● 08.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/08/2023: Linux 6.4.9 is Out, Microsoft Breach Causes More Backlash

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Coming up in this episode

• * An NVMe for me

• * The Shure Next To You

• * Of course, the History of Debian

• Great news for Linux on RISC-V and open source Nvidia drivers, communicating with devices over serial the easy way, emulating an old calculator, a fully open source flight combat game, a new approach to caching files on your LAN, and an RSS reader for the terminal.

• Why Linux reigns for privacy; our recommendations for secure tools from chat to DNS.

Kernel Space

• As we reported in previous blog post, almost the entire Bootlin engineering team was at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague in June.

Graphics Stack

• Coming only three weeks after the NVIDIA 535.86.05 release, the new version is here to address several bugs, including a bug causing excessive RAM consumption when some OpenGL and Vulkan apps were used while switching between a virtual terminal and X.

• Support for Vulkan apps was further improved in NVIDIA 535.98 by fixing a bug that caused corruption, as well as a regression that could cause a system hang when running windowed Vulkan apps with sync-to-vblank enabled.

Applications

• Fedora Linux packages a suite of graphical software for content creators. This article introduces a use case and suggestions for creating tutorial videos with Kdenlive.

• A question that you need to address is whether text and images are appropriate to share your knowledge. If you create resources for learners of graphical software, a tutorial video is something to consider.

• The automatic creation and management of virtual machines is a topical issue for any company that provides VPS services.

• MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). It is widely used for web-based applications and is known for its ease of use and scalability. MySQL is used by many popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

• NodeTube is an excellent open-source platform that provides all the features that you need for hosting your videos, audios, and images. It provides a comprehensive set of features, including livestreaming and built-in monetization, that make it an magnificent alternative to YouTube.

• AllToMP3 is a highly versatile desktop application that offers its users a comprehensive platform for downloading and converting their favorite music from popular sources such as YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Deezer.

• We spotlight alternatives tools to cal, a utility for displaying calendars on the command-line.

• noti is a small tool written in Go that monitors a command or process and triggers a notification.

• In today’s interconnected world, monitoring system performance, network health, and application behavior is crucial for any organization. Whether you’re a system administrator, a network engineer, or a DevOps professional, having the right tools at your disposal can make the difference between smooth operations and a frustrating troubleshooting nightmare.

Instructionals/Technical

• Automatic suspend is a feature that suspends your computer when you are not using it.

• What this feature does, is that it allows you to specify how long your computer will stay active before suspending.

• For example, if the automatic suspend timer is set to to 30 minutes, it means

• Building a secure collaborative environment on a private Linux server definitely sounds like a good idea.

• I dug out a computer running Fedora 28, which was released 2018-04-01 – over 5 years ago. Backing up the data and re-installing seemed tedious, but the current version of Fedora is 38, and while Fedora supports updates from N to N+2 that was still going to be 5 separate upgrades.

• Firefox has a built-in screenshot utility and you can use it to take screenshots of the entire webpage. Chrome can also do the same.

• Wget command is a Linux utility that used to download the files from the web.

• A long time ago, I wrote a script or config file that included BASE64 encoded string like “Le_PreHook='__ACME_BASE64__START_L3Jvb3QvYmluL2xlL2N5YmVyY2l0aS5iaXovcHJlX2JlZm9yZV9vYnRhaW5pbmdfYW55X2NlcnRpZmljYXRlcy5zaA==__ACME_BASE64__END_“. So I wanted to know what this string was to update my config script.

• Here’s a quick tutorial for those of you looking to change the lock screen background used in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS through the most recent release, Ubuntu 23.04. Out-of-the-box (as this is the same for any Linux distribution using a modern version of GNOME Shell) the lock screen background is a blurred version of whatever image is set as your desktop wallpaper.

• Node Version Manager (NVM) is a versatile tool for managing multiple versions of Node.js on a single machine. It’s an essential tool for any serious Node.js developer since it allows you to switch between different versions of Node.js without having to go through the hassle of installing or uninstalling Node.js manually each time.

• Jupyter AI is an incredible and powerful Python extension that brings generative AI models (like ChatGPT) in your JupyterLab or Notebooks to enhance your productivity.

• LibreOffice, developed by The Document Foundation, stands as a compelling free and open-source productivity suite, serving as a robust alternative to Microsoft Office.

• Linux, an open-source operating system known for its robustness and efficiency, offers valuable insights that can be leveraged in the world of web scraping, particularly in the management of proxies. Let’s explore how the principles of Linux can be applied to streamline your proxy usage for web scraping!

• Argo CD offers GitOps-style deployments for Kubernetes, providing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, collaboration and version control.

