● 07.31.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 31/07/2023: Release of MX Linux 23 “Libretto”

Posted in News Roundup at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Linux is something you’ve probably heard a lot about, but might not know exactly what it is. It’s hard to define because there are so many things around us that make use of Linux in some way, like your Android smartphone. Most websites use servers that run on Linux too. In other words, Linux is everywhere.

• Linux has been around since the 1990s, with the first release of the Linux kernel arriving on Sept. 17, 1991, courtesy of Linus Torvalds. Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems that all make use of the Linux kernel at their core. There’s more to Linux than just a kernel, though.

• This week we got a few good news for fans of the GNOME desktop environment as the GNOME devs have held the annual GUADEC conference, announcing some exciting new features to come like a brand-new window management system for GNOME Shell.

• On top of that, Canonical announced Ubuntu RT for Intel CPUs, Mesa 23.2 graphics stack arrived for Linux gamers, Arch Linux’s installer got a major release with more new features and many improvements, and UBports released the second Ubuntu Touch update based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt talk about a new Google proposal that would add DRM for the web. All the ad driven companies seem to be acting very strangely, there’s probably a reason for this. The way ads used to pay for content is changing, but a lot of these giant companies don’t know how to adapt. It’s going to be very interesting times in the near future.

• Virtual Lego on Linux.

• shasum -a256=6dfc3621eef11c65fd00b5382d9248ea1e414d67fa2915cfa685210635dcdf89

Kernel Space

Applications

• A couple of months ago, I decided to use Kdenlive video editor, as I thought that it is the only one that supports voice-over directly from a microphone — among the open-source free video editors that is. Posted about it:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202305/fixed-kdenlive-project-setup.html

• Surprise, surprise, yesterday stumbled upon a YouTube video showing that it can be done in Shotcut. In fact, there are a few of them, such as these:

Instructionals/Technical

• At some point in either your cloud- or container-development life, you’re going to have to share a folder from the Linux server. You may only have to do this in a dev environment, where you want to be able to share files with other developers on a third-party, cloud-hosted instance of Linux. Or maybe file sharing is part of an app or service you are building.

• And because Samba (the Linux application for Windows file sharing) is capable of high availability and scaling, it makes perfect sense that it could be used (by leveraging a bit of creativity) within your business, your app stack, or your services.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to install multiple Python versions on Ubuntu 22.04 Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language compatible with different operating systems such as MacOS, Windows, Linux and etc. In this blog post, we will focus on installing Python in the Linux distributions.

• Looking for a self-hosted password manager? Check out our guide on installing Vaultwarden with Docker Compose and regaining control of your data.

• Still running your small business without a dedicated website? You’re missing out big time. Recent studies have revealed that approximately 80 percent of the world’s consumers shop online. With a good small business website, you can tap into this vastconsumer segment and generate a high income.

• A while back I discovered that Prometheus will make persistent connections to its scrape targets. Julien Pivotto added the important additional note that Prometheus only does a DNS lookup when it makes a new connection; once the connection is established, it doesn’t re-check DNS. One of the consequences of this is that ~~these persistent connections will stay up even if your DNS resolution falls over (which can be useful in trying to understand such a failure). However, there is an important qualification on this. The general version is that scrape targets may well do DNS queries from scratch every time they’re scraped by Prometheus. The specific version is that if your DNS stops working, all your name-based Blackbox probes will probably fail, regardless of the health of the targets.

• Redmine is a free and open-source project management tool and issue-tracking tool. It allows users and teams to plan, track, and manage their projects effectively. Redmine is a web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework.

• $ – given commands should be executed as a regular user

• Glances is a free open source, modern, cross-platform, real-time top and htop-like system monitoring tool, which offers advanced features compared to its counterparts, and can run in different modes: as a standalone, in client/server mode, and in web server mode.

• Considering the web server mode, you do not necessarily need to log into your remote server via SSH to run glances, you can run it in web server mode and access it via a web browser to remotely monitor your Linux server, as explained below.

• Earlier, we’ve written about many Linux System Monitor Tools that can be used to monitor the performance of Linux systems, but we think that most users prefer the default one that comes with every Linux distribution i.e. top command (real-time monitoring of system processes).

• The top command is the real-time task manager in Linux and the most frequently used system monitoring tool in GNU/Linux distributions to find the performance-related bottlenecks in the system which help us to take corrective actions.

• A few days ago, I came across a Centos 8 32-bit distro and I felt the desire to test it on an old 32-bit machine. After booting I realized that it had a bug and it was losing the network connection, which I had to turn “up” manually every time after boot. So, the question was how could I set a script doing this job, running every time I boot my machine?

