● 06.19.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/06/2023: Cinnamon 5.8 and Alpine Has New ISOs

Posted in News Roundup at 9:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week we got a major Steam Client update that finally brings a refreshed UI and hardware acceleration on Linux, a major NVIDIA graphics driver release that brings better Wayland support and many other improvements, as well as several new distro releases including Ultramarine Linux 38, Tails 5.14, and SparkyLinux 7.0.

• On top of that, I tell you about the upcoming end of life of the Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu” operating system release and give you a first look at the Fedora-based risiOS distro. Read the hottest news of this week and get access to all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for June 18th, 2023, below.

Desktop/Laptop

• As of today, System76 has finally managed to upgrade its entire line of Linux notebooks to 13th Gen Intel Core processors. After updating earlier this year the Adder WS, Darter Pro, Galago Pro, Gazelle, Lemur Pro, and Serval WS laptops, now the Oryx Pro and Bonobo WS received the “Raptor Lake” CPU treatment.

• System76’s most powerful laptop, the Bonobo WS, now finally ships with a 13th Gen Intel Core “Raptor Lake” i9-13900HX processor with 24 cores, 36 MB cache, up to 5.4 GHz clock speed, and Intel Iris Xe graphics.

Server

• Amazon Linux is an open-source, secure, stable, and optimized Linux-based operating system (OS), which is free to use, designed, maintained, and supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Amazon Linux OS is specifically designed for cloud computing applications, whether you’re running on-premises or in the cloud.

• The Amazon Linux is designed with modern architectures and includes pre-configured packages and tools to help developers accelerate the building of their applications without incurring the high costs of proprietary operating systems.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we discuss ad-supported services and the (potential?) rise of subscriptions.

• Josh and Kurt talk about a new program from the Sovereign Tech Fund to fund open source work. It’s a great looking program with an acceptable amount of money behind the program. We also talk about a story claiming millions of perfectly good hard drives are destroyed per year. They’re probably not OK at all.

Kernel Space

• The 6.4-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “”Nothing particular stands out in the rc this week, unless you count the mptcp selftest changes that are about making the tests work on stable kernels too.””

Graphics Stack

• I am Mohamexiety, a (soon-to-be) 4th year electronics engineering student and a recently accepted contributor in the Google Summer of Code program with my project being implementing YCbCr support for NVK, the new open-source nouveau Vulkan driver, under the mentorship and supervision of Faith Ekstrand @gfxstrand for the X.Org foundation.

Applications

• OBS Studio 29.1.3 is here to improve the Source Record plugin by fixing a crash that occurred when properties are deleted in the callback. It also improves the AMF (Advanced Media Framework) encoder’s reconfiguration and dynamic bitrate as they didn’t work in previous releases, as well as the AMF preset fallback to take into account the GPU reported throughput.

• Window and game capture compatibility notices have been fixed as well in this release to be displayed correctly. Moreover, OBS Studio 29.1.3 addresses a bug in audio settings where Audio Channels, Sample Rate, and Low Latency Audio Buffer Mode would sometimes fail to save properly.

• I am pleased to announce a new release of Cambalache a new RAD tool for Gtk 3 and 4!

• Version 0.12.0 packs a year’s worth of new features and lots of improvements and bugfixes.

• Does your application use custom CSS? Now you can see CSS changes live in the workspace. All you need to do is add a new CSS file in the project and specify if you want it to be global or for one UI file in particular.

Instructionals/Technical

• The protocols used to receive emails are an essential part of how the internet functions, and yet they remain largely invisible to most users. Two of the most common protocols are Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3).

• Working with MongoDB 6.0 and mongosh 1.10.0. The Problem By the looks of it, mongosh interprets its input as Javascript, which renders the below syntax invalid.

• The world of Linux is filled with so much fun and interesting stuff, the more we go in, the more we find kinds of stuff.

• In our efforts to bring those little hacks and tips for you that make you different from others, here we have come up with a few alternative methods to schedule a job without using the cron utility in Linux.

Games

• Subscribe to Amazon Prime? Well you can get a free copy of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition thanks to their partnership with GOG.

• According to an official update posted on Steam, Zool Redimensioned, the 2021 reimagining of the 1992 platformer Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension, has now been granted Steam Deck Verified status.

• Fancy another free game during the GOG Summer Sale 2023? They’re now giving away Sigma Theory: Global Cold War along with lots of games on sale.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, the free and open-source offline use office suite, released new 7.4 version a few days ago.

