● 06.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/06/2023: Istio 1.18 and FreeIPMI 1.6.11

Posted in News Roundup at 12:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• ZDNET has researched the best Linux laptops available based on performance, design, cost, and more to help programmers find the right fit for their needs.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Eleftherios will be delivering a keynote at #Akademy2023 where he will be talking about Libre Space Foundation and the value of free software in space.

• In this interview he tells us about how he got started in the space industry, and how his love for open source shaped his choice of career.

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about yay or nay for immutable file systems. Welcome to episode 65 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

Applications

• We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.18. This is the second Istio release of 2023, and the first to ship with Ambient mode! We would like to thank the entire Istio community for helping get the 1.18.0 release published. We would like to thank the Release Managers for this release, Paul Merrison from Tetrate, Kalya Subramanian from Microsoft and Xiaopeng Han from DaoCloud. The release managers would specially like to thank the Test & Release WG lead Eric Van Norman (IBM) for his help and guidance throughout the release cycle. We would also like to thank the maintainers of the Istio work groups and the broader Istio community for helping us throughout the release process with timely feedback, reviews, community testing and for all your support to help ensure a timely release.

• These notices describe functionality that will be removed in a future release according to Istio’s deprecation policy. Please consider upgrading your environment to remove the deprecated functionality.

• When you upgrade from Istio 1.17.x to Istio 1.18.0, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.17.x. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.17.x.

• The idea behind penetration testing is to identify security-related vulnerabilities in a software application. Also known as pen testing, the experts who perform this testing are called ethical hackers who detect the activities conducted by criminal or black hat hackers.

• Penetration testing aims in preventing security attacks by conducting a security attack to know what damage can a hacker cause if a security breach is attempted, the outcomes of such practices help in making the applications and software more secure and potent.

• If you’re working as a Linux/Unix system administrator, sure you know that you must have useful monitoring tools to monitor your system performance.

• As monitoring tools are very important in the job of a system administrator or a server webmaster, it’s the best way to keep an eye on what’s going on inside your Linux system/server.

• I try to stay on top of upcoming events but when things are due to happen a little way down the line, it’s a struggle.

• Screen recording comes in handy when creating a video tutorial, recording gameplay, live streaming or even something cool you just did and want to showcase it to others. Uses of a screen recorder are diverse and there are a ton of reasons to have one installed on your PC.

• Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great. Still, there’s always room for more, right? Intel thinks so, hence the release of Intel One Mono.

• Reading a computer screen wears out your delicate eye-balls. I would like the computer to read some web-pages aloud for me so I can use my ears instead.

• Here’s what I found out recently about the available text-to-speech technology we have on desktop Linux today. (This is not a comprehensive survey, just the result of some basic web searches on the topic).

• Read Aloud is a browser extension that can read web pages out for you. That seems a nice way to take a break from screen-staring.

• I tried this in Firefox and, it worked, but sounded like a robot made from garbage. It wasn’t pleasant to listen to articles like that.

• Read Aloud supports some for-pay cloud services that probably sound better, but I want TTS running on my laptop, not on Amazon or Google’s servers.

Instructionals/Technical

• Flathub’s users’ documentation has been revamped and is now available. So dive into it to enhance your Flathub experience.

• In this guide, we’ll take you through the installation process of Rust programming language on an AlmaLinux 9. You will install Rust with two different methods and learn the basic usage of the Cargo package manager for creating and managing the Rust project.

• The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is commonly used for file sharing between Linux and Windows machines. It’s not uncommon, however, to run into errors such as ‘Failed to retrieve share list from server: Invalid argument.’ This error typically indicates a problem with accessing shared resources, which can be caused by various issues such as network misconfigurations, firewall restrictions, or outdated SMB versions.

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Able2Extract on Debian / Ubuntu. This tool is a marvel if you work with many PDF files. What is Able2Extract Professional? Able2Extract Professional is a proprietary tool for working with and manipulating PDF files.

• This is how you disable the GUI after logging in and launching a shell:

• I inadvertently installed a graphical environment installing a new Debian Xen test server. This will let you reboot to a tty.

• For fellow BSD people, remember that the systemctl(8) command has also kudzu’d shutdown(8) on most Linux distros now. I wonder how long it’ll take for sudoedit(8) to be replaced with systemctl text-editor-edit.

• This unique format for distributing Linux applications keeps it simple — mostly.

• Since I’m using Qubes OS, I always faced an issue; I need a proper tracking of the configuration files for my systemthis can be done using Salt as I explained in a previous blog post. But what I really want is a version control system allowing me to synchronize changes to a remote repository (it’s absurd to backup dom0 for every change I make to a salt file). So far, git is too complicated to achieve that.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VMware Tools on Debian 11. Are you using VMware virtualization technology for your virtualized environment? If so, then you should definitely consider installing VMware Tools.

• The Uncomplicated Firewall, or simply UFW, is a widely embraced network security tool that provides an intuitive interface for managing Linux IPTables firewall rules. It offers a user-friendly platform to manipulate the usually complex IPTables commands, making the process of administering a firewall seamless for both beginners and experienced users alike.

• Understanding the currently mounted file systems in your Linux machine is crucial for system management and troubleshooting. Mounted file systems include disk partitions, device drivers, and remote servers that your Linux system recognizes and uses.

• Java, the robust and versatile programming language has always been a preferred choice of developers worldwide.

• XFCE stands as a remarkable desktop environment in the Linux ecosystem. Its core philosophy orbits around balance to provide a modern and user-friendly environment that does not compromise on performance or consume excessive resources.

• A while back I wrote about handling numbers in Vim when they have a dash in front of them, and in a comment, Seth pointed me to a special option in visual mode, ‘g Ctrl-A’, which will increment a column of numbers the way I wanted here. Since this is visual mode, I can select the numbers without the leading dashes.

• This tutorial will explain in short how to make LibreOffice Calc able to do XLOOKUP by adding an extension called Lox365. It will give you abilities of xlookup and more features like Excel. We would love to say thank you very much to the developer, Goose Pirate, for creating it.

• It is always a good practice to know the hardware components of your Linux system running, this helps you to deal with compatibility issues when it comes to installing packages, and drivers on your system using yum, dnf, or apt.

• In this article, we shall look at some useful Linux commands that can help you to extract information about your Linux system and hardware components.

• HTTP/3 is the third version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is used for data communication on the World Wide Web. Compared to its predecessor, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 operates over QUIC, a transport layer protocol, instead of TCP. This change reduces latency and improves the browsing experience.

• Falkon, previously known as QupZilla, is an open-source, cross-platform web browser that combines the prowess of KDE technology and the robustness of the QtWebEngine rendering engine. Designed with an intuitive interface, Falkon caters to power users seeking a reliable, efficient browsing experience while providing a customizable platform for the more technical folks.

• JetBrains GoLand is a robust integrated development environment (IDE) for Go programming, offering a comprehensive suite of features and tools tailored specifically for Go developers. It was meticulously developed by JetBrains, a renowned software company famous for creating leading IDEs for various programming languages.

• If you’re on a quest for a powerful, flexible, and intelligent development environment for .NET, look no further than JetBrains Rider.

• The “git archive” command permits the developers to package the entire history of a particular Git repository into a single archive file.

WINE or Emulation

• With this release, we’re adding back the ability to run games with Proton. While this can be an useful thing for testing compatibility, it is still recommended to stick with the builds provided by Lutris. We are now using @GloriousEggroll’s Proton based builds by default, which makes using Steam’s proton an even narrower edge case.

Games

• Between 2023-05-31 and 2023-06-07 there were 26 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Gear 23.04.2 is here less than a month after KDE Gear 23.04.1 and improves the Dolphin file manager to remember opened tabs on launch if it is configured this way by the user. It would appear that this functionality broke recently during the process of fixing a bug.

• The Spectacle screenshot tool has been updated so that its sidebar can accommodate long button text in some languages and the Gwenview image viewer now opens the specified app when using the “Open With” menu instead of a different one.

• Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear. Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• It’s a big day for Linux fans as an all-new version of the iconic Linux distro openSUSE is available to download.

• Plasma 5.27.4, Xfce 4.18, Linux kernel 5.14, and tons of improvements are among the new features in openSUSE Leap 15.5. Here’s what’s new!

• Get familiar with tail and cowsay commands. Learn new tips and tricks on GNOME desktop along with all the major Linux news this week.

• In a statement, the group behind open SUSE said version 15.5 had several new inclusions like container technologies, immutable systems, virtualisation, embedded development, and other high-tech advances.

• The new release will receive maintenance and security updates until the end of 2024. The old version, 15.4, have its end-of-life six months from the date of the latest release.

• Douglas DeMaio, a leader of the openSUSE project, said in a statement: “This release brings newer packages like Mesa and others, but Leap 15.5 is a non-feature release. Some of these newer packages to highlight include KDE Plasma 5.27, which is a Plasma Long Term Support version until the next one rolls out in 2024.

Debian Family

• Based on Debian 12, the latest version of the ARM/RISC-V distribution is now available to download and install.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical’s MLOps portfolio is growing with a new machine learning tool. Charmed MLFlow 2.1 is now available in Beta. MLFlow is a crucial component of the open-source MLOps ecosystem. The project announced it had passed 10 million monthly downloads at the end of 2022. With Charmed MLFlow users benefit from a platform where they can easily manage machine learning models and workflows.We are looking for data scientists, machine learning engineers and AI enthusiasts to take Charmed MLFlow Beta for a drive and share their feedback with us.

