● 07.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/07/2023: LibreOffice 7.5.5 and curl 8.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• In the world of Kubernetes, managing containerized applications at scale requires powerful and efficient tools. The command-line interface (CLI) is an integral part of any developer or operator’s toolkit, offering a convenient and flexible way to interact with a Kubernetes cluster.

• SIG CLI plays a crucial role in improving the Kubernetes CLI experience by focusing on the development and enhancement of kubectl, the primary command-line tool for Kubernetes.

• In this SIG CLI Spotlight, Arpit Agrawal, SIG ContribEx-Comms team member, talked with Katrina Verey, Tech Lead & Chair of SIG CLI,and Maciej Szulik, SIG CLI Batch Lead, about SIG CLI, current projects, challenges and how anyone can get involved.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about questioning articles written by so-called “tech experts”. Welcome to episode 69 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has announced another game to use NVIDIA RTX Remix to add in full Ray Tracing, this time it’s a mod for the original Portal with Portal: Prelude RTX. Portal: Prelude is the highest rated mod for the original Portal and back in 2008 it came number 3 on Mod DB’s Mod of the Year contest. To play it free, you need to own the original Portal.

Applications

• Please be aware that if you’re converting videos from YouTube, that’s against Google’s terms of service. And it’s also likely to be illegal as it constitutes a breach of copyright unless the copyright holder has given explicit consent, or the video is published under an open source license.

• Here’s our verdict on the best free video converters. They are each published under an open source license. While VLC and mpv are primarily multimedia players they also offer conversion functionality.

• If you’re on the Fediverse and you use Linux, you need Tuba in your life— it’s by far one of the most accomplished and engaging apps for decentralised social media…

Instructionals/Technical

• These new GPU machines have Intel i9-13900K CPUs. Modern higher end Intel desktop CPUs have a split core model, with a mix of better ‘performance’ cores and more power efficient ‘efficient’ cores. The ‘efficient’ cores are lower performance and don’t have hyperthreading. In the case of the i9-13900K, the split is 8 performance and 16 efficient cores; with hyperthreading on, you have 8 performance cores, 8 extra logical CPUs from the hyperthreads on those cores, and then 16 efficient cores, for a total of 32.

• I will be hosting a “Build a website in an hour” event on July 29th at 5pm UK time (9am PT). Here is the event description: [...]

• If you have used a visually-hidden class in the past, you might have noticed that the width and height is set to 1px and not 0. I’ve always wondered why.

• Even in James Edwards’ “The anatomy of visually-hidden” I didn’t find the answer because he wasn’t sure either. While testing a client’s site a few minutes ago, I found at least one good reason.

• This is pleasingly straightforward, albeit with an ugly wart. This recipe was not formally developed and tested; it’s just what happened when I tried to actually perform this task.

• The official installation guide has similar instructions although they don’t seem to have the initramfs workaround.

• Loops are fundamentals of any programming language and so for the bash.

• This advisory tutorial will help your first time using your computer powered with Debian 12. This tutorial complements our previous Debian 12 GNOME Install Guide we practiced together. We compiled five simple tips and tricks below for you. Happy working with Debian!

• In Unix-like operating systems, a man page (in full manual page) is a documentation for a terminal-based program/tool/utility (commonly known as a command). It contains the name of the command, syntax for using it, a description, options available, author, copyright, related commands etc.

• You can read the manual page for a Linux command as follows; this will display the man page for the df command…

• Apache is the world’s most popular, cross-platform HTTP web server that is commonly used in Linux and Unix platforms to deploy and run web applications or websites. Importantly, it’s easy to install and has a simple configuration as well.

• In this article, we will show how to check Apache web server uptime on a Linux system using different methods/commands explained below.

• Good documentation is absolutely necessary for any software, and this principle extends to Linux commands as well.

• Numerous Linux distributions and open-source communities offer comprehensive documentation that is readily accessible on the Internet.

• As a Linux administrator, you must periodically check which files and folders are consuming more disk space. It is very necessary to find unnecessary junk and free it up from your hard disk.

• This brief tutorial describes how to find the largest files and folders in the Linux file system using the du (disk usage) and find commands. If you want to learn more about these two commands, then head over to the following articles.

• Linux users often need to use one command over and over again. Typing or copying the same command over and over again reduces your productivity and distracts you from what you are supposed to be doing.

• You can save yourself some time by creating aliases for your most commonly used commands. Aliases are like custom shortcuts that represent a command (or set of commands) that can be executed with or without custom options. Chances are you are already using aliases on your Linux system without even knowing it.

• We’ve written several articles in the past to find LUN ID mapped to Block device/disk…

• This step-by-step tutorial explains how to allow or deny sudo access to a group in Linux for improved Linux security and efficient group management.

• Are you looking for a guide to installing the Plex Media Server on your Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 20.04? So that you can easily access,

• So, you’re using Ubuntu, the cool Linux operating system, but you also need Microsoft Office? No problem! Just use this super simple solution to install

• Learn how to easily install VirtualBox on Debian 12 (Bookworm) with our step-by-step guide, and start virtualizing your systems today!

• OpenSUSE is a free and open source linux distro, which uses rpm as package manager.

• OpenSUSE is available in two different versions, Tumbleweed the version that we are going to install on this tutorial, and leap.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to change the hostname on OpenSUSE.

• If you’re using Debian 12, you can easily manage your firewall with the help of Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW). UFW interface simplifies firewall management and handles the complexities of packet filtering technologies like iptables and nftables. It’s a great option for beginners who want to set up a firewall. In this tutorial, we’ll guide you through installing UFW in Debian Linux 12, configuring it to allow SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, and other connections, and enabling it to block unauthorized traffic.

• If you’re interested in running Linux on your Android device, you’re in luck! It’s possible to install Fedora Linux on Android using Termux. Termux is a terminal emulator for Android that allows you to run Linux commands and utilities on your phone or tablet. It does not replace Android. In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of installing Fedora Linux on Android using Termux and show you how to keep it up to date with the latest versions.

• In this article, you will explore the power of the wget command, discover the key features of wget, learn how to easily install it on major Linux distributions, and gain hands-on experience with practical examples. Tutorial Details Description Wget Difficulty Level Low Root or Sudo

Games

• We are happy to announce that we are going to be hosting the 2023 GodotCon in Munich, Germany.

• We are ready to share the first batch of improvements coming to Godot 4.2 later this year with the release of the first dev snapshot!

• Another bunch of games can be yours for cheaps in the Humble Cozy Games Collection. So here’s a run over the compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and desktop Linux for you.

