● 06.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/06/2023: NVK Update and Ubuntu EoL

Posted in News Roundup at 10:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Featuring the same large, high-quality 16-inch WQHD display with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 2560×1600 pixels resolution, the InfinityBook Pro 16 Gen8 laptop is powered by an Intel Core i7-13700H processor with 14 cores, 20 threads, 24M cache, up to 5.00 GHz clock speed, and Intel Iris Xe graphics.

• The Intel Core i7-13700H processor appears to be very well suited for all demanding use cases, such as gaming, but now you can order the InfinityBook Pro 16 laptop with a more powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards with 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM for unbeatable performance.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• A project I have a very keen eye on is NVK, the open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver developed by the community (not NVIDIA), and it seems like progress on it is going rather well. Developer Faith Ekstrand wrote a bit on the Collabora blog, detailing work that has been done since the original introduction post back in October last year.

• Faith Ekstrand has provided an update on the status of the NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs.

• It’s been a while since I’ve written about NVK. Rebecca, my intern, has written a couple of blog posts about her NVK work but I’ve been mostly quiet. Part of that is because I’ve been primarily focused on something else NVK will need but we’ll get to that in a bit. That doesn’t mean nothing has happened in NVK, though. Quite a bit has landed in the main NVK branch since October and we’re long overdue for an update.

Applications

• Powerline is a great statusline plugin for Vim editor, which is developed in Python and provides status lines and prompts for many other applications such as bash, zsh, tmux, and many more.

• It enhances the appearance and functionality of the Vim editor by providing a customizable and informative status line at the bottom of the editor window, which includes current mode (e.g., normal, insert, visual), file name, path, line and column numbers, Git branch, virtual environment, and more.

Instructionals/Technical

• Imagine a situation where you wrote an excellent script to automate a tedious task for you. But when you try to execute it in Linux, all you get is a “Permission Denied” error. Fret no more, as in this article, we will discuss two easy methods to make a file executable in Linux and avoid such permission-denied errors.

• Learn how to pass arguments to bash scripts and make them interactive in this chapter of the Bash Basics series.

• You might have come across a few shell scripts on the Internet, which are used in production, that use a keyword called trap. Naturally, you are wondering what the heck is this trap keyword, how is it useful and how do I use it in my scripts?

• This article will show you useful ways to find information about users on a Linux system. Here we’ll describe commands to get a user’s account details, show login details as well what users are doing on the system.

• If you want to add or create users in Linux, use the useradd command, and to modify or change any attributes of an already created user account, use the usermod command via the command line.

Games

• Oh goodie, goodbye again free time. Remember the classic Theme Hospital? CorsixTH is a free, open source and cross-platform game engine to keep it looking good on modern systems and a new release is getting close.

• Starfield is set to release on September 6th and there’s obviously a lot of excitement around it but will it work on Valve’s Steam Deck? That’s not currently clear.

• Valve clearly still have plenty of big ambitions for Linux gaming and Steam Deck, and as it turns out recently they pulled in yet another developer to work on open source graphics drivers.

• A big milestone has just been hit for the Steam Deck, as there’s now over 10,000 titles rated to be either Verified or Playable. This comes nearly two months after it hit 9,000.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This post is going to cover the latest progress on FlatSync as well as my absence from bi-weekly updates and the project.

• Normally, I’d write bi-weekly blog post updates regarding GSoC and FlatSync, but both my mentor and I have been very busy with university work in this month’s first week, and after that, I’ve been ill and bed-ridden for a little over a week. As a result, development stagnated in this period, so there was just nothing to write about. I’m somewhat back on my feet though, so you can expect regular updates again.

• We were thrown behind quite a bit on schedule, but luckily, the still-open, expired milestone we wanted to catch up on turned out to be less work than originally planned, and we were able to fulfill it quite easily.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Are you a cybersecurity enthusiast tired of using the same old Kali Linux or other popular distros for hacking?

• Well, then we have got an alternative for you that might pique your interest.

• Let us take a look at Exodia OS.

• Kali Linux is a Debian “testing” based Linux operating system created almost a decade ago. Over the last few years has gained significant popularity among hackers and cybersecurity professionals. With the ever-increasing dependency on digital infrastructures and ever-growing online threats, cybersecurity has become more relevant today for average users and businesses.

• Here are a few points why Kali Linux is used by most of the hackers and pen testers.

BSD

• FreeBSD networking and containers (Jails) stacks are very mature and provide lots of useful features … yet for some reason these features are not properly advertised by the FreeBSD project … or not even documented at all. I remember when Solaris was still under Sun before ‘fatal’ 2008 Oracle acquisition and one of the advertised Solaris features was its networking capabilities – along with virtual switches etc. that were administrated with the ipadm(1M) and dladm(1M) commands. FreeBSD while having technologies like Netgraph or Jails lightweight containers – along with VNET Jails that have full independent of the host virtual network stack … almost does not advertise them at all. The VNET Jails – while being production ready and used by thousands of sysadmins – are still not documented in the FreeBSD Handbook or FreeBSD FAQ at all … you will not be able to find a single VNET mention in the FreeBSD Handbook. Even the FreeBSD Man Pages like jail.conf(5) does not mention it – only jail(8)partially mentions VNET feature.

