It’s been a few years since Pine64 began shipping the PineBook Pro laptop to customers looking for a cheap, Linux-friendly notebook with an ARM-based processor. But due to global supply chain issues, it’s been out of stock at the Pine64 Store for most of the past year. Now it’s coming back and should be available for purchase by July for $219.
While the laptop’s specs are starting to look a little dated by 2022 standards, it’s hard to beat that price, and Pine64 isn’t ready to announce a new model just yet. The company’s been keeping plenty busy with other product launches though.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
The PineBook Pro is a $219 Linux laptop with a 14 inch FHD IPS LCD display, a Rockchip RK3399 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. It’s been out of stock for a year due to supply chain issues, but it will be available again by July, 2022.
I suggest people use an open-source operating system like Linux Mint, but use Windows or Mac if you must — that’s better than using a regular, well-used computer that invariably has malware hidden in it.
The 5.18 kernel was released on May 22 after a nine-week development cycle. That can only mean that the time has come to look at some of the statistics behind this release, which was one of the busiest in a while. Read on for a look at the 5.18 kernel, where the code in this release came from, and how it found its way into the mainline.
The 5.18 development cycle saw the addition of 14,954 non-merge changesets from 2,024 developers, 289 of whom made their first kernel contribution during this time. None of these numbers are records, though the number of developers came close to the maximum seen so far (2,062 for 5.13). This work resulted in the addition of 756,00 lines of code to the kernel.
Linux has long been able to do fair share CPU scheduling, where CPU time was evenly divided between, for example, the various different users. Originally this took some manual work, but systemd wound up making it fairly easy. This is done through the Linux kernel 'cgroup' feature. This comes in two versions, the now-old cgroup (v1), and the not so new any more unified cgroups (cgroup v2). When using systemd, these turn out to be different in some important ways. To understand implementing fair share CPU scheduling with systemd in a cgroup v2 world, I want to start by understanding how cgroup v2 works and does fair share scheduling.
Hi list,
I'd like to announce mesa 22.1.1, the first maintanence release of the 22.1 series. Things are about where I'd expect for where we are in the cycle, and I'm happy. We've got a bit of everything here, zink, intel, and Panfrost being the biggest sets of changes, but some aco, zsn, llvm/lavapipe radv, nir, glsl, r300, aco, svga, and core mesa changes as well. I'll see you all again shortly for 22.0, and then again in two weeks for 22.1.2
Cheers, Dylan
Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
This post is about dealing with the various tasks involved in handling SSL certificates. For the moment, it only covers the tasks related to already existing certificates.
All those points were important to me to some extent. Here’s how I make use of custom domains in general: [...]
Once again, I was wandering on r/unixporn when a screenshot raised my attention. It was probably featuring a obscure window manager that I would never use but I felt like I could tune my beloved WindowMaker to not look so 1990.
Before deciding to read further, you may want to look at what is achieved.
at-spi2-core's DBus interfaces, the way the registry daemon works, atk's interfaces and their glue in at-spi2-atk via libatspi... all of these are tightly coupled. You can't make a change in the libatspi API without changing at-spi2-atk, and a change in the DBus interfaces really has to ripple down to everything, but keeping things as separate repositories makes it hard to keep them in sync.
I am still in the process of learning how the accessibility code works, and my strategy to learn a code base, besides reading code while taking notes, is to do a little exploratory refactoring.
However, when I did a little refactoring of bit of at-spi2-core's code, the tests that would let me see if that refactoring is correct were in another repository! This is old code, written before unit tests in C were doable in a convenient fashion, so it would take a lot more refactoring to get it to a unit-testable state. I need end-to-end tests instead...
IBM has confirmed to former staff that it will no longer provide grants for the Retired Employee Club, meaning no more subsidized short trips to the Italian Riviera or golf days.
The clubs are regionally split. In the UK, for example, there are 28 local organizations that have run short trips or national tournaments including corporate games or group runs.
Joining a club was free for all Big Blue retirees with at least 10 years of service under their belt, regardless of pension age. For Local Clubs, members were asked to pay a small annual subscription.
Elisa Pearson, HR director for the UK and Ireland, confirmed in an email to members – seen by The Register – that IBM has "decided to reconsider its relationship with its IBM Clubs globally."
