System76 have revealed the Launch Lite, a smaller version of their rather fancy and highly customizable keyboard that will properly launch for ordering tomorrow.
Some of them use more RAM. Some less. Today in a rather simplified benchmark I will check some popular desktop environments for their RAM usage. I recently came to see some more or less old comparisons of various desktop environments RAM usage.
Flatline allows users to select apps directly from their software center by clicking on the Install button from the Flathub website.
If you are unfamiliar with Flatpak, we will provide a short outline. It is an approach to distributing software encapsulated in a Flatpak package that offers compatibility in its use between various Linux distributions.
It has been well accepted by Linux users in recent years and is widely used. Furthermore, most desktop Linux applications are now distributed as Flatpak packages in addition to their native package format.
In practice, what matters is what is in mdadm.conf, the mdadm configuration file. If your software RAID array is listed in there (with a /dev/mdN name), it will get assigned that name when it's brought up. If it's not listed in mdadm.conf, it will get assigned a high number (often starting with /dev/md127 and then apparently counting down) and that number may change from boot to boot if you have multiple unlisted software RAID arrays.
An antifragile system doesn’t just stand up against stressors, it is strengthened by them — like the body’s immune system — whereas a fragile system is “weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors”.
BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT) is a congestion control algorithm written by Google software engineers. The truth is that it hasn’t been around very long, so it is relatively new.
The main goal of BBR is to initiate network utilization and reduce queuing. However, this feature should only be enabled on servers and not at the network or client level.
So, the first release of this feature was in 2016 and requires at least kernel version 4.19, so newer distributions should have no problem using it.
Being able to record your Linux terminal sessions is one of the cool flexes found in a Linux operating system environment. So why opt to record Linux terminal sessions? Well, suppose you want to guide someone through the installation and configuration of a specific Linux package software.
A recorded Linux terminal session is time efficient and error-free in comparison to a phone or video chat that might require too many screenshots. Also, recorded Linux terminal sessions are a perfect reference manual for command-line tasks that are not easy to memorize.
This article will walk us through successfully recording Linux terminal sessions on any Linux operating system distribution.
Despite the installation of various Linux operating system distributions being accompanied by an appealing Desktop environment, most Linux users; throughout their transition to using the operating system, tend to define themselves as willing captives of the Linux terminal or command-line environment.
The Rapid7-powered Metasploit Framework is the world’s leading penetration testing framework. The Project is a collaboration between the open-source community and Rapid7 to provide a tool for developing and executing exploit code against a target machine.
By default, Kali Linux and Parrot OS provide the Metasploit Framework within their operating systems. Even other distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, AlmaLinux, Manjaro, etc., can easily install it on their systems.
DXVK is the translation tool used inside of Steam Play Proton that translates Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan and a new release is out now with version 1.10.2. The new release comes with a warning, that future releases will require newer Vulkan extensions so you will need very up to date drivers to keep using it. More on that on their driver page.
We've all seen how Doom has become one of the ways people test electronics, the whole "I got Doom to run on x" but this is something else. Running Doom inside of Doom, Doomception here we come.
Part of the power of the Steam Deck is that not only is it a great portable for gaming, it's Linux and has a full desktop mode and so you can also create games with it.
Unity Technologies, the company behind ridiculously popular proprietary game engine Unity has announced a merger with another company called ironSource which is raising some eyebrows.
GPD, the company behind many portable devices like the upcoming GPD WIN Max 2, made a claim about "cooperating" with Valve to get SteamOS working on their hardware. This is the same GPD that blocked us on Twitter, after we confronted them about pinching videos that didn't belong to them.
To the uninitiated in the dark arts of Voice over IP we want to apologize in advance for the acronym soup you are (unless you stop reading here) inevitably about to enter. You can find explanations of all the used jargon in the first part of the blog post.
This is good news! Let's see more of these classic operating systems go open for a new retrocomputing generation. Specifically, from Bryan Sparks, the current owner of DRDOS and associated [copyright]from Digital Research, [...]
