● 07.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/07/2023: Linux 6.4.2 and Canonical’s Power Grab

Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The previous generation TUXEDO Stellaris 17 laptop was announced last year in November, along with the 4th Gen Polaris 15 notebook, and it shipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card and an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processor.

• Now, the 5th generation TUXEDO Stellaris 17 notebook is powered by a 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900HX “Raptor Lake” processor with 24 cores, 32 threads, 36 MB cache, up to 5.40 GHz clock speed, and integrated Intel UHD graphics. The CPU can run with up to 100 watts sustained thanks to the laptop’s powerful air cooling.

• In the constantly evolving world of software development and IT management, choosing the right operating system for your enterprise developers is a strategic choice. Ubuntu vs macOS, which is right for you? Our latest whitepaper helps you answer this question and make an informed decision. This blog post provides a sneak peek into our findings covering both the developer landscape, and the key considerations for IT administrators.

• Considering macOS or Linux for your organisation? Find out Ubuntu stacks up.

• In conclusion, whilst macOS offers robust, highly performant and integrated solutions, Ubuntu provides greater flexibility, control, extended support periods, and cost-effectiveness.

Kernel Space

• The fifth conference on Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel (abbreviated “OSPM”) was held on April 17 to 19 in Ancona, Italy. LWN was not there, unfortunately, but the attendees of the event have gotten together to write up summaries of the discussions that took place and LWN has the privilege of being able to publish them. Reports from the third and final day of the event appear below.

• The 6.4 kernel was released on June 25 after a nine-week development cycle. By that point, 14,835 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline kernel, a slight increase from 6.3 (14,424 changesets) but still lower than many other development cycles. As usual, LWN has taken a look at those changesets, who contributed them, and what the most active developers were up to.

• The work in 6.4 was contributed by 1,980 developers, 282 of whom made their first kernel contribution during this development cycle.

• A discussion that largely centered around the documentation of iomap, which provides a block-mapping interface for modern filesystems, was led by Luis Chamberlain at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. There is an ongoing process of converting filesystems to use iomap, in order to leave buffer heads behind and to better support folios, so the intent was to get feedback on the documentation from developers who are working on those conversions. One of the concrete outcomes of the session was a plan to move that documentation from its current location on the KernelNewbies wiki into the kernel documentation.

• Hannes Reinecke said that the lack of clear units in the iomap documentation confused him; were things specified in bytes, sectors, pages, or something else? In addition, there are many different operation-function pointers, in three different struct *_ops, that need to be provided by a filesystem, but it was not clear to him what each of them was meant to do. Chamberlain said that it had also confused him when he started looking at iomap, but the basic idea is that there are lots of different types of operations, many with flags or options of various sorts, so the myriad of ops are just meant to split those out into their own separate functions. The alternative is a single function with lots of complexity to handle all of the different possibilities. Reinecke said that he was fine with having all of those functions, but that the documentation did not (yet) explain what all the operations were for.

• The final day of the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit featured three separate sessions led by Luis Chamberlain (he also led a plenary on day two); the first of those was a filesystem session on the status of the kthread-freezer-removal effort. The kthread freezer is meant to help filesystems freeze their state in order to suspend or hibernate the system, but since at least 2015, the freezer has been targeted for removal. Things did not change much a year later, nor by LSFMM in 2018 when Chamberlain had picked up Jiri Kosina’s removal effort; this year, Chamberlain was back to try to push things along.

• It may come as a surprise to some that freezing filesystems in preparation for suspending the system has been broken in Linux for years, he began. There is no unified mechanism to freeze filesystems and if there is a lot of I/O going on, it can lead to a system hang when resuming, which is not quite what users are looking for.

• The quest to enable limited use of BPF features in unprivileged processes continues. In the previous episode, an attempt to use authoritative Linux security module (LSM) hooks for this purpose was strongly rejected by the LSM developers. BPF developer Andrii Nakryiko has now returned with a new mechanism based on a privilege-conveying token. That approach, too, has run into some resistance, but a solution for the strongest concerns might be in sight.

• Nakryiko (and his employer) would like the ability to allow a process to carry out a limited set of BPF operations without needing to hold any special capabilities. Currently, most BPF operations require (at least) the CAP_BPF capability, so code that needs to use BPF functionality must be run with privilege that often goes beyond what is actually needed. The security module implemented in Nakryiko’s previous attempt could have been used to allow specific operations as controlled by the security policy, but this module required authoritative hooks (security hooks that grant access that would otherwise be denied); such hooks are not allowed in the kernel. Thus, necessarily, the new approach takes a different tack.

Applications

• Choosing the right file system for your computer can be a difficult process. It’s easy to wonder: why do file systems matter at all? Is there a specific file system that works best for installing Linux?

• As it turns out, there are two file systems that stand out as the best general-purpose options for installing Linux.

• However, Linux is also an attractive way of reading e-books on a desktop computer or notebook. Linux has a good range of open source software which helps users to organize their e-book collection, catch up on a novel, or even to create and publish their own e-book.

• This article showcases the best graphical eBook readers. We only feature free and open source software here. Here’s our recommendations captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you have an unattended Ubuntu desktop or server running an old or non-long-term release, it’s time to upgrade to the current generally available release. Follow this guide to upgrade from End Of Life to General Availability. You can check what release of Ubuntu you have installed by running the command below.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HandBrake on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, HandBrake is a versatile and powerful open-source video transcoder that allows users to convert video files into various formats.

• You may have heard the term “controlling terminal” used in relation to Linux processes. You might be confused about what a controlling terminal is. Fortunately, a controlling terminal is easy to understand.

