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● 07.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/07/2023: MX Linux 23 RC and OpenCV 4.8.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ System76 ☛ COSMIC Skies of a Colorado July

• Beyond the dazzling sea of licensed fireworks and thunderclouds lies a cosmic array of ancient stars. It’s within our gaze upon these stars where we find the inspiration for COSMIC DE, our new desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros. Let’s get into the updates!

• When resizing a window with your keyboard in COSMIC DE, a hint will appear containing shortcuts for growing and shrinking the window. Tiled windows aligned with the one being resized will be scaled to keep the layout in alignment.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ University of Toronto ☛ Some notes on errno when tracing Linux kernel system call results

• Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you want to print out some information about every fcntl() lock call that fails, system-wide. These days this is relatively easy to do with bpftrace, especially since there are system call entry and exit tracepoints. However, you might reasonably wonder how the fcntl(2) system call actually returns errno, the error code, and how this manifests at the level of the sys_exit_fcntl syscalls tracepoint. As it turns out, there’s some tribal knowledge and peculiarities here.

Applications

=> ↺ Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Time Machine

• Time Machine is a built-in backup feature to back up your personal data automatically, including apps, music, photos, emails and documents.

• Time Machine is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ The Server Side ☛ Please make please a sudo alias on your Linux box

• There is something very passive-aggressive about the Linux sudo command.

• Just the idea of referring to yourself as a super-user, as the first two letters of the sudo command infer, is positively hubristic.

• The idea of then using the assumed super-user state to demand the Unix-based OS unquestionably perform a function or task is just outright dictatorial. It’s not a good look.

=> ↺ IT Pro Today ☛ Mastering File Permissions in Linux

• Linux is a widely used operating system favored by professionals and home users worldwide. It is well known for its strong security and integrity features.

• In computer security, key concepts include confidentiality, integrity, and availability. When it comes to the computer’s file system, file permissions play a crucial role in securing sensitive information (confidentiality), preventing unauthorized modifications to files (integrity), and allowing appropriate access to files for authorized users (availability). In Linux, file permissions can be set using both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the command line in the terminal.

=> ↺ TecAdmin ☛ Setting Up a New Next.js Application

• Next.js is a free, open-source JavaScript framework created by Vercel. Developed on top of React, it’s designed to provide an efficient solution for building server-side rendered and static websites. It offers powerful features like hybrid static & server rendering, TypeScript support, smart bundling, and route pre-fetching.

=> ↺ TecAdmin ☛ How to Remove Warning and Error Messages in PHP

• PHP, being a robust server-side scripting language, is widely used in web development.

=> ↺ Ryan Mulligan ☛ CSS Custom Property Fallbacks in Shorthand Values

• CSS Custom Properties are incredibly versatile and have become especially useful as customizable props in common layout and component style patterns. Here’s an example derived from the SmolCSS site: [...]

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Attackers target the Domain Name System, the [Internet]’s phone book. Here’s how to fight back

• The foundational Domain Name System, essentially the phone book for the [Internet], used to be something nobody using the net much noticed, but lately it has become more of a target, and the cost of attacks against it are huge and growing.

• Recent events have once again brought issues involving the DNS, as it’s called for short, to the forefront. A new kind of denial-of-service attack called Water Torture is the most recent, but earlier this year has seen other DNS-based attacks on Telsa’s network in January and a new malware toolkit called Decoy Dog that targeted business networks.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

• That action saw the exec intone the following:

• “I need my Trash back, it is where I keep all my important mails.”

• “Needless to say, because of the limited time available to my team, the one folder we hadn’t migrated was the Trash,” Curtis lamented.

=> ↺ University of Toronto ☛ The theory versus the practice of “static websites”

• The first thought is that in practice, things look different on a long time scale. The use of static files for web content has proven extremely durable over the years. Although the specific web servers and hosts may have changed, both the static file content and the general approach of ‘put your static files with .type extensions in a directory tree’ has lived on basically since the beginning of the web. One pragmatic reason for this is that serving static files is both common and very efficient. Since it’s commonly in demand even in dynamic websites, people who only have static files can take advantage of this. Being common and ‘simple’ has meant that serving only static content creates a stable site that’s easy to keep operating. This is historically not the case with dynamic websites.

• The second thought is that one reason for this is that static websites create a sharp boundary of responsibilities with simple, strong isolation. On the one side is all of the complexity of the static web server (which, today, involves a bunch of dynamic updates for things like HTTPS certificates). On the other side is those static files, and in the middle is some filesystem or filesystem like thing. What each side needs from the other is very limited. Any environment for dynamic websites necessarily has no such clear, small, and simple boundary between the web server and your code, and on top of that we’re unlikely to ever be able to standardize on a single boundary and API for it.

=> ↺ OSTechNix ☛ Master The Command Line With Useful Bash Aliases In Linux And Unix

• In the world of Linux/Unix, Bash aliases serve as powerful tools to enhance your command line experience. By creating shortcuts for frequently used commands or command sequences, you can save time and increase productivity. This guide presents an extensive collection of useful Bash aliases, providing clear explanations for each alias’s purpose and benefits. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or a command line enthusiast, this guide will help you harness the power of aliases and optimize your workflow.

=> ↺ Linux Handbook ☛ lshw Command in Linux: Get Hardware Details

• While running any operating system, a user will find himself in a situation where he wants to know all the hardware details.

=> ↺ TecMint ☛ How to Delete HUGE (100-200GB) Files in Linux

• In the realm of Linux terminal operations, a range of Linux commands are at our disposal for the purpose of effectively deleting or removing files.

• When it comes to the task of file elimination, we commonly rely on the “rm” command, which swiftly erases files from the system. For enhanced security and assurance, the “shred” command comes into play, ensuring the thorough and secure deletion of a file, leaving no trace behind.

Games

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ CodeWeavers blog about their Linux / Steam Deck work on Proton with PooShooter

• PooShooter: Toilet Invaders, yes it’s a real game and we all had a bit of a chuckle when we saw Valve noted it fixed in a Proton changelog recently. CodeWeavers, Valve’s partner on Proton development, have a blog post up talking about why it was interesting to solve.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Retro-inspired JRPG ‘Alterium Shift’ enters Early Access

• Love your classic JRPG-likes? Alterium Shift is another good looking entry that recently entered Early Access on Steam with Native Linux support. Built with the Unity game engine as far as I can see, it works great on Fedora KDE 38. Note: the developer sent a key.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Cartridges game launcher adds support for Legendary for Epic Games and Flatpaks

• Remember Cartridges? The simple launcher that aims to be a sort-of all in one solution, to bring together games from all of your sources. Well, it just had a nice upgrade.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Try out the new demo of the upcoming JRPG inspired Quartet

• Following a success on Kickstarter, turn-based pixel-art JRPG inspired title Quartet now has a demo available with Native Linux support. The Kickstarter back in 2021 pulled in a nice $54,203 towards development so it’s good to see some activity letting players experience a little of it.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ New DLC info for retro-style beat-’em-up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

• More information and a new trailer have been published for the recently-announced Dimension Shellshock DLC for the native Linux beat-’em-up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, revealing a new Survival Mode.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Volker Krause ☛ Looking forward to Akademy 2023

• In less than 50 hours from now Akademy 2023 will start in Thessaloniki, Greece, with plenty of things to look forward to.

• After having missed last year and the two previous ones having been online only, it’s the first in-person Akademy in four years for me.

• While I have been at a couple of events in the recent months, there’s still a number of people I haven’t been able to meet again in person sinceAkademy in Milan, so this is all long overdue.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, June 2023

• The biggest changes last month were a series of commits by waddlesplash, all related to the user_mutex API and the consumers of it. This API is the kernel portion of the implementation of basically anything related to mutexes or locks in userland, including pthread_mutex, pthread_cond, pthread_barrier, unnamed semaphores (via sem_open), rwlocks, and more. It bears some resemblance in concept to Linux’s futex API, but is very different in both design and implementation.

=> ↺ Data Swamp ☛ Introduction to immutable Linux systems

• If you reach this page, you may be interested into this new category of Linux distributions labeled “immutable”.

• In this category, one can find by age (oldest → youngest) NixOS, Guix, Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, Vanilla OS and many new to come.

• I will give examples of immutability implementation, then detail my thoughts about immutability, and why I think this naming can be misleading. I spent a few months running all of those distributions on my main computers (NAS, Gaming, laptop, workstation) to be able to write this text.

New Releases

=> ↺ MX Linux ☛ MX-23 “Libretto” Release Candidate 1 (RC1) now available

• MX-23 RC1 is now available for testing. MX-23 is built from debian 12 “bookworm” and MX repositories. As in past releases, the MX will default to sysVinit but systemd remains an option for installed systems. Updates from RC to final are fully supported.

• This release builds upon beta 2, and includes all bug fixes and changes to date, including default wallpapers and theming as well as updated translations and applications.

• In this release we are very interested in installer testing. Many bugs related to btrfs installations have been addressed. The installer has received many updates since beta2. The Installer now supports swapfiles as well as swap partitions. The “regular” auto installation will default to swapfiles. There are many other installer changes, including gui adjustments (layout builder in the custom install partitions area), setting of some debconf value to make legacy grub-pc updates more seamless, various fixes for grub install functions and cleanup of “dump” entries that might be clogging up a user’s nvram. There is also additional help guidance right in the installer gui.

