Google, and much of the web and internet infrastructure that powers the world's digital revolution today, relies squarely on Linux. Linux is the kernel whose development started more than 25 years ago, and today the term applies to a number of operating systems building on that kernel and powering anything from the world's top supercomputers to every Android phone – and much of the vast expanses of tech that lie in between.
Users are reporting on reddit that a number of Linux browsers can no longer be used to log in to Google services, such as Gmail and Google Docs, with the error page indicating that the apps may no longer be supported.
The blocked browsers include Konqueror, Falkon, and Qutebrowser, according to the linked discussion thread.
Cloud-native infrastructure company Fairwinds recently launched a SaaS product for DevOps teams so that they can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters.
The almost-eponymously named called Fairwinds Insights, uses an extensible architecture and has been launched with a curated set of open source security, reliability and auditing tools.
The initial suite of tools includes Fairwinds Polaris, Fairwinds Goldilocks and Aqua Security’s Kube-hunter.
A vast number of Internet servers at present are powered by solutions that are created by Red Hat, Inc. It has attracted a wide variety of loyal corporate clients from all over the globe by leveraging the massive potential of Linux, OpenStack, and different state-of-the-art tools.
Apart from Red Hat’s industry dominance, here are a few advantages of varied open-source solutions of Red Hat and the well-oiled support services of different companies.
The upcoming quarterly update to Mesa 3D Graphics Library, which brings the version to Mesa 19.3, is expected to pack a lot of benefits, including support for the latest Open Source OpenGL v4.6, and several new Vulkan extensions. The Mesa 19.3 update could land as soon as this week itself, and experts argue it is by far the biggest or most significant improvement before the current year ends. Linux desktop users have been eagerly awaiting the critical component additions to the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, as the update was severely challenged and hence delayed, due to ‘blocker’ bugs.
In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good.
Shared Virtual Memory support allows a single address space to handle threads operating on both CPU backed and GPU discrete memory. SVM is important for OpenCL, oneAPI, and other modern pointer-based programming models. Intel's SVM support is built atop the Linux kernel's Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) infrastructure.
Released on Friday was a new version of AMD's GPU Performance API "GPUPerfAPI" project under the GPUOpen umbrella. This is the AMD library used by CodeXL, Radeon Compute Profiler, and others for tapping GPU performance counters and to help in analyzing performance/execution characteristics for Radeon hardware. But this new GPUPerfAPI 3.5 release comes with a rather surprising change.
Oracle, the California-based software manufacturing company, just released VM VirtualBox 6.1.0 today. This is the first major release of the free and open-source hosted hypervisor software since version 6.0 release December of last year.
VirtualBox 6.1.0 includes better integration with the public Oracle Cloud, user-interface improvements, further work on the 3D support introduced in VirtualBox 6.0 and a plethora of other changes.
When KDE 4 was released in 2008, KDE 3 went into support mode until support was dropped entirely. That's the usual lifecycle of software, desktops included, but the KDE 3 fanbase wasn't universally pleased with KDE 4, and some of them decided a fork was in order.
Some of them formed a new project with the mission of preserving the look and feel of KDE 3, starting from KDE 3.5.10 (the last official release in the 3.x series), and then forking Qt 3 into TQt to keep the underlying technology updated. Today, the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) delivers a traditional desktop environment that looks and feels essentially the same as KDE 3 did 10-plus years ago.
KDE developers are working on "something big" but this week in pre-holiday mode still managed to land a lot of improvements to the wide spectrum of KDE software.
It’s been more than half a year since the release of Zorin 15, but now the new point release of this operating system is finally here with plenty of new features and improvements that are sure to get the users excited.
Not too long ago, Zorin 15 was made available to the general public. So, before discussing the new point release, it only makes sense to highlight the features of Zorin 15, as most of them would be included in Zorin 15.1.
The Ubuntu-based operating system accompanies a Windows-like appearance, which it’s most famous for. When it comes to its features, it also sports a new touch mode, auto dark theme support, and Zorin Connect (which connects your computer to your phone and allows you to control your cursor through your phone and do a bunch of other cool stuff). The operating system is also available in Lite flavor, which you can get to know more about here.
When you travel for the very first time Internationally there are lot of things going in your head. Especially for someone like me, who is a vegetarian and is travelling all alone with no experience of flight. I was a lot nervous, was thinking about the culture of the place I am going, was nervous about flight itself, I watched a lot of “How to save yourselves” videos while travelling in flights.
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I was in the flight, slept for a while ( It was midnight flight) , and then it hit me, I saw that crew was up whole the time making sure that we sleep well, I was so touched by this, and I reached out to the crew and talked about this, they were very welcoming and talked about their job and I had a nice talk with them, All of the whole experience was just so nice.
In the end, they reached out to me, and shared a token of gratitude, they gave me “Singapore airlines playing cards and a ball point pen”, with a letter that they enjoyed having me as a passenger. Well, I was not aiming for any gifts or something, I just went to them and asked about their job and appreciated their hard-work genuinely.
I don't think that nowadays the choice of the init system can neutral: like the choice of a kernel, a libc and some other core components, you cannot just pretend that everything can be transparently swapped with anything else, therefore Debian rightly has to choose a default thing (Linux, glibc, the GNU userland, and now systemd) which is the standard proposal to the casual user. Systemd has clearly become the mainstream thing for a lot of good reasons, and it is the choice the most Debian users and developers should adopt (this is not to say that systemd, its development mode or its goals are perfect; but we have to choose between alternatives that exist, not between ideal ones). This is the reason why imposing that any init system should be supported at the same level is silly to me, and therefore why option E is the last one, and the only one below Further Discussion; in much the same way as it would be silly to impose that kFreeBSD, Mach and musl should be supported at the same level of their default counterparts (although I would be pretty excited to see that happening!). We cannot expect any Debian contributor to have the resources to contribute scripts/units for any init system randomly appearing.
