● 07.24.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/07/2023: Debian 12.1 and Neptune 8.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Meanwhile, Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the large 6.4.5, 6.1.40, and 5.15.121 stable updates; each contains another set of important fixes.

Applications

• Inkscape 1.3 is here a year and two months after Inkscape 1.2 and introduces a new tool called Shape Builder, which lets you create new shapes by combining and building new paths even from multiple overlapping shapes. Best of all, the new shapes will retain their original color, too.

• Also new is a Document Resources dialog that can show statistics about your documents and gives you a more efficient way of organizing your Inkscape documents. Moreover, a new Font collections feature will help those of you who have way too many fonts in your collection to better categorize them.

• With version 1.3 of Inkscape, you’ll find improved performance, several new features, and a solid set of improvements to a few existing ones.

• This version is squarely focused on helping users get organized and work more efficiently with our free and open source vector-editing software.

• In fact, our project developers, most of them volunteer contributors from around the world, have been working hard behind the scenes on the code base to improve the performance of the software. Some of the heavy rendering tasks have been separated internally, to help with performance when zooming, panning and transforming objects. By default, Inkscape will now leverage the power of all your computer’s cores when it renders objects, but you can also choose to limit its powers in the preferences.

Instructionals/Technical

• UN Comtrade is a great source of data for international trade. However, some countries report imports with a different convention than CIF (Cost, Insurance, and Freight), which is the standard for international trade. The same happens with exports, which are reported with a different convention than FOB (Free on Board).

• In order to be aware of this and know which countries report with a different convention, we need to download the metadata for each country. This is a time-consuming task, as we need to download each country’s metadata one by one, because this information is not contained within UN Comtrade API, spreadsheets or bulk downloads in CSV.

• A slightly more processed version of this data is available in my valuation system repository.

• In this blog post, I’ll focus on the basics of netcat. More advanced options and scenarios will follow in separate posts at some point.

• Netcat is available on almost any Linux host and is easy to use. It is an excellent tool for troubleshooting network issues or gathering information and a great addition to any tool portfolio.

• ifconfig in short “interface configuration” utility for system/network administration in Unix/Linux operating systems to configure, manage, and query network interface parameters via command-line interface or in a system configuration scripts.

• The “ifconfig” command is used for displaying current network configuration information, setting up an ip address, netmask, or broadcast address to a network interface, creating an alias for the network interface, setting up hardware address, and enabling or disabling network interfaces.

• DNS (Domain Name System) is a fundamental facilitator of several networking technologies such as mail servers, Internet browsing, and streaming services e.g. Netflix and Spotify, among others.

• It works on a special computer called a DNS server – which keeps a database record of several public IP addresses along with their corresponding hostnames for it to resolve or translate hostnames to IP addresses upon user request.

• While writing program files or normal text files, programmers and writers sometimes want to know the difference between two files or two versions of the same file.

• When you compare two computer files on Linux, the difference between their contents is called a diff. This description was born out of a reference to the output of diff, the well-known Unix command-line file comparison utility.

• Kubernetes has revolutionized the world of container orchestration, enabling developers to manage and scale their applications effortlessly. While setting up a Kubernetes cluster can be a daunting task, K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, makes the process much more accessible.

• Let’s talk first about what XSLT is before we talk about how to use it. XSLT is unique in that it’s specifically designed to transform XML documents. This doesn’t necessarily mean it was designed for mapping from one metadata schema to another, as XML is used for more than just metadata & XSLT can do more than just shuffle around values, but it does mean that the language is uniquely suited to that task. XSLT allows us to change certain elements in the original document, alter text, & add or drop pieces of information.

• In this post, we’ll specifically look at converting the Library of Congress’ MODS schema to Dublin Core. LOC has provided a handy map between the two which illustrates the complexity of the task. A few things that we need to address: [...]

Games

• Love mysterious puzzle adventures like Myst? The Humble Myst & More Redux Bundle may be worth a look for you then. Here’s the compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

• After their huge version 43 release recently bringing with it initial ASUS ROG Ally support, ChimeraOS Linux has a first bug fix release out. This is the Linux distribution aimed primarily at gaming devices, giving you a SteamOS-like environment with a bunch of extra tweaks along with wider hardware support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you’re looking for an intuitive, user-friendly, and visually appealing desktop environment, GNOME is the answer.

