● 06.01.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 01/06/2022: Release of Linux Lite 6.0 and /e/OS-powered Murena One is Here

Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Source Hut is a relatively small source forge and for the past year hsa been getting smashed with traffic all coming from the exact same location, coming from a new proxy system introduced by the Go project created by Google

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA released a brand new stable driver release for Linux, building on the previous Beta that released along with their new open source kernel modules. Version 515.48.07 contains all on the updates from the 515.43.04 Beta, along with some additional improvements and fixes.

Instructionals/Technical

• Our facilitator diagnosed our dispair, “If you peel post-its from the side, they don’t curl up.”

• Changing the IP address of a Linux system from dynamic to static is not difficult, but requires a little care and a set of commands that you likely rarely use. This post provides a bash script that will run through the process, collect the needed information and then issue the commands required to make the changes while asking as little as possible from the person running it.

• The bulk of the script focusses on making sure that the correct settings are used. For example, it collects the 36-charater universally unique identifier (UUID) from the system so that you never have to type it in or copy and paste it into place.

• The Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a command-line tool to interact with your Android device from your computer. ADB commands enable you to perform a wide range of tasks, including some that would be difficult or even impossible to achieve without ADB. In this article we cover the essential ADB commands that every Android user should know.

• Today we are looking at how to install Rider 2022 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• SSH (Secure Shell) is a network protocol that enables secure communication between two devices, often used to access remote servers as well as to transfer files or execute commands.

• SSH was originally developed by Tatu Ylonen in 1995 to replace Telnet, a network protocol that allowed users to connect to remote computers, most often to test connectivity or to remotely administer a server.

• Today, SSH has become the standard for remote access for many organizations, and is used by system administrators to manage servers remotely or to securely connect to their personal computers. SSH is also commonly used to tunnel traffic through untrusted networks, such as public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Games

• One of the best strategy games around has grown with the Crusader Kings III: Fate of Iberia DLC now available, along with the usual Paradox free update for all players. Paradox call it a “flavor pack”, so it’s not quite a full expansion but has enough new content that looks like it may be worth picking up.

• Sprout Valley looks quite sweet. A game where you play as Nico, a cute cat that has stepped away from their busy life to clean up a tiny island and create a nice farm. One I missed that had a successful Kickstarter that finished earlier this month.

• Casebook 1899 – The Leipzig Murders is a fresh upcoming retro pixel-art point and click adventure, with a brand new demo available to try now. Homo Narrans Studio are crowdfunding it now on Kickstarter, with a €15,000 goal and to entice people in the demo features the first full case to play through.

• Do you love classic JRPGs? Final Fantasy? Or anything like it? Well, Crystal Project released recently from developer Andrew Willman and it’s quite wonderful.

• It might look colourful and inviting but don’t let that fool you, ROTA is going to test your brain with its gravity-defying puzzle mechanics.

• For the past couple of years, we have been tracking Sony’s long overdue foray into making its first party titles available to the PC gaming market. Sony, famous for walling off these titles and making them Playstation exclusives, began loosening that grip in 2020. MLB: The Show suddenly appeared on other consoles (though not on PC, grrrr), while Horizon: Zero Dawn got a long-awaited PC port that helped propel that title into incredible sales territory. Perhaps as a result of that success, Sony then acquired Nixxes, a company that specializes in porting console games to the PC. Many of us took this as a sign that Sony was ready to jump into PC gaming with both feet.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

•  GNOME devs are currently working on bringing their current GNOME Shell to mobile devices. Work started during the development of the GNOME 40 desktop environment and GNOME Shell for mobile already has a fully customizable app grid with pagination, folders, and drag-and-drop re-ordering, “stick-to-finger” horizontal workspace gestures, as well as swipe up gestures for navigating the Activities Overview and app grid.

Distributions and Operating Systems

NixOS

• The latest release of NixOS with a much-improved package manager and a user-friendly graphical installer.

