● 07.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/07/2023: GNOME Web Canary is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 8:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• China has introduced its computer operating system for the first time, called OpenKylin. The country hopes to reduce its dependence on US technology, and a group of Chinese companies, headed by China Electronics Corp, developed the OpenKylin 1.0.

• OpenKylin 1.0 is a Linux operating system which was created by a community of approximately 4,000 developers. The system, which is based on the open-source Linux platform, is utilised in various industries like finance, energy, and even in its space program.

• In recent years, China’s tech industry has prioritised developing an operating system that is not dependent on US technology. The OpenKylin system has been developed with contributions from various companies and organisations.

• The CBx3 and CBx3-7 are two compact devices based on a Celeron processor from the 7000 Series and an i7-1355U 13th Gen processor respectively. These compact devices offer an array of features including Gigabit ethernet, Wi-Fi6E/BT5.3, dual HDMI ports, etc.

• As mentioned above, the CBx3 Chromebox is equipped with a Celeron P7305 processor while the CBx3-7 is powered by an Intel Core i7 processor with the following features…

Server

• Read how this tech enthusiast went from newbie to becoming a Linux System Administrator, Security Engineer, and even a mentor and trainer to upcoming techies, all in less than five years.

• [...]

• The Bincom Programme gives participants a sense of freedom to learn things that are even outside the scope of the chosen track. From my personal experience, I applied as an infrastructure engineer, but when I was at the training center, I saw that I needed to learn Python because as an infrastructure engineer, you’re required to do scripting which involves coding. Then, when I saw that the Python class was also ongoing at that time, I expressed my interest to the project manager and was allowed to join the Python program alongside.

Kernel Space

• If you read that headline and thought, “what the heck, Zen 4 just came out,” I have bad news for you, friend. The Ryzen 7000 series processors for desktop and their Socket AM5 platform came out last September—over nine months ago. It’ll still be a long while yet before we see the release of any Zen 5 processors, but it’s well past time for us to start looking ahead toward those chips.

• Today’s news concerns AMD’s next-generation processors and their support in Linux. Patches for the open-source operating system add new hardware IDs for AMD Family 26 processors. What’s Family 26? Well, we don’t actually know officially, but Family 25 encompasses all Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors. Zen 3 was a major step forward architecturally from Zen 2, and likewise, Zen 5 is supposed to be major architectural redesign from Zen 4.

Benchmarks

• Available under the MIT license, Meta (as in Facebook) have released IGL (Intermediate Graphics Library) for developers. This was officially announced on The Khronos Group blog (who oversee various open standards), written by Meta developers.

Applications

• What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

• In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

• Google Password Manager is a password manager built into Chrome and Android devices. While it’s free to use it’s published under a proprietary license with little information about security used.

• We recommend free and open source alternatives to Google Password Manager.

Instructionals/Technical

• Jupyter Notebook is an open-source server-client application written in Python. The word “Jupyter” comes from the languages that support this platform: Julia (Ju), Python(py), and R (er).

• The Jupyter App can be executed on a local desktop or on a remote server. This blog post will focus on installing the software on a Linux server.

• Docker Compose is available in the standard repositories on most distros. However, the most recent repository versions tend to be several versions behind the latest release.

• This is increasingly becoming a problem and can throw a variety of errors that require workarounds. Here’s how to install the latest version of Docker Compose on Linux.

• While the bzip2 command line utility can compress files, many other tools let you perform basic tasks – like comparing such files – without the need to uncompress them. Here, in this tutorial, we will discuss the basics of bzcmp, bzdiff, bzmore, bzless, and bzgrep commands using some easy-to-understand examples.

• In the world of DevOps and continuous integration, Jenkins has emerged as a popular automation server that enables developers to streamline their build, test, and deployment processes. If you’re using RHEL 9 or Rocky Linux 9 or AlmaLinux 9 and want to harness the power of Jenkins, this step-by-step guide will walk you through the installation process. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have Jenkins up and running on your Linux distribution, empowering you to automate your software development workflows effectively.

• There are times when you want to redirect the output of specific output to a file so you can examine the error later.

• Every time a new alpha version of a major GNOME release pops up, people ask me how to install it on various GNU/Linux distributions. I always tell them that if there are no packages created for a specific distro, it’s very hard to compile the whole desktop environment from sources and it takes a long time.

