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Posted in News Roundup at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
For as long as there have been Linux distributions, there has been Linux distro advocacy – which in FOSS circles tends to mean people shouting at each other that they’re wrong. Computer advocacy goes way back before Linux, though; flame wars over which editor is best have a long and ignoble history. Maybe it’s Vi, maybe it’s Emacs.
Recently, a consistent theme, including in comments here on The Reg, is that Canonical has somehow gone astray with Ubuntu, and Snap is horribly broken, but people are seldom willing to give detailed specifics of what is broken and how. So when this vulture came across a detailed blog post, “Switching to Fedora from Ubuntu”, which itself links to a “giant list of bugs” in Snap, he was instantly hooked. (The post, incidentally, has provoked lively discussions in several techie forums already, which seem roughly equally split between strong agreement and fervent denial. Which is exactly how it should be, of course.)
After using System76’s Pangolin as my primary work laptop for nearly six weeks, I can tell you this: If you need a 15-inch Linux-focused laptop, this is the one to get.
The Pangolin is a solid device, designed more for dependability and convenience than ultrabook portability or cutting-edge parts, but it still has reasonably modern hardware (especially its 144 Hz screen). The Pangolin and its native Pop!_OS are a showcase for how remarkably normal Linux can feel as a daily driver in 2023. Normal, and with lots of ports.
It’s hard to do a nuts-and-bolts comparison of the Pangolin to most other laptops, due largely to benchmark comparability between Linux and most laptops running Windows or macOS. But it’s also not entirely necessary. There’s only one real version of the Pangolin available—one processor, one amount of RAM, then variable, user-expandable storage.
We’ll show you how the Pangolin did on a couple tests. But how this laptop works for you is much more about what you’re bringing to it and what you’re willing to put into customizing it to your liking. I came to the Pangolin as someone who has made a few attempts at using Linux as a daily driver. I know enough command line, vim, and Unix-based architecture to be conversant, and I have two Raspberry Pis that are constantly being improved. Still, I’m more hobbyist than practitioner.
If you have an extensive collection of photos, you will hardly want to edit each photo individually. Converseen lets you rotate, scale, and convert a large number of images in a single run.
Many IoT devices are so poorly protected against attacks that it is easy for an intruder to slip inside. With the right tools and best practices, you can bar the door.
This month Graham looks at Godot 4, PostRunner, LeanCreator, lurk, Cubic, SuperStarfighter, and more!
While searching for a method to draw geodata right into the terminal, Mike Schilli discovers the wondrous world of map projections.
The unhide forensics tool scans your system for inconsistencies to uncover hidden processes.
How long have we been told that cybersecurity starts with the programmer? And what does that mean exactly? What can we do about it?
Fostering an after-school Linux Club by encouraging participation.
A Raspberry Pi, a Pi-compatible camera, and a mesh VPN are all you need to watch your pets from afar.
SystemRescue 10.0 and Linux Lite 6.4
A look at the user-friendly, vertically integrated community distro.
Not everyone needs a conventional database content management system. For beginners and smaller websites, a flat-file content management system offers ease of use, while eliminating attack vectors.
In the news: NuTyX with Cards 2.6.3; System76 Teases In-House Built Laptop; Ubuntu 23.04 Beta; OpenMandriva Lx 23.03 Rolling Release; carbonOS: A New Linux Distro; Ubuntu Flatpak Remix Adds Flatpak Support Preinstalled; and LPI Announces IT Security Essentials Certification.
The RaspBee II module turns your Raspberry Pi into a smart control center for Zigbee devices.
Create the perfect mix of news with an RSS aggregator. Linux supports several open source aggregators, or, if you’re looking for the perfect fit, you can even create your own.
You can use one line of Bash code to scrape a web page and show the data you’re tracking in Home Assistant or Node-RED.
This month in Linux Voice and Elvie.
Linux supports a number of easy graphical tools for saving data to compressed archives.
Learn what FPGAs are, how they work, and how to design FPGA integrated circuits on Linux.
Want to bring down your electric bill? Investigate your favorite household appliances with a consumption meter and a Raspberry Pi.
No other operating system offers as many free tools for system maintenance and data recovery as Linux. Snal Linux combines these tools to create a compact Live distribution.
Version 4 of syslog-ng was released last December. Quite a few people use it already in production. How can you install it for a test drive? It might be already available in your Linux distribution. There are also several unofficial repositories with the latest syslog-ng.
From this blog, you can learn how to check your syslog-ng version, where to check if it is not yet installed, and a few additional resources, if you want to install the latest version from unofficial repositories.
Remotely connecting to a computer has several advantages. Maybe you want to help troubleshoot an issue on your friend’s desktop, or maybe you want to use another desktop session remotely for work.
Whatever your use case is, remote desktop tools on Linux allow you to connect easily. Of course, every tool is built differently. So, you can pick the one that suits your personal or professional requirements.
Today I feel like providing some statistics on that, partly for my own interest. All of these are over the past full nine days, which means that they mostly cover the end of April 2023 (plus May 1st).
When I first switched to linux I was looking for a terminal to replace the gnome default terminal mainly due to the tiling feature. I tested a few terminal emulators and the Terminator seems to be a perfect fit for me. In this detailed tutorial, we will learn what is Terminator, Terminator features, and how to install and use the terminator tiling terminal emulator in Linux.
Some times you might want to run an application (especially a web application) 24/7 in full-screen mode. In this guide, we will see how to launch web browsers in kiosk mode (full screen) from command line in Linux.
Valve has upgraded the newer Proton 8 that only launched for Linux and Steam Deck recently, with a bunch of bug fixes. This is all pretty standard stuff, a point release for the newest version of Proton for running Windows games. If you’re confused about Steam Play and Proton see my beginner’s guide.
Cellar Door Games are saying farewell to Rogue Legacy 2, with one final major content upgrade out now with The Swan Song. They had originally planned to move on earlier but they just couldn’t help but do a little bit more. Even though they’re moving on, it may still get some small patches to fix up issues as they appear.
Not only will Vampire Survivors get another content upgrade and a small patch later this month but an animated TV show is currently in the works.
Heard of Combat Master? It’s a free to play first-person shooter released on Steam in late April and now it has Linux and Steam Deck support.
Valve has now released the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2023, and it shows that things have calmed down again.
Nintendo hates whenever it loses even a modest amount of control over its properties. Lately, Nintendo has been making a ton of noise bullying YouTubers over all kinds of uses of Zelda content, with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom having been slated for release mid-May. The company even attempted to subpoena Discord to unmask a leaker of an unreleased Zelda artbook covering the game.
Some fun for game developers and game porters looking at Linux and Steam Deck here, as FNA has released a major upgrade that has early support for Direct3D 11 on Linux. FNA powers quite a lot of games, and is used to help port games over to Linux as well.
I first tried From Space as a demo at a recent Steam Next Fest with some friends as we looked for a quick co-op hit. /blockquote>
After the huge update recently that overhauled the Steam Overlay, Valve has put up another Steam and Steam Deck Beta to fix up lingering issues and upgrade Steam Input.
It’s May already huh? Another month is over and so Valve has detailed what people have been playing the most on Steam Deck. As expected, a bunch of them haven’t changed much and Vampire Survivors is once again the champion.
Klei Entertainment have just released that latest update for their co-op survival game Don’t Starve Together, it’s a good one and it’s on a massive sale too.
Somehow I ended up in a situation where running vi immediately after starting a certain DOS VM would trigger the hang, maybe 80% of the time. I decided to pounce. Once again, I couldn’t tell much from the hung state. So I decided to roll out the big gun. I ran the VirtualBox VM in a debug build with software instruction emulation and partial instruction logging—that is, logging every instruction, partially decoded, without logging the register state. This is a compromise that is already slow and produces huge log files, but not as horribly slow verbose as full register state logging. Since the problem was runaway code, I hoped the log would tell me something.
