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Posted in News Roundup at 3:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Never stand between a weeb and his video games, I was very excited to play Persona 5 Royal but the game was completely borked on linux on launch day but luckily the open source community came together and fixed it in a matter of days
Link to media Release of Ardour 7.0:
https://ardour.org/whatsnew.html
Updating Void Linux installation builds:
https://voidlinux.org/news/2022/10/new-images.html
Rhino Linux, a rolling distribution based on Ubuntu:
https://rhinolinux.org/more.html
Release of Tails 5.5:
https://tails.boum.org/news/version_5.5/index.en.html
Release of the Open 3D Engine 22.10:
https://www.o3de.org/blog/posts/o3de-22-10-release/
Release of ErgoFramework 2.2:
https://github.com/ergo-services/ergo
Release of Stratis 3.3:
https://github.com/stratis-storage/stratisd/releases/tag/v3.3.0
Release of antiX 22:
https://antixlinux.com/antix-22-released/
Coreboot 4.18:
https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2022/10/18/announcing-coreboot-4-18/
Release of Asterisk 20:
https://github.com/asterisk/asterisk/
Release of Ubuntu 22.10:
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
Release of OpenBSD 7.2:
https://www.mail-archive.com/announce@openbsd.org/msg00449.html
Doc Searls and Simon Phipps talk with Hart Montgomery of the Hyperledger Foundation about distributed data (not just the blockchain kind), decentralized trust, how the Foundation is fostering code useful to everyone in the world, what open digital wallets are—or should be—all about, the essential nature of cryptography, and much more.
It was only a matter of time before he cornered me at XDC for a quick “talk”. It was completely normal the way he had no fewer than four laptops physically harnessed to his person as he strutted around in search of hapless driver maintainers upon whom he could foist his latest and least sane project. I wasn’t at all afraid for my life when he told me that, by the time he let me leave the conference hall that day, rusticl would be working on zink.
I’m here blogging about it now, so obviously everything is fine and I’m not still trapped in his basement, but let’s take a look at some of the challenges I faced over that grueling, interminable period of CL bring-up besides lack of water and food.
In the previous blog post I discussed how a formal grammar can be transformed into a pushdown automaton in order to check if a sequence of packets or tokens is part of the language described by the grammar. In this post I will discuss how I implemented said automaton in Java in order to validate OpenPGP messages in PGPainless.
Foodies is a free open-source full stack JavaScript web application for foodies who want to share and view photos of delicious food.
Photon is a cross-platform file-transfer application built using flutter. It uses http to transfer files between devices.You can transfer files between devices that run Photon.(No Wi-Fi router is required, you can use hotspot)
[...]
The project is released under the GPL-v3 License.
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.
I don’t get much spam email in general and I get even less that has malware payloads, so in one sense it’s always interesting when one makes it through our various anti-spam measures and I get to actually look at a sample for myself. Today I received what looked like a malware attack using a PDF: [...]
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
Here’s how to install and configure Tomcat 10.1 with Nginx for reverse proxy and Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux 9.
Apache Tomcat is a long-lived open-source web server and servlet container that implements Jakarta Enterprise Edition specifications.
Its latest version, Tomcat 10.1, supports Servlet 6.0, JavaServer Pages 3.1, WebSocket 2.1, and JASPIC 3.0 specifications, as well as many other features that make it a handy platform for developing and deploying Java-based web applications and services.
It is no secret that to be a true Linux power user you have to deal with the command line. Many people actually prefer to use the command line. However, the shell — the program that provides that command line — is mired in a back history which means it has to work with existing things no matter how modern it tries to be. However, a new set of projects wants to replace most of your user interface stack starting with the shell. At the top of that stack is Cat9 which is technically a shell, but not in the way you probably imagine a shell.
Groups are the bread and butter of a Linux system. These are special lists that allow you to group multiple users into different categories. Along with securing your system’s application privileges, it allows you to finely control how each account in the system can access and share its files and folders.
This article shows how you can use the groups utility to add and modify existing groups in Linux. Further, it will also highlight how the Linux permissions system works in conjunction with the groups system.
Posting about this, in case anyone else is puzzled by the behaviour of the ‘mount’ utility.
I am working on running EasyOS as user “zeus”, where zeus has administrator rights. That means you don’t have to prepend “sudo” to do stuff, such as mount a partition.
No problem with ‘mount’ in busybox, mounting and unmounting work when running as user zeus. Busybox in Easy is currently version 1.32.0.
With so many recent advancements in the Linux gaming world, it’s now possible to play Windows games on Linux with minimal tweaks.
Playing Windows games on Linux is becoming easier thanks to the Linux community, Valve, and Proton GE. Most games on your Steam library now need no, or very little, tweaking to get running smoothly.
But what if you didn’t purchase the game through the Steam ecosystem? What then? There are alternative ways to take advantage of the improvements that Linux gamers are experiencing through applications that are getting easier to use every day.
Let’s review the apps and tools you can use to take advantage of playing Windows games on Linux.
Dokuwiki is an open-source wiki software written in PHP, and it doesn’t require a database. It was developed by Andreas Gohr in 2004. Dokuwiki works on plain text files, and its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki. With its simple yet powerful syntax, users can create structured texts easily, and it ensures the data files remain readable outside the wiki. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Dokuwiki on Ubuntu 22.04.
