● 09.05.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 05/09/2023: Starfield on GNU/Linux and Mageia 9

Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

• JetBrains will add support for the Wayland Linux graphics API to its IDE family based on IntelliJ – though the effort is “ongoing” and depends on Project Wakefield, an OpenJDK project to add Wayland support to Java.

• NVIDIA recently released two fresh driver upgrades for Linux, although one of them we have no idea what they actually changed. Here’s what’s up.

• Firstly, NVIDIA launched the stable driver update 535.104.05 on August 22nd. However, for the second time recently, they seem to have copy-pasted the driver changelog from the previous release. This driver has the same changelog as 535.98, and when 535.98 released it had the same changelog as 535.86.05 but they later corrected it. I tried to contact NVIDIA this time but here we are nearly two weeks later and they haven’t fixed it. So what did they change in 535.104.05? No idea.

Applications

• DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine and it is the international open image format for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information…

• A Lab Information Management System aka LIMS is software used in laboratory and/or hospital settings for managing medical records, client data, inventory, etc.

Instructionals/Technical

• One critical difference between OpenSSH cert-authorities and TLS CAs is what you trust. In TLS, you trust a specific self-signed X.509 certificate, and the certificate is identified by its X.509 Subject Name plus (in effect) its public key. As covered in sshd(8)’s section on the authorized keys file format and the known-hosts format, OpenSSH cert-authorities are identified by their public key, and this is all of the cert-authority provided information that you have to use. So unlike TLS CAs, an OpenSSH cert-authority can’t generate a ‘CA’ that can intrinsically only be used to sign things under a certain domain.

• For a long time, one of the pieces of advice for dealing with various TLS certificate problems is that you should establish your own internal Certificate Authority with its own CA root certificate, have your systems trust it, and then issue certificates from your internal CA with whatever names and other qualities you needed. My reaction to this suggestion has traditionally been that it was extremely dangerous. If your internal CA was compromised in some way you had given an attacker the ability to impersonate anything, and generally properly operating a truly secure internal CA is within neither the skills nor the budget of a typical organization or group (it’s certainly not within ours). Fortunately, this issue was obvious to a lot of people for a long time, so as part of RFC 5280 we got name constraints, which restricted the names (in most contexts, the DNS names) that the CA could sign certificates for. You could include only some (sub)domains, or exclude some.

idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Next.js on AlmaLinux 9. Next.js, a popular React framework, offers a powerful toolkit for building web applications. AlmaLinux 9, known for its security and reliability, is an excellent choice for hosting your Next.js projects.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kotlin on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Kotlin has swiftly risen to prominence as a modern programming language that offers enhanced expressiveness, conciseness, and safety, making it a popular choice for various software projects.

Games

• Another fresh month and Valve has revealed what were the most played games on Steam Deck. Plenty of them are of course quite obvious based on what released recently.

• Want to know how Starfield runs on Steam Deck? Or desktop Linux? Well, I’ve given it a run to see what I think of it and here’s some early info for you.

• For Steam Deck, Valve released two Steam Deck OS upgrades to solve some issues, so you’ll want to make sure you check for system updates first to get Steam Deck OS 3.4.10 to fix a GPU driver crash and a black screen problem. Once you update, Starfield will run on Steam Deck with Proton Experimental but the performance is an issue. Additionally, weirdly, the Start / Select buttons on Steam Deck with Proton Experimental are swapped – but you can change them over in Steam Input (noted in video 2 below).

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of “port the XScreenSaver daemon”, because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11.

• But that means that accomplishing that task means not just writing code, but engaging with whatever passes for a standards body or design committee in the Wayland world, and that is… how shall I put this… not something that I personally feel highly motivated to do.

• However, as I am the world’s foremost expert on screen savers on Unix-like operating systems, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Mageia 9 has been released and a lot of people are already using it.

• You can find the release notes here and the errata here

• A huge big thank you to everyone who contributed to this great new Mageia version.

• Even though almost not contributing myself, I have been using Mageia 9 without problems from when it started to be developed until now and I really like it.