• GNOME 45 alpha was released recently and some users want to help test it on Arch Linux. Thankfully, open-source developer Fabian Bornschein is still maintaining a repository with the latest GNOME alpha/beta packages for Arch Linux users that want to help with testing.

WINE or Emulation

• Another biweekly release of the compatibility layer Wine is out now! As the developers continue the progress towards getting Wine working fully with Wayland in version 8.12. Reminder: once a year a new stable release is made with the next being Wine 9.0, and Wine is just one part of what allows Steam Play Proton to play some of the biggest games around on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

Games

• Valve released a fresh upgrade to Proton Experimental to get more games like Gears 5, Overwatch 2 and Phasmophobia working better on Linux and Steam Deck.

• In the eyes of many computer users, Linux is perceived as largely functional, mostly restricted to running servers, office tasks and web browsing. However, a wide and ever growing range of native Linux games are available, but given the range, there are a number of locations where you pick them up. Whatever type of game you like, there’s lots to choose from including the latest games as well as classics and remastered titles. And compatibility software lets Linux games play a huge range of Windows titles.

• Complementing Linux games are a wide range of tools that are designed for gamers. Some of these tools have a wider audience than gamers, so there should be software here of interest even if you don’t play games.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This is a short PSA post announcing the return of the GNOME Web Canary builds. Read on for the crunchy details.

• A couple years ago I was blogging about the GNOME Web Canary flavor. In summary this special build of GNOME Web provides a preview of the upcoming version of the underlying WebKitGTK engine, it is potentially unstable, but allows for testing features that have not shipped in a stable release yet.

• Unfortunately, Canary broke right after GNOME Web switched to GTK4, because back then the WebKit CI was missing build bots and infrastructure for hosting WebKitGTK4 build artefacts. Recently, thanks to the efforts of my Igalia colleagues, Pablo Abelenda, Lauro Moura, Diego Pino and Carlos López the WebKit CI provides WebKitGTK4 build artefacts, hosted on a server kindly provided by Igalia.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Welcome back to our blog series, where we delve into the world of openSUSE Leap and its appeal to CentOS users.

• If you’re a sysadmin looking for a flexible and familiar Linux distribution, openSUSE Leap has got you covered. With a focus on inclusivity, openSUSE Leap incorporates tools and ideas from the SUSE community and beyond, enhancing flexibility and freedom of choice. This makes it a versatile platform that feels right at home for CentOS users.

• In this blog post, we’ll explore how openSUSE Leap bundles a wealth of tools and technologies that align with CentOS, making your transition seamless and hassle-free. From installation to configuration and day-to-day operations, you’ll find familiar tools and concepts, resulting in a reduced learning curve and an effortless experience.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Quite a controversial topic currently floating around is that a change proposal has been made for Fedora Workstation 40 to have some “privacy-preserving” telemetry to “enable limited data collection of anonymous Fedora Workstation usage metrics”.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical continues to push forward with its adoption of snap, revealing .deb version of an app will not be available in Ubuntu’s app store if a snap is available.

• Snaps are a packaging format that is designed to contain an app’s dependencies rather than relying on the system. In theory, this makes the app more secure, as well as easier to package for multiple distros. In practice, snaps are rarely used outside Ubuntu, with the competing Flatpak a more popular option.

• Canonical isn’t backing down from pushing snaps, however, with plans to release a snap-based immutable version of Ubuntu next year. According to OMG! Ubuntu!, Canonical plans to push snaps over traditional .deb files in the upcoming version of its app store, even in the non-immutable version of Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux distribution but it’s increasingly positioning snaps as the preferred way to ‘get’ software. The aim is, eventually, to default to a full-snap experience on the desktop.

• Canonical’s LXD tool, previously maintained in public under the auspices of the Canonical-sponsored Linux Containers project, is being taken in-house.

• On US Independence Day, Canonical announced that the LXD project it sponsors is, um, no longer independent. Previously, development of the LXD project had been carried out as part of the wider Linux Containers project. The Ubuntu Discourse has an FAQ post with a little more information, but still not very much.

• LXD has been around for quite a while now: The Reg covered its announcement back in 2014, and the inclusion of the first release in Ubuntu 15.10 the following year. LXC is rather older: we first mentioned it as an up-and-coming option in 2011, a couple of years before Docker first launched.

Devices/Embedded

• Sipeed recently launched new variants of the Lichee Pi 4A with more RAM and eMMC storage. This RISC-V based SBC comes with 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4K display output and support for wireless networking.

