● 05.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/05/2023: Plans Made for GNU’s 40th Anniversary

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Activity Monitor displays a variety of resources in use on a system in real time. These include processes, disk activity, memory usage, and more to provide a sort of dashboard.

• Activity Monitor is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

• Debian is a Linux operating system that has been around for a long time and is known for its universal compatibility. It is well known for long-term support, stability, security, and critical business use cases.

• The Debian stable version is one of the sought-after Linux distributions because its support spans multiple years. This helps if you are running older versions of applications or packages which are critical.

• We review ten Debian-based Linux distributions, which you may want to try out for all use cases.

• Download managers on Windows are one of the most needed tools that are missed by every newcomer to the Linux world, programs like Internet Download Manager Download Accelerator Plus and Free Download Manager are very wanted, but these tools are not available under Linux or Unix-like systems.

• No, to worry, you will find several alternate download managers for Linux that can help you manage and accelerate your file downloads on a Linux desktop.

Instructionals/Technical

• The talk took place on May 25th 2023 at k-space, a hackerspace in Tallinn, Estonia.

• The fake page is meant to mimic the stress of filling out a complex multi-step form while working against the clock. As the user hits a toggle-tip to get more information on a field, a dialog appears telling the user they will be logged out unless they hit the button.

• We started our Prometheus and Grafana based metrics setup in late 2018. Although many of our Grafana dashboards weren’t created immediately, the majority of them were probably built by the middle of 2019. Based on release history, we probably started somewhere around v6.4.0 and had many dashboards done by the time v7.0.0 came out. We’re currently frozen on v8.3.11, having tried v8.4.0 and rejected it and all subsequent versions. The reason for this is fairly straightforward; from v8.4.0 onward, Grafana broke too many of our dashboards. The breakage didn’t start in 8.4, to be honest. For us, things started to degrade from the change between the 7.x series and 8.0, but 8.4 was the breaking point where too much was off or not working.

• I’ve been playing with these fancy new view transitions and my experience thus far is that they work ok on localhost, but as soon as I push code to a preview branch on a remote server, the image loads between transitions are janky because of image loading.

• The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a free tool provided by the Amazon web service, a cloud computing platform. It allows users to interact and manage the various AWS services directly from their system’s command terminal. Well, if you are a Ubuntu Linux user then can install AWS CLI directly using the APT package manager, however, for other distro users who want to get the latest AWSL CLI version but using the PIP, this article is for them. PIP is a popular package manager developed to install libraries and other dependencies for a Python project.

• The convert command from the ImageMagick suite of tools provides ways to make all sorts of changes to image files. Among these is an option to change the resolution of images. The syntax is simple, and the command runs extremely quickly. It can also convert a image from one format to another (e.g., jpg to png) as well as blur, crop, despeckle, dither, flip and join images and more.

• Although the commands and scripts in this post mostly focus on jpg files, the convert command also works with a large variety of other image files, including png, bmp, svg, tiff, gif and such.

• Have you ever found yourself frantically searching for an important file, only to realize that you wasted many hours trying to look in every directory but the file is nowhere to be found? Well, this is a common problem that most Linux users face, especially new users with a huge number of disorganized files and directories. In this article, we explain how you can search for files and directories in different ways using the find command in Linux.

Games

• Get your 4x Warhammer strategy gaming on, as Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War from Proxy Studios and Slitherine Ltd is free to claim and keep until June 1st. It has Native Linux support and is Steam Deck Playable.

• Need a free game? You’re in luck as Hue from Fiddlesticks Games and Curve Games is currently free to keep on Steam until June 8th. Released originally back in 2016, it has a Native Linux version available and is rated Steam Deck Playable.

• Originally released in 2002 and then later as Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition from Beamdog, many years on it’s still getting major upgrades including a new Toon shader and loading speed improvements.

• Back in March the plan was announced for the Wii and GameCube emulator Dolphin to release on Steam, along with some useful Steam features but now that seems unlikely to happen.

• After a messy situation with their publisher, Soda Den has now split from Crytivo and Roots of Pacha has returned for sale on Steam.

