● 06.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/06/2023: Gentoo Improvements, Jeff Geerling is Done With Red Bait (IBM)

Posted in News Roundup at 8:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• UNIX is a powerful multi-user operating system (OS) that defined how we do computing for more than 40 years. It provided a lot of features and abstractions that we take for granted today. This includes the idea of files being an uninterpreted sequence of bytes as well as the notion of a hierarchical file system.

• This article will show you some of the differences between the original UNIX OS and its modern spiritual successor: Linux. Further, it will also show you a brief rundown on both the history and notable features of each system.

• >As global economic uncertainty impacts tech hiring strategies, upskilling emerges as a critical response. Training and certifications become essential, eclipsing traditional hiring practices in the quest for qualified tech talent.

• Control your A.I. at home! We bring artificial intelligence to you running on your own hardware. Control a chatbot, test auto translations and create your own A.I. artwork we get you up and running with the code and training models you need.

• PLUS: Backup Linux …

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we discuss some exciting updates from System76 about their new COSMIC desktop. Then we take a look at the latest Enterprise Linux news from Red Hat and why there’s so much drama around it. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks.

• FULL SHOW NOTES ►► https://tuxdigital.com/podcasts/destination-linux/dl-329/

• The pros and cons of working on open source software, streaming your Android screen to desktop Linux, a Hacker News alternative, stabilizing video, an ESP32-based open hardware watch, a ludicrously expensive router, quickly cropping and rotating videos, Joe and Félim troll each other, and more.

Kernel Space

• Hot on the heels of the Linux kernel 6.4 release is this FOSS-friendly fork that forgoes non-free code, firmware, modules, and other binary blobs. The Linux-libre kernel also nixes the ability to load proprietary kernel modules (assuming you wanted to).

• Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the Linux kernel 6.4 and with it, lots and lots of new features and fixes.

• We are very happy to announce the availability of a new training course in our portfolio: Embedded Linux audio.

• The Linux Plumbers’ microconference is a three and a half hour session focused on one general focus area. It can be on Android, power management, tracing, real-time or any of the other many subsystems in the Linux ecosystem. These sessions are broken up into smaller topics that are highly focused work meetings with the goal of accomplishing something during the brief discussions that happen during that time. A topic session ranges from 15 to 30 minutes in length, where no more than half the time is a presentation to bring everyone in the room (or online) up to speed about the issues that need to be discussed, and the rest of the time is spent on brainstorming ideas with the audience on how to accomplish solving the problems at hand. The problem does not need to be solved in this short time, but when time is up, the audience should understand what is at stake well enough to be productive offline in mailing lists and chat rooms.

Applications

• Blender 3.6 comes about three months after the Blender 3.5 release and it looks to be a long-term supported (LTS) series that will receive support for two years with regular updates that introduce bug fixes and stability improvements. The first long-term support release of the 3.x series was Blender 3.3 LTS, which will be supported until September 2024.

• Highlights of Blender 3.6 LTS include a new add-on to easily create VDM brushes, support for importing and exporting the legacy 3DS format, support for light trees on AMD GPUs, hardware ray-tracing acceleration for Intel Arc and Data Center GPUs, as well as support for simulations on geometry nodes.

• A terminal emulator is a computer program that reproduces a video terminal within some other display structure. In other words, the terminal emulator has the ability to make a dumb machine appear like a client computer networked to the server.

• The terminal emulator allows an end-user to access the console as well as its applications such as text user interface and command-line interface.

• Even if you are totally new to the Linux operating system and do not know about its educational capabilities, it must be noted that it is one of the safest, most expandable, and fully functional operating systems.

• GNOME Shell’s overview means you’re never more than a super key press away from launching apps, opening folders, checking timezones, copying emoji, and more.

• Bankist is an open-source virtual banking experience that provides all the necessary features of a real bank and more. It is a sleek and modern online banking application that showcases the developer’s expertise in DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation and user interaction as a skilled web developer.

• I posted a couple of days ago, taken out the ‘sudo’ package and just using ‘su’:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202306/goodbye-sudo-package.html

• On reflection, that has various limitations and potential issues, so had a rethink and came up with something else, that does not use ‘su’. Starting from the beginning, a script, say /usr/sbin/bootmanager now has this at the beginning: [...]

Instructionals/Technical

• PHP 8, the latest major release of the popular server-side scripting language, comes with numerous exciting features and performance enhancements.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Debian 12. Video and multimedia processing has become an essential part of modern applications and platforms. FFmpeg, a powerful open-source software, enables users to manipulate, convert, and stream audio and video files with ease.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MariaDB on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, MariaDB is a robust and widely-used open-source database management system. Offering high performance, scalability, and advanced features, it has become a popular choice for developers and enterprises alike.

• Pop!_OS, a Linux distribution developed by System76, is praised for its sleek user interface and compatibility with hardware. While the initial installation process is simple and user-friendly, there’s much more you can do to tailor the system to your needs. By performing several essential tasks after installation, you can ensure optimal performance, enhance security, and make the most out of your user experience.

• This article introduces you to an essential security tool, Chkrootkit, and how to install it on Debian-based systems such as Debian 12 Bookworm, Debian 11 Bullseye, and Debian 10 Buster. Chkrootkit is a valuable asset for system administrators and security professionals alike.

• Google Earth, a tool that feels almost magical, allows users to explore the world from the comfort of their homes.

• This Bash cheat sheet provides a quick reference guide to commonly used commands in the Bash shell. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced user, this cheat sheet will help you navigate the Linux command line and perform various tasks efficiently. You can also download a high quality printable version of this cheat sheet below.

• One of the powerful features of the Linux operating system is the ability to control your system’s behavior by running scripts at startup, shutdown, or reboot. This article serves as a practical guide to setting up these scripts in Ubuntu Linux. From automating routine tasks to initializing services, the potential use cases are virtually limitless.

• The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an indispensable toolset for developers, which comprises compilers for various programming languages. This guide is geared towards demonstrating how to install GCC on Linux Mint 21 or the older supported Linux Mint 20 release.

• The landscape of image viewers for Linux is teeming with an assortment of choices. Ristretto stands tall among them, catering predominantly to users who prize speed and simplicity. This nifty tool is known for its lightweight nature and rapid performance, making it an ideal selection for Fedora Linux users.

• In the previous article, we have demonstrated how to install Veritas Cluster Server 8.0 in RHEL 8.8. This is continuation of the previous article.

• Do you need to view the open file limit for a Linux process? Try “limits” files in /proc/${PID} directory with its process ID (PID) or ulimit command or prlimit command to see the open file limit for a Linux process.

• Back in 2019, when I had a Pixel 2, I compared the Google Android camera app’s RAW (specifically DNG) files against its JPGs, and was left with little temptation to save the DNG files. I just repeated the experiment with my brand-new Pixel 7 and the results are more complicated.

• Multiple reviewers have pointed out that the P7 has a really damn good camera/app combo and, well yeah, no point me pounding that drum. It’s scary good.

• During the incident, Let’s Encrypt issued a number of TLS certificates where the precertificate and issued certificate weren’t identical. These TLS certificates didn’t pass browser CT checking and also implied a technical compliance failure that made them improper as TLS certificates (see Andrew Ayer’s explanation). As explained by Let’s Encrypt, one factor in this failure is that Let’s Encrypt constructed the issued certificate completely separately from the precertificate, rather than by taking the precertificate and manipulating it. The reason for this decision is, well, let me quote Let’s Encrypt directly (without the embedded links, sorry, see the comment itself: [...]

• I wrote this on 7 December 2018 but never published it until today. The following are the “key network questions” which “would answer many key questions about [a] network, without having to access a third party log repository. This data is derived from mining Zeek log data as it is created, rather than storing and querying Zeek logs in a third party repository.”

• The uniq command is a useful tool in Linux that helps you find unique lines of text inside a file or from standard output. It filters out all repeated lines, leaving only the unique lines of text in an output. This can be helpful when you’re working with large text files and need to quickly identify distinct lines of text and easily eliminate duplicates to streamline your text-processing tasks.

• The aim of this guide is to help you discover the different applications and choices offered by the uniq command, with the goal of incorporating it into your daily toolset.

• Organizing your home directory or even system can be particularly hard if you have the habit of downloading all kinds of stuff from the internet using your download managers.

• Often you may find you have downloaded the same mp3, pdf, and epub (and all kinds of other file extensions) and copied it to different directories. This may cause your directories to become cluttered with all kinds of useless duplicated stuff.

• In Debian, managing user privileges and administrative access is crucial for maintaining a secure and efficient system. By granting users the ability to execute administrative tasks without relying on the root account, you can enhance security, control access to sensitive operations, and maintain an audit trail of user activity. This detailed guide walks you through the steps to add, delete, and grant sudo privileges to users in Debian Linux.

• In Linux, the “/opt” directory is a standard directory in the file system hierarchy. It is typically used for installing optional or add-on software packages that are not part of the core operating system.

• As you might have guessed by now, “opt” stands for “optional.”

• Debian 10, better known as Buster, is an LTS version of the distro that will receive support till 2024.

• In this brief guide, we will walk you through downloading and installing the distro on your machine.

Games

• Remember Wipe-out? If you were alive and gaming in the 90s, this was a legendary title.

• Ready for another free game? Yes another! Ancient Enemy is the latest giveaway on GOG and it should work just fine on Linux with Wine / Proton.

• Kingdom Eighties is at least the 4th game in the series and it’s a bit of a standalone spin-off, with a rather different setting compared with previous entries. While the previous games were all set hundreds of years ago, this brings things up a bit more recent since it’s set in the 80s.

• Need more games for your Steam Deck or desktop Linux with Proton? Paper Trail looks very sweet and the developers are clearly big Steam Deck fans.

• The King’s Campaign from Reverie World Studios and Bad Logic Studios is releasing July 13th, and they’ve recently detailed work to improve it on Steam Deck.

• Gears 5 from The Coalition and Xbox Game Studios recently had an update that should make it work better on Steam Deck with Proton. Really nice to see another Xbox published title look to improve things!

• Volcanoids is pretty great and a game I keep going back to with each major update, and it looks like they’re going to sucker me right in again. A co-op survival game that replaces a static base with a big moving drill-ship – what’s not to love?

Distributions and Operating Systems

• The anticipated release of Bodhi Linux 7.0 is now closer to the final release. This lightweight and elegant distribution, known for its Ubuntu LTS base, aims to enhance the user experience with improved performance and security features. After months of dedicated development, the Bodhi Linux team is excited to gather valuable feedback and suggestions from users to refine and polish the final product.

Gentoo Family

• Another week of GSOC. Days run really fast. This again was a productive week. The first half was  towards understanding the unit tests for portage and the second half was towards solving a bug.

• Tests are one of the most important components of any software. Portage being no exception  employs unit tests for testing. Till now, I did not bother to look into the tests. We have a bash script runtests. I run it and I watch for things to succeed. Sam felt that I needed to have a bit more  understanding of the tests, for various reasons. So, I started looking into the tests.

• [...]

• From day one, I wanted to work on the dependency resolution system of portage. But it is obviously not a simple job and so Sam advised to get familiar with the algorithm by fixing bugs related to that. Sam chose me a bug to fix and it is 528836. The problem is that two conflicting packages are pulled in when only should have been pulled. The bug was not reproduceable with the current state of portage and the ebuild repository. There were a few hurdles along the way, but finally, we were able to reproduce the bug by restoring portage and the ebuild repository to 2017.

