● 06.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/06/2023: Void Linux Top of DistroWatch

Posted in News Roundup at 11:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• As the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit neared its conclusion, two sessions were held in the memory-management track on process-oriented topics. Mike Rapoport ran a session on memory-management documentation (or the lack thereof), while Andrew Morton talked about the state of the subsystem’s development process in general. Both sessions were relatively brief and did not foreshadow substantial changes to come.

• Gao Xiang gave an overview of the Extended Read-Only File System (EROFS) in a filesystem session at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. EROFS was added to Linux 5.4 in 2019 and has been increasingly used in places beyond its roots as a filesystem for Android and embedded devices. Container images based on EROFS are being used in many places these days, for example.

• Unfortunately, this session was quite difficult for me to follow, so the report below is fragmentary and incomplete. There is a YouTube video of the session, but it suffers from nearly inaudible audio, though perhaps that will be addressed before long. The slides from the session are also available.

• EROFS is a block-based, read-only filesystem with a “very simple” format, Xiang began. The earlier read-only filesystems had many limitations, such as not supporting compression, which is part of why EROFS was developed. EROFS stores its data in a block-aligned fashion, which is page-cache friendly; that alignment also allows direct I/O and DAX filesystem access.

• At the end of our February article about the debate around the composefs read-only, integrity-protected filesystem, it was predicted that the topic would come up at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. That happened on the second day of the summit when Alexander Larsson led a session on composefs. While the mailing-list discussion was somewhat contentious, the session was less so, since overlayfs can be made to fit the needs of the composefs use cases. It turns out that an entirely new filesystem is not really needed.

• Larsson began by looking at the use case that spurred the creation of composefs. At Red Hat, image-based Linux systems are created using OSTree/libostree; they are not the typical physical block-device images, however, as they are more like “virtual images”. There is a content-addressed store (CAS) that contains all of the file content for all of the images. In order to build a directory hierarchy for the virtual image, a branch gets checked out from the OSTree repository, which contains the metadata and directory information for the image; OSTree then builds the directory structure using hard links to the CAS entities.

• At the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Luis Chamberlain led a plenary session on kernel support for block sizes larger than 4KB. There are assumptions in the current kernel that the block size used by a block-layer device is less than or equal to the system’s page size—both are usually 4KB today. But there have been efforts over the years to remove that restriction; that work may be heading toward fruition, in part because of the folio efforts of late, though there are still lots of areas that need attention.

• Originally, storage devices used 512-byte blocks, but over time that has grown to 4KB and beyond, Chamberlain said. Supporting block sizes greater than the page size has been desired for years; the first related patches were posted 16 years ago and the topic comes up at every LSFMM, he said. There is a wiki page about the project as well.

• Developers learning the Unix (or POSIX in general) system-call set will quickly encounter file descriptors, which are used to represent open files and more. Developers also tend to learn early on that the first three file descriptors are special, with file descriptor zero being the standard input stream, one being standard output, and two being standard error. The kernel, though, does not normally attach any specific meaning to a given descriptor number, so it was somewhat surprising when a recent BPF patch series attempted to attach a special meaning to zero when used as a file descriptor.

• BPF objects (maps and such) normally go away when they are closed, usually when the creating process exits. They may be “pinned”, though, which gives them a name in the BPF filesystem (usually under /sys/fs/bpf) and allows them to outlive the creating process. The existing API for the pinning of BPF objects is path-based, meaning that the caller provides a string containing the full path name to be created for an object.

Benchmarks

• NVIDIA has today released their latest stable driver for Linux version 535.54.03, following on from their recent 535.43.02 Beta driver in late May.

• The RADV driver in Mesa for AMD GPUs on Linux and Steam Deck is set to get Ray Tracing turned on by default for the upcoming Mesa 23.2 release.

Applications

• As always I’m not shouting the name to annoy you, it’s simply how it’s stylised.

• ONLYOFFICE 7.4 features a host of tweaks throughout all three core components, including the ability to draw on presentation slides, text documents, forms, and spreadsheets. To do this select the newly added Draw tab and, providing you’ve got the skill, select a pen and colour then doodle away!

• WhatsApp, the popular messaging platform for mobiles, has been popular in many countries. Users generally access it via mobile apps from the Play store or App Store. However, WhatsApp never launched any official desktop client for Linux.

• Although you can always access WhatsApp using the browser, which is an official way of accessing your messages from any desktop, including Linux.

• A new unofficial Flatpak desktop app arrives for WhatsApp, which you can seamlessly use to communicate.

• As the world increasingly embraces open-source software, Linux has become a favorite among many tech enthusiasts. Its flexibility, security, and extensive customization options have made it a go-to for developers and system administrators alike. One of the many strengths of Linux lies in its robust command-line interface (CLI) that can be augmented with a variety of utilities. Today, we delve into the world of one such utility that enhances the CLI experience – Progress, formerly known as cv (Coreutils Viewer).

Instructionals/Technical

• I just listened to the Syntax podcast for the first time because they were discussing topics near and dear to my heart, HTML and CSS. The episode is called “Nothing in CSS – 0 vs 0px, no, none, hidden, initial and unset”, and they’re talking about all the things that can be none or 0 in CSS and HTML. Super interesting stuff, but unfortunately, they got some things wrong. The don‘t have a commment section, so I’m commenting on the episode here in case someone else gets confused by their misinformation.

• The best way to find out which types are available and what they do is to look into the source code, which for ICU is the CLDR project. Let’s start with the definition of the keys in CLDR. (In this article, all the URLs are for a specific CLDR release, which is the latest one as I write this, because, as we will see below, these things change over time.)

• Follow through this guide to learn how to install MariaDB 10 on Debian 12.

• For the past 10 years or so, this has been the year that IPv6 will become widespread. It hasn’t happened yet. Consequently, there is little widespread knowledge of what IPv6 is, how to use it, or why it is inevitable.

• We’ve been using IPv4 ever since RFC 791 was published in 1981. At the time, computers were big, expensive, and rare. IPv4 had provision for 4 billion IP addresses, which seemed like an enormous number compared to the number of computers.

• As a systems administrator, you will occasionally be tasked with configuring or setting up the IP addresses of your servers to keep up with changing network requirements. As such, having fundamental skills in assigning IP addresses and configuring hostname resolution is crucial in ensuring that servers conform with the network topology.

• In this topic, we will first look at what an IP address is and delve into the differences between Ipv4 and IPv6. Then finally, we will demonstrate how to configure IPV4 and IPv6 addresses on a Linux system as well as hostname resolution.Table of Contents1What is an IP Address?Difference Between IPv4 vs IPv6IPv4 AddressNetwork SectionWhat is IPv4 Class AWhat is IPv4 Class BWhat is IPv4 Class CHost PortionIPv6 AddressDynamic (DHCP) and Static IP ConfigurationDHCP IP AddressStatic IP AddressHow to Configure IPv4 Networking in LinuxConfigure IPv4 Address on DebianConfigure IPv4 Address on UbuntuConfigure IPv4 Address on RHELHow to Configure Hostname in LinuxConclusion

• The openblas package prior to version 0.3.23-2 doesn’t ship optimized LAPACK routine and CBLAS/LAPACKE interfaces for compatibility. This decision has been reverted now, and the ability to choose a different default system BLAS/LAPACK implementation while keeping openblas installed is now provided to allow future co-installation of BLIS, ATLAS, etc.

• One of the best things about Linux is that there are always multiple ways to do anything you want to do. However, some ways are easier than others. Take, for example, virtual networking. There are plenty of ways to make a bunch of Internet-connected computers appear to be on a single private network. That’s nothing new, of course. Linux and Unix have robust networking stacks. Since 2018, though, Wireguard has been the go-to solution; it has a modern architecture, secure cryptography, and good performance.

• Installing Docker on Amazon Linux 2023 server system will allow users a seamless and efficient way to deploy and manage applications within isolated containers.

• LXQt, an elegant choice among the myriad of Linux desktop environments, has carved its niche with its unique blend of features and performance. Born from the combination of LXDE and Razor-qt projects, LXQt provides a refined experience that strikes a balance between functionality and resource efficiency.

• One of the first steps in understanding your Linux distro and kernel is knowing the version that they are currently running. This gives you an idea of what features are available at your disposal as well as their problems which can help you during troubleshooting.

• This article will show you how to find the version of your current distribution and kernel in Linux. Further, it will also highlight how you can do this even without the command line.

• If you’ve been looking for an easy way to move files between Linux machines, Jack Wallen shows you how with the help of the scp command.

• In the vast digital expanse of content management systems (CMS), WonderCMS has managed to carve out its niche, particularly among users who prefer simplicity and efficiency.

• Practical guide on how to encrypt an entire drive on Ubuntu 22.04 and how to encrypt the home directory and swap partition to prevent data theft in some cases.

• Practical guide on the ways of copying the files in Linux using the cp, rsync, and scp commands to copy the files and directories locally and to a remote host. In this guide, we will learn about copying files and directories in Linux.

Games

• The Last of Us Part I is finally getting to a level that’s actually good, and the latest update is out now including bumping it up to Steam Deck Verified status.

