● 07.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 04/07/2023: Perl 5.38 and Plasma 6 ISOs of KDE neon

Posted in News Roundup at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• There’s only one news story this week, and it’s a big one. Red Hat dropped a bombshell on the RHEL rebuild communities by announcing that they will restrict source code releases to paying customers only.

Instructionals/Technical

• Are you looking to make the shift from using snap packages to flatpaks? If so, you’re in the right place! In this article, we’re going to introduce you to a fantastic tool called Unsnap, which simplifies the process to migrate from Snap packages to Flatpak in Ubuntu and its derivatives.

• The future of Ubuntu arrives in 2024. But you can take it for a spin right now.

• Run the following command to see the size of Pip cache in your Linux.

• The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is a crucial tool in the Linux user’s arsenal, particularly for those using Ubuntu. It facilitates direct network connections between two devices, making it an invaluable resource for tasks like remote access and data transfers.

• The grep command is a fundamental tool in the Linux environment, renowned for its ability to search through text files for specific strings that match provided search patterns. However, its thoroughness can sometimes be a double-edged sword, leading to an overwhelming amount of results.

• In the extensive and complex world of Linux, a multitude of commands are at your disposal to manage and manipulate the system. One such command is umount, which is specifically designed to unmount a device or partition as identified by its path.

• In the ever-growing world of media players, mpv stands out as a robust and versatile option for users who seek high-quality performance.

• In this TechRepublic How to Make Tech Work video, Jack Wallen shows you how to add the Docker Scout feature to the Docker CLI.

• In this TechRepublic How to Make Tech Work tutorial, Jack Wallen shows you how to add the Docker Scout feature to the Docker CLI.

• The Linux ifconfig command is a versatile tool that plays a crucial role in network management. It’s a command-line utility that allows you to configure and manage network interfaces on Linux-based systems. With ifconfig, you can assign IP addresses, enable or disable interfaces, manage ARP cache, and much more.

• Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions installed and used around the world by millions of users. Ubuntu can be found on servers,

• This simple tutorial shows how to install the DVD authoring tool, DVDStyler 3.3 Beta, in Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 23.04. DVDStyler is a free software for creating professional-looking DVDs. It provides many built-in buttons, templates, and file browser to make easy to burn DVDs.

Games

• Another month down and Valve has announced what’s been popular over the last month, so let’s take a look at the top Steam Deck list for June 2023. Sorted by hours played top to bottom, here’s what was popular with players on the Steam Deck through June 2023:

• GE-Proton has another release available (two actually) so here’s a run over what’s new for this community-maintained translation layer. This is the version of Proton not supported by Valve, so it may have issues at times the official Proton does not. However, it also at times pulls in fixes a bit quicker and can do things sometimes that Valve cannot do.

• Free, open source and continuing to expand! Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG inspired by Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft. Version 0.15 is out now and sounds fun.

• The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for June 2023, and it shows just how much the Linux share is now influenced by the Steam Deck.

• You somehow need even MORE games? Okay well here’s the newest Fanatical Trinity Bundle with some indie gems.

• Free, open source and scientific! Thrive is an in-development evolution sim, with a new release out now adding in some more big prototypes for later-life stages.

• BattleBit Remastered is the current game climbing the ranks on Steam, made by a tiny team of only 3 people it has regularly seen tens of thousands of players. It works on Steam Deck and desktop Linux but the anti-cheat may turn into a big problem.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Work on KDE Plasma 6 is well underway and the first stable release of it is expected to be released …Well, when it’s ready – but likely sometime later this year.

• But if you’re keen to muck in and try it out ahead of then you can download KDE neon unstable edition. This is an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based “not a distro” distro whose latest ISOs include KDE Plasma 6.0 and its assorted libraries and frameworks.

• Now, I must stress that KDE Plasma 6 is a work in progress. By using it you’re liable to encounter instability, breakage, bugs, etc. KDE neon unstable has a high churn rate (i.e. you’ll be installing lots of updates, regularly) so it’s not suited for use on the laptop you’re writing your dissertation on, etc.

• KDE neon unstable edition is running Plasma 6 and is your ideal way to test the next version of our lightweight but powerful Linux desktop.

• Currently it looks near identical to the Plasma 5 builds (hopefully a banner will be added shortly).

• One obvious bug is visible in the panel above where items which should be aligned to the right are not, that’s easy to work around until it gets fixed. There’s many more bugs but considering this is an early port using unreleased frameworks it’s mostly useable, especially now the worst of the overlapping kf5/kf6 packages are sorted.

• So take care, don’t give it to your friends or family, but do give it a test and let us know what breaks.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• Last week, the Rocky Linux project said it had found a way to continue delivering its RHEL-based distribution. Now we have some information on how it’s doing it.

• The decades-long battle between Red Hat and the various organizations cloning its enterprise Linux distro has taken a new turn. If you’ve been following the news recently, Red Hat fired a salvo against the RHEL rebuilds by stopping publication of its enterprise distro’s source code to its Git repository. Soon afterwards, we covered the news that the Rocky Linux project announced that it had found a workaround.

