● 07.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 01/07/2023: More Woes for Social Control Media

Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

• Some fun news for AMD GPU owners with the open source RADV (Vulkan) Mesa driver, as it recently gained support for fragment shader interlock. This will be useful for emulation and translation layers.

Instructionals/Technical

• When you need to regularly run a program on your workstation that isn’t powered 24/7 or even not every day, you can’t rely on cronjob for that task.

• Fortunately, there is a good old tool for this job (first release June 2000), it’s called anacron and it will track when was the last time each configured tasks have been running.

• I’ll use OpenBSD as an example for the setup, but it’s easily adaptable to any other Unix-like system.

• The idea that “cool URLs don’t change” has been an article of faith for a very long time. Of course this is false in practice; decades of experience have shown us that cool URLs do change for all sorts of reasons (for example, forced changes in your domain name). Recently, we’ve seen at least two examples where cool URLs may not change as such, but they do become broadly inaccessible.

• We have a bunch of Linux fileservers, which use ZFS pools on ordinary SATA SSDs and export the filesystems from those pools over NFS. To make managing this environment easier, we have a suite of local programs (including our own ZFS spares system). All of these tools have names that start with ‘san’ (for example ‘sanpool’ and ‘sanspares’). All of the hostnames of the fileservers also start with ‘san’ (they’re mostly but not entirely named after cities, so we have ‘santafe’ but also ‘sanandreas’, which is of course the test fileserver). All of this is despite there being no SAN (Storage Area Network) in sight.

• An important factor in terms of UX and accessibility for deciding whether the <details> element is the right solution for a problem is the find-in-page behaviour.

• In Chromium-based browsers, the details element automatically opens when it contains a string the user searches for. If Safari and Firefox, it has to be opened for the find-in-page feature to find the string.

• In this guide, you will learn how to set up Private DNS Server with Unbound on a Debian 11 and Debian 12 server. You’ll set up Unbound as a Local DNS Server with some features such as an authoritative DNS Server, enable DNS cache, set up local IP address and Access Control Lists (ACLs), setup local domain names, then set up Unbound as a DNS resolver with DNS-over-TLS (DoT) enabled.

• In addition to that, you’ll also set up logging for Unbound service via Rsyslog and Logrotate.

• You can built-in cache functionality in pip that plays its role by reducing the time while doing duplicate downloads and builds.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to install Gitea on AlmaLinux 9 OS.

Games

• One final free game is here for you during the GOG Summer Sale 2023! You can now get Beholder 2 from Warm Lamp Games and Alawar Premium. The giveaway for Beholder 2 on GOG lasts until Monday July 3rd, 1 PM UTC.

• With the Steam Summer Sale 2023 now in full swing, and with a big discount on the Steam Deck, it has risen back up the Steam charts. It’s not a big surprise really, especially the top end model at a 20% discount marking the price down from £569 to £455.20. That’s a pretty huge saving on one of the best PC handhelds around.

• The fourth part of an ongoing series of submission to Wine to get full Wayland support has been merged in. The merge request was opened 4 weeks ago, and it was merged into the Wine project on June 29th.

• Here’s an interesting one on Steam publishing for you. Valve appear to be clamping down on AI art used in games due to the murky legal waters. AI art is such a huge topic of discussion everywhere right now, as is other forms of “AI” like ChatGPT and it’s just — everywhere. I can’t seem to get away from talk on it from people for and against it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Our “Plasma 6” info page gained some useful information such as a “how to use/test it” section as well as some more narrowly-targeted lists of bugs that can be used to guide development. I’ve linked the “Plasma 6 bugs” list above, and will continue to do so in coming weeks.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Not too much on this front since there still needs to be a working TUN Driver but huge thanks to Begasus’s OpenVPN recipe that was posted to haikuports a couple of weeks back which helps me out a lot and I can just update it as I go.

• The author ran several similar setups in production for years and has seen a lot of problems and strange failure modes. This project aims to solve a lot of those (at least for the author), it might also be useful for others.

BSD

• created at 2023-06-27T11:52:03Z

• The good thing is that You do not longer need to patch and rebuild FreeBSD to have this ability to run nfsd(8) NFSv4 server inside FreeBSD Jail. Its already ‘upstream’ in the 14-CURRENT and 13-STABLE branches.

• Today I am going to test how that new feature works and I will show you how to configure it within a VNET Jail. If you would like to know how the VNET Jails work take a look at my recent FreeBSD Jails Containers article for the details.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The world of Linux has seen some disquiet over recent weeks following the decision of Red Hat to restrict source code distribution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to only their paying customers. We’re sure that there will be plenty of fall-out to come from this news, but what can be done if your project relies upon access to those Red Hat sources?

• The Red-Hat-derived Rocky Linux distro relies on access to RHEL source, so the news could have been something of a disaster. Fortunately for Rocky users though, they appear to have found a reliable way to bypass the restriction and retain access to those RHEL sources. Red Hat would like anyone wanting source access to pay them handsomely for the privilege, but the Rocky folks have spotted a way to bypass this. Using readily available cloud images they can spin up a RHEL system and use it to download their sources, and they can do this as an automated process.

• We covered this story as it unfolded last week, and it seemed inevitable then that something of this nature would be found, as for all Red Hat’s wishes a GPL-licensed piece of code can’t be prevented from being shared. So Rocky users and the wider community will for now retain access to the code, but will Red Hat strike back? It’s inevitable that there will be a further backlash from the community against any such moves, but will Red Hat be foolhardy enough to further damage their standing in this regard? They’re certainly not the only large distro losing touch with their users.

Devices/Embedded

• I2C is a multi-master, low-speed, bidirectional bus specified in NXP UM10204. There are only two signals: SCL (the clock) and SDA (the data). Each of the signals is open-drain, with resistors pulling the signals high. This property is used throughout the protocol. For example, by defining an acknowledgement (ack) as holding SDA low, there is an implicit negative acknowledgement (nack) when no device responds to a transaction.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Indiedroid Nova is a single board computer with the same form factor as the popular Raspberry Pi 4B and powered by the Rockchip RK3588S SoC. This SBC supports up to 16GB of RAM and offers 8K video capability.

