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● 07.13.23

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● Links 13/07/2023: Wireshark 4.0.7 and BeagleV-Ahead

Posted in News Roundup at 9:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Ars Technica ☛ Linux could be 3% of global desktops. What happened to Windows?

• According to one measurement by one firm, Linux reached 3.07 percent market share of global desktop operating systems in June 2023. It’s a notable first for the more than 30-year-old operating system, though other numbers in Statcounter’s chart open it up to many more interpretations. It’s either the year of the Linux desktop or a notable asterisk—your call.

• As Statcounter explains, its numbers come from tracking code installed on more than 1.5 million websites across the globe, capturing roughly 5 billion page views per month. Statcounter says it does not collate, weigh, or otherwise adjust its data aside from correcting for bots and Google Chrome’s prerendering. Laptops are included in “desktop” because there is no easy way to separate them. And they’re subject to revision for up to 45 days after publication.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Converting NFSD to use iomap and folios

• Chuck Lever led a filesystem session at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit on the Linux NFS server, which is also known as NFSD. He wanted to talk about converting the network filesystem to use iomap; that kind of conversion was the topic of the previous session at the summit. Beyond that, he wanted to discuss using folios, which has been a frequent topic at recent LSFMM+BPF gatherings, including this year.

• Lever began with the announcement that NFSD is “under new management”. Bruce Fields, who had been the maintainer since 2007 or so, has taken a sabbatical from the IT world (“he is well, I am not trying to cover anything up there”). Lever became the maintainer of NFSD for the kernel in January 2022 and Jeff Layton joined him as co-maintainer in July 2022.

• The Linux NFSD has some features that no other implementation in the industry has, including NFS over RDMA, with support for “just about any fabric you can imagine”; the NFS client also works over RDMA. Support for NFS v4.2, which is pretty rare in other implementations, is also present; “those are things that we can be proud of and I hope I can extend that winning streak a little bit”.

=> ↺ LWN ☛ The first half of the 6.5 merge window

• The first days of the 6.5 merge window have been a bit calmer than usual, with “only” 4,000 non-merge changesets having been pulled into the mainline repository. Those changesets include a fair amount of significant work, though. Read on for LWN’s summary of the first set of changes merged for the next major kernel release.

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Documenting counted-by relationships in kernel data structures

• The C language is expressive in many ways, but it still does not have ways to express many of the relationships between fields in a data structure. That gap can be at least partially filled, though, if one is willing to create and use non-standard extensions. The adoption of of those extensions, in the form of the __counted_by() macro, has been merged for the 6.5 kernel release, even though the compiler feature it depends on has not yet been finalized.

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Improving i_version

• The i_version field in struct inode is meant to track changes to the data or metadata of a file. There are some problems with the way that i_version is being handled in the kernel, so Jeff Layton led a filesystem session at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit to discuss them and what to do about them. For the most part, there are solutions in the works that will resolve most of the larger issues.

• Layton’s motivation for improving the state of i_version handling is NFS. Currently, the NFSv3 code watches file/directory timestamps (access time, or atime, and change time, or ctime) to indicate when its cache should be invalidated. But those times are recorded with one-jiffy (1-10ms) resolution; a lot can happen in a jiffy on today’s hardware. That can lead to problems with the client thinking that its cache is up-to-date when it really is not.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA Vulkan Beta driver 525.47.31 released

• NVIDIA has released a fresh update to their Vulkan Beta driver for developers with version 525.47.31 now available for testing.

Applications

=> ↺ Neowin ☛ Wireshark 4.0.7

• Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.

=> ↺ Linux Links ☛ 12 Best Free Linux Voice Over IP (VoIP) Software

• Softphones are user based clients for making and receiving voice and video communication over the IP network, usually permitting integration with USB and IP Phones instead of a computer’s microphone and speakers (or headset). This article selects the best softphones available for Linux.

• For enterprise or business markets, VoIP enables the enterprise to manage a single network (the IP network) instead of separate voice and data networks, while enabling advanced and flexible capabilities to the end user. With the credit crunch still to take full effect, it’s even more important for small businesses to minimize their costs. One way to reduce expenditure is to switch from a normal telephone contract to using VoIP. Calls made using VoIP work and sound like normal telephone calls, but cost significantly less. Public Branch Exchange (PBX) is a private telephone exchange which routes calls internally and provides call queuing, hunt groups, conference calling, voicemail and more. The PBX enables many phones to use a single VoIP connection.

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Emacs for Android [LWN.net]

• The Emacs editor is not tied to the Linux kernel; indeed, it was created some years before Linux existed. The Emacs code base is intended to be portable, and the editor runs, with varying levels of support, on a wide variety of systems. Recently, an energetic developer has worked to extend the set of supported systems to Android; the result is a working port, but whether that port will be accepted into the Emacs mainline is the topic of ongoing conversation.

• On the last day of 2022, Po Lu announced that a preliminary Emacs port had been pushed to a feature branch in the Emacs Git repository. It was “”about 14,000 lines of stuff”” with basic functionality working; Lu asked for help with some of the remaining issues. Lu came back in January with more suggestions for projects that others could take on. In February, the port was declared to be “”more or less feature complete”” and, at the beginning of March, Lu requested that this work be merged into the Emacs trunk “”in the next couple of days””. Emacs maintainer Eli Zaretskii proved reluctant at the time and, as of this writing, that merge has not yet taken place.

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Termux: Linux applications on Android [LWN.net]

• Termux is an Android app that provides a Linux environment and terminal emulator for such devices. Most command-line software can be used quite easily with Termux, and GUI software can be run by installing a few extra apps. It is an excellent option for Android users who want to run Linux software occasionally on a device more portable than a laptop but do not want to use a dedicated Linux phone due to the cost or limitations of such devices.

• The Android operating system runs on the Linux kernel, but it cannot run most desktop Linux software on its own because its user space is almost entirely different. One of the most important differences is the absence of the GNU C library (glibc); Android uses Google’s custom Bionic C library implementation, released under the three-clause BSD license, instead. Android’s filesystem layout is also different from that of a typical Linux system, necessitating adaptations to run standard Linux software.

• Because of these differences, software generally must be compiled specifically for Termux. The app’s developers maintain repositories containing rebuilds of widely-used command-line Linux software, as well as many GUI programs.

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ elFinder: Open-source Free Feature-Rich Web File Manager

• elFinder is an incredibly useful open-source file manager that can greatly simplify your web browsing experience.

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ Webterminal: Open-source Web-based SSH Terminal with Multi-user Support

• The Webterminal, implemented by Django, is a project that is primarily focused on DevOps and Continuous Delivery. With its ability to support almost 90% of remote management protocols including VNC, SSH, RDP, Telnet, and SFTP, it is a versatile platform that caters to a wide range of user needs.

