China has been trying to develop an operating system of its own, but it has historically been not so successful so far. Moreover, China also had a couple of bad experiences with other companies, like when ZTE depended on the US for the processor or the infamous Huawei issue. This time, though, China might just have created the right operating system.
The open source Kubernetes platform has become the defacto standard for enabling cloud native application delivery.
At its core, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform, with organizations using it both on-premises and across both public and private cloud provides to deploy, schedule and manage container applications workloads. On March 25, Kubernetes 1.18 became generally available, as the second major release of Kubernetes in 2020, following the 1.17 update that came out on Jan.7.
Amazon has announced a new Linux-based open-source operating system (OS) called Bottlerocket, which is purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket is currently in public preview as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for customers to experiment with.
The tech giant designed and optimized Bottlerocket specifically for use as a container host, and it comes with a single-step update mechanism. Furthermore, Bottlerocket only includes essential software to run containers. Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, stated in a blog post on Bottlerocket...
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is an open-source software collective that aims at making the adoption of cloud-native computing universal. CNCF is driven by a community of developers, end-users, and IT service providers that collaborate to create open-source, vendor-neutral tools. CNCF creates tools for projects that help boost the adoption of cloud-native computing. One such tool is Kubernetes that has singlehandedly changed the way workloads are hosted in the cloud. Kubernetes, which started as a project by Google, is now an official part of CNCF’s impressive and ever-growing cloud-native landscape. These projects are usually hosted on GitHub and help enterprises go cloud-native with ease. CNCF projects go through three phases under CNCF; Sandbox, Incubating, and Graduation. Let’s take a close look at five new CNCF tools that you should consider adding to your application stack.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation has brought KubeCF under its wing as an incubating project, laying out a path for the full Cloud Foundry experience on Kubernetes.
The announcement coincides with the release of v1.0.1 of KubeCF, which is an open source distribution of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR).
Container management platforms are leveraged by developers to launch, test, and secure applications in resource-independent environments. Containers include components of applications, libraries, or collections of source code that can be used or deployed on demand.
The container management platforms support users designate resources to optimise performance and balance system workloads. Companies utilise container management platforms to streamline container performance and to evade the complexities of system architectures. Given there are tens of container platforms presently available, in this article, we list the top ones that are most widely used, both free and subscription-based for enterprises-
Google today announced the availability of “Game Servers” in beta test mode, a managed service offering using a service called Agones, which is an open-source game server hosting and scaling project built on Kubernetes.
Using Agones, game developers and publishers can provide critically needed servers for games to maintain great multiplayer experiences. Game developers now increasingly rely on dedicated severs in order to deliver lag-free and high-fidelity gameplay for connecting players, but scaling in these environments can be difficult.
In order to open up choice and control for developers, Google said its Agones-based Game Servers will make it easier to deploy, manage and scale servers based on demand.
Google and Solo.io are now collaborating to make open source Istio service mesh more extensible by adding support for WebAssembly (WASM), which was created under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and provides a portable target for compiling more than 30 high-level languages.
Solo.io has been working to marry WASM with Envoy, an open source proxy server being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The Istio service mesh is built on top of Envoy, so now Google and Solo.io are working toward providing WASM support for Istio.
Portshift, a leader in cloud-native workload protection, today introduced Kubei Open Source container scanning software. Kubei is a unique open source Kubernetes runtime images scanning solution, presented to invite developer collaboration for the hardening of runtime environments. Kubei identifies which pods were built from vulnerable images or contain newly discovered vulnerabilities, then it couples the Kubernetes information with vulnerability data for quick and easy remediation.
Portshift introduced Kubei Open Source container scanning software. Kubei is a unique open source Kubernetes runtime images scanning solution, presented to invite developer collaboration for the hardening of runtime environments. Kubei identifies which pods were built from vulnerable images or contain newly discovered vulnerabilities, then it couples the Kubernetes information with vulnerability data for quick and easy remediation.
Cloud, containers, and **cgmanager** from the **ap** software series.
This week the band is back together. We’ve been bringing new life into the universe and interconnecting chat systems. Distros are clad in new wallpapers, Raspberry Pi’s are being clustered with MicroK8s and the VR game industry has been revolutionsed.
4 Views on Linux Adoption In this video, we will be going over 4 points of view when it comes to Linux Adoption.
The Linux 5.6 stable kernel could be released as soon as tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with its current state to avoid having an eighth weekly release candidate. Whether Linux 5.6 ends up being released tomorrow or next weekend, this kernel is bringing many exciting changes.
We have our Linux 5.6 feature overview that was published at the end of the merge window for those wanting a lengthy look at all of the kernel highlights.
So I'll admit to vacillating between doing this 5.6 release and doing another -rc.
This has a bit more changes than I'd like, but they are mostly from davem's networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It's just slightly more than I'd have preferred at this stage - not doesn't really seem worth delaying a release over.
So about half the diff from the final week is network driver fixlets, and some minor core networking fixes. Another 20% is tooling - mostly bpf and netfilter selftests (but also some perf work).
The rest is "misc" - mostly random drivers (gpio, rdma, input) and DTS files. With a smattering of fixes elsewhere (a couple of afs fixes, some vm fixes, etc).
The shortlog is appended, nothing really looks all that exciting, and most of the discussions I've seen are already about things for the next merge window.
Which obviously opens now as of the release, and I'll start doing pulls tomorrow. I already have a couple of pull requests in pending in my inbox - thank you.
And while I haven't really seen any real sign of kernel development being impacted by all the coronavirus activity - I suspect a lot of us work from home even normally, and my daughter laughed at me and called me a "social distancing champ" the other day - it may be worth just mentioning: I think we're all reading the news and slightly distracted. I'm currently going by the assumption that we'll have a fairly normal 5.7 release, and there doesn't seem to be any signs saying otherwise, but hey, people may have better-than-usual reasons for missing the merge window. Let me know if you know of some subsystem that ends up being affected.
So we'll play it by ear and see what happens. It's not like the merge window is more important than your health, or the health of people around you.
Linus
Linus Torvalds just announced the release of the Linux 5.6 stable kernel a few minutes ago. This also means the Linux 5.7 merge window is now open for business.
Linus has released the 5.6 kernel.
Some of the headline features in this release include Arm EOPD support, time namespaces, the BPF dispatcher and batched BPF map operations (both described in this article), the openat2() system call, the WireGuard virtual private network implementation, the flow queue PIE packet scheduler, nearly complete year-2038 support, many new io_uring features, the pidfd_getfd() system call, the ZoneFS filesystem, the ability to implement TCP congestion-control algorithms in BPF, the dma-buf heaps subsystem, and the removal of the /dev/random blocking pool.
See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1 and part 2) and the (under construction) KernelNewbies 5.6 page for more details.
Linux overseer Linus Torvalds given the world version 5.6 of the Linux kernel, and been given the title “social distancing champ”.
The latter accolade came from his daughter. But he’s tried to live the values it implies by telling the Linux community not to stress about the pace of kernel development.
“I haven't really seen any real sign of kernel development being impacted by all the coronavirus activity - I suspect a lot of us work from home even normally,” he wrote.
“I'm currently going by the assumption that we'll have a fairly normal 5.7 release, and there doesn't seem to be any signs saying otherwise, but hey, people may have better-than-usual reasons for missing the merge window,” he added.
While we were hoping to see the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver introduced in Linux 5.7 for improving the AMD Ryzen Linux laptop experience, that now looks quite unlikely.
This driver has been sought after by AMD Linux laptop customers since 2018 for supporting the accelerometer, gyroscopic sensors, and other functionality on modern AMD laptops, similar to the Intel Sensor Hub. Patches for the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (AMD-SFH) driver for Linux were posted in January and underwent a few rounds of review.
Earlier this month there was the proposal by a Linux kernel engineer for Amazon to flush the L1 data cache on context switches as another safeguard against the ever increasing CPU vulnerabilities.
The motivation for flushing the L1d cache on context switches is driven as a result of Intel's data sampling vulnerabilities and this safeguard would be an opt-in feature for those paranoid about system security. Flushing the L1 cache would ensure the data is not being snooped or leaked following a context switch but with all of the cache flushing could significantly hamper the system performance.
For the very common Intel "Gen9" graphics found on pretty much all current pre-Icelake hardware that is available through retail channels, high dynamic range (HDR) display support could soon be enabled under Linux for a subset of devices.
The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been experimenting with compute-based culling for GFX10/Navi hardware.
Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged experimental support for compute-based culling. Marek simply noted, "This is an experimental feature that might be used in the future."
In hopefully meaning less regressions moving forward for DXVK with the latest open-source Vulkan drivers, the Mesa continuous integration (CI) infrastructure saw support added for playing DirectX (DXGI) traces with DXVK/Wine.
Consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve added support for APITrace with DXGI traces to the Mesa CI.
DirectX is Microsoft's proprietary hardware-accelerated graphics API for Windows; OpenGL is a cross-platform graphics API; and OpenCL is a cross-platform framework for parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs. Although there are Windows OpenCL and OpenGL drivers for many GPUs, the extent of support varies, and the DirectX implementation may be better optimised. The mapping layers will be delivered as enhancements to the open-source Mesa 3D project, for which Microsoft will provide a new DirectX 3D 12 (D3D12) backend.
There is less than one month to go until the official release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" but we've already begun experimenting with it for weeks across a variety of platforms. For the most part we have found Ubuntu 20.04 slated to offer some nice performance improvements, especially if upgrading from the existing LTS series, Ubuntu 18.04. In this article are our initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Xeon Scalable from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the current 20.04 near-final state.
Best Linux Apps 2020: Welcome to Tec Robust. This article is going to be a long stretch of best and essential Linux Applications 2020 for your Linux Distribution. It covers applications for Distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, CentOS, Elementary OS, Zorin OS, Debian, Kubuntu, and more. Without any more delay, we will get into the article. Equip your Linux with the best applications listed down here.
The world is dealing with coronavirus pandemic. Every nation around the globe is asking its people to stay at home and work from home.
Many companies are already asking their employees to stay at home and work from home to avoid coronavirus infection.
Well, there are many tools that you might need while working from home and one of those tools is a video conferencing tool. There are many video conferencing tools available on the internet. Some of them are free and some of them not.
A while ago, we posted some good alternatives to Linux man pages. Those tools skips all theoretical part and gives concise Linux command examples. If you are a lazy Linux user who wants some practical examples for a Linux command, they would definitely help. Today, we will see a similar tool named Navi. Navi is an interactive commandline cheatsheet tool written in Rust. Just like Bro pages, Cheat, Tldr tools, Navi also provides a list of examples for a given command, skipping all other comprehensive text parts.
We have reviewed many screen capturing tools at gHacks including Ksnip, Automatic Screenshotter, Auto Screen Capture, Ashampoo's Snap 11, or Martin's favorite program PicPick.
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To finalize it, copy and paste the authorization code generated by the cloud service into the box that the program opened for connecting to your account. You may choose the screenshot naming pattern such as Screenshot at %H-%M-%S representing the time (hours, minutes, seconds) when the screenshot was taken. The result will be something like Screenshot at 19-45-00. Select the folder name that the application should save content to, and whether you want it to copy the public link to the clipboard after the uploading process has been completed.
Hit the save button and you're all set to use it.
The application isn't portable. The lack of a crop tool in ScreenCloud's editor was a slight let down for me, but this is intended to be a basic screen capturing tool, besides I'm too used to ShareX's options.
Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
Note: The application kept crashing when the play button was used. But it works just fine when adding split points, and the split process was successful. I'm not sure why it crashed, especially since the preview panel displayed the frames of the split points correctly. A quick search on the program's SourceForge page revealed a similar issue reported by a user. This suggests that it could be a bug in the latest version.
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Both programs in the MP4Tools suite use FFMPEG for encoding videos. MP4Tools is a 32-bit software. It is available for Windows and macOS. Linux users will have to compile it from the source code. It is not a portable application.
WebRTC is a standard real-time communication protocol built directly into modern web browsers. It enables the creation of video conferencing services which do not require participants to download additional software. Many services make use of it and it almost always works out of the box.
The reason it just works is that it uses a protocol called ICE to establish a connection regardless of the network environment. What that means however is that in some cases, your video/audio connection will need to be relayed (using end-to-end encryption) to the other person via third-party TURN server. In addition to adding extra network latency to your call that relay server might overloaded at some point and drop or delay packets coming through.
Here's how to tell whether or not your WebRTC calls are being relayed, and how to ensure you get a direct connection to the other host.
Kripton is a dark, flat-style GTK theme for Gnome-like desktop environments, with a heavy focus on colors that are easy on the eyes. Suffice it to say if you like dark themes, Kripton is for you. Follow along below to learn to install the Kripton GTK theme on Linux!
A while ago, we posted some good alternatives to Linux man pages. Those tools skips all theoretical part and gives concise Linux command examples.
Django is an Open-Source application framework written in Python. A framework is a collection of modules to make development easier. It encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Following Friday's release of Wine 5.5, Wine-Staging 5.5 is now available as the experimental blend of Wine with some 850+ patches atop the upstream code-base with various features in testing.
New to Wine-Staging 5.5 is proper handling of long path/file names (greater than 128 characters) that affected some games like Magic: The Gathering Online. Wine-Staging 5.5 also has a fix for Winemenubuilder in properly respecting existing defaults for file-type associations, which stems from a bug report four years ago when Notepad became the default TXT file handler for a user.
