Are friends and family constantly asking you to troubleshoot issues with their Windows or Mac device? Being the resident support technician in your home is an important job. Like any responsible technology steward, you are going to try your best to help out. However, it might be quite a challenge if it has been a while since you last used such an operating system.
How long has it been since you last used Windows? Before using Linux, were you primarily a Mac user? Or, are you using Windows or Mac now either at home or work?
Take our poll by selecting the Windows version you last remember using. If the term, "windows" only reminds you of those glass panels that let sunlight inside, you are probably a long-time Linux user.
Leave us a comment and share your story about how you started using Linux.
I recently detailed my attempts to install Linux as an alternative boot an SD card in a new Dell laptop. Those attempts failed. See Attempting to install Linux on a new laptop for the details.
Microsoft has continued in their usual way and notified me last week that the current feature update of Windows on that laptop would soon be unsupported and urged me to update to the latest version.
However, that proved impossible. In spite of removing most of the software installed on the machine, Windows was incapable of cleaning up enough disk space to allow the installation of Windows 10 version 1903 to proceed. The installed 32GB eMMC drive simply is no longer large enough to allow the updates to install. This was true even when I manually downloaded the update and tried to install from an external drive.
It is remotely possible wiping the hard drive and performing a clean install might have worked, but the prospect of being forced to do so every year was not appealing. So being forced to choose between running an out of date version of Windows or wiping the hard drive and installing Linux, I chose to try the latter.
A higher percentage of top performing teams in enterprise organizations are using open source software, according to a survey conducted by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud. Additionally, the proportion of Elite performers (highest performing teams) nearly tripled from last year, showing that DevOps capabilities are driving performance.
SUSE, and the SUSE CaaS Platform team in particular, congratulates the Kubernetes Project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on the release of Kubernetes 1.16. The most major change in this release is actually a feature that is already in widespread use. Custom Resource Definitions (CRD) are a major foundation of Kubernetes extensibility and are used by many features and projects; however, they have been in beta since version 1.7, over two years ago. They finally graduate to general availability (GA) and stable status in this release, meaning that anyone using the current version of the feature and its API can expect compatibility for any future 1.x release as well as any 2.x release yet to come.
Kubernetes, for the un-initiated is a container orchestration platform that is deployed and supported in all the major public cloud provides and is also widely used on-premises as well. Every new Kubernetes update has features that are in alpha, beta and those that have reached general availability. In the 1.16 update, for networking professionals there is one alpha feature that stands above all others : IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack.
"If you enable IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking for your Kubernetes cluster, the cluster will support the simultaneous assignment of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses," the Kubernetes feature documentationstates.
The dual stack will support both Kubernetes Pods, which represent a set of running containers; as well as Kubernetes Services, which provide a way to abstract an application running on a set of Pods as a network service. The Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal (KEP) that defines the dual-stack feature, notes that Kubernetes has provides support for IPv6-only clusters as alpha features since the Kubernetes 1.9release which debuted in December 2017.
It’s easy to think of Kubernetes as the great disruptor of earlier generations of cloud-native platforms, such as OpenStack. But that view would be just as wrong as assuming that Kubernetes and containers have totally killed off old-school virtual machines. That’s what Stephan Fabel of Canonical had to say in an interview about the past, present and future of Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies within the enterprise.
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As a result of these differences, Fabel says OpenStack and Kubernetes each serve distinct types of workloads. For example, OpenStack might appeal to telcos, which are “more prone to adopting configuration management type approaches, where workloads have to be stateful and long-running.” Kubernetes, meanwhile, is better-suited for workloads that are deployed as REST- or HTTP-based services.
To help prove his point about the continued relevance of OpenStack, Fabel says Canonical is on track to witness “the most commercial activity in OpenStack” ever in the coming quarter, with business coming from a variety of verticals. Clearly, Fabel says, OpenStack remains a go-to solution for enterprises of many different stripes.
On September 4th, 2019, Containous, a cloud infrastructure software provider, released Maesh, an open-source service mesh written in Golang and built on top of the cloud native edge router Traefik. Maesh promises to provide a lightweight service mesh solution that is easy to get started with and to roll out across a microservice application.
On September 18th, 2019, the first OpenShift Commons Gathering Milan brought together over 300 experts to discuss container technologies, operators, the operator framework and the open source software projects that support the OpenShift ecosystem. This was the first OpenShift Commons Gathering to take place in Italy.
The standing room only event hosted 11 talks in a whirlwind day of discussions. Of particular interest to the community was Christian Glombek’s presentation updating the status and roadmap for OKD4 and CoreOS.
Highlights from the Gathering induled an OpenShift 4 Roadmap Update, customer stories from Amadeus, the leading travel technology company, and local stories from Poste Italiane and SIA S.p.A. In addition to the technical updates and customer talks, there was plenty of time to network during the breaks and enjoy the famous Italian coffee.
For more than five years we have been driving our technology strategy around the idea that the future of enterprise IT does not reside solely in an enterprise datacenter or in the public cloud. Instead the next wave of computing is built on a blend of these technologies and infrastructure: in short, the future is hybrid. The value of hybrid clouds comes from the choice it delivers, pairing the control of the corporate datacenter alongside the scale and flexibility of public clouds. We strongly feel, however, that the most valuable hybrid clouds are those that offer not only a choice of deployment type and location, but also a choice of the underlying architecture and the capacity to run on multiple public clouds.
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With RHEL available on Z15 and LinuxONE III, this helps pave the way for the rest of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, to emerge on IBM enterprise platforms. We’re pleased to continue our work with IBM in bringing the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to their next-generation systems.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15 is the last release that will only be supported for a year, as the company moves to a new model to support the open-source cloud platform.
Our first giveaway. In this episode: hidden gems, Banshee abandoned, FreeOffice issues, back to Ubuntu MATE for accessibility, and NTP and hardware clock.
Tools like error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance monitoring are tools to help you create a better user experience and are fast becoming crucial tools for web development and site reliability. But really what are they? And when do you need them?
You've built a cool web app or service, and you want to make sure your customers have a great experience.
You know I advocate for utilizing automated tests so you find bugs before your customers do. However, fast development lifecycles, and quickly reacting to customer needs is a good thing, and we all know that complete testing is not possible. That's why I firmly believe that site monitoring tools like logging, crash reporting, performance monitoring, etc are awesome for maintaining and improving user experience.
John-Daniel Trask, JD, the CEO of Raygun, agreed to come on the show and let me ask all my questions about this whole field.
The input driver updates for the Linux 5.4 kernel include the addition of an interesting, budget-friendly RC receiver that can be used for home-built drones and other use-cases while now the driver allows the receiver when paired with a supported RC controller to serve as a traditional Linux joystick input.
The input updates were sent in earlier this week and among the changes are allowing drivers to support more precise timestamps for better velocity tracking, improvements to the BU21013 touchpad driver, and other changes as outlined in the pull request.
While most of the other Linux file-systems are seeing mostly mundane changes for the Linux 5.4 feature work, the F2FS activity is fairly notable.
Most notably, F2FS now has case-folding/case-insensitive support. The F2FS case-insensitive support is based upon the recent addition to the EXT4 file-system and allows for per-directory case-insensitive file/folder look-ups. On a per-directory basis (such as for Wine and other use-cases), Unicode-based case-folding can be enabled if desiring this functionality. This F2FS support for Linux 5.4 case-folding includes a port of the recent EXT4 case-folding optimization to allow for faster look-ups.
Little is publicly known about stealth networking startup Pensando Systems, which is founded by former Cisco executives. They've been ramping up efforts since early 2018 but to date their web-site hasn't launched nor formally introduced any products, but they now have a networking driver in the mainline Linux kernel.
The PowerPC/POWER architecture changes were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.4 merge window. This time around are some interesting POWER changes with work on their means of secure virtual machines.
The Linux 5.4 kernel for POWER is bringing initial support for running on a system with an Ultravisor, which is IBM's approach for code running underneath a hypervisor and used for protecting guests from attacks by the hypervisor. Similarly, Linux 5.4 brings support for building a kernel to run as a Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) -- a guest running within an Ultravisor-ed environment.
Kicking off today in Berlin is the annual All Systems Go conference focused on systemd and other user-space components. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented on systemd-homed as a new component to systemd that is focused on improving home directory handling.
Improving the Linux handling of user home directories is the next ambition for systemd. Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.3.1 kernel.
All users of the 5.3 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.3.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.3.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Added to the device mapper (DM) code with the Linux 5.4 kernel is an interesting addition that benefits those wanting to carry out some interesting use-cases around remote replication of block devices.
As explained in the original patch proposal for dm-clone, "dm-clone produces a one-to-one copy of an existing, read-only device (origin) into a writable device (clone): It presents a virtual block device which makes all data appear immediately, and redirects reads and writes accordingly. The main use case of dm-clone is to clone a potentially remote, high-latency, read-only, archival-type block device into a writable, fast, primary-type device for fast, low-latency I/O. The cloned device is visible/mountable immediately and the copy of the origin device to the clone device happens in the background, in parallel with user I/O."
In time for any weekend gaming is the release of DXVK 1.4 as the latest big update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan implementation to boost the D3D11 Windows gaming performance with the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton).
With DXVK 1.4 the Direct3D interfaces have been updated against D3D11.4, the latest D3D11 revision shipped by Windows 10 Build 1903. This update brings new API features but DXVK isn't yet supporting some of the optional features like tiled resources and conservative rasterization.