• One of the most well-reviewed games on Steam from an indie developer and quite a tragic game, it’s getting a Definitive Edition on July 18th.

• Have a fancy VR headset and fancy picking up some new games? The Humble Upload VR Showcase Bundle has some interesting titles worth a look. I’ll list each title along with any expected compatibility thanks to ProtonDB, with each being a Steam link if you need to go get more info first.

• Ready for even more games to load up on your desktop or Steam Deck? Humble’s Summer Sports Spectacular Bundle has some good stuff in it. As per usual I will list expected compatibility across desktop Linux and Steam Deck, using a ProtonDB / Native and Steam Deck Verified details. Plus each is a Steam link to go look them up in more detailed if you need to first.

• After entirely skipping the 3.0 update for Linux, Feral Interactive has now upgraded their Linux port of Total War: WARHAMMER III to version 3.1. The 3.0 update originally released for Windows in April, with 3.1 landing in May. While it is nice to see we got the 3.1 update a bit quicker, two months between updates is not a good look if you’re sticking to their Native build.

• Retrogaming includes playing any console or arcade video games from contemporary times, and it is also referred to as old-school/classic gaming. But if you are a gamer I bet that you already knew that.

• Classic gaming is increasingly becoming popular given that people miss the action that 8-bit, MS DOS-like games brought to their screens. And since it has never been easier to play games on Linux platforms than it is today, now is an excellent time to try out all the retro games that you can.

• Lakka is a free, lightweight, and open-source Linux distro that turns a small PC into a full-blown game console. It features a beautiful and user-friendly UI with eye-candy colors and a PS4-like User Experience.

• You can install it on your SD card and easily set it up or run it LIVE. Its wide range of joypad support allows you to use PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo game controllers.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Void Linux’s average rating soars high on DistroWatch, making it a must-try for advanced users. Learn why it is winning hearts.

Debian Family

• Like most other distributions, the Debian project decided to end the separation between the root and /usr filesystems years ago. Unlike most others, though, Debian is still working on the implementation of this decision. The upcoming Debian 12 (“bookworm”) release will feature a merged /usr in most respects, but there are a couple of nagging issues that threaten to stretch this transition out for some time yet.

• At its core, the /usr merge is the project to move files out of root-level directories like /bin and /lib into the equivalent directories under /usr. Most distributors took a “rip the bandage off quickly” approach to this change, causing it to simply happen over the course of a single major-version upgrade. It was an abrupt change and not without problems but, for the most part, distributors got through it quickly.

• Debian has taken a slower approach, spreading the transition over a few releases. If one looks closely at a fresh Debian install, either the current Debian 11 (“bullseye”) or the upcoming “bookworm” release, one will see that directories like /bin and /lib exist only as symbolic links into their equivalent directories under /usr. It would seem that the merge process is complete.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• As web development continues to evolve and become increasingly complex, developers are constantly seeking out efficient and productive environments to power their projects. Pop!_OS, a Linux distribution developed by System76, offers a compelling option for web developers in need of a streamlined operating system.

• In this detailed article, we will be exploring how Pop!_OS caters specifically to the preferences of web developers. We are going to delve into various tools, frameworks, and best practices that make Pop!_OS an excellent choice for web development projects of all sizes.

• As the popularity of Windows Subsystem for Linux increases, the Ubuntu development team is committed to delivering a first class experience for Linux developers on Windows. To achieve this we’ve made improvements to our automated testing workflows via the creation of WSL-specific GitHub actions. In this post, Ubuntu WSL engineer Eduard Gómez Escandell talks us through the motivation for this approach and how you can implement these actions for your own CI workflows.

• The importance of testing can never be overstated. When you develop a product, the last thing you want is to spend valuable time playing whack-a-mole with bugs or having your inbox flooded by issues asking for help. This importance is not lost on Ubuntu developers, where all packages must pass their test suite before having patches accepted.

Devices/Embedded

• Orange Pi 5 and 5B are affordable single board computers based on Rockchip RK3588S processor, but so far they did not have a fanless enclosure nor an easy way to add a heatsink leading some to create an ICE Tower cooling fan for the boards. But Orange Pi has recently launched an aluminum enclosure for $12.99 on Aliexpress(or $25 on Amazon) for both models that should help with cooling and protect the hardware from dust. But note that it does not work with the Rockchip RK3588-powered Orange Pi 5 Plus SBC since its dimensions are different. The Orange Pi 5 fanless enclosure is made of aluminum alloy, measures 105.9 x 68.7 x 27mm, and weighs 126 grams with all ports accessible from the outside, except for the 26-pin header and the 3-pin UART header. The company also included a power button to cleanly shut down the system.

Open Hardware/Modding

• I had given up on the SyQuest drive and sold it via eBay with a full description of the problem with it and suggestions on how to fix it. I decided to replace it with a cool tech that would work with my hardware. After chatting to Fletch from some of the retro Discord communities I decided to to get a MO drive. MO stands for Magneto-Optical and it is a sort-of half-way house between a removable magnetic media and a CD. It uses a laser to read and write, but during write the laser is just used to heat and a magnetic write head changes the pattern on the disc.

• Today, we bring you a list of the best Linux distributions you can run on the Raspberry Pi perfectly. But before we delve into that list, let me brief you on Raspberry Pi Imager.

• Raspberry Pi Imager is an official software tool provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is designed to simplify the process of installing operating systems (OS) onto Raspberry Pi microcomputers. The Raspberry Pi Imager is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.

• In June last year, we launched Raspberry Pi Pico W, a $6 wireless-enabled variant of our Pico platform, built around our RP2040 microcontroller. In the year since, we’ve sold over half a million of these tiny boards, and they’ve found their way into countless projects, from singing fish to web servers to communicative house plants.

• But one thing has been missing: Bluetooth support. Now that’s been fixed – and you don’t even need to buy a new Pico W.

• Milos Rasic of element14 Presents, in contrast, had the idea to create a remotely-operated launching system that would allow the user to simply flick a switch and press a button to achieve lift-off without the need for kilometers of wire. His ignition circuit relied on an Arduino MKR WAN 1310 to receive commands over LoRaWAN™ and the board, in turn, would begin charging a pair of supercapacitors via a series of MOSFETs, relays, and op-amps until they each reached about 8V. Once everything had been tested on a breadboard, Rasic soldered his components onto perfboard and arranged them inside a custom weatherproof case.

• The conditions that, theoretically, resulted in the first amino acids were an atmosphere of compounds like methane, water, ammonia, and hydrogen along with electricity in the form of lightning. Stanley Miller, under the supervision of Harold Urey, recreated those conditions in the lab with a closed system that heated the gases, passed them through a chamber with electrodes to produce sparks, then down through a cooler and back to the start. That produced many amino acids that could (again, in theory) come together to form genetic code. M. Bindhammer’s reproduction of this experiment works in a similar way, but with a plasma arc instead of sparks.

• For almost a year now, we’ve been following the progress [Walker] has been making with Ovrdrive — a completely open source USB flash drive that features the ability to destroy itself should it fall into the wrong hands. It’s an interesting enough project on those merits alone, but what really made this idea stand out was that the user was expected to lick their fingers before handling the drive as a form of covert authentication.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• When installing browser extensions in Google Chrome, you are asked to confirm the extension’s permissions. In theory, this is supposed to allow assessing the risk associated with an extension. In reality however, users typically lack the knowledge to properly interpret this prompt. For example, I’ve often seen users accusing extension developers of spying just because the prompt says they could.

• Google on Tuesday announced a new Chrome 114 update that resolves five vulnerabilities, including four critical- and high-severity bugs reported by external researchers.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are direct results of the process by which the documentation is produced. The PostgreSQL documentation is stored in the same git repository as the source code, and anyone who patches the source code so as to change documented behavior must also patch the documentation to match.

• This means that nearly all documentation updates are made by the developer who is most familiar with what is changing in the code, or sometimes by another developer who has studied those changes closely. Therefore, the documentation is usually extremely accurate. Sure, there are oversights, but it would be incredible to discover that some PostgreSQL command has a documented option which doesn’t actually exist, or that a parameter which is documented to take a string argument actually takes an integer or a Boolean. Typically, the descriptions of what SQL statements do and how that behavior is changed by parameter settings or options passed to the command itself are crisp and precise.

• We’re particularly good at tables and lists. Every SQL command that exists is listed in the documentation index, and anybody who adds a new SQL command will add it to the list, and write a documentation page for it that looks just like all of the other ones. Every configuration parameter that exists is listed in the documentation with a description of what it does using semi-standard phraseology. When someone creates a new one, they’re bound to add it to the list and describe it using the same phraseology that’s already used for the existing parameters. Corrections to this kind of documentation are often on the level of re-alphabetizing things that have fallen out of alphabetical order, or fixing some bit of markup that wasn’t done in the same way as all of the other entries. Grown men slink away in shame when it is pointed out to them that the parameter type is listed as bool when it actually should be enum.

• Robert Haas looks at the advantages and disadvantages of how documentation for PostgreSQL is written.

