Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google’s parent), Amazon and Facebook dominate the tech landscape. Their dominance is so broad they account for more than 20% of the S&P 500.
There are many things to admire about Apple’s hardware and software. Apple make great looking (albeit expensive) hardware. Over the years key successes include the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and the MacBook Air. The company designs its own hardware and software. This gives them the power to make an operating system and suite of apps that are tailor-made and optimized for their hardware. Apple also operates the Apple Music and Apple TV media distribution platforms.
Mac OS X is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ristretto on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by Ristretto
MySQL is the most popular Open Source SQL database management system. It is developed and supported by Oracle Corporation. MySQL is widely used on Linux systems. Now MySQL providers also provide their own apt repository for installing MySQL on Ubuntu systems.
This tutorial will help you to install the MySQL server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux systems.
In Arch, a recap I elaborated a bit on my reasons for getting involved with Arch Linux. In this post I would like to highlight a few technical details and give a "behind the scenes" when it comes to packaging on and for Arch Linux. This post is written from the viewpoint of a distribution packager, but it is likely to contain information also useful to people packaging on different distributions or for private purposes.
Arch Linux is a Linux distribution, that offers binary packages in software repositories (aka. repos). To achieve this, packages are built from source files using tooling that is developed by the distribution and various volunteers. The resulting binary packages are then provided to users on mirrors of the distribution (i.e. package files and their cryptographic signatures are provided by web servers) and are downloaded, verified, validated and installed using a package manager.
I use a very custom desktop which requires me to do a lot of stuff by hand that's probably covered automatically (or with a general setting) by more standard desktops. With that said, the three big areas that I had to change were font selections, window sizes, and window positions. A subsidiary area has been tweaking the size of interface elements that are sized in pixels, like the width of xterm scroll bars.
The first step is to see if you’re already technically buzzword compliant. Do you have an existing system or product that fits that buzzword?
My answer was easy: HTML. And I wasn’t being sarcastic or mocking in the least. Sure, I pretty much know which tags to use in which instances and how to keep my HTML mostly semantic and accessible.
But there is a whole bunch of lesser-used attributes that I was sure I’d forgotten about, and probably a whole bunch of attributes I didn’t even know existed. This post is the result of my research, and I hope you’ll find some of these useful to you, as you build HTML pages in the coming months.
Git tips are a dime a dozen, and it's a good thing because you can never get enough of them. If you use Git every day, then every tip, trick, and shortcut you can find is potentially time and effort saved. I asked Opensource.com community members for their favorite Git hacks. Here they are!
Git is pretty famous for having lots of subcommands, like clone, init, add, mv, restore, bisect, blame, show, rebase, and many more. In a previous article, I wrote about the very useful rev-parse subcommand for Git. Even with all of these subcommands available, users still come up with functions to improve their Git experience. While you're free to create Git-related commands and run them as scripts, it's easy to make your own custom Git subcommands. You can even integrate them with Git through rev-parse.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeamSpeak on Debian 11 (Bullseye), as well as some extra requirements for TeamSpeak
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Shotwell on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by Shotwell
nopCommerce is a free open-source e-commerce web application built with ASP.NET. It is a high performance application with multi-store, multi-vendor and a user-friendly web interface.
In this guide you are going to learn how to install nopCommerce in Ubuntu 20.04 with MySQL, Nginx and secure the setup with Let’sEncrypt SSL.
AnyDesk meets the qualifications of reputable remote desktop software for your Ubuntu Linux distribution. AnyDesk attributes to easy and stable operation, simple administrative tools, user-friendly setup, seamless & smooth remote access from other Linux-powered machines, stable and powerful remote connectivity (Linux-based), and continuous connection (uninterrupted).
It uses encryption mechanisms like RSA 2048 asymmetric key exchange and military-grade TLS 1.2 to guarantee user safety while making remote desktop connections.
The DNS or the Domain Name Server can be characterized as the most essential part of your link to the internet. The DNS translates the domain names to and from the IP addresses so that we don’t need to remember or keep a list of all the IP addresses of the websites we ever want to access. Our systems also maintain a list of DNS records so that we can access our frequently visited websites faster through a quick resolution of IP addresses. This cache on our system needs to be flushed from time to time. This flushing is required because websites may change their addresses time and again, so it is a good idea to avoid IP conflict by clearing the cache. Flushing the cache is also a good way to clear unnecessary data residing on our systems.
When the physical memory or RAM on our system is full, we end to make use of the swap space on our systems. In this process, the inactive pages of our memory are moved to the swap space, creating more memory resources. This space is especially useful when a system is down on RAM; however, swap space is located on the hard drive and hence slower to access. Therefore, it should not be considered an appropriate alternative to RAM.
In this article, we will describe a few ways to check for available swap space on your Ubuntu system. The commands and procedures described in this article have been run on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
When we delete a file or folder from our system, it moves to the Trash folder(Linux) or the Recycle Bin(Windows). Time and again, we need to get rid of these mostly useless files and folders residing in our system trash in order to vacate space for other important data.
In this article, we will describe several ways to empty your system trash, both through the UI and the command line.
If you are a Linux user, you might be well aware of the apt and apt-get commands with the most common option apt install. Apt is a powerful package management tool that can be used to search, install, update, upgrade, and manage the packages in a Linux operating system. It is a command-line-based tool that is preferred by most system administrators and users.
This article shows how to use the apt-get command for installing programs from the command line in Debian OS. We have used Debian 11 OS for running the commands and procedure mentioned in this article. The same commands will work on Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu and its derivates as Kubuntu and Linux Mint too.
As an Ubuntu system administrator, you can create and manage groups for the user accounts on your system. This way you can assign administrative & configurations rights, files & folder access permissions to an entire group rather than a single user at a time. Sometimes we need to know which user group a user belongs to in order to verify or perform group management operations or for assigning/de-assigning user rights. This Group Management on Ubuntu 20.04 only through the command line. In this article, we will describe the simple commands used to perform this effortless check.
Open the Ubuntu Terminal through Ctrl+Alt+T or through the Dash.