• GNOME is one of the most preferred desktop environments among the Linux desktop community. Let’s take a journey to explore and review some of the most notable GNOME-based Linux distributions available today.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• I really like what Murena is trying to do with their focus on open source software and privacy. They make an unusually polished, de-Googled experience which is still compatible in virtually every way with the existing Android ecosystem. The Fairphone is a great idea, in my opinion. Too many phones get thrown away these days due to dead batteries or a malfunctioning component. The Fairphone addresses this problem really well by making it easy to pop open the device and replace a component at a reasonable price.

• Often times devices and operating systems which exist outside the mainstream struggle to be polished, performant, or to be compatible with existing apps. Murena running on the Fairphone doesn’t have these drawbacks. It’s basically Android, but with more privacy features and Google’s cloud services swapped out for Nextcloud. The Fairphone is far from under powered, in fact it’s sporting approximately the same CPU and memory as my laptop and is pleasantly fast.

• I had a little trouble getting the device to charge from a computer’s USB port, but otherwise the experience was fantastic. The phone is fast, we have access to virtually all the apps in the Android ecosystem, and I like that F-Droid is enabled by default.

• I also like the Murena cloud services. They’re optional and opt-in, making them non-invasive. I appreciated being able to synchronize all my devices – sharing tasks, contacts, and files.

• Finally, I really appreciate that this phone feels like a phone and computing device that is designed to be useful for me rather than an advertising platform for a large company. Whenever I have the misfortune to use other people’s Android phones or iPhones, I always feel as though the goal is to see how much the device can annoy me before I stop using it. The pop-ups, the ads, the nagging prompts to enable things on those phones are frustrating and time consuming. This phone feels like it is there to make my life easier, and its repairable nature means it can continue to do so for the next five years without requiring me to buy another device.

• In short, I think Murena’s Fairphone offering is a solid product. It’s a decent price, offers the power and flexibility of Android, with an added set of privacy protecting tools. Plus the phone is repairable and the software is supported for five years. This makes the device ideal for people who are environmentally or privacy focused as well as people who would like to keep their devices running for longer periods of time rather than upgrade steadily.

BSD

• One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 1 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional “build from source” way will probably take forever on this tiny board and also could potentially destroy the SD card. So obvious alternative was cross-compilation.

Fedora Family / IBM

• In our last episode we talked about the origins of Oracle Linux. This time around, we’ll look at one of Red Hat’s responses to the threat posed by Oracle Linux. Specifically, Red Hat’s decision to “obfuscate” the kernel source delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, and how it communicated (or didn’t) those decisions.

Debian Family

• Debian 12 bookworm based. Major release.

• We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 8.0 (“Juna”). This is the first major release of version 8.0 based on Debian 12 (“Bookworm”)

• This version comes with the latest major underlying changes from Debian 12 (“Bookworm”). The Linux Kernel has been updated to Version 6.1 to provide support for new hardware and better compatibility with current hardware. Additionally, KDE Plasma has been upgraded to version 5.27 along with all KDE applications present in version 22.12.3.

• Dubbed “Juna”, Neptune 8.0 is here eleven months after Neptune 7.5 and it’s the first release of this GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian’s stable branch to rebase the entire system on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” operating system series.

• Being based on Debian Bookworm, Neptune 8.0 inherits all of the upstream package versions, including the kernel, which is based on the long-term supported Linux 6.1 series that will receive updates until December 2026.

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 12 (codename “bookworm”). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

• Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 12 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “bookworm” media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.

• Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release.

• New installation images will be available soon at the regular locations.

• Upgrading an existing installation to this revision can be achieved by pointing the package management system at one of Debian’s many HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive list of mirrors is available at…

• Debian Linux project announces the first update of the Debian project’s stable distribution, Debian 12 (codename “bookworm”) named Debian 12.1. This update mainly addresses security issues and significant problems. Security advisories have been published and are now available to download.

• After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture!

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Apktool v2.8.1 has been released! This release has been quickly released to cover some immediate regressions from v2.8.0 as well as patching a new LTS Java feature that affected parsing malformed zip headers.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• For all those reasons, you may prefer to use a standard SQL database with Apache APISIX. In this post, I’ll show how you can use MySQL.

• Also, this is h2.64 only for the moment. Hardware accelerated VP8/VP9 decoding is the next goal and will help bring Firefox’s media capabilities on the Raspberry Pi 4 in-line with other platforms.

Programming/Development

• While PCC is a complete compiler, including a libpcc.a runtime support library akin to libgcc.a for GCC and libcompiler_rt.a for Clang, PCC is not a complete compilation system. PCC relies on someone else to provide an assembler and a linker to complete the process of processing object code, shared libraries, and executables. In contrast, LLVM includes everything you need to go from zero to an executable: a preprocessor, C compiler, assembler, linker, runtime support library, and is even developing their own C standard library implementation. The GNU system also has a complete preprocessor, C compiler, assembler, linker, runtime support library, and C standard library implementation; at least all under the same umbrella if not all in the same single monorepo like LLVM. PCC only provides a preprocessor, C compiler, and runtime support library.