• Today there’s a new build of Proton Experimental available for Steam Deck and desktop Linux gamers, with it Valve has given us a bunch of bug fixes. With there now being many different Proton versions it can get a bit confusing, so head on over to my beginner’s guide on Steam Play and Proton for more info.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This week probably the biggest news is that in Plasma 6, the Night Color feature will work as expected on Wayland when you’re using an NVIDIA GPU! Because NVIDIA’s drivers don’t support the necessary Gamma LUT features to make it work in an optimal way as on Intel and AMD GPUs, we had to use a slightly different approach that isn’t quite as efficient. But hopefully that’s better than not having the feature work at all, and if you care about the increased resource usage, you’re welcome to not use the feature.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• CIQ, the company supporting enterprises with the next generation of software infrastructure built atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution, announced today that it has certified its suite of software products on recently released Rocky Linux 9.2 and Rocky Linux 8.8. Certified CIQ products include Warewulf and Apptainer as well as the newly launched Fuzzball and images available in the Mountain repo as a service offering. CIQ also announced enterprise grade professional support on both of the new versions of Rocky Linux.

• [...]

• Additionally, CIQ is announcing long term support (LTS) for Rocky 9.2 which will include support for the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). The addition of LTS brings support to CIQ customers for Rocky Linux 9.2 for an additional 18 months, providing support beyond the community edition for customers who need assurance that a trusted partner will be there to support them for a guaranteed time frame.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• After the success of last year’s Ubuntu Summit in Prague, the organizers at Canonical set a goal to make this year’s Summit bigger, better and bolder. With this goal in mind, we are all extremely excited to announce that this year’s Ubuntu Summit will be hosted in the beautiful city of Riga, Latvia!

• The Ubuntu Summit is more than just a conference; it’s an annual celebration of the most compelling and groundbreaking innovations from the open source ecosystem. Produced and hosted by Canonical, the publishers of Ubuntu, the Summit offers a unique opportunity to experience first-hand the cutting-edge innovations and pioneering technologies that are transforming our world.

• In accordance with the information shared in our latest blog post, it is important to note that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver,’ is approaching the end of its standard five-year maintenance period on 31 May 2023. Consequently, unless you hold an Ubuntu Pro subscription, updates for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS servers will cease to be available.

• By subscribing to Ubuntu Pro, you can ensure that your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS deployment remains fully supported until 2028. This extended support period provides you with continued assistance and maintenance for your workloads running on Google Compute Engine (GCE).

Devices/Embedded

• The ZimaBoard 832 Single Board Server is a compact and powerful solution that caters to a wide range of server applications. In this comprehensive review, we will explore its design, features, and capabilities, highlighting its potential as a versatile and efficient server platform.

• [...]

• Once the hardware setup is complete, the next step is to install the operating system (OS) on the ZimaBoard 832. The board supports a range of OS options, including Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora.

• The Debix Model B is a single board computer integrating the NXP i.MX8M Plus processor with 2.3 TOPs NPU and with extended operating temperature range. The new embedded device comes in a Raspberry Pi form-factor and offers similar peripherals.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Like the visualizer of the equalizer on an old stereo receiver, this displays the levels of several frequency bands within the audio it monitors. In this case, that audio is the sound around the device collected by an onboard microphone. It shows the levels for seven different frequencies: 63Hz, 160Hz, 400Hz, 1kHz, 2.5kHz, 6.3kHz, and 16kHz. Most devices like this use LEDs to show the levels, but this shows them on a OLED screen instead and that allows for more flexibility.

• This is how the idea for ESP32-SBC-FabGL was born. I wanted to create a board that could be used as a graphics/sound/IO co-processor for other retro computers based on different processors.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• A rather nice feature for Linux and BSD users is that now you can use the middle-click function, which pastes whatever text is currently selected, to create a new tab. Google Chrome has done this for years, so it’s welcome to see it come to Firefox. It works for URLs and for plain text — if what you’re pasting doesn’t look like a web address, then Firefox will search for it.

Education

• Join us to celebrate the GNU Project’s freedom-spreading accomplishments with presentations in English about various GNU packages, hacking on free software and making new releases! The 40th anniversary hacker meeting is open to all who want to celebrate, work on, or learn about free software. We are putting together an appropriate schedule, if you have something to contribute, please contact <gnu40@gnu.org> with an informal proposal. We hope to put together a diverse selection of presentations, discussions and announcements all day long.

Programming/Development

• A Bloom filter is a standard data structure in computer science to approximate a set. Basically, you start with a large array of bits, all initialized at zero. Each time you want to add an element to the set, you compute k different hash values and you set the bits at the k corresponding locations to one.

• I’ve recently added JSON CEE structured logging to reSIProcate and submitted pull requests for identical functionality in some related projects.

