● 06.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

Posted in News Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

• When using bpftrace, it’s pretty common that not all of the data you want to report on is available in one spot, at least when you have to trace kernel functions instead of tracepoints. When this comes up, there is a common pattern that you can use to temporarily capture the data for later use. To summarize this pattern, it’s to save the information in an associative array that’s indexed by the thread id to create a per-thread variable. If you have more than one piece of information to save, you use more than one associative array.

• In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, I’m talking about config files for SSH. I did a video call with a client recently who didn’t know these existed, and it made his day.

• Rather than remembering which usernames, key files, ports, and hostnames you need for each machine, you can stash them in an SSH config file. Remote orchestration tools like Ansible can also use hosts defined in this, making managing fleets of servers infinitely easier.

• Linux systems provide a variety of system services (such as process management, login, syslog, cron, etc.) and network services (such as remote login, e-mail, printers, web hosting, data storage, file transfer, domain name resolution (using DNS), dynamic IP address assignment (using DHCP), and much more).

• Technically, a service is a process or group of processes (commonly known as daemons) running continuously in the background, waiting for requests to come in (especially from clients).

• Formerly known as Nagios, Nagios Core is a free, open-source, and powerful network monitoring tool that allows you to monitor servers and applications on your network. You can monitor both Linux and Windows servers as well as running applications.

• PrestaShop is a free, open-source e-commerce platform that allows users to create and manage their online store.

• In this guide from TechRepublic Premium we’re going to explore the various things you can do with a Linux server. We won’t leave out any steps, so you won’t have to refer to another tutorial to complete the process.

• If you want to deploy applications into a Kubernetes cluster, be warned — it’s not the easiest task. There are a lot of moving pieces that go into these scalable containers.

• Learn how to suspend a running process in the Linux command line. Also learn how to resume a stopped process.

• Have you ever encountered a situation where you have to suspend an ongoing task as you have more important tasks to execute and want to resume the previous task later?

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Telegram on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Telegram is a cloud-based messaging application with end-to-end encryption that allows users to send messages, files, photos, and videos securely.

• If you are planning to get rid of Windows completely but want to access Windows-specific applications while being in Ubuntu, then it’s easier to try it out in a virtual machine. Although there are many virtualization applications, we will use the powerful virt-manager application for this guide.

• After the end of this guide, you will be able to install Windows 11 in Linux Mint or Ubuntu.

• When you are trying to create a shared folder using Windows Guest and Linux host, it’s a little difficult and complex process. Because both the operating system works differently and a lot of configuration is needed.

• Here’s a detailed tutorial on how to do it.

Games

• Once again, ELDEN RING has managed to become the number 1 most played game on Steam Deck, after hovering close to it over the last couple of months. Here’s the top 20 most played on Steam Deck for May 2023.

• It’s LGBT Pride Month which means there’s another big bundle of games available in the Queer Games Bundle now on itch.io. Featuring 466 different items from 293 creators it’s filled full with games, physical games, assets, soundtracks and more.

• If there’s one thing I truly want from a Steam Deck 2 aside from the usual performance related upgrades, it would be better cooling and less noise. Perhaps the new AirJet from Frore Systems is what Valve could use.

• Valve has put out a small update to Proton Experimental, which should fix many games due to a regression that was hiding away. With this release they’ve updated the included version of DXVK, which is what does the Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan translation for Windows games on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

• Valve has now released two small graphics driver updates for Steam Deck OS (SteamOS) 3.4.8, which means the Preview update channel is now ready for a big update to drop.

• Humble Bundle just released their latest bundle and phew, if you like metroidvania styled game this is a cracking good deal overall not to be missed.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Recently, OpenBSD package manager received a huge speed boost when updating packages, but it’s currently only working in -current due to an issue.

• Fortunately, espie@ fixed it for the next release, I tried it and it’s safe to fix yourself. It will be available in the 7.4 release, but for 7.3 users, here is how to apply the change.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• The openSUSE Conference did not slow down openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots from frequently being released this week.

• Three snapshots have been released since last Friday when the conference began and a new major version of QEMU arrived just days after the conference.

• Members of the Geekos community are inviting technology enthusiasts, students, potential candidates, and anyone interested in open source, openSUSE and Linux to an Open House event in SUSE’s Prague office on June 7 from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

• The purpose of the event is to provide attendees with an exclusive opportunity to gain insight into open-source companies like SUSE and projects like openSUSE; organizers aim to share the unique culture of the two, and exhibit the exceptional work being done by the organizations. Participants will have the chance to interact with SUSE employees and openSUSE members as well as explore the office space, and learn more about the innovative projects being developed.

• Today is the launch of our logo competition for the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023. A logo is an integral part of the openSUSE.Asia Summit experience. As you have seen, the previous openSUSE.Asia Summits have their unique logos that reflect the communities where the Summit took place. In line with tradition, we have a logo contest to have a great logo for this year’s summit. The openSUSE.Asia Summit will be held this year in Chongqing, China, details are available here.

• The competition is now open. It will close on 16 July 2023. The organizers will send a “Geeko Mystery Box” as a reward for the best designed logo.

• After a while keeping working on the request page redesign, we are glad to come back to you with two new request types: maintenance incident requests and maintenance release requests. The request redesign is part of the beta program. We started the redesign of the request workflow in August 2022. Then, in September 2022, we focused on the support of multi-action submit requests.

