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If the phrase "it really whips the llama's ass" means anything to you, you clearly remember the heady days of WinAmp. Now media server and management company Plex has come up with its own take on the classic software.
Called -- slightly uninspiringly -- Plexamp, the player is available for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. The company has also released a new app for managing Plex media servers: Plex Dash. This is great news for Plex users, but there's a slight catch in both cases.
  ASUS ROG (Republic Of Gamers) is a brand of special hardware primarily aimed at PC gaming and work is now underway by the community to better support their laptops on Linux.
Being spearheaded by software engineer Luke Jones, the rog-core utility is starting off with the Zephyrus GX502GW which is being used as the basis for it. They're going to expand to support others, if they can get more data from other ASUS ROG laptop owners.

Chromebook has emerged from its niche category and it’s no longer just for kids and students. OEMs are now making Chromebooks with powerful internals that would easily rival against the best laptops based on Windows and macOS. Further, Google recently announced Linux support and brought many UI improvements to make Chrome OS a desktop-class operating system. Keeping all the points in mind, it seems Chromebook is finally ready to face the competition. So in this article, we bring you a detailed analysis on the clash between Chromebook vs laptop. From performance to battery life and user interface, we have compared both Chromebook and laptop in a comprehensive manner. So without losing a moment, let’s find out who wins the battle of Chromebook vs laptop in 2020.
Currently being tested ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is a change so the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver will begin defaulting to its passive mode for systems without hardware-managed P-States.
P-State's passive mode will become the default for more systems on Linux 5.8 if this change is not reverted. The passive mode causes P-State to behave like a conventional CPUFreq scaling driver and feeds all of the optimized configuration bits into CPUFreq, such as all of the available P-States. More details on the active vs. passive mode difference for P-State via this updated documentation.
Besides the long-running FSGSBASE patch series that has the ability to help the performance for CPUs going back years, another engineer on Intel's open-source team has been working on a separate but enticing patch in the name of performance.
The latest Linux performance work to talk about is Kirill Shutemov having posted a patch on Thursday to allow restoring large pages after fragmentation. This direct mapping fragmentation can degrade performance over time.
With the NVIDIA 440.66.09 driver (and 442.98 on the Windows side) there is now support for more acceleration structure vertex formats as part of their ray-tracing support. The rest of the changes in this weekend update are different fixes, including a number of fixes related to the new Vulkan ray-tracing support. These include fixes for multi-GPU setups, potential memory issues, ray-tracing query problems, and other items. As such, this NVIDIA 440.66.09 beta driver is primarily geared for those with newer GeForce RTX GPUs having the ray-tracing capabilities.
Today NVIDIA put out a brand new Vulkan Beta driver, as they continue to expand the capabilities of Vulkan Ray Tracing with a bunch of fixes.
If you missed the big announcement last month, The Khronos Group released the provisional cross-vendor Ray Tracing extensions for Vulkan. NVIDIA were quickly out of the gate with a driver to support it and they continue to fix it up. There's going to likely be a lot of issues and changes, as the Ray Tracing extensions go through more testing and discussions towards being finalised. With that in mind driver version 440.66.09 is not a big release comprising of mostly bug fixes.
  For those using AMD Radeon "Navi" GPUs, the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel is delivering some minor performance improvements compared to prior kernels.
Now that Linux 5.7 is booting and all of the new/improved features for Linux 5.7 have been merged, I've begun my usual performance testing of this new kernel version that will debut as stable in June.
When it comes to the AMDGPU kernel driver in Linux 5.7 there are preparations for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, HDR/OLED panel support, continued HDCP content protection work, various Navi and Renoir fixes, USB-C power delivery firmware update handling, BACO fulfilling more power management roles, run-time power management for AMDKFD, and a variety of other improvements and code clean-ups.
  System76 has released the 20.04 beta of their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution. This release comes with various improvements and in this article are some initial benchmarks of Pop!_OS 20.04 beta compared to their prior 19.10 release when testing on the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X.
