Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Julia Evans ☛ Entering text in the terminal is complicated

      The other day I asked what folks on Mastodon find confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already typed in”.

      This really resonated with me: even though entering some text and editing it is a very “basic” task, it took me maybe 15 years of using the terminal every single day to get used to using Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of the line (or Ctrl+E for the end).

      So let’s talk about why entering text might be hard! I’ll also share a few tips that I wish I’d learned earlier.

Leftovers

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ I prefer discussion in open web

  How to we have good discussions online? That’s the question Manuel Moreale was asking and answering in his blog post How to converse online. As his personal preferences differ quite a lot from mine, I figured I’ll share a different view on the topic. All quotes in this post are from that article.

  Just because this post is a direct response to Manu’s writing and contrasts my thoughts against his, I by no means mean that he’s wrong in any way. It is all about personal preference after all and we can all have our own.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Words such as racist slurs can literally hurt – here’s the science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] What fathers in the animal kingdom can tell us about humans

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] With its latest Moon mission success, China’s space programme has the US in its sights

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Here’s What We’ve Learned About Saturn Since Cassini Entered Its Orbit 20 Years Ago | Smithsonian

    “Titan is an organic chemistry powerhouse,” Niebur says. “It’s doing a lot of weird organic chemistry in its atmosphere. … That has a lot of implications not for habitability but for life, because complex organic chemistry was the step before life.”

    NASA says it is “the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it’s the only world besides Earth that has standing bodies of liquid, including rivers, lakes and seas, on its surface.”

    Titan also has a unique methane cycle analogous to Earth’s hydrologic cycle but based on methane rather than water.

• Education

  • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Why I kept my startup job for seven years (and counting)

    Software engineers typically don't stay anywhere for very long. If you're not moving, you're losing out on opportunities. And yet, I've made the choice to join and stay at one company for seven years. That's more than half my career to date. Why did I do that? And would I do it again?

  • Marcus Buffett ☛ Marcus' Blog

    I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ EU starts to look into China's legacy chip churn-out

    As reported by The Register earlier this year, China's silicon manufacturing capacity is expected to more than double within the next five to seven years, and this could be a recipe for trouble if those chipmakers decide to use their increased production capacity to sell into the wider global market as well as serving the considerable domestic demand.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Europe seeks industry views on China's older generation chips

    The European Commission has begun canvassing the region's semiconductor industry for its views on China's expanded production of older generation computer chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The Commission, the EU executive, has sought feedback ahead of two voluntary surveys for the chip industry and major chip-using industrial firms that will be due in September.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ US, China Chip War may continue for decades, says former ASML CEO — Wennick shares insights from selling chipmaking gear to both sides

    Wennick's fears that the Chip War, due to the geopolitical mess wrapped up in the potential for profit in the semiconductor industry, may continue for decades. ASML has had an outsized impact on global discussions around the Chip War, with its home country, the Netherlands, becoming China's line of communication to the West regarding ever-increasing sanctions.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Creates High-Tech Global Supply Chains to Blunt Risks Tied to China

    If the Biden administration had its way, far more electronic chips would be made in factories in, say, Texas or Arizona.

    They would then be shipped to partner countries, like Costa Rica or Vietnam or Kenya, for final assembly and sent out into the world to run everything from refrigerators to supercomputers.

  • PC World ☛ Is your SSD about to die? 10 warning signs you shouldn't ignore

    Sadly, SSDs don’t last forever. Sure, their performance and durability have improved over the years, but even the ones with impressive terabytes written (TBW) ratings and long warranties still die eventually.

    You’ll know it’s coming before it happens, too. Here are some key warning signs that your SSD is at the end of its life and what you can do about it—if you can do anything at all.

  • Ken Shirriff ☛ Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor

    Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The original Pentium was followed by the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II, and others, spawning a long-running brand of high-performance processors, Intel's flagship line until the Core processors took over in 2006. The Pentium eventually became virtually synonymous with "PC" and even made it into pop culture.

    Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.3 million transistors, its transistors are visible under a microscope, unlike modern chips. By examining the chip, we can see the interesting circuits used for gates, flip-flops, and other circuits, including the use of an unusual technology called BiCMOS. In this article, I take a close look at the original Pentium chip1, showing how much of its circuitry was built out of structured rows of tiny transistors, a technique known as standard-cell design.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • FLCCC co-founder Paul Marik has gone full cancer quack

    I realize that I say it perhaps far too often, but, truly, since COVID-19 hit four years ago everything old is new again. It started out with everything old being new again in the world of antivaccine misinformation, complete with false claims of infertility, death, cancer, and the same old, same old “vaccine injuries” due to COVID-19 vaccines. Then, as predictably as night follows day follows night, “new school” antivaxxers started to embrace “old school” antivax tropes and became just antivax. Then, given the affinity between quackery and antivax, “new school” antivaxxers started embracing more general quackery, including cancer quackery, as they quickly “repurposed” drugs that they claimed as effective against COVID-19 (e.g., ivermectin) to treat cancer and then embraced other more general quackery, including even homeopathy. So it should come as no surprise that co-founder of that group of COVID-19 cranks known as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC Alliance), Dr. Paul Marik, is now promoting a very old narrative long promoted by cancer quacks that chemotherapy doesn’t work.