WordPress is a well-known content management system (CMS) on the Internet. Almost all large and small hosting providers offer several solutions for easily hosting WordPress, and OpenLiteSpeed is one of those solutions. OpenLiteSpeed is a popular open-source free web server that is renowned for responding to user requests faster than Apache, Nginx, and other web servers.
OpenLiteSpeed is a free and open-source web server with a simple user interface. When compared to Apache and Nginx, it enables caching out of the box. The OpenLiteSpeed interface allows for the easy creation of virtual hosts for hosting multiple sites on the same server, the installation of SSL certificates, and it supports latest PHP versions.
In this tutorial, I will walk you through the entire process of installing WordPress on OpenLiteSpeed. This tutorial will teach you how to configure OpenLiteSpeed to function with the most recent PHP version, how to create virtual hosts, and how to install SSL certificates for sites.
If you are manually migrating your website or simply need to import certain SQL files into your database, this article will show you how to import multiple SQL files in mySQL. We will use both a graphical interface and MySQL command-line.
To begin with, it is strongly advised not to import a database onto a live website. Before attempting to import any SQL file, stop the web server and make a backup of your database.
A Linux bridge is a kernel module that behaves like a network switch, forwarding packets between interfaces that are connected to it. It's usually used for forwarding packets on routers, on gateways, or between VMs and network namespaces on a host.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications require substantial resources to run in production scenarios. But you can develop and test these applications on a cluster environment that runs on your laptop. In this article, you'll learn how to properly customize Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat CodeReady Containers so that you can quickly set up a clustering environment where you can run open source machine learning tools from Open Data Hub.
To say the grep command is a useful tool for Linux administrators is still an understatement. The grep command is a must-know command for all backend developers.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has rolled out today, and thankfully for fans of these LEGO games you can get it working on Steam Deck and Linux thanks to Proton.
In this case, specifically you need GE-Proton, the community-built version. Valve have given it an "Unsupported" rating on Steam Deck and it's not surprising for now. With the current Proton 7, even the intro movies are a mess of stuttering and out of sync audio. Proton Experimental is better but performance is still not great. GE-Proton 7.14 seems to work the best for now, although the game (even on Windows) has some performance problems overall it appears.
Valve has updated the Steam Deck software again, this time giving a little improvement to the way they handle Offline Mode, plus a bunch of other improvements.
Before getting into what's available now though, how about something else that's exciting? It seems Valve are preparing to have a lock screen on the Steam Deck. This is something I've seen people mention as an issue on Reddit, as the Deck isn't just like a console, it's also a PC too with a full desktop mode where you can have more sensitive info. So, a little security makes sense.
The ONEXPLAYER Mini is a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch display, built-in game controllers, and a choice of processors – a model with an 11th-gen Intel processor launched in January, and a new model with a 12th-gen Intel chip is coming soon. Last month One Netbook introduced a version with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor, but it was only available in China at launch. This week it goes on sale globally. Pricing hasn’t been revealed yet though.
In other recent tech news from around the web, Valve says it’s ramping up Steam Deck shipments, Google is cracking down on apps that had allowed you to make in-app purchases for things like eBooks without using Google Play billing (so some app makers are dropping in-app purchases altogether), there’s a new model of the Asus Tinker Edge R single-board computer that’s (a little) cheaper, and phone maker Volla has a new model coming soon that will be able to run Android-based Volla OS or the Linux-based Ubuntu Touch software.
I've never personally used one of their devices, and would have happily taken a look at any point with Linux installed onto one. Even some direct Steam Deck comparisons. Now though? This is not painting a good picture of GPD as a company.
Good news space sim colony-building fans, as Space Haven just got a fresh upgrade and now it's Steam Deck Verified.
Previously, it was given a Playable rating and it was tested with Proton. As of today, the developer released a new update adding in Steam Deck and Gamepad support directly. Seems they got a lightning fast turnaround on retesting, as it's now fully Verified with the Native Linux build, it's likely they sent Deck Verified their build before release to test to enable it to be Verified as it's released.
Playing Factorio on Steam Deck and low screen resolutions gets better, with a fresh update out now for all players.
One of the problems a lot of developers face with the Steam Deck, is the screen size and resolution. A lot of games have quite a small interface, and text that cannot scale — an area that will be a constant improvement for games. Factorio being the latest that's tweaked it.
As usual, here's our run over what a new month of Humble Choice brings and the expected compatibility across Linux and Steam Deck for you. This is the bundle where each month Humble give a list of games for subscribers to claim, a good way to build up your collection.
It seems that a business downturn at Elementary, Inc, the company behind the Elementary OS Linux distribution, has led to a partnership breakup. This has left one partner in sole custody of the company, with the other leaving to take a position at a commercial open source company.
Also gone is Elementary Inc’s CFO, which has some questioning whether the project can survive with only one person running a company with ailing financials.
Tachyumâ⢠today announced it has completed validation of its Prodigy Universal Processor and software ecosystem with the operating system FreeBSD, and completed the Prodigy instruction set architecture (ISA) for FreeBSD porting.
FreeBSD powers modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms in environments that value performance, stability, and security. It is the platform of choice for many of the busiest websites and the most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.
Reading the posts, you will get to a fix. Pemasu commented out the "HorizSync 35-81" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and X started OK.
Those horiz and vert limits were put in way back when we had cathode-ray-tube monitors. It constrained Xorg so it didn't try to run the monitor with some insane horiz and vert rates.
It is intended also, that the drives menu will popup automatically, whenever there is some change to the drives, for example, a USB-stick plugged in or removed, or a partition mounted or unmounted. However, that is not happening in Easy 3.4.4.
What is supposed to happen is that the 'xdotool' utility is used to move the mouse pointer over the drives icon in the tray, then a middle-mouse-button click simulated. This was not happening, the mouse pointer was not getting moved correctly.
Forum member 'shinobar' is the author of Grub4dosconfig PET package. It goes way back, and is no longer maintained, as shinobar is now developing Grub2config, that supersedes Grub4dosconfig, and supports both UEFI and traditional BIOS based computers.
