● 08.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/08/2023: LinuxSchools Server 14.0.1, DietPi 8.20

Posted in News Roundup at 11:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week brought us a few interesting releases for the Mozilla Firefox web browser, KDE Plasma desktop environment, Mozilla Thunderbird email client, as well as MX Linux, Arch Linux, and Nitrux distributions.

• On top of that, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS users received a major kernel update and I tell you all about the upcoming Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Sillicon, LMDE 6, and Linux Mint 21.3 distros. Below, you can read this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for August 6th, 2023.

• The latest DietPi v8.20 release of the lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution for SBCs and server systems was outed on July 29, 2023, and on a separate note, a DIY handheld Linux terminal based on the NanoPi Neo Air SBC and running DietPi has been found on the interwebs.

• While it’s nice to have an alternative Linux distribution for popular single board computers, it’s great when they are used in specific projects, and Liliputing brought to our attention one of those. Hackaday.io user Balazs has designed a handheld terminal powered by FriendlyELEC NanoPi Neo Air SBC (Allwinner H3) running DietPi interfaces over UART to a Raspberry Pi Pico board driving an 800×480 SPI TFT color display and scanning a 71-key matrix keyboard. The design also includes a DS3231 RTC module and a 10,000mAh LiPo battery providing up to 15 hours of up-time. The terminal supports ASCII, Latin-1 supplement, box drawing, block, braille, and some other characters.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt talk about the difference between what we think of as traditional open source, and enterprise software projects that have an open source license. They are both technically open source, but how the projects work is very very different.

• On this episode of This Week in Linux, Asahi Linux announced a major change with a new flagship distro for using Linux on Apple Silicon. GNOME and KDE released some exciting news for their respective desktop environments. systemd has a cool new feature called soft reboot and we have a whole lot of distro news […]

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Volatility on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, Volatility is an open-source memory forensics framework designed to analyze memory dumps obtained from various operating systems.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Htop on Debian 12. In the realm of system monitoring, Htop stands out as a powerful and feature-rich command-line tool. With its intuitive interface and real-time data display, Htop allows users to gain valuable insights into their system’s resource utilization.

• Teamviewer is a software that allows you to remote control a computer located anywhere in the world via the internet.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Firefox Browser on Debian 12. In the vast digital landscape, web browsers are the gateways to the internet. Firefox, the open-source and privacy-focused browser developed by Mozilla, has garnered a dedicated following due to its user-friendly interface and robust features.

• Skype is one of the most popular video calling software, it is used by people all around the world. Skype supports Mac, Windows and Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• There is a term, that in recent years my brain is using a lot when trying to explain to me what my eyes observe. Late-Roman Decadence. I am not a historian, so I might be inaccurate with its actual meaning. For me it just means “wasting because we can”. If you want to see this in action, delete your YouTube cookies to get out of your tech bubble and open its start page. Probably depending on your location, it’s all about eating the biggest meals for 9000€, driving the fastest cars for 777k€, destroying expensive things in the most hilarious ways for 2M€ as well as giving homeless people 100€ and filming them at whatever they do with it before they fall back into their own life of being spat out and ignored by society. For me: disgusting and worth another strategically well sized and well placed comet.

• But that’s just the depression speaking. So let’s not look at the world, let’s look at and try to tackle my own little problems.

• I like to have my laptop efficient and quiet. No fan, no moving parts that “klack” or whatever. Just silence. Bonus points if the AC adapter does not emit high-pitched buzzing. My ears are broken and very sensitive to noise. But I also like to have a machine that is as low-spec as it can be. Using less resources should be a good thing, right? So currently I am using an Acer Swift 1, which comes with an N6000 1.1GHz CPU and 8GB of RAM. This is fine for me performance-wise and I can have my usual 5 to 10 applications running with no problems at all. It even plays many of the coop games, my girlfriend comes around the corner with once in a while. For KDE work, the translation summit workflow is one of the things I tend to wait for. It would of course be faster on a higher spec’ed system but it takes around 20 minutes with Fedora and around 4 minutes with Debian on the same machine, so other factors than hardware seem to play a big role in this story as well. Also, I can still have that laptop at the… well… top of my… well… lap without burning my legs or making my blanket smell funny.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• The Asahi Linux project, which is working on getting Linux working on Apple Silicon-based Macs, is partnering with the Fedora Project for its new flagship distro.

• The team behind Asahi Linux has announced its first official flagship distro: the Fedora Asahi Remix. Although the name sounds like one, Asahi Linux isn’t a distro: it’s the project which is porting the Linux kernel to Apple Silicon Macs, meaning Apple laptops and desktops based around the M1 and M2 family of Arm64-instruction-set SOCs.