• Finally. One less extra launcher to become a nuisance? Blizzard games are finally coming to Steam with Overwatch 2 set to be the first on August 10th. Perhaps then it’s no surprise Valve fixed up an issue with Overwatch 2 in Proton Experimental for Linux / Steam Deck.

• If you’re in the need for a new game to pick up and play I can happily recommend Roto Force to you. A high-energy 2D twin-stick bullet-hell where you rotate around little arenas and it’s just chaos.

• After a week off from doing it, here’s a fresh video overview of some recent Steam Deck and Proton gaming news for you. A nice easy listening way for you to catch up on some of what’s been going on, because as usual – there’s a lot.

• In the latest Steam Beta Client update for desktops, Valve has added a new option to let you view Steam Deck Verified status. Valve’s changelog for desktop notes they added “a setting to display Steam Deck compatibility information in the library while not on a Steam Deck”.

• Between 2023-07-12 and 2023-07-19 there were 33 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

• Coming three months after VirtualBox 7.0.8, the new release adds initial support for the Linux 6.4 kernel series for both guests and hosts, initial support for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel series only for hosts

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Wrap up session at the end of the first day of meetings and workshops following the weekend of talks. Where someone from each session gives a brief overview of what happened there

• https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2023/Monday

• Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 23.08 releases to them

• Dependency freeze is next July 20

• The Feature Freeze and Beta is Thursday 27 of July.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Slackware Family

• This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development.

• Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993, and project lead Patrick Volkerding, who still maintains the distribution today, celebrated with a modest announcement…

Fedora Family / IBM

• Delve, the Go debugger, ships with the go-toolset package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The go-toolset package in RHEL 9.2 contains Delve version 1.9.1, which contains many improvements and features.

• Delve 1.9.1 is also the last release to contain the old versioning scheme; new releases of Delve will mirror the corresponding Go release . versioning, only diverging for point releases. So, for example, the latest release of Delve is 1.20.x which corresponds to the 1.20.x release of Go. Delve releases a new minor version when the Go project releases a new version’s first RC (Release Candidate). Once that version of Go is released in RHEL, the corresponding version of Delve is also released.

• Open vSwitch has moved away from using per-vport dispatch mode to using per-CPU dispatch mode. But this mode had issues with upcall handler thread imbalance and CPU mismatch error messages. These issues were mostly found in systems with tuned CPUs.

• This article explains two main fixes that my patch series applied to Open vSwitch that alleviated these issues. The first fix resulted in the ovs-vswitchd sending an array of a size that the Open vSwitch kernel module will accept and not trigger the CPU mismatch error message. The second fix added additional upcall handler threads in cases of tuned CPUs to create a more balanced workload for the upcall handler threads.

• On June 6, we shipped the latest feature update to the OpenJDK containers with a number of new features: [...]

• Understanding why a packet drops in the Linux kernel is not always easy. The networking stack is wide and reasons to refuse a given packet are multiple and include invalid data from a protocol, firewall rules, wrong checksum, full queues, qdisc or XDP actions, and many more reasons. It is possible to look at indicators such as MIB counters and statistic counters, but often those are generic and triggered for different reasons, but most importantly their coverage is small, and it’s impossible to match a specific packet to a given counter increase.

Open Hardware/Modding

• My daughter Beatrice asked for me to print her a 3D printer.

• Today, Unitree unveiled their latest quadruped robot, the Unitree Go2. This robot comes packed with advanced features, including a 4D LIDAR sensor, a depth camera, and Wi-Fi6 connectivity. Additionally, the Unitree Go2 features an increased payload capacity in comparison to its predecessor.

• [Jeff Geerling] has tried building his own network-attached storage before, but found that the Raspberry Pi just wasn’t able to keep pace with his demands. He’s back with a new all-flash NAS build, and put his new design to the test against proper store-bought gear.

• Today we’re going to be using the new Arduino Uno R4 WiFi to build a controller for a PET bottle recycler. I’m doing this as the first part of a project, working towards building my own version of a PET bottle recycler to produce filament for my 3D printer.

• Robotic arms can be expensive especially if you want one with AI Vision support, but Yahboom DOFBOT robotic arm designed for NVIDIA Jetson Nano offers a lower cost alternative as the 6 DoF robot arm sells for about $289 with a VGA camera, or $481 with the Jetson Nano SBC included. We previously published a review of the myCobot 280 Pi robotic arm from Elephant Robotics, and while it’s working well, supports computer vision through the Raspberry Pi, and is nicely packaged, it sells for around $800 and up depending on the accessories, and one reader complained the “price tag is still way too high for exploration“.

• Mohammad Reza Sharifi has made a wireless Raspberry Pi Pico surveillance robot that uses a custom GUI made with LabVIEW.

• After news recently from ServeTheHome that Intel planned to stop doing their Intel NUC systems directly, they’ve now announced they’ve agreed to let ASUS carry it on.

• Dr. J Metz is Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium and stated that there is no need to overhaul Ethernet, but instead, the team hopes to make adjustments over time that will improve efficiency.

• So far, a few specific technical hurdles have been identified, which the consortium intends to focus upon. This involves the development of APIs and specifications for various Ethernet communication protocols, interfaces and data structures to suit the needs of high-performance technology better.

• He managed to couple the original Leica range finders with the Raspberry Pi Zero and HQ Camera, so users get the feel of manually adjusting the focus. He couldn’t save the High Quality Camera’s anti-aliasing filter, however, as it kept getting caught on the new shutter, so the MPi only photographs in monochrome and natural light. It is still possible to correct photos taken under harsh street lighting with white balance.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• What happens to the people who blocked and muted you?

• I ran an extremely scientific poll on Mastodon: [...]

• Yeah… No one knows and there’s no real consensus.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• the 220th release [...]

• Back when I wrote about how the mere ‘presence’ of a URL on a web server wasn’t a good signal, I casually mentioned that you were more likely to have everything answered with a HTTP 200 status on things that weren’t really ‘web servers’ as such, but which were just using HTTP. You might ask why you’d use HTTP if you weren’t a web server, and the answer is straightforward and widely known: HTTP has become the de facto default communication protocol. Today, if you need to create a system where you pull some information from something or push some information to something, you’re most likely to use HTTP for this purpose. In the process, the software may be coded in such a way that it provides a default answer to nearly everything.

• Roy notes that some of these crap patches for Windows bugs (bugs IN WINDOWS) cause Firefox to malfunction on Linux and jam up.

• Also notes that Mozilla hires “Mac heads instead of software developers.”.

• But it’s so much worse than that. They fired 250 people who were working on Gecko and redirected others to develop adware and spyware and nag screens under a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Supervisor.