Open Hardware/Modding

• But why does this post exist if I already hacked it?

• Because Hyundai

• Sometime in late July 2022, Hyundai removed the links to all of their DAudio2 firmware downloads. Leaving only a message that said the updates would return on Sepember 1st. If I had to guess, someone at Hyundai/Mobis read my blog and they wanted to fix their issues. In anticipation of that I started to gear up to hack the latest firmware.

• Seeed Studio’s reTerminal DM is an upgrade to the Raspberry Pi CM4-powered reTerminal with a larger 10.1-inch touchscreen display and a greater range of features and interfaces for various industrial applications.

• A Raspberry Pi Camera Module acts as the eyes of the production line monitor, feeding real-time images from the production line. A computer vision model analyses the images to detect broken teeth, scratches, and dents in 3D-printed spur gears as they roll through on the homemade “conveyer belt”. When the model detects a defect, Modzy’s system updates and timestamps a log, recording what was wrong with the spur gear and exactly when it rolled past the detection point on the production line.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• There’s been something in the back of my brain that’s been bothering me about talks at the big conferences lately but I just couldn’t figure out how to talk about it. Until I listed to this episode of The Hacker Mind Podcast on Self Healing Operating Systems (it’s a great podcast, like and subscribe). The episode was all about this incredibly bizarre way to store operating system state in a SQL database (yeah, you read that right). The guest made no excuses that this is a pretty wild idea and it’s not going to happen anytime soon. But we need weird research like this, it’s part of the forward march of progress.

• [...]

• In the academic days (like our operating system example from the opening), it would be well understood that this was rocket ship research. It almost certainly wouldn’t go anywhere anytime soon, but was a step as part of the larger story of progress. As the arrow of time drags us all into the future, so does the path of progress, as long as you don’t live in Florida.

• Data backup is a crucial aspect of information management. Both businesses and individuals face risks such as hard drive failure, human error or cyberattacks, which can cause the loss of important data. There are many backup solutions on the market, but many are expensive or difficult to use.

• That’s where Minarca comes in. Developed by Patrik Dufresne of IKUS Software, Minarca is an open source backup solution designed to offer a simplified user experience while providing management and monitoring tools for system administrators. So let’s take a closer look at how Minarca came about and how it compares to other solutions.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Database migrations is one of the thorniest subjects there is. In short, they happen when a database schema must change to accommodate new or updated data. One simple example of a database migration is adding or removing columns from a table.

• There are many tools available to help the process of database migration, following a variety of approaches. In this article we will look at Atlas, a declarative tool for managing database schemas, that draws inspiration from infrastructure-as-code tools to manage migrations in a novel way.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Coming a little over a month after the LibreOffice 7.5.3 point release, LibreOffice 7.5.4 is here to address a total of 83 bugs that have been reported by users or discovered by the LibreOffice developers in the LibreOffice 7.5 series.

• The Document Foundation recommends all LibreOffice 7.5 users to update their installations to the new point release as soon as possible for better stability, reliability, and security.

GNU Projects

Licensing / Legal

• So, we’re not able to learn from these breaches because the attorneys are limiting what information becomes public. This is where we think about shielding companies from liability in exchange for making breach data public. It’s the sort of thing we do for airplane disasters.

• Incident Response (IR) allows victim firms to detect, contain, and recover from security incidents. It should also help the wider community avoid similar attacks in the future. In pursuit of these goals, technical practitioners are increasingly influenced by stakeholders like cyber insurers and lawyers. This paper explores these impacts via a multi-stage, mixed methods research design that involved 69 expert interviews, data on commercial relationships, and an online validation workshop. The first stage of our study established 11 stylized facts that describe how cyber insurance sends work to a small numbers of IR firms, drives down the fee paid, and appoints lawyers to direct technical investigators. The second stage showed that lawyers when directing incident response often: introduce legalistic contractual and communication steps that slow-down incident response; advise IR practitioners not to write down remediation steps or to produce formal reports; and restrict access to any documents produced.

Programming/Development

• The obvious niche that I missed was ‘languages that run in web browsers’, which started out being JavaScript and has spiralled outward from there (first with other languages that transpile to JavaScript and more recently with WebAssembly (WASM)). This niche became a massive thing over the past fifteen or so years and even spilled out from web browsers proper, with applications being written in ‘web shells’ such as Electron (which I consider basically browsers because, as I understand it, the API is primarily the browser’s DOM API).

• Here’s a fairly straightforward Scala 3 sample, using significant indentation. Can you spot the compilation error?

• The 49th G7 summit was held recently in Japan. Ukraine was one of the most critical issues at the meeting; most of the session topic was related to problems stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of the problems, aforementioned is food security. Because of the war, energy prices have been up. And that has stimulated food inflation. Of course, that is not the only reason but one of the important ones, like the disruption of the food supply chain.

• In this article, we will model the food and energy inflation of the G7 countries since the 1990s and make their 5-year projection. We will use the multivariate state-space model with JAGS simulation for that purpose.

• First, we will build our data set for the model. We will use food and energy annual CPI rates with the 2015 base-year, from OECD.

• We can’t trust browsers because they are designed to execute arbitrary code from website publishers. One of the biggest protections we have is Cross-Origin Request Sharing (CORS), which prevents JavaScript from making HTTP requests to different domains than the one the page is running under.

• A riddle on uniform spacings!, namely when considering eight iid Uniform (0,1) variates as visiting times and three further iid Uniform (0,1) variates as server availability times, with unit service time, the question being the probability a server is available for a ninth visiting time, T⁹.

• Hey! I had to start GSoC on sunday last week due to school, and I didn’t think that I’d write a weekly report for the first week but I decided to do it anyways.

• My plan for week 1 was: >This week I will set up a LLVM toolchain and sysroot for compiling >programs targeting LLVM libc. I will also start setting up a >“llvm-libc/Linux from Scratch” chroot.

• Because I played with LLVM libc before last week I had already completed this goal. Going forward I will only work in the sysroot until setting up crossdev because it’s simple and gives me everything I need to fix dependencies like Python.

• This far the project has been going pretty smooth, but I’ve also ran into some issues which I will comment on.

• catcream

• Learn how to use propensity score analysis in R! Join our workshop on Introduction to Propensity Score Analysis with R which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series.

PHP

• The filter_var() function is used in PHP to filter a variable with a specified filter. For more details, follow this guide.

• The die() function in PHP is used to handle fatal errors by displaying the message before terminating the script.

• The dechex() function in PHP is used to convert the decimal value into hexadecimal value. For more details, follow this guide.

• PHP offers a wide range of calendar functions that are useful for managing and displaying date and time data. Follow this guide to learn about them.

• The ucfirst() function is a built-in PHP function that allows users to change the first letter of a string to uppercase, without modifying the rest of the string.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• The command line is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal as a Linux user. While it may initially appear daunting, with the right knowledge, it can become an incredibly powerful asset. One key aspect of mastering the command line involves understanding redirection operators in Bash.

• In computer networking, port forwarding is a technique that allows an outside user to reach a service on a private network that’s otherwise inaccessible from the outside.

• In the realm of open-source operating systems, Linux Mint has become a beloved choice for many. Renowned for its versatility, Linux Mint boasts an intuitive and user-friendly environment that makes it a perfect gateway for those transitioning from other systems like Windows or MacOS.

Java and JavaScript

• Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java framework that offers a great developer experience, providing extensions for most modern development and management needs while enabling you to write imperative and reactive code. Red Hat OpenShift is a unified platform to run your applications at scale while offering a great developer experience for managing applications and their infrastructure. Quarkus and OpenShift are a great combination. Simply put, the combination of OpenShift and Quarkus helps application engineering teams to become highly productive and have a reliable runtime for their applications at scale.

• Three Bulk operations, the forEach(), search(), and reduce() methods used to retrieve all or specific elements, or to apply the same operation on elements.

• Autoboxing converts selected primitive class data into wrapper class automatically and for Unboxing the wrapper class gets converted into the primitive class.

• The “groupingBy()” method accepts a classifier function as a parameter, and this function determines the grouping key for each element in a stream.

• The placeholder “${}” is used as template literals to specify JavaScript expressions i.e., arithmetic operations, variables, call functions, etc.

• Create a Laravel project, install Tailwind CSS in it using the “npm”, configure the main CSS, write the code with Tailwind CSS, and build it.

• To use container queries plugin in Tailwind, install the container queries plugin and add them to the “tailwind.config.js” file. Then, us

• The opacity modifier is a utility class that allows users to adjust the transparency level of an element, such as text, button, background, etc.

• To use a plugin for typography in Tailwind, install the typography plugin and add them to the “tailwind.config.js” file. Then, use them in the HTML program.

• To use the forms plugin in Tailwind, install the forms plugin and add them to the “tailwind.config.js” file. Then, use them in HTML code.

• NodeJS is an open-source and cross-platform runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine for executing JavaScript code outside of a browser.

Rust

• Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

• This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org.

Leftovers

• Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

• Last time we talked about a video that purported to do plastic welding, we mentioned that the process wasn’t really plastic welding as we understood it. Judging by the comments, many people agreed, but it was still an interesting technique. Now [Inventor 101] has a video about plastic repair that also talks about welding, although — again, we aren’t sure all of the techniques qualify.

• A professional golf merger is a victory for Saudi Arabia and another sign that money can overwhelm almost any other force in sports.

• The deal to merge LIV Golf with the PGA Tour is a big win for the oil-rich kingdom, headlining a banner week that also includes a visit from the American secretary of state.

