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● 08.17.23

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● Links 17/08/2023: OBS Studio 30.0, UK Government Suffers Microsoft Breach

Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ ZDNet ☛ 8 things you can do with Linux that you can’t do with MacOS or Windows

• Bhen I first started using Linux back in 1997, the open-source operating system was primarily used by computer science students, hackers, and programmers who wanted a more powerful, flexible, secure alternative to the Windows operating system. It was serious and geared toward serious work. Computer engineering students clamored to get Linux installed on desktops and laptops so they could help build for the future and expand their skills.

• Fast forward to now and Linux is used for everything (from phones, tablets, cars, appliances, IoT devices, and much more). Why? Simply put, it’s more flexible and secure than Windows.

Server

=> ↺ Ubuntu ☛ Canonical Kubernetes 1.28 is now generally available

• Following the release of upstream Kubernetes on 15th of August, Canonical Kubernetes 1.28 is generally available in the form of MicroK8s, with Charmed Kubernetes expected to follow shortly.We consistently follow the upstream release cadence to provide our users and customers with the latest improvements and fixes, together with security maintenance and enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu.  This blog is a quick overview of the latest developments and highlights that will be available in Canonical Kubernetes 1.28. 

=> ↺ Kubernetes Blog ☛ Kubernetes 1.28: Non-Graceful Node Shutdown Moves to GA

• The Kubernetes Non-Graceful Node Shutdown feature is now GA in Kubernetes v1.28. It was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.24, and promoted to beta in Kubernetes v1.26. This feature allows stateful workloads to restart on a different node if the original node is shutdown unexpectedly or ends up in a non-recoverable state such as the hardware failure or unresponsive OS.

Applications

=> ↺ 9to5Linux ☛ OBS Studio 30.0 Promises Intel QSV Support on Linux, HDR Playback for DeckLink

• OBS Studio 30.0 promises Intel QSV (Quick Sync Video) support on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, HDR playback support for DeckLink output, 10-bit capture support for DeckLink devices, and a YouTube Live Control Panel when streaming to YouTube.

• The GUI has been updated in this release with a redesigned status bar that provides users with more organized and structured information with more representative and recognizable icons, as well as a new option for Full-Height docks in the “View” menu.

=> ↺ FOSSLinux ☛ 20 Essential Linux Apps to Elevate Your Computing in 2023

• Navigating the vast ocean of Linux applications can sometimes feel overwhelming, given the multitude of choices available. The 20 applications listed above are among the most revered in the Linux community, addressing a broad spectrum of needs, from media consumption to productivity to system management. These tools offer a robust foundation for a rich computing experience.

• Moreover, the installation steps provided for popular distributions like Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Fedora simplify the onboarding process. I hope you enjoyed reading this article. We would love to hear your feedback!

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ University of Toronto ☛ Maybe we shouldn’t default to allowing logins on machines

• For this reason and others, we have been slowly making more and more servers be ‘staff only’ servers, where all non-staff logins get rewritten to have a ‘you can’t log in to this server’ shell. At this point we have more staff-only servers than unrestricted servers, although an unrestricted server is still the default. Given how pervasive this restriction has become in our environment, quite possibly it should become the default, and the few unrestricted machines be specifically set up for that.

=> ↺ Jeff Geerling ☛ Testing iperf through an SSH tunnel

• So in my case, I wanted to run iperf through an SSH tunnel. This isn’t ideal, because you’re testing the TCP performance through an encrypted connection. But in this case both the server and my computer are extremely new/fast, so I’m not too worried about the overhead lost to the connection encryption, and my main goal was to get a performance baseline.

=> ↺ Linux Handbook ☛ Proxmox Series #5: Backup and Restore Virtual Machines

• We should all be doing these. Backing up ensures that if something happens to your virtual machine(s), you have a second unaffected copy that you can restore.

