I don't know... it really feels like a community. Maybe that's just my idealism talking, but in this video I lay out exactly why I think Linux users have organically built a community and my own experiences within it.
This week we’ve been playing with RISC-V. We discuss the future of Ubuntu releases, bring you some command line love and go over all your wonderful feedback.
It’s Season 14 Episode 10 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
The Linux kernel recently gained support for SEV-ES and support for Intel TDX is upcoming. AMD SEV will be further enhanced by Secure Nested Paging (SNP). Support for these technologies requires intrusive changes to the Linux kernel for memory integrity and secure interrupt delivery to virtual machines. Designing these changes in a way that works for different confidential computing technologies is one goal of this microconference.
In an age where hacker attacks are a daily occurrence, it is of fundamental importance to minimize the attack surface. Containerization is probably the best way to isolate a service provided for the public, but this is not always possible for several reasons. For example, think of a legacy system application developed on systemd. This could make the most of the capabilities provided by a systemd-based operative system and it could be managed via a systemd unit, or it could automatically pull updates using a systemd timer, and so on.
For this reason, we are going to explain how to improve the security of a systemd service. But first, we need to step back for a moment. With the latest releases systemd has implemented some interesting features relating to security, especially sandboxing. In this article we are going to show step-by-step how to strengthen services using specific directives, and how to check them with the provided systemd suite.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.12.4 kernel.
All users of the 5.12 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.12.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
Wim Taymans has a long track record in the Linux community. He was one of the two original developers of the GStreamer multimedia framework and he was the principal maintainer for most of the project’s initial existence. He joined Red Hat in 2013 and has helped maintain GStreamer and PulseAudio for Red Hat since. In 2015 he started working on PipeWire: a project that has come to full fruition in Fedora Workstation 34, where it handles both audio and video. In addition to that, it also merges the world of pro-audio with mainstream Linux. In this interview we will talk about where PipeWire came from, where it is at and where Wim sees it going from here.
For two years now Intel open-source engineers have floated patches for reporting per-client engine utilization for showing on an application level how much it's leveraging the Intel graphics render/3D, blitter, and video/multimedia engines. This can be used for some nifty system information reporting like a GPU top or other system monitoring functionality. The latest version of these patches were sent out this week.
The benefit of these patches for Intel graphics hardware on Linux is being able to report on a per-process level how the Intel GPU is being utilized and by what software. This "per-client engine busyness" information is exposed to user-space via sysfs so any interested application can make use of the information.
After releasing upgrading their stable drivers with version 460.80 following the release of the the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti for laptops - a new Vulkan Beta Driver is out now.
Every business depends on data. It's how they evolve, improve, pivot, market and grow. The lure of data isn't limited to marketing and suit-type staff. IT also requires data to not only make decisions, but to improve the technology used to make business happen.
That's why you need all the tools to collect information about your systems—every system. One crucial service you need to know about is your web servers. After all, those web servers are how you sell your products and interact with the public.
How do you collect data about your websites? One way is to use the Apache Bench tool. Apache Bench is a tool used to load test websites and APIs. I'm going to show you how to install and use this handy tool, so you'll have all the data you require about how your websites are performing.
GStreamer support for Digital Television (DTV) is still working. If you follow a few very simple steps you can get DTV signals tuned-to, captured, decoded and displayed with your computer and a few accessories.
This short article presents basic instructions for a working DTV setup. I'm going to use ATSC in the US as an example, but these instructions should work equally well for other terrestrial delivery systems and other countries.
What hardware do you need?
Beyond a computer, you will need an antenna and a capture device. I recently tested a Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD (ATSC/QAM) USB dongle with a 5-years old Amazon basics flat indoor antenna (that looks pretty much like this one) and it worked quite well at roughly 60km from the repeater station.
Installation
The hardware setup is simple. Install the antenna pointing to your repeater station and as high as you can. Your local telecommunications and/or broadcasting association should have data about repeaters near you. You can get this information by ZIP code from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) if you are in the US.
Deleting objects in Kubernetes can be challenging. You may think you’ve deleted something, only to find it still persists. While issuing a kubectl delete command and hoping for the best might work for day-to-day operations, understanding how Kubernetes delete commands operate will help you understand why some objects linger after deletion.
In the previous article, we have seen how to spin up a virtual machine using vagrant. In this article, we will focus on customizing the vagrant file according to our requirements and see important commands to work with the vagrant.
This guide gives you a brief introduction to Ruby on Rails and then walks you through the steps to install Ruby on Rails in Linux.
By default, the Linux system cannot play most video files that are in encrypted formats (proprietary media formats) if you do not have the required Media Codecs installed on your system.
It contains lots of packages like flash plugin, gstreamer, mp4, libavcodec, etc (especially decoder), which are not open source and some of them involve copyright patent or legal issues. Hence, these are not installed by default nor shipped with official repository.
If you try to play proprietary media formats without installing media codecs, you will see the following error message “Unable to play the file”.
In this brief tutorial, we’ll show you how to install Media Codes on Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE systems.
Buku is a powerful bookmark manager written in Python3 and SQLite3. It’s a flexible command-line solution with a private, portable, merge-able database along with seamless GUI integration.
It can auto-import bookmarks from your browser(s) or fetch the title and description of a bookmarked URL from the web. You can use your favourite editor to compose and update bookmarks. With multiple search options, including regex and a deep scan mode (particularly for URLs), it can find any bookmark instantly. Buku can look up the latest snapshot of a broken link on the Wayback Machine. There’s an Easter egg to revisit random forgotten bookmarks too! Buku is too busy to track you: no hidden history, obsolete records, usage analytics or homing.
As of March 2021, StatCounter estimates that Chrome has a 66% worldwide browser market share (after peaking at 72.38% in November 2018) on personal computers (PC), is also dominant on mobile, and has caught up with Safari on tablets (or about a percent-point below at 42.33%), and at 63.59% across all platforms combined. Because of this success, Google has expanded the “Chrome” brand name to other products: Chrome OS, Chromecast, Chromebook, Chromebit, Chromebox, and Chromebase.
RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) is an default open source and package management utility for Red Hat systems like (RHEL, CentOS and Fedora).
The tool allows you install, update, uninstall, query, verify and manage system software packages in Unix/Linux operating systems. The RPM known as .rpm file, that includes compiled software programs and libraries needed by the packages. This utility only works with packages that built on .rpm format.
Today we are going to look at how to install the Opera Browser on Deepin 20.2. As seen in the video, a person downloads Opera, from the official site, and then installs it with the built-in installer. Enjoy!
