● 06.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/06/2023: libei 1.0.0 and Qt Creator 11 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 1:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge.

Applications

• One of the best ways to take note of your schedule, chores, and things to do is by using sticky note apps. For those unaware, a basic sticky notes app can be used to pen down important things, which could be chores, to-do lists, or ideas when you’re browsing. Linux has quite a decent collection of productivity apps and here are the five best sticky note apps for Linux.

• Project management solutions allow for efficient task management, project progress tracking, smooth team collaboration and several other benefits. There are several project management applications that work on Linux. In this article, we share the six best Linux project management software in 2023. You will get to learn about the key features, pros, cons and pricing for each software. We also shared some tips on choosing the best Linux project management software for your needs.

Instructionals/Technical

• Terraform workspaces let DevOps teams manage configurations for different environments in a centralized way. Get started with workspaces through hands-on examples in this tutorial.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 11 Beta!

• Hello world,

• This is my second blog post for Google Summer of Code 2023, where I will share what I accomplished during the GSoC-23 community bonding period.

• During this time GSoC contributors spend 3 weeks learning about their organization’s community and preparing for their coding project. They get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects

• During the community bonding period, the organizers took two introductory sessions kick starting our journey. The first Welcome Session was about the best practices and tips for a successful Google Summer of Code. Following that, GSoC Contributor Summit took place, during which previous participants and mentors shared their experiences of being part of GSoC.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In this post, I’ll go over everything I did in my first two weeks of GSoC.

• Make GNOME Platform demos for Workbench

• Sonny Piers, Andy Holmes

• We first started out with a meeting to discuss a project plan, decide what needs to be done, and came up with a workflow that’ll work for everyone. Sonny made a Kanban board and filled it with some tickets to start us off. Our mentors briefly explained to us the functionality of some of the widgets and gave us an idea of what’s expected from the demos, so that we are not completely clueless when we start working on them. And when everyone is on the same page, we mark the ticket as “Ready” which means anyone is free to take up the ticket and start working on it. We also decided that we’ll have meetings weekly, to discuss the upcoming week’s work and also solve any issues or roadblocks that we may have come across along the way.

• The first thing I did was finish one of my previously open pull requests which was a demo for AdwHeaderBar, a simple widget but a very commonly used one. The demo shows a header bar with a primary menu, a secondary “Open” menu, and a “New Tab” button similar to Text Editor.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Hello Guix!

• I’m Sarthak and I’ll be working on implementing Parameterized Packages for GNU Guix as a Google Summer of Code intern under the guidance of Pjotr Prins and Gábor Boskovits.

• One of the many advantages of free software is the availability of compile-time options for almost all packages. Thanks to its dedication to building all packages from source, Guix is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions that can take advantage of these compile-time features; in fact, many advanced users such as those using Guix on High-Performance Computing Systems and new ISAs like RISC-V have already been doing this by utilizing a feature known as Package Transformations.

• Parameterized Packages are a new type of package transformations that will be able to tweak an even wider array of compile-time options, such as removing unused dependencies or building a package with support for just a specific locale. These will have a wide variety of applications, ranging from High-Performance Computing to Embedded Systems and could also help tackle a few of Guix’s issues like large binary sizes and dense dependency graphs.

• I posted about the missing libGLX.so.0 in the Kdenlive AppImage:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202305/kdenlive-appimage-vs-flatpak.html

• libGLX.so.0 is in the ‘libglvnd’ package, that is in mainstream Linux distributions, but not in EasyOS. It is a wrapper for different libGL packages, as explained here: [...]

• I haven’t had much to do with VMs in the past, but there is a lot of interest, so looking into it.

Fedora Family / IBM

• We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

• Week: 05 June – 09 June 2023

• Hindsight preface: This was written in very tired state.

• I have been chatting about this with people who know more than I ever will about Flatpak.

• Soo I have added few edits here and there.

• If I seem frustrated, most of my frustration is aimed at the unnecessary shit slinging over packaging formats.

• We all want the good stuff, why the hell are we fighting?!

