● 07.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/07/2023: Slackware Linux Turns 30, SparkyLinux 2023.07

Posted in News Roundup at 12:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• It’s been a slow week for Linux news and releases, yet we had some great announcements this week starting with SUSE’s announcement about forking RHEL to preserve choice in enterprise Linux, Thunderbird 115 with its brand-new Supernova UI, and Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” with its cool new features and enhancements.

• On top of that, I tell you all about Star Labs’ new mini Linux PC and the end of life for the Linux 6.3 kernel series, and wish Slackware Linux a happy 30th birthday. You can read this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for July 16th, 2023, below.

• We cover user groups that are running in Croatia. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Have Oracle and SUSE lost their minds? Plus, we dig into Fedora’s proposal to add telemetry collection to Workstation.

• Community.

• shasum -a256=25db76af713e522f7bf917defdf969dafe24ebe579502b3dde4e7ec8b837cf2a

Applications

• Why do we like internet radio? There are no sign-up or subscription charges. There are a huge range of stations available from around the world. If you like classical music, pop music, folk music, news, talk radio, and much more, internet radio has something for everyone wherever you live (providing you have a net connection). Internet radio offers every format that is available on traditional broadcast radio stations.

• Radio is billed as a simple radio with a clear and concise interface. It’s written in Vala and published under an open source license.

• We tested the software using the project’s Flatpak. That’s an open source containerized package format similar to Snap. While Snap relies on a central repository for software, Flatpak can be installed from different sources. The primary source is Flathub.

Instructionals/Technical

• NGINX, a high-performance open-source web server, is celebrated for its stability, low resource consumption, and ability to serve dynamic web content. It’s also capable of handling high-traffic loads and acting as a reverse proxy.

• Firewalld, with its dynamic nature and comprehensive control over network traffic, stands as the vanguard of Linux system security. It provides an abstract interface to define complex firewall rules without directly dealing with iptables.

• Do you need to create pdfs, documents, slideshows or work on other office related tasks on Arch Linux? LibreOffice is definitely the best choice when it comes to choosing an office suite software for Linux.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install a rpm package on CentOS.

• rpm is a package manager that allows you to manage rpm packages on your system. In this tutorial, we are going to use two methods to install rpm packages on rhel based distros, by using yum

• Linux Lite is a Linux distro based on Ubuntu.

• Created on 2012 by Jerry Bezencon, Linux Lite comes with XFCE desktop environment as default Desktop environment, and kernel 5.15.0.

• To run Linux Lite, you need 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of space on your HDD, which makes it

• OpenSSH is a robust utility that provides secure access to remote systems over an unsecured network. It’s a widely used encryption protocol that establishes secure communication between two untrusted hosts. Despite the availability of numerous remote server access and management tools, OpenSSH remains a popular choice due to its versatility and user-friendliness.

• When working with Bash scripts, it’s a common requirement to check if a file or directory exists before performing an operation. This guide will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of how to perform these checks in Bash, focusing on the test command and its various forms.

• In the sphere of software development, efficiency and organization are key. With projects often being handled by multiple developers across the globe, a system for managing changes and coordinating work is critical. This is where Git, a distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds, comes into play.

• Python is a versatile language with a rich library of functions. One such function is the randint() function, which belongs to the random module.

• Extending the VxFX file system is a routine task for a Linux/Unix administrator and this can be done online with a few steps described in the below article…

• In the Linux operating system, shells act as an interface between users and the system itself, enabling the execution of commands and scripts. Among various types of shells, the concept of a ‘login shell’ often comes up. But what exactly is a login shell, and how does it differ from a non-login shell?

• This simple tutorial shows how to enable RDP remote desktop for extended screen in Ubuntu 22.04 and higher with default GNOME desktop. Since Ubuntu 22.04, the default GNOME desktop has built-in RDP support. The function has feature to share screen in ‘extend’ mode.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• There has been some great work posted to the forum on using QEMU in EasyOS. I reckon one or more GUIs would be nice, so have compiled QtEmu.

