● 06.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/06/2023: Linux 6.4 RC6 and Ultramarine Linux 38 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week was full of awesome releases, starting with the long-anticipated Debian 12 “Bookworm” and openSUSE Leap 15.5 operating system, and continuing with the Firefox 114 web browser, Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment, as well as new KDE Frameworks and KDE Gear releases for KDE fans.

• On top of that, I give you a first look at the new features in the upcoming Firefox 115 web browser, Thunderbird 115 email client, and blendOS 3 immutable distribution. Read the hottest news of this week and get access to all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for June 11th, 2023, below.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Instructionals/Technical

• Linux is a powerful and flexible operating system that comes with a strong process management system that lets users handle and make the best use of their system’s resources. System stability, security, and efficiency depend on knowing how processes work and being able to manage them well. This blog post will go into the details of Linux process management, talking about important ideas and methods. We will also look at how process management fits into the larger subject of Linux permission escalation.

• With a convention NFS server filesystem stack, such as ext4 on LVM on software RAID, everything is in the kernel and you can ask kernel people for help, report issues you see, and so on. If something is going wrong that creates sub-par performance, the kernel people will probably want to fix it. But (Open)ZFS On Linux is outside the kernel, so Linux kernel people have little reason to particularly help out and ZoL people may not have the capabilities to dig into the kernel NFS and disk IO stacks to understand what’s going on (it’s a bit out of scope), and even if a problem can be identified there may not be any good fix. One reason for this is that the actual code of ZFS On Linux is also mostly Solaris/Illumos code, which creates a mismatch between the kernel and ZFS (one of the areas where this is still quite visible is memory issues with ZFS’s ARC).

• After the first day, I was chatting about CSS in a bar with some friends. Stephan said it’s great that browsers are shipping so many new features, but we need people to use them in real projects, share their experiences in talks and articles, and show the world what CSS is capable of.

• I agree because most of us still need to understand how groundbreaking some of these additions to the language are. That can only change if we’re curious and experiment, share what we’ve learned, and discuss it, but it’s not enough to rely on people like Stephanie Eckles, Ahmad Shadeed, Michelle Barker, Adam Argyle, Bramus Van Damme, Una Kravets, or Kevin Powell to do that. Especially with CSS-Tricks dying slowly*, we need more people to give CSS a stage.

• We also agreed that we need more people to push CSS to its limits and explore what else we can get from Grid, custom properties, :has(), container queries, etc., beyond the obvious use cases.

• But interoperability has evolved. There are a magnitude (or two) more programmers in the world who want to use APIs to interact with a platform. Platform changes and product sunsetting highlight the stress points of these Web 2.0 companies where users realize they can’t take their data with them.

• Welcome to this comprehensive guide on installing Debian 12, the latest release codenamed Bookworm! Debian 12 brings a multitude of enhancements, including updated software packages, improved hardware support, and increased stability. This step-by-step tutorial will walk you through the steps to install Debian 12 bookworm, ensuring a smooth and successful setup of Debian 12 on your system. Let’s dive in and get Debian 12 up and running on your machine!

• Wondering what’s new in Debian 12 bookworm edition? Refer our Debian 12 Release Notes guide in the link below. [...]

• In this blog post, I assume that tcpdump is already installed since the installation method can vary from system to system, and basic Linux and CLI skills already exist. I’ll try to keep it as short as possible while providing all the necessary information.

• The ‘!’ symbol or operator in Linux can be used as a Logical Negation operator as well as to fetch commands from history with tweaks or to run previously executed commands with modification.

• Most of the following Linux commands usage with ‘!’ symbol can vary between different shells. While the examples I provided are commonly used in the bash shell, some other Linux shells may have different implementations or may not support certain uses of the ‘!’ symbol at all.

• IPTraf-ng is a console-based Linux network statistics monitoring program that shows information about IP traffic, which includes information such as:

• The IPTraf-ng utility can be used to find out the type of traffic on your network, and what kind of service is the most heavily used on what systems, among others.

• Before jumping into the landscape of CNI plugins for Kubernetes, it’s important to understand the basic elements of Kubernetes networking. Follow this guide to get started.