• At the heart of the Lichee Pi 4A is the TH1520 System-on-Chip, built on a 12nm process and featuring the RISC-V 2.0G C910 quad-core architecture.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Differently from the other posts of this blog, this isn’t a tutorial.

• We worked with 13 primary teachers on adapting computing lessons to make them culturally relevant for their context, funded by Cognizant.

• It’s pretty easy to program the Raspberry Pi Pico in Python, or you can use C or C++ if you so desire. However, if you fancy the easy language of yesteryear, you might like PiccoloBASIC from [Gary Sims].

• This tutorial will show you how to monitor devices in your home network with Raspberry PI and LiberNMS [...]

• The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I’m focusing on a small part of the chip: the address and data pins that connect the chip to external memory and I/O devices. In many processors, this circuitry is straightforward, but it is complicated in the 8086 for two reasons. First, Intel decided to package the 8086 as a 40-pin DIP, which didn’t provide enough pins for all the functionality. Instead, the 8086 multiplexes address, data, and status. In other words, a pin can have multiple roles, providing an address bit at one time and a data bit at another time.

• I recently acquired a new Archimedes for my collection, the A5000. It was bought mostly working, but needs a little work to get it running again. Here is my journey.

• The CBx3 and CBx3-7 are two compact devices based on a Celeron processor from the 7000 Series and an i7-1355U 13th Gen processor respectively. These compact devices offer an array of features including Gigabit ethernet, Wi-Fi6E/BT5.3, dual HDMI ports, etc.

• As mentioned above, the CBx3 Chromebox is equipped with a Celeron P7305 processor while the CBx3-7 is powered by an Intel Core i7 processor with the following features:

• Sipeed recently launched new variants of the Lichee Pi 4A with more RAM and eMMC storage. This RISC-V based SBC comes with 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4K display output and support for wireless networking.

• At the heart of the Lichee Pi 4A is the TH1520 System-on-Chip, built on a 12nm process and featuring the RISC-V 2.0G C910 quad-core architecture.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• This is an extremely short post to say that at the time I didn’t make it open source, but I am making it open source now. It’s not a lot of code but maybe it’ll be interesting to someone.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Funding open access ebooks has advanced significantly in recent years beyond book processing charges (BPC) levied on authors. Originators of alternative funding models, such as crowdfunding from Knowledge Unlatched, have spurred an increase in innovative models that rely on a mix of grant funding, central university funding, and library funding or converting books to open access upon the realization of a revenue target. Examples include Direct to Open (2DO) from MIT Press and Fund to Mission from University of Michigan Press, which rely on a mix of funding participants, most prominently library supported membership or subscription commitments. Cambridge Flip it Open and Bloomsbury Open Collections convert pre-selected books to open access upon realization of a pre-set sales target.

Programming/Development

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 11 RC!

• I highly recommend reading the whole article, but my main takeaway is that when reviewing code, one should follow three phases:

• 1. Answer the question: “Good or bad idea?”

• 2. “Is this architecturally sound?”: are the changes done in a way that makes sense given the existing project architecture?

• 3. only then, can you go all in on nitpicking on naming, spelling mistakes, or ask for the commit history to be cleaned.

Standards/Consortia

• Standards are at the heart of the web: from HTML to JavaScript all the way to ActivityPub, the standard that underlies Mastodon, and that Meta has said will be used in Threads by Instagram, their new social network. A change to a standard may solve a problem, but the question “for whom?” always exists. Standards must be technically excellent and use-case driven. They should solve the problem of real-world implementors, rather than hypotheticals.

• Threads was initially conceived as a social network that supports ActivityPub, a protocol used by Mastodon, Lemmy (a Reddit-style aggregator), and WordPress. ActivityPub promises portability between applications — allowing users to interact or follow Threads users from other applications.

Leftovers

• The strategy for winning is simple: do good work and tell the world about it. In that order! This implies some level of stealth as you are doing the good work.

• Last week I went through about nine years’ worth of archives to add posts to a few collections, which you might enjoy browsing: [...]

Science

• Thomas Edison once said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. That doesn’t leave much room for partspriation.

Education

• The Australian Research Council published new guidance on the issue after applicants for grants of up to A$500,000 (£262,000) awarded under the Discovery Projects scheme reported spotting the “tell-tale” signs of ChatGPT in assessors’ comments.

