● 08.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/08/2023: HashiCorp Goes Proprietary

Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We cover user groups that are running in Jamaica. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Desktop/Laptop

• Biotech company AI Proteins is at the forefront of revolutionizing medicine through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and protein design. They use AI to harness the power of synthetically designed proteins to cure diseases and potentially make medicine more affordable. We recently interviewed AI Proteins about their work and how they use System76 machines and Linux to transform the field of drug discovery.

• At the heart of AI Proteins lies a groundbreaking approach called de novo protein design, which leverages the power of AI, synthetic biology, and automation. Unlike traditional protein-based therapies, which are derived from natural sources, de novo protein design allows the creation of entirely new molecules tailored for medicinal purposes. This level of control and precision offers a promising avenue for developing safer, more effective, and purpose-built medicines.

Audiocasts/Shows

• SHOW NOTES ►► https://tuxdigital.com/podcasts/destination-linux/dl-335/

• On this episode of Destination Linux (335), we discuss a rolling Ubuntu based distribution with Rhino Linux and we give some tips for screen recording on Wayland in our community feedback. Then we’re going to pay tribute to a special person and project. Plus, we have our tips, tricks and software picks for you.

Kernel Space

Instructionals/Technical

idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeamViewer on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, TeamViewer is a feature-rich software that facilitates remote access, making it an invaluable tool for businesses and individuals alike.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Podman on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, Podman is a container management tool that allows users to run, manage, and interact with containers without requiring a daemon running in the background.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on Debian 12. SQLite, a lightweight and self-contained database engine, plays a vital role in the Debian 12 (Bookworm) ecosystem, offering a powerful and efficient data management solution.

linuxcapable

• The Metasploit Framework is an indispensable cybersecurity tool renowned for its penetration testing and vulnerability assessment capabilities. This guide is tailored to walk you through the installation process of the Metasploit Framework on Debian platforms, specifically Debian 13 Trixie, Debian 12 Bookworm, Debian 11 Bullseye, and Debian 10 Buster.

• NVIDIA’s CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a powerful tool for parallel computing. It uses NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) to boost the speed of computing tasks. This guide will show you how to install CUDA on Debian 11 Bullseye and Debian 10 Buster.

• In the expansive world of media center software, Kodi emerges as a leading choice for many enthusiasts and professionals. This open-source application has revolutionized how users access and manage multimedia content.

• The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is an essential tool for professionals and enthusiasts in the digital image editing domain. This guide will walk you through the steps to install GIMP on Debian 13 Trixie, Debian 12 Bookworm, Debian 11 Bullseye, or Debian 10 Buster.

• For those looking to install LibreOffice on their Debian system, you’ve come to the right place. LibreOffice Suite is a premier open-source office software solution, providing a comprehensive array of tools designed for a range of tasks.

linuxconcept

• Firefox is a free and open-source web browser from Mozilla. It is one of the most popular and preferred web browsers globally because of its speed, customization, and security features. It is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

• On Ubuntu 22.04 and later, Firefox comes preinstalled as a Snap package by default. While Snap offers advantages such as ease of installation, some users do not prefer it due to its slow startup time and disk space issues.

• Metatrader 4 (MT4) is a popular trading platform used by forex traders worldwide. It offers advanced charting, analysis tools, and a vast range of indicators to facilitate efficient trading. While MT4 is primarily designed for Windows, Linux users can also enjoy the benefits of this powerful platform. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore how to install and use Metatrader 4 on Linux, along with its key features and troubleshooting tips.

• How to upgrade from Debian 11 to Debian 12 update from Debian 11 to Debian 12: please note that major release updates are prone to problems. for the savest way to upgrade: keep data sepearte from programs and reinstall.

• Anaconda is an open-source environment and package manager, also a distribution of the Python programming language specifically designed for data science and machine learning tasks. One of the main advantages of Anaconda is its extensive library support. It includes popular libraries such as NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, Matplotlib, scikit-learn, and many others.

• Learn to effortlessly mount ISO files on Linux with our easy-to-follow instructions to gain quick access to the ISO image content.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to fix the error “Ubuntu has experienced an internal error” on Ubuntu 23.04.

• This error happens, when your system crashes, and the reason why you get this error is because the apport tool may be enabled on your system.

• You can use the reboot or shutdown -r now to reboot the Linux system. However, this doesn’t scale well if you have many Alpine Linux servers (or clusters based upon Alpine Linux) and need to reboot the server only if a new Linux kernel is installed. Let us see how to use the Ansible IT automation tool to reboot the Alpine Linux VM or server only when a new Linux kernel is installed.

• Many users are annoyed by the version number included in the syslog-ng configuration. However, it ensures backward compatibility in syslog-ng. It is especially useful when updating to syslog-ng 4 from version 3, but also when updating within the same major version.