=> ↺ TecMint ☛ LFCS #2: How to Install and Use Vi/Vim as a Full Text Editor in Linux

• A couple of months ago, the Linux Foundation launched the LFCS (Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin) certification in order to help individuals from all over the world to verify they are capable of doing basic to intermediate system administration tasks on Linux systems.

• The Linux administration tasks involve first-hand troubleshooting and maintenance, plus intelligent decision-making to know when it’s time to raise issues to upper support teams.

Games

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart update includes a fix for Linux gamers

• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart released back in late July and Insomniac Games / Nixxes Software have released another patch for it, which includes a fix for Linux gamers.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ High On Life, The Outer Worlds, Journey To The Savage Planet and more in this bundle

• You can get a whole lot of crazy space sci-fi in this Spaced Out Humble Bundle and there’s some really good picks. So here’s what you can get and what compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge – Dimension Shellshock DLC to release on August 31st

• The previously-announced DLC Dimension Shellshock for the Native Linux beat ‘em up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge now has a confirmed release-date and price, and there’ll be a separate free update on the same day, too.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Tempest Rising brings back memories of Command & Conquer

• Tempest Rising is an upcoming base-building RTS from Slipgate Ironworks and 2B Games with publishing via THQ Nordic and 3D Realms and a first playable preview is out with the first GDF mission.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Sandtrix the falling-block Tetris-like is getting a Sandtrix+ Steam release

• Originally called Setris until a DMCA from Tetris Holding, LLC appeared, Sandtrix is now getting a Sandtrix+ treatment with a full Steam release coming on September 1st.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ ProtonDB now has filters for PC and Steam Deck reports

• ProtonDB is the go-to for a lot of people to see how games run on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, and while its rating system is far from perfect it’s nice to have. A recent upgrade also makes it a lot nicer to browse.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ To the Moon – Beach Episode gets a trailer, plus there’s going to be a card game

• Freebird Games have revealed a brand new trailer for To the Moon – Beach Episode, the next is the series of this 2D RPG adventure and there’s even going to be a real-life card game.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to get some big updates

• I’m still completely hooked on Baldur’s Gate 3, the first time for a while I’ve been properly firmly sucked into a game and it’s set to get some big updates too. Thanks to Valve’s effort with Proton, it’s working fantastically on desktop Linux and could easily be my GOTY – it’s going to take a lot to top this.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ FreeBSD ☛ July 2023 Software Development Projects Update

• There are different ways to measure progress like the rate of commits, the number of developers, the number of FreeBSD ports, and so on. By one measure, the number of Foundation-funded contractors, we are in a boom cycle. As of the time of writing, the FreeBSD Foundation has contracts open for 12 different projects. Some projects we have written about in past newsletters, others have only begun recently. What follows is a summary of this contracted work as well as some noteworthy development by Foundation employees.

=> ↺ Dan Langille ☛ Identifying jails and data to migrade from old host to new host

• In this post, I’ll start the migration process by identifying what data needs to move, from where, and to where.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Magazine ☛ Using Cockpit to graphically manage systems, without installing Cockpit on them

• It probably sounds too good to be true: the ability to manage remote systems using an easy to use, intuitive graphical interface – without the need to install extra software on the remote systems, enable additional services, or make any other changes on the remote systems. This functionality, however, is now available with a combination of the recently introduced Python bridge for Cockpit and the Cockpit Client Flatpak! This allows Cockpit to manage remote systems, assuming only SSH access and that Python is installed on the remote host. Read on for more information on how this works and how to get started.

• If you are not familiar with Cockpit, it is described on the project’s web site as a web-based graphical interface for servers. Cockpit is intended for everyone, especially those who are…

Devuan Family

=> ↺ Devuan ☛ Devuan Daedalus 5.0 stable release

• The next Devuan release, 6.0, is codenamed Excalibur. Repositories are already available for the adventurous to test.

