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● Links 01/07/2022: More Widespread Calls to Delete GitHub

Posted in News Roundup at 10:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Yes, Valve (kinda) downgraded the Steam Deck. No, it doesn’t matter. (Plus other Deck News) – Invidious

Applications

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Software – June 2022 Updates

•  The table above shows our articles published in June 2022.

• For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install Master PDF Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – Linux Shout

• Get easy steps to Install Master PDF Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal for editing PDF files on Linux.

• The “Master PDF Editor” is a comprehensive PDF program that contains a lot of functions. In addition to creating and editing PDF documents, the software also allows converting to various formats.

• The software provides you with a host of useful functions for creating PDFs, Text, images, shapes, buttons, checkboxes, and converting XPS files into PDFs, and fillable shapes are only a small part of the options available in “Master PDF Editor”.

• Furthermore, the program allows you to insert handwritten signatures under PDFs. Also, no problem for the tool is the secure encryption of your documents with the 128-bit standard.

• However, the free edition is limited in features and allows only the creation of new PDF documents, filling PDF forms, adding and/or editing bookmarks in PDF files; commenting and annotating PDF documents; Split and merging PDF documents.

=> ↺ How to Install Apache Tomcat 10 in RHEL 9

• A web server is essential in the completion phases of a web application project. It lets users simulate, monitor, and assess the performance of their web application projects in a real-world environment. The choice and performance of such web servers sometimes depend on the main programming language used to create the project.

• Apache Tomcat is a fused implementation of Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta Servlet, and WebSocket technologies. It is an ideal HTTP web server environment for pure Java coders. The Apache Software Foundation is responsible for Apache Tomcat’s development and maintenance.

• This article guide will walk us through the installation of an open-source java-based Apache Tomcat 10 web server on RHEL 9 Linux.

=> ↺ Manage your RPG players with pc | Enable Sysadmin

• For me, a good tabletop role-playing game (RPG), sometimes called a pen-and-paper RPG, is the perfect hobby for getting away from my computer. The classic editions of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), for example, were released well before PDFs and eBooks existed, so I bring hardcover books and paper character sheets to my gaming table.

• In recent years, however, I’ve also started gaming online using Mumble voice chat. At first, I treated these games the same as my in-person games, but as more games started integrating online maps like Mythic Table, I found switching back and forth between keyboard-and-screen and pen-and-paper became a little frantic. When I’m running a player character (PC), most of what I need to refer to is on a character sheet, a document that lists my special abilities and powers. To get to that information quickly while managing a bunch of other applications, I use the pc command.

• The pc command parses RPG character sheets written in the INI format. It works with any RPG game system, as long as that system’s character sheet data can be expressed as basic INI (most of them can be).

=> ↺ How to set per-creator/channel playback speed on YouTube

• You can find hundreds of browser extensions that let you fine-tune the playback speed for all YouTube videos. I’m happy with the default speed of 1× for most videos (and music). However, I want to speed up some channels without having to tweak the speed dial every time. Enter Samuel Li’s Speed Controller extension.

• I tend to fine-tune the playback speed to somewhere between 1,05× and 1,35×. By default, YouTube only lets you increase the playback speed by increments of 0,25×. This design decision has led to the creation of hundreds of extensions for fine-tuning and setting speeds other than the defaults.

=> ↺ How to use Terraform to manage Confluent Cloud Clusters, Topics and permissions

• In this guide, we will learn how to use terraform to launch Confluent Cloud resources such as environments, clusters, topics and ACLs.

• Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native service Kafka service provider for connecting and processing all of your data, everywhere it’s needed.

=> ↺ How to install Sublime Text 4 Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

• In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install the Sublime Text 4 code editor on Ubuntu 22.04.

• A sublime Text editor is a shareware cross-platform source code editor, it supports almost all the programming languages.

=> ↺ Deprecated Linux Commands You Should Not Use Anymore (And Their Alternatives)

•  In this article, I am going to list a few such Linux commands. You may still find a few of them in your distribution. It’s possible that your distribution is still providing it for backward compatibility or has created a new implementation underneath or plans to remove it in the newer versions.

• But it’s good to know them as an informed Linux user. Here we go!

Games

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Chess

•  Apple Chess is a traditional chess game played on a well rendered board with a set of realistic 3-D pieces. It’s actually a Unix-based chess program, Sjeng, that Apple packaged up in a new wrapper. It supports chess variants such as crazyhouse and losing chess.