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ Spacedrive: A Futuristic File Manager For Your Desktop and Mobile

• Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file manager, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem (VDFS) written in Rust.

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ PlainApp: A Free Libre App to Manage Your Android Phone Through Web Browser

• PlainApp is a remarkable open-source application that can greatly simplify your life. With its user-friendly interface, you can seamlessly manage your phone’s content via a web browser, which means that you can easily access your files, videos, music, contacts, SMS, calls, and more from your desktop!

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ XBackBone: Web-based File Manager with Multi-user Support

• XBackBone is a simple, self-hosted, lightweight PHP file manager that support the instant sharing tool ShareX and *NIX systems. It supports uploading and displaying images, GIF, video, code, formatted text, and file downloading and uploading. Also have a web UI with multi-user management, past uploads history and search support.

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ Open Metadata: Discover, Manage and Collaborate on your Data

• OpenMetaData is a comprehensive platform that offers a range of functionalities, including data discovery, data lineage, data quality, observability, governance, and team collaboration. It is an open-source project that has gained immense popularity among companies across various industry verticals, thanks to its vibrant community and adoption.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Beebom ☛ How to Change Directory in Linux Terminal

• The terminal is a powerful tool that makes interacting with any Linux-based operating system easy. One such task that every user needs to do is navigating the file system. In Linux, to change the directory from the terminal, you can use the cd (change directory) command. This may seem like a daunting task for beginners, but fear not, as we are here to help. In this article, we explain the process to change directory in the Linux terminal.

=> ↺ RIPE ☛ BGP Path Attribute Filtering – A Powerful Tool to Mitigate Alien Attributes

• On 2 June 2023, there was a disruption in the global Internet routing, caused by the inability of BGP border routers to process an “alien” BGP Attribute. A nice RIPE Labs article about this event was published back then. Well, the alien turned out to be a “legal alien” – a known attribute, introduced by a Standard Track RFC, but few years later on deprecated by another, newer RFC.

=> ↺ OMG! Linux ☛ Monitor System Resources on Linux with Mission Center

• Linux system monitoring tools aren’t in short supply, with everything from good-looking GUI apps through to powerful command-line software available — choice that is a boon for anyone wanting to keep a watchful eye on the health and performance of their Linux installs.

• Mission Center is another valuable addition to the mix.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ Autoflash multiple Raspberry Pi Picos in no time at all

• This means you can plug in, for example, ten Picos one after another, and have them flashed without the need to drag a file into the Pico drive. Perfect to streamline the preparation for workshops, computing lessons, and Raspberry Jams.

=> ↺ APNIC ☛ On Internet blowback

• In our Internet scanning experiments over the years, we have observed that some simple probes (for example, a TCP SYN or ICMP echo request) yield large volumes of packets in response although at most a few packets would be expected from the protocol specifications. We call this unexpected response traffic ‘blowback’.

• Blowback presents a hurdle to Internet-scanning measurements as experimenters must cope with blowback bursts and distinguish the blowback from the traffic relevant to their study. More problematically, the blowback can be used as part of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks — once the attacker identifies the targets that trigger blowback, the attacker can use these targets to reflect and amplify the attacker’s traffic.

=> ↺ HowTo Forge ☛ How to Set up PostgreSQL Replication on Debian 11

• PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database management system focusing on extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL is an advanced and enterprise-class RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) that supports both SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) querying.

Games

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Get a bunch of cyberpunk games in this latest bundle

• Love the whole cyberpunk theme? Humble have put up the Cyberpunk Playground bundle. Here’s what to expect for compatibility on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ After being removed from Steam, Betrayer is now free on GOG

• After vanishing from Steam quite a while ago in 2021, Betrayer from Blackpowder Games has resurfaced on GOG and it’s free to add to your account.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Infinity Engine replacement GemRB 0.9.2 improves Planescape: Torment support

• GemRB is a free and open source game engine reimplementation for Infinity Engine games including Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale 1 and more.

=> ↺ Aurélien Gâteau ☛ June 2023 monthly update

• I started a new vehicle! This time it’s an old Formula 1 car, inspired from the Lotus 25. It currently looks like this: [...]

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Vampire Survivors switching to new game engine on August 17

• The smash indie hit Vampire Survivors is planning to finally move over to their newer and upgraded game engine on August 17th.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Realms Deep returns with more explosive games on September 30th

• Ready for more first-person shooter goodies? 3D Realms announced last week that the event is set to return on September 30th. A really nice event for fans of retro / boomer shooters, as there will be some fun stuff announced.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Tabletop inspired roguelike adventure Abalon adds Linux & SteamOS support

• Abalon (formerly known as Summoners Fate), a roguelike adventure game inspired by tabletop classics recently announced official Linux and SteamOS support. They mentioned the Native port should offer “a dramatic performance increase and better build stability over running via Proton”.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands releasing August 8

• Following the Kickstarter success in 2019, Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands finally has a released date and it’s coming soon on August 8th. The Kickstarter pulled in 2,247 backers pledging $59,202 – so hopefully we’re about to see another great game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Make Use Of ☛ 12 Incredibly Useful KDE Apps That Are Worth Trying

• KDE Plasma is one of the most customizable and feature-rich desktop environments for Linux. But a desktop is of little use without a bunch of apps to support it. Luckily, the KDE community has developed hundreds of nifty little apps that you can install on your KDE desktop for free.

• Here are some of the most useful KDE apps that will be a fantastic addition to your software arsenal. The list includes a lightweight paint program, a full-blown video editor, and everything in between, so rest assured, there’s something for everyone here.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ MWL ☛ New FreeBSD Journal column out

• The new issue of the FreeBSD Journal is out, including my We Get Letters column. Before you click on the browser-based version, know there’s a PDF.

=> ↺ Undeadly ☛ pkg_*: the road forward

• An anonymous submitter reminded us that Marc Espie (espie@) posted a summary of the state of OpenBSD packages in a message to the tech mailing list with the subject pkg_*: the road forward.

=> ↺ Dan Langille ☛ pkg: No SRV record found for the repo ‘local’

• Today I removed and added the same package. The add failed.

• [...]

• Success. I’m going to guess that recent pkg changes have caused this issue.

=> ↺ Ruben Schade ☛ An even tinier NAS

• Behind Clara’s and my TV sits a monstrously large Antec 300 fitted to the gills with hard drives. It weighs as much as a school bus, and makes even more noise than one when performing ZFS scrubs, but wow it works well. I was able to consolidate five machines into the one, thanks in part to FreeBSD bhyve and jails.

=> ↺ DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ ChiBUG: meeting July 18

• If you are near Chicago on July 18th, go to the ChiBUG meeting.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Oracle Takes On Red Hat In Linux Code Fight

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu ☛ Canonical Kubernetes 1.28 pre-announcement

=> ↺ Ubuntu ☛ Large language models (LLMs): what, why, how?

