● 06.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/06/2023: Debian 12 “Bookworm”

Posted in News Roundup at 10:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Docks play a crucial role in enhancing the user experience and productivity on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. With their sleek and intuitive design, docks provide quick access to frequently used applications, system settings, and workspace management.

• The docks are complex applications, and there are very few active projects available in the Linux ecosystem. The reason might be that the desktop environment provides built-in capabilities to transform the respective default panel to a dock.

• However, here are the top 7 best docks for Ubuntu and other Linux distros which still works.

• They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.

• This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products and services offered by Microsoft.

• If you have taken the plunge and decided to install a Linux distribution on your machine, you should ensure your installation arsenal is ready for use.

• The first thing you need is an ISO image of your favorite Linux distro, which you can boot onto a flash drive and use to install the OS on your machine. Unfortunately, creating a bootable USB to install Linux without the right tools and applications is challenging.

• You can use these top seven USB Linux boot creator tools to create a bootable USB from an ISO image.

• Over the years, I have come across many blogs that claim Linux is impenetrable by security attackers too many times to count. While it is true that GNU/Linux operating systems for desktops and servers come with a lot of security checks in place to mitigate attacks, protection is not “enabled by default”.

• This is because your cybersecurity ultimately depends on the tools you have employed to sniff out vulnerabilities, viruses, and malware, and to prevent malicious attacks.

• Strawberry Music Player is an open-source cross-platform music player and music collection organizer with a focus on providing more features than typical music players would.

• Strawberry is a fork of Clementine music player released in 2018 aimed at music collectors and audiophiles. It’s written in C++ using the Qt toolkit and GStreamer.

Instructionals/Technical

• Have you ever wondered of writing a vimscript such that, when you open two files, it highlights the differences between the opened files and shows you how they differ? Why do that when vimdiff exists?

• Any change in an environment can introduce risk. However, running management and peripheral services on the latest version of an operating system helps build knowledge and confidence within your organization. And by using your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems in their Full Support Phase (that’s the first five of the ten year support life cycle), you’re getting the full support experience that you’re entitled to. Moving your applications and services to RHEL is better done sooner than later, and it’s not as hard as you might think.

• In this article, I demonstrate how easy it is to deploy GitLab on a RHEL 9 system. In addition to using the latest version of RHEL, I also show you how to use Ansible to automate the deployment process. That means in the future, you can use Ansible automation to deploy GitLab onto newer versions of RHEL upon release.

• In this article, we will share some interesting command-line tools to generate random passwords and also how to encrypt and decrypt passwords with or without the slat (a security measure used in password hashing) method.

• Security is one of the major concerns of the digital age. We set passwords to computers, email, cloud, phones, documents, and whatnot. We all know the basic to choose a password that is easy to remember and hard to guess.

• If you are running Debian 11 Bullseye, you can plan to upgrade your desktop or server now. However, it is recommended that you wait until the first point release, i.e. 12.1 of Debian Bookworm, for critical server upgrades.

• Here are the detailed steps to upgrade.

Games

• Ready to ship around the middle of June, eXtremeRate have now put up pre-orders for those of you brave enough to mod the entire shell of the Steam Deck.

• Elden Pixels who made Alwa’s Awakening and Alwa’s Legacy have announced their next game, A Void Hope. An atmospheric puzzle adventure with a slick sounding synthwave soundtrack not to be missed.

• Unspottable was a lot of fun at release, giving you competitive hide and seek amongst the crowd gameplay but local multiplayer was pretty limiting. Now though, it has online play!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

• KDE Frameworks 5.107 looks like a small update that only improves support for installations with an encrypted home directory by storing thumbnails in their typical cache location so that they won’t have to be re-generated all the time.

• It also improves dark mode support for KDE apps when they are running on other desktop environments than KDE Plasma and the plasma-integration package is not installed. This change was implemented in the Breeze icon set, which now correctly uses light colors instead of staying dark.

• This week Plasma 6 underwent some major refactoring to the fundamental Plasma widget APIs to modernize them and make it harder to introduce errors when developing new widgets. Since almost everything in Plasma is a widget, this necessitated a lot of changes and QA. After a month of work, it’s now done! The user-facing side is nil (ideally nobody will notice anything), but there are some changes that developers will need to be aware of to port their widgets. Most widgets already needed to be ported anyway due to Qt changes, but hopefully this won’t add much else. A porting guide has already been written and can be found here. This work was done by Marco Martin, with me providing QA support.

• On that subject, we got a lot more organized about Plasma 6 this week. We now centrally track status on a new wiki page that shows the outstanding issues and notable changes. I’m starting to feel like I see a light at the end of the tunnel! While I’ve had to use the X11 Plasma 6 session because the Wayland one is still a bit too unstable for me to feel productive, the X11 session now feels barely buggier than the Plasma 5 X11 session. It’s really quite nice at this point.

• While most of the effort around the transition to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6) is probably going into Plasma currently, there are still a number of lose ends to tie up in Frameworks itself as well. The below is far from a comprehensive overview of that though, it’s merely a few things I have been involved with recently.

• During the 5 era we relied on the text-template engine Grantlee in several places (e.g. KHelpCenter, KDevelop, KDE PIM). In the 6 era this will now live on as KTextTemplate as part of KDE Frameworks.

• The final bits for this, the formal review process and the actual move of the repository, have now been done as well.

• Going forward this will mean one dependency release cycle less to deal with for consumers, and a faster and more predictable way to get upstream fixes rolled out.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• I just restarted my pkg01 jail. Now Nagios can’t see it on IPv6.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• openSUSE Leap 15.5 was released earlier this week and release team would like to hear from you about your experience with openSUSE Leap 15.5.

• Did anything go particularly well, or perhaps did we miss something? Did you have trouble downloading, installing, or contributing to Leap 15.5? Did you like the overall communication?

Debian Family

• After almost two years of hard work, Debian 12 “Bookworm” is finally here and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series. This kernel brings new and updated drivers to support modern hardware and it will be officially supported until December 2026.

• New features in Debian 12 “Bookworm” include a new non-free-firmware repository consisting of non-free firmware packages split from Debian’s non-free repository. Those upgrading from Debian 11 to Debian 12 will have to add the new non-free-firmware repository to their sources.list files.

• Debian, the “Universal operating system”, has officially unveiled its highly anticipated version 12, codenamed “Bookworm.” Packed with a host of new features and improvements, Debian 12 ensures users have access to cutting-edge technologies while maintaining its renowned stability and reliability.

• Here’s what’s new.

• After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm).

• bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.

• While there is no fixed schedule, a new stable Debian upgrade appears every two years or so.

• Debian 11 was released in 2021, and now in 2023, we have the next major version bump, i.e., Debian 12.

• Interestingly, Debian 12 has been released with about 100 known bugs, as mentioned in the release notes. So, you might want to explore the release details before upgrading or installing it.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical released the final version of Ubuntu 23.04, nicknamed Lunar Lobster, in April 2023. This version of Ubuntu provides quite a few changes and updates that many will surely appreciate.