• We are not yet sure if the bug is due to portage or some misconfiguration in the ebuild repository.  We will continue to work on it and I will keep you posted.

• The next week’s plan will be to write tests for this bug to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We  will also try to squeeze in a few more quality of life changes if time permits.

• Hello! This is a combined report for both week 3 and 4.

• In these two weeks I’ve fixed several issues in LLVM libc, but quite a lot of time has also been spent purely learning things. I will start by going over what I’ve learned, and then refer to related issues.

*

• To start with I have gotten quite comfortable with CVise, how to use it and general tricks about writing the test script for determining whether the issue is still there after reducing a source file. For example, I had an issue about a the print format macro PRId64 not being defined on LLVM libc

• This caused an error that looked like this: [...]

Fedora Family / IBM

• The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as ‘freeloaders’, using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don’t mind all the open source developers, Linux kernel contributors, and software devs who used CentOS for testing and building their software. Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn’t build and don’t own.

• I almost wrote off Red Hat back then. It felt like someone stuck a knife in my back.

• This past week, Red Hat took that knife and twisted it hard, when they published this blog post. Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away.

• After Saturday’s post I wanted to take a step back and talk about some history that many have either forgotten or weren’t familiar with in the first place. Some may remember it quite well, but haven’t quite gotten the lessons right the first time around. Let’s talk about Red Hat Linux and the early days of Red Hat Enterprise Linux before it was even called that.

• My Linux journey started with Slackware Linux in 1996, completely by accident. By that I mean that I had never heard of Linux or sought it out, until I stumbled on a 4-CD set and decided I wanted to learn more. I was studying English lit and Communications/Journalism at a state school in the northeast corner of Missouri. Nobody I knew cared much about computers beyond games or running Word to write their papers. It was literally years before I met someone else who was an avid Linux user.

• It was a surprise to learn, a bit later, that Slackware was a Linux and that many distributions existed. As I learned more and more about Linux, though, something became clear: Red Hat was the popular choice. Red Hat was the Coca-Cola of Linux, even before its IPO in mid-1999.

• Last year, during HPE Discover 2022, Red Hat Enterprise Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. announced a plan to combine services on HPE GreenLake, including OpenShift, Ansible and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• For those who use Linux for gaming, streaming, and content creation, this distribution could be a great fit.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Early access to LXD graphical user interface is now available.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 793 for the week of June 18 – 24, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

• We are happy to announce that Netplan 0.106.1 is available for download on Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur and Debian testing.

• This release includes some improvements in our documentation and CI infrastructure and a number of bug fixes.

• Kubuntu is the official KDE spin of the Ubuntu classic desktop that gives users a fantastic operating system and proves how rock solid the KDE Plasma UI is.

Devices/Embedded

• Koodo Reader is an all-in-one ebook reader that can help you better manage and study your ebooks.

• Arduino UNO R4 Minima and WiFi boards powered by a Renesas RA4M1 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller and equipped with an optional ESP32-S3 WiFI & BLE module are now available for respectively $20 (18 Euros) and $27.50 (25 Euros) on the Arduino store. The Arduino UNO R4 Renesas RA4M1 board was initially unveiled during Arduino Day with most details, but not everything as the company had hidden one part of the board which we now know is for a 12×8 LED matrix and a Qwiic connector for expansion present on the UNO R4 WiFi only.

• Chipmaker Arduino s.r.l. today introduced a new microcontroller board, the Uno R4, that offers significantly higher performance than its previous-generation hardware. Switzerland-based Arduino is a major maker of microcontroller boards. Those are miniature computers that take the form of a compact chip measuring a few inches across.

• Olimex ESP32-C6-EVB is an open-source hardware board based on an ESP32-C6 wireless module with 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth LE, and Zigbee connectivity, and offering four relays and four opto-isolated inputs, as well as further expansion via two UEXT connector. So far we had a limited amount of third-party ESP32-C6 boards, with Espressif making their own module and development board available in January, and 01Space launching a tiny ESP32-C6 board in April, a time when a lot of software work was still needed.  But the ESP-IDF v5.1 with ESP32-C6 support is nearing release (now RC2), and the Olimex board may mark the start of greater availability of ESP32-C6 hardware with stable/usable firmware.

Open Hardware/Modding

• In The MagPi #129 we introduced libcamera-still which allows us to capture still images. But it also has many more options controlling how it captures images, and the file formats and available image encoders. We’ll discover some of those in this tutorial. For now, we shall continue to assume that you have your keyboard and a monitor plugged directly into your Raspberry Pi.

• Mark June 26th as an auspicious day, because Arduino has announced their new UNO R4! SparkFun is pleased to help bring you these two new boards, as well as a new kit built to support these two new boards, the UNO R4 WiFi and the UNO R4 Minima. The Arduino UNO R4 is the next generation of Arduino, and each version packed with new features and improvements that make it the most powerful and versatile Arduino yet.

• The fourth version of the iconic, beloved UNO adds a whole new dimension to the world of DIY and making revolutionized by the simple 8-bit microcontroller over a decade ago. Take your maker potential to new heights: UNO R4 has a speedy 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M4 and offers a 16-fold increase in memory, as well as more connectors and connectivity options than ever – in two variants: UNO R4 Minima and UNO R4 WiFi.

• AgonLight2 is small Z80 computer with plenty of RAM (512KB) and running BBC Basic. Beside the fancy graphics and easy to use it also has GPIO port available which allows different peripherals to be connected. We already blogged about the AgonLight2-Proto board which allows you to experiment and add external circuits to AgonLight2, now we present our next AgonLight2 board: AgonLight2-HvIO.

• The Arduino UNO R4 Wi-Fi is the newest addition to the UNO board lineup, combining a 32-bit Renesas microcontroller with the ESP32-S3 Wi-Fi module. This board introduces advanced features, expanded memory and it’s compatible with most shields and accessories designed for the UNO form-factor.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• You may have heard the news, the governments of Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana will remove mobile roaming charges for their citizens starting in August.

• We asked the Postal and Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) how true this was and they confirmed that they are working towards that goal but it might not be ironed out by August as is being reported.

• So, now that we know it is happening, what is roaming and why should we care?

• Google’s new $1,800 gadget proves that phones with bendable screens are something people might want. Now they just need to get cheaper.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 3 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list encoded into the software. Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.

• While motivated by a legitimate concern, this move to block websites directly within the browser would be disastrous for the open internet and disproportionate to the goals of the legal proposal – fighting fraud. It will also set a worrying precedent and create technical capabilities that other regimes will leverage for far more nefarious purposes. Leveraging existing malware and phishing protection offerings rather than replacing them with government provided, device level block-lists is a far better route to achieve the goals of the legislation.

Education

• APNIC participated in the 35th Annual FIRST Conference, held from 4 to 9 June in Montreal, Canada.

• This workshop series addresses journalists, activists, artists, researchers, citizen investigators, and others conducting research and investigations in the public interest.

• Registrations are open for the Virtual School on Internet Governance. The format of this online course is a massive open online course (MOOC), with the goal of networking with peers across the world.

Programming/Development

• Alloy is a formal specification language I use a lot. In Alloy, ≈all data is either an atom or a relation between atoms.

• [...]

• Unlike most languages, Alloy has two notions of subtyping: a type (or “signature”) can be extended, which is exclusive, or they can be in, which are stackable. In this example, the source can be generic, a database, or a file, but not all three.

• Typing out a lot of other people’s code – that I did. Whenever I follow a book that contains code and it’s a book I truly want to learn from, I type out the code while following along. No copy & pasting. I’ve done it this way ever since I started programming and learning from books. Not sure exactly why, maybe because copy & pasting always had a smell to it? Maybe it felt like skipping the actual work when you don’t type it out?

• When I read Zed Shaw’s Learn C The Hard Way years and years ago, I got confirmation that I’m not alone with this. In the introduction Zed sets some rules for following along: [...]

• I was complaining the other day about the ergonomics of ClojureScript and realized an interesting thing.

• It cannot be overstated just how successful GCC has been since its introduction over 35 years ago.

• What I’m interested in exploring today is if we can build all of these frontends for OpenBSD. If we can, I would like to explore their usability on OpenBSD.

• I am using amd64 but I believe arm64 and perhaps even riscv64 would also be OK, but alas I don’t have any RISC-V machines and my paltry Raspberry Pi 3B+ isn’t all that healthy anymore.

Perl / Raku

• Text files, images, videos and anything you can store in a computer have a thing in common: all of them are stored as binary data. We make sense of what a sequence of binary data refers to purely based on how we interpret the binary data, and whether it conforms to what we expect it to be. If some chunk of binary data holds any meaning, we can tell it apart from another chunk by using a binary format specification, which describes how some binary data ought to be interpreted. For example, in the dBASE specification the first 32 bytes make up the header, which contains information such as date of last update, number of records in the database file, etc. Every binary file format you can imagine has a specification, and when such a specification isn’t available to someone interested on decoding a binary file format, then they must reverse engineer it.

• Out of the blue Felix Knorr has written a very nice blog post about how the Raku Programming Language is pretty damn cool for them, describing Raku as a language that mixes Bash and Python (/r/rakulang, HackerNews, lobste.rs comments).

Python

• In Python, the Seaborn “swarmplot()” method is used to draw a non-overlapping scatter graph that includes one of the variables as a categorical variable.

• In Python, the “string.rindex()” method is used to get the highest index of the specified substring inside the input string.

• In Python, regular expressions, in operator, find(), and index() methods are pre-defined techniques that are used to find substrings from the large string.

R

• Welcome to the world of data visualization in R! In this blog post, we will explore the abline() function, a versatile tool that allows you to add straight lines to your plots effortlessly. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced R programmer, mastering abline() will empower you to create more informative and visually appealing graphs. So, let’s dive in!

• Mustafa Cavus, organizer of the Eskisehir R User Group, in Turkey, discussed the diverse and thriving R community in Eskisehir. He shared the details of a 4-day event hosted by the group, which covered beginner-level talks and advanced topics for expert users. He also shared some useful techniques for hosting successful events.

• Release 0.6.32 of the digest package arrived at CRAN this morning, and will be uploaded to Debian as

• digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3, and crc32c algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a mature and widely-used (with 58.3 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects.

Leftovers

• Jim Crown, an executive and philanthropist who recently announced an effort to rally other Chicago business leaders to help fight violent crime, has died in a car crash on a racing track in Colorado. He was 70. The Pitkin County coroner’s office says Crown, a grandson of industrialist Henry Crown and the CEO of Henry Crown & Co., was involved in a single-vehicle accident Sunday at the Aspen Motorsports Park in Woody Creek. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that financier Lester Crown said his son’s race car hit a wall while going around a curve. Earlier this month, Jim Crown said he and other Chicago corporate leaders were committed to finding jobs for as many as 10,000 young men.

• In the past, government agencies have typically taken on the cost of such searches, even when rich people pay thousands of dollars for questionable activities.

• We had pancakes for dinner last night, with a side of baked bacon. When one cooks, good manners dictate you make enough for everyone in the house. On a related note, the rats can be bribed to go home. Okay, mostly bribed.