Games

• In the natural order of the world, porting DOOM to any newly unlocked computing system is an absolute given. This a rule which [greenluigi1] understands all too well, leading to presumably the first Hyundai to be equipped with this all-time classic on its infotainment system. This follows hot on the trail of re-hacking said infotainment system and a gaggle of basic apps being developed for and run on said head unit (being the part of the infotainment system on the front dashboard). Although it is a Linux-based system, this doesn’t mean that you can just recompile DOOM for it, mostly because of the rather proprietary system environment.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• This release of openSUSE is relatively tame, it’s a minor evolution from the previous 15.4 version from last year. Which is to be expected, this release is supposed to offer minor improvements and bug fixes, not exciting new features. In other words, this release does what it says on the label.

• Of note, I think it’s worth pointing out both Discover and System Settings work better on openSUSE than most other distributions I’ve tried recently. Both were more stable and performed faster. In fact, the entire Plasma experience feels a little more responsive on openSUSE than on most other distributions I’ve tried recently.

New Releases

• After a development period spanning 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days, the Debian project is thrilled to announce the release of its new stable version, Debian 12, codenamed “bookworm” on June 10, 2023. Yes! Debian 12 ‘Bookworm’ has been officially released and is available to download!

• Thanks to the combined efforts of the Debian Security and the Debian Long Term Support teams, Debian 12 “bookworm” will be supported for the next 5 years.

• Debian 12 ‘Bookworm’ succeeds the stable series Debian 11 ‘Bullseye’, which was previously released in 2019.

• Finally, the next update, IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 175, has been released! It updates OpenSSL to the 3.1 branch, features a kernel update as well as a large number of package updates and a variety of bug fixes.

• Before we start talking about the changes in detail, we would like to ask for your support. This update has taken a lot of effort to put together and we can’t do it without you. So please, if you can, donate to the project helping us to put more resources to bring you more and better updates. It is very much appreciated by all of us here!

• Ultramarine Linux 38 (Tortuga) is here! Let’s take a peek at what’s new.

• #1 We are pleased to announce the first beta release of Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.0! The 8.x family is based on the great Debian 12 “Bookworm” and comes with a 6.2 kernel, QEMU 8.0.2, LXC 5.0.2, OpenZFS 2.1.11.

• Note: The current release of Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.0 is a beta version. If you test or upgrade, make sure to first create backups of your data. We recommend Proxmox Backup Server to do so.

BSD

• You can now clean up, grow, and destroy HAMMER2 volumes, even when they are not mounted. [...]

Debian Family

• Debian is one of the oldest GNU/Linux distributions, and it continues to serve as the foundation for many other Linux-based operating systems including Ubuntu, Kali, MX, and the Raspberry Pi OS, among others.

• The operating system is also known for emphasizing stability over flashy new features, and it can take a long time for new releases to arrive. Case in point: Debian 12 “bookworm” is now available, after nearly 20 months of development.

• Iam sure you have already installed Debian 12 Bookworm or planning to upgrade. Debian 12 was released on June 10, 2023, after more than a year of development. It brings the latest packages, upgrades and replaces some key modules as well.

• If you use Debian on your laptops or desktops, here are a few steps you might want to do after installing or upgrading to Debian 12.

Devices/Embedded

• MYiR provides a Linux 5.15 BSP for the module with the source code for all drivers, U-boot, and Linux, as well as two root file systems built with the Yocto project: a core image without GUI, and a full-features image.

• The company also designed the MYD-YF13X development board as an evaluation platform for the MYC-YF13X CPU module. The carrier board brings out two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, RS232, RS485, and CAN bus interfaces, USB 2.0 host and OTG interfaces, a mini PCIe socket for 4G LTE USB modules, as well as an LCD interface, a camera interface, an audio jack, as well as extension headers.