• The new releases feature a “Plugin Manager“, allows to easily install external functions support, such as ChatGPT, YouTube, OCR, and more. User can of course submit its own plugin to the market place for other user use.

• This month Rose Hudson has started working on wlroots as part of Google Summer of Code! She will focus on reducing frame latency by implementing an adaptive frame scheduler. She already has landed new wlroots APIs to measure render time. You can follow Rose’s blog if you’re interested.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• People are often asking the same questions again and again about some of my projects, so it might be a good opportunity to write a small FAQ.

• If you get redirected here, don’t take it personally; I am getting asked these questions very often, and I feel people often misunderstand how open-source projects work.

• The most likely reason is that it still needs to be implemented. It doesn’t mean that I or other maintainers are against this feature. It is just that X is a purely non-commercial project, and I and others are currently working on it during our free time. Unfortunately, Free time is a very limited and precious resource. Between our day jobs or university projects, sleeping, eating, and other social activities, little time and energy is left.

• There’s no better measure of success than having a diminutive eight-year-old girl demand to know the name of the painting program she has been using for the last 20 minutes.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In case they needed introduction, pads are these collections of buttons and tactile sensors (ring or strip shaped) most typically found along the side of drawing tablets. These devices will be the topic of today.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• “take-2″ is here:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202305/setting-up-permissions-under-files-take-2.html

• Easy 5.4 was released, but then we discovered that ‘cupsd’ objected to /usr/libexec/cups/cgi-bin having permissions 775, instead of 755:

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=91460#p91460

• And Easy 5.4.1 was released to fix this.

• Check ownership and permissions under /files when version update:

• https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/dda399b7a1707b7d8d4a2767874d5c45d02c0b09

New Releases

• Until now, upgrading your Nitrux installations to newer releases involved downloading the latest ISO image, writing on a USB flash drive, booting it on your Nitrux machine, and performing an installation using the Calamares installer where you had to make sure that it doesn’t overwrite your /home directory.

• Upgrading your Linux distro should be a straightforward process where you open a tool, check for new versions, and perform the upgrade with a few mouse clicks. Nitrux was missing such a tool until now, as the devs announced Nitrux Update Tool System, or NUTS for short.

Slackware Family

• The Surge XT synthesizer was recently mentioned in the comments section of another post, and I thought, why not add it to my DAW collection?

Fedora Family / IBM

• DSO National Laboratories (DSO), Singapore’s national defense research and development (R&D) organization, and open source leader Red Hat, today announced a collaboration to develop new DevSecOps capabilities. The joint work between Red Hat and DSO shows the value of collaboration to facilitate knowledge exchange in Singapore’s defense R&D efforts.

• On Jun. 7, Red Hat hosted its annual Women in Technology event [...] From the venue in the Microsoft Canada head office on the 43rd floor of 81 Bay Stree

• In 2017, Red Hat Chairman Paul Cormier and Boston University (BU) professor Orran Krieger helped spearhead a collaborative partnership between the two institutions that would come to include expanding Red Hat’s participation in the MOC Alliance, the establishment of the Red Hat Collaboratory at BU for research incubation, and the creation of a Red Hat OpenShift Data Science environment at BU for open source education resources. The Red Hat Research team has been managing Red Hat’s relationship with BU since the team’s inception in 2018.

• Disasters that affect companies can take many forms: public health, terrorism and war, and extreme weather. They can also affect companies in different ways, including needing to shut down offices, helping affected employees and regaining access to networks and computers. It’s a multifaceted challenge but, for the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on anticipating and responding to supply chain challenges due to natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons, floods, earthquakes, wildfires and droughts.

• Computers and automation have been part of industrial operations for decades, so what’s all the fuss with Industry 4.0? Join us as Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and ABB CTO for Process Automation Bernhard Eschermann take a look at the future of industrial automation using composable industrial edge platforms.

Debian Family

• Debian is a project that I’ve used a lot over the years and it’s one for which I have a lot of respect. Debian strives to be a “universal operating system”, running on a wide range of architectures, on a wide range of hardware, and in a variety of roles. Debian can run on just about anything (from a phone, to a Raspberry Pi, to a server, to a laptop) and perform as a anything from a web server to a gaming machine. The fact Debian also offers both regular stable releases with five years of support and rolling branches means the distribution can be used just about anywhere. The project’s famed stability and its flexible are key reasons behind Debian being the basis for over 120 actively maintained distributions.