• The rsync command is a powerful and versatile tool designed for efficient file synchronization for your Linux environment. Whether you’re a system administrator, developer, or just a Linux enthusiast, harnessing the capabilities of the rsync command can improve your workflow to a great extent. In this article, we walk you through some practical examples of how to use the rsync command in Linux.

• In Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu, package management plays a crucial role in installing, upgrading, and removing software packages.

• One of the fundamental components of the package management system is APT (Advanced Package Tool), which includes various utilities for managing packages, one such utility called apt-cache, which is used for package searching, querying, and information retrieval.

• One important thing to master under Linux System/Server Administration is package management using different package management tools.

• Different Linux distributions install applications in a pre-compiled package containing binary files, configuration files, and information about the application’s dependencies.

• LibreOffice is a powerful, free, and open-source office suite that includes various applications like Writer, Calc, Impress, and more. It provides a comprehensive set of tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

• Adding a dotted underline in LibreOffice is a straightforward process. Here’s how you can do it,

Games

• The June Steam Survey results show that AMD CPUs have gained significant popularity among Linux gamers, with a market share of 67 per cent –a seven per cent increase from the previous month.

• The increase is partly due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD SoC. Still, it’s been a trend building for some time of AMD’s increasing Ryzen CPU popularity among Linux users to their open-source driver work and continuing to build more goodwill with the community.

• Last June the AMD CPU Linux gaming market share came in at 45 per cent, while Intel was at 54 per cent. Or at the start of 2023, AMD CPUs were at a 55 per cent market share among Linux gamers. Or if going back six years, AMD CPU use among Linux gamers was a mere 18 per cent during the early Ryzen days. It’s also the direct opposite on the Windows side. When looking at the Steam Survey results for June limited to Windows, Intel has a 68 per cent market share to AMD at 32 per cent.

• Selaco is one that really needs to be on your wishlist, a retro-fuelled FPS powered by GZDoom with some impressive world design and fantastic combat. The developers recently updated the demo too! No word yet on when it will release but one things for certain — it’s filled me full of hype for it after playing the updated demo.

• Black Dragon Mage from developer Datablob Studio looks absolutely nuts! Taking inspiration from all the bullet heaven games like Vampire Survivors, Brotato and pulling in some elements from Path of Exile and even…Bomberman? Apparently so.

• ProtonUp-Qt is the app that allows you to install the likes of GE-Proton, Wine-GE, Luxtorpeda and more for Steam, Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher and Boxtron.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• I’m posting this here because I’m posting it everywhere. I’ve just sent an email everyone who volunteered to help make BSDCan 2024 happen. I suspect some of you have not received that email. If you haven’t seen it, please check your spam folder. We need to start organizing now to make 2024 go smoothly.

• A low key leak from the ongoing g2k23 hackathon comes the news that soft updates (aka softdep) will, for now, be a no-op on OpenBSD-current.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The LXD project, an open-source container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC), is to be brought under the umbrella of Canonical’s own projects.

• The decision by Canonical, the creator and main contributor to the project, comes after LXD had spent more than eight years as part of the LXC community.

• LXC said its team “regrets” the situation but respects Canonical’s decision to bring it under its own watch. The transition period is now underway.

• Canonical did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.

• Canonical, the creator and main contributor of the LXD project has decided that after over 8 years as part of the Linux Containers community, the project would now be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects.

• While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.

• A short statement posted on the Linux Containers website states: “The LXD project is no longer part of the LinuxContainers project but can now be found directly on Canonical’s websites.”

• Although Canonical created LXD and has been a key contributor to its development the project has thus far lived under the auspices of the Linux Containers community. That’s changing as Canonical now feels the project will “be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects”.

• Canonical’s taken LXD back. The company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution has decided that the project it created, and to which it is the largest contributer, will “be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects,” according to a notice posted by linuxcontainers.org, the organization that’s hosted the project for the past eight years.

• Linux Containers is the umbrella project behind LXC, the popular Linux container runtime that consists of tools, templates, and library and language bindings. Users like it because of its flexibility, and because it covers almost all features supported by the Linux kernel.

• In addition, the organization hosts a variety of other software projects related to LXC, such as LXCFS (a userspace filesystem), distrobuilder (an image building tool for containers and virtual machines), libresource (a library of interfaces for obtaining system resource information), and lxcri (an LXC wrapper that’s used as a drop-in container runtime replacement).

Devices/Embedded

• We’ve seen a range of mini PCs based on the Intel Processor N100 “Alder Lake-N” SoC in recent months, and the T9 Plus is yet another one but offered in an ultra-compact (85x85x43 mm) form factor, yet still offering three HDMI 2.0 video output, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and three USB ports. Pricing is also a highlight since the mini PC sells for as low as $117 in barebone configuration. The mini PC also features either 8GB or 16GB LPDDR5, an optional M.2 SATA or NVMe 2240 SSD up to 1TB, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, and an audio jack. Unsurprisingly for this small form factor, it’s not fanless, and actively cooled by a heat pipe, heat sink, and “silent fan”.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Raspberry Pi Pico has been used for tons of cool RC projects from simple robotic cars to robotic drones. Today we’re excited to share something on the nautical side created by Mr. Nr from YouTube channel Lily’s Planet. Using our favorite SBC, he’s created what he calls the Niki boat. It uses the Pico to drive a tiny RC boat built entirely from scratch by Mr. Nr using recycled bottles. So not only do you have the fun of playing captain, you get to help the environment along the way.

• We were proud to provide free IoT workshops in Kenya last month for the burgeoning hardware community in and around Nairobi. We worked in partnership with Gearbox and Safaricom to bring a group of technology enthusiasts together and get them started with Raspberry Pi Pico W, basic circuits, MicroPython, and cloud connectivity.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Engineering means “Do it right the first time”

• Engineering does not mean “Keep hacking at it until something works”

• JupyterLab is a web-based development environment widely used by data scientists, engineers, and educators for data visualization, data analysis, prototyping, and interactive learning materials. The Jupyter community has recently announced the release of JupyterLab 4.0, introducing lots of new features and performance improvements to enhance its capabilities both in research and educational settings.