Debian Family

• Tails is a privacy and strongly security-focused Linux distribution designed to be run on a live USB drive, allowing users to boot the operating system on any computer while leaving no trace of their activity on the host computer.

• The distro’s highlight is that it routes all internet traffic through the Tor network, providing high anonymity. Furthermore, it includes a wide range of privacy and security tools such as a PGP email client, Electrum Bitcoin wallet, VeraCrypt disk encryption, etc.

• Recently, the Tails Project announced the general availability of Tails 5.16, so let’s see what is new.

• Linux distributions are particularly challenging when it comes to attribution of work. The package maintainers do very little work compared to the developers who created the software. Now we have the phenomena of Debian Developer titles for people who never developed anything at all and never will. They are put up on a pedestal to look down their noses at the real developers of upstream projects. Imagine groupies pretending that they are members of the band, despite not being able to play any instruments. The end user sees the identity of the distribution, such as Debian or Fedora, in a more prominent position than the names of real developers.

• [...]

• Nonetheless, we have proven the first part of plagiarism: obfuscating the identities of real developers. The first time my name appears in Debian appears to be way back in 1998 in a bug report. The callous manner in which they disappear people is abhorrent.

• In an earlier blog, I looked at this from the perspective of modern slavery in Debian. They gave us a promise of recognition in exchange for our contributions. Now they are bouncing the cheques.

• The second half of the plagiarism case rests on the misattribution of our work to people who contributed less.

• The strongest evidence of this misattribution is the Non-Uploading / Non-Developing Developer scheme. Under the scheme, the cabal can give a Debian Developer title to somebody who did not contribute any code at all. The implication is that these people can include the title Debian Developer when applying to speak at a conference or applying for membership of another group. It is a form of privilege escalation and plagiarism all in one.

• The people who obtained these titles are asking to be given the same title and the same respect as those of us who really did author and donate code to the project.

Open Hardware/Modding

• A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a post on Hackaday about an inexpensive open-source USB 2.0 sniffer created by Alex Taradov. This is a really cool project! Normally, USB sniffers like this can cost thousands of dollars, especially if you’re paying for fancy protocol decoding and also want high-speed 480 Mbps support. This one costs about $50 in parts to assemble yourself, although it will take hours to solder and you will need some experience with hot air (or reflow oven) soldering since the USB PHY is a QFN chip with an exposed pad underneath.

• It was only in the clear light of morning that I realised what I needed was staring me right in the face. 75R is equivilent to 75 Ω!

• As of writing, it’s not clear what the Raspberry Pi 4 Bs were actually used for inside the scooter. At first glance, it seems like an overpowered option for something like an electric scooter but without exact confirmation of its purpose, we can only speculate. No doubt it requires much more power than something smaller like a Raspberry Pi Zero.

• When it comes to revitalizing old hardware, no SBC is quite as versatile as the Raspberry Pi. You can cram a Pi into anything from an old typewriter to a Commodore 64 with some exciting results depending on how far you want to take it. Today, we’re sharing another cool project that revitalizes old hardware with new tech created by Saugat Gamuwa with Maker Sci over at YouTube. In his latest video, Gamuwa shows us how he managed to transform an old CRT TV into a smart TV.

• As I gained experience with repairing arcade games, I acquired some useful tools, including an obscure device known as a cathode ray tube (CRT) rejuvenator. As the name suggests, this device rejuvenates old CRTs, thereby extending an old television set’s life. Much like a defibrillator, a rejuvenator generates an electric shock to a TV’s heart. As I will explain, using this device requires more than simply reading the manual because what’s not in the manual is often just as important as its contents, and what you don’t know can do much more harm than good.

• The goal of this article is to briefly describe the history of those old CRT television sets, and how one of the tools created to service them still serves a useful purpose in the restoration and operation of CRT-based arcade machines. I hope to convey how much the maintenance and restoration of old TV hardware depends upon the skill of the operator as much as the tools themselves. A rejuvenator is not as useful or as commonplace as a multimeter, but for a certain subset of games, it’s just as valuable and useful. I will then conclude by reflecting on the status of arcade conservation and how the rejuvenator can continue to keep game history alive today.

• The world’s first quartz wristwatches were miles ahead of electric and mechanical wristwatches by most standards of the time, their accuracy was unprecedented and the batteries typically lasted somewhere on the order of a year. Modern smart watches, at least in terms of battery life, have taken a step backwards — depending on use, some can require daily charging.

• While things like the Arduino platform certainly opened up the gates of microcontroller programming to a much wider audience, it can also be limiting in some ways. The Arduino IDE, for example, abstracts away plenty of the underlying machinations of the hardware, and the vast amount of libraries can contribute to this effect as well. It’s not a problem if you just need a project to get up and running, in fact, that’s one of its greatest strengths. But for understanding the underlying hardware we’d recommend taking a look at something like this video series on the STM32 platform.