And as always our isos can be found at http://tinyurl.com/Live-respins2
With the Fedora Websites 3.0 out alongside the release of Fedora Linux 38 and the redevelopment of Fedora Badges in full swing, it could not have been a better time than now to close the community initiative as a success. Let’s look back at how far we came from where we started. This is the first in a series of five posts detailing the journey of Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative, those who were involved in making it a grand success, and what lies ahead for the team.
Many thanks for your continued support and for your donations! A few additional visual changes were implemented in preparation for Linux Mint 21.2. Tooltips We had been planning on redesigning our tooltips for a while.
No ETA for the release of Linux Mint 21.2 and LMDE 6 has been published yet but they will release quite close to one another. LMDE is short for Linux Mint Debian Edition and a new one comes along following a major Debian release. Debian 12 is due in June so LMDE 6 should follow hot on its heels.
The Linux Mint team recently provided an update on tooltips for its upcoming point release Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria”. In the April 2023 update, the team announced that the new tooltips would use the accent colour, which is a significant design change from the traditional yellow colour.
Here’s all the information you need to know.
Ubuntu is a powerful Linux distro suited for a variety of use cases and is ideal for both beginners and seasoned Linux users.
When installing Ubuntu, you should set it up with security in mind. This lays a good foundation for a robust and resilient system. Here are the five best practices you should follow when installing Ubuntu on your PC.
We discuss choosing a D&D alignment based on your monitor layout, spying on the skies with a Raspberry Pi, and playing games on Linux without a Steam Deck
Canonical, a leading open-source provider of cloud computing services, has announced that Ubuntu Pro is now available in a subscription-included model on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users can now launch Ubuntu Pro on-demand instances and purchase Ubuntu Pro Compute Savings Plans from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) console.
Taking the unit down and reading the back, yes, it would chirp to indicate the battery needed changing. And neither Bunny nor I could recall when the battery in the unit was changed.
To build the project, Fisher is housing a Raspberry Pi inside of a modern Amiga 1200 replica shell. While you could easily use almost any Pi for this project, he opted to use a Raspberry Pi 4 to power the machine. To make full use of the case design, the ports on the Pi have been routed to the outside of the shell for access, including the floppy drive. This makes for a seamless experience as the project consists of just one unit unless you plug in some accessories.
At the end of March, a group of automotive and smartphone companies got together at a Google office to test out the Car Connectivity Consortium’s (CCC’s) Digital Key. The goal of the plugfest was to test out how well different phones and cars worked together to unlock and start vehicles using only a smartphone. Participants included Apple, BMW, Continental Automotive, Google, OPPO, Rivian Automotive, and Samsung.
IN 1973 MARTY Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, took out a bulky object that measured 23cm tall and weighed a little more than a bag of sugar. From Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, he phoned Joel Engel, his rival at AT&T’s Bell Labs, a telecoms giant. “I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real, hand-held, portable cell phone,” he crowed into his prototype, a DynaTAC. That call on April 3rd, 50 years ago, was the first placed in public on a hand-held phone (earlier mobile phones had to be plugged into cars).
Big changes are happening at Mastodon, the user-supported and advertising-free decentralized social networking platform that many are seeing as a Twitter replacement. The platform announced on Monday that it’s made it much easier for non-tech-savvy users to open an account in minutes, with other changes “coming soon.”
The easier onboarding experience comes not a minute too soon. Another decentralized social platform that’s currently in beta, Bluesky Social, is betting that easy onboarding will help it grab enough of the people who have been turned off by the difficulty of signing up for Mastodon to turn momentum its way when it’s ready for primetime. Yesterday morning it looked as though Bluesky was going to win that bet; today it looks like maybe not.
[...]
New users of the social networking platform Mastodon no longer need to choose an instance before opening an account. The platform says that other new improvements are “coming soon.”
On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web – a client, server, and library of code created under its roof – belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).
“CERN relinquishes all intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it” states a letter signed on that day by Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber – at the time respectively CERN’s director of research and director of administration.
Over the past few years, virtual events have thrived. In-person events are back now, but it’s important to keep in mind that virtual events didn’t just come out of nowhere. Many of us were actually doing a lot of different online events even before they became popular. Many communities held hackathons, bug and issue triaging, webinars, and so on, as virtual events. They brought community members together for collaboration and education. Virtual events have improved since then, largely out of necessity, and I think we’ve all learned a lot. In this article, I consider how virtual and physical events can co-exist to render an improved event experience for everyone.
For close to thirty years, commerce has been at the core of how people use the Internet. Convenience and ease have multiplied over the years as people have benefited from the unprecedented economies of scale emerging from the digital marketplace. This global ecommerce scale-up has also created new challenges for consumers, such as how to make decisions like where to shop, which products to buy for a given need, and which vendor within a store to buy from.
[...]
I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Saoud and the Fakespot team onboard. Mozilla is planning to increase the investment in Fakespot, and I’m excited about the work we’ll do together with Saoud and the team to enhance the ecommerce experience for millions of people. This is just the beginning. We’ll be introducing Fakespot functionality to Firefox over time, and would love to hear your thoughts once it’s launched.
Editor’s note: based on industry research (from Chrome and others), and the ubiquity of HTTPS, we will be replacing the lock icon in Chrome’s address bar with a new “tune” icon – both to emphasize that security should be the default state, and to make site settings more accessible. Read on to learn about this multi-year journey.
A load test is one form of performance testing implemented to ensure your application works properly under an expected number of users’ requests. Let’s say you have a shopping application that allows users to buy clothes. On the launching day, you expect about one thousand customers to sign up for new accounts on the app every minute. To ensure the application can handle these user requests, you must write tests that simulate one thousand users signing up to the app every minute. These tests are called load tests.
I make most of my money off teaching workshops, and that means I put a lot of time into thinking about how to teach them better. Most of that goes to lesson planning, topic order, pedagogical improvements, etc. But I also regularly write assistive programs. See, there’s two sources of complexity in workshops: [...]
Practical insights from research to integrate programming and writing in the primary classroom, which makes computing more relevant for learners.
We are pleased to announce the list of candidates who have proceeded to the next step in the FSF’s process to finding new board members. Nominees confirmed their interest by filling out a questionnaire that helps introduce themselves and their backgrounds to the FSF voting members. The FSF voting members thank everyone who nominated a candidate and the nominees who responded to the questionnaire.
We are delighted and somewhat relieved to announce that the third reduction of the Guix bootstrap binaries has now been merged in the main branch of Guix! If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than 22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program—something that had never been achieved, to our knowledge, since the birth of Unix.
We refer to this as the Full-Source Bootstrap. In this post, we explain what this means concretely. This is a major milestone—if not the major milestone—in our quest for building everything from source, all the way down.
How did we get there, and why? In two previous blog posts, we elaborated on why this reduction and bootstrappability in general is so important.
One reason is to properly address supply chain security concerns. The Bitcoin community was one of the first to recognize its importance well enough to put the idea into practice. At the Breaking Bitcoin conference 2020, Carl Dong gave a fun and remarkably gentle introduction.
The Guix project (“”a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system””) has announced a milestone toward its goal of bootstrapping an entire distribution from source…
None of this is the answer. None of this is close to the answer. To find the answer ask why did these things arise in Lisp first? What is the property of Lisp which is in fact unique to Lisp and which defines Lisp in strict sense that if any other language had this property it would be a Lisp? To see answer to this you must understand Bradshaw’s law and my corollary to it: [...]