Going back to December 2017 we've been tracking the Red Hat led effort on improving Nouveau's OpenCL compute support that involves adding NIR/SPIR-V support and improvements to the Clover Gallium3D state tracker. To much surprise, this morning the SPIR-V support for this open-source NVIDIA driver was merged for Mesa 19.3.
SHADERed is a cross-platform utility designed for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This week marked the version 1.2 release of this Windows/Linux program for helping to test and evaluate shaders.
Many people who regularly use computers suffer from eye strain and fatigue. Looking at a monitor for a long time can strain your eyes or can make any other problems you are having with your eyes seem more apparent. There is also research to show that late-night exposure to bright lights can affect sleep quality. This can be mitigated by reducing blue-light exposure.
Some monitors offer various eye care technologies including flicker-free technology, and an ultra-low blue light filter with different filter settings. But even if your display offers eye care technology and it’s well designed e.g. offering hotkeys that let you easily adjust filter settings. there’s still a good case to use a software solution as well. This is because the software typically offers more flexibility, such as the ability to automatically adjust the backlight and screen temperature based on the ambient brightness in your surroundings, or on a time schedule.
There are lots of simple steps you can take to reduce eye strain and fatigue. These include adjusting the brightness, contrast settings, and text size displayed, as well as minimizing glare, and ensuring your room has proper lighting. Taking regular breaks is also very important. This is where Safe Eyes can help. It’s a clone of EyeElo, Windows proprietary software designed to protect your eyes.
Pulse Audio has received a significant update accompanying several enhancements, bug fixes, and other additions that are sure to improve the sounds of your system.
Before we delve into its latest version, it only makes sense to introduce PulseAudio to our readers who are unfamiliar with it. As you would have guessed by its name, PulseAudio deals with the system sounds and allows the user to manage them better. Apart from that, the program also comes with some complex functionalities, like allowing the user to mix various sounds into one and transfer the audio to another speaker. You will find PulseAudio in most of the Linux distributions out there and mobile devices as well. Now that we’re done with its introduction let’s see what the new PulseAudio 13.0 has in store for us.
Feral Interactive today announced that A Total War Saga: TROY, the historical strategy game inspired by the Trojan war, will be released for macOS and Linux next year, shortly after the Windows release. Developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA for Windows PC, TROY is the third entry in the Total War Saga series of standalone games inspired by great turning points of history, along with THRONES OF BRITANNIA and FALL OF THE SAMURAI, also brought to macOS and Linux by Feral Interactive.
Developer Philip Rebohle has pushed out another major release of DXVK, the Vulkan to D3D layer used together in Wine and Steam Play.
Boasting a new feature set that pumps up the available Direct3D support to 11.4. However, certain optional features are not currently supported like Tiled Resources, Conservative Rasterization and Rasterizer Ordered Views but they may be added if ever needed. This should fix a crashing issue with Plants vs Zombies - Battle for Neighborville, which requires at least D3D 11.3.
Additionally, support for DXGI (Microsoft DirectX Graphics Infrastructure) was boosted up to version 1.5 which allows applications/games to check for HDR support but DXVK itself does not currently support HDR. Some games seem to need the interface for HDR to be there even if not used. You should also find the Rockstar Game Launcher working better with this update to DXVK, with new support for GDI interop with DXGI surfaces. Although the launcher does need some other Wine fixes due to a bug in Wine's Direct2D support.
Police Stories from Mighty Morgan and HypeTrain Digital is officially out now and after a very short delay the Linux version has also been released too.
A slower, more tactical top-down shooter that isn't all about going in loud? Certainly sounds interesting and it does look good. It released on the 19th with the Linux support appearing a day later. Early reports on it are good, with nearly 200 user reviews on Steam giving at a "Very Positive" rating overall so we might be onto a winner here.
FlightGear flight simulator 2019.1 was released almost two months ago. Not it’s finally made into PPA for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.04, Linux Mint 19.x and their derivatives.
FlightGear 2019.1 contains many exciting new features, enhancements and bug-fixes. See the changelog for details.
Get ready for a massive load of improvement! And it’s all pretty darn shiny too because in addition to a ton of work on apps, we polished up Plasma to be as smooth as a marble for the 5.17 beta version (numbered 5.16.90), which is now available. The final product is due to be released in about a month, and as you’ll see, KDE contributors have been hard at work making it as awesome as humanly possible! A few things have slipped until the Plasma 5.18 LTS release, but that’s okay because it means 3 more months to polish them up.
Oh, one more thing before we begin: like Kate, Okular is now also available on the Microsoft store! This work is so important because Windows users who become accustomed to using free open source software on Windows are more easily able to switch to a fully FOSS platform, like a Linux distro running KDE Plasma.
Back in 2011, we decided to remove the External Tools plugin in Kate for the KDE 4.8 release, since it was unmaintained and we got more and more bugs that were not fixed. However, over the years, we got many requests (and complaints) to bring this plugin back to life, since it was very useful to start little helper scripts with just a shortcut, via the command line, or the menu.
The good news is that for the KDE Applications 19.12 release, the External Tools plugin will be back! And it is much improved compared to the previous version.
One of the new goals of KDE is to spread the use of the applications created by the KDE community. This doesn’t only include the use of them on Linux & other Unix-like operating systems, but Windows, too.
The KItinerary data extraction engine recently got a command line interface, which can be pointed at any file KItinerary can consume (HTML, PDF, plain text, iCal, Apple Wallet passes, etc) and which then outputs JSON-LD according to the schema.org data model with the information that could be found in there. Adding this has been motivated by two separate goals: Increasing extractor robustness, and easing integration into 3rd party applications.
NetworkManager has shifted its threshold for a weak WiFi signal for when to begin searching for other WLAN networks. Up to now NetworkManager used a -80dBm threshold for when to roam for other network signals while now that has changed to find hopefully stronger network signals sooner.
And to avoid stress/burnout, I try to no longer work the evenings and weekends, so it drastically limits my time that I’ll devote to GNOME.
2. Autonomous Linux OS
Oracle has extended the promise of the autonomous database to its flagship Linux operating system. The company claims that Oracle Autonomous Linux, along with the new Oracle OS Management Service, is the first and only autonomous operating environment that helps greatly reduce complexity and human error to deliver increased cost savings, security, and availability for customers.
Autonomous Linux is based on Oracle Linux, an OS that’s binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which allows Red Hat customers to easily port applications to Oracle Cloud.
The new Linux OS from Oracle automates patching and upgrades even while the system is running. This automation reduces unnecessary and costly downtime to applications. Since it reduces human errors, it achieves higher availability and an increased system and application reliability.
Oracle has also introduced Oracle OS Management Service, a highly available Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service that enables customers to automate server management.
After almost a year of hiatus, the team is proud to release Lakka 2.3, featuring new platforms, new cores, and of course RetroArch 1.7.8.
As always, you can update through the Online Updater, or by visiting the download page of your platform here on the website.
We are proud to announce the release of Parrot 4.7, which represents an important step forward for our project.
Just a week after Manjaro announced that they would soon be a company, they officially released their latest distro, Manjaro 18.1.0 ‘Juhraya,’ to the delight of Linux enthusiasts worldwide.
Manjaro 18.1.0 ‘Juhraya’ was in development for six months, with an early controversy of whether the Manjaro team would replace FOSS office suite LibreOffice in favor of FreeOfficeX, which is proprietary.
After much feedback from the Manjaro community, the Manjaro developers dropped the plan, or in other words made both the communities happy. With Juhraya, Manjaro users can choose between the two (or choose no Office Suite at all).
Bryan Poerwoatmodjo has announced the new release of EndeavourOS’s 2019.09.15.
EndeavourOS is an Arch Linux based distribution with a pre-configured Xfce desktop.
Arc-x-icons is a complete and updated version of the Arch icon package that was previously used.
The new EndeavourOS Welcome Launcher allows you to open basic system commands and a hardware setup information wiki page with a single click.
Nvidia-installer is now installed by default, it also installs dkms drivers.
The PCLinuxOS project has announced the release of updated installation media for PCLinuxOS.
This release carries the version number 2019.09 and has a fully updated system until September 15, 2019.
The simple update notifier has been reworked and it will notify system updates. Also, you can update from the applet using apt-get.
Added small improvements to live media startup scripts.
Virtual Box Testing Media is also included in the installation media, allowing users to quickly test an ISO on the fly without creating a permanent VM in the virtual box.
It provides KDE Plasma, MATE and Xfce desktop environments.
We released Storm 0.21 on Friday (the release announcement seems to be stuck in moderation, but you can look at the NEWS file directly). For me, the biggest part of this release was adding Python 3 support.
Storm is a really nice and lightweight ORM (object-relational mapper) for Python, developed by Canonical. We use it for some major products (Launchpad and Landscape are the ones I know of), and it’s also free software and used by some other folks as well. Other popular ORMs for Python include SQLObject, SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM; we use those in various places too depending on the context, but personally I’ve always preferred Storm for the readability of code that uses it and for how easy it is to debug and extend it.
It’s been a problem for a while that Storm only worked with Python 2. It’s one of a handful of major blockers to getting Launchpad running on Python 3, which we definitely want to do; stoq ended up with a local fork of Storm to cope with this; and it was recently removed from Debian for this and other reasons. None of that was great. So, with significant assistance from a large patch contributed by Thiago Bellini, and with patient code review from Simon Poirier and some of my other colleagues, we finally managed to get that sorted out in this release.
Canonical's Mir developers since re-shifting focus to serving as a Wayland compositor have been working with the likes of the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop environment to implement Wayland support using Mir. For helping those interested in porting MATE applications from X11 to Wayland, one of the Mir developers has now issued a porting guide.