• It was not an easy task to make Evolution run nicely as a flatpak, but Milan Crha managed to do it and we’ve been fine-tuning it for the last 3 years. There are still some use cases that don’t fully work in a flatpak, but they don’t affect most users. Evolution has established itself well on Flathub, too. It has accumulated over 130k installs. There are roughly 12-15k “active” installations.

• Some time ago I also started building Evolution for the beta channel on Flathub. When there are already development releases of the upcoming version (it will be 3.49.x this cycle), I build those for the beta channel. If they’re not available yet, I push stable releases there right after the upstream release is done, roughly one week before they go to the stable channel.

Debian Family

• A long time ago, before the pandemic, I bought a Librem 5 phone from Purism. I also moved home since then, and sadly my phone was sleeping peacefully in a box in the garage since I moved.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Release management is the process of planning, scheduling, testing and deploying new versions of software. To make this process simpler for snap developers, we have released a new feature called progressive releases. Continue reading to understand what they are, why they are important and how you can use them in the Snap Store.

Devices/Embedded

• The latest NXP edge processor has built-in support for a familiar development tool.

• Aiming to bring the flexibility of Linux to edge computing hardware, NXP Semiconductors has released the i.MX 91 family of processors. The i.MX 91 family is the latest release in the i.MX 9 series of applications processors that provide higher performance and improved security to bolster the extensibility at the edge.

• Wind River released a no-fee professional-grade scanning tool to identify Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). The Wind River Studio Linux Security Scanning Service is designed for the distinct requirements of embedded Linux environments indicating when a fix or patch is available for a given CVE.

• Powertip has created a multi-option display-driving single-board computer (right) that uses daughter boards (left below) to add Quad core 64bit Arm CPUs running at 1.6GHz – either NXP with four Cortex-A53 CPUs, or Rockchip with four Cortex-A35 CPUs.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Contrary to traditional software development, data is more important than code in machine learning. Building a high-performing model requires using reliable, precisely labelled data but poor-quality data is not always obvious.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• By helping to translate and market LibreOffice around the world, native language projects bring enthusiasm and passion to the global community.

Programming/Development

• Whether it’s building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.

• We’ve all experienced that feeling of excitement starting a new project. The first few weeks you can’t wait to get on the computer to work. Then slowly over time you get distracted or make up excuses and work on it less. If this is for real work, you forcibly slog your way to the finish line but every day is painful. If this is for fun, you look back years from now and remember what could’ve been.

• I’ve learned that when I break down my large tasks in chunks that result in seeing tangible forward progress, I tend to finish my work and retain my excitement throughout the project. People are all motivated and driven in different ways, so this may not work for you, but as a broad generalization I’ve not found an engineer who doesn’t get excited by a good demo. And the goal is to always give yourself a good demo.

• With some possible fixes

• This article takes a deep dive through a complex outage in the main database cluster of a payments company. We’ll focus on the aftermath of the incident and dive deep into the internals of Postgres.

Python

• Working with timezones is an essential part of many Python applications. Whether you’re building a scheduling system, a logging tool, or any other application that involves dates and times, setting the default timezone is a critical function.

Rust

• In a recent podcast about Rust leadership, the BDFL question came up again and Jeremy Soller said (in the understatement of the century) that “I believe Graydon would have said no to some things we all like now”. And this echoes a different conversation on reddit where I was reminded that I meant to write down at some point how “I would have done it all differently” (and that this would probably have been extremely unsatisfying to everyone involved, and it never would have gone anywhere).

• Boy Howdy would I ever. This is maybe not clear enough, and it might make the question of whether the project “really should have had a BDFL” a little sharper to know this: the Rust We Got is many, many miles away from The Rust I Wanted. I mean, don’t get me wrong: like the result. It’s great. I’m thrilled to have a viable C++ alternative, especially one people are starting to consider a norm, a reasonable choice for day-to-day use. I use it and am very happy to use it in preference to C++. But!

• There are so, so many diferences from what I would have done, if I’d been “in charge” the whole time.

Leftovers

Science

• Masturbation is an “ancient trait” in the world of primates, including humans, according to a study that looked at how self-pleasure helped us evolve.

