● 07.22.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/07/2023: Mesa 23.1.4 and More Red Hat Rumours About Layoffs

Posted in News Roundup at 3:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Any time we mention Linux, it is a fair bet we will get a few comments from people unhappy that we didn’t refer to it as GNU/Linux or with some other appellation. To be fair, they aren’t wrong. Linux is a kernel. Much of what we think of as a Linux desktop OS is really from other sources, including, but not limited to, GNU. We thought about this after reading a report from [The Register] that Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market. Wait, what?

• If you are like us, you probably think that’s a typo. It isn’t. But the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. You know that half of the world’s desktops don’t run Linux. But maybe they mean Unix? Nope. So how can Linux have almost half of the Linux market? That’s like saying nearly half of Hackaday readers read Hackaday, right?

• Here’s the thing. The data came from statistics aggregator Statcounter. They report that desktop Linux use is about 3% of all desktop operating systems, which sounds about right. But an additional 4% are using ChromeOS, and ChromeOS is using Linux — in fact, based on Gentoo Linux and, before that, Ubuntu.

Server

• During the first half of 2023, ITPro Today readers sought information on a hodgepodge of topics, including containers, resource optimization, and Linux essentials.

Kernel Space

• The Linux File System Hierarchy Structure is governed by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, a set of guidelines that determines the structure and contents of directories in Unix-type operating systems, including Linux. These standards are maintained by the Linux Foundation.

• The File System Hierarchy starts at the root directory of the file system, from which all other directories and their contents branch out. The file system logically organizes files and folders, with each directory serving a specific purpose. I will explain the significance of various directories below.

• The Linux community faces a critical moment as Linux Kernel 6.3 reaches its end of life and a significant vulnerability is discovered. With the prompt action of the Linux kernel team, patches have been developed and backported, ensuring the security of affected systems. It is imperative that users heed the call to upgrade to Linux 6.4 to safeguard their systems from potential attacks.

• The announcement comes amidst the discovery of a critical vulnerability, dubbed StackRot (CVE-2023-3269), that affects Linux kernel versions 6.1 through 6.4. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges on compromised systems.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• Intel Has Been Leading the Race in Vulkan Driver Support, Up To 12% Performance Boost Coming In Upcoming Release

Applications

• Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure. In most places, weather changes from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season.

• This article focuses on terminal-based weather tools for Linux. We only feature free and open source software here. Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart.

Instructionals/Technical

• In programming languages, variables are named containers that store values. They are the backbone of any program, allowing us to create dynamic scripts. In Bash scripting, we have two main types of variables – Global and Local.

• In our previous article, we discussed the differences between local and global Bash variables (you can read it here). Building upon that understanding, today, we will dive deeper into the world of Bash scripting, focusing on Bash variables.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We’re hot on the heels of Akademy 2023, which proved to be a fertile space for collaboration. As a result, in addition to the background work being done to stabilize Plasma 6, a bunch of new features landed too!

• Plasma now plays a sound from the active sound theme (more on that in a bit) when a USB device is plugged in or unplugged. And this is configurable, of course!

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• By Tom Callway, VP Product Marketing In the fast-paced and ever-evolving world of technology, businesses face a crucial decision – whether to adopt a single-vendor IT strategy or embrace the potential benefits of mixed vendor environments.

• The content of the following article has been contributed by Gayathri Gandaboyina, Web Developer at the SUSE documentation team.     The team behind documentation.suse.com have unveiled an exciting new search tool powered by Google’s Programmable Search Engine.

Fedora Family / IBM

• There’s a lot going on over at Red Hat right now. Since the Linux giant was purchased by IBM in 2019, the company has been implementing massive changes to staffing and long-term policies. And w’re not done yet.

• [...]

• Then, yesterday, as the controversy over the recent changes to the Red Hat Linux source code policy raged on… I received a message from a Red Hat employee suggesting that an additional round of layoffs may be in the works.

• And one of our columnists, SJVN, blamed IBM for the RHEL drama

• Plus, our reaction to Oracle’s very spicy response to Red Hat.

• Red Hat has long been one of the leading enterprise vendors for the Linux operating system. The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (commonly known as RHEL) has been tremendously successful bringing in billions of dollars to Red Hat and its parent IBM.

