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Links 26/9/2019: Cutelyst 2.9.0, LibreOffice 6.3.2 and Rust 1.38.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • Containous releases Traefik 2.0 open source edge router

        With the movement toward cloud-native application deployment, there has been a corresponding need for cloud-native networking technology. One of the most successful efforts in the space comes from startup Containous, with its open source Traefik edge router technology.

        Traefik 2.0 became generally available on Sept. 17, providing users with new TCP routing support and an improved API to help direct traffic in cloud-native deployments, including the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. The new Traefik release builds on the experience the company has gained through its large user base. According to Containous, it has had over 1 billion downloads of Traefik from the Docker Hub repository for container applications.

      • IBM

        • CentOS Linux 8 and CentOS Streams Released

          CentOS project leader Karanbir Singh has announced the new release of CentOS Linux 8 and the new CentOS Stream on September 24, 2019.

          We expected CentOS 8 to be rebuilt over a period of 1 month, but it took around four months.

          See the article below for information on CentOS 8 built.

          But finally the long-awaited version of Centos 8 has just been released and ready to hit the road for racing.

          This is the first release for CentOS Linux 8 derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 source code.

          This version is marked as 8.0-1905.

        • CentOS 8 Released – Download DVD ISO Images

          CentOS is a free and open-source, community-driven Linux distribution based on the popular security-focused Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was designed to be consistent rolling-release distro joined with Red Hat but still independent from RHEL as it has its autonomous governing board. Awesome stuff.

          The development team just announced its latest release in the form of CentOS Linux 8 and it packs a ton of major fixes, UI/UX improvements, and new features. Let’s take a quick look at the ones that stand out the most.

        • Boosting banks’ customer experience with operational efficiency

          The way banking is being conducted around the world is changing, especially with customers who are always connected through mobile phones and with 5G not far away in many places.

          Coupling that with the rising levels of wage growth entrepreneurship and government policies for financial inclusion, banking's traditional customer journeys and distribution models won’t scale nor reach the average consumer, and will be significantly cost-prohibitive for the average bank to service. The idea that a consumer needs to visit a branch doesn’t even come into their equation.

          Moreover, the consumption of banking products from FinTechs, including unsecured lending, peer-to-peer payments, merchant payments, and business credit, is on the rise. Providers like Ascend Money and Rakuten are fast, simple and digital-first. Simply put, they engender customer satisfaction.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Nathan Wolf: Noodlings | MX Linux, openSUSE News

        I have installed MX Linux on several machines. December of 2018 was my first experience with it and I really enjoyed how it worked, quite literally everything about it. I was thinking a lot about WHY I like MX Linux and I think these are my top reasons:

        Simplicity of the desktop. Although my primary machine runs Plasma as my desktop of choice and it does what I want it to do, it feels snappy and is tuned to my preferences, Xfce accomplishes all of that but differently. It has the right look, it IS rather easy to customize although not quite to the same accessibly easy level and is most certainly quite snappy.

        The changes in MX 19 are not “earth shattering” and headline popping but they are all quite welcome. The High DPI support is of no benefit to me but for those with those fancy 4k monitors there is. A visual update to MX 19 that is partially related to Xfce 4.14 but is also due to general visual updates that MX has been given over time.

      • The Librem 5 smartphone. Now shipping.

        The Librem 5 smartphone -- focused on security, privacy, and user freedom -- has begun shipping! This is the very first video of the very first Librem 5 to roll off the assembly line!

      • Purism Shows Off The Librem 5 Linux Smartphone In Action

        Now that the first (beta-ish) batch of Librem 5 smartphones is shipping, Purism has published the first video showing the phone in its current state in action.

        The 30 second video simply shows the phone being unlocked and some basic interactions with their GTK/Wayland-based shell, briefling launching their web browser, opening GNOME Software, and opening their messaging/contacts program. It's a very brief video given the software stack is still a work-in-progress on performance and features. Likewise with their graphics driver supporting GL2 right now, don't expect any games or really fancy graphics running.

      • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 827
      • Bots Building Jails | BSD Now 317

        Setting up buildbot in FreeBSD jails, Set up a mail server with OpenSMTPD, Dovecot and Rspamd, OpenBSD amateur packet radio with HamBSD, DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 gets fsck, return of startx for users.

      • Why Self-Host? | Self-Hosted 2

        We visit Wendell Wilson of Level1Techs and get a tour of his self-hosted setup, what he does and does not trust in the cloud, and we reminisce about the early days of computing and the internet.

        Plus we discuss craftmanship in the Linux Kernel, and adress the fundamental question of "why self-host."

    • Kernel Space

      • VirtIO-FS Sent In For Linux 5.4 With Better Performance Over VirtIO-9P

        VirtIO-FS as a better approach for sharing folders/files with guest VMs is set to debut in Linux 5.4.

        VirtIO-FS makes use of FUSE and is much faster than virtio-8p that serves a similar purpose for sharing folders/files between the host and guest virtual machines. Directories can be exported from the host and mounted by the guest with VirtIO-FS and is effectively the "glue" between FUSE and VirtIO.

      • Intel

        • UDOO X86 II SBC Combines Intel Braswell SoC with Microchip ATMega32U4 “Arduino” MCU

          UDOO X86 development board was first introduced in a crowdfunding campaign in 2016 with a quad-core Intel Braswell processor coupled with an Arduino 101 compatible Intel Curie module for real-time I/O processing.

          Early July of next year (2019) the Intel processor and module seems to be going so well and have a bright future together with UDOO X86 board and accessories becoming broadly available. But life can be cruel at times, and Intel announced their plan to discontinue Intel Curie and other IoT projects just a few weeks later with the last shipment scheduled for July 2018.

        • Intel's Mesa Drivers Point To Even More Comet Lake Parts

          There were already 18 new PCI IDs for Intel's open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux graphics drivers for forthcoming Comet Lake processors with UHD Graphics, but now it appears there are even more models en route.

          As of Wednesday, three more PCI IDs were added for Comet Lake, making more than 20 different PCI IDs for graphics on Comet Lake processors. Granted, some of the PCI IDs are reserved for pre-production models / engineering samples or otherwise reserved for possible future revisions that aren't necessarily planned for market at this time, but either way it's a lot.

    • Benchmarks

      • NVIDIA RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 SUPER Linux Gaming Performance - 26 GPUs Benchmarked

        We finally have our hands on NVIDIA's current RTX 20 SUPER graphics card line-up and have been putting the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER cards through their paces under Linux. For the first of our long awaited NVIDIA RTX SUPER Linux benchmarks, first up is a look at the Linux gaming performance under a variety of native OpenGL/Vulkan games as well as Steam Play (DXVK+Proton) titles while testing a total of 26 graphics cards this round on the very latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce drivers.

