● 07.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/07/2023: Phone Sales Down, Microsoft Still Trying to Distract From Breach

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• I want to start this post by saying how sorry I am to hear about the struggles Gary and his family have been having of late. I send nothing but love and support. It sounds trite, but I genuinely mean when I say that Gary is good civ. I hope things pick up soon, because good people deserve good things. ♡

• Catching up on some of his videos (which you should all watch and subscribed to!), I remembered he recently discussed the state of the Linux desktop. He mentioned an angle I hadn’t considered before.

• GaryH Tech: What’s going on with Linux

• Does a nice looking GUI really matter? To me, not really. But it will to a lot of people. Because the real problem that happens here, if people aren’t going to use it as much because its not as pretty looking…

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

Audiocasts/Shows

• In our Innards section we talk browsers

• And finally, the feedback In “Check This Out” a link to a cool project and a YouTube video worth giving a lookDownload

Graphics Stack

• As usual, this month has been rich in Wayland-related activities. Rose has continued building and upstreaming better frame scheduling infrastructure for wlroots, you can read more on her blog. I’ve resurrected an old patch to make wlroots behave better when the GPU is under high load. In my testing this improves latency a lot some specific scenarios and some specific hardware, but doesn’t help on some others. It’s not super clear if anything can be done about this, it may be that we are hitting some hardware limitations here: GPUs don’t know how to preempt tasks very well.

• I’ve also started working on explicit synchronization again. This was previously blocked on a hard problem: drivers may want to use a new kind of synchronization fence primitive (user-space memory fences) and it wasn’t clear how the current primitives (drm_syncobj) would hold up. We’ve been talking about this new primitive for a few years but unfortunately it’s a complicated matter and nothing new has surfaced. However, after discussing with Daniel Vetter, we’ve come to the conclusion that the kernel will provide backwards compatibility for drm_syncobj, so we can just stop worrying and use that as the basis for explicit synchronization protocols and implementations. Moreover, NVIDIA engineers are interested in helping with this effort, so I hope we can keep the momentum and join forces to push the new protocol, APIs and implementations to the finish line.

Applications

• Handicraft is a term that describes many different types of work where practical and decorative objects are made by hand or by using only simple tools. Depending on your location, the phrase ‘arts and crafts’ may be more commonly used.

• dutree is a free, open-source, fast command-line tool for analyzing disk usage, written in the Rust programming language…

Instructionals/Technical

• In the Linux environment, there are various web browsers to choose from, each offering its own set of features, speed, and security measures. As such, you might find yourself wanting to switch your default browser to one that best suits your browsing habits or requirements. Changing your default browser in Linux can also streamline your workflow by ensuring links open in your browser of choice.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Debian 12. Snap is a cutting-edge packaging format that offers numerous benefits over traditional package management systems. With Snap, applications and their dependencies are bundled together, ensuring seamless installation, easy updates, and secure isolation.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, PlayOnLinux is a free and open-source software that simplifies the installation and usage of Windows applications on Linux systems.

• In this article, we will demonstrate how to streamline the application deployment process on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

• This article spotlights alternative tools to touch, a command to change file timestamps.

• Here are a few tips and tweaks to save your time by combining the terminal and the file manager in Linux.

• According to the official website http://www.oxid.it/cain.html , Cain and Abel software is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kinds of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking hashes passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force, and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, recovering wireless network keys, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analysing routing protocols.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This week, the PR to implement Display for Value, Array, Structure, Dict & Maybe has been merged. Thus, there is a much nicer way now upstream to display zbus::Value, similar to GVariant. With this blocker cleared out, the zbus port MR has also been merged, fully porting the Bustle rewrite to zbus.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Thanks to madanadam for more Turkish translations:

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=94373#p94373

• Symphytum simple database app now has menu translations for “all” languages:

• https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/acf064ac3e46b31aca99b28d6d59c8b8a07f5a48

• …note, some lines seem to have empty translations, but that is just a limitation of the font.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Since Linux began more than 30 years ago, it has been instrumental in space and planetary research.  There is truly a connection between Linux and space research.  Linux is widely used in space research and exploration due to its flexibility, reliability, and open-source nature.

