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Gemini version available ♊︎
Posted in News Roundup at 8:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It would appear that the Blender Foundation has been working on native Wayland support for its open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset, which artists widely use to create 3D-printed models, visual effects, motion graphics, animated films, interactive 3D apps, virtual reality, and, even video games.
Wayland is slowly but surely conquering our Linux desktops, and more and more desktop environments and GNU/Linux distributions are enabling it by default, so it’s obvious that software developers need to follow suit.
This review puts Spotube under the spotlight. It’s billed as a “fast, modern, lightweight & efficient Spotify music client”. The software is Flutter-based, a Dart-based toolkit that helps build an app’s front end. Spotube is published under an open source software.
The software uses YouTube for streaming/downloading an audio track provided by a Spotify playlist/album which sort of acts to circumvent the restriction of Spotify’s API not allowing playback on non-premium accounts. Spotube is not a YouTube client though.
Before the year 1500 or so, Western Europeans mainly tuned their instruments in three-limit just intonation, which they called Pythagorean tuning. (Don’t be fooled by the name; this system was in use in Mesopotamia centuries before the Greeks described it.) Three-limit just intonation is based on the first three harmonics of a vibrating string. Western Europeans really like the pitch ratios produced by these harmonics, as do people from many other cultures (though not all of them). In this post, I will explain why Europeans liked three-limit just intonation, why they nevertheless eventually abandoned it, and what came after.
It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.
Let’s have fun doing OpenBSD kiosks! As explained in a recent article, a kiosk is a computer dedicated to display things or to be used interactively without being able to escape the current program.
I modified the script surf-display which run the web browser surf in full screen and run various commands to sanitize the environment to prevent users to escape surf to make it compatible with OpenBSD.
The Mastodon instance I’ve been using, mastodon.technology, is shutting down in a few months, so I’ve migrated my Mastodon account to a new server. I wanted to share the steps I went through in case the details are helpful to anyone, especially others migrating off that instance–especially a warning about when you lose access to your old account. I don’t know if these are the best steps to follow, but they worked for me.
I was asked today whether I’ve a list of ideas for using Ansible’s local facts, and my answer was, sadly, ‘no’. I thought I’d start one with the help of my Ansible followers.
Let’s say you want to self-host a Gemini capsule and a weblog. Maybe you’ll use a Raspberry Pi or VPS server. Typically, you’d install (or get a pre-installed) operating system, like Debian/Ubuntu. You might then apt install a webserver like nginx, and pip3 install a Gemini server like JetForce.
There are several methods to update Ubuntu. These methods include package updates via the desktop, the unattended upgrade script, and good old Apt. As the title suggests, this post explores the last option using Cron.
In this guide, we will show you how to install ZesleCP on Ubuntu systems.
Zesle is a graphical web-based web hosting control panel designed to make administration of websites easier. Zesle is often called DA for short. It is a lightweight and fully-featured Web Hosting Control Panel.
Zesle runs on any system with at least the following specifications: Processor: 500 MHz Memory: 1 GB (2 GB is preferred), with at least 2 GB of swap memory HDD Space: minimal 2 GB free space (after the Linux install)
In this guide, we will install Thunderbird Mail on Ubuntu systems.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and operated by subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.
Cron jobs are an essential part of any Linux system. They allow administrators to schedule tasks to run at specified intervals, making it easy to automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks. Cron jobs can be scheduled to run by minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week, or any combination of these. This makes them very versatile and makes it possible to fine-tune the execution of tasks. For example, a cron job could be used to send out a daily report email or to back up a database every week. Cron jobs are extremely powerful and can make managing a Linux system much more manageable.
The most commonly used cron schedules are every 5, 10, or 15 minutes; each has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, running a cron job every 5 minutes means the task will be completed more often and uses more resources. On the other hand, running a cron job every 15 minutes means that the task will be completed less often but uses fewer resources. Ultimately, the best schedule for a cron job depends on the specific task that needs to be completed.
Kona II: Brume is the follow-up to 2017′s Kona from Parabole / Ravenscourt bringing another cold and mysterious adventure to walk through.
Up for more pointing and clicking while adventuring? You’ve come to the right spooky place, with Foolish Mortals being announced with Native Linux support.
Time to get some more really cheap games, as Fanatical have launched their Dollar Collections sale and there’s plenty of good choices in there to get you through the upcoming cold winter nights.
Don’t fancy buying from JSAUX and don’t need the charger + extra expense of the official Steam Deck Docking Station? ivoler are another good choice.
This article is a timeline of events in (or related to) the history of the Eamon text adventure series, from its earliest influences to the latest developments. For a more detailed narrative account, please see History of Eamon.
I’ve finished a rough port of the bocfel Z-code interpreter for the Pico. To avoid confusion, I have decided to call it pocfel. According to the dog developer the p indicates that Fido’s upside down windowing system has been used rather than GLK to display the text. From my point of view the letter p does not look like an upside down b.
Games are saved using a 0.5MB LittleFS partition located at 1MB while the Z-code binary is loaded as a separate uf2 image starting at 1.5MB in flash.