• Compared to the previous Ubuntu versions—22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) and 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)—Ubuntu 23.04 features several changes that may interest some people in upgrading or at least trying out the new release.

• But with Ubuntu 23.04 only being an interim release with support until the 20th of January 2024, should you still upgrade to this version of Ubuntu? Sure! Here are seven reasons why.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Feather RP2040 and a FeatherWing Proto sit next to each on the FeatherWing Doubler. The potentiometers and buttons are wired via the FeatherWing Proto. This nice show-and-tell will help you do the wiring. The Feather RP2040 powers everything via its USB port and runs Arduino code from the PicoDVI library. All the project code is up for grabs here.

• There are five animations coded onto the video synth. Twiddle the potentiometer knobs to alter each animation like a visual DJ. Three of them adjust the colours, and one changes different visual aspects depending on which animation is playing.

• The keyboard feels almost as good as any old Blackberry, though it doesn’t have full support from behind—I think a good case design could provide a tiny bit more structure behind the left and right side of the keyboard. The center keys feel great, the outside keys have a tiny bit of flex to them. Ctrl is mapped to the little ‘pick up phone’ icon (which looks more like an empty bowl to me), and you can hold down the ‘hang up phone’ (the park bench on the right) to safely shut down the device. There’s also a power switch on the bottom.

• There is a long standing tradition among hardware hackers and tinkerers. Once a platform is hacked, once a gadget is tinkered with, once a device is understood there will always be someone who asks a certain, specific question. And that question is: “Can it run Doom?”

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Tor Browser 12.5a7 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This release updates Firefox to 102.12.0esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 114.

• Finding out they use curl is rarely straight forward. They virtually never told us before hand. Many list the curl license somewhere, sometimes you can find the DLL and some actually include a mention in on-screen credits displays.

Licensing / Legal

• I think there’s a reasonable argument that de minimis non curat lex – the law cares not for small things. Is anyone seriously going to argue that I stole half a dozen bytes? Could they prove that I copied that single line from them? Would anyone care?

• And yet, morally, I feel that I should give credit.

Programming/Development

• I finally updated the alloydocs to Alloy 6. The docs now cover how to use temporal operators in Alloy.

• To celebrate, let’s talk something completely unrelated. The simplest kind of collection is the set: an unordered collection of unique elements. All branches of mathematics use sets somewhere, and in fact you can bootstrap all other collection types from just sets. Many programming languages have set types or something that mimics sets, but it’s less common than sequences, which are ordered collections of repeatable elements. ≈All programming languages have some form of sequence.

• If sequences are sets + two properties, what are sets + one property?

• I think there’s a Goldilocks Zone of indirection. Adding layers can be really powerful: it allows you to re-use code, isolate concepts, and can unlock some pretty rad ideas. But the mental overhead of indirection scales exponentially. By the third or fourth level you’re already losing track of what you were doing: I’ve had epic debugging sessions where I had to make like a pirate and draw a physical HERE BE DRAGONS style map and that’s not somewhere you want to go unless you really have to. Remember YAGNI. As I’ve learned and grown during my career I’ve really come to really appreciate taking a direct and simple approach rather than going for flexibility and power.

• Of course, in the end the boring and adult answer to “how much indirection should I use” is “it depends.” Some parts call for more indirection, some parts call for less. But the arduous path from Rockstar Ninja to Senile Senior Developer has taught me that readability is far and away the most important property of any codebase. Be mindful of it whenever you feel like adding a layer of indirection. Stay in the Goldilocks Zone, so other humans can read what you’ve written. The computer doesn’t care either way.

Python

• Given that Python data classes are popular, are named tuples still relevant? What are the key differences between the two? Are there advantages of using one over the other—depending on what we’d like to do?

• Let’s take a closer look at both data classes and named tuples, and try to answer these questions.

Leftovers

• So basically we can expect the new work requirements to definitely take food vouchers (in other words, food) away from a bunch of people—perhaps 225,000—and maybe slightly increase employment. Oh, yeah, they could also worsen physical and mental health, and increase reliance on food banks. Is that what rebuilding a culture of work looks like?

Science

• Steven Cundiff, Harrison M. Randall Collegiate professor of physics, electrical engineering and computer science, and Mack Kira, professor of computer and electrical engineering, will co-direct the QRI. The Quantum Research Institute is a result of the Michigan Quantum Science Working Group, launched by Cundiff and Kira in 2018 following the National Quantum Initiative Act passed in 2018, which provided federal funding for quantum research.

• [NASA] and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by [MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.

Hardware

• It’s always interesting to me to watch and see what gets attention in the security and privacy space. For example, everybody spent the last two years suffering absolute embolisms at the idea that TikTok was a threat to privacy, but nobody much seems to care that an absolute ocean of “smart devices,” from your router to your television, routinely come with paper-mache-grade security.

• There are all kinds of technology that appear through the ages that find immediate success, promise to revolutionize the world, but fade to obscurity almost as quickly. Things like the ZIP disk, RDRAM, the digital compact cassette, or even Nintendo’s VirtualBoy. Going even further back in time [smbaker] is taking a look a bubble memory, a technology that was so fast and cost-effective for its time that it could have been used as “universal” memory, combining storage and random-access memory into a single unit, but eventually other technological developments overshadowed its quirks.

• [Outer World Apps] noted that there was no PDP-8/V made by DEC — a variant that used vacuum tubes. So he’s decided to make one using about 320 6J6A tubes. He’s got a plan and a few boards completed — we can’t wait to see it finished.

• On today’s episode of “What If?” — what if the Apollo 13 astronauts had a 3D printer? Well, for one thing, they may have been able to avoid all the futzing with duct tape and procedure list covers to jury rig the lithium hydroxide filters, at least if they’d known about these 3D printed enzymatic CO2 filters. And time travel…they probably would have needed that too.

• Here at Hackaday, our aim is to bring you only the freshest of hacks, which carries the burden of being Johnny-on-the-spot with our source material. So if something of obvious interest to our readers goes viral, we might just choose to skip covering it ourselves, figuring you all have probably seen it already. But, if we can dig a little deeper and bring extra value over and above what the viral content provides — well then that’s another story.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The latest “U.S. Precise Advertiser Report: Kids” (PARK) research from contextual video intelligence company Precise TV has found that 9 out of 10 kids access content on YouTube versus 4 in 10 for TikTok.

• The online survey aggregated responses from 2,000 kids age 2-12 in the U.S. to better understand trends in the content consumption of young audiences and improve how best to engage with them across media platforms.