• The software is published under the Apple Sample Code License. Apple Chess doesn’t run under Linux. And there are far superior open source alternatives. We recommend the following software.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Why I switched from Apple Music to Jellyfin and Raspberry Pi

•  Whenever someone finds an open source solution, an angel gets its wings. The irony is that I was pushed into finding a non-proprietary solution by one of the biggest closed source companies on the planet. What I love most about the system I’ve created is that I am in control of all aspects of it, good and bad.

=> ↺ ESP32 Camera Slider Build Keeps Things In Perspective

• We’ve seen a lot of camera slider builds here at Hackaday, and for good reason: having one really lets you take your project documentation, especially videos, to the next level. It’s one of those force multiplier builds — after you’ve completed it, it can help you make all your future projects just that much better. But we’re also no strangers to seeing these projects become overly complex, which can often make it difficult for others to replicate.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ BMW is switching gears from Linux to Android Automotive next year

=> ↺ MyFitnessPal app crashing or not opening on Android? Here’s how to fix it

=> ↺ Tech InDepth: What is Android Auto and how can you use it? | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ Amazon Quietly Patches ‘High Severity’ Vulnerability in Android Photos App

=> ↺ OnePlus 7 and 7T finally get a taste of Android 12 – Android Authority

=> ↺ This Android Phone Neither Has A Camera Nor Supports GPS Navigation – Gizbot News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

• The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit focused on free and open source software (FOSS), said it has stopped using Microsoft’s GitHub for project hosting – and is urging other software developers to do the same.

• In a blog post on Thursday, Denver Gingerich, SFC FOSS license compliance engineer, and Bradley M. Kuhn, SFC policy fellow, said GitHub has over the past decade come to play a dominant role in FOSS development by building an interface and social features around Git, the widely used open source version control software.

• In so doing, they claim, the company has convinced FOSS developers to contribute to the development of a proprietary service that exploits FOSS.

• “We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub,” said Gingerich and Kuhn.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Vengeance

• The Northman, a medieval nordic epic written and directed by Robert Eggers, begins with a familiar setup: a young prince loses his family and kingdom in an act of fraternal betrayal. King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) is assassinated by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), while his young son Amleth watches; the young prince also sees Fjölnir kidnap his mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), as part of a bloody coup to seize Aurvandil’s title and land.

=> ↺ Adding Voluminous Joy To A DIY Turbojet With A DIY Afterburner

• You don’t happen to own and operate your own turbojet engine, do you? If you do, have you ever had the urge to “kick the tires and light the fires”? Kicking tires simply requires adding tires to your engine cart, but what about lighting the fires? In the video below the break, [Tech Ingredients] explains that we will require some specialized hardware called a re-heater — also known as an afterburner.

=> ↺ Peter Lownds Explains How and Why he Translated the Brazilian Novel Never-Ending Youth

• Let me clarify right away: the translator Peter Lownds is a writer, poet, actor (he worked in Kramer versus Kramer, for example), a youthful friend of Jack Kerouac. And a thoroughly likable person, even from me. Eric A. Gordon is a writer, editor, militant, and comrade, translator of nine books of fiction by Alvaro Cunhal, who published novels under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago. And as if such references were not enough, Eric A. Gordon was the person who made it possible for my novel to be published at International Publishers.

• In his interview with Peter Lownds, I cut out the passages that speak directly about “Never-Ending Youth”. Below.

=> ↺ The Mystery Of Automatic Lubricators Is Revealed

• Industrial machines have all kinds of moving parts that require regular lubrication in order to prevent wear and damage. Historically, these would require regular visits from maintenance personnel to keep them greased up and slippery. Automatic lubricators eliminate that job by regularly dosing machines with fresh grease, and [Big Clive] decided to see what makes them tick.

=> ↺ A.B. Yehoshua, 1936–2022

• Yehoshua was one of my literary idols. When I lived in New York City, I had seen him in action a few times: a book reading, a lecture. The A.B. Yehoshua who appeared on my computer screen—a startling thing for those of us not entirely acclimated to Zoom–was visibly ill and had aged dramatically. Shortly before my interview, I had viewed The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua, Yair Qedar’s superlative documentary. Much of the film’s contents were stark: Yehoshua was in failing health. His wife had died, ending a decades-long marriage. (Strangely enough, the plot of Molkho—his novel published in the United States in 1989 under the title Five Seasons—hinges on the protagonist’s newfound status as widower.) And with the loss of his close friend and colleague, Amos Oz, he was more than aware that his literary cohort was passing from the scene.

• Yehoshua couldn’t have been more gracious during our meeting. Voluble and expressive in English, a language very much not his own, he immediately set the agenda for our talk, as befitted someone used to expounding and having his words treated with a great deal of gravitas. But, of course, I had come to listen.

