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Posted in News Roundup at 1:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
System76 sent over a review unit a few weeks ago of their System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard, so here’s what I thought about this tiny yet weighty device.
Compared with other keyboard vendors one of the main selling points they have is open source. System76 has a good history of supporting open source, they’re a Linux hardware vendor and they have their own Linux distribution now too with Pop!_OS. This is their first keyboard though, designed and created by the American (Colorado) company at their own facilities but it’s not the first hardware they’ve directly done either with that being the Thelio desktops.
Their Thelio was back in 2018 so they’ve had a lot of time to tweak and upgrade their build process, so how well did the Launch Keyboard turn out? Very nicely actually. It’s the slickest keyboard I’ve ever had my hands on.
I believe I have mentioned before that the history of early GUI environments for PCs is sufficiently complex and obscure that it’s very common to run into incorrect information. This is markedly true of the Wikipedia article on DESQview, which “incorrects” a misconception by stating another incorrect fact. Since it’s Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, I assume that if I correct it the change will be reverted by bot within seconds.
False claims about TopView aside, the Wikipedia article on DESQview makes most of the salient points about its history. That said, I would like to talk about it a bit because DESQview is a neat example of an argument I’ve made, and it happens to dovetail into another corner of GUI history that I’ll bring up here and there.
This week has had a lot of amazing Linux news, like the Steam Deck the recent Audacity apology, even Microsofts own Linux distro, and rather than spamming the channel with videos I thought why not do a stream so that we can all chat about it.
All aboard the Steam Deck hype train! Linux gaming is making headlines again, and our new series introduces you to some cool new games, and asks the BIG question: “Will it Linux???”
That’s right. Microsoft’s latest product is an AI that deepfakes code. It’s robots programming robots and nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
While SquashFS wasn’t mainlined in the Linux kernel until 2009, this compressed read-only file-system has been in development for twenty years now with initially being a set of out-of-tree kernel patches. SquashFS has been instrumental to many Linux distributions for their Live DVD/USB environments and other use-cases where needing a general purpose read-only file-system with low overhead.
Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches were submitted on Thursday for going into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window. This drm-misc-next material continues to represent core Direct Rendering Manager changes as well as alterations/additions to the smaller DRM drivers.
The latest BPF functionality set to appear with Linux 5.15 this autumn is timers support.
BPF timers support has been worked on for the better part of the past decade and this week finally reached the milestone of being queued into net-next ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up around the start of September.
Collabora has been working on Panfrost open-source GPU driver for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPU for several years, and even getting official support from Arm.
But apparently, that support does not include documentation for Mali-G78 GPU and other recent Arm Valhall Mali GPUs, as the company recently reverse-engineered Mali-G78 for about a month before releasing the documentation on the Valhall instruction set (PDF).
This is a compilation of resources of Computer Aided Design (CAD) for free libre open source software users and community. Trying to leave AutoCAD, or SketchUp, or wanting something new? This article is for you. As for the software, you will find here 3D choices like FreeCAD and BlenderBIM, as well as 2D choices like LibreCAD and QCAD, among others. All software names mentioned below are cross platform, that is, available for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS. Now let’s see them!
Ansible is an open-source, simple, and robust IT automation tool, much like Chef. It helps automate repetitive tasks that save time, such as setting up AWS S3 buckets and much more. Ansible can also do configuration management, and it is super easy to use. This Ansible infographic will help you understand the fundamental concepts.
n Linux, how do I copy and transfer files remotely between two Linux machines? What command do I need to use to transfer files between Unix/macOS and Linux computers securely?
In Linux and Unix-like systems, you need to use the scp command or rsync command to copy files and directories between remote machines securely. This page explains how to use the scp/rsync command to copy and transfer files securely.
In this digital world, everything is about speed and performance. Every developer and business owner continuously find a way how to speed up WordPress sites. The following information will help you, how to improve your WordPress speed & performance (Ultimate Guide). you will learn a few tips for increasing your WordPress site speed and performance.
Jenkins is an open-source automation server to build, test, automate and deploy projects, much like Ansible. It is a continuous integration and continuous delivery server. It is Java-based and has the support of more than 1700 plugins to extend its functionality. First, you must create pipelines to operate Jenkins.
Puppet is an open-source automation tool for the configuration and management of servers, much like Ansible. It works by defining the desired state of the systems in your infrastructure. Therefore, you do not have to describe any steps required. Instead, the domain-specific language called Puppet Code helps define your desired state.
Chef is an open-source IT automation tool for configuration management, much like Ansible. It acts as infrastructure as code and follows the client-server architecture. To write configurations, it uses Ruby, a domain-specific language (DSL). It can use both physical and virtual machines to manage infrastructure.
Today, we will look at how you can install Fail2ban on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal, which will protect your servers from malicious attacks from bad bots and hackers. Those who are not familiar with Fail2ban are an intrusion prevention software framework that protects computer servers from primarily brute-force attacks and banning bad user agents, banning URL scanners and much more. Fail2ban achieves this by reading access/error logs of your server or web applications. Fail2ban is coded in the python programming language.
The top command in Linux is one of the most frequently used commands in our daily system administrative jobs. If you are looking for your career as a system administrator you must know about the top command.
Top command is used to show the linux processes. You can view the real time running system. You can see the processor activity and view real-time task managed by kernel. You can use neccesary action to stop, kill any unwanted process.
When you will run this command, it will will open an interactive command mode where the top half portion will contain the statistics of processes and resource usage. And other/lower half contains a list of the currently running processes.
dnswalk is a DNS debugger. It performs zone transfers of specified domains and checks the database in numerous ways for internal consistency, and accuracy.
GECOS information might be one of the last great mysteries of modern computing. Why is GECOS such a unicorn topic for Linux folk? I think it’s because sysadmins refer to it as GECOS without knowing the acronym’s meaning or its original purpose. Sysadmins refer to this /etc/passwd file information as the User Comment field. User comment makes it sound like something that is user-editable and is open to change on a whim. Neither of those is true. This field is not user-editable, and the field is generally used to hold an account’s purpose (for system or service accounts) or the user’s full name and other information.
It’s been quite some time since I wrote the last article in this DevOps series. But it’s time I focused on one of the most crucial essentials in DevOps, which is documentation.
It might feel like a very obvious activity within the DevOps community, but efficient documentation is often neglected across different organizations.
Technology and automation. We’re surrounded by it. Most of us, with the general exception of the older generation, take it for granted. How often do you get an email, a text, a phone call, or even a letter through snail mail without there being any sort of automation behind it? How often do you get one of those things that is personal, delivered just for you that wasn’t done by automation?
Have you ever wondered what life would be like a little over 1,000 years from now? You might think everything at that point is just automation. You might even think technology would be out of hand. Dangerous, even. Well, that’s the setting of Horizon Zero Dawn.
The earth is dominated by robots, called machines. They resemble very closely to their animal counterparts, from their appearance to their behavior, ranging from dinosaurs, hawks, deer, giraffes, alligators, tigers, among many others. But they’re in machine-form. Once at peace with man, they have turned on them for the worse — now they kill everything they see on sight. And now, with the verge of the death of all humanity because of these machines, there’s only one prospect that can save them — Project Zero Dawn.
