NASA has landed a new rover called Perseverance on Mars. It has it's own miniature helicopter named Ingenuity that can take off, navigate, and land on Mars without human intervention. Ingenuity runs a custom Linux-based operating system, Linux has now reached Mars.
The landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars was not just a victory for science, but also for open source software, the team behind the project has revealed.
In its bid to use software that was “safe and proven”, NASA turned to Linux and open source. “This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars,” said Tim Canham, Mars Helicopter Operations Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a discussion with IEEE Spectrum.
Without going into too much detail, Canham mentioned that the flight software framework NASA is using on the tiny helicopter dubbed Ingenuity, that’s tucked under the Perseverance Mars rover, was originally developed for miniature satellites called CubeSats.
The much awaited Linux Kernel 5.11 was released to the public recently with many changes and new features, it is a non-LTS release and this year’s first major kernel release.
For a more detailed outlook of the changes, have a look at our coverage of the same.
In the last post about KWinFT's Windowing Revolution I promised follow-up articles with detailed explorations of two elements of that revolution, which due to their complexity deserve such.
One of them was a new way how Wayland subsurfaces are managed inside KWinFT. Accompanying the 5.21 release of KWinFT this week, which was made available in sync with the KDE Plasma release, let me live up to my promise and start with an exploration of that.
But since even this topic alone is overly complex with a lot of windowing history behind it, we will split it up further and in this first article only look at subsurfaces and related concepts from a high level but without yet looking at the new and improved implementation in KWinFT.
On a high level the notions we are dealing with can always be interpreted as some form of parent-child relation between windows, on Wayland just as much as on X11. We will see that this is a very powerful mental model.
In this article, learn about the following process states in Unix/Linux: RUNNING & RUNNABLE, INTERRRUPTABLE_SLEEP, UNINTERRRUPTABLE_SLEEP, STOPPED, and ZOMBIE. Find out how to find them, how to kill the SLEEPING process, the ZOMBIE process, and more.
In previous blogpost, I wrote How to generate OpenPGP record for DNS (TYPE61). You may get puzzled what to do when you have different GPG keys with the same email.
After many, many manual cherry picks, I’ve decided to put together a short script. It’s fully interactive and hopefully self-explanatory.
PHP is a widely used server-side programming language that means it can perform actions on servers such as establishing connections to a database, generate dynamic webpages on user requests, or delete files on the server.
It is open-source and distributed as free software. Today, the abbreviation PHP stands for HyperText Process, however, originally it was known as Personal Home Page Tools. The programs coded with this scripting language stored as simple text files which later converted into machine code by the web server when they are called up. Thus, PHP programs are largely platform-independent and can be executed on different hardware systems.
Embedded in HTML files, the PHP code supplemented static websites with dynamic information such as date and time or, for example, mixed in the input of users from order forms in order confirmation pages.
Lubuntu is a fast and lightweight operating system with a clean and easy-to-use user interface. It is a Linux system, that uses the minimal desktop LXDE/LXQT, and a selection of light applications. Because of this, Lubuntu has very low hardware requirements. Lubuntu was founded by Mario Behling and has been grown for many years by Julien Lavergne.
In the company where I work, the employees often had to work from their homes during the pandemic. This necessitated the need to encrypt these laptops, and then to the question of how to stop all USB ports and CDs. In this article, we will look at some simple but effective methods to disable USB ports, CD drives and floppies.
But in the end, why do we need all this? Well, often people, without even realizing it, can forget their laptop unlocked in a cafe and a conscientious person can quickly download a few key files or do a bunch of other nonsense. Therefore, in some cases, locking all communication ports on the laptop would increase your corporate security.
In my "Linux Essentials" series, I go over the basic details of one Linux command or service in each episode in order to teach you the basics. In this episode, we'll explore the Arch User Repository (AUR).
This article describes a complete procedure for moving to UEFI.
If you have used Debian or Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint, then the APT command-line tool needs no introduction. APT, short for Advanced Package Tool is a package management tool for Debian systems. The APT utility helps users to perform a variety of tasks including installing, updating, upgrading, and removing software packages. The APT utility is used interactively, often requiring the user to type 'Y' to proceed with the operation such as installing or removing a package.
Anaconda distribution ships with a package and environment management system called Conda. It is used to manage and deploy applications, environments and packages. Conda is written in Python and it was initially created for Python programs only, but it can be used for any languages, for example R, Nodejs etc. In this guide, we will see how to create Nodejs virtual environments using conda in Linux.
You're a new Linux admin and you're familiar with how cron works. You've been tasked with hardening your Linux servers and one thing you'd like to do is prevent users from setting up their own cron jobs. After all, shouldn't that task fall into your hands?
