𝕿𝖊𝖈𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙𝖘 Bulletin for Friday, September 08, 2023
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Generated Sat 9 Sep 02:52:04 BST 2023
Created by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (𝚛𝚘𝚢 (at) 𝚜𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚣 (dot) 𝚌𝚘𝚖)
Full hyperlinks for navigation omitted but are fully available in the originals
The corresponding HTML versions are at 𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈
Latest in 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒕𝒙𝒕 and older bulletins can be found at 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒕𝒙𝒕-𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔
Full IPFS index in 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒊𝒑𝒇𝒔 and as plain text in 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒊𝒑𝒇𝒔/𝒕𝒙𝒕
Gemini index for the day: gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/
╒═══════════════════ 𝐑𝐄𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐁𝐔𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐒 ════════════════════════════════════╕
Previous bulletins in IPFS (past 21 days, in chronological order):
QmbqCQ6R4NusTRm9E3YjVzj9c1FxCfEvrfqShjAZLaCyQS
QmeZFBVX9fk1V5VBuSsZpDpx2dnJBatXxASzUtAm4wrZ26
QmR8687kGyLT5rdVV9a5wwcd599wytXYh8CbSBUtHMqNx6
QmVL6ny5v6haHeg8eGHJrcSY343AUa4deXjfvCw1ZDmDz6
QmWKPms4oLgJhFJZPgySVW8kBSCBHkHuEbpSJ9Hu8w899a
QmYRNEXfEKgCkNrxSJTkmHBQSawGzsT7jTG9zeGBgLZpYW
QmXuNJQvwQEw7vxCEMaH6S2XP6CJWxyQPwQ5XwEnWrbwNY
QmU8r9irxybJVwzTWsCaejmJ4dDWJ8vAHAHHAKEkyeufpQ
QmeryNavwPZxt2XqRC8WzQsxzm8Q2aJpPrHDJjt4MVx7j9
QmV1aDkYP6Y7Yv8Eg5mojpfKfRqGkjzLoJiut9uECHzXbF
QmNRJcNP3MBmn7dGr91i3qjc8AouAjwSZWUmroRDLJDj2W
QmR3skFpi5NU2DwodXGtVWF1yWK1pJNg7U4BHJZ26DXmJr
QmNyZCmQoHYnCZYzsD7hZtwEa43PmCo6mPJQSvxSE2bjMR
QmbHjgPAAcGNUG9Sej4vSKhK8DfUYokfFkXLdKwr1JtGJG
QmdLsuRLzrwb58dZaSmJah6oCmNNZ6cW4ick4chqJmHjmY
QmTNR3uqcbMYjPAbbHjBqyNJb3ib8kytQvdFnATzkBFVvo
QmfCHrqMLfMsHXYnQeAvVuNYt91Zw2AmMJ5mx4RqsrWy3b
QmR2rr1yXDANjQBEz2oGtd2UMgy9U37FHdjpUhPfAk7h5z
QmWE6ucdKk9Q1pi6ce3ko9xPWd9Y4BjpLij3W7tJ5TMjG3
QmaoEDiALTYYZdaq3SQ86aQpMwUji1nqCeLbXAoszFRYvJ
QmSTkZUY74BcgbgqS6JKwwNbVnbzY5uqwpgWtYonGJua8s
╒═══════════════════ 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐗 ═══════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
⦿ Record Traffic and 6 Months of Uptime for Our Gemini Capsule | Techrights
⦿ Why You Should Not Use Microsoft Office 365 | Techrights
⦿ IBM Gaslighting While Breaking the GNU/Linux Desktop Experience | Techrights
⦿ IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 07, 2023 | Techrights
⦿ OpenAI and Microsoft Can Die Together | Techrights
⦿ Google Chrome Enables More Spyware; Calls It “Ad Privacy Feature” | Techrights
䷼ Bulletin articles (as HTML) to comment on (requires login):
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/an-agate-milestone/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/do-not-use-microsoft-office-365/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/ibm-breaking-things/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/irc-log-070923/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/openai-and-microsoft-fate/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/spyware-as-privacy-feature/#comments
䷞ Followed by Daily Links (assorted news picks curated and categorised):
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/akademy-2024-plans/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/circuitpython-8-2-5/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/francis-1-0/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/migrating-to-neovim/#comments
http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/war-on-encryption/#comments
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 66
╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
(ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/an-agate-milestone/#comments
Gemini version at gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/an-agate-milestone/
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Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Record_Traffic_and_6_Months_of_Uptime_for_Our_Gemini_Capsule⠀✐
Posted in Protocol, Site_News at 12:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video_download_link | md5sum 073a3c6bcc8d795848b9133fac5d3e8d
6 Months of Gemini Uptime
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
http://techrights.org/videos/gemini-and-agate-milestone.webm
Summary: Our Gemini capsule has just broken another record and today’s video
explains what makes us proud of the way it evolved in less than 3 years
(Techrights as a whole turns 17 soon)
THIS month has started very strongly for us. In HTTP/S we’re looking at 5.5
hits/second, on average, and in Gemini about 25,000 page requests per day. One
noteworthy milestone is that for the first time (ever) our Gemini server,
agate, exceeded 6 months in uptime (today it’s exactly 6 months) and some time
this month or next month we expect to have 50,000 pages in Gemini.
“In many ways, the Web controls users, the users do not control the Web. Or the
real users are advertisers, spies etc.”As a side note or addendum to the above
video, I presented this_IPFS_index_page exactly when the list was being
refreshed (around 4AM every night) and that alone is the reason it was
incomplete. There are many reasons to prefer for our readers to use Gemini,
especially seeing the bad direction the World Wide Web has taken in recent
years. It does not exist to serve users but to serve advertisers and today’s
Web browsers, not just Web sites, help companies control people. In many ways,
the Web controls users, the users do not control the Web. Or the real users are
advertisers, spies etc. There’s no simple fix because very few companies
control the Web and its future_direction.
“Everything that makes the Web browser “better” is something that takes away
from the Web platform something that the Web browser allowed it to do to begin
with,” Ryan notes in IRC this morning. “Ad blockers, JavaScript blockers, Brave
putting in “random garbage” in an API readout so the site can’t follow you
around everywhere. Overriding cookie and local storage handling…”
“In the 90s, they called it the “World Wide Wait”, because it was over a phone
line and you had to wait minutes sometimes for a site to load. And now it’s
because you go to read the news and they want to pull in 600 MB of data, and
part of that is a video you didn’t want to see. Pretty much the only thing you
can do with the Web is turn a bunch of crap off and use it in a partially-
working state. Otherwise there’s just going to be too much junk loading.”
“Gemini pods [sic] aren’t like Web sites because they don’t have a way to FORCE
the user to do anything, even load an image if they don’t want to. This
Fediverse thing is sort of a lie. Because ideally there wouldn’t be a way to
run a server for tons of users. Every user would be in a Peer-to-Peer system.
There would be no way to block a user at a server level, only on a user-to-user
basis. Then it would be up to the users to decide who they want to see. The
Fediverse is federated between clusters of users on someone else’s server. So
it’s like “FEDRA Colonies” from The Last of Us. Maybe it would be humorous to
call it the FEDRAverse. Small groups of people living under the control of a
local tyranny. In the game/TV show, pockets of the former United States
government, forcing starving people to “earn their keep” incinerating plague
victims and digging latrines.
“The Fediverse lie is that because it’s a lot of tyrants in control of a small
cluster, that’s better somehow than one great big tyrant running Twitter. You
run into more interesting stuff on Mastodon by looking at the public list of
servers that the administrator decided to ban. A lot of times they don’t even
give a reason. It’s just that nobody using his server can see that other server
because the administrator didn’t like it and won’t tell you why.” █
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 156
╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
(ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/do-not-use-microsoft-office-365/#comments
Gemini version at gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/do-not-use-microsoft-office-365/
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Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Why_You_Should_Not_Use_Microsoft_Office_365⠀✐
Posted in America, Microsoft, Office_Suites, Wikipedia at 1:31 am by Guest
Editorial Team
Reprinted with permission from Ryan_Farmer.
Quoting Wikipedia to Explain Why You Should Not Use Microsoft Office 365.
Microsoft 365, or Office 365 has a terrible record on security, which is one of
the reasons you should not use it.
Another reason is that if your “subscription” expires, even the desktop
versions will go into “read-only” modeand prevent you from editing or creating
any new documents until you’re paying Microsoft for a subscription again.
Even the older licensing model required a “Product Activation” server, but it
was only to check if you paid the licensing fee, one time, whereas the
licensing fees for Microsoft 365 never stop unless you want the programs to
turn into document viewers that can’t do anything else.
Let’s just look at what Wikipedia says about “Security” and directly quote it
(note that this is the September 7th, 2023 edit, and it may change later.
Microsoft even pays PR firms to vandalize Wikipedia and downplay and edit out
embarrassing information.
In spite of claiming to comply with European data protection
standards, and in spite of existing Safe_Harbor agreements, Microsoft
has admitted that it will not refrain from handing over data stored
on its European servers to US authorities under the Patriot_Act.[88]
In Finland, FICORA has warned Office 365 users of phishing incidents
and break-ins that have caused losses of millions of euros.[89][90]
In July 2019, the German state of Hesse outlawed the use of Office
365 in educational institutions, citing privacy risks.[92]
In December 2020, the US_Department_of_Commerce_was_breached via
Office 365. The attackers were able to access staff emails for
several months.[93][94]
–Wikipedia
So, Microsoft will turn over your documents to US authorities under a rubber-
stamp procedure under the USA PATRIOT ACT, no matter where it claims to store
them, and in violation of your own country’s privacy laws. Many of these
procedures don’t even require the government to ask a judge in an American
court. They can just get the files.
(National Security Letters work this way, and they couldn’t tell you they
handed the files over even if they wanted to, because they come with a gag
order. The point of this is you won’t know there’s an investigation until
they’ve arrested you and have already built the case.)
Microsoft “online services” are notorious for break-ins, so Finland’s warning
shouldn’t be a surprise. When they break into the server, criminals can take
your documents and files too. They can use them to steal trade secrets or
blackmail you.
The United States government has been breached at least once, and for several
months, and there’s no telling where the Department of Commerce’s mail ended up
(Russians? Chinese? Even the US government gets no security when they use
Microsoft products.)
Microsoft 365 is banned for use in classrooms in at least one German state,
which has deemed it too insecure to even use at all.
Also, this is the stuff that survived Microsoft’s PR firm “pruning” things from
Wikipedia.
None of this things can happen to you if you use LibreOffice, and store your
documents on your own computer.
Also, LibreOffice never goes into “read-only” mode if you stop paying a monthly
fee. There is no fee.
People working with/for online trolling firms (like IBM, who now promotes MS
Office to Linux users via a Web browser) or who have been brainwashed by them
like to paint people who insist on real software as some sort of aging hipster
or a crank, but it’s all part of the rub.
“Web Apps” that do something that you could do with locally executed computer
software almost always have few or no real advantages for you, but they do give
someone power to steal and leak your data, and force you to constantly pay them
more money under threat of losing access to the program entirely.
When I was a teenager, I railed against “Product Activators” for locally
installed software too. I see that a lot of software uses those now, but I
decline to use anything that makes you submit to a Web server to continue
executing the program.
There may be some sort of “illegal crack”, which is what paying customers would
always eventually have to do to keep their binaries working when the activation
server no longer exists. So you can pay and THEN still be forced to make the
decision between committing a crime or not, later on, after you use and need
the software.
So far, Microsoft has hidden this facet by keeping the activation servers for,
I think, even Windows and Office XP running, but they won’t do that forever.
(I do not support piracy of Microsoft software. Piracy of Microsoft software is
always a terrible thing, and should never be done, because then there are more
copies of the software. Also, they can come with viruses, but the Microsoft
software itself is usually at least as bad as the virus that comes with it.)
If I can still use WordStar in DOS, why can’t a person who bought Office XP
have binaries that will always work if they want to use them in 2050 somehow?
One point of subscription models is forcing users to update even when the
program changes in ways that make it difficult for them to adjust to, or remove
features they needed.
So add all of this to the list_of_reasons_not_to_use_Microsoft_365_or_any
“Clown_Office”. █
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 317
╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
(ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/ibm-breaking-things/#comments
Gemini version at gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/ibm-breaking-things/
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Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ IBM_Gaslighting_While_Breaking_the_GNU/Linux_Desktop_Experience⠀✐
Posted in Free/Libre_Software, GNOME, GNU/Linux, IBM, KDE, Red_Hat at 12:18 am
by Guest Editorial Team
Reprinted with permission from Ryan_Farmer.
IBM Gaslighting: “The New Linux Technologies Work Fine. It’s Just You!”
Wayland is Not Robust.
I got a heckler a while back who seems to do work involving administering IBM
Red Hat systems, and he tried to tell me that Wayland works fine and it’s just
me or my distribution.
I’ve searched the Web for “plasma_crash_wayland” and variations, and found
users on recent releases of Ubuntu, Arch, and openSUSE (Leap and Tumbleweed)
complaining about it and of course there’s me, with Debian 12.1 and I ran
screaming to X11 when Wayland was causing issues here too after I had
previously experienced all sorts of issues trying to run KDE on Wayland in
openSUSE Leap 15.5.
I can’t believe Debian made this pile of crap the default. I’m far from the
only person having lots of issues with KWin and Plasma Desktop on Wayland, and
the issues just disappear for everyone when you go back to X11 (which is the
default for openSUSE KDE on Leap).
IBM is just replacing all of these mature and stable interfaces, to the Linux
kernel (with inferior and buggy systemd units/code), they’ve replaced
Pulseaudio with Pipewire, leading_to_audio_corruption_issues of the sort
Pulseaudio had 15 years ago which have been fixed since forever.
Oh, you want to smack it so it’ll stop sounding like a crackling tin can?
Restart Fedora and wait until a few hours later when it does that again.
And they’ve done Wayland to “replace X11”, and now there’s no reliable way to
run KDE on itand even in GNOME, you run XWayland for Wine and it causes Windows
programs to flake out and crash when you do something like drop files on them
from Nautilus (the file manager).
As long as X11 remains an option I’m going to use it.
KDE themselves has a list of “Wayland_Showstoppers”. Some are fixed upstream in
Qt6, but Long Term Stable distributions are shipping Plasma Desktop 5.27.5,
which is based on Qt5.
Of course, many issues are still unresolved regardless, and don’t even have a
proposed patch on the bug tracker.
IBM doesn’t care what sort of damage they cause to non-GNOME desktops on Linux.
Their answer to KDE was to throw it out of RHEL.
In Fedora, it’s maintained largely by Windows and Mac users (as revealed by
Element, the Web app for Matrix.org.)
Since KDE has a traditional desktop, it’s what most PC users would really want
to use.
If they sat down to two identical PCs, one running GNOME and the other using
KDE, most would pick KDE.
In over 10 years of using GNOME 3 and 4x, I couldn’t get past expecting there
to be a desktop there, with a system tray, and a taskbar, like every normal
desktop environment has.
IBM doesn’t even ship GNOME looking like it does in Fedora. Ubuntu doesn’t
either. Neither does System76.
They all hack it to death with shell extensions to try to beat it into some
kind of shape.
As much as I dislike Ubuntu in general (mainly because of Snaps and cozying up
to Microsoft), I think they’ve gone to the most effort of restoring some kind
of sane and usable desktop experience to GNOME.
It’s really a shame that there’s so much backing of GNOME, which is just
inferior in every way, especially this Windows 8-like “Let’s see how much we
can torture them and force our branding everywhere.” mentality to the GUI.
It’s more of a shame that the people behind GNOME (largely IBM, through Red
Hat) feel like they have to “shoot out the tires” of the competition with
broken garbage like Wayland instead of a little competition for who can write
better programs.
There’s really few arguments in Wayland’s favor.
The worst thing about defaulting Debian KDE to Wayland is that Debian promotes
IBM’s vandalism and helping them make Linux appear to be “broken” if a user
does not know to turn off Wayland at the log-in screen and choose “Plasma on
X11” instead.
This whole Wayland farce has been going on for long enough without any real
results.
The more you look, the more people_who_got_blindsided_by_this_idiotic_default
look for a way back to X.
One user in Reddit says that if you use Nvidia cards, the log-in screen
immediately returns to the log-in screen in Debian KDE on Wayland and it’s not
even clear to the user why.
In 2023, more than 10 years later, remote desktop software still won’t work in
Wayland. Why? More bogus “Something something SECURITY!”.
This_guy_here says KWin on Wayland makes his brightness controls go from “15%
to 100%”.
I mean, you can go on endlessly. People are clearly having problems with
Wayland and the consensus is “just wait longer” and hopefully some of the
issues will start disappearing.
What does the user get in exchange for using Wayland? Nothing. Only bugs that
don’t happen on X11.
It would be completely different if they found a way to make Wayland draw
things to your display 40% faster or something, but….it doesn’t even do that.
I’ve been around Linux since 1998. It was far from perfect then, but by 2010 or
so it had been cleaned up and was really easy to install and use without any
serious problems.
IBM has brought us full circle and vomited out the biggest mess onto desktop
users I’ve seen in over two and a half decades.
Almost everyone is having some trouble out of Wayland if they’ve tried using it
for a while or for enough NORMAL desktop tasks.
But IBM only considers running GNOME so you can open Firefox and load_Microsoft
Office as the sole purpose of desktop PCs now, and Wayland can handle that, so
“stable”.
Apparently, enough time has gone by that the Old Guard of IBM who at least
remember how badly Microsoft screwed them over on OS/2 are all gone. Now
they’re a satellite state.
I like to say Wayland is “Negative work.” not only because it just replaces X11
with inferior beta software-quality interfaces, sometimes missing entirely,
where everyone has to rewrite the same function from scratch, but because it
requires work that doesn’t involve actually improving the desktop and window
management for the users.
A lot of work has been poured into get KDE to do things it already did on X11,
and with code that is new and unstable, and incomplete.
“Negative work” was also a direct quote from IBM.
They accused Microsoft of “negative work” when Microsoft was rewriting OS/
2 modules that had already been written by IBM, and Microsoft said they were
optimizing it. But what was really going on was they were adding bugs and
breaking OS/2 software and causing IBM’s customers to get mad at IBM.
This Wayland thing is just “rewriting modules that worked” and “breaking
programs” in the process, forcing other software developers to write bad
Wayland code and get negative feedback on it from users. “Negative work.”
In IBM’s case, they could care less what happens when I drag files onto a
Windows program, or one using XWayland. None of the IBM execs are using desktop
Linux.
But I care.
I do not consider X11 programs, the majority of programs, to be some “optional
legacy code”, due to office politics at IBM, coming down from managers who
don’t even run Linux.
Community distributions like Debian have an excellent opportunity they’re not
taking.
Drop GNOME.
Hell, it’s easier than ever. Its applications (and GTK ones) are in Flatpak or
AppImage or something, where the GNOME people can containerize the mess so it’s
not spewing GTK nonsense out everywhere.
Set KDE back to X11.
GNOME applications are no great loss anyway. Most of them are trash. Remember,
the people paying to develop it it don’t even use it.
When I needed to file PDF documents with the US federal government and had
Fedora with GNOME, I quickly found GNOME’s PDF application to be unusable, and
had to bring in Okular, a KDE program, to do the job of…..fillable forms. █
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 569
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(ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/irc-log-070923/#comments
Gemini version at gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/irc-log-070923/
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Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ IRC_Proceedings:_Thursday,_September_07,_2023⠀✐
Posted in IRC_Logs at 5:31 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
* gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techrights-070923.gmi
* gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-070923.gmi
* gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-social-070923.gmi
* gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techbytes-070923.gmi
Over HTTP:
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Enter_the_IRC_channels_now
=> =============================================================================
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(full IRC log
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🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇IPFS logo⦈
§ Bulletin for Yesterday⠀➾
Local_copy | CID (IPFS): QmSTkZUY74BcgbgqS6JKwwNbVnbzY5uqwpgWtYonGJua8s
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 696
╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
(ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/openai-and-microsoft-fate/#comments
Gemini version at gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/openai-and-microsoft-fate/
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ OpenAI_and_Microsoft_Can_Die_Together⠀✐
Posted in Deception, Finance, Microsoft at 2:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video_download_link | md5sum
Controlled Media Hype Waves and End of OpenAI
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
http://techrights.org/videos/openai-bubble-imploding.webm
Summary: Merely starting and/or running some business does not mean that this
business is a success and actually makes money (most businesses never make
money and the vast majority will collapse in the first few years); if Microsoft
officially buys “Open”AI (which is misleading; the money typically goes to the
investor/s tolerating the losses — not to ordinary staff — and staff is
considered a likely casualty, lucky to survive an acquisition, from which
there’s no direct gain) it will be a major financial liability whose only
potential upside is an over-hyped and computationally-overzealous gimmick
(“Open”AI is a one-trick_pony) which distracts from Microsoft’s ongoing
destruction across many sectors
WE extensively covered loads_of_layoffs back in July, as expected since last
year (based_on_leaks) and we had repeatedly said that all the “HEY HI” (“AI”)
hype was intended to help distract from it. Microsoft probably shed off 20,000-
30,000 employees so far this year, not counting (perma)temps and contractors.
It's_a_bloodbath. In Bellevue alone Microsoft went down from ~9,300 employees
to only 4,400 (that’s less than half).
“It seems reasonable to predict “Open”AI’s bankruptcy and it won’t even take
very long to happen.”The video above discusses yesterday's_post about the
demise_of_"Open"AI (it’s neither Open nor “AI”; Alex Oliva called_them
"Stochastic_Parrot" and Richard Stallman said something to the_same_effect).
It seems reasonable to predict “Open”AI’s bankruptcy and it won’t even take
very long to happen. As I note in the video, maybe they will use the misnomer
“exit” as they sell the remaining “assets” (staff) to some other company and
mislabel the company’s failure as “successful acquisition”. █
🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽⦇ChatGPT_Creator_OpenAI_Could_Go_Bankrupt_by_202:_With
declining_users_and_competitors_on_the_rise,_could_the_creator_of_ChatGPT
really_be_on_the_way_to_bankruptcy?⦈_
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⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⡿⢿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⡿⠿⡿⠿⣿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⢿⢿⣿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⡿⣿⡿⢿⣿⣿⡿⢿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⠿⣿⢿⡿⢿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣸⣻⣰⣙⣎⣇⣆⣇⣇⣥⣿⣸⣯⣻⣂⣿⣠⣟⣎⣖⣇⣪⣰⣿⣸⣸⢰⣉⣮⣇⣼⣓⣸⣸⣇⣗⣏⣎⣹⣸⣈⣆⣿⣸⣸⣱⣹⣇⣅⣳⣹⣰⣁⣕⣇⣇⣇⣏⣸⣰⣿⣰⣡⢳⣷⣣⣇⣇⣗⣽⣵⣹⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⡿⢿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⡿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿⡿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣶⣽⣿⣦⣿⣤⣦⣤⣤⣤⣴⣜⣧⣵⣥⣧⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣤⣴⣾⣿⣤⣼⣿⣾⣿⣿⣿⣯⣾⣧⣮⣴⣿⣤⣤⣤⣤⣼⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣴⣥⣼⣿⣿⣧⣼⣼⣿⣿⣿⣼⣿⣿⣿⣦⣯⣿⣔⣾⣤⣴⣧⣤⣼
⣿⢻⣿⣿⡿⠿⣿⣿⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠻⢻⣿⣛⢿⣽⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣾⣿⣿⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⡏⢉⣭⢹⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣇⣲⣳⣾⣯⣯⣭⣯⣽⣭⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣭⣭⣿⣿⣽⣯⣽⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 781
╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
(ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2023/09/08/spyware-as-privacy-feature/#comments
Gemini version at gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/09/08/spyware-as-privacy-feature/
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Google_Chrome_Enables_More_Spyware;Calls_It“Ad_Privacy_Feature”⠀✐
Posted in Deception, Google at 8:06 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Reprinted with permission from Ryan_Farmer.
Google Chrome Enables More Spyware; Calls_It_“Ad_Privacy_Feature”.
Google Chrome has enabled Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC.
As Ars Technica describes it, Google implemented this “ad topics” feature as a
“solution” to third-party tracking cookies. But Apple Safari, and Mozilla
Firefox, have blocked these cookies for years. It’s only Chrome that isn’t
blocking them now. Google hasn’t even turned off third-party cookies and says
they won’t for at least another year.
Might be a good idea to mention that Brave (which uses the Chromium rendering
engine) doesn’t have FLoC or third-party cookies, and is one of the few
browsers that actually has an ad and tracking blocker (a real one) built-in.
This is really just the latest reason to leave Google Chrome. There’s really no
special rendering capabilities that it has that Brave doesn’t. It just has a
lot of spyware in it.
Google has been doing a lot of sketchy things, at the browser level, in Chrome,
to circle the wagons around its ad and tracking business.
Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, correctly said that they are not just a skin for
Chromium, they are a fork and always have been, and that they “disable lots of
junk already”, and that includes FLoC.
Their “Shields” mean that Google’s ManifestV3 neutering of privacy-based
extensions matters less to Brave because it has full support for uBlock-Origin
style content blocking lists anyway, built-in, at a level where Google is
powerless to stop you.
Mozilla-based browsing engines have other implementations than Firefox that do
a lot more for the user’s privacy, such as LibreWolf and GNU IceCat.
There’s nothing preventing people from grabbing IceCat and turning off the
extensions like LibreJS and the others if they don’t want them.
What makes Brave, LibreWolf, IceCat, or the SeaMonkey Internet Suite possible
is that with open source software, if the upstream “Goes bad.” then anyone is
free to take the code and alter it to remove that malicious feature and create
an alternative version which doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally, Google FLoC is just another way that Chromium has “gone bad” and
has been fixed by the forks. Users deserve privacy, which turning off third-
party tracking cookies helps with.
What they do not need is some “Google alternative” which preserves the worst
aspects and makes third-party tracking even more powerful than it already was.
With third-party cookies, only the server that set them could read them back
and figure out who you were and which domains you’d been on that this server
had loaded resources into.
That alone was bad enough, but with Google FLoC, the browser itself tracks
which ads you“might be interested in”, and this fundamentally creates a huge
“fingerprint” that is not quite unique, but is broadly available to any site
that asks for your FLoC data, and can be mixed in with other data that your
browser is leaking to create a strong fingerprinting vector.
In other words, in isolation it’s not globally unique, to you, in the world,
but when sites start logging FLoC plus your time zone, language preferences,
features your browser exposes, Canvas readout data, etc., suddenly all this
data is unique to one person in the entire world. Plus, for at least one year,
they have third-party cookies as well.
Google has continued making your online privacy worse than it has ever been,
basically every year. Sometimes more than once a year. They didn’t even wait
for Europe to decide if FLoC is even legal there under the GDPR and other laws.
They just put it in.
Google is not a solution. They are a disease.