• The preeminent golf league suddenly decided that Saudi Arabia’s many sins are not a problem.

• Riyadh’s foreign priorities today are little more than a shadow of its plans at home. US officials should factor this reality into their plans to stabilize relations with the kingdom.

• Norway rescued a Russian in need of emergency medical assistance on board a scientific vessel stuck in ice near the North Pole in a spectacular helicopter operation, its rescue services said on June 7.

Science

• Life beyond Earth may depend on this.

• First, a disclaimer of sorts: I am posting another article on UAPs, yet I am not addressing the recent claims by David Grusch. This is for a couple of reasons. First, I am skeptical of Grusch. He is not the first seemingly well-positioned former intelligence official to make such claims, and I think there’s a real possibility that we are looking at the next Bob Lazar. Even without impugning his character by comparison to Lazar, Grusch claims only secondhand knowledge and some details make me think that there is a real possibility that he is mistaken or excessively extrapolating. As we have seen previously with the case of Luis Elizondo, job titles and responsibilities in the intelligence community are often both secretive and bureaucratically complex. It is very difficult to evaluate how credible a former member of the IC is, and the media complicates this by overemphasizing weak signals.

• Second, I am hesitant to state even my skepticism as Grusch’s claims are very much breaking news. It will take at least a month or two, I think, for there to be enough information to really evaluate them. The state of media reporting on UAP is extremely poor, and I already see Grusch’s story “growing legs” and getting more extreme in the retelling. The state of internet discourse on UAP is also extremely poor, the conversation almost always being dominated by the most extreme of both positions. It will be difficult to really form an opinion on Grusch until I have been able to do a lot more reading and, more importantly, an opportunity has been given for both the media and the government to present additional information.

• It is frustrating to say that we need to be patient, but our first impressions of individuals like Grusch are often dominated by our biases. The history of UFOlogy provides many cautionary tales: argumentation based on first impressions has both lead to clear hoaxes gaining enormous hold in the UFO community (profoundly injuring the credibility of UFO research) and to UAP encounters being ridiculed, creating the stigma that we are now struggling to reverse. In politics, as in science, as in life, it takes time to understand a situation. We have to keep an open mind as we work through that process.

• Hello, Icarus.

Education

• A few years ago I gave a short talk (slides) about myths that discourage people from blogging. I was chatting with a friend about blogging the other day and it made me want to write up that talk as a blog post.

• However, Stivers points out that the allegation of cheating is something she’ll have to self-report to law schools during the application process. State Bar associations, she says, are known to ask similar questions about academic history, meaning this misunderstanding could shadow her for years. Indeed, U.S. News & World Report advises law school and State Bar applicants to “err on the side of disclosure” and proactively report any “disciplinary procedures at their college” on the assumption that these can turn up in background checks. And, she says, the decision in her favor came down without an apology or acknowledgement of the mistake from her professor or the college itself. (The UC Davis Office of Student Support and Judicial Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.)

• An unwanted side effect of hybrid work is more frequent and longer meetings. This leaves less time for focused work.

• Meeting-free days acknowledge that issue and aims to provide undisturbed time for focused work.

Hardware

• With the incredible variety of projects submitted to our Op-Amp Contest, you’d almost forget that operational amplifiers were originally invented to perform mathematical operations, specifically inside analog computers. One popular “Hello World” kind of program for these computers is the “ball-in-a-box”, in which the computer simulates what happens when you drop a bouncy ball into a rigid box. [wlf647] has recreated this program using a handful of op amps and a classic display, and added a twist by making the system sensitive to gravity.

• [Zak] loves getting a notification on his phone when he gets physical mail. Enough to wire his mailbox slot with an ESP8285 to send him alerts. Previously, [Zak] used a cellular-based solution as the mailbox slot was not within WiFi range. However, the network provider for the A9G GPRS module decided to move to different towers, and suddenly the module didn’t work. Unable to find a provider that had sensible pricing, he got to work redesigning the module.

• In the 1980s, [Stephen] was working on his own RPG for the Commodore 64, inspired by dungeon crawlers of the era like Ultima IV and Telengard, both some of his favorites. The mechanics and gameplay were fairly revolutionary for the time and [Stephen] wanted to develop some of these ideas, especially the idea of line-of-sight, even further with his own game. But an illness, a stint in the military, and the rest of life since the 80s got in the way of finishing this project. This always nagged at him, so he finally dug out his decades-old project, dusted out his old Commodore and other antique equipment, and is hoping to finish it by 2024.

• GPS has changed the way we get around the globe. But if you command a warship, you must think about what you would do if an adversary destroyed or compromised your GPS system. The Royal Navy and Imperial College London think a quantum navigation system might be the answer. Of course, Heisenberg says you can’t know your speed and position simultaneously. But at the real-world level, you can apparently get close enough. The quantum sensors in question are essentially accelerometers. Unlike conventional accelerometers, though, these devices use ultracold atoms to make very precise measurements using a laser optical ruler, which means they do not drift as rapidly as, say, the accelerometer in your phone. Navigating with accelerometers is well understood, but the issue is how often you have to correct your computed position with an actual reference due to drift and other error accumulation. You can see a Sky News report on the trial below.The tests were done in a rapid prototyping pod carried onboard XV Patrick Blackett, a fitting name for an experimental ship since Lord Blackett was a Nobel laureate and head of the physics department at Imperial College for a decade ending in 1963.The underlying tech came out of the university back in 2018, but making it work in a real-world environment onboard a ship is another matter. You probably won’t have the cryonics and lasers needed for such a quantum compass anytime soon in your smartphone, but the tech could have civilian applications for larger vehicles.

• Spending on fab equipment continues to grow, despite macroeconomic challenges.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A. There are many things that steal children’s time. That’s partly because we fill their schedules with so many things to do. Instead of talking to them, we load them up with experiences and don’t give them time to reflect. We are turning them into people who act robotically, and they are not creative people and do not follow their interests. Another very clear component [of this] is that there are children who are very focused on social media and using the internet. Of course, technology can be put to good use with children, but when they are too focused on searching [the internet] or looking at one perfect picture after another they don’t realize how much time they spend doing that. For example, I know of a case where a child was interacting only through social media. And I think we can’t have them lose those experiences as children and let their lives be focused only on the likes they get.

• Air-quality readings like the ones expected across parts of New York State on Wednesday would not be seen as particular cause for alarm in some parts of the world.

• European Commission Speech Brussels, 07 Jun 2023 Remarks by Vice-President Schinas:

• Today, we are here to present a comprehensive, anthropocentric approach to mental health.

• The decision to fund medications to treat H.I.V.-AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean flew in the face of expert advice. But the U.S. did it anyway.

• Construction workers at both government and private sites have been unable to properly follow new guidelines for working under extreme heat, a union has said, saying tight schedules prevented proper rest periods. Last Saturday, a construction worker died after being found unconscious while an amber warning was in place.

Proprietary

• In our latest paper, we show that using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects. The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.

• Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.

• After we published this paper, we noticed that Ted Chiang had already commented on the effect in February, noting that ChatGPT is like a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Internet, and that copies of copies get worse. In our paper we work through the math, explain the effect in detail, and show that it is universal.

• You can’t walk out of your front door these days without tripping over someone ready to tell you about the next great thing in artificial intelligence. And, hey, it’s for good reason. The last few months have seen an explosion of new tools that have come online and are capable of some seriously amazing things. But for all of the hand-wringing over where humanity will even fit into the world any longer now that ChatGPT can write me a three stanza poem about how great encased meat is (yes, I did this for real), the current generation of AI tools are not such that they globally apply to replacing human work anywhere and everywhere.

• “This issue stems from a third-party security vulnerability allowing bad actors to appear more trustworthy than they are,” a Google spokesperson told CyberScoop in an email Monday. “To keep users safe, we are requiring senders to use the more robust DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication standard to qualify for Brand Indicators for Message Identification (blue checkmark) status.” Advertisement

• The DKIM requirement should be fully in place by the end of the week, the Google spokesperson said, marking a change from the previous policy that required either DKIM or a separate standard — the Sender Policy Framework — both of which are used by email providers, in part, to determine whether incoming email is likely to be spam and to theoretically authenticate that a sender is who they claim to be. The spokesperson added that Google appreciated Plummer’s work to bring the problem to their attention.

• “Can you show me the courts opinion in Varghese v China Southern Airlines”? “Certainly! … I hope that helps!”

• Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction. This “search result” is juicing Microsoft’s own product instead of respecting its users’ intent.

• Anyone with a valid Maryland driver’s license can upload their ID into the digital wallet. These can be used at airport checkpoints at BWI Marshall Airport and the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

• Yesterday was the Apple 2023 WWDC conference. There were some big announcements, here’s my thoughts…

• I caught up on the Apple event last night, and for the most part, I thought it was all a bit meh.

Windows TCO

• The CL0P ransomware variant evolved from CryptoMix ransomware, according to the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Wednesday advisory. It started as a typical ransomware as a service platform — where a core group of developers lease access to the malware and other infrastructure to “affiliates” and split any profits — and was known for its double extortion method of stealing and encrypting data and then publishing that data on its leak website. The group is also known to sell access to compromised networks to others — known as an initial access broker — as well as operating a large botnet spcecializing in financial fraud and phishing attacks, the advisory said.

• The BBC, itself a victim of the attack, reported today that the Clop group posted a notice on its dark web site warning firms affected by the MOVEit hack to email them before June 14 or stolen data will be published. The report says more than 100,000 staff at the BBC, British Airways Plc and the pharmacy chain Boots UK Ltd. may have had payroll data stolen.

