● 06.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/06/2023: DeVault Promising a ‘Reform’, Libreboot Promising No-microcode ROMs

Posted in News Roundup at 12:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Is Ham Radio a natural hobby for Linux users? An old friend joins us to explain where the two overlap. Special Guest: Noah Chelliah.

Kernel Space

• Well that blew up. It was supposed to be just a silly off-the-cuff comment about how some bugs are very tedious to bisect.

• To answer a few questions people had, here’s what actually happened. As they say, don’t believe everything you read in the press.

• [...]

• At that point I thought I had the right commit, but Paolo Bonzini suggested to me that I boot the kernel in parallel, in a loop, for 24 hours at the point immediately before the commit, to try to show that there was no latent issue in the kernel before. (As it turns out while this is a good idea, this analysis is subtly flawed as we’ll see).

• So I did just that. After 21 hours I got bored (plus this is using a lot of electricity and generating huge amounts of heat, and we’re in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK). I killed the test after 292,612 successful boots.

• I had a commit that looked suspicious, but what to do now? I posted my findings on LKML.

• We still didn’t fully understand how to trigger the hang, except it was annoying and rare, seemed to happen with different frequencies on AMD and Intel, could be reproduced by several independent people, but crucially kernel developer Peter Zijlstra could not reproduce it.

Applications

• If you find your home computer setup needs an EQ, Easy Effects might just be the ticket.

• Easy Effects is GTK4 audio manipulation software which includes a range of tools. Besides an EQ, there are many other tools incorporated including a limiter, compressor, and a reverberation tool. There’s a built-in spectrum analyzer too.

• It’s free and open source software.

Instructionals/Technical

• MongoDB offers different operator types to utilize MongoDB with Red Hat OpenShift. MongoDB provides two certified operator products, MongoDB Enterprise Operator and MongoDB Atlas Operator. This article will cover how to set up and configure MongoDB Atlas on OpenShift.

• Those of you who regularly use fullscreen mode for apps and media content in GNOME Shell are gonna dig the following new GNOME extension.

• The new, upcoming Sparky 8 code name and repos is set.

• A new app available from Flathub makes it easy to edit short videos on Linux.

• This article spotlights alternative tools to dd, a popular utility to convert and copy a file.

• We’ve just sent out the First patch for Makulu Max.

• From Arch:

• The openblas package prior to version 0.3.23-2 doesn’t ship optimizedblockquote>

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Atom on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, Atom Text Editor is a popular, open-source code editor known for its customizable and extensible features.

Games

• Between 2023-06-11 and 2023-06-18 there were 90 new games validated for the Steam Deck.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Feature highlights of the recently released Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment. The highly anticipated Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment was released just a few days ago.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In Plasma5, we had different sorting implementations for KRunner and Kicker. This had historical reasons, because Kicker only used a subset of the available KRunner plugins. Due to the increased reliability, we decided to allow all available plugins to be loaded. However, the model still hard-coded the order in which the categories are displayed. This was reported in this bug which received numerous duplicates.

• To address this concern, I focused on refactoring and cleaning up KRunner as part of KDE Frameworks 6. Among the significant architectural changes was the integration of KRunner’s model responsible for sorting into the KRunner framework itself. This integration enabled easier code sharing and simplified code maintenance. Consequently, the custom sorting logic previously present in Kicker could be removed.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Gentoo Family

• Hello everyone,

• I am Berin Aniesh, one of the four contributors for Gentoo through GSOC 2023. You can read more about us here. In this post, I want to talk about the project I am working on and the first two  weeks of the community bonding period

• The title of the project is “Modernization of portage codebase by refactoring and rewriting performance critical parts as C++ extensions”.

• Portage is probably the most versatile package manager on the planet and this has been its boon and bane at the same time This versatility combined with portage’s feature richness has made it possible for not only gentoo users, but projects like chromium OS, Flatcar container linux, a numerous downstream projects and many more. In linux, it can support any underlying stack (eg. glibc vs musl, hardened systems, systemd vs openrc, etc). Other than linux, it can also run on BSD and MacOS. It supports compile time feature selection through USE flags. Taking all these factors into  account, together with the fact that portage supports numerous architectures, seeing portage  perform its duties as it was designed to is a huge feat of engineering. And above all, everything of  portage is written by passionate volunteers. If anything, understanding the landscape of gentoo has  brought me huge respect towards the gentoo developers and the community.