Science

=> ↺ A Math Based Personality For Games

• We make no apologies for being hardware focused here at Hackaday, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t occasionally impressed by a particularly inspired feat of bit wrangling. For example, [t3ssel8r] has taken a break from his game to discuss his procedural animation system and the beautiful math behind it.

Hardware

=> ↺ LCD Screen Windows Are This Summer’s Hottest Case Mod

• Case modding took off in the late 90s, and taught us all that computers could (and should!) look awesome. Much of the aesthetic went mainstream, and now tons of computer cases come with lights and windows and all the rest. [WysWyg_Protogen] realized those simple case windows could be way cooler with a neat LCD hack, and set to work.

=> ↺ DIY Airless Tires Work Surprisingly Well

• Airless tires have been “a few years away” from production for decades now. They’re one of the automotive version of vaporware (at least those meant for passenger vehicles), always on the cusp of being produced but somehow never materializing. They have a number of perks over traditional air-filled tires in that they are immune to flats and punctures, and since there aren’t any airless tires available at the local tire shop, [Driven Media] decided to make and test their own.

=> ↺ It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives.

• There are some tings that should be possible, so just have to be tried. [Action Retro] has a great video showing just such an escapade, the creation of a large RAID 0 array using a pile of USB floppy drives. Yes, taking one of the smallest and most unreliable pieces of data storage media and combining a load of them together such that all the data is lost if just one of them fails.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Flint Residents Outraged as Charges Dropped in Deadly Water Scandal That Poisoned Majority-Black City

• Eight years after the deadly Flint water crisis began, the state’s Supreme Court has thrown out charges against former Governor Rick Snyder and eight other former officials for their complicity in the public health emergency. Snyder’s administration made the decision to switch the city’s water source from the Detroit system to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure and then failed to protect residents from the resulting lead and bacterial poisoning in the majority-Black city. “It really feels like justice is becoming an illusion for Flint residents,” says Nayyirah Shariff, director of Flint Rising. “No one is being held accountable, no one is seeing justice, no one is seeing reparations in Flint,” adds her fellow activist and Flint resident, Melissa Mays. Democracy Now! first spoke to the two organizers in 2016 in our documentary, “Thirsty for Democracy: The Poisoning of an American City.”

Security

=> ↺ Italian Exploit Developer Follows Hacking Team’s Lead, Sells Powerful Spyware To Human Rights Violators

• Italian malware developer Hacking Team began making headlines in 2014. Infections uncovered by researchers at Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Russia’s Kaspersky Lab were traced back to servers located in the United States, Canada, UK, and Ecuador. The US servers topped the list. The second place finisher, however, was Kazakhstan.

=> ↺ 5 years on OSS-Fuzz

• On July 1st 2017, exactly five years ago today, the OSS-Fuzz project “adopted” curl into their program and started running fuzz tests against it.

• OSS-Fuzz is a project run by Google and they do fuzzing on a large amount of open source projects: OSS-Fuzz aims to make common open source software more secure and stable by combining modern fuzzing techniques with scalable, distributed execution.

• That initial adoption of curl into OSS-Fuzz was done entirely by Google themselves and its fuzzing integration was rough and not ideal but it certainly got the ball rolling.

• Later in in the fall of 2017, Max Dymond stepped up and seriously improved the curl-fuzzer so that it would better test protocols and libcurl options deeper and to a higher degree. (Max subsequently got a grant from Google for his work.)

=> ↺ Why End-of-Life Isn’t the End of the Road for Your Software

• If you are using software or operating systems in your business that are at the fourth stage of the life cycle phase, you may not be able update them as the manufacturer stops releasing security patches. But you’ll still need support. If you’re a CentOS user facing CentOS 7 EOL, you can still find support and security for the products that have an end-of-life date of 2024.

• Firms such as TuxCare are helping Linux users with issues in security, stability, and support.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ EFF to File Amicus Brief in First U.S. Case Challenging Dragnet Keyword Warrant

• The answer is no. And in an amicus brief EFF intends to file today in Colorado, we explain why these searches are totally incompatible with constitutional protections for privacy and freedom of speech and expression.

• The case is People v. Seymour, and it is perhaps the first U.S. case to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant. The case involves a tragic home arson in which several people died. Police didn’t have a suspect, so they used a keyword warrant to ask Google for identifying information on anyone and everyone who searched for variations on the home’s street address in the two weeks prior to the arson.

• Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that requires a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case queries by more than one billion Google users. As in this case, the police generally have no identified suspects when they obtain a keyword search warrant. Instead, the sole basis for the warrant is the officer’s hunch that the suspect might have searched for something in some way related to the crime.