Raspberry Pi is the most popular SBC – Small Board Computer around the world. It can do pretty much everything that a desktop computer can do and suitable for all ages who are keen to explore computing. Raspberry comes with all the software; you require for basic computing. But if you want to extend the functionalities to some extent, you will need to take the help of OS running on your device. It performs as a bridge between the user and Raspberry hardware. OS is the most crucial program that helps you to develop and execute programs. It enables the hardware to communicate with the software for generating meaningful interactions. Also, it manages CPU, memory, disk drives, printers, establishes user interface, and provides services for applications software. Although Raspbian is the official Raspberry Pi OS, there are other alternative operating systems also available out there you can run on the Raspberry Pi projects.
Mesh WiFi systems have taken off in the last few years, with pretty much every company that makes routers offering a mesh option or two. But they tend to be on the pricey side, since you typically have to buy two or more devices to get the most out of a mesh system. And like most routers, they tend to run proprietary software.
FreeMesh is designed to be an open source, relatively inexpensive alternative.
For $150 you can pick up a FreeMesh WiFi router and 2 nodes that run an open source operating system based on OpenWRT.
Onion, the team behind the Omega2 series self-styled computing modules has launched the Omega2 Dash a self-contained Omega2S module with a touchscreen.
One of the unfortunate realities of desktop FDM 3D printing is that environmental factors such as ambient temperature and humidity can have a big impact on your results. Even with the exact same settings, a part that printed beautifully in the summer can warp right off the bed during the winter months. The solution is a temperature-controlled enclosure, but that can be a daunting project without some guidance. Luckily, [Jay Doscher] has spent the last few months designing a very impressive enclosure that he’s released to the community as open source.
When you look back on the development history of any technology, it’s clear that the successful products eventually reach an inflection point, the boundary between when it was a niche product and when it seems everyone has one. Take 3D-printers, for instance; for years you needed to build one if you wanted one, but now you can buy them in the grocery store.
A supplier of configurable RISC-V embedded processor IP, Codasip GmbH announced it has joined forces with Western Digital Corp. to become the preferred provider of hardware implementation packages and expert technical support for users of Western Digital’s SweRV Core EH1, a RISC-V core currently available to the open-source community and further supported by the open-source development organization CHIPS Alliance.
CHIPS Alliance is a barrier free environment which allows collaboration for open-source software and hardware code.
The SweRV Core EH1 is a 32-bit, 2-way superscalar, 9-stage pipeline core introduced earlier this year by Western Digital, a leader in data infrastructure. With performance of up to 4.9 CoreMark/MHz and a small footprint, it offers compelling capabilities for embedded devices supporting data-intensive edge applications, such as storage controllers, industrial IoT, real-time analytics in surveillance systems, and other smart systems. The power-efficient design also offers clock speeds of up to 1.8 GHz on a 28nm CMOS process technology.
The SweRV Core EH1 is a 32-bit, 2-way superscalar, 9-stage pipeline core introduced earlier this year by Western Digital, a leader in data infrastructure. With performance of up to 4.9 CoreMark/MHz and a small footprint, it offers compelling capabilities for embedded devices supporting data-intensive edge applications, such as storage controllers, industrial IoT, real-time analytics in surveillance systems, and other smart systems. The power-efficient design also offers clock speeds of up to 1.8 GHz on a 28nm CMOS process technology.
The CutiePi is a tablet powered by a Raspberry Pi Computer Module 3 Lite. It’s designed to run Linux-based software such as Raspbian, and the design of the tablet is also open source.
First revealed earlier this year, the hardware and software are a little closer to final at this point — the CutiePi developers have posted some pictures and a video showing the custom CutiePi printed circuit board in action, and the design files are all available at github for anyone who wants to try manufacturing their own PCB and assembling their own tablet.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign the fantastic open source smartwatch which is completely hacker bore and programmable has now made the jump from concept to production. If you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign the Bangle.js smartwatch is now available to pre-order from the Espruino shop priced at €£70 or approximately $92.
With the CORE-V Chassis project, the recently formed OpenHW Group aims to tape out a heterogeneous multi-core processor evaluation SoC, capable of running the Linux operating system during the 2nd half of 2020.
The CORE-V Chassis will see a CV64A 64-bit core running alongside a CV32E 32-bit coprocessor core.
Based on the proven NXP iMX platform, the resulting CORE-V Chassis evaluation SoC will also feature 3D and 2D GPUs, MIPI-DSI and CSI display and camera I/O, hardware security blocks, PCIe connectivity, a GigE MAC, USB 2.0 interfaces, support for (LP)DDR4, and multiple SDIO interfaces, along with a wide range of further peripheral blocks. The 64-bit CV64A core in th
Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions revealed Thursday that it has introduced two new offerings to its Cobham Gaisler family of Open Source IP Cores. The new LEON5 IP core implements the SPARC V8 32-bit Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), a 32-bit architecture. And Cobham’s new NOEL-V supports RISC-V, an open, free ISA that enables processor innovation through open standard collaboration. NOEL-V is Cobham’s initial RISC-V solution and the company plans to introduce a range of RISC-V offerings.
Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions announced today that it has introduced two new offerings to its Cobham Gaisler family of Open Source IP Cores. The new LEON5 IP core implements the SPARC V8 32-bit Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), a 32-bit architecture. Based on VHDL, Cobham’s LEON5 super-scalar dual-issue processor provides software backward compatibility with previous generation LEON processors, while increasing performance both in terms of maximum achievable operating frequency and amount of computations performed per system clock cycle. Cobham’s new NOEL-V supports RISC-V, an open, free ISA that enables a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. Cobham, a Gold-Level Member of the RISC-V Foundation, plans to introduce a wide range of RISC-V offerings. NOEL-V, Cobham’s initial RISC-V solution, is a RV64GC compliant processor Intellectual Property (IP) core, a 64-bit architecture, written in VHDL. Both of Cobham’s new Processor IP Cores will be available for initial download into Xilinx UltraSCALE FPGAs.
Cities and municipalities around the world are facing serious problems that are affecting citizens' safety and access to government services. Take Baltimore, for example, the home of Mosslabs.io and its founder/organizer Jacob Green, which experienced a ransomware attack that shut down the city's digital services for most of the summer, preventing people from buying real estate and doing other everyday business with the local government.
The holiday season is upon us, and that means you'll be giving gifts to family and friends. But what do you do when those gifts are going to fans and users of open source software? Fortunately, you don't have to fret, as there are plenty of options available that are sure to please your Linux and open source friends.
