● 07.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/07/2022: End of SysAdmin Appreciation Day

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Linux and Python were my best friends in 2000.

• Slovenia is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, and the Adriatic Sea to the southwest.

Server

• To celebrate System Administration Appreciation Day and to honor the tireless work of IT professionals around the world, ADMIN Network & Security and TuxCare are proud to present the 2022 edition of 10 Terrific Tools for the Busy Admin.

• For a limited time, you can download this free collection of articles covering useful tools for IT pros.

• Data loss and ransomware are two of the biggest threats to data security today, especially as malicious actors turn their attention to the cloud. Even with security perimeters in place, bad actors are determined to map out new methods and tactics to penetrate these cloud-based environments.

• Although it’s impossible to predict or prevent every attack, there are security measures and practices that can help reduce the risk. Cloud-native development practices can help your organization ensure that these solutions are more resistant to attack. Kubernetes, for example, is a tool that can help.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Mistakes are part of growth. If we’re lucky, we’re in an environment where they’re not punished harshly. That lets us fix the problem, learn to do better, and move on—but also to tell the story once the sting has passed.

• Last episode, we heard three stories of people blundering into trouble and coming out the other side a little bit wiser. This episode adds three more stories of mistakes being made—but the culprit isn’t always as clear.

• Red Hat hints at its future direction, why realtime might finally come to Linux after all these years, and our reaction to Google’s ambitious new programing language.

• Alex runs us through his new and improved off-site backup setup, and Chris is trying out some Shelly devices.

Instructionals/Technical

• Cron is a service that runs tasks at specified intervals in Unix/Linux systems. It’s commonly used for operational tasks like cleaning log files or backing up databases. But for our purposes, we can also use it to automate applications to perform some tasks at regular intervals.

• The terminal can seem a little boring compared to flashier graphical Linux apps. lolcat is a program that adds some flair to your Linux terminal sessions. Here’s how to install and use lolcat on Linux.

• Life on the command line on Linux is clearly something most of us enjoy, but typing the same command again and again can become tiresome. To avoid that boredom, this post explains a number of ways that you can make repeating commands – or repeating commands but with some changes – a lot easier than you might expect.

• Today we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten 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.

• Please take note that the fonts are currently not visible, as seen in the video. We hope it will be fixed soon.

• This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

WINE or Emulation

• The Wine development release 7.14 is now available.

• What’s new in this release: – More progress on syscall interface for USER32. – Improved font fallbacks in DirectWrite. – Some fixes for socket shutdowns. – Various bug fixes.

• The source is available at:

• https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.14.tar.xz

• Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

• https://www.winehq.org/download

• You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

• You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

• Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• At work-work there are educational sessions for the software team. They last about 2 hours, generally filled with a mix of watching a talk, discussing how the talk applies to the codebase, and individual developers presenting something. Typical conference talks might come from CPP on Sea). Discussion might go on about vocabulary types – what are the things in our system? Presentations are whatever somebody feels is interesting, and I’ve written up two 20-minute talks so far.

• There’s CMake Domain-Specific-Languages, which was written to talk about how we (at work-work) can update our CMake infrastructure to be less repetetive and to express better the kinds of things we build. It’s based on my experience with Calamares (which has CMake code to support writing Calamares modules) and ARPA2CM (similar, also for things like “build all the kinds of libraries you can from these sources”). The slides have been sanitized of any internal bits.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 22 to July 29.

• Amazing, how long ago since the Dunfell-series had the first release? In all of that time, have not been able to from from GTK3-based apps. For Firefox, I always print to PDF, then use Evince PDF viewer to print the PDF. Evince, being GTK2-based can print. Yes, I discovered that the ‘gtk+3′ package in OpenEmbedded defaults to not having CUPS support. I modified the recipe, and recompiled it, and tested the result. Voila, FF now prints!

• Let’s compare the two most popular GNOME extensions providing dock functionality, Dash to Dock vs. Dash to Panel. Which one is better?

• Unlike other modern desktop environments, GNOME sticks to a different philosophy than the commonly accepted traditional user experience. But we will not comment here on whether this approach helps or degrades the GNOME desktop environment.

• However, one thing is certain: the average computer user has specific expectations about how the user interface appears and functions. And more precisely, elements and behaviors that he is familiar with embraced through time and is at ease with.

