● 07.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/07/2023: Solus 4.4 Out, StackRot (CVSS Score: 7.8) Still Hyped by Microsofters

Posted in News Roundup at 7:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• openKylin is a new distro offering, hailed as China’s first independent, open-source desktop operating system.

• Worked on by over 3,000 developers, 74 SIGs (special interest groups), and over 200 enterprises, openKylin has come a long way since its early releases.

• The closest competitor to openKylin would be Deepin, another distro that has come out of China. But it uses a Debian base and cannot be considered independent (or built from scratch).

• Version 1.0 of the openKylin Linux distro for the domestic Chinese market is here – and it works pretty well in English, too.

• As The Reg reported last year, openKylin has been in development for some years. The FOSS desk took openKylin 0.7 for a spin soon afterwards. It reached version 0.9.5 at the start of 2023, and now the finished release 1.0 is available, codenamed “Yangtze” after the great river of China, the longest watercourse in Eurasia.

• Today, TUXEDO launches the 5th generation of the Stellaris 17 — a hardcore gaming and workstation notebook. The laptop is everything a cutting-edge, upper-tier gaming desktop PC should be, but in a compact, portable, and robust package.

• The Linux laptop is a high-end desktop replacement encased in a premium chassis. The machine’s remarkable power is made possible by NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards (with the option of up to the GeForce RTX 4090) and the top-tier Intel Core i9-13900HX CPU.

Instructionals/Technical

• We all love Linux, right? Well, not everyone or every company. At least they bring-out their software for Mac OS and/or Windows, only. Which is a shame, no further explanation about that is needed, I guess 😉

• Snap is a modern package management system that promises seamless package distribution and better dependency management in contrast to other package managers.

• Unlike other Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Arch Linux doesn’t ship with Snap support by default. Fortunately, it is easy to install and configure Snap on Arch Linux.

• Fit-to-Width Text (from Roman Komarov) is a full-blown 5-star bonafide CSS trick if there ever was one. The idea is “size text to the container” in CSS alone (at least scale it down if it’s too big/long. The trick is a “scroll-driven animation” and text that overflows a container. As it overflows, it scrolls, thus triggering the animation, which scales the text down. Simpler than you’d think!

• My current view is that if I was to write rules for some system from scratch in an environment like Ubuntu 22.04, I would directly use nftables and /etc/nftables.conf for a static configuration that I expected to reload if I ever changed things. However, if I had a dynamic configuration where I had to add and delete rules on the fly, I would stick with using the ‘iptables’ command (and its syntax and handling of rules, sub-chains, and so on) rather than try to master using ‘nft’ for this. I’m sure that someday I’ll need to learn dynamic use of ‘nft’, but not today.

Games

• Valve has been speeding up Steam Deck game testing, and 75% of titles checked have been judged to be verified or playable.

• Steam, the famous online gaming platform, is reportedly banning the usage of AI generated Art assets in games. This decision caused debate, with some developers claiming that the ban is unfair and unwarranted.

• The latest Steam hardware survey shows minor changes in hardware usage compared to May 2023.

• As part of the Steam Summer sale, Valve is selling the Steam Deck for up to 20% off, marking its lowest price ever.

• After years of neglect, art institutions are coming around to games. Can they master the controls?

• A turn-based strategy game was being developed several years ago, with the idea of players being able to run their own semiconductor manufacturing company and compete with others to be the best in the business.

• A turn-based strategy game was being developed several years ago, with the idea of players being able to run their own semiconductor manufacturing company and compete with others to be the best in the business.

• After an initial foray into the ways that open-source software has failed to live up to its early hype, this Digital Antiquarian article covers the history of rogue-like games in great detail.

• The movement’s Little Red Book came in the form of Eric S. Raymond’s 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Originally presented as a comparison of a top-down versus a bottom-up methodology in the context of open-source projects, the central metaphor quickly got blurred in the minds of the public into a broader comparison of closed source versus open source, with Raymond’s tacit acquiescence. In this telling, the cathedral was Microsoft’s software-development model, in which a closeted priesthood bestowed programs upon a grateful populace on its own terms and on its own schedule. The bazaar was the hacker way, in which the people came together in a spirit of delightfully chaotic egalitarianism to make software for themselves, sharing their source code in the name of the greater good. “No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem,” wrote Raymond. “The closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.” Thanks to Linux and the other open-source tools it enabled, he predicted elsewhere, Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 2000, the latest incarnation of its server-grade NT operating system, would “be either cancelled or dead on arrival. Either way, it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft’s history.”

• [...]

• Those open-source games which have become relatively popular have tended to build upon previous game designers’ visions in much the same way that Chrome is built on Chromium: think FreeCiv or Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, worthy projects that are nevertheless more interested in making workmanlike technical improvements to their inspirations than bold fundamental leaps in design. The open-source movement has had the most pronounced impact on gaming in the form of tools, both for making games and for playing them. I could never have embarked with you on this journey through history that we’ve been on for over a decade now without the likes of DOSBox, ScummVM, UAE, VICE, and many, many other open-source emulators and utilities of all descriptions. I am deeply grateful to the many talented programmers who have given their time to them in order to keep our digital past accessible. Still, they do remain purely technical projects, not creative ones in the sense of the games which they enable to run on modern hardware.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This week was a bit on the slow side as people are on vacation and preparing for Akademy 2023, which begins next week! Nevertheless progress on Plasma 6 continued, with a notable uptick in open bug reports as a result of more people testing it out, which is good! If you haven’t tried it yet, please do! Progress was also made on fixing existing known issues too.