• Well, this is very simple and I’ll show you the system way using service units. But first a small introduction to service units.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XAMPP on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, XAMPP (Cross-platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl) is a popular software package that provides an all-in-one solution for setting up a local server stack.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GParted on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor, is an indispensable tool for managing disk partitions on Debian 12 (Bookworm) and other Linux distributions.

• Recent discussion in the Fedora list about frame pointers led us to think it may be an interesting idea to explain what frame pointers can and can’t do for unwinding. To summarize the discussion, there was a request from a Fedora developer that, by default, all packages in Fedora should be built with explicit frame pointers to make it easier to profile and optimize. Those opposing the change cited the performance impact that such a change would have on the system. Even though that change has already been implemented, we thought it would be interesting to give some insight into the costs from the compiler team’s perspective.

Games

• The game’s roots are meandering and surprisingly contentious, and can ultimately be traced back to Elizabeth “Lizzy” Magie. At the turn of the 20th century, Magie invented the “Landlord’s Game” — a setup that clearly resembles the modern “Monopoly,” with a board printed with various real estate properties, along with game pieces, play money, cards of chance, and the infamous command to “Go to Jail.”

• Interestingly, Magie’s version could be played in one of two ways: either as competitive monopolists, in which players try to ruthlessly buy up more properties and accumulate more wealth than their opponents; or as more cooperative “anti-monopolists,” where everyone receives some benefit each time a player acquires some wealth. In Magie’s view, the game was meant to educate players on the tensions between capitalism and communalism. As it happened, capitalism won out, at least in terms of the game’s ultimate, commercial form.

• And indeed, many board games developed through the 20th century were designed with similar competitive, land-grabbing, and even colonialist themes. Only recently have commercial-scale board games begun to feature more socially and culturally diverse themes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• Most of my experiences with Solus 4.4 were positive ones. The installer was pretty easy to get through, the live environment was nice. I like the look of Budgie and it’s fairly easy to navigate. The desktop was responsive and stable, which is always a nice combination. I especially like the Budgie-specific settings panel as it’s clearly organized and doesn’t overwhelm the user with choices.

• Solus ships with a pretty nice collection of default software and I like the software centre. The way it handles third-party software is a little unusual and I was hoping the software centre would support Flatpak, but this doesn’t appear to be the case at this time.

• There were some problems. As I mentioned above, the theme and application style are not consistent and I think the shared password approach is likely a bug as there isn’t a good reason for separate accounts to share a non-root admin password. I also feel as though having two settings panels (with similar names) is likely to cause more confusion than assistance. The biggest problem though was highly unusual: my laptop’s sound card not being detected. It is very rare for me to run a Linux distribution which doesn’t have working sound. Some systems mute sound or don’t offer a mixer control. Solus has the volume turned up, it just can’t detect my sound output device on physical hardware. Inside a virtual machine audio worked without any issues.

• I was hoping that Solus would introduce some reliability features. The distribution is a rolling release and would benefit from using technologies such as Btrfs and Timeshift to allow users to rollback packages. However, Solus defaults to ext4 for the filesystem and doesn’t appear to offer any graphical tools which would help us create or rollback snapshots.

• In short, Solus does a lot of things well and often looks really nice and polished with a great collection of applications. But then there are other times when components of the distribution offer a surprisingly jarring contrast or experience – themes not matching, sound not working. There were times when I would find myself considering Solus as being one of the smoother experiences I’ve had so far in 2023 and the next minute I’d be fuming as I tried to figure out by what logic a user should know to right-click to the right of the file manager top bar in order to open a hidden menu to find preferences that have seemingly already been changed in the settings panel. It was a weird experience and Solus’s polish in some areas meant I was repeatedly caught off guard when I ran into problems or inconsistencies in other areas.

• I don’t know if Solus is here to stay now, or if this is the distribution’s swan song after a valiant rescue attempt earlier in the year. I’m hoping it sticks around. I think the project is doing some things well, but it feels as though it just doesn’t have the development power behind it yet to make a more consistent, complete experience.

New Releases

• Discover how 4MLinux’s latest release is the perfect solution for rejuvenating your old PC or laptop. Learn about the impressive updates to XMMS, the extended language support, and the exciting range of downloadable extensions that take your computing experience to the next level.

• Derived from the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” operating system series, MX Linux 23 comes with the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series by default for all three editions supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

• However, MX Linux’s AHS (Advanced Hardware Support) editions are powered by the latest Linux 6.4 kernel series for those who need its new features and the extra hardware support where the Linux 6.1-powered images fail to detect your hardware.