• Many users are annoyed by the version number included in the syslog-ng configuration. However, it ensures backward compatibility in syslog-ng. It is especially useful when updating to syslog-ng 4 from version 3, but also when updating within the same major version.

• Learn about creating, managing, and removing users from groups in Linux. This guide covers both GUI and command-line approaches.

• Ubuntu 23.10 is going to introduce new enhanced tiling window support! Here’s how you can try it out in Ubuntu 22.04 & Ubuntu 20.04. For those who don’t know what is window tiling, it’s a window management behavior that snap window to screen edge/corner to be half or quarter-tile.

• In modern software development practices, automation plays a crucial role in streamlining processes and ensuring efficient and reliable deployments. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an enterprise automation tool that allows you to define and manage configuration as code. GitLab, on the other hand, provides a robust CI/CD platform for managing code repositories and executing continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kirigami Addons 0.11.0 is out! This release brings a bunch of new components. Since I forgot to write an announcement for the 0.10 relesse, I will mention some of the new features of 0.10 too.

• This helpful component is similar to Kirigami.InlineMessage and can be used as the footer or header of a page.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In the last few months, I have been trying to improve the default UI shipped by QEMU. As you might not know, QEMU ships with various UI backends: GTK, SDL, Cocoa and recently a DBus one.

• I first started trying to port the GTK 3 backend to GTK 4 but faced some issues where I couldn’t use GtkApplication as it starts its own GMainLoop which interferes with some god knows what internal GMainLoop started by QEMU itself. My intention was not to only do a simple port but also to see how we could optimize the rendering path as well.

• At that time, I also learned that Christian Hergert started working on libmks, a new client-side C library of the DBus backend as he has the intention of using it in GNOME Builder. Marc-André Lureau, one of the upstream QEMU maintainers, is also working on something similar, with a larger scope and using Rust called RDW, a Remote Desktop Widget to rule them all.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• My dream is also to have a single, multi-boot USB key to replace the half dozen I carry around, I just haven’t got around to doing it. Something like Rufus but with multiple images or partitions. Anyone know of a straightforward tool that could be used to do this, say for FreeBSD, Fedora, ESXi, Windows Server, macOS, and the like?

• And finally, my laptops need more NetBSD stickers to complement the FreeBSD ones. This wouldn’t add any discernable weight, though it would add discernable awesomeness. 🧡

• As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.

• This report covers hrev57127 through hrev57183.

Fedora Family / IBM

• In the rapidly evolving world of technology, a seismic shift is taking place as the very ethos of the open-source market finds itself in flux. The cherished ideals of open community standards, collaboration, and crowdsourced innovation are now being challenged by powerful enterprises, many of them publicly-traded corporations, grappling with the balance between shareholder fiduciary responsibilities and community support.

• Red Hat, one of the longtime leaders in the open-source space, made some key announcements, which I got the chance to discuss with Gunnar Hellekson, the GM of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business recently, that the company is changing how it approaches the open-source community as it relates to its main source of revenue, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL is an open-source operating system that thousands of organizations, institutions, and government departments use globally.

• A blog post from senior Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera indicates that the company is further consolidating its development efforts on desktop Linux.

• The post, simply titled “New responsibilities”, refers back to Red Hat’s earlier decision to stop packing LibreOffice for RHEL back in June. That in turn followed the company laying off Fedora project lead Ben Cotton. Nocera isn’t being laid off, merely “transferred to another team that deals with one of a list of Red Hat’s priority projects.”

• Nocera links to one of his emails from the end of June, which lists multiple Fedora packages that he had to stop working on. Although he says that he gave less than 10 percent of his time to them, he describes some of the areas which will now be orphaned…

• MontaVista® Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux® products and services, announces immediate availability for Rocky Linux 9.2 for customers needing commercial support and maintenance for Rocky Linux. MontaVista’s commitment to Rocky Linux continues despite the recent changes to the CentOS project source distribution announced by Red Hat.

• The Rocky Linux project was founded in late 2020 as a successor in principle to CentOS Linux, generating an impressive ecosystem around the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) over the last few years. MontaVista Software joined RESF as a Principal Sponsor early in the process and continues to support and drive strategic alignment with its products and services.

• This post shows how to bisect a Fedora kernel to find the source of a regression. I needed that recently and I found no good guide, so I’m at least capturing my notes here, perhaps you find it useful. This approach can be used to identify which exact commit caused a bad kernel behavior on your hardware, and then report it to kernel maintainers. Note, you need to have a reliable way of reproducing the problem. If it happens randomly and infrequently, it’s much harder to debug.

