● 06.04.23

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● Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

• OBS (Open Broadcaster System) is a remarkably powerful tool. With OBS we can record videos, using various scenes and sources to create broadcast quality shows, for free! OBS can also be used to livestream via many different services, and using a few plugins you can also interact with your community.

• Recently I had a need to record video from a 4K USB video capture device. The video source was the latest LattePanda Sigma SBC, which I was testing using Steam for a review. Steam’s built-in FPS counter was a little small (yes I could install another FPS counter, but that would incur a performance hit), so I duplicated the video source, laid one on top of the other, then cropped the FPS counter area, followed by a zoom in.

• Here is how I did it.

• GNU Grep’s defense of its decision to ruin and then drop the ‘fgrep’ and ‘egrep’ commands is that these commands aren’t in POSIX. There are a number of problems with this, but one of them is that Unix is not POSIX (and conversely, POSIX is not Unix). In practice, POSIX partially overlaps with modern Unixes, so just because something isn’t in POSIX is not any sort of reason for a Unix to not have it (and never has been). Unixes have always had many things that aren’t in POSIX.

• In this tutorial you will learn how to install Android x86 ISO on Virtualbox. We are going to download Android ISO and install it on Virtualbox 7.0.  If you want to learn how to install Android ISO on Virtualbox or on your computer follow the steps in this

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install docker engine on Debian 11 bullseye. Docker allows you to run multiple apps on your server with ease, without having to worry if these apps are going to be conflicting or causing any issues.

• You can use docker on your server

• CloudPanel is a free hosting panel for easily managing websites and web apps. Here in this article, we learn the steps involve in installing and using CloudPanel on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux server.

Games

• In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Guardians are a primitive form of sentry turret that tracks the player with a watchful eye. Inspired by this, [npentrel] decided to whip up one of his own in the real world.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• So the thing Flatpak is supposed to fix for me as developer is that I don’t need to care about distributions anymore. I can bolt on whatever dependencies I want to my app and it’s dealt with. I also don’t need to worry about having software in distributions, if it’s in Flatpak it’s everywhere. Flatpak gives me that unified base to work on and everything will be perfect. World hunger will be solved. Finally piece on earth.

• Sadly there’s reality. The reality is to get away from the evil distributions the Flatpak creators have made… another distribution. It is not a particularly good distribution, it doesn’t have a decent package manager. It doesn’t have a system that makes it easy to do packaging. The developer interface is painfully shoehorned into Github workflows and it adds all the downsides of containerisation.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Cycling is a great way to spend time outdoors while simultaneously getting exercise and even as a mode of efficient transportation. And in the last few years due to the recent proliferation of e-bikes on the market and the pandemic, there has been an explosion in the number of people wanting to use bikes on a regular basis. A few people have gone a step further and have taken it upon themselves to create devices that make this experience safer, more convenient, or more fun. For this year’s World Bicycle Day, let’s celebrate these makers and how they were able to creatively embed Arduino products into their designs for a better cycling experience.

• Last month, Axiomtek launched a palm-sized AI developer kit compatible with the NVIDIA platform to deliver up to 21 TOPs of AI computing performance and reduce product development time.

• An oddity popped up recently which I ended up acquiring. An external box with 4 interesting SCSI devices inside and a SCSI card for a RiscPC. Time to dive in and see what we have…

• We were talking about [Christopher Barnatt]’s very insightful analysis of what the future holds for the Raspberry Pi single board computers on the Podcast. On the one hand, they’re becoming such competent computers that they are beginning to compete with lightweight desktop machines, instead of just being a hacker curiosity.

• Kickstarter recently featured a compact USB infrared transceiver based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. The PiBeam can be used to remotely control electronics such as laptops, TVs, etc. or it can be used as a Python-based learning platform.

• The Milk-V Duo is a small RISC-V embedded platform capable of running Linux and RTOS. The low-cost device features up to 26x GPIOs, optional 10/100Mbps Ethernet support and integrated with a H.264/H.265 video compression encoder and ISP.