Brave and LibreWolf are already fighting fingerprinting vectors to make you
less identifiable while keeping the Web platform working. We do not need Google
rowing us towards the waterfall.
What about Microsoft Edge?
LOL!
Oh wait, well, I guess this merits explaining.
Microsoft has a “tracking protection” feature, but it’s a lie. Theirs is
basically designed to screw up everyone’s ad and tracking servers but
Microsoft’s, and when I tried Microsoft Edge on Windows, I found that Microsoft
(at least with the EdgeHTML version) was neutering uBlock-Origin for Edge so
that it couldn’t block any ads on Bing even if you installed an ad blocker.
This sort of “exempt yourself” thing is exactly what Google is trying to
achieve by abusing the fact that they have an ad network, and a browser. Same
shit, different assholes.
Except that Microsoft Edge is even more rapacious than Google Chrome. Hard to
believe anything could be even more of a privacy invasion than Chrome, I know.
Google is at least subtle about their abuses. Microsoft Edge is very in your
face about it.
You can barely open a new tab without it screaming about some online shopping
thing or demanding you get Microsoft_Office_365.
Fleeing Windows, which hectors its users to come back to Edge or demands that
they change the search engine in their other browsers to Bing, and ignores the
default browser, only to install it on Linux, where it can act this bad, but
only when you have Edge open, is a lot like successfully escaping state prison
so that you can break into a cell in the country jail.
But on a strictly “privacy” level, Edge is worse than Chrome. It’s another step
in the wrong direction.
Nevertheless, Flathub “claims” it’s been downloaded over a million times.
Who uses this nonsense on Linux? Really? The number one feature Windows users
wish for is an uninstaller program for it.
Personally, I think that even having a Linux version of Microsoft Edge that
almost_nobody_uses (even counting Windows and Mac users, they can only get to
3.37% of Web browser market share) is sort of like the North Korean propaganda
village that nobody lives in, in the demilitarized zone.
The entire point of the thing is they plant a really big flag and have a huge
bullhorn blaring propaganda at the other side, and the officials claim it’s a
modern city with people living in it, but then you look through the binoculars
and all you see are empty concrete slabs, and a few caretakers walking around
at night to flip the lights on and off.
People need to be mindful that the Web is only getting worse.
Yesterday, in Techrights IRC, I said,
“Everything that makes the Web browser “better” is something that
takes away from the Web platform something that the Web browser
allowed it to do to begin with,”.
“Ad blockers, JavaScript blockers, Brave putting in “random garbage”
in an API readout so the site can’t follow you around everywhere.
Overriding cookie and local storage handling…”
“In the 90s, they called it the “World Wide Wait”, because it was
over a phone line and you had to wait minutes sometimes for a site to
load. And now it’s because you go to read the news and they want to
pull in 600 MB of data, and part of that is a video you didn’t want
to see. Pretty much the only thing you can do with the Web is turn a
bunch of crap off and use it in a partially-working state. Otherwise
there’s just going to be too much junk loading.”
“Gemini pods [sic] aren’t like Web sites because they don’t have a
way to FORCE the user to do anything, even load an image if they
don’t want to. This Fediverse thing is sort of a lie. Because ideally
there wouldn’t be a way to run a server for tons of users. Every user
would be in a Peer-to-Peer system. There would be no way to block a
user at a server level, only on a user-to-user basis. Then it would
be up to the users to decide who they want to see. The Fediverse is
federated between clusters of users on someone else’s server. So it’s
like “FEDRA Colonies” from The Last of Us. Maybe it would be humorous
to call it the FEDRAverse. Small groups of people living under the
control of a local tyranny. In the game/TV show, pockets of the
former United States government, forcing starving people to “earn
their keep” incinerating plague victims and digging latrines.
“The Fediverse lie is that because it’s a lot of tyrants [each] in
control of a small cluster, that’s better somehow than one great big
tyrant running Twitter. You run into more interesting stuff on
Mastodon by looking at the public list of servers that the
administrator decided to ban. A lot of times they don’t even give a
reason. It’s just that nobody using his server can see that other
server because the administrator didn’t like it and won’t tell you
why.”
–Me_on_Techrights
The Open Web is basically dead. The one where people sat down and wrote
documents for you to read is dead. This one is just, grrrrrrr.
I’ll finish by giving you an example of the liberties that modern Web sites
take.
I was looking in my Brave browser on my phone this morning, and I visited Ace
Hardware’s Web site once months ago, and it left 97 MB of Local Storage data in
my browser. 97 MB for Ace Hardware while I was looking for a tool a couple of
months ago.
They all think they can just dump an unlimited amount of crap on your phone and
walk away, and in a way they’re right. Nobody making a browser will put in a
feature that lets you stop them. (Unless you only browse in Private Mode.)
The Mobile version of Brave appears to have had less effort put into it than
the desktop version, which is sadly still true on Mobile Web browsers in
general, although it is better than Chrome. █
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 1039
╒═══════════════════ 𝐃𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 ═════════════════════════════════════════════╕
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Links_07/09/2023:_DebConf23_and_Akademy_2024_Plans⠀✐
Posted in News_Roundup at 3:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇GNOME bluefish⦈
§ Contents⠀➾
* GNU/Linux
o Kernel_Space
o Applications
o Instructionals/Technical
o Games
o Desktop_Environments/WMs
# K_Desktop_Environment/KDE_SC/Qt
* Distributions_and_Operating_Systems
o New_Releases
o Fedora_Family_/_IBM
o Debian_Family
o Devices/Embedded
o Mobile_Systems/Mobile_Applications
* Free,_Libre,_and_Open_Source_Software
o Productivity_Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
o GNU_Projects
o Programming/Development
# Python
* Leftovers
o Education
o Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
o Proprietary/Artificial_Intelligence_(AI)
o Security
# Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
# Privacy/Surveillance
o Defence/Aggression
o Finance
o Censorship/Free_Speech
o Civil_Rights/Policing
o Monopolies
# Trademarks
# Copyrights
* § GNU/Linux⠀➾
o § Kernel Space⠀➾
# ⚓ LWN ☛ A_more_dynamic_software_I/O_TLB⠀⇛
The kernel’s software I/O translation lookaside
buffer (“swiotlb”) is an obscure corner of the DMA-
support layer. The swiotlb was initially introduced
to enable DMA for devices with special challenges,
and one might have expected it to fade away as
newer peripherals came along. Instead, though, the
swiotlb has turned out to be useful in places
outside of its original use cases. This patch set
from Petr Tesarik now aims to update the swiotlb
with an eye toward its continuing use indefinitely
into the future.
One of the fundamental features of any reasonably
capable I/O device is its ability to perform DMA —
accessing data directly in main memory without the
need to go through the CPU. Without DMA, I/
O performance will be severely limited. But some
devices are better at DMA than others. Older
devices for PC-class hardware, reflecting the
history of that architecture, were often limited to
24 bits of address space for DMA transfers, meaning
that they could only access the lower 16MB of
memory. That was plenty in the early days, but
quickly became limiting as memory sizes grew.
Another common problem is a 32-bit limitation,
restricting access to the lower 4GB of memory.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Development_statistics_for_the_6.5_kernel⠀⇛
The 6.5 kernel was released on August 27 after a
nine-week development cycle. By that time, some
13,561 non-merge changesets had found their way
into the mainline repository, the lowest number
seen since the 5.15 release (12,377 changesets) in
late 2021. Nonetheless, quite a bit of significant
work was done in this cycle; read on for a look at
where that work came from.
1,921 Developers contributed to 6.5, a slightly
lower number than usual; 271 of those developers
made their first kernel contribution for this
release.
o § Applications⠀➾
# ⚓ PC World ☛ The_best_Linux_backup_tools:_Don’t_put_it_off
any_longer_|_PCWorld⠀⇛
What you should back up depends on how you use your
PC. As a rule, a regular backup of the home
directories is sufficient. This protects against
data loss—for example, if an important file is
accidentally deleted. With a suitable tool, you can
automate the process.
If many programs and perhaps server services are
installed, a complete backup of the hard disk is
recommended from time to time. We present tools
with which an image of the drive can be created
and, if necessary, also restored on a new hard
disk.
o § Instructionals/Technical⠀➾
# ⚓ Make Use Of ☛ How_to_Check_the_Status_of_an_Apache_Server
on_Linux⠀⇛
Apache is one of the most widely used web server
software applications in the world. A W3Techs
survey estimates that just over 31 percent of all
known web servers use a version of Apache. It’s
highly customizable, responsive, and completely
open-source.
Apache is an excellent and well-established option
for running a website. It’s vital to know how to do
essential maintenance when running an Apache web
server. Here are five different ways to check your
Apache server status on Linux.
# ⚓ How_To_Install_Moodle™_On_Amazon,_Part_One⠀⇛
The sky is the limit for educational technologies
today. The forecast is more and more closed. The
explosion of “Platform as a Service” (PaaS)
solutions is increasing the rate of innovation in
digital products, enabling them to scale instantly
without compromising reliability, and at a lower
cost. Leading the PaaS charge is Amazon Web
Services (AWS), its reign anything but secure.
It only makes sense to consider the potential of
Moodle™, the largest, open source Learning
Management System today, on the AWS. The setup can
be tricky, but Roy Plomantes, CTO of Nephila Web
Technology, has decades of experience making anyone
capable to build things they didn’t think they
would on the cloud, maybe even struck by its vast
potential.
# ⚓ HowTo Geek ☛ 5_Ways_to_Count_Files_in_a_Directory_on
Linux⠀⇛
Working with operating systems like Linux, managing
files is one of the fundamental tasks. If you are a
Linux admin, imagine the file count you have to
deal with. And if your files consume a lot of disk
space, then it will be a tough nut to crack. Let’s
discuss some ways to count these files, including
the pesky hidden files.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Mastering_Emacs⠀⇛
A series of rabbit holes, some of which led to
unshaved yaks, recently landed me on a book called
Mastering Emacs. Given that I have been using Emacs
“professionally” for more than 16 years—and first
looked into it a good ways into the previous
century—I should probably be pretty well-versed in
that editor-cum-operating-system. Sadly, for a
variety of reasons, that is not really true, but
the book and some concerted effort have been
helping me down a path toward Emacs-ian
enlightenment. Mastering Emacs may also help others
who are struggling in the frothy sea that makes up
Emacs documentation.
The backstory of how I got here is kind of
goofy—some days rabbit holes look like so much fun
… and they definitely can be, but the lost
“productivity” may be problematic. In any case, a
Hacker News item on “Elixir for cynical
curmudgeons” caught my eye a few weeks back since I
certainly qualify. After reading that and poking at
Elixir (and Erlang) documentation some, I
remembered that I always wanted to understand Lisp
macros better—or at all, in truth. That led me back
to a project that I started (and promptly drifted
away from) after a talk at linux.conf.au about the
history of Lisp that I really enjoyed.
o § Games⠀➾
# ⚓ XDA ☛ 5_reasons_why_Linux_is_good_for_gaming_in_2023⠀⇛
Linux has gotten a lot better for playing video
games over the past few years, making it more
friendly for gamers in 2023.
Windows has long been hailed as the best operating
system for gaming, easily beating Linux and macOS
when it comes to running the latest graphically-
intensive games. But it’s not quite as cut and dry
these days. Linux gaming has come a long way since
the early 2010s when most Windows-based 3D games
used to run at drastically reduced framerates on
the open-source operating system. In fact, Linux is
now a viable platform for gaming, so maybe it’s
time to give it a shot.
o § Desktop Environments/WMs⠀➾
# § K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt⠀➾
# ⚓ OpenSUSE ☛ KDE_Gear,_FreeRDP_update_in_Tumbleweed⠀⇛
This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots
varied from large to small and there was also
an updated arm Tumbleweed snapshot released.
Packages to arrive so far this month have
touched several portions of the rolling
release.
Snapshot 20230904 had security fixes for two
packages. The XML parsing package libxml2
addresses CVE-2023-39615, which pertains to a
crafted XML that could potentially lead to a
global buffer overflow, and libxml2-python
mitigates this vulnerability with a patch.
# ⚓ KDE Official ☛ Akademy_2024_Call_for_Hosts⠀⇛
One of the biggest things you can do for KDE
(that does not involve coding) is helping us
organize Akademy.
Now is your chance to become KDE champions
and help make Akademy 2024 happen! We are
looking to host Akademy 2024 during the
months of June, July, August, and September.
Download the Call_for_Hosts guide, and submit
a proposal to host Akademy in your city to
akademy-proposals@kde.org by October 1, 2023.
Do not hesitate to send us your questions and
concerns! We are here to help you organize a
successful event and you can reach out at any
time for advice, guidance, or any assistance
you may need. We will support you and help
you make Akademy 2024 an event to remember.
* § Distributions and Operating Systems⠀➾
o ⚓ [elementaryOS]_One_Last_Bug_Fix_Update_Before_The_Big_One⠀⇛
It turns out we have one more updates blog before OS 7.1
and it brings a number of fixes and a few small features.
We’re hard at work resolving your reported issues to make
this release as smooth and shiny as it possibly can be!
So read ahead and find out what was new last month.
§ Feedback
The Feedback app has been ported to GTK 4 and it now
features search! This should make it much speedier to
send feedback when something unexpected happens.
The Feedback app now features search
The feedback app is our way to stay connected with you
and address any issues you come across, so please make
sure to make use of it. The issues that we send fixes for
every month come directly from folks who make use of this
app.
§ Videos
We’ve been hard at work getting Videos ready for GTK 4
and one of the steps along the way was getting rid of
Clutter—big “C”—which has lead to a massive rework of the
app’s internals. The code base is much cleaner and
clearer and should be more reliable and performant. This
release still uses GTK 3, but look forward to GTK 4 in
the next release.
o § New Releases⠀➾
# ⚓ DebugPoint ☛ MX_Linux_Unveils_New_Tool:_MX_Service
Manager⠀⇛
If you enjoy the simplicity and stability of the
popular lightweight systemd-free distribution MX
Linux, then a piece of exciting news for you.
MX Linux team has just announced a new addition to
its toolkit – the MX Service Manager. This new mx-
tool promises to make managing services and daemons
on your Linux system like a cakewalk, giving you
more control over what starts at boot time.
# ⚓ DebugPoint ☛ Linux_Lite_6.6_Released_with_22_Languages
Support⠀⇛
The Linux Lite team has just unveiled their latest
and most exciting release to date: Linux Lite 6.6.
In this release, they’ve added a whopping 22 new
languages to their already impressive arsenal of
features, making it one of the most comprehensive
updates since the project’s inception back in 2012.
o § Fedora Family / IBM⠀➾
# ⚓ insideHPC ☛ The_Rocky_Linux_Ecosystem’s_United_Front
against_Cyber_Threats:_Building_Trust_within_a_Zero_Trust
Environment⠀⇛
In the permanent war against cybersecurity threats
to the HPC software supply chain, you can’t fight
it alone. You need allies, information exchanges
and best practice sharing. You need to be part of a
group effort that keeps you current with the ever-
changing threat landscape. Cybersecurity means
cyber vigilance across many fronts, and it takes a
community.
# ⚓ Hacker Noon ☛ The_Noonification:_Micro-DevOps_With_Systemd:
Supercharge_Any_Ordinary_Linux_Server_(9/6/2023)⠀⇛
o § Debian Family⠀➾
# ⚓ Debian ☛ Bits_from_Debian:_Siemens_welcomed_as_a_Platinum
Sponsor_of_DebConf23!⠀⇛
We are pleased to announce that Siemens has
committed to sponsor DebConf23 as Platinum Sponsor.
# ⚓ Jonathan_McDowell:_DebConf_23_Key_Signing_+_setting_up_a
new_key⠀⇛
I’ve just finalised the OpenPGP key list for the
DebConf_23_Keysigning_party. This will follow the
“new style” approach of being a continuous
keysigning throughout the course of the conference,
with an introduction session up front to confirm no
one’s fingerprint is corrupted and that we all
calculated the same hash of the file. Participants
will then verify each other’s identities over the
conference week, hopefully being able to build up a
better level of verification than a one shot key
signing session.
o § Devices/Embedded⠀➾
# ⚓ CNX Software ☛ Gateworks_GW7400_networking_SBC_features_6
Gigabit_Ethernet_ports,_M.2_&_mini_PCIe_sockets_for_wireless
connectivity⠀⇛
Gateworks provides an Ubuntu Linux BSP for their
Venice boards which includes the GSC (Gateworks
System Controller) Firmware, Arm Trusted Firmware,
DDR controller Firmware, U-Boot bootloader, the
Linux 5.6 kernel, and a rootfs.
It’s also possible to use mainline Linux, and
although some features such as the hantro-h11 jpeg
video encoder are missing in mainline, Gateworks
does usually have separate drivers for those. More
technical details about the hardware and software,
as well as a getting started guide can be found in
the wiki.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ The_OpenSprinkler_controller_[LWN.net]⠀⇛
The more one pays attention to the Internet of
Things (IoT), the more one learns to appreciate
simple, unconnected devices. Your editor long ago
acquired an aversion to products that advertise
themselves as “smart” or “WiFi-enabled”. There can
be advantages, though, to devices that contain
microprocessors, are Internet connected, and are
remotely accessible, if they are implemented well.
The OpenSprinkler sprinkler timer would appear to
be a case in point.
This article is being written in a part of the
world with limited rainfall — a near-desert
environment. That notwithstanding, the local humans
have reached the conclusion that it would be a good
idea to surround their homes with lush, green
vegetation that evolved to thrive in a rather more
humid environment, and which requires fairly
intensive life support — and water pumped from the
other side of the continental divide — to survive
here. Western civilization, it seems, depends on us
continuing to do this; otherwise we would surely
not continue to put so many resources into it.
Providing life support to vegetation by dragging a
hose around quickly loses any charm it may have
once had, so the installation of automated
sprinkler systems is common in these parts. The
control system takes the form of a timer that,
traditionally, has been programmed through a
painful combination of dial turns and button
pushes; anybody who has tried to figure out how to
configure a bicycle computer (speedometer) will
understand. More recently, of course, we have seen
the advent of smart controllers that are said to
make this process easier and to enable control of
the system while vacationing in a distant location.
The allure of being able to soak a Colorado front
yard while lounging on a South-Pacific beach is,
seemingly, irresistible.
# ⚓ CNX Software ☛ Haxophone_–_A_Raspberry_Pi-based_electronic
saxophone_with_mechanical_keys_(Crowdfunding)⠀⇛
The Haxophone is an unusual Raspberry Pi expansion
board that transforms the popular SBC into a travel
saxophone using mechanical keys. The hackable
musical instrument is open-source hardware and
OSHWA certified and comes with mechanical keys
which makes it easily repairable, customizable by
changing keycaps or the firmware, and at a price
point cheaper than commercial digital saxophones
with custom molded keys.
# ⚓ Hackster ☛ Peter_Wasilewski’s_STMViewer_Offers_Overhead-
Free_STM32_Data_Visualization_on_Linux_and_Windows⠀⇛
Self-described embedded systems enthusiast Peter
Wasilewski has put together a tool designed to make
it easier to see what’s going on inside an
STMicroelectronics STM32 — offering a live and
historical visual overview of variable values.
“STMViewer is a software tool that can be used to
visualize variables values in real-time using only
[an] ST-LINK programmer and a STM32 target,”
Wasilewski explains of his software. “You might be
familiar with STMStudio or CubeMonitor, tools from
ST that serve a similar purpose. If there are at
least two similar tools, why bother to create my
own? Simply because STMStudio is deprecated and
works only on Windows, and Cube monitor takes
forever to setup with even the simplest graphs.”
o § Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications⠀➾
# ⚓ Make Use Of ☛ How_to_Enable_or_Disable_Call_Announcements
on_Android⠀⇛
# ⚓ The Sun ☛ People_are_just_realizing_little-known_Android
setting_finds_your_lost_phone_even_on_silent_mode_|_The_US
Sun⠀⇛
# ⚓ Android Police ☛ Add_Android_Auto_to_any_car_for_just_$105
with_this_wireless_display_deal⠀⇛
# ⚓ Android Central ☛ Android_Auto_vs._Apple_CarPlay:_Which_is
best_for_you?_|_Android_Central⠀⇛
# ⚓ 9to5Google ☛ Xiaomi_Mi_Box_S_unexpectedly_getting_Android
TV_12_update⠀⇛
# ⚓ 9to5Google ☛ Xiaomi_gives_five_years_of_updates_to_latest
Android_phone⠀⇛
# ⚓ Gadgets Now ☛ You_may_soon_see_Android_phones_with_RAM_more
than_a_high-end_laptop⠀⇛
* § Free, Libre, and Open Source Software⠀➾
o § Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra⠀➾
# ⚓ The_Document_Foundation_releases_LibreOffice_7.5.6
Community⠀⇛
LibreOffice 7.5.6 Community, the sixth minor
release of the LibreOffice 7.5 line, the volunteer-
supported free office suite for desktop
productivity, is available from our download page
for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS
(Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux
[1].
Products based on LibreOffice Technology are
available for major desktop operating systems
(Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile
platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly
recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of
applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop,
mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated
value-added features and other benefits such as SLA
(Service Level Agreements).
# ⚓ DebugPoint ☛ LibreOffice_Plans_for_Calendar-Based
Versioning:_Next_Release_Set_as_“24.2″⠀⇛
In a move that’s set to simplify versioning and
enhance user experience, the LibreOffice team has
planned a significant shift in their versioning
strategy. Say goodbye to the traditional major and
minor version numbers, and prepare for a more
intuitive and user-friendly approach.
Starting with the next release, LibreOffice will
adopt a year.month-based versioning system and the
upcoming iteration will bear the version number
24.2.
o § GNU Projects⠀➾
# ⚓ Unicorn Media ☛ GNU’s_Having_a_40th_Birthday_Party_and
You’re_Invited
⠀⇛
Wowie zowie! The Gnu System is turning 40, and its
parents — the folks at Free Software Foundation —
are throwing it a party to celebrate, and y’all are
invited!
Gnus eating cake
Officially they’re not calling it a party, it’s a
hack day, but since they make it clear that no
hacking is required (and go out of their way to
make it known that there will be cake) I’m calling
it a birthday party under the “if it walks like a
duck” rule.
Here’s what Miriam Bastion, the program manager at
FSF, had to say about it when she announced the
event a few weeks back…
o § Programming/Development⠀➾
# § Python⠀➾
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Python_is_(mostly)_made_of_syntactic_sugar⠀⇛
“Sugar” is, to a certain extent, in the eye
of the beholder—at least when it comes to
syntax. Programming languages are often made
up of a (mostly) irreducible core, with lots
of sugary constructs sprinkled on top—the
syntactic sugar. No one wants to be forced to
do without the extra syntax—at least not for
their favorite pieces—but it is worth looking
at how a language’s constructs can be built
from the core. That is just what Brett Cannon
has been doing for Python, on his blog and in
talks, including a talk at PyCon back in
April (YouTube video).
* § Leftovers⠀➾
o § Education⠀➾
# ⚓ ACLU ☛ Why_Access_to_Education_is_Key_to_Systemic
Equality⠀⇛
All students have a right to an equal education,
but students of color — particularly Black and
Brown students and students with disabilities, have
historically been marginalized and criminalized by
the public school system. The ACLU has been working
to challenge unconstitutional disciplinary policies
in schools, combat classroom censorship efforts
that disproportionately impact marginalized
students, and support race conscious admission
policies to increase access to higher education.
o § Health/Nutrition/Agriculture⠀➾
# ⚓ Wired ☛ Pinterest’s_New_Algorithms_Want_You_to_See_Every
Body_Type⠀⇛
When fashion influencer Natalie Craig recently
searched Pinterest for skorts and cargo pants, she
noticed something different from her past
explorations on the service: Women who looked like
her were sprinkled among the results—and without
adding qualifiers like “plus size” to her query.
“I’m 5’2″ and a size 20, so I have to say, ‘short-
size back-to-school outfit inspiration,’” Craig
says of her usual challenge to find relevant
fashion content online. “Now, I don’t have to take
on that mental gymnastics.”
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ Vietnam_to_sign_5-year_rice_trade_pact
with_the_Philippines_to_ensure_food_security⠀⇛
The Philippines is looking at importing 300,000 to
500,000 tonnes of rice from Vietnam at discounted
prices.
o § Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)⠀➾
# ⚓ Nasdaq_stumbled_on_growing_US-China_tech_war;_USD_surged⠀⇛
On Wednesday, Nasdaq-100 lost almost –0.93 % as
Apple tumbled after reports that China had ordered
officials at central government agencies to not use
iPhones and other foreign-branded devices for work.
Also, the European Commission designated Amazon,
Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and China’s
ByteDance as “gatekeepers” under its new Digital
Markets Act.
# ⚓ CNBC ☛ Apple_shares_fall_after_reports_of_China_government
iPhone_ban⠀⇛
The reported restrictions, which have not been
publicly announced by Beijing, raise concerns that
Apple’s products could get caught up in global
tensions.
# ⚓ EDRI ☛ EU_legislators_must_close_dangerous_loophole_and
protect_human_rights_in_the_AI_Act⠀⇛
Over 115 civil society organisations are calling on
EU legislators to remove a major loophole in the
high-risk classification process of the Artificial
Intelligence (AI) Act and maintain a high level of
protection for people’s rights in the legislation.
o § Security⠀➾
# ⚓ Help Net Security ☛ How_Chinese_hackers_got_their_hands_on
Microsoft’s_token_signing_key_–_Help_Net_Security⠀⇛
The mystery of how Chinese hackers managed to steal
a crucial Microsoft signing key has been explained.
# ⚓ Dark Reading ☛ AtlasVPN_Linux_Zero-Day_Disconnects_Users,
Reveals_IP_Addresses⠀⇛
A security researcher has published exploit code
for AtlasVPN for Linux, which could enable anybody
to disconnect a user and reveal their IP address
simply by luring them to a website.
AtlasVPN is a “freemium” virtual private network
(VPN) service owned by NordVPN. Despite being just
4 years old, according to its website, it’s used by
more than 6 million people worldwide.
On Sept. 1, after receiving no response from the
vendor, an unidentified researcher (referred to by
their Full Disclosure mailing list username,
“icudar”) posted exploit code for AtlasVPN Linux to
the Full Disclosure mailing list and Reddit. By
simply copying and pasting this code to their own
site, any odd hacker could disconnect any AtlasVPN
user from their private network, and reveal their
IP address in the process.
“Since the entire purpose of the VPN is to mask
this information, this is a pretty significant
problem for users,” says Shawn Surber, senior
director of technical account management at Tanium.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Security_updates_for_Thursday_[LWN.net]⠀⇛
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (erofs-
utils, htmltest, indent, libeconf, netconsd, php-
phpmailer6, tinyexr, and vim), Red Hat (firefox),
and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-ibm-
5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-azure,
linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-raspi, linux-oem-6.1,
linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, shiro, and sox).
