● 06.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/06/2023: Istio 1.18 and FreeIPMI 1.6.11

Posted in News Roundup at 12:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ ZDNet ☛ The best Linux laptops of 2023

• ZDNET has researched the best Linux laptops available based on performance, design, cost, and more to help programmers find the right fit for their needs.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ KDE Videos ☛ Akademy 2023 Interview: In conversation with Eleftherios Kosmas – Libre Space Foundation

• Eleftherios will be delivering a keynote at #Akademy2023 where he will be talking about Libre Space Foundation and the value of free software in space.

• In this interview he tells us about how he got started in the space industry, and how his love for open source shaped his choice of career.

=> ↺ Tux Digital ☛ Linux Out Loud 65: Immutable File Systems

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about yay or nay for immutable file systems. Welcome to episode 65 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

Applications

=> ↺ Announcing Istio 1.18.0

• We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.18. This is the second Istio release of 2023, and the first to ship with Ambient mode! We would like to thank the entire Istio community for helping get the 1.18.0 release published. We would like to thank the Release Managers for this release, Paul Merrison from Tetrate, Kalya Subramanian from Microsoft and Xiaopeng Han from DaoCloud. The release managers would specially like to thank the Test & Release WG lead Eric Van Norman (IBM) for his help and guidance throughout the release cycle. We would also like to thank the maintainers of the Istio work groups and the broader Istio community for helping us throughout the release process with timely feedback, reviews, community testing and for all your support to help ensure a timely release.

=> ↺ Istio 1.18.0 Change Notes

• These notices describe functionality that will be removed in a future release according to Istio’s deprecation policy. Please consider upgrading your environment to remove the deprecated functionality.

=> ↺ Istio 1.18 Upgrade Notes

• When you upgrade from Istio 1.17.x to Istio 1.18.0, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.17.x. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.17.x.

=> ↺ Top 17 Penetration Testing Tools You Need to Know in 2023

• The idea behind penetration testing is to identify security-related vulnerabilities in a software application. Also known as pen testing, the experts who perform this testing are called ethical hackers who detect the activities conducted by criminal or black hat hackers.

• Penetration testing aims in preventing security attacks by conducting a security attack to know what damage can a hacker cause if a security breach is attempted, the outcomes of such practices help in making the applications and software more secure and potent.

=> ↺ TecMint ☛ 15 Useful Performance and Network Monitoring Tools for Linux

• If you’re working as a Linux/Unix system administrator, sure you know that you must have useful monitoring tools to monitor your system performance.

• As monitoring tools are very important in the job of a system administrator or a server webmaster, it’s the best way to keep an eye on what’s going on inside your Linux system/server.

=> ↺ OMG! Linux ☛ Track Upcoming Events with ‘Countdown’ App for Linux

• I try to stay on top of upcoming events but when things are due to happen a little way down the line, it’s a struggle.

=> ↺ Net2 ☛ Five best screen recorders for Linux

• Screen recording comes in handy when creating a video tutorial, recording gameplay, live streaming or even something cool you just did and want to showcase it to others. Uses of a screen recorder are diverse and there are a ton of reasons to have one installed on your PC.

=> ↺ OMG Ubuntu ☛ Intel’s New Open Source Mono Font is Pretty Decent

• Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great. Still, there’s always room for more, right? Intel thinks so, hence the release of Intel One Mono.

=> ↺ Sam Thursfield: State of screen reading reading on desktop Linux

• Reading a computer screen wears out your delicate eye-balls. I would like the computer to read some web-pages aloud for me so I can use my ears instead.

• Here’s what I found out recently about the available text-to-speech technology we have on desktop Linux today. (This is not a comprehensive survey, just the result of some basic web searches on the topic).

• Read Aloud is a browser extension that can read web pages out for you. That seems a nice way to take a break from screen-staring.

• I tried this in Firefox and, it worked, but sounded like a robot made from garbage. It wasn’t pleasant to listen to articles like that.

• Read Aloud supports some for-pay cloud services that probably sound better, but I want TTS running on my laptop, not on Amazon or Google’s servers.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Linuxiac ☛ Users Can Now Take Advantage of Flathub’s New Documentation

• Flathub’s users’ documentation has been revamped and is now available. So dive into it to enhance your Flathub experience.

=> ↺ HowTo Forge ☛ Guide to Install Rust and Use Cargo Package Manager on AlmaLinux 9

• In this guide, we’ll take you through the installation process of Rust programming language on an AlmaLinux 9. You will install Rust with two different methods and learn the basic usage of the Cargo package manager for creating and managing the Rust project.

=> ↺ FOSSLinux ☛ Dealing with ‘Failed to Retrieve Share List’ Error in Linux SMB Share

• The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is commonly used for file sharing between Linux and Windows machines. It’s not uncommon, however, to run into errors such as ‘Failed to retrieve share list from server: Invalid argument.’ This error typically indicates a problem with accessing shared resources, which can be caused by various issues such as network misconfigurations, firewall restrictions, or outdated SMB versions.

=> ↺ UNIX Cop ☛ Install Able2Extract Professional on Ubuntu / Debian

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Able2Extract on Debian / Ubuntu. This tool is a marvel if you work with many PDF files. What is Able2Extract Professional? Able2Extract Professional is a proprietary tool for working with and manipulating PDF files.

=> ↺ Ruben Schade ☛ Disable GUI on modern Debian

• This is how you disable the GUI after logging in and launching a shell:

• I inadvertently installed a graphical environment installing a new Debian Xen test server. This will let you reboot to a tty.

• For fellow BSD people, remember that the systemctl(8) command has also kudzu’d shutdown(8) on most Linux distros now. I wonder how long it’ll take for sudoedit(8) to be replaced with systemctl text-editor-edit.

=> ↺ ZDNet ☛ What are AppImages and how do you use them on Linux?

• This unique format for distributing Linux applications keeps it simple — mostly.

=> ↺ Data Swamp ☛ Qubes OS dom0 files workflow using fossil

• Since I’m using Qubes OS, I always faced an issue; I need a proper tracking of the configuration files for my systemthis can be done using Salt as I explained in a previous blog post. But what I really want is a version control system allowing me to synchronize changes to a remote repository (it’s absurd to backup dom0 for every change I make to a salt file). So far, git is too complicated to achieve that.

=> ↺ ID Root ☛ How To Install VMware Tools on Debian 11

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VMware Tools on Debian 11. Are you using VMware virtualization technology for your virtualized environment? If so, then you should definitely consider installing VMware Tools.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Install UFW on Linux Mint 21/20

• The Uncomplicated Firewall, or simply UFW, is a widely embraced network security tool that provides an intuitive interface for managing Linux IPTables firewall rules. It offers a user-friendly platform to manipulate the usually complex IPTables commands, making the process of administering a firewall seamless for both beginners and experienced users alike.

=> ↺ LinuxConfig ☛ How to check command version on Linux

=> ↺ LinuxConfig ☛ How to say YES to ALL with cp command

=> ↺ FOSSLinux ☛ How to display currently mounted file systems in Linux

• Understanding the currently mounted file systems in your Linux machine is crucial for system management and troubleshooting. Mounted file systems include disk partitions, device drivers, and remote servers that your Linux system recognizes and uses.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Oracle Java 17 on Linux Mint 21/20

• Java, the robust and versatile programming language has always been a preferred choice of developers worldwide.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Xfce on Debian 12/11/10

• XFCE stands as a remarkable desktop environment in the Linux ecosystem. Its core philosophy orbits around balance to provide a modern and user-friendly environment that does not compromise on performance or consume excessive resources.

=> ↺ University of Toronto ☛ I should read the Vim help more often

• A while back I wrote about handling numbers in Vim when they have a dash in front of them, and in a comment, Seth pointed me to a special option in visual mode, ‘g Ctrl-A’, which will increment a column of numbers the way I wanted here. Since this is visual mode, I can select the numbers without the leading dashes.

=> ↺ Ubuntubuzz ☛ LibreOffice Calc Basics IX: MIN and MAX

=> ↺ Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Add XLOOKUP Function to LibreOffice Calc

• This tutorial will explain in short how to make LibreOffice Calc able to do XLOOKUP by adding an extension called Lox365. It will give you abilities of xlookup and more features like Excel. We would love to say thank you very much to the developer, Goose Pirate, for creating it. 

=> ↺ TecMint ☛ 10 Commands to Collect System and Hardware Info in Linux

• It is always a good practice to know the hardware components of your Linux system running, this helps you to deal with compatibility issues when it comes to installing packages, and drivers on your system using yum, dnf, or apt.

• In this article, we shall look at some useful Linux commands that can help you to extract information about your Linux system and hardware components.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Enable Nginx HTTP/3 and QUIC

• HTTP/3 is the third version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is used for data communication on the World Wide Web. Compared to its predecessor, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 operates over QUIC, a transport layer protocol, instead of TCP. This change reduces latency and improves the browsing experience.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Falkon on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

• Falkon, previously known as QupZilla, is an open-source, cross-platform web browser that combines the prowess of KDE technology and the robustness of the QtWebEngine rendering engine. Designed with an intuitive interface, Falkon caters to power users seeking a reliable, efficient browsing experience while providing a customizable platform for the more technical folks.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Install GoLand on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

• JetBrains GoLand is a robust integrated development environment (IDE) for Go programming, offering a comprehensive suite of features and tools tailored specifically for Go developers. It was meticulously developed by JetBrains, a renowned software company famous for creating leading IDEs for various programming languages.

=> ↺ Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Rider on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 [Ed: .NET is a poor choice for technical and legal reasons; explore the alternatives]

• If you’re on a quest for a powerful, flexible, and intelligent development environment for .NET, look no further than JetBrains Rider.

=> ↺ LinuxConfig ☛ How to extract text from PDF document

=> ↺ LinuxConfig ☛ How to locate and set JAVA home directory on Linux

=> ↺ LinuxConfig ☛ Bash base64 decode and encode on Linux

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Git With VisualSVN Server?

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use “git status” for Inspecting Git Repository

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use “git-archive” Command in Git

• The “git archive” command permits the developers to package the entire history of a particular Git repository into a single archive file.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ Lutris 0.5.13 has been released

• With this release, we’re adding back the ability to run games with Proton. While this can be an useful thing for testing compatibility, it is still recommended to stick with the builds provided by Lutris. We are now using @GloriousEggroll’s Proton based builds by default, which makes using Steam’s proton an even narrower edge case.

Games

=> ↺ Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients with Tears Fall Low, Noxious Weeds and Eigenbrau – 2023-06-07 Edition

• Between 2023-05-31 and 2023-06-07 there were 26 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Gear 23.04.2 Is Out to Improve Dolphin, Kdenlive, and Other KDE Apps

• KDE Gear 23.04.2 is here less than a month after KDE Gear 23.04.1 and improves the Dolphin file manager to remember opened tabs on launch if it is configured this way by the user. It would appear that this functionality broke recently during the process of fixing a bug.

• The Spectacle screenshot tool has been updated so that its sidebar can accommodate long button text in some languages and the Gwenview image viewer now opens the specified app when using the “Open With” menu instead of a different one.

=> ↺ KDE ☛ KDE Gear 23.04.2

• Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear. Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ OMG! Linux ☛ openSUSE Leap 15.5 is Now Available to Download

• It’s a big day for Linux fans as an all-new version of the iconic Linux distro openSUSE is available to download.

=> ↺ Linuxiac ☛ openSUSE Leap 15.5 Is Out, Setting the Bar High

• Plasma 5.27.4, Xfce 4.18, Linux kernel 5.14, and tons of improvements are among the new features in openSUSE Leap 15.5. Here’s what’s new!

=> ↺ It’s FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #23.23: openSUSE 15.5, GNOME 45 New Features, Tail Command and More

• Get familiar with tail and cowsay commands. Learn new tips and tricks on GNOME desktop along with all the major Linux news this week.

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ openSUSE releases new version with several new technologies

• In a statement, the group behind open SUSE said version 15.5 had several new inclusions like container technologies, immutable systems, virtualisation, embedded development, and other high-tech advances.

• The new release will receive maintenance and security updates until the end of 2024. The old version, 15.4, have its end-of-life six months from the date of the latest release.

• Douglas DeMaio, a leader of the openSUSE project, said in a statement: “This release brings newer packages like Mesa and others, but Leap 15.5 is a non-feature release. Some of these newer packages to highlight include KDE Plasma 5.27, which is a Plasma Long Term Support version until the next one rolls out in 2024.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Linux Magazine ☛ Armbian 23.05 is Now Available

• Based on Debian 12, the latest version of the ARM/RISC-V distribution is now available to download and install.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu ☛ Charmed MLFlow Beta is here. Try it out now!

• Canonical’s MLOps portfolio is growing with a new machine learning tool. Charmed MLFlow 2.1 is now available in Beta. MLFlow is a crucial component of the open-source MLOps ecosystem. The project announced it had passed 10 million monthly downloads at the end of 2022. With Charmed MLFlow users benefit from a platform where they can easily manage machine learning models and workflows.We are looking for data scientists, machine learning engineers and AI enthusiasts to take Charmed MLFlow Beta for a drive and share their feedback with us.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Radek Koziel ☛ How I Hacked my Car Part 5: How I Hacked my Car Again

• But why does this post exist if I already hacked it?