Leftovers

• When a computer crashes, it usually doesn’t leave debris. But when a computer happens to be descending towards the lunar surface and glitches out, that’s a very different story. Turns out that’s what happened on April 26th, as the Japanese Hakuto-R Lunar lander made its mark on the Moon…by crashing into it. [Scott Manley] dove in to try and understand the software bug that caused an otherwise flawless mission to go splat.

Science

• The trio had spent six months at the Tiangong space station.

• A European spacecraft around Mars sent its first livestream from the red planet to Earth on Friday to mark the 20th anniversary of its launch, but rain in Spain interfered at times.

Education

• In the wake of the pandemic, we must demand a new deal for the community college that fulfills its democratic potential.

Hardware

• Over Apple’s decades-long history, they have been quick to adapt to new processor technology when they see an opportunity. Their switch from PowerPC to Intel in the early 2000s made Apple machines more accessible to the wider PC world who was already accustomed to using x86 processors, and a decade earlier they moved from Motorola 68000 processors to take advantage of the scalability, power-per-watt, and performance of the PowerPC platform. They’ve recently made the switch to their own in-house silicon, but this wasn’t the first time they attempted to design their own chips from the ground up rather than using chips from other companies like Motorola or Intel.

• Solid-state drives (SSDs) were a step change in performance when it came to computer storage. They offered incredibly fast seek times by virtue of dispensing with solid rust for silicon instead. Now, some companies have started pushing the limits to the extent that their drives supposedly need liquid cooling, as reported by The Register.

• When you’re putting together a computer workstation, what would you say is the cleanest setup? Wireless mouse and keyboard? Super-discrete cable management? How about no visible keeb, no visible mouse, and no obvious display?

• Our continuing journey to write a Tedium glossary takes us through the manufacturing process—and the weird products it sometimes led to.

• Let’s face it—Tedium would not exist without the manufacturing process. Manufacturing leads to stuff that is then sold. That stuff leads to things that I can write about. In many ways, I come at the tail end of the supply chain, with the goal of attempting to explain it all to you, the reader. (One plus side of this approach: I don’t need a factory.) But as I continue on my glossary of terms, I wanted to lean in on objects that were created, the materials they use, and the way that they generally make the world a little bit better. Today’s Tedium opens up the glossary once again. May it soon be filled with many more terms.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The scientific community has expressed frank skepticism about a lot of this, with some experts saying Musk has little to no reason for such optimism. What’s more, the corporate culture at Neuralink, which has lost several founding members, is reportedly plagued by a “culture of blame” and unrealistic deadlines imposed by Musk. They have stiff competition from rivals in the space, including Blackrock Neurotech, backed by billionaire and former Musk business partner Peter Thiel, which claims it has already implanted their chips in more than 30 people’s brains. On top of all that, Neuralink has faced at least two federal probes from regulators, one of them tied to whistleblowers’ claims that rushed testing led to the “needless suffering” of 1,500 animals — and deaths of over a dozen — in experiments since 2018. Neuralink has denied that they acted improperly with any animals, yet still, in some corners of the internet, it’s is less known for pioneering neuroscience than as the Musk company that allegedly tortured a bunch of monkeys.

• Hundreds of Indiana doctors are coming to the defense of Caitlin Bernard, the obstetrician/gynecologist who was recently punished by a state licensing board for talking publicly about providing an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim.

• In public statements, doctors across a range of specialties are speaking out against the board’s decision, and warning that it could have dangerous implications for public health.

• Any good bike ride should have a big climb to push your fitness, and a nice descent for the joy of careening down at high speed. [Glen Akins] has been recording his altitude during his mountain biking expeditions, and has now built a way to play them back on an aircraft altitude indicator.

Proprietary

• But many of the experts I spoke with were skeptical of how much AI will progress from its current abilities, and they were adamant that it need not advance at all to hurt people—indeed, many applications already do. The divide, then, is not over whether AI is harmful, but which harm is most concerning—a future AI cataclysm only its architects are warning about and claim they can uniquely avert, or a more quotidian violence that governments, researchers, and the public have long been living through and fighting against—as well as who is at risk and how best to prevent that harm.

Windows TCO

• The superintendent for Middlesex County Public Schools confirmed Thursday that the school division was the subject of a recent ransomware attack.

Defence/Aggression

• The protests, which have gathered momentum since two massacres in May, are denouncing a “culture of violence” and the increasingly authoritarian rule of the country’s leader.