• Linux is open source, which means that source code should be open and shared, which is also true for Linux enterprise distributions like RHEL. The open nature has enabled a vibrant ecosystem of so-called “RHEL clones” over the years that have taken the open-source code binaries used to build RHEL and repackaged them as their own distributions. Among the many clones is Oracle Linux, which got its start in 2006.

• SUSE takes a stand for the open-source community, announces free RHEL fork to preserve choice in enterprise Linux. A $10+ million investment reinforces commitment to innovation and supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions.

• Leading enterprise open source solutions provider SUSE, has made a bold decision to fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It’s a move that’s all about giving users more choices and driving innovation in the Linux world. What this means, is that SUSE will create and take care of a RHEL-compatible version that anyone can use, with no limitations. And to make this happen, SUSE has pledged to invest over $10 million in this project.

• CIQ—the company building the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution—announced today the launch of its CIQ Partner Program. The launch reinforces CIQ’s partner-first channel strategy as the company aims to deliver its suite of solutions and services to organizations worldwide that desire stability, seamless compatibility and cost-effectiveness for their IT infrastructure and high-performance computing needs.

• Nokia will standardize its infrastructure for building software on the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes and the Red Hat OpenStack platform.

• Lunduke’s Big Tech Show – July 7th, 2023

• Multiple sources — and signs — say the first round was only the beginning.

• IBM extended its Red Hat OpenShift platform to make it simpler to build and deploy cloud-native apps across a hybrid cloud computing environment.

• IBM Corp., which is typically the first major information technology company to report earnings each quarter, today beat profit expectations and narrowly missed revenue forecasts in its fiscal first quarter but set an optimistic tone for the rest of the year.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Vito Plantamura has successfully managed to run Stable Diffusion on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 by creating what he calls OnnxStream.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Interestingly, despite being available for Windows and macOS, the new version of Thunderbird is still MIA for most Linux users. To be clear, I’m not talking about Linux distro repositories not being updated. Rather, I’m talking about the official Flatpak version.

• [...]

• In many cases, an app’s developer does not package their software for each an every Linux distro. Instead, the distro maintainers will often package the various apps and make them available in the repos. As a result, depending on a distro’s philosophy — fast-rolling or slow and stable — new versions of software may appear almost immediately or months later. The latter is especially true for distros that emphasize stability and reliability, such as Debian and Ubuntu. Maintainers of those types of distros tend to only patch in security and bug fixes in between major releases of their distro rather than releasing major feature updates. This can help reduce issues with apps installing newer components that may break dependencies with other apps that still rely on older versions of those components.

• This is the issue that Flatpak is trying to solve. Rather than relying on, and tampering with, core system libraries, these formats bundle their own dependencies in a self-contained package. As a result, one of these apps can be installed on any distro that supports Flatpak, regardless of whether the distro is a fast-moving rolling release or a slower-moving stable one. Since all the dependencies are self-contained within the Flatpak, a user can run the latest, greatest version without fear of it conflicting with anything on their system.

• With over 52000 tests and nearly two million subtests, the Web Platform Tests are one of the most important parts of the web’s interoperability and compatibility story. Servo has long used the WPT to catch regressions and flakiness, but the suite has also played a role in our layout engine migration and guiding our way towards CSS2 conformance.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Release v2.1 adds a two new features and fix issues reported by users since last release.

• PgBouncer 1.20.0 has been released. This release deprecates the online restart feature using the -R flag, instead so_reuseport should be used for online restarts. It also introduces better support for tracking PostgreSQL settings using the new track_extra_parameters setting, which can be used to tracksearch_path in combination with Citus 12.0+. It also adds some other features such as connecting using TLS by default, forwarding error codes in the authentication phase and support for the options startup parameter. And finally it also fixes a few minor bugs.

• See https://www.pgbouncer.org/2023/07/pgbouncer-1-20-0 for more information, the detailed changelog, and download links.

• EDB is pleased to announce new releases of MongoDB, MySQL, and Hadoop (HDFS) Foreign Data Wrappers to support the upcoming PostgreSQL 16 release. These Foreign Data Wrappers allow Postgres to connect to Hadoop, MongoDB, and MySQL servers enabling you to view, join, and manage remote data all from Postgres.

Programming/Development

• You can read the original post in its original format on Rtask website by ThinkR here: fusen v0.5: Gotta inflate ’em all !

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 11!