Open Hardware/Modding

• “Originally the project was created – and I generally referred to it as – ‘Badgercam’, but the current iteration is not at the badger location, so now it’s just Solar and Wind-powered sound recorder (with image capture),” Philip tells us. We think Badgercam rolls off the tongue a bit better though. “[This was] to address the problem and help with identifying the species or source of sounds; making sure it was the badger I recorded; and also to keep my footprint at the setts low by having a discreet recorder, and a way to see into the life of badgers without walking through their environment. They are very sensitive animals and I wanted to only visit once, or a limited amount of times!”

• Tesla’s autopilot and full self-driving features don’t allow for 100% autonomous driving, but they get pretty close. Blake’s autopilot is much more limited, but still impressive. It can steer the go-kart around a known track while Blake handles the throttle and brakes. However, it can only follow the course it was trained on and can’t deviate from that without issues. It also can’t account for unusual events, like a pedestrian in the “road.”

• Coreboot is the firmware that people deserve to have.

• It’s actually designed to “Just boot the computer and get the Hell out of there.”, which is what Linus Torvalds said he missed about “PC BIOS”.

• It’s up to the user, really, what they want to run and so I congratulate System76 for taking strong and decisive action on behalf of their customers and recommend that people who need an x86 PC with Linux take their business to System76 as I will do next time I need a laptop.

• [Teaching Tech’s] latest video discusses “3D printed Velcro.” But as even he admits, Velcro is a trademark, so we think it is more appropriate to talk about hook and loop fasteners. In fact, you can see the good-natured official video about the trademark below [Teaching Tech’s] video. Regardless, his experiments with several 3D-printed Vel… fastener designs are worth watching.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Android users, get ready to hum your way to discovering your favorite songs as YouTube introduces a new search feature that listens to your tunes. In a move that blends technology with musical expression, YouTube is currently testing a “search-by-song” capability on its Android app, allowing users to identify songs by humming, singing, or recording a snippet.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The Australian Federal Government is not alone in dealing with challenges like natural disasters, global pandemics and economic uncertainty. Like many governments, they are looking for new and innovative ways to tackle these challenges.

• FST Government 2023 is an exciting conference that brings over 200 government leaders together to explore how the latest advances in digital technology can help support better policy outcomes and citizen service delivery. Canonical participated in the 2022 edition and is thrilled to join the conference again this year.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• I have contributed code to wget. Several wget maintainers have contributed to curl. We are all friends.

• If you think there is a problem or omission in the diagram, let me know and I can do updates.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Join us in Indonesia, Bucharest and Mexico, for talks, workshops and lots of fun 😊 Click the image below to find out more…

• These days I use LibreOffice for all my writing that needs a bit of formatting. It is, however, heavy. It takes time to open even on a rather fast computer.

• What kind of formatting can Wordpad do? And which FLOSS editor available for Linux would be equivalent to it?

Education

• This is a collection of random personal experiences. So if you don’t want to read everything, feel free to skip to the end for takeaways.

• I write because I’d like to see more high-quality meetups. And maybe my little bit of experience will help someone out.

Programming/Development

• As the warm haze of summer gives way to the crisp air of autumn, the season marks a pivotal moment in my academic journey: the commencement of my Master’s thesis project. Having successfully had my research proposal accepted earlier this year, I now face the last leg of this marathon—bringing my theoretical framework to life.

• First, everything here was inevitable. Second, everything here could only happen when it happened, and not a moment before. When a new technology gets invented, like SSL, that was the moment for it. And if that person/group hadn’t done it, someone else would have.

• Timezones are annoying enough for regular people, but us software engineers have to deal with the fallout. Then you add in the political aspects and, well, you can’t always store all data in UTC.

• So what makes time zones so bad?

• I was just skimming the W3C “Style Guide for online hypertext” this morning and came across the “Cool URIs don’t change” document. If you haven’t read that post already, please take a moment to do so. My biggest takeaway from the document is that you should spend time thinking about how you want to structure URLs before you make a new site, or during a rearchitecture.

• Stuff in the garden grows at its own pace, revealing itself along the way, and it’s the gardener who must notice and respond in kind. This growing happens together — the plants, the gardener, the ecosystem — and drop-in replacements are risky.

• The constitution of a garden is the realization of the gardener’s experience.

• Software is quite similar.