• In this guide, you will learn how to install and configure the latest stable version of Zabbix monitoring software on Debian 9.2 to monitor all major network infrastructure devices such as physical or virtual servers or VMs, routers, switches, firewall appliances, and other network IoT devices.

• ClickHouse is an open-source, fast, and modern database management system used for online analytical processing (OLAP). It is column-oriented and stores records in blocks grouped by columns instead of rows. It allows you to generate analytical reports using SQL queries in real time.

• Magento is an open-source and one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that helps programmers create eCommerce websites. This tutorial will show you how to install Magento on Ubuntu 22.04.

• One of the best ways to explore EndeavourOS is by installing it on VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a popular virtualization software that allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on your host machine. By setting up EndeavourOS on VirtualBox, you can enjoy all its features without altering your current OS setup.

• Learn all about functions in the final chapter of the Bash Basics series.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nmap on Debian 12. In the world of cybersecurity and network exploration, Nmap (Network Mapper) stands as a versatile and powerful tool. It’s an open-source utility that aids in network discovery and security auditing.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenSCAP on Fedora 38. OpenSCAP is an open-source security compliance solution that helps administrators assess the security posture of their systems and ensure compliance with industry standards. It provides a framework for automated vulnerability scanning, configuration management, and policy compliance.

• Linux is a powerful and versatile operating system, and one of its strengths lies in the vast array of commands it offers for various tasks. Creating files is a fundamental operation, and Linux provides multiple ways to do it.

• In this part of the Proxmox tutorial series, you’ll learn to add shared storage to a Proxmox installation.

• VirtualBox, Oracle’s flagship open-source virtualization solution, has again made strides in its latest iteration, VirtualBox 7. This version continues its legacy of providing a robust platform for creating and managing virtual environments and introduces myriad enhancements that cater to the ever-evolving needs of tech professionals.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Python IDLE on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Python, an influential and versatile programming language, has captured the hearts of developers worldwide. To harness the full potential of Python, an adept Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is essential.

• In today’s digital age, multimedia playback is an essential aspect of our daily computing needs. SMPlayer stands out as a versatile and robust media player, catering to a wide range of audio and video formats.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PowerShell on Debian 12. PowerShell is a powerful cross-platform shell and scripting language designed by Microsoft. With its extensive command-line capabilities and scripting framework, it has become a popular choice for system administrators, developers, and IT professionals.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tasksel on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, Tasksel is an advanced package management tool specifically designed for Debian-based systems. It enables system administrators to install, remove, and manage software packages seamlessly.

Games

• Testament: The Order of High Human, developed and published by Fairyship Games, is a first-person platform puzzle adventure RPG that runs well on Linux and will make your Steam Deck cry.

*

• Local governments have unveiled plans to develop the industry worth $2.3 billion globally.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Unstable builds of the Ubuntu-based KDE neon now include KDE Plasma 6 (which is under active development) but apps retooled/built using KDE Frameworks 6 (considered pre-alpha quality at the time of writing) are being more cautiously previewed, siloed in a dedicated archive.

• With this blog I would like to introduce KRdp, which is a new library implementing the required glue to create a server exposing a KDE Plasma Wayland session over the RDP protocol. It also contains a command-line based server which will allow remote clients to control the current Plasma Wayland session.

• With the increase in people working from home the past years and other remote use cases, it has become increasingly important to be able to control a running computer remotely. While on X11 there are several existing solutions, for Wayland the choices are rather more limited. Currently the only way of allowing remote control of a Plasma Wayland session is through Krfb, which uses VNC1 for streaming to the client.

• Unfortunately, VNC is not ideal, for various reasons. So to provide a better experience we started looking at other options, eventually settling on building something around the RDP protocol. Fortunately, because of the work done for Krfb and various other projects, we do have all the parts implemented to allow remote desktop control, the “only” thing left was to glue everything together.

• A little over two months ago I involuntarily switched my daily driver laptop to a Plasma 6 development build (see this blog post on how that went). Since then there has been stunning progress on ironing out bugs, tidying things up, and implementing new features. Let me show you what I’ve been working on, stumbling blocks to look out for, and what you can do to help to make Plasma 6 a truly great release!

• A couple of weeks ago I actually finally switched to a Plasma Wayland session full time and it’s been working great! This now also means I have to fix all of my pet peeve bugs, and boy did I!

• I noticed several things that were missing or behaved differently from my X11 session. For instance, task manager showed not only an application’s main window but also any popup (for instance, the “really quit?” or “save or discard?” prompts). That’s because the handling of so-called transient windows in libtaskmanager hasn’t been implemented for Wayland yet. Not only does it have to hide child windows but must in turn propagate any “needs attention” state (glowing orange) back to its parent so it won’t go unnoticed. There is also a dialog protocol in the works so we can tag modal windows and darken their respective parent window accordingly.