Education

• This will be an overview by Daniel Stenberg of the new WebSocket support in curl and in particular how to use this API with libcurl in your applications. It is followed by a live Q&A.

• I’ve been a Linux fan for almost 30 years, yet in all of that time, I never actually attended a Linux event (ignoring a handful of local Linux User Group (LUG) events here and there). That is, until this past weekend when I attended SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) 2023 in Charlotte, NC. So what took so long? Well frankly, traditionally I have avoided socializing with others. COVID and age have both helped to shift my position on this a bit.

• So let’s get this out of the way up front: I loved it and I will absolutely be attending SELF each year, barring scheduling problems and life in general, going forward. I absolutely regret that it took COVID to inspire me to go to one of these. It was such a refreshing experience to meet and talk with so many other people who were enthusiastic about Linux. Even in situations where there were hints dropped that we disagreed on a wide variety of other topics, the core of shared enthusiasm for Linux won out every time. We all had something in common that brought us together and it was awesome to experience that. The reality is that in my relatively small social circle, I’m basically the only Penguin (my chosen term for referring to myself as a Linux enthusiast). This means that my non-Penguin friends and co-workers have to suffer through bouts of hearing me gush about Linux.

• Rachel currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Center of Reproducible Science at the University of Zürich. She uses R for her work and for teaching in her course on good research practices.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Last week, the New York City Council passed several bills. One of them was Int 0814-A-2022, which I had suggested. As the press release says, [...]

Programming/Development

• Any system that has STRONG as a property also has WEAK. This matches our notion of strength because a system can have a bug that breaks STRONG but not WEAK, but can’t have a bug that breaks WEAK but not STRONG. In a sense, WEAK is redundant, because it cannot give us any “new information” about correctness.

• To compute the CRC32 checksum of some data in Crystal, use Digest::CRC32.

• Candid is the primary interface definition language for smart contracts hosted on the Internet Computer.

• Most prevalent data-interchange formats, such as Protocol Buffers and Thrift, come straight from engineering departments.

• Candid is different. Candid is a child of programming language designers who grew it from first principles. As a result, Candid makes sense but might feel alien to most engineers.

• This article is an introduction to Candid I wish I had when I started using it.

Python

• Margaret Mitchell, a researcher focused on the intersection of machine learning and ethics, was the morning keynote speaker on the third day of PyCon 2023. She spoke about her journey into machine learning and how the Python language has been instrumental in it. It was a timely and thought-provoking talk that looked beyond the machine-learning hype to consider the bigger picture.

Rust

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

Leftovers

• Today in Tedium: We’ve lost a lot of things in recent years, but one that we haven’t talked about too much is the demise of the children’s radio station. Yes, this is not exactly a surprise—how is radio going to compete with YouTube and Roblox? But during the height of the pandemic, the only real player in the kid-centric terrestrial radio space, Radio Disney, quietly wound down as Disney made the decision to focus on, well, every other part of being Disney. But it’s worth noting that Radio Disney was not the only one to embrace this phenomenon. Kids’ music makes a lot of money even to this day—it’s part of the reason why traditionally adult-centric bands like They Might Be Giants have embraced it. Today’s Tedium looks back at the many attempts to sell kids on radio—a market that has basically faded away by this point. (Thanks to Disney.) — Ernie @ Tedium

• Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest may be the most orderly movie about anarchists ever made. That is part of the point. Uncannily serene as well as romantic, absurdist, and politically astute, Unrest riffs on Pyotr Kropotkin’s 1870s visit to the Jura Mountains, then the center of the Swiss timepiece industry. (The title refers to a particular watch mechanism as well as a political situation.) Not yet the amiable Santa Claus apostle of mutual aid, the thirtysomething Kropotkin (played by the nonactor Alexei Evstratov) arrives in the Jura as a cartographer and leaves a convert. Schäublin prefaces the movie with a quote: “After staying a few weeks with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled: I was an anarchist.”

• As you’re hopefully aware, over the last few years, our Copia Institute think tank, in partnership with Randy Lubin’s Leveraged Play, have been using games and game-like tools for exploring complex realities in the present, as well as exploring potential future scenarios. On the latter front, we’ve done things like our Threatcast election disinformation simulator, our Hindsight 2030 game exploring future trends, and our (suddenly much more relevant!) brainstorming game to explore potential positive AI futures.

• Sitting in an abyss of unimaginable grief after losing his family in the Port Arthur massacre, an anguished father’s courage and strength to call for change has been hailed as a defining moment in Australian history.

• “As the person who lost his wife and two beautiful daughters at Port Arthur, I am writing to you to give you the strength to ensure no person in Australia ever has to suffer such a loss,” Walter Mikac wrote to then prime minister John Howard.

Science

• Fibonacci numbers are seen in the natural structures of various plants, such as the florets in sunflower heads, areoles on cacti stems, and scales in pine cones. [HackerBox] has developed a Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge to bring this natural phenomenon to your electronics.

• Although experimental verification is at the heart of the scientific method, there is quite a difficulty range when it comes to setting up such an experiment. Testing what underlies the formation of the fast solar winds that are ejected from coronal holes in the Sun’s corona is one of these tricky experimental setups. Yet it would seem that we now have our answer, with a newly published paper in Nature by S. D. Bale and colleagues detailing what we learned courtesy of the Parker Solar Probe (PSP), which has been on its way to the Sun since it was launched in August of 2018 from Earth.

• The next one won’t be until 2040!

Education

• Critics say move is aimed at erasing Tibetan culture and Sinicizing the region

• Amid an unprecedented wave of censorship, many of our state legislators have left no mercy for LGBTQ+ Texans. Censorious legislation like House Bill 900 and Senate Bill 13 attempt to relate queer identity with sexual obscenity. The bills target educators’ expertise and diminish students’ right to read in a vitriolic attack on queer identity, and more broadly, the agency young people wield in our own education.

Hardware

• Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX81 was a phenomenal sales success as one of the cheapest machines available in the early 1980s, but even its most fervent admirers will admit that it suffered heavily from the Sinclair economy drive. In particular that membrane keyboard was notorious for its lack of feedback, and a popular upgrade back in the day was a replacement keyboard. Now we can bring you what might be the ultimate in ZX replacement keyboards, in the form of [Brian Swetland]’s mechanical ZX81 keyboard.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The Dilkon Medical Center, a sprawling, $128 million facility on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, was completed a year ago. With an emergency room, pharmacy and housing for more than 100 staff members, the new hospital was cause for celebration in a community that has to travel long distances for all but the most basic health care.

• After decades of intense debate and stalled legislation, the Food and Drug Administration has taken a critical step in overseeing a vast category of lab tests that reach patients without any federal agency checking to ensure they work the way their makers claim.

• Among the tests that are not reviewed by the FDA: popular prenatal genetic screenings that ProPublica recently reported on, as well as certain cancer screenings and tests for rare diseases.

• On a brisk morning in the winter of 2019, at a standing-room-only reception, a procession of speakers lavished praise on the surgeon who more than tripled the size of the liver transplant program at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis. The lifesaving doctor was receiving an honor often reserved for the dead: Methodist’s leaders announced that the hospital’s new state-of-the-art transplant center would be named for Dr. James Eason.

• Eason seemed to have reached the summit of what was then a 25-year career. A decade earlier, he had performed one of the highest-profile liver surgeries in recent history: the transplant that extended the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs by more than two years. That operation earned Eason the gratitude of Jobs’ widow, who later donated a total of $40 million to the transplant center he helmed and the medical school where he worked as a professor. At age 58, Eason had become one of the country’s highest-paid transplant surgeons, earning $1.7 million a year, more than anyone at Methodist but the head of its nearly 13,000-employee, six-hospital health system.

• As months-long joint investigation goes public, some additional details and context.

Proprietary

• “In the face of continued headwinds, we have had to make some hard choices, including eliminating some positions.”

• Microsoft was coming off a disastrous reveal event for the Xbox One in which it marketed its next-gen gaming console with things that weren’t games: specifically, television, sports, and… Skype?

• [...]

• I’ve never seen a company trash-talked so hard they had an existential crisis before.

• Bell Media, a division of BCE, is closing six AM radio stations and selling three others, subject to approval by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

• Instagram has no singular algorithm determining what people do and don’t see on the platform. Instead, each part of the app uses its own algorithms, classifiers, and processes to “make the most of people’s time” (and that of its investors) and the different ways people use Instagram.

• For example, Instagram says that people tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, use Explore to discover new content and creators, and “be entertained” in Reels. Instagram ranks things differently in each part of the app and has features like Close Friends, Favorites, and Following to make it easier to customize your experience.

• They ram through loose electrical wires and bring rush hour traffic grinding to a halt. They tear through crime scene caution tape and rear end city buses. Sometimes, they even obstruct Muni routes like the N Judah, inconveniencing hundreds of passengers who are simply trying to go home after a long day at work.

• Driverless cars — which are suddenly quite common in the Bay Area — have been touted as life-saving solutions by Cruise and Waymo, two local tech behemoths that are in an arms race for San Francisco’s roadways. But the “rigorous” training that these cars must undergo each day is still annoying — and endangering — San Franciscans who didn’t sign up to become the multibillion dollar companies’ unpaid lab rats.

