● 05.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/05/2023: Ruby 3.3.0 Preview1, Wine 8.8, and Kdenlive 23.04

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

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos have much in the way of Hackaday news — the Op Amp Challenge is about halfway over, and there are roughly three weeks left in the Assistive Tech challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. Show us what you’ve got on the analog front, and then see what you can do to help people with disabilities to live better lives!

Graphics Stack

• DXVK translates Direct3D 9 / 10 and 11 into Vulkan for Proton and Wine, used on Linux desktop and Steam Deck for gaming. The new DXVK 2.2 release sounds like quite a big one, and just shows how awesome open source is. Once it’s ready and in a new Proton release, we should see another nice little bump in game compatibility.

• NVIDIA has released version 0.2 of RTX Remix today, which on top of lots of improvements also opens up their NVIDIA RTX Remix Bridge.

Applications

• If you’re familiar with AirDrop, you know it’s a popular feature developed by Apple Inc. that enables seamless file transfer between supported Macintosh computers and iOS devices using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, if you’re using Linux and missing out on this functionality, worry not! We have a perfect solution for you. Say hello to LocalSend, an AirDrop alternative designed specifically for Linux systems. In this guide, we will discuss how to install and use LocalSend to securely share files, folders and text messages between different devices.

Instructionals/Technical

• SSH, an acronym for Secure Shell, is a remote protocol that is widely used to make remote connections to servers, network devices, and other remote hosts that run the service. It uses a public/private key pair to encrypt traffic between the user and the remote host.

• When making a connection, you might encounter the “ssh permission denied public key” error. In this guide, we seek to understand the cause of this error and how to address it.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Needrestart on Rocky Linux 9. As a system administrator, it is important to ensure that all services on your server are running with the latest security patches and updates.

• HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a web security policy mechanism that helps to protect websites against protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. It allows web servers to declare that web browsers (or other complying user agents) should interact with it using only secure HTTPS connections, and never via the insecure HTTP protocol.

• As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, having a robust firewall setup is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Firewalls act as the first line of defense, filtering network traffic to protect your system from malicious attacks. In Linux systems, FirewallD has emerged as a popular firewall management solution, superseding iptables due to its flexibility [...]

• HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a security mechanism that helps to protect websites from man-in-the-middle attacks (MITMs). It does this by instructing browsers to only connect to the website using HTTPS, and to never downgrade to HTTP.

• Hello! I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a long time: a free guide to implementing your own DNS resolver in a weekend.

• The whole thing is about 200 lines of Python, including implementing all of the binary DNS parsing from scratch. Here’s the link: [...]

WINE or Emulation

• The Wine development release 8.8 is now available.

• What’s new in this release: – More work towards full PE support in the PostScript driver. – Initial support for loading ARM64EC modules. – More work on IME restructuration. – Various bug fixes.

• The source is available at:

• https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.x/wine-8.8.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.

• Time for a bit of weekend Wine? The translation layer for running Windows games and apps on Linux and other platforms development release v8.8 is out now. Once a year a new stable release is made with the next being Wine 9.0, and Wine is just one part of what allows Steam Play Proton to play some of the biggest games around on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

Games

• Yes, this is a post about OpenTTD. You’re probably used to it by now 😄️

• Emulation coding is tricky business done by some people that are clearly 100x smarter than I am, and now the Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu devs are just showing off.

• Abbey Games are back and they’re making a sequel to Reus, their god game from 2013 where you play as giant beings in control of shaping planets in Reus 2. This time they’re being published by Firesquid Games.

• Want to get Linux onto your handheld PC or your living room PC console? ChimeraOS is probably what you’re going to want and version 42 has just been released. Since Valve haven’t yet released SteamOS 3 currently used on the Steam Deck for everyone, this is probably the next best thing.

• Mechabellum is a new Early Access release from Game River and Paradox Arc (the publishing arm of Paradox Interactive). It’s an auto-battler like say Dota Underlords and Auto Chess, but with big mech units with battles like Supreme Commander.

• City-builders come in all shapes and sizes and now you can build on the back of a massive turtle flying through space in World Turtles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Project released today KDE Frameworks 5.106 as another monthly update to the KDE Frameworks 5 open-source collection of more than 80 add-on libraries to Qt providing common functionality to the KDE Plasma desktop environment and KDE Gear software suite.

• Work continues on the major KDE Frameworks 6 series, but that doesn’t mean that the KDE Frameworks 5 series does not receive any attention. In fact, KDE Frameworks 5.106 is here with more improvements to the Breeze icon theme, the Dolphin file manager, Partition Manager, Plasma Browser Integration, and other components.

• Kdenlive 23.04.1 has just been released, and all users of the 23.04.0 version are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

• The 23.04.0 release of Kdenlive introduced major changes with the support of nested timeline. However, several issues leading to crashes and project corruption went unnoticed and affected this release.

• This should now be fixed in Kdenlive 23.04.1. While we have some automated testing, and continue improving it, it is difficult to test all configurations and cases on such a large codebase with our small team. We are however planning to improve in this area!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 05 to May 12.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.

• This report covers hrev56888 through hrev56961.

Fedora Family / IBM

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

Open Hardware/Modding

• According to Richard, the issue began when he couldn’t always remember to start his car on cold mornings. Sure, you can automate something like this with Alexa, but he needed the car to start itself without the need to remember the command. That’s where Pi comes into play. Using Home Assistant, he’s created a system that will trigger his car to start on mornings when the temperature gets too low.

• FS: Unfortunately, on my way to university, there’s always been this sort of divide between design and technology on the one hand and the sciences on the other; if you could do the science bits, you didn’t do design and technology, you had to just stick to the sciences to get the points to get to the university that you wanted to.

• Now that I had my degree, I was still enjoying the design and technology. I started to build props [for the Science Museum] and got approached for lots of freelance work where people from other organisations were asking me to build things.

• Your UK school is invited to take part in a project to help us evaluate students’ attitudes to coding and how they are impacted by Code Club.

• I used an Estes D12-5 engine for my rocket. This is a single-stage engine with a 24mm diameter, designed for rockets with a maximum lift weight of less than 270g. Perfect for the Estes Green Eggs.

• As soon as I stumbled across the Rockit RP2040-based model rocket flight controller on Tindie, I had to have one. Rockit (Rocket Operation Computing Kit) is a compact and inexpensive flight computer designed by Dan Invents from Finland for small model rockets. Among its many features, this board has an altimeter, accelerometer, and temperature sensor, all of which record data to a microSD card for post-flight analysis. Dan did a fantastic job with this board, and even included a 5V boost converter with 2A current output in order to control servos for more advanced rocketry. Alternatively, it can be used to power a Raspberry Pi and camera: now we’re talking!

• The researchers designed S-BAN (Shape-Based Assistance for Navigation) to work with existing GPS navigation systems, such as Google Maps on smartphones, but to provide a better user experience. The S-BAN device looks like a small remote and the fore end actuates in two dimensions. It can move forward and backward, and pivot left and right to guide the user. If, for instance, the user needs to make an immediate left turn, it will pivot left. This lets people with visual impairments navigate through touch and helps everyone else walk with their eyes up instead of focused on their phones.

• Mark your calendars: May 23rd-25th we’ll be at SPS Italia, one of the country’s leading fairs for smart, digital, sustainable industry and a great place to find out what’s new in automation worldwide.

• So much of the research and development in the area of haptic feedback focuses on universal devices that can create a wide range of tactile sensations.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• My current mouse has additional ‘rocker’ buttons, which Firefox (and probably other web browsers) map to forward and back one page, just like the keyboard shortcuts of Alt + Right Arrow and Alt + Left Arrow. Over the time I’ve become completely acclimatized to using them and having them just work, so it took a while for me to consciously notice a surprising situation where the ‘back’ rocker button worked.