• Most of our desktop applications have a toolbar, sometimes they even have multiple toolbars next to or stacked on top of each other. More complex desktop applications such as Krita, Kdenlive or LabPlot often consist of multiple sub-windows, docks, tabbed views, etc. Docks and toolbars can be undocked, moved around and arranged freely and when dragged over a part of a window snap back into the window. This allows the user to customize their work environment to their liking and needs. This worked fine on X because it lets you do anything, this post explores the situation on Wayland.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME.Asia Summit 2023 event will be held at St. Xavier’s College in Kathmandu, Nepal, between December 1st and December 3rd. The conference’s primary focus is on the GNOME desktop, GNOME apps, and the GNOME platform development tools.

• This year’s GNOME.Asia event will focus on the upcoming GNOME 46 desktop environment series, which will be released sometime in late March 2024. Since the event will be held in Kathmandu, the codename of the GNOME 46 series will be “Kathmandu”.

• I attended GUADEC 2023 this year in-person in Rīga. It was nice to be able to see more people in person than last year’s mini-GUADEC in Berlin, and nice to be able to travel overland/oversea to Rīga, avoiding flights and the associated huge carbon emissions. Thank you to the GNOME Foundation and my employer, Endless, for covering the travel.And a big thank you to the local event organising team, the AV team, the volunteers and the Foundation staff for making it all happen.

• The quality of the talks this year was really high. I don’t think there was a single talk slot I skipped. As a result, I didn’t get much hacking done! But there were good hallway conversations and catch ups.

• I gave two talks, one on some simple improvements people can make to their apps to reduce internet data use and power use when doing so would be beneficial to the user (when on a metered network or in power-saver mode).The aim was to remind people how easy it is to do this, and provide some examples of how different apps present these states/events in the UI, since the best way to do that can differ between apps.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Great changes since 5.4.9! Look at the release notes:

• https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/kirkstone/2023/5.4.10/release-notes.htm

• Yes, Flowblade video editor is now builtin. I’m really doing that for myself, as intending to get into creating videos for YouTube and would like the convenience of inbuilt video editor.

• I clicked on the “kirkstone” icon then started Flowblade in the container — looks like it runs OK in a container also.

• If you are new to EasyOS, please read the version 5.4

• Download, courtesy of ibiblio.org: [...]

Gentoo Family

• This article is a summary of all the changes made on Automated Gentoo System Updater project during weeks 9 and 10 of GSoC.

• Project is hosted on GitHub (gentoo_update and mobile app).

• I have finalized app architecture, here are the details:

• The app’s main functionality is to receive notification from the push server. For each user, it will create a unique API token after authentication (there is an Anonymous option). This token will be used by gentoo_update to send the encrypted report to the mobile device using a push server endpoint. Update reports will be kept only on the mobile device, ensuring privacy.

• After much discussion, I decided to implement app’s backend in Firebase. Since GSoC is organized by Google, it seems appropriate to use their products for this project. However, future plans include the possibility of implementing a self-hosted web server, so that instead of authentication user will just enter server public IP and port.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• According to the Gartner report, The CTO’s Guide to Containers and Kubernetes, by 2027 more than 90% of companies will have made the decision to run containerized applications in production.

• Businesses today are in a constant state of digital transformation. SAP software plays a key role in driving this transformation by offering comprehensive solutions that boost efficiency, scalability, and innovation throughout the entire enterprise.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora, a mature desktop Linux, will be available by the end of the month on your Apple M1 or M2 Macs.

• The out-of-the-box monitoring stack in Red Hat OpenShift provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to monitor various aspects of your workloads, including metrics, logs, events, and traces. With this monitoring stack, you can gain valuable insights into the health and performance of your applications, identify and troubleshoot issues, and optimize resource utilization. This allows you to deliver a seamless user experience and confidently meet your business objectives.

• In this article, we will explore the monitoring stack in Red Hat OpenShift and how to use it to monitor a sample application effectively using Prometheus and Grafana.

• OpenShift APIs for Data Protection (OADP) is an operator that lets you back up and restore workloads in Red Hat OpenShift clusters. It is based on the upstream open source project Velero. You can use OADP to backup and restore all Kubernetes resources for a given project, including persistent volumes.

• It is a best practice to be able to recreate your workloads via Infrastructure as Code (IAC) pipelines or automation. Most Kubernetes projects in production already have a way to be recreated; however, when it comes to restoring data from persistent volumes, that requires a separate solution. OADP can fill that gap. This article will focus primarily on restoring persistent volumes.