The Linux aspell and enchant tools can both ID typos in text files and suggest replacements.
If you need to count how many of each character is included in a file or phrase, there are some handy commands you can string together to accomplish this along with scripts and aliases that can make the job easy.
For anyone who’s made the switch from a Ubuntu-based to an RHEL-based Linux distribution for container deployments, you’ve probably realized that Docker isn’t the easiest or best option for your new platform. Thankfully, Podman is installed by default on most RHEL-based distributions, so you can skip directly to working with your containers.
But why would you want to learn an entirely new tool? Fortunately, Podman is almost a direct 1:1 replacement for Docker, so if you know one you can use the other. I’ve already helped you take your first steps with Podman and this time around we’re going to extend that a bit by creating and managing volumes.
Why are volumes important? Simple — persistent storage. Say, for example, you deploy a container that uses data. Everything is going great until disaster strikes. The container fails and takes your data down with it. You don’t want that.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Firefox browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
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 Firefox browser 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’re a big fan of The Witcher series you will probably love this: CD PROJEKT RED have announced The Witcher Remake. Working together with developer Fool’s Theory, it will be developed in Unreal Engine 5.
Russia’s Economic Development Ministry has prepared a new draft bill that, if passed, would prohibit the release of video games containing “information whose distribution is banned,” according to Kommersant. The bill has been sent to the necessary government agencies for review.
Here’s one from earlier in the month that was missed: Volkswagen Group has now formally pledged funding towards Blender, helping this powerful FOSS software continue improving.
JSAUX were getting close to release another (yes, another) Steam Deck Docking Station, this time with RGB lighting around the bottom but due to a “leak” and a competitor “copying” it they have cancelled it and will re-do it.
Want to play Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves on Linux desktop? It works out of the box on Steam Deck, but on Linux desktop it needed some launch options which GE-Proton now works around. Reminder: GE-Proton is a community made version of the Windows compatibility layer Proton and not endorsed by Valve.
Just short of two months after hitting 5,000 — Valve has now marked over 6,000 games as formally Verified or Playable for the Steam Deck. A big milestone for still pretty early days of the system, that you can now grab without the reservation queue (along with the official Docking Station).
Even though it was Steam Deck Verified by Valve back in July, the developer of Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition have put out a big game engine upgrade to make it even better.
It seems the time has come, EA has begun the process of swapping from Origin to the EA app on Steam, which could cause a few issues for Linux and Steam Deck with Proton. Multiple titles on Steam got updates within the last day, with no patch notes or announcements from EA that I can see. The only difference seems to be introducing the EA App.
While trying to stay warm in our first snow of the year, I got several apps tested and released in round 3 of https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-gear-snaps-round-2/ ! All of these are being ( re ) tested on both arm64 and amd64. Hence, the release is going slower than it will in the future. Thank you for your patience.
Since my article The flaws of distro hopping and asking other people about their OS of choice I have had a number of people writing to me asking for my specific advice regarding their choice of operating system, both for personal usage and for business usage. Last night I received yet another email from someone in the US who wrote to me about a difficult situation they where facing in the choice of operating system for their business usage. So I have decided to write a little bit about it. However, this article is not my professional advice. I don’t know you and I don’t know your situation and as such, I cannot advice you. Rather, this article is about what I do and why I do it.
We are currently reviewing the distros on the strict list, verifying they are still actively being developed, whether they still meet our strict criteria and anything that has changed since they were first admitted to the list.
I introduce you Voyager 22.10in final version. A 2 in 1 version with for the first time, the Gnome and Xfce desktops unified in a single distributionVoyager, à sélectionner à votre session. Le tout dans a completely redesigned style for this duo. The Gnome 43 desktop coupled with the Xfce 4.16 desktop and a part in version 4.17, still in preparation. With the promise finally realized, to have 2 unified systems Gnome and Xfce, light, fast, modern, fluid, secure and efficient in a hybrid environment for PC and Tablet. The 2 offices are quite distinct and their respective applications are for the most part invisible, for one or the other environment. This release is based on Linux kernel 5.19 and Ubuntu distribution“Kinetic Kudu” with its novelties. 22.10 is an intermediate release with a 9-month update that prepares the future 5-year LTS – Long-term support – release that will arrive shortly for Gnome and Xfce. With integrated, options grouped in the BoxVoyagerlike Conky Control , Effects , Repair ,Screencast, Switch Ubuntu , Wine development and Steam Gaming and Gnome extensions selected according to PC needs. A Special Gaming type GS profile has been created in xfce. With numerous Themes and Wallpapers and essential software . This release contains Software – Gnome Software, which was preferred over Ubuntu’s, to manage Deb, Snap and Flatpack packages together . Firefox has been installed in deb for better compatibility with gnome extensions and many other new features to discover.
In this month’s customer success highlights, learn how FIWARE, Electrical Training Alliance and SVA employed several Red Hat products to help build eco-smart city solutions, develop reusable microservices-based applications and construct a robust modern platform that meets strict compliance requirements.