I will probably update to Grub2config someday, but for now EasyOS has Grub4dosconfig, with some fixes for EasyOS.
The Fedora CoreOS team released the first Fedora CoreOS next stream release based on Fedora Linux 36. They expect to promote this to the testing stream in two weeks, on the usual schedule. As a result, the Fedora CoreOS and QA teams have organized a test week. It is underway now and runs through the end of the week. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test cases and materials you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Establishing a productive working relationship between yourself as an IT leader and your CEO is foundational to your ability to succeed. No matter what company you’re at, there will inevitably be a dichotomy between the two roles at one point or another, and it’s crucial to establish a good rapport to collaborate effectively.
You open your brand-new laptop, register your new email address, and update your LinkedIn profile. You introduce yourself to coworkers and try to get acquainted with everyone. You’re navigating the maze called “onboarding,” slowly figuring out your place in the new environment. Then anxiety creeps in: “Did I do the right thing in taking this new job? I feel like a fish out of water. What if this wasn’t the right move?”
We are very pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to support DebConf22 as a Platinum sponsor. This is the fourth year in a row that Infomaniak is sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).
Don’t like using Snap?
Well, you can always stick to the traditional binary packages (deb/rpm) or opt for Flatpak.
But, what if you already rely on apps from the Snap store?
It will be time-consuming to manually remove the apps, get rid of Snap, install Flatpak, and install all the Flatpak packages.
That’s where “Unsnap” comes to the rescue.
Unsnap is an open-source utility developed by a former Snap advocate at Canonical, Alan Pope to help you quickly migrate from using snap packages to Flatpaks.
Arducam Pi Hawk-eye is a 64MP “ultra-high resolution” camera for Raspberry Pi 4 or CM4 with built-in autofocus following the company’s 16MP autofocus camera introduced at the end of last year.
The new camera module will allow you to take still images at up to 9152 x 6944 resolution, but videos will still be limited to 1080p30 on the Raspberry Pi 4. The Pi Hawk-eye is also compatible with the official Raspberry Pi v1/v2 cameras, meaning you can reuse your enclosures/mounts, and keep on using the same software, for instance, libcamera.
RoenDi is a rotary encoder with an integrated round color display. Based on an STM32L4 MCU, it can be programmed with the STM32CubeIDE or the Arduino IDE, and be used as an information display, an IoT controller, a locking mechanism, as well as in audio applications.
Software testing is very important in every type of project to ensure the quality reaches the desired level and the product is in a production state. Unlike software testing, firmware testing does not only verify whether the code behaves as it is supposed to, but also covers functional verification if the hardware works as it should. It makes firmware validation much harder than any software application as we may face many unexpected and not always reproducible issues. The firmware industry constantly tries to improve itself in the field of validation and quality assurance, so is Dasharo. This time we made a huge leap in ASUS KGPE-D16 testing.
Mozilla released Firefox 99.0 Stable, Firefox 91.8.0 ESR and Firefox 99.0 for Android on April 5, 2022 to the public. The new release includes security fixes, sandbox strengthening on Linux devices, and support for autofill and capture of credit card data in Germany and France.
PGConf NYC 2022 is a PostgreSQL community conference that will be held on September 22 - 23, 2022 at Convene, 237 Park Avenue, New York City. Come join us for two days packed with talks, demos, and use cases, about PostgreSQL and related technologies. Stay for the fantastic hallway and social track where you can interact with other PostgreSQL users and open source contributors!
The Postgres.ai team is happy to announce the release of version 3.1 of Database Lab Engine (DLE), the most advanced open-source software ever released that empowers development, testing, and troubleshooting environments for fast-growing projects. The use of Database Lab Engine 3.1 provides a competitive advantage to companies via implementing the "Shift-left testing" approach in software development.
Database Lab Engine is an open-source technology that enables thin cloning for PostgreSQL. Thin clones are exceptionally useful when you need to scale the development process. DLE can manage dozens of independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automation process works with their own database provisioned in seconds without extra costs.
We hope that you and your beloved ones are staying safe during these difficult times. If you’re looking for a way to help support the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, a list of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) was shared earlier last month in the 26th episode of WP Briefing, Matt Mullenweg on Ukraine, Community, and WordPress.
In parallel to the work the community is doing in preparation for the next major release, WordPress 6.0, March has seen the launch of some exciting new projects and proposals. Read on to find out more about the latest updates and how to get involved.
Deployd is a free, open-source platform for quickly building a REST-API on top of MongoDB.
It is an easy-to-use system, as the user does not require any boilerplate, and dive directly into a user-friendly dashboard and start creating and testing your DB collections and API.
Deployd comes with dozens of useful features which speeds up the production time. Moreover, it comes with a set of examples, guides, and a developer-friendly rich documentation.
For many years, you could use the match() filter of syslog-ng to parse log messages with regular expressions. However, the primary function of match() is filtering. Recent syslog-ng versions now have a dedicated regular expression parser, the regexp-parser(). So, you should use match() only if your primary use case is filtering. Otherwise, use the regexp-parser for parsing, as it is a lot more flexible.
In my mind there exists this whole universe of scary power tools for large-scale sysadmin work. Of course you would want some automation if you have a server farm to manage. Of course nobody would do this by hand if you had 3000 workstations somewhere. But for my puny home network with one server and two computers? Surely those tools are overkill?
Thankfully that is not so!
My colleague Richard Brown has been talking about the Salt Project for a few years. It is similar to tools for provisioning and configuration management like Ansible or Puppet.
What I have liked about Salt so far is that the documentation is very good, and it has let me translate my little setup into its configuration language while learning some good practices along the way.
I started with the Salt walkthrough, which is pretty nice.
TL;DR: the salt-master is the central box that keeps and distributes configuration to other machines, and those machines are called salt-minions. You write some mostly-declarative YAML in the salt-master, and propagate that configuration to the minions. Salt knows how to "create a user" or "install a package" or "restart a service when a config file changes" without you having to use distro-specific commands.