You certainly don't want users creating regularly scheduled jobs that could compromise the integrity of your server. What do you do? You block users from creating cron jobs. Believe it or not, this is surprisingly easy to take care of.
Let me show you how.
For this tutorial, you’ll only need access to an Ubuntu system. We wrote this tutorial for an Ubuntu 20.04 server, but the instructions will work on the desktop version too, or any other Ubuntu-based distro. You can get a cheap Ubuntu server at Vultr.
You’ll need the root user for this tutorial, or run sudo where necessary.
First unveiled in mid-December 2020, the Wayland driver for Wine enables you to run Windows applications and games via the Wine compatibility layer on GNU/Linux distributions that use the Wayland display system, as a drop-in replacement for XWayland.
During these past two months, Collabora’s engineers worked hard on improving the Wayland driver for Wine by adding a handful of new features like copy and paste support from both Wine and Wayland apps, the ability to drag and drop items from native Wayland apps to Wine apps, and support for changing the display mode.
Two months ago we announced a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine, the compatibility layer for Windows applications.
The goal of this driver is to allow Windows applications to run directly on Wayland compositors, eventually removing the need for XWayland for many use cases. XWayland, like X11 in general, is receiving less and less developer attention and is unlikely to support modern features like improved fence synchronization or HDR. In addition, since it's yet another layer to go through it's a source of complexity and potentially of inefficiency. Some more details and thoughts about XWayland vs direct Wayland in the context of Wine can be found here.
We are now excited to announce a first update for this effort, proposed on the upstream mailing list as a new RFC (Request for Comment), which contains more details and instructions for building and running the Wayland driver.
The focus of this update is to support a number of new features that are useful for applications and games, and which have also been considered potential integration pain points for the Wayland driver. These are copy/paste, drag-and-drop and support for changing the display mode.
Copy/paste support works well in both directions (native Wayland apps <=> Wine apps) with many common formats already supported. Drag and drop works in the direction of native Wayland apps to Wine apps for many common formats.
Valheim has truly become an absolute runaway hit. A survival game about Vikings running around in co-op chopping down trees and facing off against big bosses.
Less than three weeks since the Early Access release, Iron Gate announced today that it's now sold three million copies. This is just absurd but it's genuinely well deserved. This isn't some AAA or even AA team with a huge budget, Iron Gate is a tiny team backed up by Coffee Stain Publishing.
The team shared some other records they've managed to hit recently too including over 60,000 user reviews with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, they're now doing so well they're rising up the Steam Top 250 and it has been one of the most popular games on Twitch lately too. There's just no stopping it.
[...]
Seems to have caused a surge for LinuxGSM too, the really great tool for managing game servers. Going by their stats we can see Valheim is now the most popular game being hosted with their kit with over 750 servers live.
Paradox Interactive are branching out with revenue models and they're now doing a subscription for Crusader Kings II, which itself is free to play. Even though Crusader Kings III is out now, the classic Crusader Kings II is tried and tested with multiple thousands of people still playing it regularly. It being free also makes it a good entry point for Paradox strategy titles.
Recoil Games appear to have filed for bankruptcy a while ago and sadly a casualty of that is their game Rochard, which has now been removed for sale.
Rochard was an award-winning side-scroller puzzle-platformer, originally released in 2011. It was also part of the early indie game push for Linux, thanks to it being part of the Humble Indie Bundle 6 back in 2012 it was ported to Linux especially for the bundle. Not only that, it was also one of the first commercial Unity games (possibly the actual first) to be built for Linux too, so it holds something of a special place in our history.
Updates of both KDE’s Plasma and Frameworks landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed as part of three snapshots released this week.
The rolling Tumbleweed distribution began the week with Linux Kernel 5.10.12 and has ended it with version 5.10.16, which was the latest stable Kernel when the 20210215 snapshot was released.
The newest Frameworks 5.79.0 version arrived in snapshot 20210217. As part of the release, Kholidays package updated holidays for Mauritius and Taiwan. The Kirigami user interface framework had fixes to the controls and enhanced some vertical alignments. Removal of the usage of non-UTF-8 string literals were made with Framework’s kcodecs package update. GNOME had some updates with gnome-builder updating to version 3.38.2, which provided support for an --add-policy for Flatpak, and gnome-software updating to version 3.38.1, which updated translations and ignores harmless warnings when using unusual fwupd versions. Three areas of focus were emphasized for the update of dhcp 4.4.2 with changes for dynamic DNS additions, dhclient improvements and support for dynamic shared libraries; the package is now licensed under the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0. Multiple PyPI packages were updated including python-greenlet 1.0.0, which requires setuptools to build from source, and python-numpy 1.20.1, which fixed a random.shuffle regression. A major update of perl-Mojolicious 9.01 added an experimental color attribute and an experimental color log environment variable. Other packages to update in the snapshot were Long-Term Support package subversion 1.14.1, filesystem mounter fuse3 3.10.2, pipewire 0.3.21 and git 2.30.1.
