steps for the wrapper. It also introduces the filename in an error message if an app has an invalid syntax in its overrides or metadata. The Linux Apps Summit, which covers Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, will take place in Brno, Czech Republic, next month and is a great event to hear from developers working on cross-distro solutions in the application space. The second update of the week for sudo arrived in the snapshot. The 1.9.13p2 fixed an –enable-static-sudoers option arriving in the 20230225 snapshot. An update of apparmor 3.1.3 added support for more audit.log formats, fixed a parser bug and fixed boo#1065388, which had progressed to be resolved over a five-year period.
We released Red Hat Satellite 6.12 last month. The release includes several new features designed to help you manage your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environment more effectively, including remote execution pull mode. In this blog entry, I’ll write about the differences between remote execution pull mode and push mode and provide a step-by-step guide on configuring it.
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that OMRON, a Japan-based global electrical equipment manufacturer, has chosen Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, as the conceptual model for its virtualized control platform proof-of-concept (PoC) that will help deliver greater management of industrial systems and processes. By moving to a software, containerized approach, OMRON aims to save time and reduce complexity, giving manufacturing plants more agility and flexibility to innovate. This implementation is one of the first of its kind and will allow real-time data generated at manufacturing edge sites to be more seamlessly transmitted throughout the organization and will also allow industrial control equipment programs to be operated remotely from applications running in containers configured with Red Hat OpenShift. OMRON has started the PoC rollout of its virtualized control platform primarily for current customers with future plans to help customers convert containerized solutions into composable services for industrial Personal Computers PCs (“IPCs”).
In January I was assigned 24 hours by Freexian’s Debian LTS
initiative and worked 8 hours. In February I was assigned another 8
hours and worked 8 hours.
I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable update, but
didn’t upload it. I merged the latest bullseye point release into
the linux-5.10 package and uploaded that.
On Tue 13 July 2021 there was a blog post
of new XMPP related software releases which have been uploaded to Debian 11 (bullseye).
Today, we will inform you about updates for the upcoming Debian release bookworm.
A lot of new releases have been provided by the upstream projects. There were lot of changes
to the XMPP clients like Dino, Gajim, Profanity, Poezio and others. Also the XMPP servers have been
enhanced.
Unfortunately, we can not provide a list of all the changes which have been done,
but will try to highlight some of the changes and new features.
BTW, feel free to join the Debian User Support on Jabber at
xmpp:debian@conference.debian.org?join.
You can find a list of 58 packages of the Debian XMPP team on the XMPP QA Page.
Dino, modern XMPP client has been upgraded from
0.2.0 to 0.4.0. The new version supports encrypted calls and group calls and
reactions give you a way to respond to a message with an emoji.
You can find more information about Dino 0.3.0 and Dino 0.4.0 in
the release notes of the upstream project. Dino is using GTK4 /
libadwaita which provides widgets for mobile-friendly UIs.
Changes has been done on the main view of Dino.
Gajim, a GTK+-based Jabber client has been upgraded from 1.3.1
to 1.7.1. Since 1.4 Gajim has got a new UI, which supports
spaces. 1.5.2 supports a content viewer for PEP nodes. 1.6.0 is
using libsoup3 and python 3.10. Audio preview looks a lot nicer
with a wave graph visualization and profile images (avatar) are
not limited to only JPG anymore. The plugins
gajim-appindicatorintegration, gajim-plugininstaller,
gajim-syntaxhighlight und gajim-urlimagepreview are obsolete,
these features has been moved to gajim.
There were a lot of releases in Gajim. You can find the full
story at https://gajim.org/post/
Profanity, the console based XMPP client has been upgraded
from 0.10.0 to 0.13.1. Profanity supports XEP-0377 Spam
Reporting, and XEP-0157 server contact information discovery.
It now marks a window with an attention flag, updated HTTP Upload
XEP-0363, and messages can be composed with an external editor. It also features easy quoting,
in-band account registration (XEP-0077), Print OMEMO verification
QR code, and many more.
Kaidan, a simple and user-friendly Jabber/XMPP client based on Qt has been
updated from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0. The new release supports
XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications and XEP-0313: Message
Archive Management.
Poezio, a console-based XMPP client as been updated from 0.13.1
to 0.14. Poezio is now under GPLv3+. The new release supports
request for voice and the /join command support using an XMPP
URI. More information at
[Swift][swift-im], back in Debian is the Swift XMPP client – a
cross-platform Client written in C++. In 2015 the client was
removed from testing and is back with version 5.0.
Coming three weeks after the previous Ubuntu kernel security updates, the new ones are here for Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) systems running Linux kernel 5.19, as well as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) systems running Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.
Of the 17 security vulnerabilities patched by these new kernel updates, 14 of them affect all the Ubuntu systems mentioned above. The most critical one is CVE-2022-4379, a use-after-free vulnerability discovered in the NFSD implementation that could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash) or execute arbitrary code.
Ubuntu ☛ Top 5 MLOps challenges [Ed: Canonical is helping Microsoft with mindless hype campaigns, shilling proprietary software that spies, censors, and presents itself under false pretences]
Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro is Rockchip RK3308 quad-core Cortex-A35 SBC for headless applications with a PoE-capable Ethernet port, WiFi 5, a USB port, an audio jack, and two GPIO headers for expansion.
You may think the Banana Pi guys have gone crazy by calling such entry-level level SBC “Pro”, but that’s because the company previously released the BPI-P2 Zero and BPI-P2 Maker single board computers based on Allwinner H2+ quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, so the BPI-P2 Pro is indeed an improvement albeit with some caveats.
Hardware design is a whole other can of worms. I have played with things like the Arduino and later the STM32 chips, ESP8266 and RP2040. These things are quite neat from a programmers perspective. You write your code in c++ and the included toolchain figures out all the hard parts and flashes the board. Hardware design is also quite simple since it’s mostly putting together different hardware modules and breakout boards. Only a basic understanding of the hardware busses is required to get stuff up and running.
This clock displays the time by illuminating different elements on a translucent periodic table. The color blue corresponds to hours, green corresponds to minutes, and red corresponds to seconds. So if you see Calcium lit in blue, Indium lit in green, and Lanthanum lit in red, then the military time is 20:49:57 (8:49:57 in the evening). If two must share the same element, like when the time is 3:10:10, then it will mix the two colors (yellow in this case). If three share the same element, like 2:02:02, then it should be obvious because only a single element will be lit.
Since the Raspberry Pi’s launch, creators have based countless computer science education projects on the humble pocket-sized system on a chip. These have included many projects exploring low-cost Raspberry Pi clusters to introduce parallel and distributed computing (PDC) concepts.
The UK Open University (OU) provides distance education to students of diverse ages, experiences, and backgrounds, which raises some issues not faced in more traditional universities. The OU experiment using Raspberry Pi clusters to introduce PDC concepts to distance learning students began in 2019 and has been featured in an academic paper but deserves to be known more widely.
The project uses Raspberry Pi clusters based on the OctaPi instructions, released under a Creative Commons Licence by GCHQ. Eight Raspberry Pis are connected in a private network using a router and a switch. One of the Raspberry Pis acts as the lead, while the others are servers providing results back to the lead device. Programs written in Python run on the lead Pi, and the dispy package distributes activities across cores in the cluster.
As an educator working at a public library, I keep my eyes peeled for interesting uses of the Raspberry Pi. From where I sit, the Trivia Vending Machine project out of Dallas, Texas, is one of the most creative and interesting uses of these amazing devices. Using a Raspberry Pi to replace the coin box on a food vending machine is a stroke of genius by Greg Needel and his team. The potential uses of this idea are far-reaching. Check out this short YouTube video to see the Trivia Vending Machine in action.
The original Trivia Vending Machine focused on science questions, but you could build a Trivia Vending Machine with any questions—history, civics, literature, and so on. The most engaging uses will be if you encourage students to write their own questions—and answer each others’ questions. And consider this: Instead of disbursing food, the vending machine could disburse coupons to local businesses. One way I earn a living is by teaching guitar lessons, and I’d gladly donate a guitar lesson as a coupon for a Trivia Vending Machine. However, a student must rack up a suitable amount of points to earn one of my guitar lessons.
Stretch your imagination a little further. Would it be possible to have logic puzzles for students to solve to get food (or coupons) from the vending machine? Yes, that would not be difficult to create. Maybe Sudoku puzzles, Wordle, KenKen, Sokoban, or any other puzzle. Students could play these puzzles with a touch screen. How about chess? Sure, students could solve chess puzzles to get food (or coupons).
Did you notice in the video that the original Trivia Vending Machine is large and heavy? Designing a smaller one—perhaps one-third the size that fits on a rolling cart—could make for easier transport between schools, libraries, museums, and maker faires.
Integrated circuits, chipsets, memory modules, and all kinds of other transistor-based technology continues to get smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient as time moves on. Not only are the components themselves smaller, but their supporting infrastructure is as well. Computers like the Raspberry Pi are about the size of a credit card and have computing power on the order of full-sized PCs from a few decades ago. The Arduino is no exception to this trend, either, and this new dev board called the Epi 32U4 might be the smallest ATmega platform we’ve seen so far.
Online Text Tools offers a collection of useful text processing utilities. All text tools are simple, easy to use, and they share the same user interface. Once you learn how to use one of the tools, you’ll instantly know how to use all of them. The utilities work right from your browser and don’t require downloads and installs. Created by team Browserling.
GNU Emacs is a free, portable, extensible, internationalized, self-documenting text editor. That it is free means specifically that the source code is freely copyable and redistributable, so Emacs can never be discontinued and disappear. That it is portable means that it runs on many computers under many different operating systems, so that you can probably count on being able to use the same program no matter what computer you’re using. That it is extensible means that you can not only customize all aspects of its usage (from keystrokes through fonts, colors, mousage and menus), but that you, and the community, can modify and program Emacs, even while Emacs is running, to do entirely new things that its designers never thought of. That it is internationalized means that it has full Unicode1 support, including bidirectional text and many input methods for non-Latin scripts. That it is self-documenting means that every keystroke, menu item, and function can thoroughly explain itself and its usage, and that Emacs contains 395,759 lines of hypertext reference manuals and tutorial documentation about itself and its subsystems.
Because of all this, GNU Emacs is an extremely successful program (having been in continuous development for 38 years2), and does more for you than any other editor. It’s particularly good for programmers. No matter what programming language you use, Emacs probably provides a mode that makes it especially easy to edit code in that language, providing syntax highlighting, context sensitive indentation, and layout. It also allows you to compile your programs inside Emacs, with links from error messages to source code; debug your programs inside Emacs, with links to the source; interact directly with the language interpreter (REPL); jump across multiple files to the definition of a symbol in your source code; and interact with your version control system3.
Emacs also provides many built-in applications such as: [...]
I’m a big fan of Untappd. It’s a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I’ve drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints!
After checking in, the app automatically posts to Twitter. But who wants to prop up Alan’s failing empire? Not me! So here’s some quick code to liberate your data and post it elsewhere.
