Needless to say, the security flaw, which is tracked as CVE-2019-0090, is worrying for everyone whose devices might be impacted, especially as the number of exploits launched by attackers with local access could grow in the short term.
But if you’re using a Librem Linux laptop launched by Purism, you’re perfectly safe, as the company says its implementation of the Intel ME doesn’t allow an attacker to exploit the flaw on its Intel-based computers.
Last time, we heard about Manjaro Linux’s own laptop in 2017, when they first released Manjaro Spitfire in collaboration with Station X. Currently, we can hardly find any update about the Manjaro Spitfire laptop. It looks like the project has already been closed.
But here’s another big news for all Manjaro and Linux gaming fans. On their official Twitter handle, Manjaro Linux has revealed their collaboration with AMD Ryzen to bring a new Linux gaming laptop. Could it stand out against other Linux laptops? Let’s find out more.
Josh and Kurt talk about video games. Yeah, video games. Specifically about cheating in video games. There's a lot of other security themes in the discussion. With the news being horrible these days, we needed to talk about something fun.
Words of encouragement and solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The many commands of the **cdrtools** package, including a bunch of useful utilities for **.iso** files, such as **isoinfo** and **isodump**.
The world around us may be going through strange times, but at least so far kernel development looks normal.
The bulk this week is - as usual - drivers: gpu, mmc, staging, iio, usb, sound... But there's some VM fixes, some arch updates, documentation and tooling (mostly turbostat).
Nothing really stands out, it's all pretty small. I'm going to be optimistic, and say that it's because we're nicely on track for a normal calm release, but obviously it may be partly because everybody is distracted by virus worries. But I haven't seen anything that looks hugely worrisome on the kernel side.
Go test,
Linus
The 5.6-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing; this may be the last one before the final release. "The world around us may be going through strange times, but at least so far kernel development looks normal."
Linux 5.7 is seeing some infrastructure work to provide better out-of-the-box support for some touchscreens on Linux.
In the case of some touchscreens the lack of working out-of-the-box support isn't for lacking a Linux driver but rather not having the necessary firmware in place that's needed by the driver. Unfortunately some touchscreen hardware vendors haven't signed off on allowing their firmware binaries to be redistributed as part of linux-firmware.git, the centralized source for Linux device microcode/firmware files. That in turn is a letdown for allowing good out-of-the-box Linux support with users not being aware of extra steps needed to get the touchscreen working or just left assuming it doesn't work under Linux.
More improvements were queued in recent days to sched/core of CPU scheduler improvements on the table for the forthcoming Linux 5.7 kernel cycle.
One of the main patches to land was the work we talked about earlier this month for improved/faster spreading of CPU utilization. The change in the load balancing code is about ensuring there are pending tasks to pull otherwise the load balance will fail and further delay the spreading of system load. With the change now queued in sched/core, Linaro developer Vincent Guittot found that the average time for sysbench dropped slightly but the average peak time was a great deal less going from 21ms to 10ms while the absolute peak of 41ms to 21ms.
While Ubuntu is based on Debian, for those wondering how the performance of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is looking not only compared to the previous 19.10 and 18.04.4 LTS releases but also Debian 10.3 stable and Debian Testing, here are some benchmark results on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X system.
We have already shown results for how Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is a nice performance upgrade for those with newer hardware, but for those wondering about the performance in relation to upstream Debian, here are some fresh benchmarks. Debian 10.3 was benchmarked as well as Debian Testing as of this week for those development packages that ultimately will make up Debian 11 Bullseye. Likewise, for the Ubuntu 20.04 testing a daily development snapshot was used while more 20.04 LTS benchmarks will be on the way when its April release approaches.
While we have been seeing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS offer better performance with newer hardware platforms, how does the performance compare to Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks on both AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Intel Core i9 9900KS systems.
On two current generation x86_64 desktop platforms here are benchmarks of the current Ubuntu 20.04 near-final development state up against Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X was with the ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Plus WiFi and the Intel Core i9 9900KS on the ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard. Both systems had 16GB of RAM, and Samsung 970 EVO NVMe solid-state storage.
It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield.
In part, this is because of passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as ‘brain fog’. To combat this, we arm myself with open source software that helps us efficiently capture a lot of information. We generally prefer to keep our information local and cloud-free, primarily for security reasons. And we primarily advance software which doesn’t tie itself to any specific company or service, whether it’s Evernote, Google, or Microsoft.
We list here 5 best and free remote desktop (RDP) software available in 2020 which you can immediately download and use in your Linux systems to connect remote devices - Linux or Windows i.e. you can do work from home by connecting to remote machines.
Snapd 2.44.1 Released: SNAP is one of the best Package management system used by GNU and Linux. Snap is an open-source platform which allows developers all around the world to develop their own applications. Most commonly using snap applications by Linux users are “VLC, VS Code, Shot cut, Firefox, Chromium, Postman and Many more“. Ubuntu adopts snap package management system in the year of 2016, and they released the stable version of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with preinstalled snap package management system.
Audacious is an open-source audio player available for multiple platforms that include Linux. Almost after 2 years of its last major release, Audacious 4.0 has arrived with some big changes.
Audacious (music player) 4.0 switches to Qt5 by default, GTK2 version will not receive new features going forward
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Audacious is a free and open source audio player, descendent of XMMS, which runs on Linux, *BSD and Windows. It comes with a graphical equalizer, LADSPA effects, plugins, and two interfaces: GTK2 and Qt5. It also supports Winamp Classic skins.
For the latest Audacious 4.0 release, the music player has switched to Qt5 by default. The GTK2 user interface is still available and supported, but no new features will be added to it.
While the Audacious Qt5 interface has improved a lot since it was first introduced, there are still some missing features, like the Jump to Song window. The developers also recommend to the Winamp-like user interface users to stick with the GTK2 version for the time being.
The team behind the open-source and cross-platform Audacious audio player application have released a new major version, Audacious 4.0, which brings numerous new features and improvements.
Coming about nine years after the 3.0 series and one a half years after version 3.10, Audacious 4.0 is the biggest update to date of the popular audio player. The major new feature being the switch to Qt 5 by default for the graphical user interface instead of GTK.
The change was made due to the Qt UI being quite polished and looks to offer the same level of usability to those used with the older GTK2 UI. It also adds some much-needed improvements like an easy to sort and navigate playlist view and an equalizer presets window.
This release switches to Qt 5 by default. The Qt UI has become quite polished by now. It will be quite familiar to users of the GTK2 UI, but it also brings a few nice-to-have improvements, such as a playlist view that is easier to navigate and sort.
GTK2 remains available and supported as a build option, but new features will only be added to the Qt UI going forward.
Some things that we wanted to get finished didn't make it into this release. In particular, the Qt port of the Winamp-like UI is still missing some key features such the Jump to Song window. Users of the Winamp-like UI may want to continue using GTK2 for now. The Windows builds are also still using GTK2, until some Windows-specific font size issues (on displays greater than 96 DPI) can be worked out in the Qt version.
For longtime Linux users who were fans of the XMMS audio player in the early 2000's, Audacious 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this XMMS-inspired audio player.
With this weekend's Audacious 4.0 release, the Linux audio player has transitioned from its old GTK2 user-interface to now using Qt5 by default. Their Qt user-interface is now deemed good enough to be the default while at least for the time being the GTK2 code does remain in place for those preferring that older UI. In particular, those liking the Winamp-style interface for which XMMS was based on, that isn't yet available in the Qt'ified version. Additionally, the Windows builds of Audacious 4.0 aren't yet enabled for Qt5.
Audacious audio player 4.0 was finally announced as the new stable release. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.10, and Ubuntu 20.04.
Audacious 4.0 switches to Qt 5 UI by default, though GTK2 is still available as a build option.
In today’s modern age, there are a lot of web browsers to choose from, each offering something unique. To enjoy a great browsing experience, you must choose the right browser according to your needs. The following is a comprehensive list of web browsers for Ubuntu.
Firefox is and has always been the default web browser of Ubuntu. Founded in September of 2002, Firefox is a robust web browser. It is the main competitor of Chrome. In terms of privacy, it knocks Google out of the park. Firefox was declining, but it redeemed itself after it’s quantum update offering users a new beautiful UI and a lot of solid features. It also offers a lot of plugins.
Whether you know a lot about computers or you only know as little as you can get by with, you recognize what a PDF File format is. It’s the document format that has made digital documents widely acceptable. No matter where it was created or using what, a PDF document always looks the same as long as you have software that can read a PDF file. Naturally, PDF is also a popular file format on Linux and there are many PDF Editors on the platform as a result. Here are some of the best PDF editors for Linux, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions. Try the following PDF editing apps and also check out these best application launchers for Linux.
Relax-and-Recover (ReaR in short) is a simple yet powerful, easy-to-setup, full-featured and leading open-source bare metal disaster recovery and system migration solution, written in Bash. It is a modular and configurable framework with numerous ready-to-use workflows for common situations.
ReaR creates a bootable rescue system and/or system backup in various formats. You can boot your bare metal server using the rescue system image and initiate a system restore from the backup. It can restore to different hardware where necessary, hence it can also be employed as a system migration tool.
Looking for a wireless network manager? Wavemon is a command line ncurses-based wireless network monitoring application for Linux.
Wavemon displays live signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters of your wireless network hardware. It should work with all devices supported by the Linux kernel.
The Forest VR running through Steam Play (Proton) Unsure of the Proton version as this is some old footage I found that I hadn't edited.
Monument is an indie FPS that was released in June 2015 to meet 'mostly positive' reviews on Steam. Still, beyond the user reviews, it received considerable criticism on its forum page due to various issues both gameplay and technical.
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Although uncommon, they aren’t the only developers doing this. Even Valve is addressing the problems that a previous title had, and I always remember how another FPS called Eldritch was updated out of the blue, and for that one I originally couldn’t play it due to constant stuttering, but now it works flawlessly. So I definitely commend these efforts.
As the original hardware from the golden era of 8-bit computer gaming becomes a bit long in the tooth, keeping it alive has become something of a concern for enthusiasts. There have been a succession of remanufactured parts for many of the major platforms of the day, and now thanks to [Redherring32] it’s the turn of the NES console.
The OpenTendo is a completely open-source replacement for an original front-loading Nintendo Entertainment System motherboard, using both original or after-market Nintendo CPU and PPU chips, and other still readily available components. It doesn’t incorporate Nintendo’s CIC lockout chip — Drew Littrell wrote a great article on how that security feature worked — but if you really need the authenticity there is also the NullCIC project that can simulate that component.
The first few of these substitute sim races, held last weekend, were successful in ways that surprised even the organizers. Now, many of the people who put them on have spent the intervening week trying to figure out how to use that momentum to fill the gap left by real world racing, as fans around the world hole up at home in a collective attempt to slow the spread of a global virus.
Kodo Linija have given Bloody Rally Show quite a big permanent price drop, as they're no longer going to rely on it for their main income.
In an announcement on Steam they mentioned that they will continue to work on the game (although part-time now). Originally priced at $20 / $16 it's now $13.99 / €£10.99, they said it was "relatively expensive before" as they felt all the effort they put in was worth that much and so far most people agree with it having a "Very Positive" rating on Steam. However, they've not been happy with how it sold "less copies in first month than successful indie games sell in first couple of hours".
As Half-Life: Alyx arrives today, just a reminder that it should hopefully be coming to Linux in a post-release update. On top of that, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive got some fancy cosmetics for it.
This is one of the biggest things Valve has done in a very long time, there's going to be a lot of eyes on them from everywhere. With Virtual Reality currently a niche market (just like Linux gaming…), it definitely will be interesting to see the reception to such a big series going into VR and only VR since it requires a headset. If it does well, I think it's safe to say Valve will be doing more. Once Valve communicate when they expect a Linux build and Vulkan support to land for Half-Life: Alyx, we will let you know.
If you do own a VR kit and plan to play Half-Life: Alyx, please do note in the comments your experiences with it, I've no doubt plenty of people will be watching and wanting to know.
With the full Core Defense game currently in development, they decided to release Core Defense: Prelude for free to give players a taste of Tower Defense and deck-building.
It's a strange, yet quite brilliant idea blending these two different gameplay mechanics together. Usually in a Tower Defense game you will have set locations to place towers, and you would unlock them gradually across a campaign. In Core Defense: Prelude, you earn everything as you play through, unlocking more towers and upgrades after each wave is dealt with. Not only do you choose everything between waves, you also get to entirely reposition all your pieces before an enemy wave too, so you can try out all sorts of combinations.
If this seems like a bit of Déjà vu you would be right, as both Steam and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have repeatedly smashed user records lately.
Back in February and again earlier this month, both of them smashed one concurrent user record after another. Around 18 hours ago, Steam broke through the all-time peak record again hitting 22,678,529 online with over 7 million in-game at the time. Not long after that happened, CS:GO broke it's own concurrent user record online with 1,102,067.
It's probably quite safe to say now a lot of this is due to the Coronavirus, as many more people are being forced to stay home (and so plenty playing games).
Turns out we missed some rather interesting DRM-free releases over GOG recently. Not only do they continue adding new and interesting indie games, they're also getting more classics revived too.
Firstly, the really fun Lair of the Clockwork God from Size Five Games that mixes together a platformer with a point and click adventure as you play with two very different characters is now available on GOG.com. I've had a huge amount of fun with it, the comedy is definitely on-point and quite self-aware to the point that it's repeatedly made me laugh. You also get Devil's Kiss, the prequel Visual Novel with it free.