As linux-lts moved to the 5.10 version, all official kernels of Arch Linux now support zstd compressed initramfs images, so mkinitcpio is switching to zstd compressed images by default with version 30, which is currently on [testing].
In response to the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, Call for Code for Racial Justice launched in October of 2020. The initiative provides developers with the opportunity to build open source solutions to address three focus areas: Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability, Diverse Representation, and Policy & Legislation Reform. The initiative builds upon Call for Code, which was created in 2018 and has grown to over 400,000 developers and problem-solvers across 179 countries, in partnership with Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation.
Today the Linux Foundation announced that it would be hosting seven projects that originated at Call for Code for Racial Justice, an initiative driven by IBM and Creator David Clark Cause to urge the global developer ecosystem and open source community to contribute to solutions that can help confront racial inequalities.
Launched by IBM in October 2020, Call for Code for Racial Justice facilitates the adoption and innovation of open source projects by developers, ecosystem partners, and communities across the world to promote racial justice across three distinct focus areas: Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability; Diverse Representation; and Policy & Legislation Reform.
The initiative builds upon Call for Code, created by IBM in 2018 and has grown to over 400,000 developers and problem solvers in 179 countries, in partnership with Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host seven projects from Call for Code for Racial Justice, an initiative driven by IBM and Creator David Clark Cause to urge the global developer ecosystem and open source community to contribute to solutions that can help confront racial inequalities.
Call for Code for Racial Justice launched in October 2020, and facilitates the adoption and innovation of open source projects by developers, ecosystem partners, and communities across the world to promote racial justice across three focus areas: Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability; Diverse Representation; and Policy & Legislation Reform. The initiative builds upon Call for Code, which was created in 2018 and has grown to over 400,000 developers and problem solvers across 179 countries, in partnership with Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation.
“Open source technology has an important role to play in addressing the greatest challenges of our time, and that includes racial justice,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “We are excited to host and support these projects at the Linux Foundation, and look forward to how they will develop and deploy through contributions from the open source community.”
What is edge computing, and what does it mean for data workloads, latency, and our precious, precious bandwidth? Red Hat CTO Chris Wright reboots Technically Speaking in this first episode where we explore edge computing.
Enterprises have always used multiple generations of technology simultaneously. Enterprise applications need to be deployed into both VMs and containers, and enterprises need a converged platform to support both. So the question IT people have to answer is, "How can we manage existing applications running on virtual machines and new applications running on containers together in an unified platform?"
That is the mission of the open source project, KubeVirt. Downstream of that, Red Hat introduced OpenShift Virtualization (a.k.a. Container Native Virtualization) within the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a Kubernetes based platform.
A new start? 2020 came and went, and in the process, it left a mark in history and our lives that won’t be erased. Together, as a community, we all struggled, we all faced new challenges, we all united and did our best to help each other. We are grateful for the effort of our nurses, doctors, carers, scientific, essential workers, and innovators that have led this fight. We also take a moment to remember those that we have lost and those who have been affected the most.
We have started a new year, and while some of us might be still in lockdown, working from home and unable to visit our loved ones, we see a light at the end of the tunnel.
It will take some time. But it is definitely a new start.
Thank you to all of you that have followed this monthly blog. We are committed to our robotics community and to our innovators. We will keep working for you.
Thank you to all of you that have contributed to this blog. We want this to keep growing, so if you are working on (or know of) something that you think would be interesting to our audience, let us know. Send a summary of the work to robotics.community@canonical.com.
There’s a strict eligibility criteria for inclusion in this series. See the Eligibility Criteria section below.
Are you interested in shortwave radio? Radio waves in the shortwave band can be reflected or refracted from a layer of electrically charged atoms in the atmosphere called the ionosphere over extremely long distances. Skywave Schedules is just the ticket for anyone wanting to listen and identify stations broadcasting on shortwave.
It’s true that the days of shortwave radio have long sailed with many broadcasters deserting the airwaves and providing their schedule on the internet. But there’s still lots of broadcasters who maintain a presence. And listening to shortwave remains extremely valuable if you need to access news and information from a different perspective and your remote location doesn’t offer (unrestricted) internet access.
With Congress spending a lot of time these days demanding answers from big tech firms, you may have noticed a notable similarity in style regarding how they respond to these kinds of inquiries.
