This week, Linux Out Loud chats about Linux being the ultimate set-it-and-forget appliance OS. Welcome to episode 68 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon.
OpenZFS, Your Data and the Challenge of Ransomware, I Didn’t Learn Unix By Reading All The Manpages, I try to answer "how to become a systems engineer", Writing shell scripts in Nushell, Sudo and signal propagation, infecting SSH Public Keys with backdoors, OpenBSD Thinkpad, and more
Recent advances in embedded Linux, Canonical takes full control of LXD, ZFS gets a handy Btrfs feature, and updates on the show's production.
Linux 6.4 was released on June 25, just before the start of the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague. As usual, lots of changes in Linux 6.4, and we recommend reading LWN coverage of the merge window (part 1, part 2).
AMD's 'Family 26' CPUs for servers will continue to feature a 12-channel memory subsystem.
The ROG Ally was tested under Linux to see if it was any better or worse compared to the Steam Deck, which also runs Linux. Sadly, the ROG Ally exhibited the same behavior as on Windows, with good performance but poor power efficiency.
Uh-oh
Big Triangle hard at work: [...]
When working with package management systems like apt or apt-get on Debian-based Linux distributions, you may encounter various errors.
One common error is the “E: You must put some ‘deb-src’ URIs in your sources.list” message, which occurs when attempting to use the source package repositories but missing the necessary configurations.
The apt-get command was the primary package management command used in Debian-based Linux distributions prior to the introduction of the apt command.
With the apt-get command, you could install, remove, upgrade, search, and manage packages on your system. However, starting from Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 9, the apt command became the recommended command-line tool for package management, although apt-get is still available and functional.
While the bzip2 command line utility can be used to compress files, there are many other tools that let you perform basic tasks - like comparing such files - without the need to uncompress them. Here, in this tutorial, we will discuss the basics of bzcmp, bzdiff, bzmore, bzless, and bzgrep commands using some easy to understand examples.
In the Linux operating system, services are programs that operate in the background. These services can be initiated either on-demand or during the system boot process. As a Linux user or developer, you will interact with various services such as web servers, SSH, or cron.
PostgreSQL is a powerful open-source relational database management system known for its robustness and extensive feature set.
NGINX is a popular reverse proxy and web server that has built-in IPv6 support, which provides more expansive address ranges.
If you are looking for a guide on how to install Ruby on your Ubuntu machine, you’ve come to the right place!
AMD has taken the lead in the Linux CPU market share, surpassing Intel, marking a significant shift in the longstanding rivalry between the two companies. Intel has traditionally held a dominant position in the CPU market, but recent data indicates that AMD has surpassed Intel in market share, specifically within the Linux system.
So a few days ago the Steam Deck passed another milestone with 10 000 titles now in the category of Playable and Verified.
Following the release of Godot 4.0 earlier this year, Godot 4.1 has been released today as an incremental update to this incredibly powerful, open-source game engine...
Four months after the release of Godot 4.0, we are excited to bring you Godot 4.1 — an update with a focus on stability, performance, and polish.
A few more critical regressions were fixed, and the milestone is now 100% complete. Let's confirm that 4.1 is ready with a (final?) RC.
Godot 4.1 has been released today for game developers who want a cross-platform free and open source game engine. Bringing with it plenty of new features. This is part of their commitment to more regular releases to work on stability, performance, and polish.
ChimeraOS 43 has been released today adding in support for running this SteamOS inspired Linux distribution on the ASUS ROG Ally handheld.€ Quite an exciting release, since Linux projects like this can help extend the lifespan of devices like the ROG Ally well past when the original vendor moves on.
Here's a fun bit of driver and hardware news as Imagination announced their GPUs now support OpenGL 4.6 up from OpenGL 3.3 and it's thanks to the open source Zink driver. In their announcement they mentioned how they worked with Collabora to make this happen, the open source consulting firm that has many developers working all across Linux including the kernel, graphics drivers and much more.
A fresh Steam Beta update was put out for desktop and Steam Deck, it comes with a whole bunch of little bug fixes and improvements. Especially nice on desktop if you have AMD or Intel GPUs.
Announced today, Dying Breed from Sarnayer that blends together the classic style and gameplay in the original Command & Conquer but with Zombies is now being published by MicroProse. Seems quite fitting to have a name like€ MicroProse attached to it.
SUSE was working to release SLES 15 SP3, which is 100% binary compatible with openSUSE Leap 15.3. While Red Hat has been working to lock down sources and disparage those who build RHEL clones, SUSE has actively encouraged and sponsored openSUSE as a clone of SLES.