Education

• The Editorial Board argues that Stanford should reveal how race is currently factored into admissions, and lay out a roadmap of how the University would respond to a Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action. “If Stanford truly prioritizes giving students “the opportunity to learn from the wonderful diversity of identities, experiences, and perspectives that exist in the world”, then it should work in advance to transparently inform students and all who will be affected by this monumental ruling,” the Board writes.

• In a show of solidarity with the Undergraduate Senate following the Faculty Senate’s bypassing of their vote on the Honor Code, the GSC unanimously voted to symbolically endorse the rescindment of SenD#831.

• A Hoover Institution event discussed racial-profiling of Chinese scholars in America and examined institutional efforts to protect research. Speakers talked the ‘Chinese Initiative’ and its consequences.

• When the makers of plagiarism-detection software Turnitin announced they would add the ability to detect writing created by generative artificial intelligence, UM-Dearborn opted out.

• U-M and the Graduate Employees’ Organization have reached an agreement to settle several unfair labor practice complaints filed as part of ongoing contract negotiations between the parties.

• The University of Michigan and the Graduate Employees’ Organization have reached a settlement on the unfair labor practice charges filed by each party with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission.

• Religious liberty, not religious authority, should be the aim of the American right.

Hardware

• In early 2022 I received an email from Guillaume Lion, a young filmmaker based in Brussels, Belgium. Having read Low-tech Magazine for several years, Guillaume recently started making comics, which he considers low-tech cinema. He proposed to visit me in Barcelona and make a portrait of me. I have never taken myself too seriously, so Guillaume came by later that year. The comic originally appeared in French in the Belgian magazine Médor and was translated by Mira Matthew.

• TSMC exec responds to disgruntled U.S. employees by suggesting those who aren’t ready to work long hours should try a different industry.

• Intel continues to solidify positions on the desktop discrete GPU market as sales of graphics cards shrink.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• This summer, mushroom yields are likely to be adversely affected by drought, the Latvian National Museum of Natural History’s mycologist Inita Dāniele told LETA on June 8.

• The Louisiana state legislature unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday (June 8) banning minors from creating their own accounts on websites across the internet, without express parental consent. It now goes to the desk of Governor John Bel Edwards, where it is unclear whether it will be signed into law.

• Young adults ages 19-30 nearly doubled their past-12-month use of non-LSD hallucinogens in the United States from 2018-21, according to a study by U-M and Columbia University.

• Plus: The decline of morality is an illusion.

Proprietary

• In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that the chat bot could lead him astray.

• On Tuesday, Twitch released new advertising restrictions for its platform. On Wednesday night, the platform began walking those rules back as the community revolted. Or did it? The new platform rules would prevent any advertising partnerships outside of Twitch-supported ads. That means no ‘burned-in’ video, display, or audio ads are allowed anymore.

• Falcon vs. LLaMA: Falcon and LLaMA are two of the most popular large language models (LLMs). We evaluate and contrast the two models in terms of size, training data, capabilities, and performance in this post. We also explore the advantages and disadvantages of each model.

• Advanced artificial intelligence technologies are being adopted at an unprecedented pace, and their potential to revolutionise society for good is enormous.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• The National Spectrum Consortium and Linux Foundation have announced a formal collaboration focused on Open RAN software prototypes, demonstrations and development, including an open-source reference stack.

• The NSC is a group of nearly 400 organizations that operates under a streamlined contract authority that is meant to enable closer and faster collaboration between government and industry, giving the federal government direct access to private companies in order for the government to quickly acquire and leverage new technologies.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (jupyter-core, openssl, and ruby2.5), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (libreoffice, openssl, and python-flask), Red Hat (python and python3), Slackware (mozilla, php8, and python3), SUSE (java-1_8_0-ibm, libcares2, mariadb, and python36), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-gke, linux-intel-iotg, linux-raspi, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and mozjs102).

• The University of Manchester has confirmed experts are working to resolve a “cyber incident”.

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

• The uni said it was working with a number of organisations including the Information Commissioner’s Office, National Cyber Security Centre and National Crime Agency.