• With all of that said, while Debian is a technological and organizational achievement virtually unparalleled in the open source community, using plain Debian (as opposed to one of its many children) is not a particularly pleasant experience on a desktop computer. A big aspect of this is, as I mentioned last week in my openSUSE review, some distributions act as a unified whole, a platform that feels designed. openSUSE is a prime example of that, where all the pieces are fitted together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. Debian is toward the other end of the spectrum and the distribution feels like an uncoordinated collection of components. The pieces are all in the same room, but they don’t fit together, they aren’t following a shared vision. Everything feels like it’s trying to follow a lowest common denominator (fitting with Debian’s “universal” theme). The themes are vanilla and washed out, the desktop feels awkward to navigate and requires a lot of mouse movement, nothing is automated. Updates are checked for and applied manually, Flatpak and Flathub access need to be handled manually, and there is no central configuration panel that works across all desktop environments. We even need to grant our first user admin access manually, which brings me to the system installer.

• In the past I’ve often pointed out that Debian’s installer is awkward, slow, and unpleasant to use compared to the system installers of most other mainstream distributions. It uses about four times more screens to accomplish the same result and, as started earlier in this review, its “prompt, work, prompt, work” approach means the user is trapped interacting with it rather than entering some information and then being free to walk away. The installer also misses some popular features, such as setting the first user up as an admin, which other installers will usually provide. However, I will also acknowledge that the trade-off has been that Debian’s installer has worked and worked consistently for years, largely unchanged. If you ever installed Debian 6 then you can install Debian 12 using the same steps in the same order, on either a graphical interface or a text console. The experience has been predictable and reliable.

• The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it’s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn’t work for Wayland and unfortunately no-one has written a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle (which shows the number of milliseconds that the X11 session has been idle in milliseconds.

• In the Debian bug system there is bug #813728 about a message every second due to failed attempts to find X11 idle time [1]. On my main workstation with Wayland it logs “Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified“.

• Upgraded my main machines to bookworm. Things look relatively eventless. Nice. Emacs is noisy. why is native-comp-async-report-warnings-errors t?

• I was a little surprised that drive01 didn’t seem to know what was on drive02. Perhaps that could have been remedied by adding more remotes there? I’m not entirely sure; I’d thought would have been able to do that automatically.

• I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.

• This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows.

Devices/Embedded

• The Software section under the product page indicates that the company will provide images for Android 12 and Debian 11.

• Specifications listed for the PICO3566 include…

Open Hardware/Modding

• Ed Miller leads a team that plans to integrate Raspberry Pis into their black bear conservation efforts by tracking them with trail cameras and AI.

• In this tutorial, I will show you the process to compile a MicroPython firmware for your Raspberry PI Pico from your Raspberry PI computer board.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions – even though I’ve never even heard of Kbin. That’s pretty cool! A user on one social network can mention a user on a different social network – neither needs to be registered on the other.

• And that is where things get a little confusing and, perhaps, a bit scary.

• I cobbled together a journaling system with {neo,}vim, coreutils and dateutils. This system is loosely based on Ryder Caroll’s Bullet Journal method.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Given the number of API Gateways available on the market, I’m regularly asked which is better. Better is a very subjective term. However, there’s no denying that if you’re advocating for a product, you should know your product and its competitors. In this post, I’d like to share my understanding of Spring Cloud Gateway and how it compares to Apache APISIX.

• I’m cautious when comparing products because most comparisons I read are heavily biased. That’s a risk, especially when working on one of the products one is comparing. I’ll also avoid “benchmarketing” – when you benchmark products in a context that favors your own; I’ll focus on the so-called Developer Experience.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, the free and open-source offline use office suite, released new 7.4 version a few days ago.

• The new releases feature a “Plugin Manager“, allows to easily install external functions support, such as ChatGPT, YouTube, OCR, and more. User can of course submit its own plugin to the market place for other user use.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. The first few prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on. To check if a number is prime or not, we can use the concept of loop structures in C programming.

• A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. In simpler terms, a prime number is a number that has only two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself.

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

• I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure, to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation. But most of the software I write is not for sure going to become a big system. Here’s what Perl does well: [...]