Let’s clarify the difference between openSUSE’s stable and testing ground distros. openSUSE Leap is a stable, enterprise-compatible distro, while openSUSE Tumbleweed serves as the testing ground for SLES and openSUSE Leap. I bring this up because I have repeatedly seen misinformation in community conversations about the state of enterprise Linux. Leap is not a testing ground.
The number of openSUSE users has been on the rise. Lets look into some of the reasons why your next install should be a SUSE distro.
A proposal by a Red Hat engineer is causing controversy in the Fedora community, which is related to the addition of opt-out telemetry to the Fedora desktop workstation edition.
Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.
It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.).
The ARC (which is a subset of the team) investigates possible initiatives that CPE might take on.
This article demonstrates how to configure user-managed networking via
SiteConfig€ using the zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) deployment model. ZTP automates the steps required to configure new network devices and perform upgrades using a network switch feature.
After configuring my Kafka Connect Image with Debezium, demonstrated in Hugo Guerrero's article€ Improve your Kafka Connect builds of Debezium,€ I needed to configure a type of filter to only bring certain events from the database table to my topics. I was able to do this using Debezium SMT with Groovy.
Fascinating changes are happening in the automotive industry. Car manufacturers are moving away from discrete Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in favor of consolidating computing resources into bigger, high-performance computers. The move to a more dynamic system that enables software-defined vehicles (SDVs) is bringing two formerly separate worlds together: automotive and the datacenter-centric IT industry.
AMQ streams has recently promoted Cruise Control to the General Availability stage. It optimizes how Apache Kafka distributes the workload to improve performance and health. Often the Kafka clusters are deployed and grow over time, hosting multiple topics. Thanks to its robustness and elasticity reputation, the operations department tends to give it little care, monitoring the key health indicators. But they don’t know how to tune it to face the new workload.
Cruise Control can become a fundamental ally in managing your Kafka clusters and getting the most out of your hardware resources. Plus, with the AMQ streams operator, it’s just a matter of turning a key. This article explains the key principles and how to make practical use of this new exciting capability.
FTP master
This month I accepted 221 and rejected 33 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 221.
Yeah, Bookworm was released this month. Thanks a lot to everybody who was involved in doing this.
This was my hundred-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.€
AI/ML is moving beyond the experimentation phase. This involves a shift in the way of operating because productising AI involves many sophisticated processes. Machine learning operations (MLOps) is a new practice that ensures ML workflow automation in a scalable and efficient manner. But how do you make MLOps observable? How can you better understand how your product-grade AI initiative and its infrastructure are performing?€
In the constantly evolving world of software development and IT management, choosing the right operating system for your enterprise developers is a strategic choice. Ubuntu vs macOS, which is right for you? Our latest whitepaper helps you answer this question and make an informed decision. This blog post provides a sneak peek into our findings covering both the developer landscape, and the key considerations for IT administrators.
Considering macOS or Linux for your organisation? Find out Ubuntu stacks up.
Ubuntu has been displaying APT News in the terminal window for a while now and is planning on adding it to the Software Updater GUI.
As Canonical readies a new Snap-driven version of Ubuntu desktop, Flatpak downloads keep growing and growing and growing...
Samsung reportedly plans to launch its next-gen foldable smartphones and flagship tablets latest this month. But details have been leaking for a while. Now WinFuture has obtained a collection of picture showing off Samsung's upcoming line of Android devices.
A news item from Software Freedom Conservancy.
Are you registered?
One week from today (July 13-16), we will be gathered at the Oregon Convention Center for the first ever Free and Open Source Software Yearly (FOSSY) conference, which will be an engaging, educational, inspiring four days of presentations and conversations. Whether you are a long time contributing member of a free software project, a recent graduate of a coding bootcamp or university, or just have an interest in the possibilies that free and open source software bring, FOSSY will have something for you.
Generative AI technologies powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have shown themselves to be both a big boon to productivity as well as a concerningly confident purveyor of incorrect information. At Mozilla, we’re excited about the potential role generative AI can play in creating new value for people while demonstrating leadership in responsible and ethical implementation approaches.
WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. As such it can help developers to verify that their websites are working and performing well with all major browsers. The protocol is standardized by the W3C and consists of two separate specifications: WebDriver classic (HTTP) and the new WebDriver BiDi (Bi-Directional).
The Rcpp Core Team is delighted to announce that the newest release 1.0.11 of the Rcpp package arrived on CRAN and in Debian earlier today. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution–and of course at r2u. The release was finalized three days ago, but given the widespread use and extended reverse dependencies at CRAN it usually takes a few days to be processed. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing—I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.
RPMs of PHP version 8.2.8 are available in remi-modular repository for€ Fedora ââ°Â¥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php82 repository for EL 7.
RPMs of PHP version 8.1.21 are available in remi-modular repository for€ Fedora ââ°Â¥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.