• This is QtEmu version 2.2. The original 1.x series last release was 1.0.5 in 2007, so is a dead project. It also requires Qt4. The 2.x version is a rewrite, for Qt5. Here is the homepage of the old 1.x version: [...]

• During this week Akademy 2023 is going on in Thessaloniki, Greece. It’s always awesome, to see many old friends and getting together with that amazing hacker community which is KDE.

• There, me and Niccolò gave a talk about what;s happening in Plasma 6 and what will change, Noccolò on more visual things, about some changes we are cooking on the UI and on the visual themes. Here you can find a recording of the talk (alongside all the others of the day)

• I talked more about the work I’ve bein doing in the Plasma shell during the last couple of months: code rafactors and how the API for writing plasmoids will change.

• There were many things we were not quite happy about and now with the major release is the occasion for streamlining many things.

• Now, It’s very important those changes are are well communicated, and easy to do for developes, because there are *a lot* of 3rd party plasmoids on the KDE store, which people are using and enjoying.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Rhino Linux takes an already fine Xfce desktop and blends in elements of the GNOME graphical interface to create a hybrid desktop design well worth experiencing.

• The combination does for me what few other new Linux distributions have done; it has me waiting very impatiently for the first non-beta release. However, since my initial interaction with this promising distro a couple of months ago, that wait has extended into the summer season.

• The resulting desktop retains the awesome flexibility of Xfce and adds some of the more useful conventions of GNOME with a few feature dashes based on in-house artistry. For Linux users clamoring for a touch of rolling release updates to a solid Ubuntu base, Rhino Linux checks all the usability and appearance boxes missing in other alternatives.

• Rhino is still a work in progress after resuming development where its predecessor — Rolling Rhino Remix — left off. That forerunner built by an otherwise nameless developer self-dubbed “http.llamaz” offered a rolling-release unofficial variant of Ubuntu.

Slackware Family

• Today, Slackware Linux celebrates a remarkable milestone – Slackware Linux is turning 30 years old! It’s been three decades since Slackware’s first stable release was announced, and it’s truly an achievement worth acknowledging. So, let’s take a moment to honour the efforts of the Slackware team, dedicated contributors, loyal users, and everyone who has supported this legendary Linux distribution over the years.

• Slackware, the world’s oldest maintained Linux distribution, has reached the milestone of turning 30 years old.

• Slackware’s first release predates the Linux kernel reaching version 1 and was an introduction to the operating system for many IT professionals.

• It was created by Patrick Volkerding, with version 1 emerging 30 years ago while the most recent major release, 15, was made available in 2022.

• That’s right, on July 16th, 1993, Patrick Volkerding announced Slackware Linux 1.00 as the first stable release of an independently developed GNU/Linux distribution as a “complete installation system designed for systems with a 3.5″ boot floppy”.

• Slackware Linux’s first stable release was largely based on the Softlanding Linux System (SLS), one of the first Linux distributions released back in 1992 with the motto “Gentle Touchdowns for DOS Bailouts”, but Patrick Volkerding has been enhancing and modifying it substantially with its own package manager.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The AlmaLinux distribution’s goal is shifting from being one-to-one, bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to being application binary interface (ABI) compatible. But this represents a larger shift in the enterprise Linux market.

• Management has published its third statement of direction following Red Hat’s withdrawal of publicly accessible source code for its RHEL distribution. In a post entitled “The Future of AlmaLinux is Bright”, project lead Benny Vasquez says that from now on, AlmaLinux will aim to be compatible with RHEL at the ABI level, rather than an exact clone as it originally set out to be.

• Oracle’s quarter-century-long commitment to the Linux community has been consistent and clear. Oracle seeks to make Linux the most effective server operating system, accessible to everyone, supplemented with affordable high-quality support for those in need. They are steadfast in their resolve to provide an open-source system that encourages diversity and fair competition. Jeff Geerling has created a great video to bring you up to speed with everything that is happened.

