● 07.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/07/2023: Akademy 2023 Videos and Debian Brainwashing

Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The project is Beijing’s latest move to build greater self-sufficiency amid tech sanctions by US.

Instructionals/Technical

• What happens when you have a number of Docker containers running and something goes awry? Do you panic and stop

Games

• Between 2023-07-09 and 2023-07-16 there were 98 new games validated for the Steam Deck.

• fheroes2 continues to improve the classic Heroes of Might and Magic II, with a new release available now with plenty of tweaks and improvements. This is a cross-platform game engine designed to reproduce the original game but with many improvements to gameplay, graphics, AI, wide-screen support, bug fixes and UI improvements. Giving another classic game another fresh life on modern platforms.

• LEGO Bricktales is a sweet little building adventure from ClockStone and Thunderful Publishing, one with Native Linux support and it’s Steam Deck Verified. A new free update is out now. Much like the previous Easter update, this is a themed upgrade for Summer. If you missed it they also previously updated the game to use Vulkan on Linux and they added in some UI scaling too!

• I’ve been playing through a game called Dave the Diver released on 28 Jun, 2023 from developer MINTROCKET. It seems to have taken Steam by storm with over 36,000 user reviews (and quickly growing!) giving it an overwhelmingly positive rating. After picking up a copy for myself and playing it, I can see why people love it so much.

• Capcom has now released Exoprimal, an online team-based shooter and thanks to Fanatical, I was able to take a look. Plus I have an extra discount on it for you.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• No time; Akademy 2023 has eaten up everyone’s schedule! It promises to be an enjoyable and useful conference, so I’m sure there will be lots to talk about next week. See you then!

• Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.

• Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.

• Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

Debian Family

• The idea that people care for each other is total nonsense. I’ve been doing voluntary projects with free software for just as long as Cater. The earliest record I could find in Debian is from 1998, bug #18511. Despite more than 20 years of voluntary work, Cater and others attacked my family and I ruthlessly at a time when I lost two family members. Upon seeing his words about “family”, I couldn’t help thinking about the similarities between the problems of Debian culture and the Manson Family, simply referred to as the Family, the infamous cult that used brainwashing to prep their followers for celebrity murders.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” arrived over the weekend as the latest stable Linux Mint release featuring the Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment, improvements to many of the official Linux Mint apps, as well as up-to-date packages from the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS repositories.

• Linux Mint 21.2 uses the same package base as Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera”, which means that you can easily upgrade your existing installations without downloading the new ISO images. But, before proceeding with the upgrade process, make sure you have a recent backup of your most important files, just in case.

Open Hardware/Modding

• It’s super easy. Just tag us in a photo, video, or text post sharing what you’ve been up to with Raspberry Pi recently. It doesn’t have to be the finished product; you can post a pencil drawing of what you’re hoping to build, or a photo of a very janky shoebox prototype that will eventually become an eight-legged, laser-firing robot. We believe in you.

• Create your first – or your next – IoT project with the new Arduino Nano ESP32. The latest addition to our wide range of tiny boards with mighty features pairs the accessibility and flexibility of the Arduino ecosystem with the potential of the low-power ESP32-S3 system-on-a-chip microcontroller.

• This means you can keep the familiar Nano form factor (just 45×18 mm!), get all the support you need – via documentation or our vibrant community – and master MicroPython in no time.

• In the case of VanMoof, a rival connected e-bike company has created an app that will purportedly unlock the VanMoof bikes and provide some functionality. But relying on a competitor to hack together some software to control a device made by another vendor and hoping that, as a user, you can download your security key from the VanMoof servers, before those servers are shut down, is not an ideal scenario.

• Hi! I’ve not been very communicative about my week during the Old Computer Challenge v3, the reason is that I failed it. Time for a postmortem (analysis of what happened) to understand the failure!

• For the context, the last time I was using a restricted hardware was for the first edition of the challenge two years ago. Last year challenge was about reducing Internet connectivity.

• As well as being the co-founder of the Arduino project, Banzi is also its chairman and CTO since 2004. Banzi has also worked as an interaction designer, educator and open source hardware advocate. Banzi has worked as a consultant for clients such as: Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, V&A Museum and Adidas.

• We’ll be asking Banzi all about the meteoric rise of the Arduino project, from the earliest boards all the way to its latest incarnation, the R4 Uno range. We’ll also have a selection of Arduino boards to talk about as we move through the story.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Surveillance Capitalism has led to internet centralization and is the reason why monopolistic tech giants that include Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook) control access to the internet while dominating internet commerce and trade.

• Internet centralization has led to cyber-enslavement and consumer exploitation where these tech giants have monetized every aspect of their paying customer’s life through predatory surveillance and data mining business practices rooted in Surveillance Capitalism.

• Google, Apple, and Microsoft enable app developers from around the world to monitor, track, and data mine the operating system end user posing massive privacy, security, and safety threats to the end user.

• For example, this means that every time you use your smartphone, tablet PC, connected product, SmartTV, connected vehicle, or PC, Google, Apple, Microsoft, plus their app developer partners make money 24×7/365 days a year regardless if you are an adult, teen, child, or business end user.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• They forked Libreboot, due to disagreement with Libreboot’s Binary Blob Reduction Policy. This is a pragmatic policy, enacted in November 2022, to increase the number of coreboot users by increasing the amount of hardware supported in Libreboot. Libreboot’s Freedom Status page describes in great detail, how that policy is implemented – the last few Libreboot releases have vastly expanded the list of hardware supported, which you can read here.