=> ↺ Beta News ☛ Debian 12-based MX Linux 23 ‘Libretto’ achieves release candidate status

BSD

=> ↺ Undeadly ☛ Mandatory enforcement of indirect branch targets

• Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has updated innovations.html to include an item regarding the work which has been done to enforce indirect branch target restriction (on the amd64 [Intel] and arm64 platforms).

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ OpenSUSE ☛ Tumbleweed Brings KDE Users Frameworks, Gear Updates

• This week brought KDE users of openSUSE‘s rolling release Tumbleweed updates for Frameworks and Gear along with several other updated packages.

• Snapshots have been rolling out with various enhancements and bug fixes this week.

• The more recent snapshot, 20230712, updated GNU Compiler Collection 13.1.1 and the changes related to the architecture levels for the Adaptable Linux Platform. A patch was also removed. The Linux Kernel also updated in the snapshot as kernel-source 6.4.2 addressed a Common Vulnerability and Exposure. CVE-2023-3269 addressed the lock handling for accessing and updating virtual memory areas. The tool to copy files cpio backported some upstream fixes, refreshed some patches and removed four patches. A few GNOME packages updated in the snapshot. Miscellaneous bug fixes along with some cleanup, and updated translations arrived in the gnome-shell 44.3; it also fixed a cursor offset issue with the magnifier. The 44.3 mutter had improvements to ensure the preferred monitor mode is always included and to avoid rapid toggling of dynamic maximum render time. It also fixes an issue with a dynamic maximum render time. Additionally, there are miscellaneous bug fixes and updated translations. An update of yast2-storage-ng 4.6.12 ensures that storage support packages are added correctly for MicroOS, which uses a custom partitions proposal client instead of another specific client. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Unicorn Media ☛ AlmaLinux Announces Its Solution to RHEL Source Code Conundrum

• On Thursday, the AlmaLinux Foundation made public its plans to continue to develop and maintain its RHEL clone without access to Red Hat’s source code.

=> ↺ Unicorn Media ☛ FOSS Week In Review: Istio Graduates, Oracle Bitch-Slaps Red Hat & Elon Musk’s AI Dream

• Guess what, everybody? We’re back.

=> ↺ Linuxiac ☛ AlmaLinux Decided to Drop 1:1 Compatibility with RHEL

• AlmaLinux emerged as a prominent alternative for users seeking a stable, community-driven operating system after CentOS shifted its focus to CentOS Stream, a rolling-release distribution.

• The distro quickly gained recognition as a suitable, enterprise-ready replacement for CentOS, offering a stable and secure environment that mirrored RHEL.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Matt Brown: 2023 Mid Year Review

• I’m six months into my journey of building a business which means its time to reflect and review the goals I set for the year.

=> ↺ Aurélien Jarno ☛ Goodbye Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

• Over the years, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has gone through various phases. After many years of development, it was released as technology preview with the release of Squeeze and eventually became an official architecture with the release of Wheezy. However it ceased being an official architecture a couple of years later with the release of Jessie, although a jessie-kfreebsd suite was available in the official archive. Some years later, it was moved to the debian-ports archive, where it slowly regressed over the years. The development totally has now been stopped for over a year, and the port has been removed from the debian-ports archive. It’s time to say it goodbye!

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Hackster ☛ System76 Open Sources the Electronics for Virgo, Its Upcoming In-House Linux Laptop Design

• System76, builder of Linux-based desktops, laptops, and servers, has announced that its upcoming Virgo laptop will be designed in the open — and to prove it, has published its circuits’ design files to GitHub under a reciprocal license.

• “We will be moving Virgo laptop PCB design to this public, GPLv3 licensed [GitHub repository],” Jeremy Soller, System76 principal engineer, announced via Twitter yesterday, shortly before the files went live. “This will be the most open, modern x86 motherboard design I know of.”

=> ↺ CNX Software ☛ Review of SunFounder Raspberry Pi UPS Power Supply

• SunFounder’s Raspberry Pi UPS Power Supply is a complete UPS kit for the Raspberry Pi 3/4 Model B/B+ with a PiPower board, a 2,000 mAh battery, and all accessories requires for the assembly. It also works with other Raspberry Pi-sized boards such as Banana Pi BPI-M5, Hardkernel ODROID-C4, Libre Computer ROC-RK3328-CC, and other similar SBCs.

• Many years ago, I bought a Raspberry Pi battery pack for review hoping that it would also work as a UPS, but it was not perfect as the board would sometime reboot during power failure simulations. Since then, there have been many UPS kits launched to the market, but I didn’t try any so far, so when SunFounder contacted CNX Software to review their “Raspberry Pi UPS Power Supply”, I took the opportunity, and I will report my finding in this review.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi: Our Code Editor is open source

• We’ve made the code for our Code Editor open source so people can repurpose and contribute to it. Here are the details.

=> ↺ Arduino ☛ AWAKE is a very pretty wake-up light

• Humans evolved to sleep and wake according to natural light cycles. So it is strange that we, as a society, have largely chosen to rely on blaring alarms to wake up in the mornings.

=> ↺ Arduino ☛ Can tripedal robots actually walk?

• Building walking robots is difficult, because they either need a lot of legs or some ability to balance through their gait. There is a reason that the robots designed by companies like Boston Dynamics are so impressive. But lots of hobbyists have made bipedal and quadrupedal robots, while largely ignoring tripedal robots.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ AI weed killer uses sunlight and Raspberry Pi

• A TensorFlow custom image classification model taught the robot to differentiate between weeds and plants that Nathan wants to keep. When the Raspberry Pi identifies a weed, the motors flip out the giant lens and manoeuvre it into place directly above the hapless plant. Photoresistors track the direction from which the light is coming, and provide the information needed to focus the sun’s beam through the lens. Then the weed burns to death. Sounds bleak, but nature is cruel by necessity.

=> ↺ Andrew Hutchings ☛ Amiga 3000: Restoration Part 1

• There has been a long running joke with my friend Paulee that I would buy their Amiga 3000 from them. Then, a week ago, they connected me to someone in Canada who was looking to sell their Amiga 3000 at a reasonable price. I purchased it and a couple of days later, it arrived. It is working but needs a little work, so let’s get into it.

=> ↺ Adafruit ☛ When Open Becomes Opaque: The Changing Face of Open-Source Hardware Companies

• However, recently some open-source hardware companies have either gone closed-source on products, are in process of going closed-source, are delaying the release of files/source code, or require NDAs to obtain the software for an advertised-as open-source hardware & OSHWA certified product. Many of the formerly open-source hardware and software based companies were built on open-source, what will this mean for the users, and open-source community going forward?

• Why write about this? This article intends to highlight some examples of what’s happening now as part of the years I’ve spent covering open-source and open-source hardware. Things are changing, that’s for sure. For almost two decades, starting at MAKE Magazine, including when I founded Hack a Day (2004), then working full-time at Adafruit, I’ve covered the start of open-source hardware and all its ups and downs. From the open-source hardware definition, the logo disputes, Arduino’s former CEO ousting, and MakerBot going closed-source – I’m stuck with this beat, and this beat is stuck with me.

• Since I have covered this beat for so long, companies and individuals ask for assistance on a regular basis when something is damaging the community, false open-source claims, straight-up code credit removal / attribution, or when switcheroo behavior comes up. The current challenge for helping out is that many of the companies or people who are bending or breaking the rules have specifically described Limor, myself, and Adafruit as a competitor. The strategy is to assist folks with open-source software and hardware disputes privately, contacting the parties and see if there is an agreeable resolution. The goal is to avoid a Twitter fight and pile-on where it gets personal and brings out the worst in everyone. So far, communicating directly and privately has worked out – there has been a “ruffling of feathers” when it’s a self-described “competitor,” but other open-source hardware companies are not competitors. The best way to describe it is: we are at a skate park, doing tricks, pushing what’s possible, and trying to learn and share from each other for the next trick – building upon each other to go to new heights. Sometimes the next big trick doesn’t land unless you can learn from someone else.

=> ↺ Arduino ☛ This Bluetooth tank is a perfect first robot

• The project starts with a tracked robot chassis kit, which includes the frame, DC motors, hubs, and tracks. An Arduino Nano Every board controls those motors through an L298N H-bridge driver. An HC-05 module adds connectivity and power comes from a 9V battery. The electronics enclosures are 3D-printable, but you can also use any pre-built project box. If you do have a 3D printer, you can also add a tank turret rotated by a 9g micro servo motor.

=> ↺ Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Mows Your Lawn So You Don’t Have To

• According to Ulli, he’s been working alongside TGD-Consulting, a German IT firm, to develop the mower and create some software that’s effective and easy to use. As of right now, the project is still in development so it’s not quite finished yet. Most recently, Ulli has 3D printed a chassis for the basic hardware components that enable them to test the latest software release.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Android Authority ☛ Google could be working on a ‘Connected Flight Mode’ for Android

=> ↺ Make Use Of ☛ Are Android Tablets Finally Worth Buying?