With all the salacious stories about a cheating scandal rocking the world of championship-level chess, you’d think that we’d have delved into the story at least a bit here on Hackaday, especially given the story’s technical angle. But we haven’t, and it’s not because we’re squeamish about the details of the alleged cheat; rather, it’s because it’s just too easy to pun your way through a story like this. The lowest-hanging fruit isn’t always the sweetest.
As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.
CrowdSupply recently featured the Bee Motion S3 board which integrates sensors such as a PIR motion and a light ambient sensor. This open source board also provides a LiPo battery charge circuitry for portable IoT applications and a Stemma connector to easily integrate additional sensor boards.
John Deere purchased the spectrum as part of an overall plan to modernize its factories. The company has had wired Ethernet in its factories for years; it even built its own manufacturing plant software. And the Moline plant has Wi-Fi networks in use today. It also has tested using Bluetooth and other wireless technologies, for location services. It is, in other words, a company with sophisticated IT and OT convergence.
So let’s talk wireless, since that’s why I was there. Tracy Schrauben, a manufacturing emerging technologies manager at John Deere, told me the goal is to make factories wireless so it’s easier to reconfigure work stations whenever products or plans change. Doing so will save time and money in the form of extra cabling and Ethernet drops. The factories also have thousands of devices — among them handheld drills, loaders, and more — that can wander from station to station (either intentionally or not), and using wireless technologies to track that equipment saves time and money, too.
In this Daniel Lupien YouTube short, he show you how easy it is to create a simple mold and cast it with aluminum.
Apache OpenOffice is a free, open-source office suite that supports user privacy and stores all your work in OpenDocument format (ODF). The software is compatible with popular closed-source office alternatives, such as Microsoft Office, and covers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and database applications. Here’s a list of OpenOffice tips that you need to know.
I’ve come to a professional focus over the years, and recently I’ve started summarizing it as “making software easier through removing accidental complexity and promoting evolutionary design, good abstractions, and end-user programming.” I’m glad that others are researching from a theoretical starting point, but for myself I’m glad to be learning and experimenting about these things from a hands-on starting point. If nothing else, it’s a great way to validate that human-centered computing isn’t just a university hobby: it’s an attempt to meet real needs at real organizations like the nonprofit I worked at, and like our clients at Big Nerd Ranch.
Given an array of N numbers of type double, the standard way to sort it in C is to invoke the qsort function
I recently had to work with a large piece of well aged and reliable legacy software that had to be modified to include data protection for some sensitive personal information due to recent legislation. Developers not experienced with security bolted on some encryption. They made up their minds on what to do on the fly, as they tried to somehow add the security features. It could be expected, that under such circumstances, they ended up with a confusing mess of obfuscation that couldn’t even really called “secure”. Anyone with knowledge of the inner workings would be able to reconstruct all the data from accessible files. Yet they had to write extra software, not only for handling passwords, but also for moving data between machines that could be moved by simple file transfer before. Debugging this also became annoying, with many road stops, and I flinched a lot.
I was browsing Gemini when I came across a response to my unit test question: [...]
A primer. CSS is Turing complete, but it doesn’t behave like most other languages (no native package support, and hard to share styles between rules).
I got burned pretty badly by darcs and its “theory of patches”. Git’s model as a content-addressable file system suits me just fine.♥
I am writing this article on my birthday to give my thanks and appreciations to those who helped me start and continue my journey with programming. I want to return the favor by explaining how I started programming, for those who are struggling with getting started with programming, and give them some motivation to continue their journey.
It’s inevitable that developers will use different technologies from one another and that they won’t agree on the assessment of those technologies. That disagreement can often end up being disrespectful–but it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a way to disagree that’s more respectful of other developers, as well as being more intellectually honest and productive.
In no particular order, here are fourteen principles about how to disagree about tech respectfully.
When people say “the edge,” they mean that your site or app is going to be hosted simultaneously on multiple servers around the globe, always close to a user. When someone requests your site/app, they will be directed to the one closest to them geographically. These distributed servers not only serve static assets, but can also execute custom code that can power a dynamic web app.
Moving servers closer to end-users is also a physical approach towards latency optimization. This means lower latency on every single page load. The longer your pages take to load, the more likely users will bounce. 32% more likely according to Google research when load speeds go from 1 second to 3 seconds. 90% more likely when speeds go from 1 second to 5 seconds. Users will visit 9 pages when pages load in 2 seconds, but only 3 pages when they load in 7 seconds.
That’s the gist. Now the nuance.
It is time to catch up on a few developments in the field of storing data via chemicals, such as DNA. Below the fold I discuss a half-dozen recent reports.
The expulsions in Kandahar are part of the Taliban’s enforcement of its deeply controversial ban, which has fuelled protests inside the country and attracted international condemnation.
According to the Taliban’s extremist view of Islamic Sharia law, girls who have reached puberty must be segregated from male students and teachers. The militants have claimed that, due to a shortage of female teachers, they cannot permit pubescent girls to attend school. Before the Taliban takeover, many girls’ schools were already segregated.
The Taliban have not given exceptions to girls who started school late, had to repeat school, or have learning disabilities, RFE/RL reported.