• Many times in your day-to-day programming life you have to wait. Wait for your development environment to boot up, wait for the formatting-on-save command to finish, wait for the website you just opened to load, wait for tests to run, wait for the CI build to finish.

• The waiting doesn’t really cause me physical pain, but it does evoke a physical reaction alright. I just can’t stand it. Maybe it’s because I’m impatient by nature. Maybe it’s knowing that things could be faster that causes it. When I have to wait ten seconds for a test to finish that I plan to run many times over the next hour, I tell you, it feels as if I’m about to lose my mind.

Leftovers

• But – this place is also fascinating, and I think signage is a fun, respectful, and quirky way to explore it.

• Today, if you go looking around your local bicycle retailer or favorite online outlet, you’ll probably find much less selection and rather higher prices (and what’s left is often much more basic than before). This isn’t necessarily because the basic components of a bike computer have gotten more expensive; if anything, tiny low powered computers have gotten even cheaper. Instead, it’s probably because these basic bike computers have gotten much less popular. Today, most people who’re interested in this sort of information use either their phones or a GPS based bike computer (which doesn’t even need a sensor, although it does need a GPS signal).

• I wouldn’t be the person I am today without these sorts of brilliant insights and observations. and I’m thankful these people exist in the world, thinking these thoughts and choosing to share them.

• I don’t know what the point of all this is. Twitter was a lot of fun — a social network that almost everyone was on, where you could use great native applications and see the posts from only the people you wanted to see, or if you prefer, use the terrible first-party application and see a constant feed of celebrity click-bait.

• Maybe I should just stick to IRC.

• Those inexorable, ominous seconds were the basis of a nightmare I had recently. It’s an old adage that nobody wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams, but perhaps we can make an exception for nuclear night terrors this summer. Poke around social media right now, and you’ll notice that scores of people are experiencing acute nuclear anxiety. (“Too many Oppenheimer dreams last night 😵‍💫,” reads one representative tweet.) My bomb dream happened last Sunday night. I was dead asleep, watching a missile carve an arc across the sky. I awoke just before impact, sweating, heart thumping, fists clenched. I did not get back to sleep.

Science

• Fortunately, medieval scholars have recently found another aid to turn to: a solar storm.

• Archaeologist Søren Sindbæk and his colleagues at Aarhus University in Denmark have reconstructed the timing of the Vikings’ early voyages by harnessing the power of what was likely a supermassive solar flare that erupted in 775. The flare has helped the team improve radiocarbon dating and thus more precisely date artifacts excavated at Ribe, Denmark, the site of an early medieval trading post.

• The chronology of events at Ribe reveals a less violent start for Viking voyages, at least 50 years before the Lindisfarne raid. The secret of Viking success, Sindbæk believes, is best explained by skillful trading, not fearsome raiding.

• Those are the certainties of the Cretaceous Period exchange that were encased in time until this week, when a team of paleontologists revealed the stunning fossil in a paper published in Scientific Reports.

• [Nathaniel Fairfield] aka [thandal] was curious about the actual rotation and axis tilt of Venus. He decided to spin up at GitHub Python repository to study the issue further, as one does. The scientific literature shows a wide range of estimates and variations for the planet’s rotation and axis tilt. He wondered if the real answer might be found in a publicly available set of uncalibrated delay-doppler images of Venus. These data were collected by the former Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico from 1988 through 2020.  [Thanda] observed that the planet’s rotation appears to be speeding up slightly, and furthermore, his estimates of the orbital axis were within 0.01 degrees of the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) values. [Note: Venus is a bit confusing — one planetary rotation, 243 Earth days, is longer than its year, 225 Earth days].

Education

• “It’s a kind of cat and mouse game. If we come up with a way to catch the students who are cheating, they will immediately come up with a way to get around it,” says Lina Strupinskienė, deputy director for studies at VU TSPMI. “That’s why we don’t want to outright ban the use of ChatGPT, but we would like to make that use meaningful for the purpose of study. And that it could even be integrated into the study process.”

• Well, this semester, ChatGPT finally killed off my efforts to use these discussion boards in a traditional attempt to simulate the real world. In our classes, students took our prompts, which were intentionally simple in order to encourage one to two paragraph interpersonal exchanges, and dropped them into ChatGPT. They then copied and pasted the results into the discussion boards. Often, I suspect, without even reading them. Several of the posts included admissions that the student was an AI.