=> ↺ Should You Really Delete Your Period Tracking App?

• So, should you delete your period tracking app? The short answer is: not necessarily. You may want to review your choice of app, along with other digital practices depending on what kinds of privacy invasions and threats you are most concerned about. Abortion seekers face much more urgent threats right now, and period tracking apps are not at the top of the list of immediate concerns. In the meantime, the companies behind period tracker apps have some serious shaping up to do, and legislators must move forward common-sense privacy legislation to protect not only health-related data but the full range of consumer data that could be weaponized against abortion seekers.

• Right now, the most common scenario in which people are criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes is when a third party—like hospital staff, a partner, family member, or someone else they trust—turns them in to law enforcement, who may pressure them into a device search. The most common types of evidence used in the resulting investigations are text messages, emails, browser search histories, and other information that could straightforwardly point to someone’s intention to seek an abortion. This type of criminalization is nothing new, and it has disproportionately affected people of color and people dependent on state resources.

• With that immediate scenario in mind, think carefully about who you trust with information about your pregnancy. Use end-to-end encrypted messengers with disappearing messages turned on whenever possible. This functionality is available on both WhatsApp and Signal, and we have step-by-step guides for how to turn it on for Signal on iOS and Android. Refer to our security tips for people seeking an abortion and Surveillance Self-Defense guides for the abortion movement for information about other privacy considerations and steps.

=> ↺ Digital Rights Updates with EFFector 34.4

• Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it’s posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

=> ↺ FCC’s Carr Once Again Heads To The Fainting Couch Over TikTok

• A week or two ago we noted how there was a mass panic because TikTok was found to be sharing U.S. user data with executives at the company’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. This was in stark contrast to the strict, U.S.-based data management controls the company claimed to be implementing, and, to be clear, was not a good thing.

=> ↺ The Future Of Policing In China Is Pervasive, Surveillance-Driven Law Enforcement Crystal Balls

• China is choked by surveillance. It’s everywhere and it touches every aspect of its citizens’ lives. The government uses it to stifle dissent, control the population, and persecute undesirables.

=> ↺ ‘Supercookies’ Have Privacy Experts Sounding the Alarm

• CUSTOMERS OF SOME phone companies in Germany, including Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, have had a slightly different browsing experience from those on other providers since early April. Rather than seeing ads through regular third-party tracking cookies stored on devices, they’ve been part of a trial called TrustPid.

• TrustPid allows mobile carriers to generate pseudo-anonymous tokens based on a user’s IP address that are administered by a company also named TrustPid. Each user is assigned a different token for each participating website they visit, and these can be used to provide personalized product recommendations—but in what TrustPid calls “a secure and privacy-friendly way.” It’s that “privacy-friendly” part that has raised critics’ hackles.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The Recurring Nightmare of America’s Political Tradition

• Analyzing the coups that brought to dictatorial power Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851, Karl Marx made this critically relevant remark: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” We are now confronting a nightmare bequeathed to us from the past – a past informed by the politics of a slave republic. Indeed, this dead weight is about to crush any remaining pretences of a democracy based on majority rule.

• Of course, the framers of the US Constitution were both fearful of democracy and wedded to white supremacy. These two overlapping orientations were evident not only in the foundational documents of the new nation, but also bred into the political institutions and traditions that haunt us even today. While the reactionary Republican Party has created even more of a nightmare in contemporary US politics through their manipulation of these institutions, the inability and even unwillingness of the Democratic Party to challenge inherent inequities and antidemocratic nature of these political institutions and traditions only reinforces the dead weight of the past.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Pat Cipollone, Former Trump White House Counsel

=> ↺ Starry night Ukrainian photographer Pavlo Pakhomenko captures the Milky Way over war-torn Kharkiv

• Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kharkiv has been one of the hardest hit cities in Ukraine. Due to regular airstrikes and its proximity to the frontline, blackouts and a nightly curfew have been in effect for months. The authorities have asked residents to avoid turning on the lights in their apartments and the city’s streets are no longer lit. As a result, on a clear night, you can see thousands of stars over the city — and even the Milky Way. Seizing on the opportunity, photographer and astronomy fan Pavlo Pakhomenko captured remarkable snapshots of night-time Kharkiv without light pollution. With the author’s permission, Meduza shares his photos here.

=> ↺ According to Russia’s press releases, they’ve destroyed more military hardware than Ukraine ever had Proekt’s journalists analyzed the Russian Defense Ministry’s reports

• Journalists from the investigative news site Proekt have analyzed all of the statements made by Russian Defense Ministry representative Igor Konashenkov since the start of the war. They found a number of inconsistencies — specifically regarding the order in which Russia captured Ukrainian territories and the amount of Ukrainian equipment Russia claims to have destroyed.

