11.20.19
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents, Rumour at 11:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Why are judges even speaking to Team UPC?! They’re lobbying by picking on judges and spreading falsehoods.
Summary: A sort of ‘trial by media’ (by Team UPC) compromises the integrity of the case (constitutional complaint) and can be interpreted as judges succumbing to lobbying/pressure from those who conspire to violate many constitutions across Europe for personal/financial gain
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ROVOCATION tactics seem to have worked for Team UPC, which together with Campinos and Battistelli at the European Patent Office (EPO) lobby hard for the UPC in the open and behind the scenes.
We previously took note of the "Attack on the Independence of the European Judges (Which Had) Apparently Expanded to the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht/FCC)" (taking note of a conflict of interest at the FCC).
“We previously took note of the “Attack on the Independence of the European Judges [Which Had] Apparently Expanded to the German Constitutional Court…”Why are FCC judges even speaking to Team UPC lobbyists like the litigation ‘industry’ stenographer Patrick Wingrove? Even Team UPC seems surprised. As one of them put it: “As for journalistic standards, it wd be helpful to be told when & why Prof. Huber agreed to interview (a rare occurrence, though this seems to be limited to the inner workings of the Court) & when, how (including in which language) and by whom it was conducted.”
This seemed unnecessary. Managing IP is a longtime UPC lobbying front. It bragged in Twitter: “Breaking: #UPC case to be decided in early 2020. In an exclusive interview, Justice Huber of the German Federal Constitutional Court gives @ManagingIP a timeline for the case and says suggestions that Brexit has stalled the decision are “bullshit”…”
“Why are FCC judges even speaking to Team UPC lobbyists like the litigation ‘industry’ stenographer Patrick Wingrove?”Why even give them clues?
“Apparently,” as one person noted, “no oral hearing foreseen by DE Constitutional Court” (are they rushing this?)
The FCC should not be bullied by Team UPC; they’re the major component of this anti-democratic, unconstitutional behaviour. They’re the sort of thing this complaint is about. From the said article: “The case holding up the Unified Patent Court will be decided in the first quarter of 2020, according to the judge at the German Federal Constitutional Court who is in charge of the matter.”
“The coverage from Team UPC keeps repeating the word “bullshit” (not a decent word for a judge/justice to be using anyway), but who even/ever claimed that Brexit was the cause of this delay?”Further down he’s quoted: “I don’t want to delay [the decision] but there are some other cases at hand that also have to be dealt with…”
The coverage from Team UPC keeps repeating the word “bullshit” (not a decent word for a judge/justice to be using anyway), but who even/ever claimed that Brexit was the cause of this delay? Certainly not us. It deals with a claim that perhaps nobody even made.
“Kluwer Patent blogger” (likely Bristows) accepts that there’s no UPC decision by FCC this year. In 2018 they insisted it would be done by year’s end (2018). They’re chronic liars. They just hoped to pressure judges. Here’s what they wrote some hours ago:
The constitutional complaint holding up the start of the Unified Patent Court will be decided upon in the first quarter of next year. Justice Peter Huber of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), who is overseeing case 2 BvR 739/17, has said this in an exclusive interview with Managing IP.
Huber added that the time frame will depend on the time it takes for him and other judges at the FCC to deliberate on the case. “It is quite a detailed process that we follow because we have to look at every detail of how we formulate and word the [ruling],” he said according to the interview of Managing IP. “But it is likely that we will get along with it.”
In the interview, Huber denied that the FCC has been delaying its decision because of the Brexit. According to Managing IP, he described the allegation as “bullshit”.
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If the complaint is dismissed, this doesn’t necessarily mean Germany will immediately complete the ratification procedure…
Rose Hughes (Team UPC) again plays ball for UPC with some spin. At IP Kat she wrote: “In the interview to Managing-IP, Justice Huber also confirms that he intends to decide the case in the first quarter of next year. Brexit is currently scheduled for the end of January 2020. It may therefore be touch-and-go whether the UPC comes into force (following German ratification) before Brexit. On the other hand, it has also been reported that, even if the constitutional complaint is overcome, the German Parliament may still delay ratification whilst the outcome of Brexit is unclear. Another false rumour?”
The false rumours are Team UPC’s. They did that lots of times before.
“The bottom line is, Team UPC seems to be entrapping and pressuring judges into issuing a decision prematurely, based on unrealistic deadlines and before oral statements can be made/heard.”IP Kat was also boosting Watchtroll around that same time (this time Lucy Isaev). What has happened to the ‘Kats’? Litigation fanatics now? AstraZeneca’s legal team?
The bottom line is, Team UPC seems to be entrapping and pressuring judges into issuing a decision prematurely, based on unrealistic deadlines and before oral statements can be made/heard. They also speak to fake press which is actually a pressure group of Team UPC. Follow the money and study their track record.
We can imagine that the complainant will have something to say about that. █
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Posted in Europe, Finance at 9:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Overview
Understanding Thierry Breton
Further parts pending review and research
Summary: “Whether by coincidence or not, when Atos announced in 2010 that it would acquire Siemens’ IT unit, it was the 32-year-old Macron at Rothschild who advised Breton on the deal.”
The wikipedia.org entry for Thierry Breton describes his departure from political office and his return to the world of private enterprise as follows:
“After two years of government service (2005–2007) he became in November 2008 the active chairman and CEO of Atos S.A., formerly Atos Origin. On the announcement of his nomination the share price, which was previously valued at 18 euros, rose by 7.84%.”
Well that’s nice to know, isn’t it?
“At the time of writing, the website is offline probably in an attempt to block any inquisitive researchers while Thierry’s candidacy for EU Commissioner is under scrutiny.”But what exactly was Thierry up to between May 2007 when he left Bercy and November 2008 when he moved into the CEO’s office at Atos?
According to Wikipedia, after leaving the government, Breton “briefly worked as professor at Harvard Business School (2007–2008) where he taught Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA).”
This is corroborated by the Financial Times report of 11 July 2007: “French finance minister heads for Harvard”.
Breton’s own website confirms the Harvard story. At the time of writing, the website is offline probably in an attempt to block any inquisitive researchers while Thierry’s candidacy for EU Commissioner is under scrutiny.
The website https://thierry-breton.com is currently inaccessible.
Is somebody trying to hide something?
However, with the help of Google’s web cache of the site we learn the following:
“Most recently, before joining Atos, he was a professor at Harvard Business School, teaching leadership and corporate accountability.”
“Thankfully we have the French establishment mouthpiece Les Echos to help us join the dots.”But there is a gap in the narrative. One small but interesting detail is missing…
Thankfully we have the French establishment mouthpiece Les Echos to help us join the dots.