After three years, it’s odd to think back to those few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic morphed from something on the news into an immediate and ever-present threat which kept us isolating for so long. For me, some of the last moments of normality were a trip to the Netherlands for Hacker Hotel, a hacker event in the comfort of a resort hotel. Now three years later and after two cancelled events, Hacker Hotel is back, and I made the same journey to Garderen to hang out for a weekend with a bunch of hacker friends over some good Dutch beer and a lot of bitterbollen.
Elizabeth Chamberlain is director of sustainability at iFixit and a passionate advocate of the right to repair. iFixit sells repair parts and publishes gratis repair guides for electronic devices such as smartphones, tractors, and toasters on their Web site. With these, iFixit is helping thousands of people repair their devices every day instead of throwing them away.
Chamberlain will keynote LibrePlanet 2023, the fifteenth edition of the FSF’s annual conference on ethical technology and user freedom. Regarding her talk, titled “The future of the right to repair and free software,” she says, “Free software and the right to repair are founded on so many of the same principles: We should have the right to learn how our things work. If we want to train up a new generation of technological innovators, we’ve got to make sure they can get into the guts and brains of their devices. That’s why we need both free software and the right to repair to chart our course to a freer future.”
We recently shipped import maps in Firefox 108. you might be wondering what
this new feature is and what problems it solves. In the previous post
we introduced what import maps are and how they work, in this article we are
going to explore the feature in depth.
Explanation in-depth
Let’s explain the terms first. The string literal "app.mjs" in the above
examples is called a Module Specifier in ECMAScript,
and the map which maps "app.mjs" to a URL is called a Module Specifier Map.
An import map is an object with two optional items:
imports, which is a module specifier map.
scopes, which is a map of URLs to module specifier maps.
Assuming 99% of people don’t bother hiding their SSID after setting up their router. Other Google users can pin (your) nearby WiFi Acess Points & associate it with the GPS co-ordinates of that area. So that the next time a device queries Google’s servers for a location fix — it’d find that there’s a certain Wi-Fi AP nearby & doesn’t have to wait for a GPS signal.
This can be extensively used inside of malls, shopping complexes & stadiums where each shop has their own radio hotspot that can be used for indoor mapping. This technology already exists, across certain 4G mobile carriers it’s called MIMO & the upcoming hype around 5G. Indoor mapping, is going to get even more better.
I’m angry because for the past decade of web development, I and so many others like me feel like we’ve been repeatedly gaslit, and that so many of the “merchants of complexity” refuse to acknowledge the harm that’s been done.
The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world—SPAs (Single-Page Applications) and all that—didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX and went along with it whole-heartedly (yay for the developers! amirite?).
Like, for example, Jared White! All through the piece he talks about how React is temporary while Rails is timeless. Does he not realize that Rails went through the same hype cycle? Everybody was saying that Rails was the future of webdev and you better get on board or be left behind. To pretend otherwise is either total cluenessless or deceit.
This article will teach you all you need to know about Django signals and how to use them in your project. You’ll learn the following concepts of Django signals and their applications: [...]
TextField widget is an essential widget for every Flutter developer. It is a simple basic widget, yet a powerful tool that allows many customization options, and useful functions.
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
This is a weekly summary of its progress and community.
Want something mentioned? Tag us at @ThisWeekInRust on Twitter or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request.
Want to get involved? We love contributions.
This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub.
If you find any errors in this week’s issue, please submit a PR.
Really Simple Syndication – portable, extensible, light on network resources. Also, I’ve blocked the regular HTML+JS sites in my browser – more on that later.
Currently my newsboat feed is populated with indie sites, blogs, wiki pages, updates to documentation & new software releases, podcasts, YouTube channels, WordPress sites, Telegram Channels, Odysee / LBRY channels, SoundCloud , Bandcamp, Pixelfed, Mastodon & other Fediverse feeds. Unlike most people I don’t use email for newsletters or follow people on social media just for the sake of it, or have notifications in my browser.
At some point in the recent past, mutt changed the way it generates Message-ID header values. Instead of the perfectly good old way of doing it, the developers switched to using base64-encoded random bytes. The base64 dictionary contains the / character, which causes unnecessary difficulties when linking to these messages on lore.kernel.org, since the / character needs to be escaped as %2F for everything to work properly.
Mutt developers seem completely uninterested in changing this, so please save everyone a lot of trouble and do the following if you’re using mutt for your kernel development needs (should work for all mutt versions): [...]
The New Year’s Honours List once again did State Art proud. The Pantomime Dame was made a real Dame for being unable to say no to any opportunity involving rancid self-promotion. The departing head of Tate Modern got a CBE for doing her job whilst studiously policing the State Art line for backsliders. The Director of the Baltic, a venue hosting numerous major exhibitions [subs to fill in], got an MBE, also it seems simply for turning up. Michael Landy, who once destroyed all his possessions to great acclaim, got a CBE because, well, it was probably his turn. As a serving RA you get one, it’s that easy. Ingrid Pollard accepted an MBE, the honours equivalent of a wooden spoon … Curious, isn’t it, that these supposedly anti-establishment types will accept anything even, amazingly, stuff with ‘British Empire’ tagged on the end.
John Akomfrah is knighted for being … everywhere, the human passe partout of State Art. This follows an OBE in 2008 and a CBE in 2017 – imagine that, he’s got a full set for making films no one watches. And clearly he worships a British Empire all these clones are supposed to loathe. His ‘arty’ multi-screen films are nothing remarkable. Their level of competence is the very least an audience conditioned by television and Hollywood might reasonably expect of a filmmaker. The best you can say about his work is that it’s fit only to be shown in an art gallery where normal criteria of film judgment have necessarily to be suspended. The bar in films is set very low indeed by the visual art establishment – not even the world’s most lissom limbo dancer could wriggle under the State Art film bar.
In conflicts, I know, neither side can be trusted. Both sides twist and distort, magnify and minimize in support of their cause. But the daily, almost hourly pictures from Ukraine – of hardship, suffering, of death, destruction and flight, all too genuine, cause me the despair I have always felt on hearing – and worse seeing, if only on a screen – any pain inflicted on my fellow human beings, no matter what insignia they wear or flag they honor.
If you grew up in a snowy climate, chances are you’ve ridden a sled or toboggan when you were young. The downhill part of sledding is great fun, but dragging the thing back up gets boring quickly. [Luis Marx] had been dreaming of sledding uphill since he was a child, and decided to make his dream come true by building himself a motorized sled (video, in German, embedded below).
The team, led by University of Freiburg archaeologist Ralph Araque Gonzalez, base their claims on geochemical and metallographic analyses – and some good old fashioned experimental archaeology. They demonstrated that a series of engravings on stone pillars found in the region from the late Bronze Age could only have been made with tools made from proper steel, and it was most likely developed locally.
According to the team’s paper on the research, the final bronze age (FBA) in the Iberian peninsula lasted from around 1200–800 BCE, and the early iron age (EIA) lasted roughly 200 years after that. Despite that commonly accepted timeline, the team said a series of engraved steles identified as from the FBA/EIA and examined as part of the study were mostly made of extremely hard rock – similar to quartzite.
This must be well-known, but I don’t remember seeing it before. Consider a !!3!!-cube. It has !!8!! vertices, which we can name !!000, 001, 010, \ldots, 111!! in the obvious and natural way: [...]
Programming a computer demands a kind of logical thinking at each step of the process. If you aren’t being logical, the computer won’t understand you. So, as you write code, you’re constantly reorienting yourself to a logical way of thinking, a step-by-step rationality towards a computed outcome.
The last part of my MSc Apprenticeship was my EPA Professional Discussion. It’s designed to be a 90 minute chat to make sure you’ve actually learned something on the course. The official guidance is available. But I thought you might find it helpful to see the questions that I was asked.
Cyber capabilities are an increasingly important tool of statecraft with today’s operations increasingly reflecting the strategic and geopolitical ambitions of government sponsors. This makes it essential to connect network defenders and policymakers.
The Munich Cyber Security Conference (MCSC), therefore, provides a welcome exchange to discuss nascent challenges facing the cyber security community. Both Mandiant Intelligence VP Sandra Joyce, and Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables spoke at this year’s event.
This blog post outlines key takeaways from MCSC 2023 and how Mandiant, now a part of Google Cloud, is playing a leading role in addressing burgeoning cyber policy issues.
We are looking for participants who are passionate about the DNS from the lowest protocol level up to the highest application usage, and who are interested in everything around developing, measuring and securing DNS-related tools and applications.
The school was established in 1896 by Finnish immigrants as Suomi College. It is one of 26 colleges and universities affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Suomi College changed its named in 2000 to Finlandia University.
It might not seem too impressive these days, but when microcontrollers with hardware USB support were more expensive and rare, the VUSB library was often used to create USB devices with an ATtiny85. It became so popular that the ATtiny85 even got packaged into USB dongle formfactors, like the DigiSpark boards. Well, you might not know this, but your Android smartphones can also work with USB mice and touchscreens in lieu of the built-in touchscreen display. [ErfanSn] combined these two ideas, creating a library to automate smartphone touchscreen events and keyboard input with an ATtiny85 — open for all of us to use, and with examples to spare.
I’m talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant’s newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.
After some time migrating my data, and setting up things here and there, now I finally have a working machine. Getting used to a new operational system has been easier than expected. Anything beyond that, only time will tell, but for now I’m happy.
It’s worth mentioning that this machine is not Linux certified, but everything works wonders out-the-box. The only issue is with suspend mode (as always).
The National Self-Reported Well-Being Survey showed the “mood balance” of Mexicans in January 2023 to be 6.5 points on a scale of 1 to 10 — the same as it was in January 2020.
While teen years are never easy, research is examining whether they are harder than ever for the current generation of teenagers. By ALI JONES Media headlines lamenting spiralling levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide among Europe’s teenagers make regular and uncomfortable reading. In recent years, news on this front seems to have gotten only worse.
Catte Black The “covid was a lab leak” story was always a back door official narrative that reinforced the reality of the “pandemic” while appearing to be a suppressed “alternative”. You know, one of those “suppressed alternatives” that end up in the WSJ. It’s now going to be used to finally bury any hope that …
At a time when human rights are under assault around the globe, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) today welcomes two visionary leaders who will mobilize the medical community to defend rights and advance justice. International human rights lawyer Saman (“Sam”) Zia-Zarifi, JD, LLM brings three decades of trailblazing legal, programmatic, and advocacy excellence to PHR. […]
More than 190 organizations and individuals, including health practitioners and human rights experts, today sent a letter to United Nations experts in response to the United States Supreme Court decision that repealed the constitutional right to abortion.
When the Farm Bill appears for debate in Congress every five years, most of the public pays little attention.
If people do notice, then it’s most likely because of partisan bickering over programs that deal with nutrition spending – what some refer to as “Food Stamps.” In fact, the last time the legislation was debated in 2018, Republicans caused controversy when they unsuccessfully tried to attach draconian work requirements to food assistance policy eligibility.
The mayor of East Palestine, Ohio, expressed the situation well, when he responded at a public meeting to a man who offered an opinion about the railway’s irresponsibility after the Feb 3 train derailment and toxic spill there, “Are you from town, sir?” That is, he spoke to the vulnerability of human beings in a particular place, visited by a particular disaster, the immediacy of the tragedy that is theirs personally. I felt this acutely last fall when Uticans being directly affected by the invasion of a Stewart’s Shops gas station and convenience store into their neighborhood were forced to listen to the Stewart’s rep and their lawyer, and then to planning board members as they stated their reasons for voting for Stewart’s. With their uniform consensus on the benignity of the Stewart’s plan, ignoring the valid questions for which they had no answers, several of us could not help shouting out at various points, do you live here? (And, not said: and if you don’t, don’t talk to us, you condescending corporate puppet bastards just doing your job!)