• The Breeze cursor theme has received a visual overhaul to make it nicer looking and more consistent with how Breeze style evolved over the course of Plasma 5!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 23 to June 30.

• AdwNavigationView back buttons now support a context menu allowing to pop multiple pages at once. This works with nested navigation views and even with structures like AdwNavigationSplitView containing navigation views in both content and sidebar. Additionally, back button tooltips are now more reliable – they previously didn’t work in this situation and required the app to manually sync the sidebar page’s title with its navigation view’s visible page.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Linux is commonly preferred among network engineers—so if you’ve thought about installing it for your work, you’re not alone.

• If you’re a network engineer, it’s easy to wonder which distributions will have the best features for your work. Here are the six best Linux distributions for network engineering: [...]

• Based on the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” operating system series, Q4OS 5.2 (codename Aquarius) is here with the latest KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment, more precisely the Plasma 5.27.5 release, and Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) 14.1.1.

• Q4OS stays true to its roots in offering users a unique desktop experience where both KDE Plasma and Trinity Desktop Environment can independently coexist. Q4OS makes it easy to switch back and forth between the KDE Plasma and Trinity desktops, the latter providing an old-school KDE3 desktop experience.

• Anew Solus 4 series release named Solus 4.4 “Harmony” has finally arrived, putting an end to a two-year gap in releases. This eagerly anticipated release comes with a slew of updates to the desktop environment, software stacks, and hardware enablement, marking an important milestone for the Solus project.

• Solus is a fully-fledged, independent rolling release Linux distribution targeted at desktop users. At the same time, it is also one of the few so-called original ones – written from scratch, relying on its own software repos and package manager, EOPKG.

• Traditionally associated with Budgie as its flagship desktop environment, Solus has had a difficult two years.

• After heaps of technical woes and the departure of key developers, users began to worry whether the distribution would last. It even reached where DistroWatch put a “dormant” label on it.

• Today, the Solus developers have officially released version 4.4 of the Linux-based operating system. Code-named “Harmony,” this new version of the distribution provides updates for its desktop environments, software stacks, and hardware enablement.

• All Solus editions — Budgie, GNOME, MATE, and KDE Plasma — ship with default applications like Firefox 114.0.1, LibreOffice 7.5.3.2, and Thunderbird 102.12.0. Each edition has a distinct audio-video multimedia playback software, providing a catered user experience.

• Dubbed “Harmony” and powered by Linux kernel 6.3, the Solus 4.4 release is here with Secure Boot support, Intel Arc support, better support for various light sensors and accelerometers, support for AMD Radeon RX 7600, 7900 XT, and 7900 XTX GPUs, support for NVIDIA 40 Series GPUs, and support for laptops with ATH11K Wi-Fi cards.

• The kernel was tweaked in this release to enable zram by default, providing users with a better experience for computers with 3GB or less RAM. Moreover, the Solus kernel ships with the CONFIG_NFT_FIB_INET option enabled by default to allow the Firewalld/nftables firewall to work.

BSD

• TL;DR: I found a printed copy of an assignment I had to do in 2005 back when I was a student to implement a system call for OpenBSD and Linux. I lost the original LaTeX file so I decided to rewrite it so I have a digital copy. The article originally covered loadable kernel modules (LKM) which is no longer a thing in OpenBSD, I trimmed that part. I also trimmed the Linux part because I didn’t care about it back then and did the minimum to pass This article is translated from French.

Fedora Family / IBM

• “It was a very, very smart move on our part. Our competition is probably privately kicking itself it didn’t think of it before we did.”

• So said Fran Heeran, Nokia’s general manager of core networks, cloud and network services, when Light Reading caught up with him to talk about the Finnish supplier’s tie-up with Red Hat, announced last week.

• Why the confidence? “[The partnership] is a reaction to the way the market is going,” asserts Heeran. “Our CSP [communications service provider] customers have been telling us they want more choice and openness. More and more CSPs are making separate buying decisions on cloud infra and applications.”

• Enterprise open source software provider, Red Hat, is developing a generative AI/ML model that will help developers leapfrog automation code and bridge the IT skills gap with reliable and consistent code for automated tasks. Now, a technical preview is available for users to explore.

• The core question here, again and again, is not what this corporation does to manhandle and control FOSS, is that people don’t see the immoral and unethical ways they employee to control everything and everyone. Totally against the spirit of gnu, foss, FSF, unix, whatever you want to call it. They are driving everything to a uniformity of a single system. Linus is whistling apathetically like if it was none of his business.

• So let us see whether the eudev team is up to the task in saving linux for us. Systemd is up to 253, eudev is back on 243, ten major editions behind.

• Here at Red Hat, we do things because they are the right things to do for our business, our future and our customers. But it never hurts to be acknowledged for them and to spread the word that what works at Red Hat can work for our current and future customers, too.

• I’m pleased to note that CNBC has recognized Red Hat for bringing open hybrid cloud to Red Hat IT as part of its annual review of award-winning initiatives.

• This acknowledgment springs from our work to move off legacy data centers, retire old and unused applications and architect a hybrid cloud infrastructure with distinct availability and security zones, which allowed us to make changes in the overall stack without disrupting operations in IT or the rest of the business.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Beyond simply building a model to recognize keywords from audio samples, Nurgaliyev and Kuzdeuov’s primary goal was to also deploy it onto an embedded target, such as a single-board computer or microcontroller. Ultimately, they went with the Arduino Nicla Voice development board since it contains not just an nRF52832 SoC, a microphone, and an IMU, but an NDP120 from Syntiant as well. This specialized Neural Decision Processor helps to greatly speed up inferencing times thanks to dedicated hardware accelerators while simultaneously reducing power consumption.

