Apple Music has rebranded its A List: Hip-Hop playlist to Rap Life while adding a weekly show with the same name to Beats 1 Radio. The changes have been led by Apple’s global editorial head of hip-hop and R&B, Ebro Darden.

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The post Apple Music reinvigorates hip-hop efforts with ‘Rap Life’ playlist and Beats 1 show to ‘move at the speed of culture’ appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state and 2020 presidential hopeful, is most known for his detailed plans to tackle our planet’s biggest threat: the climate crisis. But as he explained to Daily Kos backstage at Netroots Nation, he has ideas on how to solve what he believes is America’s biggest problem: Donald Trump.

“We need to make Donald Trump a blip in history,” Gov. Inslee told us backstage at the progressive conference. Trump, Inslee noted, “has never missed an opportunity to give license to racial hatred” and “has never used his position of leadership to bring more love and less hate.”

Inslee didn’t deal in niceties when it came to how important it is to vote the president out of office. He used a word to describe the president that might ring true to your own perception of him, too: insecure. “We have suffered because we have a person in the White House who is very insecure,” Inslee said, “and he has decided to intentionally use the power of fear rather than the energy of hope.”

Utilizing the energy of hope, and cleaning up the countless messes created by Donald Trump, can also describe the overarching theme of Netroots Nation, the country’s biggest progressive conference. At the conference, held this year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, organizers, activists, and politicians, including many of those running for the Democratic presidential nomination, gathered to share their insights on how to get this country back on track. 

The video interview embedded below is part of Making Progress, a new, exclusive series here at Daily Kos. In addition to Gov. Inslee, we’ve shared interviews with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. In addition to the 2020 hopefuls, we have dozens of fresh takes from leading organizers and activists from around the country, all with one goal in mind: making progress.

A transcript is below.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Starting Wednesday, July 17, 2019, the Kazakhstan government has started intercepting all HTTPS internet traffic inside its borders. Local internet service providers (ISPs) have been instructed by the local government to force their respective users into installing a government-issued certificate on all devices, and in every browser. The certificate, once installed, will allow local government agencies to decrypt users' HTTPS traffic, look at its content, encrypt it again with their certificate, and send it to its destination. Kazakh users trying to access the internet since yesterday have been redirected to web pages that contained instructions on how to install the government's root certificate in their respective browsers, may it be a desktop or mobile device.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you’re new to macOS and need to learn some basics for dealing with text, here’s how to copy and paste on your Mac, three different ways.

Donald Trump is doubling down on the decades-long Republican war on government. He just feels empowered to take it to levels never before conceived of. Where Republicans previously tried to do it within the normal bounds of the appropriations process, by starving agencies and forcing attrition, Trump is doing it by literally playing with employees’ lives.

The administration is relocating two research agencies within the Department of Agriculture from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City (it hasn’t been disclosed so far whether that’s the Missouri side or the Kansas side) and most of the Bureau of Land Management's D.C. staff to Grand Junction, Colorado. This means dozens of federal workers who can't just uproot their lives and their families from their homes are leaving the government.

That's not the only problem, though, because the targeted staff are some of the leading experts in their agencies, scientists and regulators who've made their careers in public service. It's a war on government and a war on science. "These decisions […] are meant to displace seasoned scientists and regulators who have honorably served Republican and Democratic Administrations alike," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, told ThinkProgress. "This Administration is acting to undermine the subject-matter experts at many of our federal agencies," said Van Hollen, who noted that he would "continue to use every tool available to push back against these actions."

More than half of the employees in the USDA's Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture have declined to relocate. The ERS staff, in particular, are concerned that it's intended to disrupt their scientific work on climate change and environmental issues. Employees in these two agencies have been issuing reports and conducting studies showing the impact that Trump's trade war with China and his environmental policies have been having on agriculture in particular. The workers rightly see these relocations as retribution.

One option Congress has, with Democrats in control of the House, is to block funding for the relocations, and Van Hollen, along with other senators, has introduced legislation to keep the agencies in D.C.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing Thursday, the acting Department of Homeland Security secretary said that “fewer than 1,000 juveniles have been separated from their parents crossing the border this fiscal year,” like that’s something to be proud of.

“Under current practice governed by both executive and court orders, along with operational guidance, separations of parents and guardians and the children they cross with are rare,” claimed Kevin McAleenan, saying that separations “are undertaken in the best interests and safety and welfare of the child.”

But only in the Trump administration’s twisted thinking can 1,000 separations be “rare,” because that’s still roughly a third of the number of children that were kidnapped from their parents under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy last year, and of those nearly 3,000 kids stolen, 30 remain in U.S. custody, more than a year after a court order.