• The commonality between them is that they use a company called Zellis UK Ltd. for payroll and it was Zellis that was compromised, as opposed to the companies directly.

• “This is announcement to educate companies who use Progress MOVEit product that chance is that we download a lot of your data as part of exceptional exploit,” a post purportedly by Clop stated. SiliconANGLE could not confirm the message because Clop’s dark website was down at the time of writing. The reported message went on to urge victims to email the group to begin negotiations for payment for the nondisclosure of stolen data.

• The Cl0p cyber-extortion gang’s hack of the MOVEit file-transfer program popular with enterprises could have widespread global impact.

• A cybergang believed to be based in Russia has demanded ransom from some 100,000 victims of a hack it orchestrated recently.

• The Clop ransomware gang issued “an ultimatum” companies targeted in a recent large-scale hack of payroll data

Linux Foundation

• The annual fee is $150,000 + an LF Silver Membership.

Security

• These days modern cars are nothing if not a grouping of networked software held together by bits of hardware. This is reflected not only in the rapidly increasing number of ECUs, but also infotainment systems and all-glass cockpits. For better or worse, this offers many exciting hacking possibilities, which [greenluigi1] was more than happy to explore with their new 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL last year. Naturally, Hyundai then proceeded to ‘fix’ these vulnerabilities, offering the exciting chance to test the Hyundai engineers’ homework, and proceed to bypass it again.

• Cloud native is becoming the defacto development method for new applications and workloads. Yet, the cloud-native trend also brings accelerated deployment timelines, which could leave security gaps in CI/CD. Studies also find a rise in time to remediate security incidents and uncertainty concerning cloud-native security tooling adoption. The cloud-native also

• VMware ships urgent patches to cover security defects that expose businesses to remote code execution attacks.

• Google’s June 2023 security update for Android patches more than 50 vulnerabilities, including an Arm Mali GPU flaw exploited by spyware vendors.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Kit Knightly On Monday, the World Health Organization and European Union announced the launch of their new “partnership”, building on the EU’s “highly successful” digital certification network, which was introduced during the “pandemic”. From the WHO’s website [emphasis added]: WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification…

• Contrary to a conservative myth, there is not a single example of biometric real-time surveillance ever having prevented a terrorist attack or other events of this kind. With false alarm rates as high as 99%, these technologies are not nearly reliable enough to be of any use. Requiring a court order as proposed by conservative hardliners is a mere formality, a smokescreen for mass surveillance. Their proposed ‘exceptions’ to the ban would in fact justify the pervasive deployment of facial surveillance technology to search for thousands of “victims”, “threats” and suspects of “serious crimes” who are wanted at any given moment. We must not normalise a culture of mistrust and side with authoritarian regimes that use AI to suppress civil society!

• The good news is that “only” a minority of younger American adults favor Big Brother-style surveillance of our home life. The bad news is that we’re discussing this because it’s a disturbingly large share supporting such a totalitarian intrusion. Worse, the idea seems to be gaining acceptance. We either need to get a handle on what’s going on here, or else potentially suffer lives monitored by unblinking eyes of the state, imposed by popular demand.

• “Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐​style in‐​home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor ‘the government installing surveillance cameras in every household’ in order to ‘reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,’” the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins and Jordan Gygi wrote last week. “Support declines with age, dropping to 20 percent among 30–44 year olds and dropping considerably to 6 percent among those over the age of 45.”

• US regulator Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found the tech behemoth to have breached sections 312.5 and 312.10 of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. This law “prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in connection with the collection, use, and/or disclosure of personal information from and about children on the Internet.”

• The company illegally collected data on children who used its gaming platform Xbox—it asked parents for consent only after collecting their full names, dates of birth, and email addresses to set up accounts.

• I did not know the identity of the person we were to meet. He or she had sent a “welcome pack,” a sample of classified documents that appeared genuine—but I was still uncertain, wondering whether the potential story might be an elaborate fraud or the work of a disgruntled crank. The source turned out to be no hoaxer but a contractor with the National Security Agency: Edward Snowden.

• Then age 29, Snowden had become disillusioned by what he had seen inside the NSA of the scale of intrusion into privacy in the post-9/11 U.S.—some of it illegal—and around the world. He had decided to become a whistleblower. We spent almost a week interviewing him during the day in his cluttered room, in the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, and then writing stories late into the night.

• At the end of one of the interviews, I asked Snowden for evidence showing the involvement of the NSA’s British surveillance partner, the Government Communications Headquarters. The next morning, he gave me a memory stick. I expected it to contain one or two examples; instead, it stored tens of thousands of documents, covering both the NSA and GCHQ. These were to form the basis for subsequent reporting by The Guardian, The New York Times, and ProPublica, which became partners in investigating and publishing the story. Snowden had given even more material to Poitras and Greenwald. In sheer quantity, this was the biggest leak in intelligence history.

• These same folks tell us that while public awareness of the harms posed by mass surveillance has increased over the past decade, there’s still much room for improvement. And all of them point to the upcoming battle to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as the next big test, but more on that later.

• “I warned in 2011 that ‘When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.’ I was right, as Edward Snowden’s revelations proved,” US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Register.

• Wyden was one of two US senators who had sounded the alarm about the Obama administration’s surveillance programs even before the Snowden leaks came to light.

• Today marks the tenth anniversary of the day Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance programmes of intelligence agencies worldwide. EU lawmaker and privacy activist Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) acknowledges this milestone as a key moment for the right to privacy and the defence of fundamental rights. At the same time, he calls for protecting the anonymity and encryption that whistleblowers need to expose such abuses of power.

• Breyer comments, “For the Pirate Party, Edward Snowden is a hero: By revealing the mass surveillance practices of the U.S. intelligence agency NSA and its partners, he selflessly defended the privacy of all and sacrificed his freedom. Even today he relentlessly fights for our fundamental right to privacy.

• Xbox encourages players, including children, to sign up for a Microsoft “gamertag” account to play online. The company gathers information including players’ email addresses, first and last names and birthdays when they sign up.

• According to the FTC, Microsoft stored information from 2015 until 2020 on around 10 million people, including children, who started to create accounts and gave some information but never completed the process.

• The lawmakers said recent reports from The New York Times and Forbes raised questions about statements made during congressional testimony in March by Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, and in an October 2021 hearing involving Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

• “We are deeply troubled by TikTok’s recurring pattern of providing misleading, inaccurate or false information to Congress and its users in the United States, including in response to us during oversight hearings and letters,” the senators wrote.

• We’ve done all we can we’re willing to do to make schools safer. We’ve added more cops, something that sounds like safety but just means we’ve offloaded school discipline to people trained in the art of violence. We’ve locked more doors, added more machinery, and opened up our students to all sorts of pervasive surveillance.

• Back in 2017 we established the Global South Strategy to further our mission of promoting human rights and internet freedom across the Global South. As part of this initiative, the Tor Project’s user feedback program was created – which aims to improve the user experience of our products by conducting usability research with at-risk communities alongside digital security training.

• In 2021, as part of a new grant, we expanded this program to Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. We also partnered with two other organisations who, like the Tor Project, are committed to defending human rights and internet freedom with privacy preserving technology: the Guardian Project and Tails. During the past two years we have collaborately closely to combat internet censorship and surveillance, and are pleased to share some of our findings in this report.

• Facial recognition is being used around the country to identify suspects, and we hope other courts recognize that the constitutionally protected right of due process demands that defendants be allowed to examine and question the reliability of this often faulty technology.

Defence/Aggression

• A UN court has ruled that ageing Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga is unfit to stand trial, calling instead for an ‘alternative’ legal procedure that would not end in a conviction.

• Judges at a special U.N. tribunal said they would create a procedure to allow them to hear evidence in the case against Félicien Kabuga, who has dementia, without the possibility of a conviction.

• Hundreds have been killed in the western Darfur region since the nationwide conflict in Sudan began, raising fears of protracted warfare in an area already torn by decades of genocidal violence.

• A jury at the Moscow City Court has found 45-year-old Moscow activist, Vitaly Koltsov, not guilty of attempting to murder 12 Russian National Guard officers.

• Wild stories have circulated for years about Vladimir Putin’s time with the KGB in Dresden. There are even rumors he helped orchestrate a murder carried out by German terrorists. But reporting by DER SPIEGEL has found that the Russian leader was more of a pen-pusher than a top agent.

• Russia’s Investigative Committee said on June 7 that it has started investigating the disappearance of the wife and teenage son of the North Korean Council Choi En Nam in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok.

• Twelve years after independence, South Sudan remains extremely poor and underdeveloped. A peace deal brokered in 2018 has failed to end conflict. And the government has failed to engage the people in state reconstruction, leaving the country without genuine and effective institutions of self-government.

• Senegal on Tuesday shut down several of its overseas consulates including in Paris and New York after they were targeted by a fresh wave of protests that has rocked the West African country domestically and abroad. Young protesters clashed with security forces last week, resulting in at least 16 deaths and hundreds of arrests, after opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was sentenced to two years in jail.

• Twenty-one people, most of them members of the security forces, have been killed in Burkina Faso in attacks by suspected jihadists, security sources said on Wednesday.

• The UK government has ordered China to shut unofficial police stations operating on British soil, Security Minister Tom Tugendhat told parliament on Tuesday.

• “Hungary stubbornly continues to maintain and even deepen its “connectivity” with Russia. (…) To continue to double-down on reliance on Russia while it attempts to decapitate your democratic neighbor is wrong” – this was one of the topics discussed by US Ambassador David Pressman at a reception held on Wednesday evening in honour of US-Hungarian scientific cooperation.

