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Posted in News Roundup at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos traded sweat for silence, recording from their respective attic-level offices in the August heat unaided by fans (too noisy). We decided there’s no real news this week that lacks a political bent, except maybe that Winamp is back with a new version that’s four years in the making. (Is Winamp divisive?) Does it still whip the llama’s ass? You be the judge.
2:30 The News 29:46 Security and Privacy 42:06 Bi-Weekly Wanderings 1:30:26 Housekeeping and Announcements
First up in the news: Vanessa is almost here, Xfce flirts with Wayland, GNOME is touching up the touchscreen experience, and STAR protects data on Brave browsers;
In security and privacy, the Retbleed speculative exploit is more than just speculation, but the kernel team already have a fix, and Lightning Framework flashes our way;
Then in our Wanderings, Bill is back from Pennsylvania again and again, Norbert polishes his laptop, Moss is doing the Makulu Shift, Joe is working the mods, Josh T is fixing watches, and Tom is channeling.
 Linux has a large range of open source task managers, in part because many of them have a limited feature set and hence are relatively quick to code. This feature selects our personal favorites, including both console based applications and software sporting an attractive graphical user interface.
To be productive, you may need more than a task manager. Our features on Productivity Tools and Personal Information Managers help to organize your day in other ways.
One of my favorite stories about Unix is how it turned into a text processing system. Brian Kernighan tells the story in his book Unix: A History and a Memoir (chapter 3) but to summarize: The Unix team at Bell Labs ran the original Unix on a PDP-7 computer, but it was a tiny system and didn’t have sufficient resources to support new work. So Ken Thompson and others lobbied to purchase a new PDP-11 computer. Management denied the request. Around the same time, the Patents department planned to buy a new computer platform to produce patent applications using proprietary document formatting software. The Unix group proposed that the Patents department instead buy a new PDP-11 for the Unix team, and the Unix team would create formatting software for them.
That new formatting system was called nroff, short for “New Roff,” an updated version of a text formatting program called Roff from a 1960s computer system. The name Roff came from the old expression, “I’ll run off a document.”
Today’s post is about a simple one-liner I wrote in bash. I have been playing around a lot with bash lately as I try to build a better sense of the right tools for various tasks. Why write a Python script when you can do what you want to do in the command line, using fewer lines of code? Particularly for text processing, the command line and tools like grep and awk save so much time. Over the last few weeks I have ran into four or five situations where a few commands and pipes turn an otherwise difficult task or at the least tedious task into something simple.
When updating to FreeBSD 13.1, I started getting these messages from sysutils/logcheck:
egrep: trailing backslash (\)
This post will document how I tracked down the problem. It is occurring on several hosts.
But every so often, I’ve had a Lite install that I wanted to switch to GUI, but I’m too lazy to pull the Pi out of wherever it’s installed, pull the microSD card, and re-flash it with the full OS, and then re-run my automation on it to set up whatever I had running before.
And that’s why it’s nice to be able to just install the GUI on top of an existing Lite install!
Here’s a look at all the different methods you can use to password-protect files and folders on Linux.
So, I recently switched my home router to Linux but had a network issues for devices that would get/renew their IP with DHCP. They were obtaining an IP, but they couldn’t reach the router before a while (between 5 seconds to a few minutes), which was very annoying and unreliable.
After spending some time with tcpdump on multiple devices, I found the issue, it was related to ARP (the protocol to discover MAC addresses associate them with IPs).
You will come across the dpkg error when you are using the apt-get command to install some packages or update existing software packages. If you have come across the dpkg interrupted error then we have a perfect solution for it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Audacity on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Audacity is a free and open-source audio recorder and editor for all major operating systems. Besides having an excellent audio editor, Audacity also offers several other features, including audio recording, fading in and out, and adding effects like normalization, amplification, trimming, and much more.
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 Audacity open-source audio recorder and editor on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
“If you have installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 on your computer and also have an NVIDIA GPU installed on your computer, the first thing you need do is install the NVIDIA GPU drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.
In this post, I’ll teach you how to update the proprietary NVIDIA GPU drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9. So, let’s get this party started.
One of the Linux users asked me: I’m creating a bash script in which I want to check if a directory or file is already presented to the user’s machine, and after getting the result, the next command or function should get executed.
Yes, it is possible to check whether a file or directory is presented to the file system by using a conditional statement in a bash script.
So let me show you how you can use this article to find a directory or file that exists in your system by using an if conditional statement, and before that, I’ll introduce you to a test command that will help you understand logic more clearly.
Follow through this guide to learn how to lock Linux user account after multiple failed login attempts. Linux through Pluggable Authentication Modules, PAM, can be configured to lock accounts after specific number of failed login attempts. Such are some of the security measures that aims at curbing brute force authentication attacks.
This can be achieve specifically through pam_faillock module. pam_faillock module maintains a list of failed authentication attempts per user during a specified interval and locks the account in case there were more than deny consecutive failed authentications.
Securing your files and directories with a strong password is a sure-fire way to prevent unauthorized access and snooping on Linux.
Whether you want to share a file online, store it in the cloud, carry it on a thumb drive, or add it to your archive, password-protecting it is the best approach to secure its content and prevent unauthorized access.
The same holds true for folders too. Therefore, it’s crucial to encrypt them as well. On Linux, you have several ways to password-protect files and folders. Most of these methods use encryption, which offers additional protection than others.
This step-by-step guide shows you how to easily upgrade your existing Rocky Linux 8 system to Rocky Linux 9.
Before we get into the technicalities, we need to state clearly the following. The procedure described in this guide has been tried and is workable; nevertheless, the official recommendation is that upgrading from Rocky Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 9 is not encouraged and that a clean install of Rocky Linux 9 is preferable.
The Rocky Linux team does not recommend upgrades from one major version to the next (in this case 8.6 to 9.0). While it is technically possible to upgrade between major versions, we instead recommend a fresh install of the desired latest major version.
Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a free and open source command line interface antivirus software tool. It is used to identify trojans and dangerous software, such as viruses. It can scan files rapidly and detect over one million viruses and trojans. One of its key applications is to scan emails on mail gateways. ClamAV is compatible with the following Linux operating systems: Ubuntu (20.04, 22.04), Debian (8,9), and CentOS (7,8). This article will go through how to install and use ClamAV on Ubuntu 22.04.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, XnView MP is a versatile and powerful photo viewer, image management, image resizer and is compatible with more than 500 formats. XnView MP is a general-purpose application that is used by graphics designers at personal and commercial level.
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 XnView image viewer on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
We’ll learn about how to execute several commands simultaneously in Linux in this article. Every operator has its own advantages when it comes to separating commands. This tutorial will help a little bit in improving how we execute commands and author shell scripts.
The Linux operating system offers a simple command line interface for managing the system. There are shells such as Bash, CSH, and Zsh that accept commands from the user and route them to the kernel. A command is used to perform some function on the system. We may also specify multiple shells at once and execute them one after the other.
There are three distinct options available using the separator operators. In the following section, we will look at them in detail.
Many of the applications required weekly cron jobs to perform a few tasks. For example, perform weekly maintenance, cleanup disk spaces, cleanup mailing list, and other tasks. You may run your weekly tasks on any day of the week. CPU and memory consumption is required for jobs that require a CPU and memory. Those jobs are best to run on a weekend day.
Valve are preparing to ship the next version of Proton, their compatibility layer that runs Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux desktop with Proton 7.0-4 having a Release Candidate ready to test.
Since Valve are ramping up production and a ton more people than expected will get their Steam Deck this year, plus the expansion into Asia, it was a good time to get some basic quick tips and tricks sorted for you.
Godot Engine, the free and open source full game development engine has a big new release available with version 3.5. This is not the version that comes with Vulkan and the big rendering overhaul, that’s coming in Godot 4 which is due for a proper Release Candidate sometime soon.
A huge advancement for the PlayStation 3 emulator project RPCS3 as it now has support for Save States, which is pretty awesome.
As Valve expands the Steam Deck into Asia, they’ve begun a series of interviews and one on video with IGN Japan was quite interesting so here’s the main points. While a lot of it was already known, it’s still nice to reiterate just how all-in Valve are on the Steam Deck and during the video it also shows off some rather fun looking prototype devices.
We continue chewing through bugs this week, and now I’m mentioning the “very high priority” Plasma bugs in addition to the “15 minute bugs” which are slightly lower priority. Plasma developers reading along are encouraged to prioritize the very high priority bugs.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
If you have been following the series, we have covered a fair amount up till now. From determining the desired future state of the application(s) and reviewing challenges surrounding legacy code to making a case for funding the future state and creating an effective team to work on a modernization project in an enterprise environment.
The XIAO RP2040 features the RP2040 silicon and comes in a thumb size as other products from the XIAO series by SeeedStudio. This open source device supports Arduino, MicroPython and CircuitPython. The company has also waived shipping costs for this device.
The processor on this tiny board is the Dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor with a maximum clock frequency of 133MHz. The device also includes up to 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of onboard Flash memory.
The N10 is the latest Mini PC Nano from Weibu. The N10 accommodates the Coffee Lake-U or the Comet Lake-U processor from Intel. The company also plans to release a model with Intel’s 12th Gen processors by late September.
[...]
The datasheet mentions the N10 supports Win 10/11 and Linux. The Mini PC is also compatible with a VESA mount so it can be used in different settings such as the office, home entertainment, edge computing, etc.
Firefly Station M3 is a mini PC powered by Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor, the cost-down version of the RK3588, and equipped with up to 16GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash storage, support for M.2 SATA and NVMe SSD, 8K capable HDMI and DisplayPort (USB-C) video outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5, and more.
The new model follows the Station M1 and Station M2 mini PCs with Rockchip RK3328 and RK3566 respectively and will deliver 4 times the CPU performance and up to 8 times the 3D graphics performance compared to the M2 model, but in a slightly larger and about twice as thick enclosure – probably for active cooling – than the first two Station M fanless mini PCs.
How can you find out what’s inside a sealed electronics module from the 1960s? In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid flip flop module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. These modules are undocumented1, so their internal circuitry is a mystery. Thanks to Lumafield, I obtained a three-dimensional CT scan of the module that clearly shows the wiring and components: transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors. From these images, I could determine the circuitry of this flip flop module.
Here on Hackaday, we routinely cover wonderful informative writeups on different areas of hardware hacking, and we even have our own university with courses that delve into topics one by one. I’ve had my own fair share of materials I’ve learned theory and practical aspects from over the years I’ve been hacking – as it stands, for over thirteen years. When such materials weren’t available on any particular topic, I’d go through hundreds of forum pages trawling for details on a specific topic, or spend hours fighting with an intricacy that everyone else considered obvious.
Looking to expand their hardware design experience, [mentalburden] recently put together a low-cost handheld gadget that can be used for various security-related tasks such as logging WiFi traffic, operating as a dead drop, and performing deauthentication attacks.
A frequent complaint I see from users and inexperienced contributors concerning free software projects is that they are allegedly not doing enough to grow the userbase, sometimes even asserting that a fork is necessary to right the course of the project.
Are these complaints missing the point, or do they have merit? How do free software projects grow their userbase into thriving communities?
Zero IoT is a monitoring system for air parameters (like temperature or humidity) and activity of the sun. The main goal is to run this software on a Raspberry Pi Zero or similar small SBC devices with small amount of hardware and low power consumption.
The data can come from external sensors connected to Wi-Fi network by devices (e.g. ESP8266 devices family).
Sausagewiki is a free open-source simple wiki engine that is created by first by Magnus Hovland Hoff with the Rust programming language, but the project has several contributors now.
Sausagewiki can work as a personal wiki on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It requires Rust and Cargo to run.
It is released under the GNU General Public License version 3.0 for anyone who want to use, edit, modify or distribute it.
Luckily, there is an alternative. The upper 128 characters from the ASCII table can be used for additional characters. This means that new character sets came along, used the same bottom 128 characters from ASCII and appended their own on the top half. The problem now is that many new mappings exist and interoperability between them becomes difficult. A receiver using a different code page than the sender would read the incorrect message. If someone from Brazil writes a message using the letter é to multiple people, they would read as ة in Arabic, и in Cyrillic and as a corner pipe (╔) if they’re using IBM’s code page 850.
