● 06.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/06/2023: Curl FUD and Tails Release

Posted in News Roundup at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The 6.4-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

Instructionals/Technical

• It’s extremely frustrating when your computer isn’t working properly and you don’t know why. While there aren’t easy resolutions to every issue you might encounter in Ubuntu, you can use resources like the Ubuntu error logs to troubleshoot and diagnose your PC woes.

• Is your Linux PC struggling to handle certain resource-intensive programs? Or maybe you frequently find yourself staring at a loading icon for several minutes before your computer does something. Whatever the case, we all want our PCs to perform at their level best.

• Random Access Memory, or simply RAM, is crucial to having a performant PC, especially when running multiple programs or resource-intensive applications. Here are some ways to improve RAM performance on Linux.

• By any measure, CSS has gotten a lot better in recent years. It’s gotten more useful features, better interoperability between browsers, and become easier to learn thanks to a concerted push toward making CSS a cohesive system free of quirks and hacks.

• What matters though is the real world. Real websites. Real impact on the things we make and the people who use them.

• It’s working.

• Like many people in my generation, my memories of youth are heavily defined by cable television. I was fortunate enough to have a premium cable package in my childhood home, Comcast’s early digital service based on Motorola equipment. It included a perk that fascinated me but never made that much sense: Music Choice. Music Choice was around 20 channels, somewhere in the high numbers, of still images with music. It was really ad-free, premium radio, but in the era before widespread adoption of SiriusXM that wasn’t an easy product to explain. And SiriusXM, of course, has found its success selling services to moving customers. Music Choice was stuck in your home. The vast majority of Music Choice customers must have had it only as part of a cable package, and part of it that they probably barely even noticed.

• There’s an interesting parallel here, I think, to claims about how fast you can scaffold a website. X framework or Y host allows you to go from zero to a beautiful, functional (probably cloned from a template) website in “three easy steps”. The idea being, however implicit, that “in as little as three easy steps” you’re 90% of the way to something unique and special.

• When you are dealing with arrays in bash, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to find the array length.

• This is a comprehensive guide explaining the step-by-step procedure to set up Dual Boot Windows and Debian 12. Our focus in this guide will be on the new Debian release version 12 code-named Bookworm. Dual-booting Debian 12 and Windows will give you the choice to switch between Windows and Debian Linux leveraging the power of both worlds.

• The topic for this article might sound preposterous and make you recoil with concern. Just why would anyone want to downgrade an application that works just fine, much less a web browser?

• As we know, the current tech space is swarming with a myriad of security threats that are constantly prowling for vulnerabilities and loopholes that are, in most cases, found in older software versions.

WINE or Emulation

• Another development release has landed for the compatibility layer Wine with 8.10 out now, here’s a run over what’s new and improved in the latest. Once a year a new stable release is made with the next being Wine 9.0, and Wine is just one part of what allows Steam Play Proton to play some of the biggest games around on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

Games

• Quest Master is an upcoming dungeon-designing sandbox adventure from Skydevilpalm, Julian Creutz and Apogee Entertainment.

• Interior Worlds is a strange and unsettling liminal spaces game that arms you with a mysterious camera. It’s quite atmospheric and full of secrets to discover. They recently put up a Native Linux build which didn’t initially work due to some missing bits (Unity being odd) but they’ve now managed to solve the issues and so it works out of the box.

• I love pretty much everything Klei Entertainment make and Dread Pilots looks great, a space survival game where you’re exploring a mysterious and hostile pocket universe called the Dread. From the creators of Don’t Starve, Griftlands and Oxygen Not Included – you know it’s likely to be good.

• You retired and wanted to farm but evil creatures just won’t leave you in peace, now you have to defend your farm with the help of some veggies. Noxious Weeds: Prologue is the latest take on the craze of Vampire Survivors. Inspired also by the likes of Brotato and Risk of Rain the developer says.

• Iron Gate have now released the latest update to Valheim, their co-op open world survival game and it should be good for all players. This is not a content upgrade but rather a tech upgrade, aimed at just improving the overall experience.

• Another chance for you to score some goodies, and check out some good discounts with the GOG Summer Sale 2023 now live.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• risiOS promotes itself as a Fedora Linux-based distribution designed to make it easier to set up and modernize the Fedora Workstation experience, which features the GNOME desktop environment.

• For that, risiOS comes with a collection of tools and a customized GNOME Shell interface that should make Fedora Linux more appealing to newcomers who want a modern Linux desktop experience.

• Neither RPM nor Debian packages provide hermetic builds out of the box. For RPMs, mock provides an all-in-one solution that’s generally very easy to use. Debian has the sbuild collection of tools (also, sbuild(1)) that, based on my reading, provide the tools you need to do this (I only recently found out about sbuild and haven’t tried to use it). If there is a convenient mock-like front end to sbuild and its other tools, I haven’t spotted it in Internet searches so far. Ubuntu does have a Setting up sbuild document that makes it look fairly straightforward.

• Having been a Linux user for what feels like an eternity, there have always been instances where I felt why do we have just Linux dominating. Granted it’s open-source which is great and of course, there’s the Unix family but we cannot exactly claim Unix to be fully open-source – considering the Open Group relationship.

• Even though we have the BSD family of truly free and open-source Unix operating systems including OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc there is a need to be skeptical about these systems and their interoperability with the future of IoT devices that will continue to define the landscape of technology going into the future.

BSD

• For about these past 3 months or so (perhaps even more?) I’ve become increasingly umconfortable with using Linux as my main operating system – from the oversized package counts and Python-unfriendliness (when it comes to desktop usage anyway) of the Debian family to the obligation to run the absolute latest versions of every base element of your system and update every week if you don’t want to spend entire days trying to fix your installation in Arch and everything in between, I have been increasingly wanting to move to a more coherent system, an operating system that would be structured properly as opposed to a bunch of basic tools that have been patched on top of each other and an OS that would allow me to customize my workflow with as little extra fluff as possible while simultaneously keeping a base system that won’t change until the next major release.

• …and from there, enter FreeBSD.

• I’ll be doing my talk about OpenBSD filesystems tomorrow night, for mug.org‘s online meeting.

Debian Family

• “The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included.

• “Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature.”

• Debian has three streams of development. The stable version adds security updates during its lifetime; however, one is stuck with quite old software until a new version lands.

• There is a second stream called testing, in which the software is much more recent and things are not overly prone to breakage.

• A third stream, unstable, is meant for highly experienced users, people who can keep fixing their systems if they break.

• Debian can be installed from a Blu-ray Disc, DVD, CD, USB stick, or via a network connection and images are available from the project website. Users can update by using the apt package management tool.

• Last month, the Tails 5.13 release enabled LUKS2 encryption by default for all new Persistent Storage and encrypted volumes with the promise that future releases will also support migration for existing Persistent Storage and encrypted volumes from LUKS1 to LUKS2.