• OADP allows backing up and restoring persistent volumes via either Restic or CSI snapshots. In both cases, incremental backups are supported.

• The SFC panel included policy fellow Bradley Kuhn, AlmaLinux board chair Benny Vasquez, Samba co-founder and CIQ software engineer Jeremy Allison, and Oracle chief architect for Open Source Policy, Strategy, Compliance, and Alliances, James Wright. CIQ is focused on Rocky Linux, another RHEL derivative; AlmaLinux is also a derivative.

• Clearly, Red Hat did not think any of its executives would be comfortable in this environment – even though all the talk was about free and open source software which Red Hat claims to champion.

• That should tell the free and open source software community where the company’s priorities lie.

• Hellekson fielded all the softball questions thrown at him by The Futurum Group’s Steven Dickens and was allowed to talk at length about the noble work being done by the IBM-owned company. Not surprising, as he who pays the piper generally calls the tune.

• One of Dickens’ questions embodies perfectly the type of queries that Hellekson fielded: “Red Hat’s commercial business, you’re taking the pipeline of free, community-developed, adding a significant amount of value, testing, certification, support, and they’re looking to build a commercial business off that. You’re not alone in doing this. I had Ash Kulkarni, the CEO of Elastic on this podcast a few weeks back. We’ve spent some time at MongoDB and spoke to their team.

• There is nothing developers and users hate more than waiting a long time for new software features to be deployed. Being stuck in an endless loop of long response times for QA and feedback is painful, especially when they have started a new project.

• This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

• The purpose of this project is to provide developers with a practical example of how clean architecture can be implemented in a real-world scenario. By examining this sample project’s code and structure, you will be able to better understand the key concepts and patterns involved in clean architecture.

• These days, the IT world is flooded with an overwhelming number of libraries, technologies, frameworks, and platforms to choose from. What’s considered the ultimate solution today may become outdated tomorrow. What doesn’t exist today might become tomorrow’s ultimate solution. Clean architecture incorporates principles like SOLID and domain-driven design and enforces them through module structuring during compilation. However, it’s important to note that not everything can be enforced at compile time.

• By embracing clean architecture principles, you can design software without getting tied down to specific libraries, infrastructure, or other choices right from the start of your project. Instead, you can postpone those decisions until later in the development process. This approach also makes it easier to switch libraries or infrastructure if needed, enabling you to create software that can stand the test of time. With clean architecture, you can keep your options open and ensure that your platform or application remains robust and adaptable in the long run.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• It was only a matter of time before the rise of an LXD fork, and it appears that Incus is preparing to take the stage.

• Some context to get you up to speed: Canonical took complete control of the LXD project, and that garnered mixed reactions.

• Even the lead engineer of LXD, Stéphane Graber, announced that he had left Canonical to pursue a few pet projects after Canonical’s public announcement. He also mentioned that he would occasionally contribute to LXD, provided he didn’t need to sign Canonical’s CLA.

• Rhino Linux is a new GNU/Linux distribution that’s based on Ubuntu, but which handles some key things differently from Canonical’s operating system. Unlike Ubuntu, Rhino is a rolling release operating system, which means that updates are delivered frequently, and whenever they’re available rather than saving everything up for a major OS update that comes only a few times per year (if that).

• Rhino Linux (formerly Rolling Rhino Remix) follows the concept created by Ubuntu MATE maintainer and ex-Canonical employee Martin Wimpress, who created the Rolling Rhino tool about three years ago to allow existing Ubuntu users to turn their systems into rolling releases.

• To bring the rolling-release model to Ubuntu, Rhino Linux uses the popular Pacstall utility that provides a package manager for Ubuntu inspired by Arch Linux‘s AUR (Arch User Repository). Pacstall is used for providing essential packages like the latest Linux kernel, the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Rhino Linux-specific apps, and theming.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 799 for the week of July 30 – August 5, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

Open Hardware/Modding

• looking for a new SoC? (or SBC?) (search eBay for GPIO+SoC, GPIO+SBC, but also checkout what those are up to…

• GPIO pins on Raspberry Pi are one of the ways to connect and monitor external devices with it. Follow this article for a detailed introduction to these pins.

• There is a new application available for Sparkers: RPi Imager What is RPi Imager? Raspberry Pi imaging utility. Graphical user-interface to write disk images and format SD cards.

• PicoCNC is a 4-axis CNC motion controller that works with Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W running the open-source grblHAL firmware and can be used to control CNC routers, lathes, laser engravers, and other machines. PicoCNC specifications: Works with Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W, or other compatible boards. Storage MicroSD card slot Footprint for EEPROM or FRAM Host interface – USB or WiFi via Raspberry Pi Pico (W) CNC control via screw terminals 4-axis spindle control outputs 5V PWM and direction 0-10V spindle control output. 12V PWM support via open collector output Isolated 12V limit switch input on all 4 axes. Isolated standard Grbl spindle control outputs (5V): Cycle Start, Feed Hold, EStop and Safety Door.