Fedora Family / IBM

• A blog post from Software Freedom Conservancy.

• This past weekend, July 13-16th, 2023, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) hosted and ran a new conference, FOSSY (Free and Open Source Software Yearly) in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was glad to host the keynote panel discussion on the recent change made by Red Hat (now a subsidiary of IBM) regarding the public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21.2 is available to upgrade now. Also learn a thing or two about systemd in this FOSS Weekly edition.

Open Hardware/Modding

• While I didn’t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn’t be upgrade as you would do.You can’t upgrade your memory, can’t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it’s more for tinkering as the name suggests.

• Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK.

• In the world of IoT, staying informed about your project’s status and events is crucial. Imagine receiving prompt notifications when your temperature sensor detects a critical temperature, or when your security camera detects motion in a restricted area.

• Edgeble AI’s Neurable Compute Module 2, or Neu2 for shorts, is a system-on-module for computer vision applications based on the Rockchip RV1126 quad-core Cortex-A7 camera processor that follows the 96Boards SoM form factor. I first found the Neu2 and Neu6 (Rockchip RK3588) in the release log for the Linux 6.3 kernel, but at the time I found there was not enough information about those. The specifications for the Neu6 are still wrong (e.g. “64-bit processor with 4x Cortex-A7 core”) at the time of writing, so I’ll check the Neu2 system-on-module and its industrial version – the Neu2K based on RK1126K – for which we have more details.

• At some point I will do a head to head comparison of HiFive Unmatched, Vision Five 2, Lichee Pi 4A, and Raspberry Pi 4B. I believe this little Lichee board below might win!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The data science field is continuously expanding as our digitized technologies produce unprecedented volumes of information.

Events

• I was really excited to have the opportunity to meet some of the GIMP developers in-person after many conversations with them over IRC in the past, and Wilberweek presented not only a great opportunity to do just that, but also to visit the Headquarters of another of my favourite FOSS projects, the unstoppable freedom-centric software juggernaut that is the Blender project.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Be it for personalization, security, or any other way, Linux web browsers come as good as Linux distros do. Here are 11 of these, ready to bring you every single page that the internet has to offer!

• When it comes to personalization, Vivaldi has everything. For one, it lets you move where you want your tabs should go. You can choose the top bar, bottom bar, or even either left or right side! Better yet, it lets you do gestures with your own mouse, making it an even better choice for touch-enabled monitor setups.

Programming/Development

• Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

• We have released Qt 6.5.2 today. As a patch release, Qt 6.5.2 does not introduce any new features but contains about 290 bug fixes, security updates, and other improvements to the top of the Qt 6.5.1 release. See more information about the most important changes and bug fixes from Qt 6.5.2 release note.

• Next.js is a popular React framework that simplifies the process of building server-side rendered React applications. It provides a standardized structure for building React applications, along with features such as automatic code splitting, server-side rendering, and static site generation. These features make it ideal for building high-performance web applications.

• Next.js is a popular open-source framework for building server-side rendered React applications. It provides a seamless developer experience with features like automatic code splitting, server-side rendering, and optimized performance.

• Next.js is an open-source React front-end development web framework created by Vercel. React is a popular JavaScript library used for building user interfaces and Next.js provides additional features for server-side rendering, static site generation, and automatic code splitting.

• The seventh release of the still pretty new qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

• qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.

• This release brings updates from the just-released QuantLib 1.31 version.

Python

• Flask is a lightweight web framework for Python, known for its simplicity, flexibility, and fine-grained control. Unlike more ‘heavyweight’ frameworks like Django, Flask does not come with many built-in tools or components, which means that developers have the freedom to choose the most suitable tools for their projects.

Leftovers

• An Australian sailor and his dog, who were stranded at sea for three months, were rescued by a Mexican tuna boat in the Pacific. Tim Sheddock was in good physical shape and expressed his gratitude to the captain and fishing company for saving his life.