• The facility’s new baggage scanners are only used at a “very limited” number of European and US airports, Finland’s airport operator says.

• Finland’s natural resource management firm Metsähallitus is now using the gender-neutral term “Everyone’s Rights” in its communications in an effort to use more inclusive language.

Science

• But… by whom?

• More efficient computing and recyclable rigid plastics are two projects to be undertaken by a new materials research science and engineering center at U-M.

• Lavender haze?

• Philosopher 1, neurologist 0.

• Star death in spectacular fashion.

• An obesity expert explains what that means.

• The earlier it’s started, the better.

• This could be how life is born.

Education

• Journalist and academic Nagihan Akarsel was assassinated on 4 October 2022 in Sulaymaniyah. She was renowned for her tireless dedication to feminist scholarship and women’s journalism. She was a member of the Jineoloji Research Center and Jineology Magazine Editor.

• The project Akarsel was working on, the Kurdish Women’s Library, Archive and Research Center, was opened in Sulaymaniyah on Saturday.

• The hallmark of great wisdom is not what you know, but what you know and can put to use. The globe is full of learned idiots, unable or incapable of following the wisdom they have accumulated. There’s no prize for a closet full of axioms or insights, if you leave it all in there, and venture philosophically naked into the world.

• More test results, this time for 13-year-olds, show declines in U.S. reading and math skills – underscoring the uphill battle toward post-pandemic academic recovery.

• The eight-year-old was allegedly beaten and left for dead by a trainer.

• The US Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a case asking whether a North Carolina charter school mandating girls wear skirts should be held to the same standard as public schools, which does not permit such a practice.

• The President of China compared moral education to buttons on clothes. The girls’ buttons were wrong from the start, but they learned the more valuable lessons that two systems can impart.

Hardware

• Broadcom’s claim to fame before it became a chip and software conglomerate was that it was able to integrate multiple radios on a single chip. This integration led to energy and cost savings and propelled the adoption of multi-radio technologies into more devices. After all, if a hardware designer could easily put Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in their device, why not add both?

• The need for data centers has soared, fueled by remote work and the growth of high-speed streaming. But finding the necessary land and energy can be a challenge.

• We all might dream of having an industrial robot arm at our disposal, complete with working controller that doesn’t need constant maintenance and replacement parts, and which is able to help us with other projects with only a minimum of coding or instruction. That’s a pipe dream for most of us, as without a large space, sufficient funding, or unlimited amounts of troubleshooting time we’ll almost always have to look for something smaller and simpler. Perhaps something even as small as this pocket-sized robotic arm.

• A team at The University of Tokyo is developing a series of technologies rooted in the idea of “jizai”.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Hong Kong airport’s downtown check-in service is set to resume following a three-year-long Covid-induced suspension. “The In-town Check-in (ITCI) service at Hong Kong and Kowloon stations is jointly provided by airline operators /ground handling entities,” an MTRC spokesperson told HKFP on Tuesday.

• Back in May, I wrote about how Dr. Rashid Buttar, one of the first antivax quacks whom I ever encountered after starting my blog, had “died suddenly” at age 57. Given that the entire antivax conspiracy theory that it is COVID-19 vaccines that are causing waves of younger (and, of course, healthy) people to “die suddenly” of clots, cardiac arrest, and the like, Dr. Buttar’s unfortunate demise presented them with a problem. He had never taken a COVID-19 vaccine of any sort, either mRNA-based variety made by Pfizer and Moderna that is the usual focus of the “died suddenly” conspiracy theory or other kinds. So how could Dr. Buttar’s admirers explain his unexpected sudden demise if such unexpected and sudden demises almost never happened before COVID-19 vaccines were unleashed upon the world? (Their narrative.)

• The Nicomachean Ethics is an unexampled work by a paragon of classical thought. How does it hold up as a self-help manual?

• Some of us jokingly refer to our hobbies as “mad science,” but [Justin] from The Thought Emporium could be one Igor away from living up to the jibe. The latest project to come out of the YouTube channel, video also after the break, outlines a map for creating an artificial organism in their new lab. The purpose is to test how far a citizen scientist can push the boundary of bioengineering. The stated goal is to create a swimming entity with a skeleton. The Thought Emporium also has a neuron project in the works, hinting at a potential crossover.

• In the Gulf Arab states, where preparing and serving Arabic coffee to guests is sometimes a daylong ritual, the right pot can carry a luxury price tag. It’s a price many Saudis are happy to pay.

• Mexico is mostly self-sufficient in white corn production, but the tariff could affect the trade dispute with the U.S. over GM corn.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 26 Jun 2023 The Commission proposes to mobilise additional EU funding for EU farmers impacted by adverse climatic events, high input costs, and diverse market and trade related issues.

• A Republican-sponsored resolution would authorize the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against foreigners involved in fentanyl trafficking.

• Forest fires in Canada left Montreal blanketed with smog on Sunday, giving it the worst air quality of any major city in the world, according to a pollution monitor.

• The first outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) for domestic pigs was detected in Latvia this year in the Stradi parish of Gulbene municipality. All 100 pigs in the holding will be slaughtered, the Food and Veterinary Service (PVD) said on June 27.

• An end to the Black Sea grains deal would hit the Horn of Africa hard, aid officials said on Monday, warning that another hike in food prices would add to the tens of millions of people facing hunger.

• A record 110 tonnes of cocaine were seized in the Belgian port of Antwerp in 2022. The city is now the main gateway into Europe for the drug, which largely comes from South America concealed in fruit shipments. Faced with this trafficking epidemic, Belgian authorities have recruited almost 100 extra customs officers and invested in new scanning equipment. The illegal trade has resulted in ballooning cocaine consumption in Antwerp and security problems beyond the region. Belgium’s justice system is overwhelmed – even the justice minister himself has received kidnapping threats from suspected traffickers. Our correspondent reports.

• Five cases of malaria have been detected in the U.S. in the last two months. That marks the first time there’s been local spread in in 20 years. A health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says four cases were detected in Florida and one in Texas. Infected people can suffer fever, chills and flu-like illness. They also can develop severe complications and die if they are not treated. Health officials are warning doctors — especially in southern states — to be aware of the possibility of infection and think about how to access the first-line treatment for severe malaria in the United States.

• Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs announced an executive order on Friday that protects abortion rights within the state one year after the Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization decision. Abortion is generally legal before 15 weeks in Arizona under a law passed by former Governor Doug Ducey.

• Fourteen crucial chemotherapies are currently in shortage. Why does this keep happening?

• Soaring costs are also having a detrimental effect on shoppers’ sleep and diet

• A severe shortage of care workers is complicating efforts to address the problem.

• Centuries of overgrazing and deforestation have eliminated most native flora in Ireland, creating what ecologists see as a man-made desert in places. A growing “rewilding” push aims to change that.

• Farmland prices have almost doubled over the past three years, according to new data from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences.

• The average per-hectare price for broadacre farmland rose by 93 per cent from 2020 to 2023.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The Taiwanese device manufacturer published an advisory last week to warn customers that its NAS326, NAS540 and NAS542 devices, specifically ones running firmware version 5.21 and earlier, are impacted by a critical vulnerability.

• The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-27992, can be exploited for arbitrary command injection without authentication.

• SALTWATER is a backdoor that has been used in the exploitation of the Barracuda 0-day vulnerability CVE-2023-2868. It is a module for the Barracuda SMTP daemon called bsmtpd. The malware hooked the recv, send, and close functions using an open-source hooking library called funchook. The following functionalities are implemented: execute arbitrary commands, download and upload files, proxy functionality, and tunneling functionality.

• The problem, in extremely broad strokes, is this. Years ago, the web used to be a place where individuals made things. They made homepages, forums, and mailing lists, and a small bit of money with it. Then companies decided they could do things better. They created slick and feature-rich platforms and threw their doors open for anyone to join. They put boxes in front of us, and we filled those boxes with text and images, and people came to see the content of those boxes. The companies chased scale, because once enough people gather anywhere, there’s usually a way to make money off them. But AI changes these assumptions.

• Given money and compute, AI systems — particularly the generative models currently in vogue — scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. Their output can potentially overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information, and entertainment. But the quality of these systems is often poor, and they’re built in a way that is parasitical on the web today. These models are trained on strata of data laid down during the last web-age, which they recreate imperfectly. Companies scrape information from the open web and refine it into machine-generated content that’s cheap to generate but less reliable. This product then competes for attention with the platforms and people that came before them. Sites and users are reckoning with these changes, trying to decide how to adapt and if they even can.

• YouTube just released its annual Culture & Trends Report with some interesting takeaways on fandom, generative AI, and the death of monoculture.

• Inside ‘The Comm,’ a series of Discord servers where kids post about their life of crime.

• YouTube is testing a new AI-powered tool to help make dubbing videos in non-English languages even easier—and at no cost.  YouTube teamed up with dubbing service Aloud, which is in turn a part of Google’s in-house incubator Area 120.

Windows TCO

• In the complaint [PDF] – first filed in New York state but later moved to the Southern District of New York – David M Schlachter asks for $750,000 in damages and $1 million in punitive damages. He alleges that he lost access to his Microsoft business email account in May, but that the software giant failed to extricate him from a verification loop that was preventing him from getting into his account, which he says he pays for via a monthly subscription.

• The problem started, according to the attorney’s complaint, when he tried to log in on May 10, and the system asked him for his “2 step verification.”

• Schlachter describes being caught in an “error code 500121″ loop and provides a screenshot in the complaint.

• - Operators should reach out to vendors to see if software packages include MS SQL. - Operators should ensure they have network monitoring in place, watch for xp_cmdshell alerts and, out of an abundance of caution, audit their MS SQL Servers.

• [...]

• Mandiant’s post appeared to be keen to associate COSMICENERGY with Russia, while Dragos, which has a policy of not associating threats with any country, kept to its own code.

• Back in 2020, the Israeli security firm Claroty claimed to have fixed a flaw in the Siemens Digsi 4 protocol, saying that the protocol was the same as that exploited by the malware known as Industroyer in 2016.

• Industroyer is claimed to have been used to attack the power grid in Ukraine on 17 December 2016. There is, however, no unanimity in this claim; as iTWire reported in 2017, researchers from Slovakian security firm ESET were cautious about concluding that Industroyer was really used in the Ukraine attack.

• All that ESET committed to at the time was that their researchers had found malware — it was they who coined the name Industroyer — which could have done exactly what happened to the power grid in Ukraine. The capital, Kiev, was without power for an hour. A previous attack in 2015, also in December, knocked out the power in about 250,000 houses in various regions of Ukraine.

Linux Foundation

• The Yocto Project, an open source collaborative initiative helping developers create custom Linux-based systems, has evolved significantly over the last 12 years to meet the requirements of its community. The project continues to lead in build system technology with field advances in build reproducibility, software license management, SBOM compliance and binary artifact reuse. In an effort to support the community, The Yocto Project announced the first Long Term Support (LTS) release in October 2020. Today, we are delighted to announce that we are expanding the LTS release and extending the lifecycle from 2 to 4 years as standard.

Security

• We had a DDoS hit our DNS servers a few weeks ago, so I thought I would write up what happened for anyone interested.