• I’ve mentioned a few times that my Commodore 16 has some strange boot behaviour, though its gradually getting worse. The machine won’t power on immediately, but doing a power cycle after a couple of minutes (usually) brings it to life. The hardware reset switch also does nothing.

• I have the new Watchy eInk watch. It has a cute little screen with a resolution of 200×200 pixels. How much text can we cram in there?

• Sure you could buy a heater and turn it on when you get cold but for many makers, it’s much more fun to create a system that does something for you. In Alan’s case, he complained that his butt was seemingly always cold. The obvious solution was to use the power of artificial intelligence to automate a system that will set his butt to a comfortable temperature.

• A fully functional pocket computer with touchscreen, keyboard and trackpoint.

• One thing I learned from the Commodordion project was that although the instrument was unwieldy on the whole, playing the right-hand-side keyboard—the one that remains stationary in front of the body—felt quite good. So with that in mind, I decided to build an instrument resembling a guitar. I went through a couple of iterations before settling on the final design. The first idea (which came to me in a dream, actually) was to have a little cart sliding on linear bearings along metal axles, and a rotary encoder to pick up the motion. The cart would have pushbuttons and a microcontroller on it, and the signals from the buttons and the encoder would be transmitted to the C64 electronically over the axles.

• Actually, it was more like a whole stinking Refurb Two Months. The KIM-1 is the first MOS 6502 computer, a single-board system with 1K of RAM (actually 1152 bytes total) and a one-megahertz CPU developed by Chuck Peddle in 1975 as a way to introduce engineers to the new 8-bit microprocessor. However, its low cost meant it ended up taking on a life of its own as it was one of the cheapest ways to assemble an entire working hobbyist system, and Commodore continued to sell them for several years after they bought MOS. You could hand-key in programs with the hexadecimal keypad and the six LEDs as a display or wire up a TTY. It also supported saving and loading from cassette and paper tape, all built-in to the standard ROMs.

• Professor John Gallaugher openly welcomes those who “get down with GitHub”, and that’s behaviour we reward around here, so we’re sharing his two-part YouTube lesson showing you how to create a disco button which instantly transforms any room into a party.

• The Youyeetoo YY3568 is a development board based on the Rockchip RK3568 quad-core 64-bit processor. This embedded product offers a range of versatile features, including a SATA 3.0 interface, a CSI connector, and support for multiple displays.

• At the heart of the youyeetoo YY3568 System-on-Module is the Rockchip RK3568 System-on-Chip with 22nm lithography process and ARM v8.2 architecture.

• AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive system-on-chip (SoC) is said to be the world’s largest adaptive SoC with the FPGA providing 18.5 million logic cells in order to streamline the verification of complex ASIC and SoC designs.

• While many Hackaday readers will have their own pieces of classic hardware lovingly preserved, it still remains that most of us get our fix of retro goodness through emulation. And while there are emulators aplenty for almost every platform imaginable, the world of emulation is never complete. Thus we’re happy to encounter a new player in the form of MartyPC, a cycle-accurate 8088 PC emulator written in Rust.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The Fairphone 4 modular smartphone launched back in 2021, at least in Europe. It’s only now making its way to the US, believe it or not, but with a twist.

• The device is being brought to the States by Murena, a company that specializes in “de-Googling” Android phones. As such, the US-only Murena Fairphone 4 won’t run Android like its European counterpart. Instead, it will boot Murena’s “/e/OS”.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• With recent work on Sequoia sq I have focused on improving the user experience (UX) of the commandline interface (CLI) and adding new features for increased feature parity with gpg. These changes are available starting with version 0.31.0.

• The effort has been accompanied by a few code refactorings which touch on the subject of making the CLI more composable and safe to use in the future.

• This article provides an overview of the new features and improvements.

• It looks as if the Fed’s attempt to wrangle inflation under control by raising interest rates, which has made the folks on Wall Street a little less bullish these days, is causing some trouble for the open-source database company MariaDB Plc, the main driver behind development of MariaDB and related software.

Programming/Development

• A problem remains: Intel and AMD processors are little endian, which means that if I load the string in memory, the first byte becomes the least significant, not the most significant. Thankfully, Intel and AMD can handle this byte order during the load process.

• Tracking where the time goes in your CI pipeline is an important step towards being able to make it go even faster. Up until somewhat recently, the only way of tracking how long tasks took in CI was either hoping people had wrapped all their commands in time …, or by reading a timestamped build log and calculating the difference between numbers. Which isn’t great or fun, if we’re being honest.

• What if we could create graphs of what parts of the build took time? Something like this?

• This article describes SHF_ALLOC|SHF_COMPRESSED sections in ELF and a proposed linker option –compress-sections to compress arbitrary sections.

• I’ve been learning at least one new programming language a month through Exercism which has been really fun and interesting. I frequently say that “every language you learn teaches you something about all the others you know” and with nearly a dozen under my belt so far I’m starting to worry about the combinatorics of that statement.

• APL isn’t on the list of languages but I’ve seen it in codegolf solutions often enough that it seemed worth a look.

• Hot off the heels of getting Oracle Developer Studio 12.6 running on Illumos, I am back with more Illumos compiler support. I got the Portable C Compiler running on my OpenIndiana machine.

• The 4doc model says that user-facing documentation should fall into four categories: [...]

• Footguns are features or designs more likely to be misused, often leading to self-inflicted problems or bugs (“shooting yourself in the foot”). See a list of C functions banned in the git codebase for being footguns. Some more examples: [...]

• This post is about how to test modern web applications that have complex external dependencies.