• The use case for structured logging is quite compelling in the RTC world, which includes WebRTC, SIP and XMPP software. In the early days, we would do everything with a single process like Asterisk and we would only have to deal with a single log file. Today, especially with WebRTC, we often have multiple processes involved in a single phone call or video meeting. When something goes wrong, we need to be able to look at the logs from all of these processes. Structured logging provides a convenient way to combine and analyze the log files.

• This article will delve into the challenges and risks associated with CI/CD security, best practices for securing the pipeline, code, and infrastructure, and an overview of the tools and technologies available to organizations to ensure their CI/CD process is secure. By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of the importance of CI/CD security, and the steps necessary to mitigate the risks associated with it.

Python

• If you are interested in working with relational databases in Python, then you need to know what SQLAlchemy is. It is a Python library that provides a high-level, SQL abstraction layer for relational databases. With SQLAlchemy, you can interact with databases using Python objects and methods, rather than writing raw SQL queries. In this tutorial, you will learn how to get started with SQLAlchemy and also learn how to interact with and query an SQLite relational database with the SQLAlchemy library.

Leftovers

• It is very rare for an athlete to become an Olympic champion without first having won an individual gold medal at a European or World Championship, or even at a Hungarian championship. Valéria Gyenge won a gold medal at the most successful Olympics for Hungary, the 1952 Helsinki Olympics without having been a national champion before. Her victory was a surprise even though she had won the 400 freestyle at a smaller event a month before the Olympics, having set a good time. The Hungarian swimmers were at their best then, and the team was by far the strongest ever, with four of the five gold medals going to Hungary.

• Tina Turner, a native of Tennessee who lived much of her life in Europe, only rarely waded into American politics. The “Queen of Rock and Roll,” who died Wednesday at age 83, quietly supported Barack Obama for the presidency in 2008, with the encouragement of Oprah Winfrey and some inspiration from Caroline Kennedy. But Turner’s one high-profile political performance came decades earlier, as part of a remarkable show of women’s solidarity with the anti–Vietnam War campaign of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern.

Education

• Erdoğan used the term “entel-dantel” to name these people who were included in the process to strengthen public support for it..

• While “entel” is short for “entellektüel,” (intellectual in Turkish), dantel means lace. The term is used to mock those who are either well-educated or who write or express their opinions in different ways, especially on political or social issues and problems.

• As attacks on the teaching of Black history escalate in Florida and other states, we hear from The New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on “The 1619 Project.” She spoke on May 19 at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, which is housed in the former Audubon Ballroom in New York where Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, and talked about the impact Malcolm X’s writing had on her life, as well as the importance of teaching the full history of the United States. “What we commonly call history is actually memory, and that memory in the United States has been shaped too often by white men in power who want us to remember the history of a country that never existed,” she said.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The new rules will go into effect at the end of this month, affecting its operations in Finland and six other countries in which it operates.

• The Swedish company based its decision on data security concerns related to the social media platform that have been raised by authorities, according to the firm’s quality and security management chief in Finland, Kalle Kaasalainen.

• The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, says social media poses a “profound risk of harm” to young people. Why do some in the tech industry disagree?

• It’s been a while since I’ve written about a basic science paper misinterpreted and/or misused by antivaxxers. It’s also been a while since I’ve encountered an antivax influencer or blogger with whom I was unfamiliar when first seeing their blather. So when I came across a post by someone going by the ‘nym of Joomi entitled, New study shows how little we know about how mRNA vaccines “work”—along with a blurb claiming that “Vastly different levels of spike protein depending on cell type”—I knew I had my topic for today. I have no idea who “Joomi” is other than this description from the Substack Let’s Be Clear:

Proprietary

• On the blog of tinyapps.org (first spotted by The Register), which provides micro-scale, minimalist utilities for constrained Windows installations, a blog post appropriately titled “Windows XP Activation: GAME OVER” runs down the semi-recent history of folks looking to activate Windows XP more than 20 years after it debuted, nine years after its end of life, and, crucially, some years after Microsoft turned off its online activation servers (or maybe they just swapped certificates).

Windows TCO

• In a recent attack, the Buhti operators used a minimally modified version of the LockBit 3.0 (LockBit Black) ransomware to target Windows machines. The builder for LockBit leaked online in September 2022.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (sniproxy), Fedora (c-ares), Oracle (apr-util, curl, emacs, git, go-toolset and golang, go-toolset:ol8, gssntlmssp, libreswan, mysql:8.0, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (go-toolset-1.19 and go-toolset-1.19-golang and go-toolset:rhel8), Slackware (ntfs), SUSE (rmt-server), and Ubuntu (linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4 and python-django).