  • Science Alert ☛ Autism in Children Linked to Changes in Gut Microbiome, Study Finds

    Feeding their data into a machine learning algorithm, any single one of these kingdoms could give a diagnostic accuracy that was better than random guesswork, but not amazingly good. But combining all the data for a multikingdom assessment that included 31 markers gave a far higher diagnostic accuracy rate, between 79.5 and 88.6 percent, depending on the age group.

    It's one of the broadest, most comprehensive studies of its kind conducted yet, and the results not only affirm the association between the gut and autism, but also offer a way forward for both studies into the mechanisms behind autism, and testing for it in children in a relatively straightforward and non-invasive way.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ “CUT IT OUT YOU FOOL” – Anti-Smoking Sign Outside of Zion, Illinois, ca. 1920s

    It wasn’t marketed as healthy until the late 1930s and 1940s. Alternatively tobacco wasn’t considered necessarily unhealthy either, just more “gross” and smelly and largely considered a novelty item. Before the marketing campaigns of the 1940s, the ads and marketing was mostly just artsy logos with brands behind them, mostly aimed at poorer folks until the turn of the century when ads began depicting wealthy men and Gibson girls smoking.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Waterloo software firm OpenText cuts 1,200 jobs as part of business optimization plan

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-06-28 [Older] Book Review: Regulating the Synthetic Society: Generative AI, Legal Questions, and Societal Challenges

  • [Repeat] EFF ☛ Hundreds of Tech Companies Want to Cash In on Homeland Security Funding. Here's Who They Are and What They're Selling.

    The four-part dataset includes a hand-curated directory that profiles more than 230 companies that manufacture, market or sell technology products and services, including DNA-testing, ground sensors, and counter-drone systems, to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) components engaged in border security and immigration enforcement. Vendors on this list are either verified federal contract holders, or have sought to do business with immigration/border authorities or local law enforcement along the border, through activities such as advertising homeland security products on their websites and exhibiting at border security conferences.

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Banning Android Phones for Staff in China

    Microsoft plans to implement state-of-the-art standards for identity and secrets management, including hardware-protected key rotations and phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication for all user accounts.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ JQuery Attack Hits NPM, GitHub, Can Extract Web Form Data

    Phylum researchers said they have been monitoring the “persistent supply chain attacker” since May 26, initially on npm, “where we saw the compromised version published in dozens of packages over a month. After investigating, we found instances of the trojanized jQuery on other platforms, such as GitHub, and even as a CDN-hosted resource on jsDelivr.”

  • Wired ☛ AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream

    The core objective of the HEO concept is straightforward: to give warfighters “cognitive overmatch” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent,” as SOCOM officials put it. Rather than bestowing US special operations forces with physical advantages through next-generation body armor and exotic weaponry, the future operator will head into battle with technologies designed to boost their situational awareness and relevant decisionmaking to superior levels compared to the adversary. Former fighter pilot and Air Force colonel John Boyd proposed the “OODA loop” (observe, orient, decide, act) as the core military decisionmaking model of the 21st century; the HEO concept seeks to use technology to “tighten” that loop so far that operators are quite literally making smarter and faster decisions than the enemy.

  • Federal News Network ☛ DISA’s Skinner not a fan of ‘wooden shoe’ IT services

    A prime example of this wooden shoe problem is how the Defense Department set up the unclassified version of Office 365. Across all of DoD, there are 14 different and distinct tenants.

    Skinner said DoD is not making that same mistake with the classified or secret version of O365 where everyone will use one instance.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China's AI model glut is a 'significant waste of resources' due to scarce real-world applications for 100+ LLMs says Baidu CEO

    "In 2023, intense competition among over 100 LLMs has emerged in China, resulting in a significant waste of resources, particularly computing power," said Li. "I've noticed that many people still primarily focus on foundational models. But I want to ask: How about real-world applications? Who has benefitted from them?"

  • SCMP ☛ ‘Too many’ AI models in China: Baidu CEO warns of wasted resources, lack of applications

    Like much of the industry globally, China’s AI market is still in the early stages of monetisation. Baidu’s Li said that logistics and creative writing are two industries that have already benefited from AI-powered applications that improve efficiency.