Open Hardware/Modding

• After trying to recover the backup server and giving up as soon as I found that I cannot log in as root or use sudo, I gave up on doing that over the network and decided to get physical acccess to the server. One reinstall and Ansible run later, the server is okay again.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

• by Chrystalleni Loizidou – June 2023

• There is clear dissonance between the person described in the attacks against Richard Stallman’s character, and the Richard Stallman I know and have been in conversation with for the last 5 years. There is an error here that is harmful not only to him as an individual (I am deeply saddened by this, what a phenomenon to experience, what strange times we live in) but is also harmful more broadly: it is a distraction from what he stands for and the work we must do to reverse the hold of exploitative technologies on the future of humanity.

• I call on fellow feminists not to get carried away by aggressive and divisive defamation campaigns, and to focus our energy against oppression where it is really played out: in the collusion of the non-free technology industry with the edu-war-health industrial complex and the expansion of its domination to nearly all aspects of life. Let wise, kind and meaningful activism prevail.

• Chrystalleni Loizidou, PhD. Organiser of the Free/Libre Technologies, Arts and the Commons Unconference, an event with keynotes by Richard Stallman and Silvia Federici, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, 2019.

FSFE

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

Leftovers

• In many ways, maps are more embedded in our day-to-day lives than they’ve ever been, he said, noting how much we all use GPS, satellite view and google maps. And in cartography, they tend to use geographical information systems — databases that produce dynamic maps. Online and dynamic maps are still maps, even if you can’t hold them.

• “It would be very much like saying that because we no longer use film cameras, we’re not doing photography anymore. In fact, we’re doing more photography,” Bevan said.

• “For sure, the map is still there, but the medium has certainly profoundly changed.”

• An “emperor” who transformed an Australian state and a dame who delighted global audiences for decades are together in lights for the King’s Birthday Honours List.

• Former West Australian Liberal premier Colin Barnett and legendary late comedian Barry Humphries are among 1191 Australians recognised.

• Women are at the heart of the King’s Birthday Honours list for the first time in its history.

• From artists to scientists and ex-politicians, more than 1000 Australians have been recognised, with women making up more than 50 per cent of appointments.

• Before the Internet became the advertisement generator we know and love today, interspersed with interesting information here and there, it was originally a network of computers largely among various universities. This was even before the world-wide web and HTML which means that the people using these proto-networks, mostly researchers and other academics, had to build things we might take for granted from the ground up. One of those was one of the first search engines, built by the librarians who were cataloging all of the research in their universities, and using their relatively primitive computer networks to store and retrieve all of this information.

Education

• In 1999, U-M’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library announced it had reached an exclusive agreement to receive Kaczynski’s prison correspondence. “A 5-foot stack of hundreds of letters written by people around the world to Kaczynski and his responses to some of the letters” were delivered to the library in fall 1999 after two years of negotiations, a university spokesperson said. Kaczynski agreed to provide the letters at no charge.

• Kaczynski also tried to donate the writings left in his Montana cabin to the university, but a 2004 federal court ruling said Kaczynski had “no right to donate his writings” and that the government legally possesses the papers on behalf of Kaczynski’s victims.

Hardware

• At Ateliers Perrault, a 250-year-old carpentry company in France’s Loire Valley — one of the two chosen to restore the roof — you don’t hear the whirring of electric saws. It’s the chopping of axes that resounds as craftsmen transform oak trees into long, rectangular beams by hand.

• Carpenter Joseph Canuel explains.

• “We made cathedral roofs well before saws and sawmills existed, and this is how it worked,” he says. “You got the wood in the nearby forest like we’re doing. And sure, we could easily cut these logs into two boards, but keeping the wood fibers the whole length of the beam gives it more resistance.”

• It won’t be the first time pornography has been a key driver of sales of new technology. Throughout history, the adult entertainment business has been an engine for tech innovations – from camcorders to videocams, paywalls to better broadband speeds. Nevertheless, it poses an awkward question for Apple: is pornography the key to the future of a company that prides itself on its family-friendly image?

• The importance of porn to the success of new technologies was a phenomenon observed by the US commentator John Tierney in 1994, the early days of the world wide web. “Sex has had a peculiarly creative impact on communications,” Tierney wrote. “Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation; virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.”