Red Hat’s products are distributed through numerous methods, including RPMs, ISOs and zip files. Over the past several months, we have been working across the organization to design and implement a plan to provide signatures for all zip file types so that our customers have greater assurance that Red Hat actually creates the products they receive. This work is essential to our customers’ trust in Red Hat and our products.
Released on October 4th, 2022, Red Hat Single Sign-On patch 7.5.3 is the first Red Hat zip distribution to include cryptographic signatures. More product releases will come with this vital security metadata in the coming months.
Google just announced that they have submitted an application for Kubeflow to become an incubating project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It is an initiative supported by the Kubeflow Project Steering group. The request is visible to everyone and it represents a game changer for the rhythm which Kubeflow will develop. It makes community growth a strategic objective and puts Kubeflow on a development fast track.
Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6 all-flash storage systems are designed for enterprises’ mission-critical services.
The SmartMatrix full-mesh architecture ensures hardware redundancy and fast service switchover without interruption in the event of faults. The fully symmetric active-active architecture balances service loads on the entire storage system, simplifying service planning and scaling. FlashLink®designed for all-flash storage guarantees consistent low latency. The gateway-free HyperMetro feature provides an end-to-end active-active data center solution, which can smoothly evolve to the geo-redundant disaster recovery (DR) solution to achieve 99.9999% solution-level reliability. Variable-length deduplication and compression maximize the available capacity and reduce the operating expense (OPEX).
OceanStor Dorado V6 meets the requirements of enterprise applications such as databases, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtual server infrastructure (VSI), and file sharing, helping the financial, manufacturing, and carrier industries evolve smoothly to all-flash storage.
As you may know, Ubuntu Membership is a recognition of a significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community. To this end, the Community Council recruits from our current member community for the valuable role of reviewing and evaluating the contributions of potential members to bring them on board or assist with having them achieve this goal.
Our board members terms will soon end, and we are looking to restaff our 12:00 and 20:00/22:00 UTC Membership Boards with seven new members for each board.
Certain manufacturers seriously dislike open-source firmware for their devices, and this particular hack deals with quite extreme anti-hobbyist measures. The Meraki MR33, made by Cisco, is a nice access point hardware-wise, and running OpenWRT on it is wonderful – if not for the Cisco’s malicious decision to permanently brick the CPU as soon as you enter Uboot through the serial port. This AP seems to be part of a “hardware as a service” offering, and the booby-trapped Uboot was rolled out by an OTA update some time after the OpenWRT port got published.
If you’re used to working with individually addressable RGB LEDs, then that title probably has you scratching your head — controlling six NeoPixel strips is easy with an Arduino, since each strip only needs a single I/O pin for data. But we aren’t talking about individually addressable LEDs; we’re talking about conventional common-anode RGB LED strips and Trevor Makes recently uploaded a video demonstrating how to control six of them with one Arduino Nano.
A common-anode RGB LED has four leads: one anode, and one cathode for each color. The anode always connects to the positive side of the circuit and connecting each cathode to the negative side of the circuit allows current to flow through that specific LED. A common-anode RGB LED strip expands on this concept, with all of the cathodes chained together by color channel. The operation is the same: connecting a color channel cathode to the negative side of the circuit causes all of the LEDs to light up in that color.
Arturo Borrero González has posted a detailed summary of the Netfilter workshop that was recently held in Seville.
This is an emergency release resolving an issue with Tor Browser 11.5.5′s integration of the Snowflake pluggable transport. Users of 11.5.5 will be unable to connect to the Tor Network via the built-in Snowflake bridge until they update to 11.5.6.
With the upcoming 0.10.0 release of Zig on November 1st, we are going to ship the new self-hosted compiler. This is the result of a huge amount of work that brings a lot of benefits, some obvious, some others less so.
Even though the self-hosted compiler is now shipped, there’s still more work to do on it but, at the same time, now the door has opened to more exciting features, like Zig’s official package manager.
Let’s take a look at what’s next for the Zig project.
In this segment, we are going to discuss linux security and using the Rust programming language with an Offensive MindSet, and our guest Charles Shirer!
Cartoonist and author Mr. Fish considers how a distracting burlesque of inarticulate clowns are juggling our common fate like raw eggs.
The star of films like The Producer and Bull Durham opens up about two tough years of pandemic politics, and worries society is purposefully phasing out the common meeting space.
We were stuck in traffic on the way to Alex Katz’s opening at the Guggenheim when my wife started riffling through her phone. “Does Peter Schjeldahl have a new book out?” She asked. “His picture is all over Instagram.” My heart sank. No, I knew there was no new book. I knew all those pictures were saying goodbye.
Cyberpunk is full of characters with cool body mods, and [bsmachinist] has made a prosthetic eye flashlight (TikTok) that is both useful and looks futuristic. [via Reddit]
If someone asked you to build a digital hourglass, what would your design look like? [BitBlt_Korry] took on that challenge, creating a functional art piece that hits it right on the nose: an hourglass with a digital display.
For conservatives, the most frightening place in the country has always been a college campus. By 1964, Students for a Democratic Society had formed chapters at hundreds of universities with tens of thousands of supporters, protesting racism, inequality, and the Vietnam War. After Barry Goldwater’s loss in the presidential election that same year, his young crusaders were worried—and inspired. They began building out conservative political infrastructure independent of the Republican Party to compete for America’s youth.