Leftovers

• I apologise for the break in articles. There is only one of me and I have been taking a little time to recharge my batteries and give my wonderful family some of the attention they deserve. I shall be back to the mill in another week.

• It may shock some of you to know that I spend altogether too much time and money in coffee shops. They’re my favourite places in the world to write, code, and think. The vast majority of the words you’ve read here over the years come from one of these lovely places.

• One of the older establishments I frequent in my local suburb has squishy bench seats along the walls, and faux wooden tables. The leather and laminate surfaces have started to degrade slightly, but on some surfaces more than others.

• If we assume this uneven wear is the result of differences in use, we can draw some interesting data from it.

• The most degraded chair and table combo by far is at the back. It’s next to one of the large windows, is relatively secluded, and only has one other table next to it instead of two or three. It happens to be my favourite spot, and based on this pattern, its everyone else’s as well.

Science

• A rediscovered sample of frozen sediment, collected more than 50 years ago, highlights the vulnerability of Greenland’s ice sheet to a warming climate.

• A gigantic pattern on a vast timescale.

• Experts barely recognize them.

Education

• Australia’s education ministers are backing a proposed overhaul of teacher training to stem an exodus of educators from the profession.

• The recommendations made by the Teacher Education Expert Panel include strengthening teacher education programs, improving practical teaching experiences and boosting post-graduate teacher education for mid-career entrants.

Hardware

• Here’s an exercise for you: type “crystals” into your favorite search engine and see what you get. If you’re anything like us, you’ll get a bunch of pseudoscientific posts about the healing power of crystals, along with offers to buy the same at exorbitant prices. But woo-woo aside, certain crystals do have seemingly magical powers — like the ability to turn light from one color into another.

• [OZ2CPU] has an HP power supply that is about 30 years old. It looks brand new, though, and has three outputs and includes tracking for the adjustable positive and negative supply. After a quick demo of the unit’s features, he tears it all down so we can see inside. You can catch the video below.

• Having a chemistry lab fully stocked with all necessary equipment is the dream of students, teachers, and professors alike, but a lot of that equipment can be prohibitively expensive. Even in universities, labs are often left using old or worn-out equipment due to cost. So one could imagine that in high schools this is even a more pronounced problem. High school student [Aidan Miller] has solved this problem with at least one piece of lab equipment, bringing the cost for a centrifuge down to around $10 USD.

• AEEON MIX-ALND1 is an industrial mini-ITX motherboard based on the entry-level Intel Processor N50 dual-core Alder Lake-N SoC with multiple video output options (HDMI, DP, eDP, LVDS), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and plenty of serial headers for RS232, RS422, or RS485 communication. The motherboard supports up to 32GB DDR5 memory, one SATA drive, and one M.2 NVMe or SATA SSD drive.

• MeLE Overclock3C is an ultrathin mini PC based on an Intel Celeron N5095 Jasper Lake processor, but instead of using the default 15W TDP, the company is pushing the processor harder than usual with the TDP set to 18W which should provide more performance in theory, as long as cooling is working well.

• Intel has just decided to shut down its Next Unit of Compute (NUC) business selling mini PC, PC, boards, and modules directly to customers, as the company told partners they will stop direct investment into that part of their business. We first wrote about Intel NUC in 2014, but the company’s first NUC was launched in 2013, and I can only imagine Intel decided to kill the NUC business in order to focus on its core business which is to sell processors. They won’t directly compete against their customers anymore, although it’s unclear if this was part of the decision… I have mostly read praises about the NUC family over the years, but I’ve had a mixed experience myself.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A tornado has heavily damaged a major Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in North Carolina — the latest in a string of extreme weather events plaguing the U.S. Torrential rains flooded communities in Kentucky while an area from California to South Florida endured more blistering heat on Wednesday. Pfizer reported no serious injuries but authorities said medicine was damaged after a tornado damaged the plant near Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Elsewhere, Phoenix, Arizona, broke an all-time record Wednesday morning for a warm low temperature of 97 degrees. And Kentucky braced under a forecast of more rain after flash floods prompted rescues from homes and vehicles in some waterlogged communities.

• “We have stopped eating tomatoes in salad,” one shopper said, “and we are not making any tomato-based vegetable dishes.”