Mozilla

• We’re back with another progress report as we continue improving K-9 Mail for its transformation to Thunderbird for Android! We spent most of the previous month preparing for a new stable release. In April 2023, we finally published K-9 Mail 6.600.

• (By the way, if you missed the exciting news last summer, K-9 Mail is now part of the Thunderbird family, and we’re working steadily on transforming it into Thunderbird for Android. If you want to learn more, check out our Android roadmap, this blog post, and this FAQ.)

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• One of the goals of The Document Foundation and the community it represents is to improve LibreOffice to make it even more competitive with other office suites.

• Design (UI and UX) has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in the last few years, and the Design community has produced new icon sets and a number of incremental updates to the user interface – menus, toolbars and the SideBar – along with improvements to the NotebookBar…

Licensing / Legal

• The most substantive change in the amended complaint (there is more than one change) might be this demand on page 31:

• w (d) Granting Plaintiff an injunction enjoining Defendant from making future defamatory or disparaging statements about Plaintiff and requiring Defendant to remove his prior defamatory or disparaging statements about Plaintiff, and including further injunctive relief as the Court deems just and proper;

Programming/Development

• We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.3.0-preview1. Ruby 3.3 adds a new pure-Ruby JIT compiler named RJIT, uses Lrama as a parser generator, and many performance improvements especially YJIT.

• Rust and C++ both have very similar operational semantics for their “anonymous function” expressions (they call them “closures” and “lambdas” respectively; I will use these interchangably). Here’s what those expressions look like.

• I was recently talking to a friend about how you work on a project must change depending on where in its lifecycle the project is.

Python

• While convenient, this is far from optimal for I/O intensive programs. I would say this default behavior isn’t a good idea for anything larger than human-created text files, and its presence in the base class of all I/O objects is certainly some kind of path dependence. Throughout the ecosystem, there are lots of places that iterate over files this way, and there are other places that go out of there way to inefficiently implement this contract, leaving a lot of performance on the table.

Leftovers

• The lifting of Covid-19 restrictions in 2022 changed users’ habits in the use of postal services – the total number of postal parcel shipments decreased by 1.3 million or 5.2%, and letters by 24%, according to data published by the Public Utilities Supervisory Commission (SPRK) on May 12.

• Every year the Cybertiger stalks his prey: pressing nerds everywhere with the most obscure, fascinating, minutiae of tech-related questions to quiz digital freedom supporters on their tech know-how. Who will come out on top, he wonders? Well, we found out last week, on Thursday, April 27 for EFF’s 7th Annual Tech Trivia Night!

• Thankfully, this year, the Cybertiger (EFF’s one and only Cooper Quintin, Senior Staff Technologist) wasn’t the only one dressed up for the occasion. Our three judges also dazzled the attendees: Jon Callas with a red velvet suit and top hat, Eva Galperin with a very judgmental gown, Ava Salas with a goth dress and cat ears.

• After going through a fit check for everyone on stage, the competition was ready to start! Seven teams put their tech-know-how to the test, all ready to battle it out for the chance to win champion trophies and EFF prize packs.

• But sometimes Hollywood gets it right by depicting reality in ways that both entertain and educate. And that’s important, because whether it’s a large company, government or your personal information, we all share many of the same cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. As a former cybersecurity industry practitioner and current cybersecurity researcher, I believe the final season of “Star Trek: Picard” is the latest example of entertainment media providing useful lessons about cybersecurity and the nature of the modern world.

• Brittney Griner strolled down the sideline about 1 1/2 hours before the Phoenix Mercury played and hugged and high-fived her teammates, coaches and opposing players

• This week’s show hears from a group of parents fighting to keep their children in an international school, learns about an innovative attempt to reach Russian gamers, and looks ahead to Finland’s cha cha chances at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Education

• To this day, I have yet to meet a person incapable of naming a teacher who made an impact on their life. No matter if they attended an under-resourced or well-off school, nearly everyone has had a teacher who made them believe in themselves, taught them to love a subject they thought they were terrible at, or opened up their view of the world.

• Vladimir Putin has signed a decree on higher education reform in Russia, consolidating the shift of the education system away from the Bologna Process and international accreditation standards.

• In his two most famous novels, “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the lifelong socialist George Orwell cautioned his readers, chiefly conceived to be the British leftists, about the dangers of totalitarianism they had to take into account if they wanted to secure a more just and equal future for the working classes. In her new book, “George Orwell and Russia,” Masha Karp — an Orwell scholar and Russian Features Editor at the BBC World Service — explores in depth George Orwell’s political views, the Russian roots of his novels, and the way Orwell himself had been drawn into the propaganda struggle between Britain and the Soviets when he found himself composing the controversial “Orwell’s list” of 1949. Owen Boynton reviews Masha Karp’s book, finding a great deal to admire, but taking issue with parts of the author’s moral argument about Orwell.

Hardware

• One of the more popular trends in the ham radio community right now is operating away from the shack. Parks on the Air (POTA) is an excellent way to take a mobile radio off-grid and operate in the beauty of nature, but for those who want to take their rig to more extreme locations there’s another operating award program called Summits on the Air (SOTA) that requires the radio operator to set up a station on a mountaintop instead. This often requires lightweight, low-power radios to keep weight down for the hike, and [Dan] aka [AI6XG] has created a radio from scratch to do just that.

• As digital photography has become so good, perhaps just too good, at capturing near-perfect pictures, some photographers have ventured back into the world of film. There they have found the imperfections requiring technical skill to cope with that they desire, but they’ve also come face-to-face with the very high cost and sometimes sketchy availability of film stocks. From this has come the so-called post-digital movement which marries analog cameras and lenses with digital sensors, and of this a particularly nice example comes from [Michael Suguitan]. He’s taken a classic Leica M2 rangefinder camera, and built a new back for it containing a Raspberry Pi Zero and sensor.

• Whether you want to build a computer interface device, or control a prosthetic hand, having some idea of a user’s finger movements can be useful. The OpenMuscle finger tracking sensor can offer the data you need, and it’s a device you can readily build in your own workshop.

• If you are the kind of person who reads Hackaday, you probably spent time in school doodling little design day dreams. [Allen Pan] gets it, and he’s taken it upon himself to make some of those daydreams into reality. You can see how it worked out — or didn’t — in the video below.

• Something that probably unites many Hackaday readers is an idle pursuit of browsing AliExpress for new pieces of tech. Perhaps it’s something akin to social media doomscrolling without the induced anger, and it’s certainly entertaining to see some of the weird and wonderful products that can be had for a few dollars and a couple of weeks wait. Every now and then something pops up that deserves a second look, and it’s one of those that has caught my attention today. Why am I being offered planar PCB coils with some electronics, described as “Schumann resonators”? What on earth is Schumann resonance, anyway?

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Back before the pandemic, in 2018—a time that now seems like ancient history—I took note of a woman whom I referred to as a rising star in the antivaccine movement, because she was. At the time, I took notice of Jennifer Margulis mainly because, after having co-authored a book with antivax pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas and for a blog post that brought her to my attention entitled Medical Doctors Concerned We Are Giving America’s Children Too Many Vaccines Too Soon. It was a typical antivax assertion of the time, that vaccines were causing autism and all sorts of other health problems in children because we were giving too many of them to children at too young an age. (Of course, antivaxxers would never say how many and at what age they considered “safe.”) Her post was the “gateway” that led me to look at the sorts of antivaccine misinformation Margulis had been laying down on her website and elsewhere. After the pandemic hit (and totally predictably), Margulis pivoted effortlessly, as so many antivaxxers did, to anti-COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and grift. Of course, she has no clear expertise in medicine to speak of, as her PhD is in English, specifically 19th century American Literature, African-American Literature, and American Studies, but that hasn’t stopped her from becoming prominent in the antivaccine movement.

• Why a better healthcare system is needed.

• The CDC this week reduced the coronavirus data it publishes after the public health emergency declaration related to the coronavirus ended.