• In the age of COVID-19, everything old is new again with respect to antivaccine quackery. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s antivax group Children’s Health Defense even held a 23 year memorial at the CDC over the Simpsonwood conference, which became the basis of RFK Jr.’s fear mongering antivax conspiracy theory in 2005 published in Salon.com and Rolling Stone while antivaxxers like Steve Kirsch have been resurrecting the old “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory that first arose in 2014 but was really popularized by Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield’s conspira-documentary VAXXED. I admit that I didn’t do more than sample the video, given that it was over four hours long, but truly I felt like we were doing the Time Warp to 18 years ago. I was further reminded of dredging up of every debunked old bit of antivax quackery earlier this week when I came across longtime antivaxxer Larry Cook‘s June 2023 update to his Vaccine Injury Treatment, Recovery And Resource Starter Guide.

• Although detecting pollution in surface waters has become significantly easier over the years, testing for specific pollutants still requires the taking of samples that are then sent to a laboratory for analysis. For something like detecting pesticide run-off, this can be a cumbersome and expensive procedure. But a 3D printed sensor demonstrated by [Sara Fateixa] and international colleagues offers hope that such tests can soon be performed in the field. The most expensive part of this setup is the portable Raman spectrometer that is used to detect the adsorbed molecules on the printed test strips.

Proprietary

• In any event, the saga of Twitter is well known by now. I won’t harp on it very long. Needless to say, Twitter was not consistently profitable (mostly not) before Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion. After his endless changes, tweaks and trolling of users and advertisers, Twitter is reportedly worth a third of what it once was and it’s advertising revenue has plummeted.

• On the flip side StackOverflow is a brand new drama that is just kicking off. I heard about it for the first time earlier today. The long and short of it is that they want to make their content harder to access so they can force AI companies to pay for devouring it to train their AI models.

• Twitch is relatively recent as well. While they have rolled back some of their more egregious changes in response to the negative reaction of their user base, make no mistake: Twitch wants a bigger cut and they are actively working to get it. In Twitches case this is especially sad because they are owned by Amazon, who frankly doesnt need anymore money. They have enough goddammit.

• Finally we have Reddit, which is the primary inspiration for this post. They are clearly interested in positioning themselves for an IPO. Guess its time for the Venture Capitalists (VCs) to cash out. As part of this in the last week they laid off 5% of their workforce and announced they are forcing users of their “Enterprise” API to pay. Their proposed prices are so steep, every third party reddit app worth its weight will be forced to shutdown, including the iOS app I currently use, Apollo.

• “June 30th will be Apollo’s last day. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and come to claims with this over the last weeks as talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point, and in the interest of transparency with the community, I wanted to talk about how I arrived at this decision,” Selig began a lengthy post that explains how talks between him and Reddit have seemingly broken down. Selig said he asked Reddit to push back the July 1 start date, but said he did not get a response.

• I want to train a neural network.

• So first I must learn the theory—read a textbook, ankify it. But to understand the math I must first learn probability and statistics in depth. Frequentism or Bayesianism? I heard really good things about Jaynes. Do I have the mathematical maturity? Maybe I should revise, say, set theory. The proofs in this textbook are very hard to read, so I rewrite them and make them more formal and refactor them into lemmas small enough to put into spaced repetition. They’re starting to look like Fitch notation. Maybe I can write my proofs in first-order logic? Learning logic might give me a stronger foundation for doing proofs. But what is logic, really?

• By now you’ve heard of the lawyer who used ChatGPT for his legal research, and it made up fake cases. We’ll again remind you that Joshua Browder, the founder of DoNotPay insisted that this same underlying technology was so sophisticated that he offered $1 million to a lawyer who would let it make arguments in front of the Supreme Court.

Windows TCO

• On Friday morning, the institution said some of its data had been accessed by an “unauthorised party” and data have “likely been copied”.

• Bosses have apologised for any concern the incident may cause to members of the community. They also advised staff not to download files from university systems in order to back them up.

• Cybersecurity firm Obsidian has observed a successful ransomware attack against Sharepoint Online (Microsoft 365) via a Microsoft Global SaaS admin account rather than the more usual route of a compromised endpoint.

• Columbus Regional Healthcare System (CRHS) is a non-profit organization in North Carolina licensed for 154 beds. The Daixin ransomware group claims that on May 18, they encrypted the hospital’s servers after exfiltrating data and deleting backups.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• The CA in question was called ‘HiCA’, and even if you keep good track of the (many) TLS Certificate Authorities that your browser or operating system trusts, you may be scratching your head in puzzlement because you’ve never heard of it before. That’s because this (now-ex) ‘CA’ was not an actual Certificate Authority, and it’s far from the only such one.

• What’s going on is that these days there’s a lot of white label reselling of what I could call root CAs, ie the Certificate Authorities that are trusted by browsers and systems. Resellers have their own website and brand, but they don’t have a root CA certificate of their own in browsers; instead the TLS certificates they get for you are ultimately signed by someone else. Sometimes this is a very direct relationship, and the TLS certificate visibly belongs to the CA that the reseller is in front of. At other times, the reseller has a TLS intermediate certificate in their own name (for example). As Andrew Ayer explains on HN (I know), sometimes this involves the root CA generating and holding the intermediate CA certificate itself, basically so that the branding in the end TLS certificate can have the reseller’s name on it instead of the root CA’s name (see also).

• New resource page available on timing attacks, including recommendations for action to take regarding overclocking attacks such as #HertzBleed: https://timing.attacks.cr.yp.to Don’t wait for the next public overclocking attack; take proactive steps to defend your data against compromise.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In recent months, a slew of conservative legislatures have passed age verification laws that would force users of adult sites to prove that they’re 18 years of age or older before watching porn. The idea is to protect children from being exposed to potentially harmful material at an early age. In Utah, where one such law was recently enacted, adult sites are now required to provide “reasonable age verification methods” for their users—the likes of which involve digitally submitting a state issued ID to adult sites before content can be accessed. As a result of the new law, which would also hold companies liable if they deliver adult content to minors, Pornhub recently pulled its service out of Utah entirely.

• But Utah isn’t the only state that’s headed towards this kind of regulatory reform. The state of Louisiana was the first to pass an age verification law in late 2022 and, since then, a bevy of other states have introduced similar “copycat” legislation. Bills in Arkansas, Virginia, and Mississippi were recently passed into law, while other states are said to be mulling their own bills.

• The Louisiana measure would prohibit online services — including social networks, multiplayer games and video-sharing apps — from allowing people under 18 to sign up for accounts without parental consent. It would also allow Louisiana parents to cancel the terms-of-service contracts that their children signed for existing accounts on popular services like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Fortnite and Roblox.

• The Louisiana civil code already allows parents to rescind contracts signed by unemancipated minors. Laurie Schlegel, the Republican state legislator who spearheaded the new measure, said her bill simply made it clear that the state’s existing contracting rules also covered accounts on online content-sharing platforms.