It’s big news for any PC gamer that has been frustrated with Microsoft’s erroneous-laden grip on operating systems for as far back as 1995; with it comes a monumental blow to privacy, not to mention mere control of your PC; updates have a tendency to start when they want to, new OS licenses must be purchased if you change hardware configurations, and applications that Microsoft doesn’t want you using are notoriously finicky to get working.
Of course, users can simply switch over to Linux if they have had their fill of Microsoft. That switch comes with a slew of changes, however, and dropping reliable applications is a part of the grieving process that must take place when attempting to switch over your OS. Linux does host a plethora of open-source tools that can take the place of past applications; GIMP in lieu of Photoshop, for example. Yet the old applications are never truly replaced 1 for 1; it’s more of a bandage than anything else.
Even with WINE and other techniques developed over the years to help users with Linux use Windows software, there are plenty of pitfalls and inconveniences that stymie any attempts to maintain Linux over Windows.
Lutris 0.5.5 is out today as the newest version of this Linux game manager to assist in installing both native and emulated games on Linux. Lutris continues to expand the scope of its "runners" for improving the Linux gaming experience.
While the version 0.5.5 number may not seem like a big deal, there is actually a lot to find with the Lutris 0.5.5 update. Among the changes with Lutris 0.5.5 are:
- Initial support for Humble Bundle integration.
The absolutely exhilarating short horror visual novel Critters for Sale, which was originally released the first day of 2019, had its second chapter ("Goat") available for some time (Jun 2019, actually). Considering how such a hidden gem it is I was going to write about it, but Liam ended up doing it first in this GOL article.
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It still maintains the same fever-dream like visuals, game mechanics and layout, consisting on a left HUD with some key information, a central upper section where all the images and animations are displayed, along with some point and click elements, and finally a center lower section where you see the dialogues and options to advance the story in the available directions. However, regarding the premise, now it features other characters and a different setting, but since this is one of those games where the less you know the better, I will only say that although we're only grasping the surface of the whole mystery, and while the tone of the story still keeps a personal scope, at this point it's clear that those responsible for the plot's main threat not only have enough power to influence the entire world, but also directly encompass the whole history of mankind...
Although there isn't much more context, given the title's incredibly short length, the plot of Discover my Body takes place twenty years in the future, in a dystopian society where a strange medical procedure was developed to enhance human consciousness, which is being used by people to escape their miseries and existential despair. You play as a medical student who will be examining this process on the character that you'll be interacting with, and for that purpose, you'll be assigned a scanner to look for and inspect specific instances of the procedure's evolution on this patient's body.
I must confess that I "hated" this guy for all his deviancy. It's one of those characters that you would like to stab repeatedly, only to find out that it's futile, because he would be enjoying the torment. And while you might think that I disliked the game because of this fact... on the contrary! It's the living proof that the developer got it right. Apparently reminiscent of David Cronemberg's horror filmography, Discover my Body is a title that with incredibly minimal elements manages to feel nihilistic and repulsive, and while you never get to see it, you won't help but imagine how horrific and miserable that futuristic world must be, with any remnant of human dignity and decency absolutely obliterated.
Poly Bridge from back in 2016 turned out to be quite a hit, and it's coming back for another run with Poly Bridge 2 being recently announced for release this year.
Featuring new levels, new game mechanics, a special custom deterministic physics engine along with an apparently soothing soundtrack as you attempt to build bridges and inevitably watch them crumble into nothing as they fall under the weight of various vehicles.
Currently in development by Ghostbat Games, with a release date scheduled currently for sometime around October, Spies & Soldiers looks like a fun two-player head-to-head asynchronous online strategy game.
UnderMine, the action-adventure rogue-lite brimming with secrets from developer Thorium Entertainment and publisher Fandom, has opened a mysterious new area called the Othermine in the latest update.
The game follows peasants on a journey into the world below, as they search for both fortune and freedom. You dig deeper and deeper in search of treasures, while also dealing with lots of pesky creatures and some pretty huge boss encounters. When one character meets their unfortunate end, the pick-axe is passed onto another and the cycle begins again. It's a fun mixture of rogue-lite mechanics, dungeon crawling and action.
With the Othermine open, it adds in a ton of late-game content for players who've conquered the first few areas. They say this mode brings "genuine roguelike design and endless replayability". After reaching the end of the fourth zone and providing the Gatekeeper with a Nether, peasants can enter the Othermine. With no gold and only base stats, you must rely on a randomized assortment of upgrades, relics, curses, blessings, and familiars to overcome this brand new challenge.
Wreckfest running through Steam Play (Proton 5.0-4) Runs great, all online. Using a PS4 Controller.
Trailer Trashers is a twin-stick local multiplayer shooter from Sakari Games that released this week, it's their first Linux game and it turns out it's the perfect amount of ridiculous. Note: Key from the developer.
It's a fast-paced shooter with a couple different modes, my favourite being Shotgun Soccer because it's just absurd. Bullets in all modes bounce off the walls but in this one you're trying to push a ball into the opposing goal using your shotgun bullets. It gets quite intense and pretty hilarious.
With many people stuck at home, the desire for an at-home media center is greater than ever. But what if you could add an open-source user interface (UI), or ditch the one built into your TV, with the help of Raspberry Pi? With Plasma Bigscreen, a new AI voice and KDE open-source development released this week, it's possible to use your Raspberry Pi 4 as a center of your media hub.
"Plasma Bigscreen powers the interface on a single-board computer and uses the Mycroft AI voice assistant to provide a smart TV platform," it says on KDE.org. "Plasma Bigscreen will deliver not only media-rich applications, but also traditional desktop applications redesigned to fit the Bigscreen experience.
Smart TVs are becoming more and more complete computers, but unfortunately there the experience tends to be a tight walled garden between proprietary platform, services and privacy-infringing features. Features which are very cool, like voice control, but in order to not pose a threat to the user privacy should be on a free software stack and depending less on proprietary cloud platforms where possible.
Plasma Bigscreen is just entering Beta, and is currently available to download and install on the Raspberry Pi 4. On paper, it looks incredible promising for a few reasons:
Open-source video editors over the years have generally fallen well short of the stability and feature set offered by proprietary video editing solutions but in recent years at least there has been some measurable progress to the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Out this weekend for testing is the Kdenlive 20.04 beta.
Kdenlive 20.04 is being prepared as part of the "KDE Applications" 20.04 milestone for next month. For those wanting to help in spotting any last minute bugs, the Kdenlive 20.04 beta is available. For easy convenience across distributions, the AppImage is available of this first Kdenlive 20.04 beta.
The first thing that one has to do before beginning to contribute to an organization is to build the code of the application from the source. And if this is the first time a person is building an app then he/she should be ready to do a lot of googling and praying for the CMake to compile successfully.
Kdenlive works with the help of a lot of dependencies and libraries. For the CMake to compile properly the system should have all these libraries installed in it.
First things first, I got the Kdenlive source code from the GitLab instance of KDE, invent.kde.org. It is always best to checkout from the master to a new branch to prevent committing incorrect changes and spoiling your whole branch. Then I created a build file and ran the CMake code. This returned a LOT of errors when the required libraries and dependencies were not found in my system. Most of the errors were solved when the following command was executed:
This week we worked really hard on a lot of important backend stuff that’s not so user-visible but will pay dividends down the road, such as launching applications using cgroup slices. We also did a ton of work on the Breeze Evolution project, however most of it is still in heavy development and not ready to be announced. It should trickle in during subsequent weeks, but until then, have a look at what did get landed...
This week in KDE land there weren't too many new features introduced but a lot of low-level work to foster future features.
Some of what did come about over the past week includes:
- Easier switching of time zones from the clock applet.
- Support for launching applications in Cgroup slices.
All of you that are in using a computer for a long time should use it!
If you use KDE software, there is a good chance you’re on a Linux distribution and you download the software from your distribution’s repositories. But the fact is you can get KDE software from a number of sources on different platforms. As project coordinator for KDE e.V. helping with KDE Goals, I was tasked to look at app download statistics. Join me in my quest to understand how popular KDE apps are in various app stores.
Like everyone else, I am also in quarantine, and during this quarantine I got closer to the program that I love, inkscape. I started to make smartphone mockups again, which I published on my Instagram profile (maybe I will also make posts here). But I started a new icon theme , since I have many free hours a day, I have a lot of time to devote to this project.
This month KDE web developers worked on updating more websites and some progress was made in a new identity provider and a lot of other exiting stuff and a lot of background work was also done.
One longstanding complaint I hear about modern day GTK apps is that they don’t like anywhere near as fancy as their macOS, Windows, iOS and even KDE Plasma counterparts.
And a big reason for that is the lack of blur effect support in Mutter (and GNOME Shell at large, though yes: this is changing).
Thing is, next-gen window compositors based on the Wayland stack are already capable of doing more than just ‘showing’ windows on the screen.
GNOME has a sleek interface, designed to support your work while being out of your way when possible. These considerations depend on your preferences. Some people want all the graphics and the icons, some wants to minimize distractions while remembering how to run stuff with keyboard shortcuts. A known issue is that GNOME has taken away the application menu that is common in other systems. you can add an extension to add it yourself. You write extensions for GNOME in JavaScript, though there are times when you can link to other languages. Because you use JavaScript, you can also use CSS packages such as Bootstrap.
What are the extensions changing?
This may seem like an irrelevant question but as you start troubleshooting, you need to know this. Any extension is actually adding code to the gnome-shell. Due to this, your desktop will crash due to a bad extension so test carefully before trusting any code. It is a good idea to remember this both when you are installing other people’s extensions and when you are coding yourself.
You can learn how to make an extension quickly if you know JavaScript and you follow the documentation at the GNOME wiki. You can start by using the standard tools which create the required files for you. There are only two required files, though, so creating them yourself is not a big task.
There's been quite a while since the last blog post. Since then 3.36.0 was released, and also the first update for the stable 3.36 branch, 3.36.1 has been released.
As I've written about before one of the main features in 3.36 is the support for trip planning for public transit using third party services, as shown here from Paris...
The Linux operating system offers a rich mix of features and security that make it a great free and (mostly) open-source alternative to macOS and Microsoft Windows. Because it's different "under the hood," consider some of the big-picture aspects of Linux and how it compares to the other desktop operating systems, before you take the plunge.
While you may not find the same applications or tools on Linux – the user interface is what will make you feel comfortable using the OS.
So, in this article, I shall mention only the distributions that resemble the look and feel of Windows (to some extent, at least).
Once, you’re done choosing what you want – you can simply take a look around for the essential applications available on Linux, installing themes, and a lot of similar resources available in our portal.
Walking the Tux road, one system at a time. A short while back, I thought a departure from the proven mainstream dozen distros would do me some fresh good. So I grabbed Solus OS, I tested Peppermint, and now, I'd like to embark on an Arch adventure.
Previously known as ArchMerge, Arcolinux is a distro that obeys Monty Python's rule of three. Three shall be the number of versions, and the number of desktop environments shall be three. Not two, not four. ArcoLinux has the main edition plus D and B builds for tinkerers. I opted for the Xfce-clad 19.12 release. Without further ado, let's see what gives.
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I am struggling to reconcile with the polar brilliance of the Linux desktop. Even now, some 15+ years since I started using it, I haven't gotten used to it. You get something really cool, and then a bunch of random cosmic events that ruin the experience. And this is because most distros aren't designed with the end user in mind, and they have no product awareness.
Arcolinux has some interesting points. But this ain't new, radical or special. You can pick any distro, and it will do something significantly better than others. Then, it will also fail three or five basic things that ordinary folks expect. And most distros have this problem - they do not address the most mundane activities or needs that one wants in a desktop. Arcolinux was fast, it did all right on the connectivity front, but it's quite rough around the edges, and if you deviate from the dark-theme unicorn, the session loses all traces of fun. Which is not how it's meant to be. If you want to test something a bit avant-garde, and Arch-based at this, perhaps you want to look at Arcolinux. For me, this is a classic manifestation of a much wider problem in the Linux space, and once again, sadness rules supreme at the end of the short review.
LibreELEC 9.2.2 (Leia) is a Hotfix release just for the x86_64 Generic (PC, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA …) image. It includes a fix for the missing sound at Intel based systems (mainly NUC) due an Linux Kernel bug. This is just for the Generic image as the fix only targeting this platform.
4MLinux 33.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
Today is the day! — Nitrux 1.2.7 is available to download
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.2.7. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Bodhi Linux 5.1.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.
In this video, we are looking at Nitrux 1.2.7 build 270320.
SUSE€®, the world's largest independent open source software company, has made a commitment to help all organizations that are producing medical devices to fight COVID-19. To that end, SUSE is offering free services such as support and maintenance for its operating system and container technologies to be embedded in and run those medical devices. These SUSE solutions are available immediately to help speed time to market for device manufacturers.
As with most key topics of IT intrigue, we have a webcast just for this: on April 30, 2020, El Reg’s Tim Phillips will be joined by Carla Arend, IDC's lead analyst for cloud in EMEA, and Yasser Eissa, VP of IBM Public Cloud for Europe.
As well as tackling all the basic factors of a public cloud move, they’ll be going a little deeper into the practicalities, talking about how existing cloud investments can help contribute to a wider flexibility in doing more with public cloud; how open-source software can help ramp up security and enterprise-grade infrastructure in the public cloud; and how public cloud can help you avoid vendor lock-in when planning any further changes to the way you work.
The idea of the online event is to bring the Linux world together in order to improve the way Debian can help the health industry fight against the new coronavirus, and Debian says anyone can contribute with bug triage, testing, documentation, CI, translations, packaging, and code contributions.
