● 08.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/08/2023: Citus 12.0 and Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• 3 Advantages to Running FreeBSD as Your Server OS, FreeBSD 14 Release Schedule, Stream your OpenBSD desktop audio, DOD KSOS Secure UNIX Operating System Manual, How to limit bandwidth usage with SCP transfers, and more.

Applications

• Amethyst is billed as a powerful node-based audio player. The aim of the project is quite interesting: to develop a music player in TypeScript to see how far the language can be stretched to prove it’s possible to provide pro-level features. This is mature software.

• Amethyst is published under an open source license.

• A new version of Xournal++ is available to download — and those of you needing to annotate PDFs will find it a particularly appealing update.

• We look at useful tools for Linux gamers which help to make their experience breathtaking.

• The terminal is usually used to accomplish administrative tasks on a Linux system such as installing packages, configuring services, updating, and upgrading package…

• A non-destructive photo editor is a type of photo editing software that allows you to make edits to your images without permanently affecting the original file. It works by creating a separate file that stores the changes made to the image, while the original remains untouched.

• Citus 12 adds a new and easy way to scale your Postgres database—schema-based sharding. Unlike row-based sharding, where tables are distributed based on the value in the distribution column, schema-based sharding transparently shards your database by schema name. This new model enables new workloads, that were either hard or impossible to achieve with row-based sharding, most notably microservices and non-homogenous per tenant schemas. So now, you may have a choice based upon the needs of your application—row-based sharding or schema-based sharding.

• In addition to schema-based sharding Citus 12 also includes: [...]

• The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.

• Thanks to WASM and WebGL you can play wipEout right in your browser!

• I’m not the only one who embarked on a path to restore the game. To my knowledge, there are two other efforts ongoing: WipEout Phantom Edition and a yet unnamed project by XProger. Both offer more features than my rewrite. If you’re on Windows and you just want to enjoy the game, these are the better option.

• However, neither the Phantom Edition nor XProger’s version come with the source code. Understandably so. The legality of re-distributing the leaked source is questionable at best.

• Dear syslog-ng users,

• This is the 111th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CodeIgniter on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, CodeIgniter, a powerful PHP framework, provides developers with a robust platform for building dynamic and feature-rich web applications.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SMPlayer on Debian 12. In today’s digital age, multimedia content surrounds us, from movies and music to online tutorials and presentations. To fully appreciate this rich array of media, having a powerful and versatile media player is essential.

• Renaming files may seem like a simple task, but when dealing with large numbers of files or complex naming conventions, it can quickly become overwhelming. Fortunately, Linux provides a robust solution to this challenge through the command line interface (CLI).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VLC Media Player on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, VLC Media Player stands as a cornerstone in the world of multimedia playback, offering a feature-rich and versatile platform to enjoy various audio and video formats seamlessly.

• Handbrake is a renowned open-source tool, celebrated for its prowess in video conversion and transcoding. With its ability to handle a vast array of formats, it has become a staple for tech enthusiasts and professionals alike.

• Audacity stands out as a premier open-source digital audio editor, trusted by professionals and hobbyists alike. Its blend of powerful features and intuitive design has cemented its reputation in the audio editing world.

• Connecting remotely to your VPS or dedicated server is an essential skill for managing your online projects…

• AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) audio files are a common format used for voice recordings and audio clips, often found in mobile devices.

• Welcome to the fascinating world of Metasploit in Kali Linux!

• Telegram is a hugely popular messaging client, especially for those interested in privacy. It’s easy to use and widely available for all platforms – Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS all have access to this platform, making it ideal for diverse teams of people. There are a few ways to get Telegram installed on your Linux desktop, so here we take a look at how to install the Telegram desktop app in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

• Experience hassle-free SSH sessions. Follow our guide to keep your connections alive and eliminate freezing troubles.

• Scrapy is an open-source Python framework used for web scraping. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install, set up, and start using Scrapy on Ubuntu. Requirements For this tutorial, you’ll need: An Ubuntu system.

• Signal is a end-to-end encrypted messaging app that you can use to send encrypted messages to anyone that has a signal account.

• Signal supports Android and IOS but it also supports Windows and Linux.

• Ubuntu 22.04, being a popular Linux distribution, offers a myriad of software packages directly from its repositories. However, certain proprietary software like Google Chrome is not available by default. Fear not, for there are easy methods to get this popular web browser installed.

• >Whether you’re new to the world of cryptocurrency or a crypto veteran, it’s vital that you have a good crypto wallet on hand. Cryptocurrency has taken the financial world by storm, emerging as a popular asset with the potential to generate lucrative returns.