Licensing / Legal

• These days, GENIUS NY is considered the largest drone and robotics accelerator program in the world. It vets startup ideas and offers funds to the most promising based on viability of business models. But GENIUS NY has also promised to provide more support than just money by way of ‘end-to-end’ help, including simply offering up office space at The Tech Garde (that’s CenterState CEO’s incubator in downtown Syracuse), as well as the benefit of ultra-close proximity to New York’s Griffiss International Airport, one of just seven FAA-designated UAS test sites in the United States. New York is also the site of the UTM Pilot Program Phase 2, and has been the site of other drone testing projects including drone parachutes.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• It’s an unsettling time in what has been, for more than 350 years, a remarkably stable undertaking, with changes taking place in how research is conducted, the rise of Open Access (OA) and open science, the evolution of big data, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more. Even the transition from analog to digital publishing represented more of a change of venue than a fundamental shift in the business models, norms, or values that have always sustained and guided scholarly publishing.

• As we consider how to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities of this moment in our industry, it makes sense also to reconsider how we manage peer review selection, how we gather expert feedback, and how we honor and reward reviewers. How can we make peer review easier and more fulfilling for reviewers, more efficient and effective for editors and publishers, and more trustworthy for everyone? How can we distribute the rewards and responsibilities of peer review more equitably?

• It is imperative for stakeholders across the whole scholarly ecosystem to work together proactively to ensure that peer review keeps up with the evolving publishing landscape and remains our most powerful tool for evaluating the rigor, credibility, and interest of scholarly research.

Programming/Development

• The term ‘quantum computer’ gets usually tossed around in the context of hyper-advanced, state-of-the-art computing devices, but much as how a 19th century mechanical computer, a discrete computer created from individual transistors, and a human being are all computers, the important quantifier is how fast and accurate the system is at the task, whether classical or quantum computing. This is demonstrated succinctly by [Davide ‘dakk’ Gessa] with 200 lines of BASIC code on a Commodore 64, implementing a range of quantum gates.

• We are happy to announce the Qt Insight 1.3 release.

• We have released Qt 6.2.9 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 6.2.9 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.

• The release is a  source code release made on top of the Qt 5.15.14 LTS Commercial release.

• In data analysis and programming, it’s common to encounter situations where you need to identify duplicate values within a dataset. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced programmer, knowing how to find duplicate values is a fundamental skill. In this blog post, we will explore two different approaches to accomplish this task using base R functions and the dplyr package in R. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to detect and manage duplicate values in your own datasets.

• Careers in the technology space and broad and diverse and require different sets of skills. Programming and Systems Administration are two occupations that stand out and you are likely to find professionals in these fields in almost every company.

• The rising demand for programming and administration skills has opened doors to freelancers who bridge the gap and work for companies seeking experts in the same field.

Leftovers

• While sitting at a lobby coffee shop this morning (shocking!), I saw a delivery worker arrive with a package. After failing to receive any acknowledgement from the downstairs intercom, he whipped out his phone and had a lengthy call with the recipient.

• I’m paraphrasing, but it went like this:

• I’m downstairs with your package. Uh huh. Yes. Can I deliver it? Yes? Where to? Okay, but are you here? Do you want me to leave it here? No? Okay, can you buzz me up then? No, I’m downstairs. The address on the package. I can come up, or leave it here, which one?

Science

• This comes from line 2,530 in the legendary book A Million Random Digits, with 100,000 Normal Deviates:

Education

• Her list explains a huge part of the Web, but was completely orthogonal to what I was thinking about teaching. She wasn’t asking me to teach tools. She wanted me to teach fundamental concepts. She wanted students to have understanding about a set of technologies and ideas, and the students really didn’t need IP addresses and packets to understand them.

• The important insight for me was that the computing that she was asking for was a reasonable set, but different from what we normally teach. These are advanced CS ideas in most undergraduate programs, typically coming after a lot of data structures and algorithms. From her perspective, these were fundamental ideas. She didn’t see the need for the stuff we normally teach first.

• Most top flight universities around the world have the same problem. They have space for 100 students on a specific course. 15,000 apply. How do they select the best-of-the-best-of-the-best?

• My answer is – they don’t.

• They should ignore extra-curricular activities (that tend to bias against poorer students with less free time). Ignore admission essays (which aren’t read, can be creepily voyeuristic, and are probably copy-and-pasted). Ignore relevant experience (which, again, can be bought). Ignore whether someone’s parents went to the school. Ignore skin colour, religion, sex, gender, credit-score, disability, and everything else2.

Hardware

• Particle’s Monitor One Developer Edition is a customizable cellular IoT gateway for monitoring industrial equipment packaged in an IP67 rugged enclosure with reference firmware, and suitable for rapid prototyping with support for a range of I/Os and sensors, and even a prototyping area for to solder your own circuitry. Like the company’s earlier Tracker One asset tracker, the Monitor One is based on the Tracker SoM with a Nordic Semi nRF52840 Arm Cortex-M4 wireless SoC for Bluetooth connectivity, a Quectel LTE Cat M1 (North America) or Cat 1 with 3G and 2G fallback (EMEA), u-blox Neo-M8U GNSS module, and an ESP32 for WiFi location support. The new customizable cellular IoT gateway still integrates with the Particle IoT PaaS (Platform as a Service), and the company also provides developer tools.