• First, a bit of background: Why do we ( Fedora Infrastructure ) run DNS servers? Well, we run them to provide users resolution of our domains. It’s worth noting that we don’t provide recursive servers that will answer queries for any domain, but just authoritative servers for the domains we manage. Doing this allows us to quickly update things (which we depend on to take proxy servers in and out of rotation) as well as make sure we have dnssec working and other configuration. If we were setting this up these days, we might very well go with a trusted 3rd party provider, but we predate those really existing and for the most part it’s worked fine for us. We have a number of DNS servers, 2 of them in our main IAD2 datacenter and the rest spread out to various other places we have presence.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 26 Jun 2023 The Commission welcomes the political agreement reached between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on the Regulation proposed by the Commission laying down measures for a high common level of cybersecurity at the institutions.

• Hackers gained personal information about thousands of people who applied to become pilots at American and Southwest airlines. The airlines say there was a breach at a Texas company called Pilot Credentials, which the airlines used in their recruitment efforts. About 5,700 applicants to American and 3,000 at Southwest are affected. The airlines say hackers gained access in late April to names and birth dates, as well as Social Security, passport and driver and pilot license numbers of applicants for pilot and cadet jobs. The airlines notified those people last week.

• The personal information of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines pilots was exposed in a data breach at a third-party services provider.

• Fortinet releases patches for a critical FortiNAC vulnerability leading to remote code execution without authentication.

• The latest BIND updates address three high-severity, remotely exploitable vulnerabilities leading to denial-of-service (DoS).

• Two recent events are once again bringing the internet’s foundational Domain Name System into the news, and not in a good way. The first event involving the DNS last week was a warning from the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency issued on Friday for version 9 of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, or BIND.

• UK national Joseph James O’Connor was sentenced to five years in a US prison for hacking into Twitter accounts and stealing cryptocurrency.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• “Our call centres and branches are experiencing high volumes of customer inquiries at the moment due to these service issues and there may be longer than usual wait times.

• “We will provide real-time information here on our service updates page as we know more. Please check back here to stay updated.

• “We thank customers for their patience and ask our customers to please be mindful of the wellbeing of our people as they continue to serve our customers.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• The ByteDance-owned company is the world’s fastest growing social media app. But in a letter on Thursday, TikTok admitted that certain creator data is stored on servers in China. The news follows public scrutiny into TikTok and its data storage practices, as well as its Chinese ownership and business laws that require CCP stewardship for Chinese owned companies.

• Mumbai police have also issued a public warning about the malware.

• This bill comes after a years-long concerted effort by Maine activists and concerned citizens who have been fighting for accountability in how MIAC collects, shares, and utilizes information about Mainers. In June 2021, a bill that would have defunded the fusion center entirely passed 88-54 out of the Maine House of Representatives before being defeated in the state senate.

• Fusion centers are yet another unnecessary cog in the surveillance state—and one that serves the intrusive function of coordinating surveillance activities and sharing information between federal law enforcement, the national security surveillance apparatus, and local and state police, with little to no oversight. Across the United States, there are at least 78 fusion centers that were formed by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the War on Terror and the rise of post-9/11 mass surveillance. Since their creation, fusion centers have been hammered by politicians, academics, and civil society groups for their ineffectiveness, dysfunction, mission creep, and unregulated tendency to veer into policing political views. As scholar Brendan McQuade wrote in his book Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision:

• “On paper, fusion centers have the potential to organize dramatic surveillance powers. In practice however, what happens at fusion centers is circumscribed by the politics of law enforcement. The tremendous resources being invested in counterterrorism and the formation of interagency intelligence centers are complicated by organization complexity and jurisdictional rivalries. The result is not a revolutionary shift in policing but the creation of uneven, conflictive, and often dysfunctional intelligence-sharing systems.”

• Last December, we attended and reported on oral argument before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a case in which the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) argued that TSA checkpoint staff have absolute immunity from lawsuits for assault, even sexual assault or rape, committed against travelers they are “screening”.

• We’re pleased to report that today the 9th Circuit panel of judges rejected the TSA’s claim of impunity. The three judges found unanimously that the Federal Tort Clams Act (FTCA) allows lawsuits against the TSA for damages caused by checkpoint staff who assault travelers. The 9th Circuit thus joins every other Circuit Court of Appeals (the 3rd, 4th, and 8th) to have addressed this issue in a published opinion.

• The case decided today by the 9th Circuit will now return to the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas for much-belated consideration of the claim against the TSA and its officers. The precedent set by today’s decision will apply throughout the 9th Circuit, the largest of the Federal judicial circuits, including all of the states on the West Coast.

• Open letter to the UK government from over 80 national and international civil society organisations, academics and cyberexperts raising concerns about the serious threat to the security of private and encrypted messaging posed by the Online Safety Bill.

Defence/Aggression

• A court in Kyiv has sentenced the former head of the regional council in the southern region of Kherson, Vladyslav Manher, and a former aide to a regional lawmaker, Oleksiy Levin, to 10 years in prison each in the high-profile case of a deadly attack on anti-corruption activist Kateryna Handzyuk.

• One of the highlights in Japan’s three national security documents released on 16 December 2022—the national security strategy, the national defence strategy and the defence build-up plan—is the commitment to increase defence spending.

• For 30 years, the Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered from communal violence, armed conflict and insecurity. Diverse actors have tried to stop it but conflict has intensified, particularly in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika. Regular armed forces and non-state armed groups have been involved in the violence

• “…among the rescued were 19 unaccompanied minors…”

• A former first lady and the son of an ex-president – both social democrats – will go head-to-head in Guatemala’s August runoff after no candidate secured enough votes to win Sunday’s first round of presidential elections.

• There have been many reports from Sudan that fighters with the militia group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been taking over people’s homes, using them as bases as they continue their battles with the Sudanese armed forces. Videos have been circulating online documenting the RSF brutalising civilians in their own homes, beating them or taking them hostage. We spoke to someone who narrowly survived being taken hostage by a group of RSF fighters in his own home.

• When the last U.S. troops left the Philippines in the early 1990s, the prevailing assumption was that an extremely close military relationship between Washington and Manila would be just another relic of the Cold War.

• Taiwan residents have been warned against “accidentally stepping into a minefield” and being arrested under Hong Kong’s national security law while travelling to the city by the self-ruled island’s authorities.

• The Batanes chain could be key terrain should China invade Taiwan, analysts say.

• Bangkok, for the first time, extradited Thai citizens to show its commitment to ending human smuggling.

• The M23 still controls a large part of the Masisi and Rutshuru territories as well as the movement of people and goods in those areas.

• Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu said the security of the Asia-Pacific region was facing challenges.

• New Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov, whose government assumed power three weeks ago, has pledged increased support and better security for the country’s defense industry following a second serious fire in less than a year at a private arms company.

• “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Friedrich Nietzsche We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

• The outcome of Guatemala’s presidential runoff election this August could reshape the geopolitical map of the Western Hemisphere.

• The bulk carrier Nyon is the latest ship to have been attacked by West African pirates after being boarded by four armed men on 22 June.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 26 Jun 2023 Today, the Commission announced the results of the 2022 calls for proposals under the European Defence Fund (EDF) amounting to €832 million of EU funding in support of 41 joint defence research and development projects across the EU.

• More than a thousand Afghan civilians have been killed in bombings and other violence since foreign forces left and the Taliban took over in 2021, according to a report by the UN’s mission to the country released on June 27.

• It is easy to understand what African rulers see in the mercenary group Wagner. Its fighters can be deployed quickly. It brings sophisticated arms with it and can apply force speedily and ruthlessly.

• In eastern DRC, women activists are helping survivors of sexual violence.

• Anderson Lee Aldrich, the gunman who killed five during an attack on an LGBTQIA+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, pleaded guilty in court Monday to five counts of murder, 46 counts of attempted murder and no contest to two bias-motivated crimes.

• The shooter who killed five people and wounded 17 others at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to November’s attack on Monday.

• Driving the news: Anderson Lee Aldrich received five consecutive life sentences in a state court without the possibility of parole for the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs and was sentenced to a further 2,208 years in prison over attempted murder charges.

• This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.

• Exhausted, I grudgingly open my eyes and pat my blanket as I awkwardly search for my phone. I open Twitter to see that my account has blown up. As I search my DMs to read the comments of support, a warm calming feeling covers me. My eyes well up in tears as I read one comment in particular. “We are better with you here.”

• The U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran. In response, Iran reduced its nuclear commitments under the agreement.

• The European Council has approved a ninth package of sanctions on an additional seven individuals it says are responsible for “serious human rights violations” in Iran.

• The recording of Trump attacking Mark Milley with a stolen Iran document includes damning details not included in the indictment.

• House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is threatening to open an impeachment inquiry into Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Justice Department’s investigation into Hunter Biden.

• Why it matters: It’s a significant escalation of tensions as congressional Republicans rail against what they argue is a “sweetheart” plea deal for the president’s son.

• A recording of a meeting in 2021 in which the former president described a sensitive document in front of him appears to contradict his recent assertion that the material was just news clippings.

• CNN released exclusive audio on Monday seeming to show former President Trump discussing sensitive documents during a 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey.

• Why it matters: The two-minute audio recording could hold key evidence in Trump’s indictment over his handling of classified information after he left the White House.

• The author discusses “Valley of the Moon,” his story from the latest issue of the magazine.

• The nations have moved to resolve issues tied to Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean peninsula.

• The move follows a spike in the price of both in Myanmar.

• Russian authorities have arrested Tajik activist Junaidullo Khudoyorov at Tajikistan’s request, his brother told RFE/RL on June 25, adding that the activist may face illegal incarceration and arbitrary prosecution if extradited to Dushanbe.

• A court in Russia’s Far East has decided to transfer to a less restrictive psychiatric clinic a Yakut shaman who became known across the country for his attempts to march to Moscow to drive President Vladimir Putin out of the Kremlin.

• “Election officials have been under siege,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “They’ve been threatened, abused and harassed for nearly three years now and it’s getting worse.”

• The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin in May warning that perceptions of the next presidential race could mobilize individuals to commit violence.

• “We’ve observed multiple cyber groups in action,” said Nariman Gharib, a U.K.-based Iranian opposition activist and independent cyber espionage investigator. “One focuses on human rights, unmasking the darker side of the regime, while another specializes in cyber operations, exposing the regime’s cyber tactics. There’s also a group dedicated to sabotage. They execute their task with efficiency in executing disruptive attacks and [GhyamSarnegouni] is that group.”

• Indeed, the latest hack claimed by GhyamSarnegouni involving highly sensitive government documents takes the role that hackers and hacktivists are playing in Iran’s internal politics to a new level, experts say, given the depth of information accessed, which touches on aspects of not only the office of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, and correspondence related to multiple sensitive agencies.

War in Ukraine

• The decision on permanent deployment of a German brigade in Lithuania is not a change of Berlin’s position, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said in Lithuania on Monday.

• Germany is ready to permanently deploy a brigade in Lithuania, says German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, who is visiting Vilnius on Monday.

• The current NATO multinational battle group deployed in the Lithuanian town of Rukla has around 1,600 personnel, approximately half of whom are German.

• Germany plans to station an additional 4,000 soldiers in NATO ally Lithuania to help secure the alliance’s eastern flank, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on June 26.

