● 06.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/06/2023: 30th Birthday of FreeBSD and Kdenlive 23.04.2

Posted in News Roundup at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• This article is an overview of accessibility and security efforts in Arcan “the desktop engine”: past, present and those just around the corner. It is not the great and detailed one I had planned, merely a tribute, presented in order to assist ongoing conversations elsewhere.

• Because of this the critique of other models is omitted but not forgotten, as is the firey speech about why UI toolkits need to “just fucking die already!” as well as the one of how strapping a walled garden handsfree to your face hardly augments your reality as much as it might “deglove” your brain — but it is all related.

• What should be said about the state of things though is that I strongly disagree with the entire premise of some default “works for me”, a set of trapdoor features (repeatedly pressing shift is not a cue to modal dialog a ‘do you want to enable sticky keys?’ in someone’s face) and a soup of accessibility measures hidden in a setting menu somewhere. I consider it, at most, a poor form of ableism.

• Due to the topic at hand this post will be text only. Short-links to the sections and their summaries are as follows: [...]

Applications

• People who edit PDFs regularly or students who juggle between documents would know that editing PDFs is one of the most essential tasks you expect to carry out on an operating system. If you use Linux, you needn’t worry, as there are lots of PDF editors you can use. Here are the 6 best PDF editors on Linux. These PDF editors for Linux that we have listed below come with an array of functionalities that will help you in editing PDFs seamlessly.

• If you have been like me looking for alternative image burners to use in Linux apart from the ones commonly mentioned then, here is an easy-to-use and also stylish application for you and yes, those are the exact words to describe this application called Etcher.

• Etcher, also known as balenaEtcher is an open-source and cross-platform software used for creating bootable USB drives or even Micro SD cards.

• To browse the Internet securely entails going about your daily Interneting affairs without your data getting into the hands of agents who want to use it for non-beneficial purposes e.g. identity theft and tailored malware. To browse web anonymously entails that your data is just not secure, but that your data is not traceable to you.

• As a typical user, everything that you do online is tracked. Now, there are various reasons why you might be fine with your data being tracked as well as reasons why you might not be fine with it.

• Proxy Servers act as an intermediate level between you and the internet. They are used to provide different types of security, functions, and privacy. One can choose a proxy server depending on the need of the individual or the company’s policy.

• As the name suggests Proxy means substitute. When you visit any website, your IP address gets recorded. To avoid or hide the IP address, one can choose to show a substitute IP address by using a proxy server.

Instructionals/Technical

• The .ga top level domain (TLD) is the country code TLD (ccTLD) for Gabon. For many years, .ga domain registration was handled by Freenom, which allowed people to register domains in .ga for free, had lots of bad people set up .ga domains, and finally got sued by Meta (aka Facebook) and closed down .ga registration. In the wake of all of this, Gabon decided to take .ga back from Freenom and run it itself (press release (PDF), also some commentary). As part of taking .ga back, Gabon removed quite a lot of previously registered .ga domain names.

• The QWERTY layout is, I grant you, an illogical mess. I’m happy to hear your arguments that Dvorak is the one true way. Or that Colemak is several percent faster. But QWERTY is a standard now. Everyone uses it on their laptops and phones. It is used everywhere.

• Except, it turns out, streaming services.

• When you access a website using its domain name, your system sends a request to a DNS server to get the IP address for that domain. This domain-IP address pair is saved in the DNS cache for later use so you don’t have to send requests to the DNS server every time to make a connection.

• But sometimes, the local DNS cache gets corrupted and causes HTTP errors. Fortunately, flushing and rebuilding the DNS cache on a Linux computer is straightforward. Here’s how to do it.

• Cron is one of the most useful utility that you can find in any Linux and Unix-like operating system. Cron is used to schedule commands at a specific time. These scheduled commands or tasks are known as “Cron Jobs”. Cron is generally used for running scheduled backups, monitoring disk space, deleting files (for example log files) periodically which are no longer required, running system maintenance tasks and a lot more. In this Cron jobs tutorial, we will see the basic usage of Cron Jobs in Linux with examples.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain to you in step-by-step detail how to install OpenNMS on Debian 11 OS.

• It is essential for commit message to line up with changes. What if you accidentally staged a file that was not intended for current commit?

Games

• Inspired by SNES classics, the JRPG styled Alterium Shift plans to have an Early Access release land on July 6th and it’s looking good.

• AMD is moving even further into open source, with their plans to have openSIL replace AGESA for their processors and they’ve now put up the initial open source code on GitHub.

• You may have seen the news recently that Overkill decided to stop supporting and updating their Native Linux build of PAYDAY 2. Well, they’re now saying they will ensure it works with Proton.

• Valve has now released the latest big update to the Steam client, which brings with it various UI updates and the new in-game Steam Overlay. This is the update they announced back in April, with it being promoted from Beta to Stable.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• It’s June, swimming pools are open, and System76 engineers have been swimming through our starry new desktop environment for another month now. While our COSMIC team builds out new features and functions, they’re also tackling areas to improve their workflow — putting COSMIC on the fast track to its first alpha release when it’s ready! Code is being revisited and condensed for better performance, and completed pieces are being revised with numerous fixes. The cosmic-comp compositor supports rotated displays now. Piece-by-piece, it’s becoming a happier workflow for the team!

