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Links 14/1/2020: IBM Joins LOT Network; X.Org Server 1.20.7, Tails 4.2.2 and Zanshin 0.5.71 Released



  • GNU/Linux

    • Welcome to Linux

      It’s 2020 and there’s no doubt that this is the year of Linux on the desktop. That’s the running joke among the Linux community, but the truth hiding behind it, is that there are millions of happy desktop Linux users out there in the world and this is your chance to join them.

      If you’d told many people ten years ago Linux would be getting same-day driver support from manufacturers, you could game with Steam and play AAA titles natively on Linux, run a full office suite that is used by governments, render with software used by the largest game and film companies, that it was going to run the majority of mobile phones, and that a best-selling home computer (that’s the Pi) used it, they’d think you were mad. However, that’s where we are today, besides 20-years of the regular Linux server- and embedded-based shenanigans.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

        The Windows 7 hysteria machine has most definitely kicked into gear today, with Viking burials and scary statistics for the orphaned operating system.

        Business continuity outfit Databarracks sent a Windows 7 box out to water aboard a slightly shonky-looking (and on fire) Viking longboat, sending the OS to Valhalla, before repeating the warning of Blighty's cyber snoops at GCHQ that email and banking shouldn't be done using the veteran OS.

        British newspaper the Daily Express took a break from worrying about royal conspiracies to shriek: "Microsoft will make a monumental change TODAY" (their caps, not ours) before ominously warning users to "upgrade now or face the risks." After all "millions are putting themselves at serious risk of attack."

    • Server

      • Announcing the Kubernetes bug bounty program

        We aimed to set up this bug bounty program as transparently as possible, with an initial proposal, evaluation of vendors, and working draft of the components in scope. Once we onboarded the selected bug bounty program vendor, HackerOne, these documents were further refined based on the feedback from HackerOne, as well as what was learned in the recent Kubernetes security audit. The bug bounty program has been in a private release for several months now, with invited researchers able to submit bugs and help us test the triage process. After almost two years since the initial proposal, the program is now ready for all security researchers to contribute!

        What’s exciting is that this is rare: a bug bounty for an open-source infrastructure tool. Some open-source bug bounty programs exist, such as the Internet Bug Bounty, this mostly covers core components that are consistently deployed across environments; but most bug bounties are still for hosted web apps. In fact, with more than 100 certified distributions of Kubernetes, the bug bounty program needs to apply to the Kubernetes code that powers all of them. By far, the most time-consuming challenge here has been ensuring that the program provider (HackerOne) and their researchers who do the first line triage have the awareness of Kubernetes and the ability to easily test the validity of a reported bug. As part of the bootstrapping process, HackerOne had their team pass the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam.

      • Kubernetes: a secure, flexible and automated edge for IoT developers

        Cloud native software such as containers and Kubernetes and IoT/edge are playing a prominent role in the digital transformation of enterprise organisations. They are particularly critical to DevOps teams that are focused on faster software releases and more efficient IT operations through collaboration and automation. Most cloud native software is open source which broadens the developer pool contributing and customising the software. This has led to streamlined versions of Kubernetes with low footprints which are suited for IoT/edge workloads.

      • IBM

        • What communities of practice can do for your organization

          Increased collaboration. A recent survey from My Customer.com shows that 40 percent of company employees report not feeling adequately supported by their colleagues—because "different departments have their own agendas." A lack of collaboration between departments limits innovation and increases opportunities for miscommunication. Communities of practice encourage members from all roles across all departments to unite in sharing their expertise. This increases collaboration and reduces the threat of organizational silos.

          Rapid problem-solving. Communities of practice provide a centralized location for communication and resources useful for solving organizational or business problems. Enabling people to come together—regardless of their organizational reporting structure, location, and/or management structure—encourages problem-solving and can lead to faster resolution of those problems.

          Enhanced innovation. Researchers Pouwels and Koster recently argued that “collaboration contributes to innovation." CoPs provide a unique opportunity for members to collaborate on topics within their shared domains of interest and passion. This passion ignites a desire to discover new and innovative ways to solve problems and create new ideas.

        • Goals – an experimental new tool which generalizes “make”

          For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new tool called goals which generalizes make.

        • Goals: Red Hat Developer Working On New Tool To Improve Upon Make

          Longtime Red Hat developer Richard Jones has begun developing "Goals" as a new tool to improve upon Make, the common build automation tool.

          While more open-source projects are turning to CMake or Meson+Ninja, Red Hat's Richard Jones has been working on Goals as an incremental improvement over Make and aiming to address some of the design deficits for this originally four decade old software.

          [...]

          There is an MP4 video recording of his talk of Goals. There are also his notes where he explains more of the Make shortcomings and work on Goals.

        • What’s new in Red Hat Runtimes?

          We are excited to announce that the latest release of Red Hat Runtimes is now available. The team has been hard at work on new updates and capabilities for building enterprise-grade, cloud-native applications.

          Red Hat Runtimes, part of the Red Hat Middleware portfolio, is a set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices or serverless applications. Read on to learn more about the new updates and features that are currently available in Red Hat Runtimes.

        • Red Hat commends IBM’s decision to join the LOT Network, protecting developers from patent threats

          Red Hat is pleased to see IBM—the number one U.S. patent recipient and Red Hat’s parent company—announce today it is joining the LOT Network (LOT), a non-profit company we helped found. Since 2014, Red Hat and other top companies around the world have joined LOT to provide an innovative response to the threat patent assertion entities (PAEs) pose. IBM is an extraordinary addition to LOT’s more than 600 members, which together hold more than two million patent assets.

          Both IBM and Red Hat use patents to further their strategic interests. IBM uses patents to protect and benefit from its substantial R&D investments. Red Hat uses patents exclusively to deter patent aggression against the company and the open source projects it supports. Both companies seek a patent ecosystem that protects their communities from patent aggression while encouraging open source innovation. Red Hat and IBM have approached this challenge from several directions.

        • Modernizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux System management the easy way

          As an IT manager, you need to establish the right processes to be confident in your teams’ ability to keep critical applications running smoothly and securely. Most companies face challenges like stretched IT staff, a complex technology stack, and environment sprawl that now includes public and private clouds. It becomes clear that you have to help your teams work smarter, because manual methods cannot keep pace with these trends.

          Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the intelligent operating system of choice for many customers. Why? Many factors including a hardened operating system, years of Red Hat experience in supporting a very diverse set of customer needs, management through Red Hat Insights, attention to security and more play into this. Recognizing the management challenges of cloud and on-premises deployment models and limited staff, we have designed Insights to provide proactive management analytics that can help your teams deliver IT services with confidence.

        • Introducing new Red Hat Enterprise Linux certification for software partner products

          We are pleased to announce an improved software certification for Red Hat partner products built for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8). This new RHEL software certification validates the use of common best practices, improves joint supportability, and promotes your product in the new Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.

        • It’s time to rock at Red Hat Summit!

          What could be better than a high-energy week of innovation, education and collaboration at the industry's premier enterprise open source technology conference?

          How about a performance by a Grammy Award-winning rock band?