=> ↺ Dignited ☛ Common Android Features Missing on Pixel Phones – Dignited

=> ↺ Make Use Of ☛ How to Share Photos and Videos From the Google Photos App on Android

=> ↺ Android Central ☛ Moto G Stylus 5G (2023) vs. Samsung Galaxy A34 5G | Android Central

=> ↺ Digital Trends ☛ I ditched my iPad Pro for an Android tablet — here’s why | Digital Trends

=> ↺ SamMobile ☛ Android Auto update brings new Google Assistant design – SamMobile

=> ↺ India Times ☛ Android Upgrade Invite: Here’s how Google will convince you to install an Android update – Times of India

=> ↺ Sportskeeda ☛ Best smartwatches for Android

=> ↺ SamMobile ☛ Another Galaxy S23 Android 14 One UI 6.0 test firmware spotted! – SamMobile

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ Swiple: Open-source Automated Data Monitoring

• The data quality automation plugin for data teams. Experience data quality observability in your ELT/ETL pipeline that would usually take a year to build, in just a few hours.

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ DQO: Open-source Data Quality Operations Center

• DQO is a powerful DataOps friendly data quality monitoring tool that is designed to help you monitor and maintain the quality of your data. With DQO, you get access to a wide range of customizable data quality checks and data quality dashboards that make it easy to keep an eye

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla ☛ Support.Mozilla.Org: Introducing our recent new hires

• Hey folks,

• I’m so thrilled to introduce you to our team’s recent new hires. This week, we’re joined by 3 new folks and here’s a bit of an intro from the 3 of them:

• 1. Sarto Jama – Community Manager

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL ☛ Ora2Pg 24.0 have been released

• Montreal, Canada – July 5th, 2023

• Version 24.0 of Ora2Pg, a free and reliable tool used to migrate an Oracle database to PostgreSQL, has been officially released and is publicly available for download.

• This major release adds official support to migration of SQL Server database to PostgreSQL. It also fixes several issues reported since past height months and adds some new features and improvements.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL ☛ pgCluu v3.5 released

• pgCluu is a Perl program used to perform a full audit of a PostgreSQL Cluster performances. It is divided in two parts, a collector used to grab statistics on the PostgreSQL server using psql and sar, a reports builder that will generate all HTML and charts output.

• This is a maintenance release that fixes issues reported since the past six months and adds support to PostgreSQL 16.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL ☛ Announcing SQLPage: Build Dynamic Web Applications in SQL

• SQLPage is a free and open-source tool for building beautiful web apps entirely in SQL.

• It is a small single binary executable that runs a web server, executes .sql files on demand, and renders the results using a wide array of pre-defined web components.

Education

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ Congratulations to all 2022/23 participants

• We announce the winning and highly commended teams of young people who coded experiments for this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab.

=> ↺ Olimex ☛ Olimex’s soldering workshop in Burgas tomorrow!

• The workshop will start from 12.30 and will be up to 16.00

Programming/Development

=> ↺ OpenCV 4.8.0 Is Now Available!

=> ↺ Medevel ☛ 10 Open-source Popular React Calendar Libraries

• React is a powerful and popular JavaScript library used to build modern web applications.

=> ↺ Matt Rickard ☛ Stop Overengineering

• Overengineering works against results. Shifting the focus away from results is never good — for personal projects, corporate codebases, or anything in between.

=> ↺ Daniel Lemire ☛ Recognizing string prefixes with SIMD instructions

• Suppose that I give you a long list of string tokens (e.g., “A”, “A6”, “AAAA”, “AFSDB”, “APL”, “CAA”, “CDS”, “CDNSKEY”, “CERT”, “CH”, “CNAME”, “CS”, “CSYNC”, “DHC”, etc.). I give you a pointer inside a much larger string and I ask you whether you are pointing at one of these tokens, and if so, which one. To make things slightly more complicated, you want the token to be followed by a valid separator (e.g., a space, a semi-colon, etc.) and you want to ignore the case (so that “aaaa” matches “AAAA”).

• How might you solve this efficiently?

=> ↺ Olimex ☛ AgonLight Week Programming Challenge – ISSUE 4

• AgonLight Programming challenge is here again! I just wanted to give you some time to rest and refresh for the next round!

• As you know we changed the format now you have whole week to solve the problem, not just a weekend!

Java

=> ↺ Fernando Borretti ☛ Why Checked Exceptions Failed

• Java has this feature called checked exceptions, why lets you annotate a method with the set of exceptions it may throw, like so: [...]

Leftovers

=> ↺ Ali Reza Hayati ☛ The urge of microblogging

• Microblogging is so addictive. Whatever you do or whatever interesting happens to you will go online with microblogs and we do that unconsciously because we’re used to it. We see that kind of stuff and we do that so constantly that we don’t even realize what we’re doing no more. That scares me. The urge for microblogging, no matter how wonderful it is, scares me.

=> ↺ Jim Nielsen ☛ Things I Like Over Things I Don’t

• Then, in master blogger style, he linked me to one of his own posts explaining why he thinks the way he does:

• I realized that the people I admire most don’t only criticize technology they dislike. Rather, they amplify the things they enjoy.

Science

=> ↺ Futurism ☛ Scientist Claims Universe Is Twice as Old as We Thought

• And make no mistake: the dominant theory is still that the universe is 13.7 billion years and expanding. But, in a surprising twist, University of Ottawa astronomer Rajendra Gupta has dusted off Zwicky’s work with a new theory that he says reconciles the two models — and concludes that the universe may actually be 26.7 billion years old, or twice as old as its generally accepted age.

Education

=> ↺ Times Higher Education ☛ Student use of machine translation ‘a debate we have to have’

• Dr Gniel said students were using tools such as Google Translate to convert work from their first languages into English, then polishing it with proofreading apps such as Grammarly – practices they would undoubtedly continue in the workplace after graduation.

• But such behaviour was problematic while they were still at university, she said, because of the expectation that they were educated in English. If courses had been delivered in other languages, institutions were legally required to note this on testamurs.

=> ↺ Gannett ☛ Thailand cave rescuer delivers commencement speech to survivor’s class, 5 years after rescue

• After nine days of surviving off minimal freshwater, Samon and the rest of the team were found by Rick Stanton, a volunteer from an elite British diving team. Stanton and the team supplied all the 13 of them with medicine and foil blanks before bringing them to the surface over three days.

Hardware

=> ↺ IT Jungle ☛ Spending On Legacy Systems Stalls In Q1, 2023 Forecast Looks Weak

• Neither Gartner nor IDC put out their quarterly server and storage reports for the public anymore, but IDC does still release a converged dataset that adds server and storage spending together and carves it up based on if it is spend on the clouds or for traditional – what we would call legacy – systems. The latest results are out for the first quarter of 2023, and there is what looks like a temporary stall in legacy system spending and it looks like it is going to get worse here in 2023 but return to growth in the coming years.

=> ↺ J Pieper ☛ moteus firmware releases

• It is embarrassing how long this issue has been outstanding, but ever since the flexible I/O system was introduced, there has been an issue where if the gear reduction was configured to a value other than 1, then the output position would drift from the source encoder over time. If control was not active, you would see the position drift, and if control was active, then moteus would report the correct position, but the actual position would drift.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

=> ↺ India Times ☛ ChatGPT co faces FTC probe over tech harms

• The FTC’s investigation poses the first major regulatory threat to OpenAI. Sam Altman, the startup’s co-founder, testified in Congress in May and said he invited AI legislation to oversee the fast-growing industry, which is under scrutiny because of how the technology can potentially kill jobs and spread disinformation. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

=> ↺ Teleport ☛ Version Control Best Practices With Teleport RBAC Roles

• Checking in your Teleport RBAC roles into some kind of version control lets you collaborate with other engineers smoothly. It keeps everyone in the loop, showing who changed what, when and why. This is crucial from a day-to-day standpoint as well as an audit and compliance one. While you might get away with managing your RBAC roles yourself locally if you have a tiny team, version control becomes increasingly important at scale for three main reasons: maintaining accountability thus providing a clear chain of custody, having a history of changes, and reducing overall complexity.

Windows TCO

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ Microsoft comes under pressure as more details of breach emerge

• Microsoft is coming under increasing pressure from both the security community and the US government after it was disclosed that the company’s cloud platform was breached and emails stolen from a number of government agencies, allegedly by Chinese attackers.

• Adding to the pressure on the Redmond software giant is the fact that the breach itself was discovered by employees of the US State Department who then informed Microsoft about it.

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ Microsoft cloud breached, but US Government had to tell it so

• The email account of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was among a slew of accounts breached at both the State and Commerce Departments by attackers, claimed to be from China, who gained access through a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

=> ↺ The Washington Post ☛ Chinese [crackers] breach email of Commerce Secretary Raimondo and State Department officials

• The Microsoft vulnerability was discovered last month by the State Department. Also targeted were the email accounts of a congressional staffer, a U.S. human rights advocate and U.S. think tanks, officials and security professionals said. State and Commerce were the only two executive branch agencies known to be breached, officials said.

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ Microsoft blithely signing malicious drivers with legitimate certificates

• In a statement, the security firm said drivers signed by WHCP would be fully trusted by any Windows system. This meant “attackers can install them without raising any alarms and proceed to carry out malicious activity virtually unimpeded”,

• This phenomenon does not appear to be new; in 2021, as British security guru Kevin Beaumont pointed out on Mastodon, Microsoft did exactly the same thing.

