● 08.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/08/2023: Ethernet Switch Based on Milk-V (Based on Free Chip Design)

Posted in News Roundup at 1:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• There are many possible answers to the question of what the lowest-powered hardware on which Linux could run might be, but it’s usually a pre-requisite for a Linux-capable platform to have a memory management unit, or MMU. That’s not the whole story though, because there are microcontroller-focused variants of the kernel which don’t require an MMU, including one for the Xtensa cores found on many Espressif chips. It’s this that [Naveen] is using to produce a computer which may not be the Linux computer with the lowest processor power, but could be the one consuming the least electrical power.

• The result is definitely not a Linux powerhouse, but with its Arduino-sourced ESP32 board stacked on an UNO and I2C keyboard and display, it’s an extremely lightweight device. The question remains, though, is it more than a curiosity, and to what can it do? The chief advantage it has over its competitors such as the Raspberry Pi Zero comes in low power consumption, but can its cut-down Linux offer as much as a full-fat version? We are guessing that some commenters below will know the answer.

Desktop/Laptop

• The design, and most likely also the construction, doesn’t quite hit Surface levels, but from the early images it doesn’t look bad at all. The display is a 2880 x 1920 resolution panel, which itself is amazing for something this affordable. It also promises 16GB of RAM, and storage is available from 512GB up to 2TB.

Applications

• Grammarly is everyone’s go-to tool for vocabulary and grammar correction. Unfortunately, Grammarly’s desktop app does not work on Linux, which is one of the primary reasons Linux users look for Grammarly alternatives.

• There are a few Linux native apps, which work seamlessly as alternatives, and most of all, they get the work done in the easiest ways. If you are looking for a grammar app to run on your Linux PC, then it’s time for you to consider a few of these Linux-friendly grammar applications.

Instructionals/Technical

• Recently I again started to have some DBUS issues. Like GIMP opening a new instance everytime instead of just opening next file as a tab. After some investigation it seems that because DBUS got broken – example output from terminal for Caja file manager from Mate.

• It is 2023. XHTML is dead and buried. HTML is a “living standard” with billions of users. So what kind of idiot would want to build a website using XML?

• Me. I am that idiot.

• Ok, well. This has certainly been a long time coming. According to my records (in the form of blog posts mainly) I first announced Dinit to the wider world in June 2017. By that time I’d been working on it for around 2 years already – as a hobby, on-and-off. Development has continued, at what sometimes feels like a glacial pace, since then: I simply don’t have as much time that I’d like to be able to devote to it (nor the funds to be able to put aside bread-winning concerns in order to make that time).

• That initial announcement was met with some encouragement, and some derision. I had set lofty goals, and there were plenty who were happy to fire snide remarks, criticise my level of experience (even if they knew nothing about me), attack my choice of programming language, accuse me of hubris, etc. But the encouragement was enough to offset it! I’ll be ever grateful who simply said “good luck!” and told me to ignore the trolls. Some of them also offered great advice.

• However, I won’t talk about the history further; I’ve covered it in other blog posts. What’s more important is what has been happening more recently.

• I made a tutorial for styling links and buttons, something which many developers have struggled with (resulting in links used as buttons and buttons used as links). I have embedded it on this page, but if you are coming in with your RSS reader you can visit the tutorial directly and walk through it there.

• As you may have known, my blog has been powered by Ghost for a few years. It’s definitely served me well. However, a while ago I started to like the idea of static sites. Seeing as my blog is essentially a list of static posts, it felt a bit weird that the pages were being served dynamically. So, I started on the journey of moving to Hugo.

• As of ansible-core 2.15.3, upstream moved documentation and examples to a separate dedicated repository (see the related changelogs). This means that, starting from version 2.15.3 the ansible-core package will stop shipping documentation and a default configuration example under /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.

• In a situation where your bash script needs to get the directory location where it is located?

• In the realm of software development, managing and understanding codebase metrics is crucial for maintaining code quality, optimizing performance, and ensuring efficient collaboration among development teams.

• Tools that assist in analyzing and quantifying code statistics play a pivotal role in this process. Two prominent tools that have gained traction for their simplicity and effectiveness are “SLOC, CLOC, and Code” or simply “scc” and “CLOC” (Count Lines of Code).Table of ContentsToggleWhat is scc?What is Cloc?Install Sloc Cloc and Code (scc) in LinuxInstall Cloc on LinuxCount Lines of Code in FileOther Code CountersConclusion

• In this tutorial we will describe how to install and configure the latest version of the Roundcube Webmail User Agent in Debian to manage emails from one of the most popular email services, Google Gmail.

