● 07.08.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/07/2022: End of Borisnaro (Johnson), Shinzo Abe Assassinated

Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) started promoting the idea of sharing code way back in 1985, and since then it’s defended the rights of computer users and developers. The FSF says that the terms “open” and “closed” are not effective words when classifying software, and instead considers programs either freedom-respecting (“free” or “libre”) or freedom-trampling (“non-free” or “proprietary”). Whatever terminology you use, the imperative is that computers must belong, part and parcel, to the users, and not to the corporations that owns the software the computers run. This is why the GNU Project, and the Linux kernel, Freedesktop.org, and so many other open source projects are so important.

• Recently, the FSF has acquired a new executive director, Zoë Kooyman. I met Zoë in 2019 at an All Things Open conference. She wasn’t yet the executive director of the FSF at that time, of course, but was managing their growing list of major events, including LibrePlanet. I was captivated by her energy and sincerity as she introduced me to a seemingly nonstop roster of people creating the freedom-respecting software I used on a daily basis. I had stumbled into an FSF meetup and ended up hanging out with the people who were actively defining the way I lived my digital life.

Desktop/Laptop

• I finally managed to get hold of a Thinkpad Z13 to examine a functional implementation of Microsoft’s Pluton security co-processor. Trying to boot Linux from a USB stick failed out of the box for no obvious reason, but after further examination the cause became clear – the firmware defaults to not trusting bootloaders or drivers signed with the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA key. This means that given the default firmware configuration, nothing other than Windows will boot. It also means that you won’t be able to boot from any third-party external peripherals that are plugged in via Thunderbolt.

• In the market for some new hardware? Hardware vendor Slimbook has announced the KDE Slimbook 4 with a powerful new AMD Ryzen processor. Continuing to support the KDE team as one of the “Patrons of KDE”, buying from Slimbook supports KDE development too.

Games

• Valve has sent word that Steam Next Fest is coming back again and it will be live on October 3rd – 10th.

• Update: I spoke with Valve about the issue and they confirmed change is coming — “Yes, we’re aware of the issue and will soon be shipping an update to the SteamOS Beta to address it. After the update, Firefox will be installed as a flatpak, making it easier to keep up to date.”

• Want some accessories for your Steam Deck? Well JSAUX recently put out their Docking Station, along with some other goodies for you to look into.

• The Ranchers from French developer RedPilz Studio is a very promising looking open world country-life sim, which will be coming with Native Linux support and optimized for the Steam Deck. It recently launched on Kickstarter, with it seeing the full funding in less than a day so clearly there’s plenty of people out there wanting more farming life sims.

• Valve has released another fresh update to Proton Experimental, the opt-in version of Proton you can try that often pulls in new features and fixes. This new update landed on July 7th.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Devices/Embedded

• Banana Pi is better known for its Arm Linux boards, but the company’s Banana Pi BPI-Leaf-S3 board features Espressif ESP32-S3 dual-core WiFi & BLE AI processor, with compatibility with ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1 minus a built-in USB to TTL chip, and added support for battery and an I2C connector.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  Mac OS X is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.

• Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. It supports source code for many programming languages including Swift, C, C++, Python, Ruby and more.

• Xcode is proprietary software that is available for download without charge. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives to Xcode.

Programming/Development

• Following on from my video drag soldering a QFP chip, I decided to record a demonstration of drag soldering through-hole pins on a RAMesses Gary board.

• More is being asked of information technology departments than ever before, even as budgets fail to keep up. Adopting no-code and low-code development can be difficult, but the payoff is worth it. It democratizes the ability to build business applications by empowering more employees – not just tech developers – to problem-solve.

• Traditionally, I’ve had to rely on JavaScript to add and remove classes for styling concerns. Something happened in the DOM? Add a class over here and over there so I can style different elements throughout the tree. But with :has() that goes away. No more reliance on JavaScript (or duplicating state in the form of a class, more on that in a moment).

• A great illustration of this idea is usage of the :checked pseudo-class. Today, you might style something different in the UI depending on whether a checkbox is checked. To do this with pure CSS, you’re required to structure your markup in such a way that you can target elements with CSS based on that state. For example, leveraging the adjacent sibling selector.

• I learned a lot from Peter. He was the one who introduced me to Perl, the programming language that still fits me better than any I’ve learned before or since. His dry sense of humour and wit had a lasting impact on mine. It’s also hard to describe, but he had a specific lateral way of thinking that I’ve rarely encountered in industry since.

