David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates on Monday for the Linux 5.3 kernel.
Btrfs for Linux 5.3 doesn't present any shiny new features but is mostly focused on bug fixes and low-level code improvements.
One of the internal changes worth pointing out for Btrfs is changing its CRC32C usage so that it can be hardware-assisted on more architectures where native instructions or optimized code paths are available. More Btrfs code has also been positioned for more checksum algorithms moving forward.
Drew DeVault of Sway/WLROOTS fame has been dabbling with his first Vulkan extension as part of work with other upstream Wayland developers on DRM lease support and better supporting VR headsets under Wayland.
Being worked on in-step with DRM lease protocol support for Wayland, Drew is also drafting a "VK_EXT_acquire_wl_display" extension for Vulkan. That new extension is akin to VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display for X11 but for working on Wayland. The existing VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display extension allows a Vulkan application / game engine to take exclusive control of a display currently associated with an X11 screen. This goes along with the DRM lease support and was spearheaded by Red Hat, Valve, NVIDIA, and Intel as part of Steam VR support on Linux.
The past few weeks while AMD open-source developers were busy getting their Navi enablement code public and aligned for the Linux 5.3 merge window, the display core "DC" frequent code drops ceased. Every so often AMD developers volley their DC patches from their internal development trees to the public mailing list for queuing ahead of the next cycle. Now that Navi is out there and getting stabilized, they've issued a new set of DC patches and it's coming in heavy.
Given that it's been a while during Navi review and upstreaming, the AMDGPU DC patches sent out on Monday are 87 patches that add nearly ten thousand lines of new code.
Just over one week after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT "Navi" graphics cards began shipping, the AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver support is now available for these first RDNA offerings.
AMDVLK is the official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver and is based on the same sources as the Windows/Linux Radeon Software Vulkan driver. The open-source AMDVLK, however, uses their LLVM-based shader compiler rather than AMD's long-standing proprietary shader compiler. AMDVLK is an alternative to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by the "community" (principally, Red Hat, Google, and Valve) that did see launch-day support last week for Navi.
Ccleaner is one of the popular system optimizers and cleaning software for Windows operating system. In this post, we will have a look into the list of best CCleaner alternatives for Ubuntu based operating system.
Emberlight, a roguelike dungeon crawler from Quarter Onion Games is releasing with Linux support on August 13th and it does sound like it could be interesting.
Quarter Onion Games are saying it will be a "true roguelike dungeon crawler" and while they don't go on to explain what makes it "true" versus other games, I still love the sound of it. The gameplay loop in this especially, as you will absorb abilities used by enemies which eventually corrupts you. Eventually turning to darkness, you become the boss for the next run-through along with everything you provided them with.
Rings of Saturn from Kodera Software is something I've written about a couple of times and it seems like supporting Linux and Mac has been worth it for the developer.
It's currently doing a hybrid crowdfunding/Early Access model on itch.io, with it just recently breaking one thousand dollars. The developer recently shared this on Twitter, showing that close to half of the backers have been from Linux and Mac...
Defend The Keep from Vanille Games offers a familiar Tower Defense formula, with a few extra spices thrown in to make it worthy of your attention.
Ah yes, now I can live out my dream of not just walking with the dinosaurs but to actually live and breathe as one. Path of Titans is planning full Linux support.
Kind Words from Popcannibal (Girls Like Robots, Make Sail) is a pretty sweet chilled out game, one where you write letters while listening to some seriously chilled out beats.
Well, this is certainly something unique. Kingdoms of the Dump, a SNES-styled RPG with plenty of modern touches is currently on Kickstarter. Two things make it interesting: It's made with the FOSS game engine Godot Engine and the two main creators are actual janitors chasing their dream.
The final API so far in this mini-series on new APIs in the GLib 2.62 series is g_array_binary_search(), put together by Emmanuel Fleury and based on code by Christian Hergert. It’s due to be released in 2.61.2 soon. But first, a reminder about GLib version numbering.
