Today saw the release of Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” Cinnamon Edition, a long term support release (supported until 2027).
Release notes at LinuxMint.com promise that it comes with “refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.”
Among the highlights: its Bluetooth manager is now Blueman (instead of Blueberry).
Blueberry depended on gnome-bluetooth, which was developed exclusively for GNOME. In contrast, Blueman relies on the standard Bluez stack which works everywhere and can even be used or queried from the command line. The Blueman manager and tray icon provide many features that weren’t available in Blueberry and a lot more information which can be used to monitor your connection or troubleshoot Bluetooth issues.
Out of the box Blueman features better connectivity, especially when it comes to headsets and audio profiles. In preparation for Linux Mint 21 the Blueman user interface was improved and received support for symbolic icons. Upstream, Blueman and Bluez are actively developed and used in many environments.
The lack of thumbnails for some common file types was identified as a usability issue. To address it a new Xapp project called xapp-thumbnailers was started and is now featured in Linux Mint 21. The project brings support for the following mimetypes:
– AppImage
– ePub
– MP3 (album cover)
– RAW pictures (most formats)
– Webp
Automated tasks are great to keep your computer safe but they can sometimes affect the system’s performance while you’re working on it. A little process monitor was added to Linux Mint to detect automated updates and automated system snapshots running in the background. Whenever an automated task is running the monitor places an icon in your system tray. Your computer might still become slow momentarily during an update or a snapshot, but with a quick look on the tray you’ll immediately know what’s going on….
Linux Mint 21 uses IPP, also known as Driverless Printing and Scanning (i.e. a standard protocol which communicates with printers/scanners without using drivers). For most printers and scanners no drivers are needed, and the device is detected automatically.
And there’s also a fabulous collection of new backgrounds.
Nichelle Nichols, the original actor of Star Trek’s Nyota Uhura, has passed away on Saturday, July 30. The news broke on the actor’s Instagram account, as announced by her son, Kyle Johnson.
OpenRazer as the independent open-source project providing Linux drivers and user-space daemon for Razer peripherals is out with its newest feature release…
After carrying the latest piece of the country’s Tiangong space station to orbit on July 24th, a Chinese Long March 5B rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, creating a dazzling (albeit somewhat unsettling) display as it crashed down in the Indian Ocean. A Twitter user named Nazri Sulaiman captured a 27-second clip of the rocket’s first stage breaking up in the skies above Kuching, Malaysia. Sulaiman and others initially confused the spacecraft with a meteor shower until astronomers correctly identified the debris as the remains of a Chinese rocket.
On Saturday afternoon, US Space Command confirmed the Long March 5B re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 12:45PM ET. China said most of the debris burned up in re-entry over the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Malaysia. Unlike many modern rockets, including the SpaceX Falcon 9, the Long March 5B can’t reignite its engine to complete a controlled atmospheric re-entry. That has led to worry about where the rocket would land every time China has launched one. On a test flight in 2020, remnants of a Long March 5B fell on villages in the Ivory Coast, leading to property damage.
Reentry looks to have been observed from Kuching in Sarawak, Malaysia. Debris would land downrange in northern Borneo, possbily Brunei. [corrected] https://t.co/sX6m1XMYoO
Following Saturday’s re-entry, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized China for lack of transparency. “The People’s Republic of China did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth,” he said on Twitter. “All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property.”
China plans to employ the Long March 5B at least two more times. In October, the rocket will carry the third and final part of Tiangong to space. Next year, it will do the same with the country’s Xuntian space telescope.
A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago analyzed data from a moving company, concluding that 59.4% of the moves in California were out of the state — the second-highest percentage for any state in America (behind only Illinois). And that percentage is growing, reports the Los Angeles Times, since between 2018 and 2019, California had a lower outbound move rate of just 56%.
Citing changes in work-life balance, opportunities for remote work and more people deciding to quit their jobs, the report found that droves of Californians are leaving for states like Texas, Virginia, Washington and Florida. California lost more than 352,000 residents between April 2020 and January 2022, according to California Department of Finance statistics [about 15,476 per month].
San Francisco and Los Angeles rank first and second in the country, respectively, for outbound moves as the cost of living and housing prices continue to balloon and homeowners flee to less expensive cities, according to a report from Redfin released this month. [Los Angeles residents] in particular, are flocking to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio and Dallas. The number of Los Angeles residents leaving the city jumped from around 33,000 in the second quarter of 2021 to nearly 41,000 in the same span of 2022, according to the report.