"This re-appraisal is being made within the context of developing new contemporary approaches to employee engagement. With that, from the end of June 2022 IBM will cease its formal support to UK clubs."
 Nitrux 2.2 is the first release of the distribution to ditch the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel and switch to the more recent Linux kernel 5.17 series by default, of course in a XanMod flavor just like with the previous releases.
One of the coolest changes in this release is the ability for users to perform full-disk encryption of their new Nitrux installations when using the automated partition options (Replace Partition and Erase Disk) in the Calamares graphical installer.
Timeshift is arguably the best tool to back up and restore the Linux system.
Linux Mint also utilizes the tool to let users easily take snapshots before updates, and ensure hassle-free operation.
Of course, that’s not the only thing that makes Linux Mint potentially better than Ubuntu.
Linux Mint is taking over development of Timeshift, a popular open-source backup tool.
Anyone familiar with Mint will be familiar with this utility. Timeshift is, as the distro’s own lead Clement Lefebvre says in the latest monthly update, a central plank in the system’s backup and update ‘strategy’.
Sadly, as happens, the creator of Timeshift is unable to keep working on it owing to other responsibilities. Not keen to see it stagnate, Mint says it ‘got in touch’ to see how they could help. Long story short: Linux Mint is assuming maintenance of the app henceforth.
 Rockchip RK3568-powered NanoPi R5S router has gotten a direct competitor courtesy of FastRhino R68s with the same processor, but more memory up to 4GB RAM, two 2.5GbE ports, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports (or one extra compared to R5S), and two USB 3.0 ports.
FastRhino R68s is purely a router in the traditional sense, and you don’t get an HDMI port acting as a display interface or an M.2 NVMe socket to add extra storage as found in NanoPi R5S. The plastic enclosure used with R68s will not be able to cool the Rockchip RK3568 as well as the metal enclosure of the FriendlyElec device, but there are plenty of ventilation holes so that may be sufficient.
But the anti-repair axis – led by Apple, and incorporating Big Car, Big Ag, and Big Appliances – are determined to milk their monopoly over repair for as long as they possibly can, and this is one area where their innovative genius can't be denied:
Here's one way that Deere can extend the life of its repair monopoly: they can refuse service to farmers who complain about Deere's behavior. That's what happened to Jared Wilson, a Missouri farmer and vocal repair advocate: [...]
According to the affidavit, Wilson felt the manager’s words were “a veiled threat that if I continued to complain to ‘outside people’ about my dissatisfaction with Heritage Tractor that I could or would no longer authorize [sic] repair assistance from Heritage Tractor in the future.”
Wilson is a fierce and vocal advocate for a farmer’s right to repair their tractors. He’s testified about it in the Missouri state house, been interviewed by NBC News, and is quoted by name in a complaint to the FTC.
Generally, the security certificates are very expensive and complicate to install. However, Let’s Encrypt provides free, automated and Open Source certificates. They are offering free Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TSL) Certificates and the best thing about it is the automated installation process.
The last time I had less than 30 tabs opened in my browser was in January 2021 The last time I had less than 20 tabs opened in my browser was August 2020 The last time I had fewer than 10 tabs opened in my browser was March 2020
When a programmer says that they are ‘self-taught’ or that they “taught themselves to code”, what do they mean by it?
Production and consumption of open source software is maturing for the better and along the way we shouldn't forget that the leaves in our dependency trees are living and feeling people.
A building material for you to create the best editor for yourselves. By definition the number of people who want/need to build their own editors is not that big, so I think we’d be on a wild goose chase trying to change this.2 Not to mention that Emacs being different from the pack is probably its biggest competitive advantage. Do we need one more editor that’s essentially the same as every other editor?
Interfaces are the building blocks of software. Interfaces explain what software can do but not how. They can be an API, a wire protocol (think HTTPS), or ABI (application binary interface). How you implement these interfaces is up to you. And if done in the right way, the software should be a drop-in compatible replacement for anything else that shares the same interface.
In a fast-paced talk at PyCon 2022 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Pablo Galindo Salgado described some changes he and others have made to the error reporting for CPython 3.10. He painted a picture of a rather baffling set of syntax errors reported by earlier interpreter versions and how they have improved. This work is not done by any means, he said, and encouraged attendees to get involved in making error reporting even better in future Python versions.
