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Last week I was buying some gaskets in my local hardware store when I noticed that I was the only person wearing a mask except for one of the clerks at the registers and she had it below her nose. The last time I was there, just about everybody was masked.

Weve gotten blase about the whole pandemic thing in New Hampshire and for good reason: Were in pretty good shape. The amount of COVID-19 circulating freely is as low as it was at this point a year ago, so low that its easy to ignore.

But there are hints that our free-and-easy summer may be ending sooner than we hoped.

New cases of COVID-19 began rising in New Hampshire last week, although not by much. More alarmingly, new cases are rising in every single state, sometimes sharply. A few places, notably Los Angeles County (which has seven times the population of New Hampshire) have gone back to indoor mask mandates.

According to the CDC, the month of June saw 337 Americans die from COVID-19 on an average every day more than deaths from gunshot, car crashes and flu, combined.

Its a reminder that the pandemic is not anywhere near over in America. And in much of the rest of the world, as international news depressingly tells us, COVID-19 is a raging pandemic that kills thousands and hospitalizes millions and is helping to undermine entire economies.

This is, of course, due mostly to the Delta variant.

Weve long known that the Delta breed, to use my canine metaphor, is more contagious than the original virus. Now that its widespread, weve found that, happily, it does not seem to be more likely to cause serious illness. Thats good news but even so, if we have more cases, were going to eventually see more people in the hospital and more deaths.

The solution, of course, is to boost our natural immune system to make it harder for any variant of the COVID-19 virus to take root in our lungs.

I have done that through eating right, exercising and all that stuff, but mostly through vaccination. If more people followed suit we wouldnt have to be worrying so much.

Dont you wish they would? I sure do.

TheMonitorhas paused our daily updated charts. For coronavirus-related information and updates throughout the week, visitconcordmonitor.com/coronavirus.

How are we doing on vaccinations? Not good enough and not getting better.

For all practical purposes, nobody is getting vaccinated anymore in New Hampshire.

The first two weeks of July saw just 2,000 people added to the tally of those who had gotten their first shot and just 2,500 added to the fully vaccinated list maintained by the state Department of Health and Human Services.

It looks like were going to be stuck at 60% of the population getting vaccinated, although that could rise if a vaccine is developed for children under 12. Either way its nowhere near any sort of herd immunity, especially not with a more-contagious variant on the loose.

Whats the trend on the spread and impact of the disease? Good but there are hints of less good.

Our two-week average of new cases is still low 25 per day as of July 16, exactly what it was on July 16 of 2020 but last week saw more than 40 new cases of COVID-19 announced on three days running. That hasnt happened since mid-June.

Read more from the original source:
COVID hints that our free-and-easy summer may end early - Granite Geek - Concord Monitor

What states are included?

While they vary state to state, most of the items included in the tax reduction are school based, such as stationery and folders. However, some states include some expensive products in their qualifying items such as computers and software:

For many states on this list the reasons are for back to school preparation. With the new school year approaching, the tax-free weekends give parents and students some support in acquiring school items.

That is not to say they are the only ones who can utilise the weekends. These discounts apply to all shoppers.

However, some states have multiple tax-free holidays a year but for different reasons.

For example, Florida has two more tax-free weekends. These are in place so people can prepare for natural disasters. those were back in May and June. Other states which experience disasters such as Texas and Alabama have extra breaks as well.

Originally posted here:
When will the 2021 tax holiday be? - AS English

What a great formula for a grift: Find some gullible idiots who wish to free themselves of the tyranny of Big Tech, and get them to use your platform or buy your equipment. For the last year, various MAGA types have tried to set up alternatives to Twittermost notably the clown shows of Parler last year and Gettr this year. And now we have the advent of the Freedom Phone, which promises to be Completely. Uncensored. and comes pre-loaded with apps that freedom-lovers love to love, such as Parler and Rumble.

The device has been criticized for failing to deliver on the promise of breaking its users free of Big Tech. In fact, the phone offers very little by way of freedom except freeing you of an excess $500 thats been weighing down your pockets. The Freedom Phone itself is a clunky product designed to fleece nave consumers who dont understand how they are being exploited and productized by the tech industry (for a primer on this subject be sure to watch Netflixs The Social Dilemma).