Cities: Skylines, Stellaris and more now use the Paradox Launcher and for quite a lot of people it has caused some problems. Now, there's an alternative.
Enter "Not Paradox Launcher", yes that's the actual name. As amusing as that is, this open source alternative was originally made for Windows but now it also has Linux support and in my own little testing it works quite well across multiple Paradox titles.
It's designed to use lower memory than the existing launcher, it can auto-start your game instead of clicking through more buttons, no data collection, no user accounts needed, can auto-load your last saved game and more. Quite a useful little open source application.
RetroArch is a wonderful and expansive front-end for tons of emulators and other gaming engines, it's just had a fresh release that entirely replaces the user interface.
XMB was the name of what they were using before, which was an interface thoroughly inspired by Sony's inteface for the PlayStation where you slide along and pick various options. While it looked pretty, their XMB interface wasn't very accessible and relied on people really knowing what to look for.
It’s been some time since Android smartphones came into our lives. The Google Play Store is now home to around 3 million Android apps and games, many of which are so useful or entertaining that many Linux users would like to run them on their favorite operating system. Thanks to the hard work of some talented developers, there are now multiple ways to run Android apps and games on Linux, and we describe seven of them in this article.
The second beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.15 tool-kit is now available for testing.
Qt 5.15 is the last big update before Qt 6.0 that in turn will hopefully ship around November. Qt 5.15 on the graphics front has been working on improved Qt 3D profiling as well as isolating its OpenGL renderer to a plug-in. Also significant on the graphics front is Qt 5.15 having experimental support for Vulkan with its Wayland platform code. Qt's embedded EGLFS layer also has support for Vulkan via the VK_KHR_display extension.
So far, this goal is doing quite well. A visible indicator of this is the new website, which is not just good-looking, but visually in line with other KDE project websites.
On a personal note, I went to FOSDEM this year. Unfortunately, my time with other KDE people was very limited (to put it mildly), as I was occupied with FSFE topics. I did, however, say hello at the KDE booth, and was very touched by the warm welcome there. Bhushan immediately recognised me and handed me a KDE nametag, and I had a nice chat with Nicolas about some Purpose issue I was having.
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The KDE community has decided on three goals to focus on for the next couple of years.
We already have some ideas on how to improve KPhotoAlbum regarding the Consistency goal. If you have further suggestions and ideas we would love to hear them!
A nice stream of new users for our software on the Windows platform.
If you want to help to bring more stuff KDE develops on Windows, we have some meta Phabricator task were you can show up and tell for which parts you want to do work on.
Shortwave is an interesting open-source radio player that offers a good-looking user interface along with a great experience listening to the Internet stations. It utilizes a community-powered database for the Internet stations it lists.
Shortwave is actually a successor of the popular radio app for Linux, Gradio. Its developer Felix joined GNOME and discontinued Gradio to create Shortwave from scratch in Rust programming language. If you were using Gradio as your preferred Internet radio station player, you can import the library as well.
Although it is impossible to get exactly all features just like macOS in Linux because it is a proprietary one, however, we could install one in open source which at least gives feel like it.
The reason behind the infatuation of macOS is the graphic elements and transitions offered by it. And this is the reason why often people around the world trying to install skin or some third party Mac OS X Transformation packages to even make Windows looks alike mac.
Another is the reasons for all this is to experience the dock and since the Apple products are costly thus, everybody couldn’t afford them.
Indeed, the Hackintosh like methods are available online to install and use macOS but they are full of technical complications and incompatibility to our exiting PCs. Therefore, why not use the Linux with all its open source independence while having the MacBook like UI.
Moreover, with Linux customization scope is limitless, we can make our Debian or Ubuntu look like macOS with the help of Macubuntu transformation pack.
Anarchy Linux is an Arch-based distribution that provides a custom installation script designed to quickly configure and install Arch. The Anarchy Linux ISO is 665MB and the installation process requires an Internet connection to download packages. Basically, Anarchy fully automates many steps of the Arch install process. Selecting options in Anarchy's installer is all that is required to get a system up and running. Most of the steps in the text-mode installer are the same as the ones presented when installing almost any Linux distribution, but Anarchy does provide more customization options when it comes to software selection and configuration.
[...]
Anarchy Linux is a good way to quickly get Arch installed and configured. I have some issues with some of the customization choices made in the customized desktops, and not all the desktop options are equal, but the Desktop and Desktop LTS options do provide a good experience. The installer could fail a little more cleanly when it cannot download a package, but when the installer works, it works well. However, the Server and Server LTS options need work. Finally, the Advanced option works great (though the same "fails completely when it cannot download a package" issue also applies here) and is perfect for users who want to customize an Arch install without having to do all the work by hand. Overall, Anarchy Linux a good distribution that needs just a little more polish, which, hopefully, will come as more people use Anarchy and file bug reports.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of FuryBSD 12.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.
EarlyOOM enabled by default
In the new Fedora 32 Workstation Beta, EarlyOOM is enabled by default. EarlyOOM helps to recover from out of memory situations sooner, rather than the typical complete system hang in which the user has no other choice but to force power off.
When your system’s RAM and swap use go below 10% and 5%, EarlyOOM starts initiating termination and kill signals to processes.
More Improvements
Fedora 32 Workstation Beta also enables the fs.trim timer by default, which improves performance and wear leveling for solid-state drives.
GNOME 3.36
This release brings the latest GNOME 3.36, the newest release of GNOME desktop. GNOME 3.36 brings major performance improvements eliminating lags in desktop, Do Not Disturb button in the notification, settings improvements and many more.
Today I released the first official tarball of Jcat, version 0.1.0. I’ve started the process to get the package into Fedora as it will almost certainly be a hard requirement in the next major version of fwupd.
Since I announced Jcat a few weeks ago, I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about the general concept and, surprisingly, even one hardware vendors suggested they might start self-signing their firmware before uploading to the LVFS (which is great!). More LVFS announcements coming soon I promise…
Jcat is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Catalog files and was started as a format for handling arbitrary signatures for external files. The initial focus is on the Fwupd/LVFS use-case in ensuring BIOS/firmware files are not tampered with prior to flashing on the local system. Jcat is a JSON-based file format with Gzip compression and contains a set of detached signatures.
OpenShift 4 was launched not quite a year ago at Red Hat Summit 2019. One of the more significant announcements was the ability for the installer to deploy an OpenShift cluster using full-stack automation. This means that the administrator only needs to provide credentials to a supported Infrastructure-as-a-Service, such as AWS, and the installer would provision all of the resources needed, e.g. virtual machines, storage, networks, and integrating them all together as well.
Over time, the full-stack automation experience has expanded to include Azure, Google Compute Platform, and Red Hat Openstack, allowing customers to deploy OpenShift clusters across different clouds and even on-premises with the same fully automated experience.
For organizations who need enterprise virtualization, but not the API-enabled, quota enforced consumption of infrastructure provided by Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) provides a robust and trusted platform to consolidate workloads and provide the resiliency, availability, and manageability of a traditional hypervisor.
Ceph, the open source object storage born from a doctoral dissertation in 2005, has been aimed principally at highly scalable workloads found in HPC environments and, later, with hyperscalers who did not want to create their own storage anymore.
For years now, Ceph has given organizations object, block, and file-based storage in distributed and unified cluster systems well into the tens of petabytes and into the exabyte levels, storage that takes high levels of expertise to deploy, run, and manage. Building and managing these massive object storage clusters takes the kind of skills that HPC, hyperscaler, cloud builder, and other service providers tend to have. But large enterprises and many Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers do not have such skills. And the workloads they need to run – either themselves or on behalf of clients – is driving demand for object storage among more mainstream enterprises, who want to leverage artificial intelligence, analytics, containers, and similar advanced technologies but who do not have the expertise to manage complex Ceph environments.
Red Hat is looking to fix that. The company, a unit within IBM, has recently rolled out Red Hat Ceph Storage 4, with the goal of bringing petabyte-scale object storage to cloud-native development and data analytics workloads that are becoming more commonplace among enterprises and can take advantage of cloud-level economics. It also will help Red Hat broaden the markets for Ceph.
Open source cloud services may be the next big seller for the local channel after Red Hat appointed two new distributors and pumped more resources into ANZ.
Tech Data and Ingram Micro have been appointed as distributors for the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program and will work with Red Hat to qualify, recruit and on-board partners as CCSPs.
Red Hat said the new local push comes in response to increased interest in managed, multi-hybrid cloud solutions in Australia and New Zealand.
Coming one and a half years after LMDE 3 “Cindy,” the Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 “Debbie” release is here to provide the Linux Mint community with an up-to-date installation media for easier deployment of the Debian-based Linux Mint operating system.
Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series, Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 comes packed with all the latest software updates and security patches released upstream, along with several new features and improvements.
Cool! I didn't even know Linux Mint have a Debian Edition, so LMDE 4 Debbie released last Friday is a great opportunity to explore this.
I will try it in VirtualBox first, and expect to reinstall my Dell XPS 9380 laptop – right after I complete XPS post-configuration in Ansible.
It has been around six months since the major version release of Parrot OS was released. Last month, Parrot came up with a beta version of Parrot 4.8. Continuing the development, Parrot OS has now officially released the stable version 4.8 with various new changes in features and team workflow.
Since Parrot GNU/Linux distro is based on Debian, Parrot 4.8 imports all the updates that were a part of the Debian testing repository in the last six months. If you’re an ethical hacker and pentester, you can sharpen your security lab more than before using this Kali Linux alternate OS.
So I just gave a talk at SCaLE 18x about numpysane and gnuplotlib, two libraries I wrote to make using numpy bearable. With these two, it's actually quite nice!
As part of the LLVM release cycle, I am continuing rebuilding the Debian archive with clang instead of gcc to evaluate potential regressions.
There used to be an HTC HD2 phone, and it could work with any operating system, be it Android, Ubuntu, or even Windows RT. Currently, it is very easy to install regular GNU? Linux distributions on the Samsung Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II. A developer who goes by the Twitter handle RealDanct12 has successfully ported Ubuntu Touch to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7.
He is very well known for his works on the Generic System Image (GSI) ports as well as maintaining LineageOS for various Motorola phones. According to the developers, the existing port of Ubuntu Touch for the F(x)tec Pro1 by Halium developer NotKit helped him to get started with the “hacking” job.
Ubuntu, the leading open-source operating system in the world, is going to release a new version of their operating system named Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa on April 23, 2020. Currently, the developer version is available for testing. This new version of Ubuntu will be a long term support (LTS) version. Ubuntu Focal Fossa will be available for the next 5 years. The new version comes with new features and upgrades. Ubuntu has announced to release Focal Fossa 20.04 LTS for the testing period on January 9, 2020. Before the stable and LTS version is releasing, a developer version is available on the web.
Escuelas Linux 6.8 comes five weeks after the release of Escuelas Linux 6.7 with an updated base from Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system. This means that Escuelas Linux is now powered by Linux kernel 5.3, which dramatically improves hardware support.
On top of the new Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS base, this release comes with some of the latest educational apps. Among these, there’s the LibreOffice 6.4.1 office suite, OpenShot 2.5.1 video editor, Mixxx 2.2.3 DJ software, Semantik 1.2.4 mind-mapping app, and eXeLearning 2.5 free interactive resources app.
Customer app development is possible on the Ubuntu OS; in addition, software development kits are provided for partners.
Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo’s best and worst changes occur at the desktop level with an upgrade to GNOME 3.32. The new GNOME desktop release is important because the GNOME Desktop Environment is gaining significant improvements in speed. Frame rates, smoother start-up animations, faster icon load times, GPU usage reduction, etc. are all part of this new update. It now also includes the latest version of Nautilus. Meaning features like file favorites and elegant resizing are on offer.
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Although the new update doesn’t include much in the way of new features for displays there’s an important introduction. Up until now, Ubuntu Linux hasn’t included fractional scaling support. This ability is only useful for those who use larger HiDPI displays. In Ubuntu 19.04 the feature might come in the form of a hidden option, so you’ll need to enable it. With fractional scaling, users can fine-tune their displays more granularly. You don’t have to set the scale to 1 and wish you could make things either fractionally smaller or bigger. Now you can simply make things either fractionally smaller or bigger.
Some of ITEAD Studio’s Sonoff home automation devices include Zigbee connectivity with for instance Sonoff BASICZBR3 smart switch or a version of Sonoff S31 smart socket with integrated Zigbee.
Those devices usually work via a Zigbee enabled gateway that could be a router, Raspberry Pi SBC, or mini PC, which ITEAD did not offer so far. But to help people making their own Zigbee gateway the company is now selling a low-cost ($3.99) CC2531 USB dongle preloaded with CC2531ZNP-Prod firmware (Zigbee coordinator firmware), and compatible with Zigbee2MQTT open-source Zigbee to MQTT bridge once plugged into a PC, Raspberry Pi, or another Linux SBC.
The ARM series of processors are an industry standard of sorts for a vast array of applications. Virtually anything requiring good power or heat management, or any embedded system which needs more computing power than an 8-bit microcontroller is a place where an ARM is likely found. While they do appear in various personal computers and laptops, [Pieter] felt that their documentation for embedded processors wasn’t quite as straightforward as it could be and created this development board which will hopefully help newbies to ARM learn the environment more easily.
Called the PX-HER0, it’s an ARM development board with an STM32 at its core and a small screen built in. The real work went in to the documentation for this board, though. Since it’s supposed to be a way to become more proficient in the platform, [Pieter] has gone to great lengths to make sure that all the hardware, software, and documentation are easily accessible. It also comes with the Command Line Interpreter (CLI) App which allows a user to operate the device in a Unix-like environment. The Arduino IDE is also available for use with some PX-HER0-specific examples.
