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Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
I’m always on the lookout for new Chromebooks and this morning I found one. Technically, I found two, but they’re basically the same hardware in different sizes. I’m talking about the new 11.6-inch Asus Chromebook CX1 and similar 14-inch models, which haven’t been announced but appear on the Asus US site. And they’re already available overseas.
Looking at the two Asus Chromebook CX1 models, they appear to be basic, entry-level devices.
That, I can understand as there’s a big, or bigger, market for affordable Chromebooks. No, I don’t yet know the prices but I figure around $200 to $300 is your basic entry-level price range. Of course, the hardware used can also help determine the price point, so I looked at the Asus Chromebook CX1 specifications.
SSH (the Secure Shell) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands on a remote machine. Often, SSH is the only way to access remote web servers. In this video, I’ll show you how to install and use SSH, and how to create SSH key pairs which allows you remote access without the need of a password.
A replacement for CentOS that seems identical so far, and your feedback about IRC, laptop marketing, Arch, alternatives to Windows terminal servers, loud dogs, and more.
First Impressions
We had a look at Rocky Linux, “a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with America’s top enterprise Linux distribution now that its downstream partner has shifted direction”.
Not all slideshows need to be fancy, sometimes it’s enough for them to just show the information and one format great for showing information is Markdown so about we combine the two. Doing so gives us an app known as Lookatme.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to talk about our favorite distros so far in 2021, so for all the distro-hoppers out there, you dont want to miss this one. Then we take a look at Google’s FLoC tracking concept, which is claimed to bring targeted ads into a privacy-preserving future. We’ll discuss why a lot of people don’t seem to be FLoCing towards this idea. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Gosh, when I last blogged about Zink, it hadn’t even landed upstream in Mesa yet! Well, by now it’s been upstream for quite a while, and most development has moved there.
At the time of writing, we have merged 606 merge-requests labeled “zink”. The current tip of mesa’s main branch is totaling 1717 commits touching the src/gallium/drivers/zink/ sub-folder, written by 42 different contributors. That’s pretty awesome in my eyes, Zink has truly become a community project!
Another noteworthy change is that Mike Blumenkrantz has come aboard the project, and has churned out an incredible amount of improvements to Zink! He got hired by Valve to work on Zink (among other things), and is now the most prolific contributor, with more than twice the amount of commits than I have written.
It seems the OpenGL over Vulkan driver, Zink, has been coming along at a ridiculously impressive pace. Open source consulting firm Collabora has given an overview on how it’s doing.
As a brief reminder on Zink: “Zink is an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. Or to be a bit more specific, Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available.” – Collabora.
Work on it has progressed so far that Zink can now expose the OpenGL 4.6 (Core Profile) feature set. However, it’s not yet classed as a properly conforming driver for that, as they still need to go through the official Khronos Group conformance testing and pass it.
Intel today went public with their vision and early work around a “Infrastructure Processing Unit” (IPU) as their newest ware for data centers and cloud providers.
As part of Intel’s new M.2 modem push for EVO laptops and Chromebooks, open-source Intel engineers have been working on “IOSM” as their new M.2 modem driver and this code which has been in the works for months is set to see its debut with the Linux 5.14 cycle.
This new Intel M.2 Modem driver is called IOSM which in this case stands for IPC over Shared Memory. The driver is summed up as, “The IOSM (IPC over Shared Memory) driver is a PCIe host driver implemented for linux or chrome platform for data exchange over PCIe interface between Host platform & Intel M.2 Modem. The driver exposes interface conforming to the MBIM protocol. Any front end application ( eg: Modem Manager) could easily manage the MBIM interface to enable data communication towards WWAN.”
In addition to a lot of movement right now within the Intel kernel graphics driver around memory management handling for local memory / discrete GPUs, another big and ongoing area is improving the job submission and workload scheduling by making proper use of its GuC firmware capabilities and also integrating the DRM scheduler.
Last month was a nearly 100 patch series for GuC submission for their Intel Linux kernel graphics driver for this firmware that allows offloading some of the scheduling of contexts from the kernel driver and sort of an abstraction layer over the GPU. That GuC submission work is ongoing and the fruits of that is not ready for the upcoming 5.14 cycle so it won’t be until at least 5.15 later in the year before that is all merged.
In this article, you will learn about XDM, a worthy and better IDM alternative for Linux distributions.
IDM or Internet Download Manager is a well-known name among people. The download manager is famous for its speed, features, and usability. This is why millions of users use it around the world.
Unfortunately, IDM is only available for Windows operating system, we as Linux users don’t get the luxury of this amazing tool. Luckily, Linux has a better alternative and it is free and open-source.
XDM or Xtreme Download Manager is a powerful tool to increase download speed up to 500%. It can save streaming videos from websites, resume broken/failed downloads, schedule and convert downloads. XDM seamlessly integrates with popular browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and the rest of Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. As a result, when you download anything using your browser XDM detects it and shows a download pop-up.
As you can see, XDM is a feature-loaded download manager and a better alternative to IDM. Moreover, it is a cross-platform application so you can use it anywhere you want, Linux, macOS, or Windows.
Recently I wrote about my failure to arrange a graceful TLS root certificate rollover for our OpenVPN servers. This might leave you wondering what we’re doing about this instead, and the answer is that we’ve opted to use a brute force solution, because we know it works.
Our brute force solution is to set up a new set of OpenVPN servers (we have two of them for redundancy), using a new official name and with it a new TLS root certificate that is good for quite a while (I opted to be cautious and not cross into 2038) and with it a new host certificate. With the new servers set up and in production, we’ve updated our support site so use the new official name and the new TLS root certificate, so people who set up OpenVPN from now onward will be using the new environment.
How to transfer file and directory? how to copy files and directory? If you think it is very easy and simple and you can use cp commands to copy and transfer files and directory in the local computer.
Then you are not wrong, you are absolutely right.
But it will be hard for an answer if asked about the transfer file between the two systems that have different locations.
Oh Yeah, you are not thinking wrong. You can use ftp to perform the same task.
Do you know one more thing? You can use ssh to transfer files between two systems remotely. And it is possible by SCP command in Linux. To know more about ssh server read my article How to Enable ssh on Ubuntu 19.04 I am going to cover in this article, What is scp in Linux? How to use SCP commands in Linux. and how to transfer files and directory from local to the remote system and remote to local or remote to the remote system and many more.
There is no doubt, using Linux by the command-line interface is more simple and easy than GUI. But Most of the users are familiar and habitual with a graphical interface.
They can’t change their habits easily, Why so they can’t switch themselves for using command-line interface in Linux.
Similar to other tasks, It is so easy to unzip a zip file in Linux. In this article, you will learn how to unzip a file in Linux by using commands with single unzip utility. You can also use graphical Interface to extract zip files.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Olive Video Editor on Deepin 20.2.
Today we are looking at how to install Deltarune on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
systemd is a system and service manager for Linux operating systems. When you install any application from a repository, it will drop a service unit file into the systemd directory and you should not modify these files directly.
SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is a Linux kernel security module that provides enhanced security for Linux systems. SELinux provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies. This specifies how the processes communicate with each other and interact with the files.