In yet another regressive move that dashes all hope that Afghanistan’s Taliban might reform itself, the militant movement has banned school girls above 13 from schools. The Taliban have carried out inspections of girls’ schools in the Kandahar province and removed hundreds of children who have attained puberty, according to reports.
There are already an estimated 3 million girls in Afghanistan who are being deprived of an education, IANS reports.
Since seizing power last year, the militant group has barred girls who are 13 or older or above the sixth grade from attending school.
Round two of the 2022 Supercon talks is out, and it’s another superb lineup. This round is full of high voltage, art, and science. If you’ve ever dreamed of starting up your own hacker company, making your own refrigerator, teaching your toaster to think, or just making your breath glow, then Supercon is where you want to be Nov. 4-6!
If you plan to attend Supercon or some other hacker conference, know that you’re going to get a badge with a SAO (Simple Add-On) connector, a 4-pin or 6-pin connector that you can plug an addon board onto. There’s myriads of SAOs to choose from, and if you ever felt like your choice paralysis wasn’t intense enough, now you have the option of getting a Jolly Wrencher SAO board!
It’s been a long time since computer hobbyists stored their programs and data on cassette tapes. But because floppy drives were expensive peripherals and hard drives were still a long way from being the commodity they are today, cassettes enjoyed a long run at the top of the bulk data storage heap.
Sometimes, you know where the data you need is stored, you just don’t have a way to access it. In this case, [GetHypoxic] needed to rip data off an eMMC chip, salvaged out of a camera. With no desire to wait for an adapter to show up, it was time to bust out the bodge!
Translation: The event company Lomatec has been accused of “Islamophobia” on social media for a message reminding its employees of certain hygiene regulations and has been under cyber attack for the past 24 hours. Dozens & dozens of messages have been posted on Google in an attempt to damage their reputation 1/2 This French medium-sized company, founded in the 1950s & based in Sevran, and yet making no reference whatsoever to any religion in the message attributed to it, is accused of being unhygienic, discriminatory, inciting racial and religious hatred, etc.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs sheds light on the “alternative hypothesis” that COVID could be a biotech blunder.
Jeffrey Sachs alleges a vast cover-up of Covid origins, including by former members of his commission, and details the personal attacks he has incurred for speaking out.
Last Friday morning, after pacing around a cellmate’s decaying body for days, he couldn’t take it anymore. Despite the guards’ orders, he began lifting up the wet body to drag it from the small space they shared. The guards saw him. Shouting ensued. A few moments later, he too was dead—shot and killed for trying to remove the corpse. What were the guards at Haiti’s National Penitentiary so afraid of that they killed this man? “I think it’s called kolera or koleria. I don’t know how to say it in the [Kreyol] language, but it sounds like that,” a man inside the prison told us as he narrated recent events there via a cell phone. To mitigate the risk of retaliation, this man must remain anonymous; we’ll call him Moses.
“It is unconstitutional and an act against the demands of the Haitian people.”
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.
An authentication bypass flaw in security firm Fortinet’s products, which was patched on 6 October, is being exploited in the wild, the company has confirmed.
It said CVE-2022-40684 was an authentication bypass on the administrative interface that enables remote threat actors to log into FortiGate firewalls, FortiProxy Web proxies, and FortiSwitch Manager on-premise management instances.
The advisory issued by Fortinet said an attacker who exploited the flaw would be able to execute unauthorised code or commands.
Telstra chairman John Mullen has defended Optus over the recent major data breach, saying it was easy to be critical of another company’s performance when one was not in the firing line.
Mullen told the company’s AGM on Tuesday: “…may I just say that it is easy for third parties to be critical of companies who have suffered devastating cyber-attacks such as happened recently to Optus.
“Let me be blunt, however, and say that it is easy to be critical when it isn’t you in the firing line, and we should all avoid hubris because no-one can be complacent and no organisation can ever be 100% sure that it is completely protected and safe.
“The threat and sophistication of the attackers grows every day, and to address the threat business needs to put aside competitive rivalry, and work constructively across industries, with government, and with the community to protect Australia from this modern scourge.”
This release comes on top of 12 patches for CVEs in Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) released earlier this month.
Microsoft is investigating reports of a new zero-day bug abused to hack Exchange servers which were later used to launch Lockbit ransomware attacks.
In at least one such incident from July 2022, the attackers used a previously deployed web shell on a compromised Exchange server to escalate privileges to Active Directory admin, steal roughly 1.3 TB of data, and encrypt network systems.
As described by South Korean cybersecurity firm AhnLab, whose forensic analysis experts were hired to help with the investigation, it took the threat actors only a week to hijack the AD admin account from when the web shell was uploaded.
While it does initially require ‘permission’ from the user when they hand over their login details and password, the user has no control over the ongoing collection process.
It is essentially unregulated data sharing: the scraper can access it, download it, harvest it, sell it, and do whatever they would like with it without the active consent or knowledge of the customer.
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has been pushing for open access to consumers data and have not yet responded to a request for comment.
↺ University Rolls Back Bizarre Laboratory Surveillance Tech Deployment After Students Call Bullshit
People come up with some really strange stuff to do when they have a modicum of power and apparently no idea how to utilize it responsibly. Such is the case at Northeastern University, a research university located in Boston, Massachusetts.
