● 08.02.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/08/2022: KDE Plasma 5.25.4

Posted in News Roundup at 1:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Much of the article, however, strikes me as problematic. I’ve previously dissected the allure of historical cherry-picking when trying to explain various annoyances in computing. This isn’t always intentional and it’s easy to make mistakes, because the history of software inventions is a deeply tangled web of inspiration (or copying, or stealing – whatever you want to call it) and incremental improvements dating back to the very first general purpose computers ever made.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Torvalds is using an Arm Mac with Asahi, potentially bad news for ChromeOS in Europe, a remarkable Debian server upgrade, Facebook wins a battle in the URL war, Minecraft shuns NFTs, KDE Korner, and more.

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.19 is released, largely with more hardware support and new architectures (including an unusual super-modern virtual Motorola 68000 platform to emulate Google Goldfish devices — my real Q800, clockchipped running A/UX, is flabbergasted). Here’s a full list of changes.

Instructionals/Technical

• Shell scripts are handy for automating tasks like backup databases, clearing log files, etc. You need to perform some tasks when the script finishes the execution. No matter at which stage the script is finished.

• For example, a script that clears the log files from the system. The script first checks the size of the log file, if the log file size is lower than the specified size, the script exits. In that case, you still want to run a block of code.

• When I use the Linux command line, whether I’m writing a new program on my desktop computer or managing a website on my web server, I often need to process text files. Linux provides powerful tools that I leverage to get my work done. I frequently use sed, an editor that can modify text according to a pattern.

• sed stands for stream editor, and it edits text in a file and prints the results. One way to use sed is to identify several occurrences of one string in a file and replace them with a different string. You can use sed to process text files to a seemingly endless degree, but I’d like to share a few ways I use sed to help me manage files.

• I recently built my first home TrueNAS server. I use it to store the bulk of my personal and work data, so I’ve been learning how to make the most of TrueNAS and its filesystem, ZFS.

• Today, I want to tell you about backing up encrypted data.

• Nearly a year ago, I wrote about my hunt for better WordPress hosting and the results weren’t great. Here’s an update…

Games

• Valve has released a small update to the Steam Deck Beta branch, mostly bug fixes but also an improvement for handling external displays. Here’s what’s new.

• Consider this your quick tip of the week, as Republique from developer Camouflaj is now free to keep on Steam and it’s also Steam Deck Verified! The developer has reached their 10 year anniversary as a studio, so they’ve put Republique free as it was their first game. A nice little gesture.

• While many will no doubt wait on Valve for the official Steam Deck Dock, a lot of hardware vendors are coming out with their own versions. JSAUX are one of them and they sent over their Docking Station for Steam Deck for me to take a look at.

• Valve recently released an update for the main Steam client, which amongst other things brings support in Steam Input for the Nintendo Online classic controllers. These are the special controllers Nintendo offers for playing their classics on Nintendo Switch, although Steam having support for them makes sure they have a whole lot more life.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.25.4.

• Plasma 5.25 was released in June 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• This release adds three weeks’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…

• Coming three weeks after KDE Plasma 5.25.3, the KDE Plasma 5.25.4 point release is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session by fixing an issue that caused Wine or Steam Proton apps and games to crash when switching virtual desktops with a touchpad swipe gesture, as well as a KWin crash when pressing the physical buttons on a connected drawing tablet.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

•  When you install Linux on your UEFI-enabled computer, you have to disable Secure Boot because the live USB will refuse to boot with the option enabled.

• Some mainstream Linux distributions support Secure Boot, but it is still challenging to set up for many other distributions (and with Nvidia hardware onboard).

• While things may not have improved over the years, Secure Boot is an essential protection feature in general.

•  Want all your apps to have nicely rounded bottom window corners like GTK4/libadwaita apps have?

• There’s — what else? — a GNOME Shell extension that can do it!

• Apply titled, the Rounded Window Corners GNOME extension aims to “try to add rounded corners for all windows”. While it works great with GTK3 (as pictured) it also goes out of its way to apply rounded bottom corners to pretty much every app you use, including Electron apps like VSCode.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Damien Miller (djm@) committed a change randomising the rekeying interval in arc4random(3) (and friends): [...]

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• We’re lucky to work with so many innovative and forward-thinking companies here at SUSE. We see how committed our customers are to tackling their transformation challenges by leveraging open source tools and platforms that allow their developers to quickly build new solutions that drive their organisation forward.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21 is here, with a tweaked Ubuntu 22.04 base, natively packaged Firefox, Flatpak instead of Snap, and strategically pruned systemd.