• Because Hyundai

• Sometime in late July 2022, Hyundai removed the links to all of their DAudio2 firmware downloads. Leaving only a message that said the updates would return on Sepember 1st. If I had to guess, someone at Hyundai/Mobis read my blog and they wanted to fix their issues. In anticipation of that I started to gear up to hack the latest firmware.

=> ↺ CNX Software ☛ reTerminal DM – A Raspberry Pi CM4-powered 10.1-inch HMI controller

• Seeed Studio’s reTerminal DM is an upgrade to the Raspberry Pi CM4-powered reTerminal with a larger 10.1-inch touchscreen display and a greater range of features and interfaces for various industrial applications.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi detects factory defects with machine learning

• A Raspberry Pi Camera Module acts as the eyes of the production line monitor, feeding real-time images from the production line. A computer vision model analyses the images to detect broken teeth, scratches, and dents in 3D-printed spur gears as they roll through on the homemade “conveyer belt”. When the model detects a defect, Modzy’s system updates and timestamps a log, recording what was wrong with the spur gear and exactly when it rolled past the detection point on the production line.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ India Times ☛ Android: How malicious Android apps are generating revenue for hackers – Times of India

=> ↺ SlashGear ☛ 5 Of The Best Open World Games On Android To Check Out In 2023

=> ↺ Connect on the go and learn new skills with new Android features

=> ↺ Android Police ☛ Google scraps Android TV 13, releases Android TV 14 beta

=> ↺ Android Police ☛ Android 14 makes it extra clear that your phone is charging

=> ↺ Android Authority ☛ Android TV 14 phone calls: Support incoming? – Android Authority

=> ↺ Digital Trends ☛ This cheap Android phone is one of the best I’ve used in 2023 | Digital Trends

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Rocket ships and radishes

• There’s been something in the back of my brain that’s been bothering me about talks at the big conferences lately but I just couldn’t figure out how to talk about it. Until I listed to this episode of The Hacker Mind Podcast on Self Healing Operating Systems (it’s a great podcast, like and subscribe). The episode was all about this incredibly bizarre way to store operating system state in a SQL database (yeah, you read that right). The guest made no excuses that this is a pretty wild idea and it’s not going to happen anytime soon. But we need weird research like this, it’s part of the forward march of progress.

• [...]

• In the academic days (like our operating system example from the opening), it would be well understood that this was rocket ship research. It almost certainly wouldn’t go anywhere anytime soon, but was a step as part of the larger story of progress. As the arrow of time drags us all into the future, so does the path of progress, as long as you don’t live in Florida.

=> ↺ Linux Journal ☛ Minarca: A Backup Solution You’ll Love

• Data backup is a crucial aspect of information management. Both businesses and individuals face risks such as hard drive failure, human error or cyberattacks, which can cause the loss of important data. There are many backup solutions on the market, but many are expensive or difficult to use.

• That’s where Minarca comes in. Developed by Patrik Dufresne of IKUS Software, Minarca is an open source backup solution designed to offer a simplified user experience while providing management and monitoring tools for system administrators. So let’s take a closer look at how Minarca came about and how it compares to other solutions.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ Turso ☛ Database migrations made easy with Atlas

• Database migrations is one of the thorniest subjects there is. In short, they happen when a database schema must change to accommodate new or updated data. One simple example of a database migration is adding or removing columns from a table.

• There are many tools available to help the process of database migration, following a variety of approaches. In this article we will look at Atlas, a declarative tool for managing database schemas, that draws inspiration from infrastructure-as-code tools to manage migrations in a novel way.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ 9to5Linux ☛ LibreOffice 7.5.4 Office Suite Released with More Than 80 Bug Fixes

• Coming a little over a month after the LibreOffice 7.5.3 point release, LibreOffice 7.5.4 is here to address a total of 83 bugs that have been reported by users or discovered by the LibreOffice developers in the LibreOffice 7.5 series.

• The Document Foundation recommends all LibreOffice 7.5 users to update their installations to the new point release as soon as possible for better stability, reliability, and security.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU ☛ freeipmi @ Savannah: FreeIPMI 1.6.11 Released

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ Bruce Schneier ☛ How Attorneys Are Harming Cybersecurity Incident Response

• So, we’re not able to learn from these breaches because the attorneys are limiting what information becomes public. This is where we think about shielding companies from liability in exchange for making breach data public. It’s the sort of thing we do for airplane disasters.

=> ↺ USENIX ☛ Lessons Lost: Incident Response in the Age of Cyber Insurance and Breach Attorneys

• Incident Response (IR) allows victim firms to detect, contain, and recover from security incidents. It should also help the wider community avoid similar attacks in the future. In pursuit of these goals, technical practitioners are increasingly influenced by stakeholders like cyber insurers and lawyers. This paper explores these impacts via a multi-stage, mixed methods research design that involved 69 expert interviews, data on commercial relationships, and an online validation workshop. The first stage of our study established 11 stylized facts that describe how cyber insurance sends work to a small numbers of IR firms, drives down the fee paid, and appoints lawyers to direct technical investigators. The second stage showed that lawyers when directing incident response often: introduce legalistic contractual and communication steps that slow-down incident response; advise IR practitioners not to write down remediation steps or to produce formal reports; and restrict access to any documents produced.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ University of Toronto ☛ A retrospective on my thesis about language niches, fifteen years later

• The obvious niche that I missed was ‘languages that run in web browsers’, which started out being JavaScript and has spiralled outward from there (first with other languages that transpile to JavaScript and more recently with WebAssembly (WASM)). This niche became a massive thing over the past fifteen or so years and even spilled out from web browsers proper, with applications being written in ‘web shells’ such as Electron (which I consider basically browsers because, as I understand it, the API is primarily the browser’s DOM API).

=> ↺ Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Scala 3 Significant Indentation Woes: Sample

• Here’s a fairly straightforward Scala 3 sample, using significant indentation. Can you spot the compilation error?

=> ↺ DataGeeek ☛ JAGS Simulation with Multivariate State-Space Model: The G7 on Food Security

• The 49th G7 summit was held recently in Japan. Ukraine was one of the most critical issues at the meeting; most of the session topic was related to problems stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of the problems, aforementioned is food security. Because of the war, energy prices have been up. And that has stimulated food inflation. Of course, that is not the only reason but one of the important ones, like the disruption of the food supply chain.

• In this article, we will model the food and energy inflation of the G7 countries since the 1990s and make their 5-year projection. We will use the multivariate state-space model with JAGS simulation for that purpose.

• First, we will build our data set for the model. We will use food and energy annual CPI rates with the 2015 base-year, from OECD.

=> ↺ Xe’s Blog ☛ How to enable API requests in Fresh

• We can’t trust browsers because they are designed to execute arbitrary code from website publishers. One of the biggest protections we have is Cross-Origin Request Sharing (CORS), which prevents JavaScript from making HTTP requests to different domains than the one the page is running under.

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ uniform spacings

• A riddle on uniform spacings!, namely when considering eight iid Uniform (0,1) variates as visiting times and three further iid Uniform (0,1) variates as server availability times, with unit service time, the question being the probability a server is available for a ninth visiting time, T⁹.

=> ↺ Gentoo ☛ Weekly report 1, LLVM libc

• Hey! I had to start GSoC on sunday last week due to school, and I didn’t think that I’d write a weekly report for the first week but I decided to do it anyways.

• My plan for week 1 was: >This week I will set up a LLVM toolchain and sysroot for compiling >programs targeting LLVM libc. I will also start setting up a >“llvm-libc/Linux from Scratch” chroot.

• Because I played with LLVM libc before last week I had already completed this goal. Going forward I will only work in the sysroot until setting up crossdev because it’s simple and gives me everything I need to fix dependencies like Python.

• This far the project has been going pretty smooth, but I’ve also ran into some issues which I will comment on.

• catcream

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ Introduction to Propensity Score Analysis with R workshop

• Learn how to use propensity score analysis in R! Join our workshop on Introduction to Propensity Score Analysis with R which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series. 

PHP

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use filter_var() Function in PHP

• The filter_var() function is used in PHP to filter a variable with a specified filter. For more details, follow this guide.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Die() Function in PHP

• The die() function in PHP is used to handle fatal errors by displaying the message before terminating the script.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Dechex() Function in PHP

• The dechex() function in PHP is used to convert the decimal value into hexadecimal value. For more details, follow this guide.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Calendar Functions in PHP?

• PHP offers a wide range of calendar functions that are useful for managing and displaying date and time data. Follow this guide to learn about them.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use ucfirst() Function in PHP

• The ucfirst() function is a built-in PHP function that allows users to change the first letter of a string to uppercase, without modifying the rest of the string.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ TecAdmin ☛ A User’s Guide to Understanding Redirection Operators in Bash

• The command line is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal as a Linux user. While it may initially appear daunting, with the right knowledge, it can become an incredibly powerful asset. One key aspect of mastering the command line involves understanding redirection operators in Bash.

=> ↺ TecAdmin ☛ Setting Up a Port Forwarding Using Iptables in Linux

• In computer networking, port forwarding is a technique that allows an outside user to reach a service on a private network that’s otherwise inaccessible from the outside.

=> ↺ TecAdmin ☛ Getting Started with Linux Mint: Your Download Guide

• In the realm of open-source operating systems, Linux Mint has become a beloved choice for many. Renowned for its versatility, Linux Mint boasts an intuitive and user-friendly environment that makes it a perfect gateway for those transitioning from other systems like Windows or MacOS.

Java and JavaScript

=> ↺ Red Hat ☛ Deploy Quarkus applications directly to OpenShift using S2I

• Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java framework that offers a great developer experience, providing extensions for most modern development and management needs while enabling you to write imperative and reactive code. Red Hat OpenShift is a unified platform to run your applications at scale while offering a great developer experience for managing applications and their infrastructure. Quarkus and OpenShift are a great combination. Simply put, the combination of OpenShift and Quarkus helps application engineering teams to become highly productive and have a reliable runtime for their applications at scale.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Bulk ConcurrentHashMap Operations in Java?

• Three Bulk operations, the forEach(), search(), and reduce() methods used to retrieve all or specific elements, or to apply the same operation on elements.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Autoboxing and Unboxing in Java?

• Autoboxing converts selected primitive class data into wrapper class automatically and for Unboxing the wrapper class gets converted into the primitive class.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Collectors groupingBy() Method in Java?

• The “groupingBy()” method accepts a classifier function as a parameter, and this function determines the grouping key for each element in a stream.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Dollar Sign and Curly Braces in a String Using JavaScript

• The placeholder “${}” is used as template literals to specify JavaScript expressions i.e., arithmetic operations, variables, call functions, etc.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ Install Tailwind CSS with Laravel

• Create a Laravel project, install Tailwind CSS in it using the “npm”, configure the main CSS, write the code with Tailwind CSS, and build it.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Container Queries Plugin in Tailwind?

• To use container queries plugin in Tailwind, install the container queries plugin and add them to the “tailwind.config.js” file. Then, us

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use an Opacity Modifier in Tailwind?

• The opacity modifier is a utility class that allows users to adjust the transparency level of an element, such as text, button, background, etc.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use a Plugin for Typography in Tailwind?

• To use a plugin for typography in Tailwind, install the typography plugin and add them to the “tailwind.config.js” file. Then, use them in the HTML program.

=> ↺ Linux Hint ☛ How to Use a Plugin for Forms in Tailwind?

• To use the forms plugin in Tailwind, install the forms plugin and add them to the “tailwind.config.js” file. Then, use them in HTML code.

=> ↺ Geeks For Geeks ☛ NodeJS Interview Questions and Answers – Set 2

• NodeJS is an open-source and cross-platform runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine for executing JavaScript code outside of a browser.

Rust

=> ↺ Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 498

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

• This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Books You Should Read: Prototype Nation

• Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Plastic Welding Revisited

• Last time we talked about a video that purported to do plastic welding, we mentioned that the process wasn’t really plastic welding as we understood it. Judging by the comments, many people agreed, but it was still an interesting technique. Now [Inventor 101] has a video about plastic repair that also talks about welding, although — again, we aren’t sure all of the techniques qualify.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ A Stunning Merger Angers Athletes [Ed: Sportwashing by Saudi Arabia will ruin more sports]

• A professional golf merger is a victory for Saudi Arabia and another sign that money can overwhelm almost any other force in sports.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf Deal Is a Triumph That Transcends Sports [Ed: Triumph? Associating sports with crimes against women, gays, and more is no "Triumph"]

• The deal to merge LIV Golf with the PGA Tour is a big win for the oil-rich kingdom, headlining a banner week that also includes a visit from the American secretary of state.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ The PGA Tour’s Stunning Hypocrisy

• The preeminent golf league suddenly decided that Saudi Arabia’s many sins are not a problem.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ The US should pay close attention to Saudi Arabia’s domestic policy

• Riyadh’s foreign priorities today are little more than a shadow of its plans at home. US officials should factor this reality into their plans to stabilize relations with the kingdom.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Norway Rescues Russian By Helicopter Near North Pole

• Norway rescued a Russian in need of emergency medical assistance on board a scientific vessel stuck in ice near the North Pole in a spectacular helicopter operation, its rescue services said on June 7.