• In today’s fast-paced world, the convenience and comfort of a smart home have become paramount. Monitoring systems offer us a way to streamline daily tasks, optimize energy usage, and ultimately lead to more comfortable and cost-effective living.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Highlights of the last few weeks: new releases of Inkscape, FreeCAD, LSP plugins, MuseScore, first beta of Krita 5.2, CMYK PDFs are coming in Inkscape v1.4, and more.

• The patch by mr.fantastic adding support for on-canvas alignment and even distribution has finally been merged to the main development branch.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Powered by Linux kernel 6.1 LTS, Tails 5.16, a security-focused Linux distro, comes with the latest Tor browser and some bug fixes.

FSF

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday, September 08, from 12:00

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday, September 01, from 12:00

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday, August 25, from 12:00

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday, August 18, from 12:00

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday, August 11, from 12:00

Programming/Development

• Sourceware has been running for almost 25 years, providing a worry-free, developer friendly home for Free Software core toolchain and developer tool communities. And we would like to keep providing that for the next 25 years.

• JavaScript, a high-level, interpreted scripting language, is a key technology of the World Wide Web. It adds interactivity to websites and powers web applications. A core feature of JavaScript is its ability to manipulate strings.

• SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 116 and 117 Nightly release cycles.

• We’re working on improving performance for popular web frameworks such as React. We continue to make good progress, as you can see on this Speedometer 2 graph: [...]

• A new release 0.4.19 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has already been uploaded to Debian too.

• QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for more than twenty years (!!)

Python

• In Python, special or “dunder” (double underscore) variables play a pivotal role in the internal workings of the language. These variables have special meanings and are used in various contexts. One such special variable is __path__. What is __path__? __path__ is a variable that is primarily defined for packages in Python.

• In Python, the “zip()” function is used to combine two or more iterable into a single iterable and retrieve the iterables of the tuple.

• The “DataFrame.replace()”, “pandas.factorize()”, and the “LabelEncoder()” method is used to convert categorical values to integers in Pandas DataFrame.

• Python is an interpreted programming language that offers numerous data types to work with, including float. Float is a built-in data type in Python that allows us to represent decimal numbers. It is a fundamental data type that every developer must understand since it allows us to perform various calculations, including scientific computations.

Rust

• Hello, Rustaceans!

• For the 6th year in a row, the Rust Project conducted a survey on the Rust programming language, with participation from project maintainers, contributors, and those generally interested in the future of Rust. This edition of the annual State of Rust Survey opened for submissions on December 5 and ran until December 22, 2022.

• First, we’d like to thank you for your patience on these long delayed results. We hope to identify a more expedient and sustainable process going forward so that the results come out more quickly and have even more actionable insights for the community.

• The goal of this survey is always to give our wider community a chance to express their opinions about the language we all love and help shape its future. We’re grateful to those of you who took the time to share your voice on the state of Rust last year.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Blackview MP80 is an upcoming tiny (0.285L) and lightweight mini PC powered by an Intel Processor N95 quad-core Alder Lake-N CPU clocked at up to 3.4 GHz and equipped with 16GB RAM, and a 512GB M.2 SSD preloaded with Windows 11 Pro. The mini PC also comes with three HDMI 2.0 video outputs, three USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, as well as Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 wireless connectivity.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The big news the last couple of days is that “Covid” is back…again. This time it’s the “Eris” variant, named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, it supposedly is causing a spike in cases for the first time in…who cares how long.

• The Chinese economy is in worse long-term shape than is widely understood, a prominent American economist is arguing, in ways that cannot be easily fixed. It is “economic long COVID,” featuring a persistent dearth of investment and consumer demand, writes Adam S. Posen in Foreign Affairs.

• Why it matters: Belief in a Chinese economic juggernaut has been a core assumption in the mainstream understanding of the global economy and diplomatic landscape for a generation. If it’s no longer true, China’s position on the world stage is weaker than is commonly understood.

Linux Foundation

• We are excited to announce that Software-Enabled Flash (SEF), an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation, will be showcased at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in San Jose, California. This marks a significant milestone in the evolution of flash cloud storage, offering hyperscalers unprecedented control over their flash-based storage capabilities.

• LF Networking, the facilitator of collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, announced the next ONE Summit event will take place April 29 – May 1, 2024 in San Jose, Calif. The move represents a return to the event’s origin, over a decade ago in Silicon Valley, as the “Open Networking Summit.”