• İstanbul’s Recycling Workers Association outlined their action plan for a potential earthquake, which involves repurposing their waste facilities into shelters and proposing their (migrant) companions as unbound strong rescuers and blood donors.

• Learn how to request your health insurance claim file, which can include details about what your insurer is saying about you and your case.

• An upcoming report by Sweden-based organization ChemSec will detail the costs of the continued use of so-called “forever chemicals” which go overlooked by their manufacturers—the “societal” price that individuals and governments pay as the chemicals remain in the environment long after they are used in a range of products.

• Citing extensive research which has shown recently that microplastics are ubiquitous in the environment, more than 70 U.S. House members on Friday wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency to demand stronger regulation of the microscopic particles that are used in everyday household items and have been linked to respiratory diseases and cancers.

• As Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal prepare to reintroduce legislation to establish a national health program expanding Medicare to all Americans, the two lawmakers announced on Friday their plans to hold a town hall at the U.S. Capitol on May 16 regarding the need for Medicare for All.

• What if the media and the politicians threw a moral panic about kids and social media… and the actual experts didn’t come along? The American Psychological Association has put out a thoughtful, nuanced study, about kids and social media, that suggests that the hyperventilating we’ve heard about is misplaced, and that there are some simple common sense approaches that parents can and should take to make sure their kids are having a healthy experience with social media.

• A Hong Kong man has been jailed for 11 months after he pleaded guilty to three counts of incitement linked to encouraging others to spread the Covid-19 virus and cause harm to the city’s judges and police officers. District Judge Clement Lee sentenced defendant Chung Chi-chiu to prison on Friday…

• The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) has quashed reports indicating it was ready to conduct the first transfer of ammonia in Singapore’s port waters before the end of 2023.

Proprietary

• It’s been a while since Google introduced its passkey login system which users won’t need to set and remember passwords in order to log in to their accounts. Now, Google is giving its users option to switch to passkey-only login for their accounts.

• EDITED TO ADD: Ted Chiang’s previous essay, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” is also worth reading.

• So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

• The social media company’s latest threat analysis warns about malware promising to provide some type of “AI functionality.” It says so far, in 2023, it discovered 10 malware families disguised as a generative AI program that attempts to access people’s accounts. The goal is to take over a computer so that it can run unauthorized ads from compromised machines. These ads are how they make money by making people buy fake software/malware.

• According to Marjorie’s manager, Ishan Goel, Caryn’s AI model uses the longest conversations users had with it for training. If one user had an hour-long conversation with the bot, it would consider that conversation successful and use the content of that interaction to inform how the bot behaves in future interactions. This suggests that the most engaged Caryn AI users talked about sex, a lot.

• While Adobe has, for years, offered discounts to college students, as soon as they graduate, the cost of the suite more than doubles, to $54.99 per month for a 12-month license, with a significant fee if you attempt to cancel early. Apple’s App Store certainly has its problems, but it doesn’t try to gouge you with a huge cancellation fee as you try and cut bait.

Windows TCO

• The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) and Department of Human Services (IDHS) have disclosed a data breach within the State of Illinois Application for Benefits Eligibility (ABE) system’s Manage My Case (MMC) portal.

• The breach involved unauthorized accounts created in the ABE system, which accessed and linked to existing customer MMC accounts by using the customers’ personal information, which was stolen from another source.

• Macros — which enable certain automation in particular file types — were long a favorite way for [crackers] to lace documents with malicious scripts to download malware onto targeted systems during email phishing campaigns, the researchers said in a new report. But after Microsoft’s February 2022 decision, which the company fully implemented by July, attacks enabled through macros have dropped off precipitously, the researchers said in a report published Friday ahead of a talk at the Sluethcon cybercrime conference in Arlington, Virginia.

• To remind you of the original bug, tracked as CVE-2023-23397: it was possible to send someone an email that included a reminder with a custom notification sound. That custom sound could be specified as a URL path within the email.

• If a miscreant carefully crafted a mail with that sound path set to a remote SMB server, when Outlook fetched and processed the message, and automatically followed the path to the file server, it would hand over the user’s Net-NTLMv2 hash in an attempt to log in. That would effectively leak the hash to an outside party, who could potentially use the credential to access other resources as that user, allowing the intruder to explore internal network systems, steal documents, impersonate their victim, and so on.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI. New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers…

• [...]

• But this open-source boom is precarious. Most open-source releases still stand on the shoulders of giant models put out by big firms with deep pockets. If OpenAI and Meta decide they’re closing up shop, a boomtown could become a backwater.

• For example, many of these models are built on top of LLaMA, an open-source large language model released by Meta AI. Others use a massive public data set called the Pile, which was put together by the open-source nonprofit EleutherAI. But EleutherAI exists only because OpenAI’s openness meant that a bunch of coders were able to reverse-engineer how GPT-3 was made, and then create their own in their free time.

Security

• A vulnerability in a WordPress plugin exposed the official website of sports car maker Ferrari to hacker attacks.

• A decade-long data breach in Toyota’s online service put some information on more than 2 million vehicles at risk.

• Spanish authorities have announced the arrest of 40 individuals for their roles in a group involved in bank fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.

• CISA and FBI have observed a ransomware gang exploiting a recent PaperCut vulnerability in attacks targeting the education facilities subsector.

• SentinelOne sees multiple threat groups adopting the leaked Babuk source code to build their own VMware ESXi lockers.

• Rockwell Automation customers have been informed about potentially serious vulnerabilities in several products, shortly after news of an investigation into the firm’s China operations.

• Exploitation of a critical vulnerability in the Essential Addons for Elementor WordPress plugin started immediately after a patch was released.

• Australian enterprise software maker TechnologyOne said its internal Microsoft 365 system was compromised in a cyberattack.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It has been more than 1,800 days since the FBI said it would correct its incorrect total of (allegedly) uncrackable encrypted devices in its possession. Back in the glory days of its “going dark” narrative, the FBI claimed it had more than 7,800 impenetrable devices in its possession. Some congressional scrutiny, much of it spearheaded by Senator Ron Wyden, forced the FBI to actually take a look at its presumed totals. That additional scrutiny forced the FBI to admit its tracking software had vastly over-represented its supposed encryption problem.

• Clearview has been giving web scraping a bad name since its arrival on the scene a couple of years ago. Scraping isn’t necessarily bad. Web scraping can provide data sets that help improve things for people everywhere. But this effort can also be used to do the sort of thing Clearview has been doing: grabbing any and all personal data/photos that aren’t locked down, shoehorning them into a massive database, and selling access (along with its facial recognition AI) to anyone who wants it, from gym owners to billionaires to cops.

• France’s privacy watchdog doled out further penalties to US firm Clearview AI for failing to pay a 20-million-euro fine imposed last year over data breaches.

• The Chinese Communist Party “maintained supreme access” to data belonging to TikTok parent company ByteDance, including data stored in the U.S., a former top executive claimed in a lawsuit Friday.

• Why it matters: The allegations come as federal officials weigh the fate of the social media giant in the U.S. amid growing concerns over national security and data privacy.

• The former executive sued ByteDance, which owns TikTok, for wrongful termination and accused the company of lifting content from rivals and “supreme access” by the Chinese Communist Party.

• A former executive at TikTok’s parent company ByteDance accuses the tech giant of serving as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese government

• [...]

• Among the most striking claims in Mr. Yu’s lawsuit is that ByteDance’s offices in Beijing had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members sometimes referred to as the Committee, which monitored the company’s apps, “guided how the company advanced core Communist values” and possessed a “death switch” that could turn off the Chinese apps entirely.

• “The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” the complaint said.

• In its Future of Retail Payments Report 2023, consultancy firm Bain and Co has predicted that by FY2026, cash will go down to 48% of overall payments in the country. Currently, it is at 70%. That is a steep fall, especially since FY26 is less than two years away.