• NixOS is a unique take on Linux, in that everything (including the kernel, applications, system packages, and configuration files) is built by the Nix package manager. And by isolating every application from one another, the developers have achieved a distribution without using /bin, /sbin, /lib, or /usr directories. Instead, all packages are stored within /nix/store.

• With the release of NixOS 22.5 9,345 new packages have been added and 10,666 have been updated. This was achieved, thanks to 1,611 contributors and 46,727 commits. Impressive.

• In this video, we are looking at NixOS 22.05.

• Today we are looking at NixOS 22.05. It comes with Gnome 42, Linux kernel 5.15, and uses about 600-800MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

New Releases

• Dubbed “Fluorite”, Linux Lite 6.0 is derived from the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series.

• This is the first release of this lightweight distribution targeted at Windows users who want to migrate to a Linux-powered OS that features the latest and greatest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment.

• Linux Lite 6.0 Final is now available for download and installation.

• The theme of this Series is inclusion and freshness. The newest Browser, the newest Office suite, the newest custom software. It always been my goal to provide a lean, fully functioning operating system. In Series 6x this will be our ongoing focus. New to this release are Assistive Technologies. In the form of a screen reader, a desktop magnifier and a virtual keyboard. All tools that ensures our hearing and sight impaired community is no longer forgotten. A new Theme, a new System Monitor and Manager round out the main new features.

• See below for details.

• An article and coverage of the new major release Linux Lite 6.0 which brings Ubuntu 22.04 base, Xfce 4.16, a new theme and more.

Debian Family

• This month I didn’t have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Devices/Embedded

• It’s finally arrived! I thought I’d write a little bit a about my new phone as it’s quite rare in the English speaking world. It’s the Hisense A5 Pro CC. This phone and it’s larger cousin, the A7, are the only two color E-ink phones in the world and are among a very short list of E-ink phones in general.

• Chuwi has recently revealed a mini-PC that features the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (3.2GHz – 4.4GHz) integrated with the Radeon RX Vega 8-core GPU (up to 170MHz). Unlike other mini-PCs for light use, the RZBOX 2022 was designed to run modern games, entertainment systems, etc. Price starts at $639 available at Chuwi’s website.

• The AMD Ryzen 7 5800H implements the Zen 3 architecture (7nm process), features 8-cores and 16 threads. To complement the powerful processor, there are 16GB DDR4 (3200MHz) and dual-channel memory slots for additional capacity (up to 64GB). As in other previous Chuwi mini-PC models, the RZBOX comes with 512GB SSD and dual M.2 SSD slots for even more storage.

• We love being able to share how young people across the world are getting creative with technology and solving problems that matter to them. That’s why we put together a series of films that celebrate the personal stories of young tech creators.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Cannoli is a high-performance tracing engine for qemu-user. It can record a trace of both PCs executed as well as memory operations. It consists of a small patch to QEMU to expose locations to inject some code directly into the JIT, a shared library which is loaded into QEMU to decide what and how to instrument, and a final library which consumes the stream produced by QEMU in another process, where analysis can be done on the trace.

• Cannoli is designed to record this information with minimum interference of QEMU’s execution. In practice, this means that QEMU needs to produce a stream of events, and hand them off (very quickly) to another process to handle more complex analysis of them. Doing the analysis during execution of the QEMU JIT itself would dramatically slow down execution.

• Hello everyone! This month we’re announcing production of the Pinebook Pro resuming and introduction of Quartz64 model-B. I had an opportunity to meet with TL earlier this month, and got some ear-on time with the Pinebuds, so I dedicated a section to my early impressions from the time spent with the prototype. This update also brings news of SOQuartz Blade hostboard production, camera enablement on the PinePhone Pro and a guest write-up by dsimic addressing issues some users have been experiencing with their PinePhone (Pro) keyboards. There is truly a lot to get to this month, so let’s get into it.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• If you value privacy and you use a smartphone, you’ve got a problem. Both Apple and Google constantly collect data on you. A Vanderbilt University study found, for example, that Android sends data to Google even if your phone is sitting idle with Chrome running in the background at a rate of 340 times a day.