Axiomtek has announced the release of the CEM521 — a computer-on-module (COM) Express Type 6 compact form factor module powered by Intel 8th generation Whiskey Lake-U processors with options of the Core i3/i5/i7 or the Celeron 4305UE.
For those not in the know, the COM Express specification defines specialized PCs that are either available as single-board computers (SBCs) or as a processor mezzanine that can be plugged into a carrier board. COM Express computers are used in industrial IoT applications such as medical imaging, military, networking, etc.
The Axiomtek CEM521 is capable of withstanding operating temperatures ranging from -40 €°C to +85 €°C. It can support two DDR4-2600 SO-DIMM slots for up to 64 GB RAM and offers display out via one LVDS, one VGA, and one DDI port. Other I/O options include eight PCIe lanes, three SATA-600 ports, one Gigabit Intel i219-LM LAN, four USB 3.0 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, and four digital I/O channels. A TPM 2.0 module is also availabel for hardware-based data encryption. The CEM521 can also be paired with the CEB94011 development baseboard for additional ports and flexibility.
Arrosticini — sheep or lamb skewers — are a staple of the cuisine of Italy’s Abruzzo region. A typical dish of the pastoral tradition, they are said to have been invented early in the last century by hungry shepherds stuck in the fields during the seasonal movement of their flocks to fresh pastures. The shepherds would butcher an old sheep, cut the meat into small pieces, slide the pieces onto sticks, and cook the skewers over a flame.
Cooking an arrosticino to perfection requires careful control of the cooking temperature and cooking time as well as even heat distribution. The traditional method is to grill the skewers on a fornacella charcoal grill. According to purists, electric cookers compromise the traditional flavor of an arrosticino (and the self-respect of the chef). Grilling arrosticini the traditional way, however, is a labor-intensive, exacting process. Is it possible to achieve grilling perfection using a motorized setup?
We’re increasingly seeing analytical models being developed in open source and it’s easy to understand why. If as an organisation you’re hoping to perform as an agile company, developing in open source is attractive, not least because an open source environment supports rapid and agile development of projects and models.
The skills we see emerging from universities into our industry and professional environment, are supporting this trend, with a marked upturn in graduates with the skills for developing in open source software, using widely available programmes like Python and R.
It’s rapidly becoming a tired cliché, but one thing remains true – data is the new oil. Open source provides an open space to tackle new challenges, to explore the data and see what answers it contains.
Security on our smartphones is very important, today more than ever. Our phones have gotten more and more powerful over the years and we store some of our most personal content on them.
As a result of this need, we have seen operating systems going hard on permissions, being as strict as possible so a rogue app does not access content on our phones that it is not supposed to access.
The information age is all about the growth and spread of data, we were told, but somehow the sacred, private mundane was supposed to be left off the table. Not so much.
Wherever there are privacy concerns and fears of big tech, however, there is a scrappy open-source alternative. In the case of digital assistants, one of the major open-source efforts is Mycroft AI. Mycroft is a digital assistant like Alexa or the Google Assistant, created by a company that has been working to get a consumer-grade product out the door since a 2018 Kickstarter campaign raised $400,000. As of this writing, the hardware has been delayed, but the software (which can be downloaded for free) is very much available.
ING recently open-sourced Lion, ING's core library of web components. Web Components, since their inception eight years ago, strive to provide a standard component model for the Web. Design systems have emerged as a natural use case for web components. It is in this context that InfoQ interviewed Thomas Allmer, core Lion contributor, on the motivation behind ING's open-source move, the Lion component library and its design goals, and the benefits for the community of developers at large. Answers have been edited for clarity.
Citing what he calls “incomplete information” circulating among industry and U.S. policy makers, Altiostar’s Thierry Maupilé said he wants to clarify a few things about the movement to open RAN and virtualized networks: It’s not for tomorrow and the future, but for the here and now.
“This is not pie in the sky,” he said. “This is real innovation which is deployed, working and performing extremely well.”
While Maupilé said he’s heard this “incomplete information” in various venues, Nokia’s CTO for North America, Mike Murphy, told lawmakers a couple weeks ago that there is limited maturity in both ORAN as specified by the ORAN Alliance and RAN virtualization. He was urging them not to put open RAN burdens on rural carriers, which are the least capable of being early adopters.
The deep learning company Dessa has open sourced Atlas, a deep learning platform. Though currently still in beta mode, it is designed to make running, evaluating and deploying deep learning projects easier. It works on macOS, Linux and Windows, and offers TensorBoard integration. Let’s take a closer look.
Open source technologies are increasingly attractive to financial services firms. They are in broader usage across the sector as they are more widely available and are easy to adopt, lowering the barriers for usage in new projects.
Open-source and closed-source coding both play major roles in online securities trading. Open-source software can be accessed by the public, so it is always changing. On the other hand, closed source software is proprietary and the code is closely guarded. The best software choice isn’t always obvious, and both open-source and closed-source software offer advantages.
More than a decade ago, the software development community realized that recoding popular and or useful methods over and over was not an efficient use of time and developed libraries that their peers could use to call methods that have been circulated time after time. These libraries were not developed by companies paying employees, but rather individual contributors from all over the world working on library development for the greater good of the data science and software development community.
Companies like Google and Amazon are also heavily involved in the open-source community – more than that, they were largely responsible for its inception. They were among the first firms to realize that intellectual property is far less useful today than data and collaboration and by open sourcing their tools and technologies, they enabled developers to build upon and augment them, thus kickstarting the open-source community on which many of us now rely. Thanks to this community, any firm wishing to take advantage of AI and machine learning tools can do so, so long as the right use case has been identified.
Mattermost is pretty open about what it is: an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Slack.
The team didn’t originally set out to build a messaging tool at all; they wanted to build video games. A few years and one huge pivot later, they’re powering messaging and collaboration for companies like Samsung, Daimler, SAP and Cigna — and they got there without ever actually having an office. All of Mattermost’s 100+ employees have been fully remote from the beginning.
I hopped on a chat with Mattermost CEO and co-founder Ian Tien to talk about how they decided to go full-remote before it was really a thing, what it takes to make a remote team successful and his hopes for the growing number of remote companies. Here’s our chat, edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
TechCrunch: Tell me a bit about Mattermost’s origin story. You didn’t originally set out to build a communication platform, right?
Ian Tien: Yeah! So, when we started incorporating the company, we were doing video games — we were doing an HTML5 game engine.
RDK Management said its software now powers 60 million devices worldwide, up from 50 million the year before. RDK is an open source software platform that standardises core functions used in broadband, video and IoT connected devices. This allows services providers to develop and deploy applications and services, independent of hardware platforms. The software also lets providers control their device diagnostics data, business models and apps.
Ubiquity and Democracy are the two words that best describe the open source PostgreSQL (Postgres) database management system. And, much like Linux, both are great examples of “open source at its best”.
In terms of its ubiquity, Postgres has been around more than 30 years and today is seemingly everywhere running on-premise or available as a hosted service (cloud) worldwide from dozens of providers. We often hear it is the “go-to” API most often selected by developers. Ask developers which database technologies they most love, and Postgres comes in second only to Redis, according to the Stack Overflow survey.
Today, in 2020, “Open Source” is a well understood, widely used concept. Everyone who works within the software development world understands what it means. But… who coined the term? Who is the first person to actually use the phrase “open source” in reference to software? Let's dive into some of the (sometimes conflicting) statements from multiple people… and what the reality actually looks like. Was it Eric S Raymond or Bruce Perens?
Heads up, Firefox users who rely on FTP: the browser is eliminating support for this venerable protocol.
First written in 1971, the file transfer protocol predates TCP/IP, the protocol stack that underpins the modern internet. In its original form, the protocol is insecure. For example, it transmits login credentials in plain text. In 1999, the IETF published a draft RFC listing its various shortcomings. These included everything from problems in the way it responded to invalid login attempts through to an inability to segment file permissions when using anonymous FTP (which doesn’t require user credentials at all).
Now, Mozilla is planning to turn off FTP by default in version 77 of Firefox, which will ship this June. Users will be able to turn it on again temporarily so that they can carry on using FTP from within the browser. Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) will continue to have FTP turned on by default in ESR version 78.
We have good news from our team that I believe some of you might’ve already known. Finally, Tasos will no longer be a lone coder in our team as now we have a new additional member in SUMO. Please, say hi to Leo McArdle.
I’m sure Leo is not a new name for most of you. He’s been involved in the community for so long (some of you might know him as a “Discourse guy”) and now he’s taking a new role as a software engineer working in SUMO team.
So my latest work notes were 3 weeks ago, and what I was afraid about, just came to realization. We are in there for a long time. I'm living in Japan which seems to be spared puzzling many people. My non-professional armchair-epidemiologist crystall-ball impression is that Japan will not escape it seeing the daily behavior of people around me. Japan seems to have been quite protected by long cultural habits and human-less contacts society (to the extreme point of hikikomori). I don't think it will stand for a long time in a globalized world, but I'll be super happy to be wrong.
note this is hard to keep notes with all the mental space used for work, family and… the new member of the world family: coronavirus. We need to adjust habits everywhere in the world, and it will have definitely an impact on a long term. I do not believe there will a resolution in the next couple of months. My mind is in a marathon state of mind. We are in there for a long run.
Members from the Google Brain and Google AI teams have announced they have open-sourced EfficientDet, an AI-powered tool that allows for state-of-the-art object detection with more efficient use of compute power.
Members of the Google Brain team and Google AI this week open-sourced EfficientDet, an AI tool that achieves state-of-the-art object detection while using less compute. Creators of the system say it also achieves faster performance when used with CPUs or GPUs than other popular objection detection models like YOLO or AmoebaNet.
Google filed a trademark for a “computer operating software” named Pigweed last month. While most of us were guessing it could either be a new name for Fuchsia OS or a brand-new operating system, Google has now shed some light into Pigweed – an open-source collection of embedded libraries.
Google today open-sourced Pigweed, a collection of microcontroller modules designed for developers using 32-bit devices. They’re intended to enable faster and more reliable development on microcontrollers — i.e., the small computers embedded within single circuit chips. Assuming it works as advertised, Pigweed could accelerate the development of hardware in a range of industries, from smart home and manufacturing to robotics, automotive, and even telecommunications.
Last month, Google was found to have filed a trademark for an “operating system” by the name of “Pigweed.” Today, Google is officially taking the wraps off of Pigweed, a collection of open source libraries or “modules” for developers who work on embedded devices — not an operating system.
[...]
So let’s take a look at the reality of what Pigweed is. At the project’s early stage of development, Pigweed is simply a collection of tools and libraries, which Google has taken to calling “modules,” each individually designed to help solve a problem faced by developers of embedded devices. More specifically, Pigweed targets developers who work with 32-bit microcontrollers.
One module, “pw_env_setup,” is designed solely to help you get your computer ready for development as quickly and easily as possible, downloading the most common tools you’ll need and installing them in a virtual environment. Meanwhile, another module, “pw_watch,” automatically builds and tests your code when you save changes, constantly checking for any potential errors.
8x8, Inc. (NYSE:EGHT), a leading integrated cloud communications platform, today announced Italy-based classroom collaboration platform WeSchool is now using 8x8’s Jitsi.org open-source video conferencing solution to connect Italy’s teachers and students.
8x8 is the main contributor to the Jitsi.org open-source solution, and the standalone and integrated versions of 8x8 Video Meetings are based on it. The Jitsi.org code has been hardened with over a million downloads and in applications like banking video conferencing, education as a service platforms and home security applications globally. The product is packaged with 8x8 X Series for businesses that have a mobile and remote workforce requiring a highly reliable and resilient solution across desktop and mobile devices for voice, video, chat, contact center, APIs and advanced analytics. It is also available as a standalone offering and as part of 8x8 Express, which is for small organizations and teams that require a complete, preconfigured business phone system with a dedicated business number, video meetings and messaging in a single desktop and mobile application.
The free, standalone version of 8x8 Video Meetings, introduced to the public in November 2019, is available at https://8x8.vc, and includes international dial-in numbers in more than 55 countries. 8x8 Video Meetings utilizes the WebRTC standard which enables attendees to instantly join meetings without any downloads or plugins.
Since the beginning of March 2020, 8x8 has experienced a significant increase in usage across its video meetings solutions with monthly active users growing globally to more than 1.7 million.
In spring 2018, Google quietly removed the company’s unofficial motto "don't be evil" from the preface of Google’s Code of Conduct. Although the tech giant retained the phrase in the Code of Conduct's concluding statement, to some industry watchers the move was indicative of the larger technology sector's shift away from ethical guiding principles.
In response to this perceived shift, software developers active in the free and open source software (FOSS) community began creating licenses that condition the use, modification, and distribution of free software on the licensee acting in an ethical manner. These "ethical source licenses" have sparked debate within the FOSS community about whether the licenses are consistent with open source software principles and whether commercial enterprises will use software licensed subject to ethical restrictions.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and while making your own medical equipment isn’t normally advisable, Johnny Lee’e project explores how to turn a CPAP machine into a ventilator.
The idea is that since these machines are basically just blowers controlled by a brushless DC motor, an Arduino Nano equipped with an electonic speed controller could allow it to act as a one.
The extreme and necessary measures taken to restrict the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) have impacted the day-to-day lives of everyone around the globe. From schools and jobs to sports and entertainment such as restaurants, bars and movie theaters – all been closed or impacted. The federal government has not been spared as the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has directed agencies to utilize telework to the maximum extent possible.