And just because your recipients are supporters of open source, it doesn't mean that every gift you hand out must be released under the GPL or be powered by the Linux operating system. In fact, you have plenty of options.
Here are my picks for the best open source gift options of the year.
Librecorps is a program based at the Rochester Institute for Technology's Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) initiative that works with UNICEF to connect students with NGOs for paid co-op placements where they build and maintain FOSS tools used by nonprofits.
The majority (60%) of tech professionals said their involvement in open source has increased for three key reasons: They enjoyed it, they wanted to learn new skills, or they found their contributions fulfilling, a DigitalOcean report found. The popularity of open source isn't a huge surprise, since the market for open source is forecasted to exceed $32 billion by 2023, according to the report.
“The APISIX will help speed development time and support configurable plugins for enterprise personality configuration,” the team added “APISIX is based on Nginx and etcd. Compared with traditional API gateways, APISIX has dynamic routing and plug-in hot loading, which is especially suitable for API management under micro-service system.”
It includes dynamic load balancing to balance across multiple upstream services, additional security layers such as ACL, CORS, Dynamic SSL and IP restriction. It also has traffic control, analytics, monitoring and logging plugins.
The Office of Management Budget released its open source policy in 2016.
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The policy requires agencies to examine the total life cycle cost of IT purchases. Open source software has a huge pricing spectrum from free to very expensive. There is a reason that IBM recently paid $34 billion for Red Hat, the largest provider of open source-based solutions. More often than not, there is an enterprise edition of open source software that packs a commercial license, and only a stripped-down “community edition” with a free license.
As a marine ecologist, I never expected I would one day advocate that science should operate more like the tech industry. This is not about “moving fast and breaking things.” For me, it is about openness. Open software, both a driver and a result of Silicon Valley’s success, has been game-changing for me as a scientist. Its transformative power has improved my ability to analyze data and collaborate with other scientists. But it is not only about the tool sets and skill sets. It is about mind-sets and culture: An unsung part of open software are its communities that promote and enable a more inclusive, kinder culture. When I truly began learning the open-source programming language R in 2014, I was part of a small team of marine ecologists who needed R to bring order to the chaos of repeating an annual and massive analysis of global ocean health. The first thing that surprised me was that R software was created by real people—real and incredibly nice people whom I could actually talk with and who made intentional efforts to welcome and include me.
Open-Source Technology Projects
For software engineering and data science positions, recruiters will often spend time looking through open-source technologies that are relevant to the job descriptions. Specifically, who was contributing, and who was following?
Similar to conferences, this is another way to measure who is actively interested in the same technologies and projects. Why is this important? Showing a drive to learn more means that a candidate is already likely a good fit as long as they have the right skills (both technical and soft).
Often, people who are working on/contributing to these projects are doing it on their own time because it is one of their passions. Many of them would love to do it as a full-time job but haven’t found that position yet. As a recruiter, sourcing from these open-source projects means that you are catching them before their search has started, which saves them time.
For financial firms, seeing the value of engaging in open source isn't something that happens overnight-it requires a strategic commitment and understanding of the technology's long-term benefits. Aite Group's new report called, "From Secret Sauce to Open Source," addresses this issue and revealed key findings for firms looking to engage in open source. The report was commissioned by FINOS (the Fintech Open Source Foundation), a nonprofit member organization whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services and released at yesterday's Open Fintech Forum.
The role and emergence of open source technologies simplified the equation of overall expenditure for all enterprises and organizations of any industry domains. Year by year, more open source projects are coming up and solve major challenges which businesses are facing. Companies such as Red Hat and communities like Linux Foundation have a major role in promoting open source projects at the heart of digital transformation.
What's more, lots of this software is actually developed collaboratively, created and maintained by an army of thousands, from unpaid volunteers to employees at competing tech companies.
This is the world of open-source software, where code is written and distributed freely. So how did a business model that essentially revolves around giving away information and products take over the world?
Want an open-source alternative to Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant? Download Mycroft onto Raspberry Pi for a privacy-focused voice assistant.
Oil and gas giant BP is planning on shutting down its two European data centres and shifting 900 applications to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next two and half years, as part of an ambitious cloud migration strategy.
After already shifting the majority of workloads from its Houston, Texas data centre to both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services public cloud infrastructure, BP has decided to go all in with AWS for its European cloud migration.
The launch of the Edge Native Working Group sees the likes of ADLINK, Bosch, Edgeworx, Eurotech, Huawei, Intel, Kynetics, and Siemens collaborating as founding members.
The Edge Native Working Group is a vendor-neutral and code-first industry collaboration that is set to drive the evolution and broad adoption of open source software for edge computing.
With open source still yet to unleash its full potential, the Edge Native Working Group is focused on the near-term creation of an end-to-end software stack that will support deployments of today’s most transformative technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, and more.
FOSDEM is approaching its 20 year anniversary.
It is customary to many large festivals to have an Off version at the margin of the main festival, to give space to proposals that are not represented in the official one.
The idea of OFFDEM is to address intersectional questions that are not present at FOSDEM, in a format that attracts people who usually do not go there: at OFFDEM, everyone is a user.
FOSDEM misses cosy and quiet spaces for collectives to meet, focus, hack and work together in good conditions, away from the noise and seasonal rain, shielded from the usual stress of too much sollicitation and perceptual saturation ; the main attraction of OFFDEM should be its absence of both concurrent tracks and a main track, so that ad-hoc organization, free conversation and unexpected activities can take place.
OFFDEM should also act as an overflow mechanism for a number of free software groups that could not obtain a devroom due to the saturation of physical space at FOSDEM.
On December 17, MuckRock, Code for Boston, and Hacks/Hackers are putting together a demo night to highlight a number of open source projects, including MuckRock’s newest government transparency tool, GovLens.
As far as revenue is concerned, 2018 saw a 20% decline on the previous year, dropping from USD 562,279,000 to USD 450,860,000. Royalties, the fees which Mozilla receives received from companies like Google, Baidu and Yandex for including their search engines in Firefox and which represents 95% of Mozilla's revenue went down, in percentage terms, slightly more than the total revenue. Relying so much on Royalties puts Mozilla in a vulnerable position since it relies on keeping on good terms with the Goliaths of the industry, in particular Google with which it is in direct competition for browser traffic. Mozilla has plans for augmenting its revenue with paid-for services and has recently launched its first two branded products. Firefox Premium for Enterprises was launched, in the US only, in September 2019. Its Basic service is Free, so there is no suggestion of paying to use Firefox, but for a fee starting at $10 per supported installation, enterprise users can benefit from private bug submission, critical security bug fixes, or even "concierge bug entry with guaranteed response time". A Service Level Agreement Management tool is another benefit on offer.
EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, today announced the worldwide general availability of its EDB Postgres Platform 12. This new version includes updates to the company’s flagship database management system (DBMS) and tools. These deliver scalability, high availability and disaster recovery that build on the capabilities of PostgreSQL 12 required for enterprises.
“Postgres has never been hotter both in terms of its end user adoption and technology momentum,” said Ed Boyajian, president and CEO of EnterpriseDB. “We are obsessed with helping our customers get to value faster with Postgres. Our engineers continue to set the standard for Postgres innovation in response to the needs of enterprises.”
The creators of the open-source ââ¬â¹DAMLââ¬â¹ smart contract language, ââ¬â¹Digital Assetââ¬â¹ (DA), has raised approximately $35 million in Series C funding from new and existing investors. According to DA, the latest financing round brings the total amount raised by the company to $150 million.
High Fidelity is laying off half of its workforce and halting development on its open-source VR platform. High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale announced the moves in a blog post yesterday.
It is the second big pivot for the company this year. In May, it laid off 25% of its employees as it switched gears from building a VR "metaverse" to a narrower goal of building its tech for virtual office spaces.
"We plan to continue to use our technology as our company's primary virtual office but we have decided not to commercialize the virtual workplace application at this time," Rosedale said. "Simply put, having taken a close look, while we can see that remote work is going to continue on its growth trajectory and we do have customers using it -- the opportunity is not big enough today to warrant additional development."
Why is such software so important? The problem is that Galileo navigation signals travelling through the ionosphere can be significantly delayed by the electrical charges in this atmospheric layer before reaching the end-users’ terminal. To compensate this perturbation in the signal, Galileo receivers integrate a dynamic model of the ionosphere composition known as the NeQuick G model. Receiver manufacturers will now be able to benefit from an open version of the NeQuick G correction algorithm that implements a new coding approach.
This open source farming technology aims to combat climate change via soil health – Good Algorithms
Metsä Wood's Open Source Wood Initiative and ProdLib, a free library of 3D design models, join forces to make the latest innovation in wood-based construction easily available to everyone. With ProdLib library, you can now download the elements available on Open Source Wood to your design software.
Amnesty International is launching an updated version of its Citizen Evidence Lab website, bringing together cutting-edge open-source and other digital investigation tools which have revolutionized how evidence of serious human rights violations and other crimes are gathered and preserved.
Investigations facilitated by the pioneering Citizen Evidence Lab website have already helped expose human rights violations Cameroon, war crimes in Syria and chemical weapons attacks in Sudan.
The upgraded site provides a space for human rights researchers, investigators, students and journalists to explore and share investigative techniques in human rights. It enables them to take better advantage of the digital data-streams critical for modern fact-finding, while also leading the fight against mis- and disinformation campaigns.
Open-source journalism is a practice used by the U.S. Bureau of Asian Tribune, and I have found that sitting in my home office in front of the computer in a single city in the United States.
The Eclipse Foundation today announced the launch of the Edge Native Working Group, a vendor-neutral and code-first industry collaboration that will drive the evolution and broad adoption of open source software for edge computing. With edge computing code from the foundation already deployed in production environments, the Edge Native Working Group is focused on the near-term creation of an end-to-end software stack that will support deployments of today’s most transformative technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, and more. Founding members of the Edge Native Working Group include ADLINK, Bosch, Edgeworx, Eurotech, Huawei, Intel, Kynetics, and Siemens.
“Edge computing has emerged over the past few years as the way to process data and deliver services for AI, autonomous vehicles, 5G, IoT, and important industrial use cases by leveraging distributed, localized compute,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Within the Eclipse community, we already have a mature code base of open source edge computing platforms with production deployments in the field. The Eclipse Foundation is happy to host this vendor-neutral industry collaboration to accelerate the adoption of distributed applications at the edge.”
Edge computing, a distributed computing architecture that brings compute power and storage physically closer to applications in order to improve performance and increase efficiency, is forecast to generate a market worth $16.5 billion within the next five years (Allied Market Research, 2019). The Eclipse Foundation already hosts production-ready code that enables developers to quickly build, deploy, and manage applications at the edge at enterprise scale.
Rootconf is the conference on sysadmins, DevOps, SRE, Network engineers. Rootconf started its journey in 2012 in Bangalore, 2019 was the 7th edition of Rootconf. In these years, through all the Rootconfs, there is a community that has developed around Rootconf. Now people do come to attend Rootconf not just to attend the conference but also to attend friends and peers to discuss projects and ideas.
I learned a few tidbits in awk this week. awk is a language I have, at best, looked at only very superficially, even though I use it frequently if very basically: to chop a line into fields. I tend to use it more than cut(1) because I can print additional data to that which I’ve cut out (without having to add sed(1) so awk just is more versatile for me.
I’ll put just enough commands for us to play along, assuming you’re starting from scratch. We’ll explore concepts, see them in practice in a shell, and then scream “I GET THIS!”. Along the way, we’ll also figure out what a shell really is.
But we can’t begin without getting into the minds of the creators: exploring Unix’s philosophy.
For now, we can assume Linux is Unix. If you want to know why that’s not really the case, you can skip to the bottom and come back. We’ll end the Unix vs linux confusion once and for all.
wireguard (wg) is a modern vpn protocol, using the latest class of encryption algorithms while at the same time promising speed and a small code base.
modern crypto and lean code are also tenants of openbsd, thus it was a no brainer to migrate my router from openvpn over to wireguard.
The Mozilla Corporation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are funding the Python package installer pip with $407,000 USD to support work that is planned for 2020. Where is pip headed next year? The roadmap has been laid out, so let’s have a look at what the future holds. As the Python Software Foundation (PSF) announced in a blog post, it is receiving $207,000 USD from Mozilla via the Mozilla Open Source Support Award and $200,000 USD from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) as Essential Open Source Software for Science grant.
