Brief: In this guide, we explore the best Microsoft Teams alternatives for Linux that you can use to streamline your workflows and collaborate with your friends and colleagues.
And I thought… do you even need HTML to make a website?
A few hours later, I launched the NO-HT.ML website. Proving, once and for all, that you don't need HTML to make a beautiful1 responsive2, and useful3 website which everyone will love4.
My blog is finally running on a new host! I learned a lot about DNS and SSL certificates during the transition and it tickled the curious part of my brain that loves puzzles and problems. I love doing things the “right way” and “the hard way” to learn and I hope this might educate or be a good reference in the future. I aimed to do my migration with no downtime, but my website did go down for a few minutes. For that, I explained what I did wrong and what I believe is the better method.
The FTC announced that Epic Games has agreed to pay $520 million, due to "violating children's privacy laws" and "tricking users into making unwanted charges".
Neon Prime isn't here yet, and there's nothing actually confirmed about it, but data miner and leaker Tyler McVicker gave a fresh overview on what to expect.
Out of the blue, an interesting Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), formally called CVE-2022-23093 has emerged, which exploits one of the fundamental tools of the Internet stack: Ping, the command that implements the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) as it’s universally known.
The Debian-based Tails 5.8 privacy-focused Linux distribution has been released today and it’s a major update that brings exciting new features and better security for those who want to stay anonymous while browsing the Internet.
The biggest change in Tails 5.8 is the fact that Wayland is now used as the default display system instead of X.Org Server for an extra layer of security. For Tails specifically, the switch to Wayland reenables the Unsafe Browser, which was disabled a few releases ago due to a security vulnerability in X11.
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a good chunk of my spare time over the past 6 months working on a project I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I bought a Chumby 8 in 2011. It’s an 8ââ¬Â³ touchscreen device powered by the Marvell PXA166 processor. It is essentially a souped-up digital picture frame with extra capabilities like speakers, a microphone, and Wi-Fi. There are a bunch of little Flash-based “apps” you can install for stuff like pictures, music, sports scores, weather, games, etc. I have no idea how many of the apps still work these days. Chumby actually went out of business a few months after I bought mine, although one of the founders stepped up to keep the service running. A variant of this device was also created for Insignia, which was called the Infocast 8ââ¬Â³ Internet Media Display.
The CN0549 CbM platform provides system flexibility and a myriad of software resources to designers when developing their applications. A deep dive into the software stacks has been provided with discussions around how the different components can be leveraged for CbM and predictive maintenance (PdM) developments. Due to the openness of the software, HDL, schematics, and integrations with data science tools, designers can leverage the components they need for their end system throughout the entire stack. In summary, this condition monitoring design offers an easy to use out-of-the-box solution, complete with open-source software and hardware, to provide flexibility and allow designers to achieve better, customized results in less time.
What is likely the final batch of upgrades has arrived for my RiscPC. This is exciting stuff as I got some games running on it too. Let’s get into it.
Back in t’day (drops 20p in t’swear jar), before the advent of the Internet as we know it in its current form, computers talked to each other using BBS software and terminal programs. You dialled the remote machine, the modem on the other side would pick up and a conversation would ensue, machine to machine.
The internet abstracted all this away, and we moved towards a model where your computer connected to an Internet Service Provider, and then all your traffic is routed over a global network of connected machines.
The foreign producers of the nominally “Russian” Baikal and Elbrus CPUs have stopped delivering them to Russia.
The problem with this decentralized platform, the number of servers keeps growing, and there are many domain names to track to detect Mastodon traffic. Hopefully, it’s possible to generate the list of servers through an API call.
After migrating my blog to a new host, I noticed my website would crawl to a halt while I clicked around. I would see hangs ranging from 4 seconds to 15 seconds. If I click enough, I’d eventually see HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. Why was visiting my website causing it to hang? Here’s my debugging story.
It was strange. In my previous post, I shared some tests measuring my website’s response times and the numbers were beautifully performant. Yet, I was seeing and feeling something very different. CURL would return within one second, but my real-world experience was terrible. So what was the difference?
Progress, formerly known as Coreutils Viewer, is a light C command that searches for coreutils basic commands such as cp, mv, tar, dd, gzip/gunzip, cat, grep, etc currently being executed on the system and shows the percentage of data copied, it only runs on Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.
Additionally, it also displays important aspects such as estimated time and throughput€ and offers users a “top-like” mode.
When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, right? What about when life hands you annoyingly intrusive work-from-home policies that require you to physically stay at your computer even though you really, REALLY need to go to the bathroom, but can’t be trusted to act like a responsible adult who won’t get diverted by TV or the fridge on the way back? In that case, you build something like the Mouse Whisperer — because malicious compliance is the best kind of compliance.
Alabama Power and Florida Power & Light hired a political consulting firm that paid six news websites in the two states nearly a million dollars as they attacked officials seeking to hold the polluting utilities accountable, an investigation revealed Monday.
"Matrix sought to ensure much coverage was secretly driven by the priorities of its clients."
My husband and I stopped exchanging gifts a few years ago. Instead, we make donations and do something fun, like see a play. It’s great: no shiny new books to add to the teetering tower of unread tomes, no scarves to add to the overflowing basket of same, and especially no complicated kitchen equipment to gaze up reproachfully from next to that never-used air fryer I got from a neighbor on Freecycle. Whether or not you give presents to your loved ones, here are some suggestions for your end-of-year donations.
This month the media was abuzz with the announcement that the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) had accomplished a significant breakthrough in the quest to achieve commercial nuclear fusion. Specifically, the announcement was that a net fusion energy gain (Q) had been measured of about 1.5: for an input of 2.05 MJ, 3.15 MJ was produced.
Most consumer-grade audio equipment has been in stereo since at least the 1960s, allowing the listener to experience sounds with a three-dimensional perspective as if they were present when the sound was originally made. Stereo photography has lagged a little behind the stereo audio trend, though, with most of the technology existing as passing fads or requiring clumsy hardware to experience fully. Not so with the DIY stereoscopic cameras like this one produced by this group of 3D photography enthusiasts, who have€ also some methods to view the photos in 3D without any extra hardware.