• JupyterLab’s umbrella project, Jupyter, focuses on creating free and open-source software for interactive computing across all programming languages, using the three-clause BSD license for all of its projects. Jupyter evolved from IPython, which is an interactive shell for Python that later added support for other interpreted languages. Jupyter’s core concept is the computational notebook: a shareable document that combines computer code, plain language descriptions, data tables, visualizations, and even interactive controls like sliders for changing parameters.

Standards/Consortia

• The basic idea is simple: people can’t be expected to follow a law (or technical standard) if they don’t have ready access to it. Copyright is a barrier to access, and therefore should not be allowed for harmonized technical standards (HTS), just as it is not permitted for EU laws. And even if for some reason HTS were subject to copyright, free access must be granted anyway, blunting its negative impact.

• It’s worth emphasizing that the Advocate General’s opinion is only advisory, and may be ignored by the main court when the latter issues its final judgment on the case. Nonetheless, it’s great to see one of the EU’s top legal authorities dare to go against today’s orthodoxy that copyright is so wonderful it should be applied to everything, no exceptions.

Leftovers

• Twitter is not the right place to seek information during an emergency, Dutch politicians and a prominent online group said on Wednesday, following an incident in which citizens were directed to the platform for updates during a large storm.

• “We find it problematic that the government depends on Twitter for sharing crucial information,” lawmaker Nico Drost’s office said in emailed remarks to Reuters, citing accessibility, accountability and reliability issues.

Education

• “Even though mobile phones are almost intertwined with our lives, they do not belong in the classroom,” Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf said .

• “Students must be able to concentrate there and be given every opportunity to learn well. We know from scientific research that mobile phones disrupt this,” he added.

• Mobiles, tablets and smartwatches are getting in the way of students’ learning and will not be allowed in class from next year, the Dutch government said.

• “There is increasing evidence that mobile phones have a harmful effect during lessons”, it said.

• Mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches will be largely banned from classrooms in the Netherlands from Jan. 1, 2024, the Dutch government said on Tuesday, in a bid to limit distractions during lessons.

• Devices will only be allowed if they are specifically needed, for instance during lessons on digital skills, for medical reasons or for people with disabilities.

• Schools and teachers have been asking for rules to restrict the use of mobile phones in the classroom for some time. The debate about this issue gained momentum at the end of last year when CDA Member of Parliament René Peters advocated on behalf of a ban. The largest opposition party in the Tweede Kamer, PVV, has been outspoken in favor of a ban for an extended period, and has joined forces with the CDA, a coalition party.

• The ban is the result of an agreement between the ministry, schools and related organisations.

• Schools can find their own way to organise the ban, Dijkgraaf said, but legal rules will follow if this does not yield enough results by the summer of 2024.

• The Dutch government is banning mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches from classrooms to minimize distractions, unless the electronic devices are of solid need to the students.

• The Education Ministry of the Netherlands said on Tuesday the ban will be enforced starting January 1, 2024. Exceptions will be made for lessons on digital skills, or if students with disabilities or other medical conditions need the devices.

• “I know business and the drudgery of it, but I can also be off the hook creative. The ability to do engineering, innovation and work with technology as well as handle the paperwork all has to go hand in hand. It’s a unique message that I’ll be delivering to the students here. Somebody’s gotta hire people and pay those bills, but somebody has to do the work of designing and building a thing. If you’re going to be successful, you have to be able to do both.”

• According to Hyneman, work of significant complexity also requires bringing in subcontractors and crews of people. He says it’s just as important as it is to engineer and create something. In addition, Hyneman points out that success requires curiosity. Curiosity is also a characteristic that LUT University cherishes and encourages at the J. Hyneman Center (JHC) for prototyping. JHC is located on the university’s Lappeenranta campus, and its purpose is to create a warm and playful atmosphere to inspire curiosity in students. Hyneman initially thought about setting up a trampoline and swing to set the right mood.

• These guidelines try to find a balance between using the technology responsibly and avoiding it being mishandled. The universities agreed to support students and staff to become AI-literate, allowing staff to be equipped to support students to use generative AI tools effectively. They will also adapt teaching and assessment to incorporate the ethical use of generative AI and support equal access to the technology, while ensuring academic rigor and integrity are upheld. The last principle is a vow by the universities to work collaboratively to share best practices as AI evolves.

• A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed for setting up of a campus of IIT Madras in Zanzibar, which is a Tanzanian archipelago off the coast of East Africa.

• The agreement was inked on Wednesday in presence of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Zanzibar’s President Hussein Ali Mwinyi. Jaishakar is on a visit to Tanzania.

Hardware

• A mobile avatar robot, on the other hand, allows you to move freely around the room, inspect its contents and even move things.

• ”The physicality of the robot increases the sense of real-time interaction in virtual teaching. You can see and hear the same things through a computer or smart phone, but the robot can tilt its head towards a student, pivot when a student calls out, or point to objects on a table,” analyzes Hyneman, LUT’s professor of practice.