The funds are designated to support a three-phased working plan for pip in 2020 to make the package installer “easier for people to use and troubleshoot”, and here’s what’s going to happen.
If you go back to the first case I discussed, with the unmatched parenthesis, in Friendly-traceback, I rely on the location of the error shown by Python to indicate where the problem arose and, when appropriate, I look *back* to also show where the potential problem started. Unfortunately, I cannot do that in this case with CPython.
The longer version is that several elements created extraneous amount of announcements in screen readers in the past that were not really useful. Especially in the ARIA 1.0 days where a lot of things weren’t as clear and people were still gathering experience, this was an issue for elements or roles that mapped to regions, multiple landmarks of the same type on a page, etc. Therefore, best practice has become to label both widgets (which should be labeled anyway), and landmarks with means such as aria-label or aria-labelledby, to make them more useful. This is important for several reasons...
Last month, almost a million CDs stored in Wisconsin seemed to disappear. For years, thousands of people paid a Madison-based company, named Murfie, to rip, stream, and store their CDs, vinyl, and cassettes. But a few weeks ago, Murfie’s website went offline and nearly all communication from the company ceased. Now, customers fear their physical music collections may be lost forever.
Murfie’s main service was digitizing people’s audio CDs for high-fidelity cloud playback. You’d mail in your collection, Murfie would rip them to the cloud, and if you kept paying a storage fee, Murfie would hold onto your physical collection and even let you buy and sell with other users. For nine years, it had done that. But late last month, the service stopped, and customers who went to the website found it had gone offline.
Yep, once he pushes off the ground, his center of mass actually follows a normal parabolic trajectory. Just like when you toss a ball into the air, the only force acting on him at that point is the gravitational interaction with Earth. That means he has a constant downward acceleration, producing that familiar path. At this level, it’s normal projectile motion.
But he’s not just a rigid ball; his body is still working as he moves through the air, and that’s where the magic happens. To sort it all out, I ran this clip through my Tracker video-analysis app.
And all of this malignant online activity has real-world consequences. Children are bullied to the point of suicide; immigrants and LGBTQ people are harassed, attacked, and sometimes killed; neo-Nazis are emboldened to march through our streets; women and children are sexually exploited to feed the boundless appetite for pornography; and dangerous divisions grow around the world as orchestrated lies feed suspicions and fuel hatreds.
Nations now have low-cost, non-military means to influence, disrupt and divide their adversaries. In the run up to the Brexit vote, Russian trolls were able to convince a sizeable portion of the British electorate that Turkey was going to be welcomed into the European Union and, as a result, England would be invaded by millions of Turks seeking a better life. None of it was true, but enough people believed it to fracture the European Union. It was the first known instance of an economic and cultural alliance being shattered from remote desktops.
And here in the United States, Russian electoral interference helped – depending on your orientation – elect either the man chosen by God to save the country, or that fraction of a human being who resides in the White House. In nations where freedom is a threat, digital Berlin walls are being constructed. Paul Krugman describes China’s efforts to keep its people ignorant and docile.
“China created its Great Firewall to seal off the Internet inside China from the global Internet – so Beijing could censor all news and online internal discussions, freezing out Google, Facebook, and Twitter. China, as well as other countries, has also begun ring-fencing certain data pools, software and technology stacks to make sure that all of them, or at least key elements, are stored on domestic servers and not accessible from abroad.”
And so, these marvelous, miraculous creations – personal computers, the Internet, social media – the gifts of the digital Magi, have been weaponized. The dreamers and idealists were right: They did change the world, but could not have imagined the direction the changes would take, or all of the ways their inventions would be abused.
The fearful, vile, and opportunistic have historically used the brilliance of their betters to harm the object of their fears. I think it was Ayn Rand who posited that the person who harnessed fire was probably the first to be burned at the stake. Regardless, technological progress continues at an accelerated pace. It races out ahead of our ability to integrate it. It is the evolution of human consciousness that lags so frightfully behind.
On a level democratic playing field, the for-profit healthcare industry’s fear mongering would gain little traction, as its talking points are easily refuted.
Be careful what you wish for, Canada.
One way or the other, Canadian courts are about to make some key decisions about the role of private financing and practice in the health care system; the Cambie case in British Columbia is just the latest attempt to overturn fundamental components of publicly funded medicare.
Closing arguments were made last week and the decision in this legal case, which is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court, will have ramifications for decades and for millions of people.
The most significant chapter in terms of access to medicines is Chapter 20 (Intellectual Property Rights [sic]). This chapter includes many of the ‘TRIPS-Plus’ rules from the TPP as originally negotiated, including the following obligations, which were subsequently suspended in the CPTPP:
Slack meanwhile reports ” 5+ billion weekly actions”.
(Its December 4 quarterly filing shows that the company has just over 105,000 aid customers, up 30 percent year-over-year, but the company continues to report substantial losses — $95.0 million for the quarter — despite strong growth.)
In the world of DevOps, one of the foundational elements is the concept of continuous integration and continuous delivery, commonly referred to as CI/CD.
CI/CD is not just a buzzword. It's a process that involves a number of different tools and technologies that help developers integrate new code and deploy code out to production. At the ground level of the CI/CD movement is the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), which was formally announced on March 12 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
Amazon is contributing to a new piece of open-source software that could give it a leg up in its physical stores. The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that maintains the Linux operating system and open-source software, announced the new networking operating system, called Dent, in a statement on Friday.
Dent is a proposed operating system for switches, which are pieces of hardware used to route data around networks, usually within companies or between companies and the internet. The market has traditionally been dominated by big companies such as Broadcom, which provides a lot of the underlying silicon chips, and Cisco, which sells finished assembled product.
Delta Lake (wait for it… the clue is in the name) is a project focusing on improving the reliability and performance of data lakes.
Delta Lake was actually announced by unified analytics company Databricks earlier this year before this autumn becoming a Linux Foundation project with an open governance model.
The team points out that organisations in every vertical aspire to get more value from data through data science, machine learning and analytics, but they are hindered by the lack of data reliability within data lakes.