There are no weird, specialized components nor esoteric sleep mode tricks behind the long battery life of [Zak]’s WiFi mail slot watcher. Just some sensible design and clever focus on the device’s purpose: to send an HTTP request whenever it detects that the front door’s mail slot has been opened. The HTTP request is what kicks off useful notifications, but it’s the hardware design that’s really worth a peek.
[CoreWeaver] creates an alarm clock that includes features one might expect in such a project, including an FM radio, snooze button inputs and a display, but goes beyond the basic functionality to include temperature sensing and a PC connection, opening the way for customizable functionality.
Over the years as microcontrollers have become fast enough to do the heavy lifting, we have become used to 10 megabit Ethernet being bit-banged from interfaces it was never meant to emerge from. We think however that we’ve never seen one driven from an SPI interface, so this one from [Ivan] may be a first. With a cleverly designed transceiver using logic chips, it even offers a chance to understand something about the timing of an Ethernet interface, too.
For a large part of the 20th century, motion pictures were distributed on nitrate film. Although cheaper for the studios, this film was highly flammable and prone to decay. On top of that, most film prints were simply discarded once they had been through their run at the cinema, so a lot of film history has been lost.
A study by the National Institute of Health in the first 16 months of the coronavirus pandemic found that mothers in the U.S. were especially likely to report high levels of stress during the public health crisis if they experienced major disruptions to their daily lives at work, their children's schools, or in their interactions with their communities—as the majority of people surveyed said they did.
The NIH's Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program surveyed more than 11,000 mothers between April 2020 and August 2021—the largest study to date regarding how mothers experienced the pandemic.
This narrative has made it easy for the meat industry to create a false dichotomy that pits people against animals: “Do you care more about a pig than my family’s livelihood?”
It’s now been decades with factory farming as the dominant industry, but have rural communities actually experienced their purported economic benefits? Has factory farming made life easier for the people in small towns?
With congressional leadership expected to imminently release the text of omnibus government funding legislation, Politico revealed Monday that Democrats are preparing to join with Republicans who have demanded an end to Medicaid policies enacted because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As part of pandemic relief legislation passed in 2020, Congress boosted Medicaid funding to states but imposed a "continuous coverage" requirement, barring them from cutting off most enrollees from the government healthcare program until after the public health emergency (PHE) officially ends.
Tracking technologies are used to collect and analyze information about how users interact with regulated entities’ websites or mobile applications (“apps”). For example, a regulated entity may engage a technology vendor to perform such analysis as part of the regulated entity’s health care operations.5 The HIPAA Rules apply when the information that regulated entities collect through tracking technologies or disclose to tracking technology vendors includes protected health information (PHI).6 Some regulated entities may share sensitive information with online tracking technology vendors and such sharing may be unauthorized disclosures of PHI with such vendors.7Regulated entities are not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures8 of PHI to tracking technology vendors or any other violations of the HIPAA Rules. For example, disclosures of PHI to tracking technology vendors for marketing purposes, without individuals’ HIPAA-compliant authorizations, would constitute impermissible disclosures.9
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that the video-sharing site will promote content including dangerously restrictive diets, pro-self-harm content and content romanticising suicide to users who show a preference for the material, even if they are registered as under-18s.
TikTok on Monday reiterated a statement, saying the company was "disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States."Some 19 of the 50 U.S. states have now at least partially blocked access on government computers to TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. Most of the restrictions came within the past two weeks.
Some members of Congress last week proposed a nationwide ban, which would follow countries such as India that have already prohibited its use.
The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is one of the oldest Internet protocols that is still widely used. The protocol has no security mechanisms, communication is unencrypted, and there is no authentication between client and server or safeguards against manipulation of network packets. Attacks against NTP can have a serious impact because other protocols are dependent on the accuracy of the system time, such as DNSSEC, Kerberos, and TLS.
Today, the European Commission issued a new adequacy decision replacing the "Privacy Shield" decision, that was previously invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) over US surveillance. The CJEU required (1) that US surveillance is proportionate within the meaning of Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) and (2) that there is access to judicial redress, as required under Article 47 CFR. Updated US law (Executive Order 14086) seems to fail on both requirements, as it does not change the situation from the previously applicable PPD-28. There is continuous "bulk surveillance" and a "court" that is not an actual court. Therefore, any EU "adequacy decision" that is based on Executive Order 14086 will likely not satisfy the CJEU.
Of the 189 publicly available sources we uncovered, 53 contained figures for the number of iris scans police had collected. Based on our analysis of these 53 reports, we estimate that between March 2019 and July 2022, police may have collected between roughly 1,248,075 and 1,452,035 iris scans, representing between one fifth (21.1%) and one quarter (25.6%) of Qinghai’s total population (5.9 million). The number of irises scanned would make mass iris scan collection in Qinghai the largest known program conducted in China relative to population, with the possible exception of an earlier program in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then “swatting” them — falsely reporting a violent incident at the target’s address to trick local police into responding with force. Prosecutors say the duo used the compromised Ring devices to stream live video footage on social media of police raiding their targets’ homes, and to taunt authorities when they arrived.
From the€ Internet of very broken things€ to€ telecom networks, the state of U.S. privacy and user security is arguably pathetic. It’s 2022 and we still don’t have even a basic privacy law for the Internet era, in large part because over-collection of data is too profitable to a wide swath of industries, which, in turn, lobby Congress to do either nothing, or the€ wrong thing.
We are pleased to announce the first release of the Chameleon, Sequoia’s reimplementation of the GnuPG interface. This is a technology preview, but we encourage developers who integrate GnuPG into their software to see whether it works with the Chameleon.
The Chameleon is a re-implementation and drop-in replacement of gpg and gpgv using the Sequoia OpenPGP implementation.