I recently wrote about my adventures in finding a continuous integration system to replace the Drone that I am running. It did not end on a happy note, and while it did list a couple of requirements and nice to haves, it did not provide a bigger picture, it did not describe how I’d like to work with my CI. I will try to do that today, and see how far I get.
I think the best way to start is coming up with an ideal CI configuration for my riemann-c-client project – this is likely the project where my current configuration is the most complicated, and it also exercises a number of patterns I want to write about. So lets start with that! For reference, the current drone configuration is the starting point, and said configuration’s build log is the standard I strive for.
I’ll start at a high level, look at what I would consider the ideal flow-chart for a single run of the build, and will work from there.
Just shy of four years ago, I set out to find a self-hosted continuous integration solution, and eventually settled on Drone. However, during these past four years, drone transitioned away from being fully open source into an open core model. Everything I self host, I can – and usually do – build from source, with the exception of my continuous integration system, and lets be honest, that’s not good.
So I set out to find myself a replacement, this time with more thoroughly specified guidelines than the last time. Before I go into the gory details, I will have to warn you, my dear reader: there is no happy ending just yet, and the tone here is frustrated and aggressive at times.
Sometimes I want to filter a set of strings, but the details of the filter are not known beforehand. In particular, I may want a null filter, which simply accepts anything.
This looks like a job for a regular expression, but I can think of at least two implementations. One is to pass around regular expression objects. The second is to wrap a match (m//) in a subroutine reference, and pass that around. Given the use of regular expressions, there are a number of possibilities for a regular expression that matches any string.
I wondered whether one of the alternatives I was choosing among was faster than another, so I decided to Benchmark them. Both implementations applied the regular expression to a global variable. In practice this would probably be a localized $_, but my read of the Benchmark module says that it also localizes $_, but leaves it undef.
Why do prices on new products always seem to be so consistent in advertising, yet when you actually go shopping, the prices can fall apart because of inflation or market demand? The GPU industry of a year ago is a good example of this situation in action—where demand so outstrips supply that the manufacturer’s suggested retail price is basically meaningless. Ah yes, the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, or MSRP—it’s the primary way that manufacturers can leave their mark on a product after it leaves its hands and goes to a retailer. Depending on the product and the use case, it can be a ceiling or a floor—and when used carefully, it can be one of the strongest weapons retailers have in terms of building profitability . Today’s Tedium dives into the concept of MSRP, why it’s not price fixing, and how it can change your perception of a product’s value.
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa) said it had blocked Australian access to 40 websites which were collectively attracting almost half a million visits every month.
While Teqsa monitors almost 600 suspect websites, it said the 40 it has targeted were easily the biggest and commanded around two-thirds of the traffic. “Blocking these websites will seriously disrupt the operations of the criminals behind them,” said federal education minister Jason Clare.
A principal in a middle school tells this story. He says one day, just few minutes to break time, a gentleman with a nice suit and a very calming tune and behavior walked into my office. He asked to speak with a teacher. He wanted to ask about his child’s behavior and education. I asked him to introduce himself and he replied “I’m the cow, the father of the calf!”
The long-rumored home assistant robot can map out floor plans, listen to commands to move between rooms, and even recognizes faces. Much like an Alexa-powered device, it can answer questions, play music, and show you things like the weather. iRobot’s latest OS might not be mounted to an Alexa on wheels, but it’s equally ambitious, with the aim to get a better understanding of a home through AI and smart features, and then extend to other areas of the smart home.
Amazon on Friday expanded its capacity to connect to and collect information about consumers’ homes and private lives, announcing its plan to purchase of iRobot Corp., the maker of the popular Roomba vacuum.
“Jeff Bezos has said that Amazon wants to buy its way to dominance. By snatching up Roomba and pairing it with its vast monopoly power fueled by its Prime system, it would do just that.”
E-paper price tags have become popular for retail stores over the past few years, which is great for hackers since we now have some more cheap commodity hardware to play with. [Aaron Christophel] went all on creating grid displays with E-paper price tags, up to a 20×15 grid.
One of the problems with being engaged in our hobby or profession is that people assume if you can build a computer out of chips, you must know all the details of their latest laptop computer. Most of the memory we deal with is pretty simple compared to DDR4 memory and if you’ve ever tried tweaking your memory, you know a good BIOS has dozens of settings for memory. [Actually Hardcore Overclocking] has a great description of a typical DDR4 datasheet and you can watch it in the video below.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy sampled nine locations today, with results expected tomorrow, to help track the pollutant’s location as it moves downstream. The agency, in concert with partners from across the watershed, is developing a testing plan for coming days and weeks. State investigators also met with Tribar Wednesday to gain information about how the release occurred and other details that may help regulators better protect the public.
Inspections are also taking place within the Tribar Manufacturing facility in Wixom, where the release occurred. One goal is to better define the volume/amount of liquid containing 5% hexavalent chromium that was discharged to the sanitary sewer system from Tribar over the weekend and routed to the Wixom wastewater treatment facility. The wastewater is discharged to Norton Creek, which flows into the Huron River system.
State health and environmental agencies spent a second full day Wednesday trying to assess the extent of a chemical spill in the Huron River from a Wixom auto supplier — and to learn just how much of the known carcinogen hexavalent chromium entered the waterway. The state Department of Health and Human Services continues to advise the public to avoid contact with Huron River water between North Wixom Road in Oakland County and Kensington Road in Livingston County, an area that includes Hubbell Pond, also known as Mill Pond, in Oakland County; and Kent Lake in Kensington Metropark.
Tribar Manufacturing, an automotive trim maker based in Wixom, informed state officials Monday afternoon that they had released several thousand gallons of a liquid containing 5% hexavalent chromium into the sewer system. Company officials said they discovered the release Monday but indicated it may have started as early as Saturday morning, according to Wixom city officials.
For the second time in four years, a Wixom auto supplier is behind a massive release of industrial contamination into the Huron River, according to Michigan environmental regulators. The state said “several thousand gallons” of liquid containing cancer-causing hexavalent chromium were spilled, beginning as early as Saturday.