BSD

• But if you’re able to spend the time building a system optimised for it, and you understand it well, you reap the rewards. Unlike me, who had to spend his Saturday fixing iptables rules for someone because I gave them Debian a few years ago for something for which FreeBSD would have been perfect.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical will participate in Siggraph 2023 in Los Angeles on August 8 -10 for the second time to help you explore the future of storytelling with Ubuntu. This is an additional step in working even closer with the VFX Media & Entertainment community.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Note that this doesn’t just mean your partition should be formatted as FAT32. It should be formatted as FAT32, and also there’s a “partition type” byte inside your MBR that should be changed to FAT32. On a Linux system with fdisk, this is how you’d do that: [...]

• Advantech recently announced its partnership with the robotics software solutions provider MOV.AI to simplify the development of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). One of the new Advantech PCs compatible with MOV.AI’s Robotic Platform is the UNO-238-V2 built on various Alder Lake processors.

• The NanoS3 is described as the “world’s smallest, fully-featured ESP32-S3 module”. The open-source device is packed with diverse features including LiPo battery support and it’s compatible with programming platforms such as Arduino, MicroPython, etc.

• This week, AAEON revealed a new Single Board Computer based on the Intel Processor N-Series platform. The UP 7000 still maintains the credit-card form factor as its predecessors, but now supports LPPR5 system memory along with various peripherals

• The original circuit simulation software, called the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis, or SPICE as it is more commonly known, was originally developed at the University of Califorina Berkeley in the 1970s with an open-source license. That’s the reason for the vast versions of SPICE available now decades after the original was released, not all of which are as open or free as we might like. LTspice is a popular choice but as far as a truly free and open-source circuit simulator goes you might want to try out QucsStudio.

• When looking for electronics projects to use in educational settings, there is no shortage of simple, lightweight, and easily-accessible systems to choose from. From robotic arms, drones, walking robots, and wheeled robots, there is a vast array of options. But as technology marches on, the robotics platforms need to keep up as well. This turtle-style wheeled robot called the Trundlebot uses the latest in affordable microcontrollers on a relatively simple, expandable platform for the most up-to-date educational experience.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The Shenzhen government unveiled an action plan to push for greater adoption of HarmonyOS and EulerOS, the mobile and server operating systems from sanctions-hit Huawei.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Version 8.5 of rpki-client, OpenBSD’s implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for Relying Parties (RP), has been released.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• So I had to get 10 whole RPMs downloaded and unpacked because Mozilla is bumping the version number uselessly and Fedora keeps shitting out one patch releases where the patch itself is quite broken and then they go back and patch it three more times.

• So I finally yanked it out with dnf remove firefox and installed Firefox 115 ESR from the Mozilla tarball and set it up with their instructions for a systemwide install and then unpacked a firefox.desktop from a Fedora RPM that sits in my taskbar with extras like “New Private Window”.

• Then I sat down and turned off and hid the DRM and spyware (like “Firefox Suggest”) all over again, and installed my add-ons. Hopefully, I get less update churn this way.

Mozilla

• In a major announcement, Waterfox, the privacy-centric web browser, has reclaimed its independence, marking a significant turning point in its journey. On July 3, 2023, Alex Kontos, the creator and lead developer of Waterfox, revealed that the browser has parted ways with System1, once again becoming a fully independent project.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• In general you should enforce every invariant you can tractably enforce. Most of these you can come up with while designing the database, and following a checklist (such as this post) can help. Some of them you will only come up with after the fact, looking at the data, and often wonder why you didn’t think of them.

• In either case, adding a constraint is not too time consuming, it’s just a matter of creating a migration and writing the DDL. The only tedious part is the verbosity of SQL, but GitHub Copilot is really good at this. You can write a comment explaining what you want and it usually gets the constraint right.

• You should start with the strictest possible data model, because it’s trivial to go from strict to lax: you just drop the constraints. But it is very, very hard to go from lax to strict, often it involves days or weeks or months of planning and schema migrations and data migrations.

FSFE

Programming/Development

• A neat trick to debug the keyboard navigation in your QML application is to put the following code snippet in your main.qml: [...]

• Note: this blog post was not written by me. It was posted as a comment on r/rust by user matthieum, who gave me permission to repost it here. Everything below this paragraph has been taken verbatim from there.

• Welcome back to our quantum journey! Today, we’re delving into a phenomenon that lies at the heart of quantum computing’s unique power – entanglement. At a high level, quantum entanglement is the deep and mysterious link that can exist between two qubits, no matter the distance that separates them. This powerful feature allows quantum computers to process a massive number of possibilities at once and solve certain problems much faster than classical computers.

• But how do we get there? We’ll start by exploring two-qubit gates, the essential quantum operations that can bring about entanglement. The most common of these gates, such as the CNOT gate, can modify the state of one qubit based on the state of another, creating a correlation between the two.