Galindo Salgado prefaced his talk with something of a warning that he has been told that he speaks rather quickly; with a chuckle, he suggested attendees prepare themselves for the ride. He introduced himself as a CPython core developer and a member of the steering council; beyond that, he is also the release manager for versions 3.10 and 3.11 of the language.
He began with a story of his days as a PhD student in physics, where he was using Python as a tool for his research. One day a friend showed him a Python syntax-error message that they could not figure out. They showed it to another student and all three of them were stumped; three physics students who were studying to try to solve the mysteries of the universe were unable to find a simple syntax error.
So that’s a lot of words to say it’s a new, nice format that advertises a bunch of benefits. There are a whole bunch of these formats - Zarr, Parquet and GeoParquet, Arrow, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs, . All claim some combination of a compact, or zero-copy, encoding, as well as efficient random access. Some have built-in indexes.
Buried the lede but here it is: do any of the benefits of these new formats translate into wins for any of my applications within my constraints? The answer may be yes, but I have a hunch that it’s closer to no.
Now, these formats are definitely useful to a lot of people, especially those using Python or low-level languages like C++ or Rust. Some of the more established options like Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs have been a game-changer for people working with satellite data, and those people sing the praises all the time.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music. The second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd was May 25, and sadly nothing has really changed. Racially motivated killings and cops murdering black people still occur frequently.To comment on this issue, twin sisters Naomi and Lisa Diaz of the Cuban-Venezuelan duo Ibeyi reworked Black Flag’s 1981 classic hardcore punk anthem “Rise Above.” It appeared on their recent album, “Spell 31,” and Trinidad rapper Berwyn added a verse that pays tribute to Floyd.“Berwyn is on this track,” Naomi shared. “He listened to it, and he did his verse really fast. For him, listening to this song made him think of George Floyd, and it’s beautiful.”“I think the thing is, with this song, you can think about everything. It could be for women. It could be for minorities. It’s a song for the oppressed. It could be something small or something really big, but I think this song is just empowering,” Naomi added.The song is empowering. The lyrics, “We are tired of your abuse. Try to stop us; but it’s no use,” still hold as much impact as they did when Black Flag recorded them. And Ibeyi’s reworking delivers a galvanizing message to stand against oppression.
The trial between two Hollywood actors turned warring ex-spouses is a reminder that when it comes to certain stories the idea of a mass media or a mainstream media dominated by a few major news organisations is beginning to look a bit creaky.
It is also, for some, deeply troubling.
There have been essentially two cases here - one decided by a jury and another by the public.
I used to be hung up on post counts, for some reason. On my ten year sludge through Twitter (2009-2019 (years lost forever)), I used to get worked up and enthusiastic about that I had 75K Tweets. It was a testament to how much time I *wasted* there, but it was 75K of SOMETHING I had "done". Ridiculous thing to care about.
The mystery likely has something to do with the fact that Voyager 1 is the farthest artificial object in space. At a distance of 14.5 billion miles away from Earth, Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause in 2012. The heliopause is the barrier separating the Sun's solar winds from the interstellar medium, or all of the matter and radiation that exist in the space in-between various solar systems in the galaxy. This means that Voyager 1 is literally in the interstellar void of the Milky Way.
Perhaps that has something to do with why the Jimmy Carter-era machine is sending back signals that can best be described as strange.
The Africa Internet Summit 2022 is being held on 30th May – 3rd June at Le Méridien Hotel, Pte aux Piments in Mauritius. The AFRINIC Annual General Members Meeting (AGMM) is scheduled on the last day of the Africa Internet Summit, i.e Friday 3rd June 2022.
Many AFRINIC Resource Members look forward to this meeting and they travel every year to attend the meeting in person. Others who cannot make it can still participate and ask questions via the online conference system.
Two years into the pandemic, US students are having some initial success in suing their institutions for abruptly moving courses online, aided by the pre-Covid custom of colleges charging less for virtual formats.
The shift from in-person teaching has produced more than 200 lawsuits across the US, most commonly involving students who contend that online alternatives are lower quality and therefore merit lower tuition rates.