• Suite CRM is an open-source Customer Relationship Management system written in PHP. Suite CRM is an extended version of SugarCRM and was developed when SugarCRM stopped its open-sourced version.

• Now, Suite CRM as a system offers a variety of new modules such as Products, Quotes, Teams Security, Responsive Theme, and many more.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to install SuiteCRM with LAMP stack on Ubuntu 22.04 OS. Let’s get started!

• In the reconnaissance stage of every web application pentest, it is essential to find possible directories on the application. These directories might hold significant information and findings that would help you greatly to find vulnerabilities in the application and improve its security.

• Luckily, there are tools on the internet that make directory brute-forcing easier, automated, and faster. Here are five directory-bursting tools on Linux to enumerate hidden directories on a web application.

• Last weekend, I spent many hours banging my head against software, trying to get Universal G-code sender to run with Mint Linux.

• Deleting files and directories is an essential skill you must have as a Linux user. While it’s not hard, you can get more out of the needed Linux commands once you learn how to use them properly.

• In this tutorial, we’ll show you the different ways you can delete files and directories in Linux.

• Let’s get started!

Games

• ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON is a seriously exciting upcoming release from the ELDEN RING developer FromSoftware. Seems it will run well enough on Steam Deck at release!

• Respawn have begun another little ban wave or they’ve tweaked something in their anti-cheat that Linux / Steam Deck players are getting caught in for Apex Legends.

• Valve continue cleaning up regressions with a new Proton Experimental release put up on August 18th, so here’s what’s been sorted this time.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• One of the companies fighting with Red Hat over changes affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is going private.

• SUSE is seeking to delist from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, reports ITPro.com.

• Such a move “will allow SUSE to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term strategy,” SUSE says, according to the report.

• “The company has also waded into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) furor, first with plans to invest over $10 million into a fork of RHEL and, most recently, by forming the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) with Oracle and CIQ,” ITPro adds.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• This is that time of the year when we wait for one of Ubuntu’s upcoming non-LTS releases. Code-named Ubuntu 23.10 ‘Mantic Minotaur,’ features an impressive set of new features and improvements.

• Ubuntu 23.10 will be released on October 12, 2023.

• Here, we will highlight some of the critical changes expected to arrive with Ubuntu 23.10.

• You’ve probably heard of Linux even if you haven’t used it, and while it is often talked about as an alternative to Windows, Linux isn’t just one thing. There are lots of different implementations of Linux, and one of the most popular is Ubuntu, which advertises itself as the Linux operating system for data centers, enterprise PCs, regular desktops and laptops, and more. Here’s everything you need to know about Ubuntu.

• One of the somewhat confusing things about Linux is that it’s often pitched as Windows’s primary rival, but strictly speaking there isn’t some Linux OS you install on your computer. Instead, there are lots of implementations of Linux called distributions or distros, and these distros are how you access the Linux software ecosystem. Ubuntu is a Linux distro, but it isn’t Linux itself.

• Linux on its own is merely a kernel that can provide the underlying basis of an operating system. Technically you could just run the kernel, but as a user there wouldn’t be anything to interface with: no windows, no taskbar, nothing. Ubuntu and other distros exist on top of the Linux kernel and provide that user interface and everything else that makes an OS an OS.

Devices/Embedded

• For networking, the Saylor SBC features two Gigabit Ethernet ports, implemented using the TI DP83867 Ethernet PHY on an RGMII interface. This SECO SBC also offers optional on-board wireless capabilities, including an M.2 1216 module for WLAN 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0. Furthermore, an M.2 Socket 2 Key B is available for LTE modules.

• The product page indicates that the SAYLOR supports Linux Yocto and Android. The embedded device is available in multiple temperature ranges, including commercial, extended and industrial variants.

Open Hardware/Modding

• With one machine down and with what, I think, is the diagnosis of the final issue with the second one, it is time for the home stretch.

• Over the last decade or so the definition of what a ‘small satellite’ is has ballooned beyond the original cubesat design specification to embrace satellites of 50 or 100 kg or more. Today a ‘smallsat’ is defined far more by its cost, and sometimes the technologies used, than the size and shape of the box that goes into orbit; and over the next few years the number of small satellites in orbit is going to rise exponentially.

• Milk-V recently released specifications for the Milk-V Vega which is described as the first RISC-V 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch implemented on the FSL1030M network switch chip. The company also mentions that the device is built on an open-source Linux system.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• We are back from Las Vegas and had a great time at BSides as well as at DEF CON. Teams on site ran the latest nzyme alpha release to monitor the local WiFi environment. Things worked even better than expected and we took a ton of experience and new ideas home.

