● 07.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/07/2023: Void Linux Has New Images, pfSense CE 2.7.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• A very common question that is asked by millions of people daily, whether they are students in an organization or newcomers trying to learn programming, is: “Why is Linux used by developers?” Many people mistakenly believe that Linux is only used for hacking or other illicit purposes. However, if we delve deeper, we will discover that Linux offers greater stability than Windows for development purposes.

• The journey of Linux began on September 3, 1993, when a team of developers recognized the need for a different environment that would enhance a developer’s thought process. The first version of Debian was released on that day.

• Debian 11 has gained more popularity compared to other Debian distributions, primarily due to its stability and security. Linux, as a whole, is renowned for its security measures and open-source licensing. Many organizations prefer to use Windows as their primary operating system for daily tasks, but they turn to Linux for networking packet tracing and development purposes due to its increasing popularity.

Audiocasts/Shows

Instructionals/Technical

• Yesterday I wrote about a criticism of the usual static versus dynamic website divide, where I noted a number of (what I see as) significant differences between static and dynamic websites in practice. But there is another important difference in practice, and that’s the amount of expertise that’s needed to create each of them. Specifically, static websites don’t require much expertise to create. Given a suitable general web server environment, which is easy to provide, all you need to set up a static website is the ability to write HTML, or even an authoring and editing tool that will do it for you.

• Installing the EA Desktop App (Formerly called Origin) to your Steam Deck gives you access to all of the games you bought from that platform.

• While the EA Desktop App doesn’t natively support the Steam Deck’s operating system, we can use Proton to get it to run.

• Your router is a radio transmitter, and where possible, you should try and have a clear ‘line of sight’ from the router to devices that require a fast connection, without thick walls in the way.

• Wi-Fi signals don’t travel well through metal, water, solid walls or heavy furniture, so elevating a router and putting it in an open area can help, Tofts explained

• The PDF specification has the following image as an example of how to do transparent graphics composition.

• One of the things ssh can do is execute a command on a remote server. Most of us expect it to work transparently when doing so, simply passing the command and its arguments on without any surprises in the process. But after 23 years of using OpenSSH on a nearly daily basis, [Martin Kjellstrand] got surprised.

• The system tasks that are the daily obligations of every system administrator or DevOps engineer, are taking time and dedicated work. But this can be easily automated with the Crontab software.

• Debugging a network issue should start with basic troubleshooting. If that doesn’t fix it, admins should check, verify and configure connections to the client, server and network.

• Debian 12 Bookworm is out. With it, comes a new kernel, new drivers, new features, and more improvements. In this guide, we’ll show you how to upgrade your Debian 11 system to the new Debian 12 release.

Games

• Valve released a small and sweet update for Proton Experimental, fixing up more game issues. Here’s what’s changed for July 14th.

• The Humble At-Home Arcade Bundle is live and it has a couple of games you might want to add to your collection. Here’s what compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• We’re pleased to announce that the 20230628 image set has been promoted to current and is now generally available.

• You can find the new images on our downloads page and on our many mirrors.

BSD

• pfSense Community Edition (CE) software is an open-source project, and Netgate® has been providing stewardship and resources for it since 2008. As steward, we are responsible for maintaining a stable and secure software base which enables pfSense users to confidently address their secure edge requirements with firewall, VPN, and routing features. We accomplish this by paying highly skilled people – hardware and software engineers, test engineers, SREs – to work on the project full-time. We support the pfSense CE project by contributing releases, snapshots, and updates of pfSense CE software, as well as making other code contributions, FreeBSD-related updates, and more. The pfSense CE project source code is available on GitHub, distributed under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The AlmaLinux project, after taking some time to think it over, has decided to pursue RHEL compatibility but is no longer aiming to be 1:1 “bug-for-bug” compatible with RHEL. Be sure to read their announcement from Chair of the Board, benny Vasquez. Board minutes are also available.

• A number of folks are asking why you’d choose AlmaLinux over CentOS Stream, if they’ve dropped the goal of 1:1 binary copying.