• Large language models (LLMs) are machine-learning models specialised in understanding natural language. They became famous once ChatGPT was widely adopted around the world, but they have

• [...] LLMs are suitable to generate translations or content summaries. This blog will explain large language models (LLMs), including their benefits, challenges, famous projects and what the future holds.

=> ↺ Ubuntu ☛ How to choose an OS for software development in automotive

• Automotive as an industry is constantly looking for ways to improve its processes and efficiency. The one common tool that is at the intersection of all software development activities is the operating system (OS). From advanced simulation tools to new vehicle designs, the OS has to be reliable and provide the best platforms for a maximum number of purposes.

• Engineers and IT professionals have different requirements. Developers, for instance, tend to prefer Linux. Yet, Windows still dominates the professional desktop space and has management tooling IT admins are familiar with. How then, can you empower your team with an OS that is compatible, flexible, scalable and easy to use for software development in automotive? In this blog post, we’ll go through the key considerations to keep in mind when choosing a Linux operating system. We’ll also explore how Ubuntu’s feature set can help you meet those needs. 

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Linux Gizmos ☛ BeagleV-Ahead pocket computer powered by RISC-V SoC

• BeagleBoard.org launched today the open-source BeagleV-Ahead. This new open-source RISC-V Single Board Computer is powered by the Alibaba T-head System-on-Chip which combines a quad-core RISC-V CPU, 4 TOPS NPU and 50 GFLOPS Imagination BXM-4 GPU.

• As previously mentioned, the BeagleV-Ahead accommodates the Alibaba-T-Head TH1520 SoC with the following features…

• BeagleBoard mentions that the board adopts the popular BeagleBone-style form factor, ensuring compatibility with existing BeagleBone capes.

• The product announcement additionally mentions that “the board comes with Yocto installed out of the box with Ubuntu & Fedora working prototypes available, providing users with a familiar and robust development environment.”

=> ↺ CNX Software ☛ BeagleV-Ahead quad-core RISC-V SBC offers BeagleBone Capes compatibility

• Ubuntu 23.04 and Yocto Linux images are provided for the board along with source code, and work-in-progress documentation can be found on beagleboard.org. Like other boards from the foundation, the BeagleV-Ahead is open-source with hardware design files available for download. You can also get support in the forums.

• That’s another great development for the RISC-V ecosystem as a whole, and for the T-Head T1520 processor which is already used in the LicheePi 4A SBC and has plenty of commits in the upcoming Linux 6.5 release. That also means we now have a BeagleBone board with performance roughly equivalent to the Raspberry Pi 4 while keeping the many I/Os from the BeagleBone form factor. It does lack PRU support from the Texas Instruments SoC, but only time will tell how much it matters to various projects designed for the BeagleBone Black and compatible.

=> ↺ Linux Gizmos ☛ Ambiq reveals Apollo4 Lite SoCs for low-power portable devices

• This week, Ambiq launched two powerful and energy-efficient System-on-Chips designed for a wide range of consumer wearable applications including healthcare products. Both variants are equipped with a 2D/2.5D graphics accelerator and one of them support Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Andrew Hutchings ☛ Acorn Archimedes A5000: Restoration Part 3

• Last time we were at a point where things were mostly working, but there was more work to do on the motherboard. It turns out there was even more damage to repair!

=> ↺ Arduino ☛ Introducing UNO R4 WiFi support in the Arduino Cloud

• We are excited to announce that the Arduino Cloud now supports the UNO R4 WiFi board, providing makers with seamless connectivity and enhanced features.

• Building upon the recent release of the much-anticipated UNO R4 in our store, this new integration significantly amplifies the capabilities of the Arduino Cloud. The UNO R4 WiFi is a revolutionary addition to the Arduino family, combining the widely popular UNO R3 form factor with built-in WiFi connectivity. It is perfect for all users, from beginners to experts, wanting to explore the forefront of innovation and IoT projects creation.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Building A Digital Compass With An Arduino

• The magnetic compass has been a crucial navigational tool for around a thousand years or so, perhaps longer. While classical versions still work perfectly well, you can now get digital magnetometers that work in much the same way. [mircemk] decided to whip up a digital compass to demonstrate the value of these parts.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

=> ↺ JCS ☛ Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API

• I’ve been operating Pushover’s public-facing API for over a decade now and I thought I’d pass on some advice for those creating a new API.

• Pushover’s API might be unusual in that it is used by a wide range of devices (embedded IoT things, legacy servers, security cameras, etc.) and HTTP libraries, rather than mostly being accessed from JavaScript in the latest web browsers. It also doesn’t process sensitive financial information, so the advice given here may not be applicable to something operating like Stripe’s API.

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ Uncovering History with R – A Look at the HistData Package

• Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! Are you curious about how data analysis can enrich your research and understanding? Look no further! Today, we explore the world of historical data analysis using R’s powerful package: HistData. This package contains a collection of more than 30 datasets that can be used to explore historical trends and patterns.

=> ↺ Mahesh Balakrishnan ☛ What we talk about when we talk about System Design

• Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet practical designs. This design process can be characterized as “fighting complexity with abstraction”: in any complex environment, how do you corral that complexity into cleanly defined boxes (or more technically, abstractions) and then divide functionality across these boxes?

• Later, when I switched to “real” jobs in industry (ranging from mission-critical production services to applied R&D), I found that the same design process worked quite well in solving real-world problems in production settings2. In these settings, the sources of complexity are varied (hardware, software, distributed protocols, org boundaries, deployment cycles, customers…) and so are the end-goals (reliability, scale, code velocity, performance, dollar cost); but abstraction-driven design still enabled my teams to hit production goals quickly and safely.

• This post is a dump of some rules to follow in this particular design process.

=> ↺ Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Failover

• To reduce the risk of miscommunication we need to distinguish between relevant terms because what you think may not be what you say and what you say may not be what is heard and what is heard may not be what is implemented!

Leftovers

=> ↺ BBC ☛ Threads: The BBC drama which affected a generation of viewers

• With only four channels to choose from, the harrowing post-apocalyptic Cold War drama found its way into millions of homes – and led to sleepless nights for many who saw the Sheffield-based dystopian drama unfold.

• Written by Kes author Barry Hines, the film showed the unrelenting impact of a thermonuclear blast on ordinary Britons – in graphic detail.

Science

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Ancient Trilobites Had Crystal Eyes, And They’re Still a Mystery

• Pure calcite is transparent, so, in theory, light could penetrate it and be focused, where the photoreceptors might detect it. As with insect vision, there was likely a trade-off: Trilobites probably didn’t see in high spatial resolution, but they were particularly sensitive to motion.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ France24 ☛ India promotes digital detoxes to combat excessive screen time

• In 2022, Indians spent an average of nearly five hours a day on their mobiles – the eighth highest figure in the world, according to a report by analysts from data.ai Intelligence. Social media giants are accused of fuelling the addiction. Excessive use of smartphones can cause social isolation and mental health issues, to the extent that some Indian doctors are now specialising in screen addiction. Meanwhile, a group of villages in southern India are imposing mandatory 90-minute digital detoxes. Our correspondents report.