• Tne piece in particular put some pep in the engineers’ steps this month: Tiling.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kdenlive 23.04.2 brings several bug fixes and enhancements to improve the stability of Timelines Sequences. Among the bug fixes, we addressed a freeze that occurred when encountering a duplicate sequence, sequence creation from selection, and re-enabling of sequence thumbnails. Other notable fixes include addressing problems with dragging clips in the timeline causing out-of-view scrolling, a crash when pasting subtitles in a timeline sequence without subtitles and timeline focus problems. Furthermore, there are enhancements to our subtitling engines Vosk and Whisper and resolved issues related to project archiving, subtitle file display, motion tracker, color wheel resetting issue and scaled rendering.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• FreeBSD has opened so many doors for me in my career, and in my personal life. The OS has made me a better system administrator (even for penguins), and taught me more about UNIX than I ever learned at university. I’ve been humbled meeting so many of the people involved in its creation at various BSD events over the years.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Frequent snapshots of openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed brought KDE enthusiasts freshly made software this week.

• KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks were released in two of the past four snapshots.

Fedora Family / IBM

• In this article, we will demonstrate how to use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform command-line interface (CLI) to create a virtual machine on Microsoft Azure. We will walk you through the steps required to get started with Ansible Automation Platform and Azure, including setting up the necessary resources and creating a VM using the Azure module and Ansible Automation Platform.

Debian Family

• Desktop Environments (DEs) are to Linux distros what clothes are to people. They are bundles of GUI components, such as toolbars and icons, that give a Linux distro its look and feel.

• But just like you don’t wear skinny jeans on a hike, using a basic DE like Xfce on a machine with a powerful processor doesn’t make sense.

• We’ve shortlisted the best desktop environments for Debian machines to help you find the right match.

• Based on the recently released Debian 12 “Bookworm” operating system series and synced with its repositories as of July 15th, 2023, SparkyLinux 7.0 ships with the same long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series, but it also allows users to install newer kernels for better hardware support, such as the latest Linux 6.3 kernel.

• As expected, this release comes with updated desktop environments for all supported editions. These include KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, Xfce 4.18, MATE 1.26, and LXQt 1.2.0. The Openbox 3.6.1 window manager is used on the MinimalGUI edition for those who want to fully configure their installations.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• OnLogic Helix 511 edge computer features an Intel Alder Lake processor from Celeron 7305 up to a Core i7-12800HL CPU with up to 64GB DDR5, M.2 SATA or NVMe storage and designed for use in manufacturing, automation, energy management, and other edge and IoT applications. The fanless industrial embedded computer also comes with two 2.5GbE ports, support up to four independent displays via DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 4 connectors, is equipped with six USB 3.2 ports, as well as optional digital I/O or serial ports for expansion.

• In a month, KDE is kicking off their annual conference, KDE Akademy. Thanks to support from the University of Macedonia, this year’s conference will occur in Thessaloniki, Greece, from July 15–21st. It is a great opportunity to learn more about KDE and how this stellar desktop environment is used across many different Linux distributions, as well as discuss future plans.

• Ubuntu features KDE in two official flavors, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, giving users a customizable, powerful, but also simple desktop.

• Choosing the right architecture can be hard, but we want to help. In this blog, we’ll look at different architectures and their pros and cons. We’ll also show you how to apply the chosen architecture to a mobile robot software stack with three essential apps. With this blogpost, we will see the different ROS architectures with snaps.

• ROS apps are generally designed to be modular. However, once the app is ready to deploy, this modularity may not be needed…

Devices/Embedded

• A technical paper titled “Cheshire: A Lightweight, Linux-Capable RISC-V Host Platform for Domain-Specific Accelerator Plug-In” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich and University of Bologna.

• This month, Wallystech introduced a router board powered by the Qualcomm IPQ9574 to deliver Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. The DR9574 includes up to 6x LAN ports (2x 10GbE + 4x 1GbE) and multiple M.2 slots for expansion.

Open Hardware/Modding

• New Zealand-based cyber security experts at CyberCX have detailed and demonstrated an alarmingly simple way to consistently access older BIOS-locked laptops. In the linked blog post, and video demo, an exec at the firm detailed how to short some EEPROM chip pins with a simple screwdriver to access a fully-unlocked BIOS. Then all it took was a quick poke around the BIOS settings screen to disable any BIOS password altogether.

• You already know that computers store and interpret data in binary: ones and zeroes. There are many, many ways to store binary data, because it works with anything that can maintain at least two states. In the early days of computing, punch cards were common. They were paper cards with a grid of points. A hole at any of those points could represent either a one or zero (depending on the system), while the lack of a hole would represent the opposite. To bring old and new together, Nino Ivanov built an Arduino punch card reader for cloud computing.

• With so many APIs available this day and age, the possibilities are seemingly endless when it comes to what you can tap into with a Raspberry Pi. From using AI to power your creations with ChatGPT to using Amazon’s API to create a custom Alexa device, there’s just so much you can use. Today, we’ve got an awesome project to share created by Clayton from Design Build Make who’s using an API to pull baseball scores for a custom desktop scoreboard that tracks his favorite team—the Cardinals.

