Esse Health, a healthcare provider based in St. Louis, Missouri, is notifying over 263,000 patients that their personal and health information was stolen in an April cyberattack.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/esse-health-says-recent-data-breach-affects-over-263-000-patients/

Building automation giant Johnson Controls is notifying individuals whose data was stolen in a massive ransomware attack that impacted the company's operations worldwide in September 2023.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/johnson-controls-starts-notifying-people-affected-by-2023-breach/

https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/iranian-cyber-actors-may-target-vulnerable-us-networks-and-entities-interest

Full PDF Report.

The Russian propaganda operation targeted at media organisations and fact-checkers is still going strong. Operation Overload, which we first documented in June 2024 is now leveraging AI generated content, impersonation techniques and is expanding to more platforms such as TikTok and BlueSky. Telegram and direct emails to newsrooms remain a daily dissemination technique used to attempt to create a sense of urgency amongst their targets. Since we last published an update about the operation last September, some legitimate outlets regularly fall in the trap.

Operation Overload: An AI fuelled escalation of the Kremlin-linked propaganda effort - CheckFirst

^{Guillaume K. (Check First)}

Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.

This July, we'll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
• !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.

🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫

Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.

The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.

As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn't seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn't..

The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).

Previously, our ISP would assign new IP's to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.

However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.

With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP's in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.

We'll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:

• Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
• Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
• Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.

As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could've been, and we're extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! 😁

📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿

Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.

While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we'd love it if you shared it in this month's meta to help others do the same.

John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, "Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America." This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful "No Kings" protest, called "Good Trouble Lives On" in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis' death of cancer at 80 years old.

While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a 'US' problem, it's an 'us' problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine's resistance to Russia's imperialism, Palestine's struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.

🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾‍🏭

Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It's the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we're far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.

With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now's the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!

In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I'm hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! 😁

::: spoiler 🔽 Community Projects🔽
* First off, seek out a local group already engaging in mutual aid in your area. That could take the form of a Food Not Bombs chapter, a local Anarchist group, or even a progressive church if you're in a more rural area and that's all that's around. This is possibly the best method to meet like-minded folk who you can befriend, and who will already be open to the idea of fostering and building community with you, and might even join in on some of these other projects!
* If know of an area near you where food security is an issue, building a community garden is a great way to alleviate that while also fostering a sense of community.
* If you have a front yard, that could be a great place to create a small community garden that your friends and neighbors could partake in with you! But If you live in an HOA which doesn't allow that, it might be worth considering reaching out to receptive neighbors and collectively joining the HOA board to change the rules. Alternatively, if you can manage to find a larger piece of land to, that would be ripe for a . Garden's like these are incredibly powerful community building tools, and could also be a main source of food to stock your community fridge with!
* Little Free Libraries are a great way to spread goodwill with your neighbors, and encourage kids in your neighborhood to read. It's also a good place stock with cool zines! (Check out our zines community at !zines@slrpnk.net for info on how to make them and other ideas)
* Engage in some Guerilla Gardening! It's not only fun to do with friends, but (over time) can create green spaces with lots of shade, or even become , which can be a gathering place for your community to hang out and connect (and that shade will be critical to making climate change a little more bearable too). Just be sure to use native species in your area! They're already adapted to your local climate, and won't out compete with other native plants. Do your research!
:::

🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪

Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction 😀

SLRPNK Community Resources:

Community Wiki - Moderators: you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!

Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)

Etherpad - Collaborative document editor

This question was asked by mike@flipboard.social on Dot Social's latest episode about the blogosphere on Fedi.

johnonolan@mastodon.xyz: "we wanted to connect Ghost blogs to each other, but then we discovered ActivityPub"

pfefferle@mastodon.social: "we wanted to connect WordPress blogs to each other, and ActivityPub has been the most successful attempt"

[paraphrased for brevity]

Did you catch the subtext? Both those answers, and my own answer with NodeBB contain the same seed idea... that we originally wanted to connect our software with itself only. We went through years of building a company and vying for profitability that it never occurred to us to work towards cross compatibility with anyone besides out own software.

Then ActivityPub came along and quite literally expanded the potential for the entire endeavour a hundred-fold, because not only are you connecting your own software to each other, but every other ActivityPub enabled software in existence. Blogs, microblogs, forums, image boards, etc. all with a built-in user base ready from the get-go.

It's no wonder that after discovering AP, it becomes the protocol to utilise.

In modern LLM applications like RAG and Agents, the model is constantly fed new context. For example, in RAG, we retrieve relevant documents and stuff them into the prompt.

The issue is that this dynamically retrieved context doesn't always appear at the beginning of the input sequence. Traditional KV caching only reuses a "common prefix," so if the new information isn't at the very start, the cache hit rate plummets, and your GPU ends up recomputing the same things over and over.

CacheBlend changes the game by allowing for the reuse of pre-computed KV caches regardless of their position in the input sequence.

This makes it possible to achieve a 100% KV Cache hit rate in applications like RAG. The performance gains are significant:

• Faster Time-To-First-Token (TTFT): Get your initial response much quicker.
• More Throughput: Serve significantly more users with the same hardware.
• Almost lossless Output Quality: All of this is achieved with little degradation in the model's generation quality.