• Although energy resources are becoming cheaper, the increase in food prices has not stopped in Latvia. Latvian Economics Minister Ilze Indriksone (National Alliance) does not support artificial market intervention, indicating that the buyer can contribute greatly to price reduction, Latvian Television reported on July 20.

• The research shows that the first atomic bomb explosion’s effects had been underestimated, and could help more “downwinders” press for federal compensation.

• Caeleb Dressel failed to qualify for the biggest swim meet of the year. Simone Manuel didn’t even try. Adam Peaty is taking an extended break to deal with mental health issues. Kristóf Milák decided he was in no shape — mentally or physically — to compete this summer. Some of the world’s greatest swimmers are missing the world championships in Fukuoka, Japan, as they deal with burnout and the enormous toll the sport takes on their bodies and minds. Their absence is making everyone more cognizant of the issue.

• FDA in Taiwan had found cancer-causing nitrofurans in five batches of eggs from Turkey.”Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry should investigate the event in detail,” says Manisa MP Başevirgen.

• The Health Ministry has threatened to take action against sellers who do so.

• The Japanese government has been pushing for dumping the contaminated wastewater this summer from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

• We easily pathologize bad feelings, but they’re a normal, even healthy part of human experience.

• Doctors Without Borders says armed men have attacked its 18-member team working at a key hospital in Sudan’s war-torn capital of Khartoum. The MSF medical team was stopped on the road on Thursday while transporting supplies to the Turkish Hospital in the district of South Khartoum. The group says on its website that the armed men first questioned the MSF team about why it was in Sudan, then started beating some of the members. One of the drivers was briefly detained. The group did not provide other details. Sudan has been rocked by violence since mid-April, when tensions between the country’s military and the paramilitary burst into open fighting.

• The organization’s teams are providing lifesaving medical care and supporting health facilities that are struggling with overwhelming medical needs in Khartoum, Darfur, and other areas of the country that are affected by the conflict.

• “Her antibodies were the highest we’ve ever seen.”

• Many holidaymakers – and some European hospitals – don’t understand the rules on these vital health insurance cards

• Medical device makers have bankrolled a cottage industry of doctors and clinics that perform artery-clearing procedures that can lead to amputations.

• As it turns 75, the N.H.S., a proud symbol of Britain’s welfare state, is in the deepest crisis of its history.

• The dos and don’ts of hydrating in a heat wave

• A health agency warned the artificial sweetener may be a carcinogen, but others say that risk is overblown and consumers flock to the taste.

• A deadly new normal is quantified.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• VMware announced an edition of its Tanzu Kubernetes control plane that IT teams can deploy in an on-premises IT environment or in a public cloud.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• The world of AI is abuzz, or at least parts of it are, at the news of Meta’s release of Llama 2. This is an AI text model which is thought to surpass ChatGPT in capabilities, and which the social media turned VR turned own all your things company wants you to know is open to all. That’s right, the code is open source and you can download the model, and Meta want you to feel warm and fuzzy about it. Unfortunately all is not as it seems, because of course the model isn’t open-source and is subject to a licensing restriction which makes it definitely not free of charge for larger users. This is of course disappointing to anyone hoping for an AI chatbot without restrictions, but we’re guessing Meta would prefer not to inadvertently enable a competitor.

• Happily for the open source user large or small who isn’t afraid of a little work there’s an alternative in the form of OpenLLaMA, but we understand that won’t be for all users. Whichever LLM you use though, please don’t make the mistake of imagining that it possesses actual intelligence.

Security

• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) botnets have been used to actively exploit a critical vulnerability found in Zyxel firewall models.

• The flaw, identified by Fortinet security researchers as CVE-2023-28771, explicitly affects Linux platforms.

• Exploiting the vulnerability, remote attackers gain unauthorized control over the vulnerable systems, enabling them to conduct DDoS attacks.

• [...]

• “The severity of this flaw, rated 9.8 on the CVSS scoring system, was reported by researchers from TRAPA Security,” Lin wrote.

• Repeated breaches of cloud computing services makes understanding a recent incident affecting Microsoft essential.

• Active since 2016, the group known as Syssphinx continues to refine its attack methods to deploy ransomware.

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (golang, nodejs16, nodejs18, and R-jsonlite), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk and java-17-openjdk), SUSE (container-suseconnect, redis, and redis7), and Ubuntu (wkhtmltopdf).