The Pop!_OS 20.04 beta is re-based against the latest packages found in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which means a newer GCC 9 point release, Mesa 20.04 built against LLVM 9.0.1, and the Linux 5.4 kernel, among many other package updates like Python 3.8.
After a long wait, vector graphic editor Inkscape has released a new points version of the current stable 0.92 series. Accompanying the same, the first release candidate for the upcoming Inkscape 1.0 has also arrived.
The new version of Inkscape 0.92.5 includes mostly bug fixes such as running Python extensions with Python 3 and availing globally installed Fonts on Windows 10. Meanwhile, Inkscape 1.0rc-1 rolls with better performance, new features, and a native macOS app. So, let’s see all the new improvements in detail.
It’s been a productive 3 weeks since we tagged the current code as “6.0-pre1”. Roughly 400 or so commits (changes) later, we’re now marking the current code as “6.0-rc1”, which means:
Just weeks after the first Ardour 6.0 pre-release, the release candidate is now available for this big digital audio workstation software update.
Ardour 6.0 has been working on a major re-engineering of its code-base for improvements now and more benefits in the future, a full virtual MIDI keyboard implementation, better HiDPI user-interface handling, a new plug-in manager, and other changes.
To keep your baby calm while taking care of your household or other tasks is quite different. Most of the time, we let them use our phone and stay busy with that to have some free time for our work. But it is not even safe to let them do whatever on the phone as they can delete something important or send messages or even they can order things unintentionally. Recently, I have seen an internet post where a toddler ordered a package of pizza with 200$ by just some random clicks. It seems funny, but the truth is pathetic for those parents. However, I have a solution here if you are worried about the same reason. You can install some best kids’ games for Android and keep them really very busy with that.
Dusk running natively through Linux
With a big release behind them this year with Godot 3.2, and while Vulkan support is being worked on for Godot 4.0, the team is also hard at work to improve the current version further.
Work on Godot 3.2.2 is underway and it's coming with a pretty great sounding performance improvement: batching of drawcalls for the GLES2 renderer. This is actually quite important, since the GLES3 renderer in Godot will be deprecated by Godot 4.0.
After refining our Godot 3.2 release with bug fixes in 3.2.1 last month, it's time to integrate some of the new features that didn't make it into the 3.2 merge window but have been further developed and backported since.
Making a video game is much less daunting than it might seem. While you likely aren’t going to go from having no experience to making the next Grand Theft Auto, it has actually never been easier to get started making games. Game development tools and resources have become increasingly accessible to the average person, even if they have no programming experience. Often these tools are also available for free.
To try to make things easier for those looking to get started making games, we’ve put together a list of 11 game engines / editors. Some are designed for a specific genre of game or to be incredibly easy for newcomers. Others are professional development tools for AAA games, but are effectively free to use for hobbyists and still offer a lot of learning tools to help those with limited programming experience get started.
This week’s progress update brings UI and UX improvements to the MauiKit toolkit and additional features to the apps, pursuing our goals of a convergent environment.
Are you a developer and want to start developing cross-platform and convergent apps, targeting, among other things, the upcoming Linux Mobile devices?
System76, the maker of premium Linux laptops and desktops, has released a Beta version of their flagship Pop!_OS, a Ubuntu-based Linux distro. This testing release launches a new Pop!_Shell auto tiling feature, new shortcuts for its Workspaces, and Flatpak support via Flathub repository.
  And this brings us to the end of this adventurous rollercoaster. Good stuff, bad stuff, good stuff again. Now, what worries is me is the newfound bipolar nature of the CentOS 8 desktop transformation. On one hand, some things are so much simpler, easier and faster than they were in the past editions of this distro. Significantly so. CentOS 8 is very modern, so there's none of that chasing the dinosaurs thing here. But on the other hands, lots of cool stuff is missing, or hasn't been added to the popular third-party repos, and I wonder why.
Has the distro waned in popularity - or the need for the extras? Do people use their computers differently now than they did when CentOS 6 or CentOS 7 came out? Perhaps the lack of cool software is a sign of the overall fatigue in the Linux space. Or something else entirely? All in all, you can accomplish a great deal in CentOS, and enjoy a lot of cool and fun things. Never forget this is essentially a server distro! But for the first time, I'm also sensing a great disturbance in the force, and there be negatory elements preventing me from having perfect fun. Well, I you find today's piece useful - and if you have any other asks, ask away. We're done.