In September 2007, Les Echos informed its readers that the former Minister for the Economy had taken up a position as a “senior advisor” with the renowned French bank Rothschild & Cie: Thierry Breton devient « senior advisor » chez Rothschild
At Rothschild & Cie, Breton was part of a team of three senior advisers that included the chairman of Rothschild’s German branch, Klaus Mangold, who from 2007 to 2019 sat on the board of directors of Alstom S.A., a French multinational company operating worldwide in rail transport markets, active in the fields of passenger transportation, signalling and locomotives.
Shortly after Breton moved to Rothschild & Cie, an up-and-coming boy-wonder by the name of Emmanuel Macron decided to leave the security of his civil service post at the Ministry for the Economy, to take up a more dynamic private sector job at the this prestigious financial institution.
“Whether by coincidence or not, when Atos announced in 2010 that it would acquire Siemens’ IT unit, it was the 32-year-old Macron at Rothschild who advised Breton on the deal.”Macron, a graduate of the elite ENA, had worked at the Inspection générale des finances (IGF), a key department of the Ministry for the Economy, between 2004 and 2007. This overlaps with Breton’s term of office as Minister so it’s a fair bet that their paths already crossed at some point during that time.
Whether by coincidence or not, when Atos announced in 2010 that it would acquire Siemens’ IT unit, it was the 32-year-old Macron at Rothschild who advised Breton on the deal.
In August 2014 Macron departed from the private sector to enter the political arena as Minister for Economy in the Socialist government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
We will revisit the Macron connection later on but for the moment let’s stick with Breton’s post-ministerial business career at Atos.
In 2008 Atos had 50,000 employees and generated a sales revenue of € 5.5 billion but according to Breton it was “managed too compartmentally” and the company’s inferior profitability margins relative to its competitors required a complete transformation plan.
It was another golden opportunity for the “turnaround king” to flex his managerial muscles.
In July 2011, with a little help from his “friends” at Rothschild & Cie, Breton orchestrated the acquisition of the IT activities of German industry group Siemens.
“It was another golden opportunity for the “turnaround king” to flex his managerial muscles.”This elevated Atos to rank number one among the European IT services players and in the Top 5 worldwide, with 75,000 employees in 42 countries.
The deal, valued at € 850 million, was the biggest Franco-German transaction since an alliance between Germany’s premium carmaker Daimler and France’s Renault established in 2010. The move was greeted by the financial markets and the Atos share price rose by 11.6%.
With the integration of 28,000 Siemens employees Atos became one of the most important Franco-German industrial collaborations since Airbus, manifested by a financial partnership (Siemens took 15% of Atos’ capital), and a common investment fund of 100 million euros was created as well as a joint response to international tenders. This strategy was awarded the prize for Industrial cooperation by the Franco-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
In 2012 Breton adopted the Societas Europaea legal form for Atos which gave the company two headquarters, one in France and a second in Munich, Germany.
In parallel, he participated in other European institutional projects in which the Franco-German partnership played a central role such as the European Commission’s European Cloud Partnership (2012–2014) over which he co-presided with Jim Snabe, the joint CEO of the German software company SAP.
In May 2014 Breton initiated the takeover of French IT industry player Bull, where he had first made his mark as a “turnaround wizard” in the 1990s. The aim was to turn Atos into a global player in Big Data and Cybersecurity and to enable Atos to position itself in the supercomputing segment by becoming the sole European manufacturer of such equipment.
“This elevated Atos to rank number one among the European IT services players and in the Top 5 worldwide, with 75,000 employees in 42 countries.”Six months later Atos announced the acquisition of Xerox’s IT outsourcing activities along with a strategic partnership with the American company. This operation made Atos one of the five largest digital companies in the world.
Within the space of six years the company had doubled in size to a headcount of around 100,000 employees.
By May 2015 the company’s market capitalization had risen to € 7.29 billion euros, an increase of more than € 5 billion compared with November 2008 when Breton took over as CEO. The market share price of Atos grew by 268% in five years.
But the success story of Atos has a darker side which is likely to be familiar to UK readers.
“But the success story of Atos has a darker side which is likely to be familiar to UK readers.”Along with other big corporate “service providers” like Serco, G4S, Capita, Amey and Carillion, Atos was one of the main beneficiaries of government largesse in the area of public service “outsourcing” during the late 1990s and the first decade and a half of the new millenium.
In the next part we will take a look at how Atos became a toxic brand in the UK because of its dubious role in assessing disability benefit eligibility. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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MagicBook is the first laptop series that was released by HONOR in 2018. After that, subsequent models were being launched in China without any global launch. Although the laptop series is not among the popular ones, but they are definitely the above-average laptops you can purchase at an affordable price. Recently, a new model from the series is spotted in a listing of devices that appeared on JingDong Mall.
The new HONOR MagicBook 15 is only going to come with an Intel variant unlike what they did with the previous version which also offered another AMD Ryzen variant. It is also said to be having two storage options which are 256GB and 512GB SSD storage. There will be a fingerprint sensor on the power button as well for security.
For aesthetic, it seems like the laptop still maintain its MacBook-like design while taking a different direction on the colour scheme. The HONOR MagicBook 15 we can see from the pictures below show that the laptop will come with a silver body that adds a touch of blue to the edges. The colour of the edges also somehow assembles the colour of their logo which will appear on the laptop as well.
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Server
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IBM
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The SystemTap team announces release 4.2!
support for generating backtraces of different contexts; improved backtrace
tapset to include file names and line numbers; eBPF support extensions
including raw tracepoint access, prometheus exporter, procfs probes and
improved looping structures
= Where to get it
https://sourceware.org/systemtap/ - Project Page
https://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID...
git tag release-4.2 (commit 044a0640985ef0)
There have been over 110 commits since the last release.
There have been over 25 bugs fixed / features added since the last
release.
= SystemTap frontend (stap) changes
- When the -v option is set along with -L option, the output includes
duplicate probe points which are distinguished by their PC address.
- Now it is possible to issue a backtrace using user specified pc, sp,
and fp which can be used to generate backtraces of different contexts.
This was introduced to get backtraces of user code from within the go
runtime but it can also be used to do things like generating backtraces
of user code from within signal handlers.
- The automatic printing implementation now differentiates between
pointer and integer types, which are printed as hex or decimal
respectively.
= SystemTap backend changes
- Initial support for multi-dimensional supports has been added to
the stapbpf backend. Note that these arrays cannot be iterated upon
with a foreach loop.
- The stapbpf backend now supports sorting by value in foreach loops.
- The stapbpf backend now supports the concatenation operator for
userspace probes.
- The stapbpf backend now supports the target() function and -x option.
- The gettimeofday_* functions are now provided for the stapbpf backend.
- The stapbpf backend now supports order parameterization for begin
and end probes.
- The stapbpf backend now supports stap-exporter extensions.
- The stapbpf backend now supports procfs probes. The implementation
uses FIFO special files in /var/tmp/systemtap-$EFFUSER/MODNAME instead
of the proc filesystem files.