• A hacking group claiming to be Russian-linked cybercriminals has published sensitive data from one of Australia’s largest law firms, HWL Ebsworth, after the firm refused to pay their ransom demands. The AlphV ransomware gang, also known as BlackCat, announced on the dark web that it had released 1.45 terabytes of data allegedly stolen from HWL Ebsworth in late April. The group claims to have financial and insurance data, credit card information, agreements, and reports. The firm is investigating the claim and has confirmed that it will not submit to the ransom demand.

• The hack has caused concern for HWL Ebsworth’s clients, which include ANZ, the South Australian, Queensland, and ACT governments, the Environment and Human Services Department, and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). The federal government has confirmed that it was a client of the law firm and may have been affected by the breach. The Home Affairs department has set up three “working groups” to respond to the hack, including a specialist legal team and a Sensitive Information Working Group to manage any information exposed in the breach related to vulnerable people, national security, and law enforcement matters.

• 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.

• Intellihartx LLC in Tennessee is notifying 489,830 of its clients’ patients about the Fortra/GoAnywhere breach by Clop. The types of information that may have been compromised include name, address, medical billing and insurance information, certain medical information such as diagnoses and medication, and demographic information such as date of birth and Social Security number.

• According to court documents, Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, both Russian nationals, are charged with conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 bitcoins from their hack of Mt. Gox. Bilyuchenko is also charged with conspiring with Alexander Vinnik to operate BTC-e from 2011 to 2017.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Cyclops ransomware’s info stealer, which is similarly based on the Go programming language as its ransomware’s macOS and Linux versions, facilitates the exfiltration of operating system details, computer names, and process counts, as well as .TXT, .PDF, .DOC, .XLS, . PNG, .JPG, and .JPEG files, which are then sent to a remote server, according to an Uptycs report.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences

• The FBI secretly created its own encrypted phone company. Now the U.S. government wants help capturing Maximilian Rivkin, one of its alleged top brass.

Defence/Aggression

• From June 10 to 20, international military exercises dubbed “Baltic Zenith 2023″ will take place in southern Kurzeme region at the Šķēde military training range and at the Jūrmalciems military aviation training facility, during which soldiers of Latvia, Lithuania and the United States will improve their skills in combat firing at airborne targets.

• The family’s decision to relinquish legal ownership of writings left by the Nashville school shooter comes amid a fierce legal battle over whether the writings should be made public.

• “But, we need to see an end to the violence and the looting of humanitarian facilities”

• Ousted Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan secured bail on June 8 from the Islamabad High Court over murder charges, blocking his arrest for 14 days, his lawyer Gohar Khan said.

• A court in the Siberian city of Kemerovo on June 7 sentenced noted human rights defender Dmitry Kamynin to 18 years in prison for allegedly distributing illegal drugs, a charge he and his supporters call retaliation by local authorities for his rights activities.

• Bosnia’s state court has sentenced five ethnic Serb ex-policemen to prison terms for committing war crimes against Muslim Bosniak civilians during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.

• The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), a United Nations (UN) tribunal, declared Wednesday that Félicien Kabuga, one of the last fugitives of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, is unfit to stand trial due to dementia.

• Locals say troops shot 4 People’s Defense Force members and 2 civilians.

• French shipyard Piriou has handed over the first of three OPV 58S patrol vessels to Senegal’s Navy as part of a contract signed in November 2019. Construction of the first vessel, Walo, bean in October 2020 and it was launched in April 2022 before being handed over at Piriou’s shipyard in Concarneau on 2 June.

• The upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius offers an opportunity for government officials and the defense industry to get on the same page about the true urgency of inadequate defense supply chains.

• Countering terrorism while preserving essential freedoms and holding together a stable and harmonious community isn’t an easy task, but it has been managed effectively by successive Australian governments and their agencies.

• Sea state The US Navy has released a video showing a Chinese navy ship nearly colliding with an American destroyer in the Taiwan Strait.