• In a blog post boldly entitled “Keeping Open Source Open”, the project describes two different ways that it can obtain RHEL source code without contravening Red Hat’s license agreements.

• Secure coding is essential to building robust and resilient software that is less susceptible to exploitation by attackers. One way to ensure secure coding is to use a feature called FORTIFY_SOURCE. In this article, we will explore FORTIFY_SOURCE and how it can be used to enhance the security of your code.

• Network infrastructures growth in scale and complexity pose the need for modern enterprise automation solutions such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, to cover multi-domain and multi-vendor architectures including standalone and SDN (Software Defined Network) solutions.

• Automation is driving network engineer skills transformation and is fundamental for modern network management and operations. Ansible is the de-facto enterprise network automation language and has been pervasive in different network domains, and it is considered one of the network engineer’s skills of the future by Cisco Systems. A quick search in Google will lead more than 5.3 million results, and with such an enormous amount of information it is critical  that you can trust that the reference you are using is reliable:

• Add a requirements.yml file in your automation controller project and it will pull the Collections from your private automation hub. Note you should have previously configured the private automation hub in your ansible.cfg

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Canonical Data Fabric team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Charmed Spark, our solution for Apache Spark.

• Apache Spark is a free, open source software framework for developing distributed, parallel processing jobs. It’s popular with data engineers and data scientists alike when building data pipelines for both batch and continuous data processing at scale. Engineers can write Python or Scala code to develop Spark jobs for ETL (extract-transform-load), analytics and machine learning.

Devices/Embedded

• Last month, Kontron unveiled their 3.5” Single Board Computer powered by a variety of Intel processors. The 3.5”- SBC-EKL can accommodate processors from the Atom X6000E series, the Celeron J6000/N6000 series and the Pentium J6000/N6000 series.

• The 3.5”- SBC-EKL is capable of supporting the following Intel processors:

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Other challenges bees face are beyond the control of any one beekeeper, Pettis says. They include the use of pesticides, a loss of nutrition sources for honeybees due to urbanization or land use practices leading to fewer, and less diverse food sources, such as wild flowers.

• Key findings

• In 2013–14, 1 in 5 (20%) young people aged 11–17 had either high or very high levels of psychological distress (13% and 6.6%, respectively).

• In 2017–18, an estimated 339,000 young people aged 18–24 (15%) experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress.

• In 2013–14, an estimated 245,000 young people aged 12–17 (14%) experienced a mental disorder, with males more commonly affected than females (16% compared with 13%).

• In 2019, there were 461 deaths by suicide among young people aged 15–24, a rate of 14 per 100,000 young people.

• Their main concern is that remote work promotes a more sedentary lifestyle, which can contribute to blood clots, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

• North Korean state television and newspapers showed people at theatres and other locations without masks.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• “The modern digital architecture is so advanced that systems beyond point of impact are being disrupted,” said Ryan Mandell, director of claims performance for Mitchell. “Getting a car back to pre-loss condition is harder than at any point in history, and will only become more challenging.”

• Industry experts have been particularly focused on the cost of repairing electric cars and trucks, which aren’t built like gasoline cars and have different parts. In addition, many mechanics aren’t trained to work on them. In recent months, news reports and stories shared on social media about astronomical repair bills for electric cars and trucks have captured the attention of car enthusiasts.

• Charging for TweetDeck, which was previously free and is widely used by businesses and news organizations to easily monitor content, could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertising revenue under billionaire Elon Musk’s ownership.

• Social media giant Twitter on Tuesday announced that users will soon need to be verified to use TweetDeck. The company said the change will take effect in 30 days.

• The announcement was made even as TweetDeck users, in particular, faced several problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load. The problem occurred soon after Twitter CEO Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day. Initially, Musk limited tweet reading to 6,000 posts for verified users per day and 600 daily posts for unverified users. Hours later, he increased these limits to 10,000 tweets and 1,000 tweets, respectively.

• Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites.

• But — what will happen to the Google Index? Millions of search results are effectively dead links. Users that refined Reddit search results via Google are now out of luck (Reddit’s search is inferior). Tweets in the search engine results page (SERP) now lead to a login wall for many users.

• Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.

• According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.

• Since Musk took over the company last year, chaos has reigned at Twitter. Musk wants to make Twitter a bulwark of free speech. However, critics have expressed concern that hate speech can be spread more easily due to his intervention. The well-known billionaire claims he has also cut over 6,000 jobs at the company, bringing their total number of full-time employees to about a thousand.

• As part of this shift in computing, we have to become more nuanced about what we mean when we talk about the edge. I like to think of it as a continuum moving from the most compute and power-constrained devices such as sensors to the most powerful servers that happen to be located on premise in a factory. In the middle are devices such as tablets, smartphones, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and gateways that might handle incoming data from PLCs or sensors.