- The eBPF backend now uses bpf raw tracepoints for kernel.trace("*")
probes. These have target variable arguments that match the
arguments available for the traditional linux kernel modules
tracepoints. Support for the older bpf tracepoint arguments can be
forced with a --compatible=4.1 option on the command line.
- The compiler optimizes out probes with empty handlers. Previously,
warnings were issued but, the probe was not internally removed. For
example, this script now outputs a warning and an error as the only
probe handler is empty:
probe begin {}
Additionally, probe handlers that evaluate to empty are also removed.
For example, in this script, the begin probe is elided as $foo does
not exist, however, an error won't be outputted because atleast one
probe with a non-empty handler exists (probe begin):
probe begin {
print("Protected from elision")
}
probe end {
if (@defined($foo)) { print("Evaluates to empty handler") }
}
- The sys/sdt.h file changes the way i386 registers operands are
sometimes named, due to an ambiguity. A comment block explains.
= SystemTap tapset changes
- New backtracing functions print_[u]backtrace_fileline() have been added
to the tapset. These functions behave similarly to print_[u]backtrace(),
the only difference being that file names and line numbers are added
to the backtrace.
= SystemTap sample scripts
All 180+ examples can be found at https://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/
.
- Several sample scripts have been enabled to run on the stapbpf backend:
apps/libguestfs_log.stp
network/sk_stream_wait_memory.stp
memory/mmfilepage.meta
memory/mmwriteback.meta
general/ansi_colors.meta
- New stap-exporter sample script for the stapbpf backend:
syscallsrw.stp Tallies the read and write syscalls.
= Examples of tested kernel versions
2.6.32 (RHEL6 x86_64)
4.15.0 (Ubuntu 18.04 x86_64)
4.18.0 (RHEL8 x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, s390x)
5.0.7 (Fedora 29 x86_64)
5.3.8 (Fedora 30 i686)
5.3.9 (Fedora 31 x86_64)
5.4.0-rc (Fedora 32 x86_64)
= Known issues with this release
- The array dump macros which are used with prometheus probes do not
entirely
work with stapbpf as the macros use foreach loops which cannot be used
with
multi-dimensional arrays yet.
- The user_string() function in the BPF tapsets uses the BPF
probe_read_str()
helper, which only works correctly when there is no address translation
between user and kernel address spaces. It has been restricted to x86_64
only until the BPF infrastructure provides separate helpers for reading
user
and kernel data.
= Coming soon
- More stapbpf functionality including full statistics aggregate support
and
try-catch blocks.
= Contributors for this release
*Carlos O'Donell, Frank Ch. Eigler, Jafeer Uddin,
*Richard Purdie, Ross Burton, *Sagar Patel, Serhei Makarov
Stan Cox, *Wenzong Fan, William Cohen
Special thanks to new contributors, marked with '*' above.
Special thanks to Sagar for assembling these notes.
= Bugs fixed for this release &tl;https://sourceware.org/PR#####>
9922 need to configure with --disable-pie on ubuntu
25174 string auto-concat doesn't work in @var / @cast module parameter
25169 strcpy overlap between transport arg and string on-stack
25133 stapbpf foreach loop crashing
24953 foreach (v = v1,v2) syntax not behaving correctly in stapbpf
24812 stapbpf: support order-parametrized begin/end probes
25113 Explanation and "code" mismatch in section 2.3.1.2. File Flight
Recorder
25107 need -L variant that doesn't merge duplicate probe points
23285 stapbpf procfs probes
24946 printing hex sequences causes crash
24947 valid hex and octal sequences not checked for
24926 non-ascii characters not printing on stapbpf
24934 stapbpf stack-smash on EXIT message processing
23879 print_ubacktrace can not print function name
24875 VMA tracker is broken on Fedora 29
24904 stack_trace struct undefined on kernel 5.2
23858 sorted iteration on bpf arrays can't sort values
24885 add test_{,install}check_dyninst tag to check.exp
23866 dissonance between kernel tracepoint parametrization, lkm vs bpf
24811 stapbpf segfault: nested foreach loops can corrupt sorted key data
when limit==0
11353 elide side-effect-free probes
24528 stapbpf-next housekeeping: bpf-translate.cxx should distinguish
codegen for kernel/userspace targets
24543 stapbpf breaks when cpu0 is disabled
12025 Have appropriate selection of hex and decimal formatted output for
automatic output
24639 "next" statement not recognized by stap bpf backend
24343 Some syscall.*.return missing name and retstr variables
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Today the community celebrates KEDA 1.0, an open source project aimed at providing event-driven scale capabilities for container workloads. Introduced earlier this year, Red Hat is contributing to KEDA both via the upstream project and by bringing its utility to customers using enterprise Kubernetes and containers with Red Hat OpenShift. We celebrate this milestone with Microsoft and the wider community.
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is hosting its core conference for the fifth year running. It’s official title is KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, but it’s most importantly the home for Kubernetes. Adopters, contributors, and Kubernetes-curious attendees add up to a record-breaking 12,000 people.
I attended to cover the show for our community (full disclosure: my ticket was provided as an industry analyst). Here’s what I heard on day 1.
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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.
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The impact: Another container reality check that also drives home why going through the trouble of standards can be worth it in the long run.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Welcome to Episode 311 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts cover YOTA, AO-7, WRC 2019, CWOps, NHS and a bunch of other acronyms and their associated relevant topics. Thank you for listening and we hope you have a phenomenal week.
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The Open Invention Network is taking on patent trolls, Nextcloud releases a statement concerning NextCry, Mozilla and GitLab are expanding their bug bounty programs, and the EFF helps form the Coalition Against Stalkerware.
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The Pinebook Pro gets put through the travel test, while we get an update on Pine64 projects straight from the source.
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First up, in our Wanderings, Leo picks up a hard drive docking station, Tony tests the new Gnome, Moss fights overscanning, and Joe volunteers for Full Circle — And last minute guest Oliver Kelly
Then, in the news, Microsoft is working overtime, Docker gets a second wind, new Debian updates, big .org changes, and more.
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Kernel Space
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I’ve released man-pages-5.04. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from 15 contributors. The release includes approximately 80 commits that change just under 30 pages.
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This is an extremely long journey that results in every device shipping millions of lines of out-of-tree kernel code. Every shipping device kernel is different and device specific—basically no device kernel from one phone will work on another phone. The mainline kernel version for a device is locked in at the beginning of an SoC’s initial development, so it’s typical for a brand-new device to ship with a Linux kernel that is two years old. Even Google’s latest and, uh, greatest device, the Pixel 4, shipped in October 2019 with Linux kernel 4.14, an LTS release from November 2017. It will be stuck on kernel 4.14 forever, too. Android devices do not get kernel updates, probably thanks to the incredible amount of work needed to produce just a single device kernel, and the chain of companies that would need to cooperate to do it. Thanks to kernel updates never happening, this means every new release of Android usually has to support the last three years of LTS kernel releases (the minimum for Android 10 is 4.9, a 2016 release). Google’s commitments to support older versions of Android with security patches means the company is still supporting kernel 3.18, which is five years old now. Google’s band-aid solution for this so far has been to team up with the Linux community and support mainline Linux LTS releases for longer, and they’re now up to six years of support.