Hardware

• The department said swimmers should avoid areas with seals, schools of fish or diving seabirds and murky water to reduce the risk of interacting with a shark. They should also avoid swimming at dusk, night and dawn, follow lifeguards’ instructions, stay close to the shore and swim in groups.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The National Association of Voice Actors tweeted in response: “The damage to voice actors and game companies by AI and synthetic voices is real and tangible,” proceeding to tag both Bethesda Studios and Zenimax Online, writing: “voice actors don’t have the legal ability to fight this, but you can help.”

• “In the age of the [Internet], it’s a lot easier to apply for a job. And there are tools for candidates to streamline that process. Like ‘give us your resume and we will apply to 400 jobs,’” O’Neil said. “They get just too many applications. They have to cull the list somehow, so these algorithms do that for them.”

• AI-infused hiring programs have drawn scrutiny, most notably over whether they end up exhibiting biases based on the data they’re trained on. Studies have long found that programs that use machine learning or artificial intelligence often exhibit racism, sexism and other biases.

• It’s been a distressing trend over the last decade, that of taking commercial software from a paid-for licence model and moving into the cloud and onto a rental model. In out line, we’ve seen this with CAD packages and notably with EAGLE PCB CAD, but it’s hit other sectors in exactly the same way. The art and design communities, in particular, are feeling the pinch from Adobe Suite going towards a rental model, and now the artist and perennial thorn in the side of anyone who seeks to own a colour, [Stuart Semple] is doing something about it. He’s launching a competing suite called provocatively, Abode, which will follow an affordable paid-for licence model. It’s a development that raises interesting questions for the open source community, so it’s definitely worth a second look from that perspective.

Security

• A security vulnerability, dubbed StackRot was found impacting Linux versions 6.1 through 6.4. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-3269, (CVSS score: 7.8), is a privilege escalation issue that resides in the memory management subsystem. An unprivileged local user can trigger the flaw to compromise the kernel and escalate privileges.

• A security flaw has been identified in the Linux kernel called “stockRot” (CVE-2023-3269). This vulnerability grants attackers access to the kernel and the ability to elevate their privileges.

• It has been discovered that “Stack Rot,” a vulnerability in stack expansion, is present in Linux kernel versions 6.1 to 6.4.

• The unsecured database contained internal screenshots of source code as well as customer documents that were stored in uploads folders. These documents include: US Federal and State tax filings, passports, driver licenses, birth and marriage records, business documents, denied visa petitions, among other files from customers around the world. Upon further research, there were references and invoices linked to a NYC-based translation service provider, Kings of Translation. The company offers translation services and claims to have locations in the UK and Latvia.

• Onix reported the breach to HHS as affecting 319,500 patients, but did not reply to inquiries sent by this site. There has been no report as to which ransomware group was responsible for the attack and no update to the March 26 notice on its website.

• Now Marianne Kolbasuk McGee reports that Onix Group has already been hit with three proposed class action lawsuits. But looking at one of the complaints, it is based on claiming risk of future harm, etc. Has anyone claimed that their data has already been misused in any way? And if they don’t, will their complaints survive a challenge to standing?

• Gates Corporation in Denver describes itself as a leading manufacturer of application-specific fluid power and power transmission solutions.

• On July 7, its external counsel filed a notice of a breach with the Maine Attorney General’s Office. According to the notification, 11,090 people were affected by a ransomware attack that occurred on February 11. The firm’s notification to those affected included the following statement:

• The seller insists on using a middleman, which is usually a protection and reassurance to both any buyer and the seller that this is not a scam.

• In this case, the seller says they will sell to only one party and will consider offers less than $100k.

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) are releasing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) in response to cyber threat actors leveraging newly identified Truebot malware variants against organizations in the United States and Canada. As recently as May 31, 2023, the authoring organizations have observed an increase in cyber threat actors using new malware variants of Truebot (also known as Silence.Downloader). Truebot is a botnet that has been used by malicious cyber groups like CL0P Ransomware Gang to collect and exfiltrate information from its target victims.

• The township government has been hit by an unspecified computer network “incident” that’s been affecting the function of multiple systems.

• Administrator and Law Director Mike Vaccaro said in a prepared statement Friday afternoon that officials are working with external cybersecurity experts to work through the problem. An investigation has also been launched into the matter, which has not resulted in any known access of unauthorized, personal or employee data.