Valve Software has been promoting Linux as a gaming platform for many years without a fuss. With the Steam Deck, a lot more people will suddenly be playing Linux from December – and if in doubt they won’t even notice anything. Because gaming under Linux is no longer a big deal – if you don’t want to play AAA titles with anti-cheat software, of all things. So the question arises: what is possible and what are the limitations?
The Steam client for Linux has been available since 2013, and Valve ported all of their own games such as Counter-Strike: Source, Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal to Linux shortly thereafter. With the development of the Wine fork Proton, which has been integrated into the Steam client since 2018, the Linux game world has become much bigger: What was previously fiddly, now runs with a click of the mouse in the Steam client.
It’s hard to imagine that it’s now been around 9 years since Valve confirmed that the Steam Client would be coming to Linux, after previously denying it was happening back in 2010 in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Things were pretty quiet until much later in July 2012 when it would all be confirmed. Valve opened up their special Linux blog to talk about their plans, where they said Gabe Newell had directly been interested in getting Steam and the Source game engine to Linux.
During July 2012 it was also the time that Valve’s Gabe Newell mentioned his intense dislike for Windows 8, saying very clear and bluntly how “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.”.
After that, their now quite famous (amongst Linux users) blog post titled Faster Zombies! appeared in August 2012 to talk about getting their games performing well on Linux, to the point that they mentioned it ran better with OpenGL than on Windows 7 with Direct3D.
Another wonderful open source game engine reimplementation has a major upgrade. OpenRCT2 is a modern game engine for playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and it just got better.
Just as a reminder though, this is not exactly the vanilla experience. The team on the project has made lots of small and some bigger improvements to make the game feel a little more modern. Including an enhanced Track Designer with ability to add/remove scenery and footpaths, the Track Designer has a pause button now, there’s a new single-rail roller coaster, terrain surfaces from RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 are now supported, lots of plugin improvements and new API additions, and lots more including plenty of bug fixes to improve the experience further.
For just today the game store itch.io is running another Creator Day where they don’t take a cut from any sales. Their store should also work fine on the Steam Deck.
Even though creators on itch can manually set what revenue cut they give itch, which could even be zero, itch will give 100% to all creators until 7 AM UTC Saturday, July 24. So this might be a good time to hit that purchase button on some fun indies you might have been holding back on, or actually donate to those that give their stuff away for free.
In this article I will tell you how I’ve migrated my servers running Apache+PHP to Nginx+PHP-fpm without diying the process.
We look at OpenBSD’s Signify. You can use Signify as an alternative to GnuPG or Minisign for signing and verifying files.
Signify uses Ed25519 for cryptographic signing and verification. OpenBSD developers use Signify extensively for signing. Actually, Ted Unangst developed the tool to sign and verify OpenBSD’s files. Besides, some other projects rely on Signify, like Wireguard, radare2, or LibreSSL.
The current version of Signify is v30, released on September 24, 2020.
Now enabled by default on OpenBSD -current is dhcpleased(8), a dynamic host configuration protocol daemon written by florian@ (Florian Obser), who spoke with us about his work: [...]
The last snapshot posted to the openSUSE-Factory mailing list was 20210721. The snapshot contained updates for both GNOME 40 and the userspace utility to manage the btrfs file system; the btrfsprogs 5.13 package improved documentation, made some fixes and added preparations for the 5.14 Linux Kernel. GNOME 40 on the other hand had a slew of updates that focused on updating translations and bug fixing. A regression was fixed in the 40.3 gnome-maps package and the 40.3 gnome-software package fixed a crash that sometimes happened when clicking on a website button on a details page. Another crash that was fixed in gnome-terminal 3.40.3 affected the loading of the reference schema source, which failed. The 4.4.14 autoyast2 package now copies files to a correct location based on details listed at bsc#1188357. The text-sharpening package known as harfbuzz updated to version 2.8.2 and made various fixes and improvements to the subsetter. Other notable packages to update in the snapshot were yast2-users 4.4.4, text rendering package pango 1.48.7, system call tracer strace 5.13 and many others.
Just three packages were updated in snapshot 20210720. The cpupower 5.14 version included an upstream patch and made a speed select modification for Intel hardware. The other two packages to update were ibus-table-others 1.3.12, which updated some function keys, and the library openblas_pthreads 0.3.16, which had some architecture fixes and improvements for RISC-V.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
A new week full of Tumbleweed snapshots comes to an end. And we had one day without a new snapshot (not due to problems but there was simply nothing in the queue that would have passed staging). So, as a result, we have published 6 snapshots during this week (0715, 0716, 0717, 0718, 0720, and 0721).
As more organizations begin bringing some employees back into the office and letting others remain remote, the challenges of orchestrating hybrid work are emerging. One key enabler of a productive, engaged, and innovative team in this in-between arrangement is asynchronous working.
“Working asynchronously simply means that we don’t all have to work in the same place at the same time in order to work together,” says Brian Abrahamson, CIO and the associate laboratory director for communications and IT at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab.
One problem: “Many of us brought our old ways of working to Teams and Zoom when the pandemic hit.” Sounds simple – but it’s not necessarily innate. “Many of us brought our old ways of working to Teams and Zoom when the pandemic hit,” notes Abrahamson. At the same, though, many technology organizations have made huge progress in digital work and remote collaboration. The age of the virtual workplace forced people to modify how, where, and even when they work.
“Today, instead of collaborating in real time – walking to the next cubicle to ask a question – remote work has forced us to become more independent and to rely even more on technology as our primary communication,” says Jason James, CIO of EHR software and analytics provider Net Health.
One of the unique things about Red Hat is that everything we do is open source. Every product we offer is rooted in one or more “upstream” open source projects. And since each of these projects has its own sets of participants, practices, timelines, and motivations coming together in a bottom-up, self-organizing sort of way–its own community–it is deeply insightful to look at Red Hat products from the perspective of their constituent communities. For Red Hat Data Services, one of our most important communities is Ceph, which has exciting developments underway.
Kubernetes is software to help you run lots of containers in an organized way. Aside from providing tools to manage (or orchestrate) the containers you run, Kubernetes also helps those containers scale out as needed. With Kubernetes as your central control panel (or control plane), you need a way to manage Kubernetes, and the tool for that job is kubectl. The kubectl command lets you control, maintain, analyze, and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters. As with many tools using the ctl (short for “control”) suffix, such as systemctl and sysctl, kubectl has purview over a broad array of functions and tasks, so you end up using it a lot if you’re running Kubernetes. It’s a big command with lots of options, so here are five common tasks that kubectl makes easy.
People are rapidly moving towards new technology day by day. The containerized-based solutions for applications have now become so popular. OpenShift and Kubernetes are the two most common platforms for containerized deployment management. Most of the similar features are present between OpenShift and Kubernetes. However, some differences are also between them. We will explain some major differences between Kubernetes and OpenShift in this article.
For all the Ubuntu users who are still ‘grooving’ with Groovy Gorilla (Ubuntu 20.10), the support for the same will be ending July 22. This means that you’ll no longer receive security, app, or bug fixes updates.
Saying goodbyes could be hard, but the good news is Ubuntu 21.04 has been out since April, and it brings new features and improvements. In this article, let’s look at how to update from Ubuntu 20.04/20.10 to 21.04 ‘Hirsute Hippo.’