• It is the third week of the coding period. It is mostly an uneventful week. Most part was spent on  trying to understand the dependency resolution algorithm. In the second part of the week I also did  some refactoring and some type hints.

• I lost my password to access this blog and also had troubles resetting the password. That is why I  have not been able to post per week. With help from BlueKnight, I got my access back. So, I am dumping the blog posts I have written, all at once. From next week, I expect posts to be at regular intervals (one per week). Sorry about the bulk posting, hope you don’t mind.

• So, it’s the first week of the official coding period and I wanted to write some code and get it  merged into the master branch (I understand it’s a bit over ambitious of me, but a man can wish).  As I said in the first blog post, portage is relied up on by many people for different use cases and if  something were a simple fix, the gentoo developers would have done it already. I just can’t storm in and make changes, expect things to work.

• So, we tried to find a place which has very little impact on the portage’s running and ended up at emerge --version.

• In order to get familiar with the portage codebase, we decided that I’d fix a few bugs. This blog post talks about the second half of the community bonding period (weeks 3 and 4) where I try to do that.

• When it comes to bugs, the paradox of choice is real. To choose from, there is a heap of them (1439 at the moment of writing). Most of the bugs are quality of life improvements as the portage team  has put in a lot of effort to make sure portage does it’s jobs without many errors. After searching, we decided to work on bug 634576.

• It is the second week of coding period and it has been a productive one. It started according to the  plans and diverged in the second half for the good. The first half was towards type annotation and the second half was dummy_threading deprecation.

• In the words of Sam, my mentor, “I’d considere a GSOC project complete if some 50% of the  codebase is just type annotated”. Many portage developers were excited when we were talking  about adding type hints and docstrings.

• Adding type hints and tidying up the codebase will also give me more exposure to the underlying functions. So, we decided, this week I’ll do type annotations.

• Python 3.9 adds a simpler “native” style type annotation, but portage has a minimum supported python version of 3.7.

• Hello all,

• I’m here with my week 3 report for Modern C porting of Gentoo’s packages. For this week I diverted from my initial idea a bit and focused on the “C++17 does not allow register storage class specific” type error. Basically, C++14 deprecated the register storage class and it has been completely removed in C++17, thus resulting in C++ packages that use register keywords with this kind of error. A general fix is it either removes the keywords or replaces them with *int* where applicable.

• For example, in this PR [1] for the fox toolkit, I’m using sed to remove register keywords from various folders of the source. Whenever possible I’m sending patches upstream as well, for example, I’ve sent this [2] patch upstream while also applying it Gentoo tree.

Fedora Family / IBM

• In this article, we will walk through the process of creating a custom stack unwinder for the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) using GDB’s Python API. We’ll first explore when writing such an unwinder might be necessary, then create a small example application that demonstrates a need for a custom unwinder before finally writing a custom unwinder for our application inside the debugger.

• By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to use our custom stack unwinder to allow GDB to create a full backtrace for our application.

• An unwinder is how GDB figures out the call stack of an inferior, for example, GDB’s backtrace command: [...]

• Hybrid clouds are mixed computing environments that allow applications to use a combination of compute, networking, storage, and services in public clouds and private clouds, including clouds running on-premise or at a plethora of edge locations.

• To accomplish this, hybrid cloud platforms must be designed to expose the best of the public clouds they support and present the advantages of private clouds while presenting a cohesive interface to the application developer—and preferably the cloud admin, too. A cloud admin can install a cloud instance called a cluster, consisting of a control plane (at least one instance) to manage the cluster and multiple compute instances that run applications on them.

• In the rest of this article, “developer” specifically refers to a hybrid cloud platform developer, not an application developer.  As a developer working on OpenShift, Red Hat’s hybrid cloud platform, I have found that designing features around a few key tenets ensures the cohesiveness that hybrid cloud platforms wish to achieve.

• As an Ansible Lightspeed engineer, my team works on the cloud service that interacts with Watson Code Assistant large language models for Ansible task generation. Curious to learn more about the mechanics of training such a model, I set out to create my own, very basic Ansible tasks model. I decided to do this using Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, which made it easy to configure and launch an environment pre-configured with everything I needed to train my model. I’ll walk through the steps I took here.

Debian Family

• As some of you may know, the Debian project released v12, bookworm to stable on the 10th of this month. I haven’t had a reason to try it yet, but I’m downloading it now. My first thought is that it’s much larger than I expected. The normal sized version used to fit on a CD-ROM disk, so around 650MB. The netinst has until now been even smaller, with the most recent versions being about 256MB if I recall correctly. The netinst, now with proprietary firmware, weighs in over 700MB: [...]