Michigan health and environment officials urge area residents to avoid “all contact” with a stretch of Huron River after the company, Tribar Manufacturing, released the 5 percent hexavalent chromium solution into the Wixom sewer system, where it then went through the city wastewater treatment plant and out to the river.
Ann Arbor, well downstream from Wixom on the 104-mile river, gets most of its drinking water from the Huron. But officials said there is no immediate threat to drinking water. Sampling is ongoing to determine the location and extent of the chromium plume in the river.
Prior to the current spill, Tribar was responsible for much of the PFAS contamination that resulted in widespread, years-long fish consumption advisories in communities surrounding the Huron River.
Hexavalent chromium is a known carcinogen that can cause a number of adverse health effects through ingestion, skin contact or inhalation.
MDHHS is recommending until further notice that all people and pets avoid contact with the Huron River water between North Wixom Road in Oakland County and Kensington Road in Livingston County. This includes Norton Creek downstream of the Wixom Wastewater Treatment Plant (Oakland County), Hubbell Pond (also known as Mill Pond in Oakland County) and Kent Lake (Oakland and Livingston counties).
As inflation hit a 40-year high this year, nearly 100 million Americans skipped care or cut back on necessities to cover the rising cost of medical treatment in a nation infamous for its for-profit system, according to polling results released this week.
Inflation rose to 9.1% in June—and healthcare inflation was at 4.5%—when Gallup and West Health asked people across the country how they had handled higher healthcare costs over the past six months.
As parents and global citizens, we are very worried about the cost-of-living crisis that the world is facing – the worst in over a generation. The interlinked shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and conflicts have thrown the global food, agricultural, financial and energy systems and markets into turmoil.
We speak with Michael Mable about the life and legacy of his brother, Black Panther activist and political prisoner Albert Woodfox. Woodfox spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary after he was wrongly convicted of murdering a prison guard. Woodfox’s conviction was overturned for the third time in 2013, and he was eventually released in 2016. “His legacy was based upon change,” says Mable. “He was a free man, and he’s free now.” We also speak with his fellow “Angola 3” member Robert King and Woodfox’s longtime attorney Carine Williams. “He understood his reasoning for existing,” says King on Woodfox’s legacy. “He won’t be forgotten.”
Albert Woodfox, who was held in solitary confinement longer than any prisoner in U.S. history, has died at the age of 75 due to complications tied to COVID-19. The former Black Panther and political prisoner won his freedom six years ago after surviving nearly 44 years in solitary over a wrongful murder conviction of a prison guard. Fellow imprisoned Panthers Herman Wallace and Robert King were also falsely accused of prison murders, and they collectively became known as the Angola 3. Democracy Now! interviewed Albert Woodfox in his first live TV interview just three days after his 2016 release, and multiple times afterward. “I’m just trying to learn how to be free,” Woodfox said. “I’ve been locked up so long in a prison within a prison.” Woodfox went on to write his memoir, “Solitary,” and continued to fight for prison reform after his release.
Albert Woodfox, a wrongfully imprisoned Black Panther activist who spent his 43 years in solitary confinement uplifting himself and others before finally being freed in 2019, died Thursday of complications from Covid-19 at age 75.
“Our cells were meant to be death chambers but we turned them into schools, into debate halls.”
Well two and a half weeks ago I finally put on my big boy pants and took Annette down to the local Apple Store… and bought two iPhones. That decision came about because of years of accumulated frustration with Android, Google and Android OEMs.
The newest of the three, called Sammy’s Law or the Let Parents Choose Protection Act, is being drafted by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and could be ready to be introduced in the House in a matter of weeks, said two people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss private conversations. The bill would require large social media companies to allow parents to track their kids online via third-party software.
A vulnerability in Twitter’s software that exposed an undetermined number of owners of anonymous accounts to potential identity compromise last year was apparently exploited by a malicious actor, the social media company has said. It did not confirm a report that data on 5.4 million users was offered for sale online as a result but said Friday that users worldwide were affected.
The breach is especially worrisome because many Twitter account owners, including human rights activists, do not disclose their identities in their profiles for security reasons that include fear of persecution by repressive authorities.
The bug in question allowed an individual to submit an email address or a phone number and learn which specific account was associated with the information entered.
Five times a day, people awaiting trial or deportation can be prompted by an app to scan their face. Together with location data, the information will be stored by the prison administration for up to six years.
A class action lawsuit has been filed against big-three consumer credit bureau Experian over reports that the company did little to prevent identity thieves from hijacking consumer accounts. The legal filing cites liberally from an investigation KrebsOnSecurity published in July, which found that identity thieves were able to assume control over existing Experian accounts simply by signing up for new accounts using the victim’s personal information and a different email address.
The Australian government doesn’t care much for encryption. It has, for years, tried to legislate encryption out of the picture. A law passed in 2018 gives the government the power to compel encryption-breaking efforts from tech companies.
NSA’s policy decision to sabotage public cryptographic standards. In 1968, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) “went to NSA for help”, in the words of an internal NSA history book. Work by journalists over several years forced NSA to release the relevant portions of the book in 2013, and before that smaller portions in 2008 and 2009.
NBS was an agency inside the U.S. Department of Commerce, another part of the U.S. government. Later NBS was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The reason NBS went to NSA is that NBS had decided to develop a U.S. government encryption standard.
The company in particular highlighted its mitigation of a [astroturfer] farm operated from St. Petersburg, dubbed “Cyber Front Z,” that it said was linked to individuals associated with past activity by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), a [astroturfer] farm that led the effort to spread disinformation around the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Meta said it began taking action against Cyber Front Z in March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, and it took down the network in early April.
The tech giant said the [astroturfer] farm hired people in shifts seven days a week to comment with pro-Russia content on posts supporting Ukraine published by celebrities like Angelina Jolie and politicians like the Finnish prime minister.