• The dock panel is an essential component of almost every desktop environment. It is the element with which the user interacts the most, providing for quick and easy application launching, quick switching between them, a list of currently running ones, and so on. Furthermore, other features like the start menu, system tray, and others are integral.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• You’ve heard all the accusations. Gaming on Linux is crazy, right? Gamers should use a Windows PC and be done with it. Linux is all terminal commands and Firefox stuff. Valve would like a word with you. After all, the Valve Steam Deck runs on Linux. Steam is available on Linux, with more than 6,000 titles available. Many game developers have begun building for Linux systems as well.

• Among the popular operating systems, Linux has always been the first choice of many programmers and developers because they don’t have to pay for it. Moreover being an open source licensed software it is easy for programmers to customize Linux as per their needs. Furthermore, Linux also supports a wide range of programming languages, including C, C++, Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more.

• Even Linux is now a backbone of the internet, cloud hosting, Android, smartphones, routers, and other many devices. Hence, system administrators and developers need to learn how to operate a Linux system. There was a time when it was only a cup of tea for coders, but now even common desktop users can learn and operate Linux easily because of attractive and intuitive graphical desktop environments.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

• Containerization is a key technology for enterprises that need to frequently transport critical applications between different environments and operating systems. To maintain operations, they have to launch and move those applications within a short time frame. The technology gives businesses a more flexible application infrastructure.

• The cloud native ecosystem has grown far beyond Kubernetes. The hundreds of projects show the innovation in open source, and the challenge for anyone to keep up with current technology. Red Hat Senior Director, Technical Marketing & Field PM, Cloud Platforms Chris Morgan joins host Stu Miniman to discuss the evolution of the cloud-native ecosystem. Chris was intimately involved in development of OpenShift and its partnerships with many key vendors.

• As some as you may know, there might be firmware security support in the next versions of Plymouth, GNOME Control Center and GDM. This is a great thing, as most people are running terribly insecure hardware and have no idea. The great majority of these systems can be improved with a few settings changes, and the first step in my plan is showing people what’s wrong, giving some quick information, and perhaps how to change it. The next step will be a “fix the problem” button but that’s still being worked on, and will need some pretty involved testing for each OEM. For the bigger picture there’s the HSI documentation which is a heavy and technical read but the introduction might be interesting. For other 99.99% of the population here are some pretty screenshots:

• On behalf of all of the folks working on Fedora licensing improvements, I have a few things to announce!

• Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.

• Welcome to our monthly article recap, where we round up the latest popular content from Red Hat Developer in one helpful place. Like last month, GitOps, Go, and Kubernetes security topics were in high demand from our readers. Without further ado, let’s dive into the July highlights.

• In this article, I discuss a proposal to build a success-primed team to modernize a portfolio of applications. We will take into account our points for alignment from our previous blog post. It’s important to remember this might not be a team that will be long running or one that will become a key part of the enterprise culture. As we discussed in the previous article, there will be a set budget and timeframe to get the work done. What is being proposed in this article is building a team to get results under these constraints.

• Especially as CIOs and IT departments begin to rethink the way they interact with IT and business, the idea that conflict is unproductive and detrimental to workplace culture – and the notion that organizations should avoid conflict entirely – is based on a false premise: that all conflicts are unhealthy and unproductive.

• That claim falls flat when we broaden our perspective on what the term “conflict” encompasses.

• Healthy conflict allows room for treating people with respect, listening to others’ ideas, and considering those ideas during collaborative, iterative, and agile processes. Maintaining a diversity of thought and experience is crucial to building a healthy, fair, and inclusive company culture.

• Thank you to all of the system administrators who keep our systems up and running, patched, and deployed every day of the year. Check out our most popular articles for sysadmins.

• The past two years of rapid digital transformation have reshaped the role of IT teams. More enterprises and workloads have shifted to the cloud, digital user experience (UX) has become more important than ever, and once-siloed IT professionals are now a central part of business decision-making. But understandably, many organizations are struggling to keep pace with these changes.

• The organizations coming out on top are the ones retooling IT operations to adapt to shifts in today’s market. These companies – we’ll call them the leaders of today’s IT world – are steps ahead of those that haven’t narrowed their focus on what really matters.