Science

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Artificial Photosynthesis Could Be The Secret to Colonising Space

• Life beyond Earth may depend on this.

=> ↺ Computers Are Bad ☛ 2023-06-07 something up there – nasa and uaps

• First, a disclaimer of sorts: I am posting another article on UAPs, yet I am not addressing the recent claims by David Grusch. This is for a couple of reasons. First, I am skeptical of Grusch. He is not the first seemingly well-positioned former intelligence official to make such claims, and I think there’s a real possibility that we are looking at the next Bob Lazar. Even without impugning his character by comparison to Lazar, Grusch claims only secondhand knowledge and some details make me think that there is a real possibility that he is mistaken or excessively extrapolating. As we have seen previously with the case of Luis Elizondo, job titles and responsibilities in the intelligence community are often both secretive and bureaucratically complex. It is very difficult to evaluate how credible a former member of the IC is, and the media complicates this by overemphasizing weak signals.

• Second, I am hesitant to state even my skepticism as Grusch’s claims are very much breaking news. It will take at least a month or two, I think, for there to be enough information to really evaluate them. The state of media reporting on UAP is extremely poor, and I already see Grusch’s story “growing legs” and getting more extreme in the retelling. The state of internet discourse on UAP is also extremely poor, the conversation almost always being dominated by the most extreme of both positions. It will be difficult to really form an opinion on Grusch until I have been able to do a lot more reading and, more importantly, an opportunity has been given for both the media and the government to present additional information.

• It is frustrating to say that we need to be patient, but our first impressions of individuals like Grusch are often dominated by our biases. The history of UFOlogy provides many cautionary tales: argumentation based on first impressions has both lead to clear hoaxes gaining enormous hold in the UFO community (profoundly injuring the credibility of UFO research) and to UAP encounters being ridiculed, creating the stigma that we are now struggling to reverse. In politics, as in science, as in life, it takes time to understand a situation. We have to keep an open mind as we work through that process.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ A Craft Has Flown Close Enough to The Sun to Detect The Source of Elusive Solar Winds

• Hello, Icarus.

Education

=> ↺ Julia Evans ☛ Some blogging myths

• A few years ago I gave a short talk (slides) about myths that discourage people from blogging. I was chatting with a friend about blogging the other day and it made me want to write up that talk as a blog post.

=> ↺ Rolling Stone ☛ She Was Falsely Accused of Cheating With AI — And She Won’t Be the Last

• However, Stivers points out that the allegation of cheating is something she’ll have to self-report to law schools during the application process. State Bar associations, she says, are known to ask similar questions about academic history, meaning this misunderstanding could shadow her for years. Indeed, U.S. News & World Report advises law school and State Bar applicants to “err on the side of disclosure” and proactively report any “disciplinary procedures at their college” on the assumption that these can turn up in background checks. And, she says, the decision in her favor came down without an apology or acknowledgement of the mistake from her professor or the college itself. (The UC Davis Office of Student Support and Judicial Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.)

=> ↺ Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Meeting-free days

• An unwanted side effect of hybrid work is more frequent and longer meetings. This leaves less time for focused work.

• Meeting-free days acknowledge that issue and aims to provide undisturbed time for focused work.

Hardware

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Op-Amp Challenge: Virtual Ball-in-a-Box Responds To Your Motions

• With the incredible variety of projects submitted to our Op-Amp Contest, you’d almost forget that operational amplifiers were originally invented to perform mathematical operations, specifically inside analog computers. One popular “Hello World” kind of program for these computers is the “ball-in-a-box”, in which the computer simulates what happens when you drop a bouncy ball into a rigid box. [wlf647] has recreated this program using a handful of op amps and a classic display, and added a twist by making the system sensitive to gravity.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Moving The Snail Mail To WiFi

• [Zak] loves getting a notification on his phone when he gets physical mail. Enough to wire his mailbox slot with an ESP8285 to send him alerts. Previously, [Zak] used a cellular-based solution as the mailbox slot was not within WiFi range. However, the network provider for the A9G GPRS module decided to move to different towers, and suddenly the module didn’t work. Unable to find a provider that had sensible pricing, he got to work redesigning the module.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Well Documented Code Helps Revive Decades-Old Commodore Project

• In the 1980s, [Stephen] was working on his own RPG for the Commodore 64, inspired by dungeon crawlers of the era like Ultima IV and Telengard, both some of his favorites. The mechanics and gameplay were fairly revolutionary for the time and [Stephen] wanted to develop some of these ideas, especially the idea of line-of-sight, even further with his own game. But an illness, a stint in the military, and the rest of life since the 80s got in the way of finishing this project. This always nagged at him, so he finally dug out his decades-old project, dusted out his old Commodore and other antique equipment, and is hoping to finish it by 2024.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Royal Navy Tests Quantum Navigation

• GPS has changed the way we get around the globe. But if you command a warship, you must think about what you would do if an adversary destroyed or compromised your GPS system. The Royal Navy and Imperial College London think a quantum navigation system might be the answer. Of course, Heisenberg says you can’t know your speed and position simultaneously. But at the real-world level, you can apparently get close enough. The quantum sensors in question are essentially accelerometers. Unlike conventional accelerometers, though, these devices use ultracold atoms to make very precise measurements using a laser optical ruler, which means they do not drift as rapidly as, say, the accelerometer in your phone. Navigating with accelerometers is well understood, but the issue is how often you have to correct your computed position with an actual reference due to drift and other error accumulation. You can see a Sky News report on the trial below.The tests were done in a rapid prototyping pod carried onboard XV Patrick Blackett, a fitting name for an experimental ship since Lord Blackett was a Nobel laureate and head of the physics department at Imperial College for a decade ending in 1963.The underlying tech came out of the university back in 2018, but making it work in a real-world environment onboard a ship is another matter. You probably won’t have the cryonics and lasers needed for such a quantum compass anytime soon in your smartphone, but the tech could have civilian applications for larger vehicles.

=> ↺ Tom’s Hardware ☛ U.S. Semiconductor Fab Boom Kicks Off

• Spending on fab equipment continues to grow, despite macroeconomic challenges.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ El País ☛ Psychologist and Harvard professor Rebecca Rolland: ‘We are turning children into people who act robotically’

• A. There are many things that steal children’s time. That’s partly because we fill their schedules with so many things to do. Instead of talking to them, we load them up with experiences and don’t give them time to reflect. We are turning them into people who act robotically, and they are not creative people and do not follow their interests. Another very clear component [of this] is that there are children who are very focused on social media and using the internet. Of course, technology can be put to good use with children, but when they are too focused on searching [the internet] or looking at one perfect picture after another they don’t realize how much time they spend doing that. For example, I know of a case where a child was interacting only through social media. And I think we can’t have them lose those experiences as children and let their lives be focused only on the likes they get.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Air Quality This Week Gives U.S. a Glimpse of the World’s Air Pollution

• Air-quality readings like the ones expected across parts of New York State on Wednesday would not be seen as particular cause for alarm in some parts of the world.

=> ↺ European Commission ☛ Opening remarks by Vice-President Schinas and Commissioner Kyriakides on a comprehensive approach to mental health

• European Commission Speech Brussels, 07 Jun 2023 Remarks by Vice-President Schinas:

• Today, we are here to present a comprehensive, anthropocentric approach to mental health.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ When Politics Saves Lives: a Good-News Story

• The decision to fund medications to treat H.I.V.-AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean flew in the face of expert advice. But the U.S. did it anyway.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tight construction schedules stopping Hong Kong workers from following heatstroke guidelines, union says

• Construction workers at both government and private sites have been unable to properly follow new guidelines for working under extreme heat, a union has said, saying tight schedules prevented proper rest periods. Last Saturday, a construction worker died after being found unconscious while an amber warning was in place.

Proprietary

=> ↺ [Repeat] Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Will GPT models choke on their own exhaust?

• In our latest paper, we show that using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects. The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.

• Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.

• After we published this paper, we noticed that Ted Chiang had already commented on the effect in February, noting that ChatGPT is like a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Internet, and that copies of copies get worse. In our paper we work through the math, explain the effect in detail, and show that it is universal.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Humans Still Needed: ‘Firmament’ Players Complain About Game’s Lore Content Written By AI

• You can’t walk out of your front door these days without tripping over someone ready to tell you about the next great thing in artificial intelligence. And, hey, it’s for good reason. The last few months have seen an explosion of new tools that have come online and are capable of some seriously amazing things. But for all of the hand-wringing over where humanity will even fit into the world any longer now that ChatGPT can write me a three stanza poem about how great encased meat is (yes, I did this for real), the current generation of AI tools are not such that they globally apply to replacing human work anywhere and everywhere.

=> ↺ Scoop News Group ☛ Security professional’s tweet forces big change to Google email authentication

• “This issue stems from a third-party security vulnerability allowing bad actors to appear more trustworthy than they are,” a Google spokesperson told CyberScoop in an email Monday. “To keep users safe, we are requiring senders to use the more robust DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication standard to qualify for Brand Indicators for Message Identification (blue checkmark) status.” Advertisement

• The DKIM requirement should be fully in place by the end of the week, the Google spokesperson said, marking a change from the previous policy that required either DKIM or a separate standard — the Sender Policy Framework — both of which are used by email providers, in part, to determine whether incoming email is likely to be spam and to theoretically authenticate that a sender is who they claim to be. The spokesperson added that Google appreciated Plummer’s work to bring the problem to their attention.

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Lawyer Explains How He Used ChatGPT to Produce Filing “Replete with Citations to Non-Existent Cases”

• “Can you show me the courts opinion in Varghese v China Southern Airlines”? “Certainly! … I hope that helps!”

=> ↺ The Verge ☛ Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my ‘Chrome’ search with a fake AI answer

• Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction. This “search result” is juicing Microsoft’s own product instead of respecting its users’ intent.

=> ↺ DroidGazzette ☛ Maryland becomes first state to offer driver’s license in both Apple and Google mobile wallets

• Anyone with a valid Maryland driver’s license can upload their ID into the digital wallet. These can be used at airport checkpoints at BWI Marshall Airport and the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

=> ↺ Kev Quirk ☛ Apple WWDC 2023 – My Thoughts

• Yesterday was the Apple 2023 WWDC conference. There were some big announcements, here’s my thoughts…

• I caught up on the Apple event last night, and for the most part, I thought it was all a bit meh.

Windows TCO

=> ↺ Scoop News Group ☛ US cyber officials offer technical details associated with CL0P ransomware attacks

• The CL0P ransomware variant evolved from CryptoMix ransomware, according to the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Wednesday advisory. It started as a typical ransomware as a service platform — where a core group of developers lease access to the malware and other infrastructure to “affiliates” and split any profits — and was known for its double extortion method of stealing and encrypting data and then publishing that data on its leak website. The group is also known to sell access to compromised networks to others — known as an initial access broker — as well as operating a large botnet spcecializing in financial fraud and phishing attacks, the advisory said.

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Clop gang uses MOVEit vulnerability to target BBC, British Airways and Boots

• The BBC, itself a victim of the attack, reported today that the Clop group posted a notice on its dark web site warning firms affected by the MOVEit hack to email them before June 14 or stolen data will be published. The report says more than 100,000 staff at the BBC, British Airways Plc and the pharmacy chain Boots UK Ltd. may have had payroll data stolen.

• The commonality between them is that they use a company called Zellis UK Ltd. for payroll and it was Zellis that was compromised, as opposed to the companies directly.

• “This is announcement to educate companies who use Progress MOVEit product that chance is that we download a lot of your data as part of exceptional exploit,” a post purportedly by Clop stated. SiliconANGLE could not confirm the message because Clop’s dark website was down at the time of writing. The reported message went on to urge victims to email the group to begin negotiations for payment for the nondisclosure of stolen data.

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ BBC, British Airways, Novia Scotia Among First Big-Name Victims in Global Supply-Chain Hack

• The Cl0p cyber-extortion gang’s hack of the MOVEit file-transfer program popular with enterprises could have widespread global impact.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ A Russian cyber gang is threatening to publish the payroll data of 100,000 people [Ed: But it's Microsoft Windows that gave away the data in the first place; quit blaming everything on "Russia"]

• A cybergang believed to be based in Russia has demanded ransom from some 100,000 victims of a hack it orchestrated recently.