• Northern Territory Health says the onus is on individuals to check if the privacy of their medical records has been breached by the government.

• According to Northern Territory Health’s website, the Australian government agency manages the Northern Territory public health system, operating across five service delivery regions, six hospitals, 74 health clinics, and seven corporate offices.

• An undated message on the Tennessee Orthopaedic Clinics website states that TOC recently responded to a security incident. They don’t say when they discovered it, but their investigation determined “that an unauthorized party accessed some of our systems between March 20, 2023, and March 24, 2023, and may have accessed or acquired certain files.”

• On April 28, DataBreaches reported that two different ransomware groups claimed to have attacked Albany ENT & Allergy Services, P.C. in Albany, New York. This week, Albany ENT & Allergy Services notified regulators and 224,486 affected employees and patients about a breach. Their notification is stunning, however, for its lack of certain details.

• Yesterday, New York’s Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) announced another enforcement action under the state’s Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies, 23 N.Y.C.R.R. Part 500 (“Reg 500”). According to the press release, OneMain Financial Group LLC (“OneMain”) will pay a $4.25 million penalty to New York State for alleged violations of Reg 500.

• Google makes ACME API available to all Google Cloud users to allow them to automatically acquire and renew TLS certificates for free.

• The number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.

• A Mirai botnet has been exploiting a recently patched vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-28771 to hack many Zyxel firewalls.

• Production-grade AI initiatives are not an easy task. Organisations need to go through different stages to prepare data, develop the model and deploy it. Reproducibility and portability are essential for such projects. This is where machine learning operations (MLOps) can help.

Privacy/Surveillance

• But now that the code repository has disclosed receiving three subpoenas for data on five users earlier this year, the Python community package registry wants developers to understand that it’s working to minimize the user data that it stores.

• For a few years now, the EU Commission has been pushing legislation that would undermine, if not actually criminalize, end-to-end encryption. It’s “for the children,” as they say. To prevent the distribution of CSAM (child sexual abuse material), the EU wants to mandate client-side scanning by tech companies — a move that would necessitate the removal of one end of the end-to-end encryption these companies offer to their users.

Defence/Aggression

• In a vicious five-day assault, Israeli occupying forces killed 33 Palestinians in Gaza.

• The 1958 voyage of the Golden Rule offers important strategic lessons on how to confront an overwhelming evil and win.

• Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. It is the longest sentence handed down so far to any participant in the January 6 insurrection, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the halls of Congress to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. One of Rhodes’s associates, Kelly Meggs, who led the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison. A jury had convicted both men of seditious conspiracy in November. The sentences are a “substantial win for democracy,” says Kristen Doerer, who reports on right-wing extremism and followed the case.

• Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you’ve got plenty of company, including US national security and counterterrorism officials. And we’re worried, too—worried enough, in fact, to feel that it’s time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has increasingly been enforced through violent means. While there are striking parallels between both countries, India appears to have ventured further down the road of far-right violence. Its experience could potentially offer Americans some valuable, if grim, lessons.

War in Ukraine

• The Pentagon Leaks have shown that, from the U.S. military’s perspective, the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine has reached a stalemate. Neither side can win in the foreseeable future, according to the assessment.

• During an official visit to Vietnam on Friday, Russian Security Council Deputy Chair (and former President) Dmitry Medvedev told journalists that the “military conflict” in Ukraine will be “long-lasting.”

• A Russian missile has struck a medical center in Dnipro, killing at least one person and injuring at least 15, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

• Over the last 14 months, Russia has abducted thousands of Ukrainian civilians, from volunteers and journalists to former soldiers and officials, and locked them in Russian prisons. The victims don’t have POW status, they’re not allowed to see their lawyers or loved ones, and most of them are impossible to communicate with from outside. Those who have managed to get out often still don’t know the official reasons for their incarceration or their release. In Simferopol alone, more than 100 civilian hostages (as they’re called by human rights advocates) are currently in captivity. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke with Ukrainians who have been released from the facilities, as well as with their relatives and lawyers, to find out how this clandestine prison system works.

• On Friday, May 26, a convoy with technical aid was sent by the Latvian State Police to soldiers in Ukraine. In cooperation with the Ministry of Defense and the Entrepreneurs for Peace Fund, a 12-vehicle convoy has been launched today, but there are more cars in the aid package, as well as unmanned aircraft, generators, mobile power stations and uniforms.

• The Russian intelligence ship Ivan Khurs, part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, has returned to Sevastopol. Video footage of the ship circulated on Telegram, and Russian news outlet Kommersant confirmed that the Ivan Khurs had returned to Sevastopol Bay.