At least one New Hampshire member of the Makerspace community – Adam Shrey, one of the leaders of MakeIt Labs in Nashua, the state’s first makerspace – is involved in an effort to create open-source medical equipment. I talked to Ja’dan Johnson in Flordia, who’s handling communications for the online group called OSCMS, for Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies. He said it began like the project you’ve probably heard about in Italy where a volunteer 3D printed ventilator valves that saved a number of patients struggling to breathe as COVID19 destroys their lungs.
As more and more people are hospitalized due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, there may not be enough ventilators to sustain critical patients who need breathing assistance. That has prompted various individuals and groups, for better or worse, to look at MacGyvering their own airway support equipment.
The Society of Critical Care Medicine last week published a paper noting that the American Hospital Association has estimated that 4.8 million patients in the US alone will be hospitalized due to COVID-19, with 1.9 million admitted to Intensive Care Units (ICU) and 960,000 requiring breathing support on a ventilator.
The problem with that scenario is that, according to a 2009 survey of hospitals by the association, there were only 62,000 full-featured mechanical ventilators available at the time. That was also roughly the number cited in a 2013 study.
Over the last few weeks, there's been plenty of bad news. The way things are looking with the coronavirus pandemic, we're in for even more bad news over the coming weeks and, likely, months. In a time when people's health is at risk, money doesn't matter much. Even so, economists are starting to utter the "R" word, as consumers and businesses delay spending amidst novel coronavirus uncertainty, which will, in turn, create even more hardship.
As countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic expect to run out of ventilators and other equipment, makers are desperately trying to fill the gap with proposals for open-source, do-it-yourself devices.
Most cases of COVID-19—the disease caused by the novel coronavirus—do not require hospitalization. But for people hospitalized with severe infections, coronavirus damages their lungs and makes it hard to breathe in and circulate the amount of oxygen that their bodies need. Ventilators, machines that provide the lungs with oxygen, are proving to be key to treating these people, who seem to comprise around 10 percent of cases.
One of the US’s biggest media companies is using its vast array of talent to help get the word out about staying safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
ViacomCBS has teamed up with the Ad Council for the ‘#AloneTogether’ campaign on social, digital, streaming and live television to help raise awareness, especially among younger viewers.
ViacomCBS’ Entertainment & Youth Brands, led by MTV, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, CMT and VH1, today launched #AloneTogether, a national social and talent led campaign that educates audiences on the importance of social distancing and drives unity through entertainment.
Most CoViD-19 cases — the disease that comes from contracting the coronavirus infection — don't require hospitalization. But those who are hospitalized with severe cases of coronavirus infection suffer damaged lungs that make it hard to breathe in and circulate oxygen within the body. Machines that provide human lungs with oxygen called ventilators have proven to be crucial in treating people suffering from severe cases of CoViD-19, who represent 10 percent of all cases, according to VICE.
Governments around the world are already readying themselves for a shortage of ventilators, and the effects this will have on their health care systems.
U.S. President Donald Trump called U.S. governors on Monday to tell states not to completely rely on the federal government for equipment. "Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves," said the president, according to the New York Times. "We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it for yourself."
Hackaday has issued a call to arms in the ‘ultimate medical hackathon’ to help design an open source version of a respirator that could be widely produced and deployed with the aim of aiding those suffering at the hands of coronavirus.
As we’ve already seen in Italy, hospitals face issues around the numbers (and maintenance) of medical equipment designed to provide respiratory aid. 3D-printed valves have already come to the rescue of a hospital in Brescia which needed replacement valves for so-called ‘reanimation’ machines (because the normal supplier couldn’t provide them due to disruption caused by coronavirus).
Topline: A group of 300-plus engineers, designers, tech founders and others galvanized on Facebook with a goal of building a ventilator using readily available materials, 3D printing and open-source hardware resources. In just seven days, they built a prototype that will be validated as a solution to the global ventilator shortage by Irish authorities as early as next week.
At least 950,000 coronavirus patients in the US could need ventilators, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, but hospitals here have just 160,000. Between five to 10 companies in the world supply most of the planet’s breathing machines and they weren’t ready for this.
When the number of cases in San Francisco spiked last week, entrepreneur and engineer Gui Cavalcanti decided he had to do something. At the time, there were widespread reports of a shortage of ventilators — machines that deliver air to the lungs of patients who can't breathe. So, he started a Facebook group to bring together engineers and create an open- source design that any manufacturer could use to start producing these devices.
But after a conversation with a senior health care practitioner who had just been trained on the response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, he discovered that a much more pressing concern was the rapidly dwindling stocks of basic medical supplies, especially those required to protect health workers from infection like masks, gloves and face shields.
Contxto – We’ve heard of biotechs’ approaches to coronavirus. However, here’s another take: 3D printing. In light of high demand for N95 masks, entrepreneurs from Chilean Copper3D created and launched a downloadable design of an antiviral mask for 3D printing yesterday (18).
Known as “NanoHack,” the startup boasts that it’s reusable, recyclable, and antiviral. And its STL files for creating it on a 3D printer are free for downloading here.
Although it’s worth pointing out that to make it, the Copper3D says you’ll require PLACTIVE, a unique plastic that makes the mask antiviral and antibacterial in the first place. Not to mention some assembly is required.
As hospitals in certain parts of the world are being overwhelmed due to the influx of patients with the coronavirus, they are starting to run out of medical supplies and equipment, such as ventilators, which are crucial in helping patients who are affected more severely to breathe.
Scientific questions and crippling logistical challenges surrounding the global response to the fast-moving coronavirus pandemic have led many to help look for solutions, stoking a burgeoning DIY biology movement.
ClosedLoop.ai, Healthcare’s Data Science Platform, announced the release of the COVID-19 Vulnerability Index (CV19 Index) — a free, open-source tool designed to help healthcare organizations identify and protect individuals that are most vulnerable to COVID-19. By releasing the CV19 Index as free and open-source, ClosedLoop aims to distribute this tool as widely and quickly as possible while leveraging the collective knowledge and experience of the open source community to quickly improve the Index.
The Predictive Healthcare team at Penn Medicine has developed and released an open-source tool to help hospitals plan for patient increases and intake during the COVID-19 spread in the Philly area.
The tool, called CHIME, or COVID-19 Hospital Impact Model for Epidemics, uses SIR modeling, which computes the theoretical number of people infected with a contagious illness in a closed population over time to predict outcomes.
It’s currently set up to help Penn’s operational leaders with up-to-date projections of what additional resources will be required, and estimate of how many patients will need hospitalization, ICU beds and mechanical ventilation.
The aim to to have something that can be made simply in many places around the world – to be used only when not enough ‘proper’ medical ventilators are available.
There are actually a lot of similar ideas on the web, some of them of dubious quality, but this one seems to be the real deal – being designed by engineers and medical folk, and built around an existing hand-operated medical ventilator.
A Facebook group called Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies, which consists of over 13,000 members, is trying to find solutions to the pandemic by creating open-source ventilators, as well as medicine and supply guides. The group was created on March 10 by MegaBots founder Gui Cavalcanti released the first version of its open-source medical supply guide on March 18. The group's significant growth has spread worldwide, with a strong focus on Ireland and Portugal. Some leaders in the group are beginning to focus more on the Middle East.
It’s difficult, and feels slightly irrelevant, to write a story this week that doesn’t contain the words ‘covid-19’. More difficult still to tackle a virus-related story that doesn’t add yet more doom to an already gloom-laden media frenzy, but there is one.
The open source ventilator is not only a thing, but it’s being tackled at lightning speed by at least one group aiming to have a low-cost, easy-to-assemble ventilator design finished, validated and up and in production at lightning speed to meet the pressing ventilator problem worldwide. If - or more likely, when - the open source project comes up with the goods it will be a timely validation of the open source approach (that much of the telecoms industry is now adopting to propel its next generation of services) and a proof-point for the value of collaborative working across the internet.
Health officials in Ireland are set to review a prototype 3D-printed ventilator next week created by an open-source hardware project started to address shortages driven by the spread of coronavirus.
“We have six prototypes that are ready to be manufactured and tested with validation by the [Health Service Executive] likely from next week," Colin Keogh, a 3D printing expert at University College Dublin and an early member of the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies project, told The Irish Times.
While Ireland is not currently facing a shortage of the ventilators, which are often needed to treat COVID-19 cases, getting approval from the country's regulatory body could lead to deployment elsewhere down the road.
Open Source 3D-printer ventilator project has prototypes ready to be validated by HSE
An Irish team is leading an international community of engineers, designers and medical professionals who are trying to develop a low-cost, easy-to-assemble ventilator to use in the battle against coronavirus.
It started with an open call in a Facebook group last Monday.
“I called for Chemistry scientists in the Overheard FB group and announced: ‘I said it's time to give back,’” narrated August Patacsil, project head and lead industrial designer of SaniTents PH.
Patacsil at that time was concerned that COVID-19 was going to affect the elderly when many Filipinos “have no clue as to what the lockdown is for.” He wanted to create a prototype for a decontamination tent.
Like everyone else, hackers and makers want to do something to help control the spread of COVID-19. The recent posts on Hackaday dealing with DIY and open source approaches to respirators, ventilators, and masks have been some of the most widely read and commented on in recent memory. But it’s important to remember that the majority of us aren’t medical professionals, and that even the most well-meaning efforts can end up making things worse if they aren’t done correctly.
Ever since the virus that causes COVID-19 appeared, the global supply chain for medical devices has been strained and the solutions aren't obvious.
In Canada and the U.S., governments are taking action to mobilize more production of medical supplies.
Auto parts makers are offering to shift production to ventilators, and Health Canada appears ready to relax some regulations around the manufacturing of protective devices.
Frontline workers in hospitals, ambulances, clinics and nursing homes are anticipating shortages of critical care equipment from masks to ventilators — and some are open to unorthodox solutions.
Gui Cavalcanti has one. He's a robotics engineer on the U.S. west coast. When he read about the shortage of supplies, he decided to create a Facebook group to reach out to experts who could design and build open-source, 3D-printed medical equipment.
I never thought I’d witness something like a Covid-19 Pandemic in my lifetime. While I am trying my best to stay calm, I really want to prepare for the worst-case scenario. If something like that ever comes knocking on my door, I really don’t know the right thing to do.
We are just a step away from going full-on panic, especially with misleading information to gain views and engagement. So, it is quintessential that we get the most reliable information without any underlying interest.
As COVID-19 continues to spread, the research community is looking for solutions. In addition to work on vaccines and medicine, medical technology is needed. In severe cases of COVID-19, the disease attacks the respiratory system, and one of the major bottlenecks in treatment is having enough ventilators.
The open-source hardware community wants to change that.
Joshua Pearce, Richard Witte Endowed Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is an open-source hardware expert and co-editor-in-chief of HardwareX, a leading open-source scientific hardware journal.
Fear is what triggers our survival instinct, especially in times like these, when our lives are at stake. That means we’re likely to do our best to make sure we are safe and taken care of, stocking up on food and medical supplies, such as masks or surgical gloves. Unfortunately, this has led to a shortage of masks which prompted 3D printing companies to aid in producing more. One company, in particular, went the extra mile and designed an enhanced version of the popular N95 mask, releasing the design while at it.
If you want to rally the world to your cause, think like a little bird and tweet. Hospitals and doctors are reaching out via social media to ask for mission-critical help in solving the shortage of N95-type masks during the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The latest feature release Git v2.26.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 504 non-merge commits since v2.25.0, contributed by 64 people, 12 of which are new faces.
The tarballs are found at:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/
The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.26.0' tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:
url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = https://github.com/gitster/git
New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.25.0 are as follows. Welcome to the Git development community!
Abhishek Kumar, Benno Evers, Emir Sarñ, Eyal Soha, Harald van Dijk, Jacques Bodin-Hullin, Kir Kolyshkin, Lucius Hu, Luke Bonanomi, Peter Kaestle, Rasmus Jonsson, and Shourya Shukla.
Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows. Thanks for your continued support.
Alban Gruin, Alessandro Menti, Alexander Shopov, Alexandr Miloslavskiy, Beat Bolli, Bert Wesarg, brian m. carlson, Christian Stimming, Christopher Diaz Riveros, David Turner, Denton Liu, Derrick Stolee, ÃÂoàn Trần Công Danh, Elijah Newren, Emily Shaffer, Eric Sunshine, Fangyi Zhou, Hans Jerry Illikainen, Hariom Verma, Heba Waly, Jean-Noël Avila, Jeff King, Jiang Xin, Johan Herland, Johannes Berg, Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Jonathan Nieder, Jonathan Tan, Jordi Mas, Junio C Hamano, Kevin Willford, Kyle Meyer, Luke Diamand, Martin Ãâ¦gren, Masaya Suzuki, Matheus Tavares, Matthew Rogers, Matthias Rüster, Miriam Rubio, Paolo Bonzini, Peter Krefting, Philippe Blain, Pranit Bauva, Pratyush Yadav, Ralf Thielow, René Scharfe, SZEDER Gábor, Tanushree Tumane, Taylor Blau, Trần Ngá»Âc Quân, and Yi-Jyun Pan.
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Git 2.26 Release Notes ======================
Updates since v2.25 -------------------
Backward compatibility notes
* "git rebase" uses a different backend that is based on the 'merge' machinery by default. There are a few known differences in the behaviour from the traditional machinery based on patch+apply.