• “We will notify affected individuals if the investigation identifies evidence to the contrary,” Vaccaro said via the statement. “Our goals right now are to make sure our network is secure, all devices are clean and to restore our full functionality of data.”

• Township officials declined to comment beyond Friday afternoon’s statement, which did not elaborate on the type of incident or provide other details.

Privacy/Surveillance

• EU watchdogs won’t like that, given that, in January, they ruled unlawful the legal basis Meta had been using to process its personal data from European Facebook and Instagram users to run targeted ads, slapping Meta with fines of $435 million (€400 million). Meta is appealing that ruling, but it is only one of several legal assaults by the EU on the foundations of its business model.

• On July 4, the European Court of Justice, the EU’s supreme court, issued a judgment backing an earlier decision by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), that Meta has to get user consent before gathering data for its targeted, behavioral ads. That ruling also supported the FCO’s claim that antitrust authorities can factor in privacy concerns when determining if a company is exploiting its competitive advantage. Some have said the decision could mean the end, at least in Europe, of Meta’s “surveillance capitalism” business model.

Defence/Aggression

• Though migration to Europe has not reached the levels seen in 2015 and 2016 during the height of the Islamic State’s caliphate and the Syrian civil war, economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, conflict in Ukraine and parts of Africa, and political and social crises in the Global South have collided to push people from their home countries — often via unsafe and irregular routes like human smuggling.

• Darfur’s war in the 2000s was dubbed the 21st century’s first genocide. It may also have been the world’s first climate-change war. Resource-rich but drought-prone, the region’s land had long been contested, as desertification spread and rainfall dwindled. But it took the Arab-supremacist policies of Mr Bashir and his Islamist allies to make Darfur explode. Hopes for a durable peace rose there in 2019 when Mr Bashir’s regime fell and a democratic transition seemed to beckon. A peace deal in 2020 brought Darfuri rebel leaders into a power-sharing government in Khartoum, promising fairer access to resources and the return of land to those who had been driven away. By 2021 a hybrid force of UN and African Union peacekeepers, deployed in 2007, had pulled out.

• Mr Rutte’s conservative VVD party had been trying to limit the flow of asylum [sic] seekers, following a row last year about overcrowded migration [sic] centres. His plans were opposed by his junior coalition partners.

• Foreign criminal gangs are increasingly getting involved in property crimes in the Netherlands. Based on previously unreleased police data, accessed by Omroep WNL’s NPO Radio 1 program, Het Misdaadbureau, it was reported that in 25 percent of property crimes committed last year, the suspect identified was neither born in the Netherlands, possessed a Dutch address, nor held Dutch nationality.

• And Now They’re Beginning to Say the Quiet Part Out Loud

• UN special rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the first such expert who was allowed to visit the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in over 20 years, noted that US’ treatment of detainees was “cruel, inhuman and degrading”

War in Ukraine

• Vladimir Putin met with the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov on Tuesday, June 27, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged to the press.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin defended his actions, saying he was not trying to overthrow the government.

• The news comes after HRW issued a report that said Ukraine killed civilians with U.N. banned cluster bombs used in Izium

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas effectively invited corporations accused of fraud to bring a constitutional challenge against the False Claims Act, which could dismantle a law that whistleblowers have depended on for over a century.

• Jack Sweeney, the University of Central Florida student who created the account, reintroduced the real-time tracker Thursday and has already amassed more than 14,000 followers. So far, though, either Musk has stayed on the ground or Sweeney has yet to hook up the bot that uses public data to reflect the aircraft’s location. No updates have been posted.

• “I’m honestly hoping Twitter dies,” Sweeney told Insider on Thursday. “As I am hindered on there, you search for my name, seems I’m search banned.”

• Sweeney was in charge of numerous accounts on Twitter that tracked personal flights of wealthy individuals including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. All accounts were banned alongside Sweeney’s ElonJet account.

• Newly declassified British files shed disturbing light on the origins and internal workings of Operation Gladio, a covert NATO plot deploying fascist terror militias across Italy. Have spies in London applied these lessons in Ukraine?

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• While there are a lot of exciting electric vehicles finally coming to market, many of us feel nostalgic for the fossil cars of our youth. [Mihir Vardhan] restored his grandfather’s car with an unusual gas-to-EV conversion.