=> ↺ Linux Magazine ☛ Devuan GNU+Linux Latest Release is Now Available

• The developers of the systemd-free Devuan GNU+Linux distribution have made a new release available for installation. This release offers four important updates, which start with it being based on Debian Bookwork (version 12). Next comes the kernel (version 6.1), which offers better support for newer hardware. Then, there’s rootless startx, which uses libseat1. Finally, you’ll find the Wayland GUI without the systemd elongind, which is used to track user sessions. This release defaults to the Xfce 4.18 desktop but users can install GNOME 43 and/or KDE Plasma 5.27 from the distribution’s repositories.

Debian Family

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Happy Debian Day – going 30 years strong

• Today is Debian Day and it’s quite a special one, because the Debian Project has now been going for 30 years which is a very impressive milestone.

=> ↺ Unicorn Media ☛ Debian Is 30 and Sgt Pepper Is at Least Ninetysomething

• The Linux distribution Debian turned 30 today.

• Just as Linux got started with a short message for its creator, that a “little” operating system that probably won’t amount to much was being built, Debian was announced to the world by a similar message from its founder, the late Ian Murdock, that was sent to the comp.os.linux.development Usenet newsgroup…

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ Debian marks three decades as ‘Universal Operating System’

• The Debian GNU/Linux project has completed 30 years of producing a free, community distribution which is arguably the best and one that has served as the base for several other efforts.

=> ↺ Simon Josefsson ☛ Enforcing wrap-and-sort -satb

• For Debian package maintainers, the wrap-and-sort tool is one of those nice tools that I use once in a while, and every time have to re-read the documentation to conclude that I want to use the –wrap-always –short-indent –trailing-comma –sort-binary-package options (or -satb for short). Every time, I also wish that I could automate this and have it always be invoked to keep my debian/ directory tidy, so I don’t have to do this manually once every blue moon. I haven’t found a way to achieve this automation in a non-obtrusive way that interacts well with my git-based packaging workflow. Ideally I would like for something like the lintian-hook during gbp buildpackage to check for this – ideas?

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ CNX Software ☛ Star64 RISC-V SBC can now boot Apache NuttX real-time operating system

• NuttX may not often make the news, but they are plenty of supported platforms, and we previously played with it on the Sony SPresense board, and reported about NuttX RTOS on ESP32, so it’s good seeing the open-source real-time operating system add support for the RISC-V architecture.

• The main trick to boot NuttX on the Star64 is to make U-boot think the NuttX kernel is the Linux kernel. That means a Linux image such as sdcard.img for the VisionFive 2 board will be used to get OpenSBIU and U-boot bootloaders, and the NuttX Flat Image Tree which you can build from scratch or download the starfiveu.fit binary to overwrite the boot/Image for Linux.

=> ↺ Scoop News Group ☛ How a hacking crew overtook a satellite from inside a Las Vegas convention center and won $50,000

• Teams participating in the Hack-A-Sat contest at this year’s DEF CON’s Aerospace Village all had the same target: a small cubesat dubbed “Moonlighter” outfitted with challenges and “flags” that NASA and SpaceX launched in June.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Daniel Lemire ☛ How accurate is the birthday’s paradox formula?

• Given a set of r random values from a large set (of size N), I have been using the formula 1-exp(-r**2/(2N)) to approximate the probability of a collision. It assumes that r is much smaller than N. The formula suggests that if you have hundreds of millions of random 64-bit numbers, you will start getting collisions with non-trivial probabilities, meaning that at least two values will be equal. At the one billion range, the probability of a collision is about 3% according to this formula.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ [Old] PerlMonks ☛ Unix shell versus Perl

• Even if the script is small, don’t write it in shell unless you’re really sure that it will remain small. Small scripts have a way of growing into larger ones, and you don’t want the unproductive chore of converting thousands of lines of working shell script to Perl, risking breaking a functioning system in the process. Avoid that future pain by writing it in Perl to begin with.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Vintage Everyday ☛ Exeter Cathedral Has the World’s Oldest Known ‘Cat Door’, Which Has Been Serving the Cats Since the 14th Century

• This 14th-century door located at Exeter Cathedral in the UK is believed to be the earliest known example of a cat flap. Historical records from the medieval period reveal that cats had significant roles within various cathedrals, as they were tasked with keeping the premises free of mice. These cats were even included on the payroll, with funds allocated to support their food if their mouse-catching performance fell short.