• Silicon Valley has produced no small number of moral disappointments. Google retired its “don’t be evil” pledge before firing its star ethicist. Self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk bought Twitter in order to censor political speech, retaliate against journalists, and ease access to the platform for Russian and Chinese propagandists. Facebook lied about how it enabled Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and paid a public relations firm to blame Google and George Soros instead.

• Does Section 230 shield new developing A.I. services like ChatGPT from civil lawsuits in much the same way that it has protected other online services? Jess Miers, legal advocacy counsel at the tech trade group the Chamber of Progress, makes a persuasive case that it does. Over at Techdirt, she notes that ChatGPT qualifies as an interactive computer service and is not a publisher or speaker. “Like Google Search, ChatGPT is entirely driven by third-party input. In other words, ChatGPT does not invent, create, or develop outputs absent any prompting from an information content provider (i.e. a user).”

• The European Parliament, a main legislative branch of the E.U., passed a draft law known as the A.I. Act, which would put new restrictions on what are seen as the technology’s riskiest uses. It would severely curtail uses of facial recognition software, while requiring makers of A.I. systems like the ChatGPT chatbot to disclose more about the data used to create their programs.

• The vote is one step in a longer process. A final version of the law is not expected to be passed until later this year.

• Just a quick note that if you’ve never tried Passkeys and you use Google stuff, you can set it up easily at: [...]

• The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is the foundation of Android today, being an open-source version of the platform that’s maintained by Google. This version of Android also ships with a variety of open-source apps, but it turns out that Google is killing support for two of these apps.

• This means that soon, if you build the Android Open Source Project, you will no longer be able to send messages or make phone calls without adding your own messaging and dialer applications. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter all that much since every OEM already uses their own applications, but for the open source operating system that is Android, this is another nail in the coffin. Due to the slow erosion of functionality from AOSP, as well as the transfer of functionality from AOSP to closed-source Google applications and frameworks, we’re fast approaching a point where you can’t really state that AOSP is a full open source mobile operating system anymore.

• As Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions improve malware detection efficacy on Windows and Linux systems, certain state-sponsored threat actors have shifted to developing and deploying malware on systems that do not generally support EDR such as network appliances, SAN arrays, and VMware ESXi hosts.

• The world’s first autonomous, electric passenger ferry service has begun operations in the city of Stockholm in Norway this week. The ferry, christened MF Estelle, by Zeabus, currently has a crew onboard but will be operated unmanned starting next year, a press release said.

Windows TCO

• Dubbed “Cadet Blizzard,” the hacking group carried out operations targeting Ukrainian infrastructure in the run-up to the Russian invasion.

• Microsoft is publicly exposing a Russian hacking group that worked on destructive wiper malware attacks that hit organizations in Ukraine.

• In 2022, LockBit was the most deployed ransomware variant across the world and continues to be prolific in 2023. Since January 2020, affiliates using LockBit have attacked organizations of varying sizes across an array of critical infrastructure sectors, including financial services, food and agriculture, education, energy, government and emergency services, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation. LockBit ransomware operation functions as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model where affiliates are recruited to conduct ransomware attacks using LockBit ransomware tools and infrastructure. Due to the large number of unconnected affiliates in the operation, LockBit ransomware attacks vary significantly in observed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This variance in observed ransomware TTPs presents a notable challenge for organizations working to maintain network security and protect against a ransomware threat.

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), and the following international partners, hereafter referred to as “authoring organizations,” are releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing observed activity in LockBit ransomware incidents and providing recommended mitigations to enable network defenders to proactively improve their organization’s defenses against this ransomware operation.

• Suzanne Stahl, the chair of SMP Health, the hospital’s parent organization, said last month that the hospital was planning to close this year. “Due to a number of factors, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the cyberattack on the computer system of St. Margaret’s Health, and a shortage of staff, it has become impossible to sustain our ministry,” she said in a Facebook video.

• According to Biden administration officials who briefed reporters ahead of that hearing on condition of anonymity, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allowed the U.S. government to recover the majority of the $4.4 million ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to the hackers. In another example newly made public, Section 702 data helped the U.S. government to identify and mitigate a 2022 Iranian ransomware attack against a nonprofit, allowing the organization to recover without paying the ransom.

• Schools continue to be an attractive and all-too-easy target for criminal groups. This week, Rhysida threat actors added Paris High School in Illinois to their leak site as an “auction” item: [...]

• The 2021 cyberattack on St. Margaret’s Health, a hospital in Spring Valley, Illinois, hobbled computer systems for months and prevented it from filing insurance claims, Linda Burt, a hospital vice president, told CNN on Monday.

• “It took months after we went back online to catch up with billing,” Burt said in an email. Other factors in the hospital’s closure were staffing costs brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and supply chain and inflation issues, she said.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, owslib, php7.4, and php8.2), Fedora (ntp-refclock, php, and python3.7), Red Hat (c-ares, firefox, and thunderbird), SUSE (kernel, openldap2, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (binutils, dotnet6, dotnet7, node-fetch, and python-tornado).

• BreachForums has been reincarnated. But as with all things related to BreachForums, its reincarnation has been accompanied by all kinds of drama.

• The following is a law firm-generated press release about a case they have filed. Keeping in mind that a complaint is allegations that have yet to be proven or disproven, DataBreaches has included this item on this site because if true, it would be a case of insider-wrongdoing via misuse of a client’s information.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Strasbourg, 14/06/2023 – Today, the European Parliament voted to ban real-time facial surveillance in public spaces in the EU’s new Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). Automated behavioural surveillance, on the other hand, is not to be banned (277:306:38 votes). With this position, the European Parliament enters trilogue negotiations with EU governments on the final legislation.

• EU lawmaker and digital freedom fighter Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) comments: [...]

• Spotify said it planned to appeal the decision.

• The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection’s (IMY) said it had reviewed “how Spotify handles customers’ right of access to their personal data.”

• Representatives of the Justice Department and FBI made the case that the long history of abuses linked to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are already being addressed by significant new reforms instituted in the last two years. But several members of the Judiciary Committee questioned whether these reforms go far enough and pressed witnesses about potentially more serious reforms, including a warrant requirement for using the sensitive intelligence data.

• This was probably supposed to be a slam dunk: a legislative proposal mandating client-side scanning to prevent the spread of CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Who would be against that? Surely no one, thought those pushing the bill through.

• Story after story after story has showcased how the intentionally convoluted adtech and data broker market sloppily traffics in all manner of sensitive consumer data, whether it’s your daily physical movements (say, the last time you visited an abortion clinic), your granular browsing habits, your medical history, your household energy use patterns, or even your mental health data.

• It is always controversial to have home assistants like the ones from Google or Amazon. There are privacy concerns, of course. Plus they maddeningly don’t always do what you intend for them to do. However, if you do have one, you’ve probably thought about something you wanted to do that would require programming. Sure, you can usually do a simple list, but really writing code wasn’t on the menu. But now, Google Home will allow you to write code. Well, at least script using a YAML file.

Defence/Aggression

• Notes: Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer at Mint Press News, and a frequent guest on the Project Censored Show. Read his article on “e-girls” and Army recruitment here.  Rosa del Duca is a freelance journalist and Army National Guard veteran who became a conscientious objector during George W. Bush’s Iraq war. She later wrote a memoir, Breaking Cadence. Harriet Fraad is a mental health counselor in private practice in New York. She also writes extensively about social issues.

• The Moscow-installed heads of Ukraine’s annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions have asked Russia’s Central Election Commission to hold elections on the country’s unified voting day, September 10, 2023, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

• Citing the State Duma’s press service, the Russian Defense Ministry’s TV channel Zvezda reported Wednesday that Adam Delimkhanov, a State Duma deputy from Chechnya, has been injured “but is alive.” The channel didn’t say where or when the alleged injury occurred.

• The attack has been attributed to the terrorist group Al-Shabab, which often perpetrates attacks with the goal of overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamic State.

• Currently, this jihadist group controls rural areas of central and southern Somalia and also attacks neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia.

• The sources did not say what the two might discuss. Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

• The foundation and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the Chinese government, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

• That is according to Oryx, a Dutch warfare research group, which reported that Russia has lost more than 5,000 pieces of equipment since the fighting began. Of those losses, almost 3,200 pieces of equipment were destroyed, and Ukraine captured another 1,400.

• An 18-year-old army trainee shot three fellow soldiers at a firing range on a Japanese army base Wednesday, killing two of them, officials said.

• Violent crime in Japan is extremely rare and gun possession tightly controlled.

• Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, state media reported, with China expressing readiness to help facilitate Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Abbas will stay until Friday, Beijing has said, on his fifth official visit to the world’s second-largest economy.

• Not even revelations of a Chinese spy base in Cuba can stop the US secretary of state’s visit this time.

• Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has left for a state visit to France where he will meet President Emmanuel Macron, a statement said on Wednesday.

• Saudi Arabia is levying its soccer investments both at home and abroad as its main push to make a bigger splash in the international sports world; but it’s not stopping at soccer.