She emphasized that before Russia invaded Ukraine, which is a major global grain and vegetable oil producer, over 190 million people were food insecure worldwide, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Well, since Russia’s unprovoked war, full-scale invasion into Ukraine, we estimate that number could rise to 230 million,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “That would mean that more than 40 million people will have become food insecure since President (Vladimir) Putin chose to invade his neighbor and steal their land. That’s more people than the entire population of Ghana.”
As of mid-July, about 5,200 migrants had been bused from Texas to D.C. since April. As of Aug. 3, more than 1,300 had been sent from Arizona since May. The governors call the practice a voluntary free ride – paid for by state taxpayers — that gets migrants closer to family or support networks.
On August 4, the human rights organization Amnesty International published a report titled “Ukrainian Fighting Tactics Endanger Civilians,” warning that “Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas.” The report has provoked a strong backlash in the West, including criticism by President Volodymyr Zelensky and Amnesty’s own local office in Ukraine. The report proved immediately useful to the state media in Russia, where propagandists have insisted since the start of the war that the Ukrainian military uses civilians as “human shields.” Meduza reviews the reactions to Amnesty International’s controversial findings.
Journalists haven’t identified their sources, and Russian law enforcement isn’t disclosing many details, but a police officer in Nizhny Novgorod has lost his job apparently for refusing to prosecute Internet users for publishing antiwar content on social media. Meduza pieces together what we know about “Lieutenant Kirill B.”
We live in historic times. The hearings of the January 6 committee are Watergate 2.0. Maybe they’ll have an even bigger impact than Watergate 1.0. At any rate, democracy is at death’s door, and if we want to ensure the future of our republic, we need to hold former president Donald Trump responsible for his deplorable behavior. And it doesn’t hurt that the hearings are must-see TV.
The Chinese government on Friday escalated its retaliatory response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan earlier this week by suspending diplomatic ties on a number of key fronts, including the climate crisis, and canceling military coordination agreements with the United States.
According to the Associated Press:
Israeli forces killed a five-year-old girl and at least several other Palestinians on Friday in their latest bombardment of the Gaza Strip, an occupied and deeply impoverished territory that Israel has been strangling for decades.
Citing Palestinian officials, the Associated Press reported that “Israel unleashed a wave of airstrikes in Gaza on Friday,” killing at least eight people including the young girl and a “senior militant” identified as Tayseer al-Jaabari.
Military veterans and their supporters camped out in front of the U.S. Capitol for close to a week after Republican senators withdrew their support for a major expansion of health care for veterans exposed to toxic “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Formally titled, “The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022,” the PACT Act targets the Pentagon’s reliance on burn pits for disposing of the vast amounts of waste produced during the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Plumes of polluted smoke and particulates from the burn pits injured up to an estimated 3.5 million U.S. service members over the past two decades.
The Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative is waging a campaign to encourage press coverage of the treaty, which, it argues, “provides the only pathway to a safe, secure future free of the nuclear threat” (Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance Newsletter, 6/22).
The Department of Justice has announced federal criminal charges against four former and current Louisville police officers over their roles in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor. The charges come after the state of Kentucky failed to prosecute any police officers for Taylor’s death, despite nationwide Black Lives Matter demands to investigate. “How can it be that the federal government and state government are so far apart on this case?” says Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League, who calls the federal charges “a great step in the right direction.” Reynolds is demanding an investigation into Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s prosecution of the case — which she says was either “incompetent” or “in collusion” with the police.
On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” the “Finks” author joins Robert Scheer to discuss a little-told episode in the socialist actor and singer’s life and why it’s seemingly been erased from our collective American memory.
The “Water Refill Map” (My Hong-Te) application was launched in March 2020 with the collaboration between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and CircuPlus, a startup community dedicated to promoting the circular economy through ICT applications.
The app offering information on 8,300 free drinking water locations has been downloaded 210,000 times, the EPA said at a Wednesday (Aug. 3) press event. About 458,000 PET bottles have been saved, equivalent to the cut of 40 tons of carbon emissions, wrote the Environmental Information Center.
China said Friday it would halt cooperation with the United States on areas including military relations and climate change while imposing sanctions against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as Beijing stepped up its retaliation to her Taiwan visit.
As a paid contractor for the state of Florida, Siewe, who calls herself a “python huntress,” searches for the reptiles year-round. The Florida Python Challenge invites novices to hunt alongside professionals like Siewe, and compete for cash prizes. This year’s challenge runs Aug. 5 through Aug. 14. Its goal is to both nab snakes and raise awareness of the environmental harm they cause.
Representatives of the Dutch farmers who have been protesting against new environmental regulations have for the first time sat down for talks with Prime Minister Mark Rutte and other government officials.
Climate campaigners on Friday welcomed the Los Angeles Times editorial board calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and deploy the full might of his executive powers to curb the global crisis.
“It’s time Biden adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach to this spiraling catastrophe,” said the LA Times editorial board. “There’s little chance we’ll look back decades from now and say the president did too much, or that our alarms about the imperiled planet rang too loud. We’ll only regret that we didn’t act more aggressively or sooner.”
Datafinnovation’s 3AC, DCG & Amazing Coincidences is a long and complex investigation of one of the key elements of the recent “crypto collapse”. Fortunately. at FT Alphaville Bryce Elder uses an analogy that helps explain the basic idea. Below the fold I try to explain Elder’s explanation of Datafinnovation’s investigation.
New Labor Department data published Friday showed that U.S. job growth surged to 528,000 last month, defying analysts’ expectations of a slowdown and deepening concerns that the Federal Reserve will continue hiking interest rates in its bid to curb inflation.
The better-than-predicted hiring and the slight uptick in wage growth after months of deceleration increase the likelihood that the central bank will impose its third consecutive 75-basis-point interest rate boost in September, despite warnings that the Fed’s effort to cool economic demand and rein in prices could induce a damaging recession and mass unemployment.
In addition, the household survey showed the unemployment rate falling to 3.5 percent, tying a 50-year low. The survey showed a gain in employment of 179,000 after showing declines the prior three months. The U-6 measure of labor market slack remained at its all-time low of 6.7 percent, as the fall in unemployment offset a modest increase in the number of people involuntarily working part-time.