If you haven’t seen it already, we are running a content survey. It will take you 7 minutes to complete and it will help us create the content that you want to read. So if you haven’t done it yet, here is the link: https://forms.gle/DqPg1zd7gCiad3GF8
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This is huge. According to Reuters, SoftBank stopped manufacturing Pepper robots at some point last year due to low demand. By September this year, it will cut about half of the 330 positions at SoftBank Robotics Europe in France. This follows poor long-term sales in the last 3 years, where, according to JDN, SoftBank Robotics Europe has lost over 100 million Euros.
Whether you like it or not, Pepper left its mark in the robotics world. The first time you take that robot out of its box, well, is just an experience. Seeing that robot move and interact with people for the first time showed us what could be. Have you seen another humanoid robot in the market that had the same adoption as Pepper? Or even the same autonomy?
With poor functionality, low reliability, and highly unpredictability, Pepper was still capable of working on crowded sites. Stores, banks, offices, conferences, it was there. You cannot say the same of others. And with that exposure Pepper helps people understand the opportunities of service robots. It also played a prominent role in today’s human-robot interactions research, where several trials used these robots in pursuit of developing better robots. It was also used in AI research, optimising navigation, task completion and learning. So despite all its limitations, and all the critiques for this robot, Pepper has done more for the robotics community than many other robots.
Here we will let you know how to install latest version of OBS Studio on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS including Linux Mint and other similar operating systems.
OBS-Studio is an open-source software you need for recording and Streaming (live broadcast) your audiovisual content be able. You can use OBS-Studio Screencasts included Screen recording (e.g. slides, Software, etc …), camera image, and sound record very comfortably and if necessary it can be used to start streaming of the Content to various streaming server such as YouTube, Twitch, Facebook live, Mixer, Twitter and more for worldwide audiovisual transfer.
Pine64 has officially launched the open source PineTime, a $26.99 smartwatch companion for Linux smartphones. This means, for the price of an Apple Watch Series 6 you could get yourself about 15 of these!
Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets
The outfit has been churning out single-board computers, notebook computers and smartphones aimed at hobbyists for years. As you can imagine, all of this gear is very inexpensive.
Pine64, also known as ARM Single-board Computers (SBCs), has been working on this “side-project” for at least two years. It was aimed at developing a Linux smartwatch called PineTime. The timepiece is interesting not just because of its very low price-tag.
Seeeduino XIAO is a tiny Arduino Zero compatible board with battery support that was launched last year with Microchip SAMD21G18 ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller at up to 48MHz.
Seeed Studio has now launched the XIAO RP2040 board with the same form factor but upgrading to a more powerful Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller clocked at up to 133 MHz.
Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
Many people have ATX power supplies from older desktop PCs that they may want to reuse with Arduino boards, Raspberry Pi, or other single board computers.
It’s indeed possible to do so by trimming some cables and making a circuit to protect the board from over-voltage or over-current. But ZJ-012 adapter board offers a simpler solution with a 24-pin header for the ATX power supply, terminal blocks for connection to the target board, some fuses for protection, and a header to connect an on/off button.
My literal stack of Raspberry Pi units is back up and running. That puts me at five operational in the house at the moment. They aren’t clustered at this time. I probably should do that though I would need to decide on a mission profile.
There are countless open-source solutions (including website creation tools and forum software) that power the web, and a helpdesk system is one of the vital areas that can benefit from it.
UVdesk is a free and open-source PHP based support ticket system with impressive options that you can start for free.
Here I shall mention more about it and how you can set it up for your business.
Happy Friday! Let’s review at what’s happened with the Apache community over the past week:
The Intel-led open-source Cloud Hypervisor project on Thursday issued its v17.0 release with more big improvements to this Rust-based VMM for running modern cloud workloads.
Over the past year, Oracle and Red Hat engineers have worked together to bring JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) support to GraalVM Native Image. Prototype pull requests were first introduced by Red Hat and Oracle in late 2020 and early 2021. Work then continued in a shared repository, with plans to contribute a new pull request incorporating work from all parties. In June 2021, we merged the first pull request that introduces the infrastructure for supporting JDK Flight Recorder on GraalVM with OpenJDK 11 upstream. It is available in GraalVM’s 21.2 release. This article shares some of the details behind that story: What native images are, why we worked to add JDK Flight Recorder, some of the technical challenges we faced, and what we’re looking to do next.
The text file contains only capital letters of the Latin alphabet (ABC … Z). Identify the most common character in the file immediately after the letter X. In the answer, write down this symbol first, and then immediately (no separator) how many times it occurs after the letter X.
In web development, a robust framework is where most developers go. As a result, Laravel is quite popular and loved by many developers. This post will teach you how to install Laravel and set up a basic project.
It’s easy to hate what you don’t understand. I hope that reading this article has helped you decipher some of Perl’s “noisy” quirks as well as its features for increased readability. Let me know in the comments if you’re having trouble grasping any other aspects of the language or its ecosystem, and I’ll do my best to address them in future posts.
Like any rave, I heard it before I saw it. The thick growl of bass even scared me a little. I entered the basement of the old Nabisco factory that now houses the Dia Beacon museum in New York’s Hudson Valley to find myself swimming in bass and darkness. After a minute or two, neon lights came to life in the far corners of the room, exposing a space roughly the size of a football field. A white X was painted on the floor in the center of the room. Speakers hung from the ceiling over the X, ready to belch music. More speakers lined the walls. Other than the lights and speakers, the vast room was empty.
Much of what Americans know about Rachel Robinson—who turned 99 on July 19—is what they’ve seen in the two major Hollywood films about Jackie. She was portrayed by Ruby Dee in the 1950 film, The Jackie Robinson Story, and by Nicole Beharie in the 2013 hit movie, 42. Both films depict Rachel as Jackie’s supporter, cheerleader, and helpmate, the person who comforted him when he faced abuse, and encouraged him when he was feeling discouraged.
Fies won an Eisner Award, a prize given to achievement in American comic books, in 2005 for the highly acclaimed Mom’s Cancer. He wrote a follow-up to this book in 2012, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? In addition, he is the author of The Last Mechanical Monster, which was also nominated for an Eisner Award in 2014.
Lives in northern California. He and his wife Karen have two grown daughters. Fies graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a physics major and English minor. In addition to making comics, has worked as a newspaper reporter, environmental chemist, freelance writer, and science writer.
I am pleased and proud that my Hellenic ancestors’ science, technology, philosophy, and culture sparked these blessings all over the world, especially to Western European societies, helping their metamorphosis from feudalism to enlightened democracies.
Historical decline of the West
I wouldn’t fault anyone at this stage for wanting to cut off any avenue for feedback at all. But the positive comments and constructive feedback are well worth putting up with dull people.
The initial survey’s full results will not be available until the end of next year, however, by which time the main investigation, due to start in spring should it go ahead, will have been ongoing for several months.
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A 2020 documentary which aired on Swedish TV provided filmed footage evidence of a large, several-meter gash in the hull, one of several reported holes and a development which prompted speculation over the true cause of the 1994 disaster.
The fact that half the dogs trusted the communicator who seemed to have made an honest mistake could reveal a lot about how dogs process social information, says Udell. “There is both genetic and behavioural evidence that dogs are hypersocial, meaning that many dogs have a difficult time ignoring social cues even when another solution might be more advantageous,” she says. “This is a really striking example of just how often this may occur.”