• In the Star Wars universe, pit droids are little foldable robots that perform automated repairs on spacecraft and the like. They were introduced in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, and beyond the podracing scenes, are probably the only good thing to come out of that particular film.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, has passed away.

• The news was conveyed by a family member who shared that Bram passed away on 3 August 2023, following a prolonged battle with a medical condition that had rapidly progressed over the past few weeks.

• A tool called ‘Warp’, a part of GNOME Circle featuring apps that extend the GNOME ecosystem. Warp facilitates the seamless transfer of files via the Internet or across a local network.

• Ever find yourself needing a “scratch pad” to store some transient text snippets while using your Linux desktop? If so, Mini Text should appeal.

• As you may be aware (or you may not – we all lead busy lives) one of GNOME’s Google Summer of Code projects for this year (2023) [...]

• The Linux Schools Server V14.0.1 now available for download from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/karoshi/files Both the server and client are both built using automated scripts that  will  create a customised distribution  as an iso image.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• In a post to the Openwall security mailing list, Matthias Gerstner describes a broken authentication check in Mozilla VPN client v2.14.1, released on May 30.

• Essentially, the client can be exploited by any user on a system to, among other things, configure their own arbitrary VPN setup, redirect network traffic to outside parties, and break existing VPN setups. That’s no good on shared computers with multiple users.

Education

• Join our workshop on Introduction to Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) using R, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series!

Licensing / Legal

• I was trying to figure out ways of articulating the tension the relationship between free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) and the economic environment it exists in when I realised that FLOSS created the environment. Modern tech only exists because of free and open source software.

• [...] Even in the native app domain, most of the frameworks people use to create cross-platform apps are open source.

• A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately comes from free and open source software.

• From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The scale is for extraction.

Programming/Development

• It’s really easy (and often tempting) to fix a bug without really fixing it. You make the wrong behaviour go away, but you haven’t fixed the bug. Many race conditions can be “fixed” by adding sleep-statements, but in order to really fix them, you need to understand why and when and how they happen.

Standards/Consortia

• Long ago, on a laptop far, far away the web browser and application choices were simple. That was a long time ago and things are just different in the current age of the computer. Having multiple browsers, and work flows for various work loads on your computer can make opening links somewhat more complicated.

Leftovers

• Blog about what you want on your personal website. Your personal website is a place to express yourself on the web.

Science

• I heard a startling statistic the other day: The average American worker is only able to concentrate for three minutes at a stretch without interruptions – most of them self-inflicted. That seemed hyperbolic at first, and equally exaggerated when the stat floated through my brain later that same evening. Surely, that can’t be true; and it certainly didn’t apply to me.

• Earth’s atmosphere bulges at the equator, and it is compressed at the poles, due to forces caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis. Since the atmosphere is compressed at the poles, the air pressure drops faster as you go up, compared to a similar change in elevation at middle latitudes.

• So – even though we are physically at 9,301 feet above sea level, it almost always feels like we’re higher! Because the atmosphere is compressed, 9,301 feet above sea level at the poles yields a lower air pressure (and higher associated physiological impact) than an equivalent elevation at a middle latitude.

Education

• “There’s screen fatigue and scroll fatigue, so even people who typically might be inclined to read digitally are finding print again,” says Emily Pullen, manager of reader services at the New York Public Library. “They’re craving something that they can still get entertainment and storytelling from, but they don’t have to be looking at a screen for it.”

• If you’re coming back to books for the first time in a long time, or even the first time ever, the idea of sitting down with a whole novel might seem more than a little overwhelming.

• That’s why we’re here. I talked to librarians about the strategies they use to help readers introduce themselves to books, whether it’s for the first time in a long time or the first time, period. Here’s how they go about it.

• That makes Indiana a prime case study for whether the administration’s efforts will pan out. Unlike Arizona and Texas, which have long had chip-making plants, Indiana has little experience with the complicated manufacturing processes underlying the components, beyond electric vehicle battery manufacturing and some defense technology projects that involve semiconductors.

• Local Taliban officials in some provinces of Afghanistan have issued a new set of restrictions against female education, reportedly banning girls over the age of 10 from attending primary school classes. The directive from the Taliban-ruled Ministry of Education has sparked widespread concerns over women’s rights and access to education in the country.

• According to a report by BBC Persian, officials from the Taliban-ruled Ministry of Education held meetings with school principals and short-term training classes in Ghazni province. During these meetings, they explicitly conveyed that “any girl over 10 years of age is not allowed to study in primary schools.”