• For one thing, this gives AlmaLinux leeway to evolve beyond RHEL and be its own distribution. According to the post this opens the door to “a ton of exciting developments and partnerships” that will be announced in the future.

• Red Hat has once again dropped another huge boulder into the normally serene – or at least relatively calm – open source waters.

• Back in December 2020 it killed off the CentOS distribution that lives downstream from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and created the CentOS Stream variant that lives upstream where bugs are not yet all shaken out. And now Red Hat has announced that it would no longer distribute free RHEL source code to those who aren’t paying customers.

• That means projects like Oracle Linux, EuroLinux, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux no longer will see code improvements from Red Hat, a change in a practice that is more than a decade old. Unsurprisingly, those projects and others reacted with fury to Red Hat’s decision, accusing the open source titan of essentially closing its doors to the open source community and accusing IBM of driving the move.

• Big Blue bought Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, so believing IBM would be behind the decision isn’t surprising, though it does give it all a conspiratorial vibe to it.

• Despite criticism from developers, Red Hat continues its commitment to CentOS as the delivery vehicle for RHEL, believing it benefits open source developers in the long run.

Open Hardware/Modding

• In very low volume testing, say less than a hundred a day, it is feasible to just have a human manually connect cables to each of the connectors for each board being tested. As the volumes scale up though, this becomes a big bottleneck, and if the testing is not performed in a low-wage country, it can amount to a measurable portion of the overall product cost.

• Now that I have converted the Amiga 3000 from a US to European machine, it is time to fix the minor issues with it.

• The unit is powered by an RP2040 Plus module which has the form factor of the regular Pico with a few upgrades. The screen is fairly large for a handheld this size, measuring 3.2-inches with a resolution of 320 x 240px, connecting using a parallel interface for improved performance. The Pico Hero has three buttons, a power switch, and an analog control stick. A 3-watt speaker is used for audio output, and a microSD card stores all the necessary data. Everything is held together with a beautiful, customized purple PCB made just for the project.

• The ThinkPad 701 is an iconic laptop series from the mid-90s and is still highly sought after today because of its famous butterfly keybaord. The laptop itself is tiny even by the standards of the time, so in order to fit a full-size keyboard IBM devised a mechanism where the keyboard splits and slides over itself to hide away as the screen is closed. But, like most 30-year-old laptops, the original batteries for these computers are well past their prime. [polymatt] takes us through all of the steps needed in order to recreate a battery from this era down to the last detail.

• What’s better than a Raspberry Pi Zero running DOOM on a 3.5″ touchscreen? Running it over wireless power, of course!

• Kickstarter launched this week a Rotary Encoder equipped with an RGB LED array and a 1.28”round touch LCD. This device is compatible with open-source modules such as the Raspberry Pi Pico and the ESP32-S3 System-on-Chip from Espressif Systems.

• M5stack introduced last week the UNIT-V M12 which is an AI camera unit that combines advanced specifications and a compact design. Equipped with an M12 lens and a Kendryte K210 System-on-Chip with machine vision capabilities.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• If people are to remember the password without writing it down, it only encourages weak passwords, either in terms of length or complexity. Instead of trying to remember an endless array of passwords, a popular solution is to use password manager software. In fact, this type of software is an essential tool for the active internet user. It makes it easy to retrieve, manage and secure all of your passwords. The passwords are stored in an encrypted file, protected by a single master password. Consequently, the user only has to remember a single password. Password managers encourage users to choose unique, non-intuitive strong passwords for each service.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 14 best free password managers. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone wanting to automate the process of entering passwords and other data, and save the hassle of remembering multiple passwords. We give our highest recommendation to KeePassXc and Bitwarden.

• Deep learning automation startup Deci AI Ltd. today announced the launch of a free and open-source artificial intelligence tool that can profile datasets for model training purposes.

• The European Union’s proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to bolster cybersecurity across the continent. However, it has sparked significant concern within the open source software community. Critics argue that the CRA could impose increased legal and financial responsibilities on open source contributors, potentially stifling innovation and damaging the open source ecosystem. Furthermore, the legislation’s vulnerability disclosure requirements could inadvertently expose software vulnerabilities to a larger audience, increasing the risk of malicious exploitation. This article delves into the potential implications of the CRA for open source software and the broader digital landscape in Europe.