Google has created a three-step process for responding to geofence warrants. First, it provides police with a list of de-identified device IDs for all devices in the area. In the second step, police may narrow the devices in which they’re interested and expand the geographic area or time period to see where those devices came from before or went to after the time of the crime. Finally, in the third step, police further narrow the devices in which they’re interested, and Google provides police those device IDs and full user account information. In general, police only seek one warrant to cover the entire process, which allows the police significant discretion in determining which devices to target for further information from Google.
Riot police fired into residential neighborhoods in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, as Amnesty International and the White House’s national security adviser criticized the violence targeting demonstrators angered by the death of Mahsa Amini.
The 84-year-old also called for establishing an Islamic state in Indonesia, saying that is the only way to practice perfect Islamic law
At first sight, “Saint-Jo” alias Saint-Joseph Viala is no different from other types of schools in La Cabucelle, one of the famous northern districts of Marseille. The school is Catholic, but there is no catechesis, but “inter-religious teaching”. The children, from two-year-old toddlers to third graders, are over 95 % Muslims with a North African migrant background. The same noises can be heard in the courtyard of the older children and in the courtyard of the adjacent kindergarten. The same buildings, more or less dilapidated, stand next to the same prefabricated buildings. There is a vegetable garden, like everywhere else, and physical exercises in the morning before going to class. Mothers, veiled or not, and the few fathers who accompany the youngest are asked to stay at the door of the institution, which no one enters who is not duly authorised to do so. (…)
Telex photojournalist István Huszti was awarded this year’s Hégető Honorka Award for photojournalism. The award is named after a Hungarian editor-journalist who died in a tragic car accident in 2003.
Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia’s Rostov Region, wrote on his Telegram channel that his regional government had received “a new mobilization assignment.” Regional draft offices, he added, have already begun work on this new task.
Nissan is withdrawing from the Russian market and selling all of its assets in the country to the Russian government, Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry reported Tuesday.
The Uvalde (Texas) PD’s response to a school shooting was to show up and then do nothing for more than an hour. Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies hung back as a gunman terrorized a classroom full of elementary school students, ultimately killing 19 kids and two teachers.
As I was reading today’s interview between David Barsamian of Alternative Radio and the remarkable Noam Chomsky, now 93 years old and still so much in and of our world, I had a “memory” flash of sorts. I wondered what, in his 20s, Tom Engelhardt would have thought of this ever more extreme planet if, as in one of the sci-fi novels he then read so avidly, he had been transported more than half a century into the future to this very America. And you know exactly the country I mean.
Mykolaiv, Ukraine—Shortly before one in the morning on Monday, Serghiy awoke to the sound of a loud boom. It was louder than the usual sounds of the frequent shelling in this city in southern Ukraine, so he gathered that this one was a close hit. There were four more booms in the next 30 minutes or so, each one sounding more distant from his neighborhood south of the city, near occupied Kherson, and each one approaching closer to the city center.
Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.
Next week marks 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis—the 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union widely regarded as the closest we ever came to global nuclear war. On this anniversary, as we veer terrifyingly close to the brink of Armageddon once again, we should look to that crisis to guide us in resolving our present one.
As the United States heads into another recession and labor organizing is surging, we speak with leading sociologist and longtime social movement scholar Frances Fox Piven as she turns 90 years old. “We’re at another juncture: a bitter contest about democratic rights,” says Piven, who claims the U.S. has always been a “limited democracy.” Despite attacks on fundamental rights, Piven says, “people do have power” to organize and protect their rights, because “we live in a complex, integrated society where the activities of ordinary people really do matter.” Piven’s groundbreaking books include “Regulating the Poor” and “Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail” with her late husband and collaborator Richard Cloward.
If the damage inflicted by sanctions on the regime in Moscow is less than expected, the self-harm to the rest of Europe and to a lesser degree the US, has been far greater.
Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine — “This is not a bluff,” he insisted on September 21st — the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it’s entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats, that the Russian president might indeed believe that the season for threats is ending and only the detonation of a nuclear weapon will convince the Western powers to back off. If so, the war in Ukraine could prove historic in the worst sense imaginable — the first conflict since World War II to lead to nuclear devastation.
This is an emergency.
Story by Alexander Rybin. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.
This morning, Russia resumed the massive shelling of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure that it had started the day before. Air-strike warnings were issued in all regions of Ukraine. Reports emerged about shelling and drone attacks in Kyiv and the regions surrounding Kyiv, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Rivne, Lviv, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv.
Russian forces continued to attack cities throughout Ukraine into Tuesday morning, according to local officials in the Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The wide-scale missile attack on cities throughout Ukraine on Monday cost the Russian government between $400 million and $700 million, according to an estimate from Forbes Ukraine.
Biden had promised to end US assistance to the coalition, both on the campaign trail and in his first major foreign policy speech as president on February 4, 2021. Biden has scaled back US assistance, but the US continues to sell massive quantities of arms to the Saudis and Emiratis.