• General James E. Cartwright, Lieutenant Colonel Justin M. Conelli, and Clementine G. Starling advance a framework for operationalizing integrated deterrence.

• The Australian National Audit Office’s recent report on the Hunter-class frigate program contained a number of significant revelations, but one of the most striking was the statement by the surface ships advisory committee [...]

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• Finland’s recycling rate in 2020 was 41.6 percent, while the EU’s 2025 target is over 55 percent. The Environment Ministry is worried about rising incineration since last year.

• The authorities had expected the rains on June 4 but a cyclonic storm delayed the onset.

• “…parameters indicate that very slow extrusion of shallow degassed magma is ongoing…”

• Aid groups had obtained permission to travel in the state only a day earlier.

• Echoing cancellations in New York, the Primavera Sound festival has canceled initial dates due to severe weather concerns. “Thursday’s Primavera Sound Madrid has been cancelled for safety reasons in view of the adverse weather forecast,” organizers informed attendees via social media.

Energy/Transportation

• Coinbase, undaunted by a lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging it offered unregistered securities to retail investors, continues to operate its business as it always has.

• The Spanish Government on Tuesday (June 6) granted €100m ($107.7m) in aid to seven projects that look set to integrate electrolysers into industrial settings for green hydrogen production.

• The UK and Scottish Governments should set interim targets for their hydrogen strategies to ensure production and Net Zero commitments are met, according to a Scottish Affairs Committee report.

Wildlife/Nature

• Air quality levels have been a source of intense interest this week. There are a number of ways to keep track of them on your phone.

• The severity of Canadian wildfire smoke has startled the United States and may prompt Eastern communities to draw safety lessons from the fire-prone West.

• How you, a newly minted AQI expert, can sort through the data noise from AirNow and PurpleAir.

• Mayor Eric Adams said there is “no blueprint or playbook” for hazardous air quality, but he did suspend alternate side parking.

• The air quality index in New York City reached “hazardous” levels on Wednesday afternoon.

Overpopulation

• Stanford researchers developed a tool that uses soil moisture as an indicator of evapotranspiration rates of plants. Accurately measuring evapotranspiration could allow for irrigation using less water.

Finance

• How to rock your work rather than let the work rule you

• The United States rolls out a loan forgiveness program to encourage public service. Open to teachers, librarians, nurses, and others, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program cancels a borrower’s remaining student debt after 10 years of public interest.

• Tesco should introduce unit pricing on Clubcard offers so shoppers can compare

• grocery prices more easily

• “…a total of 12,196 jobs added to the industry…”

• We saw it coming years before it was announced. Standard Chartered lost interest in the Zimbabwean market a long time ago and were, to be frank, just biding time, waiting for something to change. Last year, they said they had seen enough and decided Zimbabwe was too hot to handle. Their loss is FBC’s gain.

• The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week rose to its highest level since October 2021, but the labor market remains one of the healthiest parts of the U.S. economy.

• The Labor Department reported Thursday that U.S. applications for jobless claims were up from 233,000 by 28,000 to 261,000 for the week ending June 3. Weekly jobless claims are considered representative of U.S. layoffs.

• The four-week moving average of claims, which evens out some of the weekly variations, rose by 7,500 to 237,250.

• In January, Haoning Zhang, 33, was among the batch of layoffs announced by Google. Two months later, after his notice, the young engineer, of Chinese origin, left the offices of the search engine in Irvine (California), where he had been employed for eight months. Since then, he has given himself two missions: to find a job and above all a visa.

• Earlier this week, the Cambodian leader worried that the new Thai government would target migrant workers.

• Sale of Telegraph and Spectator to highest bid now looks likely.

• Dr. Carla Norrlöf, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, testified to the US House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy. Below are her prepared remarks for the committee on preserving the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Donald Trump’s indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate has brought renewed attention to one of the most notable cases in Justice Department history. The federal charges represent the biggest legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. A person familiar with the indictment tells The Associated Press that Trump has been charged with seven counts but that the exact charges are under seal.

• It was not immediately known what specific charges the former president is facing. One person briefed on the matter said there were seven counts.