V9.2 documentation including release notes, Installation Guide, Cross Tools Guide, Boot Manager Guide, and Calling Standard, Debugger and Linker manuals, is ready and will be available to everyone on the day of the release. The V9.2 kit, open source, and layered products will be distributed to customers through the Service Portal, similar to the field test versions. The current E9.2 field test is still in progress and will close on September 30.
But I was building a new FreeBSD server with a used SuperMicro motherboard with IPMI. The default password was changed from ADMIN (or maybe it's a new enough board that it's a random password), and when I was booted into FreeBSD, I wanted to reset the IPMI settings so I could be sure I was starting fresh.
 The new Linux kernel security updates come about a month after the previous kernel updates, which addressed the Intel “MMIO Stale Data” flaws. A total of 17 security vulnerabilities were fixed in the new Ubuntu kernel updates, which affects Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS systems, as well as the Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) releases.
In the text below I will first tell something about my set up, using my Acer as X-terminal for my old Raspberry as remote workstation.
High I/O throughput has historically been the shiny IBM dangled to keep people in the Power fold, and was a featured part of the POWER9 roadmap even though those parts never emerged. IBM's solution to the memory throughput problem was the Centaur buffer used in POWER8 and scale-up Cumulus POWER9 systems (as opposed to our scale-out Nimbus POWER9s, which use conventional DDR4 RAM and an on-chip controller), and then for Power10 the OpenCAPI Memory Interface, or OMI. In these systems, the memory controller-buffer accepts high-level commands from the CPU(s), abstracting away the details of where the underlying physical memory actually is and reordering, fusing or splitting those requests as required. Notoriously, OMI has an on-board controller, and its firmware isn't open-source.
For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, PDAs (personal digital assistants) were quite popular. But smartphones made PDAs obsolete, as even early models had far more functionality. Many of today’s microcontrollers have performance similar to early PDAs and Volos took advantage of that to build an Arduino Nano-based mini pocket computer reminiscent of a classic PDA.
PDAs — especially early models — were much more limited than smartphones. Their features were more akin to what we call “dumbphones” today, except without any kind of WiFi or cellular connectivity. They usually only had a handful of “apps,” such as a calendar, watch/timer, calculator, and notes. Later PDAs would include some connectivity options and the ability to send emails, but this mini PC is more like the first generation of PDAs like the Psion Organizer from the ’80s.
Remember how Microsoft used to warn against using Open Source? Turns out... they still are.
To understand why the problem happens in the first place we need to take a look at how PostgreSQL stores data: After the tuple header which is present in every row we got a couple of varchar columns. We just used varchar here to prove the point. The same issues will happen with other data types – the problem is simply more apparent with varchar as it is more complicated internally than, say, integer.
How does PostgreSQL access a column? It will fetch the row and then dissect this tuple to calculate the position of the desired column inside the row. So if we want to access column #1000 it means that we have to figure out how long those first 999 columns before our chosen one really are. This can be quite complex. For integer we simply have to add 4, but in case of varchar, the operation turns into something really expensive. Let’s inspect how PostgreSQL stores varchar (just to see why it is so expensive): [...]
On our latest IoT Podcast episode, we take a question that Brent left on our IoT Voicemail Hotline. He’s interested in learning to code some IoT projects. Brent knows about Arduino and Raspberry Pi products but he’s wondering if there’s anything new in this space.
I recently taught an introduction to Python course, to final-year undergraduate students. These students had little to zero programming experience, and were all expected to get set up with Python (using the Anaconda environment, which we had determined to be the easiest way to get a reasonable baseline configuration) on laptops they had brought themselves.
What follows is not a slight on these people, who were all motivated, intelligent, and capable. It is a slight on the world of programming in the current ages, if you are seeking to get started with putting a general-purpose computer to your own purposes and merely own a general-purpose computer.
“Security expert” Matthew Garrett blew up Windows on the laptop he’s been complaining about all week by enabling the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA certificate, then says the Bitlocker Backdoor (for police) saved his data from the TPM.
My God, this guy couldn’t get better with a bag of chips.
I don’t even have to make much effort to blog about Matthew Garrett FAILs. All I have to do is screenshot the Nitter instance I use.
[...]
Of course, back to Bitlocker…. If Microsoft has your decryption key, they can be compelled to give it to the police, which makes it a backdoor that they admit to having. There very well can be others that they don’t admit to having.