• When exposing an application to the outside world, consider a Reverse-Proxy or an API Gateway to protect it from attacks. Rate Limiting comes to mind first, but it shouldn’t stop there. We can factor many features in the API Gateway and should be bold in moving them from our apps. In this post, I’ll show how to implement authentication at the Gateway API stage.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• I think what bugs me most about this problem in the shell is that it’s so uncharacteristic if the Bell Labs people to have made such an unforced error. They got so many things right, why not this? It’s not even a hard choice! 99% of the time you don’t want your strings implicitly split on spaces, why would you? And the shell doesn’t have this behavior for any other sort of special character. If you have a file named foo|bar and a variable z=’foo|bar’ then ls $z doesn’t try to pipe the output of ls foo into the bar command, it just tries to list the file foo|bar like you wanted. But if z=’foo bar’ then ls $z wants to list files foo and bar. How did the Bell Labs wizards get everything right except the spaces?

Leftovers

Science

• The society awarded the Stella Arcti prize to Heidi Rikala from Ikaalinen and Eero Karvinen from Nurmes, as well as past winners Emma Bruus from Nurmijärvi and Lauri Kangas from Espoo.

• According to a press release from Ursa, the group discovered a new phenomenon where a red arc appears in the sky in connection with bright Northern Lights.

Hardware

• Although air conditioning units are generally subdivided into a number of categories, including window, split and whole house/building units, they still work the same, with the compressor, condenser and expansion stages. In the case of widely available window AC units you can indeed use them as designed in a window, or as [Lou] is in the process of demonstrating, as a whole-house AC unit. The main thing to keep an eye out for here is the rated capacity of the window AC unit (in British Thermal Units, square meters/feet). In this case [Lou] used a pretty beefy $600, 24,000 BTU window unit that should be good for about 1200 sqf (~111 m2) .

• [Nick Poole] does a lot of custom work with vacuum tubes — so much so that he builds his own vacuum tubes of various shapes, sizes, and functions right on his own workbench. While the theory of vacuum tubes is pretty straightforward, at least to those of us who haven’t only been exposed to semiconductors, producing them requires some specialized equipment. A simple vacuum won’t get you all the way there, and the complexity of the setup that’s needed certainly calls for some automation.

• Collecting energy from various small mechanical processes has always been something that’s been technically possible, but never done on a large scale due to issues with cost and scalability. It’s much easier to generate electricity in bulk via traditional methods, whether that’s with fossil fuels or other proven processes like solar panels. That might be about to change, though, as a breakthrough that researchers at Georgia Tech found allows for the direct harvesting of mechanical energy at a rate much higher than previous techniques allowed.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Department of Defence officials are being investigated for apparently manipulating dozens of Covid-19 personal protective equipment (PPE) tenders, in the latest such scandal to emerge. The Sunday Times reported that officials allegedly awarded contracts worth millions of rands to legitimate companies on condition they “ceded” them to pre-selected middlemen.

• Last month, researchers at the University of Southern California began a new study on the health effects of PFAS contamination in drinking water in Los Angeles County, focusing on the predominantly Latino communities in the east and southeast that are overburdened with environmental pollution. The multidisciplinary study, which involves researchers from USC’s medical and engineering schools, aims to develop prevention strategies and large-scale, sustainable remediation solutions that can be implemented in a cost-effective manner.

• July is a hard month for a lot of us here in New Mexico, where thousands of people’s lives were upended by the test of the world’s first nuclear bomb. The events of July 16, 1945, weigh heavily on us. And why wouldn’t they? They changed everything. The people of New Mexico were the first human test subjects of the world’s most powerful weapon.

• Extreme sodium deficiencies, or hyponatremia, can be life-threatening if left untreated, according to Mayo Clinic.

• “Unfortunately, in recent years we have seen an increase of about 20-30% annually in the number of people who were poisoned or developed [adverse] side effects from drinking methyl alcohol,” Mohammad Kazem Attari, a US-based Iranian physician and researcher, told DW.

• “As alcohol poisoning was very widespread in the cities at the same time, there is doubt that it was intentional, or rather a mistake by a local producer who added impurities to drinks during production,” Attari said, comparing it to the recent wave of suspected deliberate mass poisonings of Iranian school girls.

• Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) and Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) are blocking about $75 million in food assistance from reaching Palestinian refugees

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Minecraft players and those who run Minecraft servers face a new and dangerous security vulnerability which could allow bad actors to run remote code on their computers. Dubbed ‘BleedingPipe,’ by a user group called MMPA (Minecraft Malware Prevention Alliance), the exploit uses Java deserialization to infect servers or clients that have one of many popular mods installed. If you don’t play Minecraft on a server that has one of the mods and don’t use the mods, you can’t be infected.