• For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

• For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

Hardware

• The original first generation of Amigas such as the A500, A600, A1000 and A2000 all used a Motorola designed 68000 CPU inside. Many Amiga users eventually upgraded theirs to have an accelerator, usually based on the 68020 or 68030 CPU. But there is a contender that is a drop-in replacement for the 68000, and for some things it can be quite a bit faster.

• Kontron revealed this month two motherboards in mini-STX form-factor and equipped with i3 processors and N-Series processors. These devices are designed to continuously operate 24/7 and target medical, kiosks, digital signage and other commercial/industrial applications.

• The job of processing video after a large event must be a thankless one for whichever volunteer upon whose shoulders it falls, and thus it’s not unusual for talks at larger events to end up online much later than the event itself. Electromagnetic Field 2022 was last year, but they have continued to drop new videos. Among the latest batch is one from [Jennifer Herchenroeder], in which she discusses the steel used in her team’s BattleBot, Hijinx (Edit: her EMF talk was cut short due to time pressures, so she re-recorded it in full after the event and we’ve replaced the link. The EMF video meanwhile is here). The result is a fascinating introduction to the metallurgy of iron and steel, and is well worth a watch.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Over the years, I got bitten a few more times by the effects of asymmetry. When my left hand became painful again, I realized I was mousing exclusively with that hand, and switched the mouse to my right side. I think I’ve gone back and forth a few times, currently it’s again on the right.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• While people frustrated with Musk-owned Twitter are seeking alternatives, no single competitor has established itself as the ideal option.

• Twitter quitters have become a “diaspora” of sorts, spread across Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and other platforms in search of a new social media home, Owyang reasoned.

• “Many people have left Twitter, and that will continue,” Owyang said.

• “But the issue is where are they going? There’s no one centralized place to go.”

• New York-based cloud security firm Wiz has warned companies and organisations affected by the recent Microsoft Azure breach that the impact of the intrusion may be much wider than reported, and could affect applications beyond those claimed by Microsoft to be impacted.

• In a detailed, technical blog post, Wiz researcher Shir Tamari wrote that while Microsoft had said that Outlook.com and Exchange Online were the only applications to be affected, “Wiz Research has found that the compromised signing key was more powerful than it may have seemed, and was not limited to just those two services”.

• The company is mentioned in that same post as having checked the content for technical accuracy. Shir Tamari, a researcher from cloud security firm Wiz, said very clearly: “..we want to thank the Microsoft team for working closely with us on this blog and helping us ensure it is technically accurate.”

• Microsoft’s obfuscation was made to the CIA-funded site, The Record. The software giant has not put out any official post on this. While some others have pointed out the company’s double-speak on the issue, no American tech site has written it up and focused on the fact that Microsoft is saying one thing now, having said precisely the opposite earlier.

• Thanks to a series of commits by Jonathan Gray (jsg@), -current now has support for microcode (updates) for AMD (amd64 and i386) processors: [...]

• The firm’s Research Pod today published details about a “critical” flaw, and warned that it could have been exploited to achieve a supply-chain attack along the lines of SolarWinds – or, more recently, MOVEit – with “far reaching consequences.”

• After word of the vulnerability reached the Chocolate Factory, Google deployed a fix – though it doesn’t fully address the issue, according to Orca researcher Roi Nisimi.

• “It only limits it – turning it into a design flaw that still leaves organizations vulnerable to the larger supply chain risk,” Nisimi said. “It requires security teams to put further measures in place to protect against this risk.”

Linux Foundation

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• There’s a new virtual water cooler where employees can gossip with their colleagues.

• As part of a larger rebranding, Glassdoor recently announced Company Bowls, which are new forums that allow you to anonymously talk to co-workers and managers about the job, with less fear of repercussions.

• When you enter a “bowl,” as Glassdoor calls it, you can choose your level of anonymity before posting. You can either use your real name, your job title, or go completely anonymous, only showing the company you work for. You do however, need to submit your full name and work email in order to access the forums.

• The Google Nest Mini is a popular smart speaker, but it’s very much a cloud-based Big Tech solution. For those that want to roll their own voice assistant, or just get avoid the corporate surveillance of it all, [Justin Alvey’s] work may appeal. (Nitter)

• Choosing the right VPN can be a tricky endeavor. There are hundreds of VPN services out there promising to improve users’ privacy, but some are more private than others. To help you pick the best one for your needs, we asked dozens of VPNs to detail their logging practices, how they handle torrent users, and what else they do to keep you as anonymous as possible.