• Just a couple of weeks after we looked at the beta-test version, Mint 21 “Vanessa” is out. As usual, there are three different editions, each with their own release announcements: one based on Mint’s flagship Cinnamon desktop, one based on the GNOME 2 fork MATE, and a slightly lighter-weight version based on Xfce.

•  On August 2nd, 2022, Canonical published a new Ubuntu kernel security updates for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS systems that address four security vulnerabilities, including a remote code execution.

• The interesting part is that Canonical lists only Linux 5.15 kernels for both Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as being patched, despite the fact that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS runs Linux kernel 5.13 since the release of the Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS point release back in February 2022.

Devices/Embedded

•  Seeed Studio’s reComputer J101 & J202 are carrier boards with a similar form factor as the ones found in NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier NX developer kits, but with a slightly different feature set.

• The reComputer J101 notably features different USB Type-A/Type-C ports, a microSD card, takes power from a USB Type-C port, and drops the DisplayPort connector, while the reComputer J201 board replaces the micro USB device port with a USB Type-C port, adds a CAN Bus interface, and switches to 12V power input instead of 19V.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The OpenNCC NCB is an accelerated AI reference platform fully developed by EyeCloud.AI. This board can be interfaced with Raspberry Pi boards and it was specifically designed as an alternative to Intel’s Neural Compute Stick 2.

• This platform features the Movidius Myriad X VPU, which is Intel’s first VPU that integrates the Neural Compute Engine along with 16 SHAVE cores. The device also includes up to 8GB of LPDDR4 (1600 MHz, 32-bit).

• Everybody knows the ZX Spectrum was better than the Commodore 64, but what’s even better is Spectrum emulation on the RP2040 chip, better known as the Raspberry Pi Pico, with video output that suits modern screens.

• The original 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor developed by a team that used to work for Motorola on the 6800. There are similarities between the two, and the 6502 is a more straightforward take on the 6800 processor. Overall, the Pico is more than capable of emulating the 6502 as it’s a 32-bit microprocessor, but you can find plenty of RP2040 boards that would be fun to implement for a project like this.

• Two years ago, the Pinecil V1 was announced, and since then has become PINE64’s most popular consumer hardware. Sadly, I’m far worse at Riddles than the great Lukasz, so to cut to the chase, today we are announcing the follow up version two, which is more of an evolution than a revolution. Featuring improved hardware and accessories it retains the same ergonomics and design as the original Pinecil, and it will work with any accessories you already have. It will obviously work with any external accessories, such as cables, but also with existing cases and tips.

• AMD-Xilinx launched its new line of systems-on-module (SOM) last year, which introduced us to the Kria K26 with the KV260 Vision AI Kit. If you’re not already familiar, an SOM is a modular type of FPGA development board that isolates the actual FPGA chip to its own modular PCB with some sort of high-speed, high density connector interface; the rest of the peripherals such as power supplies, interface connectors, COM ports, etc. are placed on a compatible baseboard PCB with the corresponding high density connector.

• This makes SOM FPGAs a more cost-effective option with shortened development cycles since the hardware development changes are isolated to the peripherals located on the carrier board the SOM base board is attached to. This is especially important in current times where supply chain issues have created shortages across all markets, so any reuse of hardware that is possible is critical at the moment.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.

• A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.

Web Browsers

Chromium

• Chrome’s hefty data collection practices are another reason to ditch the browser. According to Apple’s iOS privacy labels, Google’s Chrome app can collect data including your location, search and browsing history, user identifiers and product interaction data for “personalisation” purposes. Google says this gives you the ability to enable features such as the option to save your bookmarks and passwords to your Google Account. But unlike rivals Safari, Microsoft’s Edge and Firefox, Chrome links this data to devices and individuals.

GNU Projects

Programming/Development

• My good friend, Wei, has a pet peeve: unintended horizontal over-scrolling on mobile. Which is very different from intentional horizontal scrolling on mobile. Anyway, we thought it was worth a discussion, from why this phenomenon exists to how we can do our best to avoid it.

• As you can see, I have chosen the reasonably “loose” phrase “do our best”. This is because there will inevitably be some edge cases where a trade-off needs to be made on whether to just let things be. We’ll talk about those as well.

• If you’re into programming puzzles you probably know that there’s a whole class of problems about doing something (e.g. some calculations) with the digits of a number. This means you need to break down a number into its digits first. I’ve always assumed that those problems exist just because decomposing a number to its digits is a classic example of recursion: [...]