• SUSE guest blog authored by: Don Boxley, Co-Founder and CEO, DX2i SQL Server holds an organization’s most business-critical data assets. Therefore, maximum uptime and security are among the top priorities for the IT teams that manage them. However, industry pressures have these IT pros adding another imperative task to their to-do list: SQL Server modernization.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Last October, when it was announced that Bobby Leibrock would become the next CFO of IBM subsidiary Red Hat, finance team members no doubt understood that the open-source developer was coronating not just any IBM veteran but a strategic finance executive who for years had been entrenched along the front lines of IBM’s software acquisition activities.

• In conversation with Finextra, Red Hat’s Hector Arias, Bruno Domingues and Monica Sasso highlighted that banks have been leveraging technology and collaborating with organisations outside of the financial services sector for decades, but difficulties emerge because traditional organisations are unable to keep pace with their new competitors’ management of data and an inability to realise the million-dollar opportunity that data presents.

• Performance tracing is an essential process that involves the collection, analysis and interpretation of system data. The primary objective of performance tracing is to identify bottlenecks, diagnose problems and optimize performance to ensure that systems operate within their limits.

• The following example serves as an introduction to the broader concept of performance tracing only. There are various technologies available to facilitate performance tracing and selecting the right one is critical.

• Organizations generate a vast amount of data on a daily basis, and understanding it all is becoming increasingly difficult. To gain a competitive edge, companies need to harness the power of analytics to gain insights from their data. One of the most effective ways to do this is through application-driven analytics.

• Red Hat customers will be able to configure and manage Dell infrastructure through the OpenShift user interface, under a deepening agreement between the two announced at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas that aims to make it easier to configure hybrid cloud environments to run containerised workloads on.

• Australia’s lowest paid workers are in line for a wage boost big enough to outrun the soaring cost of living.

• Starting next month, workers on the minimum wage will get an 8.6 per cent wage rise – $1.85 extra an hour – following the Fair Work Commission’s national wage case decision on Friday.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21.2 is the second update in the Linux Mint 21 series, which is based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series, and it was initially slated for release on June 2023.

• This release will come with the usual Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE desktop environments, which have been updated to Cinnamon 5.8 for the flagship edition, as well as Xfce 4.18 and MATE 1.26.

• The retail industry is going through a period of major upheaval. AI is transforming the landscape at a rapid pace. Grand View Research evaluated the market value at USD 5.79 billion in 2021 and this is expected to grow at a 23.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2030. For retailers, this translates into a need to adapt to an entirely new paradigm of customer expectations.

• As customers continue to become more discerning and margins shrink, to remain profitable, retailers are looking towards accelerated digital transformation and new technologies that can improve efficiency and enable differentiation. Innovation is taking many forms, such as virtual dressing rooms, IoT adoption, improved support for mobile e-commerce and, perhaps most crucially of all, artificial intelligence.

Devices/Embedded

• The global distributor Digilent recently announced that the new Analog Discovery 3 test instrument will arrive in June and it will still be supported by the free software Waveforms which is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

• Working with Mo School Abhiyan, we have trained 1000 teachers in Odisha to increase access to computer science education through Code Clubs.

• Flexible PCBs are super-useful things, but they can have a limited fatigue life. [Carl Bugeja] has been using them to create flexible actuators, though, and he’s getting an amazing 100,000,000 cycles out of them after some rigorous development.

• The Orange Pi 800 keyboard PC, launched as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 400 last year with a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor and 4GB RAM, has gotten an upgrade to 128GB of eMMC flash instead of just 64GB. The keyboard PC still comes with HDMI 2.0 and VGA video outputs, built-in speakers and microphone, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5 connectivity, a few USB ports, and a 78-key QWERTY keyboard, plus a 26-GPIO connector accessible without opening the device.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• WikiLeaks has today published the 16th batch of its ongoing Vault 7 leak, this time instead of revealing new malware or hacking tool, the whistleblower organisation has unveiled how CIA operatives stealthy collect and forward stolen data from compromised smartphones.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I just posted a new video with my solutions for mobile digital painting on GNU/Linux! It’s not sponsored, about a refurbished 5 y/o hardware, and relatively low budget. 🙂

• Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor client in Rust. Now we’re announcing the latest release, Arti 1.1.5.

• In the past months, our efforts have been divided between onion services and work on a new RPC API (a successor to C Tor’s “control port”) that will give applications a safe and powerful way to work with Arti without having to write their code in Rust or link Arti as a library (unless they want to).

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO) program 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.

• When we relaunched the Mozilla Builders program last March, we unveiled our Responsible AI Challenge — a one-day, in-person event designed to inspire and encourage a community of builders working on trustworthy AI products and solutions — essentially a call to builders and technologists all over the world to create trustworthy AI solutions.We are delighted to announce the prize winners of our Responsible AI Challenge, who demonstrated their ingenuity, innovation, and proficiency in developing human-centered and trustworthy AI applications and solutions.

• The investment will help Fiddler scale its AI Observability Platform

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The news today is that SQL:2023, the new version of the SQL standard, has been published by ISO.w

Education

• Communities with life in them—a kind of ‘infectious enthusiasm’—are so because of a small set of passionate volunteers who give time, love, and individual attention to the group. Meeting Mary Beth reminded me of a few individuals in other communities (Drupal, Ansible, Kubernetes, Raspberry Pi) with similar qualities.

Programming/Development

• Parallel Agile11 Parallel Agile promises to teach nine women to produce a baby in a month. Or, if you’re really in a hurry, 27 women in 10 days. Or any other combination that suits your specific staffing/time demands. You might guess that I’m a bit skeptical of the results, but it’s co-authored by Boehm. I have to give it a chance.

Python

• Abstract Base Classes (ABCs) offer a solution to these limitations by allowing us to define a set of common methods and attributes that must be implemented by any class that inherits from the ABC. This ensures that objects of different classes can be used interchangeably in our code and provides a way to catch errors at runtime through type checking. ABCs also promote code reuse and modularity by enforcing consistency across their subclasses. They ensure consistent behavior in subclasses and enable objects of different classes to be used interchangeably.