=> ↺ Beijing Slams NATO for ‘Maliciously… Smearing’ China as a Security Threat

• Beijing criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Thursday after the U.S.-led military alliance asserted that China poses “serious challenges” to global stability.

• NATO listed China as one of its priorities in the so-called 2022 Strategic Concept that leaders approved Wednesday at a summit in Madrid. This marked a first, as the alliance’s previous blueprint, published in 2010, made no mention of the East Asian country.

=> ↺ Opinion | Armed to the Teeth, America Has an Anger Problem

• Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social-media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of violence or even death against lawmakers of both parties increased more than fourfold. And too often, the call to violence seems to come from the top. Recently, defendants in cases involving extremist violence have claimed that an elected leader or pundit “told” them to do it. In a country where a sitting president would lunge at his own security detail in rage, I guess this isn’t so surprising anymore. Emotion rules the American political scene and so many now tend to shoot from the hip without even knowing why.

=> ↺ Anatol Lieven on NATO Expansion & What a Ukraine Peace Settlement Could Look Like

• The United States announced at a NATO summit in Madrid plans to build a permanent military base in Poland, as it formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance after they applied for membership in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We look at the impact of prolonged U.S. military presence in Europe and the overemphasis on Russia or China as enemies to the West at a time when threats to Western liberal democracy seem to be primarily internal. The Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven also discusses possibilities for a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine. “It’s quite impossible now for Russia to win a total victory in Ukraine, but it does also look very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to win a total military victory over Russia,” says Lieven. “We’re going to end up with some sort of compromise.”

=> ↺ NATO and Russia Both Aim to Fail

• Whichever side you’re on, you

• • agree with weapons-maker propaganda that the available actions in the world are (1) war, and (2) doing nothing;

=> ↺ NATO Knew Terrorists Would Gain from Toppling Gaddafi

• David Cameron kept bombing Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya after the UK military realised a banned terrorist group stood to gain from regime change.

=> ↺ The United States Extends Its Military Reach Into Zambia

• Vijay Prashad speaks with Dr. Fred M’membe of the Socialist Party about the reach and impact of the United States Africa Command in Zambia.

=> ↺ RIMPAC Naval Exercises, the Philippines and War on China

• One contingent in these war games will stand out: a lone frigate bearing the name of Antonio Luna, the firebrand Philippine revolutionary army general who led the military resistance against invading US troops during the Philippine-American War. This warship will represent the present-day Philippine armed forces, now allied with, trained, and funded by its former military foe.

• Such a paradox, however, does not seem out-of-place in an event such as RIMPAC, whose stated goal is to ensure “the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s interconnected oceans” by flexing America’s war muscle, intimidating rivals, and reaffirming the subservience of vassal states, particularly the Philippines.

Environment

=> ↺ US Supreme Court Drops Carbon Bomb on the Planet

• The U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority handed down a decision Thursday that will severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, undermining the federal government’s ability to combat the climate emergency.

=> ↺ Biden Urged to Take Emergency Action After ‘Disastrous’ Climate Ruling by Supreme Court

• Progressive lawmakers and activists are demanding an emergency response from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats following Thursday’s 6-3 ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.

• “The Supreme Court will not stand in the way of the fight for a livable planet.”

=> ↺ Opinion | The Fighting Soul: On the Road With Bernie Sanders

• The defining moment of The Fighting Soul, Ari Rabin-Havt’s telling of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, comes but four pages into the preface, with Sanders in an ambulance, having just suffered what will be determined to have been a heart attack. As the then deputy campaign manager is thinking, “There is no way our campaign survives this,”the candidate is asking the EMTs in the ambulance about their job—”Did they have health insurance? How did they view health care in this country?” Never off message!

=> ↺ Supreme Court Curbs EPA’s Power to Limit Climate-Warming Emissions

Energy

=> ↺ Lawsuit Challenges Biden’s Resumption of Oil, Gas Leasing on Public Lands

• Climate and conservation groups filed a lawsuit today challenging the Biden administration’s resumption of oil and gas leasing on public lands, the first auction since the president paused leasing shortly after taking office.

• The lawsuit challenges the Department of the Interior and U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) approval of today’s oil and gas lease sales in Montana, North Dakota, Nevada and Utah. These lease auctions will be immediately followed by sales in Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma and Wyoming. Collectively, these sales will open more than 140,000 acres of public land to fossil-fuel production.