• Learn how to remove personal information from Google with our step-by-step guide. Follow these instructions to remove sensitive information like phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses from Google’s search results. Protect your personal details and maintain greater control over your online identity.

• This guide aims to take you through the process of setting up a media center with Pop!_OS and Kodi, from installation to customization. Whether you’re a Linux newbie or an experienced user, these steps will allow you to create a seamless entertainment center tailored to your preferences.

• Unity Hub is a standalone application designed to streamline your Unity experience. It provides a centralized location for managing multiple Unity versions and projects, making it easier to switch between different setups. Whether you’re a seasoned game developer or just starting with Unity, having Unity Hub installed on Ubuntu can be a significant advantage.

• Have you ever felt a tinge of envy when your desktop buddies talked about those nifty Chrome extensions?

• ONLYOFFICE DocSpace is an open-source room-based platform for document collaboration, distributed under AGPL v3.0. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to install ONLYOFFICE DocSpace Server on Ubuntu using the provided script.

• In this article, you will learn how to use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace to automatically provision AWS resources.

• This article spotlights alternative tools to cmp, a utility that compares two files of any type and writes the results to the standard output.

• The Proxmox juggernaut continues in the latest edition of LHB Linux Digest newsletter.

• Gain a deeper understanding of Linux file and directory permissions. Master the chmod command in Linux to change file and directory permissions with our comprehensive guide.

• >

• Learn how to use the Linux at command to schedule tasks to run at a later time. Automate one-time tasks like backups, scripts with the at command.

• Python is the fastest-growing major general-purpose programming language.

• Several top universities around the globe use Python to introduce students to programming.

• Pip (recursive acronym for “Pip Installs Packages” or “Pip Installs Python“) is a cross-platform package manager for installing and managing Python packages …

• OpenLDAP is a software implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). This article will guide you through installing the OpenLDAP server on Debian 12 step-by-step. You will also install the LDAP Account Manager or LAM, a PHP web application that can be used to manage the OpenLDAP server.

• FileRun is an open-source and web-based file-sharing application for Linux based operating system. It is very similar to Google Drive, iCloud, and DrobBox and allows users to share and sync files over the internet.

• Flatpak is another leading technology (after Snap) that provides a platform-independent framework for packaging, distributing, and running Linux applications. The core applications and related libraries are packaged in containers to provide a consistent and secure environment for applications to run on various Linux distributions.

Games

• Between 2023-08-02 and 2023-08-09 there were 36 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 275 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 13.1 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones: [...]

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I like to keep myself honest by using slower computers regularly to do my job. When things become obnoxious, it reminds me to take a closer look at what’s going on.

• Today, I did some more profiling of 45.beta with a not-too-old-but-still-a-bit-old laptop. It’s the first laptop I received at Red Hat in 2015. X1 Carbon gen3 (5th gen i7), with 8gb RAM. Not amazing by today’s standards, but still pretty good! Surely things will be fine.

• Okay, so first up, after boot, I ssh in from my workstation so I can run sysprof-cli --session-bus --system-bus capture.syscap. Immediately afterwards, I type my login password and hit Enter.

• Things are hanging for quite some time, what does Sysprof say?

Distributions and Operating Systems

• There is now ‘pw-tray’ which sits in the tray:

• [...]

• …the snapshot shows KeePassXC in the tray, but the icon on the left is intended to be the only password manager in the tray in the future.

• ‘pw-tray’ is very simple. All it does is run whatever password manager is specified in /usr/local/bin/defaultpasswordmanager.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• The following kernels are now available. This is a security update toMitigate speculative RAS overflow on AMD (CPU_SRSO) kernel-6.4.9-pclos1-1-1pclos2023kernel-6.1.44-pclos1-1-1pclos2023kernel-5.4.252-pclos1-1-1pclos2023kernel-5.15.125-pclos1-1-1pclos2023kernel-5.10.189-pclos1-1-1pclos2023

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• A few weeks ago, SUSE released SUSE Manager 4.3.7.  This release includes some notable features:  Stability. This is the seventh enhancement of SUSE Manager 4.3, which was released in June 2022.  This means that the solution is rock solid and capable of managing all your Linux distros.

