● 05.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/05/2023: Mozilla ‘Invests’ in ‘Apps’ and ‘Gig’ ‘Workers’

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Lunduke’s Big Tech Show – May 17th, 2023 – Ep 003

• Lunduke’s Big Tech Show – May 16th, 2023 – Ep 002

Benchmarks

• NVIDIA have a brand new release of their special developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver with v525.47.24 available now. This driver series is mainly aimed at game developers, open source developers, and anyone who needs the latest Vulkan extension support.

Instructionals/Technical

• Need to mirror an entire website? Use the httrack command, available in all Linux distributions. If site requires authentication, provide to httrack a cookies.txt file exported from your browser.

• A typical httrack use:

• On ~/websites/somesite will be created a folder structure with HTML and other files similar to the URLs on https://some.site.com. You can even open the index.html file locally in your browser and browse the mirrored content.

• In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to enable automatic login in Ubuntu desktop and server editions. This convenient feature allows you to bypass the login screen on Ubuntu Desktop, allowing direct access to your desktop environment. In Ubuntu Server, it eliminates the need to manually enter your credentials every time.

• Seafile is an open-source, self-hosted file synchronization and sharing platform. It allows users to store and encrypt data on their servers without relying on third-party cloud providers. In this tutorial, you will learn to install Seafile on a Ubuntu 22.04 server, MySQL, and Nginx as a reverse-proxy server.

• The primary application we require to perform our internet activity is a browser, a web browser to be more perfect in terms of privacy and security of online activities.

• Over the Internet, most of our activity is logged to the Server/Client machine which includes IP address, Geographical Location, search/activity trends, and a whole lot of information that can potentially be very harmful if used intentionally the other way.

• In the digital era, web application security is a paramount concern. Your organization’s data integrity, availability, and confidentiality are at stake. Thus, the need for robust security measures cannot be overstated. One such comprehensive, open-source solution is ModSecurity.

• In this three-part series, we explore the Red Hat Enterprise Linux published application compatibility guidelines (ACG), and how developers can use them to ensure their application remains compatible with future releases of RHEL. Building applications can be difficult, and building applications that continue to operate after an in-place distribution upgrade is even harder. How does Red Hat Enterprise Linux make it easier? It provides guidelines and guarantees that you can follow to improve application compatibility.

• In this article, we will expand on the concept of application compatibility. In the second part, we will review the topic of compatibility with more examples. In the third article, we will discuss container userspace compatibility with the host kernel services.

• What we call application compatibility is traditionally referred to as backwards compatibility. It is the ability to run an unmodified application binary on the current or newer version of the distribution and have it operate correctly (i.e., compatible with the release of the distribution).

• How to install the Docker CE and NVIDIA docker on Linux Mint 21 to access the NVIDIA GPU of your computer from the Docker containers and run the CUDA programs.

• Tutorial on the different ways of using the named arguments in Bash script to know how to pass them and understand which argument contains which type of data.

• Comprehensive tutorial on the multiple ways of calculating the sum of a column from a file using the “awk” script in Bash through different examples

• Tutorial on the ways of using the /dev/null virtual devices on Linux to store all the physical and virtual devices and discard any data that is written to it.

• In this post, you will learn how to install Terraform on Debian 11. Introduction Terraform is a software configuration tool designed to enhance the automation of multiple processes. It achieves this through concepts such as infrastructure as code. But what does it mean?

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvtop on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Are you curious about how to monitor GPU performance on Ubuntu 22.04? Look no further than Nvtop!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In this post I’ll talk a bit about HDR and color management, and where we are with implementing them in KWin. Before jumping into the topic though, I need to add a disclaimer: I will be simplifying a lot of things significantly, leaving others out entirely and as I am by far not a color expert, almost certainly write a few things that are wrong. If you want more credible sources and dive into the details of how all the color stuff works, I recommend you have a look at the color-and-hdr repository instead of this post.

• To explain what these things mean, it’s important to take a step back and talk about how colors and brightness have traditionally been handled:

• With traditional display pipelines, applications provide color data in the form of three channels, usually1 in the form of a red, a green and a blue value. These three values are in most cases sent to the display without modifications, which then applies the so-called “electro-optical transfer function” (EOTF) to the “electrical” values that are being sent through the cable, to get the desired brightness values and powers its red, green and blue LEDs (or equivalent2) accordingly. These red, green and blue light sources then emit some amount of light, the mixture of which your eyes and brain interpret as some color and brightness.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Being anonymous on the Internet is not particularly the same as surging the web safely, however, they both involve keeping oneself and one’s data private and away from the prying eyes of entities that may otherwise take advantage of system vulnerabilities in order to harm targeted parties.

• There is also the risk of surveillance from the NSA and several other top-level organizations and this is why it is good that developers have taken it upon themselves to build privacy-dedicated distros that host an aggregate of tools that enable users to achieve both online autonomy and privacy.

• We are almost half of the year, we thought it right to share with Linux enthusiasts out there the most popular distributions of the year so far.