Seven years after the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1.75 Arm-based laptop entered production or nearly one decade since development began, it's now seeing mainline kernel support.
The ARM MMP2-powered OLPC XO-1.75 is finally seeing support in the mainline kernel with the Arm SoC pull. The OLPC XO-1.75 was a low-power, education-focused laptop continuing the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The XO-1.75 model had lower power consumption thanks to migrating away from the earlier AMD Geode and VIA C7 designs, up to 2GB of DDR3 memory, 8GB of NAND flash memory, and other basic features.
Copperhill Technologies has recently announced the release of its PiCAN3 CAN-Bus Board for the Raspberry Pi 4.
The BeagleBoard.org Foundation introduced BeagleBone-AI SBC at Embedded World 2019 last February.
One of the great things about technology is that it has raised all of our expectations. Once upon a time, people worried that controlling their television with a remote would make them lazy. Now, we don't even have to find the remote. We just talk to the TV — literally. We access hundreds of goods and services easily, without leaving the comfort of our chairs: we download games, order the supermarket shop, watch films and read books online. It really is a brave new world.
But with new worlds come new challenges, and the challenge of the new, tech-driven, marketplace is to make your business stand out in a global crowd. Of all the businesses in all the world, why should your customers choose (and stick with) you?
Lots of people will tell you that the key to gaining market share lies in improving the customer experience. And they'll be right. A combination of the need to impress and increased customer expectations have combined to make CX fundamental to gaining and retaining custom.
A majority of U.S. consumers feel that brands don't meet their expectations. The bar for customer experience has been set high -- and its on marketers to reach it.
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In the early 2000s, enterprise IT was dominated by proprietary software companies. Now, with the rise of public cloud computing, more and more developers are adopting open source tools within their organizations due to lower overall costs and access to the latest innovations.
The adoption is spreading from IT into other sectors of the business as well, notably marketing. In total, marketing and experience cloud vendors invested over $8 billion to acquire open source companies in 2018, according to PitchBook.
ReactOS, the open-source operating system still striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows as a drop-in replacement, has version 0.4.12 now available as its first big alpha update in six months.
ReactOS 0.4.12 features a lot of work on its open-source kernel including some driver compatibility enhancements, rewritten write-protecting system images, Blue Screen of Death fixes, and a lot of other low-level work.
Chinese internet giants are quickly cottoning onto the benefits of offering open-source technologies to global developers.
Tencent is the latest to throw its hat into the ring. The company announced Wednesday that it is allowing developers to use an open-source operating system to create an internet-of-things (IoT) projects that will allow Tencent to improve the performance of its IoT solutions and strengthen its foothold in the sector.
Called “TencentOS tiny,” the operating system is lighter, requires fewer resources, and uses less energy compared with other major systems, according to a Tencent release. The company also said it hopes TencentOS tiny will encourage developers to create IoT projects for smart cities, intelligent connected vehicles, and digital wearables — sectors that Tencent is aggressively targeting.
SUSECON is all about sharing the latest technical advances, best practices, customer experiences, and visions for the future. True to our “open” culture, we invite all customers, partners, engineers, developers, community members, and business leaders to submit a session proposal for you to share your expertise.
This year Akademy was a little bit different for me. I joined MBition recently to push Open Source and, giving the kind of activity and technologies we use, KDE is an community we can learn a lot from. We have many things in common.
MBition decided to sponsor the event at the Supporter level and my colleague Julia König came with me for a couple of days to learn more about these kind of events and this community in particular.
We attended to the welcome event, the sponsors dinner and the first days of talks together. During the second day of talks, I introduced the company to the attendees during the sponsors talk.
It was also great to see my former employer, Codethink Ltd, as sponsor once again.
Akademy is over. =/ And now that I have a little of time I will talk to you about a Birds of Feather that I’ve hosted during the Milan edition of Akademy that was the Mindmap of the community.
Since I’ve joined KDE I don’t have a clear picture what the structure of the community looks like. And that’s why I hosted this BoF to try to fix that.
Next week, Collaborans will be in Paris to participate in this year's editions of Embedded and Kernel Recipes, organized by hupstream.
Taking place on September 23 & 24, Embedded Recipes is a conference about open source solutions in the embedded world, wether it's latest developments, contributions, tools or platforms. This year, as the very first speaker on the programme, Collaboran Julian Bouzas will be kicking things off with a look at PipeWire, the new framework for handling audio and video streams on Linux. You can read more about his talk below.
We have extended the early registration period of the upcoming Continuing Legal Education Seminar (CLE), to Wednesday, September 25th. The CLE will be held at the Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh, North Carolina, on October 16th, 2019.
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Find more information about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 78 is beta as of September 19, 2019.
Google on Friday released the Chrome 78 web-browser beta following last week's release of Chrome 77.
Chrome 78 Beta is coming with a new Houdini API or more formally known as the CSS Properties and Values API Level 1, which lets developers register variables as fully custom CSS properties and can better handle animations and other use-cases.
With version 69, firefox removed the support for the <keygen> feature to easily deploy TLS client certificates. It's kind of sad how used I've become to firefox giving me less and less reasons to use it...
Adding third-party embedded widgets on a website is a common but potentially dangerous practice. Thankfully, the web platform offers a few controls that can help mitigate the risks. While this post uses the example of an embedded SurveyMonkey survey, the principles can be used for all kinds of other widgets.
Note that this is by no means an endorsement of SurveyMonkey's proprietary service. If you are looking for a survey product, you should consider a free and open source alternative like LimeSurvey.
In the desktop suite we have the sidebar which is a context dependant feature improving user performance eg. in chart editing. Unfortunately it's not the perfect UI for a mobile clients, so the new concept is to tunnel the UI description to the browser and create native widgets there.
Automattic, the company behind the open source WordPress content management (CMS) announced on Sept. 19 that it has raised $300 million in a new Series D round of funding.
Of note, the entire round was contributed by Salesforce Ventures, bringing total funding to data for Automattic up to $617 million. The Series D marks the first new raise for Automattic since 2014
"This puts us at a post-round valuation of $3 billion, three times what it was after our last fundraising round in 2014," Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic wrote. "It’s a tremendous vote of confidence for Automattic and for the open web."
The first BETA build of the 12.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
FreeBSD 12.0 is already approaching one year old while FreeBSD 12.1 is now on the way as the next installment with various bug/security fixes and other alterations to this BSD operating system.
FreeBSD 12.1 has many security/bug fixes throughout, no longer enables "-Werror" by default as a compiler flag (Update: This change is just for the GCC 4.2 compiler), has imported BearSSL into the FreeBSD base system as a lightweight TLS/SSL implementation, bzip2recover has been added, and a variety of mostly lower-level changes. More details can be found via the in-progress release notes.
It was early in 2001 and I was at MIT to meet and work with the nice people from Spindletop, a nascent computer hardware designer/reseller with a tiny office in the basement of a Cambridge strip-mall building, right beneath a fitness center. (Seems like a curious detail to include, doesn’t it? Will it be relevant later?) I was running a webhosting co-op at the time. The idea was that Spindletop would provide the hardware while I would provide what we now call “cloud space” for their various websites and downloads. The software that ran the computers would be Debian GNU/Linux, an operating system based on the idea of near-absolute freedom.
Dealing with GNU/Linux meant dealing with Richard Stallman, the eccentric genius who had guided the creation of pretty much everything but the Linux kernel itself. I say “eccentric”, but what I’m really saying is that Stallman is mentally ill. I don’t know the correct words to describe that illness, but it manifests itself in dozens of different ways, from extreme hydrophobia (fear of water!) to various disturbing habits of phraseology, communication, and physical behavior. Nobody who knows Stallman thinks he is sane. By the same token, nobody would doubt his intelligence. He’s the only person I have ever met in person who struck me as being measurably smarter than I am, which sounds horrifyingly egotistical but is probably more a reflection of my choice in fellow-travelers.
Stallman agreed to eat dinner with me on the condition that he be permitted to order my meal and that I eat the whole thing without complaint. I wouldn’t have dinner with a resurrected John Coltrane under those conditions but there were plenty of great jazz musicians and there is only one Richard Stallman. The meal was an utter nightmare, of course. Everything he picked had the texture, and taste, of Jell-O made from dog vomit. I told myself that if G. Gordon Liddy could burn his own finger down to the tendon that I could finish a five-course “authentic” Chinese meal. Having done so, I managed to extract some absolutely brilliant ideas from him about software design and programming principles. “Come back to my office,” he suggested, and we headed out to walk over towards the MIT Media Lab. About ninety seconds into our walk, it started to rain. Just a light sprinkling, not build-the-ark stuff. Stallman screamed like a teenage girl, pulled his dashiki (yes!) over his head, and ran in waddling fashion towards MIT.
Twenty minutes later, I arrived at the Media Lab to find him huddling on the other side of the door, shaking. “Why did you not run?” he asked, in a whining monotone. “Is it because you are heavy?” (I was 195 pounds at the time; lighter than Stallman, half a foot taller.)
“Yes,” I replied, “my weight prevents rapid locomotion.” Stallman nodded in satisfied fashion. Two hours later, in the middle of demonstrating some bizarre Bulgarian folk dance, he looked over his shoulder at me and said, “I would be happier if you were not in the office.” He did not stop dancing. I took this as my cue to leave.
I mention all of this so you know precisely the sort of person who is in the middle of being crucified for “defending Epstein’s rape island” by his institutional rivals.