Wage Growth Accelerates to 5.0 Percent Annual Rate
The Inflation Reduction Act that is poised for votes in the US Senate is far from perfect. A scaled-down version of the ambitious plans that President Joe Biden and Senate Budget Committee chair Bernie Sanders framed last summer as the “Build Back Better” agenda, it’s the latest step in the series of compromises that’s been referred to as “Build Back Smaller.”
It’s no surprise that Democrats are up against it this fall. The president’s party generally does worse in midterm elections. Inflation is at a 40-year high. The mainstream media trumpet that crime is up. And the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda has been torpedoed by united Republican obstruction—and, until the recently brokered spending deal, by the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin III.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will offer an amendment to the Democrats’ revived reconciliation bill that would affirmatively answer activists’ demands to expand Medicare benefits, the senator’s office told Common Dreams on Friday.
“Today, in the wealthiest country in the world, it is shameful that so many of our seniors must go without the dentures, eyeglasses, and hearing aids that they need.”
“We cannot provide billions of dollars in new tax breaks to the very same fossil fuel companies that are currently destroying the planet.”
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman announced Friday that his U.S. Senate campaign has received one million individual donations, highlighting the progressive candidate’s strong grassroots support.
Fetterman posted a video of himself and his family thanking his supporters for their contributions, which totaled a record-breaking $11 million in the second quarter of 2022 and which averaged less than $30 per donation.
You’ve heard about corporations being treated like people. It’s one of the outrages of the Citizens United decision some years back by the Supreme Court, that corporations have a right to free speech just like individuals and therefore can contribute unlimited money to candidates running for office. Bye-bye, democracy.
Last year, we disclosed two related vulnerabilities that broke a wide range of systems. In our Bad Characters paper, we showed how to use Unicode tricks – such as homoglyphs and bidi characters – to mislead NLP systems. Our Trojan Source paper showed how similar tricks could be used to make source code look one way to a human reviewer, and another way to a compiler, opening up a wide range of supply-chain attacks on critical software. Prior to publication, we disclosed our findings to four suppliers of large NLP systems, and nineteen suppliers of software development tools. So how did industry respond?
At CAA, Popper will be responsible for overseeing a team of executives focused on the agency’s metaverse strategy, both internally and for clients. She will work closely with Alexandra Shannon, CAA’s head of strategic development, and Adam Friedman, an executive guiding agents across departments who work with NFTs.
Twitter’s lawyers are already poking around Musk’s business dealings, trying to find evidence that the switch is about something else, while now we can see the Musk side arguing that, actually, they strategically stonewalled, misrepresented, and outright bamboozled his efforts to find out how many people actually tweet.
In the latter half, it also includes the Musk team’s answers to Twitter’s lawsuit, if you want to read a very expensive argument in full.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addressed a crowd of thousands of American admirers in Dallas, Texas on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Orban described Hungary and America as “twin fronts” in a struggle against globalists, progressives, communists, and “fake news.”
Attacks on LGBTQ+ people and boasts of stopping an “invasion” of immigrants were among the remarks that drew loud applause from Republicans attending Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s speech at one of the largest annual gatherings of U.S. conservatives Thursday evening, as the prime minister told audience members they should join forces with the far-right in other countries to expand their power.
“Progressive liberals didn’t want me to be here because they knew what I would tell you—because I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces because we Hungarians know how to defeat the enemies of freedom on the political battlefield,” said Orbán.
This trip was just the opposite. Ireland and the UK—even for those of us lacking any familial ties whatsoever—are very familiar. It is well-trodden ground, literally and metaphorically.
Everybody seems to agree that he came down to Mississippi from Chicago and went into a store and bought a drink and said sumpin to the proprietress and all hell broke loose. James Henry Harris, author of Black Suffering and N: The Forbidden Word, recalls it this way:
This, too, is the place of fourteen-yearold Emmett Till’s murder for exercising his freedom of speech by purportedly saying, “Thank you, baby,” to the wife of a white store owner in Money, Mississippi, after receiving his change for purchasing a soda. Those three words caused him to be hunted down like a dog—like an animal, like a slave—and beaten and bludgeoned to the point of pulverization. His mangled body was then restrained by a seventy-pound cotton-gin fan around the neck before being dumped in the Tallahatchie River to be carried by the currents to a place of no return. But by the providence and justice of God, his body turned up to be displayed by his mother to the entire world. This is likely the truest account.
In 1973, when the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that an unwanted pregnancy “may force upon the woman a distressful life and future.” Later, in 1992’s Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the court found that the right to abortion is necessary for “women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”
The Jewish position on abortion is simple: It’s permitted. However ignorant the ancient rabbis may have been about the female reproductive system, they managed to land on the revolutionary concept that women are people too—a finding that eludes the 21st-century United States Supreme Court. But could the court’s radical transformation into a theocracy, all but annihilating the distinction between church and state, bite them in the ass when it comes to a Jewish First Amendment case for abortion?
Following an “enormous” win in Kansas this week, reproductive freedom advocates see ballot measures as a tool to protect—and potentially even expand—abortion rights under attack by anti-choice policymakers.
“We know that Kansas will not be our last fight, or our last victory.”
Infowars founder Alex Jones has been penalized $45.2 million in punitive damages by a Texas jury in the civil trial between Jones and the parents of six-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was shot and killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. This amount is in addition to the $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded on Thursday.
A Texas jury has ordered Alex Jones to pay around $45.2 million for spreading a false conspiracy theory about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The punitive damages come on top of a $4.1 million verdict from yesterday, potentially marking a major blow to Jones’s Infowars media empire. But the number could be vastly reduced by limits built into the Texas legal code, which caps damages on defamation punishments.
“I ask that with your verdict, you not only take Alex Jones’ platform that he talks about away. I ask that you make sure that he can’t rebuild the platform. That’s what matters,” he said. “That is punishment, that is deterrence.”
Alex Jones has been ordered to pay more than $45 million in punitive damages to Sandy Hook parents, a Texas jury found on Friday.
The development comes a day after the jury ordered Jones to pay them $4.1 million in compensatory damages.