Programming/Development

• Our JavaScript bundle size was 168mb on a good day. The development environment took 3 minutes to become responsive on a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. Engineers would regularly come in to work, type npm run dev and go for a coffee while their machine’s fans tried and failed to keep up with the demands placed on them by our bloated project.

• Where did it go so wrong?

• Though most strings online today follow the Unicode standard (e.g., using UTF-8), the Latin 1 standard is still in widespread inside some systems (such as browsers). It captures the first 256 characters from the Unicode standard and represents them as a single byte per character.

• In a previous blog post, we examined how we could convert UTF-8 strings to Latin 1. I want to examine the reverse problem, the transcoding of Latin 1 strings to UTF-8. We receive a byte array, and each byte is one character. There is no need for any validation. However, some characters (the ASCII characters) are mapped to one byte whereas all others should be mapped to two bytes.

• LLVM 17 will soon be relased. This post provides a summary of my contributions in this release cycle to record my learning progress.

Leftovers

• I’ve needed to write this for a long time, for multiple reasons.

• 1. Lots of people have been asking what the hell I’m doing. Like do I work somewhere? What do I actually do all day?

• 2. Tons of my friends are either miserable at work or are getting laid off

• 3. I believe that the time for being identified by—and tied to—corporate jobs is passing, and it’s time to transition to what comes next

• I want to cover each of those and then talk about what we can do about it.

• Today in Tedium: We live in a world where the lines between marketing and journalism are constantly blurred. Sometimes content drives marketing; sometimes marketing drives content. Trying to find an objective middle? Now that’s hard. But there was once a time when the objective middle was much more obvious, where you knew what you were getting. So, where did the lines begin to blur? One could point to the infomercials of the ’90s or native advertising of the 2010s, but the point where things got really interesting might have come in the form of a trend that explicitly merged art and commerce in a way that ensured we’d never again be able to tear them apart. Today’s Tedium discusses the “magalog,” an unholy merger of content and sales that once dominated the marketing world. — Ernie @ Tedium

Education

• The Center for Academic Innovation is providing funds and in-kind support and expertise to 13 new projects to help implement educational technology that enhances learning.

• A couple weeks ago, on social media, a dad was talking about the best materials to teach his kid how to program. It’s a very interesting thread and I recommend reading it. What stood out to me: most of the learning materials just don’t look cool.

• Let me be clear. I do NOT mean that they don’t look good, or that they don’t look like great learning resources, or that they aren’t valuable and a lot of work went into them. I mean exactly what I wrote: they don’t look cool.

• Since the 1970s, many colleges and universities have become predatory financial giants, while mountains of student debt pile up and academic work becomes ever more precarious. An ascendant academic labor movement may be key to reversing these trends.

• But if you’re in my position, you need at least 2-3 months between the first and the last step. If your attendance is conditional on speaking at the conference (for example, if your company will only sponsor you if you’re speaking), then you need a minimum of 2-3 months between when speakers are notified and the conference starts.

• From what I see, this is not something that is top-of-mind for conference organisers. That may happen for a host of perfectly understandable reasons, but it also has a cost to the community and individuals who might want to participate.

• School districts across the country are staring down another year with dire teacher shortages.

• The big picture: The teaching profession faces an existential crisis. Turnover rates are high, and not enough young people want to become teachers.

Hardware

• After failing to develop competitive CPUs, Baikal kicks off development of AI ASICs.

• The truth is that GPU, CPU, RAM, and every other compute resource is probably at less than 50% utilization in any organization. There are plenty of exceptions — training jobs, for example — but this is the norm.

• The Pi is connected to 8 individual servo motors that are responsible for activating the power switch on two Mac Minis a piece. The Raspberry Pi is fitted with a PiKVM HAT so it does more than just power on the Mac Minis. This also meant that developing a custom case was necessary to support the additional hardware.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• I had meant to write something today, but I’m just getting over a case of the COVID and had a hard time getting to it.

• Before COVID-19, Kent State was ranked as the safest campus in Ohio – and the 25th safest college in the nation – according to Sgt. Tricia Knoles from the university’s police department.

• Video games and social media are keeping school kids up at night, according to a new survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM).

• But so, too, are more constructive pursuits, including homework and extracurricular activities, which can be a problem when it comes to setting a good sleep routine early in the school year.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• This change starts rolling out now, and will apply to any Google Account that’s been inactive, “meaning it has not been signed into or used within a two-year period”.