No security fix this month, so no update for version 8.0.29.
webR? wat again?
As described in the doc:
WebR is a version of the statistical language R compiled for the browser and Node.js using WebAssembly, via Emscripten.
The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 10.5.
This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 10.4 relative to previous releases of GCC.
The regex sub-team is announcing the release of
regex 1.9. Theregexcrate is maintained by the Rust project and is the recommended way to use regular expressions in Rust. Its defining characteristic is its guarantee of worst case linear time searches with respect to the size of the string being searched.
8-bit microcontrollers are here to stay despite the rise of 32-bit microcontrollers. Renesas introduced the RL78/G15 entry-level 8-bit microcontroller in a tiny 3x3mm package at the beginning of the year, and now Nuvoton has just unveiled the MUG51 8-bit 8051 microcontroller with a long-term production commitment. The MUG51 is specially designed for battery-free devices such as passive stylus pens and RFID cards. The 8-bit microcontroller embeds 1 KB SRAM, 16KB flash plus 4KB flash for user program loader, various peripherals with up to 24x GPIOs with interrupt, I2C, SPI, UART, DMA, and so on, as well as various timers.
How the modern-day aluminum beverage can was made safer and more eco-friendly by one man’s invention—a riveted tab that opened the can, but stayed attached.
According to a new study there is no correlation between increased youth drinking during COVID and alcohol delivery.
U-M has revised its vaccination policy, no longer requiring Michigan Housing students to receive a dose of bivalent COVID-19 vaccine. The policy is effective July 5.
"...the youngest victim is reportedly one year old..."
Vaccines to stave off the flu, a new COVID variant and now, respiratory syncytial virus could help avert another tripledemic this fall. Unless the public is too crisis-fatigued to care.
With Firefox 115, users on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 will automatically be moved to the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR).
Firefox is the only major browser that still supports users on these operating systems. Moving users to the ESR 115 version of Firefox will allow Mozilla to continue providing security updates until at least September 2024. Users do not need to take additional action to receive these updates.
Two novelists, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in a San Francisco federal court, alleging that its ChatGPT large language model was trained using data from their copyrighted books without consent.
one fine day, THE USER needed to run a windows program… because it’s only available for windows.
A recently reported potential buffer overflow issue in QXmlStreamReader has been assigned the CVE id CVE-2023-37369
Hackers linked to the Truebot malware are exploiting a year-old Netwrix Auditor flaw to break into organizations in the U.S. and Canada.
JumpCloud is responding to an incident that has triggered a reset of all API keys in order to protect customers and their operations.
British telecommunications company Vodafone is anticipating a future in which the power of quantum technology will override existing online security controls and render most smartphone networks vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Google’s July 2023 security updates for Android patches 43 vulnerabilities, including three exploited in the wild.
The personal, financial, and health information of over 28,000 individuals stolen in data breach at Pepsi Bottling Ventures.
Shell confirms that employee personal information has been stolen after the Cl0p ransomware group leaked data allegedly stolen from the energy giant.
Law enforcement authorities have arrested a suspected senior member of the French-speaking Opera1er cybercrime group.
A new Linux kernel vulnerability tracked as StackRot and CVE-2023-3269 shows the exploitability of use-after-free-by-RCU (UAFBR) bugs.
Cisco says a high-severity vulnerability in Nexus 9000 series switches could allow attackers to intercept and modify encrypted traffic.
Cisco Systems Inc. published a security advisory Wednesday warning customers of a high-severity vulnerability in its Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in ACI mode that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to read or modify inter-site encrypted traffic.
A member of U.S. Navy’s red team has published a tool called TeamsPhisher that leverages an unresolved security issue in Microsoft Teams to bypass restrictions for incoming files from users...
A ruling by the European Union's top court in a case brought by the German Federal Cartel Office may result in Facebook being unable to carry out targeted advertising in the political bloc.
The immediate impact of Tuesday's judgment is that Meta, Facebook's parent company, will be unable to use a mix of user data from WhatsApp and Instagram along with data collected from tracking people who visit third-party sites plus data from Facebook to serve personalised advertising.
Meta's new social media app Threads has signed up more than 30 million users in its first 24 hours, proving that yesterday's tech villain can become today's hero.
"When deployed on a person’s device, CSS acts like spyware, allowing adversaries to gain easy access to that device. Any law which would mandate CSS, or any other technology designed to access, analyse or share the content of communications will, without a doubt, undermine encryption, and make everyone’s communications less safe as a result. The laudable aim of protecting children does not change this technical reality."
And, they said, "We have serious reservations whether the technologies imposed by the regulation would be effective: perpetrators would be aware of such technologies and would move to new techniques, services and platforms to exchange CSAM information while evading detection."