=> ↺ MIT Technology Review ☛ Tech is broken—can collective action fix it?

• For Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders, any inconvenience big or small is a problem to be solved—even death itself. And a new genre of products and services known as “death tech,” intended to help the bereaved and comfort the suffering, shows that the tech industry will try to address literally anything with an app.

Science

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Sound Really Can Travel in a Vacuum, And We Can Finally Explain How

• The conditions need to be just right.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Surprise Discovery About Dopamine May Help Explain Parkinson’s

• This could explain a lot.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Mysterious Form of Vision Loss May Brew Inside The Gut, Scientists Say

• Harmful cells that migrate to the retina.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Beaming Solar Energy From Space to Earth Could Soon Be a Reality

• The potential is mind-boggling.

=> ↺ Science News ☛ A new look at Ötzi the Iceman’s DNA reveals new ancestry and other surprises

• The Iceman is about 5,300 years old. Other people with steppe ancestry didn’t appear in the genetic record of central Europe until about 4,900 years ago. Ötzi “is too old to have that type of ancestry,” says archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The mummy “was always an outlier.”

=> ↺ RIPE ☛ A Formal Analysis of Karn’s Algorithm

• In this guest post, Max von Hippel provides an analysis of Karn’s Algorithm and the RTO computations described in RFC 6298.

• The Internet consists of ‘protocols’ such as TCP, DCCP, SCTP, UDP, and so on. A protocol is a program allowing multiple computers to communicate information, such as emails or files. Since the Internet accounts for >3.4% of GDP in large and developed economies and undergirds essential infrastructure such as 911 services and power grids, we need to ensure that the Internet protocols work correctly.

Education

=> ↺ Terence Eden ☛ MSc Managed

• As my research was about “Exploring the visualisation of hierarchical cybersecurity data within the Metaverse”, I thought it only fitting that I had a formal photo taken wearing the damned headset.

Hardware

=> ↺ The Drone Girl ☛ How one Indian drone company is capitalizing on export, import bans

• Garuda Aerospace announced this month that it would be partnering with five major international drone companies as a distributor — enabling it to sell products made by those companies to other clients within India. And with some of those companies, Garuda is functioning as more than just a distributor, extending all the way into roles such as scaling from research and development or assembly to full manufacturing of those company’s drones and related products in India.

=> ↺ Linux Gizmos ☛ MYIR CPU Modules Feature TI Sitara AM62x Series

• MYIR launched today an embedded platform which includes a compact System-on-Module and a compatible development based on three Texas Instruments Sitara AM62x processor series. The device aims to target applications such as HMI, PLC, medical, EV charging stations and automation.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Tastes like chicken? ‘Cultured meat’ arrives on menus.

• “Cultured chicken” is approved for sale in the U.S. Supporters tout environmental benefits, and critics raise concerns over cost and practicality.

=> ↺ Gregory Hammond ☛ Using an emotional journal changed how I emotionally react

• For many of us, trying to do multiple things during a day can be difficult. One of the things I have recently tried to do was keeping an emotional journal, to keep track of my emotions and how they may affect others. I did it as an experiment, and I learned there are many ways to do it, you can experience many different emotions around it, and it was a great reminder that it’s ok to have emotions.

=> ↺ [Repeat] System76 ☛ AI Proteins: Creating Groundbreaking Treatments on System76 Hardware

• Folks might have heard about AlphaFold. It’s this algorithm developed originally by DeepMind. That’s really what kicked all of this off. By utilizing high-performance computing and deep learning techniques, researchers can train neural networks to understand and manipulate protein structures, accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation.