• A U.N. court links former Serbian officials to militias that killed civilians in the 1990s Balkan wars. That’s a lesson for the war in Ukraine.

• “They want the U.S. to make concessions, but no matter how much the U.S. concedes, they will not be completely satisfied,” said Chang.

• RFA was unable to confirm that China has intentionally altered its strategy to amplify the risk of escalation in order to deter freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

• Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama are reincarnated as children when they die. After the 1950-51 Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet, Beijing has made an effort to influence Tibetan affairs including the selection of a spiritual successor to the 10th Panchen Lama who died in 1989.

• In 1995, the exiled Dalai Lama chose 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima to be the 11th Panchen Lama, recognizing him as the reincarnation of his predecessor.

• The Panchen Lama’s responsibilities include leading a council of high lamas to find the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama after the current one dies.

• The 1995 recognition of the 11th Panchen Lama by the 14th Dalai Lama angered Chinese authorities, who three days later took the boy and his family into custody. They have since disappeared.

• Beijing then installed another boy, Gyaltsen (in Chinese, Gyaincain) Norbu, as their own candidate in his place.

• Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to U.S. user data, an accusation that the company denies.

• Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In the documents submitted to the court, he said ByteDance had a “superuser credential” — also known as a “god credential” — that enabled a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance, including those of U.S. users.

• Emphasizing that one of the plans to annihilate the people is to prevent their return, Sado stated, “As the people return to their land, the Turkish state targets the region with aircraft and seeks to portray Shengal as unstable. However, these attacks will not be able to prevent the return of the Shengal people because they know that if they do not return home, they will be destroyed. They are aware of the Turkish state’s goal of leaving Shengal without Yazidis.”

• Voluntary return is the „preferred type“, Frontex writes on its website, but this is only the case for 40 % of those concerned. Overall, „returns“ under Frontex mandate are steadily increasing. In the Corona year 2020, there were around 12,000 people, in 2021 already 18,000 and last year around 25,000.

• South Australia will open a trade office in Washington to pursue opportunities flowing from the AUKUS submarine pact and other defence programs.

• Funding for the office will be included in next week’s state budget, taking the number of SA trade offices in the United States to four. Others already operate in New York, San Francisco and Houston.

• This would enable the US and its partners to observe all information gathered by the aircraft.

• May was a busy month for diplomats in the Middle East. Twelve years after the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was officially welcomed back into the fold.

War in Ukraine

• “We were getting used to the shelling, but I’ve never seen a situation like this,” said one woman rescued in Kherson after a dam upstream was destroyed.

• Thousands of people sought shelter after escaping rising flood water amid an unfolding humanitarian and ecological disaster caused by the rupture of a major dam on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine.

• Klaipėda has become one of the largest container ports in the eastern Baltic Sea region following a collapse in shipments in Russia’s St Petersburg, according to the port’s CEO Algis Latakas.

• Case is viewed as possible defection attempt ahead of border reopening that would force them to return home.

• Authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka has pardoned Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen who was serving a six-year prison term in Belarus on charges related to civil disturbances that followed a disputed 2020 presidential election.

• President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko pardoned Russian citizen Sofia Sapega, who was previously sentenced by a Belarusian court to six years in prison, reports the Belarusian state-run news agency Belta.

• A local official in the Russian city of Vladimir, 200 kilometers east of Moscow, was detained on June 7 after she threw Molotov cocktails at a military recruitment center.

• Under a new procedure approved in May, non-scheduled flights to Lithuania will now need to be arranged in advance after several private jets flying to Russia were intercepted at Lithuanian airports earlier this year.

• Germany is preparing to host the biggest air deployment exercise in NATO’s history, a show of force intended to impress allies and potential adversaries such as Russia.

• The European Commission said on June 7 that it is launching legal action against Poland over its creation of a controversial body probing “Russian influence,” which is seen as targeting the opposition

• Poland has deported to Russia a former officer of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Emran Navruzbekov, who fled the country in 2017 and claimed the FSB fabricated terrorist cases against residents of the North Caucasus.

• The last phone call between the Russian President and the Saudi Crown Prince took place on April 21.

• Analysts said the countries’ mutual need to keep energy prices high would help them maintain close ties, despite signs that Moscow has undercut previous deals.

• An extensive poll of 11 European countries finds citizens less eager for competition and rivalry with China than Washington — or European elites — have become.

• Construction of 50 icebreakers, ports, terminals, and emergency rescue centers is planned.

• MINISTER for Foreign Affairs Pekka Haavisto (Greens) has refrained from shedding more light on the roles of the nine Russian diplomats who are to be expelled from Finland.

• “Unfortunately I can’t comment on what the people have done or how they’ve acted, but there’s justification for the expulsions. We’ve received an overall report on them and [the cases] have been discussed at a meeting of TP-Utva,” he stated to YLE on Wednesday.

• The Finnish foreign minister declined to provide details about the nine Russian embassy staff members who are being expelled, such as what posts they held or how long they have been in Finland.

• As rescue efforts plucked people from rooftops, and offered fresh water and shelter, Turkey’s president called for an international investigation into what caused a dam to fail.

• While economic corporation the challenges posed by artificial intelligence are on the agenda, Russia’s invasion presents immediate threats.

• Residents along the Dnipro River face devastation after the destruction of a key dam.

• Also, evacuations from flooding in Ukraine.

• China completed a second phase of joint air patrols with Russia over the Western Pacific on Wednesday, following flights on the previous day over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea, sparking concerns in Japan over national security.

• A new migration crisis is brewing on the border between Belarus and the European Union. According to a report by the Belarusian Investigative Center, the scheme first launched by the Minsk regime in 2021 will now involve Russia.

• Low-lying areas of Kherson were a panorama of water and floating debris. One man stood on a cabinet in his living room waiting for hours for help.

• 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.

• “What has just happened shows once again that anything can happen in a conflict situation,” diplomat Zhang pointed out.

• Ukraine’s armed forces have seized the initiative in the vicinity of Bakhmut and are now on the offensive, said Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar on Telegram.

• Roman Starovoyt, governor of Russia’s Kursk region, has reported a drone attack on a power substation in the village of Popovo-Lezhachi. After two bombs were dropped onto the facility the night before June 7, power was cut off from both Popovo-Lezhachi and Tetkino, another nearby village.

• In a phone call with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the destruction of the Kakhovka dam a “barbaric act,” according to the Kremlin’s press service.

• “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ~ George Orwell The Canadian government recently expanded Operation Unifier. The military training mission has been an important element in an escalatory dynamic that needs to be reversed to end the horrors in Ukraine.

• Ukrainian forces have gone on the offensive in Bakhmut, the Donetsk city that has been the epicenter of the war in eastern Ukraine, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said on Telegram on June 7.

• Vladimir Putin has directed Alexander Kurenkov, head of Russia’s emergency services, to organize aid efforts for residents of the Russian-annexed part of Ukraine’s Kherson region that’s in the flood zone following the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced the order.

• Around 5,000 residential buildings in the Kherson region are standing in water, following the destruction of the Kakhovka hydropower dam. 1,852 houses and residential buildings are flooded on the western bank of Dnipro, where 1,457 residents had to evacuate, as reported by the regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin. In the Russian-annexed part of the region, 2,700 residential buildings are flooded, and close to 1,300 people have already evacuated, as reported by TASS.

• The dam at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, a key piece of infrastructure in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, has been destroyed. Video shared online early Tuesday morning showed water streaming through the broken barrier. Ukraine’s Operational Command South, Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin, and the Ukrainian President’s Office said that Russian forces were responsible for blowing up the critical facility.

• In just an eight day period in May, the West authorized sending both long range Storm Shadow cruise missiles and F-16 fighter bombers to Ukraine, reversing a war long policy of not providing Ukraine with weapons that can strike inside Russia.

• Speculation is mounting that Ukraine’s hotly anticipated summer counteroffensive may be underway but initial stages are likely to feature probes and diversionary attacks rather than a big push, writes Peter Dickinson.

• Atlantic Council experts share their insights on the intensifying war in Ukraine.

• >President Cyril Ramaphosa along with five African Heads of State will in the coming weeks travel to Ukraine and Russia on an African Peace Initiative concerning the war in Ukraine.

• France will send aid to Ukraine “within the next few hours”, said President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday following a phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. A day after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, rescue teams rushed to evacuate people as floodwaters peaked. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Ukraine declared a full mobilisation at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, banning military-age men from leaving the country so that they could be called up to fight at any time. Days after Russia attacked, so many people were lining up to head to the front line that military commissariats were turning some away. But not everyone wants to fight. As the war drags on and the casualties mount, many are looking for ways to avoid it.

• China expressed “serious concern” Wednesday over the destruction of a major Russian-held dam in Ukraine, with Beijing saying it feared the “humanitarian, economic and ecological impacts” of the incident.

• Lithuania will send humanitarian aid to Ukraine in response to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam earlier this week, Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė has said.

• China has portrayed itself as neutral player, sympathetic to Moscow and peacemaker

• Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin on June 7 signed a decree on providing the prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague with data related to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

• Russia’s Defense Ministry claims a Ukrainian “saboteur group” blew up a segment of the Tolyatti-Odesa pipeline, the world’s largest ammonia conduit, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

• Banks in Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Hong Kong have started blocking payments for deliveries of electronics to Russia to avoid U.S. sanctions for helping Moscow evade Western penalties imposed over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on June 7 that a resident of the country’s Far East had been detained on a charge of high treason amid a growing number of such cases in recent months.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• After a week’s delay, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has forwarded to the governor legislation that aims to increase the transparency of the state’s public records law.