• The language you’re using for a Large Language Model (LLM) can have a huge effect on its cost and create an AI divide between English speakers and the rest of the world. A recent study shows that, due to the way services like OpenAI, measure and bill for server costs, English-language inputs and outputs are much cheaper than those in other languages with Simplified Chinese costing about twice as much, Spanishing costing 1.5x the price and Shan language going for 15 times more.

Windows TCO

• Infosec in brief US senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) thinks it’s Microsoft’s fault that Chinese hackers broke into Exchange Online, and he wants three separate government agencies to launch investigations and “hold Microsoft responsible for its negligent cyber security practices.”

• In a letter [PDF] sent to the Department of Justice, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Trade Commission Thursday, Wyden argued that Microsoft enabled the attack through four distinct security failures.

Security

• The provider of health, dental, and wellness benefits at the University of Guelph (U of G) has begun notifying students of a data breach which included access to personal information.

• A post on the Central Student Association’s website says Gallivan, the provider of those plans, began sending notifications via email this week.

• CTV News Kitchener was provided an email sent by Gallivan to U of G students on Wednesday morning informing them of the breach.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• This week’s Threat and Vulnerability Roundup is here! Cyber Writes pride ourselves in delivering a weekly roundup of the most up-to-date cybersecurity news.

• Our goal is to bring attention to noteworthy vulnerabilities and exploits, innovative attack methodologies, and essential software patches.

• As per the latest discovery by Security Researchers S. Tzadik and S. Tamari at Wiz, two new privilege escalation vulnerabilities, codenamed “GameOver(Lay)” in the popular Filesystem OverlayFS, affect a whopping 40% Ubuntu users across the globe. Check out the details for both of these vulnerabilities, along with the steps to check if your Ubuntu system is vulnerable or not.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Medical and Health Services Recruitment Board (MHSRB) has asked the candidates appearing for the staff nurse examination on August 2 to report to the examination centre at the designated reporting time, as the registration procedure will involve capturing biometric data this time.

• In an underappreciated ruling, District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the multinational law firm Covington & Burling must comply with an SEC subpoena requiring the firm to give up the names of clients, publicly-traded corporations, in order for the SEC to investigate whether there was any trading on non-public information. This didn’t arise because of suspicious trades or other red flags on the corporate side of the ledger, but because [crackers] working for China launched a successful cyber attack on Microsoft which ultimately gave them access to the firm’s internal records.

• When Covington became aware of the [breach], it notified its clients in order to address its significance. What happened there is between Covington and its clients. But the SEC’s concern wasn’t about the poor client, but that the possibility that the attack put non-public information into the hands of Chinese attackers, essentially insider trading, which the SEC frowns upon. The dual problem was that while the attack gave rise to the possibility that such trading occurred, the SEC had no evidence to suggest it had, in fact, happened, but merely wanted to investigate because it might have happened and it wanted to find out whether it did or not.

• The list of bad legislation relating to the topic of encryption and privacy is long and inglorious. Usually, these legislative stinkers only affect those unfortunate enough to live in the country that passed them. Still, one upcoming law from the British government should have us all concerned. The Online Safety Bill started as the usual think-of-the-children stuff, but as the EFF notes, some of its proposed powers have the potential to undermine encryption worldwide.

Defence/Aggression

• He was arrested in 2019, hours after he arrived in Vietnam and met with a fellow pro-democracy activist. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “terrorism aimed at toppling the people’s administration.”

• Kham was a member of Viet Tan, a pro-democracy group with members inside Vietnam and abroad. It has been described by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as a moderate activist group advocating for democratic reform. Hanoi claims it is a terrorist organization that aims to topple the government.

• Borax is a chemical compound containing boron that’s sold as a laundry detergent or cleaning agent. Ingesting it can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Drinking it or bathing in it can cause skin rashes. Take borax for long enough and you could end up with anemia, according to the National Capital Poison Center. But in several online enclaves, borax is one of many dubious substances in the medicine cabinet of misinformation, touted as a cure for everything from arthritis to cancer. Drinking borax is not a new phenomenon. But on TikTok, it became a trend.

• The #boraxchallenge has more than 34 million views and counting on TikTok. Click on the hashtag and it’s not difficult to find videos of people sharing their “journey” of ingesting laundry detergent. And if you spend enough time looking at these videos, TikTok will feed you even more.

• Wiedhahn said it might not have been clear at the time, but it sure is now. South Korea is democratic and among the world’s leading economies, while the North is an impoverished, brutal dictatorship. Wiedhahn just wishes the United Nations force, led by the U.S., had held on to more of the Korean peninsula before the cease-fire. At a certain point they had driven North Korean forces all the way to the Chinese border before being pushed south again.

