Back again in 2007, Michael Dell instructed me that Dell was likely to sell Ubuntu Linux-run PCs. Since then, Dell has supported Linux on its desktops, laptops, and workstations. In unique, with Undertaking Sputnik, Dell builds leading-of-the-line laptops expressively for builders. Now, Dell is giving 18 different configurations of its New XPS 13 Developer Edition laptops.
The XPS 13 has extensive been the Rolls-Royce of Linux laptops. I have named prior XPS 13 designs the very best Linux laptop you could purchase. These new types seem pretty darn superior too.
When you get to the website though that's not clear at first. Only "one" system is displayed. This is the base configuration. From it, you can configure 16 different options. There are eight different i5 and i7 models. With each you can get either a 256 or 512 Solid-State Drive (SSD), 8 to 16GBs of RAM and three different screen types of which some support touch.
Most, but not all, of these models are also available to Canadian and EU customers.
In the US, you can also order two other models by phone or online chat. One comes with a 1TB SSD and another boasts an even beefier 2TB SSD.
Even the baseline model is nothing to sneeze at. It comes with a 10th generation Intel i5-10210U processor with a 6MB cache, up to 4.2 GHz. For graphics, it uses UHD Graphics with shared graphics memory supporting a 13.3" FHD (1920 x 1080) display. The laptop comes with 8GBs of LPDDR3 2133MHz RAM. Finally, for storage, it comes with a default 256GB SSD. This will currently cost you $899.
Dell has been making considerable strides toward raising the profile of its Linux “Developer Edition” laptops (don’t worry, you don’t need to be a developer to buy one). The latest model rolled out day-and-date alongside its Windows 10 equivalent, the company launched a dedicated website devoted to its multiple Ubuntu-powered systems, and now it has increased the available loadout options for the XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop by a factor of 8X!
In mid-October, System76 made an exciting announcement for open source hardware fans: It would soon begin shipping two of its laptop models, Galago Pro and Darter Pro, with the open source BIOS coreboot.
The coreboot project says its open source firmware "is a replacement for your BIOS / UEFI with a strong focus on boot speed, security, and flexibility. It is designed to boot your operating system as fast as possible without any compromise to security, with no back doors, and without any cruft from the '80s." Coreboot was previously known as LinuxBIOS, and the engineers who work on coreboot have also contributed to the Linux kernel.
As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
Our original article about the differences between Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform still gets a lot of Web traffic, despite it being seven years old. We thought it was time to revisit the topic of differences between OpenShift and OpenStack. To start, let’s look at the advantages that VMs offered over traditional, legacy hardware solutions.
elementary OS has beefed up its Flatpak support, Firefox's plan to save you some frustration, Canonical commits to the best Pi 4 experience and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has something for your stocking.
Brent sits down with Martin Wimpress, co-founder and project lead for Ubuntu MATE https://ubuntu-mate.org/, Director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, and co-host of Ubuntu Podcast https://ubuntupodcast.org/.
We dive into why innovative, creative people are attracted to open source, his journey through Linux and podcasting, his feelings on his new position in the Desktop Team at Canonical, and much more.
With the Linux 5.3 kernel release this summer Intel enabled Speed Select Technology under Linux for this feature found on new Cascade Lake processors. The SST Linux tool has now seen some updated patches ahead of the forthcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.
Intel Speed Select Technology allows for optimizing the system's per-core performance configurations to prioritize select workloads but at a cost of lowering the performance envelope for other CPU cores. Linux 5.3 added support for these granular power/performance controls and ships with the intel-speed-select tool in-tree for configuring the per-core settings.
The latest in our Intel Ice Lake Linux testing was looking at whether the Dell XPS 7390 with Core i7-1065G7 would operate measurably better if running outdoors (inside a garage) overnight where the temperature ranged from 40~50 degrees Fahrenheit (4 ~ 10 C) compared to the results indoors for the same system when the ambient temperature was 70F / 21C.
Last week NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER as their newest Turing "SUPER" graphics card coming in at $229+ USD and delivering around 1.5x faster performance than the GeForce GTX 1060. For those wondering about the Linux gaming performance potential for this graphics card, here are our initial tests of this new graphics card using the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER.
On launch day I purchased the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER for carrying out these Linux benchmarks. The EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER (06G-P4-1068-KR) was in-stock on launch day and indeed hitting the $229 USD retail price. This graphics card features a dual fan setup and metal backplate. While the GTX 1660 SUPER reference specifications put the boost clock at 1785MHz, the EVGA model does advertise a possible 1830MHz boost clock frequency. The rest of the specs including 14Gbps 6GB GDDR6 video memory are in-line with the GTX 1660 SUPER specifications.
Following on from the 440.26 beta released last month, NVIDIA have today added a few more changes to it and pushed it out as a stable driver update with version 440.31.
It's a mixture of things big and small in this release. It adds in VP9 decode support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver, parallel GLSL shader linking has been enabled by default, support for HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate (VRR) with G-SYNC Compatible monitors and a supported GPU, HardDPMS enabled by default, support for newer multi-GPU rendering extensions and more.
As for bug fixes and other improvements: they solved issues when running applications using GLX indirect rendering, a fix preventing the NVIDIA kernel modules from building when you're system isn't in English, kernel module building issues with the 5.4 Linux kernels, a confirmation box will now show when you try to quit nvidia-settings with unsaved changes and so on.
Nvidia 440.31 is now available as the latest long-lived branch of the proprietary graphics driver for Linux, BSD, and Solaris platforms, adding support for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics card, parallel GLSL shader linking by default, support for HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate (VRR), as well as support for the GL_NV_gpu_multicast and GLX_NV_multigpu_context extensions.
It also brings VP9 decode support to the Nvidia VDPAU driver, a new "SidebandSocketPath" X configuration option to control the folder where the X driver creates a pathname UNIX domain socket that's being used to communicate with the Nvidia OpenGL, Vulkan, and VDPAU driver components, and EGL support for PRIME render offload, and optimizes the GPU clock management strategy.
Version 2.1.13 is now out. This is a bugfix release that fixes some regressions introduced in the previous version.
Arronax helps create .desktop files for any program/script, customize it, and even make it appear in the application launcher.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 10 years or so, it’s certain that you’ve come across the term ‘torrent’. Torrents provide users the ability to download files in minuscule chunks from a large number of users. Torrents became popular for two major reasons: 1. The ability to pause and resume downloads on will (something which wasn’t widely available when they launched) and 2. For being able to pirate content.
The pause and resume feature blew my mind when I first came across roughly 13-14 years ago. I had a very useless dialup internet connection and it was impossible to be able to download anything larger than a few megabytes without it being disconnected. Torrents solved a huge problem for me and soon after, download managers with such abilities became widespread.
The ability to pirate content is what made torrents largely infamous. Many countries with strict internet laws became extremely vigilant about torrents and actively monitored what was being transmitted through users. Torrent clients were in fact largely used for pirating and therefore garnered a very negative image. Talks about being arrested for torrenting grew so much that people became afraid to use them all together, even though only copyrighted material was illegal to download.