Hardware

• [ChrisMentrek] shares a design for a simple green LED signal light intended for experiments in “talking” to fireflies. The device uses simple components like PVC piping and connectors to make something that resembles a signal flashlight with a momentary switch — a device simple enough to make in time for a little weekend experimenting.

• Many of us like a keyboard with a positive click noise when we type. You might want to rethink that, though, in light of a new paper from the UK that shows how researchers trained an AI to decode keystrokes from noise on conference calls.

• LoRa, the Long Range wireless protocol is pretty great for trickling data across long distances. There are some great embedded devices based around STM32, NRF52, and ESP32 microcontrollers. What’s been missing for quite a while is a device that allows for full access to a LoRa radio from a more capable CPU. The wait may be over, as there’s now the LoShark. It’s a USB key form factor, with a MIPS processor running a real Linux kernel. Cool!

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Castor oil’s moisturizing properties make it a common ingredient in over-the-counter eye drops. However, those products are specifically formulated and tested to treat eye dryness, doctors say. The bottles of castor oil on store shelves are not intended for use in the eyes and may contain preservatives, dyes, fragrances or other ingredients that can cause irritation or infection.

• While the Texas Supreme Court instantly blocked the injunction by filing an appeal, it was seen as a victory by reproductive rights advocates.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Apple had an office in Atlanta, and still does. We went to the office to watch a Steve Jobs keynote in 1999. That year, he introduced the first laptop with wifi, the iBook, by picking it up off the podium and carrying it around while it was still connected to the internet. It was a pretty dramatic reveal.

• When I was getting ready for senior year of high school, I decided it was time to buy a laptop with my web dev savings. I had enough saved up that I was able to buy the absolutely the maxed-out PowerBook at the time: a clamshell G3. I even sprung for the $500 CompUSA full 3-year warranty. That paid off 2 and a half years later when it fell off a chair and was damaged; they replaced it with an equivalent 14” iBook.

• “16 years ago, I created @music and have been running it ever since,” Jeremy Vaught said wrote on his personal account. “Just now, Twitter / X just ripped it away. Super pissed.”

• Social network Twitter, recently rebranded as X, has commandeered the handle @music from an open-source software developer who told CNBC he created the account in 2007, and had built a community of around half a million followers there.

• While Elon Musk-led X gave Jeremy Vaught no choice but to surrender the desirable username on its platform, he was offered the option to choose from a list of other handles related to the topic of music. His X-assigned account — @musicfan — is not to his liking but he’s settling for it for now. X ported his followers over to the new account at least, he said.

• As legacy use cases for Windows break down, people abandon it. Linux has reaped a lot of new users one way or the other, and the Mac has too.

• Microsoft’s Windows revenue is “cooling” fast. That’s the new name for “It’s so bad, don’t even ask.”. AMD and Intel are suffering along with them. You only need to type in “PC shipments” or “Intel” or “AMD” “earnings” and look at the carnage playing out.

• Apple’s job listings has revealed the possible paths for using generative AI in its devices. Cook has also revealed that the tech giant has been working on generative AI and other models for years.

• The system, Prospect Medical Holdings, which operates 16 hospitals and more than 165 clinics and outpatient centers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Southern California, announced the cyberattack [sic] Thursday.

• [...]

• [Successful] Cyberattacks on hospitals have become more common, said John Riggi, senior cybersecurity adviser to the American Hospital Association.

• “China appears to be graduating from ‘smash and grab heists’ that used to be ‘noisy’ and ‘rudimentary’ to a level described by security experts as ‘among the most technically sophisticated and stealthy ever discovered.’ The incident even raises the possibility that Chinese [crackers] may be able to access high-level computer networks and remain undetected for months if not years,” they wrote.

• A cyber threat known as ransomware attack is one of the highly critical attacks which has significantly increased 300% in the recent times. It encrypts or locks the important data of the organization and prevents owners from accessing it until they pay a high cost or ransom. Since, 90% of banking sectors have faced ransomware in the past year, it positions a severe threat to the banking industry.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Chinese electric cars imported to the UK to help hit net zero targets will enable Beijing to spy on British citizens, ministers have warned.

• With car companies facing quotas for zero emissions sales from next year ahead of a ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles in 2030, China is predicted to dominate the UK market because of its prowess in providing cheap electric cars.

• However, sources at the heart of government have raised concerns that technology embedded in the vehicles could be used to harvest huge amounts of information, including location data, audio recordings and video footage, while also being vulnerable to remote interference and even being disabled.

• The iris, which controls the color of an eye, is unique to each person. The FBI began collecting images of irises in 2013 to supplement its fingerprint database.

• The special client that Mozilla VPN has for Mullvad (they use Mullvad’s VPN network) has a really nasty security hole that Mozilla has failed to address properly.