• “Now don’t get me wrong. The [cease-fire] was welcomed because that meant that the Marines and soldiers were not getting killed anymore. But to me, to us who had fought in the beginning, it was kind of an anti-climactic,” he said.

• At 94, Wiedhahn is president of the Chosin Few, a group of vets who fought at Chosin Reservior, a freezing 17-day battle with the Chinese army.

• “I strongly condemn the blast and want to give a message to the people behind it that this is not jihad but terrorism,” the JUI-F leader said while speaking to Geo News

• A video from the rally recorded before the explosion shows hundreds of men sitting outside beneath a cloth canopy as party officials addressed the crowd. As one district leader took to the stage, enthusiastic party workers stood up, chanting, “Allah is great,” according to one rally-goer, Sharifullah Mamond, 19. Then an explosion rocked the crowd.

• On Sunday, ECOWAS leaders met in an extraordinary summit and gave Tchiani and the other coup leaders seven days to step down and reinstate civilian President Mohamed Bazoum, with the threat of force should they not comply in the timeframe. In the immediate term, ECOWAS closed the borders between Niger and ECOWAS countries, instituted a no-fly zone for commercial flights in and out of the country, froze the country’s assets in ECOWAS central banks and commercial banks, and instituted a travel ban and asset freeze for those involved in the coups and their families, among other actions.

• He said that “obviously there was no need to convert the holy symbol of Orthodoxy, a monument of world cultural heritage, from a museum to a mosque, as there is an abundance of mosques in modern Istanbul.”

• This decision, the Archbishop said, was made “to exploit the religious sentiment for purely political reasons.” Three years later, “we continue to hope and strive for the revision of this decision and for the re-opening of the monument, at least as a museum, so that this incomparable miracle of the Byzantine craftsmanship can once again be offered to the world community.”

• “Experts have condemned solitary as psychological torture—and that’s exactly what it is,” said Rep. Cori Bush.

• A suicide bomber blew himself up at a political rally in a former stronghold of militants in northwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan on July 30, killing at least 44 people and wounding nearly 200 in an attack that a senior leader said was meant to weaken Pakistani Islamists.

• The Biden administration looks set to become even more warlike than it already was if you can imagine, with virulent Russia hawk Victoria Nuland and virulent China hawk Charles Q Brown now being el…

War in Ukraine

• Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said Ukrainian drones attacked the city on the night of July 30. “The facades on two City office towers were slightly damaged. There are no casualties,” Sobyanin wrote on his Telegram channel.

• On the night of July 30, Moscow City, the business district of the capital, was attacked by drones. The facades of two buildings were damaged. Sergey Sobyanin, mayor of Moscow, said that the drones were fired by Ukrainian troops — Kyiv has not yet commented. Sobyanin also said that no one was injured in the attack, but according to emergency services, a guard in the Oko-2 tower was wounded. This is what Moscow City looks like after the attack.

• A Russian rocket attack has, by the latest count, killed two people and injured 20 in Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine, the city council reports. Three people have been hospitalized with moderate injuries.

• Another drone strike hit Moscow during the early hours of July 30. Two drones struck buildings in the Moscow International Business Center, a commercial development also known as Moscow City. Sergey Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, said that no one was injured, though emergency services reported that a security guard at the OKO-2 skyscraper was injured. Russia’s state television networks ignored the incident, and President Vladimir Putin made no changes to his plans to participate in a parade for the Russian Navy in St. Petersburg. The Bereg independent journalism collective spoke with people who live and work in Moscow City about how they reacted to the drone attack and how they’re doing now. Meduza publishes Bereg’s text in full, with permission.

• Russia’s state-controlled television networks reportedly said nothing about the latest drone attack on Moscow, which damaged a building in the Moscow City skyscraper complex overnight on July 30, during their morning news shows.

• During a briefing on the 522nd day of the Russia–Ukraine war, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia’s military has “suffered bankruptcy on the battlefield,” and that the war has come to Russian territory.

• Alexander Bogomaz, governor of Russia’s Bryansk region, reports that Ukraine’s Armed Forces attacked a pig farm in the Klimovsky district.

• The killing of seven Lithuanian officers at the Medininkai border checkpoint 32 years ago was “one of the episodes” of the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine today, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said on Monday.

• Russian missile strikes on the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih have killed at least two people, with more likely trapped under rubble, the Ukrainian interior ministry said Monday. Earlier, Russian officials said a Ukrainian drone hit a police station overnight in the Russian border region of Bryansk, adding that there were no victims.