• Tails 5.14 is now here with automatic migration to LUKS2 and Argon2id for users of Tails 5.12 or previous versions. Even if LUKS2 offers stronger encryption, the devs recommend users to also change the passphrase of their Persistent Storage and other LUKS-encrypted volumes.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 791 for the week of June 4 – 10, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Docker is an open-source platform that allows developers to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of applications. It does so by creating lightweight, self-sufficient containers, that can run virtually anywhere.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is proud to sponsor HPE Discover this year again and have a presence at the Expo. Join us in Las Vegas on June, 20–22 to learn how Canonical and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) can help you securely advance your business with comprehensive open source solutions that span from infrastructure to MLOps platforms.

• [...]

• Canonical MicroCloud provides an edge over IoT by performing computing tasks, thereby facilitating unattended, autonomous, and clustering features that resolve typical edge computing challenges. It trades the exponential scalability of public clouds for the security, privacy, governance, and low latency of decentralized environments.

• Discover how MicroCloud and HPE ProLiant Servers deliver next-generation compute solutions to power hybrid environments wherever it lives — from the edge to the cloud.

• Anbox Cloud is a Canonical offering which lets you stream mobile apps securely, at any scale, to any device letting you focus on your apps. It is tailor made for delivering mobile app content independent of the end user’s device capabilities by offloading the compute, storage, and energy intensive applications from end device to HPE Infrastructure.

• There is a need for communications service providers (CSPs) to look beyond mere connectivity to become digital service providers by optimizing their current legacy hardware to improve service and costs and create value from newer, innovative operating models and service offers. To achieve this, the CSPs require programmable infrastructure, operations automation, and the capacity to deliver on-demand services.

• These validated designs with Canonical Kubernetes and OpenStack are developed in close technical collaboration with Canonical and include container technology to allow multiple and isolated applications to run on a single OS and shared kernel. It also provides an integrated cloud-native platform that deploys an OpenStack cluster on dedicated physical servers.

• From applications in telecommunications to edge cloud and industrial digital twins, experimenting with real-time capabilities in cloud technologies is a trend in the industry. Applications for the edge often have an additional requirement as they interact with real-time systems: they need to run deterministically. It means that time constraints their execution and interaction within the system.

Devices/Embedded

• A PC’s operating system, when you drill right down to the nuts and bolts, is just a way of getting the user access to their desired functions. Whether it runs macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, or something else, a given device will use whichever system the creator happened to pick for it. It will, generally speaking, go through a wide range of iterations throughout its life, in the name of usability, security, future-proofing, and so on.

• More advanced users have the knowledge to migrate an OS to another hard drive, or to replace a given one with a relatively obscure one such as Linux’s Ubuntu, if it’s their preference. Tinkerers find that a lot of systems are surprisingly forgiving when it comes to such experimentation, a line of thought that has actually led to the installation of Linux on the Nintendo Wii.

• The board supports multiple operating systems, including Ubuntu, Yocto Linux, and Android, providing flexibility for different application requirements. Moreover, the company states the following: “As for robotics development, the RSB-3810 is designed to facilitate seamless integration with the ROS2 Suite. This comprehensive software package, built on Advantech’s AIM-Linux embedded software, is specifically tailored to support Robot Operating System (ROS) environments.”

• Compulab provides support for mainline Linux, the Yocto Project, and an RTOS via full Board Support Packages (BSPs) and ready-to-run images. Its feature set, low cost, and small size make the UCM-iMX93 suitable for building and industrial control, medical devices, IoT gateways, and measurement equipment.

• The company also offers a development kit based on the SB-UCMIMX93 carrier board with Gigabit Ethernet, USB ports, MIPI CSI and LVDS display interfaces. a MIPI CSI camera interface, a mini PCIe socket for optional 4G LTE connectivity, RS485 and RS232 serial interfaces, CAN Bus, and more.

• A few weeks ago, Advantech released a compact single board computer built on the MediaTek Genio 1200 Octa-core processor with a 4.8 TOPs AI processing unit (APU). The SBC also supports Wi-Fi 6 and 5G connectivity for demanding IoT applications.

Open Hardware/Modding

• With PureOS 10.3, power saving and new goodies is the name of the game.

• Most companies abandon hardware soon after launch, but we have a different approach with the Librem 5. With every upgrade to PureOS we push on the Librem 5, the more the device can do and the more efficient it gets.

• One key method for a better battery life is Suspending while tucked away. Suspend, Wake up.

• The L5 suspend resume is now very quick, incoming calls or texts arrive nearly as rapidly as before, imperceptible to the user in speed. Without suspend, the Librem 5 can idle for around 10 hours; with suspend running, you can get upwards of 20 hours.

• You can find tons of simulation games on the market today, ranging from tractors to goats, but there’s an entirely different side of simulators that is far more immersive. Today we’re sharing with you an extraordinary creation put together by a team known as The Explorandia Association. This team has developed a wonderful submarine simulator that takes you through an actual pond in real time with a bit of help from a Raspberry Pi 3B.

• We had a visitor at Pi Towers last month. YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who we’re all a little starstruck by, came to the UK for a whistlestop tour. He took in our offices in Cambridge and (most interesting of all for you, dear readers) the factory in Pencoed, South Wales, where Raspberry Pis are built.

• Sign up to get news and insights about computing education from Hello World and the Foundation in your inbox every month.

• I started out with U-Boot. As a very basic overview of the LCD controller in the PXA168, basically you just set aside some of your RAM for a framebuffer, copy image data into it, tell the controller the format and address of the framebuffer, set up the clocking and timing, and turn it on. Then it just handles everything in the background for you.

• The steps I listed above are overly simplified — there is more stuff going on with the PXA168’s display controller. But it’s enough to get a splash screen working in U-Boot. I booted into the old kernel and dumped the LCD registers using devmem. Here’s an example of this process. The LCD_SPU_DMA_CTRL0 register contains a bunch of format configuration bits for the framebuffer, such as which bits are red/green/blue. It’s at offset 0×190 in the LCD controller, and the LCD controller is located at an offset of 0xD420B000, so I could dump the 32-bit register value with this command: [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Registration is now open for APNIC 56 in Kyoto, Japan, from 7 to 14 September 2023 at the Kyoto International Conference Center (ICC Kyoto). APNIC 56 is proudly hosted by the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC).

• The APNIC 56 technical workshops will be held from 7 to 10 September and will provide participants with hands-on training to build and manage Internet infrastructure.

• Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we are also quick to point out that the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for people to connect with others, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, what we should save in Pocket to read later, and what sites and forums shaped them.

Programming/Development

• I do enjoy the process of writing. I fire up my text editor of choice, Typora and away I go. Most of the time I have a topic in my grey matter that I want to write about, and if I don’t, something usually comes to me pretty quickly. Which topics to cover aren’t something I usually dwell on.

• Today I feel like writing, but I have nothing to write about. I’ve been staring at Typora’s abyssal blank screen for a little while now, but my grey matter remains as abyssal as the screen I’m staring at.

• The aptly named “mail2code” project is based around an Arduino Uno Rev3 board, which has been connected to a wide variety of peripherals to help students and hobbyists alike learn different hardware. The setup includes a DC motor attached to a central gear and a faster gear for exploring motors and interrupts, an array of eight LEDs that can act as a binary counter, a die face to explore random numbers, and a stepper motor with an accompanying Hall effect sensor that is used to learn analog signals in response to rotation.