        Back in July NVIDIA announced the first three RTX SUPER graphics cards as refreshed Turing parts for better positioning against AMD's Radeon RX 5700 Navi line-up. The SUPER variants offer double digit percentage improvements over the earlier Turing cards, the RTX 2060 SUPER has an extra 2GB of GDDR6 video memory (8GB total), and more competitive pricing.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Monster Sanctuary's first content update is up with a female character option, mounting mobs and more

        Monster Sanctuary from Moi Rai Games and Team17 Digital hasn't been in Early Access for long but they're already putting out a big update to expand this creature catching metroidvania. Note: Key provided by the developer.

        I've waited a long time for something resembling the gameplay of catching and battling with monsters that Pokemon made popular on Linux. While Monster Sanctuary isn't exactly the same since it's a side-scrolling Metroidvania-like world, it has so far been an absolute joy to play.

      • Quirky looking 3D indie action-RPG 'Insignificant' planned to release for Linux next month

        An action RPG where you're three inches tall, surviving in a world made for Humans? That's what's going on in Insignificant, launching on October 8 with Linux support. Speaking to the developer on Steam, they confirmed Linux will be supported and launch alongside Windows and Mac.

      • Some Sites that Linux Gamers Need to Know Besides Steam!

        Games are one of the features that are on the computer. People play games as a medium of entertainment, but there are some people who become professional gamers. Lots of cool games available on PC devices.

      • Dynamic physics 3D platformer 'Crumble' has a fresh demo available with very varied levels

        Roll around as a ball with a loose tongue you use as a swing in Crumble, now with a much updated demo available to try.

        A game I tried out and did a little video for back in April, it's actually really good. I can't help but laugh at the goofy little face on the blue ball you control as their tongue flaps around.

        Talking about what's new the developer said it has "new contents, new levels, improved mechanics and visuals!". Seems like a lot of work went into it too, it looks and feels a lot better than the first demo. There's a little intro now and the second level makes great use of the tongue swinging system and it's quite a challenge.

      • Astro Golf, a simple and relaxing game about shooting some balls in space

        After spending tons of time with Factorio recently, I needed something that used a little less brainpower to relax with and Astro Golf is a game that fits perfectly. It's about interplanetary golf, launching a ball across planets and getting it to touch their gravity and slide into a hole.

        Simple stuff, incredibly relaxing and it was made on Linux too with Unity.

      • Fantasy turn-based tactics game with dynamic environments 'Fort Triumph' has a massive upgrade

        In my book, the more games that attempt XCOM-styled combat the better. Fort Triumph is one that does it, only it's pushing things even further with the dynamic environments and the fantasy setting.

        The fun in Fort Triumph really is in how you use the environment to your advantage. Drop trees on top of people, kick a box into them, set fire to everything around them and more there's tons you can do with it. Are they by some water? Run over and kick them into it. There's even a character class that can use a grappling hook to pull enemies into things, which can sometimes be truly hilarious when you manage to set off a physics chain-reaction by doing so.

      • Easy Linux Game Streaming with OBS

        For many, watching other people play games has long taken over from TV as the favoured source of entertainment content. As a creator, whether you stream via YouTube, Twitch.tv or Mixter, Open Broadcast Software (OBS) Studio is the swiss-army knife to do it. The OBS snap makes this a breeze, whichever Linux distro you’re playing on, and simplifies hardware-accelerated video encoding. Let’s take a look at the setup.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Cutelyst 2.9.0 and simple-mail-qt 1.4.0 released!

          Today I’m rolling out two releases, Cutelyst, which is a Qt Web Framework and SimpleMailQt which is a SMTP client library.

          Cutelyst has got many bug fixes, a few API additions, some docs fixes, and most importantly it fixed a memory leak introduced in 2.8.0 that makes applications using chained actions leak.

          I was planning for a v3 due some changes I was planning but changed my mind and I think the current version can be kept for a little longer, my current plan is to add SNI support for the WSGI module so that a sort of Virtual Hosts is possiblem.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

          The GNOME Foundation, maker of the eponymous Linux desktop, has been hit with a sueball over how its Shotwell photo manager, er, manages photos.

          The plaintiff, Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, has alleged in a complaint filed at the United States District Court Northern California that defendant, GNOME Foundation, has infringed its patent for a "Wireless image distribution system and method".

          The patent, 9,936,086, filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office on 2 June 2017, is dated 3 April 2018 and, in a nutshell, is concerned with flinging digital photos from one device to another wirelessly.

          Rothschild, which has a virtual office in Texas, has been busy with its new toy and has also slapped Magix with a complaint regarding the same patent. In Magix's case, it is the company's Photo Manager that has attracted the ire of Rothschild's lawyers.

        • GNOME faces 'baseless' patent lawsuit for organising images

          GNOME Foundation has been issued with a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI) for allegedly infringing a patent regarding the wireless distribution of images.

          According to the legal complaint, GNOME's Shotwell platform allegedly infringes the patent in question as it used an image capturing device to perform various functions.

          Shotwell is a free, open source, image organiser designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment.

          "The product imports and filters photographic images from cameras, allowing users to organise the photos and share them on social media," is one example of the alleged infringement, according to the complaint.

    • Distributions

      • Tumbleweed Snapshots Trending High with Bash, PulseAudio, Curl Updates

        Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released this week brought about two dozen new versions of software.

        The snapshots brought one new major version update for pulseaudio and an updated version of bash.

        The major version update to pulseaudio 13.0 came in Snapshot 20190921. The sound server program improved the initial card profile selection for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) cards and improved the play 5.1 surround audio that now treats both “side” or “rear” channels identically when the user has a 5.1 speaker setup; the 7.1 setup still has a difference which channel pair gets used. The libreoffice 6.3.2.2 package had some stability tweaks and addressed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), which one had an unsafe URL assembly flaw. The cabextract program that un-archives files in the Microsoft cabinet file format modernized the spec file in its 1.9.1 version. Another package updated in the snapshot was osinfo-db, which is a package that provides a database of information about operating systems for virtualization provisioning tools. The snapshot is trending at a stable rating of 95, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

      • Highlights of YaST Development Sprint 85

        A few weeks ago we submitted the first round of changes to the network module to Tumbleweed. At that point, it was still using the old data model for most operations (except routing and DNS handling) and a lot of work remained to be done.

        We have been working hard on improving the overall quality of this module and we will submit an updated (and much improved) version in the upcoming days

      • Zorin OS 15 More Beautiful & Useful Than Ever

        Among hundreds of Linux distributions there are few who dare to make Linux looks like Windows, and among those is Zorin OS. But its look is not the only feature, it comes with the cutting-edge tools, always respects privacy, and improved security to name a few.

        Back in June, Zorin OS 15 was released with a lot of new features and improvements.

        So in this article, we’ll take a look at Zorin OS 15 features and what it has improved since its previous release.

      • Fedora Family

        • PHP version 7.2.23 and 7.3.10

          RPM of PHP version 7.3.10 are available in remi repository for Fedora 30-31 and in remi-php73 repository for Fedora 29 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).

          RPM of PHP version 7.2.23 are available in remi repository for Fedora 29 and in remi-php72 repository for Enterprise Linux ≥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).