• Innovation and growth – rather than just staying afloat – must be a top priority to maintain a competitive advantage in 2022 and beyond.

Debian Family

• The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Geoffroy Berret (kaliko) Arnaud Ferraris (aferraris)

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” has been in development for the past five months and it’s the new major series of Linux Mint after Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana”, shipping with a brand-new Ubuntu base powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS and derived from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), and supported for the next five years, until 2027.

• Linux Mint 21 comes in three flavors, with the Cinnamon 5.4, Xfce 4.16, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments. All three flavors include the same under-the-hood improvements, as well as numerous other changes!

Devices/Embedded

• PINE64 is about to launch the second generation Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron with the Pinecil V2 featuring a new Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V microcontroller with Bluetooth LE connectivity, optimizations for higher power levels, as well as tentative support for the new USB PD EPR standard (Extended Power Range) working at up to 28V.

• While we like open-source tools such as KiCAD, Altium has added a pretty cool feature to the Altium Designer program with a 3D layout tool, which as its name implies, allows the design of 3D PCBs…

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• This week, we are excited to launch the 2022 ASF Community Survey, which will gather scientific data that allows us to understand our community better, both in its demographic composition and collaboration styles and preferences. We want to find areas where we can continue to do great work and others where we need to provide more support so that our projects can keep growing healthy and diverse. This joint effort was long overdue: our last surveys of this kind were implemented in 2016 [1] and 2020 [2], which means we are finally in a position to see trends over time.

• For this new version of the survey, we worked with Bitergia to design it. Bitergia is an expert in analyzing open source communities and other types of software development teams. They have deep experience running this type of survey and research in open source communities. Among other studies, their previous work includes an analysis in gender diversity in technical contributions for OpenStack [3]. The 2022 ASF Community Survey is the first part of a two-stage research project. The second part consists of interviews with people who have contributed to the ASF in order to assess their experience. We’ll share more on this second part of the project soon.

• Farewell, July –we’re wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community’s activities…

Events

• As I write this post, I’m speeding through the German countryside, on a high speed train heading for Amsterdam, as I make my way home from the GUADEC satellite event that just took place in Berlin.

• The event itself was notable for me, given that it was the first face-to-face GNOME event that I’ve participated in since the Covid pandemic set in. Given how long its been since I physically met with other contributors, I felt that it was important to me to do a GNOME event this summer, but I wasn’t prepared to travel to Mexico for various reasons (the environment, being away from family), so the Berlin event that sprang up was a great opportunity.

• I’d like to thank the local Berlin organisers for making the event happen, C-Base for hosting us, and the GNOME Foundation for providing sponsorship so I could attend.

• The schedule for when the miniconferences and tracks are going to occur is now posted at: https://lpc.events/event/16/timetable/#all

• The runners for the miniconferences will be adding more details to each of their schedules over the coming weeks.

• In conjunction with 3mdeb, the fourth edition of our Qubes OS Summit will be held live this year from September 9 to 11 in Berlin, Germany! For more information about this event, including the CFP (which is open until August 29), please see: https://qubesos.3mdeb.com

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As the Perf-Tools team, we are responsible for the Firefox Profiler. This newsletter gives an overview of the new features and improvements we’ve done in the first half of 2022.

• You can find the previous newsletter here which was about the Q4 2021. This newsletter contains updates related to work done in the first half of 2022.

• Here are some highlights.

• While the last months have been pretty quiet in terms of new content for Firefox, we’re approaching a new major release for 2022, and that will include new features and dedicated onboarding.

Programming/Development

Leftovers

• Over a summer sup on the back lawn the other night, a Times-reading, MSNBC–watching, NPR–listening neighbor…

• Last week, for instance, I wrote about the weekend I spent, a decade ago, getting handgun training from the NRA — and what I learned, which is that the things you need to fear are endless, and when one of them pops up in your life you’d better be prepared to kill it. One reader said he wondered “if Robert has ever truly felt as though his life or those he values were threatened” and quickly answered his own question: Of course not! And then he crooned, oh so tenderly: “Must be nice for Robert to live in such an insulated bubble.”

• Issue solved! Everyone needs a gun, except for the utterly naïve.