Hardware

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• “…FAO and its partners are conducting training programs for agriculture extension officers (AEOs)…”

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Employees at the LGBTQ dating company Grindr Inc. are petitioning to unionize, extending a wave of organizing among tech workers.

• Microsoft is investigating an ongoing Exchange Online outage preventing customers from sending emails and triggering 503 errors on affected systems.

• Although the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft is expected to bring about significant changes within the company, the exact details of these changes have yet to be fully revealed. As the gaming industry continues to evolve and adapt to new trends and developments, it remains to be seen how Microsoft’s ownership will reshape the future of Activision and its various franchises, including the Overwatch League.

• Around 50 Activision Blizzard employees have been laid off from the eSports team, causing some speculation about the division moving forward. The Overwatch League has been hit by recent changes, and the latest Activision Blizzard layoffs could play a role in the future of the popular eSports competition scene.

• Overwatch 2′s launch received a mixed reception due to the many changes that the live-service game made to the original formula. Although the Overwatch League has faded in popularity compared to its standing during the first game, some fans still follow their favorite teams and anticipate each eSports match. With Activision Blizzard looking to amend the Overwatch League agreement terms around the same time as these layoffs, the two may be related.

Linux Foundation

• Announced today, Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is bringing together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet’s ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective.

• Cloud-native applications are scalable, resilient and flexible – but they also introduce a new set of user management challenges.

Security

• Over a dozen vulnerabilities patched by GE in its Cimplicity HMI/SCADA product are reminiscent of ICS attacks conducted by the Russian Sandworm group.

• Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick has died after a battle with pancreatic cancer.  At the time of his death, he was Chief Hacking Officer at security awareness training firm KnowBe4.

• /blockquote>

• Citrix has patched several vulnerabilities, including CVE-2023-3519, a critical remote code execution zero-day that has been exploited in attacks.

• Representatives of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have recently unveiled a U.S. national IoT security label at the White House called the “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” to inform consumers about the security, safety, and privacy of a specific IoT and Smart Home device. IoT security has been a problem for years with routers shipping with telnet enabled with default usernames and passwords, vulnerabilities in SDKs, unencrypted passwords transmitted over the network, millions of devices with older microcontrollers without built-in hardware security features, etc… There have been industry efforts to solve this such as the Arm PSA initiative, as well as regulations to prevent default usernames/passwords in new devices, but nothing about IoT security that can help a consumer find out if a device is supposed to be secure or not.

• I found a phishing email that delivered a RAR archive (password protected).

• Citrix released details on a new vulnerability on their ADC (Application Delivery Controller) yesterday (18 July 2023), CVE-2023-3519. This is an unauthenticated RCE (remote code execution), which means an attacker can run arbitrary code on your ADC without authentication. This affects ADC hosts configured in any of the “gateway” roles (VPN virtual server, ICA Proxy, CVPN, RDP Proxy), which commonly face the internet, or as an authentication virtual server (AAA server), which is usually visible only from internal or management subnets.

• The initiative has been proposed by Federal Communications Commission chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and the agency will use a QR code that links to to a national registry of certified devices.

• The NIST will also start working on a program to identify consumer-grade routers that are better able to withstand bids to eavesdrop, steal passwords, and attack other devices and high-value networks.

• Oracle has released 508 new security patches as part of the July 2023 CPU, including more than 70 that address critical vulnerabilities

• Gandalf is an interactive LLM game where the goal is to get the chatbot to reveal its password. There are eight levels of difficulty, as the chatbot gets increasingly restrictive instructions as to how it will answer. It’s a great teaching tool.

• I am stuck on Level 7.

• Feel free to give hints and discuss strategy in the comments below. I probably won’t look at them until I’ve cracked the last level.

• Facing intense pressure after Chinese APT hack, Microsoft plans to expand logging defaults for lower-tier M365 customers.

• Under fire for security failures and premium pricing for security features, Microsoft said it would make logging tools more widely available.