• DistroWatch has been the most reliable source of information about open-source operating systems, with a particular focus on Linux distributions and flavors of BSD. It collects and presents a wealth of information about Linux distributions consistently to make them easier to access.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• With the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur), there will be a considerable change to how PPAs are handled. As you may know, in the current iteration of the software-properties software, when you add PPA from the command line, a .list file is created in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, and the associated GPG key is added to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/.

• When 23.10 is released, those PPAs will use the deb822 format for .source files and their corresponding GPG keys will be added directly to the file in a Signed-By field. This means users won’t have to manage a collection of .list files.

• This is a collection of useful suggestions, tips and tricks for you to do for the first time after installing your computer with Ubuntu 23.04. We have been traditionally published similar collections like this with Jammy Jellyfish, Kinetic Kudu and now Lunar Lobster and we worked hard to make them easy for beginners to follow. We hope this will help you a lot.

• The Docker project was initiated by dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company that created Docker to run their internal infrastructure. Slowly, Docker became more successful than any of their other products, so dotCloud rebranded as Docker Inc. Docker provides easy-to-use tooling and grew into an entire ecosystem for container management. Many developers have learned to use it as part of their toolkit for packaging and distributing applications to the cloud, or for development and testing stages more broadly.

• Snaps were introduced by Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, as a way to package and distribute Linux applications. There was a growing need to ease the deployment of applications that run across different Linux flavours, versions and even types of compute. Snaps improved the overall system security and the software update lifecycle, including infrastructure for over-the-air updates and automatic rollbacks. The idea behind snaps is to decouple the Linux application from the operating system it runs on, while still providing secure access to host resources through dedicated interfaces and reusing as much as it’s practical from a minimal stable release of Ubuntu.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The map is generated using Google’s Static Maps API. Data is updated regularly on a schedule using MQTT and a server running on the Raspberry Pi. It also handles daylight savings time automatically, so you don’t have to make any adjustments throughout the year. Overall the project should operate on its own without interference.

• On a recent Internet of Things Podcast, we took a voicemail from Keith on our podcast hotline. Keith has several ceiling fans that have “dumb” remotes, meaning they’re manual remotes for power and speed. He wants to know if he can add some smarts to those old fans for automations and routines. The general answer is yes, but it does depend on the existing fan remote technology. And it will require the purchase of some new hardware.

• It brings me great joy to announce the elevation of a longstanding Purism employee to the critically important role of Director of Product—François Téchené—the second employee hired to Purism.

• Filling this role accomplishes a lot of things for us; but filling this role with someone of François’s caliber accomplishes all the things we need and want. An internal shift from R&D heavy investments—measured by tens-of-millions—into finished product and delivery—measured by features and benefits—made the choice of elevating François to the Director of Product role an obvious choice.

• Purism’s continued commitment to convenient product for the masses—where the software improves with age—while also delivering according to our social purpose, means that under François’s product leadership our past, current, and future customers will be elated as to what François will bring to their fingertips.

• It has been truly excellent for us to see Raspberry Jam events popping back up all over the world in recent months. Our Community Engagement guy Matt has pulled together every single Raspberry Pi-focused event you’ve told us about in one handy place so more people can find a local nerd squad to hang out with and show off their projects.

• Matt has received some brilliant photos from David Whiteley of Hackberry Men’s Shed which hosted a Raspberry Jam in Ontario, Canada. Let’s take a look at some of the builds on show: [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Good news! The PocketCHIP handheld Linux computer is back! OK, not quite but that’s what the Raspberry Pi Zero-powered BeepBerry reminds me of with a Blackberry-like keyboard, a small 2.7-inch display, and a 2,000mAh LiPo battery for power.

• The BeepBerry is another open-source hardware design from SQFMI, who previously did the Watchy ESP32 E-Ink smartwatch, that runs Raspberry Pi OS Lite on the Raspberry Pi Zero/Zero W, and also includes a Raspberry Pi RP2040 to handle the keyboard and peripherals.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

Programming/Development

• Projects inevitably involve more people, learning the required steps and control for collaborating and delivering a robust product is a must for any team. When working on programming projects with multiple inter-dependencies Version Control (VC) is essential. Even on smaller projects or on your own one, tracking the progress of your development has enough advantages to make the use of VC beneficial. For these reasons knowing how to interact with VC and how to collaborate within a team it is a must for any R developer.

Leftovers

• Biography was once the elegant matriarch of nonfiction. Smelling faintly of lavender, she clutched her pearls when the story got too personal, or the author intruded on the narrative to address the reader, or the political machinery showed through the corseted layers of her heaving bodice. No more. Her skirts are shorter now, her research notes briefer. Her authors prance through their pages telling us what to think and feel within a hodgepodge of genres—memoir, philosophy, even a bit of self-help.1

Science

• Sodastream machines are a fun way to turn tap water into carbonated water. However, the canisters are expensive and generally require a trip to the store to get a replacement. Lifehacker has a workaround that may make life easier for the bubble-addicted set.