• ESP32-C6 is Espressif’s first Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) SoC integrating 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE) and the 802.15.4 low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) protocol which is the basis for the Zigbee, ISA100.11a, WirelessHART, MiWi, 6LoWPAN, Thread and SNAP specifications.

• [Hack Club] is a nonprofit network of coder and maker clubs for teenage high school students around the world. With an impressive reach boasting clubs in about 400 schools, they serve approximately 10,000 students. Their OnBoard program asserts, “Circuit boards are magical. You design one, we’ll print it!”

• When Iran recently announced a quantum processing algorithm (Google translation) that would help its military to detect water surface disturbances, the instant response from Western media was one of ridicule, based on the displayed hardware. The hardware in question was the Digilent ZedBoard Zynq-7000 hybrid SoC/FPGA development board, which can be yours for less than $600.

• Young people coded 15,000 programs to show the ISS astronauts colourful images of animals and plants and remind them of home in this year’s Astro Pi Mission Zero.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• I like to tinker with old hardware. The DEC PDP-8 is my favorite retro computer and Office 2003 is the best version ever released IMHO. One of my other favorite retro devices is the HP Jornada 720. A small handheld PC (smaller than a netbook) running Windows CE or in my case, Linux. It has a decent keyboard, CFL backlit screen, 32 MB of RAM(!), a compact Flash card for storage and a stylus for the resistive touchscreen. Oh and I got a 10Mbit PCMCIA network card, but wireless cards are also still available. It might be old, released in 1999, but can do one thing your modern iPhone can’t.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• A pan-European survey, run by the Free Software Foundation Europe, has collected information from more than 1600 end-users and highlighted several obstacles to Router Freedom, such as lack of freedom of choice, provider lock-in and promotion of equipment running exclusively proprietary software.

Licensing / Legal

• Eisenberg claims that he found an open door, passed through, took valuable property that did not belong to him, and left. Arguing that because the door functioned as specified it was legal for him to take the property isn’t going to be an effective defense.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• What this means in practice is that for the general public open access articles are even more beneficial than those published in traditional titles, since they frequently turn up as Wikipedia sources that can be consulted directly. They are also advantageous for the researchers who write them, since their work is more likely to be cited on the widely-read and influential Wikipedia than if the papers were not open access. As the research notes, this effect is even more pronounced for “articles with low citation counts” – basically, academic work that may be important but is rather obscure. This new paper provides yet another compelling reason why researchers should be publishing their work as open access as a matter of course: out of pure self interest.

Programming/Development

• Now think about the date of that memo: 1966! This was before the nato Software Engineering conferences in 1968 and 1969, which means the term software engineering was not yet invented. Yet this person seemingly knew more about software development in 1966 than most managers of software product development companies do today.

• These are not new ideas, and sometimes it baffles me that they are not more widely known.

• The lm() function in R is used for fitting linear regression models. It stands for “linear model,” and it allows you to analyze the relationship between variables and make predictions based on the data.

• Let’s dive into the parameters of the lm() function: [...]

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• The chown command, which stands for “change owner”, has been the de facto tool in the Unix operating system for changing the owner of a file or directory. During the 1990s, as Linux was being developed, many Unix commands were ported over to the new operating system, including chown.

• Understanding file and directory ownership is important for managing and securing a Linux system. Proper ownership ensures that only authorized users have access to sensitive files and directories, and can help prevent data breaches and security vulnerabilities.

Leftovers

• Today, in “minor tasks completed:” The front page of tiltedwindmillpress.com now has a link to get notifications of new products via RSS. This will show you everything. Sponsorships. Tech books. Short stories. If I must destroy and recreate a product, it’ll appear. When I release something new that requires me to destroy and recreate a bundle, like adding a title to Total Mastery, you’ll see the new bundle.

• The premise of Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener is, on paper, a provocation: A reformed white supremacist, living a secluded life in witness protection after flipping on his crew, falls in love with a young biracial woman during a period of shared crisis. The man in question, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), toils away as a horticulturist employed by the estate of a wealthy, childless dowager, Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). His steadfast commitment to her land, and to the diurnal rhythms of gardening, helps him preserve order in his own life after spending much of it dedicated to death. In Narvel’s eyes, it’s an act of penance to give back to the earth with the same hands he previously used to poison it.

Science

• We aren’t much into theories denying the moon landing around here, but [Dagomar Degroot], an associate professor at Georgetown University, asserts that the Apollo 11 quarantine efforts were bogus. Realistically, we think today that the chance of infection from the moon, of all places, is low. So claiming it was successful is like paying for a service that prevents elephants from falling through your chimney. Sure, it worked — there hasn’t been a single elephant!

• [Love Hultén]’s work often incorporates reactive sound elements, and his Ferrofluid drum synth is no exception. Sadly there are no real build details but have no fear: we’ve gathered plenty of DIY insights when it comes to ferrofluid-based projects.