• Lawrence Abrams takes us through a recent Coveware report on Clop’s shifting strategies and how recent trends in exfiltration-only have impacted the amount of ransom victims are paying.

• To celebrate Franco-German friendship, German Transport Minister Wissing and his French counterpart Beaune came up with something special: 30,000 free Interrail tickets per country for travel in Germany and France for young adults between 18 and 27. Codename: “Passe France Allemagne”

• However, many things went wrong when the Interrail passes were distributed. In the following, we want to take you on a journey through the stages of the not-so-well-implemented ticket and show you how you could still get a pass after registration ended.

• According to a recently-released meeting agenda, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (“SEC”) upcoming July 26, 2023 meeting will include consideration of adopting rules to enhance disclosures regarding cybersecurity risk management, governance, and incidents by publicly traded companies.

• The leaked data contains sensitive information like home address, phone number, date of birth, and even T-shirt size.

• Letters highlight concerns stemming from use of technologies that may share a user’s sensitive health information

• Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws.

• All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. You’re told how to cross the street, how fast to drive on the way to work, and what you’re allowed to say or do online—if you’re in any situation that might have legal implications, you’re told exactly what to do, in real time.

• Imagine that the computer system formulating these personal legal directives at mass scale is so complex that no one can explain how it reasons or works. But if you ignore a directive, the system will know, and it’ll be used as evidence in the prosecution that’s sure to follow…

• A cyberattack on cloud directory-as-a-service provider JumpCloud Inc. that first came to light earlier this month has been attributed to a North Korean hacking group.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Let’s get this out of the way right up front: NSO Group — as ethically horrendous as it is — offers at least one unbeatable product. Its Pegasus malware is a zero-click exploit capable of fully compromising targets’ phones. This means the company is worth something, even if it’s not the sort of company most people would desire to keep (in both the business and the social sense of the phrase).

Defence/Aggression

• Thirty-three youths were killed in a suicide bombing in Suruç, Urfa, during an event where they had intended to deliver toys to children in Kobanî, a Kurdish town in Syria.

• Sea state China’s next-generation frigate, the Type 054B, is under construction at shipyards in Shanghai and Guangzhou, as confirmed by images posted online by Chinese military enthusiasts.

• Seoul told North Korea Friday that using its nukes would mean the “end” of Kim Jong Un’s regime, after Pyongyang threatened nuclear retaliation over growing US military deployments on the peninsula.

• Washington says Pyongyang had a history of mistreating captured Americans.

• The United States fears an American soldier held by North Korea may be mistreated by Pyongyang, which has yet to respond to inquiries about his fate, officials said Thursday.

• It may take days or weeks for the country to acknowledge that it has Pvt. Travis T. King in custody, and past practices suggest its response will be determined by Mr. King’s motive.

• It calls the drills “unacceptable and extremely regrettable”.

• Body aches and mysterious illnesses plagued family members, they say.

• In a region where US influence was paramount, other actors are now vying for influence.

• Palestinian health officials say Israeli forces have shot and killed a 17-year-old Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank. It is the latest bloodshed in a cycle of violence that has gripped the region for more than a year. Palestinian health officials say Muhammad Fouad Atta al-Bayed was fatally shot in the head Friday by Israeli forces in the village of Umm Safa north of Ramallah. The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that Israeli forces had fired live ammunition, tear gas and stun grenades during violence. The army says forces opened fire in response to stone throwing by masked suspects.

War in Ukraine

• The publication Proekt has compiled a “criminal and psychological portrait” of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, having interviewed, according to the authors, a dozen of his acquaintances and employees.

• New images published by the outlet Fontanka show the inside of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s home in the St. Petersburg luxury gated community Northern Versailles.

Environment

• Then the rain came.

• In Asia, Europe and the United States, records are shattering, and forecasters say there’s no respite in sight.

• The stifling heat wave that has affected large parts of the U.S. for more than a month will not loosen its grip anytime soon, forecasters warn.

• By the end of the week, it is likely that 15 days just this month will have breached an unprecedented global temperature threshold — a clarion wakeup call in the form of extreme weather.

• Why it matters: Nearly every facet of the climate system is flashing red this summer, from record-low sea ice extent in Antarctica to hot tub-like ocean waters surrounding South Florida, and all-time high temperature records set in multiple countries on at least three continents.