Uticans ought to be particularly alarmed hearing the news from East Palestine. Citizens who opposed the building of the massive 600 million-dollar “downtown hospital” here (due to open next fall, and meant to replace 3 existing hospitals all located further uptown) pointed out the folly of building a regional hospital in proximity to the railroad lines that frequently carry tar-sands oil tankers. If a toxic spill and/or explosion like the one in Ohio occurred here, how long would it take to evacuate hundreds of patients, some on life support? Not to mention, what about people needing emergency care? Where do they go?
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced in January that his government would delay its plan to pump over 1.37 million tons of watery radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated six-reactor complex at Fukushima-Daiichi. With the country facing harsh international pressure to cancel the dumping, Matsuno acknowledged “the need to gain public support,” for the plan, the Associated Press reported January 12. The wicked water is now being collected in large tanks that were hastily built near the wrecked reactors.
Fierce criticism of the deliberate pollution scheme has come from China, South Korea, other Pacific Rim countries, scientists, environmental groups, UN human rights experts, and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), an alliance of 17 Pacific island nations. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also indicated that the government wants a postponement of the dumping operation — designed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) — until it is “verifiably safe to do so,” Thomas Heaton reported February 16 for Civil Beat.
As regular readers might have figured out, although the family situation has stabilized somewhat it has stabilized into a situation where I have less time for this blog than the beforetime. That is evident in the decreased posting frequency. That is why I like to grab a chance like this when it presents itself, namely an article in The New Republic by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of If It Sounds Like a Quack …: A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine (forthcoming in April), entitled A Doctor’s War Against the Right-Wing Medical-Freedom Movement.
“There are enormous health and economic benefits to making daylight saving time permanent,” Buchanan said in a statement. “Florida lawmakers have already voted to make daylight saving time permanent in my home state and Congress should pass the Sunshine Protection Act to move Florida and the rest of the country to year-round daylight saving time.”
Amid growing concerns (and lawsuits) about social media’s impact on the mental health of children, TikTok announced on Wednesday that it’s setting a 60-minute time limit on screen time for users under 18 and adding some new parental controls. Those “limits,” however, are really more like suggestions. There are ways young users can continue to use the app even after the screen time limits have passed.
The RIA is unaware of the number of government agencies that have disabled Tiktok on their devices. Simply put, public bodies are not required to notify the agency.
The Information System Authority barred its employees from using Tiktok on their work phones about two years ago and five ministries told ERR that they do not use Tiktok on their work devices, as recommended by the RIA. None of them, however, has officially prohibited it. In many institutions, only a small number of employees have a work phone.
More than 50 years ago, in 1972, AGA authored a draft report highlighting indoor air pollution concerns similar to those being raised by health experts and regulators today. In particular, this draft report examined what to do about problems related to the emission of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides (collectively referred to as NOx) from domestic gas appliances. This draft, recently discovered in the U.S. National Archives, would eventually become an official report published by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council (NIPCC), a long-forgotten government advisory council composed of the nation’s most powerful industrialists.
On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed and had to put up a “Fail Whale” graphic.
Citrix has announced a licensing scheme that’s bad news for holders of so-called perpetual licenses because the vendor will stop maintaining products sold to “larger customers” under that scheme.
The vendor stopped selling new perpetual licenses in 2019, so license-holders are sitting on old code that has almost certainly been updated over the years with new features or security fixes – and will need more.
Citrix has not previously set the expectation that such customers could be denied maintenance. Indeed the very word “perpetual” more or less implies the opposite.
Further, the report said that about 33 percent of the attackers were a result of ransomware, while 17 percent of cyberattacks were due to unsecured databases in India.
So the end moral is supplemental groups don’t work over NFSv3 with systemd dynamic users. More generally, supplemental groups with anonymous UIDs don’t work over NFS; systemd dynamic users are merely one way to get anonymous UIDs. For our uses this isn’t a fatal problem, but I’ll want to remember it for the future.
In a statement to CBC News, the company said while it has been informed that “some or all of the data” could become available, it does not believe it’s appropriate to pay the ransom because it cannot guarantee the money would not “end up in the hands of terrorists.”
BlackLotus, a UEFI bootkit that’s sold on hacking forums for about $5,000, can now bypass Secure Boot, making it the first known malware to run on Windows systems even with the firmware security feature enabled.
Secure Boot is supposed to prevent devices from running unauthorized software on Microsoft machines. But by targeting UEFI the BlackLotus malware loads before anything else in the booting process, including the operating system and any security tools that could stop it.
It’s only been a few days since Microsoft announced that it was majorly restricting its unhinged Bing artificial intelligence chatbot — but apparently, the tech giant is already having major second thoughts about its decision.
In a statement issued yesterday, Microsoft seemed to reverse course on its previous announcement that it was seriously restricting the AI’s abilities by putting caps on the number and length of responses, noting that many users seemed to want the “long and intricate chat sessions” with the bot codenamed “Sydney” back.
As a tech reporter, O’Brien knows the Bing chatbot does not have the ability to think or feel. Still, he was floored by the extreme hostility.
“You could sort of intellectualize the basics of how it works, but it doesn’t mean you don’t become deeply unsettled by some of the crazy and unhinged things it was saying,” O’Brien said in an interview.
Security researchers at Salt Security Inc. today released new threat research that highlights critical security flaws found on the website of popular hotel booking service Booking Holdings Inc.
Countless apps and services rely on your phone number to identify you, and that number is not necessarily permanent. Phone numbers are also vulnerable to hackers. They were never meant to be permanent identifiers, so incidents like what happened to Ugo are widespread, ongoing problems that the industry has known about for years. There are at least two research papers about phone number recycling that lay out the potential risks, from targeted attacks by hackers or people who easily buy up recently discarded phone numbers to being cut off from your accounts entirely and a stranger getting access to your life.
Yet the burden is often on users to protect themselves from a security issue that was created for them by some of their favorite apps. Even things that those services might recommend as an added security measure — like text, SMS, or multi-factor authentication — can actually introduce more vulnerabilities.
The current economic climate globally is grim due to the ongoing recession, and taking advantage of this environment, cybercriminals are using phishing and malware campaigns to target job seekers in a bid to steal sensitive information, a new report said on Thursday.
Even under exigent circumstances, where law enforcement use of technologies that track cell-phone use are deemed immediately necessary, law enforcement must still get a pen register order. The pen register order is required by statute and policy even though exigency otherwise excuses police from having to obtain a conventional warrant. The Inspector General noted that the agencies didn’t follow the rules in these cases either.
Cell-site simulators, also known as “Stingrays” or IMSI catchers, are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower.
Cell-site simulators operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device’s radius, in violation of basic constitutional protections. Law enforcement use cell-site simulators to pinpoint the location of phones with greater accuracy than phone companies. Cell-site simulators can also log IMSI numbers (unique identifying numbers) of all of the mobile devices within a given area.
The two companies say ID enables customers to create a secure and reusable identity within the My Optus app on their personal device – and customers can then share verified information quickly and easily with consent, without needing to share physical identity documents with Optus.
When asked a similar question, President Gitanas Nausėda said that Russia’s possibilities to finance its war were limited, while the West had more resources.
Not all Western companies packed up and left Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. Some say Moscow has tied their hands, while others choose to stay put.
A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.
India is in an excellent position to play a vital role in winding up the Russia-Ukraine war as it hosts the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting attended by the West and Russia.
The mayors of Lviv and Mariupol yesterday signed a Declaration of Solidarity, a joint initiative which is intended to coordinate efforts to rebuild Ukrainian Mariupol, working with state and international institutions.
China attaches great importance to strongly enhancing its influence in the South Pacific region, by consolidating and developing its relations with the island countries there, led by the “Solomon Islands” and its capital “Honiara”.
Hybrid warfare tactics, including information warfare and the co-opting of human rights groups, make it hard to tell the good guys from the bad in the US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. But it is important to note the telltale signs of class oppression and terrorist tactics to understand the truth about the 222 people recently released to the US who were convicted of treason in Nicaragua for savage acts of violence against their people. They had benefited from an amnesty in 2019, but violated its terms by participating in a new coup plot in 2020 and 2021. In releasing the 222 over to the US, the Nicaraguan authorities effectively pardoned them a second time in order to bring further reconciliation to society. But for the sake of historical memory and non-repetition, it is important to remember their crimes.
I recently saw the film “Argentina, 1985,” a strong contender for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It tells the tale of a brave team of prosecutors seeking justice on behalf of their compatriots for the crimes committed by the Videla military dictatorship that imposed a reign of terror on Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Viewers watch as a population that was intimidated into keeping quiet about the atrocities it witnessed, was coaxed out of the shadows to give testimony in open court against the perpetrators. Young people were emboldened to call out their enemies for what they were: fascists. “Facho” they said to the faces of those who were complicit in the horrors of that period. The publicity for the film talks about how fascism continues to be a threat today. I could not agree more.
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.
Four members of Russia’s National Guard reportedly received minor shrapnel wounds when their vehicle hit a landmine while they were “cleansing” the area around the village of Sushany, in the Bryansk region. State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshteyn published a photo of one of the mines they discovered on Telegram.
Vladimir Putin has denounced a supposed incursion by a Ukrainian “sabotage and reconnaissance group” into Russia’s Bryansk region as a terrorist attack. The president delivered these remarks while speaking remotely at a Teacher of the Year ceremony.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Zelensky administration in Kyiv, called reports of a “Ukrainian saboteur group” infiltrating the Bryansk region a “classic provocation.”
Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Vladimir Putin has canceled a planned trip to Stavropol Krai in light of the events in Russia’s Bryansk region, where the Russian authorities have said “Ukrainian saboteurs” have entered the country.
Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Russia’s Bryansk region, said Thursday that a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” from Ukraine had entered the region “from Ukraine.”
Journalists with the portal Mediazona, founded by two members of the Kremlin-critical punk band Pussy Riot, have also began collecting reports about Russian casualties in the early days of the war. A few weeks later, they decided to join forces with BBC journalist Ivshina and her colleagues. Since then, they have been operating the database together.
The country’s permanent mission to the United Nations said Thursday that the resolution, which the U.N. General Assembly could vote on this year, was sponsored by 106 nations in total. The International Court of Justice, headquartered in The Hague, is the judicial arm of the United Nations.
With rising sea levels threatening its future, Vanuatu has spearheaded a drive for the court to define what legal responsibility countries have for the changing climate and its impacts.
In an immediate sense, algorithms are constantly pushing us toward environmentally-harmful options. In the longer-term they are perpetuating what Haider and Rödl term “search engine-facilitated ignorance (and knowledge) logics related to the climate crisis”. In both ways, we need to encourage a different culture of online information that is more environmentally conscious, if not environmentally-protective.