Originally released in 2018 by Swiss fintech Mt Pelerin, BRIDGE is an open source software to create and manage tokenized securities (tokens representing ownership of underlying assets) on public blockchains. With advanced compliance management features, BRIDGE enables today the issuance, distribution and trading of these digital assets within the existing regulatory frameworks.
Dynatrace announced Keptn, an open source pluggable control plane to advance the industry movement toward autonomous clouds. Keptn provides the automation and orchestration of the processes and tools needed for continuous delivery and automated operations for cloud native environments.
To combat the growing gap between constrained IT resources and accelerating cloud scale and complexity, automation and AI have become critical weapons for IT to maintain control. However, where to start and how to map out a successful path to NoOps has been a barrier for many IT organizations.
“Keptn is an outcome of a belief and program we have been working on for years,” said John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace.
Crater also provides a mobile app that works with your self-hosted Crater app. At the time of writing, Crater has an Android app with an iOS version in the works.
Open networking could be the solution. If vendors commit to open standards, systems can be created where a variety of networking and security products will work in concert. Designing products with maximum compatibility takes away the need to commit to a single vendor, and will also ensure that any existing network infrastructure will work in sync with future data center investments.
An open networking approach also means there is no need to wait around for a vendor to integrate two products. With open source, and access to the relevant APIs, it’s possible to create your own scripts to connect and automate network defenses.
Ultimately, there is no one solution in the rapidly evolving field of information security; good security practice requires interoperability and integration of solutions from multiple vendors. By creating systems where multiple products can work in concert, many layers of technologies and defense techniques can be woven together into the tapestry of everyday operations.
ZeroNorth, the industry’s first provider of risk-based vulnerability orchestration for applications and infrastructure, today announced a new solution for Rapid Application Security, enabling customers to quickly stand up software security initiatives by leveraging open source vulnerability discovery tools. The solution is ideal for companies seeking to rapidly deploy new application scanning capabilities, while evaluating long-term deployments of commercial tools.
[...]
The ZeroNorth solution provides open source options for exploring emerging areas of vulnerability testing—such as container security and cloud management—or augmenting those technologies not yet covered by commercial tools. Specifically, the solution embeds open source products directly within the ZeroNorth platform, providing software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), container security and cloud management.
Researchers discovered a new kind of “Fileless Malware” distributed by the infamous Lazarus APT Hackers Group. According to a security researcher from K7 Labs, the hacking group was spreading malware targeting MacOS users, to create fake cryptocurrency trading applications.
The researcher stated that the hacking group was targeting several cryptocurrency trading applications by trojanising a Mac application to steal cryptocurrency.
But while open source has transformed organizations’ ability to use proven and maintained code in the development of new software, it’s not untouchable in terms of security. Using code that’s readable by anyone brings risks -- and issues have occurred in the past.
Open-source software (OSS) is the leading software code used in the operating systems of the top 500 supercomputers in the world and is widely used by software developers. Due to the widespread use of OSS, it is important that businesses are aware of the potential pitfalls inherent in their software. Some of the key issues for consideration with regard to using OSS are set out below.
The bill from Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), gives the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) the power to issue subpoenas to obtain information about potential cyber vulnerabilities related to critical infrastructure, such as in the electric grid or dams.
The artificial intelligence group AI Now released its annual report on the state of the field and — more importantly — how the technology is being used in society.
The report came with a grim warning, MIT Technology Review reports. It argues that because AI tools like facial recognition, and especially emotion-detecting algorithms, can be highly inaccurate — and propagate systematic racial and gender biases — they should be removed from society.
Starting December 7, 2019, WhatsApp will also take legal action against those determined to be “engaged in or assisting others in abuse that violates our Terms of Service, such as automated or bulk messaging, or non-personal use, even if that determination is based on information solely available to us off our platform,” WhatsApp says.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), the FTC is concerned with antitrust - the combined platform would become far and away the biggest instant messenger service.
However, it is also concerned about the way that data would be shared between platforms. Facebook has proven itself to be instrumental as a tool of political influence and breaking down the silos between platforms could expose the public to more unchecked propaganda and smear.
So a bit like Twitter, all the time, then, really.
On Dec. 1, a band of assailants opened fire on worshippers at a small-town Protestant church in Burkina Faso, an impoverished West African country where the Christian minority is increasingly a target of attacks. The victims included the pastor and several teenage boys; regional authorities attributed the attack to “unidentified armed men” who, according to witnesses, got away on motorcycles.
Just two days after rebel Libyan commander Khalifa Hifter declared a “final” and decisive battle for the capital Tripoli, heavy fighting raged for a 24-hour period between his troops and militias loosely allied with the internationally backed government based in the city, officials said Saturday.
On Monday, The Washington Post began a new series called “The Afghanistan Papers,” based on documents obtained by the newspaper of an internal military report on “lessons learned” from Afghanistan since the American invasion in 2002. The Post deliberately echoed the Pentagon Papers in the title, and the series explicitly draws parallels with the earlier scoop. This comparison might seem like hype, but the revelations in the Afghan report live up to its precursor. Like the Pentagon Papers, the Afghanistan Papers make clear that policy-makers consistently held a much more pessimistic private view of the Afghan War than they ever admitted in public. A feel-good story of progress was sold to the American people by military leaders and politicians who knew the truth was very different.
And yet, unlike the Pentagon Papers, the Afghanistan Papers are not making a splash. [...]
A drone with a machine gun attached can hit targets with high precision, according to its makers. Turkey is set to become the first country to have the drone, when it gets a delivery this month.
The 25-kilogram drone has eight rotating blades to get it in the air. Its machine gun carries 200 rounds of ammunition and can fire single shots or 15-round bursts.
The new Defense Department deal will represent about 10% of Palantir’s revenue next year, according to people familiar with the company’s finances. It’s the first step in what could be a four-year, $440 million deal with the Army.
The Silicon Valley company will provide software to connect human resources, supply chains and other Army operations systems into a single dashboard. The Army considered earlier proposals for related work from Accenture Plc, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and Microsoft Corp.
“We call them precursors,” Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, said in an interview between meetings at the United Nations in Geneva. “We’re not quite there yet, but we are coming ever closer.”
So when will more advanced lethal autonomous weapons systems be upon us?
“I think we’re talking more about years not decades,” she said.