=> ↺ Jacobin Magazine ☛ This Little-Known Corporation Is Making a Fortune Kicking People Off Medicaid

• Along with draining public finances, Maximus and other Medicaid redetermination contractors are incentivized to advocate for making Medicaid even more of a bureaucratic nightmare for recipients.

• “If you look at the payment structure of these contracts, the more red tape, the more money Maximus makes,” Hatcher said. “The harder it is to get enrolled, the easier to get kicked off — the more money Maximus and contractors are making.”

=> ↺ NPR ☛ So your tween wants a smartphone? Read this first

• Before you click “place order” on that smartphone, pause and consider a few insights from a person who makes a living helping parents and tweens navigate the murky waters of smartphones and social media.

• Emily Cherkin spent more than a decade as a middle school teacher during the early aughts. She watched firsthand as the presence of smartphones transformed life for middle schoolers. For the past four years, she’s been working as screen-time consultant, coaching parents about digital technology.

• Her first piece of advice about when to give a child a smartphone and allow them to access social media was reiterated by other experts over and over again: Delay, delay, delay.

=> ↺ [Old] NPR ☛ ‘Anti-dopamine parenting’ can curb a kid’s craving for screens or sweets

• Turns out, smartphones and sugary foods do have something in common with drugs: They trigger surges of a neurotransmitter deep inside your brain called dopamine. Although drugs cause much bigger spikes of dopamine than, say, social media or an ice cream cone, these smaller spikes still influence our behavior, especially in the long run. They shape our habits, our diets, our mental health and how we spend our free time. They can also cause much conflict between parents and children.

=> ↺ NPR ☛ Heat waves in Europe killed more than 61,600 people last summer, a study estimates

• Researchers analyzed data from the Eurostat mortality database for 35 countries to estimate that 61,672 people died from heat-related illness between May 30 and September 4. Italy, Spain and Germany had the highest number of heat-attributable deaths overall.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

=> ↺ Digital First Media ☛ Judge rules Michigan law broadly bans ‘undue possession’ of voting machines

• McMillen issued her 13-page ruling Wednesday, stipulating that a Michigan law barring “undue possession” of a tabulator wasn’t limited to an ongoing election or to the period before results were tallied. Under state law, undue possession of a tabulator is a felony.

=> ↺ Bridge Michigan ☛ Judge paves way for charges in Michigan vote machine tampering probe

• But it’s clear Michigan law only allows access to voting machines with permission of the Secretary of State or through a court order, such as a search warrant, Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Phyllis McMillen ruled Wednesday, siding with Hilson.

• McMillen also declared that the undue possession law is applicable at any time, not just during an election or before the final results are determined.

=> ↺ The Conversation ☛ AI might eventually be an extinction threat, but it poses more pressing risks

• But whatever you think of such warnings, an existential threat to humanity is likely to be a threat only in the longer term. There are much more tangible risks in the near and medium term. So what are these and how worried should we be?

=> ↺ EDRI ☛ Civil society calls on EU to protect people’s rights in the AI Act ‘trilogue’ negotiations

• For the AI Act to be effectively enforced, negotiators need to push back against Big Tech’s lobbying efforts to undermine the regulation. This is especially important when it comes to risk-classification of AI systems. This classification needs to be objective and must not leave room for AI developers to self-determine whether their systems are ‘significant’ enough to be classified as high-risk and require legal scruity. Tech companies, with their profit-making incentives, will always want to under-classify their own AI systems.

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft reveals Chinese hackers breached US government emails

• A Chinese-based hacking group has breached Microsoft email accounts belonging to two dozen government agencies, including the State Department, in the United States and Western Europe, Microsoft Corp. and U.S. national security officials revealed late Tuesday.

• The issue was discovered when U.S. cybersecurity experts reported to Microsoft a troubling vulnerability in the Microsoft 365 cloud environment on June 16 by detecting suspicious email activity.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Convening public benefit and charitable foundations working in open domains (OSI blog) [Ed: Yet another front group for Microsoft et al]

Security

=> ↺ Hackers use Rekoobe Backdoor to Attack Linux Systems [Ed: The issue here is bad configurations, not Linux, and they focus too much on what's done to already-compromised systems, not the means or cause of compromise]

• Rekoobe is a notorious backdoor that primarily targets Linux environments, and it’s actively exploited by the threat actors, mainly a Chinese threat group, APT31.

• This notorious backdoor was discovered in 2015 for the first time, while an updated version of it resurfaced in 2018 that was exploited by the threat actors in several attacks.

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (erlang, symfony, thunderbird, and yajl), Fedora (cutter-re, kernel, rizin, and yt-dlp), Red Hat (grafana), SUSE (kernel and python-Django), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet7 and firefox).

=> ↺ Bloomberg ☛ Two Teens Accused of Masterminding Hacks on Grand Theft Auto and Uber

• Two UK teenagers were accused of being key members of the notorious hacking group Lapsus$, with prosecutors alleging that the pair were involved in hacks on companies including Nvidia Corp., Rockstar Games Inc., and Uber Technologies Inc.

• Arion Kurtaj, 18, and a 17-year-old boy, who can’t be named for legal reasons, were hit with joint charges including serious computer misuse, blackmail and fraud against BT Group Plc, and Nvidia.

=> ↺ Reuters ☛ Russian hackers lured embassy workers in Ukraine with ad for a cheap BMW

• Hackers suspected of working for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency targeted dozens of diplomats at embassies in Ukraine with a fake used car advert in a bid to break into their computers, according to a cybersecurity firm report published on Wednesday.

• The wide-reaching espionage activity targeted diplomats working in at least 22 of the roughly 80 foreign missions in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, analysts at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 research division said in the report.

=> ↺ Data Breaches ☛ UK: Man jailed for more than three years for attempting to extort money from the company he worked for [Ed: British police can hold people accountable when it punishes not a corporation but an individual.]

=> ↺ Data Breaches ☛ UK: Man jailed for more than three years for attempting to extort money from the company he worked for [Ed: British police can hold people accountable when it punishes not a corporation but an individual.]

• A 28-year-old man who tried to extort money from the company he worked for has been jailed for three years and seven months.

• At Reading Crown Court today (11/7) Ashley Liles, of Fleetwood, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, was sentenced for blackmail and unauthorised access to a computer with intent to commit other offences.

=> ↺ Data Breaches ☛ Former Security Engineer For International Technology Company Arrested For Defrauding Decentralized Cryptocurrency Exchange

• Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Chad Plantz, the Special Agent in Charge of the San Diego Field Office of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), and Tyler Hatcher, the Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office of the Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), announced the unsealing of an Indictment charging SHAKEEB AHMED with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with his attack on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (the “Crypto Exchange”). AHMED was arrested this morning in New York, New York, and will be presented this afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger.