• If you’re working with 3.3V or 5V circuits, it’s easy for you to throw on a power or status LED here or there. [Tom Gralewicz] has found himself in a pickle, though, often working on projects with voltages like 36V or 48V. Suddenly, it’s no longer practical to throw an LED and a resistor on a line to verify if it’s powered or not. Craving this simplicity, [Tom] invented the Cheap Universal LED Driver, or CULD, to do the job instead.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• The cost of a “forever” stamp for first-class mail is rising from 63 to 66 cents Sunday as part of increased mailing prices approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission earlier this year at the request of the USPS. The USPS said it needed more money in part due to high inflation.

• Forcing landlords to explain above-inflation rent increases is among radical changes to the NSW rental market being floated by the government.

• A discussion paper released on Friday proposes measures beyond the Minns government’s promised rental reforms to end no-grounds evictions, allow more pets in rentals and introduce a portal bond scheme.

• As inflation keeps surging, a lawmaker calls for a higher minimum wage.

• Leading economists said we’d need higher unemployment to tame inflation. Here’s why they were wrong.

• Childcare fees are growing faster than inflation and wages, although government subsidies are taking some of the pain out of price hikes.

• An investigation into the costs of childcare by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission revealed out-of-pocket expenses rose between seven and 16 per cent during the past four years, despite government subsidies counteracting some of the price growth.

• Only 18 to 24 percent of respondents planned to delay or cancel tech purchases.

• Businesses, salaried workers and experts say Pakistan needs to make the right reforms.

• The next time your car breaks down, expect to fork over more money — and wait longer — for repairs.

• Why it matters: Americans already face record-high debt after a long battle with inflation, and pricey repairs for vehicles they rely on to get around will likely only worsen the situation.

• Driving the news: Multiple shortages — a lack of mechanics, parts and new vehicles — combined with higher prices on all types of goods have hiked repair costs, experts say.

• Anthony Albanese has lashed his predecessor for what he calls a lack of contrition over the findings that came out of the royal commission into the Robodebt scheme.

• Scott Morrison is among several senior coalition figures highlighted for their roles in the scheme but has rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing, saying the inquiry’s findings were “based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how government operates”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• I think it is very important that I provide irrefutable proof of the systematic lies behind the boycott campaign with which BECTU, supported by the MSM, destroyed Doune the Rabbit Hole.

• The boycott in response to Bud Light‘s outreach to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney has had notable staying power.

• “His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table,” the statement continued. “And it will allow him to advance our message that everyone, including Americans, deserves to be represented in Washington.”

• Two days ago, Mark Zuckerberg posted a front-facing video on Instagram with some news: Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, had launched. With a few taps, users could download the new app, port over some of their Instagram network, and start posting. By this morning, according to Mark Zuckerberg, Threads had 70 million users (in July 2022, Twitter reportedly had about 238 million). My colleague Charlie Warzel wrote a story with Ian Bogost this week for The Atlantic arguing that Threads proves social media cannot die. I called Charlie this morning to get his thoughts on the new text-based social-media platform, where it’s headed, and what it means that Meta is the company behind it.

• United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says her 10 hours of bilateral meetings with senior Chinese officials have been “direct” and “productive”, helping stabilise the often rocky relationship as her four-day Beijing trip ends.

• Before departing China on Sunday, Yellen said the US and China remained at odds on a number of issues but expressed confidence her visit had advanced efforts to put the relationship on “surer footing”.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• While TikTok has deemed Berberine a “natural” alternative to Ozempic, that doesn’t mean it’s safe for everyone

• It seems fair to say that the promises that were made to us wound up feeling hollow, and more than a decade of debates about trolling, misinformation and misuse of personal data will suck the joy out of pretty much anything. We were naive, for a little while, and now we aren’t. We know that whoever runs the platforms of today and tomorrow doesn’t really care about us, or what we want. If this is a big adventure, we’re the marks, not the protagonists.

Censorship/Free Speech

• However the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, of which the UK is still a participating country despite Brexit, has now ruled in favour of a driver who had wanted to be anonymised in reporting of a deadly car crash for which he was responsible.

• The original article was written in 1994 but went online in 2008 when Le Soir created an online version of its archives dating back to 1989. The driver, a doctor, first wrote to the newspaper’s owner asking for the article to be removed, or for him to at least be made anonymous, in 2010 – but his request was refused.