Leftovers

• In 1912, after over 250 years in power, the Qing Dynasty collapsed despite being considerably wealthier at the time than modern-day China. “This clearly demonstrates that any economy must be vigilant as circumstances can change, and sometimes rather rapidly,” emphasizes Georg Orlandi, the study’s first author. The study “Structural-demographic analysis of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) collapse in China” was published in PLOS ONE.

• Inbox Zero was the philosophy that there should be super clear edges between “email you’ve never even seen before”, “email you still need to reply to but you don’t need to do anything else first”, “email that’s waiting for you or someone else to do something external”, and “email you’re done with but might wanna look up things in later”, and using folders to do that.

• I’m not sure if people are still using folders and stuff to organize email, but yeah, in general, fishing out “I need to do something” things from your notes or emails or RSS or socials or phone calls or meetings, and then making yourself aware of what are the practical and concrete actions I need to take and what context I need to be in, practicing that is pretty clutch.

• I love RSS… perhaps a little too much. My feeds are full of great stuff that I’ve curated since high school in the 2000s. It outlasted any social network, and I suspect will continue to do so. But there’s a lot there.

• There are three problems: [...]

• Fireworks will light up Hong Kong’s skies on National Day for the first time since 2019, after the city’s pyrotechnics displays were cancelled due to protests and the Covid-19 pandemic. Chief Executive John Lee made the announcement at his weekly press conference on Tuesday.

Science

• It’s not an overstatement to say that the International Space Station (ISS for short) is an amazing feat of engineering, especially considering that it has been going for over two decades. The international collaboration isn’t just for the governments, either, as many images, collected data and even some telemetry have been made available to the public. This telemetry inspired [Bryan Murphy] and his team to create the ISS MIMIC, a 1:100 scale model of the ISS that reflects its space counterpart.

Education

• To ban or not to ban is the question, though as NYT education writer Natasha Singer reports, very few colleges or universities have thus far put rules on the books about using generative AI on applicant essays. Those who have acknowledged the technology, which in its current iteration is still so new that it was barely breaking through last year’s application season, have taken stances as varied as the schools themselves.

• So let’s move onto our own turf. What are IT qualifications for in 2023?

• They can certainly save time and effort for recruiters. If you set an automatic filter on submissions searching for an appropriate degree, or a suite of industry-recognized letters, you’ll have fewer resumes to read. You will also miss out on a ton of talent, and if that seems a reasonable compromise then that talent will certainly be better off elsewhere.

• To recontextualize this in more familiar terms: a person who uses a cursor to heavily make use of an interface gets used to anticipating where and what to click. A sudden visual update forces them to re-learn where to anticipate where UI will show up.

• An important takeaway here is the value of consistency and predictability—this change was not an impossible barrier to overcome. It is instead more an annoyance that requires retraining some reflexive behaviors.

Hardware

• In the llvm-project project, I sometimes find myself assigned as a reviewer for MIPS patches. I want to be transparent that I have no interest in MIPS, but my concern lies with the specific components that are impacted (Clang driver, ld.lld, MC, compiler-rt, etc.). Therefore, regrettably, I have to spend some time studying MIPS.

• Lamps used to be things built to provide light with specific purpose, whether as reading lamps, desk lamps, or bedside table lamps. Now we just build them for the vibes, as with this minimalist LED lamp from [andrei.erdei].

• It may have taken ten years to come through on this particular Kickstarter, but a promise is a promise. In late August 2023, backers who had since likely forgotten all about the project started receiving their oscilloscope watches from creator [Gabriel Anzziani]. Whatever the reason(s) for the delay, the watch looks great, and is miles ahead of the prototype pictures.

• If you’ve never experienced it before, getting turned around on a cloudy day in the woods or getting lost during an event like a snowstorm can be extremely disorienting and stressful — not to mention dangerous. In situations where travel goes outside the beaten path, it’s a good idea to have some survival gear around, including a good compass. But if you need your hands for other things, or simply don’t want to have to stop often to check a compass, you might want to try out something like this belt-mounted haptic feedback compass.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• If there’s one thing that I came to understand over my two-plus decades of critically evaluating the claims of “brave maverick doctors,” the vast majority of whom are really just quacks, it’s that quacks hate the very concept of scientific and medical consensus. Indeed, long ago I pointed out that hostility towards the very concept of scientific consensus is a red flag, a very good indicator that the person expressing such hostility is a science denier (or quack, if it’s a physician). Moreover, although I concede that anyone has the “right” to “challenge” a scientific consensus, the bigger problem in the age of social media is recognizing when someone doing the challenging has the necessary expertise to make a scientifically robust challenge, compared to the vast majority of such “challenges,” which are made by pseudoexperts in different fields who think they have the necessary expertise but do not or by lay people who don’t even have the basic expertise necessary. Unsurprisingly, we have seen this phenomenon play out in a world stage since COVID-19 was first declared a pandemic three and a half years ago. However, even though seeing pseudoexperts about COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines flourish during the pandemic did not surprise me, I will admit, though, that even I was somewhat surprised at the sheer scale and influence of the phenomenon and how much it bled into mainstream politics and culture this time.