Leftovers

Education

• How much is a degree from a prestigious university worth? The answer is a bit difficult to answer because there are many cofounding factors: people from the connected class (folks that ‘know people’) tend to attend the most prestigious universities, and they also tend to do well professionally. It is likely that highly connected people do well no matter what.

• Sorting it out is difficult, but we should remember that the objective of an employer is often to hire the most qualified person. The credentials are only an approximation. In jobs where it is easy to identify the highly productive individuals, you would expect that credentials would have less value.

• This is one of the key reasons to pursue minimalist management. By setting up processes that handle much of the mechanics of reporting, and clearly reveals someone’s progress for all to see, as well as distributing the human elements, like mentorship, you can reap much of the benefit of letting senior people provide parts of the management work without the dreaded promotion into management per se.

• This doesn’t mean leaving them all alone to figure out the culture, the work, and the people by themselves, mind you. Nobody hits the ground running, and everyone needs guidance and mentorship to thrive in a new situation. But it does mean that the context in which you offer that assistance ought to be real as quickly as possible.

• On the 1st of June, protests will be held in fifteen Hungarian cities to once again demonstrate for education and against the introduction of the status law. The event, entitled “Let us breathe!”, is organised by Áron Molnár “noÁr” and the Tanítanék Movement. According to them,

Hardware

• There’s much truth in the advice that, to truly understand something, you need to build it yourself from the ground up. That’s the idea behind [Christian]’s entry for the Re-engineering Education category of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. Built as an educational demonstrator, this is a complete arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) using discrete relays — and not high-density types either — these are the big honking clear-cased kind.

• We’ve just written about Realtek 5 Gbps Ethernet chips, but the company also has some roadmaps for WiFi 6 and WiFi 7 router chips, and a WiFi 7 client module demonstrated at COMPUTEX 2023.

• It’s easy to find a cheap clock at any dollar store that will manage to tell the time, but chances are that the plastic-fantastic construction won’t do you any aesthetic favors. Fear not, though, for [ROBO HUB]’s upcycled design turns a humble clock into a mesmerizing horological display of beauty.

• These days, most webservers are big hefty rackmount rigs with roaring fans in giant datacenters. [naDDan]’s webserver is altogether more humble, as it runs on a single Commodore 64.

• While there have been hiccups here and there, the general trend of electronics is to decrease in cost or increase in performance. This can be seen in fairly obvious ways like more powerful and affordable computers but it also often means that more powerful software can be used in other devices without needing expensive hardware to support it. [Manawyrm] and [Toble_Miner] found this was true of a particular inexpensive thermal camera that ships with Linux installed on it, and found that this platform was nearly perfect for tinkering with and adding plenty of other features to turn it into a much more capable tool.

• The vast majority of semiconductors products we use every day are primarily constructed on a silicon process, using wafers of pure silicon. But whilst the economics are known, and processes mature, there are still some weaknesses. Especially for power applications. gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) are materials that have seen an explosion in uses in the power space, driven especially by an increase in electric vehicle sales and other high-power/high-voltage systems such as solar arrays. But, SiC is expensive and very energy intensive. It looks like diamond substrates could become much more common if the work by Diamfab takes off.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Griffin is one of an estimated 1,385 children known to have died from the blackout challenge, according to a nonprofit called Erik’s Cause, which was founded by Judy Rogg, whose son also died from a choking game.

Proprietary

• After talks with EU officials in Sweden, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the Western partners felt the “fierce urgency” to act following the emergence of the technology, in which China has been a growing force.

• The voluntary code “would be open to all like-minded countries,” Blinken told reporters.

• “There’s almost always a gap when new technologies emerge,” Blinken said, with “the time it takes for governments and institutions to figure out how to legislate or regulate.”

• European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager added that a draft would be put forward “within weeks.”

• I actually don’t think that AI poses a risk to human extinction. I think it poses a similar risk to pandemics and nuclear war—which is to say, a risk worth taking seriously, but not something to panic over. Which is what I thought the statement said.

• Nvidia’s other strength is its software. CUDA, its ai platform, is popular with programmers and runs only on the company’s chips. By, for instance, giving free access to its chips and software to some AI researchers, the firm focused on encouraging developers to use its software long before its competitors set out to woo them.

• It is estimated that of that App Store developers generated US$910 billion in total billings and sales from the sale of physical goods and services, US$109 billion from in-app advertising and US$104 billion for digital goods and services.

• We host a roundtable discussion with three experts in artificial intelligence on growing concerns over the technology’s potential dangers. Yoshua Bengio, known as one of the three “godfathers of AI,” is a professor at the University of Montreal and founder and scientific director at Mila–Quebec AI Institute. Bengio is also a signatory of the Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a pause on large AI experiments. He is joined on Democracy Now! by Tawana Petty, the director of policy and advocacy at the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about the harms of AI, particularly its encoding of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression, and by Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT and president of the Future of Life Institute, which aims to address the existential risk of AI upon humanity.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• I’m normally pretty laid back when it comes to terminology, but there’s been a lot of liberties taken with calling things Open Source in the machine learning community recently. Here I mention a few of the different licenses, draw a clear line between open source and hangers-on that are using the terminology, and try and explain why it’s important to call out the difference. Companies are free to choose how they license their software, but should not be giving the impression that they’re contributing unencumbered open source tools to the community if they’re not.