=> ↺ The Record ☛ Australian infrastructure company Ventia hit with cyberattack

• The Australian infrastructure services provider Ventia is dealing with a cyberattack that began this weekend.

• On Saturday, the company said it identified a cyber intrusion and took some “key systems” offline to contain the incident. It did not respond to requests for comment about whether it is a ransomware attack, but taking systems offline is an action typically taken in response to such an incident.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ The Conversation ☛ AI scam calls imitating familiar voices are a growing problem – here’s how they work

• Now, the technology to create an audio deepfake, a realistic copy of a person’s voice, is becoming increasingly common. To create a realistic copy of someone’s voice you need data to train the algorithm. This means having lots of audio recordings of your intended target’s voice. The more examples of the person’s voice that you can feed into the algorithms, the better and more convincing the eventual copy will be.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Bruce Schneier ☛ Google Is Using Its Vast Data Stores to Train AI

• No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years: [...]

=> ↺ Reuters ☛ Apple opens store on China’s WeChat platform

• Tencent’s (0700.HK) WeChat said on Tuesday that iPhone maker Apple (AAPL.O) had opened a store on its social media platform, marking an expansion of the U.S. firm’s retail channels in the world’s second largest economy.

• The announcement by WeChat, China’s dominant messaging app which also provides e-commerce, livestreaming and payment services, said users would be able to buy Apple products including iPhones, iPads and Macs from the store.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ Google’s New Search Tool Could Eat the Internet Alive

• But all of the past changes could pale in comparison to what comes next. Google Search, like the rest of the [Internet], is pivoting to generative AI. The first step is Search Generative Experience, an experimental tool currently available as a public beta. Instead of sending you off to other corners of the web, more search results appear within Google. Sort of like ChatGPT, it pulls information from various websites, rewords it, and puts that text on top of your search results—pushing down any links you see. In the process, it stifles traffic to the rest of the [Internet], lessening the very incentive to post online. With AI, Google Search might eventually set off a doom loop for the web as we know it.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Mandiant ☛ The GRU’s Disruptive Playbook

• On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with troops massed on the border of the two countries that had been building since the previous fall. As Mandiant has detailed previously in reports such as M-Trends 2023 and other resources available in our Ukraine Crisis Resource Center, we have tracked Russian cyber operations against Ukraine both leading up to and following the invasion. We categorize these operations stretching back before the start of the war on February 24, 2022, into six phases, spanning access operations, cyber espionage, waves of disruptive attacks, and information operations.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: A Yellen in the China Shop

• Given where the Biden regime sets the bar for its trans–Pacific statecraft these days, you have to wonder whether they chant “Limbo lower now!” as they send off the next official on one of these pointless demarches.

Environment

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable?

• In the next 30 years, according to an analysis by the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, much of the U.S. could experience temperatures that the National Weather Service puts in its “extreme danger” category. Currently, about 8 million people are facing temperatures higher than 125 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end; by 2053, an estimated 107 million people will. Not all of them will be living in the Southwest, but the region will suffer. Climate experts are reluctant to say whether this summer’s extremes will become the norm, but they do predict that our region will keep breaking records.

=> ↺ FAIR ☛ ‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’

• Janine Jackson: We think of pipelines and coal mines as arenas of the fight over climate policy, but another battlefield, rarely in the spotlight, is buildings. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the US, and about the same proportion of greenhouse gasses produced.

• There’s an obvious social gain in adapting buildings to climate realities, making them not just energy efficient, but future-proofed against predictable weather events.

• Many cities were working on building codes to reflect that need, until industry groups said, “Not so fast.”

=> ↺ Vice Media Group ☛ You’re Not Imagining It: The Ocean Has Changed Color Over 20 Years, Study Determines

• Climate change is altering the color of the oceans, making them greener over time, according to a new study that analyzed 20 years of specialized satellite observations.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ The North Atlantic ocean is the warmest it’s ever been

• Scientists are still examining why this year in particular is so off the charts. “There are multiple contributing factors,” said Sean Birkel, a climatologist at the University of Maine. Birkel and other scientists observe three things happening: there’s an El Niño in the Pacific, a large scale pattern in the jet stream that has developed over North America, and record warm temperatures across the North Atlantic that’s associated with weak atmospheric circulation.“These are likely all connected, but to what extent and the details, we don’t know yet.”

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ Boiling the Ocean

• All these numbers and stats easily start to blur. When everything’s a disaster, many of us become numb to climate-change news. But consider the following: 54 million Americans could experience triple-digit weather this week. Phoenix, Arizona, may break its all-time record for consecutive days above 110 degrees. Death Valley could hit a whopping 130 on Sunday. None of this is a mere inconvenience. It can be lethal. The climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First, described the experience of walking 10 blocks in Phoenix on a 115-degree day in a recent essay: “After walking three blocks, I felt dizzy. After seven blocks, my heart was pounding. After 10 blocks, I thought I was a goner.”

=> ↺ TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Vermont hit by 2nd day of floods as muddy water reaches the tops of parking meters in capital city

• A storm that dumped two months of rain in two days is bringing more flooding across Vermont. Many communities had been marooned by high water, though officials say a dam just upstream from the state capital of Montpelier appears to be holding. The slow-moving storm unleashed rivers from their banks and caused flash flooding in parts of Vermont and New York, and rivers are threatening to overflow in Connecticut. One person in New York’s Hudson Valley died as she was trying to leave her home during flash flooding. Officials say the storm has already wrought tens of millions of dollars in damage.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Science News ☛ How Kenya is helping its neighbors develop geothermal energy

• The country’s first geothermal well was drilled there in the 1950s. By 1981, Kenya had its first geothermal power plant, harnessing a renewable resource that taps into heat generated deep within the Earth. Today, Naivasha’s Olkaria geothermal power project plus a small facility at another site are capable of generating 963 megawatts of electricity when running at full power.

• At the end of last year, Kenya ranked seventh on the list of top geothermal energy countries in the world. Geothermal accounts for 47 percent of the country’s total energy production — a percentage that’s growing. The only other geothermal energy producer in Africa, Ethiopia, started production in 1998 and has an installed capacity of just 7.5 megawatts.

=> ↺ The Drone Girl ☛ This platform-agnostic drone dock can charge and manage pretty much any drone

• Here’s how it works: a DroneDock is placed at one block (let’s say a medical lab). A drone flies from there to a hospital to deliver test results. It might then fly on to another DroneDock where it charges its battery, downloads a new mission and takes off again — perhaps even dropping off one more package while it’s at it.

=> ↺ H2 View ☛ European Parliament approves HRS and maritime fuel regulations

• The new rules are part of the Fit for 55 in 2030 package, the EU’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, and aim to decarbonise transport.