• The recording of the August CentOS Board meeting is now available. Watch the recording Read the minutes The recording has timestamps so you can skip to the parts that interest you. Here are a few highlights of the meeting: We got an update on the status of trusting SIGs for secureboot (Issue 67).

Debian Family

• Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named “The Debian Linux Release”.

• He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection.

• After 30 years, Debian is still going strong.

• The Debian project has added the LoongArch architecture to its ports collection.

Devices/Embedded

• Chip bring-up is a job most technologists don’t want or know how to do. It involves developing and running a series of low-level interface and memory tests, coding drivers, verifying the boot process, and debugging the debuggers, then rolling all that work into the creation of board support packages (BSPs) and software development kits (SDKs) over a period of weeks or months. There isn’t much glory in it, but application development can’t happen without it.

• Daire has performed chip bring-up on dozens of target microprocessors, if not more, bringing to life chips based on Arm, x86, PIC, SPARC, ARC, MSP, and other microarchitectures so other engineers can take advantage of them. He recently did the same for a new RISC-V-based chip, the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA, adding error detection and correction (EDAC) mechanisms and Linux drivers to its technology stack for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM) company Skycorp, and doing so in time for the launch of a Northrop Grumman NG-17 spacecraft that would carry their test product into orbit just weeks later.

• When the iSSI project got underway, the PolarFire SoC FPGA lead partner Skycorp had selected as one of the system’s primary control platforms had only just hit the market. As a Linux-capable processor built around a RISC-V CPU cluster, tens of thousands of FPGA logic elements, and an advanced memory protection scheme, the PolarFire device checked a lot of boxes for the mission. That said, the technology infrastructure around the processors was still maturing.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Seeing the lack of privacy-focused video doorbells on the market, Tristam (aka ThatGuy) decided to design his own doorbell with an ESP32-CAM board purchased from Amazon and flashed with ESPHome open-source firmware for easy integration with Home Assistant so there’s no need to rely on third-party cloud services. The DIY design also comes with other off-the-shelf parts with a momentary push button, a 10kΩ resistor, an RGB LED ring light,  M2.5 brass inserts and screws, and a 10-meter micro USB cable all of which can be purchased from Amazon or another shop.

• The traditional method for changing a diaper starts when someone smells or feels the that the diaper has been soiled, and while it isn’t the greatest process, removing the soiled diaper as soon as possible is important for avoiding rashes and infections.

• Dr Sue Sentance shares what she learned about the approach taken to computing education in Malaysia’s largest state during a recent visit.

• This Raspberry Pi powered handheld looks more corporate than fun, but the project packs a lot of skills and fun into a small package.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• This collection of tutorials will help you learn LibreOffice Calc like Microsoft Excel. We published these gradually since 2022 and is still continuing. We hope these helps you all regardless your occupation being a student, a teacher or a worker. Happy studying!

Programming/Development

• A news item from Software Freedom Conservancy.

• SFC Announces Program to Help FOSS Enthusiasts Adopt Zoom Alternatives

• Software Freedom Conservancy stands with concerned users and consumers; we too face difficult choices with respect to software rights and freedom. As part FOSS options for the general public. We also strive to “meet people where they are.”

• The industrialized world has changed since the advent of FOSS. Only the most privileged among us have the option to avoid proprietary software — from the grocery store coupons, to interacting with government agencies, to looking for a job, to attending mandatory meetings at our jobs. The pandemic accelerated the widespread adoption of new technologies, such as video chat. Quite quickly after the pandemic started, we noted that some of our colleagues began pressuring us to meet on Zoom. It was really hard in the early days of the pandemic to balance the need for human connection and a principled stance on video conferencing software. We want to acknowledge that we all make tradeoffs and negotiations with our ethics, and these are not cut and dry issues. The wider business and non-profit sectors beyond FOSS quickly standardized on wholly proprietary video chat software — and Zoom was, by far, the market leader.

• This is why we need regulation:

• Welcome to the 41th post in the $R^4 series.

Python

• The “os.stat()” method of the “os” module in Python is utilized to retrieve all the file information such as type of file, size of file and others.

Java

• In Cryostat 2.3, we deliver the first iteration of a long-time requested feature, the JDK instrumentation agent for profiling Java workloads using JFR. This article provides a brief overview of an instrumentation agent, what the Cryostat agent does, reasons to instrument your containerized applications with the Cryostat agent, and finally, an example of how to include the Cryostat agent into a Quarkus application.

Leftovers

Science

• Behold!

• The University of Rochester will examine the work of Ranga Dias, who was an author of a materials science paper unrelated to his superconductor research that was retracted on Tuesday.

• For a few weeks, we had a taste of what it would be like if people cared about science as much as baseball.

• Not a pretty sight.

• A radical transition could be underway.