• It was a more familiar drill this time for the former president, his aides and allies, who cranked their political spin machine and fund-raising operation into action.

• Follow along for the latest on former President Donald Trump, who announced Thursday on social media that he’s been indicted on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate.

• As Trump faces federal charges, the evidence seems stronger, and the legal issues simpler.

• US federal prosecutors have indicted former US President Donald Trump in their investigation into his potential mishandling of classified government documents, Trump announced Thursday via his social media platform Truth Social. As of the time of this report, federal prosecutors at the Department of Justice (DOJ) have yet to confirm the indictment.

• The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he’s convicted.

• Donald Trump’s indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate has brought renewed attention to one of the most notable cases in Justice Department history.

• The former president assailed Hillary Clinton for her handling of sensitive information. Now, the same issue threatens his chances of reclaiming the presidency.

• In a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court found Thursday in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s legislature violated the voting rights of Black Alabamians with the composition of the state’s congressional maps.

• El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Wednesday signed a controversial electoral reform into law that will slash the number of seats in the country’s Legislative Assembly from 84 to 60. President Bukele and his party Nuevas Ideas argue that the measure will cut costs and promote greater efficiency.

• A conversation with Tim Alberta about his reporting on the network and its former leader

• Chris Licht’s tenure illuminated how increasingly hard it can be to find success on the divided cable news dial.

• Highlights from a “Radio Atlantic” conversation with the writer

• The Voting Rights Act lives to see another day.

• The No Labels plan is just too risky.

• In a 5-4 ruling the Supreme Court justices affirmed a lower-court decision that Alabama’s redistricting to concentrate Black voters in a single district violated the Voting Rights Act. In a surprise move, two conservatives sided with the court’s liberals.

• Three books delve into the Civil Rights Movement from Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent campaigns to the rise of the Black Panthers.

• Since Tuesday, conservative Republicans have arrested the House’s operations, refusing to support routine procedural votes. The move signals discontent from the far right over the debt-ceiling deal negotiated by Speaker Kevin McCarthy with President Joe Biden.

• The celebrity minister, who died Thursday, built a media empire and openly sought to leverage his popularity among evangelicals to influence government and the culture.

• Not all young people are Democrats.

• The Israeli prime minister has spent decades drumming out all competent challengers. Now he has no capable successors.

• The remarkable staying power of populist governments—thanks in part to their willingness to bend the rule of law—is a warning to America.

• Yes, many countries in Europe restrict abortion far more than America did under Roe. But they also do a lot more to support women and children, once those children are out of the womb.

• Pat Robertson, who died Thursday, launched the far-reaching Christian Broadcasting Network, ran for president as a Republican in 1988, and founded the Christian Coalition, which cemented the Republican Party’s enduring alliance with evangelical voters.

• I a Trump indictment comes in the next few weeks, it could provide Republicans an opportunity to distance themselves from Trump.

• How politically radical could the base of the Republican Party become between now and the 2024 presidential election?

• FBI agents have arrested a Texas businessman at the center of the scandal that led to the historic impeachment of state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Online records show that Nate Paul was booked into an Austin jail Thursday afternoon after being taken into custody by federal agents. It was not immediately clear what charges led to his arrest, and the jail records said only that he was being held on a federal detainer. Paul’s entanglements with Paxton were central to the GOP-led state House of Representatives’ overwhelming vote to impeach the Republican last month.

• Lawmakers in both parties fear that the rebellion by the extreme right could endanger spending bills and other big legislative initiatives if it persists, shaping the speakership in the most difficult of ways.

• A decision that said Alabama’s congressional voting maps were detrimental to Black voters was celebrated by advocates — and could mean changes to voting in other states.

• The main remaining power of the landmark 1965 law, over racial bias in political mapmaking, gets an unexpected buttressing from a court that had been weakening the law for years.

• In one of the biggest rulings of this term so far, the Supreme Court upheld a key section of the Voting Rights Act. The case has important implications for both 2024 elections and democracy overall.

• The Court delivered a rare victory for voting rights—and may have given Democrats a handful of new seats.