Like the rest of GNOME’s official module set, GLib follows an odd/even versioning scheme, where every odd minor version number, like 2.61.x, is an unstable release building up to an even minor version number, like 2.62.x, which is stable. APIs may be added in unstable releases. They may be modified or even removed (if they haven’t been in a stable release yet). So all of the APIs I’ve blogged about recently still have a chance to be tweaked or dropped if people find problems with them. So if you see a problem or think that one of these APIs would be awkward to use in some way, please say, sooner rather than later! They need fixing before they’re in a stable release.
Feren OS July 2019 Snapshot has been released on 13-July-2019 after 3 months of development. It offers 64 Bit Architecture and the 32 Bit Architecture.
Feren OS is desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Linux Mint’s main edition.
This release comes with a set of minor changes and improvements over the April 2019 Snapshot.
Clonezilla live 2.6.2-15 Released on 12-July-2019, which includes Major Enhancements and Bug Fixes.
Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image or Norton Ghost. It allows users to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.
The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team recently wrote about our face-to-face meeting where we developed a team mission statement and developed a framework for making our workload more manageable. Having more focus will allow us to progress higher priority work for multiple stakeholders and move the needle on more initiatives in a more efficient manner than how we are working right now.
During the F2F we walked through the process of how to gracefully remove ourselves from applications that are not fitting our mission statement. The next couple of months will be a transition phase as we want to ensure continuity and cause minimum disruption to the community. To assist in that strategy, we analysed our applications and came up with four classifications to which they could belong.
In my previous two posts I looked at the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware and at the procedure for installing and booting the new Raspbian Buster Operating System on the Pi 4. With those basic steps out of the way, now it's time to look at both the hardware and software in more detail.
The first thing I want to mention is that when I wrote the previous post about Raspbian, I had not noticed that there is an updated version of Raspbian Buster (2019-07-10) available. This version was released sort of quietly (without the usual blog post announcing and explaining it), although there are release notes for it if you are interested. This release is extremely good news, because it fixes some of the biggest problems that I mentioned in my previous post...
Some of you know I have been recently experimenting a bit more with WebXR than a WebVR and when we talk about mobile Mixed Reality, ARkit and ARCore is something which plays a pivotal role to map and understand the environment inside our applications.
I am planning to write a series of blog posts on how you can start developing WebXR applications now and play with them starting with the basics and then going on to using different features of it. But before that, I planned to pen down this series of how actually the "world mapping" works in arcore and arkit. So that we have a better understanding of the Mixed Reality capabilities of the devices we will be working with.
As an online business owner and/or site administrator it is important that you are always ahead of probable data damage by having a data contingency plan. On WordPress, this process has been simplified for all levels of users in the form of backup plugins that can enable you to automate full or partial backups which you can easily restore from later on.
Today, we bring you a list of the 10 best plugins for backing up your WordPress site. They all feature a clean modern UI, in active development with millions of downloads, and most of them are 100% free!
The word "Arduino" often invokes a wide range of opinions and sometimes emotion. For many, it represents a very low bar to entry into the world of microcontrollers. This world before 2003 often required costly, obscure and closed-source development tools. Arduino has been a great equalizer, blowing the doors off the walled garden. Arduino now represents a huge ecosystem of hardware that speaks a (mostly) common language and eases transition from one hardware platform to another. Today, if you are a company that sells microcontrollers, it's in your best interest to get your dev boards working with Arduino. It offers a low-friction path to getting your products into lots of hands quickly.
It's also important to note that Arduino's simplicity does not inhibit digging deep into the microcontroller. Nothing stops you from directly twiddling registers and using advanced features. It does, however, decrease your portability between boards.
Carbon fiber composites are incredibly strong for their weight; that’s why they’re key to the newest aircraft designs. However, they’re only strong in one direction, so they’re generally layered or woven in grid patterns before being shaped into structures. That means one set of fibers carries the load some of the time, and another set carries it at other times—which is not the most efficient use of the material.
In 2014, Hemant Bheda was CEO of Quantum Polymers, a company that makes extruded plastic rods, plates, and other shapes for machined parts. The company used chopped up carbon fiber in some of its materials, but a potential customer asked for a material which would require continuous carbon fiber to be embedded in a polymer material in carefully laid paths that would give the material super mechanical properties.
In modern operating systems, each process has its own address space and one thread of control. However, in practice we often face situations requiring several concurrent tasks within a single process and with access to the same process components: structures, open file descriptors, etc.