• The xG27-DK2602A development kit is a tiny board featuring a Silicon Labs Wireless Gecko SoC for portable IoT applications. This kit offers a range of features including four environment sensors, onboard debugger and up to 20 I/Os.

• Introducing the Liberty Phone with more RAM and more drive space, starting at $2199.

• The Liberty Phone is the upgraded version of our popular Librem 5 USA phone with Made in USA Electronics. The Liberty Phone integrates 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage.

• All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled at that same facility, using the same manufacturing process we used for the Librem 5 devkits in 2018 and Librem Key that has the Made in the USA label started in 2019. By doing all electronics fabrication, assembly, and fulfillment within the same facility Purism can oversee each stage of the production.

• It is an Arduino powered, open source, eInk display, with no data guzzling tendancies. And is only £60 including delivery. It’s gorgeous to look at without being distracting, has a massive battery life, and allows for a bunch of tinkering.

• This project is a real life representation of the those simulation GIFs that show virtual machines moving balls in endless cycles. A simulation like that is easy to make when you don’t have to adhere to physics, but it takes some doing to accomplish the same thing in real life. Perpetual motion is, of course, impossible. So this machine utilizes motor-driven mechanisms to keep a ball moving around a vertical track. That track is clear laser-cut acrylic, while the rest of the custom parts are 3D-printed.

• I tested the image against Google Image search and this particular crop of the ware seems to foil any exact matches. However, if you do manage to find an exact hit with a simple image search engine query, I’d be curious to know what you’re using, so I can use this to test against future wares.

• Let’s briefly recap the architecture of a typical intrusion alarm. An intrusion alarm system (and essentially the same goes for fire alarms as well) consists of a controller that monitors sensor zones. When the controller detects that a sensor has been violated while the system is alarmed, it enters the alarm state. Once this happens, it reports the alarm to a Central Alarm Receiver (CAR) at a Central Alarm Station (CAS). The CAS is then responsible for dispatching emergency services (or private security) to respond to the alarm.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Then Omar Polo came out of nowhere, synchronized the repository with upstream, pushed some of the portable diffs to OpenBSD, made sure it built on various distros … and asked me if we could make a release.

• He essentially took the dying portable project, revived it, brought it back to date and crafted a release in less than two weeks… this was awesome work.

• On traditional “social media” platforms, in particular YouTube, the interactions are often not especially social. The platforms facilitate a kind of intellectual consumption moreso than conversation: conversations flow in one direction, from creator to audience, where the creator produces and the audience consumes. I think a better term for these platforms is “parasocial media”: they are optimized for creating parasocial relationships moreso than social relationships.

• The fediverse is largely optimized for people having conversations with each other, and not for producing and consuming “content”. Within this framework, a “content creator” is a person only in the same sense that a corporation is, and their conversations are unidirectional, where the other end is also not a person, but an audience. That’s not the model that the fediverse is designed around.

Events

• The openSUSE.Asia Committee is seeking sponsors for the ninth openSUSE.Asia Summit. The summit will take place in Chongqing, China, from Oct. 21–23, 2023. Our participants are FLOSS users, developers, students and people who are interested in FLOSS from a wide range of different industries. The sponsorship is for accommodation, food, publicity, etc.

• We are aiming to provide a low-barrier offline platform for users, contributors and developers to meet. Relationships between open-source enthusiasts can be greatly facilitated through offline summits. It is also an opportunity for technologists to share and promote the latest trends in technology and to exchange experiences. Sponsorship is an expression of your appreciation and recognition of our community and our work goals.

Education

• This books takes you from a nascent understanding of graph data science methods to a more confident user, all in under 250 pages.

• Developers are welcome to invite guests to attend the developer summit, subject to their tolerance for ceaseless hours of kernel hacking, and availability of space at the venue.

• UPDATE: I’ve update this blog post on the 30 of June 2023. I corrected a statement where I said that the _quarto.yml file is where you can choose the version of R to compile the book. That’s wrong, choosing the version of R to compile the book is done on the Github Actions workflow. I’ve also added some answers to questions I got on social media.

• So I’ve recently self-published a book on both Leanpub as an Ebook and Amazon as a physical book and thought that it would be worth it to write down how to do it. I’ve wasted some time getting everything to work flawlessly so if you’re looking for a guide on how to create both an ebook and a print-ready PDF for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service using Quarto, you’ve come to the right place.

Programming/Development

• For a while now I’ve been trying to find a good way to explain what structured concurrency is, and how it applies to Rust. I’ve come up with zingers such as: “Structured concurrency is structured programming as applied to concurrent control-flow primitives”. But that requires me to start explaining what structured programming is, and suddenly I find myself 2000 words deep into a concept which seems natural to most people writing programs today 1.

• Instead I want to try something different. In this post I want to provide you with a practical introduction to structured concurrency. I will do my best to explain what it is, why it’s relevant, and how you can start applying it to your rust projects today. Structured concurrency is a lens I use in almost all of my reasoning about async Rust, and I think it might help others too. So let’s dive in.

• This post assumes some familiarity with async Rust and async cancellation. If you aren’t already, it might be helpful to skim through the earlier posts on the topic.

• A significant portion of cost of software infrastructure at a technology organization is due to CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment). It is easy to overlook CI cost since CI isn’t strictly required to operate a software application, but it’s a critical component of the software development lifecycle.

• A less obvious aspect of CI cost is that, in some cases, it can increase at a quadratic rate over time. John Micco, the ex lead of the Google Test Automation Platform group, mentioned that Google would spend more on CI than the rest of its compute combined if it didn’t introduce serious optimizations along the way.

• For example, we use the phrase “teaspoon languages” and not “teaspoon programming languages.” The term “teaspoon” comes from the shorthand “TSP” for “Task-Specific Programming.” So, the “programming” bit is already in there. But in particular, I don’t want to generate the reaction, “But, hey, that doesn’t look like a real programming language…”

• Harold Abelson once said that code should be written for humans to read and only incidentally for computers to write. It follows that, like any form of communication, code can carry emotions. Programming perversity, then, is code that conveys morbid fascination, the kind of amused horror where you cover your eyes but peek through your fingers. Take some innocuous features of a programming language and then bend it all into a pretzel. Congratulations, you’ve made performance art.