• One of the great advantages of print based debugging for the infrequent developer is that it requires essentially no extra knowledge. We almost always know how to print things in the language, and we have to know how to build and run the software in order to work on it. The extra learning required to do print based debugging is basically nil. This is not the case for debuggers; even the best debugger, one that sticks as close as possible to the language’s syntax, has some extra things we need to learn and then to try to remember over time.

• Hello! The other day we talked about what happened when you press a key in your terminal.

• As a followup, I thought it might be fun to implement a program that’s like a tiny ssh server, but without the security. You can find it on github here, and I’ll explain how it works in this blog post.

Python

• Every so often I wind up writing something that needs to do something more complicated than can be readily handled in some Bourne shell, awk, or other basic Unix scripting tools. When this happens, the language I most often turn to is Python, and especially Python is my default choice when the work I’m doing involves processing text in some way (or often if I need to generate text). For example, if I want to analyze the output of some command and generate Prometheus metrics from it, Python is often my choice. These days, this is Python 3, even with its warts with handling non-Unicode input (which usually don’t come up in this context).

• Normally, RStudio makes a soft launch of its products to a small group of people who have access and can give feedback before it is released to the public. However, Shiny’s early release was done discreetly before the conference. Shiny will now be a part of other Python packages like Dash and Streamlit. Cheng said that Shiny’s addition will offer a separate set of features to the users.

Leftovers

• Bill Russell, the cornerstone of the Boston Celtics dynasty that won eight straight titles and 11 overall during his career, died Sunday. The Hall of Famer was 88.

• Russell died “peacefully” with his wife, Jeannine, at his side, a statement posted on social media read. Arrangements for his memorial service will be announced soon, according to the statement.

• Okay, back to the point that I’ve been 26 days without posting. I believe that one of the reasons that makes me post less – besides the time factor – it’s my publishing workflow. This blog is powered by Jekyll, where I write everything in a .md file, then I push the modifications to my git repository. If I want to add some picture, this process becomes even annoying, as I convert the image to lightweight and web-friendly format, strip the metadata, and upload it to my s3 storage.

• Over the last week, I tried to improve this process by migrating to an opensource blog publishing platform called Writefreely. It is [...]

• Running FreshRSS has been a great experience. So much so that I almost forgot that I had Feedly account, despite using it for more than a decade.

• I’m subscribing to more feeds now. Adding new subscriptions no longer feels like a dumb idea; reading posts on Feedly was starting to become so annoying I just didn’t want more there.

Science

• Adverse selection happens when there is information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. One side takes advantage of information that isn’t known to the counterparty.

• It’s one of the most important economic ideas to think about when starting a company or buying or selling anything.

• In my last silly show I talked about how I missed looking forward to the future. The ISS was a symbol of global cooperation, and represented the idea that we could rise above (and maybe even solve) our terrestrial issues. The crew wear flag patches, but it’s a station full of humans and scientists first.

Education

• The library was also accessible to more affluent local Estonians fluent in foreign languages, but as increasing numbers of Estonian societies started to crop up at the end of the 19th century, so did the Kungla Society of Haapsalu in 1895. The latter established its own library as well, which it opened to readers in 1896 and later took on the duties of Haapsalu’s town library.

• Best Books to Learn Statistics for Data Science, Do you want to learn statistics for data science? If so, read these books. If so, your quest is over here.

• The eight finest books for learning statistics for data science are listed in this post. So, read the entire article to choose which book is ideal for you.

Hardware

• Global semiconductor revenue is projected to slow down to 7.4 per cent this year, down from 2021 growth of 26.3 per cent, while chip sales from PCs are likely to decline 5.4 per cent, according to Gartner.

• PC shipments are set to decline by 13.1 per cent this year after recording growth in 2020 and 2021.

• Semiconductor revenue from smartphones is on pace to slow to 3.1 per cent growth, compared to 24.5 per cent growth in 2021.

• Since big PC makers like Apple, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, as well as major suppliers of PC peripherals like Logitech, have officially ceased to do business in Russia, the country adopted its so-called ‘parallel imports’ scheme that allows imports of products from foreign markets without approval from trademark owners, reports The Moscow Times (opens in new tab) (via ExtremeTech (opens in new tab)). To get a new PC or a keyboard into Russia, a distributor can now buy it in China, Serbia, Turkey, or the United Arab Emirates and have it shipped to the country.