There are several Python code checkers available. For example, a lot of developers enjoy using Pylint or Flake8 to check their code for errors. These tools use static code analysis to check your code for bugs or naming issues. Flake8 will also check your code to see if you are adhering to PEP8, Python’s style guide.
Back in February, I attended the WG21 C++ standards committee meeting in rainy Kona, Hawaii (yes, it rained most of the week). This report is so late that we’re now preparing for the next meeting, which will take place mid-July in Cologne.
As usual, I spent the majority of my time in the Library Working Group (for LWG; for details on the various Working Groups and Study Groups see Standard C++: The Committee). The purpose of the LWG is to formalize the specification of the C++ Standard Library, i.e. the second “half” of the C++ standard (although in terms of page count it’s closer to three quarters than half). With a new C++20 standard on the horizon, and lots of new features that people want added to the standard library, the LWG has been very busy trying to process the backlog of new proposals forwarded by the Library Evolution Working Group (LEWG).
One of the main tasks at the Kona meeting was to review the “Ranges Design Cleanup” proposal. The cleanup involves a number of fixes and improvements to the new Ranges library, addressing issues that came up during the review of the previous (much larger) proposal to add the Ranges library, which is one of the biggest additions to the C++20 library (most of the other significant additions to C++20 affect the core language, without much library impact). In fact, I’d say it’s one of the biggest additions to the C++ standard library since the first standard in 1998. The Ranges library work overhauls the parts of the standard that originated in the Standard Template Library (STL), i.e. iterators, algorithms, and containers, to re-specify them in terms of C++ Concepts. This has been a multi-year effort that has now landed in the C++20 working draft, following multiple proposals and several meetings of wording review by LWG.
JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. This format is a popular method of storing data in key-value arrangements so it can be parsed easily later. Don’t let the name fool you, though: You can use JSON in Python—not just JavaScript—as an easy way to store data, and this article demonstrates how to get started.
So far, just 27 ERS staff out of 250 have committed to moving to the Kansas City area, according to the employee tallies.
The UDSA argues the move will save $300 million over 15 years, but critics have said their cost-benefit analysis was shoddy and did not follow guidelines.
A different cost-benefit analysis from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association found the move would cost taxpayers between $83 million and $182 million.
The boat was made by SeaKIT, and the same vessel helped an international team of hydrographers, funded by the Japanese non-profit Nippon Foundation, win the $4m (€£3.2m) Shell Ocean Discovery Xprize for advances in autonomously mapping the oceans.
Now Hushcraft wants SeaKIT to be used for transporting cargo, hence mounting the 5kg box of oysters - a local delicacy - on to the vessel and sending it to Ostend. But is there a market for it?
Of course, people don't need training to learn something; often, people learn by researching answers, talking to colleagues, reflecting, experimenting, or adapting to changes. In fact, recent estimates suggest that between 70% to 80% of all job-related knowledge isn't learned in training but rather informally on-the-job. That isn't to say that formal training isn't effective; training can be very effective, but it is a precise type of intervention. It simply isn't practical to formally train someone on most aspects of a job, especially as those jobs become more complex.
Tests were conducted on MacBook Air variants with different internal storage options and the drop in the write speeds were witnessed in every variant regardless of the internal storage.
With smartphones from various tech companies falling prey to the exploding game, it seems like it’s Apple’s turn, as this time an iPhone caught fire in Bakersfield, California.
It is suggested that 11-year-old Kayla Ramos was sitting in her sister’s bedroom and was holding the iPhone 6 in her hands. She mostly used it for watching YouTube videos and sometimes gave it to her younger siblings.
Why did it come to this? This problem was created because the USB-C connectors were designed to replace all of the previous USB connectors at the same time as vastly increasing what the cable could do in power, data, and display dimensions. The new connector may be and virtually impossible to plug in improperly (no USB superposition problem, no grabbing the wrong end of the cable), but sacrificed for that simplicity is the ability to intuitively know whether the system you've connected together has all of the functionality possible. The USB spec also cannot simply mandate that all USB-C cables have the maximum number of wires all the time because that would vastly increase BOM cost for cases where the cable is just used for charging primarily.
How can we fix this? Unfortunately, it's a tough problem that has to involve user education. [...]