One of the criticisms of the device is that contrary to its makers assertions, its actually just running Android. But this criticism is either misguided or offered in bad faith. Its true that this device is running a flavor of the Android operating system called LineageOS. Yet that in and of itself doesnt say anything about whether the device frees you from your Googlian overlords. Yes, Android is owned by Google, but once you grab an open source versionas LineageOS isand start tinkering, you can build pretty much anything you want and Google doesnt get to monitor you or collect your data just because your phone is running Android.

To put it another way: Android is a big toolbox that allows developers to build all sorts of software; it doesnt say anything, either good or bad, about the Freedom Phone that its running Android. Indeedif you plan on making a smartphone, thats almost your only option.

So no, the problem with the Freedom Phone isnt its OS. Rather, the problem is that it exists in an ecosystem where the users options for having a useful device without connecting it to services that deprive it of its freedom are exceedingly small.

Still, say you decide to buy one. Congratulations, youre the proud owner of a new Freedom Phone, free from Googles intrusive monitoring and censorship. But its also free of most of the reasons youd bother to own a phone and keep it charged and connected to the internet in the first place. You want email? You want to have your phone guide you to your next insurrection-planning meeting? You want a calendar to put that meeting on? You want a contact list that is shared with your computer? You want to make a handy shopping list (of groceries or, say, materials for protest signs and Molotov cocktails)? You want to do some research on just how bad critical race theory is? The minute you try, youll notice that your phone simply isnt as useful as it would be if it were connected to some of the services Big Tech provides. If you want to do those things, youve got to start installing Gmail and Facebook and the other apps that, well, defeat the purpose of having such a device.

You seethe phone isnt the problem. In fact, you can turn any Android phone into a freedom phone by signing out of your Gmail account, turning off your location sharing, and then only using the apps that swear on their mothers graves never to track you (and they might be lying).

All snickering aside, if the Freedom Phone were better executed, and perhaps marketed less to the right wing than to those with a general, both-sides-of-the-aisle concern about the growing social and political dominance of the tech giants, it might conceivably be a pretty resounding shot across the bow of smartphone retailers. After all, this is a device thats as disengaged from the primary culprits of digital dictatorship as it can be while still being minimally useful.

If the makers of the Freedom Phonegenuinely cared about freedom, they would not be focusing just on the right, but trying to tap into the widespread desire to use technology that doesnt exploit us or take advantage of our proclivity to become addicted to outrage. This is an admirable sentiment. If there really is a market for such a thing, perhaps someone of better faith and more competence can come and service this market. For now, though, the Freedom Phone is a gimmick being sold to people who dont know any better, and its purpose is not to reduce political anger but to put it front and center.

All that said, if youre going to buy a Freedom Phone, please tell them I sent you so that I can get a commission!

Go here to see the original:
The Freedom Phone Is a Cynical Gimmick - The Bulwark

UBports, which took on the task of maintaining the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS after Canonical abandoned it, has released OTA-18 with lots of improvements, but still based on the ancient Ubuntu 16.04.

According to the team, one of the big changes in this release is a rewritten Media-hub service, responsible for media playback and control. "20,526 lines of code later, the new media-hub emerged with better tests, a more contributor-friendly structure, and a few fixed bugs to boot," said the post introducing the release.

The OS update also improves efficiency. "We still have a lot of people using devices with just 1GB of RAM," the team explained. "OTA-18 almost always feels faster than OTA-17 on the same device."

Fairphone running Ubuntu Touch

Other fixes include automatic appearance of the on-screen keyboard in new browser tabs, a degree symbol on the on-screen keyboard, stickers added to the messaging app, snooze now works as expected in alarms, and "call audio was fixed on the Google Pixel 2."

That does not sound like much, but the team said "there are a lot of fixes that cost little in code but will have a huge impact in practice."

There are a few snags. Just 54 devices support Ubuntu Touch and, of those, just 28 support OTA-18. This includes Fairphone 2 but not PinePhone. According to a post in the PinePhone support forum: "Unfortunately, getting UT up and going on Pinephone/Pinetab is on the backburner until after the 20.04 upgrade."