        • Fedora 31 Modularity Test Day 2019-09-27

          Friday, 2019-09-27 is the Fedora 31 Modularity Test Day! We need your help to test if everything runs smoothly.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • ActivityWatch is an open source personal activity tracker for Windows, Linux and macOS

        ActivityWatch is an open source personal time-tracking application; its goal is to log "your usage" for "your analysis". It is in my opinion a tool that can help improve your productivity. The program stores the data on your computer which ensures that privacy is not an issue when it comes to using the program on your devices.

        You may use the application to log your activity, e.g. if you are worried that you spend too much time on Facebook or Twitter or some other website or application or game, you can use your ActivityWatch logs to determine how much time you actually spend on these sites.

        Once installed, the program sits in the system tray and works in the background. You can right-click on the icon to exit the application, access the dashboard, log folders, and disable watcher modules. The application's is controlled through a dashboard that can be accessed from the following URL: localhost:5600 or http://127.0.0.1:5600/ in your browser, just like how you would access a router page.

      • 3 open source social platforms to consider

        It is no mystery why modern social media platforms were designed to be addictive: the more we consult them, the more data they have to fuel them—which enables them to grow smarter and bigger and more powerful.

        The massive, global interest in these platforms has created the attention economy, and people's focused mental engagement is the new gold in the age of information abundance. As economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon said in Designing organizations for an information-rich world, "the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes." And information consumes our attention, a resource we only have so much of it.

      • Let's build an education system for an open future

        We live in unprecedented times—where the only certainty is change the likes of which the world has never seen, where people have greater access to information than they have at any time in history, and where disruptive technologies change our lives on a near-daily basis.

        Acquiring knowledge is no longer something people do exclusively in traditional, established institutions, and anyone with a smartphone is now more networked and has more access to information than all their ancestors combined.

        So why have our education systems remained essentially frozen in time for more than 100 years?

        Why do too many students see "doing school" as a passive exercise, irrelevant to their interests and ambitions? Why do too many educators, who enter the profession to make a difference in students' lives, become disillusioned with the institutional inertia of the status quo? And why do too many students either drop out of traditional educational programs or finish their formal educational career with lots of debt and still no clear idea of what they want to do in life?

      • EuroBSDCon 2019

        The conference started with an excellent Keynote from Patricia Aas (ex. Opera/Cisco/Vivaldi, cur Turtlesec), about the Ethics in the IT industry. As a person who is familiar with the issues with the privacy and many different threads of abusing user data by the company, I have to say that this talk started the avalanche of different thoughts and reflections in my mind. To my surprise, I was not the only one to have such thoughts. This topic arose quite often during the rest of the conference through many conversations between different people. For those of you who didn't see it yet, I highly recommend that you do. The key takeaway is that we, the people who are building today's digital world, need to think about the implications of our work and decisions upon the users of our services. This topic is getting more complicated even as we think about it. However, Patricia come here with the strategy "Annoying as a Service" that can be simply used in every situation to at least not makes things worse...



      • Why Is Open-Source So Important? Part One: Principles And Parity

        Open-source software does what it says on the tin—the source code of a piece of software is kept open and free to download, modify and incorporate into third party projects, which helps to improve the software itself over time. Richard Stallman, the creator of open-source operating system GNU and founder and ex-president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), arguably brought the concept of open-source to the masses, stating that: "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. You should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'"

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Charting a new course for tech competition

            Today, Mozilla released a working paper discussing the unique characteristics of digital platforms in the context of competition and offer a new framework to approach future-proof competition policy for the internet. Charting a course focused on a set of proposals distinct from both the status quo and pure structural reform, this paper proposes stronger single-firm conduct enforcement to capture a modern set of harmful gatekeeping behaviors by powerful firms; tougher merger review, particularly for vertical mergers, to weigh the full spectrum of potential competitive harm; and faster agency processes that can be responsive within the rapid market cycles of tech. And across all competition policy making and enforcement, this paper proposes that standards and interoperability be at the center.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.2

          The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, with many bug and regression fixes. LibreOffice 6.3.2 “fresh” is targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are suggested to update their current version.

          LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

        • LibreOffice 6.3.2 Open-Source Office Suite Released with 49 Bug Fixes

          The Document Foundation has announced the general availability of the second maintenance update to the latest LibreOffice 6.3 open-source and cross-platform office suite series.

          Coming three weeks after the first point release, LibreOffice 6.3.2 is here to address a total of 49 bugs and regressions across various of its core components, including Writer, Draw, Math, Calc, and Impress. The goal is to make the LibreOffice 6.3 office suite series more stable and reliable until it is ready for enterprise deployments, which is supported until May 29, 2020.

      • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • Are ground systems about to have an open source moment?

          Bogdan compared the open architecture configuration to an iPhone. While the iPhone software is designed by Apple, it’s built so that non-Apple companies can build hundreds of apps that users can pick and choose from to install onto the platform. Similarly, DoD’s ground systems need to be built with a common framework that multiple vendors can design applications for.

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • The Free Software Foundation Endorses First Router In 3 Years - But It's 10/100 + 802.11n WiFi

          If looking for a new WiFi router to go with the RYF-pending, 802.11n-based Purism Librem 5 or just want a wireless network as libre as possible, the Free Software Foundation has announced an 802.11n WiFi router now available that respects the user's freedoms.

          The Free Software Foundation announced on Wednesday that the ThinkPenguin Wireless-N Mini Router v2 (TPE-R1200) is the newest product they have endorsed as part of the "Respect Your Freedom" program. This is the first router since 2016 that has received RYF certification, with the earlier router being the TPE-R1100 model while the TPE-R1200 features updated hardware specs and dual external antennas. But this "new" router is still living in an 802.11n era.

        • The Week in Tech: An Emerging Twist on Antitrust

          The M.I.T. Media Lab meltdown continues, with a prominent Harvard professor arguing that taking money from disgraced donors like Jeffrey Epstein might, in some circumstances, be the right move. And the free software pioneer Richard Stallman has stepped down from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after making comments defending an associate of Mr. Epstein’s.

      • Programming/Development

        • 7 Excellent Free Books to Learn Scheme

          Scheme is a general-purpose, functional, programming language descended from Lisp and Algol. It is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of Lisp.

          Scheme is a very simple language with a very simple syntax based on s-expressions. Its simplicity is fundamental in making it a popular introductory language. It follows a minimalist design philosophy specifying a small standard core with powerful tools for language extension. This philosophy helps make Scheme a programming language that can be learned over a weekend. Nevertheless, Scheme is a very versatile language being used to write a diverse range of applications such as financial analysis tools, compilers, virtual reality systems, as well as more mundane software.

          Scheme is used in computing education and research as well as a wide range of industrial applications.

          None of the books featured below are released under an open source license.