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ Hackers Issue ‘Ultimatum’ Over Payroll Data Breach

• The Clop ransomware gang issued “an ultimatum” companies targeted in a recent large-scale hack of payroll data

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Verizon report finds business email compromise attacks have almost doubled [Ed: Conflating attacks with breaches, i.e. one can safely assume it's about Microsoft/Exchange/Outlook]

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Join the PyTorch Foundation: Membership Now Open [Ed: This is what LF exists to serve… billionaires]

=> ↺ Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Join the PyTorch Foundation: Membership Now Open [Ed: This is what LF exists to serve… billionaires]

• The annual fee is $150,000 + an LF Silver Membership.

=> ↺ Open Mainframe Summit Call for Papers Now Open [Ed: LF as openwashing front group for patented IBM trap. The Linux.com new(s) entries get barely 30 views after a day of/since publication. Linux Foundation lost all the following of that domain. The RSS feed was broken for years, which does not help.]

=> ↺ Open Mainframe Summit Call for Papers Now Open [Ed: LF as openwashing front group for patented IBM trap. The Linux.com new(s) entries get barely 30 views after a day of/since publication. Linux Foundation lost all the following of that domain. The RSS feed was broken for years, which does not help.]

Security

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Hacking A Hyundai Ioniq’s Infotainment System Again After Security Fixes

• These days modern cars are nothing if not a grouping of networked software held together by bits of hardware. This is reflected not only in the rapidly increasing number of ECUs, but also infotainment systems and all-glass cockpits. For better or worse, this offers many exciting hacking possibilities, which [greenluigi1] was more than happy to explore with their new 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL last year. Naturally, Hyundai then proceeded to ‘fix’ these vulnerabilities, offering the exciting chance to test the Hyundai engineers’ homework, and proceed to bypass it again.

=> ↺ The State of Cloud-Native Security

• Cloud native is becoming the defacto development method for new applications and workloads. Yet, the cloud-native trend also brings accelerated deployment timelines, which could leave security gaps in CI/CD. Studies also find a rise in time to remediate security incidents and uncertainty concerning cloud-native security tooling adoption. The cloud-native also

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ VMware Plugs Critical Flaws in Network Monitoring Product

• VMware ships urgent patches to cover security defects that expose businesses to remote code execution attacks.

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ Android’s June 2023 Security Update Patches Exploited Arm GPU Vulnerability

• Google’s June 2023 security update for Android patches more than 50 vulnerabilities, including an Arm Mali GPU flaw exploited by spyware vendors.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Off Guardian ☛ WHO launches new “digital health initiative”

• Kit Knightly On Monday, the World Health Organization and European Union announced the launch of their new “partnership”, building on the EU’s “highly successful” digital certification network, which was introduced during the “pandemic”. From the WHO’s website [emphasis added]: WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification…

=> ↺ Privacy International ☛ PI’s comments on Bureau’s text of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty (WHO CA+)

=> ↺ Patrick Breyer ☛ AI Act: For a Europe free of dystopian mass surveillance!

• Contrary to a conservative myth, there is not a single example of biometric real-time surveillance ever having prevented a terrorist attack or other events of this kind. With false alarm rates as high as 99%, these technologies are not nearly reliable enough to be of any use. Requiring a court order as proposed by conservative hardliners is a mere formality, a smokescreen for mass surveillance. Their proposed ‘exceptions’ to the ban would in fact justify the pervasive deployment of facial surveillance technology to search for thousands of “victims”, “threats” and suspects of “serious crimes” who are wanted at any given moment. We must not normalise a culture of mistrust and side with authoritarian regimes that use AI to suppress civil society!

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Why Are So Many Younger Americans Okay with Big Brother Monitoring Their Homes?

• The good news is that “only” a minority of younger American adults favor Big Brother-style surveillance of our home life. The bad news is that we’re discussing this because it’s a disturbingly large share supporting such a totalitarian intrusion. Worse, the idea seems to be gaining acceptance. We either need to get a handle on what’s going on here, or else potentially suffer lives monitored by unblinking eyes of the state, imposed by popular demand.

• “Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐​style in‐​home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor ‘the government installing surveillance cameras in every household’ in order to ‘reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,’” the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins and Jordan Gygi wrote last week. “Support declines with age, dropping to 20 percent among 30–44 year olds and dropping considerably to 6 percent among those over the age of 45.”

=> ↺ [Repeat] Quartz ☛ Microsoft has been fined $20 million for retaining children’s data without parents’ consent

• US regulator Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found the tech behemoth to have breached sections 312.5 and 312.10 of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. This law “prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in connection with the collection, use, and/or disclosure of personal information from and about children on the Internet.”

• The company illegally collected data on children who used its gaming platform Xbox—it asked parents for consent only after collecting their full names, dates of birth, and email addresses to set up accounts.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ The Snowden Revelations Reconsidered

• I did not know the identity of the person we were to meet. He or she had sent a “welcome pack,” a sample of classified documents that appeared genuine—but I was still uncertain, wondering whether the potential story might be an elaborate fraud or the work of a disgruntled crank. The source turned out to be no hoaxer but a contractor with the National Security Agency: Edward Snowden.

• Then age 29, Snowden had become disillusioned by what he had seen inside the NSA of the scale of intrusion into privacy in the post-9/11 U.S.—some of it illegal—and around the world. He had decided to become a whistleblower. We spent almost a week interviewing him during the day in his cluttered room, in the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, and then writing stories late into the night.

• At the end of one of the interviews, I asked Snowden for evidence showing the involvement of the NSA’s British surveillance partner, the Government Communications Headquarters. The next morning, he gave me a memory stick. I expected it to contain one or two examples; instead, it stored tens of thousands of documents, covering both the NSA and GCHQ. These were to form the basis for subsequent reporting by The Guardian, The New York Times, and ProPublica, which became partners in investigating and publishing the story. Snowden had given even more material to Poitras and Greenwald. In sheer quantity, this was the biggest leak in intelligence history.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ 10 years after Snowden’s first leak, what have we learned?

• These same folks tell us that while public awareness of the harms posed by mass surveillance has increased over the past decade, there’s still much room for improvement. And all of them point to the upcoming battle to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as the next big test, but more on that later.

• “I warned in 2011 that ‘When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.’ I was right, as Edward Snowden’s revelations proved,” US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Register.

• Wyden was one of two US senators who had sounded the alarm about the Obama administration’s surveillance programs even before the Snowden leaks came to light.

=> ↺ Patrick Breyer ☛ 10 years after the revelations of Edward Snowden: Let‘s defend anonymity and secure communication online!

• Today marks the tenth anniversary of the day Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance programmes of intelligence agencies worldwide. EU lawmaker and privacy activist Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) acknowledges this milestone as a key moment for the right to privacy and the defence of fundamental rights. At the same time, he calls for protecting the anonymity and encryption that whistleblowers need to expose such abuses of power.

• Breyer comments, “For the Pirate Party, Edward Snowden is a hero: By revealing the mass surveillance practices of the U.S. intelligence agency NSA and its partners, he selflessly defended the privacy of all and sacrificed his freedom. Even today he relentlessly fights for our fundamental right to privacy.

=> ↺ NBC ☛ Microsoft to pay $20 million FTC fine over storage of Xbox information

• Xbox encourages players, including children, to sign up for a Microsoft “gamertag” account to play online. The company gathers information including players’ email addresses, first and last names and birthdays when they sign up.

• According to the FTC, Microsoft stored information from 2015 until 2020 on around 10 million people, including children, who started to create accounts and gave some information but never completed the process.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Senators Say TikTok May Have Misled Congress on Handling of U.S. User Data

• The lawmakers said recent reports from The New York Times and Forbes raised questions about statements made during congressional testimony in March by Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, and in an October 2021 hearing involving Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

• “We are deeply troubled by TikTok’s recurring pattern of providing misleading, inaccurate or false information to Congress and its users in the United States, including in response to us during oversight hearings and letters,” the senators wrote.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Safety Last: AI Weapons Scanners Sold To US Schools Routinely Fail To Detect Knives

• We’ve done all we can we’re willing to do to make schools safer. We’ve added more cops, something that sounds like safety but just means we’ve offloaded school discipline to people trained in the art of violence. We’ve locked more doors, added more machinery, and opened up our students to all sorts of pervasive surveillance.

=> ↺ Tor ☛ Empowering human rights defenders in Brazil, Ecuador & Mexico

• Back in 2017 we established the Global South Strategy to further our mission of promoting human rights and internet freedom across the Global South. As part of this initiative, the Tor Project’s user feedback program was created – which aims to improve the user experience of our products by conducting usability research with at-risk communities alongside digital security training.

• In 2021, as part of a new grant, we expanded this program to Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. We also partnered with two other organisations who, like the Tor Project, are committed to defending human rights and internet freedom with privacy preserving technology: the Guardian Project and Tails. During the past two years we have collaborately closely to combat internet censorship and surveillance, and are pleased to share some of our findings in this report.

=> ↺ EFF ☛ Victory! New Jersey Court Rules Police Must Give Defendant the Facial Recognition Algorithms Used to Identify Him

• Facial recognition is being used around the country to identify suspects, and we hope other courts recognize that the constitutionally protected right of due process demands that defendants be allowed to examine and question the reliability of this often faulty technology.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ France24 ☛ UN court finds top Rwandan genocide suspect Kabuga ‘unfit’ for trial

• A UN court has ruled that ageing Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga is unfit to stand trial, calling instead for an ‘alternative’ legal procedure that would not end in a conviction.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ U.N. Tribunal Finds Defendant in Rwanda Genocide Unfit to Stand Trial

• Judges at a special U.N. tribunal said they would create a procedure to allow them to hear evidence in the case against Félicien Kabuga, who has dementia, without the possibility of a conviction.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Darfur, Blighted by Genocide, Faces a New Catastrophe: War

• Hundreds have been killed in the western Darfur region since the nationwide conflict in Sudan began, raising fears of protracted warfare in an area already torn by decades of genocidal violence.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Jury Finds Moscow Anti-War Activist Not Guilty Of Attempted Murder

• A jury at the Moscow City Court has found 45-year-old Moscow activist, Vitaly Koltsov, not guilty of attempting to murder 12 Russian National Guard officers.

=> ↺ Spiegel ☛ Were Vladimir Putin’s Years in Germany Less Thrilling than the Stories?

• Wild stories have circulated for years about Vladimir Putin’s time with the KGB in Dresden. There are even rumors he helped orchestrate a murder carried out by German terrorists. But reporting by DER SPIEGEL has found that the Russian leader was more of a pen-pusher than a top agent.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Wife, Teenage Son Of North Korean Diplomat Go Missing In Russia’s Far East

• Russia’s Investigative Committee said on June 7 that it has started investigating the disappearance of the wife and teenage son of the North Korean Council Choi En Nam in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok.

=> ↺ Defence Web ☛ War in Sudan puts South Sudan in danger too: the world’s youngest nation needs a stable neighbour

• Twelve years after independence, South Sudan remains extremely poor and underdeveloped. A peace deal brokered in 2018 has failed to end conflict. And the government has failed to engage the people in state reconstruction, leaving the country without genuine and effective institutions of self-government.

=> ↺ France24 ☛ Democracy at stake, say Senegalese youths protesting controversial arrest

• Senegal on Tuesday shut down several of its overseas consulates including in Paris and New York after they were targeted by a fresh wave of protests that has rocked the West African country domestically and abroad. Young protesters clashed with security forces last week, resulting in at least 16 deaths and hundreds of arrests, after opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was sentenced to two years in jail.

=> ↺ France24 ☛ At least 21 people killed in suspected terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso

• Twenty-one people, most of them members of the security forces, have been killed in Burkina Faso in attacks by suspected jihadists, security sources said on Wednesday.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ UK orders China to shut unofficial police stations on British soil, as Beijing denies their existence

• The UK government has ordered China to shut unofficial police stations operating on British soil, Security Minister Tom Tugendhat told parliament on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Telex (Hungary) ☛ Pressman: Hungary stubbornly continues to maintain and even deepen its connectivity with Russia

• “Hungary stubbornly continues to maintain and even deepen its “connectivity” with Russia. (…) To continue to double-down on reliance on Russia while it attempts to decapitate your democratic neighbor is wrong” – this was one of the topics discussed by US Ambassador David Pressman at a reception held on Wednesday evening in honour of US-Hungarian scientific cooperation.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ A truth verdict against state-backed Rambos

• A U.N. court links former Serbian officials to militias that killed civilians in the 1990s Balkan wars. That’s a lesson for the war in Ukraine.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ China-U.S. military near-misses may point to new Chinese ‘brinkmanship’ strategy

• “They want the U.S. to make concessions, but no matter how much the U.S. concedes, they will not be completely satisfied,” said Chang.

• RFA was unable to confirm that China has intentionally altered its strategy to amplify the risk of escalation in order to deter freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ China pays Tibetans to receive blessings from Beijing-backed Panchen Lama

• Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama are reincarnated as children when they die. After the 1950-51 Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet, Beijing has made an effort to influence Tibetan affairs including the selection of a spiritual successor to the 10th Panchen Lama who died in 1989.

• In 1995, the exiled Dalai Lama chose 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima to be the 11th Panchen Lama, recognizing him as the reincarnation of his predecessor.