Python

• Understanding the concept of prime numbers and how to identify them is an essential aspect of mathematics. A prime number is a number that has only two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Here I don’t mean reusing code from other shell scripts, because you can do that in any language. Where shell scripting is unique is that you immediately get to reuse a large mass of code in the form of all of the Unix utilities out there. Some of these utilities have relatively direct equivalents in languages like Python (especially if you’re willing to be brute force), but not all of them and often not as easily, and you also don’t get to integrate with other utilities in the fluid way you do with shell scripts.

• A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. In this article, we will explore how to write a shell script to check if a given number is prime or not.

Leftovers

• Users will start seeing video ads when waiting for their drivers to arrive and even during their trips. For cars that have tables installed inside, they will also appear there. For the Uber Eats app, video ads will play after customers place orders and continue until their deliveries arrive. Drizly, on its way, will have them in search results on its app and website.

Education

• Bonne is far from alone in his struggle with student debt; 1.9 million Canadians owed the federal government a total of $23.5 billion in student loans as of July 2022 — a number that only balloons further when including provincial loans and private debt. More than half of those who pursued professional programs such as medicine took on bank loans or lines of credit, according to a 2020 Statistics Canada report.

• Erika Shaker, the director of the national office at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says this “gateway debt” perpetuates social inequality and prevents people from achieving financial independence.

• The University of Michigan is currently under review from its accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, following a complaint filed by the Graduate Employees’ Organization. In the complaint, GEO alleged that the University entered falsified grades for students with striking graduate student instructors as part of their plan to ensure all final grades were submitted following the end of the winter term.

Hardware

• ASUS PRIME N100I-D D4 is a fanless mini-ITX motherboard based on the Intel Processor N100 quad-core “Alder Lake-N” processor with up to 16GB DDR4, M.2 NVME SSD and SATA storage, and three video outputs via HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA ports.

• In a world of 32-bit and 64-bit processors, it might surprise you to learn that Intel is releasing a 12-bit chip. Oh, wait, we mean 12-qubit. That makes more sense. Code named Tunnel Falls, the chip uses tiny silicon spin quantum bits, which Intel says are more advantageous than other schemes for encoding qubits.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Body Mass Index (BMI), a seemingly simple health metric calculated by taking an individual’s weight, dividing it by their height, then squaring that number, has been the main metric to measure body fat since the 1970s

Proprietary

• The “last” Beatles record is being made using artificial intelligence. Paul McCartney says audio engineers were able to extract John Lennon’s unfinished song from an old demo, decades after the band broke up. The new song is set to be released soon.

• From Judge Michael Baylson (E.D. Pa.), issued last week: If any attorney for a party, or a pro se party, has used Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) in the preparation of any complaint, answer, motion, brief, or other paper, filed with the Court, and assigned to Judge Michael M. Baylson, MUST, in a clear and plain factual…

• As the company explains, pre-market licensing would delay—or even deny—our access to artificial intelligence’s potential benefits.

• By Heidy Khlaaf and Artem Dinaburg The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has circulated an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Accountability Policy Request for Comment on what policies can support the development of AI audits, assessments, certifications, and other mechanisms to create earned trust in AI systems.

• I travelled to Bath on the Friday – but when I tried to return to London the following day, I was told my tickets weren’t valid. On closer inspection, I saw that the return ticket was only valid for travel on the Monday, despite the app stating I could return within three days.

• But for those who care not for socially responsibility, another issue looms. I talked with a few of you on Mastodon early this year about LLMs feeding on the output of other LLMs, and what effect that might have on their quality. I’m starting to see more discussion around this, and it raises interesting questions about the tech.

• The first batch of plagiarism-as-a-service tools were trained against human-generated data. Granted, there’s always been procedurally-generated stuff on the Internet, but it was probably easy enough to filter out. Mediocre but plausibly-human sounding chatbot output now abounds, and it’s only a matter of time before it constitutes the bulk of the modern web. It’s a dim thing to be excited about, but don’t tell that to the latest shipload of charlatans who gave up peddling blockchained tulips.

Security

• Mandiant has determined that the recently discovered hacking campaign targeting Barracuda Networks Inc. customers was launched by China-linked hackers. Mandiant, a breach investigation company that was acquired by Google LLC earlier this year, released its findings today.

• State-backed Chinese hackers have allegedly breached the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations across the globe, according to a United States cybersecurity firm. Nearly a third of the targets are government agencies.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• If the e-mail includes a zip file containing forty-five photos of the sender’s recent trip to Portugal, it’s from a scammer. Parents send way more photos than that.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Coming out is the definitive queer right of passage. The main event with no closing night. Often seen as a one-off, in reality we’re constantly judging whether to come out based on who’s around, where we are and what’s going on. The right to privacy gives us some choice over this.