Educator Orhan İnandı, a dual Turkish-Kyrgyz national who was abducted by Turkish intelligence agency MIT, was questioned about subscriptions to newspapers and magazines critical of the government after he was taken to Turkey, according to a document obtained by Nordic Monitor.
İnandı, the founder and president of the prestigious Turkish-Kyrgyz Sapat school network operating in Kyrgyzstan, was kidnapped by Turkish spies on May 31, 2021 and illegally brought to Turkey, where he is believed to have been subjected to torture.
Every once in a while, someone asks about my interests. I usually just say I’m into home computers from the 1980s and, since most people are very nice and polite, they then ask what I do with them. I usually say something about competing in computer graphics at “digital art festivals,” because explaining what the scene and a demo party is can be somewhat tricky. That’s usually when they stop asking questions. Nevertheless, I am the boss of my own home page, and I’ve decided to detail how I spent my spare time during a few weeks before easter this year.
Because of COVID, (almost) all demo parties have moved online until further notice. It’s a bit boring, but it’s better than nothing. The German party Revision is currently the biggest of its kind in the world and I decided to make an entry for the Amiga intro compo.
Here’s the bottom line: Most of the time, I couldn’t tell I was using Starlink. And that’s good. Everything felt the same.
But that was most of the time. I have eight trees around my house, and there’s literally nowhere I could put Dishy that allows it a full view of the sky with no ‘obstructions’.
My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents, and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has replaced passenger-seat navigators, maps, even traffic updates on the radio. How on earth did we survive before this technology arrived in our lives? We survived, of course, but were quite literally lost some of the time.
We are now more than six months into the Biden administration. Six months during which so many of us have been crying out for him to turn his attention to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Six months of absolute dereliction of duty, imperiling millions around the globe and hampering our own efforts to conquer SARS-CoV2 at home.
Scomo’s statement insinuates that he has a “strategy” – which he does not have and does not need to have. As long as his propaganda works, things is fine. Essentially, Scomo’s sentence links three key words. The first word is “strategy”, implying Scomo has a plan, he is in charge, he knows what he is doing. The second word is “large” which links rather neatly to “vaccination rates”.
The fact that Australia does not have a “large vaccination rate” does not really matter. By mid-July, Australia was sitting at a vaccination rate of about 9% – at the very bottom of all OECD countries. Yet this does not matter in public relations. What matters is linking key words to create the perception you want.
The significant increase in Covid 19 infections in our country in the last one week has prompted concerned Malaysians to ask the authorities to re-strategize their approach towards the fight against the spread of the virus. A total lockdown, some feel, where most movements are severely curbed is not the solution. They prefer a targeted lockdown which is focussed upon specific areas or clusters. Since infection numbers are increasing at an alarming rate the blanket approach they are convinced is not working. The proponents of the total approach argue that only such an approach will break the rapid transmission of the virus. Besides, the accelerated transmission is caused by a new variant of the virus which will happen even if a targeted approach is adopted.
On the question of vaccinations there is also diversity of opinions. Since factory workers are among those who have been infected in large numbers, they should have been given the vaccine first according to some critics. The government on the other hand prioritized senior citizens and those with disabilities, apart from front liners such as health workers who were at the head of the queue.
The highly transmissible Delta variant is fueling an alarming surge in new coronavirus infections across the United States, intensifying pressure on the White House and federal public health agencies to take steps to curtail the spread and prevent additional unnecessary deaths.
New figures from Johns Hopkins University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that coronavirus cases have jumped by at least 55% across the U.S. over the past week, and hospitalizations and deaths have been trending upward in recent days. The state of Florida, led by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is recording nearly 6,500 new cases per day—far and away the most in the country.
The U.S. House on Wednesday passed the PFAS Action Act of 2021, a bill that, if passed by the U.S. Senate, would improve the regulation and facilitate the cleanup of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—long-lasting synthetic chemicals that pose a threat to public and environmental health.
H.R. 2467, introduced by Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) in April, passed by a margin of 241-183. Twenty-three Republicans joined nearly every Democrat in supporting the bill to protect people and ecosystems from harmful PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because they persist and bioaccumulate for years on end. Five Republicans and Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) abstained.
Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Michael Carome about the FDA’s Alzheimer drug scandal for the July 16, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Russian officials have dismissed Meduza’s recent joint investigation with Mediazona and Holod Media, which revealed that Russian health officials appear to have registered as many as 29 million suspected cases of COVID-19 — a number that’s five times higher than what’s reported in official statistics.
An Indonesian man with the coronavirus has boarded a domestic flight disguised as his wife, wearing a niqab covering his face and carrying fake IDs and a negative PCR test result.
COVID-19 cases nearly tripled in the U.S. over two weeks amid an onslaught of vaccine misinformation that is straining hospitals, exhausting doctors and pushing clergy into the fray.
A malware, available for just a little over Rs 3,600 ($49) on the Dark Web, is helping hackers steal the information of Mac and Windows users, cyber researchers warned on Thursday.
Check Point Research (CPR) reported that the malware strain known as ‘Xloader’ has evolved to steal the information of MacOS users.
Web services company Akamai Technologies on Thursday suffered a massive outage, leading to several websites facing downtime, including in India, like Zomato.
In an update on its website, the Miami-based company said it received the decryptor from a third party and has “teams actively helping customers affected by the ransomware to restore their environments.”
Microsoft has shared a workaround for a Windows 10 zero-day vulnerability (dubbed SeriousSAM) that can let attackers gain admin rights on vulnerable systems and execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges.
According to NSO’s literature, its Pegasus product provides “unlimited access to target’s mobile devices”; can “transparently monitor voice and VoIP calls in real-time”; can monitor applications such as Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger; track targets using GPS; monitor switching of virtual identities and replacement of SIM cards; and, perhaps most importantly, it can “Overcome encryption, SSL, proprietary protocols”. It is able to get around even the strongest encryption not by breaking it, but by monitoring unencrypted input and output using malware that has been installed on the phone. It achieves this through a variety of remote installation methods:
Austria’s Supreme Court has questioned the legal basis on which Facebook (FB.O) collects user data and referred key issues for a ruling by Europe’s top court, after awarding symbolic damages to activist Max Schrems in his privacy case against the company.
In a 34-page ruling, the Austrian court accepted the request from Schrems, who has waged a years-long campaign against what he views as Facebook’s intrusive privacy practices, to refer key questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Government, police, military, and corporate accounts. Now, keep in mind that Ashley Madison’s mission statement back then was the same as it still is today: “Life is short. Have an affair.” So, it’s pretty clear what the goal of using the service is. Should work email addresses be used on a site of this nature? Does your place of work have a right to know? The ability to know? And for that matter, can we pose the same questions for less salacious online services?
Call it the Pegasus effect. From upping their internal security to creating centralised servers and from getting vulnerability tests to sensitising the senior management about cyber risks, the Pegasus spyware incident has brought the spotlight on rapidly emerging enterprise threats from cyberspace.
DePriest joins GitHub from the NSA where he built the agency’s Developer Experience function from the ground up and was in charge of fostering private and public sector engagement with the open source community.
A group of 21 Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to “reject a 21st century arms race” with key actions including making reductions in the nation’s nuclear arsenal and confirming a no-first-use policy.
The call came in a letter (pdf) led by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.), the co-chairs of the recently formed Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group.
On the hunt again, the cop from Wuhan rolled into New Jersey on a secret reconnaissance mission.