• The European “Cyber Resilience Act” (CRA) was introduced by the European Commission in September 2022. It aims to impose cybersecurity obligations for digital products and services within the European Union.

Events

• More and more people are turning away from social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube to alternatives like Mastodon and PeerTube. Why are they different? How are they changing the web? And how can you get involved in the Fediverse? Join our symposium and get an insight into these decentralised social networks through our talks and workshops on 22.09.2023!

• The Free Software Foundation Europe, the Centre for Civic Education of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Adult Education Centre Cologne are organising this free event. It is aimed at multipliers in political education, teachers, representatives of public institutions and educational establishments, as well as all interested parties.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Why is this happening? Basically a paradigm shift, millennials (this is a term in the common English dictionary now), are cheap (you know what but I will refrain from using sexist work terminology) like convenience and comfort, luxury and “don’t care, don’t give a …” attitudes. They are willing to try non-systemd distros, but want their flashy desktops, their carchy graphic DMs, they want ALL INSTALLED “apps” to start from cloudy pop-up-menus as users, hw plugged in and functional as soon as pushing the usb plug, they want their browser to display “all webpages” despite of what they ask in return (full access to your /home at least) or want a mail program like thunderbird to chat, use calendar luxuries for their appointment, … and Mozilla is handing them all to IBM for lunch.

Education

• The djangoproject.com website is the showcase of the Django project and is the result of contributions from many people. In this talk, we’ll update you on its development and learn how to contribute to it.

• EuroPython is the official European conference for the Python programming language.

Licensing / Legal

• When you make an account online or install an app, you are probably entering into a legally enforceable contract. Even if you never signed anything. These days, we enter into these contracts so often, it can feel like no big deal.

• But then there are the horror stories like Greg Selden’s. He tried to sue AirBnB for racial discrimination while using their site. But he had basically signed away his ability to sue AirBnB when he made an account. That agreement was tucked away in a little red link, something most people might not even bother to click through.

• But, it wasn’t always like this. On today’s show, we go back in time to understand how the law of contracts got rewritten. And why today, you can accept a contract without even noticing it.

Programming/Development

• I don’t have time to keep up with all the daft Open Source projects I release. I wish my skill and my energy was as wide as my ambition.

• Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer’s Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple – if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them commit access.

• Scratch has been an inspiration for me while I have been working on VisionScript. I remember being in my primary school class using Scratch. I cannot remember making anything of note, but I do remember one thing: I was making things. I could make a game. I can always say I made a game with code (although I can’t remember what I made!).

Python

• I’ll be sharing insights on the PSF’s journey to become a CNA along with recommendations for other open source foundations and projects.

• Since we’re aiming for the PSF CNA to have Python and pip as their initial scope I’ve sent proposals to the Python Steering Committee and pip maintainers for approving CNA scoping and how the PSF CNA and the Python Security Response Team (PSRT) will work together.

• There’s also been some work behind the scenes on creating a small advisory database using the OSV format and importing historical vulnerability data into that database so it’s available in a public machine-readable form.

Leftovers

Science

• Much more appealing is passive sonar, which works by listening for the sounds naturally created by underwater vehicles. With a sensitive directional hydrophone (an underwater microphone), you can hear the noise created by the screws of a submarine. By rotating the directional hydrophone, you can find the point of peak amplitude and thus the bearing to the submarine. This basic submarine hunting technique remains the state of the art today, but the receiving equipment has become far more capable and automated.

• Detecting gravity waves isn’t easy. But what if you had a really big detector for a long time? That’s what researchers did when they crunched 15 years’ worth of data from the NANOGrav data set. The data was collected from over 170 radio astronomers measuring millisecond pulsars as a way to potentially detect low-frequency gravity waves.

Education

• Giving a class at my daughter’s school and having her visit my university gave rise to serious questions about childcare, education and how our universities fit into society, says Andy Farnell

• Within the different computing-based courses, software engineering saw a 16 per cent increase in applications over 2022, computer science saw an 11 per cent rise, artificial intelligence had a four per cent growth, and computer games and animation had a two per cent boost.