“Wait,” some of you are saying, “that’s right! Jeffrey Epstein had a rape island! I’d forgotten all about it, what with Epstein’s convenient suicide and some remarkably media-friendly mass shootings occurring right as justice was about to be quote-unquote handed out!” Funny how that works. Perhaps it’s because Mr. Epstein had a full list of powerful and notable friends. One of those friends, apparently, was MIT artifical-intelligence savant Marvin Minsky, who is alleged to have had sex with a 17-year-old girl on the island.
When asked to give his thoughts on the matter, Stallman responded like any 110-octane autism-spectrum genius would: by questioning the terminology involved. He suggested that the correct word for Minsky’s alleged statutory rape was not “sexual assault”, noting that
a) Minsky had no way to know the girl was 17, not 18 ; b) she had been coerced by Epstein out of Minsky’s presence and might well have appeared to be entirely willing.
In true Stallman fashion, this was
a) absolutely correct from a logical perspective; b) mind-blowingly stupid from a perspective of The Current Year.
It’s no different from the thousands of logical but emotionally uncomfortable things he has said and written over the past forty years. Stallman has no way to understand how people feel about something; he doesn’t feel that way. The community of actual computer scientists and clued-in tech people has long accepted this because — and I cannot emphasize this enough — Richard Stallman is responsible for computing as we know it.
“Rafael knows MIT as well as anybody can know it. More importantly, MIT knows him,” said Lawrence Bacow, Harvard University’s president and a former MIT chancellor who has known Reif as a friend for decades. “He is a person of extraordinary decency. I have full faith and confidence in him.”
Harvard is also conducting a review of its own Epstein gifts and entanglements.
The troubles at MIT boiled over after The New Yorker revealed earlier this month that Epstein was far more involved at the university than initially disclosed and that MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and others had kept those ties hidden.
In the weeks since, the controversy has broadened. Ito, whom Reif hired, and MIT scientist Richard Stallman have resigned from the university. MIT has hired a law firm to review the Epstein ties. Reif has acknowledged that he signed a letter when he was just weeks into his presidency thanking Epstein, who was then a convicted sex offender, for a donation and that top university officials knew about efforts to take Epstein’s money and keep the gifts anonymous.
Last week more than 60 female faculty members signed a stinging letter urging Reif to improve the culture of MIT and questioned the administration’s commitment to gender equity.
“How can MIT’s leadership be trusted when it appears that child prostitution and sex trafficking can be ignored in exchange for a financial contribution?” the letter said.
Reif, who earned about $1.1 million in 2016, declined to be interviewed for this story. The controversy appears to have hit him hard.
Stallman made the announcement on his blog, writing “I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.” He simultaneously stepped down from his roles as president and board director at the Free Software Foundation, which he founded in 1985.
Mechanical engineer and MIT alum Selam Jie Gano published emails Stallman sent to a MIT CSAIL mailing list earlier this month. In the emails, Stallman tried to defend the reputation of deceased MIT professor Marvin Minsky, whom Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with during a trip to the Virgin Islands when she was 17.
As part of its social purpose charter, all software released by Purism is free software. That means our software includes a lot of free software created by others–thank you!
We make this commitment with a “free software license” that formally grants these freedoms. This means you don’t need to ask us permission to use our software–you already have it. If you are a programmer, you are free to tweak or even overhaul an application. If you are a consultant, you are free to provide supporting services. If you are an everyday user, you are free to choose whoever you like to provide programming and other services, or even learn how to do it yourself.
Everyone has opinions and preferences, especially when it comes to food. To establish a criterion when answering "How spicy should a jalapeño be?." the Scoville Heat Scale was developed as a standard to measure spiciness. This scale allows people to communicate and share information about how spicy we like our peppers.
Similarly, open source technology standards, such as USB, I2C, MQTT, and others, were developed to enable global compatibility. Furthermore, open source hardware platforms have enabled communities to “speak the same language” without reinventing the wheel. For example, Raspberry Pi makes it easy for people to use their hardware as a baseline and then add onto it. This has created a revolution in many industries by enabling individuals, startups, and large corporations to apply hardware and software to complex problems without having to design them from the ground up.
Python has become, go programming language Around the World. From many Software companies to Consumer-based Companies.
Software teams seeking to provide better products and services must focus on faster release cycles. But running reliable systems at ever-increasing speeds presents a big challenge. Software teams can have both quality and speed by adjusting their policies around ongoing service ownership. While on-call plays a large part in this model, advancement in knowledge, more resilient code, increased collaboration, and better practices mean engineers don't have to wake up to a nightmare.
This four-part series will delve into the concepts of full-service ownership, psychological safety in transformation, the ethics of accountability, and the impact of ownership on the customer experience.
Now, We are comfortable with Python and ready to get started with Machine Learning (ML) projects. But, Where to go next? Can we directly dive into coding ML projects? Please follow along to know the answer.....
Hi guys, I work as a programmer for more than 15 years and was using many different languages, paradigms, frameworks and other shit. And I want to share with you my rules of writing good code.
[...]
Code review can be as good as it can be bad. You can organize code review only if you have a developer who understand 95% of the code and who can monitor all updates without wasting to much time. In another situation, it will be just time consuming and everyone will hate this.
On this part got too many questions so describe this more deeply. Many people think that code review it’s a good way of teaching new guys, or teammates who work on a different part of code. But the main target of code review it’s maintaining code quality, and not teaching. Let’s imagine that your team making code for controlling a cooling system for nuclear reactor, or space rocket engine. And you made huge mistake in very hard logic, and then you are giving this for code review to the new guy. How do you think what would be the risk of an accident? — On my practice more than 70%.
A good team is where each person has own role and responsibility for the exact piece of work. If someone wants to understand another piece of code then he goes to a person responsible for it and asks her. Impossible to know everything and better excellent understand a small piece of code than all but on 30%.
I am no expert on teaching programming, but when I want to get better at something, I try to find a way to have fun with it. For example, when I wanted to get better at shell scripting, I decided to practice by programming a version of the Minesweeper game in Bash.
If you are an experienced Bash programmer and want to hone your skills while having fun, follow along to write your own version of Minesweeper in the terminal. The complete source code is found in this GitHub repository.
At its CodeOne conference, Oracle explains how the rapid release cycle for Java has yielded innovation, as Java SE 13 is officially launched.
“Emmy in the Key of Code” is novel written by Aimee Lucido, a software engineer who works at Uber. It’s about Java and music. Oracle invited Lucido to speak at the Oracle OpenWorld/Code One event. We sat down with her to talk about her book and what inspired her to write it.
In the world of software, good code is a necessity, and great code can make the difference between a startup succeeding and failing. But how do you protect coding innovations that may be novel or unique?
Intellectual property law, or IP law, is the main legalistic framework that can answer many of those questions and more. Any business, and perhaps more crucially, any individual coder, should be aware of their options when it comes to maintaining the rights to their work. Here, we delve into some of the most important things to know about IP law and coding.
It's my great pleasure to announce that LLVM 9 is now available.
Get it here: https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#9.0.0
This release is the result of the LLVM community's work over the past six months (up to trunk r366426 plus commits on the branch). Some highlights include:
- Support for asm goto, enabling for example the mainline Linux kernel for x86_64 to build with Clang - The RISCV-V target is no longer experimental, but built by default - Experimental support for C++ for OpenCL
as well as many bug fixes, optimizations, and diagnostics improvements.
A new version 1.3 of the distributed C/C++ compilation tool Icecream has been released. To accompany it, version 3.3 of the GUI monitor Icemon has been released as well.
A new version of digest is just now arriving at CRAN (following a slight holdup over one likely spurious reverse dependency error), and I will send an updated package to Debian shortly as well.
digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, and spookyhash algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a fairly widely-used package (currently listed at 795k downloads) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation.
The Sidewalk Museum of Congress (SMoC) located outside 1st District Rep. Roger Marshall’s office at 200 E. Iron Ave., Salina, KS, 67401 is an anti-status-quo palette of dissent against the status quo of establishment politics and its allied mainstream media, and of elite museum spaces. This resistance space has every color and no logo.€ SMoC is the palette, the media, the planter, and the engaging (or not) audience harvester.
Not very long ago (Sept 2, 2019), India launched a rocket to the far side of the moon. It carried a lunar lander that fell silent following the landing attempt four days later. Had it survived, India would have become the fourth country in the world to accomplish the feat. Still, the partial success was a matter of pride. There have been other signal achievements including a doubling of GDP in the past decade. Then, why are Indians unhappy?
For most of our existence, we shared the Earth in common. That is, there was no private property, nor, in fact, much consciousness of ourselves as individual beings, separate from one another and separate from the natural world of which we were a part. It is only during the last few hundred years that most of the commons has disappeared, converted into private property, embedded in a new mode of production—capitalism.
When looking for a heatsink with a small stature for an AMD APU mini PC build for HTPC / file storage use-cases (more on that build in the next day or two), the Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 fit the criteria and so I went with that given the success with the many Noctua heatsinks we have used over the years. For those potentially interested in the NH-L9a-AM4 for an AMD APU like the new Ryzen 5 3400G or for lower-end Ryzen CPUs, I ran some benchmarks with this cooler.
The Trump administration is sounding the alarm against vaping products as health officials scramble to determine why some consumers are suddenly becoming sick from them.
As part of then-Prime Minister (PM) Theresa May’s supposed preparations for a no-deal Brexit, the government asked different departments of the UK’s civil service, including those responsible for food, agriculture, medicine, and chemicals, to come up with impact assessments. The worst-case scenarios (not leaked or released at the time of writing) were codenamed Black Swan. Michael Gove, the future Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (basically the deputy PM), dismissed Operation Black Swan as a “film about a ballet dancer” and even denied that it is a government document.