• Margherita Bruscolini is Head of Drones at Globhe, a massive drone data-gathering company based in Sweden that works with more than 8,000 drone operators worldwide to collect high-resolution drone data from more than 130 countries, which are then delivered to clients.

• Globhe’s drone flights span various verticals —mainly global health, water, extreme weather events, environment, agriculture, forestry, infrastructure, and renewable energy. Globhe’s customers are businesses, governments, organizations and researchers — all of whom seek Globhe’s high-resolution drone data to increase their own work efficiencies and/or lower costs through applications such as map-making or conducting inspections.

• A former executive at TikTok’s parent company ByteDance accuses the tech giant of serving as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese government. The allegations were made in a complaint filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court as part of his wrongful termination lawsuit. Yintao Yu claims that the Chinese government monitored ByteDance’s work from within its Beijing headquarters. He also alleges ByteDance used software to scrape user content from competitors like Instagram and Snapchat without permission. ByteDance did not reply to a request for comment.

Confidentiality

• In the beginning of 2023 I’ve started extending my open-source project z-tokens, from just supporting passwords (plus other related tokens) generation and hashing (with various well-known algorithms), with support for a very “opinionated” encryption tool.

• I know that “opinionated” is currently a very misused word, from “opinionated” web frameworks, to “opinionated” cryptography tools. However, in this case I think I’m not misusing it, as I’ll try to describe further.

• NIST has release a draft of Special Publication 1800-38A: Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography: Preparation for Considering the Implementation and Adoption of Quantum Safe Cryptography.” It’s only four pages long, and it doesn’t have a lot of detail—more “volumes” are coming, with more information—but it’s well worth reading.

Defence/Aggression

• The US basketball player appeared in a promotional video with Taiwan’s vice-president William Lai.

• With long experience of chaos, violence, and dysfunctional governance, Haiti looks now to be on the verge of new crisis in the form of foreign military intervention. U.S. and United Nations decision-makers have held back, but now they look to be moving, again.

• Rawalpindi, Pakistan—On Tuesday evening, I was walking through downtown Rawalpindi toward General Headquarters, the army’s national command center. Earlier that afternoon, former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan had been picked up from Islamabad High Court by the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force controlled by the country’s powerful army. This had prompted thousands of his supporters to take to the streets in a show of protest, and there were reports on social media that military installations, including GHQ, had been attacked. A police statement later claimed that 1,650 protesters were arrested in the Punjab province, a number that is unquestionably short of the reality. I decided to visit the scene to report on what was happening.

• We look at the political crisis in Pakistan as the Islamabad High Court on Friday granted two weeks’ bail to former Prime Minister Imran Khan after his arrest sparked mass protests. Paramilitary forces arrested Khan on corruption charges, but Pakistan’s Supreme Court later ruled his arrest was “invalid and unlawful.” Khan served as prime minister from 2018 to 2022, when he was ousted from office in what he called a “U.S.-backed regime change” plot carried out by his political opposition. Mohammed Hanif, an award-winning writer and journalist based in Karachi, says the corruption accusations are part of a larger power struggle in the country, pitting the extremely popular Khan against the country’s establishment, including the military. “Elections are due, and they want to keep him out of the election race. Either they want to disqualify him or put him behind bars,” says Hanif.

• We speak with Serbian journalist Ljiljana Smajlović as Serbia reels from a pair of mass shootings that left 17 people dead, incidents that spurred mass protests and demands for stronger gun control. In light of the massacres, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić vowed to completely disarm the country. More than 6,000 unregistered guns and weapons were turned in after the government announced a month-long amnesty on illegal weapons. “People are stunned. Their sense of security has been taken away completely,” says Smajlović. She notes the shock of the mass shootings is providing a rare opening for the opposition to attempt to weaken the ruling party, which has been in power for more than a decade.

• The Prime Ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were meeting in Tallinn Friday under the auspices of the Baltic Council of Ministers with future energy security and more help for Ukraine top of their joint agenda.

• On Thursday, May 11, Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš met with the Executive Vice President of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager in Rīga, to discuss issues related to the European Union’s economic development, as well as the continuation of support for Ukraine.

• Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is right to say that helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invasion is about freedom, justice, and common values, writes the head of Ukraine’s Office of the President, Andriy Yermak.

• As Russia continues its assault on Ukraine, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) is keeping a close eye on Russia’s movements across the military, cyber, and information domains.

• Moscow acknowledged on Friday that its forces had fallen back north of Ukraine’s battleground city of Bakhmut after a new Ukrainian offensive, in a retreat that the head of Russia’s Wagner private army called a “rout”.

• At least as far back as the Civil War through World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the first Gulf War, “contractors,” as we like to call them, have long been with us. Only recently, however, have they begun playing such a large role in our wars, with an estimated 10% to 20% of them directly involved in combat and intelligence operations.

• FRANCE 24 spoke to Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition activist who was recently sentenced to 25 years in jail by a Moscow court for “high treason” because of his outspoken criticism of the war in Ukraine. Kara-Murza sent a message to her jailed husband: she will “never stop fighting” for him. She also discussed the current situation in Russia and said she felt unable to return there as she feared the authorities would arrest her to “put pressure” on her husband.

• China will send a special envoy to Ukraine, Russia and other European nations from Monday, Beijing said on Friday, the highest-ranking Chinese diplomat to visit the war-torn country since Moscow’s invasion last year.

• A Metropolitan of the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) was sentenced to three years in prison Friday after pleading guilty before a Ukrainian court to “violating the equality of citizens.

• Ukrainian law students and young lawyers are reporting for JURIST on developments in and affecting Ukraine. This dispatch is from Olha Chernovol, a Ukrainian lawyer who was forced to leave Ukraine in March 2022 after the Russian invasion and who is now completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

• Lithuania is considering providing more instructors for the training of Ukrainian troops, Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas said on Friday while visiting Lithuanian instructors in Germany.

• New evidence reveals that Ukraine’s infamous covert “kill list” is a product of the Ukraine regime, effectively funded by the CIA, amongst others, and hosted by NATO.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office on May 12 denied it had requested that he address the Eurovision song contest final scheduled for May 13 in Liverpool, England.

• Eurovision returned to the U.K. after 25 years, but the focus this week has been on Ukrainian culture. The finals take place Saturday in Liverpool, England. Fan favorites include Finnish Käärijä’s “Cha Cha Cha” and “Tattoo” by Sweden’s Loreen.

• While exploring endgames, Biden aides say they reject any push for peace talks — including from China — that would freeze the current front lines and Russia’s gains.

• U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with German Finance Minister Christian Lindner on May 12, underscoring the importance of working together to counter evasion of Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its war in Ukraine, the U.S. Treasury said.

• They can’t track every shell, but at a time of heightened scrutiny in Washington they know they can ill afford slips with the big ticket items.

• Ukraine will likely unleash its counteroffensive soon with tanks, drones and fresh troops. Kyiv badly needs some kind of success. The troops aren’t only fighting the Russians – they also need to prove to the West that they are still worthy of support.

• The Russian Defense Ministry has acknowledged its forces retreated from positions north of the city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region that for months has been the scene of heavy fighting.

• Russia’s uniformed and paramilitary forces appear to be in a state of panic as Ukraine begins advances on the strategic city.

• Groups representing survivors and loved ones of victims of last May’s racist massacre at the Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo, New York on Friday sued numerous social media and streaming companies, a gun dealer, a body armor manufacturer, and the shooter’s parents for the wrongful deaths of 10 Black people murdered in the attack.

• Russia’s pro-war bloggers were quick to claim that Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive had begun, but Ukrainian officials downplayed the advances.

• The apparent clandestine visit of a Russian cargo vessel to Naval Base (NB) Simon’s Town in December will be addressed by an independent enquiry headed  by a retired judge, a statement attributed to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said amid a growing diplomatic row with the United States over South Africa allegedly supplying Russia…

• A court in the city of Pereslavl-Zalessky, about 140 kilometers northwest of Moscow, on May 12 placed noted Russian physicist and mathematician Sergei Abramov under house arrest on a charge of financing an unspecified extremist group.