Hu Ji watched the suburban landscape glide past the highway. He was in his early 40s, about 6-foot-1, smooth and confident-looking. His cases had led from Fiji to France to Mexico, making headlines back home. The work was riskier here; in fact, it was illegal. But he knew the turf. He’d identified himself as a Chinese police officer on his tourist visa, and the Americans hadn’t given him any trouble. Sometimes, it was best to hide in plain sight.
Since 2009, the EU Border Agency Frontex has been hosting training events on drones and inviting manufacturers to regular demonstrations. There, border police from Schengen member states were presented market-available unmanned systems for the surveillance of land and maritime borders. The basis for this is the first Frontex Regulation, adopted in 2004, which contains the mandate to „follow up on the development of research relevant for the control and surveillance of external borders“. The agency’s remit therefore includes continuous exchange with „cross-sectorial partners“ in order to „transform operational requirements into innovative operational solutions“.
In the case of the “Islamic Police”, according to complaints that have come to light, extremists patrol the main hangout areas of migrants, terrorising and enforce religious laws on people outside of Greek law.
The self-appointed “religious police” do not hesitate to brutally beat men and women who do not follow, according to their own standards, the rules of Islam.
The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law gave this grim report today.
According to the report, Benue and Kaduna have recorded the most deaths in the last six months.
Perhaps the saddest thing about these and other revelations about the incident which have been teased from the authorities is that while they should fire up a scandal, it seems inevitable that they won’t. The police, the government, and the CAA have no desire to be reminded of their mishandling of the event, neither except for a rare bit of mild questioning do the media wish to be held to account for the execrable quality of their reporting. The couple who were wrongly arrested have not held back in their condemnation, but without the attention of any powerful vested interests it seems that some of the measures brought in as a response will never be questioned. All we can do is report any new developments in our little corner of the Internet, and of course keep you up to date with any fresh UK police drone paranoia.
The couple then sued the Sussex Police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment and won almost $253,000 in damages and legal fees.
At the time, an independent review commissioned by the Sussex Police revealed there were 96 people of interest, all of whom were ruled out in the investigation.
However, the report of this review was never made public, even though a news agency submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the same. On the contrary, the police invoked Section 22 of the FOI Act that exempts information held with a view to future publication.
The PA news agency submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for a copy of the report a year ago, but the force failed to release the document or officially respond to the request.
After months of saying a redacted version of the report was being prepared, Sussex Police now says it is applying part of the FOI Act that exempts information “held with a view to future publication without setting a date”.
Nobody has been charged over the disruption.
As the impacts of the climate emergency continue to be felt around the globe, white men overwhelmingly dominate the airwaves on climate coverage. We speak with co-editors of the new book “All We Can Save,” an anthology of essays by 60 women at the forefront of the climate justice movement. “We are simply not seeing very much climate coverage at all in the mainstream media,” says Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab. Katharine Wilkinson, visiting professor at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee, emphasizes women and girls around the world are “disproportionately impacted by climate change” and must lead the search for solutions. “There is a growing body of research that centering women’s leadership on climate is not just something that sounds nice. It’s actually a critical strategy for how we win,” Wilkinson says.
As the Pacific Northwest reels from record-breaking heat and braces itself for another fire season, four climate activists cases were dismissed on Wednesday in Clark County Circuit Court in Vancouver, Washington. The defendants, Kelsey Baker, Mike Hastie, Samantha Krop, and Bruce Watt, faced criminal charges after participating in an action that attempted to halt the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX) project, one of the worst climate-polluting pipeline projects on the planet. The activists’ cases, like those of many other criminal defendants across the United States, were significantly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The dismissal came less than two weeks before their trial, but shortly after CLDC lawyers filed motions challenging the constitutionality of the charges.
“The solidarity and commitment these defendants have shown throughout this process is a reflection of the strength of the climate movement as a whole,” said Sarah Alvarez, CLDC Staff Attorney. “They know they are on the right side of history. In agreeing to dismiss the case against our clients, the City of Vancouver finally recognized that it never had a real shot in convicting our clients of the trumped up charges. And while it’s a shame that it took the City nearly two years of wasted resources and time to realize this, it’s still a great day for our clients and the movement to end extractive industries that are hastening the demise of the planet.”
I could end this story by saying “We kept swimming and it was beautiful even if it will all be gone someday or some shit” but I already ended another climate story that way. I have, several times, really nailed that ending, sad, wistful, something like pining for lost love but worse because larger in scope, but not worse, because not totally immediate. Writing is stupid. I just want to be alive. I want all of us to just be alive. It is hard to accept the way things are, to know that the fight is outside the realm of argument and persuasion and appeals to how much it all hurts in every way. It is terrifying to know that the prize for many who care may be prison or worse. But all the right words about climate have already been deployed. It’s time for the right weapons.
When detailing catastrophic weather events, prominent corporate news outlets show less reluctance than in the past (FAIR.org, 9/22/20, 4/22/21) to prominently pointing out that these events are caused by human-driven climate change. But when humans seek to take aggressive action against this aggressive reality, reporters frame those goals as lofty and unlikely to succeed.
On July 14, the European Union (EU) announced a sweeping package of climate proposals that will help the continent cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030, from a 1990 baseline.
The so-called “Fit for 55” climate package includes a strengthening of the cap-and-trade system, an effective ban on gasoline and diesel vehicle sales by 2035, proposals to cut emissions from buildings, more renewable energy, and a tariff on imports of carbon-intensive goods from countries that aren’t sufficiently regulating emissions, among many other policies.
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Former UK Energy Minister and original COP26 President Claire O’Neill has been cleared to take up a role at a business consultancy known for running “astroturf” campaigns for fossil fuel companies, despite warnings from the body that approves such appointments.
FTI Consulting, which announced that O’Neill would be joining the company last month, has previously been revealed to monitor environmental activists in the US on behalf of a Texan oil company and has recently helped generate media interest around hydrogen as a potential climate solution.
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They, however, said the schemes struggled to fulfil needs due to the rising population.
The reservoirs are shrinking faster than expected, spreading panic throughout a region that relies on the river to sustain 40 million people. Federal officials expect to make the first-ever water shortage declaration in the Colorado River basin next month, prompting cuts in Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.
“We have seen hydrologic projections that are worse than anticipated,” Trujillo said.
The U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday that 419,000 people filed for unemployment benefits last week, an increase that came after more than two dozen Republican-led states ended their participation in federal jobless programs enacted to help workers stay afloat amid the coronavirus crisis.
According to the Labor Department’s data (pdf), unemployment claims last week were up 51,000 from the previous week, an indication that layoffs are continuing as the ultra-contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads rapidly across the nation.
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, laments the Rocket Man in Elton John’s timeless classic. In fact, it’s cold as hell. But that doesn’t seem to worry a new generation of space entrepreneurs intent on colonising the “final frontier” as fast as possible.
Three of the richest billionaires on Earth are now spending billions to exit Earth’s atmosphere and enter into space. The world is watching—and reflecting.
China’s technical advances continue to amaze and impress most of the world.
The basic story here replicates in large part the story of the United States and the British Empire. The United States was once a mere colony, humiliated as well as economically abused by its colonizer. China suffered similarly at the hands of its colonizing abusers, although it was able to avoid formal colonial status, except for some enclaves. Resentment and bitterness accumulated in the American revolutionary break from its colonial status in the late 18th century. The same happened in China in the middle of the 20th. In the War of 1812, the new United States proved that the British Empire could not undo the American Revolution. In the Korean War, the new People’s Republic of China proved that the U.S. empire could not undo the Chinese Revolution.