        • How I built a Python script to read e-mails from an Exchange Server

          My goal was to access an Exchange server and read e-mails from it. I found some scripts for reading e-mails through Outlook. However, I believe using Outlook makes the code depend on an e-mail client, and I wanted to avoid that. If you are on a business setting, getting your info from the server, in this case, getting the e-mails from Microsoft Exchange is the best approach

        • Mutation testing by example: Evolving from fragile TDD [Ed: For the fourth day in a row Red Hat promotes Microsoft .NET]
        • Automatically annotating a boxplot in matplotlib

          You can probably tell from the sudden influx of matplotlib posts that I've been doing a lot of work plotting graphs recently...

          I have produced a number of boxplots to compare different sets of data. Some of these graphs are for a non-technical audience, and my client agreed that a boxplot was the best way to visualise the data, but wanted the various elements of the boxplot to be labelled so the audience could work out how to interpret it.

          I started doing this manually using the plt.annotate function, but quickly got fed up with manually positioning everything - so I wrote a quick function to do it for me.

        • Parallelizing GCC's Internals Continues To Be Worked On & Showing Promising Potential

          One of the most interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year was the student effort to work on better parallelizing GCC's internals to deal with better performance particularly when dealing with very large source files. Fortunately -- given today's desktop CPUs even ramping up their core counts -- this parallel GCC effort is being continued.

          Student developer Giuliano Belinassi did a good job on the project this summer and is continuing to be involved in the effort. Giuliano presented at this month's GNU Tools Cauldron 2019 conference on the work done so far, how the performance is looking, and what else is left to be accomplished.

        • DevNation Live Bengaluru: Dreaming of streaming with reactive programming

          Our first DevNation Live regional event was held in Bengaluru, India in July. This free technology event focused on open source innovations, with sessions presented by elite Red Hat technologists.

          In this tutorial, presented by Edson Yanaga, you’ll learn about reactive programming and why it matters in this new cloud-native era. We’ll use live coding demos to explain how to be reactive and benefit from this brave new streaming world.

        • How to contribute to GitLab

          I think many people are familiar with GitLab—the company or the software. What many may not realize is that GitLab is also an open source community that started with this first commit from our co-founder Dmitriy Zaporozhet in 2011. As a matter of fact, we have more than 2,000 contributors from the wider community who have contributed to GitLab.

          The wider community contributions span code, documentation, translations, user experience design, etc. If you are interested in open source and in contributing to a complete DevOps platform, I'd like you to consider joining the GitLab community.

          You can find things that you can start contributing to by looking at issues with the "Accepting merge requests" label sorted by weight. Low-weight issues will be easier to accomplish. If you find an issue that you're interested in working on, be sure to add a comment on the issue saying that you'd like to work on this, and verify that no one is already working on it. If you cannot find an issue that you are interested in but have an idea for a contribution (e.g., bug fixes, documentation update, new features, etc.), we encourage you to open a new issue or even open a merge request (MR) to start working with reviewers or other community members.

          If you are interested, here are the different areas at GitLab where you can contribute and how you can get started.

        • Announcing Rust 1.38.0

          The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.38.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

        • Rust 1.38 Supports Pipelined Compilation For Building Dependent Crates Sooner

          Today marks the release of Rust 1.38 as the latest stable update for this increasingly popular, memory-safe programming language.

          On the performance front, Rust 1.38 supports the notion of pipelined compilation whereby Cargo will begin building dependent crates as soon as the meta-data is ready. For builds involving multiple crates, this can lead to around 10~20% faster compilation speeds for clean and optimized builds.

        • 12 Pythons for every programming need

          When you choose Python for software development, you choose a large language ecosystem with a wealth of packages covering all manner of programming needs. But in addition to libraries for everything from GUI development to machine learning, you can also choose from a number of Python runtimes—and some of these runtimes may be better suited to the use case you have at hand than others.

          Here is a brief tour of Python distributions, from the standard implementation (CPython) to versions optimized for speed (PyPy), for special use cases (Anaconda, ActivePython), for different language runtimes (Jython, IronPython), and even for cutting-edge experimentation (PyCopy, MesaPy).

        • PyCharm: 2019.3 EAP 3

          A new version of the Early Access Program (EAP) for PyCharm 2019.3 is available now!

        • ML with Python: Part-2

          In this Post, we will cover in detail what we do in various steps involved in creating a machine learning (ML) model. I was looking around some ML project which is not very complex but covers all the concepts in creating ML model. I found one good project in kaggle which I am using here as an example and the complete project can be found here. Jupyter Notebook file and training/test files can also be downloaded from my git repository.

          Let's start with Problem statement:

          RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in the early morning hours of 15 April 1912, after it collided with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. There were an estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the ship, and more than 1,500 died, making it one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history.

          We are createing a Model which provides information on the fate of passengers on the Titanic would have been survived or not, according to economic status (class), sex, age etc. Here, we can guess this belongs to Classification Supervised Learning as traning data is labeled with the result and we need to categorized to "survied" or "not survived".

        • Python Software Foundation: Felipe de Morais: 2019 Q2 Community Service Award Winner

          Pythonistas everywhere benefit when our community reflects the many backgrounds and experiences of Python’s users. However it can be challenging to participate in the community when there are no local user groups or harder yet if groups do exist but you do not feel represented in them. After learning that a friend was experiencing gender descrimination at work, Felipe de Morais of Porto Alegre, Brazil, decided to start Django Girls Porto Alegre. By starting this group, women like his friend who were facing similar challenges could have a community to call their own.

          Since Django Girls Porto Alegre took off in 2015, it has become one of the most active Django Girls groups in the world. Inspired by Django Girls and PyLadies, Felipe also started AfroPython, an initiative to empower Black people through technology. Additionally, Felipe contributes to Operação Serenata de Amor, an open source project that monitors public spending by politicians.

      • Standards/Consortia

        • Semantic markup improves the quality of machine-translated technical texts

          The leading web browser, Google Chrome, and leading search engines — including Bing, Yandex, Google, and Baidu — can machine-translate any webpage in seconds. This enables anyone who understands a supported language to access documents written in any other supported language.

          I noticed, completely by accident, that some of my most read articles on this blog didn’t translate well in Microsoft Translate. Many of the technical details, such as file paths/extensions and function names, got mangled in with the rest of the text and caused it to lose all meaning. This isn’t really strange considering that the classic UNIX programs are called things like find and at, and program functions are just run-together English phrases. This got me thinking about how you can optimize texts for machine-translation.

          An understandable high-quality machine-translation requires rock-solid grammar and spelling in the source material. I found that it can also benefit from rich semantic data about the text.

          I’ve marked up some of my writing with text-level semantic HTML elements like abbr (for abbreviations), code (for computer-instructions including file names and program functions), kbd (user input), samp (program output), and var (a variable). However, I’ve not been consistent and I’ve not even been using these elements properly -- especially mixing up code, kbd, and samp.

        • Centralised DoH is bad for privacy, in 2019 and beyond

          In this post I argue that in September 2019, centralised DoH “by default” is a net-negative for privacy for everyone and that even in later years it will not improve privacy outside of the most privacy hostile environments – where no one should rely on partial measures like DoH to stay secure.

