● 07.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/07/2023: GStreamer 1.20.7 and Much More

Posted in News Roundup at 8:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls Comparison Part 2, 27 Years with the Perfect OS, Top 20 OpenSSH Server Best Security Practices, Huge pfsync rewrite, OpenSMTPD 7.3.0p1 release, Running OpenBSD 7.3 on your laptop is really hard (not), and more

Applications

• The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the now old-stable 1.20 release series of your favourite cross-platform This release only contains bug fixes. It should be safe to update from 1.20.x.

• qBittorrent is An advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice Qt user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible.

• Nulloy is a free open-source (OSS) Audiophile audio player.

• Persepolis is a Download Manager & a GUI For aria2. It’s written in Python. Persepolis is a Sample of Free and open source software. It’s developed For GNU/Linux Distributions, BSDs, macOS and Microsoft Windows. You can join Persepolis contributers & Help us with developing it.

• Pencil2D is an easy, intuitive tool to make 2D hand-drawn animations.

• Pencil2D is an animation/drawing software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD.

• PeaZip is a free file archiver utility and rar extractor for Linux [...]

• Notes is an open source and cross-platform note-taking app that is both beautiful and powerful. /blockquote>

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cockpit on Fedora 38. Cockpit, a powerful web-based server management tool, revolutionizes the way administrators handle Fedora servers. Its intuitive interface simplifies complex tasks, making server administration accessible even to novices.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SmartGit on Debian 12. Version control systems are an integral part of modern software development, and Git has become the de facto standard for managing source code. SmartGit, a powerful graphical Git client, offers an intuitive interface and advanced features that streamline your Git workflow.

• RetroArch is a distinctive, open-source application designed as a frontend for emulators, game engines, and media players. It’s a robust software that brings together different gaming consoles under one interface, bridging the gap between retro and modern gaming.

• MPV media player released new 0.36.0 version a few days ago. Here’s how to install it for those sticking to the classic .deb package format. MPV does not provide official packages for Ubuntu Linux.

• Updating your system is necessary so you get the latest features, and most importantly security features that patch the security bugs that your system may have.

• On Linux Mint performing an update is done via two different ways, by using the terminal, or by using the Update Manager.

• If you

• The touch command is a very common and standard command used in all UNIX/Linux based operating systems.

• The system locale or the locale setting on Linux will help us to ensure the date and time information…

• In the realm of data transmission and storage, Base64 encoding plays a vital role. This efficient method allows us to represent binary data as ASCII characters, facilitating safe and reliable data exchange across various platforms. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the world of Base64 encoding and decoding using the command-line interface.

• Kdenlive, short for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor, is an acclaimed open-source video editing software that has grown and improved significantly over time. It’s not only aimed at professionals but also caters to beginners in the field of video editing.

• Welcome back to the Node.js reference architecture series. In this article, we’ll take a look at testing in the Node.js landscape and discuss the guidelines recommended by the Node.js reference architecture team.

• Google Chrome is a top-notch web browser known for its speed, high performance, and easy-to-use interface. Thanks to features like synchronized browsing, a wide array of extensions, and robust security, it’s a favorite among many users worldwide. This guide will walk you through installing Google Chrome on Pop!_OS.

• Learn how to safely remove Windows from your dual boot system with this step-by-step guide. Uninstalling Windows allows you to free up disk space, speed up your boot time, and improve the stability of your Linux system.

• In the age of digital surveillance and data collection, privacy has become a top concern for many internet users. One way to ensure online privacy is to use a secure and privacy-focused browser. Debian users, who traditionally rely on the Firefox browser, may find LibreWolf to be a compelling alternative.

• Android Studio is the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Android application development. Developed by Google, this sophisticated tool is designed to accelerate the process of creating Android applications.

• When you need to transfer files between computers or servers, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a traditional, robust method to accomplish the task. In the world of FTP servers, vsftpd (which stands for “Very Secure FTP Daemon”) is an excellent choice. It is known for its speed, stability, and security features. Setting up a vsftpd FTP server on Debian not only allows for secure file transfers, but also gives you control over user access and data management.