• Hyneman says the best way to assemble a robot like this is to mount a camera on a mechanism that has the same ability and geometry as humans. In other words, it could turn its head to look in different directions and be raised and lowered to the same heights as a human.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Walker’s perspective may seem extreme, but there has been resistance to the “pro-car narrative” from the very beginning. In the first decades of the mass-produced automobile, but before the Eisenhower era of rapid-fire highway construction, screeds against cars were somewhat common. In 1931, The Atlantic published “Our Delightful Man Killer,” an impassioned essay about pending motor-safety regulations that emphasized the absurdity of the 33,000 fatalities counted the year before. (This number is even worse than it sounds, because the country’s population was about 123 million at the time, compared with 335 million today.) “The trouble lies deeper than in bad driving,” the essay concluded. “It lies in the fundamental incompatibility of machines and men, steel and flesh, in a running mix-up on the highways. Nothing on earth can make their intimacy safe.” A similar, gorier essay appeared in Reader’s Digest a few years later—this one suggesting that “if ghosts could be put to a useful purpose, every bad stretch of road in the United States would greet the oncoming motorist with groans and screams and the educational spectacle of ten or a dozen corpses, all sizes, sexes and ages, lying horribly still on the bloody grass.”

• Almost 100 years later, the cognitive dissonance has become, if anything, more pronounced. Motor vehicles are a leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. They’re in the top 10 for all age groups from 1 to 54 years old, Matthew Raifman, a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, pointed out when I reached him for comment. Many other top causes of death—cancer, heart disease—are talked about all the time as serious public-health problems that need radical solutions. “Why are we not doing that for motor vehicles?” Raifman asked. “It’s weird to me that we’re okay with this top-10 cause of death that’s sitting there year after year.”

• Twenty people were killed and 126 were injured in 22 mass shootings that erupted across the country between 5 p.m. ET Friday and 5 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks shootings nationwide. The website, which defines a mass shooting as a single event with four or more victims either injured or killed, reported that the holiday mass shootings happened in 17 states and Washington D.C.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Telecom and media firm Quebecor said on Wednesday it will pull its ads from Facebook and Instagram, following Meta Platforms’ decision to stop access to news on both the social media platforms in Canada over a law requiring payments to local news publishers.

• ‘We made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our workforce, primarily to move a portion of our support roles to lower-cost regions,’ says ClickUp CEO Zeb Evans.

• Access to TweetDeck is free as of now but its users will now have to shell out money to access it with new rules mandating verification of account.

• The update will effectively end support for macOS 10.12 Sierra, 10.13 High Sierra, and 10.14 Mojave. Similarly, Windows 7 and 8 users will no longer receive any more security updates. Both platforms are being moved to the Firefox Extended Support Release, which is mainly an enterprise level of tech support. By September 2024, Apple and Microsoft’s aging operating systems will no longer get security updates.

• Microsoft (MSFT) was front and center on Wednesday after executives at the Redmond, Wash.-based software reported mixed financial results for the second quarter, but guided analyst forecasts lower for the rest of the year.

Windows TCO

• A small pop-up appears on your screen. It claims ‘a virus has been detected on your device’ and states ‘your personal and financial information is at risk’. It includes a fake number to contact Microsoft’s customer support department. The pop-up includes two buttons – one reading ‘deny’ and the other ‘support’. Clicking on either option may result in malware being downloaded onto your device.

• “Truth is, they didn’t notify us about anything,” said a mother whose son’s case file has 80 documents.

• Even when schools catch a ransomware attack in progress, the data are typically already gone. That was what Los Angeles Unified School District did last Labor Day weekend, only to see the private paperwork of more than 1,900 former students — including psychological evaluations and medical records — leaked online. Not until February did district officials disclose the breach’s full dimensions, noting the complexity of notifying victims with exposed files up to three decades old.

• The lasting legacy of school ransomware attacks, it turns out, is not in school closures, recovery costs or even soaring cyberinsurance premiums. It is the trauma for staff, students and parents from the online exposure of private records — which the AP found on the open [Internet] and dark web.

• The infamous Russian-linked ransomware gang LockBit has claimed responsibility for an attack on a Japanese port that has temporarily crippled operations.

• The ransomware attack targeted the Nagoya Port Unified Terminal System, the controlling body of the Port of Nagoya, Japan’s largest port, on the morning of July 4 local time. The port is a major hub for Toyota Motor Co.

• The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) assessment of LockBit is that it’s a ransomware-as-a-service operator that works with affiliates that conduct attacks. CISA rated the outfit 2022′s most prolific ransomware operator, and as clever enough that it often changes tactics to avoid detection.

• It’s also cheeky: CISA believes it has staged publicity stunts such as paying people to get LockBit tattoos as part of its efforts to recruit affiliates.

• Those activities have been successful. Infosec agencies from seven nations recently issued a joint advisory in which they estimated that since 2020 LockBit has cost victims in the US alone over $90 million – the result of around 1,700 attacks.

• The study found that hospitals near a health care facility that was impacted by a ransomware attack may experience an influx of patients and lack resources that could affect time-sensitive matters.

• Other disruptions may include an increase in ambulance arrivals, waiting room times, patients left without being seen and patient length of stay.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (firefox and python-reportlab), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (dnsdist, grpc, protobuf, python-Deprecated, python-PyGithub, python-aiocontextvars, python-avro, python-bcrypt, python-cryptography, python- cryptography-vectors, python-google-api-core, pyt, kernel, kubernetes1.18, libdwarf, python311, qt6-base, rmt-server, and virtualbox), and Ubuntu (containerd, firefox, and python-django).

• The disclosure contains a detailed description of the problem. Fixes have been merged into the mainline and the 6.4.1, 6.3.11, and 6.1.37 stable kernel updates.

• Japan’s biggest maritime port was crippled by an alleged Russian cyberattack, disrupting cargo as operators rushed to prevent a wider delay in shipments.

• Ransomware — used by hackers to lock access to files or systems unless a payment is made — caused a container terminal at the Port of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture to suffer an outage Tuesday morning, the Nagoya Harbor Transportation Authority said Wednesday. The authority said operations are expected to resume Thursday at 8:30 a.m. local time.