Monado now has initial support for 6DoF ("inside-out") tracking for devices with cameras and an IMU. Three free and open source SLAM/VIO solutions were integrated and adapted to work on XR: Kimera-VIO, ORB-SLAM3, and Basalt. Thanks to this, the RealSense and WinMR (Linux only) drivers in Monado were extended to support this type of tracking.
During my six-month internship at Collabora, I had the opportunity to gain firsthand experience on this project. Let me walk you through the concepts, the type of work, and exposure I attained while working remotely as an intern in the XR team for Monado. If any of this has piqued your interest, be sure to check out our careers page.
Jenkins is one of the oldest and most popular CI/CD tools. It dominates the market and is a requirement for more than 50% of job positions. However, Jenkins is a complicated solution, installing it requires a lot of heavy lifting and can become a pain. In this article, I will uncover the fastest way to deploy Jenkins using only one command.
In my last article, I used the host_list and Nmap plugins to generate a dynamic inventory to cover that gap. This article covers how to write your own dynamic inventory script using Python while following good practices for packaging tools, using virtual environments, and unit testing your code.
What is far more worrisome is the phenomenon that there are “real facts” that cry out for our attention, that demand urgent action, and that our politicians and media treat as non-existent or marginal, e.g. exorbitant military expenses, skewed national budgets, xenophobic war-mongering, structural violence, military aggression, unilateral coercive measures, financial blockades, the homologation of the media, manifestly unjust laws, the corruption of the “rule of law” through legal scams and “lawfare”, the penetration of public institutions by intelligence services, the “weaponization” of human rights, the imprisonment of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, unjust taxation, tax havens, tax evasion, corporate bribery, economic exploitation, ecocide, extreme poverty, man-made famine, social exclusion, etc.
Now pause, take a breath and ask yourself why these facts are largely ignored or trivialized by politicians and media alike.€ Why are these “inconvenient” facts shoved aside, as if they were only of marginal importance or as if they did not exist?€ Without a doubt these facts engender short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences, create or perpetuate imbalances and spread a vague, destabilizing sense of incoherence and cognitive dissonance.
In the early 1990s, one figure broke through the stuffiness of willow bats, pads, leather balls and white flannel.€ When life left the overly worked body of Australia’s Shane Warne, who expired in Thailand at 52, the reaction was global.€ In India and Pakistan, hundreds of millions mourned.€ This most celebrated of error-prone buffoons was, as the emperor Vespasian might have said, becoming a god.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground, on March 30, became the venue for one such occasion: a state memorial service held in honour of the cricketer.€ For a brief spell, a sporting stadium had become a cathedral, the occasion heavy with solemnity.€ In it, Warne’s followers and admirers communed.
Niki de Saint Phalle could be iconic even anonymously. In a 2014 interview, Gloria Steinem recalled passing the French American artist on the street in New York City “a long time ago” without knowing who she was. “She was walking on 57th Street and she had on one of those Australian raincoats…it was flowing out behind her,” Steinem said. “She had a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and no purse…. And I thought, ‘That is the first free woman I have ever seen in real life. I want to be just like her.’”
There is smoke in the air when I go pick them.
I go despite panic, also because inside I’ll make chutney.
Strewn across the floors their toys and things, a video cassette the dadhad written “We used to have more of these” on, the kitchen in a state of high party, boxed cakes half eaten, cannoli and rows and rows of drinks were pastries brimming with cream along the broken ramparts of the countertops, we noticed blue carpet but hardwood elsewhere, no choice had been right the house abandoned in haste if in triumph or terror, just abandoned, a family photo on the wall when the twins were babies dad diminutive and round, pale as batter, mom had great bones and a vanity he subsidized while the babies grew through that disorder into us and as we toured the house accepting slowly even this we can’t afford I’d love to steal the plants but how to get them home the towering ficus and an actual tree I can’t name and others they lived at least on a larger scale, they reached for things, these half-wits
An international coalition of humanitarian groups warned Tuesday that "more variants will emerge" if Congress fails to approve new money for the global coronavirus response, a message delivered after senators announced a Covid-19 funding package without any money to fight the pandemic beyond the borders of the United States.
"We are deeply disappointed by the Senate's short-sighted decision to cut off all global Covid funds."
More than 160 advocacy groups on Monday sent letters to President Joe Biden and congressional leaders decrying a proposal to slash up to $1.65 billion in U.S. Department of Agriculture funding, a move that comes during a pandemic-driven global hunger crisis.
"Ultimately, the $1.65 billion proposed rescission will impact the most vulnerable among us."
On April 29, 2021, the U.S Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit gave the federal government 60 days to either pull the chemical from all forms of use or prove it was safe for public health.
“He would just completely disengage, lie on the floor, start playing with the toys, literally turn his back to the computer, try to close it,” said mother Julia Toof of her son, who, at the time, was just shy of 3-years-old. “It just didn’t work.”
By that time, tests were in short supply following a rejected proposal to send rapid tests to every American household. As the Omicron variant reached its peak, lack of access to free testing options disproportionately affected communities of color.
When Josh Tate was sentenced in 2017 to 10 years in prison for getting caught with drugs multiple times, his wife, Claire Tate, tried not to dwell on the moments he would miss with their two young kids. She didn’t see the purpose in sending Josh — who had struggled with a meth addiction for years but never been convicted of a violent crime — away for so long.
“You can’t punish a drug addiction out of somebody,” Claire Tate said recently.
In December 2021, the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project (cip-project.org) released the first 5.10-based version of its super-long-term stable (SLTS) kernel. The 5.10-based release made official the third CIP kernel series available after 4.4-cip and 4.19-cip. It demonstrates how CIP remains committed to maintaining all SLTS versions for a minimum of 10 years after the original release.
If only Clearview had managed to remain under the radar. If it had, it could have been the stealth privacy assassin multiple entities (both public and private) desire, but are unwilling to admit to using publicly. Even the rest of the facial recognition tech field wants nothing to do with Clearview and the billions of images/data points it has scraped from the public web. Clearview remains alone in its extreme odiousness — a villain rising head and shoulders above its already questionable competition.