=> ↺ Opinion | Expanding US LNG Exports Would Be Planetary Disaster

• Should the US approve 25 proposed liquefied methane gas—often referred to as LNG—export terminal projects, we could see an additional 90 million tons of greenhouse gasses (GHG) released into the atmosphere per year, according to a recent analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). EIP says, “That’s as much climate-warming pollution as from about 18 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles running for a year—more than from all the cars and trucks in Florida or New York State.”

=> ↺ Opinion | We Don’t Need Magic Technologies for Renewable Energy Transformation

• The world is experiencing unprecedented fuel price increases, energy blackmail between countries, up to 7 million air pollution deaths per year worldwide and one climate-related disaster after another. Critics contend that a switch to renewable energy to solve these problems will create unstable electricity grids and drive prices up further. However, a new study from my research group at Stanford University concludes that these problems can be solved in each of the 145 countries we examined—without blackouts and at low cost using almost all existing technologies.

=> ↺ Critics Say Biden Drilling Bonanza ‘Won’t Lower Gas Prices’ But ‘Will Worsen Climate Crisis’

• As the U.S. Department of Interior this week resumed lease sales for fossil fuel extraction on public lands in several Western states following a year-and-a-half-long pause on onshore auctions, progressive critics warned Thursday that increasing oil and gas drilling will exacerbate the climate emergency while doing nothing to ease pain at the pump for millions of Americans.

• “The more public lands sacrificed to Big Oil, the more economic damage, death, and destruction are baked into our future.”

=> ↺ Markey, Bowman Join Climate Coalition in Urging SCOTUS Expansion

• A coalition of climate campaigners and progressive congressional allies on Thursday responded to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that drastically limited the government’s authority to reduce greenhouse emissions by urging Congress to expand the high court from nine to 13 justices.

• “Congress must act—not just by passing critical climate justice legislation, but by also addressing the six existential threats in judicial robes who brought us this appalling decision.”

=> ↺ Angry Crypto Firm Posts Weird Cease & Desist Letter To Its Own Blog; DMs It To Critics

• You know things are going just great in crypto-land when a cryptocurrency company has to post a vague cease-and-desist letter to its own blog. Everything about this is bizarre, but it culminated in this very strange cease-and-desist blog post by Nexo.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Does The Amazon Now Have a Shot at Survival?

• The Amazon rainforest, our scientists tell us, essentially works as our world’s lungs.

Finance

=> ↺ Is Universal Basic Income Part of a Just Transition?

• The results were startling, including a significant drop in hospitalizations and an improvement in high school graduation rates. After four years, however, money for the experiment dried up, and this early example of universal basic income (UBI) was nearly forgotten.

• Today, such UBI projects have become more commonplace. In the U.S. presidential race in 2020, Andrew Yang made his “freedom dividend” of $1,000 a month a centerpiece of his political campaign. Several pilot projects are up and running in California. In fact, at least 28 U.S. cities currently give out no-strings-attached cash on a regular basis (since the recipients are all low-income, these programs aren’t technically “universal”). In other countries, too, basic income projects have become more popular, including a new citizen’s basic income project in the Brazilian city of Maricá. Basic income programs were in place, briefly, in both Mongolia and Iran. Civil society organizations like the Latin American Network for Basic Income have pushed for change from below.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The First Attack on the Independents: Albanese Hobbles the Crossbench

• The decision, delivered with an arrogant casualness before another international sojourn by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, centered on the staffing arrangements for the newly elected independent members of parliament. Prior to getting on a plane, Albanese sent a letter to independent members promising to cut the staffing allocation for crossbench MPs and Senators from eight to five each. Of the five would also be one advisor, down from four in the previous Morrison government.

• On the surface, the government did not see it as problematic, because those in government tend to see the absurd as entirely normal. Albanese himself was found defending a series of spurious positions, citing “fairness and equity” and lack of sustainability. In a classic conceptual misunderstanding, the Prime Minister seemed to think that a government backbencher was somehow equivalent to an independent representative. It was not fair, for instance, that the independent MP Zali Steggall “should have double the representation in terms of staff of electorates in the same region.”

=> ↺ Democrats Lose Senate Majority as 82-Year-Old Leahy Heads for Hip Surgery

• The Democrats in the U.S. Senate have at least temporarily lost their slim-as-could-be majority as Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont heads into surgery Thursday after suffering a broken hip.

• A statement from Leahy’s office said the 82-year-old lawmaker “will undergo surgery to repair a broken hip that he suffered as a result from a fall at his house in McLean, Virginia, Wednesday night.”