Later in his career, Rogers began to raise his voice against what he saw as a national security strategy flawed by its reliance on weapons that would cause a global holocaust. After he retired, he became an advocate for nuclear weapons abolition, and has been arrested at least 10 times blocking the gates at the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington, site of the largest concentration of deployed U.S. nuclear weapons.
The death toll from the October 8 explosion on the Crimean Bridge has risen to four people, TASS reports, citing an anonymous source in the emergency-response services.
“Saudis must reverse their oil supply cuts, which aid and abet Russia’s savage criminal invasion, endanger the world economy, and threaten higher gas prices at U.S. pumps.”
The Russian Defense Ministry has begun to recruit new soldiers from among the inmates of Russia’s so-called “red” penal colonies. This is a class of penal institutions where some of the inmates are former law-enforcement and state-security servicemen. In “red” colonies, convicts are permitted to organize a good deal of their daily life, unlike the other “castes” of inmates in the Russian penal system. According to the media project Vazhnye Istorii (iStories), no later than the end of September, the Ministry of Defense began to recruit soldiers for a new formation called Storm among the people currently imprisoned in the “red” colonies. Military recruitment among convicts used to be something only done by Evgeny Prigozhin, the notorious founder of the Wagner Group — Prigozhin’s “private military company” that fought in Syria in 2015, and is now taking part in Russia’s war against Ukraine. But now the Defense Ministry, led by Sergey Shoigu, is taking Prigozhin’s lead — by trying to find new conscripts among the prisoners.
We’ve been writing about journalist Jason Leopold for many years, either focused on his FOIA adventures or the amazing (and important) scoops he achieves through them. If you look back through our archives, you’ll see that Leopold knows how to use freedom of information laws basically better than anyone, and thus wields them effectively to help better inform the public of just what our government is up to. That, of course, is the entire point of freedom of information laws in the first place. Our government is supposed to be transparent with us over what they do. FOIA makes that possible, and it only works when it’s used. And Leopold uses it.
Even though it is not yet over, 2022 has been a record year of climate-related suffering.
The “somebody” at Scientific American was S. S. Wilson and the eleven-page article in question, on bicycle technology, was printed in the March 1973 edition of the magazine. Wilson was a lecturer in engineering at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Cross College. S. S. Wilson said: “My interest in bicycles dates back to school days. I have always owned and used a bicycle; during World War II, I several times cycled more than 100 miles in a day as a means of transport.”
The Financial Stability Oversight Council — a Treasury-led panel of top officials from the Federal Reserve, SEC and other agencies — released a 120-page reportthat identified a wide range of regulatory gaps and market risks affecting everything from Bitcoin trading platforms and stablecoins to consumer protection and cyberattacks.
That’s the message that progressive U.S. Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has for voters in a pair of videos published Tuesday as part of a campaign to push members of Congress to enact windfall profits tax legislation.
“Now is the time to accelerate the transition to a renewable energy future.”
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has veto power over foreign arms sales, said in a statement that OPEC’s plan to slash production by two million barrels a day in a bid to prop up oil prices amounts to a “decision to help underwrite Putin’s war.” Russia, an OPEC ally, stands to benefit from higher oil prices without having to reduce its own production.
Conservation work aimed at protecting and replenishing the population of Saimaa ringed seals are proving successful so far, according to a report by Finland’s network of regional economic development ELY-centres.
↺ Right to Rescue: Jury Acquits Animal Rights Activists Who Saved Piglets at Smithfield Factory Farm
In a major victory for animal rights, a jury in Utah has acquitted two animal rights activists who each faced up to five-and-a-half years of prison time for rescuing two sick piglets from Smithfield’s Circle Four Farms, one of the world’s largest pig farms. During the 2017 rescue operation, activists with the group Direct Action Everywhere found piglets feeding on their own mother’s blood, pregnant pigs held in gestation crates too small for them to turn around in, and sick and feverish piglets left to die of starvation or be trampled. The long-awaited decision sets the stage for a “right to rescue’’ legal precedent, which would allow anyone to rescue dying animals from unsafe conditions. For more, we speak with one of the activists, Wayne Hsiung, who represented himself in trial and says the jury decision is “a resounding victory not just for transparency and accountability in factory farms but for the idea that animals are living beings and not just things to be thrown away in a garbage can.”
Downstream storage in reservoirs like Lake Mead is already at 28% capacity. There are discussions to cut water use throughout the river’s drainage. The lower Colorado River provides water to San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas, among other communities. Plus, 50% of the headwaters flows are diverted to Colorado’s Front Range, including Denver, by intra-basin transfer.
Climate change is already having severe impacts across our planet, bringing new and previously unimaginable challenges to the people least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.
This report, the first we’ve released jointly in the history of our organizations, provides a sobering review of how just one of those challenges – the increase in deadly heat-waves – threatens to drive new emergency needs in the not-so-distant future.
Inflation reached a record level of 20,1 percent in September in Hungary. In other words, consumer prices went up by this much compared to September 2021 – information published by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office reveals. The level of inflation hasn’t been this high in a very long time.