• “We trusted the government not to screw us,” said Edward Snowden. “But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”

• In 2008, a bipartisan Congress took a sledgehammer to the Constitution. The FISA Amendments Act codified what the Bush administration had been doing illegally after 9/11: collecting Americans’ international communications data on a massive scale, without anything resembling individualized suspicion of a crime, let alone a warrant.

• For searches to be compliant with the Constitution, their underlying warrants need to be just as compliant. Warrants have been required for cell phone searches since 2014, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Riley decision.

• NSO Group is on the ropes after years of self-inflicted damage metastasized into months of negative news coverage. Since worldwide exposure of its customers’ abuse of its malware, as well as exposing the sort of people NSO chose to deal with, the company has discussed getting out of the offensive spyware business — a move that might simply become a much shorter phrase: going out of business.

Defence/Aggression

• With Donald Trump’s federal indictment on seven criminal counts relating to the former president’s seizure of more than 300 classified documents, the American constitutional system faces another stress test sparked by a failed autocrat’s malign narcissism. The charges brought by Justice Department special prosecutor Jack Smith are both chilling and bathetic—like so many of Trump’s crimes, falsehoods, and power plays. Trump reportedly kept correspondence with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, presumably as a bit of kitschy memorabilia to impress throngs of sycophants at his Mar-a-Lago home; he’s also alleged to have purloined documents revealing nuclear secrets and outlined a plan to invade Iran for his private delectation, which brings the episode closer to the last reel of Dr. Strangelove than The Interview.

• We look at a federal indictment of four U.S. citizens for alleged election interference that has received little press attention despite its major implications for free speech and activism in the country. In April, the Biden administration charged four members of a pan-Africanist group with conspiring with the Russian government to sow discord in U.S. elections. Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, faces charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, along with Penny Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus Romain Jr. Three Russians were also named in an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department on Tuesday. This follows a violent FBI raid on the activists’ properties in Missouri and Florida last summer. “It’s very clear that this is about more than what the government has said it’s about,” says Yeshitela, arguing the real objective in the case is “to destroy our movement.”

• Winner became the first person to be prosecuted and then sentenced under the Trump administration for defying the Espionage Act by leaking classified information. Now Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information — in violation of the Espionage Act — as well as other counts related to making false statements and conspiring to obstruct justice.

• “This is probably one of the most egregious and cut-and-dry cases,” Winner, 31, said in a phone interview with NBC News of the allegations that Trump held onto sensitive government documents and attempted to mislead investigators.

• [...]

• Winner had been working for national security contractor Pluribus International at Fort Gordon in Georgia when prosecutors say she smuggled out a classified report in her pantyhose detailing the Russian government’s efforts to pierce a Florida-based voting software supplier ahead of the 2016 presidential election. That information was later reported by The Intercept news outlet.

• The treaty was signed in 1990 to establish equal limitations on major armaments for NATO and the Warsaw Pact, a collective defense treaty between the then-Soviet Union and seven Eastern European countries. The objective of the CFE was to reduce the possibility of a surprise attack and the triggering of a major offensive in Europe.

• The NATO statement on June 9 said the alliance had repeatedly called on Russia to comply with the CFE treaty, but Russia had “not engaged constructively, and has not taken steps towards full compliance.”

• Citing newly declassified information, the White House said on Friday (US time) the drones, or Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), were built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea and then used by Russian forces against Ukraine.

• Al Shabaab militants claimed responsibility for an attack on an upmarket restaurant in the Somali capital of Mogadishu on Friday that left at least seven people injured.

• The findings would appear to close the door on capping global warming under the Paris treaty’s more ambitious 1.5C target, long identified as a guard rail for a relatively climate-safe world, albeit one still roiled by severe impacts.

• “Even though we are not yet at 1.5C warming, the carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gases humanity can emit without exceeding that limit — “will likely be exhausted in only a few years,” said lead author Piers Forster, a physics professor at the University of Leeds.

• The signals jamming efforts have surged in the aftermath of drone attacks on the Kremlin and other locations in Moscow, and the interference is of Russian origin, Bloomberg says.

• The proposal for mass killing struck user “BlackPilledMAGA” as going too far: “Doesn’t have to be thousands, just a few dozen would do. Shit would STOP immediately.” But user “Nerdrem1” insisted taking out a few elites wouldn’t make the difference, suggesting the number of dead required was on a genocidal scale: “Millions. The real problem is the people that vote for them, as long as they exist the problem can’t be solved.” A user named “Heavy_Metal_Patriot” concurred: “Correct.”

• It might be tempting to dismiss these calls for mass murder as loose talk among angry MAGAdonians. Yet there is dark history here. In a previous iteration, The Donald was used to help plot and promote the violence at the Capitol in 2021, as detailed in the final report of the House Jan. 6 Committee, including by users who “openly discussed surrounding and occupying the U.S. Capitol.”

• The Guardian has revealed some of the extraordinary danger of artificial intelligence in a headline that reveals an Israeli bullet decided all by itself to kill somebody.

• After days of enraged Americans wondering how a (white) woman could shoot and kill through a locked door a (black) mother whose four children she’d harassed, bullied, called ‘niggers’ and thrown things at and yet still remain free, the murderous Karen was finally arrested in stand-your-ground Florida, where police had to think about it before deciding it was “simply a killing.” Thus is victim Ajike ‘AJ’ Owens, “a heart of gold” who “absolutely lived for her four children,” now “just another Black soul lost to earth.”

• All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

• Last year saw more multilateral peace operations conducted than in any year during the previous decade research by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found. As in previous years, the United Nations (UN) led the largest number of multilateral peace operations at 20, SIPRI Peace Operations and Conflict Management Programme Dr Claudia Pfeifer writes.

• Declassified Australia reveals the feast for lobbyists, US defence contractors and hangers-on which is the AUKUS $370bn submarines deal, Kelly Tranter reports.

• The defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners – chaired by the former Australian Defence Minister Christopher Pyne – co-hosted an AUKUS reception and dinner in Washington at the swanky Cosmos Club on Embassy Row, with Northrop Grumman Corporation, on 3 April 2023.

War in Ukraine

• NATO has condemned Russia’s decision to quit the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, saying it “further demonstrates Moscow’s continued disregard for arms control.”

• Many in Brussels, DC, Kyiv, London and Moscow have desired this war for decades.

• President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin announced that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has begun but said that Ukraine’s Armed Forces have not achieved their goals at any part of the front.

• Ukraine’s military on Saturday said three civilians were killed in an overnight drone attack on the Black Sea port city of Odesa, a day after Russian forces claimed to have repelled fierce Ukrainian attacks in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, in the clearest evidence yet that Kyiv’s long-awaited counteroffensive has begun. Follow our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Banking services in Russia may have been disrupted by the attack, which comes amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

• As the slow-motion disaster caused by the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine’s Kherson region continues, Russian officials have repeatedly blamed Kyiv for the crisis. Unusually, however, the Kremlin has not told the country’s propaganda outlets to do the same; in fact, it hasn’t issued any direct instructions for how the events should be covered at all, two sources from major pro-government news agencies told Meduza. As a result, pro-Kremlin outlets have taken different approaches in their coverage, but virtually all of them have chosen to downplay the significance of the disaster as well as the scale of the flooding. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev explains.