• Make enough attempts to cut foam using whatever you’ve got — utility knife, hacksaw, serrated plastic knife — and you’ll wish hard for something that cuts cleaner, faster, and better. While there are all sorts of ways to build a hot wire foam cutter, this design from [jasonwinfieldnz] is both interesting and imitable.

• When Johnny Cash wrote “Ring of Fire”, he was talking about love. But when an unnamed follower of [TheBackyardScientist] took it literally and suggested making actual rings of fire — underwater —  they rose to the challenge as you can see in the video below the break.

• Speaking with her, reminded me how much I loved listening to her music which I’d listened to very little in the previous decade, though she had been featured several times in CounterPunch “Best Of” articles. Her haunting voice was just as powerful as it had seemed to me when I first heard her in the late 80s. I wasn’t an MTV fanatic like my older sister, but I’d stop to watch Sinead’s videos a long with a handful of others.

• I recalled the night she tore up the photo of Pope John Paul II and said “Fight the Real Enemy”. I thought she was bold and beautiful and brave and I had deep admiration for her. And I didn’t understand why the fuck anybody in my surroundings cared at all that she’d done this. That is to say, the Mormon capital of the world, Happy Valley, Utah. I defended her and questioned them. It’s the Catholic pope… why should it bother any of them? It’s not as if it’s the president of the Mormon church. I wouldn’t have torn up a photo of him then, but I did question the abuse of men in the church from years before that. It was only two before then that I had three different men, two bishops and an older member of the priesthood, tell me that because I was then pregnant and getting married, it was now my duty to please my husband however he saw fit, whether I wanted to or not. Their orders were eerily similar. They all told me that I had tempted  my soon to be husband and spread my legs for him and got myself pregnant and ruined his life and from then forward I should continued spreading my legs (yes they said those exact words) and if I didn’t want to have sex then I should at least give him a hand-job. All three of them asked me if I knew how to do that and offered instruction. I was 17. These were men between 45-65. So as Sinead made her statement about PJ11 which brought about a war against her by the music industry, that profited from her and still does, and the entire world still ignoring for another decade the abuses committed by the Catholic church, the seeds of escaping Mormonism were already sprouted in the back of my mind. She was an inspiration even if I can’t carry a tune. Shortly after her photo destruction, I shaved my head and escaped Mormonism.

• My impulse to live and toil and evolve inside someone else’s words is sparked by a desire for intimacy. Living in Brazil for 18 months in the late 1970s, I haunted bookstores and combed through literary journals, aching to find a voice that was irresistible, larger, different than mine, one that challenged me to find a way to haul it—still fully alive—into English.

Science

• When you think Jurassic Park, you probably imagine a chomping T-Rex, or even a giant snapping Mosasaurus. But how about vampire squid?

Hardware

• [Gili Yankovitch] has always wanted some kind of macro keypad for all those boss-slaying combos he keeps up the sleeve of his wizard robe while playing WoW. Seventeen years later, he finally threw down the gauntlet and built one. But really, this is an understatement, because Paws is kind of the customizable macropad to end all customizable macropads.

• The C64 may be the best-selling computer of all time, but Commodore made several machines before that, too. [Mjnurney] always loved the Commodore PET, and set about building some new machines in the PET’s unique all-in-one form factor.

• The Commodore 64 was a revolutionary computer for its day and age. After four decades, though, it gets harder and harder to use these computers for anything more than educational or hobby electronics projects. [Gregory Nacu] is fiercly determined to challenge this idea, though, and has gone to great extremes to make this hardware still relevant in the modern age by writing a completely new operating system for the Commodore machines.

• A question: does anyone who was around in the early days of the 8-bit computer revolution remember a dual-CPU 6502 portable machine like this one? Or just a dual-CPU machine? Or even just a reasonably portable computer? We don’t, but that begs a further question: if [Mitsuru Yamada] can build such a machine today with parts that were available in the era, why weren’t these a thing back then?

• It is a shame too because it was a solid technology. The problem was always: lack of adoption. The technology was confined and limited to Intel. This is yet another case of history repeating itself and I am saddened to read this news.

• This day always comes. It is the nature of monopoly and hubris.