• [The Signal Path] had two Tektronix AC/DC current probes that didn’t work. Of course, that’s a great excuse to tear them open and try to get at least one working. You can see how it went in the video below. The symptoms differed between the two units, and along the way, the theory behind these probes needs some exploration.

• For most of us who haven’t entirely slept through biology classes, it’s probably no secret that ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the compound which provides the energy needed for us to move our muscles and for our body to maintain and repair itself, yet less know is guanosine triphosphate (GTP). Up till now GTP was thought to be not used for mechanical action like molecular motors, but recent research by Anupam Singh and colleagues in Nature Physics (press release) has shown that two GTPase hydrolase enzymes (Rab5 and EEA1) function effectively as a reversible molecular motor.

• In 2015 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft provided humanity with the first up-close views of Pluto, passing just 12,472 km (7,750 mi) from the surface. What had always been little more than a fuzzy blip at the edge of the solar system could finally be seen in stunning high resolution. Unfortunately, the deep space probe could only provide us with a relatively fleeting glimpse at the mysterious dwarf planet — the physics of such a distant interplanetary flight meant the energy required to slow down and enter orbit around Pluto was beyond the tiny spacecraft’s abilities.

• Most of us have seen those demonstrations of metal parts that mate together so finely that, once together, they have no visible seam at all. But how, exactly, is this done? [Steve Mould] has a video that shows and explains all, and we’ve never seen the process explained quite like he does.

Hardware

• Racing virtual cars from behind a PC monitor might be cheaper than doing it in the real world, but high-end sim racing peripherals still come with high-end prices. With the increasing popularity of force-feedback pedals [Tristan Fenwick] built built an active pedal that can provide significant resistance.

• The Renesas HMI board is a Renesas RA6M3 Cortex-M4F development board with a 4.3-inch LCD developed in coloration with the teams behind the RT-Thread RTOS project and LVGL open-source graphics library. Besides a color display for HMI (Human Machine Interface), the board also features a microSD card for data storage, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, Arduino headers and PMOD connectors for expansion, a microphone and a speaker, a CAN bus terminal block, and two USB-C ports for debugging and power.

• Golf balls are wonderfully tactile things. They have a semi-grippy covering, and they’re a beautiful size and weight that sits nicely in the hand. Sadly, most of them just get smacked away with big metal clubs. [Jeremy Cook] recognized their value as a human interface device, though, and set about turning one into a useful volume knob.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Some respondents explicitly said social media made them feel depressed. Many asked their parents to help them stop using it. Nearly two-thirds of respondents gave some version of this advice to future teens: Don’t use social media. It’s OK to abstain. Or delete your accounts.

• As people like Ms. Aaron spend time on TikTok and other social media sites, it’s no big deal for them to act like advertisers, without the secondhand embarrassment that can accompany selling items door to door or delivering multilevel marketing pitches.

• The driving idea is that anyone can be a creator [sic] and bring in money and free products from companies, which are eager to work with the young and the savvy on TikTok, where it can be hard for brands to break in. More than 70 percent of 18- to 29-year-old women on social media follow influencers or content creators, and half of them have purchased something after seeing an influencer’s posts, according to a Pew Research survey from last year.

• Today, Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Pramila Jayapal, and Representative Debbie Dingell introduced the Medicare for All Act in the Senate and House. They are part of a long tradition.

• I’ve been saying for a long time now that when it comes to antivaccine misinformation among COVID-19 antivaxxers, everything old is new again in antivax. Whether it’s claiming that COVID-19 vaccines sterilize our womenfolk, contain “fetal cells,” cause cancer, are resulting in global “depopulation,” are loaded with “toxins,” cause Alzheimer’s disease, permanently alter your DNA, or worse, old antivax claims have been, predictably, applied to COVID-19 vaccines. (Indeed, I used to joke that the only reason antivaxxers hadn’t claimed that COVID-19 vaccines cause autism was because the vaccines hadn’t been authorized for children under 5 years of age.) Then, as I had been predicting, increasingly the “new school” antivaxxers started circling back around to “old school” antivax claims about not just COVID-19 vaccines but all vaccines, such as the oldest of old school claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. All of this is why, increasingly, I’ve been saying on Twitter that, sooner or later, COVID-19 antivaxxers generalize their antivax beliefs about one vaccine to all vaccines and become just antivaxxers. While it’s true that some “new school” COVID-19 antivaxxers (e.g., Geert Vanden Bossche) have shown acute discomfort at the “old school” antivax rhetoric that they’ve found themselves associated with, most seem to be jumping right in, head first.

• Health technology start-up Kismet has launched with $4 million raised in a pre-seed round and says it will focus on tools to support plan and fund management, aiming to connect patients with legitimate providers and address the biggest challenges in the disability and healthcare sectors.

Proprietary

• One hurdle defeated, two more to go. For months now, we have been discussing Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision for $69 billion. What would be the largest video game studio acquisition in history has faced several hurdles along the way, primarily from the EU, the UK, and the United States. While the UK’s CMA has already formally nixxed the purchase (appeal by Microsoft pending) and the FTC decision is looming, leaks had already suggested months ago that the EU was set to approve the deal.