Python

• Over the last week, I have been working with contributors on new documentation and charting a path toward deprecating Python 2 support, which was consumed by a few applications. Indeed, backwards compatability has been at the heart of microformats: standards require long-term, robust support. We collectively decided that the work required to maintain support would have been extensive, while holding us back from taking on an important task: modernize the library.

Standards/Consortia

• “An unusual rate of unsolicited mail”? We’ve established we don’t send spam, and Google’s own Postmaster Tools can’t detect any spam, so it seems to me that Gmail’s detection algorithm is broken.

• And it has been broken for a while, because we’ve been rate-limited for months. We’ve done everything we can to alert Google to the problem, and this blog post is a last-ditch attempt to get the message across. If you know anyone at Google, please send them a link.

• Wait, I think I hear another “but”!

• BUT… Problems like this are killing independant email.

• Airline passengers who have endured tens of thousands of weather-related flight delays this week could face a new source of disruptions starting Saturday, when wireless providers are expected to power up new 5G systems near major airports.

• Aviation groups have warned for years that 5G signals could interfere with aircraft equipment, especially devices using radio waves to measure distance above the ground and which are critical when planes land in low visibility.

Leftovers

Education

• In big institutions — such as higher education and government and companies that have over, say, 300 employees — it matters so much whether you have a champion. Someone who is savvy and entrepreneurial about the resources they can command, can manage the diplomacy and process stuff to remove or alleviate barriers and annoyances for you, and is, ideally, the main person you have to report to (I say this since sometimes reporting structures get complex and you kind of report to multiple people), or is 1-2 levels above you and knows who you are. Someone who likes you and thinks you are brilliant and that your work matters.

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that if he is elected president he would seek to close four federal agencies as part of an effort to reduce the size of government.

• “We would do Education, we would do Commerce, we’d do Energy, and we would do IRS,” DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum when he was asked whether he favored closing any agencies.

• But since mid-April, nearly 1,600 CBE centers in Kandahar Province have been closed, depriving 50,000 students of an education. Similar numbers have been recorded in neighboring Helmand Province in a nationwide trend.

• The public reaction to the project came after media reports that Izmir’s Religious Affairs Office had notified more than 800 elementary and secondary schools — one-third of all the schools within the city borders — that they were assigning imams and preachers for spiritual guidance for students. For the last two weeks, several parents’ associations, left-wing community centers (halkevleri) and opposition parties led by Republican People’s Party (CHP) have staged demonstrations under the banner, “Teachers to schools, Imams to mosques,” in the multifaith city, which predominantly voted for the CHP in the last election.

• Criticizing the management’s decision, a student, requesting anonymity, said, “While we acknowledge that Darul Uloom is dedicated to Islamic studies, preventing students from learning English or any other language seems unreasonable.”

• But the thing that bothers me each time I see the comic is that it pushes the problematic “single visionary” narrative.

• At best, it’s a dangerous and risky mindset. At worst, it can be quite toxic.

Hardware

• St. Louis-based aerospace startup, WingXpand, announced this month that it had won a seven-figure contract with the U.S. Air Force for its 7-foot, wide expandable aircraft (the company calls it “backpackable” given how it can fold down in size). Along with the drone itself, the U.S. Air Force’s contract also covers WingXpand’s AI software that supports the early detection and mitigation of wildfires.

• Loongson’s SMT implementation in its next-generation 3A6000-series processors is similar to AMD’s and Intel’s and enables one physical CPU core to process two threads at the same time. Therefore, the company’s quad-core 3A6000 processor for client PCs will be able to process eight threads simultaneously. Meanwhile, Loongson’s datacenter grade 32-core 3D6000 CPU will be able to process 64 threads at once.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• “The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) will permit the prescribing of MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. These are the only conditions where there is currently sufficient evidence for potential benefits in certain patients,” Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration, or TGA, said in the release.

• Teenagers in the United States are in crisis. That news got hammered home earlier this year following the release of a nationally representative survey showing that over half of high school girls reported persistent feelings of “sadness or hopelessness” — common words used to screen for depression. Almost a third of teenage boys reported those same feelings.

• “No one is doing well,” says psychologist Kathleen Ethier. She heads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which has overseen this biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey since 1991.

• Even then, Alexander Fleming, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for the discovery, warned in his 1945 Nobel Prize speech that misuse of the drug could lead to antibiotic resistance. Indeed, within two years of Fleming’s speech, the first accounts of resistance emerged. Now, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest threats to modern life. AMR is responsible for nearly 700,000 deaths worldwide each year, and it is projected to kill 10 million per year by 2050.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• An old security technology that has gotten little attention is finally ready for a new closeup.

• It goes by the name polymorphic code — or alternatively, automated moving target defense or AMTD — and it has been around for nearly a decade. It came into its own around 2017 when was popularized by both malware writers and defenders.

• And once again, security professionals are playing another cat-and-mouse game, but this time the stakes are a lot higher thanks to better tools on both sides.

• First detected in March 2022, the 8Base ransomware group uses encryption and “name-and-shame” tactics to force victims to pay a ransom, with victims across multiple industries.

• Despite the relative obscurity of 8Base, its recent surge in activity is said by the researchers to indicate an experienced and well-organized threat actor. The group’s operations have similarities to previous ransomware campaigns, suggesting a level of sophistication and experience despite the group’s recent emergence on the ransomware and hacking scene.

• Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

• “We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he said.

• In a letter addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro in May asked the tech giant to conduct an audit of its use of Twitter’s content, alleging the Windows developer violated an agreement over using the social media company’s data.

• In this blog post, we’ll cover how to transfer files from one server to another. At Teleport we’ve covered the progression of technology used to transfer files — from SCP – Familiar, Simple, Insecure, and Slow to using SFTP. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to transfer files using Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) in 2023, which under the hood is actually SFTP, OpenSSH & open-source Teleport changed the underlying technology in OpenSSH 9 and Teleport 11.

