● 06.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/06/2023: Reddit Layoffs and OpenGL 3.1 in Asahi Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

Audiocasts/Shows

• In our innards, talk all things Git

• In “Check This Out” Londoner shared a cool tool for generating secure passwords; Joe sheres a couple links for getting started with Git No feedback this episode. Get in touch with us!Download

Graphics Stack

• The Asahi Linux team has unveiled an exciting upgrade for Asahi Linux systems: the highly anticipated OpenGL 3.1 support. This leap in graphics drivers surpasses the previous OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL 3.0 versions, significantly boosting gaming experiences and overall application functionality. Additionally, the team has announced the elevation of OpenGL ES 2.0 support to OpenGL ES 3.0, opening doors to a whole new level of possibilities.

• Upgrade your Asahi Linux systems, because your graphics drivers are getting a big boost: leapfrogging from OpenGL 2.1 over OpenGL 3.0 up to OpenGL 3.1! Similarly, the OpenGL ES 2.0 support is bumping up to OpenGL ES 3.0. That means more playable games and more functioning applications.

• Back in December, I teased an early screenshot of SuperTuxKart’s deferred renderer working on Asahi, using OpenGL ES 3.0 features like multiple render targets and instancing. Now you too can enjoy SuperTuxKart with advanced lighting the way it’s meant to be:

• [SuperTuxKart rendering with advanced lighting]

• As before, these drivers are experimental and not yet conformant to the OpenGL or OpenGL ES specifications. For now, you’ll need to run our -edge packages to opt-in to the work-in-progress drivers, understanding that there may be bugs. Please refer to our previous post explaining how to install the drivers and how to report bugs to help us improve.

• With that disclaimer out of the way, there’s a LOT of new functionality packed into OpenGL 3.0, 3.1, and OpenGL ES 3.0 to make this release. Highlights include: [...]

Applications

• Our Machine Learning in Linux series focuses on apps that make it easy to experiment with machine learning.

• BackgroundRemover is a command line tool to remove the background from images and videos using AI. The AI is performed courtesy of U2Net, a machine learning model that allows you to crop objects in a single shot. Taking an image of a person, cat, etc. as input, it can compute an alpha value to separate the background from the panoramic view.

• U2Net is a neural network based on a two-level nested architecture. This offers two main advantages: the ability to capture information at different levels of scale and the ability to go deeper without increasing the computational cost too much. U2-Net’s authors aim to design a new neural network for salient object-detection that can be trained from scratch.

• BackgroundRemover is written in Python and published under an open source license.

Instructionals/Technical

• System calls are slightly different from what it suggests from its naming schema.

• In this guide, we will explore the process of installing and configuring a dual boot setup with Fedora and Windows. We will cover the necessary steps to prepare your computer, partition the hard drive, install Fedora alongside Windows, and frequently asked questions about Dual booting Fedora with Windows.

• If you are a network administrator, you surely know, how important it is to keep track of the leased IP addresses within your network and easily manage those addresses.

• For short the IP address management process is called IPAM. It is crucial to have a management tool to help you track allocation and classify your IP addresses, which can help you avoid network conflicts and outages.

• Are you having problems monitoring your Linux network bandwidth usage? Do you need help? It’s important that you are able to visualize what is happening in your network in order to understand and resolve whatever is causing network slowness or simply to keep an eye on your network.

• In this article, we will review 19 useful bandwidth monitoring tools to analyze network usage on a Linux system. The tools listed below are all open source and can help you to answer questions such as “why is the network so slow today?”.

• GTK, an abbreviation for GNOME Toolkit, is an open-source and feature-rich development toolkit used for creating GUI applications. It’s free and open-source and offers a rich set of UI tools for creating stunning and immersive desktop applications and UI elements for desktop environments and window managers. With GTK, you can develop standalone desktop apps to complete application suites.

• If you have been running Linux for a while, you might have bumped into the “failed to load module canberra-gtk-module” error on the terminal. This occurs on Linux desktops and, as you can infer, is caused by a missing GTK module known as the canberra-gtk-module.

• A port is a logical entity that represents an endpoint of communication and is associated with a given process or service in an operating system. In previous articles, we explained how to find out the list of all open ports in Linux and how to check if remote ports are reachable using the Netcat command.

• In this short guide, we will show different ways of finding the process/service listening on a particular port in Linux.

• In this post, you will learn how to install Glances on Debian 11. According to the tool’s website Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python. It allows real-time monitoring of various aspects of your system such as CPU, memory, disk, network usage etc.

• Guide on how to install the Fish shell on various Linux distros and how to build and install Fish from the source along with some basic usage of the Fish shell.

Games

• Almost exactly a year ago, we discussed the train wreck release of Knights of the Old Republic 2 as a port for the Nintendo Switch. How big a screw up was this whole thing from the start? Well, if you’re not familiar with our previous post on it, we can just start with there being a bug that makes the game literally unfinishable and take it from there. Aspyr, the company that did the port, apparently didn’t do the sort of QC to uncover this itself, and instead only learned of the issue when many customers who bought the game got very angry on social media some two weeks after the game was released for purchase.

• Released originally back in April, Transmogrify is a puzzle-platformer where you play as Chris — a janitor stranded at Future Perfect Labs where strange and deadly specimens have breached containment and overrun the facility. To help you get through it, you have access to the experimental Transmogrify device, which allows you to transform living creatures into tools and structures to get through various puzzles and platforming and hopefully escape the lab.

• To celebrate the release of the new Amnesia: The Bunker, GOG are giving away free copies of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.  All you need to do to claim it is be logged into GOG, scroll down a bit on the homepage and you’ll see the giveaway banner to add it to your library.

• Valve has released an update to Proton Experimental, bringing with it a few nice fixes for issues in various games so here’s a run over what’s changed.

• Amnesia: The Bunker is the latest in a series of horror games from Frictional Games, one that feels a lot like Alien: Isolation with a WW1 theme. Definitely not a game for the faint of heart — like me. Wow, this was a stressful game to play. Note: key provided by Evolve.

• Need even more games to fill up your Summer with? Humble Choice for June 2023 is out now with some fresh games and here’s a run over what to expect on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

• We’ve had transparent backplates for the Steam Deck for a while now but what about the front? Well, they’re on the way from two different companies.

• Something that not many indie titles are able to do, Dead Cells has now managed to hit over 10 million sales and still going strong. This news was shared in a press release yesterday June 5th, via Tinsley PR.

• Have a few minutes to kill here and there? Sandtrix could be what you need. It’s free, has a Linux version and got the attention of Tetris Holding, LLC under the previous name Setris so it got a DMCA takedown but now it’s back. But for how long?

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Based on the latest Alpine Linux 3.18 operating system, postmarketOS 23.06 is here as the first-ever version to ship the GNOME Shell UI (GNOME Mobile) graphical interface for supported phones and tablets. GNOME Shell on Mobile 44 is included in this release, which comes with a much-improved GNOME Software package manager.

• KDE Plasma Mobile 5.27.5, GNOME-based Phosh 0.27, and Sxmo 1.14.0 are among other graphical interfaces that are included by default and supported in the postmarketOS 23.06 release. Notable here is the fact that the Phosh 0.27 interface now comes with the Evince document viewer by default.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• In the world of operating systems, there are always loud voices complaining about one operating system or another, its lack of relevance, or wrong approach to a certain problem. Throughout the development of FreeBSD as an operating system there have been triumphs and setbacks, but ultimately both Linux and FreeBSD have evolved to be stable operating systems with very different philosophies and approach to start-up, set-up and usability. When choosing an operating system, it is important to consider the best tool for the job, rather than just what is most popular.

• I got an idea today (while taking a shower…) about _partially_ reusing Qubes OS design of using VMs to separate contexts and programs, but doing so on OpenBSD.

• To make explanations CLEAR, I won’t reimplement Qubes OS entirely on OpenBSD. Qubes OS is an interesting operating system with a very strong focus on security (from a very practical point of view ), but it’s in my opinion overkill for most users, and hence not always practical or usable.

• In the meantime, I think the core design could be reused and made it easy for users, like we are used to do in OpenBSD.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• openSUSE Leap 15.5 is here exactly one year after openSUSE Leap 15.4 and it’s built on top of binary packages from the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5 operating system. It’s powered by the same Linux 5.14 kernel as Leap 15.4 but with added drivers for better hardware support.

• openSUSE Project compares the Linux 5.14 kernel included in openSUSE Leap 15.5 with the upstream Linux 6.0 kernel series saying that the biggest changes are in the area of GPU drivers, supporting new graphics cards like AMD Radeon RX 7600, AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX, Intel ARC A380, Intel Arc A750, and Intel Arc A770.

• We’d like to announce that the openSUSE Release team plans to work on openSUSE Leap 15.6.

• openSUSE Leap 15.6 is expected to be released in early June 2024 and would reach its end of life by the end of the year 2025.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat is to stop packaging a native version of the LibreOffice suite for its enterprise Linux distro.