We use the df command to find total disk space and available space on a Linux / Unix file system. Let us see how to use the df command to view the amount of free space left on your Linux, macOS, *BSD and Unix file system. We will also explain how to automate disk space monitoring and send an email alert or push notification to your mobile device.
The df is an essential tool for a developer as it reports the amount of disk space used and available on file Linux or Unix filesystem.
Investing in quality development tools will make you more productive and significantly increase code quality. One such tool is Sublime Text 3, and you might be surprised by the many cool things in Sublime Text Editor.
Sublime Text 3 is a sophisticated text editor for markup, code, and prose. Sublime Text Editor is loved by web developers, engineers, and programmers alike. Sublime Text 3 is built from custom components, a cross-platform UI toolkit, with an unmatched syntax highlighting engine. Sublime Text Editor is very responsive, giving developers excellent performance. It is free for download and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
This article will highlight tips, shortcuts, and tricks of getting the most from Sublime Text 3. The article will highlight the must-have packages and project-specific preference settings and tweaks.
Today we are looking at how to install Growtopia on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
Since its release in the early nineties, Linux has won the admiration of the technology community thanks to its stability, versatility, customizability, and a large community of open-source developers who work round-the-clock to provide bug fixes and improvements to the operating system. By and large, Linux is the operating system of choice for public cloud, servers, and supercomputers, and close to 75% of internet-facing production servers run on Linux.
Vim is an advanced and highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. Vim text editor is developed by Bram Moolenaar. It supports most file types and vim editor is also known as a programmer’s editor. We can use with its plugin based on our needs.
Also vim, short for Vi Improved is a command-line text editor. In this vim tutorial, you are going to learn useful tips in using the vim text editor. Without much ado, let’s jump right in.
Ready for more retro-infused first-person shooting action? Viscerafest is now confirmed to be launching on May 20 into Early Access on Steam following a successful Beta. The developer, Acid Man Games / Fire Plant Games have been regularly putting out Beta builds on their Discord which have shown a lot of promise.
"Viscerafest is a Sci-Fi Fantasy Singleplayer Arena FPS with minor Collectathon elements. Fight through hordes of aliens and eldritch monstrosities wielding a slew of powerful weapons, juggling your resources, and exploring over 26 intricately designed hand crafted levels."
[...]
The Linux version we tested before release has been running exceptionally well, we think this is one you're going to like a lot if you love arena-styled fast-paced shooters.
Despite everywhere you look there's always someone pointing to the Google Graveyard, the game streaming service Stadia is still soldiering on in the face of overwhelming competition.
In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Stadia's developer marketing lead Nate Ahearn says the service is actually "alive and well" and went on to mention how they have over 100 new titles launching for Stadia through 2021. They're also continuing to grow their Stadia Makers program where they help Unity developers port to Stadia (with another 20 coming from that) along with continuing partnerships with many AAA studios like Capcom, EA, Square Enix, Ubisoft and others.
Right now game store itch.io is hosting their first official itch.io Creator Day, where the store gives 100% of the sales back to developers instead of taking a cut. This is not the first time itch.io has done this, as they did so for Black Friday in 2020. Now though, they've confirmed that this is going to be a more regular thing which is why they've slapped an actual name on it.
Developers don't have to do anything, as it's all automatic. Taking a cut from developers has always been a very open point for itch, as developers set the cut they give to itch themselves - there's no forced 30% or 12% or anything here. Note: developers don't entirely get 100% exactly, as there's still taxes and payment processor fees but you get the point.
It's been three or so years since Valve announced a new "hands off" approach towards approvals for games on its dominant Steam storefront. This new "policy" was unfortunately rolled out in an extremely Steam-like manner: vague and largely indecipherable, full of holes, and all with a caveat baked in that Steam could still do basically whatever it wants. Later, the company clarified that the chief goal with all of this was to allow for more adult-oriented games while still giving Steam the ability to disallow "troll games", as though that actually clarified anything. Predictably, this new policy set off confusion all over the place, and even years into the change its application appears to be aggressively inconsistent.
Proton GE (GloriousEggroll) is a community-built version of the Proton compatibility layer for running Windows games on Linux through Steam Play. You could compare Proton GE to the Valve-official Proton Experimental, where lots of extra features and fixes go in that haven't seen as much testing - but both may get you into newer Windows games quicker on Linux.
If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page. It's a special compatibility layer for running Windows games and apps from Steam on Linux.
Over the last month or two, Proton GE has seen multiple big new releases (the latest being Proton-6.8-GE-1) based on Wine 6.5 and it also sees big bumps in versions for the likes of DXVK, VKD3D, OpenXR patches, Media Foundation fixes for getting more games video working and the list of changes goes on for some time.
Following this week's id Tech 3 based Daemon engine update, the open-source first person shooter / real-time strategy game Unvanquished has just issued its long overdue v0.52 beta release.
Unvanquished has been a very promising open-source game project succeeding the former Tremulous project. As part of Unvanquished, Daemon Engine as their downstream and much improved version of the open-source id Tech 3 has continued advancing.
KDE developers have just released the first beta of KDE Plasma 5.22.
This beta arrives ahead of the planned stable release of KDE Plasma 5.22 on June 8, 2021.
What have developers who work on for the open-source desktop environment (and its associated technologies) been tending to this time around? Well, there’s been a large focus on patching up paper-cuts within the Plasma experience, and making smaller (but no less important) tweaks to improve the overall quality of the desktop environment.
KDE developers this week have issued the much anticipated Plasma 5.22 beta for testing, which is exciting this time around largely for bringing its Wayland support up to par for daily use with quite a lot of polishing and optimizations.
Plasma 5.22 has quite well-rounded Wayland support now and should deliver a good experience especially for Linux gamers with finally adding direct scan-out support, FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync plumbing, and much more.
Early days yet, but here's some screenshots of an experimental port of LibreOffice to GTK4 I've commited upstream during the week. It starts without crashing, renders, accepts user keystrokes and mouse events, basic Input Method support also works.
Standard GTK file dialog functionality works.
Pine makes a bunch of different bits of hardware. The Pine64 was a bit of a breakthrough in single-board-computing (SBC) – very different from the Raspberry Pi, and a lot more open-source. We could argue about just how open it is, but it did spawn the Pinebook and the Pinebook Pro. I hear the latter is really nice, and runs OpenBSD and FreeBSD too. Somewhat forgotten amongst all these is the Pine H6.