But if you use Windows at all, the Telemetry, Windows Defender, and Smartscreen are telling them all of the stuff on your computer anyway, and all of your keystrokes. So if you have anything you’re not supposed to have, they can tell law enforcement, and then get themselves compelled to hand over your decryption recovery key if it is in your Microsoft account. Due to being the default, it almost certainly is.
Then you may be in court with your life ruined spending your last pennies on a lawyer in some last ditch effort to stay out of prison.
I work on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team. With just three people, we maintain the software and hardware infrastructure for GNU and FSF, and virtual machines for several other important free software projects. We run our own hardware, not relying on any so-called "cloud" services. And we run free software in all possible ways. That includes fifteen servers in two data centers and in our Boston office, over a hundred virtual machines, and ten workstations and laptops, all running GNU/Linux. Every one of those has a freedom-respecting BIOS, but that wasn't always the case...
A move to freedom
The BIOS is a computer's Basic Input/Output System, which initializes the hardware enough so that it can be passed off to another program like a boot loader. The FSF turned its free BIOS advocacy into an official Free BIOS campaign in 2005. In 2009, a new server was deployed, dubbed "Columbia," to a data center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It had a nonfree BIOS. Why? We are not certain, but a prior FSF sysadmin was a Coreboot contributor and had contributed fixes to an extremely similar motherboard. They seemed to have plans to help get Coreboot ported to Columbia's motherboard and install it. Unfortunately, that work was never completed. It was not a good idea, nor was it within FSF policy, to deploy it for uses other than Coreboot development until after it had a free BIOS. Shortly after that, two more servers were deployed, also with nonfree BIOS.
When I couldn’t fall asleep last night 1 my sleep-deprived brain suddenly went “I bet you can’t write a Makefile for FizzBuzz.” While I obviously should have responded with Homer Simpson’s classic “Shut up, brain, or I’ll stab you with a Q-tip.”, it was too late, I had already nerd sniped myself. I fully expected to waste way too much time on this but it only (?) took a little over an hour to come up with a solution.
I got 1,000 words into “what, exactly, is software complexity” before remembering that this is supposed to be less effort than the blog. So instead I’m going to list some ideas I had for programming languages. I think all of these are technically doable, so it’s more a “nobody else wants this badly enough” thing. Also caveat these might all already exist; I just know the languages I know!
FOAAS by now moved to version 2.3.2 in its repo. This releases 2.3.2 of rfoaas catches up, and brings the first release in about two and a half years.
This 2.3.2 release of FOAAS brings us six new REST access points: absolutely(), dense(), dumbledore(), lowpoly(), understand(), and yeah(). Along with these new functions, documentation and tests were updated.
openSUSE joins fellow open-source project Arch Linux in having up-to-date packages for the Nim Language and the statically typed, imperative programming language now has first-class Nim support in openSUSE.
The compiled programming language gives programmers runtime efficiency and combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula.
I'm not sure of how many of you know the ecosystem of Perl QA, so I decided to move an old article of mine to medium.com and update it to reflect all the changes that happened between those years.
The images reflect five areas of space that researchers agreed to target: the exoplanet WASP-96 b; the Southern Ring Nebula; the Carina Nebula; Stephan's Quintet (five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus); and the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.
I’ve been working as a customer service agent for what has felt like forever, but in reality it’s been less than one year and there are many things I’ve learned so far and that I wish customers knew.
This can apply to anyone who works in any sort of customer service. And if you are someone who is contacting customer service then please remember these things and your experience will be a lot better.
To accomplish this, Bandini took a single MiCS-4514 and connected it to an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, along with an OLED screen, fan, and buzzer for sending out alerts. The MiCS-4514 is a multi-gas sensor that is able to detect methane, ethanol, hydrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide. This capability means that explosive and/or poisonous gas can be identified well before it builds up to a critical level indoors.
Amin's lawsuit cites a marine biologist who analyzed 20 samples of tuna offerings from 20 different Subway restaurants and found "no detectable tuna DNA sequences whatsoever" in 19 samples. But, Amin says, the samples did contain other types of animal DNA, such as from chicken and pork.