• In a world that’s increasingly dominated by software, the role of open source in shaping the technology landscape continues to grow. To keep up, open-source giants are reshaping the future of cloud-native environments and telecommunication with evolving products and solutions. SUSE Group is one of these companies…

Fedora Family / IBM

• We’re at the stage in the Red Hat drama where everyone is consulting history, trying to figure out what parts are being repeated in 2023 after Red Hat effectively locked down the sources used to build RHEL clones.

• One talk linked quite often was Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos, by Bryan Cantrill over a decade ago. Bryan was a software engineer at Sun, who went over to Oracle after the buyout, then left to join Joyent, and now resides as CTO of Oxide.

• The talk focuses on Sun Microsystem’s handling of Solaris and OpenSolaris, both before and after their Oracle acquisition, and the whole talk is worth a listen—so much context about the history of ZFS, Solaris, Illumos, dtrace, and even UNIX and Linux history are contained within.

• But there was one section (around the 32:00 mark) where if you substitute “Red Hat” for “Sun,” rhymes with this year’s “open source company” drama:

• The fallout from Red Hat’s recent decision to make it harder to access the source code of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution continues. A number of Linux distributions, including Alma Linux, Rocky Linux and Oracle Linux, based their distributions on RHEL. When Red Hat cut off the standard ways they used to get the source code for their distributions, SUSE quickly jumped into the breach with a RHEL fork.

• Today, Oracle, SUSE and CIQ (the commercial entity behind Rocky Linux) are launching a more formal pact in the form of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), which describes itself as a “community repository for enterprise Linux sources.” In the context of the Red Hat saga, OpenELA’s tagline says a lot: “No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome.”

• CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) formation to support RHEL-based distributions.

• Red Hat’s decision to limit access to its source code is one of the leading events that marked the open-source world this year with a negative sign. It truly shocked the community, causing a storm of disapproving reactions.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• India is getting ready to make a major change in its Internet-connected computers in its critical Defence Ministry agency. A new report claims the agency will replace Windows inside all of its Internet-connected PCs with its own operating system.

• The Indian Express reports that the country’s Defence Ministry has been developing Maya OS as the replacement for Windows on its PCs. Maya OS is based on Ubuntu, which itself is based on Linux. The article states…

• Sticking to the six-month release schedule, Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is here as an up-to-date installation media for those who wish to install the long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series on new computers without having to download hundreds of updated packages from the repositories after the installation.

• As such, Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is powered by the Linux 6.2 kernel from the Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) interim release, comes with an updated Mesa graphics stack, namely Mesa 23.0.4, which is a significant update for gamers, as well as all the updated packages and security fixes released since Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS, which was released on February 23rd, 2023.

• The 3rd point release in the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series, this update rolls together all of the security patches, bug fixes, and software updates issued to the Jammy Jellyfish since the previous point release, into a shiny new ISO image.

• I.e. it’s a real time saver for those doing a fresh install.

• Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS also includes a new hardware enablement stack (HWE) composed of Linux kernel 6.2 and Mesa 23.0.4 (a sizeable update in itself).

• We are pleased to announce the release of the next version of our distro, the third 22.04 LTS point release.

• The LTS version is supported for 3 years while the regular releases are supported for 9 months.

• The new release rolls-up various fixes and optimizations by Ubuntu Budgie team, that have been released since the 22.04.2 release in February…

• Ubuntu, a popular open-source operating system based on Debian, is known for its ease of use and the variety of flavors it offers. Each flavor comes with a different desktop environment and features, and one of the latest additions to this list is Ubuntu Cinnamon.

• In this article, we will explore five reasons why some users might prefer Ubuntu Cinnamon over other Ubuntu flavors, such as Ubuntu GNOME, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others.

Devices/Embedded

• Debix announced today a new Single Board Computer integrating the NXP i.MX93 processor along with the Ethos-U65 microNPU. The SBC includes dual GbE ports, camera support, and various other peripherals.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open-source databases have promising use cases in the financial industry. With a wide range of solutions available, there is likely an open-source alternative for almost any proprietary solution on the market, according to Nosek. From a regulatory perspective, they have become feature-rich enough to comply with most regulations in the financial industry.

• “Nearly every use case is a good candidate for utilizing open-source database solutions,” he concluded. “Today, many large organizations in the financial industry have made significant modifications to their enterprise architectures to prioritize open-source solutions.”

• This includes banks, payment providers, and other institutions. Consequently, dedicated teams within organizations now focus on implementing and managing open-source database solutions.

• Another noteworthy trend is the migration from proprietary databases, such as Oracle, to open-source databases, particularly PostgreSQL. Once an open-source technology platform is established and proven within an organization, more workloads, including Tier One applications, are migrated to it.