The database schema should be described as code, in your repository. And you should be able to semi-automatically update your database schema on new deployments. Now in Kotlin, with Gradle and Flyway.
I recently got to a point where combine.social started running out of memory. What that meant for users was that at some peak hours, they may not have gotten updates for remote replies in their timelines.
This was not ideal, obviously, so something had to happen. Luckily, I had anticipated that this time would come from the onset of the project. My chosen solution was a mono-repo structure where I could split some of the functionality out of the API service into shared packages, and some of the functionality into separate apps.
Here’s our bi-monthly update from KDE’s personal information management applications team, covering progress made in the months of March and April 2023.
Since the last report, 38 people contributed approximately 1700 code changes, focusing on bugfixes and improvements for the 23.04 release, as well as preparing for the transition to Qt 6.
On the first weekend of April, a few of us met in Toulouse for the first post-pandemic KDE PIM Sprint. Kevin has published a report with details on everything we did.
Shortly after the KDE PIM sprint in Toulouse, the switch to Qt 6 and KF6 entered its final phase with the creation of the kf6 porting branches in the KDE PIM repositories. The aim is to publish a first release based on that towards the end of the year. See the corresponding blog post for more details.
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Wow, this has brought back memories! A couple of weeks ago, I received a message on the Puppy Forum from Colin. Here it is:
Hi Barry,
This message has been on my list for a long time, but for some reason I’ve never got around to sending. I was a student in your Microprocessors class at Edith Cowan back in 1993, and it genuinely was my favourite during my undergrad degree (which ironically was not a science or IT major) and was absolutely the fuel that elevated my interest in computing beyond hobbyist. While I spent the better part of 20yrs in law enforcement, I eventually left government and transitioned to cyber security, making use of the fundamentals I learned in your class, and even referring to your book again when starting to dabble in malware analysis. After almost 10 years abroad doing a variety of digital forensic work, when I returned to Australia last year and unpacked some boxes I again discovered your Assembly book among the few that I kept. It sits proudly on my bookcase as a reminder that a strong technical base goes a long way. Thank you for your course, your enthusiasm as a teacher and for the spark that took to me down a different path and a mentally stimulating career living and working in places I never expected. I hope that you are well, and from your site it appears you are enjoying pursuing both new and old interests. Regards,
NIST has release a draft of Special Publication1800-38A: Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography: Preparation for Considering the Implementation and Adoption of Quantum Safe Cryptography.” It’s only four pages long, and it doesn’t have a lot of detail—more “volumes” are coming, with more information—but it’s well worth reading.
A new draft document previews—and solicits public commentary on—NIST’s current post-quantum cryptography guidance.
Current goals outlined in the working draft include helping entities locate where and how public key algorithms are utilized in encryption schemes, developing a strategy to migrate these algorithms to quantum-resilient substitutes and performing interoperability and performance testing.
Tinder owner Match Group has said it will quit Russia by June 30, citing the need to protect human rights, one of many Western firms to leave since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine last year.
Last time, we’ve looked over FET basics, details, nuances and caveats. Basics aren’t all there is to FETs, however – let’s go through real-world uses, in all their wonderful variety! I want to show you a bunch of cool circuits where a friendly FET, specifically a MOSFET, can help you – and, along the way, I’d also like to introduce you to a few FETs that I feel like you all could have a good long-term friendship with. If you don’t already know them, that is!
This isn’t a book review, although the reason that I am typing this now is because of a book, You Are Not Alone: from the creator and host of Griefcast, Cariad Lloyd, ISBN: 978-1526621870 and I include a handful of quotes from Cariad where there is really no better way of describing things.
Many people experience death for the first time as a child, often relating to a family pet. Death is universal but every experience of death is unique. One of the myths of grief is the idea of the Five Stages but this is a misinterpretation. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance represent the five stage model of death and have nothing to do with grief. The five stages were developed from studying those who are terminally ill, the dying, not those who then grieve for the dead person and have to go on living without them. Grief is for those who loved the person who has died and it varies between each of those people just as people vary in how they love someone. The Five Stages end at the moment of death, grief is what comes next and most people do not grieve in stages, it can be more like a tangled knot.
In Camille Dungy’s new book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster), she chronicles the years she and her family spent transforming their home in Fort Collins, Colo., into “rewilded” prairie. She draws connections between the process of fostering indigenous flora and fauna, and broader cultural strains around notions of unruliness and acceptability when it comes to race, gender, land and water rights, community, time, labor, and motherhood. Her previous book, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton 2017), was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Among her many honors are an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry. She is currently the poetry editor of Orion, and a university distinguished professor at Colorado State University. The Nation spoke with Dungy about how unexpected encounters and events fundamentally shaped both the form and content of Soil, as well as how the process of writing the book has changed her perspective on herself as an artist, teacher, community member, and mother.
Retiring Qantas chief Alan Joyce ran down the airline during his 15 year tenure; his depletion of the fleet and brutal cost cutting sapped customer service and staff morale. Michael Sainsbury reports on the changing of the guard and whether the inevitable corporate makeover may consign low-cost carrier Jetstar to aviation history.
Is it time to retire Jetstar along with Alan Joyce?
Although the Curiosity rover has been well out of the reach of human hands since it touched down on Mars’ surface in 2012, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t getting constant upgrades. Via its communication link with Earth it receives regular firmware updates, with the most recent one being the largest one since 2016. In addition to code clean-up and small tweaks to message formats, this new change should make Curiosity both smarter and have its wheels last longer.
Students are staging an open-ended occupation of the anthropology library after the University of California, Berkeley, announced it would shutter the 67-year-old institution to save money.
Two men, two very different projects. But Baran and Davies reached strikingly similar conclusions. Independently, both developed the concept of what we now know as “packet switching,” a term Davies coined in 1965. Baran’s term was “distributed adaptive message block switching.” As he put it, “Davies chose a wonderful name.”
Packet switching breaks big chunks of data into smaller units, called packets. The packets are transmitted individually using the fastest route available on the network. Each packet holds information about its origin and destination. Oncce all the packets arrive at the destination, they’re recompiled into the original message.
Commodore, better known for their legendary PET, C64, and Amiga computers, also made PC clones during the 1980s. While largely unremarkable in a crowded market dominated by the likes of Compaq and Tandy, their mere existence on the retrocomputing timeline fascinates me. Learning of them a few years ago was like discovering DEC also made Intel-based workstations. It just… it doesn’t compute.
It’s rare in 2023 for an instrument to be entirely analog, instead it’s more normal for a front-end to feed the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in a microcontroller. Typically the front-end will do the job of transforming whatever the output range of the sensor is, and present it to the microcontroller in whatever range it accepts. [David] had exactly this problem with a pH sensor, and rather than buy an expensive module to do the job he designed his own.
If you’re like us, one of the appeals of retro tech is the tactile feedback you get from real buttons. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a new method for bringing haptic feedback to touchscreen devices.
Although ARM CPUs have been making headway in several areas of computing over the last decade or so, the vast majority of desktop, laptop and server CPUs are still based on the x86 architecture. How that came to be is no secret, of course: IBM chose the Intel 8088 to power its model 5150 PC back in the early 1980s, and since it became the dominant PC platform, everyone else followed suit. But what if IBM’s purchasing department had got a good deal at Motorola instead? [Ted Fried] has been experimenting with that scenario, by equipping an IBM PC with a 68000 CPU.
After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many, many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between 1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable videocassette recorder.
In 2020, the National Library of Medicine carried out a qualitative and quantitative study to analyse the effect that social media can have on mental health. The study involved systematically searching for multiple research papers with relevance to the question of whether or not social media impacted mental health; this was based on time spent online, frequent activity and social media addiction. Eventually, peers of the Library selected only sixteen papers out of thousands, and they discovered that anxiety and depression were the most commonly measured outcome of using social media.