• We speak to Lina Alhathloul, the sister of a Saudi dissident who was jailed and tortured, about how the kingdom is using its oil fortune to reshape its image by taking over the world of professional golf with the merger of its own LIV Golf and the PGA Tour. This comes after President Biden pledged to make Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a “pariah” after the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. Lina Alhathloul discusses Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and its latest diplomatic moves with regional and international powers, including its reestablishment of ties with Iran.

• In the case related to the burning to death of three Syrian migrant workers in Güzelbahçe, İzmir, suspect Kemal K. dismissed his lawyer, who was claiming that he is of unsound mind. The hearing was adjourned to October 4.

• The discriminatory, racist, and genocidal policies from the late Ottoman Empire persist until the present day, says European Syriac Union member Elber Shleymun Rhawi.

• Five soldiers were reportedly killed in the strikes. While Turkey’s Defense Ministry confirmed the drone attack, but said it targeted the Kurdish YPG forces.

• The Arab League has accepted Bashar Assad back into the fold, but the conflict in the Syrian dictator’s country is far from over. Five Syrians talk about their lives – and their fears of what is to come.

• America’s War on Terror, launched in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has had a staggering impact on our world. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, paints as full a picture as possible of the toll of those “forever wars” both in human lives and in dollars. The wars, we estimate, have killed nearly 1 million people, including close to 400,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone. Worse yet, they sickened or injured several times more than that—leading to illnesses and injuries that, we estimate, resulted in millions of non-battlefield deaths.

• The Shangri-La, a luxury hotel in Singapore, touts itself as an oasis of calm and relaxation. On June 2 to 4, however, it was the site of dueling narratives between the top military officials of the United States and China—Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III and Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu. Speaking at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, both officials warned of the growing danger of conflict in the region, but each blamed the other side for causing the trouble. In their speeches, moreover, each official laid out their vision of the emerging strategic landscape in Asia, with Austin delineating US plans for the military encirclement of China and Li describing China’s efforts to resist US “hegemonism.” Put together, these two speeches suggest that we’ve entered a period of increased tension and strife in Asia, with a strong likelihood of violent conflict.

• A New York grand jury indicted former U.S. Marine Daniel Penny in connection with the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a Black unhoused man, Mayor Eric Adams announced Wednesday.

• The White House and Congress disagree over the type and number of nuclear weapons needed to deter Russia, China, North Korea, and potentially Iran.

War in Ukraine

• June 15, 2023 8:10 AM

• New laws will be introduced to block the development on national security grounds.

• Russia will be prevented from building a new embassy near Parliament House in Canberra with the prime minister citing national security concerns.

• The government, with the backing of the coalition opposition, rushed legislation through parliament’s lower house on Thursday to block the move.

• Russia will be blocked from building a new embassy near Parliament House in Canberra over national security concerns.

• The government rushed legislation through both houses of parliament on Thursday, passing it in a little more than an hour with the coalition’s backing.

• The war in Ukraine has heightened Germany’s sense that it has become vulnerable to new threats, but some critics said the strategy lacks detail.

• The St. Petersburg Forum has become the world’s leading meeting place for representatives of the global business community.

• The Ukrainians are now on the offense. But measuring their progress is difficult this early on.

• A missile hit a warehouse in Odesa, killing at least three workers, while three more civilians were killed in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials said.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine initially shook many of its neighbors into looking for other geopolitical partners. But economic and geographical necessity is returning them to Moscow’s orbit.

• The country’s first national security strategy is an attempt to set priorities, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but hard commitments were short in supply.

• Spending caps set by the debt limit bill have empowered critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine, threatening the bipartisan coalition that has kept military assistance flowing to Kyiv.

• The U.S. has sent lots of weaponry to Ukraine. But America’s defense industrial base needs help to replenish stocks.

• At a bar in a once-occupied Ukrainian village, dehumanizing messages on the walls were a stark reminder that the Kremlin wants to stamp out Ukraine and its culture.

• Despite Xi and Putin’s public proclamation of a ‘no limits’ partnership, China and Russia’s economic ties are limited by Beijing’s strategic interests.

• The way Minister Thandi Modise’s Department of Defence (DoD) is handling a PAIA (Promotion of Access to Information Act) request concerning the arrival in South Africa of Russian hardware in the form of a cargo ship and a transport aircraft smacks of delays and “passing the buck”.

• Czech President Petr Pavel, a former senior NATO official, expects to hear “strong language” about long-term support for Ukraine during the military alliance’s summit next month along with an acknowledgement of the importance of having Ukraine as a member.

• Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, and President Biden met at the White House to prepare for a summit meeting next month in Lithuania.

• To check on the state of Russia’s standing in the international business community, look no further than the 26th edition of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), scheduled for three days starting today (June 14) in the Russian city.

• SPIEF 2023′s guest country is the United Arab Emirates.

• Sanctions against Russia mean more work for Latvian ports as many Central Asian countries are looking for new freight corridors. Large ports are already experiencing an increase in traffic. In Liepāja, for example, it has grown tenfold over a year, TV Kurzeme reported June 14.

• Several Nordic countries have started a consumer boycott of the food manufacturer Mondelez, maker of snacks including Oreo and Toblerone, over its continued operations in warmongering state Russia, reports Latvian Television’s Brussels correspondent Ilze Nagla.

• The Australian government expects to introduce legislation to prevent Russia from building a new embassy near Parliament House on security grounds. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the legislation to be presented to Parliament on Thursday would extinguish Russia’s lease on the proposed site based on the advice of security agencies. The government decided to act after Russia won a Federal Court case last month that prevented its eviction from the site which is under construction. The lease was cancelled by local Canberra authorities on the basis of a lack of building activity.

• June 15, 2023 8:10 AM

• New laws will be introduced to block the development on national security grounds.

• Soviet atrocities have not received the same recognition as those committed by the Nazis, which has led to Russia using past narratives in today’s wars, says Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, speaker of the Lithuanian parliament.

• Most illicit crossings take place in summer, when it’s easier to move across the rugged frontier zone.

• Another Step in Beijing’s Rise to Global Power.

• Nuclear power companies rely on cheap enriched uranium made in Russia. That geopolitical dilemma is intensifying as climate change underscores the need for emissions-free energy.

• The move would be another sign of worsening relations between Moscow and the West.

• The Moscow City Court sentenced activist Vitaly Koltsov to six years in prison on June 14 after a jury found him guilty of attacking a police vehicle with two Molotov cocktails.

• Lithuania will spend 6 million euros as part of a 107.5-million-euro deal to procure air defences for Ukraine, the country’s Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.

• Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court on June 14 sentenced former Kyiv judge Mykola Chaus to 10 years in prison after finding him guilty of taking a bribe.

• Vladimir Putin claims one of the main goals of his Ukraine invasion is to prevent the country joining NATO, but in reality this objective actually goes directly against Russia’s own national interests, writes Leonid Gozman.

• There’s no neat and clean way to fight a war, even for victims of aggression.

• The prosecutor asks the court to sentence Valērijs Lazarevs, who beat up a young man a year ago and demanded that the Ukrainian flag be removed from his shoulders, to two years’ conditional sentence in a court hearing on June 14.

• The Osokins Freedom Festival for Ukraine has raised more than EUR 20 000 to support Ukraine, organizers said June 14.

• The State Duma passed the first reading of a bill aimed at raising the age for military conscription in Russia.

• The aims of the special operation change according to the situation, but overall, we’re not going to change anything. For us, they have a fundamental character.

• A new investigation from BBC News Russia examines how the Russian military has enlisted labor migrants from Central Asia to dig trenches in the Belgorod region and in Ukraine’s annexed territories as well as to participate in combat.

• Pavlo Dorohoi is a documentary filmmaker and photographer from Kharkiv who, before the full-scale war, also shot the architecture of his hometown. After the full-scale Russian invasion began, he stayed in Kharkiv to document the war.

• An activist named Anatoly Berezikov has died in a special detention center in Russia’s Rostov region, his lawyer told the human rights group OVD-Info. Attorney Irina Gak says she went to the jail on June 14 to visit her client but was informed that he wasn’t in the building. She says she then observed his body being loaded into a medical vehicle in the jail’s courtyard.

• Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, India has abstained from voting on U.N. resolutions condemning Russian aggression. At the same time, the country maintains a strategic partnership with the U.S., and Indian media predict an even closer relationship with America in the future. Meduza spoke to Aparna Pande, a research fellow specializing in India, defense policy, and foreign policy at the Hudson Institute, about India’s reliance on Russian military supplies, its rivalry with China, and its partnership with the U.S. in relation to its stance on Ukraine. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

• An editor at Radio New Zealand has been suspended and is under investigation for the time-honored practices of providing balanced and factual reporting, writes Tony Kevin.

Environment

• “We are in the middle of a climate crisis and we know there is one way, and one way only, to protect us from its most devastating consequences – and that is to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

• “We also know that reducing our reliance on fossil fuels would be the most effective way to tackle the cost of living crisis which so many people across the country are struggling with day to day.

• “We have been warning about the dangers posed by climate change for decades,” climate scientist Cathy Whitlock testified to a Montana court on Tuesday, “and yet Montana continues to aggressively pursue an expansion of fossil fuel utilization and production.”