• If you’re at all into nostalgic cameras, you’ve certainly seen the old Brownie from Kodak. They were everywhere, and feature an iconic look. [JGJMatt] couldn’t help but notice that you could easily find old ones at a good price, but finding and developing No. 117 film these days can be challenging. But thanks to a little 3D printing, you can install an ESP32 camera inside and wind up with a modern but retro-stylish camera. The new old camera will work with a memory card or send data over WiFi.

• The primary purpose of a wristwatch is to tell the time, which pretty much any watch does perfectly fine. It’s in the aesthetics, as well as features other than time-telling, where a watchmaker can really make their product stand out from the rest. Watchmaker and electronic artist [Eric Min] focused on those two areas when he designed the Time Machine Mk.8, which combines exquisite design with simple, offline smartwatch functionality.

• It isn’t that often that we civilians get the chance to closely examine the fantastic internals that make up the modern marvels of avionic engineering. Luckily for us, [Glen] got his hands on a 747 fuel gauge and tore it down for our benefit. Not only does he tear it down, but he also builds a controller to display values.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

• So for those unaware Superfund is the informal term of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). This in basic English means the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may identify and clean up contaminated sites – while finding and forcing the associated party to pay or clean it up themselves.

• So lets turn back the clock and see why this started and some of the big reasons it began.

• Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of just over 3% from 2014 to 2018. Aber Christine, a market trader in Northern Uganda who sells rice, flour and soya, makes $80 a month in profit. She pays a tax rate of 40%.

• The country also reported 164 deaths in May among those who contracted Covid-19, out of 2,777 severe infections.

• In the future, part of social security contributions to the state budget could be paid into a person’s health insurance, Latvian Television reported on June 11.

• One consistent theme that I’ve been harping on since COVID-19 vaccines were granted emergency use authorization (EUA) by the FDA in December 2020, thus sparking a tsunami of antivaccine conspiracy mongering far beyond anything seen before the pandemic, it’s that everything old is new again in terms of the claims made by antivaxxers spreading misinformation. Basically, very old antivax tropes were rapidly repurposed to be wielded against the new COVID-19 vaccines, examples including:

• Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STMs) are amazing tools which can manipulate singular atoms, but they cannot characterize these atoms as they act only on the outer electron shell. Meanwhile X-ray spectroscopy is a great tool for characterizing materials, but has so far been unable to scale down to singular atoms. This is where a recent study (paywalled, see summary article) by Tolulope M. Ajayi and colleagues demonstrates how both STM and X-rays can be combined in order to characterize singular atoms.

Proprietary

• That’s according to Skylar Hinnant, a senior QA tester at Microsoft’s ZeniMax, who supported a successful union campaign at the gaming unit of the software giant.

• The report comes from Platformer, which said today that Twitter recently refused to pay Google Cloud ahead of its June 30 cloud contract renewal data. Back in 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion multiyear contract to host some of its services on Google Cloud, but is now said to be rushing to move those services back onto its own, on-premises data center infrastructure before the contract expires.

• However, Platformer says the effort is running behind schedule, and could lead to some of its moderation tools, such as Smyte, which Twitter acquired in 2018, going offline.

• Russian cybercriminal group AlphV, also known as BlackCat, has claimed responsibility for the attack, posting to the dark web what appears to be evidence of drivers licences, passports and reports stolen from the broker.

Security

• There is growing demand for offensive security testing, but it needs a multi-layered skillset that can be hard to quantify. Bishop Fox’s CEO and co-founder explains why and some potential mitigation strategies

• On May 11, the Singapore Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) issued a decision involving Kingsforce Management Services Pte Ltd.

• On January 31, 2022, the firm had notified the PDPC that on or about December 27, 2021, data from its jobseeker database had been seen for sale on RAIDForums. According to the decision released by the PDPC, that database held approximately 54,900 jobseeker datasets, comprising name, address, email address, telephone number, date of birth, job qualifications, last and expected salary, highest qualification, and other data related to job searches.

• Outdated website coding technology, with critical vulnerabilities, was determined by external investigators to be the cause of the Incident.

• Two people have been arrested in connection with an investigation into cyber offences following warrants executed yesterday (8/6).