Over the years, we’ve posted so many different stories about questionable decisions by PayPal to cut off services from users it objected to, or even seizing the money in their account that it’s impossible to dig up all of those stories. But, by now, we’ve seen well over a decade of PayPal acting as some sort of morality police. It has every legal right to do so, though we could point out that there is much less competition for easy to use, consumer-friendly payment options. It is also an example of the trickiness that ensues when people look to infrastructure layer providers to get involved in content moderation.
A. Philip Randolph, the great civil rights leader and labor organizer of the mid-20th century, said in 1966, “How we combat inflation, or the threat of inflation, is at bottom a moral or social question.”
“It’s clear what their intentions are: reaching into the American people’s pockets and stealing their hard-earned benefits.”
In its new World Economic Outlook report, the IMF lowered its global growth forecast for next year in the face of myriad “steep challenges” and warned that “the worst is yet to come” for many countries as a strong U.S. dollar worsens debt burdens and costs-of-living crises in developing nations.
Within weeks of taking office, Britain’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a radical new set of economic measures that echoed the trickle-down policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — heavy on tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.
Produced by Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI), The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2022 finds that most governments are doing little to combat income and wealth inequities that have become even more extreme during the coronavirus crisis, which has disproportionately impacted poor nations.
The fact that a country as rich as ours does not have decent welfare state provisions that can ensure people adequate housing, food, and health care is an outrage. But that is a longer-term story, not something that just happened in the last year and a half. When the media suddenly choose to emphasize the struggling population, in ways that they have not done in the past, that is a political decision on their part, not one responding to a new economic reality.
“Education systems desperately need more and better funding across low- and lower-middle-income countries.”
“The solution to stabilizing the global economy is not going to be found in debt restructuring but rather from debt cancellation.”
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has submitted a draft decision in a large scale inquiry into Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (“MPIL”) to other Concerned Supervisory Authorities across the EU. This inquiry was commenced in April 2021 after media reports highlighted that a collated dataset of Facebook user personal data had been made available on the internet. The inquiry concerned the question of MPIL’s compliance with its obligations under Articles 25(1) and 25(2) GDPR (“data protection by design and by default”).
DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.
Tao Liu had recently rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower in New York and boasted of joining the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
As the agents tracked Li’s activity across the Americas and Asia, they realized he wasn’t just another money launderer. He was a pioneer. Operating with the acumen of a financier and the tradecraft of a spy, he had helped devise an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified the cartels.
Sir James Eadie, acting for the Westminster government, closed the day at the Supreme Court with a vicious twist of the knife: “If you can’t even persuade your own law officer, the shutters come down”.
In 2003, the crowds that had gathered in a Porto Alegre stadium to explore alternatives to capitalism greeted Lula with coordinated roars of “olè olè olè Lula!” It seemed at that moment that everything could change for the better, and that, in the words of Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who also addressed the WSF, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” Indeed, Lula’s rewriting of Brazil’s economic priorities emphasizing benefits for low-income communities was a welcome change in a world seduced by neoliberalism. He went on to win reelection in 2006.
Thirteen years ago, as Indian students were being beaten up left, right and centre in Melbourne, India was anything but flavour of the month Down Under.
But now, things have dramatically changed and Australia simply cannot find enough occasions to drool over India and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi, especially when issues pertaining to the Quad — a flimsy security partnership involving Australia, the US, Japan and India — are discussed.
Suffice it to say that while Australia is ever alert to any report that China is violating human rights, Canberra turns deaf, dumb and blind when there is any such charge against India.
The latest love-in was witnessed this week when Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar faced the media along with Australian Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong in Canberra.
At this point, it seems exceptionally likely that Elon Musk will own Twitter within a few weeks. Because nothing is predictable in this saga, you never know, but the odds are that by Halloween Twitter will be Muskville. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about what that means, but in our post about Musk’s abrupt about-face, we joked that the takeover might come just in time for the Supreme Court to hold Twitter liable for any terrorist organizations who use the site and then go kill people in terrorist attacks.
When Wisconsin’s United Auto Workers unions endorsed Mandela Barnes for the US Senate earlier this year, they did not make the announcement in Milwaukee or Madison or Green Bay. Instead, Barnes accepted the endorsement in Oshkosh, a historic manufacturing town on the shores of Lake Winnebago in the state’s industrial Fox River Valley. Barnes wanted to do the event in the city of 67,000 because its plight speaks to the issues that are at the heart of his campaign against Ron Johnson, the state’s constantly embattled Republican senator.1
Florida will try to kill you. This is the Florida Rule, and it governs one of the most capricious landscapes on earth. Misunderstand the environment at your peril, as we were reminded by Hurricane Ian this past month. Parts of our unique paradise lie in ruin, and we will spend months, if not years, trying to process the experience. While Hurricane Ian has left Florida, it remains behind in the flooding and in our governor’s political maneuverings. It persists in the minds of survivors and in the material effects on their lives. Left behind, too, as porous as the sand the storm surge deposited miles inland, are questions about policy, storytelling, and the future of the state.
The Biden administration is finally putting firmer pressure on governments using child soldiers. On October 3, it announced that a majority of the 12 governments implicated in using child soldiers would be ineligible for certain categories of military assistance until they addressed the problem.