  • Leftovers

    • Health/Nutrition

      • We’ve Been Fighting The Vaping Crisis Since 1937

        But this isn’t just about a contaminated black market. Even the e-liquids with the most professional pedigrees haven’t been subject to stringent safety regulations, said Desmond Jensen, an attorney with the Public Health Law Center at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. In 1937, Blum said, pro-regulation advocates had already been warning people for years that there were too many loopholes in FDA rules. And the same is true in this case. There were no FDA regulations at all on e-cigarettes until 2016, and the regulations that exist now are more like swiss cheese than solid cheddar, Jensen said.

        “When you say a product is regulated, the average person thinks about pesticides, food or drugs,” he told me. “There’s someone making sure it’s not tainted, or making sure it won’t make us sick. That’s not what it means here.” Instead, the FDA requires sellers and manufacturers of e-cigarettes and e-liquids to register with and disclose ingredients to the agency. But that isn’t the same as quality or safety testing, Jensen said. And a lot of companies haven’t registered in the two years those regulations have been in effect. Safety testing regulations do exist — but their implementation keeps getting scooched back under pressure from vaping companies. Currently, products that were on the market before 2016 won’t have to be reviewed for safety until May of 2020. Manufacturers who don’t sell directly to consumers haven’t had to register or disclose ingredients at all.

    • Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability)

      • Shareholders allege FedEx covered up damages caused by NotPetya attack [iophk: Windows TCO]

        In this case, the suit alleges FedEx failed to inform its shareholders that TNT Express customers were abandoning the company in favor of other logistics providers as a result of NotPetya. The company later said the cyberattack would cost $400 million, though that figure failed to account for the full cost of remediation, lost business and reputational damages, the suit alleged.

      • A Mysterious Computer Issue Is Affecting Hollywood Movie and TV Editors

        “Avid is aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products,

        which arose late yesterday,” it said in a press release that spokespeople sent to VICE. “This issue is top priority for our engineering and support teams, who have been working diligently to determine and resolve the root cause.”

        Apple declined to comment and referred VICE to Avid.

      • Google says its update software is crashing some Macs, here’s how to fix

        Version 1.2.13.75 of Google Keystone (Google Software Update) recently shipped with a bug that damages the macOS file system on computers where System Integrity Protection is disabled. Also known as SIP, the OS security feature helps “prevent potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac.” This issue also affects Macs that do not support SIP (pre-OS X El Capitan).

      • Cybersecurity Roundup: September 24, 2019 [iophk: so he blocked 350M]

        In a surprise turnaround late last week, Mitch McConnell took a break from White House bootlicking to reverse his position on securing US elections, saying he’d approve a little bit of election security money. He immediately took credit for pretty much the whole thing and pretended it was what he had planned all along while he was busy smothering all earlier security legislation to death in its crib.

        The House had actually passed giving $600 million to states, a fact that prompted every idiot in the world to say 250 was better than nothing. NPR reported that Chris Krebs, director of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the work in the Senate was a “good start.”

        The reality, that McConnell set it up to do as much nothing as possible, set in over the weekend. Senator Ron Wyden called the whole thing a “sham” in a blistering tweet Friday. “This money can be used for anything relating to elections. Including giving states taxpayer dollars to buy insecure voting machines. This isn’t election security, it’s a sham.”

      • Exploiting Routers With Routersploit

        If you have Wi-Fi at home, then you have a router, this is how you get your internet access. Today we will be looking a piece of software that allows us to easily take over a router.

        Welcome back to LSB fellow hackers. Please like, subscribe or comment and be sure to come back often for more exploits. Let’s get started.

        Recently the FBI issued a statement letting us know that a piece of malware was attacking routers and that we needed to reset and update our firmware with the patched software. This attack highlighted how easy it is to attack a router.

        So, today we will be using a piece of software called Routersploit to see how you can hack routers.

      • Avid Blames Google for Mac Pro Crashes
      • Chrome Bug, Not Avid Software, Causes Damage to MacOS File Systems

        Researchers have tracked a problem that caused corruption to the file systems of macOS users to a bug in a Google Chrome update after users originally feared it was a problem with Avid Media Composer.

        People using the Avid software for video editing on macOS platforms posted warnings Tuesday on Facebook and other social media to fellow users not to shut down their computers because of file-system corruption and the inability to recover some files after shutdown.

        “Apparently something is corrupting one of the UNIX root level folders,” Avid users MarcusPun Tweeted, reposting a warning from a Facebook group called Avid Editors of Facebook. “Back up everything, not just on the servers [if] you are in a connected environment.”

      • Wladimir Palant: PfP: Pain-free Passwords security review

        I reviewed the code of the Pain-free Passwords extension. It’s a stateless password manager that generates new passwords based on your master password, meaning that you don’t have to back your password database up (although, you also can import your old passwords, which do need backing up). For this kind of password managers, the most sensitive part is the password generation algorithm. Other possibly vulnerable components include those common for all password managers: autofill, storage and cloud sync.

        [...]

        The resulting password is completely random for a person who doesn’t know your master password, so they cannot predict what passwords you will use for other websites. Your master password cannot be computed either, as scrypt is a one-way hash function.

        scrypt parameters (here we’re talking about N=32768, r=8, p=1) are explained well in this article. It is recommended to use such parameters that key derivation time on the author’s computer will be around 100ms (for cases where the key is used immediately, like in PfP). I run the test on my computer and found out that my computer derives a key in 158ms (average) with the parameters PfP uses, which means it is secure enough.

        With this setup, the only attack possible would be brute-forcing the master password, i. e. trying to reverse the one-way hash function, which is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming (we’re talking about tens of years running very expensive computers here). So it’s highly unlikely someone would even try, a much more efficient method would be to install a keylogger on the victim’s computer.

      • Security updates for Thursday

        Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dovecot), Debian (lemonldap-ng, openssl, and ruby-nokogiri), openSUSE (fish3, ibus, nmap, and openssl-1_1), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (mariadb, python-numpy, and SDL2), and Ubuntu (firefox).

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Autonomous killer drones set to be used by Turkey in Syria [paywall]
      • [Attackers] Tried to Compromise Phones of Tibetans Working for Dalai Lama

        The hackers used exploits and spyware developed for the iOS and Android operating systems, and attempted to deliver them through carefully crafted phishing messages sent via WhatsApp, from people who pretended to be journalists, staffers of NGOs, and volunteers to Tibetan human rights groups, according to the report, published by the digital rights group Citizen Lab on Tuesday.

      • [Older] What is the story behind Pakistan occupied Kashmir? Interesting facts on the history of PoK

        Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) is that part of the Jammu and Kashmir (India) which was invaded by Pakistan in 1947. The region is referred by the United Nations and other international organizations, as 'Pakistani-controlled Kashmir' (or Pakistan Administered Kashmir) and it was re-named as 'Pakistan occupied Jammu-Kashmir' by the Modi government.

      • [Older] India Is Changing The Game For China And Pakistan In Kashmir

        Pakistan and China desperately need CPEC. For Pakistan, CPEC is the express ticket to building its infrastructure, and sustain economic growth. For China, CPEC is the express link between Western China, the Middle East, and Africa, where China has growing interests.