    Baidu Comate, the internet search giant’s coding assistant powered by its Ernie LLM, has been deployed internally for employee use. Li said 30 percent of coding at the company is now handled by AI.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Dynamic watermarking with imgproxy and Apache APISIX

      Last week, I described how to add a dynamic watermark to your images on the JVM. I didn’t find any library, so I had to develop the feature, or, more precisely, an embryo of a feature, by myself. Depending on your tech stack, you must search for an existing library or roll up your sleeves. For example, Rust offers such an out-of-the-box library. Worse, this approach might be impossible to implement if you don’t have access to the source image.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Australia Spy Agency Moves Intelligence Data to Cloud in Amazon Deal [Ed: This is data breach if not treason]

    • HRW ☛ 2024-07-02 [Older] Australia: Children’s Personal Photos Misused to Power AI Tools

    • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Head of Canada's spy agency announces he's stepping down from the job

    • Futurism ☛ After Just Ten Months, Amazon Says Its "Security Guard" Robot Will Become a Useless Brick

      Though the bricking of Astro will likely be irritating to those who shelled out for the store-patrolling flatscreen on wheels, they'll at least be made whole.

      In its email to customers, Amazon said that it would refund the money spent on the robot and any related outstanding subscriptions, most of which have to do with video storage and patrol route programming. And it'll also give those customers $300 Amazon bucks for their trouble, too.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ DHS invests in digital credential technology

      The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate announced on Monday that six technology companies had been offered contracts to develop digital wallet services, part of an agency goal to advance digital technology used in the context of immigration and travel.

      Three U.S.-based companies — Credence ID, Hushmesh, and SpruceID — won awards, according to the DHS ress release, as did the European companies Ubiqu, Procivis, and Netis d.o.o. The awards came after a solicitation the agency posted last year. Each company has received just under $200,000, though the firms could eventually earn up to $1.7 million.

    • Bitdefender ☛ ChatGPT for Mac app flaw left users' chat history exposed

      It was storing users' chats with ChatGPT for Mac in plaintext on their computer. In short, anyone who gained unauthorised use of your computer - whether it be a malicious remote hacker, a jealous partner, or rival in the office, would be able to easily read your conversations with ChatGPT and the data associated with them.

    • Tim Bradshaw ☛ The absurdity of banning end-to-end encryption

      The UK government wants to effectively ban end-to-end encryption for messaging. Even if this was desirable, it is not usefully possible. The effort wasted on this futile and stupid attempt to do the impossible would be better spent elsewhere.

      For as long as I can remember, politicians have been arguing that end-to-end encrypted messaging systems should be, effectively, banned. Of course, they don’t say ‘banned’, they make some noise about how they will still be secure even though third-parties will be able to read the data if need be. But they mean banned, even if they don’t understand what they are asking for.

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Spain set to launch Porn Passport, Here's is how it works

      The verified users also will not have access to unlimited porn consumption, rather they will be provided with '30' tokens or credits which they have to use each time they want to watch porn. The tokens will expire in a month and users can request for new ones.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Site36 ☛ Frontex expands aerial surveillance: More deployments of planes, drones and surveillance satellites

    Frontex is monitoring the Mediterranean and other sea areas with aeroplanes and drones in order to curb irregular migration and flight to Europe. In 2023, companies carried out 1711 flights on behalf of the EU border agency, 243 of which were with unmanned systems. The aircraft completed over 11,000 flight hours. This is according to Frontex’s response to a question from MEP Özlem Demirel of the Left Party in the EU Parliament. Similar high figures are given for the period from January to April 2024. In the two previous years, these figures were around a fifth lower.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ US to expand control of land sales to foreigners near military sites

    A 2018 law granted the committee authority to review real estate transactions near sensitive sites across the U.S.

  • Raw Story ☛ 'Stop electing stupid people': Rage as Marjorie Taylor Greene flunks American history test

    She then added, "STOP ELECTING STUPID PEOPLE."

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Earth surpasses 1.5 degrees C of warming for 12 consecutive months

    In a troubling milestone, June marked Earth’s 12th consecutive month of global warming at or above 1.5 degrees Celsius — the internationally accepted threshold for avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

    A stifling month marked by heat waves and heat deaths, June was also about a quarter of a degree warmer than the previous hottest June on record in 2023, according to a report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. It is the 13th straight month to break its own monthly heat record.

  • US News And World Report ☛ June Sizzles to 13th Straight Monthly Heat Record. String May End Soon, but Dangerous Heat Won't

    The global temperature in June was record warm for the 13th straight month and it marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an early Monday announcement.

    “It's a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris Agreement,” Copernicus senior climate scientist Nicolas Julien said in an interview. “The global temperature continues to increase. It has at a rapid pace.”

  • RFERL ☛ Investigation: EU Shell-Production Capacity, Supplies To Ukraine Fall Far Short Of Promises

    In addition to the capacity issue, interviews with ammunition producers, buyers, government officials, policy advisers, and defense experts in EU member states and Ukraine showed that the EU has given Ukraine about half as many shells as it has promised, with a significant delay.