  It is a well-known fact that using download managers can help improve download speeds as compared to web browsers. Apart from the inbuilt download manager wget on Fedora, just as on any distribution that is based on GNU/Linux package, there are more options to explore.
You might need it because of the lack of a graphical interface or due to quick access to handy features like pause, resume, or batch manage downloads.
Red Hat, the leading provider of integrated, hybrid-cloud, enterprise software, has created an example of a humanitarian solution that enables neighbors to support each other during a disaster. Red Hat's Emergency Response Demo is an example of how community-powered open source innovation, which Red Hat makes available in an enterprise-ready form, can be used to support the efforts of another community - volunteers in a “Cajun Navy” type response as emerged during Hurricane Harvey. We also harness the power of yet another community: the passionate and talented developers and operators from across different divisions of an organization.
I decided to migrate my Windows servers to GNU/Linux. Which distribution should I choose CentOS or Fedora?
Short answer: CentOS.
Long answer
CentOS is an enterprise ready operating system built from sources provided by a prominent GNU/Linux operating system provider: Red Hat (CentOS is a RHEL rebuild).
The release cycle of new CentOS versions is every 2 years and every 6 months it performs an update to the existing version, with the main purpose of supporting new hardware, which allows establishing a robust GNU/Linux environment (security, reliability and stability ).
  The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Jonathan Carter!
His term as project leader starts next Tuesday April 21st and expires on April 20th 2021.
Of a total of 1011 developers, 339 developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 page.
Many thanks to Jonathan Carter, Sruthi Chandran and Brian Gupta for running.
And special thanks to Sam Hartman for his service as DPL during these last twelve months!
The results of the 2020 Debian Project Leader election are in.
The new Debian Project Leader for the year is Jonathan Carter. Of Debian's 1011 developers, 339 casted votes in this year's elections which continues their trend in recent of 300~400 casting ballots and down from years ago when they had a much higher participation rate. Jonathan Carter was running against Sruthi Chandran and Brian Gupta for this year's Debian elections.
The canonical company behind the Ubuntu is introducing the Ubuntu AWS rolling Kernel. The linux-aws 4.15 based kernel, which is the default kernel in the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS AMIs, is moving to a rolling kernel model.
Francis Ginther, Engineer Manager at Canonical Introduces the Ubuntu AWS rolling kernel in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Amazon Machine Image (AMI).
As possibly the last feature to be accepted and implemented before the big release, Feral Interactive's GameMode performance tool has been added into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
What the heck is GameMode? It's a Linux "daemon", otherwise known as a background process and a library that games can hook into to request a little more power from your CPU and other optimizations. The goal is to make Linux gaming smoother. Games can integrate it (like newer Feral Linux ports), or you can manually tell games to use it. You can see GameMode on GitHub.
Great job Gentlemen. It will probably take a day or 2 for it to finish. That is a lot of data. Ubuntu should pay me for the service I am about to provide. The server is no slouch. It is processing those files on raided PCIE4 NVME & 12 cores / 24 threads. A Ryzen 3900X. As the market plunges, where is AMD heading?
A protective respirator created by a Duke University medical and engineering task force is now being used by Duke Health doctors as they treat patients with suspected cases of COVID-19.
The biosurveillance system, DE4Bios, currently in use in the Veneto region, is based on the Digital Enabler platform and relies on various of its features. The Digital Enabler is a data-driven, native cloud, ecosystem platform designed by Engineering’s R&D Labs. Today, it is one of the few fully functioning, ready-to-use, cloud ecosystem platforms available on the market.
As an “ecosystem” platform, the Digital Enabler empowers new data economy business models to flourish, fostering innovation and enhancing existing capabilities. Thanks to FIWARE Open Source technology, solutions can be built to address emergency situations in a short amount of time. These solutions are easily replicable and can be adopted and used by different regions and nations.