Last year, at Linux Plumbers Conference 2018, Google announced its initial investigation into bringing the Android kernel closer to mainline Linux. This year it shared a bit more detail on its progress so far, but it’s definitely still a work in progress. “Today, we don’t know what it takes to be added to the kernel to run on a [specific] Android device,” Android Kernel Team lead Sandeep Patil told the group at LPC 2019. “We know what it takes to run Android but not necessarily on any given hardware. So our goal is to basically find all of that out, then upstream it and try to be as close to mainline as possible.”
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Graphics Stack
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While the patches overnight about “substantial” improvement in power usage for Intel graphics on Linux were exciting on first look, it’s less so now as it turns out last week’s graphics driver security fixes is what regressed the Intel graphics power-savings.
During last Tuesday’s round of Intel security disclosures where there was a fix for denial of service in the Intel graphics driver, it turns out that the CVE-2019-0154 fix is what regressed power usage. The potential Denial of Service vulnerability was about unprivileged users being able to cause a DoS by reading select memory regions when the graphics hardware is in certain low-power states.
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The open-source vkBasalt project was started as a layer implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (akin to Radeon Image Sharpening) for any Vulkan-using GPU/driver/software. The vkBasalt project then picked up FXAA support for this Vulkan post-processing layer while now a new release is out with more functionality added.
The vkBasalt 0.2 release is out today and adds support for enhanced sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing (SMAA) for higher-quality anti-aliasing than FXAA. SMAA is an image-based implementation of MLAA. This release also allows for multiple visual effects to be activated at once where as previously only any one of these image enhancing features could be active at a time.
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Flax Engine is the latest game engine seeing native Linux support and in the process the renderer also picked up Vulkan support.
Flax Engine is a lesser known game engine that now works on Linux alongside Windows and Xbox One. After two years in development, the open beta release of Flax is expected soon.
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Benchmarks
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With the many Intel Ice Lake Linux benchmarks we began publishing over the past month since picking up a Dell XPS with Core i7-1065G7, there have been many benchmarks compared to the likes of the Core i7 Whiskey Lake and Kaby Lake processors. For those curious how the performance stacks up going further back, here are some Ubuntu 19.10 laptop benchmarks putting it up against the likes of Core i7 Haswell and Broadwell processors.
This article offers a look at the Ubuntu 19.10 + Linux 5.3 performance on six different laptops including the Dell XPS 7390 Ice Lake laptop and various other laptops I had available for testing.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A year or so back I was planning on writing a congratulatory article to show my appreciation to Dave Airlie for fixing a long standing bug in Mesa that prevented users of older AMD Radeon HD cards from enjoying Trine Enchanted Edition on the free graphics stack. Bug 91808 resulted in a variety of graphical artifacts which, while not interfering with the gameplay, still put me off using that version of Trine.
After several years and a great deal of evident frustration on his part, Airlie was able to track down the root of the problem and at long last was able to push a fix to master in May 2018. Airlie and developers like him are often the unsung heroes of FOSS development, and I wanted to give him a well deserved public pat on the back for his effort in fixing a bug which would only have affected such a small number of people.
Unfortunately my research into this led me down an entirely different rabbit hole when I discovered the report for Bug 66067. A much more subtle misrendering of the game’s colours and lighting, this bug is present in both Trine 2 and Trine Enchanted Edition and affects all Mesa users. Unlike the previous instance where it was an issue in the drivers that was the culprit, this issue is present in the game binaries themselves.
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Today, the Google Stadia streaming service officially launched for those who picked up the Founder or Premier Edition.
Well, sort of anyway. Some people have it, a lot of people don’t, we certainly don’t and it appears the team at Stadia give different answers to different people on when you will actually be able to access it. I’ve also seen plenty of people whose orders have been cancelled without warning or explanation. Even worse still, some people have been sent their hardware without an access code. Google have, so far, done a terrible job at communicating on Stadia and so the initial launch doesn’t seem to have gone down well at all.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Over a couple of years, librsvg’s type that represents CSS lengths went from a C representation along the lines of “all data in the world is an int”, to a Rust representation that uses some interesting type trickery:
C struct with char for units.
C struct with a LengthUnits enum.
C struct without an embodied direction; each place that needs to normalize needs to get the orientation right.
C struct with a built-in direction as an extra field, done at initialization time.
Same struct but in Rust.
An ugly but workable Parse trait so that the direction can be set at parse/initialization time.
Three newtypes LengthHorizontal, LengthVertical, LengthBoth with a common core. A cleaned-up Parse trait. A macro to generate those newtypes.
Replace the LengthDir enum with an Orientation trait, and three zero-sized types Horizontal/Vertical/Both that implement the trait.
Replace most of the macro with a helper trait LengthTrait that has an Orientation associated type.
Replace the helper trait with a single Length<T: Orientation> type, which puts the orientation as a generic parameter. The macro disappears and there is a single implementation for everything.
Refactoring never ends!
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As far as I know, there is no known real-world solution to this problem that would scale to a full operating system (i.e. all of Debian, FreeBSD or the like). If there are any university professors reading this needing problems for your grad students, this could be one of them. The problem itself is fairly simple to formulate: make it possible to run two different, ABI incompatible C++ standard libraries within one process. The solution will probably require changes in the compiler, linker and runtime loader. For example, you might extend symbol resolution rules so that they are not global, but instead symbols from, say library bar would first be looked up in its direct descendents (in this case only abi2) and only after that in other parts of the tree.
To get you started, here is one potential solution I came up with while writing this post. I have no idea if it actually works, but I could not come up with an obvious thing that would break. I sadly don’t have the time or know-how to implement this, but hopefully someone else has.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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In this video, we are looking at quickly looking at LibreOffice 6.4 Alpha and look at how to install it.
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of OpenIndiana 2019.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Back in June we announced our first set of IO500 benchmarks. Since then, we’ve upgraded SUSE Enterprise Storage to version 6, which is based on Ceph Nautilus. This alone brought some performance improvements over the prior release, especially in terms of metadata and small I/O performance. Add to this the change in the underlying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version to 15 SP1 where we have a newer kernel, and the outcome is some dramatically improved performance. With just these two, we were able to increase our score by a few points.
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Debian Family
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A few days ago Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman laid out the proposals for the upcoming Debian General Resolution vote concerning “init system diversity” and just how much Debian developers still care in 2019 about supporting non-systemd init systems within the Linux distribution.
The general resolution over init systems and systemd had three proposals: affirming init diversity, systemd but supporting the exploration of alternatives, and focusing upon systemd for the init system and its other facilities. Now though Debian Project Secretary Kurt Roeckx has relayed a fourth proposal.