I ran across an article openly wondering what the issue is with gay men who are aware that AIDS is still out there and is still a big problem, yet engage in “barebacking” (unprotected sex, especially with strangers).
“Gay men want the AIDS epidemic to be over.”, it said.
The public was “over” COVID too, after a couple of years.
Nobody is getting their vaccines now, even though they easily could.
Few people are wearing masks. Almost nobody in Illinois does, just months after ridiculing “red state retards” for behaving the same way.
That Wandering Thoughts' front page now gives Bingbot 403s hasn't particularly slowed it down. Over the past almost 24 hours, Bingbot has made just under 1,400 requests for the URL from two different IPs (one of which made most of them). It doesn't yet seem to have latched on to any other page with a similar death grip, although my Linux category is somewhat popular with it right now (with 40 requests today). Probably I'm going to have to keep an eye on this.
It's felt surprisingly nice to have this little irritation pushed out of my life. I know, I shouldn't care that Bingbot is doing bad and annoying things, but I do look at what IP addresses are the most active here (excluding blocked requests) and always having Bingbot show up there was this little poke. And while the operators of Bingbot probably will never notice or know, I can feel that I did a little tiny bit to hold badly behaved web spiders to account.
This important amendment would bring more transparency to a glaring and growing privacy problem. The applications people download onto their smartphones often collect geolocation data for the purpose of selling to marketing companies, advertisers, and others. With all of this very personal data sitting on an open market, the government has been an increasingly voracious customer. Law enforcement or intelligence agencies would normally have to go to a judge and get a warrant to acquire this information. Purchasing it on the open market has become an unconstitutional way that the government has tried to get around warrant requirements.
Unfortunately, there are insufficient statutes regulating who can collect and sell this information and for what purpose. This is how U.S. military contractors ended up buying the location data of people who used a prayer app specifically for Muslim users.€
We urge Congress to approve this amendment to the NDAA. Transparency is necessary for us to learn how widespread this invasive practice has become.€
This debate also draws attention to how sensitive information collected in other health trackers, loyalty apps, and even utility apps, could end up in the hands of data-brokers.
App-stores are loaded with apps that put your privacy at risk. It was recently revealed that a wide range of apps with access to users’ private information transmit or resell that to the so called “data-brokers” who in turn sell it to advertisers and sometimes even other entities and institutions, including law enforcement and intelligence services.
Famously, neither of these is the case with many large third party websites, which often have functionally no customer support and generally no out of band ways of identifying you (at least not ones they trust). If you (I) suffer total loss of all of your means of doing MFA, you are probably completely out of luck. One consequence of this is that you really need to have multiple forms of MFA set up before you make MFA mandatory on your account (better sites will insist on this). People advise things like multiple hardware tokens, with some of them carefully stored offsite in trusted locations. This significantly (or vastly) raises the complexity of using MFA with these sites.
Today, the European Union Commission will publish the annual Rule of Law Report. According to MEP and civil rights activist Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Greens/EFA Group in the EU Parliament), the European Union has a serious rule of law problem with disrespecting the rulings of the EU Court of Justice on the issue of bulk collection and retention of location and communications data of the entire population.
Amazon has provided Ring doorbell footage to law enforcement 11 times this year without the user’s permission, a revelation that’s bound to raise more privacy and civil liberty concerns about its video-sharing agreements with police departments across the country.
The disclosure came in a letter from the company that was made public Wednesday by U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who sent a separate letter to Amazon last month questioning Ring’s surveillance practices and engagement with law enforcement.
Ring has said before it will not share customer information with police without consent, a warrant or due to “an exigent or emergency” circumstance. The 11 videos shared this year fell under the emergency provision, Amazon’s letter said, the first time the company publicly shared such information. The letter, dated July 1, did not say which videos were shared with police.
In a press release, Markey's office notes that's a five-fold increase of the 400 police department partnerships Amazon reported in November 2019.
In a press conference, Amit Vasava, DCP, Cyber Crime, Ahmedabad said: “Post the Nupur Sharma incident, 2 hacker groups, 'Dragon force Malaysia' and 'Hacktivist Indonesia', initiated a cyber war against India, also appealed to Muslim [crackers] around the world for the same."