=> ↺ Democrats Temporarily Lose Senate Majority as Leahy Heads for Hip Surgery

=> ↺ Supreme Court Says Biden Can End ‘Shameful’ Remain in Mexico Asylum Policy

• Immigrant rights advocates on Thursday welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of a challenge to the Biden administration’s move to end a Trump-era program under which asylum-seekers arriving at the southwestern border are forced to remain in Mexico while their cases are decided.

• “This is a bittersweet victory after so many lives have been lost to atrocious immigration deterrence policies.”

=> ↺ ‘Now We’re Talking!’ Says AOC as Biden Backs Filibuster Carveout for Abortion Rights

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez applauded President Joe Biden’s endorsement Thursday of a filibuster carveout for legislation to codify abortion rights into federal law, but stressed that much more action is needed from the administration as the Supreme Court and Republican legislatures trample basic constitutional freedoms.

• “Now we’re talking!” the New York Democrat tweeted in response to Biden’s remarks to reporters. “Time for people to see a real, forceful push for it. Use the bully pulpit. We need more.”

=> ↺ Grave Warnings as Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Case That Threatens ‘Future of Voting Rights’

• As SCOTUS-watchers scrambled to stay abreast of a rush of rulings affecting climate, immigration, Indigenous rights, and other policy areas, the nation’s highest court on Thursday said it would hear oral arguments this October in a case involving a controversial legal theory that one advocacy group says is “threatening the future of voting rights.”

• “Today’s news from the U.S. Supreme Court makes one thing clear: This fall, the future of multiracial democracy is at stake.”

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Trump Doesn’t Want To Get Back On Twitter So Badly, He’s Appealing His Case To Get Back On Twitter

• In April, Donald Trump insisted he had no interest whatsoever in getting back on Twitter (in response to questions about whether or not Elon Musk would allow him back, should he ever close his Twitter purchase). In May, Donald Trump lost his lawsuit trying to force Twitter to reinstate him. In June, Donald Trump (who again, insists he wouldn’t even go back to Twitter if he were allowed to) decided to appeal the loss in his lawsuit in order to try to force Twitter to reinstate him.

=> ↺ Argentina’s Supreme Court backs Google, says “right to be forgotten” can infringe on freedom of information

• The court said that content involving Natalia Denegri, a former socialite trapped in the orbit of football superstar Diego Maradona, fell within the public interest.

• The Argentine Supreme Court denied celebrity Natalia Denegri’s petition to have content about a scandal she was involved in more than 25 years ago removed from search engines on Tuesday. It is the first ruling by a Supreme Court in Latin America on the “right to be forgotten,” which allows the public to control their online history.

• The decision comes three months after the court listened to arguments about the right to privacy made by Natalia Denegri, and those about freedom of information made by Google. The current case escalated to the highest court after Google previously appealed a ruling in March, after the Buenos Aires Court of Appeals ordered the company to comply with Denegri’s request.

• Denegri, a former socialite trapped in the orbit of football superstar Diego Maradona in the late 90s, wanted news articles and YouTube videos removed from search engines concerning a scandal that happened when she was 20. Denegri approached Google in 2016 with a list of 22 links she wanted taken down in Argentina. She was not only a public figure at the time, but the scandal involved a high-profile corruption case, including the involvement of one of Argentina’s top judges. The Court of Appeals ruled that links to the corruption case would be exempt, while the Supreme Court found that all of the links would be exempt.

=> ↺ A million-strong troll army is targeting Iran’s #MeToo activists on Instagram – Rest of World

• More than one million bots have flooded the Instagram accounts of prominent Iranian feminist activists, in a coordinated harassment campaign that started mid-April, according to a new report released by Qurium, a digital forensics nonprofit. Almost all the activist accounts are connected to Iran’s #MeToo movement, which rose to the fore of the national conversation in March, after several accusations of sexual harassment and assault in the Iranian film industry made headlines. A number of the accounts have been posting content about sexual abuse allegations in the country over the past few months.

• Account holders impacted by the campaign told Rest of World that the deluge of notifications from bots makes it incredibly challenging for them to see comments and DMs from their core audience, making it difficult to accept requests from genuine followers after the holders went private and to focus on their own political work and content. “There is someone who wants to silence you, and I can’t stop thinking about, Who can that be? Why are they here? What do they want to do? What are these bots?” Samaneh Savadi, a prominent Iranian gender equality activist based in the U.K, who has been active in the #MeToo movement, told Rest of World. “It’s that feeling of an invisible enemy. Someone wants to attack me, but I can’t see it; I can’t name and shame it, and therefore, I can’t have a strategy to defend myself.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Philippines Orders Critical News Organization, Rappler, Shut Down; Just As Rappler’s Founder Argues Against Free Speech