• According to a post on the Fedora Development mailing list, the official RPM packages for LibreOffice in RHEL have been orphaned — in other words, they no longer have an official maintainer. The official stated reason is that the company is switching manpower to fixing more critical issues, such as support for high dynamic range displays, and that uses of the RHEL workstation distro who need LibreOffice can install the Flatpak version instead.

• This doesn’t seem to be a direct result of the well publicised Red Hat layoffs back in April, which resulted in calls to unionize. The proximate cause seems to be that the Hatter who was the product’s lead maintainer, Caolán McNamara, has quit and gone to work for Collabora, the primary company behind the ongoing development of the FOSS office suite.

• Evolving customer expectations have forced retailers to figure out how to better manage the ripple effects that the pandemic, increased online shopping and supply chain disruptions have created— including handling customer returns. On the surface, returns may seem like a fairly straightforward problem, but there are many nuances and tradeoffs to consider.

• Customers want easy returns. For merchandise delivered to the home, the return experience can be a critical reason why consumers stick with a given retailer. Take Zappos, for example, their generous return policy for shoes—an item that’s tricky to buy without trying on—was one important ingredient in their early success.

• When we started the discussions on the requirements that led to the development of Hirte (introduced by Pierre-Yves Chibon and Daniel Walsh in their blog post), we explored using systemctl with its –host parameter to manage systemd units on remote machines. However, this capability requires a secure shell (SSH) connection between the nodes, and SSH is too large of a tunnel.

• Instead, Hirte was created using transmission control protocol (TCP) based manager-client communication between the machines. Since Hirte manages systemd units, it uses the D-Bus protocol and the sd-bus application programming interface (API), not only between hirte-agent and systemd, but also between hirte-manager and hirte-agent.

• Red Hat is delighted to welcome Penny Philpot as Vice President of the EMEA Partner Ecosystem. In this role, Penny will be responsible for Red Hat’s partner ecosystem business in EMEA, driving an ecosystem-first mindset and continuing to expand Red Hat’s footprint across the region through valued partners.

• We caught up with Penny to find out more about her impressive career, why she chose Red Hat and her open approach to leadership.

• It’s time to prepare for the end of maintenance support.

• It’s been almost ten years since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, and its maintenance support phase will come to an end in June 2024.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install kubuntu.

• Kubuntu is basically Ubuntu, but instead of Gnome desktop environment, Kubuntu uses KDE Plasma as desktop environment. Even though both systems are the same, the desktop environments are different and each has its own pros and cons.

• SmartNICs, the programmable network adapters that make data centre networking, security and storage efficient, scalable and modular, have started to play a significant role in the industry.

• Join Canonical at the second SmartNICs Summit in San Jose, California from June 13-15  to connect with engineers and managers who are interested in this field.

• 5G has the potential to revolutionise the telecommunications industry, offering high speed and connectivity for a wide range of devices ranging from radio access networks (RAN), user equipment (UE), and core networks. However, the high costs associated with 5G infrastructure have been a significant blocker for adoption, hindering innovation and growth in this area.

• This blog discusses the primary challenges faced in the telecom industry and how open source technologies are helping to resolve them.

Devices/Embedded

• Working towards automating a few things in a home often seems simple on the surface, but it’s easy for these projects to snowball into dozens of sensors and various servos, switches, and cameras strewn about one’s living space. The same sort of feature creep sneaks into some of the more popular self-hosted home server platforms as well, with things like openHAB requiring so much computing power that they barely function on something like a Raspberry Pi. [Paulo] thought there should be a more lightweight way of tackling a project like this, and set about building his own smart home server with help from some interesting software.

• [...]

• From here the major hurdle is that using the default software from these devices is fairly limiting, so [Paulo] reached for a Raspbee 2 Zigbee gateway for use with a Raspberry Pi and an extremely lightweight and customizable web server called Mako to make this happen. Using Lua as the high-level language to tie everything together he was able to easily deploy the server to control the Ikea hub and devices and automate them in any way he sees fit.

• Have you ever known what you wanted to say but couldn’t figure out exactly how to say it? For some individuals, that’s all the time. The gap between intention and action can be a massive chasm. [Pedro Martin] is trying to help bridge that gap with a Bluetooth RPM letterboard.

• With most of these devices, a Linux environment is included running on top of an ARM platform. If that sounds similar to the Raspberry Pi, it turns out that a lot of these old Android TV sets are quite capable of doing almost everything that a Raspberry Pi can do, with the major exception of GPIO. That’s exactly what [Timax] is doing here, but he notes that one of the major hurdles is the vast variety of hardware configurations found on these devices. Essentially you’d have to order one and hope that you can find all the drivers and software to get into a usable Linux environment. But if you get lucky, these devices can be more powerful than a Pi and also be found for a much lower price.

• Jonathan M created Trainbot with a Raspberry Pi Camera. It watches a stretch of train track outside his home, detects trains, and stitches together images of them.

• Everyone else at Pi Towers said their favourite thing about the project is the Wes Anderson-esque aesthetic of the screen recording above. My favourite thing is that the tab for the train watching website says “Onlytrains”, because I am easily amused.

Arduino

• Solitaire is any tabletop game that can be played by just one person, and it can take the form of cards, pegs, memory, and in this case, marbles. As Mark Donners discusses in his element14 Presents video, marble solitaire is made of 33 individual divots and a total of 32 marbles that populate each one except the center with the goal of capturing every marble until the last one lands in the middle. Due to the pattern being somewhat difficult to memorize, Donners constructed a custom board that uses an Arduino Nano and LEDs to light the way.

• Beer pong is a classic party game involving skill, persistence, and alcohol tolerance. Participating in friendly games of beer pong is a great way to socialize with peers, but what if you aren’t very good at tossing ping pong balls into red Solo cups?

• Crowdsupply launched last month a tiny embedded board powered by an ATmega32 microcontroller. This open-source device features an USB Type-C port and it provides up to 23x IOs with support for serial protocols as I2C, SPI, etc.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Libre is an open-source manufacturing execution and performance monitoring tool that allows you to define your master data, push your machine metrics, and start collecting and analyzing your manufacturing data to improve your operations.

• You may have noticed that it’s been quiet here on Opensource.com lately. That’s because there’s a new project in the works, and while there aren’t many specific details to announce yet, there’s plenty to talk about. What better way to start than with the entire internet?

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. As such it can help developers to verify that their websites are working and performing well with all major browsers. The protocol is standardized by the W3C and consists of two separate specifications: WebDriver classic (HTTP) and the new WebDriver BiDi (Bi-Directional).

• This newsletter gives an overview of the work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 114 release cycle.

• Developer Tools helps developers write and debug websites on Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 114 Nightly release cycle.

• Firefox being an open source project, we are grateful to get contributions from people outside of Mozilla:

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• But there’s another aspect that receives less attention, revealed here by a new paper that looks at how open access articles are used in a particular and important context – that of Wikipedia. There is a natural synergy between the two, which both aim to make access to knowledge easier. The paper seeks to quantify that: [...]

Programming/Development

• ExpressJS is a backend web application framework built on top of NodeJS which helps us manage the server and routing. >

Leftovers

Science

• We aren’t the earliest mourners.

• It doesn’t take long.

• A higher power exists.

• A hidden sign of consciousness.

• Decades before predictions said.

Education

• Millions of Chinese students sit for notoriously tough college entrance exams on Wednesday, the first since the country lifted zero-Covid rules that forced classes online for months on end. China’s education ministry says a record nearly 13 million students are registered to take the exams — known as “gaokao” — this year.

• The foundation, with close ties to the government, will organize summer school programs for students using the buildings and all the facilities of the allocated schools in 38 of the 39 districts of İstanbul.

• Oklahoma’s decision to allow the Catholic church to operate a public school continues a winning streak for religious conservatives.

Hardware

• AAEON’s UP Squared i12 is a single board computer with the same dimensions as the UP Squared (Apollo Lake) and UP Squared V2 (Elkhart Lake) boards, and mostly the same ports layout, but powered by a more powerful 12th generation Intel Alder Lake-P processor from a Celeron 7305E up to an Intel Core i7-1270PE.

• If you are a fan of LEGO bricks or Rube Goldberg, you should have a look at [Brick Technology’s] billion-year LEGO clock. Obviously, it hasn’t been tested for a billion years, and we wonder if ABS would last that long, but the video below is still worth watching.

• Op amps are typically used to build signal processing circuits like amplifiers, integrators and oscillators. Their functionality can be described by mathematical formulas that have a single, well-defined solution. However, not every circuit is so well-behaved, as Leon Chua famously showed in the early 1980s: if you make a circuit with three reactive elements and a non-linear component, the resulting oscillation will be chaotic. Every cycle of the output will be slightly different from its predecessors, and the circuit might flip back and forth between different frequencies.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Japan is on a mission to show its renowned gastronomy is not off-limits to those who do not eat meat.