We never recommend disabling SELinux on your system, especially on production servers. For developer systems, you can disable it only if hampering your work due to its policies.
To ensure that your Linux machine is stable and reliable, you need to stress test and benchmark certain key aspects of it including CPU performance. This helps you foresee how it will respond in real-world situations in which it is subjected to computing demands.
In this article, we will show different ways to create 100% CPU load on a Linux system to stress test it. By the end of this article, you will learn how to stress test your CPU on a Linux computer that you have just built or bought, or an older computer.
When you install a virtual machine or a guest OS in your machine, it does not exactly perform like the host OS because it has some limitations regarding performance. But VMware presented a solution for this by introducing VMware guest tools that enhance and improve the performance of the guest OS.
VMware tools enable the integration between the host and the guest operating systems. It includes the set of utilities that improves the graphical performance of VM and enables sharing folders, clock synchronization, mouse tracking, and much more. Therefore, whenever you install a virtual machine on VMware, your first priority should be to install VMware tools before doing anything else.
Pepys is a markdown-based simple, and distraction-free journaling application written in Python using the Qt UI library. It is rightly made for those who love to document their daily life events.
Pepys uses markdown for writing, and it contains neat and clean highlighting for key markdown syntaxes such as bold text, code, tags, and URLs.
Interestingly, when you create a new entry in the Pepys journal app, it automatically creates a new YYYY/MM directory storing the file in YYYY-MM-DD.md name format.
You’ve just finished installing Linux on your PC. You boot it up and notice that all your audio sounds like it’s coming out of a phone. You put your hand against your subwoofer and it isn’t working at all – even when you put on a song that would normally have very heavy bass.
Most major Linux distributions use both the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) and PulseAudio for sound management. While they’re both excellent pieces of software, the default setup can be quite barebones. If you’re using a more complex speaker setup that has more than two channels (for example, a 5.1 surround sound system), you may end up losing subwoofer input due to how PulseAudio mixes input/output by default or various other reasons.
Are you in need of a KVM virtual machine in Ubuntu but don’t know where to start? As it turns out, the Gnome Boxes app makes setting up a KVM virtual machine in Ubuntu a breeze. In this guide, we’ll show you how to do it!
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Terraform on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Terraform automation tool on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Monit is a quick setup, easy to use but effective program for monitoring server services. It can also include important basics like CPU usage, disk usage, and more. If a server service fails, it can be restarted automatically. In the event of problems, one or more recipients will be informed by email.
Originally intended for a single server, M / Monit also offers a commercial version that can monitor several servers at the same time (under one interface).
Have you ever noticed that when you close your laptop, it shuts down or goes into sleep mode? While this can be a great energy-saving feature, it can also be a big problem, particularly if you connect your laptop to an external monitor to work on something important.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to run Nginx as a Docker container, and expose it to your local network. In addition to, you will learn how to create a Docker data volume to share information between a container and the host file system.
Nginx is a popular open-source software used for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, and more. It is quite popular and used on many high traffic websites today. One of the most common workloads of Docker is using it to containerize web servers. We’ll show you how to set it up with Nginx. So, let us walk you through the process.
Docker is a containerization platform, used to package up your application into one easily manageable container image.
Like Stardew Valley in space, the crowdfunded One Lonely Outpost has a brand new trailer out which appeared during E3 and it’s a pretty good one.
Farming life sims are all the rage, clearly. We’ve seen so many of them appear and somehow they all seem to add a slightly unique spin on it. Still, it’s hard to beat Stardew Valley but with the sci-fi edge to it One Lonely Outpost definitely has piqued my personal interest. Especially with the genetics side of things, with you able to mix things up with robo-cows and gene-splicing to create some weird sounding stuff.
The day is finally here after nearly 20 years, Widelands is a strategy game heavily inspired by the classic Settlers II and the big 1.0 release is out now. Widelands is a game for players who like to take things slow like the classics. You start off with nothing, gradually building up resource production and a system of roads to ferry all the resources around. Eventually expanding your borders to meet new tribes and make peace – or war.
Appearing on Steam sometime recently was Blight, a new upcoming top-down survival game that looks quite pretty graphically and the developer says it will be “brutally challenging”.
We all know graphics don’t make a game, so while pretty looking it remains to be seen if the gameplay is any good. We’ve seen a lot of survival games of all kinds from peaceful to savagely difficult and Blight leans heavily into the difficulty. The idea is that you’re trying to say away from a mysterious new disease called the Blight. It consumed your village, left it in ruins and so you fled into the wilderness to survive.
KDE Plasma 5.22.1 is here just one week after the release of the KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop environment series, and it includes improvements for the Plasma Wayland session to detect additional screens on NVIDIA/AMD multi-GPU setups, as well as to blur the transparent background behind task switchers.
This first point release to KDE Plasma 5.22 also improves the new Plasma System Monitor app to open the “Get New Pages” view in an overlay instead of a narrow column, and makes the Network Speed widget, Weather widget’s BBC weather data source, and custom shortcuts for “Walk through applications” work correctly.
The new Linux kernel security update comes exactly two months after the previous one and it’s here to fix three security vulnerabilities discovered by various security researchers in the Intel graphics drivers (i915), as well as three other security flaws.
The three security vulnerabilities affecting the Intel graphics drivers are CVE-2020-12362, an integer overflow that could allow a privileged user to escalate his/her privileges via local access, CVE-2020-12363, an input validation flaw, and CVE-2020-12364, a null pointer reference, both of which allowing a privileged user to initiate a denial-of-service (DoS) attack via local access.
On 31st December 2021, the CentOS project makes the shift to CentOS Stream – a rolling release that will serve as the upstream version for future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Sadly, CentOS 8, which was to enjoy support until 2029, will come to an abrupt and premature end. The imminent demise of CentOS has caused disquiet and consternation among CentOS lovers and the community at large.
As you know, CentOS is a fork and RHEL and packs with all the goodies that are provided with RHEL at absolutely no cost. For this reason, it has been used for quite a while in server environments especially by small businesses. If you have been using CentOS, especially in server environments, you may feel betrayed and not know the next course of action.
Similar to Rocky Linux by CentOS creator Greg Kurtzer, AlmaLinux is also a Linux distribution that came to existence as a CentOS alternative after the demise of stable CentOS 8 by Red Hat.
However, where Rocky Linux is a brand new project, AlmaLinux is a new name for the already existing Project Lenix by CloudLinux.
AlmaLinux OS is a community-driven forever free and open-source enterprise-grade Linux distribution. It is a 1:1 binary compatible fork of the popular enterprise OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with committed free support for 8.x release through 2029, including stable and thoroughly tested updates and security patches.
Last month, a stable version of AlmaLinux OS 8.4 “Electric Cheetah” arrived with Linux 4.18, GNOME 3.32.2, and various exciting new features including the most requested one, Secure Boot.
As Rocky Linux is getting closer to its stable version, a new and first development release of Rocky Linux 8.3 came at the start of last month.
If you don’t know, last year, Red Hat decided to drop maintenance of CentOS Linux 8 after 2021 to solely focus on CentOS Stream.
Obviously, the decision made various people unhappy including CentOS project founder Greg Kurtzer. Hence, within a few days, Greg announced a new alternative OS called Rocky Linux, which is still under intensive development.