Hardware

• While talking about a solar powered portable Bluetooth speaker project on the podcast, I realized that I have a new category of favorite hacks: daily-use hacks.

• [IMSAI Guy] bought a fake Nixie clock, and luckily for all of us has filmed a very close look and demonstration. Using OLED displays as the fake Nixie elements might seem like cheating to some, the effect is really very well done.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Feig followed up with a small pilot study in humans and found that men with adverse childhood experiences (such as physical or emotional abuse or neglect) had decreased levels of the same microRNA in their sperm. “We saw changes in men’s sperm that matched the changes in mice sperm,” he says. “It was a striking result.”

• Now Feig is working on a much larger study in humans to confirm those findings and to delve deeper.

• The Michigan Civil Service Commission on Wednesday voted unanimously to change state rules requiring applicants for state government positions to pass a pre-employment marijuana drug screen and barring those who fail from working for the state in any capacity for three years.

• Speaking to the media on July 15, oncologists Justin Gainor (director of the Centre for Thoracic Cancers at Massachusetts General Hospital), and M.V.T. Krishna Mohan (senior consultant in Medical Oncology at Basavatarakam Indo-American Cancer Hospital and Research Centre), shed light on the growing burden of lung cancers in India and around the world.

• When a farm worker almost rolled his vehicle while moving cattle on Felicity Richards’ farm a few months ago, she knew just how much worse it could have been.

• As the head of Farm Safe Australia the beef farmer is all too aware of the dangers farm workers face.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Larry Hryb, an Xbox employee known primarily by the pseudonym “Major Nelson,” announced Friday his separation from Microsoft. Hryb has long been an iconic face for many of Xbox’s marketing efforts, from the days of the first Xbox and the Xbox Live online service to the launch of Xbox 360 and beyond. “After 20 incredible years, I’ve decided to step back and focus on the next chapter of my career,” he tweeted. “As I pause for a moment and reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together, I’d like to thank the millions of gamers around the world who have involved me in their lives.”

• The Indonesian government’s investment in digital infrastructure and technology education further accentuates this potential. The government’s commitment to upskilling its workforce through the Prakerja program and planning for an AI-based virtual teacher highlight Indonesia’s ambitions to be a prominent player in AI development and implementation.

• I spoke with Bowman on Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown. The conversation is included in a new two-part series on AI: The Black Box.

• This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

• Fan fiction writers are just one group now staging revolts against A.I. systems as a fever over the technology has gripped Silicon Valley and the world. In recent months, social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News, authors such as Paul Tremblay and the actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against A.I. sucking up their data without permission.

• “It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy,” the former executive added.

• “The state of affairs is that we approximately have no idea what’s going on in GPT-4,” Yudkowsky claimed. “We have theories but no ability to actually look at the enormous matrices of fractional numbers being multiplied and added in there, and [what those] numbers mean.”

• Scale-to-zero will probably be necessary for the near term as organizations either need to deploy (1) on-prem models for data security or (2) custom models or infrastructure to serve a particular use case.x

• Microsoft fired 276 employees in a fresh round of layoffs recently. A man who had been working at the company for five years lost his job and took to LinkedIn to find a new opportunity. He wrote in his post that he is writing this with ‘eyes full of tears’.

• Microsoft’s employees from various departments have already changed their LinkedIn pages, but the exact number of people Microsoft wants to let go remains unknown.

Windows TCO

• London Mayor’s Office is currently under investigation as data of “around 400 people” has been shared online in a breach of privacy – something one victim called “chilling”

• That said, given the amount of work the miscreants have done to improve their techniques and the addition of Azure and Google Cloud accounts to the list of targets, the group looks set to ramp up its attacks, according to Alex Delamotte, researcher with SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs unit.

Security

• APTs Red Menshen expands targets to Linux and cloud servers, as seen in ransomware attacks on VMware ESXi, Mirai botnet variations, and cloud-focused stealers and crypto miners.