• Tens of thousands gathered on Saturday for the fifth anti-government protest this month in Serbia’s capital Belgrade after two back-to-back shootings that killed 18 people, half of them children.

• A gunbattle involving an Egyptian border guard in southern Israel along the border left three Israeli soldiers and the Egyptian officer dead Saturday, officials said. It was a rare instance of deadly violence along the frontier.

• Lebanon’s foreign ministry said Saturday it would send an investigation team to Paris following reports that Beirut’s ambassador to France, Rami Adwan, has been accused of rape and intentional violence.

• To understand where US law enforcement’s impunity comes from, we have to look at the historic role of police in maintaining a racial and class-based order.

• Police in Florida have arrested one man and announced arrest warrants for two others believed to be the gunmen who opened fire along a crowded beachside promenade on Memorial Day. The shooting wounded nine people and sent others scrambling for cover. The Hollywood Police Department on Saturday said authorities have arrested suspect Jordan Burton and obtained arrest warrants for Ariel Cardahn Paul and Lionel JeanCharles Jr. The suspects will be charged with one count of attempted murder in the first degree, eight counts of attempted murder in the second degree and one count of carrying a concealed firearm.

• Mr. Fadnavis, who is also the State Home Minister, said that the detection rate for missing person complaints in the western State ranged from 90% to 95%.

• “There are instances where we found that false promises were made or false identity was used, with even married persons trying to mislead women. Cases of ‘love jihad’ have also come forward in large numbers,” he said.

• Dogged by accusations of proximity to the Kremlin, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party had hoped to clear its name by setting up a parliamentary inquiry to investigate foreign interference in French politics. But a draft report on the committee’s findings, which was leaked to the press this week, shows the move backfired spectacularly, finding instead that Le Pen’s policy stances sometimes echo the “official language of Putin’s regime”.

• Eşliye Çiçe (Fecire Erol) from the Zimek (Çığırlı) village of Hozat, Tunceli and Necef Duman from Hopik in the same village who had witnessed the Dersim massacre (Tertele) have lost their lives.

• 94 year old Duman had survived the massacre by staying under the dead body of her mother Besi who was killed by a firing squad, the Mezopotamya Agency reported.

• “This is the women’s last vote,” she said slowly and emphatically in English. “Maybe we will lose our voting rights. They will change everything. We will be like Iran because of Huda-Par.”

• That night, not long after Erdogan vowed in his victory speech “to be here until I’m in my grave”, the middle-aged woman at the polling station kept calling and texting to ensure she was not quoted or identified. Her fears over the stakes of the election for Turkish women was as strong as her certainty that retribution against opposition supporters, especially Kurds, would be severe.

• The Madhya Pradesh government on Friday suspended the recognition of the Damoh school that is at the centre of a controversy over allegations of non-Muslim students wearing hijab.

• “It is clear that you are someone who developed an entrenched Islamist extremist mindset, extreme anti-Western views and that you intended to commit terrorist acts both in the U.K. and overseas,” the judge said.

• King could be out in five years. He has already spent 367 days in prison, which will be taken into account and deducted from the length of time he has to serve.

• The catalyst is a new decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 27, which states that Ukrainians residing in the illegally annexed territories of Ukraine who have not received Russian citizenship are considered foreigners or stateless individuals. Foreign citizens will have “the right” to reside on these territories until July 2024. No deadline for their registration is given. Disturbingly, they may be deported if they “present a threat to national security.”

• Aggressive decrees such as these are just the latest stage of Russia’s “passportization.” Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last February, Russia had used this foreign-policy tool in the breakaway states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria, as well as Ukraine’s Donbas region.

• Isn’t there a point where a corporation and its investors have amassed so much wealth that they should be able to recognize there are other goals besides money that desperately need to be pursued?

• Mobilisation is the only method allowing Russian state to work. As mobilisation is a reaction to a crisis or a challenge, Russia always needs crises. Its state management just can not work without them. The Russian society has not learned how to substitute wars with other challenges that would be serious enough to mobilise the society. Since war is the most obvious crisis, Russia cannot afford years of peaceful life. It needs war. Otherwise, its ineffectiveness spirals the country down to economic and innovative degradation.