Keyword search warrants like the one in Brazil are far broader than traditional search warrants described in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment requires police to establish probable cause to search a particular place or seize a particular person or thing before the court authorizes the warrant. But keyword search warrants don’t start with a suspect person or device. Instead, they require Google to comb through the search histories of all of its users, including users who are not logged into a Google account when they search.
Keyword warrants allow the police to learn anyone and everyone who may have searched for particular terms on the off-chance one of those people could have been involved with the crime. Like better-known geofence warrants, keyword warrants allow police to conduct a fishing expedition and sweep up data on innocent people, turning them into criminal suspects. Police are using both types of expansive, suspicionless searches with increasing frequency.
The Brazilian case arises out of the assassination of Rio de Janeiro City Councilor Marielle Franco. Franco was murdered, along with her driver, Anderson Gomes, near Rio de Janeiro in 2018. It was a terrible crime that stirred up public outcry.
I have a question for you: What would it take in today's world for America's military spending to go down? Here's one admittedly farfetched scenario: Vladimir Putin loses his grip on power and Russia retrenches militarily while reaching out to normalize relations with the West. At the same time, China prudently decides to spend less on its military, pursuing economic power while abandoning any pretense to a militarized superpower status. Assuming such an unlikely scenario, with a "new cold war" nipped in the bud and the U.S. as the world's unchallenged global hegemon, Pentagon spending would surely shrink, right?
The mass graves of civilians murdered and mutilated in Bucha, Ukraine, are stark evidence of the horrors of war—and of war crimes. Putin's invasion of Ukraine—itself a violation of international law—raises a profound challenge to the world. How can a dictator armed with nuclear weapons be held accountable for the crimes of war?
As Moscow residents went about their morning early this week, they may have come across an artist laying face-down in front of government buildings and landmarks, recreating widely-seen images of the alleged massacre of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine which have sparked international outrage in recent days.
Wearing a brown jacket with their hands tied behind their back with white fabric, the artist appeared on a staircase outside the Kremlin, two streets crowded with pedestrians, and a bridge outside the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, according to images posted Monday by independent Russian media outlet Holod.
Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West's response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West's relationship to war and conflict zones.
When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh.
Seven years have passed since the brutal war against Yemen, a ship-shaped country located on the southern Arabian Peninsula, began in March 2015. The war has been acknowledged as one the bloodiest in modern history and called the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster” by human rights groups. Yet, rather than breaking Yemeni resolve, the Saudi-led war backed by the collective military might of the world’s most powerful nations has only strengthened the poorest country in the Middle East; and Ansar Allah, its underdog combatant, is now stronger and more united than it has ever been.
There are no autocrats he can’t abide, So Carlson seems to be on Putin’s side. Thus, Russian television runs his shows. He’s sort of like a preppie Tokyo Rose.
In early April, the Telegram channel Belaruski Gayun, which has been monitoring military activity in Belarus since February, reported that Russian soldiers were sending large packages to Russia through a courier service. Journalists from the project believe the packages contain items the soldiers stole in Ukraine. In an effort to help hold Russian soldiers “responsible for stealing from and murdering people in Ukraine,” the channel published the names and phone numbers of 16 Russian soldiers.
Nearly six weeks ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From that moment, the history of the Russian state’s past crimes ceased to be history, argues Meduza’s Ideas editor, Maxim Trudolyubov. Russia’s shared present once again includes a fight against the country’s own population, the trials of “enemies of the people,” deportations, occupations of neighboring countries, and “cleansing operations” in countries that were once part of the Soviet bloc. In the war against Ukraine, all of the Russian state’s worst facets in its Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet guises have coalesced. This war is a living indictment that brings together all the things Russian society can no longer ignore.
On Monday, April 4, the Moscow City Court began to review the case of Ivan Safronov on its merits. The former defense reporter and Roscosmos communications advisor stands accused of treason; therefore, his trial is taking place behind closed doors. Meduza has translated the text of the appeal Ivan Safronov made to the court on the first day of the proceedings. Our newsroom received a copy of these remarks from human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov, who was involved in Safronov’s defense.€
Israeli officials recently hosted representatives of Morocco, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. For US media, this meant many things, but one thing that didn’t make the papers was that Israel and Morocco share a common goal: maintaining military occupations that are widely condemned throughout the world.
In addition to civilian women acting in defense, Ukrainian women also make up fifteen percent of the nation’s soldiers, Kaufman reported. They are “frontline warriors,”€ Kaufman wrote, serving as snipers and in other combat roles, not just “logistical support roles or other rear guard jobs.”
By undeveloped we should not understand uninhabited. Sheep, cattle, dogs, and pastoral people have lived on Sinjajevina for centuries, apparently in relative harmony with — indeed, as part of — the ecosystems.
About 2,000 people live on Sinjajevina in some 250 families and eight traditional tribes. They are orthodox Christians and work to maintain their holidays and customs. They are also Europeans, engaged with the world around them, the younger generation tending to speak perfect English.
NATO countries have been taken aback by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s implied threats to use nuclear weapons against “whoever interferes with us” in Ukraine, and his placement of additional nuclear officers on shifts under a “special regime of combat duty.”
Both Russia and the U.S. have thousands of nuclear weapons, most of which are five or more times more powerful than the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These include about 1,600 weapons on standby on each side that are capable of hitting targets across the globe.Those numbers are near the limits permitted under the 2011 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, often called “New START,” which is the only currently active nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the U.S. Their arsenals include intercontinental ballistic missiles, better known as ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, as well as missiles launched from specialized aircraft. Many of those missiles can be equipped with multiple nuclear warheads that can independently hit different locations.
Massacres are the all-important staging posts of history – their influence often greater than that of famous battles – because they send a message to whole communities that their existence is threatened by a common enemy. If the aim of a mass killing is to intimidate a whole population, then experience from Amritsar to My-Lai shows that it usually has precisely the opposite effect. The death of 410 civilians at the hands of the Russian army in the town of Bucha outside Kyiv may well join the grisly list of massacres that permanently shape relations between nations.
