● 05.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/05/2023: Weston 12.0 Highlights and US Debt Limit Panic

Posted in News Roundup at 8:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The Carson City Linux Users Group will be meeting Saturday, June 17 at 10:00 AM at the Carson City Public Library. Upstairs in Meeting room 1.

• The Aon S1 from MALIBAL is a custom-built ultraportable laptop that you can order with Linux pre-installed. While I hadn’t heard of the MALIBAL brand, I mostly enjoyed computing around the house and around town with this Linux laptop—mostly.

• After spending two weeks with it, what stood out to me most was the portability and premium feel. There’s an accompanying premium price, and for your money, you get a solid but lightweight build that’s also easy to upgrade and repair. However, the Aon S1 is by no means perfect, with the battery and speakers bringing down the value a little bit. That said, customized with the maximum specs, the Aon S1 impresses with its capabilities as a commuter Linux laptop that approaches being a great general-purpose computer.

• [...]

• Overall I enjoyed using the Aon S1. Some annoyances came up, like the poor speakers, the panel needing frequent wipe-downs, and the privacy shutter’s noticeable absence. But for the on-the-move open source enthusiast, the highly portable MALIBAL Aon S1 with its solid build is certainly worth consideration.

• There are other Linux laptops out there, including Purism’s security-focused Librem 14. It has a similar form factor but also a weaker CPU and no dedicated GPU option and is more expensive at that. If instead of the Aon S1’s base configuration you went with our favorite laptop, the Dell XPS 13, you could save $210 but get a lesser CPU, a smaller and lower-res screen, and fewer ports. That said, the XPS 13 notably includes Wi-Fi 6E support, a fingerprint reader, and better speakers.

• The real value in any Linux laptop, though, is freedom from being locked in anyone’s ecosystem. You also have the freedom to repair and modify your laptop how you see fit (the XPS 13’s parts are soldered together). This also lets you spread out costs: you can choose the most inexpensive configuration and upgrade incrementally when you can afford it or with parts you already have. If you want to get on the road with your PC while getting away from Microsoft and Apple’s reach, the MALIBAL Aon S1 just might be your ticket.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Microsoft’s new Linux server distro, Red Hat Summit 2023 highlights, big changes at CodeWeavers, and Podman catches up to Docker Desktop.

• FreeBSD Foundation Welcomes New Team Members, OpenZFS the Ideal Storage Solution for University Environments, SCaLE20X Conference Report, 916 days of Emacs, XTerm: It’s Better Than You Thought, NetBSD Annual General Meeting 2023, and more

Graphics Stack

• Last week, on May 17, Weston 12.0 was released. Here’s a look at some of the changes that have landed in this new version.

• In terms of features we have two new backends, support for multiple scanout devices, and have added a couple of new protocol implementations. Alongside these features, we also have been adding multiple fixes and internal changes that would further facilitate integration of functionality like color management or the ability to load up multiple backends at the same time.

• [...]

• Some further improvements towards multi-head support has been added to the backend-rdp, while backend-headless now makes use of output decorations as to be able to test out the color-lcms plugin. Resizing of windows is now possible for the nested, backend-wayland.

• A short-form for loading backends, shells, and renderers has been added, while still supporting the older command invocation. For instance, for the headless backend we can load it with “–backend=headless”, for desktop shell, we can load it with “–shell=desktop” while specifying the pixman renderer can now be done with “–renderer=pixman”.

• With this release, the color-lcms plugin has seen various improvements in color transformation precision and performance.

• Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad looks at the Weston 12.0 release. Weston is the reference compositor for the Wayland project. The highlights include two new backends and support for multiple scanout devices, along with “”multiple fixes and internal changes that would further facilitate integration of functionality like color management or the ability to load up multiple backends at the same time””.

• For the last four years I’ve served as a member of the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors, but some days ago I stepped down after my term ended and not having run for re-election.

• I started contributing to Mesa in 2014 and joined the amazing freedesktop community. Soon after, I joined the X.Org Foundation as an regular member in order to participate in the elections and get access to some interesting perks (VESA, Khronos Group). You can learn more about what X.Org Foundation does in Ricardo’s blogpost.

• See you in A Coruña!

Applications

• The right audio workstation can make editing your voice-over clips significantly easier. While Linux doesn’t have all the same applications commonly recommended for Windows and macOS users, there are many amazing and compatible tools you can use to make your work pitch-perfect.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GnuCash on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Are you looking for powerful and free accounting software to manage your personal or small business finances on Ubuntu 22.04? Look no further than GnuCash!

• Don’t you feel Bash Shell looks stale compared to ZSH, which has a number of extra features that Bash Shell is missing if you do, then let’s find out the steps to install ZSH on Ubuntu.

• I upgraded the host running my blog to Debian 12 today. My website has existed in some form since 1997, it changed from pure html to a Python CGI script in the early 2000s, and when blogging became big around then, I migrated to WordPress around 2004.

• Web application security is crucial in today’s interconnected world. It has become increasingly important, as the number of cyber threats and vulnerabilities continues to rise. Burp Suite is a powerful tool to help you find and fix these security flaws. This tool is popular among developers, QA testers, and web security experts. This tutorial shows how to install Burp Suite on Linux.

• Apache Maven is a powerful build automation tool widely used in Java-based projects. It simplifies the build process, manages dependencies, and facilitates project management. If you’re working on Ubuntu 22.04 and need to install Maven, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of installing Apache Maven on Ubuntu 22.04.

• This is where Kubernetes Cluster Federation comes in as a solution.

• The Power of Kubernetes in Modern Software Development Kubernetes, commonly referred to as K8s, is a container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

• As organizations continue to adopt Kubernetes, many are faced with the challenge of managing multiple clusters across different regions and environments. This is where Cluster Federation comes in.

• This is where Kubernetes Cluster Federation comes into play.

• Linux, the backbone of many computer systems around the world, is known for its versatility and robustness. An integral part of mastering Linux involves becoming familiar with its package management systems.

• Shotcut is a powerful and open-source video editing software that offers a range of features for creating and editing videos. If you’re using Ubuntu 22.04 and want to install Shotcut, follow this step-by-step guide to get started.

• Redshift is a popular screen temperature adjustment tool that helps reduce eye strain and improve sleep quality by adapting the color temperature of your screen according to the time of day.

• This article spotlights alternative tools to locate.

• Being able to quickly switch between different audio devices is one of my favourite things about GNOME Shell’s Quick Settings menu. No longer do I have to fire up Settings — Sound to quickly switch from my laptop’s built-in speakers to my (not exactly amazing) USB-C speakers, or to my Bluetooth sound bar. However… There is one rub in this otherwise easy-going experience: my list of sound output is quite long.

• The Ubuntu login loop is a frustrating problem that makes it impossible for you to log in. We describe six different issues that can cause this behavior and how to fix them.

• Imagine you have a server that hosts several applications. Each of these applications has different requirements, and you would like to allocate resources fairly to all of them for optimal performance. While containerisation and orchestration tools are a great boon to help simplify these tasks, having fine-grained control over individual processes and threads is preferable for high-performance computing or real-time applications. Let’s see how cgroups can effectively manage and allocate resources in a Linux system!

• cgroups, also known as control groups, allow you to manage, allocate and monitor system resources, such as CPU, memory, network and disk I/O, in a group of processes. cgroups are useful for a variety of tasks, such as limiting the resources that a process can use, prioritising certain processes over others, and isolating processes from each other.

• One of my fundamental rules of system design is when people keep doing it wrong, the people are right and your system or idea is wrong. A corollary to this is that when you notice this happening, a productive reaction is to start asking questions about why people do it the ‘wrong’ way. Despite what you might expect from its title, Hugo Landau’s [[Producing HTML using string templates has always been the wrong solution (via) actually has some ideas and pointers to ideas, for instance this quote from Using type inference to make web templates robust against XSS: [...]

• A gentleman need not know Persian, but he should at least have forgotten it. And to learn it you have to type it. You could change your computer’s input method, or buy a Persian keyboad, but it’s inconvenient.

• What is the network edge? The network edge is where your network and outside networks connect. In the enterprise world this is your path out to the Internet; in the provider world this is generally where you connect to upstream providers or peers. In this three-part post, we will cover high- and low-level designs, different types of topologies such as SMB, enterprise and Service Provider (SP), and look at the building blocks, redundancy options and other considerations.

• Reviewing what we listed for edge network challenges, SPs and enterprises face a lot of the same problems, but often in different ways. SPs don’t always have to worry about NAT or asymmetric routing since they accept the hot potato routing behaviour and the customer equipment NATs. However, like enterprises, the SP must delineate between different parts of their network for better control. Either way services are increasingly being brought closer to the border of the network so having high-performance edge POPs is becoming more important for the service provider.

• Previously in this series, we laid the foundation of network design for the edge and looked at various high-level edge connection examples. In this post, we will look into low-level designs, focusing on the enterprise-oriented dual single-homed setup as that will probably apply to most of the readers here. It provides just enough to cover multiple scenarios and is a proven design, but it isn’t too complex.

• Guest Post: What are the the privacy considerations for logged data?

• org-attach links the file to the header of the current node. It offers several different ways to create a connection between your org-file and the file to attach, like copying the file, moving the file, creating a symlink, or a hard link, and others.

• Eclipse IDE is a platform for developing applications, particularly in Java and other programming languages such as C, C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. It is one of the most powerful and feature-rich IDE used by millions of developers around the world.

• Eclipse is a cross-platform IDE that you can install on Linux as well as on Windows and macOS. Let’s see how to install Eclipse IDE on various Linux distributions.

• In this article, let’s look at how to access Linux files from Windows 10/11.

• >If you are having issues with the Android emulator, like it not showing up on screen, then this guide will help you to fix it up. Suppose you are developing an Android application, and when you run the application, it shows your Android app is successfully installed on a virtual device.