Defence/Aggression

• Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Ahmad Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said the Public Authority for Public Care would print and distribute 100,000 translated copies of the Muslim holy book in Sweden, to “affirm the tolerance of the Islamic religion and promote values of coexistence among all human beings,” according to the country’s state news agency Kuna.

• When Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn had warned that millions of taxpayer dollars were being spent on refugee resettlement and that the area was becoming more dangerous, Somalis launched a recall campaign. Piepkorn has since been stripped of Deputy Mayor status.

• Little wonder that few elected officials have had the courage to speak out against what is being done to Fargo and North Dakota.

• May this treasonous behavior in the service of the global jihad and against his country and brothers-in-arms at least be considered at his sentencing hearing scheduled for Nov. 2.

• Billström stressed that host countries have an obligation to protect diplomatic missions, saying “it is clear that the Iraqi authorities have failed to fulfill this obligation” Sweden’s government summoned the Iraqi Chargé d’Affaires and expressed their “dismay” to Iraqi authorities.

• The reasons for the instructions from Libya are not known. It is possible that the coast guard, which is known for human rights violations against refugees, did not want to be observed during its operations. On February 11, 2022 alone, Libyan units intercepted three boats and returned the passengers to the country. In two cases, the patrol ship “Ubari,” donated from Italy, is said to have been used in the process; in another case, a ship of the “Stability Support Apparatus”.

• Weather can have a significant impact on transport and operations of all kinds, especially those at sea or in the air. This makes it a deeply important field of study, particularly in wartime. If you’re at all curious about how this kind of information was gathered and handled in the days before satellites and computer models, this write-up on WWII meteorology is sure to pique your interest.

• The Barnaul Central District Court has sentenced the former head of Alexey Navalny’s local headquarters, Vadim Ostanin, to nine years in a general regime prison colony. According to the politician’s team, Ostanin was tried for his legal political work.

• Films about war, shorn of the bone crushing fear, the putrid stench of the corpses, the deafening noise of explosions, the constant exhaustion and the nervous anxiety that comes with trying to understand what is happening in the terrifying chaos, are pale and inadequate reflections [...]

War in Ukraine

• On the night of July 23, Russia launched a missile attack on Odesa. According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia launched 19 missiles:

• At a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said that Wagner Group fighters transferred to Belarus started to “bother” him, since they “want to go on an excursion to Warsaw.”

• Around 4 a.m., local time, two drones crashed into office buildings in Moscow. Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reported on his Telegram channel that the incidents caused no serious injuries to bystanders or damage to the buildings, though images circulating on social media show the windows of one high rise’s top corner totally blown out.

• Russian law enforcement agencies are investigating Pavel Gubarev, former self-styled “People’s Governor” of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (“DNR”), for extremism related to his posts on Telegram, reports the Russian newspaper Kommersant. The exact posts in question were not specified.

• According to Sergey Aksyonov, head of annexed Crimea, air defense forces shot down 11 drones over the peninsula on Monday, July 24.

• Overnight, Russian forces launched yet another attack on the Odesa region.

• Sources have told RBC Ukraine that the drone attack on Moscow overnight on July 24 was a special operation of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry (GUR).

Environment

• The rally, organised by environmental activist group “Ta tillbaka framtiden” (Reclaim the Future), tried to block the entrance and exit to the Malmo harbour to protest against the use of fossil fuel.

• “We choose to not be bystanders, and instead physically stop the fossil fuel infrastructure. We are reclaiming the future,” Thunberg said in an Instagram post at the time.

• In Friday’s decision, the ISA Council, which had been negotiating in Jamaica for the past two weeks, said it “intends to continue the elaboration” of regulations “with a view to their adoption at the 30th session of the Authority” in 2025.

• “This is an indicative target,” rather than a deadline, said council chairman Juan Jose Gonzalez Mijares.

Energy/Transportation

• When the bankruptcy of VanMoof, the company behind a series of e-bikes, was announced recently, many probably shrugged at this news. After all, what is an e-bike but a regular bicycle that has some electronics and a battery strapped to it to assist with cycling? Unfortunately for owners of a VanMoof e-bike, their fancy wheels come with a Bluetooth-connected smartphone app that somehow involves storing a special encryption key on the VanMoof servers, as detailed by [Gergely Orosz] at the Pragmatic Engineer. Without this key that is connected to your VanMoof account, your VanMoof app cannot communicate with your VanMoof e-bike.