=> ↺ Futurism ☛ Remember Bored Apes? They’re Almost Worthless Now

• The value of this once-booming collection of JPGs of lethargic simians, which sold for millions of dollars just a couple years ago, has cratered, selling for as little as $52,000 worth of Ethereum this month, Decrypt reports.

• ApeCoin, the currency of Bored Apes maker Yuga Labs’ virtual world, has also tanked in value, losing 93 percent of its $7.6 billion market cap in April 2022, per the report.

• In short, Bored Apes have turned from a celebrity-endorsed status symbol into a depressing reminder that the NFT market still somehow exists in 2023 despite a precipitous drop in interest.

=> ↺ CNBC ☛ Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape NFT was valued at $1.3 million in 2022—now it’s only worth around $60,000

• In 2021, non-fungible tokens went mainstream in a big way as celebrities and the general public spent millions buying up and trading the digital collectibles. But today, prices for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, one of the most popular collections, has crashed to a two-year low.

• Take one Bored Ape NFT owned by Justin Bieber, for example: It has declined in value by about 95% over the past year and a half.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Revelator ☛ How to Make Friends and Influence People — to Save the World

Finance

=> ↺ YLE ☛ Number of bank branches in Finland continues to decrease

• Finland’s Financial Supervisory Authority has expressed concern over the decline in traditional banking services.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Revealed: Major US Banks Are Funding Anti-LGBTIQ Groups

• Goldman Sachs and Bank of America foundations gave over $600,000 to ultraconservative groups.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Resilient home loan borrowers surprise big bank bosses

• Two of the big four banks have reported an uptick in customers asking for help but hardship levels remain surprisingly low. 

• Both ANZ and NAB, the first of the big four banks to front a parliamentary committee this week, reported resilience despite high inflation and a fast-paced series of interest rate hikes.

=> ↺ Zimbabwe ☛ Zim co-founded digital bank to target underserved African diaspora with banking and investment opportunities

• As someone who has lived in Zimbabwe my whole life, I am not fully aware of the needs of the African diaspora living in the UK and Europe. So, when I heard that a digital bank was opening up in those regions specifically targeting the African diaspora, I wondered if it was really needed.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ CNBC ☛ As Twitter continues to implode, advertisers pin their hopes on Threads

=> ↺ Patrick Breyer ☛ Pirates welcome new manufacturing rules

• Today, the European Parliament will adopt its position on the Ecodesign regulation for the trilogue negotiations with the Council. MEPs drafted a law that will establish new manufacturing rules for e.g. tech and fashion companies, aiming to significantly reduce the environmental impact by setting circular design criteria on most consumer goods in the EU. Pirate Party Members of the European Parliament, active proponents of the ‘right to repair’ directive which pursues similar circular economy targets, welcome the mandate.

=> ↺ Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Sportswashing Is Just One Part of Saudi Arabia’s Vast Foreign Influence Campaign

• Saudi Arabia’s foray into American golf is part of a broader, insidious trend of “sportswashing”—the use of sports to whitewash a country’s international reputation, especially its human rights record. From Russia hosting the World Cup to China hosting two Olympic Games, Saudi Arabia is hardly alone when it comes to sportswashing. But Saudi Arabia is taking this tactic to a whole new level, given the unprecedented amounts of money being spent by the PIF on golf, soccer and so much more. Sportswashing is part of a vast foreign influence campaign by Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to expand the kingdom’s economic and political leverage, especially in the U.S., and prevent a repeat of the aftermath of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, when American and other Western businesses partially boycotted Saudi Arabia in protest.

=> ↺ [Repeat] Daniel Pocock ☛ Evidence: Outreachy & Debian favoritism, women who missed out

• In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion about favoritism in Debian and Outreachy. Evidence already shows widespread rule breaking. Nonetheless, favoritism is often spoken about in abstract terms. There is an unfair focus on the woman or beneficiary, there is a lot less focus on the male decision makers and there is often no acknowledgment of the women who missed out.

• This blog aims to complete that information gap. By looking at some incredibly talented women who Outreachy & Debian rejected, we can see how wrong it was in 2019.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Elon Musk’s new AI company is staffed entirely by men

• The website for xAI lists a team of 12 men, including Musk, with links to their Twitter accounts. The site brags about their storied accomplishments and full résumés: [...]

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ EDRI ☛ Cambridge Disinformation Summit

• Strategic disinformation is an accelerant for major societal problems such as climate change, extremism, polarisation, fraud, and suppression of rights. It is exploited across all information dissemination platforms, including social media, news media, financial and non-financial reporting, and other broadcast vehicles.

=> ↺ A mouse “died suddenly” of “turbo cancer” after COVID-19 vaccination

• One of the more ridiculous bits of antivaccine misinformation to have arisen since the introduction of mRNA-based vaccines against COVID-19 by Pfizer and Moderna is the claim that the vaccines cause not just cancer, but “turbo cancer.” In this narrative, “turbo cancers” are much worse than just your average run-of-the-mill cancers in that, if you believe antivaxxers, they are much more rapidly growing and lethal. A variant of the “turbo cancer” narrative is that patients whose cancers were in remission have had sudden recurrences sometime after being vaccinated with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. As I explained when discussing “turbo cancer,” the best evidence that antivaxxers can produce are either dubious case reports in which the relationship between the aggressive cancer described and vaccination is almost certainly coincidence rather than causation or even more dubious case series cited by antivaccine physicians and scientists, such as Dr. Charles Hoffe, Idaho pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole, and Swedish pathologist named Dr. Ute Kruege. As I’ve also explained, “turbo cancer” is just a more frightening variant of a very old myth claiming that vaccines cause cancer, a myth that antivaxxers have sometimes gone to truly cringeworthy lengths, from a scientific standpoint, to explain and justify. (SV40 promoter, not gene, anyone?)

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ EFF ☛ EU Media Freedom Act: A Media Privilege in Content Moderation Is a Really Bad Idea

• The EMFA sets out rights and obligations for ‘media service providers’, including rules on transparency about media ownership and protections against political interference. The proposed bill also introduces valuable safeguards against surveillance powers of states and the use of spyware against them. EFF has warned for years about the dangers of powerful state-sponsored malware, and the Pegasus project shows the need to take the abuse of power by governments seriously. 

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Matt Taibbi: Where Have All the Liberals Gone?

• Opening comments to the general public to ask a question, in sincerity: what changed the minds of society’s former First Amendment advocates?

=> ↺ Reason ☛ After Legal Threats, Uvalde School District Lifts Ban on Parent Who Criticized Police Hire

• At the meeting, Martinez approached Joshua Gutierrez, the UCISD police chief, and criticized the decision to hire the new officer. Though Gutierrez told Martinez to sit down, Martinez continued speaking to him. According to a letter sent to the school district’s board of trustees by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, video recordings from the meeting show that the conversation remained “quiet and did not disrupt the meeting.”