• The IRS on Tuesday announced that it would develop an experimental online tool to allow Americans to file taxes directly with the agency for free.

• It’s a major development — one in which ProPublica’s reporting played a significant role — given that most U.S. taxpayers pay to file and the tax preparation industry has long held sway in Washington. Only four years ago, the industry nearly succeeded in getting a law passed that would have barred the IRS from providing direct filing.

• The problem with the patch is that it breaks backwards compatibility: “…once the fixes have been enabled, your PC will no longer be able to boot from older bootable media that doesn’t include the fixes.”

• No system prompt is safe. The system prompt is the initial set of instructions that sets the boundaries for an AI conversation. What rules the assistant should follow, what topics to avoid, how the assistant should format responses, and more. But users have found various workarounds to get the models to divulge their instructions.

• Whether the source of content is Yahoo! Answers, Geocities, 12-year-old images from Imgur, or a random YouTube channel full of forgotten videos, the easiest-to-remove parts of the internet are often those that aren’t getting noticed. On the one hand, if you go into any library, most books are just sitting on shelves, actively being unused. But on the other, the internet is simply designed to be screwed with. Websites do not stay stationary, encased in amber, and there is significant financial motivation for large companies to only play the hits. After all, it’s why Top 40 radio isn’t all Dishwalla, all the time. With the news that Google is about to implement a rule letting the company remove content from accounts that haven’t been accessed in two years, I’m left to wonder if the problem is that the motivations for maintaining sites built around user-generated content simply do not favor preservation, and never will without outside influence. How can we change that motivation? Today’s Tedium, in the spirit of a 2019 piece we wrote about digital preservation, attempts to see the corporate point of view on mass content removal. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Google will start deleting inactive accounts in December 2023 (at the earliest) and take a “phased approach,” starting with “accounts that were created and never used again.” The company says it is “going to roll this out slowly and carefully.”

• An internal analysis at Google found that abandoned accounts were much less likely than active accounts to have two-factor verification, an authentication method that helps to confirm a user’s identity, the company said.

• The policy change won’t just impact that Gmail account you set up to get a free trial subscription to something years ago and then forgot about. It applies across Google products, including Workspaces. While accounts for businesses or educational institutions won’t be deleted, individual users of Google’s cloudy productivity suite and photo storage lockers need to pay attention. The latter may demand special attention: billions of Android devices back up photos into Google’s cloud, meaning the pix in that dead ‘droid in your bottom drawer might face deletion from the G-cloud.

• To reduce this risk, we are updating our inactivity policy for Google Accounts to 2 years across our products. Starting later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents – including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube and Google Photos.

• Google said it will send several notices to inactive accounts and to recovery emails associated with those accounts. The deletions will start in December at the earliest, and accounts that were created and never used again will be removed first, Kricheli said.

Privatisation/Privateering

• A nation of profit-makers and their crusade to deregulate and monopolize public systems.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• So long as the IP address can be connected to a device at some time and a user can be connected to a device simultaneously, the IP address can be at least part of the information used to identify an individual user’s activity.

• All of which means the IP address is, in fact, protected information.

• The Maltese Data Protection Authority (IDPC) has taken decisive action against C-PLANET, the IT company responsible for a voter data breach in Malta. Following a second complaint filed by noyb, the IDPC has ordered C-PLANET to reveal the specific details regarding the collection of data belonging to Maltese citizens within a strict 20-day deadline. If the company does not comply with this order they will face a “dissuasive” fine.

• Apple introduced Advanced Data Protection in the United States in December 2022, and released it globally in January 2023. (No list of countries is currently available, but Apple confirmed to EFF that it’s available globally). The idea is simple: you can now enable end-to-end encryption of data that was previously only encrypted in transit and on Apple’s servers, meaning that Apple itself could access the data. In other words, you can now control the encryption keys and Apple will not be able to access any of this data. It also means Apple will not be able to help you regain access to most information on your account. The full list of data categories is available on Apple’s site, but the most notable include the iCloud backup (which includes the backup of Messages), iCloud Drive, photos, notes, reminders, and more.

• EFF first called for Apple to enable encrypted backups back in 2019 because, while some of the data in iCloud is end-to-end encrypted, backups were not, and that meant a lot of different categories of data were vulnerable to government requests, third-party hacking, and disclosure by Apple employees. This was often a cause for confusion with Messages, where the messages were end-to-end encrypted, but the backups were not. The potential for privacy issues were complicated further in 2021 when Apple proposed a backdoor with client-side scanning for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but delayed after EFF supporters and allies delivered a petition containing more than 60,000 signatures to Apple executives.

• With Advanced Data Protection enabled, your backups and most important files get that end-to-end encryption benefit, better securing your files against mass surveillance, rogue Apple employees, or potential data leaks. If all your devices support the newest operating systems, you can turn Advanced Data Protection on without losing any features, so, most people should turn it on, if you can.

• One unifying thread to this pervasive system is the collection of personal information from marginalized communities, and the subsequent discriminatory use by corporations and government agencies—exacerbating existing structural inequalities across society. Data surveillance is a civil rights problem, and legislation to protect data privacy can help protect civil rights.