• Moreover, each of these devices along the continuum might run their own AI models and require their own specialized type of computing to compare the data coming into those models. For example, I’ve written about the need for sensors to get smarter and process more information directly.

• Twitter Inc. is refusing to engage in arbitration with ex-employees who were fired when Elon Musk took over the company after pushing them to use that process to resolve claims that they weren’t paid, didn’t get promised severance, or were discriminated against, according to a lawsuit.

• AWS executives who departed or resigned from Amazon in 2023 include presidents, vice presidents, data center and professional services leaders.

• Gurdeep Pall, a long-serving corporate vice president at Microsoft, announced to his colleagues that he intends to retire from the company in September, The Information reported on Monday citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (cups, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, python3.7, and yajl), Fedora (chromium, kubernetes, pcs, and webkitgtk), Scientific Linux (open-vm-tools), SUSE (iniparser, keepass, libvirt, prometheus-ha_cluster_exporter, prometheus-sap_host_exporter, rekor, terraform-provider-aws, terraform-provider-helm, and terraform-provider-null), and Ubuntu (python-reportlab and vim).

• On May 6 and May 7, DataBreaches reported that the attack on Murfreesboro Medical Clinic & SurgiCenter (“MMC”) appeared to be the work of the ransomware group known as BianLian.

• On June 14, MMC issued an updated notice on their website, as noted by Daily News Journal. The news report reiterated that MMC refused to pay the ransom or contact the threat actors at all — as a matter of principle, according to the CEO of the for-profit center.

• MMC’s investigation was “unable to determine whether any personal information was actually accessed or removed from our network,” the June 14 notice stated. Perhaps if they had contacted the attackers, they would have found out what data the bad actors had accessed or acquired?

• A systems error involving the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) resulted in 2,632 Health-e-Arizona Plus household accounts having their data accidentally exposed to others accessing the website.

• ARx Patient Solutions and its affiliate pharmacy, ARx Patient Solutions Pharmacy, have issued a press release about a data breach affecting patient data.

• Their notice states, “It was determined that in March 2022, an employee email account was compromised and accessed by an unauthorized third party.” The types of patient information that may have been accessed or acquired included names, dates of birth, medical information, and health insurance information, and in some limited cases, Social Security numbers.

• The Fontana Herald News alerts us to an update by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department concerning the ransomware attack they experienced in early April.

• A satellite communications system serving the Russian military was knocked offline by a cyberattack late Wednesday and remained mostly down on Thursday, in an incident reminiscent of an attack on a similar system used by Ukraine at the start of the war between the countries.

• Dozor-Teleport, the satellite system’s operator, switched some users to terrestrial networks during the outage, according to JD Work, a cyberspace professor at the National Defense University.

• If you’ve ever owned a domain name, the chances are good that at some point you’ve received a snail mail letter which appears to be a bill for a domain or website-related services. In reality, these misleading missives try to trick people into paying for useless services they never ordered, don’t need, and probably will never receive. Here’s a look at the most recent incarnation of this scam — DomainNetworks — and some clues about who may be behind it.

• Email is one of the most prominent methods of modern business communication. It acts as a critical dissemination channel for sharing legal documents and other confidential business information in any formal environment. However, email is also the root cause of over 90% of all cyberattacks such as phishing, URL spoofing, malicious attachments, trojans, and malware.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On 1 July, Spain holds the Presidency of the Council of the EU for the fifth time. In his welcome address, the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced: “Europe must become an area of certainties, in which material welfare, freedom and democracy pave the way for the future of all people.” Previously, Sweden had presided over the Council of the EU for six months. Under the Swedish Presidency, the so-called “Going Dark” program was launched, which aims to reintroduce indiscriminate communications data retention while limiting citizens’ digital freedoms and rights for confidential and anonymous communications on the internet. Similarly, under the Swedish Presidency, the Council pushed ahead with plans for EU-wide chat control, despite legal opinions showing that the plans are incompatible with EU law.

• Following noyb’s 101 complaints on unlawful EU-US data transfers, the Swedish data protection authority (IMY) issued decisions against four companies and imposed a fine of 12 mio SEK (1 mio Euro) against telecommunication provider Tele2 and 300.000 SEK against online retailer CDON for using Google Analytics on their webpage. Although many other European authorities (e.g. Austria, France and Italy) already found that the use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, this is the first financial penalty imposed on companies for using Google Analytics, despite the CJEU’s rulings on EU-US data transfers.

• The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY) has audited how four companies use Google Analytics for web statistics. IMY issues administrative fines against two of the companies. One of the companies has recently stopped using the statistics tool on its own initiative, while IMY orders the other three to also stop using it.

• All four decisions stem from NGO noyb’s 101 complaints against Google Analytics and Facebook Connect. noyb has already successfully brought identical cases in other countries, and these decisions are more of the same- that is to say, their legal content is an application of the Schrems II decisions of the Court of Justice.