• “Additional Audit Premium features include longer default retention periods and automation support for importing log data into other tools for analysis.”

• Cl0P first breached PwC in May. The firm acknowledged it had suffered an intrusion through MOVEit, telling the Australian Financial Review on 19 June: “We are aware that MOVEit, a third-party transfer platform, has experienced a cyber security incident which has impacted hundreds of organisations including PwC.”

• While Cl0p has divided the files stolen from PwC into 11 batches and listed all on the dark web, only four of these batches have been listed on the clear web.

• {loadposition sam08}There is a spelling mistake in the URL of the site on the clear web; technology industry sources told iTWire that this could be intentional, with a threat to correct it, and thus make the site easier to find, serving as an additional means of leverage.

• In its statement about the breach on Wednesday, Estee Lauder said: “After becoming aware of the incident, the company proactively took down some of its systems and promptly began an investigation with the assistance of leading third-party cyber security experts.

• “The company is also co-ordinating with law enforcement. Based on the current status of the investigation, the company believes the unauthorised party obtained some data from its systems, and the company is working to understand the nature and scope of that data.

• Nearly 10 years ago my colleague wrote a cracking post on exposed Git repositories.

• Attackers are exploiting two path traversal vulnerabilities in the Stagil navigation for Jira – Menus & Themes plugin.

• Today, I noticed the following URL on our “first seen URLs” page:

• Norwegian recycling giant Tomra says internal systems have been taken offline to contain an extensive cyberattack.

• Adobe releases a second round of patches for recent ColdFusion vulnerabilities, including flaws that have been exploited in attacks.

Defence/Aggression

• Twenty-seven people in the Democratic Republic of Congo were sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping passengers who had the misfortune of getting into their fake taxis. But despite this mass sentencing, which took place between July 5 and 7, people in Kinshasa are still terrified by the rising number of kidnappings taking place on public transport. The police, however, are downplaying the alarming situation, calling them “ordinary security issues”.

• Hong Kong national security police have questioned seven relatives and acquaintances of two wanted activists, according to local media, in the latest move against eight overseas-based pro-democracy figures for whom arrests warrants and HK$1 million bounties were issued.

• Security will be heightened ahead of Thursday night’s opening Women’s World Cup game after a gunman killed two people at a downtown construction site in Auckland, roughly 12 hours ahead of co-host New Zealand’s match against Norway. The Norway team’s hotel is located within a short distance of the shooting, which occurred in the tourist area of the city near the harbor ferry terminal. Norway captain Maren Mjelde says teammates were awakened by a helicopter hovering outside the hotel.

• ‘It is impossible to try to transform China,’ Wang Yi tells Kissinger.

• Since Lebanon is “not a country of asylum,” its authorities hope to facilitate the safe and dignified return of the displaced Syrians to their territory of origin.

• While the number went up by 0.2% over the last three months, the figure is down 5.1% from the same time last year.

War in Ukraine

• High-end cars continue to be shipped to Russia via Lithuania despite sanctions placed on luxury goods, the LRT Investigation Team reports.

• The Kremlin has criticised Lithuania for wanting NATO troops on its soil, falsely claiming that Russia has never moved bases toward Europe. Polygraph.info and Voice of America, partners of LRT English, report.

• On Wednesday, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda met with the newly elected president of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, in Vilnius where he urged the Baltics to speed up the decoupling from the Russian-controlled power grid.

• Arrests happened last month, a day after authorities said two had gone missing.

• The International Gymnastics Federation (IGF) has decided to admit Russian and Belarusian athletes to competitions under a neutral team, the organization announced in a press release on July 19.

• A pro-Russian activist with close ties to Moscow works for an AfD member of the federal parliament, giving him access to the seat of German democracy. Security authorities are alarmed by the man, who holds both German and Russian citizenship. Nevertheless, it seems there is little they can do.

• South African President Ramaphosa announced that Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov will represent Russia at the BRICS summit to be held from August 22.