“You can also contribute directly to the upstream packages, linked from the Debian Med COVID-19 task page at [covid-19-packages]. Note: many biomedical software packages are quite resource limited, even compared to a typical FOSS project. Please be kind to the upstream author/maintainers and realize that they may have limited resources to review your contribution. Triaging open issues and opening pull requests to fix problems is likely to be more useful than nitpicking their coding style,” the Debian developers explain.
The Debian platform has many ‘Pure Blends’ available, which are distributions specifically designed to serve the requirements of a specific topic. For example, there is Ubuntu Studio, a version of Ubuntu, particularly for content creation. Or Fedora Labs.
The team of Debian Med (medical-related Debian variation) has announced a ‘COVID-19 Biohackathon’ between 5 April and 11 April to help with the pandemic that has depredated the world.
According to Telegraph, one-fifth of the world’s population is under lockdown in the fight against the COVID-19. Consequently, almost all domains of technology have come forward to help. Open-source giants like OpenSUSE have also started various initiatives to offer support for medical devices and tools.
Along the same lines, yesterday, the open-source Debian Med team announced the launch of the online Biohackathon for students. The Med team also requested Debian developers to participate and contribute to improving biomedical free and open-source software.
New iso images of Sparky 2020.03.1 of the (semi-)rolling line have been generated.
The developing team working on Sparky Linux has just announced that new ISO images for version 2020.03.1 of the (semi-)rolling line are now available for download.
And of course, there are no breaking changes in this release, but only a minor update for the live and install media for Sparky Linux.
There are technically three important improvements that are part of this new release, as it follows.
First and foremost, all packages are now updated from the Debian testing repos dated March 27, 2020, so you’re also getting tons of fixes as part of this release.
Then, the update fixes an issue that blocked booting Sparky 2020.03 that was previously copied on an USB flash drive. This was a particularly inconvenient bug affecting those who used USB media to boot Sparky Linux, so after updating to this version, everything should be working just as expected.
Smart cards have proliferated and are now everywhere, from work ID badges to credit cards and passports. For example, the United States Federal Government uses smart cards to control access to federal facilities and information systems because they offer an extra layer of security and respond to strict government guidelines. If used in a company, these will provide identity confirmation, verification that data has not been changed, and confidentiality via encryption.
This whitepaper will provide information on how to configure Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to operate with a smart card to provide multi-factor authentication when logging into the system both locally and remotely. For the purposes of this whitepaper, a PIVKey smart card is used as an example since they are readily accessible and contain a few basic credentials.
Before you install Ubuntu on top of your current operating system, it's a good idea to try it out first. There are various ways to try Ubuntu, and the following guides will help: [...]
Running Ubuntu directly from either a USB stick or a DVD is a quick and easy way to experience how Ubuntu works for you, and how it works with your hardware. Most importantly, it doesn’t alter your computer’s configuration in any way, and a simple restart without the USB stick or DVD is all that’s needed to restore your machine to its previous state.
With a live Ubuntu, you can do almost anything you can from an installed Ubuntu:
In the second part of his take on “what’s wrong with the free desktop app ecosystem and how we can fix it”, Tobias spotlight’s Ubuntu’s divergence from the upstream defaults as symptom of hurdles placed in front of developers who want to target the GNOME experience.
With GNOME desktop designers and developers (upstream) and the Linux distros shipping it (downstream) often pulling in different directions the ‘target’ developers should try to aim for is, well, a little less clear.
We’re not sure how many of you out there own a boat large enough to get its own integrated computer network, but it doesn’t really matter. Even if you can’t use this project personally, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the work [mgrouch] has put into the “Bareboat Necessities” project. From the construction of the hardware to the phenomenal documentation, there’s plenty that even landlubbers can learn from this project.
In its fully realized form, the onboard computer system includes several components that work together to provide a wealth of valuable information to the operator.
Hardware is important when selecting a new desktop computer, but so is the software that drives the experience. You need to know there are applications you can rely on for your workflow. What can you use to browse the web, edit a spreadsheet, watch a movie, or play a game? PureOS, which empowers all our hardware, has plenty of software that respects your freedom and can get the job done.
The default browser on PureOS is the Extended Support Release of Firefox. This gives you the stable base of Firefox with at least a year of support on each version. Firefox puts an emphasis on security and is licensed under a weak copyleft license called the MPL.
Huawei uses the open-source version of Android without all of the core features that are tied to Google services.
Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment, Inc. (ASSIA€®) the market-leading supplier of AI-driven broadband and Wi-Fi optimization software, announced its official involvement in the prpl Foundation, an open-source, community-driven, not-for-profit consortium with a focus on enabling the security and interoperability of embedded devices for the smart society of the future. ASSIA makes it possible for service providers' Wi-Fi management solutions to work with any Wi-Fi router and middleware solution and interoperate, scale, and evolve with technology and standards.
Cloud Foundry, an open-source foundation dedicated to a cloud-oriented application platform, is now incubating the KubeCF project, and has also welcomed Google upgrading its membership to platinum – the highest level.
Google has been a member of Cloud Foundry since January 2017, but platinum membership represents a higher level of commitment. Google's Jennifer Phillips, head of Open Source Programs, is to be on the foundation's board of directors. The other platinum members are Dell EMC, IBM, SAP, SUSE and VMware.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 21st Anniversary.
In 2019, DigitalOcean and the open source community celebrated the sixth annual Hacktoberfest, an inclusive community event that inspires open source participation and maintenance. It was an exciting year with record-breaking numbers of pull requests, participants, and events around the world. From the start, our goal has always been to encourage all types of people, from seasoned developers to total newcomers, to get more involved with open source, all while promoting DigitalOcean's longstanding values of simplicity, community, and love.
We recapped Hacktoberfest 2019 on our blog, but in honor of the 22nd anniversary of open source, we decided to dive into the results of our annual participant survey within the context of our seasonal Currents report on the state of open source. This year, we revamped the Hacktoberfest survey to better understand what it means to the community, as well as their involvement with open source projects, key motivators for participating, and more. So how did the community do? Here are some findings.
Multirotor drones excel at vertical lift and hover, while fixed wing drones are great at both distance and wide-open spaces. In February, Auterion Government Solutions and Quantum-Systems announced a two-pronged approach to the rotor- or fixed-wing drone market, with a pair of drones that use the same sensor packages and fuselage to operate as either the Scorpion Trirotor or the Vector fixed wing craft.
“As we started to develop our tactical UAS Platform, our plan was only to develop a VTOL fixed wing solution (like our Vector),” said Florian Siebel, managing director of Quantum-Systems. “During the development process we decided to build a Tri-Copter Platform as well, as a result of many discussions with law enforcement agencies and Search and Rescue Units.” Adapting the fixed-wing fuselage to the tri-copter attachments means the drone can now operate in narrow spaces and harsh conditions. Scorpion, with the rotors, can fly for about 45 minutes, with a cruising speed of zero to 33 mph. Put the fixed wings back on for Vector, and the flight time is now two hours, with a cruising speed of 33 to 44 mph.
There are a lot of tire models available in the world. Most are closed source (or black box), meaning the program code behind them is not available to end users. This is understandable as the code can easily be licensed and its development paid for. Everyone’s got to make a living! This approach, however, makes it much harder to get the best out of the models – if you can’t see their internal workings, it’s harder to maximize their usefulness.
Other models, such as Magic Formula, are effectively open source, with the equations published in books and journal papers. This means that anyone (if they invest the time) can build and use their own Magic Formula solvers and, in the process, learn the details of how the model works.
In April 2015, during a session at the 4th International Tire Colloquium at Surrey University, UK, the general idea of open sourcing was discussed. In attendance were various figures from the commercial tire model development community, representatives from car and tire companies who use the models, and a large group of academics involved in more fundamental research. Issues were raised regarding everything from intellectual property concerns and licensing through to technical advances, development strategies and training. Boiling all this down, most discussions centered on one of two approaches.
During the Huawei 2020 Developer Conference continues online, bringing the latest progress of The Wei Peng and Yan Teng Ecology. According to the agenda of the meeting, the first day of the developer conference (March 27) will focus on Peng Peng, the next day (March 28) will focus on The Teng.
Megvii Technology Limited has announced the launch of a new open-source artificial intelligence platform for developers, Shanghai Daily learned on Thursday.
Other firms offering such platforms include tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu.
From smart fever-screening at subway stations to scan-reading diagnosis, artificial intelligence (AI) is on the frontline of China's battle against the novel coronavirus.
Behind the smart systems are deep-learning frameworks that emulate the way the human brain learns, like recognizing patterns and coping with ambiguity.
Noble.AI, whose artificial intelligence (AI) software is purpose-built for engineers, scientists, and researchers and enables them to innovate and make discoveries faster, today announced that it had completed contributions to TensorFlow, the world's most popular open-source framework for deep learning created by Google.
Google researchers recently published a paper describing a framework — SEED RL — that scales AI model training to thousands of machines. They say that it could facilitate training at millions of frames per second on a machine while reducing costs by up to 80%, potentially leveling the playing field for startups that couldn’t previously compete with large AI labs.
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) provides the widest range of NHS mental health services in the UK with 52 inpatient wards, outpatient, and community services. As recognition of their digital accomplishments, SLaM have been awarded GDE (Global Digital Exemplar) status.
Following a two-year pilot of Open-eObs software, the trust had proven the long-term benefits of an open source approach and needed a supplier to further drive their digital ambition.
Coronavirus had no impact on my working life for now. The same as usual.
Mozilla is working well in a distributed team.
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We had an issue with the new form design. We switched to 100% of our users on March 16, 2020. but indeed all the bugs received didn't get the label that they were actually reporting with the new form design. Probably only a third got the new form.
So that was the state when I fell asleep on Monday night. Mike pushed the bits a bit more during my night and opened.
LibreOffice 6.4.3 RC1 Released: LibreOffice is one of the best open-source text editors. LibreOffice comes as default application release of Linux OS. LibreOffice is developed by Team Document Foundation. Today they announced that the LibreOffice 6.4.3 RC1 version has been released. As per their calendar, LibreOffice 6.4.3 RC1 has been released exactly on today!. This RC1 version has many bugs fixes and tweaks in essential features.
Bitcoin has today become synonymous with cryptocurrencies and decentralization. What started off as project popular only among a certain group of tech enthusiasts and cryptographers has now become one of the most radical innovations in the world of finance and technology.
Unifont 13.0.01 is now available. This is a major release. Significant changes in this version include the addition of these new scripts in Unicode 13.0.0: U+10E80..U+10EBF: Yezidi, by Johnnie Weaver U+10FB0..U+10FDF: Chorasmian, by Johnnie Weaver U+11900..U+1195F: Dives Akuru, by David Corbett U+18B00..U+18CFF: Khitan Small Script, by Johnnie Weaver U+1FB00..U+1FBFF: Symbols for Legacy Computing, by Rebecca Bettencourt
After three years of legal wrangling, the defamation lawsuit brought by Brad Spengler and his company Open Source Security (OSS) against open-source pioneer Bruce Perens has finally concluded.
It was clear that the end was nigh last month when California's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling against the plaintiffs.
Spengler and OSS sued Perens for a June 2017 blog post in which Perens ventured the opinion that grsecurity, Open Source Security's Linux kernel security enhancements, could expose customers to potential liability under the terms of the General Public License (GPL).
OSS says that customers who exercise their rights to redistribute its software under the GPL will no longer receive software updates – the biz wants to be paid for its work, a problem not really addressed by the GPL. Perens, the creator of the open-source definition, pointed out that section six of the GPLv2 prohibits modifications of the license terms.
In our work, we leaned heavily on open source technology — and want to contribute back to that community. So today we’re taking the important step of open-sourcing some of the most important projects of the Elizabeth Warren campaign for anyone to use.
Font families can sell for hundreds of dollars. Gotham, a popular typeface used by President Barack Obama’s campaign and many others, costs nearly $1,000 to license a complete set of 66 different styles. But The League of Moveable Type, gives all of its fonts away for free. What's more, it makes them open source, so that other people can modify the fonts and make their own versions of them.
And people have. Raleway, designed by Matt McInerney and released in 2010, was expanded from a single weight into a family with nine weights, from “thin” to bold to “black,” each with matching italics, in 2012 by Pablo Impallari, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, and Igino Marini. It's now one of the most popular font families on Google Fonts, a collection of free fonts hosted by the search giant.
The app, named TraceTogether and its government is urging citizens to run so that if they encounter a Coronavirus carrier, it’s easier to trace who else may have been exposed to the virus. With that info in hand, health authorities are better-informed about who needs to go into quarantine and can focus their resources on those who most need assistance.
The app is opt-in and doesn’t track users through space, instead recording who you have encountered. To do so, it requires Bluetooth and location services to be turned on when another phone running the app comes into range exchanges four nuggets of information - a timestamp, Bluetooth signal strength, the phone’s model, and a temporary identifier or device nickname. While location services are required, the app doesn't track users, instead helping to calculate distances between them.
Less than a week after launching an app to track potential exposure to the coronavirus, Singapore is making the technology freely available to developers worldwide.
The city-state rolled out an app called TraceTogether on March 20 and described it as a supplementary tool for its contact tracing efforts that relied on the recall and memory of infected individuals. Contact tracing is the process of identifying those with close contact with infected patients.
A mobile application developed by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) that helps in contact tracing for Covid-19 has been installed by more than 620,000 users since its launch last Friday.