          That’s just what you’ll get at Red Hat Summit 2020. On Wed Apr. 29, all attendees are invited to join us at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for an exhilarating night full of food, drinks and music headlined by Vampire Weekend!

          Celebrated by GQ as "one of the most important bands of the 21st century," the band from New York City released their fourth studio album, Father of the Bride, in May 2019. The third Vampire Weekend album in a row to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 has also been nominated for three Grammy awards including Album of the Year. Vampire Weekend tops several "Best Albums of 2019" and "Best of the Decade" critic charts by: Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Billboard, NPR and US Weekly, to name a few.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • [S4 TRAILER] Command Line Heroes: Season 4 Audio Trailer

        No one ever said hardware was easy. Season 4 of Command Line Heroes starts January 28.

      • [S4 TEASER] Command Line Heroes: Season 4 Animated Teaser

        Command Line Heroes is back for Season 4. We're telling 7 special stories about those who dared to change the rules of hardware and, in the process, revolutionized how we all interact with technology.

      • LHS Episode #320: The Fire Down Below

        Welcome to the 320th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts cover amateur radio and the recent earthquake in Puerto Rico and fires in Australia, Bitcoin, ARRL awards, Huawei, TensorFlow, Tucnak, Gridtracker and a whole lot more. Thank you for listening to our program and we hope you have a fantastic week.

      • Brunch with Brent: Chase Nunes | Jupiter Extras 46

        Brent sits down with Chase Nunes, co-host of Unfilter, Jupiter Broadcasting's former weekly media watchdog. We discuss his beginnings in podcasting and how Unfilter came to be, his contributions to LinuxFest Northwest, his love for Linux in the media broadcasting industry, and his recent 15-month life-changing personal transformation journey.

    • Kernel Space

      • Linus Torvalds Won’t Merge ZFS Code Into Linux Kernel

        In the recent “Moderated Discussions” forum at realworldtech.com, Linus Torvalds warned kernel developers against adding a module for the ZFS filesystem until Oracle were to re-license the code for mainline inclusion.

        He was answering a user’s question about a year-old kernel maintenance controversy, as reported by Phoronix.

        “Honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle,” he wrote. “Other people think it can be OK to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it OK, and that’s their decision. But considering Oracle’s litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there’s no way I can feel safe in ever doing so.”

      • The Time Namespace Appears To Finally Be On-Deck For The Mainline Linux Kernel

        Back in 2018 a time namespace was proposed for the Linux kernel and now in 2020 it looks like this kernel functionality will be merged for mainline, likely with the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle.

        A few hours ago the time namespace patches were queued in the timers/core Git branch ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window opening at the start of February.

        The time namespace allows for per-namespace offsets to the system monotonic and boot-time clocks. The time namespace is suited for Linux containers usage for allowing the date/time to be changed within a container and for adjusting clocks within a container following restoration from a checkpoint/snapshot.

      • Graphics Stack

        • CoreAVI Achieves Formal Khronos OpenGL SC 1.0.1 Compliance Running its VkCoreGL SC1 Library

          Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. (“CoreAVI”) announced today that it has achieved formal Khronos Group compliance for its VkCoreGLâ„¢ SC1 (OpenGL SC 1.0.1) application library running on its Vulkan-based VkCoreâ„¢ SC graphics and compute driver. Successful passing Khronos’ conformance testing process ensures implementation quality and provides implementor protection via the Khronos Intellectual Property Framework.Adhering to open software standards is a key part of CoreAVI’s philosophy and this compliance provides customers with the standards-based confidence they require for safety critical software products. CoreAVI is the chair of Khronos’ Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group to define a formal safety critical version of Vulkan and is continually focused on driving forward new standards to support true safety critical compute capabilities using graphics processors.

        • CoreAVI VkCoreGL SC1 Hits Compliance For Ushering Vulkan Into Safety Critical Systems

          Vulkan could soon be used indirectly on safety critical military and aerospace displays thanks to CoreAVI's VkCoreGL SC1.

          While there is a Vulkan safety-critical working group with aims similar to OpenGL SC, at the moment there is no released Vulkan SC specification. But Military and aerospace supplier CoreAVI (who is also involved in the Vulkan SC effort) has developed VkCoreGL SC1 as an OpenGL SC library running on top of Vulkan.

          VkCoreGL SC1 is for transitioning OpenGL safety critical applications onto Vulkan-based systems. VkCoreGL SC1 is similar to Mesa's Zink and the other projects implementing OpenGL over Vulkan but with CoreAVI's commercial offering they are implementing the OpenGL safety critical specification. As of today, they are now formally deemed in compliance with OpenGL SC 1.0.1.

        • xorg-server 1.20.7
          A variety of bugfixes, primarily in modesetting, glamor, and Solaris
          support. This release also contains support for choosing the DRI driver
          via EGL_MESA_query_driver. Thanks to all who contributed with testing
          and fixes!
          
          

          Aaron Plattner (1): modesetting: Check whether RandR was initialized before calling rrGetScrPriv

          Alan Coopersmith (5): os-support/solaris: Drop ExtendedEnabled global variable Add ddxInputThread call from os layer into ddx layer Add xf86OSInputThreadInit call from common layer into os-support layer os-support/solaris: Set IOPL for input thread too ospoll: Fix Solaris ports implementation to build on Solaris 11.4

          Kenneth Graunke (2): glamor: Add a function to get the driver name via EGL_MESA_query_driver modesetting: Use EGL_MESA_query_driver to select DRI driver if possible

          Matt Turner (1): xserver 1.20.7

          Michel Dänzer (5): modesetting: Call glamor_finish from drmmode_crtc_set_mode xfree86/modes: Call xf86RotateRedisplay from xf86CrtcRotate modesetting: Clear new screen pixmap storage on RandR resize xwayland: Do flush GPU work in xwl_present_flush glamor: Only use dual blending with GLSL >= 1.30

          Peter Hutterer (1): Xi: return AlreadyGrabbed for key grabs > 255

          git tag: xorg-server-1.20.7
        • X.Org Server 1.20.7 Released With A Handful Of Fixes For GLAMOR + Modesetting

          With no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 on the horizon, the X.Org Server 1.20 point releases continue rolling on.

          Intel Linux graphics developer Matt Turner stepped up to release X.Org Server 1.20.7 as the latest point release, consisting of fourteen changes. The changes are mostly centered on the GLAMOR and xf86-video-modesetting driver bits but also some Solaris updates via Oracle's Alan Coopersmith.

          NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner added a check to the xf86-video-modesetting DDX around verifying RandR initialization, Intel's Kenneth Graunke now has the modesetting driver using EGL_MESA_query_driver to select the DRI driver if possible (needed for their Iris driver), and a few other modesetting fixes are in there too. Graunke also added a change to GLAMOR for querying the driver name as well via EGL_MESA_query_driver, again, good news for their Iris Gallium3D driver.

        • Wayland Adds Meson Build System Support

          While Wayland's Weston reference compositor has been using the Meson build system for about the past year, only this week did Wayland itself see Meson support introduced.

          Wayland has added Meson build system support for the same reasons most projects do: faster build times, cleaner than GNU Autotools, and tends to work better on other platforms especially with Windows.