• China’s ByteDance has already ordered around 100,000 Nvidia datacenter accelerators in 2023 — more than the entire Chinese market ordered last year.

Confidentiality

• But none of the organizations listed above are CAs – they just take certificate requests and forward them to real CAs, who validate the request and issue the certificate. The Internet is safe – from these organizations, at least.

• In this post, I’m going to define terms like certificate authority, root CA, intermediate CA, and reseller, and explain whom you do and do not need to worry about.

• Note that I’m going to talk only about publicly-trusted SSL certificate authorities – i.e those which are trusted by mainstream web browsers.

Defence/Aggression

• Militants linked to the Islamic State group massacred at least 41 people, mostly students, in western Uganda, in the country’s deadliest such attack in over a decade, officials said Saturday.

• After three failed marriages, Musaibli at the age of 25 traveled in 2015 to Syria, where he fought for ISIS, according to federal prosecutors. He was eventually caught by the Syrian Democratic Forces, handed over to the FBI and taken back to the U.S. where he was criminally charged, according to court records. In January, a jury found him guilty of three counts of supporting the Islamic State group and training with its members from 2015 to 2018.

• On Thursday, U.S. District Judge David Lawson of the Eastern District of Michigan sentenced Musaibli, age 33, to 14 years in federal prison. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit had asked Lawson for a 35-year sentence; defense attorneys asked for a 10-year sentence.

• The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted Jack Teixeira, the US airman suspected of leaking classified US intelligence documents, with six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information, according to a Thursday press release. Teixeira remains in federal custody, following a failed attempt by his legal counsel to obtain his release.

• The launch of the short-range projectiles came the same day the United States and South Korean militaries conducted a joint live-fire drill.

• A search is continuing for additional objects from what the North claimed is a space launch vehicle.

• North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles, South Korea’s military said Thursday, shortly after Pyongyang warned of an “inevitable” response to ongoing US-South Korea joint military drills.

• “Looting of medical and humanitarian assets continues on a massive scale…”

• The governor was killed shortly after criticizing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces for ethnic attacks.

• “It’s a domestic situation, obviously, that’s been ongoing for quite some time,” according to Marion County Sheriff Bo Burnett.

• As Ukraine begins a counter-offensive and Biden’s hawks look on, new rhetoric out of Russia points to a revival of the nuclear threat.

• Demonstrators and civil rights groups in Senegal are accusing the country’s security forces of working with armed civilians who shot and killed several people who participated in recent anti-government protests. Amnesty International says at least 23 people died during clashes between the country’s between police and supporters of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko this month. A young man told The Associated Press he saw a childhood friend get shot in the chest by a person he recognized. Senegal’s government denies gunmen for hire collaborated with police. Rights groups say police shouldn’t have used live bullet rounds to quell the unrest. Conflict analysts warn that mobilizing civilians to reinforce law enforcement ranks would set a dangerous precedent.

• Thirty-two years ago, the departure of American troops from the archipelago symbolized the end of colonialism. Today, their return seems like the least bad option.

• Video download link | md5sum 25143997fa3602ec8a0eb4b96c0ea757

• Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has accused Azerbaijan of “ethnic cleansing” with its continued blockade of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

War in Ukraine

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The charge he coveted was mishandling national security secrets under the Espionage Act, and his plan was to give me another classified document he had taken decades ago that he had held onto without authorization all this time. He wanted to mount a defense in a way that would offer the Supreme Court an opportunity to declare that law unconstitutional as applied to those who leaked government secrets to reporters. It is the same law former President Donald J. Trump is now accused of violating 31 times, though under very different circumstances.

• Ellsberg, whose hair by then had turned all white, grew up in Michigan, in Highland Park — back when it was a growing blue-collar, middle-class, auto-industry suburb — and his message, in light of the then-upcoming presidential election, was to be socially and politically active.

• The 7,000-page Pentagon Papers, which Ellsberg surreptitiously released to the press, was titled, “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force.” It led to a First Amendment showdown, with the U.S. Supreme Court siding with the newspapers.