Linux Foundation

• Welcome to the world of tracker applications on the Android operating system.  A tracker application, in its simplest form, is a software program designed to monitor and track specific activities or data on a device. In this article, we will delve into the fascinating realm of tracker apps, their increasing popularity, and the underlying connection between Android and the Linux foundation.

Security

• Code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software. This post is a deep dive on “Megatraffer,” a veteran Russian hacker who has practically cornered the underground market for malware focused code-signing certificates since 2015.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Similar to Twitter, Meta already verifies certain high-profile users or organizations, and the new service is not expected to bring any immediate changes to accounts that are already verified that way. But that may change.

• Since its inception, the UK’s latest attempt to directly regulate the internet has been a disaster. Once dubbed the “Online Harms Bill,” it has since been rebranded to make it appear less harmful to the internet. The bill hasn’t gotten any better, but it does have a less alarmist name, even if everyone pushing hard for its passage tends to align themselves with alarmists.

• The FISC order is replete with problems. It describes the government’s repeated, widespread violations—over a seven-year period—of procedures for searching its databases of internet communications involving Americans, all without a warrant. These searches included especially sensitive people and groups, including donors to a political campaign. And it shows the FISC giving the FBI all-but-endless do-overs, each time proclaiming that the executive branch has made “promising” steps toward compliance with procedures that are largely left up to government attorneys to design.

• Perhaps most shocking, however, is the court’s analysis of how the Fourth Amendment should apply to the FBI’s “backdoor searches” of Americans’ communications. These searches occur when the FBI queries Section 702 data that was ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence purposes without a warrant but includes a person on U.S. soil in the communication.

• Although the court acknowledged that the volume of Americans’ private communications collected using Section 702 is “substantial in the aggregate,” and that the FBI routinely searches these communications without a warrant for routine matters, it held that the government’s oft-broken safeguards are consistent with the Fourth Amendment and “adequately guard against error and abuse.” When EFF writes that Section 702 and similar programs have created a “broad national security exception to the Constitution,” this is what we mean.

Defence/Aggression

• A hacking group has released a batch of what it claims are classified Iranian government documents, some of which revealed new details of an attack early this year on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran.

• The Air Force’s Chief of AI Test and Operations said “it killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

• Puerto Rico-based military drone and technology giant Red Cat is set to fulfill a purchase order this month consisting of 200 long-range, high-speed FPV (first-person view) drones to Ukrainian drone pilots engaged in conflict with Russia.

• ”Seven of the nine indicators that we’ve been evaluating are outside the fair and safe space. We can also see that there’s a window [of opportunity], meaning that a transformation that recovers said safe space is still possible. But it requires transformations and very, very rapid action. And it will not be enough to simply decarbonize the global energy system.”How to do it? Zafra, from BC3, discusses what this challenge entails: “Human well-being cannot exist without the earth’s system. Reconciling the well-being of all people fairly within the limits of the [global ecosystem] involves asking ourselves what well-being really is: what and how much we need to feel good, how much we are willing to harm other people and living beings to achieve [our goals]… we need to carry out broad social processes at all scales that allow for inclusive and just transformations to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis.”

• General Officer Commanding (GOC) of Chinar Corps Lieutenant General A D S Aujla also said that due to the ongoing internal crisis in Pakistan, there are no major worries regarding Kashmir but the armed forces have to remain alert to thwart any attempts to push in infiltrators, narcotics or weapons.

• The men and women, mostly of German nationality, were detained on suspicion of supporting a terrorist organization. They allegedly belonged to an international network that solicited financial donations for IS in Syria using platforms that included Telegram. They subsequently transferred the money to the group or its intermediaries.

• A few days after banners were hung by the Kaldirac Movement to mark Ibrahim Kaypakkaya’s anniversary of death on 18 May in 10 different locations in Istanbul, a reader of the magazine and Yıldız Technical University student Oğuzhan Kul, was harassed and forced to become spy on behalf of police by people who introduced themselves as police officers.

• Oğuzhan Kul spoke to ANF about the harassment of the police and its reasons.

• And yet some Democrats are again rejoicing at the prospect of Trump as his party’s pick. They reason that he was an unproven entity before but is a proven catastrophe now and that his troubles with the law, troubles with reality, egomania and megalomania make him an easier opponent for President Biden, who beat him once already, than Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott or another Republican aspirant would be. Perhaps they’re right.

• But if they’re wrong? The stakes of a second Trump term are much, much too high to wager on his weakness and hope for his nomination. The way I size up the situation, any Republican nominee has a decent shot at the presidency: There are enough Americans who faithfully vote Republican, lean Republican or are open to a Republican that under sufficiently favorable circumstances, the party’s candidate wins. And the circumstances in November 2024 are neither predictable nor controllable — just as they weren’t in November 2016. If Trump is in the running, Trump is in the running.

• Ben Roberts-Smith was a towering figure and permanent fixture throughout his marathon defamation trial, attending court almost every day. But the hulking former special forces soldier was nowhere to be seen on judgment day.

• Publishers have heralded a historic win in the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial as vindication and a “critical step for justice”. After an 11-month deliberation, Justice Anthony Besanko found The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times had successfully proved their allegations the Victoria Cross recipient committed war crimes.

• Alan Macleod reveals the new unconventional recruitment strategy being deployed by the US military: using psyop specialists disguised as E-girls to combat dismal recruitment numbers among a war-weary Generation Z.

• Aggression Made Easy.

• Israeli settlers and military systematically made life unbearable for the Bedouin community living in the West Bank’s Ein Samiya region. On May 22 they were forced to leave their lands and were displaced for the fourth time since 1969.