Among the authorities to have banned dog walking at their coastline is the Sunderland City Council. It has banned pets at Roker Beach and part of Seaburn Beach from May 1 to Sept. 30, reported BBC. The council said that the measures are being taken to help tackle dog fouling and anti-social behaviour.
The founders of Physicians for a National Health Program put single-payer health care on the map. Now, discussing the next phase of the movement, they say even single-payer won’t be enough to fix the problems caused by continued privatization.
The rate of overdose deaths involving fentanyl spiked by 279% between 2016 and 2021 from 5.7 per 100,000 to 21.6 per 100,000, according to a report published early Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System — which looked at death certificate records.s
Agricultural policy experts on Tuesday said the deadly dust storm that led to “zero visibility” for highway drivers this week in Illinois should be a “wake-up call” for lawmakers as advocates fight against industrial farming practices.
If coders lied as often as ChatGPT, they would be fired immediately. Stunningly, some enterprise execs seem to be just fine with that — as long as AI continues to code quickly and for so little money.
Last week, we successfully pulled off our biggest cloud exit yet for Basecamp Classic. This is the original app that started it all for us from way back in 2004. And now, after a couple of years running on AWS, it’s back on our own hardware, using MRSK, and holy smokes is it fast! Just look at these charts: [...]
The Fuchsia rollout for the Nest Hub 2nd Gen began earlier today, 9to5Google reports. The company told the publication that the OS switch for the 2021 smart display, which comes with a Soli radar sensor for sleep tracking, will take place slowly. Like in the past, it will begin with a small percentage of users enrolled in the Preview Program in the Google Home app. Google will likely use those devices for public testing. Once it confirms that everything’s fine, the update should reach everyone around the world.
North America’s largest transportation network suspended the use of Twitter for service alerts Thursday, saying the “reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which serves 15.3 million passengers across a 5,000 square-mile area surrounding New York City, Long Island, New York State and Connecticut, also said their access to Twitter through its Application Programming Interface (API) was involuntarily interrupted twice over the last two weeks.
Unity is conducting its third and largest round of layoffs in the past year, according to people familiar with the matter, joining other companies in tech and beyond in trimming their workforces as recession fears mount.
San Francisco-based Unity is slashing roughly 600 jobs, about 8% of its workforce, the people said. The company, which will be left with around 7,000 employees after the layoffs, is also planning to reduce its global network of offices over the next few years to fewer than 30 from 58 today, they said.
The job cuts come after Unity let go more than 500 employees in two rounds of layoffs, one this January and another last June, in response to negative economic trends.
The January layoffs also reflected a need to deal with a duplication of roles resulting from its $4.4 billion acquisition last year of ironSource, an Israeli ad-tech company.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libdatetime-timezone-perl and tzdata), Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (emacs and libwebp), Slackware (netatalk), and Ubuntu (php7.0).
APT37 is among a growing list of threat actors that have switched to Windows shortcut files after Microsoft blocked macros last year.
There are new developments on the cybersecurity attack that has crippled internet services at Bluefield University. We’ve learned through “RamAlert” texts sent to students, faculty and staff that the cyber attackers are now directly communicating with everyone on the alert system. They have identified themselves as “AvosLocker” and are demanding payment in return for not leaking students’ private information. The FBI considers AvosLocker to be ransomware. In March 2022, they released an advisory on it. They said avoslocker has “Targeted victims across multiple critical infrastructure sectors in the U.S. Including…The financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities sectors.”
Merck may finally be entitled to a hefty insurance payout from the high-profile NotPetya cyberattack—if an appeals court ruling stands.
A New Jersey appellate court on Monday ruled that a group of insurers can’t use war as an argument to deny Merck coverage from the notorious cyberattack that afflicted the company and others back in 2017.
Upholding a prior ruling, the appeals court said in an opinion (PDF) that the “hostile/warlike action” exclusion clause shouldn’t be applied to a cyberattack on a non-military company—even if it originated from a government or sovereign power. In this case, the hack was tied to Russia as part of its aggression against Ukraine, according to U.S. officials.
The Superior Court of New Jersey previously granted Merck a $1.4 billion payout after the pharma company sued its insurers who had denied coverage for the NotPetya attack. In appeal, eight insurers disputed nearly $700 million in coverage, or about 40% of the total Merck had in its property insurance program at the time.
In an operation coordinated by Europol and involving nine countries, law enforcement have seized the illegal dark web marketplace “Monopoly Market” and arrested 288 suspects involved in buying or selling drugs on the dark web. More than EUR 50.8 million (USD 53.4 million) in cash and virtual currencies, 850 kg of drugs, and 117 firearms were seized. The seized drugs include over 258 kg of amphetamines, 43 kg of cocaine, 43 kg of MDMA and over 10 kg of LSD and ecstasy pills.
Over the weekend, Wichita State University took proactive measures and disconnected several University systems to isolate an unauthorized attempt by a third party to access the University’s systems, according to a statement of the school’s website.
Most of the University system access has been restored and there has been no indication that any of the University’s secure data or information has been compromised. The University will continue to engage its security protocols in restoring full availability of all networks and systems, prioritizing student needs.
Over the weekend, the PENNCREST School District became aware of a situation, believed to be a ransomware event, which has disrupted certain aspects of our operations. We quickly took steps to implement our Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan. Following our plan, we shut down and disconnected the entire network and technology infrastructure. We are now working diligently with external cybersecurity specialists to conduct a thorough forensic investigation into the nature and scope of the event and to securely restore operations. At this time, we have not identified evidence of any data loss, data access, or data theft as a result of this event.
Threat and Risk Intelligence Services pointed out to DataBreaches that the university’s update does not mention that this is a ransomware attack by Royal that has been listed on Royal’s leak site (but without data as yet).
It was late 2019, and Adair, the president of the security firm Volexity, was investigating a digital security breach at an American think tank. The intrusion was nothing special. Adair figured he and his team would rout the attackers quickly and be done with the case—until they noticed something strange. A second group of hackers was active in the think tank’s network. They were going after email, making copies and sending them to an outside server. These intruders were much more skilled, and they were returning to the network several times a week to siphon correspondence from specific executives, policy wonks, and IT staff.
Kenneth Brancik will oversee development and enforcement of programs intended to protect the county’s data, systems and technology, Suffolk County officials said.
German IT services provider Bitmarck has shut down all of its customer and internal systems, including entire datacenters in some cases, following a cyberattack.
The company, one of the largest service providers for German health insurers, said no customer, patient, or insured individuals’ data had been accessed in the security breach — at least not according to “the current state of knowledge,” according to an April 30 update posted on its temporary website.
T-Mobile disclosed the second data breach of 2023 after discovering that attackers had access to the personal information of hundreds of customers for more than a month, starting late February 2023.
Compared to previous data breaches reported by T-Mobile, the latest of which impacted 37 million people, this incident affected only 836 customers. Still, the amount of exposed information is highly extensive and exposes affected individuals to identity theft and phishing attacks.
According to Mick McCluney, Trend Micro’s technical director for the region, “We saw the Australian cyber-risk index (CRI) improve from -0.54 in 1H 2022 to -0.12 in 2H 2022. It means that organisations may be taking steps to improve their cyber-preparedness. There is still much to be done, as employees remain a source of risk. The first step to managing this is to gain complete and continuous attack surface visibility and control.”
This article is the first in a six-part series in which we present various usage models for confidential computing, a set of technologies designed to protect data in use—for example by using memory encryption—and the requirements to get the expected security and trust benefits from the technology.