U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh announced the administration’s proposed rule, which would establish a “multifactor, totality-of-the-circumstances” framework under the Federal Labor Standards Act to determine whether a worker is truly an independent contractor—a status which exempts people from minimum wage and overtime laws as well as tax contributions from their employers.
On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”
Despite this, EU member states continue to subvert, by varying degrees, such protections. Fixated by notions of protecting society from the unsavoury and the criminal, lawmakers continue to flirt and court the mass surveillance properties inherent in such regulations.
Two high-profile events will coincide next month. One of them—the U.S. midterm elections, which will conclude November 8—could provide the strongest indicator yet of which way our society will turn in the near future: toward an inclusive, pluralistic democracy or toward the anti-democratic “semi-fascism” of the MAGA right. It could go either way. In contrast, the other big event—the COP27 global climate conference from November 6 to 18—is highly unlikely to bring any perceptible change in the trajectory of world greenhouse-gas emissions or anything else.
With their ample funds, the Democrats have to aggregate the case against the GOP’s morbid opposition to humanity and contrast it with the Democratic Party’s own lawmaking, votes and positions. For example, the Dems need to compare all their pro-children work with the GOP’s ugly record of cruelty to the little ones once they are born. (See my column: Big Campaign 2022 Issue: GOP’s Cruelty to Children). Trump’s GOP went out of its way to keep federal Medicaid funds from insuring children in GOP-dominated states, lunged to revoke an Obama rule to ban a pesticide, especially deadly to young children, and blocked all attempts to enact paid sick leave, family leave and daycare. In 2017 the Republicans also slashed the already low tax rates for their Rich and Powerful paymasters.
I understand why the GOP recruited Walker to run for Senate. He’s got (and deserves) great positive name recognition, especially in Georgia, for his career in football. His public political positions prior to running clearly fell within the Republican ambit. What wasn’t to like?
Mostly, we all spend more time speculating on what will happen after an event rather than knowing about the actual event itself these days. The actual “knowing” of anything is farmed off to investigative bodies that take a great deal of time so that when we finally know the results we don’t care because we’re into another speculative if not spectacular event. And we’re watching it all on a screen three stops away from reality. That’s how it goes.
If it weren’t for all the suffering and pain and fear, that might even be funny.
The Taliban has responded to the protests with brute force, detaining, beating, and threatening female demonstrators.
“The Taliban grabbed the girls and dragged and beat them with the butts of their guns,” said Nahid, a female protester in the western city of Herat who did not reveal her real name for fear of retribution. “I still have bruises on my back from the beating I endured.”
She told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi that armed Taliban fighters attempted to disperse the October 2 protest in Herat by firing into the air.
The family of Mahsa Amini – the 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose death in police custody three weeks ago sparked protests across Iran – say they have received death threats and have been warned not to get involved in the demonstrations.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Roskomnadzor, the country’s federal censor, has gone into overdrive to limit Russians’ access to “undesirable” media. A recent investigation from Mediazona, however, found that the Russian authorities feel threatened by Russian-language news outlets abroad as well — and not only outlets that publish media for Russian audiences, like Meduza, but also Kazakh and Kyrgyz outlets writing primarily for Kazakh and Kyrgyz readers. Undeterred by national borders, Roskomnadzor has been sending warning letters to Central Asian news outlets demanding they remove articles on the war in Ukraine — and threatening to block them in Russia, where millions of Central Asians live, if the outlets refuse. In English, Meduza explains what Mediazona learned about Roskomnadzor’s power abroad.
It seems the answer is simple – just pivot to local news. Though who knows if your local news station is just owned by a central organization and fed scripts.
You can see above that you may think local news is in-fact local, but chances are some scripts are from the central organization. So that begs a real question of who decides what your own local news coverage looks like.
The video is now available of this discussion in Liverpool in the furthest fringes of the Labour Party Conference. While the session lacked any adversarial spark, it was a deep dive and I believe very informative. I am here with Stella Assange, Iain Munro, Deepa Driver and Ogmundur Jonasson. Ogmundur’s experience as an Icelandic minister dealing with the FBI is particularly interesting as an example of the lawlessness with which the USA has pursued its vendetta against Assange.
The three men — Shadli, Atallah and Ibrahim Al-Huwaiti — were arrested in 2020 for refusing to give up their home for the project. Shadli Al-Huwaiti is the brother of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti, a 43-year-old Tabuk resident who was shot dead by Saudi Special Forces in April 2020 for protesting against Riyadh’s eviction orders.
Since their eviction the tribe has appealed to the United Nations for help in preserving their presence on their ancestral lands. Six months after the killing of Abdul Rahman, Al-Huwaitat tribal leaders called on the international organisation to investigate the Saudi authorities’ forceful displacement and abuse of tribal members.
Last month saw the Saudi women’s national football team compete in their first matches at home against Bhutan, and a women’s premier league is now in the works.
British-Iranian correspondent Ramita Navai was in Bayeux, Normandy on Thursday to present the première of her documentary “Afghanistan: No Country for Women”, a harrowing look at life under the Taliban. Often using a hidden camera, she witnessed the daily struggle women face to stay alive.
“These girls were targeted and attacked both because they were female and because they were from a persecuted minority [Hazaras]. They have been systematically discriminated against and denied their most basic human rights,” she said.
