The Galaxy Note 10 has just broken cover and, just like its predecessors, it has something new for Samsung DeX users. To be fair, the convenience of being able to not just control your phone but access the “DeXtop” from any Windows or Mac computer is a major step forward, but it may have fallen short of what fans of the platform have been expecting or even requesting for a few months now. Samsung DeX definitely has a lot of potential but Samsung may have missed the boat on that one this year.
I hate to say it, but summer is finally winding down. This time of year just “feels” like school, doesn’t it? Some kids are already back in school but mine have a couple of weeks of summer left that they are trying to savor. For my kids, preparation for the new school year is quite involved, from concerns about who their teachers will be, will their friends have the same teacher, what to wear, and more. Rarely does what they’ll learn come up as a concern for my kids. Deep down we trust that their school, and teachers, have a plan for each day and that their learning journey will pick up where it left off last spring. It’s the one thing my kids don’t worry about when it comes to school.
We've heard a lot about them, but what ARE Snaps, Flatpaks, and AppImages? What do they do for us? Which should we use?
Ubuntu integrates ZFS even further, NVIDIA starts publishing GPU documentation, and Harmony OS makes its debut.
Plus why you might actually want to use the new Dex, significant performance gains for a beloved project, and more.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.2.8 kernel.
All users of the 5.2 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.2.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.2.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
EXT4 set off the new trend for opt-in, per-directory case-insensitive file/folder support on Linux systems. EXT4 picked up that optional case-insensitive support for Linux 5.2 while the for Linux 5.4 kernel cycle the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is set to receive similar support.
Last month we wrote about case-insensitive patches for F2FS that provided case-folding support using Unicode similar to the patches for EXT4. Like EXT4, this feature is opt-in on a per-directory basis. A Google engineer sent out these F2FS patches, which didn't come as a surprise considering the growing use of F2FS on mobile Android devices where for conventional end-users may be handy having case-insensitive support to behave to the likes of FAT32/NTFS on Windows.
AMD is striking well over the past month with their Linux hardware bring-up. In the past month we've seen the Navi 10/12/14 support get in order for Linux as well as support for the future Vega-based Arcturus GPU and now we see the initial enablement patches for their next-generation APUs, Renoir.
Sent out today was the initial 27 patches amount to around two thousand lines of code (roughly half of which is just header files) for bringing up this next-gen AMD APU.
Intel's open-source SVT video encoder team today released a new feature update to their HEVC/H.265 open-source video encoder.
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 77 is beta as of August 8, 2019.
Following the Chrome 76 release from just over one week ago, Google has now issued the beta for the Chrome/Chromium 77 series.
As much as we love Linux, we all have to agree on Windows’s massive dominance in the industry. Due to being the most widely used operating system for personal computers since the last couple of decades, Microsoft Windows enjoys a widespread usage in the business world. If you’re a Linux enthusiast but need to utilize Windows for your Job or academic purposes, you don’t need to be disappointed anymore. There are powerful Linux emulators for Windows which allow you to run Linux programs seamlessly in your Windows machine without having to install a fresh copy of your favorite distro.
Batman Arkham Origins running through Steam play.
Almost six years after the original, Michael Todd Games returns to inflict more painful hardcore platforming with slick beats in Electronic Super Joy 2 which is out now. Technically the third game, since Electronic Super Joy: Groove City was also released back in 2014.
It's…difficult, maddeningly so in some areas. This is a game designed to make you furious, yet it's so damn good at the same time. I will fully admit to being absolutely atrocious at it, hardcore platformers aren't usually something that I go for but Electronic Super Joy 2 has the right amount of weird for me to enjoy it.
Almost six years after the original, Michael Todd Games returns to inflict more painful hardcore platforming with slick beats in Electronic Super Joy 2 which is out now. Technically the third game, since Electronic Super Joy: Groove City was also released back in 2014.
It's…difficult, maddeningly so in some areas. This is a game designed to make you furious, yet it's so damn good at the same time. I will fully admit to being absolutely atrocious at it, hardcore platformers aren't usually something that I go for but Electronic Super Joy 2 has the right amount of weird for me to enjoy it.
Garry Newman from Facepunch Studios has put out a new blog post detailing their final plans for the Linux version of the survival game Rust.
It's quite an open and honest post about the state of things, noting that they didn't really do a good job of actually supporting the Linux version. The post mentions how they never routinely tested it, unless they knew something was wrong. Newman also mentions how the "quiet majority" of Linux gamers accept that they're often a second-class citizen but we shouldn't be as we are paying the same. Which is why they made the decision to stop supporting Linux originally in July last year.
The last couple of week I’ve been on holiday and I spent some of that hacking on gthree. Gthree is a port of three.js, and a good way to get some testing of it is to port a three.js app. Benjamin pointed out HexGL, a WebGL racing game similar to F-Zero.
This game uses a bunch of cool features like shaders, effects, sprites, particles, etc, so it was a good target. I had to add a bunch of features to gthree and fix some bugs, but its now at a state where it looks pretty cool as a demo. However it needs more work to be playable as a game.
So far, most of my blog postings that appeared on Planet KDE were release announcements for KBibTeX. Still, I had always planned to write more about what happens on the development side of KBibTeX. Well, here comes my first try to shed light on KBibTeX&aposs internal working …
Active development of KBibTeX happens in its master branch. There are other branches created from time to time, mostly for bug fixing, i.ââ¬â°e. allowing bug reporters to compile and test a bug fix before before the change is merged into master or a release branch. Speaking of release branches, those get forked from master every one to three years. At the time of writing, the most recent release branch is kbibtex/0.9. Actual releases, including alpha or beta releases, are tagged on those release branches.
KBibTeX is developed on Linux; personally I use the master branch on Gentoo Linux and Arch Linux. KBibTeX compiles and runs on Windows with the help of Craft (master better than kbibtex/0.9). It is on my mental TODO list to configure a free Windows-based continuous integration service to build binary packages and installers for Windows; suggestions and support are welcome. Craft supports macOS, too, to some extend as well, so I gave KBibTeX a shot on this operating system (I happen to have access to an old Mac from time to time). Running Craft and installing packages caused some trouble, as macOS is the least tested platform for Craft. Also, it seems to be more difficult to find documentation on how to solve compilation or linking problems on macOS than it is for Windows (let alone Linux). However, with the help of the residents in #kde-craft and related IRC channels, I was eventually able to start compiling KBibTeX on macOS (big thanks!).