          GNOME's Emmanuele Bassi added the support. For now the Meson build system support is living alongside the Autotools support. The plan is to drop Autotools once the Meson support has proven to be at least on-par with the existing build system support.

    • Applications

      • 3 Music Media Players for the Debian 10 Terminal

        If you are addicted to the Terminal and always find the ways to do every possible thing inside the Terminal, then why not listening to music through it. The command line or Terminal gives you everything you need in a more efficient and faster way while also utilizing fewer resources. It also becomes handier when you are using a headless version of your operating system.

        In this article, we are going to look at some tools using which you can listen to your favorite music right from your command line. This may be useful in scenarios such as the one I described above. Moreover, we will explain how to install and use these tools and also to remove them if needed.

        We have run the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on a Debian 10 OS.

      • File carving tools

        In computers, file carving consists of recovering and rebuilding, reconstructing or reassembling fragmented files after a disk was formatted, its filesystem or partition corrupted or damaged or the metadata of a file removed. All files contain metadata, metadata means: “data that provides information about other data”. Among more information, files metadata contains the location and structure of a file within the filesystem and physical blocks. File Carving consists of bringing back files even if their metadata with the information of their location within the filesystem isn’t available.

      • Firebird 3.0.5 sub-release is available

        Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.5 — the 5th point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.

        This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes. Binary kits for Windows and Linux platforms are immediately available for download, Android and Mac OS packages will follow shortly.

      • TeXstudio 2.12.20 Released! How to Install via PPA

        The open-source LaTeX text editor TeXstudio 2.12.20 was released today as a new bug-fix release for the 2.12 series.

        Most notably changes in TeXstudio 2.12.20 include fix bug when replacing highlighted search results, and add \text{} to amsmath.cwl.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • ShotX Studio got a big boost to sales by releasing a free torrent of Danger Gazers

        This is certainly an unusual way to get a little extra support for your game. ShotX Studio, an indie outfit of just developer Shota Bobokhidze who recently released the rather good Danger Gazers put it up in a torrent.

        After posting about what they did on Reddit, it ended up as an extremely popular post. In doing so, they had a spike of about "400%" increase in their sales (they didn't want to share the number of copies) with many appreciating the gesture for those who cannot afford to purchase a copy directly. They had emails thanking them, people asking where they can donate and they seem generally very happy with how it turned out.

      • Super Mega Space Blaster Special Turbo arcade shooter released

        Super Mega Space Blaster Special Turbo is a long name and this is supposed to be the expanded edition of the 2019 release, giving additional arcade-style shoot 'em up action.

      • MediaTek Helio G70 & Helio G70T Processors Targets Mainstream Gaming Smartphones

        Announced last summer, MediaTek Helio G90 & Helio G90T processors are specifically designed for gaming on smartphones and ideals for titles such as Fornite, PUBG, or KOG.

      • Grand space strategy game AI War 2 had a massive update so big it's 'almost a sequel'

        Arcen Games sound quite proud of how big the latest update to AI War 2 is, saying it's "Almost a sequel in how much it adds to the core game mechanics and AI.".

        They certainly don't mess around when it comes to post-release support, with the actual changelog taking up around 30 pages when pasted into a word processor. Blimey, that's a lot to go over and it would be a bit mad to attempt to. Safe to say, everything has been touched.

      • Korean survival horror-adventure 'The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters' leaving Early Access this month

        Atmospheric, story-driven Korean survival horror-adventure from Devespresso Games and Headup 'The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters' is just about ready, with a full release announced for January 28.

      • Silly physics sandbox Garry's Mod is getting some big upgrades

        Garry's Mod is a game about screwing around, playing with physics and possibly creating your own fun game and it's about to get some big upgrades.

        Actually getting games and extra content to play in Garry's Mod is about to get quite a bit easier, with an update releasing on January 21 which moves it onto a more modern Steam API. For the Steam Workshop this means addons won't have a size limit (so you can download everything in a single pack) and they can show their real uncompressed size. Facepunch also said that new or updated addons will take less space on your drives thanks to all this too.

      • Upcoming point and clicker 'Born Punk' has a Steam page up, coming to GOG and newer trailer

        I do love a good bit of Cyberpunk, I also love the point and click genre getting a resurgence in recent years and Born Punk really does look and sound great.

        Funded on Kickstarter last year, Insert Disk 22 have been hacking away to get the game ready to release. Ahead of that, they now have a Steam page live you can properly follow it on. Additionally, they've now confirmed it will release on GOG but no store page up just yet.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • ZANSHIN 0.5.71

          The GPG signing key for the tar is Jonathan Riddell with 0xEC94D18F7F05997E.

        • Jonathan Riddell: Zanshin 0.5.71

          We are happy and proud to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.5.71.

          This updates the code to work with current libraries and apps from Kontact.

        • Krita in 2019 and 2020

          Let’s have some statistics first! Statistics are fun! (And notoriously unreliable) We started 2019 with about 450 open bugs — and that’s how we ended 2019. That said, we had 1236 new bug reports and closed 1272. Still, our 2018 fund raiser was all about getting rid of bugs, and that seems to be a tough proposition.

          According to openhub, we had 2271 commits from 60 contributors. This excludes translation commits, because those are still done in a subversion repository, apart from Krita. We had nine releases (4.2.0 to 4.2.8) in 2019, slightly less than we’d planned, we’d wanted to have twelve releases. We had four Google Summer of Code students, and most of their work has already been merged and will be in Krita 4.3.0: a new magnetic selection tool, the history docker and the android port.

          Next to fixing bugs, we’re work on that 4.3.0 release, but the main reason why 4.3.0 didn’t happen in 2019 was because rewriting the core system for loading brushes, gradients and so turns out to be much more work than we had ever thought. We should have approached that much more gradually, but we couldn’t figure out how to make that work.

          We had 2,346,618 unique downloads from the download page on this website; that excludes downloads from other download sites, downloads from release announcements or downloads from the various stores. At a guess, we’ll have topped 3,000,000 downloads in total this year.

    • Distributions

      • New Releases

        • Officially Linux Lite 4.8 Released & Available for Download Now!!

          Linux Lite 4.8 Released: The Developers team of Linux Lite has officially announced the release of the latest version of Linux Lite 4.8 version. According to them, this is the best alternative for Windows 7! The Linux Lite 4.8 is built based on the Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS version.

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • Solaar | Application for Logitech Unifying Receivers and Devices on openSUSE

          I recently purchased a new Logitech wireless keyboard for my kitchen computer because the Bluetooth keyboard I previously used was driving me nuts. Mostly for the keyboard layout and sometimes because it didn’t want to connect. Possibly due to hardware failure or bad design. It also doesn’t have media keys so I thought it best just to replace it.

          I have previously used ltunify with success but I only used it because “L” comes before “S” so that was my first stop. Since I received feedback that I should try Solaar I did so this time. Since there isn’t an official Linux based application available from Logitech, the fine open source community has stepped in to make managing your devices simple and straight forward.

          [...]

          Having Solaar in the system try is quite handy. Though, the reality is, I don’t need it all the time but having it to manage your devices is very handy. It’s nice to know that you can manage multiple Unifying receivers with this application. This is easy to use and has a great, well laid out and straight forward interface. I am glad I was recommended to try this application out.