• Chocolatiering is considered an advanced cooking subject because chocolate is a bastard of an ingredient. Cocoa butter is a polymorphic crystal, meaning it forms different types of crystals at different temperatures. When chocolate only has type V crystals, it’s smooth and shiny and snaps cleanly. When you have other crystals, it looks like this: [...]

• If you want just type V crystals, you need to temper the chocolate. First you get the pot to 50 °C1 to melt out all the crystals, then you let it cool to about 32 °C2, then you agitate it or add seed crystals, and then finally you can work with it until it hits about 27 or so °C3, when it starts to harden.

• Longtime readers know I am most certainly not going to use Python directly, as such practice has been found to cause early onset dementia. But, that module is so well done that I’ll gladly use it from within R.

Python

• The kicker is that those bundled libraries can have vulnerabilities too! An example of this happening is when pdftopng contained vulnerable versions of libpng (among other libraries) bundled in their wheel. There’s also this related issue for the PyPI Advisory database about vulnerabilities in shared libraries.

• These bundled libraries don’t show up in your requirements.txt or pip freeze so it’s tougher for you and your audit tooling to know what libraries and versions are in use.

Leftovers

Science

• Reader Dan Turner pointed me toward a highly interesting paper co-authored by Tetlock, about the bin model of forecasting.

Education

• A recent report has shed light on the presence of US companies in the European children’s TV channel market. According to the study, a staggering 48% of children’s TV channels in Europe are owned by US companies. The findings indicate a significant influence of American players in shaping the media landscape for young audiences in Europe.

• The report, titled “Audiovisual Media Services in Europe,” was published by the European Audiovisual Observatory, a division of the Council of Europe based in Strasbourg.

• For starters, these skills would open up opportunities for students to show that they know things in a variety of ways. Having core competencies with technology means that educators could feel comfortable having students create an audio program (frequently called a podcast), create a video, create an interactive presentation, create a website, etc. Students need assistance in the how to do those things. However, once students have those skills, they can utilize them in multiple settings.

• ‘We should always pay our debts’: that’s the self-evident moral foundation of our economic and political relations. And it’s total bollocks. In the first four pages of Debt, David Graeber leaves it for dead. What if, David posits, debt was forced on a people to pay for the invasion of their own country by a colonial power, and, a hundred years later, the repayment costs caused the cessation of a malaria eradication programme that subsequently led to the death of ten thousand citizens? True story.

• To make matters worse, the law of ‘Always Pay Your Debts’ doesn’t even apply to any of society’s most destructive actors: imperial powers, of course, but also bailed out banks, extractive, polluting industries and tax-avoidant billionaires and transnationals.

Hardware

• Many drones rely on GPS (as do other technologies like ship and cargo fleets, and even your smartphone) for navigation and tracking. But some bad actors are trying to jam those GPS signals.

• Next, I flicked the sensor with my wet hands until I got a few drops of water on the sensor, in an attempt to recreate the conditions that stopped the tap operating in the first example. I gestured as I had done before, and sure enough, my hails went unacknowledged.

• This required me to take stock of the situation. Here we have a tap, that dispenses water, in a wet bathroom environment, that’s liable to being splashed with water, that can be rendered inoperable by… get this… water.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The problem is, it’s the fourth such app you now have to engage with. The race to replace Twitter has four horses. And there are enough potentially fatal flaws with each that it’s impossible at present to back a sure-fire winner. The favourites are undoubtedly Threads with its billionaire backing, and Bluesky as the crowd favourite. Mastodon is trailing behind. But Twitter is like the old nag that still has life left in it. It could find its form again, and pip the others at the line.

• At least 45% of the nation’s tap water could be contaminated with at least one form of PFAS known as “forever chemicals,” according to a newly released study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

• Completely removing PFAS from local water supplies isn’t easy — experts told Vox that the problem can really only be resolved if companies that utilize PFAS heavily in their products, like DuPont and 3M, curb their usage or pay for cleanup. Public water utilities must also adhere to regulations meant to make sure water is safe to drink, though policies on PFAS vary by state.

• Haribo, the German company that popularized gummy bears, sells different versions of its classic Goldbears in Germany and the U.S.; the German ones are chewier (and made with fruit juice rather than with artificial flavors). In Japan, where the popular candy company Meiji rates its gummies on a chewiness scale of one to five, the hottest trend is gummies that are off-the-charts chewy at level five plus. “I’m not going to lie. I personally don’t like the level five or six ones,” says Adam Labriny, an American who manages the Japan-based snack-box service TokyoTreat. “It kind of feels like you took a tire and cut off a little piece.”

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• SiriusXM has announced it will shut down its podcast app Stitcher in favor of its own. Here’s the latest. During the height of the pandemic, SiriusXM acquired the Stitcher podcast app for $325 million in July 2020.

• The maker of the augmented reality “Pokemon Go” game, Niantic Inc., will lay off about a quarter of its workforce, or 230 employees, the company said in an email shared Thursday with employees by Chief Executive John Hanke.

• Artificial intelligence isn’t simply changing how we do our jobs: It’s also deciding whether we get jobs at all. Companies are increasingly incorporating algorithmic tools into their hiring processes, from software that reads our resumes to AI bots that score our first interviews.

• Pokémon Go maker Niantic is closing its Los Angeles studio, letting go off 230 employees—around a quarter of its 1,000-plus workforce—and scrapping at least two games, CEO John Hanke shared in an e-mail with Niantic employees yesterday (June 29).

• The German automaker Volkswagen AG announced today that it will start testing a small fleet of self-driving microbuses in Austin, Texas, with a mind to expanding to more U.S. cities in the future.

• But before getting to the heart of the discussion, several issues need to be clarified. The first question is the following: what Artificial Intelligence are we talking about?