Tests on the people of Langouët showed levels of glyphosate—one of the most widely used herbicides and the active ingredient in RoundUp—in their urine up to 30 times the recommended limit. It was especially high in children.
Dear America:Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare, and although it has improved access to healthcare for some, tens of millions of Americans still cannot afford basic medical care for their family.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab have dumped wastewater underground in apparent violation of a state environmental regulation, according to documents and interviews, potentially endangering local waterways in and near the town of Middleton.
Nitrogen levels from the lab’s wastewater registered more than 20 times above the legal limit, according to documents provided by a former Media Lab employee. When water contains large amounts of nitrogen, it can kill fish and deprive infants of oxygen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on September 19 released the “Lower Drug Costs Now Act” (H.R. 3), which would institute a series of measures designed to address runaway prescription drug costs.€
"The vast majority of community water systems meet legal standards. Yet the latest research shows that contaminants present in the water at those concentrations can still harm human health."
Cryptojacking is a lucrative venture for malware developers, but it comes with a problem. Cryptojackers take up a lot of the processor’s resources which makes the attack very noticeable for the victim. One strain of cryptojacker has developed a way to avoid detection by masking the tell-tale signs from the user.1 The Arrival of Skidmap Skidmap is a Linux-based malware which mines cryptocurrency on computers and servers without the owner’s permission. What makes Skidmap so dangerous is its wide range of advanced features that make it a pain to locate and stop.
Earlier this week I already provided a Chromium update in my Slackware repository. That update addressed a critical security issue in the media playback plugin whereby an attacker was able to take over your computer remotely, simply by letting you load an infected page.
But then another critical vulnerability was discovered and two days ago a new Chromium source was released to take care of this security hole in the User Interface code. The new version of Chromium is 77.0.3865.90 and of the four mentioned vulnerabilities on the website, one is a remote-takeover issue.
John Bolton tried his best.
Amnesty International said the bombing "suggests a shocking disregard for civilian life."
Here, in the village of Stryszow in Southern Poland, you can hear the funeral ceremonies from the farmhouse on the hill where I reside during my time in this Country. The mournful cadences of the undertaker match the dull mechanical tolling of the church bell, as friends and relatives of the deceased, mostly in black, walk slowly and solemnly down the high street following the funeral cortege.
The death in the€ Democratic Republic of Congo€ of a rebel leader wanted by the International Criminal Court highlights the need to bring justice for his forces’ many victims.
Three years ago, Congolese security forces€ shot dead at least 66 protesters, rocking Kinshasa, the capital of the€ Democratic Republic of the Congo. Three years later, nothing has been done to hold senior officials responsible to account.
Late on the night of July 14, 1958, I navigated our KC-97 aerial tanker to refuel a lone B-52 on a secret radio-silence mission near the Arctic Circle. On our way home, our number three engine conked out as we approached the Gaspé Peninsula. We got permission to make an emergency landing at Loring, the big B-52 base in northern Maine. As soon as we touched down, we were ordered to clear the runway. Suddenly the squawking of Klaxon horns pierced the night. Jeeps flashing red lights materialized out of the darkness and sped to the row of giant B-52s on standby alert, each loaded with thermonuclear bombs. Flight crews raced from the jeeps to the planes. One after another, the B-52s started their eight engines, taxied out, and launched into the black sky.
Even if US intelligence decisively shows that some of the drones and cruise missiles used in the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields originated in Iran, a decision to go to war with Iran would be inexcusable and insupportable.
On August 3, 2019 a white supremacist walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and murdered 22 people and injured dozens more. Shortly before the attack, he posted online comments complaining about a “Hispanic invasion.” He later told authorities that he was specifically targeting “Mexicans.” Just a few days before the El Paso massacre, another shooting in Gilroy, California left 3 dead and many more injured. The murderer in this case had online postings about invading “hordes of mestizos” and recommended that people read a white supremacist favorite “Might is Right” which, among other things, exalts the racial superiority of Anglo Saxons.
Forget everything you’ve ever been taught about free speech in America.
"This is just one of the horrors of endless war."
I’ve never been to Afghanistan, but I am the mother of two young children. So when I imagine what life must be like there after 18 years of war, my mind conjures up the children most vividly -- the ones who have been affected by the conflict -- and their parents.
The range of options the Pentagon will present the president with include military actions as well as political and economic moves.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius, of Sweden, became the first scientist to quantify the effects [PDF] of man-made carbon dioxide on global temperatures. He calculated that doubling the atmospheric level of the gas from its concentration in his time would raise the average midlatitude temperature by 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. That’s not too far from the latest results, obtained by computer models running more than 200,000 lines of code.
The United Nations held its first Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, and this was followed by a series of meetings and climate treaties. But the global emissions of carbon dioxide have been rising steadily just the same.
At the beginning of the 19th century, when the United Kingdom was the only major coal producer, global emissions of carbon from fossil fuel combustion were minuscule, at less than 10 million metric tons a year. (To express them in terms of carbon dioxide, just multiply by 3.66.) By century’s end, emissions surpassed half a billion metric tons of carbon. By 1950, they had topped 1.5 billion metric tons. The postwar economic expansion in Europe, North America, the U.S.S.R., and Japan, along with the post-1980 economic rise of China, quadrupled emissions thereafter, to about 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon by the year 2000.
Finally, it seems that the urgency of the climate crisis has become impossible for decision-makers—especially in the global North—to ignore. | By Dipti Bhatnagar
The irony of this old New Yorker€
California and 22 other states sued Friday to stop the Trump administration from revoking the authority of the nation’s most populous state to set emission standards for cars and trucks.
"California won't bend to the president's reckless and politically motivated attacks on our clean car waiver."
"Why should we go to class if you won't listen to the educated?" one homemade sign asked.
Finally, it seems that the urgency of the climate crisis has become impossible for decision-makers—especially in the global North—to ignore.
In May of 2016, the school board in Portland, Oregon, passed what is believed to be the first comprehensive climate education resolution in the country.
A very large chasm exists between those in power, including most of the 2020 presidential candidates, and environmentalists and scientists intent on acting now to resolve growing environmental crises. To reiterate what is known, the United Nations, through its IPCC and the IPBES committees, has provided comprehensive evidence that little time remains to avert catastrophic global warming. And the world is already in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.
A sophisticated greenwashing industry has been evolving over the last few decades to not just mask the environmental destruction of corporations while passing the blame on to consumers, but to also present the climate crisis as a neutral and natural disaster that is disconnected from a system of inequality. In fact, climate change is a crime being perpetrated against us.
"We're here to reclaim our right to live, our right to breathe, our right to exist."
"It's crystal clear that this is a climate emergency. It's time those in Washington started acting like it."
On a late spring day in Seattle, I went for a walk in my neighborhood to enjoy the long-absent rays. But a thought intruded not long into my walk: I needed to pick up an N95 mask before the wildfires started and the hardware stores sold out. That’s what had happened the previous summer when, on a few occasions, smoke from wildfires in British Columbia and eastern Washington
According to Bill McKibben, the internationally renowned climate activist, author and founder of 350.org, today’s record-breaking hurricanes should not be labeled with such innocuous names as “Dorian” or “Maria.” Rather, they should be named after Exxon Mobil, Chevron and BP—major fossil fuel corporations that have been the driving force behind global warming...
Millions of children and adults are expected to strike across the globe today, inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s call for climate€ action.€
20 September sees the start of a week-long youth-led global climate strike. Students will be voicing their demands for action âËâ backed by many scientists.
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has sparked a global movement with her “school strike for the climate.” Last year, she started skipping school on Fridays to stand outside the Swedish parliament demanding climate action. Since then, she has inspired millions around the world to join her. The final two Fridays of this month, Sept. 20 and 27, are expected to be some of the largest global protests in history. These two strike days fall on either side of the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit on Monday, Sept. 23.
Dear Tom,Since the first open letter I wrote to you didn’t seem to get through, I’m trying again.
Peace activists and organizations have€ worked€ for€ years€ to bring environmental and peace activism together. When an environmental campaign includes the peace movement, it’s time to join in and show up and take part.
"Students have led and we must follow—in defense of the scientific truths our colleagues have discovered over the decades, and of the planet we love."
On Wednesday Greta Thunberg and other inspirational young climate activists spoke at a joint hearing in Congress about climate change.They were speaking before both the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee and the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill today.
For other species, climate impacts are not as direct. The 2019 State of Canada’s Birds report found aerial insectivores like swifts, swallows and nightjars have declined by 59 per cent since 1970. The report cites climate change as one of several threats, as severe weather limits insect availability.
"If we don't come together and create change now, future generations will remember us as the people who stood idly as our world burned."
It’s hard to ignore not just the scientific reports, but also the on-the-ground reality of climate disruption. It’s€ getting hotter and drier, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates we have about 12 years to reverse this direct trend. It’s a challenge requiring us to come together as a mature and functional human family.
"Global demand for meat is destroying the Amazon rainforest."
Most of the politicians and policy makers who wield the power to reverse the climate crisis are likely not going to suffer any serious consequences. They will be long gone when the youth of this world grow up. Sixteen-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg began a student strike in 2018 to demand action to prevent further global warming and climate change.
"We need to stop funding things that destroy nature and pay for things that help it."
Today, it seems that the scariest thing for rich white men is the activism of school children, whose decision to strike for the climate has energised the climate movement into an exciting new phase. The young activists, from Greta Thunberg in Sweden whose Fridays For Future school strikes call out governments, to the survivors of typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines...