California has grappled with extremely high housing prices compared with other states, according to USC economics professor Matthew Kahn. Combined with the pandemic and the rise in remote work, privileged households relocated when they had the opportunity. “People want to live here, but an unintended consequence of the state’s environmentalism is we’re not building enough housing in desirable downtown areas,” Kahn said. “That prices out middle-class people to the suburbs [and creates] long commutes. We don’t have road pricing to help the traffic congestion, and these headaches add up. So when you create the possibility of work from home, many of these people … they say ‘enough’ and they move to a cheaper metropolitan area.” Kahn also pointed out that urban crime, a growing unhoused population, public school quality and overall quality of life are driving out residents.
“In New York City, but also in San Francisco, there are all these fights about which kids get into which elite public schools,” he said. “The rich are always able to hide in their bubble, but if the middle class looks at this quality of life declining, that’s a push factor to leave.”
Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather cited a June report that tracked the change in spending power of a homebuyer on a $2,500 monthly budget. While 11.2% of homes in Los Angeles were affordable on that budget, using a 3% interest rate, that amount swelled to about 72% in Houston and about 50% in Phoenix. “It’s really an affordability problem,” Fairweather said. “California for the longest time has prioritized single-family zoning, which makes it so people stay in their homes longer because their property taxes don’t reflect the true value. California is the epicenter of where the housing shortage is so people have no choice but to move elsewhere.”
The Times also notes figures from the Public Policy Institute of California showing that the state’s population did increase between 2010 and 2020 — but by just 5.8%, “below the national growth rate of 6.8%, and resulting in the loss of a congressional seat in 2021 for the first time in the state’s history.”
At least part of this seems tied to a sudden curtailing of immigration into California. UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian points out that immigration had offset California’s population outflow over the past two decades, but “Delays in processing migration requests to the U.S. were compounded during the pandemic, resulting in the lowest levels of immigration in decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Estimates showed a net increase of 244,000 new immigrants between 2020 and 2021 — roughly half the 477,000 new immigrant residents recorded between 2019 and 2020 and a drastic reduction from more than 1 million reported from 2015 to 2016.”
The state is also seeing a dwindling middle class, said Ohanian, who cited a report from the National Association of Realtors, outlining that the national median home sales price has reached $416,000, a record high. Meanwhile, California’s median home price has topped $800,000. “(California is) at a risk for becoming a state for very, very wealthy people and very, very low earners who receive state and local and federal aid that allows them to be able to live here,” Ohanian said. “We should worry about those in the middle who are earning that $78,000 household median income and is, at the end of the day, really struggling, especially if they have interest in buying a home.”
The big movie of the weekend is the CG animated film DC’s League of Super Pets, which famously stars a range of established actors, headlined by Kevin Hart and eventual Black Adam Dwayne Johnson. Super Pets joins Disney’s Lightyearfrom earlier this month, along with the now finally released Paws of Fury, in being…
Over time, normal wear-and-tear on kitchen appliances starts to take its toll, leaving our once-pristine ovens, dishwashers, and refrigerators with dings, dents, and scratches. Take that glass window on your oven door, for example. In addition to being covered in all types of food stains, they also have a tendency to…
According to some users of Google’s latest, affordably-priced flagship Android smartphone, the Pixel 6a, the device’s biometric security isn’t exactly secure, and that is a big problem.
The Google Pixel 6a was just released on July 28th to the masses, retailing in the US for $449. Compared to its bigger brethren the screen is smaller at
Back in 2018, MGM released the Tomb Raider reboot film starring Alicia Vikander that did solidly at the box office. A sequel seemed like a sure thing for Vikander’s take on Lara Croft, which was largely modeled after the events of Crystal Dynamics’ reboot trilogy, but then the pandemic cut off its production date, and…
“I started playing pickleball more than 50 years ago,” Bill Gates says in a new video — not long after the game was invented…
Now the 66-year-old Microsoft co-founder writes in a blog post that “I’ve been a little stunned — and delighted — by the sudden popularity of one of my favorite pastimes…”
Largely confined to the Pacific Northwest for decades, it has now emerged as America’s fastest-growing sport…. It’s best described as a mash up of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong. And if you haven’t heard of it, I expect you soon will….