When the A64 came out originally (was that 2018?), closely followed by the H6, the H6 was clearly a more-capable board: more memory, even if you can’t access all 4GiB that is soldered on, eMMC, barrel power-connection. The Pine64-LTS remedied a lot of that, and the H6 was then also surpassed in compute-power by the Rock64 and RockPro. By that time, though, I had ordered a couple.
Red Hat’s hiring spree announced this week is designed to to bolster cloud computing efforts and is seeking employees at each stage of the product development process.
So says Mike McGrath, vice president of Software Engineering at Red Hat, in an interview with WRAL TechWire.
The new talent can help the company develop products to meet emerging edge computing needs as requested by current and prospective clients, he added. The cloud and Red Hat’s expertise were the big reasons IBM acquired Raleigh-based Red Hat two years ago for a whopping $34 billion.
IBM is continuing its bet on Red Hat, with plans to add more than 200 Red Hatters to its Triangle operation.
In an interview, Tim Cramer, senior vice president of software engineering at Red Hat, said the investment is a continuation of the bet IBMm (NYSE: IBM) made on the firm when it purchased it in 2019 for $34 billion.
“We’re definitely performing,” he said. “We’re doing well, and clearly the open hybrid cloud bet is the one we want to continue on.
Don't have great displays? Here you can see Ubuntu displayed in high resolutions by 1400's and better as well as get a way to test them even without buying a monitor device. I tried to collect how it looks starting with normal desktop, menu, and Activities overview, to system tray, calendar tray, Settings, LibreOffice Writer and Ubuntu Software. You will find here multiple aspect ratios by 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10. Lastly, because Ubuntu is based on GNOME desktop environment, this article applies to GNOME as well no matter what other GNU/Linux distro you are using. Now let's have a look!
Each Ubuntu release is different from the other releases in various ways. Each release has a different code name and a different version number. I have explained the logic behind Ubuntu version and codenames so I am not going to bore you with those details again.
Each Ubuntu release also comes with a different set of wallpapers. There is one default background that you’ll see while installing Ubuntu or when you first log in to it.
Machine vision applications highlight the complexity of implementation due to the requirement of interfacing several devices. These devices include image sensor modules, cables, GPU modules, and memory units, thus increasing the time for development and deployment. ADLINK?s NEON-2000-JNX series AI camera aims to simplify the deployment of edge machine vision and AIoT use cases.
NEON-2000-JNX series AI camera comes with an inbuilt ADLINK?s new edge vision analytics software known as the EVA SDK. The software reduces the time in designing and creating proofs-of-concept, which leads to quicker deployment of applications. Users get a wide range of options for selecting field-ready ?application plug-ins and ADLINK-optimized AI models?. This ensures the quality of vision AI and eases the building of use cases with lesser software code and programs. Additionally, the preview function allows quicker verification of AI Inference flow.
Adlink’s “NEON-2000-JNX” embedded C-mount camera runs an Ubuntu-based “EVA” stack on a Jetson Xavier NX and provides GbE, USB Type-C with DP, and support for 6x sensors up to an 8MP Sony IMX334.
In July of last year, Adlink unveiled a NEON-2000-JT2 Series embedded machine vision camera that came with a choice of a Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 or Xavier NX modules. The company has now announced a minor update called the NEON-2000-JNX Series equipped with the faster Xavier NX and offering a choice of two more sensors, including the first 8-megapixel model.
I recently wrote about a Linux microwave oven with a built-in voice assistant, and somebody mentioned a quad-core SoC was overkill, and instead US516P6 microcontroller designed for offline voice commands would be a better fit.
The camera comes with six sensor modes for producing raw data and image details for machine vision in the form of frames and pixel numeric data. The two new MIPI image sensors provide high-resolution imaging with less load on the CPU. The sensors also allow a higher operating temperature range. “An embedded Image Signal Processor (ISP) provides enhanced and environment-adaptive imaging to improve AI accuracy”
Tor is the actual network software for the Tor network. It is not the same as the Tor Browser bundle end-users use to access the Tor network, Tor is just a daemon you run to create a small part of the Tor network. The Tor Browser bundle is a bundle with web browser based on Mozilla Firefox and the Tor daemon configured to run in client mode.
The latest Tor release is a bit of a yawn. It has a tweak in Tor's support for the Linux kernels seccomp sandbox that lets Tor use seccomp correctly with Glibc 2.33 (bug 40382) and a tweak that makes GNU Authconf 2.70+ create the build script correctly (bug 40335)
In my introduction to Autotools, I demonstrated how to manage building and packaging code with GNU Autotools. It's a robust and common platform that integrates easily into many packaging systems, including RPM, APT, pkgsrc, and more. Its syntax and structure can be confusing, but luckily there are alternatives, including the open source CMake framework.
CMake is a cross-platform suite for building, testing, and packaging software. It uses simple and clearly documented syntax, so it's easy to start using even if you've never used a build system before.
We are happy to announce the new version 1.2 of the Qt Safe Renderer is now available.
Finally Erlang/OTP 24 is here! A release that for me has been about 10 years in the making. As is tradition by now, this blog post will go through the additions to Erlang/OTP that I am most excited about!
This post is a spiritual successor to my "Building LLVM on OpenBSD/loongson" article, in which I retraced my attempts to build LLVM 3.7.1 on MIPS64 in a RAM constrained environment.
After reading the excellent "Make LLVM fast again", I wanted to revisit the topic, and see how fast I could build a recent version of LLVM and Clang on modern x86 server hardware.
The system I'm using for this experiment is a CCX62 instance from Hetzner, which has 48 dedicated vCPUs and 192 GB of RAM. This is the fastest machine available in their cloud offering at the moment.
The system is running Fedora 34 with up-to-date packages and kernel.
I do not, generally speaking, enjoy reading novels whose protagonists both live and think like I do. I’m already doomed to a lifetime in my own head. When I read fiction, I want to visit minds that operate differently from my own. As a result, I was initially put off by how swiftly I saw myself in the unnamed protagonist of the Australian writer Kavita Bedford’s debut novel, Friends and Dark Shapes, and yet I kept reading. Not until several chapters into the novel did I realize that I was reacting to a very specific point of connection between her fictional life and my real one—she’s a freelance writer.
At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith were told before their 200-meter race that any protest would be met with severe consequences. If they made it to the winner’s podium, they were to stand in silence and do nothing else. The messenger of this ominous warning was none other than 1936 Olympic legend Jesse Owens, bringing the word directly from imperious International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage. Carlos and Smith were fed up with both the racism in what Brundage termed “the Olympic Movement” and oppression in the broader society. So they dared to raise their fists after coming in first and third, creating a moment that has stood the test of time.