• The Panchen Lama’s responsibilities include leading a council of high lamas to find the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama after the current one dies.

• The 1995 recognition of the 11th Panchen Lama by the 14th Dalai Lama angered Chinese authorities, who three days later took the boy and his family into custody. They have since disappeared.

• Beijing then installed another boy, Gyaltsen (in Chinese, Gyaincain) Norbu, as their own candidate in his place.

=> ↺ CBC ☛ Ex-TikTok executive says Chinese government used app to locate, identify Hong Kong protesters

• Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to U.S. user data, an accusation that the company denies.

• Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In the documents submitted to the court, he said ByteDance had a “superuser credential” — also known as a “god credential” — that enabled a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance, including those of U.S. users.

=> ↺ ANF News ☛ ‘One of the plans to annihilate the Yazidi people is to prevent their return to Shengal’

• Emphasizing that one of the plans to annihilate the people is to prevent their return, Sado stated, “As the people return to their land, the Turkish state targets the region with aircraft and seeks to portray Shengal as unstable. However, these attacks will not be able to prevent the return of the Shengal people because they know that if they do not return home, they will be destroyed. They are aware of the Turkish state’s goal of leaving Shengal without Yazidis.”

=> ↺ Site36 ☛ How Frontex oils the EU deportation machine

• Voluntary return is the „preferred type“, Frontex writes on its website, but this is only the case for 40 % of those concerned. Overall, „returns“ under Frontex mandate are steadily increasing. In the Corona year 2020, there were around 12,000 people, in 2021 already 18,000 and last year around 25,000.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ New SA trade office in US to grow defence opportunities

• South Australia will open a trade office in Washington to pursue opportunities flowing from the AUKUS submarine pact and other defence programs.

• Funding for the office will be included in next week’s state budget, taking the number of SA trade offices in the United States to four. Others already operate in New York, San Francisco and Houston.

=> ↺ The Straits Times ☛ US, Taiwan, Japan drone fleets to share real-time data: Report

• This would enable the US and its partners to observe all information gathered by the aircraft.

=> ↺ The Strategist ☛ The post-American Middle Eastern order

• May was a busy month for diplomats in the Middle East. Twelve years after the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was officially welcomed back into the fold.

War in Ukraine

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Ukraine Flood Deepens Misery in War Zone

• “We were getting used to the shelling, but I’ve never seen a situation like this,” said one woman rescued in Kherson after a dam upstream was destroyed.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Ukraine Forced To Cope With Disastrous Flooding After Rupture Of Kakhovka Dam

• Thousands of people sought shelter after escaping rising flood water amid an unfolding humanitarian and ecological disaster caused by the rupture of a major dam on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine.

=> ↺ LRT ☛ Lithuania’s Klaipėda overtakes St Petersburg in container traffic, says port CEO

• Klaipėda has become one of the largest container ports in the eastern Baltic Sea region following a collapse in shipments in Russia’s St Petersburg, according to the port’s CEO Algis Latakas.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ North Korean diplomat’s wife and son go missing in Russian far east

• Case is viewed as possible defection attempt ahead of border reopening that would force them to return home.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Belarusian Leader Pardons Russian Jailed After Forced Landing Of Commercial Flight

• Authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka has pardoned Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen who was serving a six-year prison term in Belarus on charges related to civil disturbances that followed a disputed 2020 presidential election.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Lukashenko pardons Russian citizen Sofia Sapega, who was arrested after forced Ryanair landing in 2021 — Meduza

• President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko pardoned Russian citizen Sofia Sapega, who was previously sentenced by a Belarusian court to six years in prison, reports the Belarusian state-run news agency Belta.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Local Official Throws Molotov Cocktails At Military Recruitment Center In Russia

• A local official in the Russian city of Vladimir, 200 kilometers east of Moscow, was detained on June 7 after she threw Molotov cocktails at a military recruitment center.

=> ↺ LRT ☛ In response to sanction-busting, Lithuania changes flight rules

• Under a new procedure approved in May, non-scheduled flights to Lithuania will now need to be arranged in advance after several private jets flying to Russia were intercepted at Lithuanian airports earlier this year.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ NATO Allies Prepare Unprecedented Air Deployment Exercise Over Europe In Show Of Force To Russia

• Germany is preparing to host the biggest air deployment exercise in NATO’s history, a show of force intended to impress allies and potential adversaries such as Russia.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ EU Launches Case Against Poland Over ‘Russian Influence’ Panel

• The European Commission said on June 7 that it is launching legal action against Poland over its creation of a controversial body probing “Russian influence,” which is seen as targeting the opposition

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Poland Deports Former FSB Officer To Russia After Rejecting His Asylum Request

• Poland has deported to Russia a former officer of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Emran Navruzbekov, who fled the country in 2017 and claimed the FSB fabricated terrorist cases against residents of the North Caucasus.

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ Russian President Talks With Saudi Crown Prince

• The last phone call between the Russian President and the Saudi Crown Prince took place on April 21.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Russia and Saudi Arabia’s Oil Partnership Shows Strain

• Analysts said the countries’ mutual need to keep energy prices high would help them maintain close ties, despite signs that Moscow has undercut previous deals.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Europeans Now See Russia as an Adversary, but Not China, Poll Says

• An extensive poll of 11 European countries finds citizens less eager for competition and rivalry with China than Washington — or European elites — have become.

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ Russia to Invest 24 Billion to Develop Northern Sea Route

• Construction of 50 icebreakers, ports, terminals, and emergency rescue centers is planned.

=> ↺ Helsinki Times ☛ Haavisto: Finland prepared for Russia’s response to diplomat expulsions

• MINISTER for Foreign Affairs Pekka Haavisto (Greens) has refrained from shedding more light on the roles of the nine Russian diplomats who are to be expelled from Finland.

• “Unfortunately I can’t comment on what the people have done or how they’ve acted, but there’s justification for the expulsions. We’ve received an overall report on them and [the cases] have been discussed at a meeting of TP-Utva,” he stated to YLE on Wednesday.

=> ↺ YLE ☛ Haavisto on diplomats’ expulsion: Finland is braced for Russian countermeasures

• The Finnish foreign minister declined to provide details about the nine Russian embassy staff members who are being expelled, such as what posts they held or how long they have been in Finland.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ After Dam Destruction in Ukraine, Thousands Flee for Water and Shelter

• As rescue efforts plucked people from rooftops, and offered fresh water and shelter, Turkey’s president called for an international investigation into what caused a dam to fail.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Rishi Sunak to Talk Tech With Biden, but Ukraine Is Likely to Surface

• While economic corporation the challenges posed by artificial intelligence are on the agenda, Russia’s invasion presents immediate threats.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Your Thursday Briefing

• Residents along the Dnipro River face devastation after the destruction of a key dam.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Your Thursday Briefing: A Dangerous Haze Across North America

• Also, evacuations from flooding in Ukraine.

=> ↺ France24 ☛ Japan voices ‘serious concerns’ over joint China-Russia air patrols

• China completed a second phase of joint air patrols with Russia over the Western Pacific on Wednesday, following flights on the previous day over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea, sparking concerns in Japan over national security.

=> ↺ LRT ☛ A new migration crisis is brewing on border with Belarus. This time, the trail starts in Russia

• A new migration crisis is brewing on the border between Belarus and the European Union. According to a report by the Belarusian Investigative Center, the scheme first launched by the Minsk regime in 2021 will now involve Russia.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Ukraine Dam Collapse Brings Floodwater to Kherson

• Low-lying areas of Kherson were a panorama of water and floating debris. One man stood on a cabinet in his living room waiting for hours for help.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Deliberate Explosion Inside Ukraine Dam Most Likely Caused Collapse, Experts Say

• With Russia and Ukraine blaming each other for the collapse of the Kakhovka dam, experts say that an external attack or even structural failure might explain the disaster, but that it is not likely.

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ China Voices Concern Over Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam

• “What has just happened shows once again that anything can happen in a conflict situation,” diplomat Zhang pointed out.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Ukrainian army on the offensive, shifting frontline by Bakhmut. Russia claims to have ‘deflected’ all assaults. — Meduza

• Ukraine’s armed forces have seized the initiative in the vicinity of Bakhmut and are now on the offensive, said Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar on Telegram.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Kursk governor blames Ukraine for drone attack on power substation — Meduza

• Roman Starovoyt, governor of Russia’s Kursk region, has reported a drone attack on a power substation in the village of Popovo-Lezhachi. After two bombs were dropped onto the facility the night before June 7, power was cut off from both Popovo-Lezhachi and Tetkino, another nearby village.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Putin calls destruction of Kakhovka dam ‘barbaric act’ by Kyiv — Meduza

• In a phone call with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the destruction of the Kakhovka dam a “barbaric act,” according to the Kremlin’s press service.

=> ↺ AntiWar ☛ Canada’s Only Answer in Ukraine: More Weapons, More War

• “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ~ George Orwell The Canadian government recently expanded Operation Unifier. The military training mission has been an important element in an escalatory dynamic that needs to be reversed to end the horrors in Ukraine.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Military Says Forces Making Advances In Bakhmut Area

• Ukrainian forces have gone on the offensive in Bakhmut, the Donetsk city that has been the epicenter of the war in eastern Ukraine, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said on Telegram on June 7.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Putin directs Russian emergency services to organize aid efforts in flooded Kherson region — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin has directed Alexander Kurenkov, head of Russia’s emergency services, to organize aid efforts for residents of the Russian-annexed part of Ukraine’s Kherson region that’s in the flood zone following the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced the order.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ The Kakhovka dam disaster unfolds Submerged minefields and hazardous pathogens are just some of the dangers posed by flooding in Ukraine’s Kherson region — Meduza

• Around 5,000 residential buildings in the Kherson region are standing in water, following the destruction of the Kakhovka hydropower dam. 1,852 houses and residential buildings are flooded on the western bank of Dnipro, where 1,457 residents had to evacuate, as reported by the regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin. In the Russian-annexed part of the region, 2,700 residential buildings are flooded, and close to 1,300 people have already evacuated, as reported by TASS.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Both sides of the river: The aftermath of the Kakhovka dam disaster from Ukrainian and Russian-held territory. In photos. — Meduza

• The dam at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, a key piece of infrastructure in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, has been destroyed. Video shared online early Tuesday morning showed water streaming through the broken barrier. Ukraine’s Operational Command South, Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin, and the Ukrainian President’s Office said that Russian forces were responsible for blowing up the critical facility.

=> ↺ AntiWar ☛ Four Big Reasons Not To Green Light Strikes on Crimea

• In just an eight day period in May, the West authorized sending both long range Storm Shadow cruise missiles and F-16 fighter bombers to Ukraine, reversing a war long policy of not providing Ukraine with weapons that can strike inside Russia.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive will aim to keep the Russians guessing

• Speculation is mounting that Ukraine’s hotly anticipated summer counteroffensive may be underway but initial stages are likely to feature probes and diversionary attacks rather than a big push, writes Peter Dickinson.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ Has Ukraine’s counteroffensive really begun?

• Atlantic Council experts share their insights on the intensifying war in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Defence Web ☛ African Heads of State to embark on peace mission to Ukraine and Russia

• President Cyril Ramaphosa along with five African Heads of State will in the coming weeks travel to Ukraine and Russia on an African Peace Initiative concerning the war in Ukraine.

=> ↺ France24 ☛ France to send aid to Ukraine for dam disaster, says Macron

• France will send aid to Ukraine “within the next few hours”, said President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday following a phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. A day after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, rescue teams rushed to evacuate people as floodwaters peaked. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

=> ↺ France24 ☛ As casualties mount, mobilisation tests Ukraine’s social fabric

• Ukraine declared a full mobilisation at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, banning military-age men from leaving the country so that they could be called up to fight at any time. Days after Russia attacked, so many people were lining up to head to the front line that military commissariats were turning some away. But not everyone wants to fight. As the war drags on and the casualties mount, many are looking for ways to avoid it.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China expresses ‘serious concern’ over ‘humanitarian, economic and ecological impacts’ of Ukraine dam destruction

• China expressed “serious concern” Wednesday over the destruction of a major Russian-held dam in Ukraine, with Beijing saying it feared the “humanitarian, economic and ecological impacts” of the incident.

=> ↺ LRT ☛ Lithuania to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine following dam destruction

• Lithuania will send humanitarian aid to Ukraine in response to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam earlier this week, Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė has said.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Media Watch: China’s mixed signals on Russo-Ukrainian war

• China has portrayed itself as neutral player, sympathetic to Moscow and peacemaker

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Ukraine’s Prosecutor To Provide ICC With Data On Kakhovka Dam Destruction

• Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin on June 7 signed a decree on providing the prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague with data related to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Russia Claims Ukrainian ‘Saboteur’ Group Blew Up Ammonia Pipeline, Kyiv Yet To Comment

• Russia’s Defense Ministry claims a Ukrainian “saboteur group” blew up a segment of the Tolyatti-Odesa pipeline, the world’s largest ammonia conduit, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Banks In Kazakhstan, Armenia, Hong Kong Block Payments For Electronics Deliveries To Russia

• Banks in Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Hong Kong have started blocking payments for deliveries of electronics to Russia to avoid U.S. sanctions for helping Moscow evade Western penalties imposed over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Another Resident Of Russia’s Far East Detained On Treason Charge

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on June 7 that a resident of the country’s Far East had been detained on a charge of high treason amid a growing number of such cases in recent months.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Pro Publica ☛ After Delay, Texas Public Records Bill Heads to Governor’s Desk

• After a week’s delay, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has forwarded to the governor legislation that aims to increase the transparency of the state’s public records law.