• The chairman of the board at AlmaLinux, one of the distributions that sprang up after Red Hat discontinued CentOS, has admitted that it would not be possible to continue providing a 1:1 binary copy of RHEL.

• Benny Vasquez said in a blog post that after the change announced by Red Hat on 21 June, that the next correct step for AlmaLinux was instead to aim for application binary interface compatible.

Debian Family

• Powered by the Linux 6.3 kernel series, SparkyLinux 2023.07 brings packages from the upcoming Debian 13 “Trixie” (Debian Testing) and SparkyLinux Testing repositories, from where users can install newer or LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel versions like Linux 6.4, Linux 6.1 LTS, or Linux 5.15 LTS.

• The good news for users wanting to install SparkyLinux on their computers with Secure Boot enabled is that the live ISO image of the SparkyLinux 2023.07 rolling release comes with Secure Boot enabled by default. On top of that, the devs added Debian’s non-free-firmware repository for top-notch hardware support.

Linux Mint

• Linux Mint 21.2 is out now as the latest distribution built on top of Ubuntu, coming with various careful improvements to the base software included.

• Available with Cinnamon 5.8 / MATE 1.26 / Xfce 4.18, a Linux kernel 5.15 and an Ubuntu 22.04 package base with a plan to receive security updates until 2027. Until 2024 they will continue to use the same Ubuntu package base, so upgrades will be “trivial” to do.

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” Cinnamon Edition. Linux Mint 21.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” MATE Edition. Linux Mint 21.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” Xfce Edition. Linux Mint 21.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Illumos is an OpenSolaris-derived Unix system, and no Unix is complete without a C compiler or two. And with a name like Portable C Compiler (PCC), you would think that would be a great bet to get up and running on Illumos. That’s probably what [Brian Callahan] thought, too, but found out otherwise.

• Hello all.

• First of all, I would like to give the good news of passing the Mid-Term evaluation. My mentor/s have provided me some valuable advice that I would like to incorporate in my work in the following weeks ahead.

• Coming to my work, as I said in my last report. I picked up where I left before week 6. Sent sent in some patches (no upstream unfortunately). This week I mainly worked with Juippis (my other mentor) on reviews of my already submitted PRs. We came across some challenges while doing, namely reproduction of a bug, the case being juippis and sam_ were able to reproduce the bug, but I couldn’t due. It was most probably due to compiler-rt. I still have to send in a proper fix for that bug. Which brings us the to second topic of setting up a test environment. Juippis has an excellent guide on using lxc containers for setting up test environment.

• These 2 weeks were spent on the parser and the reporter. During this time, I’ve added many features to it, but there are still much more things left to be done. Due to limited time of GSoC I will implement additional features after the program end.

• Here is a list of features that were implemented so far:

• [...]

Leftovers

• From his Microblog yesterday

• Many people have responded to my assertion that Apple should do something good with the argument that they simply never would. My style of activism includes proclaiming unlikely outcomes. Like Phil Ochs, who sang in the midst of the Vietnam war: “I Declare the War is Over”. Optimism has its own power.

• One of the joys of writing for Hackaday comes in learning new things which even after a long engineering background haven’t yet come your way. So it is with the Rogowski coil, an AC current sensing coil which is unlike conventional current transformers in that it’s open ended — in other words not needing to be closed around the conductor it’s measuring. [Weston Braun] has an interesting introduction to the subject, as part of his open source Rogowski coil based current probe.

• Wind will be added to a territory-building, and potentially nation-building, plan to send Australian solar power to Southeast Asia through the world’s longest undersea power cable.

• But the completion of an asset sale agreement that would mark a clean break from Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s role in the $30 billion Sun Cable venture has been pushed out to early August.

Science

• If you want a strong magnet, the obvious answer is to buy one. However, for a variety of reasons, you might want to combine several smaller magnets. There are a few ways to do this, but the Halbach array, as [wannabemadsci] explains, allows you to make an array of magnets where one side is very strong, and the other side is very weak.