The House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol tried to make the case Tuesday that far-right groups and the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election are inextricably linked, detailing the mobilization of extremist groups after then-President Trump sent a tweet on Dec. 19, 2020, calling for supporters to protest in D.C. on Jan. 6.
[...]
In the hours after that tweet was posted, Kelly Meggs, the head of the Florida Oath Keepers, posted a message on Facebook pledging that his group would "work together" with the Three-Percenters and Proud Boys, two other right-wing extremist groups.
The investigation was hampered by riots in the city, incited by the brother of the suspected murderer, Mounir K..
Such nationalism worries not only liberals such as Fang Fang, a 67-year-old former member of China’s literary aristocracy. It has also raised anxiety in the West and among many of China’s neighbours. Foreign observers see it as a reflection of the Communist Party’s own mindset, and wonder whether it could portend more aggressive behaviour by China abroad.
A Brooklyn Center man faces federal charges after he lit his own camper on fire to make it look like a politically-motivated crime, and then allegedly filed several fraudulent insurance claims.
The U.S. Attorney's Office says Denis Vladmirovich Molla, 29, is charged with two counts of wire fraud in connection with the fire that took place on September 23, 2020.
On Wednesday, a jury in New York convicted ex-Central Intelligence Agency engineer Joshua Schulte on all nine charges he faced (as first reported by @InnerCityPress) as a result of the single largest leak in agency history. Dubbed Vault 7, the files and information shared by WikiLeaks in 2017 exposed a trove of tactics and exploits the CIA used to hack its targets’ computers, iPhones or Android phones, and even Samsung smart TVs.
One summer when I was there the factory caught fire. An entire hectare of industrial complex burned to the ground. This would have been a devastating environmental disaster as those chemicals would have flowed into the river in great amounts.
Except that in a somewhat rare moment of political clarity the municipality had decided a few years prior that cleaning up said chemicals, while costly, would be worth it. The risk of having it there was just too great.
And its “streamliner” shape isn’t just for the aesthetic. The Ioniq 6’s 0.21 drag coefficient helps bring its power consumption down to 14kWh per 100km, giving it an estimated 610km or about 379-mile range from the long-range 77.4-kWh battery (though the estimate is based on the European WLTP range, expect EPA range to be shorter). There is also a standard-range option with a 53-kWh battery. The Ioniq 6 in the press briefing also featured side view cameras instead of traditional mirrors, which we’re unlikely to see in the US.
In what the report described as a major breakthrough, Taiwan’s Tangeng Advanced Vehicles Co., Ltd. signed a memorandum of cooperation with Guatemala’s Luka Electric, the Innovate Group, and the city of Mixco to supply electric buses for services between Mixco and Guatemala City.
I did some tests with my USB chargers: how much power do they consume when plugged into a power socket without charging any device (standby)?
Bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency markets have a long history of "persons with a dominant position in bitcoin manipulating bitcoin pricing" and "manipulative activity involving purported “stablecoins,” including Tether (USDT)". Among the techniques involved are "pump-and-dump" schemes. Below the fold I review the literature on these schemes, and follow up with a critique.
Digiconomist also estimates that the Bitcoin network is responsible for about 73 million tons of carbon dioxide per year—equal to the amounts generated by Turkmenistan. Based on data through July 9, 2022, mining for Ethereum produces an estimated 35.4 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the same amount as New Zealand.
Miners such as Riot Blockchain Inc., Argo Blockchain Plc and Core Scientific Inc., who operate millions of energy-intensive computers to secure the Bitcoin blockchain network and earn rewards in the token, flocked to the Lone Star State thanks to its low energy costs and liberal regulations on [cryptocurrency] mining. The state has become one of the largest [cryptocurrency]-mining hubs by computing power in the world.
The European Commission wants to organise an EU response to such a nightmare, not least to avoid the sort of beggar-thy-neighbour policies which member states initially pursued when covid hit. “We need to make sure that in case of full disruption, the gas flows towards where it’s needed most,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the commission, on July 6th. The commission’s plan should be announced by July 20th. A ministerial summit on energy security is being planned later this month.