=> ↺ Tampa Bay ☛ Hillsborough notifies 70,000 of potential data breach in health, aging services

• A county news release said MOVEit, notified the county of a breach June 1 and staff began installing security measures. On June 18, the county’s cyber security staff learned files belong to the Health Care Services and Aging Services departments had potentially been at risk. The files contained protected health and personal information, including names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, medical conditions, diagnoses and disabilities.

=> ↺ Scoop News Group ☛ Chinese [cracking] operation puts Microsoft in the crosshairs over security failures

• As the Biden administration pushes a so-called “secure by default” approach to cybersecurity as a part of the White House National Cybersecurity Strategy, the fact that Microsoft up-charges customers for security features — even to discover its own flaws — has some officials questioning the reliance on huge tech firms that play a central role in Washington’s broader computer security initiatives.

• “Offering insecure products and then charging people premium features necessary to not get [breached] is like selling a car and then charging extra for seatbelts and airbags,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ F.T.C. Opens Investigation Into ChatGPT Maker Over Technology’s Potential Harms

• In a 20-page letter sent to the San Francisco company this week, the agency said it was also looking into OpenAI’s security practices. The F.T.C. asked OpenAI dozens of questions in its letter, including how the start-up trains its A.I. models and treats personal data, and said the company should provide the agency with documents and details.

• The F.T.C. is examining whether OpenAI “engaged in unfair or deceptive privacy or data security practices or engaged in unfair or deceptive practices relating to risks of harm to consumers,” the letter said.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ CNCF CTO Foresees Larger Orchestration Role for Kubernetes

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation CTO Chris Aniszczyk said the role Kubernetes plays in enterprise IT environments is on the verge of expanding beyond simply orchestrating containers.

Security

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

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (lemonldap-ng and php-dompdf), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, .NET 7.0, firefox, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (ghostscript, installation-images, kernel, php7, python, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-oracle, mozjs102, postgresql-9.5, and tiff).

=> ↺ Mirror UK ☛ Sex abuse victim’s details could be among hundreds revealed by data breach

• A sex abuse survivor is one of “around 400” victims of a “chilling” data breach, it tonight has emerged.

• The London Mayor’s Office blunder, currently under investigation, involves complaints about policing in the capital being made wrongly accessible via an official website. The survivor of sexual abuse has described her distress tonight.

• The probe centres on the London Mayor’s Office online forms which were hosted by the Greater London Authority’s website.

=> ↺ Tampa Bay ☛ Hillsborough notifies 70,000 of potential data breach in health, aging services

• Hillsborough County has notified more than 70,000 people that a global data breach may have put their personal information at risk.

• The breach involved the MOVEit file transfer tool, a third-party service that complies with federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.

• The breach also may have affected 106 people employed by a dozen vendors used by the county’s Aging Services Department.

=> ↺ Citrix fixed a critical flaw in Secure Access Client for Ubuntu [Ed: Typical proprietary software]

• Citrix addressed a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-24492 (CVSS score of 9.6), affecting the Secure Access client for Ubuntu that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution.

• An attacker can trigger the vulnerability by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted link and accepting further prompts.

=> ↺ Benefit from Linux Security

• The siloed security of traditional SAP environments is reaching its limits in an era of increasing interconnectivity between SAP and non-SAP systems. Will this lead to compromises in process landscape security?

• The answer is no. Established security layers from the open source and Linux world are also certified for SAP landscapes. Supported by an automated solution, they can even simplify and increase IT security. There are many tried and tested features available for Linux that also improve IT security in a sustainable manner, which can now be increasingly curated and certified for use in SAP landscapes.

=> ↺ Bleeping Computer ☛ Fake Linux vulnerability exploit drops data-stealing malware [Ed: Typical FUD from Microsoft-connected sites, perhaps trying to shift focus to "Linux" after Microsoft diddled the entire US government with its clown computing breach (Microsoft blames "China")]

• ​Cybersecurity researchers and threat actors are targeted by a fake proof of concept (PoC) CVE-2023-35829 exploit that installs a Linux password-stealing malware.

• Uptycs analysts discovered the malicious PoC during their routine scans when detection systems flagged irregularities such as unexpected network connections, unauthorized system access attempts, and atypical data transfers.

=> ↺ Hacker News ☛ Fake PoC for Linux Kernel Vulnerability on GitHub Exposes Researchers to Malware [Ed: This is not a Linux issue but social engineering. GitHub is Microsoft/NSA proprietary software. People who use it already disregard security.]

• In a sign that cybersecurity researchers continue to be under the radar of malicious actors, a proof-of-concept (PoC) has been discovered on GitHub, concealing a backdoor with a “crafty” persistence method.

=> ↺ Bleeping Computer ☛ AVrecon malware infects 70,000 Linux routers to build botnet[Ed: They're not Linux routers, the issue is further up the stack, sometimes bad passwords. Anything to distract from what Microsoft just did to the US government?]

• “We suspect the threat actor focused on the type of SOHO devices users would be less likely to patch against common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs),” Black Lotus Labs said.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ An Indiana Police Department Has Been Using Clearview AI For A Year, Much To The Surprise Of Its Oversight

• Out of all the purveyors of facial recognition tech, Clearview is by far the sketchiest. It has compiled billions of photos and other personal info by doing little more than scraping the internet of anything that isn’t locked down. Web scraping isn’t inherently evil, but Clearview certainly makes scraping appear malicious.

=> ↺ NYOB ☛ „Pay or Okay“ on tech news site heise.de illegal, decides German DPA. Major implications for many other German news pages.

• One of the largest German-language tech news sites, heise.de, made users choose between paying for a monthly subscription or having their personal data processed for advertising and many other purposes. The Data Protection Authority of Lower Saxony (LfD) decided that their “Pay or Okay” approach from 2021 was unlawful. This is yet another blow to news outlets that use such a model on their websites, after the Austrian Data Protection Authority (DSB) declared the implementation on an Austrian news page unlawful earlier this year.

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ Industry Reactions to EU-US Data Privacy Framework: Feedback Friday

• While many have applauded the new deal, privacy advocates are not pleased with the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

• European non-profit privacy organization Noyb said it plans on challenging the pact, arguing that the new framework is largely a copy of the failed Privacy Shield. Noyb co-founder and chair Max Schrems noted that the “latest deal is not based on material changes, but political interests”.

=> ↺ Franz Dill ☛ Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain

• Fascinating term: Supply Chain, used in this context

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ Legislators Vote Forward Bill That Would Turn Tech Platforms Into DEA Narcs

• On Thursday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted forward a bill that would force tech companies to report web users to the Drug Enforcement Agency if they suspected them of engaging in criminal drug activity. The controversial Cooper Davis Act, named so after a Kansas teenager who died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021, has rankled privacy advocates, who see the proposed legislation as a gateway to broad internet surveillance efforts by the federal government. Proponents of the bill say it would help crack down on illicit drug markets that have been proliferating on social media platforms.

• The committee, which had been debating the bill for weeks, voted to advance it 16-5. The proposed law now heads to the Senate floor, where it could soon be subject to a debate and a general vote.

=> ↺ Computer World ☛ Apple launches Tap to Pay on iPhone for UK business

• The system is iPhone simple. Once you sign up with a payment provider, you can set up your device to accept payments using that partner’s system. To take a payment, you use the NFC chip inside your iPhone to read contactless cards, including credit and debit cards and digital wallets, including Apple’s Wallet/Apple Pay.

• At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their contactless payment solution near the vendor’s iPhone, and payment is made. No additional hardware is required.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ The NSA Is It’s Own Worst Enemy

• While the government often likes to claim people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are the dangerous actors in revealing the inner workings of the U.S. security state, Bamford’s journalism exposes the irony in shifting the blame. Nefarious surveillance and military equipment has been co-opted by foreign governments by way of the NSA yet not much has been done about it. “[T]here’s all this effort to silence whistleblowers when there is no effort to really stop foreign countries from accessing the material that NSA has and then… use it against American citizens,” Bamford said.

=> ↺ MIT Technology Review ☛ Transforming business begins with IT

• Khot describes the power of advanced data analytics to both improve a company’s understanding of its customers and to optimize its operations. The ability to combine internal company data with data collected from social media and at point of sale will enable savvy companies to recognize new patterns. These advanced analytics, he says, will go beyond answering standard questions about financials and historical performance to provide insight into more complex questions about customers’ thoughts and changing preferences.

=> ↺ EFF ☛ Even the Government Thinks It Should Stop Buying Corporate Surveillance Data

• U.S. government intelligence agencies are buying data about us. The danger to our civil liberties is so extreme that even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said things have gone too far in a detailed report released in June.

• The report explains that federal intelligence agencies, like the NSA and FBI, do more than just conduct their own surveillance: they also buy data from private surveillance companies. This is a powerful partnership: the government’s desire to surveil us aligns well with corporations’ incentives in the surveillance economy. When intelligence agencies buy our data, they do not even follow basic constitutional safeguards—like obtaining warrants—since they say the purchased data is “publicly available.” In other words, since many data brokers will sell our personal data to anyone, intelligence agencies see no reason to treat that data as protected by the Fourth Amendment.

• But the report warns that when the government buys data about us, it threatens our privacy and civil liberties, something EFF has been saying for years. The government should not escape warrant requirements simply by paying private surveillance companies. As the report says, commercially available data, just like data the government collects itself, can be “misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals.” This commercially available data “can disclose, for example, the detailed movements and associations of individuals and groups, revealing political, religious, travel, and speech activities.”