What then of Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04? Apparently, progress is under way, and in fact the limited number of new features on OTA-18 is in part because "the small team of people who know the internals of Ubuntu Touch has been preoccupied with things other than OTA-18," most of those other things being connected with 20.04.

This includes work on Lomiri, the "convergence desktop" originally called Unity, until Canonical abandoned it. However, there will be an OTA-19 again based on 16.04 before we get a 20.04 release. There is more information on development progress in this Q&A.

On the plus side, users of Ubuntu Touch on the stable channel will get OTA-18 on compatible devices simply by "using the Updates screen of system settings."

It sounds like an uphill battle, though. UBports' Ubuntu Touch is one of several ways to run a free operating system on a smartphone, but all have snags. One approach is to base a phone on AOSP (Android Open Source Project), in which case there is an issue with Google's proprietary Play Services not being available see here for how the /e/ Foundation works around this problem. Another approach (as with Ubuntu Touch) is to base the OS on Linux and to rely on the Linux application ecosystem.

There is plenty of interest in the idea of a phone that is free from Google or Apple and the various ways they restrict, track, and control smartphones, but translating that interest into a viable alternative is problematic.

More:
Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04 - The Register

Former journalist Matthew Keys, who served two years in prison for posting his Tribune Company content management system credentials online a decade ago in violation of America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, has been ordered back to prison for violating the terms of his supervised release.

On Monday, Keys, 34, a resident of Vacaville, California, received an additional six-month sentence and 18 months of supervision with computer monitoring requirements, according to the US Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of California. The sentence follows from a judge's finding that Keyes intentionally deleted a YouTube account he was managing on behalf of his then employer, Comstocks Magazine.

"Businesses and individuals are already struggling against threats to the integrity of their data from hackers and data thieves, said Acting US Attorney Talbert in a statement on Monday. "They should not also have to worry about data destruction from former employees seeking retribution."

Keys's attorney, Mark Reichel, told The Register in a phone interview that he's appealing the decision.

"The reason we are appealing is the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is continuously being reinterpreted and reexamined in the courts of appeal, so any district judges ruling on a novel approach or unique circumstance as presented here clearly need to be reviewed in the appellate courts," said Reichel.

Initially indicted in 2013 [PDF] for posting his corporate username and password to IRC, which allowed a miscreant claiming to be a member of the Anonymous hacking group to alter a Los Angeles Time article, Keys was convicted under the controversial CFAA recently narrowed by the US Supreme Court and served his two-year sentence.

Following his release in 2018, he began working in 2019 as the digital editor at Comstocks Magazine in Sacramento, Caliornia, where he also managed the publication's social media and YouTube accounts.

According to the USAO, he resigned unexpectedly in January 2020, less than a year after he started and three months before his supervised release term was set to expire. He allegedly refused to turn over the credentials for the magazine's online accounts and subsequently is said to have emailed the publisher to express frustration with the publication's work environment and business practices.

"He accused editors of badgering him after hours, interrupting his sick leave, creating a hostile work environment, 'making comments about protected classes,' spreading lies about his work, and lying about the reasons for his departure," according to the judge's April 20, 2021 order [PDF].

A new assistant editor was hired around February, 2020, to take the place of Keys. But she found she could not login to the Google account associated with the magazine's YouTube channel the password had been changed and the videos were gone. Comstock's filed a police report and the ensuing investigation led authorities to conclude that Keys was responsible.

According to the judge's order:

The judge found the government's case persuasive, and Keys' explanation implausible, and concluded that Keys violated his release requirements.

Reichel nonetheless argues that what happened was not a CFAA violation, particularly in light of the US Supreme Court's recent Van Buren decision. "[The government] may think he did this and they obviously don't like it, but that doesn't make it a federal crime," he said. "Everything done with a computer does not become a CFAA violation."

Reichel hopes to have the case reviewed by the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Read the rest here:
Journo who went to prison for 2 years for breaking US cyber-security law is jailed again - The Register