In the series, we will focus on four primary use cases: confidential virtual machines, confidential workloads, confidential containers and finally confidential clusters. In all use cases, we will see that establishing a solid chain of trust uses similar, if subtly different, attestation methods, which make it possible for a confidential platform to attest to some of its properties. We will discuss various implementations of this idea, as well as alternatives that were considered.
A month ago I announced the end of PfP: Pain-free Passwords. But I’m allowed to change my mind, right? Yes, PfP will be developed further after all. However, it’s so different that I’m publishing it as a new browser extension, not an update to the existing extension.
Rather than using its own data format, PfP 3.x reads and writes KeePass database files. In order for the extension to access these files, users have to install a PfP Native Host application. This application provides access to the configured database files only.
Also, PfP 3.x no longer generates passwords on the fly. All passwords are stored inside the database, and generating passwords randomly happens when passwords are added. While this makes recovery more complicated, elsewhere it simplifies things a lot.
We have now received a response from the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the prosecutor in charge of the operation, who told us that the search warrant was a decision made in international legal cooperation with Germany. However, the Swedish Prosecution Authority does not want to give any more details and we were not given any protocols with reference to confidentiality.
See the letter from the prosecution office in its entirety below: [...]
A new tool that is free to use for consumers aims to better inform people about the types of data their particular car manufacturer might be collecting and sharing about their identity and driving patterns.
The Vehicle Privacy Report tool, made by automotive privacy company Privacy4Cars, is based on a manual and automatic analysis of car manufacturers’ data collection policies. Users enter their vehicle identification number (VIN), and the tool provides information based on those policies.
There is a lot to be learned from the experience of building something functional, and even better if doing so doesn’t break the bank. [Sergej Stoetzer]’s 20€ DIY-Eyetracker aims to be an educational process that covers everything from hardware to functional software in an accessible way.
As U.S. lawmakers renew efforts to pass a bipartisan bill intended to combat sexual exploitation of children online, 11 dozen advocacy groups argued Tuesday that the federal legislation would actually not only fall short in its mission but also endanger digital privacy and free expression.
Passing blatantly unconstitutional dangerous laws “to protect the children” based on totally unsubstantiated moral panics appears to be part of a bipartisan mass hysteria these days. The Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is officially back. And, with it, the recognition that over a quarter of the Senate has bought into this dangerous, unconstitutional nonsense:
Online child safety is a complex issue, but KOSA attempts to boil it down to a single solution. The bill holds platforms liable if their designs and services do not “prevent and mitigate” a list of societal ills: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, physical violence, online bullying and harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse, and suicidal behaviors. Additionally, platforms would be responsible for patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors.
On Thursday, May 4, 2023, the committee will consider S. 1207, the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2023 (EARN IT Act), and S. 1199, the Strengthening Transparency and Obligation to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment Act of 2023 (STOP CSAM Act).
Bloomberg reported Tuesday that some Samsung staff members uploaded sensitive code information to ChatGPT, raising concerns that information uploaded to the AI software could be exposed to other users. A memo obtained by Bloomberg News informed employees that they were prohibited from using AI programs like ChatGPT due to cyber security, noting that the data uploaded could also be difficult to retrieve and delete.
A sprawling online company based in Georgia that has made tens of millions of dollars purporting to sell access to jobs at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has exposed its internal IT operations and database of nearly 900,000 customers. The leaked records indicate the network’s chief technology officer in Pakistan has been hacked for the past year, and that the entire operation was created by the principals of a Tennessee-based telemarketing firm that has promoted USPS employment websites since 2016.
A new investigation by Skhemy, a Ukrainian division of Radio Liberty, has uncovered the Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman’s involvement in providing insurance to the Russian military in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has adopted a resolution designating the ideology of Russia’s current political regime as “Ruscism.”
Resistance fighters in Gaza launched a volley of rockets at Israel amid protests and a call for a general strike after Palestinian activist Khader Adnan, who had been on a nearly three-month hunger strike, died in an Israeli prison early Tuesday.
Forgive us as we splutter with dumb rage, grief, depletion. The story from Texas is achingly familiar yet singularly ghastly: a houseful of 10 people seeking safety, a family trying to get their 6-week-old son to sleep, a drunk neighbor with an AR-15, five dead – three women, a man, a 9-year-old shot in the head. Most harrowing, two of the women were lying over children to protect them. Oh America, when will it be enough?
TikTok users are teaching Chinese citizens fleeing the country — known as the “run” movement — how to navigate a dangerous smuggling route through Latin America, and the bureaucratic intricacies of getting settled in the United States while making a political asylum claim.
The FAA today announced that a previously-held partnership with counterdrone tech company Dedrone has been expanded. What started as a test project at a single airport, New Jersey’s Atlantic City International Airport, has today officially grown to two test projects.
Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin says that Wagner artillery detachments destroyed an armored vehicle near Bakhmut. Ihor Tantsyura, commander of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense, was reportedly in the car.
The Ukrainian military is widely expected to launch its spring counteroffensive any day now, though what approach it will take and how the situation will unfold is anyone’s guess. According to Zelensky administration adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, Moscow’s anxiety surrounding the war’s next stage is one reason the Russian army has increasingly launched missiles at civilian targets in recent days: the sooner Ukraine can be provoked into starting the offensive, the less prepared it will be. New guidelines sent by the Putin administration to Russia’s pro-government media outlets and obtained by Meduza confirm that the Kremlin is preparing for multiple scenarios. Meduza explains how the Russian authorities plan to use their propaganda apparatus to prepare citizens for what’s to come.
A second explosion in as many days occurred on a railway in Russia’s Bryansk region. Regional governor Alexander Bogomaz reported that an “unidentified explosive device” went off near the Snezhetskaya station. No one was injured, but a locomotive and several freight cars were derailed.
In Russia’s Belgorod region, a UAV dropped an explosive device onto a construction site where some defensive fortifications were being built.
A court in Russia’s Tula region has sentenced two defendants, Alexander Suchkov and Andrey Kuznetsov, in the murder of Daria Dugina, a pro-war pundit and the daughter of Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin, TASS reported.
The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called U.S. data on Russian losses in Ukraine “made up.”
On the few occasions when a government moves toward converting property or weapon production facilities into something useful for human beings, I can’t restrain a tumbling brainstorm: What if this signals a trend, what if practical problem-solving begins to trump reckless war preparation? And so, when Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced on April 26 that his government will build 20,000 homes for social housing on land owned by the country’s Ministry of Defense, I immediately thought about crowded refugee camps around the world and inhumane treatment of people without homes. Visualize the vast capacity to welcome people into decent housing and promising futures if space, energy, ingenuity, and funds were diverted from the Pentagon to meet human needs.
In Canada today, the war hawks are circling overhead in swiftly scudding skies while on the ground, the drum majors of militarism are leading the call for an arms race with the tenacity of a snare drummer performing “The Downfall of Paris.”
Everyone who abhors war, detests imperialism, and favors cooperation between nations on global warming, poverty reduction, protection of biodiversity, international disarmament, implementation of international law, and other left-wing priorities ought to be appalled by the escalating tensions between the U.S. and China and actively organizing against them.
Leaked intelligence assessments detail how Brazil, Pakistan, India, and other countries don’t want to follow Biden.
By DemocracyNow! We spend the hour with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who recently announced that he has been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer with only months left to live. Ellsberg, who turned 92 on April 7, may be the world’s most famous whistleblower. In 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers […]
I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than “Mama” or “Dada,” in some strange fashion, I grew up at war.