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Devices/Embedded
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This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of single-board computers.
Last week’s blog looked at whether the RPI4 cuts the mustard as a desktop web browser. It does although with a few reservations. This week’s blog focuses on another absolutely essential desktop activity. Managing your email.
My email requirements are very simple. I use Gmail for my personal email. It offers ample storage, threads, rich text features, useful keyboard shortcuts, and more. It gives me access to my email whatever device and platform I’m using. For the RPI4 to replace my desktop, I need quick and easy access to Gmail.
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Shenzhen Xunlong has posted preliminary specs for a Rockchip RK3399 based “Orange Pi 4” SBC that is smaller and more affordable than the Orange Pi RK3399 and faster and more feature rich than the Orange Pi 3. A 4B variant adds a Lightspeeur 2801S AI chip.
New Orange Pi boards usually just show up unannounced on AliExpress, but for the fourth iteration of its flagship Orange Pi board, Shenzhen Xunlong teased some detail views on Twitter. The Orange Pi 4 and an AI-enhanced Orange Pi 4B will ship in two weeks. Pricing is undisclosed, but the boards will be “cheaper” than the previous Rockchip RK3399-based Orange Pi, the Orange Pi RK3399. That larger SBC debuted at $109 and now sells for $89 with 2GB DDR3 and 16GB eMMC compared to 4GB LPDDR4 and 16GB eMMC for the Orange Pi 4.
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The coreboot project is proud to announce to have released coreboot 4.11.
This release cycle was a bit shorter to get closer to our regular schedule of releasing in spring and autumn.
Since 4.10 there were 1630 new commits by over 130 developers. Of these, about 30 contributed to coreboot for the first time.
Thank you to all contributors who made 4.11 what it is and welcome to the project to all new contributors!
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Coreboot 4.11 was released today as the tagged autumn build of Coreboot that is used as an alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware on motherboards.
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Fujitsu’s three new “Futro” thin clients feature the Linux-based eLux RP stack running on Intel’s Gemini Lake Refresh SoCs. The quad-core Futro S9010 and S7010 and the dual-core S5010 offer GbE, 2x DP, and 7x USB ports.
Fujitsu has expanded its line of Futro thin clients with three models that feature Intel’s recently announced Gemini Lake Refresh SoCs. The Futro S9010, S7010, and S5010, which we saw on Fanless Tech, are intended to run the proprietary, Linux-based eLux RP 6.7.0 CR, although they also support Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. The security-enhanced, “flexibly licensed” eLux is available with an optional Scout Enterprise Management Suite with regular security patch updates. The new Futro products supports Citrix Receiver and VMware Horizon Client desktop environments.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The flaw (CVE-2019-2234), which was found by researchers from Checkmarx, affects the Google camera and Samsung camera apps that haven’t been updated since July this year.
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The exciting thing about open source is that nobody needs permission to try something new. That’s a formula that allows new ideas to emerge all the time.
Here are three open source projects that are still in their early stages but show real promise.
This Linux is utterly unapologetic in catering to technology hobbyists, enthusiasts, and power users. It’s for the amateurs, in that best and most original sense of the word—those who love what they do. Awesome. So isn’t Endeavour the perfect name?
If what you want is to roll your sleeves up and level up while still enjoying a gentle start and a friendly community, this could be a great way to go about it.
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Community-driven open source projects are at the forefront of innovation of virtually every leading technology trend. The fields of AI, ML, deep learning, predictive analysis, and neural networks are no exception.
It’s also worth noting that HPC is a vital element for successfully delivering AI and ML. Both rely on high levels of compute capacity for fast analysis of huge datasets – and Linux is at the heart of all the top-performing HPC solutions. Just this week, the latest TOP500 list of supercomputers was released. It was no surprise to see that, yet again, every one of the world’s fastest computers run on Linux.
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Events
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It was a great conference with a diverse crew of people who all care about making apps on Linux better. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s keynote on Linux apps from the perspective of Nextcloud, an Actual ISV. Also worth your time is Rob’s talk on how Flathub would like to help more developers earn money from their work; Adrien on GTK and scalable UIs for phones; Robin on tone of voice and copywriting; Emel on Product Management in the context of GNOME Recipes and Paul Brown on direct language and better communication. There were also great lightning talks including a starring turn by one of my former colleagues Martin Abente Lahaye who showed off the work he’s been doing to make the Sugar educational applications more widely available with Flatpak. After a bit of review and some polish in the cafe they’re now starting to appear on Flathub. All of these videos are available to watch in the YouTube livestream playback, and I’m sure individually soon when appropriately processed.
I gave a talk entitled Product Management In Open Source. Astute readers will recognise the title from the similar talk I gave last year at GUADEC, however the content is actually fairly different. Emel’s talk that I mentioned above covered quite a lot of the basic material so I concentrated more on how individual app developers could use Product Management techniques to make their own practice a bit more deliberate and help them guide and prioritize their work.
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On November 13 more than 120 students in Ankara Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus joined the first session of the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, a course for students with interest in C++. There is a session every week, until the end of the semester.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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One of the big risks with this plan is that code depends on a whole software stack: hardware, assembly language, and a certain form of electricity. The chips that code runs on are really incredibly complex, noted Skymind’s Nicholson.
“You would need all that underlying infrastructure to run the code GitHub stores. I hope GitHub will also include some model hardware in its vault. It would be too much to ask to include a fab,” he said.
For technology’s survival, open source stands out for two reasons:
First, you can increase the positive feedback loops between the people who write code and those who use it. That leads to much better code quality compared to closed-source projects with limited users looking over the source.
“The importance of that cannot be understated,” said Nicholson.
Second, open source code minimizes legal risk. That is also extremely important, he added, noting that some great closed-source code probably should go into the vault.
“But why risk a lawsuit?” Nicholson reasoned. “Open source code really is moving society forward in a lot of ways, based on the work of a few dedicated teams and a relatively small number of core committers.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Here at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), we strongly believe that one person can make a difference. Our main task, as the principal organization in the fight for user freedom, is one of connection; to bring people together around an unwavering set of principles. We will achieve global software freedom by staying the course, by focusing on education, and by making tools and solutions available, all by working together with this passionate and diverse community.
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GNU Health 3.6.1 patchset has been released !
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Programming/Development
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A new version for PyCharm 2019.2 is now available!
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Python threading allows you to have different parts of your program run concurrently and can simplify your design. If you’ve got some experience in Python and want to speed up your program using threads, then this course is for you!
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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use PycURL, which is an interface to the cURL library in Python. cURL is a tool used for transferring data to and from a server and for making various types of data requests. PycURL is great for testing REST APIs, downloading files, and so on. Some developers prefer using Postman for testing APIs but PycURL is another suitable option to do so as it supports multiple protocols like FILE, FTPS, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, SCP, SMB, etc. Moreover, PycURL comes in handy when a lot of concurrent, fast, and reliable connections are required.