• An inactive account and any content in it will be eligible for deletion from December 1, 2023, the tech giant said.

• Microsoft declined to elaborate further on what type of “algorithmic techniques” it employed to produce the piece and others like it.

• Unsurprisingly, folks at the Ottawa Food Bank weren’t too pleased.

• “Needless to say, this is not the type of messaging or ‘story’ we would ever put out or wish to be included in,” Samantha Koziara, communications manager at the Ottawa Food Bank, said in a statement to The Verge on Thursday. “The ‘empty stomach’ line is clearly insensitive and didn’t pass by a (human) editor. To my knowledge, we haven’t seen something like this before — but as AI gets more and more popular, I don’t doubt an increased number inaccurate / inappropriate references will be made in listicles such as this. This simply highlights the importance of researchers, writers, and editors… of the human variety.”

• On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission handed Cruise and Waymo a victory by allowing them to operate across San Francisco at all hours and charge fares. During a six-and-a-half-hour hearing, hundreds of residents testified for and against the robotaxis. Supporters claimed they were safer and more reliable than human-driven vehicles, and disabled people said they were more accessible, especially for service animals. Opponents, including transit and fire officials, argued that the taxis had repeatedly gotten in the way of emergency responders and had become a nuisance.

Windows TCO

• The BlackCat malware works on Windows and Linux, and is rented out to criminals, who break into targets and run the data-stealing malware, making it a ransomware-as-a-service operation. Under this business model, the affiliates pay to use the malware developed by operators in their attacks, and then the affiliates earn a cut of the proceeds if the victims pay the ransoms.

Security

• Linux is often praised for its enhanced security compared to other operating systems. Nevertheless, IT professionals must never assume that Linux is immune to threats.

• Due to widespread adoption in critical infrastructure, Linux has drawn the attention of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups aiming to breach its security. Additionally, Linux finds use in various IoT devices. One of the largest cyberattacks in history involved the “Mirai” malware, which exploited vulnerabilities in devices running Linux.

• Tesla has started notifying current and former employees who were affected by a data breach that occurred in May. The company conducted an investigation and found that two former employees had misappropriated confidential information in violation of Tesla’s IT security and data protection policies. As a result, Tesla has filed lawsuits against the former employees and has seized their electronic devices containing the stolen information.

• To prevent further use or dissemination of the data, Tesla has obtained court orders prohibiting the former employees from accessing or sharing the information, subject to criminal penalties. Additionally, Tesla discovered that the two former employees had shared the stolen data with a German newspaper, Handelsblatt. However, Handelsblatt assured Tesla that they will not publish the information and are legally prohibited from using it inappropriately.

• Snatch Team has recently been exploring some novel uses of Telegram. Unlike other groups that use Telegram mainly to list new leaks, Snatch is providing commentaries and analyses of their breaches and more educational materials for readers.

• Some of their commentaries on specific incidents can be fodder for any lawsuits against the companies or entities they breached because they point out security failures that plaintiffs’ lawyers will appreciate. And some of CyberSnatch’s comments seem designed to help insurers avoid having to reimburse clients, which is a somewhat novel approach.

• A crippling cyber attack at the state’s second-largest insurer not only interrupted operations for months but also pummeled the insurer’s financials.

• For the six months ending in June, Point32Health reported a $102.7 million operating loss on $4.8 billion in revenue. Those results compare to a $25.8 million operating loss on $4.9 billion in revenue in the same period the previous year. The most recent earnings capture nearly the full timespan of the ransomware attack and cyber security breach that hamstrung operations at one of Point32′s insurers, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, from mid-April through much of July.

• This week, DataBreaches spotted a listing for data from a Brazilian plastic surgery practice. The seller, who calls himself “TheSnake,” claims to have 1.3 TB of files from RobertoPolizzo.com.

• [...]

• A sample of files was uploaded as proof of claims. DataBreaches notes that all the files appeared to be password-protected. DataBreaches sent an email inquiry to Dr. Polizzi yesterday about the claimed attack but received no reply.

• Bunker Hill Community College (“BHCC”) confirmed today that the college experienced a data incident in May 2023 and will issue notices to affected individuals and relevant state and federal agencies about the incident.

• On May 23, 2023, BHCC detected irregular activity on certain BHCC systems that was consistent with a ransomware attack. BHCC immediately responded to the situation by taking the affected systems offline, engaging data security and privacy experts, contacting law enforcement, and simultaneously beginning an investigation. BHCC personnel were able to stop the unauthorized activity from spreading and contained the incident to a limited number of BHCC systems. BHCC’s backups were not affected by the incident, and BHCC personnel were able to restore BHCC’s network from those backups without any data loss. As a credit to the existing safeguards that BHCC had in place, BHCC personnel successfully and safely restored BHCC’s network, enabling BHCC to continue with its academic calendar without any delay.