Boredom was what got this sport started in 1965. Three dads living on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, came home one summer evening to find their children complaining that there was nothing for them to do. So, they found a net, a Wiffle ball, some ping-pong paddles, and created a game on an old badminton court that the entire family could play together…. Over the next year, the three friends worked together to develop a set of rules, formalize the court layout, and introduce a larger plywood paddle that was good for striking the ball. And they decided to call it pickleball… Meanwhile, word slowly spread in Seattle of this odd new pastime.
My dad was friends with the game’s inventors, Joel Pritchard, a state legislator and later Washington’s lieutenant governor, Barney McCallum, and Bill Bell. He learned about their creation and by the late 1960s, he got inspired to build a pickleball court at our house. I’ve been playing ever since. At the time, the pickleball community was very small. I doubt there were more than a thousand people in the Seattle area who had ever seen the sport when my family picked it up. And I don’t think anyone expected it would ever become a national phenomenon.
Today, there are more than 4.8 million players nationwide, a growth of nearly 40 percent over the last two years. And I expect it will only get bigger….
The best thing about pickleball, however, is that it’s just super fun. I look forward to playing a pickleball game with friends and family at least once a week and more often during the summer.
BMW is recalling 83 iX and i4 vehicles after investigating multiple battery fire incidents involving the two EVs. In an advisory spotted by Autoblog, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warns owners of select iX xDrive 50, iX M60, i4 eDrive40 and i4 M50 vehicles not to drive their cars, charge them or park them inside.
After first investigating an overseas incident involving a 2022 i4 eDrive back in April, BMW found a manufacturing defect with select Samsung SDI battery cells in iX models produced between December 2nd, 2021 and June 30th, 2022, and i4 models built between November 22nd, 2021 and June 13th, 2022.
BMW has already notified dealers of the recall. The automaker will replace the batteries in affected vehicles free of charge. BMW adds it’s not aware of any accidents or injuries due to the battery defect. Affected owners can expect a notification letter by September 19th. You can also contact BMW support ahead of time for more information.
For those worried about a potential repeat of the situation Chevy Bolt owners went through with GM, it’s worth noting BMW sources batteries for its iX and i4 EVs from two manufacturers: CATL and Samsung SDI. By contrast, GM single-sourced the Bolt’s battery from LG Chem before it announced a worldwide recall in 2021.
Porsche has unveiled its latest generation of the 911 GT3 R, and it is an absolute beast. The new model will make its first appearance in public at this year’s 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps.
The sleek and rounded lines of the Porsche 911 are easily recognizable to fans of the iconic body style. Michael Dreiser, Sales Director at Porsche
“Lunar scientists think they’ve found the hottest places on the Moon,” reports Live Science, “as well as some 200 ‘Goldilocks’ zones that are always near the average temperature in San Francisco.”
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report:
The moon has wild temperature fluctuations, with parts of the moon heating up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and dropping to minus 280 F (minus 173 C) at night. But the newly analyzed 200 shaded lunar pits are always always 63 F (17 C), meaning they’re perfect for humans to shelter from the extreme temperatures. They could also shield astronauts from the dangers of the solar wind, micrometeorites and cosmic rays.
Some of those pits may lead to similarly warm caves. These partially-shaded pits and dark caves could be ideal for a lunar base, scientists say.
“Surviving the lunar night is incredibly difficult because it requires a lot of energy, but being in these pits and caves almost entirely removes that requirement,” Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student in planetary science at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author on the NASA-funded research published online July 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, told Live Science.
The national news cycle may have largely moved on from coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic — despite, as of this writing, infections being on the rise and more than 300 deaths tallied daily from the disease. But that certainly doesn’t diminish the unprecedented international response effort and warp speed development of effective vaccines.
In The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Loftus takes readers through the harrowing days of 2020 as the virus raged across the globe and biotech startup Moderna raced to create a vaccine to halt the viral rampage. The excerpt below takes place in early 2021, as the company works to adapt its treatments to slow the surging Delta variant’s spread.