[Henry Segerman] and [Kyle VanDeventer] merge math and mechanics to create a kinetic cyclic scissors sculpture out of 3D printed bars adjoined together with M3 bolts and nuts.
The technology, which alleviates red-green CVD for about four out of five users with the condition, was developed by EnChroma, an independent company based in Berkeley, California. Usually genetic, red-green CVD is caused by an overlap in the red and green color receptor cones within the eye, causing the hues to become practically indistinguishable. The lenses now provided by the DMA increase the contrast between red and green color signals for users with the cone overlap, enabling them to view the world with a more enriched color field.
Germany on Wednesday set out plans to legalise cannabis, in a move promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government that would make it one of the first countries in Europe to make weed legal.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach presented a cornerstone paper on planned legislation to regulate the controlled distribution and consumption of cannabis for recreational purposes among adults.
Acquiring and possessing up to 20 to 30 grams of recreational cannabis for personal consumption would also be made legal.
New York City public schools led the way on Meatless Monday—now it’s time for other districts to follow.
Enhanced Container Isolation aims to harden container isolation by applying a number of techniques, including running all containers unprivileged through the Linux user-namespace, isolating critical system call to prevent containers escapes, and preventing console access to the Docker Desktop VM.
It takes advantage of Docker, a mainstream platform used for building, running and managing containerized workloads. Since Docker runs container workloads in the cloud, a misconfigured cloud instance can expose a Docker API to the internet. Attackers can then exploit this API to run a hidden crypto miner inside an attacker-controlled container.
The syslog-ng Store Box (SSB) appliance is built upon syslog-ng Premium Edition (PE). SSB inherits most of syslog-ng PE’s features and makes them available with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. There are multiple ways how users can authenticate when using SSB. Recent versions also introduced federated single sign-on (SSO) via OpenID Connect (OIDC).
The SSB appliance can collect log messages from many different log sources, in many formats. These include UNIX / Linux / Windows system logs, firewall and router logs, various application logs, and now SQL sources as well. SSB can parse, rewrite, filter, and store log messages. In addition to the traditional syslog-ng features, the SSB appliance provides an interface to search log messages, and does complete log life cycle management, including archiving and backup. Finally, it can also forward events to various on-premises and cloud destinations. It allows you to optimize your SIEM installations both for resources and licensing, as you can collect log messages in a single step, store them on SSB, and only forward a reduced subset of logs to various analytics tools.
Apple has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected device.
In the midst of a spate of data breaches — there have been eight reported in Australia since Optus led the way — the last thing one would expect is for any company to send out digital communications asking people to verify their identity.
But Westpac, one of the big four banks in this country, seems to think this is fine. Last week, I received an SMS and an email, couched in roughly the same language, asking me to “verify your details to better protect your account and identity”.
Receiving such communications at other times from any source tends to make me suspicious. At this time, the degree of suspicion is ten times worse.
I called up the Westpac support line and was told that the SMS was not genuine but the email was. Which left me scratching my head.
Signal ensures its users’ security and privacy by encrypting their messages and refusing to collect a bunch of data governments or malicious hackers might find useful or interesting. That hasn’t made it many friends in governments (except with government officials who utilize the service to dodge public records requests).
The trial in state court was an offshoot of the main case in federal court, which produced mixed results: conspiracy convictions for Fox and three others but also two acquittals.
Ismail received an 18-month prison term for failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism. Azeez was jailed for three years for preparing for acts of terrorism.
Iranian schoolchildren, girls in particular, have brought the nation’s widespread protests into the classrooms according to a late-October report from Israeli non-profit IMPACT-se, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.
Created by an Iranian artist who requested to be anonymous, but gave us this statement: In Iranian culture there are many stories about heroes who fought for the glory of their nation against all kinds of demons and beasts.Today we are rewriting history in Iran.We are showing the world that those stories were never just legends and myths. We Iranians have it in our blood, we can never stand injustice, we will fight until we restore our freedom.We want the world to hear us and be our voice: “Woman, Life, Freedom!”
He was a dangerous extremist when jailed for seven years in 2017 for terrorism offences.
The media calls for military intervention in Haiti, Jane Regan breaks down the reality of the situation.
Midway through a combative Pennsylvania US Senate debate, as Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz expounded on policy matters ranging from fracking to the minimum wage and Social Security, former Obama White House speechwriter Pat Cunnane weighed in with an observation about the issue that everyone was focused on: the status of Fetterman’s recovery from a serious stroke in May. “Put the analysis to the side for a second: What John Fetterman is doing right now in the midst of his recovery—so publicly, on the same stage as a smirking TV doctor—is remarkably brave.”
The move comes after the mild and carefully worded letter sparked furious backlash from pundits and at least one Democratic leader.
“Nuclear power plants—and their mounting inventory of high-level nuclear waste—are inherently dangerous.”
This month, United States President Joe Biden warned that the world could face armageddon if his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, were to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. You would imagine that such a prognosis would lead to urgent action to dial down the confrontation. Yet no effort is being made to move us back from that risk.