• Swathes of Europe baked Tuesday in a heatwave trailed by wildfires and health warnings, as parts of Asia and the United States also suffered under extreme weather.

• More than 100 more people were feared to be trapped under debris, as torrential monsoon rainfall continued to pummel the country.

Energy/Transportation

• Drax, the company that runs Britain’s biggest power station, stands accused by residents of “brazen politicking” in a closely fought by-election contest in Selby and Ainsty, North Yorkshire.

• DeSmog can reveal that Drax is co-hosting a hustings with five of the local candidates on Wednesday evening, and has encouraged its allies both to attend the event and offer statements in support of the firm.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 20 Jul 2023 A huge majority of Europeans believe climate change is a serious problem facing the world (93%), according to a new Eurobarometer survey published today.

• The most powerful on-shore drilling rig in Australia is believed to be on its way to the Beetaloo Basin despite protest action in Darwin.

• A woman locked herself to a gate outside the city’s port on Friday in a bid to stop Tamboran Resources from moving the rig to the drill site.

• A look ahead at the key events leading the news agenda next week, from the team at Foresight News.

• Nearly £50m ($64m) of Ofgem funding has been earmarked for UK hydrogen blending and de-blending projects, aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of transporting the energy carrier through existing gas grids.

• Doing something for the first time is tough. Yet to replicate the nuclear fusion process that powers the very stars, and do it right here on Earth in a controlled and sustained fashion is decidedly at the top of the list of ‘tough’ first times. What further complicates matters is when in order to even get to this ‘first’ you also add in a massive, international construction project and a heaping of geopolitics, all of which is a far cry from past nuclear fusion experiments.

• Aiden Pleterski is accused of spending investors’ money on luxury cars and vacations before filing for bankruptcy, according to court records. Then he was kidnapped by one of his investors, police say.

Overpopulation

• “They’re not talking about health, they’re talking about a transfer of wealth.” James Corbett and James Roguski return to ‘Good Morning CHD’ with Dr. Meryl Nass to chronicle the latest on the WHO and global control efforts.

Finance

• The NSW government wants reforms to the state’s overheated rental market legislated by the end of the year as part of a system “rebalance” opposed by the peak body for real estate agents.

• A government discussion paper released on Friday proposes revamps beyond previously promised rental reforms to end no-grounds evictions, allow more pets in rentals and introduce a portable bond scheme.

• Most Americans want to retire, but only half feel like they’re able to save for the future.

• The big picture: Many Americans who haven’t yet retired say they are unprepared for retirement, unsure how to prepare and unsure if they even want to fully retire, according to a new Axios-Ipsos poll.

• Former coalition ministers have been found to have dismissed or ignored key concerns about the unlawful robodebt scheme.

• But it is not yet clear which – if any – ex-ministers will be referred for civil or criminal action or to the new national corruption watchdog.

• Australia and the European Union have failed to strike a deal on a planned free-trade agreement as better market access for farmers remains a major sticking point.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday met with French President Emmanuel Macron as he pushed for an improved deal for sheep and beef producers as part of the proposed agreement.

• Hun Sen’s economic achievements are unraveling and everyone’s getting hit.

• The stream of bank branches leaving country communities may be drying up after Australia’s largest banker committed to zero closures for the next three years.

• Commonwealth Bank will keep all its remaining regional branches open until 2026 but has left the door open to reducing face-to-face services as it moves towards more “multi-channel” branches.

• America’s working women were feared to suffer the worst in the pandemic recovery. The opposite, however, has proven to be the case, with women serving as historic drivers of a labor market that remains surprisingly strong.

• Why it matters: The pay gap between full-time working women and male counterparts is now the narrowest on record. The dynamic has been long in the making — a reflection of discrimination’s slow fade and other structural forces that have held women back on pay.

• The rise in interest rates did not meet expectations, according to Prof. Dr. Hayri Kozanoğlu. Warning that inflation will jump, Kozanoğlu says that the policy the economy administration follows is intended to prevent a balance of payments crisis and to strengthen the reserves of the Central Bank.

• The 76-year-old woman was convicted of forging personal documents and breaching real estate laws.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Cornel West is a very serious man.