• The 2nd edition of the Zimbabwe International Drone Conference is scheduled for the 3-5th of August of 2022. Find more information about how you can be a part of it below. [...]

• GPU prices continue to fall across the board. I bought my RTX 3070 at the exact wrong time earlier this year; I could now get 3080 Ti or an AMD 6900 XT for about the same money, and I’ll bet they’d have more robust cooling than the two inadequate fans on this Zotac card that make me long for the days of my PowerMac G5’s over-the-top cooling. That was a long sentence.

• But then I think back to all the fun memories of playing multiplayer games with Clara during the past four months, and I’d say it’s worth it.

Proprietary

• Now, after a decade and a half of expansion, the global smartphone market has plateaued, according to idc, a data firm, which also forecasts no growth over the next four years. Apple still has room to increase its market share. Although in America the iPhone accounts for nearly half of smartphone sales, in Europe it makes up more like a quarter, according to Kantar, a research firm. Nonetheless, the years of rocket-powered annual growth are over.

• Last week, the House Intelligence Committee passed the Intelligence Authorization Act, which included a provision authorizing the Director of National Intelligence to prohibit the U.S. intelligence community from buying and using foreign spyware.

• The bill would also allow the president to impose sanctions on foreign government officials and firms that target U.S. officials with spyware.

Security

• The Linux operating system is used on most cloud servers, and this fact is important to know. More companies are moving their data to the cloud. A good Linux cybersecurity professional will have a deep understanding of the key areas of this operating system to ensure that their system is secure.

• You should protect the integrity of your data. This ensures that no one can alter it or corrupt it. Data should be available when a user needs it. This requires securing your system from the outside world by implementing strong user authentication. Keeping your system secure also means enforcing all privacy laws. When choosing your software, make sure that you choose a system with strong security features.

• Researchers from Kaspersky labs found the malware stranded in the motherboards’ Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) – their boot sector, so to speak, which is tasked with identifying, verifying and booting up all the connected hardware bits. From simple fans spinning up all the way to your PC’s overclocking capabilities on the latest and greatest gaming CPUs – it all leads to your PC’s BIOS. For the sake of clarity, this isn’t the first such threat discovered – but one is already too many, and it does add to possible infection vectors.

• The agency announced on Friday that it had taken some of its systems offline following a malicious attack the previous night. It said the attack caused extensive damage.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A few months ago, we had some tree work done on our property, and while here the crew left behind a water bottle, a rake, and a chainsaw. When we called to tell them, they weren’t concerned about the water bottle and rake; it was, however, worth it for them to come and fetch the chainsaw. But what if we hadn’t called?

• It’s possible that such a valuable piece of equipment would be counted as lost, costing the business money and — until they purchased another chainsaw — productivity. Preventing gear from being lost and/or finding it once it has been is one reason businesses are interested in asset tracking services. But the current process and business model associated with trackers can make it hard to track anything but the most expensive items, such as cars or large equipment. So a company called Momentum IoT hopes to bring that price down.

• The Markup has identified 37 companies that are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data in an environment with few regulations governing its sale or use.

• 2021 marks noyb’s fourth year of fighting for the right to privacy. We have taken things up a notch by filing a record-breaking amount of complaints: noyb filed over 400 half-automated GDPR complaints on deceptive cookie banners. Hundreds of major websites have switched to a more reasonable cookie banner in the course of this project. Towards the end of the year, we started to see decisions resulting from our 101 complaints on EU-US data transfers based on the Court of Justice decision in “Schrems II”. In a groundbreaking decision, the Austrian and French Data Protection Authority decided that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. Furthermore, we worked on many other projects, such as worker’s rights, or collective redress, or a new automatic browser signal that serves as a consent management system.

• 2021 was not only the fourth year of our organization but also the second year of a global pandemic. We are even more thankful to all our supporters, members, sponsors and funders, who made it possible for this organization to get through another difficult year and be financially stable.

• On July 27, 2022, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton was asked to appear before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was invited to provide expert testimony on a hearing devoted to combating threats to U.S. national security from the proliferation of foreign commercial spyware. What follows is the written submission of that testimony.

• The allegations surfaced in a report from the National Post, when a reporter found that the app had tracked their location over 2,700 times in under five months. A subsequent investigation by Canadian privacy watchdogs said that although the app asked for location tracking permission, it misled users into thinking they would only be tracked while using the app. Instead, they were allegedly tracked throughout their day, allowing Tim Hortons to infer where they lived, where they worked, and to analyze when they visited competing restaurants or major sporting venues.