• A Russian Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Dmitry Mishov, who fled the country after refusing to take part in Ukraine’s invasion is currently in Lithuania, officials have confirmed.

• The United States says it has information that Iran intends to build a drone-manufacturing facility inside Russia that could become operational next year as Moscow and Tehran step up military cooperation, posing an increased danger to Ukraine, the Middle East, and to the international community.

• Ukraine’s gross domestic product fell by 10.5 percent in the first quarter of the year compared with the same period a year ago, the economy ministry said on June 9.

• The Dutch Supreme Court on June 9 upheld lower court decisions ordering the return of ancient Crimean gold artifacts to Ukraine, ANP reported, citing the decision.

• Ukraine’s Security Service says it intercepted telephone communications between Russian military personnel that “confirm” Russia’s involvement in the destruction of the Kakhovka dam as Norway’s seismological institute said it detected a possible “explosion” around the time of the dam’s breaching.

• Was it Russian incompetence or a monstrous war crime? Following the massive dam breach on Tuesday morning, several possible theories have emerged to explain the disaster.

• The breach of the Kakhovka Dam makes it clearer than ever: A rapid end to the war can only come through support for Ukraine’s army.

• Over the past five days there has been heavy fighting with numerous casualties being recorded on the Ukrainian side.

• On Tuesday, Moscow denounced that Ukrainian forces carried out sabotage at the Kakhovka dam, which caused flooding on both sides of the Dnieper River.

• On June 9, the Cabinet of Ministers adopted a decision on the allocation of EUR 200 000 from contingency funds for assistance to Ukraine to address the ecological and humanitarian crisis caused by Russia’s destruction of the dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) on June 6.

• A grainy black-and-white gunsight video Russia released this week to bolster a claim its military blew up some of Ukraine’s most fearsome tanks actually documented the destruction of a tractor.

• Initial analysis indicates that Russia deliberately destroyed the Kakhovka dam in what would qualify as one of Moscow’s worst war crimes in Ukraine, but holding the Kremlin accountable will prove extremely difficult, writes Danielle Johnson.

• Rebuilding the country in the midst of war was thought crazy. Yet look at how one city devastated by Russian atrocities is rebuilding.

• Military analysts and U.S. officials said it was too soon to judge the success of Ukraine’s offensive, which is looking for weaknesses to exploit, in the face of fierce resistance.

• Russia and Ukraine are presenting divergent accounts of fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region, where analysts warn that Kyiv faces a difficult battle against Moscow’s entrenched forces.

• The main thrust of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is expected in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, not along the Dnipro River, where the fighting quickly resumed after the disaster.

• Privately, U.S. and European officials concede that pushing all of Russia’s forces out of occupied Ukrainian land is highly unlikely.

• U.S. spy agencies still do not have any solid evidence to determine who caused the destruction, the senior administration official said.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said on June 9 during talks with Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka that the transfer of tactical nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus will begin immediately after the construction of facilities is finished on July 7-8.

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on June 9 that a resident of the Siberian city of Omsk had been detained on a charge of high treason amid a growing number of such cases in recent months.

• Rasul Kusherbaev, an adviser to Uzbekistan’s natural resources minister and a former lawmaker, has warned against signing of a deal with Russia on the construction of a long-discussed nuclear power plant.

• The broadcaster said an employee had been placed on leave pending outcome of investigation.

• A rights activist in Russia’s Siberian region of Buryatia, Natalya Filonova, has been hospitalized after she fell ill during her trial on a charge of assaulting police that she and her supporters reject as politically motivated.

• Washington is trying to raise the pressure on Tehran and make it more difficult to complete the work on the factory, which would enable Russia’s military to produce drones domestically.

• In mid-March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges of ordering the illegal deportation of children in occupied parts of Ukraine to Russia. But the ICC operates on the basis of the Rome Statute, which Moscow has not ratified, meaning that Russia doesn’t recognize the court’s jurisdiction. More than once, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged the creation of an international tribunal to investigate Russian war crimes. Officials in the United States and the European Union have expressed support for this initiative, and the U.S. Senate is already considering a plan to form an international judicial body that could hold Russian officials responsible for crimes against humanity. Twenty-six Russian lawyers, legal scholars, and human rights defenders are joining in a declaration to endorse President Zelensky’s proposal, denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an act of aggression and expressing their readiness to aid this investigation in any way possible. The group below signed the Brussels Declaration in early June, and Meduza is publishing the text and list of endorsements below.

• During a meeting with Alexander Lukashenko on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow will begin to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in July, once the necessary equipment is fully prepared, the Russian state news agency Interfax reported on Friday.

• Iceland announced Friday that it will suspend the operations of its embassy in Moscow beginning on August 1.

• A drone has crashed on the roof of an office building in Belgorod, according to Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. He said the drone did not detonate but did catch on fire. “There’s minor damage to the roof and the boiler room, and two vehicles were also damaged by shrapnel,” Gladkov said. He said nobody was injured.

• Experts from the Norwegian research foundation NORSAR, which studies seismic events, have determined that on the day that Ukraine’s Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant was destroyed, an explosion was detected in the facility’s proximity.

• “Hungary stubbornly continues to maintain and even deepen its “connectivity” with Russia,” said US Ambassador David Pressman at a reception held on Wednesday afternoon at the Chief of Mission residence in honor of US-Hungarian scientific collaboration. “Just this weekend, the Foreign Minister of Hungary Péter Szijjártó described Russia as Hungary’s “reliable partner” on energy, and one that would not be replaced. (…) To continue to double down on reliance on Russia while it attempts to decapitate your democratic neighbor is wrong,” he added.

• At the beginning of his speech, Pressman pointed out that as Hungary expands its relationship with Moscow, a massive wave of water from the destruction of the Kakhova hydroelectric dam has just swept over and displaced tens of thousands of people in and around Kherson.

• UK fossil fuel imports from authoritarian petrostates surged to £19.3 billion in the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a new DeSmog analysis has found.

• Government efforts to end the purchase of oil and gas from Russia have seemingly resulted in an upsurge in imports from other authoritarian regimes, including Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The revelations from Snowden that made the most waves in the United States concerned domestic surveillance. The very first revelation was a classified court order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granting an FBI request that Verizon be forced to turn over all US persons’ call records to the NSA. Such data did not include the contents of communications, but it did include who the calls were from, to whom they were made, and at what time and for how long. According to the court order, Verizon was to turn over this data daily, and the company was gagged by law from ever telling its customers or the public writ large about it.

• The order was stunning for a number of reasons. Surveillance, including foreign surveillance, generally required an individual target. Yet here the FBI had demanded, and the NSA had received, a legal mandate that Verizon turn over bulk information on millions of people with no identifiable target. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, like the NSA, is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence. The order included purely domestic calls, however, and excluded foreign ones.