Mozilla

• Mozilla is one of the most important companies on the Internet. For a very long time, they have represented the only real competitor that Microsoft and Google have had as far as web browsers go. Mozilla is widely seen as a force for good by vast numbers of the developer community, but they seem to be torching all that good will by just giving up.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.5.5 is here about one and a half months after the LibreOffice 7.5.4 point release to address a total of 70 bugs that have been reported by users or discovered by the LibreOffice developers in the LibreOffice 7.5 series.

• Meanwhile can download the LibreOffice 7.5.5 release right from the official website as binary installers packaged by The Document Foundation for DEB or RPM-based GNU/Linux distributions. Source tarballs are also available for system integrators and those who want to compile LibreOffice from sources.

• LibreOffice 7.5.5 Community, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.5 line, the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from our download page for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux [1].

• Given the upcoming announcement of LibreOffice 7.6, all users are invited to update to this version, which has been tested and sought after enough to be ready for production environments.

• Several other products based on the same LibreOffice Technology of LibreOffice 7.5.5 are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Chrome OS and Linux), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud. In some cases the name is not LibreOffice, although the underlying technology is the same.

Education

• I recently spoke about the future of Perl at The Perl and Raku Conference. The slides are now available.

Programming/Development

• The commit in glibc says: [...]

• Perhaps you may have heard people refer to Haskell as a “pure” language. Functions in Haskell may by default diverge (loop infinitely), and they may throw exceptions. Koka on the contrary is what you could call a “total language”. By default functions are considered “total” 1, and are only allowed to operate on their inputs, and produce outputs. In Koka if you want to write a “pure” function, you write a function which makes use of the exn effect (“may throw exceptions”) and div effect (“may diverge”): [...]

• JSOS, which stands for JavaScript Objects, but Smaller, is a proof-of-concept data interchange format for busy programmers. It aims to be a drop-in replacement for JSON that produces smaller payloads.

• It may be a bad idea. (I want feedback!)

• One of the most frequent questions about Qt WebEngine is about the pace of updates of Chromium. The shortest one would be just like “When do we get the next Chromium in Qt?”. Well, there are a few elements in this which make this question a matter of perspective. I once thought, I should put all elements on a timeline to sort that for me and hopefully for you in a more explanatory form.

Perl / Raku

• Matthew Stuckwisch gave two very interesting presentations at the 2023 Perl and Raku Conference in Toronto: Highly recommended if you’re interested in using the new RakuAST capabilities in your code.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Bash is a known shell that is preinstalled with most Unix and Linux distributions. Bash makes it extremely easy to write powerful scripts that you can use to perform complex jobs, control hardware and software, and perform logical and analytical computations.

• In this article, you’ll explore the fundamentals of shell scripting functions and arguments. You’ll see how they’re used and learn how to create your own scripts. You may come across some more terminology than you typically encounter in a blog post, along with some simple scripts you can reproduce and run. So grab your keyboard, open up a terminal, and get started!

• While for maybe the most popular bahs loop, wait until you discover until. Pun intended

• Practical tutorial on how we can use the Milvus CLI, cURL, and Python to create a vector index in simple steps to enhance the search operations on a vector.

Leftovers

• Should it?

• I was tying the abbreviation fwd in a document, and typo’d the word fid instead. It didn’t autocorrect me, so I was intrigued about what it meant.

• Kevin Mitnick, a reformed hacker who was once one of the most wanted computer criminals in the United States, died on Sunday, according to a statement shared Wednesday by a cybersecurity training company he co-founded and a funeral home in Las Vegas. He was 59.

• His death was confirmed by Kathy Wattman, a spokeswoman for KnowBe4.

• Years ago I got into the habit of leaving positive messages in optional text forms on order pages, like those for delivery instructions or customisations. Often it’s just a “thanks! :)” or my attempt at a translation into their local language. It takes almost no effort whatsoever.

• The new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, stands on the site where more than 40% of enslaved people were brought to the U.S.

• The Gold Coast has thrown a lifeline to the Commonwealth Games, but only if the Australian government stumps up the cash.

• Mayor Tom Tate said the tourist city – which hosted the Games in 2018 – could again hold the event in 2026 after Victoria sensationally cancelled this week.

Science

• A gruesome mystery.

• The size of the shrine at Tiel, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Utrecht, is equivalent to three soccer stadiums and archaeologists realized a few months ago that the largest of the mounds they had uncovered was a solar calendar. About 20 meters in diameter, a trench had been dug around it with openings through which the sun entered on specific dates of the year, as at Stonehenge. “For example, the sun’s rays would mark June 21, the summer solstice, and the longest day of the year. Or December 21, the winter solstice and the shortest day,” explains archaeologist Cristian van der Linde, the discoverer of the site, whose team worked in tandem with municipal experts.

Education

• Panelists found multiple instances of manipulated data in the 12 papers they investigated, but concluded he was not responsible for the misconduct. Still, they found that each of the five papers in which he was principal author “has serious flaws in the presentation of research data” and in at least four of them, there was apparent manipulation of data by others.

Hardware

• China wants the Dutch government not to impose new export rules that ban sales of advanced DUV tools to the People’s Republic.

• China looks set to suffer another blow in its ongoing trade war with the U.S. amid reports that it will be slapped with further restrictions on the sale of computer chipmaking equipment.

• Shares of Nvidia, AMD drop on report about further restrictions against Chinese AI sector.

• Global shipments of desktops and notebooks fell by 11.5% year-on-year to 62.1 million units in the second quarter of 2023, the technology analyst firm Canalys says, adding that this followed two quarters when the decline was more than 30%.

• You think of digital displays as modern, but the idea isn’t that new. We had clocks, for example, with wheels and flip digits for years. The Racal frequency counter that [Thomas Scherrer] is playing with in the video below has columns of digits with lamps behind them. You just need the right plastic and ten lightbulbs per digit, and you are in business. Easy enough to accomplish in 1962.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Today in Tedium: As we pointed out in our recent piece on beverage cans, a lot of innovation had to get into place to get us to the point where we are today, where you can open a can with another can, as a TikTok user so helpfully showed us. And one of the points of innovation we didn’t even bring up is that the pop-top lid is brilliant because it’s obvious it hasn’t been tampered with. Problem is, that design doesn’t work for every product sold in stores. Some jars need to be built to be reusable, but they also need to be re-opened. Today’s Tedium is going to talk about one of the most common things in your refrigerator that you never think about—the tamper-evident “safety button” that you commonly see on the lids of jars. Where did it come from, and why didn’t know you needed an article about it until now? — Ernie @ Tedium

• We’re not ready for old age. Not as individuals, not as a society. That’s the sobering news from lawyer M.T. Connolly, former coordinator of the Elder Justice and Nursing Home Initiative at the U.S. Department of Justice. In her new book, The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life, she outlines how our institutions, laws, and cultural practices have failed to keep up with our amazing advances in longevity over the last century. As a result, many, if not most of us, are spending our final years with far less security, health, purpose, and joy than we could be having. (Americans have been falling behind peer countries on mortality rates in recent years).