Education

• The nonprofit Committee for Education Funding noted that the Republican proposal would impact “virtually all” education programs, hitting teacher funding, student aid, and more.

Hardware

• Mobile PINs are a lot like passwords in that there are a number of very common ones, and [Mobile Hacker] has a clever proof of concept that uses a tiny microcontroller development board to emulate a keyboard to test the 20 most common unlock PINs on an Android device.

• When iTWire contacted Vedanta for comment, a company spokesperson offered a statement that said nothing about Foxconn, only that it had lined up other partners to set up what would be India’s first foundry.

• However, apart from this, the spokesperson also said that Vedanta would be holding its AGM on 14 July, adding that this meeting “should help clear a lot of the queries that we have received including yours”.

• {loadposition sam08}A link to a live feed of the AGM on YouTube was provided by the spokesperson.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• “…the COVID-19 and the Ukraine conflict added 122 million people to the hunger map…”

• What’s surprising isn’t that Kennedy voiced an anti-Jewish conspiracy, but that it took this long.

• Kids’ camp these days isn’t just s’mores and swimming. It’s multiplication tables and reading comprehension.

• Why it matters: Summer camps are incorporating academic and emotional recovery for young students seeing historically low test scores and a widespread mental health crisis.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Security

• USB devices are now ubiquitous and, from an information security standpoint, this is a terrifying prospect as malicious software can potentially be injected into a system by plugging in a compromised USB stick. To help get some piece of mind, [Cesare Pizzi] created USBValve to help expose suspicious USB activity on the fly.

• It was discovered that in Django 3.2 before 3.2.20, 4 before 4.1.10, and 4.2 before 4.2.3, EmailValidator and URLValidator are subject to a potential ReDoS (regular expression denial of service) attacks via a vast number of domain name labels of emails and URLs (CVE-2023-36053).

• Multiple severe security issues were discovered in the GPAC multimedia framework, including a heap-based Buffer Overflow in the GitHub repository gpac/gpac before V2.1.0-DEV (CVE-2023-0760) and a NULL Pointer Dereference in the GitHub repository gpac/gpac before 2.2.2 (CVE-2023-3012). These vulnerabilities have received a National Vulnerability Database base score of 7.8 out of 10 (”High” severity).

• Well-known American security expert Jake Williams has weighed in on the recent breach of Microsoft’s cloud at a number of government agencies, saying that it was not acceptable that any security provider should charge a logging tax.

• A research team with MIT has put forward a side-channel attack mitigation framework that aims to objectively and quantitatively measure the impact of certain known and unknown side-channel attacks. ‘METIOR’ aims to bring cybersecurity closer to the chip design space.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Senior Deloitte executives have confirmed an employee who shared confidential government information has been stood down by the consultancy firm.

• The executives told a Senate inquiry into the big firms the staff member had “inadvertently breached” Deloitte’s protocols by sharing the information while working on a government project.

Defence/Aggression

• Russia’s Defense Ministry and Mikhail Razvozhaev, the head of administration of Russian-annexed Sevastopol, said that drones attacked the city in the morning of July 16.

• Commander of the Azov Regiment Denys Prokopenko, who spent several months in a secure facility in Turkey after being captured by Russian troops, returned to Ukraine on July 8 and met with military personnel.

• Russian troops hit Kharkhiv with a missile strike — the second such attack today — reports regional governor Oleh Synyehubov.

• Lawyers for al-Hawsawi say they have proof that British intelligence agents illegally “aided, abetted, encouraged, facilitated, procured and/or conspired” with the US to torture and abuse their client.

• By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News In this day and age, it can sometimes feel like satire is dead. This is doubly true if one turns on a television to watch what passes for it. Yet genuinely sharp, cutting political comedy is enjoying a renaissance on platforms like TikTok, as young comedians who otherwise would […]

War in Ukraine

• The Russian state has taken control of shares in the Russian subsidiary of French food producer Danone, according to a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin on July 16.

• Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry has criticized Moscow, saying it “did not ensure full implementation” of an agreement that instituted a cease-fire between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia in September 2020.

• Another Russian general has reportedly been fired in the latest shakeup in the military since Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a short-lived mutiny three weeks ago.

• A long convoy transporting Wagner troops entered Belarus from Russia on July 15, the independent Belarusian military monitoring project Belaruski Hayun reported.

• More than a dozen vehicles have arrived at a rapidly built military field camp in Belarus, and video from Russia showed a convoy flying Wagner flags on the move.

• Elizabeth Tsurkov, the Russian-Israeli researcher who has been kidnapped in Iraq, took risks in pursuit of knowledge, understanding and doing what she felt was right.

• Russia has repeatedly threatened to pull out of the wartime export agreement, which has helped stabilize global grain prices and avert famines. The latest deadline to renew it is Monday.

• An explosion occurred on the Crimea bridge in the early hours of July 17. Russian groups on social networking site VKontake and bloggers who support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reported two explosions on the bridge, at 3:04 a.m. and 3:20 a.m. Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed head of annexed Crimea, announced at 4:21 a.m. that traffic on the bridge was stopped due to an “emergency.” Pro-Kremlin publication Readkovka reported that a rocket hit the bridge, causing one support pillar and two spans to collapse. Russia’s Transport Ministry said that the roadway on the bridge had been damaged on the Crimea side, but “the structures of the spans themselves are on their supports.”

• President of Russia Vladimir Putin said that Russian troops could use cluster munitions if Ukraine’s Armed Forces use the weapons, reports Interfax.

• Rural tourism in Latvia this summer is doing well compared to the situation last year, when some foreigners feared the Russian war in Ukraine, the Chair of the Latvian Rural Tourism Association, Asnāte Ziemele, said in an interview to Latvian Television on July 17.

• At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, eventual membership in NATO was promised to Ukraine and Georgia with the statement that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.

• Traffic was stopped on the Russian-built Crimean Bridge due to “an emergency” situation, Russia-installed officials said on Monday, while Ukrainian media reported blasts on the bridge.

• The deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain from its Black Sea ports is set to expire at midnight Monday if Russia does not agree to extend the agreement brokered by Turkey and the UN. Kyiv on Monday said its forces had retaken several square kilometres of territory around the eastern city of Bakhmut.

• Georgia, like Ukraine, used to be at the top of the list of NATO hopefuls. But, in the context of the NATO conference in Vilnius, the country is barely getting any attention. What changed?

• Traffic on the bridge linking Russia with Moscow-annexed Crimea was stopped early on July 17 due to an “emergency,” Russia-installed regional Governor Sergei Aksyonov said, amid unconfirmed reports of at least one explosion on the bridge as Ukraine said the incident could be a Russian provocation.

• Russian forces struck the Kharkiv region for a third time late on July 16, the governor said, as Russia reported an apparent retaliatory strike on towns in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.

• Ukrainian courts have convicted and sentenced more than 50 Russian soldiers for crimes committed in Ukraine since Russia’s massive military invasion in February 2022.

• At last, NATO has a plan. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include admitting Ukraine.

• Russian military bloggers reported that Ukraine had attacked the Kerch Strait Bridge, although Russian and allied authorities in Crimea only described the episode as an “emergency.”

• The Kremlin said Friday that it is considering granting legal status to some of the more than two dozen private military companies active in Russia. Legally, these shadow paramilitary groups do not exist – which allows them to operate parallel to Russia’s armed forces, at times doing high-risk “dirty” jobs for the army while giving Moscow a measure of deniability.

• Azerbaijan accused Russia on Sunday of failing to fulfil its obligations under a 2020 Moscow-brokered ceasefire agreement to end fighting with Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Environment

• “These same rich people farting into the Hamptons on private jets are often the ones who make their money in industries that hugely accelerate the climate crisis,” Teddy Ogborn, action participant, and Planet Over Profit organizer, said in a statement. “As long as the 1% continues to needlessly poison our air and heat our earth, we will continue to escalate our actions against them.”