Over the course of the last two weeks, at the 25th Conference of the Parties in Madrid—referred to as COP25, an annual United Nations summit that gathers global leaders, scientists, and activists on issues of environmental justice—16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg has commanded an unusual pull. Fortunately for the planet, Thunberg is not alone. Her voice joins a youth-led climate movement that is demanding a course correction from the politicians, governments, and private corporations that have led to skyrocketing levels of greenhouse gas emissions. To put it plainly, the planet is getting too hot too fast. We’re in deep trouble.
As world leaders descended on Madrid, Spain, during the first two weeks of December 2019 for the annual United Nations climate summit (COP25), a video of blindfolded women filling plazas across Latin America and Europe went viral; the women stomping, symbolically squatting and singing in unison, in Spanish, to the beat of a drum: “The patriarchy is the judge/ It judges us for just being born/ And our punishment / is the violence you don’t see.” The lyrics escalate, “The rapist is you/ It’s the cops/ The judges/ The state/ The president.” In Madrid, feminists from around the world gathered near COP25 to perform the piece, “A Rapist in Your Path.”
Chilean officials presiding over this year’s U.N. climate talks said Saturday they plan to propose a compromise to bridge yawning differences among countries that have been deadlocked on key issues for the past two weeks.
"The only thing more disastrous than the state of UN climate negotiations at COP 25€ is the state of the global climate."
This year, Canada experienced record-breaking temperatures across the nation, with a larger increase above normal temperatures in the north than in the south. Canada’s annual average temperature has warmed 1.7C since 1948, but in northern Canada it has increased by 2.3C.
When anti-protest legislation pushed by oil, gas and utility interests was introduced in the Ohio state Senate this year, it met a receptive audience and passed easily on a mostly party-line vote. It has since moved to the state House, where almost one-third of legislators are ALEC members, and will likely pass at the beginning of 2020.
The Hollywood actor spoke at an Evanston town hall in support of a new policy to use revenue from marijuana legalization to narrow racial economic gaps.
It’s not easy being McKinsey & Company these days.
For most of its 90-odd-year existence, the prestigious management consultancy prided itself on remaining above the fray. McKinsey consultants plied the executive suites of Fortune 500 companies, counseling chief executives with discretion and quietly building a business that, with $10 billion in annual revenues, is now bigger than many of the entities it serves. The substance of the company’s work, and even the identities of its clients, lie concealed under an institutional code of silence. That reticence, enforced by a nondisclosure agreement, bedeviled Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign until last Monday, when McKinsey granted him a rare dispensation to reveal the names of his former clients.
Yavor Tarinski is an independent researcher and activist whose publications and talks center on the possibilities of direct democracy and commoning practices as an alternative to the current social imaginary. He is the author of Direct Democracy: Context, Society, Individuality (Durty Books Publishing House, 2019). He is a member of the editorial team of the Greek political journal Aftoleksi, bibliographer at Agora International and member of the administrative board of TRISE. In the past he has co-founded “Adelante” — the first social center in Bulgaria as well as the first Bulgarian Social Forum.
"It all made sense thanks to a simple trumpian tweet..."
The prime minister resigned over the nationwide protests, catapulting a 34-year-old woman into Finland’s top job.
Foreign agents peddling influence for a controversial Ukraine politician were part of a coordinated effort bankrolled through a secretive network of shell companies and offshore entities, according to new foreign lobbying records.
The Brazilian government announced the creation of a new video series with which it intends to "combat leftist ideas" and offer a false narrative of Brazilian history.
On Friday the 13th of December, the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. After a 14-hour hearing, the committee voted 23-17, along party lines, to recommend to the House of Representatives that Trump be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
As the hospitality workers’ union Unite Here Local 11 said that next week’s Democratic presidential debate could be threatened by stalled contract negotiations for workers at Loyola Marymount University, which is hosting the debate, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders led the Democratic field in announcing they would be on the side of the workers if a deal is not reached in the coming days.
"If believing that 500,000 Americans should not be forced into medical bankruptcy every single year is radical, than we're proud to be radical."
"Labour’s worst performance since 1983 carries an important lesson for the grassroots left-wing campaign in the United States to elect€ Bernie Sanders€ as president: You must defeat false anti-Semitism smears at all costs."
Leaving the European Union is not the only split British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has to worry about.
Not much of a cliff-hanger, was it? Despite every squalid disappointment of this dull, dishonest election and all that driving rain, Boris Johnson's winter gamble has paid off. Now his troubles really begin. He has refashioned his party in Nigel Farage's harsher image and has promised to deliver many impossibles. He has the Commons majority he asked for. No more excuses for the World King. No more hope of reversing Brexit. That re-set Brussels clock is ticking again towards a weak deal, a no-deal or a One Nation chameleon's U-turn.
Friday's hearing lasted just over ten minutes before the two articles of impeachment - abuse of power and obstructing Congress - were passed by 23 votes to 17.
The vote had been expected on Thursday but was delayed after more than 14 hours of rancorous debate. Republicans criticised that decision by Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Nadler, accusing him of pushing back the vote to ensure more TV coverage.
In the abuse of power article, Mr Trump is accused of soliciting a foreign country to help him politically by trying to force Ukraine to launch a corruption investigation into his political rival Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential contender.
He is also accused of obstructing Congress by failing to co-operate with the House investigation.
Whatever Foxconn is building in Wisconsin, it’s not the $10 billion, 22 million-square-foot Generation 10.5 LCD factory that President Trump once promised would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” At various points over the last two years, the Taiwanese tech manufacturer has said it would build a smaller LCD factory; that it wouldn’t build a factory at all; that it would build an LCD factory; that the company could make any number of things, from screens for cars to server racks to robot coffee kiosks; and so on.
Throughout these changes, one question has loomed: given that Foxconn is building something completely different than that Gen 10.5 LCD facility specified in its original contract with Wisconsin, is it still going to get the record-breaking $4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies?
There was just one problem. Around the time Blanco opened his account,v (Blanco embraces the term sex worker; not all influencers on these sites are as unabashed in welcoming the label.) Today, building a sustainable brand requires cross-platform synergy—a kind of digital harmonic convergence—which means many creators often leverage their following on Instagram to promote their fan accounts, typically adding a link in their bio. As first reported by XBIZ, Facebook updated its community guidelines over the summer, fine-tuning specific language around sexual expression; this applied to content not only on Facebook but also on Instagram, which it owns. (The platforms share “sexual solicitation” policies, the company confirmed.)