• Patrick had been holding up the bill amid increasingly frayed political relations between him and his Republican counterparts in state leadership, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Gov. Greg Abbott.

=> ↺ DeSmog ☛ Why We’re Supporting Climate Whistleblowers

• The climate crisis is worsening by the day. Despite growing pledges to act, greenhouse gas emissions are breaking records. Climate change, pollution and extinctions are intensifying, causing instability, displacement and conflict. To quote U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, we’re on the “highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

=> ↺ Digital Music News ☛ Texas Appellate Court Refuses to Lift ‘Gag Order’ Covering Astroworld Litigation

• A Texas appellate court has officially refused to lift a gag order covering hundreds of lawsuits filed against Live Nation over the Astroworld tragedy. A three-justice panel just recently rejected a challenge to the seemingly far-reaching gag order, which Judge Kristen Hawkins implemented back in February of 2022.

Environment

=> ↺ CNN ☛ Russia’s war in Ukraine is undermining global efforts to tackle the climate crisis, new report finds

• The war in Ukraine has brought an enormous human toll: Thousands of civilians have been killed, millions have been forced to flee overseas, it has destroyed homes, schools and hospitals. But beyond the immediate, visceral impacts, the conflict is also causing a climate disaster at a time when the world is already struggling to meet climate goals, according to a new report.

• A team of carbon accounting experts has evaluated the climate impact of the first year of the conflict, which started in February 2022.

• They found that a total of 120 million metric tons of planet-heating pollution can be attributed to the first 12 months of the war, according to the report published Wednesday. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of Belgium, or those produced by nearly 27 million gas-powered cars on the road for a year.

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ Arctic Sea Ice Is Melting Way Faster Than Previously Thought, Study Finds

• In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers outlined how the Arctic could experience rapid sea ice loss as early as the 2030s. It’s a decade earlier than a 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which predicted that the region would lose its sea ice by the middle of this century, researchers wrote. And even if world leaders create policies that successfully lower earth-warming global emissions, the Arctic would still lose September sea ice by the 2050s, the study explained.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ ‘About That Climate Emergency?’: Northeastern US Chokes on Wildfire Smoke

• Environmental groups are demanding that world leaders take urgent action as smoke from Canadian wildfires fueled by the climate crisis continued to smother eastern regions of the United States on Wednesday, pushing the Air Quality Index (AQI) in both nation’s capitals to “unhealthy,” with at least 16 states issuing air quality alerts affecting millions of people.

=> ↺ European Commission ☛ Readout of meetings of President von der Leyen, Executive Vice-President Timmermans and High-Representative/Vice-President Borrell with the COP28 President

• European Commission Statement Brussels, 07 Jun 2023 Today in Brussels, Commission President von der Leyen, Executive Vice-President Timmermans and High-Representative/Vice-President Borrell met with COP28 President Designate Dr Sultan Al-Jaber to discuss preparations for COP28, the 2023 UNFCCC climate conference

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ Moldova needs an energy overhaul

• If energy security is national security, then Moldova is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world and is in need of a comprehensive energy sector overall, writes Suriya Evans-Pritchard Jayanti.

=> ↺ DeSmog ☛ Replace fossil fuels — with more fossil fuels? That’s one major utility’s plan.

• By Katie Myers, Grist. This story was originally published in Grist, and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.

• Austin Wall was attending an environmental law conference at the University of Tennessee not long ago when, during a discussion of natural gas pipeline projects, a map appeared on the screen and gave him a surprise.

=> ↺ Federal News Network ☛ Replacement plane for diverted Air India flight leaves Russia for San Francisco with all aboard

• A replacement plane for an Air India flight diverted to Russia has left for San Francisco, carrying all passengers and crew. The original plane had been forced to landed in Siberia on Tuesday because of an engine problem. It had departed New Delhi carrying 216 passengers and 16 crew members. The airline said Thursday that the replacement plane is expected to arrive in San Francisco just after midnight. The U.S. State Department has said fewer than 50 American citizens were on the plane. One of the passengers said they were barred from leaving the hostel where they were staying and were unable to use their credit cards because of sanctions over Russia’s war on Ukraine.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Air India flight passengers diverted to Magadan stay in local school building after emergency landing. San Francisco flight to resume Thursday. — Meduza

• Passengers from an Air India flight traveling from Delhi to San Francisco and diverted to Magadan are staying in a public school building guarded by the Russian military. The emergency landing took place on June 6, due to aircraft malfunction.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ NRL great joins race for carbon-free commercial flight

• A new alliance plans to launch Australia into carbon-neutral commercial flight, and an airline owned by rugby league great Johnathan Thurston is a key playmaker.

• The goal is the first focus of the Hydrogen Flight Alliance, a group of aviation and green energy players that wants to fly the country’s first commercial emission-free hydrogen-powered aircraft between Brisbane and Gladstone in 2026.

=> ↺ Latvia ☛ New pedestrian bridge faces criticism for design

• On June 5, Latvian Railways solemnly unveiled a new railway crossing – a pedestrian bridge on Ezera Street. However, on the first day, it has already been sharply criticized, and complaints have been made on social networks, because some people could not cross the bridge when they came to it, Latvian Television reported on June 6.

=> ↺ Vox ☛ Can [cryptocurrency] survive in Biden’s America?

• In the Coinbase lawsuit, the SEC claims that certain tokens exchanged on the platform qualify as securities and are therefore subject to the SEC’s regulations, including a requirement for Coinbase to register as a securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency. Coinbase also, the SEC says, sells securities through its “Earn” staking program. At the heart of all of this is Gensler’s unwavering belief that most [cryptocurrency] assets are securities, so they fall under his agency’s purview and are subject to its rules. Coinbase says the tokens aren’t securities, but it sure would love some legislation that makes all of this clear (preferably that Coinbase helps write) rather than being in the middle of a years-long turf war between the securities and commodities agencies over who is in charge of what. The SEC maintains that it has oversight here and that Coinbase knows it.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Crypto Firms Start Looking Abroad as U.S. Cracks Down

• As the country becomes one of the world’s strictest crypto regulators, companies are exploring plans to expand internationally and possibly leave entirely.

=> ↺ H2 View ☛ Meld Energy to build green hydrogen facility in UK

• The hydrogen-friendly east coast of England has received another fillip today with news that px Group’s Saltend Chemicals Park in Hull will house a green hydrogen facility.

=> ↺ European Commission ☛ Opening remarks by Commissioner Simson at the International Energy Agency’s 8th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency

• European Commission Speech Paris, 07 Jun 2023 Your Excellencies,

• Dear Ministers,

• Dear Fatih,

• Let me first thank the IEA for hosting us here today at the 8th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ Natural gas reduced China’s urban air pollution. Can it be a global climate solution?

• Greater uptake of natural gas has helped substantially reduce urban air pollution in Beijing. Ahead of COP28 discussions this year, the United States, China, and other countries should encourage responsible natural gas production as a solution for reducing global emissions and urban air pollution.

=> ↺ Spiegel ☛ The Global Competition for Raw Materials: Europe at Risk of Losing the Lithium Race

• Without lithium, copper and rare earths, our mobile phones, electric cars and wind turbines wouldn’t function. Currently we are almost exclusively dependent on China for these critical raw materials. But there might be a way out.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Revelator ☛ What City Birds Around the World Have in Common

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ CS Monitor ☛ Bird migration’s robust history – and fragile future

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ New York Times ☛ Orange Skies and Burning Eyes as Smoke Shrouds New York City

• In “Flight Paths,” author Rebecca Heisman lays out the secrets of avian migration, as revealed over centuries of study by enterprising scientists.

• New Yorkers are accustomed to dealing with weather. This was something very different.

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ Smoke From Wildfires In Canada Reaches US East Coast

• More than 400 wildfires have been raging across Canada for days, and smoke from the provinces of Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario has reached the northeastern U.S.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ The Northeast Gets a Taste of Fire Season

• A guide to what comes next—and what this moment explains about our warming planet

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Canadian wildfire smoke has given New York the worst air quality of any major city

• New York City is shrouded in a smoky, apocalyptic haze, which will persist all day today (June 7).

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Smoke from Canadian wildfires leads to record poor air quality in eastern U.S.

• Wildfires burning across Canada are pouring smoke into the Great Lakes, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states again Wednesday, with alerts up from New York State to Washington, D.C.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ Wildfire Masking Is Just Different

• The not-COVID reason to mask is here.

=> ↺ New Yorker ☛ The Day That Wildfire Smoke Shrouded New York City

• As the world warms and Canada burns, what once seemed unprecedented is becoming familiar.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ As Canadian Smoke Darkens the New York Sky, The Future is Clear

• There’s nowhere to escape the harm from wildfires.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Quebec Wildfires Contribute to Extreme Fire Season in Canada

• Massive plumes of smoke from hundreds of Canadian fires, enveloped millions in smoke, triggering dangerous air quality warnings in both countries and turning skies an ashen orange.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ Photos: Smoke From Canada’s Wildfires Drifts South

• Images of the fires in Canada and the surreal skies caused by the drifting smoke

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Colorado River Carved Grand Canyon; Humans Dented It

• A rafting trip yields insights about a national treasure that seems permanent but is always being changed, lately by humans.

=> ↺ YLE ☛ Supreme Court throws out climate case

• The case was brought after the last government’s final climate report.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Droughts in East Africa stoke tension between herders and lions

• A prolonged drought in East Africa has increased lions targeting livestock and causing significant financial losses for herders. In retaliation to recent attacks near Kenya’s Amboseli Park, the Maasai people have killed six wild lions.

=> ↺ NYPost ☛ 6 lions in Kenya speared to death in retaliation after killing goat herd

• The Big Life Foundation, which has run the compensation program for 20 years, said it cannot afford to pay the market price but asserted that the amount cannot be disregarded because it at least expresses solidarity with herders for their loss.

Finance

=> ↺ Turkish Lira continues to weaken after elections

• The lira plummeted to yet another all-time low against the US dollar and the Euro. Despite overall stability in global gold prices, gold prices also reached record highs.

=> ↺ David Rosenthal ☛ Flash Loans

• I have been generally skeptical of claims that blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are major innovations. Back in 2017 Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark published Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree, showing that Satoshi Nakamoto assembled a set of previously published components in a novel way to create Bitcoin. Essentially the only innovation among the components was the Longest Chain Rule.

• But, for good or ill, there is at least one genuinely innovative feature of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and in Flash loans, flash attacks, and the future of DeFi Aidan Saggers, Lukas Alemu and Irina Mnohoghitnei of the Bank of England provide an excellent overview of it. They:

• analysed the Ethereum blockchain (using Alchemy’s archive node) and gathered every transaction which has utilised the ‘FlashLoan’ smart contract provided by DeFi protocol Aave V1 and V2. The Aave protocol, one of the largest DeFi liquidity providers, popularised flash loans and is often credited with their design. Using this data we were able to gather 60,000 unique transactions from Aave’s flash loan inception through to 2023

• Below the fold I discuss their overview and some of the many innovative ways in which flash loans have been used.

=> ↺ Robert Reich ☛ Busting the “Paid What You’re Worth” Myth

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Retail recession hits and services could be next

• Australia has ushered in a “retail recession” and recorded its second quarter in a row of declining spending in inflation-controlled terms.

• Real retail turnover has recorded a 0.6 per cent fall in the March 2023 quarter, hot on the heels of a 0.3 per cent fall in the December quarter.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Young students brave grueling college exams amid job crisis in China

• A record 13 million students are taking the national college admissions exam.

=> ↺ Telex (Hungary) ☛ May inflation in Hungary at 21.5 percent

• Consumer prices in Hungary were on average 21.5 percent higher in May than a year earlier. Over the past year, household energy and food prices have risen the most, the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) said on Thursday.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Small businesses granted amnesty on overdue tax returns

• Small businesses with overdue tax and fringe benefits returns dating back almost four years are being granted amnesty.

• The Australian Taxation Office is encouraging small businesses with an aggregated turnover of less than $10 million at the time lodgements were due to file the overdue returns.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Households fretting over power bills as costs rise

• Australian households are fretting about keeping the lights on and many have little confidence new technologies will ease the cost burden in the years ahead.