As many have noted: these criminal referrals legally mean jack squat. Congress is not a law enforcement body. Congress can write the laws, but it’s up to others to determine if those laws have been violated. That’s a good thing, and the next two years of Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Congress hunting Hunter Biden’s penis pics will prove the wisdom of having at least nominal separation of powers between our political bodies and our law enforcement apparatus.
Unfortunately, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is the law enforcement body responsible for holding the people who attacked the country accountable. Whether Trump is actually charged for the crimes the Select Committee laid out is, and has always been, up to the discretion of Garland and the DOJ.
In November, less than a week after the United States and other countries issued a terror alert in South Africa, the U.S. Treasury Department filed sanctions against four Durban men who allegedly procure weapons and money for ISIS.
“On the evidence before this court, the government has made arrangements with the government of Rwanda which are intended to ensure that the asylum claims of people relocated to Rwanda are properly determined in Rwanda,” read part of a summary of the judgement by Lord Justice Lewis, who oversaw the high court case.
Human rights advocates on Monday vowed to continue fighting the United Kingdom's plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda if they arrive in the U.K. after crossing the English Channel by boat, after the country's High Court ruled that the Conservative Party's plan is lawful.
"If the government moves ahead with these harmful plans, it would damage the U.K.'s reputation as a country that values human rights."
One of the judges, Lord Justice Lewis, said, “The court has concluded that it is lawful for the government to make arrangements for relocating asylum seekers to Rwanda and for their asylum claims to be determined in Rwanda rather than in the United Kingdom.” But he added that the home secretary “has not properly considered” eight individual cases, meaning the decisions to send these people to Rwanda will now be returned to the Home Office.
More than 44,000 people have arrived in Britain across the Channel this year, and several have died in the attempt, including four last week when a boat capsized in freezing weather.
Hey, cheer up because it truly is a beauty! I’m talking about this country’s latest “stealth bomber,” the B-21 Raider, just revealed by Northrop Grumman, the company that makes it, in all its glory. With its striking bat-winged shape and its ability to deliver a very big bang (as in nuclear weapons), it’s our very own “bomber of the future.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it at its explosive debut, it will “fortify America’s ability to deter aggression, today and into the future.” Now, that truly makes me proud to be an American.
My blueprint for peace is simple.€ 1. Ceasefire based on the UN Charter, 2. A ban on deliveries of weapons to the belligerents, 3. UN organized international assistance to all populations suffering because of the war, lack of energy, lack of food, etc. 4. UN organized and monitored referenda in Crimea and Donbas, 5. Lifting of sanctions that have nullified the benefits of globalization, broken supply chains, upset international trade, endangered food security, 6. Drafting of a new security architecture for Europe and the world, 7. Establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear the grievances from all sides, 8. Punishment of war crimes by the respective governments, e.g. Ukrainian crimes to be investigated and prosecuted by Ukrainian judges, Russian crimes to be investigated and punished by Russian tribunals.
There is no valid binary analysis or division of the world into “good guys” and “bad guys”.€ There has always been good in the bad and bad in the good.€ A binary analysis is only possible if one refuses to consider the opinions of all belligerents, and of the rest of humanity — as it watches this tragedy unfold.€ There are root causes of the catastrophe that we are witnessing, and if we want to formulate a viable blueprint for peace, we must not look at it exclusively from the “Western” perspective, but also take into account the views of 1.5 Billion Chinese, 1.5 Billion Indians, 240 million Pakistanis, 170 million Bangladeshis, 280 million Indonesians, 220 million Nigerians, 220 million Brazilians, 140 million Mexicans etc.€ The stakes are too high, and we Americans and Europeans have no right to risk the survival of the planet because of an internal European querelle.€ For the average African, Asian or Latin American, it is wholly irrelevant whether Crimea is in Russia or in Ukraine.€ A nuclear war must not be fought over this.
There is no war that I have experienced that has been as devastating as the war on Iraq, which snatched the lives of millions, devastated the lives of the entire population, and left the country scarred beyond belief. No doubt other reporters who are in Ukraine will come with their own stories. There is no comparison of warzones, one more deadly than the other, although the sheer destruction of Iraq compares to the pain inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombs.
Wars are to be opposed and every effort must be made to prevent wars and to end wars.
Refugees who are at first warmly accepted as victims of tyranny may outstay their welcome and become resented and even hated. This is what happened to the five million Syrians who fled to Turkey and one million to Lebanon after 2011. The wars in Somalia and Yemen are not only endless, but are escalating.
Will the Ukraine conflict become another of these ceaseless wars? It is difficult to see why it should not, since neither Moscow nor Kyiv is likely to win a decisive victory but they still hope to improve their political and diplomatic position on the battlefield. The Russians are using precision-guided missiles and drones to destroy the Ukrainian infrastructure and the Ukrainians are beginning to fire missiles back at ostensibly military targets. It may not be long before they decide that if they are going to sit in the dark, so too will the Russians.
Conversely, the preoccupation with Ukraine has kept the Biden team from pursuing alternatives to the feckless dual containment policy against Russia and China; the maximalist (and similarly feckless) denuclearization policies against Iran and North Korea; the emphasis on increased military spending; and the unwillingness to pursue arms control and disarmament measures.€ A dialogue is needed with North Korea, and Biden should have returned to the Iran nuclear accord.€ But the Biden team doesn’t even include a disarmament specialist!
Although Biden can claim credit for ending the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the record spending on defense, which includes an $80 billion increase over last year’s spending as well as the emphasis on costly weapons systems points to business as usual.€ The increase in spending alone is far more than Russia spending on its entire defense budget.€ In fact, with the exception of China, this year’s increase is greater than every defense budget in the global community. The mainstream media approved the unrestrained defense spending, and merely highlighted the fact that the defense bill rescinded the Pentagon mandate regarding the coronavirus vaccine.
San Francisco was embroiled in controversy earlier this month over a proposal to allow police to deploy robots armed with deadly weapons. After initially greenlighting the technology, the Board of Supervisors reversed course due to widespread public outcry. For the time being, killer robots are banned in San Francisco, but the controversy there has put the issue in the national spotlight. People are increasingly aware that this technology exists and that some police departments want to deploy it.