Open source and free material are 100% legal to torrent anywhere in the world and users should be vigilant about what they download. Enough about the brief history of torrents, let’s get down to listing what are some of the best clients out there to torrent. The list is not in any particular order as most clients perform the same tasks and preference is usually by themes and interface. When it comes to advanced features, the users should research what they need before committing to a certain software
LazPaint is an open source raster graphics editor that is available across multiple platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux). I wouldn't call it a Photoshop alternative (nothing is, in my opinion), or even a GIMP alternative as it isn't a vector editor. Instead, it is targeted as a replacement for Paint.net, PaintBrush and similar programs.
The interface of LazPaint, while intimidating at first glance, is not too difficult to get used to. A learning curve does exist, but if you just want to perform some basic edits you can pick it up and do them just fine in a matter of minutes. The menu bar and toolbar on the top offer access to basic and advanced options, and the canvas has a checkerboard pattern.
We are proud to announce the 5.4 release of Tryton. In addition to my bug fixes and performance improvements, this release improves in many place the user experience. It also extends a lot the existing workflow to support more use cases. We see 8 new modules landing as official.
You can have a try it on the demo server, use the docker image or download it here. As usual the migration from previous series is fully supported. Some manual operation may be required, see Migration from 5.2 to 5.4.
IGEL, provider of a next-gen edge OS for cloud workspaces, today announced from Microsoft Ignite that its Linux-based IGEL OS will support Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop customers, enabling enterprises to centrally manage, control and secure thousands of endpoint devices. As a supporting vendor for Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop value-added partner program "early adopters," IGEL is among the recommended Microsoft ecosystem partners for customers deploying Windows Virtual Desktop at scale.
With DXVK in remarkably good standing for translating Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for use by Steam Play (Proton) and Wine, Philip Rebohle who started that project is now contributing more to Wine's VKD3D initiative for mapping Direct3D 12 on Vulkan.
As DXVK is working out damn well these days for D3D10/D3D11 games and potentially due to whatever funding engagement he has with Valve, Philip Rebohle is now focusing some attention on VKD3D for doing the same to this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer. Just over the past week has been a big uptick in activity from Rebohle. Of his commits, there have been 17 commits by him to VKD3D but 10 of them were just in the past week.
After looking a little iffy in the last few days, ROCKFISH Games managed to pull it out of the bag and end up getting over their initial funding goal for their space action adventure EVERSPACE 2.
Their Kickstarter campaign ended yesterday with €503,478 against their €450,000 initial goal. This should hopefully give them enough to create an incredible game. The original was good and this sounds so much bigger it's crazy with a big open world to explore, lots more loot, lots more ships, plenty more to explore and fight above the surface of planets and so on. Sounds like a sci-fi space combat fans dream come true.
After a successful mobile release, Mars Power Industries Deluxe has arrived on PC with expanded content and Linux support right away.
With a style that looks pretty slick, Road To Nowhere seems like it's going to be quite an emotional adventure game.
The style they're going for here is inspired in part by 90s adventure games, using real actors that have been rotoscoped in the style of the movie A Scanner Darkly. Road To Nowhere tells the story of an successful introvert software developer, whose life is torn apart by a scandal.
This is a welcome surprise, Zachtronics have released another new game into Early Access. MOLEK-SYNTEZ is all about making drugs out of ordinary industrial chemicals.
According to what they said, it has a little bit of everything from the other games with some new experiments "in the Zachtronics-style puzzle game space". Along with "lots and lots of benzene rings, which never quite worked right in SpaceChem".
Headcannon might not be a name too familiar to a Linux gaming focused audience but they're quite well-known for helping with Sonic Mania development and they're now making their own game with Vertebreaker.
Vertebreaker is a love letter to 90's gaming in the form of a fast-paced action platformer. In Vertebreaker, the way you traverse the environment is the big hook—a grapple hook actually. You will be slinging, swinging, and launching from floors, walls, and ceilings to propel yourself forward and it does look like a huge amount of fun. They've launched a Kickstarter campaign, with a goal of $275K which they need to hit by November 30 and they've had a bit of a slow start.
Halloween has been a gone but don't let that stop you trying out a new horror game, as Dream Well recently released with Linux support.
This is the first chapter in a planned series of four. It looks and sounds quite interesting, with a claim of an AI that learns to hunt you down requiring a stealthy approach. It also has procedural music, a responsive environment and incremental difficulty with a growing narrative—not that they explain what much of that actually means for the gameplay as it all sounds like fancy buzzwords to me.
The team behind the free and open source game engine, Godot Engine, have another progress report to share on Vulkan support coming to Godot Engine 4.0. Plus, they have a new Code of Conduct.
With the 4.0 update that brings in Vulkan, it's also going to give developers a much more powerful Global Illumination system. Godot's support for it landed in the 3.0 release but they said it was quite limited, so they've reworked it. The new system offers much better performance, 100% real-time lighting, voxel ambient occlusion, support for dynamic objects, multiple bounce lighting and more to come.
Decemberborn Interactive recently released Cathedral, a homage to classic 8-bit and 16-bit classics with a large hand-crafted connected world to explore.
While it certainly has a retro look, it's much more than just a throwback. It has a huge world full of more than 600 rooms to explore, completely hand-crafted full of secrets to find and puzzles to solve. When so many games end up repetitive with random generation, perhaps this might feel better?
Seeing Nebuchadnezzar recently gave me a bit of a buzz, a city builder inspired by classics like Pharaoh from Impressions Games which I spent a lot of hours playing in my youth.
Proton GE, the unofficial and updated build of Proton for Steam Play has another big new release out. To help those who can't wait for Valve/CodeWeavers to update the official Proton or you need some extra fixes.
With Proton-4.19-GE-1 now available it includes updated builds of DXVK, D9VK, FAudio and Vkd3d. On top of that, it's also pulled in patches to help with GTA V and the Rockstar Launcher, a patch to help with Origin client downloads, patches to fix Skyrim SkyUI status effect icons, patches to help Mortal Kombat 11 run (although online matches won't work) and more.
Geneshift: Battle Royale Turbo from Nik Nak Studios continues getting polished up ready for a full release with some big new features being released recently that should hopefully make it even sweeter.
Now you don't need to fumble around picking the right server to play with friends, as Geneshift actually has a built-in party system. It's integrated with Steam too, allowing you to invite others to join you and chat while you're in the menu sorting what you're going to do and party members follow the leader into games. Much better! Music got a big revamp too with faster tunes to fit the gameplay, and it's also more dynamic based on what's going on so as you start taking damage it should get more intense beats.
KDDockWidgets is an effort by KDAB to provide an advanced docking system for Qt.
Throughout the years KDAB has contributed and funded QDockWidget development. Sadly, this wasn’t without pain: each change took many days to implement and an equal amount of time to fix regressions.
QDockWidget mixes GUI code with logic/state in a spaghetti manner, making it very hard to move forward. In hindsight, what caused this complexity was the combinatorial explosion of options it supports (which seem unneeded to me, as most people just want to use all the features). That, times 3 platforms, which have different nuances, times 2, since code behaves drastically different if you have animations enabled or not.