        That can explain why Beijing has committed $46 billion to the project.

        The problem is that CPEC passes through Pakistani regions claimed by India. That makes it a bumpy road, to say the least -- Pakistan and India continue to fight for control of these regions.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Daniel Ellsberg: Whistleblowers Preserve American Democracy

        What follows is a conversation between famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

      • Ukraine Call
      • Whistleblowing: A Primer

        “The question of whether a whistleblower will be protected or pilloried depends on the interests of those in power,” Boyne writes. Leaks to the media from officials for political advantage are standard operating procedure. But those outside this inner circle don’t fare as well: Snowden is in exile and Manning is in jail. Boyne notes that three NSA employees who did do what critics said Snowden and Manning should have done, that is, go through the system and use the proper channels to report government abuse, “found their lives destroyed and reputations tarnished.”

        Retaliation against whistleblowers hit some of the pioneers, too, Boyne notes. Ernest Fitzgerald, who revealed billions in cost-overruns in a military transport program in 1968, was demoted after President Richard Nixon told his supervisors to “get rid of the son of a bitch.”

        That same president ordered a break-in to Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in 1971, in hopes of finding dirt on Ellsberg. [...]

    • Environment

      • Fires Rage in Indonesia, Turning the Sky Red

        This year’s fires are the worst in Indonesia since 2015. Officials estimate that the fires have burned more than 800,000 acres.

      • World's oceans and mountains are in big trouble from climate change, UN report says

        The "Special Report on Oceans and the Cryosphere" offers a bleak picture. It warns that the world's oceans have reached or are nearing critical tipping points: Oceans have gotten warmer, more acidic and are losing oxygen, resulting in a cascade of negative effects that are wreaking havoc on coral and other marine ecosystems, threatening the collapse of the world’s fisheries and turbocharging deadly hurricanes and tropical storms.

      • World's oceans at a tipping point, indicates UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report

        Tonight, the IPCC released its Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere (or frozen areas) in a Changing Climate, finding that since the 1970s, these vast blue expanses have absorbed 90 per cent of excess heat in the climate.

        Recently, the world's oceans have also had to work overtime to suck up excess pollution caused by humans and it's taking its toll.

        Oceans are warming faster than before, causing ice sheets, permafrost and glaciers to rapidly melt.

        As they do, they risk releasing toxins and harmful gasses, which would further heat the planet.

      • Evacuations ordered as Mont Blanc glacier on brink of collapse

        A piece of the Planpincieux glacier containing 250,000 cubic metres of ice could fall down the mountain, the mayor of nearby town Courmayeur, Stefano Miserocchi said, after experts found the sheet of ice was moving much faster than normal.

        Mr Miserocchi has ordered the closing of two roads and the evacuation of huts on the mountain, which is 4,810 metres (15,780 feet) high, after experts said the glacier was threatening part of the Ferret Valley.

      • UN Report: Marine Heatwaves To Become One-In-Four-Day Event By 2031

        Cascading impacts and tipping points for the Earth’s oceans and cryosphere are outlined in a report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of the United Nations.

        The report comes a little over a month after a prior IPCC report on climate change and its effects on land (desertification, food security, greenhouse gas fluctuations in ecosystems, etc). It also comes days after a global climate strike organized by activists throughout the world.

      • The Pangolin Reports: CC Journalism About the World’s Most Trafficked Mammal

        We were excited when Patrick circled back recently to tell us about his latest project, The Pangolin Reports, which launches today in newspapers and online media in several countries. The result of a nine-month investigation by more than 30 journalists around the world, The Pangolin Reports is a series of investigative reports that document the poaching and smuggling of pangolins, the scaly anteaters that are known to be the most illegally traded mammals in the world.

      • Fighting in the Heart of Texas for a Green New Deal

        My friend, Harvey Hayek, is a vintage Texan. A third-generation pecan farmer in Fayette County, he owns a gun club, hundreds of prime agricultural acres on the Colorado River and a bottomless store of homespun stories. Unfortunately, the most compelling of these relates to a coal plant that opened next door, 40 years ago, and destroyed Harvey’s livelihood—and nearly his life.

      • U.N. Report Paints a Harrowing Portrait of the Planet's Future

        A landmark United Nations climate€ report€ published Wednesday details the observed and anticipated future impacts of planet-heating emissions from human activity on the world’s oceans and frozen zones—and warns of the emerging consequences for humanity, marine ecosystems, and the global environment.

      • Energy

        • Gas: how Australia privatised the profits and socialised the losses

          In contrast, Norway made better use of the oil and gas in its continental shelf. The Norwegian government owns two-thirds of the shares in Equinor, formerly known as the Norwegian State Oil Company. Equinor’s workers elect three of the 11 directors.

          The Norwegian government created the Government Pension Fund Global in 1990 to invest Norway’s oil revenue. The Ministry of Finance owns the fund on behalf of the Norwegian people, and determines its investment strategy. The Fund had more than 9 billion kroner (almost $1.5 trillion Australian dollars) in 2019. This was a handsome investment for a country with less than six million people.

    • Finance

      • The Disaster of Negative Interest Rates

        The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory. Investors were fleeing into the dollar, prompting President Trump to tweet on Aug. 30:

      • Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End

        What was We thinking? That’s the only question worth asking now about the clowncar start-up known as The We Company, the money-burning, co-working behemoth whose best-known brand is WeWork.

        What’s a WeWork? What WeWork works on is work. The We Company takes out long-term leases on in-demand office buildings in more than 100 cities across the globe (lately, it’s even been buying its own buildings). Then We redesigns, furnishes and variously modularizes the digs, aiming to profitably sublease small and large chunks of office space to start-ups and even big companies. Well, profitable in theory: The We Company lost $1.7 billion last year.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Half of Moscow mayor's Instagram followers are bots, new report finds

        A report by the Center for Current Policy has found that, on average, 30 percent of the accounts that follow any given Russian regional governor on Instagram are bots.

      • Trump Pushed Ukraine Leader on Biden Probe, Memo Shows

        The Latest on President Donald Trump and the House impeachment inquiry€ (all times local):

      • The Case for Impeachment Goes Way Beyond Ukraine

        “Has Trump finally gone too far?” There’s a headline you’ve seen a thousand times.

      • Johnson Enters Neo-Con Heaven

        There has been remarkably little media commentary on the effect of the UK leaving the EU Common Foreign Policy, even though this is a major aim of Johnson, Gove and the Tory Brexiteers. The media appear not to have noticed the existence of the Common Foreign Policy. We saw perhaps the first public glimpse of the UK’s new foreign policy yesterday when Boris Johnson breached the EU Common Foreign Policy to join Donald Trump in denouncing the Iran nuclear treaty. As the UK has not actually left the EU yet, that was bad faith and an illegal act against an EU treaty obligation, but following the law is evidently of no concern whatsoever to Johnson.