• Over the past ten plus years, the event has evolved from a focused conference on SDN and NFV to what we have today: a robust, cross-industry ecosystem gathering of the most innovative discussion topics within the broader networking and edge space, which now encompasses the next phase of innovation: AI+Networking, IoT/Edge and AI, Open RAN and Enhanced Connectivity/Access, Enterprise & Multi-Cloud Networking, Security, and more.

Security

• Scaling a software application successfully is no small feat. Like raising a child, it requires planning, having the right foundations, and being prepared to adapt along the way. Just as kids outgrow clothes and need bigger shoes, our software creations need room to grow and stretch as user demand escalates. That’s where scalability comes in – the capacity to handle increased usage without breaking stride.

• It looks like a Chinese hacking group is attacking air-gapped networks: Kaspersky has documented a sophisticated attack created by a hacking group associated with China. The attack uses several stages to get malware onto air-gapped devices, infiltrate other devices on the network, and then copy and exfiltrate files.

• This month I accepted 408 and rejected 40 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 412.

• This was my hundred-ninth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

• We have been tracking researchers scanning the Internet for open ports or vulnerabilities for a few years. These groups often show up in our “top 10″ lists. We do not make any general recommendations to block these IPs but we want to give you the information you need to make this decision for your network.

• Microsoft fixed a security flaw in the Power Platform Custom Connectors feature that let unauthenticated attackers access cross-tenant applications and Azure customers’ sensitive data after being called “grossly irresponsible”…

• Tenable’s CEO and former national cyber security director to the George W Bush administration, Amit Yoran, has hit out at Microsoft and accused the software giant of deliberately [...]

• Facepalm: Microsoft developers are working on a new feature for Edge.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Online communications software provider Zoom has been forced to issue a clarification to its terms of service after it was noticed that a change, said to be in March, appeared to say data from calls could be used to train the company’s AI.

Defence/Aggression

• Manila summoned Beijing’s envoy Monday after the China Coast Guard blocked and water cannoned Philippine vessels in the disputed South China Sea, President Ferdinand Marcos said.

• Hundreds of people, mostly women, gathered on August 7 in the Turkmen city of Turkmenbashi to protest food shortages amid Turkmenistan’s severe economic crisis.

• An examination of the time from December 2018, when protests against then-president Omar al-Bashir first broke out, and December 2022, when a framework agreement between civilian and military leaders came into play.

• The friends and family of a missing man in Khartoum discovered he had been murdered when the murderers sent a gruesome video of his body to all of his WhatsApp contacts. The man’s family believe that the paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces was behind the killing – as the man had supposedly been caught filming them looting a home. The video is proof of just one more human rights abuse since a new war began in the country in April.

War in Ukraine

• On Monday, the Riga City Council and the association “Tev” said Latvia would be sending a water purification station produced in Latvia to Ukraine to help the Kherson area, where hundreds of thousands of people are without access to drinking water after the destruction of Kahovka dam.

• A Russian court has handed a writer an eight year prison sentence, finding him guilty of deliberately spreading false information about Russia’s armed forces. Dmitry Glukhovsky was found guilty of posting texts and videos on his social media channels that accused Russian servicemen of committing crimes in Ukraine and that Russian prosecutors said were fake. Glukhovsky is best known for writing a science fiction series and is the latest creative to be handed a prison term in a relentless crackdown on dissent in Russia. He isn’t in Russia and was tried in absentia.

• In the “liberal” New York Times today, I saw an article on “Putin’s forever war” that has the following short synopsis: “Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine.

• Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said five people, including a local official of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, were killed and 31 more were wounded by the strikes.

• Should the U.S. continue to bankroll the counteroffensive?

• Ukraine’s lack of counteroffensive progress over the past two months should serve as a wake-up call for Western leaders. Their response will shape the geopolitical landscape for decades to come, writes Maksym Skrypchenko.

• Two Russian missiles struck the centre of Ukraine’s Pokrovsk on Monday night killing at least seven people including civilians and first responders, the regional governor said. The missiles – launched 40 minutes apart – damaged residential buildings, a hotel, catering establishments, shops and administrative buildings, the governor added.

• As the war in Ukraine raged, Benjamin Tallis marvelled at the support emanating from the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. For the first time, the voice from the East was helping shape decisions in the West, not vice-versa. Grasping for a word to define what he was seeing, he coined a new term – neo-idealism.

• A court in Ukraine has sentenced Ukrainian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Ionafan (Anatoliy Yeletskykh) to five years in prison on charges of justifying Russian aggression.

• Ukraine’s security service (SBU) says it has detained an alleged Russian informant who was allegedly gathering intelligence on the eve of a working trip by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the Mykolayiv region.

• Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces continued in the country’s southeast, Kyiv said on August 8, as official casualty figures from a Russian missile strike in the eastern city of Pokrovsk have risen to at least seven dead and nearly 70 wounded.

• The U.S. Justice Department is cooperating with the International Criminal Court and supporting Ukrainian prosecutors carrying out war crime investigations, Attorney General Merrick Garland said on August 7.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on August 7 commented on the 15th anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, saying that the “wound” caused by Russia’s occupation of the country remains.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff said on August 7 that talks over the weekend in Saudi Arabia discussed no other peace initiative than the one put forth by Ukraine and that the participants agreed to hold another meeting within about six weeks.

• Russian FM Lavrov said his country highly agrees with the position paper put forward by China on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis.

• The problems caused by the Ukrainian conflict quietly continue to take their toll on Europe.

• Victoria Amelina was a gifted novelist who put fiction aside to devote herself to documenting the atrocities of Putin’s war.

• Poetry by Victoria Amelina (translated, from the Ukrainian, by Valzhyna Mort): “Only women testify in this strange town.”

• It was dinner at the farm of Serhii and Tetiana Khoroschiak, in the southern Mykolaiv region, that showed me just how grateful Ukrainians are.

• The Black Sea, a largely overlooked part of the war in Ukraine, is suddenly a cauldron of military and geopolitical tensions. The region is deeply important to both Moscow and the West.

• Since the August 2020 protests against the rigged re-election of Alexander Lukashenka, the geopolitical landscape of Europe has drastically changed. Now, Belarus is viewed by the West as a military district of Russia, not a sovereign state.

• The Motherland Monument — a 335-foot-tall stainless steel behemoth towering over Ukraine’s capital — was unveiled in 1981 and designed to assert Soviet invincibility.

• A criminal case on false psychiatry diagnoses was initiated in June in connection with efforts to get out of Latvian language exams mandatory for Russian citizens, the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB) confirmed to Latvian Television on August 7.

• Recently, the Latvian Television program “Panorāma” reported that several hundred Latvian companies continue to export their products to Russia. While they might not be breaking any sanctions, such actions still create a very negative impression, particularly on social media, reports LSM’s Russian-language service.

• A sanctioned Russian missile maker appears to have been targeted by two important North Korean hacking groups.

• Russia said Monday it plans to launch a lunar lander this week after multiple delays, hoping to return to the Moon for the first time in nearly fifty years.

• China underscored its desire to “actively promote” efforts to end the war in Ukraine “on any multilateral occasion.”

• The strikes hit the center of the small city in eastern Ukraine twice within 40 minutes, officials said. At least 31 people were injured.

• Journalists from The Times spent two weeks with troops from brigades trained and supplied by NATO to get their take on how, and where, the counteroffensive is going.

• An emergency worker was killed, and dozens of people were injured in missile attacks on a residential complex in Pokrovsk.

• More than 103 million euros in Russian and Belarusian assets have been frozen in Lithuania, according to the latest data from the country’s Financial Crimes Investigation Service (FNTT).

• Belarus has begun military exercises near its border with Poland and Lithuania, the Associated Press news agency said on Monday. The move comes following tensions over the deployment of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries in the country.

• Belarus on August 7 began military exercises near its border with Poland and Lithuania, a move that comes with tensions already heightened between Belarus and the two NATO members over Russian-linked Wagner mercenaries moving to Belarus after their short-lived mutiny in Russia.

• Russia will launch its first lunar-landing spacecraft in 47 years on August 11 in a race with India to the south pole of the moon, a potential source of water to support a future human presence there.

• Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service added sociologist and political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky to the register of extremists and terrorists on August 7.

• Russian production will rise to 370,000 units per year between 2023 and 2026 and will reach its maximum annual level between 2031 and 2035.

• In a rare move, a Russian court has acquitted two Jehovah’s Witnesses of extremism charges.

• The United Arab Emirates, which has translated its wealth into outsize global influence, is diverging from U.S. foreign policy — particularly when it comes to isolating Russia and limiting ties with China.

Environment

• Officials in Juneau, Alaska, declared an emergency Sunday after record glacial flooding destroyed at least two buildings and forced residents to evacuate.

• Driving the news: The Mendenhall River first flooded Saturday following a major glacial dam outburst from Suicide Basin, a side basin on the 3,000-year-old Mendenhall Glacier, some 12 miles north of Alaska’s state capital, per a statement from the City and Borough of Juneau.

• Severe storms were threatening much of the eastern and southern U.S. overnight with heavy rain, damaging winds, large hail and even tornadoes in some places, per the National Weather Service (NWS).