• Python is a versatile, powerful, and widely used programming language that is known for its simplicity and readability. Its diverse applications range from web development and machine learning to data analysis and automation. Installing Python on your Debian system can unlock a wealth of development opportunities.

• In any Linux system, understanding the management of users and groups is fundamental. It’s a critical part of system administration, aiding in organizing and securing a system’s resources.

• The Linux command line, also known as the terminal, is a powerful tool that gives you complete control over your system. An essential command in every Linux user’s toolkit is the bc command. It stands for Basic Calculator.

• The Linux operating system provides its users with comprehensive commands to manage and administer system-related activities. One such command is chage. The chage command, an abbreviation for “change age,” is a crucial command used to modify and manage password expiration policies for user accounts in Linux.

• In this article, we will learn how to work with a specific Python class from the multiprocessing module, the process class. I will give you a quick overview with examples.

• Full article: Checking usage of realloc with Valgrind

• Summary: realloc has a surprising number of tricky corner cases to watch out for. Valgrind Memcheck will help you find various issues like using it with bad arguments, pointers that might have become invalid, and leaks of blocks that have been resized.

Games

• Between 2023-07-19 and 2023-07-26 there were 38 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Wondering what the default GNOME 45 wallpaper will look like? Well, wonder no more, kid!

• Window management is one of those areas I’m fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody’s fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we’ve relied on the window metaphor as the primary way of multitasking on the desktop. In this metaphor, each app can spawn one or more rectangular windows, which are stacked by most recently used, and moved or resized manually.

• The traditional windowing system works well as long as you only have a handful of small windows, but issues emerge as soon the number and size of the windows grows. As new windows are opened, existing ones are obscured, sometimes completely hiding them from view. Or, when you open a maximized window, suddenly every other window is hidden.

• Over the decades, different OSes have added different tools and workflows to deal with these issues, including workspaces, taskbars, and switchers. However, the basic primitives have not changed since the 70s and, as a result, the issues have never gone away.

• While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It’s also what we jokingly refer to as shit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose.

• Most of the time you don’t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that’s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it’s two or three windows next to each other. It’s incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it’s up to you to clean it up.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Whether you’re a seasoned Linux user or just starting your journey, this blog post is designed to be your go-to resource for technical guidance when transitioning from CentOS to openSUSE Leap.

• Delivering Kubernetes resources efficiently and securely can be a challenge, particularly at hyperscale and at the edge. Combining CLASTIX Kamaji and Rancher Prime by SUSE gives organizations the power to optimize, secure, and manage large and diverse, multi-tenant Kubernetes landscapes.

Fedora Family / IBM

• This is a summary of the work done on initiatives by the CPE Team. Each quarter CPE Team together with CentOS and Fedora community representatives choose initiatives that will be being worked on in this quarter. The CPE Team is then split into multiple smaller sub-teams that will work on chosen initiatives + day to day work that needs to be done. Some of the sub-teams are continuous efforts in the team and some are created only for the initiative project.

Debian Family

• When the news appeared about Kevin Spacey today, I couldn’t help reflecting on the similarities to the case of Cardinal Pell. Both men had a very prominent status in their profession. Both were in authority positions: Spacey was not only an actor, he was also artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London for eleven years. Pell had been Arch-Bishop of both Melbourne and Sydney at various times. In both cases, the accused had substantial wealth.

• [...]

• Thinking about the impact these thoughts have on a child’s state of mind, it is not hard to answer the question I raised at the beginning: Why did a fourteen year old boy from the choir begin using hard drugs like heroin? It could originate with any priest, even one he encountered before joining the choir and the school. Cardinal Pell may have been a red herring.

• Yet we see a very similar phenomena in Debian and other open source communities today. Abusers like Enrico Zini have inflicted secret punishments on various developers. At the same time, Zini tells the victims he still wants us to sing for him. Dr Norbert Preining shared one of those messages in December 2018. Here is the bit about continuing to sing:

• Zini is telling Dr Preining: continue to work for us but you are not allowed to speak.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• New video on Xero Linux, first look at GyroFlow editor and the regular assortment of tips and tutorials.