According to third-party data provided by NetMarketShare, Windows 7 continues to be one of the most popular choices for desktop users.
The threat of cybercrime constantly looms over business leaders – and it becomes more urgent as cyber attacks become more sophisticated. In 2019, security breaches happen more frequently, and the associated financial hit has increased, according to research from Accenture.
Notably, the report points out that hackers increasingly target humans – the “weakest link in cyber defenses” – at all levels of organizations, through tactics like ransomware and phishing. (Witness the recent wave of ransomware attacks against U.S. cities, large and small.) That’s why it’s becoming essential for everyone – not just security professionals – to be well-versed in risk and their organization’s security efforts.
Security is one of the most important considerations for running in any environment, and using open source software is a great way to handle security without going over budget in your corporate environment or for your home setup. It is easy to talk about the concepts of security, but it's another thing to understand the tools that will get you there. This tutorial explains how to set up security using Jenkins with Anchore.
There are many ways to run Kubernetes. Using Minikube, a prepackaged virtual machine (VM) environment designed for local testing, reduces the complexity of running an environment.
There’s a reason we have beta versions of software: all the kinks need to be worked out. This is also why using beta versions always come with warnings and disclaimers that you’re using the software at your own risk.
Users of the iOS 13 beta have discovered that there’s a bug that makes it easy to access the data in “Website & App Passwords” in the Settings app. Certainly, this is something Apple needs to get fixed before the official release, expected for September.
Bulgaria has suffered what has been described as the biggest data leak in its history. The stolen data, which hackers emailed to local media on July 15, originates from the country’s tax reporting service – the National Revenue Agency (NRA).
The breach contains the personal data of 5 million citizens, local outlet Capital reports. To put that into perspective, Bulgaria has a population of 7 million. Among other things, the trove includes personal identifiable numbers, addresses, and even income data.
In just under a week, the contest to become the next leader of the UK Conservative party—and by extension, the country’s next prime minister—will come to a close. Traders aren’t waiting to find out who wins: they’ve already decided it’s bad news. Both candidates, current foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson, who previously held the same position, have pushed the UK on a path to a destabilizing “no-deal Brexit” at the deadline of Oct. 31.
In a debate yesterday, both said a crucial part of the previously negotiated exit deal—the Irish backstop, which is like an insurance policy to avoid imposing a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland—had to be removed from any agreement between the UK and EU. But the EU has repeatedly said the backstop is an essential part of the withdrawal agreement.
With Hunt and Johnson thus raising the chances that a deal both sides can agree on won’t be reached by the Halloween deadline, the pound is down against its major peers. At the time of writing, sterling was 0.7% weaker against the US dollar and down 0.4% against the euro, despite better than expected labor market data published today.
It’s hard to tell where Twitter’s actual bar for “hateful conduct” sits, though, because content is moderated by large numbers of people who interpret the rules in different ways — as with most social media platforms. Also, Twitter in particular has a convoluted stance on racist content. You apparently can’t be a self-professed Nazi, but Twitter has said it’s talking with experts to figure out its more general rules around white supremacy.
He said: “Donald Trump’s behaviour is racist. Let’s be clear about that, as the Tory leadership contenders were not last night.
“I’m proud that the Green Party has been a leader in calling out dog-whistle politics over years in which it has been all too common in our politics.
“But the US President’s tweets went beyond that.
“We have seen a highly disturbed rise of Far Right rhetoric and support in many countries, but in all of them, it represents the views of only a tiny minority.
The spread of mass education may have exemplified the promise of liberal civilization. But, without an understanding and appreciation of what allowed it to flourish, it could also accelerate its dissolution. The reduction and reshaping of the past are essential to undermining liberal democracy. The great exemplars of the past—Washington, Madison, Burke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill—all warned that human beings are not necessarily good and, for that reason, power must be dispersed and restrained not concentrated. Yet we are witnessing the creation of a society, as envisioned by HG Wells, controlled by a credentialed elite. This “emergent class of capable men,” Wells wrote, should take upon itself the task of “controlling and restricting…the non-functional masses.” This new elite, he predicted, would replace democracy with “a higher organism” of what he called “the New Republic.”5
Any reasonable reading of history cautions us against such power grabs, however well-intentioned. But this won’t resonate if our next generation remains cut off from the past and molded by a highly manipulated tech-driven reality. If one does not even know about the legacies underpinning democracy, individual freedom, and open discussion, one is not likely to miss them when they are eroded.6
Remember when there was a terrible decision in the 5Pointz VARA case and I wrote 3000 words to explain just how terrible it was? Well, buckle-up, because here's another awful decision, this time in the Section 230 realm. In fact, this one may even be worse, because it was a decision at the federal appellate level, and thus we are more likely to feel the impact of its terribleness. What follows is an explanation of how it so badly missed the mark.