The congressional committee probing the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on Monday concluded its proceedings by unanimously voting to recommend that Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department investigate former President Donald Trump and some of his associates for four crimes in connection with the deadly insurrection.
"Donald Trump knowingly and corruptly repeated election fraud lies, which incited his supporters to violence on January 6."
This time Eric takes on some of the arguments put forward by those on the Left who advocate for immediate negotiation as they claim to be the voice of the authentic “antiwar” Left. Eric addresses claims about NATO, US arms to Ukraine, the objectives of the Biden Administration, Putin’s justifications for the war, and much more.
Congress is on track in the coming week to give final approval to a national military budget for the fiscal year that is expected to reach about $858 billion—or $45 billion more than President Biden had requested and 8 percent more than last year.
"This isn't using our taxpayer dollars wisely," said one analyst. "It's robbing programs that we need."
In September, a Russian prisoner named Alexey who had just a few months left on his sentence decided to sign a contract with the Wagner private military company (PMC) after learning that his twin brother, Konstantin, had been drafted to fight in Ukraine. Now Konstantin is dead, and the twins’ family is desperately lobbying the Wagner Group to return Alexey, who has been out of contact since early November.€ But their pleas are being ignored.
Vladimir Putin has signed a decree instructing authorities in the Moscow region, Crimea, and Sevastopol to pass legislation to grant plots of land to veterans of the war in Ukraine free of charge.
EU member states and parliamentarians on Sunday announced an agreement for a major reform to the bloc's carbon market, the central plank of its ambitions to reduce emissions and invest in climate-friendly technologies.
The deal aims to accelerate emissions cuts, phase out free allowances to industries and targets fuel emissions from the building and road transport sectors, according to a European Parliament statement.
Restaurants have been preparing for months to implement a rule that comes into force on January 1, which for many has upended business models based on single-use packaging and utensils, both for eating in and for take-out.
The roughly 30,000 fast-food outlets in France serve six billion meals a year, generating an estimated 180,000 tons of waste.
The turnaround is attributable to the adoption of more accurate calculation methods at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). The updated calculations reveal that the carbon sink of forests has eroded so much in the past decade that it has undone the otherwise commendable emission reductions and, as a result, jeopardises the government-stated objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2035.
The objective is inscribed in the newly adopted climate act.
Over the objections of the Democratic Republic of Congo and frustrations by other African nations, a final draft of The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted in the early hours of Monday that conservationists say is not strong enough to prevent industries and corporate behemoths from continuing their destructive, profit-driven attacks on the natural world and vulnerable species.
"The draft agreement is weak," said An Lambrechts, leader of Greenpeace International's delegation at the summit, following the release of the final draft text on Sunday. "This is an open invitation to greenwash. In its present shape, it won't halt biodiversity loss, much less reverse it."
LUT University and Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aiming to deploy a micro-modular reactor (MMR€®) as a research and test reactor in the city of Lappeenranta, Finland. The planned project will also involve local authorities and stakeholders.
Zimbabwe’s power demand sits at 2100MW and at the time I am writing this we are producing 501MW of power. Less than 25% of the national demand. Is it a case that we don’t have enough power-generating stations to meet this demand?
The disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried has agreed to be extradited to the United States, one of his lawyers said on Monday, after a chaotic morning of legal maneuvering in which Mr. Bankman-Fried was shunted back and forth between court and prison in the Bahamas.
Mr. Bankman-Fried is facing fraud charges in the United States related to the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, which was based in the Bahamas. Jerone Roberts, a local defense lawyer for Mr. Bankman-Fried, told reporters that his client had agreed to extradition voluntarily, defying “the strongest possible legal advice.”
Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire of fraud was protected by the disguise of philanthropy, with the ideology of effective altruism used as justification for his once-immense fortune, estimated recently, at its peak, at over $26 billion. That fortune, always largely imaginary and speculative, is now gone. The Bahamas-based crypto exchange Bankman-Fried founded, FTX, is bankrupt. Bankman-Fried himself is facing a variety of criminal charges on fraud in both the Bahamas and the United States. Bankman-Fried’s philanthropy was always a shifty business (despite having prominent neoliberal apologists), since it was so clearly a vehicle for keeping cryptocurrency deregulated.1
U.S. Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden on Monday pressured federal regulators to reject a Canadian company's attempt to expand a fracked gas pipeline, citing President Joe Biden's climate promises, threats to Oregon's frontline communities, and efforts by their state to fight the planetary crisis.
"Rather than helping Americans, GTN Xpress would be supporting a market for dirty fossil gas from a foreign country."
“Thousands of fishers set out to catch trophy sharks after seeing Jaws,” he told the outlet, while suggesting — similar to other published studies — that the shark population was notably impacted by the release of the movie. “It was good blue-collar fishing. You didn’t have to have a fancy boat or gear — an average Joe could catch big fish, and there was no remorse since there was this mind-set that they were man-killers.”
For that reason, Benchley spent parts of his life after the book’s publishing working to campaign to save the oceanic creatures his book had vilified. “Jaws was entirely a fiction,” he reportedly told the London Daily Express in 2006. “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today.”
Johnson, a real estate broker and mother of two, said that on July 9, she noticed the same charge of $106.34 appear on her bank statement 12 times in a row. In a transaction report shared by Johnson with "GMA," there were also lesser charges of $53.16 and several more in the $200 to $600 range.
This generous support will help EFF educate journalists about, and protect them from, digital and legal threats. It also will help us do public education, build coalitions, and conduct research into the disciplinary technologies that corporations, schools, and individuals use to violate people’s autonomy and privacy.€
This grant, for work to be conducted through April 2023, is the latest in a series of grants made to EFF by the Craig Newmark Philanthropies, created by the founder of Craigslist to support causes including building networks to help protect the country in the cybersecurity world, defending against disinformation warfare, and fighting online harassment as well as support for ethical and trustworthy journalism, particularly in underserved communities.€
EFF, founded in 1990, is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, championing user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. Newmark is a member of EFF’s advisory board.€
Congratulations to everyone who worked to move the country and the world towards greater equity in 2022. Herewith are 10 of the most inspiring economic inequality victories of the year.