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of a severe vulnerability in a cardiac device from medical device company Medtronic.

• The issue – tracked as CVE-2023-31222 – carries a “critical” CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10 and affects the company’s Paceart Optima software that runs on a healthcare organization’s Windows server.

• Medtronic said in an advisory that if exploited, the vulnerability allows hackers to delete, steal or modify data from a cardiac device. Hackers can also use the device’s issues to penetrate into a healthcare organization’s network.

• The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJ&CD) has been ordered to pay a R5 million fine following its failure to comply with an Enforcement Notice after contravening the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia).

• On May 9 the Information Regulator issued an Infringement Notice against the department for contravening various sections of Popia.

• This after the DoJ&CD suffered a security compromise on its IT systems in September 2021, leading to the department’s systems being unavailable to its employees and affecting services to the public.

• According to court documents, Adrian Pena, 49, of Del Rio, Texas, used a law enforcement service to locate individuals with whom Pena had personal relationships and their spouses. Pena obtained the cell phone data by uploading blank and random documents to a system operated by Securus Technologies exclusively for authorized law enforcement purposes. Pena falsely certified that those documents were official and that they granted Pena permission to obtain the individuals’ data.

• Just three months after a ransomware attack pulled down India’s largest drugmaker, Sun Pharmaceuticals, the threat actors went after another pharma company. Hyderabad-based Granules India was notified of a significant loss of revenue and profitability due to a cybersecurity attack in the last week of May. […]

• From Dr. Reddy’s to the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), the pharma and healthcare sector have been experiencing an uptick in cyberattacks over the past few years, especially post-Covid-19. These incidents have put a spotlight on the weak cybersecurity infrastructure in the industry.

• Australia has experienced a number of significant cyberattacks on healthcare entities in the past few years. Now a relatively new ransomware group, Cyclops, claims to have attacked Atherfield Medical & Skin Cancer Clinic in Australia: [...]

• The Tennessee-headquartered healthcare provider did not reply immediately to an email asking them if they had experienced a breach and were aware that data allegedly from them was up for sale on a hacking forum.

• When Kelsey Puddister-Collins opened an email from Newfoundland and Labrador Fertility Services on Tuesday, she said she was mortified to see the names and email addresses of over 100 people on the email list.

• Puddister-Collins’ information was among those shared in a data breach. The email was a survey about her experience in receiving the province’s fertility subsidy, which people can avail of when travelling out of province for procedures like in vitro fertilization.

• How this leak occurred has not been explained yet, and there doesn’t seem to be any statement from Tigo yet.

Privacy/Surveillance

• 28 civil society organisations and privacy experts have written to the European Commission to raise concerns about the threat that UK data reform poses to European citizens’ data rights.

• The Data Protection and Digital Information (DPDI) Bill, which is expected to be passed into law this autumn, will amend the UK GDPR. Privacy campaigners have long warned the proposals will undermine the data protection rights of people in the UK, and give more power to the state and corporations. But the proposed changes will also impact data protection rights in the EU.

• Sweden on Monday ordered four companies to stop using a Google tool that measures and analyses web traffic as doing so transfers personal data to the United States, fining one company the equivalent of more than $1.1 million.

• The court sided with a 2019 German antitrust ruling that threatened to upend Meta’s business model of selling ads targeted to users based on data gleaned from how they spend time on its services.

• Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, appealed that finding, which led German authorities to seek an opinion from the Court of Justice, the 27-nation bloc’s top tribunal.

• America’s Transportation Security Agency (TSA) intends to expand its facial-recognition program used to screen US air travel passengers to 430 domestic airports in under a decade.

• The TSA’s program, which uses Idemia’s biometric technology, has come under fire from some privacy and civil-rights organizations, which argue the software amounts to large-scale surveillance that does little to stop terror in the skies.

• Critics say investigations take too long and fines are too low to deter privacy breaches by Big Tech companies, undermining the goal of landmark EU rules known as the General Data Protection Regulation which came into force in 2018.

• The Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), the EU lead regulator because many of the world’s largest technology companies are based in Ireland, has also attracted criticism from its peers for its fines, seen by some as too low.

• The move puts almost 1,000 ticket offices at risk up and down the country.

• Under the plans, which will now be subject to a consultation, ticket office staff would be moved to platforms to ‘modernise customer service’.

• However the proposals have come under fire from unions and disability groups who fear both job cuts and a reduced level of service for those vulnerable passengers who already struggle to access the railways.

• The Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies, confirmed plans on Wednesday that could result in the axing of up to 1,000 offices over the next three years

Defence/Aggression

• The Allied Democratic Forces, which are based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is accused of attacking a dormitory in western Uganda in mid-June, leaving 41 dead. Attackers set fire to the building, shot wildly and then used machetes to hack survivors to death. It was the deadliest attack in Uganda in more than a decade.

• The veto was announced on Monday by Vietnamese authorities: “We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, responsible for licensing and censorship, said to the country’s media outlets. The distributor, Warner, has not made any statements, according to the specialized media Variety.

• If it can sustain that momentum, analysts say, it could revamp a company whose mainstay video platform is already luring consumers and advertisers away from Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

• Some propose processing applications somewhere else in order to let in only the “genuine” refugees. But this opens up a whole new can of worms. We assume that genuine refugees are only those fleeing “war and persecution”, and so many have figured out that they can get a permit by claiming to not get along with their home government, or to be homosexual or (another popular trick) a minor. Not only does this make a mockery of the system, it could also reduce the chance for genuine change at home, when the masses leaving are this large. Perhaps more importantly, the distinction between war and economic refugees makes no sense. The two are often related, and to the people experiencing them, unemployment and poverty can be deadlier than war.

