● 08.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/08/2023: LibreOffice 7.6 RC2 and Azure Breached

Posted in News Roundup at 4:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• A Guide to Problem-Solving for Software Developers with Examples, making 20% time work, Long Live Netbooks, OpenBSD Router on Sg105w…

Kernel Space

• AMD’s fTPM had been causing stuttering and freezing issues first on Windows, and then on Linux too. As such, Linux boss Linus Torvalds has now suggested disabling fTPM entirely on Ryzen.

Graphics Stack

• Input Methods are a way of allowing third parties programs to manipulate text in text input boxes in applications.

• The two traditional uses of this are on-screen keyboards like one has on a mobile phone, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) input where a keyboard doesn’t map directly to the text we want to see on screen.

• It’s a lot more than merely injecting keys; the input method needs to have an awareness of the text cursor and the ability to manipulate whole words and sentences at a time. This is extremely important for the CJK way of typing where multiple keyboard keys are used to compose a single character. It’s also important for virtual keyboards that have advanced features like auto-completion and spell-checking words.

Instructionals/Technical

• Secure Shell (SSH) is an essential tool for establishing encrypted and secure remote connections. It ensures data confidentiality and integrity during communication over an insecure network. However, when attempting to connect to a remote server using SSH, you may encounter the dreaded “SSH Permission Denied (Publickey)” error.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zabbix on Debian 12. Monitoring and managing IT infrastructure is crucial for businesses and organizations to ensure seamless operations and optimal performance. Zabbix, an open-source monitoring solution, offers a powerful platform to monitor various components of your infrastructure.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ruby on Rails on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, Ruby on Rails, often referred to as Rails, is a powerful and elegant web application framework that facilitates the development of robust and dynamic websites and applications.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install pgAdmin on Debian 12.

• Navigating through a Linux system requires frequent manipulation of files and directories, whether that’s moving them to a new location, renaming them, or both. One of the most commonly used commands for such tasks is the ‘mv’ command in Linux.

• GNU Emacs text editor released version 29.1 few days ago. Here’s how to install it in current Ubuntu releases. According to the release note.

• In a Linux environment, understanding your location within the directory structure is fundamental. A central command that aids this task is the ‘pwd’ command in Linux, an abbreviation for ‘print working directory’.

• The rm command in Linux, a powerful tool for removing files and directories, is an integral part of any Linux user’s toolkit. Despite its seeming simplicity, it offers impressive versatility for both straightforward and complex tasks.

• This tutorial describes how to install and configure WordPress 5 on Ubuntu 18.04 with Apache as the web server and MySQL as the database and secure the website with a Let’s encrypt SSL certificate. WordPress is the most widely used CMS and Blog platform on the internet and powers about 32% of all websites worldwide.

• Vlc is a free and open source player that you can use on Linux to watch videos or listen to music.

• Apache is one of the most popular open-source web servers available. It’s incredibly powerful, capable of serving a high number of requests per second. PHP-FPM is an efficient method used to deliver PHP content on high-traffic servers. When combined, they can efficiently serve dynamic PHP applications.

• Shopware Community Edition is a free, open-source, highly flexible, powerful, and customizable software solution that allows you to quickly and easily create an online shop. It is built on PHP with Symfony and Zend components and uses MariaDB to store its data.

• In this guide, you will install MongoDB NoSQL Database on a Debian 11 server and also learn some of MongoDB operations, the basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) in MongoDB.

• GlusterFS or Gluster File System, is a free and open-source distributed file system developed by RedHat. In this guide, we’ll take you through the installation process of GlusterFS Cluster on AlmaLinux 9 servers. You will set up high-availability file system storage using GlusterFS on AlmaLinux 9 servers.

• Laravel is a web application framework based on PHP for building enterprise web applications. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Laravel step-by-step on Debian 12, so you can get started with the Laravel project.

• InfluxDB is an open-source and time series database developed by InfluxData. It is written in Go and designed to handle high write and query loads. This tutorial will explain how to install InfluxDB on CentOS 8.

• Nowadays, online document collaboration is a must for everyone. You definitely need to co-edit numerous docs with your teammates as well as work on office files with various external users, almost everyday.