It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.
The pre-print paper in the Lancet shows there was an 80 per cent reduction in admission to intensive care units among hospitalised patients who were treated with large doses of Vitamin D, and a 64 per cent reduction in death. The possibility of these being chance findings are infinitesimally small, note the researchers. And to boot, the study found no side-effects even when these mega-doses were given short term to the hospitalised patients.
This article has been published in partnership with South Side Weekly and was supported by Shadowproof’s Marvel Cooke Reporting Fellowship.
A few days before Easter, Karl Battiste called his daughter Karla with a headache. He wasn’t feeling well and was worried about the spread of COVID-19 in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where he was incarcerated at the time.€
One year into the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, everyone in the United States should be familiar with the Centers for Disease Control’s coronavirus guidelines: Wear a mask, stay six feet apart, avoid crowds. There remains, however, one setting in which these guidelines are disregarded by the authorities themselves: prisons. In Wisconsin, for example, nearly 20,000 prisoners are held in facilities where, as the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) admits, they cannot socially distance. Unsurprising, then, that the Wisconsin DOC reports that more than half of all prisoners in its custody have tested positive for Covid.
"Unless production is significantly increased, many people in developing countries won't get vaccines until 2024. The pandemic cannot be stopped anywhere unless people are vaccinated everywhere."
Our nation's preeminent drug warriors rolled the dice on turning less than a half-gram of drugs into a lengthy prison sentence. They lost. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals isn't amused by the machinations of DEA agents (and federal prosecutors) who tried to turn a freebie sample into a drug trafficking conspiracy.
You might already know the story of Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s memoir that argues that a variety of social ills in Appalachia—low birth rates, declining religious affiliation, domestic violence—can be attributed to “hillbilly culture.” At the end of last year, Hollywood ran the book through a few spin cycles, bleaching its film adaptation of Vance’s virulent right-wing commentary, which places blame on government welfare programs for incentivizing perverse behaviors that tear families and society apart. Naturally, most critics scanned Elegy for its politics. However sanitized the movie is of Vance’s beliefs, it was still destined for the front lines of the culture war.
"There is no rational reason why Medicare pays nearly three times more than Medicaid and about twice as much as the VA for the same exact medicine."
While COVID-19 infection rates and hospitalizations appear to be waning, the United States has a long way to go before people can safely return to everyday life without masks. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says it’s vital to stay vigilant even as vaccinations ramp up. “If we can get our transmission down as low as possible, that is actually going to make the vaccines more effective.”
Traffic and transportation solutions developer PTV has extended the capability and benefits offered by its traffic simulation software PTV Vissim Kernel by making the program available to Linux users within the automotive industry.
PTV Group says the software is capable of reproducing realistic simulations of entire traffic environments, including the interactions and movement of different road users using a multitude of vehicles. Within the virtual environment an array of concepts can be reproduced including autonomous driving, shared mobility and Mobility as a Service.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9, libbsd, openssl1.0, php-horde-text-filter, qemu, and unrar-free), Fedora (kiwix-desktop and libntlm), Mageia (coturn, mediawiki, privoxy, and veracrypt), openSUSE (buildah, libcontainers-common, podman), Oracle (kernel, nss, and perl), Red Hat (xterm), SUSE (java-1_7_1-ibm, php74, python-urllib3, and qemu), and Ubuntu (libjackson-json-java and shiro).
VanDyke Software€®, a developer of multi-platform secure terminal emulation and secure€ file transfer software, today announced the official releases of SecureCRT€® 9.0 and SecureFX€® 9.0.
"We cannot pick and choose who the Constitution applies to," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib. "Our government cannot continue to violate the privacy of Americans."
While there are so many ways we’re living through exciting times in the world of technology, it’s not all good. It seems we’re dealing with privacy concerns from every direction. The latest is tracking pixels that are secretly embedded in our emails. What Are Tracking Pixels? Tracking pixels are also sometimes called “spy pixels,” and rightfully so, or “web beacons.”
There are obvious differences in the Democrats’ approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy. This assertion can be justified if the Democratic administration’s official language on Palestine and Israel is examined, and such language considered within the context of practical policies on the ground.
How the USS Enterprise was transformed into the USS Roach.
Obstacles left by Trump still stand in their way. Agreements he made with Honduras and Guatemala led to police attacking and dispersing the refugees. Scattered groups are still heading towards the Mexican frontier at Chiapas – according to one Trump-era official, ‘now our southern border’ – where they will face Mexican troops. If they eventually reach the Rio Grande, they’ll join 25,000 asylum seekers in camps, waiting to be processed by US border officials. Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s official charged with forming his new ‘secure, managed and humane’ migration policy, has asked them to be patient and pleaded for no new arrivals.