• Last week’s 6-3 decision in the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, with all the conservative justices vindicating a website designer’s ability to refuse to build a website celebrating gay marriage, may seem at first glance to be a blow to gay rights. And maybe that’s what some or all of the six justices in the majority intended for it to be. But that’s not the upshot to the decision. With its language and rationale the majority has instead reinforced in our constitutional jurisprudence a critical recognition of the way the First Amendment right to free expression reaches online expression, including as expressed through coding. In so recognizing it the Court has ended up providing critical protection for everyone, including those whom bigoted government officials seek to victimize and silence. Even if that’s not what the Court realized it was doing, or intended to do.

• On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.

• Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”

• It will surprise nobody to learn that when politicians trumpet the First Amendment, they are generally referring only to expression that they agree with. But occasionally, they demonstrate their hypocrisy in a fashion so outrageously transparent that it shocks even the most cynical and jaded First Amendment practitioners. Last week, we were treated to just such an instance, courtesy of seven Republican Attorneys General. They deserve to be named, ignominiously: Todd Rokita (IN), Andrew Bailey (MO), Tim Griffin (AR), Daniel Cameron (KY), Raul Labrador (ID), Lynn Fitch (MS), and Alan Wilson (SC).

• Britain’s ruling Conservatives on Friday held the former seat of ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson but saw hefty majorities in two other seats blown away as scandals and high inflation took their toll.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Middle East powerhouses Saudi Arabia and Iran have summoned Swedish diplomats to denounce Stockholm’s permission for protests that desecrate the Koran on free speech grounds.

• The National Assembly in the Republika Srpska (RS) on July 20 adopted amendments to the Criminal Code of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s majority Serb entity that journalists and rights activists say would criminalize defamation and stifle free speech.

• The platform has failed to appoint a representative within the country and notify the authorities about the appointment, according to the country’s internet authority.

• A 27-year-old man who replaced China’s national anthem with protest song Glory to Hong Kong in an online video has been sentenced to three months in prison after being convicted of insulting the national anthem.

• The court filing claims that the Federalist Society leader, a champion of free speech, urged police to violate the First Amendment rights of a demonstrator near his Maine home.

• Controversial Finns Party politician Teuvo Hakkarainen also told the European Parliament that accusations of racism are in his view attacks on people with nationalist beliefs.

• Republicans called Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to testify at a House hearing on government censorship. The longshot presidential candidate worked to defend himself from allegations of racism and antisemitism in the wake of a controversial leaked clip.

• Hong Kong’s Eastern Magistrates’ Courts sentenced photographer Cheng Wing-chun to three months prison on Thursday for violating the National Anthem Ordinance. Cheng, who was found guilty on July 5, is the first person tried under the ordinance.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Milashina, who was attacked and brutally beaten in Chechnya on July 4, has been discharged from the hospital, says Alexey Venediktov, former editor-in-chief of Echo Moscow.

• While the formal reason for detentions and deportations is usually expired papers, the underlying reason is a shift in Turkey’s policies towards Syria, says the group.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The U.S. has been a major force of violent repression globally that stamps out people’s hopes for freedom and justice.

• The White House aimed for a race-neutral environmental justice strategy, but a new analysis questions whether the program can actually achieve its goals.

• Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

• Never mind fitting the description, even though that, too, has its own problems. In Texas, it apparently only matters how your name is spelled. If you share a name with a criminal suspect, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has said you have no recourse if you’re wrongly arrested and detained for multiple days.

• An Aboriginal man who lost his bid to access the age pension sooner than a non-Indigenous man says he’s frustrated the white system has let him down again.

• Proud Wakka Wakka man Dennis James Fisher tried to sue the Commonwealth in the Federal Court, arguing he should have been eligible to receive the pension at the age of 64 rather than 67 because of his shorter life expectancy.

• With their UPS contract set to expire at the end of the month, the Teamsters have walked away from negotiations and begun practice pickets.

• The workers of the electricity distribution company in southeast Turkey declare that they will continue the walkout if their demands are not met.

• Antigovernment protests over price hikes and new taxes have left at least 31 people dead in recent weeks, prompting the country’s news outlets to join together to issue a dire warning.

• Warren was one of several Democratic senators who had urged the agency to investigate Twitter’s privacy policies in the wake of layoffs and to consider enforcement actions against executives if appropriate.

• Plus: Twitter subpoenas Elizabeth Warren’s communications with the SEC, mortgage rates are starting to fall, and more…

• Finnish passport holders have visa-free access to a total of 189 countries.