• This post is about the idea of doing away with lifetimes in Rust, what that would bring to the table and how much it would cost.

• Loading software on a vintage computer, such as a Commodore 64, is a pain. Early eight-bit computers almost never contained any onboard persistent storage, so users had to load software from external media like cassette tapes.

Perl / Raku

• I’m currently a little into quantitative text analysis. Not big time, but a little. A nice end goal, that I have no intention of reaching, would be a script that can suggest if a cluster of articles on this site seem similar but don’t share a tag, or if there’s a tag that might as well not exist because it’s applied to a very broad range of articles. This would help me maintain the tags that are currently assigned completely manually and, as the observant reader has noticed, rather arbitrarily.

Leftovers

• Over the last several months, we’ve been enjoying a front-row seat as [Jay Bowles] of Plasma Channel has been developing and perfecting his design for a high voltage multi-stage ionic thruster. With each installment, the unit has become smaller, lighter, and more powerful. Which is important, as the ultimate goal is to power an RC aircraft with them.

Science

Education

• According to The 74, NYC school employees made 6,500 reports of abuse or neglect to ACS from September 2022 to February 2023, but only 15 percent of them were found to be substantiated. Parents of students with disabilities were at the center of 22 percent of those reports—though disabled children only comprise 21 percent of the student body. Anna Arons, a New York University law professor, speculated that the actual share of calls relating to students with disabilities is likely higher, due to school employees’ failure to mention a student’s disability in the report.

• “It’s probably a pretty serious undercount,” Arons told The 74.

• Now, some parents are claiming that, after they pushed back against their school’s treatment of their disabled children, school officials retaliated by filing unsubstantiated ACS reports against them, sparking extended, invasive investigations that left families feeling traumatized.

• Writing has always been my passion, and even in my previous jobs as a developer, I stood out as the one who enjoyed creating and maintaining documentation. But June 9th, 2023, marked my first birthday as a full-time technical writer at Azul. Yes, it’s already a year ago that I changed from being a developer-who-also-writes to a writer-who-also-develops. Let’s take a moment to reflect on my incredible journey over the past year.

Hardware

• Ironically, it appears the plans to build a doppelganger of Samsung’s manufacturing plant may have foundered only because a Taiwanese company reversed its decision to invest $6.2 billion in the project.

• Samsung told us it had “no comment” at this time.

• These revelations are likely to be seized upon by parties such as the US government which have previously warned that Beijing is attempting to build up its semiconductor capabilities by any means possible, even if that means stealing advanced technology from other countries.

• Let’s be honest — there are some not very pleasant stereotypes associated with amateur radio, at least if you ask outsiders. Hams are often thought of as being in two camps: old guys who can’t figure out modern technology or conspiracy theorists who think their knowledge of radio will give them an edge after the world becomes a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We’ll leave it to you to decide which is the worse brush to be painted with.

• The megapixel wars of a decade ago saw cameras aggressively marketed on the resolution of their sensors, but as we progressed into the tens of megapixels it became obvious even to consumers that perhaps there might be a little more to the quality of a digital camera than just its resolution. Still, it’s a frontier that still has a way to go, even if [Yunus Zenichowski]’s 489 megapixel prototype is a bit of an outlier. As some of you may have guessed it’s a scanner camera, in which the sensor is a linear CCD that is mechanically traversed over the focal plane to capture the image line by line.

• When we see a photograph or photo of a scene, we can likely imagine what sounds would go with it, but what if this gets inverted, and we have to imagine the scene that goes with the sounds? How close would we get to reconstructing the scene in our mind, without the biases of our upbringing and background rendering this into a near-impossible task? This is essentially the focus of a project by [Diego Trujillo Pisanty] which he calls Blind Camera.

• For most outsiders the Netherlands is a country of picturesque cities, windmills, tulips, and maybe those famous coffee shops. Head away from the coast though and you enter the country’s rural hinterland, farming country with lush green fields, dairy cattle, and farm lads doing what they do best, which is hacking old machinery to do crazy things under those wide skies. [Plodno] are based on a farm somewhere in the eastern Netherlands, and the latest of these lads’ creations is a motorised picnic table (Dutch language, you’ll need YouTube translated subtitles).

• [CuriousMarc] is back with more vintage HP hardware repair. This time it’s the HP 5245L, a digital nixie-display frequency counter from 1963. This unit is old enough to be entirely made of discrete components, but has a real trick up its sleeve, with add-on components pushing the frequency range all the way up to 18 Ghz. But this poor machine was in rough shape. There were previous repair attempts, some of which had to be re-fixed with proper components. When it hit [Marc]’s shop, the oscillator was working, as well as the frequency divider, but the device wasn’t counting, and the reference frequencies weren’t testing good at the front of the machine. There were some of the usual suspects, like blown transistors. But things got really interesting when one of the boards had a couple of tarnished transistors, and a handful of nice shiny new ones — but maybe not all the right transistors.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• An inquiry probing the UK government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic kicks off Tuesday with the investigation mired in controversy even before the first witness is called.

• Open Democracy hopes to afford to send a journalist to every day of the Covid-19 inquiry.

• A few weeks ago, Bloomberg profiled Bryan Johnson, the 45-year-old tech entrepreneur who harvests his 17-year-old son’s blood in a medically dubious anti-aging treatment known as “plasma-swapping.” He calls it Project Blueprint. Others have compared it to the “blood boy” arc from Silicon Valley. In any case, his goal is simple: to look 18 again.

Proprietary

• At least 7,000 pages engaged in voluntary blackouts, which restrict the public from seeing those pages. This included the r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming subreddits which, between them, have about 30 million subscribers. The blackout included smaller forums, which together also have millions of subscribers.

• Aaron Swartz was, perhaps by technicality, a co-founder of Reddit. The more complete story is that he was working on a different project, infogami, that got merged into Reddit, which was created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, but it’s been said that part of the deal was that all three would get founder credit. Years later, Huffman insisted that Swartz wasn’t really a co-founder and shouldn’t be called such. But, still, Swartz’s views on access to information were certainly a compelling part of early Reddit’s existence.

• New research suggests that AIs can produce perfectly secure steganographic images:

• Some poor sod in Microsoft just had the mother of all elys. A careful, intricate, tested and approved rewiring of the Azure DevOps suite got sent out into the world, only for South Brazil to go dark as it started to eat customer instances. You can read the gory details here, they’re just as compelling as an episode of Air Crash Investigation. The skinny is simple. A typo triggered unforeseen cascading errors, which continued attempts to restore order dragged on for ten embarrassing hours.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (pypdf2 and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, dbus, mariadb, matrix-synapse, sympa, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (python and python3), SUSE (chromium, gdb, and openldap2), and Ubuntu (jupyter-core, requests, sssd, and vim).

• The victims of data breach include high profile politicians like Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien and former Union Minister P Chidambaram.