KarmSolar and Karm Constructions have partnered with 25 January Hospital to launch an initiative, entitled “Egypt Care”, to provide open source design of a field intensive care hospital for coronavirus (COVID-19) patients.
While health authorities focus on top-down measures to get COVID-19 supplies to hospitals in need, home-grown initiatives are enlisting regular people to create open-source equipment. Rather than wait for the impact of government efforts to persuade manufacturers to move into emergency production of ventilators and protective equipment, the sharing economy is already saving lives with home-made masks and 3D-printed ventilators.
A dearth of adequate medical supplies was implicated in an increase in coronavirus mortality in Italy, compared with Germany and South Korea, where supply was adequate.
Creatives in the fields of design, fashion and communication of Antwerp, Belgium have formed a collaboration to fight against the Coronavirus. They’re tackling the urgent demand from healthcare workers for protective isolation gowns and coveralls.
“The government agencies right now probably don’t understand our point of view that an open source project is more trustworthy because it can be vetted by an enormous number of people, and it can be done independently.”
“Instead of building ventilators, what people need to do is to modularize the ventilator project itself, so that your typical Make: magazine reader can work on a small part of the ventilator, not be responsible for the whole ventilator themselves.” “You can’t have these all built in one place and get them to where they’re needed.”
“One thing that is important to understand for the average maker who wants to consider this is many of these designs might not be COVID-19 suitable. Unfortunately, even the doctors are unclear on exactly what is needed and they’re learning things every week.”
“We’ve proposed a process for how we could open source the verification of these ventilators as well. So the idea here is in order to convince, rightfully skeptical, medical administrators or the government that something works, you have a high burden of proof in this case.”
Make: founder Dale Dougherty and executive editor Mike Senese talked with a number of people about "the state of open source ventilator options, and propose a modular system to allow for more effective community support in addressing ventilator shortages."
To combat the coronavirus pandemic, DIY makers and companies are scrambling to create open-source ventilators. Here's what they're up against.
At a time when ventilators critical to treating patients diagnosed with COVID-19 are in short supply, a dedicated group of radio amateurs is making important contributions to an effort to bring a low-cost human ventilator to market as quickly as possible.
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, introduced a new open-source ventilator system reference design that customers can use to swiftly design ready-to-assemble boards for medical ventilators. Many regions are experiencing a critical shortage of ventilators as COVID-19 infections continue to rise and hospital demand exceeds supply.
In an effort to help combat the COVID-19 virus, Renesas released a new open-source ventilator system reference design. Its purpose is to design ready-to-assemble boards for ventilators.
Brooklyn design agency Standard Issue has created an open-source design for a face mask that can be CNC-cut and produced on a large scale.
Standard Issue's product, called One Mask, is designed so it can be produced by companies that have access to automated cutting and seaming technologies, such as manufacturers for furniture, fashion and sportswear brands.
The face mask is not intended to be medical grade but instead aims to help ramp up the production of masks for use by the public. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has urged everyone living in the US to wear a face cover whenever they are outside of their homes to help slow the spread of Covid-19.
Tolomatic, a global leader in linear motion technologies, has applied its expertise to develop automation solutions for manual resuscitators, which are needed worldwide to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tolomatic’s solution is a new type of ventilator that operates using an electric linear actuator. These prototypes automate a non-invasive, positive-pressure resuscitator (also self-inflating bag, bag valve mask or ‘AMBU’ bag/Artificial Manual Breathing Unit). The device, used primarily in emergency situations when traditional ventilators are not available, provides oxygen to patients requiring breathing assistance. The bag valve mask is positioned over the patient’s nose and mouth. An assistant manually squeezes the bag to provide airflow via a combination of ambient air and an oxygen cylinder and connecting tube. Squeezing the bag manually is workable for short durations, but not viable for longer term care. It can also create air flow inconsistencies, as well as require extra time and labor to stabilize the patient. Tolomatic’s approach is to automate this traditionally manual process using their electric linear actuators and insure patients would continue to get air for days or weeks.
The design came together overnight, and took 30 days to perfect: a portable desktop ventilator that costs $1,000 or less to manufacture and can function with or without access to compressed air.