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Ubuntu_to_add_TPM-backed_full-disk_encryption⠀⇛
The Ubuntu blog has a detailed article on plans to
add full-disk encryption, with the key stored in
the system’s trusted platform module (TPM), to the
desktop distribution.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ FTC_Finalizes_Order_with_1Health.io_Over
Charges_it_Failed_to_Protect_Privacy_and_Security_of_DNA_Data
and_Unfairly_Changed_its_Privacy_Policy
⠀⇛
The Federal Trade Commission finalized an order
with 1Health.io that settles charges that the
genetic testing firm left sensitive genetic and
health data unsecured, deceived consumers about
their ability to get their data deleted, and
changed its privacy policy retroactively without
adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their
consent.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Beverly_Hills_Plastic_Surgery_notification
—_and_what_it_doesn’t_tell_the_patients.⠀⇛
On July 17, DataBreaches reported that BlackCat had
added the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery (BHPS) to
their dark web leak site. The June listing was
updated to include photos that appeared to be proof
of claims about their access to the clinic’s files.
# ⚓ Defence_Housing_Australia_investigates_third-party_data
breach_–_Cyber_Security_Connect⠀⇛
An investigation by Defence Housing Australia (DHA)
is currently underway after it was notified that
one of its third-party service providers had been
hit by a cyber attack.
The organisation, which provides housing and
accommodation for military personnel and their
families on and off base, has stressed that while
there has been no impact or breach of DHA or
Defence ICT systems, an investigation to determine
if any data belonging to Defence Force members and
their families had been compromised has been
launched.
“DHA has notified the Australian Cyber Security
Centre, the Department of Home Affairs’ cyber
security response unit, and the Office of the
Australian Information Commissioner,” the DHA said
in a notice released on its site.
“Defence personnel affected by this incident will
be advised as soon as practicable.”
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) also
issued a notice regarding the breach; however, it
said that its systems remain secure.
# ⚓ The Record ☛ Minneapolis_school_district_says_data_breach
affected_more_than_100,000_people⠀⇛
Minneapolis Public Schools has begun notifying more
than 100,000 people that their personal information
may have been leaked after a cyberattack early this
year.
The school system started sending letters late last
week, according to local media reports, and on
Tuesday a notice posted on Maine’s data breach
notification site said that 105,617 people were
affected.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Ragnar_Locker_leaks_data_from_Israeli
Medical_Center⠀⇛
Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak was
hit by a cyberattack on August 7. Patient care was
not disrupted for some things, but the ministry
instructed that the center’s outpatient clinics and
imaging centers not accept patients and that the
public not go to its emergency room until further
notice. A week later, the hospital disclosed it had
received a ransom demand. It was pretty much an
open secret that the attackers were the
Ragnar_Locker group, but the hospital never named
them.
# ⚓ Hacker News ☛ Ukraine’s_CERT_Thwarts_APT28’s_Cyberattack_on
Critical_Energy_Infrastructure [Ed: Microsoft Windows TCO,
causing more deaths in Ukraine.]⠀⇛
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine
(CERT-UA) on Tuesday said it thwarted a cyber
attack against an unnamed critical energy
infrastructure facility in the country.
The intrusion, per the agency, started with a
phishing email containing a link to a malicious ZIP
archive that activates the infection chain.
“Visiting the link will download a ZIP archive
containing three JPG images (decoys) and a BAT file
‘weblinks.cmd’ to the victim’s computer,” CERT-UA
said, attributing it to the Russian threat actor
known as APT28 (aka BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Forest
Blizzard, or FROZENLAKE).
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Coffee_Meets_Bagel_Meets_Hacker?⠀⇛
This is not the first cyberattack CMB has
experienced. In February 2019, DataBreaches
reported that user data from 6.1 million users was
up for sale on DreamMarket by gnosticplayers.
# ⚓ 3,20,000+_Patient_Records_From_Ayush_Jharkhand_Gov._In
Shared_On_Dark_Web_Hacking_Forums⠀⇛
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Do_IT_Consultants_victim_of_attack_by
Ragnar_Locker⠀⇛
When DataBreaches started to look into this
listing, we discovered that Do IT Consultants’
website is no longer online and the last time it
was archived by archive.org was in early 2022.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ United_States_and_United_Kingdom_Sanction
Additional_Members_of_the_Russia-Based_Trickbot_Cybercrime
Gang⠀⇛
Today, the United States, in coordination with the
United Kingdom, sanctioned eleven individuals who
are part of the Russia-based Trickbot cybercrime
group. Russia has long been a safe haven for
cybercriminals, including the Trickbot group.
Today’s action was taken by the U.S. Department of
the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control
(OFAC). The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is
concurrently unsealing indictments against nine
individuals in connection with the Trickbot malware
and Conti ransomware schemes, including seven of
the individuals designated today.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ “i_know_it_hurts_your_little_dick_seeing_a
true_hacker_like_me_in_a_crowd_full_of_skids_and_sheep,”_said
a_man_with_no_knowledge_of_anatomy⠀⇛
After the arrest of Breached.vc’s owner
“Pompompurin” in March, Breached.vc was taken
offline by an administrator because it seemed
likely the server had been compromised by law
enforcement. Months later, the domain was seized by
law enforcement.
# ⚓ The_Government_Isn’t_Sure_How_to_Get_Small_Hospitals_to
Take_Cybersecurity_Seriously⠀⇛
The U.S. government is struggling to convince
hospitals that they need to spend time and money
fighting hackers and provide useful advice to them,
a problem that could have lethal consequences as
the country’s ransomware crisis rages on.
“I don’t think we’ve figured out how to talk to the
small and medium-sized organizations in a way that
actually reaches them, and I don’t think we’ve come
up with a convincing story” about why cybersecurity
matters, Jessica Wilkerson, a senior cyber policy
adviser at the Food and Drug Administration, said
Wednesday at the Billington Cyber Summit in
Washington.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Bienville_Orthopaedic_Specialists_notifies
243,000_patients_of_cyberattack⠀⇛
On April 1, DataBreaches reached out to Bienville
Orthopaedic Specialists (BOS) in Mississippi to ask
about a claim by Abyss threat actors that they had
compromised BOS. BOS never replied.
But now, five months later, BOS submitted a breach
notification to the Maine Attorney General’s
Office. The notification indicates that 242,986
people were affected by a “data security event”
that occurred between February 3 and March 5.
# ⚓ Insights_From_The_IBM_2023_Cost_of_a_Data_Breach_Report⠀⇛
The annual Cost of a Data Breach Report (Report)
published by IBM is reliably full of helpful
cybersecurity data. This year is no different.
After reviewing the Report, we pulled out some
interesting data points. Of course, the Report as a
whole is well worth the read, but if you don’t have
the time to get through its 78 pages, this post may
be helpful.
# ⚓ Cybernews ☛ IBM:_Janssen_health_database_breached_in_cyber
incident⠀⇛
IBM announced Wednesday that an unauthorized party
breached the patient healthcare database it manages
for the Johnson & Johnson-owned Janssen CarePath
platform. Many of the patients are or have been
treated for serious diseases, such as cancer.
The tech giant says it has begun to notify patients
whose information may have been compromised in the
breach, discovered on August 2nd.
The IBM-run database is used by Janssen CarePath, a
free patient support platform that offers savings
on advanced prescription medicines and other
patient resources.
# ⚓ SANS ☛ Security_Relevant_DNS_Records,_(Wed,_Sep_6th)⠀⇛
DNS has a big security impact. DNS is partly
responsible for your traffic reaching the correct
host on the internet. But there is more to DNS than
name resolution. I am going to mention a few
security-relevant record types here, in no
particular order:
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Password-Stealing_Chrome_Extension
Demonstrates_New_Vulnerabilities⠀⇛
Academic researchers design a Chrome extension to
steal passwords from input fields and publish it to
the Chrome webstore.
# ⚓ Silicon Angle ☛ Well-known_security_consultant_‘Mudge’_is
once_again_on_the_move⠀⇛
The former hacker known as Mudge is once again on
the move. Mudge, the alias for Peiter Zatko
(pictured, center), was the former head of security
back when X Corp. was known as Twitter. He is now a
consultant for the U.S. Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, the Washington Post
reported yesterday.
# ⚓ Pen Test Partners ☛ Information_disclosure_through_insecure
design⠀⇛
Introduction Insecure design can lead to many
issues. The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
should contain steps to evaluate and consider
security throughout the process.
# ⚓ The_Insider_website_hit_by_DDoS_attack_after_publishing
investigation_into_“patriotic”_hacker_group_Killnet⠀⇛
The Insider’s website was hit by a 24-hour DDoS
attack after the publication of an investigation
into the Killnet group, which calls itself the
“Russian cyber army.” The attack began the day
after the investigative report was released online,
starting at 13:00 Moscow time and peaking at a rate
of 20,000 requests per second. The Insider’s
website and its mirrors went offline briefly on
September 6, hit by a flood of requests from close
to 400,000 different IP addresses.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Crash_Dump_Error:_How_a_Chinese_Espionage
Group_Exploited_Microsoft’s_Mistakes [Ed: It is Microsoft’s
fault, not China. Microsoft kept covering up, do not paint it
as a victim. Microsoft is the worst possible "supply
chain".]⠀⇛
Microsoft reveals how a crash dump from 2021
inadvertently exposed a key that Chinese cyberspies
later leveraged to hack US government emails.
# ⚓ Scoop News Group ☛ Mystery_solved?_Microsoft_thinks_it
knows_how_Chinese_hackers_stole_its_signing_key [Ed:
Deflection. Microsoft failed, stop blaming "China".]⠀⇛
A “crash dump” file containing a highly sensitive
signing key is believed to have been at the center
of an explosive Chinese hacking campaign.
# ⚓ Silicon Angle ☛ W3LL_‘Phishing_Empire’_targets_Microsoft
365_accounts [Ed: Do not use Microsoft. Use software that you
control and runs locally.]⠀⇛
A new report from cybersecurity services
company Group-IB Global Pvt. Ltd. warns of a
largely unknown threat actor that is running a
“phishing empire” targeting Microsoft 365 accounts.
# ⚓ Scoop News Group ☛ Researchers_identify_high-grade_phishing
kits_attacking_nearly_60,000_Microsoft_365_accounts [Ed: Do
not outsource to Microsoft. use Free software like
LibreOffice.]⠀⇛
Hackers compromised roughly 8,000 of those accounts
with tools that a cybercrime group known as W3LL
sold through its underground marketplace.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Cash-Strapped_IronNet_Faces_Bankruptcy
Options⠀⇛
It appears to be the end of the road for IronNet,
the once-promising network security play founded by
former NSA director General Keith Alexander.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Investors_Betting_Big_on_Upwind_for_CNAPP
Tech⠀⇛
Upwind raises a total of $80 million in just 10
months as investors pour cash into startups in the
cloud and data security categories.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Thousands_of_Popular_Websites_Leaking
Secrets⠀⇛
Truffle Security has discovered thousands of
popular websites leaking their secrets, including
.git directories and AWS and GitHub keys.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Dozens_of_Unpatched_Flaws_Expose_Security
Cameras_Made_by_Defunct_Company_Zavio⠀⇛
Dozens of vulnerabilities have been found in widely
used security cameras made by defunct Chinese
company Zavio.
# § Integrity/Availability/Authenticity⠀➾
# ⚓ Tom’s Hardware ☛ Toyota_Shut_Down_14_Factories_Due_to
‘Insufficient_Disk_Space’⠀⇛
Toyota’s shutdown of 14 factories in late
August was due to an error that occurred
because of “insufficient disk space” on its
servers.
# § Privacy/Surveillance⠀➾
# ⚓ Scoop News Group ☛ Intelligence_community_to_meet
with_civil_liberties_groups_on_controversial
surveillance_tool⠀⇛
The clock is running down on reauthorization
of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act set to sunset later this
year.
o § Defence/Aggression⠀➾
# ⚓ France24 ☛ US_imposes_sanctions_on_Sudanese_paramilitary
commander_over_Darfur_violations⠀⇛
The United States imposed sanctions Wednesday on
Sudanese paramilitary commander Abdel-Rahim Hamdan
Dagalo for acts of violence and human rights abuses
committed by his troops in their monthslong
conflict with Sudan’s army.
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ Alternative_security_futures_in_the_High
North⠀⇛
Climate change, combined with increasing
geopolitical competition and hostilities, has
focused renewed attention on national security
interests in the Arctic. By 2035, how will those
variables combine to influence the High North?
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ Atlantic_Council_announces_2023
Fellowship_selection_of_Veterans_in_Energy⠀⇛
WASHINGTON, D.C. – September 6, 2023 – The Atlantic
Council Global Energy Center’s (GEC) Veterans
Advanced Energy Project (VAEP) announced the twenty
highly distinguished military veterans of the 2023-
2024 VAEP Fellowship Program. This one-year
fellowship offers veterans an immersive experience
in the field of advanced energy, culminating in a
policy proposal capstone that exemplifies VAEP’s
motto, “energy security is national security.”
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ Global_Development_Initiative_and_Global
Security_Initiative:_China’s_Blueprint_for_the_New_World
Order⠀⇛
Tuvia Gering and Michael Schuman shed light on the
Chinese Communist Party’s approach and practical
implementation tactics of Beijing’s global
development initiatives.
# ⚓ Defence Web ☛ Global_Terrorism_Index_finds_attacks_down,
but_becoming_more_lethal⠀⇛
The Institute for Economics & Peace’s (IEP) latest
Global Terrorism Index (GTI) has found that last
year, terrorism resulted in 6 701 deaths – 38%
lower than at their peak in 2015 – but the
lethality of attacks increased dramatically.
# ⚓ teleSUR ☛ Islamist_Party_Leaders_Arrested_by_Tunisian
Security⠀⇛
The report was released a few hours after the
arrest of Mondher Ounissi, the party’s interim
head, and the release of Hamadi Jebali, the party’s
former secretary-general and former prime minister
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ Main_Pakistan-Afghan_border_crossing
closed_for_second_day_after_clashes⠀⇛
September 07, 2023 2:33 PM
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Pakistan’s main border
crossing with Afghanistan was closed for a second
day on Thursday, leading to a build-up of trucks
laden with goods, after clashes between security
forces from the two countries.
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ Sleight_of_hand:_How_China_weaponizes
software_vulnerabilities⠀⇛
China’s new vulnerability management system
mandates reporting to MIIT within 48 hours,
restricting pre-patch publication and POC code.
This centralized approach contrasts with the US
voluntary system, potentially aiding Chinese
intelligence. MIIT shares data with the MSS,
affecting voluntary databases as well. MSS also
fund firms to provide vulnerabilities for their
offensive potential.
# ⚓ Federal News Network ☛ In_Southeast_Asia,_Harris_says_‘we
have_to_see_the_future’⠀⇛
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled for more than
a day to reach this year’s summit of Southeast
Asian nations, where she was tasked with
strengthening ties in a region that’s crucial to
U.S. interests. Harris said in an interview with
The Associated Press that Washington must “pay
attention to 10, 20, 30 years down the line, and
what we are developing now that will be to the
benefit of our country then.” This was her third
trip to Southeast Asia since taking office. She’s
at the center of the White House’s efforts to
foster partnerships that can serve as a
counterbalance to China’s influence.
o § Finance⠀➾
# ⚓ GeekWire ☛ Slalom_Consulting_lays_off_7%_of_workforce;_CEO
cites_‘significant_shifts_within_our_industry’⠀⇛
Seattle-based business and technology firm Slalom
Consulting laid off about 900 employees in a
workforce reduction.
# ⚓ Roku_cutting_10%_of_staff,_third_mass_layoff_in_months⠀⇛
In a recent filing to the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC), the streaming software
company announced that it’s laying off
approximately 10 per cent of its workforce as it
continues to look for ways to “bring down its year-
over-year operating expense growth rate.”
# ⚓ Federal News Network ☛ Stock_market_today:_Asian_shares
fall_as_China_reports_weaker_global_demand_hit_its_trade_in
August⠀⇛
Shares have fallen in Asia as China reported weaker
global demand hit its trade in August, adding to
pressures on its economy. Oil prices and U.S.
futures also fell. Hong Kong’s benchmark gave up
more than 1% and most other major regional markets
also declined. China said its exports fell 8.8% in
August from a year earlier, while imports were down
7.3%. On Wednesday, the S&P 500 shed 0.7% and the
Dow industrials fell 0.6%. The Nasdaq composite
handed back 1.1% as declines in several big
technology stocks, including Apple, weighed on the
market. Treasury yields rose following data showing
the U.S. services sector remains strong.
# ⚓ YLE ☛ Survey:_Over_40%_of_workers_in_Finland_want_to_retire
early⠀⇛
A survey published on Thursday has found that 43
percent of employees in Finland want to leave
active working life well ahead of time.
Those surveyed who would like to retire early
wanted, on average, to get out of the workforce 6.4
years before retirement age.
The poll was commissioned by Mehiläinen, a private
provider of social and healthcare services.
Mehiläinen’s chief occupational health psychologist
Suvi Suortamo considers the results to be a sign
that working life is perceived as increasingly
stressful and burdensome.
# ⚓ BBC ☛ Brits_most_likely_to_say_‘we_don’t_live_to_work’_–
BBC_News⠀⇛
There’s a steady drift towards getting a good work-
life balance, a new survey suggests.
# ⚓ The Strategist ☛ India’s_quiet_rise⠀⇛
China’s sharp economic slowdown has raised alarm
bells around the world. But it has also thrown into
relief the rise of another demographic powerhouse
next door.
o § Censorship/Free Speech⠀➾
# ⚓ Reason ☛ Brickbat:_The_King_and_I⠀⇛
A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced Muhammad al-
Ghamdi to death after finding him guilty of
“describing the King or the Crown Prince in a way
that undermines religion or justice,” “supporting a
terrorist ideology,” “communication with a
terrorist entity,” and publishing false news “with
the intention of executing a terrorist crime.”
o § Civil Rights/Policing⠀➾
# ⚓ RFA ☛ Photojournalist_in_Myanmar_sentenced_to_20_years_of
hard_labor⠀⇛
Sai Zaw Thaik was documenting Cyclone Mocha’s
damage when he was arrested.
o § Monopolies⠀➾
# ⚓ Yahoo News ☛ FTC_Should_Look_at_Microsoft_Teams_Bundle
After_EU_Investigation,_Zoom_CEO_Says⠀⇛
Zoom Video Communications Inc. Chief Executive
Officer Eric Yuan said the US Federal Trade
Commission should look into Microsoft Corp.’s
bundling of its video-conferencing software, Teams…
# ⚓ Silicon Angle ☛ Google_tentatively_settles_antitrust
lawsuit_over_Play_Store_practices⠀⇛
Google LLC has agreed to settle a lawsuit that
accused it of breaching antitrust rules with the
Play Store. Reuters reported the development today,
citing a court document that was filed on Tuesday.
# ⚓ TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Google_reaches_tentative
settlement_with_all_50_states_over_alleged_app_store
monopoly⠀⇛
All 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto
Rico have reached an agreement in principle with
Google to settle a lawsuit filed in 2021 over the
tech giant’s alleged monopolistic control of the
distribution of apps for the software that runs
most of the world’s cellphones. The agreement was
cited in a court filing late Tuesday by both sides.
Terms were not disclosed. Google still faces
several major antitrust lawsuits filed by the
Department of Justice and other agencies across the
U.S. focused on alleged search-related and
advertising market monopolistic behavior. In
November, it settled with 40 states over the
tracking of user location, paying $391 million.
# ⚓ [Repeat] New York Times ☛ In_Its_First_Monopoly_Trial_of
Modern_Internet_Era,_U.S._Sets_Sights_on_Google⠀⇛
The 10-week trial, set to begin Tuesday, amps up
efforts to rein in Big Tech by targeting the core
search business that turned Google into a $1.7
trillion behemoth.
# § Trademarks⠀➾
# ⚓ TTAB Blog ☛ Precedential_No._24:_Claim_for_Violation
of_Section_10_“Anti-Assignment”_Provision_Is_Time-
Barred_by_Section_14⠀⇛
In this proceeding for cancellation of a
registration for the mark SUBSCRIBE & THRIVE
for “online ordering” featuring skin care
products, supplements, and assorted other
products, Respondent Nature’s Sunshine
counterclaimed for cancellation of one of
Petitioner’s pleaded registrations for the
mark THRIVE on two grounds: fraud and
violation of the “anti-assignment” provision
of Section 10(a)(1) of the Lanham Act. The
Board dismissed the fraud claims due to the
insufficiency of the pleading, and it
dismissed the Section 10 claim as barred by
the time limitation of Section 14(3). Thrive
Natural Care Inc. v. Nature’s Sunshine
Products, Inc., 2 023 USPQ2d 953 (TTAB 2023)
[precedential].
# § Copyrights⠀➾
# ⚓ Public Domain Review ☛ The_“Madame_B_Album”_(ca.
1870s)⠀⇛
A leatherbound volume of some hundred
photocollages, featuring elaborate,
fantastical watercolour settings for
photographic portraits of friends, family,
and pets.
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 2606
╒═══════════════════ 𝐃𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 ═════════════════════════════════════════════╕
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Links_08/09/2023:_CircuitPython_8.2.5_and_PowerDNS_Authoritative_Server
4.8.2⠀✐
Posted in News_Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇GNOME bluefish⦈
§ Contents⠀➾
* GNU/Linux
o Applications
o Instructionals/Technical
o Games
o Desktop_Environments/WMs
# K_Desktop_Environment/KDE_SC/Qt
* Distributions_and_Operating_Systems
o BSD
o Debian_Family
o Canonical/Ubuntu_Family
o Devices/Embedded
o Open_Hardware/Modding
o Mobile_Systems/Mobile_Applications
* Free,_Libre,_and_Open_Source_Software
o Productivity_Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
o Education
o Licensing_/_Legal
o Programming/Development
* § GNU/Linux⠀➾
o § Applications⠀➾
# ⚓ Linux Links ☛ 9_Best_Free_and_Open_Source_Linux_Usenet
Tools⠀⇛
Unlike web forums, Usenet does not have a central
server or a dedicated administrator. Instead,
Usenet is distributed among a conglomeration of
servers that store and pass messages to each other.
There are several different types of newsreaders.
Some newsreaders are intended primarily for
discussions, others are better suited for
downloading files. Newsreaders that help users to
adhere to the netiquette are evaluated by the Good
Netkeeping Seal of Approval (GNKSA). There are also
tools which are dedicated for downloading files
only.
The ratings chart below summarizes our verdict.
Only free and open source software is eligible for
inclusion.
o § Instructionals/Technical⠀➾
# § idroot⠀➾
# ⚓ ID Root ☛ How_To_Install_OpenCV_on_Debian_12⠀⇛
In this tutorial, we will show you how to
install OpenCV on Debian 12. For those of you
who didn’t know, In the world of digital
content and SEO optimization, the role of
image processing cannot be underestimated.
# ⚓ ID Root ☛ How_To_Install_Webmin_on_AlmaLinux_9⠀⇛
In this tutorial, we will show you how to
install Webmin on AlmaLinux 9. For those of
you who didn’t know, Webmin is a powerful
web-based system administration tool that
provides a user-friendly interface for
managing Linux servers.
# § howtoforge⠀➾
# ⚓ HowTo Forge ☛ Update_the_ISPConfig_Perfect_Server
from_Debian_11_to_Debian_12⠀⇛
This tutorial will take you through updating
a server managed by ISPConfig from Debian 11
(bullseye) to Debian 12 (bookworm). This
guide works for both single- and multiserver
setups.
# ⚓ HowTo Forge ☛ Replacing_Amavisd_with_Rspamd_in
ISPConfig_3.1_on_Debian_and_Ubuntu⠀⇛
Rspamd is a modern high-performance spam scan
software for Linux servers which delivers
very accurate filter results. This tutorial
describes the steps to replace amavis
(amavisd-new) spam scanning software with
Rspamd on an ISPConfig 3.1 server.
# ⚓ HowTo Forge ☛ How_to_Upgrade_from_Debian_11_to_Debian
12⠀⇛
This article will show you how to upgrade
from Debian 11 (Bullseye) to Debian 12
(Bookworm) in a few easy steps.
# ⚓ Net2 ☛ How_to_Install_Google_Chrome_on_Ubuntu_22.04⠀⇛
Google Chrome is a popular web browser that is
available for many different devices, including
Ubuntu 22.04. In this tutorial, we will cover three
methods for installing Google Chrome on Ubuntu
22.04: using a Debian package, using Gui and using
the Google repository.
# ⚓ Own HowTo ☛ How_to_fix_”_Failed_to_execute_default_terminal
emulator”_on_Debian_12⠀⇛
I was using Debian 12 today, and I had the terminal
window open installing some stuff on my machine.
Once I closed the terminal,
# ⚓ RoseHosting ☛ How_to_Install_Elgg_on_Debian_11⠀⇛
Elgg is a free and open-source social networking
engine that is easy to install and set up…
# ⚓ Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How_to_Make_File_Chooser_Dialog_default
to_Current_Working_Directory⠀⇛
This simple tutorial shows how to replace ‘Recent
Used‘ with current working directory as default in
GTK file chooser in Ubuntu.
# ⚓ Rlang ☛ Mastering_Data_Visualization_in_R:_How_to_Plot_a
Subset_of_Data⠀⇛
Data visualization is a powerful tool for gaining
insights from your data. In R, you have a plethora
of libraries and functions at your disposal to
create stunning and informative plots. One common
task is to plot a subset of your data, which allows
you to focus on specific aspects or trends within
your dataset. In this blog post, we’ll explore
various techniques to plot subsets of data in R,
and I’ll explain each step in simple terms. Don’t
worry if you’re new to R – by the end of this post,
you’ll be equipped to create customized plots with
ease!
Before we start, make sure you have R and RStudio
installed on your computer. If not, you can
download them from R’s official website and
RStudio’s website.
# ⚓ University of Toronto ☛ (Unix)_Directory_traversal_and
symbolic_links⠀⇛
If and when you set out to traverse through a Unix
directory hierarchy, whether to inventory it or to
find something, you have a decision to make. I can
put this decision in technical terms, about whether
you use stat() or lstat() when identifying
subdirectories in your current directory, or put it
non-technically, about whether or not you follow
symbolic links that happen to point to directories.
As you might guess, there are two possible answers
here and neither is unambiguously wrong (or right).
Which answer programs choose depends on their
objectives and their assumptions about their
environment.
# ⚓ TecMint ☛ LFCS_#6:_How_to_Assemble_Partitions_as_RAID
Devices_and_Create_System_Backups⠀⇛
The Linux Foundation launched the LFCS (Linux
Foundation Certified Sysadmin) certification, a
shiny chance for system administrators everywhere
to demonstrate, through a performance-based exam,
that they are capable of performing overall
operational support on Linux systems: system
support, first-level diagnosing and monitoring,
plus issue escalation, when required, to other
support teams.