• Here you will learn how to install Chromedriver on Ubuntu or other Linux distributions and test its functionality with Selenium using a short Python script.

• In this article, we will walk you through the process of installing Metabase on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Metabase is an open-source business intelligence and analytics tool that allows users to easily visualize, analyze, and share data.

• Mesa is an open-source graphics driver used to support hardware acceleration for GPUs on Linux. It provides OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics APIs support for Linux. In this article, we will guide you through the process of installing Mesa drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• GnuCash is a powerful open-source personal finance manager that allows you to track your income, expenses, investments, and budgets. If you’re using Ubuntu 22.04 and want to install GnuCash, follow this step-by-step guide to get started.

• Apache Maven is a powerful build automation tool widely used in Java-based projects. It simplifies the build process, manages dependencies, and facilitates project management.

• Linux belongs on your home network, and setting up an on-premises cloud is simpler than you’d think.

WINE or Emulation

• The ongoing work bit by bit to get Wine and Wayland to fully work together on Linux has taken another step, with a third big merge request accepted. Wine 8.4 from mid-March was the first development release to actually have some of the initial Wayland work in it.

Games

• What’s this? An entirely new genre, you say? Well, arguably that’s exactly what Valve presented to the public in 2008 with the original Left 4 Dead, and its superlative sequel the following year. But was it really a new genre?

• Fish Folk is an in-development and constantly growing bundle of multiplayer games. All open source and they want your help to grow bigger and better. The first game they’re focusing on is Fish Folk: Jump, a spiritual successor to the popular Duck Game, with Fish Folk being created out of their love for it. They want the basic idea to continue on but be open to the community which is why it’s open source with modding in mind too.

• Another beta build for Godot 3.6, implementing important bug fixes and some new features for existing games in production.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The upcoming KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment series looks to offer support for the Night Color feature that automatically adjusts the color temperature of your screen to protect your eyes during long night computing sessions for users with NVIDIA graphics cards when using the Plasma Wayland session.

• KDE Plasma 6 is shaping up nicely lately and looks like it gears up to become the best Plasma release ever. Last week, I told you that Plasma 6 promises basic HDR support and it will adopt the Plasma Wayland by default.

• The KWin piece of KDE Plasma now has HDR support and color management geared for the 6.0 release.

• Video: First Round of KDE Plasma 6 Features and Changes

• KDE runs everywhere. Remember when it got ported to the DEC Alpha and SPARCv8? Heady times, because that was the time that a whole bunch of 32-bit assumptions got wrestled out of KDE code. And then there was a long boring period where all the world was amd64. No more! There are ARM-based SBCs, which are a world of frustration all their own for board bring-up. No more! As of today KDE e.V. – and so the KDE community – has a new core to work with. The RISC-V architecture, and the VisionFive 2 board in particular.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• Pop!_OS is something of a unicorn in the Linux world, a distro that a hardware maker develops in an effort to offer a fully integrated experience.

• For the rest of this review, I will refer to Pop!_OS as Pop OS or merely Pop. The distro has many positives, but how it is spelled is not one of them. With that out of the way, let’s delve into what makes Pop OS so special.

BSD

• I am grateful to report that the FreeBSD Foundation offered to fund my trip to Ottawa, Canada for the 2023 FreeBSD Developer’s Summit and BSDCan conference. I boarded my flight and arrived at the YOW airport on May 16th late at night.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Much like Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, and Fedora Sericea there’s going to be a new immutable version of Fedora coming called Fedora Onyx.

• Written in Python using GTK+ 4 and libadwaita, Cartridges started as a simple game launcher that only supported a couple of game distribution platforms, including the popular Steam game service and Bottles, a free and open-source software that lets you run Windows games and apps on Linux based on Wine.

• Today, Cartridges has matured and it supports importing games from many popular game distribution platforms, such as Lutris, a free and open-source game manager, Heroic, an open-source launcher for GOG and Epic games, as well as Itch.io, an independent store for indie games.

• The CentOS team is excited to announce that we will be hosting a CentOS Connect event at Flock to Fedora on August 2, 2023. CentOS Connect is a series of mini-conferences that showcase the latest developments across the Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

• This is the fourth post in a series covering details about the journey of the Fedora Websites and Apps community Initiative, those who were involved in making it a grand success, and what lies ahead down the road for the team. If you have not already, read the previous post before delving into this one.

• By October 2022, the experiment of me stepping away to assess the team’s strength began to show promising results. Niko Dunk, Jefferson Oliviera, Deepesh Nair, and many others, joined the development efforts. Likewise, Madeline Peck, Jess Chitas, Dawn Desmarais, and numerous others contributed to the design aspects. Hari Rana also participated in testing, alongside others who were already involved. I am immensely grateful to Ashlyn Knox, Francois Andrieu, and Niko Dunk for their effective collaboration with members from Fedora Infrastructure, Fedora Design, Fedora Marketing, and other teams. Together, they gathered requirements and provided valuable feedback. This development initiative commenced on GitLab itself, making it the first project to be entirely developed there. The team utilized planning tools such as epics, stories, issues, and timelines. In addition to Fedora Websites 3.0, we began collecting testimonials to gauge community interest in maintaining Fedora Badges.

• Several announcements headlined this week’s Red Hat Summit event, one of which was Ansible Lightspeed, an offshoot of last year’s Project Wisdom, geared toward the artificial intelligence-driven automation of IT workloads. On the backend, Red Hat Inc. has also invested in improving the overall experience for Ansible developers, in addition to securing critical software supply chains.

• Argo CD provides numerous ways to deploy resources from a Helm chart. In this article, you will learn about three patterns used to manage and deploy Helm charts, including when and where to use each pattern in your GitOps environment and the advantages and disadvantages.

Debian Family

• The wait is almost over! Debian 12 (Bookworm) is now in the full freeze, the last phase before the final stable release.

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2023)The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:James Lu (jlu)Hugh McMaster (hmc)Agathe Porte (gagath)The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:Soren StoutnerMatthijs KooijmanVinay KeshavaJarrah GosbellCarlos Henrique Lima MelaraCordell BloorCongratulations!

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• As we announced at Cephalocon 2023 in Amsterdam, Canonical has started to make container images for Ceph available.  We received lots of questions at the booth about what it means to the average Ceph user who has or wants to deploy Ceph on Ubuntu.

• In this blog post, we will cover the benefits to users who are running containerised Ceph on Ubuntu, and specifically how these images can provide an improved security posture.

Devices/Embedded

• SQFMI is now selling the BeepBerry, its latest open-source gadget. Based around a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, the BeepBerry also has a BlackBerry Q20-derived keyboard and a 2.7-inch display.

• Estone Technology just launched an embedded board based on the NXP i.MX8M Plus processor along with a 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit. Some of the features found include a RJ45 port and an onboard voice DSP.

Open Hardware/Modding

• It is the early to mid 90s and you just forked out for an Acorn Archimedes or RiscPC machine, which was arguably a superior choice over PCs at the time. But you have some old DOS software you want to run. What do you do? It turns out that there were a few ways of solving this.

• The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD is a pixel-style LED wall lamp that comes with a few baked-in animations, and [ph1p] improved it immensely with an ESP32 board and new firmware. The new controller provides all kinds of great new abilities, including new modes and animations, WiFi control, and the ability to send your own images or drawings to the panel. All it takes is desoldering the original controller and swapping in a programmed ESP32.

• SSH is an awesome protocol for any network. It’s secure, easy, and cheap. Any Raspberry Pi SSH network can be made to include almost any I/O peripheral. In fact, you’d be amazed at how you can control most things wirelessly with an OpenHABian server running SSH.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• It might seem quaint through the lends of history we have the luxury of looking through, but in the mid 1980s it was a major symbol of status to be able to communicate on-the-go. Car phones and pagers were cutting-edge devices of the time, and even though there were some mobile cellular telephones, they were behemoths compared to anything we would recognize as a cell phone today. It wasn’t until 1985 that a cell phone was able to fit in a pocket, and that first device wasn’t just revolutionary because of its size. It made a number of technological advancements that were extremely impressive for its time, and [Janus Cycle] takes us through some of those in this teardown video.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. This post introduces the Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO) program, which fuels this movement by supporting people who are looking to advance a more human-centered internet. With MIECO, Mozilla is looking to foster a new era of internet innovation that moves away from “fast and breaking things” and into a more purposeful, collaborative effort that includes voices and perspectives from many different companies and organizations.

• [...]

• “As a kid, I would go to museums and fairs and see machines that people had built, or reproductions of famous machines throughout history, and then I would go home and build them out of Legos,” Adam said of his childhood in South Florida.

• Once, a friend told him that their cousin built games on calculators, so Adam carried around programming books until he learned how to program. “I spent a lot of time writing the things that I wanted to play,” Adam recalled. “So that was always a strong motivator for me.”

• Adam participated in programming and math competitions in high school. Before graduating, he interned at Motorola’s robotics group, where he developed software that ended up shipping with the company’s phones. Adam went on to attend MIT, during which he continued to work for Motorola.

• “I realized how powerful tools can be,” Adam said. “If you have the right tools and the right ideas about what those tools should do, you can get much farther than you otherwise would.”

• (“This Week in Glean Data” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean. You can find an index of all TWiG posts online.)

• Recently I’ve been granted the role of “tech-lead” of the Glean SDK, where I find myself responsible for more of the direction and communication regarding Glean.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 16 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available when PostgreSQL 16 is made generally available, though some details of the release can change during the beta period.

• You can find information about all of the features and changes found in PostgreSQL 16 in the release notes:

• https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/release-16.html

• In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 16 on your systems to help us eliminate bugs or other issues that may exist. While we do not advise you to run PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 in production environments, we encourage you to find ways to run your typical application workloads against this beta release.

• As part of bringing myself up-to-speed after joining TigerBeetle, I wanted some background on how distributed consensus and replicated state machines protocols work. TigerBeetle uses Viewstamped Replication. But I wanted to understand all popular protocols and I decided to start with Raft.