On Wednesday morning, the Federal Food and Drug Administration gave emergency use authorization to the Coventor, which is intended to be a relatively low-cost back-up for hospitals and nursing homes if they run out of professional-grade ventilators.
[...]
The U of M has made the design available to manufacturers open source, meaning any company across the globe with means can produce the Coventor.
Brought to our attention by the BBC and CNX Software, the Mascobot is not your ordinary Raspberry Pi project. Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mascobot is the work of Marco Mascorro, a robotics engineer from California. Utilising a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and off the shelf parts, Mascorro has published the files for the Mascobot on GitHub.
However, it is unlikely to be ready to treat patients during the current pandemic. Nonetheless, Colombian authorities have fast-tracked tests, with the Pontifical Xavierian University and Los Andes University hoping to start human trials by the beginning of May.
A robotics engineer, Marco Mascorro, said he built the “pandemic ventilator” because he knew the machines were in high demand to treat COVID-19. In a recent tweet, Mascorro said he was “glad to see Elon Musk and Tesla working on this as well.” He told the BBC, “I am a true believer that technology can solve a lot of the problems we have right now specifically in this pandemic.” The design and computer code were made available online in March, meaning anyone can use or modify it.
Since you’d need an ESP32-S2 board that mostly means ESP32-S2-Saola-1 at this stage, and that’s exactly the board the company’s used in its getting started guide, where you can also learn how to modify the firmware and use the command line tools.
When you start out with Arduino, you get a lot of goodies directly from their own website. However, when you get into more advanced territory, you can move to other editors and IDEs. The main advantage is that you can use what you are used to using. The second advantage is that you can do the more advanced stuff that the Arduino IDE hides from beginners.
Around these parts we tend to be exponents of the KiCad lifestyle; what better way to design a PCBA than with free and open source tools that run anywhere? But there are still capabilities in commercial EDA packages that haven’t found their way into KiCad yet, so it may not always be the best tool for the job. Altium Designer is a popular non-libre option, but at up to tens of thousands of USD per seat it’s not always a good fit for users and businesses without a serious need.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the EU-funded Luminus Shamal Start project has joined forces with TechWorks, a Crown Prince Foundation (CPF) initiative, to support the healthcare system in Jordan by producing open-source designs for medical equipment, the EU announced on Thursday.
In a statement, the Delegation of the European Union to Jordan said that this cooperation comes with the aim of creating swift and innovative ways of addressing the COVID-19 crisis, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.
Accounting is one of the critical components of a business irrespective of the size of the company. Accounting mistakes can be very deadly and may cost you your business, which is why you need reliable accounting software to handle the financial side of your business in order to perform simple & complex transactions. The following is a list of some free open-source accounting software that are suitable for small businesses.
  As technology advances, we see new gadgets and inventions that make our everyday tasks easier. In recent years we have seen a considerable rise in automation. Machines are doing most of the jobs done by people. The most obvious example of this is smart homes or home automation. Automated homes have become relatively popular in the recent past. Home automation is a marvellous and revolutionary technology that has changed the way people live.
For home automation software to be good, it should be easy to use as the majority of the audience isn’t technical & are of different age groups and diverse backgrounds.
Fifteen or so years ago I was a Windows developer and I was never, ever, ever going to use Git. For years I regularly heard ‘Git was the future’ but I remained unconvinced. There was a cult of personality around the Linux-based source control tool and I knew I could never be part of that.
I was wrong, of course, so wrong that my penance is to now work for a company based on Git.
In fact, Git was the future. As we look back on 15 years of Git [as of April 7 2020] and perhaps also look forward a few years, some things have become crystal clear to me.
Anybody can use, extend and adapt Synse free of charge. Synse 3.0 is licensed under an open source GNU General Public License v3.0...
With Silicon Valley under lockdown Chrome 82 has been abandoned by Google, but the Chocolate Factory boffins haven't been slacking and on Thursday released the beta build of Chrome 83 ahead of schedule.