Finance

• As the coronavirus pandemic raged in July 2020, the Trump administration approved a $700 million loan to a Nashville-based trucking company called Yellow.

• Extreme weather events and our warming planet are primed to strike commodities and the food supply like never before.

• Why it matters: The recent global heat wave, deadly floods across China’s grain belt and wildfires that spanned several continents have put a spotlight on how climate change may wreak havoc on the world’s most-consumed food crops.

• The man duped hundreds of S-Bank customers into revealing their banking details before stealing an estimated €2.4 million from them.

• The next year’s budget package will include a commercial bank excess profits tax, but it is necessary to assess which model to choose – the Estonian or the Lithuanian one, Finance Minister Arvils Ašeradens (New Unity) said in an interview with Latvian Radio on August 7.

• Emergent BioSolutions, the producer of the opioid overdose-combating nasal spray NARCAN, will cut 400 positions, the company announced on Tuesday, as employers continue to reduce their headcounts well into 2023 amid lingering recession fears (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• As a person who has an immigrant spouse (who entered the United States legally and has always been here legally), I have insights into the US Immigration System and what the Democrat and Republican position on the issue is.

• Take the 2018 midterm. The Democrats ran on stopping Trump, on impeaching Trump, then the House Democrats didn’t even sue the administration for swiping money from other programs to build the “border wall”, even though this clearly goes against Constitutional separation of powers and the Constitution giving the House of Representatives primary control over taxation and spending issues, and then Nancy Pelosi gave him money earmarked to upgrade the border fencing near her own district in San Francisco.

• [...]

• But the whole country is falling apart under this system. Both Trump and Biden are responsible for the hyperinflationary mess and the debt crisis and the ruined economy.

• [...]

• The irony, of course, is that an industrial strength serial-bankrupt adulterer that my parents voted for is the one that gave them control of our highest court.

• [...]

• The United States went from Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery.

• The way it works is “You’re free, but the invisible whip (not to be confused with Wonder Woman’s) is that if you don’t work, you don’t have food, medical care, or shelter, and you will run out of money quickly. Then they steal your retirement from you. But you’re free and the government is your benevolent protector. Oh, and don’t get any funny ideas about saving money because we’ll raise government spending and inflate it all away.”

• My spouse comes home every day, pissed off. Walmart is cutting hours again (to the just and the unjust alike, because fuck morale) to do a “quiet layoff”, boss yells at you for doing what their handheld computer told you to, then the next day you get called in and told thanks for never being late for work in three years.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• After attracting a massive number of users out of the gate, Meta’s Threads has reportedly experienced a material community-size falloff. Meanwhile, more than a few commercially prominent artists have thus far decided against using the Twitter alternative.

• Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has left the original creator of the @music handle high and dry. Here’s the latest. The Twitter rebrand to X now has Elon Musk combing through registered handles to pick out his favorites, like a child reclaiming toys handed out.

• At least eight staff announced on Twitter they are leaving the company in the past week.

• On Monday, Lithuania’s Prosecutor General’s Office said it had opened a pre-trial investigation after Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas shared on Facebook details about a tank deal.

• Facebook ads promise huge discounts but lead to dodgy sites

Censorship/Free Speech

• PEN struggles to reconcile its commitment to social justice with its commitment to free speech.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• A new Spotify for Android update seems to be causing major issues like crashes and the inability to open the app at all. Here’s the latest. Reports from social media seem to indicate that most problems are from users who are on the Spotify beta version.

Monopolies

Patents

• The dispute between Edwards Lifesciences and Meril Life Sciences spans numerous jurisdictions and numerous patents, all of which relate to minimally invasive heart-valve technology. Now, the District Court of The Hague in the Netherlands has found in favour of Meril, after Edwards Lifesciences brought infringement claims against its competitor.

Trademarks

• Here are three recent decisions in Section 2(d) oppositions. At least one of the oppositions was dismissed. See if you can guess how they came out, based on looking at the marks and the involved goods and services. Answer(s) in the first comment.

• By my reckoning, the Board has affirmed about 85% of the Section 2(d) refusals it has reviewed on appeal this year. (That’s a bit lower than usual.) Here, is the latest decision. The USPTO refused to register the mark SUNSET SUSHI & Design on the ground of likelihood of confusion with the registered mark BANSHOO SUSHI BAR & Design, for overlapping restaurant services. According to the cited registration, the English translation of “BANSHOO” is “SUNSET.” How do you think this appeal came out? In re DBMG, LLC, Serial No. 90185762 (August 3, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Cheryl S. Goodman).

Copyrights

• The Korean Fair Trade Commission is investigating major K-pop agencies over deceptive album sales practices related to photocards.

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