As the world’s richest man flies his Blue Origin rocket into suborbital space, here on Earth calls are growing to tax the rich and let Amazon unionize. Billionaire Jeff Bezos has faced strong criticism after Tuesday’s flight, for which he thanked Amazon workers and customers who “paid for all of this.” Bezos traveled to the edge of space just days after another billionaire, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, took a similar trip on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. “The richest and most powerful people in the world are turning their eyes away from the planet and to the stars,” says Paris Marx, a writer and host of the podcast “Tech Won’t Save Us.” “We need to question whether we should be dedicating so much resources to this kind of grand vision of a future that may never arrive,” Marx says. We also speak with journalist Peter Ward, author of the book “The Consequential Frontier: Challenging the Privatization of Space,” who says billionaires who have monopolized large sectors of the economy are seeking to do the same for space infrastructure. “It’s not the worst thing to have the private sector involved. It’s just it can’t be where they have complete control,” Ward says.
There was a great public outcry when the Commission asked the public for their opinion on limiting cash payments in 2017. More than 90% of responding citizens spoke out against such a step. Respondents considered paying anonymously in cash an “essential personal freedom” and that “Restrictions on payments in cash are ineffective in achieving the potential objectives (fight against criminal activities, terrorism, tax evasion)”. According to an ECB survey up to 10% of citizens use cash even for amounts greater than 10.000 € (e.g. buying cars). According to calculations by shadow economy expert Friedrich Schneider of the University of Linz, banning large cash payments would have “only minimal lowering effects on crime”.
For those who were looking forward to obtaining transparency for the incompetent negligence, malfeasance, and reckless disregard for the health and safety of the American people that were the hallmarks of Donald Trump, the prospect of that reckoning has dimmed. Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland appears to be working to protect the interests of Trump and all those in his administration who may have broken the law and were investigated in federal grand jury proceedings.
As U.S. senators held a hearing Thursday on American workers’ organizing rights, dozens of progressive organizations announced a new coalition to demand that lawmakers pass the PRO Act.
Motherboard reports that “the grassroots group, the Worker Power Coalition, is made up of 40 of the most powerful progressive organizations in the United States, across a broad spectrum of issues, including racial justice, electoral politics, [and] environmental activism.”
Rights groups and other progressives are demanding a probe of the FBI’s rushed and limited 2018 background investigation into U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after seven Democratic senators on Thursday revealed new details about the bureau’s actions.
Kavanaugh was nominated to the court by former President Donald Trump and narrowly confirmed by GOP senators in October 2018, despite allegations of sexual assault, which Kavanaugh has denied. A newly released letter to lawmakers from the FBI sheds light on—but also raises more questions about—how the bureau handled its investigation of those allegations.
I cannot sign this letter. I am sad to see it promoted by some longtime friends who have been in solidarity with Nicaragua since the 1980s. But other longtime friends in solidarity with Nicaragua–many of who have lived there for years and are still in Nicaragua–have a very different perspective, one shaped by what they have seen and experienced there over the past decade.
My most recent trip to Nicaragua was in September, 2018, just a couple of months after the 2018 uprising–the timing was intentional. I spoke with old friends, Nicaraguans, Americans, and Europeans living there, most of whom I have known since the 1980s and some I met when I was there with the Witness for Peace longterm team in the mid 1980s. What I heard during my September visit was a whole spectrum of opinions about Ortega and the Sandinistas, about what the government has been doing, and quite different stories about what actually happened in the 2018 “autoconvocado” (insurrection). What I heard presented a reality a lot more complex than the simple story of a brave resistance and a bad dictator. It seemed, and still seems, clear to me that the Nicaraguan people are not united against the government, not by any means.
Six independent experts appointed by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council on Wednesday warned that “hundreds of Venezuelan cancer patients could die” as a result of illegal U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela and its state-owned oil company.
“There are some 190 cancer patients on a waiting list for foreign treatment, and some 14 children, including three toddlers, died between 2017 and 2020 waiting for treatment.”—U.N. Human Rights Council
Progressives on Thursday denounced the Biden administration as the White House announced plans to hit Cuban officials with new targeted sanctions amid recent protests in the Caribbean country—going back on President Joe Biden’s campaign promise to reverse his predecessor’s Cuba policies and ignoring calls from the Democratic Party’s left wing to lift the U.S. trade embargo on the island.
Biden reportedly announced his plans regarding Cuba policy in a Wednesday night call with Democratic Cuban-American activists who had been calling for aggressive action since protests erupted on the island earlier this month.
Almost instinctively, many of these reports have paid particular attention to the taking to the streets of right-wing Cuban-American exiles in various US cities, and especially the Mecca of the exile diaspora, Miami. Apparently, these people’s views on Cuba count for a great deal. So much so, that some publications have reported on how the Democrats are seizing on the protests as an opportunity to win back Cuban-American voters in Florida. These reports remind us that this formerly neck-and-neck swing state went for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020, in no small part due to his administration’s toughened stance on Cuba and close relationship with Cuban-American hardliners like Marco Rubio. Politico, for example, tells its readers that Biden’s Cuba policy going forward “could have a big political impact in a state where Democrats are reeling” and that “Florida Democrats see what many are calling a “golden opportunity.””
As with US intervention, this is presented in corporate media accounts as a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to do. But upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that something is very seriously amiss. Because, in reality, predicating policy toward a foreign country based on the interests and political orientation of that country’s immigrant community within the US, rather than those who actually live in that country, is a totally bizarre, not to mention destructive, modus operandi.
The Russian government has filed its first-ever interstate complaint with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) — and it’s against Ukraine.
The so-called Arab Spring policy, initiated by Washington to spread “democracy” in targeted countries is hardly talked about now as a “democratic” venture. The after-math, marked by use of weapons, forcible ousting of several governments, has been being called Arab Winter, a far-cry from the democratic revolution initially painted by Uncle Sam. Little importance was then given by most, including media blowing trumpets about this democratic ploy, to how can democratic revolution – which begins from grass-roots – be exported into any other country? That too into nations with fairly different cultural norms.
And, pray, wherein lies the linkage between democracy and use of weapons- whether by internal or by external sources? One understands democracy as voice for the people, of the people and for the people. Not as that of powers, “targeted” communities don’t recognize as theirs and cannot be identified with.
When Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes made his much-anticipated entry into the Democratic primary contest to take on Republican Senator Ron Johnson on Tuesday, the 34-year-old rising star in progressive politics immediately secured a list of endorsements from national groups that have focused on the race. That provided an indication of the seriousness of Barnes’s candidacy, as did the predictably crude attacks from Republican groups that recognize his potential as a challenger to the scandal-plagued incumbent.
Utah Senator Mike Lee, a raving hypocrite who abandoned his stated principles to play lackey to Donald Trump, is fond of saying, “We’re not a democracy.” Lee thinks that’s a good thing. He’s written: “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” When Lee says these things, he’s not merely playing the role of an overzealous high school social studies teacher trying to use “cool facts” to deflect the hail of spitballs. He’s also channeling the deepest fears of the slavers and colonists who wrote the Constitution. Those guys understood, as Lee does, that a true democracy, in which everybody gets to vote and participate in self-government, would be a threat to white male hegemony in the New World.