• [...]

• He had a few reasons for doing this. Config files often have their own comments, so prefacing yours with a double pound makes them easier to disambiguate.

• Today we share the second report in our series of findings from the Gender Balance in Computing research programme, which we’ve been running as part of the National Centre for Computing Education and with various partners. In this £2.4 million research programme, funded by the Department for Education in England, we aim to identify ways to encourage more female learners to engage with Computing and choose to study it further.

• To be a professional card dealer takes considerable skill, something that not everybody might even have the dexterity to acquire. Fortunately even for the most ham-fisted of dealers there’s a solution, in the form of the Dave-O-matic, [David Stern]’s automated card dealer using a Raspberry Pi 4 with a camera and pattern recognition.

Java

• They are mainly used by text editors to store and manipulate large strings. It provides different string operations such as append, insert and delete in a faster and more efficient way. Ropes work more efficiently on large strings. Ropes do not require any extra memory nor any large contiguous memory areas.

Leftovers

• The movie premiere also created a stir due to a TikTok trend called “Gentleminions,” a call for moviegoers to attend the film in formalwear and get rambunctious whenever the minions appear onscreen. The trend led to dozens of teens dressed in formalwear moshing and creating disturbances at theaters across the U.K.

• Humans tend to have an aversion to empty spaces. Consider awkward silences during a conversation or too much negative space on a website. Our discomfort tends to push us to fill a void, which isn’t always the best solution. But sometimes the absence of content is exactly what’s right, which is something we see in our work building design systems for federal agencies.

Science

• Maryna Viazovska, a mathematician at the EPFL in Switzerland, has won one of this year’s Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The Fields Medal is one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics. It is awarded every four years “to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement”. Up to four mathematicians up to the age of 40 are awarded a Fields Medal each time.

Education

• After one year of online learning in eighth grade, I chose blended learning for my freshman year at Beacon High School in New York City. For one day a week, I would be learning in-person, and the rest of the week my classes were held remotely. Eventually, I learned that it didn’t really make sense to go in at all, since my teachers would have to teach through Zoom for the other students that were still taking the classes online.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St. Louis ruled that chemical giants Monsanto—acquired by Bayer AG in 2018—and BASF are liable for damage to Bill Bader’s peach groves caused by dicamba, leaving in place a $15 million judgment for nonpunitive damages.

• The children’s parents are represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, a law firm that “works to hold social media companies legally accountable for the harm they inflict on vulnerable users,” according to their website. The law firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• The complaint said that the platform’s algorithm failed to properly warn users and their parents and that it intentionally pushed an “unacceptably dangerous video” on the girls’ “For You” pages, which show users videos they may like based on their previous interactions with the app.

• TikTok is facing multiple lawsuits from parents who say their children died of strangulation attempting the “blackout challenge,” after the app showed them videos of other people trying it. One suit filed against the company in June alleges that at least seven specific children died last year while attempting the challenge, which the complaint says “encourages users to choke themselves with belts, purse strings, or anything similar until passing out.” All the children who reportedly died were under 15 years old.

• The number of ticks as well as the diversity and spread of ticke-borne pathogens in Estonia have all increased significantly over the past ten years, it appears from the results of a recent study conducted by the National Institute of Health Development (TAI).

• “Nothing epitomizes market failure more than the cost of insulin.”

• Just four months after President Vladimir Putin began the war in Ukraine, more than 71 million people around the world have fallen into poverty as food exports from the two countries—which together export nearly a quarter of the world’s wheat, 14% of corn, and more than 50% of sunflower oil—have plummeted.

• The world has been shaken to its core by a respiratory virus pandemic. Humanity has been raiding the toolbox for every possible weapon in the fight, whether that be masks, vaccinations, or advanced antiviral treatments.

Security

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 218. This version includes the following changes:

• * Improve output of Markdown and reStructuredText to use code blocks with

• syntax highlighting. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#306)

• Continuing the rollout of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) to national governments around the world, today I’m very happy to welcome Poland to the service! The Polish CSIRT GOV is now the 34th onboard the service and has free and open access to APIs allowing them to query their government domains.

• Seeing the ongoing uptake of governments using HIBP to do useful things in the wake of data breaches is enormously fulfilling and I look forward to welcoming many more national CSIRTs in the future.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Top senators on the Intelligence Committee requested the FTC investigate TikTok over concerns that the company is misleading the public about its data practices.