• Keeping this in mind, the open-source project ONLYOFFICE released the DocSpace solution which allows connecting people and files and levels up document collaboration. Let’s discover its features and installation options.

• Android Studio, the official Google integrated development environment (IDE) for Android app development, is a widely used tool among developers for its robust capabilities in creating, testing, and debugging Android applications.

• Git is a distributed version control system that allows multiple developers to work on a project simultaneously without overwriting each other’s changes. It provides features for tracking changes, reverting to previous states, and creating branches for isolated changes.

• Git is a distributed version control system that allows multiple developers to work on a project simultaneously. It is widely used for its capability to manage code changes across various branches and for its ability to track historical changes. Overview of Git Rebase One of Git’s powerful features is “rebase”.

• Git is a distributed version control system that allows multiple people to work on a project simultaneously without overwriting each other’s changes. One of the most powerful, yet often misused features of Git is the rebase command. Git rebase is a command that integrates changes from one branch into another.

• Version control is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later.

• Git is an open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. It allows multiple people to work on the same codebase simultaneously, without overwriting each other’s changes.

Games

• Between 2023-07-26 and 2023-08-02 there were 33 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

• Valve has just published Proton 8.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

• We have reached a nice little milestone in the adoption of Linux on Steam. Over the years, gaming on Linux has consistently risen thanks to the introduction of the likes of Wine, Proton, and SteamPlay.

• Like always, Steam recently released the survey results for the month of July 2023, and we were glad to see that Linux’s market share had deviated upwards in comparison to previous months.

• AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX has finally surfaced in the Steam Hardware Survey at position 93, with 0.17% market share.

Distributions and Operating Systems

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• The famous email client continues to improve with an update to Thunderbird 115.1.0 and is now available in the PCLinuxOS Software repository.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Many think of Podman to be a replacement for Docker (if they have heard of Podman at all). But, this is not the case, as Podman is another option that provides better security and developer features. Podman is a cloud-native, daemonless tool that helps developers manage their Linux containers. Podman is all about security, but also minimizing the friction between your local development environment and production.

• The VMware Antrea Operator, a network cluster operator for deploying Antrea as the default cluster network in Red Hat OpenShift, is now certified and available as a container network interface (CNI) plug-in and can be deployed on OpenShift 4.9, 4.10, 4.11, and 4.12.

• The container network interface (CNI) badge represents a distinct classification in the Red Hat OpenShift certification ecosystem and is reserved for networking solutions that integrate with OpenShift via a CNI plug-in.

• This outage impacts s390x builds in Fedora Coprfrontend

Debian Family

• Due to misunderstanding of purpose of Sparky ‘unstable’ repo by many Sparky users, specially new ones, the Sparky unstable repo have been deactivated.

• Sparky unstable repo features Sparky builds of Linux kernel only, but some of you can think that packages from Sparky unstable repo in Sparky stable, oldstable or testing line can damage your systems. I already received a few messages about that.

• They can’t, cause there are only kernel packages only, as I said before…

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• On August 10th, 2023, Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS will arrive (if everything goes according to plan) as the third point release in the Jammy Jellyfish series and it will ship with a newer kernel, namely Linux 6.2, from the Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) interim release.

• But it looks like Canonical has already promoted the Linux 6.2 HWE kernel to existing Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS users. So, if you’re running Jammy Jellyfish and you update your installation by running the sudo apt update and sudo apt full-upgrade command in the Terminal app, you’ll receive the Linux 6.2 kernel.

Open Hardware/Modding

• When you combine the forces of open source and the wide and deep semiconductor experience of legendary chip architect Jim Keller, something interesting is bound to happen.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• GNOME’s proposed new features, MX Linux and ZorinOS releases, Compiz demystified and other regular elements.

Events

• August is now upon us, and the deadline for refereed track submissions is August 6, which is right around the corner. We have already received some excellent submissions, for which we gratefully thank our submitters!

• For those thinking about submitting, please polish off your ideas, and point your browsers at the call-for-proposals page.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.6 will be released as final in mid-August 2023 (check the Release Plan), with LibreOffice 7.6 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth pre-release since the development of version 7.6 started in mid December, 2022. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.6 RC 1, 100 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 62 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

• LibreOffice 7.6 RC2 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard version.