• This is why Putin always needed wars. He started with the war in Chechnya eliminating hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens, then he continued with Georgia, depriving it of 20% of its territory. He contributed to the war in Syria. He authorised the Wagner Group military operations in Africa. He needs wars because he runs Russia, even if he may not realise it.

War in Ukraine

• Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba hit back at Viktor Orbán at a press conference in Kyiv on Friday, after the Hungarian PM once again called on Ukraine to stop counter-attacking and negotiate with Russia instead, Pravda’s European edition reports. Kuleba said that Ukraine wants peace to be restored more than anyone, and that as soon as possible, “but a just peace, a peace that first and foremost includes the restoration of territorial integrity”.

• During the Qatar Economic Forum Bloomberg interviewed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The nationalist leader expressed sympathy for Ukraine but argued that sending them further aid will only lead to more deaths.

• “Emotionally it’s tragic, all of our hearts are with the Ukrainians,” Orban, 59, told Bloomberg. “But I’m talking as a politician who should save lives. There’s no chance to win this war,” he added.

• On May 22, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Health Sergey Glagolev addressed the 76th World Health Assembly, held in Geneva, on behalf of Moscow and Minsk. His speech wasn’t very long, so I’ve decided to break it down line-by-line: “On behalf of the Union State of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus…”

• With cross-border strikes, residents of the Russian region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horrors of war being waged at their doorstep.

• A rapid inspection of Ukraine’s air-raid shelters on June 3 has found that nearly one-quarter of them were either locked or unusable.

• The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he met South Korea’s defense minister on June 3 to discuss Ukraine’s needs for ammunition.

• Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry on June 3 protested to the government of Hungary over an official video that used a map of Ukraine that did not include the Russian-occupied region of Crimea.

• Ukraine’s interior ministry said Saturday that an inspection of the country’s air raid shelters found nearly 900 “unfit for use” and more than 250 locked. The announcement came two days after a woman in Kyiv allegedly died while waiting outside a locked shelter door during a Russian missile attack. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Rescue efforts are ongoing following a Russian air strike on a residential district in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Saturday night that injured 20 people and left three children in a serious condition, officials said. Attempted strikes on Kyiv were repelled by Ukraines air defence system in the early hours of Sunday morning, the capital’s military officials said. Read our live blog to see how the day’s events unfold. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Residents of the Shebekino district, in Russia’s Belgorod, region have been complaining on local social media channels that local authorities have charged them 3,000 rubles (around $37) per child to evacuate children from cities on the border with Ukraine.

• Employees of the Moscow metro, who were fired en masse after the publication of a list of potential participants in 2021 a pro-Navalny demonstration, have had their jobs reinstated in court. The head of the union for Moscow Metropolitan workers, Nikolay Gostev, spoke to publication Agentstvo about the proceedings.

• The leadership of St. Petersburg State University (SPBGU) has fired Mikhail Belousov, a professor at the university’s History Institute, for committing an “immoral act” by speaking out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The university posted its decision on its website.

• Shelling in the Belgorod region hit the villages of Novaya Tavolzhanka and Bezliudovka, both in the Shebekinsky district, killing two women, reports regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.

• At least 20,000 Starlink terminals have been shipped to Ukraine so far.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Never has the wrath and petulance of the American government been focused so relentlessly on a breach of official secrecy. The pursuit of Julian Assange is in its 14th year, as the U.S. continues trying to extradite him from London to stand trial for helping the world’s most powerful news organizations publish U.S. diplomatic and military intelligence in sweeping defiance of secrecy protocols. Assange, convicted of nothing, has been behind bars in Britain since 2019, when he was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy where he had sheltered for seven years.

• New documents show Julian Assange got little more than a mention at Mark Dreyfus’s media talkfest this year. Amid much talk about reform and transparency, the Government wants to draw our big media outlets into cozy secret relationships with Australia’s spies. Philip Dorling unpacks the Attorney-General’s Media Roundtable.

• In January, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus announced he was convening a national round table of “key stakeholders” to discuss press freedom.