• Trigona also provided DataBreaches with an Excel file that showed a few employees’ login credentials to city accounts.

• The defendant, who also formerly worked at SK Hynix as a vice president, is accused of illegally acquiring Samsung data to build a factory in the northwestern Chinese city of Xian between 2018 and 2019, the Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office said in a statement.

• The person or team at NVD whose job it is to make up stuff for security vulnerabilities ranked this as CRITICAL 9.8. Almost as bad as it gets apparently. 10 is the max as you might recall.

• When realizing this, at the end of May, I first fell off my chair in shock by this insanity, but after a quick recovery I emailed them (again) and complained (yet again) on setting this severity for *27536. I used the word “ridiculous” in my email to describe their actions. Why and who benefits from them scaremongering the world like this? It makes no sense. On the contrary, this is bad for everyone.

• As a reaction to my complaint, someone at NVD went back and agreed to revise the CVSS string they had set and suddenly it was “only” ranked HIGH 7.2. I say “someone” because they never communicate with names and never sign the emails which whomever I talk to. They are just “NVD”.

• I objected to their new CVSS string as well. It is just not a high severity security problem!

• In my new argument I changed two particular details in the CVSS string (compared to the one they insisted was good) and presented arguments for that. For your pleasure, I include my exact wording belo

• Intellihartx says the personal information of roughly 490,000 individuals was compromised in the GoAnywhere zero-day attack earlier this year.

• By having a golden image you will put a process in place that allows you to quickly take action when a vulnerability is found within your organization.

• WhosHere Plus is a dating app that uses GPS data to recommend users near to each other, based on similar interests.

• Researchers discover new MOVEit vulnerabilities related to the zero-day, just as more organizations hit by the attack are coming forward.

• Switzerland said government operational data might have been stolen in a ransomware attack on a technology firm that provides software for several departments.

• Fortinet has patched CVE-2023-27997, a critical FortiGate SSL VPN vulnerability that can be exploited for unauthenticated remote code execution.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Supreme Court’s Riley decision has been the law of the land since 2014. If cops want to search seized cell phones, they need a warrant. Nearly a decade on, cops are still violating it. The inability to follow the rules has seen evidence in this criminal case (brought to us by FourthAmendment.com) tossed twice.

• On June 6th, 2013, an article appeared in The Guardian [guard2013] that was the beginning of a series of what have come to be known as revelations about the activities of the United States National Security Agency (NSA). These activities included, amongst others, secret court orders, secret agreements for the receipt of so-called “meta-information” that includes source, destination, and timing of communications, tapping of communications lines, and other activities. The breathtaking scope of the operations shocked the Internet technical community, and led to a sea change within the IETF, IAB, and many parts of the private sector.

• Now that some years have past, it seems appropriate to reflect on that period of time, what effect the community’s actions had, where security has improved, how the threat surface has evolved, what areas haven’t improved, and where the community might invest future efforts.

• Bruce Schneier begins this compendium of individual essays by bringing us back to 2013, recalling how it was for him and others to report what was happening, and the mindset of those involved. Next, Stephen Farrell reviews the technical community’s reactions, technical advances, and where threats remain. Then Farzaneh Badii discusses the impact of those advances – or lack thereof – on human rights. Finally Steven M. Bellovin puts the Snowden revelations into an ever-evolving historical context of secrets and secret stealing that spans centuries, closing with some suggestions for IETF.

• Readers are invited to reflect for themselves on what impact we as a community have had – or not had, and what positive contribution the technical community can and should make to address security and privacy of citizens of the world.

• I am pretty sure that the blocking is done by Comcast and is triggered by being in public list of tor relays. The blocking disappeared after I stopped my tor relay and restarted my router (thus getting a new external IPv4 address). After 1 day, I relaunched the tor relay, and the blocking reappeared a few hours later. It was also confirmed by the said operator of the lightning node, who said there were various rounds of blocking tor, customers complaining and Comcast lifting the block for some time, only to reinstate the blocking later.

• The EARN IT Act (the tortured acronym stands for Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act) has been bad news ever since its introduction way back in March of 2020. The bill’s original backers were all people who either hated encryption (AG Bill Barr, Sen. Dianne Feinstein) or “Big Tech” (Trump acolytes Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham).

Defence/Aggression

• Nuclear-armed states have continued to expand and modernize their atomic arsenals amid a deterioration of the world’s geopolitical situation, investing huge sums of money diverted from other development goals, an influential think tank said in a report published on June 12.

• Police have detained a 19-year-old Chechen woman at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport while she was on her way out of Russia to escape domestic violence, rights defenders told RFE/RL on June 12.

• Aleksandr Kolodich, a lawmaker in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District in Siberia, has been stabbed to death in his home in Moscow.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 12 said that Washington is seeking to learn more about the detention of U.S. citizen Michael Travis Leake, 51, in Russia and working to get consular access to the musician and former paratrooper.

• Confronting the Phantom Limbs of America’s Foreign Wars.

War in Ukraine

• Russia said Sunday that it had destroyed German-made Leopard tanks and US-made Bradley fighting Vehicles.

• Here is a selection of what the international press has published about Finland in the last week:

• Increased Russian GPS jamming hits signals in Baltics, Finland

• Russia’s increasing attempts of jamming Global Positioning System (GPS) signals affecting Baltic and Finland region has been covered in an article in Bloomberg on June 7.

• The war games have been planned since 2018, but took on added urgency after the invasion of Ukraine, which alarmed NATO members that lie in the shadow of Russia and jolted the military alliance into reinventing itself after years of torpor.

• All but two of the participating nations are NATO members, including Finland, the newest, and the drills are hosted by Germany. Sweden, which is seeking NATO admission, is also taking part, and Japan is an observer.

• International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Grossi says he is en route to Ukraine where he’ll meet President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and present an assistance program for “catastrophic” flooding in the country sparked by last week’s breach of the Kakhovka dam.

• The decision by Elizabeth Gilbert to indefinitely delay the publication of her novel is a wrongheaded attempt to help the Ukrainian cause.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has signed a bill approved by lawmakers last month to set May 8 as the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in World War II, instead of the Soviet-inherited celebrations of Victory Day on May 9.

• The subsidies that Poland has given to its farmers in response to a surge in grain exports from Ukraine aren’t in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, Ukrainian Deputy Economy Minister Taras Kachka said on June 12.

• UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on June 12 he is concerned that Russia will on July 17 quit a deal allowing the safe wartime export of grain and fertilizers from three Ukrainian Black Sea ports.

• Images from Kherson, Ukraine, and other towns downstream of the destroyed dam

• Lithuania’s Prosecutor General Nida Grunskienė has opened a pre-trial investigation into the alleged criminal transfer of Ukrainian children to Belarus, according to a statement issued on Monday.

• A marathon held by several independent media outlets in Russia on June 12 to raise funds to support political prisoners and Russian citizens who openly condemn Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has raised 34.5 million rubles ($415,000), organizers said.

• Tampere property is difficult to sell at the moment.