KDDockWidgets was born from my need to preserve sanity after having worked in two projects that needed extensive customization. One where we tried to work directly upstream but the regression rate ended up being too much. And another one where I took the route of using private API, fake mouse events and event filters, which seemed like a good idea at first, but ended up being a world of pain. Furthermore, our customers were getting more creative with their requests, so it was clear we needed a better docking framework.
We today provide a bugfix and localization update release with version 5.4.4. This release introduces no new features and as such is a safe and recommended update for everyone currently using a previous version of KDevelop 5.4.
You can find the updated Linux AppImage as well as the source code archives on our download page.
Landing in GNOME's Mutter tree today is a change for GNOME 3.36 improving the effectiveness of running the GNOME Shell desktop with a software renderer like LLVMpipe.
The change by Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan introduces an intermediate shadow frame-buffer for applying of transformations to the in-memory frame-buffers before blitting to the screen. This intermediate shadowfb should "keep things fast(ish)" when lacking OpenGL hardware acceleration.
In this video, we are looking at KaOS 19.10. Enjoy!
edora 31: Fedora recently launched their latest release that is the Fedora 31 for Workstations and Servers. Fedora Projects launched the latest release Fedora 31 on October 29, 2019. The latest release is the most advanced Fedora Release and a lot of features has been added with this release. You can download Fedora 31(For both WorkStations and Servers) from Official Fedora using the following links.
32-bit architecture is suspended from Fedora 31. However, the 32-bit users will receive support until the life cycle of Fedora 30 that is June 2020.
If you have recently updated Ubuntu, chances are a new bug might be sharing your media files with users on the same network.
Reportedly, the problem is the part of Ubuntu’s easy media sharing feature in the latest version of Ubuntu 19.10.
The future of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 4 is looking pretty fresh, with Canonical unveiling a new roadmap outlining official support.
October’s Ubuntu 19.10 release brought with it official version of the OS tailored for the majority of the Raspberry Pi family, including 32-bit builds for Rpasberry Pi 2, 3 and 4, and a 64-bit build for the latter.
But Canonical isn’t stopping there.
Raspberry Pi Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support is also planned for the near future. This will likely materialise around the time of the next point release/HWE update, which comes with the Linux 5.3 kernel.
Presently, Ubuntu 19.10 supports both the 1GB RAM and 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 boards. A bug (soon-to-be-fixed) hampers Ubuntu’s performance on the 4GB model by nixing the (somewhat essential) USB ports!
This blog does recount my misadventures in using computers. I had not intended to so quickly get back into testing. After several frustrating failures in trying to upgrade to 19.10 that left me with a system that refused to boot I chose to take a risk.
After many multiple failed upgrade attempts as well as a failed attempt to install something completely different I was about to settle for just using the Windows Subsystem for Linux under Windows 10 1903. The problems is that Windows 10 just feels so utterly slow to me compared to Xubuntu or even Ubuntu MATE. This may come from having to use very unmaintained computers for almost six years in a government job that ran very old versions of Microsoft Windows that were very behind the rest of the world.
Considering all that I decided to push forward. I got Focal Fossa installed on my laptop and it is working for the time being.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 603 for the week of October 27 – November 2, 2019. The full version of this issue is available here.
You have four option to vote in this poll and they are:
Ubuntu 18.04 – Bionic Beaver Ubuntu 18.10 – Cosmic Cuttlefish Ubuntu 19.04 – Disco Dingo Ubuntu 19.10 – Eoan Ermine
modular, open-spec “YABA DesktopBox” controller and IoT gateway has launched on Indiegogo with an RPi CM3 based control board and an Arduino based analog and digital I/O board. A USB 3.1 backplane supports LVDS/EtherCAT and I2C buses.
A startup called YABA (Yet Another Backplane Architecture) based in Italy and Latvia has gone to Indiegogo with an concept-stage campaign for a Linux-driven, open hardware industrial PAC/PLC controller, edge computer, and IoT gateway. For $334, you can invest in an initial “YABA DesktopBox” that runs Raspbian on a control board build around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3).
As you may know, Raspberry Pi Foundation forked the Xfce desktop environment to create PIXEL, an optimized desktop environment for their Debian-based Raspbian operating system for Raspberry Pi computers. A couple of years ago, Arne Exton forked PIXEL and created an installer to allow users to install it on PCs and Macs.
The latest release of Arne Exton's Raspberry Pi PIXEL is a major version that upgrades the system base from Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" to the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series. It also ships with two Linux 4.19 kernels for PAE and non-PAE systems, Linux kernel 4.19.0-6-686-pae and Linux kernel 4.19.0-6-686.
How often do we hear of phones that offer digital privacy and security? Librem 5 is a Linux powered smartphone that is built on PureOS, an open-source operating system that is completely free, secure and privacy focused.
PureOS: What is it and how is it built?
PureOS, developed by the company Purism is a general-purpose operating system based on Debian. It is a GNU/Linux based distribution that can be used either as live media or in the form of an operating system on a hard disk. PureOS is fully free for any purpose you want to use it for. The best part about the software is that it allows you to encrypt your data and entire operating system with your own password or encryption keys. It also helps you surf the web or use software apps without the fear of being tracked or controlled.
Previously, I put a lot of blame on impostor syndrome for delaying my first open source contribution. But there was another factor that I can’t ignore: I can’t make a decision to save my life. And with millions of open source projects to choose from, choosing one to contribute to is overwhelming. So overwhelming that I would often end up closing my laptop, thinking, "Maybe I’ll just do this another day."
Mistake number two was letting my fear of making a decision get in the way of making my first contribution. In an ideal world, perhaps I would have come into my open source journey with a specific project in mind that I genuinely cared about and wanted to work on, but all I had was a vague goal of contributing to open source somehow. For those of you in the same position, here are strategies that helped me pick out the right project (or at least a good one) for my contribution.
In the wake of Facebook’s recent behavior, I see people once again saying they wish there was an alternative.
Well, there is. There’s a social network with 4.7 million users that’s free and open and not controlled by any single company. I’m going to tell you how to join it.
First, though…
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been a hot commodity in recent years as it helps automate tedious manual workflows inside large organizations. Robocorp, a San Francisco startup, wants to bring open source and RPA together. Today it announced a $5.6 million seed investment.
Benchmark led the round, with participation from Slow Ventures, firstminute Capital, Bret Taylor (president and chief product officer at Salesforce) and Docker CEO Rob Bearden. In addition, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton will be joining the company’s board.
In Tracking Diaries, we invited people from all walks of life to share how they spent a day online while using Firefox’s privacy protections to keep count of the trackers that tried to follow them.
Whenever you’re online, a multitude of third parties attempt to record what you’re doing, largely without your knowledge or consent. Creepy! That’s why Firefox has turned the tables, letting you block and see the trackers. Read on to find out how many trackers tried to trail Matt Navarra throughout his day, and how he felt about it.