The Russian buyers’ demand for foreign real estate has increased by a factor of 2.3, compared to 2021. Compared to the 2019 pre-pandemic demand for properties abroad, this is a 1.7-fold increase.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit’s prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.
The Biden administration on Monday released a plan that seeks to eventually eradicate homelessness in the United States, starting with a 25% reduction in the number of people suffering from a lack of reliable access to safe housing over the next two years.
"My plan offers a roadmap for not only getting people into housing but also ensuring that they have access to the support, services, and income that allow them to thrive," President Joe Biden said in a statement. "It is a plan that is grounded in the best evidence and aims to improve equity and strengthen collaboration at all levels."
That said, reporters Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell, both excellent tech reporters who were both suspended from Musk’s Twitter over the last few days, have a more complete story of the stalker, including talking to the guy. And it’s pretty damn clear that it has literally nothing to do with the ElonJet account, which did not dox him, nor help the crazed guy.
"The Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi, who has been releasing internal documents from before Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Here Matt reveals everything we need to know about these revelations."
Update: After twelve hours of voting—and over 17.5 million accounts casting a digital response—the results of Elon Musk's survey question on whether or not he should "step down" as head of Twitter determined the answer was resounding: Yes.
With 17,502, 391 total votes, 57.5% said he should step aside while just 42.5% said he should not.
The last few days on Twitter have been, well, chaotic, I guess? Beyond the blocking of the ElonJet account, followed by the blocking of the @JoinMastodon account, then the blocking of journalists asking about all this and the silly made up defense of it, over the weekend, Twitter announced a new policy banning linking to or even displaying usernames on a whole host of other social media platforms:
Dozens of artists, labor advocates, and climate campaigners answered a call from Climate Justice Arts on Sunday, arriving at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco to paint the company's famed bird logo on the street outside along with pro-democracy messages.
"Sick of billionaires, wealthy corporations, and their politicians mismanaging, profiteering, and wrecking our communities and planet?" read the invitation to community members. "Join us speaking out against oligarchy by painting a guerrilla street mural directly in front of San Francisco Twitter headquarters."
Elon, we knew ye all too well. Elon Musk, the failed emperor of Twitter, will apparently be stepping down from his lofty perch after issuing a user poll asking whether he should remain head of the company. The poll appeared after yet another series of deranged miscalls and abuses on the site—from the random suspension of the accounts of Musk-critical journalists on the fabricated charge of doxxing Musk’s real-time whereabouts to an abrupt ban on promotional links to other social media platforms—which alienated even his previous supporters. It was scarcely surprising that the vote landed firmly in the “Leave” column.
Every year, Congress must follow through on an enormous and complicated task: agreeing on how to fund the government for the following year. The wrangling over spending often comes down to the wire, and this year, some Senators are considering shoehorning a controversial and unconstitutional bill, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), into the must-pass legislation. Make no mistake: KOSA is bad enough on its own, but putting KOSA into the “omnibus package” is a terrible idea.
The policy may have been short-lived – last night the company’s tweets on point were removed – but the policy on linking remains particularly notable because it bears a striking resemblance to the Canadian government’s Online News Act, known as Bill C-18. While some responded to a tweet I wrote that the comparison is a stretch, the parallels are obvious. In Twitter’s case, the company took the position that certain links posted by users – namely links to rival services – create unfair competition since Twitter is competing with services such as Instagram for the same user base and the same advertisers. In response, the company said that the links would either be blocked or could remain with compensation (ie. paid advertising).
Monday's announcement was about "suspected violations" of EU antitrust rules and gives Meta a chance to respond to the commission's formal Statement of Objections.
Those concerns focus on the way Meta gives Facebook users automatic access to Facebook Marketplace "whether they want it or not".
Arizona is ground zero for the wackiest theories and craziest political candidates.
OK, he’s a politician —€ Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting “hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire” along Arizona’s eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?
No matter the wall doesn’t really keep desperate, fleeing migrants out. It keeps out ocelots and jaguars, bighorn sheep and spotted owls. It keeps out, or rather, imperils the life of the western yellow-billed cuckoo. It€ endangers the survival€ of 70+ plant and animal species. The wall is a monument to racism, according to Daniel Lombroso, director of “American Scar,” and what it accomplishes is ecocide.
The “three-in-one” conveyed a big signal that Saudi Arabia stands at the heart of China’s Arab world diplomacy. It is in sharp contrast with the transactional relationship that the historic U.S.-Saudi alliance has been reduced to.
Indeed, the nearly three dozen energy and investment deals during Xi’s visit will preserve the core of the strategic interests of Saudi Arabia and China. They encompass frontier areas such as information technology, green energy, cloud services, infrastructure and health and inject a greater sense of alignment between Riyadh’s economic diversification pivot (known as Vision 2030) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)-driven development of smart industries and high quality infrastructure, including digital infrastructure, which has the potential to undergird regional connectivity in the coming decades.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the most inept congressional leader of the modern age, is struggling to pull together enough assurances from members of the House Republican Caucus to secure his election as speaker of the House in January. He may get the votes he needs, but the fact that he does not have them yet offers a measure of just how miserable the next two years will be for McCarthy and his partisan allies.
You can learn a lot about the people who make up a political party by identifying their heroes. So, who are the heroes of today’s Republicans? If your first thought was Ronald Reagan, you’re showing your age. Reagan was the answer of an earlier time, when we had a different, although not wholly dissimilar, Republican Party. Saint Ronnie, as he was sometimes called back then, was the patron saint of the GOP. Their answer to every question.
The final public hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will be held Monday afternoon, a televised session that will include a vote on issuing criminal referrals against former president Donald Trump to the U.S. Department of Justice.