• “It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• So, what did St Stephen of Fry wish for? And can 2023 iPhones and Android match His expectations?

• ChatGPT can take over a lot of tasks that, broadly speaking, boil down to “bullshitting.” It can write legal threats. If you need 2,000 words about “the first time I ate an egg” to go over your omelette recipe in order to make a search engine surface it, a chatbot’s got you. Looking to flood a review site with praise about your business, or complaints about your competitors? Easy. Letters of reference? No problem.

• Bullshit begets bullshit, because no one wants to be bullshitted. In the bullshit wars, chatbots are weapons of mass destruction. None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it.

• The new policy is expected to come into effect on 29 September. “We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models,” the company said.

• Owner and former CEO Elon Musk said that private data, such as text in direct messages, however, will not be used to train its models. The change should come as no surprise, Musk previously said that he planned to use data from the microblogging site to help researchers and engineers from his latest startup, xAI, to build new products.

• UEFI is a security disaster.

• Lenovo has patched my UEFI over 30 times and there are still releases like this month’s.

Security

• The final legislative phase of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is starting and the drafts still have issues arising from bad framing by the Commission or Parliament. Read OSI’s recommendations to frame the trialogue.

Privacy/Surveillance

• With the Lithuanian government considering mandatory registration of prepaid SIM cards from 2024, mobile operators are sceptical about the measure, saying it could cause chaos in socially vulnerable groups and give rise to a black market in SIM cards.

• This will result in an enormous shift in the availability of information online, and pose a serious threat to the privacy of UK [Internet] users. It will make it much more difficult for all users to access content privately and anonymously, and it will make many of the most popular websites and platforms liable if they do not block, or heavily filter, content for anyone who does not verify their age. This is in addition to the dangers the Bill poses to encryption.

• The details of the law’s implementation have been left to the UK’s regulation agency, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), but the Bill is vague on the details of this. Social media and other sites, where users regularly engage with each other’s content, will have to determine the risk of minors using their site, and block their access to any content that the government has described as ‘harmful’. Platforms like Facebook and TikTok, and even community-based sites like Wikipedia, will have to choose between conducting age checks on all users – a potentially expensive, and privacy-invasive process – or sanitising their entire sites. That’s why Wikimedia has come out strongly against the Bill, writing that in its “attempt to weed out the worst parts of the [Internet], the Online Safety Bill actually jeopardises the best parts of the [Internet]”.

Defence/Aggression

• The head of a UN investigative unit sees a trend in the Myanmar junta’s willingness to disobey international law.

• A Swedish citizen working for the European Union diplomatic corps has been imprisoned in Iran for more than 500 days, making him an important bargaining chip for Tehran as it tries to wring concessions from the West.

• The arrest, which has been kept under wraps for over a year by the Swedish and European Union authorities, appears to be part of an expanding pattern of what has become known as Iran’s “hostage diplomacy.”

• US military equipment left behind during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has made its way into the hands of Pakistani militants, the country’s prime minister claimed Monday.

• The high-tech gear, which may include firearms with laser and thermal sighting systems, is reportedly being used by the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group also known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, in clashes that have intensified in recent months with Pakistan’s security forces.

• The equipment — which includes a wide variety of items, from night vision goggles to firearms — is now “emerging as a new challenge” for Islamabad as it has enhanced the fighting capabilities of the Pakistani Taliban, Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said.

• The Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, have over the past months intensified attacks on Pakistan’s security forces. They are a separate militant group but an ally of the Afghan Taliban.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• Moldovan President Maia Sandu marked her country’s Independence Day by recalling the effort of Moldovans to “win freedom” 32 years ago and by saying that Moldovan authorities now “have the chance and the duty” to take the country into the European Union.