Jurors at first awarded Heslin and Lewis $4.1 million in compensatory damages, which Jones called a major victory. But in the final phase of the two-week trial, the same Austin jury came back and tacked on an additional $45.2 million in punitive damages.
Earlier this week, Jones testified that any award over $2 million would “sink us.” His company Free Speech Systems, which is Infowars’ parent company, filed for bankruptcy protection during the first week of the trial.
Several of the victims’ families, who had been harassed and tormented for years by his viewers, sued Mr Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, in four separate lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas. He was found liable by default in all of them as he did not hand over documents, including financial statements, as ordered by the court. A trial in Austin, Texas, this week determined how much Mr Jones must pay Jesse’s parents.
Among the most incendiary falsehoods he ever circulated was that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which left 20 children and six adults dead, was completely fabricated by the US government in a plot to strip American citizens of their guns.
After a two-week defamation trial full of twists and turns, a jury in Austin, Texas, has ordered Jones to pay nearly $50m (£41m) in compensatory and punitive damages to the parents of a boy killed in that attack.
Here are five key moments from the case.
The decision, which closes a two-week trail period for one of several civil lawsuits that have been brought against Jones, comes after a day of testimony in which attorneys for the Sandy Hook family hammered home that Jones is not as broke as he claims. Bernard Pettingill, a forensic economist, took the stand to explain that Jones is a “very, very successful man” with several revenue streams, and that he actually made more — not less — money after being booted from Twitter and Facebook in 2018, contrary to what Jones has claimed.
“Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years?” Mark Bankston, the parents’ attorney, asked Jones. “You know what perjury is, right?”
In an emotional closing argument Friday, Lewis and Heslin’s attorney Wesley Todd Ball had said to the jury, “We ask that you send a very very simple message, and that is, stop Alex Jones. Stop the monetization of misinformation and lies. Please.”
Dr Berger has been silenced by AHPRA because it works alongside the government and Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly to keep workers from knowing the truth about the pandemic. If parents knew the truth about the danger of COVID, they wouldn’t be sending their children to school, and workers wouldn’t be able to continue to make money for big businesses that are profiteering from the pandemic.
Twitter unsuccessfully attempted to close down the Socialist Equality Party for coming to the defence of Dr Berger, Julian Assange, Lisa Diaz and David O’Sullivan, who all fought for the truth. What the SEP has done is link these important cases together.
The government intended to advance and vote on the Online Safety Bill last month, but the scheduled vote was postponed until a new Prime Minister of the UK can be chosen. Members of Parliament should take this opportunity to insist that the bill be tossed out entirely.
If the Online Safety Bill passes, the UK government will be able to directly silence user speech, and even imprison those who publish messages that it doesn’t like. The bill empowers the UK’s Office of Communications (OFCOM) to levy heavy fines or even block access to sites that offend people. We said last year that those powers raise serious concerns about freedom of expression. Since then, the bill has been amended, and it’s gotten worse.
People shouldn’t be fined or thrown in jail because a government official finds their speech offensive. In the U.S., the First Amendment prevents that. But UK residents can already be punished for online statements that a court deems “grossly offensive,” under the 2003 Communications Act. If the Online Safety Bill passes, it would expand the potential scope of such cases. It would also significantly deviate from the new E.U. internet bill, the Digital Services Act, which avoids transforming social networks and other services into censorship tools.
Students should not have to fear expulsion for expressing themselves on social media after school and off-campus, but that is just what happened to the plaintiff in C1.G v. Siegfried. Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the student’s expulsion violated his First Amendment rights. The court’s opinion affirms what we argued in an amicus brief last year.
We strongly support the Tenth Circuit’s holding that schools cannot regulate how students use social media off campus, even to spread “offensive, controversial speech,” unless they target members of the school community with “vulgar or abusive language.”
The case arose when the student and his friends visited a thrift shop on a Friday night. There, they posted a picture on Snapchat with an offensive joke about violence against Jews. He deleted the post and shared an apology just a few hours later, but the school suspended and eventually expelled him.
Threats are not uncommon for journalists in Serbia.
The association „Reporters United“ had previously reported how a network of companies with the participation of Dimitriadis was making money from state operations of the spyware. Intellexa, the company that distributes „Predator“ in Greece, is part of this. The revelation is also explosive because the two are relatives: The Secretary General is the nephew of the Prime Minister, who in turn is directly responsible for the secret service as a user of „Predator“.
After two years of exemptions following the coronavirus outbreak, teleworking for employees in Luxembourg is returning to normal. The Grand Duchy and its neighbouring countries lifted limits on the number of days cross-border workers were permitted to work from home to allow employees to continue working during lockdown – however, the bilateral agreements ended on 1 July.
In terms of social security, European regulations offer some room for respite, with a six-month “transitory period” granted to workers employed in Luxembourg, who may continue working from home beyond the 25% threshold.
It was confirmed to me at a meeting with the school’s administration and teachers that kindergarten education should be Estonian-language, which would make it easier for children in school as well. Agreed, it should be. But in reality, a lot of kindergarteners who have received Estonian-language education have to be placed in Russian-language classes due to a lack of spots [in Estonian-language ones].
The situation in Sillamäe is significantly worse than in Lasnamäe. Of those to graduate from the city’s two Russian-language basic schools, just under 30 percent passed the B1 proficiency exam. Thus, a full 70 percent of students who’d attended school for nine years were incapable of speaking in Estonian at an elementary level.
Working from home can be a balancing act between your business and personal life — especially if you’ve got kids. If your children are toddlers, then you must depend on partners, family, or childcare providers to keep them away from your Zoom sessions. If they are school age, you may have some time for yourself and your job during school hours — until the school day is done.
“You know D, you was a good kid at the core, before all that street stuff,” Greg said. “I wasn’t nobody’s example, you know that. But other than Fat Albert, they never put no Black people on no cartoon.”
I then recapped our exchanges from back when I was a kid, and told Greg that it was George Jetson’s birthday, that this was the year, and maybe even the week, the character was supposed to be born.