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ Sudan Conflict: Neighboring Countries Meeting in Cairo

• Thursday’s meeting in Cairo comes weeks after the several failed attempts between Saudi Arabia and the United States in the meetings held in the Saudi city of Jeddah. Washington and Riad initiatives did not result in any agreement between both sides of the conflict to stop fighting and commit to cease-fire.

=> ↺ ADF ☛ Wagner Mutiny Has Lessons, Implications for Africa

• As the dust settles after the 36-hour rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group against Vladimir Putin, some observers see parallels to fighting in Sudan. Like Wagner, the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is a powerful paramilitary group that was funded and heavily armed by its government.

=> ↺ ANF News ☛ TGS: Without good journalism, there can be no democracy

• A recent study by the Journalists Union of Turkey (TGS) highlights challenges faced by journalists in the country, including low wages, long working hours, mobbing and censorship.

• Supported by the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the study entitled “Journalism in Turkey: Perception and Profile” provides a deep insight into key findings about various aspects of the profession in the country.

=> ↺ The Economist ☛ What would Europe do if Trump won?

• Under President Joe Biden, America has provided the lion’s share of military aid to Ukraine and the leadership to muster the West’s response. If the war shows the value of American protection, Trumpian populism may prove how fast it can be lost.

=> ↺ Salon ☛ Be very afraid: Trump’s “Agenda 47″ is no joke

• But nothing about Agenda 47 is childish, innocent, or funny. Fascism in its various forms is a revolutionary project that draws inspiration from a fictive past and “golden age” in order to destroy the current order and replace with some type of ideal society based upon the authoritarian leader and the movement. Trump’s Agenda 47 fits that model almost perfectly.

• I asked Paul Mason, who is author of the book “How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance” for his thoughts about Trump’s Agenda 47 and the mainstream new media and political class’s failure to take it seriously. Via email he warned: [...]

=> ↺ JURIST ☛ UK parliamentary report says China poses broad ‘security threat’

• The wide-reaching report details what the Committee, chaired by Conservative Party MP Sir Julian Murray Lewis, regards as China’s extensive interference with UK academia, politics, technology and industry. The report concludes that the UK’s current approach to what it describes as a “whole of state” assault by the Chinese government is “completely inadequate” and says that China has “taken advantage” of UK infrastructure.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Ex-Twitter employees owed half a billion in severance, says lawsuit

• The lawsuit also claims that only a touch over 1,000 people are left working at Twitter 2.0, just as the billionaire is launching his new xAI biz with newly installed CEO Linda Yaccarino now running the show. The legal filing claims: “Upon information and belief, Twitter has terminated approximately 6,000 employees since Mr. Musk’s takeover, reducing the Company’s workforce from over 7,500 to around 1,300.”

=> ↺ [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ ByteDance Is Now Allowing US-Based TikTok Employees to Cash Out Shares Pre-IPO

• ByteDance initiated its stock buyback programs for its global employees in 2017, with the most recent round occurring in April 2023. The programs were not previously accessible to employees without fully vested stock. According to the same sources, ByteDance is planning another stock buyback program in Q3 2023. Employees own 20% of ByteDance, while founders own 20%, and global investors own the other 60%.

=> ↺ The Straits Times ☛ Solomon Islands says China police pact not a ‘threat’

• Western powers have raised fears the deal could inflame regional tensions.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Australia and New Zealand urge China to reveal details of Solomon Islands policing deal

• Australia and New Zealand have urged China to release the details of a new policing pact with Solomon Islands, saying Beijing’s latest push for influence threatens to inflame tensions in the South Pacific.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Kerry: China won’t surrender ‘developing country’ rights

• US climate envoy says China won’t give up a status that lets it commit to less stringent emission reductions.

=> ↺ Will the workplaces be closed on extreme heat days?

• Worker’s Party of Turkey Chairperson Erkan Baş submitted a parliamentary question and asked if the workplaces will be closed in order to protect workers health and reduce their life-threatening risks.

War in Ukraine

=> ↺ LRT ☛ Lithuanian energy facilities to be protected from drones

• Lithuania’s electricity and gas transmission system operators Litgrid and Amber Grid are planning to purchase systems capable of detecting and neutralising unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and install them at 19 energy facilities.

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ “A Historic Mistake”: Swedish Peace Activist Decries Move to Join NATO & Abandon Neutrality

• Sweden may soon join NATO after over a year of negotiations with Turkey over its bid for accession to the transatlantic military alliance. Turkey’s right-wing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had staunchly opposed Sweden’s bid due to the country’s strong presence of Kurdish exiles, including members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Turkey considers a “terrorist” organization. Erdoğan attributed his unexpected change of heart to Turkey’s own bid to join the European Union, which has been stalled for years, suggesting he will open the doors to Sweden in NATO if Turkey is in turn granted entry to the EU. We hear from Swedish peace activist Kerstin Bergeå in Stockholm, who says the decision to join NATO has lacked sufficient public debate in the country and who calls the move “a historic mistake.” Bergeå is president of the 140-year-old Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, one of the oldest peace groups in the world.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ On eve of summit, NATO secures big win

• Turkey is a valued member of NATO for its military strength and strategic location. But it’s often at odds with members. That came to a head in a dispute over Sweden. Monday brought a breakthrough.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Turkey Agrees to Support Sweden’s NATO Bid

• The move came after the Turkish president’s surprising new demand that the European Union should move forward with his country’s bid to join the bloc, one day before a high-profile summit.

Environment

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ A Third Way?

• Last season, when fires fiercely scorched northern Canada, who would have predicted that this year far more acreage would burn nationwide long before the fire season was faintly near an end, sending yet more carbon into the atmosphere to make future seasons even worse? Oh, and just recently, the planet experienced its hottest day ever, in all of human history — or at least during the last 125,000 years. But count on one thing: it won’t be the hottest day ever for long. (Oh, wait! The very next day, July 4th, proved in true patriotic fashion to be even hotter and the following day tied it for the record with, by the way, 57 million Americans under an extreme heat watch!) In the weeks to come, we may even pass the 1.5°C temperature limit set just eight years ago as part of the Paris climate agreement. And the saddest thing of all is that I could go on and on… and yes, on.

=> ↺ DeSmog ☛ BBC Under Fire for Doing Pesticide Giant’s PR

• Sustainable farming advocates have criticised the content for favouring industrial agriculture, which is heavily dependent on chemical pesticides and fertilisers. They expressed shock that the BBC did not widely interview critics of the controversial technologies featured, including those used and sold by Corteva.

=> ↺ Greece ☛ Motorists should only fill up after sunset, Environment Ministry says

• The Ministry of Environment and Energy has also urged motorists to cut down on the use of their cars in favour of public transport as the heat leads to the accumulation of pollutants in the air.

=> ↺ Greece ☛ Over 9 million citizens experience temperatures above 39 degrees

• A heatmap produced by the service showed that 7.6 million inhabitants experienced temperatures ranging from 39 to 41 degrees and 1.1 million inhabitants temperatures of 41 to 43 degrees.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ The death of a road worker during Italy’s hellish heat wave is a labor rights issue

• A sweltering heat wave has hit Italy this week and likely caused the death of a road worker, a tragedy that was avoidable (link in Italian) according to a trade union representative, should appropriate precautions have been taken.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ ‘Things Don’t Always Change in a Nice, Gradual Way’

• Climate change feels more real now than ever.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Surviving Extreme Heat

• A dispatch from Phoenix.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Leaks Can Make Natural Gas as Bad as Coal for Climate, Study Says

• The findings cast doubt on the idea that natural gas can serve as a transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables like solar and wind.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ US envoy John Kerry to head to China as world’s biggest polluters set to resume climate talks

• US envoy John Kerry will travel to China on Sunday, the State Department said, as the world’s two biggest polluters work to restart talks on climate change.

=> ↺ France24 ☛ EU lawmakers back major plan to fight climate change, protect nature

• The European Union’s parliament on Wednesday backed a major plan to protect nature and fight climate change in a cliffhanger vote that had the 27-nation bloc’s global green credentials at stake.

=> ↺ New Yorker ☛ Will Record Temperatures Finally Force Political Change?

• The climate activist Bill McKibben discusses this week’s weather, which he calls a “truly remarkable moment in the history of the planet.”

=> ↺ The Straits Times ☛ World’s biggest climate fund makes its largest water investment

• The South Korea-based Green Climate Fund has contributed $312 million to a water reuse funding facility in South Africa.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ The Once and Future Climate Emergency

• Heavy rains have caused catastrophic flooding and soaring temperatures are heating up oceans and cities. But emergency response often seems more popular than prevention on many issues.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ After a Bitter Fight, European Lawmakers Pass a Bill to Repair Nature

• The measure would require E.U. countries to restore damaged natural habitats.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Florida Ocean Temperatures Are in the 90s Fahrenheit, Posing Risk to Coral

• Researchers are recording ocean temperatures that pose severe risks to coral reefs and other marine life.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ ‘Underground Climate Change’ Threatens to Destabilize Buildings

• We built this city.