• Russian defences shot down three drones in the western regions of Moscow, Kaluga and Tver, authorities said on Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is planning to meet this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is likely to head by armored train to Vladivostok to discuss the possibility of Pyongyang supplying Moscow with weapons.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that the deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain safely through the Black Sea won’t be restored until the West meets Moscow’s demands to facilitate Russian agricultural exports. Putin made the statement after talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Russian port city of Sochi.

• The focal point of the meeting is expected to be arms trading.

• General Sergei Surovikin, who has not been seen publicly since the June mutiny by Wagner Group mercenaries, has reappeared in a new photograph online, adding further mystery to the fate of the Russian commander.

• The White House says arms negotiations between Russia and North Korea “are actively advancing,” and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un expects to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani has accused Serbia of trying to destabilize the Western Balkans in a similar fashion to how she said Russia acted against Ukraine in 2014.

• The North Korean leader plans to travel to Russia in September to meet the Russian President.

• Mr Kim will discuss the possibility of supplying Moscow with weapons for the war in Ukraine.

• Russia seeks more weaponry for its war in Ukraine, and a North Korean delegation recently traveled to Russia by train to plan for Mr. Kim’s visit this month, officials say.

• Any notion that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey might be shifting away from his friendly ties with the Kremlin appeared to evaporate on Monday.

• The legacy of World War II lingers in the Ukrainian town of Kamianka, where tractors spit out shell casings, old and new. Now it has been destroyed by a new conflict.

• Also, Xi Jinping might skip the Group of 20 summit.

• Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who was seen as an ally of the mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, has re-emerged in public.

• After a call to donate funds to Russian occupation forces in Ukraine, the prosecutor’s office is seeking a two-year prison sentence for former Rīga City Council deputy Igors Kuzmuks. The trial is still ongoing, Latvian Television reported on September 4.

• Ukraine now has a Jewish president and a Muslim minister of defense, underlining the diversity of the country’s leadership while exposing the absurdity of Russia’s “Nazi Ukraine” propaganda, writes Peter Dickinson.

• At the end of August, Ukraine declared it had finally managed to pierce Russia’s first line of defence after retaking the small village of Robotyne in Ukraine’s south. This key advance coincided with a Russian mercenary group’s threat to stop fighting on Russia’s behalf on the front lines of the village and could be a sign of more anti-Kremlin sentiment brewing among those fighting for Moscow.

• Ukrainian forces in the southeastern Zaporizhzhya region have breached formidable Russian defensive obstacles, according to a U.S.-based research group.

• Russia shot down at least three Ukraine-launched drones early on September 5 that were targeting the country’s capital, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says issues raised during his meetings with soldiers who have battled on the front line will be considered by top Ukrainian military officials.

• During the period from April 11 to August 29, the Latvian language test was passed by 39% of Russian citizens who had taken it for the first time, while 61% of Russian citizens did not pass the test on the first try, the State Educational Content Center (VISC) reported on September 5.

• According to the law currently in force, a number of citizens of the Russian Federation who have not shown an initiative to pass the Latvian language check lose their permanent residence permit in September. Meanwhile, additional proposals are coming in and there is no complete clarity on what’s awaiting these people yet, Latvian Television reported on September 4.

• About 80 Russian citizens who have applied for residence permits in Latvia in connection with the amendments to the Immigration Law have received a negative opinion from the State Security Service (VDD), reports the Latvian Television broadcast “Forbidden Method” (Aizliegtais paņēmiens) on September 4.

• The mother of a nine-month-old girl unlawfully taken to Russia by her father has left for the neighbouring country to meet with her daughter, the National Crisis Management Centre (NKVC) has confirmed to BNS.

• Russian and Belarusian athletes will be allowed to compete as neutrals in World Aquatics events, the sport’s governing body said on September 4.

• Russia will not conduct the major military exercises known as Zapad (West) this year, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has said.

• The Kremlin on Tuesday rejected a suggestion by Armenia’s prime minister that Russia had failed to ensure Armenia’s security amid its standoff with neighbouring Azerbaijan and was winding down its role in the wider region.