• A protective effect.

• The debate over covid masks has reignited, courtesy of In-N-Out Burger. The fast food chain issued a guidance telling workers in five states—Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah–will be banned from wearing masks starting Aug. 14, unless they provide a doctor’s note.

• Four members of a Florida family were convicted Wednesday of selling a toxic industrial bleach as a fake COVID-19 cure through their online church.

• Join Reason on YouTube and Facebook Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a discussion with Matt Ridley of new documents that reveal how and why scientists downplayed the possibility of a COVID lab leak scenario.

• Epidemiologists say a rise in cremations in an eastern province was the latest indication that the country’s official death toll from Covid is a vast undercount.

• Communications between officials and scientists who wrote the key paper promoting a natural origin for Covid-19 show doubts, interference, politicized science, and more.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Last month I blogged about how the mainstream media is focusing on the wrong parts of the Artificial Intelligence/ChatGPT story.

• Twitter has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since it was bought by Elon Musk for $44bn (£33.6bn) last October, its owner has revealed.

• Like so many millions of American workers, across so many thousands of workplaces, the roughly 230 customer service representatives at AT&T’s call center in Ocean Springs, Miss., watched artificial intelligence arrive over the past year both rapidly and assuredly, like a new manager settling in and kicking up its feet.

• Suddenly, the customer service workers weren’t taking their own notes during calls with customers. Instead, an A.I. tool generated a transcript, which their managers could later consult. A.I. technology was providing suggestions of what to tell customers. Customers were also spending time on phone lines with automated systems, which solved simple questions and passed on the complicated ones to human representatives.

• Microsoft is yet to seal the deal to take over Call of Duty maker Activision which was announced in early 2022. According to a report by Verge, the gaming studio has reportedly laid off around 50 employees from its esports division amid the acquisition turmoil. The report also mentioned that the sacked employees have already been informed about the layoffs. As per the report, Activision Blizzard is also planning major changes to the Overwatch League (OWL).

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Not only has LLaMA been trained on more data, with more parameters, the model also performs better than its predecessor, according to Meta.

• Llama 2 is a commercially-available open-source model from Meta that builds on LLaMA, the “academic-use only” model that was, in reality, generally available to anyone who could click a download link.

Security

• Airline gets regulatory approval from Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia to enable Gate-to-Gate connectivity.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Several victims lodged police reports but decided not to follow up because of travel inconveniences.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The proximate cause is Google’s new effort to DRM the web, but there is of course so much more.

• This is a unique time, when it’s actually feasible to become ungoogleable without losing much. Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now, so if they’re looking for me or something I’ve made and don’t find it, they’ll use some other approach.

• Months after Ireland fined Meta $1.3 billion for violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the company will soon be slapped with a daily $100,000 daily fine for breaching advertising rules in Norway.

• Open Rights Group has received legal advice from Dan Squires KC and Emma Foubister of Matrix Chambers, which states that measures in the Online Safety Bill may involve breaches of international law.

Confidentiality

• Although the Enigma machine used polyalphabetic substitution encryption, it represented a significant advancement compared to classical polyalphabetic techniques. It used an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambled the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma’s keyboard and another person writes down which of the 26 lights above the keyboard is illuminated at each key press. The illuminated letters are the ciphertext. Entering ciphertext on the keyboard transforms it back into readable text. The intricate rotor mechanism enabled the use of an enormous number of different rules, making it extremely difficult to crack the code, which is only possible if the initial machine configuration is known. But small system issues, combined with several years of hard work, mathematical and computational advancements, and a dose of luck, ultimately cracked the Enigma code.

• One weakness of Enigma was the need to distribute machine configuration information (or keys) in advance, which carried the risk of potential interception. The challenge of securely exchanging keys was the next cryptography problem to address for enhanced system resilience. The solution came in the 1970s with the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol.

Defence/Aggression

• A federal appeals court has refused to stop an upcoming execution in Alabama. Sixty-four-year-old James Barber is scheduled to be put to death Thursday evening at a south Alabama prison. It is the first execution scheduled in the state since Gov. Kay Ivey paused them in November for an internal review. That came after two lethal injections were called off because of difficulties inserting IVs. Advocacy groups said a third execution was botched, though the state disputes that. The judges said the state conducted a review of execution procedures and Barber’s assertion that the “same pattern would continue to occur” is “purely speculative.”

• Choudary was for many years the UK’s most prominent Islamic extremist, who had headed up a number of militant groups including al-Muhajiroun, which were banned under terror laws introduced in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and the Jul 7 2005 bombings in London.

• The 16 people being charged in Michigan allegedly met in the basement of the state’s Republican Party headquarters and signed multiple certificates claiming they were “the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America for the state of Michigan,” Nessel said in recorded remarks.

• “That was a lie. They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it,” she said.

• Of course, the plan backfired. Trump had a field day, spewing lies and trampling over and insulting host Kaitlan Collins to the wild cheers of the crowd. The entire affair read as a giant campaign rally sponsored by CNN, aided by the floor manager’s instructions to the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not. While immediate ratings spiked (Axios, 5/11/23) they then plunged even further (TV Insider, 5/16/23), as the network’s reputation immediately suffered and morale hit rock bottom. Licht was soon given the boot (FAIR.org, 6/8/23).

• The BRICS need to coordinate forces and strategies in an increasingly polarized international scene, where traditional hegemonies are being restructured in a way that has not been seen since the Cold War.

• The launch came after heated complaints from North Korea about American spy planes.

• The country warned that it would shoot down American spy planes, escalating verbal attacks on the U.S. as South Korea’s leader traveled to attend a NATO summit.

• Ms Kim accused the US Air Force of intruding into the North’s “economic water zone” on Monday.

• Multiple reports are reinvestigating the neo-Nazi fighters and militias involved in the war both in Russia and Ukraine. “You have neo-Nazis on both sides of this conflict,” says Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin, a longtime reporter on the far right in Ukraine and Russia who is critical of the Western media’s normalization of groups like the Azov Battalion. “We are sending a very dangerous message that if you’re the right type of neo-Nazis, we will not only work with you, we will celebrate you,” Golinkin notes.

• North Korea has fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea, Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday, hours after an American nuclear-armed submarine made its first South Korean port call in decades.

• The Hwasong-18 flew 1,001km at a maximum altitude of 6,648km before splashing into the East Sea.