• More mass killings. More bloody “normal”—not just in Texas, not just in the United States, but around the world.

• A court in Siberia on May 12 sentenced jailed businessman Anatoly Bykov to 11 years in prison for his involvement in ordering the assassination of a rival businessman in 2005.

• PRESIDENT Sauli Niinistö hosted a dinner for the diplomatic corps at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki on Thursday, marking the first such gathering in four years due to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

• Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that the current pause on student loan repayments will end “no later than June 30.”

• Driving the news: “The emergency period is over and we’re preparing our borrowers to restart,” Cardona said Thursday at a Senate appropriations committee hearing.

• The death of an imprisoned Palestinian militant leader on a hunger strike prompted new skirmishing.

• Exchanges of fire continued on Friday despite overnight mediation efforts for a cease-fire.

• Max Jones joins Kim Iversen to discuss his confrontation of U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown on his calls for the ICC to prosecute Vladimir Putin for war crimes.

• The provision of Storm Shadow missiles marks an escalation of NATO support for Ukraine.

• The searing images, by “the poster child for America’s torture program,” stun. “Like clockwork,” Abu Zubaydah was ceaselessly beaten, rectal-fed, hung by his hands, slammed into walls and waterboarded 83 times during Darth Cheney’s grisly, senseless “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In newly released drawings, Zubaydah documents his abuse during 21 years at Guantánamo. Still there, he’s “the forever prisoner” – not for what he did (he was never charged) but for what was done to him.

• Observers have long compared Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia to Alexander Lukashenko’s rule in Belarus. When protests swept the latter country in 2020 (only to be forced back into submission as winter set in), many speculated that Russia might be headed down the same path. In 2022, Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the domestic repressions against anyone who dared speak out against Putin’s policies did indeed reach an unprecedented level, but it appears to be only the beginning of the Kremlin’s crackdown. At Meduza’s request, Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political scientist and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, explains what Russians can expect if their country continues moving in the same direction as Belarus.

• State Duma deputy from the United Russia faction Viktor Vodolatsky was injured by artillery fire in Luhansk, reports Interfax, citing an announcement by the Russian-appointed authorities of the annexed LNR.

• An explosion occurred in Melitopol, a city in the Russian-annexed part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. The state-owned Russian news outlet RIA Novosti reported the incident.

• Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin has repeated his claim, first made yesterday, that Russian Defense Ministry troops surrendered their positions on the outskirts of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, allowing Ukraine’s Armed Forces to occupy important tactical heights. Prigozhin’s press service released a video of the tycoon’s response to media requests for his comments.

• In a letter posted on Telegram Friday, Wagner paramilitary cartel founder Evgeny Prigozhin called on Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to come to the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, where heavy fighting has been ongoing for more than nine months. The letter is dated May 11.

• Hungarian President Katalin Novák took to Twitter to try to explain the scandalous statement by newly appointed Chief of General Staff Gábor Böröndi that World War II could have been prevented if the world had made peace with Nazi Germany before it was too late.

• Perm police have arrested three people on suspicion that they were defrauding donors in a fake fundraising campaign purportedly in support of the Russian army while using the name of RT head Margarita Simonyan, according to the Russian Interior Ministry.

• Hungary is the only EU member state not to have backed a report that drew attention to the “politically motivated repression” of the Minsk regime and the large number of political prisoners, Radio Free Europe reports.

• In the evening on May 11, multiple Russian Telegram channels supporting the invasion began announcing that the counteroffensive everyone had been expecting from Ukraine for the past several months had finally begun.

• A Russian Mi-28 attack helicopter crashed in Crimea during a training flight, reports Interfax, citing sources in Russia’s Defense Ministry. Both pilots were killed.

• In the first four months of 2023, Russian military courts heard 1,053 felony cases under the Criminal Code’s article against “unauthorized abandonment of a military unit,” which can carry a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. That’s more cases than in the entirety of 2022 (when courts heard 1,001 such cases), according to the independent outlet Mediazona, which took its data from the official websites of Russia’s military courts.

• A Russian Defense Ministry representative reported Friday that Ukrainian forces were advancing in the tactical direction of Soledar “along the entire contact line extending more than 95 kilometers” (59 miles) on Thursday.

• A court in Russia’s Yaroslavl region has put a local resident under house arrest on suspicion that he “financed extremist activities.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• After the start of the war on Ukraine, Russia has banned its citizens from accessing such online services as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as the sites of several Western media, including Helsingin Sanomat. Due to this, a large proportion of Russians are not aware of what is going on in Ukraine, for example.

• The Russian state-controlled media are not telling the truth.

• [...]

• Early this year, Helsingin Sanomat commissioned two well-known map designers to create a Counter-Strike map imitating a Slavic city. A secret room was hidden in the map.

Environment

• Increase driven by post-COVID economic rebound, stimulus and drought.

• If current forecasts hold, the storm could be the strongest and most dangerous since 2010 to hit the area, which is the site of many refugee camps.

• Climate groups accused President Joe Biden of violating his pledge to end public financing for international fossil fuel projects after the U.S. Export-Import Bank voted Thursday to approve a $99.7 million loan for an Indonesian oil refinery.

Energy/Transportation

• As FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried prepares to go on trial for several of the 13 charges against him, the crypto world is getting pressured by regulators around the globe to make sure they’re not liable for another fraudulent scheme.

• Four in five bank directors at the six largest banks in the U.S. have ties to polluting companies and organizations, including major fossil fuel companies, according to a new DeSmog analysis.

• The research raises fresh concerns about the extent of anti-environmental influence inside some of the nation’s most powerful boardrooms at a time when campaigners are pushing the banks to enact stronger environmental policies at their annual shareholder meetings.

• In an effort to gain federal approval for a natural gas storage project in south Louisiana, Sempra LNG lobbyists crafted letters for Louisiana elected officials to send to federal regulators in support of the project.

• Last fall, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) greenlit the Hackberry gas storage project, which involves converting underground domes constructed in the 1970s to mine for salt into storage space for up to 25.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Sempra LNG has been trying to build the project in Cameron Parish since 2006, when the company planned to store gas in the caverns from its liquefied natural gas (LNG) import facility. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing later created a surplus in U.S. natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

• More than three dozen progressive advocacy groups implored East African leaders this week to stop funding fossil fuel projects and instead ramp up investment in renewable energy production and other green economic initiatives.

• ChatGPT and other AI applications such as Midjourney have pushed “Artificial Intelligence” high on the hype cycle. In this article, I want to focus specifically on the energy cost of training and using applications like ChatGPT, what their widespread adoption could mean for global CO₂ emissions, and what we could do to limit these emissions.

• People are not going to be any more patient about adding generative AI to their workloads today than they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s to add Web infrastructure to modernize their applications to deploy interfaces for them on the Internet. The difference this time around is that the datacenter is not transforming itself into a general purpose X86 compute substrate, but rather is becoming more and more of an ecosystem of competing and complementary architectures that are woven together to provide the overall best possible bang for the buck across a wider variety of workloads.

• Russia-based airline Azimuth and Georgian Airways are completing the “last formalities” before starting direct flights between Russia and Georgia later this month, says Russian state broadcaster RBC.

• Europe has come a long way from the frenzied stockpiling driving up natural gas prices a year ago.

Wildlife/Nature

• Colorado’s snowcapped Rockies towered in the distance on a crisp April day as firefighter Emilio Palestro used a torch to ignite damp prairie grass within view of a nearby farmhouse and a suburban neighborhood.

• Propelled by a breeze, orange flames crackled up a ditch bank, devouring a thick mat of dead grass, cornhusks and weeds. It was neither too windy, nor too humid, nor too hot — a rare goldilocks moment for firefighters to safely clear irrigation ditches of weeds, grasses and brush that can block the flow of water and spread wildfire.