• To understand Threads, just imagine all the worst parts of Instagram and Twitter. The interface looks and feels like Instagram’s comments section, and there is no way to view posts chronologically on the timeline—or even to limit your feed to posts from accounts you follow. Instead, users see text posts based on what an invisible algorithm determines is most likely to make them engage and stay on the app, so they will see more ads.

• Threads is a separate app from Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. This means Threads’ user base will be separate from their existing platforms. Instagram users however can sign-in using their Instagram accounts. It will not be available in the EU and will not support federation at launch.

• You are owed profits for your data that powers today’s AI, and we have a way to make that happen. We call it the AI Dividend.

• Our proposal is simple, and harkens back to the Alaskan plan. When Big Tech companies produce output from generative AI that was trained on public data, they would pay a tiny licensing fee, by the word or pixel or relevant unit of data. Those fees would go into the AI Dividend fund. Every few months, the Commerce Department would send out the entirety of the fund, split equally, to every resident nationwide. That’s it.

Security

• Exploit code will soon become available for a critical vulnerability in the Linux kernel that a security researcher discovered and reported to Linux administrators in mid-June.

• The bug, which the researcher labeled StackRot (CVE-2023-3269), affects Linux kernel 6.1 through 6.4 and gives attackers a way to escalate privileges on affected systems.

• Details have emerged about a newly identified security flaw in the Linux kernel that could allow a user to gain elevated privileges on a target host.

• Dubbed StackRot (CVE-2023-3269, CVSS score: 7.8), the flaw impacts Linux versions 6.1 through 6.4. There is no evidence that the shortcoming has been exploited in the wild to date

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (debian-archive-keyring, libusrsctp, nsis, ruby-redcloth, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (apache-ivy, cups, curaengine, glances, golang, keepass, libreoffice, minidlna, nodejs, opensc, perl-DBD-SQLite, python-setuptools, python-wheel, skopeo/buildah/podman, systemd, testng, and webkit2), SUSE (bind), and Ubuntu (Gerbv, golang-websocket, linux-gke, linux-intel-iotg, and linux-oem-5.17).

• A federal grand jury has indicted Rambler Gallo, charging him with intentionally causing damage to a protected computer after he allegedly accessed the computer network for the Discovery Bay Water Treatment Facility, located in the Town of Discovery Bay, Calif., and intentionally uninstalled the main operational and monitoring system for the water treatment plant and then turned off the servers running those systems, announced United States Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey and Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent in Charge Robert K. Tripp.

• Earlier this week, DataBreaches reported that Imagine360 had the unfortunate experience of discovering that two of their file-sharing platforms had both suffered breaches within days of each other: Citrix and Fortra/GoAnywhere.

• Today we bring you another double-whammy scenario. But in this one, it’s not two different platforms being breached within days of each other. This time, it’s two different vendors both falling prey to the MOVEit breach.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Algorithm disgorgement requires companies to remove products built on data they shouldn’t have used in the first place.

• The scope and detail of this data collection is staggering. There is hardly a human characteristic that advertisers do not want to exploit for their purposes. Want to reach people in Denmark who have bought a Toyota? No problem. Italians with financial problems? No problem. Minors in Austria? Hardcore Christians in Portugal? Pregnant women in Poland? Fragile seniors in France? Queers in Spain? No problem.

• But the tight integration among the Meta-owned apps can also serve to remind users they could be giving away the same personal data that’s collected from many of Instagram’s 2.3 billion monthly active users and from those on other Meta platforms, such as Facebook.

• Meta’s privacy policy says the app may collect and share information about purchases, location, contacts, “financial info,” health and fitness, and browsing and search history, and then share that data to advertisers.

• In addition, the Threads and Instagram apps, according to Apple’s App Store, “may include handling” of “sensitive information,” which could include race, sexual orientation and religion.

Defence/Aggression

• The last of the United States’ declared chemical weapons stockpile was destroyed at a sprawling military installation in eastern Kentucky, the White House announced Friday, a milestone that closes a chapter of warfare dating back to World War I.

• Workers at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky destroyed rockets filled with GB nerve agent, completing a decades long campaign to eliminate a stockpile that by the end of the Cold War totaled more than 30,000 tons.

• The last remaining munition in the obsolete US arsenal was a sarin nerve agent-filled M55 rocket, which was destroyed Friday at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, according to the Pentagon.

• TikTok just recently moved to obtain a preliminary injunction to prevent the full-scale prohibition, violations of which could each bring a $10,000 fine, according to reports. Earlier in 2023, Montana became the first state to approve legislation banning TikTok outright, after north of 30 states (and several countries) barred government employees from using the highly controversial video-sharing service on official devices.

• The killings in Friday’s shootout before dawn marked the latest bloodshed between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO). Up until relatively recently, Bangladesh officials had denied that Rohingya militants had a foothold in the sprawling refugee camps near the Myanmar border, where security has deteriorated sharply.

• Speaking after talks with the Turkish and Swedish foreign ministers at the security alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Swedish membership was “within reach.”

• Stoltenberg said he would convene a meeting between Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in Vilnius on Monday, on the eve of a NATO summit there, with the aim of bridging the gap between the two sides.

• Recently, Joel Millward-Hopkins of the University of Leeds suggested that as the climate emergency intensifies, we may only find ourselves ever more affected by some of the indirect impacts of global warming. Those would include the “widening of socioeconomic inequalities (within and between countries), increases in migration (intra- and inter-nationally), and heightened risk of conflict (from violence and war through to hate speech and crime).” Such impacts, he suggests, will reflect a “highly inconvenient overlap with key drivers of the authoritarian populism that has proliferated in the 21st century.” Inconvenient indeed.