The last year has prompted many IT professionals to rethink their current roles and career goals, landing some in the role of job hunter.
It’s a challenging time to find a new job. At the same time, talented IT leaders have never been in greater demand. And much of the advice on positioning and marketing yourself to employers and acing the screening processes remains relevant even in these seemingly in-between times.
The Fedora Diversity & Inclusion team is hosting this week’s Fedora Social Hour to celebrate Pride month. Come join us to chat, catch up, and have some fun playing Pictionary. Everyone is welcome to join the event!
The second release candidate of the Debian Installer for the upcoming 11.0 “Bullseye” release is now available for testing.
The Debian Installer Bullseye RC2 release shifts to the latest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel release point release, brings an updated mirror list, a fix for properly re-installing GRUB on BIOS systems, and a variety of other installer updates. This release candidate also works around an infinite loop within the GTK toolkit by making sure the requested width for the UI doesn’t fall below 300px.
At the end of May, it was reported that Linux Mint 20.2 would see a beta release in mid-June. We’ve reached mid-June and it looks as though the team is running last-minute tests on the beta ISOs before making them available to the public. Following the ISOs’ release, the beta period should run for about two weeks before the stable release is made with upgrade paths opened up.
The Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce images were tested about 7 hours ago and all failed, the Xfce image was tried again several hours later and failed again, now the Xfce image is being tested a third time along with the MATE edition. Users don’t have to worry about these tests, only, the longer they take to pass, the longer you’ll all be waiting to try out the beta.
Ubuntu Pro is coming to Google Cloud, replete with an all-important 10-year maintenance commitment for corporate punters who like things stable.
While Canonical’s Ubuntu is hardly new to Google’s Cloud, the Pro edition joins other enterprise favourites in the premium category, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
The lengthy support window is based at least in part on Canonical’s Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) programme. ESM means eight years for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (to 2024), 10 years for 18.04 LTS (to 2028), and support until 2030 for 20.04 LTS.
During the support period, customers paying for Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will get live kernel patching as well as patching of high and critical CVEs for Ubuntu’s repository (which includes the likes of Node.js, MongoDB, and Apache Kafka).
Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu distro, has launched its Ubuntu Pro platform on Google Cloud.
Ubuntu is no stranger to Google’s cloud computing platform, having been available to users since 2014. However Ubuntu Pro is the self-styled premium version of the environment that comes with a feature set that’ll appeal to developers and administrators at enterprises.
“The availability of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will offer our enterprise customers the additional security and compliance services needed for their mission-critical workloads,” said June Yang, VP and GM, Compute, Google Cloud.
Xilinx announced a 7nm, headless “Versal AI Edge” SoC that runs Linux on dual 1.76GHz Cortex-A7 cores and has dual 750MHz Cortex-R5F cores, flexible, FPGA-like “Adaptible Engines” up to 520K LUTS, and “AI Engine-ML” cores up to 479 TOPS.
Xilinx, which is soon to be acquired by AMD, announced its 7nm fabricated Versal ACAP processor family in Oct. 2018 and a year later followed up with more details on the platform’s AI support. Since then, the data center oriented Versal Prime and Versal AI Core series have reached production and the Versal Premium has begun sampling. Now Xilinx has followed up with its latest Versal ACAP. The Versal AI Edge series is the direct heir to the earlier Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC for Linux-driven embedded computers.
We’ve previously written about Pine64’s Quartz64 model A and model B SBC‘s, but the community has now announced another Rockchip RK3566 hardware platform with SOQuartz Compute Module compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4.
We learned about the module in Pine64’s June update, where they also announced Quartz64 was now available to developers and enthusiasts with 4GB or 8GB RAM for respectively $59.99 and $79.99. But let’s have a look at the upcoming SOQuartz SoM in more detail.
The actual hack is a bit of a cheat, given the fact that unlike past Doom hack candidates, like the Nintendo Game & Watch, the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, or a TI calculator, the Trådfri bulb doesn’t have any buttons or a display. Next-Hack had to add those, using the MGM210L RF board that powers the “smart” part of the bulb, and modifying a copy of Doom to run on its paltry 108kB of RAM.
This palm-sized robot project is called Hex Mecanum. It features a six-sided design with wheels mounted to three of the sides. Parrott revealed in a Tweet this week pictures of the HexDriver board samples and again later with components soldered into place. Parrott’s robot is a personal project, but in their day job at Pimoroni they have access to all of the latest products and we can see that robot is powered by the PGA2040 which breaks out the RP2040 into a smaller package than the Raspberry Pi Pico while providing all of the GPIO pins.
Pine64 is making a keyboard accessory for the PinePhone. When it goes on sale later this year, it will let you basically turn a PinePhone into a tiny Linux laptop. But first, developers need to create software that lets the two devices talk to one another.
The company has started sending prototypes to developers, and last month Martijn Braam posted a short video that shows that the phone can detect input from the keyboard… but when you try to type, the wrong letters and symbols appear on the screen.
Now developer Megi has a prototype in-house, and after a bit of hardware hacking, Megi has found a way to flash custom firmware to the keyboard, and now it looks like basic keyboard input using open source software is possible.
Data analytics is a trendy field with many solutions available. One of them is Cube.js, an open source analytical platform. You can think of Cube.js as a layer between your data sources and applications.
As the diagram below shows, Cube.js supports serverless data warehouses and most modern relational database management systems (RDBMS). You can work with any JavaScript front-end library for data visualization, and Cube.js will take care of the rest, including access control, performance, concurrency, and more.
The open source landscape is chock-full of talented developers creating powerful tools. These tools are often more than just barebones applications; they can be fully featured business technology solutions.
After months of work, we have a new stable release series! If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.6.5 on the download page. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser around the end of the week.
Because this release includes security fixes, we are also releasing updates for our other supported releases. You can find their source at https://dist.torproject.org:
After many struggles with using git LFS on repositories that need to store big files, I decided to spend some time on checking the status of the built-in partial clone functionality that could possibly let you achieve the same (as of git 2.30).
V is a statically typed compiled programming language designed for building maintainable software. It’s similar to Go and its design has also been influenced by Oberon, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, and Python.
It compiles itself in less than one second with zero library dependencies.
Valgrind is a great tool not only for finding errors related to memory management in a program, but also for memory consumption analysis, performance profiling, issues related to multithreading, and more. In this article, I introduce Valgrind’s undocumented –trace-flags option and explain how we improved Valgrind’s accuracy in one area related to the AArch64 processor from Arm.
Plenty of people like backwards compatibility, especially strong backwards compatibility. But it has what is a sometimes unpleasant consequence, which is that a strong commitment to backwards compatibility requires keeping your mistakes. Or at least many of them. To put it one way, you need to keep mistakes that work, and of course you have to keep them giving the same result as they currently do. For example if you provide an API that people can use to express potentially conflicting things and you don’t reject the attempt but instead give some deterministic result, you’re stuck with it.
I requested and foolishly offered help with a Discord log bot to lizmat. While doing so I stumbled upon a neat use for none().