• The US Supreme court has sided with a California law mandating pork sold in the state come from pigs raised in humane conditions.

• In what green groups on Friday called “a victory for environmentalists, scientists, and vulnerable agricultural communities across California,” state officials announced a day earlier that a controversial release of genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Central Valley has been suspended.

Overpopulation

• Italy recorded a record low number of live births last year, 392,598, which combined with an elevated number of deaths, 713,499, has accelerated the demographic trend that threatens to crash the country’s social security system. The government of Premier Giorgia Meloni is backing a campaign to encourage at least 500,000 births annually by 2033, a rate that demographers say is necessary to prevent the economy from collapsing by growing the wage-earning population as retirees draw on their pensions.

Finance

• The Group of Seven’s top financial leaders say they are united in their support for Ukraine and determination to enforce sanctions against Russia for its aggression

• One outcome is clear as Washington reaches for a budget deal to end the debt ceiling standoff: The ambitious COVID era of government spending is giving way to a new focus on stemming deficits

• Desiree Fixler served as head of sustainability at the DWS. Her ouster after criticizing the German fund internally for “greenwashing” generated considerable outrage against parent company Deutsche Bank. In an interview, she talks about the mendacity of the financial industry and an apology she is still waiting to receive.

• It’s “Everything Week” on the Buick. I had to replace a broken, leaking, power steering rack, some lower control arms, and do the brakes. I shouldn’t have had to do the brakes since Car-X did them last year.

• Precious Price ditched her profitable business of renting home stays to tourists to combat the mounting housing crisis.

• A mixed report on the date the nation will default on its debt comes as the White House and Congress are in a high-stakes game of chicken over raising the debt limit.

• After meeting with congressional leaders earlier this week as the U.S. barrels toward a catastrophic debt default, President Joe Biden said that “we should be cutting spending,” a remark that fueled concerns among progressives that the White House is preparing to cede to at least some Republican demands in exchange for a deal to lift the debt ceiling.

• Kathryn Campbell is well known in the parklands and on the footpaths where some of Australia’s most disadvantaged live. Witnesses at the RoboDebt Royal Commission made her the face of the governance scandal. But in stark contrast to those affected by RoboDebt, she now sits in a plum job inside the Department of Defence on her old $900K salary. Former senator Rex Patrick examines the ins and outs.

• Kathryn Campbell AO CSC was not liked by Labor senators. The Senate inquired into Centrelink’s Compliance Program (“RoboDebt”) from September 2019 to May 2022, and whilst senators didn’t penetrate Minister Stuart Robert’s improper public interest immunity shield preventing fulsome evidence being available to the Committee, they had a pretty good idea about what had gone on.

• Global private equity majors are looking to fund Indian businesses directly as banks take a step back.

• Finance leaders from the Group of Seven advanced economies have set a year-end deadline for launching a new scheme to diversify global supply chains, according to a final draft of their communique.

• We were not able to buy gold tokens before the deadline yesterday. We tried different banks and came up short in all cases. One bank told us they were waiting on instructions from their Head Office on how they should process gold token purchase requests.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Representative Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress, hosted an educational event on Wednesday at the Capitol to highlight the 75th anniversary of what Palestinians recall as al-Nakba, which is Arabic for “the catastrophe.” But it wasn’t easy.1

• You may be wondering how on earth did a jury find Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll but not for raping her—and what’s the difference anyway? Welcome to the decade-long battle in New York state to change the definition of rape in the first degree (aka Rape 1).

• For four decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has extolled the importance of “personal responsibility.” He has chastised those who “make excuses for black Americans” and argued there is a need to “emphasize black self-help.” He has denigrated affirmative action programs on the grounds that they “create a narcotic of dependency” where there should be “an ethic of responsibility and independence.” He bemoans the “ideology of victimhood” that allows the marginalized to “make demands on society for reparations and recompense.”

• CNN CEO Chris Licht says he is proud of the Wednesday night town hall with Donald Trump, where the former president got to spew forth his usual toxic mixture of misogyny and conspiracy theories. Along with repeated lies that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump took the opportunity to insult E. Jean Carroll (recently awarded $5 million in a lawsuit where the jury found Trump had defamed and sexually assaulted her). Trump referred to Carroll as a “wack job” and also went after his CNN interviewer Kaitlan Collins as a “nasty person.” (“Nasty” being a slur Trump reserves for women who defy him).1

• Of course Trump will pardon January 6 criminals if he wins in 2024! Why wouldn’t he?!?! You let him blather on for an hour, even discussed future pardons with him, with not a single mention of his past abuses.

• If you vote for a Republican, you’re selecting someone who—once elected—is unlikely to support your views on the issues that matter to you most. Instead, here’s what you’re choosing:

• Sylvia Shawcross Welcome to your Off-Guardian Friday/Saturday opinion piece.

• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited the Hungarian town of Veszprém on Friday morning, where he gave a speech at the opening of ActiCity, the new Centre for Dance and Movement Arts, which was established with the support of the European Capital of Culture (ECC) program.

• Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams still doesn’t have a clear path for reelection despite winning bipartisan praise during his first term in office and expanding voter access during the COVID-19 pandemic

• CHP members were suspicious of a group distributing leaflets in Esenler of İstanbul. They checked and saw that the leaflets being distributed were fake leaflets in the name of their party, and one of the people distributing them was a representative of the pro-government foundation TÜGVA.

• Arman Adamian of Russia won a world judo title on May 12 at the first major international team competition to welcome back Russian and Belarusian athletes since last year’s invasion of Ukraine.

• The South African government did not approve any weapons shipments to Russia late last year, the country’s communications minister said on May 12, one day after the U.S. ambassador to South Africa said he was confident that a Russian ship had picked up weapons at a South African port in December.

• A court in Ukraine has sentenced Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) Metropolitan Iosaf (Petro Huben) to three years in prison with a two-year probation term on a charge of premeditated violation of citizens’ equal rights.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has signed a decree imposing sanctions on 13 individuals and 28 entities that he said have been cooperating with Russian occupying authorities in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region, helping to maintain the Zaporizhstal steelworks giant.

• Three former fighters of Russia’s Wagner private mercenary group who returned to their home region of Volgograd after taking part in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine have been arrested on charges of robbery and extortion.

• Turkey says talks to extend a deal allowing grain exports from Ukraine via the Black Sea following the Russian invasion are nearing an agreement before it expires on May 18.

• China will send a special envoy to Ukraine, Russia, and other European nations from May 15.

• Li Hui, China’s special representative for Eurasian affairs, is expected to begin his trip on Monday.

• They cited reasons such as the Ukraine war and surging inflation worldwide.

• She began her first diplomatic job 30 years ago, led talks on the Iran nuclear deal and grapples with China and Russia. She is also the first woman to be deputy secretary of state.

• Former US Ambassador to Hungary David Cornstein has urged the Trump campaign team to hire Orban’s strategist, Arpad Habony, Axios reports. However, the former US president’s team has no plans to hire Orban’s spin doctor. While Mr. Cornstein was in Budapest during the Trump presidency, he frequently met with Habony despite the State Department’s concerns.

• With so much of the recent talk about House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s political future—Will she run again? If not, who will succeed her? and her past: her 2023 Award of Honor from the American Hospital Association “for her efforts to advance health care throughout her career”—San Franciscans might easily forget that she is not San Francisco’s Representative Emerita, but is actually San Francisco’s Representative for real. But the fact is that there’s a need for some real representation coming up, real soon, that she needs to get on top of.

• Now Ms. Yaccarino is set to become the face of Twitter 2.0. Mr. Musk said on Friday that he had selected Ms. Yaccarino, 60, to become the company’s chief executive. Hours earlier, NBCUniversal announced that Ms. Yaccarino was leaving, effective immediately.

• Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., who chair the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, said on Friday that the administration risks losing momentum in implementing its cybersecurity strategy without a permanent national cybersecurity director.