• To stop the rise in food prices, one of the action plans prepared by the Agriculture Ministry is the closure of supermarkets on Sundays. This will encourage more low-price fights on working days and the opportunity on Sunddays for small businesses to earn, Latvian Radio and Latvian Television reported on June 6.

• Minister of Agriculture Didzis Šmits (United List) does not see a reason for announcing a state of emergency in the dairy sector, as farmers have requested, but hopes for additional European Union (EU) support for the sector, as well as plans a special program for restructuring dairy farmers’ activities to other agricultural sectors, LSM reports on June 6.

• For weeks now, Cyrille Traoré Nbembi has been filming video after video of the black smoke coming out of an old foundry and factory located just a few metres from his home in Vindoulou, an area on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire, in Congo. As his family and neighbours continue to suffer health problems, Nbembi reached out to the FRANCE 24 Observers team – and is calling on the government to take action

• Intense Canadian wildfires are blanketing the northeastern U.S. in a dystopian haze, turning the air acrid, the sky yellowish gray and prompting warnings for vulnerable populations to stay inside.

• Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee has likened the “phenomenon” behind the recent uptick in withdrawals from the city’s organ donation registry to the “black riots” in 2019, after four people were arrested over suspicious cancellations.

• Drought-plagued Nevada pledged to do away with 3,900 acres of grass in the Las Vegas area within six years, but a ProPublica analysis found that the state grossly overestimated how much of that grass would likely be removed.

• A single shot might someday replace spaying as a tool for cat-population control.

• The artificial sweetener sucralose (marketed as Splenda) is widely used and found in products like diet soda and chewing gum. According to a new study, it’s also capable of damaging the DNA material inside our cells.

• As DNA holds the genetic code controlling how our bodies grow and are maintained, that’s a serious problem that could lead to multiple health issues.

• We never knew.

• A presentation by the Director: Military Health Planning of the SA Military Health Service (SAMHS) left Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Defence (JSCD) under no illusions about the poor health of the national defence force’s healthcare facilities

• A Chinese woman killed herself in late May after her first-grade son was fatally struck by a teacher’s car on school property, sparking outrage among residents and netizens who blamed cyberbullying and government pressure for her death.

• The specific reason for her death remains unclear, but in a video recorded before she died, the woman, surnamed Yang, said that national security officers had told her to keep quiet about her son’s death.

• The US federal government’s ban on TikTok has been extended to include devices used by its many contractors – even those that are privately owned. The bottom line: if some electronics are used for government work, it better not have any ByteDance bits on it.

• The interim rule was jointly issued by NASA, the Department of Defense and the General Services Administration, which handles contracting for US federal agencies. The change amends the Federal Acquisition Regulation to prohibit TikTok, any successor application, or any software produced by TikTok’s Beijing-based parent ByteDance from being present on contractor devices.

• Last week, I discovered a new antivax scientist named Kevin McKernan, whose message had been recently amplified by long time quack tycoon Joe Mercola. At the time, his false claim was that SV40 promoter sequences in plasmid DNA contaminating the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines were somehow putting people at risk for cancer. In my deconstruction, I pointed out that this claim was an even more ridiculous variation on an old antivax claim that oral polio vaccines from the late 1950s to 1963 that had been discovered to be contaminated with SV40 virus were responsible for a wave of cancer. They weren’t, but this antivax claim keeps coming back from the grave (going back a decade, at least), ready to party. This time is no different, except that the claim is even more ridiculous than the movie from which I adapted that tagline to describe it. Why? Because it’s almost as though McKernan, his background in microbiology and (apparently) genomics, either does not know the difference between a promoter sequence and an actual gene or, more likely, knows the difference but knows that his audience doesn’t know the difference but is aware of the polio vaccine/SV40 story.(Take your pick.)

• All you want is a decent night’s sleep, so you decide to invest in one of those fancy adjustable beds. At first, it’s fine — being able to adjust the mattress to your needs on the fly is a joy, and yet…something isn’t quite right. Something nags at you every night, thwarting your slumber and turning your dreams of peaceful sleep into a nightmare once you realize your bed has locked you into a vertically integrated software ecosystem from which there’s no escape.

Proprietary

• Thankfully, this isn’t a Buttle/Tuttle mix-up. Just a reminder that no one is ever as unique as they think they are.

• Experienced game designer David Ellis is another developer to leave 343 Industries after working on the Halo franchise for more than a decade. This comes a few months after the studio’s restructuring and the departure of other veteran employees.

• Microsoft will pay $20 million to settle government charges that it collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent, officials said Monday. The Federal Trade Commission alleged that from 2015 to 2020 Microsoft collected personal data from children under age 13 who signed up to its Xbox gaming system without their parents’ permission and retained this information. To open an account, users had to provide their first and last names, an email address, and date of birth. The FTC said Microsoft violated a law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.

Security

• KeePass 2.54 patches a vulnerability allowing attackers to retrieve the cleartext master password from a memory dump.

• This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what is different between Istio 1.17.2 and Istio 1.17.3.

• One of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to constantly create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting customers temporarily rent access to a vast pool of established accounts at major providers.

• Verizon’s 16th annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) provides data on ransomware costs, the frequency of human error in breaches, and BEC trends.

• Google has released a Chrome 114 security update that patches CVE-2023-3079, the third zero-day vulnerability patched in the browser in 2023.

• Major companies have confirmed being impacted by the recent MOVEit zero-day attack, including BBC, British Airways and Zellis.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This week marks the 10th anniversary of the first story featuring National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden’s initial revelation: the role of Verizon in aiding NSA’s telephone metadata mass surveillance program.

• Internal DHS documents reviewed by Motherboard provide more detail on a DHS plan to monitor social media for content related to terrorists, the illegal opioid trade, and foreign interference bots.

• Microsoft is being fined $20 million by the US Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by illegally gathering kids’ personal information and retaining it without parental consent.

• Along with paying the rather small fine (slightly more than a tenth of a percent of Microsoft’s most recent quarterly profit), the FTC is also requiring the company to update its account creation process for children to prevent collection and storage of data, and extend those responsibilities to third-party publishers that Microsoft shares such data with.

• This evidence, according to Patterson’s arrest warrant [PDF], included reimbursements from the Network for Strong Communities, a state-registered nonprofit, for expenses including “gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, COVID rapid tests, media, yard signs and other miscellaneous expenses.” These expenses totaled nearly $7,000 over about two years.

• The police somehow obtained and used PayPal records as evidence of those reimbursements. The cops suspect charitable donations to the Network for Strong Communities were passed to Kautz et al, who then used the cash, as board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, to support those protesting against Cop City. Those protesters included the Defend the Atlanta Forest group, which Homeland Security considers violent domestic extremists, according to the police.

• “We’re here pleading our case to a government that has been unresponsive, if not hostile, to an unprecedented movement in our City Council’s history,” one opponent of the police training facility said.

• Residents in Atlanta shattered the record for turnout at a city council meeting Monday, as thousands lined up to voice their opposition to the construction of a massive police training facility known as Cop City. Ultimately, the Atlanta City Council voted 11-4 to approve $30 million in additional funding for the project, bringing the total to $67 million — more than double the original estimate. The contentious vote comes after a SWAT team raided the Atlanta Solidarity Fund last Wednesday and arrested three people who had been raising money to bail out protesters opposed to Cop City, charging them with money laundering and charity fraud. Forty-two protesters still face charges including domestic terrorism for opposing Cop City, and activists continue to demand answers over the fatal police shooting of environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán in January. For more on Cop City, we speak with Reverend James Woodall from the Southern Center for Human Rights, who spoke at the City Council meeting, as well as Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizer Marlon Kautz, one of the three people arrested in last week’s SWAT raid. Kautz says the charges are “malicious political prosecutions” with the intent to “suppress a political movement.”

• In the early morning of Wednesday, May 31, a heavily armed joint task force of officers from the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Teardown House, a long-standing community center in Edgewood—a historically Black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Atlanta—that doubles as a home for community organizers.

• It would take much more than a blog to outline all of what we learnt over the next year and more. Javier Ruiz, Policy Director at ORG wrote a comprehensive analysis, Collect it all, describing what specifically learnt about surveillance in the UK, which included the following: [...]

• Japan has joined the United States and Australia in signing a $US95 million ($A143 million) undersea cable project that will connect East Micronesia island nations to improve networks in the Indo-Pacific region where China is increasingly expanding its influence.

• The approximately 2250-kilometre undersea cable will connect the state of Kosrae in the Federated States of Micronesia, Tarawa in Kiribati and Nauru to the existing cable landing point located in Pohnpei in Micronesia, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

• After some initial public enchantment with artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies, people have been ringing alarm bells with increasing fervor. In Hollywood, concerns that AI will be used as a worker-replacement contraption has helped animate the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike. Katrina vanden Heuvel noted in The Nation that although AI could usher in “an era of unprecedented human health and happiness,” the bundle of technologies also “has the potential for massive economic disruption, weakened national security, and the erosion of personal privacy.” In other words, because we, the people, don’t control AI, it is in the hands of the 1 percent, and it could come to control us.