The main issue that came up when crafting KBibTeX on macOS was the problem of linking against ICU (International Components for Unicode). This library is shipped on macOS as it is used in many other projects, but seemingly even if you install Xcode, you don't get any headers or other development files. Installing a different ICU version via Craft doesn't seem to work either. However, I am no macOS expert, so I may have gotten the details wrong …
As I mentioned in the previous post, one drawback of attempts to sync theme settings with SDDM is that SDDM requires these files to be present on the root partition. When users install content from GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff), it’s installed in the home directory. Detecting if theme files in use are present on the root partition and copying them there if not when the user syncs their settings with SDDM would be possible for most (but not all) files, but is grueling and clumsy in the long run. It’s possible to instead implement an option for global installation of content. As a matter of fact, something alike can already be encountered when installing fonts.
In this video, we are looking at BeeFree OS MMXX.
PCLinuxOS KDE Full Edition ISO updated installation media has been released and is available for download at: http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/live-cd/64bit/
name: pclinuxos64-kde5-2019.08.iso md5sum: 577240b993d9d7914e32cf446ff0ccd2 size: 2355mb (2.3 gb)
This ISO image is fully updated as of August 10, 2019 and is being provided so new installations will not require a large update to get updated to current levels.
I just migrated the first / a customer's mail server site away from Amavis+SpamAssassin to Rspamd. Main reasons for the migration were speed and the setup needed a polish up anyway. People on site had been complaining about too much SPAM for quite a while. Plus, it is always good to dive into something new. Mission accomplished.
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The main part of the work had already been documented in a blog post [2] by someome with the nick "zac" (no real name found). Thanks for that!
The Sophos AV integration was a little tricky at the start, but worked out well, after some trial and error, log reading, Rspamd code studies, etc.
On half way through, there was popped up one tricky part, that could be avoided by the Rspamd upstream maintainers in future releases. As far as I took from [3], Rspamd lacks support for retrieving its map files and such (hosted on *.rspamd.com, or other 3rd party providers) via a http proxy server. This was nearly a full blocker for my last project, as the customer's mail gateway is part of a larger infrastructure and hosted inside a double ring of firewalls. Only access to the internet leads over a non-transparent squid proxy server (one which I don't have control over).
To work around this, I set up a transparent https proxy on "localhost", using a neat Python script [4]. Thanks for sharing this script.
Canonical has announced that it has plans with regards to implementing support for ZFS on the root file system, for the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) operating system. This operating system will be the next major release of the most-known Ubuntu Linux operating system. It will also be the test doe Canonical to actually include brand new features to see if they are useful to the community for the next LTS releases.
One of the new features that we were talking about will be released this fall and is an experimental option included in the graphical installer. It is supposed to let its users create a root file system formatted with the ZFS file system. However, Canonical warns its users that they should not use it on a production machine.
I'm happy to announce that we would like your help to test OTA-10! OTA-10 is slated to release on Wednesday, August 14, 2019. Until then, we need to make sure it's ready to go!
We want to ensure that every release we ship is better than the previous, so we're looking to our entire community to help us with QA (Quality Assurance) of OTA-10.
We've prepared a GitHub Project for OTA-10 QA which lists the issues we'd like your feedback on. The QA column lists issues which do not have complete test results. The Done column lists issues which, thanks to our efforts here, are confirmed to be fixed. The In Progress column lists issues which are not fixed, or the fix introduces a severe negative side effect. The goal at the end of this is to have every issue in the Done column.
Imagine a complete POE touch panel PC solution built around the newest i.MX8M ARM technology. A touch panel computer with wide-ranging Linux and support, including Yocto Embedded, QT, Wayland, and Ubuntu, as well as Android 8.1 and 9 Support. Estone Technology is pleased to announce the 10” PPC-4310 Frameless Panel PC.
The PPC-4310 is one of the first complete POE touch panel solutions constructed around an i.MX8M ARM processor with long lifecycle support. The new i.MX8M processor is optimized for industrial control applications, and guarantees more than 10 years of lifespan support. It has been optimized for industrial HMI and control, but is also equipped and designed to look and function well in commercial and residential applications. This new Estone touch panel PC platform offers many options not seen in other systems, including dual core DSP digital MIC input with noise suppression, and acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) , ready for OEM/ODM customization projects with edge-computing voice interaction supports.
Huawei Technologies Co. took the wraps off its “HarmonyOS” operating system Friday, offering the first glimpses of in-house software that may someday replace Google’s Android and reduce its reliance on American technology.
To begin with, the open-source software will skip smartphones and instead find its way into everything from cars and watches to personal computers by 2020, Richard Yu, chief executive of the consumer business said during a launch event. Earbuds and virtual reality goggles will follow. Huawei is considering running the OS on its upcoming flagship Mate 30, he told reporters.
So is that it for long form technical journalism? Are we reduced to bitty threads on Stack Overflow and personal blogs that often reveal as much ignorance than knowledge?
You might say that the days of the "magazine" are over. I feel sorry for the generation who did not have the pleasure of curling up with a good issue of Byte, Dr Dobbs and yes, Linux Journal. There is a lot to be said for a curated collection of long form articles, written by people with a track record and kept in line by the hard man editor.
These days we, as consumers, won't pay for content and we won't even look at a few adverts so that the content can be free.
This comes at a bittersweet moment in my career. For a couple of years now, I was moonlighting as an editor for Linux Journal. Notice the word was in the previous sentence. If you recall, sometime in late 2017, Linux Journal, the very reputable and all things open source 25 year old publication could not afford to keep its lights on and with a broken heart, announced to the entire world that it was shutting down its operations. Upon hearing this, a hero stepped forth. Or so it seemed. London Trust Media (or LTM) offered to acquire Linux Journal and help the publication get back on its feet. In early 2018, the publication was back in business and with money in the bank. That is when I was both invited and welcomed aboard and by some of the most wonderful people you would ever meet.