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Dubbed “Victoria”, Linux Mint 21.2 is the third installment in the Linux Mint 21 series, which is based on Canonical’s long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.

• Linux Mint 21.2 Beta is available in three editions with the Cinnamon 5.8, Xfce 4.18, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments preinstalled. As expected, the Cinnamon edition remains the flagship and it brings the most interesting changes and new features.

• >Users of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS who make use of window snapping to enhance their productivity will be interested in a bug fixes coming down the update pipes shortly.

Devices/Embedded

• As shown above, the carrier board includes a Mini PCIe socket with a Nano SIM card port enabling the use of a 4G LTE modem for cellular connectivity.

• The HDMI 2.1 port offers support for up to 8K resolution at 60 frames per second (8Kp60). On the other hand, the MIPI DSI interface provides support for up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second (4Kp60) through a 26-pin header. For audio, the SBC features a 3.5mm audio jack and supports 8-channel audio output via HDMI.

• The Software section located on the Idea3588S product page indicates that Boardcon will provide software support for Android 12 (i.e. Kernel, Drivers, Debug tools, etc.).

Open Hardware/Modding

• Luwu Dynamics is working on a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered robot that uses two wheels to locomote capable of self-balancing.

• We covered [Anders Nielsen]’s 65duino project a short while ago, and now he’s back with an update video showing some more details of bit-banging I2C using plain old 6502 assembly language.

• [Prof. Marvin Minsky] is a very well-known figure in the field of computing, having co-founded the MIT AI lab, published extensively on AI and computational intelligence, and, let’s not forget, inventing the confocal microscope and, of course, the useless machine. But did you know he also was a co-developer of the first Logo “turtle,” and developed a computer intended to run Logo applications in an educational environment? After dredging some PDP-10 tapes owned by the MIT Media Lab, the original schematics for his machine, the Turtle Terminal TT2500 (a reference to the target price of $2500, in 1970 terms), are now available for you to examine.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Let’s work together for a better world? Introducing the Declaration of Duties of Man and Citizen, a complementary document to the Declaration of Human Rights, emphasizing our responsibilities and obligations. >

• Several weeks ago, I wrote The Free Software Foundation is dying, wherein I enumerated a number of problems with the Free Software Foundation. Some of my criticisms focused on the message: fsf.org and gnu.org together suffer from no small degree of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility which makes it difficult for new participants to learn about the movement and apply it in practice to their own projects.

• This is something which is relatively easily fixed! I have a background in writing documentation and a thorough understanding of free software philosophy and practice. Enter writefreesoftware.org: a comprehensive introduction to free software philosophy and implementation.

• Drew DeVault has announced the launch of a new web site that is intended to be a better introduction to the free-software community.

• As of January 2021, Telegram has more than 500 million active users worldwide. It is an instant messaging app that is widely used due to its various features. These include the ability to create bots, which are programs that can carry out various tasks within the Telegram app.

• What are

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• LibreOffice doesn’t include an email program, but there are many excellent free and open source software clients that work well alongside it. One prominent example is Mozilla Thunderbird – a sister project to the Firefox web browser.

• We know that many people use LibreOffice and Thunderbird as part of their daily workflows – so how can we make them work better together? We reached out on social media to hear from our users – on Mastodon and Twitter (and the Thunderbird project posted on their Mastodon and Twitter accounts too).

Programming/Development

• Git has been a powerful tool for software development and version control since the mid ’00s, gaining widespread popularity since then. Originally built by none other than Linus Torvalds for handling Linux kernel development, it’s branched out for use with all kinds of other projects. That being said, it is not the easiest thing to learn how to use, with tons of options, abstract ideas, and non-linear workflows to keep track of. So if you’re new to the system or don’t need all of its vast swath of features, you might want to try out an alternative like Gitless.

• Another quick update to the still somewhat new package spdl is now om CRAN, and will go to Debian soon too. The key focus of spdl is to offer the exact same interface to logging from both R and C++ by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package. Usage examples are shown on the RcppSpdlog docs

• This release add support for the wrappers init() and log() wrapping the existing setup() function but requiring only the level argument. This requires version 0.0.13 of RcppSpdlog which was released to CRAN yesterday.