• Remote attestation has been a technology around for decades now. Richard Stallman railed about the freedom it would take in 2005, A Senator presented a bill asking for the required chips to become mandatory, and Microsoft prepared Palladium to improve “security” and bring remote attestation (among other things) to the masses. Then it all fell apart – Palladium was canceled, a Senator retired, and TPM chips have been in our PCs for years but have generally been considered benign.

• For those who do not know what remote attestation is: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• President Joe Biden confirmed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, was killed in Afghanistan by an American drone strike over the weekend. Mr Zawahiri was second-in-command during the plotting of the September 11th attacks and took over after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. He returned to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, after the Taliban took over last year. Mr Biden said that “justice had been delivered,” and warned that America would not allow Afghanistan to become a “terrorist safe haven” again.

• In countries such as the U.S., there is an unwritten theory in police investigation that assumes whenever a neighborhood robbery occurs it was done by someone who not only had the motive to commit that crime, but the basic intelligence to help time it well and to get away with it. In other words it was committed by someone who lives or operates within 5-miles radius around the crime scene. If your gut feeling is ‘such mentality, regardless of how logical it may sound, will keep the law-enforcement stereotypically myopic and perpetually racist’ you are not alone. But that is a topic for another day.

• Of course, the key words here from Iran are “not looking to directly” escalate tensions. The Iranians want to conduct their regional aggression not “directly,” but through their two closest proxies, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. So far, Iran has supplied Hezbollah with 130,000 rockets and missiles that have been hidden in civilian areas all over southern Lebanon, and occasionally Hezbollah launches a rocket or drone toward Israel.

• In the Austrian province of Burgenland, an illegal migrant injured a female soldier (32) after crossing the border. During a border check, the Afghan hit the female soldier in the face with his fist.

• As a treaty review conference kicked off in New York City, anti-war groups on Monday called out nuclear-armed countries—particularly the United States—for not complying with the decades-old agreement, especially as global tensions escalate.

• “Nuclear-armed states are violating their disarmament obligations under the treaty and increasing the risk of catastrophic nuclear war.”

Environment

• The majority of UPS workers, some 350,000 people, are covered by the biggest union contract in North America, which expires next year. Heat protections will be one of the key issues in the upcoming negotiations, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the workers.

• One important metric is wet bulb temperature, or the temperature of a wet thermometer in a shaded area while water evaporates freely off of its surface. As University of Arizona geosciences professor Peter W. Reiners wrote for Salon last year, “It is important to understand that wet bulb temperatures of 95 °F (35 °C) are not conditions we can just get used to. Human bodies have fundamental physiological limits; our planet’s perturbed, angry climate doesn’t care about them.”

• Reiners added, “Air conditioning may save some, but increased demand and likelihood of outages in already strained power grids makes this a risky bet at best.”

• The impact of climate change on extreme water-related events like this is becoming increasingly evident. The storms in the U.S. followed extreme flooding this summer in India and Australiaand last year in Western Europe.

• Studies by scientists around the world show that the water cycle has been intensifying and will continue to intensify as the planet warms. An international climate assessment I coauthored in 2021 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays out the details.

• As parents, we would do anything to protect our kids. And nothing threatens their survival or their futures more than the climate crisis. That’s why, on a (fittingly) 96 degree Saturday morning, we joined a dozen families with young children in visiting White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s home in Chevy Chase with a message for President Biden: Declare a climate emergency, stop new fossil fuel expansion, use every executive tool possible to meet his own clean energy targets, and support Supreme Court expansion to protect the executive branch’s ability to act on climate.

Energy

• Tallinn’s “Bike to School” support measure is aimed at encouraging children to earn their cyclist driving licenses, which help improve their safe traffic habits and awareness, as well as promoting them to bike more, according to a press release.

• As I picked up the discarded materials, I took time to consider each object I found. Mostly vessels, packaging, and containers and one time use plastics, I realized these objects were made with the very intention to be discarded. Never before has a civilization produced such abundance with an intended use duration of just a few seconds. Each time I went back to this stretch of shoreline, it was once again covered in debris as if I had not just been there just days before. It seemed never ending. That overwhelming feeling led me to contemplate each item individually. Each small item that I found was once thought useful and necessary. So I cradled each piece as I went, to honor that history of production and use before it got recycled or discarded once again. Like in the Pharaoh project, it was an exercise in pointing at the absurdity of these unsustainable systems we find ourselves part of and fighting against. And it made me ask the question, what are we willing to sacrifice of ourselves and our natural habitat for a kilowatt of energy.