Border officials have continued to separate hundreds of families by exploiting a clause in that order that allowed a child to be removed if they were considered to be in danger. McAleenan references some sort of “operational guidance,” but advocates have said border officials have been tearing families apart with no input from actual child welfare experts, instead falsely accusing some parents fleeing gangs of having gang ties.

Nor does the number cited by McAleenan “include children who come with older siblings, or aunts and uncles and grandparents and are separated under longstanding policy meant to guard against human trafficking,” PBS reports. “McAleenan said Congress would need to amend laws to allow border officers more discretion in order to keep those groups together.” Interesting when the Trump administration chooses to be bound by Congress and when it chooses not to be bound by Congress. 

Nonbiological parents are equally valid guardians for children, and border officials can make the decision to keep them together, but instead they’re tearing them apart just as they tear apart children who are coming with their biological parents. It’s never been about “the best interests and safety and welfare of the child,” as McAleenan has claimed; it’s been about the cruelty. Family separation remains a crisis. 

Pete Hegseth, Trump's #1 presidential fluffer, got an earful from Geraldo Rivera, who basically said he'd beat him up if Pete dared to say the same thing to him that Trump said to the four freshmen Congresswomen.

Geraldo Rivera, a friend of Trump, joined Fox and Friends this morning and vented his frustration over Trump's racist tweet directed at Ilhan Omar and her colleagues.

Trump's tweet culminated into a racist exhibition when his rallygoers chanted at Rep. Ilhan Omar, "send her back."

The Fox News morning show played video of Trump making believe he didn't like the racist chants his rallygoers were spewing at his North Carolina rally.

Geraldo explained, "'Go back to where you came from' is the old racist trope that all of us, ethnic or racial minorities, have grown up with at various times. It is unforgivable at this day and age, and I really lament that it came up."

Rivera continued, "We cannot ever fall back into that lazy kind of "the other" that we did for several days there."

That kind of honesty on Fox News about Donald Trump was too much for Hegseth to handle so he tried to rewrite and lie about the meaning of Trump's racist tweet.

And as he was doing so he got a little more than he bargained for.

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Pwn20wnd updated the unc0ver jailbreak tool twice on Friday, bringing the tool up to version 3.3.5. The latest version now supports Jake James’ Sock Port exploit for A7-A9(X) devices running iOS 11.0-12.1.4.

Where does one begin when the defense of Donald Trump turns into an economic rationalization for slavery, and that race never entered into the equation?

It's sometimes hard to believe that we're actually living in the twenty-first century when you hear people say things like this. But I suppose for people like Werner Horn slavery is, or at least was, just a natural part of the human condition.

Source: Fox News

A lawmaker in New Hampshire said this week that American slavery had nothing to do with racism and was just purely about economics.

Republican state Rep. Werner Horn raised eyebrows in a now-deleted social media post, insisting those who owned slaves weren’t racist and were just making a “business decision.”

The lawmaker made the comment in response to former state House member Dan Hynes who criticized President Trump over his tweet that four freshmen congresswoman, all American citizens, should “go back” to their home countries, USA Today reported.

“If Trump is the most racist president in American history, what does that say about all of the other presidents who owned slaves?” wrote Hynes on Facebook.

This prompted Horn to respond, writing “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist…”

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On Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted that the United States had shot down an Iranian drone that had come too close to an American ship. Almost immediately, Iran claimed the event never happened, and that all its drones were safely tucked in at their bases. It’s a measure of how Trump has handled international relations that no one seems to know whom to believe.

As The New York Times reports, military officials state that a “relatively small drone” was fired on after coming within a kilometer of the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer in the Strait of Hormuz. The statement says that the drone was “shot down over international waters,” but it doesn’t provide any information about any portions of the drone being recovered.

Meanwhile, CBS News reports that Iranian officials deny that they’re missing a drone. Not in the strait. Not anywhere. The Iranian deputy foreign minister even suggested that the United States might have shot down one of its own drones by mistake.

This high stakes version of “You touched me,” “No, I didn’t” is playing out less than a month after Iran very definitely did shoot down an American drone. That event, also involving a drone that was apparently in international waters but that was judged to be too close to a vital asset, ratcheted up the tension between the two nations to the point that Trump ordered a military strike on Iran … only to call it off after planes were already in the air.

In between those two drone events, Iran also made it clear that it intended to enrich more uranium than was allowed under the terms of the former agreement preventing it from developing nuclear weapons—the agreement from which Trump withdrew despite its being a legal treaty and despite his having no evidence that Iran was in violation at that time. Now Iran is very much waving its flag to show that it is willing to violate that former treaty because the United States has been squeezing Iran through increasingly tight economic sanctions, including threatening any nation that buys oil from Iran.