Storage vendor Seagate Technologies says in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has accused the company of violating export regulations by shipping hard drives to an unidentified vendor on the BIS Entity List.
That vendor was identified as Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies in a report issued in October 2021 by Republican members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Seagate said it had received the proposed charging letter on 29 August. It said it had responded, setting out its position that it had not committed any such act, especially as its disk drives were not subject to the export regulations.
“Seagate believes it has complied with all relevant export control laws and regulations,” the company filing said.
The Google-owned security outfit Mandiant Intelligence claims it has discovered a pro-China actor, which it has named DRAGONBRIDGE, trying to influence voting intentions in the forthcoming US mid-term elections.
A British citizen has been charged in the US with allegedly operating a trading site on the dark web which was used to sell attack tools and stolen credentials.
A statement from the US Department of Justice said Daniel Kaye was charged with device fraud and money laundering. He allegedly operated a website known as The Real Deal.
“While living overseas, this defendant allegedly operated an illegal website that made hacking tools and login credentials available for purchase, including those for US Government agencies,” said US Attorney Ryan Buchanan.
“This case is a timely reminder, during National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, that federal law enforcement will make those accused of breaking US laws face their day in court, regardless of where they reside in the world.”
What’s the US military doing in Africa? It’s an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, straitjacketed in secrecy, and hogtied by red tape. Or at least it would be if it were up to the Pentagon.
One nun I represented in another nuclear resistance case, the heroic Jackie Hudson, asked me what she should wear to court. Being an atheist myself, I suggested it might help get sympathy if she would wear her habit, as we would be going to the “temple of justice.” So ignorant was I of her order, I did not know they did not wear habits, rather they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, housed the homeless, while wearing “ordinary” clothing. Admittedly, my ignorance was boundless, in those naïve days of my innocence and faith in the law.
I was surprised by the Analysis News segment (“Rising Fascism and the Elections,” October 12, 2022) when icons, and justifiably so on the left, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, make their argument for the importance of supporting Democrats to prevent the ultimate evil from taking place this November. The stakes are the possibility of moving the US inextricably close to fascism, they argue. They argue that while Republicans and Democrats are on the same page in regard to foreign policy, they have different positions on domestic policies.
Miko Peled provides a distinctive critique on Netanyahu’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show, having personally known the former Israeli prime minister.
Umaro Sissoca Embalo, the president of Guinea-Bissau, announced that Russian president Vladimir Putin is ready to negotiate with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Embalo spoke about it during a joint briefing with Zelensky. The Office of the President of Ukraine published a video recording of the meeting.
Colonel General Alexander Lapin, commander of the Russian army group Center in Ukraine, used a pistol to personally threaten the commander of a mobilized unit, which retreated from the front lines without orders. One conscript from Moscow spoke about it as part of an official complaint, reports outlet Sota. The publication didn’t name the man but writes that they know his name, and that they have copies of his complaint and his call-up papers, which he sent the outlet.
More than 70,000 people have crossed from the right (western) bank of the Dnipro to the left, said Vladimir Saldo, Russian-appointed head of the annexed region, on air on the Crimea-24 channel.
The Russian military, led by President Vladimir Putin as Commander-in-Chief, conducted a training exercise for a massive nuclear strike in response to an enemy nuclear attack. This was reported on the Kremlin’s official website and, separately, by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu.
Sixty years ago, the world was on the doorstep of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The resort to nuclear weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis would have led to a nuclear holocaust from which humanity as a species would not have recovered. Though there were over three billion people on the planet, the peaceful resolution of the conflict stemmed from the decisions of just two individuals, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union.
On October 8, a group of new conscripts from the Moscow region recorded an understated but still urgent video, in which they hoped to tell the civilian audience about their circumstances. Their platoon of 30 was about to be sent to Lyman, to take part in a Russian offensive there. The soldiers, dressed in rag-tag uniforms each of them had to put together around retail shops, said that they were going to the front without any training, and with weapons that were “rusty, stuck, or jammed.” With only a day’s worth of firing practice, and no acquaintance at all with the vehicles some of them would have to drive, they felt completely unprepared to be sent to a war “hot spot.” The day after recording the video, the platoon of 30 was sent to the Luhansk region. By October 17, when the video was first published on YouTube, only 13 men were left in the unit. The rest of them were either dead or missing. Here’s what happened to the platoon, based on an extended investigation published recently by Mediazona and the videos recorded by the soldiers — one of them still unpublished.
Russia has notified the Pentagon of its intent to conduct its annual strategic nuclear exercise, Grom (“Thunder”). Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder said this in his daily briefing on October 25. “Yes,” he said, “the U.S. was notified.”
Russia’s State Duma has passed a series of amendments to the law that governs mobilization, lifting the prior ban on conscripting persons with unexpunged felony records.
Ekaterina Mizulina, head of the Russian Internet Safety League, said Wednesday that the organization will submit a request to the Russian Attorney General’s Office for Russian rapper Oxxxymiron’s song Oida (“Oh yeah”) to be declared extremist.