=> ↺ France24 ☛ Backlash against Nature Restoration Law shows deep divides in European Parliament

• The future of the EU’s flagship environment law hangs in the balance after a coalition of centrist and right-wing parties mounted an attack campaign in the European Parliament. The Nature Restoration Law now heads to a decisive vote on Wednesday with the EU’s climate neutrality targets at stake.

=> ↺ Helsinki Times ☛ Study reveals forest may adapt to climate change, but not quickly enough

• Climate change is posing a significant threat to America’s forests as rising temperatures and decreasing moisture levels create unfavorable conditions for trees. A recent study conducted by researchers from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah has shed light on the potential fate of these woodlands in the near future. By combining mathematical models with data collected by the U.S. Forest Service and plant physiologists, the study aimed to assess the vulnerability of forests to drought and their capacity to adapt to changing conditions.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Why large-scale global flooding could become new normal

• Many countries are experiencing deadly flooding this week and climate scientists say this is par for the course in a warming world. Climate pollutants, mainly carbon dioxide and methane, are holding more heat in the atmosphere.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Vermont Floods Show U.S. Lags in Adapting to Climate Change

• The lack of a comprehensive national rainfall database and current flood maps hampers the ability to prepare for storms intensified by climate change.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ When Climate Change Hits Home

• A dispatch from the flooded house of our new lead writer.

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ Human Rights Activists Warn Climate-Induced Heat Waves Are Killing Asylum Seekers at the Border

• A massive heat dome is starting to engulf the southern United States this week. It could grow to be one of the worst in the region’s history, breaking records for intensity and longevity and impacting some 50 million people in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California and Nevada. Heat domes are a key part of heat waves and have become hotter and longer due to climate change, making heat the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States. Along the Southwest border, more than 100 migrants have already died from heat this year amid the Biden administration’s continued crackdown on asylum seekers. We hear from Laurie Cantillo, a board member and volunteer with Humane Borders, which works to maintain water stations for migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument along the Arizona-Mexico border, as well as Eddie Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who condemns the U.S.’s policy of migrant deterrence as inhumane and ineffective and says that “migrant deaths will continue to happen until we have a policy [to receive] workers … [and] to deal with the lack of human rights in their home [countries].”

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ Federal backing for Rio Tinto refinery hydrogen pilot

• A major emitter, Rio Tinto’s alumina refinery in Queensland, has attracted federal support to switch gas use for renewable hydrogen.

• More than 17,000 workers in Australia’s emissions-intensive aluminium industry, which brings in around $14 billion in export revenue each year, are on the frontline of efforts to curb climate change by slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ Meet the TV Meteorologist Who Quit After Facing Death Threats for Explaining Climate Crisis on Air

• Chris Gloninger resigned from his position as chief meteorologist for KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday after receiving death threats as a direct result of reporting on climate change. One man behind the emails has pleaded guilty to harassment. We speak with Gloninger, now a senior climate scientist at the Woods Hole Group, about the difficulties scientists and journalists face when reporting on the climate crisis. “Meteorologists need to be doing this more, not less,” says Gloninger.

=> ↺ New Yorker ☛ What to Do with Climate Emotions

• If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?

=> ↺ The Straits Times ☛ Xi calls for a shift towards controlling China’s carbon emissions

• China will have to lower traditional energy’s share on the basis of reliable and safe renewables.

=> ↺ Vice Media Group ☛ Surreal Photos of People Chilling in Bomb Shelters to Beat the Heat In China

• Shelters built in the runup to World War II are being used to avoid the heat wave.

Energy/TransportationBreach Media ☛ How Quebec won the world’s first ban on oil and gas extractionThe story of the social movement that won a massive climate victory has never been fully told (until now)…DeSmog ☛ US Oil-Linked Pressure Group Attacks EU Green Policies, Breaks Lobbying RulesConsumer Choice Center, a libertarian outfit, has advocated against green regulations in the EU without being registered as a lobbying group, DeSmog can reveal.The US-based organisation – which has links to a network of fossil fuel funded think tanks and advocacy groups – has opposed climate-friendly measures in Europe, such as the phase-out of petrol cars and green farming reforms, despite being removed from the lobby register over a year ago.DeSmog ☛ Connecticut bans utilities from billing customers for lobbying effortsOn June 29, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed a law to prohibit the state’s investor-owned utilities from charging customers for lobbying expenses and other efforts to sway political outcomes. The new law marks the third comprehensive effort by a state to prevent utilities from using consumers’ monthly bills to fund political efforts, following a similar law passed in Colorado in May and a law that Maine Governor Janet Mills signed in late June.DeSmog ☛ Protesters Accuse Executives at ‘Low-Carbon’ Gas Conference of Telling ‘A Dirty Lie’Executives from the world’s largest gas companies are meeting in British Columbia this week for a conference marketing Canada’s liquefied natural gas industry as providing “low-carbon” energy solutions to the world.  But dozens of climate protesters who showed up outside the Vancouver Convention Centre Tuesday morning delivered a much different message to the suit-wearing delegates of LNG2023, a global gathering of gas industry leaders held annually for more than 50 years. The Straits Times ☛ South Korea’s $1 trillion pension fund under new pressure by climate groups over coalThe National Pension Service holds stakes in companies with coal-linked investments including Korea Electric Power.Yahoo News ☛ Binance lays off employees days after executive exodusCryptocurrency exchange Binance has cut jobs just days after it was hit by a wave of executive exits, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.The layoffs at the world’s biggest crypto exchange come at a time when the industry’s future in the U.S. market is uncertain, with regulators aggressively clamping down on what they deem are illegal activities.The job cuts were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which said more than 1,000 people had been let go in recent weeks. India Times ☛ Bitcoin crashes over reports of Binance laying off 1,000 employeesSan Francisco, Bitcoin prices nosedived on Saturday after leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance reportedly laid off roughly 1,000 workers, and the layoffs could continue.India Times ☛ Binance lays off over 1,000 employeesMore employees were laid off this week, according to former employees, who said customer-service workers were heavily affected. The cuts were global, including about three dozen customer-service employees in India, the report added.Forbes ☛ Everything You Need To Know About Bitcoin And The EnvironmentA report by JPMorgan highlights this stark reality: only bitcoin miners with access to cheap electricity and a high proportion of sustainable energy will likely survive in this progressively competitive space. As we hit an all-time high in mining difficulty, it’s clear that being a bitcoin miner is no easy task.[Old] Climate Impacts of Bitcoin Mining in the U.S.We validate arguments from both sides and provide empirical evidence for the extent and energy sources of Bitcoin mining in the U.S., based on data from 13 publicly listed mining companies that account for one-fourth of the total network hashrate as of the end of 2022. Using the grid average emission factors, we find that the carbon intensity of electricity consumed by the 13 miners included in our analysis of 397 gCO2/kWh is nearly equivalent to the U.S. grid average of 387 gCO2/kWh. Furthermore, we find that the annual emissions of 7.2 MtCO2 caused by the 13 analyzed publicly listed miners in the U.S. alone surpass the carbon emissions of the State of Vermont.

Finance

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Chart: Why homeowners weren’t crushed by the Fed’s rate-hiking campaign

• Most mortgage holders aren’t feeling the pain of higher interest rates.

• Why it matters: It’s one reason the U.S. economy has so far proved resilient in the face of the Fed’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign.

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Brickbat: The Rising Cost of Getting By

• Starting July 12, New York City will require food delivery apps to pay their workers $17.96 an hour. That will rise to $19.96 in hour in 2025 and then be indexed to inflation. Prior to the law taking effect, food delivery workers were making about $12 an hour in the city. New York City’s minimum…

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ UK Junior Doctors Start a 96-Hour Walkout Over Better Wages

• Continuously high inflation has been eroding people’s real income in the United Kingdom. In May, 128,000 working days were lost because of pay-related disputes.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Everything’s Coming Up Soft Landing

• Inflation seems to be fading without a recession.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ The average prices of US airplane tickets dropped 8% in June

• The US consumer price index (CPI) showed a decline of 8.1% for airfares, despite summer travel hotting up—one sign that inflation is declining faster than economists expected.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ US inflation hits lowest point since 2021, bringing consumers relief

• After two years of soaring inflation, the Federal Reserve reported the lowest figure since early 2021 – 3% in June, year over year. The shift, which should ease consumers’ minds, comes as prices ease for gasoline, airfares, used cars, and groceries.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Inflation Drops to 3% in June

• The Consumer Price Index climbed far more slowly in June, a relief for shoppers and a hopeful — though inconclusive — sign that America might pull off a “soft landing.”

=> ↺ Latvia ☛ Annual inflation down to 7.9% in Latvia

• The latest data published on July 11 by the Central Statistical Bureau show that in June 2023, compared to June 2022, the average level of consumer prices increased by 7.9%.

=> ↺ The Nation ☛ A Strategic Blueprint to Give Student Debt Relief a Fighting Chance

• The Supreme Court is an incredibly powerful institution, with the capacity to do tremendous damage to society. In recent months it has rolled back labor rights, stripped environmental protections, gutted affirmative action, legalized discrimination on free speech grounds, and more. But it did not kill student loan relief, though the ultraconservative supermajority certainly tried. President Biden’s cancellation plan, which grants up to $20,000 of relief for borrowers making under $125,000 a year, still has a fighting chance.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ NYPost ☛ John Kerry refuses to call China’s Xi Jinping a ‘dictator’

• President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry broke with the commander-in-chief on Thursday and refused to refer to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” during a hearing on Capitol Hill.