Comcast-owned European pay TV giant Sky has named Cécile Frot-Coutaz, former CEO of Fremantle and currently head of YouTube in Europe, the CEO of its production arm Sky Studios, starting in September.
Current Sky Studios CEO Gary Davey, who launched the business in 2019, remains with the company to ensure a smooth transition before retiring later this year.
This is very difficult for me to do, as I am perhaps guilty of too much pride.
"We need urgent public manufacturing and technology sharing to meet global need and end the pandemic."
The United States won't achieve herd immunity because a significant portion of the herd is suffering from mad cow disease.
The media needs to stop misreporting Covid-19 numbers now, and desist from minimizing the hardships in the parts of the world that are facing the worst—economically, socially, and health wise—aspects of this pandemic.
As an Indian American, my family has experienced the worst of this pandemic in two countries. For any of us to be safe, we all need vaccine equity.
"Moms work hard to protect their babies, but big corporations are putting these, and other toxic chemicals that can contaminate breast milk, in products when safer options are available."
In one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi, Mumbai, putting food on the table is proving to be a pressing challenge for the population of about 1,000,000 living in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. “Hunger is a major problem,” says Nawneet Ranjan, founder of the nonprofit Dharavi Diary (Gyanodaya Foundation), who has been working in Dharavi for the last several years. “In the last six or seven years that I have worked here, I have never seen anything like this,” he says, referring to the helplessness being felt by the marginalized sections of India’s societies who have been facing increasing food insecurity, especially during the second wave. “Food is a bigger priority than sickness,” he explains. He has recently started a crowdfunding effort to provide the residents of Dharavi with food supplies, especially the most vulnerable sections like single mothers, the elderly and the transgender population.
During the second week of May, India recorded more than 400,000 daily infections and more than 4,000 deaths, surpassing earlier records, and has overtaken Brazil as having the second-largest number of COVID-19 cases in the world (after the United States of America).
Ransomware is a combination word of “ransom”—holding stolen property to extort money for its return or release; and “malware”—malicious software installed on a machine. The principle is simple: the malware encrypts the victim’s files so that they can no longer use them and demands payment from the victim before decrypting them.
Most often, ransomware uses a vulnerability to infect a system or network and encrypt files to deny the owner access to those files. The key to decrypt the files is possessed by a third party—the extortionist—who then (usually through a piece of text left on the desktop or other obvious means) communicates instructions to the victim on how to pay them in exchange for the decryption key or program.
Most modern ransomware uses a combination of public-key encryption and symmetric encryption in order to lock out the victim from their files. Since the decryption and encryption key are separate in public-key encryption, the extortionist can guarantee that the decryption key is never (not even briefly, during the execution of the ransomware code) transmitted to the victim before payment.
Users can connect to their remote Linux machines directly from any web browser via RemotePC Viewer Lite, without the hassle of any additional software installation.
RemotePC offers many features that make it the perfect solution for Linux remote access. It is platform independent, so remote computers and servers can be accessed from any PC, Mac, or Linux machine, as well as iOS and Android devices. The software also allows users to perform remote access functions such as lock screen, blank host screen, adjust the screen of the remote computer, and block remote input during a session.
The weaknesses have been known for years: Eighty-five percent of American critical infrastructure is owned by private companies, and few regulations govern how those companies must protect their computer networks. Criminal [attackers] like the ones the FBI says attacked Colonial Pipeline are given overseas sanctuary by hostile foreign governments, out of reach of American law enforcement. The vast majority of ransomware attacks originate abroad, many of them from Russia, experts say.
The news is also a little worrying because of how a successful ransom might encourage [attackers] in future. Over the years, we’ve heard reports of smaller companies and local government entities paying ransoms to regain access to their computers, but this is perhaps one of the most high-profile examples of ransomware yet, and the news might inspire copycats.
Officials so far have found no significant connection to the Russian government, instead concluding that the pipeline company delivering 45% of the U.S. East Coast's oil was crippled by ransomware attack.
DarkSide lets "affiliates" [crack] into targets elsewhere, then handles the ransom negotiation and data release.
The group, previously identified as DarkSide, demanded nearly $5 million, two other sources familiar with the incident said. The sources CNN spoke to Thursday did not say how much the company paid. Bloomberg first reported the ransom payment.
CNN was previously told by multiple sources that Colonial Pipeline had not yet paid the ransom, but two sources said on Thursday that the company did pay as it sought to retrieve the stolen information. It is not clear when the payment was made.
A recent change to the component responsible for displaying text in Microsoft Outlook is preventing users from creating and viewing emails in the desktop version of the email client.
The bug in Outlook Build 13929.20372 (version 2104) was spotted and reported by several users from all over the world, and has now been confirmed by Microsoft as well.
The issue causes emails inside the affected Outlook version to appear blank. Users have also reported all kinds of graphical anomalies including blank screens shortly after using the client to send and receive emails.
The Windows 10 KB5003173 cumulative update may fail to install with an error 0x800f0922 if Microsoft Edge has been previously uninstalled.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (jetty9, libgetdata, and postgresql-11), openSUSE (java-11-openjdk), SUSE (dtc, ibsim, ibutils, ipvsadm, and kernel), and Ubuntu (awstats and glibc).
A study by a marketing expert found Americans are willing to pay more for full data privacy on social media and their smartphones, which he said could pave the way for a new class of companies that could fulfil those privacy needs.
In an interview with Broadband Breakfast, Ajit Ghuman, who runs marketing at customer engagement platform Narvar, sat down to discuss why Americans are willing to pay extra for privacy when it comes to their smartphone uses, and why men are particularly willing to pay more than double than women for full privacy on social media.
The definition of full privacy in this study means customer data cannot be sold to advertisers and is not kept by the company.
The smartphone is amazing not just for the computing power it packs into its pocketable format. It has become a universal digital tool: a typical model today includes phone, pager, computer, still and video camera, calculator, diary, multimedia player, radio, TV, clock, maps, GPS, voice recorder, e-book reader, translator, weather station, authenticator, gaming device, WiFi hotspot, and flashlight. No wonder, then, that a group of anthropologists at University College, London, found that the smartphone now occupies a special place in many people’s lives:
The NY Times had an incredible story a few days ago about an apparent "cheating scandal" at Dartmouth's medical school. The problem was, it doesn't seem like there was any actual cheating. Instead, it looks like a ton of insane paranoia and an overreliance on surveillance technology by an administration which shouldn't be in the business of educating kindergarteners, let alone med students. We've had a few posts about the rise of surveillance technology in schools, and its many downsides -- and those really ramped up during the pandemic, as students were often taking exams from home.