Why did the Russian army carry out these crimes? They are much against the interests of the Kremlin, which five weeks ago had persuaded itself that part of the Ukrainian population would welcome Russian intervention with open arms. The atrocities were the more-or-less inevitable outcome of this ill-conceived invasion plan, rooted in wishful thinking and carried out by ill-disciplined and ill-trained troops. Poor-quality soldiers like this facing a hostile population are particularly dangerous in my experience, because they quickly come to believe that they are being spied on, sniped at and generally betrayed by the local population.
Obituaries for Albright in the mainstream media described the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as her “greatest diplomatic achievement.”€ At the ceremony in 1999 for the signing of the expansion of NATO into the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary), she shouted “To quote an old Central European expression: ‘Hallelujah!’”
NATO expansion was the return of the United States to the Cold War policy of containment; it played a major role in destabilizing the balance of power in Europe.€ We will never know the full impact of this expansion as well as the flirtation of membership for Ukraine and Georgia, but there is ample evidence of Russian anxieties over the new balance of power.€ Putin’s wanton destruction of Ukraine suggests that the expansion of NATO does not fully explain the Russia invasion of Ukraine, but the provocations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush must be part of any discussion of today’s war.
That notion differs from the “balance of forces” by placing greater weight on intangible factors. It stipulates that the weaker of two belligerents, measured in conventional terms, can still prevail over the stronger if its military possesses higher morale, stronger support at home, and the backing of important allies. Such a calculation, if conducted in early February, would have concluded that Ukraine’s prospects were nowhere near as bad as either Russian or Western analysts generally assumed, while Russia’s were far worse. And that should remind us of just how crucial an understanding of the correlation of forces is in such situations, if gross miscalculations and tragedies are to be avoided.
The Concept in Practice Before Ukraine
Well, I wouldn’t count on it.€ Based on developments after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago, here’s what I suspect would be far more likely to happen.€ The U.S. military, aided by various strap-hanging think tanks, intelligence agencies, and weapons manufacturers, would simply shift into overdrive. € As its spokespeople would explain to anyone who’d listen (especially in Congress), the disappearance of the Russian and Chinese threats would carry its own awesome dangers, leaving this country prospectively even less safe than before.
You’d hear things like: we’ve suddenly been plunged into a more complex multipolar world, significantly more chaotic now that our “near-peer” rivals are no longer challenging us, with even more asymmetrical threats to U.S. military dominance.€ The key word, of course, would be “more” — linked, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, to omnipresent Pentagon demands for yet more military spending.€ When it comes to weapons, budgets, and war, the military-industrial complex’s philosophy is captured by an arch comment of the legendary actress Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
As an Army veteran who served in Desert Storm and a frontline organizer in the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline, I am certain that a transition to renewable energy is what our world needs right now. We can’t keep watching as fossil fueled wars displace and kill thousands of people around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq. Not only are these wars inhumane; they threaten the possibility of a livable future for everyone on this planet. They underscore the need to stop projects like MVP and transition to renewable energy.
The US House Oversight and Reform Committee kicked off its investigation of the fossil fuel industry's decades-long climate change disinformation campaign last fall by inviting top executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to testify about their role and subpoenaing their companies for internal documents.
More than 120 advocacy groups on Tuesday urged Democratic congressional leaders to support proposed legislation that would levy a new tax on Big Oil "to provide relief to consumers from rising prices and prevent fossil fuel corporations from exploiting the current energy crisis for profit."
"Consumers need relief from price gouging—relief that a windfall profits tax can provide."
An analysis released Tuesday by a trio of groups highlights how Big Oil has cashed in on various crises over the past year—including the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia's war on Ukraine, and the global climate emergency—while enriching wealthy shareholders.
"Big Oil is living the second half of their unspoken mantra 'socialize losses, privatize gains.'"
Environmental defenders on Tuesday urged the Biden administration to take advantage of a federal court ruling which declared that the U.S. Interior Department under former President Donald Trump had wrongly allowed the expansion of a coal mine in Montana—one that would have resulted in the largest coal mine in the U.S. and hundreds of millions of tons of fossil fuel emissions over a decade.
With the question of the expansion of Signal Peak Energy's Bull Mountain Coal Mine now headed back to the Interior Department, said Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, which joined other groups in suing over the expansion, "this is now a huge opportunity for the Biden administration to get it right on coal and climate."
HELENA, MONTANA—A€ Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ panel€ has just ruled€ that€ Trump’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM) wrongly approved an expansion of Signal Peak’s Bull Mountains coal mine located north of Billings, Montana. OSM largely ignored the fact that the proposed 175 million ton expansion would release 240 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution over 11 years. The court ruled OSM “hid the ball” about the climate and environmental impacts of expanding the mine.
The proposed expansion would make this the largest underground coal mine in the U.S. based on annual production. It would also result in more greenhouse gas emissions than any point source in the country.
The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council are extremely pleased the Court halted this clearcutting and road bulldozing project and sent it back to the drawing board to force the Forest Service to follow the law.€ Public lands must be managed for the public and for our€ wildlife, not for the private profit of a few logging companies.€ Legal protections are meaningless if the Forest Service is free to simply ignore them when it plans logging projects on our public lands.
The Castle Mountains get their name from the numerous 50-foot high igneous rock spires on the western slopes that look like castle turrets. The range is located about 65 miles northeast of Bozeman and is characterized by peaks over 8,000 feet with numerous grassy parks surrounded by Douglas fir, lodgepole, and limber pine forests.“
Women had a good pandemic the last time around—something actually came of it!—compared with this one, which is total shit. Just over a century ago, the 1918 flu pandemic may have vanquished a decent chunk of the global population, but after witnessing mass death, plus the loss of their children from other preventable diseases like diphtheria and meningitis, women decided to actually do something about it. When (white) American women got the vote two years later, they used their newfound political power to immediately pressure local and federal governments into action, resulting in the largest expansion of public health spending in US history up until that point. It was wildly successful, fueling later large-scale door-to-door household hygiene campaigns and driving an 18 percent decline in childhood infectious diseases, with 20,000 fewer annual deaths compared with pre-suffrage mortality rates. Then, as now, women were overwhelmingly the early adopters of that revolution—washing their hands, boiling milk to kill bacteria, and refrigerating meat—while men generally resisted even the most basic public health directives, much as they’ve resisted wearing masks today. Quite simply: More children lived because politicians actually responded to the flush of new female voters and their demand for less death.1
Employment Closes in on Pre-Pandemic Levels
The rise in employment in March left total employment at 1.6 million jobs below its pre-pandemic level, less than three months of growth at its recent pace. Private sector employment is down by just 870,000 jobs from its February 2020 level.