• A final option is paying countries, such as Libya, Turkey or Tunisia, to stop migrants from coming in – however they deem fit. This costs a lot of money, makes us vulnerable to endless blackmailing and exposes the hypocrisy of our human rights rhetoric. Would it be better to do the dirty work ourselves?

• During a sentencing hearing for his case this week, prosecutors revealed that Chail’s Star Wars-inspired plan was aimed at avenging the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre and that he conversed with an artificial intelligence chatbot that encouraged him to carry it out.

War in Ukraine

• “I wanted our counteroffensive happening much earlier, because everyone understood that if the counteroffensive will be unfolding later, then much bigger part of our territory will be mined,” the Ukrainian leader added.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• An investor named Ken Hodgson repeatedly complained to The Times and its data supplier, a financial services firm, about figures in the equity price listing over the course of several years. He eventually made a formal complaint to IPSO over the 9 July 2022 listings.

Environment

• Yet from a scientific perspective, there’s nothing surprising about record-breaking heat, dangerous as it may be. It’s actually exactly in line with what scientists have long predicted in a world warmed by climate change. Fossil fuel emissions heat up the planet, and hotter weather makes heat waves more extreme.

• “Hotter extremes are one of the most obvious consequences of rising global temperatures,” John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist at Texas A&M University, told Vox.

• In the years to come, heat waves like those in the American South and Europe are likely to get worse on the whole, not better. So while this summer might be unbearably hot, it’s likely to be one of the coolest summers for decades to come.

• Greta Thunberg joined the protest in June which was organised by environmental activist group “Ta tillbaka framtiden” (Reclaim the Future). Protesters attempted to block the entrance and exit to the Malmo harbour to against the use of fossil fuel. “We choose to not be bystanders, and instead physically stop the fossil fuel infrastructure. We are reclaiming the future,” Greta Thunberg had then said in an Instagram post.

Energy/Transportation

• America has an exploding e-transportation problem—and no easy way to fix it. Many e-bikes and e-scooters are perfectly safe, but bad batteries (and other bad hardware, such as chargers) at risk of igniting are making their way into some products. Policy makers are working on the issue, but no solution will arrive overnight. For the foreseeable future, more e-bikes will explode, and more people may die. “That’s the simple and horrifying truth right now,” William Wallace, the associate director for safety policy at Consumer Reports, told me. Unfortunately, when it comes to e-bikes and the like, we are stuck in a kind of battery purgatory.

• Four years have passed, minus the two lost pandemic years when the kilometre limit and our collective willpower was so diminished the e-bike often stayed on the back porch. And from a sample pool of one, I’ll try to answer the question people always ask: is it worth it?

• Unequivocally, yes. With some caveats.

• Can an e-bike replace a car? If you live in an urbanised area with reasonable bike paths and don’t have too far to travel, then perhaps. Riding them is easy, charging them is straightforward and with enough storage onboard – like a front or back basket and panniers – they can carry a stack of groceries.

Finance

• Retailer The Children’s Place unveiled plans to close its corporate headquarters and lay off 181 employees this week, making it the latest major U.S. company to conduct layoffs this year, following major cuts this month at Robinhood, KPMG, Uber, Oracle, Grubhub and Spotify (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• Jenny Craig went bust in May after more than 40 years in business because of growing competition from trendy diets and weight loss drugs like Ozempic.

• After stints at Disney, Google and Twitter, Vaishnavi Jayakumar joined Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in January 2020.

• Her job on the youth policy team was to protect children and teens from bullying, harassment and other forms of abuse. But Jayakumar – an Asian American originally from Singapore – says she couldn’t shield herself from racial bias on the job.

• Soon after inquiring how she could move up at Meta, Jayakumar says her supervisor began leaving her out of opportunities and initiatives that used to be in her scope and “layering” her under less experienced employees.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This July, the Estonian State Information System Authority (RIA) is launching a cyber awareness campaign to draw attention to some of the dangers that lurk in Estonian cyberspace and may lead to both businesses and individuals being deprived of important data, access to accounts and money.

• Chinese state media has published a sternly worded opinion piece that makes it plain Meta’s ambition to sell its VR hardware in the Middle Kingdom is unlikely to succeed – because, unlike his fellow tech titans, he hasn’t been nice to China.

• The Canadian government will stop buying ads on Facebook and Instagram amid a dispute over a new law on paying online news publishers that the Meta-owned platforms have opposed, heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez said on Wednesday.

• The Online News Act, or Bill C-18, was passed into law last month, triggering Meta and Alphabet’s Google to say they would end news access on their platforms in Canada.

• The Online News Act, or Bill C-18, was introduced in April last year and lays out rules to force companies such as Meta and Alphabet-owned Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content.

• Google and Meta previously said they would block access to news articles in Canada if the legislation was passed. It was passed last month.

• The federal government’s Online News Act, C-18, became law on June 22. It compels companies like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to pay money to news organizations each time a user accesses a web story through a link on one of their products.

• Opinions are sharply divided on whether Threads will outperform Twitter. Some say its links to Instagram, which provides it with a ready user base, will be an advantage, especially at a time when Elon Musk and new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino try to revive the struggling business. Others, however, feel that Twitter has a news-oriented outlook that Instagram, primarily a visual platform, will find difficult to replace.

• Hun Sen’s Facebook account, which the hardline leader has used to rally political support, went blank after the June 29 announcement from Meta Oversight Board, which had ruled that a video in which he threatened violence against his political opponents had violated Facebook’s guidelines against prohibiting incitement.