• But, in Texas, the Republican-led legislature spent much of the past year at work on laws that would discourage the use of renewables and prop up oil and gas. In Congress and on the campaign trail, the G.O.P. is expending far more energy in defending gas stoves than in doing anything about this growing crisis. So far, there’s no real political penalty for that kind of reckless behavior. Indeed, Sawan told the BBC that, while there are not currently any plans, Shell wouldn’t rule out moving its headquarters from the United Kingdom to the United States, where oil companies get higher market prices for their shares. (Britain has also implemented a windfall-profits tax on energy companies. ) This suggested to him that the U.S. is more supportive of oil and gas companies, and, as he has told investors, he wants to “reward our shareholders today and far into the future.”

• As weather grows more extreme, geodesic domes and other resilient home designs are gaining new attention from more climate-conscious home buyers, and the architects and builders who cater to them.

• The trend could begin to dislodge the inertia that underlies America’s struggle to adapt to climate change: Technologies exist to protect homes against severe weather — but those innovations have been slow to seep into mainstream homebuilding, leaving most Americans increasingly exposed to climate shocks, experts say.

• Sudden, torrential rains struck areas in Bucks County, Pa., trapping people in their cars. Much of the Northeast was experiencing periods of heavy rainfall.

Energy/Transportation

• The price of electricity turned negative at -0.06 cents per kilowatt-hour on Sunday, around 3pm, newspaper Iltalehti reported.

• Water is heavy, so if you think about it, a moving ocean wave has quite a bit of energy. Scientists have a new way to use triboelectric generators to harvest that power for oceangoing systems. (PDF) Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are nothing new, but this new approach allows for operation where the waves have lower amplitude and frequency, making traditional systems useless.

Wildlife/Nature

• “For a long time, the focus was on the display of a single animal,” he continued. Going forward, the zoo intends to shift its emphasis towards promoting the preservation of entire species, placing conservation at the core of its activities.

• Like I experienced in Roman churches on vacation last year from looking up at frescoes on the ceiling, I found my neck feeling tense. The stars were captivating. I didn’t want to take my eyes off them. I haven’t seen so many stars in months, back when I was on a plane and was blessed with being able to look out the window and see stars from the sky while I was above the clouds.

Overpopulation

• Hanlon’s research suggests that in rural Tuscany at the height of infanticide the victims might have constituted up to a third of the total number of live births.

Finance

• The first female Reserve Bank governor is expected to bring a reform agenda to the institution as it moves to make its decisions on interest rates more transparent.

• Michele Bullock will take over as the head of the central bank in September, replacing Philip Lowe.

• Asian shares slipped on Monday as a mixed bag of Chinese economic data were not as bad as some feared, but still fanned market impatience with the lack of major fiscal stimulus from Beijing.

• China reported economic growth of 0.8 per cent in the second quarter, above the 0.5 per cent forecasted, while the annual pace slowed more than expected to 6.3 per cent.

• China’s economy grew at a frail pace in the second quarter, although the annual figure was flattered by base effects, data showed with overall momentum faltering rapidly due to weakening demand at home and abroad.

• Gross domestic product grew just 0.8 per cent in April-June from the previous quarter, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday.

• China’s economy showed further signs of weakness in the second quarter as data Monday showed growth missed expectations and consumers remained cautious, adding pressure on leaders to unveil further stimulus.

• Government data shows gross domestic product growth slowed in the second quarter from earlier in the year, even though it rose over the same period in 2022.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Australia’s media landscape is facing a tremendous loss as one in three women in the industry contemplate quitting their jobs.

• More than half of women in the media game are either unsure about or dissatisfied with their career progress.

• Treasurer Jim Chalmers remains optimistic progress can be made on multinational tax reform at a key G20 meeting.

• Dr Chalmers and Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe will meet with their counterparts in Gandhinagar, India, this week to gain a better understanding of the global economy.