• In the first article of this series, we covered the major differences between two types of firewalls platforms – either Linux or FreeBSD based and what the options are. We covered how pf, IPFW, iptables and nftables act when actions are applied to different packages and just in general the differences between deploying a FreeBSD-based firewall and a Linux-based firewall. In the second part, we go a bit deeper and discuss how egress filtering is done, and how tables and sets are built.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora is the community-driven upstream distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As such, it serves as the testing ground for the various features and technology that will eventually become RHEL.

• As such, Fedora tends to move faster than many distros in adopting new technologies. Pipewire, Wayland, and immutability are just a few of the technologies that Fedora has adopted and pushed before many other distros. Because of this, Fedora is often referred to as a “cutting-edge” distro.

• Obviously, being upstream of Red Hat means that Fedora uses RPM packages, not the DEB packages of the Debian/Ubuntu family. While not quite as popular as DEB packages, RPM easily offers the second-largest adoption rate among developers. If a developer only plans to target one family of Linux distros, it will be Debian/Ubuntu. If they target two, however, you can bet Red Hat/Fedora will be the second.

• For decades Red Hat has led the enterprise Linux market, but as popular as its eponymous Linux distribution might be, CentOS 7 is orders of magnitude more widely used—20 times as popular, by my back-of-the-envelope estimate. And while CentOS once masqueraded as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, the company changed all that in late 2020 with the introduction of CentOS Stream. So far, so good, so what, right?

• Wrong. Red Hat announced that CentOS 7 will be end-of-lifed in June 2024 (goodbye security patches and software updates). More recently, Red Hat announced that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For enterprises doing long-term IT planning, which is almost any enterprise of reasonable size, now is the time to consider what to do post-CentOS 7.

• As you may have heard, Fedora Project’s Anaconda team has been working on a new web-based installer for desktop users that promises to offer a much better and more polished user experience. The new installer is called Anaconda WebUI and a new change proposal aims to include it by default in Fedora Linux 39 Workstation.

• The Anaconda WebUI installer is not yet full-featured, that’s why the Fedora Project decided to implement it only in Fedora Workstation, the flagship edition featuring the GNOME desktop environment, to get some feedback from users so that they can continue to improve the installation experience.

• Lest anyone panic I must stress that “web-based” does not mean “requires [Internet]”. Nor does it mean losing out on any of Anaconda’s existing install features.

• Not only does the new Anaconda WebUI have feature parity with the existing GTK3-based UI but also nixes longstanding issues, like a hard dependency on X for keyboard switching, insecure remote access (VNC), and an outdated UX.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Cinnamon has what many people consider a traditional user interface. It’s the desktop paradigm that Windows has used for decades. There is a taskbar across the bottom, a menu in the bottom left for launching applications, and a system tray in the bottom right next to a clock.

• You can create folders on the desktop or sprinkle files all over the screen, or use the area to store app icons. The layout is so familiar that non-technical computer users may not realize they’re running anything other than Windows (at least until the time comes to install software). And many in the know still appreciate that they can have the benefits of Linux without having to completely change how they use a computer.

• Kubuntu, another Ubuntu flavor, may also look like Windows at first blush, but there are many moving parts to its KDE Plasma desktop.

• Unlike Windows, Plasma can be molded largely into what you want it to be. This configurability is a big way KDE Plasma shows how fun computing can be, and it allows you to stray very far from the default experience. Cinnamon is somewhat customizable, but it never gets too far from feeling like Windows.

• Those without a calendar to gawp at should know that this is less than a month way away at the time of writing.

• But don’t panic (though I admit my headline doesn’t help in that regard).

• You can upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04 in-place, without needing to reinstall from scratch. Barring the 25 mins or so the process takes, it’s a painless procedure (note: you may need to manually re-enable any PPAs or 3rd-party repos you make use of, but that’s true of any upgrade).

• Support for Ubuntu 23.04 ‘Lunar Lobster’ ends in January of next year. This might be a little sooner than you want given, y’know, you’ve only just made the move on up to it.

• As the number of snaps increases, the need for automation grows. Any automation to help us maintain a group of snaps is welcome and necessary for us to be able to scale. The solution detailed in this article has two main benefits:

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is thrilled to announce its membership of the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group. As an esteemed project under the Eclipse Foundation, the Adoptium Working Group brings together renowned OpenJDK builders and distributors such as Alibaba, Azul, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Rivos, and, most recently, Google. Through membership of the working  group, Canonical is strengthening its dedication to  making the Java toolchain a first-class solution on Ubuntu, while providing open-source licensed, free-to-use, and high-quality builds of OpenJDK.

• The Eclipse Adoptium Working Group is a collaborative platform that fosters innovation and promotes the development and distribution of Java toolchains based on the OpenJDK project. By joining forces with like-minded entities within the Java ecosystem, Canonical will continue to advance, promote and disseminate high-quality toolchains and related technologies across the Java community.

Devices/Embedded

• But this time the problem is much worse, because the world is different: All of these devices are connected to the Internet. The computers in our routers and modems are much more powerful than the PCs of the mid-1990s, and the Internet of Things will put computers into all sorts of consumer devices. The industries producing these devices are even less capable of fixing the problem than the PC and software industries were.