• It came for IBM. It came for Microsoft, and it is coming for Facebook. It will come for Google and, even though it is hard to believe, it will come for Amazon. And it is most assuredly coming for Intel right now, and it is probably going to get worse. Maybe not as bad as IBM in the early 1990s – because nothing was worse than that self-inflicted and self-described “near-death experience,” where Big Blue had the biggest write-offs in corporate history and eventually had to lay off half of its 400,000 workforce – but most assuredly for Intel, bad nonetheless.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• International outcry against the Russian bombing of Odesa—as with its earlier strikes on shopping malls, train stations, and hospitals—has been fierce. “Striking a target crucial for grain export a day after the signature of Istanbul agreements is particularly reprehensible & again demonstrates Russia’s total disregard for international law & commitments,” tweeted Josep Borrell Fontelles, who coordinates the European Union’s foreign policy.

• Despite Russia’s action, the agreement on grain exports will likely hold. After all, Russia didn’t technically violate the accord. The Kremlin promised only to avoid hitting the ships carrying food to the outside world.

• I see constellations at night instead of smog. I’ve summited rock formations that left me breathless and humbled with sweeping views, reminding me to tread lightly on the sacred and ancestral lands of the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Serrano, and Mojave peoples.

• Millions have also shared memorable experiences like these at our long-treasured national parks. But as climate change caused by human activities brings more heat, drought, and fire, it now threatens natural wonders across the country.

Linux Foundation

• Non-profit OS Climate on Wednesday launched the first in a series of free tools to drive climate-friendly decision making by companies, financial institutions and governments.

• As a project of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 that builds open-source software, OS Climate aims to help fill the gaps in data currently preventing capital flowing to the right projects.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (aws-iam-authenticator, ldb, samba, libguestfs, samba, and u-boot), and Ubuntu (firefox, intel-microcode, libtirpc, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-5.4, mysql-5.7, and mysql-5.7, mysql-8.0).

• Yet another article about cyber-weapons arms manufacturers and their particular supply chain. This one is about Windows and Adobe Reader zero-day exploits sold by an Austrian company named DSIRF.

• Multiple news outlets have published articles like this one, which cited marketing materials and other evidence linking DSIRF to Subzero, a malicious toolset for “automated exfiltration of sensitive/private data” and “tailored access operations [including] identification, tracking and infiltration of threats.”

• CISA has added one new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.

• Before we start let’s set the scene regarding vulnerability assessment. It is imperative that enterprises conduct their own continuous automated scanning, to have up-to-date assessments of threats that their networks may be susceptible to. Infrastructure penetration testing (discussed in this blog post) should be then used to delve further to expose issues and attack chains using manual testing that would have not been uncovered by automated techniques.

• To go one step further, mature environments with well-formed patch management policies and good security practice, should then consider Red Team engagements to assess response and detection against emulated real-world adversaries.

• On several infrastructure tests I’ve found myself performing vulnerability assessments on expansive networks. While Nessus and other scanning tools have their place, it is crucial to be able to work efficiently to provide much more value on an engagement rather than providing tool output that clients can run themselves (and should be doing, regularly).

• The 1.10 update brings some other nice features, particularly for Windows users. Windows Pro machines can now take advantage of generation 2 virtual machines through Hyper-V. These new VMs support a variety of boot features, including UEFI, secure boot, and more.

Defence/Aggression

• That conversation between my father and brother has been on my mind, as I’ve been experiencing America’s increasingly divided, almost schizoid, version of social discourse. It’s as if this country were suffering from some set of collective auditory hallucinations whose lead feature was nastiness.

• Take cover! We’re being threatened by a revived red(dish) menace from a “rogue” Russia! A “Yellow peril” from China! Iran with a nuke! And then there are the alleged threats at home. “Groomers”! MAGA kooks! And on and on.

• The Paranoid Nature of American Foreign and Domestic Policy.

• BlackRock’s power is growing — and that’s not a good thing.

• On the other hand, journalist Gerard Colby-Zilg—also identifying progressivism with corporate liberalism—defines the first as an “instrument of conservatism,” in the sense that it is the “rationalization of the old order to meet the needs of the new monopolistic order.” This radical view presupposes a psychological derivation of the idea of progress in terms of political ideology, as in Karl Polanyi: “Hope—the vision of perfectibility—was distilled out of the nightmare of population and wage laws, and was embodied in a concept of progress so inspiring that it appeared to justify the vast and painful dislocations to come.” This interpretation locates a cynicism at the heart of the modern liberal project, a dark twin to its much-vaunted idealism, and would therefore read the original progressive rhetoric for empire as textbook delusions of grandeur. These delusions would be leveraged to crush indigenous initiatives toward self-sufficiency around the world while hiding behind platitudes of support for the self-determination of all peoples.