=> ↺ “I’m a rational theorist, not a conspiracy theorist.”

• Regular readers know that the last couple of weeks have lacking in the usual quantity of Insolence, both Respectful and Not-So-Respectful, on the ol’ blog. The reasons were twofold: A grant deadline on August 4, followed immediately by a vacation, during which Orac sought to recharge his much-depleted Tarial cells. When he returned, he immediately moved to update and revise a recent post from before his hiatus, but what then? Thankfully, there is never a shortage of material, to the point where I had difficult picking what target topic to start with. When I saw a post by COVID-19 antivax quack and crank Dr. Peter McCullough, I knew that I had to start out general, rather than specific. His post? The very title alone was enough to sell me: “Conspiracy Theorist” Recoined “Rational Theorist” in Battle Against the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex. Even more hilariously, the tagline for his Substack post was:

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

=> ↺ Scoop News Group ☛ [Crackers] are increasingly hiding within services such as Slack and Trello to deploy malware

• An analysis of more than 400 malware families deployed over the past two years found that at least a quarter of them abused legitimate [Internet] services in some way as part of their infrastructure, allowing malicious hackers to more easily blend in with normal traffic and complicating the job of those tasked with defending networks.

=> ↺ The Gray Zone ☛ Zelensky holds court with Ukraine’s most notorious neo-Nazi

Security

=> ↺ Bruce Schneier ☛ UK Electoral Commission [Breached]

• The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was breached] the year before. That’s fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesn’t know who was behind the [intrusion].

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ CoryDoctorow ☛ At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans’ privacy

• Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry’s shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.

• Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ New York City bans TikTok on government devices over security concerns

• Despite TikTok’s many efforts to convince the U.S. that the app is not a virtual spying machine for the Chinese Communist Party, slowly but surely it has been disappearing from government devices all over the country. It’s currently banned in 30 states, including New York State, which got rid of it around two years ago. This has been going on since 2020 when the Trump administration tried and failed to ban TikTok from the whole of the U.S.

• The concern isn’t just in the U.S. Earlier this year, the European Commission banned TikTok from all corporate and personal devices, again citing security concerns.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Texas woman charged over threat to kill judge overseeing Trump case

• Shry was charged with one count of transmitting a threat to injure another person, according to the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas Friday.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ TikTok Is Opening a Parallel Dimension in Europe

• TikTok will soon allow users in Europe to disable the personalized feed. It’s an update meant to satisfy a component of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) that requires the internet’s largest social-media sites to let users opt out of being algorithmically targeted. The regulation, part of an aggressive push in Europe in recent years to rein in tech platforms, is geared toward better protecting people’s rights online and mitigating risks to democracy such as the spread of disinformation. For anyone who chooses to hide from TikTok’s all-knowing algorithm, the For You feed will become something like a “For Everyone” feed, filled with broadly popular videos that don’t take into account individual interests—or whatever the algorithm perceives those interests to be.

=> ↺ Express ☛ Migrants told to ‘ignore’ small boat deaths in Channel as they are ‘conned’ into crossing

• The revelations will heap pressure on social media giants to do far more to prevent their platforms from being exploited by organised crime gangs.

• Border Force chiefs fear a surge in crossings over the coming weeks as the wind drops and the sea becomes calmer.

• The force’s former chief immigration officer, Kevin Saunders, said: “This just proves how well organised the smugglers are.

=> ↺ LBC ☛ Organised crime gang steals hard drive containing vital evidence against Channel people smugglers from UK base

• These record migrant crossings via camera and that footage is used to prosecute criminals and help target gangs who bring them over the sea.

• A hard drive that was held in a safe in a hangar was stolen in the raid on August 1. It contained footage of crossings from previous days.

=> ↺ The Telegraph UK ☛ Letters: Are the French doing enough in the fight against Channel trafficking?

• “It’s difficult to believe that migrants wishing to cross the Channel from France, with probably only mobile phones, can find smugglers – yet the authorities in both Britain and France seem unable to locate them. This is gross incompetence.”