Events

• The Android Microconference brings the upstream community and Android systems developers together to discuss issues and changes to the Android platform and their dependencies and interactions with the Linux  kernel, allowing for collaboration on solutions for upstream.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The PostgreSQL Community Association (PGCA) is issuing a news announcement to clarify recent comments around an ongoing trademark dispute.

• On 24th July 2023, Álvaro Hernández posted a blog on the Fundación PostgreSQL website regarding the PostgreSQL Core Team’s request that the website moderation team reject any submitted content linking to Fundación PostgreSQL or their events.

• The Core Team requested this on the advice of legal counsel, because of the ongoing legal action to invalidate PostgreSQL related trademarks registered by Fundación PostgreSQL which conflict with those held by the project (through the PostgreSQL Community Association, or PGCA).

• Postbird is a cross-platform PostgreSQL GUI client, written in JavaScript, runs with Electron

• Motivation The original LiPad site provides a SQL dump that requires you to configure PostreSQL on your own laptop or server. Because some classmates asked me about it, I decided to host the database to simplify its access.

Programming/Development

• We are currently facing issues with open-source installations of Qt. Root cause is a bug in the latest installer. We are working on fixing the issue and there are a few ways to work around it.

Rust

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

Standards/Consortia

• This story was originally published in my weekly newsletter on Friday July 21, 2023. You can sign up for my newsletter here.  Tired of having dozens of IoT devices competing for the same wireless airwaves as your computers, phones, and televisions? There might be a solution in the form of LiFi, or light fidelity, networks.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Counterpoint made the prediction on Wednesday, the day on which Samsung released its latest two foldable devices, the clamshell-like Galaxy Z Flip 5 and the bigger Galaxy Z Fold 5, in South Korea.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Do you have a water filter in your home? Not to scare you, but it might be worth investing in one or at least getting your water tested for a certain class of chemical that you might have heard about: PFAS.  Short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are cropping up almost everywhere…

• A new study conducted by researchers from UC San Francisco reveals that people who contract COVID-19 but remain asymptomatic, often referred to as “super dodgers,” may have a hereditary advantage. These individuals are more than twice as likely as those who develop symptoms to carry a specific gene variation that aids in eradicating the virus.

• Published in Nature on July 19, 2023, the study provides the first evidence that there is a genetic basis for asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• According to the Fast 50 Q2 2023 report, an analysis of over 280,000 jobs posted on Freelancer.com between April and June 2023, creative writing emerged as the fastest-growing skill. The report also indicated increased investments by businesses in marketing and on-site photography and videography.

• If an advertisement autoplays for a bot on a site that’s not publicly listed or indexed by search engines, does anyone see it? According to Google, people do see the ad, which has led to a purported class action against the company that claims it overcharges advertisers for the “privilege of autoplaying their advertisements into the void.”

• A suit filed against the Alphabet-owned company on Wednesday accuses the tech giant of misleading advertisers about its “TrueView” ad program by inflating metrics on its ads, which are allegedly displayed as muted, autoplaying videos and served on unlisted webpages in violation of promised standards.

• A federal lawsuit alleges that health insurance giant Cigna used a computer algorithm to automatically reject hundreds of thousands of patient claims without examining them individually as required by California law.

• The class-action lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in Sacramento, says Cigna Corp. and Cigna Health and Life Insurance Co. rejected more than 300,000 payment claims in just two months last year.

• Learn how to install Visual Studio Code on Debian 12 effortlessly with our comprehensive guide. Enhance your coding experience today!

• Are you fan of shortcuts? Did you know that on Visual studio code you can create your own shortcut?

• Creating a shortcut on Visual studio code, it’s really easy, and this method works on any Vscode installation, no matter the operating system.

Linux Foundation

• The Overture Maps Foundation (OMF), a collaborative effort to enable current and next-generation interoperable open map products, today announced the release of its first open map dataset.

Security

• Samsung’s newest Galaxy Z foldable phones are up for pre-order. Prices start at about $1000 for the Galaxy Z Flip5 and $1800 for the Galaxy Z Fold5, although various retailers are offering free storage upgrades, gift cards, or other perks to sweeten the deal before the phones are generally available on August 11.

• Other Linux distributions do not use the Overlay filesystem module and are hence not affected.