• Dissident antiwar UK academics Piers Robinson and David Miller tell Max Blumenthal how they were targeted by the British intelligence services and its media proxies.

Defence/Aggression

• Nigerian security forces continue searching for hundreds of inmates who escaped following a Tuesday attack on an Abuja prison. The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) has claimed responsibility for the jailbreak and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has criticized the intelligence service for failing to stop it.

• But that night, Foster was riding alone, swerving in and out of traffic lanes without a bike light, and caught the attention of officer Ryan McMahon, who pursued Foster in his car. Foster hit the brakes, and McMahon ordered him to “come over and sit in front of my car,” according to the officer’s deposition in a civil rights lawsuit filed by Foster’s family.

• Bucking a trend set by two separate Appeals Courts (Ninth and Tenth), a federal court in Texas has said it is actually a violation of rights when cops destroy an innocent person’s home to effect an arrest. What’s more, a jury has backed up that decision with actual compensation. (h/t The Honest Courtesan)

• The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — Canada’s federal Dudley Do-Whatevers — is again belatedly admitting it has access to powerful surveillance tech its supposed oversight seems unaware the RCMP possessed.

• The Taliban have become hypersensitive to any threats, he said. “They focus on consolidating power by monopolizing resources, squashing perceived threats, and preempting future threats. When it comes to Balkhab, the group has made monopoly over resources a red line.”

• Former President Trump and his son were among six board members removed from the board of Trump’s social media company weeks before it was hit with federal subpoenas, according to state records.

• Florida state business records showed Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and the four others were removed as board members of the Trump Media and Technology Group on June 8, based on a filing with the state’s Division of Corporations. Roughly three weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a grand jury in Manhattan subpoenaed the company.

• In recent weeks, a newly emboldened right-wing Supreme Court struck down a more than century-old New York law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons and a nearly 50-year-old precedent on abortion. Meanwhile, the January 6th Committee has been laying out in graphic televised detail how our last president tried to subvert the 2020 election. Inflation, of course, continues to run riot; gas prices have soared to record levels; the brutal war in Ukraine proceeds neverendingly; the Biden administration looks increasingly hapless; and the president himself ever older and less on target. In sum, our world seems to be in headline-making disorder, while our fate here in this country—thank you, (in)justices Alito and Thomas, not to speak of The Donald and crew!—remains remarkably up for grabs by the worst of us all.

• The proposed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023 were introduced days after lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees—both controlled by Democrats—voted to pile $37 billion and $45 billion, respectively, onto Biden’s March request for $813 billion in military spending.

• “For far too long, this country has put profits ahead of its people,” said Rep. Barbara Lee. “Nowhere is that more apparent than in our Pentagon topline budget.”

• “Congress should prioritize the true, urgent human needs of everyday people.”

• This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War.

• In letters to the chief executives of Daniel Defense, Smith & Wesson Brands, and Sturm, Ruger, and Company, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) noted that the committee she leads is examining “the role of the firearms industry in the gun violence epidemic, including with respect to the sale and marketing of assault weapons and the broad civil immunity that has been unfairly granted to manufacturers.”

• 15 years have passed since Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip, subjecting nearly two million Palestinians to one of the longest and most cruel politically-motivated blockades in history.

• It is widely understood that Israel has imposed the siege as a response to the Hamas takeover of the Strip, following a brief and violent confrontation between the two main Palestinian political rivals, Hamas, which currently rules Gaza, and Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.

• Brasilwire’s Brian Mier first reported that Reps. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), Albio Sires (D-N.J.), Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Susan Wild (D-Pa.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023 which, if approved, would require the secretary of state “to review actions by Brazilian armed forces related to that country’s October 2022 presidential elections and to consider such actions under statutory guardrails on U.S. security assistance.”

• NATO’s defensive role was once largely limited to the European heartland, a legacy of its origins as a Cold War foil to the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe. After 9/11, however, its reach was extended to Afghanistan, under the assertion that a treaty member, the United States, had come under armed attack from a hostile party and so warranted support from other alliance members in accordance with their treaty obligations. Over the years, NATO also acquired new members in the Baltic Sea area and Eastern Europe, advancing its defense perimeter all the way to Russia’s borders and inflaming tensions with Moscow. Now, the alliance is about to undertake its most ambitious expansion of all: extending its strategic reach to Asia and the Pacific in an ambitious, US-led campaign to curb China’s rise.