With a decision to make the technology behind it available to developers around the world, even more people could stand to benefit.
Developed in collaboration with the Health Ministry (MOH), the TraceTogether mobile app works by exchanging short-distance Bluetooth signals between phones.
TraceTogether, a mobile app to support contact tracing efforts developed by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MOH), was launched on Friday, Mar. 20.
A new Israeli app can instantly tell users if they have crossed paths with someone known to have been infected with the coronavirus.
On Sunday, the country’s health ministry unveiled the app, called “The Shield”(“HaMagen”, in Hebrew.) The app takes location data from the user’s phone and compares it with the information in Health Ministry servers regarding the location histories of confirmed cases during the 14 days before their diagnosis.
As a research lab of the university’s Global Research Institute, AidData facilitates innovative research projects that bring students and faculty together to solve global problems.
An MIT design has resulted in the E-Vent respirator-design that can be brought online quickly using available valve bag masks used by EMTs and others in emergency situations to ease breathing problems. The advantage of the design, says the MIT team, is that the masks are approved components. The MIT design automatically squeezes the respirator bag.
New York University is among the many academic, private and public institutions doing what it can to address the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) among healthcare workers across the world. The school worked quickly to develop an open-source face-shield design, and is now offering that design freely to any and all in order to help scale manufacturing to meet needs.
Face shields are a key piece of equipment for front-line healthcare workers operating in close contact with COVID-19 patients. They’re essentially plastic, transparent masks that extend fully to cover a wearer’s face. These are to be used in tandem with N95 and surgical masks, and can protect a healthcare professional from exposure to droplets containing the virus expelled by patients when they cough or sneeze.
One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use, which could be built quickly around the world.
oronavirus attacks the lungs. In some cases, your throat and chest may rattle from the effort just to breathe. It’s fast become common knowledge that ventilators can be a life-saving intervention — and that there simply aren’t enough of the machines to meet the growing number of patients. As a last resort, some hospitals are deploying the experimental technique of hooking two patients up to one unit.
Folding@Home, a crowdsourced computing project from scientists at Stanford University lets people across world join computing capabilities of their personal computers to form a crowdsourced supercomputer. Folding@Home then carries out research, mostly on diseases like Cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and now COVID-19. With the coronavirus outbreak, Folding@Home comes as a platform that will allow people across the world to play their part. By lending computing powers from their PCs, people can help scientists speed up their research as they have shifted their focus towards coming up with a cure for the deadly pandemic that has sent the whole world in a lockdown.
The simple, all-plastic shield — created by InStore Design Display and in collaboration with DI, The Center for Design Research at the University of Kansas, and The University of Kansas Health System — consists of two interlocking plastic parts cut from PETG, a clear plastic sheet material, that provides significant durability, chemical resistance and excellent formability for manufacturing.
Infineon engineers developed a 3D printed lung ventilator to help address the shortage of ventilators due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The German federal government held a hackathon called #WirvsVirus (“We against the virus”) where 42,000 people met to find solutions to challenges from the coronavirus. Infineon engineers, led by Mahmoud Ismail who has a doctorate in lung mechanics, submitted a 3D print design and a design for the electronics and algorithms to develop and open-source lung ventilator.
As COVID-19 continues to push unprecedented challenges on medical communities, one of the most pressing threats for hospital staff across the country is a dwindling supply of ventilators.
Now, an interdisciplinary team of Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center faculty is taking on the challenge by way of a fabricated, open-source ventilator design.
Led on the Vanderbilt side by engineers Kevin Galloway, research assistant professor of mechanical engineering and director of making at the Wond’ry, and Robert Webster, Richard A. Schroeder Professor of Mechanical Engineering, the team is currently on “version two” of the ventilator prototype and hopes to soon move into the final prototype phase before manufacturing.
A professor of anesthesiology at the University of Florida is building an "open source" ventilator out of common items from hardware stores, in an effort to meet the desperately high demand internationally due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Decades ago, Dr. Samsun Lampotang helped build a minimal-transport ventilator while he was a mechanical engineering student at UF. That ventilator became a commercial success, the university says.
John Strupat wants to make his design open source so it can be used by 'anyone from anywhere'
Canadian startup DarwinAI and researchers from the University of Waterloo are open-sourcing COVID-Net, a convolutional neural network that aims to detect COVID-19 in X-ray imagery. In response to the pandemic, a global community of health care and AI researchers have produced a number of AI systems for identifying COVID-19 in CT scans.
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“[Though it is by] no means a production-ready solution, the hope is that the open access COVID-Net, along with the description on constructing the open source COVIDx data set, will be leveraged and built upon by both researchers and citizen data scientists alike to accelerate the development of highly accurate yet practical deep learning solutions for detecting COVID-19 cases and accelerate treatment of those who need it the most,” the paper reads.
Since the initial news flurry about how a network of Italian 3D printing users came to the rescue of a hospital on the front lines of the COVID-19 outbreak in Northern Italy, a number of new stories have come out about how additive manufacturing (AM) is or could be used to help medical workers. Here we will break down just some of the news that has made headlines recently.
Due to the overall inundation faced by medical workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak, the store of medical supplies doesn’t meet the demand. As most readers will know at this point, the two biggest medical items currently lacking (aside from medications and COVID-19 tests) are ventilators and masks. In part this lack of supply can be attributed to bureaucratic mismanagement, but even in locations that are well prepared for such an outbreak, there just aren’t enough masks and ventilators to go around.
Agencies are lending their talents and resources to help make a difference in the COVID-19 pandemic with the release of open source assets.
MullenLowe is launching a public-facing version of its proprietary conversation-analysis tool, Speedbag, to help industry professionals navigate this new landscape. The tool parses the social conversation around COVID-19 as it relates to key sectors (including alcohol, automotive, construction, finance, grocery, health and wellness, healthcare, the US military, QSR, technology and travel). New categories are being added on an ongoing basis.
EARLY LAST WEEK, Lennon Rodgers, director of the Engineering Design Innovation Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison, got an urgent email from the university’s hospital. Could his lab make 1,000 face shields to protect staff testing and treating Covid-19 patients? The hospital’s usual suppliers were out of stock, due to the spike in demand prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
After putting his kids to bed, Rodgers went to Home Depot and a local craft store and grabbed supplies, including transparent plastic and a couple of foam mannequin heads. Then he made a hasty prototype at the UW maker space by adapting a construction visor and presented it to his wife, an anesthesiologist. “I was really proud of it, but she put it on and said ‘This is way too heavy,’” Rodgers recalls.
COVID-19: The team, which consists of only volunteers, has been working without any funding and is working anonymously so that people do not call them with inquiries about the project.
Here’s a new project for do-it-yourself lovers. It could save someone’s life.
A professor of anesthesiology at the University of Florida is building an open-source ventilator out of items consumers can buy from hardware stores as a way to meet the demand for ventilators since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, WCJB reported. The cost? Anywhere from $125 to $150.
Designers, engineers and programmers have heard the klaxon call. The last few weeks have seen a wave of ingenuity unleashed, with both garden-shed tinkerers and high-tech manufacturers scrambling to develop things that will combat the spread of Covid-19.
Many of their innovations raise as many questions as they answer, though. Could 3D printing now finally come into its own, with access to open-source, downloadable designs for medical parts? If so, will intellectual property infringements be waived, or will altruistic hacktivists still face costly lawsuits? Could mobile phone tracking map the spread of infection like never before, keeping people away from virus hotspots? If so, might governments use the pandemic as an excuse to ramp up surveillance measures post-crisis?
The otherwise serene, calm and beautiful southern state of Kerala known for its palm-lined beaches and backwaters, has grabbed the headlines for some not so healthy news off late. The state popularly called God’s own country is the worst hit state by the Novel Coronavirus in India, reporting 95 cases till 24.03.2020 at 08:45 AM (as per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare). It is estimated that 50% of Kerala’s population (about 16.5 million) may catch the corona virus at some stage.
In the last weeks, hospitals in the countries most affected by COVID-19, from China to Italy, Spain to the USA, have been struggling to increase their ICU capacity to admit a growing number of patients with severe respiratory diseases, in need of ventilators. Whatever the evolution of this pandemic, it is expected that more ICUs will be needed internationally in the next few months. CURA aims to improve the efficiency of existing solutions in the design of field hospitals, tailoring them to the current pandemic.
Guided by Carlo Ratti, an interdisciplinary team of researchers in continuous expansion provide a not-profit alterative to the tents currently used in field hospitals during the medical emergency.
Hospitals overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic could find a much-needed capacity lifeline in retrofitted shipping containers. An international task force, comprised of designers, engineers, medical professionals and military experts, has unveiled designs to convert shipping containers into plug-in Intensive-Care Pods as part of an open-source design dubbed CURA (Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments). The first CURA biocontainment pod prototype is currently being built in Milan, Italy.
Squint/Opera, the creative digital studio and consultancy, presents CURA (Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments), an open-source design for emergency coronavirus (COVID-19) hospitals.
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The idea is to create extra space for hospitals and medical facilities which are under pressure due to the pandemic. The use of shipping containers means that they are fast to mount and safe to use as isolation wards. CURA could be quickly deployed to cities around the world, allowing medical professionals to respond fast to the spread of the virus despite lack of hospital space.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have partnered with an artificial intelligence (AI) startup on a project that aims to use AI to improve COVID-19 screening.
The Waterloo research team publicly released AI software that can better detect infections from chest x-rays and is looking to enlist expertise from around the world to aid in the project.
Researchers Thomas Campbell and James F.X. Jones, both of the School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland, have a created a new 3D printer for the medical field, detailing their work in the recently published ‘Design and implementation of a low cost, modular, adaptable and open-source XYZ positioning system for neurophysiology.’
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With the integration of the Raspberry Pi 3, the authors were also able to incorporate the Open Computer Vision Library (OpenCV) stating that feature is what makes the system unique in comparison to other XYZ positioning systems. The open-source machine learning software library is used with automated movement, and the creators expect it to transform the exploration of mechanotransduction, the method for sensory neurons to change a mechanical stimulus to an electrical signal.
Ventilaid is an unusual project straight out of Poland and just in time for the COVID crisis19: a team of engineers has developed and made available free of charge on the Internet a breathing apparatus that can be printed with a 3D printer for the modest sum of 40 euros.
The project uses inexpensive and widely available components – it could save the lives of thousands of people in places where access to such devices is difficult. The beta version of the device is ready to be deployed, while work on a second prototype is almost complete. At this stage, the support of specialists like doctors and engineers is necessary. Those who want to help can apply directly via the project’s website.
Earlier this month, the CEO of an Italian 3D-printing startup learned that a hospital near the center of the coronavirus outbreak in Italy was running short on a small but crucial component: the valves that connect respirators to oxygen masks.
The company that makes the valves couldn't keep up with the demand, and doctors were in search of a solution.
"When we heard about the shortage, we got in touch with the hospital immediately. We printed some prototypes. The hospital tested them and told us they worked," the CEO, Cristian Fracassi, told Reuters. "So we printed 100 valves, and I delivered them personally."
In many parts of the world the COVID-19 pandemic is causing shortages in hospital space, staff, medical supplies, and equipment. Severe cases may require breathing support, but there are only so many ventilators available. With that in mind, MIT is working on FDA approval of an emergency ventilator system (E-Vent). They have submitted the design to the FDA for fast track review. The project is open source, so once they have approval the team will release all the data needed to replicate it.
The app, aimed at "location-based containment, triage & response", is described here. People involved include US-based Dr Daniel Kraft, who describes himself as a "physician/scientist and innovator"; Bruno Bowden, ex-Google; and Dean Hachamovitch, formerly general manager for Internet Explorer. Three WHO representatives – Peter Singer (special advisor), Ray Chambers (global ambassador) and Sameer Pujari (digital health and innovation) – are also listed on the team, which calls itself the COVID App Collective.
When health care workers sounded the alarm about a serious shortage of N95 masks to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic, people across the state and country started sewing handmade medical masks.
A St. Cloud school district teacher has also taken up the initiative but in a more high-tech way: printing face masks on a 3D printer.
"I have the materials. I have a little bit of knowledge. I thought, can I attempt this?" said Rick Wilson, who teaches engineering and technology at North Junior High. "And (the district was) great about it."
A group of Spanish innovators is attempting to alleviate the Covid-19 ventilator crisis by developing an ultra-simple machine that uses a car windscreen-wiper motor to turn a manual resuscitation bag into automated breathing aid.
The machine can be made in four hours by an untrained person, using simple materials such as wood, acrylic or aluminium. “You don’t need special tools. All you need is a saw,” says Lluís Rovira Leranoz, a Barcelona-based robotics maker at prototyping company Protofy, one of the leads on the OxyGEN project.
In response to the growing threat of Coronavirus (COVID-19)-themed cyberattacks, Anomali, a leader in intelligence-driven cybersecurity solutions, today publicly released over 6,000 open source Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) that were collected, curated, and validated by Anomali researchers. In addition, Anomali has also released a related Threat Bulletin providing a narrative description of the attacks being seen. This actionable threat intelligence, which identifies COVID-19-related threats and the malicious actors looking to capitalize on the pandemic, is available now for organizations to immediately feed into their cybersecurity technologies to rapidly and proactively block the identified threats.
As the World Health Organization named COVID-19 a pandemic, the global need for medical equipment and fast, effective supply chain management became apparent.
That’s when Ja'dan Johnson, Lynn University class of 2021 and Watson Scholar, joined MegaBots Founder Gui Cavalcanti to create Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies (OSCMS).