• Breaking a big problem into subproblems is often a great strategy. Asking an LLM to solve a complex problem or write an intricate program is bound to fail. Even with chain-of-thought prompting, these models can easily get sidetracked. Instead, they are most effective when asked to solve smaller problems. Things that can fit inside a reasonable context window — e.g., a small function (rather than an entire program) or a paragraph of a book (rather than a whole book).

• LLMs are reasoning engines that mimic expert responses in nearly any domain. However, sometimes the plausible-sounding output is nonsense on closer inspection.

• Additionally, Tinder is no longer available in the App Store or the Google Play Store.

• According to TechCrunch, these AI functions have been “trained on music that is licensed to or owned by ByteDance” and specifically include a tool with which one can hum or sing a melody and then see artificial intelligence turn this input into an instrumental song.

• It’s unclear if lyrics and vocals will be incorporated down the line, but the length of the AI tracks at hand is currently said to match the length of the audio that one provides. Similarly, while Ripple remains a standalone app at present, time will tell whether at least a portion of its components (and particularly those that enable anyone to generate music instantly) will expand into TikTok proper.

Windows TCO

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office acknowledged Thursday that 61,000 private addresses of trademark applicants were inadvertently exposed in a years-long data leak between February 2020 and March 2023.

• The trademark office said the data leak affected about 3% of the total number of trademark applicants filed during the three-year period and that the issue was fully fixed on April 1, without any data having been misused.

• And if you’re thinking about paying, who are you making the payment to? Are you paying someone who is on the sanctioned list? Are you paying threat actors who are working for governments hostile to the U.S. who will use the funds to develop weapons to use against us?

• Large health systems, including CommonSpirit Health, have encountered ransomware attacks, but experts say smaller hospitals and systems are increasingly at risk.

• Some cyberattacks have targeted the electronic medical records systems, while others are aimed at acquiring patient data and selling it on the dark web. Hundreds of data breaches involving private health data occur annually, affecting millions of Americans.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 28 Jun 2023 The Commission welcomes the political agreement reached today between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, on the European Data Act, proposed by the Commission in February 2022.

• European Commission Questions and answers Brussels, 28 Jun 2023 Why do we need a Data Act?

• Currently, the full value of data in the European economy is not being reaped due to a number of factors.

• The requirement that member states assign a lifelong unique personal identification number to each citizen, which had been opposed by Pirate Party MEPs in several committees, was completely removed from the draft. The Pirates were also able to prevent the mandatory acceptance of state browser certificates, but rejections due to insufficient security will need to be justified. The details of the agreements will now be negotiated in further technical meetings and will probably be finalised in another trialogue under the Spanish Presidency in autumn.

• Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer, who negotiated the bill in the co-advisory Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE), comments: [...]

• Open Rights Group has responded to the government’s announcement that the Online Safety Bill will require “pornography companies, social media platforms and other services to be explicitly required to use age verification or estimation measures to prevent children accessing pornography”.

• Dr Monica Horten, policy manager for freedom of expression at Open Rights Group, said: [...]

• Max Schrems is the lawyer and activist behind the first and second (and, probably soon, a third) legal challenge to the adequacy of US law to protect European personal data. Thanks to the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project, Max and I were able to spend an hour debating the law and policy behind Europe’s generation-long fight with the United States over transatlantic data flows. It’s civil, pointed, occasionally raucous, and wide-ranging – a fun, detailed introduction to the issues that will almost certainly feature in the next round of litigation over the latest agreement between Europe and the US. Matthew Heiman acted as moderator.

• EU rules on market surveillance & compliance of non-food products entering the EU (Regulation 2019/1020) require national customs authorities to share information on imported products placed under ‘release for free circulation’.

• Customs authorities should transmit this information extracted from the national customs systems to the information and communication system for market surveillance (ICSMS).

• This initiative sets out the information that national customs authorities must submit to ICSMS.

• [...]

• This draft act is open for feedback for 4 weeks.

• Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has endorsed increasing the number of surveillance cameras used to identify women who defy mandatory hijab rules, choosing not to wear the headscarf in public, the Islamic Republic’s police commander said on Thursday.

• The move comes amid escalating pressure from the Islamic Republic to enforce mandatory hijab and to use artificial intelligence to identify women seen without headscarves.

• New Jersey cops must apply for a wiretap order — not just a warrant — for near-continual snooping on suspects’ Facebook accounts, according to a unanimous ruling by that US state’s Supreme Court.

• Thursday’s decision overturned a lower court’s ruling that said a search warrant was sufficient to compel Meta’s social network to turn over access to a user’s future posts and messages every 15 minutes for a period of 30 days. That’s effectively a real-time tapping system, it was argued.

• Zuckerberg took to his official Facebook handle and shared a demonstration video along with a caption, “If you want to move your WhatsApp chats to a new phone, you can now do it more privately without your chats ever leaving your devices.” As per the statement shared by the WhatsApp team, users can preserve their complete chat and media history for the first time without having to exit the app. More secure than using unofficial third-party apps which lack clear privacy practices and are more private than cloud services, the transfer process is authenticated with a QR code, data is only shared between your two devices and is fully encrypted during transfer.

Defence/Aggression

• Though he survived a vote of no-confidence called by opposition politicians in Finland’s Parliament on June 28, Junnila announced he was stepping down Friday, saying, “For the continuation of the government and the reputation of Finland, I see that it is impossible for me to continue as a minister in a satisfactory way.”

• Junnila had come under fire for, among other things, a public speech that he had given in 2019 related to a far-right memorial in the western Finnish town of Turku. He was also criticized for repeated Nazi jokes.

• Wagner’s spread across a handful of faltering countries, mostly concentrated in the Sahel region, has undermined efforts by France and the United States to strengthen professional African militaries under civilian command. “Its effect,” the United States Institute of Peace noted recently, “is to strengthen rule by force rather than by democracy and law [and] to promote corruption over transparency.”