Events

• After a three-year hiatus, the Live Patching Microconference is back for 2023.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” ships with brand new layout options to give you a more beautiful and more productive email experience. But those new options aren’t on by default (for now), out of respect to those who have grown comfortable with Thunderbird’s Classic View throughout the years. Fortunately, getting that shiny new “Supernova” look is accomplished in just a few seconds. In this short guide, we’ll show you how to do it!

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• The community documentation team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Impress Guide 7.5 and Draw Guide 7.5. The guides are updated to the latest LibreOffice release as a community effort to keep our literature sharp and up to date.

Programming/Development

Python

Rust

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

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Health care workers are increasingly being assaulted or shot on the job, making hospitals and clinics among the most dangerous workplaces in America.

• The big picture: Violence was a serious problem before COVID-19 — the field suffered more nonfatal injuries from workplace assaults than any other profession, even law enforcement, per the Associated Press — and pandemic stressors like backlash against public health measures have made matters worse.

• By Sébastien Ricci China slipped into deflation for the first time in more than two years in July, official data showed Wednesday, as slowing domestic spending weighs on the post-Covid economic recovery.

Security

• The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) announced today at Black Hat 2023 its collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) – a two-year competition aimed at driving innovation at the nexus of AI and cybersecurity to create a new generation of cybersecurity tools.

• AIxCC brings together leading AI organizations that will work with DARPA to make their cutting-edge technology available for challenge competitors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft.

• The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) will serve as challenge advisor to guide teams creating AI systems capable of addressing vital cybersecurity issues, such as the security of our critical infrastructure and software supply chains.

• In this report, we analyze the Windows, Android, and iOS versions of Tencent’s Sogou Input Method, the most popular Chinese-language input method in China. Our analysis found serious vulnerabilities in the app’s custom encryption system and how it encrypts sensitive data. These vulnerabilities could allow a network eavesdropper to decrypt sensitive communications sent by the app, including revealing all keystrokes being typed by the user. Following our disclosure of these vulnerabilities, Sogou released updated versions of the app that identified all of the issues we disclosed.

• EvilProxy is once again on the rise. The malware is one of the more popular phishing kits that is used to bypass multifactor authentication by stealing credentials. A new report by Proofpoint Inc. today illustrates its new rise in popularity and its focus on compromising Microsoft 365 accounts of C-level executives at major corporations.

• Two more vulnerabilities in CPUs have surfaced this week, one in Intel hardware and the other in AMD’s offerings.

• The Intel bug, given the name Downfall, allows a user to gain access to, and steal, data from another user on the same machine. It was reported to Intel on 24 August 2022.

• The flaw is due to memory optimisation features in Intel processors that allow internal hardware registers to be viewed by software.

• Google senior research scientist Daniel Moghimi, who discovered the bug, wrote: “I discovered that the Gather instruction, meant to speed up accessing scattered data in memory, leaks the content of the internal vector register file during speculative execution.”

• Multiple security issues were discovered in Thunderbird, including a bug in popup notifications delay calculation that could have enabled an attacker to trick a user into granting permissions (CVE-2023-4047), and an out-of-bounds read that could have led to an exploitable crash when parsing HTML with DOMParser in low memory situations (CVE-2023-4048). These bugs are simple to exploit and threaten impacted systems’ confidentiality, integrity, and availability. As a result, they have received a National Vulnerability Database severity rating of ”High”.

• Eleven severe vulnerabilities have been found in Chromium, including multiple Type Confusion bugs in V8, use-after-frees in Cast, Blink Task Scheduling and WebRTC, a heap buffer overflow in Visuals, out-of-bounds read and write in WebGL, out-of-bounds memory access in ANGLE, and insufficient data validation and inappropriate implementation in Extensions. These bugs have received a National Vulnerability Database severity rating of ”High” due to their ease of exploitation and the significant threat they pose to impacted systems’ confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Defence/Aggression

• Whether by accident or design, federal Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien chose to write an op-ed about introducing nuclear power in Australia on a day [Wednesday] when the world remembers the destruction of Nagasaki, the second Japanese city to be smashed to smithereens by an American nuclear device in three days, the first having been Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

Russia and War in Ukraine

• Officials said nine people were injured, a church building and several local shops were destroyed, and the windows were blown out of several high-rise buildings.

• It was the 12th time in the past three weeks that Russian officials had reported intercepting such aerial attacks in the heart of the capital.