• ICP presented today the NANO-ADL-P single board computer which is designed to deliver high-performance in a compact form factor. The device comes with up to 16GB RAM, dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports, and multiple display interfaces.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The project is made using two custom digital picture frames, each featuring a Raspberry Pi and an E Ink display panel. The Pis connect to the internet throughout the day and pull a new image to be loaded from a specific email address. This makes it possible to send new pictures to each other every day by just sending them as an attachment with a custom message to be overlayed.

• Few days ago I spotted on Twitter that there is possible to run Linux on ESP32-S3.

• It was good timing as our new EUR 12.00 ESP32-S3-DevKit-Lipo board just hit the mass production, so I got one board and try to replicate the results.

• The Invader game is part of FabGL library, made originally in odd resolution 320×200 pixels which is not visible on our VGA monitor. We changed the resolution to 320×240 pixels which sync to 640×480 standard VGA mode and we finally could play it!

• Paul Rickards, aka Biosrhythm, shows off how to set up Mac II emulator Mini VMac on a portable PocketCHIP board.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Unlike other boot firmware, Libreboot is entirely free of proprietary blobs, is free to inspect, modify, and redistribute. It also boasts solid support for booting Linux-based distros, as well as OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• The Pocket app and web experience are trusted by millions of people everyday to stay up to date and informed on the topics they care about most, free from clickbait, fake news and the pressure and anxiety often felt while on social media platforms. Since being acquired in 2017, Pocket is part of the family of products made by Mozilla, the nonprofit-backed tech company building responsible technology that prioritizes people over profits, so internet safety and security are top of mind for our customers.

• In our ever faster and more overwhelming online lives, we’ve learned to settle for the obvious choices — the ones we’re made to believe are practical and right for us. Our phones come with pre-installed apps, our laptops have their own browsers. But in real life, we can choose to go to our local ethical store, choose which school to send our children to, or decide to travel by train. So why should this choice be taken away from us online? Why can’t we pick technology that feels more like us and what we stand for?

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• In a recent article, I compared the compilation times of PostgreSQL using different compilers. In the comments, I was asked for numbers for the new Meson build machinery. Let’s do that now.

• (Of course, when we are testing the compilation step, we are not really using Meson much but rather Ninja operating on build description files produced by Meson.)

• We have to consider how we can make both build systems build approximately the same set of files, to make this a fair comparison. I’m going to use make world-bin on the make side, which builds the same things as meson compile on the meson side (that is, core, contrib, but not documentation). Also, I’m configuring with plain configure without options and with meson setup –auto-features=disabled, in order to get approximately the same build configuration. Finally, I’m running the configure and make build in a separate build directory, to match the meson build, just in case that matters. Beyond that, the methodology is the same as in the previous article.

Education

• If you attend or host a Raspberry Pi-focused meet-up that we haven’t yet listed, scroll to the bottom of this page to let us know some details and we’ll put out the Pi signal to alert others near you.

Programming/Development

• There are few rites of programmer passage as iconic as writing your first parser. You might want to interpret or compile a scripting language, or you might want to accept natural-language-like commands. You need a parser. [Varunramesh] wants to show you parser combinators, a technique used to make practical parsers. But the demonstration using interactive code cells in the web page is nearly as interesting as the technique.

• A statistical method called relative importance analysis (RIA) is used to assess the relative contribution of independent variables to the variance of a dependent variable.

• 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. The Step can be generic, an extraction step, a load step, or both:1 [...]

• I worked through a simple implementation of mutable value semantics here (tree-walking interpreter, no optimizations). The main difference from swiftlet/val is that it’s a dynamic language – demonstrating that nothing about MVS requires static typing.

• Apache Arrow is a software development platform for building high performance applications that process and transport large data sets. It is designed to improve the performance of data analysis methods, and to increase the efficiency of moving data from one system or programming language to another.

• In this community call moderated by Stephanie Hazlitt, our speakers, Nic Crane and Jonathan Keane, will lead us through the Arrow R package.

• This post is the culmination of years of accumulated professional frustration. It will not be well received by some. That’s okay. If you make it to the 25 year point of your dev career and you spent most of that time writing custom software for clients and you still disagree, feel free to write your own take and send it along to me. I will afford it my due consideration.

• That isn’t me gate keeping or trying to make an argument based solely on an appeal to my own authority. I’m just pointing out that I have watched a lot of clients break themselves against the rocks of custom software development and over time the accumulated weight of their trials, tribulations and in some cases, overt failures, has begun to weigh upon my soul. The purpose of this post is to discuss some of this at a high level and explain why I now believe custom software is not a good option for most.

Python

• In Python, the length of an array can be obtained using the len() function.

• Today I confessed on the Fediverse that I had somehow mentally overwritten what I once knew about Python’s assert with a C-like version that I wrote as ‘assert(expression)’ (which I apparently started doing more than a decade ago). What caused me to notice this was that I was revising some Python code to cope with a new situation, and I decided I wanted to fail in some way if an impossible thing turned out to not be as impossible as I thought. This wasn’t an error that should be returned normally, and it wasn’t really something I wanted to raise as an assertion, so adding an assert was the easy way.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• If you answered yes, then it’s the perfect time to learn two more bash commands: pushd and popd. In this article, you’ll learn how pushd and popd work, as well as a couple of alternative commands. By the end of this article, you’ll have added two more useful commands to your repertoire.