On April 20, the State Department renewed multimillion-dollar bounties on three senior leaders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK): Cemil Bayñk, Duran Kalkan, and Murat Karayñlan. Bayñk and Karayñlan are founding members of the PKK and Kalkan is a senior commander.
And indeed, as far as, say, infrastructure or pandemic vaccination goals, Biden has delivered in a major way. Blindly funding the Pentagon and its priorities in the stratospheric fashion that’s become the essence of Washington has, however, proven another matter entirely. One-hundred days later and it’s remarkable how little has changed when it comes to pouring money into this country’s vast military infrastructure and the wars, ongoing or imagined, that accompany it.
For the past decade, debate about the Pentagon budget was governed, in part, by the Budget Control Act, which placed at least nominal caps on spending levels for both defense and non-defense agencies. In reality, though, unlike so many other government agencies, the Pentagon was never restrained by such a cap. Congress continued to raise its limits as military budgets only grew and, no less important, defense spending had a release valve that allowed staggering sums of money to flow without serious accounting into an off-budget fund meant especially for its wars and labelled “the overseas contingency operations account.” The Congressional Research Service has estimated that such supplemental spending from September 11, 2001, to fiscal year 2019 totaled an astonishing $2 trillion above and beyond the congressionally agreed upon Pentagon budget.
"It's up to us to keep demonstrating and keep hammering home that people will not sit back and tolerate Israel's system of apartheid."
The New York Democrat criticized Biden for failing to acknowledge "what precipitated this cycle of violence—namely, the expulsions of Palestinians and attacks on Al-Aqsa."
The obvious story is that of the nightly raids and violence meted out by Israeli police and Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the devastated East Jerusalem neighborhood.
For weeks, thousands of Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinian communities in Jerusalem’s Old City. Their objective is the removal of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. They are not acting alone. Their riots and rampages are directed by a well-coordinated leadership composed of extremist Zionist and Jewish groups, such as the Otzma Yehudit party and the Lehava Movement. Their unfounded claims, violent actions and abhorrent chant “Death to the Arabs” are validated by Israeli politicians, such as Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Arieh King.
I have been trying to think of a moment since 1948 when so broad a range of Palestinians have been exposed to as great a level of Israeli violence as they have been these last few days—and I don’t think I can.
On Monday evening, Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who is the former cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, responded to news reports of surging violence in Israel and Palestine. Referencing the deaths of Palestinians following Israeli air strikes on targets in the Gaza Strip—including those of a number of young children—the representative declared, “We cannot just condemn rockets fired by Hamas and ignore Israel’s state-sanctioned police violence against Palestinians—including unlawful evictions, violent attacks on protestors and the murder of Palestinian children. U.S. aid should not be funding this violence.”
We look at the crisis unfolding in Israel-Palestine with Nathan Thrall, former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group and writer now based in Jerusalem, who says despite a buildup of Israeli troops on the Gaza border, Israel wants to avoid a ground invasion of the besieged territory and return to the status quo that existed before the latest round of violence. “Israel’s preference and its policy is to have Hamas remain in control of its little island of Gaza after this is finished,” Thrall says.
"Palestinians aren't going anywhere," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, "no matter how much money you send to Israel's apartheid government."
Televised images of Israeli mobs attacking Palestinians have been widely denounced by Israeli media and public figures, but Palestinian writer Budour Hassan says the selective outrage ignores decades of occupation that have led to this point. “There is some mention of these lynch mobs that are attacking Palestinians in mixed cities. What is not mentioned is who emboldened these lynch mobs. We’re talking about state-sponsored, decades-long discrimination, isolation and erasure that emboldened these groups,” says Hassan, legal researcher for the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights, who joins us from Nazareth.
Cutting military aid to a state that oppresses its Palestinian population would show that the U.S. is serious about human rights.
Benny Gantz's comments "should be entered directly as evidence of war crimes to the International Criminal Court," said one critic.
On Monday, we spoke to writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family is facing forceful eviction from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. He also spoke on CNN and MSNBC. After these interviews, Israeli forces arrested him and forcibly removed him from Sheikh Jarrah. It was captured in a dramatic video shared widely on social media. “They just threw me in the street and told me that I couldn’t come back into the neighborhood,” El-Kurd says. “They’ve done this many times to us, many of my family members, many of my neighbors. They do this routinely.” El-Kurd has been one of the most prominent Palestinian voices in recent weeks describing what is happening in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where Israeli authorities’ planned evictions of several Palestinian families to give their homes to Jewish settlers has been widely described as “ethnic cleansing.”
The death toll in Gaza has reached at least 83, including 17 children, and hundreds of people have been injured, as Israel’s aerial bombardment of the besieged territory continues. Israel is now sending troops to the Gaza border for a possible ground invasion as many Palestinians are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The Biden administration on Wednesday gave Israel a green light to continue its assault, and Israel has reportedly rejected calls for an immediate ceasefire, despite growing international condemnation. Issam Adwan, Gaza project manager for We Are Not Numbers, a youth-led initiative to share Palestinian stories with the wider world, says many international observers make the mistake of viewing the latest violence in isolation. “They think this war is the only violation of human rights Israel is doing to the people of Gaza. Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed three brutal wars, and this is a fourth one,” says Adwan.
"We will continue to do what we're doing with great intensity," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Defense Minister Benny Gantz vowed that "Gaza will burn."€
Two lawmakers who are veterans of the war in Afghanistan warned a Pentagon official on Wednesday that Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government would be hunted down by the Taliban unless the Biden administration organized an emergency evacuation before American troops withdraw in four months.
She tells me she paid smugglers 8,000 Libyan dinars (€£1,300; $1,800) for the three-day boat crossing to Lampedusa. Italian intelligence reportedly estimate that 50-70,000 people may be on Libya's shores waiting to take a similar journey.
The recently passed restrictive voting law in Georgia reduces time to request absentee ballots, reduces voting hours, limits the number of ballot dropboxes and bans giving water to voters waiting in line at a polling place. According to Anderson, that bill contained “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.” She also bragged about meeting with Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, just days ahead of him signing the bill. Another bill, similar to Georgia’s, is making its way through the Texas legislature and has “19 provisions” from Heritage, Anderson said.