• We’ll implement two key components of Raft in this post (leader election and log replication). Around 1k lines of Go. It took me around 7 months of sporadic studying to come to (what I hope is) an understanding of the basics.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• In 2022, the documentation community continued to update LibreOffice guidebooks and the Help application…

Education

• I am grateful to report that the FreeBSD Foundation offered to fund my trip to Ottawa, Canada for the 2023 FreeBSD Developer’s Summit and BSDCan conference. I boarded my flight and arrived at the YOW airport on May 16th late at night. I took OCTranspo’s 97 bus line to the Hurdman station where I rode the Hurdman East light rail to the uOttawa University. I had arranged to share a double suite with Mark Johnston, so I headed over to the U90 Residences to find my room. After arriving, I set my alarm for the next morning and quickly fell asleep.

Licensing / Legal

• Dozens of state attorneys general have banded together to sue a telecommunications company, alleging that the company is solely responsible for 7.5 billion calls to people on the US’s federal Do Not Call registry.

• The lawsuit claims (pdf) that Avid Telecom, which provides voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services, illegally facilitated robocalls, violating federal telemarketing, spoofing, and robocalling laws, as well as calling numbers on the Do Not Call list.

Programming/Development

• Codefresh is a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform specifically designed to support the development and deployment of cloud-native applications.

• In Scala, how do we model enumerations of values? What are the possible issues? How does Scala compare with Java? What are the changes in Scala 3?

• “[I really] wanted to see what laid in the river outside of my house,” Oliver explains. “After I first deployed the camera, I told Autun, who said that he could take it with him to Antarctica on his next mission.” With the camera tested, Autun stood by his word, took it on the RV Polarstern, a research icebreaker ship, and deployed it during two helicopter missions.

• We have released Qt 5.15.14 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.14 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.

• When Qt Design Studio was in its infancy we recognized the need for Designers to be able to import their work into Qt Design Studio (QtDS for the rest of this piece) from other tools. This was before Figma existed and the whole concept of design systems with atomic components was not so well known. At the time we targeted Photoshop, as it had a large user base in the industry and was considered to be an industry standard for UI and UX design. At first our idea idea was that the Bridge, as we called it, would be mostly useful as an asset importer, a way to get the graphical assets across from one tool to the other, retaining the position and composition, so the Designers would be able to skip the tedious work of exporting and rebuilding the screen design piece by piece.

• The sixth release of the still new-ish qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

• qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.

• This release brings updates to a few calendars which happened since the QuantLib 1.30 release, and also updates a several of the (few) non-calendaring functions.

Python

• Complex numbers in Python consists of a “real” and an “imaginary” component that represent the quantities that cannot be described solely with real numbers.

Leftovers

• Betting scandals in college sports and other woes from a rapid rise in legalized gambling on athletics push New Jersey to weigh teaching students about luck versus reality.

• She enthralled the masses like she was a wonder of the world, bringing her singular electricity to songs about survival, freedom and bravery. It’s hard to believe she’s gone.

• The woman from Nutbush, Tenn., renounced her American citizenship in 2013 to live a quiet life in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich.

• The Nutbush, set to its eponymous song and sometimes considered an unofficial national dance, is popular with all ages and has taken on special significance after the singer’s death.

Science

• Not all space weather starts in space.

Education

• For some, this is an all-too-familiar experience, a symptom of exposure to the production-line mode of education. Pretend to read the book, struggle to stay awake as the teacher pontificates about what some dead author meant by something or the other, and regurgitate those sacred words when it comes time for testing. But this is not how things out to be, and it is a real shame that so many wonderful insights and revalations are crushed under the heel of such drudgery. A simple miscommunication leaves students with a warped perception of literary criticism for life.

• The book is not an official production. It is able to use the characters of Winnie-the-Pooh in its material as they have been in the public domain in the United States since the beginning of 2022.

• In October 2021, a freshman at Stanford University, whom we will call Sarah, went to an on-campus party. She met another freshman, whom we will call Alex, and they danced and talked. The next day, they met up again, walked around campus, and then went back to his dorm room. They both consented to having sex, and Sarah asked him to wear a condom. They argued about it. She told him she’d leave if he didn’t wear a condom, so he eventually put one on. As things progressed, she says, she asked him to stop and to slow down because she was in pain, but he wouldn’t. She left bleeding and with hickeys that lasted for nine days.

• Some 15,000 Romanian teachers took to the streets of Bucharest on May 25 on the fourth day of a strike over low salaries and insufficient funding for education with no sign of a deal with the coalition government in sight.

Hardware

• “Consumers are willing to hold on to their phones longer, even if they must spend more on a premium handset.”

• We’ve all been there before — you need some 3D printable design that you figure must be common enough that somebody has already designed it, so you point your browser to Thingiverse or Printables, and in a few minutes you’ve got STL in hand and are ready to slice and print. If the design worked for you, perhaps you’ll go back and post an image of your print and leave a word of thanks to the designer.

• [Jan Říha]’s PionEar device is a wonderful entry to the Assistive Tech portion of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. It’s a small unit intended to perch within view of the driver in a vehicle, and it has one job: flash a light whenever a siren is detected. It is intended to provide drivers with a better awareness of emergency vehicles, because they are so often heard well before they are seen, and their presence disrupts the usual flow of the road. [Jan] learned that there was a positive response in the Deaf and hard of hearing communities to a device like this; roads get safer when one has early warning.

• In the technologically-underpinned modern world, most of us interact with a battery of some sort every day. Whether that’s the starter battery in a car, the lithium battery in a phone, or even just the coin cell battery in a wrist watch, batteries underpin a lot of what makes society possible now. Not so in the early 1800s when chemists and physicists were first building and experimenting with batteries. And those batteries were enormous, non-rechargable, and fairly fragile to boot. Not something suited for powering much of anything, but if you want to explore what it would have been like to use one of these devices, follow along with [Christopher]’s build of a voltaic pile.

• TQ-Embedded TQMxE41S is a SMARC 2.1 system-on-module (SoM) powered by an Intel Alder Lake-N Atom x7000E, Processor Nxxx, or Core i3 processor with a TDP ranging from 6W to 15W TDP, up to 16GB LPDDR5-4800 memory and up to 256GB industrial iNAND eMMC flash.

• Reolink E1 Outdoor Pro is a 4K smart security camera with PTZ and auto-tracking like the Reolink TrackMix, but instead of relying on PoE or WiFi 4/5, the camera comes with WiFi 6 connectivity for a faster and more stable network connection with less latency. Most of the WiFi security cameras I’ve been using come with 2.4GHz WiFi 4, and I’ve found connectivity to the solar-powered Reolink security cameras I’ve been using to be somewhat unreliable with difficulty connecting to them through the mobile app, although uploads to the cloud don’t suffer from those issues. So I typically prefer PoE or 4G LTE security cameras since the connectivity is more stable, but Reolink E1 Outdoor Pro security camera’s WiFi 6 support could help depending on the environment.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant changed her sense of agency and self. She told researchers that she “became one” with her device.

• She was devastated when, two years later, she was told she had to remove the implant because the company that made it had gone bust.

• Technology should be a generator of efficiencies. I’m aware that’s not always the case and that a mismanaged project can be worse than no project at all. But comparing every piece of technology to a nurse’s salary is an emotional sleight of hand which prevents any progress.

• Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters.

• The decision was a second major blow to the E.P.A.’s authority and to the power of administrative agencies generally. Last year, the court limited the E.P.A.’s power to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

• Experts in environmental law said the decision would leave many wetlands subject to pollution without penalty, sharply undercutting the E.P.A.’s authority to protect them under the Clean Water Act.

• Months after an explosive Norfolk Southern train derailment changed their lives and communities forever, residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding area feel “numb,” lied to, and abandoned… and they’re running out of drinkable water.

• “…The police officers were transported to a medical facility in proximity…”

• Use your time wisely.

• It doesn’t add up.

• The drug could reroute the trajectory of a kid’s life—or throw it off course.

• You don’t have to quit Instagram and TikTok cold turkey. Use these strategies — some practical, some more philosophical — to be online in a healthier or less harmful way.

• “I am deeply remorseful for my conduct.”

• The operational management group established during the Covid-19 pandemic will assess the possibility of amending or abolishing the Covid-19 infection management law, Latvin Radio reported on May 25.

• The University of Michigan updated its emergency response protocol to COVID-19 on May 12 and 13 following the expiration of the federal COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11.  The changes, which have been called “a new phase” by U-M administration, will apply equally to faculty, staff and students at the University.

• Experts don’t expect a return to the stringent restrictions of the zero-COVID policy.

• The recent fight over wet-market raccoon dogs underscores just how much prior beliefs can affect interpretation.

• The first step is to prevent more plastic from reaching the sea in the first place.

• The US Supreme Court has reined in the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate water pollution, ruling that wetlands are not “waters of the United States,” as defined in the landmark 1972 Clean Waters Act.

• Electricity generation will be impacted across the region, the study says.

• The Public Distribution System (PDS) started in the 1960s to provide food grains at subsidised rates to the people of the country facing a food crisis. PDS was transformed into the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013.

Proprietary

• A whole bunch of media articles are noting that Twitter users who deleted tweets have noticed in recent weeks that the deleted tweets have magically returned. There seems to be little rhyme or reason for which deleted tweets have returned, but it’s definitely happening to many users. In some cases, people said they had deleted tens of thousands of tweets, only to find them all come back.

• Here we go again. We’ve talked several times in the past about game publishers and studios going out of their way to shut down fan-run servers for online play. The excuses for doing so mostly amount to either claims that intellectual property laws require this sort of policing action (it doesn’t), that the publisher needs to shut down servers for older versions of games to get people to buy newer versions (objection: asserting facts not in evidence), and some just seem to want to play strongman for whatever reason.