• Rebuilding Ukraine during the fighting adds further complexity to the relation between peace and justice. Those who favor peace point to ending the fighting as soon as possible. “Priority number one remains ending the war, because without the war ending, the suffering will definitely continue,” said a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) representative in Ukraine. Those who insist on justice first, say that human rights and humanitarian violators must held accountable immediately. “No peace without justice,” they advocate.

• In the aftermath of Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, experts warned that Western sanctions might tank the ruble, threaten the Russian state’s capacity to pay public employees, and cripple the national economy. So far, however, the financial system is holding out. Russia has avoided a run on its banks, and the ruble now trades for more dollars and euros than at any time since 2015. This relative stability is largely the result of the policies pursued by Elvira Nabiullina, the chairwoman of Russia’s Central Bank, which now operates in wartime conditions. Meduza examines how Nabiullina and her deputies have managed Western sanctions, and what moral dilemmas the Central Bank’s leadership faces while the Kremlin wages a full-scale war against Ukraine.

• I knew that at times the Cossacks, best imagined as dashing soldiers on horseback and living astride the Don River, had bailed out various tsars from Ottoman encroachments along Russia’s southern borders. Later, however, I learned that the independence of the Cossack nation became a threat to the established order in Moscow, and that after World War I Joseph Stalin—to use a more modern expression—ethnically cleansed Russia of many Cossacks, scattering them to the Soviet winds.

• “Dad, did you hear about Highland Park?” That was an ominous beginning. She continued: “There was a shooting during the 4th of July Parade. A bunch of people were killed.”

Environment

• “Unleashing this destructive flood of oil is climate cowardice.”

• Last week the U.S. Supreme Court, in its latest rollback of precedent and law voted 6-3  to strip the EPA of its ability—under the Clean Air—to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants during a global heat wave and expanding climate emergency.

• There’s a new study out about climate change — and our new climate normal — that is truly shocking and, for those of us concerned about future generations, alarming.

Energy

• Is Albo auditioning for membership of NATO? His Labor government may be more competent than the Coalition on foreign affairs but little has changed on government secrecy, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese even stepping up weapons traffic to Ukraine while keeping mum on coal.

• “Today we are announcing an additional $100 million in military-technical assistance. In total, we have already provided $390 million,” Albanese said this week on his tour to meet President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi. “We are also additionally providing 14 armoured personnel carriers and 20 “Bushmaster” – armoured vehicles. Thus, the total number of “Bushmasters” was 60″.

• Protests over fuel shortages are unfolding around the world — in Sri Lanka, Ghana, Peru, Ecuador and elsewhere — over high gas prices. We look at the impact of rising fuel costs on countries in the Global South with Antoine Halff, former chief oil analyst at the International Energy Agency, now at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. He contextualizes the fuel shortage as part of a greater global energy crisis created in part by dependency of nations like Sri Lanka on imports and the imbalance in supply and demand resulting from COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• The Canadian capital joins more than 50 local governments, 1,300 groups, and 150,000 individuals—from youth to grandparents to scientists—who support the initiative, which calls for ending all new fossil fuel exploration and production; phasing out existing production in line with the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C goal; and “a peaceful and just transition.”

• The former Liberal MP is known as ‘Gas Buddy Dan’ or the ‘Gas Wizard,’ a level-headed media persona who offers gas price forecasts and expert commentary on price changes in gasoline and the impacts they’ll have on consumers.

Wildlife/Nature

• “A wide range of effective, nonlethal measures are available to livestock producers.”

• My criticism of the Sequel Trilogy isn’t unique. In retrospect, it’s clear there was no plan. If neither J.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson wanted to direct three films, I wish one of them would have been put in charge of creating an overall narrative the other would follow. As things turned out, the trilogy feels like a car being driven by two people fighting for control of the wheel.

Finance

• Eradicate the Diseases of the Poor

• Friends of socialist Cuba like good news about that country. Now bad news has its use.

• The Fed, chaired by Jerome Powell, has made clear in recent months that it is hellbent on reining in price increases even as top officials publicly admit that interest rate hikes—the central bank’s primary tool to constrain economic demand—won’t affect gas and food prices, two of the main drivers of inflation in the U.S. and around the world.