Education

• The argument I’m making is that computer science as a field has become more narrow over time. I wrote a CACM Blog Post last month where I provided several definitions of computer science: “Education is always changing: We need to define CS to keep the good stuff.” The earliest definitions of computer science described it as something to be taught to everyone, a critical literacy for 21st century citizenry, and touching on many different aspects of modern life. (I tell the story of those early definitions in this blog post.) More modern computer science definitions are much more narrow.

• I screenshot my book being there just for posterity.

Hardware

• “The show must go on,” so they say. These days, whether you’re an opera singer, a teacher, or just someone with a lot of video meetings, you rely on your voice to work. But what if your voice is under threat? Work it too hard, or for too long, and you might find that it suddenly lets you down.

• There was a time when the very idea of building a complex circuit with the intention of destroying it would have been anathema to any electrical engineer. The work put into designing a circuit, procuring the components, and assembling it, generally with point-to-point wiring and an extravagant amount of manual labor, only to blow it up? Heresy!

• We often say that hardware hacking has never been easier, thanks in large part to low-cost modular components, powerful microcontrollers, and highly capable open source tools. But we can sometimes forget that what’s “easy” for the tinkerer that reads datasheets for fun isn’t always so straightforward for everyone else. Which is why it’s so refreshing to see projects like this LED chandelier from [MakerMan].

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The auto industry has spent several years trying to dismantle efforts in Massachusetts to make auto repair more affordable and convenient. And they just got help from US auto safety regulators.

• Or this column will take 50 minutes because your kid will text you midway through reading it and you’ll mindlessly toggle to another tab on your browser, then remember the email you were supposed to send first thing this morning. You’ll stop to collect the DoorDash, which didn’t actually come in 12 minutes but instead materialized in 22, just as you’d settled into a Zoom meeting. The laundry, on the other hand, will be ready in 12 minutes.

Proprietary

• Social media giant LinkedIn may have landed a buyer for an office building near its Silicon Valley headquarters, but the price tag underscores dwindling valuations and a depressed sales climate that has now spread to the tech-concentrated area.

• The Microsoft-owned company sold its property at 880-888 W. Maude Ave. for $23 million, according to documents filed with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office, slightly above the $22.4 million that LinkedIn paid for the Sunnyvale, California, building in late 2015. The deal shakes out to about $562 per square foot for the nearly 41,000-square-foot property, less than half what other high-end Silicon Valley office transactions have commanded in recent years.

• “This wasn’t just a simple inconvenience, though,” he wrote. “I have a smart home, and my primary means of interfacing with all the devices and automations is through Amazon Echo devices via Alexa. This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions.”

• Jackson’s smart home wasn’t entirely non-functional during this period. Most of his smart home gear, he said, is self-hosted locally, via Apple HomeKit, and not tied to an Amazon cloud service. He could still interact with some devices through Apple’s Siri assistant software.

• Jackson attributes the suspension of his Amazon account – which controls his Echo hardware and Alexa software – to an Amazon driver misinterpreting an automated Eufy doorbell audio message.

Windows TCO

• Two cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry (ACR) could have led to unauthorized access to user sessions, data tampering, and service disruptions, cloud security firm Orca warns.

• U.S. officials say the Department of Energy is among a small number of federal agencies compromised in a Russian cyber-extortion gang’s global hack of a file-transfer program popular with corporations and governments. They say the impact is not expected to be great. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters that the hacking campaign was short, opportunistic and caught quickly. A senior CISA official said neither the U.S. military nor intelligence community was affected. Known victims to date include Louisiana’s Office of Motor Vehicles and Oregon’s Department of Transportation.

• The top U.S. cybersecurity agency said it did not have evidence that the group was acting in coordination with the Russian government.

• LockBit, which emerged in January 2020, was the most active ransomware variant in 2022 in terms of victims claimed on the group’s data leak site, U.S. cybersecurity officials said in a June 14 advisory. Known LockBit attacks accounted for 16% of state, local, tribal and tribunal government ransomware attacks reported in the U.S. in 2022, as well as roughly 20% of known government ransomware attacks in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the advisory said. Since January 2020 the group is associated with approximately $91 million in ransoms paid in the U.S., the advisory said.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation (LF) has announced a new global partnership with the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (Iown Global Forum) to work together on integrating LF software into Iown’s platform. The shared aim is to develop a collaborative infrastructure that enables higher performance, low latency and energy efficiency to meet growing data delivery demands, said the partners.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (python-django-filter and qt), Mageia (cups, firefox/nss, httpie, thunderbird, and webkit2), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, .NET 7.0, c-ares, firefox, jenkins and jenkins-2-plugins, nodejs, nodejs:18, python3, python3.11, python3.9, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (frr, opensc, python3, and rekor), and Ubuntu (c-ares, glib2.0, libcap2, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, pano13, and requests).

• We recall that a total of 34,004 documents stolen from the city’s servers, in addition to several hundreds of e-mails present in the e-mail accounts of 12 employees of the Municipality and those present in the 6 Outlook backups.

• Another report by research nonprofit MITRE — which Dominion Voting Systems brought on to evaluate the Halderman report — downplayed the seriousness of the vulnerabilities, concluding that they were “operationally infeasible.”