Python

Gentoo ☛ Problems faced when downstream testing Python packagesDownstream testing refers to the testing of software package done by their redistributors, such as Linux distributions. It could be done by distro-specific CI systems, package maintainers or — as it frequently is the case with Gentoo — even distribution users.What makes downstream testing really useful is that it serves a different purpose than upstream testing does. To put it shortly, upstream testing aims to ensure that the current code of the package works in one or more reference environments, and meets quality standards set by the package authors. On the other hand, downstream testing aims to ensure that a particular version of the package (possibly an old one) works in the environment that it will be used on, or one that closely resembles it.To put it another way, downstream testing may differ from upstreaming testing by:testing a different (possibly old) package versionusing a diferent (possibly newer) Python version

• Here you will find the steps to install the Zlib library on your system to resolve zipimport.zipImportError: can’t decompress data; zlib not available.

• Python, a versatile and dynamically-typed language, gained significant enhancements with the introduction of type hinting in Python 3.5.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Liberal MP Warren Entsch has rejected claims he organised for a wealthy donor to jump the queue for a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, saying he has been “grievously” misrepresented.

• Health Minister Mark Butler raised the claims during Question Time and Mr Entsch requested the chance to respond from the Speaker.

• In the span of a hundred years, South Korean women grew by 20.2cm – the largest jump in the world.

• What is this doing to us?

• At least 14 people have died in Iran after after drinking bootleg alcohol in the northern Iranian province of Alborz.

Proprietary

• Last week I had to convert a table in a Google Doc to a JSON structure that will render as an HTML page. This is the sort of mundane task that burns staggering amounts of information workers’ time, effort, and attention. Until recently there were two ways to do it.

Security

• “Microsoft quietly snuck out a blog on Friday night admitting Azure and Microsoft 365 have been under DDoS for weeks – previously they had been calling it ‘technical issues’.

• “They then didn’t put out the blog on their social channels, nor name Azure or M365,” added Beaumont, who has worked for Microsoft in the past.

• Early June 2023 disruptions to Microsoft’s flagship office suite were Layer 7 DDoS attacks by a shadowy new hacktivist group dubbed Storm-1359 by Microsoft.

• Recently I was contacted by a Falklands veteran who was a victim of what appears to have been a classic pre-play attack; his story is told here.

• The Biden Administration has extended the deadline for federal agencies to submit documentation proving that the software they use was developed with appropriate security practices, because the form for reporting on such matters isn’t complete.

• If you’ve been keeping up with security news, you may have noticed that it seems as if there have been an increasing number of attacks on Linux in recent years. The number of new Linux malware variants reached a record high in the first half of 2022, as nearly 1.7 million samples were discovered.

• In this episode, ASPI’s Alex Caples speaks with Hamish Hansford, who was recently appointed deputy secretary of cyber and infrastructure security at the Department of Home Affairs.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (golang-go.crypto, maradns, requests, sofia-sip, and xmltooling), Fedora (chromium, iaito, iniparser, libX11, matrix-synapse, radare2, and thunderbird), Red Hat (c-ares, jenkins and jenkins-2-plugins, and texlive), SUSE (bluez, chromium, go1.19, go1.20, jetty-minimal, kernel, kubernetes1.18, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, libX11, open-vm-tools, openvswitch3, opera, syncthing, and xen), and Ubuntu (libcap2, libpod, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.19, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-lowlatency, linux-raspi, linux-oem-5.17, linux-oem-6.1, pypdf2, and qemu).

• But when I clicked “Post reply,” I learned that I was Banned. It was my very first reply and I had no other posts. I was banned, it seems, for “Spam” and the ban will never be lifted.

• I was banned for asking a serious question? Is OnniForums so lame that they are unwilling to explain their actions? That’s a shame. Or was the ban just a mistake or accident? I hope the latter is the explanation.

• A former member of RAIDForums was sentenced to prison today by an Amsterdam court.

• The 25-year-old man, Erkan Sezgin, was known as “DataBox” on RAIDforums when he listed the data of millions of Austrians for sale.

• “Through the investigation, Mandiant identified a suspected China-nexus actor, currently tracked as UNC4841, targeting a subset of Barracuda ESG appliances to utilize as a vector for espionage, spanning a multitude of regions and sectors,” Mandiant said in a post on Thursday.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal has blocked pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai’s bid to challenge a national security search warrant of his phones, which he says contained protected journalistic materials, at the city’s top court.

Defence/Aggression

• Although junior British ministers hold talks with Taiwanese counterparts, the convention was that senior British ministers do not.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met today with senior Chinese officials in Beijing, as the U.S. and China try to reduce tensions in their bilateral relationship, which is at its lowest point in decades.