• A key element of the plan is Rubio’s proposal for “paid” family leave, which he developed in 2018 with former presidential adviser Ivanka Trump.

• Here are the figures from the Federal Reserve Board showing the wealth of the 1% since Biden became president, and the first quarter and last quarter of Trump’s regime.

• That question is not necessarily answered in Hudson’s text. What is answered, however, is how the world economy—especially that part of it tied into Washington and Wall Street—got to this point. Originally presented as a series of lectures at China’s Global University for Sustainability, The Destiny of Civilization is a fairly plainspoken and incredibly astute history of US capitalism, especially in its most recent phase known as neoliberalism. It is also an economic textbook of a kind one will rarely see in any university economics syllabus today.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Truth: government exists to protect life and liberty. But the lie embraced was government is willing to kill everyone because: “better dead than red.” This is the same view embraced by Hitler when he sent 12-year-old children to the front (by then their front yards) to die in a “total war” to defend Nazism no matter the nihilism of total destruction.

• James Murray is retiring as director of the U.S. Secret Service after a 27-year career with the agency to take a position with Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, as chief security officer.

• Murray will join Snap after his term with the Secret Service ends July 30, 2022. He will report directly to CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel.

• The Washington Post reports that Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter is “in peril,” based on three anonymous sources who told the paper that the billionaire’s camp has “stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding” for the agreement. Musk isn’t going it alone in his attempt to buy Twitter, with others like Larry Ellison, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, the [cryptocurrency] exchange Binance, and the state investment firm of Qatar among those pitching in a few billion as a part of the effort.

• The proposal is co-sponsored by Sens. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). The Veterans Online Information and Cybersecurity Empowerment Act would provide $20 million over three years for the Department of Veterans Affairs to administer a grant program to teach veterans media literacy skills. The program would also teach veterans cybersecurity best practices to identify disinformation and help them avoid online scams and [cracking].

• Just last week, Governor Kathy Hochul and her running mate steamrolled their opposition, easily winning the Democratic primaries for governor and lieutenant governor in New York. Hochul captured 68 percent of the vote and Antonio Delgado, her recent pick for lieutenant governor, won 61 percent, finishing far ahead of rivals on the left and right. While the most conservative Democrats ran the furthest behind, it was an anemic showing for the progressive ticket, which has failed once more to win a statewide election.

• Last week FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr made headlines by sending a letter to Apple and Google demanding they ban TikTok. Journalists couldn’t be bothered to mention the FCC has no authority over app stores or social media, the letter had no legal backing, or that Carr (a captured regulator largely loyal to AT&T) has no credibility on consumer privacy issues and was largely just publicity hunting.

• Iman Hamid, a lawyer and author in London, was browsing TikTok in January when she came across a NYX lip gloss being sold on a livestream for just £3.99 (about $5) — almost half of the product’s original price. Thinking this was a good deal, she purchased the lip color — but once it arrived, she said she realized the discount was too good to be true.

• In a video she posted on TikTok in June, Hamid swatches the lip gloss she purchased on TikTok and compares it to the same color she bought at Superdrug to compare. The colors are starkly different and she says the texture didn’t match up. […]

• Several commenters on Hamid’s TikTok video shared their experiences of purchasing what they believed to be a fake product from TikTok. “Same happened to me with mascara,” one person said. Another warned, “if the price is too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true.”

• “It’s shocking to me to see how many people have actually gone through the same problem,” Hamid told BuzzFeed News.

• We host a conversation about “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire,” which is the focus of an essay by Cornell University law professor Aziz Rana in Dissent magazine. Rana argues for the creation of a “transnational infrastructure of left forces across the world” and says movements of the left need “clear alternatives to the hardest questions” of foreign policy crises, such as the Russian war in Ukraine. We also speak with Darryl Li, professor at the University of Chicago, who is one of many scholars who published a response to Rana’s piece in the new issue of Dissent that highlights the importance of a nuanced and solution-oriented critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy.

• U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation as leader of the Conservative Party on Thursday following a wave of departures from his government, including senior Cabinet members. The party will choose a new leader and the country’s next prime minister in the coming days. In the past week, 59 members of Parliament have resigned from the government, and on Wednesday night, a group of Cabinet members went to 10 Downing Street to urge Johnson to step down. This week’s resignations came as Johnson faced increasing criticism for promoting a member of the Conservative Party who was accused of sexual misconduct. “This was one lie too far,” says Priya Gopal, English professor at the University of Cambridge. Gopal says Johnson’s resignation “was more or less inevitable” and the next prime minister is “likely to be a very serious Brexiteering ideologue.”