• People will sympathize with Mr. Estavi regarding his NFT’s 99.93% valuation collapse. After all, he has pledged to give 50% of any successful bid to charity. However, gamers will probably remember the dread felt when the gaming industry began to flirt with NFTs. Luckily it turned out that implementing NFTs in games wasn’t worth the effort, with entertainment software giant Ubisoft reportedly only managing to harvest $396.43 during the first two weeks after establishing its Digits NFTs platform.

• The very first tweet of Jack Dorsey, whose non-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $2.9 million to crypto entrepreneur and Iranian investor Sina Estavi in 2021, is reportedly now only worth less than $4. At the time of purchase, Estavi tied the NFT’s value to its uniqueness and its association with a valuable company like Twitter.

• It has been estimated that minting an NFT using the Ethereum platform uses more than 260 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is the same amount of electricity the average American household required over a period of 9 days.

• Susan Hall, the Conservative Party candidate for London mayor, has opposed key climate policies, backed the reintroduction of fracking and promoted articles online which spread climate science denial, DeSmog can reveal.

• She has been accused of trying to “undermine” climate science when the impact of human-caused climate change is making headlines amid a summer heatwave in Europe.

• Attempts to make a viable nuclear fusion reactor have on the whole been the domain of megabucks projects supported by countries or groups of countries, such as the European JET or newer ITER projects. This is not to say that smaller efforts aren’t capable of making their own advances, operations in both the USA and the UK are working on new reactors that use a novel superconducting tape to achieve a much smaller device.

Finance

• Tasmania has kept its spot as the best performing state economy amid a slowdown across the nation.

• CommSec’s State of the States report released on Monday found economic performances were being supported by a solid job market and strong population growth at a time of rising interest rates.

• More households are in severe housing stress than at any other time in the nation’s history while the shortfall in social housing has peaked at record highs.

• A report has laid bare the brutal reality of Australia’s housing crisis, revealing two in three Australians are experiencing housing stress.

• As the steady drip of revelations over the past few months shows, Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to intellectual, cultural, and financial luminaries were much more extensive than previously known. For years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution, he socialized with Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, Leon Botstein, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, private equity billionaire Leon Black, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, CIA director William Burns, and Lawrence Summers.1

• Casual workers could soon have the right to become permanent employees, but business groups warn the changes may create economic uncertainty.

• Employment Minister Tony Burke has unveiled reforms to force bosses to offer casual staff who work regular hours a permanent job.

• Australia’s books are likely to show a $20 billion surplus for the last financial year off the back of a strong labour market and high commodity prices for key exports.

• The underlying cash balance for the year to May was $19 billion, up from the $4.2 billion surplus for 2022/23 flagged in the federal budget.

• Senior public servant Kathryn Campbell has quit her $900,000-a-year job in the defence department after her suspension following damning revelations about her role in the illegal robodebt scheme.

• The department confirmed on Monday it had accepted Ms Campbell’s resignation effective from July 21, a day after news she was suspended without pay was made public.

• Australia’s books are likely to show a $20 billion surplus for the last financial year thanks to higher tax revenue from a strong labour market and booming commodity exports.

• But households should not expect extra cost-of-living relief as the government sticks to plans already unveiled in the past two budgets.

• A fresh face has been picked for the task of guaranteeing Australia’s future prosperity and lifting living standards.

• Accomplished economist and public servant Chris Barrett has been installed in the top job at the Productivity Commission to replace outgoing chair Michael Brennan.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Most of us know the culminating moment of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992) when the lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) cross-examines the Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) and declares, “I want the truth!”, and Jessep shouts, “You can’t handle the truth!” This reply is more ambiguous than it seems: it should not be taken as simply claiming that most of us are too weak to handle the brutal reality of the world. If someone were to ask a witness about the truth of the Holocaust, and the witness were to reply, “You can’t handle the truth!”, this should not be understood as a simple claim that most of us are not able the process the horror of holocaust. At a deeper level, those who were not able to handle the truth were the Nazi perpetrators themselves: they were unable to accept the fact that their society was traversed by the economic and social crises of the 1930s, and to avoid this troubling insight they engaged in a mass murder spree that targeted Jews – as if killing Jews would somehow miraculously re-establish a harmonious social body. And therein resides the final lesson of the stories about venturing from fantasy into reality: we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid confronting reality, we also escape into reality to avoid the devastating truth about the futility of our fantasies.

• These commitments underscore three fundamental principles in the future of AI: safety, security, and trust. Ensuring products are safe before introducing them to the public involves internal and external security testing of AI systems before release, sharing information across the industry and with governments, civil society, and academia on managing potential risks and using best practices.