• But this ideology – call it A.G.I.-ism – is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence.

• Unbeknown to its proponents, A.G.I.-ism is just a bastard child of a much grander ideology, one preaching that, as Margaret Thatcher memorably put it, there is no alternative, not to the market.

• Rather than breaking capitalism, as Mr. Altman has hinted it could do, A.G.I. – or at least the rush to build it – is more likely to create a powerful (and much hipper) ally for capitalism’s most destructive creed: neoliberalism.

• In an interview before his first official trip to Washington, Boris Pistorius made clear he is intent on helping the United States by taking a more assertive stance.

• The revised counterespionage law, passed by the Chinese legislature in April and taking effect on Saturday (July 1), vastly expands the definition of espionage. Criminal cases of espionage already risk life imprisonment. For foreigners, the new law threatens exit and entry bans, as well as deportation.

• While the original 2014 version of the counterespionage law focused on state secrets and intelligence, the amendment includes “other documents, data, materials, or items related to national security.”

• The catch-all phrasing means that even mundane business activities could be deemed harmful to national security, putting companies in legal jeopardy. That’s especially so given Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s push to make everything a matter of, and subordinate to, national security. Hong Kong is a case study of this dynamic: The city’s sweeping national security law covers everyone on Earth, and permeates society and governance.

• Levin noted that while Swedish support for NATO membership remains at a record high, recent polling has shown that “an even stronger majority — around 80% — believe that NATO accession might have to wait if it meant that Swedish principles of rule of law and other similar principles had to be sacrificed.”

• Baryal is among those listed in a recent United Nations report as one of the Taliban’s leaders “affiliated” with al-Qaida. Besides Baryal, Nuristan Governor Hafiz Muhammad Agha Hakeem and Tajmir Jawad, the Taliban’s deputy director of intelligence, are also listed in the report.

• At least two people died in a shooting incident near the United States consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, according to local police and a spokesperson for the consulate. One of those killed was a consulate security guard.

• Sweden said its staff were safe. “We are well informed about the situation. Our Embassy staff are in safety and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs is in regular contact with them,” the Swedish foreign ministry’s press office told CNN in an email.

• Islamic extremist rebels launched an insurgency in 2009 in Nigeria’s northeast to fight against Western education and to establish Islamic Shariah law in the region.

• At least 35,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million displaced due to the violence by the Boko Haram group and a breakaway faction backed by the Islamic State, according to U.N. agencies in Nigeria.

• “These attacks are becoming one too many, and the government needs to do something urgently,” farmer Becky Koji said, echoing the concerns of many in the area. “We are not safe anymore”

War in Ukraine

• Germany is deploying the Patriot long-range air defence system in Vilnius in preparation for the NATO summit, the Lithuanian Armed Forces said on Thursday.

• Germany’s defence minister, standing next to Lithuanian politicians in Vilnius on Monday, announced that 4,000 troops were coming to the Baltics – permanently. Although sounding like a culmination of months of work, the statement allegedly caught the Bundeswehr and Berlin off-guard.

• After Berlin confirmed it would deploy 4,000 troops to Lithuania, Vilnius officials said it showed that the pressure on Germany has worked.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Ellsberg’s vindication was extremely powerful. A federal judge dismissed charges against him because he had been harassed by the Nixon Administration. The Judge, William M. Byrne, dismissed all charges because of “gross prosecutorial misconduct” such as illegally entering Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and illegally wiretapping him. The Judge said the government’s actions were so severe as to “offend the sense of justice.”

• As for the Papers publication, in an unsigned opinion, with six justices concurring, the Supreme Court quoted two lower court decisions in confirming that the New York Times and the Washington Post were right in publishing the Papers.

Environment

• Chupriyan said there had already been some 4,000 wildfires this year so far, destroying almost 1,300 buildings, including 730 residential houses, forcing the Siberian region of Kurgan on May 10 to impose a state of emergency.

• Florida has passed a law allowing the use of phosphogypsum—a radioactive runoff from phosphorus fertilizer production containing uranium and thoranium—in the construction of new roads.

• The new law is the legacy of a Donald Trump–era decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to allow phosphogypsum in construction. President Joe Biden’s administration quickly reversed that change, citing the likelihood of trace metals getting absorbed by groundwater and radioactive toxins being dispersed in the air by wind and traffic.

• The malarial mosquitos were caught by Sarasota County Mosquito Management Services and sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for analysis. Mosquitos in the genus Anopheles are known to host and transmit the protozoans that cause malaria. Out of more than 100 Anopheles individuals collected, the CDC determined that three were carrying malaria, a Sarasota County spokesperson told Gizmodo via email.

Energy/Transportation

• A New York court has banned a California digital creator from making non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on luxury handbags made by French fashion house Hermès International.

• Since 1951, Oregon has banned drivers from filling up their own vehicles. Instead, they’ve had to wait while attendants ask how much gas they should pump, drum their fingers on the roofs of the cars, and run to the till indoors to make change.

• Rupert Stadler—the former head of Audi—became the first Volkswagen board member to be sentenced for fraud related to the 2015 emissions scandal that rocked the German auto manufacturer known as “Dieselgate.”

• Of course, the cost of running a fan will depend how long you sleep for – for our calculations we’ve taken a typical 8 hours of sleep and assumed people will leave it on for that whole time. We’ve assumed an electricity cost of 30p per kWh – the average price capped rate from 1 July.

• On June 17, Alstom joined forces with the Government of Quebec, Chemin de fer Charlevoix, Train de Charlevoix, Harnois Énergies, HTEC and Accelera by Cummins to take hundred of passengers on the Coradia iLint for the first hydrogen train journey ever to take place on North American soil. The train rode from the Parc de la Chute-Montmorency in Quebec City to Baie-Saint-Paul, a 90-kilometer trip.

Overpopulation

• Goa depends fully on the water reservoirs for drinking and irrigation supply during the non-monsoon months from October to May. Deficit rainfall means a looming water crisis in the non-monsoon months.