• As the ethical lapses kept piling up, Boris Johnson, who studied classics at Oxford university’s Balliol College, reached for the moral code of the Iliad. “He thinks in classical terms,” one MP told the London Times. “For him there is no greater honour in resigning than being killed…. if you are going to die, go down fighting.”

• As the Associated Press summarized, “Johnson, 58, managed to remain in power for almost three years, despite allegations that he was too close to party donors, that he protected supporters from bullying and corruption allegations, and that he misled Parliament and was dishonest to the public about government office parties that broke pandemic lockdown rules.”

• Fuel shortages in Sri Lanka have triggered a wave of protests calling for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. This comes as Sri Lanka’s government has forced the closure of all schools and announced plans to cut electricity by up to three hours a day, as well as stop printing currency to quell inflation. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka is also facing a dire shortage of food and medicine, and doctors say the country’s entire health system could collapse. “There is no discussion on the part of the government on how we as Sri Lankans are going to come out of this crisis,” says Ahilan Kadirgamar, political economist and senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna, who explains how the government’s doubling down on austerity measures has devastated the working class.

• Article 1 of the UN Charter says that one of the purposes of the UN is “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” However, what “self-determination” means in specific international legal cases is far from a settled debate. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute explains that

• A few states are already rushing to attack contraception too, with officials in Idaho and Louisiana pushing to ban IUDs, the morning after pill, and other common birth control methods. Hardline lawmakers are also likely to ban methods of conception, including in-vitro fertilization, or IVF.

• With the Senate majority and now the possibility of somehow restoring abortion rights at stake, the race is attracting national attention and record-breaking amounts of money. With the Senate majority and now the possibility of somehow restoring abortion rights at stake, the race is attracting national attention and record-breaking amounts of money.

• As for confirmation of those haunting feelings that something’s not right, a recent UN report discusses prominent risks of “global collapse”: UN 2022 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, aka: GAR2022 d/d May 2022, more on this later.

Misinformation/Disinformation

Censorship/Free Speech

• Ten years ago, Techdirt was one of the few sites to be following closely some obscure but important machinations at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to create a top-down regulatory scheme for the Internet. The fact that the two main proponents of this move were Russia and China gives an idea of the underlying intentions. Had the plan succeeded, it would have granted governments greater control over the parts of the Internet within their borders, including domain names, ISPs, traffic management etc. Fortunately, the final 2012 treaty was something of a damp squib, since many key players, including the US and EU countries, refused to sign.

• Ten years ago, Techdirt was one of the few sites to be following closely some obscure but important machinations at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to create a top-down regulatory scheme for the Internet. The fact that the two main proponents of this move were Russia and China gives an idea of the underlying intentions. Had the plan succeeded, it would have granted governments greater control over the parts of the Internet within their borders, including domain names, ISPs, traffic management etc. Fortunately, the final 2012 treaty was something of a damp squib, since many key players, including the US and EU countries, refused to sign.

• On June 29, Moscow’s Culture Department dismissed the heads of three theaters. Among them were the leaders of Gogol Center, Alexey Agranovich and director Alexey Kabeshev. Both are associates of the venue’s founder, well-known director Kirill Serebrennikov. After nine years of successful work, the theater will change not only its management, but also its name: it will now be known as the Gogol Drama Theater. And it will be headed by Anton Yakovlev and Alexander Bocharnikov, who have no relationship with the previous leadership. For Meduza, theater critic Anton Khitrov explains what the Gogol Center meant to its audience and what its closure means for the Russian theater world.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Now a documentary, Ithaka: A Father, A Family, A Fight for Justice, co-produced by Assange’s half-brother Gabriel Shipton, is being released, chronicling Assange’s fight against extradition through the eyes of his wife and 75-year-old father.

Civil Rights/Policing

• This is not a battle of left vs. right. It is a battle between democracy and autocracy.

• Or maybe it was just force of habit—the reflex to not say anything lest one get labelled a bigot. And if you’re not going to say something, best to condition yourself not to think it in the first place. (Biological females consistently score higher than males on agreeableness in the Big-Five personality model. But that’s a digression for another day.)

• Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Moore v. Harper in the coming fall term. In that case, Republican legislators in North Carolina are asking the court to overturn the state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out their gerrymandered congressional map and impose one of the court’s own.

• The threat of civil litigation and criminal charges imposed on care providers and others puts pregnant patients at risk for negative health outcomes and also complicates the role of physicians in providing potentially lifesaving care.

• With other states following Texas’s example, we want to explain how “bounty” laws work, where they’ve been implemented, and how you can find care.

• The ‘Rehumanize International’ movement opposes abortion, capital punishment, police brutality, torture and war. One may agree or disagree with any of their positions, but at least there seems to be a consistency in that organization’s viewpoints that is lacking in most of the ‘pro-life’ arguments this writer has heard.

• “I want to reach a comprehensive agreement with the women of Hungary. I think it is important for them to let us know – and for us to understand – what they want,” said the Prime Minister four years ago, articulating his point of departure for demographic policy. But just what sort of impact have the state’s childbearing incentives – which in terms of GDP is high even globally – had, and what demographics are considered worthy of receiving support?

• Judges are usually trained in law. They are not Justices. Justice is an ideal of virtue rarely apparent in human beings. To be just is beautiful and perfect, but extremely difficult. So calling judges Justices gives them the illusion they are much better than they are. It elevates them to heights they don’t deserve.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Americans received 4.4 billion robocalls in June. It never quite stops being weird how we’ve had to effectively stop using a core voice communications platform because it’s been hijacked by scammers and debt collectors. As we’ve noted numerous times, there are several reasons why our nationwide robocall hell never quite seems to end despite new announcements promising to tackle the problem every 6 months:

• It’s no secret to long term Techdirt readers that Australia truly is the upside down when it comes to internet laws and policy. We’ve discussed in the past things like Australia’s news link tax (they hate when you call it a tax, and insist it’s just a “bargaining code,” but the bargaining is to force internet companies to pay for linking to news, so it’s a tax), and its laws that can force companies to break their encryption. Or how about their plans to outlaw anonymity? But what’s been most stunning is their completely upside down view of intermediary liability. In Australia, not only can you sue intermediaries for someone else’s speech, the courts regularly happily side with absolutely ridiculous claims against those intermediaries.

Monopolies

• EU antitrust regulators are investigating the video licensing policy of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Alphabet unit Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta, the European Commission said on Thursday.

• The investigation is the latest to hit the tech industry, which will be subject to tough new rules in Europe next year that could force companies to change their core business models and do more to tackle illegal content on their platforms.

Copyrights

• For many years we’ve written stories regarding various lawsuits over scraping the web. Without the ability to scrape the web, we’d have no search engines, no Internet Archive, and lots of other stuff wouldn’t work right either. However, more importantly, the ability to scrape the web should result in a better overall internet, potentially reversing the trend of consolidation and internet giants that silo off your info. Most often, we’ve talked about this in the context of Facebook’s case over a decade ago against Power.com. That involved a company that was trying to build a single dashboard for multiple social media companies, allowing users to log into a single interface to see content from, and post content to, multiple platforms at once. In that case Facebook relied on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the CFAA), and the courts sided with Facebook, saying that because Facebook had sent Power a cease-and-desist letter, that made the access (even with the approval of the users themselves!) somehow “unauthorized.”

• Two top-tier European football leagues have been successful in their latest bids to have pirate IPTV services blocked by internet service providers. Following applications filed this year by LaLiga and a Serie A rightsholder in Malta, three local ISPs have been ordered to block IP addresses and servers on demand. Yet again in an IPTV blocking case, a secret agreement lies behind the scenes.

• The founder of Florida-based VPN company TorGuard is listed as the prime suspect in a Greek fraud case. The authorities hold Ben Van Pelt personally responsible for roughly €2,000 in attempted fraudulent transactions carried out by an anonymous user of the service. Van Pelt’s legal team say the incredible allegations and a potential five-year prison sentence are hard to justify.

• A decision handed down by Finland’s Supreme Court states that ISPs can be compelled to hand over subscribers’ personal details to rightsholders, if those subscribers are suspected of piracy. The decision, which overrules the opinion of a lower court, essentially gives so-called ‘copyright trolls’ a green light to press ahead with cash settlement demands on a scale of their choosing.

• Today, one day ahead of the final approval, the European Parliament debated the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) establishing new rules for online platforms.

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