OSCMS launched as a Facebook group March 12 and grew to a community of over 40,000 in less than two weeks. The group’s mission is to mobilize makers and fabricators around the world to generate open-source plans, build a library of medical supply requirements and designs, and create distributable plans for organizing effective local responses to medical supply chain interruption.
A 3D-printed #ventilator prototype from an open-source project https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2020/03/20/open-source-project-to-build-a-medical-ventilator-autonomously.html
A research group including the Irish Colin Keogh and Gui Calavanti, CEO and co-founder of Breeze Automation, studied in less than a week the prototype of a ventilator made by 3D parts and other easily available low-cost materials. The project is open-source. The research team is also focusing on other projects for the rapid and cost-effective manufacture of products required for this health emergency, such as masks or other equipment needed by medical personnel.
As hospitals prepare to take in more patients with the coronavirus, they are in acute need of life-saving equipment: ventilators that help patients breathe, face masks and protective gear. The problem is, there aren’t enough of them. And there’s not enough manufacturing capacity to easily hike up production.
This is where the do-it-yourself (DIY) community in Spain comes in: Under the name Coronavirus Makers, over the last few weeks, thousands of citizens have been connecting online to fight against the shortage of life-saving equipment. From their living rooms and basements, they tinker with ideas and designs, share them, build prototypes and print them out with 3-D printers.
Ashoka Fellow David Cuartielles and César García, both innovators in the open source space, are helping to curate the Coronavirus Makers Forum that they set up on March 13 as the crisis was getting worse. The Forum takes a bird’s eye view of all the community’s activities, connects members, extracts insights, and builds bridges to health care institutions and experts — to speed up solutions that could save lives.
While face masks that block particles from coming into the lungs via the nose and mouth are important to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the eyes and the rest of the face can also be a pathway for the disease to find its way into the body.
There are now a number of projects around the world, big and small, manufacturing breathing masks as fast as they can. A group of designers and engineers in New York City with access to a machine shop has designed a face shield that can be quickly, cheaply, and easily manufactured using simple tools and supplies available in local hardware stores.
Details are posted online on how to build new masks, including design files, and you can also help the organization by joining their distribution efforts. All at this link…
Divio Technologies AB (publ) today announced the availability of CoReport - an open-source information-sharing tool designed to help local governments manage their resources in addressing COVID-19. CoReport was developed and launched on the Divio platform, in response to a request from a local government region of Switzerland.
Many developers turn their noses up at PHP, but I have a soft spot for it. For me, it's the most approachable programming language by far. It feels intuitive in a way no other languages do, and it makes it possible to cobble together a working application with just a handful of lines of code. So whenever I can't find a tool for a specific job, I try to build one myself.
The latest project of mine is a case in point. I was looking for a simple application for keeping a photographic diary, and I was sure that I'd be able to find an open-source tool for that. I searched high and low, but I came back empty-handed. Sure, there are plenty of static website generators, but I'd prefer something that doesn't require me to perform the write-generate-upload dance every time I want to post a quick update. And I need something that I can use not only to maintain a simple diary, but also store notes, manage tasks, and draft articles -- all this without getting bogged down by configuring templates, defining categories, and tweaking settings. And because I want most of my content to be private, I should be able to protect access to it with a password.
A new release 0.4.17 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.
This release contains small polishes related to the release 0.4.16 which added JSON support for messages, and switched to ByteSizeLong. This release now makes sure JSON functionality is only tested where available (on version 3 of the Protocol Buffers library), and that ByteSizeLong is only called where available (version 3.6.0 or later). Of course, older versions build as before and remain fully supported.
With the recent release of Git 2.26, the open source distributed version control system uses version 2 of Git’s network fetch protocol by default.
This protocol, introduced in 2018, addresses a problem with the old protocol, whereby a server would immediately list all of the branches, tags, and other references in the repository before the client could send anything. Use of the old protocol could mean sending megabytes of extra data for some repositories, even when the client only wanted to know about the master branch.
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New config options, including the ability to use wildcards when matching credential URLs. Git config options can be set for all connections or only connections to specific URLs.
The Eclipse Foundation's IoT Working Group has issued a report that reveals that for commercial organizations the IoT is real and adoption is growing, albeit with a degree of caution. As far as IoT is concerned, the open source model clearly dominates.
Conducted online between October and December 2019, with 366 respondents, the IoT Commercial Adoption Survey was the first exercise of its kind. Its aim was gain a better understanding of the IoT industry landscape by identifying the requirements, priorities, and challenges faced by organizations that are deploying and using commercial IoT solutions. It can be seen as the counterpart of the IoT Developer Survey, which since 2015 has been an annual exercise reporting on the programming languages, platforms, infrastructure and tools used for building IoT solutions.
In November 2019, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the popular core-js library, lost an appeal to overturn an 18-month prison sentence imposed for driving his motorcycle into two pedestrians, killing one of them.
As a result, he's expected to be unavailable to update core-js, a situation that has project contributors and other developers concerned about the fate of his code library.
The question: “What are the problems we should assume can be solved with machine learning?”, or even narrower and more focused on current developments “What are the problems we should assume a neural network is able to solve?”, is one I haven’t seen addressed much.
There are theories like PAC learning and AIX which at a glance seem to revolve around this, as it pertains to machine learning in general, but if actually applied in practice won’t yield any meaningful answers.
However, when someone asks me this question about a specific problem, I can often give a fairly reasonable confidence answer provided I can take a look at the data.
Thus, I thought it might be helpful to lay down the heuristic that generate such answers. I by no means claim these are precise or evidence based in the scientific sense, but I think they might be helpful, maybe even a good start point for further discussion on the subject.
Uber has released an open source version of Piranha, a tool that scans source code to delete code related to stale, or obsolete, feature flags.
Piranha is run at Uber in an ongoing pipeline for its Android and iOS codebases and has been used to remove around two thousand stale feature flags and their related code. Uber says it has led to a cleaner, safer, more performant, and more maintainable code base.
These are some answers to the Week 53 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.
This is a part of Perl Weekly Challenge(PWC) #053 and the followings are related to my solution. If you want to challenge yourself on Perl, go to https://perlweeklychallenge.org, code the latest challenges, submit codes on-time (by GitHub or email) if possible, before reading my blog post.
In Python, == compares the value of two variables and returns True as long as the values are equal.
Start writing here..In this article, you'll learn about Python file operations. More specifically, opening a file, reading from it, writing into it, closing it and various file methods you should be aware of. What is a file? File is a named location on disk to store related information. It is used to permanently store data in a non-volatile memory (e.g. hard disk).
Since, random access memory (RAM) is volatile which loses its data when computer is turned off, we use files for future use of the data.
lambda is a keyword in Python, we use it to create an anonymous function. So we also call lambda functions as anonymous functions.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control provides daily-updated worldwide COVID-19 data that is easy to download in JSON, CSV or XML formats. In this tutorial, we will use the pandas data analysis tool on the comma-separated values (CSV) data to learn some of the basic pandas commands and explore what is contained within the data set.
Java runtime solutions company Azul Systems has announced the general availability of its Zulu release of OpenJDK 14 builds.
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All Zulu 14 JDKs and JREs are verified against and pass the TCK certification tests required to ensure the correct execution of Java SE 14 applications.
Historically, troff has been a widely used typesetting language that looks back at a long history.[0] Today’s arguably biggest use of troff are man pages. Man pages come actually in two flavors: –man and –mdoc macros. The –man macros are the ones originally used to typeset the first volume of the UNIX manuals back in the 1970s.[1] In the 80s, the –mdoc macros were developed on BSD. The major difference between the two is how much semantic input they allow. –man is purely presentational. –mdoc is highly semantic; for example, .Pa is a macro to indicate a path. GNU and the entire Linux ecosystem seem strangely attached to the –man macros. Furthermore, most "anything to man page" converters output –man because they cannot possibly infer the –mdoc macros from presentational markup; this is e.g. the case with Mark– down. Meanwhile, every BSD, illumos and macOS have moved to –mdoc. For more details, see: Kristaps Dzonsons, “Fixing on a Standard Language for UNIX Manuals,” ;login: 34(5), pp. 19–23, USENIX, Berkeley, CA (October 2009).
I feel for all these parents now, thrust into a home-schooling world they didn't choose for themselves, while trying, in many cases, to work from home at the same time. I hope they learn to ditch those whiteboard schedules and stop trying to replicate school. I hope they take this opportunity to give kids what they could use more of: independence, time for play. If schools are assigning work, I hope families can get through it quickly so there's time for stories. For games. For art. Time for those kids to pursue whatever sets them gleaming.
For my children, the strategy of relaxing worked. My oldest, that kid who made ridiculous movies about elves? He's now a cinematographer in Brooklyn — one of his recent projects was the Netflix documentary "Fyre." The girl who narrated her own cooking shows now works for a nonprofit as a food educator in — when they're open — New York City public schools. And my youngest, who binged on comics and atlases, is (presumably) off to college this fall, planning to study international relations — and comedy.
This is not an economic policy. It is the collective punishment of civilians. It is an act of biological warfare against children, the elderly, and people of all ages.
Out of this crisis can come efficient historic changes for justice
"We need your leadership in supporting science-based recommendations on social distancing that can slow the virus."
A council representing more than 800,000 doctors across the U.S. signed a letter Friday imploring President Donald Trump to reverse his call for businesses to reopen by April 12, warning that the president’s flouting of the guidance of public health experts could jeopardize the health of millions of Americans and throw hospitals into even more chaos as they fight the coronavirus pandemic.
A conservative business group founded by a prolific Republican political donor is pressuring the White House to greenlight an unproven COVID-19 treatment, saying in an online petition that the country has plants in the U.S. ready to produce a drug but can’t because of “red tape, regulation, and a dysfunctional healthcare supply chain.”
The limited supply of ventilators is one of the chief concerns facing hospitals as they prepare for more COVID-19 cases. In Italy, where hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients in respiratory failure, doctors have had to make difficult life-or-death decisions about who gets a ventilator and who does not.
Instead of erasing our weak parts, we’ve raced them, blaming vulnerability on the vulnerable and hoping the bridges wouldn’t break where we are.
Here’s what has happened in the meatpacking industry in the last week alone:
A federal food safety inspector in New York City, who oversaw meat processing plants, died from the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
Nurses at one hospital in southeastern Washington state have alleged that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they were ordered by supervisors to use one protective mask per shift, potentially exposing themselves to the novel coronavirus.
At another hospital, just east of Seattle, nurses had to use face shields indefinitely.
Elsewhere in the city, nightclubs have been open this week, but gatherings for more than 50 people will be banned from Sunday.
Pharmaceutical company Roche announced Friday afternoon that it will release the recipe for its lysis buffer if Dutch laboratories ask for it. Earlier today Follow the Money revealed that the European Commission was exploring options for an intervention in pharmaceutical company Roche, instigated by the possible abuse by Roche of its position of power on the coronavirus test market. Below you find the article that prompted Roche to release its recipe.
Desperate times call for unprecedented measures, even for the courts. At an emergency meeting Saturday, California’s Judicial Council voted unanimously to delay criminal arraignments, extend timelines for criminal trials, and use technology wherever possible to help courts conduct remote proceedings as they grapple with ensuring due process while protecting public health.
The technology stack behind Dfuse’s advanced blockchain APIs has been made open-source, according to a March 19 announcement. These APIs are primarily used in EOS development. Cointelegraph took the opportunity to interview the CTO of Dfuse, Alexandre Bourget, who revealed some of the far-reaching consequences of this for the EOS community.
RT-Thread, an open-source embedded real-time operating system that has launched its one-stop development tool: RT-Thread Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
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The community version is free forever.
Microsoft’s open-source shopping spree has claimed another victim: npm
The new version supports the new versions of the e-invoicing standards Factur-X 1.0.05 and ZUGFeRD 2.1, which will be released by their respective organizations on the same day.
Analysis of the infrastructure used by the [attackers] led to the discovery of an executable named comahawk.exe that incorporated two local privilege escalation exploits targeting Windows.
The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-1405 and CVE-2019-1322, were patched by Microsoft in November 2019 and October 2019, respectively. Microsoft’s advisories for both these flaws say “exploitation [is] less likely”
In mid-November 2019, NCC Group, whose researchers reported the vulnerabilities to Microsoft, published a blog post describing the weaknesses. Shortly after, someone made public an exploit named COMahawk that weaponizes CVE-2019-1405 and CVE-2019-1322.
According to its own website, Chubb had more than US$177 billion (A$291 billion) in assets and reported US$40 billion of gross premiums in 2019. The company says it has offices in Zurich, New York, London, Paris and other locations, and has more than 30,000 employees.
iTWire contacted Chubb's Australian office for comment. A spokesperson responded: "We are currently investigating a computer security incident that may involve unauthorised access to data held by a third-party service provider.
A recently discovered watering hole attack has been targeting iOS users in Hong Kong. The campaign uses links posted on multiple forums that supposedly lead to various news stories. While these links lead users to the actual news sites, they also use a hidden iframe to load and execute malicious code. The malicious code contains exploits that target vulnerabilities present in iOS 12.1 and 12.2. Users that click on these links with at-risk devices will download a new iOS malware variant, which we have called lightSpy (detected as IOS_LightSpy.A).
One hurdle in any roll-your-own Linux platform development project is getting the necessary tools to build system software, application software, and the Linux kernel for your target embedded device. Many developers use a set of tools based on the GNU Compiler Collection, which requires two other software packages: a C library used by the compiler; and a set of tools required to create executable programs and associated libraries for your target device. The end result is a toolchain.