• North Korea’s ruling party slammed a recent failed satellite launch in a high-level meeting, state media reported on Monday, “bitterly” criticising the officials responsible.

• North Korea attempted to launch a spy satellite on May 31 but it crashed into the sea.

• Top political leaders said the botched May 31 launch, which was meant to put a military spy satellite in orbit, had been “irresponsibly” planned.

• The number of people arriving in the UK in small boats has reached over 10,000 since the start of the year, UK government figures showed Sunday.

• An Armenian poet and communist fighter in World War II will enter the Pantheon mausoleum and join an elite group of France’s revered historical figures, French President Emmanuel Macron said on June 18.

• Emperor Naruhito and his wife, Empress Masako, arrived in Indonesia on Saturday for a week-long visit.

• According to the Indictment in U.S. v. Comiskey, the defendant Tweeted, about Rep. Lauren Boebert, “If I ever saw Lauren I’d be glad to take her out and go to prison. Would be job well done.”

War in Ukraine

• After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the Telegram communication app group “Baltic antifascists” was created. An investigation into participation in a criminal organization has been launched against at least five persons associated with the group. Latvian Television’s broadcast De Facto, aired June 18, took a closer look at the group.

• The clandestine move by Russian forces shows the desperation of Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin 16 months into a difficult and protracted conflict.

• Intense battles were continuing on June 19 as Russian forces reportedly focus on Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and Kyiv tried to dislodge Russian troops from southern areas, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed his country would continue its “de-occupation steps.”

• Russian billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich has refused to release the $3 billion proceeds from his sale last year of the Chelsea soccer club to help Ukrainian victims of Moscow’s February 2022 invasion, Britain’s Daily Mail reported on June 18.

• The European Union is speeding up arms deliveries to Ukraine in support of the country’s counteroffensive against Russian forces, EU industry chief Thierry Breton said.

• Britain said on June 18 it would expand its program to help Ukraine’s cyberdefenses as it launches a counteroffensive against Russia.

• Some of the weapons sent to Ukraine by other countries have been unusable, and hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts paid up front have yet to be fulfilled.

• A Russian official and military bloggers said Sunday that Kyiv’s forces had retaken another village in their fight to recapture territory, a claim the Russian Defense Ministry denied.

• In a tweet posted on Friday, Raiu said the time was right for him to look for a new challenge after so many years in the same job.

• “Twenty-three years ago, I joined the Kaspersky team. Today, I am 46 and that makes it half my life dedicated to protecting the world,” he wrote.

• {loadposition sam08}”You probably know some of the research we did over the years in GReAT – looking back, I’m very proud of what we accomplished. It has been an incredible journey that has allowed me to meet and work with many amazing people.”

• Raiu does not in any way resemble the stereotypical hacker. I met him in April 2018 at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Sumnmit in Cancun and to me he looked like a dignified headmaster, only without a cane!

• A controversial trial of prominent Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny is scheduled to officially start on June 19.

• Russian luge sliders remain banned from international events, the ruling body FIL has decided, joining several other sports in snubbing a recommendation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to allow them back.

• Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced in April to 25 years in prison after being convicted of state treason, said on June 18 that prison authorities have stopped delivering letters to him.

• A failed plot to assassinate a C.I.A. spy in 2020 in part led to expulsions of the agency’s chief in Moscow and his Russian counterpart in Washington.

• A free-trade-zone agreement between Iran, Russia, and several countries that cover the vast Eurasian region spanning the borders of Eastern Europe to Western China is possible by the end of the year, Russia’s TASS news agency reported on June 19.

• While Lithuanian sports federations have been campaigning to have Russian and Belarusian athletes barred from international competitions, the country is much more divided whether its athletes should take a personal stand at the risk of harming their careers.

• Esteban Volkov, the grandson of Leon Trotsky, has died in Mexico at the age of 97, reports Mexico newspaper La Jornada.

• Esteban Volkov Bronstein, grandson and guardian of the memory of Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, died in Mexico on June 17, the Spanish daily El Pais reported on June 18.

• Politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently in pre-trial detention, says that Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service has stopped delivering letters to him.

• Evgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group military cartel, said on June 18 that 32,000 former prisoners have returned home after having fought for Russia in Ukraine.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The US Supreme Court ruled Friday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) can retain its power to dismiss third-party federal whistleblower actions filed on behalf of the government under the False Claims Act (FCA).