Which means that the odds of a conflict remain high—and while Iran shooting down an American drone was seen by Trump as provocation of war, America shooting down an Iranian drone is … also seen by Trump as a provocation of war.

Jared Bernstein writes today about four ideas that economists have gotten wrong for decades. You can read the whole thing here, but the details are less interesting than his entirely correct conclusion:

Pegging the “natural rate” too high, ignoring the harm from exposure to international competition, austere budget policy, low and stagnant minimum wages — all of these misunderstood economic relationships have one thing in common.

In every case, the costs fall on the vulnerable: people who depend on full employment to get ahead; blue-collar production workers and communities built around factories; families who suffer from austerity-induced weak recoveries and under-funded safety nets, and who depend on a living wage to make ends meet. These groups are the casualties of faulty economics.

In contrast, the benefits in every case accrue to the wealthy: highly educated workers largely insulated from slack labor markets, executives of outsourcing corporations, the beneficiaries of revenue-losing tax cuts that allegedly require austere budgets, and employers of low-wage workers.

It’s funny how mistakes like this always seem to point in the same direction, isn’t it? And I’d add at least one more: that lower taxes on the rich are good for the economy. There is, at best, some thin evidence that this is true if top marginal rates are very high, but that’s about it. In the America that we actually live in today, there’s simply no reason to think that cutting taxes on the rich will have any effect other than the rich paying lower taxes and the budget deficit going up.

But don’t expect to stop hearing this anyway—or any of Bernstein’s other four examples. They’re just too convenient for the rich and powerful.

New submitter SpaceForceCommander writes: Tech unemployment hasn't been this low since the turn of the century, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data crunched by CompTIA. As of May, tech's unemployment rate sat at 1.3 percent. "There is now the very real prospect of tech worker shortages affecting industry growth," Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying the data. "Firms seeking to expand into new areas such as the Internet of Things, robotic process automation or artificial intelligence may be inhibited by a lack of workers with these advanced skills, not to mention shortages in the complementary areas of technology infrastructure and cybersecurity." Tech's unemployment rate previously hit 1.4 percent, in April 2007 and March 2018. (The BLS began measuring occupation-level employment data in January 2000.) However, not all segments within tech are adding jobs at the same rate; although custom software development and computer systems design gained 8,400 new positions in May, for example, both information services and telecommunications saw modest losses. Meanwhile, new data from PayScale suggests that wages within the tech industry grew 2.3 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2019. That's an indicator that the low unemployment rate is forcing employers to pay more in order to secure the talent they need.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Watch Sport Bands in various styles are just $5, plus a new weekend Apple movie sale and the Siri-enabled Emerson Sensi smart thermostat is on sale.

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The post Friday deals: Apple Watch Sport Bands $5, iTunes movie sale, and Emerson HomeKit Thermostat $89 appeared first on 9to5Mac.

The media has given us a frustratingly sexist and racist narrative that the only formidable Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election is a white man. We have been bombarded with headlines and sound bites that reinforce the idea that only a white man can beat Donald Trump in 2020.

Ironically, this is happening on the backdrop of an election cycle that will have the most diverse field of Democratic candidates based on gender, race, and sexuality ever in this country's history. There are more women running, people of color, and candidates with a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds, but the mainstream narrative continues to center around the idea that the only “electable” presidential candidates are white men. Why are we so obsessed with the notion that only a white man can save us from Trump? Fact is, as the American electorate becomes younger and more diverse, there is a growing desire for candidates that are also more reflective of this new electorate.  

We are in a defining moment in this country’s political history and voters are looking for something different. We believe that the majority of voters want a reflective democracy. Last year’s blue wave gave us the most diverse Congress in our history, with over 100 women serving in the House for the first time ever. A record 37% of them were women of color. And it wasn’t an accident—women and candidates of color were more likely to win their primary races, proving that the electorate hungers for more diverse leadership and reflective democracy.

Another data point: no white male presidential candidate has ever hit 63 million votes. Two candidates have hit 65 million: a black man, and a white woman. Makes sense, doesn’t it, that candidates that look like America get more votes, right?

Sure there are those that refer to the fact that Biden is currently polling higher than most of the other Democratic candidates. Yet we are much too early in the election cycle to actually know and/or be able to determine who will win the Democratic nomination, much less determine who is more “electable” as a result. Indeed, the first Democratic primary debate turned the race upside down, with Kamala Harris piercing Biden’s veil of invincibility and inevitability. And with eight months to the first contests, and with countless campaign events, forums, debates, and news cycles until then, Biden’s current lead, as thin as it already is, means nothing right now. Recent history (and the last few weeks!) have taught us two things: polls are not necessarily the determinant of who actually wins and in a highly competitive political environment anything can shift in a matter of weeks or even days. Trump’s election as president is solid evidence for both points.