If your workflow is negatively affected by this change, please report it to git@vger.kernel.org so that we can take a look into it. After doing so, you can set the 'rebase.backend' configuration variable to 'apply', in order to use the old default behaviour in the meantime.
UI, Workflows & Features
* Sample credential helper for using .netrc has been updated to work out of the box.
* gpg.minTrustLevel configuration variable has been introduced to tell various signature verification codepaths the required minimum trust level.
* The command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete subcommands and arguments to "git worktree".
* Disambiguation logic to tell revisions and pathspec apart has been tweaked so that backslash-escaped glob special characters do not count in the "wildcards are pathspec" rule.
* One effect of specifying where the GIT_DIR is (either with the environment variable, or with the "git --git-dir=<where> cmd" option) is to disable the repository discovery. This has been placed a bit more stress in the documentation, as new users often get confused.
* Two help messages given when "git add" notices the user gave it nothing to add have been updated to use advise() API.
* A new version of fsmonitor-watchman hook has been introduced, to avoid races.
* "git config" learned to show in which "scope", in addition to in which file, each config setting comes from.
* The basic 7 colors learned the brighter counterparts (e.g. "brightred").
* "git sparse-checkout" learned a new "add" subcommand.
* A configuration element used for credential subsystem can now use wildcard pattern to specify for which set of URLs the entry applies.
* "git clone --recurse-submodules --single-branch" now uses the same single-branch option when cloning the submodules.
* "git rm" and "git stash" learns the new "--pathspec-from-file" option.
* "git am --show-current-patch" is a way to show the piece of e-mail for the stopped step, which is not suitable to directly feed "git apply" (it is designed to be a good "git am" input). It learned a new option to show only the patch part.
* Handling of conflicting renames in merge-recursive have further been made consistent with how existing codepaths try to mimic what is done to add/add conflicts.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* Tell .editorconfig that in this project, *.txt files are indented with tabs.
* The test-lint machinery knew to check "VAR=VAL shell_function" construct, but did not check "VAR= shell_function", which has been corrected.
* Replace "git config --bool" calls with "git config --type=bool" in sample templates.
* The effort to move "git-add--interactive" to C continues.
* Improve error message generation for "git submodule add".
* Preparation of test scripts for the day when the object names will use SHA-256 continues.
* Warn programmers about pretend_object_file() that allows the code to tentatively use in-core objects.
* The way "git pack-objects" reuses objects stored in existing pack to generate its result has been improved.
* The transport protocol version 2 becomes the default one.
* Traditionally, we avoided threaded grep while searching in objects (as opposed to files in the working tree) as accesses to the object layer is not thread-safe. This limitation is getting lifted.
* "git rebase -i" (and friends) used to unnecessarily check out the tip of the branch to be rebased, which has been corrected.
* A low-level API function get_oid(), that accepts various ways to name an object, used to issue end-user facing error messages without l10n, which has been updated to be translatable.
* Unneeded connectivity check is now disabled in a partial clone when fetching into it.
* Some rough edges in the sparse-checkout feature, especially around the cone mode, have been cleaned up.
* The diff-* plumbing family of subcommands now pay attention to the diff.wsErrorHighlight configuration, which has been ignored before; this allows "git add -p" to also show the whitespace problems to the end user.
* Some codepaths were given a repository instance as a parameter to work in the repository, but passed the_repository instance to its callees, which has been cleaned up (somewhat).
* Memory footprint and performance of "git name-rev" has been improved.
* The object reachability bitmap machinery and the partial cloning machinery were not prepared to work well together, because some object-filtering criteria that partial clones use inherently rely on object traversal, but the bitmap machinery is an optimization to bypass that object traversal. There however are some cases where they can work together, and they were taught about them.
* "git rebase" has learned to use the merge backend (i.e. the machinery that drives "rebase -i") by default, while allowing "--apply" option to use the "apply" backend (e.g. the moral equivalent of "format-patch piped to am"). The rebase.backend configuration variable can be set to customize.
* Underlying machinery of "git bisect--helper" is being refactored into pieces that are more easily reused.
Fixes since v2.25 -----------------
* "git commit" gives output similar to "git status" when there is nothing to commit, but without honoring the advise.statusHints configuration variable, which has been corrected.
* has_object_file() said "no" given an object registered to the system via pretend_object_file(), making it inconsistent with read_object_file(), causing lazy fetch to attempt fetching an empty tree from promisor remotes.
* Complete an update to tutorial that encourages "git switch" over "git checkout" that was done only half-way.
* C pedantry ;-) fix.
* The code that tries to skip over the entries for the paths in a single directory using the cache-tree was not careful enough against corrupt index file.
* Reduce unnecessary round-trip when running "ls-remote" over the stateless RPC mechanism.
* "git restore --staged" did not correctly update the cache-tree structure, resulting in bogus trees to be written afterwards, which has been corrected.
* The code recently added to move to the entry beyond the ones in the same directory in the index in the sparse-cone mode did not count the number of entries to skip over incorrectly, which has been corrected.
* Rendering by "git log --graph" of ancestry lines leading to a merge commit were made suboptimal to waste vertical space a bit with a recent update, which has been corrected.
* Work around test breakages caused by custom regex engine used in libasan, when address sanitizer is used with more recent versions of gcc and clang.
* Minor bugfixes to "git add -i" that has recently been rewritten in C.
* "git fetch --refmap=" option has got a better documentation.
* "git checkout X" did not correctly fail when X is not a local branch but could name more than one remote-tracking branches (i.e. to be dwimmed as the starting point to create a corresponding local branch), which has been corrected. (merge fa74180d08 am/checkout-file-and-ref-ref-ambiguity later to maint).
* Corner case bugs in "git clean" that stems from a (necessarily for performance reasons) awkward calling convention in the directory enumeration API has been corrected.
* A fetch that is told to recursively fetch updates in submodules inevitably produces reams of output, and it becomes hard to spot error messages. The command has been taught to enumerate submodules that had errors at the end of the operation. (merge 0222540827 es/fetch-show-failed-submodules-atend later to maint).
* The "--recurse-submodules" option of various subcommands did not work well when run in an alternate worktree, which has been corrected.
* Futureproofing a test not to depend on the current implementation detail.
* Running "git rm" on a submodule failed unnecessarily when .gitmodules is only cache-dirty, which has been corrected.
* C pedantry ;-) fix.
* "git grep --no-index" should not get affected by the contents of the .gitmodules file but when "--recurse-submodules" is given or the "submodule.recurse" variable is set, it did. Now these settings are ignored in the "--no-index" mode.
* Technical details of the bundle format has been documented.
* Unhelpful warning messages during documentation build have been squelched.
* "git rebase -i" identifies existing commits in its todo file with their abbreviated object name, which could become ambiguous as it goes to create new commits, and has a mechanism to avoid ambiguity in the main part of its execution. A few other cases however were not covered by the protection against ambiguity, which has been corrected.
* Allow the rebase.missingCommitsCheck configuration to kick in when "rebase --edit-todo" and "rebase --continue" restarts the procedure. (merge 5a5445d878 ag/edit-todo-drop-check later to maint).
* The way "git submodule status" reports an initialized but not yet populated submodule has not been reimplemented correctly when a part of the "git submodule" command was rewritten in C, which has been corrected. (merge f38c92452d pk/status-of-uncloned-submodule later to maint).
* The code to automatically shrink the fan-out in the notes tree had an off-by-one bug, which has been killed.
* The index-pack code now diagnoses a bad input packstream that records the same object twice when it is used as delta base; the code used to declare a software bug when encountering such an input, but it is an input error.
* The code to compute the commit-graph has been taught to use a more robust way to tell if two object directories refer to the same thing. (merge a7df60cac8 tb/commit-graph-object-dir later to maint).
* "git remote rename X Y" needs to adjust configuration variables (e.g. branch.<name>.remote) whose value used to be X to Y. branch.<name>.pushRemote is now also updated.
* Update to doc-diff.
* Doc markup fix.
* "git check-ignore" did not work when the given path is explicitly marked as not ignored with a negative entry in the .gitignore file.
* The merge-recursive machinery failed to refresh the cache entry for a merge result in a couple of places, resulting in an unnecessary merge failure, which has been fixed.
* Fix for a bug revealed by a recent change to make the protocol v2 the default.
* In rare cases "git worktree add <path>" could think that <path> was already a registered worktree even when it wasn't and refuse to add the new worktree. This has been corrected. (merge bb69b3b009 es/worktree-avoid-duplication-fix later to maint).
* "git push" should stop from updating a branch that is checked out when receive.denyCurrentBranch configuration is set, but it failed to pay attention to checkouts in secondary worktrees. This has been corrected. (merge 4d864895a2 hv/receive-denycurrent-everywhere later to maint).
* "git rebase BASE BRANCH" rebased/updated the tip of BRANCH and checked it out, even when the BRANCH is checked out in a different worktree. This has been corrected. (merge b5cabb4a96 es/do-not-let-rebase-switch-to-protected-branch later to maint).
* "git describe" in a repository with multiple root commits sometimes gave up looking for the best tag to describe a given commit with too early, which has been adjusted.
* "git merge signed-tag" while lacking the public key started to say "No signature", which was utterly wrong. This regression has been reverted.
* MinGW's poll() emulation has been improved.
* "git show" and others gave an object name in raw format in its error output, which has been corrected to give it in hex.
* "git fetch" over HTTP walker protocol did not show any progress output. We inherently do not know how much work remains, but still we can show something not to bore users. (merge 7655b4119d rs/show-progress-in-dumb-http-fetch later to maint).
* Both "git ls-remote -h" and "git grep -h" give short usage help, like any other Git subcommand, but it is not unreasonable to expect that the former would behave the same as "git ls-remote --head" (there is no other sensible behaviour for the latter). The documentation has been updated in an attempt to clarify this.
* Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc. (merge d0d0a357a1 am/update-pathspec-f-f-tests later to maint). (merge f94f7bd00d am/test-pathspec-f-f-error-cases later to maint). (merge c513a958b6 ss/t6025-modernize later to maint). (merge b441717256 dl/test-must-fail-fixes later to maint). (merge d031049da3 mt/sparse-checkout-doc-update later to maint). (merge 145136a95a jc/skip-prefix later to maint). (merge 5290d45134 jk/alloc-cleanups later to maint). (merge 7a9f8ca805 rs/parse-options-concat-dup later to maint). (merge 517b60564e rs/strbuf-insertstr later to maint). (merge f696a2b1c8 jk/mailinfo-cleanup later to maint). (merge de26f02db1 js/test-avoid-pipe later to maint). (merge a2dc43414c es/doc-mentoring later to maint). (merge 02bbbe9df9 es/worktree-cleanup later to maint). (merge 2ce6d075fa rs/micro-cleanups later to maint). (merge 27f182b3fc rs/blame-typefix-for-fingerprint later to maint). (merge 3c29e21eb0 ma/test-cleanup later to maint). (merge 240fc04f81 ag/rebase-remove-redundant-code later to maint). (merge d68ce906c7 rs/commit-graph-code-simplification later to maint). (merge a51d9e8f07 rj/t1050-use-test-path-is-file later to maint). (merge fd0bc17557 kk/complete-diff-color-moved later to maint). (merge 65bf820d0e en/test-cleanup later to maint).
Version 2.26.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. Significant changes include a reimplementation of the "rebase" mechanism, improvements to sparse checkouts, performance improvements, and more.
Git 2.26 is out as the newest feature release for this distributed revision control system.
We have released version 2.11.1 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. The changes mainly focus on establishing full compatibility with Qt 5.14 as well as bugfixes and performance improvements, but there’s also a few new features.
Areas most affected by changes in Qt 5.14 are the inspection of Qt Quick software rendering, deployment on Android and signal monitoring. We also fixed a major performance issue that can be caused by interference between the newly added event monitor in GammaRay 2.11 and the Qt Quick remote view feature, as well as the in-app widget overlay causing layouting issues when applied to a QSplitter. The Qt 3D geometry inspector now has a OpenGL ES2 fallback implementation in case your host machine doesn’t support OpenGL 3, and the event monitor can now also visualize event propagation in Qt Quick’s input handling.
Recently, we published an article about why developers prefer to code at night. Author Matt Shealy highlighted the many benefits of nocturnal programming including the quiet time and space for creative thinking.
An optimal time of day to code is far from an absolute science. There is evidence to support we all work from a circadian rhythm, but that does not mean we all work on the same clock when it comes to productivity.
Now I have a todo list command-line script. I want to have a to-do list for my wikipedia editing activities, a to-study list for math I want to study sparely, a to-study-or-to-code in computer programming and maybe a to-read list for books.
This week we welcome Komiya Takeshi as our PyDev of the Week! Takeshi is a maintainer of Sphinx, Python’s documentation package. Takeshi is also the creator of blockdiag, diagram image generator.
In this Pandas tutorial, we will go through the steps on how to use Pandas read_html method for scraping data from HTML. First, in the simplest example, we are going to use Pandas to read HTML from a string. Second, we are going to go through a couple of examples in which we scrape data from Wikipedia tables with Pandas read_html. In a previous post, about exploratory data analysis in Python, we also used Pandas to read data from HTML tables.
Even after successful integration of mypy with an existing project (see mypy: how to use it in my project part 1), there are tons of code that does not have type annotations. Adding them manually is an unimaginable amount of work. We may do it gradually (as suggested in part 1) or use tools to help us.
I've written before about what a community manager does, and if you ask ten community managers, you'll get 12 different answers. Mostly, though, you do what the community needs for you to do at any given moment. And a lot of it can be repetitive.