• Murena and Mandrake Linux founder Gael Duval was sick of it by 2017. He wanted his data to be his data, and he wanted open-source software. Almost five years later, Duval and his co-developers launched the Murena One X2. It’s the first high-end Android phone using the open-source /e/OS Android fork to arrive on the market.

• This is one awful phone.

• If you’re reading this waaaay later, it might have become good, just as Light and Punkt eventually improved. But it’s not now. I’ve used this as my one and only phone for six months.

• And since it’s so unusable, that has meant pretty much emergencies & delivieries only.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Free and open-source software is software where you not only have access to freely use a program, but to view, edit, and share its source code as well.

• Source code refers to the code that a person (or, on some occasions, a computer) typed when creating a program. This is distinct from binary code, which is the actual language that a computer speaks. When a programmer is done writing a program, they compile the source code into a binary program.

• A human knows how to read source code. A computer knows how to read binary code.

• When someone distributes a program, they typically provide you with a binary file that you can run on your computer. That program isn’t free and open source unless they also provide you with the source code and the freedom to do with both largely what you wish.

• After a bit of soul searching with regards to the future of the website, I’ve decided to open source the code for marginalia.nu, all of its services, including the search engine, encyclopedia, memex, etc.

• A motivating factor is the search engine has sort of grown to a scale where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to productively work on as a personal solo project. It needs more structure. What’s kept me from open sourcing it so far has also been the need for more structure. The needs of the marginalia project, and the needs of an open source project have effectively aligned.

• Let me introduce you to a new program, an experimental authoritative DNS server intended for dynamic answers (answers depending, for instance, on the client). It is just for fun and it does not pretend to replace existing programs. But you may want to read its source code, or use its online demo, at dyn.bortzmeyer.fr.

• My main goal was to have fun. A secondary goal was to have a service to get the IP address used by resolvers to query authoritative name servers. So, as said above, this program is not intended for mission-critical uses.

• The program is named Drink, for no special reason. Its source code is available online, under a free-software licence. It uses the Elixir programming language and I’ll talk about it later.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Tor Browser 11.5a12 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

Programming/Development

• While I’ve played around a little with the entries family, this is the first time I’ve used it for real. Going through the intermediate process of finding myself using map actually has helped me reflect on with_entries very well.

• Over the last few days, I dabbled with maps in R. Two days ago, I made a map of all the cities I’ve visited. Today, I thought to make street maps of some of them (and other cool cities).

• The dark grey lines are highways and roadways, light grey lines are other streets and blue is water.

• When I introduced Quamina, I described the core trick: You prepare an arbitrary JSON blob for automaton-based matching by “Flattening” it into a list of name/value pairs, then sorting them in name order. Today, a closer look at how you work with the flattened data.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Just knocked up (really mostly borrowed) a quick solution to mirror my gemlog to my https site.

• In this post, I want to focus on unit tests. A given file containing some shell funtions shall be tested so that it is ensured that the functions formally conform to their specification.

• Now, what does mocking actually mean? Again, some definitions before discussing some real-world examples: [...]

Leftovers

• What happens when a website or service gets purchased by a larger company, with assurances and promises that it’ll remain operational? We all know the drill! The effort the original owners put into claiming a site will remain online scales linearly with the chances of it vanishing as soon as the ink has dried on their new contracts. This sounds cynical, but it’s a modern web reality, and very human.

• This can happen for a few reasons; some more truthful than others.