      • Man who walked into Tretyakov Gallery and calmly stole painting in plain sight gets three years in high-security prison

        Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky Court has sentenced Denis Chuprikov to three years in a high-security prison camp. In January of 2019, Chuprikov walked into the Tretyakov Gallery during visiting hours and removed a painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi from the gallery’s walls in full view of other visitors and staff. He grasped the painting in one hand and walked out of the building without interference from security personnel.

      • Democrats Are Blowing A Huge Opportunity on Venezuela

        Days after the Democratic presidential candidates missed yet another opportunity to challenge President Donald Trump’s failed Venezuela policy on the debate stage on September 12, President Nicolás Maduro signed an important agreement with four opposition parties. These events offer insight into the differing perspectives on the economic, social and political crises in Venezuela—one perspective from the Washington political establishment, the other from Venezuelans.

      • If This Is Trump’s Best Case, The Ukraine Scandal Is Looking Really Bad For Him

        You might object that the public won’t care so much about the technical details here. But that potentially cuts both ways. The public could view the quid pro quo part to be a technicality and see Trump’s “favors”/demands/requests of Zelensky to be the nut of the story.

      • Why impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump became inevitable

        Punters on PredictIt, an online betting market, reckon that the chance Mr Trump will be impeached in his first term is 50%, up from 25% a week ago. But the chances he will be leaving the White House before 2021 are slim. The implied probability that Mr Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2020 has not changed. Nor have the GOP’s chances of winning the presidential election.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • France Welcomes the Saudis, Condemns Critics of Islam

        It seems that French authorities never learn from their mistakes. Right after the massacre at the weekly Charlie Hebdo, then-French President François Hollande invited the Saudis to join the march of solidarity in Paris. When the Saudis returned home, they started flogging Badawi. The Saudis play it smart: they are both "the arsonists and the firefighters". The day before the inauguration of the institute in Lyon, the Saudis were in Paris to attend the "International Conference for Peace and Solidarity", where they were greeted by placards from Badawi's wife and friends. French president Emmanuel Macron first accepted then declined an invitation to join the Saudis at their conference in Paris.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Jeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakers

        In February, the company, which has faced escalating scrutiny over its controversial facial recognition tech, called Amazon Rekognition, published guidelines it said it hoped lawmakers would consider enacting. Now Amazon is taking another step, Bezos told reporters in a surprise appearance following Amazon’s annual Alexa gadget event in Seattle on Wednesday.

        “Our public policy team is actually working on facial recognition regulations; it makes a lot of sense to regulate that,” Bezos said in response to a reporter’s question.

        The idea is that Amazon will write its own draft of what it thinks federal legislation should look like, and it will then pitch lawmakers to adopt as much of it as possible.

      • Amazon Won’t Stop Until Alexa’s Always With You

        Alexa earbuds, Alexa glasses, an Alexa ring: Amazon announced them all at its annual hardware showcase on Wednesday. What these devices have in common, aside from a naming convention—Echo Buds, Echo Frames, Echo Loop—is a singular focus on pushing Alexa outside of the home, and inserting it into the rest of your life.

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

      • Journalists Association blasts attack on reporter

        Yeung said the attack was not an isolated incident and there has been a worsening in the reporting environment for journalists in Hong Kong in recent months, with threats from various fronts, including the police.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • White Supremacist Violence Is On the Rise. Expanding the FBI’s Powers Isn't the Answer.

        In response to the increase in white supremacist violence, Congress has been holding hearings — including one today — on the urgent need to address it. But, rather than getting to the bottom of why our law enforcement agencies have failed to address white supremacist violence, some lawmakers are rushing to give law enforcement agencies harmful additional powers and creating new crimes. That approach ignores the way power, racism, and national security laws work in America. It will harm the communities of color that white supremacist violence targets — and undermine the constitutional rights that protect all of us.

      • Trump admin broke law with visa delays for Afghans, Iraqis who worked for U.S., judge rules

        U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan of Washington, D.C., said the government offered no convincing explanation why it has failed to abide by 2013 legislation requiring authorities to deliver a decision on visa applications for Afghans and Iraqis within nine months. Instead, many applicants — who risked their lives working for U.S. troops or other government agencies — have had to wait for several years to get an answer on their visa requests, the court said in the ruling handed down on Friday.

      • Saudi 'Youth Forum' at New York public library canceled after activists' outcry

        With only a few days to go, the New York Public Library announced last Wednesday that it would be pulling the plug on the event. It cited "concerns about possible disruption to Library operations as well as the safety of our patrons" as the reason behind its decision.

        Some of the scheduled speakers dropped out of the event too.

      • Burnt, Stabbed, Beaten: Indonesian Police Detail Papua Deaths [iophk: transmigration]

        Papua, on the western half of New Guinea island, has seen weeks of protests fuelled by anger over racism against indigenous Papuans by people who have migrated from other parts of Indonesia, as well as fresh calls for self-rule in the impoverished region.

      • Opinion: Why won't Sweden help us find out what happened to Raoul Wallenberg?

        However, that same year, after the end of the official, ten-year long investigation conducted by the bilateral Swedish-Russian Working Group, the Swedish government decided that the question of Raoul Wallenberg's fate was now a 'historical matter' and quietly transferred the task of solving the case back to private citizens – that is, to Raoul Wallenberg's immediate family and to researchers.

        Swedish officials continue to insist on this approach even when it is very evident that without determined official support it constitutes a nearly impossible task.

        As a result, we find ourselves at a serious impasse: It is clear that Russia possesses highly relevant information in the Wallenberg case, yet the Swedish government will not push Russian authorities to provide the access needed to conduct an independent review of the documentation.

      • Robert Reich: GM Is Betraying the American Worker. And Trump Is Hanging Them Out to Dry

        The corporation came roaring back. Over the past three years, it's made $35 billion in North America.

        But its workers are still getting measly pay packages, and GM is still outsourcing like mad.

        Last year, it assigned its new Chevrolet Blazer, a sport utility vehicle that had been made in the United States, to a Mexican plant, while announcing it would lay off 18,000 American workers.

        Earlier this year, it shut its giant plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which President Donald Trump had vowed to save. "Don't move. Don't sell your house," he said in 2017 at a rally about 15 miles away in Youngstown.

        GM is still getting corporate welfare—since Trump took office, some $600 million in federal contracts and $700 million in tax breaks (including the president's giant corporate tax cut).

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Increase in Illegal Boosters Threatens Mobile Signals in Rural Areas

        Out of desperation, some people living in rural areas are adding illegal rooftop aerials, mobile boosters, and other illegal equipment, Ireland’s Telecoms regulator ComReg reported a 66 percent rise in this equipment.

        It can be worse than the mobile signal becoming weaker, as the illegal boosters can even threaten the success of emergency services. Certainly, it’s not what people are intending when they add an illegal booster.

        Air traffic control, gardaí, and the Dublin Fire Brigade faced interference of two-way radio and telemetry systems leading to seven complaints in the last 12 months.