The letter concluded: "Finally, the huge number of false positives that can be expected will require a substantial amount of resources while creating serious risks for all users to be identified incorrectly. These resources would be better spent on other approaches to protect children from sexual abuse."
The United Nations General Assembly has approved a resolution to establish an independent body to investigate what happened to more than 130,000 people who went missing during the conflict in Syria over the last 12 years. The Syrian government opposed the resolution, along with Russia, China, Belarus, North Korea, Cuba and Iran. “This is one of the most painful chapters in the Syrian crisis,” says Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president and CEO of the medical nonprofit MedGlobal, as well as a former medical school classmate of President Bashar al-Assad.
Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom (UK) filed a joint application Tuesday instituting proceedings against the Islamic Republic of Iran before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming that Iran has violated its obligations under the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation [...]
Despite Australia’s hopes, the Indian military will not be participating in the Australian Defence Force’s multinational Exercise Talisman Sabre later this month. But that shouldn’t be taken as a reflection of the Australia–India defence relationship.
Taipei relies on maritime imports for nearly 98 percent of its energy, even as Beijing appears increasingly capable of launching a quarantine, blockade, siege, or even invasion of the island.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Thursday that the mutinous chief of Russia’s Wagner group was still in Russia with thousands of fighters, but dismissed speculation that President Vladimir Putin would have Yevgeny Prigozhin killed.
Germany opposes sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, its foreign minister said on July 7, a day after U.S. officials said Washington was planning to provide Kyiv with the weapons, widely denounced for killing and maiming civilians.
On Friday, border control measures entered into force on Lithuanian borders, which will be in force for six days, as Lithuania reinforces security ahead of the NATO summit next week in Vilnius, Latvian Television reported on July 7.
Border control measures have been introduced on Friday and will remain in place for six days as Lithuania is ramping up security for the NATO summit in Vilnius next week.
NATO’s 2022 Madrid summit marked a shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition by including Indo-Pacific regional partners as participants for the first time.
The European Union took a major step early on July 7 in approving plans to boost its anemic production of ammunition and missiles within the 27-nation bloc, to both defend itself and quickly help Ukraine in trying to push back the invasion by Russia.
The UN's nuclear watchdog is "making progress" on inspecting several parts of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant in Ukraine after claims it had been mined, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said on July 7.
According to Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Belarusian service, three camps in Belarus that have been used to train and equip mobilized Russian soldiers are being dismantled. They were able to make this determination by analyzing satellite imagery from Planet Labs.
According to the deal that was announced after his rebellion, Wagner Group military cartel founder Yevgeny Prigozhin should be in Belarus. However, Alexander Lukashenko told a group of journalists on July 6 that Prigozhin was in St. Petersburg.
The Kremlin is not following the movements of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, says Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The ruble fell as low as 94 rubles per dollar on Thursday before making a slight recovery by the end of the trading day.
After the mercenary boss staged a brief insurrection in Russia, the leader of Belarus said his country had taken him in, but now says the Wagner leader was in St. Petersburg and then “maybe he went to Moscow.”
Fighting Russia without long-range weapons is "difficult", Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky has told reporters on a visit to the Czech Republic, adding that their delivery "depends only" on the United States. The Ukrainian president will travel to Istanbul this Friday to hold talks with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hoping to push Kyiv's bid to join NATO and secure more weapons from allies. Follow our live blog for the latest updates on the war in Ukraine. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).
Finland’s membership in the Western military alliance has increased NATO’s borders with Russia by 830 miles — and angered Moscow.
Air defense systems were triggered today in Russia’s Belgorod region, where several UAVs were reportedly been shot down before reaching the capital. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported the incident on his Telegram channel.
Late on July 5, the Kremlin press service announced that Vladimir Putin had been briefed on the state of Russia’s economy by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. Meduza’s special correspondent Margarita Liutova takes a close look at the economic report presented by Mishustin to the president and explains where the minister got his figures, what stands behind them, and what’s missing from the rosy picture of Russia’s unstoppable GDP growth.
Press freedom groups around the world have condemned the brutal attack on Russian journalist Elena Milashina, who was beaten by unknown assailants in the Chechen capital of Grozny on July 4. Milashina, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, was in town to report on Chechnya’s ongoing attacks on LGBTQ people when she was assaulted along with lawyer Alexander Nemov. The attackers broke her fingers, shaved her head and doused her in liquid iodine, which leaves long-lasting stains on a person’s skin. For more, we speak with human rights monitor Anna Dobrovolskaya, the former executive director of Memorial Human Rights Center before the rights group was shut down by the Russian government in late 2021. “It’s a very clear signal that next time it will be even more brutal than that,” Dobrovolskaya says of the attack.
Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is back in Russia weeks after leading a brief rebellion against Moscow, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said on Thursday.
Why it matters: Lukashenko's comments fuel more uncertainty around the deal that saw Prigozhin and his forces end their march toward Moscow nearly two weeks ago in exchange for amnesty and certain security guarantees.
Zoom in: As part of the deal, Prigozhin agreed to move to Belarus, and Minsk offered to allow some Wagner fighters to be stationed in the country.
Finnish President Sauli Niinistö has already discussed possible countermeasures with party chairs of the coalition government.
What will be the long-term aftermath of Russia's Wagner mutiny? Here are four possible paths for Russia's future the West should consider.
The issue of relocation and deployment of the Wagner military group in Belarus has not been resolved and it depends on the decision of Russia and the Wagnerites themselves.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner -- who led a short-lived mutiny last month -- is in Russia and not in Belarus, the leader of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, claimed.
Russia said on July 6 it was expelling nine diplomats from Finland, Russia's neighbor and NATO's newest member, in a tit-for-tat measure.
Russian athletes have reportedly appeared under false names in the list of competitors for Syria at the Arab Games in Algeria, but according to Russia's Sports Ministry there is no foul play.
News Corp has led a campaign to keep its reporter's imprisonment on the news agenda.
/blockquote>
This Friday will mark 100 days since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich began his prison sentence in Russia.
The president of Belarus says the mercenary leader who led a short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin is in Russia and his troops are in their field camps. Thursday's announcement raised new questions about the deal that ended the extraordinary challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s rule. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s claim could not be independently verified, and the Kremlin refused to comment on Yevgeny Prigozhin’s whereabouts. But Russian media have reported he was recently seen at his offices in St. Petersburg. It was not clear if Prigozhin’s presence in Russia would violate the deal. The agreement allowed the head of the Wagner Group military contractor to move to Belarus in exchange for ending the rebellion and a promise of amnesty for him and his troops.
As a result of a Russian strike in Lviv on the night of July 6, debris from a missile hit an apartment building, destroying apartments on two floors. As of 08:00, four people are known to have died, while 32 people were injured, reports RBC-Ukraine. According to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, seven people have been rescued and another 64 people were evacuated.
A major political trial is underway in Moscow. The defendant this time is Oleg Orlov, a well-known dissident, human rights advocate, and co-founder of Memorial, a key civil liberties NGO dissolved by a court decision in 2021 and honored with a Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The formal cause of charges against Orlov is an opinion article he first published in French, posting a Russian translation on Facebook the following day. “They Wanted Fascism and They Got It” is a piece of sharp polemic about Putin’s regime and the causes of its going to war with Ukraine. Although the whole essay is just as outspoken as its title, the prosecution contracted two different sets of “expert witnesses” to prove that it criticizes Russia’s military aggression, violating the Russian law against “discrediting the military.” Meduza’s reporter Kristina Safonova describes the case, how it gained momentum, and how evidence against Orlov is being scraped together from plagiarized undergraduate papers and hired-witness testimonies.
Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, came under a Russian missile strike the night of July 6. According to the city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, this was one of the largest attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.
Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky is coming to ðstanbul today to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoßan.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a growing number of countries have severed diplomatic ties with Moscow and actively condemned its actions. There are, however, a few states that have done the opposite, and moved to strengthen relations with Moscow. Temur Umarov, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explains the case of Kyrgyzstan in an interview with Meduza.
Moscow—The main question that remains unanswered after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion was why he stopped it at the very moment when he had almost reached Moscow. For the day and a half during which the rebellion of Wagner mercenaries led by Prigozhin continued, no one offered any serious resistance to it. Wagner captured two large cities—Rostov and Voronezh—and shot down at least five army helicopters and two planes (causing more damage to Russian aviation than the Ukrainian army had inflicted since the beginning of its counteroffensive on June 4). Prigozhin’s fans were already heading out to meet him on the streets and squares of the capital; much of the government had apparently fled to St. Petersburg; Putin’s whereabouts were unknown, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was hiding somewhere.
We remember the acclaimed Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who died as a result of injuries from a Russian strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk last week, which also killed 12 other people. Amelina was part of a human rights group, Truth Hounds, investigating Russian war crimes. Amelina’s friend Andrey Kurkov, a fellow author and the former president of PEN Ukraine, says the young writer’s death is just the latest in a long string of artists lost to the Russian invasion. “We don’t know when the war is going to end, but it will cost a lot for Ukrainian culture,” says Kurkov.
As the war in Ukraine reaches the 500-day mark, three big things have to go right in order to achieve peace.