• Consider that the archetypal elements of American Third World thuggery emerge fully formed—like Athena from the head of Zeus—in the period 1898-1901, between the dust-up to the Spanish-American War and the defeat of the Filipino insurrection:

• Talks have been dragging on for months and leading nowhere. Iran’s demands are simple and remain virtually the same since day one, save for a few concessions that they’ve made to the Biden Administration; knock it off with the fucking sanctions that crazed orange orangutan gagged us with and we’ll offer you back our nuclear program on the same silver platter we awarded to Obama back in 2015. But somehow this simple message is two fucking complicated for Biden’s people, who let’s not forget are essentially just Obama’s people in new ties. America won’t even meet with Iran directly. We send them coded messages in a bottle through EU intermediaries at drop sites in Doha or Vienna and they fucking put up with it! Yet somehow, the simplest snafu to undue in imperial history continues to be derailed by a never-ending procession of tripwires and landmines.

• Iran offers to return to the JCPOA, and Biden demands they make concessions to the maximum pressure ransom note of the same ginger asshole who continues to insist Joe stole the fucking election. Iran offers to return to the JCPOA, and their scientists are assassinated in broad daylight by hired guns who do everything but wave an Israeli flag over their bodies after dropping the gat to announce who sent them. Iran offers to return to the goddamn JCPOA, and America hijacks their oil tankers on the high seas like Blackbeard with battleships. Iran finally caves to the crazy concessions Trump made and Biden demands, and talks are put on hold. Iran finally loses their shit with these honky whack jobs and raises their plutonium enrichment to well beneath the threshold necessary for nuclear weapons to even be an option and suddenly they’re the crazy brown rogue state swinging a saber at the wilting Western World.

• This waking nightmare is a policy choice. When the Taliban became the de facto government in August 2021, the Biden administration decided to deny Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), access to most of its international reserves, more than $7 billion that are deposited in the US. Without access to foreign reserves, it is virtually impossible for DAB to fulfill its basic central banking functions. And without a functioning central bank, economic collapse was nearly inevitable.

• The blocking of DAB assets, and the subsequent executive order setting aside half for potential compensation for victims of the September 11 attacks, have been widely condemned by lawmakers, economists, UN human rights experts, civil society organizations, 9/11 victims’ families, and everyday Afghans alike. After months of pressure, there are now reports that the Biden administration is in talks with the Taliban for an as-yet-undetermined mechanism for using half the assets to help address the crisis.

• I once watched a small youth soccer game pitting two teams of four and five-year-olds against each other. One of the teams had an aggressive thirty-something buzz-cut white dad coach who egged his team down the field until they somehow managed to nudge the ball though their opponents’ goal posts. Winning was a big deal to him. He was a local Republican and general all-around pain in the ass – the kind of guy who fouls you a lot during noontime basketball at the Y.

• The other team was coached by a laid-back Democrat, a decent young man with shoulder-length hair and a tie-dye t-shirt. I liked him. For him, the game was about fun and sharing. He’d yell out “good job” and “great kick” whenever one of his kids almost made a decent play. When the other team scored, as it did over and over, he’d call out “nice try” to his goalie, a five-year-old girl who had little idea where the goal was.

• Griner, currently on trial, faces a ten-year sentence if convicted of possessing cannabis. She was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport on February 17 after officials allegedly found vape cartridges containing “hash oil” in her possession.

• I’d personally like to see Griner released. I suspect most Americans agree with me. But the political outrage over her arrest feels quite manufactured given that hundreds of thousands of Americans get treated like Griner every year by their own governments.

• We speak to Oksana Dutchak, a Ukrainian feminist and co-editor of the leftist journal Spilne, who fled to Germany because of the “inability to live under the constant pressure of fear” as Russian invaded. She says Western leftists and feminists who have misgivings about Western military support for Ukraine often overlook that Ukrainians are fighting for self-determination and against imperialism. “What does it mean to stop the war? How it should be stopped? There are questions which should be in the center if you want to give a political answer to the challenges Ukrainian society is facing,” she adds.