• Illinois, Minnesota and Missouri state governments are among a growing list of organizations attacked via a critical flaw in Progress Software’s MoveIT Transfer product.

• Progress Software on May 31 detailed an SQL injection bug in its managed file transfer (MFT) software MoveIt Transfer. Progress urged customers to immediately apply mitigations for the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-34362, while it worked on a patch, which was released later that day. But as security vendors reported soon after, the critical bug was already under active exploitation in the wild.

• A wave of organizations have disclosed data breaches in the wake of CVE-2023-34362 coming to light.

• The Justice Department today announced charges against a Russian national for his involvement in deploying numerous LockBit ransomware and other cyberattacks against victim computer systems in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Africa.

• “This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in a emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally.

• In May 2018, OCR initiated an investigation of Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital following the receipt of a breach notification report, stating that 23 security guards working in the hospital’s emergency department used their login credentials to access patient medical records maintained in Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital’s electronic medical record system without a job-related purpose. The information accessed included names, dates of birth, medical record numbers, addresses, certain notes related to treatment, and insurance information.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Speculation about the potential use of sweeping powers to grab databases and add backdoors in US law had been growing, while governments denied their abuse. ORG Advisory Councillor Caspar Bowden, a longstanding UK privacy advocate, had begun an international tour to explain their potential for abuse, and ask why exactly the American National Security Agency (NSA) was building vast data centres in the Nevada desert. Two days later, at ORGCon, Caspar delivered his long-prepared lecture on the topic to a packed room: he was no longer making educated guesses.

• BearID is the kind of engaging project that everyone loves: using face-recognition technology, it helps work out how many individual bears live in an area and monitors their movement and health. Identifying brown bears (Ursus arctos) they already know about allows the project team to develop and refine animal face-recognition techniques that can then be applied to other species.

• “The ban is really going to protect the rights of the least of us. The poor, the low-income, the senior citizens, the youth, the homeless, and people like me who still like to use cash,” Whitfield-Calloway said in a statement.

• Here’s what to know about the new ordinance: [...]

• Well, here’s some welcome news! It appears the EU Commission may have learned something from the less-than-wholehearted support it received following the introduction of its CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) bill.

• Secret services in Western countries should increase their surveillance of Russian citizens living abroad, said Czech Republic’s President Petr Pavel in an extensive interview with Radio Free Europe.

Defence/Aggression

• TikTok revealed on Thursday that it would invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia over the next few years, securing its foothold in the area amid intensifying scrutiny over its data security in the West and elsewhere.

• The region is one of TikTok’s biggest markets in terms of sheer user numbers, with a collective population of 630 million — half of whom are under 30 — generating more than 325 million monthly visitors to the app. But TikTok has yet to translate that large user base into a significant e-commerce revenue source in the region, as it faces fierce competition with bigger rivals like Sea’s Shopee, Alibaba’s Lazada, and GoTo’s Tokopedia.

• The shows of bonhomie between the two leaders reflect the bond between Russia and China, which could become more fraught as Russian dependence deepens.

• Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the United Nations’ atomic agency, is investigating conditions at the plant, which is held by Russian forces.

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

• “It is not Russia that is a threat to Europe, but the United States, because it sees domination of the Eurasian continent as a prerequisite for its global dominance,” a security expert said.

• Fighting between rival military factions in Sudan targeting medical facilities has left the country’s healthcare system on the verge of collapse. With a limited amount of power, water and medical supplies, and doctors fleeing the country for safety, less than a third of hospitals in the country’s conflict zones remain open. Calling this situation a calamity, Dr. Khidir Dalouk, advocacy director of the Sudanese American Physicians Association, joins the show to share the perspective of healthcare workers in the country. “We, as physicians, have sworn an oath to treat and take care of civilians and military, whether it’s in peace or it’s in war.”

War in Ukraine

• Australian lawmakers passed legislation on June 15 banning Russia from constructing its new embassy near parliament following intelligence service warnings about possible security threats.

• A Russian Sukhoi Superjet-100 (SS-100) plane with 54 passengers aboard made an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Irkutsk on June 15 after the air-conditioning system malfunctioned.

• A free trade agreement with the countries of the region would strengthen Russia’s position in international trade.

• Russia’s Justice Ministry has started investigating a museum dedicated to the late President Boris Yeltsin for possible activity as a “foreign agent,” stated-owned agency RIA reported.

• Russia has faced a series of recent attacks, but, in the absence of public space, military losses are personal tragedies, not collective experiences.

• Belarus says Russia has begun transferring tactical nuclear weapons to the former Soviet state, which shares a nearly 700-mile border with Ukraine, escalating the risk of a nuclear confrontation in Europe. Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has urged allies to “dig deep” to provide more arms and ammunition to help Ukraine as it launches its counteroffensive against Russia. The Ukraine conflict has intensified the “new Cold War” between the United States and its allies, on one side, and Russia and China, on the other, says Gilbert Achcar, professor of international relations at SOAS University of London. He pegs the start of this new geopolitical standoff to the Kosovo War in 1999, which NATO entered without U.N. approval and over the objections of Russia and China. He says the United States had a “window of opportunity” in the 1990s to reshape the world for more cooperation and multilateralism. “Instead of going for peaceful options, options leading to a long-term peace in international relations and enhancing the role of the United Nations, it made the opposite choices,” including the expansion of NATO, says Achcar. His new book is titled The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China from Kosovo to Ukraine.