By taking strings from an online gaming program and appending them to malicious files, researchers were able to trick Cylance's AI-based antivirus engine into thinking programs like WannaCry and other malware are benign. From a report: AI has been touted by some in the security community as the silver bullet in malware detection. Its proponents say it's superior to traditional antivirus since it can catch new variants and never-before-seen malware -- think zero-day exploits -- that are the Achilles heel of antivirus. One of its biggest proponents is the security firm BlackBerry Cylance, which has staked its business model on the artificial intelligence engine in its endpoint PROTECT detection system, which the company says has the ability to detect new malicious files two years before their authors even create them. But researchers in Australia say they've found a way to subvert the machine-learning algorithm in PROTECT and cause it to falsely tag already known malware as "goodware." The method doesn't involve altering the malicious code, as hackers generally do to evade detection. Instead, the researchers developed a "global bypass" method that works with almost any malware to fool the Cylance engine. It involves simply taking strings from a non-malicious file and appending them to a malicious one, tricking the system into thinking the malicious file is benign. The benign strings they used came from an online gaming program, which they have declined to name publicly so that Cylance will have a chance to fix the problem before hackers exploit it. "As far as I know, this is a world-first, proven global attack on the ML [machine learning] mechanism of a security company," says Adi Ashkenazy, CEO of the Sydney-based company Skylight Cyber, who conducted the research with CTO Shahar Zini. "After around four years of super hype [about AI], I think this is a humbling example of how the approach provides a new attack surface that was not possible with legacy [antivirus software]."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has rebranded its "A-List: Hip-Hop" playlist, changing the name to "Rap Life" and refocusing its attention.

On Thursday, late-night hosts had one thing on their minds: the Trump rally's racist chant of "send her back" regarding Ilhan Omar, a US citizen duly elected to the Congress of the United States of America.

Above, Stephen Colbert asks his audience to "chant responsibly."

Jimmy Kimmel noted that Trump's rally went for ninety minutes because Trump claimed he had "nothing to do."

KIMMEL: If all these people screaming "love it or leave it would have left when Obama was the president or when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage or for that matter when they made a lady "Ghostbusters," they would have all got on their Ninas, Pintas and Santa Marias. And here's this from a guy who faked an injury to get out of Vietnam.

[embed eid="36060" /]

Trevor Noah of The Daily Show said the racist chant made him sentimental:

TREVOR NOAH: It almost makes you miss the innocent days when all Trump's crowd wanted to do was imprison a woman without trial, you know? (chanting): "Lock her up! Lock..." 'Cause that was horrible, but at least Hillary would get to stay in the country, you know?

[embed eid="36061" /]

Finally, enjoy the song stylings of the "Go Back To Your Country Girls!' via Late Night with Seth Meyers:

[embed eid="36058" /]

A Trump administration official reportedly floated slashing the number of refugees that can be admitted to the U.S. next year “to nearly zero,” Politico reports. The suggestion reportedly came from John Zadrozny, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official allied with—no surprise—White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller. Zadrozny reportedly “argued in the meeting that the refugee cap should be low because of ongoing security concerns and the ability of the U.S. to offer humanitarian protections through the asylum process, according to an attendee.”

Bulllllllllllllshit. The vetting process for refugees can take as long as two years—two years longer than, say, vetting for your typical Trump nominee—and the administration has already taken inhumane and illegal action after inhumane and illegal action to strangle the right to asylum, including another illegal rule change blocking Central Americans and others.

While Zadrozny offered letting zero people fleeing war and other disasters into the U.S., “Homeland Security Department officials at the meeting later floated making the level anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000, according to one of the people,” Politico continued, still a devastating slash from this year’s level of 30,000, which was also a devastating slash from the year before that. 

Even if the administration kept the number at 30,000, they may not even try to let 30,000 here to start new lives. “Nearly 9,000 refugees are currently approved to travel to the U.S.,” and among Iraqi applicants, “only 140 have entered so far this year. More than 100,000 remain in the queue, according to an analysis provided by refugee groups.” The Statue of Liberty weeps.

WADSWORTH — A national awards program is visiting Wadsworth this week for the first time, evaluating community features including flower arrangements, landscaped areas, urban forestry and aspects of local history.

WADSWORTH — A national awards program is visiting Wadsworth this week for the first time, evaluating community features including flower arrangements, landscaped areas, urban forestry and aspects of local history.