• The problem, in market terms, is that if buyers don’t have enough information to tell the two groups of goods apart—Akerlof worked with the used car market as a test case—they will price all goods as if they were potentially defective. The seller of the defective car gets more for it than if they were upfront—especially at the beginning before market dynamics kick in—but the seller of the non-defective car gets less. This drives the good sellers out of the market.

• AI language models aren’t used goods. We don’t buy and sell language models on Etsy. But information asymmetry is still an issue because, as with the “lemon” cars, we have no way of telling a defective good from a non-defective one.

• Except this time, the defects are security vulnerabilities and it looks like they are all quite defective.

• Interesting essay on the poisoning of LLMs–ChatGPT in particular:

• Nuance Communications, a company working with AI for speech recognition has decided to hand over pink slips as it intends to focus on the healthcare sector.

• As reported by Boston Globe, the company informed the employees through an internal memo.

• While the exact number of impacted employees is not known, macroeconomic variables and inflationary pressures have seemingly made the company prioritise the core healthcare segment going forward.

• A state-sponsored Chinese hacking group has been spying on a wide range of US critical infrastructure organisations, from telecommunications to transportation hubs, Western intelligence agencies and Microsoft MSFT.O said on Wednesday. China’s foreign ministry on Thursday said the reports were a disinformation campaign initiated by the US.

• Surface Pro X owners are reporting that the cameras on their devices have stopped working this week.

• Facial recognition technology maker RecFaces is making its flagship products available on Linux operating systems and plans to allow end users to choose operating systems while upgrading.

• The company’s two main products are access control solution IdGate, and IdGuard, which allows facial recognition through video streams. Using IdGate on Debian-based OS will provide customers more flexibility, while IdGuard users will be able to deploy facial recognition technology in a broader range of environments to enhance security, the company said in a release.

• “This is just the beginning of a new RecFaces’ strategy of updating all our product lines, says Eugenia Marina, business development director for MENA at RecFaces. “We believe it will lead to a more efficient way of providing our solutions to end-customers all over the world”.

• But a new feature that isn’t even a part of the update takes up the crown for most wanted: baked-in RAR file support.

• Spilling a drink on the seat. GM suggests: “Taking apart the seat and allowing the PPS mat to dry for 48 hours.”

• Placing a bag of groceries, some books, or a backpack on the seat. GM suggests: “Remove the shit.”

• Interfering with the electronics in the PPS mat by having an MP3 player, cell phone, laptop, or other electronic device on or too close to the seat, including in your pocket. Even if the device is off. GM Suggests: “Don’t come too close to it with electronic devices.”

• You’re sitting “wrong”. (Thanks Apple!) GM Suggests sitting up straight, taking it like a man, be nice to your little sister. Don’t drive on the railroad tracks.

• Your ass is abnormal. No seriously…..Your ass is abnormal. I don’t know. Replace ass and try again.

Windows TCO

• China’s response to the accusations is to claim that this is all a disinformation campaign from Five Eyes countries.

• A state-sponsored Chinese hacking group has been spying on a wide range of US critical infrastructure organisations, from telecommunications to transportation hubs, Western intelligence agencies and Microsoft MSFT.O said on Wednesday.

• On May 22, the Royal ransomware group added Morris Hospital to their leak site with a small sample of files as proof of claims.

• On May 24, the Vascular Center of Intervention (VCI) in California submitted a breach notification to California and posted a substitute notice on VCI’s website.

• The notification, signed by Dr. James Lee, states that on March 29, VCI became aware of unusual activity on its network. An investigation revealed that some patient-related files had been accessed or exfiltrated between February 25 and March 29. The letter notes that the types of information involved might include one or more of the following for any affected patient: medical history, mental or physical condition, medical treatment or diagnosis by a healthcare professional, date of birth, health insurance information, Social Security Number, and Driver’s license information.

• On May 20, DataBreaches reported that Norton Healthcare in Kentucky and Indiana had disclosed what sounded like a ransomware incident that they discovered on May 9, but they never called it a ransomware incident, even though they stated that they had received faxed threats and demands.

Security

• Learn how to build reproducible analytical pipelines in R! Join our workshop on Building reproducible analytical pipelines in R which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series.

• The code designed to target industrial control systems joins the pantheon of dangerous malware that can cause cyber-physical harm.

• Mandiant has analyzed a new Russia-linked ICS malware named CosmicEnergy that is designed to cause electric power disruption.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (python2.7), Fedora (maradns), Red Hat (devtoolset-12-binutils, go-toolset and golang, httpd24-httpd, jenkins and jenkins-2-plugins, rh-ruby27-ruby, and sudo), Scientific Linux (git), Slackware (texlive), SUSE (cups-filters, poppler, texlive, distribution, golang-github-vpenso-prometheus_slurm_exporter, kubernetes1.18, kubernetes1.23, openvswitch, rmt-server, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, calamares-settings-ubuntu, Jhead, libhtml-stripscripts-perl, and postgresql-10, postgresql-12, postgresql-14, postgresql-15).

• The second-largest health insurer in Massachusetts was the victim of a ransomware attack in which sensitive personal information as well as health information of current and past members may have been compromised.

• Apria Healthcare is informing 1.86 million individuals of personal information compromise in 2019 and 2021 data breaches.

• GitLab CE/EE version 16.0.1 patches a critical arbitrary file read vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-2825.

• Barracuda Networks is warning customers about CVE-2023-2868, a zero-day exploited to hack some Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances.

• There are many factors to consider when choosing an OS, security being among one of the most critical. The general consensus among experts is that Linux is the most secure OS by design – an impressive feat that can be attributed to a variety of characteristics including its transparent open-source code, strict user privilege model, diversity, built-in kernel security defenses and the security of the applications that run on it.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Hong Kong police have warned the public to stay alert to a fake mobile app disguised as the force’s anti-scam Scameter+ app. The bogus app had been attempting to lure victims into depositing money into scammers’ bank accounts.

• Please let me know if you have any idea what they are trying to do here

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Citizen Lab examined the devices of a number of individuals in Armenia for evidence of spyware infections including Pegasus, as part of an investigative collaboration with Access Now, CyberHUB-AM, Amnesty International’s Security Lab, and independent mobile security researcher Ruben Muradyan.

• Read the Access Now report on the civil society cases: Hacking in a war zone: Pegasus spyware in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict

• Our forensic analysis of the following individuals’ devices found evidence of Pegasus spyware infection with a high degree of confidence.

• You may have heard the news that the EU hit Meta with a $1.3 billion fine for violating EU “data privacy rules” and assumed that this was just Meta being Meta and being bad about your privacy. But that’s not really an accurate portrayal of what happened, and it hides how this fine is actually pretty problematic for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Meta whatsoever, and a lot to do with the NSA.

• A robbery/kidnapping case allegedly implicating business owner and immigrant Evgeni Kopankov has resulted in the government losing the evidence it took it oh so long to obtain. And the government has only itself to blame for how this went down.

• The letters from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU NorCal), and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) gave the agencies a deadline of June 15 to comply and respond. A months-long EFF investigation involving hundreds of public records requests uncovered that many California police departments share records containing detailed driving profiles of local residents with out-of-state agencies.

• ALPR camera systems collect and store location information about drivers, including dates, times, and locations. This sensitive information can reveal where individuals work, live, associate, worship—or seek reproductive health services and other medical care.

• “ALPRs invade people’s privacy and violate the rights of entire communities, as they often are deployed in poor and historically overpoliced areas regardless of crime rates,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Pinsof. “Sharing ALPR data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy.”

• ORG’s new report exposes failures by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in protecting the public privacy and data rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. Failure to act Data privacy and the Information Commissioner’s Office During a Crisis analyses the ICO’s role in relation to three key Covid-19 health programmes…

• A new report exposes failures by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in protecting the public privacy and data rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. The report analyses use of data in three key Covid-19 health programmes NHS Test and Trace, NHS Contract Tracing App and the NHS Datastore.

Defence/Aggression

• The navy’s mine countermeasures ship inspected more than 100 underwater contacts, finding six naval mines from World War I and World War II, it said in a press release.

• On Sunday, voters will go to the polls for the first presidential runoff in their history with their country at a turning point.

• It is almost 100 years since Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a secular republic.

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan is promising a new “Turkish century” if he is re-elected.

• His supporters say he will deliver more development and a stronger Turkey. His critics say it will be less Ataturk, more Islamisation, and a darker future.

• Now, according to a February 2023 official International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report to the United Nations Security Council, Iran has portentously amassed a stockpile of 193 pounds of U-235 enriched to 60 percent, or enough mass to produce three full-scale atomic weapons. It has also, alarmingly, demonstrated a menacing capacity to enrich U-235 particles to 83.7 percent. Equally disconcerting was “two cascades of IR-6 centrifuges at Iran’s Fordo facility” were “configured” to facilitate reaching a weaponized grade of 90 percent.

• Iran clearly knows now how to unlock the doors to a nuclear Armageddon. There is a growing sense in Israel that Jerusalem is quickly running out of time to prevent Iran from becoming a regional nuclear power. Moreover, it is highly likely that, as part of Tehran’s partnership to supply Russian President Vladimir Putin with drones for use in Ukraine, Moscow is helping Iran overcome the last of several remaining technical obstacles to producing, weaponizing, delivering and detonating a nuclear bomb.

• The annual display of Jewish Supremacy in Palestine, known as the Flag March, is not limited to the Old City of Jerusalem. It is part of a campaign of intimidation in cities around the country that have a significant Palestinian population.

• Belarus’s Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin and his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu have signed an agreement on deploying Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

• The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police was three years ago today, and the fervent protests that erupted around the world in response seemed like the catalyst needed for a nationwide reckoning on racism in policing. Along with a few other cities, Minneapolis has issued bans on chokeholds and neck restraints, and restrictions on no-knock warrants. But activist calls to defund the police and to hold officers accountable have mostly failed. The killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police earlier this year underscored just how long it’s taking to achieve meaningful change. On Thursday night, more than 100 people gathered at the site of Floyd’s killing, known as George Floyd Square to remember him with music, dancing and a candlelight vigil.