• In a blog post, the company’s researchers Sagi Tzadik and Shir Tamari wrote that OverlayFS had become popular along with the rise in the use of containers.

• “…its features enable the deployment of dynamic filesystems based on pre-built images,” they explained.

• The banking trojan Qakbot has once again risen in popularity, because you just can’t keep well-designed and effective malware down. A new report from Zscaler Inc.’s threat labs provides new details about the trojan virus that has been around since 2007 stealing banking credentials from around the world.>

• We have published Qubes Security Bulletin 091: Windows PV drivers potentially compromised. The text of this QSB and its accompanying cryptographic signatures are reproduced below. For an explanation of this announcement and instructions for authenticating this QSB, please see the end of this announcement.

Defence/Aggression

• American troops led United Nations forces to defend South Korea against the North. The war ended with a cease-fire agreement and a Korean Peninsula that is still divided.

War in Ukraine

• Kim Jong Un met the Russian defence minister and a high-ranking Chinese delegation in Pyongyang ahead of major Korean War anniversary celebrations, state media said Thursday, the leader’s first known foreign guests since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

• This report examines the accessibility of certain types of content on VK (an abbreviation for “VKontakte”), a Russian social networking service, in Canada, Ukraine, and Russia. Among these countries, we found that Russia had the most limited access to VK social media content, due to the blocking of 94,942 videos, 1,569 community accounts, and 787 personal accounts in the country.

• Like the war that necessitated it, Russia’s decision not to renew the UN-Turkish brokered grain deal is bad for the world but not entirely unprovoked.

• Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. It can’t be coincidence. In the past few days, I’ve seen articles at mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that the much-hyped and much-delayed Ukrainian “spring” counteroffensive has stalled, and at high cost to Ukrainian troops.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and climate change are fundamentally changing the Arctic; unmanned aircraft systems may help allies fill their security gaps in the region.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin told a summit with African leaders in St Petersburg on Thursday that Russia is able to replace Ukrainian grain exports to Africa, and that Moscow would be ready to start supplying free grain to six countries “in the coming months”. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the southeastern city of Dnipro where he discussed ammunition supplies for soldiers and air defence.

• The inability of some NATO allies in the West to not see the bigger picture in Ukraine is costing lives every day. While states in the region continue to raise the alarm, many of their partners are still frozen with indecision, Dzmitry Pravatorau argues at the New Eastern Europe, partners of LRT English.

• The European Union ambassadors have approved new sanctions against Belarus, introducing new restrictions on dual-use goods and aviation parts, and more sanctions against persons involved in the war in Ukraine.

• The Italian parliament’s upper chamber, the Senate, voted on July 26 to recognize the Holodomor — the starvation of millions in Ukraine in the 1930s under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — as genocide.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on July 27 traveled to the city of Dnipro, which has been repeatedly subjected to air attacks, as Russian forces unleashed a fresh wave of drone and missile strikes overnight on targets in Ukraine, causing civilian victims and damage.

• Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) claimed responsibility for the first time on July 26 for an explosion that badly damaged the bridge linking the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula with Russia in October 2022.

• A Moscow court on July 26 sentenced Sergei Belavin, a Russian-Ukrainian dual citizen, to 22 years in prison on sabotage charges.

• Discussions included the latest situation in Ukraine as well as the global financial system.

• Ambassadors from the European Union’s 27 member states have agreed to adopt “restrictive measures” against Belarus over its assistance to Russia in Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

• Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations (DBR) says former lawmaker Vadym Rabinovych, who is currently out the country, is suspected of high treason.

• Despite tough talk, Britain’s new sanctions program against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proved shaky. Some oligarchs have received generous exemptions. Officials have at times overreached.

• Moscow launched airstrikes and artillery barrages in the south, where U.S. officials said Ukraine had begun the main thrust of its counteroffensive.

• At a summit for African countries, the Russian president insisted that Western hypocrisy rather than his invasion of Ukraine was to blame for disruptions in the global food supply.

• After holding back many of its units trained and armed by the West, Ukraine is now committing them, the officials said, but it remained unclear whether a full-scale assault was taking place.

• The step signals a major shift in American policy and ends months of resistance by Pentagon officials who feared setting a precedent that could pave the way for the court to prosecute U.S. troops.