• Independent Russian publication Verstka reports that Belarus has started building camps for Wagner Group fighters. The camps will be located in the Mogilev region of Belarus, approximately 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the border with Ukraine, and will be able to accommodate 8,000 fighters.

• Ukraine is hopeful Australia’s latest round of military support isn’t the last, with armoured vehicles still high on the wish list.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Australia would provide an additional $110 million in assistance with a package including 70 military vehicles, ammunition and $10m for a humanitarian fund.

• Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin remains under investigation by the Federal Security Service (FSB) on suspicion of organizing an armed mutiny, the Kommersant newspaper reported

• Dictatorships seem stable up until the moment they no longer are. After the failed uprising of the Wagner troops, Vladimir Putin’s system is looking wobbly. Suddenly, a Russia without him is conceivable.

• Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin quickly brought his uprising to an end on Sunday. But not before inflicting a deep humiliation on Russian President Vladimir Putin. There will almost certainly be consequences.

• On June 24, when Wagner forces were still en route to Moscow, the news publication Fontanka wrote that the authorities raided founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s office in St. Petersburg (reportedly located at the Trezzini Hotel). Reporters say officials recovered the following items:

• An Embraer Legacy 600 business jet with the tail number RA-02795, which is believed to belong to Yevgeny Prigozhin, landed at the Machulishchy Air Base near Minsk at 7:40 a.m. local time, according to the independent monitoring group Belaruski Hajun.

• Before Saturday’s uprising in Russia unraveled, Western intelligence thought the Wagner Group might be able to reach Moscow – and believed that Putin had left the city. Hours later, Western politicians were wondering how to exploit the weakness shown by the Russian leader.

• The president confirmed the agreement reached on Saturday under which Wagner members who wish to do so can leave for Belarus, return home, or re-enlist in the Russian army.

• Atlantic writers explain how to make sense of the weekend’s events.

• In standing by Russia’s embattled strongman, Chinese leader Xi Jinping signals just how high a priority he has made of undermining the power of the West.

• The rebellion by armed mercenaries lasted less than 24 hours and was the gravest threat yet to Putin’s authority.

• This weekend, the country saw someone other than Putin act politically and—even more important—wield force.

• The former TV anchorwoman warned Russian state media against questioning her claim to the Wagner helm.

• While the situation has calmed down in Russia, Finland’s Border Guard is closely monitoring any developments.

• Finland’s border with Russia is calm and both civil and state agencies are closely monitoring the situation, according to foreign affairs minister Elina Valtonen.

• If you have a bead on what transpired in Russia from Friday through Saturday, you’re ahead of most folks.

• Whatever the Wagner uprising says about Vladimir Putin’s hold on the Kremlin, it is also the story of a mercurial mercenary leader’s growing desperation.

• A member of Russia’s elite marched on his rivals, with a mercenary army at his back, suggesting that Vladimir V. Putin’s grip over a coalition of powerful figures may be more brittle than it appeared.

• As part of our roundtable discussion, we speak with political science professor Kimberly Marten, expert on the Wagner Group, who says this weekend’s mutiny by the mercenary group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is part of a game of “smoke and mirrors” between Russian power players. She details Prigozhin’s long history as “Putin’s servant” and says Wagner “is not really a private military group,” but has a long history of being contracted by the Russian state. “We’re just at the beginning of what’s going to happen, but neither Prighozin nor Putin came out looking very good,” says Marten.

• The last tumultuous days bring to mind an old Russian anecdote: What’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist knows that however bad things are in Russia, they can always get worse. Soon after the news broke, a Russian friend e-mailed me, “What I’m most concerned about is Russia in chaos with nukes, and someone worse than Putin coming to power.”

• The Kremlin had said an investigation into Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s role in the brief uprising against Russia’s military command was dropped, but Russian news media reports say the case remains open.

• Investigators from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) are still investigating Yevgeny Prigozhin in connection with the felony case for “organizing an armed rebellion” that the agency opened against him on June 23, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

• On the evening of June 24, Wagner Group forces ended their ‘justice march‘ towards Moscow. According to official statements from the Russian and Belarusian authorities, this was the result of negotiations between Yevgeny Prigozhin and Alexander Lukashenko — a figure nobody expected to serve as a key player in the rebellion’s outcome. Journalists from the independent Belarusian outlet Zerkalo spent the following day watching state television to see how their country’s propaganda news channels would cover the perplexing saga. Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of their report.

• Russian politician and former presidential aide Vladislav Surkov has urged the Russian authorities not to pass a law that would allow the state to regulate private military companies (PMCs) like Wagner Group and other similar formations, saying it would be better for the authorities to steer clear of any association with private armies.

• Vladimir Putin made his second emergency national address in as many days tonight. He denounced the armed rebellion led by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, but did not mention the group’s leader by name. Putin said the insurrection’s leaders “betrayed their country, their people, and those who were drawn into the crime. They lied to them and drove them to death under gunfire to shoot at their own.” The president also said that he believes many members of Wagner Group are patriots and that he plans to honor his promise to allow rebellion participants to sign contracts with Russia’s regular Armed Forces, go home to their families, or “leave for Belarus,” where Prigozhin will reportedly be exiled. Meduza is sharing a full translation of Putin’s speech.

• On June 24, Wagner Group entered Rostov-on-Don and occupied the center of the city, apparently without a fight. Some residents headed to the center cheering for the mercenaries, while others tried to leave the city, creating backups on the highways and at the train station. Local police were conspicuously absent from the city while Wagner troops took selfies with residents and Prigozhin met with Russian officials at the Southern Military District headquarters. Local law enforcement later said they’d been told to wait for orders from Moscow. Here’s what we know so far about the short-lived occupation.

• He survived a brief revolt, but the cracks in his system are now evident.

• Wagner Group recruiting centers have resumed operations in Novosibirsk.

• On Monday afternoon, Yevgeny Prigozhin released his first public statement since he called off Wagner Group’s march towards Moscow on Saturday. In English, Meduza has summarized the main points from the 11-minute audio clip.

• Vladimir Putin will make a “series of important announcements” later tonight, says Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

• For the second time in two days, Vladimir Putin made an emergency national address, denouncing the armed rebellion staged by members of the Wagner mercenary group. Without mentioning the aborted rebellion’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin said the insurrection’s leaders “betrayed their country, their people, and those who were drawn into the crime. They lied to them and drove them to death under gunfire to shoot at their own.”

• We speak with Nina Khrushcheva in Moscow after an extraordinary weekend that saw the most significant challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership since the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago. On Friday, the head of the powerful Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, accused the Russian military of attacking his forces and began a march on Moscow — but the revolt quickly fizzled out. By Saturday, Wagner troops had returned to base, and Prigozhin had agreed to exile in Belarus, while Putin denounced the episode as “treason.” Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, says that while Putin has reasserted his control over the state for now, the episode “didn’t really show him in the strong light.”

• “This is serious,” tweeted Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, a little before 5 pm on Friday. He was talking about the dramatic events unfolding in Russia that day, as private mercenary forces loyal to Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin rolled out of Ukraine and headed toward Moscow on a so-called “March for Justice.” Prigozhin’s bombastic pronouncements and the rapid progress of his troops proved to be so serious, in fact, that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military commanders were deploying tanks to defend the capital city of one of the world’s two foremost nuclear powers.

• Vladimir Putin styles himself as a student of history, frequently justifying his actions with lectures on the lessons and legacies of the past. He defended his invasion of Ukraine not just with references to recent disputes Russia had with its neighbor but also claims of proprietorship dating back to the time of the czars, and complaints about the alleged national betrayals of Vladimir Lenin and Nikita Khrushchev. When faced with a mutiny of mercenaries led by the Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, Putin instinctively started talking about the Russian Revolution of 1917.

• The border infrastructure between Latvia and Russia will need improvements, Interior Minister Māris Kučinskis (United List) said in an interview with Latvian Radio on June 27.

• Due to the unpredictable development of Russian internal political events, the acceptance of all types of visa applications from Russian citizens has been suspended from June 26, 2023, at Latvian diplomatic and consular missions abroad, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced Monday.

• A leading US expert on Russia advocates outreach to Putin’s Russian opponents and encouraging emigration from Russia. The best way to encourage Russians to leave is to allow more of them to come to the West.

• Plus: Florida drag law ruled unconstitutional, Meta cancels Canadian news posts, and more…

• In response to the recent Wagner mercenary group’s aborted mutiny in Russia, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry has once again reminded of its recommendations for Lithuanian citizens not to travel to Russia and Belarus.

• The Lithuanian State Defence Council agreed to devote more intelligence capabilities to assessing the situation in Belarus, President Gitanas Nausėda said on Sunday.

• Nearly sixteen months into the war, ordinary Russians harbor substantial and most likely enduring anger and resentment toward the West. In the later decades of the Soviet Union, the government largely failed to convince Soviet citizens of an implacably hostile West and, in the 1980s, the barriers between the Soviet Union and the West were weakening.

• Russian private military contractor Wagner Group has been in business with the Kremlin for almost a decade now. As the mercenary unit became more prominent on the battleground in Ukraine, so did its chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s criticism of Russia’s military leadership.

• President Joe Biden says the United States and NATO had no involvement in the short-lived insurrection in Russia by the Wagner mercenary force. Biden says it’s “too early” to assess the impact on the war in neighboring Ukraine. Biden said Monday that he spoke to allies over the weekend and they are all in sync in working to ensure that they give Russian President Vladimir Putin “no excuse to blame this on the West.” Biden said the action by the Wagner Group “was part of a struggle within the Russian system.” Biden also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the weekend and plans to do so again soon.

• National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is arguably the key person driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

• As the world was distracted by an episode of Russian drama complete with the betrayal of a once-loyal servant, armed mutiny and panic at the court of a tsar, Ukraine was being shelled.

• Many analysts believe Ukraine must liberate Crimea in order to win the war, but it could be possible to render the peninsula strategically irrelevant for Russia without launching a major land campaign, writes John B. Barranco.

• Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk offers his five-step vision for the decisive defeat of Russia’s Ukraine invasion and a genuinely sustainable peace in Eastern Europe.

• Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group is preparing to hand over heavy military equipment to the country’s regular armed forces, the defence ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. The mercenary group launched a failed rebellion on Saturday that brought armed troops within 200 km of Moscow.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the nation about Wagner’s aborted rebellion on Monday, thanking soldiers and mercenaries for avoiding bloodshed and stating that Wagner mutineers could either join the army or “go to Belarus”. Earlier, the mercenary group’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin defended his actions in an audio statement, claiming he did not aim to overthrow the leadership of Russia but to “avoid the destruction of Wagner”.

• Thirty-three runners are carrying a flag from the frontline in eastern Ukraine to the NATO summit in Vilnius.

• Thousands of volunteers from dozens of nations have joined Ukraine’s military since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, but only a handful are from Japan – a country that has adhered to the principle of national pacifism since the end of World War II. But Yuya Motomura, a 45-year-old mahjong parlour manager, is among the few heading to the front lines.

• The Hermitage Amsterdam art museum has been renamed one year after it severed ties with Russia’s State Hermitage museum over Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was upbeat about his military’s progress during his daily video address late on June 26, calling it a “happy day.”

• NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is visiting Lithuania, says the alliance will support Ukraine for as long as necessary. “We are sending a message to Putin that he will not win the war,” he told LRT TV.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on June 26 handed out awards and posed for selfies with troops who are along the front line in Ukraine, saying it was an honor to be with them and shake their hands.

• The Bulgarian government has approved a new military aid package for Ukraine, the press service of the Council of Ministers announced on June 26.

• Jailed anti-Kremlin politician Ilya Yashin, addressing recent comments by Czech President Petr Pavel that Russians in the West should be monitored, said any such attempt would only play into President Vladimir Putin’s hands.

• The United States plans to announce as soon as June 27 a new military aid package for Ukraine worth up to $500 million, keeping up U.S. resolve to help Ukraine against Russia as Moscow deals with an abortive mutiny by some of its soldiers.

• The Australian government will provide a new $73.5 million package to Ukraine, including 70 military vehicles to defend against Russia’s invasion, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on June 26.

• In an address to the nation on June 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Wagner mercenary fighters who took part in the revolt over the weekend can either join the Russian Army or go to Belarus.

• This is the second time the EU has agreed to increase the EPF since the start of the conflict in Ukraine.

• Without Russia’s single most effective fighting force, Putin will have to rely wholly on the country’s weakened military.

• Biden says it’s “too early” to assess the impact on the war in neighboring Ukraine.

• The Wagner mercenary revolt could cause cracks in Russian leadership and demoralize Russian troops.

• A popular Russian commander bursts the lies that justified the invasion of Ukraine. Despite his failed mutiny and exile, his truth-telling may ricochet in the war trenches.

• The Russian president made brief public remarks on Monday, his first since the end of the short-lived rebellion by the Wagner mercenary group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

• Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s unexpected offensive into the Russian interior may breathe new life into the counteroffensive across the border in Ukraine.

• The big picture: Ukraine’s forces have made only gradual progress so far in attacking well-defended Russian positions in the south and east of Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries, meanwhile, took control of the major Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and seemed to face little resistance as they covered three-quarters of the roughly 600 miles from there to Moscow.

• On the one hand: The short-lived uprising in Russia doesn’t appear to have left any major gaps for Ukraine to exploit. Wagner forces were not playing a major role in Russia’s defenses, and the mutiny appears to have ended without Russian units being pulled out of Ukraine to help repel it, analysts say.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin declared in a televised address on Monday that the organizers of a “rebellion” over the weekend would be “brought to justice,” though he did not name Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin directly.

• Why it matters: The Kremlin announced this weekend that Prigozhin would be allowed to go into exile in neighboring Belarus as part of a deal to end his push toward Moscow, but Putin’s comments suggest the oligarch-turned-warlord could still be punished.

• The Wagner Group’s short-lived rebellion over the weekend was not intended to overthrow the Russian government, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed in his first remarks since the uprising ended.

• As we continue to look at the fallout of this weekend’s mutiny in Russia by Wagner mercenary troops, we go to Kyiv to speak with Ukrainian political scientist and historian Denis Pilash, who notes that despite infighting inside Russia, the military still carried out devastating strikes across Ukraine. He adds that the Wagner revolt still shattered an illusion of consensus inside Russia. “The myth of civility — one of the pillars of Putin’s regime — has eroded completely,” says Pilash.

• President Vladimir V. Putin spoke angrily of those who want “Russians to fight each other,” but his former ally, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, said the mutiny he led was not a coup attempt.

• The Ukrainian Army is encountering an array of challenges that has complicated the early stages of its counteroffensive, especially the large swaths of minefields. But its leaders are urging patience, insisting the main push is yet to come.

• After Vladimir Putin’s brief speech to the nation on Monday night, he held a meeting with the heads of Russia’s security agencies to discuss the aftermath of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s weekend rebellion. The outlet Verstka has noted that according to the Kremlin’s official site, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev was not one of the attendees.

• Western nations agreed on a conference call not to let President Vladimir Putin of Russia blame them for the short-lived uprising, the American president said.

• Putin may emerge weakened, strengthened or vindictive.

• The White House concluded that it had to get ahead of any argument by Vladimir V. Putin that the uprising was serving the interests of Russia’s adversaries.

Environment

• The UK government’s advisory body on tackling climate change on Tuesday voiced concern at the slow pace of the transition to clean energy, warning time was running out to meet its goals.

• Overproduction in the industry destroyed wetland habitats and caused significant environmental damage.

• The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal district court in Oregon to put an end to the landmark constitutional youth climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States after the court reactivated the litigation earlier this month.

• The case, which was originally filed in 2015 and alleges constitutional violations stemming from the federal government’s ongoing support of climate-destabilizing fossil fuels, had nearly made it to trial twice before. But after the Obama administration failed in the government’s initial bid to get the case dismissed, unprecedented legal tactics deployed by the Trump administration derailed the proceedings and a federal appeals court eventually dismissed the case in January 2020.

• Australia can supply the world with minerals critical to curbing climate change, balanced with the need to mine sustainably and trade fairly.

• More than 3500 delegates have gathered in Brisbane for the World Mining Congress of scientists, researchers, company executives and diplomats being held in Australia for the first time.

• Mandatory classes will end on June 29 in the interests of students’ health, as extreme temperatures continue to affect the state.

Energy/Transportation

• Moving forward, the debate will be about “net zero via renewables” vs “net zero via nuclear”, without ever questioning whether we need to go “net zero” at all, or if it’s even physically possible to do so.

• Until the announcement of his selection as a Nobel laureate, Dr. Goodenough was relatively unknown beyond scientific and academic circles and the commercial titans who exploited his work. He achieved his laboratory breakthrough in 1980 at the University of Oxford, where he created a battery that has populated the planet with smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, lifesaving medical devices like cardiac defibrillators, and clean, quiet plug-in vehicles, including many Teslas, that can be driven on long trips, lessen the impact of climate change and might someday replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks.

• Lithium-ion battery co-inventor Dr John Goodenough has died at the age of 100, his employer, the University of Texas at Austin, announced on Monday, describing him as “a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor”.

• John Goodenough, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work developing the lithium-ion battery that transformed technology with rechargeable power for devices ranging from mobile phones, computers, and pacemakers to electric cars, has died at 100, the University of Texas says.

• Goodenough died on Sunday at an assisted living facility in Austin, the university announced.

• Drivers in New York City will be charged extra in tolls to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street as part of a long-stalled congestion pricing plan. The first-in-the-nation plan is part of an effort to reduce congestion, improve air quality, and raise funds for the city’s public transit system. It will bring New York City in line with places like London and Singapore, which have implemented similar programs. A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday that the congestion pricing plan cleared its final federal hurdle after getting approved by the Federal Highway Administration. The program is expected to begin in spring of 2024.

• “As the seizure and forfeiture of cryptocurrency has become commonplace, the USMS has sought to create a contract with private industry, just as it does with nearly all other asset types,” a spokesperson for the DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture Division told FedScoop. “Currently there is no private company that manages USMS’s cryptocurrency portfolio.”

• Rajabi said electricity consumption in the Iranian month of Khordad, ending on June 21, increased by 7 percent, and that a large part of the hike was the result of digital-mining activities that involved high-powered computers.

• French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday he would double state funding for upgrading transport in the country’s troubled second city Marseille, where 23 have been killed in drug gang turf wars so far this year.

• He helped New York City avoid bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and later served as lieutenant governor.

• The United States has a nascent offshore wind strategy that requires approving new projects and catalyzing investment into the sector. Two major issues are constraining US offshore wind deployment: challenges in securing permits and cost inflation. How fast the US offshore wind market matures will depend in part on whether the country quickly learns from others who have more developed offshore wind sectors.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday ordered a temporary halt to the construction of a wind turbine project that became the subject of controversy and conflict between the government and the Druze population in the Golan Heights.

• co2mon.nz currently uses monitors based on Oliver Seiler’s open source design which I am personally building. This post describes my exploration of how to achieve production of a CO2 monitor that could enable the growth of co2mon.nz.

• Primarily I want to design a CO2 monitor which allows the majority of the production process to be outsourced. In particular, the PCB should be able to be assembled in an automated fashion (PCBA).

• More than half of financially vulnerable Australians cannot afford to pay utility bills on time, new Salvation Army research has found, as cost of living pressures continue to mount nationwide.

• The survey found 64 per cent of those polled did not have enough money to pay bills on time, while 51 per cent had hardship plans with energy providers.

• Companies and governments are vying for enough critical minerals to accelerate the world’s energy transformation but community trust is stuck in the slow lane.

• The industry is at a defining moment, Minerals Council of Australia CEO Tania Constable told an international forum in Brisbane.

• Seeing airplanes fly in formation is an exciting experience at something like an air show, where demonstrations of a pilot’s skill and aircraft technology are on full display. But there are other reasons for aircraft to fly in formation as well. [Peter] has been exploring the idea that formation flight can also improve efficiency, and has been looking specifically at things like formation flight of UAVs or drones with this flight planning algorithm.

Wildlife/Nature

• Deforestation rates appear “headed in the wrong direction” despite international pledges to halt destruction, according to an annual assessment.

• Canada is facing the most treacherous wildfire season in its history, and as the smoky skies blanketing Ottawa this past weekend have proven, it’s only going to intensify as the summer continues. Little fires everywhere have manifested into big catastrophes throughout the country, and the effects have been felt in the United States. But those most affected by the wildfires—primarily Indigenous people—are being completely overlooked as some Canadian politicians seek to downplay not only the current devastation but also the likelihood of future extreme weather events caused by a warming planet.

• Florida is on high alert for snails. The state government designated part of southeastern Broward county a “quarantine and treatment area” after a giant African land snail, a highly invasive species of mollusk, was spotted north of Miami earlier this month.

• Earth lost an area of carbon-absorbing rainforest larger than Switzerland or the Netherlands in 2022, most of it destroyed to make way for cattle and commodity crops, an analysis of satellite data released Tuesday revealed.

Over/population

• Now, its most profound threat is water, in its many terrible incarnations: drought, deluge, cyclones, saltwater. All are aggravated to varying degrees by climate change, and all are forcing millions of people to do whatever they can to keep their heads above it.

• South Koreans used to be referred to as one to two years older because time spent in the womb is counted.

Finance

• With student loan interests set to resume in the coming months, borrowers will need to prepare to make payments.

• State of play: It’s been more than three years since millions of borrowers have had to make payments on their student loans. Servicers may have changed in that time and portal logins may have been forgotten.

• The Tajik Prosecutor-General’s Office said on June 26 that it had launched a probe into the suspected abduction of Shuhrat Ismatulloev, the deputy chairman of one of the Central Asian nation’s leading banks.

• The Australian share market has bounced back from four straight days of losses, driven by iron ore miners and the big four banks.

• At lunchtime AEST on Tuesday, the benchmark S&P/ASX200 index was up 46.5 points, or 0.66 per cent, to 7,125.2, while the broader All Ordinaries was up 42.2 points, or 0.58 per cent, to 7,306.3.

• How the city’s next mayor could push better transit, more affordable housing and climate action

• As the leader of Toronto, once considered an affordable model city, Ms. Chow will be tested by the same issues confronting other hubs trying to recover from the pandemic.

• China’s economic growth is expected to reach the annual target of around 5 per cent, with a higher second quarter, Premier Li Qiang has told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin.