• The long story short is that Mozilla incompetently designed their client software, then refused to fix the problem for over three months after a security researcher at SUSE reported it to them, at which time it was publicly disclosed.

• But while free money – even if it’s digital – is always an enticing prospect, questions surrounding the technology have given detractors more than ample reason to urge caution. It’s not everyday you have to give up your biometrics to enter the party – dystopian fiction has been written on much less impactful premises.

• Of particular concern to detractors is the fact that WorldCoin aims to build up a “real human” database that’s both an identity and a financial network. Identity through iris scans; financial network through the WorldCoin app actually being a [cryptocurrency] wallet compatible with the project’s own WorldCoin token (as well as the big two of Bitcoin and Ethereum).

Defence/Aggression

• The official U.S. bombing survey on what happened in Hiroshima 78 years ago today.

• Long considered the most dangerous area to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the Tucson sector is now also its busiest. On average, more than 1,300 migrants cross daily despite temperatures that regularly top 100 degrees, according to Customs and Border Protection data obtained by NBC News.

• The request came during a visit by one of the coup leaders, Gen. Salifou Mody, to neighboring Mali, where he made contact with someone from Wagner, Wassim Nasr, a journalist and senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, told The Associated Press. He said three Malian sources and a French diplomat confirmed the meeting first reported by France 24.

• Like every fraught relationship, Niger’s crumbling commitment to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is ending with an ultimatum: Either reinstate democratically elected Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum or face military intervention. Unsurprisingly, neither side is ready to concede power in this breakup.

• Kai Cenat, the Twitch and YouTube streamer, issued a statement Saturday through his group AMP (Any Means Possible) apologizing after a violent mob took over New York’s Union Square Park a day earlier when he urged fans to come to the park, where he said he was planning to give away free PlayStation 5s and gift cards.

• Thousands of people flocked to Union Square Park after Cenat’s social media posts went viral Friday, and the flash mob became violent and began attacking police and other people in the area with bottles, rocks, other debris and fireworks. The riot resulted in multiple injuries and 65 arrests, according to the NYPD.

• AI-spun misinformation has also already proved itself to be pretty convincing. Though it was quickly debunked as fake news, a likely AI-generated photo of a bombing nearby the Pentagon, for instance, caused a brief but notable dip in the stock market after going viral on Twitter in May.

War in Ukraine

• On the night of August 6, the Donetsk National University of Economics and Trade located in the center of Donetsk caught fire as a result of shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, reports the head of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” Denis Pushilin.

• Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reported that there was an attempted drone attack on the morning of August 6.

• The Russian military launched a large-scale overnight missile attack on Ukraine. The attack employed air-launched and sea-launched missiles, and Iranian Shahed-136/131 drones.

• The Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out a missile strike on the Chonhar Bridge, which connects annexed Crimea and the Kherson region, reports Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed head of the peninsula.

• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The New York Times that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be re-elected with 90% of the vote in the 2024 Russian presidential election.

• There was a whole menu of peaceful ways the war in Ukraine could have been prevented. NATO could have kept its promise and not expanded east to Russia’s borders and across its long advertized “brightest of all red lines,” as now CIA Director and then Ambassador to Russia William Buns called Ukraine in 2008.

• Ukraine’s air force said Sunday it shot down 30 out of the 40 cruise missiles and all the Iranian-made Shahed drones that Russia launched overnight in several waves of attacks. Read our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded on the war in Ukraine. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• A member of German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz’s ruling party has for the first time called for Berlin to supply Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles.

• The number of Russians vacationing in Crimea, the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula occupied by Moscow, has fallen by nearly half in recent weeks following attacks carried out by Kyiv.

• Ukraine has placed its trident coat of arms on a gigantic Soviet-era statue that dominates the Kyiv skyline, replacing the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem.

• For the second time in the last week, Moscow’s Vnukovo airport was temporarily closed on August 6 after Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported that a drone strike on the Russian capital had been parried.

• Ukraine has grown bolder, firing drones at Moscow, while Russian forces have turned to regular attacks on the Black Sea, a crucial economic lifeline.

• Russian diplomats have been expelled from many countries around the world but facilities through which Russian secret services may still obtain valuable information remain, Latvian Television reported on August 6.

• Russia passed a new law on Friday allowing courts to strip foreign owners from hostile countries of stakes in key Russian entities, in a purported attempt to protect strategic companies from foreign influence.

• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov appeared to disparage the state of Russian democracy, a rare honest assessment from a man who has spent years spinning truths about elections and freedom at home.

• Russian figure skating star Sofia Samodelnika has obtained a Kazakh passport as Russian athletes face a possible ban from the Olympics.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Emails released to Insider via a public records request take a look behind the curtain at NASA’s response to reports that it had helped design the Titanic-exploring submersible.