Shina is from Pune, Maharashtra, India. Her journey started with the Mozilla Pune community while she was in college in 2017, with Localization in Hindi and quality assurance bugs.
She’s been an active contributor to the community and since then has helped a lot of newcomers in their onboarding and helping them understand better what the Mozilla Community is all about.
At Mozilla, we work hard to ensure our users’ browsing activity is protected when they use Firefox. That is why we launched enhanced tracking protection this year – to safeguard users from the pervasive online tracking of personal data by ad networks and companies. And over the last two years, Mozilla, in partnership with other industry stakeholders, has been working to develop, standardize, and deploy DNS over HTTPs (DoH). Our goal with DoH is to protect essentially that same browsing activity from interception, manipulation, and collection in the middle of the network.
This dedication to protecting your browsing activity is why today we’ve also asked Congress to examine the privacy and security practices of internet service providers (ISPs), particularly as they relate to the domain name services (DNS) provided to American consumers. Right now these companies have access to a stream of a user’s browsing history. This is particularly concerning in light of to the rollback of the broadband privacy rules, which removed guardrails for how ISPs can use your data. The same ISPs are now fighting to prevent the deployment of DoH.
In April we announced our intent to reduce the amount of annoying permission prompts for receiving desktop notifications that our users are seeing on a daily basis. To that effect, we ran a series of studies and experiments around restricting these prompts.
[...]
Most of the heavy lifting here was done by Felix Lawrence, who performed a thorough analysis of the data we collected. You can read his full report for our Firefox Release study. I will highlight some of the key takeaways:
Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user. This is even worse than what we’ve seen on Nightly, and it paints a dire picture of the user experience on the web. To add from related telemetry data, during a single month of the Firefox 63 Release, a total of 1.45 Billion prompts were shown to users, of which only 23.66 Million were accepted. I.e, for each prompt that is accepted, sixty are denied or ignored. In about 500 Million cases during that month, users actually spent the time to click on “Not Now”.
Users are unlikely to accept a prompt when it is shown more than once for the same site. We had previously given websites the ability to ask users for notification every time they visit a site in a new tab. The underlying assumption that users would want to take several visits to make up their minds turns out to be wrong. As Felix notes, around 85% of prompts were accepted without the user ever having previously clicked “Not Now”.
Most notification prompts don’t follow user interaction. Especially on Release, the overall number of prompts that are already compatible with this intervention is very low.
Prompts that are shown as a result of user interaction have significantly better interaction metrics. This is an important takeaway. Along with the significant decrease in overall volume, we can see a significantly better rate of first-time allow decisions (52%) after enforcing user interaction on Nightly. The same can be observed for prompts with user interaction in our Release study, where existing users will accept 24% of first-time prompts with user interaction and new users would accept a whopping 56% of first-time prompts with user interaction.
The release notes for FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 12-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
FreeBSD 12.1 has released on-time as the first incremental update to last year's FreeBSD 12.
In this article, we will create a python function that will turn a string into a list, then return the sum of all the positions of the alphabets within that list based on a-z. a = 1, b =2 and so on, all the alphabets within that given string will be in lower case.
These days, developers are highly likely to be working on a mobile or web application. Python doesn’t have built-in mobile development capabilities, but there are packages you can use to create mobile applications, like Kivy, PyQt, or even Beeware’s Toga library.
These libraries are all major players in the Python mobile space. However, there are some benefits you’ll see if you choose to create mobile applications with Kivy. Not only will your application look the same on all platforms, but you also won’t need to compile your code after every change. What’s more, you’ll be able to use Python’s clear syntax to build your applications.
The first week of October 2019, which happens to be my Birthday as well, I got an opportunity to attend Grace Hoppers Conference.
Being in there with 26,000 other women in tech at the same place was thrilling, overwhelming and quite tiring at the same time. I say tiring because of the 2 hours wait in the long queues just to pick up a paper-badge and later for Keynotes, regular sessions, food, even to get a picture with the great GHC signboard. Waking up at 5 am and going to the convention center to pick my badge is a story for another day..
Practically everyone who has ever used Python came across at least one of the so-called Python magic methods. Dunder methods, as they also called that way, are Python’s special functions that allow users to hook into some specific actions being performed. Probably the most frequently encountered one is the __init__ method. It is called when instantiating a new object from a class and by overriding it, we can gain control over that process.
However, this post is not going to take you through a full list of these.
Instead, we will show how you can effectively use this great Python feature by telling of a short story. We will use quaternions as an example to explain the proces of creating of our data model that is easy to handle for other developers, especially those less enthusiastic about advanced algebra. Most importantly, we will explain the decision process and argue why it makes sense to even bother.
Today I did a python evaluation and saw that there are many new aspects that should be kept in mind for a programmer.
Guido van Rossum is stepping down from his current role at Dropbox after spending more than six years with the company.
Vulkan 1.1.127 is out this morning as the latest routine update to the specification for this high-performance graphics API.
Vulkan 1.1.127 comes with its usual churn of internal and public GitHub-driven issues resolved. Besides a number of clarifications and typo fixes, Vulkan 1.1.127 brings one new extension.
In€ Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, author Christopher Ryan proposes the most controversial explanation offered today for what is wrong with our world. The problem began with advent of agriculture which gave rise to civilization: the movement of human activity from a life of cooperative community foraging together to one of individual competition for personal gain.
In a study published this week, Texas Tech University researchers tested how university students reacted when unknowingly given incorrect calculator outputs.
Some students were presented with an onscreen calculator that was programmed to give the wrong answers, whereas a second group was given a properly functioning calculator.
Participants could also opt not to use the calculator, but most chose to use it - even if they had good numeracy skills. Researchers found most participants raised few or no suspicions when presented with wrong answers, until the answers were quite wrong.
In addition, those with higher numeracy skills were, unsurprisingly, more suspicious of incorrect answers than others.
The multi-decade long fight between Intel and AMD has recently taken a new dimension, as more users begin to wonder which processors can protect their computers, data, and online activities best.
Lauren Bard opened the hospital bill this month and her body went numb. In bold block letters it said, “AMOUNT DUE: $898,984.57.”
Last fall, Bard’s daughter, Sadie, had arrived about three months prematurely; and as a nurse herself, Bard knew the costs for Sadie’s care would be high. But she’d assumed the bulk would be covered by the organization that owned the hospital where she worked: Dignity Health, whose marketing motto is “Hello humankindness.”
The Australian government should act on the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s report criticizing the its failure to protect older people in aged care from chemical restraint and other abuses
PORTLAND, Ore. — A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday put on hold a Trump administration rule requiring immigrants prove they will have health insurance or can pay for medical care before they can get visas.
United Arab Emirates (UAE) prison authorities are denying non-national HIV-positive detainees in at least one UAE prison regular and uninterrupted access to lifesaving antiretroviral treatment, Human Rights Watch said today. Detainees living with HIV are also segregated from the rest of the prison population in an isolated area and report facing stigma and systemic discrimination.