=> ↺ Bruce Schneier ☛ Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack

• It’s actually a pretty good idea. He could have spent the money on direct mail, or personalized social media ads, or television ads. Instead, he buys gift cards at maybe two-thirds of face value (sellers calculate the advertising value, the additional revenue that comes from using them to buy something more expensive, and breakage when they’re not redeemed at all), and resells them. Plus, many contributors probably give him more than $1, and he got a lot of publicity over this.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Desperate to Debate: Why a G.O.P. Candidate Is Offering $20 for $1 Donations

• Mr. Burgum is one of several Republican presidential candidates going to great lengths to reach a crucial threshold to qualify for the party’s first primary debate on Aug. 23 — the requirement that only candidates with at least 40,000 individual donors to their campaigns will be allowed on the stage.

=> ↺ The Wall Street Journal ☛ Honeywell to Buy Israeli Cybersecurity Business Scadafence

• Operational technology, which generally controls the heavy equipment used by critical-infrastructure operators such as manufacturing and energy companies, has long been an area of concern in cybersecurity.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ We will find you and we will sue you, Twitter tells 4 mystery alleged data-scrapers

• Twitter alleged the four unnamed defendants, identified in the suit only by IP addresses, were flooding Twitter’s sign-up page with automated requests that “severely taxed X Corp’s servers and impaired the user experience for millions.”

• The IP addresses, which the suit claims can be identified by lookup requests as being located in Fremont, California, and Atlanta, Georgia, are all Twitter has to go on, it said in the complaint. “X Corp. has been unable to ascertain the identity of John Does 1-4.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ RFA ☛ China’s social media coverage of French riots rife with misinformation, distortion

• Many accounts of the strife in France used photos from older incidents or otherwise misrepresented the event.

• [..]

• Coverage of the riots by Chinese language Twitter accounts are rife with misinformation accompanied by misleading videos not taken during the riots and fake images “corroborated” by other fake images.

• Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) checked and disproved four such widely circulated stories about the riots.

=> ↺ US News And World Report ☛ Efforts to Deceive Are a Top Concern Among State Election Officials Heading Into 2024

• Some state election officials said they would not be deterred by a recent court order by a federal judge in Louisiana that limited federal agencies when it comes to contacting social media companies about content deemed false or deceptive with a few exceptions. On Friday, an appeals court temporarily paused the order.

• “The injunction doesn’t apply to state officials, so I’m going to keep talking to whoever the hell I want to talk to,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “If you know somebody is out there lying and it hurts voters, they’re literally telling voters the wrong day or the wrong places to vote, literally giving them bad information on purpose, you should be able to shut that down because that’s interfering with the voter’s right to vote.”

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Critics of the Ruling Against Biden’s Anti-’Misinformation’ Crusade See No Threat to Freedom of Speech

• The response to the decision illustrates the alarming erosion of bipartisan support for the First Amendment.

=> ↺ AntiWar ☛ Good News on Free Speech – for Now

• Occasionally, the news makes one cheer. That’s the case with a preliminary injunction granted this week (July 4) to stop the federal government from suppressing lawful speech on social media. U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty took the action in the case of State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R.

=> ↺ Digital Music News ☛ Why Does Spotify Allow Hate Speech & Racial Slurs as Playlist Titles?

• Why is it possible to create Spotify playlists with hate speech and racial slurs in the title? One artist shares the frustrating process of discovering hate speech on their artist profile—and how long it took Spotify to do anything about it.

=> ↺ Reason ☛ Some Critics of the Ruling Against Biden’s Censorship by Proxy Have a Beef With the 1st Amendment Itself

• “Disinformation” researchers alarmed by the injunction against government meddling with social media content admire legal regimes that allow broad speech restrictions.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Social Media Restrictions on Biden Officials Are Paused in Appeal

• The judge’s preliminary injunction blocked several agencies — including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security — from urging the platforms to take down “protected free speech.” The order said the government agencies could still discuss content related to categories including criminal activity, threats to national security and foreign election interference.

• Legal scholars have said the broad nature of the injunction may make it difficult for the government to follow it. The Department of Justice appealed the order the day after it was issued.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Law That Made “Sex Work Industry More Dangerous” Upheld in Court

• The legal challenge to FOSTA alleged that the law chilled constitutionally protected speech.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ China blocks prominent Tibetan lama from preaching

• In recent years, Chinese authorities have strengthened laws to control the behavior of religious teachers in an effort to curb the spread of Tibetan Buddhist teachings, demolished Tibetan religious sites, and closed down religious schools.

• The Tibetan source went on to say that the venue and tents for the event had been in place since June, but that “Chinese authorities suddenly banned the Kalachakra for some lame excuses.”

=> ↺ The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Heart-stopping’: censored pages of history of Elizabeth I reappear after 400 years

• Now state-of-the-art imaging technology has enabled the British Library to read hidden pages of William Camden’s Annals for the first time, “a significant finding in early modern historical scholarship”.

• Those pages had been either over-written or concealed beneath pieces of paper stuck down so tightly that attempting to lift them would have ripped the pages and destroyed evidence.

• Enhanced imaging technology, involving transmitted light, has revealed those texts, offering new insights into the queen and the political machinations of her court, to the excitement of scholars.

=> ↺ ANF News ☛ 54 lawyers in Iran face investigation over solidarity with the family of Jina Mahsa Amini

• After the brutal murder of Amini, 54 lawyers published a joint declaration, expressing solidarity with the family of the young Kurdish woman and denouncing the unlawful actions of the state forces.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Man jailed for 18 days for insulting flags of China and Hong Kong

• Yung was arrested on October 7 last year for damaging two flags erected on China’s National Day outside Po Leung Kuk Lam Man Chan English Primary School in To Kwa Wan. Surveillance footage showed Yung taking down the flags on October 2 and throwing them to the ground.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Media adviser: Estonia needs proactive legal measure to protect media space

• According to media adviser at the Estonian Ministry of Culture’s arts department Andres Jõesaar, the recent controversial proposal by the Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority (TTJA) that media ought to be monitored for bias, was badly worded. However, in his view, Estonia needs a proactive legislative measure to restrict harmful foreign media outlets, in addition to the sanctions imposed on Russia.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ ‘An accumulation of lies’: Right-wing group La Resistencia stokes anti-press fervor in Peru

• Gorriti, the founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning Lima-based investigative news website IDL-Reporteros blames the backlash largely on La Resistencia, or “The Resistance,” an ultra right-wing group that has picketed the homes and offices of prominent journalists, politicians, and human rights activists, claiming they are pushing Peru towards communism and chaos. The group has also disrupted book events and news conferences and has clashed with left-wing protesters. Critics describe its members as bullies and shock troops at the service of right-wing politicians.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ The Nation ☛ Police Are Spreading Authoritarianism Under the Guise of Counterterrorism

• As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.”

=> ↺ ACLU ☛ Moving Beyond the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Rulings

• At the end of its term, the Supreme Court upended established equal protection law with its decision in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, effectively eliminating the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The court’s decision disregards prior precedent, as well as the societal realities of race discrimination and inequality.

• Many schools, as well as the courts, recognize that diversity exposes students to new ideas and ways of thinking, prepares them to live and work with one another in a diverse society, and increases understanding and respect across differences. Those findings have not changed, although schools will need to rely more on other means of cultivating a campus where students of all backgrounds can learn together.

• While this legal decision is indisputably a major setback, it is not the end of the drive to open educational opportunities for people of color. As we press forward in this work, here are four answers to crucial questions in the wake of the affirmative action rulings:

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ J4S: Missouri Court Order – Free Speech Victory or Not Enough?

• Check out this video on Rumble! Is the judgment from the Western District Court of Louisiana on July 4th a true victory against the censorship apparatus or does it fall short?

=> ↺ TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Police say there’s no sign of crime by BBC anchor who allegedly paid teen for sexual photos

• London police say there’s no evidence that a BBC news anchor who allegedly paid a teenager for sexually explicit photos committed a crime. The Metropolitan police issued the statement Wednesday as the wife of Huw Edwards identified him as the presenter. Edwards wife, Vicky Flind, says in a statement that her husband is hospitalized while suffering from serious mental health issues. The U.K.’s publicly funded national broadcaster had not named Edwards, but said it had suspended a male star over allegations he gave a youth $45,000 starting in 2020 when the young person was 17. The BBC says it will continue its investigation into the matter.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ BBC Crisis Grows as Staff Member Is Accused of Abuse by 2nd Person

• The British broadcaster was facing questions about its handling of an internal inquiry over explicit photos after another person accused the male staff member of sending abusive messages over a dating app.

=> ↺ YLE ☛ No legal grounds for officers to prevent protesters from filming, Police Board says

• Police cut down a roadblock using a chainsaw, but did not permit protesters to photograph or record its removal.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Ninth Circuit Dumps Oregon’s ‘Surreptitious Recording’ Law, Handing A First Amendment Win To Project Veritas

• The worst people can make the best case law. That’s the way it works here in the United States, where the court system occasionally works like it should and the old “disagree with what you say but defend your right to say it” axiom is upheld by judges who frequently have to deal with speech probably only the speaker likes.