Not long ago we warned that the Ninth Circuit's decision in HomeAway v. City of Santa Monica, if allowed to stand, threatened Internet commerce. This new decision from the Third Circuit in Oberdorf v. Amazon heightens that alarm. As with the Ninth Circuit, it reflects undue focus on the commercial transaction it facilitated instead of on the underlying expression the transaction was connected to. Worse, it did so in a way that gave short shrift to the policy interests behind why Section 230 exists in the first place.
As is typical in cases with terrible Section 230 rulings, the underlying facts in this case are terrible too. One of the plaintiffs had bought a retractable dog leash via Amazon. The leash was defective, and when it broke it recoiled in a way that blinded her in one eye. She and her husband then sued Amazon over the injury. The district court dismissed their claims, partially for Section 230 reasons, and also because it could not find a way to deem Amazon a "seller" for purposes of the Pennsylvania consumer protection law the plaintiffs were trying to base their claim upon. But the Third Circuit, looking at the decision afresh, substantially rejected the district court's analysis and largely reversed its holding. It's this decision that joins the Ninth Circuit HomeAway decision in now seriously threatening Internet commerce.
It is worth noting that this was a 2-1 decision, with a majority opinion providing the controlling analysis and a dissent. Much of the majority decision involves pages and pages of discussion about what counts as a "seller" under that Pennsylvania law. While on the surface this discussion may seem at first seem tangential to our larger Section 230 concerns, in this case it ends up being fairly relevant. For one thing, it's part of the decision, and it shouldn't be. Section 230 includes a pre-emption provision because state and local laws are often messy and, worse, contradictory. An Internet platform's protection from liability should not be contingent on how any given state a platform's services may reach has opted to write its local law. So the mere fact that the decision starts out by reviewing how Pennsylvania's state law might affect the liability of an Internet platform like Amazon is the first sign that the decision is trouble.
In a sign of widening scrutiny after Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) proposed Libra digital coin aroused widespread objection, the bill proposes a fine of $1 million per day for violation of such rules.
The meat and veggies of the deal says: "A large platform utility may not establish, maintain, or operate a digital asset that is intended to be widely used as medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, or any other similar function, as defined by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System."
It defines a 'large platform utility' as one with global revenue in excess of $25m.
No one trusts Facebook, a company that repeatedly disregards privacy concerns, issues meaningless apologies for doing so, then violates them again. Significantly, though, much of the cryptocurrency community hated Libra. They argued it was not a cryptocurrency (plausible); that Libra was not based on a blockchain (likely); and that it violated the decentralized vision of cryptocurrency (absolutely). In a defensive follow-up blog post, Facebook’s David Marcus opens with the question “Is this really a blockchain?” and then proceeds to… not answer the yes-or-no question he himself posed.
The text of the bill says simply “A large platform utility may not be, and may not be affiliated with any person that is, a financial institution,” with further sections spelling out the definitions of various terms. Most notably, “large platform utility” is defined as “a technology company with an annual global revenue of $25,000,000,000 or more...predominately engaged in the business of offering to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties.”
Congress holding hearings on Facebook Inc.’s plan for a possible digital coin suggests that the high-profile debut for Libra was likely a public relations effort gone bad.
But as my EFF colleague Hayley Tsukayama writes, "Our information should not be thought of as our property this way, to be bought and sold like a widget. Privacy is a fundamental human right. It has no price tag. No person should be coerced or encouraged to barter it away. And it is definitely not a good deal for people to receive a handful of dollars in exchange for allowing companies’ invasive data collection to remain unchecked."