In public statements and interviews over recent days, committee members have made clear their shared belief that Trump is guilty of criminal conduct related to his involvement in the lead up to the insurrection that took place on January 2, 2021 and his behavior on that day.
The first congress of the new state-sponsored Russian children’s and youth organization has voted on the organization’s name. TASS, RIA Novosti, and RBC report that the organization will operate as the “Movement of the First.”
After winning, Dunn says, a top lobbyist for the utility took him aside and promised he could hold his roughly $100,000-a-year position on the commission for years — as long as he remained a team player. (Alabama Power declined to make the executive available to address the accusation; the utility and its corporate parent, Southern Company, declined all comment for this story.)
"They didn't take me [seriously]," Dunn says now.
Dunn, a Republican and Tea Party conservative, plowed ahead. And soon enough, he found himself the target of a political pressure campaign, replete with character assassinations and online smears.
Hartlauer notes that beyond driving tourism, the campaign aimed to start discussions about the power social media companies wield regarding censorship and illuminate the challenges some artists face in promoting their more provocative work. The message clearly resonated—the video landed a coveted Cannes Golden Lion award this year. “We question this kind of censorship because we believe it’s not a good idea to let an algorithm determine our cultural legacy,” Hartlauer tells NPR. “It might lead to some unconscious self-censorship when artists make art differently because they know a tool as strong as social media would not show or promote certain types of art. This is quite frightening.”
While Vienna found success in leveraging OnlyFans as an inclusive venue for uninhibited artistic expression, observers note that artists have yet to follow the city’s lead. The reason may lie in the website’s stigma as a platform for sex workers and performers—in 2020 alone it experienced growth from 7.5 million subscribers to 85 million. (Some say Beyoncé is partially responsible for shouting it out in her “Savage” remix.) Though OnlyFans hosts family-friendly accounts for cooking, gardening, and fitness, it has yet to shake its X-rated reputation, especially after a botched attempt to ban pornography in 2021 garnered widespread ridicule.
Book bans are only one of the issues that public libraries are currently facing. In Tennessee, lawmakers want to force librarians to list all the materials they offer and to conduct periodic reviews to make sure the materials are “age-appropriate,” a measure many librarians told Chalkbeat is unnecessary and beyond the scope of their job. Across the country, several librarians have been attacked or doxxed for standing up for books that are deemed controversial or worthy of being banned.
The American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world, is a nonprofit that promotes libraries and public education across the United States. Teen Vogue spoke with the organization’s president, Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada, about the consequences of book bans, the importance of public libraries as community spaces, and how the ALA is fighting back against censorship across the country.
Hengaw, a Norway-based group that monitors rights violations in Iran's Kurdish regions, said on December 19 that Mohammad Haji Rasoulpour was arrested on October 1 during nationwide protests over the death of Mahsa Amini in September while in police custody for allegedly wearing a head scarf improperly.
Responsible speakers avoid trafficking in bad speech, that is, speech that they have reason to believe causes or constitutes net harm. Moreover, third parties have prima facie reason to suppress such speech. As recent events have made salient just how harmful speech can be, there has been a corresponding increase in calls to suppress or censor such speech. This article argues that there are three mechanisms by which calls to suppress bad speech themselves tend to cause or constitute harm. Paradoxically, then, those most concerned about the pernicious effects of bad speech ought to be especially reluctant to call for its suppression.
Delivering the first M.R. Narayana Kurup memorial lecture at Government College, Madappally, here on Monday on ‘A writer’s responsibility’, the author of Tomb of Sand ( Ret Samadhi) said writing, for a writer, was as natural as breathing. “How can I breathe when the atmosphere is so polluted? But I have to find strategies to do it even in such a condition,” she said, adding that censorship crushed the story and limited knowledge and that the curbs to freedom should come from within the writer.
Ms. Shree explained, through several anecdotes, how most people thought that writing was not a profession that had something to covet, that writing in a regional language was not necessary when the writer was educated and were often surprised to find an educated writer writing in his or her mother tongue.
One recent illustration is the censorship of True Naked Yoga—a platform providing online naked yoga videos. In August 2022, payment processor Stripe banned True Naked Yoga, calling it a “restricted business,” which contravened Stripe’s service agreement. Stripe gave True Naked Yoga just four days’ notice before the account was closed.
Stripe had reviewed the site in December 2021 and did not flag any problems, nor did it give True Naked Yoga any warning that the terms of service had changed. The abrupt ban forced True Naked Yoga to shut down for more than one month until it could find a new payment processor.
The simplest explanation for Musk's ever-more-hilarious self-contradictory behavior as the new boss of Twitter is that the man is a narcissist and a hypocrite. Like his right wing brethren (no, his politics are not "complicated"), Musk subscribes to a "free speech for me, but not for thee" philosophy, which of course means he never believed in free speech at all.
But it's worth digging a little deeper, because this entire (extremely entertaining) debacle also helps reveal quite a bit about the right wing mythology around "free speech" that colonized Musk's mind. It goes further than plain old hypocrisy and into the psychology of the right, especially the self-serving tale of their own alleged victimhood.
The winner of the 2022 critics’ poll, on the other hand, raised more than a few eyebrows. Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a 202-minute work of glacial minimalism, which painstakingly dramatises the daily routine of a middle-aged woman who earns money by selling herself. It’s deeply admired by the few people who have seen it, but it’s rarely discussed today. Even its most ardent admirers would, I think, struggle to argue that it has had a fraction of the cultural impact of Vertigo or Citizen Kane. Dielman’s surge from #36 in the 2012 poll to #1 in 2022 only really makes sense as a political statement rather than an assessment of artistic importance. This is, after all, the first time that a film directed by a woman has topped Sight and Sound’s poll, and the film’s status as a feminist portrait of a sex worker appears to meet the demand for a more progressive canon, inclusive of previously marginalized voices.
This has led some observers to suspect that the results had been massaged to produce a politically desirable outcome. In a characteristically blunt post on his Facebook page the day after the poll results were published, the veteran American screenwriter and director Paul Schrader spoke for many skeptics when he wrote the following: [...]