• University of Michigan researchers published a study detailing a new method for making brain organoids, or miniature lab-grown brains used in neuroscience research, last June.

• And we still have two years until solar maximum.

• This is an emergency.

• Welcome to the machine.

• Gaze upon the dawn of time.

Hardware

• Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies has increased its revenue by more than 3% in the first half of 2023, following an 0.8% rise in the first three months, the company says.

• Huawei is a private company owned by its employees, but releases a short statement about its performance occasionally.

• Aspera Mobile managing director Allan Robertson explained, “The AS8 is a highly featured, lower-cost smartphone which is part of our new 2023 range. As with all Aspera phones, it is aimed squarely at the budget conscious and those people who want a great smartphone experience, but don’t want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get one.

• “It has a high-quality feel, an HD+ display, a great camera and a long-lasting and removable battery. It even comes with a free gel case – all of which make it terrific value at just $149. As such, we believe it is the best value smartphone in the market at that price.”

• GGtag is a 3.52-inch e-paper display based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and programmable through sound or USB serial from your web browser, plus it also supports emulation of 125 kHz RFID tags (ASK and FSK). When Radoslav Gerganov contacted me about the upcoming Crowd Supply campaign for the GGtag e-paper badge, I happened to have just discussed using an e-paper display to sell some samples on Facebook Groups where requirements include using the seller’s name and date in the photos.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Readers respond to our June 2023 issue.

• Imagine if each time your wages were deposited in your bank account, your employer deducted a fee of 1.5% to 5% to provide the money electronically. That, increasingly, is what health insurers are imposing on doctors. Many insurers, after whittling down physicians’ reimbursements, now take an additional cut if the doctor prefers — as almost all do — to receive funds electronically rather than via a paper check.

• Such fees have become routine in American health care in recent years, according to an investigation by ProPublica published on Monday, and some medical clinics say they’ll seek to pass those costs on to patients. Almost 60% of medical practices said they were compelled to pay fees for electronic payment at least some of the time, according to a 2021 survey. With more than $2 trillion a year of medical claims paid electronically, these fees likely add up to billions of dollars that could be spent on care but instead are going to insurers and middlemen.

• THE FINNISH Food Authority will conduct inspections at all of the roughly 400 fur farms in Finland, according to YLE.

• “The avian influenza is a dangerous disease at fur farms because it can mutate into a disease that can transmit to people. This hasn’t happened yet, but the risk does exist,” Terhi Laaksonen, the director of animal health and welfare at the Finnish Food Authority, stated to the public broadcasting company on Monday.

• I remember when I told my mom that I wanted to start seeing a therapist. I was 20 years old, and it marked a new beginning. I was a little bit less afraid to ask for help.  For too long, I thought seeking help for my mental health wasn’t an option.

• Chili peppers thrive in hot and dry conditions. But even they have their limits.

• You don’t need a massive garden and a green thumb. Just put a pit in a pot.

• A way to stop its lingering effects?

• A scientific rescue mission aims to analyze every plant, animal, and fungus before it’s too late.

• There’s still so much we don’t know.

• The problem is exacerbated by the fact that countries measure disability in different ways. While some nations only take into account physical ailments, others include mental health conditions. Thus, the study found that three key factors influence the depth of stigma against children with disabilities: their gender, the type of disability and the degree of dependency.

• Has the national obsession with trauma done real damage to teen girls?

• Jakarta registers unhealthy air pollution levels nearly every day, according to IQAir.

• Not just infants with a history of underlying conditions or who’d been born prematurely but even healthy ones need to be inoculated against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) as part of routine care, according to study in JAMA Network Open.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Microsoft’s Azure AD (Entra ID) is a popular choice for identity and device management. Until recently, Linux systems lacked a comprehensive solution for integrating seamlessly with these Microsoft services. Enter Himmelblau, a project meant to bridge the gap between Linux and Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Readers have been pointing us to HashiCorp’s announcement that it is moving to its own “Business Source License” for some of its (formerly) open-source products. Like other companies (example) that have taken this path, HashiCorp is removing the freedom to use its products commercially in ways that it sees as competitive. This is, in a real sense, an old and tiresome story.

• The lessons to be drawn from this change are old as well. One is to beware of depending on any platform, free or proprietary, that is controlled by a single company. It is a rare company that will not try to take advantage of that control at some point.

Security

• Multiple significant microcode security issues have been discovered. An information exposure bug known as Downfall ( CVE-2022-40982 ) has been found in some Intel(R) Processors, as well as a side channel vulnerability in some AMD CPUs known as Inception ( CVE-2023-20569 ) that may allow an attacker to influence the return address prediction, potentially resulting in speculative execution at an attacker-controlled address.

• Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.