  • BIA Net ☛ 2024-06-28 [Older] FATF removes Turkey from grey list

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-27 [Older] Sahel: Germany redefines its development cooperation approach

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Brazil's Bolsonaro Formally Accused Over Saudi Gifts, Sources Say

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Saudi Arabia's Gaza Aid Threatened by Rafah Closure, Aid Official Says

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Victims of Hamas Attack Sue Iran, Syria, North Korea in U.S. Court

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Lawsuit Accuses Iran, Syria and North Korea of Providing Support for Hamas' Oct. 7 Attack on Israel

  • Defence Web ☛ 2024-07-02 [Older] Turkey sends Syrian mercenaries to Niger

  • The Local SE ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Germany and Sweden arrest eight over Syria crimes against humanity

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] As Turkey, Syria thaw ties, unrest may derail reconciliation

  • ANF News ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Pogrom against Syrians: Racist attacks spread across Turkey

  • BIA Net ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Is normalization with Syria possible for Turkey while protecting jihadists?

  • BIA Net ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] 15-year-old Syrian child fatally stabbed in Antalya amid anti-refugee violence

  • HRW ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] The Delusion, Once Again, of a ‘Safe Zone’ in Syria

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Quantity over quality What the Kremlin’s new defense pact with North Korea means for the Russian army fighting in Ukraine — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital has treated patients throughout the war. Today, a Russian missile strike killed one of its doctors. — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Medium ☛ Scientific journalism, Julian Assange, and a world without leaks

    (Author’s note: I wrote this article as a sequel to Rubberhose Cryptography to be published in time for the UK High Court’s final appeal against Julian Assange’s US extradition. I’ve, happily, had to make some edits…)

    In the northern spring of 1905, the young Swiss physicist Albert Einstein published the first of three scientific journal articles that outlined the theory of special relativity — how light travels in discrete “photons”, how the speed of light is constant even if you’re on a moving train, and the famous energy-matter equivalence E=mc² which would go on to unleash nuclear power across the planet.

    One hundred years later, in 2005, the world marked the anniversary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis by declaring it the International Year of Physics. The Australian Institute of Physics celebrated too — and for its biannual congress held that year at the Australian National University invited Nobel Prize-winner and laser-physicist Bill Philips to deliver a keynote address, and held, for the first time ever, a National Physics Competition. The best undergraduate physics students from across Australia and New Zealand were invited to compete in theoretical and experimental tests with sponsored prizes for the winners.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Self-Satisfied and Often Wrong Media Frenzy

    With that as background, I want to lay out a number of problems with the story the members of the frenzied mob — people rushing to press with stories that are far less responsible than these two (see this must-read post from Jennifer Schulze on some of the worst examples) — are telling:

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Saskatchewan files for injunction as CRA attempts to take $28M its owed under federal carbon tax

  • RTL ☛ Highly prized hallucinogen: Sticky future: climate change hits Nepal's honey hunters

    He blamed the decline in bees on increasingly irregular rainfall, wildfires, agricultural pesticides and the diversion of rivers due to a surge of hydropower dams and accompanying construction of roads. RTL

    "Streams are drying up due to hydro-projects and irregular rainfall," he said, noting wild bees prefer to nest near water.

    "Bees that fly to farms also face the problem of pesticides, which kill them."

  • YLE ☛ EIB Survey: Finns most climate aware in EU

    The survey assessed people’s knowledge of climate change in three key areas: definitions and causes, consequences, and solutions.

    The survey's report noted that people in Finland were very aware of the causes and consequences of climate change, but there was "room for improvement" in the overall knowledge of solutions.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2024-06-30 [Older] Transformation to Green Energy: EU Cooperation with Argentina in the Lithium Sector

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Ecuador Names Antonio Goncalves as New Minister of Energy and Mines

    • DeSmog ☛ Two Thirds of Anti-Net Zero Tories Wiped Out in UK Election

    • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Cyanide detected in Yukon creek after Victoria Gold's heap leach failure at Eagle gold mine

    • Gizmodo ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] We’ll Have to Wait a Bit Longer for the World’s Biggest Fusion Reactor

    • NL Times ☛ 2024-07-02 [Older] Government support prevented energy poverty for 500,000 Dutch households

    • Gizmodo ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Huge, Faltering Fusion Reactor Project Finally Completes Its Magnet System

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Melbourne now getting an airport train… maybe?

      I think I speak for all Melbournites and regular travellers: get it built!

    • JWB ☛ Two month of consequent biking

      I wanted to write about my success to stay focused on using my bike and just realised I already did that a month ago, but never came around to publish the post 😅

    • US News And World Report ☛ Panama Canal Expects New Water Reservoir for Ship Crossings in 6 Years

      Last month, the Panama Canal said after recent rains boosted water levels, it would increase the total number of available slots in both Neopanamax and Panamax locks to 35 slots after Aug. 5.