In response to Tuesday's publication of€ Forbes' annual compendium of billionaire wealth, critics of skyrocketing inequality denounced the list as "a slap in the face of society" and called for hiking taxes on the super-rich around the globe.
"The time for a wealth tax on people like me is long overdue. Inequality is bad for everyone."
President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to keep the moratorium on student loan repayments in place through August 31, an extension that progressives criticized as inadequate as they continued pressuring the White House to fully cancel all outstanding federal student loan debt.
"We have to keep pushing. This isn't enough," the Debt Collective tweeted in response to reports Tuesday that the Biden administration intends to announce its fourth extension of the payment freeze as soon as Wednesday.
On March 8, 2021, 700 nurses launched what would become the nation’s longest strike of the year. They were demanding better staffing and working conditions at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Mass., and they picketed for nearly 10 months as the hospital, owned and operated by Tenet Healthcare, hired permanent replacements. The two sides reached an agreement on most issues in August, but the work stoppage continued for four more months until the Massachusetts Nurses Association members could ensure that striking workers could keep their jobs.
As the midterm elections loom, Americans feel worse about the economy than they have in a decade. Inflation is at a 40-year peak. Gas prices are soaring. And the situation is unlikely to improve anytime soon, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rages on.
Or is it a privilege affordable only to those who have made it under our unfair system of market capitalism?
If you read CNBC’s recent financial advice column, you may come away believing the latter to be true. Economist and CNBC contributor Laurence J. Kotlikoff said Americans “are wasting too much money on housing,” and in order to be more financially savvy about housing he offered such innovative ideas as moving in with one’s parents, renting out part of one’s home to visitors through Airbnb, selling one’s home altogether in favor of a smaller, cheaper one, or—and this is my favorite—moving to a cheaper state.
In California, some 48,000 grocery workers in 540 stores stretching from central California to the Mexican border authorized a strike on March 27 against two major chains, Kroger and Albertsons. Whether or not the strike is now in effect as you read this column, or whether it’s been averted (or is still pending the outcome of bargaining), the strike authorization itself represents a powerful response to untenable conditions for workers. These conditions underscore the deep inequality continuing to erode the quality of life for millions of people.
This past year, financial stresses impacting grocery workers have drawn increasing attention. A recent survey of workers employed by Kroger-owned supermarkets found that almost two-thirds of the workers surveyed reported being unable to meet basic monthly expenses, and of this group, a significant number (39 percent) indicated that they were unable to pay for groceries and 44 percent reported being unable to pay rent. Fourteen percent said that they were either currently homeless, or had been homeless in the preceding year. A New York Times account began with the story of one young worker at a Kroger-owned store who has been selling blood plasma to make ends meet.
While much of the criticism of a U.S. Postal Service deal with Oshkosh Defense for a new fleet has focused on the fact that most vehicles will be gas-guzzling versus electric, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday got a USPS official to admit the agency isn't concerned the Wisconsin-based firm plans to build the trucks in notoriously anti-union South Carolina.
Near the end of a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, the New York Democrat questioned Victoria Stephen, executive director of the Postal Service's Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) Program, about whether the USPS considered Oshkosh's unionized workforce in Wisconsin and when the agency knew about the company's location decision.
As he plants the seeds of democracy's destruction, former President Donald Trump is open and notorious about his plan. Most recently, at an April 2 rally in Washington Township, Michigan, he exhorted the crowd to ask each candidate at the state's upcoming Republican convention "if they will support the Trump ticket."
“What a celebration this is!” Kathy Hochul kvelled in mid-February as she accepted the New York State Democratic Party’s nomination for governor, a job she’d been doing ably for six months. A parade of powerful New York women preceded her at the podium: US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, state Attorney General Letitia James, state Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, US Representative Carolyn Maloney, and, finally, the woman who introduced Hochul, former US senator (and so much more) Hillary Clinton. The message: While the state has never elected a woman governor, it has nonetheless elevated some badass female leadership. The steely, diminutive Hochul stepped up to the microphone beaming.
Redistricting for the next decade is nearly complete, with a whole new set of gerrymandered legislative maps. State and federal courts, governors, and some modicum of legislative self-restraint have prevented gerrymandering for the sort of extreme Republican advantage we saw a decade ago, with a map poised to produce a balanced Congress. Yet I can hardly call this result fair. While appellate courts can sometimes lend their blessing to the right result supported by the wrong reasoning, we should not accept a broken and antidemocratic process just because it yields a false sense of balance.
According to the state of Georgia's Standards of Excellence for teaching the Reconstruction era to eighth-graders, students ought to "compare and contrast the goals and outcomes of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Ku Klux Klan." That side-by-side framing of the federal agency tasked with supporting formerly enslaved people in the years after the Civil War with a group of White supremacist terrorists has two problems: It is not only an unsettling echo of the "both sides" language mobilized by then-President Donald Trump following the 2017 deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, but is also an example of how state standards fail to help educate young people about one of the most important eras in U.S. history.
The American Library Association on Monday marked the start of National Library Week with a new report documenting a record-high number of attempts to ban books and a new campaign "to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship."
Reading—especially books that extend beyond our own experiences—expands our worldview. Censorship, on the other hand, divides us and creates barriers.
Reproductive rights advocates on Tuesday braced for Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma's Republican governor, to sign what's been described as a "worse than Texas" abortion ban that would make performing the medical procedure at any stage of pregnancy a felony punishable by up to a decade in prison.
"These extremist politicians are willing to turn their own constituents into medical refugees."