• The glitch allowed people with withdraw large sums despite having little or no money in their accounts.

• Two new reports on phishing trends show a rise in attacks, and they’re taking more complex paths through the internet to connect victims with malware-laced websites.

• Hudson Rock security researchers have identified credentials for hacker forums on roughly 120,000 computers infected with information stealers.

• Discord.io, a third-party site that allows users to create custom server invites for the instant messaging and voice app Discord Inc., has been taken offline after a data breach led to the exposure of the information of more than 760,000 users. The breach took place Monday night and Discord.io was taken offline shortly thereafter.

• We need to start talking about the Cyber Resilience Act, because according to all major Open Source organizations the CRA is a threat to Free Software itself, and it has been approved by the European Committee that was working on it.

• This, is going to be a complex story of laws and burocracy, and even though it might seem like Europe accidentally hurted Open Source whilst doing an otherwise great bill… this is very much intentional.

• A threat actor has exploited a recent Citrix vulnerability (CVE-2023-3519) to infect roughly 2,000 NetScaler instances with a backdoor.

• A new report released today by Fox-IT, part of NCC Group PLC, has detailed how about 2,000 Citrix NetScalers have been exploited by a threat actor to gain persistent access. Citrix NetScaler is an application delivery controller and load-balancing solution offered by Citrix Systems Inc.

• The personal information of 1.5 million individuals was compromised in a ransomware attack at Alberta Dental Service Corporation (ADSC).

• A zero-day security vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer software discovered in late spring has been wreaking havoc across American companies this summer. The latest victims are people signed up for Colorado’s version of Medicaid, who had their data compromised when cybercriminals used the flaw to access their data in the IBM Cloud.

• The Linux variant is also designed to tamper with the motd (aka message of the day) file to display the ransom note, employ AES-256-CTR encryption instead of Salsa20, and solely rely on the file size for its encryption process.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (datatables.js and openssl), Fedora (ghostscript, java-11-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, microcode_ctl, and xen), Red Hat (redhat-ds:11), SUSE (java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, krb5, pcre2, and perl-HTTP-Tiny), and Ubuntu (gstreamer1.0, mysql-8.0, tiff, and webkit2gtk).

• Cleveland City Schools faced a ransomware attack this week, but it only affected a small number of devices.

• The school system said they became aware of the issue on Tuesday, August 15. An issue they say is affecting many other school districts as well. […]

• Sensitive information is secure offsite, and officials do not believe any of this data has been compromised.

• In this volume of the Ransomware Diaries, I will share interesting, previously unknown details of the LockBit ransomware operation that LockBit has tried very hard to cover up. Until now, you have been lied to about LockBit’s true capability. Today, I will show you the actual current state of its criminal program and demonstrate with evidence-backed analysis that LockBit has several critical operational problems, which have gone unnoticed.

• This time, besides using fake personas, I have spoken directly with the gang and many of its affiliate partners. I also reached out to victims. I learned what happens behind the scenes during the ransom negotiations and the relationships LockBit has with its affiliate partners and competing rival gangs. LockBit has secrets it does not want either party to know. Now, I look forward to sharing them with you!

• Before I begin, I need to share a significant event that took place as I finalized this report. In August 2023, LockBit’s leadership vanished and was unreachable to fellow gang members, including its affiliate partners,

• for the first two weeks of August. During that time, several of LockBit’s close associates shared concerns that the gang’s leadership was on the run or dead. Then, on August 13, LockBit reappeared on private channels as if it never happened. Still, during the time LockBit was gone, LockBits data leak site and infrastructure were up, but no one was actively managing it.

• The question is: why? Fortunately, I have some answers.

• The hacker group that has claimed responsibility for the breach at the Mayanei HaYeshua Medical Center in central Israel earlier this month has issued an ultimatum to the facility, threatening to reveal sensitive medical files that include the prime minister, MKs, senior rabbis, and other known figures in the Haredi word if its demands are not met.

• According to Israel Hayom sources, the hackers demand tens of millions of shekels. The group claims that it has obtained access to hundreds of thousands of digital files due to the breach, including psychiatric evaluations and various checkups that could reveal private medical conditions among Haredi wheelers and dealers. The concern is that this would become a ‘Haredi WikiLeaks’ that could jolt the community.

• The healthcare sector is a prime target for data breaches. According to a summary by the HIPAA Journal, 32% of all data breaches between 2015 and 2022 were in the healthcare sector, “almost double the number recorded in the financial and manufacturing sectors.” Industry analysts cite to many reasons for this, including the sensitivity of health data and its value on the black market compared to other forms of data. Evidently, another driver of data breaches for healthcare entities is M&A activity.

• LinkedIn is being targeted in a wave of account hacks resulting in many accounts being locked out for security reasons or ultimately hijacked by attackers.