        • What’s New with SUSE CaaS Platform?

          SUSE CaaS Platform continues its steady pace of advancement, delivering new capabilities targeted at improving the Kubernetes platform operator experience. In addition to updating to Kubernetes 1.16, the SUSE CaaS Platform also now enables operators to consolidate operations across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-platform environments; to simplify cluster and application management with a web-based console; and to optimize system performance with powerful monitoring and management capabilities.

          Customer centricity was once again at the heart of feature considerations and enhancements for SUSE CaaS Platform. Over the past couple of weeks, we heard an increasing desire from our customers for key capabilities like the need for a unified management console and the need for more powerful data visualization. We listened to you, and your needs, and let that be our guide for development.

      • Fedora Family

        • F31-20200113 updated Lives released

          The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F31-20200116 Live ISOs, carrying the 5.4.8-200 kernel.

          This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have 1GB+ of updates)).

          A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, Southern-Gentleman for testing these iso.

        • Let’s write a new vision statement for Fedora

          This statement reflects our values, the four foundations of Freedom, Friends, Features, and First.

          We talked a lot about Fedora’s Freedom foundation. As a project, we want everyone to live in a universe of free and open source software; the user should be in control of their computing. But we also recognize the reality that we have to lead people there, not push them. People have hardware that requires closed drivers, and sometimes the software they need for their jobs or life isn’t open either. We want people to be able to use open source for everything, but often the real world doesn’t let them. We need to provide a path so people can get to the ideal, not demand that they teleport there or else. We want our vision statement to encourage a productive approach rather than to act as a weapon.

          We also want the statement to reflect our community approach — the Friends foundation. Fedora isn’t bits and bytes. Fedora is our people, and we want the statement to include our vision of a healthy community. As the saying goes, none of us is as smart as all of us. A welcoming and inclusive project produces better results.

          And finally, we want to keep our focus on innovation, both by incorporating the latest upstream code and in the work we do to build our releases. While long-term support is important, it’s not our focus — and many other communities do a great job providing this already. Fedora advances the state of the art in Linux operating systems. We try new things, many of them succeed, but some do not — we learn from those and move on.

      • Debian Family

        • Tails 4.2.2 is out

          This release is an emergency release to fix a critical security vulnerability in Tor Browser.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Why you should upgrade Windows 7 to Ubuntu

          Windows 7 has reached the end of its life. It will no longer receive security updates and Microsoft’s technical support will stop. Running an out-of-date OS can have serious potential risks. Fortunately, there are two simple ways to solve this problem: 1. Buy a new computer running another operating system, or 2. Install Linux on any computer you like. In this blog, we’re talking about the Linux option, specifically Ubuntu.

        • How to switch from Windows 7 to Chrome OS CloudReady

          Yesterday, a friend asked what he should do since Windows 7 has come to the end of its supported life. I asked him what he uses his computer for. He replied, "Email and Facebook." He added that he has no interest in moving to Windows 10. He's far from the only one. About one in five users have stuck with Windows 7 to the bitter end. And, really, for his purposes, who can blame him? For him, Windows 7 just works. So, rather than try to convince him to move to Linux, I suggested he consider Neverware's Chrome OS variant, CloudReady. Here's how to do it.

        • Windows 7 support is ending — what do you do now?

          Microsoft is pulling the plug on Windows 7 support, which means that the decade-old operating system will get its final security update today. You can continue using Windows 7 indefinitely — aside from a nag screen that will likely pop up to let you know support has ended, nothing will change. But Windows 7 will likely become less secure over time as new vulnerabilities are discovered, exploited, and left unpatched.

          According to StatCounter, nearly 27-percent of all Windows computers were running Windows 7 as of December, 2019. So what do you do if you have one of those PCs?

          [...]

          Option 4: Say goodbye to Windows (and install GNU/Linux, Chrome OS, or something else)

          Windows isn’t the only game in town. For more than 20 years, some folks have been buying Windows computers and replacing the operating system with GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch, or Gentoo, just to name a few. There are literally hundreds of options.

          The folks at Ubuntu even published a January 14th blog post titled “Why you should upgrade Windows 7 to Ubuntu.” It’s unclear if everyone would consider this an upgrade, but it is true that for many users Ubuntu (and other Linux-based operating systems) have most of the software you’d need from a modern operating system.

        • ‘Disco Dingo’ of Ubuntu to reach end of life: Make sure to upgrade

          On January 23, Ubuntu ‘Disco Dingo’ is to reach its end of life. This news is released by canonical recently. If you are still using the version released in April, make sure you upgrade it before the deadline. This will keep you notified of all the latest security updates if you think that it is difficult to upgrade to Ubuntu. It is not. You just have to go to the upgrade option to see the instructions.

          How to get notified about the latest versions?

          Canonical provides a detailed guide to install the latest update and refer to the release notes in case of any issues. Go to “Settings” and select “Update manager,” click the option “Notify me of a new Ubuntu version.”

        • Unity 8 Desktop On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Could Take A Year Before Being Usable

          While Canonical no longer develops their Unity 8 stack for Ubuntu, the UBports crew continues advancing Ubuntu Touch mobile as a community project and as part of that they do work on Unity 8 for their devices and desktop support. But if you're hoping to see Unity 8 running nicely on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, that could be a while.

          Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is releasing in April but it could still be a year or so before Unity 8 is considered "usable" on the updated desktop.

        • Ubuntu Touch Q&A 67

          Complete overhaul of Suru colors

        • New Folder Icons, Aubergine As Second Accent Color Currently In Testing For Ubuntu 20.04 Yaru Theme

          For the next Ubuntu release (20.04 LTS, to be released in April 2020), the Yaru maintainers are testing some important theme changes.

          One of the updates involves using aubergine as a second accent color instead of blue, which didn't fit with the rest of the theme. Aubergine is now used for the GNOME Shell sliders and dialogs (active button/field), as well as for the Gtk progress bars, sliders, checkboxes, radioboxes and switches. The link color continues to be blue because aubergine is usually the color used for visited links, which would cause confusion.

          The Yaru icon theme was also updated with brand-new folder icons, which are now predominantly gray, with aubergine/orange as accent colors.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • CMS

        • 10 Best WordPress Migration Plugins

          Before the widespread adoption of WordPress, transferring web data between websites was more than a painstaking task for any beginner developer because it typically required using scripts and several terminal commands to SSH files around.

          Things got a lot better when WordPress came along and developers created plugins that can help even beginners to the content management system move existing website data such as plugins, themes, customizations, databases, etc. from an old site tp a new one, for example.

          Today’s article is a compilation of the best WordPress migration plugins for your WordPress websites. That is to say that they feature a beautiful modern UI, reasonable prices, easy of use, and support from both their developers and certified users.

          Nothing in this world is perfect, though, so allow me to highlight the pros and cons of each plugin as that will further simplify the choice you have to make when making your decision.

      • Funding

        • Daniel Stenberg: Backblazed

          libcurl is MIT licensed (well, a slightly edited MIT license) so there’s really not a lot a company need to do to follow the license, nor does it leave me with a lot of “muscles” or remedies in case anyone would blatantly refuse to adhere. However, the impression I had was that this company was one that tried to do right and this omission could then simply be a mistake.