Calculating the sum of two integers (Numbers) in a shell script is pretty simple as other programming languages. Bash shell provides a command-line utility called expr to evaluate expressions. The latest version of Bash shell also includes the functionality to evaluate expressions directly with the shell.
In this tutorial, we will discuss few methods to calculate the sum of the two numbers in a bash script.
Between daycare closures, school closures, and nursing homes becoming hotbeds for the deadly virus, the Covid-19 pandemic turned millions of people into caregivers overnight.
In response to a legal challenge from a group of landlords and real estate companies, attorneys generals in nearly two dozen states are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s life-saving moratorium on residential evictions for nonpayment of rent during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“An unprecedented wave of mass evictions—amid the embryonic stages of the post-pandemic recovery—would be catastrophic.”—Attorneys Generals’ brief
A group of the world’s richest nations vowed Sunday to collectively donate at least 1 billion coronavirus vaccine doses to developing nations over the next year, but a closer look reveals that the pledge includes just 613 million new doses—a paltry sum compared to the 11 billion doses that experts say will be needed to inoculate 70% of the global population.
“The G7 response to the scale of the challenge is just embarrassing.”—Heidi Chow, Global Justice Now
It’s been a while since supporters of abortion rights have had anything to celebrate. States have enacted a staggering 69 anti-abortion bills this year alone, including nine bans. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on Mississippi’s 15-week ban that is likely to upend Roe v. Wade entirely. But on the eve of Memorial Day weekend came a victory that was decades in the making: President Biden struck from his budget the 45-year-old ban on federal funding of abortion known as the Hyde Amendment.1
Fancy maggot burgers for dinner? Eating animals and plants which revolt many of us could cut hunger caused by climate change.
Before there were safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use, such as the vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson here in the US, as well as AstraZeneca in Europe and elsewhere, those of us who have been countering the antivaccine movement for many years now were warning about the sorts of disinformation that antivaxxers would spread about them. We were largely correct, too, but I can’t really say that it took any particular brilliance or foresight to have been so correct. We simply knew that there is no truly new trope, pseudoscience, or disinformation in the antivaccine narratives and conspiracy theories; so all we did was to predict the repurposing of tried-and-not-true antivax lies, be they about death, infertility, autism, or whatever.
Today I’m very happy to welcome the Finnish government to Have I Been Pwned by granting their National Cyber Security Centre full and free access to query their government domains. API access to query their domains will give them greater visibility into the impact of data breaches on the Finnish government.
Dear Fellowlship, today’s homily is a call to an (un)holy crusade: we have to banish the usage of commands in compromised machines and start to embrace coding. Please, take a seat and listen to the story of netsh and PortProxy.
The Teamsters spokesperson who spoke to The Hill declined to comment beyond what was included in NBC’s article.
Until now, the major labor union had managed to keep the hack out of the public eye for nearly two years. That points to a truth that cybersecurity experts say is lurking beneath the surface of recent high-profile attacks: An unknown number of companies and organizations have been extorted without ever saying a word about it publicly.
As developers, it’s our responsibility to help keep our users safe online and protect their data. This starts with building products that are secure by default, private by design, and put users in control. Everything we make at Google is underpinned by these principles, and we’re proud to be an industry leader in developing, deploying, and scaling new privacy-preserving technologies that make it possible to learn valuable insights and create helpful experiences while protecting our users’ privacy.
The Google Developers Blog has this announcement describing the release of a fully homomorphic encryption project under the Apache license. “With FHE, encrypted data can travel across the Internet to a server, where it can be processed without being decrypted. Google’s transpiler will enable developers to write code for any type of basic computation such as simple string processing or math, and run it on encrypted data. The transpiler will transform that code into a version that can run on encrypted data. This then allows developers to create new programming applications that don’t need unencrypted data.” See this white paper for more details on how it all works.
The Cardea system, along with the Global COVID Certificate Network (GCCN), was launched recently to provide an ecosystem and global trust registry, respectively, for interoperable digital health passes.
Cardea also meets the technical recommendations included in the Good Health Pass Collaborative’s Interoperability Blueprint, according to the announcement.
“The Cardea and GCCN projects are both excellent examples of breakthrough innovations that can take shape when companies and projects come together to solve real-world problems, using open source tools available to everyone,” comments Mike Vesey, CEO of IdRamp. “We’re excited to offer our experience in the creation of passwordless zero trust ecosystems that will bring diverse ideas and skills into the Cardea community.”
Zephyr Project, an open source project at the Linux Foundation, continues to gain momentum with its 5th anniversary this year. To celebrate the milestone, the Project recently hosted its inaugural Zephyr Developer Summit (June 8-10).
There has been a theorem proposed on these pages, originally by Mike himself, for a long time that goes something like this: when a data breach is first reported in the news, the severity of the breach is always, always, always underreported and there will eventually be an admission that the breach was much worse. Despite this not having been my original idea, I nonetheless slapped my name on it and called it The Geigner Effect. If that sort of name-slapping is good enough for former US Presidents, it’s damned well good enough for me.
In February this year, he told BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster that a digital health certificate or passport of some sort covering vaccination and testing status was bound to happen. It was a matter of “national security”. Never mind the deaths and the illness, it was “the damage to our economy and the global economy” that proved “massive.”
This month, Blair went one step further. In Less Risk, More Freedom, a report authored by his firm the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the authors remark that “vaccine status matters.” They write of a “robust Covid pass” that could be used to facilitate virtually unhindered mobility. In terms of international movement, “we propose that anyone who is fully vaccinated should be free to travel to and from any country currently designated green without any quarantine or testing required.” In terms of domestic settings, the authors proposed “that any venue or setting that wants to admit only those who have been vaccinated be permitted to do so”.
Apple has never looked kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company’s ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company’s efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can’t be refurbished and re-used). As is Apple’s often comical attacks on essential right to repair legislation, which usually involves the company insisting that allowing broader independent and consumer repair of their devices would be a security and privacy nightmare.
Creating false personal information may have existed in the past in the form of rumors, slander and libel, but it is becoming a more serious problem today because computers make it hard to tell false personal data from the real thing. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is the new class of deepfake videos, which use artificial intelligence to place someone else’s face on pre-existing videos. These are still relatively crude, and can often be spotted by direct inspection.
Although hardly a household name in the West, VibraImage technology has been around since 2001, and is used in “thousands of systems around the world” according to the company. Elsys Corp says that since 2007, VibraImage has successfully detected “criminals, terrorists and suspicious behavior” at two Russian airports. An article on The Conversation about VibraImage by James Wright, who is a Research Associate at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, adds that VibraImage has been deployed in several high-profile contexts, including two Olympic games, a Fifa World Cup and a G7 Summit.
California Democrat Ro Khanna wants Facebook Inc. to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp — two of its biggest deals in the past decade — as he called for more aggressive antitrust enforcement and privacy regulations.
The date for the vote on the chat control regulation has been set: On 8 July, all Members of the European Parliament will cast their vote on the legislation that will allow e-mail and messaging providers to indiscriminately scan and search your private messages for suspicious content in real-time. This will be the final vote on the regulation. Once it has passed, your private communications can be searched by error-prone artificial intelligence technologies. Although these algorithms are meant to search for potential child pornography and grooming, up to 86% of the correspondence reported to the police is not criminally relevant and users are falsely being reported – including many minors.