Climate advocates on Wednesday intensified their warnings to the Biden administration against approving oil giant ConocoPhillips’ Willow project in Alaska, rejecting attempts by White House officials to reach a “compromise” on a drilling project that would generate an estimated 9.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.
The trend had been building even before the Ukraine war, as businesses, investors, and political leaders began positioning themselves to reap the benefits of an economic future based less on fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, and coal, than on clean energy sources like wind, the sun, and hydrogen.
But the pace was nowhere near fast enough to reach the climate target that environmental experts say is needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming – limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The government recently opened up a new round of North Sea oil and gas licences for oil and gas exploration, at a time when the UN has warned that only drastic, immediate cuts to carbon emissions can avert a climate catastrophe.
Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said donations from polluting industries represented a “dangerous conflict of interest”.
The deserts of the southwestern United States are well known for their high levels of biodiversity and endemism. An abundance of mountain ranges breaks this landscape into a series of isolated lowland valleys, many of which contain sand dune or wetland systems harboring unique species.
Eric Maestas didn’t have much time to spare on an afternoon in April when he stepped out of the old Memorial Middle School gymnasium with an armful of food, water and an extra pair of slippers.
The supplies were for his parents, waiting for him at a nearby campground. They’d been evacuated from their Cleveland home, threatened by what was becoming the biggest wildfire in New Mexico history. His parents were elderly, his father on oxygen. They feared their home had been consumed by flames.
Skvarla, who is the director of Penn State University’s Insect Identification Lab, accidentally discovered the giant lacewing—a species that dates back to the Jurassic and hadn’t been seen in eastern North America in over 50 years—in a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Walmart in 2012. Its identity was only discovered recently, however, as described in a new study in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.
Polystoechotes punctata (Fabricius, 1793) (Neuroptera: Ithonidae) was formerly widespread across North America, but was extirpated from eastern North America by the 1950s. We report a specimen collected from Fayetteville, Arkansas, which represents a new state record and the first specimen recorded in eastern North America in over fifty years. We also reexamine a previously published dataset and discuss the history of P. punctata in eastern North America. The importance of community science efforts are discussed and compared with museum holdings. We propose that P. punctata may have always been uncommon in eastern North America, or at least when insect collecting began in earnest in the late 1800s, and support our case by examining collection effort in other insects. This discovery suggests there may be relictual populations of this large, charismatic insect yet to be discovered.
Flash storage pioneer Pure Storage Inc. missed Wall Street’s revenue target for the first time in years today and followed up with a soft forecast for the coming fiscal year. The market reacted negatively, with Pure’s stock falling more than 10% in extended trading.
Major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. said today it would no longer use Silvergate Bank to facilitate dollar payments for its institutional partners after it was revealed that the bank may be in financial trouble. Stablecoin issuer Paxos Trust Co. LLC also announced that it would break ties with Silvergate.
Big-data company Splunk Inc.’s shares fell almost 3% in extended trading today after it gave a first-quarter and full-year outlook that came in far below Wall Street’s targets.
Cloud data warehouse provider Snowflake Inc. beat expectations on revenue and earnings in its fiscal fourth quarter today, but a weak forecast sent the stock down more than 7% in initial after-hours trading. Quarterly revenue rose 59% from a year ago, to $589 million, ahead of the average analyst estimate of $576 million.
On January 17, 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced that the country’s population fell in 2022 by 850,000 people from 2021, which was the first population decline witnessed by the country in six decades. This has mostly resulted from low birth rates stemming from the imposition of China’s one-child policy from 1980 to 2015, as well as from voluntary family decisions, rather than deaths from COVID-19.
On the same day, the NBS reported that China’s GDP grew by only 3 percent in 2022, which is less than half the previous year’s 8.1 percent expansion pace.
Simon Elmer One of the obstacles to understanding the managed and apparently deliberate destruction of the small and medium-sized businesses that in the UK have decreased in number by half a million since 2020 and the removal of our national sovereignty on the justification of saving us from…
Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates don’t agree on many things, but they both want to see a “robot tax,” a special levy on companies that replace workers with machines.
Sanders and Gates may be well-intentioned with this call for a robot tax. But that doesn’t make their call on this the right one.
I’m a proud Air Force veteran. But in the service, I had little to no say over the decisions made for myself or my team. I knew that when I left the military, my next job would be a union job.
Now I’ve worked as a union broadband technician for seven years. I get a voice at work and everything I need to provide the best service on every assignment. And I’m paid a quality wage for the education, training, and skill that I bring to do each job correctly and safely.
An advisory from the Interior’s Office of Inspector General found that fossil fuel companies operating on public land aren’t paying royalties for [cryptocurrency] gains.
The long-awaited National Cybersecurity Strategy calls for adopting minimum security standards for critical infrastructure owners and operators, and holding software companies liable for security flaws in their products. It also says the US plans to use “all instruments of national power to disrupt and dismantle threat actors” that threaten US and public safety.
The plan [PDF] is built around five “pillars,” the first of which is focused on defending US critical infrastructure, which is mostly commercially owned. This includes enforcing minimum cybersecurity requirements in critical sectors and improving public-private collaboration around threats and defenses.
“What we really need instead of totalitarian chat control and ID obligations for age verification is a long overdue obligation for law enforcement agencies to have known abuse material on the internet removed, as well as Europe-wide standards for effective prevention measures, victim support and counselling, and swifer criminal investigations.”
Released Thursday, the White House’s long-awaited strategy for improving the security of computer systems represents a shift in how Washington approaches cybersecurity, veering from the government’s long-standing emphasis on information sharing and collaboration toward a more strictly regulated approach.
The strategy calls for critical infrastructure owners and operators to meet minimum security standards, to expose software companies to liability for flaws in their products and for the U.S. to use all elements of its national power to prevent cyberattacks before they happen, an indication that the Biden administration intends to continue U.S. Cyber Command’s so-called “defend forward” strategy of seeking out malicious hackers on foreign networks.
Before the 1970s, companies commonly required employees to take aptitude tests to be eligible for promotions. But Griggs vs. Duke changed that practice.
Margaret Anna Alice I get it. You don’t want to be called a “conspiracy theorist.” You don’t want to be tarred an “anti-vaxxer.” A “science-denier.” A “far right-wing extremist.” You’ve got your reputation to protect. Your credibility. Your grant funding. So you water down the truth. You tiptoe around it. You don’t go there.
Defending itself from the extremely hostile bully to the north is old hat and a constant activity for Cuba. This was especially so, after the collapse of the USSR and European socialism roughly 35 years ago nearly crushed Cuba, which immediately lost its chief trading partners, while the U.S. blockade strangled it. Forced to turn inward, Cuba strove to improve its productivity and workforce, without damaging the twin foundations of the revolution, education and health care. That it did so, that this small, besieged nation turned a dangerous even deadly situation around, happened thanks to the efforts of committed revolutionaries like Pedro Ross, who helped found the workers’ parliaments – specifically to save the revolution at this lethal juncture. It worked. Now Ross has written a book about it.
His recently published How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution details the at first frantic, but soon thereafter steady, methodical and committed continuation of efforts to prevent the Cuban economy from capsizing. Cuba had managed to do this before. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, 70 percent of Havana’s trade was with the U.S. That vanished overnight. With the post-revolution blockade, Cuba needed new trading partners; the country found them in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. But when socialism in those nations collapsed, Cuba’s “gross domestic product fell by nearly 35 percent,” Ross writes. “Cuba lost more than 70 percent of its foreign markets. The oil supply fell from 13 million tons to 5.8 million. In 1990, 3 billion rubles in products were no longer received.” To make matters worse, the U.S. intensified the blockade. Because, of course.
The end of February marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine. Here Tempest’s Ashley Smith interviews Ukrainian socialist Vladyslav Starodubstev, who spoke on a panel organized by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) and hosted by Haymarket Books on February 25, 2023. Starodubstev discusses socialist strategy in Ukraine, a principled approach to internationalism, and how the international Left can build solidarity among the exploited and oppressed from Ukraine to Palestine.
“And the world has already voted multiple times, including in the United Nations General Assembly [UNGA], to condemn Russia’s aggression and support a just peace,” President Biden proudly declared in a speech in Warsaw just before the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Each time in the U.N.,” he went on, “that vote has been overwhelming.” He boasted: “In October 143 nations in the United Nations condemned Russia’s illegal annexation. Only four – four in the entire U.N. – voted with Russia. Four,” he repeated for emphasis. (The four were Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Syria.)
It doesn’t take a statistician to be impressed by what Biden said. One hundred forty-three countries voted to condemn Russia’s aggression. Only four, plus Russia, voted against condemnation. According to Biden, the U.N. vote was 143-4 for the United States against Russia, 143 votes for freedom and democracy. In Biden’s world, “the vote was overwhelming.” The United States won; Russia lost.
When self-proclaimed white nationalists spray painted over a mural of Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Va., in the fall of 2021, it wasn’t just another act of vandalism. It was an American-born form of terrorism that needs to be put down before it spreads to your community.
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a report Wednesday highlighting the splashy incentives—from luxury vacations to cash bonuses—that private insurance companies offer agents and brokers for enrolling seniors in potentially higher-cost Medigap plans.
In the United States government has been privatized by the Citizens United ruling of the SCOTUS. Government is now really up for sale and auctioned off to the highest campaign contributors. The Supreme Court ‘Citizen’s United’ decision opened the floodgates for big money in our politics, allowing giant corporations and a handful of the wealthiest families to spend obscene amounts of money in our elections. Citizens United is just one of a line of terrible Supreme Court decisions holding that money equals speech and corporations are people under the First Amendment — thereby allowing huge corporations and the super wealthy/oligarchs to buy undue access to members of Congress, and to effectively dictate legislative outcomes. This is significant in policy decisions reinforced by influence of corporate lobbies, now further enhanced by the Court’s decision which favors the very small 1% sector of the population that dominates the economy. Our society is run by a class-conscious 1% business community dedicated to reducing the political and economic power of the 99%.
On the morning of March 2, Bryansk Governor Alexander Bogomaz announced that a “sabotage and reconnaissance group from Ukraine” had crossed into the small border town of Liubechane, allegedly shooting at a vehicle, killing a local resident, and wounding a 10-year-old child. The governor also reported another attack “by Ukraine’s Armed Forces” in the town of Sushany after a drone strike allegedly started a fire in a residential building. Unconfirmed reports soon spread on Telegram that between 40 and 50 “saboteurs” entered the Bryansk region on Thursday. Meduza examines what happened in Thursday’s incursions, what we know about the group responsible (the Russian Volunteer Corps), and how this bizarre incident fits into the war’s larger story.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave a speech at the meeting of the Fidesz-KDNP in Balatonfüred where he listed his opponents, pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet writes.
Orbán named “pro-war” international interest groups: US President Joe Biden and the US administration, and Brussels bureaucrats as his opponents. He also mentioned Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros and the Hungarian left led by former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány. Orban stated that years ago Soros wrote: “that the Central European countries should be used as a proxy for a war against Russia because Central Europeans are more tolerant of the human sacrifice that war entails than the West”.