• Last month I talked about getting a gorgeous Tseng ET4000AX ISA graphics card for my recently-fixed Am386SX motherboard. I was looking forward to seeing Windows 3.0 [sic] in 256-colour goodness for the first time since our childhood PC, and maybe even GEM.

• Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have managed to entangle a record 51 qubits. More importantly, the qubits weren’t just entangled in pairs, but as a single system, a required step on the road to more useful quantum computing.

• The U.S. and China are engaged in a great-power struggle, and chips are part of the fight.

• The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A UN report published this month found that racism from health care providers is likely contributing to higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths among people of African descent in North and South America.

• Depression in China isn’t just an individual issue, but involves collective trauma, sufferers say.

• I’m not gonna achieve anything from this experiment, I’m just curious to see what happens if instead of eight hours straight, we sleep for two hours, four times a day.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• For this month’s newsletter, I’m going to cover a range of things you can do to simplify your Teleport deployment, so you can spend less time maintaining Teleport and more time enjoying the summer!

• In the space of about one second, at the age of almost 23, I had glimpsed my future, my colleagues’ future, and the future of PC gaming, and that future was phenomenal.

• A world in which machines governed by artificial intelligence (AI) systematically replace human beings in most business, industrial, and professional functions is horrifying to imagine. After all, as prominent computer scientists have been warning us, AI-governed systems are prone to critical errors and inexplicable “hallucinations,” resulting in potentially catastrophic outcomes. But there’s an even more dangerous scenario imaginable from the proliferation of superintelligent machines: the possibility that those nonhuman entities could end up fighting one another, obliterating all human life in the process.

• But a world in which the bots can understand and speak my name, and yours, is also an eerie one. ElevenLabs is the same voice-cloning tech that has been used to make believable deepfakes—of a rude Taylor Swift, of Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro debating Ratatouille, of Emma Watson reading a section of Mein Kampf. An AI scam pretending to be someone you know is far more believable when the voice on the other end can say your name just as your relatives do.

• A recent email compromise by Chinese APT group Storm-0558 highlights a lack of access to security logging by many Microsoft 365 license holders, prompting calls from researchers to abolish it.

• According to BlackCat, these documents contain personally identifiable information of both employees and clinicians associated with the Trust, including National Insurance Numbers (referred to as Social Security Numbers by the organisation).

• In addition to personal data, the documents are claimed to contain financial information such as client documentation, credit card details, financial reports, accounting and loan data, as well as insurance agreements.

• Elon Musk admitted Twitter has lost half of its advertising revenue.

• In a reply to a tweet offering business advice, Musk tweeted Saturday, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to (about a) 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

• “Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he concluded.

• A “small number” of employees from the Amazon Pharmacy division have been fired by the company, Amazon confirmed to the media. Here are all the details.

Security

• In diary entry “Deobfuscating a VBS Script With Custom Encoding“, I decoded a reader submitted VBS script with custom encoding of the payload.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (gpac, iperf3, kanboard, kernel, and pypdf2), Fedora (ghostscript), SUSE (bind, bouncycastle, ghostscript, go1.19, go1.20, installation-images, kernel, mariadb, MozillaFirefox, MozillaFirefox-branding-SLE, php74, poppler, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (cups, linux-oem-6.1, and ruby2.3, ruby2.5, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, ruby3.1).

• According to the City of Odessa, mayor Joven was advised that the city dealt with a serious data breach.

• It was discovered that accounts assigned to a terminated high-ranking employee have been recently accessed, and sensitive information was transferred.

• On June 21, BlackCat (AlphV) threat actors added Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery to their leak site. “We have lots of PII and PHI, including a lot of pictures of patients that they would not want out there,” the listing read. “It be in your best interest to reach out before we release all data. Leak to follow if no contact made.”

• On July 8, that text was replaced with a different message: “Dr. David Kim and Dr. Eugene Kim does not care about patient privacy. Only fill they pockets with money,” BlackCat claimed in their usual insulting manner.

• A majority of the records referred to an application called 419 Dating – Chat & Flirt. However, inside the database, I also saw information related to other dating apps called Meet You – Local Dating App by Enjoy Social App, and Speed Dating App For American by MyCircle Network Corp. The presence of what appeared to be logos and development files pertaining to these apps in the same database may be suggestive of the likelihood that all three dating apps are owned or developed by the same company using different names. There were also documents related to a couple of location-tracking applications found in the database, though we can’t assure they are related in any way to 419 Dating due to the lack of information available online that the companies are connected. According to multiple listings of software download sites, 419 Dating – Chat & Flirt is developed by a Chinese company called SILING APP (also visible in the web archive). I immediately sent a responsible disclosure notice and although the database was quickly secured no one ever replied. The app used to be available on the Google Play Store but was removed shortly after my notification. However, the app is still available on many other websites. Per its own advertisement campaign, the 419 Dating app claims to have 50 million users worldwide.