• Sea state On the eve of last week’s G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan’s Ministry of Defense reported that several Chinese warships were circling the Japanese islands.

• Japanese police on Friday detained a suspect who had holed up in a building after allegedly killing four people, including two police officers, in a gun and knife attack.

• The assault on Thursday in the city of Nakano in central Japan took the lives of two women and two police officers. It was a rare episode of violence in a country where gun crime remains low.

• It perhaps goes without saying that one nuclear bomb can really ruin your day. The same is true for non-nuclear dirty bombs, which just use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material over a wide area. Either way, the debris scattered by any type of radiation weapon has the potential to result in thousands or perhaps millions of injuries, for which modern medicine offers little in the way of relief.

• - Zoltán Kovács, State Secretary for International Communication wrote, in response to the news that the European Parliament has called into question Hungary’s suitability to assume the rotating presidency of the EU Council due to the state of the rule of law in the country. According to Kovács, the accusation that Hungary is violating the EU’s fundamental values is well-known, but the Hungarian government remains firm in its pro-peace stance.

• What is historical fiction for? If you ask devotees of Michael Shaara’s Civil War books or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, you may hear that historical fiction not only lets readers comprehend long-ago events intellectually but also captures some of their emotional reality. Mantel herself said, in a 2017 Radio 4 talk, that studying history “helps us put our small lives in context. But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.” Novels of the near past—that is, novels whose characters could plausibly still be living today—play a somewhat different role. Such books can, as Mantel says, help readers put our lives in context, not only by telling us whether, by comparison, we live in “good times, bad times, [or] interesting times” but also by showing us the old times we remain stuck in.

• To grow up in or around Chicago in the late 20th century meant knowing the sound of Studs Terkel’s voice. Friendly, welcoming, unassuming, a little raspy, he hosted The Studs Terkel Program each weekday on WFMT from 1952 to 1997. Before political shows adopted professional wrestling as their discourse model, Terkel talked like you were sitting on a front stoop or in a pub booth with him. It’s the feeling that reporters want when they fly out to red states to talk to reg’lar folks at whatever local diner they think looks Americana enough for their Sunday readers. Terkel didn’t have to go anywhere to meet real people, because he saw the real in everyone.

• Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said during a meeting in Moscow on May 25 that there are serious grounds for normalizing relations with Armenia based on mutual recognition of territorial integrity.

• A car collided Thursday with the gates of Downing Street in central London, where the British prime minister’s home and offices are located, setting off a rapid, intense security response at one of London’s most-fortified sites. No one was injured and police said they were not treating the incident as terror-related.

• There remains a slate of accountability tools for Syria, and certain avenues for seeking accountability may even be expanding with normalization.

• After expressing zero remorse and heralding himself to a federal judge as a “political prisoner” who “like Donald Trump only committed the crime of opposing those who are destroying our country,” Oath Keeper Elmer Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role leading and orchestrating a seditious conspiracy….

• The sentence for Stewart Rhodes was the longest so far in the federal investigation of the Capitol attack and the first issued to a defendant convicted of sedition.

• Sudan’s warring sides accused each other on Thursday of being behind breaches of the latest ceasefire that was negotiated by the US and Saudi Arabia, now in its third day.

• In an otherwise problematic early report on the results of the Durham Report, CNN caught Durham in two of the Special Counsel’s numerous lapses of precisely the standards he attempted to criminalize with the FBI.

• Overzealous instructors, unchecked drug use, and inadequate leadership and medical oversight turned a tough selection course into a dangerous ordeal, investigators found.

• A sentencing for a sedition conviction in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol spotlights subtle differences within a suite of related criminal offenses.

• The world is failing to protect civilians as the number of people caught up in conflicts and their humanitarian aftershocks skyrocketed last year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday.

War in Ukraine

• As calls grow for an end to the war in Ukraine, a number of recent developments indicate the war could instead be expanding beyond Ukraine’s borders. Russia has signed an agreement with Belarus to begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons there, and a group of pro-Ukrainian fighters from Russia has attacked sites in the Russian region of Belgorod using what appears to be U.S.-made armored vehicles and Humvees. This cross-border raid was carried out in part by the Russian Volunteer Corps, a group that includes self-avowed neo-Nazis. For more, we speak to Gregory Afinogenov, a professor of Russian history at Georgetown University, and Denis Pilash, a Ukrainian political scientist, historian and member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh.

• European Commission Speech Brussels, 25 May 2023 Thank you very much for the opportunity to join you all here today to discuss the situation of women and children living in Ukraine…

• Russian attempts to explain away Western support for Ukraine with conspiracy theories and outdated arguments are falling flat as the democratic world continues to oppose Moscow’s invasion, writes Richard Cashman.

• South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa is set to lead an initiative of six African heads of state to explore an end to the year-long Russia-Ukraine war. The announcement followed his phone calls with both Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

• Russia’s Wagner mercenary group is withdrawing its forces from the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and is transferring its positions to Russian army units, according to the group’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said Thursday that Russia had begun moving ahead with relocating tactical nuclear weapons to his country. Follow our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Chinese President Xi Jinping offered Beijing’s support on Moscow’s “core interests” at a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on Wednesday.

• At 2:00 on Thursday night, Kaunas ambulance station staff brought a Lithuanian soldier injured in Ukraine to the Kaunas Clinics.

• Ukraine’s parliament speaker, Ruslan Stefanchuk, on May 25 offered condolences to the descendants of Poles massacred by Ukrainian nationalists in World War II, a gesture likely to defuse tensions between the allies ahead of the 80th anniversary of the killings.

• The United States on May 25 imposed sanctions on the head of the Wagner Group in Mali, accusing the Russian private army of trying to obscure its efforts to acquire military equipment for use in Ukraine, and of working through Mali and other countries.

• Russia’s most powerful mercenary on May 25 said he was sending back the bodies of a U.S. citizen who was killed in fighting in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and that of a Turkish citizen who was found dead in a destroyed building.

• Finland on May 24 said it would provide Ukraine with 109 million euros ($117 million) in additional military equipment to include anti-aircraft weapons and ammunition.

• Customs duties on imports from Ukraine into the EU are to remain suspended for another year, member states agreed in Strasbourg on May 25.

• The war in Ukraine is reaching a crucial moment. Will it recapture the world’s flagging attention?

• Images of some of the many small drones being used on Ukraine’s battlefields

• After seizing the city in eastern Ukraine after a long, brutal fight, the Wagner mercenary force is turning it over to the depleted Russian Army to defend.

• Wagner, the Russian private military contractor, claims to be withdrawing from Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and transferring control to the Russian military by June 1. Still, independent verification is unavailable amidst ongoing heavy fighting in the city.

• The mercenary group’s leader said his fighters would hand the ruined city to regular Russian forces, who are already stretched and will have to fill the gap left by the mercenaries.

• A photographic chronicle of the second year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• On 25 May in Rīga, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, met with the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Tiny Kox, and the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Marija Pejčinović Burić.

• On May 24, online political consultations were held between Latvia and China, according to a release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The previous political consultations between Latvia and China took place as far back as 2021.

• Moscow has declared victory in its long, bloody assault. But a full capture of the ruined city may not help Russian forces advance deeper in the Donbas region.

• Ukrainian and American officials say Russian warplanes are dropping Soviet-era bombs, some modified to glide long distances, which are almost impossible to shoot down.

• After an anti-Putin Russian volunteer military unit attacked Belgorod, trolls and bloggers online viciously ridiculed Russian defenses.

• Tackling export controls circumvention by Russia; the enforcement and effectiveness of the oil price cap; the failure of the US sanctions policy towards Sudan, and how to fix it.

• Russia and Belarus have signed documents allowing for the placement of Russian tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus, a move that has increased already strained tensions between the Kremlin and the West.

• A court in Russia’s northwestern Komi region sentenced human rights activist Andrei Ivashev on charges he posted online calls for terrorism.

• Over the past several days, Moscow has been celebrating its purported capture of Bakhmut, even though some Ukrainian units are still fighting for the city. Nevertheless, President Vladimir Putin has personally congratulated Wagner Group and its mercenaries for their role in the assault that, in President Zelensky’s words, left almost nothing of what used to be a thriving city. And while Russia tries to make the most of its reported local victory, the acute conflict between Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin and Russia’s senior military officials is far from over. Prigozhin’s facetious veiled remarks about “some happy grandpa” who is deluded that “all is well” at the front made many a senior official wonder whom exactly he was hinting at. Betting on his military effectiveness, Prigozhin has upped the ante in his political game, but Russia’s national-security establishment doesn’t like “loose cannons” in politics. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev takes stock of Prigozhin’s prospects off the battlefield.

• Moscow’s prestigious School of Higher Economics will fully fund the education of students who have participated in the “special military operation” (“SVO”) and their family members, says a university press release.

• Citing a Ukrainian military source, the news website Ukrainska Pravda reports that the intelligence ship Ivan Khurs, part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, has been damaged in a Ukrainian naval drone attack.

• The Tajik Foreign Ministry has summoned the Russian ambassador to Dushanbe, Semyon Grigoryev, over reports about mass detentions and beatings of Tajik students in Russia by law enforcement and security officers.

• After the liberation struggle in 1980, Russians came to Zimbabwe to share knowledge in construction, medicine and agriculture.

• Drone attacks in Moscow, incursions over the border—Russians are starting to wonder whether Putin really does have, as he promised, “everything under control.”

• Japan will never accept Russia’s “nuclear menace”, a government spokesman said.

• Ilta-Sanomat reports that a record number of Russians immigrated to Finland last year, more even than following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• In an interview with the Ukrainian news outlet NV, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said he’s been seriously wounded in the Donbas.