• ‘He cannot be disconnected because the opposition party officials still use Facebook,’ opposition member says.

• ‘She continues to be a threat to the government of Cambodia, which is … why they’re keeping her in jail.’

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This essential utility service in Portland is provided by corporations charged with making as much profit as possible – resulting in predatory behavior towards consumers. In the past, the capital investment necessary to build robust broadband service resulted in only a few large under-regulated corporations controlling internet access and service offerings in the Portland Metropolitan region. Oftentimes that infrastructure was built with public funds, through federal grant programs. Yet ownership remains with private corporations, who also pocket significant profits.

• Municipal Broadband across the U.S.

• In the United States, in 2018, over 100 communities nationwide were offering some form of high-speed internet service. Since then, there has been a dramatic expansion in this space. Currently, over 600 communities offer municipal broadband in some capacity, an increase of more than 600 percent since 2018. Municipal broadband can be both faster and more affordable than internet offered by privately owned ISPs and helps bring high-quality internet to places with limited access, such as rural and low-income areas. It also keeps taxpayer money local, and local control of internet provision leads to more accountability and greater competition in areas with only one or two providers, incentivizing those providers to offer better, more affordable services.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• According to The Wall Street Journal, Spotify plans to increase the price of its ad-free premium subscription plan by $1 in the US to $10.99 a month — a long-awaited change as the company continues its profitability push.

Monopolies

Patents

• WIPO General Assemblies 2023: EPO holds bilateral and multilateral meetings with strategic partners

• A wide-ranging battle between medical device manufacturer Insulet, and diabetes tool management company Medtrum, has entered its next phase. Earlier this month, the Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf declared that Medtrum’s latest model, the Medtrum A7+, infringes Insulet patent EP 2 438 957 B1 (I-2 U 79/22).

• Peter Koch (45) is leaving IP boutique Taliens, which has offices in Munich, Madrid and Paris, at the end of July to set up his own practice in the Bavarian capital.

• On July 17, 2023, less than six weeks 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 10,015,064, owned and asserted by AdaptFlow Technologies LLC, an NPE and IP Edge entity.

• On July 14, 2023, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,330,431, owned and asserted by Corrigent Corporation, an NPE. The ’431 patent is directed to bandwidth assignment in logical network topologies. The patent is being asserted against Cisco, Dell, and Arista Networks.

• On July 10, 2023, six weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all claims of U.S. Patent 11,185,738, owned and asserted by Fitistics, LLC, an NPE. The ‘738 patent is generally directed to tracking exercise using a handheld device to obtain data from an exercise machine or body monitoring device. The patent has been asserted against Huawei and Fossil.

Copyrights

• We’ve documented extensively how the AT&T—>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery mergers have been a gargantuan pointless mess, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, widespread animosity across Hollywood, the death or decay of numerous popular brands (from Mad Magazine to HBO), weird holes in streaming catalogs, and just a shittier, dumber product overall.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• The box fan rumbles. It exhausts hot air out the window over the driveway, draws cooler air from the shady backyard. Low tones of grandpa’s voice from first daughter’s room, a 35-year-old cassette tape reading her fairy stories and nursery rhymes he once read me: Snow White and Rose Red, Jack and the Beanstalk. The timbre of his voice slowly changes. Tape degrades at naptime and bedtime. One day the stories will be unintelligible.

• Yesterday we biked to the library for toddler time and books, Bugz’ house for a book, creek on the way home. Daughter slipped on slick wet slate, fell— splash!, laughed, slipped carefully to low water- fall wet and muddy. To minnows holding formation in a dapple of sun she said “Hi fishes I love you!” I started Adolph Reed’s new book The South.

• Books for summer reading in this diary entry are in three categories: true adventures, 1930s anarchist/ communist fiction, challenges to liberal dogma from the Left.

• Elves are immortal, metrosexual, aloof know-it-alls. They know every better, they can do everything better, and they’re not afraid to tell you.

Politics and World Events

• First off, I’m going to apologize to Geminispace at large for accidentally setting off this entire firestorm in the first place. I for one much preferred when we were talking mostly about geek culture and gemini itself.

• That said, since my original post about my own feelings regarding the Supreme court there seems to be a neverending discussion on politics, and I’m going to weigh in again with a couple of things that I think need said.

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