      Increased rainfall in recent months has allowed the canal, the world's second-largest, to replenish its watershed, leading to an increase in transits that had been severely restricted last year amid a drought.

    • University of Michigan ☛ U-M researchers collaborate with Los Alamos National Laboratory

      Reetuparna Das, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in an interview with The Daily she hoped the collaboration between LANL and the University will allow researchers to have access to projects they previously couldn’t work on.

      “Sitting in the university, it’s very hard to know about these problems, because we are not aware,” Das said. “These are very highly secure and sensitive simulations and algorithms which are not open source to academics.”

      As part of the Los Alamos partnership, researchers will be working to improve not only the hardware of these computers, but also their algorithm designs in an effort to speed up the computing process.

      Das said improving the computer speed will enable scientists to learn more by making the simulation process more efficient.

    • The Register UK ☛ Fraud guilty plea flies from Boeing over 737 Max crashes

      The plea deal amounts to Boeing accepting one felony count, a move that will in exchange allow it to skip a trial.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Production curtailed as wildfire burns out of control near Suncor's Firebag oilsands site

    • The Revelator ☛ Meet the Malaysian Conservationist Devoting Her Life to Protecting Fireflies

    • Hakai Magazine ☛ Meet the Narwhal Dentist

      Martin Nweeia is a modern Renaissance man. He has a degree in English and biology, a working dental practice, and a side interest in zoology and anthropology; he has composed music for documentary films and has become an expert on narwhals—the mysterious, one-toothed unicorns of the sea.

      The male narwhal typically hosts a roughly 2.4-meter-long, single exterior tusk, whose function has been a mystery for centuries. Nweeia has obtained many grants to investigate the narwhal and, over the course of more than 20 trips to the Arctic, has compiled ambitious logs of Indigenous knowledge about the tusk, conducted in-depth studies on the material it is composed of, and attached heart and brain monitors to narwhals to try to determine what the animals can sense through the protrusion.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Hindu ☛ Will be left with no water to drink if Teesta water is shared with Bangladesh, says Mamata

      Expressing concern over the threat of floods in north Bengal as several rivers, including the Teesta, were flowing in full spate, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee once again reiterated her opposition to sharing Teesta waters with Bangladesh. Such a sharing arrangement would leave no water for the people of north Bengal, she added.

    • San Fancisco ☛ California to impose first-ever permanent water restrictions on cities

      “Conservation is a critical part of California’s strategy to adapt to a hotter, drier future,” said Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the state water board, which worked with the Department of Water Resources to develop the regulation. “Our climate has changed. Our uses should match the hydrology that we’re now facing.”

• Finance

  • CBC ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Hundreds of rejections a 'hard reality' for high school students looking for summer jobs

  • CBC ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Bombardier aircraft assembly workers still on strike after union rejects latest offer

  • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] Many Canadians in their 20s and 30s are delaying having kids — and some say high rent is a factor

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Democracy Now ☛ Iran’s New Reformist President Promises More Freedom, Better Relations with the West

    Voters in Iran elected Masoud Pezeshkian as president Saturday. The heart surgeon and former health minister defeated hard-liner Saeed Jalili in a runoff vote held just weeks after President Ebrahim Raisi and other top officials died in a helicopter crash. Pezeshkian has criticized Iran’s mandatory hijab law for women and has promised to disband Iran’s morality police, as well as better relations with the United States and other Western countries in the hopes of lifting sanctions. Journalist Reza Sayah in Tehran says that while Pezeshkian spoke the language of the reformist movement, he also strived to show “he’s not going to be a disruptive force to the establishment.” We also speak with Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, who says “elections in Iran are a farce” and that no candidate who reaches the presidency can really challenge the system. “The president does not change a lot.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ “The Whole Country of France Has Won”: Far Right Blocked from Power as Left Surges

    A leftist coalition pulled off a surprise victory in the second round of parliamentary elections in France on Sunday, becoming the largest bloc in Parliament and successfully keeping the far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen out of government. The New Popular Front, which won 182 seats in the National Assembly, still fell short of the 289 seats required for an absolute majority. President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition came second with 163 seats, while the National Rally and its allies won 143 seats after having led the first round of voting a week earlier. We go to Paris to speak with author and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi and journalist Rokhaya Diallo about the historic election result.