• Cities recover from floods, and Kherson’s wartime experiences have steeled it to face challenges. But in the Ukrainian city, along the banks of the Dnipro, and around the Black Sea, concerns mount for the flood’s environmental impact.

• South Africa is accused of helping supply Russia with weapons for the Ukraine war, a charge that South Africa denies.

• Military analysts said it would take weeks or months to gauge the success of the attacks Ukraine mounted last week across a broad stretch of the front lines.

• Attacks from Ukraine have killed at least a dozen Russian civilians and displaced thousands. But they have not fundamentally changed the calculus for Vladimir Putin.

• A disaster unfolds in slow motion after a blast destroys the dam at the Kakhovka Reservoir, emptying its waters and threatening livelihoods and industries crucial to Ukraine.

• Rafael Mariano Grossi said he would meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and present a plan for assistance in the aftermath of floods unleashed by the Kakhovka dam’s destruction.

• The head of Ukraine’s Enerhoatom nuclear generating company says he is concerned that Russian forces still occupying Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant may “worsen the situation even further” after last week’s destruction of a dam that put Europe’s largest nuclear station in peril.

• Polish President Andrzej Duda has called on NATO member states to give Kyiv a clear roadmap to joining the defense alliance.

• At least three people were killed and 25 others were wounded in an overnight Russian missile strike on a five-story apartment building in the city of Kryviy Rih in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul wrote on Telegram.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy expressed unhappiness on June 12 at the results of an inspection he ordered into all Ukrainian shelters after three people were killed when they were unable to access one during a Russian air strike in Kyiv.

• Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis met with Karim Khan, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), in the Netherlands on Monday to hand him information on the alleged criminal transfer of Ukrainian children to Belarus.

• Russian air strikes hit several buildings in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih early Tuesday, leaving at least three dead and dozens wounded, local authorities said, as drone and missile attacks were reported in Kyiv and other cities. Follow our live blog for the latest updates on the war in Ukraine. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Intelligence sharing ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should inform efforts to combat Chinese cyber operations, DHS official argues.

• Ukrainians overwhelmingly reject the idea of a compromise peace with Vladimir Putin. Instead, they are committed to liberating their entire country and bringing centuries of Russian imperial aggression to an end, writes Peter Dickinson.

• The international community’s efforts to enforce accountability for Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine are vital to achieve justice for Ukrainians suffering through war crimes and crimes against humanity.

• The Latvian army’s goal to train 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers this year is likely to be surpassed, Latvian Defense Minister Ināra Mūrniece (NA) said in an interview with the newswire LETA on June 12.

• The examination session for high schoolers is coming to a close. Among them are some students who came from Ukraine last year or this year. LSM’s Latvian-language service spoke to Ukrainian Yaroslav, who is residing in Daugavpils and about to graduate high school there.

• Since the previous week, a support point for Ukrainians has been working at the border inspection post Vientuļi. Here, though, a line forms not of those who have just fled the war, but those who go to Russia – to get their children or to go back to Ukraine, Latvian Television reported on June 12.

• In recent days, social media has seen outrage by various pro-Kremlin activists about a Ukrainian sculptor’s exhibition at the Latvian National Library (LNB), Latvian Television reported on June 12.

• Mondelez International—the global manufacturer of a range of snacks including Oreo and Toblerone—is facing a growing boycott across northern Europe for its decision to remain in Russia.

• Two Russian nationals are charged in the US with hacking a cryptocurrency exchange and conspiring to launder the proceeds.

• As clashes continue between the Sudanese military and rapid support forces, the current and historic role of foreign governments in Sudanese affairs is under close examination. Unsurprisingly, the Sudan conflict has amplified concerns from the US and other countries about the roles Russia and China are playing in Sudan specifically, and in Africa.

• American musician and manager Travis Leake, who had been living in Russia for over a decade, has been arrested by Russian officials on drug charges. Michael Travis Leake, an American musician who has lived in Russia for more than a decade, has been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking, Russian news media reported on Saturday.

• NATO’s jets policing Baltic airspace were scrambled 15 times last week to identify and escort Russian aircraft, the Lithuanian Defense Ministry said on Monday, adding it was a record-high number of weekly cases.

• While the Russian threat will not go away as long as Vladimir Putin lives, Europe must also prepare to contain Russia’s possible destabilisation in the event of his passing. This is the most realistic possibility for change, says Dr Kirill Shamiev, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

• The Canadian parliament voted unanimously on Friday to grant honorary Canadian citizenship to Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political prisoner and Kremlin critic, hoping that this move would increase the chances that he would be released alive.

• Lithuanian authorities have accepted the asylum request of the former Russian air force pilot, Dmitry Mishov, who fled to the Baltic states.

• A Russian fighter was killed and several others wounded in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo on June 12, a war monitor and a Kurdish security source said.

• The Cold War ended. The United States declared victory. Then things took a turn.

• The army responded to an attack targeting the areas under its control, the Defense Ministry has said.

• Russian forces carried out a missile attack against the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Monday night, killing at least six people and injuring at least 25, according to Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul. The Ukrainian authorities have reported that at least seven people might still be stuck beneath the rubble.

• An ecclesiastical court is about to consider the case of Ioann Burdin, a defrocked cleric from Kostroma who’s a vocal objector to the Ukraine war.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a law establishing May 8 as the country’s new Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in World War II 1939 — 1945.

• Ukrainian troops carried out a missile strike on an area in the occupied part of the Kherson region where Russia’s Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov had concluded a visit just minutes earlier, Russian state media reported on Sunday night.

• The Russian Defense Ministry and Chechnya’s Akhmat battalion have signed a contract codifying the activities of Chechen volunteer units in Ukraine, the ministry said Monday on Telegram.

Environment

• Today I am in Helena to stand in solidarity with the youth plaintiffs of Held v. Montana as they work with their legal team to make the case that the state has violated their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. I’m an environmental attorney, but this time, I’m headed to court in a different capacity — as a mom.

• Montana is a major coal exporter and has the largest coal reserves in the United States. The coal industry has also been a boon for the local economy: Jobs in the coal industry pay about 30 percent more than the median income in the state. The outcome of this case could impact coal’s place in the local economy.

• At the same time, preserving the environment makes economic sense for Montana, too. Outdoor recreation is a $7.1 billion dollar industry there. Camping, hiking, fly fishing, and other outdoor activities draw tourists to the state. Critics of the state’s current energy policy point toward green energy like wind turbines as a possible economic alternative to fossil fuels.

• This case could also set a precedent, creating a legal roadmap for similar challenges at a crucial time. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be out of reach unless drastic changes are made in the next two years.

• Environmental advocates believe such a finding could put pressure on government leaders in Montana and elsewhere to take action on curbing emissions. They are also hopeful that the judge could order the state to consider climate impacts when approving new projects.

• The effects of a warming climate are already spreading across Montana, including shrinking glaciers at Glacier National Park and a lengthening wildfire season that threatens the state’s treasured outdoor pastimes. The plaintiffs in the case have said that the state’s inaction on climate change threatens their ability to access clean water, sustain family ranches or continue hunting traditions.