• Just three in ten state office workers are working on site on any one day, on average.

• While in the Belgian capital, Marin will also receive a Trailblazer award from the Women Political Leaders group.

• With a coalition of anti-vax activists, crypto enthusiasts, Silicon Valley moguls, and supporters from across the horseshoe of extremism.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Porn viewers in Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi are now met with a video imploring them to contact their representatives about age-verification laws.

• “there is no place in Australia for symbols that glorify the horrors of the Holocaust”

• Australia Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said on Thursday that he will introduce a bill next week banning the public display of the Nazi Hakenkreuz, commonly known as the swastika, and SS Bolts. The bill will also ban the trade of any items which bear these symbols.

• “Talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point.”

• US Democratic and Republican lawmakers have urged Washington not to invite Hong Kong’s sanctioned leader John Lee to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco in November, describing him as a “human rights abuser.”

• Hong Kong’s top court will hear an appeal by the government against an earlier ruling that overturned the conviction of former Tiananmen vigil activist Chow Hang-tung over an unauthorised commemoration.

• At RightsCon, human-rights advocates and tech leaders who have faced harassment online detail their experiences—and ways the international community can support women moving forward.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Robinson talks Today, the threat (or lack thereof) posed by podcasts and his workaholic ways.

• What publishers can learn from the troubles facing Buzzfeed and Vice.

• Partner publications include the Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters and Bloomberg.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Yet another big tech baron is beckoning workers back to the office. Now Google is doubling down on enforcing in-person work, according to a new company notice.

• While the term ‘quiet quitting’ may be having its zeitgeist moment, it’s just a new name for a very old behavior—and it’s a lot more nuanced than an employee simply doing the bare minimum at work.

• In a public courtroom of the United States of America, in which a high-level criminal case is being tried, the prosecutors are permitted to press a buzzer on their table in the midst of argument to the court by defense counsel.

• In a near-unanimous opinion, the Justices made it easier for employers to sue labor unions for damages caused by a work stoppage.

• What Barbie means in 2023 seems as unclear to the designers of the Barbie Malibu Cafe as to anyone else—but they do make a great garlic aioli.

• Top Chef has spent the past 20 seasons redefining what it means to be a chef—and a leader.

• If next month’s election isn’t free, the E.U. could raise tariffs – a move that could cause factory closures.

• Interior Minister Agne Bilotaitė said the detention of migrants, deemed unconstitutional by a Lithuanian court on Wednesday, was necessary to protect the country.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• At a DFRLab RightsCon event, Wezenbeek spoke about the need to get everyone involved in the implementation of the DSA and DMA.

• Understanding the function and importance of MAC addresses is essential for anyone dealing with computer networks, be it a home network or a complex business setup. This article provides a comprehensive guide on Media Access Control (MAC) addresses, their role in network communication, and their significance in today’s digital world. What is a MAC Address? [...]

Monopolies

Patents

• Under former director Iancu, the USPTO created a set of guidelines allowing the PTAB to deny IPR institution even in situations where the challenger raises strong challenges.  These discretionary denials are known as Fintiv guidelines based upon the precedential case of Apple Inc. v. Fintiv, Inc., IPR2020-00019 (P.T.A.B. 2020).  The statute appears to provide the USPTO Director with discretion in at least two key ways: (1) The statute does not expressly require institution but rather sets the reasonable-likelihood of success as a minimum threshold for granting institution. (2) The statute also indicates that the decision of whether to issue is non-appealable, suggesting a discretionary approach.

Trademarks

• A California judge has dismissed a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by Guns N’ Roses against a store called Texas Guns and Roses that sells — you guessed it — guns and roses.

Copyrights

• Earlier this week, a federal judge dismissed the Dua Lipa “Levitating” lawsuit, questioning whether the London-born artist had in fact accessed the allegedly infringed track. Now, despite being given leave to amend the complaint, the plaintiffs have agreed to drop the action.

• Spotify pivots its podcasting strategy yet again — this time with an eye on syndication. Spotify is shifting its podcast strategy again, making its exclusives available on other platforms to gain revenue through syndication.

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