• Our phones and other devices process a vast amount of highly sensitive personal information that corporations collect and sell for astonishing profits. This incentivizes online actors to collect as much of our behavioral information as possible. In some circumstances, every mouse click and screen swipe is tracked and then sold to ad tech companies and the data brokers that service them.

• Where mobile apps are used disparately by specific groups, the collection and sharing of personal data can aggravate civil rights problems. For example, a Muslim prayer app (Muslim Pro) sold geolocation data about its users to a company called X-Mode, which in turn provided access to this data to the U.S. military through defense contractors. Although Muslim Pro stopped selling data to X-Mode, the awful truth remains: the widespread collection and sale of this data by many companies makes users vulnerable to discrimination. Yet far too many companies that collect geolocation data can make a quick buck by selling it. And law enforcement and other government agencies are regular buyers.

• The FBI has never not been abusing its access to Section 702 collections. This collection includes communications, scooped up by the NSA during its so-called “foreign facing” surveillance. The thing about this collection is it also obtains communications from US persons to foreign individuals. The NSA can collect the latter, but not without grabbing the former.

• It turns out that if you fire basically all of the competent trust & safety people at your website, you end up with a site that is neither trustworthy, nor safe. We’ve spent months covering ways in which you cannot trust anything from Twitter or Elon Musk, and there have been some indications of real safety problems on the site, but it’s been getting worse lately, with two somewhat terrifying stories that show just how unsafe the site has become, and how risky it is to rely on Twitter for anything.

• There may be an entire commission behind the push to mandate client-side scanning in the European Union, but there’s one truly propulsive force behind it: Commissioner Ylva Johansson, the person in charge of the Home Affairs office.

• Blocks from a migrant camp in El Paso, execs at the Border Security Expo hawked dystopian tech designed to repress them.

Defence/Aggression

• More than a dozen former U.S. national security officials have released an open letter calling for a diplomatic end to the Russia-Ukraine war. The call for peace was published as a full-page ad Tuesday in The New York Times and organized by the Eisenhower Media Network. They called the war an “unmitigated disaster” that the U.S. should work to end before it escalates into a nuclear confrontation. We speak with Dennis Fritz, director of the Eisenhower Media Network and a retired command chief master sergeant of the U.S. Air Force. “The majority of my life has been in and out of the Pentagon, and this is probably the most fearful I’ve ever been with a nuclear escalation,” says Fritz.

• On May 13, 1985, police surrounded the home of MOVE, a radical Black liberation organization that was defying orders to vacate from 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Police flooded the home with water, filled it with tear gas, blasted it with automatic weapons, and finally dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter, setting it ablaze and killing 11 residents — six adults and five children. The fire ultimately burned the entire city block to the ground, destroying over 60 homes. We speak with second-generation MOVE member Mike Africa Jr., who has launched a “Reclaim Osage” campaign to repurchase the bombed MOVE house after the city previously used eminent domain to seize it and turn it into a police substation before selling it to developers.

• After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the business activities of Russians have increased in Hungary. Most of the companies are looking to secure their own assets, but Szabad Európa has found several companies with links to intelligence services and political circles. According to the newspaper’s tally, in March this year there were 674 companies in Hungary that were wholly or partly Russian-owned, with 97 of them founded after the war in Ukraine started.

• - the European Commission’s Representation in Hungary wrote to Telex in response to the question on whether Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen had indeed advised the Ukrainians to shut down the Friendship pipeline towards Hungary. President Von der Leyen’s own press office sent an almost verbatim reply: ‘President von der Leyen has never made such a recommendation regarding the Friendship pipeline and has never been in contact with anyone on this issue’.

• Russia’s Defense Ministry has announced that, during its May 16 nighttime strike on Kyiv, a Russian Kinzhal missile destroyed a radar station and five Patriot missile launchers supplied to Ukraine by the United States.

• President of Turkey Recep Erdogan says an agreement allowing Ukraine to export grain from occupied Black Sea ports will be extended for another two months. Turkey helped to broker the initial 2022 deal between Ukraine and Russia.

• The Russian Jewish Congress has asked Alexander Bastrykin, head of the country’s Investigative Committee, to investigate Roman Silantyev, an expert witness whose testimony supplied the basis of terrorist propaganda charges against theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk.

• Russia’s official public services portal, Gosuslugi, notified users of an upcoming forum titled “Strong ideas for a new era” and invited them to submit “an idea, a public initiative, or a project” that would contribute to “the country’s development” on an online platform created for the event.

• A Russian military court has sentenced activist Mikhail Kriger, a member of the Solidarnost movement, to seven years in prison on charges of “justifying terrorism” and “issuing threats of violence,” according to a Telegram channel created in Kriger’s support.

• A Bishkek district court sentenced a Kyrgyzstani citizen to 10 years imprisonment for fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine, reported the court’s verdict.