• In her Independence Day address, Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili criticized the government for its policies with regard to Russia and Russian immigrants.

• The Prime Ministers of the Baltic states gathered in Tallinn, Estonia May 26 to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

• The revival of Ukraine’s economy will also be an opportunity for Latvian entrepreneurs, who should help Ukrainians to break into the European market, Aigars Rostovskis, president of the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said in an interview to Latvian Television on May 26.

• In the early days of the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was open to negotiating a peace. The United States was not.

• Russia’s continued isolation from the G7, and the expansion of sanctions against Moscow, have made the severe consequences of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine clearer than ever.

• A hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro was hit Friday morning in a Russian missile attack, regional governor Serhiy Lysak said. This comes as Russia held separate talks with China and Brazil on the war in Ukraine. Follow our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Russian forces have for months been concentrating their offensive on eastern Ukraine with the aim of capturing the Donetsk region. Avdiivka, a town located on the outskirts of the occupied regional capital, is one of the most dangerous places on the front line. It has resisted Russian assaults for nearly a year of continuous siege, and Russian aircraft and missiles have been ravaging what remains of the town for weeks. FRANCE 24 reporters Catherine Norris Trent, Johan Bodin and Dymitro Kovalchuk went in to speak with the people there.

• The European Union told China’s envoy on Thursday that it expects Beijing to help push Russia to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine and withdraw from the country. Senior EU foreign policy official Enrique Mora met China’s Li Hui in Brussels on the latest leg of Beijing’s special representative for Eurasian affairs’ European tour. Li has received coordinated […]

• The Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov says that plans for transporting Andrey Rublev’s “Holy Trinity” icon from the Tretyakov Gallery to Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral have been finalized and approved by stakeholders.

• Lithuania’s next military assistance package for Ukraine will include drone jamming equipment, ammunition, military rations and other support, Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas has said.

• Russian arms producer Kalashnikov, maker of the world’s most widely used assault rifle, said on May 26 it was launching a new division for the production of kamikaze drones — one of the key weapons used in the Ukraine war.

• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned President Vladimir Putin against creating a frozen conflict along the borders of the Ukrainian territories seized by Russia, in remarks published on May 26 in the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to visit to Sweden, Norway, and Finland from May 29 to June 2 as Washington seeks to deepen transatlantic cooperation amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

• The European Union’s former high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton, has defended the bloc’s initial response after Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, but acknowledged “we did not know then what we know now.”

• Dozens of people protested the screening at a Russian cultural center in Sofia on May 25 of a Russian film casting the capture last year of the Azovstal steel plant in southern Ukraine as a “liberation” from “neo-Nazis.”

• “We have not placed limitations on Ukraine being able to strike on its territory within its internationally recognized borders,” U.S. Security Adviser said.

• Ukraine wants long-range missiles in order to regain Crimea and end the war. Why won’t Washington supply them?

• Most reception system clients have come to Finland from Ukraine, according to the Finnish Immigration Service.

• A Russian missile killed at least two people and wounded dozens more at a hospital, while apparent Ukrainian strikes hit occupied cities in the south.

• Some fighters who led an incursion into Russian territory this week have neo-Nazi ties. “I worry that something like this could backfire on Ukraine because these are not ambiguous people.”

• The leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, one of the two insurgent groups responsible for an armed incursion into Russia this week, is a far-right extremist, German officials and humanitarian groups say.

• West Germany joined NATO in 1955, choosing security over immediate territorial integrity. Some suggest the same path could be the best guarantee for Ukraine.

• Support for the war in Ukraine remains high but could potentially turn if concern over the high numbers of casualties persists, according to FilterLabs AI.

• The Durham report is a “black eye” for the FBI, leading Democrats, and the media, says Lake.

• We preview what is next in the war in Ukraine.

• The recent furore over accusations by the US ambassador to South Africa, Reuben Brigety, that South Africa was supplying arms to Russia despite its declared policy of non-alignment, has sparked a debate on whether the country’s arms control is lax, non-compliant and lacks oversight.

• Russia moved ahead on Thursday with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, whose leader said the warheads were already on the move, in the Kremlin’s first deployment of such bombs outside Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

• The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language (VLKK) has rejected a proposal by several MPs to stop calling the Russian exclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland ‘Kaliningrad’.

• The Lithuanian capital is hosting the 9th Vilnius Russia Forum on Friday.