• Nine drones were destroyed or disarmed over Crimea on Wednesday night, the peninsula’s Moscow-installed head, Sergey Aksenov, reported on Telegram.

• The Russian military launched a new strike on the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih the night before June 15, using Kh-101 and Kh-555 missiles, as well as Iranian Shahed drones. Tu-95 strategic bombers executed four missile launches from the Caspian. One of the missiles had been shot down. The others hit industrial facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk region of southeastern Ukraine.

• A Shebekino resident writing under the name Natalia Chemerchenko complained to Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov on social media Thursday that Russian soldiers in the town of Novaya Tavolzhanka have been behaving “disgracefully” and “stealing personal things and property” from local residents’ homes.

• An article appeared on the website of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska on Tuesday that said the businessman’s foundation, “Volnoe Delo,” had “taken patronage” over children who had been transported to Russia from Bakhmut. The post has since been removed from the site, but a copy remains on the Internet Archive.

• Forty eight ceasefires between 1946 and 1997 — while often ignored — offer guidance on how to end the killing. Since history shows it takes a long time to end a war, Ann Wright says the process must start now.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• A senior executive at Dominion Energy responds to a critique of the company’s influence over Virginia politics.

• Vietnam has released a long-awaited energy plan that aims to transition the country to renewables while meeting soaring demand. However, continued reliance on fossil fuels, experts warn, could make it hard for the country to meet its ambitious goals.

• Plaquemines Parish residents Mark and Barb Comeaux take little comfort in NOAA’s predictions of a near-normal Atlantic hurricane season this year. They live in Plaquemines Parish a few hundred feet from a massive liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminal being built by Venture Global and the Gator Express pipeline, which will transport natural gas under high pressure to the facility.

• “There is only one road leading in and out so if there is a problem at the facility or with the pipeline we will be stuck,” Mark told me on May 25 while we watched pipeline being built in wetlands from the deck of his brother’s porch, located across a small bayou from his home.

• If there was a common theme at the second annual Canadian Hydrogen Convention, held in Edmonton Alberta this spring, it was the hydrogen industry’s effort to move away from “blue hydrogen” and other color-coded descriptions.

• According to numerous panelists representing Canada’s hydrogen industry, referring to blue, green, or gray hydrogen is now passé. More inclusive language, such as “clean hydrogen” and “low carbon hydrogen” are the new terms industry prefers.

• A senior Republican on the Senate Energy panel is calling for an investigation of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, after she told the committee she mistakenly provided false information about her family’s stock holdings in testimony earlier this year. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso asked the Energy Department’s inspector general to investigate Granholm after she sent a letter to the committee revealing she owned financial stocks as recently as May. That contradicts testimony she gave to the panel in April. Granholm also said her husband, Daniel Mulhern, owned previously undisclosed stock in Ford Motor Co., a key player in the Biden administration’s efforts to boost sales of electric vehicles.

• The proposed 900-mile East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), which would carry crude oil from Uganda south to neighboring Tanzania before being exported to refineries in the Netherlands, is facing continued resistance from climate activists around the world. Protesters disrupted the annual shareholder meeting of potential EACOP lender Standard Bank in Johannesburg Monday. Among them was our guest Kumi Naidoo, the former head of Greenpeace International and Amnesty International. Naidoo was forcibly removed from the building during the peaceful protest. “It’s extraction at its worst — it’s colonial,” Naidoo says of the pipeline. We speak to him about stemming climate change at its source by cutting off the flow of capital to carbon-polluting projects.

Wildlife/Nature

• Several times a day, Hassanatou Bah scans for threats along the river’s edge near her village in northwest Guinea. The once-mundane chore of fetching water has become a territorial tug of war with an increasingly frightening foe: chimpanzees. Some days, she’s seen them hurl rocks from trees. Other times, they throw clusters of leaves containing nests of biting weaver ants.

Finance

• A jury in Oregon says the electric utility PacifiCorp must pay punitive damages for causing devastating wildfires in 2020. That’s on top of an earlier verdict already expected to amount to billions of dollars. The decision Wednesday came two days after the jurors found PacifiCorp liable for the fires and said it must pay for damage to property as well as emotional distress. The jury awarded more than $70 million to 17 homeowners named as plaintiffs in the case. Damages for a broader class involving the owners of nearly 2,500 other properties will be determined later. PacifiCorp said it would appeal. The company is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway.

• Influential donors with deep pockets are having an effect on Australian politics as a report finds election spending has reached record highs.

• Analysis by the Centre for Public Integrity, an independent think tank, found election spending had increased by almost 85 per cent in the past two decades.

• Economists often talk about the role labor unions play in transforming workplaces and society, but rare is the economic scholar who has actually led a union local during a period of intense, and ultimately transformational, struggle. William Spriggs, the assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration and former chief economist for the AFL-CIO, who died last week at age 68, was such an economist and such a leader.