Anderson went on to say that sometimes Heritage actually “draft[s] the bill” for the legislators, or if there is a lawmaker who may not be open to hearing from groups like Heritage, they simply have someone else deliver their message. “We have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” she said.
Last year, 65% of waste facilities fires in California began with lithium-ion batteries. And when one goes, others can, too.
“If there are multiple batteries there, you will have not just a fire, you will have explosions,” said Carl Smith, CEO and president of Call2Recycle, a national recycling program funded by battery manufacturers.
Last week, two new papers were published simultaneously in the science journal Nature that offer radically different visions of the Doomsday glacier, as well as radically different visions of how climate models work and what they can tell us about the future. But they agree on one thing: “Both papers make it very clear that human decisions are important, and that limiting warming can limit sea level rise,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State and one of the most respected ice scientists in the world. But beyond that, the two papers may as well be describing life on different planets.
"If the Fed did not begin moving aggressively on Day One of the Biden administration (if not long before that), then the Fed is contributing to the climate crisis."
"Combating climate change—it's not optional. It's essential," said EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
Despite all that, I am not a doomist, and believe we still have possibilities to leave our children and their generations with a world with which they can cope.€ € After many years working on climate, that is how I express my climate mission.€ € There is no doubt that humanity will be adapting to the consequences of our fossil-fueled bacchanal for generations, if not millennia. We will learning to live with far less water in certain regions, and too much in others.€ € We will be dealing with dustbowls where there were breadbaskets, and retreating from coastal cities. Storms will be ravaging, and wildfires widespread. But we will be coping, and will have eliminated the root causes of climate chaos, fossil fuel pollution and deforestation.
We will do it because we have to.€ € Because the story will changed, we will realize what we face, and as humans can do in the face of disasters, pull together in a common response. Facing the most challenging crises in human history, we will rise to the better angels of our nature, and leave the children of the future with a world in which they have possibilities other than coping with collapse.
Many scientists and conservationists argue that we should do our utmost to prevent artificially-caused extinctions, which collectively are causing a Sixth Mass Extinction far more rapid than previous ones from the fossil record, with human failures as the cause. Other researchers contend that we can do more good by protecting healthy ecosystems, rather than focusing on individual species. The reality is that individual species protection, and broader habitat protection, are two equally necessary sides of the same conservation coin. Doing one in no way precludes pursuing the other; in fact, if you’re doing it intelligently, there is synergy in pursuing both at the same time. That’s what E.O. Wilson was driving at when he advocated for saving half the Earth in a natural state, to solve (or at least slow) the Biodiversity Crisis. Saving ecosystems is absolutely necessary to provide habitats required by individual species, and saving species is essential for maintaining healthy and functioning ecosystems, which fall apart in unpredictable ways when their component parts are removed. Single-species and ecosystem-based conservation methods aren’t contradictory; they’re two essential sides of the same coin.
The more fundamental schism lies between those who see value in conserving and restoring wild, self-willed nature, and those who are bent on human domination and control. Only the former can legitimately call themselves conservationists, but the latter don’t even deserve to be called pseudo-conservationists. They are dominionists, and their guiding principle is that humanity ought to control everything, including natural processes.
It’s a very potent greenhouse gas, and very short-lived. So drastic methane cuts should be a priority for rapid action.
One nuclear scientist said the situation is "like the embers in a barbecue pit."€
"Standing in the way of progress on climate, clean energy, and environmental justice is simply not an option for any elected official who cares what their constituents think."
Grazing on public lands is a privilege, not a right. Nevertheless, the political power of the livestock industry makes it nearly impossible to remove domestic animals even where there is apparent damage to public values like water quality, wildlife habitat, and wildlife.
A potential solution has been the Voluntary Grazing Allotment Permit Buyout. The way it works is an agreement is reached between a rancher and some funding source, typically a private foundation or conservation organization, to close the allotment in exchange for a mutually agreeable fee. Usually, the managing agency, whether the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, or National Park Service, often agrees to close the allotment to future livestock use.
A recent study analyses data collected at 44 of the darkest places in the world, including the Canary Island Observatories, to develop the first complete reference method to measure the natural brightness of the night sky using low-cost photometers.
Of the 44 photometers in the survey, the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands) stands out at the darkest of all the skies analyzed.
"Wage suppression was an actively sought outcome engineered by policymakers," concludes the Economic Policy Institute.
The pay hike only applies to company-owned restaurants, leaving out employees at 95% of all U.S. locations.
Vladimir Putin is a patriot and don’t you forget it. Throughout his presidency, Putin has repeated often and resolutely that Russia’s business elites should be allowed to enjoy wealth only insofar as it enriches Russia as a country. Since the annexation of Crimea and successive waves of Western economic sanctions, the president has only further stressed the need for Russian wealth to reside in Russia. The Kremlin’s actual commitment to repatriating capital from abroad begs a few questions, however. That’s the essence of a new investigative report by Dmitry Velikovsky at iStories, which describes how the brother and sister-in-law of presidential adviser Igor Levitin built a vast business empire worth at least $300 million, relying on offshore companies. Meduza summarizes Velikovsky’s report.
For most of the rest, any ascent into the money elite is excluded with a handful of exceptions such as, for example, the Bush clan valuing at $400 million. As an exception to the rule, the Bushs confirm the rule of strict exclusivity. Nonetheless, clans like the Bushs are part of the global money-making apparatus’ inner ring that surrounds and protects the monetary elite of the global money-making apparatus. At the outer ring, we find technocrats, managers and experts in all kinds of fields. Some of them have been indispensable for the emergence and expansion of the money-making apparatus. This is the managerial and economic elite that has much needed pro-business knowledge and expertise.
Yet, the people of the inner and outer rings are ranked according to their usefulness for the money-making apparatus’s economic, managerial and cultural interests. Corporate media make sure, for example, that we accept that an MBA ranks higher than someone with a PhD in art history. They, too, can move up the ranks of being close to the HNWIs but almost never higher than that. Access to the UHNWIs – which make up 0.003% of the world’s population or less than 1 in 33,000 – remains closed. Again, exceptions such as the dot.com billionaires confirm the rule. Depending on the counting perspective:
Guardians submitted these petitions to list the Joshua tree on an emergency basis under the ESA, while simultaneously€ challenging€ the Service’s 2019 decision under the Trump administration to deny Joshua trees protected status as a “threatened” species in federal court—a listing decision that was prompted by a previous petition submitted by Guardians€ in 2015.