• Google has started disclosing data on this. In 2021, all the company’s data centers consumed 4.34 billion gallons of water. That’s so much, the company tried to put it all in context by comparing itself to that bastion of environmental stewardship: Golf courses. Google noted that 4.34 billion gallons are equivalent to the annual water footprint of 29 golf courses in the southwest US.

• Meta discloses this information, too. The company’s data centers withdrew just over 5 million cubic meters of water in 2021. That’s about 1.33 billion gallons.

• This brings us back to Arizona. The state is running out of water. A few weeks ago, the governor unveiled a plan to limit construction in areas around Phoenix after finding that the groundwater can’t support the current pace of building.

• The upheaval was caused by a new state study that found groundwater supplies in the Phoenix area were about 4 percent short of what is needed for planned growth over the next 100 years. That may feel like a far-off horizon, but it is enough of a change to force the state to rethink its future in the near and long terms.

• Most of the population is consuming bottled water and the governor recalled that half a million inhabitants in the metropolitan area will receive two liters of this product daily.

Finance

• The resources sector has been a force for good in Australia, according to Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

• Headlining the final day of the World Mining Congress in Brisbane on Thursday, the Queenslander will thank his home state and the national resources industry for helping deliver a budget surplus.

• Shoppers are already spending more conservatively and a fresh batch of retail trade data could show belts tightening even further.

• The Reserve Bank will be watching the retail trade data for more evidence of a slowing economy in the May retail sales numbers before putting the brakes on rate rises.

• Keen readers of Blackrock CEO Larry Fink’s annual letters will be familiar with how he’s been arguing that purpose begets profit, and such purpose is defined by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.

• Lordstown Motors filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware yesterday (June 26) after a promised round of investment from Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, fell through. In tandem, Lordstown sued Foxconn, blaming the Taiwanese company for its financial travails.

• Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats.

• Treasurer Jim Chalmers has denied the country’s first budget surplus in more than a decade comes at the expense of under-pressure households as the cost of living rises.

• Dr Chalmers has confirmed there will be a larger surplus for the 2022/23 financial year than predicted in last month’s federal budget.

• The competition regulator has raised concerns over Transurban’s proposed takeover of the operator of Melbourne’s EastLink toll road.

• The Sydney-based company, which already operates Melbourne’s CityLink toll road and will operate the under-construction West Gate Tunnel, is seeking to acquire Horizon Roads, which has a concession over the EastLink freeway until 2043.

• The federal budget is on track to smash its earlier surplus forecasts as the government rakes in much more revenue.

• The underlying cash balance for the 12 months to May was $19 billion, well above the $4.2 billion surplus flagged for the 2022/23 financial year in the last federal budget.

• Global shares have been steady as investors scrutinise inflation data from both sides of the Atlantic to cap a rollercoaster quarter for markets that has upended bets on interest rates peaking.

• Oil was poised for its first monthly gain this year, as a big drawdown in US oil stocks outweighed concerns fuel demand will be dented further by more hikes in borrowing costs.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Former Network 10 political editor Peter van Onselen claims his legitimacy as a journalist and media commentator is at risk by the media company’s contract rules.

• Dr van Onselen quit his position in March and agreed not to disparage the network or its US-based owner Paramount.

• Moderators of protesting Reddit communities are being shown the virtual door. The protest against aggressive API charges that would kill third-party apps started on June 12 and was meant to last at least for two days—or until Reddit came up with some remedies. The website’s volunteer moderators, who took their threads dark, are now being strong-armed into reopening their platforms, or risk being locked out altogether.

• The possible scenarios for the development of events in the Russian Federation are described in detail in this article. Please pay attention to the second section called “Scenarios of turmoil”. The collapse of Russia will occur as a result of the clash of power clans, the destruction of the army and a new parade of sovereignties.

• American Islamic scholar Shadee Elmasry of the New Brunswick Islamic Center in New Jersey said in an episode of the “Blood Brothers” show that was posted on the 5Pillars YouTube account on June 7, 2023 that Muslims made a mistake by aligning with the political Left because their beliefs contradict Islam and will inevitably lead to “utter war”. Elmasry said that if a liberal army were to liberate Gaza, it would be “trading one problem for another” because the Muslims would then have to “tiptoe” in accordance with the liberal agenda. He said that the Left wants to kill the Islamic faith, that if the political right had wanted to exterminate the Muslims it already would have, and that the Right is better suited for an alliance with Islam because they at least believe in objective truth. In addition, Elmasry said that the true interfaith initiative is to explain to Christians that they are wrong. The 5Pillars channel is a U.K.-based Islamic media platform.

• The US government considers any failing company with more than $50 million in liabilities to be a large bankruptcy filing. Here’s a look at some recent corporate bankruptcies in that category: [...]

• A pair of Meta’s content moderators reviewed the video and decided it did not violate the social networking giant’s policies. The vid was also referred upwards to “policy and subject matter experts within Meta” who reversed that decision but “applied a newsworthiness allowance” that sees Meta keep violating content online if the public interest value outweighs the risk of it causing harm.

• The Oversight Board has now decided that decision was wrong, and the video should be shoved in Meta’s memory hole.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• And in these photos, the oil industry sure as hell isn’t responsible for disastrous wildfires that are, in turn, creating climate-warming carbon emissions.

• The photos, used in Facebook advertisements and on the websites of Canada’s largest oil lobby groups, portray a completely different reality than the one Canadians are experiencing. They’re part of a deceptive push by Big Oil to deceive the public about its role in the climate crisis—and scientists are calling for it to stop.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin has dissolved his Patriot Media Group, an umbrella entity that housed dozens of “news” sites and had become the home of his “troll factory” since its creation in 2019, according to the outlet Rotonda.

• Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)

• “I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• It really was a crazy time. And I think we’re only beginning to appreciate just how bananas it was. Like I can imagine Americans coming out of the 1950s Red Scare must have felt. But the fact that it’s undeniably a different time already was illustrated when Facebook banned many forms of political discussions inside their company late last year, and basically nobody gave a damn.