• As factory output slows amid weak external and domestic demand, Li said: “We will launch more practical and effective measures in expanding the potential of domestic demand, activating market vitality, promoting coordinated development… and promoting high-level opening to the outside world.”

• PRODUCTIVITY in Finland will increase at an average annual rate of 1.1 per cent for the next two decades, forecasts Etla Economic Research.

• Economic and productivity growth could both exceed the forecast due to the positive effects of investments in the green transition and developments such as the recent accession to Nato and the re-shoring of manufacturing operations to Europe and the US.

• The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (Etla) pointed to Finland’s Nato membership, a stable business climate and a push to bring manufacturing back to the West may help counter Finland’s predicted slow growth.

• Whoever is in the White House in 2025 will quickly face a series of legislative deadlines with impossible price tags: $3.6 trillion in tax cuts and $350 billion in Affordable Care Act subsidies are expiring — and that’s after the debt limit will need to be addressed again.

• Why it matters: The deadlines could force political horse-trading of epic proportions. Alternatively, gridlock or alarm over the nation’s debt may lead to Americans seeing higher taxes and fewer benefits.

• Workforce shortages continue to plague manufacturing businesses, even as the slowing economy and the influx of migrants take the edge off the competitive labour market.

• The monthly business survey by Westpac and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry released on Tuesday revealed ongoing tightness in the labour market.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• On 24 June 2022, the former CEO of AFRINIC, Eddy Kayihura, announced a temporary moderation of the Community Discuss mailing list, mentioning the AFRINIC Code of Conduct issues. The temporary moderation lasted for three days.

• Then, on 27 June 2002, Eddy Kayihura sent an email to explain that because the mailing list was getting out control with members violing the Code of Conduct, the Community Discuss mailing list will be moderated until further notice. He mentioned that all emails will be archived on https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/community-discuss-unmoderated. Only emails that are approved by the moderators will be received by the recipients of the mailing list and the emails will be archived at https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/community-discuss. Eddy Kayihura mentioned that the moderation will be carried out based on advice from the Governance Committee.

• There was no mentioned about the Board of Directors being involved in the decision to moderated the mailing list. It appeared solely the former CEO’s decision to do so.

• On 4 November 2022, Eddy Kayihura’s contract with AFRINIC expired and with the Board of Directors not having quorum, his contract could not be renewed.

• The affected nations were previously counted in the group of 169 countries eligible for visa-free visits, as outlined in Presidential Regulation Number 21 of 2016, along with 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) nations.

• The only countries exempted from this rule are those 10 nations from the ASEAN, i.e. Brunei, Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Vietnam.

• To sustain the ongoing recovery against short-term headwinds and boost inclusive, productive, and sustainable development in the long term, governments cannot, and should not, act alone. In this context, the Atlantic Council is providing timelier-than-ever insights to highlight the critical role of the private sector in supporting growth and improving lives in Latin America and the Caribbean.

• The National Assembly of Cambodia amended on Friday their election laws to impose criminal liability on citizens who disrupt the election in  July. Deputy Prime Minister of Cambodia Samdech Krolahom Sar Kheng stated that the amendment stipulates individuals must vote in order to be eligible to run for office.

• Pakistan’s army has sacked three senior officers for failing to prevent violent attacks on military assets by supporter of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who were protesting his arrest, the army’s spokesman said on June 26.

• They were among 18 officers disciplined for their handling of protests by supporters of Imran Khan, a former prime minister, sending a message that support for him would not be tolerated in the ranks.

• 49% of registered voters have a negative view of Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to 32% with a positive view, per a new NBC News poll.

• We already knew that Twitter had stopped paying its cloud computing bills from Google and Amazon as Elon continues his “pursuit of profitability” that he himself destroyed in Twitter (remember, Twitter was profitable in 16 of the previous 20 quarters before Elon took over at a much higher run rate, before Elon drove away somewhere around half of the advertising revenue of the company while simultaneously saddling it with massive debt). I may not be a massively successful business man, but I’m having trouble with the business logic of driving away half of revenue for no clear reason, while increasing the company’s expenses through unnecessary debt financing, combined with trying to make up the difference by breaching contracts left and right.

• Elon Musk sure has a way of fucking over anyone who trusts him. A bunch of current and former employees, including some who agreed to stick around at Twitter with the explicit promise that they would receive the bonuses they were owed, are suing Twitter saying that those bonuses were never given (story found via Jon Brodkin over at Ars).

• The Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) released partial election results Monday from the country’s national elections on Saturday. The results tallied a large lead by incumbent President Julius Maada Bio over his main challenger, Dr. Samura Kamara. Multiple election observers expressed concerns on Sunday about the integrity of Sierra Leone’s national elections.

• The order by Judge Aileen Cannon means the identities of some or all of the Justice Department’s 84 potential witnesses in the case against the former president could become public.

• By Ralph Nader / Nader.org Most heads of giant corporations are drunk with their own power. These corporate CEOs push the envelope in ways that harm defenseless people. They believe they can get away with anything, and they do, with few exceptions.

• Full disclosure time, Techdirt peeps! I am a resident of this state. And, as such, I am painfully familiar with the governor’s pro-Trump performativeness, as well as the state legislature’s general disdain for the people it serves.

• Voters seemed to embrace Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s approach to the economy and tough stance on migration, and were less concerned about revelations of spying on the opposition.

• The tragedy of the Adriana comes amid renewed anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe.

• The remark at a World Economic Forum meeting came amid growing momentum in Europe to reduce dependency on China.

• “China stands ready to work with all parties to support multilateralism and free trade,” Li said.

• A political science professor says the results show that people’s faith in the government’s longevity is not very strong.

• The election victory was a breakthrough for the Alternative for Germany party: It gained a majority in a district, albeit a tiny one, and will have bureaucratic authority over it.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The study was carried out by Farhan Samanani, from University College London and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity; Susannah Crockford from the University of Exeter; Daniel M. Knight, from the University of St. Andrews; Craig Stensrud from the University of British Columbia; Girish Daswani from the University of Toronto; Marc Tuters, from the University of Amsterdam and visual artist Io Chaviara, from the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences of Athens.

• The research team examined the use of irony across varied groups, including Black American abolitionist literature; contemporary BlackLivesMatter activism in Ghana; the so-called alt-right; the veneration of the Greek socialist party PASOK; and the gun-loving, millenarian Boogaloo Bois.

• The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians. Jordan has argued that content removals urged by some in the government have suppressed legitimate theories on vaccine risks and the covid-19 origins as well as news stories wrongly suspected of being part of foreign disinformation campaigns.

• The letters are the latest effort by a House subcommittee set up in January to investigate how the federal government, working with social media companies, has allegedly been “weaponized” to silence conservative and right-wing voices. So far, the committee’s investigations have amplified a variety of dubious, outright false and highly misleading Republican grievances with law enforcement, many of them espoused by former President Donald Trump. Committee members have cited supposed abuses that include the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, its investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the Biden administration’s purported use of executive powers to shut down conservative viewpoints on social media.

• Yes, a committee of the United States House of Representatives is working in tandem with The Stupidest Man On The Internet (copyright Wonkette). That is where the Republican Party is today. It’s not only working the sewers, it’s setting up housekeeping there.

• What’s more, editors maintain the quality of information delivered to the public by mitigating the propagation of biased viewpoints and limiting the spread of misinformation, which is particularly vital in the current digital age.

• AI is highly unreliable

Censorship/Free Speech

• Book bans and how to fight them are a major focus of this year’s ALA conference. The conference is being held in Chicago. On June 12, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker signed into law a bill that he says will make Illinois the first state in the nation to outlaw book bans.

• Illinois public libraries that restrict or ban materials because of “partisan or doctrinal” disapproval will be ineligible for state funding as of Jan. 1, 2024, when the new law goes into effect.

• “We are not saying that every book should be in every single library,” said Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who is also the state librarian and was the driving force behind the legislation. “What this law does is it says, let’s trust our experience and education of our librarians to decide what books should be in circulation.”

• Huang Zhihong, who goes by the username Poinsettia, is suffering from deteriorating mental health amid constant surveillance by police in the southern province of Guangdong, said her friend Wang Zhihua, who now lives in New York and who recently spoke with her via video call.

• In the video, Huang is dressed in black and performs a graceful “hand dance” to a mournful background track.

• A couple of times during the dance, her hands form the hand signals – often used by street vendors and in regular conversation – to denote the numbers 6 and 4, a reference to the date of the June 4, 1989, massacre of unarmed civilians by the People’s Liberation Army with machine guns and tanks.

• Hong Kong’s film censorship law does not apply to government screenings, the city’s censorship authority has said after local media reported that a police publicity film was screened at police headquarters despite not having gone through the official vetting process.

• “It has been difficult for the programme to invite guests in the face of the free-fall changes of the political situation, red lines, and perilous situation after the Umbrella and anti-extradition bill movements,” the post read.

• “Recently, [Citizens’ Radio’s] bank account was even ‘locked,’ and we can only afford rent until August, after that we could not continue.”

• Lawyer Irina Gak has left Russia for an unspecified country after her client, anti-war activist Anatoly Beryozikov, died while in custody, the OVD-Info rights group said on June 26. [...]

• More than 16 months into a war the Kremlin anticipated would be over in roughly three days, authorities in Russia continue to come up with ‘innovative’ ideas to limit the severity of the damage inflicted on its own entertainment sector. The latest plan is to start unblocking thousands of pirate sites but only if they comply with a set of stringent conditions they already ignore.

• Ever since his ‘Twitter Files’ revelations exposed censorship collusion between social media giants and the FBI-led Foreign Influence Task Force, the journalist has found himself under IRS investigation.

• Over 160 people have been detained during recent Pride parades as anti-LGBT rhetoric by officials surges.

• Xie Wenfei is sentenced on public order charges after a long incommunicado detention

• Hong Kong will “comply” with mainland China’s “patriotic education law,” Chief Executive John Lee has said after a bill aimed at helping citizens enhance their sense of national identity was tabled to China’s legislature.

• State security police warn Ji Feng’s friends not to meet with him

• Hong Kong national security police have arrested a 63-year-old man over alleged “seditious messages,” including calls for the city’s independence, on social media.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The union’s most recent return, for 2022, puts it at 24,528 members, of whom 20,722 pay. 2020 was the only year during that decade in which total membership did not decrease.

• The city paper committed a team of ten to a year of revamping its print infrastructure.

• International journalist group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has published a new report which it says identifies loopholes and weakness in the law in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with regard to journalists’ access to official information.

• Chung Pui-kuen, former chief editor of Stand News, and Patrick Lam, former acting editor of the outlet, stand accused of conspiring to publish seditious publications along with the outlet’s parent company, Best Pencil Limited.

• Reuters reported allegations of Bilal Erdoğan’s involvement in discussions regarding potential bribery with an international company.

• The California legislature is competing with states like Florida and Texas to see who can pass laws that will be more devastating to the Internet. California’s latest entry into this Internet death-spiral is the California Journalism Protection Act (CJPA, AB 886). CJPA has passed the California Assembly and is pending in the California Senate.