• Finland, which shares a more than 800-mile or 1,300-kilometer border with Russia, joined NATO in April. But Sweden, which has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, has seen its ascension delayed by Turkey and Hungary; NATO requires the unanimous approval of all members to expand.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• A Tuesday ruling by a federal district judge in Louisiana could have far-reaching consequences for the government’s ability to work with Facebook and other social media giants to address false and misleading claims about COVID, vaccines, voting, and other issues that could undermine public health and erode confidence in election results.

• Whitbrook said he sent a statement to G/O Media along with “a lengthy list of corrections.” In part, his statement said, “The article published on io9 today rejects the very standards this team holds itself to on a daily basis as critics and as reporters. It is shoddily written, it is riddled with basic errors; in closing the comments section off, it denies our readers, the lifeblood of this network, the chance to publicly hold us accountable, and to call this work exactly what it is: embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here, and a blow to our authority and integrity.”

• He continued, “It is shameful that this work has been put to our audience and to our peers in the industry as a window to G/O’s future, and it is shameful that we as a team have had to spend an egregious amount of time away from our actual work to make it clear to you the unacceptable errors made in publishing this piece.”

• Several researchers, however, said the government’s work with social media companies was not an issue as long as it didn’t coerce them to remove content. Instead, they said, the government has historically notified companies about potentially dangerous messages, like lies about election fraud or misleading information about Covid-19. Most misinformation or disinformation that violates social platforms’ policies is flagged by researchers, nonprofits, or people and software at the platforms themselves.

• “That’s the really important distinction here: The government should be able to inform social media companies about things that they feel are harmful to the public,” said Miriam Metzger, a communication professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of its Center for Information Technology and Society.

• The agencies and officials, Doughty said, are prohibited from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

• Government efforts to interact with social media platforms took a major hit on Tuesday when a federal judge restricted the Biden administration from communicating with tech companies about a broad array of online content.

• The 155-page ruling, which the administration is likely to appeal, raises questions about how the government is supposed to interact with platforms that reach billions of people. It also complicates the outlook for regulating tech companies over the content their users post.

• It’s part of a long-running feud many Republicans have with social media platforms, which they claim disproportionately censor conservative content from what have become public town squares, albeit run by private businesses. Democrats, on the other hand, have complained that social media platforms don’t do enough to remove harmful speech and that they go out of their way to favor the right.

• The Joe Biden administration on Wednesday appealed a federal judge’s ruling restricting some agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content, according to a court filing.

• The notice of appeal filed on Wednesday signals the government’s plan to ask the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans to review the ruling in a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade social media companies to police posts it considered disinformation.

• Trying to influence content on social media by “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group” is also off the table. The Election Integrity Partnership, set up in July 2020—100 days before elections—works to fend off voter suppression and election misinformation online. Virality Project is something similar for covid-19.

• Fake news research has become repetitive, revolving around themes such as the fate of journalism, the role of technology, remediating its effects and deep dives into definitional components (disinformation, misinformation, lies and so on). A broader framing of systematically distorted communication allows us to arrive at some conclusions about contemporary fake news: that it is a power strategy with a particular right-wing slant and it creates a sociology – that is, its own interpretive environment – hostile to democratic functioning. It answers the question: what is fake news for?

• These trends may prove disastrous for the 2024 elections, and for the health of democracy at large, said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit that fights misinformation.

• “This is fundamentally dangerous,” he said. “American democracy itself cannot survive wave after wave of disinformation that seeks to undermine democracy, consensus and further polarizes the public.”

• Faced with economic headwinds and political and legal pressure, the social media giants have shown signs that fighting false information online is no longer as high a priority, raising fears among experts who track the issue that it will further erode trust online.

• Researchers at Stairwell, a cybersecurity firm, didn’t find any overt malicious behavior and noted that the app’s primary purpose seemed to be pulling information that’s freely available on the [Internet] and incorporating a “tremendous amount of advertising.” The app didn’t directly claim to be affiliated with the US government, but took intentional advantage of search terms — they called it “scam-ish.”

• Instead, they would allow ACMA to compel tech companies to keep records of matters relating to misinformation and disinformation, and turn them over to the government when requested.

• A further provision would impose fines on companies that systematically breach a new code of practice relating to the way they combat misinformation and disinformation.

• However, no such code is yet in place and the industry will be given a chance to write one before the government steps in.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Reuters this week said that it will appeal a move by Turkey to block access to more than 90 web links and social media posts that used reporting by the news agency.

• The ban relates to an article that said that Swedish and American anti-corruption authorities were reviewing a complaint that named the Turkish president’s son, Bilal Erdogan.

• President Emmanuel Macron’s government faced a backlash Wednesday after the centrist leader called for powers to “cut off” social media in case of widespread violence like riots [sic] over the past week.

• In response to a question about the extent to which respondents have self-censored their writing “either in content or by avoiding covering certain subjects,” 47 per cent said “slightly,” while 18 per cent said “considerably.”

• The total figure of 65 per cent marks an increase from two years ago, when 56 per cent of survey respondents said they had self-censored.

• Meanwhile, 57 per cent said they had encountered censorship at their news outlet, and 67 per cent agreed that they had a “clear sense” of what subjects are “sensitive.”

• In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.

• Banning books has consequences, and it’s not the consequences that people think of. When someone decides to pull a book off the shelf, you’re basically saying that this information is not readily available to the person that needs it the most. But also when that happens, when librarians fight against this [and] they do not pull the books off the shelf, their funding is threatened. My library is funded by the state, the county, and the city. If the city pulled our funding, we would not have a library. There are consequences that come along with that. Libraries, I love to say, are about more than books.

• Turkey has been holding off ratifying Sweden’s membership in the alliance, accusing the Scandinavian country of being too soft toward groups that Ankara regards as threats to its security, including Kurdish militants and members of a network that Ankara blames for a failed coup in 2016.