Environment

=> ↺ Breach Media ☛ To stop a pipeline, a three-week jail sentence was a small price to pay

• Yet our tax dollars are being siphoned into escalating construction costs, and more covertly, being wasted on incarcerating peaceful land defenders who are desperate to help our society transition off oil and gas.

• Here in the Lower Mainland, a coalition of Indigenous and environmental groups has formed under the banner “Protect the Planet – Stop TMX,” who have been organizing to halt pipeline construction through the deployment of non-violent direct action since August 2020. The majority of those 250-plus arrestees have been members of this coalition.

• Many of these arrests have been relatively high-profile, and Indigenous people are receiving the harshest sentences. Most recently, there was the “Secwépemc Eight,” a group of four Indigenous land defenders and four settler allies who received sentences between 28 to 32 days this past February as punishment for conducting a water ceremony to stop drilling under the Secwépemcetkwe (Thompson River) in unceded Secwépemcul’ecw.

=> ↺ New Yorker ☛ Why It’s So Hard to Forecast Wildfire Smoke

• The best available science allows for little more than a day of prediction, making the arrival of smoky skies feel sudden and unexpected.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Massive Tidal Waves Taller Than The Sun Are Crashing on a Distant Star

• You can’t ride these waves.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Landmark US Trial Rules Young People Have a Right to a Clean Environment

• This could be huge.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Revelator ☛ Eels, Cocaine and Climate Change

Finance

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ As 93 Confirmed Dead, Locals Fear Lahaina Rebuild Dominated by Rich Outsiders

• “Disaster capitalism will happen yet again unless they act proactively.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI acquires digital products company Global Illumination for undisclosed price

• What exactly those descriptions mean is not entirely clear. The website for the company is sparse, with the company only saying, “Global Illumination is a digital product company based in New York most recently working on Biomes.” “Biomes” is an open-source sandbox massively multiplayer online role-playing game that strongly resembles games such as “Minecraft” and those from Roblox Crop.

• Presumably, unless OpenAI has a secret plan to enter the MMORPG gaming business, this is a talent acquisition — that is, one in which bigger companies acquire smaller companies for their talent versus the company and what it is building.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Another Perfect Irrefutable Indictment

• We know it’s always darkest before the dawn. But GOOD NEWS! Our blessed Racketeer-In-Chief – now facing, it’s true, four criminal indictments encompassing 91 counts that carry 712 years behind bars, including a vast Georgia rap for election interference charging him with 13 felonies and 161 overt acts under the RICO Act in a state with atypically harsh rules on bail and pardons – will soon issue a “Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT” that will bring “a complete EXONERATION!” Whew that was close. Go MAGA!

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Axios ☛ AI-generated books are infiltrating online bookstores

• Amazon doesn’t prohibit AI-generated book content but works created using AI sometimes intersect with violations, including not complying with intellectual[sic] property [sic] rights [sic] and misleading and “disappointing” customers.

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Beijing’s Tibetan studies seminar serves as ‘propaganda tool,’ critics say

• But critics say the seminar – titled “Prosperity of Tibetan Studies and the Opening of Tibet” – is nothing more than a propaganda tool meant to whitewash its efforts to erode Tibetan culture and identity.

• “The Chinese government’s claim of protecting Tibetan culture, language and religion is completely untrue,” said Tenzin Lekshey, spokesman for the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India.

• “Instead, they are using such platforms and seminars to amplify their false narratives to the international community,” he said.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ JURIST ☛ Iran human rights report: Sunni religious leaders persecuted for protesting state violence

• According to the report, this includes clerics who have decried the killings of protestors who took to the streets to protest the death of Mahsa Amini. JURIST’s Iran correspondent reported on the police response to these protests, describing their own near-deadly interaction: [...]

=> ↺ Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Quran Burnings Put Sweden in a Bind in the Middle East

• But these government reactions are also politically calculated—to buttress themselves against any perceived lack of piety that could lead to domestic dissent, given genuine public anger over the burning of the Quran.