Russian lawmakers have adopted the second reading of amendments to misdemeanor and felony statutes that would expand protections for soldiers and federal officials against “disinformation” and “discrediting claims” to all “volunteers” aiding Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. If passed in a third and final reading (this vote is scheduled for March 14) and then adopted by the Federation Council and signed by President Putin, the legislation would make it illegal to spread any unofficial information about “volunteer battalions” or Russian mercenaries now fighting in Ukraine. Even expressing general disapproval of these groups or their actions could constitute a crime.
“In some ways this type of app, trained on vast volumes of what Beijing would view as uncensored data, represents one of the most serious challenges to Beijing’s censorship apparatus since the banning of Google search in China more than a decade ago,” Paul Triolo, the technology policy lead at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge, told VICE World News.
Google withdrew from China in 2010, saying it was no longer willing to continue censoring results on its search engine.
Another journalist following the demonstration told bianet that the police forced them to turn off their camera and seized their wallet. After they resisted, the officers threatened to detain them, they said.
On Thursday, the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s legislature, passed amendments that would expand those laws to include all organizations and individuals who assist in the war, including fighters for private military companies, such as the Wagner Group.
The bill’s final reading is expected on March 14, after which it will go to the upper house of parliament and then to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law, according to those reports and the State Duma’s website.
The report identified India as a high-risk country for digital censorship, with Indian authorities blocking over 55,000 websites, URLs, applications, social media posts and accounts since 2015. Indian authorities cut internet access 49 times in Jammu and Kashmir in response to political instability and violence. Of those, 16 consecutive orders for “curfew-style shutdowns” were imposed in January and February 2022.
On February 22, Abdalkin posted a video clip to social media — in it, he listened to Vladimir Putin’s address to the Russian Federal Assembly with noodles draped over his ears. “I’m fully in support, I fully agree, excellent presentation. I haven’t heard anything like it in the past 23 years. I’m pleasantly surprised,” the deputy wrote to accompany the video.
On the evening of Monday, February 27, police in the eastern province of Osmaniye arrested Ali İmat and İbrahim İmat, two brothers who work as journalists in the area, according to news reports and legal documents shared online by parliamentary deputy Tuncay Özkan.
According to CNET, with the reorg and layoffs, the site will narrow its coverage categories to five areas: consumer technology, home and wellness, energy, broadband and personal finance. Those are “categories where the CNET Group has a high degree of authority, relevance, differentiation and where we can make a large difference in the lives of our audience,” the spokesperson said. “We believe success in these focus areas will set the groundwork for future expansion and create the right conditions for a high-growth, sustainable business.”
In 2020, Red Ventures acquired CNET Media Group in a $500 million deal with Paramount Global. In addition to the flagship CNET site, the group housed other brands including TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot and Giant Bomb — which Red Ventures sold last year to Fandom for about $50 million. In January, Fandom made layoffs affecting less than 10% of its workforce across those properties.
Foreign journalists working in China continue to face government interference when trying to do their jobs, amid “battered morale” linked to repeated journalist expulsions and visa woes, according to a new report.
An annual survey of journalists’ working conditions from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China found it had been “yet another tough and draining year” for members in 2022, with scant hope of any improvement despite the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in December.
But campaigners have rejected the amnesty as a PR stunt and key figures remain detained. They include Bayani and Mohammadi and also environmental campaigner Sepideh Kashani, arrested in the same case as Bayani, the labour activist Sepideh Gholian, journalist Golrokh Iraee, arrested in the protest crackdown, and German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi.
Also held in Evin are Fariba Kamalabadi and Mahvash Sabet, two members of the Bahai faith not recognised by the Islamic republic who were detained in July and are now serving a 10-year prison sentence apiece for the second time in their lives.
More than two weeks after a mass shooting at Michigan State University, campus police are struggling to explain why it took them 13 minutes after a gunman first opened fire to send an emergency alert to students.
American constitution emphasized over the individual rights as the utmost priority. Roe versus Wade case played a huge role to constitutionalize and administer the fundamental right of individual to abortion in American legislation.
I know this has kind of become a virtue signaling cliche in this day and age, but Black History Month really does end way too goddamn soon. I thoroughly recognize that the entire month is largely a contrived ritual devoted to historical revisionism much like what the vanilla conquistadors of mainstream wokeness have reduced Pride Month too. But the obnoxious history geek in me just can’t seem to help but jump at any opportunity to set the record straight when it comes to America’s criminally whitewashed outlaw history.
I’ve been accused by people on both ends of this nation’s hopelessly antiquated left-right paradigm of taking Black history way too personally, with some people on the left even going so far as to accuse me of appropriation. It’s bullshit but I can see it. After all, what the fuck does some transgender Irish Catholic hillbilly know about the Black experience? Maybe not much but my lifelong fascination with the revolutionary end of Black history taught me everything that I desperately needed to know about being an outnumbered freak and living to tell about it. The rise and fall and rise of Black Power inspired my own vision of Queer Panarchy and no chapter of that history has taught me more than the lost one on the modern school of Black Anarchism that came out of that movement’s collapse.
The increasingly shabby treatment of former US marine Daniel Edmund Duggan by Australian authorities in the service of their US masters has again shown that the Australian passport is not quite worth the material it’s printed on.
In January this year, Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court heard that Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accepted a request from the US before Christmas to extradite Duggan. Duggan holds Australian citizenship, but Canberra has often regarded this as irrelevant when it comes to the US-Australian alliance.
It’s a relatively familiar recitation to those who study an honest history of the United States. It begins with the first encampment of British colonists in what became Plymouth, MA and Jamestown, VA.; the failure of the latter colony and the success of the former thanks to the Pequot peoples in the region in a tale remade as the Thanksgiving legend. The expansion westward and the bloody heroism of men like Davy Crockett, the blessings of men like John Winthrop and the false military prowess of killers like Custer. Then there’s the politicians with their fancy words writing and talking about freedom, justice and governance; all while they profit from the trade in human beings and the theft and sale of lands that were never theirs to take or sell.
Yes, it’s a familiar litany to those who acknowledge the genocidal history of this nation under its murdering god. Even those who try to eliminate this history from that taught in schools and shared by the real and figurative descendants of those who conquered know the nature of it. That is why they fight so hard to keep it from their children and those who immigrate here now. After all, knowledge of such truth could mean the end of their assumed domination of the nation and its riches. So, instead, the brutal truth is either eliminated or diluted, as if there can be some justification for the legacy of death and destruction celebrated every Fourth of July in these United States.
Because of his American education and the kindergarten he ran in Xingjiang that taught the Uyghur language, the linguist Tahir Hamut was incarcerated by the Chinese government for fifteen months in 2013 and 2014.
In our highly digitized society, online speech like posts, messages, and emails, can be taken out of context, repackaged in ways that distort or completely lose their meaning, and spread far beyond the intended recipients.With this in mind, we are urging the Supreme Court to rule that any time the government seeks to prosecute someone for threatening violence against another person, it must show that the speaker subjectively intended to threaten before their speech can be considered a “true threat” not protected by the First Amendment.In a brief filed with the Student Press Law Center, we argued that people should not face prison time because they misjudged how many people would see their speech or how an unintended recipient would react to the speechThe First Amendment requires that true threats are only those in which a speaker subjectively intends to threaten someone, so as to prevent protected speech such as humor, art, misunderstandings, satire, and misrepresentations, we told the court.True threats are one of the very few categories of speech that has no constitutional protection. For this reason, it is important that true threats be narrowly defined. But to date, the Supreme Court has not decided the required state of mind a speaker must have. Some state and lower courts require that the speaker have a subjective intent to threaten the person when they speak. But other courts, and some state laws, believe the First Amendment only requires that an objectively reasonable person would perceive the statement to be a threat of violence.The Supreme Court is considering a case called Counterman v. Colorado to resolve this question. The Court previously considered the question in 2014 in Elonis v United States, in which EFF also filed a friend of the court brief, but ultimately decided that case on other grounds.In our Counterman brief, we argue that the First Amendment requires the subjective standard, particularly given the decontextualization that readily occurs in online communication, and social media in particular.What’s more, speech that a reasonable person may interpret as a violent threat includes much protected and valuable speech. There is no historical First Amendment exception for violent language in general. To be clear, EFF and the Student Press Law Center do not challenge the need to have a true threats exception to the First Amendment. We acknowledge the seriousness of true threats and the speech-inhibiting effects they can have.But the requirement of a subjective intent to threaten remains necessary to distinguish these true threats from the misunderstandings and artistic expression discussed above, striking the proper balance between protected and unprotected speech.Online communication, while providing countless benefits and opportunities for connection and collaboration in our digitized society, also poses challenges for understanding each other. As speech spreads on online platforms, its original context is easily obscured and often lost completely.And it’s difficult to control just who our audience is. Even if an account is limited to those who are in our network of friends, trusted confidants, or contacts, it can be difficult to limit the spread of virtual messages through screenshotting, reposting, and engagement with that content.As our brief states:
“A speaker’s subjective intent standard is also a practical necessity when dealing with social media and other online communications because a purely objective standard, negligence or otherwise, does not account for the ways in which communication on the Internet can strip speech of vital context, necessary to understand the words’ full meaning, or how quickly speech can be recontextualized from the time it is first posted online until it ultimately reaches a person who interprets the speech as threatening. Indeed, the original speaker may have never intended for the that recipient to see the speech that caused them fear.”The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case on April 19, with a decision expected in June.
From the days of chattel slavery until the modern Black Lives Matter movement, Black communities have developed innovative ways to communicate to fight back against oppression.
EFF’s Director of Engineering, Alexis Hancock, documented this important history of codes, ciphers, underground telecommunications and even dance in a blog post that became one of our favorite articles of 2021. In collaboration with The Nib and illustrator Chelsea Saunders, we now have adapted “Coded Resistance” into comic form to further explore the stories of slave revolts, the coded songs of Harriet Tubman, civil rights era strategies for circumventing “Ma Bell,” and the use of modern day technology to document police abuse. The comic is available below, as well as on the EFF Instagram feed, and also via The Nib.
Our hope is that by combining images and text, we can help bring the history of resistance to surveillance to life. And like all EFF content, it’s shareable and remixable under a Creative Commons – Attribution license. If you enjoy the comic and would like to see more illustrated takes on our blog posts, let us know!
The cost of having a bad cop on the force never ends once the officer is no longer employed. The bleeding continues for years, either as tangible costs related to ongoing civil rights lawsuits or, less tangibly, the aftershocks of their negative effect on their coworkers.
We’re in a new era (or at least the early days of a new chapter)—not just a new period in our technological history but also a new paradigm for how people work and contribute to solving problems. One significant challenge I’ve found in working with leaders is that most organizations are not designed to adapt—let alone thrive—in this new era.
With the rapid emergence of Web3 technologies and the rise of open source software as the basis for these advances, I see multiple challenges every organization can turn into epic opportunities immediately. I detail these in my recently published book, Mesh. In this article, I’ll offer a quick overview of three of the most distinct opportunities: Reliance on distributed structures rather than decentralized ones, trapped and untapped value, and the emergence of Web3.
What is Web3?