Environment

Axios ☛ Heat wave puts over half of U.S. population under heat alertsA heat wave that has hammered the southern U.S. for weeks expanded into the Great Plains, Midwest and Northeast on Wednesday, triggering heat alerts for over 170 million people, according to the National Weather Service.Why it matters: The extreme heat is expected to persist over a massive swath of the country through Friday, all the while posing an immediate risk to public health.Heat events are the top annual weather-related killer in the U.S., especially when they persist over a long period of time, as the current heat wave has in many locations.The extreme, record-breaking heat that has recently broiled the U.S. and Europe would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, according to a new study published earlier this week.The study reinforced prior research that found that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are making extreme heat events both more likely and more severe.Threat level: Several major cities from coast to coast, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Louisville, New York, Washington, D.C. and Boston, were forecast to see heat indices between 85 and 105° Fahrenheit.

Energy/Transportation

Axios ☛ Chinese automakers want to sell electric cars across AmericaInexpensive electric cars from China have quickly gained a toehold in Europe — and could be taking over American driveways next.Why it matters: The Biden administration is incentivizing rapid electric vehicle (EV) adoption, while also trying to reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese EV supply chains.Yet experts say there’s no way to meet the administration’s proposed vehicle emissions standards without low-priced EVs that everyday Americans can afford.With today’s U.S. EV prices averaging close to $55,000, there’s a big opening at the bottom of the U.S. market for budget-priced cars from Chinese brands like BYD, Xpeng Motors and Li Auto.

Overpopulation

• Finland’s birthrate hit an all-time low in the first half of 2023, dropping to the lowest level since 1900.

Finance

• For the next decade, U.S.-China rivalry will likely be characterized not by military struggle but by economic statecraft — using economic means to achieve geopolitical outcomes, Axios China reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian writes in her new book Beijing Rules.

• Why it matters: That could create an economic arms race, with both sides struggling to create ever sharper and more innovative economic tools, and to rally ever more allies into their respective economic spheres of influence.

• Snap is making a habit of scaring investors with earnings reports.

• Shares of the Snapchat parent crashed as much as 20% on Wednesday, marking the fifth consecutive quarter that the stock declined by double-digits after earnings. By midday in New York, Snap stock changed hands at about $10.10 per share.

• Late Tuesday, the company reported second-quarter results that beat forecasts on the top and bottom lines, but its guidance for third-quarter sales was $1.07 billion-$1.13 billion, largely below analysts’ views for $1.13 billion.

• The Federal Reserve resumed its campaign of interest rate increases, pushing its target rate up another 0.25 percentage point to the highest level in 22 years.

• Dozens of jobs are on the chopping block at CD Projekt Red (CDPR) as the video game studio restructures its business.

• In a blog post on July 26, CEO Adam Kiciński announced that the company eliminating approximately 100 jobs, or nine per cent of its total workforce.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• President Biden had feared the electoral victory of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party last fall would spell trouble. But she has proved to be a strong ally in the American-led effort to support Ukraine.

• Here are five totally made-up “crises” Republicans have invented to distract from the real crises facing Americans today: the growing concentration of wealth, the worsening climate crisis, and the undermining of our democracy.

• Fake crisis #1:  Anything they claim is “woke.”

• Although Republicans struggle to define what “woke” even means, they’re constantly using it as a weapon to combat anything that seeks to foster tolerance and acceptance.

• On July 24, Aleksandra Gadzala Tirziu and Amy K. Mitchell co-authored a National Interest piece opining that Washington’s efforts to “thaw” strained relations with Beijing is inadvertently emboldening the CCP’s coercive and malign endeavors.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Dagmar, a marketing agency, conducted a Digital Media Research that reveals how much people’s daily lives have changed with the evolution of media usage and devices.

• Few people watch television without a phone in hand, and every fourth person now sports a smartwatch on their wrist. Additionally, YouTube has grown to rival linear television in popularity. These significant changes have occurred in the last ten years, as Dagmar has been conducting its monthly Digital Media Research.