Environment

• Hong is the founder and executive director of CHANGE – a non-profit organization with the mission of inspiring the community and raising environmental awareness with the aim of protecting nature and wild animals, combating climate change, and promoting sustainable development.

• Based on her activism, climateheroes.org included her in their 2015 “Climate Heroes” list. Four years later, in 2019, she was voted among the Top 5 Ambassadors of Inspiration at the 2019 WeChoice Awards and was named the Green Warrior of the Year at the Elle Style Awards.

• Hoang Thi Minh Hong is the fifth activist in Vietnam to have been arrested on the charge of tax evasion.

• At the same time, other researchers were mapping the region’s dry caves. As the various groups have compared their findings, they are discovering that the wet and dry caves are much more interconnected than previously suspected.

• Some experts even suspect that the caves of the southeast are entirely linked.

• “There’s only one cave in Quintana Roo,” says cave management specialist Peter Sprouse, who has been studying the area for years. “It’s just a case of connecting all the pieces.”

• Global negotiators have agreed to craft an initial draft treaty to end plastic pollution, a preliminary but crucial step toward tackling one of the most lasting sources of human waste.

Energy/Transportation

• Tallinn City Government made the proposal to the City Council this week and wants to introduce the change from July 1 as the free parking of diplomatic missions’ vehicles in public parking spaces will be reduced.

• The rail disaster, in the eastern state of Odisha, was among the deadliest in a nation with a history of rail safety problems.

• The disaster killed at least 288 people, and a preliminary government report described it as a “three-way accident” involving two passenger trains and an idled cargo train. Officials were investigating possible signal failure.

• A signal failure is being investigated as a possible cause of the three way collision which involved two passenger trains and one freight train.

• Friday’s crash is remarkable even in a country with a long history of train deaths.

• At least 288 people were killed and more than 700 injured in what officials described as a “three-way accident” involving two passenger trains and a freight train in the Indian state of Odisha.

*

• The rail car he was in was so full that there was only standing space.

• It felt “like the sky was falling on us or the earth was cracking open”.

• This means that the next closest station will be 30 kilometres away in Norway.

Wildlife/Nature

• The existing Macquarie Island Marine Park will be tripled in size, bringing a total of 475,465 sq km.

Overpopulation

• Arizona’s groundwater is stored in underground aquifers that take so long to replenish that the state rules require that planned homes or businesses reliant on them must be able to ensure water supply for the next 100 years.

Finance

• Now that the bill is law, the nation will not risk running out of money to pay its obligations for two years.

• \

• The development of construction and real estate sector has been weak in the early part of 2023. The amount of construction in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area grew rapidly during the period of zero interest rates but is expected to decline significantly this year. The largest drop is in residential construction, but there is also a slight decrease in commercial construction. The rise in construction costs slowed down significantly in April, and there has been a significant increase in bidding activity.

• Ordering groceries from Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats often costs more than buying direct from the same supermarket

• Another close interest rate call is looming for the Reserve Bank amid persistent inflation and stagnant productivity growth.

• The RBA board is due to meet on Tuesday afternoon for the June cash rate call after lifting interest rates 11 times since May last year in a bid to stamp down rising prices.

• US President Joe Biden has signed a bill that suspends the government’s debt ceiling, averting what would have been a first-ever default.

• The House of Representatives and the Senate passed the legislation this week after Biden and House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an agreement following tense negotiations.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, an estimated 7,500 worked there. Within six months, Musk—mired in debt from an acquisition now worth far less than the $44 billion he paid for it had whittled the company’s ranks below 2,000 staffers.

• Musk rid the place of its old guard, and anyone who criticized him, opting instead for staffers happy to serve his vision of a Twitter with fewer ads, fewer rules, and more “free speech.”

• The move, which the social media giant announced in a blog post on Thursday, comes in reaction to the looming passage into law of Bill C-18, the Online News Act.

• Facebook has said it will be forced to block news content from its platforms in Canada if the bill becomes law, something that could happen as soon as this month as the bill is currently being considered in the Senate.

• Dr Armend Bekaj, Programme Manager in the Foundation’s Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace project shares an overview of the most recent online seminar with the International Training on Dialogue and Mediation Alumni Network hosted jointly by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University.