• A 28-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman, both from Camarthenshire, were arrested after South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) officers carried out warrants at addresses in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire and Newcastle Emlyn, Wales.

• A group of Ukrainian hackers known as the Cyber.Anarchy.Squad claimed an attack that took down Russian telecom provider Infotel JSC on Thursday evening.

• Among other things, Moscow-based Infotel provides connectivity services between the Russian Central Bank and other Russian banks, online stores, and credit institutions.

Defence/Aggression

• Multiple people waved red and black flags with swastikas, and at least one person held a poster of DeSantis, according to photos and videos circulating on social media and obtained by USA Today.

• Kim made the pledge in a message to Putin marking Russia’s National Day.

• “…attacks targeting United Nations peacekeepers may constitute war crimes under international law…”

War in Ukraine

• Joining co-hosts Max Jones and Diego Ramos this week is Ray McGovern.

• On June 11, two drones crashed in Russia’s Kaluga region, reported the region’s governor Vladislav Shapsha.

• The village of Blahodatne in the Donetsk region has been liberated by the 68th Separate Jaeger Brigade “Oleksa Dovbush” and other units of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

• In Crimea’s Kirovske region, railway traffic was suspended after damage to the railway tracks, reported Sergey Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed governor of annexed Crimea. According to him, there were no casualties.

• Since the Kakhovka dam collapsed on June 6, Ukraine has been working to rescue residents from flooded parts of Ukraine’s Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. More than 70 settlements and thousands of homes are estimated to be located downstream from the Kakhovka HPP. Thousands of local residents have already been evacuated. According to reports by both the Ukrainian authorities and the Russian occupation authorities, at least 13 people have died in the flooding. Volunteers who have evacuated residents from Russian-occupied territory estimate that the number of dead is actually much higher. The dam breach has also caused an ecological catastrophe, which could lead to (or may have already led to) a mass death of animals.

• Russian forces have decided to place the flooded city of Hola Prystan under quarantine, Ukrainian volunteers told Meduza. The city is located in the part of the Kherson region controlled by Russia.

• The Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak said that the Russian military fired at a boat evacuating civilians from the Russian-controlled left bank of the Dnipro River in the Kherson region. According to Yermak, the civilians were able to reach the city of Kherson, which is controlled by Ukrainian forces.

• Several Russian planes flew over the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland this week, according to the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF).

• A Moscow court has detained a U.S. citizen on charges of drug trafficking, Russian media reported.

• Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the private military force, said he would not comply with an order that would require it to sign a formal contract with Russia’s defense ministry by July 1.

• The man, Michael Travis Leake, has been accused of drug trafficking, according to Russian state media.

• Pakistan has received its first ever cargo of Russian crude oil as Moscow seeks out new markets in Asia amid Western sanctions.

• NATO will begin the largest air-force-deployment exercise in Europe in the alliance’s history on June 12 in a display of unity toward partners and potential threats such as Russia.

• Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif says the first cargo of discounted Russian crude oil arranged under a new deal struck between Islamabad and Moscow has arrived in Karachi.

• A German Shepherd who was severely wounded during a rocket attack on the front lines in Ukraine is starting a new life working with a Hungarian police department.

• Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine is exposing all of his personal weaknesses as a ruler and casting an unforgiving light on the extensive damage he has done to Russia, writes Anders Åslund.

• If Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive is successful, Kyiv will be faced with the significant challenge of reintegrating communities that have lived under Russian occupation for extended periods, writes Lesia Dubenko.

• NATO will launch its largest-ever aerial drill in Europe on Monday, coordinated by Germany, in a show of unity from the military alliance against potential threats – notably from Russia. Ukraine said on Sunday it had made territorial advances on three villages in its southeast, marking the first liberated settlements since its military launched a counteroffensive this past week. Follow our live blog for the latest updates on the war in Ukraine. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) last month announced it would lay off nearly 10 percent of its global staff and roll back dozens of its operations across the world. Although the ICRC’s crisis can partly be blamed on the war in Ukraine and resulting inflation, it also reflects a much more worrying problem plaguing the world’s humanitarian aid groups: with the world more in need of humanitarian action than ever before, donations are failing to keep up with demand.