Environment

Energy

Wildlife/Nature

• There were an estimated ten million monarchs in the 1980s. In July 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature issued a report that said the population has declined by an estimated 99.9 percent. The species was originally described by Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae in 1758.

• Black, orange and white, as though painted by an artist, and with a wingspan of about three-and-a-half inches by four inches, the monarchs are easily recognizable, even by those who aren’t lepidopterists and don’t study butterflies and moths. “I’m not sure I deserve the title of monarch queen,” Weber tells me. “But Ole definitely deserves the title of monarch king.”

• The primary reason for this arboreal zeal is to capitalize on the power of trees to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into wood, safely locking carbon away for decades to centuries.

• That’s the theory, anyway.

Finance

• Big company CEOs have enjoyed soaring pay, even as their employees have been struggling to keep their families safe and their bills paid.

• Look at Target, for example. Last year, the median Target worker salary did not even keep pace with inflation, rising by less than 4 percent to just $25,501.

• As new government data on Thursday stoked fears of a looming recession—and even led to some claims that the nation is already experiencing one—progressives renewed calls for the Federal Reserve to stop hiking interest rates and policymakers to take on the corporate profiteering driving inflation.

• “Reining in corporate greed is the key to bringing down costs for families and kickstarting economic growth.”

• Workers at a Massachusetts Trader Joe’s on Thursday voted to become the first of the supermarket chain’s more than 500 locations to unionize, a historic development that comes amid a nationwide labor organizing wave.

• “Our crew needs to be represented by an entity that is solely dedicated to our best interests.”

• See a pattern? Leave your nation’s money in a western bank, and it might not be yours for very long, especially if you in any way bother western politicos, like having an economic system they disapprove of, or sending them packing when they invade your country, or telling NATO where to get off when it threatens to absorb a neighboring nation and plant missiles there. In this last instance, it would have been far better had Moscow waged economic war on NATO countries, instead of an actual war on Kiev. But as it happened, Ukraine got clobbered militarily and dreadfully, and the west launched an economic blitzkrieg on Moscow, accidentally firing all its financial missiles at itself.

• The west’s larcenous behavior erodes trust in its financial system, to understate matters. Keep your savings in dollars or in western banks and you could lose them, if say, you don’t let NATO invade your country and topple your government, or balkanize your country, or even if you don’t privatize your ports, or worse, you let China invest in them. Not saying these last two have happened, but if the past is precedent, they sure could. All over the world, in recent months, countries finally got the message, and some feel vulnerable. So things have begun to change in ways that do not bode well for Washington’s global financial hegemony. It is certainly likely, for example, that Chinese leaders look at their more than one trillion dollars in U.S. debt and now think “Gee, maybe that’s not such a great idea.” Indeed, compared to May, 2021, China’s holdings in U.S. treasury securities this year fell by 9 percent.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Beidaihe, a coastal resort some 280 km north of Beijing, does not see the country’s leading politicians taking the plunge into the blue, to escape the sultry heat, but it does see them testing the political waters for two weeks from the beginning of August.  The jostling for position and power brokers doing deals may be reminiscent of political conclaves the world over but this is in a league of its own. One showpiece event will focus their minds this year.

• In November central Beijing will cordon off its roads, and close it subway stations as the quinquennial 20th National Congress of the Communist Party takes place. President Xi Jinping wants to take this opportunity to be chosen for an unprecedented third term as party secretary and get his allies into top positions. Xi’s hope was that the political atmosphere could be summed up, ahead of the congress, as steady as she goes. That hope has vanished, evaporated like mist in the glare of an unforgiving sun.

• No leader with such a destructive sense of presence could do anything but impair those who followed him. But that impairment lingers in the contenders who are seeking to replace him, and it shows.

• In a system that is admirably daft, the governing party, namely the Conservatives, have given themselves a remarkable span of time to pick Johnson’s successor. A number of candidates initially put their name forth, a chaff-wheat separation exercise that eventually led to the selection of chaff.

• I am confident in saying that members of Congress and their staff have never been more unresponsive to serious petitions (letters, calls, emails and old-fashioned petitions) on important issues than today.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Progressive U.S. lawmakers on Thursday joined relatives of Shireen Abu Akleh in demanding the Biden administration thoroughly and transparently investigate the Israeli military’s killing of the Palestinian-American journalist, with one congressman introducing a bill that would require such a probe.