• The Schrems II ruling requires companies that transfer data to the US to implement extra safeguards on top of the “standard” safeguards required by the GDPR for all data transfers (in most cases, the standard contractual clauses drafted by the EU Commission). These safeguards are needed because of the risk of State surveillance over foreign data, as highlighted in the Snowden files.

• NOYB asserted that the use of Google Analytics for web statistics by the companies resulted in the transfer of European data to the United States in violation of the EU’s data protection regulation, the GDPR.

• The GDPR allows the transfer of data to third countries only if the European Commission has determined they offer at least the same level of privacy protection as the EU. A 2020 EU Court of Justice ruling struck down an EU-U.S. data transfer deal as being insufficient.

• At the heart of the matter is the fact that Google Analytics transfers EU users’ information to U.S. data centers for processing. For several years, that practice was permitted under a legal framework called Privacy Shield. But in 2020, the EU’s top court struck down Privacy Shield, limiting companies’ ability to move personal user data outside the EU.

• Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• France is mourning the death of Leon Gautier, the last of 177 French green berets who stormed the Normandy beaches defended by Hitler’s forces on June 6, 1944.

• Gautier, who was 100 when he died early Monday, was a nationally known figure in France and was a guest of honor at multiple D-Day commemorations.

• When news of Nahel’s killing spread, swarms of French Muslims – without waiting to obtain further information about the case – took to the streets, setting fire, that night and on the nights that followed, to countless vehicles and bus shelters, plus innumerable buildings, including dozens of schools and city halls and police stations, at first in Paris and its outskirts and later in other French (and even Belgian) municipalities. A library in Metz – recently enlarged for the benefit of Muslim youth “who wanted to work, study, read, and have a haven of peace” – was burned to the ground. So was a transport depot in Aubervilliers. A Holocaust memorial in Nanterre was desecrated, with vandals writing on it that they planned to perpetrate “a new Holocaust.” And the homes of several mayors have been attacked.

• As with previous riots, though, much of the current violence is being carried out by agitators or opportunists taking advantage of the disorder to loot and vandalise, often using social media and messaging apps to encourage revolt. Indeed most of the arson attacks in recent days have taken place against public services—town halls, libraries, schools, buses—in the banlieues themselves, prompting dismay among residents. The government has in recent years spent huge sums trying to renovate such neighbourhoods.

• Finance minister Bruno Le Maire said more than 700 shops, supermarkets, restaurants and bank branches had been “ransacked, looted and sometimes even burned to the ground since Tuesday”.

• While the Leftist-Islamic alliance is cracking elsewhere due to the Left’s determination to normalize gender delusions and fantasies and sexualize children, in France, it has the whole country aflame, and could conceivably bring about the end of the Republic. What is happening now in France was entirely foreseeable, but few dared foresee it, for fear of being called “racist,” “Islamophobic,” and “far right.” Once again those who have been smeared with such terms turn out to have been right all along.

• According to Habib, “in these lost areas of the republic, for years there has been an undisturbed growth of hatred of France, white people and Jews.”

• On Sunday night, the mums in Aulney, a working-class area near Paris, took to the streets themselves, waving banners calling for an end to the violence. President Macron appealed to the “mamans et papas” (the mums and dads) of the rioters last week to keep them at home and off social media, which, he said, allow “inflammatory material” to circulate.

• The tweet, posted early on 2 July had over 1.7m views but it’s false – it’s not from the current riots in France but is actually a still from a film.

• BBC Verify examined the image and, searching for previous versions of it on the internet, found it was from the French film, Athena – a fictional account of rioting in a city suburb – made in 2022.

• But as populations cross a certain threshold — around a million or so, he argues — civilizations “either acquire a civil service” or collapse into a “bureaucratic empire” run by administrative elites. This “switch from militarized ruling classes to administrative ruling classes is a general rule in history,” Turchin argues, at least for large states such as China, which has been a bureaucratic empire for two millennia — a continuity unbroken by multiple revolutions, including the overthrow of imperial rule, the triumph of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party or the more recent turn to state capitalism.

• States run by ideological elites (most often religious in nature) are relatively rare in history, Turchin argues, as are those run by the fourth kind of elites: plutocracies. Those would include the Italian merchant republics of Venice and Genoa in the late Middle Ages, the Dutch Republic of the 17th and 18th centuries — and the present-tense United States of America.

• In Imphal, an angry mob of men and women looted hundreds of weapons from a police armory in the initial days of the violence. The police and security forces have yet to recover most of the missing weapons. Many police officers have been disarmed to thwart incidents of weapon snatching. Manipur is now divided between two sides. Meiteis in the valley and Kukis in the hills. Each side defends its own territory with civilian defense volunteer groups.

• Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy Made Love, Got War, among others. See https://www.normansolomon.com

• The Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has “foiled an assassination attempt” on Sergei Aksenov, the head of annexed Crimea.

• Mutual skepticism between the United States and China over a wide range of economic and security issues has festered in recent years.