• South Korea says North Korea has launched a ballistic missile toward the North’s eastern waters. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff says the launch was made on Wednesday morning but gave no further details. The reported launch came a day after North Korea threatened “shocking” consequences to protest what it called a U.S. spy plane’s reconnaissance activity near its territory. The United States and South Korea dismissed the North’s accusations and urged it to refrain from any acts or rhetoric that raises animosities.

• North Korea conducted a missile test on Wednesday, as leaders of South Korea and Japan were set to meet on the sidelines of a NATO summit to discuss threats including the nuclear-armed North.

• Both the missiles appeared to have fallen outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

• This may give leader Kim Jong Un more leverage in his dealings with the Biden administration.

• The submarine made a port call as part of Washington’s effort to show its commitment to defending its East Asian ally.

War in Ukraine

• A new investigation reveals the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, where the agency operates clandestinely in what, under a formal declaration of war, would be the domain of the military. We’re joined on the show by the author of the investigation, William Arkin, a national security reporter and senior editor at Newsweek, who says that the CIA has “got its hand in a little bit of everything” in Ukraine. According to various sources, the CIA is shuttling weapons into Ukraine using a “gray fleet” of commercial aircraft that crisscrosses Central and Eastern Europe, sending personnel into Ukraine on secret missions and assisting Ukrainians with new weapons and systems, all while using Poland as its clandestine hub to coordinate its operations inside the country. At the same time, the U.S.’s nonaligned status appears to place a limit on its intelligence, keeping it in the dark on both Zelensky and Putin’s next moves.

• The proxy war on Russia is the centre piece of Biden’s foreign policy of uniting the world’s ‘democracies’ against ‘autocracies’, particularly China and Russia. He boasts repeatedly of uniting US allies, most in NATO, as never before.

• Nearly €7,000 has been raised at a charity concert by the association Your Friends. The money will be channeled to the military hospital in Ukraine for the purchase of X-ray equipment. This summer, the association organizes a concert series called “Hangar Sunsets”, where it calls for money and materials to be donated to Ukraine during four concerts.

• Russia has launched a massive series of missile attacks across Ukraine today, with reports of explosions and fresh power outages in cities including Lviv, Kyiv and Odessa. The attacks come after Ukrainian officials called on residents to evacuate the city of Kherson amidst heavy Russian artillery strikes.

• At least 20 people were injured in Russian strikes on the Ukrainian port cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa, Ukrainian officials said early on Thursday. In northwest Crimea, a Ukrainian drone attack killed a teenage girl, the Moscow-installed regional governor said on Thursday.

• Lithuania is assembling a coalition of countries to help demine Ukraine. The country’s defence minister, Arvydas Anušauskas, announced the plan on Tuesday at the Ramstein-format meeting held by countries supporting Ukraine, according to the ministry’s press release.

• Belarus says its soldiers have begun holding joint military maneuvers with fighters from Russia’s Wagner mercenary group in the city of Brest, which lies on the border with NATO member Poland.

• Australia on July 20 announced targeted sanctions against 35 Russian defense, technology, and energy entities and 10 Russian and Belarusian individuals.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led the Russian private Wagner mercenary group’s aborted mutiny last month, has appeared in a video welcoming his fighters and saying they would be headed to Africa as the company was halting its involvement in Russia’s war with Ukraine for the foreseeable future.

• Not everything is under America’s control.

• A military court in Moscow on July 19 sentenced a Ukrainian national, Oleksandr Tsylyk, to 12 years in prison after finding him guilty of plotting a terrorist act.

• Ukraine accused Moscow of specifically targeting the infrastructure for exporting food, after Russia pulled out of an agreement allowing ships carrying grain to sail past its Black Sea blockade.

• The war with Russia compounds the struggles of pediatric cancer patients and their families, but it has also prompted positive changes in treatment in Ukraine.

• Five European Union countries will extend a ban on Ukrainian grain to protect their farmers’ interests, their agriculture ministers said on July 19, but food can still move through their land to parts of the world in need after Russia pulled out of a deal allowing Black Sea shipments.

• Russia on July 20 launched a third consecutive round of air strikes on southern Ukraine, targeting port installations and grain storage facilities as well as civilian infrastructure and wounding several civilians, regional officials said.

• The money is expected to be used to buy new air-defense missile systems and other military equipment.

• Russia’s withdrawal from a U.N.-backed grain deal and its attacks on Odesa have brought the Black Sea port city’s importance back into focus.

• As a former intelligence officer, I’ve been wondering why has no one done an investigation about Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine?

• On the night of July 19, Russian troops launched missile and drone strikes on Ukraine, causing air raid sirens to go off. The Ukrainian Independent Information Agency reported explosions in Odesa and that air defense systems were activated in Kyiv.

• Two Telegram channels associated with the Wagner Group mercenary organization published a video on Wednesday apparently showing Yevgeny Prigozhin addressing his men at their new training camp in Belarus. Prigozhin continues to call Russia’s military conduct in Ukraine a “disgrace” and vowed to keep Wagner Group from returning to the war until it receives better treatment from the Russian authorities. The footage marks Prigozhin’s first video appearance since his brief mutiny in late June and perhaps the first-ever public remarks from Dmitry “Wagner” Utkin, the former military intelligence officer who reportedly founded the mercenary group that now bears his callsign.

• The Canadian government’s plan to double its semi-permanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Seems we had both been told the accident was our fault, and had spent eighteen years feeling bad about it. This time she started crying, sniffled, grabbed a tissue to wipe her eyes and said, “It’s so stupid – these stories.”

Environment

• “This is apocalyptic, end of the world, end of times stuff,” said Ms. Sims, an attorney who is representing 16 Puerto Rican municipalities that are seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for the damage caused by a series of storms, including Maria.

• Ms. Sims wiped away a tear as she surveyed the broken graves and absorbed the pain of the grieving families. But she also vowed to hold those responsible to account.

• A dangerous 19th straight day of scorching heat in Phoenix set a record for U.S. cities Tuesday, confined many residents to air-conditioned safety and turned the usually vibrant metropolis into a ghost town.

• Local temperature records were set Tuesday at several monitoring stations in the south of France including in the Alps and Pyrenees mountains, the French weather office said.

• On June 29, the air quality in Detroit was among the worst in the world. “Outside it smelled like burnt plastic, almost like trash,” said UAW member Cody Zaremba, who works at a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan. He and his co-workers were experiencing coughing, runny noses, watery […]

• By Poornima Weerasekara Beijingers baked under crippling summer heat on Wednesday as China’s capital kept up a record-breaking streak of four weeks of highs above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

Wildlife/Nature

• The woman claimed the bar-headed goose had frightened her child.

Overpopulation

• China’s birth rate last year fell to 6.77 births per 1,000 people, from 7.52 births in 2021.