Wildlife/Nature

• The concept of human overpopulation, once common, is now rarely used in the scientific literature. Yet overpopulation is a major driver of biodiversity loss and a key obstacle to fairly sharing habitat and resources with other species. A new publication from TOP explores the connections between human numbers and preserving wild nature.

Overpopulation

• From today onwards, humanity is living on credit. Every year, Overshoot Day – the date by which humanity has consumed all the resources that Earth can sustainably produce in one year – arrives earlier. In 1970, it fell on December 29, in 1990 on October 11, and this year on July 28, proof that we are deepening our “ecological debt” to the planet.

Finance

• SQM and Albemarle, the two major Chilean mining companies, dominate the Atacama salt flat. It is impossible to get a permit to visit the southern end of the flats, where the large corporations have set up their operations. The companies extract the lithium by pumping brine from beneath the salt flat and then letting it evaporate for months before carrying out the extraction. “SQM steals our water to extract lithium,” said the former president of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Atacameño, Ana Ramos, in 2018, according to Deutsche Welle. The concentrate left behind after evaporation is turned into lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, which are then exported, and form key raw materials used in the production of lithium-ion batteries. About a third of the world’s lithium comes from Chile. According to Goldman Sachs, “lithium is the new gasoline.”

• What Necessity Does

• On Friday, July 29, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California issued a decision in the Fleites v. MindGeek case, denying Visa’s motion to dismiss the claim it violated California’s Unfair Competition Law — which prohibits unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business acts and practices — by processing payments for child porn. (A copy of the decision is available at this link.)

• If you own a car, pay energy bills, or buy groceries, then you have probably noticed that prices are soaring. The cost of food is up 10% and the cost of a gallon of gas is up 50% from a year ago. And in May this year, median monthly rent hit a record high at $2,002. We’re experiencing the highest levels of inflation in 40 years, which is taking a particularly harsh toll on low-income households.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A coalition of 40 labor and social justice groups on Monday sounded the alarm over anti-worker legislation recently introduced by right-wing Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas and two House Republicans.

• “The latest attack on working people by Rep. Cuellar is proof positive that elections matter.”

• Dubbed the CHIPS Act for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Act for America Fund, the measure is expected to incentivize domestic semiconductor manufacturing and also provide grants for the design and deploying of wireless 5G networks. It also includes a $24 billion fund to create a 25 percent tax credit for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities.

• While primarily known for viral dance videos and dishing up a lighter side of the [Internet], lawmakers see an opportunity to reach new and different demographics, especially younger voters.

• But that opportunity presents security risks. So much so that intelligence officials have cautioned some lawmakers against using the app due to concerns that the Chinese-based tech company could face pressure to share data stored by the platform with Beijing.

• Suzanne Spaulding, a senior adviser for homeland security and director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Stewart Gloster’s hire was significant.

• I feel it’s important that such grant applications are made public so everyone has visibility into the process. This will allow us to collectively learn from the experience and perhaps even to improve the process itself.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Prof Dimitrakopoulou studied public perceptions of Covid vaccines and obstacles to acceptance of reliable information as part of a project called FAKEOLOGY.

• She found that, when people lose faith in institutional sources, they end up relying only on themselves, close friends and family.

• Contacted by Reuters, a spokesperson for The Atlantic confirmed that the screenshot does not show “a real article” and that it is “a fabricated image of our newsletter.”

• The Atlantic did not publish a headline calling U.S. President Joe Biden heroic after falling off his bike when on a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware in June 2022. The image is fake, and no such headline was published by the outlet.

Censorship/Free Speech

• “The ministry of information has decided to halt projection of one of the films showing in cinema halls for the sake of preserving and safeguarding society’s moral values,” the ministry said in a brief statement late Thursday.

• If passed, the legislation would expand the regulator’s power, allowing it to invalidate online news outlets’ registrations, issue fines against them, and shut them down pursuant to court rulings, according to media reports and the text of the bill, which CPJ reviewed.

• Two uniformed prison officials prevented the journalists from covering the event and denied their requests to photograph it, ordering them to stay away from the state-media journalists who were allowed to cover it, according to those sources.

• The video received backlash on social media and a hashtag denigrating her that translates into “Tala offends society” circulated on Twitter, according to Vice. Safwan stated that her comments were taken out of context and denied the allegations social media users made against her.