Science

• The integration of smartphones and microfluidics is nowadays the best possible route to achieve effective point-of-need testing (PONT), a concept increasingly demanded in the fields of human health, agriculture, food safety, and environmental monitoring. Nevertheless, efforts are still required to integrally seize all the advantages of smartphones, as well as to share the developments in easily adoptable formats. For this purpose, here we present the free platform appuente that was designed for the easy integration of microfluidic chips, smartphones, and the cloud. It includes a mobile app for end users, which provides chip identification and tracking, guidance and control, processing, smart-imaging, result reporting and cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) integration. The platform also includes a web app for PONT developers, to easily customize their mobile apps and manage the data of administered tests. Three application examples were used to validate appuente: a dummy grayscale detector that mimics quantitative colorimetric tests, a root elongation assay for pesticide toxicity assessment, and a lateral flow immunoassay for leptospirosis detection. The platform openly offers fast prototyping of smartphone apps to the wide community of lab-on-a-chip developers, and also serves as a friendly framework for new techniques, IoT integration and further capabilities. Exploiting these advantages will certainly help to enlarge the use of PONT with real-time connectivity in the near future.

Hardware

• The Hewlett Packard Enterprise-built machine handily beat out the previous record holder Fugaku, which registered a peak computational performance last year of 442 petaflops — less than half the speed of the Frontier. The IBM-built Summit machine was the world’s fastest supercomputer for two years before the Japanese-made Fugaku claimed the title in June 2020.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• I myself have to accept that my health is degraded, and I have not reached 60 either. And of course it is unclear, how to proceed, how life will go on. I have reached the state, where regular visits to the doctor occur, where taking medication daily is the norm. This is my personal definition of getting old. I have lost a noticable fraction of my confidence in life. And that is a consequence of the direct experience of finiteness, imho.

Proprietary

• Disclaimer: This post is not meant to attack the Discord developers, rather to write in hope that Discord will listen to the Linux community about practical issues with the Discord client on the Linux desktop. I also haven’t contacted the Discord developers, so information may be wrong.

• TL;DR: Outdated Electron.

• What happened, however, was more complicated than a simple algorithmic mistake. It involved several humans, academic bureaucracy and an automated facial detection tool from Amazon called Rekognition. Despite extensive data collection, including a recording of the girl, 17, and her screen while she took the test, the accusation of cheating was ultimately a human judgment call: Did looking away from the screen mean she was cheating?

Security

• The first section is a python script ‘cc7.py’, used to download all dependencies and compile the malware into different OS architectures (x86, ARM, macOS, OpenBSD, PowerPC, MIPS). After compilation, a batch file “update.sh” is created and used to spread the malware to vulnerable targets.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It’s an increasingly common service as schools grapple with the chaos of social media, often raising serious privacy and speech concerns along the way. Systems like Social Sentinel promise to give genuine insight into the huge volume of information posted on social media every day, parsing out the signal from the noise so that educators can be informed of threats before harm takes place. For these firms, it can be a lucrative business — but often, they’re mining shallow insights from available data, providing few benefits to outweigh the privacy harms.

• Whenever cops discover a new means or method of tracking people that seems to run afoul of the letter (if not the spirit) of the Fourth Amendment, they’re quick to defend these actions by claiming they’re necessary to hunt down the most dangerous of criminals: terrorists, sexual exploiters of children, kidnappers, homicide suspects, etc.

Defence/Aggression

• Uvalde keyed me to a feeling that has been growing in recent months, helped me to identify it. Grief. The sense that comes with loss and failure.  Of a world coming to grief. For there is no doubt, we are leaving a wounded world to our children, one wracked by climate catastrophe and general ecological deterioration. I’ve felt a grief about that for a long time.

• But the Ukraine War and the intensification of great power conflict has deepened that feeling immensely. This is the decade we were supposed to be undertaking a vast transformation in infrastructures to bring climate-twisting pollution down by at least half. To leave our kids with a world they can cope with. A Green New Deal. A new World War II with that scale of investment. Instead we seem to be setting up for World War III, with nations amping up their arms spending, while the fossil fuel industry gains the clout to reverse drilling bans. Replacing Russian fossil fuels with renewables is on the margin, while increased oil and gas production is the main show.