• Support for Labor is at its lowest ebb since the 2022 election, with the coalition seizing on a by-election win as a positive sign.

• Labor’s primary vote has fallen two points to 36 per cent, according to a Newspoll published in The Australian on Monday – its weakest result since it won office with base support of 32.6 per cent.

• He came, he went and in between he did what exactly? Duncan Graham unpacks the reality of last week’s visit to Australia by the Indonesian president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo.

• Before heading to Sydney for a billed three-day visit — in reality,  just one full day —  President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s media team gave a select few Australian journalists the inside running on what the trip was going to yield: an EV batteries mineral deal yielding billions in investments, plus extracting major concessions on discriminatory travel rules.

• Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has admitted the over-reliance of consultancy firms in the public service was worse than expected.

• The comments came as senior executives from one of the big four firms will be asked to explain conflicts of interest at a Senate inquiry.

• The two ruling parties have destroyed our democracy. Voting for one or the other will not bring it back.

• Support for Labor is at its lowest ebb since the 2022 election, although the coalition has failed to reap the benefits as voters swing to independents and minor parties, according to the latest Newspoll.

• Labor’s primary vote has fallen two points to 36 per cent, according to the poll published in The Australian on Monday – its weakest result since it won office with base support of 32.6 per cent.

• A group of Jewish House Democrats is circulating a letter denouncing Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) since-withdrawn comments calling Israel a “racist state,” Axios has learned.

• Why it matters: It’s the latest example of Democrats’ bitter divide on Israel bubbling up in recent days as several progressives prepare to boycott the Israeli president’s speech to Congress on Wednesday.

• >

Censorship/Free Speech

• This crackdown on social media is relatively new, but is of a piece with a broader campaign to silence, sideline or co-opt those who publicly question or criticize the government.

• That wider effort traces its roots to the months of demonstrations in 2019 and 2020, when young Iraqis poured into the streets demanding an end to corruption, a reduction in Iranian influence in Iraq and a new era of openness. ​Those demonstrations eventually forced the resignation of the prime minister, who was supported by Iranian-linked parties in the government.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Waves of migrants taking dangerous, unauthorized passages to Europe and the U.S. are fueling a new rush of anti-immigrant policies and deepening political divisions in several wealthy countries.

• Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, released statements on Friday condemning Russia’s newly adopted bill that targets transgender people. The new legislation states that citizens who have already changed their sex will be prohibited from adopting children and their marriage will be annulled.

• Campaigners managing the ‘yes’ case for an Indigenous voice to parliament are doing a “disappointing” job, with a leading marketing expert warning time for a turnaround is short.

• Newspoll shows national support for the referendum has dropped to 41 per cent, with 38 per cent of female voters and 45 per cent of men backing the constitutional change.

• The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet will hold a hearing on Tuesday, July 18, 2023, at 10:00 a.m. EST. The hearing, dubbed ”Is There a Right to Repair?,” will “examine the current legal landscape of the right to repair and related intellectual property issues, including potential future avenues for policymaking.”

• The hearing will also discuss laws and regulations at both the federal and state level, including Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the implications for a range of industries from automotive to software to consumer electronics.

• Pinter alleged that Tate’s vast social media following has been turned against her clients, who are grappling with thousands of threats and relentless efforts to intimidate and undermine them. Supporters of the brothers have doxed private information of her clients and their relatives online, Pinter said, while at least two private investigators have also pursued her clients, digging into their past and showing up at their homes.

• It took decades of challenging systemic barriers and exclusion for disabled Americans to secure their right to exist and participate fully in our society. Thirty-three years ago, Congress passed the American with Disabilities Act to protect people with disabilities from ableist discrimination. At its core, the law was intended to facilitate access to transportation and public accommodations, like restaurants and workplaces. Yet, people with disabilities still face a myriad of challenges that infringe on their right to survive and thrive in our society, and mass surveillance technology is only making the problem worse.