• Finally, the order was based on a secret interpretation of a since expired provision of the USA Patriot Act. The provision had garnered significant controversy when the act was proposed, as civil libertarians believed it would be used to track library book checkouts. Despite this fierce opposition, no one believed it would be used for the bulk collection of US metadata. Even some of the original proponents of the Patriot Act were stunned.

Environment

• This is mainly meant to happen by starving the supply chain of funding. More than 200 of the world’s largest financiers, including 87 banks, have announced policies restricting investments in coal-mining or coal-fired power plants. Lenders representing 41% of global banking assets have signed up to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, pledging to align portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050. At the cop26 summit in 2021, the un predicted that this campaign would “consign coal to history”. As recently as 2020 the iea believed consumption had peaked a decade ago.

• Yet King Coal looks brawnier than ever. In 2022 demand for it surpassed 8bn tonnes for the first time. This article will look at who is greasing the wheels of the once doomed trade. We find that the market is lively, well-funded and profitable. More striking still, the motley crew bankrolling it will probably allow trade to endure well into the 2030s, lining survivors’ pockets to the detriment of the planet.

• Montana’s Republican-led state government has failed to stop a groundbreaking youth climate lawsuit against the state from going to trial, despite last-minute legislative moves that have altered Montana’s energy and environmental policies.

• The state legislature’s Republican supermajority passed House Bill 971 just two weeks after it was introduced in April, and Gov. Greg Gianforte signed it into law on May 10. The measure bans “evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions and corresponding impacts to the climate in the state or beyond the state’s borders” in environmental impact studies of major projects, such as fossil fuel pipelines.

Energy/Transportation

• Alexey Bilyuchenko is also alleged to have conspired with a Russian man seeking to be included in a swap for an imprisoned U.S. journalist.

• The United States has charged two Russian nationals related to the 2011 hack of the cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox and the operation of the illicit cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• Economic growth was hurt by high food and energy prices, disrupted trade networks, and instability — all large impacts of the ongoing Ukrainian conflict.

• Apple has just thrown its hat (or its $3,500 AR headset) into the ring. Apple’s Vision Pro, launched at WWDC23 and maybe the most credible AR product yet, but it could be caught out by a change in the economic climate, along with a host of hot ideas that could turn out to have just been “ZIRP phenomena.”

• The cuts are necessary for the bank to reduce its cost base because of adverse market conditions, according to a person within the bank, who isn’t authorized to speak publicly. Financial News reported the layoffs earlier.

• Citi is also dismantling its global team that provides commentary and analysis on foreign-exchange markets, with departures in both London and New York as well as its Latin America corporate bond trading team, Bloomberg News reported separately Thursday.

• A leading lender for Australian small and medium sized businesses is expecting challenges for its client base as interest rates rise seemingly ever higher, but not widespread business failures or a deep recession.

• Judo Bank chief risk officer Frank Versace told reporters on Friday that while the forward outlook was challenging, many businesses were starting from a position of strength.

• Global equities look set for a small weekly gain following a Wall Street rally, as rising bets the Federal Reserve will skip a rate increase next week overshadowed worries about US markets being drained of cash.

• MSCI’s broad index of global shares edged 0.1 per cent higher, on track for a weekly rise of 0.6 per cent.

• Following another interest rate hike and higher odds for more tightening, the residential property market’s recovery may be cut short.

• The Reserve Bank hiked by another 25 basis points on Tuesday, taking the cash rate to 4.1 per cent, and kept its options wide open to keep going if deemed necessary.

• What’s the scam with the Qantas board letting CEO Alan Joyce dump $17m worth of his own Qantas shares into the share buy-back?

• The scam is buy-backs. They simply prop up the share price using shareholders’ own money, not to mention, in the case of Qantas, the public’s bail-out money. And this buy-back is already in the red so Qantas shareholders have helped Alan get out for a higher price. Meantime, not one new aircraft was bought under the Joyce regime, so the fleet ran down, customer service ran down and now Alan’s successor faces a massive capex bill to fix things.

• After bringing the nation to the brink of economic catastrophe, and then negotiating a debt-ceiling agreement that literally made it harder for hungry people to get food, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hightailed it out of Washington on an urgent mission: to collect tributes from the oligarchs who keep him in power.

• When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, lawmakers didn’t just give the IRS a big funding infusion. They also directed the agency to look into something that has evaded the United States for decades: creating a system for Americans to file their taxes directly with the government electronically for free, rather than going through tax preparers, who often skim money off of their returns.

• The debt deal is now law. Far-right Republicans were unhappy, because it doesn’t cut spending by enough. Center-left Democrats (there are no far-left Democrats in Congress) are unhappy, because they got nothing: It’s all concessions to win Republican votes.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff.

• The type of waste we are discussing is called handoff by Ward, and you might recognise its effect from your past work experiences: [...]

• It’s never fully appreciated the way we’ve let scammers, scumbags, and assorted bullshit artists hijack the nation’s top voice communications platform. Or that we’ve let marketing industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it.

• In a historic first, the Justice Department has indicted former President Donald Trump on multiple felony charges related to his mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s attempts to recover them. Trump is the first former president ever to face federal criminal charges and could potentially spend years in prison if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in a Miami court on Tuesday. This latest news adds to Trump’s legal woes, with the former president also facing charges in New York related to hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 and another probe in Georgia over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. For more, we speak with Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor and currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy. “We do not have kings here. We have the rule of law, and no one is above it, including a former president,” says Aftergut.

• In a surprise 5-4 decision Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a racially gerrymandered voting map in Alabama, upholding a key plank of the Voting Rights Act that the conservative majority has spent years whittling away at. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the court’s liberal justices in finding that Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional districts unlawfully disadvantage Black voters by diluting their voting power, a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act banning voting practices that discriminate based on race and color. The court ordered Alabama’s Legislature to redraw the map. For more on the decision and the state of voting rights across the country, we are joined by three guests: Khadidah Stone is a named plaintiff in the case and works for the civic engagement organization Alabama Forward; Tish Gotell Faulks is legal director at the ACLU of Alabama; and Davin Rosborough is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Voting Rights Project who helped represent the plaintiffs.

• Sergey Sobyanin, the current mayor of Moscow, announced on his personal blog that he will run again for the position in the fall 2023 elections.