• “From Day One the Israeli government has denied Shireen’s murder. There is no reason for them to be conducting an investigation.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Far-fetched? Not the way things are going. When it comes to extremism, Republican politicians are racing each other to the bottom.

• Once we thought that otherwise anti-choice Republicans favored allowing girls and women who were victims of rape or incest to get abortions. But there are no such exceptions in the laws Republican legislatures have recently enacted.

• Political organizing is challenging work. You’re expected to keep up with the metrics and goals of your parent organization while convincing people, one by one, to help you push political leaders to make positive change. All the while, climate change continues, justices and Republicans strip people’s reproductive rights, and the news from Washington is relentlessly bad. It’s no wonder organizers are burning out.

• As horror stories abound of the impact his Dobbs ruling is having on pregnant people across the United States, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito used his keynote address Thursday at Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Summit in Rome to mock critics of the opinion, which ended constitutional protections for abortion and endangered a plethora of other rights.

• “I had the honor this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law,” Alito said in his first public address since the ruling, which was joined by the high court’s five other right-wing justices.

• Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban is facing backlash after a speech arguing that Europeans should not become people of ‘mixed race’. Orban held his annual speech in Băile Tuşnad, Romania, where he spoke about racial purity among Europeans. This year’s event (a Summer University often referred to as ‘Tusványos’) was the first since the coronavirus pandemic started. Băile Tuşnad is where Orbán usually assesses current political events and sets the tone for future communication.

• When Orbán started his speech, leader of Romanian nationalist Calea Neamului Mihai Tîrnoveanu and another individual held up a poster that read “Ceva este etern: Transilvania, pământ românesc!” meaning “Something is eternal: Transylvania is Romanian land!” Orban supporters quickly gathered around them and hid the message with umbrellas. The two protesters were escorted out of the event.

• At the entrance to the Philip Guston exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, one might pick up a card bearing a statement that reads: emotional preparedness for “philip guston now.” On the verso, one finds the trigger warning—“The content of this exhibition is challenging”—and the wise observation that while “it is human to shy away or ignore what makes us uncomfortable…this practice unintentionally causes harm.” Viewers are invited to “lean into the discomfort of confronting racism on an experiential level as you view art that wrestles with America’s past and present racial tensions.” But maybe you shouldn’t lean too far: “Identify your boundaries and take care of yourself.”

• Meta is deflecting accountability in India, and perpetuating human rights harms, by refusing to disclose findings from the independent Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA).

• Meta’s first-ever human rights report has a mere four pages on Facebook’s impact on India, most of which is merely descriptive rather than providing detailed substantive information. It also shifts the blame to third parties, and emphasizes that Meta does not agree with its findings. It fails to include the assessor’s analysis, conclusions, or recommendations, and Meta does not make any commitments on next steps. In private briefings, Meta has made it clear that it will not release any further information, wholly rejecting the calls by civil society to release the full report.

• HRIAs are supposed to show that a company is seriously committed to understanding and addressing its impacts on human rights. Investors also look to HRIAs to evaluate whether the companies in their portfolios are meeting their responsibility to respect human rights. Under the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, Meta has a duty to “provide information that is sufficient to evaluate the adequacy of an enterprise’s response to the particular human rights impact involved” – one that it is failing to fulfill.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• About a year ago, I wrote about a copyright case involving fireworks firing codes. This case did not get a lot of attention at the time, and it was yet another example of a plaintiff using copyright law as unexploded ordinance (if you will forgive the pun) to harass its competitors, rather than to protect works of authorship.

• Fortunately, the Third Circuit recently vacated a prior injunction in the case, for lack of likelihood of success on the merits, and remanded to the district court with an order to to dismiss the claim with prejudice.

• The court analyzed the copyright protection of both Pyrotechnics’ digital message format, and the digital messages created with it. The opinion linked above provides interesting detail on how the messages worked.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

Science

• We think of data storage as a modern problem, but even ancient civilizations kept records. While much of the world used stone tablets or other media that didn’t survive the centuries, the Incas used something called quipu which encoded numeric data in strings using knots. Now the ancient system of recording numbers has inspired a new way to encode qubits in a quantum computer.

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