• Due to the complexity of the unauthorized activity, BHCC’s investigation is still ongoing; however, out of an abundance of caution, BHCC is providing this notice. Based on the information BHCC generally collects and maintains for students, applicants, and personnel, data including names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers, education records, and other personal information may potentially be involved. However, BHCC’s investigation is ongoing and specific details as to what categories of information were involved are not yet available. Note that this describes general categories of information collected and maintained by BHCC, and it likely includes categories that are not relevant to each individual. As soon as BHCC is able, individual notification letters will be mailed to affected individuals with further details. If you do not receive a letter, this indicates that your information was not involved in the incident.

• Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents, and listing websites throughout the US have been stymied for five days by a cyberattack on a California company that provides a crucial online service used to track home listings.

• The attack, which commenced last Wednesday, hit Rapottoni, a software and services provider that supplies Multiple Listing Services to regional real estate groups nationwide. Better known as MLS, it provides instant access to data on which homes are coming to the market, purchase offers, and sales of listed homes. MLS has become essential for connecting buyers to sellers and to the agents and listing websites serving them.

• The prevailing wisdom from cybersecurity experts is that trying to negotiate with ransomware hackers is a bad idea, but on December 30, 2020, one victim broke the rules and gave it a shot.

• “Help?” they typed into one of the compromised computers.

• “Hello,” one of the hackers replied. “Are you ready to negotiate? Your network and all of your data were encrypted by [the] CONTI team. Besides the encryption process, we’ve downloaded a large pack of your internal documents and files that will be published in case our negotiations fail. The recovery price is $8,500,000.”

• Demands for medical records can stem from a variety of investigations, which can involve a myriad of sources. The most recent example driving headlines is an investigation involving Vanderbilt University Medical Center (“VUMC”). VUMC disclosed records concerning treatment of transgender patients to the Tennessee Attorney General. According to the Attorney General, an investigation of alleged billing irregularities was launched. The investigation stemmed from allegations of improper coding practices that were purportedly revealed by a VUMC clinician on social media posts.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The university has created a new policy, effective Jan. 1, 2024, setting expectations and guidance for research data stewardship, focusing on issues of ownership, sharing and retention.

• It’s another classic example of a no with an if, or yes with a but, followed by a discussion about their threat domain. Or in English, what is it you’re trying to protect, and from whom.

• The DSA makes modifications to a decades-old eCommerce Directive and tries to bring the laws of EU member nations into a coherent and unified approach, especially how online businesses handle illegally posted content, disinformation and online ads. “Businesses will use new simple and effective mechanisms for flagging illegal content and goods that infringe their rights, including intellectual property rights, or compete on an unfair level,” according to the EU directives issued last year.

• Part of these rules include new mechanisms to enforce “know your customer” methods. The EU has this fact sheet for businesses that’s worth studying for more specifics. “Tech platforms will have to respond to the DSA regulations,” says privacy specialist Tom Kemp. “I don’t see anything happening in the U.S., nor with any new federal privacy laws enacted.”

• One of the more notable circumstances is that the noncompliance penalties could result in substantial fines, with up to 6% of a company’s global annual revenue that could be levied.

Defence/Aggression

• Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.

• The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.

• Kit Knightly, from the OffGuardian, recently published ISIS are back and they are faker than ever. He explored the apparent return of the ISIS bogeymen and the media narrative that preempted their re-emergent threat.

• In an interview with The New York Times, a civilian leader of the junta sounded a conciliatory tone. He also said Niger would not summon the Kremlin-backed Wager Group.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• Luna-25, Russia’s uncrewed spacecraft, has “ceased to exist” after crashing into the Moon’s surface, reports Roscosmos, Russia’s state space corporation.

• The Luna-25 probe, Russia’s first Moon mission in almost 50 years, has crashed on the Moon after an incident during pre-landing manoeuvres, Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Sunday.

• Russia’s Luna-25 robotic spacecraft crashed into the Moon on Sunday ahead of its planned attempt to land on the lunar surface this week.

• /blockquote>

• The robotic Luna-25 spacecraft appeared to have “ceased its existence” after a failed orbital adjustment, the space agency Roscosmos said.

• Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed onto the surface of the moon on August 20 after spinning into an uncontrollable orbit, the Roskosmos space agency reported.