The series will be titled Preparation for the LFCS
(Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin) Parts 1
through 33 and cover the following topics:
# ⚓ OSTechNix ☛ How_To_Configure_SSH_Key-based_Authentication
In_Linux⠀⇛
This guide provides an overview of different SSH
authentication methods, with a particular focus on
SSH key-based authentication. Additionally, this
guide will walk you through the steps on how to
configure SSH key-based authentication in Linux and
Unix-like operating systems.
# ⚓ OSTechNix ☛ How_To_Enable_Bucklespring_Keyboard_Sound_In
Linux⠀⇛
Have you ever used any good old IBM keyboards?
Especially, the IBM Model-M space saver
bucklespring keyboards are heavy and loud. If you
are a fan of bucklespring keyboards, then
Bucklespring utility is a great way to enjoy the
sound of these keyboards even if you don’t own one.
In this brief tutorial, we will see how to enable
Bucklespring keyboard sound in Linux.
# ⚓ How_to_Remove_Inserted_Horizontal_Line_in_LibreOffice
Writer⠀⇛
Are you get frustrated when horizontal lines are
inserted and you face trouble removing them in
LibreOffice Writer? These lines can disrupt the
flow and appearance of your document. But don’t
worry, there are ways to remove them and improve
your experience with LibreOffice. This article will
guide you through the steps to remove these lines
and give you back control over your document’s
formatting.
o § Games⠀➾
# ⚓ GamingOnLinux ☛ These_custom_Steam_Deck_buttons_look
awesome⠀⇛
Want to mod your Steam Deck to make it a little bit
more fancy? Deck Buttons from Colored Controllers
look awesome but they’re selling out fast.
# ⚓ GamingOnLinux ☛ Ratchet_&_Clank:_Rift_Apart_gets_FSR_2.2
and_Ray_Tracing_for_AMD_GPUs_on_Linux⠀⇛
Insomniac Games and Nixxes Software showing how
good PC support is done with Ratchet & Clank: Rift
Apart, with another free upgrade out now. It’s good
news for Steam Deck and desktop Linux players too.
# ⚓ GamingOnLinux ☛ Titanfall_2_has_a_player_surge_with_a_huge
sale,_great_on_Steam_Deck_&_desktop_Linux⠀⇛
Available really cheap until September 18th,
Titanfall 2 has one of the best FPS campaigns
around and some great multiplayer with the
Northstar mod too.
# ⚓ GamingOnLinux ☛ Star_Trek:_Infinite_from_Paradox_releases
October_12⠀⇛
Paradox Interactive along with Nimble Giant
Entertainment have announced that Star Trek:
Infinite will be releasing on October 12th. Unlike
titles from their in-house first-party development
teams, this one will not have Native Linux support.
It’s built on the foundation of Stellaris, and
pretty much looks like Star Trek Stellaris.
# ⚓ GamingOnLinux ☛ Chaotic_furniture-building_co-op_game
KallaX_only_gives_one_player_instructions⠀⇛
KallaX sounds like it could be quite hilarious.
With co-op play of between 2-6 players, you will
need to build some furniture but the problem is,
only one of you has been given the instructions.
# ⚓ GamingOnLinux ☛ Tactical_turn-based_stealth_game_Spirited
Thief_releases_September_19⠀⇛
Spirited Thief looks pretty sweet. A tactical turn-
based stealth game with a twist, where you take
your time to scout ahead and plan your heist as
your ghostly friend, then use your knowledge to
break in and break out with pricey loot.
o § Desktop Environments/WMs⠀➾
# ⚓ DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ IBM_Gaslighting:_“The_New_Linux
Technologies_Work_Fine._It’s_Just_You!”_Wayland_is_Not
Robust.⠀⇛
I like to say Wayland is “Negative work.” not only
because it just replaces X11 with inferior beta
software-quality interfaces, sometimes missing
entirely, where everyone has to rewrite the same
function from scratch, but because it requires work
that doesn’t involve actually improving the desktop
and window management for the users.
A lot of work has been poured into get KDE to do
things it already did on X11, and with code that is
new and unstable, and incomplete.
“Negative work” was also a direct quote from IBM.
# § K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt⠀➾
# ⚓ Linuxiac ☛ KDE_Plasma_6_Roadmap_Unveiled:_When_Can
You_Expect_It⠀⇛
The KDE Plasma desktop environment has long
been a favorite among countless Linux
enthusiasts and open-source advocates, known
for its stunning visuals, customizability,
and user-friendly design.
The current stable release, KDE Plasma 5.27
LTS, is the last in the 5.x series and will
receive bugfixes only, but no new features.
In this light, in recent months, all
developer efforts have been focused on the
upcoming Plasma 6 release, which is expected
to be a turning point in the evolution of
this beloved desktop environment.
# ⚓ OMG! Linux ☛ Devs_Announce_KDE_Plasma_6_Release
Date⠀⇛
Development on KDE Plasma 6 kicked off (heh)
earlier this year. The desktop side is now
built using Qt 6 technologies. This unlock
support for new features, capabilities
(including enhancements to ‘convergence’
implementations), and further future-
proofing.
Earlier this KDE developers met up in Berlin,
Germany to work on the next-generation of the
KDE Plasma desktop. A number of interesting
details came out of that sprint, including a
decision to adopt a slower release cadence.
Sadly a release date wasn’t part of that info
dump, so it’s great to finally have one.
Something to jot down in our calendars to
look forward to.
* § Distributions and Operating Systems⠀➾
o ⚓ Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ [remark]_Linux_becoming_a_Windows_/_OSX
clone⠀⇛
A rant about the complexity of modern Linux
distributions, which places them on par with the
opaqueness of Windows and OSX.
o § BSD⠀➾
# ⚓ FreeBSD ☛ Meet_The_Summer_2023_University_of_Waterloo_Co-Op
Student:_Naman_Sood⠀⇛
The Foundation has continued our successful
partnership with the University of Waterloo Co-Op
Program. Since 2017 we’ve had 15 interns, some
having returned for more than one internship. We’ve
also had two interns become full-fledged
committers, and many continue to contribute. We sat
down with this year’s Summer Co-Op Student to learn
more about them and why they chose to work with
FreeBSD.
o § Debian Family⠀➾
# ⚓ Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu_at_DebConf_2023_|_Ubuntu⠀⇛
It is safe to say that there would be no Ubuntu
without Debian. Canonical is a long time supporter
of Debian, and a Gold sponsor of DebConf this year.
On top of the sponsorship, many Ubuntu developers
and Canonical engineers are going to speak at
DebConf.
Till Kamppeter will show us The New Architecture
for Printing and Scanning on Debian in a dedicated
talk. He is also going to share his experience of
running events and inspiring more contributors with
his session Opportunity Open Source conference in
the IIT Mandi, India: Motivating people to be a
part of us!
# ⚓ The Register UK ☛ Linux_on_the_Arm-based_Thinkpad_X13S:
It’s_getting_there⠀⇛
The latest release of Armbian helps with the non-
trivial problem of installing and running an
arbitrary Linux distro on Arm computers.
The Lenovo Thinkpad X13S Generation 1 which we
reviewed back in March is the first mainstream Arm-
powered laptop that the Reg FOSS Desk has got to
evaluate. There are other Arm-based laptops out
there, such as Pine64′s Pinebook Pro and various
Arm-powered ChromeBooks, but the X13S is closer to
an ordinary X86-based laptop: it has a decent spec,
with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe SSD – plus PC-
industry-standard UEFI firmware, which is still
relatively unusual on consumer Arm computers.
Better still, you can disable Secure Boot, which
many Arm-powered devices don’t allow. A decade ago,
this was a critical problem with the original
Microsoft Surface RT: Windows RT was a flop, and
the firmware wouldn’t let you run anything else.
o § Canonical/Ubuntu Family⠀➾
# ⚓ It’s FOSS ☛ Ubuntu_23.10_to_Feature_Experimental_TPM-backed
Full_Disk_Encryption⠀⇛
Ubuntu 23.10 daily builds keep getting exciting new
additions!
Earlier we had covered the major PPA changes, and
the new Flutter-based store (which also landed with
the latest daily builds).
Now, we have yet another major change that is set
to enhance the security of Ubuntu systems; by
changing how users handle the encrypting of their
disks (if enabled).
The initial support for the feature is set to
arrive with Ubuntu 23.10 and will be improved in
future Ubuntu releases.
# ⚓ Ubuntu ☛ Manage_FIPS-enabled_Linux_machines_at_scale_with
Landscape_23.03⠀⇛
You or your organisation are tasked with hardening
your workstations and servers, where do you begin?
Installing Ubuntu and applying all the security
patches is a good place to start, but what else is
needed? The National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), a cybersecurity agency
established in 1988, has published a series of
security requirements for cryptographic modules
since 1993. Instead of approaching hardening from a
blank slate, anyone can benefit from NIST’s ongoing
work in under 5 minutes, and have the strongest
cryptography and hardening posture, when using
Ubuntu.
Presented by Canonical’s VP of Public Sector, Chris
Huffman, and Product Managers Rajan Patel, Ijlal
Loutfi, and Henry Coggill. The webinar covers
baselines, standards, and guidelines as they
pertain to implementing FIPS with maximum security.
o § Devices/Embedded⠀➾
# ⚓ Adafruit ☛ CircuitPython_8.2.5_Released!_@circuitpython⠀⇛
Firmware downloads are available from the downloads
page on circuitpython.org. The site makes it easy
to select the correct file and language for your
board.
# ⚓ Linux Gizmos ☛ Rock_Pi_S_Core_SoM_taps_Rockchip_RK3308
CPU⠀⇛
# ⚓ Linux Gizmos ☛ T-Display_S3_Pro_adds_a_2.33”_screen_and
phone_OTG_support⠀⇛
o § Open Hardware/Modding⠀➾
# ⚓ Herman Õunapuu ☛ The_IKEA-powered_homelab_on_a_wall⠀⇛
There are some improvements that I might implement
to a revision of this board. The USB cables
connecting the external SSD-s seem to be just small
enough to be routable behind the pegboard. Other
cables that are visible can probably be hidden on
the other side as well, giving the setup a much
cleaner look.
# ⚓ Arduino ☛ This_bionic_hand_responds_to_motion_control⠀⇛
This is the newest iteration of a project that
Cogley first started a few years ago. It is robotic
hand meant to mimic a human hand as much as
possible. Human fingers do not contain muscles.
Instead, muscles in the forearms and palms pull on
tendons to move the fingers. Cogley’s bionic hand
works in a similar manner by using servo motors in
the forearm to pull on cables that actuate the
fingers. An Arduino UNO Rev3 moves the servos
according to commands from a PC, but Cogley needed
a way to streamline those commands.
# ⚓ Purism ☛ PureOS_on_Liberty_Phone_and_Librem_5⠀⇛
With the Librem 5 just hitting shipping parity and
Purism holding stock for new purchases, it was time
for an updated review of the tremendous progress
our team has made with PureOS for the Librem 5 and
Liberty Phone with Made in USA Electronics. Here
we will talk about the good, bad, and lasting
effects of PureOS on the Liberty Phone and Librem
5.
Both the Librem 5 and Liberty Phone were a giant
gamble that paid off in a big way. Prior to the
Librem 5, nearly every new phone produced used the
software stack from Android or iOS, both of which
are fundamentally flawed around data protection and
proper transparent fully released source code.
Instead of using this problematic base and adopting
apps that monetize your data, or where the source
code is not released, or worse… both of those. We
chose the much harder but proper path and built an
Operating System, PureOS, using only free software
thereby avoiding data collection entirely,
advancing fully free software, and bonus we
invented true convergence within PureOS which is a
non-Android Linux OS. With PureOS, you get a full
Linux Desktop on everything from servers to phones.
We don’t collect user data nor provide avenues to
easily incorporate ads into our ecosystem.
Resulting in a pure experience free of nagging apps
and unalterable defaults. The Librem 5 and Liberty
Phone running PureOS do not spy on you, giving you
peace of mind that you are fully protected from the
hardware all the way to the apps.
On the Liberty phone and Librem 5 the Linux kernel
is kept up to date by Purism and its many
investments in upstream, it needs a shrinking
number of alterations from the main branch because
of these advancements. This keeps kernel features
up to date and makes it easy to port alternative
OSs to the Librem 5 or Liberty Phone.
Congratulations are in order for our Linux kernel
team.
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ How_Small_Can_The_ESP32_Get?⠀⇛
At its core, the ESP32 chip is not much more than
an integrated circuit, a huge mass of transistors
sealed inside an epoxy resin package with some
leads. Of course, most of us won’t buy discrete
ESP32 chips with no support circuitry since it’s
typically easier and often not that much more
expensive to get them paired with development
boards of some type for easy access to things like
USB and GPIO. But these tiny chips need little in
the way of support to get up and running as [Paul]
demonstrates with this tiny ESP32 board.
o § Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications⠀➾
# ⚓ Android Police ☛ The_Pixel_Watch_2_won’t_work_on_super_old
Android_phones⠀⇛
# ⚓ Giz China ☛ AnTuTu:_Unveiling_the_Most_Powerful_Android
Smartphones⠀⇛
# ⚓ The Sun ☛ Millions_of_Android_owners_receive_huge_free
‘text_checker’_upgrade_that_instantly_makes_typing_so_much
easier_|_The_US_Sun⠀⇛
# ⚓ Gadget Bridge ☛ 7_easy_ways_to_turn_off_or_restart_an
Android_phone_without_using_the_power_button?⠀⇛
# ⚓ Phone Arena ☛ Pixel_Watch_2_will_require_the_Android_phone
you_pair_with_to_run_Pie_or_later_–_PhoneArena⠀⇛
* § Free, Libre, and Open Source Software⠀➾
o ⚓ PowerDNS ☛ PowerDNS_Authoritative_Server_4.8.2⠀⇛
In Authoritative Server 4.8, the LMDB backend gains a new
Lightning Stream-compatible schema, which requires a data
migration (this is automatic, and there is no migration
back to the old schema). LMDB backend users should pay
extra attention to the Upgrade Notes.
o § Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra⠀➾
# ⚓ DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Quoting_Wikipedia_to_Explain_Why
You_Should_Not_Use_Microsoft_Office_365.⠀⇛
Microsoft 365 is banned for use in classrooms in at
least one German state, which has deemed it too
insecure to even use at all.
Also, this is the stuff that survived Microsoft’s
PR firm “pruning” things from Wikipedia.
None of this things can happen to you if you use
LibreOffice, and store your documents on your own
computer.
Also, LibreOffice never goes into “read-only” mode
if you stop paying a monthly fee. There is no fee.
o § Education⠀➾
# ⚓ Carl Schwan ☛ Freedom_Not_Fear_2023⠀⇛
Last weekend, I went to Freedom Not Fear 2023 in
Brussels. Fnf is an unconference for and by
European digital activists. It covers various
topics, from the latest terrible European law (Chat
Control) to discussing how to get more involved in
our democracies.
I usually attend more technical conferences, and it
was refreshing to participate in a conference where
ethical and political discussions around digital
rights were a central topic. It was an occasion to
meet people from different backgrounds, from a
Dutch politician (and self-proclaimed student for
life), to a member of various organizations (e.g.
Edri, NlNet, epicenter.works, Chatons, …) and
journalists from Netzpolitik.
# ⚓ Carl Svensson ☛ The_Wachowskis_and_the_Hacker_as_a
progressive_archetype⠀⇛
To serve the positive connotation, hacker culture
needs to be fairly broadly defined. It usually
encompasses various in-group markers and qualities
that the bad hackers lack – most often a set of
morally pure values with a countercultural, often
progressive twist. Early real world political
markers of hacker culture were distrust of the
(deep) state, safeguarding personal privacy, free
speech advocacy and an opposition to predatory
capitalism – a heritage from the counterculture
prevalent at the time and place of its birth, the
US in the late 1960:s. This has since been echoed
in many a hacker tract, factual as well as
fictional. WarGames (1983) pits a mischievous boy
next door against the hubris and excess of the
military-industrial complex. Sneakers (1992)
features a group of aging hippies doing battle with
foreign as well as domestic political actors, and
The Lone Gunmen (2001, originally from The X-Files)
are at constant odds with both megacorps and US
intelligence agencies.
Through the increased ubiquity of networked
computers and the gradual reframing of hackers from
criminals to freedom fighters, the connotation of
the word hacker itself has gone from largely
negative to largely positive. In the word hack’s
capacity of describing a clever solution to a
problem, it’s even trickled outside the realm of
technology and blessed us with life hacks in
general and specific ones like kitchen hacks in
particular. Hence, new words must be constructed:
bad hackers are now instead cyber terrorists or
cyber criminals.
o § Licensing / Legal⠀➾
# ⚓ The Drone Girl ☛ Drone_remote_ID_rules_apply_as_of
September_16._Are_you_ready?⠀⇛
As of September 16, 2023, the drone remote ID rules
start applying to drone pilots, too. The final rule
for remote ID is a requirement from the Federal
Aviation Administration mandating that drones must
provide identification and location information,
which can then be read by other parties. Consider a
sort of electronic licensing plate system for
drones, with a built-in layer of location
information.
The FAA’s drone remote ID rules technically went
into effect in September 2022, but the FAA actually
gave a year for drone pilots to make sure their
aircraft actually is equipped with Remote ID. That
point comes on September 16, 2023 at exactly 12:01
a.m. — which isn’t far away.
At that point, all drone pilots required to
register their UAS (which is most drone operators
flying outdoors with drones that weigh 250 grams or
more) must operate their aircraft in accordance
with the final rule on remote ID.
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ South_Dakota_Looks_Like_It_Might_Be_The_Next
State_Asked_To_Explain_Its_Stupid_Vanity_Plate_Laws_To_A
Federal_Court⠀⇛
Governments are weird. Maybe “weird” isn’t the
right word. The more accurate word may be
“opportunistic.” When it comes to speech they don’t
like, they move into this mode. If they think they
can silence it, they will try to. And they’ll do
this while still pretending the speech they’re
trying to control is nothing more than their own.
o § Programming/Development⠀➾
# ⚓ Rlang ☛ Adding_a_website_next_to_your_Shiny_server⠀⇛
I have been off from the blog lately due to a big
load of personal projects. Just lately I got a few
days off and found time to work on my personal
website, to be ready soon. That made me get more
into Nginx configuration, where I consider myself a
total rookie. However, I was mainly adding a few
domains that are intended for different purposes.
That is incredibly easy to do using Nginx even with
minimal knowledge, and that’s what I want to show
here.
Basically I want to have my shiny apps under one
domain, and some other sites under different
domains, but using only one server. I also decided
to add my own customized 404 error page. There are
different ways to accomplish that, here are just a
couple of them. I hope they can be of use.
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 3471
╒═══════════════════ 𝐃𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 ═════════════════════════════════════════════╕
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Links_08/09/2023:_Release_of_Francis_1.0,_EnterpriseDB_Chooses_GNU_General
Public_License_v3_for_Component⠀✐
Posted in News_Roundup at 8:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇GNOME bluefish⦈
§ Contents⠀➾
* GNU/Linux
o Server
o Kernel_Space
o Applications
o Instructionals/Technical
o WINE_or_Emulation
o Desktop_Environments/WMs
# K_Desktop_Environment/KDE_SC/Qt
* Distributions_and_Operating_Systems
o Fedora_Family_/_IBM
o Debian_Family
o Canonical/Ubuntu_Family
o Devices/Embedded
o Mobile_Systems/Mobile_Applications
* Free,_Libre,_and_Open_Source_Software
o SaaS/Back_End/Databases
o Programming/Development
# Python
* Leftovers
o Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
o Proprietary/Artificial_Intelligence_(AI)
o Pseudo-Open_Source
# Openwashing
o Security
# Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
# Privacy/Surveillance
o Defence/Aggression
o Environment
# Energy/Transportation
o Finance
o AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
o Censorship/Free_Speech
o Civil_Rights/Policing
o Internet_Policy/Net_Neutrality
o Monopolies
# Patents
# Copyrights
* Gemini*_and_Gopher
o Politics_and_World_Events
o Technology_and_Free_Software
* § GNU/Linux⠀➾
o § Server⠀➾
# ⚓ Cloudbooklet ☛ Top_5_Free_Linux_Cloud_Servers_to_Host_Your
Website⠀⇛
A free Linux cloud server is a virtual machine that
runs Linux and is hosted on a cloud platform for
free or with some limitations.
o § Kernel Space⠀➾
# ⚓ Collabora ☛ Video_codecs:_Adding_AV1_stateless_video
decoder_support_to_Linux⠀⇛
The latest mainline Linux kernel (v6.5) includes 22
patches that enable support for the AV1 uAPI and
for two stateless video decoders: one for the
Rockchip RK3588 and one for MT8195, a MediaTek SoC.
# ⚓ Neowin ☛ Linus_Torvalds_accepts_Microsoft’s_Linux_Hyper-
V_upgrades_so_both_Intel_and_AMD_can_benefit [Ed: No, it is
so that Microsoft can benefit]⠀⇛
Microsoft is improving Hyper-V support in the
upcoming Linux kernel version 6.6 so that both AMD
and Intel processors will benefit. The upgrade
mainly pertains to improved guest support.
o § Applications⠀➾
# ⚓ DebugPoint ☛ Reviving_the_Glory_Days:_NsCDE_Desktop_for
UNIX_Buffs⠀⇛
If you’ve been pining for the nostalgia of the
Common Desktop Environment (CDE) that graced UNIX
systems back in the ’90s, but also yearn for a
modern, robust, and highly customizable desktop
experience, then NsCDE might just be your answer.
In this review, we’ll dive into what NsCDE is all
about, why it exists, and who it’s meant for.
# ⚓ GNOME ☛ Juan_Pablo_Ugarte:_Cambalache_0.14.0_Released!⠀⇛
I am pleased to announce a new Cambalache version.
Cambalache is a new RAD tool for Gtk 4 and 3 with a
clear MVC design and data model first philosophy.
Version 0.14.0 brings two new features one of them
not even originally supported by Glade.
# ⚓ Sam_Thursfield:_Improvements_to_my_helper_tool_for_VM-based
openQA_testing⠀⇛
It’s two years since I started looking into end-to-
end testing of GNOME using openQA. While developing
the end-to-end tests I find myself running tests
locally on my machine a lot, and the experience was
fiddly, so I wrote a simple helper tool named
ssam_openqa to automate my workflow.Having chosen
to write ssam_openqa in Rust, it’s now really fun
to hack on, and I somewhat gratuitously gave it an
interactive frontend using the indicatif Rust
library.
# ⚓ Linux Links ☛ 11_Best_Free_and_Open_Source_Linux_e-Learning
Tools⠀⇛
Linux has a wide range of e-Learning software
available. This article focuses on software which
is user friendly for students and instructors.
# ⚓ Medevel ☛ 15_Open-source_Free_DSLR_Camera_Software_and
Solutions_for_Photographers⠀⇛
In this list we offer you the best usable open-
source solutions to control and manage your DSLR
cameras.
# ⚓ Medevel ☛ 54_Free_Open-source_Web_Spiders,_Crawlers_and
Scrapping_Solutions_for_Data_Collection⠀⇛
Web crawling, scraping, and spiders are all related
to the process of extracting data from websites.
o § Instructionals/Technical⠀➾
# ⚓ Red Hat ☛ How_to_trigger_jobs_manually_in_Packit⠀⇛
Packit is an open source project aiming to ease
your project’s integration with Fedora Linux,
CentOS_Stream, and other distributions. Packit is
mostly used by projects that build RPM packages. We
won’t go through the onboarding process that was
already described in a previous_article, but we
would like to introduce you to new features that
were recently promoted into production.
§ Testing Farm execution
From Packit, you can easily trigger the tests on
Testing Farm even without building the RPMs. This
is very handy for projects that basically don’t
build RPMs but want to use these two services for
verifying the code. As a good example, we can refer
to the Strimzi_project where users consume
container images.
In such cases, the users want to trigger the tests,
verify the code and see some output. This option is
available from the beginning. Users can easily
define when to execute the tests for every pull
request, commit, or release. That sounds pretty
cool; however, when you have complex tests (5+
hours per test run) as we have in Strimzi, you
probably don’t want to trigger all tests for each
commit. So, how can the users achieve that?
# ⚓ Podman_Vs._Docker:_Exploring_Key_Differences_and_When_to
Make_the_Switch⠀⇛
Podman is an open-source container management tool
that provides a way to create, manage, and run
containers on your Linux systems. Sounds familiar,
right? If you’ve ever used Docker in your life, you
can relate their similarities.
# ⚓ Tmux_Tutorial:_Mastering_the_Basics⠀⇛
What is tmux? Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that
allows you to manage multiple terminal sessions
with a single terminal window, and you can easily
switch between those multiple terminal sessions.
Why use tmux?
# ⚓ TecAdmin ☛ Using_if-else_in_Dockerfile⠀⇛
Docker is an essential tool for containerizing
applications, making them portable and isolated.
The Dockerfile is a key component in the Docker
ecosystem, allowing developers to specify how their
application should be containerized. Often, there
is a need for conditional logic in Dockerfiles,
much like you would find in programming scripts.
# ⚓ MWL ☛ 60_Seconds_of_WIP,_7_September_2023⠀⇛
Run Your Own Mail Server has finally forced me to
write a bit about netcat versus telnet. Netcat is a
flexible network tool that, among other things,
allows you to connect to arbitrary TCP/IP ports.
We’ll use it for testing services.
# ⚓ Red Pixels Ventures Ltd ☛ How_to_Take_Screenshots_on_a
Laptop_or_Desktop_Using_Windows,_macOS_or_Linux⠀⇛
How to take a screenshot on a laptop is one of the
most commonly asked questions by users when they
start using a computer running on Windows, macOS,
or Linux. There are several ways to take
screenshots on your laptop or desktop computer,
from using keyboard shortcuts to opening apps
designed to crop, rotate, annotate, and print the
image you have captured from your screen. However,
the fastest way to take a screenshot is through
pressing a combination of keys on your keyboard for
the screen capture functionality.
o § WINE or Emulation⠀➾
# ⚓ ScummVM ☛ Androids_get_a_companion._iOS_port_public
testing⠀⇛
The day has come. We are super happy to announce
public beta testing for the iOS port of ScummVM in
the store. Yes, you read it right! Since Lars
Sundström, aka lman, joined our team as the iOS
porter, we have made significant progress. Thus,
you no longer need to compile ScummVM yourself in
order to add it to your iOS or iPadOS device.