• In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla (you just need a legit email account in order to create a new account).

• The Membership Committee (MC) at The Document Foundation is responsible for managing membership applications and renewals. The primary objective of their task is to carefully evaluate applications from individuals who want to become members of TDF.

• You’ve probably used libreoffice. You opened a document, and proceeded to insert an image into the text. It wiggles all over and never rests where you want it to.

• The solution:

• You most likely want the “anchor as character” option. Right-click on the newly inserted image, go to the Anchor menu item, and choose As Character. You will have to do this for each image you insert which is annoying…

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

Rust

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

Leftovers

Hardware

• [Taylor and Amy] love taking on retro computer projects. This week they’re building a MiniPET from Tynemouth and The Future is 8 Bit.  It’s a pretty awesome kit which sadly isn’t available anymore. Taylor bought one of the last ones as part of a charity sale at the 2023 Vintage Computer Festival Southwest.

• Mechanical displays use a variety of different methods to represent data with physical objects, and [AIRPOCKET]’s Mechanical Display aims to be a platform anyone can use. Each “pixel” in this display is a panel of some kind, and different effects can be had by moving individual panels to different angles. Not only can images be represented, but the patterns of the movements themselves can be beautiful as well.

• GL.iNet Puli AX (also known as GL-XE3000) is a WiFi 6 and 5G cellular router with an integrated 6,400 mAh battery and running a fork of OpenWrt 21.02 on a MediaTek Filogic 820 dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 router SoC. If the design looks familiar it’s because it’s based on the same platform as the GL.iNet Spitz AX 2.5GbE, WiFi 6 and 5G cellular router that we reviewed last May, except the new Puli AX model comes with a 6,400 mAh which makes it even more convenient as a travel router..

• Elecrow CrowView is a lightweight 14-inch portable monitor designed to be attached to your laptop adding a secondary monitor to it through a clamping structure that works with laptops having a 13-inch to 16.5-inch display. We’ve seen this type of laptop monitor extension for years, and you’ll find various models on Amazon. But the Elecrow is now offering the CrowView at a significantly lower price than competitors especially if you pledge $114.90 for the super early bird reward on Kickstarter. The regular price ($179) can still be interesting as in this price range you’d usually get an 11-inch or 12-inch display.

• Chromebooks are unique creatures in the vast jungle of laptops. These devices have carved out their space from the collaboration between Google and leading hardware manufacturers. But what exactly are they, and what makes them tick?

• The Cooler Master NR200 and NR200P are fun mini-ITX cases that support SFX power supplies by default. I’ve since moved to a Fractal Ridge, but I’m repurposing mine for a friend. I remembered reading it supported ATX power supplies with the removal of a top fan too, but I couldn’t figure out how.

• Cooler Master: ATX Power Supply Bracket

• Turns out, Cooler Master makes a bracket that mounts in the front of the case that looks, a little something, like this: [...]

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• July 26 saw 57,220 cases, the first time in 6 months that the caseload exceeded 50,000.

• A small uptick in Covid cases has led to more hospitalizations, but the numbers, about 800 statewide, are still far below previous waves.

• Infections remain very low, despite signs of a slight increase. Now, experts are looking for clues to what living with the coronavirus will be like this winter and beyond.

• Economist Rory Robertson has been waging war on Big Sugar and Sydney University for more than a decade. Rory’s campaign has taken a sudden turn over recent days. James F Sice reports.

• Warning to Big Sugar and friends: Rory Robertson has stopped being polite. That’s not to say you won’t be getting his long emails, full of jibes, questions and copied en masse to Sydney University academics, the ABC, most MPs, leading scientists and medical journals and, well, anyone else who needs to know about the big “diabetes fraud”.

• The Conversation On July 13, 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drugmaker’s application for the first daily over-the-counter birth control pill for people seeking to prevent pregnancy.

• How do you nurture the soil, feed hungry bodies, and heal hurt people and places in these stressed-out times? In Central Louisiana, on five acres of what was once a cotton plantation called “Hard Times,” a network of Black farmers is leading an experiment in rice-growing, regeneration and repair.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Security

• Microsoft says a Russian government-linked hacking group is using its Microsoft Teams chat app to phish for credentials at targeted organizations.