• As reported today by Cyberint, many LinkedIn users have been complaining about the account takeovers or lockouts and an inability to resolve the problems through LinkedIn support.

• “Some have even been pressured into paying a ransom to regain control or faced with the permanent deletion of their accounts,” reports Cyberint’s researcher Coral Tayar.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Now, there’s finally an industry discussion happening about the best methods of preventing unwanted trackers. The most effective way to prevent physical trackers from being used as stalking devices against most people is through tracking alerts. If a physical tracker is out of range of the phone that it is paired to, and it’s moving with you, you should get an alert about it.

• Apple rolled out AirTags with some rudimentary anti-stalking mitigations: a tracking alert that worked for iPhone users and a beep from the AirTag that was worryingly easy to muffle or disable and which did not go off until the AirTag had been out of range of the phone it was paired to for three days. Since then, Apple has improved its mitigations by cutting down the time until the beep goes off and by putting out an Android app that can be used to scan for unwanted AirTags in the vicinity. In the meantime, Tile took one step forward by adding tracker detection to its app, and then one step back by creating an “anti-theft mode” that turned that detection off. As of right now, none of the other physical trackers on the market have any anti-stalking mitigations at all.

• Recently, Google announced that it was rolling out Bluetooth tracking detection for Android. The new capability only detects AirTags at the moment, but it’s still a major step forward for people who may be followed by physical trackers. Android users will no longer have to download an app and run a scan to detect unwanted AirTags—it will all happen in the background.

• The recent announcement by Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick regarding the proposed rules to triple fines for businesses and landlords supposedly supporting illegal migrants has ignited significant concerns, calling for careful reconsideration, as their implications run deep and require immediate attention.

• As the technological world advances, the need for secure communication grows more crucial by the day. VPNs, or “Virtual Private Networks,” have become pivotal in maintaining online security.

• However, there are many ways in which network providers and institutions can block a VPN connection. You can circumvent these blocks by setting up your very own VPN over HTTPS with SoftEther.

Defence/Aggression

• Director B.K. had shared the photos taken inside and outside the mosque under the title “The Magic of Contrasts.” The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that both E.C., the individual photographed at Kocatepe Mosque, and B.K., the director who shared the content, have been taken into custody.

• Observers say morale is low amid gains by the resistance.

• More than 30 Kenyan security officers were killed by improvised explosive devices (IED) in more than 10 attacks over a three-week period in June. Officials suspect that al-Shabaab was behind the attacks in the northeastern Garissa and Lamu counties, both of which border Somalia.

• ‘They are trying to use their last strategy of causing people direct mental pain,’ said one observer.

• Taiwanese officials say China could launch military drills this week.

• More than one million people have fled Sudan to neighbouring states and people inside the country are running out of food and dying due to lack of healthcare after four months of war, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.

• August 16, 2023 10:15 AM

• Yoon is set to meet Kishida, Biden in a landmark summit in the US.

Environment

• Three temperature tracking centers — NOAA, NASA and Berkeley Earth, came out with their July temperature reports Monday.

• Hot weather can destabilize mood, exacerbate mental health disorders and complicate drug treatment. Climate change itself is a stressor, scientists say.

Energy/Transportation

• Volvo Trucks Australia said in a statement on Tuesday that the truck, given the name Oscar by its own staff, had been fitted with a rear-loading 16 cubic metre waste body suited to urban operations.

• The trial will run for three months on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and the results will be scrutinised to look at the use of electric vehicles for such jobs.

• The 6×2 FE Electric has four second-generation batteries, giving it a capacity of 265KWh and the dual-motor vehicle has a range of 220km.

Finance

China

• China has suspended the release of data on youth joblessness, which hit a record high in June, citing a need to examine its method for calculating the key economic indicator.

• China’s government will no longer release youth unemployment statistics, it said Tuesday, but the mood among young people online and on the streets of Beijing left no doubt the situation was dire. Recently, the figure has hit a record every month, with 21.3 percent of young people jobless in June.

• Key July statistics are worse than expected with age-related unemployment announcements nixed.

• A look at some of the datasets that have been restricted recently.

• Country Garden was China’s biggest real estate developer. Now it is staring down default, facing billions of dollars in losses and $200 billion in unpaid bills.

• Asia stocks hit a 11-week low on Wednesday as renewed concerns about US interest rates slugged Wall Street, while investors still smarted from dismal Chinese economic data and the absence of meaningful stimulus.

• China stopped publishing data on its rising youth unemployment rate on Tuesday, as it released a raft of disappointing figures that stoked concerns over the state of the world’s second largest economy. Shortly before the latest uninspiring indicators were published, the central bank cut a key interest rate in an effort to boost flagging growth.