Defence/Aggression

• Iran claims it has a hypersonic missile capable of reaching speeds 15 times faster than sound amid tense United States-Iran relations over its nuclear program. The missile, named Fattah, has a moveable nozzle that makes interception more challenging.

• During a United Nations Security Council meeting in mid-May, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Africa Martha Pobee lamented the failure of international, regional and state peacekeeping efforts to prevent the Sahel’s violence from spreading.

• Iran presented what officials described as its first domestically-made hypersonic ballistic missile on Tuesday, the official IRNA news agency reported, an announcement likely to heighten Western concerns about Tehran’s missile capabilities.

• Last week, a report indicated that TikTok had stored creators’ sensitive financial information on servers in China – where government officials can unilaterally demand access to companies’ records. Now, a former ByteDance executive says the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) previously accessed the TikTok data of protesters in Hong Kong.

• Korean Children’s Union members are known for their red scarfs.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman amid strained relations between Riyadh and Washington. Blinken’s trip to Saudi Arabia that began Tuesday is his second since becoming America’s top diplomat. It also comes after Saudi Arabia under Prince Mohammed has become more willing to disregard the U.S. in striking its own decisions. However, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab nations still rely on the U.S. to be the security guarantor for the region as tensions over Iran’s nuclear program spill over. Blinken will also meet with other Saudi officials, attend an anti-Islamic State meeting in Riyadh and meet with foreign ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council.

• The second draft of the mandatory State Defense Service (VAD), which will start in January next year, can be applied for voluntarily until July 15. At the moment, the activity is low, head of the VAD recruitment and selection center, Major Rihards Rozenbaums, told Latvian Television on June 6.

• The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention released a report alleging that Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Thailand, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the US all participated in human rights violations against Abd al-Rahim Hussein al-Nashiri, a man accused of assisting in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

• Leon Gautier, the last surviving member of the French commandos who stormed the Normandy beaches defended by Hitler’s troops in 1944, on Tuesday joined President Emmanuel Macron at a seafront ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

• A vast network of tunnels 400 metres underground that has been under construction for nearly 20 years will soon begin operating as the world’s first spent nuclear fuel disposal facility – locking away radioactive uranium deep beneath the Earth’s surface for thousands of years. It is hoped the Onkalo facility in Finland will provide a solution to the problem of how to safely store the world’s nuclear waste.

• Authorities in Richmond, Virginia, say seven people were shot following a high school graduation ceremony held at a downtown theater near Virginia Commonwealth University. Interim Police Chief Rick Edwards said at a news conference that two suspects were taken into custody after Tuesday’s shooting. Edwards said officers inside the theater heard the gunfire and radioed to colleagues outside, who found multiple victims. Four had injuries that were not life-threatening. School board member Jonathan Young told Richmond TV station WWBT that graduates and other attendees were exiting the theater when they heard about 20 gunshots in rapid succession. That prompted a rush to get back inside that he likened to “a stampede.”

• Originally posted at TomDispatch. All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving? For me, that last question is radical indeed.

• Most mornings as I prepare for my run, I tune in to BBC news. Of late, the newscaster has presented, in sober British-fashion, the number of Palestinians killed the night before by the Israeli army in its near-nightly raids on homes and refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

• Coup attempts were frequent in Africa in the post-independence and Cold War periods. By comparison, the past 20 or so years have been quiet. From 2011 through 2020, the continent averaged fewer than one completed coup per year.

• Senegal has temporarily closed its consulates abroad following attacks on diplomatic missions in Bordeaux, Milan, Paris and New York among others, the foreign affairs ministry said on Tuesday.

• The Russian aggression against Ukraine shows that we have not learned the lessons of history and are paying a high price for it. Future generations will also pay a significant price for our generation’s sins: fractured and destroyed families; poor social and health services; and a polluted environment. Children with mental and developmental problems are the clearest examples of the intergenerational effects of war.

• The scientific quest for advanced aliens is about imagining not just who might be out there but also how we might find them. The physicist, mathematician, and polymath Freeman Dyson thought we shouldn’t expect anyone to try to signal us, but instead could look for what came to be known as Dyson spheres—massive spheres, or more likely swarms of satellites, that would surround a star so that an advanced civilization could catch and make use of all the star’s power. This is an excerpt from The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.

• Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring counteroffensive.

• “What accountability will there be for the Israeli soldier(s) who opened fire into a Palestinian community and shot a two-year-old in the head?” asked one journalist. “The track record isn’t promising.”

War in Ukraine

• The End Stage of American Empire.

• The tragedy unfolding in Haiti is a direct result of over a century of U.S. political, military and economic coercion.

• Russia may be buying back military components it exported to India so as to use them in its war against Ukraine.

• I tell you, serving as a New York Times correspondent these days cannot be easy. You have to convey utter nonsense to your readers while maintaining a straight face and a serious demeanor. You have to suggest the Russians may have exploded a drone over the Kremlin, that […]

• New intelligence report from Jack Teixeria’s Discord leaks reveals CIA, Europe knew about plot to blow up the pipeline.

• European Commission Statement Brussels, 06 Jun 2023 Russia’s attacks against Ukrainian civilian critical infrastructure reached an unprecedented level today with the destruction of the dam…

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 06 Jun 2023 Commissioner for Transport Adina Vălean and Deputy Prime Minister for Restoration of Ukraine and Minister for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development Oleksandr Kubrakov, today signed an agreement in Lviv, associating Ukraine to the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme…

• There is an unsolved problem with the lack of garbage cans and toilets at the border inspection post Grebneva in the Latvian-Russian border area. The war started by Russia in Ukraine exacerbated the situation, with people waiting for several days on the border, and the mountains of garbage on the roadside continues to grow, Latvian Radio reported on June 6.

• On June 6 2023, the Latvian government (Cabinet of Ministers) adopted a decision on the allocation of funding for contributions to NATO’s Comprehensive Assistance Package for Ukraine worth EUR 2 million in 2023, and approved matching contributions in the two following years, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed.

• What can you expect from a government headed by a comic actor named Zelensky?>

• As the West pours more advanced weapons into Ukraine that have the range to strike, not only inside Russian occupied territory in Ukraine, but inside the internationally recognized territory of Russia itself, the risk of nuclear war looms.

• Evacuation efforts are underway in southern Ukraine, where floodwaters are rising after a dam on the Dnipro River was breached overnight in the Ukrainian city of Nova Kakhovka. The breach has created an additional humanitarian disaster in an area that’s seen heavy fighting since Russia’s invasion. Ukraine’s government says floodwaters are threatening 80 towns and villages, as well as the city of Kherson, home to 300,000 people. The breach could also limit drinking water supplies across Kherson and Crimea. Ukrainian officials accused Russia’s military of deliberately sabotaging the dam, calling it an act of “ecocide,” while Russian officials blamed Ukrainian artillery fire for the breach. The disaster has raised fears of a nuclear accident at Europe’s largest nuclear power station, the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plant, which is upstream of the dam breach and relies on a reservoir formed by the dam for critical cooling systems. We go to Kyiv to speak with Olexi Pasyuk, deputy director of the Ukrainian NGO Ecoaction, to discuss the environmental implications.

• Atlantic Council experts answer pressing questions about the broken Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, including what it means for the ongoing war and if damaging it amounts to a war crime.

• Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have famously proclaimed a “friendship without limits” but the Chinese leader may be looking to a post-Putin Russia and cultivating ties with Putin’s PM Mikhail Mishustin, writes Anders Åslund.

• Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive is an important moment in the war with Russia but it is critical to maintain a sense of perspective and underline the need for long-term Western backing, writes Tennyson Dearing.

• Ukraine is continuing to evacuate thousands of people Wednesday after an attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam, a major Russian-held dam in southern Ukraine, unleashed a torrent of water, flooding two dozen villages and sparking fears of a humanitarian disaster. Follow our live blog for the latest updates on the war in Ukraine. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River that separates Russian and Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine has sent a torrent of water gushing through the breached facility, creating a new humanitarian disaster at the heart of the war zone and stoking fears of a nuclear escalation.

• Kyiv on Tuesday said it is evacuating over 17,000 people from flooded areas following the partial destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine. Ukraine accused Russian forces of blowing up the major hydroelectric dam, which represents a significant resource for the wider region by supplying water to a host of communities and Europe’s largest nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia. Follow our live blog for the latest updates on the war in Ukraine.

• Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, the world tennis number two, said on Tuesday she did not want her country to be in any conflict and did not support the war in Ukraine.

• Elina Svitolina’s fairy-tale run at Roland Garros, her first Grand Slam tournament since becoming a mother, has inspired and enthralled a French Open crowd stripped of home players. With war still raging in her home country, she hopes her feats on the Paris clay can bring a little joy to Ukrainians, too.