• You may find yourself in a situation where you want to use a shell script to read files line by line.

Standards/Consortia

• One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning whether copyright is really the best way to support artists and promote creativity hard. Against that background, there’s an interesting opinion from one of the top EU court’s special advisers, known as advocates general, suggesting a situation in which copyright definitely should not be applied. The Court of Justice of the European Union’s press release explains the background: [...]

Leftovers

• An assassin works from a partial understanding of the world. If not literally a hashishi, as suggested by the word’s etymology, an assassin must nevertheless see the world in tunnel vision, his victim viewed through the lens of a scope. The vast, complex network of humanity to which he and his victim belong, with contending narratives and blurred individual motives, cannot be allowed to exist. To do so would be to fail as an assassin.

• America’s record as an ambivalent and erratic liberal hegemon has deep roots, as analysed by Robert Kagan in The ghost at the feast: America and the collapse of world order, 1900–1941.

Science

• Cut marks on an ancient shin bone are the earliest evidence that early human relatives defleshed each others’ corpses, and likely feasted on the remains.

Education

• As I was at the time a member of “staff in some other department” at Sun Microsystems and then Nvidia, below the fold I discuss some of the “practicalities” that should have been faced earlier rather than later or not at all.

Hardware

• The virtual world, a strange cross between Burning Man and Neal Stephenson’s metaverse, marks its 20th anniversary with no true corporate competitor in sight.

• This be a short article for now, but I’ll save the details for when the laptop actually arrives. I am happy to have bought myself a new toy, but the impetus for the purchase wasn’t really a happy one, so I don’t have this amazing, giddy feeling bubbling inside me. I also didn’t spend a great deal of time reading reviews and comparing products, one because I like and know Slimbook’s offerings, and two because I didn’t think I’d come to any wiser conclusion than the one I already have. Linux-friendly systems are all much alike, they do cost a bit more than the generic off-the-shelf Windows-powered system, but hey.

• Well, now we shall wait. I do have a question for you though, if you feel like sending an old-fashioned email. Do you think I ought to re-use all of the Slimbook Pro2′s user settings and desktop configurations, or simply start fresh, create a brand new setup, and then just copy the actual user data? If you have an idea or a suggestion, feel free to ping me. Stay tuned for updates.

• [...]

• But then, I noticed that the case was actually warped. The entire left side was thicker than the right side, and the abnormality was slowly, but steadily growing. I figured that my laptop’s battery was bulging! As I’ve already told you in my recent Slimbook & Kubuntu 22.04 upgrade article, I was worried the battery may cause problems down the road. It did, and much sooner than I expected, and in a more destructive way than I’d have liked. As one does with devices with Lithium-ion batteries, I let it drain and powered the machine off. And then went searching for a replacement.

• With the Bathydrone system, a drone drags a small vessel on the water’s surface. That vessel is equipped with a commercially-available, off-the-shelf sonar unit mounted on its bottom.

• And it’s that sonar unit that has down-scan, side-scan, and chirp capabilities, making it possible to log data onboard the console, which is located inside the hull. After the drone’s flight and the sonar unit is retrieved, data can then be uploaded post-mission from the console.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Dark patterns are design tactics used in websites that manipulate users into doing something they didn’t intend to do.

• A list of dark patterns I’ve come across.

• They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “soft­ware upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex ­obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; be­cause who wouldn’t want it?

• Mick (his middle name) wanted a bigger penis because he believed it would allow him to look in the mirror and feel satisfied. He had trouble imagining what shape the satisfaction would take, since it was something he’d never actually experienced. Small and dark haired, he’d found his adolescence to be a gantlet of humiliating comparisons: to classmates who were blond and blue-­eyed; to his half brothers, who were older and taller and heterosexual; to the hirsute men in his stepfather’s Hasidic community, who wore big beards and billowing frock coats. After he reached puberty — late, in his estimation — he grew an impressive beard of his own, and his feelings of inadequacy concentrated on his genitals.

• There are a wide variety of protein-based drugs that are used to treat various serious conditions. Insulin is perhaps the most well-known example, which is used for life-saving treatments for diabetes. New antibody treatments also fall into this category, as do various vaccines.

• Cross-pollination between different industries can yield interesting innovations, and a few years ago [John Wiltrout] developed some non-slip meter probe adapters. He recently used our tips line to share some details that you won’t see elsewhere, letting us know how the idea came to be.

• Around half of the wellbeing services counties that took part in Yle’s survey report closing some of their wards due to a lack of staff.

• Officials say a law banning single-use plastics may come into force within weeks.

• The number of people suffering from drug use disorders has skyrocketed to 39.5 million globally, a surge of 45 percent over the decade.

• I thought our shared history would keep us close, but it hasn’t.

• They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. Will we ever be rid of them?

• After the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, North Dakota and thirteen other states banned most abortions. Emily Witt visits one clinic that managed to move across state lines.

• One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Some South American users also say they’re having issues with the Outlook desktop application, which crashes when launched.