• The United Nations secretary general for humanitarian affairs said in a series of UN reports on Friday that Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis has been made severely worse by the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant’s destruction.

• Ukrainian forces claim to have retaken two villages in the Donetsk region as a days-old counteroffensive to push Russian forces out of the country gathers steam.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, said he will not obey a new Russian Defense Ministry decree obliging all volunteer formations to sign a contract directly with the ministry in his latest spat with the nation’s military leadership.

• Russian tourists are expected to skip Crimea for the second year in a row as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine takes its toll on the Black Sea peninsula’s economy.

• French President Emmanuel Macron warned Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi on June 10 about the consequences of delivering drones to Russia,

• Three small settlements in the eastern region of Donetsk have been taken back from Russian occupiers, Ukrainian officials say.

• A disaster unfolds in slow motion after an explosion destroyed the dam at the Kakhovka Reservoir, emptying its waters and threatening livelihoods and crucial industries.

• The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iceland announced on Friday that it will suspend operations of its embassy in Moscow starting August 1, 2023.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Perhaps the most famous defendant sent to prison by federal prosecutors with violating the Espionage Act while Mr. Trump was president is Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran who was working for a military contractor when, not long after Mr. Trump became president, she printed out a single classified document, took it home and mailed it to the news website The Intercept. The report, which was classified top secret, stated that Russian hackers had gained access to voter registration rolls during the 2016 election. She was charged by federal prosecutors with a violation of the Espionage Act and, after pleading guilty to a single count of unauthorized transmission of national defense information, was sentenced to 63 months in prison.

• A Chinese company was disqualified from participating in a major infrastructure project in Bosnia-Herzegovina after it submitted false documents and incorrect information in its bid to build a key tunnel in the country’s mountainous south.

• Autoceste — the state highway company that vetted contracts for the project — told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that the Gezhouba Group submitted incorrect and doctored documents in its offer to construct the 11-kilometer Prenj tunnel, a crucial part in the construction of a new highway across the Balkan country of some 3.48 million people.

Environment

• “Brutal ecocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted on Tuesday in reference to the explosion, also calling it an act of “Russian aggression,” a “war crime,” and “an act of terrorism.” Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office has launched an ecocide probe into the effects of the dam’s destruction, and climate activist Greta Thunberg is using the same term to describe the event. This is not the first time Ukrainians have used the term to describe Russian actions: Ecocide gained traction earlier this year when Ukraine hosted a panel on “prosecuting environmental war crimes” at the United for Justice conference in March.

• The effects of the climate crisis intrude with increasing regularity into our lives and yet we do not act. We are as paralyzed as past civilizations were when facing catastrophic destruction.

Energy/Transportation

• This past week, the SEC filed lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world by volume. In considerable part, the SEC’s actions against Coinbase hinge what on cryptocurrencies actually are. Gensler has frequently said that the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are, in fact, unregulated securities that his agency should have authority over. Accordingly, the SEC has accused Binance and Coinbase of operating illegally as unregistered brokers, exchanges, and clearinghouses for securities.

Wildlife/Nature

• Martin Hügi is a man on a pilgrimage – he is walking from Land’s End to John O’Groats, visiting (at least) 2,700 trees on the Ancient Tree Inventory (ATI) – on the way. He’s just turned 50 and the somewhat indirect route he is taking – which spans 2,077 miles – took a year to plan.

• Over the past 10,000 years the world has lost half of its forest, and most of that went in the previous century. The UK is relatively rich in ancient trees, but, says Hügi, we take them for granted and they are not well enough protected, if at all.

Finance

• Finding adequate housing is one of the top challenges for disadvantaged Australians as concerns about affordability highlight a backward trend for the nation’s most disadvantaged.