  • NL Times ☛ 2024-06-30 [Older] Rutte will give farewell speech this afternoon before stepping down as Prime Minister

  • NL Times ☛ 2024-06-29 [Older] Thousands attend the 20th edition of Veterans Day, King Willem-Alexander gives a speech

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-06-29 [Older] UK Reform Leader Farage Speech Interrupted by Banner Mocking Putin Views

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-28 [Older] Kenya anti-tax protests: Where do things go from here?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-28 [Older] US: Supreme Court ruling limits power of federal agencies

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-28 [Older] Pakistan: Parliament passes tax-heavy budget to appease IMF

  • India Times ☛ Accenture acquires Excelmax Technologies to expand semiconductor design services

    Global IT services firm Accenture acquired Bengaluru-based Excelmax Technologies, a semiconductor design services firm, to bolster its growing silicon design and engineering capabilities. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Age AU ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Billionaire Andrew Forrest’s court win threatens to expose Facebook’s trillion-dollar secrets

    • Gizmodo ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Supreme Court Punts on Laws Stopping Social Media Companies From Removing Extremist Content

    • RFA ☛ Did a deal between Saudi Arabia and US to sell oil in dollars expire?

      A claim emerged in Chinese-language social media posts in June that Saudi Arabia terminated a 50-year formal agreement with the United States to conduct oil transactions in U.S. dollars, under a deal called the “petrodollar agreement.”

      But the claims are false. No known formal deal stipulating that Saudi Arabia must sell oil in U.S. dollars exists. While not formally bound by agreement, Saudi Arabia has in practice conducted all its oil deals over the past several decades entirely in U.S. dollars.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • VOA News ☛ Pakistan hearings on surveillance, TikTok worry digital rights advocates

    In Islamabad, a submission to the high court said that telecom companies had been ordered to install a mass surveillance system. And in Peshawar, the Chinese social media app TikTok told the high court it would allow the Telecoms Ministry access to remove content deemed “blasphemous.”

  • Reason ☛ Tennessee Woman's 'Fuck Em' Both 2024' Sign Ruled Protected Speech

    In a brief, three-page ruling, the U.S. district court agreed with Pereira. The court barred the city from taking any further enforcement action over her sign and instructed the city to reimburse Pereira for the fines she'd paid, plus $31,000 in attorneys fees, and $1 in nominal damages for having her constitutional rights violated.

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2024-06-29 [Older] Glenn Greenwald: SCOTUS Protects Biden Administration’s Social Media Censorship Program

  • NL Times ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Amsterdam blocks replies on X as hate speech issues grow; Utrecht Univ. exits platform

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] BET Says 'Audio Malfunction' Caused Heavy Censorship of Usher's Speech at the 2024 BET Awards

  • CPJ ☛ 2024-07-03 [Older] Attacks, arrests, threats, censorship: The high risks of reporting the Israel-Gaza war

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-06-30 [Older] Turkey Arrests at Least 15 Protesters at Pride Rally

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-30 [Older] Turkey: Istanbul's banned Pride Parade leads to arrests

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • There will be more like Julian Assange

    Rebecca Vincent argues that despite the WikiLeaks founder’s release, those who care about press freedom must remain vigilant.

    One week after the surprise sudden release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, his wife Stella posted a photo on social media, captioned ‘Free!’, showing the couple hugging in the forest, smiling and looking up at the blue sky. It was Assange’s 53rd birthday.

    Such a moment might seem mundane to the average person, but it represented something monumental for Assange, his family and global journalism.

  • CPJ ☛ Kenya court rules police unlawfully killed Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif

    The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes a Kenyan court’s Monday ruling that Kenyan authorities violated Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif’s right to life and that his death was arbitrary and unconstitutional.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ PBS funds, tax cuts, porn ban: Stories from Kansas legislative session still unfolding

    Wouldn’t you know it, the budget as passed now boasts a whopping $700,000 for public media.

    You don’t often see a happy ending in this business, so I’m glad to bring you one here. A tip of the Wirestone fedora to those who realized the potential for Kansas looking terrible in this situation and reversed course with alacrity.

  • The Hindu ☛ Journalists must speak truth to power, says MLA

    “Journalists hold a mirror to society. They should develop social concern, report objectively and bring the demands of the people to the attention of the government,” he said.

    Veteran journalist Sarju Katkar traced the history of Kannada journalism. “German missionary Hermann Moegling had learnt Kannada started a handwritten paper called ‘Kannada Samachara’ in Ballari in 1843. The same year on July 1, he started a printed newspaper called ‘Mangaluru Samachara’ in Mangaluru That is why, media day is celebrated on July 1,” Dr. Katkar said.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2024-06-29 [Older] Illinois Amazon Drivers Just Went on Strike for a Contract

  • Pro Publica ☛ West Texas Pastor Who Used Illegal Donations From Churches to Campaign for Office Is Fined $3,500

    A West Texas pastor who used his parish’s resources to campaign for office and several pastors from other churches who donated to him were fined after the state’s ethics commission determined that each violated election law.

    The fines, some of which were issued last month, are the latest sanction from the commission following reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which revealed that three churches donated to the campaign of Scott Beard, founding pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship church, despite state and federal prohibitions on such activity.