Windows TCO

• Since the Russian-speaking CL0P began publicizing its victims, state and local governments appear to have been heavily affected by the campaign as at least seven have been hit, including the nation’s largest public-employee pension fund the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Over the weekend, around 45,000 New York City public school students had their personal data stolen which included information like Social Security numbers, StateScoop reported.

Security

• “Since launching the 2020-2024 Cyber Security Strategy, APRA has repeatedly stressed the importance of an uplift in cyber security and continued vigilance to identify and address cyber exposures.

• “Unfortunately, not all entities are heeding these messages as we continue to identify poor cyber security practices and inadequate oversight from boards and management,” Smith said.

• In response, Medibank said in a note sent to the ASX that it had sufficient capital to meet the increase.

• It said after application of this requirement the company would remain well capitalised with unallocated capital remaining at 30 June 2022 levels: $148 million. Given this, the company said it would not reduce its target health insurance required capital ratio.

• Medibank chief executive David Koczkar said: “Safeguarding customer data is a responsibility Medibank takes very seriously.

• “Medibank has continued to strengthen our systems and processes to provide our customers with the security they expect and deserve. We will continue to work to enhance our systems and processes even further. Our company remains strong and well capitalised.

• “We continue to support our customers through the Medibank Cyber Response Support Program, which includes mental health and well-being support, identity protection and financial hardship measures.”

• When dealing with malware analysis, you like to get “fresh meat”. Just for hunting purposes or when investigating incidents in your organization, it’s essential to have a triage process to reduce the noise and focus on really interesting files. For example, if you detect a new sample of Agent Tesla, you don’t need to take time to investigate it deeply. Just extract IOCs to share with your colleagues. From a business point of view, you don’t have time to analyze all samples!

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (c-ares and libx11), Fedora (chromium and kubernetes), Red Hat (python3 and python38:3.8, python38-devel:3.8), and SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, kernel, kubernetes1.24, libvirt, nodejs16, openssl-1_1, and webkit2gtk3).

• A hacker has stolen the messages, call logs and locations intercepted by a widely used phone monitoring app called LetMeSpy, according to the company that makes the spyware.

• The phone monitoring app, which is used to spy on thousands of people using Android phones around the world, said in a notice on its login page that on June 21, “a security incident occurred involving obtaining unauthorized access to the data of website users​​.”

• Pilot data relating to American Airlines Group Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co. has been breached following the hack of a third-party provider of pilot applications and recruitment. The breach involved the compromise of a company called Pilot Credentials between April 30 and May 1, with the airlines informed on May 3.

• In this detailed article about academic plagiarism are some interesting details about how to do data forensics on Excel files. It really needs the graphics to understand, so see the description at the link.

• (And, yes, an author of a paper on dishonesty is being accused of dishonesty. There’s more evidence.)

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• “The issue at hand is that the version metadata (a.k.a. ‘manifest data’) is submitted independent from the attached tarball which houses the package’s package.json,” he explains. “These two pieces of information are never validated against one another and [this] calls into question which one should be the canonical source of truth for data such as dependencies, scripts, license, and more.”

• Why? Because whilst the data may be encrypted using a TLS certificate, there is no verification – so you could be using a TLS certificate that is compromised or that was injected into the data path by an attacker.

• So the usual answer for this on a Linux system is to: download the trust bundle for the certificate, add it to a set folder, and to run a command to install it.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Safeguard private communication Over 80 civil society organisations, academics and cyber experts from 23 countries have written to the UK government to raise the alarm about proposed powers in the Online Safety Bill.

• EDRi, Open Rights Group and over 80 civil society organisations, academics and cyber experts from 23 countries have written to the UK government to raise the alarm about proposed powers in the Online Safety Bill.

Confidentiality

• This is the third blog post on the topic of the centralization of the Internet. The first post discussed the diversity of authoritative name servers, and the second post discussed the diversity of MX records.

Defence/Aggression

• We spoke with Patrik and Tomas to find out more about the experience: how did it feel to work under that level of stress, what lessons did they learn, and what surprises did they encounter along the way?

• The popular video service had deflected questions about its involvement in the creators’ lawsuit for more than a month.

• [...]

• While TikTok is funding the lawsuit, the creators said, the company is not paying them directly for their role.

• Writing the majority opinion for a 6-3 decision (pdf), chief justice John Roberts wrote that the US Constitution does not “insulate” state legislatures from judicial review.

• The decision was an indictment of the independent state legislature theory, a radical interpretation of the US Constitution’s elections clause that claims state legislatures should have unilateral control over elections. The June 27 ruling essentially establishes that courts have the authority to weigh in on the legality of state election regulations.

• NERF guns are a toy that appeals to adults and youngsters alike — if you’ve never had the chance to pelt your friends with safe and kid friendly foam darts in a surprise ambush, you haven’t lived. But just as with real-world weapons of the type superpowers put in shows of military strength, there’s an arms race in the world of NERF. Mere darts aren’t enough, and there’s a range of missiles for the bellicose youngster intent on skirting the brink of global foam dart annihilation. These come with a catch though in the shape of a lackluster launcher, and this has prompted [Joel Creates] to create a self-firing NERF missile with a secondary rocket motor.

• The recent spike in murders already seems to be over.

• The collapse is one of a several similar disasters in Egypt in recent years. Rescuers were trying to determine if more people were trapped under the rubble.