• The river had touched an all-time high of 208.66 metres last Thursday before the water level began receding gradually.

• But here lies part of the problem. To reserve space for spring snowmelt, reservoir managers must release water that should be stored, then used later as drinking water or for irrigating farmland, or even for recreation.

• We should bank that extra rainfall and snowmelt so that in future drought years we have savings to draw from. Instead, without the space to store that water, the means to transport it to reservoirs that do have space or to improve environmental conditions — that surplus water ultimately ends up in the ocean.

• Water scarcity happens when communities can’t fulfill their water needs, either because supplies are insufficient or infrastructure is inadequate. Today, billions of people face some form of water stress.

• “It is settling in to a longer duration event,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “What you see there is going to be a fact of life for some time to come.”

• I don’t pay much attention to awareness days, but I make an exception for World Population Day, first observed on 11 July 1987 when the global population reached approximately 5 billion.

• We are now at about 8 billion and still increasing by some 80 million every year – roughly the population of Germany. While the global rate of growth has decreased markedly in recent decades, the increase in absolute numbers has not reduced significantly due to the high total population. For instance, it took 12 years to add 1 billion people between 1999 and 2011 (giving us 7 billion), but still only 11-12 years to add the next billion (even while the rate of growth decreased).

• Humans have never added 1 billion people more quickly.

Finance

• Britain’s stubbornly high inflation rate has come to symbolize a deeper economic malaise — a morass of problems, some new, others longstanding, that are stymying Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

• Bank experts held a cautiously optimistic view that eased inflation in the US and Europe could lead to a better performance for the end of the year.

• China became a powerhouse on the back of foreign investment; today that investment is far more cautious.

• Mr Liu Zhongtian, who founded Zhongwang Group and built it into Asia’s biggest maker of aluminum extrusion products while launching himself onto the Forbes list of China’s richest billionaires, now finds himself under legal restraint with his company in bankruptcy and much of his wealth evaporated. What went wrong?

• A senior public servant who oversaw the unlawful robodebt scheme has been stood down from her position at the Department of Defence following the royal commission findings.

• Kathryn Campbell, who was previously the secretary of human services and later the foreign affairs department, has been involuntarily stood down from her advisory role at defence, AAP has confirmed.

• House Republicans are raising unsubstantiated allegations against President Joe Biden over his family’s finances. GOP lawmakers summoned IRS whistleblowers to testify publicly for the first time about claims the Justice Department improperly interfered with a tax investigation into Biden’s son Hunter. Lawmakers heard from the two IRS agents assigned to Hunter Biden case. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty recently to misdemeanor tax charges in what Republicans have derided as a “sweetheart” deal. House Republicans are deepening their own investigation, making broad claims of corruption and wrongdoing by the Bidens that they acknowledge are not proven. The Justice Department has denied the whistleblowers’ allegations.

• A pair of IRS whistleblowers testified to Congress that the Justice Department slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden and ignored recommendations to file felony tax charges, instead striking a plea deal that will allow the president’s son to avoid prison time.

• A fall in petrol and diesel prices helped ease inflation in June

• Britain’s Conservative government faces a morass of problems, some new, others longstanding, that are stymying Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

• The larger-than-expected slowdown, led by motor vehicle fuel prices, offers some relief to the government and the Bank of England.

• More people are being forced to use buy now pay later services to pay for basics such as food and petrol, as the cost of living and inflation continue to rise.

• A new survey of financial counsellors found more than 80 per cent said clients were using buy now pay later for general retail.

• After changing its top leadership and merging its Swedish and Norwegian production units, Viaplay, the listed Scandinavian streamer, has announced that it will lay off 25% of its workforce as it plans to focus on its core Nordic and Dutch business, as well as sports and international distribution. Approximately 450 jobs will be axed as part of the layoff plan.

• Filippa Wallestam, chief commercial officer for the Nordics, is departing the org. Wallestam has been a leading force behind the streamer’s output in ambitious scripted originals, including the banner’s dive in English-language content. Viaplay will not be totally pulling out of originals but will be focusing on Nordic unscripted originals. Going forward, the streamer intends on delivering approximated 10 scripted Viaplay series or movies per year, as per the outline of the content plan for 2024. It’s a massive reduction from the previous output which included at least 40 original productions per year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Today marks the end of World Economic Forum’s 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, the three-day-long meeting in Tianjin, China known as “Summer Davos”. Really, the very fact this meeting exists should be the beginning and end of the “China are opposing globalism” conversation, but alas it likely won’t be.

• The official ‘no’ campaign against a First Nations voice has been accused of racism by two Indigenous groups, one of which opposes the referendum.

• The Blak Sovereign Movement, supported by independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, released its critique of the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns on Thursday.

• Keir Starmer’s determination to use his refusal to alleviate child poverty as the issue with which to demonstrate his macho Thatcherite credentials, has provided one of those moments when blurred perceptions crystallise.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• One in ten adults used Tiktok for news in 2023, putting it on a par with The Guardian.

• One in ten people aged over 16 (10%) said they used the video app for news[sic] in 2023, placing it ahead of BBC Radio 1 (8%) and Channel 5 (8%) for the first time, and on a par with The Guardian (10%).

• What isn’t changing, not one bit, is the otherworldly spin from fossil fuel lobbyists and spinmasters, one of whom had the tone-deaf audacity this week to insist it would be “dangerous and irresponsible” not to increase fossil fuel production into the indefinite future.

• MINISTER of Economic Affairs Wille Rydman (PS) has stated that some actors are feeding false claims about the Finnish government to the international media.

• The tech press often gets called out for lazy journalism, and here we have yet another example. On Monday, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri posted that due to an influx of spam on Threads (and there’s been a lot), the company was tightening up its rate limits:

• Last week, we promised an upcoming episode featuring a conversation with Cory Doctorow — and that conversation has been recorded and is arriving next week! But we decided to take a brief intermission this week, since things in the social media landscape are changing so quickly. Mike recently appeared on The Neoliberal Podcast with Jeremiah Johnson to talk about the ongoing nonsense at Twitter, the dawn of Meta’s Threads, the situation at Reddit, and all the other chaos engulfing the world of social media. You can listen to the entire conversation right here on this week’s episode.

• CGTN was sanctioned for four 2019 editions of The World Today and one of China 24.

• According to flight navigation data, the plane has not flown since Feb 21.