• Firefighters dealt with about 20 blazes on Sunday alone, as dry conditions and strong winds heighten risks of forest and brush fires getting out of control.

• In September 2020, West Coast wildfires spread smoke that blackened the skies of the East Coast. I reported on the phenomenon for Inside Climate News, an exercise in detachment from the personal stakes of the issue as a New Yorker that allowed me to focus on the bigger picture. But less than three years later, such detachment feels impossible.

Energy/Transportation

• During the last months we have been working on switching the solar powered website from one static site generator (Pelican) to another (Hugo). Many readers will not notice the changes right away, as we have not made any major adjustments to the design. Nevertheless, the new platform has allowed us to address some issues based on the feedback we received over the years.

• The new solar website was designed by Marie Otsuka and Roel Roscam Abbing, the same people who were behind the first solar design. Marie Verdeil assisted throughout the process and coordinated the migration of the website.

• A hydrogen industry lobby group has produced a comic book aimed at high schoolers that suggests solar and wind power are incapable of fueling decarbonization goals, and that only hydrogen fuel cells provide sufficient energy to eliminate fossil fuels.

• In the comic, several giant robots — led by Battery Bot — are defending the city of Neo Toronto from an attack by Exhaust-o-Saurus. Battery Bot is low on power and his comrades Solar Bot and Wind Bot are unable to help him recharge — owing to cloud cover and a lack of breeze, respectively. Exhaust-o-Saurus mocks the trio by saying “nothing can match the dispatchable, instant power of fossil fuels!” at which point Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bot enters the battle to save the day.

• Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke of his desire for people to “stop demonising oil and gas” in a private meeting with the head of the United Arab Emirates’s state investment company while serving as Business and Energy Secretary, DeSmog can reveal.

• Rees-Mogg agreed with Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak that “hydrocarbons need to be part of the [energy] solution”. He also suggested that the UK and UAE could collaborate more closely on the development of nuclear small modular reactors, and the production of hydrogen – a technology described by critics as a fossil-fuel industry “delay tactic”.

• An average of about 5,000 people a year are killed in crashes involving large trucks, a death toll that has soared by almost 50% since 2011, according to the most recent federal data. Tens of thousands more have been injured.

• Anthony Albanese has urged Australia to grasp the opportunity to become a renewable energy superpower.

• The prime minister warned the nation could not afford to just wait, watch and react to the clean energy transformation and the growth of the care-and-support economy, or rely on breakthroughs in technology.

• The fastest motorcycle in the world is not some elite racer piloted across the salt flats at crazy speeds, instead it’s your first bike. Even if it’s a 50 cc moped, no other motorcycle you will own afterwards will give you that same hit as the first time you sit astride it and open the throttle. It has to be admitted though, that 50 cc mopeds are slow if it’s not your first ever ride. Really slow. How can they be made faster? Perhaps an extra cylinder will do the trick. In the video below the break, [LeDan] takes a single cylinder Simson moped engine and turns it into a 2-cylinder model.

• Financial engineer Brookfield, which is bidding for Origin Energy, has been pinged at its annual meeting with a large protest vote for tax dodging. What’s the scam?

• The scam is that maybe tax dodging by large corporations is now even frowned upon by company shareholders. A motion by a pension fund shareholder at the Toronto general meeting calling for great tax transparency has attracted 27% support, equivalent to one third of independent shareholders. Brookfield has taken over Healthscope, AusNet and Aveo in recent years.

• Speed up investment and cut red tape around building the transmission for renewable energy to power new jobs, or risk falling behind, the industry has warned.

• “Australia’s prosperity and quality of life depend on the decisions that everyone in this room makes now as leaders,” Paul Gleeson, head of energy at engineering giant Aurecon, told a business summit at federal parliament.

• Iron ore leader Rio Tinto has signed a pact with the world’s biggest steelmaker as investors demand ways to curb the climate impact of the steel and mining industries.

• Under the memorandum of understanding signed with China Baowu in Shanghai, the two companies pledged to play a leading role in transforming one of the world’s most emissions-intensive products.

Overpopulation

Finance

• Superannuation members will be able to access affordable financial advice from their funds under changes floated by the Labor government.

• Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones says super members are missing out on social security entitlements and other benefits because they aren’t getting financial advice ahead of retirement.

• In a bid to salvage its rather labyrinthine Housing Affordability Future Fund (HAFF) proposal, Labor has sallied forth with a twist, a guaranteed $500m income for the HAFF. What’s the scam?

• The scam is that you can’t deliver a guaranteed income from a variable finance product without further complicating an already complicated solution to the housing crisis, without a MacBank-style structure finance element. So now we are facing another box or two for the HAFF flowchart, some sort of derivative to guarantee income from the financial markets.

• Expel has axed 60 workers just eight months after hauling in $31 million to provide the managed detection and response vendor with a financial cushion.

• The Athletic, a subscription sports outlet owned by The New York Times, is laying off about 4% of its newsroom staff as part of reorganization efforts, the company confirmed on Monday.

• The job cuts will impact nearly 20 journalists of The Athletic’s 450-person newsroom. In addition to the layoffs, more than 20 additional reporters from the San Francisco-based outlet will be moved to new assignments, The New York Times reported.

• The New York Times Co. bought The Athletic for $550 million in January 2022, marking one of the news company’s largest-ever acquisitions. In a Monday statement to The Associated Press, New York Times Co. executive director of communications Jordan Cohen noted that the company had reorganized the sports site “to cover the most compelling stories that matter to fans across all the teams in a given league daily.”

• The pipeline of work in the business sector is drying up and has worrying implications for Australia’s economic growth.

• Businesses have reported a major pullback in forward orders, NAB’s business survey has revealed, which can signal a turnaround in economic activity.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Paragraph 44 of the report endorses, in seemingly innocuous language, a radical proposal by ETNO, the lobbying association of Europe’s largest telecom, to force certain websites and apps to pay broadband providers like Telefonica, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom.

• The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued new guidance on when and how federal agencies should collect security guarantees from software vendors.

• Building on the cybersecurity executive order that President Joe Biden signed in May 2021, the OMB last year published a memorandum (M-22-18) requiring federal agencies to obtain from software vendors guarantees that the software they provide is secure.

• “It is ORDERED that on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, all cellular phones and/or electronic equipment are hereby prohibited for news reporters and other members of the media inside the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. United States Courthouse in Miami,” Chief US District Judge Cecilia Altonaga wrote in her ruling on Monday.

• The judge added that US Marshals Service will “continue to inspect all cellular phones and other electronic equipment as they are brought into the federal courthouse facilities as directed to protect the Bench, Bar, and public from harm” and that anyone violating the order could face punishment up to and including 30 days in jail and $5,000 fine.

• Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has labelled the leaking of text messages between Brittany Higgins and her partner as the “most egregious abuse of privacy”.

• The senator has denied she misled parliament on her knowledge of Ms Higgins’ 2019 rape allegation before it was made public in 2021.

• A political brawl over Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations has spilled into both houses of parliament, as federal police investigate the apparent leak of multiple court documents.