• Russia’s Supreme Court dissolved the Parnas political party, according to Mediazona. The Supreme Court cited the absence of the party’s offices in at least half of Russia’s regions as the primary reason. The Justice Ministry noted that the party’s number of offices had dropped from 47 to 40 since the new year.

Environment

• To that end, scientists led by Muriel Rabone, a deep-sea ecologist at the Natural History Museum in London, U.K., have now unveiled the first comprehensive checklist of “benthic metazoans” meaning seabed animals, in the CCZ, which was compiled from more than 100,000 records of expeditions to the seabed.

• The researchers identified 5,578 different species in the checklist, of which 92 percent are new to science, which clearly demonstrates that “the CCZ represents significant undescribed biodiversity” and illustrates “the novelty of the region at deep taxonomic levels,” according to a study published on Thursday in Current Biology.

• A logic professor explains how a persistent, subtle fallacy has infected public discussion of climate change.

• In a first at the state level, the City of Hoboken, New Jersey recently added racketeering charges to its climate lawsuit against major petroleum producers and their national trade group the American Petroleum Institute (API). Hoboken is making this claim against fossil fuel companies under the state-level equivalent of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a federal law used successfully to prosecute organized crime groups such as the Mafia starting in the 1970s and later the tobacco industry. Puerto Rico lodged federal racketeering charges against the industry in a class action climate case last November.

• “These racketeering cases should be viewed as a new legal front against the oil and gas industry,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which advocates for climate accountability from polluters, said by email.

Energy/Transportation

• The U.S. Department of Transportation funding is part of its Advanced Transportation Technology and Innovation Program created to promote new technologies that improve safety and reduce travel times for drivers and transit riders. This ATTAIN grant will update one of the largest connected vehicle pilots in the world, formerly known as the Safety Pilot Model Deployment program, with the latest connected vehicle and infrastructure technologies.

• In December 2021, Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation establishing the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) program—”a $1 billion economic development fund to ensure the state can compete for billions of dollars in investment and attract tens of thousands of jobs to bolster our economy,” according to the press release. Michigan’s legislature apportioned an initial $1 billion for the program. SOAR grants would be disbursed to companies that invested in the state, or to state-affiliated entities for the benefit of those companies; all transfers would require approval first from the state Senate Appropriations Committee and then from the entire legislature.

• There are two possible ways to ban short-distance domestic flights, according to a Finnish researcher.

• One option, they say, would be to decrease the amount of airline subsidies handed out. The other would be to make laws to limit flights based on distances, like in France.

• France banned air travel between cities that are 2.5 hours apart by high-speed rail on May 23.

• France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.

• But this was reduced to two-and-a-half hours after objections from some regions, as well as the airline Air France-KLM.

• Critics have pointed out that the cutoff time for comparable train journeys falls short of the approximately three-hour duration it takes to travel from Paris to the Mediterranean port city of Marseille by high-speed rail.

• France has officially introduced a ban on domestic flights for journeys that can be made by train in less than 2.5 hours, a much-hyped measure aimed at cutting carbon emissions from the aviation industry. But the fine print means that only a handful of routes will be affected.

• Shell has agreed to pay for breaching emissions limits at a plant in Pennsylvania—but not to stop polluting altogether.

• As electric cars continue to see increased adoption, one associated technology that was touted long ago that still hasn’t seen widespread adoption is vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-home. Since most cars are parked most of the time, this would allow the cars to perform load-levelling for the grid or even act as emergency generators on an individual basis when needed. While this hasn’t panned out for a variety of reasons, it is still possible to use an EV battery for use off-grid or as part of a grid tie solar system, and now you can do it without needing to disassemble the battery packs at all.

• I was young and needed a fresh start, our essayist writes. So I headed to Oregon from Boston on a bike.

Wildlife/Nature

• The findings come after a study published in March suggested protecting or restoring a handful of wild animals such as whales, wolves and otters could help capture 6.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.

• Forget changing only the names that honor the horrors of the past. Some biologists now argue no species should ever be named after a single individual.

• They’re basically just like us.

Overpopulation

• Whitmer’s office is not disclosing details until next week but confirmed that reversing decades of population stagnation is top-of-the-mind for the second-term Democrat as she approaches the annual conference of lawmakers, business leaders and policymakers hosted by the Detroit Regional Chamber.

• Seven US states that depend on the overused Colorado River on Monday reached agreement to cutconsumption and help save a river that provides drinking water for 40 million people and irrigation for some of the country’s most bountiful farmland.

Finance

• JPMorgan Chase laid off roughly 1,000 employees from failed lender First Republic, three weeks after JPMorgan—the country’s biggest bank—acquired the collapsed regional bank, marking the latest in a round of layoffs this spring as recession fears and high inflation continue to push employers to reduce their head counts.

• Meta conducts its latest round of layoffs as part of its ‘Year of Efficiency,’ cutting approximately 6,000 jobs, including Instagram’s Head of Music Partnerships. As part of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta’s so-called “Year of Efficiency,” — restructuring en masse to save money — the company is waging its latest round of layoffs.

• Lithuanian residents saw their income grow in the first quarter of 2023, but growth lagged behind inflation, the latest data from the country’s social insurance fund SoDra showed on Thursday.

• Germany fell into a recession around the turn of the year, official figures published Thursday showed, as inflation and higher interest rates curbed demand in Europe’s largest economy.

• The sophisticated hacking effort is the latest in a long line of financially motivated malware campaigns emanating from Brazil.

• French President Emmanuel Macron told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the country is seeing a trend towards “décivilisation”, government sources said. Macron’s remarks followed the deaths of a nurse and three policemen in the past week as well as a fatal shooting in Marseille.

• The European Commision aims to conclude negotiations on free trade agreements with Australia and Kenya in the next couple of months, as the war in Ukraine and a desire to reduce reliance on China drive a European Union push for partnerships.

• Even as congressional negotiators near a deal with the White House on raising the U.S. debt limit, avoiding default isn’t a foregone conclusion. That’s stirring criticism of the debt limit process itself.

• The private banking industry either can’t or won’t do what needs to be done to stop preying on vulnerable people.

• On May 19, 2023, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) brought together leading experts in the study of economic sanctions to help to answer a critical, but often-ignored, question: What are the human consequences of US economic sanctions?

• Adult learners can’t always devote two or four years to a degree. Can certificate programs help bridge the gap to better employment, and help companies fill labor shortages?

• Why are the corporate regulator (ASIC) and the Commonwealth Bank so deeply immersed in a simple case of collecting a fine for a misdemeanour? After four days in court, the Magistrate is not the only one that is confused. Lisa-Jane Roberts reports from Southport.

• The case of Crown v Shannon seemed straightforward on paper. After investigating bank victims advocate Mr Geoffrey Shannon, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) was suing him for $8500, a fine imposed on the advocate for allegedly operating as the director of a company – Business and Personal Solutions (BAPS) – while bankrupt.

• The local share market is edging higher this morning amid reports that Republicans and Democrats in the United States were closing in on a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default. At noon AEST on Friday, the ASX200 was up six points, or 0.08 per cent, to 7,1442. B

• Congressional Democrats are dreading a potential debt default. They are also dreading a potential debt ceiling deal.

• Why it matters: What’s good for President Biden – and the economy – might not feel so good for congressional Democrats, who are largely in the dark on the deal’s specifics and concerned they’ll be forced to support a bill that eviscerates programs they have long championed.

• President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy could not reach an agreement Monday on how to raise the U.S. government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling with just 10 days before a possible default that could sink the U.S. economy, but vowed to keep talking.

• The French government plans to move homeless people out of Paris ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in the capital, sparking criticism from some mayors of regional towns and villages which are expected to house them.

• Stocks were subdued on Friday, apart from standout gains in Japan, as an artificial intelligence rally took a breather and as time ticked out on high-stakes talks to avoid a US debt default. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan drifted 0.3 per cent higher in trade thinned by a holiday in Hong Kong.

• Americans are in favor of raising the minimum wage well above $20, according to a new poll.

• Employers are battling the labor shortage by ratcheting up retention incentives, and some are focusing on a demographic more likely to leave their jobs: Parents.

• A new Oxfam analysis released as the leaders of the Group of 7 nations met in Hiroshima, Japan, shows G7 countries collectively owe poor nations in the Global South more than $13 trillion in development and climate assistance. But instead, these countries are saddled with daily debt repayments of $232 million, deepening the global chasm of inequality. That debt burden “is essentially the money that could have been invested in education, in health, in gender justice programs, in ensuring safe drinking water, in climate resilience,” says Amitabh Behar, the interim executive director of Oxfam International, speaking from New Delhi.

• Markets are stuck in US debt ceiling limbo, while Europe largely shrugged off news that its biggest economy, Germany, had sagged into recession and that all the wrangling in the United States could cost it an AAA credit rating.

• Romanian President Klaus Iohannis would like to see more investment by German companies in his country, he said on May 25 during a visit by the German president.

• The percentage of women with children who are working is back to a peak level last seen in 2019.

• The Biden administration is working to finalize an executive order to restrict outbound investments in China’s defense industry, aiming to release it later this summer, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

• Why it matters: The proposed regulations represent a novel approach by the Biden administration to prevent China from gaining a military advantage in certain targeted technologies. But new regulations are always complicated, and the administration wants to avoid unintended consequences and uncertainty for U.S. investors.

• The details were not finalized, but negotiators were discussing a compromise that would allow Republicans to point to spending reductions and Democrats to say they had prevented large cuts.

• Hakeem Jeffries, the New Yorker who succeeded Nancy Pelosi this year as the House’s top Democrat, is getting a trial by fire.

• Biden must do something. There are no riskless options.