Viruses of all types frequently change. They mutate as they jump from person to person. The coronavirus was no different. Throughout the pandemic, health officials tracked variants of the SARS CoV-2 virus first found in Wuhan, China, as those variants arose. None seemed a big concern, until one was flagged in the United Kingdom in December 2020, right as Moderna’s vaccine neared approval. This UK variant appeared to be as much as 70 percent more transmissible. It was given the name the Alpha variant.
Alpha reinforced the possibility that the virus could mutate enough to become resistant to vaccines and treatments that were designed to target the earlier, predominant strain. Or it could fizzle out. But variants would keep coming. Shortly after Alpha, researchers identified another variant circulating in South Africa. Beta.
In late December—just a few days after the United States authorized its vaccine — Moderna issued a statement that it was confident the vaccine would be effective at inducing the necessary immune response against variants. The original vaccine targeted the full length of the spike protein of the coronavirus, and the new variants appeared to have mutations in the spike protein that represented less than a 1 percent difference from the original.
“So, from what we’ve seen so far, the variants being described do not alter the ability of neutralizing antibodies elicited by vaccination to neutralize the virus,” Tal Zaks said during a virtual appearance at the all-important J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2021. “My definition of when to get worried is either when we see real clinical data that suggest that people who’ve either been sick or have been immunized are now getting infected at significant rates with the new variants.”
Even if the vaccine proved less effective against a new variant, Moderna could use its mRNA technology to quickly tweak the design of its Covid-19 vaccine, to better target a variant of the virus, Zaks said. After all, the company and its federal health partners had already demonstrated the year before how quickly they could design, manufacture, and test a new vaccine.
Still, Moderna needed to run a series of tests to see if its original vaccine offered the same high level of protection against variants as it showed in the big Phase 3 clinical trial.
Moderna collaborated again with researchers from NIAID including Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett. They analyzed blood samples taken from eight people who were vaccinated with Moderna’s shot in the Phase 1 trial back in early 2020. They essentially mixed these blood samples with the coronavirus variants, engineered so they copied the mutations of the variants but couldn’t replicate and pose a threat to lab researchers. Researchers then analyzed whether the vaccine-induced antibodies present in the human blood samples could effectively neutralize the virus variants.
The results were mixed. They suggested the vaccine worked as well against the UK Alpha variant as against the original strain of the coronavirus. That was good news. Even if the UK variant spread more easily than the original virus, Moderna’s vaccine could probably mute its effects.
But the Beta variant first identified in South Africa seemed to pose a problem. The vaccine-induced antibodies had a significantly reduced neutralization effect on this strain in the lab tests. “Oh shit,” Bancel said when Stephen Hoge showed him the data. It wouldn’t be the last time. Moderna’s leaders saw the data on a Friday in late January 2021 and spent the weekend discussing it. They hoped that a modified, variant- targeted vaccine wouldn’t be needed, and that Moderna’s original vaccine would suffice, even if it had a reduced neutralizing effect. But Moderna didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if a variant-specific booster was needed.
They decided by the next Monday it was time to take action. They would develop a new version of the vaccine, one that more closely matched the mutations seen in the strain that circulated in South Africa, and which could potentially be given as a booster shot to better protect people who had gotten the original vaccine.
“It really highlights the fact that we need to continue to stay vigilant,” Moderna’s president, Stephen Hoge, said. “This virus is evolving, it’s changing its stripes. And we need to keep testing the new variants, and make sure the vaccine works against them.”
Moderna repeated the steps it took a year earlier: it quickly designed a new variant vaccine and manufactured an initial batch for human testing, shipping it to NIAID in late February, a year to the day after it had shipped the original batch of the original vaccine. The new batch was called mRNA-1273.351, appending the “351” because researchers initially called the variant seen in South Africa “B.1.351.”
“Moderna is going to keep chasing the variants until the pandemic is under control,” Bancel said that day.
Moderna also developed other plans to test. It would try a third dose of its original vaccine, given several months after the second dose, to see if that booster shot would protect against variants. It would also develop a combined vaccine that targeted both the original strain and the Beta strain.
Once again, volunteers stepped up to test these various approaches. Neal Browning, the Microsoft engineer who was the second person to get Moderna’s vaccine, showed up once again to volunteer. In the intervening year, he had gotten married, in a small outdoor ceremony to minimize Covid risk. Now he received a third dose of the Moderna vaccine. He felt tenderness at the injection site and a low-grade fever and chills, but the symptoms went away after several hours. He continued to visit the research site to give blood samples to be analyzed for immune responses.