The EU’s chat control regulation has been found to violate fundamental rights by a former judge of the European Court of Justice. According to a representative poll, 72% of EU citizens clearly reject indiscriminate screening of private correspondence. Despite all that, the Parliament’s Committee for Civil Liberties (LIBE) recommends the plenary to vote in favor of chat control.
The plenary vote is the last chance to stop this law! Contact your Members of Parliament now if you are concerned about #Chatcontrol. A list with all contact details of the MEPs is available for download here.
“A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content. This includes things like “faceprints and voiceprints,” the policy explained. Reached for comment, TikTok could not confirm what product developments necessitated the addition of biometric data to its list of disclosures about the information it automatically collects from users, but said it would ask for consent in the case such data collection practices began.”
McDonald’s announced earlier this month that it was deploying an AI chatbot to handle its drive-thru orders, but it turns out it might break privacy law.
The chatbot is the product of a voice recognition company McDonald’s snapped up in 2019 called Apprente which is now known as McD Tech Labs.
McDonald’s deployed the chatbots to ten of its restaurants in Chicago, Illinois. And there lies the issue.
As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.
All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had been subpoenaed.
No matter what happens at Wednesday’s summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that Democratic Party leaders have already hobbled its potential to move the world away from the worsening dangers of nuclear war. After nearly five years of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent—a depiction that squandered vast quantities of messaging without electoral benefits—most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers human survival.
As President Biden meets with leaders of NATO countries, where he is expected to continue stepping up rhetoric against China and Russia ahead of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this Wednesday in Geneva, we speak with famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg about why he recently released another classified document showing that U.S. military planners in 1958 pushed for nuclear strikes on China to protect Taiwan from an invasion by communist forces. The top-secret study revealed the U.S. military pressed then-President Dwight Eisenhower to prepare a nuclear first strike against mainland China during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958. Taiwan “could really only be defended, if at all, by the U.S. initiating nuclear war against China,” says Ellsberg. The document also shows that U.S. military planners were ready to accept the risk that the Soviet Union would launch its own nuclear retaliation, including against Japan. Although Ellsberg’s online release of the document was publicized in May, he reveals that he shared the same information with Japan decades earlier. “I had given the entire study to the Japanese Diet,” Ellsberg says.
Fifty years ago this week, The New York Times began publishing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the Pentagon’s secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam since the 1940s. The leak exposed years of government lies about the war, revealed that even top officials believed it was unwinnable, and would end up helping to end the Vietnam War and lead to a major victory for press freedom. The Times exposé was based on documents secretly photocopied by Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, who both worked as Pentagon consultants at the RAND Corporation. Ellsberg, who had been deeply involved in the Vietnam War as a defense analyst, decided to risk life imprisonment to reveal the truth about Vietnam. “I’d been lied to. The whole country had been lied to. The Congress had been lied to as to what the situation was,” Ellsberg says. He says top officials knew for years that the war had “very little likelihood of helping anyone, but leading just to an escalating stalemate.”
On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
After 12 years, Israel finally inaugurated a new prime minister. While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuation of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s.
Former GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said in an interview on Monday that he took part in a march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 in support of what he called a “fraudulent” presidential election that should have been investigated but that he did not enter the building that was later overrun by rioters.
Rohrabacher, a former California Republican who now lives in Maine, confirmed to the Portland Press Herald that he took part in a march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 after online observers identified him in footage over the weekend.
Newly released footage from the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol shows former Orange County Congressman Dana Rohrabacher joined a crowd that crossed police barricades, making him the highest profile politician known to be on the ground that day.
The northern highlands of Ethiopia became a global byword for famine in the mid-1980s, when drought and conflict combined to create a disaster that killed as many as one million people. Now hunger is stalking the Tigray region again, and a senior UN official alleges that starvation is being used as a weapon of war.
More than 350,000 of Tigray’s nearly 6 million people are living in famine conditions, according to an analysis by United Nations agencies and global aid groups first reported by Reuters on Thursday. Nearly 2 million others are one step away from such dire deprivation, they said. Ethiopia has disputed these estimates.
Now, we are learning that Trump’s Justice Department gathered communications-data records of reporters, Congress members, and congressional staff (along with family members, including at least one juvenile), allegedly to investigate intelligence leaks. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that just last month Apple told Trump’s own White House counsel Don McGahn that his boss’s top legal guns sought the records of not only McGahn but also his wife back in early 2018. On Monday, a Trump holdover in the DOJ’s national security division, John Demers, announced that he will leave his job at the end of the week. The move was long planned and is not necessarily connected to these subpoena controversies. But it could be.
What the hell was going on here?
In September of last year, SFPD arrested a man suspected of illegally discharging a gun, and a report in the San Francisco Chronicle raised concerns that the arrest came after running the man’s photo through a facial-recognition database. If the SFPD was involved in using facial recognition, that could potentially be a violation of San Francisco’s Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinance.
EFF filed a public records’ request with the SFPD about the investigation and the arrest, but the department released only previously available public statements. EFF appealed to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, after which point SFPD produced many more relevant documents. EFF filed a complaint with the task force about SFPD’s original, misleading record release.
At Tuesday’s hearing, EFF Investigative Researcher Beryl Lipton will ask the task force to uphold EFF’s complaint about the SFPD, arguing that San Francisco’s transparency policies won’t work well unless public agencies are held to account when trying to skirt their responsibilities.
Press freedom advocates were among those celebrating the release of former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner on Monday after her attorney announced Winner had been transferred from federal prison to a halfway house.
Reality Winner, the former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked evidence of Russian interference in a US Presidential election to the press, has been released from prison.
Her attorney Alison Allen announced Winner, 29, had been let out on Monday early due to “exemplary” behavior while inside.
In 2018, Winner pleaded guilty to one count of espionage for printing out a classified document describing the Kremlin’s attempts to infiltrate and meddle with voting systems amid the 2016 White house race. She sent the five-page report to The Intercept, which published a news article about the file’s contents.
Winner was sentenced to 63 months behind bars. The near five-year sentence is the harshest punishment handed out by the courts in the United States for leaking classified information to the media.
*The following report was originally published as part of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. NSA whistleblower Reality Winner was released from federal prison to a halfway house in San Antonio on June 2. She was released one week later to home confinement with her family.Prior to her release from Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, the facility confined Reality with five other women in a hospital-sized room for 23 days. Reality was informed it was a COVID-19 quarantine protocol. Billie Winner-Davis, who is Reality’s mother, told The Dissenter that her daughter received both doses of the vaccine. She was past the two-week period necessary for the vaccine to become effective.
The 29-year-old was jailed in 2018 for providing classified documents related to alleged Russian election [cracking] to the Intercept website.
Reality Winner, a former intelligence contractor jailed for leaking classified information, has been released from prison to serve her remaining sentence in a halfway house program. Winner’s attorney Alison Grinter tweeted the news this morning, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ website lists Winner in custody of San Antonio’s Residential Reentry Management field office, which oversees community-based programs for incarcerated people.