Guardians’ emergency petitions were submitted in advance of what is expected to be yet another severe fire season in Southern California. Last summer, the Mojave Desert reached a record-breaking 130 degrees while enormous wildfires like the Dome Fire also decimated thousands of acres of Joshua tree habitat, destroying an estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees.
Compounding the election shuffle, the City is introducing what is known as “ranked-choice voting” by which voters can vote for multiple candidates in order of preference.€ A voter indicates their first to fifth pick in order of preference and the one that receives a majority (50% plus 1) is the winner.
While the mayoral race has drawn eight very different Democrats into the primary, the most controversy has erupted over an alleged incident of sexual misconduct by Scott Stringer, the City Controller.€ His accuser, Jean Kim, a 41-year-old lobbyist, declared in a statement released by her attorney on April 28th: “One evening, shortly before the [2001] primary, I was talking to Stringer about the primary when without warning, and without my consent, he kissed me using his tongue, put his hand down my pants and groped me inside my underpants.” She added,€ “I pulled away and tried to avoid him.” The Gothamist, a city website owned by WNYC, a local public radio station, reported that she said he asked her on more than one occasion, “Why won’t you fuck me?”
The Vermont senator warned that many workers "will be forced into poverty" if Republican leaders are permitted to end emergency unemployment benefits.
Destroying houses appears to be a cop hobby. Somehow searching for suspects involves punching larger-than-man-size holes in walls, shattering every pane of glass that separates cops from perps, and forcibly removing every door that would otherwise open as designed if officers attempted to use the handles.
They may be following him over a cliff, hopefully.
House Republicans led by their leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, followed through on their threats and ousted three-term Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from the party’s No. 3 position as conference chair for repeatedly condemning Trump for his Big Lie about a “rigged” election that was “stolen” from him.
However, Mill’s vision was deeply contradictory. Mill was an integral member of the Radical Liberals, who lamented the miserly electoral gains from the 1832 Reform Act. Yet he remained committed to Classical Liberalism (in spite of his musings on socialism) to the end. Undoubtedly his self-submersion and attachment to the rigors of Classical Political Economy contributed mightily to his faith. He retained a purist commitment to ‘free trade’ and ‘competition’ in the abstract. For example, competition was even an undiluted vehicle for good for wage labour, a ‘source not of low but of high wages’.
In some of Mill’s most quoted works there is minimal acknowledgement and account of the convulsions of his time. Those mentioned in his Autobiography are mostly external to Britain, as in 1830 and 1848 France, Ireland (with English culpability ignored) and the 1865 Jamaican Morant Bay massacre.
At some point, the GOP will use bullets rather than ballots.
Since the start of the year, conservative lawmakers have promoted and enacted legislation in state capitols that seek to make it harder to vote. At the same time, state legislatures are passing laws to impose harsh punishments on public protests.
The dual efforts, aimed at subverting democracy, are also targeted to constrain the growing campaigns for racial and climate justice, and they have been aided by prominent corporations, according to a new report from Greenpeace.
Foreign technology companies will be forced to open offices in Russia or face penalties such as advertising bans under draft legislation, a senior lawmaker said on Thursday, in a fresh move by Moscow to exert greater control over Big Tech.
Russia is keen to strengthen control of the internet and reduce its dependence on foreign companies and countries. It has imposed a punitive slowdown on social network Twitter over its failure to delete content Moscow says is illegal.
Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court has overturned a decision from a magistrate’s court to impose 140 fines on RFE/RL’s Russian Service and its director Andrey Shary. The Tverskoy Court sent the proceedings for re-examination.
In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, China sought to block news of the rapidly spreading virus, detaining those who tried to speak out. But in the months that followed, as the pandemic ravaged families and economies worldwide, Beijing sought to reset its public image through foreign media, research published Wednesday by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) shows.
A survey of 54 journalist unions in 50 countries found a rise in the number of countries reporting a visible Chinese presence in their media, from 64% to 76% in a year. In countries where China has offered support and training to local media, a higher percentage said coverage of Beijing was more favorable, the IFJ report found.
He and dozens of bloggers and media watched on May 10 as a judge in the Surkhandarya region convicted their colleague, Otabek Sattoriy, of extortion and slander.
The prosecutor asked for 11 years, accusing Sattoriy of blackmailing and defaming local officials for personal benefit. The judge threw out some accusations but sentenced Sattoriy to 6€½ years in prison.
On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden vowed to end the federal government’s use of private prisons for any detention, including the detention of undocumented immigrants. Shortly after entering office, Biden delivered on one aspect of his promise, issuing an executive order to end the use of private facilities by the Department of Justice. But he still hasn’t issued a corresponding order addressing for-profit detention centers operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On a cold, rainy night last November, Bastian Rodriguez spent the first hours of his 18th birthday inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement van. Rodriguez was aging out of the Cowlitz County Youth Services Center, a juvenile jail in Longview, Wash., and was on his way to the Northwest ICE Processing Center, a privately run immigration detention facility for adults in Tacoma. He had already spent more than two years in ICE custody. This piece was published in partnership with the ACLU.
A federal judge denounced an investigation into two Indigenous leaders as "an illegal embarrassment."
No matter how hard he tried, Jonatan Garcia said, he couldn’t find steady work in Guatemala. He dabbled in construction, and on some days picked beans, after losing his sales job at a TV station a few weeks after the pandemic shuttered businesses and further stifled employment in his country.
Desperation quickly mounted for Garcia. He struggled to make enough money to provide food for his wife and two small children, and they faced eviction from the three-room house they rented in the mostly indigenous and impoverished rural state of Baja Verapaz.
This commitment to freedom emerged from bitter experience with tyranny and the invention of democracy.
Democracy and freedom
This past year-plus has laid bare the pressures, burdens, and violence that women, especially poor women and women of color, face every day.
Although the movement against the US war on the Vietnamese was not in the newspapers as much as it had been up to a year earlier when weeks of antiwar protests culminated in an attempted shutdown of Washington, DC, it regathered its forces. Protests may have been smaller in numbers in some cities and campuses, but on others they were better attended than at any time since the student strike in May 1970 after the invasion of Cambodia. The politics were certainly more clearly anti-imperialist in nature and the protesters seemed to be more militant overall. People were tired of the war and the system it maintained. The death of the hated FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the beginning of the month was already forgotten as police and protesters battled across the nation. Highways were taken over in several cities, riots took place in several campus towns, including Rochester, NY., Davis, CA., Berkeley, College Park, MD., and near the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Police fired into crowds near the Albuquerque campus of the University of New Mexico, wounding at least two people. Protesters in other cities reported the use of live ammo by police, as well.