• In a special broadcast, we remember the life and legacy of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June at the age of 92, just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, then a top military strategist working for the RAND Corporation, risked life in prison by secretly copying and then leaking 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the secret history of the U.S. War in Vietnam. The leak would end up helping to take down President Nixon, accelerate the end of the War in Vietnam and lead to a major victory for press freedom. Henry Kissinger once called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.” Over the past 50 years, Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. We mark his death with excerpts from some of our interviews with Ellsberg over the years about Vietnam, as well as Ukraine, tensions with China, the threat of nuclear war and working toward a more honest discourse about U.S. policy. “To this day, the very idea that the U.S. is … an empire is a taboo, and a very unfortunate one, because it makes it impossible to understand what’s going on,” Ellsberg said.

• In June, Biden was confronted with the ultimate “3 am phone call” moment. He could have made a call which would have helped reduce the threat of a nuclear crisis or worse.

• Saudi Arabia and Russia have announced cuts to the global oil supply to combat falling energy prices, building on several reductions by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) this year.

• >Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are set to address the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation alliance on Tuesday, with Iran expected to expand the Asian grouping. Putin will be addressing his first summit since a short-lived mutiny last month after the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led a failed rebellion against the Kremlin.

• South Africa hasn’t sold or supplied arms or weapons to Russia since 2020, Mondli Gungubele, National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC) chair, told a Parliamentarian attempting to dig deeper into December’s Simon’s Town docking of Russian freighter Lady R. Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) National Assembly (NA) public representative, Magdalena Hlengwa, wanted Gungubele, currently Communications [...]

War in Ukraine

• A Hague-based international prosecutorial team launched efforts Monday to prepare case materials against Russia for the crime of aggression — a crime that is notoriously difficult to prosecute on the international stage.

• Waiting for an international tribunal to prosecute Russia’s crimes is counterproductive, but there are measures that countries can do now, argues Tetyana Zhurman, a political science student at Columbia University.

• An award-winning Russian investigative journalist from Novaya Gazeta and a lawyer were badly beaten by armed men during a trip to Chechnya, the human rights group Team Against Torture reported on July 4.

• Family members of imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny have officially sued the penal colony where he is being held for not allowing them access to him.

• U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy was granted access to jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison on July 3 and reported that he is “in good health and remains strong, despite his circumstances,” according to the State Department.

• An L-410 twin-engine short-range transport plane made in the Czech Republic had to make an emergency landing on July 3 in Russia’s Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk Krai due to an engine malfunction.

• Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has appointed Dauren Abaev, the former press secretary of his predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaev, to the post of ambassador to Russia.

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on July 3 it had thwarted an assassination attempt on Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea, the Interfax news agency reported.

• The assailant was waiting for a vehicle to place the bomb in and park it on Sebastopol Street to detonate it as Sergei Aksyonov’s convoy passed by.

• A group of paddlers braved four-foot swells, the Russian mob, and yahoos in powerboats on a watery fifteen-hundred-mile journey from Maine and back.

• After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny, Vladimir Putin must now figure out what to do with Wagner troops in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

• Evan Gershkovich has been held at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison since late March on accusations of espionage that the United States and his employer vehemently reject.

• The Russia experts Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa on the aftermath of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed mutiny.

• On July 3, the Krasnodar krai operational headquarters reported that there was a traffic jam near the Crimean Bridge in the Temryuk district of the region. The traffic jam is said to be 13 kilometers (eight miles) long.

• Within days of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed insurrection, Russia’s National Security Council chair Dmitry Medvedev was once again threatening the West with nuclear armageddon. The logic of these threats ran counter even to Medvedev’s own earlier admission that the coup had alarmed the West, with the prospect of Russia’s nuclear arsenal landing in a pair of hands as untrustworthy as Prigozhin’s. Nor did the saber-rattling impress its intended audience. While pro-Kremlin nuclear strategists might lament that the West has lost the fear that underpins nuclear deterrence as such, the contradictions of Russia’s wartime nuclear policy are coming to a head in the wake of a coup that exposed the weakness of the Kremlin’s grip on the rest of the country. In an article written for the independent journalism cooperative Bereg, political scientist Mikhail Troitsky analyzes Russia’s current nuclear dilemma. Meduza publishes his article with permission.

• Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, is under fire for learning too late about the recent Wagner Group coup attempt in Russia. It’s possible the agency’s head could soon be out as a result of the late response, which many see as one too many.

• One person has been killed and 16 more injured in a Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, where two apartment complexes and an office building have been damaged by four Shahed-136 drones late Monday morning.

• Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13).

• Volodymyr Zelensky has responded to the courtroom photos of Mikheil Saakashvili from a hearing attended by Georgia’s jailed ex-president earlier today. In the stills, the politician looks dangerously emaciated.