• Ukraine’s General Staff reported Wednesday morning that 610 Russian soldiers had been killed over the previous 24-hour period, bringing the total number of Russian troops who have died in Ukraine since Moscow’s full-scale invasion to 200,590.

• 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.

• In 2022, more than 2,000 flights in Russia were conducted using planes equipped with expired parts as a result of Western sanctions, the head of the country’s transportation watchdog, Viktor Basargin, said at a State Duma committee meeting on Tuesday.

• In Taiwan, the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), has announced that Hou You-yi is its candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• BBC News has unveiled BBC Verify, a brand aiming to build audience trust by showing how its journalists know what they are reporting is true.

• The BBC says Verify will be “a team of investigative journalists, a brand and also a physical area in the BBC newsroom in London”.

• BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness first revealed plans for the new team at the Sir Harry Summit in London last week when she said BBC Verify would be a “new brand within our brand” that would “pull back the curtain” on BBC journalists’ work to produce “radical transparency”.

Environment

• On Sunday, March 12, to prevent any chance of a systemic financial crisis, federal banking regulators announced that they would bail out the wealthy techie depositors of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, overriding the normal rules of banking. The next day, the Biden administration violated a campaign promise by approving the Willow Project, one of the largest oil and gas developments on federal land in US history.

Energy/Transportation

• While driving to my family’s house for Christmas, I got into an accident that totaled my car. I’d made this exact trip before, but this time I hit a small patch of frozen slush on the salted road. The accident left me with a severe concussion, along with months of headaches, brain fog, whiplash, and vertigo.

• A Kenyan human rights campaigner has voiced her anger at being removed from the list of delegates to an African oil and gas conference in London on the grounds that the event was “sold out” – even as organizers continued to advertise tickets.

• Salome Nduta, Africa coordinator for campaign group OilWatch Africa, said she believed she had been deliberately excluded from this week’s Africa Energies Summit, whose sponsors include Royal Dutch Shell, TotalEnergies, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Eni.

Finance

• With the United States just two weeks away from a possible default on its debt for the first time ever, President Joe Biden has cut short a trip to Asia to continue negotiations with congressional leaders in Washington over lifting the federal government’s debt ceiling. Republicans are seeking major budget cuts, as well as new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, but prominent Democrats are pushing the White House to stand firm. For more, we speak with The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, who says the debt ceiling deadline and budget negotiations later this year are part of a larger effort by Republicans to shred the social safety net.

• Who wants to enforce the debt ceiling and push the United States into default? Only the Republicans in Congress.

• You’ve seen the ads in your neighborhood. They’ve flashed across your television and buzzed your phone to life at odd hours. The slogans and phone numbers might change, but the pitch is the same: “We buy houses for cash.”

• Thousands of real estate investors across the country use a variety of techniques to find potential sellers and plan their next deal.

• Maybe you recall all the post–Cold War talk of a “peace dividend” and maybe you don’t: It depends on when you took up residence on this mortal coil. The term arose as the Soviet Union disintegrated and was commonly mentioned during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, 1989–1993.

• Short sellers have made a killing in the recent banking crisis, scalping $14.3 billion from bank stock owners just in March of this year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Montana Governor Greg Gianforte (R) has signed legislation to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok from operating in the state. It’s the first state to enact a ban encompassing private citizens—and is expected to trigger first amendment legal fights.

• Susan Schmidt examines the highlights and lowlights of the new Special Counsel report on Trump-Russia.

• We are in for 19 months of relentless, insultingly transparent spin by way of which a patently incompetent man will be purveyed as commander in chief for another four years.

• We had some very positive impressions, but we also saw some shortcomings, Monika Hohlmeier, Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control said, assessing the outcome of their three-day visit to Budapest. She said that their goal was to make sure that EU funds reach the Hungarian people, but this requires a fair and unbiased distribution system.

• The meeting between Tibor Navracsics and the delegation of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control was a pragmatic one, seeking for mutual understanding, according to Hungarian Minister of Regional Development. During the three-day visit, the delegation was informed on issues related to the protection of the EU budget and the rule of law conditionality mechanism. They also familiarized themselves with the processes and monitoring arrangements for the operation of the recovery fund in Hungary, over and above the “regular” budget, and met with government officials, members of parliament and representatives of NGOs, among others.

• On May 10, Vladimir Putin signed a decree canceling Russia’s visa requirements for Georgian citizens and lifting a ban on direct flights from Russia to Georgia. The executive order came into force on May 15. Georgia’s ruling party welcomed the decision. Georgia’s President, Salome Zurabishvili, who represents the opposition and those in Georgia who are against improving ties with Russia, responded with outrage and concern. It’s unclear exactly why Putin lifted the ban on direct flights to Georgia, but many believe the move is part of a coordinated attempt by the Kremlin to prevent Georgia from joining the European Union. Meduza explains whether there has indeed been a thaw in relations between Moscow and Tbilisi and how the new rules affect Russian citizens who moved to Georgia after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

• This year is the 50th anniversary of a back-to-school party in the Bronx, where Clive Campbell, a Jamaican American better known as DJ Kool Herc, used two turntables to create a “break beat.” It’s the moment that’s said to have birthed hip hop. Today, some say hip hop is dead, or at least lost some of its collective fighting spirit. Others look at the uprisings against police killings, and the multibillion-dollar global music market as indications of its continuing success. Chuck D is the leader and cofounder of the legendary group Public Enemy, and the author and executive producer of a BBC series airing on PBS, Fight The Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World. Rosa Clemente is an award-winning organizer, journalist, and historian specializing in Afro-Latinx identity and Black and Latinx liberation movements. In 2008, Clemente became the first Afro-Latina to run for vice president of these United States, alongside Cynthia McKinney on the Green Party ticket. After 50 years fighting the power, how is it going, and what does hip hop have to teach?