None of the cases has yet produced a courtroom verdict, although judges have agreed in several instances to allow complaints to move to trial, and a few institutions already have accepted settlements.
Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago gives an excellent lecture on writing effectively. Though his audience is academic, his concept is portable to non-academic audiences. These are my notes on the lecture.
mentioned the Z80 processor, which had me remembering having a "Timex Sinclair" computer (I *believe* with a 16K (whoa!) memory expansion unit), on which I first tinkered with assembly language (vaguely remembering the book describing the instruction set seeming to cost a fortune at the time).
As of May 25, less than halfway through the year, the United States has had 213 mass shootings.
And yet for every person who died in a U.S. mass shooting in 2020, about another 86 died from other forms of gun violence.
She will be joining others who will read off the names of Michiganders being inducted into the national In Memory program — part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. The inductees include soldiers like her husband, who is believed to have died of cancer caused by Agent Orange exposure during the conflict, and others who faced similar problems.
I just tested positive — something that surprised me even though I am on day 3 of a strange little cough. I had received my fourth dose just on May 19th and was feeling somewhat bulletproof.
When I got the cough I started home-testing every day, and tested negative. I almost skipped today, because, you know, it's kind of unlikely... But then I felt the familiar joint ache which alternates with an almost ecstatic feeling when I shift my legs to a more comfy position.
That, to me, is the symptom unique to covid. I don't know if I am physiologically weird as I haven't heard anyone mention that. The muscle/joint aches that turn to an extremely pleasurable sensation after getting more comfortable…
About three weeks ago I was afflicted with awful allergies to the high spring pollen count. My nose ran like a creek, I sneezed in paroxysms lasting several minutes, my red eyes watered and itched. A cold sore began to present on my left eyelid.
If you're unit restricted in the psych hospital where I work, you can't go to the cafeteria or Rec. Nursing staff can put you on UR or take you off it. It doesn't need a doctor's order.
Microsoft has now revealed the CVE identifier for this vulnerability is CVE-2022-30190, including a Security Update and article with guidance... but no patch looks to be available as of yet.
Huntress is keeping a close eye on the developing threat of a zero-click remote code execution technique used through MSDT (Microsoft Diagnostics Tool) and Microsoft Office utilities, namely Microsoft Word. Throughout the next coming days, we expect exploitation attempts in the wild through email-based delivery.
Details shared by Proofpoint on Twitter suggest that a hacking group labeled TA413 was using the vulnerability (named “Follina” by researchers) in malicious Word documents purported to be sent from the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government in exile based in Dharamsala, India. The TA413 group is an APT, or “advanced persistent threat,” actor believed to be linked to the Chinese government and has previously been observed targeting the Tibetan exile community.
In general, Chinese hackers have a history of using software security flaws to target Tibetans. A report published by Citizen Lab in 2019 documented extensive targeting of Tibetan political figures with spyware, including through Android browser exploits and malicious links sent through WhatsApp. Browser extensions have also been weaponized for the purpose, with previous analysis from Proofpoint uncovering the use of a malicious Firefox add-on to spy on Tibetan activists.
Getting this right will be tricky for Google. If it wants to build a cross-platform, cross-purpose platform for audio and video calls, it has to get a lot of little things right. Should every single device and browser tab you’re signed into ring every time you get a call? (Google says no, and that it’s getting better at recognizing which device you’re actually using and sending calls and notifications to that one.) Should you be able to get calls on your personal and work device at the same time? (No good answer yet, but Soltero said he’s leading the charge to figure it out.)
The Biden administration is planning to sell Ukraine armed attack drones as the embattled country continues to defend itself from Russia's nearly 100-day invasion, a move that experts say would risk increasing the chance of war between the United States and Russia.
"Supplying large, long-range drones would be a significant escalation in the types of systems supplied to Ukraine."
Nakasone previously said his agency deployed a “hunt forward” team in December to help Ukraine shore up its cyber defenses and networks against active threats. But his latest remarks appear to be the first time that a U.S. official said publicly that the U.S. has been involved in offensive cyber operations in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The general, who was speaking in Tallinn, Estonia, told Sky News that the “hunt forward” operations have enabled the U.S. to look for foreign hackers and identify their strategies before they target the United States.