War in Ukraine

• Responding to Evgeny Prigozhin’s remarks about the Chechen battalion Akhmat, State Duma Deputy Adam Delimkhanov (an ethnic Chechen allied with the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov) recorded a Telegram video message to Prigozhin, telling him to tone down his statements about the military in general and Akhmat in particular.

• The Russian government’s public services portal, Gosuslugi, has sent users a message offering them free access to a book called “PoemZ of the Russian Summer.”

• Kursk Governor Roman Starovoit reported that “several Ukrainian drones” were downed by air defenses near the regional capital on Thursday night.

• The U.S. State Department announced that it has “adopted countermeasures in response to the Russian Federation’s ongoing violation of the New START Treaty,” a nuclear arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia.

• Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin visited the nationalist writer and politician Zakhar Prilepin in a hospital in Nizhny Novgorod. Prigozhin stopped in Nizhny Novgorod after travelling to Yekaterinburg, Vladivostok, and Novosibirsk. Prilepin has been in the hospital since May, when he was the target of an assassination attempt.

• The Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russia Legion announced Thursday morning that they were conducting a new raid into Russia’s Belgorod region. The two pro-Ukrainian militia groups have carried out multiple armed incursions into Russia from Ukraine in recent months. In videos posted to Telegram, the RDK said its fighters were at the border and were approaching the “outskirts of Shebekino,” a town in the Belgorod region, while the Freedom of Russian Legion said they were also at the border and would soon enter Russian territory “to bring freedom, peace, and calm.”

• Let us consider the following paragraphs, which appear in the May 29 edition of The New Yorker:   While Tynda and his team were fighting from the trench, long and powerful fusillades had issued from another Ukrainian position, on a hilltop behind them.

• Schools in several Russian regions have been purchasing “training drones” and other equipment needed to teach children to pilot drones. Independent news outlet iStories found the purchase contracts on a public records site.

• Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported that the village of Shebekino came under fire from a Grad multiple rocket launcher system on Thursday.

• The Russian Presidential Administrative Directorate is planning to build a new bomb shelter on the territory of Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, according to documents that have appeared on Russia’s public procurements portal.

• Russia’s Justice Ministry made an unlikely addition to its “foreign agents” list last week: former lawmaker Magomed Gadzhiyev, who once represented the ruling United Russia party in the State Duma. Besides being one of the deputies who voted for the original “foreign agents” law in 2012, Gadzhiyev has supported a number of the Kremlin’s other initiatives, including the annexation of Crimea and the “Yarovaya Package” (legislation that requires telecoms to store six months of clients’ calling and texting records and Internet history — and to share the data with police, no questions asked). Gadzhiyev served a total of three terms in Russia’s federal parliament. After Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Gadzhiyev expressed support for the war and sent humanitarian aid convoys to the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev explains how such a loyal figure became a “foreign agent.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The ongoing negotiations aimed at forming Finland’s next government are unprecedented in terms of the level of secrecy surrounding them, veteran political journalist Unto Hämäläinen told Yle TV1′s A-Studio current affairs programme on Monday evening.

• “We don’t really know anything about the events of the past month. These are the most secretive government negotiations ever,” Hämäläinen said, adding that he was puzzled as to the reasons why the talks have been conducted in such a clandestine way.

• The negotiations entered their fifth week on Monday.

• Despite fervid attempts to keep that blindfold in place, the search has not been in vain. On the contrary, over these last two decades, its layers have slowly worn away, thread by thread, revealing, if not the full picture of those medieval-style practices, then a damning set of facts and images relating to torture, American-style, in this century. Cumulatively, investigative journalism, government reports, and the testimony of witnesses have revealed a fuller picture of the places, people, nightmarish techniques, and results of that program.

Environment

• The boom in tourism — which Ms. Reid says has brought opportunities as well as challenges — is a change that she has both witnessed and participated in. In 2016, when her husband was elected president, she was the editor of the in-flight magazine for Icelandair. Three years later, as first lady, she took on a paid position to promote the country’s exports and champion Iceland as a tourist destination. She published a book last year — part travelogue, part memoir, part feminist history of Iceland — and continues to run the writers’ retreat that she founded with a colleague.

• I sat down with Ms. Reid in the presidential residence, and in our hourlong conversation, she talked about the best way for visitors to meet Icelanders and what she thinks of the term “overtourism.”

• Previously secret data has been released by the Clean Energy Regulator after questions were raised about the integrity of methods used to generate carbon credits.

• The Carbon Estimation Area (CEA) data was issued on Friday, as recommended by a recent review of Australia’s carbon credit scheme and after a law change allowed the release.

Energy/Transportation

• Around the second year, the quest for charging started to become more frustrating than enjoyable. Significantly more people were driving EVs, which was encouraging. But this also meant that the chargers in my neighbourhood were almost always unavailable unless I got there before 7 a.m. or after 10 p.m. After repeated incidents of disappointment, I stopped checking the availability online beforehand. The charger that showed as “available” online was often taken by the time I got there.

• In March, a man named David Irizarry wrote a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in support of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project to be built in Brownsville, Texas. The Rio Grande LNG project (RGLNG), estimated to cost more than $11 billion, would be the largest private sector investment in Texas’ history. But it was awaiting a key decision from FERC.

• “As you know, the US appeals court of the DC circuit rejected all but two of the claims put forward by opponents of RGLNG related to RGLNG’s FERC order,” Irizarry wrote. Irizarry is not in the gas business, nor does he deal with energy policy. As the chief executive of the Valley Regional Medical Center, a medical system serving Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley, his letter displayed an unusually fluent understanding of the ins and outs of the federal gas permitting process.

• Prospects for the release of new areas of offshore gas exploration under federal Labor remain unclear, according to testimony at federal budget hearings.