The big picture: Whatever happens next will depend in part on how much occupied territory Ukraine can retake. A successful counter-offensive could make it easier to reach a negotiated settlement, but it might also bring another x-factor into play: avoiding nuclear escalation.
The authorities said more than 30 people had been injured and warned that there could still be people trapped under the rubble.
Ukraine has pressed the United States to supply it with the munitions. Here’s a guide to why this type of weapon is controversial and widely banned — and why Kyiv wants it.
TOKYO – Ukraine has submitted its request to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to New Zealand, said the Japanese and New Zealand authorities on Friday.
There are currently around 46,000 people registered as clients in Finland's reception centre system, most of them from Ukraine, according to the Immigration Service.
Finland's Ãâ¦land islands have been demilitarized for over a century as part of a peace treaty with Russia. Since Moscow invaded Ukraine, though, the agreement has come under intense scrutiny. Protests are held almost daily in front of the Russian Consulate in the capital city of the autonomous territory.
Ukraine is seeking cluster munitions, which are known to cause grievous injuries to civilians, as its ammunition supply runs low.
At least 10 people have been killed in a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Lviv, Ukrainian officials said, describing it as the “heaviest attack” on the city’s civilian areas since Russia's full-scale invasion last year.
The United States has decided to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine and is expected to announce on July 7 that they will be included in a new military aid package, according to news reports.
A robust fund-raising operation has been critical in supplying Ukraine’s military. But as the war drags on, contributions have lagged.
Rescuers in Lviv concluded their search in the aftermath of Thursday’s strike. In southern Ukraine, two people were killed in a Russian drone attack.
The brief mutiny by the Wagner mercenary force last month has given Belarus’s autocratic leader Aleksandr G. Lukashenko an opening to upend his subservient relationship with Moscow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in Prague on July 6 for a visit with senior Czech officials€ as Kyiv pushes for NATO membership and more weapons that can be deployed in its ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces.
Belarus appears to be dismantling tent camps on Belarusian territory used to train Russian soldiers, raising questions about whether Moscow is in need of more troops at the front to halt Ukraine's large-scale counteroffensive.
The United States and its Western allies clashed with Russia and Iran at the UN Security Council on July 6 over Tehran’s advancing uranium enrichment and its reported supply of combat drones to Moscow being used to attack Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is set to hold talks with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 7 as Kyiv pushes for NATO membership and more weapons that can be deployed in its ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces.
Granting NATO membership to Ukraine is critical to ensuring it wins the war against Russia quickly and decisively.
The attempted putsch by Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his Wagner troops in late June is perhaps best understood as a symptom of Russia’s ongoing imperial decline, writes Richard Cashman and Lesia Ogryzko.
As we assess the fallout from the Wagner revolt, it no longer makes sense to be afraid of a new Russian collapse. On the contrary, the time has come to begin preparing for the possibility of a post-Putin Russia, writes Oleksiy Goncharenko.
A few days before the anniversary of the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine, I received an offer to create a performance for an exhibition called “How I've Been Feeling Lately".
Rehearsals July 5 for Thursday's grand choral concert at the Latvian Song and Dance Festival included a rousing rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy i slava, i volia, as noted by the Latvian Foreign Ministry.
At the NATO summit in Vilnius next week, there will be no invitation of Ukraine to join the Alliance, the Foreign Minister and the newly elected President of Latvia Edgars RinkēviÃÂs said in an interview with Latvian Radio on July 7.
In the first six months of his term, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has somewhat succeeding in curbing the damage his successor Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called Trump of the Tropics, did to the Amazon rainforest.
According to sources close to the situation who wish to remain anonymous, approximately 20-30 employees were affected in this recent bout of job cuts, adding to the 50 individuals who were let go just a few months ago. Most of the cuts appear to impact its Singapore headquarters.
Campaign has come to understand that the impact of these layoffs have reportedly been felt across multiple departments, including marketing, engineering, product, people and culture, and the entire Circles X team, its cloud platform. Reportedly one of the company's co-founders was also asked to leave after pressure from the board, and his position changed to a non-executive director.
U.S. job openings slipped in May but remained at levels high enough to illustrate that the American labor market remains resilient in the face of sharply higher interest rates.
Employers posted 9.8 million job vacancies, down from 10.3 million in April, the Labor Department said Thursday. But layoffs fell slightly, and more Americans quit their jobs -- a sign they were confident they could find better pay or working conditions elsewhere.
The stock market rally retreated Thursday as strong economic data sent Treasury yields soaring, though indexes pared morning losses somewhat. The ADP Employment Report estimated private payrolls skyrocketed 497,000 in June, more than double forecasts. The ISM services sector index rose more than expected. Initial jobless claims rose modestly, but the four-week average fell while continuing claims slipped. Announced layoff plans declined significantly last month.