On March 18, Google paused the development of Chrome, Chromium, and Chrome OS releases due to the labor challenges posed by COVID-19 public health actions. Eight days later, production resumed under a modified schedule that saw the cancellation of Chrome 82.
Planned technical changes in that release were moved to Chrome 83, which is set to debut in mid-May – three weeks earlier than initially planned. The beta version of Chrome 83 has some define pluses, including a safer way to access abusable brower profiling capabilities and various useful features like the ability to detect barcodes in web apps.
We all know how important it is to keep WordPress sites updated. New updates provide the latest bug and security fixes against any nasties lurking on the web. But, more critically, an outdated site can also lead to poor performance, such as slow loading speed or an outdated look and feel.
Unfortunately, keeping your WordPress site up-to-date is not as easy as clicking a button. There are several components to consider, from theme to plugins to PHP. Even worse, updating too quickly can wreak another kind of havoc. Have you ever experienced the dreaded, "There has been a critical error on your website" warning after an innocent little update? I know I have, many times!
Here is a practical guide on what to look out for, as well as when and what to update, to ensure your WordPress site works well.
“Even before the pandemic, we were re-examining the value of the big deal,” Pickett said. “That is not unique to our university. This is an issue that librarians have been talking about for 20 years. Now we are at a significant inflection point, and I think most libraries understand they will have to do something different moving forward.”
Two institutions announced last week that they will not be renewing their big deals with academic publisher Elsevier due to budgetary constraints -- the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State University of New York Libraries Consortium.
If you're new to the world of Linux administration and open source software, you've probably only just started scratching the surface of the power this new world offers. Eventually, however, you'll start mining deeper depths. When that fateful moment arrives, chances are you're going to need to use a regular expression or two.
[...]
What does that bit of cryptic nonsense mean? Well, it's actually not nonsense. The above regular expression searches for a string of characters (/^ marks the beginning of the string and $/ marks the end), between three and 16 characters, that includes lowercase letters, the numbers 0-9, or an underscore or hyphen.
Every regular expression has meaning and use. Although they might seem a bit complicated for new users, it's important to understand how they work.
Modern optimizing compilers are truly amazing. They have tons and tons of tricks to make even crappy code run incredibly fast. Faster than most people could write by hand. This has lead some people to claim that program optimization is something that can be left to compilers, as they seem to be a lot better at it. This usually sparks a reply from people on the other end of the spectrum that say that they can write faster code by hand than any compiler which makes compilers mostly worthless when performance actually matters.
In a way both of these viewpoints are correct. In another way they are both wrong. To see how, let's split this issue into two parts.
Once again I’m inventing terms for useful distinctions that programmers need to make and sometimes get confused about because they lack precise language.
The motivation today is some issues that came up while I was trying to refactor some data representations to reduce reposurgeon’s working set. I realized that there are no fewer than three different things we can mean by the “length” of a structure in a language like C, Go, or Rust – and no terms to distinguish these senses.
Before reading these definitions, you might to do a quick read through The Lost Art of Structure Packing.
The first definition is payload length. That is the sum of the lengths of all the data fields in the structure.
In Haskell (and many other functional languages) it's quite common for the implementation of a function to reference one less argument than the type signature declares:
g :: foo -> bar g = length . reverse Known as point-free style by proponents (and pointless style by opponents), the function definition is a list of other functions which are composed together to produce a composite requiring a single argument: the missing one.
Designing UI:s is hard and application software can't please everyone all the time!
This is true and, as a software developer of more than 20 years, I have a huge amount of respect for the complexity of UI design. I also happen to know that such complexity is not a valid excuse for willingly and knowingly breaking UI concepts that have been proven and working for, in some cases, more than four decades. In fact, a lot of the examples above introduce more complexity for the user to cope with. The intricacies of each application and window decoration must be learned separately and time and energy is spent by repeatedly parsing the differences.
lowdown is a Markdown translator producing HTML5, roff documents in the ms and man formats, and terminal output. The open source C source code has no dependencies.
The tools are documented in lowdown(1) and lowdown-diff(1), the language in lowdown(5), and the library interface in lowdown(3).