• Coalition resources spokeswoman Susan McDonald quizzed the federal government over ongoing uncertainty for consumers and the industry, with supply still a pressing issue for the domestic gas market and prices rising.

• Federal authorities sued West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s business empire on Wednesday, seeking $7.6 million in unpaid environmental fines and overdue fees. The move adds to Justice’s growing legal and debt problems and comes just a month into his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

• Justice Department lawyers filed the suit to collect fines assessed by the Interior Department against 13 companies for strip mining violations that “pose health and safety risks or threaten environmental harm” to neighboring communities.

• Martin Hench really likes playing on the Red Team — being on the attack. He’s a financial geek, understands cryptocurrency, understands how money is moved around to keep it hidden, and is really good at mining data from social media. He puts those skills together as a forensic accountant. Put simply, Martin finds money that people want hidden. Against his better judgment, Marty does the job of a lifetime, and makes an absolute mint. But that job had hair, and he’s got to live through the aftermath. It turns out, that might just be a challenge, as three separate groups want a piece of him.

• Diesel, like sugar and chicken, is a controlled good in Malaysia.

Wildlife/Nature

Overpopulation

• In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.

Finance

• Millions of Australians on award and minimum wages are set to find out how much more they will be paid.

• But economists warn a too-generous rise could add to pressure on the Reserve Bank to push up interest rates next week.

• Airbnb has sued New York City over rules the company says impose arbitrary restrictions that would greatly reduce the local supply of short-term rentals.

• A 2022 ordinance, which the city plans to begin enforcing next month, would require owners to register with the mayor’s office, disclose who else lives in the property, and promise to comply with zoning, construction and maintenance ordinances.

• A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales.

• Callum Foote has dusted off the accounting standards (AASB) and discovered that Shine Justice and its auditors PwC may not be meeting their obligations as a company listed on the ASX and as auditors, respectively. Foote has therefore offered assistance to the Audit and Risk Committee of the Shine Board of Directors. His investigation concludes with some free staff training tips for PwC which ought to complement the firm’s newly avowed enthusiasm in the fields of integrity training and compliance.

• In accounting, auditing and tax consulting, standards are vital. Professional and ethical standards promote exemplary levels of professionalism and ethical behaviour thereby maximising the integrity of the accounting profession. While accounting and auditing standards facilitate investor confidence in the Australian economy including its capital markets.

• Advocates for student debt relief are raising the alarm over a controversial part of the bipartisan deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling that would end the freeze on student loan repayments by the end of August. The moratorium has been in place since 2020. Meanwhile, the fate of the Biden administration’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers is going to be decided by the Supreme Court, where it is likely to face skepticism from the conservative majority. “This is President Biden turning his back on student debtors,” says Braxton Brewington, press secretary of the Debt Collective.

• The United States has signed a trade agreement with Taiwan despite opposition from China, which claims the self-ruled island democracy as part of its territory.

• The two governments say the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade will strengthen commercial relations by improving customs, investment and other regulation.

• University students raced to fork out more money to pay off their student debts to try to beat a deadline for a rise in HECS interest.

• More than three million Australians have been slugged with a 7.1 per cent rise in their HECS debts after indexation was applied on Thursday.

• The US Senate has passed bipartisan legislation backed by President Joe Biden that lifts the government’s $US31.4 ($A47.7) trillion debt ceiling, averting what would have been a first-ever default.

• The Senate voted 63-36 to approve the bill that was passed on Wednesday by the House of Representatives, as lawmakers raced against the clock following months of partisan bickering between Democrats and Republicans.

• The US Senate is on track to pass a bill to lift the government’s $US31.4 ($A47.7) trillion debt ceiling in a late sitting.

• Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer said: “We are avoiding default tonight.”

• Home buyer lending has dropped off again as higher interest rates continue to suppress demand for housing.

• The 2.9 per cent monthly fall in new home commitments followed a 5.3 per cent uptick in housing-related borrowing in March.

• A surge of students are forking out more money to pay off their student debts to beat the deadline for a rise in HECS interest.

• More than three million Australians were slugged with a 7.1 per cent rise in their HECS debts, after indexation was applied.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This text is the transcript from a keynote speech delivered during the RSA Conference in San Francisco on April 25, 2023.

• There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st century. They don’t align incentives well. And they are being hacked too effectively.

• The meeting, which is most likely to take place in San Francisco, will see Breton seek a roadmap for implementation of EU’s AI regulations that are expected to come into effect in 2026, the news report cited unnamed EU officials as saying.

• The real victims of the Russian-Ukrainian war are those whose family members are dying because the front line “spares neither God nor man”, thus began Viktor Orbán’s semi-regular Friday statement on Kossuth Rádió.

• According to Fidesz MEP Balázs Hidvéghi, it is a gross violation of the EU treaties in force that an EP resolution adopted today would “deprive” Hungary of the EU Council presidency due next year (the text questions whether Hungary could credibly lead the EU co-decision-making body representing the member states).

• Although the Hungarian company Aluminárugyár Zrt. says that it no longer has any economic relations with the Moscow-based Ruszball, which manufactures and supplies the Russian army with combat equipment, including inflatable tanks, it still supplied gas cylinders to the company months after the outbreak of the war, in the summer of 2022, Szabad Európa writes.

• The European Parliament (EP) adopted its new resolution on Hungary by a large majority of 442 votes to 144, with 33 abstentions. According to the document, which has no legal consequences, “as a result of the government’s systemic actions, the state of rule of law in Hungary has been deteriorating for years”. This has not been properly addressed and, in addition, many new issues continue to arise.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says Singapore can be a trusted partner to maintain stability in the Indo-Pacific amid growing tensions in the region.