• The Saudi Public Security authority’s official Twitter posted a statement Monday saying Riyadh police had “arrested a resident who appeared in a broadcast talking to another with sexual content and suggestion that would prejudice public morals.” The tweet didn’t mention Safwan by name, but included an extremely blurred clip from the influencer’s TikTok live stream which has over 1.6 million views.

• Deobandi Ulema issued a ‘Fatwa’ against a singer named Farmani Naaz for singing “Har Har Shambhu”. The Muslim body cited that it is against “Sharia” law.

• Farmani Naaz, a resident of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, sparked the controversy with her music cover hindi song “Har Har Shambhu”. While many are praising her for her beautiful singing and non-stereotypical approach, Deobandi Ulema was seen angry with her.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Until the High Court hearing last year, I believed the country’s senior judges would reject the US appeal and reclaim something of the mythologised notion of British justice if only for the system’s survival, which partly depends on ‘face’ within the arcane reaches of the British establishment. This show of ‘independence’ in support of justice has happened in the past. In Julian’s case, the facts are surely too outrageous – no properly constituted court would even consider it – yet I was wrong. The decision by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales last October that the US in effect had the right to fabricate and belatedly introduce ‘assurances’ that had not even been part of previous due process was quite shocking. There was no justice, no process; the guile and ruthlessness of US power was on show. Might is right.

• Today, the US knows it is close to getting its hands on Julian. Unlike previous parliaments at Westminster, there is not a single voice speaking up for him. In spite of a tenacious campaign emphasising the threat Julian’s extradition poses to a ‘free press’, he is barely acknowledged in the media, which remains intensely hostile to him. Journalists have never been as compliant as they are today, and Julian’s case is a reminder – to some – of what they ought to be. He shames them.

• He could die in jail in the coming months, the Australian Doctors For Assange warned.

• “Medical examinations of Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison in the UK have revealed that he is suffering from severe life-threatening cardiovascular and stress-related medical conditions, including having a mini stroke as a result of his imprisonment and psychological torture,” spokesman Dr Robert Marr said.

• February and March 2022 saw Moscow bureau shuttered, staff accreditations annulled, website blocked and DW declared a “foreign agent”: the 60th anniversary of DW’s Russian Service marks the return to the Cold War era. “Without our studio in Moscow work has become more difficult for us. There’ s no way to sugarcoat it either. But we have found a way to continue to provide our audiences in Russia with authentic information from and about their country,” says Christian F. Trippe, Director of Programs for Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

• In response to censorship, the team relocated to Riga, under the direction of Juri Rescheto, and reinforced DW’s Russian-language content, recently offering two new podcasts, DW Novosti Show and Geofaktor. Both multiplatform broadcasts are available online and on medium-wave frequencies (MW). In a way, DW’s Russian Service is back to its roots, having set up its first radio broadcast in August 1962 and its last in 2011.

• I continue to have passion to shed light on and right the wrongs of the Espionage Act and how the United States government is using it to target not only whistleblowers, but also anyone who dares reveal its transgressions and illegalities. I was extremely honored to participate in the Belmarsh Tribunal which, in addition to calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, also decried the international disgrace that is the potential extradition of Julian Assange. This affront to accountability, press freedom, and freedom of speech is on stage for the entire world to see, yet I wonder who is paying attention.

• Assange has been held since April 2019 in Belmarsh prison, which is what many call the United Kingdom’s version of our super-max prison. He has been held in solitary confinement for every moment of every day at Belmarsh while the U.S. makes an incredible effort to have him extradited to face charges of violating the Espionage Act. The U.K. courts have been all too obliging by issuing rulings, with no support in truth, that Assange can and should be extradited. And — in a final blow to demonstrate its willingness to be the puppet government that the U.S. needs to continue its Espionage Act campaign of terror — on June 17th, Priti Patel, the U.K. Home Secretary certified Assange’s extradition, clearing the way for Assange to be turned over to the United States. Assange is appealing, but given U.K. reticence, it is only a matter of time until Assange will find himself, as I did, in the Alexandria jail being charged with violating the Espionage Act.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The candidates have a lot of ground to cover. The Navajo Nation, straddling Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, is the largest Native American reservation in the country, bigger in area than ten of the 50 states. And thanks to brisk enrolment of citizens living outside the reservation (boosted by the lure of covid relief funds), it vies with the Cherokee to be the most populous tribal nation, with around 400,000 people. Legally, it is both a “domestic dependent nation” and a sovereign state predating the founding of the United States. In practice, the Navajo government’s authority is somewhere between that of an American state and an independent country, not unlike Scotland’s relationship with the United Kingdom—which is to say, it’s complicated, and distinctive.