There were 171,000 fewer enterprise IT-related jobs last month according to an analysis of Friday’s federal jobs report
Seattle-area office vacancy rates have more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels, reflecting the ongoing impact of macroeconomic uncertainty and work-from-home policies on the region’s reeling commercial real estate sector.
Vacancy rates rose to 12.2% in the second quarter, up from 11.2% in the first quarter and 2019’s low mark of 5.79%, according to a new report from commercial real estate firm Kidder Mathews. It’s the sixth consecutive quarterly increase in regional vacancy.
US Treasury Secretary says she seeks to protect ‘national security’ and reestablish communications.
High inflation, increased interest rates, and a weaker economic outlook are challenging the resilience of Finnish banks’ primary borrowing sectors: households and businesses. The Financial Supervisory Authority (FIN-FSA) of Finland reports that while the financial position of households and firms has generally remained reasonable, and non-performing loans are low, there are early signs of growing credit risks associated with housing company loans and corporate loans.
In a recent development, it has come to light that Twitter is considering legal action against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, over concerns related to its newly launched Threads app. News platform Semafor has obtained a letter sent by Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he asserts that Meta utilised Twitter's trade secrets and intellectual property to develop Threads.
Elon Musk didn’t have to take Twitter to the bottom of the ocean in a shoddy submersible to implode. Meanwhile, Zuck is resurrecting an old concept to fill the gap.
We could be about to witness an InnBucks kind of launch for Threads. If you had forgotten, Threads is the latest in a growing list of Twitter alternatives. Could this one be the one to unseat Twitter, or at least offer proper competition in the microblogging space? Threads has everything going for it at launch.
Instagram Threads is now official. And the truth is that Meta’s new social media, which wants to compete with Elon Musk’s platform, has some similarities to Twitter, to the point that Elon Musk is considering suing Instagram Threads for plagiarism.
Alex Spiro, Twitter’s lawyer, reportedly sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arguing that they used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to create Instagram Threads.
Learn how to permanently delete Twitter account on desktop. Follow these simple steps to deactivate and delete your account securely and permanently.
Mark Zuckerberg has launched Threads, a clone of Twitter designed to lure people away from Elon Musk's $44 billion 'plaything'.
Hong Kong’s District Council overhaul, along with other developments including the Beijing-imposed national security law, “raises serious questions about the state of fundamental freedoms, democracy and political pluralism in Hong Kong,” a European Union (EU) spokesperson has said.
The Hong Kong government has slammed “some other countries, organisations, and politicians” for “unsubstantiated accusations” against national security police operations.
Hong Kong national security police have detained one more man in connection with an alleged conspiracy to collude with foreign forces by providing financial support to self-exiled activists.
Meta’s new microblogging app Threads is emerging as a potential threat to Twitter’s lock on politicians and political observers seeking real-time news and debate.
The latest: Within 16 hours, the Instagram-linked app had been downloaded more than 30 million times — making it the most rapidly downloaded app of all time. Twitter has already threatened legal action against Meta for creating a "copycat."
Walt Nauta, an aide to former President Trump, pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges related to his handling of classified documents.
Data: Axios Reporting; Chart: Jared Whalen/Axios
Meta's new Twitter copycat app, Threads, may seem like an attempt to undercut Elon Musk while he's down — but it's also a continuation of the company's longstanding "clone and conquer" product strategy.
The Biden administration is appealing a court ruling that would limit government officials and agencies from communicating with social media companies on content moderation, according to court filings Wednesday.
With the recent torrent of repugnant and oligarchic rulings from the US Supreme Court, it’s easy to overlook another ghastly ruling from the federal bench: US District Judge Terence Doughty’s sweeping, incoherent injunction holding that most federal government officials cannot contact employees at key social media platforms and Internet companies. Doughty’s diktat takes hold as he prepares to rule on the outcome of a broader case brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri claiming that the Biden administration improperly pressured digital concerns to tamp down on misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The complaint, which also included Gateway Pundit impresario Jim Hoft as a plaintiff, also laments the alleged crackdowns on the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story and on false claims about the 2020 election’s fraudulence.
The injunction comes in a lawsuit brought by Louisiana, Missouri, and several individuals alleging federal government agencies and officials illegally pushed the platforms to censor content about COVID safety measures and vaccines, elections, and Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other issues. The court sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a broad injunction that does not clearly track First Amendment standards.
Oddly, the injunction includes exceptions that permit some of the most concerning government interactions and indicates that the court may have been more concerned with the subject matter of the government’s complaints—for instance, posts encouraging vaccine hesitancy—than with drawing a workable line on the government’s conduct.
Supporters of the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny have erected a replica of the prison cell where the Kremlin critic spent six months.