• But let’s not forget that it isn’t over everywhere yet. It’s just waning rapidly within the corporate world. As Heather Mac Donald has documented in When Race Trumps Merit, institutions within academia, the arts, and even branches of science are still in the throes of this ideology, with disastrous effects.

• The Chinese government has been intensifying its monitoring of Tibetans and maintained their interrogations of Tibetans living in Lhasa to determine if they have contacted people outside Tibet and stepped up surveillance measures to prevent such communication. Now the Chinese authorities are interrogating Tibetans in Lhasa specifically targeting and warning them to stop communication.

• In March, two major anniversaries prompted police to step up surveillance. The month marked the 15th anniversary of a 2008 riot, and the 64th anniversary of the 1959 uprising against Chinese troops that had invaded the region a decade earlier.

• An art exhibition that brings together the works of top Turkish artists in a sumptuous 19th-century building in Istanbul has become the latest flare-up in Turkey’s culture wars, as an Islamist group and several Justice and Development Party (AKP) members urged its closure, saying that the works contain perversity and blasphemy.

• The exhibition, called “Beginning From the Middle,” brings together from June 24-Aug. 30 some 400 works of art from the country’s most prominent — and most expensive — artists in Feshane, a former factory that used to make military gear and fes, or fez, the traditional red, flat-topped felt hat worn by men during the Ottoman era. The factory underwent a costly renovation over the last four years and reopened as an arts hub on June 23.

• The law threatens to punish entities that act in ways “detrimental” to China’s interests but does not specify which lines should not be crossed.

• Experts say the law underscores China’s aggressive diplomacy, but how actively it will be enforced when it takes effect on 1 July remains to be seen.

• The protesters were targeting the Swedish diplomatic mission in the city, after a backlash over Swedish police decision to allow a Quran to be publicly burnt near a mosque in Stockholm.

• The Deputy Head of Mission in Baghdad Anna Malinen told Yle that the situation escalated quickly, but the protest remained in the yard and did not get inside the building.

• “The boys were booked under Section 295-C of the blasphemy law a statute which prohibits disrespect of the prophet Muhammed and is punishable by death.

• On Friday 20th May a Judge sent the two boys to prison on judicial remand and now they face a potentially long prison sentence while they try to attain acquittal or bail.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Indonesia’s supposed core belief in diversity is being tested by religious-led homophobia and anti-semitism. It comes as President Joko Widodo is due in Australia — and his nation of 600 ethnicities readies for presidential elections next year, writes Duncan Graham

• Outbursts of anti-semitism and homophobia are poisoning Indonesia’s well of respect for difference, its tradition of living in harmony and making a mockery of the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika – Unity in Diversity.

• Social media app IRL—an acronym for “in real life”—is shutting down after discovering that most of the 20 million users it boasted were anything but real. An internal investigation by the company’s board of directors found more than 95% of the accounts on the six-year-old company were “automated or from bots” [...]

• Mayor Eric Adams criticized the woman, whose family left Germany in the 1930s, after she questioned him about back-to-back rent increases.

• Volkswagen, Zara and Temu are among brands called on to monitor their supply chains.

• The Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS), a monitor group tracking antisemitism in Germany, announced in its annual report on Tuesday that Germany saw 2,480 antisemitism incidents last year.

• French President Emmanuel Macron called a new government emergency meeting on Friday after a third night of violent clashes between protesters and police in cities including Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse and Lille. Some 40,000 police officers were deployed in France on Thursday night – nearly four times the number mobilised on Wednesday – and 667 people were arrested, the interior minister said. Protests were sparked by the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old on Tuesday that shocked the nation.

• The death of 17-year-old Nahel, shot by a police officer on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, is not the first of its kind. Fatal shootings by police officers during traffic stops are on the rise in France. While police say it’s due to a spike in public non-compliance and dangerous behaviour, experts say this is not the only explanation.

• French President Emmanuel Macron criticized social media and video games after convening a crisis meeting with ministers on the unrest.

• The French president said social media was playing a “considerable role” in fomenting the unrest. Macron said he wants platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok to delete sensitive content.

• Macron urged parents to keep young rioters off the streets, while noting a third of the 875 individuals arrested overnight were “young, or very young.”

• “It’s the responsibility of parents to keep them at home,” Macron said about young rioters. “It’s not the state’s job to act in their place.”

• A French police officer was charged with voluntary homicide and placed under arrest on Thursday ahead of trial over the killing of a teenager at point-blank range, an incident that sparked nationwide protests. Thousands gathered to honour the victim in his Paris-area neighbourhood, and clashes erupted between some protesters and police, with officers using tear gas. French authorities were expecting more protests in the nights to come.

• “A night of unbearable violence against symbols of the Republic…”

• France has erupted in protests, many violent, after a video of a French police officer killing a 17-year-old was released on Tuesday. The French president has labeled the killing, which is being investigated as voluntary manslaughter, “unjustifiable.”

• “We don’t forget, we don’t forgive,” crowds chanted as they denounced the shooting death of a 17-year-old from the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

• Protesters set cars on fire and looted stores in cities around the country for the third day in a row after the fatal police shooting of a teenage driver.

• Protests over the fatal police shooting of a teenager come as President Emmanuel Macron seeks to restore a sense of calm after his pension overhaul ignited turbulence in the streets.

• The killing has reignited anger in France at police violence, especially against people of color. On Thursday, after two nights of violent protests, riot police officers fired tear gas to break up a march being held for the slain 17-year-old.

• Violent riots convulsed French cities after the police shooting of a 17-year-old. The interior minister said that 40,000 officers would be deployed across France on Thursday evening.

• The 17-year-old fatally shot by a police officer was an only child being raised by his mother in Nanterre, a Paris suburb.

• A British court ruled Thursday that a government plan to send asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda is unlawful, delivering a blow to the Conservative administration’s pledge to stop migrants making risky journeys across the English Channel.

• The section dedicated to Turkey in the index report highlights the rampant repression of strikes, the arbitrary arrests of trade unionists, and the systematic union busting employed by employers.