The Russian politician Alexey Navalny, currently imprisoned in the Vladimir region’s Sixth penal colony, is once again locked in a solitary confinement cell. This is the sixth of Navalny’s back-to-back stays in an unventilated six-by-ten-foot cell referred to as the “SHIZO,” or “disciplinary isolator.”
Acts of Desperation, the debut novel by the Irish writer Megan Nolan, explores a familiar sort of debilitating love affair. Its protagonist is a modern woman who, in full possession of herself, seeks to yield that self completely to a man. The unnamed twentysomething narrator meets Ciaran, a beautiful, emotionally unavailable art critic, at a gallery event in Dublin. The novel gives a retrospective account of their mutually destructive relationship.
This week we talked to Derek Silva, co-author of an article in The Guardian about racial epithets, college athletics, and what occurred at BYU when Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson faced racist taunts and was subsequently told by university officials that she did not in fact hear them.
There is a lot on the docket in this Supreme Court term that is cause for alarm: not only threats to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act affirmative action, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the Clean Water Act, but also the bizarre “independent state legislature theory.” With issues like these, it’s easy to overlook other matters before the court. But those cases matter just as much as the headliners do.
A political scandal is unfolding in Los Angeles, where City Council President Nury Martinez resigned from her leadership post Monday after she was caught on tape using racist language about the city’s Indigenous immigrant population and referring to the Black son of another city councilmember as a “little monkey.” Martinez made the comments last year during a conversation discussing redistricting with Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, as well as Ron Herrera, the head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, who also resigned from his leadership post Monday. “Her [Martinez] inciting hate against Indigenous people has a direct impact on their lives,” says Odilia Romero of the L.A.-based organization Indigenous Communities in Leadership, who’s calling for Martinez’s resignation. “Beyond the pain and beyond the hurt is also this effort to really sideline Black power,” says Melina Abdullah of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, who is calling for the resignation of all four councilmembers, an investigation into how racism within the city council has undermined Black electoral power, and a “fundamental culture shift” in city politics.
The vote was 6-3, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
“This is yet another example of the FEC refusing to enforce our nation’s campaign finance laws.”
David Almond, who until January managed several stores in the Buffalo area—where the pro-labor push among Starbucks workers across the U.S. began in 2021—told the NLRB in sworn testimony in August that the company had provided him with a list of pro-union employees and told him to find reasons to reprimand or penalize them.
A St. Petersburg woman visited the grave of Vladimir Putin’s long-dead parents, leaving them a note allegedly containing a death wish for the Russian President. She is now facing criminal charges.
Internet-wide scanning — the process of initiating network connections with public services on a set of given ports — allows researchers and network operators to understand how the Internet works in practice.
Unfortunately, no study has been able to analyse the entire IPv4 service space across all ports. Scanning all 65K ports across all 3.7 billion IPv4 addresses would take five years when using one of the fastest Internet scanners, ZMap, at a bandwidth of 1 Gbps (a bandwidth that does not overwhelm destination networks). Consequently, researchers have been subsampling the services and ports they scan, causing them to miss the majority (tens of billions) of Internet services.
To scan all IPv4 services, my colleagues and I at Stanford University have built a system called GPS, which is the first scalable and wall-time efficient solution for predicting IPv4 services across all 65K ports.
Back in 2016, Alphabet executives made it pretty clear they had grown tired of trying to disrupt the U.S. broadband industry with Google Fiber. Executives were fired, hundreds of employees were laid off, and any real expansion in the project was effectively frozen. Alphabet and Google Fiber executives then just pretended none of this had happened and nothing had changed.
It seems that trademark shenanigans are becoming something of a corporate tradition for the folks over at Oatly. The Swedish oat-milk maker, backed by several celebrities, last made it onto our pages first for suing another oat-milk producer essentially for having the word “oat” in its brand name… and then for losing that lawsuit because of course. You might have thought that experience would have changed Oatly’s behavior surrounding trademark, specifically in it ceasing to try to enforce trademarks over generic or descriptive terms.
Piracy is on the rise. New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by more than 20 percent compared to last year. Movie piracy saw the most rapid increase after the Covid release slowdown. In line with tradition, the United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers.
Since its inception more than three decades ago, UK-based broadcaster Sky has been fighting piracy battles on multiple fronts. The internet certainly hasn’t made things any easier but the company continues to press on, despite what appear to be mounting odds.
Today I feel I love my life.
I went to Integration systems classes. I don’t really enjoy Java, but the teacher is actually teaching stuff I don’t know anything about, Spring Boot Webflux. It’s based on the Java Streams and recent Java features.
The ARM processor is popping up everywhere. From Raspberry Pis, to phones, to Blue Pill Arduino-like boards, you don’t have to go far to find an ARM processor these days. If you program in C, you probably don’t care much or even think about it. But do you know ARM assembly language? Well, if you look at it one way, it can’t be too hard. The CPU only has about 30 distinct operations — that’s why it is called RISC. Of course, sometimes fewer instructions actually make things more difficult. But you can get a great starting tutorial with the 21 programs on the ARM Assembly by Example website.
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