• Whether it is a baby sloth hanging onto someone’s thumb, a tiny colourful peacock or baby penguins taking a selfie, these insanely cute images of animals have been shared thousands of times on social media in recent months by people unable to resist. But it turns out that all three of these images were generated by AI. We’ve written up a list of tips so that you won’t be duped just because something is wildly cute.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A report from Citizen Lab laid out how much online censorship has increased on one of Russia’s biggest social media sites.

• Several platforms, including Netflix, MUBI, and Disney+, have been affected by fines imposed due to their productions depicting LGBTI+ stories.

• After its spectacular screw-ups on COVID-19 “misinformation,” the government shouldn’t be so quick to squelch dissenting voices.

• Ahmad Zeidabadi, a prominent Iranian political activist, has been sentenced to a year of punitive imprisonment and 50 lashes in a case he says is linked to speeches he gave during the 2009 presidential election.

• I blogged about the underlying libel case, Tera Shanley a/k/a T.S. Joyce & Wicked Willow Press, LLC v. Robyn A. Hutchings a/k/a Terry Bolryder a/k/a Domino Savage two months ago; here’s a quick summary of the allegations: Ms. Shanley and Ms. Hutchings both write paranormal romance fiction. Readers of such fiction gather online to discuss books…

Civil Rights/Policing

• An 11-year-old Florida girl was arrested Wednesday after she falsely reported that her friend was kidnaped by an armed man — a prank apparently inspired by a YouTube challenge, authorities said.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• “This means Google decides which browser is trustworthy on its own platform. I do not see how they can be expected to be impartial,” he noted.

• “On Windows, they would probably defer to Microsoft via the Windows Store, and on Mac, they would defer to Apple. So, we can expect that at least Edge and Safari are going to be trusted. Any other browser will be left to the good graces of those three companies.”

• Picalausa said it would not be possible for browser firms not to implement the specification if it was accepted. “Any browser choosing not to implement this would not be trusted and any website choosing to use this API could therefore reject users from those browsers. Google also has ways to drive adoptions by websites themselves,” he pointed out.

• “First, they can easily make all their properties depend on using these features, and not being able to use Google websites is a death sentence for most browsers already.

• “Furthermore, they could try to mandate that sites that use Google Ads use this API as well, which makes sense since the first goal is to prevent fake ad clicks. That would quickly ensure that any browser not supporting the API would be doomed.”

• He said that it was possible that laws in the European Union would “not allow a few companies to have a huge amount of power in deciding which browsers are allowed and which are not. There is no doubt that attesters would be under a huge amount of pressure to be as fair as possible”.

• However, Picalausa added, “Unfortunately, legislative and judicial machineries tend to be slow and there is no saying how much damage will be done while governments and judges are examining this. If this is allowed to move forward, it will be a hard time for the open Web and might affect smaller vendors significantly.”

• The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday (July 27) that “Netflix is restructuring its advertising partnership with Microsoft a year into their deal and lowering ad prices in a bid to jump-start that fledgling corner of its business,” adding that “Some Netflix executives have been frustrated that Microsoft hasn’t sold more ad inventory, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Those soft sales and the weaker than expected ad market have so far led Microsoft to pay out the maximum amount required under the guarantee it agreed to a year ago when Netflix selected the company as its partner in launching the ad business, one person familiar with the partnership said.”

Monopolies

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 27 Jul 2023 The European Commission has opened a formal investigation to assess whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules.

• The agency’s failure to block a merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard represents the latest in a series of blows to its campaign to rein in tech giants’ economic power.

Patents

• A wide-ranging battle between medical device manufacturer Insulet, and diabetes tool management company Medtrum, has reached France. On 7 July, Judicial Court of Paris declared that Medtrum’s latest models of pump bases and patch reservoirs infringe Insulet patent EP 2 438 957…

• Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” becomes latest institution to integrate the EPO’s Modular Intellectual Property Education Framework into curriculum.

Copyrights

• Alphabet revealed its Q2 2023 financial report, showcasing a rise in YouTube ad revenue. Here’s the latest. Google has revealed that YouTube brought in $7.67 billion in ad revenue, beating Wall Street analyst estimates ($7.43 billion) for 4.4% growth compared to last year. More than 2 billion monthly users are watching its YouTube Shorts platform,

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