• Japanese carmakers have been struggling mightily in China. Sales are declining, their market share is being whittled away, and the competition has grown cut-throat as Chinese electric vehicle upstarts establish dominance where foreign automakers once held sway.

• The Bank of Latvia supports the Ministry of Finance’s intention to introduce mandatory payment of corporation tax (UIN) advances to banks at 20% of the previous year’s profits, Latvian Television reported on August 14.

• Last month, America’s oldest craft brewery, Anchor Brewing Company, announced that it would shut down after 127 years. The news came as a shock; the San Francisco brand is well-known, and bars across the country stock their famous Anchor Steam beer. But a group of former Anchor employees have a plan to save the company: They want to buy it, and restructure it as a worker’s cooperative.

• Due to the rapid growth of inflation and the significant increase in Euribor rates, the number of leasing contracts concluded in Latvia has been falling, according to leasing sector information gathered by credit history company JSC “Kredītinformacijas Birojs” (KIB).

• Which? urges supermarkets to stock budget-range food and drink in convenience

• stores

• Walmart keeps giving him a 5.5 hour shift here and there because of the ongoing national hour cuts, and it’s just not worth going through all of this, ESPECIALLY on one of those days.

• Campaign’s question of the week asks industry leaders whether a widespread reduction in spend signals too much reliance on technology clients.

• the company ,which was founded 99 years ago, had been in financial trouble for a number of months.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The claim was first made by a user, who uses the handle xslowzone, on the Hacker News forum early on Tuesday. The user wrote: “Go to Twitter and click on a link going to any url on ‘NYTimes.com’ or ‘threads.net’ and you’ll see about a ~5 second delay before t.co forwards you to the right address.

• “Twitter won’t ban domains they don’t like, but will waste your time if you visit them. I’ve been tracking the NYT delay ever since it was added (8/4 [August 4], roughly noon Pacific time), and the delay is so consistent it’s obviously deliberate.”

• The danger posed by domestic violent extremists is considerable. The United States needs a nationwide, community-grounded initiative to address this threat.

• We’re joined in Atlanta by LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, to discuss Donald Trump’s latest criminal indictment. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is charging Trump and more than a dozen of his allies with plotting to steal Electoral College votes during the 2020 presidential election. “There was an attempt to disenfranchise voters in the state of Georgia,” says Brown, who also describes Trump’s targeting of poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss and how Georgia’s status as one of five states where the governor cannot grant pardons will affect the upcoming trial. “If he is convicted in the state, he is going to jail.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Just published, closing out our symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Speech.

• The prosecution of Trump for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election does not threaten freedom of speech, not even a little bit.

• “Those adults are with your children more than you are during the day,” Rogan said to his guest, comedian Tim Dillon, about teachers. “They’re there for hours and hours with the undivided attention of your kids and some of them are f—ing loons.”

• Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas has always been been a joke. Despite his repeated claims to being a “free speech absolutist,” and promising that his critics and rivals alike would be encouraged to remain on exTwitter, he has consistently shown that he has a ridiculously thin skin, and a quick trigger response to try to remove, suppress, or silence those he dislikes.

• X Corp., formerly known as Twitter Inc., reportedly throttled links to websites and applications for which X owner Elon Musk has a particular distaste. The issue has now been resolved, but for a while, when an X user clicked on a link to Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Threads, Facebook or Instagram, there was a five-second delay.

• This one will take a bit of background to explain where things stand. As you likely know, two years ago first Florida and then Texas each signed laws that would restrict social media companies and how they moderate content on their platforms. Both laws were quickly challenged by two trade associations for internet companies: NetChoice and CCIA. The lower courts in both states ruled against the laws, saying they were clearly unconstitutional.

• The nature of the messages or who exactly wrote them remained unclear, but it was a revelation that such messages were associated with the former president’s account.

• X, the company formerly known as Twitter, will no longer allow advertisers to promote their accounts within the platform’s timeline to attract new followers, according to an email to advertising clients obtained by Axios.

• Why it matters: Promoted accounts — or “Follower Objective” ads — generate more than $100 million annually in global revenue for X, a source familiar with the company’s business told Axios.

• August 16, 2023 9:40 AM

• The man has been remanded for four days till Aug 18.

• (Part of the fees also stemmed from defending against Ohio State’s investigating his alleged research misconduct.)

• Senegal’s government has shut down internet access in response to protests about the sentencing of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko. This is a tactic governments are increasingly using during times of political contention, such as elections or social upheaval. The shutdowns can be partial or total, temporary or prolonged.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Members of the New York Times’ union on Monday evening briefed several dozen staffers from The Washington Post union about best practices they learned from The Times’ union’s walkout last December, three sources familiar with the meeting told Axios.