Why do people take these risks? The truth is that Honduras is a failed state and, unless US policy towards it changes radically, many thousands more will head north. Since the military coup in 2009 there have been three corrupt elections. The last, in 2017, which saw Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) re-elected when he had clearly lost, led to even more repression. Persecution of human rights defenders is unceasing, even after international condemnation of the murder of Berta Cáceres five years ago. Seven were killed in 2020, and four young leaders from Garifuna communities, abducted in a single night seven months ago, are still missing.
This election will have enormous consequences for Ecuador as well as the entire region. After four years of President Lenin Moreno’s neoliberal turn, which reversed the economic and social gains of former President Rafael Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution, the majority of Ecuadorians have opted for a change of course. An Arauz victory would once again prioritize social investment over IMF imposed austerity and resume Ecuador’s leadership in the movement towards regional integration. If the ultra right in Ecuador and Colombia have their way, however, Arauz will not make it to the run-off election.
Just a week prior to the first round, with Arauz ahead in most polls, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, who is a fierce opponent of the UNES candidate, met with the notoriously interventionist Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, in Washington. This meeting raised suspicions that efforts were underway to prevent a return of the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador.€ On February 12th,€ the Attorney General of Colombia, Francisco Barbosa arrived in Quito to meet with his Ecuadorian counterpart, Diana Salazar, armed with a dossier that allegedly shows the campaign of Arauz had received funding from the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerillas in Colombia. Although no independent corroboration of such charges have been presented to back these allegations, the echo chamber of right wing fake news is already urging election authorities in Ecuador to disqualify UNES in a bid to prevent Arauz from participating in the second round of the presidential election.
Since its inception 14 years ago, Politico has risen to become an internet news giant. Now employing over 700 people and reaching 50 million people per month, the website and newspaper has become one of the most trusted sources of information on political issues in the United States. Key to this is its range of influential newsletters, which reach millions every day.
A review of Tomorrow's Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth
Take five minutes today to do three things to #StopLine3.
India must adopt a clean energy policy, a real industrial revolution, if the world is to slow the rising climate crisis.
Millions of people in Texas were plunged into freezing cold and darkness as a major winter storm overwhelmed the state’s power grid. More than 12 million Texans face water disruptions and have been ordered to boil tap water for safe consumption, and some parts of the state have no running water at all. The state is also running out of food as the storms disrupt key supply chains. Leading Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, falsely blamed renewable energy sources for the state’s blackouts, warning against a shift to more green energy, but the state’s own energy department said the outages were primarily due to freezing at natural gas, coal and nuclear facilities. Despite the crisis, state leaders say they will not integrate Texas’s power grid with the rest of the country. “The impact of this storm is more than just power outages and inconveniences,” says Texas Southern University professor Robert Bullard, who warns that the additional costs associated with the crisis will hurt Black and Brown communities most. “That’s the inequity that’s piled on top of the inequity.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been presiding over a waking nightmare, as millions of Texans have been freezing because of massive power outages caused by the failure of the state’s energy grid. A career politician who is facing what may be the most serious crisis of his governorship, it comes as no surprise that Abbott is desperate to shift the blame away from himself. But his griping about the Green New Deal is deeply dishonest, and his attempt to blame alternative-energy strategies for the catastrophe he is overseeing is pathetic.
"Abbott has failed and passed off blame to somebody else. Texas is in dire straits. Texans are dying. Homes are being destroyed, people are cold and hungry, and we have no idea when things will begin to return to normal."
"Lives are already being lost because of Texas politicians' refusal to acknowledge and prepare for the realities of the climate crisis."
It’s far from surprising that Texas leaders are using a crisis to do some PR against real action on climate change. It’s strategy #1 in the GOP playbook for dealing with the existential crisis facing our nation.
Initial news reports described the facility — located in Dallas Pike, 50 miles southwest of Pittsburgh — as a truck stop cleaning station. However, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) confirmed to DeSmog that the facility, which the agency says is owned and operated by Ohio-based company Petta Enterprises, does a lot more than clean trucks: It processes oil and gas waste. And the agency confirmed that it was the volatile nature of this waste — transported inside trucks arriving at the site — that helped cause the€ blaze.
"Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet," said Secretary-General António Guterres. "It's time to reevaluate and reset our relationship with nature."
Ecological civilization is based on the consciousness that we are part of the Earth, not her masters, conquerors, or owners.