President Joe Biden said late Wednesday that he remains opposed to eliminating the legislative filibuster even as the Senate GOP uses the archaic procedural tool to obstruct his agenda, including a popular bill that would shield voting rights from state-level Republicans hellbent on eroding them.
During a CNN town hall in Cincinnati, Biden reiterated his support for bringing back the so-called talking filibuster, which required senators to hold the floor and speak continuously in order to block legislation.
He was right, but times have changed. Formerly a critic, Norman’s now a fan. On June 29th, he notified the Clerk of the US House of Representatives that he was “unable to attend proceedings in the House Chamber due to the ongoing public health emergency,” designating a proxy (fellow South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson) to vote in his stead.
Oddly, the “public health emergency” which prevented Norman from traveling the 400 miles or so from his home in Rock Hill, South Carolina to Washington, DC, proved no obstacle to a 1,400-mile trip from Rock Hill to Weslaco, Texas.
On July 9, 2020, the governor of Russia’s Khabarovsk territory, Sergey Furgal, was detained outside of his home and taken to Moscow. There, he was interrogated and later jailed on charges of organizing multiple murders. The Russian Investigative Committee initially claimed to have “irrefutable evidence” of Furgal’s involvement in the killings — but over a year later, they still haven’t been able to offer any proof. The case hearings, which sparked massive protests in Khabarovsk, are being held behind closed doors. Meduza has obtained case materials containing the testimonies at the center of the case against Furgal, and their authenticity has been verified by two sources familiar with the case. Meduza special correspondent Anastasia Yakoreva, who studied the case documents thoroughly, describes them here for the first time.
State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin is making billions of rubles off of hidden business interests, says a new investigation from Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (the FBK). In particular, the report traces a number of companies back to Volodin’s relatives, as well as expensive properties in Moscow, the Moscow region, and Saratov. The FBK also tallies up Volodin’s regular trips from the Russian capital to his home region on a super-expensive jet owned by the presidential administration. Meduza summarizes the investigation here.
Are social-media companies killing people?
Techdirt was recently sued in Florida by Larry Klayman for an article that we published concerning the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suspending his license for 90 days. We strongly believe that this case is entirely without merit, and is a clear attempt to silence opinion and criticism via the court system.
Content moderation in virtual reality comes with its own unique challenges. What works for the moderation of text and video doesn’t neatly translate into VR. In late June, Facebook’s Horizon, a VR social space still in beta testing, released an update to prevent its blocking feature from creating ghosts. That might sound hyperbolic, but it is a perfectly apt description of the feature’s effect in Horizon prior to the update. In the earlier build, both the blocker and the blocked were made invisible to one another, but allowed to continue interacting with the same virtual world. While they couldn’t see one another, they could see each other’s effects on their shared environment. If someone blocked you, your obscene gestures might be invisible to them, but you could still move the furniture about and rattle chains – practically becoming a poltergeist.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, introduced a bill Thursday that would remove online platforms’ Section 230 liability protections when the platforms are used to spread misinformation about coronavirus vaccines or other public-health emergencies.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online platforms like Facebook and Twitter from civil liability for third-party content posted on their platforms. The measure has come under intense scrutiny over the past year, with prominent figures from both major political parties calling for reform.
Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Ben Ray Luján (N.M.) introduced a bill Thursday that aims to hold tech companies accountable for spreading health misinformation as the federal government continues to push for Americans to get COVID-19 vaccines.
The bill would create an exception to a part of a controversial bill, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that provides tech companies a legal liability shield over content posted by third parties. The proposal would create an exception for platforms that have algorithms that promote health misinformation related to an existing public health emergency.
It’s just something different whether you depict Christ as a pig on the cross or sell the Piss Christ dipped in urine as art or whether you cartoon the murderer, warmonger and child molester Mohammed. In the latter case, it is obviously understandable for MSM like SPIEGEL if the “faithful” are outraged and cut the throat of someone or other or shoot him or blow him up.
Ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been making ample use of laws against insulting the head of state or government officials as a pretext to punish or intimidate critics and opponents since the introduction of the executive presidency in 2018.
Any person who criticizes Erdoğan or his government can be sentenced to up to four years under Article 299 of the Turkish Criminal Code (TCK) or two years under Article 301 of the same law, penalizing insults against the president or the cabinet.
While locals demand transparency, the regime has been busying itself promoting so-called positive energy propaganda programs. Such content includes those praising party officials, the military, and rescue efforts. In turn, online censors have swooped in to quickly remove any content deemed to carry “negative energy,” such as footage captured by locals documenting the destruction and calling for official accountability.
The recent plot to kidnap Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad has reopened the case of Iran’s targeting of opposition members and dissidents living abroad.
Alinejad said on Wednesday that she was shocked by an Iranian plot to kidnap her from her New York home, as Tehran stiffly denied the allegations contained in a US Justice Department indictment.
The White House strongly condemned the plot, which came to light late Tuesday when the Justice Department unveiled charges against four Iranian intelligence agents, who had allegedly planned to seize the dissident journalist and smuggle her to Iran.
Alexander Ionov, the founder of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, has filed a complaint against the investigative journalism outlet IStories with the Russian Attorney General’s Office. Ionov told MBX Media that he reported IStories to the Russian authorities because the outlet has allegedly been the recipient of foreign funds.
“They will torture [me] for sure,” said Win, whose news outlet has been blacklisted by the junta, its offices raided by police and some of its reporters arrested and put on trial. He asked that his full name be withheld for his safety.
For years, the Department of Justice has used its bespoke “balancing process” to decide whether or not to target journalists during investigations of criminal acts or to hunt down the source of leaked documents. This was intended to make the DOJ take into consideration the impact on protected speech and press freedoms when issuing subpoenas targeting journalists. Far too frequently, the DOJ has told itself it’s ok to collect journalists’ phone and email records in hopes of identifying the actual targets of leak investigations.
Just a few months ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a broadly-written anti-protest bill that, among other things, criminalized the act of participating in a protest if other protesters did illegal things. It also criminalized the blocking of traffic and roadways by protesters, something that was already illegal but now was super-illegal with enhanced punishments that made this act a felony.
The ACLU is calling a federal judge’s decision to block an extreme abortion ban in Arkansas “a big win”—the latest victory by rights advocates as Republican-led state legislatures pass increasingly extreme bans—while pro-choice lawmakers called for the passage of legislation guaranteeing abortion rights.
U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, ruled on Tuesday that the law signed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson is “categorically unconstitutional” and would cause “imminent irreparable harm” to patients and doctors in Arkansas.
Several of the same corporations and law firms that publicly condemned the passage of Georgia’s voter suppression law in March also contributed thousands of dollars this year to state lawmakers and officials who supported the legislation, according to a new analysis of campaign finance disclosures, first reported on Thursday by the Washington Post.
“Many of the most powerful institutions in our society—global corporations and elite law firms—have made vague statements about supporting voting rights, but these statements are meaningless if these entities continue to fund the politicians behind restrictive voter legislation,” said Daniel Jones, president of Advance Democracy, the nonprofit research group behind the analysis.
Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a US-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands and water sources of the Indigenous Lenca people. For years, Cáceres and her organization, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH, had led the struggle to halt that project. It turned out, however, that Cáceres’s international recognition—she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015—couldn’t protect her from becoming one of the dozens of Latin American Indigenous and environmental activists killed annually.
A Moscow court has jailed Pussy Riot activist Rita Flores for 15 days, the news outlet Open Media reported on Thursday, July 22.
American Atheists, Mississippi humanists and others filed a federal lawsuit saying the motto violates the separation of church and state guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
“The phrase ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ is rooted in hostility toward non-Christians and atheists, intended to convey the message that non-belief in the Christian god is un-American,” the lawsuit says. AA President Nick Fish added:
But the treaty’s drafting process has been deeply flawed, with civil society groups, defense attorneys, and even data protection regulators largely sidelined. We are hoping that CoE’s Parliamentary Committee (PACE), which is next in line to review the draft Protocol, will give us the opportunity to present and take our privacy and human rights concerns seriously as it formulates its opinion and recommendations before the CoE’s final body of approval, the Council of Ministers, decides the Protocol’s fate. According to the Terms of Reference for the preparation of the Draft Protocol, the Council of Ministers may consider inviting parties “other than member States of the Council of Europe to participate in this examination.”
The CoE relies on committees to generate the core draft of treaty texts. In this instance, the CoE’s Cybercrime Committee (T-CY) Plenary negotiated and drafted the Protocol’s text with the assistance of a drafting group consisting of representatives of State Parties. The process, however, has been fraught with problems. To begin with, T-CY’s Terms of Reference for the drafting process drove a lengthy, non-inclusive procedure that relied on closed sessions (Article 4.3 T-CY Rules of Procedures). While the Terms of Reference allow the T-CY to invite individual subject matter experts on an ad hoc basis, key voices such as data protection authorities, civil society experts, and criminal defense lawyers were mostly sidelined. Instead, the process has been largely commandeered by law enforcement, prosecutors and public safety officials (see here, and here).
Earlier in the process, in April 2018, EFF, CIPPIC, EDRI and 90 civil society organizations from across the globe requested the COE Secretariat General provide more transparency and meaningful civil society participation as the treaty was being negotiated and drafted—and not just during the CoE’s annual and somewhat exclusive Octopus Conferences. However, since T-CY began its consultation process in July 2018, input from external stakeholders has been limited to Octopus Conference participation and some written comments. Civil society organizations were not included in the plenary groups and subgroups where text development actually occurs, nor was our input meaningfully incorporated.
The government in Athens is targeting organisations and individuals who observe and document human rights violations. An „information management“ agency set up with EU funding is involved in the investigation.
The letter asks that the company give moderators regular access to clinical psychiatrists and psychologists. “Imagine watching hours of violent content or children abuse online as part of your day to day work,” they write. “You cannot be left unscathed. This job must not cost us our mental health.”
Moderators also want to be brought in-house, saying the current system makes them second-class citizens. They’re calling on the company to give them the same pay and benefits as full-time Facebook moderators.
The second reason to be concerned about decisions like Brnovich is that the Supreme Court’s attacks on the Voting Rights Act are not isolated; they are part of a greater web of decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prevail in court.
Wednesday, a judge sentenced 18-year-old Shane Sonderman to five years in prison in connection with Herring’s death. Soderman pleaded guilty to harassing and threatening Herring and others over the course of five months from December 2019 through April 2020 while trying to steal social media handles.
In May 2020, a federal grand jury charged Tennessee resident Shane Sonderman, a minor at the time of Herring’s death, with a litany of threats and coordinated harassment campaigns against Herring and five other people over valuable handles. The maximum for all charges are fines of up to $1 million and 35 years in prison.
Sending armed cops to someone’s house for harassment purposes is known as swatting, and it’s not the first time it has led to a death. In 2017, Andrew Finch was killed by police after being ultimately swatted by Tyler Barriss in a row over the computer game Call of Duty. Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
On Tuesday, Al-Azdee presented his latest findings to the ongoing conference on antisemitism in the United States organized by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University, Bloomington. “Whatever generalizations are made about imams in the Arab world, many in the US want to believe that Islam is a religion of peace, and that imams in America embody that perspective in their comments about Jews and Israel,” he told the audience attending a Tuesday panel on anti-Zionism.
“Are you still a Muslim, or you are now a Christian?” Murishid asked him, according to Kijwalo.
“I am for Christ,” Kijwalo told him.
His brother revealed a machete that had been strapped beneath his long robe and struck him on the head, sending Kijwalo sprawling and screaming, the Christian said. As he bled heavily, Murishid walked away, likely thinking he had killed him, Kijwalo said.
We’ve noted repeatedly that while “big tech” has faced intense scrutiny over the last few years, “big telecom” has largely seen the exact opposite. Despite being every bit as problematic as tech giants (worse in some ways given their natural monopolies over broadband access), in the last few years the media and telecom sectors (one in the same when it comes to AT&T and Comcast) managed to effectively lobotomize the FCC, obliterate longstanding (and bipartisan) media consolidation rules, gut countless consumer protections, and generally turn the U.S. government into a giant bobble-headed doll with a rubber stamp.
Remember when the FCC rubber stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without even looking at impact analysis? Remember when a long line of economists and experts noted the merger would likely erode competition, raise rates, and kill jobs — and both U.S. regulators and the court system completely ignored them? And remember when the FCC and DOJ both cobbled together a “fix” to this problem by trying to throw some spectrum at Dish Network, a proposal we noted was likely to fail?
In one case, the court ruled that administrative judges hired to hear challenges to existing patents were too independent and had to be supervised by a presidential appointee with the power to overturn their decisions.
The judges sit on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The board is known as the “death squad” because it frequently invalidates patents. Smaller businesses say giants like Apple and Google use the board to squash legitimate competition, while larger companies argue that these so-called competitors are infringing on existing patents and that the board is needed to root them out. Often, millions, if not billions, of dollars are at stake.
As First Lady Dr. Jill Biden prepares to lead the U.S. delegation to the Tokyo Olympic Games this week, a global pandemic rages. Yet it is not raging equally. Some of the countries sending athletes to the Games have secured more than enough COVID-19 vaccines for their populations and are even discussing booster shots—or are already rolling them out. Meanwhile, many lower-income countries are barely reaching a 1 percent vaccination rate; people are needlessly dying waiting for a vaccine, while the virus continues to spread and mutate, becoming more dangerous for us all.
This post is one of a series of posts we’re running this week in support of Patent Quality Week, exploring how better patent quality is key to stopping efforts that hinder innovation.
The forthcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo—pushed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic—provides a snapshot of how much cord-cutting has changed. Live TV streaming services have ballooned in price since early 2018, and they no longer offer every event as some coverage is moving to Peacock this year. By my calculations, those who want access to every televised event will need to pay twice as much as they did last time around.
Internet provider RCN has modified its countersuit against the RIAA and Rightscorp. The company argues that the piracy notices sent on behalf of music labels were fraudulent and based on flimsy evidence. In addition, piracy tracking firm Rightscorp lacks a private investigator’s license, which could cause further trouble.
Former Gears IPTV operator OMI IN A HELLCAT is fighting the US Government over the seizure of a fleet of supercars, jewelry, and millions of dollars in cash. The YouTuber has informed a Pennsylvania court that he has committed no crimes and his business activities were entirely legal. As a result, all of his assets should be returned, he argues.
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