• Gov. Tim Walz said the legislation would have raised costs for ordering an Uber or Lyft too high, potentially pricing out Minnesota customers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The leaders of bitter Caucasus rivals Armenia and Azerbaijan mixed words of conciliation and with angry disagreements over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a Moscow meeting on May 25 in front of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• Isabel Díaz Ayuso has risen out of nowhere to political stardom. In Madrid, the regional president is on the verge of her next triumph, a success story that could pull Spanish conservatives to the right.

• Germany’s large Turkish population often feels caught between two worlds: a physical home and a psychological home. How much is Germany fostering that by banning dual citizenship?

• Twitter – already a small source of clicks for publishers – has further declined in importance as a traffic referrer in recent years.

• Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution—or the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV)—warned Monday against rising levels of anti-government extremism in the midst of provocation from authoritarian states, such as Russia. The BfV claimed these states are seeking to generate societal division and to topple governments of other democratic nations.

• Georgian Airways plans to launch transit flights for Russians via Tbilisi to several destinations in Europe, a move likely to raise the ire of Washington and Brussels, which have banned Russian airlines from entering their airspace as they look to isolate Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

• He appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who shocked the nation with rulings that dramatically took away rights. He sided with the racists who used “states’ rights” to push through undemocratic policies locally. And he’s the only American president who lost a reelection bid but returned to office in the following election.

• With Florida Governor Ron Desantis officially announcing his candidacy for the presidency yesterday in the tailor-made (if decidedly bug-ridden) media space of Elon Musk’s right-wing Twitter, we are moving through the baroque phase of right-wing American culture warfare—a moment when the shape-shifting politics of offense-taking can be trained on virtually any subject. The topic in question gets roughly tricked out as fodder for outrage—whether it’s the perpetual anti-Trump “witch hunt” that produced the adverse verdict for the 45th president in E. Jean Carroll’s suit charging him with sexual assault and defamation, or the perfidy of Bud Light, which now carries the reputation of trans-grooming among the MAGA set thanks to a short-lived campaign that put a trans social-media influencer’s image on a beer can. And whatever you do, do not get them started on the Disney Corporation and its subservience to the gay agenda.

• In the early days of Web life, 1993 to be precise, The New Yorker ran a cartoon that would become one of its most shared. It featured a dog at a computer screen saying to a canine companion, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” It was spoofing the growing number of nobodies trolling and LOLing and sometimes being vile, even threatening, without using their real names or any identifying information. Dogs, in fact, would generally have been better behaved.

• Ron DeSantis officially launched his presidential campaign Wednesday, pitting the Florida governor against his former ally Donald Trump and at least five other Republicans in a fight for their party’s 2024 nomination. His formal announcement came in a Twitter audio stream hosted by the company’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, and was beset by technical problems. As governor of Florida, DeSantis has signed a slew of bills targeting reproductive rights, immigrant rights, the transgender community, and diversity programs in schools. He has also recently signed legislation to weaken the power of public sector unions. For more, we speak with Alphonso Mayfield, president of SEIU Florida Public Services Union. “People are hurting. … And instead of dealing with those issues directly, he’s punching down and focusing on the most marginalized aspects of our community and the people who are actually working and trying to create a better life for their families and their communities,” says Mayfield.

• Tierney has a key reason for his concern. As the chief cybersecurity officer for General Motors, he needs to ensure security across the GM ecosystem, which includes everything from the automaker’s vehicles to GM Financial to its Cruise subsidiary that’s focused on developing autonomous vehicles.

• The House Judiciary Committee said Wednesday it obtained that detail and other information about the case from the IRS following the outcry over a tax agent visiting Taibbi’s home on March 9, 2022 — the same day he testified to Congress about the “Twitter Files.”

• Twitter files author Matt Taibbi weighs in on the IRS’s examination of him.

• The IRS opened its probe of Mr. Taibbi just three weeks after he published his first Twitter Files account of government officials colluding with Twitter to shut down voices of dissent. Mr. Taibbi, who is far from a conservative journalist, quickly became a hero to the right and deepened a growing rift with those on the political left.

• The IRS investigation struck a chord, with the Treasury Department struggling to explain why it sent an agent to make a house call at his home this year on the exact date that he was appearing before Congress to testify on his Twitter Files work.

• Professor Suisheng Zhao explains China through the lens of three of its most prominent leaders in the contemporary world.

• As Alabama introduces new death penalty legislation, former governors urge elected officials to do the morally right thing.

• A new criminal case is being mounted against the imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny, now serving a nine-year sentence in a Russian penal colony. The Russian news outlet Mediazona has spotted a new docket filed at the Moscow City Court.

• Konstantin Sonin, an economist and professor at the University of Chicago, was placed on Russia’s federal wanted list, according to Mediazona, which found this information in the Internal Affairs Ministry’s database.

• Coming from all points under the southern sky, more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates met at Uluru for the First Nations Constitutional Convention six years ago.

• At a time when the relationship between the Australian public service and consultancy firms is under fierce scrutiny, a new unit is looking at keeping more work in-house.  What has been dubbed the Commonwealth Evaluation Unit will essentially be responsible for checking public programs are working as they are meant to.

• Some were killed in detention, while others in hiding were blocked from medical treatment.

• Cambodia’s Chhim Sithar was charged with “inciting social chaos”

• The Candlelight Party is planning a public protest despite warnings from Hun Sen.

• The Alabama House of Representatives’ Health Committee voted to advance House Bill 405 on Wednesday which provides definitions for sex and gender terms like male, female, woman and man.

• The presidential candidate of the opposition answered young people’s questions on Babala TV in the program that lasted four hours and eleven minutes and was viewed by 7.9 million people within 10 hours.

• The Republican-led House committee said Ken Paxton’s abuses of office rose to the level of possible crimes that warranted an impeachment vote.

• That would help foster a culture of accountability and transparency for a small group of powerful officials who have long avoided both.

• Net migration to Britain has exceeded 600,000 a year, stirring tensions in a government that promised to stem arrivals.

• Despite post-Brexit restrictions and government vows to control it, immigration to Britain reached an all-time high in 2022, driven by war, politics and economics.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Twitter is likely to pull out from a voluntary EU code of practice to tackle disinformation, but the move does not mean it will quit Europe, an EU official said on Thursday.

• The European Commission beefed up the code last year, requiring companies to submit regular progress reports with data on how much advertising revenue they had averted from disinformation actors.

• During live broadcast on TRT, the public broadcaster, Erdoğan acknowledged that the video may be fabricated, saying, “Kılıçdaroğlu has videos with [PKK leaders]… Manipulated or not, these video recordings were made.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Around the globe, governments periodically impose internet shutdowns during school exams under the pretext of curbing malpractices. These acts, often severe and prolonged, disrupt digital rights, impede access to information, and create a ripple effect impacting social, economic, and civic life.

• Branch 103 of the Criminal Court 2 in Ilam, in western Iran, sentenced former Kurdish political prisoner Khadijeh Mehdipour to three months and one day in prison on 17 May on charges of “spreading lies online to disturb public opinion”, Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) reported.

• Racing NSW boss Peter V’landys has lost an appeal in his defamation case against the ABC over a report showing graphic footage of retired racehorses being slaughtered at a Queensland abattoir. The 7.30 program titled The Final Race treated Mr V’landys shabbily but did not defame him, Justice Steven Rares said on Friday.

• Byu Har said life was better under the democratically elected government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi.

• He was convicted under a controversial ‘propaganda’ article of the Penal Code.

• A prominent Pakistani television journalist known for his public support of former Prime Minister Imran Khan has gone missing, the police, his family, and his employer said on May 25.

• Target became the latest company to adjust plans for marketing supportive of the L.G.B.T.Q. community after it faced backlash from some customers.

• Between June 2019 and January 2020, as Hong Kong was gripped by months-long pro-democracy protests and unrest, the city’s political cartoons and artwork scene flourished.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A court in Moscow extended pretrial detention charges for American journalist Evan Gershkovich on Tuesday, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The Wall Street Journal reporter will now be held in Russian detention until August 30.

• Pro-Kremlin journalist Konstantin Dolgov was fired on May 25, a day after he published the full version of an interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner private mercenary group.

• On Thursday, he was referred to the courthouse with a request for judicial control. He was released with a prohibition on traveling abroad.

• As part of the same investigation, 191 people were detained in house raids in 21 cities on 25 April, and more than 50 people, including journalists and lawyers, were arrested.

• Why the move away from paywalls at companies like Time and Quartz does not indicate a market tipping over.

• Crime reporter Marco Aurelio Ramírez was shot while driving his car on Tuesday, making him the third journalist murdered in Mexico in 2023.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Bandcamp employees officially voted to unionize, 31-7, in favor of forming Bandcamp United, a union represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) in affiliation with the Tech Workers Union Local 1010.

• Turkey has risen to the fifth rank in the world in the Global Slavery Index.

• Rent-a-bike users in the French capital found large anti-abortion stickers plastered on their bicycles on Thursday, sparking an outcry from the government.

• First Children and Women Association in Turkey requested immediate research and investigation into the event.

• The Moscow City Court on May 25 registered a new criminal case against jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.

• The West Kazakhstan regional court has rejected an appeal filed by Russian citizen Igor Sandzhiyev against a lower court’s refusal to grant him asylum.

• Chinese authorities consider it illegal for Tibetans to contact other Tibetans living in exile and are particularly sensitive about any contact with the Dalai Lama, who fled to India 74 years ago and has been living in Dharamsala ever since. Beijing considers him a separatist seeking to destroy China’s sovereignty by pushing for independence for Tibet.

• “I cannot grasp why,” she told the outlet. “The same cop that told him to come out of the house. (Aderrien) did, and he got shot. He kept asking, ‘Why did he shoot me? What did I do wrong?’”

• Police ordered everyone in the house to show themselves with their hands up, Moore said. When the 11-year-old came out of a bedroom with his hands up, he was met by gunfire, the attorney said.