Environment

• The Swiss on Sunday backed a new climate bill aimed at steering their country of melting glaciers towards carbon neutrality by 2050.

• World leaders will gather in Paris this week with ambitions to reimagine global financing for a new era shaped by climate change, as a cascade of crises swamps debt-burdened countries.

• Home to the Darvaza Crater, a massive molten pit that has spewed flames and noxious gases for decades, Turkmenistan has the world’s worst record when it comes to climate-heating methane leaks. As it pledges to plug the smouldering crater, the reclusive central Asian nation is under pressure to fix its leaking oil and gas industry, too.

Energy/Transportation

• The Paris Air Show opens Monday after a four-year break with the aerospace industry bouncing back from the Covid-19 pandemic but under pressure to slash its carbon footprint.

Wildlife/Nature

• They’re extraordinarily cunning.

Finance

• While the world’s eyes were on the pandemic, China and the war in Ukraine, the paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier.

• Treasurer Jim Chalmers is confident Australia is not heading towards a recession despite some economists warning the path to a soft landing from soaring inflation is narrowing.

• He says the Australian economy might stutter as interest rates lift, but neither the Reserve Bank nor Treasury are anticipating a recession.

• The COVID-19 pandemic derailed the Commonwealth’s clampdown on the shadow economy designed to recoup billions in unpaid tax.

• An audit of the federal government’s blitz on the “shadow” or “black” economy, which refers to economic activity outside the tax system, painted a mixed picture of the government’s response.

• The Incident at Waukegan Pep Boys is a Symptom of a Disease.

• Argentina’s financial crisis has a surprising side effect: a flourishing dining scene in Buenos Aires, as residents rush to spend pesos before they lose more value.

• The National Education Union (NEU) announced on Saturday that teachers in England will be striking nationally on the 5th and 7th of July due to “inadequate” pay. The strike action would result in many schools fully or partially closing.

• Most of them cite the unavailability of jobs offering desirable wages and working conditions.

• Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. 1.

• In New Zealand, high interest rates have sent property prices sliding nearly 18 percent since November 2021.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Axios ☛ Biden’s weird sayings: Even his aides are mystifiedPresident Biden often uses old-timey expressions that confound even his own staff. That happened again Friday when he ended a speech on gun violence with “God save the queen, man.”Even Olivia Dalton, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary, didn’t know what her boss meant. When journalists asked, she replied only that he “was commenting to someone in the crowd.”Later, the White House didn’t respond when Axios asked what Biden had meant.

• Approval for the Kishida government had been on the upswing in the run-up to the G7 meeting.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Pro-democracy protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong has reappeared on streaming platforms KKBox and Spotify, days after the latter told HKFP that it had been removed by the distributor.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Julian Assange’s legal options have nearly run out. He could be extradited to the U.S. this week. Should he be convicted in the U.S., any reporting on the inner workings of power will become a crime.

• Reporter Sans Frontieres (RSF), also known as Reporters Without Borders, announced Sunday that Algerian media mogul Ihsane El Kadi had his prison sentence extended to seven years by the Algerian Court of Appeal.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Loving dad in the face of injustice.

• The Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed its condemnation on Friday of a European Parliament resolution that supported democracy and human rights in Hong Kong. The resolution was in response to political repression in Hong Kong, and raised the issue of sanctions against Chinese politicians who have violated human rights.

• The Irish Cultural Centre in Paris held a ‘Festival of Ideas’ event from June 15 to June 17 to join in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Ireland joining the European Union on January 1, 1973. The final day’s activities consisted of panel discussions and concerts celebrating all things Irish, from the Irish language to traditional music and cuisine.

• Demonstrators protested against the incoming government’s stated aims to tighten Finland’s laws on immigration, saying the proposals unfairly target foreign workers.

• A Hong Kong university student arrested over allegedly “seditious” online posts has been barred from possessing electronic devices with social media apps and joining chat groups with more than five people, as part of a list of strict bail conditions. The court heard that most of the offending posts were published whilst abroad.

• Texas Governor Greg Abbott, on Friday signed S.B. No. 17. The bill prohibits state funded universities and colleges from operating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and offices. The bill is set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2024.

• An emerging strand of feminism zeroes in on the differences between male and female bodies.

• A new ruling finds Alabama discriminated against Black voters.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Copyright holders have sent billions of takedown requests to Google. Their goal is to make it harder for people to find pirated content through the search engine. However, when legal options such as Reelgood are targeted, takedown requests can end up being counterproductive.

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