I will be taking two weeks off to see if my batteries are rechargeable! In that time I will be experimenting with substances like fresh air and rest. I fully expect this to be successful and return to “The Greater Quiet” on August 22.In solidarity, Steve
This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who don’t just want to argue for particular ideas to guide us forward, but want to shut down the spaces in which we can have the arguments. And where a vigorous free press should be, we have corporate, commercial media that don’t have defending those spaces as their foremost concern.
There are a few questionable assumptions made by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court in its denial [PDF] of a suppression request, but the opening suggests drug cartels might want to vet their employees a little better.
Last month, the FCC issued a public notice inviting comment on the interagency agreement between the FCC, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and National Telecommunications and Information Administration on coordinating broadband efforts, known as the Broadband Interagency Coordination Act. The comments received will be reported to Congress as findings and potential improvements to the agreement.
BICA currently outlines that agencies must provide information about project areas, entities that provide broadband services, levels of broadband service provided, and each entity that has or will receive funds to provide service in that area upon request from another agency.
For years, we’ve noted how one of the greasier lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of civil rights groups to provide cover for anti-competitive and anti-consumer policies.
A few years back, the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and eventually raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major replacement wireless carrier in Dish Network.
The EU is well on its way to fundamentally destroying the internet. Two giant new regulations are set to become law soon: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. And while neither is ridiculous in the same way that laws in the US and the UK and some other places are just pandering to grandstanding nonsense, that doesn’t make these laws good. Both regulations went through long, convoluted bureaucratic processes… and came out with long, convoluted bureaucratic regulations that simply don’t match with an internet that is designed to be an open system for innovation.
The first strategic priority on the streaming side of the house is to merge HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single platform. That’s slated to hit first in the U.S. in the summer of 2023, the company said Thursday, although WBD did not reveal what it would be called or what it would cost.
Pretty much everyone who has ever gone to college hates educational publishers. There’s an oligopoly of just five giant publishers, and they long ago learned that they are in the best market ever: the buyers of their textbooks (the students) have no choice and are forced to buy the books if their professors assign them — and more such books will get sold every semester that the professor requires it. Therefore, textbook prices are insane by any imaginable standard. And, for decades, they kept getting higher — massively outpacing tons of other goods. For unclear reasons, the never ending march upwards in book pricing finally seemed to hit a ceiling around 2016, and prices seem to have somewhat leveled out since then. This chart from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is really pretty striking:
We had a depressing number of Techdirt stories on this site that involve Shaquille O’Neal. I say that as a basketball fan who absolutely adores Shaq’s contributions to the TNT studio broadcasts for the NBA. On the other hand, the times Shaq has made it onto our pages hasn’t been for the best of reasons. There was the time he was part of a child porn raid on a house based solely on an IP address, or the time that the company he hired to manage his social media accounts went all 9/11 truther using his handles.
AT&T subscribers who are repeatedly accused of downloading pirated content risk having their accounts terminated. This can be prevented by following the instructions at AT&T’s dedicated copyright alert portal. However, due to technical issues, many subscribers are unable to “acknowledge” warnings and participate in the mandatory “copyright tutorial.”
Please, never forget how to feel.
It’s important.
I tested positive for coronavirus! My grandma got it first, then my sister, now me. So far I feel very tired, but not too sick, i.e. I’m not feverish or coughing. We’ll see how it progresses. I don’t want to give this to anyone else.
In my country, the price of energy is getting higher day by day: the price of the kilowatt per hour increases more and more and has no limits.
At home, we don’t use not much energy: we try to have everything turned off, even the lights and in general we don’t use the microwave. We do not have a dishwasher or dryer or even a oven. On this hot summer we arent using the kitchen either because we always eat fresh vegetable salads and drink only water.
However, there was something that worried to me, and this concern comes from the energy consumption of my daily-basis setup.
I generally don’t like the “Just Arrow of Time” idea that a lot of people seem to implicitly believe in. By that I mean the idea that current and historical events are somehow guided in a way that, eventually, creates a better, more just world. I don’t see any reason to believe that’s anything more than a fiction. And when people use it to justify or explain away past wrongs (“it was a different time,” or “we have to judge them by the standards of their time” come to mind) or to absolve themselves of current social responsibility (“things will all work out in the end”), it’s just gross.
If you’ve been following [Joe Barnard]’s rocketry projects for the past few years, you’ll know that one of his primary goals has been to propulsively land a model rocket like SpaceX. Now, 7 years into the rollercoaster journey, he has finally achieved that goal with the latest version of his Scout rocket.
A recent tour of an old WWII-era aircraft carrier reminded us how hard navigation was before the advent of GPS. It used to be the work of skilled people to sight the sun or the stars and use giant books to figure out a vessel’s position. Now you just ask your phone to listen to some GPS satellites and you have precision undreamed of with other systems. But GPS sometimes isn’t enough. Just using conventional GPS, you can locate yourself to a couple of meters. The new L5 band, which isn’t on all satellites yet, can get you to about 30cm. But if you need better — up to around 1 or 2 cm — you need to use special techniques lumped together as GNSS enhancements. [Viktor] wanted to have an Arudino -based lawnmower, but wanted to use more conventional GPS techniques along with ultrawideband (UWB) ranging tags.
Just learned how to setup custom handlers for the gemini scheme in Firefox and XDG.
For Firefox, go to about:config, create a new boolean variable named network.protocol-handler.expose.gemini and set it to false. Open a gemini URL, choose your Gemini client and you’re good to go.
Since I’ve started hosting shit.cx from home, my internet and electricity has been more unreliable than ever.
It started with the cleaner pouring water into the electric stove tripping circuit breaker. I shrugged and figured that this things would sometimes happen.
Then the power went out for a second or two causing the server to reboot.
I will state this upfront as a disclaimer: I’m not a big fan of Android OS, its dev tools and programming language(s), Google, or any of the big players in the Android ecosystem. This is probably why it has taken nine months to get this up and running, even though the code is (thanks to SDL) pretty much the same. However, Android is the leading mobile phone OS in the world, so supporting it is rather important.
The version I have now is still pretty far from being releasable. While it runs nice and smooth on this decently-specced 2017 phone, it lacks any real integration with the operating system, crashes if you look at it wrong, and the screen goes partially blank if you rotate the device.
Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink Send this to a friend
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