According to a Facebook spokesperson, the update aimed “to help people better understand our policies, but nothing changed in terms of the policy itself or how we enforce it. In other words, it was simply a clarifier for the community.” The company said in an email to WIRED that it has AI “constantly running” to find content that violates its policies.
The lead case is In Re Alphabet Inc. Shareholder Derivative Litigation, 19CV341522, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County (San Jose).
According to the WSJ, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have worked to influence the reports and have used a variety of tactics over the years to boost their numbers. In doing so, the FCC’s reporting system could be showing connection speeds that are far faster than what customers actually get.
".Org is usually the namespace for non-profits, foundations, governmental research institutes, and others. Being owned by a private equity firm usually stands for maximizing profits and revenue. The big problem is that non-profits have limited funds and they fear that the domain prices will rise beyond a level that they can afford," said Peter Wilfahrt, co-founder of Versangigant.
While not many open-source blockchain projects depend on the .org TLD, the move from the non-profit Internet Society (INSO) to the for-profit Ethos could hasten the end of the public-domain Internet. In fact, INSO's parent, the so-called PIR – which stands for Public Interest Registry – "has confirmed it will discard the non-profit status it has held since 2003 as a result of the sale," according to a Register report.
Although moving the TLD into private hands shouldn't change much technically, it effectively removes the price cap associated with .org domains, allowing squatters to set outlandish prices for sought-after domains.
Billboard has announced that YouTube streams will be factored into the Billboard 200 albums chart starting early next year. Video streams from other platforms will also count, including Apple, Spotify, Tidal, and Vevo, and Billboard says the change will also impact genre album consumption charts, like country, Latin, and others. Billboard’s charts have historically been seen as a barometer of success within the music industry.
The World Intellectual Property Organization has launched a public consultation process on artificial intelligence and intellectual property policy, inviting feedback on an issues paper designed to help define the most-pressing questions likely to face IP policy makers as AI increases in importance.
In January 2019, WIPO issued a study that surveyed the landscape of AI innovation. The WIPO Technology Trends report offers evidence-based projections to inform global policymakers on the future of AI. Subsequently, in September 2019, WIPO held a Conversation on IP and Al bringing together member states and other stakeholders to discuss the impact of Al on IP policy, with a view to collectively formulating the questions that policymakers need to ask.
[...]
Looking at issues around Inventorship and Ownership, Patentable Subject Matter and Patentability Guidelines, Inventive Step or Non-Obviousness, Disclosure and General Policy Considerations for the Patent System.
Software start-ups have a phrase for what Amazon is doing to them: ‘strip-mining’ them of their innovations.
By 2018, Medicinal Genomics’s ability to map the genome of cannabis strains had advanced greatly. So when a cryptocurrency gave McKernan’s company 150 DASH (approximately $67,500 at the time of the grant) to map a strain called Jamaican Lion, the genome was assembled and publicly available within 60 days of the payment.
Blockchain technology didn’t just fund the effort. Jamaican Lion’s actual genomic information was also encoded directly into a blockchain. That made sure the data was published publicly and securely, with a globally recognized timestamp, in a way that can’t be edited after the fact.
[...]
That paper trail is important because it predates the patent applications of Biotech Institute LLC, a shadowy cannabis science company profiled extensively in Part 2 of this special report. Which means that if Jamaican Lion can be proven to have exhibited the same properties described in Biotech Institute’s first patent at least a year prior to when the Biotech patent was issued, then that would effectively invalidate Biotech’s claims.
But that’s far from a sure thing. Cannabis patent law remains in its infancy, and the plant remains federally illegal in the United States, so it’s pretty much impossible to predict how the government will weigh a claim based in part on a High Times sponsored harvest contest.
I asked Nokia, which has recently issued a couple of public statements on its EU antitrust row with Daimler and four of its suppliers, for comment on Continental's new licensing offer. Nokia declined to comment, and stressed that they "respect confidentiality, including that of the mediation process, which will itself be confidential."
This means we're unlikely to hear anything for some more time. EU competition commissioner Vestager said she was going to wait until mid-February.
On Tuesday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Democrats had reached a deal with the Trump administration to advance the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), also referred to as “NAFTA 2.0.” In explaining the deal, she said: “There is no question of course that this trade agreement is much better than NAFTA.”
The USMCA replaces the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. A key part of the new agreement is to lower or end tariffs and boost markets for U.S. crops - most notably corn and soybeans - in countries bordering the United States.
The United States, Mexico, and Canada have reached an agreement on a modernized, high-standard Intellectual Property (IP) [sic] chapter that provides strong and effective protection and enforcement of IP rights critical to driving innovation, creating economic growth, and supporting American jobs.
Patents protect new inventions, such as pharmaceutical products, chemical processes, business technologies, and computer software. USMCA definespatentable subject matter asnew productsand processes, as well as new uses, methods, or processesof a known product. Under TRIPS, patented inventions must receive a minimum term of 20 years of protection. USMCA requires adjustments of patent termsfor “unreasonable” delays in the patent examination or regulatory approval processes. “Unreasonable delays” include a delay of more than five years from the date of filing or three years after a request for examination of an application, whichever is later. USMCA includes a notification system and procedures(e.g., judicial or administrative proceedings) to assert patent rights or to challenge a patent’s validity. These procedures are more flexible than “patent linkage”—a provision common to many prior U.S. FTAs whereby regulatory authority cannot grant marketing approval to a generic drug without the patent holder’s permission
The new agreement includes stronger protections for patents and trademarks in areas such as biotech, financial services and domain names – all of which have advanced considerably over the past quarter-century. It also contains new provisions governing the expansion of digital trade and investment in innovative products and services.
Two defendants have pleaded guilty for their role in the operation of two streaming services that offered access to pirated movies and TV-shows. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, ]iStreamItAll and Jetflicks were among the biggest illegal streaming services in the US. The platforms used torrent and Usenet sites to source thousands of pirated videos for their platforms, which were offered to the public for a monthly subscription fee.