When we say 'banned' we don't mean detention for anyone that does, we're talking illegal, proper illegal.
The central state of Hesse has ruled that using the cloud-based version of the service opens children up to potential surveillance by US officials.
This isn’t a problem that’s unique to Microsoft. The commissioner notes that it’s also not possible for schools in Hesse to use cloud solutions from Google and Apple in a GDPR-compliant way. For now, the only option for schools is to use a locally stored piece of software like Microsoft’s non-cloud Office 2019, unless the company is willing to provide better assurances about data security.
The Hesse Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (HBDI) ruled that using the popular cloud platform’s standard configuration exposes personal information about students and teachers “to potential access by US authorities.”
In declaring that Windows 10 and Office 365 is not compliant with EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for use in schools, this development ends years of debate over whether “schools can use Microsoft’s Office 365 software in compliance with data protection regulations.”
The heart of the issue concerns the telemetry information sent by Windows 10 operating system and the company’s cloud solution back to the US.
The issue is not specifically the storage of school documents on cloud services – that in itself is ok provided that proper steps are taken to comply with GDPR requirements, as HDMI says.
[...]
The problem, says the regulator, is that telemetry data is sent out of Germany to the US, and this can include personal data.
Investigators in the Netherlands last year found that the data being transmitted by Microsoft Office 365 could include sentences from documents and email subject lines, in addition to the usual software diagnostics. This is a breach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, the Netherlands said.
EPIC also discussed the Cambridge Analytica scandal and outlined Facebook's long history of failing to protect user data. As reported, a pending settlement with Facebook would not address proposals made by EPIC and others to strengthen Facebook's protection of user data.
Smartphones are not just amazing pieces of technology that pack a range of advanced capabilities into a pocket-sized device. They are also the best tracking device invented so far. They reveal where we are, and what we are doing, every minute we have them with us. And the most amazing aspect is that we carry them not because we are forced to do so by authoritarian governments, but willingly.
A permanent state of surveillance is something most people just accept as the price of using mobile phones. But for one class of users, the built-in tracking capabilities of smartphones are far worse than just annoying. For spies -- especially more senior ones -- the information revealed by their mobile phones is not just embarrassing but poses a serious threat to their future operational usefulness.
That's evident from a new investigation carried out by the Bellingcat team in partnership with various media organizations. Techdirt was one of the first to write about Bellingcat's use of "open source information" -- material that is publicly available -- to piece together the facts about what are typically dramatic events. The latest report from the group is slightly different, in that it draws on mobile phone data leaked by a whistleblower in Russia. According to Bellingcat's research, the account seems to be that of the mid-ranking Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer Denis Sergeev
By now, you've certainly heard the news that was very likely leaked by Facebook late on Friday that the FTC, by a narrow 3 to 2 party line vote, had approved a $5 billion fine for Facebook for violating its earlier consent decree in the way it allowed an app to suck up lots of data that eventually ended up in Cambridge Analytica's hands. Most of the reaction to this fine (by far, the largest in the FTC's history) is anger.
Many people focused on one key point to argue that the fine wasn't enough: Facebook's stock jumped upwards after the news broke, to the point that Facebook's valuation probably went up more than the amount of the fine itself (never mind the difference between the value of equity and actual cashflow...). However, I wouldn't read too much into the stock jump. After all, Facebook had already said back in April that it was expecting a $5 billion fine, meaning that Wall Street had already priced in exactly that. If the $5 billion fine had come out of the blue it might have been a different story. The bump, then, could be explained by investors reacting to the end of any uncertainty and the fear that the fine might have been larger.
Nalayeh was the second journalist killed in the attack. Mohamed Omar Sahal, a reporter for local SBC television was also killed. On Friday he went to the hotel to interview a humanitarian worker who was staying there. He was shot in the head by the al-Shabab militants, according to friends.
But organisations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) say there is doubt over how much change is actually taking place.
Though they've been permitted to drive, HRW say women still face several barriers.
They claim Saudi authorities have arrested several well-known women's rights advocates just before lifting the driving ban, accusing them of "suspicious contact with foreign parties".