          [...]

          At the same time, Backblaze also becomes the new largest single-shot donor to curl when they donated no less than 15,600 USD to the project, making the recent Indeed.com donation fall down to a second place in this my favorite new game of 2020.

          Why this particular sum you may ask?

        • Google gives $1 million to UVM to advance open source research

          Members of the UVM-Google team, left to right: Juniper Lovato, director of education and outreach for Complex Systems; Nick Cheney, research assistant professor, Computer Science; Jim Bagrow, associate professor, Mathematics and Statistics; Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, assistant professor, Computer Science; Julia Ferraioli, Open Source at Google; Peter Dodds, director of the Complex Systems Center and professor, Mathematics and Statistics; and Amanda Casari, Open Source at Google. (Photo: Brian Jenkins)

          Vermont Business Magazine The Google Open Source Programs Office, a division of Google that manages Google’s use and release of open source software and promotes open source programming, has provided the University of Vermont (UVM) Complex Systems Center a $1 million unrestricted gift to support open source research.

          Open source is about more than the software—it’s a framework that defines how software is created, released, shared, and distributed, as well as the community that is formed around it.

          [...]

          In addition to the core team, two postdoctoral positions are currently open in associated research areas. Other UVM faculty involved with the research include Josh Bongard, professor of Computer Science; Peter Dodds, professor of Mathematics and Statistics; Nick Cheney, research assistant professor of Computer Science; and Chris Danforth, professor of Mathematics and Statistics. The UVM program director is Juniper Lovato, director of outreach for the Complex Systems Center.

          The Google collaboration reflects UVM’s commitment to its land-grant mission to enhance the intellectual, human, economic and social capital of its community, the state, and the nation.

      • FSF

        • GNU Projects

          • First Poke-Conf at Mont-Soleil - A report

            This last weekend we had the first gathering of poke developers, as part of the GNU Hackers Meeting at Mont-Soleil, in Switzerland. I can say we had a lot of fun, and it was a quite productive meeting too: many patches were written, and many technical aspects designed and clarified.

            Attendants: Bruno Haible, Egeyar Bagcioglu, John Darrington, Luca Saiu, Darshit Shah, Jose E. Marchesi.

            First we made a little introductory talk for the benefit of the GHM attendants who were not familiar with poke, followed by a quick review of the recent developments. After that, we went to discuss some serious business: handling of stream-like IO spaces, integral "atoms" in structs, the adoption of a bug tracking system for the project, how to best support Unicode and UTF-8 in poke, and many many other things, some of which are summarized below.

        • Licensing / Legal

          • How and why to use Creative Commons licensed work

            Creative Commons (CC) copyright is a series of copyright licenses that make it easy for creators to share their work and adapt the work of others. Just because something is online doesn’t mean you are free to use it however you like.

            [...]

            Photos, art, movies, songs, and books all belong to the people who made them. When a new work is created, the copyright belongs to the creator. The creator has a right to decide how their work will (or won’t) be copied, remixed (changed), and shared. No one can use someone’s work without permission.

            Creative Commons empowers creators to give implicit permission to everyone to use, share, and remix their work without needing to ask in each instance. Creative Commons licenses can be multi-layered, allowing more or less freedom.

      • Programming/Development

        • The MLIR-Targeting "FC" LLVM Fortran Compiler Is Now Open-Source

          Last week we reported on "FC" as a new LLVM Fortran compiler targeting the new MLIR intermediate representation. That new Fortran compiler is now public and open-source.

          While the Flang compiler is being upstreamed at the moment, "FC" is being worked on by consulting firm start-up CompilerTree as an LLVM Fortran compiler that has shifted focus from using the conventional LLVM IR to MLIR as LLVM's new IR developed by Google with a focus on machine learning.

        • LLVM/Clang 10.0 Adds AMD Zen 2 Scheduler Model For Optimized Code Generation

          It's too bad that it has taken so many months after AMD Zen 2 based Ryzen and EPYC processors began shipping to see this compiler support in place, but the good news now is that for the upcoming release of LLVM 10.0 is now the Zen 2 scheduler model being added to the "znver2" target.

          Going back to before the Zen 2 processors began shipping last summer, in February AMD Znver2 support was added for LLVM Clang 9.0. But like the GCC compiler support at the time, it added new instructions supported by these CPUs but didn't update the scheduler model / cost tables. In July AMD-partner SUSE added Znver2 tuning to GCC including a new scheduler model that was wired up for GCC 10 and back-ported to GCC 9.2.

        • AMD Begins Providing PowerPC Builds Of Their "AOMP" GPU Compiler

          AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler for OpenMP and HIP support on GPUs as part of Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have begun providing PowerPC 64-bit LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing Radeon GPU compute to happen on POWER9 systems.

          As reported on in December, we've been seeing AMDKFD compute driver work for PowerPC that ultimately landed in Linux 5.5. This work has been continuing in user-space with their AOMP GPU compute compiler now also working for PowerPC and AMD even providing PowerPC 64-bit binaries. The actual AOMP lifting for PPC64LE support isn't much considering this compiler is based on LLVM Clang that has long supported the architecture.

        • data-types for representing stream-processing programs



          This year I want to write much more about my PhD work on my blog, and here's my first effort. Most of this material has been languishing as a draft for over a year, so it's past time to get it out!

        • KDAB Challenge Solutions

          Proxy types can be tricky. If we got a QChar (or a reference to a QChar) by accessing a character in a QString with the operator[] as most people would expect to, the automatic type deduction requested by auto current = hello[i] would deduce that current is of type QChar.

          But QString::operator[] does not return a QChar. It returns a QCharRef. Even if we think of it as a reference to a QChar, the compiler does not, and the automatic type deduction can not remove the reference part like it would if the return type was a proper reference (QChar&).

          This means that current will be a value of type QCharRef. When we modify it, it will modify the original string (contrary to what most people expect because of C++’s value semantics).

          One of the solutions here is not to use automatic type deduction and explicitly specify the type of current to be QChar.

        • Introducing GVariant schemas

          GLib supports a binary data format called GVariant, which is commonly used to store various forms of application data. For example, it is used to store the dconf database and as the on-disk data in OSTree repositories.

          The GVariant serialization format is very interesting. It has a recursive type-system (based on the DBus types) and is very compact. At the same time it includes padding to correctly align types for direct CPU reads and has constant time element lookup for arrays and tuples. This make GVariant a very good format for efficient in-memory read-only access.

          Unfortunately the APIs that GLib has for accessing variants are not always great. They are based on using type strings and accessing children via integer indexes. While this is very dynamic and flexible (especially when creating variants) it isn’t a great fit for the case where you have serialized data in a format that is known ahead of time.

        • Perl / Raku

          • Create PDF using Perl/PDF::API2

            I wrote a practical and detailed description of Perl's PDF::API2.

            It turns out that PDF::API2 is a library for performing necessary and sufficient PDF operations.

          • Paws XXXXVIII (Way too many 'I' s)

            Well I think it is a first here in the Paws patrol. I spent the day plunging away with CloudFront and I have no new Paws issues but I did learn and important practical lesson about using CloudFront.