“Famine,” a new documentary film from the U.S.-government-funded media outlet Current Time about the famine that ravaged Russia in the early 1920s, has been released on YouTube after the Russian Culture Ministry revoked its theatrical distribution certificate.
A decorative display with two hearts — the greater one inscribed “St. Petersburg,” and the one beside it “Mariupol” — had to be removed from the Palace Square, after a 16-year-old girl scrawled on it in black paint: “Murderers, you bombed it to rubble. Judases.”
Moscow libraries have received a government-issued list of books that must be written off and “recycled,” due to content that runs against the grain of Russia’s new law against “LGBT propaganda.” This information was published by the journalist and literary critic Sergey Lebedenko, on Telegram.
Network data confirm the restriction of social video platform TikTok in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan on multiple internet providers on Friday 16 December 2022. The incident comes amid protests over high fuel prices which have spread to multiple cities.
The court said there were "several hindrances" to the extradition of Kenes, the former editor-in-chief of the Zaman daily newspaper, including the fact that some of the accusations against him are not crimes in Sweden.
This, along with his refugee status and the political nature of his case, made the extradition impossible, it added.
"There is also a risk of persecution based on this person's political beliefs. An extradition can thusly not take place," Judge Petter Asp said in a statement.
After a two year process, the NUJ Executive have finally rejected the renewal of my NUJ membership based on social media posts I allegedly made which they refuse to show me and of content and subject of which I genuinely have not a clue.
But apparently these social media posts make me not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ.
Murdoch employees are fit and proper persons. The Guardian journalists who produced the front page of lies about Manafort meeting Assange are fit and proper persons. The security service mouthpieces at the BBC are fit and proper persons.
The NUJ even accepts for membership copywriters for corporations working in PR companies. All these people are fine.
Julian Assange was selected as one of three finalists for the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded each year by the European Union Parliament. More than 40 MEPs nominated Julian Assange for this year’s Sakharov Prize long list. Julian Assange’s wife Stella Assange addressed a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, October 11th, in which she made the case for Julian Assange winning the award.
The editors-in-chief of two of Estonia's leading daily newspapers, Postimees and Ãâ¢htuleht, believe that Eesti Päevaleht will eventually follow them in opting not to publish paper editions on Mondays. Postimees and Ãâ¢htuleht will discontinue their Monday editions from January due to rising costs announced by state-owned delivery service Omniva.
A Sevastopol court has sentenced a Russian citizen to 12 years in a high-security penal colony on treason charges after finding him guilty of gathering information for Ukrainian intelligence services, Interfax reported on Monday, citing the Russian FSB. The man, whose name is Yevgeny Petrushin, was also reportedly fined 100,000 rubles (about $1,480).
A Greek citizen whose father is a former employee of the Russian General Staff and former diplomat has reportedly been arrested in Vienna. The unnamed man is suspected of spying for Russia and faces up to five years in prison if convicted, Deutsche Welle reported Monday.
Russia seeks arms control agreements to prevent dangerous escalation. But the U.S. seeks only unilateral advantage. This risks all out conflict unless this changes.
Over the past half-century, some of the most prominent community organizing networks in the United States — ranging from the€ Gamaliel Foundation€ to€ Faith In Action€ to the€ Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF — have taught about this divide as a key part of their introductory trainings, using it as a means of orienting new organizers to their approach to organizing. Over the years, the framework has been invoked by Barack Obama, Saul Alinsky and countless rank-and-file organizers. For advocates of this concept, understanding the “two worlds” dichotomy is fundamental to developing the type of people who can effectively produce change: namely, realistic radicals.
So what is the origin of this idea? And why might it be useful for us today?
While many activists welcomed Monday's official apology by Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte for his country's 250-year history of enslaving Africans, some Dutch advocates of African ancestry called the gesture ill-timed and insufficient.
"For centuries, the Dutch state and its representatives stimulated, preserved, and profited from slavery," Rutte, who represents the center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, declared during a speech in The Hague. "For centuries, in the name of the Dutch state, human beings were made into commodities, exploited, and abused. For centuries, under Dutch state authority, human dignity was violated in the most horrific way possible."
Less than three weeks after ProPublica and the New Yorker published an exposé of hospice fraud, members of Congress have called on the Department of Health and Human Services to “immediately investigate this situation.”
In a letter sent Friday to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of Inspector General, the bipartisan leaders of the Comprehensive Care Caucus wrote that “Medicare fraud cannot be tolerated, especially when it is being perpetrated on our nation’s most vulnerable patients.”
A corruption scandal involving Qatar and Morocco is rocking the European Union, with authorities in Belgium earlier this month raiding the homes and offices of multiple European Parliament lawmakers for allegedly accepting bribes from the two governments. The raids recovered hundreds of thousands of euros in cash. Among those arrested was European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili, who in the lead-up to the World Cup repeatedly defended Qatar against critics. Ana Gomes, a retired Portuguese diplomat who was a member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2019, says that while the investigation was initially focused on Qatar, “it looks more and more that Morocco should be the center of the investigation.” We also speak with Francesco Bastagli, a former United Nations special representative for Western Sahara, who notes that Morocco has cultivated a sophisticated network of “friends” in Europe who have helped the country in trade agreements and in gaining acceptance for its illegal occupation of Western Sahara.
Supporters of imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal are celebrating a decision by a Philadelphia judge on Friday to order the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to share all of its files on the case with Abu-Jamal’s defense team. Judge Lucretia Clemons gave prosecutors and the defense 60 days to review the files, including many that Abu-Jamal’s team has never seen. The judge is then expected to rule on whether to hold a new trial for the former Black Panther, who has been imprisoned for over 40 years for his 1982 conviction in the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. His supporters have long claimed prosecutors withheld key evidence and bribed or coerced witnesses to lie, and documents found in the DA’s office in 2019 show Abu-Jamal’s trial was tainted by judicial bias and police and prosecutorial misconduct. For more on the case, we speak with Johanna Fernández, an associate professor of history at CUNY’s Baruch College and one of the coordinators of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. “We have enough evidence here to clearly give Mumia at least an evidentiary hearing, a new trial or set him free,” says Fernández. She is the executive producer and writer of the film “Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” and is also the editor of “Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
No matter what you may have heard on certain social media outlets, this is how the First Amendment actually works.