• On the night of August 20, a Ukrainian drone crashed into the roof of a train station in Kursk, causing a fire to break out, reported the region’s governor Roman Starovoyt.

• On August 19, Russia’s defense ministry reported that a Ukrainian copter-type drone attacked a military airfield in the Novgorod region.

• Russia launched an attack on the center of Chernihiv, said the region’s governor Vyacheslav Chaus.

• On the night of August 19, Russia launched a drone attack on Ukraine, reports the Ukrainian Air Force Command. Ukrainian air defense systems shot down 15 of the 17 Shahed-136/131 drones involved in the attack.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday hailed a decision by the Netherlands and Denmark to hand over F-16 planes to help Ukraine battle the Russian invasion as “historic”. The acknowledgment came shortly after Zelensky and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte inspected F-16 jets parked in a hangar at a Dutch air base where Zelenskyy arrived earlier Sunday.

• Ukrainian pilots began training on the highly sought-after F-16 fighter jets — just days after the US approved sending the aircraft to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands to help in the ongoing war against Russia.

• The Netherlands and Denmark have said they will give F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine once certain “conditions” have been met, a long-awaited step that will help Kyiv fill a crucial hole in its armed forces.

• Wishful thinking is still the rule among Biden’s foreign policy team, as the slaughter in Ukraine continues.

• Western media has dismissed evidence of neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine by citing President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage.

• Western officials attempted to blame Kyiv for refusing to push operations despite taking massive losses.

• The authorities in Moscow briefly halted operations at two major airports overnight in response to what officials described as a Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian capital.

• President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is on a visit to Stockholm, says he is discussing the possible production of Sweden’s powerful CV-90 combat vehicles in Ukraine.

• At least seven people, including a child, were killed and 129 were wounded in a Russian missile strike on the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv on August 19, while President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the attack “a day of pain and loss” caused by “a terrorist  state.”

• In May, the Ukrainian army had to withdraw from Bakhmut, but the battle for this completely destroyed city in the Donbas region continues – as an important part of the counteroffensive. A visit to the Third Assault Brigade on the front.

• According to Commander of the Finnish Defence Forces General Timo Kivinen, Russia’s war in Ukraine means that it does not have enough troops to implement concrete changes near its border with Finland.

• Despite tough fighting and heavy casualties, Ukrainian commanders say their forces are in better shape now than just months ago, while Russian troops appear worse off.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the Netherlands had agreed to supply 42 of the jets. Denmark also said it would donate the planes.

• While embroiled in warfare in Ukraine, the Kremlin has increasingly felt the need to explain itself to younger Russians. Starting this fall, Russia’s college students will be required to take a state-approved course in the “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.” The curriculum (packaged as a series of video-lectures) is a brainchild of Andrey Polosin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin’s Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kiriyenko. Meduza’s correspondent Andrey Pertsev, who has covered Russia’s new ideological curriculum as it emerged and came together, watched the online lectures and talked to the people who made the videos. Here’s a survey of the new Russian ideology as it’s going to be taught at Russia’s schools, from “passionaries” and “the Russian world” to Russia’s unofficial state symbols — the birch and the bear.

• In an interview with the The New Voice of Ukraine, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service Vasyl Malyuk detailed how Ukrainian intelligence organized the explosion on the Crimean Bridge in October 2022.

• The attack, which killed at least seven people and wounded more than 100, came after President Vladimir V. Putin visited a Russian city that was briefly seized by the Wagner group.

• A Russian missile strike on Ukraine’s northern city of Chernihiv on Saturday killed seven people and wounded more than 100 others on Saturday, Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said. The strike came hours after the Kremlin said that President Vladimir Putin met with the commander of Russia’s war in Ukraine at army headquarters in southern Russia. Read about the day’s events as they unfolded on our liveblog. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Anne Applebaum is a US Pulitzer-Prize winning author who has written several books on Russia and the Soviet Union, including Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.

• Supporters of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny around the world are marking the third anniversary of his near-fatal poisoning with demonstrations against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly Friday declared new sanctions against 15 Russian individuals and three entities following human rights violations and state-sponsored violence faced by political opponents and critics in Russia. The new sanctions aim to supplement the previous sanctions by expanding the list of restricted individuals and entities.

Environment

• The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

• Here’s the situation: SoCal Gas is California’s private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

• The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state’s very survival.