        • Python

          • Interviewed about microservices

            I got interviewed about Microservice and talk a bit about my last book, Hands-on Docker for Microservices with Python.

            I was an interesting view on what are the most important areas of Microservices and when migrating from Monolith architecture is a good idea. And also talking about related tools like Python, Docker or Kubernetes.

          • Passing a function as an argument to another function in Python

            One of the more hair-raising facts we learn in my introductory Python trainings is that you can pass functions into other functions. You can pass functions around because in Python, functions are objects.

            You likely don’t need to know about this in your first week of using Python, but as you dive deeper into Python you’ll find that it can be quite convenient to understand how to pass a function into another function.

            This is part 1 of what I expect to be a series on the various properties of “function objects”. This article focuses on what a new Python programmer should know and appreciate about the object-nature of Python’s functions.

          • “Microservices require a high-level vision to shape the direction of the system in the long term,” says Jaime Buelta

            To get an understanding of what exactly microservices are, when we should use them, when not to use them, we sat with Jaime Buelta, the author of Hands-On Docker for Microservices with Python. Along with explaining microservices and their benefits, Buelta shared some best practices developers should keep in mind if they decide to migrate their monoliths to microservices.

          • Quick Dive into Selenium with python

            Hi guys, I am chris, a software engineer and I have been building stuff with python since 2016. This would be a fast paced introduction to selenium.

            What is Selenium?

            In simple terms, selenium is a tool used to automate browsers, in even simpler terms selenium can be used to control broswers. To find out more visit the selenium site

          • Supercharge Your Classes With Python super()

            While Python isn’t purely an object-oriented language, it’s flexible enough and powerful enough to allow you to build your applications using the object-oriented paradigm. One of the ways in which Python achieves this is by supporting inheritance, which it does with super().

          • Django 3 Tutorial & CRUD Example with MySQL and Bootstrap

            Django 3 is released with full async support! In this tutorial, we'll see by example how to create a CRUD application from scratch and step by step. We'll see how to configure a MySQL database, enable the admin interface, and create the django views.

            We'll be using Bootstrap 4 for styling.

          • Creating a transparently encrypted field in Django

            This is officially PythonDiary's first Python 3 article! Python 2 is now officially dead, so there's less reasons to make that a major focus going forward.

            In some rare situations you may wish to have data which may otherwise be visible on the Django site, or through the Django admin, but may wish to have this data transparently encrypted into the database. This could be very useful, if for example, you use an untrusted database where it is not managed by you, and some database administrator can indeed either dump the data, or otherwise view the stored schemas. This is common with managed databases, which are either maintained by a hosting provider, or is shared with other tenants. In this current day and age with many database breaches appearing in the news from large vendors, you can never be 100% sure that the data you save into your database will never be leaked.

            Django supports custom fields on your database models, and the various CRUD and model services Django provides will use these fields with ease, making the creation of a globally transparently encrypted field possible. First lets start with the creation of the custom Django field to explain how that works first.

          • Return the word with the longest length within a string using Python

            Simple challenge – eliminate all bugs from the supplied code so that the code runs and outputs the expected value. The output should be the length of the longest word, as a number. There will only be one ‘longest’ word.

            Above is a question from CodeWars, we will create the below python function to perform the above task.

          • Getting Jenkins Jobs by Build State with Python

            I have been working with Python and Jenkins a lot lately and recently needed to find a way to check the job’s status at the build level. I discovered the jenkinsapi package and played around with it to see if it would give me the ability to drill down to the build and resultset level within Jenkins.

            In the builds that I run, there are X number of sub-jobs. Each of these sub-jobs can pass or fail. If one of them fails, the entire build is marked with the color yellow and tagged as “UNSTABLE”, which is failed in my book. I want a way to track which of these sub-jobs is failing and how often over a time period. Some of these jobs can be unstable because they access network resources, which others may have been broken by a recent commit to the code base.

            I eventually came up with some code that helps me figure out some of this information. But before you can dive into the code, you will need to install a package.

          • Wing Python IDE 7.2 Release Candidate 1 - January 14, 2020

            Wing 7.2 adds auto-formatting with Black and YAPF, expands support for virtualenv, adds support for Anaconda environments, explicitly supports debugging modules launched with python -m, simplifies manually configured remote debugging, and fixes a number of usability issues.

          • Creating password input widget in PyQt

            One of the most common parts of writing any desktop tool and taking password input is about having a widget that can show/hide password text. In Qt, we can add a QAction to a QLineEdit to do the same. The only thing to remember, that the icons for the QAction, must be square in aspect ratio; otherwise, they look super bad.

            The following code creates such a password input, and you can see it working at the GIF at the end of the blog post. I wrote this for the SecureDrop client project.

        • Shell/Ncurses

          • Organize your email with Notmuch

            Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

            Maildir is probably one of the most useful mail storage formats out there. And there are a LOT of tools to help with managing your mail. The one I keep coming back to is a little program called Notmuch that indexes, tags, and searches mail messages. And there are several programs that work with Notmuch to make it even easier to handle a large amount of mail.

            [...]

            Tagging messages in bulk is probably more useful, though, since manually updating tags at every run can be really tedious.

            [...]

            In the coming days, I'll show you some other mail clients that will likely integrate with tools you already use. In the meantime, check out some of the other tools that work with Maildir mailboxes—you might find a hidden gem I've not tried yet.

  • Leftovers

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Security

          • On retiring the Maxmind GeoIP database

            Maxmind, a US-based company who is quite well-known for providing their GeoIP database which fires a lot of services that need GeoIP data, has changed their usage policy on this database with effect of the beginning of this year. Unfortunately this makes it unusable for IPFire and we have decided to replace it. Here is how we are going to do it.

            IPFire is using geo information for two things: We are showing flags next to DNS servers, firewall hits, etc. and we are using it to block connections from or to certain countries in the firewall.

            We, the IPFire developers, have started a side-project to replace the Maxmind GeoIP databases in IPFire over two years ago. We felt that this was necessary because of the quality of the database getting worse and worse. Strict licences as well as changes like this December are very incompatible with the freedom that we want to provide for all IPFire users.

          • Mozilla Security Blog: January 2020 CA Communication

            Mozilla has sent a CA Communication to inform Certificate Authorities (CAs) who have root certificates included in Mozilla’s program about current events relevant to their membership in our program and to remind them of upcoming deadlines. This CA Communication has been emailed to the Primary Point of Contact (POC) and an email alias for each CA in Mozilla’s program, and they have been asked to respond to the following 7 action items:

          • Exploit that gives remote access affects ~200 million cable modems (ars technica)

            Thus far, there doesn't seem to be any information out there on whether routers running OpenWrt are vulnerable.

          • Exploit that gives remote access affects ~200 million cable modems

            Hundreds of millions of cable modems are vulnerable to critical takeover attacks by hackers halfway around the world, researchers said.