• Ukrainian law students and young lawyers are reporting for JURIST on developments in and affecting Ukraine. This dispatch is from Polina Dvornikova, a law student at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

• For weeks now, along the nearly 1,000-kilometre Ukrainian frontline that stretches from the northeastern city of Kharkiv south to Donetsk and then west to the mouth of the Dnieper River, there’s been a noticeable uptick in clashes, skirmishes, and full-fledged combat between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

• Five more Lithuanians have left to fight in Ukraine and have already reached their military unit, the 15min.lt news website reported on Tuesday.

• Belarusian tennis star Aryna Sabalenka says she does not want her country to be in any conflict and she does not support the war in Ukraine or its authoritarian ruler.

• The International Cycling Union (ICU) has suspended Savely Laptev, a member of Kazakhstan’s Astana Qazaqstan DT cycling team, over his online support of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

• A Kazakh court has sentenced a woman to three years in prison for saying online that Russia should “take over North Kazakhstan and its capital, Petropavl, like it took Crimea” from Ukraine.

• A top Ukrainian diplomat called Russia a “terrorist state” on June 6 as he opened his country’s case against Moscow at the United Nations’ highest court, and lawyers argued that Russia bankrolled a “campaign of intimidation and terror” by separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

• A Russian court on June 6 sentenced Ukrainian activist Bohdan Zyza from Russian-occupied Crimea to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges.

• Ukrainian authorities have blamed Russian forces for the destruction of the dam.

• One of the purposes of this terrorist action is to deprive Crimea of water, Kremlin spokesperson Peskow said.

• NINE PEOPLE WORKING at the Russian Embassy in Helsinki will be expelled from Finland, as per a decision made on Tuesday by President Sauli Niinistö and the Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy.

• How does one respond when a once-trusted friend turns out to be an aggressive threat to its neighbors? That’s what eastern Germans are wrestling with after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• The fighting spirit of Ukrainians has emboldened the European Union to ensure its member states – such as Poland – uphold democratic values.

• The wall of a major dam controlled by Moscow in southern Ukraine has collapsed, threatening Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and drinking water supplies. Both sides of the conflict are evacuating residents and blaming the other for damages to the dam.

• With Russia and Ukraine blaming each other for the collapse of the Kakhovka dam, experts say that an external attack or even structural failure might explain the disaster, but that it is not likely.

• Membership in the E.U. A security pact with America. And a restoration of borders, minus Crimea.

• Experts suspect an explosion collapsed the dam on the Dnipro River. Kyiv and Moscow blamed each other, and residents downstream were forced to evacuate to escape the cascading waves.

• Many Ukrainians have learned to live with occupation and shelling. On Tuesday a new menace began lapping at their doors.

• Assaults on trenches can be stealthy, or deafeningly loud. Either way, they are nerve-racking. Here’s how one Ukrainian unit says it carried out a successful attack earlier this month.

• The destruction of a major dam in Ukraine.

• Also, a victory for the Saudi-backed golf tour.

• The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of plans to attack the Nord Stream pipelines three months before thwy were bombed.

• Thousands of Ukrainians who were already on the front lines of the war in Ukraine now face a “monumental humanitarian, economic and environmental catastrophe” after the destruction of a key dam on the Dnipro River, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned on Tuesday.

• The big picture: The collapse of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam unleashed floodwaters downstream, destroying the homes of at least 16,000 people, threatening drinking and irrigation water supplies in the region, and raising concerns about the potential consequences for the massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

• Kyiv has not formally announced the start of operations. But on Tuesday, Ukraine said the Russians had blown up a dam on the Dnipro River, potentially imperiling residents and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

• A dam in southern Ukraine was split in half, but it is unclear what caused the damage. Thousands are being evacuated as dangerous volumes of water gush downstream.

• China and Russia conducted joint air force patrols over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea on Tuesday, as South Korea said it had deployed fighter jets in response to warplanes near its airspace.

• A man who threw a bag with trash into the territory of the Russian Embassy was detained in Vilnius, police reported on Tuesday.

• Finland will expel nine diplomats from the Russian Embassy in Helsinki for “acting in an intelligence capacity,” the Finnish president’s office said on June 6.

• Russian anti-war activist and anarchist Aleksei Rozhkov was deported from Kyrgyzstan in late May and is currently in pretrial detention in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg for allegedly setting the building of a military recruitment center in the town of Beryozovsky on fire in March 2022.

• Russian authorities said on June 6 the number of people killed by tainted cider in the regions of Ulyanovsk, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, and Udmurtia had risen to 25.

• Russian trawlers appear to be angling for more than fish, sailors are taking an interest in bridges and spies are being uncovered: In the far north of Europe, the Kremlin appears to be increasing its activity, and Norway is paying close attention.

• The matter was decided by the Finnish government’s foreign and security policy ministerial committee and President Sauli Niinistö.

• The presence of Russia’s consulate in Mariehamn on the demilitarised Åland islands has generated much political and public debate in recent weeks.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. But I had a more personal involvement as well.

• I wrote the essay below in September 2013. The New Yorker agreed to publish it, but the Guardian asked me not to. It was scared of UK law enforcement, and worried that this essay would reflect badly on it. And given that the UK police would raid its offices in July 2014, it had legitimate cause to be worried.

• Now, ten years later, I offer this as a time capsule of what those early months of Snowden were like.

• The May 23 teletype, titled “Releasing Information to News Outlets Without Proper Authority,” advised that unauthorized leaks to reporters would “not be tolerated. Any member found to be engaging in this behavior will be subject to discipline up to and including termination.”

• A headline on the website for The Times of India, one of India’s most popular and reputable newspapers, reads that “Sweden Will Soon Host the European Sex Championship.”

• According to the report, Sweden has officially recognized sex as a sport and, to determine who’s best at it, would host a tournament in which contestants would engage in daily encounters lasting up to six hours.

• The competition was apparently scheduled to begin June 8 in the city of Gothenburg.

Environment

• An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.9 struck southern Haiti early Tuesday, killing at least four people and injuring 36 others, authorities said.

• At least 42 people were dead and 11 missing in Haiti after heavy rains at the weekend triggered flooding and landslides, civil protection officials said Monday.

• An investigation by the National Bureau of Investigation in cooperation with Estonian authorities uncovered evidence that thousands of tons of waste were illegally transported between Finland and Estonia.

• Golf as a professional sport now has completely lost its way with the merger of PGA with LIV. Apparently blood money makes the greens greener.

• Climate action and economic development will be on the agenda as Treasurer Jim Chalmers visits New Zealand.

• Dr Chalmers heads to Wellington on Wednesday as the two countries mark 40 years of the Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement, known as the CER.

• Australia’s banking regulator will push banks, insurers and superannuation funds to properly account for climate risks under an updated charter.

• The Albanese government on Wednesday released an updated Statement of Expectations for the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA).

• Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated.

• The research, which adds novel detail about who will be most affected and where, suggests that climate-driven migration could easily eclipse even the largest estimates as enormous segments of the earth’s population seek safe havens. It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.

Energy/Transportation

• The Japanese Government plans to invest ¥15 trillion ($107.67bn) in hydrogen over the next 15 years under a revision of its Basic Hydrogen Strategy, according to Japanese media.

• Ford Motor Co. is recalling 125,322 SUVs and pickup trucks in the US, after the discovery that leaked engine fluids and fuel vapor could cause fires, according to a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

• An old report by the country’s official auditor, now in focus following a deadly train crash, indicates “mis-spending” of funds by Indian Railways while safety suffered.

• The price of lithium batteries has plummeted in recent years as various manufacturers scale up production and other construction and process improvements are found. This is a good thing if you’re an EV manufacturer, but can be problematic if you’re managing something like a landfill and find that the price has fallen so low that rechargeable lithium batteries are showing up in the waste stream in single-use devices. Unlike alkaline batteries, these batteries can explode if not handled properly, meaning that steps to make sure they’re disposed of properly are much more important. [Becky] found these batteries in single-use disposable vape pens and so set about putting them to better use rather than simply throwing them away.

Wildlife/Nature

• Oregon Democratic lawmakers stood at state Capitol and implored boycotting Republican senators to return and vote on bipartisan bills that are at risk of failure because of the month-long political stalemate. Among the bills cited are ones aimed at reducing drug overdoses, mitigating wildfire risks and shoring up seismically vulnerable dams. But neither side is budging on a bill on protections for abortion and transgender care, with Democrats saying it isn’t negotiable and minority Republicans insisting it die or be changed. Senate Minority Leader Sen. Tim Knopp blamed Democrats for the impasse and called their agenda “extreme.”

• A Latvian bear cub rescued from the side of the road is doing well at its chic new home near Paris, reports LTV show ‘Environmmental Facts’.

• Brazil’s government on Monday unveiled how it plans to meet a pledge to eliminate deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, using strengthened law enforcement against environmental crimes and other measures in the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

• A 3,300-year-old palace mural offers an exquisitely detailed view of several bird species, and presents an artistic mystery.