• Young people are helping organize a climate march in New York next month, during the United Nations General Assembly. And their force is being felt even in deep-red states such as Montana, where a judge Monday handed the movement its biggest victory to date, ruling in favor of 16 young people who had sued the state over its support for the fossil fuel industry. In that case, a lengthy fight resulted in a surprise victory that means the state must consider potential climate damage when approving energy projects.

• More than 60% of the top 142 oil, gas and coal companies—including three of the five Australian companies assessed—were not on track. Rio Tinto and BHP were the two Australian companies found to be on track. Between 2014 and 2020, the fossil fuel sectors exceeded overall production budgets by 64% (oil), 63% (gas) and 70% (coal).

Energy/Transportation

• The community of Victoria West has issued notice to stage a march on August 21 in an attempt to persuade Ubuntu Municipality to conclude a contract for the R100 billion Ubuntu Green Energy project.

• The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management announced that the project had been selected to negotiate an award of around $5m as part of the ‘Clean Hydrogen Production, Storage, Transport and Utilisation to Enable a Net Zero Carbon Economy’ funding opportunity with the cost share among partners bring the contract up to $10m.

• The university is partnered with Los Alamos National Laboratory; Engineering, Procurement and Construction LLC; and energy infrastructure company, Williams, all focusing on the project aiming to demonstrate hydrogen production via water produced during oil and gas extraction.

Wildlife/Nature

• The two associations cite mistrust and cost as reasons for cancelling the assistance

Finance

• Byju’s has laid off about 100 employees in a fresh round of job cuts. The ed-tech startup has fired employees from the mentoring and product expert divisions citing poor performance.

• As reported by TOI, the company said that the fired employees did not meet the expectations after a performance improvement plan, “As part of a periodical performance review, 100 individuals who did not meet expectations after a performance improvement plan were let go with proper procedures. This measure is firmly rooted in performance based considerations and is not in any way a cost-cutting endeavour,” the company spokesperson told TOI.

• It took just two days for the Canadian program designed to attract H-1B workers residing in the United States to reach its 10,000 application cap. However, there are potential pitfalls that the program needs to overcome.

• In the United States, more than 600,000 people are employed through an H-1B visa in specialty occupation fields, making it the largest employment-based immigration program in the country.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Founder James O’Keefe, who was forced out by the board in February, is under investigation by the Westchester County district attorney in New York for undisclosed reasons, a probe that comes after Project Veritas accused him of spending donor funds on personal luxuries.

• The prospect of a second presidential term for Donald J. Trump has many officials worried about alliance cohesion, NATO and the war in Ukraine.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Finnish President Sauli Niinistö also says that Putin’s speech in December 2021 convinced him to consider Nato membership and other security policy measures.

• The former Russian president said that Vladimir Lenin created an independent Finland.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Some excerpts from Sandmann v. N.Y. Times Co., decided yesterday by the Sixth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Jane Stranch, joined by Judge Stephanie Davis (for more details, read the full opinions): On January 18, 2019, then-sixteen-year-old Nicholas Sandmann and his classmates had an interaction with a Native American man named Nathan Phillips…

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• But after years of Canadians and news publishers relying on Facebook to connect them, observers are wondering how — and if — the issue can be resolved.

• And if the Record doesn’t pay attention, nobody will. The weekly newspaper is the sole publication covering Marion, a city of about 2,000 in south-central Kansas.

• It’s this type of reporting that’s drawn the ire of local officials — including the city’s police chief, whom the paper was investigating before he raided their newsroom.

• [...]

• The Record’s role in the community has put a spotlight on the function of newspapers as local watchdogs. An informed public is at the heart of a strong democracy, but with the disappearance of local news organizations, many small towns have lost the ability to get information about local governance.

Civil Rights/Policing

• From today’s press release, by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:, about Palsgaard v. Christian (E.D. Cal.): Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

• The Permanent Commission for the Defense of Detainees and Public Freedoms: “the lack of respect for laws and regulations is what led to war, chaos, and the constitutional vacuum in the country.”

• S.Y., who resigned under pressure in Gaziantep, has won the lawsuit she filed to claim severance pay. The higher court, after hearing the witnesses, decided to grant severance pay despite the resignation letter being in ‘handwriting’.

• British rock band Coldplay is being sued by their former manager of more than 20 years, Dave Holmes, over a breach-of-contract dispute, according to legal documents filed in the UK.

• The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the District of Columbia alleging that it selectively enforced its defacement ordinance against anti-abortion protesters but not Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters in the summer of 2020.

• Michael Oher has long criticized the feel-good Hollywood version of his life as a struggling high school football player. His lawsuit against the family that took him in questions their relationship.