• COVID-19 misinformation has been coming at me (and everyone) so fast and furious that to me it seems like only yesterday that I was addressing the resurrection and repurposing of an old antivax claim that SV40 had contaminated COVID-19 vaccines, making them carcinogenic. It wasn’t, though. It was well over a month and a half ago. As you might recall, at the time an microbiologist turned COVID-19 conspiracy theorist named Kevin McKernan had, either cluelessly or intentionally, confused simian virus-40 (SV40) that had contaminated live attenuated virus polio vaccines 60 years ago, leading to an old antivax claim that polio vaccines cause cancer with the SV40 promoter, a DNA element from the virus that, when in front of a gene, can stimulate cells to make a lot of that gene’s product, and then fear mongered about it. As I said at the time, it was almost as though McKernan, his background in microbiology and (apparently) genomics notwithstanding, either did not know the difference between a promoter sequence and an actual gene or, more likely, knew the difference but also knew that his audience didn’t know the difference but was aware of the polio vaccine/SV40 story.

Censorship/Free Speech

• From Judge Nina Wang yesterday in Doe v. Roe (D. Colo.); note that I filed an objection to plaintiff’s motion for pseudonymity: According to the allegations in the Complaint …, Plaintiff and Defendant dated for nearly a year while enrolled at Tulane University …. After their relationship ended in October 2021, Defendant complained about Plaintiff’s…

• Hollywood, K-Pop blockbusters anger Hanoi with maps reflecting Beijing’s position on disputed waters.

• Veteran trade unionist is one of eight wanted by police

• July 06, 2023 4:10 PM

• The move comes after criticism from fans that the website used a map that showed Beijing’s claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including parts claimed by Vietnam

• The artist delivers a hard-hitting series of paintings inspired by the 2019 Hong Kong protests

• “Officials must also uphold the right to peaceful protest as provided in Kenya’s Constitution and refrain from use of excessive force,” said Nyamu-Mathenge. “We call for immediate, independent investigations into the deaths and injuries of protestors in Kenya, as well as full accountability for those responsible.”

• Widespread use of excessive force has been reported in Kenya over recent weeks, including an incident in which some 53 primary school children were hospitalized after security forces deployed tear gas in a Nairobi classroom. Up to 23 people have reportedly been killed during the protests, according to the UN Human Rights Office.

• Kenyans are divided over the protests, with some backing them, saying the high cost of living is unsustainable: “Kenyans are personally defending themselves, arguing against the imposed taxes. The salary you are paid against what you are spending, there is nothing important you can do for yourself as a human being,” William Musembi told the Reuters news agency.

• Jordan’s intelligence services have long had a notorious reputation for surveilling, monitoring and punishing Jordanians advocating for any kind of reform in the country, but Abdullah’s abuse in February of this year was one of the first signs that they dared to take such harsh measures against activists living abroad. And he was not alone. DAWN has uncovered at least 10 other cases just this year of transnational repression by Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID), which directly reports to King Abdullah II, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East. The GID, which has a dedicated division to spy on Jordanians, has been harassing, intimidating and punishing activists abroad, whose numbers in exile have increased in the face of the country’s spiraling domestic repression. Hundreds of teachers, journalists, academics, lawyers and even truck drivers who protested against corruption and government mismanagement have been arrested in recent years. Jordanians abroad thought they had found freedom and space to advocate for change in the kingdom and establish democracy and human rights organizations like the Gathering of Jordan’s Sons in Exile and the Democratic Platform.

• A series of videos posted by One Baghdad, a popular Telegram channel that supports Sadr, showed people gathering around the embassy around 1 a.m. on Thursday (2200 GMT on Wednesday) and storming the embassy complex around an hour later.

• Later videos showed smoke rising from a building in the embassy complex. Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the videos.

• The Swedish foreign ministry said staff at its embassy in Baghdad “are in safety” after the embassy was stormed and set alight in protest against the expected burning of a Koran in Sweden on Thursday.

• The Swedish foreign ministry’s press office also told Reuters that Iraqi authorities have the responsibility to protect diplomatic missions and staff.

• Iraqi riot police fired water cannons to break up the protests while security forces armed with electric batons chased protesters, an AFP photographer on the scene reported.

• [...]

• “The Iraqi authorities are responsible for the protection of diplomatic missions and their staff,” The Swedish Foreign Ministry said in a statement to AFP, adding that attacks on embassies and diplomats “constitute a serious violation of the Vienna Convention”.

• The Swedish and Finnish embassies are located very close to each other in a walled compound within the city of Baghdad.

• “The Iraqi authorities are responsible for the protection of diplomatic missions and their staff”, the ministry said, adding that attacks on embassies and diplomats “constitute a serious violation of the Vienna Convention”.

• Several trucks to extinguish the fire had arrived at the embassy, where skirmishes between Iraqi security forces and demonstrators had broken out, an AFP photographer said.

• “We condemn all attacks on diplomats and staff from international organizations,” the ministry said. “Attacks on embassies and diplomats constitute a serious violation of the Vienna Convention. Iraqi authorities have the responsibility to protect diplomatic missions and diplomatic staff.”

• Iraq’s Foreign Ministry also issued a statement condemning the attack, without explaining how it allowed the breach to happen or identifying who carried out the assault.

• The videos showed dozens of men climbing over the fence at the complex, with the sound of them trying to break down a front door. Another showed what appeared to be a small fire being set.

• Sweden called the attack on the embassy a serious violation of the Vienna convention and called on Iraqi authorities to “protect diplomatic missions and staff”.

• While the Swedish police have rejected several recent applications for anti-Quran demonstrations, courts have overruled those decisions, saying they infringed on freedom of speech.

• “If you don’t go away, we will kill you,” Santorelli cited one of the aggressors as saying. The group also warned the journalists not to set foot on the island again.

• Santorelli filed a criminal complaint to the police who identified and charged two alleged perpetrators. “Threats and insults unfortunately have happened previously, but we’ve never been prevented from working before”, he told CPJ.

• From New York trial judge Shlomo Hagler’s opinion released today in Gu v. The Verge: (you can also read Gu’s argument to the contrary, and the underlying article): Plaintiff Dr. Eugene Gu, appearing pro se in this media defamation case, is an online activist involved in a series of controversies, ranging from a Congressional investigation…

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• TELE1 TV’s Chief Editor, Merdan Yanardağ, faced trial on charges of “insulting the president” due to his article series titled “Fascism and Islamist Fascism,” published in BirGün newspaper. During the hearing yesterday at İstanbul 2nd Criminal Court, the prosecutor demanded a sentence of up to 8 years and 2 months in prison for the journalist.

• The group pointed out that even journalists visiting European Union countries for professional duties are granted short-term visas, a situation they described as burdensome and financially unsustainable, calling for a resolution.