  • BIA Net ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Violent protests target refugee community in Turkey’s Kayseri after alleged sexual assault on minor

  • ANF News ☛ 2024-07-05 [Older] Men killed at least 34 women in Turkey in June

  • CBC ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] LCBO employees will walk off job Friday, union says

  • Firstpost ☛ Samsung workers Union go on a three-day strike in South Korea – Firstpost

    Last month, the union's first strike involved a coordinated mass walkout using annual leave, which Samsung claimed had no effect on business operations. On Monday, Samsung again reported no production disruptions

  • India Times ☛ Samsung Electronics workers strike as union voice grows in South Korea

    The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), whose roughly 30,000 members make up almost a quarter of the firm's South Korean workforce, also wants an extra day of annual leave for unionised workers and changes to the employee bonus system.

  • The Korea Times ☛ Samsung Electronics union launches first strike in 55-year history

    The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) claimed that about 4,000 unionized workers from Samsung's plants nationwide participated in a rally at the company's Hwaseong Campus in Gyeonggi Province. Police estimated that approximately 3,000 union members were present at the rally.

    According to its own survey, the union reported that a total of 6,540 members expressed their intention to participate in the strike. They emphasized that disruptions in manufacturing are anticipated, with over 5,000 members from facility, manufacturing, and development divisions joining the strike.

  • The Korea Times ☛ Unionized workers at Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics to stage 3-day strike

    The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), the largest labor union at the world's largest memory chipmaker, held the demonstration at the entrance of the company's facility in Hwaseong, 45 kilometers south of Seoul, to kick off the strike.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Supreme Court Decision May Impact FCC Rules Now Before Appeals Courts - Inside Towers

    In the telecom sector, Chevron has been a major reason the FCC is recognized as having the power to regulate — and deregulate — ISPs. Chevron was cited in 2016 when a federal appeals court upheld the Obama-era FCC’s Net Neutrality rules. The U.S. Court for the District of Columbia Circuit applied the Chevron precedent when evaluating whether the FCC decision to regulate broadband as a telecommunications service was permissible under the law, according to Ars Technica.

    Chevron later helped the Trump-era FCC repeal those Net Neutrality rules. One of the three judges deciding the case wrote that then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s justification for reclassifying broadband as an information service “is unhinged from reality.” But Chevron and another precedent caused the court to defer to the FCC’s interpretation.

    Chevron is relevant again because the agency voted in April to restore Net Neutrality for ISPs, prohibiting them from blocking or slowing down websites in favor of paid prioritization. Opponents, including FCC Commissioners Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, said the ruling wasn’t needed because ISPs are not conducting those actions, Inside Towers reported.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Amazon Music, Spotify, & Apple Music Sue Over 5% Canada Tax

    The services, which are the three largest in the U.S. by market share, announced the legal actions via their Digital Media Association (DIMA) trade organization. Boasting a fresh website, said organization has evidently embraced an all-caps acronym, doing away with the lowercase “i” in most parts of the relevant release.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ HP discontinues online-only LaserJet printers in response to backlash — Instant Ink subscription gets the boot, too

    In any case, it's important to clarify that this discontinuation of HP printers will only impact HP LaserJet printers that have an "e" added to the end of their model name to denote the alternative business model. So, the HP Laserjet M110w is unaffected by this, but the HP LaserJet M110we and M209dwe, two cheaper always-online alternatives, will no longer be produced or sold by HP.

    Another critical point of clarification is that the existing HP e-series LaserJet printer models in the wild will still function exactly as they did when they were purchased. No software updates are forthcoming to unlock the true potential of the hardware, so existing customers will have to deal with it and HP+ until they can replace their printers entirely. At least they'll still get HP+ benefits, but after such backlash, it'd be nice if HP acknowledged its mistake enough to remove some of the restrictions on e-series printer users.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Korea Times ☛ Regulator prepares action against Google for YouTube bundling allegations

  Korea's antitrust regulator is expected to take punitive steps against Google regarding allegations that it has unfairly bundled YouTube's music service with its premium subscription program, officials said Monday.

  The U.S. tech giant was accused of providing the YouTube Music streaming service to users of the ad-free YouTube premium program without additional charges in violation of the fair transaction law, and the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has carried out an on-site probe since February last year.

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple okays Epic Games marketplace app in Europe

  Before Apple’s announcement, Epic said the iPhone maker had twice rejected documents the videogame publisher submitted to launch the Epic Games Store because the design of certain buttons and labels was similar to those used by its App Store.

  “We are using the same ‘Install’ and ‘In-app purchases’ naming conventions that are used across popular app stores on multiple platforms, and are following standard conventions for buttons in iOS apps,” Epic said in a series of posts on X.

• Patents

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • IP Kat ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] BREAKING: Referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal on claim interpretation confirmed (G1/24)

• Trademarks

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-06-29 [Older] The never ending story of Brexit – Chapter: EUIPO v Indo European Foods – Act II: The CJEU’s decision [Ed: EUIPO is truly corrupt, but they won't mention this ]

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-07-04 [Older] [Guest post] Decoding the General Court in design law – adding matter to the prior art?