I “know” things I’d rather not consciously acknowledge. We all do. To be a human being is to implicate oneself in some degree of hypocrisy; existence is acquiescence to imperfection. If we want to live with a minimum of contentment, we have no alternative. But there is a difference between unavoidable, low-grade inconsistency—an inescapable element of the human condition—and eminently escapable hypocrisy. Avoidable hypocrisy comes in two flavors: hypocrisy which is structural, forced upon individuals by systems largely beyond any given individual’s control, and the chosen, flagrant hypocrisy of powerful people, so lulled by complacency and ideology that they fail to see how their behavior appears to an outside observer. Powerful people who are nonchalant upon being confronted with evidence of hypocritical behavior aren’t hypocrites: they’ve foresworn the claim to any modicum of consistency, opting for the stolid impenetrability of power. With them, the logic of hypocrisy does not obtain.
Trump, Mitch McConnell, and congressional Republicans fall into this latter category: they subscribe to the simple, age-old premise that might makes right. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must. Republican pseudo-populist politicians make only token efforts to deny swift 180-degree shifts in rhetoric—and they largely get away with it. If pushed, they will shrug, give an aw-shucks grin, and drop the pretext altogether. This abrupt jettisoning of pretense allows them to provide the cynical, weary masses—rightly embittered, hopeless, angry, tired of pious platitudes—the illusion of “telling it how it is.”
The panel’s 33 commissioners — medical professionals of all sorts, along with assorted notables in legal and economic circles — have just delivered their final report, and media outlets worldwide are taking notice. They’re headlining the commission’s most stunning stat: that some 200,000 fewer Americans would have diedfrom the coronavirus if the United States had treated Covid with the same level of public health competence that its peer developed nations have demonstrated.
“President Trump’s time in office,” the Lancet commission charges, “brought misfortune to the USA and the planet.”
Students, campaigners and top Democrats have been pushing President Joe Biden to use executive authority to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per person. Student loan debt in the U.S. stands at $1.7 trillion, with some 45 million people owing money. Filmmaker and organizer Astra Taylor, an author, documentary director and organizer with the Debt Collective, says Biden has clear legal authority to cancel student debt. “Not doing this is a choice,” she says. We also speak with Braxton Brewington, a digital strategist with the Debt Collective, who says student debt cancellation is also politically smart. “President Biden has a unique opportunity to bring together a broad coalition of individuals who otherwise would be unlikely to come together around a policy,” he says.
"The vast majority of borrowers that benefit from forgiveness hail from low- and lower-income communities," the study's authors affirmed.
The new letter coincides with a report debunking the claim that boosting tipped workers' wages will cause business closures.
I saw this Thomas Edsall piece in the NYT that includes a variety of genuflections about social media and democracy. What the piece never addresses is the responsibility of the mainstream media (thread)
It is one thing for random individuals to spew nonsense on social media sites. That is a real problem with no comprehensive solution.
PARIS — France’s Minister for Higher Education, Frederique Vidal, has sparked a nationwide controversy with her announcement that the government is attempting to stop the spread of what she called “Islamo-leftism” in universities. Part of the process, she said, would be for the state to decide “what is academic research and what is activism and opinion,” implying that academics would need government permission to research and write on topics deemed too politically sensitive.
Parliaments present a paradox. Encrusted with surveillance, crawling with security, safety would surely be guaranteed for all who work within their walls. But the environment of power, ambition and conspiracy lends itself to hierarchies, asymmetries, and inequalities. Politicians find themselves with access to budgets, forums and staffers. There are receptions and meetings to attend, liquor to consume in abundance, deceptions to cultivate. The risk of wandering hands is ever present.
The staffers, in turn, are mindful of their careers, insecure about their futures to the point of neuroses. They are expected to be unconditionally loyal to politician and party. Nikki Savva, herself a former staffer turned scribe, remembers the time: “The hours were long, the demands never-ending, the stress phenomenal and the fear of stuffing up overwhelming.” The staffer is permanently vulnerable and precariously positioned. Reasons for terminating employment are broad and susceptible to abuse. The parliamentarian can, for instance, do so for having “lost trust or confidence in the employee”. When politicians become arbiters of trust, the condition of the absurd has been affirmed.
I worked as a truck driver for years for Roadway (RPS), UPS and FedEx (a job I really enjoyed btw-people of all stripes are genuinely very respectful to package delivery folk, and I loved the uniform, particularly the shorts), but I digress. My truck always had Wisconsin Public Radio on but most trucks, and at most loading docks, Rush Limbaugh was the noise of choice.
I was a full-on leftoid by the early 90’s and his brand of shock jockery and “conservatism” were viscerally repulsive to my core. But I thought about him a lot because in the white male working class of south-central Wisconsin, he was king.