Together with this new IPFire Community Portal, we are launching IPFire People - our new account system which is being integrated here, our bugtracker Bugzilla, Patchwork and many other things more. In order to sign up for this, you will need to head over to IPFire People and register a new account. That will allow you to login everywhere - a single sign-on solution.
A new categorisation system will organise topics better and hopefully allow us to keep conversations around a problem more contained in one place, have everyone join in to contribute their knowledge and therefore create a dynamic support community!
To be as inclusive as possible, we will make this portal English only. Having this debated for a long time, and after phasing out translations on the Wiki, we have decided that we will reach a maximum number of users and leave nobody excluded.
The project has a large group of users in Germany, but we keep growing and IPFire is becoming more and more popular all around the world. English is the de-facto language in Open Source and allows everyone to take part in our community.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and qt5-webengine), CentOS (firefox and php), Fedora (file, java-latest-openjdk, nspr, nss, php, t1utils, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (ansible, aspell, golang, libsoup, and libxslt), openSUSE (chromium and chromium, re2), Oracle (php), and Ubuntu (apport and file).
There have been recent discussions around the general security of containers and container runtimes like Podman. None of the discussions resulted in the identification of a vulnerability or exploit by their definitions, but the talks did elevate the importance of basic security principles that apply to containers, and just about everything else we do with technology.
Enterprises need to understand how to securely operate container workloads in production and take steps to prepare for the massive growth expected, the report said.
The book does a great job of identifying and describing simple rules that, when applied to a project lead to a cleaner, more structured architecture. All in all it teaches how important software architecture in general is.
There is however one drawback with the book. It constantly wants to make you want to jump straight into your next big project with lots of features, so it is hard to keep reading while all that excited ;P
If you are a software developer – no matter whether you work on small hobby projects or big enterprise products, whether or not you pursue to become a Software Architect – I can only recommend reading this book!
Too many passwords and logins these days. Well, it is unwise to remember hundreds of passwords from websites or keeping them written somewhere. Which is by definition, not recommended.
This is why you should use a strong password manager like KeepassXC. Forked from KeepassX in Linux, it is a cross platform password manager available in Windows, Linux and Mac. KeepassXC is a database driven password manager armed with industry-standard AES (alias Rijndael) encryption algorithm using a 256 bit key. Some of its features includes – auto-type passwords, multi tagging of passwords (e.g. Work, home, social etc), database locking, passphrase, temp password supports.
A 20-year-old vulnerability in PuTTY, an open source network file transfer application, has been tracked down and patched during a wide-ranging bug bounty programme conducted by HackerOne on behalf of the European Union Free and Open Source Software Audit (EU-FOSSA).
Undergoing penetration testing or PT, within a company is equivalent to paying a cybercriminal to come in and hack the system albeit legally and with the intention of improving the organization’s security measures. PT is essential as a means to give businesses a real-world vision into the threats that are imposing themselves on their security.
When Microsoft issued the first patch in years for Windows XP in May 2019, you knew that something big was brewing. That something was a wormable Windows vulnerability that security experts warned could have a similar impact to the WannaCry worm from 2017. The BlueKeep vulnerability exists in unpatched versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2: and it’s now been confirmed that a BlueKeep exploit attack is currently ongoing.
Even before the recent raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the erstwhile head of the Islamic State, Donald Trump had spoken of how he had single-handedly defeated the caliphate.
On November 26, 1969, Mrs. Trinh Thi Ngo, known to Americans as “Hanoi Hannah”, read over Radio Hanoi an introduction to a tape provided from Hoa Lo prison, just a city block away: “Now listen to a US pilot captured over North Vietnam on the occasion of the [American] Thanksgiving Day.”
Iran on Monday broke further away from its collapsing 2015 nuclear deal with world powers by doubling the number of advanced centrifuges it operates, linking the decision to U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement over a year ago.
Thousands of Chileans again filled the streets Monday in a mega-rally to kick off the third week of protests against the country's "savage capitalism" and rising inequality under billionaire President Sebastián Piñera.
Hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola of the “Unauthorized Disclosure” weekly podcast are joined by Renato Velez, a left-wing activist in Chile. He has been involved in the protests and talks to them about how they were sparked.
Renato addresses the way in which the military police cracked down on demonstrations and highlights the ties that President Sebastian Pinera’s administration has to the regime of Augusto Pinochet.
Last week, the Trump administration announced it€ intends to€ cut trade benefits for Cameroon€ by January 1, 2020, citing persistent human rights violations in the country.
This week Germany marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.€ I remember watching the dramatic TV pictures of East Germans flocking through checkpoints on the night of November 9, 1989. A dozen years later, I moved to Berlin, and since then have seen the city and country grow together.
The ship, named Bonita, was boarded by pirates 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) from the port city of Cotonou on Saturday and eight crew members and the captain were abducted.
In a statement to Norway's Dagens Naeringsliv newspaper on Sunday, a company spokesperson said it would not reveal the crew's nationalities, citing safety reasons.
The gruesome footage is much like that produced by the ultra-violent Islamic State (IS) group.
Yet the men in this video are not IS militants, but rather fighters for a rebel alliance known as the Syrian National Army, trained, equipped and paid for by a Nato member, Turkey. They are under the command of the Turkish army.
On Kashmir, Pakistan's leaders are pretending to put on a mask of statesmanship abroad. But the truth is Pakistan has long cultivated, trained and funded Islamist proxy terrorists who have radically undermined living conditions in Kashmir.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed off on some significant wins for state residents. He approved a bill banning the use of facial recognition tech in law enforcement body cameras -- the first such statewide ban in the United States. Well… I guess that's it really. To be fair, he hasn't been in office all that long.
So if long lists of things to think about only make things worse, how do we get better at sorting truth from fiction and everything in-between?
Our solution is to give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. We call the “things to do” moves and there are four of them: [...]
People in Delhi-NCR are losing "precious years of their lives" and cannot be "left to die" due to the "atrocious" pollution situation which reflects a "shocking state of affairs", the Supreme Court said Monday and directed neighbouring Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh to stop stubble burning.
The top court also stopped all construction and demolition activities as well as garbage and waste burning in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) till further orders.
Google workers are again calling on the company to cut all of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. In a letter sent to chief financial officer Ruth Porat today, the employees also ask Google to end contracts with fossil fuel companies and eliminate funding for think tanks, politicians, or lobbyists that impede action on climate change. They’re doubling down on demands that were made across the tech sector in September when employees at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft joined the Global Climate Strike.
Swedish scientists say they have found a way to recycle plastic perfectly: their new process€ can turn any waste plastic back into new plastic€ of identical quality – and recover all of it.
A new report released Friday claims that if fossil fuel companies want to have any chance of hitting Paris Climate Accord numbers by 2040, they will have to cut production by over a third.
The Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), again in the spotlight of the national and international news media because€ of its shutoffs of electricity to millions of Californians as fires now rage throughout€ the state, spent $876,445 on lobbying€ from January 1 to June 30 of his year.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday announced it would roll back Obama-era regulations on how coal-fired power plants dispose of waste laden with arsenic, lead and mercury.