• The former prime minister also told Asia not to take sides in U.S.-China disputes

• Kazakh presidential spokesman Ruslan Zheldybai told journalists on May 26 that the energy-rich Central Asian country has no plans to join any union states, adding that the integration process within the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union should only be in the sphere of economics.

• And some news about that Kremlin drone strike

• The bank accounts of the Finnish Embassy in Moscow and the Consulate General’s office in St Petersburg were frozen at the end of last month.

• Already jailed for two months on charges for which Russia has provided no evidence, Mr. Gershkovich has been ordered to remain in prison for three more.

• Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti, published a message from an “informed source in Moscow,” warning The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) of “consequences” for Evan Gershkovich, a WSJ journalist who was arrested in Russia in March 2023.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Elon Musk has insisted that “transparency is the key to trust” in rebuilding Twitter in his image. He says it all the time. But, of course, under Musk, Twitter has been significantly less transparent, choosing to skip its transparency reports, and generally close itself off. But one of the key methods for transparency on Twitter has long been its willingness to allow academic researchers to access its API and do research around Twitter and its users.

Environment

• Ecocide is one of the most disastrous acts perpetrated by the AKP government during its 22-year rule. The AKP government has deliberately plundered the nature of Kurdistan, not only through construction, but also through dams and power plants.

Wildlife/Nature

• If you had a chance to save a species from extinction, would you take it? I would—and I am.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Republicans see this as momentum to push other state bans. Lawmakers of both major parties are pushing legislation that “would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of a ‘country of concern,’ like China and Russia,” a move that would ban TikTok in the US (USA Today, 12/13/22). Such a sweeping ban is popular among voters, especially among Republicans (Pew, 3/31/23; Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23).

• Improbably – is there enough irony left in the world to contain it? – “spineless chicken man,” “sniveling li’l bitch,” liar, coward and “coifed, soft, seditionist” Josh Hawley, famed for his “wee scamper of fear” from Jan. 6 rioters he abetted, has written a book about…manhood. Predictably, it’s been shredded by the former Marine and Democrat seeking his Senate seat and most of the known world for banalities like, “Every man is called to be a warrior.” Most cogent review: “As if.”

• EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn says there is no specific deadline for the ongoing procedure against Hungary, Euronews reports. It is also possible that the closure of the case will slip into the next Commission’s tasks in 2024. “There are still major issues to be resolved, so we are nowhere near the finish line,” said Hahn during a hearing at the European Parliament. The Austrian politician called the setting up the Integrity Authority a step forward but said the Hungarian government had not yet met the conditions.

• He also denied that the Commission was blocking the deal. The Commission is interested in a solution that serves the interests of Hungarian citizens, he added. Hahn also said that since the rule of law procedure has no time limit, the process could be completed after the next European Commission is in place. He suggested that it might be worth changing the rules of the procedure in the future.

• Nézőpont Institute, the government-affiliated think tank, isn’t expecting any major changes at the 2024 EP elections. Speaking at an event organised by the institute on Thursday at the headquarters of Polgári Magyarországért Alapítvány (Foundation for a Civic Hungary, the party foundation of Fidesz) on Stefánia út, Ágoston Sámuel Mráz said that according to their latest analysis, Fidesz could win as big a victory on 9 June 2024 as it did at the last EP elections or five years before.

• Joe Biden’s reelection campaign isn’t going well. Since announcing his bid for a second term in April, the president’s poll numbers have remained dismal. RealClearPolitics’ average of recent polls gives him a 41.4 percent approval rating among likely voters, while 53.8 percent disapprove. And it won’t necessarily get better when Biden is in a two-person race against a MAGA Republican. The overall RCP average of recent polls currently has Biden trailing former president Donald Trump by 1.4 points, while a mid-May Harvard CAPS/Harris survey put the incumbent down by seven points against the indicted Republican. An early May ABC News/Washington Post poll had Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading Biden by five points.1

• It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the handful of indefatigable optimists who took a Susan Collins–like posture on the prospects that Fox News might have learned some newsgathering lessons from its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion News over the election lies it aired in the wake of the 2020 presidential balloting. Yes, Fox cut ties with white nationalist hate merchant Tucker Carlson, purportedly over a private text communication in which he remained a bit too true to the bit even for the jaded and Caligulan Fox executive class. But there’s been no broader institutional reckoning with the network’s flagrant mendacity—indeed, without missing a beat, the network that has aired endless variations on the War on Christmas and a steady stream of James O’Keefe–grade election-season agitprop has resumed fabulizing about virtually every facet of public life in the United States.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Twitter has withdrawn from a voluntary European Union agreement to stamp out disinformation online, a top EU official said late Friday.