Many people have preconceived notions of what Web3, or features like blockchain, is or isn’t. Web3 refers to the next generation of the internet, which is decentralized and enables more direct, secure, and private interactions between users without intermediaries. Instead of relying on centralized systems like companies or governments, Web3 uses technology such as blockchain to create a network of peers who can transact and exchange value directly with each other. Blockchain provides a secure and transparent ledger for recording transactions and tracking data, enabling trust and collaboration. This results in a more open, transparent, and fair environment where users have greater control over their data. Simply put, Web3 is a more empowering and equitable internet. The features and technology of Web3 bring new opportunities for organizations to improve insights, strengthen connections and build trust as we transform many aspects of how we work and do business.
Seeing someone who looked like me with such a huge platform was powerful. It’s part of why I wanted to share my own love of reading through my blog, Here Wee Read. The internet helped me find not only a platform, but a community of readers who are as passionate about diverse literature as I am. Now that I have two young children, I’m showing them that while the internet isn’t perfect, it’s a great place to find inspiration, make connections and grow their worlds.
Internet privacy company Proton can spot attacks on democracy in a country before they hit the headlines, simply by watching demand for its services explode, its chief told AFP.
When Russia blocked access to independent news sites following its invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the small company which provides virtual private networks (VPNs) saw “a 9,000 percent increase in sign-ups over just a period of a few days”, company chief executive Andy Yen said in an interview last week.
DRM’d content is a big no-no. I don’t consume any kind of DRM these days. Most likely, like you — I have a ~/Music folder on my laptop. I like to keep my music collection offline – available any day I want.
I keep music cached on my disk as long as I need it. Songs get archived periodically every few months, if I have a change of taste. yt-dl is a good tool if you want to automate / batch download music for offline use, instead of live streaming from YouTube.
Over the last few months we’ve had a few articles highlighting the pretty serious questions raised regarding how much of DoNotPay’s (“the world’s first robot lawyer”) marketing is pure bullshit and nonsense. It’s not surprising that there might be a bit of puffery from a startup, but DoNotPay’s claims are so outlandish, and its CEO, Joshua Browder seems so allergic to just telling the truth, that it’s increasingly looking like DoNotPay is not just puffing up its claims, but more or less making them up wholesale, in a manner that is fraudulent to consumers who are paying it a monthly subscription fee of up to $18.
The metaverse, shared virtual worlds accessible via the Internet, is the next digital market to attract regulatory scrutiny, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Thursday.
Hux is among a group of independent pharmacists who have stopped carrying Ozempic and other drugs in the same class, in part, they say, because of the underpayments by pharmacy benefits managers, who act as middlemen between pharmacists and insurers. These drugs, called GLP-1 agonists, are relatively new and still under patent, meaning there are no generic alternatives.
The patent document was submitted to the United States Patent Office in August 2021 but it was formally published Feb. 23. It’s titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle.” It describes several ways to make the life of somebody who has missed several car payments harder.
It explicitly says the system, which could be installed on any future vehicle in the automaker’s lineup with a data connection would be capable of “[disabling] a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle.” Everything from the engine to the air conditioning. For vehicles with autonomous or semi-autonomous driving capability, the system could “move the vehicle from a first spot to a second spot that is more convenient for a tow truck to tow the vehicle… move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a location such as, for example, the premises of the repossession agency,” or, if the lending institution considers the “financial viability of executing a repossession procedure” to be unjustifiable, the vehicle could drive itself to the junkyard.
The basic concept at the patent’s core is a description of how the [Internet] works: An interconnected system between the car, a centralized network, and various other institutions such as a repossession agency, “police authority,” medical facility, and lending institution. Along with the car’s on-board computers, this would enable dozens of scenarios for the car to punish an owner for missing payments.
This will be a quick one, but we now have a name and confirmation of a detail from a previous post. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how an unreleased game from developer Fntastic, The Day Before, was both having its release date pushed back and dealing with takedowns of a bunch of footage from streaming sites due to a trademark dispute. Fntastic, which I should mention hasn’t always been seen as a trustworthy source of information in the past, nevertheless indicated that a company with a calendar app and a trademark by the same name as the game was the source of the trademark dispute.
Last month the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment worked with Egyptian authorities to shut down MyCima. It was one the largest piracy platforms in the Middle East with an estimated 50 million visits per month. According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was sewn back together after being cut into 14 pieces. Using many more pieces than that, MyCima is already back in business.
Reddit has asked a California federal court to reject a request to unmask several anonymous Redditors. Filmmakers believe that the users’ posts are useful evidence in an ongoing piracy lawsuit against an ISP. However, Reddit characterizes the posts as irrelevant and argues that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is at stake.
That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result, huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds, infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda.
It concerns the taxing of books in the UK. Most goods there are subject to a Value Added Tax (VAT), which is a simple percentage of the sale price – generally 20%. However, certain classes of goods are exempt: this applies to things like food, children’s clothing, and also books. Or rather, to physical books: one quirk of the early ebook market was that ebooks were taxed at 20%, even though physical books were not. This led to a 2018 campaign with the catchy slogan “Axe the reading tax”. It was led by the Publishers Association, which wrote in a press release at the time: [...]
I first listened to Bruckner’s symphonies as a teenager. I liked them a lot. I’d go listen to them at the symphony when they programmed them. But they didn’t really stick with me in a long term way.
Fast forward 25 years to the pandemic and I’m holed up in my dark basement office, binge-listening various things. Julian Bream. Itzhak Perlman. And Bruckner. Four or five years ago I picked up a CD of his 9th symphony from the library’s sale rack. And was like, yeah, this is good. So I picked up a box set (Gunter Wand), and started listening to them, a lot.
Online is perhaps the absolutely worst place to make a friend. This fact bears out most sadly in web2.0 social media. Fame culture shreds authenticity; parasocial posturing undercuts trust. Social media is only really about the tawdry and superficial, and no where more pathetically so than in those of us who play online advocate or philosopher. But the cruelties of anomie and atomism can be breached still, with a good kick from Serendip above. A bit of Courage within helps, too. Something should be at stake.
Oh, ye gods, save foolish humanity from our folly!
Just sitting here thinking of you while I watch the Avs. I missed you earlier today too brother when I saw a hilarious hick on Insta named cornbreadcowboi. Hilarious!
When I was in university, a friend of mine rented a very old house in the far north of town. The front of the house had a large porch with a swing and a few chairs. We loved to relax there: his roommate would light up a Black & Mild cigar, another friend would puff on a tobacco pipe, and we’d listen to the summer rain. I often miss the simple, idyllic serenity of those days.
I’ve wanted a porch of my own ever since, but none of the houses I’ve lived in have had one. My area is full of newer houses, and the vast majority of them do not have porches. It’s a trend that seems to be dying out.
I **would not** recommend having so much going on besides needing to move (cuz it’s not much of a choice, so much as a “If I value the rest of my life working out good, I’ve gotta do this” sorta thing).
I **would not** recommend having easy access to IT surplus, cuz I’ve got way too much of this junk to keep. It’ll be Christmas for somebody at the local thrift shop, or possibly **shiver** Facebook Marketplace.
This evening, I turned my coin microscope to the exploration of paper birch bark. I experimented with some different room lighting effects and angles. These photos are not post-processed, except that I had to re-encode them with GIMP.
Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 569bff0a35f42185c1521efcb8827cd9 EPO Patent Quality Under Scrutiny
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Evidence suggests that EPO managers have knowingly and intentionally ruined patent quality; they conspired against the charter of the EPO and then covered that up; stakeholders are complaining while EPO managers try to install “controlled judges” that would tolerate the EPO’s abusive behaviour — in effect implementing a coup for the litigation ‘industry’ with its largest clients (monopolistic multinationals)
IN the just-published "EPO Togetherness" post we showed that the EPO’s assault on its own staff is intensifying greatly. There’s no ambiguity about it; EPO management acts in a self-harming fashion assuming that the managers’ goal is the same as the goals of the Office (in reality, or in practice, there tends to be a conflict of interest; for fixed but not permanent terms the management can intentionally bury the institution for short-term gains). Were the managers appointed to serve science or to serve a bunch of lawyers, manning national patent offices and going back and forth (revolving door) between the private and public sector?
“Were the managers appointed to serve science or to serve a bunch of lawyers, manning national patent offices and going back and forth (revolving door) between the private and public sector?”Seeing that national patent courts rarely tolerate fake European Patents, the EPO has pushed for an illegal system and basically incited (in its official site, EPO.org) to commit crimes. It has been colluding with lying lawyers, who for profit’s sake decided that they would openly and fragrantly attack constitutions, conventions, and laws. We hope that the EPO’s biggest union will talk about this problem a lot more often, but it’s not for us to decide…
Either way, shown and discussed in the video above is EPO.org, a propaganda site of Team UPC (sponsored by Team UPC), and some internal material from the EPO, including the latest publication from the Central Staff Committee (CSC). Everyone needs to see this, along with the evidence presented, as the CSC and the staff union (SUEPO) got vindicated repeatedly, including earlier this year. “Several European companies have recently expressed serious concern about the declining quality of granted patents by the EPO in a letter sent to Vice-President DG 1,” the CSC claims, citing the phony “Quality Reports” (warning: epo.org link; it’s like the fake “Ombuds”) and some other documents (like these letters from almost exactly 6 years ago [1, 2], attributed to VP Cosado and VP Willy (Guillaume) Minnoye). This lie started under Battistelli — a tradition that continues under the person who perpetuates and covers up the same abuses. When the management claims “Attack on quality delivered by EPO staff” the managers try to portray the people who actually protect the staff aw people who try to discredit the staff. “Staff Representation criticizes EPO quality during Administrative Council,” says the title as if this is a religious matter and an act of blasphemy was committed.
The text below alludes to this presentation from 2022[PDF] and it contains a lot of other references that are publicly accessible.
Zentraler Personalausschuss
Central Staff Committee
Le Comité Central du Personnel
Munich,24/02/2023
sc23024cp
Patent Quality
Can it be put back on the EPO’s agenda?
Several European companies have recently expressed serious concern about the declining quality of granted patents by the EPO.
The future of the European patent system depends on how the EPO, as a public service, is able to set worldwide standards to foster innovation in the interest of European society. Consequently, management should take the criticism very seriously. The staff would be perfectly capable of carrying out prior art searches of the highest quality and, accordingly, conducting patent examination procedures that result either in patents that stand up in court or in refusals when adequate. Mismanagement resulting in decreasing quality should be put under the spotlight: recruitment policy, time budgets and incentive systems for staff, HR policies, IT strategy, etc.
The Staff Committee is ready to contribute actively and constructively to these points so as to respond to external criticism and put quality back on the EPO’s agenda.
Increasingly loud criticism
The members of Industry Patent Quality Charter (IPQC) recently sent a letter to Vice-President DG 1 signed by the Chief IP counsel of Siemens. IPQC members are important European players1 in the patent world and several of them have been among the largest patent applicants to the EPO in recent years.