• The incompetence of the local police response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary has drawn attention to the inadequacy of police for stopping gun violence. We speak with Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where police took three hours to respond after an emergency call, and 13 people may have bled to death during that time. “We have to be honest about stopping gun violence before it erupts in the halls of our school, instead of waiting to assess whether or not police officers responded in the right way once it’s over,” says Wolf, who is now a gun control and LGBTQ rights advocate.

• “21 Gun Salute,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, considers the hypocrisy so often on display by the predominately pro-life party.

• When a Texas law enforcement official last week laid out how police waited in the halls of Robb Elementary School while children trapped with the gunman pleaded for help, my mind went back to 23 years ago.

• April 20, 1999. I remember it all too clearly. Two teenagers methodically murdered 12 classmates and a teacher inside Columbine High School in Colorado, and even though police swarmed to the scene quickly, they stayed outside, waiting. Those within hung a sign in a window to alert officers below: “1 bleeding to death.” The SWAT team ignored it. When officers finally searched the building, they found the body of Dave Sanders, a teacher shot hours before.

• The joint investigation team, made up of Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland, that is meeting Tuesday in The Hague was established in late March, a few weeks after the ICC opened an investigation in Ukraine, after dozens of the court’s member states threw their weight behind an inquiry. Khan has visited Ukraine, including Bucha, and has a team of investigators in the country gathering evidence.

• Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, will be among those at the meeting. Her office has already opened more than 8,000 criminal investigations related to the war and identified over 500 suspects, including Russian ministers, military commanders and propagandists. Last week, in the first case of its kind linked to the war, a Ukrainian court sentenced a captured Russian soldier to the maximum penalty of life in prison for killing a civilian.

• On April 13, a court in St. Petersburg jailed artist Sasha Skochilenko for replacing price tags at a local grocery store with stickers bearing anti-war messages. Skochilenko stands accused of the felony offense of spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military. Meduza spoke to her girlfriend, Sofya Subbotina, about the artist’s life before and after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, her arrest, and the conditions of her pre-trial detention, which now jeopardize Skochilenko’s life.

• The United States has become the wild west of violence and a signpost of the power of gun lobbies, the arms industry, and the military-industrial complex to buy off politicians in order to get their support. As one example, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas receives more money from the gun lobbies than any other Senator. Unsurprisingly, his response to the horrific mass shooting of children in Uvalde, Texas was to arm teachers. Other arms propagandists in the GOP have called for putting fewer doors in schools. It gets worse. Some politicians and media pundits  have called for supplying students with bullet-proof blankets. It is hard to make this stuff up.

• While the Democratic Party laments the lack of gun regulations, its hypocrisy is astonishing as it pours money into the military-industrial complex, the defense budget, and police departments in the form of outdated military weapons. As Jeffrey St. Clair points out, $7.4 billion in military equipment has been transferred to police departments across the United States since 1990. He also observes rightly that both parties support, benefit from, and are in collusion with the merchants of death “whose arms exports totaled $138.2 billion in 2021, before the blank check given to Ukraine.” Not to mention the millions racked up by gun manufactures who received COVID relief checks.[5]

• It will take a lot of time and research to answer the question of what led to Russia’s monstrous war against Ukraine. After Moscow launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, the notion quickly spread around the world that this was “Putin’s war” and that he personally made the decision to invade. In this essay for Meduza’s “Ideas” section, political scientist Kirill Rogov breaks down why this reasoning is more of a convenient pretense than a real explanation of how Russia reached this point.

• Using open sources, BBC News Russian has identified 3,052 Russian soldiers and officers killed in Ukraine since Moscow began its full-scale invasion on February 24.

Environment

• By Emily Satterwhite

• A fossil fuel executive recently told Fortune, “Appalachia is the elephant in the room,” referring to the claim that demand for natural gas is rising, while supply in Appalachia and the United States is falling. Such corporate executives would like to see expansion of production in order to bail out their dying industry.