• We’ve written about Rappler, the very successful Filipino investigative news organization founded by reporter Maria Ressa, multiple times over the past few years. Rappler was very critical of the Rodrigo Duterte administration, but it’s reporting was solid. Back in 2018, the Filipino SEC announced that it was going to shut down Rappler, in a move that was clearly political retaliation for Rappler’s reporting.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ The Justice Department Pressured USA Today to Stop Publishing Me

• Fallon caterwauled that I had “authored pieces in various places criticizing [Holder] on civil liberties, relations with law enforcement, civil asset forfeiture and media subpoenas. In the past, Bovard even has articulated a conspiracy theory involving Mr. Holder and the incident at Waco in the 1990s.” (Waco was only “the incident… in the 1990s”? No wonder Fallon loathed me.) Fallon groused, “I don’t understand why USA Today would provide a platform on repeated occasions for his Holder bashing.”

• Mastio never flinched. He replied,  “As an opinion section, much of what we publish is written by writers with agendas…. Just as our door is open to writers who want to say nasty things about the attorney general, our door is wide open to the attorney general when he wants to write about the top issues of the day.”  Mastio also declared, “The guarantor of balance in the opinion section is that we are open to a wide variety of views.”

=> ↺ ACLU’s David Cole: Supreme Court Conservatives Imposing “Truly Radical Ideology” on U.S. Population

• As the Supreme Court ends its term, Justice Stephen Breyer is officially retiring, and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson takes his place as the country’s first Black woman justice, joining a court dominated by conservatives. We speak to ACLU national legal director David Cole about what can be done in the face of lifetime judicial appointments to the nation’s highest court who often rule counter to majority opinion in the country. “This is a radical court that is intruding upon our liberties,” says Cole. “It’s doing it all in the name of a commitment to a historic vision of the Constitution as it was drafted, when it was drafted, and imposing that on the American people, notwithstanding the fact that two centuries have intervened and circumstances are dramatically different today.”

=> ↺ Chomsky: Overturn of “Roe” Shows How Extreme an Outlier the US Has Become

=> ↺ Misogyny, Theocracy and Other Missing Issues in Post-Roe Coverage

=> ↺ Opinion | Unshackle the Women Forced to Give Birth in Chains

• “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

=> ↺ ‘Massive Betrayal’: Biden Cuts Deal With McConnell to Nominate Anti-Abortion Judge

• President Joe Biden has reportedly struck a deal with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to nominate an anti-abortion lawyer to a lifetime federal judgeship in Kentucky, news that comes less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.

• “Lifetime appointments to federal courts for people with records like Chad Meredith are unacceptable.”

=> ↺ Opinion | The People Must Create a New America

• When I was in my early 20s and naïve, and I would lament petty things to my mother, she would say, “Why don’t you go back and live in Iran for two years, and then let me hear you complain.” It was her attempt to tell me, harshly but lovingly, that we had it good because everything in America was better than the restrictions we had left behind in Iran, especially as women. 

=> ↺ Who’s Murdering Immigrants? It’s No Mystery

• US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pronounces himself “heartbroken,” but doesn’t seem inclined to apologize for the “unprecedented” operation he launched less than three weeks ago in “an all-of-government effort to attack the smuggling organizations.” As of that time, DHS bragged, nearly 2,000 smugglers had been arrested in the previous eight weeks.

• Texas governor Greg Abbott declares that “these deaths are on [US president Joe] Biden” — not because Biden is ultimately responsible for the “unprecedented operation” leading directly to outcomes like this, but because (in Abbott’s vivid imagination, anyway) Biden pursues “open border” policies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Sudan government shuts off internet ahead of anti-coup protest

• Sudan’s government has shut off the internet across the country ahead of massive protests organized to pressure the military into handing power back to civilian leaders.

• Several organizations monitoring internet access across the world confirmed that the internet was severely limited on Thursday morning.

• Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, told The Record that a shutdown order was circulated on Wednesday in anticipation of demonstrations and by Thursday morning, the organization was registering disruptions in connectivity.

• The shutdowns were in full force by 8 am local time on Thursday, Toker said.

• “[This] has become standard procedure by the post-coup authorities in anticipation of demonstration days — the procedure is straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” Toker explained.

• “The shutdown has nation-scale impact and covers both fixed-line and cellular services. While impact isn’t total, the vast majority of users have been sent offline.”

=> ↺ Industry says new Indian cyber regs go way too far

Gemini* and Gopher

Politics

=> ↺ ABCJKTO Wordo: BROKE

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