• Patrick had been holding up the bill amid increasingly frayed political relations between him and his Republican counterparts in state leadership, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Gov. Greg Abbott.

• The climate crisis is worsening by the day. Despite growing pledges to act, greenhouse gas emissions are breaking records. Climate change, pollution and extinctions are intensifying, causing instability, displacement and conflict. To quote U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, we’re on the “highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

• A Texas appellate court has officially refused to lift a gag order covering hundreds of lawsuits filed against Live Nation over the Astroworld tragedy. A three-justice panel just recently rejected a challenge to the seemingly far-reaching gag order, which Judge Kristen Hawkins implemented back in February of 2022.

Environment

• The war in Ukraine has brought an enormous human toll: Thousands of civilians have been killed, millions have been forced to flee overseas, it has destroyed homes, schools and hospitals. But beyond the immediate, visceral impacts, the conflict is also causing a climate disaster at a time when the world is already struggling to meet climate goals, according to a new report.

• A team of carbon accounting experts has evaluated the climate impact of the first year of the conflict, which started in February 2022.

• They found that a total of 120 million metric tons of planet-heating pollution can be attributed to the first 12 months of the war, according to the report published Wednesday. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of Belgium, or those produced by nearly 27 million gas-powered cars on the road for a year.

• In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers outlined how the Arctic could experience rapid sea ice loss as early as the 2030s. It’s a decade earlier than a 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which predicted that the region would lose its sea ice by the middle of this century, researchers wrote. And even if world leaders create policies that successfully lower earth-warming global emissions, the Arctic would still lose September sea ice by the 2050s, the study explained.

• Environmental groups are demanding that world leaders take urgent action as smoke from Canadian wildfires fueled by the climate crisis continued to smother eastern regions of the United States on Wednesday, pushing the Air Quality Index (AQI) in both nation’s capitals to “unhealthy,” with at least 16 states issuing air quality alerts affecting millions of people.

• European Commission Statement Brussels, 07 Jun 2023 Today in Brussels, Commission President von der Leyen, Executive Vice-President Timmermans and High-Representative/Vice-President Borrell met with COP28 President Designate Dr Sultan Al-Jaber to discuss preparations for COP28, the 2023 UNFCCC climate conference

Energy/Transportation

• If energy security is national security, then Moldova is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world and is in need of a comprehensive energy sector overall, writes Suriya Evans-Pritchard Jayanti.

• By Katie Myers, Grist. This story was originally published in Grist, and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.

• Austin Wall was attending an environmental law conference at the University of Tennessee not long ago when, during a discussion of natural gas pipeline projects, a map appeared on the screen and gave him a surprise.

• A replacement plane for an Air India flight diverted to Russia has left for San Francisco, carrying all passengers and crew. The original plane had been forced to landed in Siberia on Tuesday because of an engine problem. It had departed New Delhi carrying 216 passengers and 16 crew members. The airline said Thursday that the replacement plane is expected to arrive in San Francisco just after midnight. The U.S. State Department has said fewer than 50 American citizens were on the plane. One of the passengers said they were barred from leaving the hostel where they were staying and were unable to use their credit cards because of sanctions over Russia’s war on Ukraine.

• Passengers from an Air India flight traveling from Delhi to San Francisco and diverted to Magadan are staying in a public school building guarded by the Russian military. The emergency landing took place on June 6, due to aircraft malfunction.

• A new alliance plans to launch Australia into carbon-neutral commercial flight, and an airline owned by rugby league great Johnathan Thurston is a key playmaker.

• The goal is the first focus of the Hydrogen Flight Alliance, a group of aviation and green energy players that wants to fly the country’s first commercial emission-free hydrogen-powered aircraft between Brisbane and Gladstone in 2026.

• On June 5, Latvian Railways solemnly unveiled a new railway crossing – a pedestrian bridge on Ezera Street. However, on the first day, it has already been sharply criticized, and complaints have been made on social networks, because some people could not cross the bridge when they came to it, Latvian Television reported on June 6.

• In the Coinbase lawsuit, the SEC claims that certain tokens exchanged on the platform qualify as securities and are therefore subject to the SEC’s regulations, including a requirement for Coinbase to register as a securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency. Coinbase also, the SEC says, sells securities through its “Earn” staking program. At the heart of all of this is Gensler’s unwavering belief that most [cryptocurrency] assets are securities, so they fall under his agency’s purview and are subject to its rules. Coinbase says the tokens aren’t securities, but it sure would love some legislation that makes all of this clear (preferably that Coinbase helps write) rather than being in the middle of a years-long turf war between the securities and commodities agencies over who is in charge of what. The SEC maintains that it has oversight here and that Coinbase knows it.

• As the country becomes one of the world’s strictest crypto regulators, companies are exploring plans to expand internationally and possibly leave entirely.

• The hydrogen-friendly east coast of England has received another fillip today with news that px Group’s Saltend Chemicals Park in Hull will house a green hydrogen facility.

• European Commission Speech Paris, 07 Jun 2023 Your Excellencies,

• Dear Ministers,

• Dear Fatih,

• Let me first thank the IEA for hosting us here today at the 8th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency.

• Greater uptake of natural gas has helped substantially reduce urban air pollution in Beijing. Ahead of COP28 discussions this year, the United States, China, and other countries should encourage responsible natural gas production as a solution for reducing global emissions and urban air pollution.

• Without lithium, copper and rare earths, our mobile phones, electric cars and wind turbines wouldn’t function. Currently we are almost exclusively dependent on China for these critical raw materials. But there might be a way out.

Wildlife/Nature

• In “Flight Paths,” author Rebecca Heisman lays out the secrets of avian migration, as revealed over centuries of study by enterprising scientists.

• New Yorkers are accustomed to dealing with weather. This was something very different.

• More than 400 wildfires have been raging across Canada for days, and smoke from the provinces of Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario has reached the northeastern U.S.

• A guide to what comes next—and what this moment explains about our warming planet

• New York City is shrouded in a smoky, apocalyptic haze, which will persist all day today (June 7).

• Wildfires burning across Canada are pouring smoke into the Great Lakes, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states again Wednesday, with alerts up from New York State to Washington, D.C.

• The not-COVID reason to mask is here.

• As the world warms and Canada burns, what once seemed unprecedented is becoming familiar.

• There’s nowhere to escape the harm from wildfires.

• Massive plumes of smoke from hundreds of Canadian fires, enveloped millions in smoke, triggering dangerous air quality warnings in both countries and turning skies an ashen orange.

• Images of the fires in Canada and the surreal skies caused by the drifting smoke

• A rafting trip yields insights about a national treasure that seems permanent but is always being changed, lately by humans.

• The case was brought after the last government’s final climate report.

Overpopulation

• A prolonged drought in East Africa has increased lions targeting livestock and causing significant financial losses for herders. In retaliation to recent attacks near Kenya’s Amboseli Park, the Maasai people have killed six wild lions.

• The Big Life Foundation, which has run the compensation program for 20 years, said it cannot afford to pay the market price but asserted that the amount cannot be disregarded because it at least expresses solidarity with herders for their loss.

Finance

• The lira plummeted to yet another all-time low against the US dollar and the Euro. Despite overall stability in global gold prices, gold prices also reached record highs.

• I have been generally skeptical of claims that blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are major innovations. Back in 2017 Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark published Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree, showing that Satoshi Nakamoto assembled a set of previously published components in a novel way to create Bitcoin. Essentially the only innovation among the components was the Longest Chain Rule.

• But, for good or ill, there is at least one genuinely innovative feature of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and in Flash loans, flash attacks, and the future of DeFi Aidan Saggers, Lukas Alemu and Irina Mnohoghitnei of the Bank of England provide an excellent overview of it. They:

• analysed the Ethereum blockchain (using Alchemy’s archive node) and gathered every transaction which has utilised the ‘FlashLoan’ smart contract provided by DeFi protocol Aave V1 and V2. The Aave protocol, one of the largest DeFi liquidity providers, popularised flash loans and is often credited with their design. Using this data we were able to gather 60,000 unique transactions from Aave’s flash loan inception through to 2023

• Below the fold I discuss their overview and some of the many innovative ways in which flash loans have been used.

• Australia has ushered in a “retail recession” and recorded its second quarter in a row of declining spending in inflation-controlled terms.

• Real retail turnover has recorded a 0.6 per cent fall in the March 2023 quarter, hot on the heels of a 0.3 per cent fall in the December quarter.

• A record 13 million students are taking the national college admissions exam.

• Consumer prices in Hungary were on average 21.5 percent higher in May than a year earlier. Over the past year, household energy and food prices have risen the most, the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) said on Thursday.

• Small businesses with overdue tax and fringe benefits returns dating back almost four years are being granted amnesty.

• The Australian Taxation Office is encouraging small businesses with an aggregated turnover of less than $10 million at the time lodgements were due to file the overdue returns.

• Australian households are fretting about keeping the lights on and many have little confidence new technologies will ease the cost burden in the years ahead.

• Some 52 per cent are concerned about how they are going to pay their power bills, up from a year ago, a sentiment survey published by Energy Consumers Australia shows.

• More than a quarter of homes were bought without a mortgage last year, suggesting there’s a sizeable cohort insulated from aggressive interest rate rises.