In the five weeks since Russia’s mobilization drive began, hundreds of thousands of draft-eligible people have fled the country. While the authorities have vowed to grant draft deferments for certain people such as select government officials and IT workers, these promises have not always been enough to keep people in those groups from getting conscripted. According to the independent media outlet Verstka, many government employees have decided not to take their chances: numerous people who work for both the Moscow city government and Russia’s federal ministries have fled the country in recent weeks. The majority of them have been fired soon after leaving, but some have flown under the radar and remain on the payroll. In English, Meduza summaries Verstka’s findings.
For the first time since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, a criminal complaint has been filed against someone in Russia for insulting Ukrainians on the basis of nationality.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reached out to his counterparts in India and China on Wednesday to express his “concern regarding a possible false flag attack involving the use of a ‘dirty bomb’” by Ukraine.
Just 26 of 193 countries that agreed last year to step up their climate actions have followed through with more ambitious plans. The world’s top two polluters, China and the United States, have taken some action but have not pledged more this year, and climate negotiations between the two have been frozen for months.
Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the report said, the planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100.
That’s far higher than the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) set by the landmark Paris agreement in 2015, and it crosses the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic climate impacts significantly increases.
Here we summarize some of the littler-known features that have shifted in the face of climate change and pulled the map out from under the people living on the edges. Everything about global warming is changing how people grow their food, access their drinking water, and live in places that are increasingly being flooded, dried out, or blasted with heat waves. Seeing these changes literally drawn on a map helps to hammer these impacts home.
“The climate crisis is killing us.”
The analysis by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) examines the climate commitments of the 193 national parties to the Paris climate accord, which sets out to limit warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—an amount of heating that would still have devastating impacts across the world, particularly in poor and low-lying nations.
Renate Egan explains why with less than 5% of the world’s electricity delivered by solar, we are just at the start.
The proposal, which the Biden administration claims “is consistent with our shared net-zero goals,” would generate fossil fuel emissions equivalent to 400 million metric tons of carbon each year, according to the analysis by Food & Water Watch, which warned the plan “would spell climate disaster.”
Piney Woods, N.C., is one of those small, quiet, rural communities you might pass on a drive up North. Blocks of lush grass, farmland, and forests are bisected by a single asphalt road; it’s not uncommon to find a tortoise or two lazing on the empty street, unafraid of potential traffic.1
Conducted by longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, the survey tests a number of sample messages, including one that notes “working people haven’t seen a real pay increase in years,” spotlights Democrats’ efforts to combat corporate price-gouging, and hammers the GOP for getting “their money from Big Oil and big pharmaceutical special interests”—two major culprits behind recent price hikes.
“The new Kroger could increase its monopoly power and further disenfranchise its own workers and consumers.”
“The Federal Reserve is doing the greatest harm I could ever imagine,” William Spriggs, chief economist of the AFL-CIO, told The Hill. “I consider what they’re doing right now politics, and they are making a political statement about the economy, and they are wrong. Their analysis is flat wrong.”
The polls are tightening up right now, and the media is treating it like it’s some mystical force of nature causing people to shift their concerns from abortion, guns, climate, democracy, and the survival of Social Security over to gas prices, Black crime, banning books, and trans kids playing sports.
These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
A “heavy tweeter” is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.
Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter appears likely to go through by Friday US time, a deadline set for the proposal to take effect.
A court case was filed by the company against Musk to force him to go through with his bid, made initially in April.
Janine Jackson: Independent, challenging, far-ranging and fearless coverage of elections and the electoral process is one of journalists’ core jobs at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.
U.S. news media have consistently made analogies to this historical big lie strategy with former President Donald Trump’s efforts to spread doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election in hopes of overturning its results. They contend that this threatens the viability of American democracy. It does at some level, but to focus on Trump is to miss the forest for the trees. An even greater threat to democracy has long been hyper-partisanship– when people choose party loyalty and wishful thinking over empirical data and election results. Cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, play a huge role in supporting such a fallacious thought process to detrimental ends. As we pointed out in our book, United States of Distraction, Trump is a symptom of this much larger problem.
Dick and Liz Uihlein of Illinois are the largest contributors to Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and was linked to a prominent antisemite, and have given to Jim Marchant, the Nevada Secretary of State nominee who says he opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. They are major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica, aims to “get on God’s side of the issues and stay there” and “punish leftists.”
Working-age mortality rates have been rising for decades across the United States, but premature deaths are more pronounced in states where “conservative” policies predominate and less common in states that have adopted more “liberal” policies, according to peer-reviewed research published in PLOS ONE.
“Desperation to save a floundering campaign has led to potential violations of campaign finance law and potential illegal coordination.”
As Republican-led states clamp down on voting rights, we look at how Black voters are helping to organize unprecedented voter turnout ahead of midterms. “We are literally fighting for democracy,” says LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, who says organizing voters is “the winning strategy” despite the resolve of the “consulting class” to invest campaign funds primarily in TV ads.Georgia’s special election Senate races in early 2021 were “not a fluke, “says Brown. “We need to recognize that it is going to be community-led efforts, grassroots democracy groups that are literally our best defense on the frontlines from protecting us against facism.” This comes as President Biden announces he has authorized the transfer of $10 million from the Democratic National Committee to House and Senate Democratic campaign committees.