• Russia is taking a big gamble as it prepares to launch its first spacecraft to the Moon since 1976 on Friday. After decades of failed space missions, and with the war in Ukraine making it a pariah on the international stage, Russia is hoping to re-emerge as a major player in space exploration and consolidate its alliance with China.

• Authorities in the northeastern Ukrainian town of Kupiansk urged vulnerable residents to leave the area on Thursday citing an uptick in Russian attacks on the settlement. The evacuation order came as Poland is planning to move up to 10,000 additional troops to the border with Belarus to support the Border Guard.

• When the Kakhovka dam was destroyed in early June, a vast expanse of water disappeared. The water’s dramatic recession has had far-reaching effects on the population of surrounding towns, notably Nikopol. But as residents adapt to the new landscape, Ukrainian authorities and environmental experts are grappling with the best strategy to restore the sea of sand to its former glory.

• Lithuania is considering to join the declaration by G7 countries, made in Vilnius last month, pledging to keep supplying military assistance to Ukraine.

• The co-founder of Russian Internet giant Yandex, Arkady Volozh, has condemned what he described as Russia’s “barbaric” invasion of Ukraine, days after criticism in Russia over his apparent efforts to distance himself from the country.

• Russian authorities have declared the Conflict Intelligence Team investigative group that analyzes armed conflicts, including Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine, an “undesirable” organization and banned its activities in the country.

• Arkady Volozh, a founder of Yandex, known as ‘Russia’s Google,’ is only the second sanctioned Russian businessman to take an unequivocal public position against Moscow’s invasion.

• Did I really want to fight?

• A drone assault on a Danube River port sent shock waves — both the physical and the psychological kind — into villages just across the water that are in NATO territory.

• Ukraine’s nuclear authority, Enerhoatom, has warned that the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhya is on the verge of a blackout because power was cut off from the main high-voltage line to the facility.

• The United States and its European allies are importing vast amounts of nuclear fuel and compounds from Russia, providing Moscow with hundreds of millions of dollars in badly needed revenue as it wages war on Ukraine.

• The Ukrainian cybersecurity official discusses charging Russian operatives with war crimes for digital assaults on civilians.

• Russian hackers have become increasingly focused on intelligence gathering to gain advantage on the battlefield.

• A series of concerts for Ukraine, held by pianist Andrejs Osokins and dubbed the ‘Osokins Freedom Festival’, raised more than 30,000 euros this summer, organizers have confirmed.

• The recent talks in Jeddah were a Ukraine-focused initiative to prepare the ground for future peace negotiations and get key players closer to Kyiv’s position.

• Russia and Ukraine each reported shoot-downs of unmanned drones around their respective capital regions overnight on August 10, while the Ukrainian side said a “massive” Russian UAV attack destroyed an oil depot in the western region of Rivne.

• A Ukrainian unit sent a drone into Russian-occupied territory to surveil the battlefront, and it brought back vivid images of the Russian side of the war zone.

• U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (Democrat-New Jersey) has called on Kyrgyzstan to uphold international sanctions against Russia for its unprovoked war against Ukraine and urged the Central Asian country to stop its violations of human rights.

• The explosion happened on Wednesday morning at around 10:40 a.m. local time at a pyrotechnics warehouse.

• Russian officials said one person was killed and dozens were injured in the blast. The warehouse is on the grounds of a plant that has produced night vision devices and binoculars, according to local news media.

• Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said on August 10 that 12 people are still missing following an explosion at or near an optical-mechanical plant in the city of Sergiyev Posad that killed at least one person and injured dozens more.

• Lithuania’s Transport Ministry is proposing to close two of the six checkpoints on the border with Belarus, saying this needs to be done in response to the presence of Russian mercenaries in the neighbouring country.

• The deployment comes as concerns are mounting in Poland, a NATO member, over the presence of mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner private military company in neighboring Belarus.

• The number of asylum applications to Finland submitted by Russians has decreased since last year. Yle caught up with a few of those who fled and are making Finland their new home.

• Petr Trofimov said that someone came out of the consulate and threatened him with physical violence, stole his poster and tried to hit him.

• “…Erdoğan referred to the Russian claim about the West’s non-compliance with the Black Sea grain agreement…”

• German prosecutors have arrested an official of the military procurement agency whom they suspect of passing secret information to Russia, the federal prosecutor’s office said on August 9.

• A Russian human rights organization on August 9 said Muslim inmates in a prison in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk have been subjected to abuse on religious and ethnic grounds.

• Vilnius has expressed a “strong protest” after Russian authorities closed down The Jurgis Baltrušaitis House, a Lithuanian cultural centre in Moscow.