The survey data I’m referring to comes from a study conducted by the Eclipse Foundation about the adoption of commercial Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The aim of the study was to get a better understanding of the IoT industry landscape by identifying the requirements, priorities, and challenges faced by organizations deploying and using commercial IoT technologies. More than 350 respondents from multiple industries responded, with about a quarter of respondents coming from industrial production businesses.
"Social development environment" CodePen has unfurled support for Flutter, Google's open-source cross-platform framework for mobile and web.
CodePen is an online editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, intended for sharing design ideas, getting help with bugs, prototyping, or forming an online portfolio. A CodePen file is called a Pen, and is public by default. A Pen is limited to 1MB of code, but you can also create multi-file projects. Free users are limited to Pens, or one project with up to 10 files. Paying users get the option to mark their work as private, do collaborative editing, and eliminate ads. You can also use CodePen for deploying projects to production websites, though it is really optimised for demos and experiments.
Back in 2013, QNX might have been a good choice compared to Linux. Today, with Yocto and similar tools for developing embedded Linux systems, it feels like an odd choice to add a license cost to such a device. But no biggie. Back in the day this was not an unreasonable choice (and still isn’t for certain applications).
The Flash stuff. There were alternatives back in 2013, but sure, there were plenty of developers at hand and things like Qt QML was still probably a bit clunky (I can’t recall the state of it back then – it required OpenGL ES, which I guess was a big ask back then).
But the mix of techniques and tools. The on-board web servers. The complexity of a small system and the costs it brings to maintenance and testability. If this is the foundation for Harmony remotes and a platform that has been used for the better past of the past decade, I wonder if the added engineering costs for architecture the platform to be more optimized early on would not have paid off in lower maintenance costs, as well as lower hardware costs.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (April 19, 2020). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
After posting two separate blogs for PWC 055 and seeing how awkward the explanations were, I'll try a new tack: Both submissions will be elaborated in one blog post. The elaborations will not be explanations. I'll focus more on the "idea" part and let any programming details come out in the comments, if at all.
This blog post contains the "missing comments" from my contribution to the Perl Weekly Challenge 055. If you haven't read the Task #2 Problem Description: Wave Array you might want to do that first.
This blog post contains the "missing comments" from my contribution to the Perl Weekly Challenge 055. If you haven't read the Task #1 Problem Description: Flip Binary you might want to do that first.
Finally I saw posts of PWC#056 on blogs.perl.org .
I haven't found what to discuss about #056 Task #1. Just to keep people know this code producer is alive and healthy, I share my recent life:
  We received the very sad news today, that Oier Echaniz Beneitez has passed away, after a long-term illness (not as a result of COVID-19).
Oier was one of the initiators for bringing EuroPython to Bilbao in 2015 and co-chaired the conference in both 2015 and 2016, together with Fabio...
He was one of the most enthusiastic and engaged organizers of the conference, served on the EuroPython Society board from 2015 - 2017 and founded and chaired the local Python organization in San Sebastian (PySS, pronounced “peace”). Oier also started the pyjok.es project, together with Alexandre Savio and Ben Nuttall, inaugurating the first Python Jokes-as-a-Service of its kind.
The goal is to use all the letters in a certain number of words. For this puzzle, the challenge is five words.
But if you look at the answers they provide for yesterday’s puzzle, it’s always just two words. So now I’m tormenting myself trying to find two-word solutions. And of course I started thinking about writing a program to find them.
I found a giant list of words and started hacking on some code. I wasn’t sure if I’d need some fancy tree structure for searching the solution space. I figured I would start simpler than that, and maybe it would work.
Finite State Machine is a mathematical model of computation that models a sequential logic. FSM consists of a finite number of states, transition functions, input alphabets, a start state and end state(s). In the field of computer science, the FSMs are used in designing Compilers, Linguistics Processing, Step workflows, Game Design, Protocols Procedures (like TCP/IP), Event-driven programming, Conversational AI and many more.
Do you still remember the project Terminator? People around the world are still using this tool as their terminal emulator of choice for Linux- and Unix-based systems (including Mac OS).