Members of the public are “welcome” to report books that may endanger national security to the government department that oversees the city’s public library system, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) has said. In a press release on Thursday, LCSD said it had launched new channels to collect views on library collections.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has new leadership, with the appointment last week of P.J. Lechleitner as acting director. ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration, making Lechleitner’s appointment as acting director more significant — and potentially likely to last through the end of Biden’s term.
The big question is whether Lechleitner is willing to move forward on a reform agenda that has been stalled for the last year. The good news is that in June, the Supreme Court removed a major obstacle to ICE reforms, shutting down litigation brought by anti-immigrant attorneys general in Texas and Louisiana that had aimed to force Biden to pursue a draconian deportation agenda. (The ACLU filed an amicus brief in the case).
The ugly politics of immigration remain a major barrier. House Republicans are still trying to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — Lechleitner’s boss — over his handling of the border, although they have not been able to muster the votes. Lechleitner will need to overcome the chilling effect of the threatened impeachment proceedings, as well as pre-presidential election anxieties around immigration.
But there are common-sense, impactful changes that Lechleitner can make as acting ICE director — ones that will help President Biden show that he’s made good on his campaign promises. Here are three of them: [...]
With multiple uncertainties in the air, including the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) for potential PTAB reforms, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023, third-party funding disclosures, jury damages higher than before, and multiple FRAND decisions, patent litigation has entered a bear market. Delaware went from the number two patent venue, to number three.
The European Patent Office has nullified EP 2 233 127, belonging to German pharmaceutical company Stada, following multiple parties filing oppositions against the patent.
As Professor Crouch has noted, the Federal Circuit has granted rehearing en banc in the design patent case of LKQ v. GM. The main question raised in the petition for rehearing—and in the court’s order granting that petition—is the continuing viability of the Rosen primary reference requirement for evaluating whether a design is obvious under €§€ 103.
The court has ordered briefing on the issue of whether Rosen and Durling (the Federal Circuit case that expanded upon the Rosen approach) were overruled, abrogated, or otherwise affected by the Supreme Court’s decision in KSR and, if so, what the test should look like going forward. For my own thoughts on those issues, see this article and this post. (Tl;dr: The primary reference requirement is good but the Federal Circuit has applied it too strictly.)
In this post, however, I wanted to discuss another issue raised by the court. In granting LKQ’s petition for rehearing, the court asked:
[...]
If implemented, the proposed rule changes could seriously damage the system of “inter partes reviews,” or IPRs, that Congress created 10 years ago. The IPR system is far from perfect, but it has been effective in holding patent trolls accountable for some of their outrageous and harmful patent claims. In the 10 years it’s been operating, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has thrown out thousands of patent claims that never should have been issued in the first place.€
At EFF, we used the IPR process to crowd-fund a challenge to the Personal Audio “podcasting patent” that tried to extract patent royalty payments from U.S. podcasters. We won that proceeding and our victory was confirmed on appeal.
Earlier this month, we asked supporters to speak out and file public comments with the USPTO asking them to withdraw these proposed rules. The response was fantastic. More than 600 supporters filed comments using our suggested language, and countless more chose to explain their own reasons for opposing this proposal.€
The May-June 2023 (Vol. 113 No. 3) issue of The Trademark Reporter (TMR) has arrived. [pdf here]. Willard Knox, Editor-in-Chief, summarizes the contents as follows (and below): "This issue offers our TMR readers an article guiding brand owners and professionals through the case law on special remedies for counterfeiting under the Lanham Act, an article exploring the tension between trademarks that contravene “public policy” and “morality” and freedom of expression under the laws of the European Union, and a review of a book offering a proactive, business-focused approach to brand protection and anticounterfeiting."
The Rolling Stones have filed a ‘Motion to Dismiss’ the copyright infringement lawsuit by Spanish songwriter Sergio Garcia Fernandez. The legal filing outlines several reasons for dismissal, including Plaintiff’s choice of improper venue, failure to state a claim, and lack of personal jurisdiction over a Europe-based rights management company.
Here’s a fascinating tax hack from Belgium (listen to the details here, episode #484 of “No Such Thing as a Fish,” at 28:00).
Basically, it’s about a music festival on the border between Belgium and Holland. The stage was in Holland, but the crowd was in Belgium. When the copyright collector came around, they argued that they didn’t have to pay any tax because the audience was in a different country. Supposedly it worked.
Outselling books by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells in their day, Marie Corelli’s occult romance novels brim with fantasies of telepathy, mesmerism, and radioactivity. Steven Connor revisits The Life Everlasting (1911), where the recent discovery of radium shapes the mechanics of phantasmal machines and psychic forces able to pass through all impediments.