• Mian Mithoo, a high-profile religious leader in rural Sindh, known for using his seminary to convert Hindu girls to Islam and even bandits, has openly threatened to punish Seema if she returns.

• His supporters have also threatened to attack Hindu worship places in Seema’s village but SSP Kashmore-Kandhkot, Irfan Samoo, assured Hindus and Sikhs they would be protected.

• Iran’s religious rulers have vehemently defended the dress code and see the hijab as a mainstay of the Islamic revolution that brought them to power.

• The dress code has been in force in Iran since 1979. Violators face fines or prison terms of up to two months.

• In 2012, more than 25,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) included common good demands when they walked picket lines in front of 580 schools during a strike that lasted seven days; it was the first school strike the city had seen in a quarter-century. The teachers won salary increases and more job security — typical bargaining fare — but they also got more collective wins, like pushing back against the testing obsession of the education reform movement and fighting for more support staff, such as counselors and nurses, to serve their most marginalized students.

• Hollywood actors were “duped” into extending negotiations for two weeks by studios who wanted more time to promote their summer blockbuster movies, union president Fran Drescher told AFP on Thursday.

• The Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) last month postponed their initial strike deadline, in the hope of thrashing out a deal with the likes of Netflix and Disney over demands for better pay and more protection against artificial intelligence.

• Traditional TV is dying. Ad revenue is soft. Streaming isn’t profitable. And Hollywood is practically shut down as the actors and writers unions settle in for what is shaping up to be a long and bitter work stoppage.

• All of this turmoil will be on investors’ minds as the media industry kicks off its earnings season this week, with Netflix

• up first on Wednesday.

• Netflix, with a new advertising model and push to stop password sharing, looks the best positioned compared to legacy media giants. Last week, for instance, Disney CEO Bob Iger extended his contract through 2026, telling the market he needed more time at the Mouse House to address the challenges before him. At the top of the list is contending with Disney’s TV networks, as that part of the business appears to be in a worse state than Iger had imagined. “They may not be core to Disney,” he said.

• One of the largest Indigenous-led renewable energy partnerships in Australia will build wind, solar, and battery projects in the Pilbara region.

• Under an initiative announced on Monday, the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (YAC) and Southeast Asian renewable energy giant ACEN will develop, own, and operate large-scale projects in an area covering 13,000 square kilometres.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• So recently I’ve been trying to use email and I just don’t know how I should feel about it. There’s a lot of core problems with it that seem to seep out to every part of the protocol, user experience, and the entire thing is just leaving me uncertain for its future.

• I attended a workshop on the topic of Internet fragmentation in July. The workshop was attended by a small collection of Australian public policy folk, some industry representatives, folk from various cyber-related bodies, and those with a background in Internet governance matters. It was a short meeting, so the perils of fragmentation were not discussed at length, as they often can be. Still, the concerns about the breakup of the essential bonds that keep the Internet together were certainly palpable in that meeting.

• On the other hand, there is a concern voiced in different venues at different times, that not only are the bonds that tie the Internet together too strong already, but these bonds are exclusively controlled by a handful of digital behemoths whose collective agenda appears to be based more on the task of ruthless exploitation of everyone else in the singular pursuit of the accumulation of unprecedented quantities of capital and social power.

Monopolies

• The US Federal Trade Commission is still seeking to stop the deal between Microsoft and games producer Activision Blizzard, requesting an appeals court on Thursday to put a temporary stop to the agreement soon after a federal judge refused a similar plea.

• But Sony executives questioned Microsoft’s offer and terms. While those concerns were never clearly articulated in public, Microsoft could potentially use Call of Duty to hurt PlayStation even without pulling it, by offering it first or better on its own console (Microsoft has denied it would do this) or by offering Sony an unfavorable revenue split on sales of the game.

• The former head of the consumer watchdog has called for big consultancy firms to be broken up, in a bid to reduce the risk of conflict of interest.

• Allan Fels, who previously oversaw the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, told a Senate inquiry the big firms should only focus on auditing, rather than consultancy work.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.