• Yoran said the bank he had referred to was still vulnerable more than four months after the Azure flaw had been reported.

• “And, to the best of our knowledge, they [the bank] still have no idea they are at risk and therefore can’t make an informed decision about compensating controls and other risk mitigating actions,” he explained.

• “Microsoft claims that they will fix the issue by the end of September, four months after we notified them. That’s grossly irresponsible, if not blatantly negligent. We know about the issue, Microsoft knows about the issue, and hopefully threat actors don’t.”

• Yoran said cloud providers had supported the shared responsibility model for a long time. “That model is irretrievably broken if your cloud vendor doesn’t notify you of issues as they arise and apply fixes openly,” he said.

• “What you hear from Microsoft is ‘just trust us’, but what you get back is very little transparency and a culture of toxic obfuscation.

• “How can a CISO, board of directors or executive team believe that Microsoft will do the right thing given the fact [of the ] patterns and current behaviours? Microsoft’s track record puts us all at risk. And it’s even worse than we thought.”

• Contacted for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson told iTWire: “We appreciate the collaboration with the security community to responsibly disclose product issues.

• “We follow an extensive process involving a thorough investigation, update development for all versions of affected products, and compatibility testing among other operating systems and applications.

• Microsoft has once again come under blistering criticism for the security practices of Azure…

• Through mid-2022 and early 2023, Project Zero had access to pre-production hardware implementing this instruction set extension to evaluate the security properties of the implementation. In particular, we’re interested in whether it’s possible to use this instruction set extension to implement effective security mitigations, or whether its use is limited to debugging/fault detection purposes.

• In order to understand the “additional difficulty” that attackers will face in writing exploits that can bypass MTE based mitigations, we need to consider carefully the context in which the attacker finds themself.

• Ever since KeePassXC got builtin and in the tray in EasyOS, I have had reservations about it. FPM2, Figaro’s Password Manager v2 is tiny in comparison, about 1/100 the size, yet has adequate functionality and is simpler to use.

• Up until now, Easy has FPM2 version 0.79. Today have compiled version 0.90, which has superior encryption. Here is the website: [...]

• A new macOS-targeting hVNC malware family is being advertised on a prominent cybercrime forum.

• Freenom, which offers free domain names in .tk and several other ccTLDs, is being sued by Meta for ignoring abuse complaints. Freenom subsequently paused new domain registrations in March 2023.

• StagingTool is a lot like a widely used third-party utility called ViVeTool.

Privacy/Surveillance

• When an investigator punched the name into Google, a revealing clue emerged.

• Facebook parent Meta has changed its data processing rules for those living in the European Union, European Economic Area and Switzerland, saying it would from now on seek consent for targeted advertising.

Defence/Aggression

• A review of Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible.

• Niger’s new military ruler has lashed out at neighboring countries and the international community in a nationally televised speech, and he is calling on the population to be ready to defend the nation. In one of few addresses to the West African country since seizing power from the democratically elected president a week ago, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani warned late Wednesday against foreign meddling and military intervention against the coup. Earlier, a fourth French military evacuation flight left Niger with a load of civilians. Defense officials of the regional West African bloc ECOWAS met in the Nigerian capital to discuss how to respond to the coup. ECOWAS is threatening to use force to restore Niger’s president to power.

• Nine people were killed Wednesday in a police operation targeting criminal gangs in Rio de Janeiro, authorities said, the latest in a week of security force raids that have left at least 44 dead across Brazil.

• Jailed Myanmar civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been pardoned in five criminal cases, although she still faces 14 others, state media said Tuesday.

• How Disturbed Is the U.S. Military?

• The bill narrowly passed in a vote of 219-210 due to a partisan divide over amendments included by Republicans.

War in Ukraine

• To rest for a week from the horrors of war and the feelings of insecurity about the parents who have gone to the front, a summer camp organized by the Namejs Foundation for the children of Ukrainian soldiers is taking place, Latvian Television reported on August 3.

• While the conflict in Ukraine is mostly concentrated in the east along the country’s border with Russia, the borders of NATO members to Ukraine’s north and west are increasingly being tested.