• Pressure has been mounting on Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who has denied she misled parliament in 2021 about being aware of the allegations before they were made public.

• Finance Minister Katy Gallagher is set to come under heated questioning when parliament resumes on whether she had used rape allegations made by Brittany Higgins for political gain.

• Senator Gallagher has denied she had misled parliament in 2021 about her knowledge of the allegation made by Ms Higgins before they were made public.

• A political brawl over Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations has spilled into both houses of parliament, as Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and former prime minister Scott Morrison defend their conduct.

• Pressure has been mounting on Senator Gallagher, who has denied she misled parliament in 2021 about being aware of the allegations before they were made public.

• In announcing that he’s running for president under the auspices of the Movement for a People’s Party (MPP), the distinguished thinker and progressive activist Cornel West has set himself up to be attacked from all sides. For supporters of the Democratic Party, such as my colleague Joan Walsh, West is preparing to act as a spoiler in the mode of Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016 by running a campaign that can only siphon off votes from Joe Biden at the risk of handing the presidency to a Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. But there’s a contrary critique made by people who share West’s desire to create a movement that pressures mainstream Democrats such as Biden to move left. These critics think West has the right goal—but has chosen a deeply damaged vehicle in the People’s Party.

• Among its many well-documented deficiencies, Washington, D.C., conspicuously lacks a robust tabloid press. Unlike Britain’s pioneering tabloid scene in London, Washington reporting, tasked with chronicling the fortunes of a putatively more expansive and less class-bound American social order, is a dreary exercise in chin-stroking deference and decorum. This condition is grimly distilled in the self-regarding pomposity of the motto adopted by The Washington Post, the market-dominating broadsheet owned by one of the richest men in the world: “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the city teems with open graft, influence peddling, corporate giveaways, and industry-subsidized think tanks, its reporters tend to cover the city as if it were the Parthenon. The dominant journalistic refrain holds that the people’s tribunes are always and forever seeking some mystic golden mean of self-canceling interests—even when they’re pursuing objectively demented aims, such as hijacking the phony mechanism of the debt ceiling to extort brutal budget cuts in the name of bipartisan comity.

• Silvio Berlusconi, who served as Italy’s prime minister four times, is dead at 86. He was one of the most influential figures in the country’s republican history, and the most consequential of the past three decades. None of it was for the better.

• We’re covering a faster path to clean energy, the death of Silvio Berlusconi and the Tony Awards.

• Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire businessman who dominated Italy’s political landscape for decades, died on Monday aged 86, drawing tributes from leaders across the world. Italy has declared Wednesday a national day of mourning for Berlusconi, when a state funeral will be held for him in Milan’s Duomo cathedral.

• Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media tycoon and four-time prime minister who brushed off a litany of legal battles and sex scandals to dominate Italian public life for more than two decades, died in Milan on Monday aged 86. The former Italian prime minister will be given a state funeral on Wednesday, which has been declared a day of national mourning.

• The two tycoons thrived in the borderland of entertainment.

• His demagogic style revolved around self-interest, but he inspired other right-wing populists to bend the rule of law and divide their democracy.

• Silvio Berlusconi, who died Monday, left a lasting impact on Italian politics with his polarizing policies and charismatic personality. His influence extended to his business empire, which now faces an uncertain future.

• Whether as a politician or media tycoon, the former prime minister and businessman who died Monday at 86, left an imprint, or a bruise, on just about everything he touched.

• The former prime minister of Italy reveled in the spotlight, even when it shined on him for causing offense.

• The former Italian prime minister and media mogul, who died at 86, was a divisive figure, but even his foes acknowledged that he was an influential political and cultural force.

• He introduced sex and glamour to Italian TV and then brought the same formula to politics, dominating the country and its culture for more than 20 years.

• The federal government will pitch further changes to its $10 billion housing fund in a last-ditch bid for crossbench support.

• As parliament returns on Tuesday, crunch time is looming for the Housing Australia Future Fund, with the bill due to hit the Senate in the upcoming sitting fortnight.

• On the morning of the highest-profile state election of 2023, the highest-profile state party chair in the country could have been making the rounds of the cable TV shows that regularly invite him to comment on national politics. He could have been checking in with the Biden White House, where aides closely monitor his work. He could have been cajoling a major donor to steer another check into what has been hailed as one of the most innovative and successful political fundraising operations in American history.1

• Special counsel Jack Smith has brought charges against former president Donald Trump, breaking the string of federal prosecutors without the courage or commitment to justice to prosecute Trump for the many crimes he’s committed in plain sight. The 37-count indictment handed down by a Miami grand jury deals with Trump’s alleged mishandling of sensitive documents. I feared that Smith would be an updated version of Bob Mueller, but this indictment puts those concerns to rest. I’m happy to have been wrong about him. As near as I can tell, no punches were pulled, and Trump was given no special treatment. Trump has been charged under the Espionage Act with willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements to criminal investigators. Trump is in more legal jeopardy now than he has been at any time in his corrupt life.

• We speak with The Nation’s Elie Mystal about the Justice Department’s unsealed, sweeping 37-count indictment of former President Donald Trump for retaining and mishandling classified documents, including top-secret information about U.S. nuclear weapons and secret plans to attack a foreign country. Trump is the first U.S. president to face federal criminal charges. He has denied any guilt. The new indictment joins his indictment earlier this year in New York, where he is accused of committing financial fraud.

• Donald Trump has arrived in Florida ahead of a history-making federal court appearance Tuesday on dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents and thwarting the Justice Department’s efforts to get the records back. Trump’s appearance in Miami will mark his second time since April facing a judge on criminal charges. But unlike a New York case some legal analysts derided as relatively trivial, the Justice Department’s first prosecution of a former president concerns conduct that prosecutors say jeopardized national security, with Espionage Act charges carrying the prospect of a significant prison sentence.

• When the PGA Tour announced a long-term partnership with LIV Golf, the upstart organization bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, no one sounded angrier than survivors of the 9/11 attacks and the families of those who were killed.

• The pact on June 6 marked an abrupt reversal for the PGA, which had fought LIV Golf since it emerged in 2021. The rival league courted star golfers with vast payouts that were widely seen as part of a global public-relations campaign by the Saudi government.

• All sorts of interesting things can happen in the process of a lawsuit. What’s going on here may seem complex, but stick with it, as it’s worth following…

• Former President Trump‘s tortured relationship with his own lawyers has been at the root of his most consequential scandals, including two special counsel inquiries, two impeachments and — now — two indictments.

• Why it matters: Trump’s history of treating lawyers like attack dogs and personal fixers — shaped by his mentorship under the infamous Roy Cohn in the 1970s — has put him in the most precarious legal jeopardy of his life.

• The U.S. government is halting some of its advertising campaigns on TikTok amid further ban scrutiny. According to the report, an interim rule by the Department of Defense, NASA, and the General Services Administration was established last week. This new rule would prohibit contracts that require the use of TikTok.

• In the wake of increased scrutiny surrounding social media platforms and the information they gather about their users, here’s a peek at how the Instagram algorithm works in 2023.  The conversation around social media algorithms has gotten noticeably louder as state and federal government agencies debate the merits of TikTok.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Julian Assange is “dangerously close” to being extradited to the US after losing his latest legal appeal.