America's military conducted offensive cyber operations to support Ukraine in its response to Russia's illegal invasion, US Cyber Command chief General Paul Nakasone has said.
"We've conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum; offensive, defensive, [and] information operations," General Nakasone told Sky News in an interview that aired Wednesday.
Nakasone, who also serves as director of the NSA, didn't provide specific details about the offensive operations, though he said they were lawful and complied with US policy.
"My job is to provide a series of options to the secretary of defense and the President, and so that's what I do," he said.
White House press spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre doubled down on the message, saying: "We don't negotiate our security assistance packages to Ukraine. We are doing exactly what the President said he would do ... to provide security assistance that is above and beyond."
In 2015, Smith traveled to Tunisia and was voluntarily taken to Syria by members of the Islamic State. There, Smith alleges she was pressed into marrying an unnamed British/Pakistani man in Raqqa, Syria. Smith alleges her husband became violent in 2016, and the violence continued through 2017 when Smith gave birth to their daughter. After the leadership of ISIS fell in 2018, Smith fled at the urging of her husband and was placed in the Al-Hawl refugee camp by Turkish armed forces. Smith was then deported to Ireland amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In Ireland, Smith was charged with being a member of ISIS and of financially supporting ISIS; she was later acquitted of the financial charges.
Musk’s company has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts to launch spy satellites for espionage, drone warfare and other military uses. For example, in 2018, SpaceX was chosen to blast a $500 million Lockheed Martin GPS system into orbit. While Air Force spokesmen played up the civilian benefits of the launch, such as increased accuracy for GPS devices, it is clear that these devices play a key role in global surveillance and ongoing drone wars. SpaceX has also won contracts with the Air Force to deliver its command satellite into orbit, with the Space Development Agency to send tracking devices into space, and with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to launch its spy satellites. These satellites are used by all of the “big five” surveillance agencies, including the CIA and the NSA.
Thus, in today’s world, where so much intelligence gathering and target acquisition is done via satellite technology, SpaceX has become every bit as important to the U.S. war machine as more well-known companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Without Musk’s company, the U.S. would not be able to carry out such an invasive program of spying and drone warfare around the world. Indeed, China is growing increasingly wary of this power, and is being advised to develop anti-satellite technologies to counter SpaceX’s all-seeing eye. Yet Musk himself continues to benefit from a general perception that he is not part of the system.
Some 250,000 Kashmiri Pandits left the Kashmir valley because of a sharp rise in killings of Hindus and attacks on their homes at the start of a rebellion by Muslim militants in 1989.
In the days since the Uvalde shooting, media outlets have shared heartbreaking images of the small victims as they were cherished in life. As Americans, we’re forced to look into their young, innocent eyes and accept our shame that we failed to protect them.
The day after an armed 18-year-old entered the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and shot dead 19 children and two teachers, the share prices of gun and weapons manufacturers jumped.
Yet framing what needs to be done in terms of a ‘climate emergency’ is perhaps not as helpful as might seem. As Hema Vaishnavi Ale (2021) reasons, emergencies are finite and time-bound, after which our lives can hopefully revert back to ‘normal’. As such, the idea of ‘climate emergency’ implies a form of extraordinary mitigating responses that might stand a chance of addressing and eventually overcoming the problem. This neatly sidesteps more awkward expectations that we are not facing a finite ‘emergency’ that can be nipped in the bud. Instead, it seems more realistic to take the stance that this is a fast-changing condition that we need to permanently readjust our lives around.
Though it can be easy to think of them as little more than city furniture, urban trees are very much alive – and their struggle to survive is only becoming more extreme. Without a radical rethink of the living conditions of this long-overlooked community, some experts are concerned that our cities could soon lose much of their greenery altogether.
How have some trees survived in these dystopian environments for so long? And what can be done to save the others?
Fourteen young people on Wednesday filed a groundbreaking constitutional climate lawsuit against the Hawaii Department of Transportation and its director, Jade Butay; Hawaii Gov. David Ige; and the State of Hawaii.
"Climate change is drastically changing lives around the world and we need our governments to take it and us seriously."