This letter follows the critical reception of the “EPO Patent Quality Charter” (part of Mr Campinos’ so-called “Strategic Plan 2023″) that came into force on 1 October 2022. It is indeed an open secret that Mr Campinos’ “EPO Patent Quality Charter” was a disappointment. The Chief IP counsel of Siemens told JUVE Patent in October 2022 that “[a]ll the measures are too focused on the improvement of internal processes and their effectiveness, including speed and timeliness. This does not necessarily enhance the actual quality of the granted patents.”2
_____________ 1 ATOS, Bayer, Deutsche Telekom, Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, Ericsson, Eraeus, HP, Iveco Group N.V., MTU, Nokia, Physik Instrumente (PI) GmbH & Co. KG, Procter&Gamble, Qualcomm, Roche, Siemens AG, Siemens Healthineers, Syngenta, Vodafone, Volvo, … 2“Dissatisfied industry users push back against EPO quality measures” by JUVE Patent (12.10.2022) https://www.juve-patent.com/news-and-stories/legal-commentary/dissatisfied-industry-users-push-back-
against-epo-quality-measures/
The recent IPQC letter follows up on an earlier meeting with EPO management and identifies many relevant topics with regard to the quality of search and examination at the EPO, which should obviously be discussed and fixed:
− Complete searches
− Complete examination
− User feedback
− Training (of examiners)
− A transparent incentive system for examiners
Each topic is subdivided into detailed points. The Kluwer Patent blog and Juve Patent have reported on the letter.
Well-known issues
Staff Representation has been critical of management’s approach to quality for many years and has denounced the deleterious effects on substantive quality of the “New Career System” (NCS) introduced in 2015 which incentivises examiners to focus on their work as first examiner and in this role to issue as many search reports and grant as many patents as possible, with substantive quality being secondary to productivity and timeliness3456. Management openly reproached7 the staff representation regarding its interventions on the EPO’s quality policies in front of delegations and user representatives in the Administrative Council.
EPO staff have repeatedly expressed their concern about the decreasing importance of quality in several staff surveys conducted by Technologia: for a great majority of respondents, the importance of quality in relation to quantitative targets has steadily decreased at the EPO since 20138.
The official figures from the Directorate Quality Audit (DQA), which assesses the substantive quality of the work in DG1, also show a negative trend: the compliance rate of grants has dropped from 85% in 20159 to 75% in 202210, an all-time low. The substantive quality of searches is steadily decreasing.
The Office is in denial
In the face of the converging signals of deteriorating quality, how can management continue to pretend that everything is fine. For example, VP 1′s response to recent criticisms of prioritising efficiency over quality has been to declare them “unfounded”11. In his New Year’s
_____________ 3“Measure for Measure: Quantity, Quality & Timeliness for Europe”, CSC paper of 14.09.2016 (sc16170cp) 4“Measure for Measure: Quantity, Quality & Timeliness for Europe”, CSC paper of 14.09.2016 (sc16170cp) 5“Good enough? A discussion paper about Patent Quality at the EPO”, LSC MU and BE paper of 19.04.2018 (su18003mp) 6“All the President’s Peas”, CSC paper of 18.01.2018 (sc18008cp) 7“Attack on quality delivered by EPO staff”, Clarification to publication (see also here) of VP1 and VP2 dated 17.03.2017, CSC paper of 20.03.2017 (sc17040cp) 8 Technologia Survey Results 2022 (page 31) of staff survey frequency tables: https://www.suepo.org/archive/A1-OEB_EN-2010-2013-2016-2020-2022.pdf 9 EPO Quality Report of 2016 or here 10 DQA Report of 2022 or here 11 “Efficiency-over-quality criticisms are unfounded, says EPO VP for Patent Granting Process”, IAM Magazine (12.12.2022) https://www.iam-media.com/article/efficiency-over-quality-criticisms-are-unfounded-says-epo-vp-patent-
greetings to staff, Mr Campinos referred to what he sees as general positive feedback from 6000 EPO users and said that “[q]uality is the appraisal of the many – and not the discontent of the few”. In other words, the President considers that complaints from the public or users about the quality of EPO patents − which undoubtedly include IPQC members − can be downplayed if not ignored.
The fact is that management’s interest in genuine patent quality began to fade a decade ago, when the pursuit of endless productivity and production growth replaced a sense for public service and common sense.
Which future for (substantive) quality?
Under the topics of “Complete Searches” and “Complete Examination”, the IPQC members stress the need to give examiners sufficient time (budget) to carry out their tasks. Examiners (and formalities officers) have the right qualifications and dedication to carry out their duties in accordance with the EPC and the Implementing Regulations, if sufficient time is given for a proper functioning of the divisions, including quality control within the divisions12.
The recruitment policies need to be reconsidered, especially the decision not to recruit formalities officers and to replace only 80% of leaving examiners, despite a steady rise in the workload and a predictable wave of retirements of highly experienced staff in the coming years13.
The long-term attractiveness of the Office as an employer and the impact of the recent recruitment policies14 needs be assessed.
The CSC has always advocated for a transparent incentive system for examiners (and other staff, particularly a career system with a performance-based reward system that provides the right incentives to get the job done right and a commitment that staff careers are a long-term investment, not a liability.
Senior management will not spontaneously call into question the mantra of ever-increasing productivity, especially in DG1, where “management by Excel sheet” now prevails. Hopefully the IPQC initiative will trigger an adequate reaction that goes beyond denial, window dressing and continuing to hope that progress in IT tools will solve the problems. In addition to an IT strategy that needs to be revised, internal appreciation of the EPO’s own personnel and appropriate HR policies are key aspects of a reorientation toward more quality.
It is not yet clear whether the IPQC initiative from outside the EPO will achieve what could not be achieved internally: to put patent quality back at the top of the agenda. The Staff Committee will report on the progress made (or lack thereof) in the coming weeks.
The Central Staff Committee
_____________
granting-process 12 In accordance with Article 15 EPC and Article 143(2) for the administration of the European patent with unitary effect 13 “Depletion of the Workforce – Failure to recruit under the current administration”: CSC publication of 17/02/2023 (sc23020cp) 14 Five-year contracts, lowering of the standards for recruitment, the hiring of young professionals
The figures from the Directorate Quality Audit (DQA)[PDF] cannot be easily hidden like before. The Office tends to scuttle and bury any figures that don’t flatter “quality”. This one was originally published in proprietary Microsoft formats because the EPO is technically controlled by Microsoft. Sure, it’s illegal, but the EPO is run by liars and criminals, who choose liars and criminals as IT vendors. Campinos would help Bill Gates liberate his close friend Jeffrey Epstein from prison if he had the chance. These people are all effectively above the law.
So where’s the media in all this? Or politicians? Silence, as usual?
“MEPs are probably part of the problem and not just through passivity,” an associate of ours explains. “Media avoids anything even remotely related to technology policy, in any shape or form. That’s in part thanks to the Bill and Lolita slush fund which is used liberally to prevent such coverage lest people bring up the topic of software Freedom. Or of no-Microsoft software.” █
Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 99b58eb33ca1eb3a603ffae61d7568fc EPO Togetherness
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The criminals who run the EPO (and also try to replace patent courts in the EU with unlawful and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) are attacking their very own staff as if the goal is to cause mass resignations or assign patent applications to depressed, besieged workers, unable to actually carry out the tasks in compliance with the European Patent Convention
THE “Bringing Teams Together” [sic] programme/initiative has been mentioned here a lot — several times last year and earlier this year. We spent a lot of time exploring what it meant to staff. It had become crystal clear that it was a coordinated action against examiners, likely connected to notorious union-busting strategies. Whose idea was this collective punishment? Some union-busting ‘consultancy’? One of the persons responsible for this travesty has since then left the Office and we can expect António Campinos to persist with this no matter the consequences and irrespective of the brain drain (that’s likely the goal; Benoît Battistelli already drove out many of the veteran examiners — those whom he did not illegally dismiss until their appeal reversed the decision of dismissal/demotion in 2018).
“China would have a field day if it knew what this supposedly ‘lucrative’ employer does to the workforce.”Shown below (and discussed above; I didn’t realise it would be satirical) is an essay that helps explain what EPO management is doing to all the staff; if the goal is to compel people to grant European software patents (leaks suggest so) and to not unionise, they’re being unrealistic. This will doom the entire patent office once both stakeholders and the general public catch up. Where are the politicians or so-called ‘representatives’ of voters? In Germany and its neighbouring countries they’re in the pockets of the abusers. The German government actively protects and hides the corruption at the EPO. Scandal of epic scale.
Here’s the full publication dated one week ago:
Zentraler Personalausschuss
Central Staff Committee
Le Comité Central du Personnel
Munich, 24/02/2023 (early as of 01/04/2023)
sc23025cp
“Bringing our Family Together”
Best practices everywhere
Dear Colleagues,
“Bringing Teams Together” seems to have inspired some colleagues to make similar improvements in their home environment. For sure, the administration, and perhaps you, will be pleasantly surprised to read that our colleagues have transferred best practices from their workplace to their home.
The text we publish below was sent to us by a colleague – we would like to thank the anonymous author(s) for sharing it with us.
The Central Staff Committee
—————————————————–
Bringing our Family Together
Dear colleagues,
I would like to inform you myself, before rumours start spreading around:
I have just asked my husband to move out of our family house where he’s been living with me and our small children.
First, he was shocked and wanted to know why. Then I explained to him that:
1.) This will decrease our family’s environmental footprint by 1/8 (12.5%). In order to make use of our family house in a sustainable way, we need to avoid leaving large areas of our house empty by reorganising our daily lives. By discarding one place to sleep and moving closer together, the top floor will be cleared and from now on remain empty. Thereby, power consumption will be reduced. In light of our family’s commitment to environmental sustainability and the efforts to reduce our energy consumption, it is neither viable nor socially responsible to leave large areas of our family house left empty. All of us can make a difference for the environment. We should work together towards a more sustainable future.
2.) This is part of our new family concept, which I call “Bringing our Family Together”. I told him that moving him out has the added benefit of keeping our family house vibrant and strengthening our sense of belonging by bringing our whole family together. It also gives us the flexibility to adapt to our changing needs.
I furthermore told him that preparations for this reorganisation are in full swing. Accommodation plans for the remaining family have been reviewed and as of 25 March, our children will begin to relocate within the house. The plans for his move out are to follow in due course.
When I showed him our “bringing family together” relocation plan with all our family member’s names filled in except for his name (which was evidently missing), he looked at me with this blank look, a mixture of unbelief and despair.
I assume that’s normal. Change is never easy. Being a loving and caring wife, personally, I actually do have some sympathy for him, of course. But as a family, we need to be professional. We need to adapt to our family’s changing needs. And we need to keep in mind our common goal, namely improving our effectiveness in order to strengthen our commitment to our family life. We all have to focus on what is best for our family and for our environment, not only as self-centered individuals but in a holistic, collaborative way.
Even though I had just informed him about the upcoming changes in a very kind and supportive manner, he nevertheless seemed negatively surprised and unsettled. He asked me whether the past 15 years spent together meant nothing to me and expressed concern that this change would exclude him from our family life.
Of course I found some warm-hearted words and kindly reassured him that he should not worry about any of this. I told him that:
1.) I really appreciate his past contribution. Here, I made a strong effort in listing all his achievements and contributions in house cleaning and years of childcare, so that he knows that his contribution is very much valued.
2.) He will continue this contribution in the future. I made it abundantly clear that his move out will neither affect his household responsibilities, nor the required level of cleaning performance. I informed him that from now on, he will come to our house in the morning and leave as soon as he has managed to finish all his household tasks for the day. I furthermore informed him that in addition to his previous tasks, he will get an increase of 15% additional tasks. Expected future improvements of our household devices warrant it. When he looked puzzled, I told him that he can do it. And that he will do it.