• Getting access to shelter with basic utilities has become harder in most states and territories except Victoria, with Tasmania, Queensland and South Australia ranking lowest on the latest social progress index in terms of shelter.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Billionaire investor and liberal donor George Soros has handed over his multi-billion-dollar foundation to his son, Alexander Soros, who will now run his father’s philanthropic enterprise. Back in 1992, the now 92-year-old financier notably made $1 billion after betting against the British pound and “breaking the Bank of England.” He had previously claimed he does not wish to hand over his Open Society Foundations (OSF) to any of his five children.

• Billionaire investor turned philanthropist George Soros is reportedly ceding control of his empire to a younger son, Alexander Soros.

• Soros’ $US25 billion ($A37 billion) in business holdings include his nonprofit Open Society Foundations, which is active in more than 120 countries.

• Never in the history of American politics has one man survived and even thrived off more terrible news than Donald Trump.

• Why it matters: The former president has racked up impeachments, investigations, and indictments at a pace never seen in America. Yet he persists — and often comes out stronger.

• Montenegro’s Europe Now Movement (PES) won 25.7 percent of votes in a snap election on June 11, according to preliminary results communicated by the Center for Monitoring and Research (CEMI) pollster on the basis of a projection of results from a sample of polling stations.

• Montenegro’s Europe Now Movement (PES) won 25.5 percent of votes in a snap election on June 11, the Center for Monitoring and Research (CEMI) pollster said on the basis of a projection of results from a sample of polling stations.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• An internal survey conducted by the Meta revealed that only 26 per cent of employees who responded have faith in the leadership.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The protests, which lasted for months, have long since fizzled, dispelled by a violent government crackdown that killed at least 573 people, according to human rights groups. But for many of those involved, an official reckoning goes on: The authorities have executed seven protesters, and at least eight more are on death row. At least 95 journalists have been arrested, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

• Freshmen often have not yet decided what their major would be, nor should they! Having an opportunity to explore interests without yet being pigeonholed into one discipline can be an important and sometimes life-altering experience. Our class, “Banned Books and School Policy,” related to education, of course, but also touched on sociology, political science, history, English literature, religion, and public policy. This allowed students with varied interests to hear each other interact in a way they might not again get the chance to. When a history major and a religious studies major read the same homework assignment, they bring different perspectives to the reading, and therefore illuminate the subsequent class discussions that benefit from heterogeneous viewpoints.

• The Post checked with 29 stores and found that books about Tiananmen Square crackdown were not available

• Libraries’ action to remove titles that may violate national security law has caused fear among readers and the publishing industry

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The manifesto provided critical clues to his identity, and six months and two weeks later, the Unabomber — Theodore Kaczynski, who died in a federal prison cell on Saturday — was captured. But to many in the profession, acceding to Mr. Kaczynski’s demands set a terrible precedent, undermining journalistic independence and doing the bidding of law enforcement.

Civil Rights/Policing

• What should you make of it? A full dissection of the issue — showing, for example, that such statements distract from the many serious harms that AI companies have already caused — would require more time and space than I have here. For now, it’s worth taking a closer look at what exactly the word “extinction” means, because the sort of extinction that some notable signatories believe we must avoid at all costs isn’t what most people have in mind when they hear the word.

• Understanding this is a two-step process. First, we need to make sense of what’s behind this statement. The short answer concerns a cluster of ideologies that Dr. Timnit Gebru and I have called the “TESCREAL bundle.” The term is admittedly clunky, but the concept couldn’t be more important, because this bundle of overlapping movements and ideologies has become hugely influential among the tech elite. And since society is being shaped in profound ways by the unilateral decisions of these unelected oligarchs, the bundle is thus having a huge impact on the world more generally.

• Estonia may become the first Baltic country to legalise same-sex marriages. According to Lauri Hussar, the newly elected president of the parliament, the changes are the result of a more united country. In an exclusive interview with LRT, Hussar discusses the same-sex legalisation law, the future of digital Estonia, and Russia;s threats to the Baltic states.

Monopolies

Patents

Trademarks

Copyrights

• Even worse, the answers in Google’s SGE boxes are frequently plagiarized, often word-for-word, from the related links. Depending on what you search for, you may find a paragraph taken from just one source or get a whole bunch of sentences and factoids from different articles mashed together into a plagiarism stew.

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