VICTORY: DOJ Backs Down from Facebook Gag Orders in Not-so-secret Investigation
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The U.S. Department of Justice has come to the obvious conclusion that there’s no need to order Facebook to keep an investigation “secret” when it was never secret in the first place. While we applaud the government’s about-face, we question why they ever took such a ridiculous position in the first place.
Earlier this summer, Facebook brought a First Amendment challenge to gag orders accompanying several warrants in an investigation in Washington, D.C. that Facebook argued was “known to the public.” In an amicus brief joined by three other civil liberties organizations, EFF explained to the D.C. Court of Appeals that gag orders are subject to a stringent constitutional test that they can rarely meet. We noted that the timing and circumstances of the warrants were strikingly similar to the high-profile investigations of the protests surrounding President Trump’s inauguration on January 20 (known as J20). Given these facts, we argued that there was no way the First Amendment could allow gag orders preventing Facebook from informing its users that the government had obtained their data.
In a joint filing today, Facebook and the DOJ have told the court that the gag orders were no longer necessary, because the investigation had “progressed.” Of course, if the investigation in this case is about what we think it is—the January 20 protests in D.C., opposing the incoming Trump Administration—then it had “progressed” to the point where no gag orders were necessary even before the government applied for them.
While we’re pleased that the government has come to its senses in this case, it routinely uses gag orders that go far beyond the very narrow circumstances allowed by the First Amendment. We’ve fought these unconstitutional prior restraints for years, and we’ll continue to do so at every opportunity.
Read about what we had to say about the government’s original position here.

screen and tmux
A comparison of the features (or more-so just a table of notes for accessing some of those features) for GNU screen and BSD-licensed tmux.
The formatting here is simple enough to understand (I would hope). ^ means ctrl+, so ^x is ctrl+x. M- means meta (generally left-alt or escape)+, so M-x is left-alt+x It should be noted that this is no where near a full feature-set of either group. This - being a cheat-sheet - is just to point out the most very basic features to get you on the road. Trust the developers and manpage writers more than me. This document is originally from 2009 when tmux was still new - since then both of these programs have had many updates and features added (not all of which have been dutifully noted here). |
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Action | tmux | screen |
start a new session | tmux OR tmux new OR tmux new-session |
screen |
re-attach a detached session | tmux attach OR tmux attach-session |
screen-r |
re-attach an attached session (detaching it from elsewhere) | tmux attach -d OR tmux attach-session -d |
screen -dr |
re-attach an attached session (keeping it attached elsewhere) | tmux attach OR tmux attach-session |
screen -x |
detach from currently attached session | ^b d OR ^b :detach |
^a ^d OR ^a :detach |
rename-window to newname | ^b , <newname> OR ^b :rename-window <newn> |
^a A <newname> |
list windows | ^b w | ^a w |
list windows in chooseable menu | ^a " | |
go to window # | ^b # | ^a # |
go to last-active window | ^b l | ^a ^a |
go to next window | ^b n | ^a n |
go to previous window | ^b p | ^a p |
see keybindings | ^b ? | ^a ? |
list sessions | ^b s OR tmux ls OR tmux list-sessions |
screen -ls |
toggle visual bell | ^a ^g | |
create another window | ^b c | ^a c |
exit current shell/window | ^d | ^d |
split window/pane horizontally | ^b " | ^a S |
split window/pane vertically | ^b % | ^a | |
switch to other pane | ^b o | ^a <tab> |
kill the current pane | ^b x OR (logout/^D) | |
collapse the current pane/split (but leave processes running) | ^a X | |
cycle location of panes | ^b ^o | |
swap current pane with previous | ^b { | |
swap current pane with next | ^b } | |
show time | ^b t | |
show numeric values of panes | ^b q | |
toggle zoom-state of current pane (maximize/return current pane) | ^b z | |
break the current pane out of its window (to form new window) | ^b ! | |
re-arrange current panels within same window (different layouts) | ^b [space] | |
Kill the current window (and all panes within) | ^b killw [target-window] |