Things were looking great. The publication was restructured. The website was revamped and modernized. The team was revitalized. The business model was redefined. Subscribers were resubscribing. New subscribers were subscribing. Companies were sponsoring. We were going to make it.
Fast forward to the present. Literally, this week. Without warning or explanation, our parent company decided to cease all Linux Journal operations. The staff was immediately let go. Our hearts are broken (and for some, a second time). For its authors and contributors, writing and supporting Linux Journal was a labor of love. We did it because we wanted to and not because we had to. I will miss working with my now-former colleagues but most of all, I will miss our audience who stood by our side in both the good times and the difficult ones.
Linux Journal has announced its shutdown to its reader-base through a blog post by Kyle Rankin, titled ‘An Awkward Goodbye.’ All of its employees were laid off and the company has no funds left to continue in any capacity, while they hope that the website will stay online for a few more weeks, allowing the archiving of the content. The website faced trouble and imminent closure back in December 2017, but it was rescued by London Trust Media, the creator of the Private Internet Access VPN solution and the Freenode project.
As Rankin details, London Trust Media helped them get back on their feet, but unfortunately, the publication didn’t get healthy enough fast enough. When the Linux Journal was left to operate on their own financial and resource strength, they quickly realized that they were clearly not viable. Rankin goes a step further to remind us of the reasons that publications like the Linux Journal fail in the year 2019, which are the same as those that hit them two years ago. Linux is not really embraced by the people of this world, and large software companies only support FOSS projects in order to use them for their proprietary solutions and/or services.
It’s not that Linux has lost though. To the contrary, the Linux kernel is running inside 2.5 billion Android devices right now, Linux is dominating the server market, and the planet’s most powerful supercomputers are all running Linux. Even open-source software like VLC, Firefox, Chromium, GIMP, LibreOffice, WordPress, Magento, and Audacity are counting millions and millions of users. However, people don’t care about Linux, have no interest in reading about it, and they are certainly not willing to become a part of ‘the ecosystem’ by contributing code, debugging, or translating.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics about the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo. Both ROS and Gazebo are open source and are widely used in the robotics community. ROS is a set of software libraries and tools, and Gazebo is a 3D robotics simulator. Gerkey explains ROS and Gazebo and talks about how they are used in robotics, as well as some of the design decisions of the second version of ROS, ROS2.
In 2014, when I switched to Linux I spent hours, days and month looking for free and open source alternatives to the commercial ones, by watching video, reading articles, story and even comments, it was a hard time but it made me a more positive and happy Linux user, now after five years i want to share with you my favorite list of open source alternatives including distros, tools, software... as a result of my humble Linux experience. Have a pleasant reading.
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When I was a Windows user, I was not interested in blogging, but my move to Linux motivated me to create my first YouTube channel On April 26, 2014.
So I started looking for the tools that I would use for blogging and broadcasting, after searching on the Ubuntu software center and the web i installed vokoscreen recorder, Kdenlive for video editing and audacity for audio editing and after a year of learning and discovering i made my first Linux video which was about installing Gnome 3.16 on Ubuntu wily 15.10.
Developer relations, in all its iterations, is built on the foundation of open source community management, says Mary Thengvall, an author, consultant, and community builder. It encompasses a variety of roles and titles, including developer advocate, community manager, and developer evangelist/technical ambassador.
In her Lightning Talk at the 17th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 17x), Mary shares what her experience has taught her about the importance of investing time and energy into building relationships with the larger technical communities. She touches on what developer relations is, where we should (and shouldn't) look for signs of success, and what DevRel has in common with avocados.
The Linux Foundation has released its presentation line-up for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and the co-located Open Source Summit Europe, scheduled for Oct. 28-30 in Lyon, France.
Just as the North American versions of the Embedded Linux Conference and Open Source Summit (formerly LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon) are joining forces to share the stage on Aug. 21-23 in San Diego, the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) and Open Source Summit Europe are collocating on Oct. 28-30 in Lyon, France. The confluence makes sense given the Linux Foundation’s new vision of an edge computing future that relies heavily on cloud technologies rather than the traditional grassroots approach to embedded.
Yet as the newly posted schedule shows, even if you have little interest in containers or cloud-native platforms, there’s plenty at ELCE to keep you busy. In addition to the ELCE tracks, embedded developers will be particularly interested in the OpenIoT Summit track and newcomers will want to check out the Embedded Development Essential presentations.
This summer I am very lucky to join the Hubs by Mozilla as a technical artist intern. Over the 12 weeks that I was at Mozilla, I worked on two different projects. My first project is about particle systems, the thing that I always have great interest in. I was developing the particle system feature for Spoke, the 3D editor which you can easily create a 3D scene and publish to Hubs.
Particle systems are a technique that has been used in a wide range of game physics, motion graphics and computer graphics related fields. They are usually composed of a large number of small sprites or other objects to simulate some chaotic system or natural phenomena. Particles can make a huge impact on the visual result of an application and in virtual and augmented reality, it can deepen the immersive feeling greatly.
Particle systems can be incredibly complex, so for this version of the Particle System, we wanted to separate the particle system from having heavy behaviour controls like some particle systems from native game engines, only keeping the basic attributes that are needed. The Spoke particle system can be separated into two parts, particles and the emitter. Each particle, has a texture/sprite, lifetime, age, size, color, and velocity as it’s basic attributes. The emitter is more simple, as it only has properties for its width and height and information about the particle count (how many particles it can emit per life circle).
As a result of the efforts by the Document Foundation, LibreOffice 6.3 is here with improved performance, better interoperability, and a variety of new features.
LibreOffice 6.3 comes with a lot of features, which is impressive considering that LibreOffice 6.2 was released just six months ago. However, it should be noted that The Document Foundation has decided not to include 32-bit binaries starting from this release. So only users with 64-bit architecture will be able to apply this update. Getting back on track, let’s delve into what the new LibreOffice has in store for us.
You’ve probably heard that WordPress is open source software, and may know that it’s created and run by volunteers. WordPress enthusiasts share many examples of how WordPress changed people’s lives for the better. This monthly series shares some of those lesser-known, amazing stories.
Used by Lyft, among others, Capsule8's platform automates a lot of tedious manual work involved in securing enterprise infrastructure.