            The attacks work by luring vulnerable users to websites that serve malicious JavaScript code that's surreptitiously hosted on the site or hidden inside of malicious ads, researchers from Denmark-based security firm Lyrebirds said in a report and accompanying website. The JavaScript then opens a websocket connection to the vulnerable cable modem and exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in the spectrum analyzer, a small server that detects interference and other connectivity problems in a host of modems from various makers. From there, remote attackers can gain complete control over the modems, allowing them to change DNS settings, make the modem part of a botnet, and carry out a variety of other nefarious actions.

          • Security updates for Tuesday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (wordpress and xen), Mageia (graphicsmagick, kernel, makepasswd, and unbound), openSUSE (containerd, docker, docker-runc,, dia, ffmpeg-4, libgcrypt, php7-imagick, proftpd, rubygem-excon, shibboleth-sp, tomcat, trousers, and xen), Oracle (firefox), Red Hat (kernel), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (e2fsprogs, kernel, and libsolv, libzypp, zypper), and Ubuntu (libgcrypt20, libvirt, nginx, sdl-image1.2, and spamassassin).

          • OpenStack Security and Compliance for Telco
          • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

            • NPM security team removes malicious package caught leaking data from UNIX systems

              The security team at Node Package Manager (npm) has removed a malicious JavaScript package present in the npm repository, which was observed stealing sensitive data from UNIX systems.

            • Malicious npm package exfiltrating data from UNIX systems

              A malicious JavaScript package was uploaded Dec. 30 2019 on the Node Package Manager (npm), the world’s largest software registry, containing over 800,000 code packages that developers use to write JavaScript applications.

              The package, identified as 1337qq-js, was spotted stealing sensitive data through install scrips of Unix Systems. It marks the sixth-known incident to strike the npm repository in the past three years.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Women Are Forced To Commit Crime Because Of Social Challenges – Auxillia Mnangagwa

        FIRST Lady Amai Auxilia Mnangagwa urged men to respect and support their families as a way of fighting crime and building the nation.

        Amai Mnangagwa said this in her speech at the Female Open Prison Ground Breaking Ceremony held at Marondera Prison on Friday.

        [...]

        “Thus, the establishment of the female open prison would be quite conducive for promoting and maintaining such family fabric and unity given that this would provide them with more time and opportunities to be in touch with children and families apart from aiding their rehabilitation and re-integration given that such an institution would at most be serving as a hallway home,” she said.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • “Nonappealable” means Not Keeping the PTAB in Check

          The Federal Circuit has denied en banc rehearing in this case that focuses primarily on the ability of the appellate court to keep the PTAB in-line. In this particular case, the PTAB did not follow a prior remand order from the Federal Circuit. In particular, in a prior SAS appeal, the Federal Circuit indicated that the PTAB should hold trial on “each claim challenged.” Instead, the PTAB decided to dismiss the whole case — finding it it be “inefficient and expensive” to include the additional grounds. Judge Newman argues that such disobedience should be treated swiftly.

        • Parallel District Court and ITC Litigation

          ARM’s US Patent 8,720,320 covers a Keurig coffee-machine adapter. Typical cartridges are single-use — rendered ineffective after being pierced by the brewer during operation. ARM’s device isn’t pierced and so retains its effectiveness over multiple uses.

          ARM filed an ITC complaint against Eko and others. Although the ITC ruled that several claims were invalid for lacking written description (e.g., claim 5), Eko defaulted with respect to claims 8 and 19 and the ITC issued an exclusion order with respect to those claims.

          Subsequently, Eko filed a district court declaratory judgment action to collaterally attack the ITC ruling as to claims 8 and 19. The district court complied and found the claims not-infringed (summary judgment) and invalid as obvious (jury verdict). The district court also awarded attorney fees to Eko as the prevailing party in what it found to be an exceptional case.

          [...]

          However, on appeal, the Federal Circuit refused to order a new trial — holding that jury instructions must be considered as a whole – “we think that the instruction taken as a whole provides reasonable clarity as to the correct test for willful infringement.” In particular, the instructions allow for a finding of infringement that is simply “deliberate.” Later, the instructions also focus jury attention on intentional copying and belief of non-infringement. Those elements of the instructions were sufficient to cure the problematic language since “[t]he jury was reasonably informed that it could make a finding of willful infringement if it found that ARM deliberately or

        • South Africa’s Constitutional Court rules on whether patent validity can be used as both a sword (revocation action) and a shield (infringement action) in patent proceedings

          Late in October last year, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (the ConCourt) handed down its decision on the appropriate default position in patent proceedings in Ascendis Animal Health (Pty) Limited vs Merck Sharp Dohme Corporation and 2 Others [2019] ZACC 41. The appeal raised the question of whether a defendant who has unsuccessfully challenged the validity of a patent in revocation proceedings may be permitted to raise the issue of patent validity as a defence in infringement proceedings.

          [...]

          In 2011, Ascendis Animal Health (Pty) Limited (the applicant) instituted revocation proceedings at the High Court seeking to invalidate the patent held by Merck Sharp Dohme Corporation and Merial Limited (the respondents) on grounds that the patent was not new (novelty) and lacked an inventive step (obviousness) under section 25(5), (6) and (10) of the South African Patents Act. [Paragraph 7].

          While the revocation action was pending, the respondents instituted proceedings against the applicant for patent infringement.

          The parties agreed to stay the infringement proceedings and proceed with the revocation proceedings to finality. Also, the applicant informed the respondent of its decision to argue only the novelty claim and to present oral evidence regarding the obviousness claim, should the novelty claim fail. The respondents opposed this approach as untenable in law and procedure but the applicant proceeded as it planned and there was no ruling on this during the revocation proceedings. [Paragraph 10]

          The High Court revoked the respondents’ patent for lack of novelty and on appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal, it was held that the novelty claim had no merit and that the patent was valid. [Paragraph 14]

          The applicant returned to the revocation proceedings at the High Court and filed an application to amend its application thus: remove the novelty claim; retain the obviousness claim and introduce a new defence of inutility under section 61(1)(d) of the Patents Act. The respondents opposed this application and sought to amend their pleadings to plead res judicata based on the Supreme Court decision. The respondent also sought an interim order to restrain further infringement pending the outcome of the suit. [Paragraphs 15-16].

        • Lawyers react to US plans to strengthen design patent enforcement

          In-house and private practice lawyers say that proposed legislation could help companies fight counterfeiters and enforce design patents, though others say the bill raises prior art concerns

        • The Broad Institute's CRISPR patent appeal hearing: Day 1, Setting the Stage

          Today was Day 1 of the Board of Appeal hearing on the validity of one of the Broad Institute’s patents relating to fundamental aspects of CRISPR technology. The simple question at the heart of the dispute between the Broad Institute and the opponents was summarised with admirable succinctness by the Board of Appeal in their preliminary opinion:

          “A and B are applicants for the priority application. A alone is the applicant of the subsequent application. Is this priority claim valid even without any assignment of priority right from B to A? The appellants say that the answer is ‘yes’ and the respondents that the answer is ‘no’”.

          IPKat heard from one Katfriend that a crowd of interested parties turned up bright and early for the start of the hearing at 9am. However, it seems that the Hearing did not actually begin until after lunch, with proceedings commencing at 1pm. As expected, the afternoon was devoted to clarifying the requests of the various parties in attendance, before moving on to the arguments concerning linguistic analysis of "any applicant" according to Article 87 EPC.