If you want to help by testing this version, just
follow this_Testflight_link and enroll yourself in
the test program. This may require installing
Apple’s Testflight app. You can find instructions
on how to install games and how to play them on our
documentation_portal.
o § Desktop Environments/WMs⠀➾
# § K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt⠀➾
# ⚓ Carl Schwan ☛ Francis_1.0⠀⇛
Today is my birthday but it’s also the day
Francis got its first release. Francis is a
pomodoro app, which was originally developed
by Felipe Kinoshita. The Pomodoro Technique
is a time management method developed by
Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses
a kitchen timer to break work into intervals,
typically 25 minutes in length, separated by
short breaks.
# ⚓ “Bring_Back_[obscure_feature]!”⠀⇛
Did a feature you love disappear from your
Free Software project of choice? Before
kicking up a fuss on Reddit, read this.
# ⚓ KDE_Frameworks_6_/_Plasma_/_Gear_Release_Schedule
Plan⠀⇛
The Qt 6 based KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6)
development is ongoing since some time.
Already many things including Plasma and
several applications, like Kate, have working
KF6 based development versions.
KDE contributors did meet this week online
for planning the final release time-frames.
* § Distributions and Operating Systems⠀➾
o ⚓ Medium ☛ Top_7_Lesser-Known_Linux_Distributions_You_Need_to
Explore⠀⇛
When it comes to Linux distributions, most users are
familiar with the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and
CentOS. However, the Linux world is a vast ecosystem with
a multitude of distributions, each catering to different
needs and preferences. In this article, we’ll introduce
you to seven lesser-known Linux distributions that you
may have never heard of but are definitely worth
exploring.
o ⚓ The Register UK ☛ Linux_distros_drop_their_feelgood_hits_of_the
summer⠀⇛
Taking advantage of the summer lull, there are new
versions of a slew of distros: Nitrux, Ubuntu DDE, Linux
Lite, Manjaro, and siblings Mageia, OpenMandriva and
PCLinuxOS.
o ⚓ Barry Kauler ☛ More_fixes_convert_Void_pkg_db_to_Puppy_db
format⠀⇛
Previous blog post:
https://bkhome.org/news/202309/fix-convert-void-pkg-db-
to-puppy-db-format.html
I have fixed a couple of bugs in support/void/cvt.sh
script:
https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/
107c337089a942b046ec1baa124f1da9b3153279
o § Fedora Family / IBM⠀➾
# ⚓ TechEconomy.ng ☛ CentOS_Linux_is_Coming_to_an_End:_What
Does_that_Mean_for_Nigerian_Businesses?⠀⇛
As of June 2023, enterprises in Nigeria have less
than a year to plan and execute their migration
paths from CentOS Linux 7.
Updates for the open source project will end on 30
June, 2024 as it reaches its end of life. The
project comprises two Linux variants: CentOS Linux,
a platform built for a wide variety of deployments;
and CentOS Stream, a delivered distribution that
tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(RHEL) development and is positioned as a midstream
between Fedora Linux and RHEL.
# ⚓ Christiano_Anderson:_Contributing_to_Fedora⠀⇛
Fedora is the Linux distribution that I primarily
utilize, as it offers a satisfactory balance
between cutting-edge packages and stability. The
release schedule is six-monthly, and you can expect
the most recent version of the main packages, a
level of innovation you can only find in one of the
most up-to-date and stable operating systems. Being
a data professional, I enjoy trying new software
and staying abreast of the newest industry
innovation.
# ⚓ Fedora_Infrastructure_Status:_Fedora_Copr_is_slow_for
ppc64le_build_tasks⠀⇛
This outage impacts performance ppc64le tasks in
Fedora_Copr_frontend
o § Debian Family⠀➾
# Thorsten Alteholz ☛ Thorsten_Alteholz:_My_Debian_Activities
in_August_2023
§ FTP master⠀➾
This month I accepted 347 and rejected 39 packages.
The overall number of packages that got accepted
was 349.
This was my hundred-tenth month that I did some
work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by
Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
# ⚓ Thomas_Lange:_FAI.me_service_now_support_backports_for
Debian_12_(bookworm)⠀⇛
The FAI.me service for creating customized
installation and cloud images now supports the
backports kernel for the stable release Debian 12
(aka bookworm). If you enable the backports option
in the web interface, you currently get kernel 6.4.
This will help you if you have newer hardware that
is not support by the default kernel 6.1.
# ⚓ Valhalla’s_Things:_Banners_and_Signs⠀⇛
Some time ago, I decided to make a small banner
with the GL-Como penguin for a friend, because
reasons.
However, this friend has a big problem, he, well,
is from Pisa (no, I’m not from Leghorn, why do you
ask?), and I had a screen printing kit, openclipart
and no inhibitions.
# ⚓ Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk_Eddelbuettel:_x13binary_1.1.57-
4_on_CRAN:_Minor_Update⠀⇛
Release 1.1.57-4 of the x13binary package providing
the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau
arrived earlier on CRAN.
# ⚓ Tomeu_Vizoso:_Etnaviv_NPU_update_6:_Almost_there!⠀⇛
And with this we should have all the features we
need to run a model such as MobileNet v1 and get
some performance numbers to guide the next steps.
o § Canonical/Ubuntu Family⠀➾
# ⚓ OMG Ubuntu ☛ Brand_New_‘App_Center’_Lands_in_Ubuntu_23.10⠀⇛
Ubuntu’s new “App Center” app has arrived in Ubuntu
23.10 daily builds – no Snap channel commands
required to test it out. The new front-end for
installing Snap and Deb package is built using
Flutter. Ubuntu made Flutter its ‘default choice’
for app making in 2021. Despite being made with an
unconventional toolkit the new store looks
perfectly in-keeping with the rest of the Ubuntu
desktop. For a closer look at this natty new
client, and to learn more about what it can and
can’t do, keep reading!
[...]
Visually, the app is pleasant to look at. The
homepage is clean and uncluttered, logically
ordered, and uses eye-catching banners to draw
interest when scrolling. App listing pages put the
install button within easy reach, and relays info
on license, download size, confinement, and links
to the publisher.
# ⚓ Alan Pope ☛ Alan_Pope:_Developer_Tools⠀⇛
I have long said I’m not really a developer.
Whenever I used to see news articles in the past
quoting me as “Alan Pope, Developer at Canonical”,
I would cringe quite a bit. I say to my
professional developer friends that I’m not one,
and they often roll their eyes at me.
o § Devices/Embedded⠀➾
# ⚓ CNX Software ☛ Libre_Computer_AML-S905X-CC-V2_SBC_directly
installs_Linux_images_from_the_Internet⠀⇛
Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC-V2 “Sweet Potato” is a
“new” Amlogic S905X SBC following the Raspberry Pi
3B form factor and that can directly boot Linux
images downloaded from the Internet using the Libre
Computer OS Tool (LOST). I wrote “new” in quotes
because the single board computer is an update to
the Potato board (AML-S905X-CC) introduced in 2017
with just a few hardware changes. But that’s
because Libre Computer focuses on the software side
and all/most of their boards can now run mainline
Linux and have support for features such as LOST.
# ⚓ Arduino ☛ Meet_Arduino_Pro_at_PACK_EXPO_2023_in_Las_Vegas⠀⇛
The Arduino Pro team will be exhibiting in Las
Vegas next week at PACK EXPO 2023, the largest
event for the packaging industry. From Monday,
September 11th through to the 13th, meet our team
at the Arduino Pro booth #7592 in the upper south
hall.
# ⚓ CNX Software ☛ Gateworks_GW7400_networking_SBC_features_6
Gigabit_Ethernet_ports,_M.2_&_mini_PCIe_sockets_for_wireless
connectivity⠀⇛
Gateworks Venice GW7400 is a rugged industrial
single board computer for networking and gateway
applications with six Gigabit Ethernet ports, and
one M.2 and three mini PCIe sockets for WiFi,
cellular, and other wireless options. We first
mentioned the GW7400 board around three years ago,
when the company introduced the Venice family
powered by NXP i.MX 8M processor.
o § Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications⠀➾
# ⚓ 9to5Google ☛ Qi2_has_arrived_–_Where_are_the_Android
phones?⠀⇛
# ⚓ 9to5Google ☛ Android_TV_homescreen_gets_Google_TV-like
design_for_all⠀⇛
# ⚓ Android Police ☛ How_to_check_your_notification_history_on
your_Android_phone⠀⇛
# ⚓ Make Use Of ☛ How_to_Add_Birthday_Reminders_in_Google
Contacts_on_Android⠀⇛
# ⚓ HowTo Geek ☛ How_to_Save_Voicemails_on_Your_Android_Phone⠀⇛
# ⚓ Dignited ☛ Original_Xiaomi_Mi_Box_S_4K_upgraded_to_Android
TV_12_from_Android_TV_9_–_Dignited⠀⇛
# ⚓ Android Police ☛ Android_14_still_doesn’t_calculate_device
storage_utilization_correctly⠀⇛
# ⚓ CNET ☛ Android_14_Beta_5.3_Is_Out._How_to_Download_to_Your
Phone_Right_Now_–_CNET⠀⇛
# ⚓ Giz China ☛ AnTuTu:_Unveiling_the_Most_Powerful_Android
Smartphones⠀⇛
# ⚓ Medevel ☛ 23_Open-source_Free_Workout_Apps_for_Android,
iOS,_and_the_Web⠀⇛
Workout apps are software applications that can be
used to track and manage fitness-related
activities. They typically offer a range of
features, such as tracking workouts, setting goals,
providing workout plans, and monitoring progress.
* § Free, Libre, and Open Source Software⠀➾
o § SaaS/Back End/Databases⠀➾
# ⚓ Silicon Angle ☛ EnterpriseDB_releases_PostgreSQL_cluster
deployment_tool_[as_Free_Software]⠀⇛
EnterpriseDB Corp., which sells a commercial
version of the popular open-source PostgreSQL
database management system, today said it’s making
Trusted Postgres Architect available as open source
under the GNU General Public License v3. TPA is a
tool for automating the deployment and
configuration of high-availability Postgres
clusters.
o § Programming/Development⠀➾
# ⚓ Ted Unangst ☛ enjargo_–_another_way_to_generate_go_json
encoders⠀⇛
Some people, when presented with a data structure,
think let’s encode this to json. Now they have two
problems. Encoding and decoding. In response to
this dilemma, various libraries were created, such
as rust serde or go encoding/json, to facilitate
drama and debate about which approach is best.
Enter enjargo, another approach for go quite
different from the standard library, which exists
mostly to complete the D triumvirate with a bit of
didacticism, and not so much to be a practical
option.
# § Python⠀➾
# ⚓ Towards_a_new_SymPy:_part_1_–_Outline⠀⇛
The other posts in this series can be found
at Towards a new SymPy.
Over the last year in particular I have been
working as a part of a CZI funded project
that has three strands. One of those three
strands is for me to work on speeding up
SymPy. Now that we come to the end of that
year, I want to describe what has been done
and spell out a vision for the future.
I will be writing this in a series of blog
posts. This first post will outline the
structure of the foundations of a computer
algebra system (CAS) like SymPy, describe
some problems SymPy currently has and what
can be done to address them. Then subsequent
posts will focus in more detail on particular
components and the work that has been done
and what should be done in the future.
I am writing this with the intention that it
should be accessible to someone who is not a
SymPy developer although other SymPy
developers are the intended audience for many
of the points that I will make. Many of the
things that I will describe here are not well
understood even by many SymPy developers
though and a major goal of this series of
posts is to help to try to change that.
# ⚓ Towards_a_new_SymPy:_part_2_–_Polynomials⠀⇛
This post will describe SymPy’s computational
algebra system for polynomials and how each
of these steps could be applied to speed up
SymPy. I will talk a bit about FLINT and
python-flint but I will also write a separate
post about those because I know that some
people will be more interested in using
python-flint than SymPy itself and I hope to
encourage them to contribute to python-flint.
As before I am writing this with the
intention that it should be to some extent
understandable to non SymPy developers. The
primary intended audience though is other
SymPy developers because I want them to
understand the significance of the work done
so far and the changes that I think are
needed for the future.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Benjamin:_Towards_a_new_SymPy⠀⇛
In a series of posts on his blog, Oscar
Benjamin looks at SymPy, which is a Python-
based symbolic-mathematics library. In the
first article, he outlines the “”big changes
for SymPy with particular focus on speed””.
The second covers polynomial handling;
subsequent articles will examine other pieces
of the puzzle.
* § Leftovers⠀➾
o § Health/Nutrition/Agriculture⠀➾
# ⚓ Creating_Apples⠀⇛
Time for another weekend post in the 100_days_to
offload effort.
A couple of years ago I had an excavator dig up
parts of the garden to make room for a new deck.
Apparently it took out a bit too much of the roots
of my daughters favourite apple tree – the
Transparent Blanche. So, yesterday evening we
finally got a new one and planted it.
o § Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)⠀➾
# ⚓ Report:_Expedia_Group_laying_off_tech_workers_as_part_of
restructuring⠀⇛
Expedia Group is reportedly trimming its headcount
as the Seattle-based travel giant restructures its
business.
According to an internal email that was obtained by
GeekWire, the company is laying off an undisclosed
number of tech workers. Those impacted include
members of Expedia Group’s Traveler Products team.
“As we have begun looking to 2024, it is important
that we are ready to ‘Build the world’s most loved
AI powered travel apps.’ These changes to our
[organization] will help us take the next steps to
move quickly and stay tightly aligned while
simplifying where we can,” Tript Singh Lamba, a
senior vice president, said in the email.
# ⚓ France24 ☛ Apple_shares_fall_following_reports_of_China
iPhone_ban⠀⇛
The shares of several major Apple AAPL.O suppliers
fell on Friday, following reports that China had
widened curbs on use of iPhones by state employees,
fanning fears about sales prospects in one of the
US company’s biggest markets.
# ⚓ Microsoft_clarifies_one_of_the_most_controversial_findings
of_the_FTC_federal_trial⠀⇛
Microsoft’s legal counsel clarifies some of the
most compelling and controversial aspects of the
recent FTC v Microsoft federal trial.
# ⚓ Microsoft_announces_the_end_of_servicing_for_third-party
printer_drivers_on_Windows⠀⇛
o § Pseudo-Open Source⠀➾
# § Openwashing⠀➾
# ⚓ Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Why_You_Can’t_Miss
This_Year’s_Open_Source_Summit_Europe⠀⇛
We’re less than 2 weeks away from the 12th
annual Open Source Summit Europe, the premier
European conference to showcase the open
source community’s expertise and innovation.
This year’s event will take place in Bilbao,
Spain September 19-21, with co-located events
held September 17-18.
# ⚓ OSI Blog ☛ The_Approved_Open_Source_Licenses_never
looked_better [Ed: But OSI never looked worse. It's
doing openwashing and promotions of Microsoft, actively
promoting the attacks on Open Source in exchange for
some dirty Microsoft/GitHub money,]⠀⇛
The Open Source community needs a resource to
confidently and easily identify licenses that
have gained OSI approval, and now they have
it. This Approval Registry offers a
comprehensive and authoritative listing of
all licenses so organizations know that the
license they choose for their project allows
their software to be freely used, modified,
shared and monetized in compliance with the
Open Source Definition.
o § Security⠀➾
# ⚓ LinuxInsider ☛ Atlas_VPN_Linux_Leak_Exposes_Users’_IP
Addresses⠀⇛
A Reddit user with the handle ‘Educational-Map-
8145′ published a proof-of-concept exploit last
week for a zero-day flaw in the Linux client of
Atlas VPN. The exploit code works against the
latest version of the client, 1.0.3.
# ⚓ Silicon Angle ☛ Apple_security_updates_address
vulnerabilities_targeted_by_NSO_Group⠀⇛
Apple Inc. has released urgent security updates for
its suite of operating systems after revealing two
critical new vulnerabilities that researchers say
were exploited by Israeli spyware maker NSO Group
Ltd. to install spyware on devices.
# ⚓ Scoop News Group ☛ Multiple_nation-state_hackers_infiltrate
single_aviation_organization⠀⇛
A single aviation organization was infiltrated by
the hackers using vulnerabilities on internet-
facing devices.
/blockquote>
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ ‘Atomic_macOS_Stealer’_Malware_Delivered
via_Malvertising_Campaign⠀⇛
A malware named Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS) has
been delivered to users via a malvertising
campaign.
# ⚓ SANS ☛ Fleezeware/Scareware_Advertised_via_Facebook_Tags
Available_in_Apple_App_Store,_(Thu,_Sep_7th)⠀⇛
# ⚓ SANS ☛ Apple_Releases_iOS/iPadOS_16.6.1,_macOS_13.5.2,
watchOS_9.6.2_fixing_two_zeroday_vulnerabilities,_(Thu,_Sep
7th)⠀⇛
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Apple_Patches_Actively_Exploited_iOS,_macOS
Zero-Days⠀⇛
Apple pushes out an urgent point-update to its
flagship iOS and macOS platforms to fix a pair of
security defects being exploited in the wild.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ See_Tickets_Alerts_300,000_Customers_After
Another_Web_Skimmer_Attack⠀⇛
See Tickets is informing 300,000 individuals that
their payment card information was stolen in a new
web skimmer attack.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ CISA_Releases_Guidance_on_Adopting_DDoS
Mitigations⠀⇛
CISA has released new guidance to help federal
agencies decide upon and prioritize DDoS
mitigations based on mission and reputational
impact.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Cisco_Patches_Critical_Vulnerability_in
BroadWorks_Platform⠀⇛
Cisco has released patches for CVE-2023-20238, a
critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the
BroadWorks Application Delivery Platform.
# ⚓ IT Wire ☛ Ransomware_hit_nearly_three-fourths_of_Indian
firms_last_year⠀⇛
More than half of these Indian companies — 53% to
be exact — had forked out ransoms of up to
US$500,000 (A$783,881) to end disruptions which had
lasted from a day to weeks, the analyst firm added.
It cited figures from the Computer Emergency
Response Team of India which showed that 1.4
million incidents had been recorded in 2021, with
slightly less (1.39 million) in 2022.
# ⚓ Dark Reading ☛ ‘Evil_Telegram’_Spyware_Campaign_Infects
60K+_Mobile_Users⠀⇛
Legitimate-seeming Telegram “mods” available in the
official Google Play store for the encrypted
messaging app signal the rise of a new enterprise
threat.
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Rigged_Software_and_Zero-Days:_North_Korean
APT_Caught_Hacking_Security_Researchers⠀⇛
Google again catches a North Korean APT actor
targeting security researchers with zero-days and
rigged software tools.
# ⚓ Google ☛ Unveiling_the_Chrome_Web_Store’s_Redesign [Ed:
Only a spying company, Google, gets to decide what you can
and cannot run]⠀⇛
In celebration of Chrome’s 15th birthday, we’re
thrilled to introduce the redesigned Chrome Web
Store. With a user-centric focus, we’ve made it
easier for you to search and find fun themes and
helpful extensions to stay productive at home or at
work. Let’s go behind the scenes and learn more
about this redesign from Chrome Product Manager
Hafsah Ismail and UX Designer Crystal Wang.
# ⚓ CISA ☛ MAR-10454006.r5.v1_SUBMARINE,_SKIPJACK,_SEASPRAY,
WHIRLPOOL,_and_SALTWATER_Backdoors⠀⇛
This report is provided “as is” for informational
purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind
regarding any information contained herein. The DHS
does not endorse any commercial product or service
referenced in this bulletin or otherwise.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Quick_note:_Two_more_school_districts_hit
by_cyberattacks⠀⇛
Brett Callow of Emsisoft notes that LockBit has
added Skokie-Morton Grove School District 69 in
Illinois to their leak site. No proof of claim was
posted and no description of any data allegedly
stolen was provided.
# ⚓ Decatur_ISD_hit_by_suspected_cybersecurity_attack⠀⇛
DISD’s main server went down at 5:15 a.m. Tuesday.
Since then, district officials have met with
various experts to look into the cause of the
issue. On Friday, DISD Director of Communications
Robyn Jones released a statement indicating the
investigation has pointed to a “cybersecurity
incident.”
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Coca-Cola_FEMSA_victim_of_ransomware_attack
and_data_leak⠀⇛
The attack involved both encrypting files and
backups and exfiltrating data. TheSnake claims the
encryption did not interfere with the firm’s
functioning.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Schneck_Medical_Center_settles_Indiana
Attorney_General’s_lawsuit_over_2021_data_breach⠀⇛
On June 6, the state also sued Schneck, alleging
violations of HIPAA, the Indiana Disclosure of
Security Breach Act, and the Indiana Deceptive
Consumer Sales Act.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ Rite_Aid,_one_of_many_victims_in_MOVEit
breach,_sued_for_negligence⠀⇛
Rite Aid was one of numerous entities affected by
the massive MOVEit breach. In July, they disclosed
that 24,400 patients’ pharmacy information
including medication names and dates of fill,
prescriber information and limited insurance
information was involved. They were notified by
their vendor of the breach on May 31.
# ⚓ Dymocks_warns_shoppers_of_possible_dark_web_data_breach⠀⇛
Bookstore chain Dymocks has warned customers of a
possible data breach that could lead to their
personal information being leaked on the dark web.
In an email sent to members on Friday, the
bookseller’s managing director, Mark Newman, said a
potential hack was detected two days earlier.
# ⚓ Dallas News ☛ Dallas_delays_release_of_report_that_reviews
ransomware_response⠀⇛
An internal report reviewing Dallas’ response to a
ransomware attack that was planned to be published
Wednesday could now have its public release delayed
up to two weeks, city officials say.
The hold up could mean further delaying clarity to
the public on how the cyberattack happened and what
steps the city took to safeguard residents’
personal information since then.
A full after-action report was scheduled to be
released to the public after a briefing on the
review’s findings by information technology
officials to the City Council on Wednesday, but the
briefing was postponed because it was past 8 p.m.
by the time the presentation was set to be heard.
The City Council meeting started around 9:30 a.m.,
and the bulk of it was spent discussing amendments
to the upcoming budget.
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ More_than_a_year_later,_Lifeline_Health
Systems_notifies_75,000_people_of_a_data_breach⠀⇛
What conditions existed that should excuse Lifeline
Health Systems from its obligation under the HIPAA
Breach Notification Rule to notify HHS and those
affected no later than 60 days from discovery? Is
this another case where maybe HHS should take
enforcement action and start handing out fines and
corrective action plans to make sure entities
comply with the timely notification rule?
# ⚓ Data Breaches ☛ The_Blackbaud_data_breach_—_SuspectFile’s
final_chapter⠀⇛
While SuspectFile closes its data collection and
provides its final figures, we note that litigation
against Blackbaud is ongoing. There are still
multiple cases open against them stemming from the
incident.
# ⚓ Blackbaud_Data_Breach_(2020-2023),_the_final_chapter⠀⇛
With this article on the Blackbaud Data Breach, we
conclude the final chapter of a story that
SuspectFile has been following for three years, but
not before updating our table with the number of
people involved in the data breach at the
University of Birmingham – UK (464,395), a figure
that was only recently provided to us by the
university.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Security_updates_for_Friday⠀⇛
Security updates have been issued by Debian
(chromium, libssh2, memcached, and python-django),
Fedora (netconsd), Oracle (firefox and
thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE
(open-vm-tools), and Ubuntu (grub2-signed, grub2-
unsigned, shim, and shim-signed, plib, and
python2.7, python3.5).
# ⚓ TechCrunch ☛ Polish_Senate_says_use_of_government_spyware
is_illegal_in_the_country_|_TechCrunch⠀⇛
A Polish Senate commission concluded that Poland
government’s use of spyware made by NSO Group was
illegal and influenced the 2019 elections.
# § Integrity/Availability/Authenticity⠀➾
# ⚓ Digital Music News ☛ Concert_Ticket_Scams_Are
Absolutely_Soaring_in_2023,_Latest_Data_Reveals⠀⇛
Concert ticket scams are soaring in 2023.
Here’s a peek at some of the latest data.
Banking group Santander says customer reports
of ticketing scams have more than doubled in
the UK within the last year.
# § Privacy/Surveillance⠀➾
# ⚓ Ars Technica ☛ Google_gets_its_way,_bakes_a_user-
tracking_ad_platform_directly_into_Chrome⠀⇛
Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you
from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad
platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy
Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread
rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been
following this, this feature will track the
web pages you visit and generate a list of
advertising topics that it will share with
web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built
directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been
in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the
“Topics API,” and despite widespread
opposition from just about every non-
advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome
and is one of the world’s biggest advertising
companies, so this is being railroaded into
the production builds.
# ⚓ LWN ☛ Google_bakes_a_user-tracking_ad_platform
directly_into_Chrome_(ars_technica)⠀⇛
For those who use Chrome anyway, there are
instructions on how to disable this
functionality.
o § Defence/Aggression⠀➾
# ⚓ Ministry_acknowledges_event_involving_‘torture,_killing’_of
refugees_on_Turkey-Syria_border⠀⇛
“Criminal proceedings were initiated against two
soldiers. Four contract personnel were dismissed,
and proceedings are underway regarding one reserve
officer. It is clear that torture has been
acknowledged and cannot be denied,” MP Gergerlioğlu
said based on the response he received to his
parliamentary question.
# ⚓ Federal News Network ☛ Biden_to_use_G20_summit_and_Vietnam
visit_to_highlight_US_as_trustworthy_alternative_to_China⠀⇛
President Joe Biden hopes to demonstrate at the
upcoming Group of 20 summit in India and a visit to
Vietnam that the United States and like-minded
allies can be more trustworthy partners than China
on economic and security issues. White House
officials say Biden, at the summit, will spotlight
a U.S. plan to increase by $200 billion the lending
power of the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund. That’s an attempt to offer an alternative to
China’s massive Belt and Road infrastructure
initiative, which the U.S. views as a Trojan horse
for Chinese military expansion. In Vietnam, Biden
is expected to announce plans to tighten economic
cooperation between the countries.
# ⚓ The Strategist ☛ Leadership_change_creates_new
opportunities_for_Vanuatu–Australia_security_relationship⠀⇛
On Monday, Sato Kilman was voted in as prime
minister of Vanuatu for the fifth time, after the
country’s Supreme Court upheld a vote of no
confidence against former PM Ishmael Kalsakau.
# § Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine⠀➾
# ⚓ Ukrainian_boy’s_anti-war_painting_set_to_fetch
hundreds_to_help_fight_Russia⠀⇛
A 9-year-old Ukrainian boy’s poignant anti-
war painting of a tank with a twisted cannon
is set to fetch hundreds of pounds at
auction.
o § Environment⠀➾
# ⚓ University of Michigan ☛ Planting_trees_and_picking
politicians:_How_to_survive_the_new_era_of_global_boiling⠀⇛
In July 2023, Earth broke its “hottest day ever”
twice in a row, reaching the highest temperatures
in over 100,000 years.
# ⚓ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ In_Pictures:_Hong_Kong_hit_by
widespread_flooding,_landslides_as_record-breaking_rain
paralyses_city⠀⇛
Torrential rain has brought severe flooding and
landslides to parts of Hong Kong after the city’s
Observatory recorded the highest one-hour rainfall
since records began in 1884, with public transport
and public services affected as the Observatory
raised its highest rainstorm signal.