The battle over Twitter's future is moving into a courtroom — not in California, where it is headquartered, but in Delaware, where the social media company was incorporated in 2007.
The Council on Foreign Relations discussed its recommendations at an event it hosted Tuesday, as Washington comes on the heels of major cyber attacks that have rocked the private sector. A publication from the CFR argued that the United States cannot “capture the gains of future innovation by continuing to pursue failed policies based on an unrealistic and dated vision of the internet.”
The think tank said Tuesday that the United States should confront the reality that U.S. policies promoting an open, global [Internet] have failed but should bring together a coalition of allies around these ideals.
Chinese social media networks such as Sina Weibo and the Bilibili video service have announced campaigns against “wrongly written” Chinese characters, state media reported Thursday.
Weibo on Wednesday said it launched a campaign to “rectify posts that use wrongly written characters, including homophonous characters or restructured characters, to spread illegal and harmful information,” state news outlet Global Times said.
Chinese internet users often resort to homophones, very common in the Chinese language, to circumvent censorship.
A group of more than 75 workers, including producers, reporters and editors, has requested voluntary recognition. A spokesperson for the news unit's parent station says management intends to recognize the group.
Before going further, it’s essential to put California into context. While the state is known for posh spots like Beverly Hills, Marin County, and Silicon Valley, the Golden State has the highest poverty rate in America. Indeed, the poverty figures in the state can only be described as shocking. A 2021 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that “More than a third of Californians are living in or near poverty. Nearly one in six (16.4 percent) Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line … All told, more than a third (34.0 percent) of state residents were poor or near-poor in 2019.” Los Angeles, the state’s biggest city, and a magnet for generations of immigrants has one of the highest poverty rates among America’s biggest cities.
Hugo Clément, who has been accused of Islamophobia by some internet users, also wanted to remind people that he fights against all forms of violence against animals. “For many, to be ‘Islamophobic’ is to speak out against ritual slaughter. It is shameful to argue like this,” he posted at length on his Twitter account. Throughout the year, animal rights activists mobilise around 1000 issues: Bullfighting, factory farming, cruel hunts, industrial fishing, ‘classic’ slaughterhouses.” Defending his position, he concluded: “There is no reason not to fight a practice that adds unnecessary suffering just because it is done in the name of religious beliefs.”
Security video published Tuesday by two Texas news outlets shows police officers retreating from the classroom where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Melinna Bobadilla shared the incident to Twitter on 11 July. In a series of now-viral tweets, the California-based actress explained that she was removed from the Sacramento flight for questioning the airline’s “misogynistic” dress code.
Though the timeline of the events are unclear, according to the actress, the police were soon called to escort her from the plane, as well as force the unnamed young woman to cover up with a Southwest-branded top.
Tiyrab will appeal the decision. Most stoning sentences, which are mainly against women are overturned in the high court. the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies (ACJPS) called for Tiyrab's release and for her right to go for a fair trial. The ACJPS also said the sentence violated domestic and international law.
Under Islamic law, Hudud crimes – including apostasy, theft, highway robbery, adultery, slander, and drinking alcohol – carry penalties that include the amputation of hands and feet, flogging, and death.
The implementation of the Islamic Penal Code in Sudan by the former regime has drawn criticism from international human rights groups.
Ms. Tiyrab’s trial was also tainted with several irregularities, for example, her trial commenced without obtaining a formal complaint from the police in Kotsi. Ms. Tiyrab was also denied legal representation. Under Article 135(3) of the Sudanese Criminal Procedure Code 1991, a defendant is entitled to legal representation in any criminal case that carries a punishment of 10 years or more imprisonment, amputation, or death. The charge and penalty were not explained to Ms. Tiyrab either. Authorities have also failed to refer the file to the high court for approval.
The proceedings, which have been running since August 2021, have strained relations between Sweden and Iran, raising concerns about reprisals against Western prisoners held by the Islamic regime. Two Swedish-Iranian citizens are on death row.
Noury, 61, faced charges including crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the killing of at least 5,000 prisoners across Iran, allegedly ordered by supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
The killings were revenge for attacks carried out by exiled opposition group the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) at the end of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.