• Russian children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova has said that more than 700,000 Ukrainian children have been taken from Ukraine to Russia since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• Ukrainian forces have been engaged in heavy fighting along the entire front line, repelling Russian assaults in the northeast and making incremental advances, officials said, as Kyiv and Washington are preparing to start talks on security guarantees for Ukraine.

• Austria, unlike most European Union countries, is still buying nearly as much natural gas from Russia as it was before the war in Ukraine.

• The US Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), also known as the Helsinki Commission, in a letter on Friday asked for sanctions on three Swiss officials involved in the release of frozen financial assets.

• Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has begun training mechanized units of the Belarusian military, the Belarusian Defense Ministry said on July 30.

• Russia’s embassy in Moldova said it will temporarily stop providing appointments for consular matters in what Moldovan officials say is a situation linked to the order by the country’s authorities to reduce staff.

• Pro-democracy Russians in Serbia protested on July 30 after two prominent anti-war activists and critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin said they faced problems with entry and residence permits in the Balkan country.

• The economic strength has helped to maintain popular support for Vladimir Putin’s war, but some have warned the state-led spending is threatening the country’s financial stability.

• Almost half of shoppers in Lithuania would like retailers to label goods from producers that retain business with Russia, according to an opinion poll conducted by Vilmorus for BNS in July.

• In the early days, the war in Ukraine had not escalated into the dangerous NATO-Russia nightmare that it is today. The massive amounts of death and destruction was not yet imagined.

• Since the beginning of the Russian war in Ukraine, the Latvian enterprise and private fund “Entrepreneurs for Peace” has sent more than €6.6 million in aid to Ukraine and its armed forces, said Laura Skrodele, representative of the fund, on July 31.

• Many of the GOP’s leading Senate recruits are speaking out against U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia — sounding a downright isolationist note and breaking from the views of party leaders.

• Why it matters: The emerging Republican rhetoric from up-and-coming candidates on Ukraine is a signal on where the party’s foreign policy views are headed.

• On Monday, the Latvian Olympic Committee (LOK) is due to receive an official invitation to participate in the Paris Olympic Games, LOK President Jānis Buks told Latvian Radio July 31.

• Thousands of people backing the coup in Niger marched through the streets of the capital denouncing the country’s former colonial power, waving Russian flags and lighting a door at the French Embassy on fire Sunday before the army broke up the crowd. The Russian mercenary group Wagner is operating in neighboring Mali, and President Vladimir Putin would like to expand his country’s influence in the region. The new junta’s leaders have not said whether they would move toward Moscow or stick with Niger’s Western partners. Niger, a French colony until 1960, had been seen as the West’s last reliable partner battling jihadists in Africa’s Sahel region.

Environment

• You don’t have to go back to biblical times to find a more verdant Iraq. Well into the 20th century, the southern city of Basra was known as the “Venice of the East” for its canals, plied by gondola-like boats that threaded through residential neighborhoods.

• Indeed, for much of its history, the Fertile Crescent — often defined as including areas of modern-day Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, the West Bank and Gaza — did not lack for water, inspiring centuries of artists and writers who depicted the region as a lush ancient land. Spring floods were common, and rice, one of the most water-intensive crops in the world, was grown for more than 2,000 years.

• But now nearly 40 percent of Iraq, an area roughly the size of Florida, has been overtaken by blowing desert sands that claim tens of thousands of acres of arable land every year.

• Its spread in France “was not exponential”, says Pierre Tattevin, head of the infectious diseases department at Rennes University Hospital, “but it was continuous”. He says that since its arrival, “there have been about four or five new départments affected each year” and that the mosquito can now be spotted close to the English Channel, all the way north in Brittany.

• Without globalisation, France wouldn’t be home to the tiger mosquito today. “Human activity allowed for the spread of this mosquito,” says Failloux, noting that it only spread rapidly throughout Europe after arriving in Italy, since Italy had greater exchange with other countries than Albania at the time.

• Young people could be put front and centre in federal government decision-making on coal and gas projects, if a push to impose a duty of care is successful.

• ACT independent senator David Pocock will seek to add two conditions to existing laws covering the financing and approval of large fossil fuel developments.

Energy/Transportation

• Great to see Australia’s East Coast gas customers helping Origin Energy offset a decline in gas exports (not). It’s terrific to know our record energy bills are helping Origin executive bonuses (not). What’s the scam?

• The scam is that Origin has just handed down its 4th quarter results which confirm energy policy is a complete failure. Although prices for LNG exports fell 16%, Aussie consumers rode to the rescue, helping domestic gas prices up by 10% – and let’s not forget Origin executive bonuses too.

Wildlife/Nature

• Just going to see fireflies poses less obvious risk to them. But scientists have amassed some alarming reports. In Thailand, for example, where boats ferry tourists past mangrove-swamp forests pulsing with synchronous fireflies, scientists have documented shorelines eroding, gas leaking into the water, and camera flashes disturbing firefly courtship. At one popular Thai site, scientists have estimated that the population of one synchronizing-firefly species is down 80 percent since tourism began.