• Astonishing!

• More than 170 species of Lampyridae, or light-emitting beetles, light up North America’s nights. Worldwide, there are more than 2,000 types – many that have been around for millions of years.

• But some species are threatened with extinction.

• Habitat loss, overuse of pesticides, climate change and increased light pollution threaten some fireflies. Yet, these hazards have varying effects on species depending on their genetics and environments.

• Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has removed the Koala Referral Guidelines, replacing them with a weaker and far more complex system, again dependent on self-referral. Suzanne Arnold reports on the ‘Nature Repair Market Bill’ to establish a voluntary market for “biodiversity credits”.

• Increasingly, the likelihood of koalas surviving on Australia’s east coast is grim.

Finance

• Media legitimizing the GOP’s economic hostage-taking allowed the party to stick with it without fear of massive political blowback.

• The price freezes will not be lifted for the time being, but why should they be, and inflation will be down to single digit figures by the end of the year, Márton Nagy, Hungarian Minister for Economic Development, told Világgazdaság in an interview evaluating his past year on the job. The paper also asked about the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) and whether it can replace EU funds, and the Minister for Economic Development said that it can, and is even better than EU funds.

• Among EU member states, Hungary saw the biggest year-on-year decline in retail sales in April, Portfolio reports.

• An Australia-first proposal to make rent bidding transparent has been shelved after warnings of even worse inflation were aired by tenant and landlord advocates.

• Designed to help level the playing field for tenants and assist with the costs of renting, a ban on secret rent bidding would spark legal rental auctions and further push up prices, an inquiry into the proposal heard late last week.

• The federal government has rejected claims the latest hike in interest rates was partially driven by its decision to back wage rises for low-paid workers.

• The Reserve Bank of Australia on Tuesday hiked the key cash interest rate to 4.1 per cent in another blow for mortgage holders.

• A new report projects that economic growth will slow this year and remain weak in 2024.

• The wages of the lowest-paid workers should be protected from the rising cost of living but not everyone should expect a pay rise that eclipses inflation, the central bank head says.

• Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe has clarified his thinking about swelling pay packets and the inflationary outlook after the RBA’s interest rate decision on Tuesday.

• Australia is still on track to bring inflation down without triggering a recession but this “narrow path” is littered with risks, Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe says.

• Tuesday’s interest rate hike – the 12th in a particularly assertive tightening cycle – will ensure inflation comes back within its two-to-three per cent target range in a “reasonable timeframe”.

• The debt-ceiling crisis that recently played out in Washington between budget-cutting Republicans and the further explosion of debt under the Biden administration highlights again the failure of the US monetary system to provide effective liquidity for the world’s largest economy.

• The World Bank has raised its 2023 global growth outlook as the US, China and other major economies have proven more resilient than forecast but says higher interest rates and tighter credit will take a bigger toll on next year’s results.

• Real global GDP is set to climb 2.1 per cent this year, the World Bank said in its latest Global Economic Prospects report – up from a 1.7 per cent forecast issued in January but well below the 2022 growth rate of 3.1 per cent.

• Weight loss giant Jenny Craig will immediately cease trading from stores across Australia with employees to be made redundant after the company failed to sell its Australian and New Zealand operations of the brand.

• FTI Consulting took the reins of the weight management service’s Australian and New Zealand operations last month after they slipped into voluntary administration.

• The battle to raise the $US31.4 ($A47.2) trillion US debt ceiling has rekindled debate in Congress over funding for Ukraine, as House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he has no immediate plans to take up legislation to boost defence spending beyond what was in the deal.

• McCarthy’s comments could signal a tougher road through Congress when President Joe Biden next asks for additional funds for Ukraine.

• Amid a housing crunch, Singapore’s only racecourse is being cleared to make way for more homes.

• A mere 300,000 people participated in demonstrations in Paris on Tuesday according to the CGT union, the lowest since protests against the government’s deeply unpopular pension reform started in January, while police put turnout at 31,000. Despite the low numbers, French unions remain determined in their fight againt raising France’s retirement age. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• After months of widespread protests failed to budge the government, opponents acknowledge that the chances of turning the tide now are slim.

• French union activists and protesters once again took to the streets Tuesday to protest the controversial pension reform bill, which first sparked mass protests back in January. While tens of thousands of people still turned out to protest, the turnout—as of the time of this report—is lower than previous protests.

• As centrist Washington rallies around the Fiscal Responsibility Act—the GOP austerity bill blessed by the Biden White House as a shining example of elegant, difference-trimming compromise—student debtors are facing a far less pleasing lesson in bipartisan lawmaking. The debt agreement abolishes the pandemic-era pause on student debt repayments—a senselessly punitive reversal that comes as the US Supreme Court is preparing to decide a right-wing challenge to President Joe Biden’s own student debt-relief plan, pledging $20,000 in debt forgiveness per borrower. It will almost certainly rule in favor of the plaintiffs seeking its overthrow. In this charged atmosphere, Biden’s mishandling of the debt crisis is a stunning repudiation of yet another bold claim that Biden has made about his egalitarian record: commitment to relieve “unsustainable debt” for college students seeking basic middle-class economic security, and to “fix a broken system” of spiraling tuition and debt for college students.

• Reddit confirmed it was laying off approximately 5% of its workforce, or 90 employees, on Tuesday — in line with most other noteworthy tech companies — to make 2023 a year of layoffs and cost-cutting measures.

• The Wall Street Journal broke the news, revealing that Reddit’s laying off employees and looking to cut down on costs in an effort to break even next year. Furthermore, the company’s previous projections of hiring 300 people by the end of 2023 have been slashed down to 100.

• “CNN is not about me,” he said, according to multiple reports based on a transcription, and inside sources. “I should not be in the news unless it’s taking arrows for you.” Licht also vowed to “fight like hell” to earn back the newsroom’s trust.

• Several tech companies are dropping their workers like ballasts as they struggle to take on the diminishing economy. Job cuts are affecting major companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Etc. T-Mobile is no stranger to this as the company has dropped several hundred more employees. According to The Mobile Report, T-Mobile laid off nearly 70% of its notable T-Force customer service team.

• If you are unfamiliar with what T-Force is, it’s T-Mobile’s very notable team of customer service specialists. They were introduced back in 2018 when John Legere was the CEO. The consisted of several call centers full of waiting customer service representatives to help people with their troubles.

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has the potential to significantly diminish either the crypto industry’s presence in the US, or the power of the SEC.

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued the crypto company Coinbase, one day after filing a lawsuit against Binance. Nearly a year after SEC chair Gary Gensler asserted that most cryptocurrencies are, in fact, securities, the agency is finally trying to bring the crypto industry into compliance.

• New data published by Eurostat May 5 shows that Latvia is close to the bottom of the list in the European Union when it comes to social protection expenditure.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The decision, which is final and binding, is a decisive victory for Malaysia, the law minister said.

• On Sunday I spoke alongside Jeremy Corbyn and others at a packed meeting in Oslo to discuss freedom in the modern world, with particular reference to Julian Assange and to Guantanamo. It was a truly inspirational event.

• After decades of challenging the Democratic Party from within and without, professor and progressive activist Cornel West announced on Monday that he is running for president in 2024 as the candidate of the independent progressive People’s Party.

• Spain’s socialist leader Pedro Sanchez is betting his party’s survival on voters’ desire to keep the far right out of government. Although the pandemic is officially over, it has had a lasting impact on the mental health of young people across Europe. The Afghan artist Kubra Khademi’s bold artwork of the female body explores politics, culture and the patriarchy.

• Is Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a political chameleon, a phoenix, or a kamikaze? This is the question running through the minds of many on the left in Spain after May 29, when, less than 12 hours after his Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) was humiliated in local and regional elections across the country, Sánchez suddenly announced that he was dissolving the parliament and calling a general election for July 23—a full five months earlier than expected.

• Increasingly, Republicans are going after Black candidates for higher office. The GOP has fielded multiple Black nominees for statewide office and encouraged South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to run for president. Although these are mainly cynical attempts to peel away some Black support from Democrats, these developments do pose a threat to the party—but not for the reason many pundits think.

• On Monday of this week, new CEO Linda Yaccarino officially became CEO of Twitter. Of course, basically no one believes that she’s actually the CEO. Everyone knows that Elon Musk, who in the past has mocked the “CEO” title anyway, is still in charge. He still owns the company and is executive chairman, meaning that he can still fire Yaccarino whenever he wants. And he’s still managing the company and its products. Any honest look at what’s happening here would recognize that Yaccarino’s role is somewhere between “VP of Marketing & Advertising” and “the person we sent to meetings when Elon has pissed off someone important.” At best, she’s poised atop that glass cliff, awaiting the inevitable shove from Elon.

• Brazil’s former president is accused of spreading false information about the nation’s election systems. A conviction would block him from office for eight years.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• “Every statement of fact in the summary [provided by ChatGPT] pertaining to [plaintiff] Walters is false.”