• Irwin confirmed to Reuters that she resigned but did not provide a reason for her exit. Earlier, Fortune reported that Irwin’s Slack account at Twitter appeared to have been deactivated. Neither Irwin nor Musk have publicly tweeted about her departure. An email to Twitter’s press account requesting comment returned an autoreply with a poop emoji. Attempts to contact Irwin were unsuccessful.

• It is joining dozens of states that have asserting dominance over cities through a practice known as state pre-emption.

• Eight presidential hopefuls, with Donald Trump absent, spoke at an annual political rally in Des Moines to highlight their conservative bona fides.

• Tim Parlatore’s decision to quit because of Boris Epshteyn’s role as a gatekeeper looks very different given the news that he and other Trump lawyers haven’t been able to find the Iran document Trump claimed to have in 2021.

• Texas lawmakers passed more than 1,300 bills before the end of this year’s contentious legislative session, quickly sending them to the governor for consideration.

• All of them but one.

• Anthony Albanese has hailed Vietnam’s breakneck speed of economic development ahead of meetings with key leaders that will touch on Beijing’s assertive approach to the South China Sea.

• The prime minister arrived in Vietnam on Saturday for his first visit as leader amid concern in Hanoi over Chinese ships operating in its exclusive economic zone.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• [...] Over just a few days, we received hundreds of detailed responses, read them closely, and decided to publish some of them with minimal edits. We believe these letters are an important record, and we hope they’ll be informative for those working to end the war, trying to change the ruling regime in Russia, and wondering how to deal with people whose minds may never be changed.

• Why it matters: YouTube established the policy in December 2020, after enough states had certified the 2020 election results. Now, the company said in a statement, leaving the policy in place may have the effect of “curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.”

• YouTube will no longer remove videos falsely claiming the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen, reversing a policy put in place in the contentious weeks following the 2020 vote.

• The reversal comes as several notable online platforms have adjusted their policies to deal with election denial, including the reinstatements of Trump’s accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

• The proliferation of disinformation has raised questions about how social media platforms enforce their policies against misleading content about elections.

• As of June 2, 2023, YouTube has reversed that decision: The video giant announced that it “will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. Presidential elections.”

• Another popular article cites a fake news story planted by hackers in Jordan, saying that Saudi Arabian royalty funded 20% of Clinton’s campaign.

• While the articles are easy to disprove outside the Great Firewall, there’s less information inside it. They use screenshots from news sites like the New York Times and MSNBC—both blocked in China—in an attempt to give them more credibility. An article from Insight China (link in Chinese), a blog about overseas studies, uses a screenshot from the New York Times to introduce the FBI twist, but the headline says “Hillary is connected to ISIS.”

• As a result, Chinese readers are taking their [disinformation] to heart.

• Ukraine has submitted a formal note of protest to Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó over a propaganda video published by the Hungarian government, in which Crimea is shown on a map as separate from Ukraine, according to an official statement.

• What was not said in the Durham Report?

Censorship/Free Speech

• British author Salman Rushdie has said that he is writing a book about the knife attack that took place on him last year in New York, as per a report in The Guardian. In a pre-recorded Zoom appearance at the Hay Literary Festival, he said, “I’m trying to write a book about the attack on me – what happened and what it means, not just about the attack, but around it.”

• The award-winning author added, “It will be a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages. It’s not the easiest book in the world to write but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this … So I just have to deal with it.”

• Authorities have worked tirelessly to scrub the affair from history books, online discussions and the media. Every June, police descend on the homes of dissidents, placing them under house arrest and banning them from posting on the topic or speaking to the media.

• And with the student protesters now well into their 50s, and children born since the massacre being raised with virtually no knowledge of the event, the passage of time is helping the Communist Party erase memories.

• The U.S. imposed sanctions on an Iran-based technology firm Friday for its role in facilitating the Iranian government’s censorship of the internet as anti-government protests have swept the country since September.

• A firm known as Arvan Cloud, its co-founders Pouya Pirhosseinloo and Farhad Fatemi, and a United Arab Emirates-based firm were all sanctioned for helping to facilitate the Iranian government’s attempts to control and censor internet traffic.