• South Africa has announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has an outstanding arrest warrant issued in his name by the UN’s International Criminal Court (ICC), will not travel to a BRICS summit to be held in Johannesburg next month.

• THE PRESIDENT and the Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy decided yesterday to revoke the operating licence of the Russian consulate general in Turku, Southwest Finland, as of 1 October.

• The decision was made in response to the closure of the Finnish consulate general in St. Petersburg by Russia, which was an asymmetric response to the diplomat expulsions announced by Finland.

• Russia announced plans earlier this month that it was withdrawing consent for the operation of Finland’s Consulate General in St Petersburg.

• Richard Moore, the chief of MI6, said the Russian leader acted “to save his skin,” offering rare insights into the events surrounding the sudden end of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s march on Moscow.

• A nephew of the authoritarian ruler of Russia’s region of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has been made the new head of Danone’s Russian operations after President Vladimir Putin signed a decree giving the state the right to “temporarily take over” the Paris-based multinational’s subsidiary.

• Viewers of state media were told that a mutiny and other events are causes for celebration.

• The Russian leader’s decision not to go in person to a diplomatic meeting in Johannesburg spared South Africa the predicament of whether to arrest him. He has been accused by an international court of war crimes.

• The State Duma, the Russian parliament’s lower chamber, on July 19 approved in its final reading a bill allowing an experiment to introduce the Islamic banking system in the country’s four mostly Muslim-populated regions.

• After the Kremlin announced the grain deal had been terminated, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that all vessels heading toward Ukrainian ports will be considered potential carriers of military cargo starting July 20.

• Russia’s Ministry of Defense had announced that vessels heading to Ukrainian ports from the Black Sea would now be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo.

• In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material? What I wanted to know was: How did he ever get accepted into the Air Force in the first place?

• On the night of July 19, a fire broke out at a military base in the Kirovske region of annexed Crimea. At 5:00 a.m. local time, the Telegram channel Crimean Wind posted a video of the fire. Explosions can be heard in the video. At 6:00 a.m., Russian troops closed off the road to the base, reported the channel.

• Within a few hours of the July 17 attack on the Crimean Bridge, Russia’s National Antiterrorism Committee attributed the explosions to “two Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles.” A source close to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate, who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity, later confirmed this. Ever since, however, there’s been no additional proof that drones carried out the attack. We still don’t have even a leaked photograph of the weapons. There is nevertheless some circumstantial evidence to corroborate these reports: namely, videos and photos showing that the blasts hit the underside of the bridge’s roadway, as well as satellite imagery recorded a day earlier that captured six unknown vessels, five of which were headed east, roughly 75 kilometers (almost 47 miles) from Snake Island. When the satellite overhead photographed these ships, they were about 520 kilometers (almost 325 miles) away from the bridge. Beyond this limited available information, the various capacities of Ukraine’s known naval arsenal make it possible to draw a few conclusions.

• Overnight, Russian troops launched kamikaze drones and missiles at Odesa, Mykolaiv and Sumy.

• Wagner Group leadership has decided to let all former prisoners who worked as mercenaries for the military cartel go home, reports Russian independent news outlet iStories. The publication studied messages between relatives of mercenaries and Wagner representatives in private chats. Many former mercenaries are currently staying in hotels in the city of Anapa, on the Black Sea, awaiting pardons.

• Based on the recommendation of the State Security Service (VDD), Minister of Interior Māris Kučinskis has added three owners of the company Pobeda Confectionery to the list of foreigners for whom entry is prohibited in Latvia, the VDD said July 20.

• The State Duma approved a bill giving Russia’s National Guard the right to use military equipment, including heavy equipment, according to the official website of the lower house of Russia’s parliament.

• The wife and son of Alexander Zakharov, who invented Russian Lancet suicide drones, have owned an apartment in central London worth 1.5 million pounds ($1.9 million) since 2018, reports Russian independent outlet iStories.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin will not go to South Africa for the August BRICS summit, the South African presidential administration has announced. Instead, the Russian delegation will be led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

• Sergey Aksyonov, head of the administration of annexed Crimea, has reported that an “enemy UAV” struck one of the settlements in northwestern Crimea.