• Shortly after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yulia Matveyeva, a judge from Mariupol, was captured by Russian soldiers. She spent seven months in captivity, where she was subjected to physical and psychological violence. In May, she was offered a seat on the Supreme Court of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” but she refused — and was later accused of crimes against the self-proclaimed republic’s “constitutional order and security,” which is punishable by death. The trial against Matveyeva was originally slated for September but was postponed, and in October, she was freed as part of a prisoner exchange. The Ukrainian outlet Graty recently told Matveyeva’s story, from Russia’s first strikes on Mariupol to her reunion with her family in Kyiv. With Graty’s permission, Meduza retells the report in English.

• Latvia will resume limited acceptance of visa applications from Russian citizens at Latvia’s diplomatic and consular missions abroad as of July 4, 2023, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday.

• The demand by Russian citizens for the acquisition of Latvian citizenship by naturalization is relatively high. Pensioners who have lived in Latvia for decades also want citizenship and are now starting to act. LSM.lv visited a naturalization exam in Daugavpils on July 2.

• RIA Novosti reports that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has commented on the mutiny organized by Wagner Group military cartel founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, saying that the incident did not affect the troops.

• Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin released his first public statement since June 26 on Monday.

• The 37-year-old poet and novelist became the 13th person to be killed in the missile strike on a restaurant in eastern Ukraine on June 27.

• Experts are divided over the accuracy of polling in Russia, but polling firms say well-designed surveys can still produce reliable results.

• Mikheil Saakashvili, now a Ukrainian citizen, has been imprisoned in Georgia. He appeared frail and skeletal in a court appearance that renewed concerns about his treatment in prison.

• Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NAZK) has added British consumer goods company Unilever to its list of sponsors of war.

• The compound has turned into the scene of protests, spy games and general weirdness as the most hostile relations in decades play out between the United States and Russia.

• Ukrainians who live near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have grown largely complacent about the dangers despite warnings that the facility has a bull’s-eye on it.

• EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen vowed to “leave no stone unturned” to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin and others responsible for alleged crimes committed during the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine as a new office opened in The Hague to gather evidence for future trials.

• Russia has accused Ukraine of launching a drone attack on Moscow and the surrounding areas that resulted in the temporary restriction of landings and takeoffs at the capital’s Vnukovo airport.

• Emergency responders in Ukraine’s capital offer not only physical care to the victims of airstrikes, but also mental health support for survivors in crisis.

• The first group of children from Bucha, a town near Kyiv that has become a symbol of war crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine, arrived in Lithuania’s Baltic Sea resort of Palanga on Saturday.

• Valerijus Polkovnikovas, a Lithuanian who fought for Ukraine, died in a hospital in Kyiv, Rokas Pauliukaitis, a Lithuanian Air Force pilot, announced on Facebook on Monday.

• Kyiv’s forces have made more small gains, but the situation on the battlefield is “quite complicated,” a senior Ukrainian official said.

• Russia said on Tuesday that Ukraine had launched a drone attack on Moscow and the surrounding region that disrupted flights at one of the capital’s main airports, in what it called “another act of terrorism” by Kyiv.

• As Ukraine’s top army general has put it, every metre of ground in the country’s counteroffensive is being won “with blood”. The Ukrainian soldiers’ progress is particularly gruelling in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region. FRANCE 24’s Gwendoline Debono reports from the front line, where Russian forces are giving Ukraine’s artillerymen no respite.

• When Russia’s military crossed the Ukrainian border on 24 February 2022 to march on Kyiv, they were expecting an easy victory.

• European Commission Press release The Hague, 03 Jul 2023 Today, the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) started its operations in the Hague, hosted by the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust).

• Over the past 50 years, Daniel Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. In his last interview with Democracy Now!, in April, he spoke about the war in Ukraine and why it required a diplomatic solution, and about the latest leak of Pentagon documents by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, who has been indicted on six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information. We asked Ellsberg about what the leaks say about the war in Ukraine, and discussed his decision in 2021 to leak a classified government report that he had kept in his possession for decades, which revealed the U.S. had drawn up plans to attack China with nuclear weapons during the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. Ellsberg warned the possibility of a nuclear first strike by the United States was an “insane” policy that would end most life on Earth. “The belief that we can do less bad by striking first than if we strike second is what confronts us in Ukraine with a real possibility of a nuclear war coming out of this conflict,” Ellsberg said.

Environment

• New Zealand has become the world’s first country to expand its ban on plastic bags in supermarkets to thin bags, which are typically used to hold fruits or vegetables.

• The move, which took effect on Saturday, is part of a wider government campaign against single-use plastics.

• Companies are increasingly facing legal action over their false or misleading climate communications, according to a new report examining trends in global climate litigation. That report, released late last week, highlighted a surge in litigation around climate-related greenwashing — what researchers have termed “climate-washing” — over the past few years.

• Out of 81 climate-washing cases filed against companies since 2015, nearly two-thirds were brought in 2021 and 2022. By contrast, fewer than 10 such cases were filed both in 2020 and 2019.