"They knew that it was real. Their own scientists told them that it was real. What do you do to people who lied in a very bold-faced way, lied to the American people, lied to the media?"
"We have to act now to protect the places we know birds rely on."
"We have to act now to protect the places we know birds rely on."
The irony of this old New Yorker cartoon by Eric Lewis is so precise I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for two years. The speaker is the planet Saturn, clad in doctor’s garb — a stethoscope circling his forehead — giving the bad news to a sick and miserable-looking Earth...
A few weeks ago, another young man was shot to death in Michigan City, Indiana. He was the fourth or fifth in the past several months (no on really keeps count, especially when the victim is black). Here, in the shadow of the nation’s third-largest city, poor and working class people slave away at low-paying service sector jobs that provide no benefits, seasonal wages (at best), and no future. The ghosts of Neoliberalism and Deindustrialization continue to haunt our small town.
Let us begin with just a few recent and disturbing statistics about working in America. First, most Americans (nearly 78%) live paycheck to paycheck, which makes them vulnerable to abuse and bullying by employers. Second, a 2018 Harris Poll found that “seven in ten employers (70 percent) use social networking sites to research job candidates during hiring process,” and another seven percent was planning to do so as of 2018. This means that on top of working under inhumanely precarious and insecure conditions, average American employees are also being watched online and offline by authoritarian employers to make sure they are conforming to their demands. Based on more than 12 years of work experience, observation, and collecting insights from many friends, colleagues, and total strangers, I find that most American workplaces operate in ways that makes it almost impossible for anyone to speak truth to power or challenge the status quo and be able to thrive or advance in their career. “If you dare to open your mouth, you basically ruin your career,” is one of the most common lines I hear from people when I ask them about what usually stops them from saying or doing what they see as the right thing to do. Here, we must ask, is there a dictatorship worse than this reality? Is there any difference between being ruled by authoritarian leaders and authoritarian employers? A bigger concern is that America goes around the world toppling “authoritarian” or “dictator” regimes, while most American corporations and institutions act as dictatorships squeezing life out of their employees/citizens. It is important at this time to start connecting between countries ruled by single dictators and others ruled by dictators who own and manipulate the job market.
Remember RCEP? The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is a massive trade deal being negotiated by most of South-East Asia -- including China and India. Although still little-known, it has been grinding away in the background, and is drawing closer to a final agreement. Almost exactly a year ago Techdirt noted that there were some interesting rumors that corporate sovereignty -- officially known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) -- might be dropped from the deal. A story in The Malaysian Reserve confirms that is the case...
Earlier this year, a number of wealthy parents, celebrities, and college prep coaches were accused of offering large bribes to elite universities in order to get their children into schools they didn’t qualify for. Federal prosecutors charged at least 50 people in the criminal investigation named “Operation Varsity Blues.”
"We are going to make the changes that we need in this country when the working people of America stand up to the corporate elite, not take their money."
"With Scalia in charge, Trump's Department of Labor would go even further down the path of siding with big corporations over workers and the American people."
The poverty rate in the United States fell to 11.8 percent in 2018, according to data released last week by the Census Bureau — the lowest it’s been since 2001. But this estimate significantly understates the extent of economic deprivation in the United States today. Our official poverty line hasn’t kept up with economic change. Nor has it been modified to take into account widely held views among Americans about what counts as “poor.”
President Donald Trump, along with his father, Fred Trump, were the defendants in a 1973 lawsuit brought by the Justice Department, in which housing and civil rights activists laid bare the Trumps’ practices of turning away black renters. “It was front-page news,” The New York Times stated in 2016, “and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.”
Washington is awash with proposals for a new regulatory agency centered on Silicon Valley. Often lost in that important conversation is the fact that the executive branch already has some positions with a direct focus on the technology sector, though they are limited in scope and scattered across the alphabet-soup of agencies. Perhaps no tech-focused bureaucrat has the president’s ear quite like the Chief Technology Officer. The CTO is the White House’s top advisor on anything to do with technology and innovation, tasked with explaining the latest developments and guiding the thinking of the most powerful politician on earth.
With 99.95 percent of those who gave still able to do so again, 2020 candidate says record milestone—reached faster than any other campaign in history—"is astonishing."
America has been fooled by the charter school industry for too long.
One of the major themes in U.S. politics over the past decade or so has been the enormous influence that corporate America has over our political and economic life. Since the financial crisis erupted 10 years ago, populism has taken hold of the public imagination, and popular anger seems to have reached new heights as inequality has risen and corporations have grown more powerful.
It was only the first week of the fall semester, but the scandal, which had been steadily brewing all summer, struck a nerve. In August, the university had admitted to accepting $800,000 from Epstein over the course of roughly 20 years, but this was a new punch to the gut.
"We enabled a child sex trafficker," she told Insider. "How can I not be disgusted? He used [the] MIT name to protect himself. He used connections that he may have made here to protect himself. He associated himself with faculty that I respect — with us."
Epstein, who essentially acted as a broker between MIT's affluent donors and the school, had secured millions for MIT's Media Lab from tech giants like Bill Gates. That prospect sickened her.
It’s been another hard week at MIT. Our campus has been divided by revelations of inappropriate fundraising, coverups, and the harboring of far too many tech geniuses who seemingly put their own interests and careers over the safety of women, among other marginalized groups.
As a chaplain to students and faculty at the Institute, but also as an opinion writer on the ethics of technology who is supposed to be on sabbatical from the chaplaincy to focus on the writing, I’ve been torn all week as to what to say. If you don’t know what a chaplain is, and you would hardly be alone in any ignorance there, it is a position that emphasizes confidentiality and trust. I know there are a lot of people on MIT’s campus who are scared, sad, and hurting for various reasons, and I wouldn’t want any of them to feel less able to speak with someone like me because I’ve chosen to speak out publicly.
At other times, in the midst of other campus controversies, I’ve personally opted to remain relatively silent, leaning into the part of my job that is, officially, one of quiet service to a university as a whole. I’ve been critical of a lot of big institutions over the years, including much of religion, but also a lot of organized atheism.
I’ll be honest: Writing a weekly opinion column about the environment during the Trump era is depressing — and boring. Every week is the same: “Trump did something harmful to the environment. That’s bad. He should stop. Here are the catastrophic things that will happen if we don’t take care of our planet.”
Many Muslims follow the traditional 40-day grieving period, but Kashmir has been grieving for decades. Now, 46 days later, even the grief is helpless, and soon the voices of outside support will fade. Today, too, Indian sympathy for the state is a quid pro quo. “They are one of us,” say the hashtag supporters, completely ghosting the plot. There is barely any acknowledgement of their right to be independent of the country. “I stand with Kashmir” is the slogan, not “I stand with Kashmir to be free”.
Home Minister Amit Shah of the BJP now bats for Hindi as the unifying language that India requires.
For most Israelis, the general election on Tuesday was about one thing and one thing only. Not the economy, nor the occupation, nor even corruption scandals. It was about Benjamin Netanyahu. Should he head yet another far-right government, or should his 10-year divisive rule come to an end?
"In 2016, countless voters across the state of New York were disenfranchised by the state's arcane and inexcusable early party affiliation deadline," said Faiz Shakir, campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Early this month, workers at the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management gathered to discuss a Trump administration plan that would force some 200 people to uproot their lives or find other jobs.
With a vague plan that keeps changing as officials describe it — and no guarantees that Congress would fully fund their relocations — the employees were being detailed to distant locations in the West like Grand Junction, Colorado, and Reno, Nevada. Many career staff saw the move as part of a wider Trump administration effort to drive federal employees out of their jobs. Acting White House chief of staff Mike Mulvaney has described that approach as a “wonderful way to streamline government.”
The post mortem on the latest Democratic debate tells us all we need to know. The fix is in. Choose your so-called liberal media—New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, MSNBC, or any of the other members of the neoliberal media mafia—and you’ll be told either that Biden did well, that he was the “winner,” or that he at least avoided any major gaffes.€ A few non-traditional news
Christopher Ketcham’s “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West” is a politically explosive and beautifully written chronicle of the ongoing struggle to preserve publicly owned land in the West. This is home to iconic endangered species such as the grizzly bear, the wolf, and the wild horse. Much of the left is rightfully fixated on the horrifying prospects of Bolsonaro giving the green light to ranchers, miners, oil companies and farmers to ravage the Amazon rainforest. Now it is time that we took a stand against the same kind of devastation taking place on American soil. If it was up to Donald Trump and the “liberal” Democrats like Obama who paved the way for him, all of the land that had been protected under successive presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon (yes, that’s right) will face the same fate.
For half a year, Yakutsk resident Alexander Gabyshev had been walking on foot toward Moscow, thousands of miles and six time zones west of his hometown. Gabyshev describes himself as a “warrior shaman,” and he plans to defeat “Putin the Demon” at the conclusion of his journey. Along his path to Moscow, the shaman gave speeches at multiple protests, attracted a group of companions who walk with him along Russia’s highways, and became a subject of energetic discussion and meme production nationwide. On September 19, officials arrested Gabyshev and sent him for a brief psychiatric evaluation. He also reportedly faces felony extremism charges. These developments have prompted leading newspapers around the world to write about Gabyshev. Meduza is also looking at this man’s story and the life events that led him to where he is now.