• “They have to be shown to be standing up to the West’s different values when it comes to Islam or insulting Islam by members of the Western public,” said Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center.

=> ↺ Off Guardian ☛ The “Free-Speech Twitter” PSYOP

• I’m writing this column because, maybe, now that folks are starting to face the fact that the whole “free-speech Twitter” thing was an elaborate con, or a trap, or a PSYOP, maybe, now, they can knock off the “Elon is our savior!” crap and try to pay attention to what is actually happening.

• Here’s an example of what is actually happening…

• Here’s a link to that Tweet with a recording of the Spaces thing. It’s Linda Yaccarino, X CEO, explaining how the new censorship system works. And here’s my favorite Yaccarino quote: [...]

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ Taliban authorities detain 2 journalists, ban women’s voices from broadcasts in Helmand

• On Sunday, August 13, Taliban intelligence agents summoned Omar, a journalist at the independent broadcaster TOLO News, to the intelligence service’s provincial headquarters in Kandahar and detained him, according to his employer, the local Afghanistan Journalists’ Center nonprofit, and a local journalist familiar with the situation who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban. Authorities accused him of working with media outlets operating from exile.

• CPJ could not immediately determine Omar’s whereabouts as of Tuesday evening.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ Benin and Burkina Faso suspend media outlets over coverage of Niger coup

• Both suspensions stem from the outlets’ coverage of the recent coup in Niger.

=> ↺ BIA Net ☛ Journalist Barış Pehlivan surrenders to prison

• Barış Pehlivan had been sentenced to 3 years and 9 months in prison for a news article related to the funeral of a National Intelligence Organization (MİT) agent who died in Libya in 2020 and was buried in Manisa.

=> ↺ Kansas Reflector ☛ Why care about Marion’s newspaper? Because police raid was a step too far.

• We run the police chief out of town on a rail and thank heaven to be quit of him. We address through open discussion and if need be due process the might-is-right culture that pervades law enforcement in towns large and small. The smart answer always is to raise the standard and lift all boats. To go high, as Mrs. Obama reminds us, when they go low.

• We say, simply but firmly, that this is a.) not good enough and b.) just not the way things will be done here, period, amen. We lean into the mutuality King mentions. We resolve and then further resolve that any and all public office necessitates a higher standard and never a blind eye. We remind ourselves we can always do better and that everyone is subject, if not to review, then to each other.

• Which is the ethos here. We look carefully into what happened, we label it what it is — a series of grave mistakes — and hold people accountable to the degree we can.

=> ↺ Kansas Reflector ☛ Marion County Record publishes in defiance of police raid — and gets seized property back

• Authorities returned property taken by police during Friday’s raid but said they would continue to investigate whether a newspaper reporter had committed a crime by verifying information from a confidential source.

• Eric Meyer, the owner and publisher of the newspaper, said it was important the newspaper prevail in this First Amendment fight.

=> ↺ Kansas Reflector ☛ With return of Marion newspaper’s equipment, the time has come for answers. And consequences.

• On Wednesday, the county prosecutor withdrew the search warrant and requested the return of all materials to the Record. An investigation would continue, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation said, but without the Record’s technology. In the meantime, the paper celebrated the publication of this week’s issue, created with a cobbled-together computer and a dash of adrenalin.

• “I have come to the conclusion that insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized,” county attorney Joel Ensey wrote in a statement.

=> ↺ Gannett ☛ Why did this police department raid the local newspaper? Journalists decry attack on press

• The letter sent to Mario Police Chief Gideon Cody by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on Sunday states that, “under any circumstances, the raid and seizure appeared overbroad and unduly intrusive, and raised concerns that the execution of the warrant may have violated federal law strictly limiting federal, state, and local law enforcement’s ability to conduct newsroom searches.”