Back when I was a sysadmin, I had a rule: if I had to do something three times, I'd try to automate it. And, of course, these days, with awesome tools like Ansible, there's a whole science to that.
Picking the right programming language can overwhelm some developers, given the sheer number of factors to consider. Python and Ruby both sit high on developers' lists, mainly because of their ease of use, levels of power and dynamic flexibility.
However, these languages do not behave the same way, and there are a few key elements developers should consider before they choose one. Learn the backgrounds of Python and Ruby, then examine the factors -- startup speed, mobile-friendliness and more -- that determine which language is right for your project.
Here we are at the uptick in the Covid 19 pandemic. There are many sources of data which list infections and deaths as a result of the virus. It’s very tempting to want to put your Python skills to use and crunch some numbers on the infection. By and large, go for it, but one thing I’d ask you not to do is to try to calculate a “mortality rate”. This is not because Python can’t do division but, rather, working this number out is conceptually pretty tricky. It’s something that epidemiologists need to get a lot of training in to do correctly. You can’t just take the deaths column and divided it by the infected column because the two numbers are not properly related.
Running a successful business requires some method of organizing the information about all of the processes and activity that take place. Tryton is an open source, modular ERP framework that is built for the flexibility needed to fit your organization, rather than requiring you to model your workflows to match the software. In this episode core developers Nicolas Ãâ°vrard and Cédric Krier are joined by avid user Jonathan Levy to discuss the history of the project, how it is being used, and the myriad ways that you can adapt it to suit your needs. If you are struggling to keep a consistent view of your business and ensure that all of the necessary workflows are being observed then listen now and give Tryton a try.
Azul Systems (Azul), the leader in Java runtime solutions, has announced the general availability (GA) of its Zulu release of OpenJDK 14 builds that are compliant with the Java SE 14 standard. Zulu 14 is available in a wide variety of package types spanning multiple operating systems and is available for immediate free download from Azul’s website.
“So this is hell… all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone…there’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!” So says journalist and man of letters, Garcin, a deserter, one of the three “absentees” together confined forever in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1940s play No Exit. (Vintage International Edition, 1989) “Each of us will act as torturer of the two others.” “Each must try to forget the others are here.” “How utterly absurd,” says another. “I feel you in every pore.”
The paradoxical capacity to be alone in the presence of another person is one of the most important signs of emotional maturity. (Winnicott, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1958) Sartre's version of "familiarity breeds contempt," though, is at least as old as 16th-century Dutch philosopher and Christian scholar Erasmus, (Oxford English Dictionary.) What kind of hell is there when no one else is there?
Poignantly depicted in Rod Serling’s "The Lonely" (Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 7, 1959), we find Corey, a man who killed in self-defense, condemned to total social isolation on an asteroid millions of miles from earth. Four times a year a spaceship arrives to bring him supplies—and stays fifteen minutes, not even enough time for a game of checkers or cards. He tells the captain he is “dying of loneliness, in agony.”
China and South Korea have shown that "testing early, often, and widely makes all the difference."
We are all facing the consequences of the Trump administration’s many failures in responding to the coronavirus pandemic, from the disastrously low number of tests that have been administered to identify and treat those with the virus to the misleading presidential statements and absence of national leadership in implementing aggressive and timely public health measures for physical distancing aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.
At the moment, we are just playing for time. Whether social distancing is working will be clearer in a month than it is now, but even then we will not know to a moral certainty when adults can safely go back to the office and children can go back to school. Which is partly why employers, university officials, and others have given such widely varying time frames for how long they are shutting things down—two weeks, until the end of April, until the end of the academic year, until sometime later.
As the novel coronavirus spreads through the U.S. during presidential primaries, election and government officials are scrambling to figure out how to allow voters to cast their ballots safely ââ¬â¢ or postpone primaries altogether. Managing in-person voting during an unprecedented pandemic has forced authorities to overcome new virus-related hurdles: providing sufficient cleaning supplies to polling places, moving polling places out of nursing homes and ensuring there are enough poll workers.
Most small Alaska villages can be reached only by plane or snowmobile. Many still harbor the intergenerational scars from previous epidemics of influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis, all of which killed thousands of Alaska Natives.
Now, some of those villages are choosing to further isolate themselves in hopes of delaying the arrival of the coronavirus, tribal and village leaders say.
"ICE is making the pandemic more dangerous for everyone."
"What better time than now to call for bold, progressive policy solutions."
On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.
The drug Plaquenil keeps Anna Valdez’s lupus in check.
Late last week, as she sheltered in place at her home outside Santa Rosa, California, Valdez called her local pharmacy and ordered a refill to treat her autoimmune disorder, thinking a 90-day supply would help her ride out the coronavirus outbreak.
Richard Curren and his wife, Sheila, were living out their retirement at Atria Willow Wood, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, assisted living facility near their daughter and two grandchildren, when he started feeling weak and had trouble breathing.
The former travel agent had suffered from respiratory problems in the past, and, at first, family members weren’t overly concerned.
On March 22, Russian health officials announced that they recorded 61 new cases of coronavirus in the previous 24 hours, bringing the country's number of confirmed COVID-19 infections to 367.
In his daily coronavirus press briefing today, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that “our main scramble now is ventilators.” The state anticipates that within 45 days it could need 37,000 ventilators. It currently has 3,000.
Ramsey County Board members this week approved nearly $2 million in funding to cover the costs of preparing two east-metro facilities that will serve as quarantine and isolation sites for people experiencing homelessness who are impacted by the coronavirus.
The measure recognizes that the virus could move quickly inside a homeless shelter due to the age and vulnerability of the homeless as well as the close quarters of shelters, according to the resolution signed Tuesday.
The county’s most recent Point-In-Time homeless count found that more than 50 percent of shelter residents are over the age of 50 and that many lack health insurance.
Our plan was to go free when we rolled out “LT2,” our upcoming redesign. But the coronavirus has changed our plans, along with everyone else’s. A lot of people are now stranded at home, with nothing to do but read and catalog their books, movies, and music. A lot of kids are at home too—free cataloging help. And with the economy in freefall, many are worried about money. We want everyone to be able to use LibraryThing. This is the right time to go free.
So, starting today, LibraryThing.com, both on the web and using our cataloging app, are free to all, to add as many books as you want. And, no, we’re not going to add ads. (We will keep showing a few Google ads to visitors, but they vanish as soon as you become a member.)
It wasn't a surprise that Microsoft followed Google in halting browser upgrades. Both Chrome and Edge, after all, rely on the Google-led open-source Chromium project for their core technologies. "We are making this change to be consistent with the Chromium project, which recently announced a similar pause due to adjusted schedules," wrote Kyle Pflug, principal program management lead, in the Friday post.
Like Google, Microsoft told users that it will continue to service version 80 of its browser with security updates. The Redmond, Wash. company did just that Thursday, when it refreshed Edge to build 80.0.3987.149; that build included fixes for the same vulnerabilities cited by Google when it patched Chrome 80 the day before.
Working from home and want to access your PC at work? The best solution may cost thousands in additional Microsoft licensing costs.
In the scramble to migrate employees to home working, there are issues for businesses who normally have staff in an office working on desktop PCs, or accessing network file shares and intranet applications, or running applications that connect to an on-premises database.
This poses some difficult and potentially risky and expensive questions for organisations that are not already set up to have all or most of their staff working remotely. Business continuity is top of mind, but as security expert Bruce Schneier has observed: "Worrying about network security seems almost quaint in the face of the massive health risks from COVID-19, but attacks on infrastructure can have effects far greater than the infrastructure itself."
Piranha is available on GitHub. The tool currently supports the Objective-C, Swift and Java programming languages, a list Uber’s engineers hope will grow now that outside developers have an opportunity to contribute to the project.
Code is not usually on a piranha’s menu, but this predatory fish is different: Uber has open sourced Piranha for automatically deleting feature flags that are no longer needed. The corresponding code is deleted as well. Let’s see how that works and when to use Piranha.
[...]
Find out more about Piranha on the Uber blog and get it on GitHub.
Treedy's, the technology market-leader in ensuring the right clothing size for customers via instantaneous, fully-clothed and precise scanning technology, today announced it is making available its 1st generation software as open-source in order to facilitate access to its cutting edge quality 3D scans by research institutions, universities and other non-profit organisations.
The research project OpenLicht was launched in September 2016 and stands for the design of smart, customized light solutions based on open source and new materials. OpenLicht was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), with the goal of enabling new forms of collaboration between science, business, maker and startup community. Infineon Technologies AG is supervising the project in close cooperation with Bernitz Electronics GmbH, Deggendorf Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Dresden.
A lot of it is open source at this point. The stuff that we've built has been almost entirely open source.
To me that's … the core thing that I hope will make us successful. … We recently started the Bytecode Alliance with Mozilla, Intel and Red Hat, working together on some of the infrastructure for WebAssembly. The whole idea is to create the foundations that other people can then use.
The OpenBridge consortium has just released open source design guideline for maritime digital user interfaces.
Project OWL, the winner of 2018's Call for Code, is a cloud-based analytics tool that assists in organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response.
Today The Linux Foundation is announcing that it's making Project OWL's IoT device firmware open source to help developers around the world build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks.
The OpenTravel Alliance, the interoperability data standard for the travel industry for the past twenty years has joined the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source.
Your personality could significantly impact your ability to contribute to open source projects, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Waterloo.
Open source projects are online spaces where software developers work together to improve computer code that is made available to anyone. Each project is managed by a person whose job it is to accept or reject the offer of help from a software developer.
In a recent study, the Waterloo researchers found that social factors, such as past experience, remain the most influential element in the acceptance or rejection of online contributors’ work. But they also found that personality traits are an essential part of the decision.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (amd64-microcode, chromium, graphicsmagick, jackson-databind, phpmyadmin, python-bleach, and tor), Gentoo (exim and nodejs), openSUSE (chromium and thunderbird), Oracle (tomcat), Red Hat (devtoolset-8-gcc, libvncserver, runc, samba, thunderbird, and tomcat6), and SUSE (ruby2.5).
As happens every time there is a major news event, scumbags exploit the public's interest to spread malware. This time, criminals have picked on the World Health Organization's handling of the global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Researchers at IBM X-Force report the HawkEye malware is being spread under the guise of an email alert from WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Victims are asked to open an attachment, launching the password-and-Bitcoin-harvesting Windows malware.
"One thing worth mentioning is that the attackers put some effort in hiding the real intention of it," X-Force said. "The environmental awareness of our sample was quite good and average users would most likely not notice an info-stealer being installed."
I’m trying something new – a “Security 101” series. I hope to make these topics readable for those with no security background. I’m going to pick topics that are either related to my other posts (such as foundational knowledge) or just things that I think are relevant or misunderstood.
Today, I want to cover Virtual Private Networks, commonly known as VPNs. First I want to talk about what they are and how they work, then about commercial VPN providers, and finally about common misconceptions.
Research teams at the Pwn2Own 2020 competition successfully exploited 13 software vulnerabilities this past week, including bugs found in products from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and Ubuntu. Participants earned $270,000 over the two-day event — the first Pwn2Own ever to be held virtually, as a measure to combat the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.
Richard Zhu and Amat Cama of Fluoroacetate repeated from last year and were once again crowned Masters of Pwn. On day one, the team demonstrated a use-after-free (UAF) bug in Microsoft Windows and exploited it to escalate privileges to SYSTEM. The next day, they paired UAF bugs in Windows and Adobe Reader to once again elevate to SYSTEM.
Other highlights included the chaining of six bugs to produce a macOS kernel escalation of privilege in Apple Safari, another Windows UAF flaw allowing the escalation of privileges to SYSTEM, a local privilege escalation in Ubuntu Desktop, and a two-bug combination in Oracle VirtualBox that enabled code execution on the host OS from the guest OS. Unofficially, the event also featured one additional flaw in VMware Workstation and another in Oracle VirtualBox, although they did not count toward the competition.
Official bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO) as well as former government officials and academics are using avenues such as Twitter and TikTok to share information about the threat from the virus during one of the most daunting public health challenges in decades.
To put it bluntly, when millions more turn on Netflix, scroll through TikTok, start a Zoom call, play Fortnite, or simply scroll idly through Twitter, that has repercussions on the quality of the country’s [Internet]. (That is why EU commissioner Thierry Breton asked Netflix to restrict high-definition streaming until the emergency is over.)
Fracking has been banned by countries such as France, and by states such as New York because it is highly polluting, leaving behind ponds of toxic water. Moreover, research has demonstrated that the process of fracking, which involves pumping water under high pressure underground to break up rocks and release oil or natural gas, causes gargantuan methane emissions that had earlier been underestimated as much as 45%. The methane in the atmosphere is burgeoning, and scientists had puzzled over why. But scientists have fingered the culprit: fracking. Methane is 80 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as carbon dioxide over two decades, and carbon dioxide is no slouch. A quarter of the global heating effect of greenhouse gas emissions put out by humans burning fossil fuels is owing to methane emissions. Rapid heating is melting the North and South Poles, causing sea level rise that will soon be calamitous.
Given that the world population is increasing and that developing countries such as China and India and Indonesia are seeing more and more people abandoning their bicycles or bus rides for mopeds or automobile ownership, for the world to want less petroleum this year than it did last is extremely unusual.
We are getting a preview, courtesy of COVID-19, of what will happen through the next decade and a half as electric vehicles take off, significantly reducing demand.