• Finland’s Data Protection Ombudsman has temporarily ordered Yango to stop the transfer and processing of personal data of customer data from Finland to Russia.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• There’s also the fact that, with what we’ve already put in the atmosphere, some warming is inevitable. Is it helpful to describe a nonending situation as a crisis? Does that take away crucial nuance – removing our ability to effectively distinguish more acute and serious climate challenges?

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• The driverless, 41.2km system connects central Jakarta and its satellite cities in West Java, Bekasi and Depok.

• Although saying the exact amount of the damages could not be assessed, the company has said it cannot be ruled out that the damages might be in the low three-digit million-euro range.

• Compressed air isn’t really a practical form of energy storage for headline uses like transport or heating, but it’s a fun thing to tinker with at the small scale. [Tom Stanton] is plenty experienced in that area, having built a series of compressed air engines over the years. His latest effort is capable of running at up to 4,500 RPM, and delivering a full 0.05 horsepower.

• Heat pumps are taking the world by storm, and for good reason. Not only are they many times more efficient than electric heaters, but they can also be used to provide cooling in the summer. Efficiency aside, though, they’re not perfectly designed devices, largely with respect to their climate control abilities especially for split-unit setups. Many of them don’t have remotely located thermostats to monitor temperature in an area, and rely on crude infrared remote controls as the only user interface. Looking to make some improvements to this setup, [Danilo] built a setup more reminiscent of a central HVAC system to control his.

• Aidana Tastanova is a Kazakhstan national and a 4th year law student attending the Moscow State Institute of International Relations under a Kazakh government scholarship.

Finance

• With smuggled cell phones and a handful of accomplices, Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., took money from large bank accounts and bought houses, cars, clothes, and gold.

• he first round of potentially thousands of layoffs at failed retailer Wilko is expected to start on Monday even as hopes of a rescue deal for parts of the business remain.

• Administrators confirmed last week that 269 people in the company’s Worksop support centre would be having their last day with the business.

• Redundancies at the company’s Worksop and Newport warehouses are also due to start early this week.

• The administrators did not confirm how many warehouse staff would lose their jobs, but around 1,296 people are thought to work there.

• mPharma, the Ghanaian startup that manages prescription drug inventory for pharmacies and their suppliers, has laid off 150 employees. According to the company’s CEO, Gregory Rockson, the layoffs are in light of the current macroeconomic conditions driven by the naira devaluation.

• Further job cuts are expected in the technology sector as a growing number of industry CFOs and other C-suite executives prioritize profitability over growth, according to a survey by AlixPartners, a consulting firm.

• The survey found that many executives are relying on headcount reduction as a tool to boost their profitability, with nearly half (46%) of those whose companies have already trimmed their workforce by more than 5% planning future job cuts over the next 12 months.

• “Unfortunately, we expect more pain to come for the tech industry,” Giuseppe Gasparro, a partner and managing director at the firm, said in a press release.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• YouTube Shorts have amassed billions of views since 2021, but some staff are worried the platform is losing focus. Here’s the latest. According to a new report from the Financial Times citing senior staff, many are worried that Shorts are cannibalizing its core business.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The death sentence comes amid an “escalating crackdown” on free speech in the country, said Lina Alhathloul, ALQST head of monitoring and advocacy and sister of released Saudi political prisoner Loujain al-Hathloul.

• “They are sending a clear and sinister message – that nobody is safe, and even a tweet can get you killed,” she said.

• The newspaper also said Muratov will temporarily suspend his duties as editor-in-chief while the legal proceedings are underway. Sergei Sokolov will serve as acting editor-in-chief. “We don’t want to get used to putting idiotic notices on our website,” its journalists said, referring to the 24-word disclaimer that Russian law requires be posted on all content authored by “foreign agents.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Critics argue that this maneuver by the Kremlin represents a broader strategy aimed at stifling dissent and suppressing independent journalism. Of significance, Muratov also holds the position of Editor at Independent Novaya Gazeta, which temporarily halted its publication in response to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. Nevertheless, many of its journalists have regrouped to establish a new publication, Novaya Gazeta Europe, now headquartered in Latvia. Novaya Gazeta, founded in 1993 by former Soviet leader and fellow Nobel Peace laureate Mikhail Gorbachev, is one of the rare media outlets in Russia openly critical of President Vladimir Putin’s policies.