• Some 52 per cent are concerned about how they are going to pay their power bills, up from a year ago, a sentiment survey published by Energy Consumers Australia shows.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ A quarter of homes are bought mortgage-free

• More than a quarter of homes were bought without a mortgage last year, suggesting there’s a sizeable cohort insulated from aggressive interest rate rises. 

• Roughly 25 per cent of all sales in the eastern states – both dwellings and land – were made without a mortgage, according to property data firm PEXA.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Macquarie Bank not so green with billions dipped in oil

• Macquarie Group has been accused of touting green credentials while taking stakes in high-growth oil and gas companies.

• Billions of dollars in oil and gas undermine the investment bank’s net zero commitments, according to a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ A $1 Trillion Borrowing Binge Looms After Debt Limit Standoff

• The government has avoided default, but the effects of the debt-ceiling brinkmanship may still ripple across the economy.

=> ↺ Breach Media ☛ Organized tenants are racking up wins against landlords and politicians

• Instead of “succumbing” to their landlords’ whims, Canadian tenants are coming together to fight rent increases and evictions

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Turkey’s Lira Falls to New Low as a New Economic Policy Forms

• The lira plunged 7 percent against the U.S. dollar, as a new finance minister promising “rational” economic policy takes charge

=> ↺ Mexico News Daily ☛ US sanctions CJNG leaders and money laundering network

• The U.S. government has sanctioned alleged senior leaders in the Mexican cartel, as well a woman accused of laundering money for it in Mexico.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Axios ☛ House GOP tensions erupt as standoff hamstrings agendaFrustrations from establishment House Republicans spilled out into the open on Wednesday after right-wing lawmakers succeeded in blocking nearly a week’s worth of House votes.Why it matters: The latest bout of infighting has reignited concerns about GOP leadership, all but helpless to stop right-wing agitators from hijacking the legislative process. “The Dysfunction Caucus does what it does best,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told Axios. “This hurts the GOP conference, Congress and the Country.”

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ Cornel West on Running for President, Ending Ukraine War & Taking on “Corporate Duopoly” of Dems & GOP

• Cornel West, the iconic academic and social critic, has declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the 2024 election. He is running with the People’s Party, a progressive alternative to the two major parties that grew out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. With 2024 shaping up to be a rematch between “neofascist” Donald Trump and “milquetoast neoliberal” Joe Biden, West says voters need a real alternative focused on tackling inequality, racism, war and corporate greed. “There’s an indifference to the plight of the vulnerable,” West tells Democracy Now! He also discusses the war in Ukraine, censorhip, right-wing extremism, and allegations of sexual harassment and assault against People’s Party founder Nick Brana, among other topics.

=> ↺ The Gray Zone ☛ British media protected pro-war serial sex pest Nick Cohen for decades

=> ↺ Bert Hubert ☛ The Dutch government wants to automatically and administratively gain permission to target victims of hackers

• The Dutch government is proposing adding a lex specialis to its existing intelligence and security services act. This addition significantly changes the scope of many powers and also extends who they can be applied to.

• [...]

• On this page I’d like to go over just one specific element of this new law: automatic extension of warrants to hacking victims (’non-targets’). Under the new law, the criteria for targeting non-targets actually become more lenient than for targeting actual targets. I would also hope to hear from experts on what the ECtHR might imply for this automatic extension and the newly proposed oversight. At the very end of this article you will find the original text of the articles, and my best stab at a translation.

=> ↺ Mandiant ☛ A Peek Behind the Curtain: Examining the Dimensions of a National-level Cyber Program

• In the past year, Mandiant Intelligence has been thinking of new ways to help organizations scale their defenses to outpace and outmaneuver state-sponsored cyber programs—all in a format that is widely accessible. This led us to developing “Inside the Mind of an APT,” an on-demand course that shares our more than ten years worth of insights on state-sponsored cyber programs to tip the scale in favor of the blue team. This course focuses heavily on exploring what we call the Big Four: Russia, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and Iran.

=> ↺ Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Less meetings, more focused work

• At most companies, meetings are the cost of doing business, not a product that’s directly sellable to the customer.

• Customers don’t pay us to go to meetings. They don’t even pay us for making the right decision. They only pay for the right execution. And that just happens to happen outside those meeting rooms!

=> ↺ Variety ☛ Reddit Laying Off 5% of Workforce, Cuts Back Hiring Plans

• The job cuts, which will span companywide, were announced by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in an email to staffers Tuesday. “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Huffman wrote. Along with the layoffs, Reddit is reducing its hiring plans for the rest of 2023 to about 100 additional employees (previously it expected to hire 300). Reddit currently has around 2,000 employees worldwide.

• A Reddit rep confirmed the job cuts, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the company, as of May 2023, more than 57 million daily active unique visitors engage with more than 100,000 active communities on Reddit. Users on the site have contributed more than 13 billion posts and comments worldwide to date.

=> ↺ India Times ☛ Regulation? AI, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

• Altman, who was previously president of Silicon Valley’s famed Y Combinator accelerator, said he’s cognizant of the advantages and dangers of OpenAI, including potential misuse by dictators leading to serious geopolitical implications. He pointed out that generative AI will need more regulations, with parallels to nuclear power and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ How Sam Altman Stormed Washington to Set the A.I. Agenda

• But Mr. Altman, 38, has run toward the spotlight, seeking the attention of lawmakers in a way that has thawed icy attitudes toward Silicon Valley companies. He has initiated meetings and jumped at the opportunity to testify in last month’s Senate hearing. And instead of protesting regulations, he has invited lawmakers to impose sweeping rules to hold the technology to account.

=> ↺ India Times ☛ Google, Meta using ‘bullying tactics’ against Canada’s news bill, says PM Trudeau

• Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms are using “bullying tactics” against a Canadian push aimed at ensuring financial support for news publishers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.

• The proposed legislation is designed to compel internet giants like Google and Meta’s Facebook to negotiate commercial deals and pay publishers for their content.

• The U.S. firms say proposals in the bill, dubbed the “Online News Act,” are unsustainable for their businesses.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ David Zaslav Picked Chris Licht to Revamp CNN. Now What?

• Mr. Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros. Discovery, must find a new leader who shares his vision for the network and can figure out its financial future.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ CNN head Licht quits US news network after one year

• Chris Licht is out after a year as chief executive at CNN, following a series of missteps and plunging ratings.

• David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN parent company Warner Bros Discovery, announced the leadership change on CNN’s morning editorial call on Wednesday.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Chris Licht Is Out at CNN, Leaving Network at a Crossroads

• Mr. Licht’s turbulent time running the 24-hour news organization lasted slightly more than a year.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ ‘Nothing to hide’ on Higgins compensation, Labor says

• The attorney-general has rejected claims the Albanese government has questions to answer about a compensation payment to Brittany Higgins. 

• The former Liberal staffer reached a confidential settlement with the Commonwealth in December 2022 after she launched legal action against her employers in the previous coalition government.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Former JPMorgan exec rejects bank’s Epstein accusations

• The former JPMorgan Chase & Co executive accused of shepherding the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has formally denied involvement in the disgraced financier’s sex trafficking and blamed JPMorgan for keeping him as a client.

• In Wednesday night filings in a New York federal court, Jes Staley said his dealings with Epstein were not the “proximate cause” of any damages JPMorgan might incur in two lawsuits it faces over its work with Epstein, a client from 1998 to 2013.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Hey Philip Lowe, it ain’t the wages. Best regards from Mathias Cormann and the OECD

• The latest OECD report is out, confirming higher profits are the leading component of recent inflation in Australia and elsewhere. Yet Philip Lowe and the RBA keep raising interest rates to curb inflation with wages growth as the culprit. What’s the scam?

• The scam is that they don’t know any better ways, and their policy options are limited, so they have to blame something.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Australia willing to walk away from EU deal: minister

• Australia was willing to walk away from a possible free trade deal with the European Union despite there being a “lot at stake”, Agriculture Minister Murray Watt has admitted.

• The EU has been pushing for geographic indicators, which would stop Australian producers from using names like parmesan, prosecco or feta to label products.

=> ↺ ‘Hakan Fidan stands at a crucial point for the Kurdish question’

• bianet has talked to academician Adnan Çelik about the new cabinet and the “Kurdish Ministers” in the cabinet.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ House grinds to halt as GOP rebels push McCarthy for new deal

• The House continued to postpone votes on Wednesday as a group of right-wing lawmakers pushed to renegotiate a deal they struck in January with Republican leadership.

• Why it matters: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) detractors have the numbers to kill any efforts by leadership to pass party-line legislation, meaning they effectively control the House floor.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Eleanor Catton talks about ‘Birnam Wood’ and ‘the seduction of certainty’

• New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton brings her reading of “Macbeth” to bear on contemporary politics in her novel “Birnam Wood.”

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Pacific Northwest states search for gun control solutions

• Gun control advocates in Washington state are hailing victory after a federal judge rejected a request to block a new state law. The new law bans the sale and manufacture of more than 50 types of guns, including AR- and AK-style rifles.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ No more ‘faceless bureaucracy’? How cities are deepening trust.

• Most Americans think favorably of local government. Still, citizens academies try to deepen trust by getting past “faceless bureaucracy.”

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ ‘After the Miracle’ spotlights Helen Keller’s political crusades

• The story of Helen Keller’s childhood is inspirational. As an adult, her uncompromising political views – she was an avowed socialist – made some people uncomfortable.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Prosecutors Tell Trump’s Legal Team He Is a Target of Investigation

• The notice from the office of the special counsel Jack Smith suggested that an indictment was on the horizon in the investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ House Is Paralyzed as Far-Right Rebels Continue Mutiny Against McCarthy

• Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus refused to surrender control of the floor, forcing G.O.P. leaders to scrap votes for the week and leaving the speaker facing what he conceded was “chaos.”

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ From a galaxy far, far away to Cape Town: Star Wars re-imagined

• “Aau’s Song” is an African reimagining of the famous fantasy universe.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Reports: Blinken to visit Beijing within weeks

• The reports come as the chief of U.S. naval operations said he is ‘encouraged’ by a change in tone in ties.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ uni Michigan ☛ Charlie Pappalardo: ‘Shemy’ Schembechler and accountability in the Twitter age

• On Tuesday, Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler published an op-ed in The Michigan Daily in which he apologized for his social media activity. Such interactions — primarily in the form of liking racist and insensitive tweets on Twitter — led to his resignation after public backlash, just two days after his hiring. 

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ ‘Tucker on Twitter’ Is Equal Parts Fox News and Fox Mulder

• The low-fi “Tucker on Twitter” finds the former prime-time host at the intersection of Fox News and Fox Mulder.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Scoop: Fox News says Tucker Carlson breached his contract

• Fox News Wednesday notified Tucker Carlson‘s lawyers that the former prime-time anchor violated his contract with the network when he launched his own Twitter show on Tuesday, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios.

• Why it matters: A breach of contract claim sets Fox News up to explore potential legal action against Carlson, a move that would intensify the already thorny public battle between the two parties.

• Carlson’s lawyers told Axios that any legal action by Fox would violate his First Amendment rights.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ The Indian internet has taken a massive and malicious turn in recent months

• Tanu Kapoor, a 30-year-old media employee from Noida, has blocked 15 international numbers from which she has been receiving calls and WhatsApp messages offering “jobs” since May.

=> ↺ The Gray Zone ☛ Leaks reveal FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info

=> ↺ Index On Censorship ☛ Tiananmen Square? Don’t mention it

• Words or symbols that reference the massacre are notoriously scrubbed from the internet by the Chinese authorities. Last week, this censorship extended to the Sitong Bridge in Beijing, when Chinese language online searches of the bridge yielded no results. It comes after a banner was unfurled on the bridge in 2022 calling for the removal of Chinese president Xi Jinping. A Weibo post by the British Embassy in Beijing showing how the Chinese state media originally reported the massacre (namely in more detail than the silence now, with state media making reference to mass casualties in hospital at the time) was removed by the authorities. The anniversary is sometimes known as “internet maintenance day” because of the number of websites taken offline.

=> ↺ The Print ☛ Pakistani Generals have a history of censoring media. Imran Khan is just the latest victim

• The trial ended in a few minutes: Four lashes would fall on the body of Khawar Naeem Hashmi, accused of defacing the mausoleum of Mohammad Ali Jinnah on Pakistan’s independence day in 1977. He was, arguably, lucky — the other journalists who had joined him in a public protest against military dictatorship were sentenced to five lashes each. Lines were drawn on their backs to ensure the whip would fall with precision; army officers, Hashmi later recalled, would amuse their families by bringing them along to watch.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

• The Cyberspace Administration (CAC) floated the guidelines on Tuesday, framing them as applicable to operators of “short-distance ad hoc networks” – providers of technologies that might enable local networks to promote non-socialist values or not abide by existing laws.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Remembering a Massacre That China Keeps Trying to Erase

• In all my decades of reporting, one of my most searing experiences came in 1989 in Beijing when I watched the Chinese People’s Liberation Army unleash weapons of war on throngs of unarmed pro-democracy protesters.