• However, that didn’t keep Gutierrez from retaliating. According to FIRE’s letter, he “lashed out by banning Mr. Martinez from all school district property and escorting Mr. Martinez and his family from the building.” The next day, the ban was formalized when Gary Patterson, UCISD’s interim superintendent, sent Martinez a “formal criminal trespass warning banning him from all school district property, including School Board meetings, for two years.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Press Gazette ☛ Assange is the excuse for all who jail journalists: Why the pursuit of Assange creates an “immediate jeopardy” for journalists.

• The Committee to Protect Journalists has a tally of nearly 400, while Reporters Without Borders (RSF) lists more than 500 behind bars. The differences can be explained by imperfect information and methodological differences, but what is most striking is the sheer number.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ EFF ☛ Victory! Ninth Circuit Allows Human Rights Case to Move Forward Against Cisco Systems

• In a tremendous victory for the victims of those tools of repression, the Ninth Circuit cleared a path of legal accountability for American technology companies who build tools that facilitate human rights abuses by foreign governments, in a case called Doe I v. Cisco Systems. EFF filed multiple amicus briefs in the case, including in the Ninth Circuit. 

• Cisco is just one of many American technology companies that have been complicit in facilitating human rights abuses in foreign countries. We applaud the Ninth Circuit in helping ensure that the key statute in the case, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), remains an important mechanism for holding companies accountable when they choose profit over human lives.

• The Ninth Circuit allowed victims to sue tech giant Cisco Systems in a long-running case seeking redress for the company’s role in building and deploying the “Golden Shield,” also referred to as “The Great Firewall of China.” It’s a vast surveillance system that Cisco began building in the late 1990s and that the Chinese government used to violate the human rights of disfavored minorities, including members of the Falun Gong religion, who are the plaintiffs in the case.

=> ↺ CoryDoctorow ☛ Why are so many Californians homeless?

• 12% of Americans live in California – but 30% of homeless Americans, and 50% of unsheltered Americans, call California “home.” This is the source of endless schadenfreude from “red state” partisans, and is often waved as proof of the failure of liberal policies. But the real story is both more complicated – and simpler.

• UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative’s “California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness” is the largest, best study of homelessness in California in some 30 years: [...]

Monopolies

=> ↺ DroidGazzette ☛ FTC is appealing ruling that cleared Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard

• Now that the FTC is choosing to appeal Judge Corley’s decision, the regulator needs the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to issue an emergency stay to extend the existing temporary restraining order (TRO) that is set to expire at 11:59PM PT on Friday, July 14th. It’s not clear if the appeals court will even rule before the deal deadline on July 18th, potentially leaving the door open for Microsoft to close the Activision Blizzard deal on Monday or Tuesday without a restraining order in place.

=> ↺ The Verge ☛ FTC appeals its loss to Microsoft in Activision Blizzard case

• Now that the FTC is choosing to appeal Judge Corley’s decision, the regulator needs the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to issue an emergency stay to extend the existing temporary restraining order (TRO) that is set to expire at 11:59PM PT on Friday, July 14th. It’s not clear if the appeals court will even rule before the deal deadline on July 18th, potentially leaving the door open for Microsoft to close the Activision Blizzard deal on Monday or Tuesday without a restraining order in place.

=> ↺ CNBC ☛ FTC says it will appeal to block Microsoft-Activision deal

• The FTC first sued to block the acquisition last December, then filed for an emergency injunction last month ahead of the deal’s July 18 deadline. The FTC has argued that the deal was anticompetitive because Microsoft might make some of its games exclusive to its own game consoles or diminish the experience of Activision games on rival services should the deal close. Microsoft has said it would instead make the games more widely available.

=> ↺ The Washington Post ☛ FTC will appeal court’s decision allowing Microsoft to buy Activision

• The decision in Microsoft’s favor, while not unexpected, is a major setback for antitrust regulators, who have pursued a new, more aggressive strategy under current chair Lina Khan. The FTC also sued to block Meta’s acquisition of augmented reality start-up Within, but a judge also decided to allow that acquisition to proceed.

• The FTC’s approach on fighting consolidation in the tech industry is wide ranging.

=> ↺ FTC Moves To Appeal This Week’s Microsoft/Activision Blizzard Court Decision

• Following Microsoft’s recent win against the Federal Trade Committee in US federal court, the company may once again be taken to the stand. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has moved to appeal the recent court order ruling not to grant the temporary injunction on Microsoft that the FTC was seeking.

Patents

=> ↺ JUVE ☛ UKIPO publishes industry opinions on future of SEP licensing [Ed: Juve, a bribed mouthpiece for illegal agenda and a lobby against EU constitutions, talks about a patent office outside the EU and compulsory patent monopolies]

• With technical standards and SEPs of rising importance for the UK economy, the government has set out an Innovation Strategy and Telecoms Diversification Strategy in a bid to establish the country as a “science and technology superpower and innovation hub” by 2035.

=> ↺ JUVE ☛ Moderna targets Ireland and Belgium in next round against Pfizer and BioNTech [Ed: COVID-19 is one giant patent cartel for vaccine makers, who barely bothered testing what they mandated almost everyone to take. Here, Juve (propaganda rag for people who shred the law to pieces and demand kantagoo court), sees ongoing squabbles.]

• Ireland and Belgium are the next two targets for Moderna’s campaign for damages over alleged infringement, by Pfizer and BioNTech, over mRNA vaccine technology.

=> ↺ Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ Patent case: In re Couvaras, USA

• The combination of two well-known high blood pressure medicines did not result in unexpected patient benefits.

=> ↺ Unified Patents ☛ IP Investments Group entity, DataCloud Technologies, network patent reexam granted

• On July 3, 2023, less than six weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,762,498, owned by DataCloud Technologies, LLC, an NPE and an IP Investments Group entity. The ‘498 patent generally relates to communicating to a network through a virtual domain. It has been asserted in over 25 district court litigations, including against 8×8, A10 Networks, Squarespace, Box, Arista Networks, Extreme Networks, and others.

Software Patents

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Orca Security sues Israeli rival Wiz for patent infringement

• Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Orca Security Ltd. today filed a lawsuit against its Israeli rival Wiz Inc. claiming that Wiz has infringed its patents.

• The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court, District of Delaware, claims that Wiz built its business on infrastructure that Orca had first developed and, in doing so, intentionally violated Orca’s intellectual property. The lawsuit demands that Wiz halt offering all products and services that infringe its IP and pay financial compensation for using Orca’s patents.