• In this issue brief, Global Energy Center experts explore the potential for Ukraine’s energy sector to strengthen European energy security and decarbonization objectives. The brief explores how Ukraine can reform its energy sector to attract investment and create new revenue streams, and how transatlantic partners in government and the private sector can support Ukraine’s clean energy transformation.

• Reports of new deals to sell French arms to India and Qatar are just the latest sign that France’s defence industry is gaining pace. The news comes as Russian arms exports decline in the wake of the war in Ukraine, leading to speculation that France could soon take its place as the world’s second-largest weapons exporter after the United States.

• Almost 15 drones were downed during an overnight attack on Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said early on Thursday, in the second strike on the capital in as many days.

• Several people were wounded, one of them seriously, in the Russian shelling of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, local authorities said on August 3, shortly after Russia launched a fresh wave of drone attacks on Kyiv for the second day in a row.

• Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine are being forced to assume Russian citizenship or face harsh retaliation, including possible deportation to Russia, U.S.-backed research published on August 2 said.

• He also recalled that the European Union “has the purpose of promoting peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples.”

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on August 2 that he hoped a Ukraine “peace summit” could be held this autumn and that this week’s talks in Saudi Arabia were a stepping stone toward that goal.

• The summer of drones and trenches drags on, but hopeful signs are emerging.

• We may be getting the moral of the Russian leader’s childhood story all wrong.

• Joshua Yaffa discusses the private military unit that used uncommonly brutal tactics in the war against Ukraine.

• The country’s once-mighty defense industry has been ramping up, but the supply needed for Kyiv’s counteroffensive is vast.

• Nearly a year and a half after Russia invaded Ukraine, we speak with defense and international affairs expert Rajan Menon about the state of the war and prospects for peace. “The difficulty is that neither side, neither Ukraine nor Russia, feels that it is losing the war,” says Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at Defense Priorities and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. “We are liable to see this war continue for several months, if not more than that.” Menon is the author of several books, including Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, and recently visited Ukraine.

• The village parishioners’ decision to oust their priest reflects a broader push within Ukraine to reduce the influence of an Orthodox church that answers to Moscow.

• Over the past week, the office towers of Moscow City, a major commercial development in the Russian capital, have been attacked by drones twice. The Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula has seen 16 drone attacks just in the last month. While Kyiv strives to distance itself from incidents like these, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested that “war is gradually returning to Russian territory and its symbolic centers and military bases.” Meduza’s correspondent Elizaveta Antonova spoke with Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak about Kyiv’s perspective on who is targeting objects within Russia and what future developments this might herald.

• Positioned close to the front lines, temporary medical posts are a critical lifeline for the constant inflow of soldiers hurt in the counteroffensive.

• A number of industrial companies owned by Russian billionaire oligarchs Oleg Deripaska, Leonid Mikhelson, Sergey Gordeev, and Mikhail Gutseriev are involved in a scheme for providing financial incentives to contract soldiers willing to take part in the Ukraine war. Maria Zholobova and Anastasia Korotkova, investigative journalists working for the independent news outlet iStories, spoke with contract servicemen (called “volunteers” by the Russian authorities), as well as military recruiters, whose phone numbers link them to corporations like Deripaska’s Rusal, Mikhelson’s Novatek, and other industrial giants. Here’s the gist of their investigation, just released by iStories.

• Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš confirmed joint plans by the Baltic states August 3 to cut links to the Russian and Belarusian electricity grids, which have been in place since the Soviet occupation era.

• Some 140 Lithuanian companies continue operating in Russia, according to data gathered by Lithuania’s business daily Verslo Žinios and Estonia’s Aripaev and Delovyje Vedomosti newspapers.

• Russian authorities have opened a criminal case against Mikhail Svetov, the leader of the Libertarian Party of Russia, for allegedly rehabilitating Nazism.

• The parties have not yet agreed on dates.

• Moscow is sweeping up after two recent drone strikes. On Sunday and Tuesday, drones shot down by the Russian military blew out part of a floor of windows on a high-rise building and sent glass cascading to the streets below. There were no fatalities.

• The Russian authorities have issued weapons to members of territorial defense units in the Belgorod region, state media reported Wednesday.

• Chişinău police have arrested a man who crashed a Mercedes into the gate of the Russian Embassy in Moldova, the country’s Interior Ministry reported on Wednesday.