• Russian president Vladimir Putin’s administration, realizing that the country’s young people are the least likely demographic to support the president and Kremlin policies, have decided to develop a special ideological curriculum designed to instill values like “tradition,” “trust in institutions,” and “patriotism” in university students. A source told Meduza that Kremlin policymakers believe Russia’s problems have always started with its intelligentsia — the new curriculum aims to form an intelligentsia that will fall in line with the Kremlin’s programs. The Russian authorities tapped Andrey Polosin, a political operator and occasional scholar, to build the new curriculum, which will be rolled out in the fall. Meduza takes a close look at the professional background of a man who has, while designing a program to make the Kremlin’s preferred “traditional values” seem cool, transformed himself from “typical Putin technocrat” into a long-haired, bearded “crazy professor who knows everything, or a rockstar, or a prophet.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Those three images are likely AI-generated, according to an analysis of traces left by synthetic image generators, said Matthew Stamm, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University. “Our results consistently output a decision that these images are fake,” he said.

• The video does not disclose any potential AI use and the DeSantis campaign did not respond to a question about whether the images were fake or whether AI was used to create them.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Russia’s Interior Ministry has added journalist Sergei Podsytnik to its wanted list on unspecified charges. The editor of Protokol, an online newspaper in the city of Samara, appeared in the wanted persons registry on June 9.

• Human Rights Watch has called on Kyrgyz lawmakers to withdraw a controversial “foreign agents” bill, calling it “a highly repressive draft law” intended to “discredit and stigmatize” civil society groups that receive foreign funding similar to a law in Russia that has had a chilling effect on NGOs.

• By passing Act 372, which also strikes a statute that protected librarians from being prosecuted for circulating material “claimed to be obscene,” Arkansas became one of at least seven states that have passed laws criminalizing librarians and school employees who provide books deemed sexually explicit or “harmful” to minors, The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson reported in May. Another dozen states have considered similar bills.

• None of the bill’s four sponsors in the Arkansas General Assembly responded to a request for comment. In a May op-ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, state Sen. Dan Sullivan defended Act 372, saying that it simply expands existing prohibitions on “displaying” harmful material and creates a process for parents to “appeal the decisions of unelected librarians to local elected officials.”

• Those bookstore owners joined in a federal lawsuit filed June 2 that takes aim at what they call “a vague, sweeping law that restrains public libraries and booksellers in Arkansas from making available constitutionally protected books and other media to their patrons and customers.” Other plaintiffs include the Central Arkansas, Fayetteville and Eureka Springs public library systems, the Arkansas Library Association, booksellers, a 17-year-old bookworm and other library advocates.

• The plaintiffs argue the new law obliterates Americans’ First Amendment rights to distribute, access and engage with books and media.

• It’s hardly news that many of these requests are abusive, and often used to take down perfectly legal material. But a recent takedown request to Google is exceptional in this respect. As TorrentFreak explains, the complaint, made under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), apparently comes from the independent music label “Because Music”, and targets download and conversion software that allows YouTube material to be downloaded as a file.

• During its 2013 visit to Hong Kong, the solo lemon-hued bird ruffled feathers in Beijing after internet users edited the famous “Tank Man” photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown by replacing the tanks with ducks.

• Internet searches for “yellow duck” were banned in mainland China in the run-up to June 4 that year, the anniversary of the crackdown, as Beijing forbids discussion of the day Chinese troops crushed demonstrations.

• Freedom House, a US-based think tank, in the 2022 edition of its global online freedom report, categorized Turkey as “very poor” in terms of content blocking measures. According to the Freedom of Expression Association, by the end of 2021, the country had blocked over 467,000 URL addresses, encompassing a range of websites, including thousands that feature adult content.

• On May 4, the Russian authorities arrested two female theater artists: playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and director Zhenya Berkovich, whose 2021 production of Petriychuk’s play, “Finist the Bright Falcon,” had won the dramatist a Golden Mask, a prestigious theater award in Russia. In the play, Svetlana Petriychuk combined the devices of court drama and traditional Russian folk tale to tell the story of hundreds of real Russian women who converted to Islam, starting long-distance relationships with radicalized Muslim men and later moving to Syria — only to find themselves convicted and jailed for terrorism upon return to Russia. Shortly after it was performed by the theater collective Daughers of Soso, the work was denounced by the ultraconservative Russian National Liberation Movement (NOD), for allegedly glorifying the Islamic State and justifying terrorism. Anna Razumnaya has translated Petriychuk’s play for Meduza, with permission from the playwright’s spouse and acting agent, theater director Yury Shekhvatov. Another English translation, by Alexander Vartanov, also exists and is yet to be produced.

• China is not alone in this practice. Regrettably, countries around the world continue to abuse such crimes and numerous others to target their people. We have documented bloggers in the Middle East, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and elsewhere who, like Ruan, have been thrown in prison and given outrageous prison sentences or subjected to physical violence by authorities, echoing a disturbing pattern of persecution against dissenting voices. Courageous bloggers, journalists, and writers are treated like criminals for protecting and enhancing free expression and privacy. This is a grave injustice. EFF joins free speech advocates around the world in calling for Ruan’s immediate release. States are obliged to uphold the right to free expression enshrined in Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN Human Rights Council has affirmed that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy and free expression. The right “to seek, receive and impart information” includes a right to devise and share tools that enable and protect those abilities.Ruan’s journey to becoming one of China’s most well-known and courageous bloggers began amid a successful career as a cybersecurity expert. A college dropout with a passion for computer science, Ruan worked for cybersecurity companies, and later landed a government job as chief engineer for the information security system of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. He continued his career in industry, but eventually decided to pursue open-source software development. He quit his job and started his blog in 2009.At first, he focused his writing on software development. But that year was the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, and the government began blocking foreign websites, including the website that hosted his blog.He found a way around the blockage, and published tutorials so his followers could continue seeing his posts. It was at that point that he began blogging about how to hide your online identity, how to circumvent China’s Great Firewall, and, increasingly, politics. As China clamped down even further, banning Western social media platforms and mandating censorship software on new computers, he wanted to speak out. “I don’t want to keep silent anymore, and I don’t want to avoid these issues anymore,” he blogged, according to an English translation. “It’s time to write something other than technology.”Over the next 12 years, Program Think published over 700 posts about politics, security, and corruption, from building a database of hundreds of wealthy individuals and their ties to the Chinese Communist Party to “how to overcome the wall,” seemingly undetected or outwitting China’s internet police. In 2013 Program Think was nominated for the Deutsche Welle International Best of Blogs Award.In prescient comments to Deutsche Welle, Ruan said two incidents—the suspicious death of a villager protesting a land grab to make way for the government-approved construction of a power plant, and pro-democracy protests where marchers were beaten and arrested—led him to call for public marches on his blog and focus on politics to raise awareness about China’s corrupt government. “At the time, blog posts calling on netizens to take to the  streets were in nature ‘inciting subversion of state power,’” he noted. “But I have been safe because I am more experienced in concealing identities.”In explaining his decision to write about politics instead of just technology, he said everyone is touched by politics, even if they don’t realize it. “Many netizens have always had a misunderstanding, thinking that politics has nothing to do with their own lives…But everyone has to understand one thing: You don’t have to care about politics, but politics will care about you.”Ruan urged people to speak out against injustice, putting himself at risk to inform, inspire, and motivate others to challenge attacks on freedom of expression. By silencing Ruan, imposing such a severe punishment, and denying him the ability to choose his own counsel to challenge his conviction, China’s playbook for stamping out criticism and free expression is on full display. We condemn this injustice and call for Ruan’s release.