• Students talking in library with books. Photo from Pexels by Yan Krukau on June 3, 2021. By Roxanne Prichard / The Conversation The big idea Experiencing discrimination significantly harmed the wel…

• The long silence on Gao Zhisheng highlights the enforced ‘disappearance’ to target critics of Beijing

• ‘Uncle Tuan proved himself to be a useless and cowardly person’

• The company, First Solar, said an independent review had found that subcontractors used unethical recruitment tactics and withheld pay from workers.

• North Korea asserted Wednesday that a U.S. soldier who bolted into the North across the heavily armed Korean border last month did so after being disillusioned with the inequality of American society and racial discrimination in its Army.

• August 16, 2023 6:20 AM

• It is the first public acknowledgement of the incident by Pyongyang.

• The statement was the first public acknowledgment by the country that it has the soldier, Pvt. Travis King, in its custody.

• Travis King’s motivation and exact location remain unconfirmed.

• Ali Yalçın, the President of Memur-Sen confederation, stated, “It is not possible for us to endorse the received proposal, our recommendation is for the proposal to be revised,” while Şükran Kablan, the Co-Chairperson of KESK, announced that they will go on strike on August 16.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Guest Post: Upgrading a large network to EVPN without disruption.

• APNIC actively participated at APIGA 2023, held in Seoul, South Korea from 24 to 28 July 2023.

Monopolies

Patents

• EP 3 351 246 protects the use of everolimus (a rapamycin derivative) in combination with an aromatase inhibitor. It forms the basis of Novartis’s drug Afinitor, a treatment for breast cancer. The EPO granted the patent in spring 2019. Shortly afterwards, Stada filed the first opposition, with other opponents joining the suit.

• A new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, was added seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,485,621, owned by Avant Location Technologies, LLC, an NPE and entity of Anjay Venture Partners LLC.

• A new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, was added seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,392,970, owned by WristDocs LLC, an NPE. The ‘970 patent provides a portable, disposable biotelemetry system, including one or more sensors, capable of being mounted on one or more extremities, particularly the wrist. The invention provides a biotelemetry system for disposition on the wrist. The device of the invention may be portable, untethered and in some instances, disposable.

• A new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, was added seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,130,900, owned by GeoSymm Ventures LLC, an NPE and entity of Jeffrey M. Gross.

• On August 15, 2023, the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules published proposed amendments to Rules 16 and 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. One of the goals of these amendments is to encourage parties to address issues relating to claims of privilege and work product protection early in litigation. This could be particularly impactful for patent cases, which frequently involve extensive disputes over these very issues.  The proposal would also retitle Rule 16(b) to include both scheduling and case management (the current version just focuses on scheduling).

• Rule 26(b)(5)(A) focuses on the the procedure for “claiming privilege” as an reason for refusing to comply with an otherwise valid discovery request or disclosure requirement.

Trademarks

• In a whopping 82-page opinion, the Board affirmed the USPTO’s refusal to register PARKING.COM, on either the Principal Register or the Supplemental Register, as a service mark for “website providing information regarding parking availability.” The Board first found the term to be generic for the services, and then, in the alternative, found it to be merely descriptive and lacking in secondary meaning. In re SP Plus Corporation, Serial No. 87906630 (August 11, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Elizabeth A. Dunn).

Copyrights

• Sony Music and Triller have officially agreed to conclude their copyright infringement battle concerning Triller’s use of Sony’s music on the platform. Sony Music Entertainment and short-form video platform Triller have agreed to settle their copyright infringement legal battle concerning Triller’s unauthorized use of Sony’s music on the platform.

• Last year Larken Rose and I appeared on Patrick Smith’s Disenthrall show, (( See KOL389 | Disenthrall, with Patrick Smith and Larken Rose: The Morality of Copyright “Piracy”.

• More and more, as the video game industry matures, we find ourselves talking about game preservation and the disappearing culture of some older games as the original publishers abandon them. Often times leaving the public with no actual legit method for purchasing these old games, copyright law conspires with the situation to also prevent the public itself from clawing back its half of the copyright bargain. The end results are studios and publishers that have enjoyed the fruits of copyright law for a period of time, only for that cultural output to be withheld from the public later on. By any plain reading of American copyright law, that outcome shouldn’t be acceptable.

• It’s Music Monday time! Wait, today is Tuesday. It’s a belated Music Monday, the series where I post about much each Monday. Unless it’s a Tuesday. It’s still Monday on the other side of the date line, right?

• Rapper Melvin ‘Magoo’ Barcliff has passed away at age 50. The cause of death is unknown at this time. The wife of the rapper Meco Barcliff told The New York Times that the rapper had not been feeling well for about a week.

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