• Authorities announced late Monday that they had arrested a 41-year-old man in the weekend killing of a Massachusetts couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, along with another family member, in the small city outside Boston. Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan announced police took Christopher Ferguson, of Newton, into custody Monday evening and charged him the killing of 73-year-old Gilda “Jill” D’Amore after an autopsy revealed she had died from a homicide. Additional charges were expected in the death of 74-year-old Bruno D’Amore and Jill’s mother, 97-year-old Lucia Arpino, Tuesday after those autopsies have been completed.

• The events illustrate Hanoi’s flexible ‘bamboo foreign policy,’ expert says.

• A Serbian court has ordered the release of three Kosovar policemen detained on June 16 along the border between the two countries in an incident that heightened tensions between Belgrade and Pristina.

• The report was the result of the first visit by an independent human rights investigator to the prison in its two-decade history.

• With nearly constant surveillance, gruelling isolation and limited family access, the treatment of the last 30 Guantanamo detainees is “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” UN rights experts said Monday as they reported on their first visit to the US military prison.

• The U.S. Naval Base prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, opened in January 2002, during the presidency of George W. Bush.

• The first U.N. independent investigator to visit the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay says the 30 men held there are subject “to ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law.” Irish law professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin called the American government’s use of torture against them “a betrayal” of the rights of victims and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States to justice. She told a news conference Monday about her 23-page report that the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that killed nearly 3,000 people were “crimes against humanity.” But she said the U.S. use of torture and rendition against alleged perpetrators and their associates in the aftermath violated international human rights law.

• Ultranationalist West Bank settlers who have recently attacked Palestinian towns and villages seem to want to wedge out their Palestinian neighbors.

• The top prosecutor in Latah County said the November killings met the standard for the kind of aggravating factors that warrant seeking the death penalty.

War in Ukraine

• Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion didn’t topple President Vladimir Putin. But in its aftermath, it has launched debate over just how stable Mr. Putin’s hold on the country really is.

• If Wagner forces are stationed in Belarus, just across the border from Lithuania, Vilnius will have to prepare for possible hybrid actions of the mercenary group, says an adviser to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda.

Environment

• It may not be the movie filter-like orange haze that we saw over NYC earlier this June, but it’s still pretty damn bad. The air quality right now is categorized as extremely unhealthy, and it’s the worst of any major city worldwide, according to data from IQAir. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow air quality monitor, Chicago’s air quality is “very unhealthy” this afternoon. The city’s air quality index is over 200, healthy aqi levels are under 50.

• The GSMA points out that having all those phones lying around is jolly wasteful, given that hauling new metals out of the ground and refining them is a messy and energy-intensive business.

• A plan has therefore been hatched to do two things about it: [...]

• The four residents in Sarasota County received treatment and have recovered, according to the state’s Department of Health advisory. Malaria, caused by a parasite that spreads through bites from Anopheles mosquitoes, causes fever, chills, sweats, nausea and vomiting, and headaches. It is not spread person to person.

• The high-pressure “heat dome” that has engulfed Texas and Oklahoma for several days is forecast to shift eastward this week, bringing dangerous temperatures to the Gulf States.

• Oppressive heat will expand out of Texas to blanket an area from Arizona to Alabama.

• 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. Private firms can help advance the green agenda by working to create green jobs, taking measures to promote a transition to a circular-economy model, and partaking in green finance.

• From July 1, shops in Lithuania will no longer be allowed to issue single-use plastic bags for free. How much will they cost?

Energy/Transportation

• Fledgling aviation engineers will have access to fresh training facilities as part of a boost for the sector by the flying kangaroo.

• Qantas will partner with Aviation Australia to set up an engineering academy near airports in Melbourne and Brisbane.

• Sustainability expert Vanessa Elliot wants the mining industry to think a little differently about mine closures.

• “I want you to think about the term ecological trauma,” she told an international summit in Brisbane.

• The program, which could begin next year, would charge drivers to enter Midtown Manhattan, with the revenues going to improve mass transit.

• After locating the lost Titan sub near the wreckage of the Titanic, the U.S. Coast Guard declined to provide a cost estimate for its efforts. The search renews questions on whether wealthy risk-takers should absorb the costs of search and rescue efforts.

• The Hydrogen Offshore Production for Europe (HOPE) consortium has signed a €20m ($21.8m) grant agreement with the European Commission to develop a 10MW offshore renewable hydrogen production project.

• A quick repair project was the exception to the rule of American dysfunction.

• The average price of electricity in Latvia increased by 18% compared to April, according to AS Latvenergo’s latest survey of the electricity market, LETA reported June 26.

Wildlife/Nature

• Organisers told local media that the protesters had provoked the children.

Overpopulation

• Groundwater is a pretty important source of water throughout the world, especially in the U.S. It’s used to provide drinking water and it’s a backup source of water when there’s drought. But there is such a thing as taking too much out of the ground. “Earth’s pole has drifted toward 64.16°E at a speed of 4.36 cm/yr during 1993–2010 due to groundwater depletion and resulting sea level rise,” researchers wrote in the study. That’s a tilt of about 1.7 inches towards the east per year, or more than 28 inches (70 centimeters) in less than two decades.