According to statements made by Commissioners Vestager and Breton, Internet access providers could be allowed to require payments from online platforms in the upcoming Connectivity Infrastructure Act. “This kind of access fee would radically abolish the longstanding internet principle of net neutrality, which requires internet service providers to provide access to all sites, content, and applications at the same speed, under the same conditions without blocking or giving preference to any content. By experience access fees risk to make Internet access expensive, slow down or even disrupt access to important Internet services. Pirates fought hard for net neutrality and we will not watch this Commission dismantle it”, explains Patrick Breyer MEP (Pirate Party), one of the letter’s initiators.
Telstra has completed the acquisition of Digicel Pacific, after necessary approvals from the government and regulatory bodies being completed, the company said in an announcement to the ASX on Thursday.
The telco said the issue of tax to be paid to the PNG Government would be resolved by the vendor.
"The vendor has made arrangements to resolve the matter with the PNG tax authorities. Telstra is not part of this process, and the outcomes of this process are a matter for the vendor," the statement said.
The Additional Company Tax was approved by the PNG parliament on 29 March and imposes a one-time 350 million kina (about A$132 million) tax on Digicel, according to a statement released by Digicel Pacific on 4 April.
Law students getting ready to take the Bar exam digitally may run into a serious issue: one of the nation’s most frequently-used test-taking software packages, Examplify, is incompatible with Intel’s latest generation of processors.
In a notice to users, ExamSoft, the company that owns Examplify, writes that 12th Gen Intel processors aren’t compatible with its software. “New Windows devices containing the Intel 12th generation chipset are triggering Examplify’s automatic virtual machine check,” Examplify’s notice reads. “These are NOT currently supported. Therefore, they cannot be used for the upcoming July 2022 bar exam.” One user drew attention to the issue in a post on Twitter, and included a screencap of what appears to be a notice given to Bar applicants.
The software focuses on microtransactions but can also be applied to games with more traditional DLC models. Denuvo reckons this is the first anti-piracy software that specifically protects DLC and, given that's such a popular business model these days, no doubt you'll start to see it soon in a F2P game near you. Whether it will also make those games run like a dog remains to be seen but, on past form, you wouldn't bet against it.
Microsoft President Brad Smith has served on Netflix's board since 2015.
First Netflix will keep the ad-support plans separate from the existing plans. This means these newer plans could be much cheaper given they would have advertisements on them. It is not clear if Netflix will make changes to the mobile, basic and standard plans in India, given these are typically priced much lower than the US market price. Rivals such as Disney+Hotstar do offer ads on their more basic plans.
Netflix today said that it's "very early days" and there's "much to work through," but that its long term goal is to offer "more choice for consumers and a premium, better-than-linear TV brand experience for advertisers." Netflix is rumored to be aiming to launch its ad-supported tier before the end of 2022, perhaps in the last three months of the year.
Netflix’s decision came as a surprise to the industry, given its long-standing distaste for ads, and word spread quickly that it was looking to find a well-equipped partner to help it get an ad-backed plan off the ground quickly. To that end, Netflix seemingly spoke to everyone in the ad tech world, including Google, Comcast, The Trade Desk and Roku. Microsoft, which acquired the Xandr digital video advertising service from AT&T earlier this year, ultimately won out.
The move is a surprising one in many regards. By taking on a partner, Netflix will likely have to sacrifice some of the ad revenue it generates. Yet building an ad-sales unit where none exists is a daunting task, and Netflix may have required help to get started as its rivals — already well-versed in how to sell millions of dollars in commercial inventory to Madison Avenue — use their hard-won expertise as an edge. Disney, for example, earlier this week unveiled a new agreement between itself and the ad-tech company the Trade Desk as part of an effort to boost the commercial inventory it sells via connected-TV. Disney is set to launch an ad-supported version of Disney+ later this year, and was already at work selling it to marketers during the industry’s recent “upfront” ad-sales market.
Netflix executives hope that introducing a lower-priced advertising tier will attract cost-conscious subscribers. Some analysts have cautioned that by introducing a cheaper service, the streaming service could cannibalize from its base of subscribers who pay more for a commercial-free experience.