• American software company Oracle on Thursday laid off hundreds of employees, rescinded job offers and cut back open positions within its health unit Cerner, the Insider reported, citing three people familiar with the matter. The company had acquired electronic medical records firm Cerner for $28.3 billion, its biggest ever deal, in December last year.

• According to the report, the layoffs were largely due to Cerner’s challenging work with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which hired Cerner to replace its homemade medical records with Cerner’s technology. The laid-off employees will receive severance pay equal to four weeks, one additional week for every year of service and a payout of vacation days, the report added.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The DOJ must not have much confidence in its case against Backpage executives Michael Lacey and James Larkin. This prosecution is now more than a half-decade old and the government still hasn’t found a way to lock up the many Backpage employees and founders it arrested.

• To do so, the proposed act categorizes AI applications based on risk. Applications that pose an unacceptable risk will be prohibited, including those that violate fundamental rights, employ manipulative or exploitive techniques, and engage in social scoring. High-risk applications, such as resume-scanning tools and other technologies that may introduce undue bias, will be subject to mandatory requirements and an ex-ante conformity assessment. Applications that pose a low or minimal risk, however, will still be permitted without limitations. The proposed bill was accompanied by annexes that further clarify the types of applications intended for capture in each risk category.

• We, the undersigned organisations, write to express our concern with vulnerability disclosure requirements under the proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The CRA’s objective to encourage software publishers to patch vulnerabilities and report cyber incidents is salutary. However, the CRA’s mandatory disclosure of unmitigated vulnerabilities will undermine the security of digital products and the individuals who use them.

• The CRA would require organisations to disclose software vulnerabilities to government agencies within 24 hours of exploitation.

• The Bill C-11 process featured a marked divide on the implications for consumer choice. While Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez claimed it would lead to increased choice (a claim he re-iterated this week in Banff), critics of the bill argued that the opposite was true, namely that the bill would likely lead to fewer services entering the Canadian market or streamers reducing content choices. The net effect – contrary to government claims – would be to impact what Canadians could watch. With the CRTC’s Bill C-11 consultations now underway, foreign streamers are warning that they may block services from Canada or reduce the scope of their content libraries due to the regulatory requirements or burden. This notably includes mainstream streamers such as PBS and niche services such as AMC’s ALLWAYSBLK.

• Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

• In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activity began as early as October.

• Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister of Italy, media mogul, and owner of the AC Milan soccer team, died in a hospital bed in Milan at the age of 86 on Monday. It is not easy to capture the mix of political and cultural ingredients that brought this central figure of contemporary Italian history to power and allowed him to mold the world in his favor for decades. There’s a risk of reducing his career to a swirl of folklore, corruption, and media manipulation—though, given his perennial sordidness (remember the bunga bunga sex parties?), of course they play an important part in this story. But considering the laudatory words following his death from journalists and politicians from across the political sphere, casting him as a cunning strategist, the greater risk is failing to account for the damage that Berlusconi has left behind him.

• Silvio Berlusconi was honored Wednesday with a state funeral in Milan’s Duomo cathedral and a day of national mourning, as his legacy — positive or negative — was being hotly debated among Italians.

• Meagan Wolfe’s tenure as Wisconsin’s election administrator began without controversy.

• Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission chose her in 2018, and the state Senate unanimously confirmed her appointment. That was before Wisconsin became a hotbed of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, before election officials across the country saw their lives upended by threats and half-truths.

• Vladimir Putin has instructed lawmakers to draft legislation that would give the state priority rights to purchase the assets of Western companies who leave the Russian market at a “significant discount,” The Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing a secret presidential decree.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said: “Whether or not legacy media feel they have completed their initial digital transformation from print, or broadcast-focused, to digitally focused brands with a compelling news website and app, they now face a continual transformation of digital as generations come of age who eschew direct discovery for all but the most appealing brands.”

• But the declining quality of Google Search isn’t merely a function of chatbot overload. For many years, Google’s local business listings have been terrible. Anyone who’s tried to find a handyman, a locksmith, an emergency tow, or other small businessperson has discovered that Google is worse than useless for this. Try to search for that locksmith on the corner that you pass every day? You won’t find them – but you will find a fake locksmith service that will dispatch an unqualified, fumble-fingered guy with a drill and a knockoff lock, who will drill out your lock, replace it with one made of bubblegum and spit, and charge you 400% the going rate (and then maybe come back to rob you): [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

• Pro-democracy protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong was removed from Spotify by the distributor, the streaming platform told HKFP, as the government seeks to ban all forms of the song and its derivatives. T

• A Moscow court on June 15 ordered veteran Russian rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov, who currently resides outside of Russia, to pay a fine of 50,000 rubles ($600) for discrediting Russia’s armed forces.

• Just published as part of the symposium on Media and Society After Technological Disruption, edited by Profs. Justin “Gus” Hurwitz & Kyle Langvardt.