This essay attempts to explain the root causes of the current developing political and Constitutional crisis in the United States as the economy moves toward concentration of capital and wealth reflected by and organically linked to concentrated political power. The crisis includes lawlessness at national and international levels: violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the rising frequency of mass shootings, increasing crime and incarcerations, corruption, violation of UN Charters, agreements, and state sovereignty, termination of trade and arms treaties, ending agreements and conventions, illegal wars, foreign-election meddling, surveillance, and more.
As a general rule, a functional government is better than a dysfunctional one. Nevertheless, the bipartisanship everyone supposedly yearns for is crap. This is obvious.
The emergence in recent years of the economic and military powers in countries like China, Russia and India has given rise to theories and hopes of a multipolar world that could temper the heavy-handed unilateral/unipolar policies of the United States on a global level. Such hopes are further buoyed by the fact that these rising poles of economic development have instituted a number of regional international organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the China-sponsored Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the Eurasian Economic Union that incorporates Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
President Donald Trump urged the new leader of Ukraine this summer to investigate the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, a person familiar with the matter said Friday. Democrats condemned what they saw as a clear effort to damage a political rival, now at the heart of an explosive whistleblower complaint against Trump.
Being a mouthy genderfuck internet personality, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing some pretty caustic shit online and I’ve generally come to except it. After the sixth or seventh time being threatened with gang rape by yet another alt-right troglodyte, the shock runs a little thin. I’ve actually become rather skilled at the digital-jujitsu that’s become a necessity for existing as an openly trans person online. I’ve even made a few hideous friends on the far-right in the process. Generally speaking, most trolls are either childish pranksters or sadistic psychopaths. If you keep a razor sharp tongue and a sense of humor, either one can be handled with relative ease. This isn’t to say that they aren’t despicable human garbage or that words don’t hurt, but there are things far worse than hate speech online and I personally have never felt more dehumanized or offended as a queer person than I have by the way Facebook treated me this past week, all in the name of policing hate speech and patronizing marginalized creatures like myself.
It should be no secret that I'm not at all a fan of the right to be forgotten, which is a European concept, as currently employed, that allows people to get old news stories about them removed from search engines (there's more to it than that, but that's the basic explanation). To me, it seems like an attempt to bury history and facts, and that's dangerous. We've also seen too many cases of people trying to abuse it to hide spotty historical records that deserve to remain public. However, the excellent Radiolab podcast a few weeks back had a fascinating episode exploring the idea of the news media voluntarily agreeing to "forget" certain stories. More specifically, last year, Cleveland.com adopted a policy that would let people apply to be "forgotten" by the online news publication. They invited Radiolab folks to be present for one of the meetings where the staff debates applications.
When it comes to intellectual property, the culture of ownership has grown so large that it threatens to consume itself. Still, while we have an overly permissive USPTO and European trademark offices that facilitate this insane notion that all language is meant to be owned, there are still, blessedly, some rules. One of those rules is that, on the topic of trademark and publicity rights, people and companies are allowed to state facts. It is not infringing on anyone's rights to state such facts. That is all the more the case when the facts in question are historical facts.
For quite a while now, we've pointed out that doing any serious content moderation on major internet sites is laughably difficult, if not impossible. Whether done in a purely automated format, or with real human oversight, everything ends up boiling down to just how much collateral damage are we all willing to accept when sites attempt to enforce moderation rules. Even when sites attempt to communicate the rules to the public in a somewhat transparent fashion, such as Facebook, it all inevitably goes to the kind of hell that includes nixing accounts for sharing what is purely art.
Big online platforms tend to brag about their ability to filter out violent and extremist content at scale, but those same platforms refuse to provide even basic information about the substance of those removals. How do these platforms define terrorist content? What safeguards do they put in place to ensure that they don’t over-censor innocent people in the process? Again and again, social media companies are unable or unwilling to answer the questions.
A recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing regarding violent extremism online illustrated this problem. Representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter each made claims about their companies’ efficacy at finding and removing terrorist content, but offered very little real transparency into their moderation processes.
YouTube said it would remove verified status from many large accounts. Creators were baffled and upset. And then YouTube changed its mind.
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Many YouTubers, some with millions of followers, made their disappointment public. “Been doing YouTube for 5 years, I post 2 videos a week, 950,000 subscribers … YouTube emails me today that my channel has been ‘unverified’ because the verified badge is only for well known channels with a large following,” the YouTuber Sierra Schultzzie posted on Twitter.
Caryn Marjorie Jones, a 19-year-old who goes by CutieCaryn on YouTube, said that she was heartbroken when she got the email. “It’s just a little sign but it’s something I’ve worked years to get and to develop this fan base, so for it to be taken off was alarming and hurtful and I feel really emotionally impacted.”
Not a great week for the FBI, encryption-wise. The same week it was revealed the FBI's encrypted communications system was cracked by the Russians, a report by Joseph Cox of Motherboard details the agency's failure to punch a hole in a phone company's encrypted network.
We hear so much from law enforcement agencies about how much tech companies -- and their encryption offerings -- are turning America into a lawless frontier where the criminals always win and the cops are eternally hamstrung. We mainly hear this from two law enforcement agencies in particular: the FBI and the DOJ.
San Francisco has already banned the use of facial recognition tech by local law enforcement. Oakland did the same thing a couple of months later. Pretty soon, it's not going to matter where you are in California. If you're a law enforcement agency, facial recognition tech is off-limits. Here's the latest news on the biometric front from the EFF.
Facebook took big step forward this week in its march to create an "oversight board" to help vet its more controversial takedown decisions, publishing more details about how it will work. Both Facebook and its users will be able to refer cases to the Board to request its review. Is this big step a big deal for online speech?
Maybe not, but it's worth paying attention. A handful of tech companies govern a vast amount of speech online, including the platforms we use to get our news, form social bonds, and share our perspectives. That governance means, in practice, making choices about what users can say, to whom. Too often—on their own or under pressure—the speech police make bad choices, frequently at the expense of people who already struggle to make their voices heard and who are underrepresented in the leadership of these companies.
Trump is enormous; this is true, in all ways of the word, but certainly in terms of an enormous lack of empathy for others. But America is (and always has) selected for and advanced those with sociopathic traits. A touch of sociopathy seems to be an affliction ideally suited to a nation that covets individual success over the benefits of the whole. A nation with a staggering homeless population and epidemic medical bill-induced bankruptcies would not be considered a success when viewed in its entirety, but the nation is quite adept at turning out billionaires, so there’s that.
After the elections in Saxony and Brandenburg, and before the election in Thuringia on October 26th, the various German parties are sorting out the results. In Saxony, where the Christian Democrats (CDU) lost strength but stayed in the lead, they are trying to patch up a difficult coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, their only option without their tabooed LINKE (Left) and Alternative for Germany (AfD) – the far, far right. In Brandenburg, the SPD also lost feathers and must now decide whether to stay with the LINKE plus the Greens – both would now be necessary to barely reach that needed majority, or to replace the LINKE with the CDU and, necessary here too, the Greens.
In the 1963 horror-thriller, The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock wants his viewers to understand the world from the point-of-view of birds. Angry birds. Birds angry at humans. The question is: Why? Why are the birds angry? Why have they gone amok, seeding chaos, and what will be the solution?
On September 20th millions of students across the globe are taking a stand with student strikes – demanding action on climate change so they, and our grandchildren may survive and thrive.€ Now, adults have been called on to join the strikes. We believe educators should be the first to join them. | By Jessica Garraway, David Boenke
I was recently accused on social media of offering up “flowery words” after posting a short call to non-violent activism. I would like to assure all that although non-violence may have the sound of flowery words, these words are also a call to what may be the best strategy and the bravest strategy for living with and responding to a world that has been in the fits of some power struggle or another, throughout the extent of its entire written and I oral history. The struggle for human rights is not new to us here in the year of 2019, although the conditions and environment in which the struggles exist may be.
Much of the prison literature I have read expresses a legitimate bitterness about the political forces that led to the inmate’s incarceration. I can’t imagine writing without such anger if I were the one imprisoned. I wouldn’t have such control over my emotions, such tranquility in the face of the horrible environments that exist in virtually all prisons in the world, except in the Scandinavian countries that are almost always more enlightened than we are in the United States. Nor would I be able to stop cursing the head off at the government that has incarcerated me. But these characteristics are largely missing from Turkish writer’s Ahmet Altan’s I Will Never See the World Again.
In light of the United Kingdom government’s decision to suspend parliament, apparently to avoid scrutiny just weeks before it risks crashing out of the European Union without a deal, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka suggested that the Commonwealth should€ investigate Britain.
Mars Petcare US—purveyor of pet products including Whiskas€®,€ Greeniesââ¢, Sheba€®,€ Cesar€®, and Iamsâ⢗is a division of the $35 billion Mars (M&Ms) chocolate empire.
There seems to be two branches of what I see as a drive toward global domination, global hegemony, by the ruling class. One is the Trump phenomenon and the narratives and political actions that accompany his presidency (often in the background). Second is the new ruling corporate control of environmentalism.
Kenyan authorities have not investigated abuses by security officials during the forced evictions of thousands of people from Mau Forest in July, 2018 and now are planning more evictions, Human Rights Watch said today.
Neo-Nazis, the KKK, the Proud Boys, and various white power groups have been rallying in Portland, Boston, Berkeley, Charlottesville, and Gainsville. Mass shootings and numerous hate crimes targeting immigrant/Latinx/Black/Muslim/Jewish people are on the rise. Four junior women of color U.S. representatives are under constant racist, xenophobic, and misogynist attack. In fact, Rep. Ilhan Omar has received so many death threats she has had to hire private security. Last fall Brett Kavanaugh had a privileged white boy tantrum in front of a national audience, egged on by white male senators equally outraged by challenges to their entitlement. These are the latest signs that the United States is again gripped by white resentment. While this is certainly not a new cultural phenomenon, we have yet to deeply explore what makes the last decade unique.