• More than four decades later Daniel Ellsberg again takes on the Pentagon´s secret war plans. He warns us of a nuclear holocaust, caused by the refusal of the nine nuclear states to comply with the binding commitment of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to further the goals of a nuclear-free world.

• According to an analysis by the Breakthrough Institute and the Center for Global Development, the majority of climate projects funded by the World Bank between 2020 and 2022 turned out to have little to do with climate at all.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• They said they were willing to proceed to trial in October without pursuing charges they filed after Mr. Bankman-Fried was extradited from the Bahamas.

• After filing fraud charges against Binance on June 5, the S.E.C. moved to freeze the firm’s U.S. assets in a move that the exchange’s lawyers said would put it out of business in the United States.

• But in a court filing on Friday, the S.E.C. said that the two sides had reached a compromise after several days of court-ordered mediation. On Saturday morning, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the case in federal court in Washington, signed off on the deal.

• When he woke up the next morning, Mr. Roche says, he felt groggy. He couldn’t remember much aside from being pretty sure he had spotted Mr. Villavicencio’s business partner, a Norwegian named Christen Ager-Hanssen, lurking at a nearby table. The brain fog was odd because he didn’t think he’d had all that much to drink. As he flew back to Miami a few days later, Mr. Roche couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss.

Wildlife/Nature

• California is blooming with wild mustard this year. The invasive species smothers native plants and serves as tinder for wildfires in a state already ravaged by blazes. In response, artists are using the plant as dye and chefs are cooking with it.

Overpopulation

• While surface water basins are filling, underground stores of fresh water (aquifers) that are tapped for irrigation and other needs could take years to fully recharge. “One good winter of rain and snow won’t make up for years of extreme drought and extensive groundwater use,” said Felix Landerer, GRACE-FO project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The GRACE-FO team will continue to track how California’s water storage evolves through the summer after the snowpack melts and water levels in the state’s lakes, rivers, and reservoirs start to recede during drier weather.

• The lecturer criticised the trend of Instagram users “flexing” their fancy lifestyle habits.

• “Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after.”

Finance

• Certificate of need laws hurt consumers by decreasing the supply of services, raising prices, and lowering service quality.

• Sonos has disclosed a 7% reduction in its workforce in the latest layoff round to hit a tech company. Sonos says it is also committing to further reducing its real estate footprint and re-evaluating its program spending. The layoffs and decisions regarding who is impacted are subject to local laws and consultation requirements.

• A leading Danske Bank economist estimates that the Beyonce  Renaissance Tour launching in Stockholm contributed to Sweden’s rising inflation. Beyonce fans flocking to Sweden’s capital city sent hotel prices soaring, and economist Michael Grahn is calling it a “Beyonce blip.

• Disentangling the many drivers of the trend is difficult, but who we blame for it also shapes what we do about it.

• The pace of inflation is finally starting to show a more noticeable slowdown, as consumer prices in Finland rose by 6.8 percent in May, compared to 7.9 percent in April. The decrease in gasoline prices had the largest impact on slowing down inflation compared to the previous year. The Chief Economist of the Central Chamber of Commerce emphasizes the significant role of mortgage interest rates in domestic inflation measurement, and without them, inflation would have been only 4.9 percent.

• Experts say that 30-40% of the more than 300,000 technology jobs lost to layoffs globally could move to outsourcing hubs like India in the coming months.

• A lot of these jobs are likely to be redistributed across the existing workforce of large tech companies in India, they said.

• Social issues are creating a market downdraft for America’s mainstay brands — just ask Target, Anheuser Busch, Kohl’s and their collective $28.7 billion loss in market value since the beginning of April.

• Why it matters: Fiercely contested cultural issues have always aroused political passions, and held sway over electoral politics.

• California lawmakers and President Joe Biden seem determined to help fast-food workers by eliminating their jobs.

• After the Competition Council identified a road construction cartel, the Central Financial and Contract Agency (CFLA) concluded that the State would have to reimburse part of the EU funding allocated to the projects affected by the cartel, totaling EUR 1.02 million, according to the CFLA’s statement on June 16.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• How conservatives went from demonizing Muslims to wooing them.

• Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson deliberately misled Parliament about the lockdown-flouting parties that undermined his credibility and contributed to his downfall, a committee of lawmakers said Thursday after a year-long investigation

• Jurors in federal court have awarded $25.6 million to a former Starbucks regional manager who alleged that she and other white employees were unfairly punished after the high-profile arrests of two Black men at a Philadelphia location in 2018.