Finance

• Multinational tax avoiders and the OECD have won a reprieve from the Albanese government which has delayed legislation aimed at shining the light on tax avoidance. Jason Ward explains why the backdown is bad news.

• The Labor government made an election promise, a budget promise, a legislative promise and held two consultations on landmark legislation to implement global tax transparency for multinationals. Now it has bent to corporate pressure. Landmark legislation for public country by country reporting was set to be implemented as of 1 July.

• Tens of thousands of hopeful buyers can secure a property with a smaller deposit by locking down a spot on the latest home guarantee scheme.

• From Saturday – the start of the next financial year – there will be 50,000 new places available for buyers hoping to jump on the property ladder with a smaller deposit, as the government guarantees a chunk of the loan.

• A basic two-person option for space at the columbarium is sold for $78,000.

• The race gap in employment between Black and white US workers has nearly closed for people 65 and over, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

• For small rural shops, the size of which is more than 60 square meters, the Law lays down an obligation to accept empty containers for deposit, but shopkeepers have long been saying that there are issues with that, mainly space, Latvian Radio reported on June 27.

• How many times have you been in a situation where a colleague said, “I thought so-and-so was going to do that?” or “Isn’t that your job?” It’s frustrating at the minimum—but on top of that, it slows down decision-making and makes teams less effective.

• PwC is selling its scandal-ridden Australian government services business for next to nothing. The consulting firm yesterday (June 25) announced the sale to Sydney-based private equity firm Allegro Funds for the price of just $1 Australian dollar ($0.67).

• The Spanish government on Tuesday angered the ride-hailing transport industry by allowing regions to restrict their activity despite a ruling by the European Union’s top court that had overturned a set of local curbs in Barcelona.

• Associations representing drivers working with app platforms operating in Spain, such as Uber, Bolt and local rival Cabify, said they would challenge the decision in Brussels and ask the European Commission to open legal proceedings against Spain.

• “We regret the aim is again to impose limits on business activity and not the users’ right to get a quality service,” Bolt said in a statement.

• Domestic shares in the UK have slumped into their longest losing streak since the lows of the pandemic amid worries about the outlook for the economy.

• Although many global stocks are trading higher in a so-called bull market, the FTSE 250 index of Britain’s midcap companies dropped for the 10th straight day on Monday.

• The index, which is mainly made-up of domestically-focused companies, has fallen 5.8pc so far this year, worse than the benchmark FTSE 100, which is down 1.5pc.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A shady property deal threatens to transform part of the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City into a luxury resort. “It will change the status quo and the entire picture of Jerusalem,” says Armenian activist Hagop Djernazian.

• One state’s “Baby Bonds” program should be a model for the whole country.

• The justices returned the case to a lower court on Monday, raising the chances that the state will soon be required to create a second district that empowers Black voters to select a representative.

• The ruling political party in El Salvador, Nuevas Ideas (NI), tweeted on Monday that President Nayib Bukele will seek a second term. The tweet stated, “Nuevas Ideas are invincible” as “the largest party in the history of El Salvador,” but the announcement sets up a possible constitutional conflict.

• Lawmakers in Ohio have called for an August special election that could have national implications, as voters will consider a measure to make it harder to amend the state’s constitution. Now election offices are scrambling to prepare on a tight timeframe.

• Before Matthew Graves was confirmed as US Attorney, DOJ had already secured the content on Rudy Giuliani’s phone, making it available without privilege review as soon as January 6 investigators developed probable cause.

• Aileen Cannon issued three orders. None are anything to panic about.

• Conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis embarked Monday on his second term as Greece’s prime minister with a vow to accelerate institutional and economic reforms, after voters handed him a huge election victory for the second time in five weeks.

• This is the fifth election Sierra Leone has conducted since the civil war that ravaged the country from 1991 to 2002.

• Colombia’s Indigenous Guard has long had to fight for a space in the national narrative. Today, it is at the center of the country’s biggest story.

• The Justice doesn’t just join with the liberals on the bench when it comes to tribal rights; he often seems to lead them.

• “…a second round of voting will be held on August 20…”

• “…the number of null votes is 817,394, which represents 17.4042% of the valid ballots…”

• Bernardo Arévalo, a professorial lawmaker, stunned Guatemala’s establishment by advancing to a second round against Sandra Torres, a former first lady.

• Throughout Latin America, families have not given up on finding the tens of thousands disappeared by military dictatorships during the Cold War.

• The US Supreme Court removed a stay Monday in Ardoin v. Robinson, unblocking a lower court order requiring Louisiana to redraw its congressional map to include a second majority-Black district. Louisiana had been accused of allegedly “packing” the majority of the state’s Black voters into one congressional district.

• Thalia Clerveau is a 3L at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She files this dispatch from Accra.  This summer I have the unique opportunity to study and work in Ghana as a law clerk at the Ghanaian Supreme Court.

• The EU first unveiled its hitlist of influential platforms on 26 April. As we explained earlier that month, those companies are supposed to detail how their algorithms work, and be transparent about how their software allows ad slingers to target users or recommend content. The new rules are expected to apply from January 1, 2024.