In 2010, Barbara G. Brents and Teela Sanders published a pioneering study, “Mainstreaming the Sex Industry: Economic Inclusion and Social Ambivalence,” that argued, “mainstreaming of the sex industry is invariably linked to wider patterns in leisure consumption, travel, and the hedonistic search for relaxation and pleasure.”€ € They announced the establishment of the sexually “new normal.”
Early in the Mueller investigation, President Trump rankled at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ reluctance to circle the wagons on his behalf. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” the president asked, name-checking his unscrupulous mentor, lawyer and fixer.
I’m happy to report this week that the Chicago City Council overwhelmingly approved a pretty major set of reforms to the city’s system of ticketing and debt collection. You may know that I have been, em, a little obsessed with said system for almost two years, when I first joined the ProPublica Illinois team and began reporting on why so many people were filing for bankruptcy over ticket debt.
On Wednesday, my pal Elliott Ramos from WBEZ Chicago — with whom I’ve worked on these stories since last summer — and I watched as aldermen voted 49-1 in favor of the reforms. It was a good morning.
Egyptian authorities should protect the right to peaceful protest in upholding Egypt’s obligations under international human rights law, Human Rights Watch said today.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is moving quickly to alter the political reality in Palestine, and facing little or no resistance.
There were some notable differences between the swearing-in ceremonies of the Hindu-supremacist government of Narendra Modi in its first victory on May 26, 2014, and its re-election on May 30, 2019.
Jazz is activism: it requires training, commitment, belief, and action. It is brought to life through fire, resolve, imagination. Now practiced by peoples of all colors and tongues around the globe, jazz was born of African-American musical traditions and the lived experience of oppression. Music of the church and of the fields voiced hopes for a better tomorrow whether in the North or in heaven.
Moscow City Court Judge Yulia Manerkina decided on Friday to release Pavel Ustinov on his own recognizance, following a request from the District Attorney's Office. Ustinov was recently sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for allegedly injuring a National Guardsman when he was arrested at a protest on August 3. Ustinov's appeals hearing will take place on September 26.
A senior technician at the Federal Security Service’s Academy has been sentenced to four years in prison for stealing and selling off computer parts. According to the newspaper Kommersant, warrant officer Airat Khairullin spent two years working in the FSB Academy’s foreign-languages department, where he disassembled hundreds of computers and sold the components through free classified ads on the websites Youla and Avito.€
Dmitry Popelysh, who together with his twin brother stole more than 12 million rubles ($187,920) from various bank clients, has complained to federal investigators that he was forced into illegal hacker activity, a source who witnessed Popelysh’s courtroom testimony told the news agency RBC.€
As we just got done noting, investors have finally started to grumble about AT&T's obsession with merger mania (aka "growth for growth's sake"). AT&T, you'll recall, spent more than $150 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV in a bid to dominate the streaming video and online advertising space. But the deals saddled AT&T with so much debt, it forced the company to raise rates despite rising competition, driving many of these customers to the exits. Oh, and AT&T's being sued by other investors for allegedly lying about it. It has also largely bungled its TV branding in general.
In a case of first impression, the Federal Circuit held that “claim language can limit the scope of a design patent where the claim language supplies the only instance of an article of manufacture that appears nowhere in the figures.” Curver Luxembourg, SARL v. Home Expressions Inc., No. 2018-2214 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 12, 2019).
In the particular case, Curver Luxembourg, SARL (Curver), filed suit against Home Expressions Inc. (Home Expressions) in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey alleging infringement of U.S. design patent no. D677,946 (the ’946 patent) for making and selling baskets incorporating Carver’s claimed “Y” pattern. Defendant Home Expressions filed a Rule 12(b)(6) motion arguing noninfringement in view of the ’946 patent being limited to chairs. The district court agreed with the defendant and granted the motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a plausible claim of design patent infringement. Curver appealed to the Federal Circuit.
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This case offers up a good lesson to applicants seeking to secure design patent protection and enforce their rights against third parties. BakerHostetler routinely helps clients develop and execute effective strategies involving design patents along with other forms of intellectual property.
In the lawsuit, Balsam sued Frontgate for infringing its patents covering an artificial Christmas tree. Frontgate brought-in the manufacturer UCP for indemnification. Balsam then settled with Frontgate (without notifying UCP) and in a manner that left UCP liable for infringement. The confidential information is apparently related to the settlement between Balsam and Frontgate whose contents were designated as “Highly Confidential – Outside Attorneys’ Eyes Only” in the district court litigation. In its briefing, Balsam identified the settlement terms as “highly confidential, sensitive information.”
The Federal Circuit has asked the parties to “show cause” as to why the under seal opinion should remain under seal with briefing due by October 3. The Federal Circuit has a particular rule limiting confidential marking to 15-words. Fed. Cir. R. 28(d)(1). “A party seeking to mark confidential more than fifteen words in any brief must file a motion with this court establishing that the additional confidentiality markings are appropriate and necessary pursuant to a statute, administrative regulation, or court rule.” Id.
I have included the redacted sections from UCP’s brief (BELOW) and I really can’t see how it can only be 15 words that are redacted. Note that the rule does allow for “repeating the marked words” without recounting. But, there are more than 15 lines of text marked confidential with usual average of 10+ words per line.
A question of sovereign immunity, which has come before the Federal Circuit in many guises of late (Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Regents of the University of Minnesota v. LSI Corp.), arose again in Board of Regents of the University of Texas System v. Boston Scientific Corp. earlier this month. And as has happened thus far in this spate of these cases, the Court did not recognize the immunity as advanced by the State, in this case asserted over the question of proper venue.
The case arose when the University of Texas sued Boston Scientific for infringing U.S. Patent Nos. 6,596,296 and 7,033,603 directed to implantable drug-releasing biodegradable fibers. These fibers are useful, inter alia, for producing implantable stents impregnated with therapeutic agents. The University of Texas (UT) filed suit in the Western District of Texas, and Boston Scientific successfully moved to transfer the lawsuit to the District of Delaware. It was undisputed that Boston Scientific is a Delaware corporation having its principle place of business in Massachusetts. Moreover, the corporation "does not own or lease any property or maintain a business address in the Western District of Texas," and its 46 employees all worked from home. Under settled Supreme Court (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC) and Federal Circuit law (In re Cray Inc.), venue was clearly improper in Texas.
On August 15, 2019, Time Warner filed a petition with the United States Supreme Court seeking to vacate a $139.8 million damages verdict. That amount represents approximately 5% of Time Warner’s monthly subscriber revenue ($1.37 per subscriber per month). Time Warner argues that this award is too much given the contribution the patented feature made to its infringing service. At its core, the damages portion of the petition is asking the Supreme Court to provide guidance that will ensure that damages verdicts rely on apportionment principles and provide clarity in how they achieve this.
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As with many issues in patent law, this is easier said than done. How do courts ensure that a patentee’s expert opinion on the ultimate damages figure is based on apportionment principles? How do we know if the jury verdict reflects those same principles?
The parties agreed that the relevant toys were first shown to the public at the “Mega Show” trade fair in Hong Kong in October 2017. They were later exhibited at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in January 2018, the first time that they were shown to the public in the EU. The parties also agreed that exhibition at the Mega Show was sufficient for the design to have become known in the normal course of business to circles specialising in the sector concerned, operating within the EU (therefore falling within Article 7(1) of the Design Regulation). This, argued PMS, destroyed the novelty of the UCDs, because the UCDs only would have qualified for protection when they were first made available to the public within the EU i.e. in Nuremberg in January 2018.
In light of Gautzsch, we know that it is possible for Article 7(1) to be engaged to destroy novelty even if the relevant act of publication after registration, exhibition, use in trade or disclosure occurs outside of the EU. The debate therefore focused on whether the event of disclosure that would trigger protection as a UCD should also be treated in the same way as a potentially novelty-destroying disclosure (given the substantially identical wording of Article 7(1) and Article 11(2) regarding commencement of protection). Or, in other words, can a design first be disclosed (in a manner specified under the Design Regulation) geographically outside of the EU and yet qualify for protection as a UCD by virtue of the same disclosure that was outside of the EU?
There is no direct CJEU authority on this question. Article 110(a), which was added in connection with the 2003 accession to the EU by several states, seems to suggest a narrow, EU-centric approach to first disclosure....
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The judge noted that were he to determine the application and therefore leave it to an appeal court to make a reference to the CJEU, given the continuing uncertainty regarding Brexit it is eminently possible that the Court of Appeal would no longer be entitled to make a reference. This reference may have more important Brexit-related implications, however. If a design must first be disclosed within the EU in order to attract UCD protection, designers are likely to be more careful about where they first display their designs. For example, if Brexit happens, London Fashion Week, the 2019 edition of which just concluded, might lose shows to Paris or Milan.
After being targeted by massive legal action in 2017, TVAddons founder Adam Lackman is still hoping to put up a fight against several major Canadian media companies. The huge costs incurred so far are proving crippling and with bankruptcy always just round the corner, defeat by default is rarely far away. It's a scenario that's all too familiar to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.
Publishers of Manga comics are working hard to shut down any and all pirate sites. With the planned shutdown of Manga Rock they have a major victory in sight. Interestingly, however, research shows that taking down all pirated content may not be in their best interests. As it turn out, piracy increases the sales of some comics books.