• Amid a growing number of expulsions of Belarusians from Lithuania, the parliament may soon again consider imposing the same visa and residence permit bans for Belarusians as it did for Russian nationals.

• The work has been carried out by a newly identified group dubbed “MustachedBouncer,” according to researchers with ESET.

• On June 16, the 92-year-old Daniel Ellsberg passed away. At RAND, he contributed to a top-secret 47-volume study of classified documents on the Vietnam War. Even though the war had been acknowledged to be “unwinnable” since the 1950s, successive presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon had lied about the conflict.

Environment

• After pummeling southern Japan again, the storm moved slowly up the Korean Peninsula, bringing torrential rain and winds. One person died in floodwaters.

Finance

• Disney CEO Bob Iger made it clear on a call with investors Wednesday that if Disney is going to be successful long-term, it needs to seriously rethink its commitment to the traditional TV business.

• In his new executive order banning investment in certain Chinese sectors, President Biden is trying to restrict more than just U.S. dollars from flowing into China’s technology industry.

• Why it matters: He also wants to prevent the transfer of American know-how from top private equity and venture capital firms to China’s semiconductor, artificial intelligence and quantum computing sectors.

• The mayor of a Bulgarian town has been arrested in an investigation into an alleged fraud involving EU funds meant for a project to increase energy efficiency in multifamily residential buildings, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Overdue accountability or politicized attacks? The Trump indictments divide the electorate, but some see ways to sift the difficult questions at play.

• Republicans and Democrats alike are bigger fans of Prince William and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky than many of their own political leaders, a new Gallup poll shows.

• Two weeks from today, former President Trump’s expected absence from the debate stage will provide at least seven Republican candidates a fleeting opportunity to be heard above the Trump megaphone that has dominated the primary.

• Simon Elmer The week after I published my article, ‘Trans Rights and the Order of Speech’ in Off-Guardian, The New Statesman published two articles by, respectively, the biologist, Richard Dawkins, ‘Why biological sex matters’ and the feminist, Jacqueline Rose, ‘The gender binary is false’.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Some politicians accused the company of sharing U.S. user data with China but failed to produce any evidence. TikTok has repeatedly denied all the accusations.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Here’s an excerpt from the article, by free speech historian Jacob Mchangama, writing in Time: On July 30, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen announced that the government will seek to enact legislation for “special situations where other countries, cultures, and religions could be insulted, potentially resulting in significant negative consequences for Denmark.”

• When it comes to conflicts with people engaged in unpopular or disfavored speech, too many journalists side with the feds.

• Two teachers’ unions joined six professors in Idaho to bring a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the No Public Funds for Abortion Act (NPFAA), an Idaho law that prohibits the use of public funds to provide, promote, or counsel in favor of abortion.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia’s national broadband network, has again reported a loss for the 12 months ending in June, this time of $1.12 billion, an improvement of 24% or $346 million from FY22, the company said on Thursday.

Monopolies

Patents

• Orphan drugs treat rare diseases. They receive ten years of market exclusivity in the European Union in addition to patent protection, so as to promote the development of corresponding active ingredients and treatments. The US pharmaceutical company Alexion markets such an orphan drug, the biologic Soliris.

• On August 9, 2023, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,291,475 unpatentable. The ’475 patent relates to alerting a recipient regarding a violation of a vehicle, such as a speeding violation, and had been asserted in district court against Toyota, GM, and Honda.

• View district court litigations by Intellectual Ventures.

• Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 9,584,262 owned by AX Wireless, LLC, an NPE and IdeaHub subsidiary. The ‘262 patent generally relates to a method and apparatus for use within a wireless OFDM network that transmits and receives first and second packets each having header bits and utilizing variable header repetition. It has been asserted against Acer, HP Inc., Lenovo, and Dell.

• We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent.

• Nintendo is patenting Ultrahand, Fuse, and even the loading screens from its blockbuster Legend of Zelda game.

• In Axonics, the patentee offered a new claim construction proposal in its post-institution response. On appeal, the Federal Circuit determined that it was only just, and mandated by the APA, for the petitioner to present new responsive arguments and evidence in its reply briefing. Additionally, the court suggested that the patentee should then have the opportunity to submit further evidence in a sur-reply. The PTAB had adopted the patentee’s claim construction proposal and refused to consider Axonics reply arguments and evidence — finding them to represent improper new arguments.  The Federal Circuit vacated that decision and sent the case back down for reconsideration.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.