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ Hong_Kong,_Shenzhen_deluged_by_heaviest
rain_on_record;_83_people_hurt⠀⇛
The torrential rain was brought by Haikui, a
typhoon that made landfall in the Chinese province
of Fujian.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Rain_and_Flooding_in_Greece_Traps
Residents_and_Submerges_Villages⠀⇛
Greek military forces were called in to assist the
rescue efforts. At least six people in Greece and
at least nine in neighboring Turkey have died this
week amid torrential rains and flooding.
# ⚓ University of Michigan ☛ Local_Citizens’_Climate_Lobby
chapter_event_promotes_in-home_energy_efficiency⠀⇛
More than 50 Ann Arbor residents and community
members gathered in Venue by 4M Thursday evening to
learn about home energy efficiency and how to
utilize federal incentives such as the Inflation
Reduction Act to reduce their home carbon
footprint.
# § Energy/Transportation⠀➾
# ⚓ Reason ☛ Politicians_Say_They_Want_To_Fight_Climate
Change._So_Why_Are_They_Fighting_China_on_Electric
Vehicles?⠀⇛
Rather than posing a national security
threat, the growth of China’s E.V. industry
is an opportunity for global innovation.
o § Finance⠀➾
# ⚓ University of Michigan ☛ Op-Ed:_The_rent_is_too_damn_high⠀⇛
The views expressed here are not the official views
of the Ann Arbor Renters Commission I speak to a
lot of renters and they tell me a lot of things:
horror stories galore of insect infestations,
collapsing ceilings and even outright theft of
rental deposits.
# ⚓ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China_exports,_imports_fall_again_in
August_as_economy_struggles,_but_pace_slows⠀⇛
By Peter Catterall China’s exports and imports sank
again in August, data showed Thursday, adding to
growing pressure on authorities to introduce fresh
stimulus for the world’s number two economy even as
the figures showed some sign of improvement.
# ⚓ Mexico News Daily ☛ Inflation_declined_for_7th_consecutive
month_in_August_to_4.64%⠀⇛
Inflation was driven by the cost of food, services
and housing, although it did see a decline from
July, analysts say.
# ⚓ Walmart_Cutting_Starting_Pay_And_No_Raises_In_It_Is_A
Double_Edged_Sword,_Complacency_In_Apple⠀⇛
# ⚓ TechCrunch ☛ Market_intelligence_firm_Sensor_Tower_conducts
layoffs,_several_execs_out⠀⇛
Sensor Tower, a prominent market intelligence firm
for the app economy, this week laid off a notable
portion of its workforce, estimated at around 40
people out of the 270+ at the company, according to
LinkedIn’s headcount. The layoffs included C-suite
executives, TechCrunch has learned from multiple
sources, including the CMO, CFO and chief product
officer. Other teams impacted include finance and
nearly all of marketing, we’re hearing.
o § AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics⠀➾
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ Taiwan_tycoon_Terry_Gou’s_entry_heats
up_presidential_race,_may_force_opposition_candidates_to
strike_deal⠀⇛
The Foxconn founder has access to Chinese and US
leaders, and believes he can balance Taiwan’s ties
with both sides.
# ⚓ RFA ☛ South_Korea,_China_grapple_with_different_priorities
amid_regional_tensions⠀⇛
Seoul seeks cooperation in regional security;
Beijing wants to focus on economic ties.
# ⚓ teleSUR ☛ Sudan:_East_African_Bloc_Calls_Inclusive_Talks_to
End_Conflict⠀⇛
The leaders warned that the Sudan conflict is
becoming increasingly complex and risks taking on a
regional dimension with the entry and participation
of other armed movements, in addition to the rapid
proliferation of small arms and light weapons
posing severe security, humanitarian and political
risks for Sudan and the broader region.
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ PM_Lee_to_attend_G-20_Summit_in_India⠀⇛
The summit will discuss world issues such as
sustainable development, climate change and food
security.
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ White_House:_Still_work_to_do_on
Israel-Saudi_normalisation⠀⇛
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan
said on Thursday that U.S., Israeli and Saudi
leaders have put many of the elements of a pathway
to normalization on the table but there is still
much work to do.
# ⚓ teleSUR ☛ Fearab_Congress_Condemns_Blockade_Imposed_on
Syria_and_Cuba⠀⇛
The participants urged respect for international
laws and human rights, and called to abandon
policies of use of violence, blockades, and theft
of natural resources.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ 2_Senators_Propose_Bipartisan_Framework
for_A.I._Laws⠀⇛
The effort by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh
Hawley is the latest move by lawmakers to catch up
with the rapidly evolving technology.
# ⚓ Mint Press News ☛ Transparency_International’s_Covert
Agenda:_A_Pawn_in_Western_Intelligence’s_Game⠀⇛
Founded by World Bank apparatchiks in 1993,
Transparency International has relentlessly exposed
public sector corruption in the Global South while
leaving government-enabled criminality in rich
nations unexamined.
o § Censorship/Free Speech⠀➾
# ⚓ ACLU ☛ What_the_Fight_Against_Classroom_Censorship_is
Really_About⠀⇛
The ACLU is leading the fight to end classroom
censorship and protect our right to learn. We filed
the first case in the country to challenge a law
that censored instruction about systemic sexism and
racism in Oklahoma, survived a motion to dismiss in
New_Hampshire, and obtained an injunction to block
the State of Florida from enforcing the higher
education provisions of the Stop_W.O.K.E._Act.
o § Civil Rights/Policing⠀➾
# ⚓ RFA ☛ Political_prisoner_stages_hunger_strike_to_protect
Vietnam’s_constitution⠀⇛
Le Trong Hung says corrupt officials have gone
unpunished.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Spain’s_Female_Soccer_Players_Strike_Over
Wage_Dispute⠀⇛
The season was scheduled to begin on Friday, but
the players refused to play after talks with the
league brought no agreement. The dispute comes amid
a debate over sexism and soccer in Spain.
o § Internet Policy/Net Neutrality⠀➾
# ⚓ Chris ☛ Response_Time_Is_the_System_Talking⠀⇛
# ⚓ Zimbabwe ☛ NetOne_is_the_biggest_loser_of_subscribers_and
Telecel_loses_56.5%_of_its_mobile_internet_traffic⠀⇛
Mobile subscriptions as a whole dropped in Q2, a
trend that has been consistent since Q3 2022. This
time around NetOne lost the largest chunk of
subscribers at 5.2% (193,126 subscribers). An
interesting stat is the number of subscribers
NetOne lost in Q2 of 2023 is equivalent to 63% of
Telecel’s subscribers (307,534).
o § Monopolies⠀➾
# § Patents⠀➾
# ⚓ Unified Patents ☛ GW_Law_to_host_PTAB_Roundtable
Discussion,_September_28⠀⇛
GW Law is pleased to invite you to our in-
person annual PTAB roundtable. Please join us
on Thursday, September 28, 2023, for a
dynamic discussion on recent PTAB and IPR
developments. Join patent leaders for a half-
day program discussing the post-grant
practice at the PTAB, recent developments,
proposed rules and legislation, trends,
policy considerations, and more. A casual
lunch will be provided before the program and
a reception will follow afterwards. The event
is complimentary.
# ⚓ Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ The_Federal_Circuit’s_New
Reluctance_to_Limit_Claims⠀⇛
Federal Circuit’s decision in Dali Wireless
parallels the issues that I recently
discussed in an analysis of the court’s
September 1 decision in Sisvel International
v. Sierra Wireless. Both cases grapple with
claim construction and the tension between
construing claims broadly versus importing
limitations from the specification.
In Sisvel, the Federal Circuit affirmed the
PTAB’s broad construction of “connection
rejection message” over the mobile-network
patentee’s arguments that the term should be
limited to GSM/UMTS networks. Although the
disclosed embodiments all focused on GSM/UMTS
networks, the claims were drafted broadly
without a clear disclaimer or redefinition.
# § Copyrights⠀➾
# ⚓ Digital Music News ☛ Spotify_Keeps_Snubbing_Oliver
Anthony_Music_—_But_This_Success_Story_Is_Being_Driven
By_Users,_Not_Playlist_Editors⠀⇛
Oliver Anthony’s music continues to move up
on the streaming charts—no thanks to
Spotify’s most popular country playlists.
Just last week, Digital Music News wrote a
piece highlighting how the upstart singer has
been slow to gain traction with both radio
airplay and streaming music playlists.
# ⚓ Public Domain Review ☛ The_Works_of_Mars_(1671)⠀⇛
Manesson’s book encompasses theories of
fortifications from their origins in designs
developed in the sixteenth century by
Michelangelo.
* § Gemini* and Gopher⠀➾
o § Politics and World Events⠀➾
# ⚓ How_to_increase_Bible_engagement⠀⇛
As someone who spent my adolescent and young adult
years in some form of Evangelical Protestantism
(Christian Reformed to JW to Independent
Fundamental Baptist to Charismatic/Pentecostal),
and as someone who majored in biblical studies as
an undergrad for a couple of years, I thought I
knew the Bible from the cover to cover. So it was
quite a shock for me earlier this year to find out
how little I knew about it, while I was taking
Bible survey classes at CLI.
According to the American Bible Society’s “State of
the Bible” survey in 2022, there was an
“unprecedented drop” in Bible engagement during the
early part of last year. This is when the survey’s
definition of Bible engagement is “reading the
Bible outside church settings at least three or
four times a year.” Even under this shallow bar,
the engagement dropped by 11 percent between 2021
and 2022.
o § Technology and Free Software⠀➾
# ⚓ The_Middle⠀⇛
I enjoy playing video games, but I don’t consider
myself a “gamer” in any substantive fashion. I
mostly play the same set of old games from my
childhood, and when I do buy new consoles, I often
make the purchase years after the consoles were
first released–sometimes even waiting until the
next generation to save some money. I also very
rarely buy games on release. My wife, on the other
hand, often pre-orders games, and sometimes she has
to twist my arm to get me to play games with her.
[...]
This behavior contrasts with people who play video
games casually: those who try out a game at a
friend’s house, or maybe get introduced to a game
via a coworker, a Facebook friend, or even their
children. They may play video games or only half an
hour or an hour at a time, and if they find they
don’t like it, they’ll likely never touch the
console again, let alone that particular game. Even
if they find that they like it, they may only play
socially, or when they have some empty time between
other hobbies or interests. Such people rarely play
games for more than a dozen or so hours a year.
# ⚓ stream_3⠀⇛
my phone is in black and white. it goes into sleep
mode when the time comes. the time comes always at
8 30 pm now. the baby is here because she makes me
wake up early so I go to bed earlier so my phone is
black and white and gray. it is mostly gray. the
gray takes and takes and takes and sucks and it
sucks. songs that suck suck. songs that suck rock
suck rocks
go into the day with another life behind you. the
only way to live is to remember. the only thing you
can do is live. so you must remember.
=> =============================================================================
World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 5179
╒═══════════════════ 𝐃𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 ═════════════════════════════════════════════╕
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Gemini_Links_08/09/2023:_Apple_Stuff_and_Migrating_to_Neovim⠀✐
Posted in News_Roundup at 3:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇GNOME bluefish⦈
§ Contents⠀➾
* Gemini*_and_Gopher
o Personal/Opinions
o Technology_and_Free_Software
# Programming
* § Gemini* and Gopher⠀➾
o § Personal/Opinions⠀➾
# ⚓ Good_evening⠀⇛
Hello. I’ve come across this place while walking
through Nightfall City several times, but only last
month did I decide to enter. I got my pass this
week.
# ⚓ A_rice_portion_size_is_eighty_grams⠀⇛
Because i always forget how much to weigh out.
Different resources of course say different
amounts, but it tends to be in the range of
seventy-five grams to a hundred grams. I’m choosing
eighty grams because that’s the same as what one
portion of five a day is measured as, so it’s easy
to remember.
# ⚓ Eating_cheap_and_healthy⠀⇛
My approximate current shopping list for eating
pretty well as pretty cheaply. It could be cheaper
in some places but i have chosen some things for
taste as well.
o § Technology and Free Software⠀➾
# ⚓ The_worst_things_about_iPad_OS⠀⇛
In September 2021, after 22 years using only FOSS
except for driver firmware and video games, I got
an iPad. Here are the three worst things about its
OS. (The sustainability issue of the difficult-to-
repair hardware is a topic for another day.)
# ⚓ iMac_G5_WiFi⠀⇛
In the past I tried several times to get the
AirPort cart for my iMac G5 (1st generation machine
with 17″ screen). I was never successful – every
time I bought one on-line (no matter where) the
seller always wrote to me that the offered product
no longer works. So I gave up.
# ⚓ Macintosh_Classic_II_Repair_—_Part_2⠀⇛
the keyboard & mouse arrived first, followed by the
Wombat, with the capacitors dilly dallying until
Wednesday (the 6th). I was surprised they bothered
shipping the Wombat over labor day weekend, but
they did so it arrived in typical USPS punctual
fashion. Turns out that UPS, that Mouser uses to
ship, don’t work over labor day “to clarify, I’m
not upset about that” so it didn’t get sorted or go
out for delivery until Wednesday. Luckily I had all
afternoon free and they arrived early-ish, so I had
plenty of time to work before needing to drop
everything for while—time which it unexpectedly
turned out I needed.
# ⚓ Migrating_to_Neovim⠀⇛
I remember my first time using vi, using sudoedit
because I was blindly following a guide online for
who knows what. I remember struggling to figure out
which mode I was in, though exiting never was as
hard as the memes made it out to be. I started
using it more and more, I never much cared for nano
and so once I knew vim worked basically like a
regular text editor when in insert mode, I used it,
if I was already in the terminal. With my use of
tiling window managers the hjkl keys got to be
fairly familiar and so more and more often in my
journey using Linux I jumped to vim when I needed a
text editor.
For the first 4 or so years of using it, I ran on
the stock config, I didn’t even have a separate
.vimrc. Then a couple years ago I got sick of
needing to go back and replace tabs with spaces in
python and so I made a .vimrc consisting of a few
lines, enabling relative numbers and fixing the
aforementioned tabbing issues. When I first heard
of neovim I checked it out, but realized it was
really not all that different from regular vim, so
I had no reason to jump ship, and anyway nobody
likes a splitter. With the recent passing of Bram
Moolenaar, it pushed me to consider neovim again
due to him being the largest contributor to vim. I
can’t imagine there will be many more major updates
to the original project, though his name will live
on in our hearts.
# ⚓ Rogue_Mapgen⠀⇛
The map generation in rogue (1980) is primitive by
today’s standards, though if you run Moore’s Law in
reverse for a few decades you may see why. Nor was
there much in the way of prior games to borrow
from. Even with the simple map generation there are
emergent features, notably where passages
(represented by the “#” in the screenshots below)
cross or loop back on themselves.
# ⚓ Magic’s_sieges_are_weird⠀⇛
Magic introduced a new card subtype, “siege”, on a
card type that itself was also new, “battle”. You
can attack battles and try to defeat them. Sieges
are special in that you play them on the opponent’s
side of the table so you’re attacking your own
sieges.
# § Programming⠀➾
# ⚓ Little_languages⠀⇛
=> =============================================================================
World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 5355
╒═══════════════════ 𝐃𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 ═════════════════════════════════════════════╕
⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 09.08.23⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧
Gemini_version_available_♊︎
✐ Leftover_Links_08/09/2023:_Security_and_War_on_Encryption⠀✐
Posted in News_Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇GNOME bluefish⦈
§ Contents⠀➾
* Leftovers
o Science
o Hardware
o Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
o Proprietary/Artificial_Intelligence_(AI)
o Security
# Privacy/Surveillance
o Defence/Aggression
o Environment
# Energy/Transportation
# Overpopulation
o AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
o Censorship/Free_Speech
o Freedom_of_Information_/_Freedom_of_the_Press
o Civil_Rights/Policing
o Internet_Policy/Net_Neutrality
o Monopolies
# Trademarks
# Copyrights
* Gemini*_and_Gopher
o Personal/Opinions
o Technology_and_Free_Software
# Internet/Gemini
* § Leftovers⠀➾
o ⚓ The History of the Web ☛ Remembering_Molly,_one_of_the_greats⠀⇛
So thank you Molly. For pushing for web standards and the
open web and a better web. For writing your books and
sharing what you know. For facing off against anybody who
needed a push (even when that person was Bill Gates). For
being the loudest in the room when no one was listening
to what everyday people needed.
o § Science⠀➾
# ⚓ Gizmodo ☛ Norwegian_Man_With_Metal_Detector_Hit_the
Frickin’_Jackpot⠀⇛
Associate Professor Håkon Reiersen with the
University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology,
which received the gold, described the gold
pendants as bracteates which are thin, flat,
single-sided gold medals, saying in the press
release that the gold pearls and pendants were part
of “a very showy necklace.” The necklace, he said,
was worn by powerful individuals in society, adding
that “in Norway, no similar discovery has been made
since the 19th century, and it is also a very
unusual discovery in a Scandinavian context.”
o § Hardware⠀➾
# ⚓ Ruben Schade ☛ What_colour_is_the_Commodore_64?⠀⇛
This post is dedicated to the lovely Paul Traylor,
whom I amuse when I dive into retrocomputing topics
:).
This discovery has shaken me up in ways I didn’t
expect. While we all remember what colour the Apple
II+ was, and the IBM 5150, and the Atari ST, I’m
not not sure all C64 fans do… myself included.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The
legendary machine came in so many permutations over
its long production run, and even machines within
the same generation had cosmetic and technical
differences. It was Commodore’s way!
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ Share_Your_Feelings_Like_A_Spy⠀⇛
While hackers can deftly navigate their way through
circuit diagrams or technical documentation, for
many of us, simple social interactions can be
challenge. [Simone Giertz] decided to help us all
out here by making a device to help us share our
feelings.
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ [Thomas_Sanladerer]’s_YouTube_Channel_Goes_In
The_Toilet⠀⇛
We like [Thomas Sanladerer], so when we say his
channel has gone in the toilet, we mean that quite
literally. He had a broken toilet and wanted to
compare options for effecting a 3D printed repair.
The mechanism is a wall-mounted flush mechanism
with a small broken plastic part. Luckily, he had
another identical unit that provided a part that
wasn’t broken.
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ Transistor_Radio_Repair,_More_Complex_Than_It
Seems⠀⇛
The humble transistor radio is one of those
consumer devices that stubbornly refuses to go
away, but it’s fair to say that it’s not the mover
and shaker in the world of electronics it might
once have been. Thus it’s also not a staple of the
repair bench anymore, where fixing a pocket radio
might have been all in a day’s work decades ago now
they’re a rare sight. [David Tipton] has a Philips
radio from we’re guessing the later half of the
1960s which didn’t work, and we’re along for the
ride as he takes us through its repair.
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ 2023_Cyberdeck_Challenge:_The_Best_Decks_On_The
Net⠀⇛
It was an easy decision to run a Cyberdeck
Challenge in 2023 — after all, it was far and away
one of our most popular contests from last year.
But what was much harder was sorting out the
incredible array of bespoke computers that readers
have been sending in for the last few months.
o § Health/Nutrition/Agriculture⠀➾
# ⚓ Truthdig ☛ Fossil_Fuels_Make_Every_Breath_People_Take_in
Asia_Deadly⠀⇛
New data last week from University of Chicago
researchers showed that across South Asia, air
pollution—mostly from burning fossil fuels—is
robbing people of five years of life on average.
Five years! If you live in Delhi, the most polluted
big city on the planet, that number is an
unimaginable 11.9 years. If you would have lived to
70, you died at 58. Thank about that. Across the
region, “particulate pollution levels are currently
more than 50% higher than at the start of the
century and now overshadow” other health risks.
Every breath that people take is killing them,
every hour of every day.
# ⚓ Science Alert ☛ The_Secret_to_Avoiding_The_Next_Pandemic
Might_Be_Found_in_Bat_Biology⠀⇛
A lesson in tolerance.
# ⚓ WhichUK ☛ Covid_and_flu_vaccines_2023:_can_you_get_free
jabs? [Ed: Mixing a vaccine that works with experimental but
heavily patented junk]⠀⇛
NHS autumn vaccinations moved forward due to rise
of new Covid variant. Here’s who’s eligible
# ⚓ MIT Technology Review ☛ What_to_know_about_this_autumn’s
covid_vaccines [Ed: Better than placebo? By how much?]⠀⇛
# ⚓ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Top_Hong_Kong_court_says_it_refused
to_hear_democrats’_appeal_since_Covid_rules_no_longer_issue
of_‘general_importance’⠀⇛
Hong Kong’s top court said it refused to allow four
democrats to launch a final appeal against
convictions for breaching social distancing
regulations during a Labour Day protest three years
ago, because the now-scrapped Covid curbs were no
longer an issue “of any general importance.”
# ⚓ Latvia ☛ Slight_upturn_in_Covid_illness_in_Latvia_as_autumn
approaches⠀⇛
The Covid-19 virus was never gone and there is a
slight increase in the number of cases at the
moment, Jurijs Perevoščikovs, director of the
Department of Risk Analysis and Prevention at the
Disease Prevention and Control Center (SPKC), told
the agency LETA on September 8.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ His_World_Shrank_in_the_Pandemic._So_He
Shrank_His_World.⠀⇛
Danny Cortes was at a low — divorced, unemployed,
on parole — when Covid hit. Then a craft hobby to
stay sane during lockdown blew up on social media —
and in auction houses.
# ⚓ Interesting Engineering ☛ Cruise_AVs_allegedly_disrupt
medical_care_in_San_Francisco⠀⇛
Cruise and Waymo currently have a combined fleet of
500 autonomous vehicles in the San Francisco area.
The firms plan to expand significantly to cater to
the growing demand for such services after the CPUC
approval. Currently, Cruise services are restricted
to 35 miles per hour (56 kph) and not allowed to
operate when the weather conditions are not ideal,
while Waymo can operate up to speeds of 65 miles
per hour (104 kph).
# ⚓ Digital First Media ☛ Why_planes_are_extremely_gross_right
now⠀⇛
But even though it’s not new or impacting the
majority of flights, Nelson does believe we’re
seeing more cases of gross. She credits the uptick
to more people flying, as travel volume this summer
exceeded 2019 levels.
Nelson also believes the pandemic kept more sick
people at home, and that sick people may be more
inclined to travel these days.
It doesn’t help that airlines have struggled with
cleanliness with labor shortages and pandemic-
cleaning procedures dropping. “Planes are not
getting any kind of deep clean in the day unless
there is a specific action to pull the plane out of
service — and we frankly rarely see that.”
# ⚓ Raspberry Pi ☛ Track_your_run_to_the_Moon_with_a_Raspberry
Pi-powered_ladder⠀⇛
Maker Lorraine wanted to motivate her family to up
that step count, so she set them the goal of
running the distance to the Moon. Totally do-able.
She created a Raspberry Pi Pico W-powered
motivational tool to let them see their progress
and drag them through those last tough hundred
thousand miles.
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ Yet_Another_Study_Debunks_The_‘YouTube’s
Algorithm_Drives_People_To_Extremism’_Argument⠀⇛
A few weeks ago, we had director Alex Winter on the
podcast to talk about his latest documentary, The
YouTube Effect. In that film he spoke with a young
man who talked about getting “radicalized” on
YouTube and going down the “alt-right rabbit hole.”
One thing that Alex talked about in the podcast,
but was not in the documentary, was that, at one
point, he asked the guy to go to YouTube and see if
it would take him down that path again, and he
couldn’t even get it to recommend sketchy videos no
matter how hard he tried.
# ⚓ DeSmog ☛ Toxins_from_Marathon_Refinery_Fire_Leaked_15_Hours
Before_Evacuation_Called⠀⇛
When St. John the Baptist Parish residents woke up
on Friday, August 25, they saw a plume of black
smoke above the Marathon Petroleum refinery between
Reserve and Garyville, Louisiana. Marathon told
residents and parish officials that the fire
started that morning around two tanks storing
naphtha — a type of partially refined petroleum
used as an ingredient in gasoline.
But the naphtha leak actually began at 6:50 p.m.
Thursday, August 24, 15 hours before residents in
the area were evacuated, according to a report to
the National Response Center, the federal point of
contact for reporting all oil and chemical spills.
The Louisiana State Police were notified about half
an hour later.
o § Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)⠀➾
# ⚓ India Times ☛ X_officially_changes_tweets_as_posts_in
upcoming_term_of_service⠀⇛
Elon Musk-run X has formerly renamed tweets as
“post” and retweets as “reposts” in its new term of
service that will go into effect on September 29.
# ⚓ Citizen Lab ☛ NSO_Group_iPhone_Zero-Click,_Zero-Day_Exploit
Captured_in_the_Wild⠀⇛
The exploit involved PassKit attachments containing
malicious images sent from an attacker iMessage
account to the victim.
We expect to publish a more detailed discussion of
the exploit chain in the future.
# ⚓ Vox ☛ What_if_AI_treats_humans_the_way_we_treat_animals?⠀⇛
The obvious problem with this, though, is that
humans aren’t special in this way. Non-human
animals share many of our capacities for
intelligence and perception, yet we’ve refused to
extend the generosity we might expect from AI. We
rationalize unmitigated cruelty toward animals —
caging, commodifying, mutilating, and killing them
to suit our whims — on the basis of our purportedly
superior intellect. “If there were gods, they would
surely be laughing their heads off at the
inconsistency of our logic,” O’Gieblyn continues.
“We spent centuries denying consciousness in
animals precisely because [we thought] they lacked
reason or higher thought.”
Why should we hope that AI, particularly if it’s
built on our own values, treats us any differently?
We might struggle to justify to a future artificial
“superintelligence,” if such a thing could ever
exist, why we’re deserving of mercy when we’ve
failed spectacularly at offering our fellow animals
the same. And, worse still, the dehumanizing
philosophy of AI’s prophets is among the worst
possible starting points to defend the value of our
fleshy, living selves.
# ⚓ CoryDoctorow ☛ How_plausible_sentence_generators_are
changing_the_bullshit_wars⠀⇛
In my latest Locus Magazine column, “Plausible
Sentence Generators,” I describe how I unwittingly
came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI
chatbot – and what this means for a specialized,
highly salient form of writing, namely, “bullshit”:
[...]
# ⚓ Jon Udell ☛ How_LLMs_teach_you_things_you_didn’t_know_you
didn’t_know⠀⇛
As I mentioned on Mastodon, I know we are in a hype
cycle, and I’m trying to report these findings in a
quiet and matter-of-fact way. But when Greg Lloyd
played this quote back to me, I got excited all
over again.