• APT groups extend focus beyond Windows, signified by Sandworm’s attacks on Linux-based routers. Unlike cybercrime malware with broad targets, APT malware prioritizes persistent stealth and routine maintenance.

• Red Menshen, an APT group active in the Middle East and Asia, continuously enhances the BPFDoor backdoor, utilizing Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) to evade Linux and Solaris OS firewalls.

• After months of chaos which saw data fall into the hands of cyber criminals from Russia who hacked into Gloucester City Council, the authority will “just get a slap on the wrist”. The authority was targeted by hackers in late 2021 and public services across Gloucester were severely disrupted during the following year.

• The now disbanded group of Russian cyber criminals compromised the council’s systems by using a “very sophisticated” spear phishing attack. Council officers became aware their systems had been compromised on December 20 that year and ransomware, a malicious computer programme, had encrypted their files.

• Payroll services provider UKG has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from a cyberattack in 2021, capping a significant piece of litigation that emerged from the incident.

• A ransomware strike in December 2021 forced parts of UKG’s Kronos Private Cloud product offline, disrupting software that tracked employee hours during the Christmas holiday period. Some personal information, including that of current and former employees and contractors, was breached during the attack. […]

• The settlement also compels UKG to disclose to plaintiffs how much information was breached by hackers, and how many people it affected. A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

• In Steinmetz et al. v. Brinker International, Inc., No. 21-13146, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS 17539 (11th Cir. July 11, 2023), the Eleventh Circuit vacated the district court’s order certifying a nationwide class and California-only class in a data breach case. In so doing, it remanded the case with instructions to the district court to define the phrase “who had their data accessed by cybercriminals” and to analyze the viability of the California class.

• For employers facing data breach claims in class actions, this decision is instructive in terms of what reviewing courts consider in certifying a class, especially when class definition terms or phrases are broad.

• AlphV (aka BlackCat) threat actors have added Highland Health Systems in Alabama to their leak site.

• As proof of claims, they have leaked a number of files with employee and patient data or information, including part of a psychiatric intake form with a narrative from 2008. Other files are more current.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Journalist, author and filmmaker James Bamford dives into his latest book exploring the NSA’s hypocrisy in scapegoating whistleblowers when the spy agency is the world’s main source of the malware that threatens to destroy us.

• In this joint submission, Privacy International (PI) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) provide observations and recommendations on the proposed draft text of the UN Cybercrime Convention for the August 2023 session.

• The Cooper Davis Act was introduced by Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in March and has been under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee for weeks. Named after a 16-year-old Kansas boy who died of a fentanyl overdose two years ago, the bipartisan bill, which the committee is scheduled to vote on Thursday, has spurred intense debate. Proponents say it could help address a spiraling public health crisis; critics, meanwhile, see it as a gateway to broad and indiscriminate [Internet] surveillance.

• Gizmodo spoke with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—two organizations involved in the policy discussions surrounding the bill. Both groups expressed concern over the impact the proposed law could have on internet privacy. “There are some very real problems with this bill—both in how it’s written and how it’s conceptualized,” said India McKinney, an analyst with the EFF.

• press

Defence/Aggression

• The idea is that municipalities will draw up a personal plan with a refugee within 10 weeks of getting residency. Their Integration and Participation Plan (PIP) is often created after the deadline.

• The German Islamist Nadja Ramadan has to answer before the State Security Senate of the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main on suspicion of membership in the terrorist organization Islamic State and war crimes. The 38-year-old from Landshut is accused by the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office of having traveled from Germany to Syria in the summer of 2014 and having joined ISIS there.

• Australia has been told to be bolder about calling out corruption and malign foreign interference in the Pacific to counter China’s increasing influence.

• The expanding security relationship between Beijing and the Solomon Islands has raised concerns in Canberra, which wants the issue to be primarily dealt with by Pacific nations.

War in Ukraine

• Members of Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, an important think tank, published a statement on July 13, condemning a “preemptive nuclear strike” by Russia.