• Yesterday, two of those associates – Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, both programmers for Megaupload – pled guilty in New Zealand’s High Court.

• As the sentencing notes [PDF] in the case explain, the pair’s role as developers meant they understood Megaupload’s operations and intentions. After years of legal action they agreed to plead guilty, and assist US authorities, in return for extradition proceedings ending.

• On the contrary, the challenge is to act quickly and take responsibility for exploiting all the advances while controlling the risks. And it is regulation that gives start-ups the legal certainty they need to innovate.

• As June started an article spread like wildfire in the technical communities and it was this thread on Reddit: “Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter’s pricing, and Apollo would have to pay Reddit $20 million per year to keep running as-is.”

• The title basically summarizes this issue, but we need to turn back the clock to understand what Apollo is and why this spread quickly.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Content warning: Gun violence, suicide, domestic abuse It has been one year since The Michigan Daily Summer Editorial Board published an editorial discussing and demystifying the common misconceptions many Americans have about gun violence.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Belarusian singer Patrytsia Svitsina, who in 2020 refused to accept a scholarship from authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, citing her “moral principles,” is facing a charge of “actively participating in actions that blatantly disrupt social order.”

• It’s a troubling change in an increasingly frail digital news business, where companies have little choice but to rely on social media’s biggest gatekeeper. Publishers say they deserve transparency, but as with similar changes in the past, there’s been no communication from Meta, Facebook’s parent company. In fact, Meta did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on the matter.

• Journalist Sinan Aygül, who had been writing about the corruption and land sales of the municipality of Tatvan for a while, was targeted by a violent attack on Saturday.

• Aygül wrote on his Twitter account: “I was attacked by the armed bodyguards of mayor Mehmet Emin Geylani in Tatvan a little while ago. They got out of the municipal vehicle, hit me on the head from behind, insulted and threatened me to death. I am being taken to Tatvan State Hospital.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The homes of New Hampshire Public Radio journalists were vandalized after they aired a sexual harassment investigation involving a prominent businessman in the state.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Japan’s previous laws on sexual assault did not mention permission and required that the crime include physical force. The new law also raises the age of consent to 16, from 13.

• Japan’s national legislature passed groundbreaking revisions to its sex crimes laws Friday. The House of Councillors, the upper house of Japan’s National Diet, voted in favor of changes to Chapter 22 of Japan’s Penal Code. Chapter 22 concerns crimes of obscenity, forcible sexual intercourse, and bigamy.

• New mandates in states like Utah and Virginia will lock in large incumbents like PornHub while discouraging positive trends and self-regulation in the industry.

• Iranian state news agencies have reported the arrest of two young men accused of being part of a team that manages a Telegram channel associated with the wave of protests sweeping the country.

• Google is making money from those misleading abortion seekers, according to a new study.

• Dozens of members rescued from a church whose pastor is accused of telling followers to starve themselves appeared in court. A judge sent them to rehab rather than jail to await another hearing.

• When reflecting on their Arab Spring revolution, Tunisians often say that freedom of expression was the only concrete achievement. As the country slides back toward autocracy, that, too, is being quickly eroded.

• While Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the residential school system in 2008, the United States has never done so publicly.

• This is a very important difference.

• Workers voted 97 percent in favor of authorizing a strike.

• Two Supreme Court decisions expected next week could profoundly change the makeup of higher education.

• Residents say officials sold their grazing lands out from under them

• China is allegedly running more than 100 police stations in at least 53 countries.

• This is happening more and more. I’ll visit a global website for a computer or camera site, and the server will detect I’m in a different country. They’ll claim there’s an Australian or Singapore-specific page I can go to for more relevant information, which I’ll click through to. Invariably, I get a 404 on that localised site.

• The pay is listed on Indeed as $620 per week, gross, that is before any taxes or withholding. If you average this out as a 40 hour week, that’s only $15.50 an hour.

• A wage that is so low that it’s less money than my spouse makes at Walmart even with his hours cut for a while to 34 per week (and we’re working on this problem), and his job isn’t even one where you will risk physical injury working on cars, be exposed to hazardous carcinogens and hot muggy shops and lift heavy things a lot and have to road test cars that may be unsafe to operate due to the owner “delaying maintenance”. That’s the new term in America for being broke.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• US president Joe Biden is meeting today (June 15) with representatives of some of the country’s largest entertainment and travel companies to end their practice of levying hidden fees.

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