• A couple of weeks back, we discussed how Google had delisted the app Downloader from the Play Store after a DMCA notice was issued by a firm representing several Israeli TV networks. The problem with all of this is simple: Downloader doesn’t have anything to do with copyright infringement or piracy. All it does is combine a file manager and basic web browser. The DMCA notice centered on the latter, complaining that users could get to piracy sites from the browser. You know, just like you can from any browser.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hollywood is one of several unhoused residents who frequent the library and connect to the internet inside as well as outside after the building closes. But last August, the branch cut off its Wi-Fi after hours. It’s the only public library branch in the city that discontinues Wi-Fi at night, and the policy continues today, despite a simultaneous citywide push to increase internet access for San Franciscans with lower incomes.

• City and library officials said the change was made after neighbors in the area complained that the free Wi-Fi was part of what attracted unhoused people to the area and contributed to crime.

• In addition to your fundamental value, there are some weak points in the corporate structure that you should be aware of. There are some big levers that you may already be aware of that I have already placed outside of the scope of this blog post, such as the use of collective bargaining, unionization, strikes, and so on, where you need to maximize your collective leverage to really put the screws to your employer. Many neo-liberal workplaces lack the class consciousness necessary to access these levers, and on the day-to-day scale it may be strategically wise to smarten up your colleagues on social economics in preparation for use of these levers. I want to talk about goals on the smaller scale, though. Suppose your goals are, for instance: [...]

• The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater. Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality.

• United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has backed a proposal by some artificial intelligence executives for the creation of an international AI watchdog body like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

• Generative AI technology that can spin authoritative prose from text prompts has captivated the public since ChatGPT launched six months ago and became the fastest growing app of all time.

• During an online panel last week hosted by the Cato Institute, TSA Privacy Officer Peter Pietra made some bold but false claims (starting at 18:05) about the case law on ID to fly:

• But as Mr. Pietra and the TSA should know, that’s not what was decided in Gilmore c. Gonzales.

• Based on pleadings submitted to the court ex parte and under seal by the TSA, the 9th Circuit found that the TSA’s “identification policy” did not require passengers to show ID credentials in order to fly, but provided an alternative of a more intrusive search:

• The British media company is also changing its internal processes following a New York Times investigation into a former star political columnist.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In 2021 Governor Newsom signed into law S.B. 156, which promised a $6-billion multi-year investment toward building broadband infrastructure in California. This $6 billion, together with the incoming federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) dollars, is enough money to deliver 21st-century-ready broadband access to virtually all Californians. This is badly needed. California, and indeed much of the United States, pays far more for far poorer internet than other similarly developed nations.

• Unfortunately, the California State Assembly plans to cut $625 million in last-mile broadband infrastructure funding, defer $950 million over the next three fiscal years, and reduce state middle mile fiber funding by an additional $125 million. Any cut to broadband funding undermines California’s ability to fulfill the promise of 21st-century broadband access to all, which then undercuts both the economic development opportunities of building and having 21st century broadband access and the state’s ability to address the systemic inequalities that arise from digital discrimination.

• In its proposal (page 113) the Assembly seeks to offset state expenditure with federal BEAD dollars to come. That is both directly counter to the rules that determine BEAD funding and gives up the chance to cover both unserved and underserved Californians. Instead of simply seeking to cover uncovered areas, the combined funds of original bill and the BEAD money would allow all Californians access to high-speed, low-cost internet. As it stands, by cutting the funding, the California legislature risks losing the BEAD money as well, turning a win-win into a lose-lose.

• Once, news organizations enthusiastically piled into social media. New platforms like Facebook and Twitter were powerful “traffic funnels,” where algorithmic recommendation systems put excerpts from news stories in front of a vast audience of new readers, who followed the links at the end of the excerpt to discover sources that became part of their regular news-diets.

• As platforms like Facebook grew essential to the new companies’ business, they changed the deal. First, it was a general “deprioritization” of news posts.

• This didn’t just mean that articles from news accounts were less likely to be recommended to users who didn’t subscribe to the news publisher’s account. It also meant that people who explicitly followed publishers – that is, who had explicitly directed Facebook to show them the things those publishers posted – would be less likely to see the publishers’ posts.

• Every so often, I see somebody, who has no idea what they’re talking about, say some variant of: “well, the internet still works despite all of that freaking out by consumer groups, therefore net neutrality must not have been important.” I’ve noted repeatedly how that statement is the claim of deeply unserious people for a deep well of reasons, yet the uninformed hot take never quite seems to die.

Monopolies

• In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the F.T.C. said the move was necessary because “Microsoft and Activision have represented that they may consummate” the deal. It asked the court to issue an order blocking the acquisition’s closing by the end of the day on Thursday.

• The FTC requested a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction from a federal court on Monday to stop the companies from merging before the deal’s July 18 deadline. The agency sued the companies to block the merger last December, saying that the merger would harm competition in the gaming market, but that trial won’t begin until August. The FTC believes that Microsoft and Activision will go ahead with the merger despite the pending legal action unless a court forbids them to do so and that there will be competitive harm if that happens. This latest filing shows that the FTC is still very serious about stopping the merger.

• The federal judge’s decision may play a pivotal role in the case going forward. If a judge does not rule in the FTC’s favor, the FTC is more likely to drop its entire case. If the judge allows the temporary restraining order, the FTC may see this as a good sign for its chances in its later trial.

Patents

Trademarks

• The USPTO recently announced that a data security incident has impacted domicile information “in certain trademark filings between February 2020 and March 2023.” Notice of the incident (set out below) was sent to the listed contact in these affected applications.

Copyrights

• Back in November last year, Walled Culture reported on the shocking opinion by a top EU court advisor that copyright was more important than privacy. The case in question was brought by four French associations for the protection of rights and freedoms on the Internet (La Quadrature du Net, the Federation of Associative Internet Access Providers, the Franciliens.net and the French Data Network), and concerned the “High Authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of rights on the Internet” (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur internet – the infamous HADOPI). The latter has a large database of personal information that it uses to police copyright’s intellectual monopoly in France, and it is one of the main villains in the Walled Culture book (free digital versions available). Euractiv reports that La Quadrature du Net is challenging this approach at the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s top court, on the grounds that it is incompatible with the main EU privacy laws: [...]

• Piracy release group CAKES has shut down. In the wake of the RARBG closure, this is yet another hit for the piracy ecosystem. While CAKES was part of The Scene, most of its TV show releases eventually ended up at public sites as well. The same is true for the TV release group GLHF, which has gone quiet too.

• Had everything gone to plan, Maria Schneider’s lawsuit against YouTube would’ve culminated in a jury trial today after almost three years of litigation. The lawsuit began with claims of mass copyright infringement on YouTube, failure to terminate repeat infringers, and denial of access to piracy mitigation tool Content ID. It ended Sunday with the dismissal of the entire case and an agreement that it will never see a courtroom again.

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