• The database appears to contain a massive number of user records that include customer names, account numbers, emails, passwords, and more. In total, the database contained more than 600 compressed server logs.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Q: But why is there such hectic push to acquire either personal identities (through phone verification or electronic payment) or a corporate/legal-identity before you are able to publish? In the past, you could participate in movement activities and hand leaflets out, or newspapers, or just sheets of paper with an essay, nobody asked your id, and unless state agencies recorded your picture and identified you, you remained anonymous within a crowd. Except for military regimes most “democratic constitutions” protected the right to free speech.

• Following a CJEU ruling that declared Meta/Facebook’s GDPR approach largely illegal, the Norwegian DPA (Datatilsynet) is the first national data protection authority declaring behavioral advertising on the company’s platforms Facebook and Instagram illegal. Datatilsynet imposes a temporary ban for the usage of said approach by Meta. noyb welcomes this decision as a first important step and hopes that other DPAs will follow.

• Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms will be fined one million crowns ($100,000) per day over privacy breaches unless it takes remedial action, Norway’s data protection authority said on Monday, in a move that could have wider European implications.

Defence/Aggression

• Junnila is not the only controversial politician in his party. Many other Finns Party MPs have been convicted of ethnic agitation. The party’s ideological leader Jussi Halla-aho, now the speaker of the Parliament of Finland, once wrote about his desire for foreigners to rape several left-wing and liberal female politicians. The new finance minister — Finns Party leader Riikka Purra — got her start in politics by commenting on Halla-aho’s online guestbook in 2008, making a bevy of racist statements about immigrants.

• Still, it is not the Finns that are in the driver’s seat. They are an accessory to this government, playing second fiddle to bring neoliberalism and austerity to a new level, a local variation of a model that is being replicated across Europe.

• The Michigan House is likely to vote soon to expand the use of [Internet] voting, sometimes called electronic ballot return, in future Michigan elections. It might sound like a great way to expand voter access, but internet voting is extremely risky. Election experts deeply familiar with the many aspects of election security expressed significant concerns when the House introduced this legislation.

• [...]

• Michigan elections must remain free, fair, and accountable. HB4210 will not help.

• The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

• Trust in the FBI has been plummeting among Republicans during the Trump era, as voters increasingly see institutions – including law enforcement – as being weaponized for political purposes.

• These incidents are just some of the most recent terrorist attacks committed by groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group (IS) around Sub-Saharan Africa, which counterterrorism experts say is now the world’s terrorism hot spot. Half of the victims killed by terrorist violence last year were in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

• Terrorism in Africa was among the subjects broached during a recent high-level U.N. conference of heads of counterterrorism agencies, including those from Interpol, the international criminal police agency; Qatar; the United States; and Google’s senior manager for strategic intelligence.

• As we remember Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June, we look at how he was also a lifelong anti-nuclear activist, stemming from his time working as a nuclear planner for the U.S. government. In December 2017, he joined us to discuss his memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. “This was an actual war plan for how we would use the existing weapons,” he noted, “many of which I had seen already that time.”

• War-torn Sudan’s capital experienced a communications blackout for several hours on Friday, residents said, as the army and paramilitary forces waged intense battles across Khartoum and humanitarian groups warned of worsening crises.

• Conflict continues in Sudan after tensions between the military and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces exploded into open fighting in April. Around 3.1 million people have fled, and the United Nations fears the fighting become a “full-scale civil war.”

• Widespread riots in France sparked by the police killing of a teenager with North African roots have revealed the depth of discontent roiling poor neighborhoods — and given a new platform to the increasingly emboldened far right.

• The international community has recently been rocked by the Hong Kong government’s chilling decision to place bounties on eight exiled activists, two of whom are currently residing in Australia.

• The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced on Monday that it was charging Gal Luft, the co-director of a US think tank, with acting as an unregistered agent of China, arms trafficking and sanctions violations.

• New signs of tension emerge as the two powers continue to negotiate a resumption of communications.

• Wang Yun killed one child and injuring 24 others by poisoning their porridge with sodium nitrite in 2019.

• It said the contentious map does not depict Beijing’s nine-dash line claim over the South China Sea.

• July 12, 2023 10:20 AM

• China has, over the past three years, regularly sent warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.

• “China hopes that the United Nations and international partners will support the efforts of regional organizations and cooperate with them…”

• India’s promise as a counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific led French President Emmanuel Macron to invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi as guest of honour at the July 14 Bastille Day military parade. But does India have the will and means to deliver?

• It wasn’t that long ago that Australian and New Zealand prime ministers were falling over themselves to run trade missions to the People’s Republic of China.

• A Senegalese opposition politician was on Tuesday charged with committing an offence against the president, his lawyer said, in a case over recent comments he made about President Macky Sall.

• The crackdown coincides with the anniversary of 2009 ethnic violence.

• A recent flurry of diplomatic talks shouldn’t be taken to mean that Beijing is looking for compromise with Washington.

• It is a common interest of Seoul and Beijing for North Korea to stop provocations and return to dialogue.

• India and China share a 3,800km frontier, and fought a brief but bloody war over it in 1962.