By early May, Moderna had some answers. It gave booster shots — either the original vaccine or the Beta variant – targeting vaccine — to people about six to eight months after they had been vaccinated with two doses of the original vaccine. The company found that in the new analysis, both types of booster shots increased neutralizing antibodies against the Beta variant. And they increased antibodies against a related variant that had been detected in Brazil. But the newer version of the vaccine that targeted Beta induced a stronger immune response against the Beta variant than the booster shot of Moderna’s original vaccine.
At the time, Moderna’s plan was to continue testing the different booster approaches, with an eye toward possibly getting government approval to sell the booster shot that specifically targeted the Beta variant. But it didn’t seem particularly urgent. The existing mass vaccination campaign was making good progress at the time.
Then, with the virus on the retreat in the United States, scientists discovered a new variant driving an alarming surge in India. This variant had already jumped to other countries, including the United States. Initially, it was code-named B.1.617.2. It was even more contagious than the Alpha variant and there were fears that it could evade vaccines. This was the Delta variant.
The previous winter the hope provided by vaccines was juxtaposed with the deadliest virus surge in the United States. Again, in early summer 2021, the lifting of mask mandates and reopening of public life was bringing great hope and a sense of relief. And again, this would be juxtaposed with public-health officials sounding the alarm about the Delta variant. It could become the dominant strain of the virus in the United States, they said. The best way to stop its spread, officials said, was to get more people vaccinated, with any of the three vaccines available.
By mid-June, about 55 percent of the US adult population was fully vaccinated, which was good but still left many people exposed to the new Delta variant that spread much more easily than earlier strains. And there were clear geographic vulnerabilities. The Northeast United States had higher vaccination rates than the national average, particularly in some New England states, like Vermont with its 62 percent vaccination rate. But in the South the numbers were much lower in states like Alabama, where only 30 percent were fully vaccinated.
The high proportions of unvaccinated people in those places would serve as a breeding ground for Delta. And the more the variant spread, the more it could mutate into more variants.
By late July, the effects of an ill-fated combination — stubbornly low vaccination rates in some regions, the winding down of masking and distancing, and a rapidly spreading Delta strain—were clearer. Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths were climbing again, especially in open states like Florida, which suffered one of the highest rates of Covid-19 hospitalizations, and low-vaccinated states.
Doctors and nurses who thought they had put the worst of the pandemic behind them were once again scrambling to treat severely ill Covid-19 patients in intensive-care units. By the end of August, the United States was averaging about fifteen hundred Covid-19 deaths a day, versus fewer than two hundred in early July. Nearly all of the patients who ended up in the ICU were unvaccinated.
Some vaccinated people were beginning to test positive for Covid-19, too — commonly called “breakthrough” cases—and a few progressed to severe cases. The vaccines, after all, weren’t 100 percent effective in the clinical trials, either. A small percentage of vaccinated people in the studies got sick with Covid. But it was becoming clear that the vaccines weren’t entirely blocking transmission of the virus or stopping asymptomatic infections, as initially hoped.
Vaccinated people were better protected than unvaccinated people, even when Delta took over. In states like Massachusetts, less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people in the state had tested positive for Covid-19 by the fall of 2021. Other analysis showed that people who weren’t fully vaccinated were nearly five times more likely to get infected, ten times more likely to be hospitalized and eleven times more likely to die from Covid than fully vaccinated people.
But Delta reminded people, or made them understand for the first time, that the vaccines weren’t bullet-proof. New indoor mask mandates were imposed, including at schools, where educators just weeks earlier had been eager for the first normal back-to-school season in two years. No vaccine was yet authorized for children under twelve (both Moderna and Pfizer were studying that population), raising concerns that Delta would spread rapidly among them as they gathered in classrooms.
By the end of the summer, people wondered if the pandemic would ever end. Some started talking about the coronavirus as endemic, not a pandemic.
And a big slice of America was still saying “No thanks” to the vaccine.