” This is the kind of tacit knowledge transfer that
can happen when you work with another person, you
don’t explicitly ask a question, and your partner
doesn’t explicitly answer it. The knowledge just
surfaces organically, and transfers by osmosis. “
# ⚓ [Repeat] Scoop News Group ☛ Researchers_identify_high-grade
phishing_kits_attacking_nearly_60,000_Microsoft_365
accounts⠀⇛
The previously undocumented group that Group-IB
identified as “W3LL” has been active since 2017 and
has “created their own private ecosystem of highly
effective phishing tools for compromising corporate
email accounts,” the researchers said in a
sprawling report.
It appears that [crackers] successfully compromised
roughly 8,000 of the corporate Microsoft email
accounts using the phishing kits, the researchers
found. Group-IB notified all relevant law
enforcement agencies of its findings, the company
said.
o § Security⠀➾
# ⚓ Security Week ☛ Wealthy_Russian_With_Kremlin_Ties_Gets_9
Years_in_Prison_for_Hacking_and_Insider_Trading_Scheme⠀⇛
Vladislav Klyushin was sentenced to nine years in
prison for his role in a nearly $100M stock market
cheating scheme that relied on information stolen
by hacking.
# ⚓ Scoop News Group ☛ US,_UK_take_action_against_members_of
the_Russian-linked_Trickbot_hacker_syndicate⠀⇛
The DOJ also unsealed indictments against some of
the sanctioned individuals for alleged roles in
ransomware and other cybercrime activity.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ U.S.,_U.K._Impose_New_Sanctions_Against_Russian
Hacking_Group⠀⇛
The United States and Britain have expanded
sanctions on members of a Russian hacking gang
known as Trickbot, targeting people involved in
management and procurement for the group.
# ⚓ Vice Media Group ☛ Who_Pulled_Off_a_$41M_Online_Casino
Heist?_North_Korea,_FBI_Says⠀⇛
North Korea’s state-sponsored hackers have executed
another major online theft as Kim Jong-un is
expected to discuss supplying weapons to Russia.
# § Privacy/Surveillance⠀➾
# ⚓ OpenRightsGroup ☛ Omnishambles_over_encrypted
messages_continues⠀⇛
At the eleventh hour of the Online Safety
Bill’s passage through Parliament, the
Government has found itself claiming to have
both conceded that it won’t do anything
stupid and that it may well press ahead if it
wants to.
# ⚓ teleSUR ☛ Norway:_Oslo_Court_Upholds_Data_Regulator’s
Fine_on_Meta⠀⇛
On Wednesday, the Oslo District Court sided
with Datatilsynet, the country’s data
protection authority, affirming the legality
of a daily fine imposed on Meta Platforms for
invasive behavior-based marketing on Facebook
and Instagram.
The court fully endorsed Datatilsynet’s
action, dismissing Meta’s plea for a
temporary injunction to halt the fine and
stating that there was no cause to undermine
the regulator’s judgment.
# ⚓ The Register UK ☛ UK_drops_‘spy_clause’_for_scanning
encrypted_chat,_admits_it’s_not_‘feasible’⠀⇛
The statements have been widely interpreted
as a victory for technology firms, many of
which had threatened to exit the UK over the
requirement that it must be possible for even
strongly end-to-end encrypted messages to be
scanned for illegal content.
However, it could also be argued that the
changes only represent the bare minimum
needed to get the bill across the line. The
controversial clauses remain largely in
place, with the buck passed to future
administrations, or to when reading the
messages becomes “technically feasible.”
# ⚓ Interesting Engineering ☛ Your_car_may_be_listening,
watching_and_collecting_your_data⠀⇛
The organization reviewed 25 car brands and
their data collection policies and found that
all of these brands are collecting more
personal information about whoever sits in
the car than is required. Moreover, 84
percent of these brands say they can share
your personal data with service providers,
data brokers, and other businesses. But
shockingly, 19 of these brands (76 percent)
say they can also sell your personal data.
# ⚓ JURIST ☛ Norway_court_upholds_ban_on_Meta_Platforms’
behavioral_marketing⠀⇛
The case revolves around a request for a
provisional injunction against Datatilsynet’s
directive to prohibit Meta Ireland and
Facebook Norway from processing personal data
for behavioral marketing based on GDPR Art. 6
(1)(b) and (f) in connection with their
services Facebook and Instagram. Behavioral
marketing is ads and marketing targeted to an
audience based on actions taken on a website,
rather than demographic information.
# ⚓ Patrick Breyer ☛ Breyer’s_lawsuit_forces_EU_to
publish_secret_AI_surveillance_research⠀⇛
The European Court of Justice today issued
important clarifications on the transparency
of EU-funded development of surveillance
technology in response to a transparency
lawsuit by MEP Dr Patrick Breyer (Pirate
Party) (Case T-158/19). Under the iBorderCtrl
project, the EU had tested the use of
controversial AI-based “video lie detector”
technology on travelers. Breyer’s lawsuit had
already forced the EU in the first instance
to release a large number of documents about
the project in full or partially redacted,
which Breyer published today on his homepage.
# ⚓ 404 Media ☛ The_Secret_Weapon_Hackers_Can_Use_to_Dox
Nearly_Anyone_in_America_for_$15⠀⇛
On the messaging app Telegram, I entered a
tiny amount of information about my target
into the dark blue text box—their name and
the state I believed they lived in—and
pressed enter. A short while later, the bot
spat out a file containing every address that
person had ever lived at in the U.S., all the
way back to their college dorm more than a
decade earlier. The file included the names
and birth years of their relatives. It listed
the target’s mobile phone numbers and
provider, as well as personal email
addresses. Finally, the file contained
information from their drivers’ license,
including its unique identification number.
All of that data cost $15 in Bitcoin. The bot
sometimes offers the Social Security number
too for $20.
This is the result of a secret weapon
criminals are selling access to online that
appears to tap into an especially powerful
set of data: the target’s credit header. This
is personal information that the credit
bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion
have on most adults in America via their
credit cards. Through a complex web of
agreements and purchases, that data trickles
down from the credit bureaus to other
companies who offer it to debt collectors,
insurance companies, and law enforcement.
# ⚓ Bruce Schneier ☛ The_Hacker_Tool_to_Get_Personal_Data
from_Credit_Bureaus⠀⇛
The new site 404 Media has a good_article on
how hackers are cheaply getting personal
information from credit bureaus:
This is the result of a secret
weapon criminals are selling access
to online that appears to tap into
an especially powerful set of data:
the target’s credit header. This is
personal information that the
credit bureaus Experian, Equifax,
and TransUnion have on most adults
in America via their credit cards.
Through a complex web of agreements
and purchases, that data trickles
down from the credit bureaus to
other companies who offer it to
debt collectors, insurance
companies, and law enforcement…
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ As_EU_Commission_Moves_Forward_With_‘Chat
Control’_Proposal,_EU_Nations_Continue_To_Push_Back⠀⇛
Do not go gentle into that mass surveillance
night, as the phrase goes. The EU Commission
is sure something needs to be done about the
sharing of child sexual abuse material
(CSAM). And it’s not wrong! Things need to be
done.
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ Mozilla:_Modern_Cars_Are_A_Privacy
Shitshow⠀⇛
Mozilla’s latest *Privacy Not Included report
isn’t subtle when it comes to calling out the
shortcomings of modern, internet-connected
vehicles:
o § Defence/Aggression⠀➾
# ⚓ International Business Times ☛ Man_who_took_selfies_while
bringing_migrants_to_the_UK_jailed⠀⇛
A man who had his phone seized after driving a
small boat that carried 50 migrants to the UK has
been jailed under the Adapted Illegal Migration
Act.
[...]
“Putting lives at risk by steering men, women and
children across the Channel in flimsy dinghies will
not be tolerated and we will continue to work
relentlessly to stop these completely unnecessary
crossings and ensure those responsible are put
behind bars,” noted Immigration Minister Robert
Jenrick.
# ⚓ NPR ☛ After_grand_jurors_were_doxed,_Georgia_prosecutors
want_Trump_trial_jurors_shielded⠀⇛
In an attached affidavit, Atlanta Police Chief
Darin Schierbaum wrote that the grand jurors were
subject to harassment and threats after their home
addresses, phone numbers and vehicle information
were posted on a website operated by a Russian
company.
# ⚓ WABE Radio ☛ Why_Georgia_grand_jurors’_names_are_made
public_and_what_else_to_know_as_Trump_investigation_comes_to
a_head⠀⇛
Wait, what’s the difference between a grand jury
and a special grand jury?
Last year, Willis asked the Fulton County Superior
Court to empanel a special grand jury to
investigate attempts to interfere with the 2020
election result. The special grand jury is an
investigative tool where the jurors look into one
case for up to a year.
The special grand jury heard from 75 witnesses,
some under subpoena, over eight months and compiled
a final report. The special grand jury recommended
multiple indictments.
# ⚓ JURIST ☛ Colorado_voters_sue_to_remove_Trump_from_state
ballot_over_insurrection_allegations⠀⇛
The 100-page complaint alleges that the former
president led a “broad-based effort to pressure,
coerce, and intimidate state and local officials to
unlawfully overturn the 2020 election results.” In
support of this claim, the complaint details the
events of January 6, 2021, saying Trump called more
than 10,000 protesters to Washington D.C. to “stop
the steal” of the 2020 presidential election.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Islamists_Kill_Dozens_of_Civilians_and
Soldiers_in_Two_Attacks_in_Mali⠀⇛
Islamist militants staged separate attacks on a
passenger ferry and a military camp in northern
Mali on Thursday, the government said, killing
dozens of civilians and soldiers in a region of the
West African nation that is increasingly controlled
by armed groups.
# ⚓ CNN ☛ CNN_Exclusive:_‘How_am_I_in_this_war?’:_New_Musk
biography_offers_fresh_details_about_the_billionaire’s
Ukraine_dilemma⠀⇛
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn
off his company’s Starlink satellite communications
network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt
a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval
fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter
Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric
billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with
explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost
connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,”
Isaacson writes.
# ⚓ Pro Publica ☛ 8_Key_Facts_About_the_Navy’s_Failed_Littoral
Combat_Ship_Program⠀⇛
Here are eight takeaways from ProPublica’s report
on the Navy’s littoral combat ship program, which
has cost taxpayers billions but failed to deliver
on its promise.
1. Navy officials vastly underestimated the costs
to build the ship in estimates provided to
Congress. The original price tag more than doubled.
# ⚓ Democracy Now ☛ Ukrainian_&_Russian_Activists_on_How
Putin’s_War_Emboldens_“Authoritarian_Forces”_Around_the
World⠀⇛
On the same day U.S. Secretary of State Antony
Blinken visited Kyiv to announce $1 billion in new
U.S. aid to Ukraine, 17 Ukrainians were killed in a
Russian missile attack on a Donetsk market. “It’s
very painful for me to see all the streets and
cities that I spent my childhood in to be
completely destroyed by the ongoing war,” says
Hanna Perekhoda, Ukrainian historian from the
Donetsk region on a speaking tour of the U.S.
calling for an end to the war by driving out
Putin’s occupation. “If we let Russian
authoritarians win, it will mean that the
authoritarian forces also in our countries, in the
U.S., for example, will grow stronger.” Perekhoda
is joined on the speaking tour by Russian historian
Ilya Budraitskis, who agrees that this war is about
Putin’s regime maintaining its power. “This
criminal war is not just a war against Ukraine.
It’s a war of the Russian regime against its own
society,” says Budraitskis.
# ⚓ Democracy Now ☛ Democratic_Republic_of_Congo_Faces_“Worst
Hunger_Catastrophe”_as_Mineral_Extraction_Enriches_the_Few⠀⇛
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing a
dramatic deterioration of infrastructure and
displacement of citizens as a result of armed
violence, flooding and the world’s largest hunger
crisis. In recent months, rampant violence of armed
groups has forced more than half a million people
to flee their homes, while the United Nations says
some 3,000 families also lost their homes after
recent intense flooding and mudslides in the
eastern part of the country. Twenty-five million
people are facing starvation as displaced citizens
are unable to access their land to grow their own
food, and the humanitarian response has so far
failed to address the crisis. “The crisis is beyond
belief,” says Secretary General of the Norwegian
Refugee Council Jan Egeland, who just visited the
DRC and reports that the international community
still looks for the country’s resources while
ignoring its plight. “The Congo is not ignored by
those who want to extract the riches of that place.
It’s ignored by the rest of the world who would
want to come to the relief of the children and
families of the Congo.”
# ⚓ Federal News Network ☛ A_man_charged_with_aiding_Michigan
Gov._Whitmer_kidnap_plot_says_the_scheme_didn’t_seem
serious⠀⇛
One of three men accused of assisting a plot to
kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is testifying
in his own defense. Eric Molitor told jurors that
he was scared when he joined a daytime ride to see
Whitmer’s vacation home in northern Michigan in
2020. He says he didn’t initially know it was
Whitmer’s property. Molitor and two other men are
charged with providing material support for
terrorist acts. They’re accused of aiding the
leaders of a kidnapping scheme. Social media posts
and text messages show the group was outraged over
COVID-19 restrictions. Evidence has also revealed
strident anti-government views and calls for a
civil war. Nine men have been convicted.
# ⚓ India Times ☛ SpaceX_refused_govt_request_to_activate
Starlink_to_sink_Russian_fleet:_Elon_Musk⠀⇛
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Friday revealed
that he did not budge to an emergency request from
the government authorities to switch on space
internet service Starlink up to Sevastopol in
Crimea, which is a major port on the Black Sea, to
target Russian ships.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Top_French_Court_Upholds_Abaya_Ban_in
Schools⠀⇛
Until last week, it was up to individual principals
to decide whether the 2004 rules applied. The
government said that the nationwide ban was merely
an update to the existing rules that was needed to
stop a ballooning number of disputes in its secular
school system.
# ⚓ The Register UK ☛ China_reportedly_bans_iPhones_from_more
government_offices⠀⇛
The paper put the bans in the context of
geopolitical tensions, China’s desire for
technological independence, and hinted the ban is
perhaps therefore Beijing’s latest move in the game
of 4D diplomatic chess. The Journal noted that
Apple shares tumbled 3.6 percent on the day of its
story.
# ⚓ Gizmodo ☛ Chinese_Government_Officials_Banned_From_Using
iPhones_at_Work⠀⇛
The country’s shift to ban iPhones comes only one
week before an Apple event where the company will
announce the launch of its next line of iPhones.
The ban also comes after Apple CEO Tim Cook visited
the country in March to meet with China’s Minister
of Commerce, Wang Wentao, where they reportedly
discussed stabilizing Apple’s local industrial and
supply chain.
# ⚓ The Register UK ☛ Bombshell_biography_claim:_Fearing
nuclear_war,_Musk_switched_off_Starlink_to_stymie_Ukraine
attack_on_Russia⠀⇛
An excerpt from the forthcoming tome by Walter
Isaacson, titled Elon Musk and shared with CNN,
revealed that in 2022 Ukraine planned an attack
against Russian naval ships near Crimea. But as
Ukraine’s explosive-laden submarine drones
approached Russia’s warships, they “lost
connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” the
book claimed.
SpaceX CEO Musk was the reason for the lost signal:
he cut off the Starlink connectivity the drones
were relying upon because he feared a “mini-Pearl
Harbor” would take place, according to Isaacson in
his book.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Kyrgyz_Ministry,_TikTok_In_Talks_To_Halt_Move_To
Ban_Social_Media_Network⠀⇛
[...] “We laid out a condition that the age limit
and the adaptation of social network rules to
Kyrgyz legislation should be done. They said that
it is technically difficult. Talks are ongoing,
[...]
# ⚓ Defence Web ☛ The_Sahel_is_the_world’s_terrorism
epicentre⠀⇛
The report, compiled by the Institute for Economics
& Peace (IEP), reveals that the Sahel has witnessed
a steady rise in conflict-related fatalities since
2011, with a pronounced spike from 2017 onwards.
This troubling trend can be attributed to the
emergence and intensification of conflicts in
countries such as Nigeria, Mali, Chad, Niger,
Cameroon, and Burkina Faso. The Sahel has witnessed
22 074 fatalities in 6 408 terror attacks between
2007 and 2022.
# § Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine⠀➾
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russian_missile_strike_on_Kryvyi_Rih_leaves
at_least_one_dead_and_44_injured_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russian_army_commander_responsible_for
Moscow’s_air_defenses_arrested_on_bribery_charges_—
Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russian_authorities_report_first_attempted
drone_attack_in_Volgograd_region_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ ‘Women_don’t_get_a_life_sentence’:_Two
Moscow_theater_artists,_charged_with_‘justifying
terrorism’_for_producing_a_documentary_play,_describe
learning_to_cope_with_the_absurdity_of_Russia’s_justice
system_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Oryol_court_arrests_U.S._citizen_for
allegedly_donating_money_to_Alexey_Navalny’s_Anti-
Corruption_Foundation_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russia’s_public_services_website_launches
portal_called_‘I’m_in_Russia’_for_residents_of_occupied
territories_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Two_drones_hit_Rostov-on-Don,_four_drones
shot_down_in_Bryansk_and_Moscow_regions_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russia’s_FSB_claims_having_uncovered
trafficking_scheme_to_supply_Russian_combat_aircraft
parts_to_Europe_and_Ukraine_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Veteran_reporter_Elena_Milashina_to_travel
to_Grozny_again,_two_months_after_violent_attack_in
Chechnya_left_her_with_multiple_injuries_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ An_experienced_negotiator_and_a_proud
Crimean_Tatar_What_the_appointment_of_Ukraine’s_new
defense_minister_says_about_Kyiv’s_evolving_war
strategy_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Shut_your_mouth,_Dad:_A_man_outside
Khabarovsk_faces_years_in_prison_for_‘discrediting’
Russia’s_army_after_his_son_was_killed_fighting_in
Ukraine_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Latvia ☛ Latvian_businesses_explain_why_they
continued_exports_to_Russia⠀⇛
Latvian Radio’s investigative broadcast
‘Atvērtie Faili’ (‘Open Files’) reported
September 7 on why some Latvian companies are
choosing to continue their exports to Russia
despite that country’s brutal attack on
Ukraine.
# ⚓ Latvia ☛ Latvian_nurse_gets_Ukrainian_state_award⠀⇛
September marks one year since Latvian nurse
Sarmīte Cīrule has been helping the wounded
on the Ukrainian front day and night. She has
received several awards recently, including
the Order of the Ukrainian Ministry of
Defense, after she herself was wounded in an
attack, Latvian Television reported September
7.
# ⚓ Latvia ☛ ‘Nordic-Baltic_8′_Foreign_Ministers
reiterate_support_for_Ukraine⠀⇛
Foreign Ministers of the so-called ‘Nordic-
Baltic Eight’ (NB8) countries (Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Finland,
Denmark and Iceland) have been meeting in
Latvia September 6 and 7.
# ⚓ Latvia ☛ Latvia_helps_with_reconstruction_of
Chernihiv,_Ukraine⠀⇛
On September 7 in Chernihiv, Ukraine the
Ambassador of Latvia to Ukraine, Ilgvars
Kļava, acting on behalf of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, and the Deputy Resident
Representative the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP) in Ukraine, Christophoros
Politis, signed an agreement on the
reconstruction of infrastructure facilities
in the Chernihiv Oblast.
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ Russian_War_Report:_A_new
recruitment_push_for_fighters_from_Russia_to_Hungary⠀⇛
The Russian National Guard and a private
Hungarian foreign legion have launched
campaigns to recruit soldiers to fight in
Ukraine.
# ⚓ France24 ☛ 🔴_Live:_Ukraine_condemns_Russia’s_‘sham’
elections_in_occupied_regions⠀⇛
Ukraine on Friday condemned the “sham”
elections Russia is currently holding in four
occupied Ukrainian territories, and called on
international partners to denounce them and
not recognise the results. Several people
were also killed, and dozens injured, in
multiple Russian air strikes on eastern
Ukrainian towns and villages, Ukrainian
officials said.
# ⚓ France24 ☛ Ukraine_‘gradually_gaining_ground’_in
counteroffensive,_says_NATO_chief_Stoltenberg⠀⇛
Ukrainian forces have been able to break
through Russian defences and are “gradually”
making progress in their counteroffensive
against Moscow’s troops despite “heavy,
difficult fighting”, NATO chief Jens
Stoltenberg said Thursday. Russia earlier on
Thursday described the US decision to supply
depleted uranium anti-tank rounds to Ukraine
to aid its counteroffensive as “a criminal
act”. Read our live blog to see how all the
day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris
time (GMT+2).
# ⚓ Latvia ☛ Saeima_moves_ahead_law_giving_Russians_more
time_for_exams⠀⇛
On Thursday, September 7, the Saeima
supported amendments to the Immigration Law
in the first reading, which provides for the
possibility for Russian citizens living in
Latvia to extend the time period for the
Latvian language exam for the receipt of a
permanent residence permit by two years. This
would apply to those Russian citizens who
have already tried to pass the test.
# ⚓ JURIST ☛ EU_dispatch:_Latvia_immigration_law_may
force_thousands_of_Russian_residents_who_failed
language_exam_to_leave⠀⇛
Oksana Bidnenko is a staff correspondent for
JURIST. She is a Ukrainian law student at the
Riga Graduate School of Law in Riga, Latvia.
On Tuesday, September 5, the situation in
Latvia regarding the new Latvian Immigration
Law took a significant turn.
# ⚓ LRT ☛ Pollution_and_stress_for_refugees:_Fireworks
festival_not_granted_permission_in_Vilnius⠀⇛
The Vilnius City Municipality Administration
has decided not to issue a permit for the
fireworks festival Vilnius Fejerija, citing
air and noise pollution, as well as the
emotional health of Ukrainian refugees.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ EU’s_Michel_Says_Russian_Blockade_Of_Ukraine
Ports_‘Must_Stop’⠀⇛
European Council President Charles Michel
said Russia “must stop” its blockade of
Ukrainian seaports.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ G20_Members_Struggle_For_Consensus_On_Ukraine
As_India_Gears_Up_For_Summit⠀⇛
Leaders of the Group of 20 began arriving in
New Delhi on September 8 for their annual
gathering as negotiators struggled to bridge
differences over the war in Ukraine, seeking
to build consensus for a successful summit.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ NATO:_No_Sign_Drone_Debris_In_Romania_Was
Result_Of_‘Intentional_Attack_By_Russia’⠀⇛
NATO has no information that the drone debris
found on the territory of alliance member
Romania was caused by a deliberate Russian
attack, NATO’s secretary-general has said.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Romania_To_Upgrade_Black_Sea_Port
Infrastructure_To_Bring_In_More_Ukrainian_Grain⠀⇛
Romania’s government will approve on
September 8 a plan to upgrade road
infrastructure in the Black Sea port of
Constanta, part of wider investments in the
port that could help more Ukrainian grain to
transit.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Russia_Forces_Shell_Several_Ukrainian
Regions;_Kyiv_Claims_Successes_Near_Bakhmut⠀⇛
Russian forces launched fresh attacks on
several Ukrainian regions early on September
8, killing at least one person, local
authorities said, as Kyiv claimed “partial
success” near Bakhmut.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Russia’s_Elections_In_Occupied_Ukrainian
Regions_Dismissed_As_‘Sham’⠀⇛
Russian authorities are holding local
elections this weekend in occupied parts of
Ukraine in an effort to tighten their grip on
territories Moscow illegally annexed a year
ago and still does not fully control.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Musk_Says_He_Blocked_Ukraine_Attack_On
Russia’s_Black_Sea_Fleet⠀⇛
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to
turn off his company’s Starlink satellite
communications network to disrupt a Ukrainian
sneak attack last year on the Russian fleet,
according to a new biography of Musk due out
next week.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Ukraine’s_New_Defense_Minister_‘Well-Known
And_Respected’_In_U.S.,_Former_Envoy_Says⠀⇛
Newly appointed Ukrainian Defense Minister
Rustem Umerov is well-known and respected in
the United States, former U.S. special envoy
Kurt Volker said on September 7 in Kyiv.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Ukrainian_Tycoon_Kolomoyskiy_Named_A_Suspect
In_Second_Criminal_Case⠀⇛
Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency is treating
tycoon Ihor Kolomoyskiy as a suspect in a
criminal investigation into the embezzlement
of funds from Privatbank.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Serbian_President’s_Wife_Meets_Zelenskiy
During_Summit_In_Kyiv⠀⇛
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s wife,
Tamara, met with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy on September 7 in Kyiv,
where she was participating in a summit
organized by the Ukrainian first lady Olena
Zelenska.
# ⚓ teleSUR ☛ The_US_Announces_1_Billion_in_New_Aid_for
Ukraine⠀⇛
Washington also provided a US$203-million
funding for support to transparency and
accountability of institutions.
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ G20_members_struggle_for
consensus_on_Ukraine_as_India_gears_up_for_summit⠀⇛
Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies
began arriving in New Delhi on Friday for
their annual gathering as negotiators
struggled to bridge differences over the war
in Ukraine, seeking to build consensus for a
successful summit host India wants.
# ⚓ CS Monitor ☛ Can_Ukraine_avoid_a_‘forever_war’
against_Russia_without_talks?⠀⇛
Ukraine needs battlefield success to give it
dominance in any negotiations with Moscow
that Kyiv’s allies might propose to avoid a
“forever war.”
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Russia-Ukraine_War:_One_Person_Is
Killed_in_Missile_Strike_in_Central_Ukraine,_Officials
Say⠀⇛
A deadly strike in Kryvyi Rih, about 45 miles
from the front lines, is the latest in a city
that has been pummeled repeatedly by Russian
attacks.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Cuba_Arrests_17_People_It_Accuses_of
Recruiting_for_Russia’s_War_in_Ukraine⠀⇛
Cuba’s government says it is taking action
against a “human trafficking network” that
was trying to bring Cuban citizens into the
Russian military.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Rostov-on-Don,_Russia,_Home_to_Key
Military_Base,_Is_Rocked_by_Drone_Strikes⠀⇛
Ukraine never acknowledges strikes on Russian
soil, but the incursions are happening with
increasing frequency.
# ⚓ LRT ☛ Delay_in_processing_Karach’s_Lithuanian_asylum
claim_violated_her_rights,_court_rules⠀⇛
Lithuania’s authorities took too much time to
process Belarusian activist Olga Karach’s
asylum request, thus violating her rights,
the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court
ruled on Wednesday.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Belarus_Condemned_By_U.S.,_EU_For_Depriving
Citizens_Abroad_Of_Fundamental_Right⠀⇛
The United States and European Union have
condemned a decree signed by authoritarian
Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka
prohibiting the renewal of passports by
Belarusians living abroad.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ What_$50_Million_Can_Buy:_Inside_the
Sleek_New_White_House_Situation_Room⠀⇛
The ultrasecure facility, which was last
upgraded in 2006, is returning to use after
officials closed it for a year to modernize
it in an era of high-tech sparring with China
and Russia.