• The current events in the border area of Latvia–Belarus are a reason to create daily news centered on migrants, border crossing, fence, breaking through it, deterring migrants, or allowing migrants into Latvia. The process is justifiably described in the context of the hybrid war by the Belarusian regime. How to write about all this in the media professionally and ethically?

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hearing about a relative’s death months or years later is not unusual for Uyghurs abroad.

• As thousands gathered in Washington Saturday to commemorate the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a racist gunman killed three people in a historically Black Florida neighborhood.

• The newspaper said the museum had 23,000 Chinese items.

• In honor of Labor Day, I’ve revised a previous attempt at the impossible task of naming the best songs ever written about working people. The list is highly debatable; songs about work and working people cut across genres and generations. I know it’s a travesty to neglect “Which Side Are You On?” and Johnny Paycheck’s classic “Take This Job and Shove It.” It also seems impossible that I’ve excluded Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Nina Simone, and John Mellencamp, and given such short shrift to the rich history of punk rock odes to the insanity of wage slavery. Hopefully, these songs will get people thinking about their own favorite musical celebrations of the working condition.

• A woman in Pakistan was allegedly stoned to death by her own family members, including her husband, for committing adultery. The incident took place in Rajanpur district of Punjab, some 500 km from Lahore, on Friday.

• According to local media reports, the woman’s husband tied her to a tree with the help of her brother-in-law and one more accomplice.

• Given the relative universe that is organized labor’s long, hard, hurdle-strewn history, this is “a good year to have a Labor Day,” with a string of organizing wins, a pro-union president, soaring jobs and even rising support from a public long immune to acting in its own best interests. Still, in a ceaseless, shifting fight between those with the overweening power of “a rich men’s club” and those seeking a sliver of it, the bottom line stays constant: “The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor.”

• MLK regarded progressive unions as bulwarks of the civil rights movement. In this rousing 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, he linked the democratic struggles of workers and black people and ended by quoting the “beautiful words” of Eugene Debs.

• As extreme weather disasters intensify, the workers who are hired by corporations to clean up after hurricanes, floods, blizzards and wildfires are increasingly on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

• Salvadoran poet and writer Javier Zamora discusses the roots of his memoir Solito, which details his odyssey as an unaccompanied 9-year-old child through Guatemala and Mexico to reunite with family in Arizona. “After surviving that nine-week journey, surviving the United States as an undocumented person was perhaps the main reason why I became a writer,” Zamora says. He describes how he works to cope with trauma from his experiences, and how he was inspired to become a writer when he was exposed to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as a high school student in California.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Japan is widely regarded as one of the most advanced economies for Internet penetration. Japan’s Internet usage rate (individuals) is 82.9% and the development rate of optical fibre is 99.3%. The number of broadband subscribers is 43.8M, which includes 36.6M FTTH subscribers and 6.5M CATV Internet subscribers, while the number of mobile broadband subscribers (4G and 5G) is 184M.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Stepping back, I worry about the equilibrium steady state: the more that people are able to authenticate these technologies the more attractive it is for sites to basically require them, to increase the level of scrutiny (as in WEI), and provide a massively inferior experience to those who can’t. Ironically, this is actually a direct consequence of Privacy Pass being well-designed so that it’s seamless and provides a good level of privacy, because that makes it seem less objectionable to require, as opposed to (say) making everyone log in with a Google account.[6] At the end of the day, though, the risk is further entrenching the existing big players.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• No matter whether takedowns are justified, unjustified (Markscan hit Sony’s own website with a DMCA takedown recently), or simply disputed, getting Markscan’s attention is a lottery at best, impossible at worst. In MCCTv’s short experience, nothing has changed.

• “Our YouTube channel with 150k subscribers is in danger of being terminated by September 6th if I don’t find a way to resolve these copyright claims that Markscan made,” Klein told TorrentFreak on Friday.

• “At this point, I don’t even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not – I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes. I am willing to remove the material manually to get the strikes reversed.”

• Tackling online piracy isn’t an easy task. In addition to dismantling illicit sites and services, the public at large should be made aware of the associated risks and threats. According to the Premier League, news media can be helpful to spread these messages. However, the lines between reporting news and serving as a simple mouthpiece can sometimes find themselves blurred.

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