• It states, “Throughout 2023, workers’ freedoms and rights were relentlessly attacked, with law enforcement cracking down on protests and trade union leaders facing unjust arrests.

• “Moreover, employers continued their systematic efforts to undermine unions by systematically terminating workers who attempted to organize.”

• The court session concluded with an immediate announcement of the verdict. Bahadori was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “gathering and collusion,” with an additional one-year prison term for spreading “propaganda against the Islamic Republic under the guise of preaching for Baha’is.”

• This resulted in a total of six years in prison for Bahadori, accompanied by a two-year ban on leaving the country.

• Scot Peterson, a former Broward County sheriff’s deputy, was acquitted of seven counts of child neglect and three counts of culpable negligence for the deaths and injuries of 10 people on the third floor of the building where the shooting occurred. He was also found not guilty of one count of perjury for claiming to the police that he heard only a few gunshots and saw no children fleeing.

• When Mr. Peterson’s behavior was revealed after the shooting, critics — including some fellow police officers — painted him as being too scared to face a heavily armed gunman. His actions outraged the Parkland community, and Mr. Peterson was cast as the central character in a morality tale about cowardice and law enforcement’s duty to protect children. One victim’s father told him to “rot in hell,” and he was derided in national media outlets as the “coward in Broward.”

• Tens of thousands of unionized workers for the United Parcel Service are on the verge of going on strike as negotiations between the company and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for better benefits and working conditions reach a critical point.

• An estimated 5,000 prisoners were executed in prisons, including Evin, the country’s largest detention facility, during the summer of 1988. Many of the victims were members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), an exiled armed opposition group, leftist parties and groups, and students.

• A criminal court in Tehran has sentenced a woman to 270 hours of unpaid cleaning work for allegedly violating mandatory hijab rules in public places, the feminist Twitter account Bidarzani reported.

• According to Iran Open Data, the estimated $900 million spent annually to enforce mandatory hijab rules are equivalent to the monthly income of up to 7 million workers who earn minimum wage.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Its first order of business is releasing a handbook, called “Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap,” meant to help tech companies navigate the many grey areas of AI ethics.

• His Holiness and his associates might not seem like an obvious choice to weigh in on artificial intelligence. But according to Father Brendan McGuire, pastor of St. Simon Parish in Los Altos and an advisor to ITEC, the initiative is the culmination of longstanding interests for the church. He argues the Vatican wields a unique ability to bring key players to the table.

• “The Pope has always had a large view of the world and of humanity, and he believes that technology is a good thing. But as we develop it, it comes time to ask the deeper questions,” Father Brendan told Gizmodo in an interview. “Technology executives from all over Silicon Valley have been coming to me for years and saying, ‘You need to help us, there’s a lot of stuff on the horizon and we aren’t ready.’ The idea was to use the Vatican’s convening power to bring executives from the entire world together.”

• The two tech giants have been battling the Canadian government over the law that would force them to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations for distributing links to news stories.

• The law, called the Online News Act, passed last week. But it could take months for it to take effect. Once it does, Google and Meta say they will start removing news articles by Canadian news outlets from their services in the country.

• Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a press release Thursday that the law “remains unworkable,” leading the company to make the “difficult decision” to remove links to Canadian news from Google Search, Google News and other products in Canada when the law goes into effect.

• Bill C-18, which was introduced in April 2022, passed Royal Assent, the last step before it becomes a federal law, on June 22. The act will undergo a regulatory process before it is applied, which Google said it plans to participate in.

• Google has issued a warning to the Canadian Government, saying it would “remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada”.

Monopolies

• At the time, the FTC charged the company, whose owner Jeff Bezos is once again the world’s richest man, with using “manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions”.

• But cloud gaming is not so much about gaming as it is about the cloud, and here the competition policy issues are more profound. The data engineering, graphics, real-time compute, language and image synthesis, and related functions that power today’s games are precisely the technologies that will power tomorrow’s AI-supercharged enterprise cloud applications. And in that much larger and more important market, Microsoft’s old habits of bundling, licensing and leveraging market power have continued largely unabated.

• The Federal Trade Commission should look at this as a question about the future of the cloud, not simply gaming. It should stop an acquisition that would further advance Microsoft’s subversive efforts to win the future of cloud by creating a battle among walled gardens in enterprise cloud computing—as it has already tried to do with OpenAI.

Software Patents

• Nokia said on Friday it had signed a new long-term patent license agreement with Apple, as the current license between the companies expires at the end of 2023.

• While terms of the agreement remain confidential between the companies, it covers Nokia’s inventions in 5G and other technologies.

• While the specific details of the agreement remain confidential between Nokia and Apple, it encompasses Nokia’s innovations in 5G technology and other related technologies. Nokia, known for its extensive investments in research and development, has built a patent portfolio comprising more than 20,000 patents, with over 5,500 patents declared essential to 5G.

Copyrights

• RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI.

• So RMS said to himself, “Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is only partial, we will go with Mach.” It was a decision which I strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and doing something new from that standpoint.

• This was all way before Linux; we’re talking 1991 or so.

• Last November, coders sued GitHub along with its parent company Microsoft and partner OpenAI over a tool known as CoPilot that uses AI to generate code. The coders argued the companies violated the licensing agreements for the code. In February, Getty Images sued Stability AI for allegedly infringing the copyright of more than 12 million images.

• As the lawsuit notes, AI companies deploy data scraping technology at a massive scale. The race between every major tech company and a growing pack of startups to develop new AI technologies, experts say, has also accelerated not just the scale of web scraping but the potential harms that come with it. Experts note that while web scraping can have benefits to society, such as business transparency and academic research, it can also come with harms, such as cybersecurity risks and scammers harvesting sensitive information for fraud.

• Copilot and Codex were trained from tons of publicly available source code, including the plaintiffs’ GitHub repositories, and other materials. When presented with a prompt by a user, these AI models will generate code snippets in response, using the materials it learned from.

• The issue for the plaintiffs is that Copilot incorporates copies of their code and can be coaxed to reproduce their work, or something similar, without including or taking into account the required software license details – Copyright Management Information (CMI) in the context of the law.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.