• Verstka reports that the Shebekino territorial defense in Belgorod region has announced that it’s recruiting women. Those wishing to join may take courses in basic military training, tactical medicine, and learn to fly drones.

Environment

• The simultaneous, record-shattering heat in the U.S., Europe and Asia may be getting all the headlines (more on these events below), but hotter and drier-than-average conditions are fueling the disaster unfolding in Canada.

• Extreme heat was forecast across the globe on Wednesday, as wildfires raged and health warnings were in place in parts of Asia, Europe and North America. Scientists have long warned that climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions mainly from burning fossil fuels, will make heatwaves more frequent, severe and deadly.

• OVER A HALF of Finns believe Finland should be a leader in the global effort to mitigate the climate emergency even if it created costs for ordinary citizens, finds a survey conducted for YLE by Taloustutkimus.

• Most (54%) of the survey respondents agreed partly or fully with the statement that the country must be a pioneer in slowing down climate change.

• US-China ties remain fragile, even as they appear to be on the mend with recent top-level meetings.

• So far this year, wildfires in Canada have devouring about 100,000 square km of land.

• Here are some figures that illustrate the complex energy relationship between the United States and China.

• In the face of climate change, women seaweed farmers in the Philippines are cultivating a lucrative alternative crop. Seaweed farming is the world’s fastest-growing form of aquaculture and the Philippines is the fourth largest producer globally.

• Over 20% of the U.S.’ population — 80 million people — are expected to face an air temperature or heat index above 105° Fahrenheit this weekend as a record-breaking heat wave persists over most of the South, the National Weather Service (NWS) warns.

• John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, emerges from talks in Beijing without a new agreement. But just talking is progress, he said.

• Average temperatures for the entire globe have been at their highest on record, scientists said.

• Climate change is already affecting the world in powerful ways. But it could also drive mass migration and reshape societies as its consequences add up.

• From gas emissions to electric vehicles, here is how the world’s two biggest economies — and polluters — compare on taking steps to confront climate change.

• The National Weather Service says that residents of the capital, as well as Jalisco, Colima and Michoacán are facing intense rains Wednesday.

Energy/Transportation

• While pledging to reduce carbon emissions, the country is greatly increasing its use of the fossil fuel to generate electricity.

• On Wednesday, July 19, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs went on the second foreign visit as president – to Lithuania, where he met with the Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda to discuss energy independence, Latvian Television reported.

• In case you didn’t know. I run a small energy company and am building a small solar farm with the money I made from selling video games. Here is the company website: http://www.positechenergy.com We made another trip to the site yesterday. Its a 350 mile round trip, and part of it was in the rain.

• The Graham Sustainability Institute is launching the Center for EmPowering Communities to foster decarbonization solutions that advance community goals and priorities.

• Australian sustainable finance and carbon market experts have warned of a massive gap in investment needed to scale up financing.

• “There is a $US3-5 trillion annual gap – out of a $US9 trillion annual need – in investment currently,” Mara Chiorean, ANZ’s director of sustainable finance, told an international forum.

Overpopulation

• The recent heatwave has exacerbated the water shortages, and aid comes only when the problem makes headlines, according to local officials and quake survivors.

Finance

• Orrick’s recent layoffs were prompted by the tech industry slowdown, according to CEO Mitch Zuklie. The firm, which cut about 90 lawyers and staff, draws about half of its overall revenue from tech work. “Things haven’t fallen off a cliff, but they haven’t been on fire,” Zulkie said

• The House Republicans are using a federal government funding bill as a way to cut public defenders, but not the prosecutors.

• Lending in Latvia is hampered by the large proportion of gray economy, which makes many businesses and households “unbankable”, Jānis Brazovskis, board member of the Finance Latvia Association, told Latvian Radio on July 20.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Hanoi is showing its usual sensitivity and insecurity, but fears of an economic slowdown may be driving it now.