• In response to the riots that erupted in France following the tragic incident of the police shooting and killing of a teenage boy named Nahel in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on June 27, 2023, various Arab commentators, including Muslim clerics, took to social media and websites to express their perspectives. They argued that the rioters’ violent reactions can be seen as a form of divine punishment against France due to its anti-Islam policies and positions, as well as a consequence of its colonial history and foreign interventions.

• This will, directly, make financial crime easier in the UK. Here is an example of how it will do so. Under the laws about money laundering, there is an offence called ‘tipping off’ which is exactly what it sounds like: if you tell someone that you suspect of laundering money about your suspicions then you are tipping them off and this is, not surprisingly, illegal as it would allow them to take appropriate action to avoid being caught. In particular in this official document is this description: [...]

• A shocking 28 percent of people said that they could not afford to eat balanced meals, and 11 percent of people in the UK reported experiencing hunger in the last month because they had not been able to afford food, up from 9 percent and 5 percent before the pandemic, respectively. Twenty-three percent of people on means-tested benefits experienced severe food insecurity over the winter.

• Tony Abbott is urging the campaign against an Indigenous voice not to become complacent, warning the ‘yes’ side will try to “buy” a successful referendum.

• The former prime minister has been a staunch critic of the Indigenous voice.

• Twitter’s blue bird logo has now been replaced by the new ‘X’ logo on the web. Twitter-owner Elon Musk had started hinting at this change on Sunday with a series of tweets, starting with one that said, “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.

• Now ‘X’ logo has replaced the Twitter blue bird on the platform’s web version. Musk also changed the company’s official account’s name to ‘X’ on the platform along with its picture. Microsoft Layoffs: Tech Giant Reportedly Lays Off 1,000 Employees, Mostly in Sales and Customer Service Teams in Fresh Round of Job Cuts.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• “California Islamic Scholar Dr. Ali Ataie: Earth Is Flat, Moon Landings Were Fake, 94% Of Astronauts Are Freemasons, As Is Neil DeGrasse Tyson; You Believe In Gravity, I Believe In God,” MEMRI, June 10, 2023: [...]

• Scammers are turning to deep fakes of trusted public figures to take your money through bogus online ads. The National’s Ian Hanomansing is among them. He found out what the law says and what social media companies are doing about it.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As regular readers know, I have long questioned the value of social media and I have struggled with the question of how involved I should be with it. This morning I decided to quit Bluesky permanently because the bulk of the community there seems hellbent on ostracizing and ejecting anybody who doesn’t fully subscribe to their specific brand of group think.

• In a statement signed and released to the PUNCH on Friday by the Director General THURIST-Nigeria, Sulaymon Tadese, the group also cautioned skit makers against deriding Islamic ethics and values.

• Police detained a 35-year-old Christian man named Zaki Masih on July 8 after lodging a case against him under Sections 295-A and 298 of the blasphemy laws following an accusation by a local resident named Muhammad Awais, who alleged that Zaki shared a blasphemous [sic] post on Facebook.

• [...] Sweden closed its embassy in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. [...]

• Homosexuality is illegal in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation. A statement on the festival’s website says Malaysia’s Ministry of Communications stands “against any parties that challenge, ridicule or contravene Malaysian laws.”

• [...] Koran burnings are permitted in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, which all have legal protections for freedom of speech. [...]

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Since then, by learning about her investigative journalism background and her leading position in the organization of women journalists of Russia, and her feminist stand and by being invited by her to several academic and professional meetings in Sochi, Wien, and Moscow, I have had a great chance to know more about her and impressed by her endless motivation for a “good journalism”.

Civil Rights/Policing

• When the issue is position of the women in/by mainstream media, all the problems we knew continue to be valid although there is slight progress in different cultural and political, geographies. On the one hand, discrimination against women in the media sector through the glass ceiling, wage gap, high unemployment rate, unequal job division, such as expecting “soft news” from women journalists, etc. “Symbolic annihilation” of the women with the term of George Gerbner (1976) and Gaye Tuchman (1978) and in the sense of miss/less and stereotypical representation of women, on the other hand.

• Judges in Iran have diagnosed three prominent actresses sentenced for not wearing the hijab as mentally ill, anti-family, and antisocial, prompting top psychologists in the country to condemn the “abuse of psychiatry and psychology in the judiciary.”

• The heads of four leading psychiatry boards in the country went public with their criticisms after actresses Azadeh Samadi, Leila Bolukat, and Afsaneh Bayegan were all recently given the diagnoses during their sentencing in a Tehran criminal court.

• The reason behind the killing was an SMS message received by the teenager, according to Etamad newspaper. Some reports said she was killed after her father discovered she was engaged in a relationship with a boy.