Yet even a blade of grass or a lost pillbug in Manhattan has its secrets. As does the moth flitting about your home, or the ants on the sidewalk, or the moss sprouting off your roof shingles. As I sit writing this amid the coronavirus pandemic, the small bits of "nature" intruding on my home life have started to seem far more meaningful — a means of experiencing the beauty of the natural world while trapped inside. As COVID-19 restricts us to the confines of our homes, it is perhaps time to reflect on the small bits of urban "nature" that we generally ignore or dismiss as quotidian.
"Now is not the time to allow large corporations to take advantage of this horrific crisis by ripping off U.S. taxpayers and profiteering off of the pandemic."
In 1992, Sam Tsemberis, a faculty member at the New York University School of Medicine, founded Pathways Housing First, an innovative New York City program that provides shelter to homeless individuals without preconditions.
Our rich today and the corporations they run don't seem, sadly, to be exactly rushing to give up any of their contemporary comforts.€
Current forecasts indicate at least $2.1 trillion is needed through 2020.
As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, it is abundantly clear that the global economy is entering a recession – the first we’ve seen since 2008.
EY Japan, the Japanese branch of global accountancy firm Ernst & Young, has announced plans to launch a blockchain system for tracking Japanese sake and fruit and preventing the sale of fraudulent or counterfeit products.
According to Asian Nikkei Review, EY Japan’s SAKE Blockchain will be rolled out across Asia once the threat of the coronavirus and a stable business environment has been reestablished in the region.
dfuse, a provider of blockchain APIs, today announced the open-sourcing of its blockchain data stack. Core components of the dfuse stack will be open-sourced first for EOSIO networks; with Block.one, creators of the EOSIO protocol, supporting the solution.
Crypto bounty payment platform Gitcoin announced it has enabled contributor payouts in Ethereum Classic (ETC). In partnership with Ethereum Classic Labs, bounty seekers now have the option to receive pay in ETC for their work on various open-sourced projects, Ethereum Classic Labs said in a March 16 announcement.
The ETC core team confirmed to Cointelegraph that this partnership provides the option for ETC payout, regardless of the project being worked on. “This allows hunters to receive pay in ETC for our bounties and enables people who want to pay in ETC to do so,” the team said in an email.
Open-source crypto bounties platform Gitcoin’s fifth round of grants includes a section dedicated to causes that help fight the coronavirus. Grants are due to be allocated on Monday, the project announced on Twitter, and the company will match donations with $100,000 of its own money.
To stay competitive, especially with digital startups unencumbered by legacy systems, traditional financial institutions (FIs) need to deliver seamless customer services to individual consumers and enterprise customers alike.
To that end, Vincent Caldeira, chief technologist for FSI in APAC for Red Hat told PYMNTS, FIs — especially incumbent FIs — are facing rapid changes in payments that demand they modernize payments processing, embedding new functionality along the way.
Drilling down a bit, Caldeira said that the speeds of money transfers themselves are increasing across any number of use cases and verticals, and crossing borders with growing frequency.
"This decision is unconscionable.€ It will allow the virus to spread.€ It will get people killed."
Trump & Co was so busy provoking Iran into an air war, politicking in Washington, and studying polls of Midwestern evangelical voters that they totally missed the advent of the coronavirus, even though they had plenty of time to see the onrush of this viral tsunami.
The coronavirus pandemic cries out for remedies to remove the President.
He also alleged without offering any evidence that the virus “is specifically built for Iran using the genetic data of Iranians which they have obtained through different means.”
“You might send people as doctors and therapists, maybe they would want to come here and see the effect of the poison they have produced in person," he said.
There is no scientific proof offered anywhere in the world to support Khamenei's comments.
However, his comments come after Chinese government spokesman Lijian Zhao tweeted earlier this month that it “might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe[s] us an explanation!”
Lijian likewise offered no evidence to support his claim, which saw the U.S. State Department summon China's ambassador to complain.
A second worry is that other European countries will disregard Polish courts if they are deemed to be subject to political influence. On March 10th a German court refused to extradite a suspect to Poland, ruling that its judicial reforms meant he could not be sure of a fair trial there. In February Norway cancelled some 70m ($75m) in assistance to Polish courts, saying “basic European legal standards are no longer present”. Such rifts could ultimately split Poland off from European law.
Poland’s judges hope the EU can prevent that. The European Commission has gone to the ECJ to challenge the legality of the disciplinary chamber that punishes judges, and has asked the court to suspend it while the case is pending. A decision is expected soon. Many in Brussels understand the threat: last month Vera Jourova, the commissioner for transparency, said Poland was “carpet bombing” its judiciary rather than reforming it. But time is short. The president of the Supreme Court has resisted efforts to undercut judicial independence throughout her term, but she will be replaced by PIS in May. By the time the EU acts, Poland’s courts may already, in effect, be under government control.
Update: Social media has been blocked in Guinea as of Saturday evening. See new report for details.
Update: Some connectivity has returned after a near-total blackout lasting approximately two hours, although it remains unclear how much access is restored and whether connectivity will be sustained.
The outbreak necessitates heavy government involvement in our lives but this does not mean an overreach is justified.
Dr. Peter Graham, executive medical director for Physicians Health Plan in Michigan, is affiliated with Sparrow Health System in Lansing. He is making no assumptions. It’s possible central Michigan could take overflow COVID-19 patients from Detroit if that’s where the disease clusters, he said. Or patients might have to be transferred hundreds of miles away.
“It’s just obvious people are going to need to move” if local facilities are overwhelmed, he said. “If we’re able to find a ventilator bed in Indianapolis, in Chicago or Minneapolis or wherever, it is go, get them there!”
Yet experts warn that even areas comparatively rich in ICU beds could be overwhelmed with patients struggling to breathe, a common symptom of seriously ill COVID-19 patients.
“No matter how you look at it, the numbers [of ICU beds] are too small,” said Dr. Atul Grover, executive vice president of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “It’s scary.”
At least 38 people tested positive for coronavirus in New York City's jails, according to the Associated Press.
“It is likely these people have been in hundreds of housing areas and common areas over recent weeks and have been in close contact with many other people in custody and staff,” Board of Correction interim chairwoman Jacqueline Sherman said in a letter seen by AP.
The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world, with more than 2.2 million people in jails and prisons administered by federal, state and local authorities. The often crowded conditions in the facilities also makes them susceptible to a rapid outbreak.
“They also are living in filthy conditions and often without adequate access to soap, other hygiene products, other cleaning supplies, and that exacerbates the likelihood of the spread of a contagious illness,” said Maria Morris, a staff attorney with ACLU’s National Prison Project. “And prisons particularly have a high number of people with serious chronic medical conditions.”
The Department of Justice is using the coronavirus outbreak to ask Congress for sweeping emergency powers including suspending habeas corpus during an emergency, a power grab that was denounced by civil liberties advocates.
Days after Lacoste made headlines for selling products that had allegedly been manufactured in Chinese mass detention camps, where ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are reportedly forced to “learn Chinese and memorize propaganda songs” and to work as part of a secretive – yet sweeping – “re-education” campaign, U.S. lawmakers have proposed legislation aimed at taking a stricter stance on the import of products coming from this particular region. Something of a significant departure from the current rule, the new bipartisan bill would require importers to obtain certification from the U.S. government that goods coming from Xinjiang were not produced using forced labor. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Representative James McGovern (D-MA) – who co-chair the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (“CECC”), a Congressional-Executive commission that is tasked with “monitoring human rights and the development of the rule of law in China” – proposed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act on Wednesday in furtherance of a quest “to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for the use of forced labor in Xinjiang and ensure that goods produced through forced labor do not enter the United States.” If enacted, the bill, which was introduced over a year after North Carolina-based Badger Sportswear made headlines after it was revealed that its apparel orders were quietly being fulfilled by prisoners in internment camps on the Chinese mainland, will alter existing law in that it will impose a “‘rebuttable presumption’ that assumes that all goods manufactured in Xinjiang are made with forced labor and therefore, banned under the 1930 Tariff Act” – meaning that they will be barred from importation into the U.S. – “unless the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection certifies otherwise,” Reuters reported this week.
Tens of millions of products on Amazon sold by approximately 250,000 merchants won’t be available to many Amazon shoppers until late April at the earliest, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the New York research firm Marketplace Pulse that monitors the site. “This is the biggest disruption Amazon has ever seen, and it will see sales decrease as customers turn to shop elsewhere, looking for faster delivery,” he said. “The impact on sellers is going to be heartbreaking.”
Many merchants -- who provide about half the inventory sold on the web store -- rely on in-house delivery service Fulfillment by Amazon to reach customers quickly and efficiently. Expected delivery appears to be slowest for Amazon shoppers who don’t pay monthly or annual fees for Prime, which includes shipment discounts and other perks.
In this invited online symposium piece, Professor Holbrook engages with the recent article by Dotan Oliar & James Y. Stern, Right on Time: First Possession in Property and Intellectual Property, 99 B.U. L. Rev. 395 (2019). This essay explores the important role that communication to interested third parties plays in possession for allocating property rights. The essay focuses on two aspects of patent law that demonstrate the importance of such communication: patent priority and utility. Under the first-to-invent regime, the first to invent could lose the right to the patent - and a second-to-invent could get the patent - if the first abandoned, suppressed, or concealed the invention. Thus, to qualify as being in "possession" of the invention first, there must be a communication of the invention. In terms of utility, patent law requires the disclosure of utility in the patent document itself. Exogenous demonstrations of utility are insufficient, again demonstrating the importance of the communicative act.
With the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic being seen in all facets of our lives, European IP registries are also seeking to manage these exceptional circumstances.
On Monday 16 March 2020, the Executive Director of the EUIPO issued a decision extending all time limits for EU trade marks and designs expiring between 9 March 2020 and 30 April 2020, that affect all parties before the Office, to 1 May 2020. Similarly, the EPO has announced that all deadlines for patent matters are extended until 17 April 2020.
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An official statement by the UK Intellectual Property Office on Wednesday 11 March 2020 indicated that said it will extend periods where national and international legislation allows and that the office will support affected customers. Requests for an extension will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The European Patent Office (EPO), the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the United State Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have each announced some relaxation of certain rules and procedures to accommodate 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19)-related delays and interruptions in filings.
The EPO will extend all deadlines accruing after March 15, 2020 until April 17, 2020, including deadlines for international applications under the PCT. The currently extended deadline of April 17 may be further extended by a future Notice.
However, to take advantage of the EPO deadline extensions, applicants or their representatives must offer "evidence that on any of the ten days preceding the day of expiry of a period, it was not possible to observe the time limit due to” a COVID-19 related disruption.
As a response to the new coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak, intellectual property offices in Europe have implemented special measures to offer some level of flexibility to rights holders whilst Europe is working under new and uncertain conditions. Full details of these measures can be found below. Whilst this flexibility is welcomed we are not intending to make use of these provisions but will continue to work to the original deadlines.
In light of the ongoing coronavirus situation the EPO has issued guidance regarding its deadlines. Time periods expiring on or after the date of publication of their notice are extended for all parties and their representatives to 17 April 2020 and may be extended further if the issue persists.
Medical Marijuana, Inc. (OTC: MJNA) (the "Company"), the first-ever publicly traded cannabis company in the United States that launched the world's first-ever cannabis-derived nutraceutical products, brands and supply chain, announced today that the European Patent Office has issued European Patent EP3094318B1 (the "Patent") specific to "Novel Functionalized 1,3-Benzene Diols and their Method of Use for the Treatment of Hepatic Encephalopathy" to its portfolio investment company Kannalife, Inc. ("Kannalife") (OTCQB: KLFE). This is the sixth patent grant that Kannalife has received.
Several publications are writing about a Samsung patent for a new wireless gamepad that would work with Galaxy smartphones. However, it looks like the South Korean company got the jump on them, because the gamepad is already on sale.
LetsGoDigital first covered the patent, which shows illustrations of this same wireless gamepad available on Samsung’s U.K. website. Further, the gamepad is also available on Amazon in both the U.S. and Canada, although it’s out of stock and not sold by Samsung on either site.
On 20th February, the Delhi High Court in Novartis Ag & Anr v. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries passed an order issuing a temporary injunction restraining Sun Pharmaceuticals from launching its generic version of Novartis’ Nilotinib. The injunction was granted on the grounds that there was a prima facie case in favor of the plaintiff, that the balance of convenience also lay in favour of them and that they would suffer an irreparable loss without the injunction. Yet, there is no recording of reasons why the Court deems the situation to be so.
This post looks into the fundamentals of granting interim injunctions with respect to the pharmaceutical drugs and the potential implication of granting them without rightly recording the reasons for the same.
Under presiding judge Klaus Bacher, the German Federal Court of Justice has upheld Sisvel’s SEP EP 08 52 885 (case ID: X ZR 44/18). The senate thereby confirms the decision of the German Federal Patent Court.
However, the patent has already expired. It protects a technology that is used in mobile communication to establish a data call. In the oral hearing, the representatives demonstrated how the technology can be used to increase the efficiency of a connection.
Applying the US Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS framework, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) finding patent claims directed to data management and processing systems for merely storing advertising data were not patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. €§101. Customedia Techs., LLC v. Dish Network Corp., Case No.18-2239 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 6, 2020) (Moore, J.)