Current goal: Work with a handful of developers who want to regularly use Got for their work on OpenBSD. Improve version control operation based on their feedback.
Stefan Sperling works as a freelance open source developer and consultant and is based in Berlin. Stefan has been involved in the OpenBSD project for a decade, and he is also one of the main contributors to the Apache Subversion version control system.
The tool collects evidence of personal data processing, such as cookies, or requests to third parties. The collection parameters are configured ahead of the inspection and then collection is carried out automatically. The collected evidence, structured in a human- and machine-readable format, allows website controllers, data protection officers and end users to understand better which information is transferred and stored during a visit of a website, i.e. the consecutive loading of a number of web pages without giving consent or logging in.
This is an important gesture from Nvidia. Many gamers rely on Windows even if they'd prefer to use Linux simply because the former plays nicer with Nvidia hardware. If this documentation leads to better Linux drivers, it could easily complement other efforts to improve gaming on the platform, such as Valve's ongoing commitment to improving Linux support for games sold via its Steam marketplace.
As a professional, Gavin interacted primarily with me as a project manager. He was instrumental in helping to build Novena, Chibitronics, Fernvale, and many more projects big and small. What made him special was not that he was a genius in electronics or process engineering. His degree was in Western Philosophy: he understood how people worked, both in terms of their minds and their hearts. He thought deeply on all issues, big and small; formed his own opinions about government and politics, and as such, always had to straddle a fuzzy gray line living in China.
A fairly raised issue was that the batch approach means adding new functionality to the compiler. This is true, but not particulary interesting as a standalone statement. The real question is how much more work is it, especially compared to the work needed to support other module implementation methods.
In the batch mode there are two main pieces of work. The first is starting compiler tasks, detecting when they freeze due to missing modules and resuming them once the modules they require have been built. The second one is calculating the minimal set of files to recompile when doing incremental builds.
The former is the trickier one because no-one has implemented it yet. The latter is a well known subject, build systems like Make and Ninja have done it for 40+ years. To test the former I wrote a simple feasibility study in Python. What it does is generate 100 source files containing modules that call each other and then compiles them all in the manner a batch compiler would. There is no need to scan the contents of files, the system will automatically detect the correct build order or error out if it can not be done.
Deploying Django has often been a confusing and hard topic for many who are starting out in Django development.
It takes time in playing around with various deployment options to actually get to the right technology or practices in deploying Django projects.
I will be covering the various ways to deploy your Django web application, I hope it might be useful for anyone who is starting out.
We are pleased to announce ejabberd version 19.08. The main focus has been to further improve ease of use, consistency, performance, but also to start cleaning up our code base. As usual, we have kept on improving server performance and fixed several issues.
Dealing with JSON data; pulling it in and reading it was something I strugled with significantly when I began coding. This article is for anyone who is facing that issue or just wants a diffrent point of view.
When Sarah phoned me an hour later, she reminded me that teens of this generation have lived their entire lives in the shadow of mass shootings and deaths—at shopping malls, churches and synagogues, movie theaters, schools, outdoor music and food festivals, and other public places.
China's second-largest mobile chip developer aims to launch a 5G chipset in 2020, far earlier than previously planned, to catch up with global leaders Qualcomm and MediaTek and tap demand from local companies looking to end their dependence on U.S. suppliers.
UNISOC Communications' timetable is roughly similar to those of its much bigger competitors, and marks a significant acceleration of its ambitions following the disintegration of its partnership with chip leader Intel earlier this year.
The plan also comes amid political backing for the sector, with Beijing pushing to speed up the rollout of 5G mobile networks in the country, as well as cut China's dependence on foreign chipmakers following Washington's crackdown Huawei Technologies' use of American tech.
At end of Games just nine doping cases were detected. Total now stands at 132 – and that could rise.
A ransomware outbreak that hit QuickBooks cloud hosting firm iNSYNQ in mid-July appears to have started with an email phishing attack that snared an employee working in sales for the company, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. It also looks like the intruders spent roughly ten days rooting around iNSYNQ’s internal network to properly stage things before unleashing the ransomware. iNSYNQ ultimately declined to pay the ransom demand, and it is still working to completely restore customer access to files.
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But Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, showed KrebsOnSecurity information obtained from monitoring dark web communications which suggested the problem started on July 6, after an employee in iNSYNQ’s sales division fell for a targeted phishing email.
“This shows that even after the initial infection, if companies act promptly they can still detect and stop the ransomware,” Holden said. “For these infections hackers take sometimes days, weeks, or even months to encrypt your data.”
While various high-tech solutions to secure electronic voting systems are being touted this week to election officials across the United States, according to infosec guru Bruce Schneier there is only one tried-and-tested approach that should be considered: pen and paper.
It's the only way to be sure hackers and spies haven't delved in from across the web to screw with your vote.
“Paper ballots are almost 100 per cent reliable and provide a voter-verifiable paper trail,” he told your humble Reg vulture and other hacks at Black Hat in Las Vegas on Thursday. “This isn’t hard or controversial. We use then all the time in Minnesota, and you make your vote and it’s easily tabulated.”
The integrity of the election process depends on three key areas: the security of the voter databases that list who can vote; the electronic ballot boxes themselves, which Schneier opined were the hardest things to hack successfully; and the computers that tabulate votes and distribute this information.
At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today, 18-year-old Bill Demirkapi presented his findings from three years of after-school hacking that began when he was a high school freshman. Demirkapi poked around the web interfaces of two common pieces of software, sold by tech firms Blackboard and Follett and used by his own school. In both cases, he found serious bugs that would allow a hacker to gain deep access to student data. In Blackboard's case in particular, Demirkapi found 5 million vulnerable records for students and teachers, including student grades, immunization records, cafeteria balance, schedules, cryptographically hashed passwords, and photos.
Demirkapi points out that if he, then a bored 16-year-old motivated only by his own curiosity, could so easily access these corporate databases, his story doesn't reflect well on the broader security of the companies holding millions of students' personal information."The access I had was pretty much anything the school had," Demirkapi says. "The state of cybersecurity in education software is really bad, and not enough people are paying attention to it."