The Trump administration's proposals weaken rules dealing with the residue from burning coal, known as coal ash, as well as the residue rinsed off of filters installed on smoke stacks. Both are often mixed with water and stored in giant pits that could leach into groundwater or be released directly into local waterways.
The answer, he decided, lay in the unsecured buildings at the old naval base, packed with zillion-dollar money machines. “I wanted to start Bitcoin mining,” he says, “because it is very similar to growing cannabis. Everything is related: electricity, air, heat, cooling systems. So I started asking around on the [Internet].”
What’s going on in the repo market? Rates on repurchase (“repo”) € agreements should be about 2%, in line with the Federal Reserve funds rate. But they shot up to over 5% on Sept. 16 and got as high as 10% on Sept. 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big profits to hold onto their cash—just as they did in the housing market crash and Great Recession of 2008-09.
Bolivia has recently had a presidential election that without foreign interference would have passed without notice outside Latin America. President Evo Morales was re-elected democratically to a forth term without the need of a run-off election with incumbent Carlos Mesa, which shows his strength as the chosen candidate. However, nine days after the elections the Foreign Ministry of the Canadian government issues a statement expressing “concern” about “reports of serious election irregularities.”
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
"This is yet more evidence of obstruction of Congress, which is an impeachable offense."
The cry of the mighty who are falling is growing louder. In the case of the USA it’s a combination of angry accusations based on a confused bluster of humanity in the White House whose phalanx of fools exists so deep within its own perception of itself its members cannot conceive of their leader being booed at a national sporting event. Then again, neither can certain conservative pundits who do not like the man in the White House but slobber their servitude to the building’s presence as some monument of integrity and honor. Honor in DC is a presumption I won’t ever make, not even among those who are not thieves. I have more respect for the dope slingers and their customers, the hookers and their johns, and the panhandlers who sleep in places most of us never knew existed, than I do for the politicians and their paymasters. At least the former do a day’s work and rarely misrepresent their intentions.
At Techdirt, we've been writing about the problems of electronic voting for just about our entire existence. I believe the first time we wrote about the problematic nature of electronic voting was in June of the year 2000, a few months before the controversy over "hanging chads" in the 2000 election in Florida. Over the years, we've continued to write about electronic voting and its myriad problems dozens upon dozens of times -- and to this day I remain amazed at how little companies and election officials have taken this space seriously. Part of the issue is that there is no easy solution. There isn't a "good" solution, there are only options that are "less bad" than others. The problem is that many places use solutions that are obviously bad when there are at least better options on the table.
This past week, Boeing’s deadly 737 MAX crashes were the focus of two back-to-back hearings –€ one in the Senate and one in the House. In the House Transportation Committee hearing, at least€ 50 Democrats and Republicans criticized Dennis Muilenburg’s mismanagement and implied€ criminal negligence. Muilenburg’s actions allowed Boeing’s marketeers to overrule Boeing’s€ engineers so that Boeing could circumvent FAA’s safety oversight, which had already been€ diminished by the Congress.
A knife-wielding man slashed several people and bit off part of the ear of a pro-democracy politician in Hong Kong on Sunday, as riot police stormed several malls to thwart protesters who have been demanding government reforms for nearly five months.
Governments should use an upcoming review of Kazakhstan’s rights record at the United Nations (UN) to hold the country’s new president to his pledges to respect human rights, Human Rights Watch said today. On November 7, 2019, Kazakhstan will undergo its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
State Duma Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy is outraged about a YouTube channel called Real Talk, where children have conversations with “unlikely companions.” In one episode, for example, children speak to a gay man. In another, a child questions a pornographic actress. A month after Tolstoy’s complaint, Russia’s Investigative Committee launched a felony case against the channel’s unidentified owners for alleged “sexual violence against minors,” and child protection services have visited the parents of the children who appeared in the videos. Meduza spoke to someone with ties to Real Talk, who requested anonymity and answered our questions through the messenger app Telegram.
I guess if you don't really rely on the First Amendment as much as you used to, it's cool to tell everyone else these protections are overrated. That seems to be Richard Stengel's take on this important Constitutional amendment. The former Time editor and State Department undersecretary has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that says we Americans perhaps enjoy too much free speech.
Dennis Prager has been peddling complete and utter nonsense via his PragerU efforts for quite some time, and it expands beyond that too, because he's been peddling complete and utter nonsense in his still ongoing joke of a lawsuit against YouTube in which he tries to insist that YouTube is biased against conservatives because they put a small number of his videos in "restricted mode." This, despite the facts that (1) YouTube has no legal obligation to host his videos (for free!) in the first place, (2) less than 1.5% of people use "restricted mode" in the first place, (3) "Restricted mode" is to help parents block inappropriate content from kids, (4) the videos that were put into restricted mode had content that many would consider inappropriate for kids, and (5) most importantly, YouTube showed that many other sites -- including those that people consider to be "liberal" had their videos put in restricted mode at a much higher rate than PragerU.
Major Internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are taking proactive measures to keep offensive content off their services. According to the Motion Picture Association, online services can use similar systems to proactively remove pirated content too. That would be even easier since it doesn't raise the same speech concerns, the group's senior vice president notes.
Unless Congress stops it, foreign police will soon be able to collect and search data on the servers of U.S. Internet companies. They’ll be able to do it without a probable cause warrant, or any oversight from a U.S. judge. This is all happening because of a new law enforcement deal between the U.S. and the United Kingdom. And while it seeks to exclude purely domestic correspondence between U.S. citizens and residents, plenty of Americans’ data will get swept up when they communicate with targeted individuals located abroad.
This is all happening because, for the first time, the U.S. executive branch is flexing its power to enter into law enforcement agreements under the CLOUD Act. We’ve been strongly opposed to this law since it was introduced last year. The recently signed deal between the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.K. Home Office will allow U.K. police easy access to data held by American companies, regardless of where the data is stored. These U.K. data requests, including demands to collect real-time communications, do not need to meet the standards set by U.S. privacy laws or the 4th Amendment. Similarly, the deal will allow U.S. police to grab information held by British companies without following U.K. privacy laws.€
The Australian government’s Department of Home Affairs has proposed using facial recognition for online age verification for pornography and gambling websites visited by Australians as an update to Australia’s National Identity Security Strategy. The full not-so-detailed plan is titled: “Submission to the Inquiry into Age Verification for Online Wagering and Online Pornography.” In it, the Department of Home Affairs highlights their new Face Verification Service and how it could be used for age verification. Note: no words on how online pornography and gambling users would submit their face image for comparison versus their ID in the Face Verification Service...
As a result, the microphone interpreted the incoming light into a digital signal, just as it would sound. The researchers then tried changing the intensity of the laser over time to match the frequency of a human voice, aiming the beam at the microphones of a collection of consumer devices that accept voice commands.
In all, 1,616 people were asked that slightly morbid question - hopefully in a way which didn't sound like a threat - and the answers were pretty muddled.