• Really? Well, how about all the people who have received long jail sentences in the United States for drug possession or distribution? What about them? I don’t recall many conservatives calling for mercy when they were receiving those punishments during the past 40 years or more. I certainly didn’t read anything about them in Opelka’s WSJ op-ed.

• A couple of days ago, theleafonline.com published an article entitled “Biden Pardons Nine Federal Cannabis POWs.” Let’s review a few of the people mentioned in that article.

• The sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia

• For more than a thousand years, the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia was at the center of Greek life and civilization. This is where every four years the Olympics took place. The Olympics was the greatest Panhellenic athletic and religious celebration. Greek men and the best athletes from mainland Greece and from the entire Mediterranean went to Olympia, sometimes as many as 40,000.

• In its Article 9, the Japanese constitution promulgated in 1946 under the U.S. post-war occupation renounces war as a means of resolving international disputes and proscribes maintaining land, sea and air forces. This article is widely supported by the Japanese people. To those in the countries and areas in Asia that Japan invaded and colonized during the Asia-Pacific War, Article 9 is a pledge by the Japanese people not to repeat colonial and military violence.

• As GOP-led states continue working to further restrict reproductive freedom in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s late June ruling, some progressive advocates on Monday responded critically to the introduction of bipartisan abortion rights legislation.

• Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) introduced the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, which they claim “would undo the damage of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For the longest time, DStv has been the dominant player in the satellite tv space in Sub-Saharan Africa. You cannot count 3 houses without a dish in any direction owing to how ubiquitous they are. And that has been the case for decades now. However, technology is now a lot different from where it was 10 years ago. And like it or not, DStv’s current model might be on its last legs…unless they use the biggest asset they have to their advantage. Satellites.

• Earlier this year, we published a tutorial paper ‘Addressing the challenges of modern DNS: A comprehensive tutorial‘. The paper was co-authored with colleagues at the University of Twente and sinodun. It describes the Domain Name System (DNS) from two perspectives — what the modern DNS actually looks like in practice, and what security challenges the DNS currently faces. The paper is aimed at technical personnel who want to know more about the DNS, and at DNS specialists looking for somewhere to get started on a more detailed exploration of the subject. In this article, we want to give an overview of our paper and to discuss open challenges.

• The RIPE NCC has been collecting BGP routing data with the RIS project since late 1999. In November 2002, the first IPv6 peering sessions were established on the collector at AMS-IX, Amsterdam. At that time, a default free IPv6 routing table had about 300 prefixes. By the time of world IPv6 launch in 2012, this had grown to 9,500. And now, 10 years later, RIS sees a total of 155,000 IPv6 routes; a growth close to 1600%. Alongside that, the IPv4 table has grown by roughly 140%, from 410,600 to 935,500. Figure 1 shows the development of both IPv4 and IPv6 tables in the past 10 years. Note that in the many peering sessions, RIS also picks up a significant number of routes which are not announced on the global Internet, but are meant to stay local; internal to a peer’s autonomous system, at best only shared with customers. To estimate the number of routes circulating in global default free routing tables, we restrict the RIS view to those routes which are seen by at least 10 peers.

• No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You’re rewriting history that’s less than 20 years old!

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Other artists with a similarly large Spotify following include Ariana Grande, with nearly 82 million followers, and Billie Eilish, with over 66 million followers. With such a massive fanbase, it’s an unsurprising yet fitting achievement for Sheeran, whose latest album, =, was released last year.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Everyone has gotten into some kinbd of argument or disagreement about “human nature,” which is supposed to be the one true thing that makes humans actually human if you dig deep enough through all the layers of society, relationships, morals, etc. Or if you haven’t had an argument about it, you’ve at least had someone bring it up as some kind of self evident explanation for something in the world, usually something they take to be unfortunate but unavvoidable. “I don’t really like the police either, but humans are naturally violent and greedy, so we need them.” “My boss is a dick too, but the sad truth is that humans are naturally lazy, so what are you gonna do?”

Politics

• Finished the move. Glad to be up in the PNW. It’s so pretty. Also fuck CA I hope I never have to go back there.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• MoonGem 2.3 includes an in-memory key/value store. This allows for keeping persistent state across requests.

• The entire feature is abstracted into the `mg.store` Lua table. Any primitive value stored in that table will be persisted in-memory and available to subsequen

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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