• Under the legislation establishing the office, the national cyber director is charged with advising the president on cybersecurity policy and strategy. It replaced a White House “cyber czar” position that former president Donald Trump eliminated. The Solarium Commission contended that the White House needed “a more robust and institutionalized national-level mechanism for coordinating cybersecurity and associated emerging technology issues.”

• Gen. Nakasone, 59 years old, has said he is eyeing a possible departure in August or September after spending more than five years jointly running the two organizations, one of the people said, while others said his timing was less precise. Gen. Nakasone’s plans could change, in part because his deputy at NSA, George Barnes, also is expected to retire soon, the people said.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main election rival of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, issued a warning to Russia, accusing it of releasing fake material on social media ahead of the May 14 ballot.

• If Moscow wants its friendship with Ankara to continue after the elections, it should “keep your hands off the state of the Turks,” said the opposition candidate.

• The opposition candidate has once again raised concerns about the potential involvement of “paramilitary groups,” who he claims may resort to violence in the event that Erdoğan loses the election.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Defamation cases are having quite a moment. The threat of a likely loss in a big defamation suit resulted in Fox News settling for $787 million just as trial was set to begin in the Dominion case, And then, this week, we saw E. Jean Carroll win her defamation (and sexual abuse) lawsuit against Donald Trump, with a jury awarding her $5 million.

• A Russian-speaking resident of Estonia, Artemy Ivanov aka rapper ‘Temada’, who caused outrage among many Rīga residents by holding street concerts in Russian during the Easter holidays, has been denied entry into Latvia, Latvian Television reported on May 11.

• A 60-year-old Russian woman was given a two-year suspended sentence on Thursday for leaving a note with an “insulting inscription” on the grave of President Vladimir Putin’s parents, independent news sites reported on Thursday.

• Russian writer Viktor Shenderovich was doused with ketchup by a protester in Vilnius on Thursday.

• Clause 110 of the bill requires websites and apps to proactively prevent harmful content from appearing on messaging services. This will mandate the screening of all user content, all the time. It’s not compatible with encryption, or our right to privacy. When our words, personal photos, and videos are screened for compliance with state-mandated criteria, this interferes with our rights to free speech online. And where screening is done by algorithms, the decision to remove content will be taken without context.

• The briefing states:

• Throughout the UK legislative process, EFF has stressed that mandated scanning obligations will lead to  censorship of lawful and valuable expression. The Online Safety Bill also threatens another basic human right: our right to have a private conversation. That’s why we have called for action to make sure that users’ rights to private messaging and end-to-end encryption are safeguarded, not abandoned.

• Utah and Arkansas  have already passed such laws. When they go into effect in March 2024 and September 2023, respectively, anyone under eighteen will be required to obtain parental consent before accessing social media. The same would be true nationally under the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which was recently introduced in Congress. And though it doesn’t directly require parental consent for social media, the Kids Online Safety Act, too, would require platforms to implement “parental supervision” tools that would force them to verify child-parent relationships. Once the Utah and Arkansas laws are in effect, young people will not be able to access social media using a login without a complicated approval process that would require parents and guardians to share their private information with social media platforms or third-party verification services.

• Two Lithuanian conservative MPs have turned to the country’s Commission of the Lithuanian Language with a proposal to stop using the name of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

• Two women from Russia’s northwestern region of Karelia, Anna Trusova, 57, and Irina Nippolainen, 59, have fled the country after authorities launched a probe against them in March, accusing them of public calls for actions compromising Russia’s national security.

• Liberal voters have intensified their scrutiny of the Thai monarchy in recent years. Conservatives have responded with a campaign to defend the institution at all costs.

• Even though Smith had liaised with police for months, the eight were arrested early on Saturday morning for allegedly possessing items that could be used for a “lock on” protest, under new powers rushed into laws days before the coronation. These items were in fact luggage straps used to carry placards, but as more than 20 organisations warned the Public Order Act 2023 is so ill-defined: “essentially any person walking around with a bike lock, packet of glue, roll of tape or twine, or any number of other everyday objects could be at risk of having been found to have committed this offence, so wide is the net cast by it”.

• [...]

• Within weeks of being introduced, critics of the Public Order Act have been proved right: its broad powers will enable the police to close down protests and suppress dissent. The Act builds on draconian powers included in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which gives the police powers to close down protests because of “noise”, “unease” and the risk of “serious disruption”. Both of these laws also extend the police’s powers to stop and search members of the public, despite evidence that such powers are used disproportionately used against racialised communities.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• My part in the sacking of the notorious counterintelligence chief.

• The senior Al-Jazeera journalist was killed and her colleagues attacked by Israeli forces while they were covering an Israeli army raid on a refugee camp in Jenin in the occupied West Bank last year in May.

• The Israel Defense Forces’ chief spokesperson outraged people worldwide with a televised interview Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the IDF killing Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead as she reported from the occupied West Bank on May 11, 2022.

• On May 6, police arrested Felgate, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker, while he covered an environmental protest held during King Charles III’s coronation, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The W.G.A. had been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of all the major Hollywood studios, including Netflix, before talks broke down last week. The writers went on strike on May 2. Negotiations have not resumed, and Hollywood is bracing for a prolonged work stoppage.

• Last week, at a summit in Los Angeles a day after the strike was called, one attendee asked union leaders which studio has been the worst to writers. Ellen Stutzman, the chief negotiator of the W.G.A., and David Goodman, a chair of the writers’ negotiating committee, answered in unison: “Netflix.” The crowd of 1,800 writers laughed and then applauded, according to a person present at that evening who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the strike.

• The NYPD told Truthdig that officers “responded” at 2:27— seven minutes after the first clocked call for help — but video shows a train clock at 2:28 with no officers on the scene. The department has not replied to queries about when, exactly, officers arrived to administer first aid. According to New York City statistics, in critical situations, the average time from 911 call to police arriving at the scene is 7.5 minutes.

• Singer Zemfira Ramazanova has filed a lawsuit against Russia’s Justice Ministry, requesting that her inclusion on the ministry’s list of “foreign agents” be declared illegal. State broadcaster RBC reports that a representative of the singer filed the suit on her behalf on May 10.

• The authorities in Buryatia are prosecuting Natalia Nizovkina, a civil liberties activist and defense attorney representing the Ulan-Ude resident Natalia Filonova in a separate overtly political case.

• Cyprus and Malta revoked citizenship obtained in exchange for investment from dozens of Russian nationals, and members of their families, who are subject to E.U. sanctions. Der Spiegel reports that, in response to a request by European Parliament member Moritz Kerner, Cyprus annulled nine “golden passports” issued to Russian nationals who have been sanctioned, as well as another 34 passports belonging to their relations. Malta revoked two sanctioned Russian nationals’ citizenship.

• In the past year and a half, start-up unionization efforts such as those at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Apple have been satisfying to witness for those of us hungry for social justice in the United States. We have their backs, and we’ll continue to root for them.1

• In 2013, a picture of a baby with tight curls and tears rolling down his cheeks greeted passengers on the New York City subway.

• The Trump-era Title 42 policy has come to an end, but the Biden administration has instituted what human rights advocates say amounts to a new asylum ban. We get an update from the San Ysidro border crossing near San Diego, California, where hundreds of asylum seekers have been sleeping on the ground under trash bags and foil blankets, with many reporting they’ve not eaten in days. Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program, says Biden’s anti-asylum policies are “reconfiguring the concept of asylum to a point where it no longer offers the promise that it did post-World War II.”

• On April 8, three young Venezuelan men were detained in El Paso, Texas, where they had just crossed the border from Ciudad Júarez, Mexico. They were among the 183,000 undocumented people reportedly apprehended by the United States Border Patrol that month, which, according to the Reuters news agency, constituted a 13% increase from March.

• As pandemic-era asylum restrictions ended early Friday, migrants in northern Mexico faced more uncertainties about a new online system for appointments to seek asylum in the U.S. Some migrants still waded apprehensively into the Rio Grande, defying officials who shouted for them to turn back, while elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border people hunched over cell phones trying to access an appointment app that may change their future.