Sleeping bags, backpacks, shoes, and dishes from last night’s dinner are scattered around the halls. It has been three days since students at Liceu Camões, a high school in central Lisbon, began their occupation, using time away from class to educate each other on what really matters in a planet on fire: climate justice, revolutionary politics, and movement strategy. Grassroots teach-ins are interwoven with drums and chants that interrupt those remaining in class. “Pelo clima. Unidos. Ocupamos. Resistimos!” (For the climate. United. We occupy. We resist!) they shouted.
The White House Correspondents Dinner has been an annual tradition since 1921. The gathering for media and political elites has the reputation for being the toughest ticket to get in Washington, D.C. This past weekend, the newly formed Climate Defiance group made it a bit harder to get in.
Climate Defiance is a self-described youth-run collective that has been using direct action to disrupt events that lawmakers and newsmakers attend in order to draw attention to insufficient action on the climate crisis. Just last week, the collective interrupted a speech by Biden advisor John Podesta, chanting phrases such as “Keep your promise. No new drilling.”
The Daily Telegraph’s chief interviewer and columnist Allison Pearson has joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), one of the UK’s principal climate science denial groups.
This appointment adds to the influence of the GWPF in the press and potentially the amount of sway that it holds over the Conservative Party.
Transportation is responsible for the largest portion of California’s greenhouse gas emissions, with heavy-duty trucks accounting for a significant portion. According to data by CARB, even though trucks only account for 6% of the total vehicles on state roads, their emissions result in 35% of California’s transportation-generated nitrogen oxide emissions and 25% of on-road greenhouse gas emissions.
Hundreds of students occupied their schools and universities on Tuesday as part of a global movement to disrupt educational institutions this May and push for an end to the fossil fuel economy.
If you’ve travelling via bike, you’ll know there’s a certain advantage to packing light. But what if you need to take your beefy desktop-replacement laptop with you on one of these trips? These power hungry machines can’t go far without their chargers (or a place to plug them in), which generally makes them poor traveling companions.
Climate campaigners in New York were credited on Tuesday with pushing Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature to include in the state budget “historic” provisions that will build publicly owned renewable energy and end the use of fossil fuels in new buildings—without a loophole allowing municipalities to opt out of the requirement.
Migratory bird nest survival “decreased significantly” near fossil fuel extraction sites in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, a study led by the Wildlife Conservation Society revealed Tuesday.
Vice, which was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, is now preparing to file for bankruptcy, according to a New York Times report citing “two people with knowledge of its operations.”
It’s a stunning development coming on the heels of a series of layoffs in digital media, including at Vice. Last week, the American-Canadian company announced that it was closing Vice News Tonight, its TV news program, and Vice World News, its global operation, laying off more than a hundred employees.
Once-unthinkable options for averting a U.S. debt default have invaded the mainstream debate, a day after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen predicted a shorter countdown to catastrophe than previously thought.
Shares of Icahn Enterprises lost more than a fifth of their value after Hindenburg Research announced that the holding company—founded by legendary activist investor Carl Icahn—was the target of its latest short sell in a sprawling report. The decline marked the firm’s largest intraday drop since 2010.
House and Senate Democrats are taking procedural steps to force votes on a clean debt ceiling increase without the spending cuts Republicans have demanded.
Why it matters: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Congress on Monday that a default could come as soon as June 1 if action is not taken, spurring both parties to double down on their debt ceiling strategies.
House Republicans’ debt ceiling proposal would slash President Biden’s student loan relief plan and undercut potential future student debt relief programs.
The media firm has received interest from five companies and might consider a sale to avoid bankruptcy, the NYT report said, adding that in the event of a bankruptcy, which could happen in the coming weeks, Vice’s debtholder Fortress Investment Group could end up controlling the company.
House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled their closely held plan to force a vote on a debt ceiling hike “without extreme conditions,” a remote bid to prevent the chamber’s GOP majority from unleashing an unprecedented and severely damaging U.S. default.
First Republic Bank became the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history after the lender was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and sold to JPMorgan Chase on May 1, 2023. First Republic is the latest victim of the panic that has roiled small and midsize banks since the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023.
If House Republicans refuse to raise the limit on the amount of money America may repay on what it owes — the deceptively named “debt limit” — they might force the United States to default, pushing interest rates into the stratosphere and shaking the world economy.
Political Economist Grieve Chelwa explains the reasons why countries of the Global South are forced to go time and again to the International Monetary Fund for aid.
Dorsey added that Musk “should have walked away” from acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, and faulted Twitter’s board in hindsight for trying to compel Musk to follow through with the deal despite Musk’s attempts to back out of the purchase last year.
In that safe-for-work video, shown to all Pornhub visitors with a Utah IP address, Cherie DeVille – an adult performer, natch, and member of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee – apologizes for the blockade but insists access to the world’s 13th most popular website has to be restricted as a result of legislation about to kick in.
That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.
The chief executives of Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic will meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and top administration officials to discuss key artificial intelligence (AI) issues on Thursday, said a White House official.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a state visit to Portugal and Spain last week. He was primarily seeking trade agreements, and especially wished to prepare the way for agreement this summer on a huge European Union – Latin American free trade […]
Four members of the U.S. House of Representatives from across the political spectrum came together on Tuesday to introduce the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act, which would ban federal lawmakers and their immediate relatives from owning and trading stocks.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday night rejected claims that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is being targeted by “anti-feminist” attacks as calls mount for the 89-year-old lawmaker’s retirement.
A report published Monday highlights potential connections between the political influence of Harlan Crow’s family and the billionaire GOP megadonor’s yearslong endeavor to shower U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with lavish vacations and other undisclosed gifts.
Judith Herman’s seminal book “Trauma and Recovery” created a template for her field. Three decades later, she’s published a follow-up to explain how survivors’ needs are still misunderstood.
In the early days after the Internet became a common domestic utility, there was broad optimism that interconnectedness would ultimately be for the greater good. Today, that picture is tarnished, particularly as the Internet is dominated and shaped by a handful of private companies. Platforms don’t simply provide us with a service. Their real goal is often to track our interactions even outside their own sites in order to monetize every millisecond of our lives. We are under constant surveillance, because these platforms want to sell us things. The hope of a free and open Internet endures, but evidence is mounting that, without some guardrails, those who seek to harm will take advantage of the platforms’ drive for profit to deepen their own power.
These are not aberrations, according to a coalition of environmental organizations and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a report released on Tuesday, researchers from the organizations accused YouTube of continuing to profit from videos that portrayed the changing climate as a hoax or exaggeration.
“The page had an owner and he sold it,” a former administrator of the group told RFE/RL’s Belarus Service on condition of anonymity. “The new owner fired all the editors and administrators. Now he is either doing everything himself or has brought in his own people.”
Similar stories have been developing in many of Belarus’s largest cities. Popular local-news groups in Vitsebsk, Mahilyou, Zhlobin, Orsha, and other cities have similarly been relaunched under the banner of The Main Thing! Their online histories show they were created in various years dating back to 2012, but all of them took their new names around the middle of March.
“In April 2023, NewsGuard identified 49 websites spanning seven languages — Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai — that appear to be entirely or mostly generated by artificial intelligence language models designed to mimic human communication — here in the form of what appear to be typical news websites,” NewsGuard claimed.
NewsGuard journalists and analysts worked to spot telltale signs a website is AI-generated.
We’ve already talked about Montana’s extraordinarily unconstitutional “ban TikTok” bill that raises a huge number of constitutional issues. Lots of individuals and organizations pointed this out to governor Greg Gianforte (who came to office as a former tech exec of an internet company, and was supposed to be someone who understand the internet).
Narrowing permitted ideas on both left and right, one unsuitable voice at a time.