As mentioned above, PycURL is an interface to the libcURL library in Python; therefore PycURL inherits all the capabilities of libcURL. PycURL is extremely fast (it is known to be much faster than Requests, which is a Python library for HTTP requests), has multiprotocol support, and also contains sockets for supporting network operations.
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Today, we will tackle the big bad memory leak that eats up my laptop’s memory.
A quick look at the heap profile (+RTS -h) showed that the memory was filling up with lists. Not very helpful, as lists are everywhere. So I looked through the hot code of the interpreter, eval, step and instr in Wasm.Exec.Eval to see if anything fishy is going on. I found some uses of the list concatenation operator (++) – always a bad sign, as it has to traverse the list on its left completely!
And often the solution is pretty simple: Use difference lists! It’s even simpler than the name makes it sound like. It does not require you to import anything new, and works well everywhere where you assemble a list in multiple stages, but use it, in its full form, only once at the end.
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I’m currently (re)learning how to knit. Here are some textile-themed Raspberry Pi projects for the yarn-curious.
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It has been wonderful journey so far in the year 2019. When I started the journey in March, I didn’t know it would take this shape. All credit goes to the support of Perl/Raku community in general. It would be unfair if I pick few names. You know who I am talking about anyway. Let me share the story with you all.
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Pichai cited decreased attendance rates, the difficulty of running a real-time gathering across time zones, and an uptick in meetings among big product groups like Cloud or YouTube. His most resonant reason, however, was that Google employees could no longer be trusted to keep matters confidential. He cited “a coordinated effort to share our conversations outside of the company after every TGIF … it has affected our ability to use TGIF as a forum for candid conversations on important topics.” He also noted that while many want to hear about product launches and business strategies, some attend to “hear answers on other topics.” It seems obvious he was referring to recent moments when aggrieved employees registered objections to Google’s policies and missteps—on developing a search engine for China, bestowing millions of dollars to executives charged with sexual misconduct, or hiring a former Homeland Security apparatchik. Pichai says Google may address such issues in specific town-hall meetings when warranted.
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Health/Nutrition
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In an opinion dated Nov. 8, Chief Judge Richard Yuille dismissed claims of professional negligence, negligence, public nuisance, fraud and a request from the state for exemplary damages — leaving only a claim of unjust enrichment in the case against Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam.
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Initially filed by Republican then-Attorney General Bill Schuette, the case against Veolia and LAN is the only civil case initiated by the state on behalf of Flint residents in the wake of the water crisis. When Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel took over the case, she said the engineering firms allegedly played “a seminal role” in the Flint water crisis and chided the companies for “denying and shifting responsibility” in recent court filings.
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Scientists have found that lead — a metal so toxic that the World Health Organization said, “there is no safe level” — elevates the risk for various health problems. A pregnant woman who has too much lead in her blood is more likely to deliver her baby preterm. Minute amounts of lead diminishes a child’s ability to learn. An uptick in a man’s lead exposure reduces his fertility.
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Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availabilitiy)
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Official Linux CLI binary for the Monero cryptocurrency compromised with malware that steals users’ funds.
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They had more success with the Windows variant of the malware, however.
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Furthermore, the Linux variant comes across as more complex with extra capabilities such as process renaming. This is also evident through a search of the Linux binary on VirusTotal where it is detected by only one anti-malware scanning engine whereas the Windows version yielded a significantly higher detection rate of 37/70.
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US student was allegedly building a custom Gentoo Linux distro for ISIS [Ed: ZDNet -- the CBS tabloid -- now associating "Linux" with terrorism. And it was composed by their biggest troll, Catalin Cimpanu. Fact: most terrorists use Microsoft Windows. Shall we deduce Windows is the "operating system of terrorists"?]
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Enterprises using Linux for their cloud or data center servers may be faced with a larger threat from advanced security attackers in the near future. Based on the Linux Foundation’s estimates back in 2014, 75% of enterprises reported using Linux for the cloud and 79% for application deployments.
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Defence/Aggression
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Junaid I., a 27-year-old Pakistani national, travelled to the Netherlands in August last year after Wilders announced a competition for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. In the video, recorded in Urdu, I. pledged to do everything in his power to stop ‘the dog’ Wilders.
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A 27-year-old Pakistani, Junaid I., was sentenced on Monday to 10 years in jail for plotting to assassinate Dutch politician Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing populist PVV party.
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On October 25, a leader of a NATO member nation openly incited violence against non-Muslims.
On that day, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the Friday prayers at the Great Çamlıca Mosque in Istanbul. He was accompanied by Istanbul’s governor Ali Yerlikaya, mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s chief of police Mustafa Çalışkan and the head of the Istanbul branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Bayram Şenocak.
After the prayers, the hafiz of the mosque recited the Koranic Verse Al-Fath, which means “victory, triumph, conquest” in English. Then Erdogan took the microphone, reciting a part of the verse in Arabic and then in Turkish. He told the congregants:
“Our God commands us to be violent towards the kuffar (infidels). Who are we? The ummah [nation] of Mohammed. So [God] also commands us to be merciful to each other. So we will be merciful to each other. And we will be violent to the kuffar. Like in Syria.”
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Environment
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North Dakota regulators will hold a hearing in Linton, a town of 1,000 along the pipeline’s path. The Public Service Commission will take comments from tribe members and other pipeline opponents in the community near where a pump station would be placed to increase the line’s capacity from 600,000 barrels per day to as much as 1.1 million barrels. A barrel is 42 gallons.
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The disagreement is over Enbridge’s plans to construct a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac to replace its Line 5 oil pipelines and attempt to prevent any catastrophe from a potential rupture.
Environmentalists have opposed plans for the tunnel and want the line decommissioned as soon as possible, but some labor groups want the tunnel built. In the middle are Democratic lawmakers who usually have support from both sets of interests.
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In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week with Wisconsin Attorney General Joshua Kaul and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, they argue that state law, not federal, controls the routing of pipelines.
Ellison said in a statement that he joined the brief to support Michigan “in protecting its right to control its underwater land against the federal government’s attempt to pre-empt it. The people of Michigan, who share the Great Lakes with us, have as much of a right to control their underwater land as the people of Minnesota do. By supporting Michigan, I’m protecting Minnesotans.”
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Enbridge Energy, which owns and operates the decaying Line 5 oil pipelines that cross in the Straits of Mackinac, has tried to buy its way into this Great Lakes-proud storyline with extensive lobbying and an aggressive statewide ad campaign.
At the same time, Enbridge has been pursuing a scorched-earth strategy in the courts, trying to force the hand of state government to bless continued operation of its pipelines for another decade while an underwater tunnel is built — instead of sitting down and negotiating with Gov. Whitmer on a timeline to decommission Line 5 and address the real risk to Michigan’s waters and its people.
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The country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, released data Monday revealing that 3,769 square miles of rainforest were lost to deforestation in a 12-month period ending in July. That marks the highest rate of deforestation since 2008 — and a nearly 30% spike over the rate recorded by INPE during the previous yearlong span.