• On August 8, after two years of negotiations, staff at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City became the latest to ratify their first contract with an overwhelming 97 percent majority. The Guggenheim Union consists of 150 staff members across departments, including visitor service, education, curatorial, administrative, and other departments. The union first began to organize in the fall of 2021 under the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110. Some highlights from the first contract include a minimum 9 percent wage increase over the next two and a half years, an increase in retirement contributions, four weeks paid family leave, and funding for career training retroactive to July 1. One major victory is that this contract guarantees minimum rates for full- and part-time employees.

• In a rare moment of clarity — or even, dare we say, self reflection? — a whole bunch of executives have admitted that they may have been wrong about the whole return-to-office push made after the COVID-19 pandemic. Well, sort of.

• In a Hanover Research and Envoy survey of over 1,100 senior executives and workplace managers in the United States, a whopping 80 percent answered that they would’ve “approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently” if they had the right “workplace data” at the time.

• As a special consultant to Colorado’s child welfare agency, Susan Coykendall accepted that there was no reliable profile for a child abuser, but she was fairly certain Bruce was not one.

• ProPublica has been reporting on family courts’ handling of custody disputes that involve allegations of child or domestic abuse. The reporting shows that a disputed psychological theory that’s been rejected by mainstream scientists has widespread influence on outcomes in family court.

• Parental alienation is a theory in which one parent is accused of brainwashing a child to turn them against the other parent. It is most frequently diagnosed and cited as evidence in divorce and custody cases, even though most mental health professionals reject it as junk science.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The basic property of an open system like the Internet and the Web is that you can only be assured of the properties of the elements you directly control. The elements that belong to other people work for them and not you. In a closed system, by contrast, the software on the end user device works for the provider, not for them, whether it is officially owned by the user (as in mobile apps) or it actually belongs to the provider (as with the old Bell System monopoly).

• WEI and similar attestation technologies represent an attempt to impose an alien model, that of a closed system, onto the open system of the Web. As with any closed system, the net impact will be that users don’t control their own experience of the Web but rather have only the experiences that sites are willing to let them have. That seems bad.

Monopolies

• The FTC’s expected lawsuit against Amazon will likely bring novel antitrust claims amidst a retail marketplace…

Trademarks

• But that rebrand is off to a choppy beginning with news that the company is going after a small restaurant in Lower Manhattan called Döner Haus, which sells a German take on Turkish kebab — and uses a logo that, to be fair, looks an awful lot like Pornhub’s notorious orange-and-black lettering.

Copyrights

• Howell, in this most recent ruling, reaffirmed that US copyright law “protects only works of human creation.” Further, she stated that creations made by “non-human actors” such as AI “need no incentivization with the promise of exclusive rights under United States law, and copyright was therefore not designed to reach them.” While she acknowledged that the copyright is meant to “adapt with the times,” she argued that anything seeking protection is required to have “an originator with the capacity for intellectual, creative, or artistic labor. Must that originator be a human being to claim copyright protection? The answer is yes.”

• Simon Malynicz KC, for Redding and Mitchell, told the court the releases did not give the musicians’ rights away and only related to revenue generated by the vinyl recordings, which does not include digital income including from streaming, YouTube and other digital platforms.

• The heirs of bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell – who made up two thirds of the Jimi Hendrix Experience – have filed a lawsuit against Sony Music for copyright infringement and are seeking royalties.

• The U.K. lawsuit seeks a declaration of copyright ownership in the musical works, sound recordings and performers rights (each of which are a separate right invested in the work), a declaration as to whether there has been copyright infringement and, if there has, damages as well as an account of profits plus interest on that figure and legal costs.

• It is unclear how the U.K. lawsuit will interact with Sony and the Hendrix’s estate’s pre-emptive claim in New York and it is likely the first matter the courts will deal with before even getting to the copyright issues is jurisdiction.

• Football bodies and broadcasters including the Premier League, Sky and UEFA, recently obtained permission to continue their ISP blocking programs to limit access to pirate IPTV streams. While almost no information relating to these secret processes appears in public, today we’re able to take a look inside one of several blocking orders active right now in Europe.

• There are plenty of examples of supposedly good ideas that had unintended consequences that were not so good. There are also plenty of examples of “good” ideas that weren’t good at all and should never have been implemented. The recent Canadian “link tax” law that went into effect on June 22, which requires major online publishers such as Facebook and Google that link to online news sites to pay those site for the links, fits both categories.

• Yes, you have that right. Under the new law, if a Canadian searches Google for information and Google’s results include a link to a Canadian news site, Google has to pay that site for running the link and sending traffic its way.

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