After 10 years as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo is facing an uproar over€ revelations€ that his administration€ intentionally and drastically undercounted€ the deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Meanwhile, in California, the once-bright political glow of Gavin Newsom has dimmed, in large part because of personally hypocritical€ elitism€ and a zig-zag “middle ground” approach to public-health safeguards during the pandemic, unduly deferring to business interests.
The political circumstances differ: Cuomo has been€ in conflict€ with New York progressives€ for many years€ over key policy matters, whereas Newsom was somewhat of a golden boy for Golden State progressives — if they didn’t look too closely at his corporate-friendly policies. But some underlying patterns are similar.
The Feb. 9 Washington Post article, “California’s rainy season now starts nearly a month later, increasing wildfire risk,” by Diane Leonard, “a science writer covering natural hazards,” quotes a Serbian climatologist in the third graph:
The other expert in the article was Daniel Swain, a climate scientist from UCLA. He offered this modestly accurate insight: “When you get to Thanksgiving, it’s pretty wet in Northern California – at least it used to be.”
The day was conceived by the ruling class as a declaration that U.S. capitalism would not be bullied or besieged by the likes of the Jan. 6 Trump-inspired mob of several hundred white supremacist, fascist wannabes, small groups of self-described paramilitary neo-Nazis, including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, some off duty police, off duty or retired military personnel, a sprinkling of fanatic Republican elected officials, and some 100 Proud Boy Hitlerites.
These political hucksters had combined two weeks earlier to violently push aside a handful of Capitol Police to occupy the Capitol building, unimpeded for several hours. More than a few noted that the violent invaders, partially armed and explicitly organized to nullify the Nov. 3 elections results, were allowed to peacefully exit the Capitol – no names taken or ID requested. A few heads rolled instantly at the top echelons of the federally-funded D.C. Capitol Police and House and Senate officials, who had made near zero security preparations. Embarrassed officials, vulnerable to having handled this internationally-viewed “insurrection” spectacle with kid gloves to say the least, subsequently organized a Justice Department and FBI-led national “manhunt” to round up some 250 Trumpers to date to face a variety of initially lesser charges – “unlawful entry and obstructing official proceedings.” These have now been expanded to include more serious felony charges of conspiracy to violently storm the Capitol building to disrupt the proceedings of Congress.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has dismissed as a false report from the investigative outlet Proekt connecting Putin’s aide Anatoly Seryshev to the persecution of 64-year-old historian and activist Yuri Dmitriev, who previously led the Karelian chapter of the human rights group Memorial.
“Navalny’s film said nothing about the fact that around ‘Putin’s palace’ no less luxurious and guarded estates have already sprung up like mushrooms,” writes the news outlet Open Media in its newly published investigation into the area surrounding the luxury residence on the Black Sea supposedly built for the Russian President. According to this “travel guide,” these ritzy properties belong to people from the president’s inner circle. Meduza sums up Open Media’s guide to “the Putin riviera,” in brief.
Oppositionist Vladimir Kara-Murza has appealed to Russia’s Investigative Committee seeking an investigation into reports implicating FSB agents in two apparent attempts on his life.
One of the arguments for changing Section 230 is that even if we needed it a long time ago when the Internet was new, now that the Internet has been around for a while and some of the companies providing Internet services are quite big, we don't need it anymore. This view is simply untrue: Internet service providers of every size still need it, including and perhaps even especially the big ones because they are the ones handling the greatest volume of user expression.
Regardless of one's opinions on the Middle East, everyone should be distressed by The Guardian's act of blatant censorship.
"When Big Tech's gatekeeper power is unchecked or a handful of dominant publishers can influence legislation, we get caught in a battle where users always lose."
None of this should have been a surprise. Back in September we wrote about Facebook publicly saying that if Australia went forward with its ridiculous attack on the open internet, and instituted a "news link tax" on Facebook and Google, that it would block news links on Facebook in Australia... and basically everyone ignored it. So, yesterday, when Facebook announced that it was no longer allowing news to be shared in Australia (and relatedly, no longer allowing the sharing of Australian news services on Facebook), it should not have been a surprise.
Compared to the classical type, digital fascism may well be furnished with the greatest propaganda machine the world has ever seen – the Internet. Unlike, classical fascism which used printed newspapers and radio, digital fascism transmits its hate messages through the Internet. These so-called social media are in fact anti-social media. They aren’t socially organised. Instead, a few monopoly corporations run Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and all the rest.
What allows digital fascism to thrive is the space these electronic platforms grant to right-wing extremism. Online platform corporations like Facebook, for example, hold on to the delusional idée fixe that their platform is not – and, in fact, should not – be an independent empire judging what is to be posted. So too the other gigantic monopolies. Their platforms, according to their self-serving ideology, are simply technical instruments that allow people to connect.