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“Nobody was ready for that. But at the end of the situation, well, I think we are all feeling pretty lucky because a lot of young people came here in Venice to take care of us and help us. They helped them a lot,” she says.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Software Patents
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IBM, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have partnered with the Open Invention Network, a company formed to protect Linux from patent threats, to take on “Patent Assertion Entities”, also known as patent trolls.
Specifically, the group will help fund the Open Source Zone of Unified Patents, an organisation which provides legal services to deter “unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions.”
The move had already been flagged, at the Open Source Summit in Lyon last month, but the identity of the participating companies was not then known. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt spoke to The Register about the announcement. Although we have had a Linux-friendly Microsoft for a few years now, Bergelt, a veteran of patent battles against Microsoft, is by the sound of it still coming to terms with how things have changed.
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Open Invention Network (OIN) is teaming up with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
The group will support Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription. This expands OIN’s and its partners’ patent non-aggression activities by deterring PAEs from targeting Linux and adjacent OSS technologies relied on by developers, distributors and users.
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Copyrights
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Spain’s National Police says it has dismantled a pirate IPTV operation worth an estimated €1 million to its operators. A police video shows raids on various locations which resulted in the arrest of 12 individuals, four said to have captured signals with eight more acting as resellers of the service.
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The second season of the sitcom “Sick of It” will soon air on the British TV-channel Sky One. This prompted co-writer and actor Karl Pilkington to share an episode of the first season with over a million Facebook fans. A kind gesture, but since the video was indirectly sourced from a pirate group, perhaps not one that everyone will appreciate.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Microsoft, Patents at 1:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Remember that most European Patents aren’t even European
Summary: For the financial benefit of law firms and patent offices (they profit from processing loads of patents and lawsuits) Europe is being reverted back to Medieval Times when exercising invention and free thought (or free coding) was a luxury of the rich alone
THE BRETON series will soon explore the connection to the European Patent Office (EPO). The series will be finished about one week from now. Don’t obsess over nationalities though; sure, Breton and Macron are French. And sure, Team Campinos/Battistelli is predominantly French (those two presidents are). But it’s much better to follow the commercial — not the national — trail. It’s all about money; it’s never about Europe. And no, it’s not about money for Europe but from Europe. The public sector, through privatisation, is being looted by these people. Serco already does some of the work of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); Campinos already hands over some of the EPO's work over to Serco as well. This is pillage and plunder, but it’s done by people in suits rather than pirates in dingies.
“Call it the “EPO Laboratory”. Campinos already did his “experiments” with the EUIPO (outsourcing an EU agency to India).”We continue to watch with great concern the events that unfold at the EPO; some people refer to this as “corporate globalism” (the idea that massive and well-connected corporations set in motion the devouring of all public assets, workers and Commons worldwide). The EPO isn’t just a symptom; one might say it’s a model or a case study. Call it the “EPO Laboratory”. Campinos already did his "experiments" with the EUIPO (outsourcing an EU agency to India).
The corporate media (or “mainstream media”) is also part of the problem. It’s owned by large publishers — in effect multinational corporations — and very rich people, including some of the world’s richest people. As such, “the press” (or “the media”) often reflects not public opinion or popular discourse; instead it’s lecturing the public, seeking to ‘manufacture consent’. In social control media it’s even worse as people are censored, spied on, and subjected to propaganda from states and corporations (the real clients of such social control networks).
It has become rather frustrating to see how even those who wrote about the EPO’s Serco outsourcing deal have since then deleted their articles. Even the press release was deleted, but the PDF of the announcement is still on Serco’s site. Why are they trying so hard to hide what’s happening? This relates in a lot of ways to Breton and Atos — a subject we’ll publish something about later today (part 10 of the Breton series).
“It has become rather frustrating to see how even those who wrote about the EPO’s Serco outsourcing deal have since then deleted their articles.”The EU hoped to impose on the European public an inherently unconstitutional system called (or rather dubbed, with plenty of euphemisms) “UPC”. Helped by EPO lobbying (e.g. bribing media and scholars), the EU sought to hand over control of courts to those who violate the law every day. But the UPC is dead, for numerous reasons. Several complaints, including constitutional ones, have been filed. In some cases, such as in Hungary, courts sided with complainants. Studies commissioned by those not loyal to Team UPC have also disproved the alleged premises. The UPC was a lie — a system from which multinationals were set to gain, along with their lawyers in Europe. We’ve just noticed that Bristows’ Luke Maunder perpetuates the old lies with “Luxembourg government advertises for leader of UPC’s IT team” (similar to this PR stunt from earlier this year).
Team UPC spent at least 4 years advertising jobs that do not exist and will never ever exist. It even developed an IT system that will never be used. It’s part of their lobbying tactic. These ads, by the way, are against the law (faking job openings). They admitted to the media (Financial Times) that they merely try to fake an impression (illusion) of “progress”. Anyone can just throw out there some ad. In Bristows’ own words: “The position is located in the CTIE (Centre des Technologies de l’Information de l’Etat, State Information Technology Centre) in Luxembourg.”
Position for a job that does not exist and won’t exist. In a country that barely exists except for tax (evasion) purposes. It’s a ‘hopping point’ for rich multinationals.
“Are patent offices supposed to be in the lobbying business? No.”As an avid proponent of the EU I’m often left wondering why these law firms are so eager to tarnish the EU's reputation with these dirty tricks.
Earlier this week corrupt EPO management openly bragged (warning: epo.org link) about lobbying — equipped with paid-for lies — about patents in Brussels.
Are patent offices supposed to be in the lobbying business? No.
This is what the EPO wrote:
The EPO last week presented two of its studies at an event in the European Parliament hosted by Jörgen Warbon MEP, Vice-President SME Europe of the European People’s Party group. The Office’s study on High-growth firms and intellectual property rights, as well as its recently published Patent commercialisation scoreboard: European SMEs, were presented to MEPs and other stakeholders at a breakfast debate co-organised by SME Europe and the EPO.
In his opening address Mr Warborn reinforced the pivotal role of intellectual property (IP): “IP is the measurement of our competitiveness”. He also noted, however, that EU growth in patents is being outpaced by that of China and India. “IP offices located in Asia receive 66.8% of all patent applications filed worldwide, whereas only 11% of the global total is filed in the EU.”
Does the EPO nowadays control the European Parliament? Shouldn’t that work the other way around? Notice how they’re lying about SMEs. The EPO is bad for SMEs and the UPC even more so. But facts don’t matter. EPO just buys (pays for) “the facts”.
“Does the EPO nowadays control the European Parliament? Shouldn’t that work the other way around?”We’ve meanwhile also learned about Microsoft (US) lobbyists, ACT, pushing for software patents in Europe in this Berlin event; remember that those same liars also attacked Linux and ODF.