• One of the most important tools for trust and safety efforts is the “block” feature, allowing a user to entirely block someone else from following them. Yes, on Twitter you can get around this by going into incognito mode, but overall, the feature is a very useful tool for those being harassed to limit access to their abusers. Indeed, one of the biggest criticisms early on of the (still in invite-only beta) Bluesky social media app was that it opened its doors to thousands of users before they had implemented a “block” feature (that has since been added). Lots of people argued that launching social media today without the “block” feature is malpractice.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• In a statement [sic] on Facebook, Paul Gutierrez, executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Media Security, named the two gunmen as Narciso Ignacio Guntan and Isabelo Lopez Bautista.

• With “democracy itself” at stake, Licht decided to give Donald Trump a town hall event stocked with supporters, in which little effort was made to rein in the presidential candidate’s lies and insults. The outcome? As the Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta put it, “The only one who wasn’t angry, it seemed, was Trump, most likely because he’d succeeded in disgracing the network on its own airwaves.”

• The letter Gök, who is in Diyarbakır High Security Closed Prison No. 1, sent to journalist Hüseyin Aykol was seized by the Letter Reading Commission. In the letter the journalist talked about the pressures the judiciary has exerted on him since 2017 for photographing the murder of Kemal Kurkut by the police. Gök’s objection against the seizure of the letter by the Letter Reading Commission was rejected on the same day, on the grounds that “in his letter he accused the state of being a murderer”.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Human Rights Committee is only one of multiple international bodies that have found that the denial of abortion care can violate global prohibitions on torture and ill-treatment. For example, the UN Committee against Torture, which monitors the Convention against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (which the United States ratified), has found that denial of abortion care and restrictive abortion laws can in some cases cause “physical and mental suffering so severe in pain and intensity as to amount to torture.” The committee has also found that abortion laws that lack exceptions in cases of life or the health of a pregnant person, or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal impairment, may constitute torture and ill-treatment. Most recently, the Colombian Constitutional Court cited the fact that human rights bodies have found that denial of abortion services can constitute torture and ill-treatment in its decision to decriminalize abortion under all circumstances to 24 weeks.

• In Smith v. BlueCross BlueShield of Tenn., decided today by the Court of Appeals of Tennessee (in an opinion by Chief Judge Michael Swiney, joined by Judges John McClarty and Kristi Davis), Smith alleged that BlueCross had wrongly fired her for, among other things, “email[ing] Tennessee state legislators with her concerns and grievances regarding vaccine mandates.” The court concluded that this stated a claim under Tennessee law: [...]

• Amnesty Turkey has walked away from collective table with the Sosyal-İş union affiliated with DİSK Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DİSK), the union said on Wednesday.

• Releasing a statement, the union asserted that Amnesty International was endangering the workers’ union rights, noting that the negotiations started after a two-month delay.

• Even while raising concerns over free speech, however, Warnock praised the law enforcement involved in the case.

• Local officials in Wisconsin are planning to improve how sheriff’s deputies communicate with people who don’t speak English in response to a ProPublica report that found that an investigation into the death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy living on a dairy farm was mishandled due to a language barrier.

• Dane County supervisors said that their goals include making language access a key part of department equity plans and creating a dedicated countywide language-access coordinator.

• When General Efraín Ríos Montt assumed dictatorial control over Guatemala after a coup in March 1982, he was able to bolster his murderous rule by calling on a special group of friends, the leaders of the American religious right. Guatemala is a predominately Roman Catholic country, but Ríos Montt converted to evangelical Christianity in 1978, becoming an adherent of the Church of the Word, a California-based sect.1

• Yesterday, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ruled that Alabama could be sued over its racially gerrymandered congressional maps. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the court, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh.

• Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney has referred to Bob Hawke’s great regret at not delivering on a treaty as she quoted his widow saying if he was alive today he would urge voters to deliver a voice to parliament.

• Speaking at the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory on Saturday, Ms Burney referred to the 1988 Barunga Statement which called for the recognition of Aboriginal rights.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• While most countries have switched to digital broadcasting, and most broadcasts themselves have programming on 24/7 now, it’s hard to remember the ancient times of analog broadcasts that would eventually stop sometime late at night, displaying a test pattern instead of infomercials or reruns of an old sitcom. They were useful for various technical reasons including calibrating the analog signals. Some test patterns were simply camera feeds of physical cards, but if you wanted the most accurate and reliable test patterns you’d need a Philips pattern generator which created the pattern with hardware instead, and you can build your own now because the designs for these devices were recently open-sourced.

Monopolies

Trademarks

• The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision Thursday in Jack Daniel’s Properties v. VIP Products, a trademark case we weighed in on in an amicus brief. The main question before the Court was whether the Rogers test—a special test for trademark infringement that’s more protective of free expression—should be applied to VIP’s parody of Jack Daniel’s trademarks for a “Bad Spaniels” dog toy. Novelty dog toys aren’t exactly our usual focus at EFF, but this case was an important one because the Supreme Court had never ruled on whether the Rogers test is valid at all. Activists, artists, and regular internet users frequently use trademarks for expressive purposes, and the Rogers test provides important protection from legal threats.

• The good news is that the Court didn’t reject the Rogers test, nor did it change the test itself. Instead, it ruled against VIP on narrower grounds, holding that Rogers’ heightened First Amendment protections didn’t apply because VIP was using “Bad Spaniels” as a trademark of its own—that is, to identify the source of the product.

• As the Court explained, the defining characteristic of a trademark is that it signals the source of a good or service to consumers. For example, when you see the word “Oreo” on a package of cookies, you know those cookies came from the same company as every other pack of Oreo cookies. That makes “Oreo” a trademark. On that same package, you might also see the words “chocolate sandwich cookies.” That gives you some information about what’s inside, but it doesn’t tell you anything about who made the cookies—so that phrase is not functioning as a trademark. Trademark law rests on the assumption that knowing who made your cookies (or dog toy, or whiskey) helps you decide what to buy. The law regulates the use of trademarks so that consumers can confidently rely on their associations between trademark, source, and experience.

Copyrights

• Internet provider RCN and several major music companies are exploring options to settle their piracy liability dispute. A mediator was assigned this week to help the parties reach a deal but the same can’t be said about a lawsuit filed against the ISP by a group of filmmakers. That battle only appears to have intensified, with a new law firm and evidence provider joining the case.

• The developers of Invidious, a privacy-respecting alternative front-end for YouTube, have received a cease-and-desist notice from YouTube’s legal department. The free and open source software, which provides a YouTube experience minus advertising and user tracking, has been instructed to shut down within seven days. As things stand, cooperation isn’t on the agenda.

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