According to figures reported to tax authorities, residents of Finland sold more than 2.14 billion euros worth of cryptocurrencies. In 2020, the corresponding amount was just 190 million euros.
With the world's population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall and severe droughts, experts say the number of water-related violent incidents is growing. More than 200 such conflicts occurred in the past three years, according to data from the Pacific Institute, which tracks water-related violence around the world.
Households are now forbidden from watering their lawns more than once a week in many jurisdictions. The goal is to slash water use by 35 percent as the state enters its third straight year of drought.
The rules come after California officials in March announced they were cutting State Water Project allocations from 15 percent to 5 percent of normal amid declining reservoir levels and reduced snowpack. California’s two largest reservoirs have already dropped to critically low levels, and the state this year experienced its driest January, February and March on record.
In simple terms, this excess depreciation means that the company's real cost for creating income is much higher than they report, and thus their real profit as a continuing business is much less than they report, because they are not putting aside the money they will need to replace obsolete hardware.
Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008 from Google and helped build the company's online advertising operation into one of the internet's most profitable businesses and expand the company's reach outside the U.S. But her high-profile role alongside co-founder Mark Zuckerberg also made her among the most recognizable figures tied to Facebook's various scandals, including data privacy and misinformation issues that have continued to surround the company.
Key Facebook force Sheryl Sandberg steps downSan Francisco: Meta's second most powerful executive Sheryl Sandberg made the shock announcement Wednesday she will leave after a 14-year tenure that included helping steer scandal-prone Facebook to advertising dominance.
Sandberg, 52, has been one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley and her departure comes as the social media juggernaut faces an uncertain future and fierce competition.
Her exit from Facebook parent Meta will be effective in the fall, she wrote on the platform, adding she planned to remain on the firm's board.
Next up: Sandberg will be replaced as COO by Javier Olivan, the company’s chief growth officer, but his role will differ from the work Sandberg did for the company, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.
In her own words, there are two big factors in Sandberg’s decision to leave now: the fact that Meta’s executive team has been built up to make way for her departure, and that, as the leader of the “Lean In” movement, she wants to focus more on philanthropy and women’s rights. “There’s no perfect time,” she told me during a brief phone interview Wednesday afternoon. “It is a job that’s been an honor and a privilege, but it’s not a job that leaves a lot of time to do much else.”
Here’s my full conversation with Sandberg about her stepping down as COO of Meta, edited lightly for clarity: [...]
In response, tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) asked the Supreme Court to intervene and vacate the 5th Circuit's stay.
And now it has, in a 5-4 decision issued Tuesday.
The majority—a conservative-liberal mix that included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—did not offer reasoning for their ruling.
A dissent penned by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, can be found here. Justice Elena Kagan also dissented.
The Applicants alleged that HB20 “interferes with their exercise of ‘editorial discretion,’ and they maintain that this interference violates their right ‘not to disseminate speech generated by others.'”
Justice Alito wrote that HB20 is “ground-breaking” and “of great importance” due to the fact that it “addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.” His dissent also stated that the court’s decision to block HB20 is “a significant intrusion on state sovereignty, and Texas should not be required to seek preclearance from the federal courts before its laws go into effect.”
The law will remain blocked until the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decides whether the law is constitutional or not.
I am tired of rightwing politicians distorting our language to suit their bigoted ideology.
It's so disappointing to see people who don't realize they're being used to deliberately divide people. Smart, caring, thoughtful people whose hearts are umdoubtedly in the right place so frequently get caught up in culture-war bullshit that is just so obviously designed to divide people or to create new subcultures and identities for capitalists to market to.
The perfect wedge issues are those that deal not with morality, but with the nature of reality itself. People aren't going to agree about those, not easily, especially when you keep moving the goalposts and pulling the rug out from people who were previously on board. And, of course, you have to realize what the end goal is of cannibalistic movements that seem all too keen on cutting people out at the slightest transgression. In a strange twist of fate, it's religion. We all know the boiled frog never reacts if the temperature is raised slowly enough.
You're being used to facilitate the rise of fascism. It's happened before and it'll happen again. The last time culture-war bullshit like this was so prevalent, it was used to radicalize people into right-wing extremism and galvanize the fascists. Of course by the time you realize this it will be too late.