• Arkansas is one of four states that recently passed laws that make it easier to prosecute librarians over sexually explicit books, a designation conservatives often use to target books with descriptions of gender identity and sexuality. On Friday, a coalition led by the Central Arkansas Library System, based in Little Rock, filed a federal lawsuit it hopes will set a precedent about the constitutionality of such laws.

• Meanwhile, it says there has also been an influx of people, thought to be security agents, “in civilian clothes roaming universities, taking pictures of students, and engaging with them” as officials try to enforce the hijab law.

• With candlelight vigils to the victims of the 1989 crushed student uprising in Beijing now only a memory, the anniversary is also a reminder of the freedoms Hong Kong has lost.

• From Peterson v. Harris, decided Friday by the California Court of Appeal, in an opinion by L.A. Superior Court Judge Audra Mori, joined by Justice Audrey Collins and L.A. Superior Court Judge Helen Zukin: In January 2021, plaintiff Sabrina Peterson posted a video and messages to her Instagram account accusing defendants…

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Supreme Court ruling barred Oklahoma from prosecuting crimes committed by Native Americans on tribal land, but some Black tribal members are still being prosecuted because they lack “Indian blood.”

• Each time he stood before a Chicago traffic court judge and told his story, the judge asked his name.

• “Jeffrey Kriv,” he’d say. That was true.

• The U.S. soon could witness “the most substantial Pride celebrations in recent memory,” one bill tracker said.

• The National Institute of Health, the main US government agency working on health research, is the largest biomedical founder. It employs nearly 20,000 people across 27 institutes and centers, financing research in the full range of medical issues.

• It might also soon be home to a very large unionized workforce. Nature reports that nearly 5,000 fellows—early-career scientists including graduate students and post-doctorate researchers—have filed a petition to unionize in order to improve their work conditions, compensation, and benefits.

• Kenyan content moderators at Meta have been fighting for better compensation for workers forced to watch videos of murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. Meta was initially unwilling to give in to these demands, but Kenyan courts are intervening on the side of workers.

• Last month, the prison authorities revoked Ms. Mohammadi’s telephone and visitation rights because of statements she had issued from prison condemning Iran’s human rights violations, which were posted on her Instagram page, her family said.

• “Dexter Barry’s disturbing, preventable death from medical neglect highlights a major flaw in how America treats its carceral system,” ACLU Florida told NPR in a statement. “We urge state officials to investigate Mr. Barry’s killing and pursue justice for his loved ones.”

• Barry told Jacksonville Sheriff’s Officer Jacob McKeon at least seven times that he needed to take his anti-rejection medications every day to survive, according to body camera footage that was reviewed by The Tributary. The next morning, according to the court transcript, Barry told Judge Gilbert Feltel the same.

• He was released from prison — and a life sentence — earlier this year when authorities acknowledged that Titus’ trial lawyer in 2002 was never given a police file with details about another suspect. Thomas Dillon was an Ohio serial killer whose five victims between 1989 and 1992 were hunting, fishing or jogging.

• There is no dispute that the failure to produce the file violated Titus’ constitutional rights.

Monopolies

Patents

• Companies from the open source community are warning that urgent action is needed to stop patent trolls. Unified Patents, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Linux Foundation are coming together to highlight that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is considering changes to rules that will embolden patent trolls further…

Trademarks

• In Stay You, LLC v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, LP (S.D.N.Y.), plaintiff is claiming that defendant’s use of the phrase “Stay True Stay You” infringes plaintiff’s trademark “Stay You,” and the defendant is arguing (among other things) that “the Urban Dictionary definition of ‘Stay You” is strong evidence that the phrase is in common usage…

Copyrights

• Early 2020 the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP) and IFPI launched legal action to compel local ISPs to block The Pirate Bay and Zamunda, Bulgaria’s most-visited pirate site. This week a Bulgarian court ordered local ISPs to block both sites, including all mirrors and proxies. The music groups say they’re pleased with the outcome but the details suggest that local ISPs were against the process right from the beginning.

• These sessions on artificial intelligence (AI) and open journalism will extend our work to support the public interest commons and a better internet for everyone, by following our strategy to support better sharing, sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. Both topics will also be part of the program at CC’s Global Summit during 3–6 Oct 2023 in Mexico City, now open for registration and session proposals!

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