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine’s_partners_cannot_remove
Putin_but_they_can_stop_legitimizing_him⠀⇛
As long as Vladimir Putin is in power, Russia
will remain a rogue state. Western policies
that legitimize him through fear of a
potential post-Putin Russia are perverse,
writes Richard Cashman.
# ⚓ JURIST ☛ European_Court_of_Justice_dismisses_Putin
ally’s_appeal_against_sanctions⠀⇛
The EU’s top court Wednesday refused an
appeal by Russian billionaire and staunch
Putin ally Gennady Timchenko. The oligarch
was placed on the EU sanction list following
the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ At_G20,_Biden_Looks_to_Fill_a_Hole
Left_by_Putin_and_Xi⠀⇛
With the Russian and Chinese leaders absent,
the president hopes to get others to align
with him on a variety of matters, including
Ukraine and curbing Beijing’s assertiveness
in the Indo-Pacific.
o § Environment⠀➾
# ⚓ NPR ☛ Climate_activists_protested_at_Burning_Man._Then_the
climate_itself_crashed_the_party⠀⇛
The second, in a twist of extreme I-told-you-so
irony, was caused by attendees trying to escape the
pop-up city after an unrelenting bout of intense
rainfall that experts say is increasingly typical
in warming climate.
One could argue that the protesters, whose efforts
ahead of the festival were met with ridicule and
ire by their fellow partiers, were right. And
Patrick Donnelly, does.
# ⚓ Science Alert ☛ 40_Years_Ago_The_EPA_Made_a_Grim
Prediction._It_Came_True.⠀⇛
The EPA’s report concluded banning coal and oil was
the most effective way to prevent the oncoming
disasters, which also remains true. If we’d
successfully weaned ourselves off fossil fuels by
the year 2000, warming by 2100 would have halved
from 5 °C to 2.5 °C, they estimated. The report
accurately predicted why this would not be
politically or economically feasible, including
corporate greed and lack of cooperation between
nations.
Despite this missed opportunity it’s still not too
late to reduce future impacts, as every fraction of
a degree will save lives.
# ⚓ NPR ☛ ‘One_player_is_gonna_die’:_Star_sounds_dire_warning
as_the_U.S._Open_heats_up⠀⇛
Who are we talking about? The dozens of athletes
competing in the U.S. Open in New York City, who
are suffering through muggy temps that are cracking
the 90s.
# ⚓ International Business Times ☛ US_Open:_‘A_player_is_going
to_die’_warns_Medvedev⠀⇛
The quarter-final clash between the two Russian
stars was played under a partially closed roof at
the Arthur Ashe Stadium. Both players looked
miserable in the stifling heat, and Medvedev
admitted that at one point his vision was so
blurred that he could hardly see the ball.
Meanwhile, he also noticed that Rublev was already
struggling to run and return his shots.
Even though Medvedev won in straight sets, the
match still stretched over a span of two hours and
48 minutes. After the match, Medvedev said that the
only consolation he felt was that at least both
players have to endure the same conditions.
# ⚓ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 60%_of_Hong_Kong_outdoor_workers
suffer_heatstroke_symptoms_despite_new_warning_system,_survey
finds⠀⇛
A non-mandatory three-tier warning system designed
to help protect Hong Kong workers from heatstroke
went into effect on May 15. The system consists of
amber, red and black warnings, indicating three
levels of heat stress, and suggests different rest
arrangements for people working outdoors or in
indoor environments without air conditioning.
However, employers have no obligation to offer the
recommended rest periods as the guidelines are not
legally binding.
# ⚓ The Straits Times ☛ Climate_gridlock_feared_at_G-20
summit⠀⇛
With Russia and China skipping the talks, chances
of the group delivering robust climate pledges are
slim.
# § Energy/Transportation⠀➾
# ⚓ Interesting Engineering ☛ ZF’s_magnet-free_EV_motor
is_more_efficient_and_sustainable⠀⇛
The German firm, which specializes in making
automotive components, has achieved this by
integrating its inductive transmitter into
the rotor itself. The design promises to
offer performance on par with permanent-
magnet synchronous machines (PSMs).
According to ZF, its I2SM’s (In-Rotor
Inductive-Excited Synchronous Motor) magnet-
free design also requires fewer rare earth
elements, increasing supply security and
sustainability.
# ⚓ The Register UK ☛ Texas_cryptomining_outfit_earns
more_from_idling_rigs_than_digging_Bitcoin⠀⇛
Bitcoin mining outfit Riot Platforms earned
$31.7 million from Texas power authorities
last month for curtailing operations – far
more than the value of the Bitcoin it mined
in the same period.
In a press release yesterday, Riot said it
produced 333 Bitcoin at its mining operations
in Rockdale, Texas, which would have been
worth just shy of $9 million on August 31.
All the cash earned from those energy
credits, on the other hand, equates to around
1,136 Bitcoin, Riot CEO Jason Les said in the
company’s monthly update.
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ Triso_Fuel_And_The_Rolls_Royce_Of_Nuclear
Reactors⠀⇛
Bangor University scientists think that the
way to go big with nuclear power is to, in
fact, go small. Their tiny nuclear fuel
pellets called triso fuel are said to be the
size of poppy seeds and are meant to power a
reactor by Rolls Royce the size of a “small
car.” We aren’t sure if that’s a small Rolls
Royce or a small normal car.
# § Overpopulation⠀➾
# ⚓ Bridge Michigan ☛ Chicago_suburbs,_running_out_of
water,_will_tap_Lake_Michigan⠀⇛
For a century Joliet and its Will County
neighbors mined their sandstone aquifer. In
less than a decade the easy water will be
gone for these communities in Chicago’s
southwest suburbs. They can’t drill their way
out; deeper layers of the aquifer are too
salty and shallower units are vulnerable to
contamination from road salts.
Illinois’s third largest city and five
neighboring communities instead are banding
together to secure an alternate source of
supply. Their plan: tap Lake Michigan.
o § AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics⠀➾
# ⚓ Quartz ☛ Former_FTX_[cryptocurrency]_executive_pleads
guilty_to_making_millions_in_illegal_campaign_contributions⠀⇛
Under a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to forfeit
up to $1.55 billion in assets. He could also be
called as a witness to testify at the trial of FTX
founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was arrested last
year in the Bahamas and extradited to the U.S. to
face charges that he committed a host of crimes
while running the popular digital currency trading
platform.
Salame, 30, entered his plea before a judge in
Manhattan, admitting to the court that he illegally
used millions of dollars from a hedge fund
controlled by Bankman-Fried to make political
contributions in 2020 and 2021 to both Democrats
and Republicans.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ Fourth_Top_FTX_Executive_Pleads_Guilty
Ahead_of_Sam_Bankman-Fried_Trial⠀⇛
Mr. Salame said he had made millions in political
contributions at the direction of Mr. Bankman-
Fried. The contributions were labeled loans from
FTX’s sister company, the [cryptocurrency] hedge
fund Alameda Research.
# ⚓ The Nation ☛ Sheeptown⠀⇛
# ⚓ The Nation ☛ The_War_Party_Is_Back⠀⇛
President Joe Biden recently appointed Victoria
Nuland, Dick Cheney’s point person on Iraq, acting
deputy secretary of state, the department’s number-
two official. He named Eliot Abrams, convicted
perjurer and grim apologist for Central American
torturers under Ronald Reagan, to his Advisory
Commission on Public Diplomacy. Bill Kristol,
perfervid lobbyist for the Iraq War, cadged $2
million to pay for TV ads urging Republicans to
stay the course in Ukraine. War may or may not be
the health of the state, but it surely is a tonic
for neoconservative armchair warriors. An adapted
version of this column was posted at the
Responsible Statecraft website.
# ⚓ The Nation ☛ The_Biden_Panic_Stops_Now!⠀⇛
The Summer of Joe Biden Panic is almost behind us.
It was worse than Shark Panic, Wildfire Panic,
Burning Man Panic, and I-can’t-get-TSwift-tickets
panic. I have here in my hand, well, my laptop,
some very good intel, and very good advice. The
fact that many of you will dismiss the one of the
bearers of this good news—Jim Messina, Obama 2012
campaign manager—as a former Barack Obama/Harry
Reid shill is fine. So did I when I read it.1
# ⚓ Common Dreams ☛ Completely_Without_Merit,_Every_Time,_On
Every_Level⠀⇛
If you no longer have the fortitude to follow the
vagaries, felonies and idiocies daily dispatched by
the awful former guy, we have good news: The bad
news keeps coming in his manifold legal battles,
because courts evidently deal in facts, not lies,
feints, boasts or fantastical bunkum. Just this
week, the losingest loser lost against Jean Carroll
and Letitia James, in Georgia and D.C., even
against t-shirts declaring, “TRUMP TOO SMALL,”
which couldn’t have happened to a smaller guy.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ ‘The_Devil_They_Know’:_McConnell’s_Health
Issues_Worry_Democrats⠀⇛
The legislative stances of the G.O.P. leader and
his usual opponents are aligned on Ukraine,
spending and impeachment as he faces mounting
health scrutiny.
# ⚓ France24 ☛ Indonesia’s_leader_calls_for_peaceful_solutions
to_conflicts_at_ASEAN_summit⠀⇛
Indonesia’s president issued a stark warning
Thursday after wrapping up a summit of Southeast
Asian countries that was joined by China, the
United States and Russia, saying “we will be
destroyed” unless conflicts are resolved.
# ⚓ France24 ☛ Macron_says_Russian_flags_‘cannot_be’_at_Paris
Olympic_Games_due_to_war_crimes⠀⇛
French President Emmanuel Macron insisted Wednesday
that “the Russian flag cannot be at the Paris
Olympic Games… at a time when Russia is committing
war crimes”.
# ⚓ New York Times ☛ After_Prigozhin’s_Death,_a_High-Stakes
Scramble_for_His_Empire⠀⇛
A shadowy fight is playing out on three continents
for control of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sprawling
interests as head of the Wagner mercenary group.
The biggest prize: His lucrative operations in
Africa.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Germany_Will_Keep_Russian_Oil_Giant_Rosneft
Subsidiaries_Under_Its_Control⠀⇛
The German government said on September 8 it will
keep two subsidiaries of Russian oil giant Rosneft
under the control of German authorities for another
six months.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Russian_Sentenced_To_Nine_Years_In_Hacking_Scheme
Involving_Securities_Fraud⠀⇛
A wealthy Russian businessman with ties to the
Kremlin was sentenced on September 7 to nine years
in prison for his role in a nearly $100 million
stock-market cheating scheme.
# § Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda⠀➾
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ ‘I_won’t_let_them_turn_into_pawns_for_the
military’_Meduza’s_Russian_readers_on_how_they’re
protecting_their_children_from_pro-war_propaganda_in
schools⠀⇛
The upcoming school year is expected to bring
a surge of propaganda in Russia’s educational
institutions, surpassing any previous period
in modern history. Events, lectures, and
ceremonies in support of the war are set to
be combined with new, state-approved
curricula, including a new “unified” history
textbook for high schoolers that has a
chapter on the invasion of Ukraine. Meduza
reached out to readers in Russia who sent
their kids back to school on September 1 and
asked them to share their strategies for
safeguarding their children against
propaganda. We’re publishing some of the most
interesting responses below.
# ⚓ VOA News ☛ Meeting_Erdogan,_Putin_Lies_(Again)_About
Why_Russia_Quit_the_Black_Sea_Grain_Deal⠀⇛
That is false.
There is no evidence Ukraine has ever
launched strikes from the grain corridor or
used the designated humanitarian sea route
for any military purpose. Russia’s Black Sea
fleet, on the other hand, has systematically
fired cruise missiles at civilian targets in
Ukraine.
The grain corridor charted a very specific
path and cannot be conflated with the entire
Black Sea.
# ⚓ Digital Music News ☛ How_Does_the_YouTube_Shorts
Algorithm_Work?⠀⇛
Recently Todd Sherman took the time to speak
with Creator Insider about the impact of
YouTube Shorts and how the short-form video
feed differs compared to traditional long-
form content on YouTube. Creators may not
realize that a different approach entirely is
needed to effectively engage with an audience
on YouTube Shorts.
o § Censorship/Free Speech⠀➾
# ⚓ RFA ☛ ‘Hurting_the_feelings_of_the_Chinese_people’_could_be
punished_by_jail_time⠀⇛
It’s a stock phrase frequently used by Chinese
officials and state media to criticize speech or
actions by outsiders that Beijing disapproves of.
But now it could be turned against the Chinese
people themselves.
Under a proposed amendment to the Public Security
Administration Law, wearing the wrong T-shirt or
complaining about China online could lead to a fine
of up to 5,000 yuan (US$680) or 15 days in jail.
# ⚓ [Repeat] Tedium ☛ The_Barenaked_Truth⠀⇛
“We’re in a very strange time where everyone holds
the nuclear codes,” Ed Robertson says in the clip,
adding: “I just want to play music and entertain
people and not live in fear of one joke I made 25
years ago bringing our career to a halt.”
And then he talked about it from the perspective of
being an on-stage performer: “It’s a difficult time
to be creative, to try to be funny. And I try to do
that every night we’re on stage, and it feels like
there’s more and more land mines placed around you
every day.”
This is the kind of complaint usually heard from
comedians that make a habit of performing blue—the
Dave Chappelles of the world—not bands that dabble
in clean comedy in their shows. (Page, on the other
hand, has gotten more explicitly political in his
solo work.)
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ ‘I_must_figure_out_the_fate_of_my_cats’_Human
rights_campaigner_Gregory_Winter,_now_on_trial_in_Russia,_has
diabetes_and_doesn’t_expect_to_survive_if_he_goes_to_prison.
He_is_trying_to_find_new_owners_for_the_animals_he_rescued.⠀⇛
In September 2022, Winter became a criminal suspect
once again, this time for a social-media comment
about the Russian army’s atrocities in Ukraine.
After some time in custody, Winter was put under
house arrest. He is certain, however, that this
will only last for a couple of months — until the
next court hearing, to be precise. His lawyers
think his chance of getting a prison sentence very
high.
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russian_authorities_blocked_more_than_885,000
websites_in_first_half_of_2023_—_Meduza⠀⇛
# ⚓ Meduza ☛ Russian_authorities_‘postpone’_two_local_elections
near_Ukrainian_border_—_Meduza⠀⇛
o § Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press⠀➾
# ⚓ BIA Net ☛ Journalists_handed_international_travel_ban_over
report_on_controversial_top_court_appointment⠀⇛
Faruk Eren, the head of legal affairs at the Gerçek
Gündem news portal and the president of the DİSK
Basın-İş Union, and editor Furkan Karabay, were
indicted on charge of “targeting counterterrorism
officials for terrorist organizations” due to the
report in question.
The Ankara 22nd Heavy Penal Court, imposed a travel
ban on the two journalists due to “strong suspicion
of a crime” as per article 109/3 of the Code of
Criminal Procedure.
o § Civil Rights/Policing⠀➾
# ⚓ EFF ☛ EFF_Award_Winner:_Alexandra_Asanova_Elbakyan⠀⇛
All are invited to attend the EFF Awards! Whether
you are an activist, an EFF supporter, a student
interested in cyberlaw or public interest
technology, or someone who wants to eat good food
and drink with other cool individuals, anyone can
have a fun time at the ceremony.
The celebration will begin at 6:30 pm. PT,
Thursday, September 14 at The Regency Lodge, 1290
Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. Register today to
attend the event! We even have discounted tickets
for EFF members and students.
# ⚓ Site36 ☛ Double_surveillance_of_climate_activist_by_German
Federal_Police_was_unlawful,_court_says⠀⇛
Accompanied by a solidarity rally, environmental
and climbing activist Cécile Lecomte won two
lawsuits against the German Federal Police on
Wednesday. Lecomte had challenged two surveillance
measures before the Hanover Administrative Court: a
covert observation lasting several weeks on the
occasion of the transport of nuclear waste to
Biblis in 2020 and a two-year tender for police
surveillance that began the same year. Both
measures were unlawful, the court ruled.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ Rights_Groups_Say_Iranian_Security_Forces_Killed,
Tortured_Protesters_In_Kurdish_City⠀⇛
A joint report by the Iranian rights groups
Kurdistan Human Rights Network and the Human Rights
Campaign, released on September 6 to mark the
upcoming anniversary of the nationwide “Woman,
life, freedom,” protests sparked by Amini’s death
on September 16, showed the families of those
killed, injured, and arrested have been pressured
by the authorities to keep silent over what took
place.
# ⚓ Atlantic Council ☛ The_protests_in_Iran_are_not_a
revolution—yet._These_events_must_occur_first.⠀⇛
The protestors, in contrast, claim to be expressing
the authentic will and voice of the Iranian people,
who are tired of the unfair repression of women,
the intrusive and petty “morality police,” and the
strained, warped economy driven by hostility to the
West, with only the military, clerical leaders, and
their cronies benefiting.
The question is whether a new round of protests
could, this time, prove a real threat to the
regime, leading to a revolution and regime change,
as happened in Tunisia in 2010 and Egypt in 2011.
It’s unlikely, given the asymmetry in organization
and clear leadership between the government and the
protestors. However, events and actions by both
sides could still lead to a revolutionary outcome.
# ⚓ RFERL ☛ U.S.,_U.K._Call_For_Kremlin_Critic’s_Release_As_He
Spends_Second_Birthday_Behind_Bars⠀⇛
The United States and United Kingdom have strongly
condemned the “politically motivated” case against
Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza as he spent a
second birthday in detention after being moved to a
new prison that has not been disclosed.
# ⚓ Off Guardian ☛ Meet_the_New_Normal,_Same_as_the_Old_Normal:
You_Are_Still_the_Enemy_Within⠀⇛
Today, we are witnessing the nudging (manipulation)
of the population to accept a ‘new normal’ based on
a climate emergency narrative, restrictions on
movement and travel, programmable digital money,
‘pandemic preparedness’ courtesy of the World
Health Organization’s tyrannical pandemic treaty,
unaccountable AI and synthetic ‘food’.
o § Internet Policy/Net Neutrality⠀➾
# ⚓ APNIC ☛ Address_policy_formulation_and_its_methods_in
Japan⠀⇛
Many readers of this blog will already be
subscribed to the SIG-policy mailing list on Orbit
or have participated in the APNIC Open Policy
Meeting (APNIC OPM). However, how many are aware
that an organization with similar activities exists
in Japan? This article will explain the origins,
structure, activities, achievements, and challenges
of this organization known as the Japan Open Policy
Forum (JPOPF).
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ After_Years_Of_Stupid_Games,_The_Senate_Finally
Gives_The_Biden_FCC_A_Voting_Majority._Now_What?⠀⇛
You might recall that Biden’s first nominee to the
FCC, Gigi Sohn, found her nomination torn apart
after an industry-funded smear campaign
successfully derailed the nomination. Sohn is an
extremely competent and popular reformer, but a
homophobic lobbying campaign by media and telecom
giants (Comcast, News Corp.) falsely framed Sohn as
a radical extremist, eroding her support in a
corrupt Senate.
o § Monopolies⠀➾
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ The_EU_Designates_The_Six_Companies_You_Already
Expected_As_‘Gatekeepers’_Under_The_Digital_Markets_Act⠀⇛
The two big EU attempts to overly regulate the
internet are starting to go into effect. The
Digital Services Act (DSA), along with all its
associated problems, is about six months ahead of
the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and all of its
associated problems. Six months ago, the EU
designated 17 sites as “Very Large Online
Platforms” under the DSA (though a few of those
sites are protesting the designation, including
Zalando, which is the only company on the list
mainly targeting EU users).
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ Forget_About_Platform_Exclusives;_Here_Comes_The
PC_GPU_Exclusives!⠀⇛
Of all the things in the gaming industry that annoy
me, exclusivity deals have to rank near the very
top. The idea that any title, but in particular
third-party titles, could be exclusive to certain
platforms, such as Xbox or PlayStation, is anathema
to how art and culture distribution is meant to
work. I understand why they’re a thing, I just
think they shouldn’t be. And exclusivity deals tend
to taint many other aspects of the industry. You
need only look at the all of the convoluted fights
Microsoft engaged in with regulators after gobbling
up a bunch of large game studios to see the
vascular reach exclusivity has in the industry.
# § Trademarks⠀➾
# ⚓ Techdirt ☛ UFC_Opposes_Trademark_App_For_Pillow
Fighting_Championship_League_Over_Logo⠀⇛
The Ultimate Fighting Championship people are
certainly no strangers to readers here at
Techdirt. The league that puts on both mixed
martial arts events and, incredibly, events
where participants take turns slapping the
shit out of each other has been one of the
most aggressive pushers of greater and
greater IP enforcement programs in
professional sports. From the desire for
instant takedown enforcement foisted on ISPs
to pushing for reforming the DMCA to “notice
and stay down” practices, the UFC makes no
apologies for wanting as much control and
enforcement of its IP as possible.
# ⚓ TTAB Blog ☛ Recommended_Reading:_The_Trademark
Reporter,_July-August_2023_Issue⠀⇛
The July-August 2023 (Vol. 113 No. 4) issue
of The Trademark Reporter(TMR) has hit the
newsstands. [pdf here]. Willard Knox, Editor-
in-Chief, summarizes the contents as follows
(and below): This issue offers our readers a
comprehensive article examining the impact of
delay in seeking preliminary injunctive
relief in trademark infringement actions in
the United States federal courts, a
commentary by J. Thomas McCarthy inspired by
the fiftieth anniversary of the publication
of his treatise McCarthy on Trademarks and
Unfair Competition, and a review of a book
exploring the both complementary and
conflicting relationship between artificial
intelligence and intellectual property law.
# § Copyrights⠀➾
# ⚓ Torrent Freak ☛ DAZN’s_Early_Piracy_Targets_May
Include_U.S._Govt._Domain_Seizure_Survivors⠀⇛
As sports rightsholders scramble to launch
their new site-blocking system in Italy,
after missing the start of the local football
season, telecoms regulator AGCOM has
announced the successful blocking of 45
pirate sports streaming sites following
requests filed by DAZN. Two of the sites may
be survivors of a U.S. law enforcement domain
seizure campaign carried out last year.
# ⚓ Torrent Freak ☛ Hollywood’s_Latest_Pirate_Site
Blocking_Injunction_Covers_‘Future_Content’⠀⇛
The Delhi High Court in India has approved a
new type of pirate site-blocking order,
requested by Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros,
and other Hollywood studios. The novel
‘Dynamic+ injunction’ requires Internet
providers to block access to ‘hydra-headed’
pirate sites, and covers copyrighted content
that doesn’t yet exist.
# ⚓ Walled Culture ☛ After_publishers,_now_recording
companies_want_to_stop_the_Internet_Archive_from
sharing_culture⠀⇛
The details of the lawsuit hinge on a
slightly obscure aspect of US copyright law.
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick provides a
good explanation of the recording companies’
argument. The key point is that the Great 78
Project is preserving culture that is at risk
of being lost because of the fragile nature
of 78 rpm records. It is not trying to
produce perfect copies for casual listening –
the digital versions include all the pops and
hisses that are typical of old shellac
records. As Brewster Kahle, who set up the
Internet Archive (and whose Kahle/Austin
Foundation supports this blog) is quoted as
saying: [...]
# ⚓ The Register UK ☛ Microsoft_to_shield_paid-up_Copilot
customers_from_any_AI_copyright_brawls_it_starts⠀⇛
Microsoft promised to shield customers, and
pay the costs of damages or settlements from
such lawsuits, but only if plaintiffs “used
the guardrails and content filters we have
built into our products,” and only if they
are using the paid versions of the company’s
tools. Those that are only using the free
version of Bing or GitHub Copilot will not be
protected, for instance.
# ⚓ India Times ☛ Microsoft_to_defend_customers_on_AI
copyright_challenges⠀⇛
Microsoft will assume responsibility for the
potential legal risks arising out of any
claims raised by third parties so long as the
company’s customers use “the guardrails and
content filters” built into its products, the
company said. It offers funcionality meant to
reduce the likelihood that the AI returns
infringing content.
# ⚓ Creative Commons ☛ An_Open_Letter_from_Artists_Using
Generative_AI⠀⇛
Today, we’re publishing an open letter from
over 70 artists who use generative AI. It
grew from conversations with an initial
cohort of the full signatory list, and we
hope it can help foster inclusive, informed
discussions.
# ⚓ Hackaday ☛ Programming_A_Poker_Game_With_GPT_Help
[Ed: Well, programming with plagiarism by Microsoft]⠀⇛
Although ChatGPT generated a huge amount of
hype around replacing white collar workers
completely when it was first released to the
public, the general consensus now is that it
won’t outright replace anyone yet, but rather
people who know how to use it as a tool will
replace those who don’t. Getting started with
it is not too hard, either, but you’ll of
course need a project to work on to
familiarize yourself with the tool. [Volos
Projects] gave himself the challenge of
writing a poker game using ChatGPT not as the
opposing player, but as a co-designer in
order to learn more about it as an assistant.
# ⚓ Digital Music News ☛ Sam_Smith_‘Dancing_With_a
Stranger’_Copyright_Suit_Dismissed_With_Prejudice_After
18_Months⠀⇛
A federal judge has officially dismissed with
prejudice a copyright infringement lawsuit
filed against Sam Smith, Normani, and others
over “Dancing with a Stranger.” Judge Wesley
L. Hsu just recently ordered the copyright
complaint “dismissed on the merits with
prejudice,” after Sam Smith, Normani, and
their legal team took initial steps last
summer…
* § Gemini* and Gopher⠀➾
o § Personal/Opinions⠀➾
# ⚓ 🔤SpellBinding:_ACHWNTM_Wordo:_BORNE⠀⇛
# ⚓ I_shot_the_moon⠀⇛
5:00 AM
Awake in bed
5:05 AM
Let’s get up
5:06 AM
Noticing the clear night sky
5:07 AM
Getting my telescope out!
# ⚓ What_you_cannot_hear⠀⇛
~bartender, a whiskey please. Maybe some Red
Breast?
Today, I called my girlfriend at work, as she was
running late.
Not because she was late for dinner, or because our
daughter was asking about her. We’re goofballs both
of us; distracted, forgetful, always drawn by the
things we love. I knew I’d be cooking and bringing
the baby home, probably beginning the meal without
her. In fact, this is why I usually cook; I can’t
stand the hunger, and neither can our girl.
o § Technology and Free Software⠀➾
# § Internet/Gemini⠀➾
# ⚓ Usenet_had_to_die⠀⇛
Usenet was sorta like Reddit or other
threaded forum sites but decentralized.
The word for “sub”, “forum”, “community” on
Usenet was called a “newsgroup” or just a
“group”.
Each server decided which group it should
carry. News servers were mostly ran by ISPs.
Back then, ISPs would have email service, you
might get a home page on the web, and you’d
get Usenet access via one server.
You could only post to groups that your own
server carried.
=> =============================================================================
World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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