• The policy, which for years allowed the U.S. to quickly expel migrants to contain the spread of COVID-19, ended at 11:59 p.m. Thursday.

• The number of asylum seekers from Cuba and Venezuela is expected to grow as the Trump-era Title 42 asylum restriction ends. A group of House Democrats are urging the Biden administration to lift sanctions on the countries, which they say are driving people to leave their homes out of economic desperation. We speak with Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez, author of a new report for the Center for Economic Policy and Research, “The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions.”

• Title 42, which lifted at midnight, had allowed the swift removal of migrants on public health grounds. Though holding facilities were full, border crossings remained lower than predicted.

• The mother of a 17-year-old boy who died this week in U.S. immigration custody is demanding answers from American officials, saying her son had no known illnesses and had not shown any signs of being sick before his death. The teenager, Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, was detained at a facility in Safety Harbor, Florida, and died Wednesday. His death underscores concerns about a strained immigration system as the Biden administration manages the end of asylum restrictions known as Title 42. His mother, Norma Saraí Espinoza Maradiaga, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that her son “wanted to live the American Dream.”

• The torrential rain was shed from the policeman’s flat hat via its curved plastic peak, forming a curtain of water that flowed down in front of him, obscuring his face.

• Underpaid app workers are facing more pressure to accept risky clients. That’s putting them in danger.

• After almost 79 years on this beleaguered planet, let me say one thing: this can’t end well. Really, it can’t. And no, I’m not talking about the most obvious issues ranging from the war in Ukraine to the climate disaster. What I have in mind is that latest, greatest human invention: artificial intelligence.

• Officials in Bangladesh and Myanmar are preparing Friday to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people as a tropical storm turbocharged by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis strengthens in the Bay of Bengal.

• After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Friday confirmed that a 17-year-old Honduran in the United States without a parent or guardian died in government custody earlier this week, CBS Newsrevealed another recent death.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• You might recall how when U.S. telecom giants lobbied the Trump FCC to kill net neutrality, they hired a bunch of PR firms to flood the FCC with fake comments from a bunch of fake and dead people. The goal: create the illusion of support for shitty, unpopular policies. It’s a pretty popular tactic by corporations and lobbying firms looking to influence the government and/or create the illusion of consensus.

• The employees will not be able to come to the Turkcell headquarters or connect to their computers between May 12 and 15. There will be no similar practices by the other mobile operators. The concerns led to a 5 percent drop in the price of Turkcell shares.

• Through periodic reports within the ¿Quién defiende tus datos? project, key digital rights groups in Colombia (Fundación Karisma), Perú (Hiperderecho), México (R3D), Brazil, (InternetLab), Chile (Derechos Digitales), Paraguay (TEDIC), Argentina (ADC), Spain (Eticas), and Panamá and Nicaragua (IPANDETEC), have been rating ISPs and holding them to account vis-à-vis privacy best practices and international human rights standards. Evaluating companies’ public statements, policies, service contracts, transparency reports, law enforcement guidelines, and judicial or administrative challenges to government demands for user data, each national edition assesses whether and how ISPs defend users’ privacy and protect their data.

• The report we are releasing today provides an overview and comparative analysis of this series of editions. It highlights achievements and gaps throughout editions’ shared criteria, looking at companies’ data protection and digital security policies, how transparent ISPs are about government data demands, whether they notify users about data requests, and whether they require a previous judicial order to hand user data to authorities. It compares the performance of regional and global companies, like Telefónica and América Móvil, in countries the project covers. The imbalances this comparison reveals is a mix of gaps in companies’ commitments and in national law, which  mirrors how weak or strong privacy safeguards are in countries’ legal frameworks. Moreover, the report describes how our partners’ studies revealed privacy issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the rise of data-sharing agreements with governments related to policies aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

• Our cloud strategy framework provides the principles and requirements for the cloud architecture of the RIPE NCC services. To determine these requirements, it uses the service criticality framework, more specifically its availability component rating.

• We published our cloud strategy framework in November 2021. Since then, we worked on developing the service criticality framework and published its final version in May 2022. We have recently published the criticality ratings for some of our core services. At the same time, we realised that we need to update the cloud strategy framework to better reflect the reality and the diversity of services we provide.

Monopolies

• I have to admit that I’d lost track of the whole White House IP Czar position. Officially, the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator” or IPEC, the job was created by the “Pro-IP Act” in 2008, and we warned that the whole thing was an attempt to turn the White House into Hollywood’s private copyright police force. The first IPEC didn’t come until after President Obama was elected, and while he was in office, there were two IPECs who served under him, with somewhat mixed results. The first one, got off to a rocky start, but was willing to listen to non-maximalist opinions, and eventually produced some more balanced reports on “IP enforcement.”

Patents

• The European Commission has today (27 April 2023) published proposals for changes impacting on patents in the EU in relation to compulsory licensing of patents in crisis situations, reforms to the Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) system (including the EUIPO being able to set SEPs licence fees worldwide) and the introduction of a Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) for the new unitary patent right [sic] (UP) and a centralised SPC application procedure for this and national SPC rights [sic]. [...]

• The European Commission has proposed Regulations on standard essential patents, compulsory licensing of patents in crisis situations, and amendments to the laws about supplementary protection certificates. These aim to create a more transparent, effective and futureproof intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights [sic] framework.

• Less than three weeks before the planned opening of the Unified Patent Court, a message has been published on its website as a reaction to problems with the content management system, which apparently isn’t able to cope with the growing inflow of opt-outs.

• Earlier today, the USPTO issued its final written decision in IPR2021-01064.  The final written decision found that all challenged claims in VLSI’s patent were in fact invalid. So what makes this IPR special?  Well, the challenged patent was one of the patents underlying VLSI’s $2 billion verdict against Intel.

• In July 2021, an EPO press communiqué confirmed that compulsory video conferencing is admissible, under the European Patent Convention, in appeal proceedings “in a general emergency”. Then, in November 2021, the Enlarged Board of Appeal released its final reasoning in G 1/21.

• Dominic O’Connor, Principal, Chartered (UK) and European Patent Attorney, at Marks & Clerk, reflects on this year’s European Patent Office report and latest developments involving patent filings for hydrogen technology.

Trademarks

• Iron Maiden, the band, is not a band I have thought about much in the last, oh, let’s call it 20 years. They have made it onto our pages before, specifically for behaving like trademark bullies, which is apropos. I say that as the band most recently is opposing the trademark application for a lingerie company that goes by the name “Maiden Wear,” asserting that the public is going to think that the company is associated with the band because the band also sells clothing merch.

Copyrights

• Aside from the extraordinary idea that anyone can hold the copyright on a sequence of just four chords, there’s another striking aspect to this latest case. It was not Marvin Gaye himself alleging harm from Sheeran – Gaye died nearly 40 years ago, in 1984 – but the family of the co-writer of the song, Ed Townsend, who died in 2003. Copyright is supposed to be about incentivising artists to create, so the idea of taking a living creator to court over alleged copying of dead artists’ work is particularly reprehensible. Moreover, in this case, copyright nearly caused a very real future loss for culture: [...]

• Internet provider Grande Communications’ challenge of a $47 million music piracy verdict has failed to achieve the desired result. A federal court in Texas denied Grande’s request for judgment as a matter of law or a new trial. This means the company will now take its dispute with the major music labels to the Court of Appeals.

• Major pirate sites, including Fmovies, 9anime, BestBuyIPTV, Abyss.to, Fembed, and 2embed, are reportedly linked to or directly operated from Vietnam. Enforcement efforts have faced challenges but things may be about to change. From verifying customer identities to clarified ISP liability, through content blocking, takedown tools and the ability to unmask infringers, a government decree appears to offer rightsholders a smorgasbord of opportunities.

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