• In a rural town in Mexico’s Tlaxcala state, where a new synchronizing-firefly species was formally recognized in 2012, tourism has since ballooned to some 120,000 visitors a year. And in North America, too, firefly tourism is on the rise. In Faust’s beloved Great Smokies, even after years of trying to throttle crowds—the National Park Service has instituted an online lottery to limit the number of visitors—some guests still head off into the forests and lie on the ground.

• Tourism is far from the only threat to fireflies. As with many insects, data on lightning-bug populations are spotty, outside of a general, anecdotal sense that they’re blinking out. But insects overall are in crisis. Numerous studies suggest that within many insect groups, abundance is dwindling by 1 to 2 percent each year. An International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) group found in 2020 that fireflies face three primary threats.

Finance

• Former prime minister Scott Morrison has defended his role in overseeing the unlawful robodebt scheme, rejecting findings from the royal commission.

• In his first in-person comments since the release of the royal commission’s report, Mr Morrison said the findings against him were “disproportionate, wrong and unsubstantiated”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “A building permit is required to make sure the sign is structurally sound and installed safely,” Patrick Hannan, a spokesman for the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection said in a statement on Sunday. “Planning review and approval is also necessary for the installation of this sign.”

• “Planning review and approval is also necessary for the installation of this sign. The city is opening a complaint and initiating an investigation,” he said in an email.

• Italy made an “improvised and atrocious” decision when it joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative as it did little to boost exports, Italy’s defence minister says.

• Italy signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) under a previous government, becoming the only major Western country to have taken such a step.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• “The gaming world is really a platform that can impact public opinion, to reach an audience, especially young populations,” said Tanya Bekker, a researcher at ActiveFence, a cybersecurity company that identified several examples of Russian propaganda on Minecraft for The New York Times.

Censorship/Free Speech

• US District Judge Timothy L. Brooks blocked Arkansas on Saturday from enforcing Act 372, a law that penalizes librarians for “furnishing harmful item[s] to minors.” The case is in the US District Court for the Western District of Fayetteville Division. Judge Brooks ruled that the law is unconstitutional because it is overbroad and vague.

• U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.

• Denmark and Sweden have found themselves in the international spotlight in recent weeks following anti-Islam protests where the Koran, the Muslim holy book, has been damaged or burned, offending Muslims around the world.

• Both countries have said they deplore the burning of the Koran but cannot prevent it under rules protecting free speech.

• Rasmussen stressed that any measure taken would fall “within the framework of the constitutionally protected freedom of expression and in a manner that does not change the fact that freedom of expression in Denmark has [a] very broad scope.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Sheikh Aziz al-Rahman al-Muhajir, the provincial head of the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, said music led to “misguidance of the youth and the destruction of society,” according to the report.

• People could be corrupted, according to the official. The Taliban banned nonreligious music the last time it ruled the country in the 1990s.

• The singer, who died on Wednesday, made an unforgettable protest song about the police killings of Black people 30 years before the murder of George Floyd.

• Louisiana is the only state where every Republican and Democratic woman senator voted to remove reproductive rights.

• The Office of the Inspector General, the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau and the City Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee all pass the buck on controversial case.

• Since May, hundreds of wildfires across Canada have burned more than 47,000 square miles of forest, an area the size of New York State, and have displaced more than 25,000 Indigenous residents from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, according to government officials.

• The blazes have taken a particularly devastating toll on Indigenous communities because they live on the frontline of many fires and depend on forests for food and their homes are in remote areas that are not a firefighting priority since they are sparsely populated and have few buildings.

• Then there’s the opacity – imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” – and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer: [...]

• I am sitting in Eric Heimel’s barbershop in the center of Mechanic Falls.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• If you haven’t heard about WEI, please take a look at [1], and the explainer/proposal document[2].

• I wonder what would be google’s strategy to adopt it and how it will play out. The more informed we are, the better prepared we are at defending user freedom against it.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• After reporting on countless piracy lawsuits it’s hard not to conclude that, from a human perspective, most are miserable affairs with regularly depressing outcomes. But then there’s the lawsuit targeting two men behind Louisville Media Box, a one-stop shop for everything pirate IPTV. It appears to exist in a strange parallel universe where normal rules don’t appear to apply.

• Two years after shutting down in the United States, Russian stream-ripping site FLVTO.biz is appealing the $83 million verdict against the site. Major labels represented by the RIAA won a major victory against FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com.

• Content farmers appear to be “getting a bit more brazen”.

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