The residents of Philadelphia elected Larry Krasner as their new DA in 2018. Krasner promised reforms to the criminal justice system. And he delivered. He secured 33 resignations from prosecutors and staff who didn't feel they could back his reforms. Shortly after this, he received the best possible (inadvertent) endorsement for his reform efforts, one that took the form of criticism from the head of the local police union.
Krasner eliminated cash bail for nonviolent defendants and made it clear he would not tolerate misconduct or abuse by police officers. More importantly, he did more than talk. Two officers were criminally charged for performing an illegal stop of a pedestrian and Krasner secured an indictment from a grand jury against a cop who shot an unarmed man in the back.
The EU Commission is considering the creation of a new authority for the regulation of online services. This is part of a possible legislative proposal by the Commission to regulate platform companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Under the proposed scheme, the e-Commerce Directive is to be replaced by a new law, the Digital Services Act, according to a leaked Commission note. (Click here for full document.)
The new Act is supposed to create European rules against online hate speech and disinformation. It also means to address issues such as political advertising online and fairness in e-Commerce. It would affect ââ¬Å¾all digital services and in particular online platforms“, according to the paper. The note mentions social networks, cloud services, services such as Uber and Airbnb as well as internet service providers.
The paper was written by officials in the Commission’s Directorate-General Connect. It is part of a discussion process towards a more detailed proposal to be brought forward by the next Commission. As the news site Contexte reports, several versions of the paper have been circulating earlier. PoliticoPro reported on it as well.
For years we've explored how the nation's phone companies no longer really want to be in the broadband business. They routinely refuse to upgrade their networks, yet often lobby to ensure nobody else can deliver broadband in these neglected footprints either. Telcos in particular have a bizarre disdain for their paying customers, delivering the bare minimum (slow DSL) at the highest rates they can possibly charge without a full-scale consumer revolt. It's not surprising then that many telco DSL customers are fleeing to cable, assuming they even have a second option for broadband.
This scenario has been particularly true in West Virginia, which has become the poster child for telecom sector graft and corruption. For years, incumbent phone provider Frontier Communications (which bought most of the state assets from Verizon), has seen zero competitive pressure to improve service. At the same time, they've enjoyed rampant regulatory capture, to the point where company executives have simultaneously acted as state senator, without a single question raised. The company has also been routinely under fire for bilking the government (read: you) out of millions of dollars intended to shore up coverage gaps.
Back in February, the Federal Circuit issued a R.36 affirmance — affirming the lower court’s claim construction and non-infringement finding. Tech. Properties has now filed a statement of intent to petition for writ of certiorari, now with Ken Starr at the helm and focusing on prosecution disclaimer precedent from the 1880’s along with a constitutional argument.
The UK courts last month dealt with another patent dispute concerning non-invasive prenatal blood testing (NIPT). NIPT is a method for genetically screening the unborn fetus. NIPT is performed on the maternal blood and is therefore safer than previous methods for genetically testing the fetus that required fetal cells or amniotic fluid. NIPT allows clinicians to screen the fetus for diseases such as Down's syndrome. The global market for NIPT is growing rapidly, and has been predicted to reach almost $5 Billion by 2025. Commercial NIPT tests available in the UK such as The Harmony Test and the IONA test cost around €£350-500 per test. The market for NIPT is currently very competitive, with key players jockeying for position; now being played out as patent disputes in the UK courts.
[...]
Key players in the NIPT testing market include Roche/Ariosa (The Harmony Test) and Illumina, following their acquisition of Verinata Health (Verifi). Another key player is Sequenom, a San Diego based company that began offering its own NIPT in the US in 2011 (MaterniT21). Sequenom owns what are arguably some of the broadest patents in the NIPT field. For example, EP0994963 (Lo), claims the detection of fetal DNA in maternal blood.
In 2014, NIPT patent disputes between Illumina and Sequenom were settled with a patent pool agreement. Illumina and Sequenom have since joined forces in going after other players in the field. In 2017, Illumina and Sequenom sued UK NIPT providers Premaitha and TDL for patent infringement of Lo (EP0994963) ([2017] EWHC 2930 (Pat), IPKat post here). Premaitha subsequently agreed to licence the technology from Illumina.