• The global climate group Greenpeace criticized the European Union’s newly announced embargo on Russian oil as inadequate, noting Tuesday that the ban includes a key carve-out that will allow the nation’s crude to continue flowing into E.U. countries through pipelines.

• “A partial ban on Russian oil is not a ban and it’s unacceptable that money from E.U. countries is even partially funding this brutal war,” said Silvia Pastorelli, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace E.U. “This is no time for half-measures.”

Energy

• The ban applies to all Russian crude oil and other refined oil transported by sea, but does not affect pipeline oil imports, at least for now, following opposition from Hungary.

• European Union leaders agreed on Monday to ban most Russian oil imports as part of a new sanctions package against Moscow. Pipeline imports will be exempt from the sanctions.

• EU Council President Charles Michel said the agreement covers more than two-thirds of oil imports from Russia. Ursula Von der Leyen, the head of the EU’s executive branch, said the punitive move will “effectively cut around 90% of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year.”

• Michel said leaders also agreed to provide Ukraine with a 9 billion-euro ($9.7 billion) tranche of assistance to support the war-torn country’s economy. It was unclear whether the money would come in grants or loans.

Wildlife/Nature

• When I was assigned to a ProPublica collaboration with Oregon Public Broadcasting last year, I was excited to dive into a topic that was totally new to me: fish hatcheries. Over the past two centuries, development has decimated wild salmon and steelhead trout populations in the Pacific Northwest. First overfishing, then hydropower development, destroyed a key component of the local ecosystem, and with it the traditional ways of life for some of the Northwest’s Indigenous people. To address plummeting fish stocks, the U.S. government has poured billions into a network of hatcheries to literally mass-produce fish.

• My task was to perform a first-of-its-kind comprehensive analysis of these publicly funded salmon and steelhead trout hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest. As someone who, for years, kept a faithful inventory of my freezer using Google Sheets, I thought this sounded like a reasonable goal. Heck, maybe even a good time. (In hindsight, this may explain why I have so much trouble making friends.)

Finance

• Corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise their prices, hurting workers and consumers while they enjoy record profits.

• More generally, the supply shortages that drove prices higher in 2021 seem to be replaced by gluts, with major retailers like Amazon and Target complaining about stockpiles of unsold goods. With the stimulus measures from the pandemic fading into the past, and people no longer fearing to travel or go to restaurants, it is likely that we will be seeing serious downward pressure on the prices of many goods.

• While inflation may be easing on the goods side, there are questions about prices in the service sector, most importantly rent. Rent accounts for more than 31.0 percent of the overall CPI, and almost 40 percent of the core index.

• Lawlessness is now so rampant that a group of realistic law professors, led by Professor Mihailis E. Diamantis of the University of Iowa Law School, claim there is no corporate criminal law. I say “realistic” because their assertion that corporate criminal law, does not in fact, exist is not widely acknowledged by their peers.

• Most Americans know that none of the executives on Wall Street who are responsible for the lies, deception, and phony investments they sold to millions of trusting investors were prosecuted and sent to jail. “They got away with it,” was the common refrain during the 2008-2009 meltdown of Wall Street that took our economy down and into a deep recession that resulted in massive job loss and the looting of savings of tens of millions of Americans.

• The state of Louisiana is pausing efforts to collect money from thousands of homeowners who accepted hurricane recovery grants and used them for repairs rather than elevating their houses. The decision comes after news outlets presented the state with evidence showing that its lawyers have stepped up the pace of court filings even as the state hopes to wipe away the lawsuits entirely.