As the midterms draw closer, we speak with journalist Will Bunch about how extremist Republican candidates increasingly look like they could win. In Pennsylvania, the Republican gubernatorial candidate is Doug Mastriano who attended the January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally and helped arrange buses for pro-Trump protesters to come as well. He later worked with former President Trump’s legal team to overturn the 2020 election results. This comes as racist campaign ads sponsored by a new group called Citizens for Sanity continue to fill the airwaves. “The Democrats are running out of time but I hope they find a way to counter this Republican message on crime because I’m really worried that it’s proven to be very effective so far,” says Bunch.
Hundreds of Penn State students protesting a speaking event with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on Monday night were showered with pepper spray by men who appeared to be with the hate group. Penn State, which abruptly called off the talk on Monday, had resisted earlier calls from students, faculty and community members to cancel the event, citing free-speech rights. We speak with one of those students, Sam Ajah, president of the Penn State College Democrats club. “Fascism doesn’t have a place on our campus,” says Ajah, who describes being “disappointed and disgusted” by the university, which attempted to pin the violence on the peaceful protestors.
Lake Ivan is a scenic lake surrounded by pine forests some 240 kilometers from the northern Russian city of Pskov. Over the lake stands a small village called Opukhliki. Yulia, whose parents have an old house in Opukhliki (we’ve changed her name at her request), calls the village a “dying ghetto”: she says that there’s no life in it, apart from Blue Lakes — a lakeside resort where visitors come to stay in the summer. Last May, Yulia realized that Blue Lakes had been designated a “temporary housing facility” for Ukrainian refugees, and that people from Mariupol were living there, side-by-side with Russians taking an ordinary vacation. Without any money of their own, and subsisting on a daily allowance of about $15, paid by the local Department of Social Services, the refugees lacked even the basic necessities like medications and detergent. Yulia and her friends began to collect and deliver aid to these people — but, to their astonishment, within a few months the refugees suddenly left for Mariupol, on buses provided by the local government. The volunteers believe that Russian authorities manipulate the refugees, enticing them back to Mariupol and other uninhabitable places with free transportation and promises of “compensation” for their demolished homes. But the Ukrainians’ real motives in returning to Mariupol might be more complicated.
The interim county clerk in Nye County, Nevada directed six teams of five people each to begin a hand count on Wednesday after the Nevada Supreme Court gave approval for the plan last week.
The 63-year-old, a forensic expert, has spent much of her career documenting torture and ill-treatment, and is a leading human rights activist in Turkey. She has served also as president of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.
Turkish newspaper Birgun and other media reported that she was detained in Istanbul following an early-morning raid on her home and was being taken to Ankara, where the chief public prosecutor’s office has launched a probe against her last week.
The Brazilian government — under the “leadership” of Donald Trump Mutual Admiration Society member Jair Bolsonaro — has been steadily cracking down on free speech under the guise of saving the public from “fake news” and other misinformation.
There’s this weird thing that people who hate Section 230 continue to ignore: that if you just take away Section 230, it doesn’t magically make companies liable for the actions of their users. If you studied the history of Section 230 (i.e., read Jeff Kosseff’s excellent book on the topic) or just had a passing familiarity with the nature of concepts such as scienter and mens rea, you might understand these things. But most people, falsely, assume that without Section 230, websites automatically become liable for the things their users do, even if the websites are totally unaware of the details.
The victim, Negin Abdulmaleki, who was a medical engineering student at the Hamadan University of Technology, hailed from Qorveh city in Sanandaj province of Iran. She was killed two weeks ago, but the incident was hidden from the media
Wednesday’s demonstrations, which reportedly took place in around 30 Iranian cities, were a continuation of nationwide and international protests sparked by the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested by so-called morality police three days earlier and reportedly beaten for violating the fundamentalist theocracy’s strict Islamic dress code.
By evening, demonstrations had spread across the country to many cities and university campuses with large crowds in the streets clapping and defiantly chanting the mantras of the protests: “Women, Life, Freedom” and “We will fight and take Iran back,” according to videos on social media.
In the capital, Tehran, women tossed their head scarves onto bonfires in the street, shouting “Freedom, freedom,” videos showed. In many places, the protesters targeted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and chanted for his death and removal. Some crowds in the city fought back, chasing security forces and setting fire to their motorcycles.
Security forces attacked protesters with tear gas, beat them with batons and in some places, like Tehran, Qazvin and Saghez, even opened fire on them, videos showed.
As the young woman’s father explained to a reporter soon after, “My son begged them not to take her, but he was beaten too, his clothes were ripped off.”
The candidates for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania met Tuesday for their first and only debate in a race being closely watched across the country as a possible bellwether for the midterm elections. Trump-backed Republican nominee and TV personality Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, sparred with Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman about crime, inflation, abortion and more. The night was a major test for Fetterman, who used a closed captioning device as he recovers from a major stroke that has resulted in auditory processing difficulties. “No matter where you come down politically, it was a very hard night for John Fetterman in terms of where he was at with his stroke recovery and trying to deal with a format like this,” says journalist Will Bunch, who called the debate “one of the most make-or-break nights I’ve seen in my lifetime of covering politics.”