The Trash Wheels employ a straightforward technology: A large water mill is turned by the flowing river which powers a system of pulleys that turn a large conveyor belt and an array of rakes which help scoop floating debris onto the conveyor belt as trash floats down stream. The trash wheel has 2 long floating buoys which trap garbage that’s floating on the surface and funnels it into the mouth of Mr. Trash Wheel. From there it gets carried up the conveyor belt and emptied into a large dumpster. A small crew easily removes and empties the floating dumpsters as they get full.
Power for the belt comes from river currents that turn the water mill, but the Trash Wheels are also outfitted with solar panels and batteries for times when the river isn’t flowing fast enough to turn the wheel.
Europeans gawked at the bizarre comments of US climate envoy John Kerry, who claimed last month that the transition to a climate-neutral world hinges upon “technologies we don’t yet have” and that developing them could take decades. Kerry’s statements were outlandish—and undermine efforts to curb global warming.
The President’s bold Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) announcement could be just what we need to get America back on its feet. This program would bring jobs to people who have been underserved by the past economy. Teens, especially urban teens, adults over 50 and disabled Americans would all be trained for productive employment. Of course, green energy will be a large part of the program. That means thousands of jobs upgrading our electrical grid to move energy to where it is needed. Utilities have been neglecting grid upgrades for decades and we are now paying for it.
Monday brought fresh outrage among climate campaigners after the G7 Summit ended without a commitment to ending coal extraction in some of the world’s richest countries.
Five of the seven delegations—all but the U.S. and Japan—supported phasing out coal by 2040, but as Politico reported, the Biden administration forced the group to steer clear of language in its final statement that would point to the end of coal.
An analysis released Monday by advocacy group Friends of the Earth says that eliminating an overlooked loophole included in the Republicans’ 2017 tax legislation amounting to fossil fuel industry “welfare” could help fund renewable infrastructure while advancing smart climate policy.
“One of the biggest presents [former President Donald] Trump ever sent to the oil industry was hidden on page 157 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” Lukas Ross, author of the new analysis and program manager at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement.
Climate campaigners on Monday welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an appeal by oil and gas companies including BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil seeking to shift a lawsuit from state to federal court, a move that means litigation filed by states and cities against fossil fuel corporations will continue to play out in lower courts.
“Appeals courts have overwhelmingly agreed that climate liability lawsuits filed in state courts belong in state courts.” —Richard Wiles, Center for Climate Integrity
↺ ‘Sorely Disappointed’ by Court Ruling, Pipeline Foes Demand Biden ‘Act Immediately to Stop Line 3′
Native American, climate, and environmental activists on Monday renewed calls for the Biden administration to fulfill its stated commitment to climate action and Indigenous rights and stop Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline after a Minnesota appellate court upheld a state agency’s approval of the highly controversial project.
“Climate leadership means ending the fossil fuel era and stopping Line 3.” —Collin Rees, Oil Change International
Officials with Texas’ power grid operator pleaded with residents Monday to limit their electrical usage amid soaring temperatures and a series of mechanical problems at power plants.
The appeal, from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, comes four months after deadly blackouts during a winter storm left millions of people without power — and weeks after state legislators passed a package of measures aimed at fixing some of the problems exposed by the storm.
Even among the same type of source, there can be very big differences in their properties and performance. Let’s look at the most important features we should care about for any power source, how to measure them, and what to expect.
During the Trump Administration, the Bureau of Land Management seized the opportunity of the court’s 2015 remand to expand grazing under its 2020 Resource Management Plan. To do this, they needed to determine if grazing was compatible with resource protection, for which they generally use proxy measures like rangeland health standards to assess things like wildlife habitats and cultural sites.
The 496,000-acre monument proclamation specifically identifies the need to protect and preserve:
Either way, as Avidor-Reiss pointed out, modern life is almost built to put male fertility in peril. He cited a laundry list of factors, including the chemicals which surround us and can disrupt our hormones (known as “endocrine disruptors”); obesity; and men choosing to delay fatherhood. In addition, he noted that men have to continue producing sperm throughout their lives to remain fertile, while women are born with all of the eggs they will ever have; that sperm production takes over two months and is complicated, meaning that it is easier to trip us; and that “reproduction is not a task the body is trying to accomplish regularly; therefore, male infertility can go unnoticed until we try to reproduce.”
If the hyperbolic claims are to be believed, one might imagine American workers are luxuriating in the largesse of taxpayer-funded payments, thumbing their noses at the earnest “job creators” who are taking far more seriously the importance of a post-pandemic economic growth spurt.
It is true that there are currently millions of jobs going unfilled. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just released statistics showing that there were 9.3 million job openings in April and that the percentage of layoffs decreased while resignations increased. Taking these statistics at face value, one could conclude this means there is a labor shortage.
Does this mean the inflation hawks were right? Did Biden’s recovery package throw too much wood on the fire and is now setting off an inflationary spiral?
A little closer look at the numbers indicates that caution is still advised. First of all, prices plunged last April and May of last year, as the economy was shutting down in response to the pandemic. This means that the year-over-year comparison is not very informative.
Last year as COVID-19 laid siege to the nation, many U.S. hospitals dramatically reduced their aggressive tactics to collect medical debt. Some ceased entirely.
But not all.
↺ ‘All He Has to Do Is Sign’: Group Crafts Executive Order for Biden to Cancel All Student Loan Debt
A union of debtors on Monday released a draft executive order that would fully cancel the $1.8 trillion in federal student loan debt currently saddling tens of millions of people across the United States.
“We have no other option but to fight for debt abolition and a society where everyone has the means to live.”—Braxton Brewington, Debt Collective
You know, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, officially created in 2019, “establishing space as a warfighting domain and guaranteeing that the United States will dominate in that environment just like all others.”
Thus declared President Donald Trump at the time, unleashing a Hollywood script on the global and perhaps the intergalactic future. John Wayne lives, and he’s wearing a space suit!
But first, let me back up.
Democracies don’t turn into fascist oligarchies by being invaded or losing wars. It always happens from within, and is always driven by an alliance between demagogic, populist politicians and some of the very wealthiest people in society.
Progressive calls to add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court gained fresh urgency Monday after Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested he would block President Joe Biden from filling a potential high court vacancy if Republicans wrest back control of the upper chamber in next year’s midterms.
“We don’t have time to wait for a commission of academics to publish a pro-con list. Expand the court now.”—Demand Justice
At this time of a global pandemic, climate change, and teetering international economies, Presidents Biden and Putin will meet for their first official visit on Wednesday under a nuclear cloud that many observers feel is analogous to the Cold War. This meeting is expected to have frank discussions by each leader on many issues including the topic of strategic stability. Yet there is cause for hope. Noting previous occasions of cooperation and collaboration, on June 7, both governments were simultaneously delivered a high level appeal from more than 30 American and Russian organizations including international nuclear policy experts, former senior officials from both governments, international physicians and scientific organizations urging the presidents to, “Commit to a bilateral strategic dialogue that is regular, frequent, comprehensive and result oriented leading to further reduction of the nuclear risk hanging over the world and to the rediscovery of the road to a world free of nuclear weapons.” The appeal recalls the Reagan – Gorbachev Principal and joint statement following their November 1985 summit in Geneva, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This group also understands that since that historic summit, our nuclear world has changed. It is now generally recognized that:
A coalition of more than 300 progressive advocacy groups on Monday sent a letter to dozens of corporate executives demanding that companies stop providing financial support to the American Legislative Exchange Council due to its support for the Republican Party’s nationwide assault on voting rights.