• “If he’s your best, Indianola, you need a clean house from top to bottom,” he said.

• When the clerk at VJ’s Food Mart confronted Corey Stingley, the 16-year-old handed over his backpack. Inside were six hidden bottles of Smirnoff Ice, worth $12, and the clerk began pulling them out one by one.

• Stingley watched, then pivoted and quickly moved toward the door, empty-handed. But there would be no escape for the unarmed teen in the light blue hoodie.

• In 2022, there were more than 23,000 eviction cases — civil lawsuits filed by property owners to remove an occupant of their property. The majority of the cases are for nonpayment. Through April 2023, there have been about 7,300 such cases. Pre-pandemic eviction cases averaged more than 29,000 a year in Detroit, according to a report for the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions group.

• Around 13 million tea estate workers suffer “endemic human rights abuses” in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, and 43 other countries, according to the UK-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).

• Yet long after the documents are issued, the fingerprints, photos and family information collected from applicants will remain in Russia’s possession, in a boon for its security apparatus.

• The information also serves as a ready-made list for drafting men into Russia’s war effort, which experts say has already happened.

• After more than three years, Title 42—a policy that allowed immigration officers to return migrants they encountered at the border with Mexico without a hearing, thereby shutting hundreds of thousands out of the asylum system—has ended. The Biden administration didn’t rescind Title 42 because of a desire to rebuild the asylum process, but because it had to. The statute authorizing the border closure is part of the Public Health Service Act. Once Biden lifted the Covid-related emergency declarations, the pretext for Title 42 disappeared. Instead of a return to the pre-pandemic status quo, however, the end of Title 42 has ushered in a labyrinthine set of new regulations, many of which are right out of Trump’s playbook.

• On a quiet Friday afternoon in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., a handful of current and former Starbucks workers, donning their signature green aprons, lined up in front of a microphone across the street from one of the city’s two remaining Starbucks locations. One by one, they testified before a few dozen local protesters about how their jobs had become unbearable in recent months: surveillance, intimidation, and arbitrary discipline by managers—all to punish them for forming a union. And on May 26, Starbucks would be shutting down their union altogether by shutting down the cafés that employed them.

• Chloe Scheibe entered Maryland’s prison system in 2016. Unsure where to house a transgender woman in a male prison, officials placed her in administrative segregation. Administrative segregation, or ad seg, as it’s often called, is not intended for punishment, but nonetheless keeps a person in isolation. This story was published with Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group that investigates, documents, and disseminates information on the use of solitary confinement in US prisons and jails.

• A grandmother who died after being tasered by police is being remembered as a beloved matriarch and tireless volunteer. Clare Nowland, 95, died in Cooma Hospital on Wednesday night, with 33 year-old Senior Constable Kristian White facing criminal charges that could be upgraded due to her death.

• The organisers said there was not enough time for anyone to use drugs prior to the arrival of police.

• The Pirkanmaa District Court on Thursday convicted a man of sex crimes and related offences involving over 100 victims, most of them minors.

• Government formation talks are in their fourth week.

• The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday that US immigration law regarding the reentry of migrants who have already once been removed from the US is “facially neutral as to race,” overturning a lower court’s decision.

• Hong Kong’s flagship carrier Cathay Pacific has apologised and suspended some cabin crew members from flying, after they were accused of discriminating against non-English-speaking passengers.

• Hong Kong’s flagship carrier Cathay Pacific has fired three cabin crew members accused of discriminating against non-English speakers on a flight departing from the mainland Chinese city of Chengdu.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Meta’s $1.2 billion fine by the EU signals the bloc’s intention to tighten legal controls in cyberspace, contrasting with Washington’s voluntary approach.

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.

• Despite industry best efforts to prevent it, the “right to repair” movement shows no sign of slowing down.

• The era of disposable tech is coming to an end.

*

• Minnesota has just surpassed New York as the best place to fix your stuff.  The Minnesota Fair Repair Act is now law – adding access to repair materials to just about everything high-tech used in education, business, government, and industry to the consumer electronics law passed only a few months ago in New York.  This, paired with the new law in Colorado covering Agricultural equipment, has dramatically altered the repair landscape to take effect in the next 6 to 12 months.  More legislation in more states is still advancing.  “Fair Repair” is on a roll.

Monopolies

Patents

• As part of the efforts of Unified Edge, Korok Ray, an Associate Professor at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University and Research Director of the Mays Innovation Research Center, published a paper on the economic impact of codifying “Fintiv”. Read the abstract below and follow the link to download the paper.

• In mid-May, the Munich Regional Court ruled against US company NanoString Technologies and its German subsidiary for indirect infringement of the German part of European patent EP 2 794 928 B1 (case IDs: 7 O 2693/22 and 7 O 5812/22).

• Unified added two new PATROLL contests, with a $2,000 cash prize for each, seeking prior art on the list below. The patents are owned by Freedom Patents LLC, an NPE. The contests will end on July 31, 2023.

• In view of the problems with opting out patents from the Unified Patent Court’s jurisdiction, the court will temporarily accept opt out applications in hard copy in case the CMS ceases to function.

• The European Patent Convention (EPC) is used daily by many patent practitioners and is essential reading for the thousands of candidates taking the European Qualifying Examination (EQE) each year.

• Last week, Representative David Schweikert (AZ-01) and Don Beyer (VA-08) introduced the Advancing America’s Interests Act (AAIA). If passed, this legislation would help prevent the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) from being manipulated by patent trolls, protecting both American consumers and U.S. industries.

• (This post is part of a series by the Diversity Pilots Initiative, which advances inclusive innovation through rigorous research. The first blog in the series is here and resources from the first conference of the initiative are available here.)

• Hello! I’m Piers Blewett, a principal at Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner (SLW), and a patent attorney who started in a place once known as Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. My personal journey exposed me to the nuances of systemic change and the gap that can often exist when it comes to universal access to opportunities.

• The Devil’s Dictionary of Patent Law and Beyond by Martin Abramson fills a long-standing humor gap in patent law. It contains diabolical definitions, hilarious cartoons, and amusing anecdotes on patent law and the general law environment in which it exists. Where there’s satire, clarity follows, and as in the original Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, the droll definitions in the present book have the “ring of truth.” The author has more than 40 years of IP experience and a deep knowledge of its history, so along with the patent law are showcased the little known gems of patent lore.

• Also a great gift for those fortunate enough to have a patent attorney in your life.

• The case involving Medtronic and Teleflex centered on five patents related to a coaxial guide catheter used in interventional cardiology procedures. These patents, US Patents 8,048,032, RE45,380, RE45,776, RE45,760, and RE47,379, cover inventions devised to offer an “enhanced backup support” in contrast to using a guide catheter individually.

Trademarks

• The Board reversed a Section 2(e)(5) functionality refusal of a product configuration mark (shown below) comprising the side of a rocking chair (not including the high back and curved base). Applying the Morton-Norwich factors, and giving some weight to applicant’s design patents, the Board concluded that the USPTO failed to make a prima facie case of functionality. However, Applicant JBL failed to prove that this design has acquired distinctiveness, and so registration was refused on the Principal Register, but the Board accepted JBL’s alternative amendment to the Supplemental Register. In re JBL International, Inc., Serial No. 88941388 (May 22, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Thomas W. Wellington).

Copyrights

• This year, we kicked off a public consultation with CC community members and a wide range of stakeholders. We believe AI can work in the public interest, and want to be part of the solution in navigating to that reality.

• The immediate impact of this victory for transparency is the public will be able to visit the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards & Training (POST) website to inspect 19 previously unseen training outlines. These documents cover a variety of sensitive issues, such as police shootings and internal affairs investigations, and were developed by the California Peace Officers Association, which represents more than 23,000 law enforcement officers across the state. The longer term impact is that law enforcement agencies across California will no longer be able to rely on POST’s practices to justify their own decisions to withhold their training records on copyright grounds.

• The story behind this case dates back to 2018, when California State Senator Steven Bradford introduced legislation that recognized a key ingredient to police accountability is allowing the public to scrutinize what kind of training officers receive when it comes to practices such as police stops, use-of-force, and surveillance. SB 978 requires all local law enforcement agencies and POST to publish their policy manuals and training materials on their websites, at least to the extent that those records would be releasable under the California Public Records Act. With EFF’s support, the California legislature passed the bill and it went into effect in January 2020.

• However, when EFF went to the POST’s OpenData hub to review training materials for issues such as police shootings, automated license plate readers, and face recognition, we found that the documents were completely redacted. Even the training on California public records requests was ironically redacted. All that was left was a single line: “The course presenter has claimed copyright for the expanded course outline.” While courses developed by California agencies are by default in the public domain, third-party private entities can also seek POST certification for their training materials.

• In his concurrence, Justice Gorsuch called the Supreme Court’s decision last week in the Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case a narrow one of statutory interpretation, ostensibly doing nothing more than interpreting the breadth of the first fair use factor (“the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes”) the copyright statute lists for determining whether the use of an existing copyrighted work is fair.

• This week, the Dutch fiscal police took down one of Europe’s largest illegal IPTV operations, which acted as a supplier to many smaller services. The action centered around a local data center where 1,200 servers were pulled offline. Many of these servers were allegedly used to serve IPTV, but the action also took down several legitimate websites operated by entirely innocent companies.

• In response to rising levels of online infringement, major rightsholders have promoted the use of so-called ‘trusted flaggers’. These entities would have permission to interface with online services and directly flag content to be rendered unavailable, minus the usual friction. In its 2023 IP Index report, the US Chamber of Commerce suggests that the introduction of ‘trusted flaggers’ in the EU may actually represent a new barrier to effective enforcement.

• As I write this, Casey Neistat has 12.5 million subscribers on YouTube, over 3.1 billion total views, and 1,000 videos uploaded. Pretty much everyone in the YouTube world knows his name. He hustled like crazy, posted a ton of content, and grew his now-huge following.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.