Why doesn’t the media mention these attacks? Why are we all so exposed to the EPO’s propaganda?
As the old saying/adage goes, “follow the money…”
Riana Harvey of IP Kat is, as usual, a megaphone of EPO management and its propaganda, lobbying with their press releases yesterday (she often links to Watchtroll, the litigation fanatics who attack judges). Watchtroll’s latest article is “European Patent Office launches new Espacenet” — yet another EPO puff piece.
“Why doesn’t the media mention these attacks? Why are we all so exposed to the EPO’s propaganda?”Remember when IP Kat actually questioned what these liars had said? Remember when the blog wasn’t just a bunch of lawyers? How about IAM, which is literally funded by patent trolls? IAM still refuses to report on EPO protests and corruption, but it’s perfectly happy to repeat press releases of the EPO. It’s just a propaganda rag in the EPO’s pockets.
The only thing they had to say about the EPO? “An EPO agreement with China’s national IP administration looks set to boost Chinese tech companies’ moves into European markets.” Jacob Schindler promoted this nonsense through the parent company of IAM, which interjects IAM’s nonsense (EPO megaphone) into news feeds.
“So-called ‘Hey Hi!’ has been around for more than half a century; but nowadays the media shuffles the labels a bit. Automation? “Hey Hi!” Computers? “Hey Hi!” Algorithms? “Hey Hi!””Going back to the ‘Kats’, as we noted the other day IP Kat promotes the “Hey Hi!” (AI) hype. It’s totally out of control nowadays, especially in patent zealots’ circles. Mind this new comment that says: “I am unpersuaded by the “lack of incentive for AI developers” argument. The personal computer created a new era of content creation. No one argued at the time that Apple or IBM should have any rights in the output created with their products. Google Translate is an AI solution (something people tend to overlook, this is the ‘AI effect’). No one is arguing that Google should enjoy rights in the translations created with its product.”
So-called ‘Hey Hi!’ has been around for more than half a century; but nowadays the media shuffles the labels a bit. Automation? “Hey Hi!” Computers? “Hey Hi!” Algorithms? “Hey Hi!”
Everything is “Hey Hi!”
“What good is an opposition which is rushed? For an opposition proceeding to be effective time is needed; finding prior art doesn’t take 10 seconds.”We’ve also just noticed IAM’s sister site “World Trademark Review” (WTR is as credible as IAM, i.e. not so much) stating that “Singapore IP [sic] Office chief executive confirmed as candidate as WIPO leadership race prepares for take-off”. Singapore’s IPOS promotes nonsensical software patents (disguised using buzzwords such as “FinTech”) just like WIPO (even though they’re illegal in almost the whole world!). Disguised as a ‘news’ site, WTR is actually a pressure group/front of the litigation ‘business’ (law firms), just like Life Sciences Intellectual Property Review (close to WIPR and WIPO), which continues crafting EPO propaganda. How to spin EPO scuttling proper appeals or challenges to fake patents (making it harder to find evidence) as a positive thing? Here we go: “EPO successful in cutting opposition times” (optimal time would be zero, i.e. reject the appeal!)
The European Patent Office (EPO) has made strides in streamlining its opposition procedures, new data from Mewburn Ellis has shown.
According to the new report, published November 14, the EPO is on track to meet its target timeframe for patent oppositions of 15 months by 2020.
The EPO introduced its streamlining initiative in July 2016, aimed at reducing the amount of time it takes to conclude European patent opposition proceedings.
What good is an opposition which is rushed? For an opposition proceeding to be effective time is needed; finding prior art doesn’t take 10 seconds. Evidence must be provided. If they strive to just shorten the window (“cutting opposition times”), that’s basically adopting the same approach that lowers patent quality by cutting examination times. Then again, when the EPO is run like a private sector (Serco for instance), all that matters is money, right? Not justice, not truth, not quality of service and so on… █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, OIN, Patents, Red Hat at 1:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Times have changed; Red Hat and Microsoft are now close partners.
Summary: “Microsoft has no taste” and IBM has no taste, either; they’re lying to our collective face together with OIN and the ‘Linux’ Foundation
IBM has long cross-licensed with Microsoft. This means they won’t sue one another over patents. Good for them, eh? Shared monopoly. No wonder Red Hat nowadays promotes Microsoft things almost every day. Now that IBM owns Red Hat (and all of its patents) IBM won’t care about Microsoft’s ongoing — even in 2019 — blackmail of OEMs that ship GNU/Linux.
Now Microsoft and IBM, the biggest purveyors of software patent trolls, tell us they’ll protect from what they are, themselves [1-3]. Wow, the audacity! Joined by their front groups, OIN, a false representative to/of Free software, and Linux Foundation, a GitHub outsourcer which compares Microsoft to "a puppy". They use a lawsuit against GNOME (Foundation) to take us astray from abolishing software patents. Both IBM and Microsoft are feeding patent trolls, are blackmailing companies that implement things they themselves never did, and lobby aggressively for software patents in the US. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Open-source software — heck, all software — has been plagued by patent trolls for decades. The Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history, is now expanding protection of open-source and Linux by partnering with IBM, the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft to further protect it from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), aka patent trolls. This new consortium is doing this by supporting Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription.
Unified Patents is an international organization of over 200 businesses. Unified Patents takes an aggressive stance against trolls. The name of its game is deterring trolls from attacking its members by making it too expensive for the troll to win. The group does this by examining troll patents and their activities in various technology sectors (Zones). The Open Source Zone is the newest of these Zones.
United Patents does this in a variety of ways. For example, it runs a public bounty program, where it seeks prior art for troll patents. According to Kevin Jakel, Unified Patents CEO, in a recent interview, “The prize money offered can be as much as $10,000 for anyone that is able to find prior patents on the one being questioned. For example, we recently announced a $10,000 bounty for any prior art relating to network monitoring and sequence integrity.”
In practice, their method works. For instance, with Unified Patent’s aid, the ride-sharing company Lyft recently beat a patent troll. In the case, a troll claimed essentially he has created all ride-sharing software. US District Judge Jon S Tigar ruled against the troll, saying, “Given the lack of an algorithm for allocation, RideApp ‘has in effect claimed everything that [performs the task] under the sun.”
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An eternal truth is that everything has its opposite for good and evil. Patents are no exception. In fact, even the simple word ‘Patent’ evokes much positive and negative emotion in today’s software world – particularly as news continues to circulate around baseless patent lawsuits by non-practicing entities (NPEs).
But in news this week there is a bit of positive for a change. The positive news is the announcement of the efforts by Unified Patents to reduce NPE assertion of invalid patents in the open source software zone.
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Open Invention Network (OIN) is teaming up with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
The group will support Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription. This expands OIN’s and its partners’ patent non-aggression activities by deterring PAEs from targeting Linux and adjacent OSS technologies relied on by developers, distributors and users.
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Posted in Quote at 12:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ralph Nader on money in politics
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