• The Russian Justice Ministry is investigating the Yeltsin Center, a cultural and education institution in Yekaterinburg, for engaging in possible “foreign agent” activity, Deputy Justice Minister Oleg Sviridenko announced on Thursday.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• There has never existed any government so evil and repugnant that it has been unable to find lawyers, and particularly judges, to do its bidding.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Union members, who routinely grade the work of undergraduate students, chose not to submit grades while they were on strike. The union contends the university instead submitted student grades that do not accurately reflect the work students completed during the semester.

• GEO spokesperson Amir Fleischmann told Bridge on Wednesday he estimates there are hundreds of instances where a graduate student instructor was the sole instructor of a class and, once they went on strike, students were then given straight A’s by other university employees.

• [...]

• Fleischmann said the union’s complaint included testimonials from graduate student instructors who had “grades entered on their behalf without their permission and that don’t reflect the progress or the learning that their students did over their course of the term,” as well as messages from administrators that discuss grading during the strike.

• He said the complaint included letters from department chairs who say they were pressured by upper administration “to get grades in by any means necessary” and messages from administrators that say they are “empowering non instructional staff to input grades” and that students will be getting grades that don’t reflect their course progress.

• We went down to the Illinois Department of “Employment Security”, where everyone goes when they’re unemployed…no irony there….

• They told us that my spouse would have to be cut lower than 24 hours a week to qualify for any unemployment based on his work at Walmart. Things haven’t gotten THAT bad yet, but we at least have an account and can file from home quickly now if things get that bad.

• When Cheyenne Hinojosa saw her husband, Jose, and her mother charging through the doors at the gas station where she worked, she assumed something terrible had happened. In Jose’s hands was a stack of papers — the latest legal filing in Hinojosa’s long-running child protective services case regarding her then-3-year-old daughter.

• In 2018, not long after Hinojosa’s daughter turned one year old, a South Dakota Department of Social Services caseworker had come to Hinojosa’s home in Huron and taken her away. Two years later, a county judge terminated Hinojosa’s parental rights, an act so permanent that in the legal world it’s considered the death penalty of child welfare cases.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• However, those press reports are wrong. The Parliament voted to reject the ISPs’ proposal.

• That’s because the Parliament voted to amend the original recommendation by adding the phrase “without prejudice to net neutrality,” leaving the final text to read:

• “The European Parliament … calls for the establishment of a policy framework where large traffic generators contribute fairly to the adequate funding of telecom networks without prejudice to net neutrality.” (para. 44)

• The modern power grid was built long before solar energy was even imagined. Today it proves a major bottleneck to adopting renewable power sources. Recent efforts to enable open source software (OSS) microgrids and digitizing electrical infrastructure IT might help.

• It’s generally recognized that gigawatts of new solar and wind will have to come online for the UK to meet its carbon reduction goals. But despite tremendous progress in producing new solar panels, businesses now face delays of up to fifteen years to connect renewable power sources. One big bottleneck is reliably connecting new power sources to the national electrical grid, created before small-scale power sources were even practical.

• There are some questions about whether or not Section 230 protects AI companies from being liable for the output from their generative AI tools. Matt Perrault published a thought-provoking piece arguing that 230 probably does not protect generative AI companies. Jess Miers, writing here at Techdirt, argued the opposite point of view (which I found convincing). Somewhat surprisingly, Senator Ron Wyden and former Rep. Chris Cox, the authors of 230 have agreed with Perrault’s argument.

• You may recall that, back during the last net neutrality open comment period, the FCC’s comment system was overrun by millions of faked comments, including from many dead people. Not surprisingly, it was eventually determined that legacy broadband companies funded the fake comment submissions, which they felt they needed to do because actual activists were actually effective in getting the public to speak out in favor of net neutrality.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• To be honest, I’m somewhat amazed that more copyright lawsuits haven’t been filed against Twitter yet. There have been multiple reports of how the company’s DMCA takedown response systems have been broken/ignored since Musk took over. Without looking for it, I’ve seen full length high def movies show up in my Twitter feed (including movies still in theaters).

• Twitter is accused of monetizing tweets with music that hasn’t been paid for or licensed appropriately. Even after receiving copyright notices, Twitter allegedly takes weeks or months to take them down, increasing its monetization prospects.

• The site doesn’t take strict action against infringers, according to the complaint. At most, it temporarily suspends accounts, but there’s no real risk of termination, the lawsuit says.

• At the heart of the lawsuit is the fact that Twitter has no licensing agreement in place with any of the artists or their reps – unlike YouTube or TikTok. The lawsuit claims that X Corp thus profits from “copyright infringement, at the expense of music creators, to whom Twitter pays nothing,” and that the engagement with the music clips is helping the company drive up its own advertising sales, Twitter’s main source of revenues.

• A group of major music publishers has sued Twitter for “breeding” massive copyright infringement. In a complaint filed at a federal court in Nashville, the companies accuse the Elon Musk-owned social media platform of failing to terminate accounts of repeat offenders, while profiting from piracy.

• After signing a plea deal in 2022 to avoid extradition to the United States, former Megaupload coders Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk have been sentenced in New Zealand. The High Court in Auckland handed down prison sentences of 31 and 30 months respectively. Both had faced up to 10 years behind bars but guilty pleas, cooperation and rehabilitation all played a part in reducing their sentences.

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