Its preliminary findings indicate more than 1,500 civilians were killed or wounded, mainly due to a spike in casualties from insurgent attacks. It did not provide a breakdown of deaths and injuries, but said the overall number was the highest for a single month since May 2017.
There is no doubt that if we had suffered a string of massacres on our soil carried out by Islamic radicals, we would do everything in our power to diminish and eradicate the danger — indeed, we have. The national response to racist extremists should show the same alacrity and resolve, while acknowledging that they represent a different, more difficult-to-counter threat than the old Klan did.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to go after the Klan as he had done with the Communists. Running until 1971 and involving 26 field offices, COINTELPRO-White Hate targeted groups and people deemed violent threats, not their ideology per se.
No US institution or practice is sweepingly condemned in a comparable fashion. Carrying out an invasion of Iraq, as the US military did, and causing as many as a million deaths is not considered the conduct of a “malign actor” or “a tool of violence and military adventurism”; nor is keeping children in cages or having the world’s largest prison population evidence of a “despotic…regime.” Whatever the Times’ definition of “support for regional terrorist organizations” is, it evidently does not include backing racist groups in Libya, laying waste to Syrian cities or flooding the country with weapons that helped ISIS, or carrying out massacres in Afghanistan, or underwriting brutality in Yemen and Palestine.
In this respect, the Times’ apparent anti-war editorials bolster the case for war against Iran: If Iran is a “despotic . . . regime” that provides “support for regional terrorist organizations” and has a military outfit that is “no doubt . . . a malign actor” and a “tool of violence and military adventurism,” readers can be forgiven for failing to rush out and organize a peace movement. And if the United States is or has none of these things—or, in the case of a nuclear weapons program and “work on missile systems,” is presumably allowed to have them—they may be confused about why the US shouldn’t bomb or invade Iran, or overthrow its government, or some combination of these.
The editorials also muddy responsibility for the crisis, presenting what is happening as roughly equally the fault of the United States and Iran. The first editorial (5/4/19) argued that the “Trump administration is playing a dangerous game in Iran, risking a serious miscalculation by either side.” The problem isn’t so much the risk of “a serious miscalculation by either side” as it is deliberate US calculations to inflict misery on Iranians in an effort to force Iran to submit to US orders. US sanctions are severely harming Iranians, causing food shortages, undermining the healthcare system, preventing flood relief from getting to Iranians, setting off a collapse in economic growth and driving the country into a deep recession while helping to push up inflation; all of this information was publicly available before any of these editorials were published. Iran, of course, has done nothing comparable to US society.
Peter Knippertz from the Karlsruhe Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK) confirms this. Together with other scientists from 16 institutions across Africa and Europe, he's been looking for answers to the question: How bad is the air over southern West Africa? And why?
The concentration of dirt particles is definitely above the guidelines recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), says Knippertz. For the study, the team set up measuring stations in Cotonou and Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast. There, too, the population suffers from poor air quality.
Indonesia is experiencing its worst annual fire season since 2015, with the cross-border spread of haze once again threatening to spark a diplomatic row with neighbors Malaysia and Singapore.
Indonesian farmers use fire to clear land during the dry season but they can rage out of control and produce a choking haze that spreads to neighbours such as Singapore and Malaysia.
Indonesia has recorded the highest number of hot spots this year since devastating fires in 2015 and faces global pressure to put an end to slash-and-burn clearance of land, often to plant palm and pulp plantations.
Emergencies were declared in six Indonesian provinces on Sumatra island and in Kalimantan last week as fires raged, while neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia issued health warnings about the air pollution that is heading their way.
Agriculture, forestry and other human land use accounts for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat and cause the earth to warm, researchers found.
The report, authored by more than 100 scientists from over 50 countries, contained dire warnings and concluded that immediate action is needed to address the threat. It was released Thursday in Geneva and is the latest publication from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The UN’s top climate science body says land tenure of Indigenous and traditional landholders is key to slowing the climate crisis — but those groups in Colombia warn they can’t protect the forests if they can’t protect themselves.
After a three year wait, the UN’s official scientific advisory panel’s verdict on land and climate is here. The report is about as glum as you might have come to expect from a body tasked with documenting humanity’s ongoing descent into climate-induced havoc.
The UN is right to highlight the crucial importance of land in both causing and curbing climate change — it has been neglected for far too long. In particular, the report’s conclusions on just how much our current food system threatens the climate, as well as how much climate impacts threaten our food supply, need a huge and sustained conversation.
The death of a mayor from a town in the south of France has drawn attention to what has been dubbed a nationwide “scourge” – the illegal dumping of waste along roadsides, fields and forests across the country.
In July, Alexander Uss, governor of the vast Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, said it was simply “pointless and maybe even harmful” to attempt to fight the wildfires that cloaked his capital city in a toxic cloud of smoke.
Days later, President Vladimir Putin sent in the army and even Donald Trump took notice, offering his Russian counterpart U.S. help to battle the blazes. Governor Uss has since reversed his position, and is joining the fight against what Greenpeace Russia says are on track to be the worst Siberian forest fires on record.
Temperatures in June and July were the hottest ever charted globally, with parts of Siberia where the fires are concentrated reaching 10 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) above the 30-year average from 1981 to 2010. The resulting dry conditions fed fires that torched more than 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of Siberian wilderness in just two months. Since the beginning of the year, fires have consumed more than 13 million hectares—an area larger than Greece.
The destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining.
Protecting the Amazon was at the heart of Brazil’s environmental policy for much of the past two decades. At one point, Brazil’s success in slowing the deforestation rate made it an international example of conservation and the effort to fight climate change.
But with the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, a populist who has been fined personally for violating environmental regulations, Brazil has changed course substantially, retreating from the efforts it once made to slow global warming by preserving the world’s largest rain forest.
McConnell came under fierce criticism for blocking the two election security bills a day after Mueller warned House lawmakers that he believed Russia was trying to interfere in the 2020 elections “as we sit here.” The floor fight went viral after MSNBC host and former GOP lawmaker Joe Scarborough repeatedly referred to the GOP leader as “Moscow Mitch.”
Gordon's letter was sent to reporters by the White House on Thursday evening, amid some suggestions that she was ousted for holding opposing views.