• As the Wall Street Journal reported in June, now-deceased pilot and CEO Stockton Rush had insisted before the tragedy that NASA and Boeing had helped design it. That account was rebuked after the accident by NASA, which told the WSJ and other outlets that although it had planned prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to work with OceanGate on the design of the vessel’s carbon fiber hull, that role was ultimately downsized to video consulting.

• “NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities, which was done elsewhere by OceanGate,” NASA said in a statement to ABC News in June.

Environment

• On July 27, China’s state-run newspaper Global Times criticized Canada’s handling of its wildfires, which the paper said caused “immeasurable” damage to the global environment.

• Canada is suffering from the worst fire season on record, with some 4,797 fires active as of July 26, 132% of its 10-year average rates.

• The Global Times said Canadian authorities have failed to prevent and extinguish the wildfires, allowing the issue to become a global environmental emergency. The paper then praised China’s effectiveness in handling forest fires and used related data to paint an image of an ecologically responsible country.

• Bringing more people into the climate struggle starts with transforming movement culture and opening diverse paths to entry.

Energy/Transportation

• We recently upgraded our home solar storage to 4.8kWh. The battery has sensors to detect how much solar power we’re generating, and how much electricity we’re buying from (or selling to) the grid.

• That means… GRAPHS AND STATISTICS!

Wildlife/Nature

• Then whoosh! About 100m away, dozens of elephants of all sizes burst from cover and dash across the road, into the bush on the other side. For the next few minutes, a whole herd crosses, some flapping their ears and trumpeting. They are warning each other and us to keep away, Mojita explains.

• Defenders of the Azuay water, led by Indigenous leader Yaku Pérez, are fighting against gold mining in the region

Finance

• Each US state, plus Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Kenya, and several provinces in Canada, keeps a record of unclaimed property that people can then collect. Unclaimed properties are assets and money people forgot they had — like uncashed checks (often a final check from an employer), money in old checking or savings accounts, refunds, security deposits, or the contents of a safe deposit box. About one in seven Americans has unclaimed property, according to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators.

• Amazon warehouse worker Paul Blundell has spent the past year talking to his co-workers about how UPS Teamsters were getting organized to strike. So recently, he had big news to share: “A few days before the strike deadline, UPS caved.”

• He says to never expect loyalty from the company and to never offer loyalty to them, either.

• If the first half of 2023 was characterized by mass layoffs, then the second half certainly looks to have a particular focus on returning to the office, with video conferencing giant bizarrely Zoom now asking workers to leave their homes once more.

• The company confirmed that workers living within a 50-mile radius of a Zoom office should now return there for at least two days per week (via Business Insider).

• The new return-to-office (RTO) mandate is a full 180-degree change on what Zoom had previously said, implying that only a small minority of workers would need to be office-based.

• London’s bruised technology sector is showing its first signs of recovery – where in June new tech job roles within tech firms increased by +10.3% on the previous month, and by +25.7% in May.

• When looking at technology roles based in non-tech companies, London job volume was only marginally down in the past month (-1.52%) and saw a small uptick of +11.48% in May.

• Even the most incredible employees have recently been laid off due to mass layoffs in large corporations. Layoffs have been announced by companies ranging from Google to Microsoft and even eBay. Freelancing might be the solution for you.

• Consequently, many people have lost their employment and a prospective professional path. Many people are preparing to change occupations, while others are just seeking work to help them survive the crisis. If you’re in the same scenario and searching for a way out, freelancing might be the answer. While freelancing was rarely used as a means out of employment in the past, things have changed dramatically. Although it is still true that freelancing is not given enough credit in society, an increasing number of people are jumping on board and giving it a shot.

• Freelancing is an excellent choice if you want to revitalise your career and your phone rarely rings. Learn how to begin your freelance job.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Fewer than one third of Americans believe that local news media hold public officials accountable, a finding that calls into question whether local journalism is fulfilling one of its primary missions, according to national poll commissioned by the Medill School at Northwestern University

• While the sudden pause to the scheme is not a good look for India’s government, the decision to require import licenses may have worked: Indian media report that in the wake of the announcement, 44 hardware manufacturers registered to explore incentive schemes that fund manufacturing on Indian soil.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Participants were only able to identify fake speech 73% of the time, improving slightly only after they received training on how to recognize deepfake voices.

• These artificially generated samples and genuine samples were played for 529 participants to see whether they could detect the real thing from fake speech. Participants were only able to identify fake speech 73% of the time, which improved only slightly after they received training to recognise aspects of deepfake speech.