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ Orca Sues Wiz Over Alleged Cloud Security Patent Violations

• The patents cover techniques for securing virtual cloud assets at rest and blueprints for securing virtual machines by application use analysis. They were granted to Orca Security less than two months ago with Orca’s founder Avi Shua listed as the inventor. The patents were filed in August 2021 and November 2022.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Site Cost MindGeek “$275 Million Per Month”: $117m Damages Will Suffice

• MG Premium, the adult entertainment giant behind brands including Reality Kings, Brazzers, MOFOS, Babes.com, and Twistys, sued pirate site ‘PornEZ’ in January. The MindGeek subsidiary says the site ignored over 19,500 DMCA notices and feigned compliance with U.S. law. For that it deserves $117 million in damages, despite estimates that PornEZ could’ve potentially cost MG over $275 million per month in lost subscriptions.

=> ↺ [Old] We’ve filed law­suits chal­leng­ing Chat­GPT and LLaMA, indus­trial-strength pla­gia­rists that vio­late the rights of book authors.

• Hello. This is Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick. In Novem­ber 2022, we teamed up to file a lawsuit chal­leng­ing GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant built on unprecedented opensource software piracy. In January 2023, we filed a lawsuit challeng­ing Stable Diffusion, an AI image generator built on the heist of five billion digital images.

• Since the release of OpenAI’s Chat­GPT sys­tem in March 2023, we’ve been hearing from writers, authors, and publishers who are concerned about its uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials, including thousands of books.

• Today, on behalf of two wonderful book authors—Paul Tremblay and Mona Awadwe’ve filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI challenging ChatGPT and its under­lying large language models, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which remix the copyrighted works of thousands of book authors—and many others—without consent, compensation, or credit.

=> ↺ [Old] How the GitHub Copilot Lawsuit is Going So Far

• At the end of the GitHub Copilot investigation blog, Butterick claims you can actually help out with the process, stating that, “We’d like to talk to you if…” and then listing several qualifications, such as:

• • You have stored open-source code on GitHub.

• • You have used or do use GitHub Copilot.

• • You have other information regarding GitHub Copilot you would like to let Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm know about.

• On the blog post you can find Butterick’s email as well as a link to contact the Joseph Saveria Law Firm. I’m sure there are email filters in place, and at this point in the lawsuit, it might be a little too late for any elementary pieces of evidence or accounts. Still, I find it fitting that like the open-source community, individuals can come together to make a huge impact on the world.

=> ↺ [Old] The Register UK ☛ GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit

• The judge rejected the defense motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claim that Codex’s capacity to reproduce code represents a breach of software licensing terms. He also rejected the defense effort to toss a claim under Section 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Copilot and Codex reproduce copyrighted code without the required copyright management information – author, title, owner, terms and conditions, and so on.

• So litigation, at the very least, can be expected to continue based on those allegations.

=> ↺ Rolling Stone ☛ New ChatGPT Lawsuits May Be Start of AI’s Legal Sh-tstorm

• Both suits were filed on Wednesday and target OpenAI, a research lab consisting of both a nonprofit arm and a corporation, over ChatGPT software, a “large language model” capable of generating human-like responses to text input. One, filed by Clarkson, a public interest law firm, is wide-ranging and invokes the potentially “existential” threat of AI itself. The other, filed by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and attorney Matthew Butterick, is focused on two established authors, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, who claim that their books were among those ChatGPT was trained on — a violation of copyright, according to the complaint. (Saveri and Butterick are separately pursuing legal action against OpenAI, GitHub and Microsoft over GitHub Copilot, an AI-based coding product that they argue “appears to profit from the work of open-source programmers by violating the conditions of their open-source licenses.”)

• OpenAI did not return a request for comment on the various suits.

=> ↺ [Old] GitHub and Copilot Intellectual Property Litigation

• Microsoft has monetized Copilot by offering it as a subscription service. Although Copilot is free for verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects, “Copilot requires running software that is not free, such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE or Visual Studio Code editor.”

• The Copilot FAQ states “You are responsible for the code you write with GitHub Copilot’s help” and admits “GitHub does not own the suggestions GitHub Copilot generates.” However, it also notes “about 1% of the time, a suggestion may contain some code snippets longer than ~150 characters that matches the training set.” Independent analysis has found “[i]n files where Copilot is enabled, it accounts for nearly 40% of code in popular programming languages like Python.”

=> ↺ Maybe you don’t mind if GitHub Copilot used your open-source code without asking. But how will you feel if Copilot erases your open-source community?

• Microsoft and OpenAI have conceded that Copilot & Codex are trained on open-source software in public repos on GitHub. So which choice did they make?

• If Microsoft and OpenAI chose to use these repos subject to their respective open-source licenses, Microsoft and OpenAI would’ve needed to publish a lot of attributions, because this is a minimal requirement of pretty much every open-source license. Yet no attributions are apparent.

=> ↺ Silcon Republic ☛ US programmer sues Microsoft and OpenAI for open-source piracy

• Matthew Butterick is alleging that the way AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot uses public open-source code without attribution is illegal.

• Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are facing a class-action lawsuit over GitHub Copilot, the AI tool that is like predictive text for programming.

• The lawsuit was brought forward by US programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick “on behalf of a pro­posed class of possibly millions of GitHub users”.

=> ↺ Reuters ☛ Lawsuit says OpenAI violated US authors’ copyrights to train AI chatbot

• Two U.S. authors sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company misused their works to “train” its popular generative artificial-intelligence system ChatGPT.

• Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad said ChatGPT mined data copied from thousands of books without permission, infringing the authors’ copyrights.

=> ↺ Digital Music News ☛ OpenAI Inks 6-Year Deal with Shutterstock to Secure ‘High-Quality Training Data’

• Shutterstock, a leading content and creative workflow platform, has announced the expansion of its partnership with artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI. Through a new six-year agreement, Shutterstock will provide “high-quality training data” for OpenAI models.

• OpenAI has secured a license to access additional Shutterstock training data, including image, video, and music libraries and associated metadata, as part of the expanded collaboration. Shutterstock gains priority access to the latest OpenAI technology and will continue to leverage DALL-E’s generative text-to-image capabilities into its platform.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ Conversation

• So this set of links (or, “links”) spawned from a discussion of how products are advertised; apparently some vendor labels the package with a big model number, TU500 perhaps, and puts a smaller capacity number of only 250 somewhere. A human might buy the TU500 thinking that’s the capacity they want. Nope!

=> ↺ More Plant Photos and Identification

• Last Wednesday (July 5th) I took another walk by the Tanana River and got more nice photos.

• I revisited the one highbush cranberry plant I found earlier. The fruit is still green, but I’m glad to see the plant has been undisturbed.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ Day 3

• I have the rest of the week off, but I travelled to visit/stay with family today. Therefore, most of the day has had no time for computing, but I’ve loaded up the laptop now and managed to connect to the WiFi where I’m staying (I still can’t get it to connect to my phone though). Getting 43% of packets dropped at the moment though for some reason.

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