3.) Regarding his concerns that he will not have a place to be, I reassured him that while he is neither cleaning nor washing (which shouldn’t happen anyway, as there’s always plenty of work to be done), he can spend a few minutes break in one of our rooms, if not occupied by someone else. It will be his responsibility to check for time slots when the children are away from home, in order to find out when empty rooms are available. Evidently, child’s approval to make use of the room is to be obtained every time in advance, as a matter of courtesy.
4.) He was informed that he will be provided with a locker in the cellar where he can keep his house-cleaning tools (such as his vacuum cleaner and swiffer). He might even temporarily store some of his personal belongings there while doing the housework.
His reaction did not meet the expectations. After all the convincing and empathic explanations which I had provided to him, he still insisted on his presumption that he might not be a full-fledged member of our family any more. He even dared to ask me whether I might reconsider my decision (can you imagine?).
I told him that I would like nothing better. It’s just that I don’t have a choice. As much as I would love to reconsider, that is beyond my scope of decision. In order to achieve our common goals, his move out of our family house is inevitable. It is conditioned by our holistic goals of environmental sustainability and bringing our family closer together. It’s not my personal choice. There is nothing I can do about it. Things are the way they are.
When he looked at me in disbelief, I reminded him of how grateful he should be for having such a great family and me as a loving and caring wife.
I also reminded him how good we have it that none of our children needs to move out. It is an inevitable fact that we have to reduce the number of space occupied in our family house. There is nothing we can do about that, it is a fact. But we can make the best out of it. So through his move out, all our children will be able to stay in our house. After all, they are all pretty young, 5 years in average. So I reminded him to be thankful that together, we have found such a people-friendly and sustainable solution, which best accommodates the wishes of all family members. Now it is time to adapt. Together, we will create a vibrant and energizing collaborative family environment.
After I had said that, he became silent. He just looked at me with an incredulous expression on his face. Then he turned around without a word and left the room.
So I did not even have opportunity to tell him that any potential lack of personal contact with our children will be more than compensated by mandatory family meetings, which will greatly improve the team spirit and the personal relationships within our family.
Sometimes he is just so resistant to change. As I said before, somehow I even understand him. Change is never easy. But being responsible for our family, I cannot be sentimental. I need to ensure that he delivers according to expectations. So I will be very clear that this must not negatively impact his performance. And he will maintain and increase his cleaning performance, of that I am sure. He knows exactly what will happen if he does not. We both know. So there is no need to explicitly remind him.
Instead, I can focus on my future communication. After all, I should be perceived as the caring and loving wife who I actually am.
Fortunately, I have learned effective communication methods. First, I will give him time to speak and to raise his concerns, such that he will gain the impression of being heard. This, I have read between the lines of my communication training, will make him feel even more valued and respected and therefore will drive him to clean our family house even more.
Of course, any arguments put forward by him might not lead to actual changes or reconsiderations, as I am only a small being in the face of the universe, therefore always being bound by the circumstances that prevail. So my husband and I are both aware that nothing he might say will ever be taken into account, nor make any difference. Then how can I ensure to be perceived by my children as the caring and loving wife who I actually am?
I think I will just start repeating:
“How can I support you? What can I do for you?”
This is what I will say to my husband at every occasion, after he has been moved out of our family house in order to bring our family together. I am sure he will understand.
One might expect this in China, but this is happening not too far from the ICC and in Bavaria. China would have a field day if it knew what this supposedly ‘lucrative’ employer does to the workforce. █
Posted in Site News at 4:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: We have some promising plans for Techrights and some raves to share today; we’ve invested a lot in the site’s improvement lately
WE are fast approaching our 36,000th blog post (some time later this month), our Gemini capsule currenly shows up at the top of the list in Lupa’s statistics, and Geminispace is generally growing. “There are 3162 capsules,” it says. “We successfully connected recently to 2329 of them.”
Lately we’ve been having some trans-Atlantic connectivity issues (cause unknown, might be related to cyber-attacks or DDOS) and 2 days ago we completed one month with fibre-optics at home (where Gemini is hosted). Also 2 days ago my wife officially became a British citizen and we took these photos with the Lord Mayor of Manchester (~47 hours ago):
The man on the left is her refree.
“Things move in positive direction in the sense that examiners are revolting against law-breaking managers.”At Techrights, EPO is still a priority, as European software patents may be at great risk, along with the UPC (it would be challenged very fast at a high level; kangaroo courts don’t tend to stick around once the media gets involved and there’s public/political uproar). There’s coalition-building behind the scenes and we expect to have many guest post quite soon. Regarding Sirius ‘Open Source’ and several of its pension providers, we’re still studying the pension situation (it impacts a lot of people!). We’ve spent weeks on this and we’ve been improving the code associated with our curation of news, which means that Daily Links are a lot more extensive since my hard-drive (SSD rather) died at the end of January.
Later today we have a lot of stuff to show about EPO affairs. Things move in positive direction in the sense that examiners are revolting against law-breaking managers.
We’re not counting on the Web to thrive and grow. It’s shrinking and it will likely perish in a decade or two. One site that we link to regularly is shutting down — part of a trend likely accelerated by economic pressures in recent years. Today’s Web is lots of JS/’webapps’ with spying and disinformation/spam. It’s not what it was 10 or 20 years ago. █
Thoughts on Microsoft Stabber Joseph Cantrell’s Drug Diary.
This will largely be from my Mastodon wall, so if it reads strangely, I apologize.
Microsoft employee Joseph Cantrell is a Nazi, a drug addict, and a misogynist.
He left a diary on his Web site admitting to all of this and more.
After skimming it over, I came to these conclusions:
Microsoft Stabber actually was nice enough to go crazy and detail a lot of embarrassing things including all about his drug and masturbation cycle with detailed time indexes for the last 3 years.
It also details his paranoid hallucinations directly leading up to the stabbing.
It goes on for well over 100 pages.
At lot of it is skippable, because it details his eating habits. Spoiler, his favorite McDonalds is the double bacon cheeseburger with bbq sauce.
Wonder if he’ll get one in prison.
The Microsoft Stabber said in his rambling diary, while he was working for Microsoft, that their products, including Windows, are a disaster, and that Windows in particular has been broken, on a surface level, for years, without any action taken to fix it.
He said that his request to join “Windows UX” team was turned down by the same manager that pulled him into the office and yelled at him for making racist remarks about Indian people and having a drug diary on his public Web site.
There’s something amusing about a psychopathic Nazi working at Microsoft, that tried to murder a man, while on drugs, wanting to fix the GUI in Windows because it’s awful.
Shows you that part of his brain works.
Who knows why they actually turned him down. Could be the racism. I think they were probably too afraid to lay him off and were content with leaving him at Azure.
Could you imagine being the guy that fired this person? It’d be you in the hospital.
In Office 95, Microsoft apparently hid an entire flight simulator as an Easter Egg.
If they had only let Joseph Cantrell take a crack at Windows 11 (while on crack), he could have integrated Prophet Launcher re-written as C#. Sharp as a knife, you see.
DEI at Microsoft. Diversity, Equity, INCISION!
You want to know where DEI gets you?
It gets you the Microsoft Stabber.
He said in his diary that he applied to Microsoft’s “Neurodivergent Hiring Program” (read this and it will tell you about what managers are being told to do regarding crazy people in the office) and he got a $165k job with benefits specifically for being crazy.
They hired him, he scared the fuck out of everyone that worked with him, then he started responding badly by demanding transfers to another dept that got denied, calling in, using PCP for an entire month, and then stabbing a coworker 13 times.
The witnesses to the Microsoft Stabber told police that the man he was trying to murder was “screaming like a dog that got hit by a car or something”.
Some folks asked why the guy wasn’t able to get him off of him.
Well, just off the top of my head, he was being stabbed 13 times, by surprise, by the result of the Neurodivergent Microsoft Hiring Program, who was on PCP. (He had been on PCP the entire month according to his diary.)
“He was probably on PCP. Broke every bone in his arm, wouldn’t feel it for hours.” -Detective (The Terminator)
The Stabber worked from late May through October 2022 without Microsoft finding out about his diary and Web site, and then Microsoft pulled him into the office and gave him a coaching for making inappropriate comments at a meeting about how Indians shouldn’t work at Microsoft.
October 19th, 2022 was when they found out about all of his insane paranoid ramblings and talking about how he was always on drugs on his personal Web site.
The Microsoft Stabber’s November 22, 2022: 7:15 p.m. entry is about his manager’s manager at Microsoft yelling at him for talking too much about what they had him doing at Azure.
He says he was hallucinating colors and shapes appearing over the manager’s face while he was being yelled at.
The Microsoft Stabber’s December 4, 2022 8:14 PM entry says that Microsoft was still “watching” him over the “resolution”.
He is starting to become concerned about legal troubles if the authorities start investigating him for the drugs and drug-induced mental illness and says he has to be careful because Microsoft is watching him.
Yet the blogging continues and gets worse.
December 21, 2022: 7:53 a.m
The Microsoft Stabber blogs about his STD test for that day.
He also believes that women and the government are in a conspiracy to give him STDs and then experiment on his corpse. He believes that he has had “an unknown STD” for some time and the doctor simply won’t tell him what it is and that perhaps it’s “jock itch”. He says he’s been trying to cure it with amphetamines. (Uhhhh.)
“STD” appears 98 times in his diary.
On December 27, 2022: 10:54 p.m., he calls the men who sold him weed his “Private Dindu Nuffins”.
At 6:06 p.m. on January 1, 2023, he says Microsoft Hololens could take off. Clearly on drugs.
January 6, 2023: 6:10 p.m.
The Microsoft Stabber loses his erection after 5 minutes of whacking it while thinking about owing the IRS for two years of back taxes.
So far this is the most normal thing I’ve seen in this blog. Throughout his blog he keeps going back to his failure and inability to sexually perform or even satisfy women. He admits that he pays prostitutes and that he can’t finish, and then they tell him the usual “it happens to a lot of guys” type stuff. I’m sure they could care less if he’s impotent as long as he’s paying them.
(Superior Nazi Genes = Erectile Dysfunction?)
January 25, 2023
The Microsoft Stabber blogs that four highly paid programmers at Microsoft couldn’t figure out a bug in some Azure software and resorted to asking for advice on Stack Overflow.
“January 25, 2023 4:02 p.m. – The people at work even have database queries they can run to see how many people they fucked over with that fake ass error. “
Other observations:
The Microsoft Stabber was boasting about buying his drugs (using money from Verizon and Microsoft) over the Dark Web. The links are in Onionv2, so none of them work anymore.
He complained that a lot of the drugs he was purchasing were stale. The ketamine in particular. (A horse tranquilizer.)
He admitted that he was high on various substances throughout the entire Microsoft interviewing process, including at least 60 minutes, face-to-face, with their Hiring Manager.
He had been chased out of Verizon, where he had previously worked for a couple months.
While he was working at Verizon, he bragged that his apartment was infested with flies and that he had killed “45” of them with a $1 bill. He said he borrowed some money so he wouldn’t have to spend “my Special Dollar” on the MARTA (Atlanta Public Transit). █
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