• Whitlock, a professor emeritus at Montana State University, is one of a number of climate scientists scheduled to testify for 16 young Montanans who have sued the state for continuing to favor oil, coal, and gas development despite the worsening climate crisis.

• It’s been 21 days since super typhoon Mawar tore through the island of Guam. A Category 4 cyclone, Mawar cut off all communications as well as power and water to the vast majority of the nearly 171,000 people living here. In the days that followed, the island looked like a war zone. Downed power lines littered main roads, while felled trees blocked back ones. Jungles thick with green became brown wastelands.

Energy/Transportation

• AGL Energy has been accused of using bids on the wholesale electricity market to inflate power prices and cause higher bills for consumers.

• A class action filed in the NSW Federal Court seeks to compensate customers for AGL’s alleged manipulation of the electricity market which affected downstream prices charged to homes and businesses.

• Officials did not say when the Jakarta-Bandung service will begin commercial operations.

• In an Australian-first, Sydneysiders can help make biomethane with a simple flush of the loo.

• Biomethane produced using wastewater is being injected directly into the NSW gas distribution network from a demonstration plant in Sydney’s south-east.

• As the world’s largest iron ore producer, Australia could put the world’s steel sector on the fast track to net zero.

• Rather than shipping raw ore, Australia could export pellets and briquettes of green iron made using hydrogen derived from local, cheap, abundant clean electricity.

Wildlife/Nature

• A number of proposals have been made to address the booming elephant population, including rangers and scientists who believe that birth control could be deployed to prevent herds from growing even bigger. The idea involves firing hormones at female elephants from the air, a rather expensive and involved undertaking.

• Another idea under consideration involves the establishment of corridors for the animals between the nature preserves and areas designated for resettlement. Critics, though, point out that doing so would merely amount to moving the problem elsewhere.

• Roger Payne, the scientist who spurred a worldwide environmental conservation movement with his discovery that whales could sing, has died. He was 88. Payne made the discovery in 1967 during a research trip to Bermuda in which a Navy engineer provided him with a recording of curious underwater sounds documented while listening for Russian submarines. Payne identified the haunting tones as songs whales sing to one another. He saw the discovery of whale song as a chance to spur interest in saving the giant animals, who were disappearing from the planet. He would produce the hit album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” in 1970.

Overpopulation

• Another third of the metro’s water comes from underground aquifers — and that water is running out, too. Earlier this month, Arizona’s water department published a new report assessing how much water remains in the aquifers below Phoenix. The data was alarming: The state found that it has allocated more groundwater to cities and farms over the next hundred years than is actually present in the aquifers. If the Phoenix area keeps pumping water at its current rate, those aquifers will tap out over the next century, according to the department. The total shortfall amounts to almost 5 million-acre feet, or around 1.6 trillion gallons, that were permitted for use over the next hundred years but may not exist at all.

• Increasing urban density rather than continuing to expand outwards is the answer to Sydney’s urgent housing shortfall, NSW Premier Chris Minns says.

• Expanding outwards into untapped areas for development in many cases required stretching public services beyond what the state government can provide, he says.

Finance

• NSW will pay more each year in interest on the state’s massive debt than it spends on NSW Police and TAFE combined, Premier Chris Minns has revealed.

• Mr Minns said the government was on track to record $187 billion worth of debt in the next three years – equal to more than $20,000 per person in NSW – which would cost the state about $7 billion in interest a year.

• This century has known a stunning decrease in global income inequality, bringing it down to levels not seen in well over a century.

• After three years of zero-covid isolation took its toll on China’s economy, a drastic pivot away from pandemic restrictions was supposed to turbocharge an economic recovery. But the country’s growth is stalling. Exports are down. Youth unemployment is up. Plunging producer prices are raising risks of deflation.

• Creditors and customers of failed building company Porter Davis have been handed a detailed report into the firm’s collapse by its liquidators.

• Grant Thornton released the report on Wednesday.

• “After an unprecedented 10 interest rate hikes in a row, it’s clear the corporate profiteering epidemic will persist no matter how many times the Fed doubles down,” said Liz Zelnick of Accountable.US.

• High-profile US golfers Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas are looking to invest in former Premier League side Leeds United after 49ers Enterprises agreed on a takeover of the English soccer club.

• Leeds owner Andrea Radrizzani agreed to sell his stake to the investment arm of the San Francisco 49ers NFL franchise after the club was relegated from the Premier League in May.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Former President Donald Trump gave a wave and thumbs-up to crowds gathered outside the federal courthouse in downtown Miami as he left his first court appearance on federal criminal charges. He then headed to a Cuban restaurant where he warmly greeted supporters in a scene that more closely resembled a campaign stop. Later Tuesday, he denounced the charges before a friendly crowd at a private golf club he owns. The post-court itinerary was part of Trump’s efforts at counterprogramming, as he campaigns again for president and maintains that he has been unfairly targeted. The attention from journalists and the screaming crowds were more signs of the extraordinary nature of the event.

• West reveals his switch from the People’s Party a month after his initial announcement.

• Given the structure of Bill C-11, none of this should come as a surprise. In fact, an internal Canadian Heritage memo identified many of these services as being caught by the bill, making it clear the bill’s regulatory scope extended far beyond just big tech. When combined with the coming battle over economic thresholds – the CRTC proposed $10 million in revenues, while submissions range from $1 million to $100 million – the fight to be excluded from Bill C-11’s regulatory requirements is only getting started.

• Like Mr Ellison, Oracle might be seen as a dinosaur of American tech. It began life in 1977 as a database-software business, later expanding into applications for business functions such as finance, sales and supply-chain management. As a latecomer to the cloud, however, the business has ceded market share in recent years to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, three cloud giants that have aggressively expanded their business-software offerings. Oracle’s slice of the database-software market, which remains its bread and butter, fell from 43% in 2012 to 19% in 2022, according to Gartner, a research firm.

• Once adopted by the EU parliament, officials say negotiations for a final law with the bloc’s 27 member states will begin almost immediately, starting later Wednesday.

• The race is on to strike an agreement on final legislation by the end of the year.

• Cornel West is running for president. He announced last Monday in a short video referencing issues including Medicare for All, “decent housing,” abortion rights, the war in Ukraine, and ensuring that everyone has “access to a job with a living wage.”

• Dr West has a record of writing and activism on many of these issues that stretches back several decades. And he has a way of talking about them that conveys not just a political perspective but a deeply compelling moral vision. I can hardly think of anyone I’d rather see replace the deeply mediocre Joe Biden as president of the United States — to, as West said in a recent appearance on Democracy Now!, become “the head of Empire to help dismantle it.”

• The House on Wednesday voted down a resolution to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

• Why it matters: The push to reprimand the former House Intelligence Committee chair came as former President Trump was arrested on Tuesday over his handling of classified documents.

• Former President Trump’s allies in Congress have begun furiously pulling on every lever available to ensure his enemies — from federal prosecutors to President Biden himself — pay a price for his historic indictment.

• So news has it some old white crook, carnival barker and GOP pol who’s been arrested more often than he’s been elected just got hauled into court in Miami for stealing copious top-secret government documents, lying about it and hoarding them “like a deranged squirrel,” most cringingly in a pimped-out bathroom at his trashy golf club. The attendant circus, both cheesy and chilling, featured a small crowd of “MAGA misfits.” It felt very old. Dear God, isn’t it time to cancel this show?

• As former President Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned at a federal courthouse in Miami, where he pleaded not guilty to 37 felony charges around his handling of classified documents, we speak with Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He predicts Trump “will challenge every aspect of this prosecution,” but says there is no reason the trial can’t begin within the next year. Trump is the first president to ever be arraigned on federal charges, just months after he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges in New York in a state investigation involving hush-money payments during the 2016 election campaign. This all comes as the former president, who was impeached twice and is now facing multiple indictments, is now running again for the White House.

• The majority of former President Donald Trump’s charges for mishandling classified documents stem from the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that has often been used to silence dissent and go after whistleblowers. We speak with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent, who calls for reforming the Espionage Act. Regardless of Trump’s conduct, the Espionage Act is “basically unconstitutional” and should not be used as it is currently written, says Gibbons, and notes Trump himself used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers when he was in office.

• Liberal senator David Van has denied he sexually assaulted or harassed independent senator Lidia Thorpe, but admitted he had to move away from her office following a complaint.

• Senator Van said he was “shattered” by the allegations made by the former Greens senator in parliament on Wednesday and said they were “completely unfounded”.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Congratulations, TikTok, for managing to unseat Google, Facebook, and Twitter as Congressional Enemy #1. What started as concerns about national security and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) having too much influence over the platform’s algorithmic design and content moderation has morphed into something different.

• Viral video showing a suspected rat’s head spawns a menu of ‘duckrat’ memes and spoofs

• More than 3,000 scientists have rejected claims that EU plans to curb pesticide use and restore nature will harm food security and farmers.

• In recent months, the industrial farming lobby and the European People’s Party (EPP), the largest right-wing party in the EU, have been at the forefront of pushback against green legislation.The EPP has called for a halt to proposed green farming reforms. They argue that the laws will cause a drop in EU food production and lead to widespread economic losses.