• The European Union is pushing online platforms like Google and Meta to step up the fight against false information by adding labels to text, photos and other content generated by artificial intelligence, a top official said Monday.

• EU Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said the ability of a new generation of AI chatbots to create complex content and visuals in seconds raises “fresh challenges for the fight against disinformation.”

• Judging by the number of very angry press releases that landed in my inbox this past Friday, you’d think that YouTube had decided to personally burn down democracy. You see, that day the company announced an update to its approach to moderating election misinformation, effectively saying that it would no longer try to police most such misinformation regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election:

Censorship/Free Speech

• A Hong Kong pollster said it has cancelled the release of survey results on Hongkongers’ views of the Tiananmen crackdown, citing “suggestions” made by “relevant government department(s).” The findings of the annual survey, conducted by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI), were originally scheduled to be announced on Tuesday.

• [...]

• PORI published a statement hours before the slated release, saying that it was advised by “relevant government department(s)” to cancel the sharing of its June 4th Anniversary Survey Report based on a “risk assessment.”

• On Sunday, June 4, I went to Victoria Park to light a candle. In Poland, that’s how we commemorate the dead. That’s how we pray for the dead who lost their voice, and the living. Having made friends here during my exchange, I was made aware that Hong Kong used to have a similar tradition.

• [...]

• When I entered Victoria Park, the truth is, I was scared, very scared. I thought I would be arrested, probably even deported. But if that’s what it meant – that in 24-hours I might be on the plane to the safety of home – it was a risk worth taking. My Hong Kong friends don’t have the same luxury.

• In the end, I had nothing to lose as an exchange student, but the action felt important. I wanted to show that the exchange students are aware of what Hong Kong is going through. We know. We might be foreigners, but we are not foreign to Hong Kong’s struggle.

• Hundreds gathered in Taiwan’s capital on Sunday to mark the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown – a show of solidarity as Beijing continues to censor all trace of the 1989 incident.

• The annual vigil took place outside Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, with speakers including Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Jiangang, Taiwanese NGO worker Lee Ming-che, Danish artist Jens Galschiøt via video link, and ex-Tiananmen student leader Zhou Fengsuo — who spoke from New York, home to the world’s only museum about the crackdown.

• The government is seeking a legal injunction, and interim injunction, to ban unlawful acts relating to the 2019 protest song Glory to Hong Kong, the lyrics of which contain a slogan that has been deemed a call for secession.

• The store owner Debby Chan, a former district councillor, told HKFP that a banner was hung on the gate on Sunday. The date marked the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

• On Monday morning, some neighbours sent her photos of several police officers outside her store before the banner was removed and a notice was put on the gate, Chan told HKFP.

• Hong Kong’s law is “clearly stated,” Chief Executive John Lee has said when asked to explain the reason behind a number of arrests made in relation to the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary.

• The government of Hong Kong has sought an injunction to prevent performance and distribution, including online, of a song that has been mistaken for its national anthem.

• The song is titled “Glory to Hong Kong” and was composed as part of protests against the winding back of democratic freedoms in the Chinese territory.

• The ditty became popular among protestors and was widely shared – so widely shared that Google’s search engine often produces results naming it the Special Administrative Region’s (SAR) official anthem.

• In 2021, I published Shenanigans (Internet Takedown Edition) in the Utah Law Review; the article is about people using various schemes—some of which included forgeries and frauds—to get material vanished from Internet search results. (You can read the Introduction below.)

• Yesterday, I saw that someone tried to use a different scheme, which I briefly mentioned in the article (pp. 300-01), to try to deindex the Utah Law Review version of my article: They sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice to Google claiming that they owned the copyright in my article, and that the Utah Law Review version was an unauthorized copy of the version that I had posted on my own site: [...]

• “Oblivion and silence,” sums up a European diplomatic source based in Beijing. Thirty-four years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, those two words are what best define the mood on the anniversary of the bloody repression of June 4, 1989 against peaceful protesters who had spent weeks in Tiananmen Square demanding political reforms from the Chinese government.

• For several years now there has not even been an official ceremony in Hong Kong. The island, returned by the United Kingdom to China in 1997, was for decades the only stronghold in the People’s Republic where massive vigils were organized annually in memory of the victims of the 1989 student protests. But a growing crackdown on freedoms in the former British colony, where a harsh National Security Law has been in force since 2020, has resulted in another year of forgetfulness.

• Chinese students in Britain, the United States and elsewhere outside their homeland led vigils and rallies over the weekend marking the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre despite threats and potential violence from agents and government supporters.

• A group of overseas students in London called the “China Deviants” staged a rally in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, displaying posters and photos of the massacre, alongside plastic tanks and other props.

• In actions that imitated the banners, headband slogans brought by the young people who once congregated in their thousands on Tiananmen Square 34 years ago, the students’ slogans also spoke eloquently to their own generation in the wake of the “white paper” protests of November 2022.

• A spokesman for the Kremlin Dmitri Peskov announced on Sunday that journalists from ‘unfriendly countries’ were banned from covering St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) which is scheduled for mid June. The ban, announced just days before the event, effectively prohibits independent media organizations and critical journalists from reporting on one of Russia’s most prominent economic gatherings. No journalists from Western countries will be accredited to attend for the first time in history. Peskov stated “Yes, indeed. It was decided not to accredit media outlets from unfriendly countries to the SPIEF this time.”

• Many journalists have been jailed for reporting on issues that displeased Modi’s government. The Indian authorities have raided the offices of human rights organizations like Amnesty International and frozen their bank accounts, accusing them of money laundering. In February of this year, there were raids on the BBC’s local offices after the British channel broadcast a documentary that criticized Modi’s handling of the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat when he was the state’s chief minister.

• Most of the Indian media supports Modi and has either misrepresented this crackdown or ignored it altogether. New Delhi Television (NDTV) was one of the last remaining news channels that maintained a semblance of neutrality and reported on uncomfortable issues. However, a wealthy Gujarati businessman and Modi supporter, Gautam Adani, recently purchased NDTV in a hostile takeover. Many of NDTV’s leading news anchors resigned after the takeover, anticipating a change in its editorial policies.

• With near-total control of the conventional print and broadcast media, one can only find unbiased and critical reporting in the independent news platforms that are available online. But Modi and the BJP are now seeking to crack down on the space offered by the [Internet] for dissenting voices. The moves it is making could establish a wider template for authoritarian control of online space and platforms.

• When I wrote a cover ­story about the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, for the November 2017 edition of Harper’s Magazine, I wanted to take him down. To ruin his reputation and topple the statues of him. I didn’t realize it would make me an apologist for cancel culture.

• Last month, in partnership with Engine, we launched our new browser game that puts you in the shoes of a frontline content moderation worker at a growing online platform: Moderator Mayhem. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can play it in your browser on mobile or desktop. The response to the game has been great, and this week Mike is joined on the podcast by myself, our game design partner Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, and Engine executive director Kate Tummarello who spearheaded the project, to discuss how we built Moderator Mayhem and the impact it’s been having so far.

• The Atlantic Council is hosting its 360/0S Summit at RightsCon this week, and Twitter Files documents tell us more about how this VIP-room-within-a-VIP-room was formed.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On Monday, hundreds of journalists joined a strike to demand a change in management at Gannett, a business group that controls newspapers like USA Today.

• Their protest coincides with Gannett’s annual meeting of shareholders who have been asked by protesters to withdraw their trust from CEO Mike Reed.

• The move of putting veteran journalist Mak Yin-ting in police custody in Causeway Bay on Sunday without giving any reason amounted to “seriously hindering reporting,” the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) said in a statement issued on Monday.

• The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Russian authorities failed to adequately investigate the poisoning in 2020 of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, thus violating his right to life and a proper investigation under the European Convention of Human Rights.

• The administration of a prison in Russia’s Vladimir region has barred journalists from entering the facility, where the preliminary hearing into a new criminal case against already jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny is set to start on June 6.

• The BRICS Africa Channel editor-in-chief tells TV BRICS about the opportunities in the South African media market.

• CNN is on edge following a chaotic weekend of media reports and headlines suggesting CEO Chris Licht’s days at the network are numbered.

• Why it matters: The network was already under enormous stress following years of corporate mergers, product pivots and evaporating cable viewership.

• When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in 2010, he didn’t just usher in a new kind of computing device – the first mainstream touchscreen tablet – he also promised a new model for internet-based publishing: paid subscriptions.

• Jobs railed against the world of advertising-supported web publishing, correctly identifying it as the pretense for the creation of a vast, dangerous unaccountable surveillance system that  the private sector would build, but which cops and spies enjoyed unfettered, warrantless access to.

• Jobs promised a better internet: he promised publishers that if they expended the capital to build apps for his new tablets, that he would free them from the increasingly concentrated and aggressive surveillance advertising sector. Instead of paying for journalism with ads, Jobs promised that publishers would be able to sign up subscribers who’d pay cash money, breaking the uneasy coalition between surveillance and journalism.