• PRATO, Italy — On a rainy June afternoon, six Chinese mobsters hurried across the plaza of a drab apartment complex near the medieval gates of this Tuscan textile capital.

• Their targets, two gang rivals in their early 20s, were eating in a small Chinese diner. Drawing machetes, the attackers stormed in.

• China, Solomon Islands signed 9 agreements including for police cooperation and aviation.

• Solomon Islands-China relations have blossomed since the Pacific island country cut ties with Taiwan.

• China’s violent taking of islands in the South China Sea has pushed nations in the region to start settling their own maritime disputes. Their example of building trust might wear off on Beijing.

• China protested the Tibetan spiritual leader’s meeting with a U.S. delegation in New Delhi.

• Kosovo has bought a batch of Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, Prime Minister Albin Kurti said on July 16 as the Balkan country faces unrest in the north where ethnic Serbs refuse to recognize Pristina authorities.

War in Ukraine

• Now that Turkey has dropped its opposition, the path is clear for Sweden to join NATO. What are the expectations on both sides regarding Swedish membership of the Western military alliance?

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• US climate envoy John Kerry will head to China on Sunday to meet with his counterpart Xie Zhenhua and restart stalled talks between the world’s two biggest emitters of planet-warming gases. Kerry’s trip to China — his third as President Joe Biden’s climate emissary — follows weeks of record-setting summer heat that scientists say is […]

• Many people associate technologies like solar and wind power with efforts to tackle climate change. But for the world’s most vulnerable populations, they are much more than a clean-energy solution.

• US special envoy for climate John Kerry arrived in Beijing on Sunday for a three-day visit aimed at renewing bilateral cooperation on climate change between the world’s two biggest polluters. His trip follows on the heels of two other high-profile visits by US officials in recent weeks after years of tension between Beijing and Washington.

• The homebuilding industry has been slow to adopt changes that can better protect against extreme weather. Some architects are showing what’s possible.

• The two sides aimed to rebuild trust following a suspension in talks in 2022.

• A dangerous, historic heat wave that was expected to peak Sunday across the Southwest is spreading across southern U.S. states, with no major cool down in sight for many areas.

• Japan has been hit by unusually heavy rain, raising fears of the pace of climate change.

• Around the United States, dangerous floods, heat and storms are happening more frequently.

• Severe storms sweeping the U.S. Northeast disrupted flights and caused catastrophic flooding that officials in Vermont said Monday had surpassed levels experienced by the remnants of the deadly 2011 Hurricane Irene, which washed away homes and roads.

• The Nystar smelter at Port Pirie has been granted a new operating licence with stricter environmental conditions.

• The Environment Protection Authority says the five-year licence until June 2028 will allow the company to demonstrate its long-term commitment and investment in reducing lead emissions.

• Scorching weather gripped three continents on Sunday, whipping up wildfires and threatening to topple temperature records as the dire consequences of global warming take shape.

• A lost world hidden under South Africa.

Energy/Transportation

• If the private developers and also the state really implement the current plans for the coming years in setting up wind parks, the operation of such generators could produce electricity for more than half of Latvia, Latvian Radio reported on July 17.

• The European Union and Tunisia on Sunday signed a memorandum of understanding for a “strategic and comprehensive partnership” on irregular migration, economic development and renewable energy.

• They will develop an investment platform to lower the cost of capital and increase private investment.

• Some energy experts say battery-powered vehicles will increasingly help keep the lights on and support electric grids, rather than straining them.

• Expanding access to critical minerals and increasing manufacturing capacity is at the top of the Biden administration’s decarbonization agenda. ayors, who have shown their ability to deliver on domestic investment projects, have begun exploring opportunities for international collaboration.

• Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi faced questions from South Korean legislators at a Seoul forum on Sunday over his decision to endorse Japan’s proposal to discharge water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.

• According to SEC, the company raised $12.2 million illegally from LBC sales

• Users could post and watch videos on Odysee using the LBRY protocol

Wildlife/Nature

• Some have even lost their eyes entirely.

• Canadian wildfires have burned more than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) this year, a record-breaking figure that has surpassed scientists’ most pessimistic predictions, government data showed Saturday.

• Manuel Chang, the former finance minister of Mozambique, is at the center of a scandal that roped in American investors.

• “Great apes and other primates too have been shown to understand the correspondence between a 2D digital image and a real thing in the world, so they can understand and make that cognitive link. So I think that’s kind of why images and videos are interesting to them the same way they are to us,” Martin says.

Overpopulation

• Marriages in China are at a record low. Recent political and economic turmoil have added another reason to postpone tying the knot.

• A social model dependent on importing hundreds of thousands of people a year is not sustainable, both because of public attitudes and this country’s stubborn refusal to build housing, infrastructure, or any of the other essential supports of a growing population. Nor is it ethical to maintain a system that relies on there always being poorer nations whose skilled professionals and most mobile workers we can skim off to top up the Exchequer and keep British public services ticking over. We need a comprehensive overhaul of the way the tax system handles children – and one that goes much farther than just abolishing the welfare cap.

Finance

• It’s a grim milestone for first-time buyers and remortgagers, but lower rates can still be found

• Another Victorian home builder has slid into liquidation, leaving clients and creditors in the lurch.