• While Facebook retained its position as the most important social network for news with 28% of people saying they had used it for this purpose in the previous week, its role has declined sharply since 2016 when 42% of people reported that they accessed news on the Meta-owned network on average across 12 markets.

• The report linked Facebook’s declining importance in news to the growing popularity of video-based networks like Youtube and Tiktok and Meta’s deliberate turn away from news.

• Less than a third of the survey’s respondents said that having stories selected for them based on their previous consumption is a good way to get news, a six-point decline from 2016, when the survey last asked the question. Yet people still slightly prefer to have their news chosen by algorithms than by editors or journalists.

• An NBC News review Tuesday of Twitter search results for Addison Rae Easterling, Charli D’Amelio and Bella Poarch — the three most-followed women on TikTok — found multiple examples of sexually explicit and sexually suggestive deepfakes posted in a 24-hour period. Other searches turned up tweets with deepfakes that had been posted weeks ago and remained up despite Twitter’s policies banning them. A deepfake is an advanced form of manipulated media in which a person’s face or head is digitally inserted onto the body of another person.

• There is no magic bullet. However, an opportunity exists in our polarized journalistic environment for news organizations across the political spectrum –– from, among others, the perceived right-leaning Wall Street Journal and Fox News channel to the perceived left-leaning New York Times and MSNBC, to the perhaps more down-the-middle legacy broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) –– to unite on this one key issue.

• AI-generated political ads are officially here. And no one—including the campaigns themselves, let alone the voters—are prepared to handle this new reality. Artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated by the day, and candidates and campaigns are just beginning to grapple with practical and ethical concerns over AI-produced content creeping into politics. The time when a deepfake videos which can’t be easily discerned from real events play a major role in campaigns seems not only inevitable but closer than ever.

• This week marked a watershed moment.

• The result is well-documented: a barrage of “hallucinations” that greatly undermined the tech’s usefulness as a search assistant and perception in the public eye.

• And that still applies, even after Microsoft put strict limits on conversation lengths in February, effectively “lobotomizing” the infamously free-spirited AI.

• The incident underlines that these consequences were almost entirely predictable and avoidable — yet Microsoft ignored OpenAI’s warnings, likely in a bid to position itself better during the early days of the burgeoning AI wars.

• Bulgarian Foreign Minister Mariya Gabriel has called statements about Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russian Ambassador to Sofia Eleonora Mitrofanova “propaganda and disinformation” that are “unacceptable and inappropriate.”

• The Russian parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, said on June 14 that lawmaker Adam Delimkhanov, who is a relative and close associate of the Kremlin-backed authoritarian ruler of the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, was wounded in Ukraine.

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday said his country has started taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, at least three people were killed and 13 wounded in a Russian missile attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa early Wednesday, according to local authorities. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• UN nuclear chief Rafael Grossi has delayed a planned trip to Ukraine’s Russian-held Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant until it is safer to travel, a senior Ukrainian government official said

Censorship/Free Speech

• The incident comes amid growing concerns over a spate of overseas attacks by supporters of the Chinese state

• Actually, the resolution just dictates what flags may be flown on city flagpoles; and that, I think, is constitutionally permissible.

• I’ve mentioned a few times that one of the decentralized social media services I’m following closely is nostr, which is an incredibly lightweight protocol, enabling lots of people to (very simply) create their own relays and clients. Unlike Mastodon or Bluesky, Nostr isn’t federated. You don’t join a server. You just get a key pair… and go (and, yes, I realize even that is too complicated for some, which may limit eventual adoption)*.

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

• Note that Nebraska makes it a crime to threaten to fire an employee based on political activity: “Any person who … attempts to influence the political action of his or her employees by threatening to discharge them because of their political action … shall be guilty of a Class IV felony.” Courts have generally found that such criminal prohibitions yield a civil cause of action as well, as “wrongful discharge in violation of public policy.” (Nebraska law generally recognizes the wrongful discharge tort, when a firing contravenes a clear public policy prohibition set forth in, among other things, a statute; and courts in other states have applied the tort specifically to firing based on political activity.) Publicly criticizing a mayor, and likely other leading figures, may well qualify as covered “political action.” And courts have also held that “[T]he actual firing of one employee for political activity constitutes for the remaining employees … a threat of similar firings”; indeed, the bank’s public interpretation of its social media policy as banning such speech does seem like a threat of discharge because of, among other things, political action.

• But when you’re Reddit or Twitter, and you’ve offered what you offer for so long, and then make absolutely massive changes and make it wholly unsustainable to apps that depend on it, offering them absolutely no way forward…. well, fuck that.

• Qiao, whose birth name is Yang Zewei, is missing, believed detained on or around May 31 in Vientiane, after launching an online campaign to end internet censorship in China, known as the BanGFW Movement, a reference to the Great Firewall, according to fellow activists.

• The case reflects China’s growing “long-arm” repression of its critics outside the country. Some have been detained on foreign soil, while others have told Radio Free Asia they face regular harassment from people believed to be acting on Beijing’s behalf targeting loved ones back home and via their social media accounts.

• The hearing of the case against Koma Pel soloist İlyas Arzu and singer Jiyan Savcı was held at the 2nd Heavy Penal Court in Adana on Wednesday. The two Kurdish musicians, both of whom are standing trial without arrest, are accused of “membership in a terrorist organization”, meaning the PKK.

• Arzu and Savcı did not attend the hearing, where they were represented by their lawyers.

• Lilia Chanysheva and Rustem Mulyukov are the first of the jailed opposition leader’s organization to be convicted of charges related to national security since the Russian government declared his group an “extremist organization.”

• Being a censor is hard. You have to be constantly ready to feel offended or unsafe or abused, which is stressful, and lots of people are bound to hate you and call you nasty names like “Stalinist” or “Puritan” or “killjoy.” How much easier the purification of literature would be if writers could be moved to censor themselves in advance. At least they’ve read their own writing, which is more than can be said for people who call for those books to be withdrawn before publication on the basis of a tweet or a Goodreads post.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Nicaraguan authorities should release journalist Victor Ticay from prison and ensure members of the press do not face criminal penalties for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

• On Friday, June 9, a judge in the capital city of Managua convicted Ticay, a correspondent for the privately owned TV station Canal 10, on charges of undermining national integrity and disseminating false news and transferred him to the Jorge Navarro Prison, known as “La Modelo.” The journalist was denied the right to a private defense attorney and was instead assigned a public defender.

• With a brutal round of layoffs in March, a media outfit called Gamurs that owns several popular gaming sites including Dot Esports and Destructoid culled the jobs of at least 50 humans — annihilating, by some estimates, around 40 percent of its workforce.

• Now, just months later, the media group has been caught putting up a job listing for an “AI Editor,” who with the help of an “AI Content and SEO Strategist” would use AIs like ChatGPT to output up to an astounding — if not outright impossible — 200 to 250 articles of questionable quality per week.

• The more you unpack what those numbers entail, the more ludicrous it gets. According to the listing, the “AI Editor” would have to “write headlines, add links, add images, and other WordPress production processes,” and would be expected to “rewrite content where appropriate.”

• The plan entails “moving to a single newsroom approach across brands, allowing for greater collaboration and efficiency,” said Richard Gray, vice-president of news at Bell Media, in an internal memo distributed to staff Wednesday morning and provided to The Canadian Press.

• Bell executive vice-president Robert Malcolmson says the company’s media branch can’t afford to continue operating with its various brands such as CTV National News, BNN, CP24, its local TV news stations and radio channels operating independently of one another.

• Journalist Ardıl Batmaz was battered by officials while covering the visit of former Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu and Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Murat Kurum in Elazığ on 26 April 2022.

• In today’s episode, co-hosts Diego Ramos and Max Jones talk to journalist Kit Klarenberg about his detainment by British police at London Luton Airport…

• Prosecutors have indicted the officer for beating a journalist during ministers’ visit to Elazığ last year.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Independent senator Lidia Thorpe has detailed allegations of her being sexually assaulted by a Liberal senator during a speech to the upper house.

• The remarks followed Senator Thorpe using parliamentary privilege on Wednesday to accuse Senator David Van of harassment and sexual assault.

• Walmart does well when America’s economy is doing very badly, so it’s not surprising they’re having their best years ever when I’ve never seen as many people eating out of the trash and standing at stop lights with what dignity they have left, selling roses for whatever people can spot them as they drive by.

• As this has happened, Walmart stores across the country have been slashing employee hours to fatten up the bonuses for greedy managers and executives.

• This union fight, like those at other large corporations, has exposed the public to current practices of “union busting,” and such exposure carries an additional charge in the case of Starbucks because of the personal connections many people have to their local stores and to the workers who prepare and serve their coffee.

• But there’s another dimension to the fight that, for many, is less readily apparent, and this has to do with the struggle’s implications for American democracy. As political scientist Danielle Allen put it, a democratic society means “equality entailed in sharing ownership of public life and in co-creating our common world.” That shared ownership and co-creation extends to the workplace as much as it does to other aspects of our everyday lives.