• When Le Devoir director Brian Myles appeared before the Senate committee studying Bill C-18 last month, he closed by urging the committee to pass the legislation quickly, stating “the time to act is now. We can’t wait two years between the passage of the bill and the CRTC regulations, because the delay will benefit opponents, giving them time to organize and undermine the spirit and the letter of the law.” While Myles acknowledged that claims regarding “theft” of news content by Internet platforms was overstated, he nevertheless expressed full support for the bill. One month later, the Online News Act is now law, Meta has confirmed that it will block news sharing before it takes effect, and the government is reportedly in last ditch negotiations with Google to stop it from doing the same.

• He added, “But what our paper shows is that the software could be built or tweaked to include other hidden features such as scanning private content from the phones of hundreds of millions of people using facial recognition, the same technology used at airport gates.”

• Its intervention comes as 80 organisations and tech experts have written to Technology Minister Chloe Smith urging a rethink on the powers.

• Apple told the BBC the bill should be amended to protect encryption.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced new legislation to combat online misinformation on Sunday that would empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to prevent and address the spread of misinformation on digital platforms.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Swedish police have given a man permission to burn a copy of the Quran outside a mosque in Stockholm on Wednesday afternoon.

• Timor-Leste is a tiny nation just to the north of Australia, also known as East Timor. In 2004, its newly independent government began negotiations with the Australian government over oil and gas in an offshore field between the two countries. To gain an upper hand in the negotiations, an Australian spy agency installed listening devices in Timor-Leste government offices during a humanitarian aid project.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On June 6, 2023, Hanson Kaizolu, a member of Liberia’s opposition Unity Party, ordered two of his bodyguards to “flog” and “beat up” Winston Blyden, a producer and director with the privately owned broadcaster Bana FM, after he covered daily legislative proceedings at the Capitol building in Monrovia, according to a statement by the local trade group Press Union of Liberia and Blyden, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

• Social media has shrunk as a source for news, mostly due to Facebook’s global pullback from news.

• The lopsided scales of the American justice system were on vivid display in England last weekend. In London’s His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh—a fortress-like maximum security prison encircled by 18-foot water-stained concrete walls, balls of shinny razor wire and a dozen menacing guard towers—inmate A9397AY, otherwise known as Julian Assange, was into his fifth year of confinement. His accommodations consist of a plastic chair, a metal bed, and a steel toilet. That is where, for over four years, he has fought extradition to the United States on charges of espionage and computer intrusion in connection with the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Civil Rights/Policing

• More than 150 years after the Navajo Nation signed treaties with the United States establishing its reservation and recognizing its sovereignty, the country’s largest tribe still struggles to secure the water guaranteed by those agreements.

• France’s secret service hacked the Encrochat crypto service and created a goldmine for law enforcement. Thousands were arrested. Doubts remain about the usability of the data in court.

• On June 2, the CEOs of Deliveroo, Uber, Delivery Hero, Wolt, and Bolt joined forces in a show of unity among gig-economy bosses. Their aim: to sabotage European Union attempts at regulating platform work.

• There is a growing body of research that shows that solitary confinement as it is used today can cause a variety of severe psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. These problems can be so severe that they can lead to long-term disability or even death.

• Law enforcement officers and sexual assault go hand-in-hand. Give someone enough power and they’re sure to abuse it. That’s just human nature. Only the best people should be trusted with this much power, but this nation tends to believe that only the most law enforcement will do. Consequently, our hiring practices — not to mention our disciplinary practices — are woefully deficient.

• More than 150 years after the Navajo Nation signed treaties with the United States establishing its reservation and recognizing its sovereignty, the country’s largest tribe still struggles to secure the water guaranteed by those agreements.

• Decades of negotiations with the state of Arizona have proven fruitless. The state has been uniquely aggressive in using the scarce resource as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from the Navajo Nation and other tribes, dragging out the talks while Indigenous communities await desperately needed water and infrastructure, a recent ProPublica and High Country News investigation found.

• The fine print is what really matters when it comes to affirmative action.

• The next big question for school admissions will likely be the legality of “race-neutral” methods that are designed with the continuing goal of producing diverse student bodies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This update documents the state of DNS rebinding for April 2023. We describe Local Network Access, a new draft W3C specification currently implemented in some browsers that aim to prevent DNS rebinding and show two potential ways to bypass these restrictions.

• We also discuss the effects of WebRTC IP address leak mitigation, and DNS Bit 0×20 on DNS rebinding attacks.

Monopolies

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 27 Jun 2023 The European Commission has informed Orange and MasMovil of its preliminary view that their proposed joint venture may reduce competition in the retail supply of mobile and fixed internet services as well as of multiple-play bundles in Spain.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 26 Jun 2023 The European Commission invites comments on commitments offered by Renfe to address competition concerns over its alleged refusal to supply full content and real-time data to rival ticketing platforms operating in the Spanish online passenger rail ticket distribution market.

Copyrights

• Will.i.am joins Neil Jacobson’s Hallwood Media for solo artist management, including his track ‘The Formula’ featuring Lil Wayne as the official song of the 2023 Formula 1 season. Producer, musician, and entrepreneur will.i.am has signed with Neil Jacobson’s Hallwood Media for artist management.

• Growing up in Manhattan Plaza, an artists’ housing complex, the singer-songwriter sat in with the Marsalis brothers and almost had Alicia Keys as a babysitter.

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