• A Russian serviceman prosecuted for leaving a military base without permission has escaped from custody in Ufa. Brandishing a hand grenade, he demands the detectives close the criminal case against him.

• As Iceland decided to send a representative to Kyiv, Lithuania will provide them with a workplace and all the necessary facilities at its embassy, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

• Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says that that all relevant services and agencies are ready for possible new attacks after the explosion on the Crimean bridge.

• According to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the grain deal has been de facto terminated as of July 17.

• Romania’s efforts to develop Black Sea gas can weaken Moscow’s influence.

• Turkmenistan Airlines has suspended flights from Ashgabat to Moscow due what it called “a situation in Moscow’s airspace,” an apparent reference to recent drone attacks in the capital.

• On the evening of July 17, a man threw a Molotov cocktail at Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, according to Telegram channels Baza and Shot. The arsonist was arrested by the police.

Environment

• Officials say 20 have died and nearly a million have been evacuated in two northern provinces, Beijing suburbs.

• Global responses to water security reveal the possibilities of progress forged by unity, trust, and environmental renewal.

Energy/Transportation

• Having largely lost the debate over whether cars are a good thing in urban areas, car-centric planners have been trying to figure out how to continue incorporating them in new and innovative ways. Hyperloops!

• Massive road tunnels were the in vogue approach from the 1990s. City and state governments have poured billions into digging and covering up their traffic problems, rather than solving them with investment in public transport. Alan does a great video about this in the context of the Boston Big Dig, though it could as easily apply to all the recent road works in Sydney as well.

• Between 2000 and 2022, China has built enough coal-fired capacity to power the entire European Union.

Finance

• Chip major Qualcomm’s shares fell about 7 per cent after it provided a gloomy outlook for its fiscal Q4, warning of an ongoing slump in smartphone sales and likely job cuts. In a US securities filing as it announced results for its fiscal third quarter ended June 25, the company said “while we are in the process of developing our plans, we currently expect these actions to consist largely of workforce reductions, and in connection with any such actions we would expect to incur significant additional restructuring charge”.

• The proportion of Brits who say Brexit was a mistake has hit a record high, a survey from pollsters YouGov shows.

• With few economic benefits to show for the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union, 57 per cent of Brits said the decision to leave the European Union in 2016 was the wrong one, compared with 32 per cent who thought it was correct.

• The red-hot rental market has already started to cool and there’s further sign of relief over the horizon for struggling tenants.

• Renters in many suburbs have endured double-digit growth in rents as demand for housing outstrips supply.

• For months, Harlan Crow and members of Congress have been engaged in a fight over whether the billionaire needs to divulge details about his gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, including globe-trotting trips aboard his 162-foot yacht, the Michaela Rose.

• Crow’s lawyer argues that Congress has no authority to probe the GOP donor’s generosity and that doing so violates a constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the Supreme Court.

• FedEx announced plans this week to slash 280 jobs at a facility in Texas, the nationwide delivery giant’s latest in a series of cuts as employers continue to reduce their headcounts well into 2023 amid lingering recession fears (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• Rumors started circulating this week that VMware layoffs are in the works.

• Insider, which requires a subscription, first reported the news, calling the affected number of people “huge.” Apparently, Broadcom will enact a large number of VMware layoffs once it closes the pending $61 billion acquisition.

• Other outlets then picked up the scoop, though few details are available. Broadcom did not respond to Channel Futures’ request for comment. The reports indicate the VMware layoffs could come as soon as the end of this month once both companies release their latest earnings. The cuts supposedly would target non-engineers.

• Meanwhile, the possibility of VMware layoffs looms as the redacted version of Broadcom’s recent filing with U.K. regulators has come to light. The Competition and Market Authority last month gave provisional approval to the Broadcom-VMware pairing. Not long after, Broadcom’s legal filing from May hit the internet.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Axios ☛ Trump’s First Amendment defense in Jan. 6 case is shaky, experts sayFormer President Trump’s legal team says he’s been indicted for actions that are protected by the First Amendment — and that the First Amendment will ultimately exonerate him.Reality check: Many legal experts say that’s not true, and not really the point.Driving the news: “There’s nothing that’s more protected under the First Amendment than political speech,” Trump attorney John Lauro said on CNN shortly after special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment was unsealed.“Donald Trump had every right to advocate for his position … now his advocacy is being criminalized,” Lauro said.