• Jay Dardenne, the head of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ Division of Administration, said Monday that the state has agreed to settle a related lawsuit against a company that ran the recovery program after Hurricane Katrina. If the federal government approves that agreement, he said, the state would drop the suits against homeowners who didn’t follow the rules on how they spent elevation grants.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• What is striking about Johnson’s personality and career is, on the contrary, how similar they are to those of other populist nationalist politicians who have risen to power around the world, mostly within the last decade. These include Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the US, to name but four, who all sing similar political tunes and behave in a similar way.

• Bombastic nationalism is a common feature, as is the exaggeration of threats at home and abroad (immigration and the EU in Britain; migrants on the Mexican border and Iran in the US; Muslims in India; migrants and foreign influencers in Hungary).

• The South Dakota attorney general has closed its investigation into billionaire T. Denny Sanford for possession of child pornography and is not filing charges, according to a notice the office sent to a judge Friday.

• Exhale.

• Following the Supreme Court’s decision over the stay, the lawsuit over HB 20 will continue in a lower court, leading to a more final decision about whether to overturn it. While a district court was highly critical of the law, the Fifth Circuit ruling followed a hearing where judges appeared to dismiss concerns about the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, both of which NetChoice and the CCIA allege are violated by HB 20.

• Colombia’s highly anticipated presidential elections on Sunday resulted in victory for two anti-establishment candidates: leftist Gustavo Petro and Trump-like right-wing millionaire Rodolfo Hernández. The two will face off in a runoff election on June 19, the outcome of which will determine whether Colombia addresses worsening inequality under Petro or ushers in a new era of populist conservatism under Hernández. Both options seem to answer to previous years’ mass uprisings in the country that protested the corruption within the state leadership. “What is going on in Colombia is a popular uprising now being expressed through the electoral process against the status quo,” says Colombian activist Manuel Rozental. “People want to vote against the establishment because there are very few and very small avenues to act politically otherwise.”

• Democratic Texas state Senator Roland Gutierrez, who represents the town of Uvalde, has been meeting with family members of victims from last week’s mass shooting and interrupted a press conference by Republican Governor Greg Abbott last week to demand a special session of the state Legislature to address gun violence. “The failure begins with Greg Abbott, who’s undergone seven or eight mass shootings in his tenure, and he’s done nothing but give greater access to militarized weapons,” says Gutierrez. “We have to take militarized weapons off the street, and if we’re not going to do that, maybe that’s a federal issue.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Any psychologist will tell you that studying self-deception scientifically is a headache. You can’t simply ask someone if they are fooling themselves, since it happens below conscious awareness. As a result, the experiments are often highly intricate.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Real-time network data show the restriction coming into effect across multiple providers in a pattern consistent with an intentional disruption to service, corroborating user reports of outages in multiple cities. Authorities have also deployed road barriers to push back the march per reports. Service was restored after approximately two hours following a backlash from subscribers, and some internet providers claimed an issue in the country’s web filtering infrastructure.

• In a review of Jacob Mchangama’s new book, Free Speech, at the Law & Liberty site today, I argue that this social trust has frayed greatly, and that Americans’ problems with free speech result more from social breakdown than from a failed commitment to abstract ideas about expression. Here’s an excerpt: [...]

• The Supreme Court has taken two swings at this issue: whether or not artistic expression can also be evidence of criminal activity. Two cases with obviously serious First Amendment implications and yet the nation’s top court felt there was no need for it to establish a bright line that might deter future prosecutions based on what should be considered inadmissible evidence.

• Today, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law that would bar social media companies from engaging in most forms of content moderation. Public Knowledge applauds the NetChoice v. Paxton ruling against Texas law HB20.

• The following can be attributed to John Bergmayer, Legal Director at Public Knowledge:

• “It is good that the Supreme Court blocked HB20, the Texas online speech regulation law. But it should have been unanimous. It is alarming that so many policymakers, and even Supreme Court justices, are willing to throw out basic principles of free speech to try to control the power of Big Tech for their own purposes, instead of trying to limit that power through antitrust and other competition policies. Reining in the power of tech giants does not require abandoning the First Amendment.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• International media monitors demanded Tuesday that Taliban rulers in Afghanistan urgently investigate the alleged disappearance of two journalists and bring the perpetrators to justice.