• Today in Tedium: I don’t feel particularly motivated to write about Threads, the Instagram-in-Twitter-form social network that Meta launched this week. It feels like a social network that exists to check a box for a company that owns a lot of social networks. But I do think it represents something about the moment that we’re in, where people are so desperate for a certain kind of experience that they will go from the hands of one billionaire to another, in hopes that will give them what they don’t feel like they were getting before. If Threads descended into the bottom of the ocean on a poorly built submersible, I would not care. But what I do care about is why I don’t care about Threads. And I think it comes down to the reasons why this site lives on the open web, even if I can’t leave the networks. Like many internet creatures of a certain age, I came from grime. We try to pretend the grime isn’t there, we dress it up as best we can, but it’s always there, no matter how hard we try to pretend it’s not. Today’s Tedium defends the grime from which the internet was built. — Ernie @ Tedium

• All NATO members must approve new ones, so Erdoğan’s opposition is effectively a veto. The Turkish president is not alone; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is also holding out, but Hungary has signaled it won’t be the final roadblock. Erdoğan has continued to insist that Sweden has not done enough to crack down on people in Sweden with ties to Kurdish militants and other groups that Turkey has deemed terrorists.

• Sweden has tried to appease Turkey, including passing a new anti-terrorism law that went into effect June 1. But Erdoğan’s definition of terrorists is pretty expansive, and often includes dissidents and others critical of his regime. And even if Turkey has a case, Sweden has to follow due process and rule of law and can’t just, say, extradite a bunch of people on a whim. A recent Quran-burning outside a Stockholm mosque has added to tensions, as Turkey interprets these as Sweden’s permissive attitude toward anti-Islamic protests rather than freedom of speech.

• Hong Kong authorities are offering 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($128,000) each for information leading to the arrest of Lau and seven other activists living in self-exile in the United States, Britain and Australia. They are the first such cash rewards since Beijing imposed a national security law on the city in June 2020, which the activists are accused of breaching.

• Here in Harvard in 2023, a code of conduct [sic] was implemented requiring participants to, among other things to, “refrain from using the parade as a platform to promote any specific agenda.” This includes using slogans, displaying signage, or distributing literature supporting or opposing any specific governmental policy, ideology, political party, candidate, or elected official that could be reasonably considered demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior or speech deemed inappropriate.”

• ElonJet has tracked the movements of Musk’s private jet using data available in the public domain.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Chris Hedges, Stella Assange and Matt Kennard discuss the implications of the Julian Assange case and the demise of mainstream journalism.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On 9 August 2022, a Saudi court sentenced al-Shehab and al-Qahtani to 34 and 45 years in prison to be followed by a travel ban of the same length, under a range of charges under the counter-terrorism law in connection to tweets in support of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. Al-Shehab was later re-sentenced to 27 years.

• Last year, five organisations representing the two women — ALQST for Human Rights, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), Freedom Initiative, Human Rights Foundation, and MENA Rights Group — submitted a complaint the UNWGAD and requested the group of experts to issue an Opinion on their cases.

• In its Opinion, the UNWGAD found that the Saudi government had failed to establish a legal basis for the arrest and detention of al-Shehab and al-Qahtani.

• The Iranian leadership has managed to contain the biggest protest wave since the 1979 revolution. De-escalation of geopolitical tensions with the US would help the protesters, making it harder to depict domestic dissent as the product of foreign interference.

• Terry Compton’s 24 years at a Toronto university’s English-as-a-second-language program ended with a four-minute Zoom call in March 2020.

• She said her director’s camera was off and a “second-in-command” informed her and her colleagues that they had been permanently laid off because of the impact of COVID-19.

• As the fight continues to stop the construction of an 85-acre police training complex, organizers pursue a ballot referendum but are concerned about crackdown.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

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

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

• In the wake of the severing of two Taiwan-Matsu submarine cables in February, efforts by Taiwan’s government to set up a backup network in the event of a Chinese attack have become more urgent. In September last year, Taiwan announced plans to set up a satellite network similar to the use of Starlink in Ukraine — as a backup in the event China tries to take the country offline.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• With millions of users, YTS is arguably the most visited torrent site. The site owes its popularity to the constant stream of pirate movies it makes available. For several years, this excluded titles from Millennium Media, Voltage Pictures, and other independent film companies, due to a settlement agreement with the site’s operator. However, somewhere along the line, YTS decided to disobey this agreement.

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