• In other words, although weather disasters of many kinds can increase public concern about climate change, they can also help to whip up an oppressively violent sociopolitical climate that may prove ever more hostile to the very idea of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions—especially in large, affluent, high-emission societies.

• As Ukrainians mark 500 days of fending off the Russian invasion, Anthony Albanese is preparing for security talks in Europe.

• The prime minister will start his visit in the German capital Berlin, where he will meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• FOIA has been amended many times over the decades, including the most recent update: the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. It strengthened the FOIA ombudsman, put a time limit on the use of the deliberative process exemption, mandated more proactive openness, and wrote into law a specific presumption of openness. But there can be issues with enforcing the reforms.

Environment

• “If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation, as the last two records in temperature demonstrates,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres.

• According to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyser, the daily average temperature was higher than any week in 44 years of record-keeping during the seven-day period ending Wednesday.

Energy/Transportation

• A move aimed at maintaining stability and balance in oil markets.

• During the Song and Dance Festival, the State Police are testing two electric scooters produced in Latvia. The scooters allow them to reach speeds of 25 kilometers an hour and navigate through participants and spectators. So far, scooters have been particularly useful in catching unauthorized drone flights, Latvian Television reported on July 4.

• Because this field is NOT flat, you need to wire the tables in groups that will get the same level of sunshine at all times. because of the hill, at sunset some panels in one region might be getting more sun than others. This means that each row is NOT a single inverter, but varied clumps of panels are wired to each inverter. That means SOME cabling in that gap between the rows you see above. That will be DC cabling, but will also need to be buried safely underground. Its an annoying extra complication.

• The White House had originally planned to universalize a different charging system, the Combined Charging System (CCS), for all EVs in the US. Tesla CEO Elon Musk refused the government subsidy associated with the CCS, instead offering the NACS system to other car manufacturers free of charge.

• In June, the Biden administration attempted to mitigate the migration by reminding Tesla that its chargers could be included in the federal subsidy program if they added CCS compatibility.

• But, with the increasing adoption of NACS by major car companies—as well as last month’s decision by the Texas Department of Transportation to mandate the inclusion of NACS in all new charging stations—it looks like the CSS is losing the battle.

• This was complicated by the fact that Tesla’s connector was proprietary. Tesla declared its patents could be freely used but left a few small avenues closed that kept their cord from being fully open. It didn’t help that they were the upstart and the others were the incumbents, who were cooperating via a standards body as you might imagine they should. In 2022, Tesla declared their connector to be fully non-proprietary, but most people felt it needed to do this sooner to make a difference. In addition, their fast charging network is still mostly proprietary, except for a few stations (and a pledge to build out 3,500 more dual stalls this way in the next 2 years.)

• General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) announced today a collaboration with Tesla to integrate the North American Charging Standard (NACS) connector design into its EVs beginning in 2025. Additionally, the collaboration will expand access to charging for GM EV drivers at 12,000 Tesla Superchargers, and growing, throughout North America. This agreement complements GM’s ongoing investments in charging, reinforcing the company’s focus on expanding charging access across home, workplace, and public spaces and builds on the more than 134,000 chargers available to GM EV drivers today through the company’s Ultium Charge 360 initiative and mobile apps.

• As Reuters has learned, the use of the CCS fast-charging standard will be made a condition. In North America, the CCS1 standard is used, which combines the Type 1 connection for AC charging that is widespread there with the two DC contacts – in Europe, the CCS2 with Type 2 socket + DC is used.

Finance

• Major food delivery companies—including DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub— are suing New York City over a new law that raises the minimum pay rate for app-based delivery workers. The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection passed the law, the first of its kind, in June, and it takes effect on July 12.

• Pakistan’s benchmark share index scored its biggest single-day jump in 15 years on July 3, gaining around 6 percent on the first trading session after the country secured a last-gasp funding deal from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

• Evernote, the note-taking app once heralded by Engadget as the “king of note-taking apps,” has laid off most of its staff as it prepares to exit the Bay Area and relocate nearly all operations to Europe.

• The Redwood City-based note-taking company — which has weathered all manner of tumult over the past decade, capped off last November by the sale of the company to Italian app maker Bending Spoons — axed nearly all its employees in the United States and Chile, according to a statement from Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari provided to SFGATE.

• But after more than 30 meetings with venture capitalists, Bastian could not find the required capital. With just six weeks before the company ran out of cash, she pulled together her advisors to brainstorm a plan B.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Germany’s far-right AfD notched up another first Sunday when its candidate was elected a full-time town mayor, in a further boost for the anti-immigration party.

• Germany’s far-right AfD notched up another first Sunday when its candidate was elected a full-time town mayor, in a further boost for the anti-immigration party.

• The demolition of the city’s main synagogue was an early sign of the terrible destruction to come under the Nazi regime.

• Seven people have been detained in western Germany on suspicion of forming an Islamist terrorist cell, prosecutors said on July 6.

• The proposed package foresees spending about 6 percent less in 2024 from this year, in a return to financial austerity. But the severity of the cuts to social services drew sharp criticism.

• Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda has criticised the “harsh rhetoric” toward Germany from the country’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis.

• The European Union’s ambassador to China expressed regret on Sunday over the lack of “substantial progress” with Beijing on trade talks, as EU countries seek to reduce their economic dependence on the Asian giant.

• The investigation into Ant began after its founder and billionaire entrepreneur, Jack Ma, publicly criticized Chinese regulators in 2020 for stifling innovation and being overly cautious. Then, Mr. Ma, the most prominent Chinese tech entrepreneur, disappeared from the public eye.