• Speech deepfakes are artificial voices generated by machine learning models. Previous literature has highlighted deepfakes as one of the biggest security threats arising from progress in artificial intelligence due to their potential for misuse. However, studies investigating human detection capabilities are limited. We presented genuine and deepfake audio to n = 529 individuals and asked them to identify the deepfakes. We ran our experiments in English and Mandarin to understand if language affects detection performance and decision-making rationale. We found that detection capability is unreliable. Listeners only correctly spotted the deepfakes 73% of the time, and there was no difference in detectability between the two languages. Increasing listener awareness by providing examples of speech deepfakes only improves results slightly. As speech synthesis algorithms improve and become more realistic, we can expect the detection task to become harder. The difficulty of detecting speech deepfakes confirms their potential for misuse and signals that defenses against this threat are needed.

• Many Americans don’t understand a lot about their health. Whether due to people believing conspiracy theories or simply walking out of their doctor’s offices without a good idea of what was said, communicating what scientists know has been a long-standing challenge.

• The problem has gotten particularly acute with a recent wave of misinformation. And when Francis Collins led the National Institutes of Health, the world’s premier medical research agency, he thought he had a solution: to study health communications broadly. “We basically have seen the accurate medical information overtaken, all too often, by the inaccurate conspiracies and false information on social media. It’s a whole other world out there,” he said in 2021 as part of a farewell media tour.

• It sounds like an alarming equation: While local news outlets shutter and news deserts expand nationwide, so-called “pink slime” sites are filling the void with political propaganda disguised as legitimate news. For anyone who believes democracy is built on a foundation of truth, this is a disturbing trend.

• But most of the attention on pink-slime journalism has focused on its production, such as the “1,300 community news sites” that Metric Media, Chicago businessman Brian Timpone’s company that pushes Republican candidates and far-right talking points, touts operating across the country. A new Stanford University study looks for the first time at the other side of this equation: consumer usage of these sites.

• Its key finding: Pink-slime outlets have not altered the journalism world or our democracy —at least not yet.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Interethnic, sectarian, and insurgent violence is not new to India, and Modi’s Hindu nationalist ideology has contributed to the atmosphere of discord, if not outright fueled violence in some cases. The BJP governs Manipur state, and rather than attempting mediation between the largely Hindu Meiteis and Christian Kukis, the state government imposed an [Internet] blackout that was only partially lifted last month.

• Cortez said the principals and superintendent can not actually decide whether or not books are taken or put on the shelves. Instead, liberty material must go through an official book challenge.

• The District said they failed to do an official book challenge, but removed the books. Cortez said once the new superintendent began their duties on July 1st, they looked over the book incident again and identified they did not follow procedures.

• “Intellectual freedom is a right for all, and libraries are tasked with providing reliable information, quality service and diverse resources in order to enable that right,” the statement reads. “We respect the right of patrons to decide which materials are appropriate to their individual circumstances, however, no individual or group has the right to restrict access for others. The Board of Trustees endorses and follows the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which states that a library serves all members of the community, offers diverse materials and condemns censorship.”

• What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

• Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

• On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

• In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

• Real-time NetBlocks metrics show that Telegram frontends and backends have been restricted on leading providers Zain and Earthlink, while service remains available on Kurdish operators Kurdistan Net and Korek Telecom. This class of disruption can be worked around using VPN services which can circumvent government internet censorship measures.

• The service was effectively blocked by midday on Sunday, with new messages not loading for users in Baghdad. The application was still accessible to users connected using a VPN.

• This ban follows a recent trend in the region of restricting freedom of speech in online spaces. In March, many international organizations released a Joint Statement on the topic of free speech in Iraq, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In it, they argued: [...]

• The daily Russian-language news show “What Happened” is again available on the Apple Podcasts streaming platform. Apple did not provide a reason for suddenly removing and restoring the podcast.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• News organizations seeking to measure their websites’ success typically have focused on two metrics: page views and time spent on the site. But data collected and analyzed from the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index indicates that such an approach is misguided.

• Journalists say social-media platforms have hurt their industry, contributing to inaccurate and one-sided news accounts by exerting too much control over the mix of news that people see, according to a recent survey.

• More than nine of every 10 survey respondents said social-media companies deliver a “worse mix of news” to their users, according to the online survey of journalists by Northwestern University’s Medill school of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. The survey also found that nearly eight of 10 said harassment of journalists on social media is a “very big” or “moderately big” problem.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The BBC has paid a legal bill of more than £450,000 in high-profile disputes with two former employees.

• The corporation disclosed the figures following a freedom of information request from the Belfast Telegraph.

• Both cases, involving Donna Traynor and Lena Ferguson, were settled without any admission of liability.

• BBC NI said that the legal expenditure was “only incurred to the extent that is necessary and after careful consideration”.

• During the COVID-19 epidemic, large technology companies have benefited “hugely” from the boom in online spending and remote working. But in 2023, many of these businesses report disappointing growth rates. Leaders of technology companies say that they are expanding too quickly and are looking for ways to cut costs in the context of a risky economic situation.