• The prime minister visited Singapore on Friday where he met with acting prime minister Lawrence Wong, announcing three climate-related initiatives.

• Billy Jones joins us for an in depth chat about social media and more.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The [Internet] is no longer what it once was. Novel, I know. Where we used to use the internet to seek out information, friends, family, or public figures, now, hours and hours of carefully selected Amazon hauls, lip syncs, and babies cuddling puppies are spoon-fed to us by the all-knowing algorithms behind every app on your phone.

• But these algorithms aren’t just giving us incredibly catchy, quotable memes. They’re also spreading fake news and pushing us further into echo chambers, calcifying our political views and influencing the names we check off at the ballot box.

• While Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenaries have been at the forefront of fighting in Ukraine’s ravaged eastern town of Bakhmut, a close associate of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has been involved in another battle – for the hearts and minds of people in occupied areas behind the front lines.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Just when we didn’t think the state of Texas could get any more wacko on tech policy, this latest bill really suggests otherwise. House Bill 1181 is an age verification measure that is similar to what we’ve seen in the state legislatures across other red U.S. states.

• A Yekaterinburg court has reportedly fined the local branch of the human rights organization Memorial 300,000 rubles ($3,700) on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army, the newspaper Kommersant has reported, citing the group’s director, Alexey Mosin.

• But a Tuesday update to her comments indicates the reviewer’s opinion of Stusek soon soured: “EDIT: the author is now attacking me on tik tok for not giving her a 5 star review(it was a 4) 😭😭😭😭 giving her a 1 just for her attitude! I didn’t think the book was bad but her attitude certainly is!”

• Stusek responded to Kebartas on TikTok: “I had a perfect 5 star average till this bitch came up. She said, ‘The ending was kind of predictable.’ Yeah, well, it’s my life, not a fucking murder mystery. ‘But other than that, it was incredible,’ so you just gave me four stars?” The video attacking Kebartas’ review no longer appears on Stusek’s TikTok profile, removed for violating TikTok’s community guidelines, according to screenshots and Stusek herself.

• After the discussion, the soldiers handcuffed the journalist and prevented him from being examined. The soldiers took the journalist back to the prison after keeping him waiting in the hospital yard for hours.

• On Tuesday the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in a case called Gonzalez v. Google, which questions whether tech giants can be held legally responsible for content promoted by their algorithms. The case targets a cornerstone of today’s Internet: Section 230, a statute that protects online platforms from liability for content produced by others. If the Supreme Court weakens the law, platforms may need to revise or eliminate the recommendation algorithms that govern their feeds. And if the Court scraps the law entirely, it will leave tech companies more vulnerable to lawsuits based on user content.

• “If there are no protections for user-generated content, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that this is probably the end of social media,” says Hany Farid, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Social platforms, such as Twitter and YouTube, rely heavily on two things: content created by users and recommendation algorithms that promote the content most likely to capture other users’ attention and keep them on the platform as long as possible. The Court’s verdict could make either or both strategies more dangerous for tech companies.

• NetBlocks metrics confirm the restriction of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Telegram and other social media platforms in Senegal on 1 June 2023. The measure comes amid widespread protests over the sentencing of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.

• As universities try desperately to serve two masters (knowledge production; diversity and inclusion), they will increasingly end up sanctioning speech that should be protected.

• Russia’s Justice Ministry has included Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation on its list of “undesirable” organizations, reports Telegram channel Ostorozhno, Novosti.

• Justice Anthony Besanko found that Chris Masters and Nick Mackenzies and their publishers were substantially reporting the truth about Ben Roberts-Smith. It is a win for quality investigative journalism, but will we now see criminal charges against the former soldier?

• Defending defamation cases in Australia is hard. The law favours the defamed, the truth defence a high bar to hurdle. Especially when the litigant is backed by a billionaire. The court has yet to decide on who will pay for it all, and, of course, Roberts-Smith may well appeal. No doubt his chief financial backer, Kerry Stokes, will have a say in that decision.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Three journalists from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala provide a first-person account of what it’s like to continue reporting on reality despite the authoritarian onslaught in the region and the criminalization of their work

• Lippmann asked reporters not to serve any cause “no matter how worthy.” Instead, he proposed applying scientific methods to professionalize the media, which, until that point, had been openly partisan. His proposal was so successful that the ideal of objectivity became the center of American newsrooms.

• We’ve written a few times about California’s “Journalism Protection Act” (CJPA) from state Rep. Buffy Wicks, and many times about the terrible concept of such link taxes. Unfortunately, it looks like California’s bill is moving forward, with buy-in from the big media orgs and their journalists that will get the free pay offs from such an unconstitutional link tax.

• An Australian newspaper reported Thursday the F.B.I. sought to question Julian Assange’s former ghostwriter in London as the U.S. continues a probe that resulted in an indictment three years ago of the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher.

• Russia’s Investigative Committee is charging the journalist Roman Popkov with organizing the terrorist attack that killed the pro-Kremlin war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in St. Petersburg on April 2.

• Most rights are based in statute, but dozens — such as rights to same-sex marriage, search warrants and Miranda warnings — are based on judicial rulings that the Supreme Court can overturn and that current justices have questioned some aspect of.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Authorities in Lingya village, about an hour’s drive from Rebgong, issued the order on May 23, requiring seven villages in the region to move so the Chinese government can begin the first phase of construction 10 days after the notice’s issue date, said a Tibetan from Rebgong who now lives in exile.

• “The land that is being confiscated by the Chinese government is farmland, which is the livelihood of Tibetans,” said the source who declined to be identified so as to speak freely about the situation. “The authorities have warned the Tibetans to not show any kind of condemnation.”