Gordon worked for the CIA for over 25 years prior to becoming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's second-in-command.
In China, the world’s largest smartphone market with over 800 million users, a unique type of farm springs up in urban areas. The only crops there are smartphones.
The operations, known as click farms, can house hundreds or thousands of iPhones and Android phones on the shelves. They are plugged in and programmed to search, click, and download a certain app over and over again. The goal is to manipulate the system of app store rankings and search results.
Q: Have we learned anything from the mistakes of past public policies?
A: No. It’s very frustrating to see the lack of attention to evaluating policies. This is partly because almost none of the politicians want to hear that their programs are not working and partly because these programs are often too rigid to adapt to the evidence. There has been a lot of progress in evaluating the impact of these programs in the last 20 years, but the greatest challenge is for this to be incorporated into the political process.
The provider of Wake County’s controversial new high school math curriculum is suing the Cary parent who is leading the fight to get the program dropped from the district’s schools.
Mathematics Vision Project filed a lawsuit Thursday in a Utah state court accusing Blain Dillard of making false and defamatory statements about the MVP Math program that the company says have harmed its business. The company says it will ask a jury to issue damages against Dillard for his “intentional interference with MVP’s economic and/or contractual relations.”
The company behind a controversial math curriculum being used in Wake County public schools has filed a lawsuit against a Cary parent, accusing him of "libel and slander" and "tortious interference with business relations" after he criticized the program.
An attorney for the Utah-based Mathematics Vision Project, or MVP, said the company decided to sue parent Blain Dillard after he made "false statements" about the company. Dillard says he is "innocent of all allegations and can defend each and every point made in the summons."
"When it comes to speaking up at a board meeting, these are public meetings, there's a reason we have them so the public is able to voice their opinions and voice their thoughts about what's happening in their school system," said Nicole Ligon, a professor at Duke Law School.
I said I would try not to focus on the external events surrounding Rushdie’s novel but the content and themes of the book are, in the end, inseparable from what happened after the book was published. Hybridity, irony, and interconnectedness once more, it seems—the fictional and the real intermingling and synthesising to form a powerful defence of openness and civility.
The Satanic Verses is therefore not only a work of astonishing beauty but also a foundational document in the fight for culture, openness, civilisation, and civility against those who wish to see those things stifled by narrow-minded faith-based puritanism. Salman Rushdie’s life and work remind us of the importance of this battle and the necessity of remaining staunch and unyielding in the task of defending civilisation against its enemies in whatever grotesque permutations they appear.
But it didn't just leak location. 3Fun also gave away birthdays and private photos too. One other interesting twist: using the copious leaked data, the researchers estimate that 3Fun is a bit of a sausage fest, with men outnumbering women by four to one. So if you were hoping to have two ladies in your threeway, the odds are even less in your favour than you might have expected.
In case you've been living under a rock, it emerged earlier in the year that Amazon was keeping recordings and offering them up for transcription by external contractors. It meant in some cases they had access to crimes being committed, eavesdropped on sexy-times and other things that it would make you hurl if you stopped and thought about it too hard.
After all the recent shenanigans surrounding voice assistant data and its use, it's now the turn of the Luxembourg National Data Protection Commission (CNPD) to probe Amazon on behalf of the EU27 1/2.
News of the FBI’s interest in Facebook comes in the same week that the president called on social networks to build tools for identifying potential mass murderers before they act. And across the government, there appears to be growing consensus that social networks should become partners in surveillance with the government.
But so far, as the Journal story illustrates, the government’s approach has been incoherent. On one hand, it fines Facebook $5 billion for violating users’ privacy; on the other, it outlines a plan to potentially store all Americans’ public posts in a database for monitoring purposes.
Hearst Magazines is tracking what readers click online and using those behaviors to serve the same magazine subscribers targeted ads in print.
Called MagMatch, the offering is a product from the Hearst Data Studio and will first go live in the most recent issue of Elle magazine. But the ads could also appear in other Hearst brands, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Food Network Magazine and Car & Driver.
[...]
Hearst said it’s using first party data, including the buy buttons on which readers click, to inform the offering. While most subscribers aren’t logged on to the websites of Hearst brands, the company anonymously matches their behavior using third parties, Wolrich said.
The Monitoring Association, a major non-profit trade organization representing home security companies, has released a statement saying it is “troubled” by partnerships between local law enforcement and Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company.
The statement comes after extensive reporting by Motherboard and Gizmodo has revealed the scope and nature of these partnerships, which, in part, require police to promote Ring products either implicitly or explicitly.
Biometric surveillance by companies against consumers is a growing menace to our privacy, freedom of expression, and civil rights. Fortunately, a federal appeals court has ruled that a lawsuit against Facebook for its face surveillance may move forward.
The decision, by the federal Ninth Circuit about an Illinois privacy law, is the first by an American appellate court to directly identify the unique hazards of face surveillance. This is an important victory for biometric privacy, access to the courts for ordinary people, and the role of state governments as guardians of our digital liberty.
The unsuspecting officers on duty welcomed them to present their case and that is when one of the women is alleged to have lurched forth and attacked the officers with a dagger while the two others attempted to burn the station down with petrol bombs. In the ensuing commotion the women were shot dead.
Investigations revealed that Tasmin — the mastermind of the attack — was a member of the Islamic State which claimed responsibility for the attack. Her fellow alleged attackers, sisters Maimuna and Ramla, attended Ainaba madrasa as well as Markoz Noor madrasa at Sparki mosque in Mombasa where they studied religion.
Jimmy Aldaoud was deported from the U.S. in June to Iraq, a country that his family said he had never set foot in. Two months after he arrived there, his family got word that he was found dead in Baghdad.
Aldaoud was born in Greece, his sister Mary Bolis said, after his family fled Iraq. He didn't speak Arabic.
Animal Aid, an animal welfare organisation, commissioned two freelance investigators to install covert cameras in the killing room. The investigators secretly entered the premises at night and installed the cameras which eventually provided the evidence on which the Foods Standards Agency based the prosecution.
Mr Shaw said over two days of filming 94 per cent of the sheep killed by non-stun halal methods were not slaughtered in compliance with the welfare requirements.