Overpopulation

• He added that the median age of the Chinese population is now 38-years-old. In India, which earlier this year was projected by the UN to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, the average age is 28.

Finance

• One of the biggest worries surrounding central bank digital currencies is the potential for them to be used to surveil and ultimately control how citizens spend their money. These concerns should of course not be dismissed, but they are often blind to the ways in which our payments are already surveiled and controlled by state and non-state actors under the current system.

• When you pay with a card or payment app, user data, as well as fees, are collected not only by the merchant, but all the intermediaries involved, including card companies, the acquirer (the company providing the payments infrastructure your card interacts with), and both parties’ banks. And this information is routinely accessed by the state and sold off to other third parties.

• The digital pound design being developed would at the very least offer as much privacy as private bank money, and has the potential to offer more. Even under an account-based digital pound, the central bank and government will only be able to see anonymised transaction data, rather than users’ personal information. But there is also potential for a genuine form of digital cash, which offers much more privacy and security than current electronic payment methods.

• Currently, physical cash represents the most privacy-enhancing form of payment. Rather than requiring authentication by being linked to an account, cash is a ‘bearer instrument’ that is authenticated simply by possession, allowing peer-to-peer settlement without any intermediaries, and generating no user data. Positive Money wholeheartedly supports keeping physical cash, and we advocate for a digital pound as a complement to it rather than a replacement. But it has limitations: as a result of a war on cash it is increasingly not accepted by retailers, and it of course cannot be used for online payments. So without a digital equivalent of cash, there would be no privacy in the digital economy.

• The world’s richest people added $852 billion to their fortunes in the first half of 2023, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and released on Monday. Each member of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index made an average of over $14 million per day over the last six months—even as 47 percent of the world’s population barely survived on $6.25 a day.

• The rise in the wealth of the world’s 2,640 billionaires was the largest six-month spike since the second half of 2020. The previous jump was the result of the trillions of dollars the US and other governments around the world poured into the financial markets to protect the assets of the super-rich from the impact of the pandemic. In the three years between March 2020 and March 2023, all three of the New York Stock Exchange’s largest indexes have risen by 70 percent. They have continued to rise in the last quarter despite the growing signs of financial instability and warnings of economic recession.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Of course, we never really know whether talk means action when it comes to Congress. However, US lawmakers’ thinking about AI reflects some emerging principles. Here are three key themes in all this chatter that you should know to help you understand where US AI legislation could be going.

• Ms Braverman, who alluded to high-profile cases including in Rotherham and Rochdale that involved groups of men of mainly Pakistani ethnicity, pointed to a “predominance of certain ethnic groups – and I say British Pakistani males – who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values, who see women in a demeaned and illegitimate way and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave”.

• However, it is understood Baker has decided he would not back Braverman again because of serious concerns over the way she has approached the issue of so-called grooming gangs.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The hearing for the government’s application of the injunction was adjourned to later this month. A Department of Justice representative said the injunction was aimed at people who “are conducting or intending to conduct” the distribution of Glory to Hong Kong to incite secession, sedition, or to violate the national anthem law, and that it did not intend to target “the world at large.”

• Swedish police charged the man who burned the holy book with agitation against an ethnic or national group. In a newspaper interview, he described himself as an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban it.

• On Sunday, the OIC urged member states to “take unified and collective measures to prevent the recurrence of incidents of desecration of copies of the” Quran, according a statement released after the “extraordinary” meeting.

• Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: “The death penalty is used to create societal fear and prevent more protests. The majority of those killed are low-cost victims of the killing machine, drug defendants who are from the most marginalised communities. We especially call on the UNODC and Member States funding joint projects with Iran, to break their meaningful silence on the execution of more than 206 people for drug offences, and to make all collaborations contingent on halting drug executions.”

• All eight fled Hong Kong after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the financial hub in 2020 to quell dissent after huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in 2019 were quashed.

• The move is the latest example of China’s ‘long-arm’ law enforcement that has included police surveillance among Chinese and their relatives overseas, including through unapproved “police service stations” in many countries.

• U.K-based activists Finn Lau and Mung Siu-tat and U.S.-based businessman Elmer Yuen are also on the wanted list.

• According to the indictment, Phan Son Tung created and managed three YouTube channels, namely “For a prosperous Vietnam,” Phan Son Tung and Son Tung TV, and a Facebook page under the name David Phan. He had posted around 1,000 video clips on these channels, generating more than 148 million views with 530,000 followers.

• The indictment also accused him of creating and disseminating 16 video clips with fabricated and confusion-creating content, six of which contained information promoting psychological warfare. Another 17 pieces of content distorted, slandered or insulted the prestige of organizations or the honor and dignity of individuals.

• A full-page Wen Wei Po report in May slammed subdivided housing concern groups for engaging in “soft resistance” by leveraging the housing crunch to “incite citizens’ negative emotions against the government.”