• So I was appalled on the 34th anniversary of that citywide massacre a few days ago when apologists for the Chinese government insisted that it had never happened. Even worse, I discovered that one of the eyewitnesses they cited to buttress their denial was me.

• All this reflects the Chinese government’s effort to rewrite history, so it seems useful to push back and say what I actually saw that terrible night of June 3-4, 1989.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Russian journalists are calling on Big Tech companies to help stop the Kremlin from blocking YouTube and Telegram Read their message to Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Elon Musk. — Meduza

• Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and independent Russian journalists are calling on Big Tech to help put an end to Russia’s informational shutdown.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ No place in Australia for Nazi symbols: Dreyfus

• Nazi symbols will be publicly banned nationwide and people who display the “evil” insignia could face up to a year in jail.

• The ban will include flags, armbands, T-shirts, and will extend to posting the symbols online.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Jewish groups welcome federal ban on Nazi symbols

• Jewish organisations have applauded a planned nationwide ban on Nazi symbols, following a rise in their use amongst far-right groups.

• New federal laws will see people displaying Nazi insignia face up to a year in jail.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ A Natural History Of Trust & Safety

• In the beginning, there were harms.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Research Shows Twitter Was Missing Known Child Sex Abuse Material

• Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he insisted that stopping child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was his top priority, and while some of his fans insisted that he had magically done so, the fact is that he fired nearly the entire team that was handling that issue, meaning that CSAM was running rampant on the site, and the company seemed to be doing little about it.

=> ↺ Turkey’s media authority fines TV outlets over election coverage

• RTÜK penalized FOX TV, Halk TV, TELE1 and Flash Haber.

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ The Insubmissive Left to Try to Censor the French Government

• This decision arose as a result of pro-government legislators refusing to vote on any amendment aimed at repealing the pension reform.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Free speech or homophobia? French soccer dips into the scrum.

• How do you balance the demands of a sports league that’s promoting a social agenda with the rights of players wanting to express their personal beliefs?

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Kat Timpf: Make America Funny Again!

• The You Can’t Joke About That author says that free speech and dark humor can bring a fragmented country together.

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Journal of Free Speech Law: “Beyond the Watchdog: Using Law to Build Trust in the Press,” by Prof. Erin Carroll

• Just published as part of the symposium on Media and Society After Technological Disruption, edited by Profs. Justin “Gus” Hurwitz & Kyle Langvardt.

=> ↺ Off Guardian ☛ Conspirators for the Constitution: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes “Sedition”

• “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” attributed to George Orwell Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Hong Kong Asks Court to Stop Protest Anthem From Circulating Online

• Efforts to ban “Glory to Hong Kong,” a song popularized during pro-democracy protests in 2019, could set up a legal battle between tech giants and Hong Kong.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Protest song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ dominates local iTunes top 10, hours after gov’t sought ban

• Protest song Glory to Hong Kong dominated all positions in Apple’s Hong Kong iTunes Top 10 on Wednesday, a day after the government sought to ban “unlawful acts” relating to the song, its melody, lyrics and all derivations.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Downloads of protest song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ spike after government seeks court ban

• Injunction would outlaw the dissemination of the song on any platform.

=> ↺ JURIST ☛ Hong Kong government applies for injunction against protest song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’

• The Hong Kong Department of Justice applied to the High Court on Monday for an injunction to prohibit any activity in relation to the song “Glory to Hong Kong” with unlawful intent.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ The Dissenter ☛ Attorneys, Journalists Who Visited Assange Respond To CIA Push To Dismiss Their Lawsuit Against Alleged Spying

=> ↺ [Repeat] CS Monitor ☛ Journalists walk out: Hundreds strike against major paper chain

• Journalists at two dozen local newspapers across the United States walked off the job Monday to demand an end to painful cost-cutting measures and a change of leadership at Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain.

• The strike involves hundreds of journalists at newspapers in eight states, including the Arizona Republic, the Austin American-Statesman, the Bergen Record, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and the Palm Beach Post, according to the NewsGuild, which represents workers at more than 50 Gannett newsrooms. Gannett has said there would be no disruption to its news coverage during the strike, which will last for two days at two of the newspapers and one day for the rest.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ The Daily Caller Says It Will Use Buffy Wicks’ Journalism Bill To Make Sure Google Pays It To Produce More Nonsense

• It seems the propaganda peddlers are no longer even trying to pretend any more how they plan to abuse the bills being pushed by Democrats to “regulate” social media. It would be nice if some of the Democratic politicians actually listened to them. First, we had the story of how the Heritage Foundation, the main think tank of the GOP, flat out said they intended to use the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to censor LGBTQ content as “harmful” to children.

=> ↺ Journalist Fırat Can Arslan detained

• The Mezopotamya Agency reporter was apprehended during a raid at his residence in Ankara.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Police Almost Beat Him To Death. After His Conviction Was Dismissed, Prosecutors Are Recharging Him.

• Joesph Zamora spent nearly two years in prison after being convicted of assaulting police officers. The Washington Supreme Court overturned his conviction, but local prosecutors want to charge him again to show him the “improperness of his behavior.”

=> ↺ Shadowproof ☛ Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Indignation’ By Divide and Dissolve

• Reed is descended from “indigenous people of the so-called United States.” The duo also collectively stated: “Our music is helping carve out space where it isn’t supposed to be. Heavy music is apparently supposed to look, sound, and feel a certain way. Divide and Dissolve is and will continue to be a point of difference.”

=> ↺ The Nation ☛ Pride, in Freedom and Equality

=> ↺ Eleven killed and thirty-two injured in ‘celebrations’

• The Umut Foundation announced a record-high number of casualties and injuries with firearms in celebrations for the election results, for the championship of Galatasaray, and in wedding ceremonies in only eight days.

=> ↺ ECtHR convicts Turkey in case of imprisoned HDP politicians

• The most recent European court ruling adds to the previous judgments against Turkey concerning Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ.

=> ↺ Workers’ Party launches nationwide protests, demands release of imprisoned MP

• Can Atalay, a lawyer and a human rights advocate, was imprisoned after the Gezi Park trial. He has not been released despite being elected as an MP.

=> ↺ JURIST ☛ Canada dispatch: Indigenous women and girls still suffering disproportionate violence four years after government report

• Canadian law students are reporting for JURIST on national and international developments in and affecting Canada. Mélanie Cantin is JURIST’s Chief Correspondent for Canada and a rising 3L at the University of Ottawa. 

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Important Federal District Court Decision on Racial Classifications and Affirmative Action

• On Tuesday, in Nuziard v. Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) federal district court judge Mark T. Pittman issued an injunction against the MBDA’s Business Center Program. These Centers may give assistance only to businesses owned by socially or economically disadvantaged individuals. A Business owned by a “Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, American Indian, Alaska Native,…

=> ↺ Latvia ☛ ‘Baltic anti-fascists’ named a criminal organization by Security Service

• The State Security Service (VDD) in the so-called “Baltic anti-fascists” criminal case has changed the crime’s qualification to a more severe one – the conduct of a criminal organization and participation in crimes committed by such an organization, the VDD said in a statement on June 7.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ APNIC ☛ RIPE 86 bites — QUIC and active network management

• What is challenging active network management?

=> ↺ APNIC ☛ [Podcast] Failed Expectations: 40 years of network history

• How the failures and successes of technology deployment offer valuable lessons.

=> ↺ [Repeat] Quartz ☛ An Indian state is offering free hi-speed internet to 2 million of its poor

• Fourteen thousand poor households and 30,000 government offices of the southern Indian state of Kerala today (June 5) were provided with high-speed [Internet]. But the aim is higher.

• The state’s new service, called Kerala Fibre Optic Network (KFON), is the first such in India and aims to uplink its 35 million citizens, especially 2 million of those considered poor. Launching the project in 2019, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s government declared access to the [Internet] a basic right.

• When completed, it will function on 35,000 kilometres of optical fibre network across Kerala’s 14 districts.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ $400 Million Later And The FCC Is JUST Starting To Map Broadband Accurately. Sort Of.

• We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide” (and the billions in subsidies thrown at telecom giants to solve the problem), the U.S. never had any real idea where broadband is or isn’t available. You can probably imagine that’s a problem given the decades of policy proposals and billions of dollars thrown at the problem.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Universal Says On-Demand Film Strategy Has Increased Audience

• The studio let viewers rent or buy movies earlier for a higher price. This made more than $1 billion in less than three years, with nearly no decrease in box-office sales.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Meta will let you keep your Instagram and Facebook accounts separate after German antitrust concerns

• The German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) announced that Meta will introduce a new overview of data sharing regulations for users of Facebook and Instagram, addressing concerns by EU antitrust regulators over the company’s data collection services.

=> ↺ European Commission ☛ Antitrust: Commission carries out unannounced inspections in the synthetic turf sector

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 07 Jun 2023 The European Commission is carrying out unannounced inspections at the premises of companies active in the synthetic turf industry in several Member States.

Patents

=> ↺ Telex (Hungary) ☛ Viktor Orbán: We have begun preparations for the EU Presidency [Ed: Orbán running EU with his mates will just about right given how much corruption EU has been involved in lately, inc. the illegal Unified Patent Court (which Hungary ruled unconstitutional)]

• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced on Wednesday that Hungary has begun preparations for the EU Presidency, the Hungarian State News Agency, MTI reports. Referring to Hungary’s turn to hold the rotating presidency in the second half of 2024, he said that there was no shortage of experience and preparation, as his government was preparing for its second presidency, which was almost unprecedented in Europe.

=> ↺ Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Court Finds that it would be Inconvenient for Major Multinational Corporation (Microsoft) to Litigate in Texas

• In the recent case of In re Microsoft, 23-128 (Fed. Cir. 2023), the Federal Circuit once again granted a writ of mandamus, ordering a patent infringement case to be transferred out of Judge Albright’s courtroom in the Western District of Texas (WDTX). This decision was made under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), which allows for the transfer of cases for the convenience of the parties and in the interest of justice.

• Microsoft, a multinational corporation with a significant presence in many U.S. states, including Texas, is no stranger to litigation in the Lone Star state. The company’s substantial business activities in Texas, which include marketing, selling, and servicing the accused products, did not significantly impact the 1404(a) jurisprudence in this case.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Variety ☛ Why Prince Changed His Name to an Unpronounceable Symbol 30 Years Ago, and What Happened Next

• GOLD: At one point he was in my office, and he’s kind of complaining that Warner Bros. won’t let him release all the albums he wants to release, basically saying, “Let me get off the label and finish the contract by just delivering a bunch of music” [which is essentially what he ultimately did]. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he knows we know exactly what he’s doing, so I say to him, “You know, we paid you a huge amount of money for each one of these records as an advance, and we need to be able to market them and release two and three singles and give the marketplace some space between them. We can’t just release a record every three months.” And it was really one of the few times he broke character with me, he says something like, “You know that everybody thinks these albums are carefully crafted, conceptualized things? I’m in the studio constantly, and when I get enough songs that I think, hey, together, there’s a record, it’s a record. So I have a lot of inventory and I want to release a lot of albums.” That was the one time we had a real conversation, rather than him kind of fronting one of those almost pantomime things he was famous for.

• It never got contentious with any of us — it might have gotten contentious with his lawyers talking to the business affairs people and things like that. But he was kin of doing his talking by press release, and he was showing up still at Warner Bros.’ offices and even at a marketing meeting — with the “slave” thing on his face! But there was never a time that he wasn’t talking to us or I couldn’t get him on the phone.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Vox ☛ How streaming caused the TV writers strike

• At the core of this dispute is streaming and how it has revolutionized the industry. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given consumers an unprecedented array of films and TV shows and opened the door to new voices that don’t have to adhere to mainstream network formats. On the other hand, it has also changed how television gets produced, the role writers play, and how they get paid.

• We interviewed four television writers and showrunners about how streaming has changed how they work, how their incomes have taken a hit, and why it has become harder than ever to build a career.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Hollywood’s hot strike summer

• This fall might be a great time to catch up on your streaming list — Hollywood has one union on strike, and studios are facing more labor strife that could result in further shutdowns this summer.

• Why it matters: The streaming era has fundamentally broken the industry, and that has Hollywood’s biggest unions united to a degree we haven’t seen in decades.

• State of play: The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studio side in union negotiations, is trying to use the same playbook it did to end the last writers strike in 2007-08:

• [...]

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ What Remains of Content ID Lawsuit Seems Unlikely to Change YouTube

• Maria Schneider’s lawsuit against YouTube began with great ambitions to vastly improve the copyright enforcement landscape on YouTube to the benefit of artists everywhere. With a jury trial just days away, but with class-action status already denied, what’s left of the lawsuit could still deliver a win for the plaintiffs. Fulfilling ambitions will probably have to wait until another time.

=> ↺ Ruben Schade ☛ Goodbye Astrud Gilberto ♡

• She was my introduction to bossa nova and latin jazz, which have since become my favourite genres of music. I had a poster of her in my bedroom as a teenager. I bonded with my parents over her music, and it got me through some rough years.

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