Overall, the most popular response with 26 per cent of the vote was that the accounts should die with them - but for the contents to be shared with friends and family as a kind of digital inheritance. That was one per cent ahead of those that just wanted everything deleted.
Nine per cent wanted accounts to be left up for a limited time period and then taken down, and 17 per cent didn't care because they didn't have any social media accounts. In all just seven per cent of people wanted to (digitally) live forever, and 13 per cent ticked the every-tempting "don't know box."
As consumers, we all have “secret scores”: hidden ratings that determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive. A low score sends you to the back of the queue; high scores get you elite treatment.
Every so often, journalists lament these systems’ inaccessibility. They’re “largely invisible to the public,” The New York Times wrote in 2012. “Most people have no inkling they even exist,” The Wall Street Journal said in 2018. Most recently, in April, The Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”
As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.
The Europol Police Agency will focus more on new technologies in the field of internal security. To this end, Europol will set up an ââ¬Å¾Innovation Laboratory“ to look for new ways of intercepting, decrypting and monitoring. This was decided unanimously by the European Interior Ministers at their last Council meeting at the beginning of October.
The new centre will take a ââ¬Å¾proactive approach“ and analyse new products and processes before they come onto the market. At present, however, the focus is on equipment that is already available, including 3D printers for manufacture weapons. The ââ¬Å¾Innovation Laboratory“ also deals with the ââ¬Å¾Internet of Things“. It deals with ââ¬Å¾challenges and opportunities“, i.e. the criminal use of technologies and their potential use for law enforcement.
In all, the logs were detailed enough to see which users were logging in, from where, and often their email addresses or other identifiable information — which in some cases we could match to real-world identities.
Facebook says the goal of including “from Facebook” is to let people know that its apps have “shared infrastructure” and rely on many of the same teams. “People should know which companies make the products they use,” writes Antonio Lucio, Facebook’s chief marketing officer.
At the same time, the new logo feels like it might also be an attempt to keep Facebook’s different brands a little bit more distinct amid almost nonstop controversy. The different logos seem to say that Facebook the company is not entirely defined by Facebook the social network — they just happen to share the same name and controlling interests.
Now, instead of being rendered "Facebook" or "facebook" with a lowercase "f", the rebranding displays the word "Facebook" in all capital letters and in a modern font. The company also seems to want its users to know that its subsidiaries are part of its parent company; hence, Instagram and WhatsApp will tell you they’re “from FACEBOOK."
This re-arranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic is an easy target of mockery from pundits and online personalities. As many have pointed out, it seems a bit tone-deaf to rebrand after the years of horrors that have emerged from the social media platform. To wit: Facebook's policy around giving free rein to politicians to lie in advertisements; ennobling far-right groups promoting violence; the platform's role in foreign manipulation of the 2016 U.S. election; and the preponderance of Myanma military personnel who used the social network to incite genocide — to name a few.
“They actually came for Engineer. After killing him, they wanted to go so one of his neighbour wanted to know the identity of any of them but they turned back and killed him too,” he said.
According to Cockburn’s source about the seven whistleblowers, there’s more. It is that Kushner (allegedly) gave the green light to MBS to arrest the dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was later murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A second source tells Cockburn that this is true and adds a crucial twist to the story. This source claims that Turkish intelligence obtained an intercept of the call between Kushner and MBS. And President Erdogan used it to get Trump to roll over and pull American troops out of northern Syria before the Turks invaded. Cockburn hears that investigators for the House Intelligence Committee know this whole tale and the identities of some of the people telling it. Whether any of is true is another matter but Adam Schiff certainly seems to be smiling a lot these days.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) on May 29 staged an assassination of Bachenko as part of a sting operation to catch people involved in an alleged Russian plot to kill him.
The SBU never presented direct evidence linking Moscow to the alleged plot.
In accompanying comments to the Associated Free Press, Melzer said that his statement was based on “new medically relevant information.” “Mr Assange’s health has entered a downward spiral of progressively severe anxiety, stress and helplessness typical for persons exposed to prolonged isolation and constant arbitrariness,” the UN official said.
Melzer, an internationally recognised legal expert on torture and its symptoms, explained: “While the precise evolution is difficult to predict with certainty, this pattern of symptoms can quickly develop into a life-threatening situation involving cardiovascular breakdown or nervous collapse.”
On September 10, the scholar and social activist Albert Razin walked up to Udmurtia’s parliament building in the region’s capital city of Izhevsk. The 79-year-old, who held the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D. in philosophy as well as one of Udmurtia’s highest government honors for researchers, held a one-man picket against the disappearance of the Udmurt language. Then, he poured gasoline onto his body and lit himself on fire. Razin died in the hospital that same day. While many Izhevsk residents have come to revere the Udmurt elder as a hero even if they had never heard of him before his suicide, the regional government of Udmurtia has been doing its best to act as though his final act of protest never happened. Meduza reported from the ground on Albert Razin’s life, work, and death.
Three years ago, police in Colorado destroyed Leo Lech's home to arrest a person suspected only of shoplifting from a nearby Walmart when the house destruction began. Shoplifting suspect Robert Seacat abandoned his vehicle and hid in Lech's house. When police entered to arrest him, Seacat shot at them five times.
Authorities in Iraq’s Anbar governorate are suppressing the right of residents to show support for demonstrations elsewhere in the country.
Riot police stormed several malls in Hong Kong on Sunday in a move to thwart more pro-democracy protests, as the city's leader prepares for talks in Beijing on deepening economic integration between the semi-autonomous Chinese territory and mainland China.
(It may not yet be translated into English. The French publisher presents the book as a study that sheds light on a tragedy that has gone almost unnoticed: the trafficking of Blacks from Africa by the Arab-Muslim world. This trafficking has involved seventeen million victims killed, castrated or enslaved for more than thirteen centuries without interruption. The prisoners were forced to cross the desert on foot to reach the Maghreb, Egypt or the Arabian Peninsula via Zanzibar, by boat... Yet this slave trade was minimized, unlike the Western trade to America. Why? Because only conversion to Islam made it possible to escape slavery, but did not spare Blacks. However, nowadays most of Africa has become Muslim, hence a form of religious fraternity between the "white" and "black" sides of the continent, and a common desire to "veil" this genocide. A polemical and courageous book.)
“We couldn’t stay there,” explains Shabnam Rahimi, 26. “In Afghanistan, women have no rights, no life. I got tired of crying day and night. We were living in fear for much of the time. We went out to box in the mornings and we didn’t know if we would get back alive at night.”
In Latin America several countries are under turmoil, as people cannot even meet their most basics needs. The last few months have seen a remarkable spectacle: hundreds of thousands of citizens are taking to the streets to protest to what they perceive is their governments’ attack on their well-being, and the governments’ responses have been late and inadequate.
The€ Ugandan€ police and military have cracked down on student protests over fee increases at Makerere University in Kampala on multiple occasions since October 22, 2019.
What is at stake in north-east Syria is more than the fate of the Kurdish people or the autonomous homeland of Rojava or even the fight against Isis. What is at stake is humanity’s ability to survive our current civilizational crisis and to imagine new alternatives before it’s too late.