“These companies cannot hide behind the excuse that they only support ALEC because of their pro-business legislation.”—Cliff Albright, Black Voters Matter
This essay discusses the frontier borderlands of East Asia from the seventeenth through nineteenth century. I analyze Chinese dynastic political practice, its legacy on early twentieth and twenty-first century geopolitics, as well as the need for American progressive positioning regarding the Uyghurs. In my view, commentary on this issue needs to be firmly rooted in leftist opposition to international human rights abuses, (Pukr) while resisting Sinophobia, US militarism, and Cold War exaggeration and intervention. I highlight these borders by looking at multiple frontiers geographically and thematically. Generally speaking, the regions discussed are covered in terms of the following respective evolving institutional zones: (1) the northeast, Manchuria, eastern Mongolia and Chosŏn Korea, (2) the southwest, Yunnan, Tibet and India (3) the northwest, Turkestan and Xinjiang, and (4) the north, and Outer and Inner Mongolia. I will show how each area had its own set of social, political and economic implications of environmental territory and history “across forest, steppe and mountain.”[1] To understand the problematic nature of American imperialism and Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” is to understand China’s own borderlands and how Uyghurs today, or “people in the middle” get in the way of uncompromising nation-building.
I argue that significant conflicts, starting in the seventeenth century, influenced Qing territory and the consequences of these are still seen in the case of the Uyghurs: ranging from mounting and forced pressure to reopen markets adjacent to border space, corporatized surveillance, economic suffering and famine, dejected statesmen and Confucian scholars, political impeachments, and forms of illicit trading. Additionally, succession and sectional disputes, mass violence, as well as pivotal demographic changes, all shaped China’s society, and its environmental history for generations.
In his first address to Congress on April 28, Joe Biden invoked the January 6 insurrection, saying, “The images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remain vivid in all our minds.” He added, “The insurrection was an existential crisis—a test of whether our democracy could survive. And it did. But the struggle is far from over.”
At 2021-06-13 01:38:57 BST, I was banned (k-lined) from Freenode (server evilcorp): [...]
EFF has long criticized large online platforms’ content moderation practices as opaque, inconsistent, and unfair because they often remove legitimate speech and disproportionately harm marginalized populations that struggle to be heard. These are serious problems that have real world consequences, but they don’t justify a law that violates the free speech rights of internet users who don’t happen to be Florida politicians and the private online services on which they rely, EFF said in a brief filed today in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.
“The First Amendment prevents the government from forcing private publishers to publish the government’s preferred speech, and from forcing them to favor politicians over other speakers. This is a fundamental principle of our democracy,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene.
The Supreme Court in 1974 unanimously rejected a Florida law requiring newspapers to print candidates’ replies to editorials criticizing them. Government interference with decisions by private entities to edit and curate content is anathema to free speech, the court said.
Hong Kong’s new “national security” law — thrust on it by the Chinese government that’s supposed to stay out of Hong Kong’s governmental business until 2047 — continues to increase the amount of censorship in the supposedly still-independent region.
Hong Kong’s film censors have been instructed to begin censoring films on national security grounds, making the city’s vaunted film industry the latest victim of spreading political censorship under the Hong Kong National Security Law. On Friday, an amendment to the film censorship ordinance means official censors are required to “be vigilant to the portrayal, depiction, or treatment of any act or activity which may amount to an offense endangering national security.” South China Morning Post’s Kanis Leung and Phila Siu reported on the details of the new censorship guidelines: [...]
Since the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar, journalists have been persecuted, arrested and forced to flee. The situation is dire, but some reporters have remained despite the risks. This is a personal account of one such journalist about life since the coup. VOA is withholding the journalist’s identity for security reasons.
At the recent Luxembourg Peace Prize Boniface Mwangi became 2021 laureate for ‘Outstanding Youth Peacemaker’.
Traceable to the late 1870s when the tobacco industry began to invest in baseball, through to the 1930s when television broadcasting produced the first millionaire sportspersons, sports marketing has all but corrupted what began millennia ago as forms of relaxation especially for the underclasses – sport.
While earning the respect of many, the insistence by Sócrates to be treated as a human being were bound to fall on deaf ears. The confluence of media corporations, especially television, sponsors and advertisers, and greedy administrators, all marshalled by sports marketing companies and agents, has led to the replacement of relaxation and social cohesion, which is what sport was all about, with the dominance of financial interests.
Case in point: Ohio’s Hudson American Legion Memorial Day parade organizers cut the volume on Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter’s mic when he began to discuss the role freed African American slaves played in organizing the first Memorial Day ceremony in 1865. Reportedly, this was because that portion of the speech, in the words of Cindy Suchan, chair of the committee and president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, “was not relevant to our program for the day” and its “theme of honoring Hudson veterans.” Days before, organizers had asked Kemter to remove sections of his speech that dealt with the black origins of the celebration. He refused.
Kemter is to be commended. But media reports that describe his speech as an attempt to introduce his audience to “black[1] history” miss the mark. Or, more precisely, they are part of the problem. The origin of Memorial Day is more than black history; it is American history, a history that includes both the tragedies of slavery, Jim Crow, and race massacres as well as the triumphs of Elijah McCoy, Florence Price, Claudette Colvin, William Grant Still, Bass Reevesand other black cowboys, Alice Ball, and Marsha P. Johnson, whose collective histories have been given short shrift, overlooked, or distorted outright by school textbooks and popular media. Until Americans realize that the contributions black and other people of color have made to America are inextricable from the nation’s history, they will continue to live in a comforting state of denial that erases anything that does not square with the fraudulent, monochromatic mythology white America manufactures to celebrate itself.
Early on the morning of July 20, Unite Here Local 11 Copresident Susan Minato crammed her suitcases, computer, and other necessities into her gray SUV rental and set off on a 371-mile drive from her home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles to Sun City West, on the northwestern edge of Phoenix. She was on a mission: to knock on as many doors as possible and help flip Arizona blue for Joe Biden.1
Over the past 20 years, Raoul Peck has emerged as one of his generation’s leading filmmakers and intellectuals. Beginning with Lumumba and Sometimes in April, his unflinching examinations of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Peck has shown us the horrors of late-stage decolonization and postcolonialism. With his last two feature films, I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, and The Young Karl Marx, he produced startlingly original and moving portraits of two of his main muses, setting the stage for his latest work, an epic four-part docuseries for HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes.1
For Peck, each of his films is as much a vehicle for political argument and posing philosophical questions as it is a way to offer alternative historical narratives. Even as he attempts to reinvent the documentary genre through innovative storytelling, employing a kind of dreamlike melancholy akin to jazz improvisation, as he did in Negro, he is a formalist committed to inventing new cinematographic modes. Although he built his career by assuming the role of journalistic or directorial objectivity and prefers to show rather than tell, he’s unafraid to step out from behind the camera and challenge the underpinnings of those Western myths that shaped his education and continue to define so much of contemporary political life.2
In 2013, families at a Seattle high school raked in more than $100,000 through a raffle to win a Tesla Model S. This story about PTAs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
There is a lot of talk about which contender in the crowded field of New York City mayoral candidates offers the boldest vision for bringing justice and equity to the nation’s largest municipality.