• Roughly 25 per cent of all sales in the eastern states – both dwellings and land – were made without a mortgage, according to property data firm PEXA.

• Macquarie Group has been accused of touting green credentials while taking stakes in high-growth oil and gas companies.

• Billions of dollars in oil and gas undermine the investment bank’s net zero commitments, according to a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

• The government has avoided default, but the effects of the debt-ceiling brinkmanship may still ripple across the economy.

• Instead of “succumbing” to their landlords’ whims, Canadian tenants are coming together to fight rent increases and evictions

• The lira plunged 7 percent against the U.S. dollar, as a new finance minister promising “rational” economic policy takes charge

• The U.S. government has sanctioned alleged senior leaders in the Mexican cartel, as well a woman accused of laundering money for it in Mexico.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Axios ☛ House GOP tensions erupt as standoff hamstrings agendaFrustrations from establishment House Republicans spilled out into the open on Wednesday after right-wing lawmakers succeeded in blocking nearly a week’s worth of House votes.Why it matters: The latest bout of infighting has reignited concerns about GOP leadership, all but helpless to stop right-wing agitators from hijacking the legislative process. “The Dysfunction Caucus does what it does best,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told Axios. “This hurts the GOP conference, Congress and the Country.”

• Cornel West, the iconic academic and social critic, has declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the 2024 election. He is running with the People’s Party, a progressive alternative to the two major parties that grew out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. With 2024 shaping up to be a rematch between “neofascist” Donald Trump and “milquetoast neoliberal” Joe Biden, West says voters need a real alternative focused on tackling inequality, racism, war and corporate greed. “There’s an indifference to the plight of the vulnerable,” West tells Democracy Now! He also discusses the war in Ukraine, censorhip, right-wing extremism, and allegations of sexual harassment and assault against People’s Party founder Nick Brana, among other topics.

• The Dutch government is proposing adding a lex specialis to its existing intelligence and security services act. This addition significantly changes the scope of many powers and also extends who they can be applied to.

• [...]

• On this page I’d like to go over just one specific element of this new law: automatic extension of warrants to hacking victims (’non-targets’). Under the new law, the criteria for targeting non-targets actually become more lenient than for targeting actual targets. I would also hope to hear from experts on what the ECtHR might imply for this automatic extension and the newly proposed oversight. At the very end of this article you will find the original text of the articles, and my best stab at a translation.

• In the past year, Mandiant Intelligence has been thinking of new ways to help organizations scale their defenses to outpace and outmaneuver state-sponsored cyber programs—all in a format that is widely accessible. This led us to developing “Inside the Mind of an APT,” an on-demand course that shares our more than ten years worth of insights on state-sponsored cyber programs to tip the scale in favor of the blue team. This course focuses heavily on exploring what we call the Big Four: Russia, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and Iran.

• At most companies, meetings are the cost of doing business, not a product that’s directly sellable to the customer.

• Customers don’t pay us to go to meetings. They don’t even pay us for making the right decision. They only pay for the right execution. And that just happens to happen outside those meeting rooms!

• The job cuts, which will span companywide, were announced by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in an email to staffers Tuesday. “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Huffman wrote. Along with the layoffs, Reddit is reducing its hiring plans for the rest of 2023 to about 100 additional employees (previously it expected to hire 300). Reddit currently has around 2,000 employees worldwide.

• A Reddit rep confirmed the job cuts, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the company, as of May 2023, more than 57 million daily active unique visitors engage with more than 100,000 active communities on Reddit. Users on the site have contributed more than 13 billion posts and comments worldwide to date.

• Altman, who was previously president of Silicon Valley’s famed Y Combinator accelerator, said he’s cognizant of the advantages and dangers of OpenAI, including potential misuse by dictators leading to serious geopolitical implications. He pointed out that generative AI will need more regulations, with parallels to nuclear power and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

• But Mr. Altman, 38, has run toward the spotlight, seeking the attention of lawmakers in a way that has thawed icy attitudes toward Silicon Valley companies. He has initiated meetings and jumped at the opportunity to testify in last month’s Senate hearing. And instead of protesting regulations, he has invited lawmakers to impose sweeping rules to hold the technology to account.

• Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms are using “bullying tactics” against a Canadian push aimed at ensuring financial support for news publishers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.

• The proposed legislation is designed to compel internet giants like Google and Meta’s Facebook to negotiate commercial deals and pay publishers for their content.

• The U.S. firms say proposals in the bill, dubbed the “Online News Act,” are unsustainable for their businesses.

• Mr. Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros. Discovery, must find a new leader who shares his vision for the network and can figure out its financial future.

• Chris Licht is out after a year as chief executive at CNN, following a series of missteps and plunging ratings.

• David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN parent company Warner Bros Discovery, announced the leadership change on CNN’s morning editorial call on Wednesday.

• Mr. Licht’s turbulent time running the 24-hour news organization lasted slightly more than a year.

• The attorney-general has rejected claims the Albanese government has questions to answer about a compensation payment to Brittany Higgins.

• The former Liberal staffer reached a confidential settlement with the Commonwealth in December 2022 after she launched legal action against her employers in the previous coalition government.

• The former JPMorgan Chase & Co executive accused of shepherding the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has formally denied involvement in the disgraced financier’s sex trafficking and blamed JPMorgan for keeping him as a client.

• In Wednesday night filings in a New York federal court, Jes Staley said his dealings with Epstein were not the “proximate cause” of any damages JPMorgan might incur in two lawsuits it faces over its work with Epstein, a client from 1998 to 2013.

• The latest OECD report is out, confirming higher profits are the leading component of recent inflation in Australia and elsewhere. Yet Philip Lowe and the RBA keep raising interest rates to curb inflation with wages growth as the culprit. What’s the scam?

• The scam is that they don’t know any better ways, and their policy options are limited, so they have to blame something.

• Australia was willing to walk away from a possible free trade deal with the European Union despite there being a “lot at stake”, Agriculture Minister Murray Watt has admitted.

• The EU has been pushing for geographic indicators, which would stop Australian producers from using names like parmesan, prosecco or feta to label products.

• bianet has talked to academician Adnan Çelik about the new cabinet and the “Kurdish Ministers” in the cabinet.

• The House continued to postpone votes on Wednesday as a group of right-wing lawmakers pushed to renegotiate a deal they struck in January with Republican leadership.

• Why it matters: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) detractors have the numbers to kill any efforts by leadership to pass party-line legislation, meaning they effectively control the House floor.

• New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton brings her reading of “Macbeth” to bear on contemporary politics in her novel “Birnam Wood.”

• Gun control advocates in Washington state are hailing victory after a federal judge rejected a request to block a new state law. The new law bans the sale and manufacture of more than 50 types of guns, including AR- and AK-style rifles.

• Most Americans think favorably of local government. Still, citizens academies try to deepen trust by getting past “faceless bureaucracy.”

• The story of Helen Keller’s childhood is inspirational. As an adult, her uncompromising political views – she was an avowed socialist – made some people uncomfortable.

• The notice from the office of the special counsel Jack Smith suggested that an indictment was on the horizon in the investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.

• Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus refused to surrender control of the floor, forcing G.O.P. leaders to scrap votes for the week and leaving the speaker facing what he conceded was “chaos.”

• “Aau’s Song” is an African reimagining of the famous fantasy universe.

• The reports come as the chief of U.S. naval operations said he is ‘encouraged’ by a change in tone in ties.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• On Tuesday, Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler published an op-ed in The Michigan Daily in which he apologized for his social media activity. Such interactions — primarily in the form of liking racist and insensitive tweets on Twitter — led to his resignation after public backlash, just two days after his hiring.

• The low-fi “Tucker on Twitter” finds the former prime-time host at the intersection of Fox News and Fox Mulder.

• Fox News Wednesday notified Tucker Carlson‘s lawyers that the former prime-time anchor violated his contract with the network when he launched his own Twitter show on Tuesday, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios.

• Why it matters: A breach of contract claim sets Fox News up to explore potential legal action against Carlson, a move that would intensify the already thorny public battle between the two parties.

• Carlson’s lawyers told Axios that any legal action by Fox would violate his First Amendment rights.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Tanu Kapoor, a 30-year-old media employee from Noida, has blocked 15 international numbers from which she has been receiving calls and WhatsApp messages offering “jobs” since May.

• Words or symbols that reference the massacre are notoriously scrubbed from the internet by the Chinese authorities. Last week, this censorship extended to the Sitong Bridge in Beijing, when Chinese language online searches of the bridge yielded no results. It comes after a banner was unfurled on the bridge in 2022 calling for the removal of Chinese president Xi Jinping. A Weibo post by the British Embassy in Beijing showing how the Chinese state media originally reported the massacre (namely in more detail than the silence now, with state media making reference to mass casualties in hospital at the time) was removed by the authorities. The anniversary is sometimes known as “internet maintenance day” because of the number of websites taken offline.

• The trial ended in a few minutes: Four lashes would fall on the body of Khawar Naeem Hashmi, accused of defacing the mausoleum of Mohammad Ali Jinnah on Pakistan’s independence day in 1977. He was, arguably, lucky — the other journalists who had joined him in a public protest against military dictatorship were sentenced to five lashes each. Lines were drawn on their backs to ensure the whip would fall with precision; army officers, Hashmi later recalled, would amuse their families by bringing them along to watch.

• The Cyberspace Administration (CAC) floated the guidelines on Tuesday, framing them as applicable to operators of “short-distance ad hoc networks” – providers of technologies that might enable local networks to promote non-socialist values or not abide by existing laws.