• Former Test cricketer Stuart MacGill has claimed an emotional court victory after a judge dismissed intimidation charges against him.

• MacGill, 52, was accused of stalking and verbally intimidating his friend’s former fiancee Samantha Ford on a Sydney street and at a nearby pub on February 1, 2022.

• This whole nightmare of a list might be defensible if it made us safer, but it doesn’t.

• Before Katherine Dunn published her celebrated novel Geek Love in 1989, she was a struggling single parent in Portland, Ore., paying rent by serving hash browns, painting houses, and pouring beers at a biker bar, where she became adept at breaking up knife fights. If this lean time was a prelude of sorts, it also came after an important chapter in her life had ended: the wide-open years of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Dunn had dropped out of Reed College to go vagabonding around the world. More an observer of the era’s revolutionary energies than a participant, she had also become a writer during this period, penning two slim, savage novels about recalcitrant misfits—Attic and Truck—that were snapped up by a publishing industry seeking voices who could speak for a generation of dropouts. But by the time Dunn had moved back to Portland, the era’s youth movements had largely dissipated, as had interest in her first literary efforts. Her relationship with her son’s father had ended around the same time that the new novel she was working on—set at a fictional version of Reed in the ’60s—was rejected by her publisher. In the late ’70s, the sum of these disappointments left Dunn living in a tiny studio apartment, where her young son slept in the closet. It was in these years that she started working on Geek Love.

• In 2022, I was Vermont’s Democratic nominee for governor. I am a proud member of my party and a fiercely devoted citizen of my state. But now, I am publicly pleading with the party that chose me as its standard-bearer last year to step back from the brink of making one of the biggest crises in our state even worse.

• “Bailing out protestors who exercise their constitutionally protected rights is simply not a crime,” said one civil rights defender.

• Iran Human Rights (IHR) says at least 142 people were executed in Iran in May, the highest monthly total in eight years, amid a brutal crackdown on dissent that the Norway-based watchdog says is aimed at spreading “societal fear.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The European Commission’s “exploratory questionnaire” about the so-called Sending Party Pays idea—or “fair share” as the telecom lobbyists call it—is full of biased questions and misunderstandings of how the internet works.

• For over a decade, large global telecom corporations and internet providers have been lobbying for an internet fee in which content providers like Netflix, Youtube and public broadcasters would pay the telecoms industry for letting their online content flow through their networks. It looks like the Commission has heard them, despite such an internet fee having been consistently rejected by governments, legislators, and regulators across the EU and around the world.

• EDRi has therefore responded to this questionnaire in line with the quasi unanimous criticism by experts: Nothing has changed in the past 12 years that would merit a direct payment scheme where telecom corporations get paid twice for the same service: first by consumers who pay for their internet connection at home, and then by content providers who make online content available to those consumers.

• Tribal governments need to be prepared to approach the state with a data-driven argument about what coverage data is not included in the state map and what changes need to be made, said Valandra.

• We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the bill insist that they’re trying to stop experimentation on children).

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Reform efforts aimed at making it easier and more affordable to repair technology you bought and paid for continue to see progress. California’s SB 244 this week passed in the California State Senate with a vote of 38-0, a notable retort to the lobbyists that had been trying to kill the bill:

• Netflix’s new password sharing crackdown is a dumb cash grab. It’s unnecessary, confusing, risks annoying subscribers, duplicates existing monetization efforts (Netflix already forces you to pay for higher tiers of service if you want simultaneous streams), contradicts years of Netflix’s stated position on the issue, comes on the heels of other price hikes, and the company’s projections of how much money it stands to make don’t appear rooted in reality.

Monopolies

• Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard plods along with a drip of news coming out every so often. For those of you with your pencils and scorecards ready, the current state is: the FTC has sued to stop the deal in the States, the EU has given its approval for the purchase to move forward, and the UK’s CMA blocked the purchase outright.

Copyrights

• Meta on Wednesday threatened to block all news articles on Facebook and Instagram in California if state lawmakers move forward with a bill that would tax the tech company for news content.

• The California Journalism Preservation Act would tax the advertising profits that platforms like Meta and Google make from distributing news articles. About 70% of the money collected would then go to support newsrooms around the state.

• Meta has warned it will pull news links from Facebook and Instagram entirely if the bill is passed.

• Canadian news publishers have shed new light on how journalism in Canada could be harmed if big tech platforms make good on their threats to block the posting of their content, should Ottawa’s online news bill pass unchanged.

• Jeff Elgie, the CEO of community news company Village Media, told senators studying the bill that Google and Facebook generate more than 50 per cent of his digital company’s web traffic.

• “If that traffic was lost, the business would be over,” said Elgie, whose company owns 25 local news publications across Ontario.

• The surprise shutdown of torrent site RARBG and its tracker came as a shock to millions of users and the knock-on effects are already being felt elsewhere in the piracy ecosystem. Other torrent sites are seeing a slowdown in fresh content, automated download apps are starting to throw up errors, and many of the largest streaming sites are missing a key source of content.

• While many ISPs in Europe were initially opposed to pirate site-blocking measures, anti-censorship and free-flow of information ideals have long since given way to resignation and, in some cases, full cooperation. In the Netherlands, ISP KPN went up against BREIN recently, citing concerns over its application for a shape-shifting dynamic injunction. KPN couldn’t prevent Lookmovie and Flixtor from being blocked but the discussion was one worth having.

• Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For June, we’re excited to showcase “Share Freely, Openly, Like We Share Air” by Hust Wilson. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from David Moinina Sengeh, Education Minister and Chief Innovation Officer of Sierra Leone and TED Senior Fellow:

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