• Many defiant women have been arrested, summoned by the authorities and prosecuted, with criminal courts issuing harsh sentences against the defendants. Hundreds of businesses have been shut down for allegedly failing to enforce the Islamic Republic’s strict dress codes on their customers.

• Recently, a court in Tehran sentenced a woman to six months in prison and ordered her to attend six months of counseling sessions to treat her “no-hijab infectious disease.”

• As an alternative sentence, the court imposed up to 300 hours of community service and mandatory psychotherapy sessions twice a week.

• The panel primarily discussed how to mitigate the concerns of allowing AI to generate lines that the actors didn’t agree or consent to read. Actors talked about putting talent first provisions in contracts and staring companies that would make sure that any AI was used in concert with actors and would also include provisions for appropriate compensation.

• The perils of artificial intelligence to the entertainment industry came to San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, with SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland joining a panel of voice actors organized by NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, to discuss the specific hazards AI is already posing to the profession.

• “We’ve got to reject the idea that this is just something that’s going to happen to us and we can’t say anything about it,” Crabtree-Ireland said at the outset of the panel, about whether AI could devastate the entertainment industry. “I think it definitely could, the question is whether we’re going to let that happen.”

• Normally, VFX photography wouldn’t raise an eyebrow from actors. But a bombshell proposal from the ongoing contract negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of TV and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) last week has caused widespread confusion and concern when it comes to artificial intelligence and image rights in Hollywood. The AMPTP reportedly wanted to pay background actors a low daily rate to take AI scans of them, opening up a pathway to make all talent “vulnerable to having most of their work replaced by digital replicas,” according to SAG-AFTRA. (In response, the AMPTP said SAG-AFTRA had “mischaracterized” its AI proposal and it had offered protections around digital replicas.)

• In a 23-page document issued on Friday afternoon, the AMPTP responded to SAG-AFTRA’s version of events, provided in a July 17 chart of alleged union proposals and responses from management. “Substantial portions of that chart are misleading, either in the characterization of the Producers’ offer or in the omission of key details,” the group said. In its own chart of SAG-AFTRA proposals and AMPTP counter-offers, the group offered its take on the union’s asks and its responses, saying that the ultimate package it offered the union on July 12 was worth more than $1 billion in compensation and benefits increases.

• Witnesses say that Thursday evening, a group of security officers — said to be wearing uniforms associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC — attacked tourists at the Opert summer resort.

• An eyewitness told Voice of America that a few hours after they arrived at the resort, two cars displaying IRGC insignia drove up and the occupants aggressively ordered women to adhere to the hijab dress code.

• At least 120 people have been killed during months of ethnic conflict between the predominantly Hindu Meitei majority and the mainly Christian Kuki in India’s troubled northeastern state of Manipur.

• The women from the Meitei community decided to show their anger after the humiliating video surfaced on Wednesday, which reportedly shows two Kuki women being forced to strip naked and then jeered at and harassed by Meitei men in May.

• The ruling Friday from U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi permanently blocks enforcement of the law that he suspended last year.

• The Republican-backed law was signed by former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in July 2022 but enthusiasm for the restrictions faded and legislators refused an opportunity to defend the law during an initial court suspension. Republican state Sen. John Kavanagh, who sponsored the measure, has said he was unable to find an outside group to defend the legislation.

• The law would have made it illegal to knowingly film police officers 8 feet (2.5 meters) or closer if the officer tells the person to stop. And on private property, an officer who decides that someone is interfering or that the area is unsafe could have ordered the person to stop filming even if the recording was being made with the owner’s permission.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Spotify Premium was introduced nearly 15 years ago at the $9.99/monthly price point. It allows a single user to listen to Spotify’s entire catalog of music ad-free and offline. Now that the pricing tier dam is about to break, will Spotify experiment with more tiers? There has been speculation that the rumored Spotify HiFi tier would create a service tier with access to hi-fidelity recordings and potentially audiobooks as Spotify looks to break into the spoken word market.

Monopolies

Patents

Trademarks

• A clothing company says the studio used its signature backpacks in the sequel without permission and then passed off the products as a competitors’ product.

Copyrights

• America didn’t invent improvisation, but it seems to have held the patent for generations. Even if, as many presume these days, the nation’s democracy is imperiled, its promise of unlimited reinvention remains its biggest selling point. Nothing exemplifies this more than jazz. The will to improvise, embedded in a society that has always cherished freedom, found its highest and purest cultural expression in an art form whose greatest innovators—from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman and many more in between—were one with all the legendary pioneers of American expansion, whether of inner or outer space.

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