Contrary to popular belief, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. On top of that, BA.5, the current variant making the rounds, is highly transmissible, and tends to evade some of our protections against the virus when it comes to (re)infection. (Having said that, vaccines continue to provide protection against severe…
Digimonisn’t quite the juggernaut it was back when us 90s kids were watching it early in the morning before school, but Toei has been gradually releasing more of it over the years. For anime fans, there was a reboot of the original Digimon Adventure season that premiered last year and whose English dub is currently…
If you missed the chance to buy the Apple TV 4K when it was $59 off a few weeks ago, now is your opportunity to purchase it at that price again. Amazon has discounted the 32GB model to $120, making it only $10 more than it was during Prime Day. That’s a compelling price for one of the best streaming devices you can buy.
Engadget senior editor Devindra Hardawar awarded the 2021 Apple TV 4K a score of 90. Highlights include a much improved Siri remote and a more powerful A12 Bionic chip. The latter allows the Apple TV 4K to output HDR video at up to 60 frames per second and deliver excellent gaming performance.
If you own a handful of other Apple devices, you’ll appreciate the Apple TV 4K’s support for AirPlay. The wireless protocol makes it easy to share video, photos and music from your iPhone, iPad or Mac to your TV. With SharePlay built-in, you can even participate in watch parties over FaceTime with friends and family. For those with AirPods, Apple updated the Apple TV 4K last fall to add support for spatial audio so you can enjoy a more immersive experience without buying an expensive sound setup.
The Apple TV 4K also supports all of the most popular streaming services, including Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu and more. One of the most significant drawbacks of Apple’s streaming device is its expensive price tag, but that’s something the $59 discount helps address.
“The Anonymous declaration of cyberwar was a top news story despite no evidence,” writes cybersecurity specialist Jeremiah Fowler (an American who worked in Kyiv for the last 10 years — until fleeing in February to Poland). To investigate, Fowler performed a random sampling of 100 exposed Russian databases — and discovered that 92 of them had indeed been compromised. “Anti-Russian hackers used a similar script to the infamous ‘MeowBot’ that changed the name of folders and deleted the contents of the files. ” (For example, renaming the folders to “putin_stop_this_war”.)
And that was just the beginning, reports CNBC:
Anonymous has claimed to have hacked over 2,500 Russian and Belarusian sites, said Fowler. In some instances, stolen data was leaked online, he said, in amounts so large it will take years to review. “The biggest development would be the overall massive number of records taken, encrypted or dumped online,” said Fowler. Shmuel Gihon, a security researcher at the threat intelligence company Cyberint, agreed that amount of leaked data is “massive.”
“We currently don’t even know what to do with all this information, because it’s something that we haven’t expected to have in such a short period of time,” he said….
The more immediate outcome of the hacks, Fowler and Gihon agreed, is that Russia’s cybersecurity defenses have been revealed as being far weaker than previously thought.
Fowler’s report argues that Anonymous has “rewritten the rules of how a crowdsourced modern cyberwar is conducted” — with the group also offering penetration testing to Ukraine, “finding vulnerabilities before Russia could exploit them.” But in addition, Fowler writes, Anonymous’s efforts have also “transformed into a larger operation that spread far beyond the Russian government, companies, or organizations, and included an information campaign aimed at Russian citizens.”
Some examples:
Hacking Printers — Russian censorship has blocked many inside the country from knowing the true scale of the war and Russian losses. Anonymous hacked printers across Russia and printed uncensored facts or anti-propaganda and pro-ukrainian messages. The group claims to have printed over 100,000 documents. This also includes barcode printers at grocery stores where prices were changed and product names were changed to anti-war or pro-Ukrainian slogans….
RoboDial, SMS, and Email Spam — Almost everyone on earth has received some form of spam in the form of a phone call, text, or email message. These usually try to sell a service or scam victims out of money. Now this same technology has been used to bypass Russian censorship and inform citizens of news and messages they are forbidden to learn on state sponsored propaganda channels. Anonymous affiliated Squad303 claimed to have sent over 100 million messages to Russian devices.
At DebConf22 in Kosovo that recently wrapped up, Lenovo’s Mark Pearson who leads the company’s Linux initiatives talked in-person about their 2022 platform support for Linux and their progress over the past year. In 2022 they expect 30+ platforms with Linux support…
All the recent heat and humidity may be causing you to spend more time in the shower or bath than usual. And if you pay for water (or are concerned about conserving it), you may be wondering which is harder on your wallet (and the environment): Showering or bathing? Here’s what to know.