• In all my decades of reporting, one of my most searing experiences came in 1989 in Beijing when I watched the Chinese People’s Liberation Army unleash weapons of war on throngs of unarmed pro-democracy protesters.

• So I was appalled on the 34th anniversary of that citywide massacre a few days ago when apologists for the Chinese government insisted that it had never happened. Even worse, I discovered that one of the eyewitnesses they cited to buttress their denial was me.

• All this reflects the Chinese government’s effort to rewrite history, so it seems useful to push back and say what I actually saw that terrible night of June 3-4, 1989.

• Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and independent Russian journalists are calling on Big Tech to help put an end to Russia’s informational shutdown.

• Nazi symbols will be publicly banned nationwide and people who display the “evil” insignia could face up to a year in jail.

• The ban will include flags, armbands, T-shirts, and will extend to posting the symbols online.

• Jewish organisations have applauded a planned nationwide ban on Nazi symbols, following a rise in their use amongst far-right groups.

• New federal laws will see people displaying Nazi insignia face up to a year in jail.

• In the beginning, there were harms.

• Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he insisted that stopping child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was his top priority, and while some of his fans insisted that he had magically done so, the fact is that he fired nearly the entire team that was handling that issue, meaning that CSAM was running rampant on the site, and the company seemed to be doing little about it.

• RTÜK penalized FOX TV, Halk TV, TELE1 and Flash Haber.

• This decision arose as a result of pro-government legislators refusing to vote on any amendment aimed at repealing the pension reform.

• How do you balance the demands of a sports league that’s promoting a social agenda with the rights of players wanting to express their personal beliefs?

• The You Can’t Joke About That author says that free speech and dark humor can bring a fragmented country together.

• Just published as part of the symposium on Media and Society After Technological Disruption, edited by Profs. Justin “Gus” Hurwitz & Kyle Langvardt.

• “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” attributed to George Orwell Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.

• Efforts to ban “Glory to Hong Kong,” a song popularized during pro-democracy protests in 2019, could set up a legal battle between tech giants and Hong Kong.

• Protest song Glory to Hong Kong dominated all positions in Apple’s Hong Kong iTunes Top 10 on Wednesday, a day after the government sought to ban “unlawful acts” relating to the song, its melody, lyrics and all derivations.

• Injunction would outlaw the dissemination of the song on any platform.

• The Hong Kong Department of Justice applied to the High Court on Monday for an injunction to prohibit any activity in relation to the song “Glory to Hong Kong” with unlawful intent.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Journalists at two dozen local newspapers across the United States walked off the job Monday to demand an end to painful cost-cutting measures and a change of leadership at Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain.

• The strike involves hundreds of journalists at newspapers in eight states, including the Arizona Republic, the Austin American-Statesman, the Bergen Record, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and the Palm Beach Post, according to the NewsGuild, which represents workers at more than 50 Gannett newsrooms. Gannett has said there would be no disruption to its news coverage during the strike, which will last for two days at two of the newspapers and one day for the rest.

• It seems the propaganda peddlers are no longer even trying to pretend any more how they plan to abuse the bills being pushed by Democrats to “regulate” social media. It would be nice if some of the Democratic politicians actually listened to them. First, we had the story of how the Heritage Foundation, the main think tank of the GOP, flat out said they intended to use the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to censor LGBTQ content as “harmful” to children.

• The Mezopotamya Agency reporter was apprehended during a raid at his residence in Ankara.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Joesph Zamora spent nearly two years in prison after being convicted of assaulting police officers. The Washington Supreme Court overturned his conviction, but local prosecutors want to charge him again to show him the “improperness of his behavior.”

• Reed is descended from “indigenous people of the so-called United States.” The duo also collectively stated: “Our music is helping carve out space where it isn’t supposed to be. Heavy music is apparently supposed to look, sound, and feel a certain way. Divide and Dissolve is and will continue to be a point of difference.”

• The Umut Foundation announced a record-high number of casualties and injuries with firearms in celebrations for the election results, for the championship of Galatasaray, and in wedding ceremonies in only eight days.

• The most recent European court ruling adds to the previous judgments against Turkey concerning Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ.

• Can Atalay, a lawyer and a human rights advocate, was imprisoned after the Gezi Park trial. He has not been released despite being elected as an MP.

• Canadian law students are reporting for JURIST on national and international developments in and affecting Canada. Mélanie Cantin is JURIST’s Chief Correspondent for Canada and a rising 3L at the University of Ottawa.

• On Tuesday, in Nuziard v. Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) federal district court judge Mark T. Pittman issued an injunction against the MBDA’s Business Center Program. These Centers may give assistance only to businesses owned by socially or economically disadvantaged individuals. A Business owned by a “Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, American Indian, Alaska Native,…

• The State Security Service (VDD) in the so-called “Baltic anti-fascists” criminal case has changed the crime’s qualification to a more severe one – the conduct of a criminal organization and participation in crimes committed by such an organization, the VDD said in a statement on June 7.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• What is challenging active network management?

• How the failures and successes of technology deployment offer valuable lessons.

• Fourteen thousand poor households and 30,000 government offices of the southern Indian state of Kerala today (June 5) were provided with high-speed [Internet]. But the aim is higher.

• The state’s new service, called Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON), is the first such in India and aims to uplink its 35 million citizens, especially 2 million of those considered poor. Launching the project in 2019, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s government declared access to the [Internet] a basic right.

• When completed, it will function on 35,000 kilometres of optical fibre network across Kerala’s 14 districts.

• We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide” (and the billions in subsidies thrown at telecom giants to solve the problem), the U.S. never had any real idea where broadband is or isn’t available. You can probably imagine that’s a problem given the decades of policy proposals and billions of dollars thrown at the problem.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The studio let viewers rent or buy movies earlier for a higher price. This made more than $1 billion in less than three years, with nearly no decrease in box-office sales.

Monopolies

• The German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) announced that Meta will introduce a new overview of data sharing regulations for users of Facebook and Instagram, addressing concerns by EU antitrust regulators over the company’s data collection services.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 07 Jun 2023 The European Commission is carrying out unannounced inspections at the premises of companies active in the synthetic turf industry in several Member States.

Patents

• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced on Wednesday that Hungary has begun preparations for the EU Presidency, the Hungarian State News Agency, MTI reports. Referring to Hungary’s turn to hold the rotating presidency in the second half of 2024, he said that there was no shortage of experience and preparation, as his government was preparing for its second presidency, which was almost unprecedented in Europe.

• In the recent case of In re Microsoft, 23-128 (Fed. Cir. 2023), the Federal Circuit once again granted a writ of mandamus, ordering a patent infringement case to be transferred out of Judge Albright’s courtroom in the Western District of Texas (WDTX). This decision was made under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), which allows for the transfer of cases for the convenience of the parties and in the interest of justice.

• Microsoft, a multinational corporation with a significant presence in many U.S. states, including Texas, is no stranger to litigation in the Lone Star state. The company’s substantial business activities in Texas, which include marketing, selling, and servicing the accused products, did not significantly impact the 1404(a) jurisprudence in this case.

Trademarks

• GOLD: At one point he was in my office, and he’s kind of complaining that Warner Bros. won’t let him release all the albums he wants to release, basically saying, “Let me get off the label and finish the contract by just delivering a bunch of music” [which is essentially what he ultimately did]. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he knows we know exactly what he’s doing, so I say to him, “You know, we paid you a huge amount of money for each one of these records as an advance, and we need to be able to market them and release two and three singles and give the marketplace some space between them. We can’t just release a record every three months.” And it was really one of the few times he broke character with me, he says something like, “You know that everybody thinks these albums are carefully crafted, conceptualized things? I’m in the studio constantly, and when I get enough songs that I think, hey, together, there’s a record, it’s a record. So I have a lot of inventory and I want to release a lot of albums.” That was the one time we had a real conversation, rather than him kind of fronting one of those almost pantomime things he was famous for.

• It never got contentious with any of us — it might have gotten contentious with his lawyers talking to the business affairs people and things like that. But he was kin of doing his talking by press release, and he was showing up still at Warner Bros.’ offices and even at a marketing meeting — with the “slave” thing on his face! But there was never a time that he wasn’t talking to us or I couldn’t get him on the phone.

Copyrights

• At the core of this dispute is streaming and how it has revolutionized the industry. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given consumers an unprecedented array of films and TV shows and opened the door to new voices that don’t have to adhere to mainstream network formats. On the other hand, it has also changed how television gets produced, the role writers play, and how they get paid.

• We interviewed four television writers and showrunners about how streaming has changed how they work, how their incomes have taken a hit, and why it has become harder than ever to build a career.

• This fall might be a great time to catch up on your streaming list — Hollywood has one union on strike, and studios are facing more labor strife that could result in further shutdowns this summer.

• Why it matters: The streaming era has fundamentally broken the industry, and that has Hollywood’s biggest unions united to a degree we haven’t seen in decades.

• State of play: The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studio side in union negotiations, is trying to use the same playbook it did to end the last writers strike in 2007-08:

• [...]

• Maria Schneider’s lawsuit against YouTube began with great ambitions to vastly improve the copyright enforcement landscape on YouTube to the benefit of artists everywhere. With a jury trial just days away, but with class-action status already denied, what’s left of the lawsuit could still deliver a win for the plaintiffs. Fulfilling ambitions will probably have to wait until another time.

• She was my introduction to bossa nova and latin jazz, which have since become my favourite genres of music. I had a poster of her in my bedroom as a teenager. I bonded with my parents over her music, and it got me through some rough years.

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