The Los Angeles Committee of Human Rights Watch announced today that it will present its third annual Promise Award to the docuseries for the Discovery Channel,€ Why We Hate.€ The award will be presented at the upcoming Human Rights Watch Voices for Justice Dinner on November 12, 2019.
Despite a lack of public evidence proving Huawei spies on American citizens (the entire justifying cornerstone of the effort), the FCC this week just dramatically escalated the Trump administration's blackballing of Chinese telecom firms. In a fact sheet circulated by the agency, the FCC says it will vote in November on a new rule that would ban US companies from receiving taxpayer subsidies if they use Huawei, ZTE, or other Chinese gear in their networks. This could be followed later with additional rules requiring that companies rip Chinese gear from their networks and replace it with presumably US alternatives, the FCC says.
On September 11th, Junior Party (Regents of the University of California, University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, collectively "CVC") in Interference No. 106,115 with The Broad Institute et al. filed a motion to file its priority statement under seal. Specifically, CVC's motion requested that it be permitted to have the PTAB seal the priority statement until 45 days after final judgment or indefinitely; CVC also asked for 45 days after judgment to move that the statement be expunged from the record. (In the alternative, CVC requested that its statement remain sealed until a scheduling order issued by the Board for the priority phase of the interference, and that CVC be permitted to file a motion to expunge, e.g., if the count was changed). Last week, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) denied this motion, in a Decision by Administrative Patent Judge Katz, joined by APJs Moore and Lane.
[...]
The Board was persuaded by CVC's request to keep its priority statement under seal until the Board issued a schedule for the priority phase, stating that CVC had correctly noted that 37 C.F. R. ۤ 41.120(a) permits the Board to keep priority statements confidential "for a limited time." The Board remained unpersuaded by the Broad's arguments that it would be prejudiced, inter alia, because "Broad's potential licensees, commercial partners, and the public will not be able to evaluate for themselves CVC's claims to priority, and Broad's patents will continue to be subject to the uncertainty CVC has sought to create around them since suggesting the 048 interference four years ago." The opinion states in support that the parties' priority evidence will not be "made in full" until priority motions are filed if there is a priority phase in this interference. And the Board does not see prejudice to the Broad's ability to establish priority if CVC's priority statement is kept in confidence until the priority phase commences.
The opinion mandates that CVC file by November 7th a revised proposed protective order taking into account the Board's decision to keep CVC's priority statement under seal until commencement of the priority phase.
Customedia … submits a notice of supplemental authority identifying this court’s recent decision in Arthrex, Inc. v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., No. 2018-2140 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 31, 2019). That decision vacated and remanded for the matter to be decided by a new panel of Administrative Patent Judges (“APJs”) at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board after this court concluded that the APJs’ appointments violated the Appointments Clause. Customedia’s letters seek to assert the same challenge here, which the court construes as a motion to vacate the Board decisions here and remand in accordance with Arthrex.
Last Thursday, in Arthrex v. Smith & Nephew (Fed. Cir. 2019), a panel of the Federal Circuit held that the administrative patent judges (APJs) at the PTAB are “principal officers” who must, under the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. In contrast, the current patent statute provides for APJs to be appointed by the Secretary of Commerce in consultation with the PTO Director. The panel further determined that it could remedy the constitutional defect by severing APJ removal protections, thereby rendering them inferior officers who can be appointed by “Heads of Departments” like the Commerce Secretary.
This unusual trademark situation has given rise to numerous legal proceedings in Spain, in which the Spanish licensee of the trademark (Schweppes, S.A.) faced distributors who marketed products in Spain under the brand 'Schweppes’ of the Coca-Cola Group. In the case at hand, Schweppes, S.A. brought an action against Red Paralela before the Commercial Court No. 8 of Barcelona, alleging that the marketing in Spain of Schweppes branded products, manufactured and marketed in the United Kingdom by the Coca-Cola Group, infringes its rights over the Schweppes brand in Spain.
In defense, Red Paralela argued that the rights of the Schweppes Group in Spain have been exhausted. As a result, Schweppes, S.A. can no longer oppose the marketing in Spain of Schweppes branded products coming from the United Kingdom. In support of its claims, Red Paralela provided evidence which, in its opinion, showed the existence of economic links between the Schweppes Group and the Coca-Cola Group, as well as the existence of promotion of a single brand image by both owners.
[...]
On the other hand, it cannot belong exclusively to the Coca Cola Group, simply because it is the current owner of the brand in the United Kingdom, which is the historical territorial origin of the Schweppes brand, dating back to 1783.
Thus, the historical value belongs to both the Schweppes Group and the Coca-Cola Group. This means that both owners can use the elements that form part of the historical "DNA" of the Schweppes brand, independently of the existence of a fragmentation of the brand between two owners in the territory of the EU.
As a key point of the Chinese government’s initiative to curb the proliferation of bad faith trade mark applications, Several Provisions for Regulating Application for Trade Mark Registration (è§âèÅÆÃ¥â¢â æ â¡Ã§â³è¯·æ³¨åâ Åè¡Å为èâ¹Â¥Ã¥Â¹Â²Ã¨Â§â定, hereinafter referred to as ‘the Provisions’) will go into effect as of 1 December 2019. The full text (in Chinese, Google translatable) has been published on the China National Intellectual Property Administration official website (CNIPA, which used to be SIPO).
The Provisions are intended to achieve the following:
1. Strengthening the principle of good faith by (1) summarising and listing prohibited behaviours that are scattered in several provisions of the Chinese Trade Mark Law under Article 3; (2) holding accountable not only applicants, but also agents who facilitate activities that violate the principle of good faith (Article 4).
[...]
Trade mark squatting is a topic of platitude already. Normally, through early application (roughly speaking, China has a ‘first-to-file’ system for trade mark registration), or more actively, by applying for invalidation or cancellation of the pre-emptively registered trade mark, one can formulate an effective countermeasure against squatters.
What Jing Hanqing encountered was an escalated version: it seems absurd for an individual to be pre-emptive enough to file a trade mark application for their own name. In this sense, the Provision provides practical guidance. Together with the revised Trade Mark Law of China (which has just taken effect as of 1 November 2019), the upgraded legal framework is expected to prevent bad faith applications more effectively.
A massive operation in Brazil has seen police across the country take action against hundreds of 'pirate' websites and apps. The Ministry of Justice initially said that 'suspensions' had hit 136 sites and 100 apps but that number has continued to grow. Authorities state that they received assistance from US authorities including ICE and the Department of Justice.
Hollywood hates fair use. Even though Hollywood frequently relies on fair use, it seems to go out of its way to fight against fair use being used anywhere else. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) (which is a mega trade group of intellectual property maximalist trade groups, including the MPAA, the RIAA, ESA, IFTA and AAP) has freaked out any time any other country in the world has sought to have American-style fair use. Over a decade ago IIPA flipped out when Israel's fair use rules matched the US's. The group and other surrogates have also fought American-style fair use in the UK and Australia after both of those countries explored implementing American-style fair use.