To those who decry their censorship, the companies and their liberal defenders respond by citing their property rights as private companies and the constitutional principle that guarantees publishers the right to accept or decline material as they see fit.
Were these sites normal publications, whether online or traditional print, they’d be within their rights to publish what they like as America’s founders intended when they wrote the First Amendment. But they are nothing of the sort.
I read something that struck me: "Throwing money at a problem is unlikely to resolve it, as actual sit-uations require genuine, not monetary, action.[^1] I don't have to add context. You brought your own.
An online acquaintence had money but couldn't pay rent for his server because all means of payment are sanctioned. Finally he found Mir (Russian) can transfer money to UnionPay (Chinese), accepted in the Netherlands.
An award-winning journalist who fled from Afghanistan last August says the international community must not remain silent on Taliban restrictions for female journalists.
Anisa Shaheed, a former TOLOnews broadcaster who on May 23 was honored with the International Center for Journalists’ Knight award, says she is troubled by orders that impact the ability of female journalists to work.
In an interview with VOA’s Dari service, Shaheed said the Taliban mandate that women cover their faces when reporting is “not acceptable.”
He allegedly removed church inventory at the end of October last year, tore the valuable Christ figure from the wall and damaged it, and broke an altar panel. He is charged with damage to property and trespassing.
The police said the miscreants, who came to the premises of the temple on Monday, swam in the Kalyani (sacred water body of the temple). They also smoked despite objections and threatened and chased away the labourers working in the premises.
Later, they went to the exhibition centre and vandalised the idols which were ready for installation and some were under construction to be set up in the temple premises. The miscreants used rods and other equipment to break idols.
The IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905 by the legendary firebrand William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, and the beloved matriarch of radicalism Mother Jones. “Every working man or woman who earns his livelihood by brain or muscle” must “organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system,” read the preamble to the organization’s founding document. “They were a little vague,” admits one interviewee, “on where they went from there.” From the start, the “Industrial” billing was something of a misnomer: the IWW welcomed migratory workers, lumberjacks, and any other weather-beaten laborer with calloused hands. Unlike the exclusionary crafts and guilds, every working “stiff” (a tag worn as a badge of honor) was entitled to membership. University students and intellectuals—those who came to radical politics by way of the head not the stomach, as Lenin put it—tended to join up elsewhere.
Amazon has blasted a proposed antitrust law that aims to clamp down on Big Tech's anti-competitive practices.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) led by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and House Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) is a bipartisan bill, with Democrat and Republican support in the Senate and House. It is still making its way through Congress.
The bill [PDF] prohibits "online platforms" from unfairly promoting their own products and services in a way that prevents third-party businesses from competing. Companies with 50 million-plus active monthly users in the US or 100,000-plus US business users, and $550 billion-plus in annual sales or market cap, that act as a "critical trading partner" for suppliers would be affected.
In practice, it would mean Amazon, at its current rate of revenue growth, would not be able to push its own products and those sold by vendors that have signed up to its Fulfillment by Amazon program to the detriment of other sellers. Businesses hawking fare via FBA pay the e-commerce giant to store and package their goods in Amazon's warehouses. In return, Amazon ranks these items more highly on its website and sends them to consumers more quickly using its Prime delivery service.
On June 15th, 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF, a way to share images — or animated sequences of images — anywhere. The incredible portability of the late Steve Wilhite’s “graphics interchange format” made it the perfect canvas for viral memes.
Now, a company called Looking Glass is trying to make holograms effortlessly portable, too.
Mega is one of the leading file storage platforms on the Internet with more than 117 billion files stored on its servers. Given this scale, it is no surprise that these files include some infringing content. During the first quarter of 2022, Mega reported a significant increase in copyright takedown requests, targeting more than a million links.
Before the UK passed the Digital Economy Act in 2017, critics warned that categorizing file-sharers as criminals would encourage "copyright trolls" to demand cash settlements while implying a criminal conviction might be an alternative. The government didn't listen and it is now happening. One of the parties involved is FACT, the company behind the infamous 'Piracy, It's a Crime' campaign.
Over the course of a year, Thomas Carlyle supposedly transmitted this text to Dr. Wm. J. Bryan from beyond the grave.