• The New York Times reports that Ukraine lost as much as 20 percent of the equipment it sent into battle during the first two weeks of the summer counteroffensive campaign. More recently, losses have slowed to around 10 percent, though the Times says this is because the counteroffensive’s pace, too, has slowed.

• A district court in Russia ruled partially in favor of Maksim Moiseyev, a defendant in Russia’s first case concerning evading mobilization. The human rights group Voyennye Advokaty [Military Lawyers] says the court ruled that Moiseyev should be paid 20,000 rubles (around $220) as compensation for unlawful criminal prosecution.

• A Moscow municipal court has ordered the arrest of Mikhail Polyakov, the administrator of the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Kremlyovskaya Prachka [The Kremlin Laundress], reports Russian independent publication Mediazona, citing a court press release.

• Biden’s anxieties over the Ukraine War and the election in 2024 come into view.

• A Ukrainian general told CNN on Thursday that Ukraine has received a shipment of US cluster bombs, controversial munitions that have a devastating impact on civilians. “We just got them, we haven’t used them yet, but they can radically change the situation on the battlefield,” Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi said. The Biden administration announced last week […]

Environment

• “Year after year, the water situation gets worse,” the 37-year-old told AFP.

• While it can be difficult to attribute a particular weather event to climate change, scientists insist global warming — linked to dependence on fossil fuels — is behind the multiplication and intensification of heatwaves.

Energy/Transportation

• Gautier Mignot said that investment in the Plan Sonora project, which includes the development of a massive solar park in Puerto Peñasco, will be approved at the EU-CELAC summit to be held in Brussels, Belgium, next Monday and Tuesday.

• Households, cafes and manufacturers might think they’re going to get cheaper gas under a new price cap regime, but unfortunately that’s not how it works.

• While the federal government’s mandatory gas code of conduct for producers is now law, it doesn’t affect supplies already under contract which means bills won’t suddenly drop.

Finance

• Single parents are particularly vulnerable to running short and being unable to afford more, the ONS says.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, recently expressed concerns about Twitter’s negative cash flow. In a tweet on Saturday, Musk emphasized the importance of achieving positive cash flow before considering other endeavors. This comes as Twitter faces a significant decline in advertising revenue and a substantial burden of debt.

• Feedback period: 14 July 2023 – 16 September 2023

• [...]

• Regulation (EU) 2019/881 on the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and information and communications technology cybersecurity certification, mandates the Commission to assess the performance of ENISA in achieving its mandate, objective and tasks, as well as the possible need to modify its mandate. It also calls on the Commission to assess the impact, effectiveness and efficiency of the European Cybersecurity Certification Framework.

• In general, two images perpetuate the Woody Guthrie legend. In the first, he is the rambling Okie troubadour, known for hopping freight trains and writing simple ditties celebrating the common people of America. In the second, he is an outspoken advocate of the so-called Old Left, the labor-centered mass movement that blossomed in response to the Great Depression, whose members ranged from FDR supporters to communists; Guthrie himself frequently spoke favorably of the latter.

• This second image is far more historically accurate, and more significant. But the persistence of the first has meant that his political views and sympathies have sometimes been absorbed into American settler-colonialist myths: the trope of freedom as antisocial, inhering in the unrestricted mobility of individual white males through wide, open, fictionally uninhabited spaces. But Guthrie’s relationship with movement and travel was more complicated than that — and tied intricately to his radical and antiestablishment politics.

• The Washington Post was first to report this story. Walden confirmed to the newspaper she recently withdrew from consideration of the nomination but declined to comment further.

• In short, DJI (and other companies partnering within the alliance) doesn’t like the relatively recent bout of legislation that could ban federal agencies from using its products, or otherwise inhibit the Chinese-based company from growing within the U.S.

• While DJI is the biggest name on the list of initial partners participating in the Drone Advocacy Alliance, other partners include Blue Nose Aerial Imaging, Dronelink, DroneSense, the Drone Service Providers Alliance (DSPA), the Pilot Institute and the Uncrewed Trade Alliance. But DJI also holds perhaps the biggest hand in the alliance, as the group is sponsored by (and its website maintained by) DJI.