Three parents were upset, according to Carrasquilla. Two parents said they wished they were notified about the lesson beforehand, while one parent complained more specifically about the nudity, equating it to pornographic material.
The school later sent out an apology to parents of the sixth grade class about the oversight. Despite the measure, Carrasquilla said she was given the option to resign or be terminated without cause by the school board chair.
Posts about the Chinese government, U.S.-China trade, former president Donald Trump, persecuted minority group Uyghurs, and even TikTok competitors like YouTube are subject to monitoring and, in many cases, suppression by ByteDance.
Records show the moderation tools and other internal programs also collect data on the “hit rate” of sensitive words, including information about U.S. users posting them. One document mentioning TikTok and other ByteDance products describes a recent upgrade that integrated the moderation system with “a new text detection service,” making it easier to track and analyze “hit records of sensitive words” in real-time. (At least one of the people running that project was an engineer in Beijing.) Favazza, the TikTok spokesperson, said that tracking data on hits of sensitive or prohibited words “simply helps us understand performance” and that “access is restricted.”
The Chinese government has used social media to target people in the U.S. who’ve spoken out online against the Chinese Communist Party, including by commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The Justice Department in April charged dozens of police officers tied to the Chinese government with doing just that.
Lawmakers, particularly Republicans, continue to push legislation that silences people in communities that they choose not to understand or listen to, a decision that directly impacts the sanctity of democracy. In using censorship as a political tool, such politicians are able to elevate their power over communities that are already systemically underprivileged, underrepresented and undervalued.
No one wins in that system. It doesn’t help anyone to create a society that is afraid to step outside of the box set up by those in positions of privilege and power. No one wins when people are afraid to fully express themselves. The censorship of marginalized communities, histories and livelihoods encourages rhetoric that is close-minded and breeds a population of people that are unwilling to experience societal change.
This arrangement is now coming under stress due to the rise in hate speech and misinformation on social media. Both governments and civil society believe that social media companies have not done enough to keep the internet safe for people. For example, parliamentary panels have summoned social media companies and are evaluating their role in inciting violence in India. Governments are calling for the companies to do more, including threats to remove the legal immunity and ‘safe harbour’ that they have hitherto enjoyed. These issues culminated in new rules framed for online intermediaries in February 2021.
The new rules augmented existing government control over online platforms. Social media companies, a term left vague and expansive, need to take down content within 36 hours of receiving a government notice. They also need to appoint a nodal person for 24×7 coordination with law enforcement officials and hand over any data that they are asked for within 72 hours. The rules, however, go far beyond just social media. The central government can ask ‘curated content platforms’ such as Netflix and Hulu to take down or modify content. Ditto for digital news platforms. Through these rules, the government is empowered not only to restrict fake or hateful content but also regulate almost all kinds of content that are shared online.
On May 3, a new law restricting porn access in Utah will go Into effect. The response is going to be epically controversial as angry porn consumers in the state will soon lose access to much more than a few household adult entertainment industry brand names like Pornhub.
If only the media would cover the persecution of Julian Assange with the same the same zeal as the wedding of shock-jock Kyle Sandilands; and the controversial attendance of Albo. At this time, when Jackie-O turned up late to the wedding, Michael West reports on World Press Freedom Day.
If you had remarked 20 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq, that an Australian citizen, a whistleblower, would expose the grotesque war crimes of another nation, but rather than being hailed as a hero, had been forced into hiding and then imprisoned for 4 years without a trial, without charges, you would have been called barking mad.
Speaking ahead of World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a rallying cry for journalists and media worldwide.
“All our freedom depends on press freedom,” he said in a video message, calling it the “foundation of democracy and justice” and the “lifeblood of human rights.”
“But in every corner of the world, freedom of the press is under attack,” Guterres added, addressing a conference held at UN headquarters in New York.
The incident occurred a few days before Trump would be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his role in hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels. Some of Trump’s comments on the plane have been previously reported, such as when he responded to reporters’ questions about Bragg’s probe by attacking it as a “fake case” that “they’ve already dropped.” The Guardian noted how Trump lashed out at Hillyard when the NBC News reporter asked whether he was frustrated by the investigation. Trump denied the notion, insisting, “We did nothing wrong,” and saying, “This is fake news, and NBC is one of the worst. Don’t ask me any more questions.” Hillyard himself said Trump avoided specifics and called the press “fake news.” But the full scope of Trump’s tirade, including his throwing the reporter’s phones, has not been previously reported. Hillyard declined to comment.
Speaking ahead of World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a rallying cry for journalists and media worldwide.
“All our freedom depends on press freedom,” he said in a video message, calling it the “foundation of democracy and justice” and the “lifeblood of human rights.”
“But in every corner of the world, freedom of the press is under attack,” Guterres added, addressing a conference held at UN headquarters in New York.
After his release, he was turned around and sent right back again by Beijing police as the authorities stepped up “stability maintenance” measures aimed at getting rid of other politically sensitive figures who have made their homes in the capital.
“India’s new IT Rules amendment effectively empowers the government to be the judge and the jury on online content pertaining to itself. Fake, false and misleading are subjective terms with no legal definition. They can be used to arbitrarily demand removal of online content such as editorials, investigative journalism, satire, and more,” Namrata Maheshwari, Asia Pacific Policy Counsel at Access Now said in the statement issued on Tuesday.
A defamation case filed by a Russian businessman in Monaco against the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle is “worrying” from the perspective of both domestic media and journalistic freedom, according to a statement by Finland’s Association of Editors (abbreviated as PTY in Finnish).
“When the free press erodes, democratic erosion almost always follows.”
The secretary general of Amnesty International, Agnes Callamard, said censorship has also become more common.
The story of taiga.info could have ended last year, when it was blocked by the central media regulator Roskomnadzor. Since then, it can only be accessed in encrypted form via so-called VPN apps. However, Chistyakov is pleased to report that this hasn’t deterred critically-minded readers. On the contrary: “We now receive more donations from our readers than from companies, as we used to.” Overall, though, their revenue has collapsed, and it can no longer be described as a business, he says. His work is now a mission.
Some politicians get elected and think they’re heading up the musical equivalent of vaporware. Just a heads up: you may have more power than you’re used to but it’s constrained by the Constitution: both the one ratified by the nascent US federal government and the one adopted by individual states, which are required to use the federal version for a baseline, rather than a high bar they should never feel compelled to clear.
Marches from South Korea to Italy called for higher wages and targeted anti-worker policies.
This epochal artist helped us see that justice for all requires a just distribution of wealth.
After weeks of denial, the deputy health minister acknowledged in an interview that the attacks on girls’ schools were intentional, and blamed extremist groups who seek to dissuade girls from pursuing education by increasing its cost (he later retracted these statements under pressure from conservative groups). Initially, the public did not find this claim credible, since the right to education for girls has never been a point of contention in Iran’s political and public sphere after the 1979 revolution, despite the numerous limitations imposed on women. However, as the range of attacks expanded and a few clerics and politicians hinted at the possible involvement of extremist groups, this theory has gained greater traction.
Demonstrations erupted in various parts of the Iranian capital of Tehran as the city steps up enforcement of the mandatory hijab rule, angering residents who for months have protested over what they see as the government’s intrusion into their daily lives.
After the doll hanging and Koran burning, he has again used aggressive rhetoric against Sweden. The number of people he wants extradited from Sweden to Turkey has now increased again – from 33 to 130.
And despite the fact that Sweden has a well-functioning terrorism law, the government now even wants to restrict Swedish freedom of association.
A line of 25 people, mostly college students, snaked from the counter to the front door at the Starbucks in downtown Iowa City, Iowa, on April 21. A dozen “mobile orders” of lattes and cappuccinos sat waiting near the tip jar, which on this day was stuffed with bills.