Maybe if enough cases pile into the federal court system, the Supreme Court might decide to actually establish a First Amendment right to record public officials as they engage in their public duties. Until then, we’re stuck with a patchwork of precedent that recognizes this right only in certain parts of the nation.
The Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, has declared a state of emergency over concerns the city won’t be able to provide shelter and resources to the thousands of asylum seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. This comes as the Biden administration is expected on Wednesday to stop enforcing Title 42, the Trump-era pandemic policy that has been used by the U.S. government to block over 2 million migrants from seeking asylum in the country. Many asylum seekers now at the border are sleeping outdoors in freezing temperatures while the infrastructure to welcome them is sorely lacking, says Fernando García, the founder and executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights based in El Paso. “This is what I consider the perfect storm happening right now at the border,” he says. “If we don’t have long-term fixes, if we don’t have immigration reform fixing the asylum process, which has been broken and damaged by the previous administration, I think we are going to continue seeing these crises.”
In a move that outraged migrant rights advocates, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday granted a request from 19 GOP-led states to temporarily stop the Biden administration from winding down the Title 42 policy used to swiftly expel asylum-seekers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
"It's an inhumane policy that misuses public health to unjustly—and unlawfully—expel asylum-seekers."
It’s not that Williamson supports the death penalty. Unlike most “conservative” commentators, he considers the outcome good. His complaint is that “executive unilateralism of the sort being practiced here by Gov. Brown is an invitation to chaos.”
He does, in a minor way, support his claim. After court decisions eviscerated the death penalty as practiced, Oregon’s voters remedied the situation with a constitutional amendment specifically providing for its narrower use, and the legislature has since tailored that use. “If Gov. Brown wants to change the laws of Oregon,” Williamson opines, “she should run for the state legislature.”
Meta’s Facebook is joining the telecoms space and they have decided to come out of the gates with the longest undersea fiber optic cable at 45000km. To make this all happen they formed the 2Africa group which comprises other telecom operators. China Mobile International, Djibouti Telecom, Meta (Facebook), MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, and WIOCC is the full list of the consortium.
I see firsthand both the huge opportunities and damaging effects of the Internet for kids. It can be a huge enabler for education, it gives us access to information for living, it connects us globally, and it is also a place to advocate for ourselves and share our voices.
The creator of the World Wide Web is on a mission to reinvent it and protect personal data from Big Tech.
"I think the public has been concerned about privacy—the fact that these platforms have a huge amount of data, and they abuse it," Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the concept of the web in 1989, told CNN on Friday. "But I think what they're missing sometimes is the lack of empowerment. You need to get back to a situation where you have autonomy, you have control of all your data."
The European Commission on Monday said it has warned Facebook parent company Meta that it is breaching EU antitrust laws by distorting competition in markets for online classified advertising and abusing its dominant position.
The Commission said in a preliminary view that it would further investigate and that it could impose a fine of up to 10% of the company's annual global turnover, if there is sufficient evidence of an infringement of European Union rules.
The company said that it will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
Twitter will still allow cross-posting content from any social media platform.
Large U. S. multinational corporations are, however, major drivers of inflation by price gouging. € An analysis by the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy included these findings between 2019 and 2021:
According to Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Cooperative, 3
But things didn’t go as planned. After a string of legal patent challenges, design flaws, and competition, American Brush Machinery was ready to give up. “When they didn’t do too well and wanted to close up,” said Spiegel in an interview with the New York State Military Museum, “I asked them to let me run it.” So, the higher-ups gave him a shot.
Spiegel decided to take a different approach. He brought in real trees to study and then made corresponding tweaks to the brush machines. With more tinkering, Spiegel eventually crafted the perfect artificial tree that was set to take over American homes. And with the influx of plastic products following World War II, Spiegel had the right materials to make his vision a reality.
Music streaming services are great – for listeners, who gain access to huge quantities of music, even if they don’t end up owning any of it. But it’s hardly a secret that streaming services produce very little income for the musicians involved – even the big names earn a pittance – with most of the money ending up with the recording companies. That doesn’t mean that streaming services are beyond redemption. It just requires a little imagination to think of ways in which they can be great for artists and audience alike. Take this idea, for example, reported on Vice: [...]
That prototype has become the open source program MUSICat, which is now being used by a number of libraries in North America. Artists whose music is included in one of the local streaming collections are paid an honorarium of at least $200 per licensed album. That means they get money up front, not in barely visible dribs and drabs over years, as with the mainstream streaming services.
The UK Government's Intellectual Property Office published new piracy guidance today, and it contains a small, easily missed detail. People who share their Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney+ passwords are violators of copyright law. And it gets worse. The IPO informs TorrentFreak that password sharing could also mean criminal liability for fraud.
Today, Creative Commons (CC) is excited to announce one million US dollars in new programmatic support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) to help open large climate datasets. The twelve-month grant will enable CC to conduct key climate data landscape analyses and expand our work, bringing people together to create policy and practices to open data that advances climate research and innovation.
Today, we are proud at CC to announce the publication of Towards better sharing of cultural heritage — A Creative Commons Call to Action to Policymakers, a simple, concise, and accessible resource that aims to support policymakers with key arguments to reform policy — in particular copyright — to achieve better sharing of cultural heritage in the public interest.€
One of the reasons that copyright is so unbalanced in favor of companies, especially Big Content, is that the process of bringing in new copyright laws is hard for ordinary members of the public to engage with. Typically, new laws come about after government consultations. Although these are public in the sense that they are not secret, and anyone can take part, their questions and format are at best intimidating, and at worst incomprehensible for ordinary people.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.