The San Francisco Police Department's "investigation" of journalist Bryan Carmody has just about finished collapsing completely. The stupid "investigation" -- supposedly initiated to figure out which cop leaked sensitive documents to the stringer -- has been the equivalent of a claymore mine deployed in reverse. Several claymore mines, to be more precise. With each iteration of the news cycle, the SFPD has sustained consecutive, concussive blasts to the face.
What culminated in a raid of Carmody's house began with a warrant seeking phone call and messaging data covering two days in February. That warrant has already been unsealed and quashed, with the judge pointing out the swearing officer did everything he could to avoid telling the court the SFPD was looking to put a journalist under surveillance.
This warrant preceded everything else. Since that was the foundation for search warrants targeting Carmody's home and the multiple devices SFPD officers seized from there, the rest of the investigation -- along with any charges the SFPD thought it might get away with pressing -- is disintegrating. Nicholas Iovino reports for Courthouse News Service that two more warrants the SFPD obtained have been tossed by judges.
Three of the five warrants the San Francisco Police Department obtained to search journalist/stringer Bryan Carmody's home, office, and phones have been tossed by the judges who issued them.
The initial warrant, issued in February by Judge Rochelle East was the first be declared invalid. Judge East said the warrant application was misleading, omitting information that would have made it clear Carmody was a journalist and protected by the state's shield law. This warrant -- seeking access to phone call and text message records -- has been tossed. Since everything else in the Carmody investigation stems from this illegal search, the rest of the warrants are destined for the dustbin.
Judge East's findings have led to two more judges tossing warrants they issued. It also has led -- at least in Judge Victor Hwang's case -- to the judge possibly reading the warrant for the first time. This statement from David Snyder of the First Amendment Coalition says the warrant Judge Hwang tossed contained information about Carmody that made it clear the SFPD was targeting a journalist.
David Seaward writes with the assumption that the operator is always untrustworthy. But, what if the operator was someone you knew? Someone you could reach out to if there were any issues, who could reach out to other operators? This is the case on the Fediverse, where Purism’s Librem Social operates. Within this system of federated networks, each node is run by a person or group of people. These people receive reports in various forms. In order to continue to be trusted, moderators of servers are expected to handle reports of spam, hate speech, or other instances of negative interactions from other services. Since the network is distributed, this tends to be sustainable.
In practice, this means that as a moderator my users can send me things they’re concerned by, and I can send messages to the moderators of other servers if something on their server concerns me or one of my users. If the operator of the other node breaches trust (e.g. not responding, expressing support for bad actors) then I can choose to defederate from them. If I as a user find that my admin does not take action, I can move to a node that will take action. The end result is that there are multiple layers of trust:
I can trust my admins to take action My admins can trust other admins to take action This creates a system where, without lock-in, admins are incentivized to respond to things in good faith and in the best interests of their users.
Financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in New York, officials said Saturday.
Despite obvious red flags regarding reduced competition and massive layoffs, both the FCC and DOJ have rushed to support T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint. We've noted that the math (and history) are very clear on this front: the reduction of major telecom competitors uniformly results in much higher consumer prices as the incentive to compete in direct price competition is hugely reduced. It's a major reason why you haven't seen AT&T and Verizon (both lobbying juggernauts) criticizing the merger. History's also clear: such mergers inevitably result in huge layoffs as redundancies are eliminated.
And while the FCC and DOJ (both now run by former telecom executives, it bears repeating) are tripping over themselves to sign off on the merger, a growing coalition of states has other plans. 10 states have sued to block the deal, quite correctly noting that mindless M&As are one of the biggest reasons we all hate broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast so much. Such deals help just two class of folks: investors and executives. Everybody else pays a steep price.
One of the more subtle assaults on net neutrality has been the slow but steady introduction of arbitrary, often unnecessary restrictions mobile carriers will then charge you to get around. Sprint, for example, has toyed with plans that throttle all video, music, and games unless you pay extra. Verizon has also banned 4K video from its network unless you pay more for 5G (which isn't widely available). The company also now throttles all video on its "unlimited" data plans, charging consumers even more if they want to view content in HD as the originating service intended.
Apple customers have long complained about the $900 billion company’s draconian restrictions on repairing broken iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices. Now, consumer advocates are turning to lobbyists to pressure legislators to etch a “right to repair” into law.
From its inception Uber has now lost a cumulative $14bn. In the most recent three months the firm recorded a large one-off expense related to share-based compensation for workers after the initial public offering. However, even the company’s preferred measure of profits, “adjusted-EBITDA” showed a loss of $656m, better than the first quarter of the year but worse than the same period a year earlier. And the rapid growth that the losses are intended to sustain seems to be faltering.
Amazon has been testing its Scout delivery robots near its headquarters in Snohomish County, Washington, for a few months. Today, it announced that it’s expanding the program, and it’s set to start testing the robots in the Irvine, California, area on a larger scale.
Shadow-banning is a process that dates back to at least the 1980s, with Citadel BBS's "twit bit," which would allow users to post replies to forums that they could see, but no one else could see.
That hasn't stopped Facebook from claiming to have invented shadow banning in is application for United States Patent 10356024, "Moderating content in an online forum," which claims that current/former Facebook employees Jeffrey Andrew Kanter, Mitu Singh, and Daniel Gregory Muriello "invented" a bunch of moderation techniques that have either been done before or are incredibly obvious, or both.
Patents are a gigantic dumpster-fire, and software patents doubly so. [...]
Venezuelan lawyers have welcomed the US government’s announcement that IP-related transactions in the South American country will be permitted, following months of uncertainty during which use of a specially created digital currency for this purpose was banned.
On summary judgment, the district court found for the patentee Eli Lilly — holding that the ANDA filings by Hospira & Dr. Reddy infringed Lilly’s U.S. Patent 7,772,209.
On appeal, the Federal Circuit found error’s in claim construction and consequently reversed the judgment of literal infringement. However, the court affirmed the alternative judgment of infringement under the doctrine of equivalents (DOE).
The drug at issue is pemetrexed (Lilly brand “Alimta”) approved for treatment of inoperable malignant pleural mesothelioma. The drug operates as an anti-folate (blocking folic acid from binding and being harnessed for cancer cell growth).