I vividly recall attending at least two protests that May. One was a rally at the Opernplatz in Frankfurt am Main in what was then called West Germany. There were several thousand in attendance. The speakers were from different antiwar student groups, the German communist party, and a member of the international wing of the Black Panthers. The latter two organizations had previously sponsored a very successful fundraising rally with Fania Davis as part of the international campaign to free her sister Angela. After the rally we marched towards the headquarters of the US Army’s V Corps, located in the IG Farben building which Eisenhower had appropriated from the Nazis after their defeat in World War Two. The police, who were set up at different intersections along the route and carrying automatic weapons, prevented the march from getting too close to the building. A big reason for the show of force was the bombing of the US Officer’s Club by the Rote Armee Fraktion on May 11, 1972. The bombing was but one of several that month aimed at the US military presence in Germany and the complicity of the West German government in the US Empire.
Opposition politician Alexey Navalny has filed a lawsuit against the staff of the prison where he is being held for allegedly preventing his lawyers from bringing cell phones and laptop computers to their meetings. Navalny has been in custody in Correctional Facility No. 3 (IK-3) in Vladimir since his transfer to a prisoners’ hospital there in mid-April.
Alexey Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, has announced that his team plans to abandon its tactic of organizing street protests and notifying their supporters about new rallies in advance, reports Voice of America.
The BBC Russian Service obtained a new trove of documents corroborating much of what Alexey Navalny reported earlier this year about the schemes used to obfuscate who really owns a massive residence and network of vineyards near Gelendzhik, known colloquially as “Putin’s Palace.” The records leaked to the BBC go up until the early 2010s, focusing mostly on early 2011, when longtime Putin ally Nikolai Shamalov sold away the rights to the properties for a pittance to the billionaire€ Alexander Ponomarenko.€ Meduza summarizes Andrey Zakharov’s report for the BBC (available in both text and video formats).
The U.S. Supreme Court "has held that a particular sentence is unconstitutional in a case that is not materially distinguishable from the case in front of us," the dissenting judges noted, meaning the Mississippi Appeals Court is "obliged to apply the Supreme Court's decision and vacate the sentence."
A recent case handled by an Illinois Appeals Court has some interesting things to say about cellphones and searches. It also contains some rather interesting assertions by law enforcement, which apparently didn't feel all that compelled to search a seized phone for more than a year after it was seized. (via FourthAmendment.com)
Altering the presentation content to support Canadian content is precisely what Guilbeault and the government have in mind in Bill C-10. As he signals in his comments to the Toronto Star, the government is abandoning its longstanding commitment to net neutrality. In fact, with plans to introduce website blocking, mandated content takedowns, and the creation of a new social media regulator, the future of net neutrality in Canada is very much in doubt.
We've already highlighted our concerns with Wired's big cover story on Section 230 (twice!). The very same day that came out, Wired UK published a piece by Prof. Danielle Citron entitled Fix Section 230 and hold tech companies to account. Citron's proposal was already highlighted in the cover story and now gets this separate venue. For what it's worth, Citron also spent a lot of energy insisting that the Wired cover story was the "definitive" article on 230 despite all of its flaws, and cheered on and liked tweets by people who mocked my arguments for why the article is just not very accurate.
While the Biden administration's $2 trillion American Jobs Plan set aside $100 billion for broadband infrastructure, the details of how that money is to actually be spent remains murky. Enter cable industry lobbyists, who are hard at work attempting to dictate who gets access to those funds, while also trying to make sure the funds aren't used for anything that could threaten their regional monopolies. They're particularly worried about the Biden administration's promise that a big focus of the effort will be on giving aid to locally owned and operated broadband networks, as detailed in this good piece by Issie Lapowsky at Protocol:
For those who haven’t been following this issue: after the Federal Communications Commission rolled back net neutrality protections in 2017, California stepped up and passed a bill that does what the FCC wouldn’t: bar ISPs from blocking and throttling internet content and imposing paid prioritization schemes. The major ISPs promptly ran to court, claiming that California’s law is preempted– meaning, the FCC’s choice to abdicate binds everyone else – and asking the court to halt enforcement until the question was resolved. On February 23, 2021, Judge John Mendez said no, making it pretty clear that he did not think the ISP's challenge would succeed on the merits.€ As expected, the parties then headed to the Ninth Circuit.
Our brief supporting the district court’s decision explains some of the stakes of SB 822, particularly for communities that are already as a disadvantage. Without legal protections, low-income Californians who rely on mobile devices for internet access and can’t pay for more expensive content may face limits on that access which is critical for distance learning, maintaining small businesses, and staying connected. Schools and libraries are also justifiably concerned that without net neutrality protections, paid prioritization schemes will degrade access to material that students and public need in order to learn. SB 822 addresses that by ensuring that large ISPs do not take advantage of their stranglehold on Californians’ internet access to slow or otherwise manipulate internet traffic. The large ISPs also have a vested interest in shaping internet use to favor their own subsidiaries and business partners, at the expense of diverse voices and innovation. Absent meaningful competition, ISPs can leverage their last-mile monopolies to customers’ homes and bypass competition for a range of online services. That would mean less choice, lower quality, and higher prices for users—and new barriers to entry for innovators.
We hope the court recognizes how important SB 822 is, and upholds Judge Mendez’s ruling.
For years, "right to repair" advocates have been warning about the problems with efforts to monopolize repair. Whether it's Apple's efforts to bully small repair shops, Sony and Microsoft's efforts to monopolize repair of game consoles, or John Deere's implementation of DRM and repair restrictions so onerous customers have to drive a thousand miles and pay a small fortune to repair their own tractors, the impact is rather obvious. And the impact has only been more pronounced during Covid, as hospitals complain about the difficulty in obtaining the documentation and parts necessary to repair ventilators in a timely fashion.
A TRIPS suspension may only be a first step, but it is an important one. It puts in play questions of who really makes and who profits from these miraculous vaccines.
Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan reports that she has received a worrying email, ostensibly from Apple, revealing that law enforcement has demanded and gained access to her account data. The email indicates an FBI investigation although the precise nature of any inquiry remains unclear.
After two days of downtime, The Pirate Bay returned with a surprising promotion this week. The logo on the homepage links to PancakeSwap where people can trade other cryptocurrencies for PirateTokens (TPB). It's wise to proceed with caution, as it's not clear whether this is just an ad for a suspicious coin, or if there's more to it.