• Timothy Holden of insolvency firm Crouch Amirbeaggi was on Friday appointed as the liquidator for Melbourne-based Bentley Homes.

• PwC has offloaded its embattled government consultancy arm, but questions remain around the firm’s conflict of interest.

• The under-fire organisation has agreed to the $1 sale to private equity firm Allegro Funds to pave the way for the transfer of 1750 employees to the new buyer in the wake of its tax scandal.

• New fact sheets by the Poor People’s Campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies reveal disturbing data on systemic racism, poverty and inequality, ecological devastation, and militarism in every U.S. state.

• The East African nation’s economy will expand by 5.0% in 2023.

• Any such restrictions are expected to anger Beijing and will be the first test of the new channels of communication that the world’s two largest economies are trying to restore.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Up for debate over the next months will be the limits for police’s use of surveillance technology, how far people affected can challenge the use of AI, and how far companies should play a role in deciding the reach of this legislation.

• As we watch the painful and infuriating consequences of unchecked police power in France, we cannot ignore the descent into a state of heightened surveillance and violence enacted by police.

• Lots of places pushing that $15/hr minimum wage, some already have it. Target lead the charge bumping to $15/hr in 2017 and now starting wage goes up to $24/hr. I’m sure there are other companies upset I didn’t toot their horn here, but you need to understand, Target tried to be “college kid cool” and pay well. If you can start at more than $18/hr with just a high school education, you didn’t do bad. Unless you are willing to go into “the trades” where you do a lot more labor without air conditioning, $24/hr plus some form of health insurance is about the best you can hope for. I’m told they’ve hired from within their store ranks for people to be Web developers and other IT roles at corporate.

• The shit companies sit around chanting “Nobody wants to work.” They just don’t finish the phrase “Nobody wants to work for us because we are a shit company paying shit wages.”

• I have written about The Minimum Wage Debate many times.

• He is replaced as CEO by former managing director Satbir Singh.

• The United Arab Emirates and Qatar are battling for influence in Europe. A data leak has revealed how Abu Dhabi has sought to discredit its rival with the help of a private intelligence company in Switzerland – an effort that extends into Germany.

• African content moderators urge tech giants to provide adequate mental health care and fair pay in recognition of their grueling but vital role.

• Unionised staff said they urged shareholders to “intervene as a matter of urgency”.

• There was a time, not so long ago, when every major architect on this planet was “building” in the Metaverse, the brand name for the open-world virtual reality platform and associated projects under the aegis of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Last year, some staggering names such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Grimshaw, Farshid Moussavi, and, of course, the Bjarke Ingels Group pledged to create “virtual cities,” virtual “offices,” and equally vague sounding “social spaces” to be funded with cryptocurrency and supplied with art (NFTs). The eagerness to latch onto whatever the newest trend the increasingly desperate and failure-prone tech industry dished out was so palpable that even real-life developers like hotel chain CitizenM and brands like Jose Cuervo got involved and threw what one presumes is a whole lot of actual money at the enterprise. The rush to move into virtual real estate was a full-on frenzy.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The increasing prevalence of social media has led many Finns to gain more confidence in their political knowledge. This trend may be attributed to the online platforms that provide an environment where individuals can easily find affirmation for their beliefs without necessarily improving their level of political literacy.

• Grim reports come amid steady exodus of middle class Chinese fleeing the country

Censorship/Free Speech

• Since the beginning of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” actions that started after the murder of Jîna Amini in Iran, the arrests continue.

• At least a thousand activists have been arrested since the beginning of 2023. It was announced that 513 of those detained were Kurds and the others were Baloch.

• SLAPPs don’t usually win in court, but that’s not what they’re intended to do. Instead, they set out to threaten activists and drain the financial resources of social movements. They often unfold as years-long wars of attrition, where corporations and governments with disproportionately large resources grind down the financial, emotional, and legal capacities of activists. The threat of such a suit—typically brought against individuals or groups that confront powerful people or institutions—discourages free speech and association, chilling democracy itself.

• Overseeing the birth of YAF were two defenders of McCarthyism and the stamping out of free speech: Buckley himself and his protégé M. Stanton Evans, author of YAF’s credo, “The Sharon Statement.” Buckley first came to public attention as the disgruntled Yale graduate who warned in God and Man at Yale (1951) of the evils that higher education poses for Christian lovers of the free market. In that book, he called for discarding the “superstition” of academic freedom so the academy could be purged of dangerous voices (by which he meant Keynesian economists and atheists). Buckley’s second book, cowritten with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, was a defense of McCarthyism, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). Evans was, like many of the younger writers who gravitated toward National Review, a mini-Buckley: a Yale alumni made dizzy by worries of subversion in academia and the government. He would go on write Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). (Ann Coulter blurbed it as the “greatest book since the Bible.”)

• Iran is once again deploying police officers on the streets to enforce its conservative dress code for women, which many have flouted since the protest movement that rattled the country began last fall, according to state news media and social media posts.

• The 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested by the Tehran police on September 14, 2022 for wearing an “improper” hijab and died after two days in custody. The incident sparked protests in major cities throughout the country, which lasted for months and only died down earlier this year following a major crackdown. At least 469 people have been killed during the protests.