• Jacobin founding editor and president of The Nation Bhaskar Sunkara joins Bad Faith and Briahna Joy Gray to discuss his recent article arguing that Cornel West should run in the Democratic Party. He and Briahna debate the pros and cons before moving on to analyze why it is that […]

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Google Docs’ new AI writing features have a gaping security hole that could lead to new kinds of phishing attacks or information poisoning. Available in public beta, the “Refine the selected text,” feature allows the user to have an AI bot rewrite large swaths of copy or an entire document to “formalize,” “shorten,” “elaborate” or “rephrase” it.

• Unfortunately, the bot is vulnerable to prompt injection, meaning that a stray line of malicious text in the input can cause it to modify the output in ways that could fool the user or spread dangerous misinformation.

• The ruling from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means that the administration is not bound, for now, by a July 6 order by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Monroe, Louisiana. Doughty had found that officials’ efforts to limit the spread of posts they considered to be misinformation on social media violated the right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

• With key provisions going into effect on Aug. 25, an ambitious package of E.U. rules, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, is the most extensive effort toward checking the power of Big Tech (beyond the outright bans in places like China and India). For the first time, tech platforms will have to be responsive to the public in myriad ways, including giving users the right to appeal when their content is removed, providing a choice of algorithms and banning the microtargeting of children and of adults based upon sensitive data such as religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The reforms also require large tech platforms to audit their algorithms to determine how they affect democracy, human rights and the physical and mental health of minors and other users.

• This will be the first time that companies will be required to identify and address the harms that their platforms enable. To hold them accountable, the law also requires large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter to provide researchers with access to real-time data from their platforms. But there is a crucial element that has yet to be decided by the European Union: whether journalists will get access to any of that data.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The matter did not stop at this point by the banned Brotherhood group in confronting me after I exposed them. Rather, continuous contacts continued with me on the day immediately following my exposure. Terrorists from Pakistan communicated with me through letters and e-mails that are proven with me and with evidence, from countries that house the international organization of the terrorist Brotherhood to invite me to them or to accept them. Publishing and writing articles and analyzes in its most famous and most important newspapers and websites, and this is what happened and is happening with me for the first time after I exposed the invitation of the Pakistani terrorist to me the next day directly, as a person from the state of Indonesia contacted me and photographed him on his WhatsApp profile with the Qatari Prince “Hamad bin Khalifa”, the father of Sheikh Tamim, the Emir of Qatar, and requests scientific cooperation with me without any prior knowledge between us at all, and many people continued to contact me asking me to cooperate with them from countries that harbor the international organization of the Brotherhood such as Pakistan, Britain, and the United States of America, all of them once and in a short period asking for cooperation With me in anything I want. In a more precise sense, there are real, proven attempts to track me down. And this is in a final attempt by the international organization of the terrorist Brotherhood to protect the members of their terrorist organization in Cairo to save them or save what is left of them in my last confrontation with them before the official Egyptian and Chinese authorities and authorities and before the eyes and ears of the Egyptian and Arab public opinion and the entire international community, as the most resounding scandal that the organization will suffer. The international Brotherhood terrorist in the face of a woman and a lonely young academic in the heart of Cairo, after their size dwindled and they rallied to confront and engage in war with a lone woman in their confrontation, who is crying out to remove their ears from her for no comprehensible reason, other than their attempt to compliment the American and Israeli side in confronting me due to my closeness to China.

• In an essay for the literary and free expression group PEN Ukraine last year, Amelina wrote that imperial and Soviet Russia had long suppressed Ukrainian culture. She described how, in the 1930s, Soviets murdered Ukrainian writers and intellectuals, destroying their manuscripts and confiscating literary magazines that published their work.

• Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she said, she felt like it was happening all over again.

• “The Russians want to exterminate Ukrainian culture,” she told NPR last May. “They want to kill those they cannot turn into a Russian.”

• The Breach is an independent news outlet, funded mostly by readers, that operates as a non-profit. We produce investigations, analysis and video content about the crises of racism, inequality, colonialism and climate breakdown. Thousands of new readers discover The Breach on Instagram, Facebook and Google every month, or use those platforms to share our work.