        In figures released by ComReg, unlicensed mobile boosters, that are often an aerial perched on a rooftop, have threatened rural mobile networks and add to blackspots.

        “Over 60pc of interference to mobile networks in the State is caused by these devices,” said ComReg. “Typically, there is greater use of these amplifiers in rural areas, and locating them often requires many hours of direction finding and travel to locate and remove them.”

    • Monopolies

      • China steals US designs for new weapons, and it's getting away with 'the greatest intellectual property [sic] theft [sic] in human history'

        "Sometimes superficially the designs do look similar — it could be, in part, from some of the attempts China's made to acquire good technology, but I would just caution that at the end of the day, it's hard to know how similar it is or not," he told Insider.

        While there's no concrete evidence that the Chinese design is the result of espionage or theft, the visual similarities are unmistakable — nose-mounted cameras on the CH-4B, as well as locations for external munitions are just like those on the Reaper, Popular Mechanics reported in 2016, calling the two aircraft "identical."

      • She alleges she was raped by a Lyft driver. Then the company ghosted her

        Salon's Amanda Marcotte spoke with Turkos about her allegations and the lawsuit against Lyft. (Full disclosure: Turkos is a friend, who has cat-sat for Marcotte in the past.)

        This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

      • Patents and Software Patents

        • Jaguar Land Rover Ltd. v. Bentley Motors Ltd. (E.D. Va. 2019)

          Motors, Inc. launched their first SUV, the Bentayga, which is a direct competitor to Jaguar Land Rover Ltd.'s (JLR) Range Rover model. JLR's patented Terrain Response technology is included on certain vehicles, and the Bentayga has a Drive Dynamics system, which can be equipped with an "All Terrain Specification" that provides four off-road settings: Snow, Ice & Wet Grass, Dirt & Gravel, Mud & Trail, and Sand.

          JLR filed a complaint, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that Bentley knowingly copied the Terrain Response system installed on JLR's Range Rover, and which is covered by U.S. Patent No. 7,349,776 that was later reissued as U.S. Patent No. RE46,828. Specifically, JLR asserted that Bentley infringed at least claims 21, 41, and 46 of the '828 patent.

          Defendants Bentley Motors Ltd. and Bentley Motors, Inc. filed a Motion to Dismiss. The Court denied Defendant's Motion to Dismiss, instead finding that the technology embodied in the '828 patent claims improves computer functionality and is directed to "a particular way of performing that function," rather than merely being directed to performing a function in a computerized manner.

          [...]

          Finally, the Court noted that it is not clear that people could do what the '828 patent claims to do. Although Defendants provided the example of driving slower downhill or applying the brakes in a different manner, drivers are generally not able to change the wheel spin of their vehicles or change the suspension while the vehicle is moving. Therefore, unlike tabulating a vote or performing basic economic principles, the technology here is more than mere computerization of functions that people can already do.

          Because the claims of the patent are directed at both improvements in computer functionality and providing concrete, physical means of implementing the functionality, the Court concluded that the '828 patent is not directed at an abstract idea.

          Thus, for these reasons, the Court denied Defendants' Motion to Dismiss.

        • Here’s a Quarter … : Continued Tricks in Defining what as a Covered Business Method Patent

          In its final written decision, the PTAB sided with the patent challenger Emerson Electric — finding claims of SIPCO’s U.S. Patent 8,908,842 invalid as lacking eligibility and as obvious. Claims 1, 7, 9, 16, and 17.

          The patent at issue requires a “low-power transceiver” connected to the internet and wirelessly connected to a remote device. The patent included dependent claims 3 and 4 that defined the remote device as a “vending machine” and “ATM” respectively. However, those claims were disclaimed during prosecution — and part of appeal argument is the role of disclaimed claims in construction of the remaining claims.

        • OpEd: “Blocking Patent” Doctrine Denies Valuable Innovation [Ed: The patent maximalists are up in arms when the law is not on their side]

          “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” Sir Isaac Newton’s observation has never been more true than in the development of medicines.

          Scientific advances have brought us to the verge of a golden age of medicine. In the years ahead we have the opportunity to alleviate enormous human suffering: more and more cancers will be cured; gene therapies and precision medicines will turn fatal genetic diseases in children into diseases that kill no more; seniors and the families who care for them will no longer be afflicted by Alzheimer’s. To help ensure that we will benefit from such advances, our policies and laws must be aligned with the interests of patients.

          A patent issue pending before the United States Supreme Court, if left unaddressed, could have serious consequences for us all: slowing medical innovation by deterring researchers from improving upon existing medicines. This should alarm every patient who needs a new medicine today and every person who may need one tomorrow.

          [...]

          The U.S. Supreme Court will decide next month whether to hear the case. We are deeply concerned that leaving the lower court’s ruling intact will deter investment in science and medicine needed to improve upon existing treatments. In so doing, it would deprive patients of cutting-edge medicines that can dramatically enhance the quality and length of their lives.

      • Copyrights

        • The MIT License, Line by Line

          If you’re involved in open-source software and haven’t taken the time to read the license from top to bottom—it’s only 171 words—you need to do so now. Especially if licenses aren’t your day-to-day. Make a mental note of anything that seems off or unclear, and keep trucking. I’ll repeat every word again, in chunks and in order, with context and commentary. But it’s important to have the whole in mind.

        • Canadians will soon have even more options in streaming — but can they afford them all?

          "A typical household if they have cable or satellite or an ITV subscription, they might be spending $70 to $90 a month on that," he says. "So as new companies, new services come in, the consumer will have to look across the board at what they are spending, and make some tough decisions. I think this is a big concern to cable companies."



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IRC logs for Thursday, December 26, 2024
Links 26/12/2024: Japan-China Mitigations and Mozambique Prison Escape (1,500 Prisoners)
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2024: Ukraine's Energy Supplies Bombed on Christmas Day, Energy Lines Cut/Disrupted in the Baltic Sea Again
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/12/2024: Rot Economy, Self-hosted Tinylogs
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 25, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 25, 2024
[Meme] Time to Also Investigate Bill Gaetz
Investigation overdue
IBM Has Almost Obliterated or Killed the Entire Fedora Community (Not IBM Staff)
Remaining Fedora insiders are well aware of this, but bringing this up (an "accusation" against IBM) might be a CoC violation
Links 25/12/2024: Fentanylware (TikTok) Scams and "Zelle Scams Lead to $870M Loss"
Links for the day
Brittany Day Can Rest and Let Microsoft/Chatbots Write Fake 'Articles' About "Linux" This Christmas
Who said people don't work on Christmas? Chatbots or plagiarism-as-a-service work 24/7, every day of the year except during Microsoft downtimes
Links 25/12/2024: Windows TCO Brought to SSH, Terence Eden 'Retires'
Links for the day
Links 25/12/2024: Latest Report Front Microsoft Splinter Group, War Updates
Links for the day
Links 25/12/2024: Hong Kong Attacks Activists During Holidays, Xerox to Buy Lexmark
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 24, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Gemini Links 25/12/2024: Open Source Social and No Search
Links for the day