• A growing number of politicians, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, are calling on the United States to drop its case against WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange, who has been locked up for four years in London’s Belmarsh prison awaiting possible extradition to face espionage and hacking charges for publishing leaked documents about U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among Assange’s supporters is Australian human rights attorney Jen Robinson, who has been a legal adviser to Assange since 2010. She joins us from London, where she calls for the case against Assange to be dropped and warns that continuing his prosecution “threatens free speech around the world.”

• By Caitlin Johnstone / CaitlinJohnstone.com If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centralized empire, in almost the same way you’d expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets. The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US […]

Civil Rights/Policing

• A former member of Iran’s police force who resigned in protest against the suppression of demonstrators, is said to have died under what colleagues say were suspicious circumstances.

• Joining a new digital community can be an exhilarating and empowering experience. This has been observed on numerous occasions when people join new platforms such as Nostr, BlueSky, Farcaster, Post.news, Tribel, and many others, as well as older social media platforms such as blogs, Usenet, LiveJournal, Xanga, AOL, Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

• Days after a planeload of Latin American migrants arrived on a private jet at a small Sacramento airport, a second such group has landed in California’s capital.

• Riga Mayor Mārtiņš Staķis told Latvian Radio June 6 that the decision on hanging the pride flag at the City Council building was taken by himself alone, to express solidarity with the LGBT+ community.

• Authorities say someone left a dead raccoon and a sign with “intimidating language” outside an Oregon city mayor’s law office. The Redmond Police Department says the raccoon and the sign were found Monday and named both Redmond Mayor Ed Fitch and Redmond City Councilor Clifford Evelyn, who is Black. The Bulletin reports that Fitch characterized the sign’s language as “racially hateful.” Evelyn described the act as a hate crime in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting. He says he has confidence in the police investigation.

• “Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups,” the SPLC’s report argues.

• Ubiquitous in immigrant households, the cookie tin might be a more apt metaphor for our journeys than the melting pot.

• Onur Yaser Can, a 28, took his own life in 2010 following alleged torture by narcotics police. After years of legal proceedings, four officers were ultimately convicted of “tampering or destroying official documents.” The plaintiff’s lawyers will appeal the decision, urging for the officers to be face trial for torture.

• From Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein’s opinion yesterday in Olympus Spa v. Armstrong (W.D. Wash.): The Olympus Spa is a Korean spa “specifically designed for women,” and the services offered there “are closely tied to the Korean tradition,” meaning patrons are “require[d] … to be naked” during certain services.

• Mr Wan Azlan said the authorities are tracing the suspect’s whereabouts.

• The Taliban have banned secondary and higher education for women since they came to power on August 15, 2021. Other gender-related restrictions include mandatory face coverings, segregation by sex, and requiring women to travel accompanied by a male relative.

• In March last year, the Taliban administration barred girls from attending high schools and in November, it prohibited women from attending university. Women have also been barred from going to many public places like gyms and parks, traveling any significant distance without a male relative and working in most fields outside of the private sector and health care.

• Hundreds of young Dutch people are at risk of forced marriage and abandonment abroad during the summer period because they often miss signs of danger. They are blind to these issues, often out of loyalty to their family, so that a seemingly innocent family visit abroad can end in a “one-way trip,” claimed the LKHA, a Dutch information center specialized in research and policy regarding forced marriage and abandonment.

• Victims realize only afterwards that there were signs, such as a sudden departure or a lack of control over their passport, visa or tickets. “For example, victims are kept out of certain conversations, or no return ticket has been booked for the victim,” the LKHA said.

• The unanswered question of the royal commission into aged care will be tackled by a new expert group seeking to lift standards, improve funding models and put people’s rights at the centre of the system.

• Aged Care Minister Anika Wells will lead a task force of economic, finance, public policy, First Nations and consumer advocacy representatives who will provide the federal government with the next steps in sector reform.

• In the early 1980s, two Black women sat at a table, a tape recorder between them. One, Margaret Walker, was an elder, a trailblazing writer and educator who had endured untold obstacles since her career began in the 1940s. The other, Claudia Tate, was a young academic hard at work on her first book: a study of Black women writers who, like Walker, had found success in spite of the misogynoir of the American literary landscape. “People think that [Richard] Wright helped me and my writing,” Walker told Tate, the hurt and indignation in her voice. “But I was writing poetry as a child in New Orleans. I had published in The Crisis even before I ever met Wright…. Do you believe I was just being introduced to literature by Wright?” Though Tate had never suggested that, decades of snubs and indignities animated Walker’s defensiveness. Eventually, though, she softened. “Here’s one of Wright’s letters,” she said, and I can imagine Walker rummaging through an armoire, or a filing cabinet, to deliver these precious yellowed memories into Tate’s lap. It is a beautiful thing to picture her, after shadowboxing her invisible detractors, realizing that the young Black woman sitting in front of her can be trusted.

• “We should not have to risk arrest and imprisonment for exercising our constitutional rights, including freedom of speech and equal protection under the law,” asserted one of the plaintiffs.

• Mansa Musa, who spent 48 years in prison, talks about what John Oliver’s recent Last Week Tonight segment on solitary confinement gets right and what it leaves out, including the fact that solitary was used to isolate Black Panthers and other radicals entering the prison system in the ’70s.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Submit a nomination now for the open seat on the NRO NC. Nominations close on 7 August 2023.

• A look at current IPv6 numbers, anomalies, and outliers around the region.

• Geoff Huston presented on DNSSEC and resolver use at RIPE 86, held from 22 to 26 May 2023 in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

• Wita Laksono gave an update on APNIC measurements and products at the BKNIX Peering Forum 2023, held in conjunction with ThaiNOG 5, in Bangkok, Thailand from 15 to 16 May 2023.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• On Monday, Spotify Technology SA said it would slack off 200 employees in its podcast division, which is about 2 per cent of the audio streamer’s global workforce. The company has complied to aggressive methods of expansion to compensate for its earnings from music streaming with other revenue-generating formats including podcasts, spending more than $1 billion on them and adding popular names such as Joe Rogan and Meghan, Duchhess of Sussex, to its brand campaign.

• We just got done discussing how, as the streaming video space consolidates and grows, it’s starting to behave more and more like the unpopular, consolidated cable and broadcast companies they once disrupted. Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification has come to streaming, in a big way.

Monopolies

• A coalition of the willing has united to confront what they say is a menace that could destroy us all: artificial intelligence. More than 350 executives, engineers, and researchers who work on AI have signed a pithy one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” But like the target of the last infamous coalition of the willing—Saddam Hussein and his mythical “weapons of mass destruction”—there is no existential threat here.

EU/EC

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 06 Jun 2023 The European Parliament and the Council have today reached a final political agreement on the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI).

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 06 Jun 2023 Today, the European Commission proposed to support 603 workers dismissed by a logistics company in Belgium with €2.2 million from the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund for Displaced Workers (EGF).

• The EU’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has published its annual report, which shows that in 2022 it opened 15 investigations into suspected fraud in Hungary, and in ten of these, the office proposed some kind of financial consequence. The investigation didn’t just compare EU member states, but included other countries where EU funds are used as well, Hvg.hu reports.

Trademarks

• The government, on the other hand, argues that the trademark registration scheme should be treated like government subsidies, which can generally be distributed in content-based but reasonable and viewpoint-neutral ways. (For instance, the charitable tax exemption can be limited to groups that don’t use the exemption to advocate for or against candidates, because the exemption is a subsidy and the no-electioneering condition is viewed as reasonable and viewpoint-neutral.) The Court will presumably hear the case this Fall, and will decide it by June 2024.

Copyrights

• Time travel with a hairpin twist: two women land in the psyche of Marie Antoinette in 1792, while she is thinking about 1789.

• K-pop boy band Stray Kids smashes records with five million-plus album pre-sales and more than two million copies sold on day one in South Korea. On the day of its release, Stray Kids’ comeback album 5 Star quickly became one of the bestselling titles in South Korea this year.

• Manga publishers Kodakawa, Shogakukan, and Shueisha hope to recoup millions of dollars in damages from the operator of Mangamura, which was once the largest manga piracy site. To assist in their legal battle in Japan, the publishers went to a U.S. federal court this week, requesting traffic stats and personal data from the site’s accounts at Google and Cloudflare.

• While the shutdown of RARBG is bad news for former users, scammers are happily exploiting the confusion to boost their own traffic. One copycat in particular, which has been around for years, has sneakily managed to convince some people that the site hasn’t been shut down. RARGB is working just fine! Oh, wait…

• After somehow managing to survive years of losses that pushed the company ever closer to bankruptcy, Rightscorp’s piracy settlement model suddenly underpinned recording industry lawsuits against ISPs in the United States. After joining the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), Rightscorp hopes that the Indie sector will reinvigorate its fortunes.

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Ellen is a Lawyer and Cultural Heritage professional who is currently a Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam where she teaches about open access in the Library and Information Sciences department.

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