• The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator’s report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database. All six people have been Black; Ms. Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.

• It is the third case involving the Detroit Police Department, which runs, on average, 125 facial recognition searches a year, almost entirely on Black men, according to weekly reports about the technology’s use provided by the police to Detroit’s Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian oversight group. Critics of the technology say the cases expose its weaknesses and the dangers posed to innocent people.

• “I was scared, that was the main thing,” Woodruff told The Post Sunday evening after realizing cops weren’t joking. “What is going on?”

• “There was no sympathy, there was like ‘OK let’s pause,’” she added.

• Woodruff later learned she was being “implicated as a suspect” from a photo lineup shown to the victim following an “unreliable facial recognition match,” according to the court documents.

• The victim was also shown a lineup of potential suspects and identified Woodruff as the woman he was with when he was robbed. Oliver used an eight-year-old picture of Woodruff in the lineup from an arrest in 2015, despite having access to her current driver’s license, according to the lawsuit.

• On the day Woodruff was arrested, she and her fiancé urged officers to check the warrant to confirm whether the woman who committed the crime was pregnant, which they refused to do, the lawsuit alleges.

• The surge in sentences forcing women to undergo psychological treatment has alarmed the Iranian psychiatric sector. In an open letter sent to the head of the country’s judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, on July 23, the presidents of four mental health organisations accused authorities of “exploiting psychiatry” for other purposes.

• [...]

• Their concerns are all the more serious given that even young children are not being spared. At the peak of the anti-government protests that broke out in Iran following Mahsa Amini’s death, Education Minister Youssef Nouri admitted that schoolchildren were being detained in the streets or at school and held in “medical psychological centres” where they were “re-educated” to prevent “anti-social” behaviour.

• But, Howell said, the security screeners told her the only woman security officer in the building was not trained for a manual search. Her only option was to be patted down by a male guard or miss her flight.

• According to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada website, a physical search at airport security “may also be needed if an individual has a medical condition (e.g., pacemaker) that makes using a scanner dangerous.”

• JFK8, where workers won a union authorization election last year, offers the most competitive Amazon wages in the region. Presumably union density in the borough pushes up wages; the average wage on Staten Island is $41 per hour and the median household income is $85,381, according to the US Census Bureau.

• Alphabet Inc. illegally ended contract employment for a majority of Google Help workers as they were trying to unionize, organizers alleged in a complaint to the US labor board.

• The Alphabet Workers Union accused the [Internet] giant of violating federal labor law, which prohibits retaliation against employees for organizing.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• A potentially precarious situation might be brewing regarding the integrity of the open web as we know it. Recently, a very controversial API was discovered that has been in the works by a team of Google engineers for over a year.

• Called the “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), this is a potential gatekeeping move that has many concerned, including the three critical competitors to Google’s Chrome web browser.

• This situation has unfolded over the past two weeks, resulting in widespread criticism over the implementation of such a protocol.

• Allow me to take you through it.

Monopolies

• Any Chromium-based browser should be avoided. Doesn’t matter how the company behind your browser is removing Google’s DRM or how they advertise themselves to you, they should be avoided. I saw companies like Brave and Vivaldi protesting Google’s new war on Web but I think that’s ridiculous. They are some of the companies that are helping Google dominate in the Web browser war.

• Using Chromium, which only results in Google winning the Web war, is a betrayal to the Internet and Web community and to all of us. There’s no excuse, there’s not “but”, there’s no good reason, it’s all false and hopeless justification of helping Google take away our precious Web.

• US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Friday that a central part of the case should be heard, though he did allow some claims to be removed, the Financial Times reported.

• The case, filed in October 2020 by the Federal Government and joined by 38 states, said it was stopping Google “from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anti-competitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets and to remedy the competitive harms”.

• The US Department of Justice said at the time Google, as a company that did not lack money given its market value of US$1 trillion (A$1.4 trillion), was the monopoly gatekeeper to the Internet for billions.

Copyrights

• The CC team and community volunteers have been working hard on preparations for the 2023 Global Summit, and we are thrilled to announce the official artwork for this event! “Somos El Bien Común” is a representation of Mexico’s vibrant culture and rich history.

• The vast majority of piracy-related consumer research is conducted through surveys. Over time, these findings can spot useful trends. However, new experimental research suggests that the piracy habits reported by respondents can vary depending on how surveys are primed.

• It’s Music Monday time. Each and every Monday without fail, except when I fail, I share a song that has contributed audible joy to my life. I then post it on a Monday, or sometimes another day by mistake, because if there’s one thing I always do, without fail, it’s to sometimes do this.

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