• The whereabouts of Ali Akbar Khairkhwa and Jamaluddin Deldar were unknown since May 24, when they both went missing from the Afghan capital, Kabul, according to relatives and co-workers.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Christian Association of Nigeria in Taraba State has described as worrisome a viral video on social media where an Islamic cleric was heard urging Muslims in the state to stand up and take over political power.

• The State CAN Chairman, Rev. Isaiah Magaji-Jirapye, who condemned such a message, in a statement, said the Christian body viewed the several videos being shared on the social media as calculated plots to set the stage on fire by outside forces that are not happy with the peace Taraba is enjoying.

• Therefore, the original question: If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque, which claimed 51 Muslim lives, was enough for the UN to establish an “international day to combat Islamophobia,” why have so many Muslim attacks on churches, which have claimed thousands of Christian lives, not been enough for the UN to establish an “international day to combat Christianophobia”?

• Iraq is home to one of the first Christian communities in the world that was, according to tradition, established by the Apostle Thomas and Mar Addai (or Thaddeus) of Edessa, one of the seventy disciples of Christ. Under Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the 1.5 million Christians—Chaldean and Syriac Catholics and Syriac Orthodox—had found a modus vivendi that allowed them to both publicly worship and carry out their activities. After the US/British-led invasion of 2003 that deposed Hussein, violence against Christians rose, with reports of abduction, torture, bombings, and killings by Islamists—the number of Christians in the entire country today has diminished to approximately 200,000.

• When the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL) occupied the Nineveh Plain, which is the cradle of Mesopotamian Christianity, more than 100,000 Christians were forced to flee their homes along with other persecuted minorities, such as the Yazidis, who nearly faced extinction at the hands of the jihadists.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted more than a few times how net neutrality rules were just some stopgap rules to prevent telecom monopolies from being assholes in the absence of real competition. They were modest protections (by international standards) attempting to protect consumers and competitors from giant unchecked monopolies we’ve let run amok for the better part of a generation.

• Julie Hollar writes about Gigi Sohn’s nomination to the Federal Communications Commission.

• By making reserved and invalid addresses available. Work is afoot to free up several internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address ranges which have been unroutable as reserved, invalid or used for loopback networks since the 1980s.

• Seth Schoen, who co-founded the free transport layer security digital certificate provider Let’s Encrypt is working on an IPv4 clean-up project that would take address currently not routed on the public Internet, and make them generally usable.

• If there’s a reason I let this glog dry up, I think it’s because I got too wrapped up in the mailing list talking about how Gemini ought to work, and it became too serious. Better to treat it all playfully.

• Writing long essays is fun. It’s enjoyable to be able to express an idea, work on it a bit, mold it, pull out the imperfections, and show it off to the world. It can feel like a timeless accomplishment, rather than a temporal quip on social media.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Two years ago we wrote about how the Wikimedia Foundation was blocked from gaining observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) after China objected, over some bizarre nonsense because there happens to be a volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. Obviously, it makes sense for Wikimedia to have observer status at WIPO, as excessive copyright can do serious harm to Wikimedia and its ability to share knowledge. Even though local chapters are independent of the larger foundation, China apparently has to punish anyone who even hints at the fact that Taiwan is, and has been, an independent country.

• Disney Star, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, has filed a complaint with police in India. The report targets well-known piracy sites Tamil Rockers, Tamil MV, and Tamil Blasters, plus popular streaming application Pikashow. The registered First Information Report names two local men as suspects.

• Mixtape platform Spinrilla is being sued by several major record labels. It faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages in the upcoming jury trial. To rule out bias, Spinrilla wants to ask potential jury members if they have ever worked in the music industry. The labels, meanwhile, want to know whether the jurors have DJ experience, are hip-hop fans, or support EFF.

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