• “Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain,” EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote on Twitter.

• A majority of GB News hosts attacked climate action on the channel in 2022, while one in three spread climate science denial, a DeSmog analysis can reveal.

• Opponents of green policies have seized on the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to denounce the UK’s net zero target and push for new, environmentally-damaging fossil fuel extraction.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Tiananmen Mothers, a group representing victims of the June 4 massacre that ended weeks of pro-democracy protests in 1989 has called on Chinese leader Xi Jinping to take responsibility for the actions of the government ahead of this year’s 34th anniversary.

• Technically we’ve posted this analysis before, when we posted our entire amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in the Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case, along with a summary of what we had written in it. But that summary also included other arguments, and a very condensed version of this one, that the First Amendment requires copyright law to be interpreted in a way that doesn’t harm future free expression. It is an idea important enough to be worth more attention – especially given that it seems the Supreme Court itself overlooked it.

• The first hearing in a new criminal case against the imprisoned Russian politician Alexey Navalny has been scheduled for May 31, according to Navalny’s social media accounts.

• The St. Petersburg authorities have opened a misdemeanor case against journalist Valery Nechay, the former head of the radio station Echo of St. Petersburg, for participating in the activities of an “undesirable” organization, according to the human rights organization First Department.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A Burmese journalist was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in prison with hard labor for violating Myanmar’s counterterrorism law, in addition to a three-year sentence she received in December 2022 for defamation, an attorney working on her case said.

• Journalist Oktay Candemir covered the rape case in Bêgirî (Muradiye) district last January. He described how the “girl, studying at Muradiye Nizamettin Aktaş High School, was made to use drugs since 2019, and then was systematically sexually assaulted. She was suspended from school on the grounds that she was a drug addict. The people who took pictures of Y., including police and officers, raped Y. for years, using the pictures to blackmail her.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• After the Taliban seized control of Kabul in August 2021, the human rights situation of women and girls in Afghanistan deteriorated severely, despite the Taliban’s initial promise to respect women’s and girls’ rights. The Taliban have been increasingly introducing new restrictions with the apparent aim of completely erasing women’s and girls’ presence from public arenas. Taliban policies have been further oppressing women and girls in almost all aspects of their lives. The widespread and systematic subjugation of girls and women in Afghanistan is a flagrant violation of their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

• Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Thursday vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed a minimum wage and other protections for Uber and Lyft drivers.

• RightsCon provides an opportunity for human rights experts, technologists, government representatives, and activists to discuss pressing human rights challenges and their potential solutions.

• We’re excited that many EFFers are heading to Costa Rica and will be actively participating in this year’s event – both online and in person. Several members will be leading sessions and contributing as speakers, as well as being available for networking.

• Spanish-speaking dairy farm workers in Wisconsin, many of them undocumented immigrants, are not regular readers of our website. Most have never heard of ProPublica, let alone formed a trusting relationship with us. Some have low levels of literacy and poor internet connections because the farms they work on are remote. Connecting with them, both to conduct our reporting and to share our findings, is a challenge.

• For months, Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel have been reporting on conditions at these farms. But one of their earliest missions was crucial. They needed to find out how the workers got their news and make sure ProPublica’s reporting reached them and their communities. The reporters’ process underscores one of our central beliefs at ProPublica: Publishing a story about injustice isn’t enough if we don’t reach the people who are directly affected.

• A bill signed into law this week in Colorado prohibits family courts from ordering children to participate in reunification programs that isolate them from a trusted caregiver. Many of these programs purport to offer treatments for parental alienation, a psychological disorder that has been rejected by mainstream scientific circles but continues to influence custody decisions.

• The new law, which takes effect immediately, also requires experts who advise the court on custody cases to have training in working with victims of domestic violence and child abuse.

• May 19 marked what would have been the 98th birthday of Malcolm X. The director Spike Lee gave the keynote address at an event marking the day at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, which is housed in the former Audubon Ballroom in New York where Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Lee discussed the challenges of making his acclaimed 1992 biopic of Malcolm starring Denzel Washington, and how he overcame funding shortfalls and studio indifference to get the film made. “We knew that we had to keep going,” Lee said.