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In preference to working on features or product differentiation, developers often spend valuable time supporting, maintaining, and updating a cross-compilation environment, Linux kernel, and root file system. All of which, requires a significant investment of personnel and wide range of expertise.
Free zero-to-ping support, free VPN configuration and connection support, free direct assistance for first responder | front line healthcare agencies, and reduced pfSense TAC support subscription prices all introduced
Ben Porter, Chief Product Officer at Instaclustr, writes about how the potential of Open Source Libraries must be balanced with the growing risk of library jacking by hackers.
So, why didn’t the open source model work in these three cases?
The main reason is that in all of these cases, data structure specs and the description of algorithms are not the most important piece of the picture.
The root of the problem is in the variety of real-life situations where bugs and failures may occur and lead to a data-loss situations, which is a total no-go in the real world.
The open source community is successful, though it has been in create open source programs and platforms, is still no guarantee of industrial-grade software development(3). The core to success in developing a highly reliable solution is a carefully nurtured auto-test environment. This assures a careful track record and in-depth analysis for every failure, as well as effective work-flow, making sure any given bug or failure never repeats. It’s obvious that building such an environment can take years, if not decades, and the main thing here is not to know how something should work according to specs, but to know how and where exactly it fails. In other words, the main problem is not the resources needed to develop the code, the main problem is time needed to build up a reliable test-coverage that will provide a sufficient barrier for data-loss bugs.
Another problem with open source is that it is usually accompanied by a GPL license. This limits the contribution to such projects almost solely to the open source community itself. One of the major requirements of the GPL license is to disclose changes to source code in case of further distribution, making it pointless for commercial players to participate.
I did not expect two police officers to come knocking at my door at 08:15 when I was still asleep in my bed on Sunday morning.
My phone briefly ran out of battery at 07:30, and in less than an hour, four different local administrative units had called. A patrol was dispatched to check my whereabouts. A text was sent notifying that the government had lost track of me, and warned me of potential arrest if I had broken quarantine.
Content moderation during this pandemic is an exaggerated version of content moderation all the time: Platforms are balancing various interests when they write their rules, and they are making consequential choices about error preference when they enforce them. Platforms’ uncharacteristic (if still too limited) transparency around these choices in the context of the pandemic should be welcomed—but needs to be expanded on in the future. These kinds of choices should not be made in the shadows. Most importantly, platforms should be forced to earn the kudos they are getting for their handling of the pandemic by preserving data about what they are doing and opening it up for research instead of selective disclosure.
One thing is certain: With enormous numbers of people locked inside, spending more time online and hungry for information, the actions taken by platforms will have significant consequences. They may well emerge from this more powerful than ever. Right now the public is asking tech platforms to step up, but we also need to keep thinking about how to rein them in.
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, more employees are working from their homes, more than ever before. But does that mean managers and business leaders let up with their bizarre, over-reaching workplace surveillance? Not a chance.
In an office, surveillance tech can be justified a little bit: It’s defensible for an employer to not want workers using company computers for personal business. Surveillance software also be used for cybersecurity. But now? Bloomberg reports that workplace-surveillance software is flying off shelves and being forced on people working in their own homes — a massive breach of trust and privacy.
And even without these issues around implementation, there is no clear evidence that the use of contact tracing or tracking financing information such as purchases through mobile phones is sufficient to enforce physical distancing. Even with its substantial surveillance infrastructure, China had to force people to scan a QR code whenever they left or entered a building, public transit, or street.
According to EPIC, Zoom intentionally designed its web conferencing service to bypass browser security settings and remotely enable a user's web camera without the knowledge or consent of the user.
As it stands now, Zoom’s privacy policy says that it may collect personal information, such as payment data and a device’s IP address, from anyone who interacts with its products, while also collecting information about recorded meetings that take place in a video conference. The company also includes a feature, called “attention tracking,” which administrators can turn off as requested, that informs meeting hosts whenever someone has clicked out of the main video call webpage for more than 30 seconds.
Boyles said she’s concerned about having conversations with students about personal matters, including livelihood and mental health, through online platforms that may not be compliant with the federal standard.
As the global coronavirus pandemic pushes the popularity of videoconferencing app Zoom to new heights, one web veteran has sounded the alarm over its "creepily chummy" relationship with tracking-based advertisers.
Doc Searls, co-author of the influential internet marketing book The Cluetrain Manifesto last century, today warned [cached] Zoom not only has the right to extract data from its users and their meetings, it can work with Google and other ad networks to turn this personal information into targeted ads that follow them across the web.
This personal info includes, and is not limited to, names, addresses and any other identifying data, job titles and employers, Facebook profiles, and device specifications. Crucially, it also includes "the content contained in cloud recordings, and instant messages, files, whiteboards ... shared while using the service."
The indictments are another brick in the foundation for a pretext for either a direct U.S. military invasion or a proxy war.
“A $1 billion cut in U.S. aid would be a significant blow to the country. Afghanistan’s GDP is only about $20 billion per year, and much of that comes from international donations,” Johnathan Schroden, an expert on Afghanistan and director of Stability and Development Program at Washington-based think tank Center for Naval Analysis (CAN), told VOA.
rdinary Afghans say it has happened to them many times and never—not once—has it made news anywhere outside Afghanistan. Last November, an American Reaper drone targeted a group of villagers in the mountainous area of Afghanistan’s southeastern province of Paktia and killed seven of them. Paktia has long been home to Taliban militants, but local residents say all the victims were civilians, including three women and one child. They had gone to the remote area to graze their cattle and collect wood. Suddenly, they were dead.
“Nobody wants to listen to us. I doubt that the murderers will face justice one day. God is our only hope,” said Mohammad Anwar, a resident of Zazai Aryub, a district in Paktia. The perpetrators he is talking about are sitting far away in one of the many U.S. military bases where drone operators are working from.
According to Anwar, who is related to the victims, some families lost their male breadwinners, as often happens after such attacks. “They are desperate. Their future is very uncertain,” he told Foreign Policy in a phone conversation.
And now it is more uncertain than ever, even after 18 and a half years of war. The newly signed U.S.-Taliban truce contains secret annexes that reportedly will give the Taliban information allowing the Islamist insurgent group to prevent attacks during the U.S. withdrawal. But the Afghan national government and its officials have been cut out of the deal—though it calls for peace talks between various Afghan factions—and even more so, ordinary Afghans, who have no recourse to justice and don’t know whether the drone strikes will let up.
Google confirmed to WIRED that it removed the app on Friday. The app had more than 100,000 downloads according to Google Play's published metrics, and was rated "E10+," meaning safe for all users 10 and older. The Infowars app sold products like supplements and protein powder, broadcast The Alex Jones Show live, and posted videos and articles from Jones and others.
The app was apparently removed because of a video posted by radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that, according to Wired, “disputed the need for social distancing, shelter in place, and quarantine efforts meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.” Before it was removed, the app had more than 100,000 downloads, Wired reports.
NewsGuard's Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking Center has found 132 sites — 82% of which NewsGuard had identified as unreliable prior to the coronavirus outbreak — that are publishing false claims about the coronavirus. What's in it for them? Money.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to suspend its enforcement of environmental laws indefinitely in light of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, as The Guardian reports. The move sends a clear signal: pollute with impunity.
“This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment,” EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in an announcement.
The ESA observations by the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite show clear declines in pollution. The measurements were taken over 10 days to even out changes in the weather, which affect the concentration of nitrogen dioxide.
Data from the European Environmental Agency paint a similar picture. The average concentrations of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) in the air in the Italian province of Bergamo, which has been completely paralyzed by the outbreak, were 47% lower last week than during the same week last year, the environmental agency said. The NO2 levels in Rome were 26% to 35% lower than in 2019, the environmental agency said.
Much of the NO2 pollution comes from car exhausts, which is why the strict controls on citizens movements led to such dramatic declines.
The National Water Commission (Conagua) announced on Thursday that it would not divert additional water from a dam in Chihuahua to settle a 220-million-cubic-meter “water debt” with the United States after protests against the diversion turned violent.
Conagua said in a Twitter post Thursday afternoon that it had taken the decision to stop the additional water diversion from the La Boquilla dam due to farmers’ rejection of the move, whose aim was to comply with the 1944 bilateral water treaty between Mexico and the United States.
A global shortage of condoms is looming, the world’s biggest producer said, after a coronavirus lockdown forced it to shut down production.
Malaysia’s Karex Bhd makes one in every five condoms globally. It has not produced a single condom from its three Malaysian factories for more than a week due to a lockdown imposed by the government to halt the spread of the virus.
Pastor Tony Spell of Baton Rouge knows what you can do with your social distancing. “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated,” said Spell regarding the 1,170 people who attended services at his Life Tabernacle Church on Sunday. They came on 27 buses from five parishes, and will do so again, because “it’s not a concern,” according to Spell.
"This is a frightening amount of public money to have given a corrupt admininistration with zero accountability."
Cable technician Troy Walcott, along with 1,800 of his fellow members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3, has been striking for three years, and there’s still no end in sight.
"The clock has already started on a fourth bill and we expect and demand that House Democrats fight to ensure that the needs of all communities are met."
This time, any industry bailouts must place corporate investment under public control.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced at a press conference on Monday, March 23 that he was charging his former high-level aides William Mulrow and Steven M. Cohen with rebuilding New York’s economy in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Cuomo’s former aides have deep ties to Wall Street: Mulrow is a senior advisory director at the private equity giant Blackstone Group and Cohen is chief administrative officer of MacAndrews & Forbes, the conglomerate owned by billionaire Cuomo donor Ronald Perelman.
The enormous economic impact of the reaction to Covid-19 is plain for all to see. The effect on economies – which had barely recovered to 2008 levels after the great Banker Theft crisis – is enormous. You cannot just close down businesses and expect them all to restart three months later. Plus the hit to personal finances is going to result in a huge and lasting reduction in consumer demand, exaggerated by what I predict will be a much higher propensity to save against future disaster. Even optimistic economists are expecting a 15% drop in GDP and slow recovery. At recent levels it is going to take some seven years of compound economic growth to recover that.
As we scramble to locate hospital beds and life-saving equipment during this pandemic, remember that we are fighting two diseases.
Rule 506(c), to date, is mostly used by real estate funds. Even SEC does not understand why VCs and startups do not use it more. The Director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, Keith Higgins, said “one wonders why the new Rule 506(c) exemption has not caught on more widely with issuers who have long clamored for the general solicitation ban to be lifted.” There is the additional requirement of validation, with its increased paperwork load on prospective investors, but the effect of this is reduced by using third party validation companies that shield those documents from view, even by the fund that requested validation.
I first encountered rule 506(c) after I had been a partner at OSS Capital for a year. I had felt constrained by the restrictions on speech that fund has under rule 506(b). When I started to found a separate company, the business incubator or “venture studio” Incubator.Fund, I resolved to use rule 506(c), and not simply for the free speech advantages. I have dedicated most of my life to charity, as one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software, and did not have a personal network, a phone book full of moneybags to raise funds from privately, as rule 506(b) assumes. The ability to advertise, using rule 506(c), allows me to reach far beyond my personal network.
the FTC, Teami promoted “deceptive health claims” and arranged for “endorsements by well-known social media influencers who did not adequately disclose that they were being paid to promote its products.” While some influencers did provide adequate disclosures, at least 10, including rapper Cardi B and singer Jordin Sparks, did not and have received warning letters from the government regulator.
This action marks the first time the FTC has brought legal action against an advertiser using Instagram to promote unsubstantiated health claims, the agency said in a press call Friday morning.
The corporate cronyism of America’s political system has been highlighted with a massive kleptocratic bailout, writes Caitlin Johnstone in this summary of U.S. haywire responses to the crisis.
“Weirdly, things haven’t changed much,” says Kyle Mathews as he sprays disinfectant on his hands. At least at work. His startup, Gatsby, helps websites manage content in the cloud. It has no headquarters and its 50-odd employees straddle the world, from Mr Mathews’s home in Berkeley, California, to Siberia.
Such “fully distributed” firms were on the rise before covid-19. As national lockdowns spread, conventional ones are forced into similar arrangements. Those that have grown up this way offer lessons.
Distributed organisations are as old as the internet. Its first users 50 years ago realised how much can be done by swapping emails and digital files. These exchanges led to the development of “open source” software, jointly written by groups of strangers often geographically distant.
Today most distributed startups have open-source roots. Gatsby is one. Nearly all 1,200 employees of another, Automattic, best known for WordPress, software to build websites, work from home. GitHub, which hosts millions of open-source projects (and was acquired by Microsoft in 2018), may be the world’s biggest distributed enterprise. Two-thirds of its 2,000 staff work remotely. Most firms that build blockchains, a type of distributed database, are by their nature dispersed.
In December 2020, blockchain infrastructure provider Nodesmith announced it would be winding down its support for a number of blockchain networks, including the OAN. Bloq is now working with Nodesmith to ensure infrastructure continuity for The Open Application Network (OAN) via the BloqCloud platform.
Ripple has been criticized for being centralized for years now. In fact, many critics have gone as far as calling XRP a fake cryptocurrency because even though XRP does use the blockchain technology, all existing coins were pre-mined at the beginning. The majority of XRP tokens are still in the hands of the Ripple creators and the company itself.