• Chinese regulators said Friday they had fined fintech giant Ant Group almost US$1 billion for “illegal acts” and handed an affiliate of rival Tencent a US$415 million penalty, adding that a long-running crackdown on tech firms was drawing to a close.

• The trouble is that in a media industry run for profit, the rules of economics tell us the unwavering duty of any private company, whether Google, Meta or Postmedia, is not to the public interest, but to maximize the income of those who own it. Acting for the public welfare only occurs if it adds value to that first responsibility. As Tusikov explained, too often the two are in conflict.

• “Simultaneously with Turkey requesting Sweden to repatriate its opponents, Sweden is facing the largest organized criminal actions in its history. Almost every day comes reports of armed attacks and killings from all parts of Sweden,” the call states*.

• The European Union and Belgium’s regional Flemish government will together invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in Belgian chip technology firm Imec, the Flemish government said on Friday.

• Imec will use the investment to expand its “clean room” test facility with the most advanced equipment and processes, the company said in a statement.

• ASKA A5 only has to tackle the first two challenges, which might be significantly easier. And with the second challenge — integrating into airspace — ASKA has also made some great strides. In 2020, ASKA signed a five-year Space Act Agreement with NASA to advance their participation in NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign (AAM), jointly organized with the FAA.

• Musk wants to recoup “excess” fees that Wachtell charged under an agreement signed on the day of closing by one of its partners and Twitter’s chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde.

• According to the lawsuit, filed in California superior court, Wachtell lawyers persuaded Twitter’s former management to agree to pay a “success fee” if Musk closed the deal—part of the $90 million in fees that the law firm allegedly arranged in the days leading up to the sale.

• Seeing the NYT join the ranks of those demanding cuts is more than a bit disturbing. Of course, this is not the first time the NYT’s editorial board has joined with those on the right. Back in the 1980s the paper famously told readers that the “right minimum wage” was $0.00.

• But let’s step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture. The NYT is indisputably correct in saying that we are running unusually large annual deficits. However, the piece is more than a bit off the mark in focusing on the debt, rather than these deficits.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• For years, Facebook’s algorithm automatically moved posts lower in the feed if they were flagged by one of the platform’s third-party fact-checking partners, including AFP, reducing the visibility of false or misleading content.

• Under a new “content reduced by fact-checking” option that now appears in Facebook’s settings, users have flexibility to make debunked posts appear higher or lower in the feed or maintain the status quo.

• The news shows that as deepfakes started as a vehicle for non-consensual pornography, government officials were already concerned about other ways deepfakes would impact their work, including for surveillance and investigating crime. Advertisement

• “Do we have the ability to effectively detect this?” one FBI official from the Bureau’s Operational Technology Division (OTD), which handles advanced technical issues such as hacking tools, wrote in an July 2018 email. The context was a Washington Post newsletter titled “Doctored videos could send fake news crisis into overdrive, lawmakers warn.”

• “The [Internet] and TikTok have been very dangerous for sexual health misinformation,” says OB/GYN and women’s health specialist Dr. Sameena Rahman, noting that influencers often go viral for sharing anecdotal experiences that their viewers try to replicate despite a lack of research to confirm safety and effectiveness.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Launched in 2020, the app rewarded users who supported “yellow businesses” – restaurants, shops and service providers that promoted democracy in Hong Kong – and allowed users to leave reviews. It also provided discounts and information about the stores.

• That’s not the first time I’ve criticised Apple, far from it, and therefore it’s not the first time I have had to deal with the subsequent backlash via email and private messages. I can deal with disagreements. I don’t expect every one of my readers (usual or new) to agree with me all the time. When the person who took the time to write me expresses their disagreement in a cogent, articulate manner, I’m very eager to listen. I’m not infallible and I might have missed some huge things in my analyses. It happens, and I can change my mind and opinions on something. If you write me to insult me or to say dumb things at me, you’re wasting your time, you’re showing me your colours, and the impact of what you say is less than zero.

• But the negative emails and messages I’ve received after speaking my mind about Vision Pro are worth mentioning. Not because they’re particularly intelligent or articulate (most aren’t, I’m sorry to report), but because they’re emblematic of the way certain tech discourse is degrading nowadays.

• [...] A man identified in Swedish media as a Christian from Iraq burned a Koran outside a mosque. [...]

• In the capital, Islamabad, lawyers holding copies of the Quran protested in front of the Supreme Court, while worshippers outside mosques held small rallies, demanding the severing of diplomatic ties with Sweden.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Cohen and Evans were arrested while other demonstrators chanted slogans demanding freedom for Assange, the 52-year-old Australian facing extradition from the United Kingdom to the U.S., where he has been charged with Espionage Act violations and could be imprisoned for up to 175 years if convicted on all counts.

• “It’s outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture,” Cohen said during the protest. “He revealed the truth, and for that he is suffering, and… we need to do whatever we can to help him, and to help preserve democracy, which is based on freedom of the press.”

• “It seems to me that, right now, unless things change, and unless we change them, freedom of the press is going up in smoke,” Cohen asserted before lighting an effigy of the Bill of Rights in four places.

• Turkey has the highest rate of legal harassment against women journalists in the world and ranks second in the number of women journalists imprisoned, according to a new report by the Coalition for Women in Journalism (CFWIJ).

• “This direct attack, recorded and documented by media outlets, reveals a blatant targeting of journalist crews and their equipment for no reason other than deliberately harming journalists, hindering their work, and disrupting their coverage. This action represents a clear violation of international human rights norms and standards that guarantee the safety of journalists,” said the Al-Araby TV statement.