• We look at the largely forgotten 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, when police in Chicago shot at and gassed a peaceful gathering of striking steelworkers and their supporters, killing 10 people, most of them shot in the back. It was a time like today, when unions were growing stronger. The workers were on strike against Republic Steel, and the police attacked them with weapons supplied by the company. The tragic story is told in a new PBS documentary. “The mass media, right up to The New York Times, was supporting the police story that they had no choice but to open fire on this mob,” says Greg Mitchell, who directed the new PBS documentary, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, and edited a companion book that is the first oral history on the tragedy. The film can be viewed at PBS.org and was produced by Lyn Goldfarb.

• In early May, Texas resident Gabriella Gonzalez traveled to Colorado for abortion care. The journey out of state is a familiar one for Texans, who have lived under a draconian six-week abortion ban since 2021, long before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, and a criminal “trigger law” that imposes up to life in prison for providers, since August. Like so many Texans, the 26-year-old mother of three was forced out of her home state for health care. Upon her return, Harold Thompson, her 22-year-old ex-boyfriend who is believed to have impregnated her and who did not approve of her abortion—sought revenge. During an argument at a gas station in Dallas the morning after she returned, Thompson placed Gonzalez in a choke hold and then fatally shot her once in the head and several times thereafter.

• Today, Friday, May 26, unions in Los Angeles are pushing some big new ideas into the public sphere. Negotiators with UNITE HERE Local 11, the radical trade union that represents thousands of hospitality workers in restaurants, hotels, sports arenas, and airports around the region, are advancing a set of proposals for an updated contract with 100 employers, replacing those contracts that are expiring at the end of June.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• We’ve noted repeatedly that as the streaming sector grows and consolidates, it’s revealing many of the same problems we saw inherent in traditional, shitty, cable TV. As in the need to provide Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost has them doing the sort of things common in the traditional cable sector they used to criticize and disrupt (see Netflix’s password sharing cash grab).

Monopolies

Trademarks

• Ah, Monster Energy. For regular readers of Techdirt, the name of the company alone is enough to get your eyes rolling harder than a teenager at a rave. Posts on the company’s trademark bullying ways are so legion that I dare not even begin listing them; if you’re unfamiliar with them, click the link and be sure you have a pillow on your desk or you’re going to suffer a concussion.

Copyrights

• This is an important case, because it will clarify whether copyright infringement can be considered a “serious crime” that trumps privacy concerns and allows general online surveillance of the public despite the region’s privacy laws. In bringing the case, La Quadrature du Net naturally hopes that data protection laws will not be trampled upon so easily, and that the EU’s top court will affirm copyright’s relative lack of importance in the grand scheme of things, but nothing is certain. Euractiv writes: [...]

• Despite offering only one type of content, 9anime is one of the most-visited sites in the world, period. Since that amounts to over 2.5 billion visits per year, it was no surprise to see anti-piracy coalition ACE back in court this week hoping to obtain information on the site’s operators. Other anime piracy sites are under the spotlight too, including some that appear to have no traffic at all.

• The High Court in Bombay, India, has ordered Instagram to share the personal details of copyright-infringing users with a media company. Through a broad dynamic injunction, the social media giant is further required to terminate associated accounts and purge infringing URLs they shared from its platform.

• We’ve certainly been talking a lot about the “AI Doomers” who insist that AI is all too likely to destroy humanity. However, even people who aren’t fully on board with the existential threat of AI do often say that, at the very least, it’s going to destroy jobs for most people, potentially creating huge problems. For years now, people have been arguing for universal basic income, in large part, because they think that automation and AI will take away everyone’s jobs. I mean, it was a core plank of Andrew Yang’s silly run for President.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve written a new book on PMBOK 7 (the well-known project management standard). I aimed to go underneath the surface and explain what it really means. It’s about appreciating its true value without dogmatism.

Technical

• I added a commandline cheatsheet for mutt (my mail client) and updated the one for amforai (gemini space browser).

• The mutt cheatsheet is not a full step-by-step tutorial, they aren’t meant to be. I’ve done my best to give a structured outline of what I tweaked.

Internet/Gemini

• There is much buzz about [Skyjake's project called Bubble] on the Geminispace. There was a long thread on Cosmos, which I can’t locate now. A good start of discussion is Bacardi55′s second gemlog article. So there are many points of view, as usual in today’s world.

• It’s something like the plot of /Silo/ (a TV series, according to Wikipedia: based on the /Wool/ series of novels by author Hugh Howey). /Silo/ is about the last ten thousand people living in the underground concrete bunker formed in a silo-shaped hole. They live according to the rules called the Pact, which origin is unclear. One of the Pact regulations forbade the installation of elevators. So they walk up and down the stairs. There are hundreds of floors, so such travels last all day.

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