The most recent UK action concerned another Sequenom patent, EP1524321 (Hahn). This patent relates to a key step in NIPT, the separation of fetal DNA from maternal DNA. EP1524321 (Hahn) is based on the discovery that fetal cell free DNA (cfDNA) in the blood of the mother is, on average, smaller in size than the cfDNA of the mother present in the blood. Fetal and maternal DNA could therefore be easily separated to allow the fetal DNA to be analysed.
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The judgment includes an interesting end note on the patentability of the subject-matter of the claim, in view of an attempt by the defendants to bring a US-style assessment of patent eligibility into proceedings. In the US, the Sequenom NIPT patents have fallen foul of Section 101. Particularly, the US Court of Appeals for Federal Circuit found Sequenom's diagnostic patents invalid for relating to patent ineligible subject matter, particularly for relating to a natural phenomena (Ariosa v Sequenom). Sequenom were denied permission to appeal to the US Supreme Court (Sequenom v Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc 136 S.Ct. 2511 (2016)).
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This case in the High Court is unlikely to be the last relating to NIPT. The growing commercial importance of this technology, and the crowded market, will undoubtedly give rise to yet more patent disputes. It is not yet known if TDL will seek to appeal the decision.
In the inter partes review (IPR), the Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB) sided with the patentee Infobridge — concluding that the purported prior art was not sufficiently publicly accessible prior to the patent’s November 7, 2011 filing date (and therefore not prior art). On appeal, the Federal Circuit has rejected that decision — holding that the PTAB “applied the wrong legal standard in assessing public accessibility.”
The reference at issue is “Working Draft 4 of the H.265 standard” (WD4) which was developed by an MPEG group known as the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (“JCT-VC”). The information included int he reference was discussed at a July 2011 meeting in Torino that included about 250 participants including both academics and corporate representatives. WD4 then written and uploaded to the JCT-VC website on October 4, 2011 as one of hundreds of documents listed on the Torino meeting sub-page. The documents are in no apparent order and when printed run 48 pages long. (The relevant page is listed below, can you find our reference of interest?).
WD4 was also uploaded to an MPEG website on October 4, 2011, but required a password to access. Also, the same day the WD4 lead author posted a link to the document to a listserve that included JCT-VC members and other interested individuals.
A publication must be either actually distributed or else made publicly accessible. Courts ask “whether a person of ordinary skill in the art could, after exercising reasonable diligence, access a reference.” If so, then it is a publication.
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On remand, the PTAB will reconsider these issues — and likely find again that the listserv distribution was not sufficiently public.
In fact, unlike what is for subject matter like software, databases and photographs, the InfoSoc Directive does not contain a harmonized concept of originality. In this sense, it might have well been the case that individual EU Member States could have defined originality in accordance with their own national copyright traditions.
However, this is not what the CJEU decided.
In fact, the Court held that the InfoSoc Directive is rooted within the same principles found in those directives that contain a harmonized notion of originality.
Thus, also for subject matter falling within the scope of the InfoSoc Directive, protection arises when a sufficient degree of originality - to be intended as the 'author's own intellectual creation' - is found to subsist.
A Copernican Revolution had just begun and nothing could stay the same!
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Turning to the latter, the recently adopted DSM Directive [Katposts here] shows how any review of EU copyright rules would not just need to consider the (formally rich but substantially relatively thin) existing legislative framework, but also – and possibly above all – the CJEU interpretation of existing sets of rules.
In this sense, the discussion around certain provisions in the DSM Directive included the relationship with existing CJEU case law and whether and to what extent EU legislature should retain it. Examples in this sense are: Article 17 (as stated in Recital 64, that OCSSPs communicate to the public is a clarification of existing (case) law); Article 16 (which was meant to 'erase' Reprobel) and Article 8 (which was meant to remedy Soulier).
2009 was the year that changed EU copyright. There is no reason to think that the Court would cease having a central role in the clarification, construction and development of the copyright framework in the near future. Although doubts might remain regarding the role and actual competence of the Court in building, rather than just interpreting (but how do you draw the line?) the law around copyright, this trend appears bound to stay ... Happy Infopaqversary!
A few years ago, movie and music industry companies would regularly go to the UK High Court to demand pirate site blockades. These efforts, which were previously seen as an essential tool to combat infringement, have stopped for now. It appears other anti-piracy endeavors have priority instead.