Thousands of screenwriters behind Hollywood movies and TV shows are on strike as of midnight on Tuesday. The Writers Guild of America says its members are struggling to make a living, as rates have fallen and writers have less job security — even as the streaming era has led to an explosion in TV and film production. The strike is set to bring most TV production to a halt immediately, with some films also likely to be delayed if the impasse continues. The WGA previously went on strike in 2007-’08, which lasted 100 days and had a significant impact on the entertainment industry. “We are demanding that this industry be one that can sustain a career,” says Brittani Nichols, captain for Writers Guild of America West and a writer on Abbott Elementary. “The studios have devalued our contributions. They have shifted the industry to prioritize streaming while not … making sure that our pay reflects those changes.”
“You’re getting checks for $3, $7, $10. It’s not enough to put together any sort of consistent lifestyle,” she told NPR. “It can really be a real shock. … sometimes you get a stack of checks for $0.07.”
Writers in Hollywood are basically gig workers with a union, constantly looking for their next job.
And TV writers say that streaming translates to less work and less money, with studios asking for series to last eight to 10 episodes a season, rather than the traditional 22 episode seasons on network TV.
Unionized film and television writers are on strike Tuesday after a midnight deadline came without a deal with executives of the major producers and streaming giants in Hollywood.
Law enforcement agencies around the world seized an online marketplace and arrested nearly 300 people allegedly involved in buying and selling drugs.
In total, 288 people were arrested, including 153 in the U.S., according to the statement. “A number of investigations to identify additional individuals behind dark web accounts are still ongoing,” the agency noted. “As law enforcement authorities gained access to the vendors’ extensive buyer lists, thousands of customers across the globe are now at risk of prosecution as well.”
Sixty years ago today is known as “D-Day” in Birmingham, Alabama, when thousands of children began a 10-week-long series of protests against segregation that became known as the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds were arrested. The next day, “Double D-Day,” the local head of the police, Bull Connor, ordered his white police force to begin using high-pressure fire hoses and dogs to attack the children. One photograph captured the moment when a white police officer allowed a large German shepherd dog to attack a young Black boy. Four months after the protests began, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Black Birmingham church, killing four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair. We revisit the history of the Children’s Crusade with two guests: civil rights activist Janice Kelsey, who joined the Children’s Crusade as a 16-year-old in 1963, and author Paul Kix.
Last week, the interior minister described the elections called by his government “a coup attempt by the West.”
Istanbul—At just after 4:17 am on February 6, nature made a lethal intervention in Turkish history.1
The Great Replacement Theory was his shtick. Untroubled by the fact that it is based On racist doctrines, Carlson carried on. And then, ironically, he got replaced.
Human rights defenders on Tuesday condemned the Defense Department’s plan to deploy 1,500 active duty soldiers to the southern border for “non-law enforcement duties,” with numerous activists urging the Biden administration to instead address the root causes of migration and improve the process for people seeking asylum in the United States.
Moms are still often laid off while on parental leave, pushed out of workplaces and subjected to stereotypes about their competency. But with few legal protections, attorneys say most cases go unreported.
Fifty years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. vowed not to read another book about liberalism until his mother wrote one. Liberalism was riding high then, and Buckley was probably annoyed by its champions’ triumphalist tone. Over the past four decades, things have changed: You can hardly walk around the block today without tripping over a critique of liberalism. There are critiques by wild-eyed Randians, free-market libertarians, neoclassical economists, neo-Burkean conservatives, Catholic integralists, critical race theorists, postmodernists, and, of course, Marxists.1
Few of us are paying attention to Guantánamo Bay right now. But a recent United Nations report reveals that the post-9/11 forever prison is shifting into a macabre new phase: providing end-of-life care for its aging captives with its characteristic brutality. It’s a grim testament to how normalized Guantánamo is in 21st-century America.
The partisan divide on reproductive rights has grown so wide that it is easy to forget that there are still some pro-choice Republicans and, yes, some anti-abortion Democrats. That reality is only rarely reflected in national debates. But it has real consequences at the state level—since, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning federal protections for abortion rights, that is where the fight for reproductive freedom is now playing out on a daily basis.
Kwaneta Harris typically keeps National Public Radio playing through her headphones. It’s the only way she can block out the incessant noise.
The SQ series Arm processors, which are custom designed for Surface portable devices, are collaboratively designed with Qualcomm doing most of the heavy lifting. These chips are based on contemporary Snapdragon 8CX designs, so when the Nuvia chips arrive, Microsoft might have a parallel SQ model taking advantage of the newer cores. The first Snapdragon with Nuvia cores is expected to be the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 Processor, and should emerge near year-end.
We’ve noted repeatedly how Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a stupid cash grab that alienates and annoys loyal customers, duplicates existing efforts to restrict “freeloaders,” won’t give the company the financial windfall it thinks, and just generally represents how the company has inevitably shifted from innovative disruptor to the kind of tone deaf cable giants it used to criticize.
Microsoft plans to make web links in the Outlook for Windows app and Teams open by default in its Edge browser, regardless of the default browser chosen in Windows Settings.
In accordance with Redmond’s declaration in March that customers should “be able to control their default applications such as their default browser through consistent, clear and trustworthy Windows provided system dialogs and settings,” Outlook users will “have the opportunity to choose [their] preferred browser for opening links from Outlook the first time [they] launch in Edge.”
The recently filed petition for certiorari in CareDx and Stanford University v. Eurofins Viracor, Inc. (Supreme Court 2023) offers an opportunity to examine the patent eligibility doctrine in the context of an important health diagnostics innovation. The inventions at issue relate to early detection of organ transplant failure, which obviously hold significant potential to save lives and reduce reliance on invasive exploratory surgical procedures. The detection method involves identifying DNA fragments from the transplant within the bloodstream, a challenge that had stumped scientists for over a decade.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) did not err by declining to consider a patentee’s claim construction arguments raised for the first time at oral argument.
Government officials should be working to reduce, not increase, the burden that low-quality patent lawsuits impose on innovators. So we’re concerned and dismayed by recent briefs filed by the U.S. Solicitor General, asking the Supreme Court to reexamine and throw out the best legal defenses regular people have against “patent trolls”—companies that don’t make products or provide services, but simply use patents to sue and threaten others.
To truly stop patent trolls, we’ll need wholesale reform, including legislative change. But the current framework of rules governing Section 101 of the U.S. patent laws, including the Supreme Court’s 2014 CLS Bank v. Alice decision, were important victories for common-sense patent reform.
The Alice decision made clear that you can’t simply add generic computer language to basic ideas and get a patent. The ruling has been consistently applied to get the worst-of-the-worst software patents kicked out of the system. For the most part, it allows courts to state, clearly and correctly, that these patents are a form of abstract idea, and should be thrown out at an early stage of litigation. A win under the Alice rules spares the targets of patent trolls not just from an unjust trial, but from an invasive and expensive discovery process, fueled by a patent that never should have been issued in the first place.
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is eager to send warnings to persistent pirates but doing so isn’t straightforward in the Netherlands. The issue has been at the center of several lawsuits and a mass notice-forwarding scheme was shelved recently over privacy concerns. In a win for BREIN, a court of appeal today ruled that in specific cases, ISPs can be required to forward copyright warnings to online pirates.
This week the European Commission is expected to publish its recommendation for combating live sports piracy in the European Union. A draft leaked to the media last month revealed that despite rightsholders’ calls for urgency, the EC envisions a three-year review period. In a letter sent to EC President Ursula von der Leyen, 24 Members of the European Parliament demand more urgency and a commitment towards legislation.
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