• The Iranian regime has taken all sorts of measures to quell the protests. Thousands have been detained and hundreds have been killed in the last few months, but the regime has refused to bow down. Iran’s supreme leader blamed the United States and Israel for the protests and added that the “riots” were “engineered” by Iran’s enemies.

• “I say clearly that these riots and the insecurity were engineered by America and the occupying, false Zionist regime [Israel], as well as their paid agents, with the help of some traitorous Iranians abroad,” he said last year. But the supreme leader did not care to back his claims with some evidence.

• Several Iranian celebrities joined the protests, including prominent directors and actors from the country’s celebrated film industry. Several Iranian actresses were detained after appearing in public without the hijab or expressing support for the protests.

• In a recent case, actress Azadeh Samadi was barred from social media and ordered by a court to seek psychological treatment for “antisocial personality disorder” after appearing at a funeral two months ago wearing a cap on her head.

• In September last year, the 22-year-old Kurdish womanMahsa Jina Aminidied in hospital three days after being arrested by the “morality police” for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Her death, allegedly caused by maltreatment, sparked nationwide protests that shook the country for months. The authorities’ violent response resulted in the deaths of hundreds. Many women refused to give in and increasing numbers dared to appear in public without covering their heads. In December, officials claimed that the “morality police” had been disbanded.

• But recently there have been reports of its return by several journalists and social media users in the Iranian capital Tehran, and also other cities. On Sunday, a video began circulating on social media that captures the moment when dozens of passers-by intervened to prevent “morality police” officers from arresting three women in the northern city of Rasht.

• Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies remote work, told me that “research and evidence are slowly catching up” to the work-from-home debate. In five years, he predicted, the topic will be less controversial. Bloom and two colleagues, Jose Maria Barrero and Steven J. Davis, published a working paper earlier this month that collects some of the existing work-from-home research, pulling both from their own work and from other papers. One interesting finding is that although fully remote work has been correlated with a drop in productivity, hybrid work (which occurs widely in white-collar fields such as tech and business services) was not linked to any productivity loss—and could actually help with recruitment and retention.

• Our two unions have not been on strike together since 1960. The writers’ pickets at shooting locations had already shut down an estimated 80 percent of productions. Now SAG’s strike rules dictate that actors not only can’t shoot or do voice-over work for productions; they also cannot attend red carpets or promote any Motion Picture Association projects—something that was already a challenge, given that the writers’ strike had shut down the nighttime talk shows that were such a staple of the press circuit.

• Much like the writers, actors are looking for increases in their residual pay—compensation that’s akin to royalty checks—once-reliable income that has all but vanished in the pivot to streaming. Actors are also seeking protections against artificial intelligence using their voice and image.

• New regulations on “degrading content” are part of a broader campaign to silence independent voices.

• Facial recognition cameras are installed in guest room doors, a notice warns guests.

• Goal seems to be to avoid tainting purity of communist monuments with commercialism

• Campaign exposing personal information on 2,000 protesters was ‘designed to avoid attribution.’

• I am pleased to see that my latest article on the efforts of state legislatures to restrict what ideas professors can endorse in the classroom has now been published. “Professorial Speech, the First Amendment, and Legislative Restrictions on Classroom Discussions” appears in the latest issue of the Wake Forest Law Review.

• One thing is clear about Missouri v. Biden: The decision cannot be understood by viewing it through a polarized lens.

• From Judge Lewis Kaplan’s opinion today in Carroll v. Trump (S.D.N.Y.): This is a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll against President Donald Trump, as he then was, for statements Mr. Trump made in June 2019 shortly after Ms. Carroll publicly accused him of sexual assault. In those statements, Mr. Trump denied Ms.…

• Sir James Dyson himself is no longer pursuing the case after a judge ruled his claim out.

• The court concludes that this justification doesn’t generally let plaintiffs sue pseudonymously in libel or disclosure of private facts that seek damages.

• A Hong Kong court sentenced a man on Friday to 18 days in jail for “insulting” the national flag and regional flag, according to Hong Kong Free Press. The man, Yung Ching-man, was charged with one count of desecrating the Chinese national flag and one count of insulting the regional flag.

• [...]

• The National Flag and National Emblem Ordinance was amended in 2021. The charge against Yung is based on the amendment for insulting the national flag by misuse. That amendment also stipulates the correct display and use of the national flag and national emblem. It was enacted by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in October 2020. The amendment could not take effect in Hong Kong directly, but is put into effect by local legislation pursuant to the Hong Kong Basic Law.

• Article 23 of the Basic Law stipulates that the government shall enact laws on its own to prohibit acts of treason, secession, sedition and subversion against Beijing. Its legislation failed in 2003 following mass protests and it was not tabled again until after the onset of the separate, Beijing-imposed security law in 2020. Pro-democracy advocates fear it could have a negative effect on civil liberties.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Hong Kong’s press freedom score dropped four times in four consecutive years, said the Hong Kong Journalist’s Association Friday when releasing its Press Freedom Index for 2023.

• Despite repeated violence against journalists, the Mexican police were investigating without taking into account their journalistic backgrounds, as RSF observed.