CacheBlend works by intelligently handling the two main challenges of reusing non-prefix caches:

• Positional Encoding Update: It efficiently updates positional encodings to ensure the model always knows the correct position of each token, even when we're stitching together cached and new data.
• Selective Attention Recalculation: Instead of recomputing everything, it strategically recalculates only the minimal cross-attention needed between the new and cached chunks to maintain perfect generation quality.

An interactive CacheBlend demo is available at: github.com/LMCache/LMCache-Exa…

LMCache-Examples/demo-rag-blending at main · LMCache/LMCache-Examples

Contribute to LMCache/LMCache-Examples development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-senate-strikes-ai-regulation-ban-trump-megabill-2025-07-01/

The violence last week in Kafr Malik, in the West Bank, comes amid a surge in assaults by Israeli settlers. It also set off a chain of violence in the area.

By Fatima AbdulKarim
July 1, 2025 Updated 1:56 p.m. ET

"The attackers threw another firebomb into the bedroom where Mr. Afeef’s newborn nephew was being lulled to sleep, scorching furniture and leaving blackened marks on the floor and walls, the family said. The damage was visible when Times reporters visited on Friday.
[...]
Soon after, Israeli forces arrived and opened fired at Palestinians instead of stopping the rioters, according to multiple witnesses.

The soldiers killed three people, according to the Palestinian health ministry. [...]Nine others were injured, some gravely..."

archive.ph/j6Mce

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/world/middleeast/israel-west-bank-palestinians-attack.html

The violence last week in Kafr Malik, in the West Bank, comes amid a surge in assaults by Israeli settlers. It also set off a chain of violence in the area.

By Fatima AbdulKarim
July 1, 2025 Updated 1:56 p.m. ET

"The attackers threw another firebomb into the bedroom where Mr. Afeef’s newborn nephew was being lulled to sleep, scorching furniture and leaving blackened marks on the floor and walls, the family said. The damage was visible when Times reporters visited on Friday.
[...]
Soon after, Israeli forces arrived and opened fired at Palestinians instead of stopping the rioters, according to multiple witnesses.

The soldiers killed three people, according to the Palestinian health ministry. [...]Nine others were injured, some gravely..."

archive.ph/j6Mce

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/world/middleeast/israel-west-bank-palestinians-attack.html

Republican Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday that despite voting in favor of the sweeping tax and spending package, she wants the House to return the "One Big Beautiful Bill" to the Senate for further work.

"My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet," Murkowski told reporters today.

Murkowski's vote was pivotal in the Senate's razor-thin 51–50 passage of the bill. The Alaska senator had been the focus of intense lobbying by GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, to secure her support amid concerns over Medicaid cuts and food assistance reductions. The bill now heads to the House, where its future remains uncertain.

Big, Beautiful Bill: Republican Lisa Murkowski Urges House Not to Vote on Bill She Just Approved

Sen. Lisa Murkowski backs Trump's megabill but urges House to return it for fixes, citing Medicaid cuts and tax impacts on Alaska.

^{Amanda Castro (Newsweek)}

In modern LLM applications like RAG and Agents, the model is constantly fed new context. For example, in RAG, we retrieve relevant documents and stuff them into the prompt.

The issue is that this dynamically retrieved context doesn't always appear at the beginning of the input sequence. Traditional KV caching only reuses a "common prefix," so if the new information isn't at the very start, the cache hit rate plummets, and your GPU ends up recomputing the same things over and over.

CacheBlend changes the game by allowing for the reuse of pre-computed KV caches regardless of their position in the input sequence.

This makes it possible to achieve a 100% KV Cache hit rate in applications like RAG. The performance gains are significant:

• Faster Time-To-First-Token (TTFT): Get your initial response much quicker.
• More Throughput: Serve significantly more users with the same hardware.
• Almost lossless Output Quality: All of this is achieved with little degradation in the model's generation quality.

CacheBlend works by intelligently handling the two main challenges of reusing non-prefix caches:

• Positional Encoding Update: It efficiently updates positional encodings to ensure the model always knows the correct position of each token, even when we're stitching together cached and new data.
• Selective Attention Recalculation: Instead of recomputing everything, it strategically recalculates only the minimal cross-attention needed between the new and cached chunks to maintain perfect generation quality.

An interactive CacheBlend demo is available at: github.com/LMCache/LMCache-Exa…

LMCache-Examples/demo-rag-blending at main · LMCache/LMCache-Examples

Contribute to LMCache/LMCache-Examples development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-relaxes-rule-to-allow-for-wider-phone-support-on-t-mobiles-cellular

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/01/kirsten-gillibrand-zohran-mamdani-00436031

Moderate 3.8 mi out and back
1,332 ft elevation gain
Hiked 6/3/25

Beginning at the former Yoho NP campground, this short but steep trail takes you to one of the many great hoodoos found along the Canadian Rockies. As the trail crosses multiple washout areas, the trail degrades in places but remains manageable. A split towards the end takes you to different views which are both pretty cool, but both washed out a lot/steep.

The view up at the hoodoos from the lower trail terminus. Trees grow in the more stable sections of the hill.

An upstream view of Hoodoo creek taken from the walking bridge. Mountains may be seen in the distance.

This section of the lower hoodoos trail was very degraded, with atleast one foothold wedged into the slide.