• Before Kate L. gave birth to a baby girl last September, a nurse at New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center collected a urine sample from the soon-to-be mother. Kate thought nothing of it, because she was accustomed to having her urine tested for protein levels during her pregnancy. She had no idea that her urine would be tested for drugs, which resulted in a terrifying, monthslong investigation aimed at determining if she was a fit mother.

• Kaitlin K. had a similar experience when she gave birth to a baby boy at Virtua Voorhees Hospital in Camden County, New Jersey, the following month. The immediate culprit in both cases seems to have been a poppy seed bagel that triggered a false positive for opiates. That, in turn, led to state investigations of alleged child neglect.

• The real blame, according to state discrimination complaints that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey filed in March, lies with the hospitals. The ACLU says they conducted surreptitious, medically unnecessary, and woefully inadequate drug tests, then reported the erroneous results to the state.

• An esoteric battle over API fees and access is highlighting a power struggle between corporate overlords and unpaid moderators. It’s worth understanding, and it’s worth fighting for.

• Reddit first announced changes to its API pricing in April 2023—closely following examples set by Elon Musk’s Twitter. Reddit initially told third-party app developers these changes wouldn’t be exorbitant. But third-party app developer Christian Selig, who maintains the popular iOS app Apollo says it would cost him $20 million to maintain his current userbase at the new API pricing. As such, many third-party apps have chosen to shutdown on June 30, the day before the API pricing change takes effect.

• The outcome of this reddit blackout will be interesting. For most of its lifetime, reddit did not have a mobile app. After it acquired Alien Blue—the company got to work enshittifying the new mobile app beyond usability for most power users. Now the company is banking that its core audience won’t leave like the big Digg Migration that helped reddit grow. Unfortunately, federated link aggregators like Lemmy, KBin, and Tildes are rising—and feature robust music communities.

• The Russian State Duma has approved on its first reading a bill banning surgical and legal gender reassignment in the latest move by lawmakers to promote so-called “family values.”

• Russia’s State Duma passed the first reading of a bill to ban legal gender changes, reports the independent news outlet Mediazona. All 365 deputies present at the meeting voted in favor of the bill.

• A former manager at the Harvard Medical School morgue, his wife and three other people have been indicted in the theft and sale of human body parts. Federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania announced the indictments Wednesday. They say 55-year-old Cedric Lodge stole dissected portions of cadavers that were donated to the Harvard Medical School from 2018 to early 2023. Authorities say the body parts were taken without the school’s knowledge or permission. They say Lodge sometimes took the body parts back to his New Hampshire home and also allowed buyers to visit the morgue to choose the remains they wanted to buy.

• Detained lawyer Xie Yang is denied a last video call with his father, terminally ill with COVID-19

• Hundreds of Aldi truck drivers around the country are on strike, saying they are under “deadly pressure” and the international supermarket chain must improve its safety standards.

• Workers are striking in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide and plan to take further action unless the company agrees to improve safety in its supply chain.

• California Governor Gavin Newsom has always been outspoken about his views against the policy of capital punishment. Once elected, he kept his promise to halt all criminal executions in the state by closing down the death chamber located at San Quentin. On March 13, 2019, the lethal injection chair was officially removed from the room before it was padlocked. With this move, he effectively shut down the infamous and controversial Death Row cell block, which has been where people convicted of heinous crimes are isolated to a single housing unit where together they await execution.

• Since the closure of death row, Governor Newsom and his allies at the state capitol, in coordination with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), have begun to implement a pilot program that offers some of the formerly condemned-to-death the opportunity to receive a transfer to other high-security prisons throughout the state. At these prisons, there is a benefit of more access to educational, rehabilitative, spiritual-religious programs and resources. With the good behavior credits earned there from, these men have a roadmap to gradually work their way back into a medium security facility with more accommodations. So then even if they must spend the rest of their lives in prison, this can be viewed as an improvement from life on death row for them.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For those of us licensed in other countries it comes as something of a surprise to find that American radio amateurs now have to run RF exposure calculations as part of their licence requirements. [Ham Radio Crash Course] as approached this in a unique fashion, by running around 800 watts of 6-metre power into a vertical antenna festooned with hotdogs. That’s right, this ham is trying to cook some ‘dawgs! Is his station producing dangerous levels of power that might cook passers-by?

Monopolies

• The decision by FTC chair Lina Khan is the latest move in a multiyear legal battle to block the merger of the two companies, on the grounds that it would stifle competition in the video gaming industry. The FTC first sued to stop the $68.7 billion deal last December, in a case that’s scheduled to go before an administrative law judge in August.

• Big Tech steals from the news, but it doesn’t steal content – it steals money. In “Saving the News From Big Tech,” a series for EFF, I’ve documented how tech monopolies in ad-tech and app stores result in vast cash transfers from the news to tech, starving newsrooms and gutting reporting: [...]

• Now we’ve published the final part, describing how social media platforms hold audiences hostage, charging media companies to reach the subscribers who asked to see what they have to say. And, as with the previous installments, we set out a proposal for forcing tech companies to end this practice, putting more money in the pockets of news producers: [...]

• The EC said it had informed the search behemoth of its preliminary view that it had breached EU anti-trust rules by distorting competition in the adtech business.

• “The Commission takes issue with Google favouring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers,” the statement said.

• {loadposition sam08}”Google provides several adtech services that intermediate between advertisers and publishers in order to display ads on Web sites or mobile apps. It operates (i) two ad buying tools – Google Ads and DV 360; (ii) a publisher ad server, DoubleClick For Publishers, or DFP; and (iii) an ad exchange, AdX.

• Google can now defend itself by making its case before the commission issues its final decision. The company said it disagreed with the finding and “will respond accordingly,” adding that the EU’s investigation focused on a narrow part of its ad business.

• Google controls both the buy-side and sell-side of the digital advertising market, European Commissioner on Competition Margrethe Vestager wrote on Twitter. She said the government believes that Google used its market control to favor its own platforms and push out competition.

• The case was brought by the European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-nation European Union, and is the fourth time Google has been charged with violating European antitrust laws in recent years. In this instance, the European Union accused Google of abusing its control of the market for buying and selling online advertising.

• In particular, the probe focused on Google’s display advertising business. The business provides tools that facilitate the sale of ad space on publishers’ websites.

• “Our preliminary concern is that Google may have used its market position to favour its own intermediation services,” said European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager. “Not only did this possibly harm Google’s competitors but also publishers’ interests, while also increasing advertisers’ costs.”

• Well, that was fast. In the ongoing saga of Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Activision Blizzard, we just discussed the FTC’s petition to the court to have a temporary restraining order put in place preventing the two companies from finalizing the purchase while regulatory bodies were still doing their thing. Honestly, the most interesting part of that story were the hints within the request pointing to some of the arguments that the FTC is likely to make in court.

Patents

• The decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board potentially vacate Intel from paying VLSI for allegedly infringing its 759 and 373 patents. Meanwhile, VLSI, which has engaged in numerous patent infringement cases against Intel, now has the right to appeal PTAB’s decisions at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

• The Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidated the computer chip-related patent after canceling another VLSI patent that accounted for the remainder of the Texas federal court verdict last month.

• VLSI can appeal both decisions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Copyrights

• After running through some of the problems with the current system of remunerating artists, he proposes building on the existing idea of charitable contribution tax deductions, which is a way the US and other governments support a wide variety of non-profit organisations through the tax system. Baker suggests: [[...]

• In a rare move, the EP, European Commission, and European Council agreed to start three-way negotiations — the so-called trilogues — immediately after the vote at 9pm CET today. This need for speed underscores the political imperative of reaching a deal before next year’s EP elections on the high-stakes, hot-button draft AI Act, which is the regulation that will set the rules around AI in the EU space. In fact, the Act is bound to shape how policymakers approach regulating AI in many other jurisdictions and at the international level.

• A federal court in Seattle has confirmed an arbitration ruling which requires cheat seller AimJunkies to pay $3.6m in damages to game developer Bungie. The cheat seller’s objections to the arbitration outcome were denied. While DMCA violations are resolved now, the copyright and trademark infringement claims will be tackled at trial.

• Soap2Day, one of the world’s most popular pirate streaming sites, has unexpectedly shut down. Via numerous domains, many put in place to avoid site-blocking measures and search engine delisting and deindexing programs, Soap2Day serviced around 108 million visits per month. Other than a statement that the site will close forever, no reason has been provided for the shutdown.

• “The keyword of the new [20th] century was modernity. Modernity meant believing in technology and not craft, human perfectibility, not original sin. And above all in a ceaseless consumption of things and the images of things.”

• The trade group the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has sued Twitter for $250 million for copyright infringement on behalf of several music publishers. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Nashville and represents a total of 17 music publishing companies including Universal, Sony, Warner Chappell, BMG, Polygram, Concord, EMI and more.

• A group of 17 music publishers sued the social media company and said it was seeking as much as $250 million in damages.

• The National Music Publishers’ Association accused Twitter in a lawsuit Wednesday of repeatedly violating copyright law by allowing users to post music to Elon Musk’s platform without permission.

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