• Morocco’s highest court upheld the journalists’ sentences on Tuesday. The two were arrested in separate incidents in 2020; Raissouni is serving five years on a sexual assault conviction; and Radi is serving six years for sexual assault and undermining state security. Both deny the allegations and local press freedom advocates have told CPJ that they see the convictions as retaliation for their critical reporting.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Lawyer Jayarubbiny Jayaraj said Section 498 of the Penal Code violates women’s right to equality before the law.

• Thousands of Iranians, including active and retired teachers and cultural figures, have added their signatures to an online petition calling for the release of scores of educators who have been imprisoned in recent months for their support of protesters demanding more freedoms.

• Swatch claimed Home Ministry’s officers had acted “illegally, irrationally, with procedural impropriety”.

• July 13, 2023 2:18 PM

• It is expected to be similar to Singapore’s Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act.

• A ham-fisted approach could harm ruling parties desperate to win over Malay, Muslim majority.

• An Umno official had asked Dr Mahathir to stop fanning racial sentiments.

• The worst wildfire season in Canadian history is displacing Indigenous communities from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, blanketing them in thick smoke, destroying homes and forests and threatening important cultural activities like hunting, fishing and gathering native plants.

• Thousands of fires have scorched more than 42,000 square miles (110,000 square kilometers) across the country so far. On Tuesday, almost 900 fires were burning— most of them out of control — according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre website.

• The case began on April 18 at the Walmart on Sheridan Boulevard in Westminster. A store employee watched a man walk out without paying for a $199 speaker and called police. The man got into a black Subaru Outback outfitted with Soza’s expired Texas license plate.

• Dozens of Afghan women protested a beauty salon ban on Wednesday after the Taliban ordered their closure nationwide. Security forces used fire hoses, tasers and shot their guns into the air to break up the protest.

• The Taliban said earlier this month they were giving all salons in Afghanistan one month to wind down their businesses and close shop, drawing concern from international officials worried about the impact on female entrepreneurs. The Taliban say they are outlawing salons allegedly because they offer services forbidden by Islam and cause economic hardship for grooms’ families during wedding festivities.

• “Yes, they were very violent. They fired shots in the air and sprayed water on us. They beat the girls. They took their mobile phones,” one woman told Radio Azadi through WhatsApp.

• There was no official information regarding the charges that led to the arrest of Rahimian, who has previously been detained for his role as an educator at the online Baha’i University. He was sentenced in 2011 to a five-year term of punitive imprisonment for his association with the faith. He was released in September 2017.

• The recent usage of psychological treatment and other controversial punishments such as being made to wash corpses has outraged rights activists, who accuse the judiciary of disregarding human rights.

• Azadeh Samadi’s sentence, issued by Tehran’s Criminal Court on July 18, stipulates that she must visit psychiatric centers “every two weeks” for treatment for an “anti-social disease,” culminating in a “certificate of health” to be presented to authorities, according to Iranian media.

• That was May 2021. Three months later, the Taliban took power and shut down schools for girls and restricted the rights of women.

• Earlier this year, the Taliban confirmed it will ban women’s beauty salons in Afghanistan because they offered services forbidden by Islam.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Kaushal Mahan, Vice President, Chase India, shared his views on how the structures for Web 3.0 should be. “We need to move out from traditional regulatory structures to optimum structures. How can we do it? We need to look for a hub and spoke model, which we have been suggesting. The nodal agency is looking at the high risks associated with Web 3.0 and also looking at the existing resolutions. How do you encourage innovations – by helping startups and generating more funds.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Netflix has been on the receiving end of much of the vitriol surrounding the strike, primarily from writers who say the economics of the streaming era have eroded their working conditions and hurt their overall compensation. The company already contended with angry shareholders last month, when they voted to reject lucrative pay packages for the company’s top executives. A rosy earnings report could certainly inflame those on the picket lines.

Monopolies

• Organizers of Farm Aid 2023 slammed Ticketmaster on Twitter for its buggy ticketing process. The September event takes place in Indiana, with general ticket sales happening this weekend. But numerous fans took to social media to complain about the checkout process, prompting organizers to call out Ticketmaster on social media.

• Microsoft and Activision Blizzard said on Wednesday that they were delaying a $69 billion merger as the two companies scrambled to get final approval from British antitrust regulators.

• The new extension, set for Oct. 18, signals that the companies believe they will complete the deal but need more time to satisfy regulators’ concerns.

• The guidelines — which generally provide a road map for whether regulators block or approve deals — show the Biden administration’s commitment to an aggressive antitrust agenda aimed at curtailing the power of companies like Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon.

• The guidelines, which aren’t enforced by law, follow a losing streak in the courts. A ruling last week prevented the F.T.C. from delaying the closing of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game maker Activision Blizzard. In January, a court sided against the F.T.C. in its lawsuit to stop Meta’s purchase of Within, a virtual reality app maker.

Trademarks

• Taco John’s, the regional chain that has “Taco Tuesday” trademarked, announced Tuesday that it’s ending its fight in defending the phrase and will “abandon” it because it doesn’t want to pay the legal fees that come with a fight against Taco Bell.

• Taco Bell filed a petition in May with the US Patent and Trademark office to cancel the trademark owned by rival Taco John’s for 34 years because Taco Bell claims the commonly used phrase “should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat and celebrate tacos.”

• Taco John’s CEO Jim Creel said it would have cost as much as $1 million to defend the trademark, The Wall Street Journal first reported.

• Flashback: Taco Bell filed legal petitions in mid-May aiming to cancel the trademark registration that its small Wyoming-based competitor has owned since 1989.

• While Taco John’s has abandoned the trademark fight, the company did issue a challenge to Taco Bell and other competitors. Instead of spending money on the trademark dispute, Taco John’s is pledging $100 per location, or about $40,000, to the nonprofit Children of Restaurant Employees (CORE), which provides financial aid to restaurant workers when they, a spouse or their children face a life-altering crisis.

Copyrights

• This book by Hokusai assembles images of famous Japanese and Chinese warriors, both historical and legendary.

• On a voyage from England to Bombay, C. V. Raman penned a short paper that forever changed how we see the sea.

• Strike 3 Holdings and an alleged BitTorrent pirate were scheduled to appear before a jury in a Florida federal court this week. These types of lawsuits rarely make it to a full trial and this case did nothing to upend the status quo. The adult entertainment company and defendant reached a confidential settlement at the eleventh hour, but with both parties reportedly happy with the outcome, who takes the moral victory remains unclear.

• Telefonica is recognized as one of the largest telecoms companies in the world but as owner of Movistar and 50% owner of Virgin Media, it also has significant subscription TV rights to protect. This week Telefonica announced an extended partnership with anti-piracy company Nagra, with the aim of boosting capabilities to identify and disrupt large-scale pirate IPTV services. Telefonica, meanwhile, has tools of its own under development.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

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