• CPJ reached Nyantakyi by phone, but when asked about the police investigation into him after the killing, he said, “OK, thank you” and then the line disconnected. Follow-up calls rang unanswered.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Olympics have long been plagued by overspending, forced displacement, militarized policing, and false promises, but organizers of the Paris Olympics promised that under their stewardship, the 2024 Games would mark a break from its sordid history. “We want the legacy to be different,” Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 Olympics, told Time magazine a year ago.

• France’s top administrative court on Thursday upheld a ban on women football players wearing Islamic hijab headscarves, after the issue was seized on by politicians claiming secularism was at risk.

• Woman in Iran will be allowed to watch football matches in stadiums in the future, the head of the country’s soccer association Mehdi Taj, said on June 30.

• After spending past summers debating burkinis, France looks set for a new bout of arguing over Islamic clothing, this time over whether women’s football players should be allowed to wear headscarves during matches.

• Kylian Mbappé and other prominent French soccer players have expressed their indignation after the death of a 17-year-old delivery driver shot and killed during a police check in a Paris suburb.

• French police raided the home of Paris Saint-Germain boss Nasser Al-Khelaifi on Wednesday in an investigation into a man’s claims of detention and torture in Qatar, a source close to the case told AFP.

• After the murder of a young Kurdish woman, Jina Amini, in Tehran in September 2022, state violence to suppress the unprecedented popular uprising is escalating.

• The new law planned to raise the minimum wage of app-based delivery workers in the city to $17.96 per hour on July 12, and subsequently to $19.96 per hour by April 2025, when it would be fully phased in. A press release from the city at the time stated that delivery workers currently earn around $7 per hour on average. Most food delivery apps pay workers by the delivery and drivers often greatly rely on customer tips to be their main source of income. Motherboard has previously reported that DoorDashers, for example, often only get a base pay of $2 or $3 per delivery, and get about two-thirds of their income from customer tips. The law, then, would mean an overall increase of around $13 per hour.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• There are two leading schools of thought when it comes to economics. Austrian economics is primarily concerned with sound money, as seen with a gold standard; money is what it is and can’t be changed. The Austrian economists study economics with this constant in mind.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• There is a lot more I could have said: CHERI contains many, many details I haven’t even hinted at; and there are certainly other ways of using CHERI than the two stories I’ve outlined. I think, though, that this post is long enough already!

• In terms of the two CHERI stories I’ve presented, it’s worth being explicit that the purecap story is very much the standard CHERI story at the moment, with the hybrid story being more speculative. The very different implications each story has for today and tomorrow’s software might give you some idea that CHERI is best thought of as a toolbox – and many tools within that toolbox have more than one possible use. Exactly which use(s) of CHERI will end up being most useful – which, to my mind, probably means “provides the best balance between security and performance” – remains unclear. And, of course, there are no guarantees that CHERI will enter the mainstream! But, whatever happens to CHERI, I think it is extremely helpful in opening our eyes to possibilities that most of us have previously not even considered.

Monopolies

• The European Commission (EC) has announced an in-depth investigation into Amazon’s proposed acquisition of iRobot over concerns it may restrict competition in the robot vacuum cleaner market.

• Amazon’s $1.7 billion takeover was announced almost a year ago, in August 2022, but the EC has now decided that a full investigation is necessary to assess whether the merger may have an adverse impact on the market for robotic vacuum cleaners.

• In a letter sent on Wednesday, Twitter alleged that Meta used its trade secrets to develop its new social media platform, Threads, and demanded that it stop using the information. Twitter said that Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees, many of whom “improperly retained” devices and documents from the company, and said Meta “deliberately” assigned them to work on Threads.

• It was unclear whether any lawsuit would be filed.

Copyrights

• We just got done noting how the AT&T—>Time Warner—>Warner Bros Discovery mergers just keep on demonstrating the absolutely pointlessness of most media mergers.

• The stock music niche is projected to grow by nearly $665 million by 2027 due to the expanding variety of stock music coupled with the increasing adoption of the subscription model.

• A more recent post on TorrentFreak reveals how the copyright industry is trying to attack IPFS by attacking gateways to it. Specifically, it concerns the IPFS gateway at hardbin.com operated as a free service for the benefit of the online world by James Stanley. In a recent blog post, he writes: [...]

• The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment will increase pressure on sites contributing to rampant piracy of Japanese anime running to billions of illicit views per year. DMCA subpoenas filed in the United States reveal three new anime targets, several persistent domain-hopping evaders, and an interesting new entrant hoping to emulate one of the most resilient pirate sites.

• As part of ongoing piracy liability lawsuits against Internet providers, a group of film companies are focusing on Reddit once again. The filmmakers believe that public comments posted by Reddit users could lead to breakthrough evidence. Reddit clearly disagrees and asks the court to deny the request, as it did in a similar case earlier this year.

• The notices were actually sent to abuse addresses at DigitalOcean and gandi, and I think gandi forwarded them to me.

• I have now taken hardbin.com down completely because dealing with this sort of thing makes it less fun to run and more like hard work, but I do still have a copy of the log files.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• This album came out of nowhere for me. It was late 2019 and I was really fucking sad. Then boom I find this album from 2015 and I finally understand why my friend had it on display in his apartment. I love this album so much that Run Away with Me was my top streamed song in 2020. My Top Albums list is only for new releases but while I streamed Bell Witch a whole lot Carly had my heart the entire year.

• I found this album at the perfect time with COVID-19 about to lock down the entire world I needed a brighter spot in my life. And not to mention I was engaging more with my general femininity and having a song that evoked those … emotions … in myself was perfect.

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