• The attack on scholarship and on a vulnerable community heralded an eventual descent into unimaginable violence. Book burning and banning, while not invented by the Nazis, became closely associated with them — and with authoritarian repression more generally.

• The popular porn site has already ixnayed services in Utah over similar age verification laws. Virginia’s and Mississippi’s laws require porn sites to verify users’ age beyond a simple checkmark of “Are You 18+?” Under these laws, users are supposed to provide porn sites with scans of government IDs. Pornhub has openly said this is a major privacy issue for both them and users. The site also complained about the states “not regulating the enforcement of these laws” which means “responsible platforms will follow the law, irresponsible platforms won’t.”

• Pornhub has already begged its users to reach out to lawmakers to complain about the regulations. Instead, the company believes the best way to deal with underage porn viewing was to further incentivize parental control features on childrens’ devices.

• According to Roskomsvoboda, which monitors blockages on the Russian internet, Russian authorities have added seven domains in support of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group military cartel, to the register of blocked sites.

• Video logs showing idyllic life in North Korea banned from platform

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Happy 52nd Birthday to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• In June, the Australian lost his first appeal against the order that aims to send him to the US for trial over alleged espionage charges.

• The second appeal was filed on 13 June. Since then his wife, father and brother have been campaigning for his release, but nothing has yet happened.

• Njabulo Ncube, director of the industry trade group Zimbabwe National Editors Forum (ZINEF), told CPJ via messaging app that he feared journalists could risk arrest or imprisonment for meeting with foreign missions sent to observe and monitor the August 23 general elections.

• “They will ask us to give the state of the situation in Zimbabwe, and once we speak, they may deem that to be unpatriotic, and they may want to invoke provisions of this bad law,” Ncube said. “Since it’s so vague, they can find anything to use to charge the journalists.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue also ordered the Kabul municipality to bring the new decree of the Taliban leader into effect and cancel the licenses of women’s beauty salons.

• Virtually all the major Harry Potter themes and implied messages clash with the claimed mainstream beliefs and attachments of the age in which it was created, and to which it speaks. That age has been confident, even arrogant in its proclamation of the freedom of individuals, the supremacy of their right to live as they wish, taking any pleasure they may, holding to be true whatever they choose, while being largely dismissive of universal laws and truths. The picture it leaves is the opposite of the cloud-cuckoo-land dream that life was meant to be easy, a condition of perpetual, untroubled leisure; that humans are all inherently good; and that insecure identity, neurosis, disappointment, and chronic free-floating anxiety may all be wished away. Harry’s life is a constant, unremitting ordeal.

• A couple of days before the deadline, a group of 20 young women came to the gates of the building Sqn Ldr Bird had turned into a “citadel”. She was called to speak to them, having told her team – many of whom were just 19 years old – to leave the hardest decisions to her. “You’re a junior aviator, you elevate that through the chain of command, that’s what it’s there for.”

• The women weren’t eligible to come to Britain, but they had received letters from the Taliban saying “we know you are single, and we’re coming for you”. “They spoke eloquently, very good English, they were university educated and they were begging these guys to help them. […] They’re pleading for their lives so they’re playing very heavily on the fact that I’m a woman.”

• It appears that the Patriotic (Vatan) Party, a secular nationalist party aligned with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), protested the event alongside its affiliated youth and women’s groups. An Islamist group chanting “Allahu Akbar” slogans also joined the protest.

• “Fascists, accompanied by Islamists, openly insult and threaten us. They chant religious slogans and slogans full of hatred. The police are spectating,” said Şeren, also sharing a video of the incident: [...]

• Even before Moms for Liberty had wrapped up its second annual national conference—bearing the Margaret Atwood–esque sobriquet “Joyful Warriors Summit”—in Philadelphia on Sunday, the event was a messaging triumph. That’s because the Florida-based right-wing school takeover group, launched in 2021 to protest Covid lockdowns, could count on an amnesiac and credulous press to dress up its race-mongering, anti-LGBTQ+, and hard-right organizing profile in the image of a standard-issue interest group steeped in the homespun politics of local citizen outrage at the grassroots level.

• The New Jersey judge, Gary Wilcox, posted the videos using an alias. In some, he wore judicial robes. At least one was recorded from bed.

• State Department advisory removes concerns about COVID lockdowns but warns of rise in ‘wrongful detentions.’

• Fears mount that UK Online Safety Bill may include a requirement for an encrypted message scanning capability.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

Technology and Free Software

Internet/Gemini

• Until a few weeks ago, I occasionally visited Usenet using the Lynx browser’s built-in NNTP handler. It’s a basic tool that served its purpose for browsing a few groups. However, Lynx couldn’t handle killfiles, and the abundance of spam on Usenet nowadays made it very discouraging, looking at you google groups!. Recently, my other computer stopped working, which gave me a clean slate, so I decided to invest more time into finding a better solution. I remember using Pan back in the day, towards the end of Usenets hayday, but I wanted something CLI based so that’s why I ended up going with slrn.

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