Every June, we recognize Pride month because internet freedom and the human rights of LGBTQIA+ people go hand in hand.
LGBTQIA+ people have the right to access information, resources, and community relevant to their identities without being tracked, surveilled, censored, or persecuted—but in many parts of the world, governments block LGBTQIA+ content and punish people who engage with it.
↺ High School Responds To Student’s Prank By Asking Local Law Enforcement To Step In And Investigate
I see we’re still handling things stupidly when it comes to school disciplinary problems. For years now, many schools have been steadily abdicating their responsibilities, allowing in-school law enforcement (commonly called “School Resource Officers”) to hand out discipline that school administrators used to handle themselves.
One of the more recent opportunities for law enforcement in the Third Party Doctrine space has been DNA databases. A number of companies offer on-demand DNA testing, allowing users to check themselves for potential markers that could indicate susceptibility to diseases or just to figure out where they fit in in the world by linking them to distant relatives they may not be aware of.
On Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver seemed chipper about our impending summer, but of course that was a bait and switch to address a serious situation that hasn’t been getting enough attention. While those of us who’ve emerged on the other side of COVID relatively unscathed may look forward to watching a movie in a theater, relaxing on a beach or possibly visiting loved ones, the prospects for prisoners during the summer is much more grim and possibly life-threatening.
In the segment below, Oliver presented the growing issue of overheating prisons across the country this summer – creating potentially fatal conditions – and the absurd lack of compassion officials have demonstrated.
Over the past year, once widely popular cop shows have fallen under increased scrutiny for their rosy portrayals of policing, at a time of far-too-frequent police killings of Black people in real life. This type of storytelling – dubbed “copaganda” because it amounts to millions of dollars in free PR for the police – has been linked to the negative and inaccurate perception of protesters, among others. Now, sexual assault survivors and their advocates are increasingly calling out the inaccuracies of how police officers treat survivors onscreen, and the dangers of telling victims and the general population that police will protect us.
More than 50 advocacy groups on Monday sent a letter to President Biden urging him to nominate a candidate to fill an open seat on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The groups said it is necessary for Biden to appoint a nominee to the FCC in order to start the process to reinstate net neutrality rules rolled back under former President Trump, and underscored their push by noting the additional hurdles posed by the pandemic.
This is a quick public announcement to say that I am not on the Freenode IRC network anymore. My nickname (sergiodj), which was more than a decade old, has just been deleted (along with every other nickname and channel in that network) from their database today, 2021-06-14.
There’s just something about terrible customer service, high prices, and sketchy product that consumers oddly don’t like. American consumers’ dislike of traditional cable TV providers was once again made clear this week in a new study by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which tracks US consumer approval of companies on a 100 point scale. As has long been the case, the full report shows most traditional cable TV, satellite, or IPTV providers languishing somewhere in the mid 60s — scores that are bested by a long line of industries and government agencies (including the IRS).
It’s no secret that Rupert Murdoch is an extreme hypocrite. He spent decades railing against any kind of regulatory powers to hold back companies, but as soon as his own attempts to build an internet empire flopped dramatically, he’s come around to being a major booster of regulatory crackdowns. Just only against the companies who out-innovated him. For years now he’s been demanding that governments force the internet companies to pay him money — a move that has been successful in his home country of Australia.
The antitrust committee investigation, which scrutinized the business practices of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, led to a report that accused the tech giants of charging high fees, forcing small customers into low-quality contracts, and buying out smaller companies that posed a competitive threat.
The bills will be referred to the House Judiciary Committee before being sent to the House floor.
To become law, they must pass through the House of Representatives, the Senate and, finally, be signed by President Joe Biden.
San Francisco: Apple has been hit with a lawsuit alleging that virtually all of its products that support Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity infringe on a set of wireless communication patents.
The complaint, lodged in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, claims that Apple products — like iPhones and iPads — infringe on specific claims in 13 different patents owned by non-practicing entity Smart Mobile, LLC.
New Zealand is a signatory to the World Intellectual Property’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement. The legal basis for compulsory licenses under New Zealand Patent Law is the New Zealand Patents Act. The provisions for compulsory licenses are found in Sections 169 through 175.
The President of the EPO has submitted written observations to the Enlarged Board of Appeal on case G 1/21, “Oral proceedings by videoconference”.
The appeal concerns the question whether the conduct of oral proceedings by videoconference is compatible with the right to oral proceedings as enshrined in Article 116(1) of the European Patent Convention if not all of the parties to the proceedings have given their consent.
The President submits that proceedings by videoconference has become an indispensable measure, ensuring legal certainty of the European patent grant and opposition process. In the President’s view, the question referred is admissible as it is important that it is resolved to ensure legal certainty. It is also in the interest of the users of the European patent system, general public and the EPO.
The President says that, irrespective of party consent, the compliance of oral proceedings by videoconference is “beyond doubt”. Construing Article 116 EPC in line with general principles of treaty interpretation, the President contends that Article 116 does not prescribe a specific form of oral proceedings and exclude other forms, such as videoconference. Further, all substantive requirements of Article 116 are met when oral proceedings are held by videoconference and conducting oral proceedings this way therefore complies with Article 116(1). Further, case law of the EPO supports the concept of oral proceedings by videoconference being consistent with Article 116.
TRCM: Conservative Sen. Claude Carignan appears at committee for Bill S-225, June 2, 2021
The Internet is full of misleading ads that promise free access to popular blockbuster movies, some of which are still in theaters. People who sign up for these services will soon realize that the offers are too good to be true. And when the trial expires, it can get quite costly too. Meanwhile, the masterminds behind the schemes are earning millions of dollars.
Triller has followed up on its threat to sue someone for simply watching a pirated stream of the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight. Triller previously gave pirates the opportunity to pay a settlement fee to avoid a lawsuit but one man decided to confess on Instagram instead. It didn’t go well.
Choosing the right VPN can be a tricky endeavor. There are hundreds of VPN services out there, all promising to keep you private but some are more private than others. To help you pick the best one for your needs, we asked dozens of VPNs to detail their logging practices, how they handle torrent users, and what else they do to keep you as anonymous as possible.
Preparing Bulgarian GLAMs for the EU Copyright Reform — by Ana Lazarova
The initiative ‘GLAMs to Fix Copyright: Preparing GLAMs for the Copyright Reform in Bulgaria’ was organized by Creative Commons Bulgaria in collaboration with Digital Republic Association, and supported by Creative Commons Global Network Copyright Platform Activity Fund.
On December 07 and 14, 2020, we organised a two-days extensive copyright training for public libraries in Bulgaria. Our main purpose was to inform library representatives about the upcoming implementation into national law of the recently adopted Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (the CDSM Directive). However, we also included what it turned out to be much-needed information on copyright basics, CC licenses, Rights statements, the legal status of e-books and digitisation.
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