• “What I have done is to practice my profession in order to protect the rights of an innocent child,” the journalist has said.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Cherokee people and their tribal government, Teehee believes, should have always had a seat at the table where these decisions were made: The very treaty that saw her ancestors forced off their lands almost 200 years ago also promised Cherokee people a non-voting delegate seat in the US House. Now, the Cherokee Nation and Teehee — who was appointed to the job by the tribe’s leaders — are mounting an aggressive campaign to see that promise fulfilled.

• The Dalai Lama is widely regarded by Chinese leaders as a separatist intent on splitting Tibet, a formerly independent nation that was invaded and incorporated into China by force in 1950, from Beijing’s control.

• The Dalai Lama, who now lives in exile in India, says only that he seeks a greater autonomy for Tibet as a part of China, with guaranteed protections for Tibet’s language, culture and religion.

• Some landowners, however, are resisting the project due to threats of eminent domain being utilized. These landowners have argued that they have the right to deny Summit Carbon Solutions surveyors access to their property under both the South Dakota and U.S. constitutions. The basis of the argument is that a carbon pipeline is not a “common carrier” pipeline.

• A group of Amazon delivery drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California went on strike for a second time on Saturday to demand that Amazon recognize and bargain with their union. The picket lines then extended to a second Amazon warehouse in San Bernardino on Sunday, making this the first multi-day strike at an Amazon facility in the U.S., and the first such strike to extend its reach, according to a Teamsters spokesperson.

• Çiğdem Mater makes a contribution to Rebekka Endler’s book, “The Patriarchy of Things: On a world unsuitable for women,” from the most populated women’s prison in Turkey.

• Peg Yorkin, who donated $10 million to the feminist foundation she co-founded and pushed to bring the most common method of abortion to the United States, has died. Yorkin died Sunday night after a long illness, her daughter Nicole Yorkin said. Peg Yorkin was 96. Yorkin was chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization she founded with Eleanor Smeal in 1987. The national group is dedicated to women’s equality, reproductive health and non-violence. In 1991, Yorkin gave $10 million to the foundation, with millions of it earmarked toward efforts to bring the French abortion pill mifepristone into the U.S. She also worked to get more women elected to state legislatures and Congress.

• Saturday marked the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that saw the conservative majority overturn Roe v. Wade and end the federal right to abortion. Abortion rights activists rallied in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the country to demand access to reproductive healthcare. In the year since the ruling, more than a dozen states have passed new abortion bans, and about 25 million women of childbearing age now live under tighter restrictions than before the court intervened. However, thanks to grassroots organizing efforts and underground abortion networks, “Abortions are still happening in every state in the country every day,” says Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation. Littlefield discusses how abortion activists are working to continue providing care, as well as what to expect from the anti-abortion movement as it seeks to further restrict reproductive rights.

• In 1994, when I was 10, my most reliable babysitter—a hexagonal television set with two antennae—introduced me to the concept of abortion. My cousins and I sat on the couch—our legs, clammy in the Miami heat, stuck to the plastic-covered furniture. There we watched the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. Even then, I understood the 1960s American class markers: the summer holiday resort, the pleasant cabins around a pristine lake, the employees serving the wealthy guests. But the scene I remember most was when Penny, a dance instructor, sat on the kitchen floor at night in tears and realized she had gotten into “trouble.”1

• “Trouble for what?” I wondered. My older cousins explained: Penny was pregnant, and an unplanned birth was the worst tragedy. It might have been less of a problem for the wealthy guests, but for someone like Penny, it could be life-threatening. The film is set in 1963, a decade before Roe v. Wade. Penny can’t afford to terminate the pregnancy or hold Robbie, the womanizer from Yale who impregnated her, accountable. She has to rely on the goodwill of her childhood friend and coworker, Johnny Castle, and a guest, Frances. Penny finally gets an abortion, but viewers learn that the doctor botched the procedure, and she barely survives.2

• My name is Marie Bergum. When I turned 18, my dad and stepmom got a guardianship over me. I didn’t want to have a guardianship, I wanted to keep learning and making my own choices. But my parents said that because I have an intellectual disability, I had to be in a guardianship, or a conservatorship as it’s called in California. The court agreed, and took away my rights.

• In the guardianship, I couldn’t make my own choices. My guardians stopped me from doing a lot of things I wanted. It was like being behind bars. I felt trapped.

• The alleged victims had accepted jobs posted on Facebook to work as “assistants in online gaming”.

• A mayor in the southern province of Hatay clarified that an official letter declaring makeshift tents, containers, and prefabricated structures in public spaces illegal is not as strict as it seems.

• Shortly before his detention, the journalist told bianet that “I did not praise Öcalan but cricitized the AKP’s hypocrisy.”

• Convicted to 11 years and 9 months of imprisonment, Zennure Şahinkaya’s son should have been released on probation in October 2022. His right was denied on grounds of disciplinary punishment, and he cannot continue his graduate or postgraduate studies that he is entitled to.

• JURIST staffer Pitasanna Shanmugathas attended the rally described in this dispatch. On Saturday, over 100 individuals assembled in Portland, Maine, to show their solidarity with the rights of migrant workers. The Milk with Dignity campaign, advocating for farm workers in New England, called upon Hannaford Supermarkets, an American retail chain, to take action.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Washington’s response began in 2021, when Congress approved more than $42 billion in grants for states to expand high-speed internet to areas without access, as part of $65 billion in broadband spending. Two years later, president Joe Biden’s administration has announced funding for the project.

• “High-speed internet is no longer a luxury—it is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school, access health care, and to stay connected with family and friends,” the White House said in a press statement on Monday (June 26).

• By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up. And though it varies by state, counting the taxes, fees and surcharges that you have paid every month (many of these fees are actually revenues to the company or taxes on the company that you paid), it comes to about $4000-$5000.00 per household from 1992-2014, and that’s the low number.

• You were also charged about nine times to wire the schools and libraries via state and federal plans designed to help the phone and cable companies.

• amaysim chief Renee Garner said: “At amaysim we strive to provide affordable mobile freedom to our customers. Given the current economic climate, we are thrilled to be able to bring even more value to our customers by way of fast 5G and the elevated experience benefits of this latest network tech.

• “Most 5G market offerings are currently out of reach for many Aussies because they come with a premium price tag. We’ve ditched that constraint by offering exceptional 5G network access on our Unlimited plans $30 and above, at no extra cost.

• “As always our customers are our number one priority and 5G access is just another reason why we think every Aussie should make a break for amaysim and take advantage of affordable mobile plans with generous data inclusions and a whole lot of customer love.”

• “We acknowledge receipt this morning of correspondence from Dee Forbes confirming her resignation as Director General with immediate effect. We note the contents of her accompanying statement. Representatives of the RTÉ Board and Executive will be attending the Joint Oireachtas Committee and Public Accounts Committee this week.”

• RTÉ is acutely aware that the issues that were communicated by the RTÉ Board in its statement last Thursday have raised profound questions. The public, public representatives and RTÉ staff want to know what happened, how it happened and who is accountable.

• During a White House event on Monday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris provided important details about the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, a $42.5-billion federal-funding initiative in support of affordable high-speed internet access.

• The BEAD program, administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in the Department of Commerce, is designed to fund deployment of robust broadband infrastructure in largely rural areas of the country that don’t have adequate high-speed internet service.

• I have been working on developing a framework for my quarterly update series. The objective of this series is to provide valuable insights to our community, ensuring they are well-informed about our activities, progress, and decision-making processes. Through these reports, we aim to foster transparency, engagement, and continuous improvement.

• Here’s a brief overview of what you can expect from each report.

• Telecel lives, miraculously, and today we get to peek into its inner workings and see how it is staving off death. It’s been years since we last saw positive news regarding the smallest mobile network operator in the country and yet it still stands.

• President Biden announced plans to spend $42 billion on the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program by 2030.

• We’ve noted several times how European telecom giants have somehow convinced European policymakers that technology giants like Netflix and Google should annually give them billions of dollars… for no coherent reason.

• Guest Post: How to mitigate and prevent DNS rebinding attacks.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Netflix announced that Canadian users will no longer have access to its cheapest streaming subscription tier that doesn’t include ads. Netflix’s help page now notes Canadians looking to get Netflix or switch plans will no longer have access to the $9.99 Basic option. Their choices now are to accept ads into their Netflix and chill sessions, or they can pay an extra $6.50 per month.

Monopolies

• The saga of Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard continues. The two biggest remaining hurdles over which Microsoft has to jump to get the deal over the finish line at this point are in the UK with the CMA and in America with the FTC. While Microsoft appeals the CMA’s refusal to allow the deal to move forward, the FTC’s suit is just getting started. We’re just starting to see the content of depositions and hearings at this point and two pretty significant developments have come out of them, neither of them being a particularly good look for Sony.

• Amazon plans to tap thousands of U.S. small businesses, from bodegas to florists, to deliver its packages by the end of the year, Axios is first to report.

• Driving the news: Amazon on Monday will start actively recruiting existing small businesses in 23 states including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington.

• In late 2022, I posted that I canceled my Amazon account:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202210/have-cancelled-amazon-account.html

• I had an awful experience, getting signed up with Prime membership without realizing, and then unable to cancel it. Well, it turns out that I am not the only one experiencing that difficulty with Prime: [...]

Patents

• Though there have been some improvements, initial office actions regularly require a fair amount clean-up and fine-tuning. This process often includes rectifying typographical errors and clarifying loose claim language. It’s also common for the examiner to misconstrue aspects of the invention.  However, by the time the final rejection stage is reached, these issues are usually addressed, and the lines of difference are more clearly drawn.  So, for my study here, I decided to look solely at final office actions and ask the question of what percentage of these involve eligibility rejections.

• Meetings with stakeholders touch upon quality, digital transformation and the Unitary Patent

• On June 20, 2023, Unified Patents submitted its comments to the USPTO’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“ANPRM”) regarding proposed changes to PTAB practice.

Trademarks

• The USPTO refused to register the mark BILT for “non-metal mailboxes, excluding office products,” finding confusion likely with the registered mark BUILT TO INSPIRE for, inter alia, “non-metal mailboxes.” Because the goods overlap, a lesser degree of similarity between the marks is necessary to support a Section 2(d) refusal. But what about the marks? Applicant argued that the term “built” is a weak formative, and further that the marks differ in appearance, sound, connotation, and commercial impression. How do you think this came out? In re Architectural Mailboxes, LLC, Serial No. 90581763 (June 23, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Jonathan Hudis).

Copyrights

• With multiple verification checkpoints and information requirements throughout the platform, Too Lost has deployed AI-powered Veriff, a state-of-the-art KYC compliance technology, for identity verification. The move aims to safeguard labels and artists from streaming fraud— potentially putting an end to the rampant industry-wide problem.

• Bill C-18 passed the House and Senate and received royal assent last week, leading Meta to confirm that it will be blocking news sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms given the economic costs and uncertainty with the law. Meanwhile Google is reportedly in discussions with the government about whether regulations might be crafted in a way to avoid a similar outcome.

• Pirate ebook repository Z-Library has released a dedicated desktop application that should make it easier to access the site going forward. The service is at the center of a criminal crackdown and has lost hundreds of domain names, which in part triggered the development of this new software.

• About 16 months after an appellate court ruled in favor of Google and lyrics platform LyricFind as part of a lawsuit levied by competing lyrics database Genius, the Supreme Court has refused a request to hear the case.

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