• In the leaked video, the İstanbul mayor, who has been calling for a change in the party leadership, is seen discussing the party issues with other senior figures of the CHP.

• Last year, I started an e-petition suggesting we rename Victoria before hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2026. It looks like the government has gone even further, completely abolishing the event, originally known as British Empire Games. It is an odd coincidence, the minister and I both attended the same school in regional Victoria.

• It Can Always Get Worse Dept: After Margarine Trailer Queen told a crowd of young Nazi wannabes that Biden wants to “complete socialism” by addressing education, poverty, health care etc just like FDR/LBJ/Lenin, and before she called Jack Smith “a weak little bitch” for trying to arrest “the People’s president,” she unveiled a new “MAGA rap” video with one Forgiato Blow, as in coke, who took time off from bragging on “four bitches in my trailer” to laud her for “fighting for our freedom.” Whew.

Censorship/Free Speech

• We’ve already talked a bit about how Rep. Jim Jordan’s “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Government” is the exact thing it claims it seeks to stop: a part of the government that is being weaponized to attack free speech.

• Schools don’t get to censor nondisruptive off-campus speech.

• Noted Belarusian journalist and photographer Zmitser Bayarovich and his wife, Valeria, have gone on trial for taking part in mass rallies against the official results of an August 2020 presidential election that handed victory to authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In October 1912, John A. Mead, then-Governor of Vermont, gave his farewell speech to the state legislature. He addressed the problem of “our degenerates,” what he called “a class of individuals in whose mental or nervous construction there is something lacking.”

• The two countries have decided to elevate the bilateral relationship to the level of strategic partnership.

• The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) gave British Columbia, Canada port employers a 72-hour strike notice on Wednesday, just hours after the federal Labour Minister and Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) declared the ILWU’s renewed strike efforts illegal.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Deploying ZONEMD in the root zone will help increase the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS.

Monopolies

Patents

• On July 17, 2023, two months after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,838,736, owned and asserted by Better Browsing LLC.

• Unified added 5 new PATROLL contests, with a $2,000 cash prize for each, seeking prior art on the list below. The patents are owned by IQar, Inc., an NPE. The patents generally relate to power management in a vehicle engines. All 5 patents are currently being asserted against Tesla.

Trademarks

• Last fall, a few people sent me this fun video from YouTuber Allen Pan, which briefly talks about how he ended up with a MythBusters trademark for clothing and apparel. I didn’t write it up at the time because, while amusing, the discussion of the trademark (and, for that matter, copyright) issues was so confused that it was difficult to know what was accurate and what wasn’t.

Copyrights

• Intellectual property rights in the U.S. have long been a mix of state common law rights and federal statutory rights.  Patents and copyrights were established in the Constitution and enacted by the First Congress in 1790.  Those rights were fairly quickly established as exclusively federal, meaning that there is effectively no patents or copyrights offered by individual states.  Trademarks and trade secrets followed a different path – developing under state common law before later later gaining federal protections; with trade secrets moving federal most recently via the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) of 2016.  Unlike patent and copyright, trademarks and trade secrets continue to be concurrent and overlapping, meaning that state rights continue to exist and be enforceable alongside the federal right.  It is common for litigation to assert both.  With trademark law, the federal right has been around since 1870 and today occupies most of the space.  Because the federal trade secrecy right is so new (and no registration is available), it is still unclear whether we’ll see the same result.

• A few months back, I got added to a group chat of Hollywood writers/actors/directors, all seeking to understand what the fuck was going on with AI. And one topic that came up consistently early on was “will copyright protect us” and, if not, “how can copyright be changed to better protect us?” I’ve already made it clear that I’m skeptical of the various copyright lawsuits against AI companies, claiming that the training of their LLMs violated copyright law. While there are some arguments against it, it seems to me that training is the equivalent of learning from, and we’d never say that reading a book and learning from it violates copyright law. Similarly, various lawsuits about search engines and book scanning suggest a (correct) recognition that scanning copyright covered works to create new (even commercial) products is fair use.

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