=> ↺ Jacobin Magazine ☛ We Owe the French Revolution a Debt of Gratitude

• And yet the Jacobin clubs and newspapers survived the repression of Thermidor and kept alive the revolutionary spirit: of grassroots democracy, of commitment to social equality, of the zealous defense of revolutionary principles. This is what made it impossible for the reactionaries who ruled in the subsequent decades — both the liberals and the conservatives — to completely snuff out its achievements and reverse the course of history.

• And what were those achievements? Everything. Almost everything that makes public life in the modern world worth living was decisively advanced by the revolution that Bastille Day commemorates. From the creation of the first modern citizen army to replace the traditional brigades of monarchist mercenaries; to the imposition of popular juries where the “justice” of local oligarchs once held sway; to the first national abolition of slavery; to the abstract principle of popular sovereignty and the concrete practice of universal suffrage.

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Actors say Hollywood wants to use AI to reproduce their likenesses forever

• In another example of intelligence changing the nature of work, Hollywood actors brought up their own concerns about how studios intend to use the technology to use their likenesses in media forever without compensation.

• During a press conference Thursday, the actors said that they would be going on strike, Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland revealed that studios intended to implement what sounded like a dystopian science fiction use for this technology to scan background actors.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Actors Join Writers on Picket Lines to Fight the Studio Oligarchy

• That timing, like the talks themselves, bespoke a stunning tone deafness on the part of the entertainment industry’s bosses. At the literal and figurative summit of American media capitalism, Disney made Iger the belle of the billionaires’ ball, touting his track record to such labor-soaking peers as WB Discovery’s David Zaslav, Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, among others.

• Meanwhile, in the trenches of contract negotiation, things fell apart. As the AMPTP’s talks with the actors ground to a halt, the angry and apparently fractious producers sent out mixed messages. Some made a public play for a federal mediator, hoping this gambit would help them look like the reasonable party in the negotiations. But other members could not contain themselves. “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”

=> ↺ Deutsche Welle ☛ Hollywood actors join writers on picket lines

• AMPTP, which represents employers including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and others, said it had agreed to a “groundbreaking AI proposal” to mitigate these concerns by protecting performers’ digital likeness.

• SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland sad that studios had proposed that background actors be offered a days pay to have their likeness scanned, which entertainment firms could permanently use.

=> ↺ Reuters ☛ Twitter owes ex-employees $500 million in severance, lawsuit claims

• McMillian claims that under a severance plan created by Twitter in 2019, most workers were promised two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service if they were laid off. Senior employees such as McMillian were owed six months of base pay, according to the lawsuit.

• But Twitter only gave laid-off workers at most one month of severance pay, and many of them did not receive anything, McMillian claims.

=> ↺ Business Insider ☛ An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff after an AI chatbot outperformed them

• “We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,” Shah wrote in a thread that’s been viewed over 1.5 million times since being posted.

=> ↺ NPR ☛ ‘I am crying at my salon’: Taliban orders Kabul beauty parlors to shut down

• The ban on beauty salons is also likely one of the most economically bruising for women since the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan nearly two years ago. When it comes into effect at the end of July, it will shutter some 3,000 women-run salons in Kabul, which employ many thousands. The salons were one of the few places where women could openly work under Taliban rule.

=> ↺ Hollywood Reporter ☛ Fran Drescher Q&A On SAG-AFTRA Strike: “The Digital Age Is Cannibalizing Us”

• In an interview as the smoke began to clear on Thursday, union president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator and national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland discussed how they came to this point, and the stakes involved. Not long after a SAG-AFTRA press conference, the two discussed with The Hollywood Reporter the issues that the union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers agreed on during negotiations, the topics that divided them and why Drescher believes “the whole world is looking at us right now.”

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ ‘We Demand Respect!’ Hollywood Actors Union Joins Writers With Strike Against Studio Titans

• Nearly 98% of voters in the actors union supported a strike authorization in a vote in June, and weeks later, more than 1,000 luminaries including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, and John Leguizamo signed a letter saying they were “prepared to strike” to ensure that the vast majority of SAG-AFTRA members—who are not wealthy or famous and whose livelihoods depend on the union’s demands being met—get the compensation and job security they need to continue working in the industry.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Hollywood Actors Strike: TV and Movie Actors Vote for Biggest Walkout in Four Decades

• The leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, announced the strike after negotiations with studios over a new contract collapsed, with streaming services and artificial intelligence at the center of the standoff. On Friday, the actors will join screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, on picket lines in New York, Los Angeles and the dozens of other American cities where scripted shows and movies are made.

=> ↺ Truthdig ☛ SAG-AFTRA Strike Set to Upend Entertainment Industry

• People familiar with the negotiations say the AMPTP has disregarded union demands concerning compensation, contributions to the union’s pension and health fund, residuals and safeguards against artificial intelligence. To illustrate the distance between the two sides, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, revealed AMPTP’s plans for AI at a press conference on Thursday.

• “They proposed that our background actors should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation,” he said.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Fox News Faces Headaches As Cord Cutting Kills Off Its Artificially Inflated Subscriber Totals

• We just got done noting how there’s not much the federal government can do about right wing propaganda outlets like Fox News, given their protections under the First Amendment and the general limitations (both legally and courageously) at regulators like the FCC.

=> ↺ uni Stanford ☛ Yes, Telefonica, Forcing Apps to Pay ISPs Violates Net Neutrality

• Since Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton endorsed the proposal in May 2022, a broad group of stakeholders have warned that forcing websites to pay ISPs violates Europe’s net neutrality law. They include civil society organizations, consumer groups, members of the European Parliament, member states, academics (including me) and Europe’s top telecom regulator BEREC.

• But this week, Telefonica, one of Europe’s largest telecom companies, wrote a blog post seemingly intended to convince journalists and European officials that the proposal doesn’t violate net neutrality.

• The blog post is a marvelous specimen of deceitful lobbying.

=> ↺ [Old] BEREC response to the European Commission’s Exploratory Consultation on the future of the electronic communications sector and its infrastructure: Annex to complement section 4 of the BEREC response [PDF]

• This annex provides additional information and clarifications related to the messages outlined in section 4 of BEREC’s Response to the Exploratory Consultation “The future of the electronic communications sector and its infrastructure”. This document follows the structure of section 4 of the BEREC response.

• BEREC is committed to continue the work on the issues raised in this consultation and has a number of relevant projects in its Work Programme 2023, including, a report on the IP-Interconnection (IP-IC) ecosystem1, which it will publish in 2024 after collecting relevant data. BEREC also looks forward to the EU Commission sharing the data it receives from this consultation, which will allow BEREC to carry out quantitative assessments that will facilitate a deeper understanding of the topics under discussion and, will use relevant data to substantiate its approach and explore any new options that may arise.

• In this document BEREC focuses mainly on the mechanism of mandatory financial contributions from CAPs to ISPs, in the form of a sending party network pays (SPNP) regime and looks into possible impacts that this may have. Moreover, BEREC’s analyses the topics mainly via an IP-IC approach, but notes that a more complete analysis could be performed regarding the entire internet ecosystem.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ Internet Archive Targets Book DRM Removal Tool With DMCA Takedown

• The Internet Archive has taken the rather unusual step of sending a DMCA notice to protect the copyrights of book publishers and authors. The non-profit organization asked GitHub to remove a tool that can strip DRM from books in its library. The protective move is likely motivated by the ongoing legal troubles between the Archive and book publishers.

Monopolies

=> ↺ CoryDoctorow ☛ Why they’re smearing Lina Khan

• These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

• [...]

• We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize – this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ UK regulator to consider fresh proposal from Microsoft on Activision deal

• The UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, has again changed its stance on Microsoft’s bid to acquire gaming giant Activision Blizzard following a decision by an American court against the US Federal Trade Commission’s bid to block the deal.

• In April, the CMA announced it was blocking the deal as it would change the cloud gaming market and lessen choice for gamers in the country.

• At that time, the regulator said Microsoft’s solution had “significant shortcomings” and would need oversight.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Vice Media Group ☛ Trader Joe’s Sues Trader Joe’s United for Copyright [sic] Infringement

• Trader Joe’s filed a lawsuit against its union on Thursday for copyright infringement, claiming that the union’s merchandise was too similar to the Trader Joe’s logo, and demanding that the union’s profits off that merchandise be given to Trader Joe’s.

Copyrights

=> ↺ The Week ☛ Characters in the public domain, explained

• For quite some time, copyright laws have shielded many iconic and well-known characters. However, since 2019, some of those existing copyrights have been expiring, meaning that those characters entered the public domain, as their owners lost exclusive rights to their likeness. Now, creatives can attempt to reimagine the characters without fear of litigious reprisals.

• While many popular characters already exist in the public domain, there isn’t much precedent for the impending wave of copyright expirations of iconic 20th-century cartoons, superheroes and literary heroes. Most notably, Disney’s copyright over the original Mickey Mouse expires next year. Does that mean it will be a free-for-all for Disney’s most iconic character?

=> ↺ Walled Culture ☛ The copyright industry’s obsession with pursuing alleged infringements borders on the pathological

• As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions) details, for decades the copyright industry has lobbied consistently (and successfully) for more and harsher laws targeting alleged infringement. Against that background, it is hardly uprising that these laws are used on a massive scale every day. But some companies take this to extremes. Here, for example, is a story on Ars Technica from earlier this year: [...]

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