          [...]

          The stage is therefore set for one of the most exciting Board of Appeal hearings of recent times. If the Opposition Division hearing is anything to go by, we can expect an interesting series of days to come. As a mark of the interest in the case, today's hearing included complaints of tweeting amongst the audience, something it seems the Board is keen to prevent.

          It is widely expected that the Board of Appeal will dismiss the appeal in view of the mountain of Board of Appeal case law in support of the current EPO approach. None-the-less, the Broad Institute have thrown a considerable amount into this fight, despite what many see as the limited chance of success. Will the EPO be swayed?

        • Barkan Wireless patent claims held unpatentable by PTAB

          On January 8, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a public version of its final written decision in Unified Patents Inc. v. Barkan Wireless IP Holdings, L.P., holding as unpatentable 15 of 21 challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,014,284 owned by and asserted by Barkan Wireless IP Holdings, an NPE. The '284 patent, directed to an “add-on base station” in a cellular network, has been asserted in district court litigation against Verizon and Samsung.

        • Software Patents

          • U.S. Supreme Court on Eligibility: Nothing to See Here, Move Along [Ed: Kevin E. Noonan upset that fake, abstract patents remain invalid.]

            It can only be concluded that the Court is comfortable with the state of diagnostic method patenting (i.e., it does not exist in the U.S.). There are members of the Court who have expressed skepticism or outright hostility to such claims, fearing that they will inhibit the practice of medicine, as well as statements (some of dubious provenance) that diagnostic methods are unlike pharmaceuticals and don't need patents (mostly from legal academics and economists). Although Bilski was a business method patent case, some of the Justices there seemed unimpressed with method claims more generally, and this prejudice may be affecting their certiorari behavior. And there is the animus many of the Justices have voiced about the Federal Circuit over the past 15-20 years, which may have made the Court less inclined to come to their rescue.

            Or maybe the Court believes that this decision (not to decide) will motivate Congress to change the law; after all, in Mayo, Justice Breyer said something along the lines of "if you disagree with us, go to Congress." And genuinely, the Court may be facing up to the reality that, even if its concerns are real, the Justices don't have a solution to the problem, in which case Congress is the only answer.

          • Certiorari Denied in Eligibility Cases

            Although there are several other pending eligibility petitions, I gave these three the highest potential for certiorari. The result here is that the Supreme Court is now highly unlikely to take up eligibility anew this term. The one exception is the copyright case of Google v. Oracle where the court will likely discuss a dividing line between patentable and copyrightable subject matter.

            [...]

            Although several of these petitions raise important points, none of them have received the attention or support of the ones denied today.

          • A Decade of Federal Circuit Decisions

            Recently, we updated the Compendium to include all decisions arising from origins other than the District Courts and USPTO. This lets us compare decisions across all origins along a variety of dimensions.

            Figure 1 shows the distribution of Federal Circuit decisions by major source. A “decision” in the Compendium is defined as an opinion or Rule 36 affirmance. I’ve grouped origins with small numbers of appeals, including the Board of Contract Appeals, Department of Justice, and Department of Veterans’ Affairs, into the “other” category. (The figures link to larger versions.)

            [...]

            These graphs show the well-known increase in decisions arising from the USPTO (mostly from inter partes review proceedings), but also a decline in decisions arising from the MSPB. (These outputs match the inputs: the Federal Circuit’s statistics page indicates a decline in the number of docketed appeals arising from the MSPB.) While decisions arising from the district courts and the USPTO have crossed paths over the past few years, the number of decisions originating from the district courts is about where it began the decade. Overall, the court’s total output has risen by about 100 decisions/year during this time.

            [...]

            If there are particular graphs of Federal Circuit decisions from the last decade that you’d like to see, send me an email and if we have the data I’ll try to generate them.

            You’re welcome to play around with the data on your own. If you do use it for something that you publish, please include a citation to the Compendium. There’s a convenient cite form on the landing page for the database. You’re also welcome to use the above graphs in presentations, provided that you give credit to PatentlyO and the Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions (https://empirical.law.uiowa.edu/compendium-federal-circuit-decisions).

      • Trademarks



Recent Techrights' Posts

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António Campinos and the Administrative Council, whose delegates he clearly bribed with EPO budget in exchange for votes
Adrian von Bidder, homeworking & Debian unexplained deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Sainsbury’s Epic Downtime Seems to be Microsoft's Fault and Might Even Constitute a Data Breach (Legal Liability)
one of Britain's largest groceries (and beyond) chains
 
People Don't Just Kill Themselves (Same for Other Animals)
And recent reports about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 18, 2024
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Suicide Cluster Cover-up tactics & Debian exposed
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Linux Foundation Boasting About Being Connected to Bill Gates
Examples of boasting about the association
Alexandre Oliva's Article on Monstering Cults
"I'm told an earlier draft version of this post got published elsewhere. Please consider this IMHO improved version instead."
[Meme] 'Russian' Elections in Munich (Bavaria, Germany)
fake elections
Sainsbury's to Techrights: Yes, Our Web Site Broke Down, But We Cannot Say Which Part or Why
Windows TCO?
Plagiarism: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian Developer list hacking
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 18/03/2024: Putin Cements Power
Links for the day
Flashback 2003: Debian has always had a toxic culture
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
[Meme] You Know You're Winning the Argument When...
EPO management starts cursing at everybody (which is what's happening)
Catspaw With Attitude
The posts "they" complain about merely point out the facts about this harassment and doxing
'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype
Free Software Needs Watchdogs, Too
Gentle lapdogs prevent self-regulation and transparency
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE analogous to identity fraud
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 18/03/2024: LLM Inference and Can We Survive Technology?
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, March 17, 2024
Links 17/03/2024: Microsoft Windows Shoves Ads Into Third-Party Software, More Countries Explore TikTok Ban
Links for the day
Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Our Plans for Spring
Later this year we turn 18 and a few months from now our IRC community turns 16
Open Invention Network (OIN) Fails to Explain If Linux is Safe From Microsoft's Software Patent Royalties (Charges)
Keith Bergelt has not replied to queries on this very important matter
RedHat.com, Brought to You by Microsoft Staff
This is totally normal, right?
USPTO Corruption: People Who Don't Use Microsoft Will Be Penalised ~$400 for Each Patent Filing
Not joking!
The Hobbyists of Mozilla, Where the CEO is a Bigger Liability Than All Liabilities Combined
the hobbyist in chief earns much more than colleagues, to say the least; the number quadrupled in a matter of years
Jim Zemlin Says Linux Foundation Should Combat Fraud Together With the Gates Foundation. Maybe They Should Start With Jim's Wife.
There's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud
Not About Linux at All!
nobody bothers with the site anymore; it's marketing, and now even Linux
Links 17/03/2024: Abuses Against Human Rights, Tesla Settlement (and Crash)
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, March 16, 2024
Under Taliban, GNU/Linux Share Nearly Doubled in Afghanistan, Windows Sank From About 90% to 68.5%
Suffice to say, we're not meaning to imply Taliban is "good"
Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 17/03/2024: Winter Can't Hurt Us Anymore and Playstation Plus
Links for the day