=> ↺ The Guardian UK ☛ Tony Blair Institute continued taking money from Saudi Arabia after Khashoggi murder

• The prince, who is the Gulf state’s de facto leader, was accused of ordering the assassination of dissident Washington Post journalist Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

=> ↺ Express ☛ Saudi Crown Prince set for UK visit – five years after murder of journalist Khashoggi

• Downing Street is believed to extended an invitation to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to visit the UK this autumn for what would be his first trip to these shores since the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

• Rishi Sunak’s Government is understood to be trying to take advantage of the nation’s plan to diversify its economy away from oil, with a massive £1trillion pot of cash up for grabs.

=> ↺ Middle East Eye ☛ Khashoggi murder: Tony Blair Institute kept advising Saudi Arabia after killing

• The crown prince became a global pariah after he was accused of ordering the killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post and Middle East Eye columnist, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

• Saudi agents executed the 59-year-old journalist after luring him into the consulate, in an assassination that US intelligence believes was approved by the crown prince.

=> ↺ Middle East Monitor ☛ Tony Blair Institute confirms it continued partnership with Saudi Arabia after Khashoggi killing

• Throughout the course of the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance in early October 2019, Blair had expressed concern over the incident and had acknowledged it went against the spirit of Saudi Arabia’s reforms. Despite that, he refused to cancel his Iinstitute’s deal with the country when Khashoggi’s killing was discovered and it became ever more evident that Riyadh and bin Salman had a direct hand in it.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ Two Bangladeshi journalists investigated under Digital Security Act

• The complaint, which CPJ reviewed, was filed by Md Shahinur Islam, who identified himself to The Daily Star as a reporter for the newspaper Amar Somoy, which supports the ruling Awami League party. It accused the journalists and other unnamed members of the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party and Bangladesh Nationalist Party of working together to commit “anti-state crimes” and disseminate “conspiratorial news” in a July 27, 2023, Dainik Fulki article.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ Iranian journalist Ali Moslehi detained, transferred to Kashan Central Prison

• Iran ranked as the world’s worst jailer of journalists when CPJ conducted its most recent worldwide census of imprisoned journalists on December 1, 2022. Overall, Iranian authorities detained at least 95 journalists in the wake of nationwide protests following the death in morality-police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last September. Many have been released on bail while awaiting trial or summonses to serve multi-year sentences.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ Women in Afghanistan speak about being under Taliban rule for 2 years

• Although the Taliban have never been recognised as the official leaders of Afghanistan, their rule has inherently crushed the rights of Afghan women and girls.

• The Taliban started by first restricting girls’ education and women’s right to work, followed by the swift enforcement of a strict dress code and several impositions on women’s freedom of movement and access to public life.

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ Taliban officials make a bonfire of musical instruments because music ‘destroys society’

• The complete annihilation of a humane society which began in August 2021 in Afghanistan is gradually reaching its tipping point. The group had promised [sic] a moderate approach this time, but the situation on the ground says otherwise.

• The group is again doing what it used to do in the 90s, ruling Afghanistan with an iron fist with zero consideration for human rights. The tyrannical Taliban government has been passing diktat after diktat restricting women’s movement, lifestyle, and rights. Women are slowly being erased from public places.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ ‘Z-Library ‘Fugitives’ Should Be Brought to Trial in The United States’

• The U.S. has responded to a motion to dismiss submitted a few weeks ago by two arrested operators of Z-Library. According to the prosecution, the Russian defendants are fugitives because they continue to protest their extradition to the United States. As such, they should not be allowed to request a dismissal from the U.S. judicial system they are trying to avoid.

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ Anti-Piracy Group Takes Prominent AI Training Dataset ”Books3′ Offline

• Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has taken down the prominent “Books3″ dataset, that was used to train high-profile AI models including Meta’s. A takedown notice sent on behalf of publishers prompted “The Eye” to remove the 37GB dataset of nearly 200,000 books, which it hosted for several years. Copies continue to show up elsewhere, however

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