• Ankara has also been angered by a series of demonstrations in Sweden by supporters of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, as well as Quran-burning protests, including one that took place last week that was condemned by Muslim countries.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Under Barack Obama, the DOJ decided it could not prosecute Assange without threatening U.S. journalists and their First Amendment protections — given that the 2010 charges relate to the handling and publication of classified documents in conjunction with reporters and organizations including The New York Times and other major outlets. But first under Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, the department has reversed itself.

• The first approach to get me to cooperate with the Assange prosecution came via London’s Metropolitan Police in December 2021. On legal advice, I had stayed quiet about these attempts at the time. But now more journalists have told me that police have turned up on their doorsteps, too, in the last month. Those approached are former Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, transparency campaigner Heather Brooke, and the writer Andrew O’Hagan.

• A British journalist who has, in the past, blown the whistle on WikiLeaks’ own ethical lapses, claims the US Department of Justice and the FBI are leaning on his fellow scribes to back the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange.

• In an op-ed written for the American website Rolling Stone, James Ball said he knew of these manoeuvres because he had also experienced the same treatment.

• The American agencies were using vague threats and pressure tactics to try and achieve their aim, Ball said.

• During the hearing, Zemo Ağgöz, one of the journalists on trial, emphasized the baseless nature of the allegations against them, saying, “Our journalism is being unjustly criminalized. These groundless accusations are not only targeting our work but also casting doubt on the credibility of the agency we work for. Due to these unfounded claims, I was unable to breastfeed my newborn baby for 45 days.” Ağgöz had been taken into custody shortly after giving birth.

• On June 14, 2023, unidentified people assaulted or harassed at least four reporters covering local elections in the eastern Uganda district of Bukedea, according to a report by the privately owned broadcaster NTV Uganda, a statement by the Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda (HRNJ-U) local press rights group, and three of those journalists, who spoke to CPJ.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In 2014, thousands of Yazidi women and children were enslaved by the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria. Their fellow Yazidis launched a rescue effort almost immediately, but nearly a decade later, their task is still unfinished.

• A spokesman for the Taliban-run Virtue and Vice Ministry, Mohammad Sidik Akif Mahajar, didn’t give details of the ban. He only confirmed the contents of a letter circulating on social media.

• The ministry-issued letter, dated June 24, says it conveys a verbal order from the supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. The ban targets the capital, Kabul, and all provinces, and gives salons throughout the country a month’s notice to wind down their businesses. After that period, they must close and submit a report about their closure. The letter doesn’t give reasons for the ban.

• The United Nations on Tuesday also said it was engaged with the authorities in Afghanistan to get the ban on beauty salons reversed. The U.N. mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, took to Twitter, urging the Taliban to halt the edict.

• “I began this prostrating journey again for world peace, for the long life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and for the well-being of all sentient beings,” the monk said from Dharamsala, the Indian hillside city where the Tibetan government-in-exile and the Dalai Lama reside, which he reached on June 30.

Monopolies

• The investigation stems from a 2020 complaint by the Salesforce Inc.-owned messaging app Slack, relating to Microsoft’s 2017 decision to bundle its Teams collaboration application with Office 365, effectively making it free for Office users. The Teams app eventually replaced Microsoft’s previous chat and video conferencing app, Skype for Business.

• Microsoft has previously been slapped with fines totaling billions of dollars by the EU for breaching its competition rules, which include prohibitions on tying or bundling two or more products together. In its complaint, Slack argued that Microsoft has harmed competition by integrating the Teams chat and video app with its Office product.

Patents

• Remember the StarTrek saying: “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives, we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” just one of many examples: [...]

• Novartis is once again going head-to-head with its competitors in Germany to protect a version of multiple sclerosis drug fingolimod. This time, after a multi-party action in Düsseldorf last year, German pharmaceutical company betapharm Arzneimittel is the defendant in Munich. At the end of June, the German Federal Patent Court declared a Novartis patent covering [...]

• IP firm Ipsilon is expanding its presence across Europe through the acquisition of Belgium-based IP services firm, IP Hills. Originally a patent attorney practice, Ipsilon became a mixed team in late 2020 when it took on Matthieu Dhenne, its first litigator in France.

Trademarks

• The Board rendered a split decision in this opposition to registration of the mark EVOGUE for a wide variety of consumer electronic devices and accessories, tossing out Opposer Advance Magazine’s Section 2(d) claim but partly upholding its dilution claim, based on the registered mark VOGUE for, inter alia, magazines and mobile phone software. Laches barred both claims as to certain of the goods in light of Applicant Fashion Ele    ctronics’ ownership of an expired registration for EVOGUE for substantially the same goods. As to the remaining goods, the Board found confusion unlikely but dilution-by-blurring likely. Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc. v. Fashion Electronics, Inc., 2023 U.S.P.Q.2d 753 (T.T.A.B. 2023) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Karen

Copyrights

• In a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property [sic] and the Internet examining the intersection of AI and copyright law, key players in Hollywood moved for guardrails to protect their work. “The rapid introduction of generative AI systems is seen as an existential threat to the livelihood and continuance of our creative professions unless immediate steps are taken on legal interpretive and economic fronts to address these emerging issues,” said Ashley Irwin, president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL), at the hearing on May 17. “It’s essential to prioritize policies and regulations to safeguard the intellectual property [sic] and copyright of creators and preserve the diverse and dynamic U.S cultural landscape.”

• The SCL, which counts creators of scores and song for film, TV and theater as members, maintains that AI firms should have to secure consent by creators for the use of their works to train AI programs and compensate them at fair market rates for the subsequent creation of any new work that’s created on top of providing the proper credit, Irwin said. He stressed that any regulatory framework should not grant copyright protection to AI-generated works since doing so could flood the market with them, diluting the value of original pieces.

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