• In his 2002 political memoir, Leadership, Rudy Giuliani—then basking in the acclaim of the media consensus-sphere as “America’s mayor”—claimed that his entire ethos in public life was summed up in a two-word slogan mounted on a plaque in his office: “I’m responsible.”

• The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear oral arguments in a South Carolina redistricting case where the NAACP is challenging the state’s Republican plan as racially motivated.

• The role of the state’s most powerful Democrat, U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, is likely to play an important part in the discussions, legal experts said.

• Texas lawmakers have closed a loophole in state law that allowed people who had serious mental health issues as juveniles to legally purchase firearms.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Some states’ legislatures, including California and Texas, have taken action to protect everyday peoples’ First Amendment rights by passing anti-SLAPP laws. These laws limit invasive discovery while a judge first determines if a case qualifies as a SLAPP. If it is a SLAPP, it can be thrown out quickly and, depending on the law, the person or company who filed the SLAPP can be made to pay legal fees of the party they sued. Anti-SLAPP laws have proven to be crucial tools in vindicating the rights of everyday people to speak out on issues of public concern.

• Right now, key Texas lawmakers are pushing forward with an unnecessary bill that would make a mess of Texas’ anti-SLAPP law, the Texas Citizens’ Participation Act, or TCPA. The TCPA was already slightly weakened in 2019; EFF opposed those changes too. This time, it’s worse.

• Texas’ anti-SLAPP law helps everyday people who speak out about matters of public concern. The law protects you if you complain about a local restaurant, contractor, or real estate development project, for instance, and then are sued for “defamation” or something even more vague, like having your activism deemed a “RICO conspiracy.” Currently, you can file an anti-SLAPP motion, the case is automatically stayed until a judge decides whether it’s a SLAPP suit or not. If it is, the case gets thrown out, and the SLAPP victim gets their legal fees paid by the other side.

• Twitter bowed to the demands of autocratic Turkish president Recep Erdoğan over the weekend ahead of a contentious and close election in the country. When faced with criticism over the move, outgoing CEO Elon Musk, a self described “free speech absolutist,” claimed the capitulation was meant to keep Ankara from having Twitter “throttled in its entirety.”

• NetBlocks metrics confirm the restriction of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms in Guinea-Conakry on Wednesday 17 May 2023. The measure comes as authorities call in the army to assist police in dealing with protests amid political unrest.

• But good luck to any of you hoping to use non-Chinese AI in apps to serve users behind the Great Firewall. Google and Bing – neither of which is accessible in China – can also shelve any plans for an AI-inspired comeback. OpenAI can probably forget China entirely for the forseeable future.

• The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and the country’s federal education watchdog, Rosobrnadzor, have launched an unscheduled investigation into the European University at St. Petersburg as part of the government’s ongoing “measures to prevent extremism and terrorism,” BBC News Russia reported Wednesday, citing sources from the university and others with links to the school.

• Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) has blocked a number of webcams that recorded the work of air defense systems around Kyiv.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Linking is part of journalistic duties and therefore cannot constitute support for a banned criminal association, according to a court ruling on a raid and indictment. It dismisses charges against a radio editor and orders compensation.

• Law enforcement seized two mobile phones, a laptop, and two SIM cards, and said the journalist was a witness in an investigation into an anti-war comment posted in a public group on the Russian social media platform Vkontakte, left by a man identified as Pavel Chumakov, which allegedly discredited the Russian army. Mullayeva told CPJ that the confiscated equipment had not been returned as of May 17.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “It is obvious, however, that job discrimination based on racial or religious prejudice is subsidiary to the more pressing issue of full employment. When jobs are plentiful, all kinds of economic discrimination are minimized. When jobs are scarce, and the competition among workers for available openings is sharpened, it is relatively easy to divide employees into convenient groupings provided by the incident of race, color, or religion, and to aggravate the prejudice which leads to an exclusion of minority groups from job opportunities. The basic problem to be solved, therefore, is the problem of full employment.”

• In March 2021, a court found he and his former lawyer, Thierry Herzog, had formed a “corruption pact” with judge Gilbert Azibert to obtain and share information about a legal investigation.

• The trial came after investigators wiretapped Sarkozy’s two official phone lines, and discovered that he also had a third unofficial one taken out in 2014 under the name “Paul Bismuth”, through which he communicated with Herzog.

• The contents of these phone calls led to the 2021 corruption verdict.