• Instagram’s removal of The Breach’s posts is the latest escalation in Big Tech’s fight with the Canadian government over Bill C-18. Meta, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced on June 1 that it would conduct “randomised tests” of news-content removal for several weeks. The tech giant said that eventually, it will block all news content for all users in Canada.

• “The police does not issue permits to burn various religious texts — the police issues permits to hold a public gathering and express an opinion,” Carina Skagerlind, press officer for Stockholm police, told the AFP news agency. “An important distinction.”

• But a couple of weeks before the vote, Kenny Chiu, a member of Canada’s Parliament and a critic of China’s human rights record, was panicking. Something had flipped among the ethnic Chinese voters in his British Columbia district.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The study reveals that over half of the journalists perceive political pressure as the major hurdle impeding their journalistic practice within the country.

• Following political pressure, financial sustainability, working conditions, and employer influence are identified as significant challenges. Additional obstacles include difficulties in organizing in professional groups and the diminishing societal reputation of journalism.

• Hold The Front Page reported on Friday the cuts will see “between three and five reporters and newsreaders working in each newsroom” at risk of redundancy and some newsrooms closed altogether in favour of operating from larger hubs.

• As of 14 July, the Associated Press and Shutterstock were the only major news companies to have agreed deals with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

• The Associated Press has signed a two-year deal that will let OpenAI train its generative AI tools on the news agency’s historical content.

Civil Rights/Policing

• BBP Chair Mustafa Destici also backed the ministers remarks in a tweet yesterday, saying, “I wholeheartedly support and agree with our Minister of National Education’s suggestion to open separate schools for our girls. We know that those who oppose this under the guise of secularism have a hidden agenda of hostility towards faith and religion.

• Zoom in: For entertainers and journalists alike, the rise of artificial intelligence has become a sticking point in union negotiations.

• “The entire business model has been changed by streaming, digital, AI. This is a moment of history — that is a moment of truth,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a press conference Thursday.

• “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

• Worse, as NBC’s Kat Tenbarge reported back in March, these sites seem to be making money on the nonconsensual material. And while some sites support themselves by paywalling the nonconsensual content, the first Google result for “deepfake porn,” a site called MrDeepFakes, offers its fake porn videos of celebrities and influencers to users for free, appearing to instead cash in on old-fashioned advertising dollars — a revenue model likely made possible by its top-spot Google ranking.

• To be clear, these sites are not at all shy about their offerings.

• In a statement published on Tuesday, the caucus notes that when workers first began organizing at JFK8, they chose to form an independent union — an arduous task that required them to organize in the eight-thousand-person warehouse without the resources they would have received had they worked with an established union — because “it offered rank-and-file workers a level of autonomy and control that was vital in engaging them through a vicious fight against one of the most anti-union companies in the world: Amazon.”

• “ALU’s current leadership is entirely unelected and self-appointed,” the group continues. “Not only do we feel this is unlawful and antidemocratic, it is also a major barrier to organizing workers in support of a contract fight, as democracy is a key element in engaging workers.”

Monopolies

Copyrights

• British recorded music exports leap 20% to surpass £700 million annually for the first time as UK artists led by Harry Styles and Glass Animals dominate the year’s biggest global streaming hits despite increasing international competition.

• Fan fiction writers are just one group now staging revolts against AI systems as a fever over the technology has gripped Silicon Valley and the world. In recent months, social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News, authors such as Paul Tremblay and actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against AI sucking up their data without permission.

• Their protests have taken different forms. Writers and artists are locking their files to protect their work or are boycotting certain websites that publish AI-generated content, while companies like Reddit want to charge for access to their data. At least 10 lawsuits have been filed this year against AI companies, accusing them of training their systems on artists’ creative work without consent. This past week, Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and others over AI’s use of their work.

• As global anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment maintains pressure on illegal streaming platforms everywhere, news of fresh casualties and confirmation of its involvement in recent actions continues. They include the forced shutdown of CableKill and CKHosting, the voluntary shutdown of Anime Kaizoku, and the unexplained disappearance of domains previously revealed as investigation targets.

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