“There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions,” Oz said when asked about his position on abortion, which has become a central midterm issue following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
A reformist approach to women’s incarceration places the responsibility of reform on the individual, not the institution.
On Wednesday, a Moscow judge jailed Kirill Sukhanov, the commercial director of journalist and socialite Ksenia Sobchak, on charges of trying to extort 11 million rubles ($178,650) from Rostec head Sergey Chemezov and at least one other victim in exchange for burying negative news coverage on the Telegram channel Tushite Svet (Lights Out!).
In Virginia, back in 1759, a white Scottish servant named Elizabeth Gallimore fell in love with a black slave whose name had been lost over time. Their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, who performs under the pseudonym Fantastic Negrito, has released a compelling concept album, “White Jesus Black Problems,” based on his recently discovered lineage. The ambitious multimedia project includes a companion film, and Fantastic Negrito says the project was produced to challenge a popular narrative around polarization.“There’s a feeling out there right now that we can’t get anything done because we’re so polarized, soentrenched in our ideologies and unmoved by facts or logic, but I wanted to share this story because Ithink it smashes that narrative to pieces,” Fantastic Negrito declared. “I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, both Black and white, who showed me that anything is possible. There was a lot of ugliness in their story, but there was a lot of beauty, too, because in the end, perseverance overcame.”“Man with No Name,” which appears on the album, is a painful reminder that often the identity and experiences of the oppressed are erased. With the song (and album), the stories of the courageous forgotten are reclaimed and finally told. The message, “I keep moving on,” encourages perseverance even when it is difficult to be hopeful.
Governments set up rules governing how they govern. Then they ignore them. So, what’s the point? Is it a nod to decorum before the proverbial government party guest throws up in the bathtub and hits on your mom?
For decades, consumers have mostly wanted one thing from their ISP: a semi-affordable dumb pipe connection for the Internet. For just as long, US ISPs have bucked this demand, routinely trying to saddle users with higher costs and additional services consumer never asked for, while finding strange new ways to make an additional buck on the back of what are usually captive customers.
Imagine waking up in the morning, grabbing your hot cup of coffee, and scrolling your favorite blog post or website, only to find it looking like this…
GitHub is trained upon billions of lines of public code. But, there is no surety over whether the training data comes as fair use under copyright law. In presenting the case, Butterick writes that Microsoft characterises Copilot’s output code as only a series of “suggestions” and does not claim any rights over it. Additionally, he also cites a passage from GitHub’s website showing how Microsoft plays safe by pushing the blame onto the end user: [...]
If I price an ebook at $9.99, I make about $7 at any distributor.
If I price that same ebook at $14.99, I make about $10 everywhere but Amazon, and $4.50 at Amazon.
In short, ebook prices of $10-$19.99 are a “dead zone” that benefits nobody but Amazon. I must price my book over $20 to make more per sale than I would by pricing at $9.99.
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a betrayal of the implicit bargain of copyright. Fortunately, the plan was dropped, partly as a result of the outrage it generated.
The operator of several “AI” powered music mixer and extractor sites has responded to the RIAA’s copyright infringement allegations. The rebuttal admits that using popular artists to showcase its technology wasn’t smart so the references have been removed. However, the services themselves are not infringing. In fact, one of the core algorithms is created and publicly shared by Deezer.
Amid claims that live sports piracy in France was recently cut in half, anti-piracy agency Arcom says that 40% of illegal stream viewers observed at least one website block in 2022. In response, an impressive 15% decided to go legal, but others weren’t so readily converted. Close to half migrated to other pirate sites, with around 12% of blocked pirates deploying VPNs or modified DNS settings.
… then nothing is there. Health is the most important aspect of your life!
I am curious about the tech savvy patrons of The Midnight (which is likely many of us, though no trouble if one is not) about how they got into (web) development, computers, in general?
I realized it’s been awhile since I posted. This is mainly due to painting myself into a corner; I was trying way too hard to make this particular online identity the one I use for Deep or Controversial thoughts.
But I find that coming up with something worth writing about in this (imagined) context was exceedingly difficult, and I didn’t want to just have a blog where I complain about day-to-day life. There’s also the fact that many of these issues or questions haven’t changed or been resolved especially. Change is typically incremental.
Stargazing is still a struggle with overcast skies every night. But the sky cleared up just enough late this morning that I could do a few minutes of stargazing right before clocking in for work. Once again, I only had my 4×30 binoculars on hand, which made it harder.
[...]
Something that stuck out to me this morning was Vega, off to the North: It seemed to me like it’s color was sparkling brightly and dramatically, like some distant police car with the emergency lights all turned on. I thought I saw the color red and some other colors. Stellarium has it categorized as a “pulsating variable star, double star”, so maybe that explains it. But perhaps there was also some effect from the atmosphere, being as it was fairly low on the horizon at the time. This was about 6:20am AKDT.
There are 715 posts going back to January 2003 just sitting there, in an archived git repository. Many are not very good, and I don’t want to bring them back from the graveyard, but there are some good ones too.
Especially I want to bring back the very first blog post I made, for reasons of vanity, mainly, so I can say I have been having a blog since 2003, back when blogs were just starting to take off, and you kind of had to get your hands dirty with a bit of code, or at least HTML, to start doing anything on the web.
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