On Thursday, February 18, a Minsk court sentenced journalists Darya Chultsova and Katsyaryna Andreyeva from the independent television channel Belsat to two years in prison. They were found guilty of organizing protests, despite the fact that they were only running a live stream of the rally in question. Journalists from countries around the world have spoken out in support of these two women and human rights defenders have declared them political prisoners. Meduza recounts how the criminal case against Darya Chultsova and Katsyaryna Andreyeva€ came about and how their trial ended.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is coming under fire again from Democratic lawmakers, as well as from the American Postal Workers Union, who are calling for President Joe Biden to pave the way for DeJoy’s removal after the Trump-appointee announced higher mailing fees and logistical changes that could further slow down mail. The US Postal Service (USPS) has already suffered a more than 50% drop in on-time arrivals for first-class mail deliveries, according to the service’s own data.
It would be something of an understatement to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a big effect on our lives. One sector where people have had to re-invent themselves is the academic world. Core in-person activities like lectures, seminars, and conferences have been forced to move online. One advantage of a shift to virtual gatherings is that people can participate from around the world. However, for governments, that's less a feature than a bug, since it means they have less control over who is taking part, and what they are saying. In response to this development, the Ministry of Education in India has issued "Revised Guidelines for holding online/virtual Conferences, Seminars, Training, etc." (pdf). An opinion piece in The Indian Express calls it the "biggest attack in the history of independent India on the autonomy of our universities":
The Preventative Commission at the remand prison where Alexey Navalny is in custody has registered him a flight risk, the opposition politician wrote on Instagram on Thursday, February 18.
In November 2020, the French learned that their government was about to pass a law that could punish anyone sharing images or recordings of police officers with up to a year in prison and 45,000 euros in fines.
A court in Rostov-on-Don has sentenced activist Anastasia Shevchenko to four years probation after finding her guilty of violating Russia’s “undesirable organizations” law, reports lawyer Sergey Badamashin from the rights organization Pravozashchity Otkrytki.
PC Magazine recently unveiled their list of the best cities to work at home from. To make the list, the magazine examined affordable housing, the availability of fast gigabit broadband, reasonably priced internet connections in general, and the presence of employers with friendly work from home policies. At the top of the list? Chattanooga, Tennessee:
Intellectual property firms have steadily come around to the idea that they need to hire more attorneys from diverse backgrounds, including black and African-American attorneys – partly because of ethical considerations and partly because clients are increasingly demanding more diverse legal teams.
New research from the Perryman Group shows that inter partes review (IPR) is economically beneficial, even if co-pending district court litigation isn’t stayed. The Perryman study, commissioned by Unified Patents, examines IPR’s economic impact, including the difference between staying or continuing on with a co-pending district court case. There are two important findings in this study.
First, when IPR is conducted in parallel with district court litigation, it still has a positive impact on the overall efficiency of the patent system and the economy. This means that in any analysis focused on the overall efficiency of the patent system or the overall impact on the economy, institution of IPR is favored even when there is co-pending district court litigation. And since those are the precise factors that the Director of the USPTO is required to consider in prescribing regulations, this study is a signal that regulations that would deny IPR on the basis of co-pending litigation may well contravene the statutory factors which Congress directed the USPTO to use in rulemaking.
And second, the grant of a stay is associated with significantly greater savings and more positive impact. Over the 2014-2019 period of the Perryman study, around two thirds of requests for stay were granted. But while there were twice as many stayed cases as non-stayed, the Perryman study finds that stayed cases represented nearly fourteen times as much positive economic impact. That means that, for a given case, the positive economic impact of an IPR is multiplied approximately sevenfold if a stay is granted. That is a strong signal that there should, as many courts believe, be “‘a liberal policy in favor of granting motions to stay’ pending IPR.”
For years now, I have railed on the USPTO for its overly permissive posture when it comes to granting trademarks. The whole thing is far too easy, with far too little concern shown by examiners as to how distinct or useful proposed marks actually are. All of that being said, there are still some hoops you have to jump through to get a trademark. And there are some rules governing how to get through those hoops.
Back in 2010, we discussed that the at-the-time "spin class" craze in the fitness world was encountering the fact that one company, Mad Dogg Athletics, held a trademark on the term "spinning" for use in the fitness industry. Mad Dogg had taken to going around the world and threatening anyone else using the term with trademark infringement as a result. And, to be clear, they had a lot of targets for these threats, which factored into the argument that term was now generic and hadn't been properly enforced as a trademark for years.