In 1980, my first book, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict 1880–1917, was published. In it, I used the term “united front of women” to mean a broad women’s movement of different classes within which progressives must fight for leadership without destroying the unity needed to move forward. The suffrage movement in the early part of the 20th century was like that, drawing in everyone from millionaire J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne to radical union organizer Clara Lemlich. While anarchists and syndicalists saw the vote as a bourgeois distraction, most socialists recognized it was a basic democratic right; the Socialist Party’s founding program in 1901€ included equal rights for men and women. When the party did nothing to put this position into practice, socialist feminists around the country organized local women’s groups and, in 1908, submitted two resolutions to the party convention: one to set up a Women’s National Committee, the other for a women’s suffrage campaign. Within a year, the party had increased its female membership 10 times over. This essay was adapted from the introduction to the third edition of The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict 1880–1917, published today in Verso’s Feminist Classics series.
Two weeks ago in Nashville, a jury found former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse RaDonda Vaught guilty of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult for unintentionally giving her patient, 75-year-old Charlene Murphey, the wrong medication. Murphey died; Vaught faces up to six years in prison for the abuse charge and up to two years for homicide.
On March 9th, we covered a Virginia court’s decision to reject a geofence/”reverse” warrant as unconstitutional. This was brought to our attention by FourthAmendment.com. Roughly a month later, it’s suddenly news.
In 2021, Congress appropriated $1.5 million for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) to construct a women’s prerelease facility. However, in an interview with The Real News Network, Executive Director of Out For Justice Nicole Hanson-Mundell shared that DPSCS have yet to spend one dime of the allocated $1.5 million toward meeting this goal. Hanson-Mundell and other advocates are now attending numerous budget hearings involving the Department of Corrections in order to ensure adequate funding is guaranteed toward the creation of a prerelease facility for incarcerated women in Maryland.
The teenage girls, ranging in age from 12-16, who started the campaign in 2020 are from San Ramón, El Salvador. Sandoval wrote, “Like other communities, San Ramón has been classified by the government as ‘zona roja’ (red zone) because of ongoing gang violence.” With high levels of violence and “street harassment being one of the most pressing problems affecting them in their community,” the girls saw an opportunity to speak up and make a difference. Sandoval interviewed one of the activists who said, “… We seek to make visible that street harassment is violence, which adolescents experience daily.” Unwanted gestures, comments, or in some cases invasions of personal space have become a normal, daily encounter for girls. According to Sandoval, “For many of them, street harassment is something they experience walking to school, taking the bus, or in other parts of their daily lives.” The campaign has allowed these girls to voice their opinions, but it has also been a learning experience for them as well.
On his first day back as chief executive of Starbucks, billionaire Howard Schultz said during a town hall Monday that the coffee giant and other U.S. companies are "being assaulted" by unionization drives, a comment that workers took as a signal of his union-busting intentions as he takes the helm amid a nationwide wave of organizing.
"It doesn’t matter what industry: corporations are terrified of what happens when workers organize."
Amazon spent over $4 million in trying to defeat the union drive. The independent union, the Amazon Labor Union, had almost no money at all for their grassroots campaign but ended up with 55% of the vote. Congratulations Amazon Labor Union.
I also want to congratulate the workers at Starbucks for their incredible union organizing efforts. Starbucks has coffee shops in some 15,000 locations all across the country and, until a few months ago, none of them were organized. Then, in December, workers in 2 shops in Buffalo, New York voted to join a union and that union organizing effort is now spreading like wildfire all across the nation. In fact, last Friday workers in New York City successfully voted to form the first Starbucks union roastery and tenth union Starbucks coffee shop in America. And, in the coming weeks and months, Starbucks workers in some 170 other coffee shops in 27 states will be holding union elections.
Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a floor speech on Monday hailing the growing wave of union victories across the United States, including high-profile wins by Amazon and Starbucks workers, as an essential challenge to the country's vastly unequal political and economic status quo.
"It is that growing trade union movement that makes me so very hopeful for the future of this country."
We’ve already talked about how Georgia looks to be moving forward with its clearly unconstitutional content moderation bill. Back when Florida signed its content moderation bill into law (which actually put in a few things to pretend to appear more constitutional, unlike Georgia’s…), we noted that the state was going to waste a ton of taxpayer funds before losing. And, that’s exactly what’s happened. Florida’s bill was tossed out as unconstitutional, fairly easily. While an appeal on that ruling will be heard soon, all this is doing is racking up Florida’s expensive legal bills.
Well, this is a mess.
At its origins, we were promised the entry to The Golden Age of Computer Networks. Instead, what emerged under capitalism was the Internet becoming, rather quickly, a vastly profitable gold mine for a handful of corporations. Today, there are a few companies that have taken very profitable advantage of the original collective enthusiasm for a new creation of a computerized network system that started to emerge during the 1990s.
Today, the Internet and the World Wide Web (www) are the commanding signifiers of social and political – but even more so – for corporate information, control. In short, the much-trumpeted Internet Revolution announced by some intellectuals, a substantial entourage of business writers, all too many politicians, and even several counter-cultural movements, has turned into a domain for a few corporate players furnished with the power to centralize information based on their corporate power.
We’ve noted for a while that DC, and particularly the GOP’s, interest in “antitrust reform” is somewhat hollow. For one, while the United States is rife with heavily monopolized business sectors (insurance, health care, telecom, banking, airlines), this recent batch of “reform” only specifically targets large technology companies. It’s as if these other sectors (most notably telecom) simply… don’t exist.
While a bipartisan antitrust bill targeting Big Tech makes its way through Congress, industry giants have been showering both Democrats and Republicans with tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. Their political action committees, executives, and lobbyists have targeted both critics and supporters of the legislation, which is aimed at reining in some of the most powerful tech companies in the world.
Normally when discussing a company that has appeared on our pages before for being a trademark bully, I like to list off and link to a few examples. Monster Energy, the company that makes fizzy caffeine bombs in liquid form, makes that all very silly. You need only look at all the stories we’ve done on the company to see why: there are simply too many of them from which to choose. I could be convinced that the company was, in fact, doing some kind of avant-garde art piece highlighting the horrors of the trademark bully were I not so well informed of Monster’s ridiculous behavior overall.