Dish Network filed petitions for Covered Business Method review (CBM review) of claims of two Customedia patents directed to data management and processing systems for merely storing advertising data. The patents, which share a specification, describe a remote Account-Transaction Server (ATS) and a local host Data Management System and Audio/Video Processor Recorder-player (VPR/DMS) such as a cable set-top box to which that broadcasters and content providers transmit advertising data. The advertising data can be selectively recorded in programmable storage sections according to user preferences. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) found most of the patents’ claims ineligible under 35 U.S.C. €§101, as being directed to abstract ideas, and certain other claims anticipated under 35 U.S.C. €§102 or indefinite under 35 U.S.C. €§112. Customedia appealed.
A decision by the EPO’s first instance departments (Receiving Section, Examining Division, Opposition Division or Legal Division) can be appealed (i.e. contested) before the EPO’s Boards of Appeal. The primary object of the appeal proceedings is to review the decision under appeal in a judicial manner (Article 12(2), RPBA). The Boards act as the final instances in granting and opposition procedures before the EPO. The Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal provide details of the relevant procedures. These were revised in 2019, with the changes coming into effect as of 1 January this year.
The EPO states that it revised the Rules of Procedure to: “increase (i) efficiency, by reducing the number of issues to be treated, (ii) predictability for the parties and (iii) harmonisation”.
In fact, RPBA 2020 codifies various aspects of the current practice and case law of the Boards of Appeal; in particular, regarding the basis of the appeal proceedings (Article 1,2 RPBA 2020) and the ability of a party to amend an appeal case after the appeal has started (Article 13, RPBA 2020).
Teraoka Seiko Co., Ltd (the "Opponent") is a Japanese company dealing inter alia, in electronic price-computing scales named 'DIGI'. Digi International Inc. (the "Applicant") is an American company engaged in a variety of business-critical machine-to-machine and Internet of Things connectivity products and services.
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The Hearing Officer ruled that it did not. To hold the Applicant to such an obligation would be to stretch the Agreement beyond its express wording. Furthermore, no evidence was provided to prove that the parties shared such an understanding at the time the Agreement was made.
The Hearing Officer also distinguished the case law cited by the Opponent in support of its arguments - a decision by the UK Registrar of Trade Marks in Case O-006-17 Trade Mark Application No. 3134673 by Cold Black Label Ltd ("Cold Black Label") and a decision by the Australian Trade Marks Office in Ceravolo Premium Wines Pty Ltd v MA Kirkby TRPL Pty Ltd [2018] ATMO 43 ("Ceravolo").
In Cold Black Label, the applicant agreed, inter alia, not to sell beer cans with the same or confusingly similar appearance. It was held that even if the agreement prohibited use and not registration of similar marks, the application was made in bad faith because it was “plainly contrary to the spirit of the agreement” and the marks were so highly similar that the Applicant ought to have realised that.
In Ceravolo, the applicant had agreed not to use “Red Earth Child” or terms deceptively similar to the opponent’s “Red Earth” mark. The applicant subsequently applied for the registration of “OCHRE EARTH CHILD” without notifying the opponent. It was held that the applicant's deliberate secrecy in doing so indicated his insincere motivations for making the application. Although the marks were not similar, the crux of the issue is the knowledge of the applicant and whether the applicant knew he ought not make such an application.
In Shaggy’s 2000 hit, the main character is caught cheating on his girlfriend and defends himself by simply denying the facts and repeating the phrase: “It wasn’t me!”. Contract manufacturers caught infringing intellectual property rights do not generally deny having manufactured the given infringing goods. However, they often claim that they are not liable, since they had only fulfilled orders and had no influence whatsoever over the infringing nature of the goods. A recent case before the Budapest Metropolitan Court highlights the difficulties of “pointing the finger” in IP infringement cases.
Last year we commented here on the Greek draft trade mark law aimed at implementing the Directive 2015/2436 (the Directive). This law was recently submitted and accepted by the Greek Parliament (the Law), almost one year after its public consultation, adding Greece to the EU countries that are now fully compliant with the Directive.
Greece had since the first Greek trade mark law a bi-furcated system, where the Trade ÃÅark Administrative Committee / Trade ÃÅark Office (TMO) and administrative courts were competent for opposition, cancellation and invalidity actions and the civil courts were competent for infringement actions. The Law puts an end to the competence of administrative courts on invalidity and revocation actions. The new Law also institutes the possibility to file a counter-claim for declaration of invalidity or revocation of a national mark in infringement proceedings. Indeed it now foresees that, once an infringement action is pending, the validity of the mark can no longer be questioned before the TMO but only by way of counter-claim. As regards EUTMs, counter-claims have of course been possible before Greek courts since the first CTM Regulation 40/94 took effect – leading to different procedural treatment of EUTMs and national marks.
The Trade Mark Law introduces opposition proceedings, in combination with ex officio examination on absolute and relative grounds – the latter being the system that the Serbian IP Office has followed for years. Trade mark applications are first examined on absolute and relative grounds and, if found suitable for registration, they are published in the Intellectual Property Gazette for opposition purposes. The deadline for opposition is three months from publication date. If the applicant does not respond, the opposition is automatically accepted. The Law provides for a maximum cooling-off period of 24 months.
The decisions of the Serbian IP Office can be challenged by filing an administrative lawsuit before the Administrative Court. The new law abandons the possibility of appealing to the Board of Appeals at the Ministry of Education. The decisions of the Administrative Courts can be further challenged in revision proceedings before the Serbian Supreme Court of Cassation.
Like the old Law, the new Law provides for the mandatory use of trade marks. Third parties can challenge a trade mark in case of unjustified non-use during a period of five years starting from the registration date or the date of last use. The novelty is that, in case of cancellation for non-use, the trade mark ceases to be valid on the date of filing of the non-use cancellation action. In the past, trade marks ceased to be valid on the date of expiry of the five-year period (from the registration date, respectively from the date of last use). Use of an earlier trade mark is also required in opposition/invalidation/infringement actions, but only if the trade mark was registered for longer than five years and if the adversary raises an issue of use. If this issue is raised in the context of a trade mark infringement action before the Court, the defendant will be directed to challenge the plaintiff’s trade mark by way of a non-use cancellation action before the IP Office.
Filings of registered Community designs (RCDs) increased by 36.2% between 2010 and 2019, according to a new report published by EUIPO. There were more than 988,000 applications by 84,000 applicants during the 10-year period.
The report, EUIPO Design Focus: 2010 to 2019 Evolution, is available to view and download (PDF). An infographic showing the key data is reproduced below.
It analyses trends in filings over the past 10 years, including the origin of applications. The top five countries (Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain) accounted for 51% of total direct RCD filings. However, over the period, the EU share of filings fell by 15% while the United States and China increased their share by 4% and 12% respectively.
A copyright infringement lawsuit pitting one of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s go-to designers against a fast fashion giant has landed on a New York federal court docket. In the complaint that she first filed in a federal court in Texas in June 2019 against H&M, Sophie Theallet claims that she created “a unique floral print fabric design and color scheme” in 2016, enlisted celebrities to promote it, and before she had a chance to formally launch the collection for sale to the public, H&M stole the print for garments of its own and beat her to market. According to Theallet’s suit, in February 2018, she learned from Marka Klonlari-Copycats, an Instagram account dedicated to calling out fashion copycats, that H&M had begun selling jumpsuits and tunics bearing a marigold and black floral print that is “a clear copy of both the textile and the overall look of [her own copyright-protected] print.” More than merely copying the print, itself, which she describes as a “floral print fabric design and color scheme (black floral print silhouette on yellow-gold fabric),” Theallet argues in her suit that H&M hijacked the overall “look and feel – e.g., flowing dresses and a loungey jumpsuit” – of her garments by way of its allegedly infringing wares.
Picture a rotating roster of glossy crocodile Birkin bags in hues of royal purple, vibrant salmon, fire engine red, and cool turquoise displayed against the rolling terrain of Provence or on the terrace of the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc overlooking the sea on the Côte D’azur in Antibes. Now add in the latest seasonal purses from Chanel, perched atop a bench at the Paris-based fashion brand’s elaborate runway shows, and throw in a Louis Vuitton suitcase and a colorfully-painted Petite Malle for good measure. This is the content that has made @swedishandstylish a popular follow for more than 150,000 handbag-obsessed Instagram users. In the sea of Hermès and Chanel that is @swedishandstylish’s timeline, there is also an expansive collection of Christian Dior bags, from tie-dyed Saddle bags to exotic skinned Lady Dior ones, which the account’s owner – a Florida-based jet-setter who routinely obscures her face in her luxury-soaked photos – pairs with ready-to-wear, footwear and eyewear from the 73-year old high fashion brand. While not nearly as striking as the pool of eye-poppingly expensive Birkin and Kelly bags that populate the @swedishandstylish page, a couple of these Dior-centric posts are noteworthy, as they are precisely the ones that have pitted the Florida-based limited liability company tied to the Swedishandstylish account against the fashion brand in a new lawsuit.
Earlier this week, the Swedish Supreme Court issued its decision in an interesting copyright case: T 4412-19 (commonly referred to as the “metal pole case”). In a nutshell, the case concerned the relationship between, on the one hand, copyright and related rights in a film and, on the other hand, the public interest in accessing information (freedom of information).
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Among other things, it noted that Directive 2001/29/EC (the InfoSoc Directive) must be transposed into national law in such a way that a fair balance between the authors’ rights and third-party rights and interest is achieved.
In this regard, Articles 23 and 25 of the Swedish Copyright Act (SCA) set out that works which have been made public may be reproduced in a newspaper in connection with a report on a current news event. Works which are seen or heard in the course of an event may be used in connection with information concerning the event through sound radio, television, direct transmission or film. The works may, however, be used only to the extent justified by the purpose of information.
The latter provisions were left unaffected when Sweden transposed the InfoSoc Directive into its own law.
By taking into account the InfoSoc Directive, Swedish legislature concluded that the requirements “have been made public” in Article 23 and “works which are seen or heard in the course of an event” in Article 25 SCA must be fulfilled for the limitations to apply. In this sense, the legislature did not envisage a more general limitation on copyright for the purposes of news reporting where courts would be given further discretion to assess whether a certain actions can be considered justified for the purpose of freedom of information.
Consequently, the newspaper’s argument failed: the longer version had not been made public prior to publishing the longer version of the video.
Other legislation may, depending on the circumstances, pose limits to the rightsholder’s exclusive rights as granted under the SCA. Examples of this are usually mentioned under legislation relating to competition law and/or criminal law.
In Oracle America, Inc. v. Google LLC, the Federal Circuit undermined copyright law’s deference to patent law and, in doing so, delivered a blow to both regimes. Copyright’s deference— including a historic refusal to enforce rights that might undermine the public’s liberty to copy unpatented inventions-- is a necessary part of preserving inventors’ willingness to accept the short duration, mandatory disclosure, and other stringent bargains demanded by patent law. Deference to patent law is also integral to copyright law’s interior architecture; copyright’s refusal to monopolize functional applications of creative work lowers the social costs that would otherwise be imposed by copyright’s ease of acquisition and long duration.
If patent law refuses to protect a functional device or other innovation (perhaps because its patent has expired, or because the innovation would be obvious to anyone skilled in the field), various copyright doctrines make it difficult for an eager claimant to use copyright law instead. These doctrines act like fences.
For example, under 17 USC €§ 102(b), copyright cannot extend to “ideas” or to any “procedure, process, system,[or] method of operation.” This prohibition applies “regardless” of the copyrighted “form” in which the idea, procedure, process or method appears. Id. Therefore, the public violates no copyright duties when it copies, say, ideas about how to improve the manufacture of steel from a copyrighted instruction manual or video. If the creator of the manufacturing idea wants protection for it, the inventor needs to look to patent law.
Similarly, although copyright can subsist in drawings of a useful article, the statute and caselaw disable those copyrights from giving any rights to keep others from making or selling the article. 17 USC ۤ 113(b). Say the inventors of an automobile engine with improved fuel efficiency want to restrain others from building and selling copycat engines. To restrain such functional copying, the inventors get no mileage out of the copyrights that subsist in their blueprints. Rather, to stop competitors from building and selling the new engine, the inventors must seek the protection of patent law.
Under yet another statutory rule, sculptured shapes that have “an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information” are not copyrightable unless their aesthetic and functional components are separable. 17 USC €§ 101.
The instant Article discusses these and other limits on copyright law. Their overall impact is to emphasize the importance Congress and the courts give to preventing copyright law from directly or indirectly competing with, or undermining, the decisions of patent law.
Computer-program copyrights were intended to respond to programmer’s expression, not their engineering ingenuity. As technology poses new chanllenges, separate intellectual property laws need to keep conguent with the separate purposes each serves. The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Oracle, allowing the Court to evaluate a judicial opinion that, this Article argues, ignored these first principles.
A need for congruence (‘or ‘fit’) is recognized in most areas of civil liability. For example, in enforcing the Clayton Act, the Supreme Court honored that need for congruence by creating a doctrine it called ’antitrust injury’ to limit liability. Common-law tort generally employs the doctrine called “proximate cause” to similarly assure fit between the facts of a given case and the law’s purposes. In copyright law, the courts and Congress entrust this familiar but crucial task to “fair use”. The instant Article employs analogies from antitrust and common-law tort to reinforce the appropriateness of using the fair use doctrine to keep copyright law in its own yard.
Popular hip-hop mixtape site and app Spinrilla has sued the RIAA for sending false takedown notices. The company believes that the music group relies on text searches, without properly checking if the content is infringing. The mixtape site informs the court that these faulty notices harm its goodwill and reputation, so is requesting damages in return.
The Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment has been quietly comandeering more pirate site domains, presumably as part of settlement arrangements with their former owners. One domain relates to a previously announced case but three others, all connected to pirate IPTV, are reported today for the first time.