Back in 2018, David Schwartz, the Chief Technology Officer of Ripple Labs wrote and published an article titled ‘The Inherently Decentralized Nature of XRP Ledger’ explaining why XRP is far more decentralized than other cryptocurrencies.
Unfortunately, blockchain experts seem to agree that XRP is not really decentralized, in fact, Matt McKibbin, the founder of Decentranet told CCN that the digital asset is wholly centralized.
The president has amazingly declared that the people in the United States will be able to resume all their normal activities after Easter, thanks to him.
In an age of pandemics and climate crisis, countries’ health, environmental, and development policies are globally important.
In advance of the 2020 Presidential election, KILL CHAIN: THE CYBER WAR ON AMERICA'S ELECTIONS, debuting THURSDAY, MARCH 26 (9:00-10:35 p.m. ET/PT), takes a deep dive into the weaknesses of today's election technology, investigating the startling vulnerabilities in America's voting systems and the alarming risks they pose to our democracy. From filmmakers Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale, the team behind HBO's 2006 Emmy (R)-nominated documentary "Hacking Democracy," and producer Michael Hirschorn, KILL CHAIN follows Finnish hacker and cyber security expert Harri Hursti as he travels around the world and across the U.S. to show how our election systems remain dangerously unprotected.
By then, the pandemic was on its way to wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and its citizens’ way of life—not least because of the actions of Xi Jinping’s own government. Yet in February, Trump again praised for Xi on Twitter, writing that “he is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus … Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.”
Employing a combination of moral outrage and devastating sarcasm, the Vermont senator shamed Republicans in a Wednesday Senate floor speech that ripped into them for prioritizing corporate bailouts while objecting to providing a measure of security for low-wage workers who have lost their jobs as much of the American economy has ground to a near halt.
The ruling angered Doctors for Assange, comprising a list of some 200 physicians scattered across the globe. “Despite our prior unequivocal statement that Mr Assange is at increased risk of serious illness and death were he to contract coronavirus and the evidence of medical experts,” their March 27 statement reads, “Baraitser dismissed the risk, citing UK guidelines for prisons in responding to the global pandemic.” The group cited Baraister’s own solemn words deferring to the wisdom of the UK prison authorities. “I have no reason not to trust this advice as both evidence-based and reliable and appropriate.”
The medical practitioners took firm issue with the steadfast refusal of the judge to accept the medical side of the equation. Not only was he at “increased risk of contracting and dying from the novel disease coronavirus (COVID-19)”, declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, he was also more vulnerable because of the torments of psychological torture and a “history of medical neglect … fragile health, and chronic lung disease.”
"We've come too far, marched too long, prayed too hard, wept too bitterly, bled too profusely and died too young, to let anybody turn back the clock on our journey to justice," Lowery said in 2013.
Despite city efforts to restore service to those whose service has been disconnected for non-payment, hundreds — if not thousands — of residents remain in homes without running water, even though hand-washing is vital to slowing the pandemic.
Detroit has shut off water to more than 141,000 accounts since an aggressive collections campaign began in 2014 in an effort to improve its finances. Last year alone, crews cut service to more than 23,000 homes.
That’s left many vulnerable to the pandemic, said activists, who spent more than two weeks making phone calls before obtaining pallets of water bottles from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy and local merchants.
Member of Parliament and Chair of the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport and Cities, John Alexander has signed an Affirmation of Support joining the Joint Justice Initiative launched by the Armenian-Australian, Assyrian-Australian and Greek-Australian communities.
The Joint Justice Initiative was launched in Canberra last month with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding by the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU), Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA) and Australian Hellenic Council (AHC), and calls for national recognition of the 1915 Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against its Christian Armenian, Assyrian and Greek populations.
Reportedly, a woman belonging to the family of the attackers had eloped with a man from Muhammad Ayub Lashari’s family, leading to a dispute between the two families. The former demanded that the woman and Lashari should be handed over to them but the latter refused. The two sides, reportedly, had held several rounds of negotiations before the incident took place.
Parris said the teen went to an urgent care March 18.
"He did not have insurance, so they did not treat him," Parris said, adding the boy was sent to a hospital.
En route, he went into cardiac arrest, according to the mayor. When the teen got to the hospital, he was revived and kept alive for six hours. But, it was too late, the mayor said.
A 17-year-old boy in Lancaster, whose death was said to be from COVID-19 but is now being investigated by federal health authorities, sought treatment at an urgent care center but was turned away due to lack of insurance, according to the city’s mayor.
In a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Representative Ilhan Omar and Senator Bernie Sanders asked the world’s richest man what he was doing to protect his workers in warehouses across the country, at least ten of which already have confirmed cases of coronavirus:
Under the current climate of lock-ins, self-isolation, shelter-in-place policies, and quarantine, it is becoming evident to more people the integral role computers play in our lives. Students are learning entirely online, those who can are working from home, and our personal relationships are being carried largely by technology like video chats, online games, and group messages. When these things have become our only means of socializing with those outside our homes, we begin to realize how important they are and the inequity inherent to many technologies.
Someone was telling me how a neighbor doesn’t have a printer, so they are printing off school assignments for their neighbor. People I know are sharing internet connections with people in their buildings, when possible, to help save on costs with people losing jobs. I worry now even more about people who have limited access to home devices or poor internet connections.
As we are forced into our homes and are increasingly limited in the resources we have available, we find ourselves potentially unable to easily fill material needs and desires. In my neighborhood, it’s hard to find flour. A friend cannot find yeast. A coworker couldn’t find eggs. Someone else is without dish soap. Supply chains are not designed to meet with the demand currently being exerted on the system.
Mosher is a celebrated international scholar who became in 1979 the first American research student to conduct anthropological research in China after the Cultural Revolution. He exposed the forced abortions of women due to the CPC’s “one-child policy” and as a result, was barred from entering China again.
Mosher was also expelled from the PhD program of Stanford University, which became a controversy in the academic world. Critics said Stanford bowed down to Chinese pressure, but the university denied this and said Mosher was dropped because he violated research ethics and compromised the safety of his sources in China.
Those sources may have aided Mosher in contesting CPC’s claim of defeating the COVID-19 pandemic.
A new index from the Institute for Southern Studies gives the numbers behind the connectivity inequality.
The pandemic also lays bare the many vulnerabilities created by society’s dependence on the [Internet]. These include the dangerous consequences of censorship, the constantly morphing spread of disinformation, supply chain vulnerabilities and the risks of weak cybersecurity.
In the field of patents, an unintentional failure to pay the right fees at the right time can be a very costly mistake. The costs of a mistake are potentially even more significant for Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPC). SPCs provide extra years of patent protection (up to 5 years) based on a marketing authorisation for a clinical product. With a bulk of sales happening during the life of SPCs, SPCs can thus be very valuable to a patentee. A recent case before the UK High Court considered the consequences of underpaying the annuity fees for a UK SPC ([2020] EWHC 572 (Pat)). The UK is unique in requiring these fees to be paid as a lump sum at the start of the SPC term (Rule 116, Patents Rules). Unfortunately for the patentee, it seems there is little that can be done to rectify the mistake of underpayment.
The $2 trillion stimulus and economic rescue bill known as the CARES Act is moving forward in the Senate. Although not generally a key aspect of the legislation, the current proposal on the table includes temporary authority for the USPTO Director to “toll, waive, adjust, or modify, any timing deadline” established by the patent or trademark laws or by prior PTO regulation.
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Dir. Iancu has privately indicated a need for the legislation, but has not stated publicly what if he would make any immediate actions or whether he would delegate his authority to the PTAB to make these determinations.
My reading of the proposal is that it provides authority to the USPTO Director but does not place any requirement on the Director to act. Thus, a particular party who experiences problems with filing or meeting other deadlines will not have a claim under the statute.
All of the deadlines are easy for the PTO Director to adjust with the one exception being the original filing date. In addition, international obligations may create some problems with adjusting PCT-related dates — although WIPO and the big-five are working through potential arrangements as we sit here today.
Yesterday, the 24th of March, the President of the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) took a "Decision concerning the extension of time limits" that fall in the period 17 March – 3 May included, until 4 May 2020 for parties to proceedings before the Office and the Board of Appeal.
On March 11, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom declared that the COVID-19 outbreak "can be characterized as a pandemic," cautioning that the WHO has "rung the alarm bell loud and clear." At the time of the announcement, the WHO noted that there were 118,000 cases reported globally. In the fifteen days since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic, the number of global cases has almost quadrupled, with the WHO reporting in its latest situation report that as of March 26 there have been 462,684 cases. The Director-General also stated that "[t]his is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector – so every sector and every individual must be involved in the fight." The WHO's March 11 declaration -- and global developments since then -- raise the question of how the pandemic is affecting the patent community.
Ever since the Supreme Court's decision in Dickinson v. Zurko, patent applicants (and with the advent of inter partes review proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, patentees) have found it difficult to overcome Patent Office determinations of obviousness, due to the deference to factual issues the Zurko case imposed on the Federal Circuit in reviewing PTO decisions. But one Achilles' heel to these difficulties arises over how the PTO construes claims, which remains subject to de novo review (because all the evidence before the Patent Office is inherently intrinsic evidence). And when the Office (through the PTAB) makes an error in construing a claim, the Federal Circuit remains ready to pounce, which was the basis for the Court overturning the PTAB's invalidation on obviousness grounds of Kaken Pharmaceutical's claims in the recent Kaken Pharmaceutical Co. v. Iancu decision.
The case arose in an IPR over all the claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,214,506, which are directed to methods for topically treating fungal infections in human nails. The Board initiated the IPR on petition by Acrux Ltd. and Acrux DDS Pty. Ltd. (who are not party to the appeal), and found all claims of the '506 patent to be unpatentable as obvious.
My Civil Procedure class at Mizzou is now “Online Civil Procedure.” The final topic in the course will be “respect for judgments.” A basic setup of our legal system is to offer substantial justice — giving all parties due process including an opportunity to be heard and judged by an impartial tribunal. Once that process is complete, the result is then seen as final and further challenges regarding the same issues or claims are precluded.
In patent law, the sense of finality and respect for judgment has been substantially complicated with the rise of AIA trials.
A case-in-point is Chrimar Systems v. Ale USA (Supreme Court 2020). Chrimar is typical of many contemporary cases because it involves parallel district court and PTAB litigation.
We know that a district court judge deciding an issue on the merits must expressly the legal and factual basis for their decision. The rules of appellate procedure don’t provide the same requirement for appellate decisions. However, the Federal Circuit’s local rules suggest that it will issue no-judgments affirmance only when an “opinion would have no precedential value” and the lower tribunal decision is properly affirmed. Fed. Cir. Rules of Practice R. 36.
A few weeks ago, I covered a PTAB case that illustrates why the PTO’s proposed rule on who bears the burden on amended claims in IPRs is fatally flawed. In that case, ZTE challenged a CyWee patent and LG joined the ZTE petition. But CyWee filed an amended claim that ZTE wasn’t concerned by. ZTE chose not to oppose this amendment, which makes sense—but it’s also actively refusing to allow LG to step in to oppose the amendment. LG argued that they should be allowed to step in, and that the only reason ZTE was blocking them was because of some type of side arrangement between ZTE and CyWee.
The PTAB panel in the case decided that LG would not be permitted to oppose, claiming the public benefits when a new claim is proposed at the PTAB and no one is permitted to oppose it. They also refused to inquire (or allow LG to inquire) into whether there was a side agreement of the type LG alleged.
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It’s also not unthinkable, given evidence filed alongside the request for rehearing. LG asked ZTE whether it was representing that it had no written or oral agreement with CyWee. In response, ZTE’s lawyer said “I make no representations one way or another.” If there was no such agreement, ZTE’s lawyer could have saved his client time and money by stating that there was no such agreement. A refusal to represent that no such agreement exists suggests that, in fact, there is such an agreement.
That’s relatively anodyne compared to the words out of Michael Shore’s mouth. Unsolicited, Shore contacted LG’s lawyers after the PTAB’s decision to say, “Get ready for the district court case, buddy.”
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All of this leads back to one main problem—the PTO’s proposal to place the burden for amendments on the petitioner, rather than the patent owner. This case is exceptional because there’s a joined petitioner who would step in—in the average case, if the petitioner didn’t care to oppose an amendment, there’d be no active party bearing the burden and amended claims would effectively sail through unopposed.
That’s why CCIA suggested to the PTO that it should place the burden on the party where ordinary legal principles suggest it should go—on the party requesting relief, the patent owner. The Board should rehear this case and reverse itself, but more importantly, the Director should revisit the PTO’s proposed rule and determine that a rule placing the burden on the petitioner is inappropriate.
The European Patent Office (EPO), European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) have published advice on measures being taken in view of the world-wide coronavirus outbreak.
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The disruptions due to COVID-19 in Germany qualify as a “general dislocation” under Rule 134(2) EPC in a country where the EPO is located, and so the EPO has issued a notice stating that “periods” expiring on or after 15 March 2020 are extended until 17 April 2020 for all parties and their representatives. In accordance with Article 150(2) EPC, this extension applies also for international applications under the PCT.
This is the third part of our three-part series on the impact of the COVID-19 on patent offices around the world (Part 1 was on the USPTO and Part 2 was on the Chinese Patent Office). We focus today on the European Patent Office (EPO), which is the regional patent organization for filing and prosecuting European patent applications. While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect Europe, the EPO has taken some steps to ease pressure on Applicants and on the Office. The EPO has made a number of announcements regarding coronavirus-related impacts, which are summarized below.