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-07-01 [Older] Brand wars: the never-ending battle against the clones

  • Right of Publicity

    • Digital Music News ☛ Woollim Entertainment Files Criminal Complaints

      “Accordingly, we collected many posts about the criminal acts of those who groundlessly defamed Kwon Eun Bi’s character, insulted her, sexually harassed her, spread falsehoods about her, wrote malicious posts and libel about her, or combined her portrait with other photos and spread fabricated pornographic photos of her, and we filed our first round of criminal complaints.”

    • Wired ☛ Google’s Nonconsensual Explicit Images Problem Is Getting Worse

      The women, joined by an attorney and a security expert, presented a bounty of ideas for how Google could keep the criminal and demeaning clips better hidden, according to five people who attended or were briefed on the virtual meeting. They wanted Google search to ban websites devoted to GirlsDoPorn and videos with its watermark. They suggested Google could borrow the 25-terabyte hard drive on which the women’s cybersecurity consultant, Charles DeBarber, had saved every GirlsDoPorn episode, take a mathematical fingerprint, or “hash,” of each clip, and block them from ever reappearing in search results.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

    Popular pirate library search engine Anna's Archive faces monetary damages and a permanent injunction at a U.S. court. The site's operators failed to respond to a lawsuit filed by OCLC, after its WorldCat database was scraped and published online. Anna's Archive remains silent but did switch to a new domain name recently, which may not be entirely coincidental.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Z-Library Admins "Escape House Arrest" After Judge Approves U.S. Extradition

    Two alleged Z-Library operators who were arrested in Argentina at the request of the United States, have reportedly escaped from house arrest. Russian citizens Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova were facing extradition to the United States after a judge approved their transfer. After filing an appeal at the Supreme Court of Justice requesting political refugee status, the pair apparently vanished into thin air.

  • The Register UK ☛ Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

    The case started with 22 claims in all, and over time this has been whittled down as the defending corporations motioned to have the accusations thrown out of court, requests that Judge Jon Tigar has mostly sustained.

    In an order [PDF] unsealed on Friday, July 5, Judge Tigar ruled on yet another batch of the plaintiffs' claims, and overall it was a win for GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Three claims were dismissed as requested and just one allowed to continue. According to a count by Microsoft and GitHub's lawyers, that leaves just two allegations standing in total.

  • The Register UK ☛ Case No. 22-cv-06823-JST ORDER GRANTING IN PART DENYING IN PART MOTIONS TO DISMISS Re: ECF Nos. 215, 219 [PDF]

    Defendant OpenAI moves to dismiss Plaintiffs’ breach of contract claim for violation of open-source licenses. ECF No. 219 at 13. In support of this argument, OpenAI contends that (1) Plaintiffs fail to state a claim based on Codex; (2) Plaintiffs fail to state a claim based on Copilot; and (3) Plaintiffs’ theory based on Copilot fails on the merits because “the attribution and notice terms are conditions and do not give rise to a contract claim.” Id. at 14–17. Plaintiffs respond that OpenAI has waived its right to challenge Plaintiffs’ breach of contract claim pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(g)(2), and in any event, its arguments fail on the merits. Having considered these arguments, the Court declines to dismiss Plaintiffs’ breach of contract claim.

  • Axios ☛ Bots are already fighting bots online

    A new kind of turf war is breaking out on the web, with AI bots battling other AI bots to seize or defend stockpiles of the AI era's most valuable commodity: data.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • On the Job

      currently waiting for a job interview to start in a few minutes. don't know if it's zoom or if they'll literally call me, but what little i've read about the interview points to the former. quite nervous at the moment, considering this is the first major job i've interviewed for in a few years. hopefully i do well!

    • on a rainy monday

      finally, some much-needed rain is hitting my neck of the woods today. we are currently seeing some of the remnants of Beryl, and it's been quite the nice cooldown - currently sitting at a comfortable 71F outside and looking like we are expecting it to continue raining into the morning - which I am more than fine with. :-)

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Internet/Gemini

      • Seriously? ... SERIOUSLY?

        I'll be danged if I can solve what seems like a DNS problem that lives somewhere between my Chromebook and our new T-Mobile "wireless 5G" router.

      • hello small world

        I stumbled upon this website a while back and was delighted to have received a key to join ! I am not fully sure how it all works here but I've been readings some posts and it's really great I feel like I'm in an old warm house. would love to get to know more and talk and possibly later also share ( I don't know if hello posts are a thing I hope they are and I'm not just awkward). hope you are having a good day

      • Writing a blog post (on the web, sadly) about Geminispace.

        Writing a blog post (on the web, sadly) about Geminispace. Are there any other cool sites on here that showcase what the Gemini protocol can do?