The ‘209 patent does not cover the drug itself, but instead covers an “improved method for administering pemetrexed disodium to a patient in need of chemotherapeutic treatment.” I previously wrote about the patent being challenged in separate IPRs and explained that “the claimed invention calls for a pre-treatment of a patient with folic acid and vitamin B12 in order to reduce the risk skin rashes, fatigue, etc.”
[...]
Thus, ultimately the judgment of infringement is affirmed despite the lack of literal infringement.
Wang Yeci (‘Wang’) is the patentee of ‘a small electric submersible pump with welded motor housing (‘the patent at issue’, No ZL200910025263.7, registered on 2 May 2012)’. In comparison to existing products on the market, Wang’s patent solves the problems of large and thick housing, heavy weight, high material consumption and high manufacturing costs. As a result, the products under Wang’s patent were very popular on the market.
In 2018, Wang filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pengcheng water pump factory and the other four factories in the Jiangsu Nanjing Intermediate People’s Court (‘the Nanjing Intermediate Court’), alleging that the defendants had been manufacturing and selling Wang’s patented products without authorisation, which had caused Wang serious economic losses. Wang requested the court to require the defendant to immediately stop the alleged infringements and to pay damages and reasonable expenses for CNY 250,000 (approx. EUR 32,771) and CNY 300,000 (approx. EUR 39,325), respectively.
The defendants argued that: 1) Wang had no evidence to prove the alleged infringing products fell within the scope of the patent claims at issue; 2) The patent at issue lacked novelty and inventiveness and therefore did not conform to the requirements of patentability in China. The defendants filed a request for invalidation to the Re-examination and Invalidation Department of the Patent Office of CNIPA; 3) The alleged infringing products were manufactured based on the state of the art; 4) The amount of damages claimed by Wang was too high and lacked factual or legal basis. In view of the above, the defendants requested the court to dismiss Wang’s claim in its entirety.
Sisvel holds a SEP-portfolio relating to various wireless communications technologies. On 15 October 2013, it informed Chinese phone manufacturer Xiaomi of this portfolio and stated its willingness to license it on FRAND-terms. The negotiations carried on for several years but were apparently unsuccessful. Sisvel brought suit against Xiaomi in the UK on 23 April 2019 and asked the High Court to set a global FRAND-rate between the parties. PI proceedings in the Netherlands were initiated shortly thereafter, on 29 May 2019. The decision suggests Sisvel also initiated proceedings on the merits in the Netherlands, but it is unclear what is claimed there.
Sisvel requested the District Court to enjoin all of Xiaomi's sales in the Netherlands; or, in the alternative, to grant the injunction subject to Xiaomi's agreement to have a FRAND-rate determined in arbitration; or, in the further alternative, to order Xiaomi to disable the patented functionalities in the phones it sells in the Netherlands.
In a nutshell, the District Court considered (i) Sisvel's interest in relief in these proceedings insufficiently urgent and (ii) the FRAND-dispute too complex for condensed PI proceedings. Consequently, it did not address validity, infringement or the parties' compliance with FRAND-obligations, but dismissed Sisvel's claims out of hand.
A lawyer registered a mark for Annie Sloan Interiors Ltd. (ASI) to register a mark for it, but later represented Jolie Design & Decor LCC (JDD) and Jolie Home, LLC (Jolie Home) to challenge the mark (“CHALK PAINT”) asserting genericness (apparently at the USPTO and in litigation). ASI, a former client by then, sued for breach of fiduciary duty and legal malpractice.
Defendant moved to dismiss. The court held the complaint adequately pled breach of a fiduciary duty. Specifically, the court reasoned ASI alleged the lawyer had “breached a duty of loyalty by using knowledge gained during his representation of ASI to assist a different client in a challenge to its mark, and that its damages consist of the money expended in defending the mark and any resulting diminution in the value of the mark.”
The court found that an agreement “waiving” (i.e., consenting) to this was insufficient because, among other things, in it ASI acknowledged the firm would be representing JDD, and made no mention of Jolie Home.
In a letter to the US Department of Commerce, the RIAA is calling for stronger measures to curb piracy and counterfeiting that takes place through online marketplaces. The music group points out that copyright infringement is widespread on many services, including Amazon and eBay, where a significant percentage of the CDs and box-sets are sold without permission.
The recent announcement of from the New York Public Library on its results in identifying books published in the USA that are now in the public domain, inspired me to update the scripts I use to track down movies that are in the public domain. This involved updating the script used to extract lists of movies believed to be in the public domain, to work with the latest version of the source web sites. In particular the new edition of the Retro Film Vault web site now seem to list all the films available from that distributor, bringing the films identified there to more than 12.000 movies, and I was able to connect 46% of these to IMDB titles.
[...]
New this time is a list of all the identified IMDB titles, with title, year and running time, provided in free-complete.json. this file also indiciate which source is used to conclude the video is free to distribute.
You may recall that, back in March, we were excited to hear the news that the University of California had cancelled its Elsevier subscription, after Elsevier was unwilling to support UC's goal of universal open access to all of its research (while simultaneously cutting back on the insane costs that Elsevier charged). Apparently the fight between Elsevier and UC has continued, and it's getting nasty.
For decades, the recording industry -- mainly in the form of its lobbying bodies, the RIAA, IFPI and other similar organizations -- have pushed, time and time again, for broadly expansive copyright law, in which everything possible is "owned" and everything possible must be licensed. And now we're reaching the logical conclusion to that mess -- even as many of us warned that this is where things would head, and we were laughed off by the very same recording industry as being "copyright haters." Except, here we are, now, with musicians afraid to even mention their heroes for fear of being sued.
It's all creating a massive chilling effect on music, and has backed the recording industry into a corner. Perhaps it's finally time for the recording industry to just admit that it went too far in pushing for everything to be covered by copyright and that everything must be licensed. Perhaps it should start using that massive lobbying power to change copyright laws in a manner that increases fair use and puts basic building blocks of music into the public domain for anyone to use. Perhaps it should admit that not everything needs to be "property," and that creativity often flows from someone inspired by another musician to create a similar sounding song. And that's a good thing.