The software giant brought in $10 billion in ad revenue last year, selling ads on various services such as its Bing search engine and its business-focused social network, LinkedIn. Last month, Microsoft completed its acquisition of AT&T Inc's online advertising platform, Xandr Inc., which allows advertisers to buy ad space across thousands of websites and target audiences.
Microsoft President Brad Smith has served on Netflix's board since 2015.
Work on the project inside Microsoft started with a small team and Mr. Nadella has personally been involved for more than a month, people familiar with the matter said. Among the Microsoft executives heavily involved were Mikhail Parakhin, president of web experiences at Microsoft, Chris Young, executive vice president of business development, strategy and ventures and Rob Wilk, corporate vice president of advertising, the people said.
Netflix has warned it will likely report even larger subscriber losses for the April-June period, increasing the urgency to roll out a cheaper version of its service backed by ads to help reverse customer erosion. That decline has contributed to a 70% decline in its stock price so far this year, wiped out about $190 billion in shareholder wealth and triggered hundreds of layoffs.
The Los Gatos, California, company is scheduled to release its April-June numbers on July 19, but still hasn't specified when its ad-supported option will be available except that it will roll out before 2023. Netflix's announcement about the Microsoft partnership also omitted a crucial piece of information: the anticipated price of the ad-supported option.
Choosing Microsoft recalls a close relationship between the two for streaming launches. The first version of Watch Instantly that streamed mostly B-movies used Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to deliver video instead of the more common Flash Player until it was replaced by HTML5, and the Xbox 360 was the first console with an HD Netflix streaming app.
The Commission is monitoring the implementation of the Microsoft Windows 8 security requirements. The Commission is however currently not in possession of evidence suggesting that the Windows 8 security requirements would result in practices in violation of EU competition rules as laid down in Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. In particular, on the basis of the information currently available to the Commission it appears that the OEMs are required to give end users the option to disable the UEFI secure boot.
Bright House Networks will go to trial accused by several major music companies of not doing enough to curb piracy. In preparation, both sides have asked the court to ban topics from being presented to the jury. The music companies, for example, don't want the ISP to argue that terminating Internet access is a human rights violation.
As I wrote at the time, by some measures Medium was succeeding. It had started 2021 with around 700,000 paid subscriptions, and was on track for more than $35 million in revenue from its $5 monthly subscription offering. At the same time, internal data showed that it largely was not high-quality journalism that was leading readers to subscribe: it was random stories posted to the platform by independent writers that happened to get featured by the Google or Facebook algorithms.
Medium said that Mr. Williams would be stepping down as chief executive effective July 20 and that he would be replaced by Tony Stubblebine, the chief executive of the online coaching company Coach.me. Mr. Williams will become chairman of Medium’s board, a new position.
Proxmox is my preferred hypervisor to deploy various containers and VMs. Sometimes, I want to create a VM inside another VM. Meaning - I just want to host a guest hypervisor(i.e VM) in my physical Proxmox hypervisor. Have you ever wondered how to setup a guest hypervisor in a host hypervisor? In this guide, I will show you how to enable nested virtualization in Proxmox VE and then enable VT-X in the guest hypervisor.
I bought some herbs and planted them in a planter box on my porch! Currently I'm growing basil, cilantro, and parsley, the three I figured I'd be most likely to use. Maybe one day I'll fulfill my dream of turning my father-in-law's entire yard into a vegetable and herb garden. He'll never have to mow again; I'm sure I can convince him.
I was walking my dog a few weeks ago and – having just crossed the street – looked back to see a young coyote walking in the opposite direction. While it was small enough to not be a threat and probably didn't want to have anything to do with us, my (large) dog is trusting enough she could easily be hurt. I took a bit of a circuitous route back home, avoiding a second encounter.
If you've read some of my previous posts you probably know that I drink a lot of tea. My daily intake is measured in pots (of about 1.2 litres each) rather than cups. Thus when I had to spend almost a full day in town a couple of days ago I was faced with a conundrum. A single cup of tea at a café is around €3 (yes, I hop between using euros and USD when describing prices; just be happy that you don't have to learn quick conversions from SEK). Can you imagine what my tea consumption for a day would cost at that price?
Sefaria is an incredible online resource, and now Krixano has made it significant parts of it available via Gemini!
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.