• Yesterday, the Minnesota Senate passed the strongest Amazon warehouse worker protection bill in the nation. The Warehouse Worker Protection Act, Minnesota House Bill HF36 / SF58, makes sure that a company like Amazon cannot come into our communities and disregard the safety of its workers or rob Minnesotans of their health and livelihood.

• The ACLU has been helping victims of the Kansas Highway Patrol hold the agency (and its troopers) accountable for their actions. Multiple lawsuits have been filed targeting the “Kansas two-step” performed by troopers. After delivering citations or otherwise making it clear drivers are free to go, the troopers take a step back to the car to start asking exploratory questions or otherwise drag things out until a drug dog arrives.

• Taiwan’s parliament passed an amendment on Tuesday allowing gay couples to jointly adopt children, a move hailed by activists as “another big step forward” for marriage equality.

• May 17 is the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. This Wednesday also marks exactly 10 years since gay marriage became legal in France. Since then, around 7,000 such marriages have taken place each year in the country. Back in 2013, FRANCE 24′s reporters Pauline Godart and Claire Paccalin met several same-sex couples who were bringing up children together in France. Ten years later, they caught up with two of these couples to find out how having the right to get married has changed their lives.

• Deutsche Bank will pay $75 million to settle litigation alleging the German lender financially benefited from supporting Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme, according to a report Wednesday.

• Electric vehicle manufacturing in the US is overwhelming nonunion, but 1,400 workers for an electric bus manufacturer in Georgia have just unionized. It’s one of the labor movement’s biggest victories in the South this century.

• Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots.  When scrutinising the critics, attention should be paid to their motivations.  What do they stand to gain from adopting a particular stance?]

• There’s been a lot of talk lately about the role of AI and copyright, with much of it focused on fretting by various copyright maximalists about how things created by AI need more copyright or how AI systems are violating the copyright of artists, both of which seem to be fairly questionable claims at best.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This sort of approach has long been advanced by incumbent telecom companies, opposed by virtually every other relevant constituency, and rejected repeatedly around the world. It would undermine open Internet access — sometimes called “net neutrality” — and replace today’s well-functioning system of payments with a regulated morass, where consumers will ultimately pay the price. Content and application providers (in particular smaller players) will either be impeded from delivering their traffic at all due to costs, or will pass the costs on to consumers themselves.

• The reason, of course is, that .zip and .mov are both file extensions. So there’s concern that a miscreant could employ these TLDs to confuse people by visiting a malicious website rather than opening a file, among other threat scenarios.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• We’ve noted more than a few times that Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a dumb cash grab, and illustrative of the company’s inevitable transition from innovative disruptor to the type of nickel-and-diming cable company Netflix originally disrupted.

Monopolies

• Where did the media’s money go? It’s complicated.

• Let’s start with the news outlets themselves. Right around the time that personal computers were finding their way into home offices and kids’ bedrooms, news media underwent an orgy of consolidation, starting with the Reagan administration’s deregulation of the financial markets and, later the Clinton administration’s Telecommunications Act, which stripped away the already weak restrictions on media consolidation.

• As media outlets across the country merged, national chains took over from family proprietors. They raised prices and fired reporters, turning to wire services and chain-wide correspondents for subjects of national interest. They also fired locally focused salespeople, consolidating classified and display ad-sales to national call-centers. They sold off their buildings and presses and logistics networks, leasing them back. These cuts yielded dividends to the chains’ investors, dividends that were augmented by liquidating the papers’ cash reserves and “rainy day” funds.

• As we enter the 2023 AGM season, we look at what shareholder proposals for Big Tech companies Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta reveal about the companies’ capacity to mitigate risk and ensure accountability for emerging tech like AI.

Copyrights

• Copyright discussions typically concern texts in just a few languages, and often only in English. In part, that’s because copyright law has evolved most quickly in anglophone countries. But it means that the copyright problems faced by those speaking less well-known languages – particularly languages with limited quantities of textual material available – are completely glossed over.

• In explaining the dismissal decision, Judge Stanton emphasized the belief that the “commonplace” components of “Let’s Get It On” at issue are “unprotectable” under stateside copyright law.

• “At some level,” the judge wrote, “every work is the selection and arrangement of unprotectable elements. … That means a songwriter only has finite options for playing a commonplace chord progression. The options are so few that many combinations have themselves become commonplace, especially in popular music.”

• YouTube has no legal obligation to use its piracy filtering tools to remove pirated videos, Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres concludes in a detailed recommendation. The Judge sides with the video platform on its request for partial summary judgment, noting that copyright infringement claims filed by movie tycoon Carlos Vasallo should be dismissed.

• The popularity of Japanese manga comics fuels rampant online piracy on a massive scale, with some sites generating more traffic than the largest movie piracy platforms. A list of pirate manga sites, accidentally ‘leaked’ on a government website, was quickly taken down recently after causing excitement on social media. On one hand that’s understandable; on the other it might be a missed opportunity.

• A new report finds the Big Three pondering an AI ‘takedown notice’ system under discussion with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

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