• Burkinabè authorities should immediately reverse the suspension of French television news channel La Chaîne Info (LCI) and stop censoring local and foreign media coverage of the jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso and the Sahel region, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

Civil Rights/Policing

• There is much at stake in this fight. Postdocs bring in billions of dollars in grants to universities, and the potential of our research outputs is worth even more. Yet a staggering 94.8 percent of us report that low pay negatively affects our personal and professional lives. Postdoc scholars often leave our positions after years of having been asked to sacrifice too much in terms of low pay, impacts on our mental health, and delays in starting a family.

• Individual researchers suffer on account of poor conditions for postdocs and the resulting retention crisis — and so does the public, which depends on the work that we do. Making postdoc jobs sustainable is in the common interest, as our work is critical to solving the biggest problems our society faces, like climate change and global pandemics.

• The same officer then applied what’s known as a “drive stun,” which involves placing the Taser directly on the skin, police said.

• On Sunday, Gen. Saeed Montazerolmahdi, a police spokesman, said the morality police would resume notifying and then detaining women not wearing hijab in public. In Tehran, the men and women of the morality police could be seen patrolling the streets in marked vans.

• Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary comprises over 63,000 hectares of conservation land in the Flinders Ranges and Outback of South Australia. It is significant for the Adnyamathanha people, whose cultural connections to the land remain strong and vibrant, with stories that relate directly to the landscape. It is one of Australia’s outstanding geological “hotspots”, with a rich biodiversity recognized by the Arkaroola Protection Act 2012. Established in the rugged, arid mountain environment in 1968 by Dr. Reg Sprigg and his wife, Griselda, their aim was for tourism activities to promote and support ongoing conservation, education, and research.

• Artificial intelligence tools that mimic humans have in recent years become far more effective in creating images and text — and more common. Technology that replicates individuals’ faces and voices is becoming more prominent in Hollywood. Chatbots like ChatGPT, which can convincingly reproduce human writing, have surged in popularity since late last year. But they also have clear shortcomings: the bots often get basic facts wrong and are derivative when asked to write creative works.

• The actors’ concerns highlight a broader anxiety among entertainers and people in many other creative professions. Many fear that, without strict regulation, their work will be replicated and remixed by artificial intelligence tools, and that such a transformation will both cut their control over their work and hurt their ability to earn a living.

• What’s interesting to think about is what happens when this kind of thing becomes cheap and easy: when it can all be done through easily accessible databases, or even when an AI can do the sorting and make the inferences automatically. Cheaper digital forensics means more digital forensics, and we’ll start seeing this kind of thing for even routine crimes. That’s going to change things.

• The case was broken open thanks to cell phone data, credit card bills and DNA testing, which ultimately led them to arrest Heuermann, 59, authorities said.

• Iranian authorities on Sunday announced a new campaign to force women to wear the Islamic headscarf and morality police returned to the streets 10 months after the death of a woman in their custody sparked nationwide protests.

• A federal court rejects plaintiff’s arguments “that sealing … is required because she is being ‘slandered and libeled’ and ‘[m]aking [her] information public would magnify the effects of [defendants'] wrongdoing’ rather than right those wrongs.”

• Former No. 3 draft pick tells Congress his support for Uyghurs and Tibetans threatened the NBA’s profits.

• The grants aim to help shed light on China’s genocide of Uyghurs, foundation head says.

• City’s chief vows to hunt down wanted overseas activists, likens them to ‘rats crossing the street.’

Monopolies

• The latest case, which the Financial Times says will go under the spotlight imminently, pertains to Microsoft injecting Teams into its online Office suite in 2017. Rival Slack lodged a complaint with the EU in 2020, griping that the Windows giant was “force installing [Teams] for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”

• The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) ruled on Monday that the full hearing of Microsoft’s appeal, which was due to begin on July 28, should be adjourned.

Patents

• Just in time for my early August floating trip down in the Ozarks, the Federal Circuit has affirmed the USPTO’s rejections of Float’N’Grill’s proposed reissue claims.  The problem: the reissue claims omit an “essential element” of the original invention in violation of 35 U.S.C. 251. The case here is quite similar to the maligned essential elements test of Gentry Gallery, but relies upon the reissue statute rather than the written description requirement of Section 112(a).

• Float’N’Grill’s US 9,771,132 covers a floating grill. In patent lingo, we call this a “floating apparatus with grill supports” to allow grilling while floating in water. The disclosed embodiment uses magnets to removably secure the grill to the grill supports, and the original claims required a plurality of magnets.

Copyrights

• “It says it’s not fair to use our stuff in your AI without permission or payment,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of The Author’s Guild. The non-profit writers’ advocacy organization created the letter, and sent it out to the AI companies on Monday. “So please start compensating us and talking to us.”

• Rasenberger said the guild is trying to get these companies to settle without suing them.

• Several lawsuits filed against OpenAI in the past few weeks allege the company used datasets containing personal data and copyrighted materials to train ChatGPT. Among the biggest was a 157-page lawsuit filed by 16 unnamed plaintiffs, who claim OpenAI used sensitive data such as private conversations and medical records.

• The latest legal challenge, presented by lawyers for comedian Sarah Silverman and two additional authors, accused OpenAI of copyright infringement due to ChatGPT’s ability to write up accurate summaries of their work. Two additional authors, Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in late June that makes similar allegations.

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