This pro se petition to the Supreme Court has a number of major problems, but does ask one interesting question:
Whether 35 U.S.C. ۤ112 [the enablement doctrine] is satisfied when the specification of a patent application is enabling to an interdisciplinary team of two or three persons, working in cooperation?
The EPO has famously strict requirements with respect to support for amendments. An important principle in the prosecution of patent applications is that any amendments the applicant makes to the application must have basis or support in the application as filed. The EPO is particularly strict with regards to amendments based on the combination of features from different parts of a patent specification. A recently published decision from the Boards of Appeal (T 1621/16) clarified the criteria for assessing whether a selection from multiple “convergent lists” (i.e. lists with features of increasing preference) is supported.
The Board of Appeal found that the selection from convergent lists is different in principle from a selection from a normal, non-convergent lists. However, to have basis in the application as filed, the Board reasoned that the selection from multiple convergent lists must not be identified with a previously undisclosed technical feature and must be supported by a pointer elsewhere in the specification. Importantly, basis and novelty are inextricably linked. In particular, the same test for "disclosure" is used. Therefore, if applied by other Boards of Appeal, this decision also has implications for the assessment of novelty of selection inventions from multiple convergent lists.
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The principles of basis and novelty are inextricably linked. The test for novelty and added matter apply the same Gold Standard test that a disclosure must be clearly and unambiguously derivable (Case Law of the Board of Appeal, II.E.1.2.1). The recent Board of Appeal decision on the selection from convergent lists therefore has implications for the novelty of inventions in view of prior art disclosing converging lists. Applying the Board of Appeal's reasoning in T 1621/16, the selection of multiple features from converging lists in the prior art would be novel if the selection was associated with a previously undisclosed technical feature. The question remains whether the identification of a previously undisclosed technical feature of the selection would also be necessary for novelty.
The novelty requirement that a selection invention must relate to a "technical contribution" has otherwise fallen out of favour with the Boards of Appeal. Such a requirement is now broadly considered to be more properly associated with an assessment of inventive step rather than novelty. There have been recent calls to refer the issue of whether the requirement is necessary to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA). It will therefore be interesting to see whether the reasoning of T 1621/16 is applied by other Boards. If nothing else, the case is a reminder that the Boards of Appeal may not yet have reached a consensus on the appropriate criteria for assessing the novelty of selection inventions.
The Federal Circuit is set to start holding oral arguments again for the week of April 6, 2020. The arguments not be in-person but rather conducted via telephone (audio only). The currently conceived setup won’t allow non-parties to listen-in on the conversation but the court is recording oral arguments and has indicated that it “will continue to release same-day audio for all arguments.” Additionally, a substantial number of scheduled arguments have been cancelled with a notice that:
The panel of judges that will decide this appeal has determined that oral argument is unnecessary. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a)(2)(C).
Antitrust enforcement should simply be a question of legal merits. But the industrial-policy argument that some forces within the European Commission make in Nokia's (and, by extension, Ericsson's) favor just doesn't withstand even superficial scrutiny.
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Europe's automotive industry dwarfs Nokia and Ericsson with respect to investment in research and development. According to ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers Association), "EU automotive investment in R&D has increased by 6.7% to reach €57.4 billion annually." Macrotrends says "Ericsson research and development expenses for the twelve months ending December 31, 2019 were $4.107B, a 8.3% decline year-over-year." Statista shows that Nokia's R&D spend is also in decline, down to €4.41 billion. Here's a column chart (click on the image to enlarge):
It's often said that hard cases make bad law. And that is what had happened here: faced with an unreasonable number of potentially asserted claims in litigation, and a Plaintiff not required to identify which of those claims it would actually assert within the filing limit (one-year) between being served with a complaint and filing to initiate an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding, Facebook played the novel gambit of trying to join its own IPR to attack the claims actually asserted against it. At the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, it actually worked (with a little assistance from the USPTO Director). But the Federal Circuit held otherwise, finding that joinder was only permitted for other parties who were seeking review of the same issues, not for the same party seeking to change the scope of the review. Thus, it vacated the PTAB's decision on the late-added claims, despite otherwise affirming the PTAB's decision on the merits of the claims.
The dispute between Facebook and Windy City began on June 2, 2015, when Windy City sued Facebook for infringement of four patents in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. Those four patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 8,458,245; 8,694,657; 8,473,552; and 8,407,356, have 58, 671(!), 64, and 37 claims, respectively. The Complaint did not identify which of those 830 claims Facebook allegedly infringed. Facebook was served with the Complaint the day after it was filed, and moved to dismiss it on July 24, 2015, arguing that the Complaint was deficient because it did not identify the allegedly infringed claims. Facebook then filed a motion to transfer the case to the Northern District of California on August 25, 2015.
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In addition to the panel opinion, the Federal Circuit included additional views to address the POP's decision in Proppant, which issued after primary briefing in the appeal, and whether deference would be appropriate. Facebook had earlier suggested the Federal Circuit should defer under Chevron, but the Federal Circuit had never done so with a nonprecedential Board decision (and expressly refused to do so here). But Proppant was precedential, which caused the Federal Circuit to look more closely. Proppant suggested that the Director had discretion to allow same-party joinder, but would only exercise that discretion where fairness requires it and would alleviate unfairness to a party.
The Federal Circuit again rejected that deference for a number of reasons. First, it found the statute unambiguous, which preempts Chevron deference. Second, although the AIA gave the Director rulemaking authority in relation to the procedures for joinder in IPRs (and therefore deference would be most appropriate), it found that was different from interpreting the statute itself. The panel found that there was no deference indicated for statutory interpretation, just filling in the interstices of the statute. Finally, the Federal Circuit found that there were other ways to alleviate the potential unfairness to parties (including patent local rules, which normally would call for early disclosure of asserted claims) that would cause less disruption to the statutory scheme. Thus, it rejected the Proppant decision.
Sprouts is a supermarket chain sued by Motion Offense, LLC in W.D.Tex. for infringing its patents, US10013158 & US10021052 (processing and sharing a “data object”). The basic allegation in the case is that Sprouts’ is infringing the patents by using Dropbox. After hearing that its customers were being sued, Dropbox itself brought a declaratory judgment action in D.Del. against Motion Offense seeking a non-infringement declaration.
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In patent cases, courts have recognized a customer suit exception to the first to file rule in a situation where there are parallel lawsuits involving (1) the prime manufacturer/originator of an infringing product/service and also (2) customers of the prime manufacturer. Even if the customers were sued first, courts have found it proper and appropriate to stay those cases pending outcome of the big one against the prime manufacturer. Other approaches abound — including synchronizing motion practice and partial joinder. The guiding principles for all of these approaches is “efficiency and judicial economy” Tegic Commc’ns Corp. v. Bd. of Regents of Univ. of Texas Sys., 458 F.3d 1335 (Fed. Cir. 2006). As stated by Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: The rules “should be construed, administered, and employed by the court and the parties to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.”
Japanese mobile network operator, Rakuten, has formally joined the Open Invention Network, in a bid to speed up research and development of open source mobile network technologies.
The Open Invention Network is committed to facilitating freedom of action for its community members and users of Linux or open source software. The OIN already has 3,100 members from across the global telecoms community.
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Rakuten is currently Japan’s smallest mobile network operator, but will look to grow its subscriber base rapidly as it scales up its 5G offering throughout the year.
Recently, this provision has been used to refuse registration of Coronavirus pandemic-related trade mark applications.
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A brief note here: Huoshenshan Hospital (ç«神山åÅȎâ¢Â¢, Vulcan Mountain Hospital) and Leishenshan Hospital (éâºÂ·Ã§Â¥Å¾Ã¥Â±Â±Ã¥ÅȎâ¢Â¢, Thor Mountain Hospital) are both urgent makeshift medical facilities in Wuhan, set up specifically to tackle Coronavirus. It took around ten days from the beginning of construction to the admittance of the first patients (BBC report and Telegraph footage). These two field hospitals are quite special to Chinese people, not only because they saved thousands of lives but also because their whole construction processes were livestreamed in real time, round the clock. Tens of millions of people watched the livestreaming (partly because cities were on ‘lockdown’ and people were quarantined at home), and they became so familiar with the construction vehicles at the site that they gave them nicknames, e.g. ‘The Cement King’.
Dr Li Wenliang (æÂŽæââ¡Ã¤ÂºÂ®) is doctor who first warned about the epidemic outbreak. He died, aged 33, in Wuhan after contracting Coronavirus. Needless to say, he will be remembered by many of us. As Professor Dr Jie Qiao said to The Lancet: ‘I deeply mourn for all the medical practitioners passing away in the struggle against this emerging infectious disease, especially Dr Li Wenliang, as one of the whistle-blowers dedicating his young life in the front line. We were encouraged by his dedication to patients and we will continue to fight against the virus to comfort the dead with the final victory.’
Ask a Kat reader what comes to his mind when hearing the word “lemming”, and he will probably say: “Aren’t they the rodents [Merpel says, “technically they are voles"] that live in the frozen north and who every so often commit mass suicide by hurtling themselves over a cliff into the wide ocean”. This image of lemmings is now a mainstream metaphor, where accusing a group of “lemming- like behavior” is a way of describing impulsive, herd-like behavior, even mass hysteria, usually ending in a mass disaster.
The only problem is—it ain’t so. As Alaska state wildlife biologist Thomas McDonough categorically stated in an article published back in 2003 by the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, “It’s a complete urban legend” [Merpel says, “Or the wildlife equivalent”], confusing dispersal with migration. If lemmings over-breed, some may, moving as a group, seek an alternative food supply which may, in certain circumstances, lead some of them to venture into the open sea. But acts of intentional mass suicide, vole-style-not a chance.
The Katy Perry decision for copyright infringement and $2.8M in damages [Katposts here and here] has been overturned. This judgement, made on the 16th March, comes in the wake of the decision on 9th March that Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' did not infringe the copyright of the song 'Taurus', [Kat post here].
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At trial, the plaintiffs argued that there were "five or six" protectable elements in their ostinato; length (8 notes), rhythm, melodic content, melodic shape, timbre or quality and colour of the sound, and the placement. Although in their opposition papers they extended this to nine elements. The defendants argued that none of these elements were individually protectable and the court agreed. Highlighting that the plaintiff’s evidence from their expert musicologist was that any single one of those elements would not have been enough, but it was the combination of them that supported his conclusion. Therefore, the plaintiff’s burden to prove the protectable elements of their ostinato was not met.
Furthermore, the evidence of the musicologist [for the plaintiff, apparently] was that several of the elements where unoriginal to such an extent that the choices were tendencies in popular music “the way that the ostinato resolves is not so much original so much as it is necessary.” The court demonstrated that, as a matter of law, the courts have routinely denied copyright protection for such commonplace elements. As such, pursuant to the extrinsic test, the individual elements of the ostinato were deemed not to be protectable by copyright. [In line with Zeppelin, where the court specifically stated that descending chromatic scale, arpeggios, and other common elements are not protected by copyright, which at the time seemed at odds with the KP case].
Last month, this Kat posited my observations and predictions regarding a case before the U.S. Supreme Court about state sovereign immunity in copyright, Allen v. Cooper. Today, the Supreme Court issued a disappointing ruling; all 9 justices concurred that Florida Prepaid (a similar Supreme Court case in the patent context) is binding precedent. As a result, the Court unanimously ruled that Congress did not validly abrogate state sovereign immunity through the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act (CRCA) under neither Article 1 of the Constitution nor under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment.
Lawyers say the Ninth Circuit‘s decision to get rid of the inverse ratio rule will affect all copyright-intensive industries and clear up sloppy analysis
The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (the CDSM Directive) requires the European Commission, in cooperation with copyright holders, services, user groups and others, to meet up to discuss potential practical solutions for the implementation of Article 17 therein (the provision concerning online content sharing service providers (OCSSPs)’ obligations in relation to the making available of user uploaded content (UUC), also known in jargon as the ‘value gap’ provision).
Article 17 also requires OCSSPs to enter into licensing agreements with rightholders for the making available of copyright content uploaded by users of their service. If a licence is not concluded, these services must make ‘best efforts’ to prevent the making available of infringing content.
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), based in Danvers, Massachusetts, has released a statement today announcing what it calls an “education continuity license” intended “to enable creative approaches to remote teaching and distance learning made necessary by the pandemic.”
In its statement, the company says that responsible educators in parts of the United States have asked about their need to use copyrighted content and materials “in innovative new ways to support distance learning.”
In response, CCC says it’s coordinating with rights holders “to authorize the use of their materials at no cost by educators as required by the pandemic during this time of emergency.”
Copyright Clearance Center stipulates that it isn’t delivering educational materials or content to educators. Instead, it’s offering a new license that will authorize American school districts, educators, parents, and others to make immediate additional uses of materials that they have previously lawfully acquired (italics ours). CCC also says that it will not collect any fees from this “education continuity license” from any party, nor will it charge for its own services in administering the contract.
An artist who uploaded a parody cartoon to YouTube and received a strike against his channel following a Warner Bros. complaint has been denied the opportunity to fight his corner. MeatCanyon uploaded a cartoon featuring a creepy 'Bugs Bunny' and later appealed using a DMCA counternotice. YouTube, however, refused to pass the notice on and dismissed the claim.
A federal court in Virginia has granted Megaupload's request to place the cases filed by the RIAA and MPAA on hold for another six months. The lawsuits have been frozen for years now and are not expected to start anytime soon, as there's no progress in the criminal case against the defunct file-sharing service.