• TikTok rival Triller plans a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange amid compounded financial woes. Short-form video app and TikTok rival Triller plans to sell its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct listing, according to the company’s S-1 filing released Wednesday, August 2.

• In 2018, the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk elected its first female mayor, Sardana Avksentieva, just five weeks after she entered the race. .

• Moscow’s Synergy University announced Wednesday that it will begin offering a course on OSINT (open-source intelligence) investigations in September.

• Join Reason on YouTube and Facebook at 1 p.m. Eastern this Thursday for a discussion with director Alex Winter about his new documentary The YouTube Effect.

• At writing, we are 16 months and five days from the 2024 presidential election.

• If you paid for Twitter Blue and now regret it because of the blue badge that adorns your profile, Twitter built a nifty new feature for you. The $8-a-month premium subscription service now lets you hide the blue checkmark you get when you subscribe.

• X Corp., formerly Twitter Inc., announced today that if users so choose, they can hide what they might now feel are their embarrassing checkmarks.

• With Elon Musk’s rebranding of the app, is Twitter’s name really retired? What about tweets? We unravel the terminology puzzle.

• Social networks in Iran have been awash with compromising footage featuring several well-known ultra-conservative officials engaging in homosexual activities. While homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, the Iranian regime has attempted to deny the videos and cover up the scandals. We spoke to a former religious authority who says authorities are trying to “save face” by refuting the wave of videos.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

Censorship/Free Speech

• Russian state investigators have classified the felony case against Telegram blogger and former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Igor Strelkov, who was charged with extremism last month, his lawyer told the outlet RBC on Wednesday.

• Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case on “rehabilitating nazism” against libertarian politician and leader of the Civil Society movement Mikhail Svetov, sources told state news agencies RIA Novosti and TASS.

• Prigozhin was a constant poster, but he’s barely been online since his aborted mutiny.

• A Moscow court on June 30 extended pretrial detention until at least September 10 of theater director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk, who were arrested last month on charges of “justification of terrorism” in production of the play Finist — The Brave Falcon.

• UVA found “insufficient evidence” to conclude that Morgan Bettinger called protesters “good speed bumps.” They punished her anyway.

• Larkin, 74, took his own life on Monday, just a little over a week before he was slated to stand trial for his role in running the web-classifieds platform Backpage.

• Many writers are looking for ways to capture the everyday realities that the government keeps hidden — sometimes at their own peril.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• NSW Greens Senator David Shoebridge sharply criticised the Labor Government for Assange’s plight, saying: “The real reason Julian Assange is still in jail is that, whether it’s Prime Minister [Anthony] Albanese or Prime Minister [Scott] Morrison, Australian leaders are willing to trade a citizen’s liberty, their right to speak truth to power, for a close and unquestioning bear hug from a US president.

• “They say truth is the first victim of war and, in the case of Julian Assange, that’s a truth the whole world is seeing. I’m standing in this chamber today with my colleagues echoing the concerns of millions of Australians who can see what is happening to Julian Assange is an outrageous attack on journalism and on the truth.”

• {loadposition sam08}Assange is still being held in the UK’s Belmarsh maximum security jail as he awaits the outcome of a second appeal to the UK High Court against an extradition order.

• RAJARs for Q2 2023 show a mixed bag for news and current affairs-based stations.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Between A.I. and TikTok, the actors and writers will be returning to a changed industry.

• Executives at consultancy firm EY have conceded its workplace culture is “not perfect”, as politicians zero in on problems in the industry.

• EY’s Oceania chief executive David Larocca says a review of the company’s culture will be made public shortly after it is finalised at the end of July.

• DoorDash behaves badly via selective non-compliance with a new law setting pay rules for food delivery workers.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Internet Resilience Index (IRI) tracks open-source Internet resiliency metrics to support the development of policies and infrastructure to improve Internet resilience everywhere.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

Monopolies

Patents

• As I was reading the Federal Circuit’s nonprecedential decision in Realtime Data v. Array Networks, I noted the court’s repeated statements about how the broad functional claims lacked support in the specification.

Trademarks

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