Unfortunately the development stagnated a bit since 2017 and within the last three years there had to be a lot of things to do. Terminator is written in Python, it had to be migrated to Python 3 for example, as distributions started to think about dropping support for Python 2. Packagers of several distributions started maintaining their own patches to support Terminator with Python 3, until today.
Two weeks ago, things have changed. A project at GitHub as been created, the source code has been migrated from Bazaar to Git and even some package maintainers from Arch Linux and Fedora contributed and were working hard towards whats happened this weekend. There is a Terminator 1.92 release available and you can find Terminator at it's new home here: https://github.com/gnome-terminator/terminator.
If you work on the data science or data visualization side of Python, you may have come to it from a scripting side of things. Writing just a little Python, using its magical libraries, with little structure or formalism to build a powerful analysis tool that runs in the terminal or maybe a jupyter notebook.
What if you could take that same code, sprinkle in just a bit of a simple API, and turn it into a fast and dynamic single page application allowing your users to dive into the visualizations on the web?
Well, that's basically what the folks over at Streamlit created! We'll dive into it with one of the creators, Adrien Treuille.
The Open Mainframe Project, an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, has organized its membership, including Broadcom, IBM, Phoenix Software, Rocket Software, SUSE, Vicom Infinity, and Zoss Team, to address a growing COBOL skills gap spotlighted by public sector officials.
The Rust language focused Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to boot the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core/128-thread processor and run with full multi-threading capabilities.
While one of the fundamentals of the Rust programming language is on offering safe concurrency, Redox OS itself had a multi-core issue until this week when it was sorted out by lead Redox OS developer (and System76 engineer) Jeremy Soller.
JAXenter: Eclipse Theia version 1.0 has just been released. Here on JAXenter we’ve followed Eclipse Theia for some time, so we’ll approach the topic a little bit differently. In the official announcement it is noticeable that Theia is explicitly called a “True Open Source Alternative to VS Code”. If we stick to the scope of functions and functionality: What are the similarities between Eclipse Theia and VS Code?
Sven Efftinge: VS Code is an extremely good tool. In my opinion it offers just the right balance between a code editor and an IDE. In addition, the strong focus on command line interfaces via terminal and the development of the Language Server Protocol finally allows to shift a lot of work to the communities. This is an extremely important design decision because it means that IDE-specific plugins do not have to be built for every framework and programming language.
We compose our opinion pieces, writing anywhere from 400 to 1000 words. Most of us use “we must” and “we should” and “we need” and conclude with a paragraph that offers hope.
In No Exit, the translated title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clos, three deceased characters find themselves in a room, ostensibly in Hell, in what transpires as a permanent wait. Locked after being ushered in by a valet, with quite literally no means of escape, they are confronted with each other’s moods, lies and eventual confessions. Sadism, cowardice and mendacity figure. The torment each character subjects the other to leads to that famous observation: L’enfer, c’est les autres (Hell is other people.) Humans are inventive, and tiringly so, in ensuring that torture or physical requirement need not be necessary in inflicting enduring misery.
"The future has arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet."
As I scrawl the sloppy copy for my latest manifesto on a windowpane between my thoughts on string theory and Kevin Bacon’s connection to 9/11 (Madoff made him do it!), I am sincerely struck by America’s latest outpouring of affection for the pathologically eccentric. We may be on the veranda of a new black death but it has never been a better time to be mad in America. Not only is the evening news waxing hysterical and joining the angrier voices in my head like a Henry Rollins gospel ensemble, but every corporate huckster from Viacom to Disney apparently wants to be alone with me (I’ll be Daria if you play Snow White).
We don't often do book reviews here on Techdirt, but since we've been talking about reading books scanned by the Internet Archive,* this one seemed good to discuss because of how it touches on many of the issues discussed here.
A day after President Donald Trump unveiled a three-phase approach to ending stay-in-place orders across the country, he voiced support for right-wing protesters in a number of states who are themselves urging a quicker — and potentially more dangerous — approach.
In regions and cities across Russia, state officials are taking extraordinary measures to limit people's movements and curb the spread of coronavirus. On March 18, Russia’s Supreme Court even imposed a€ moratorium€ on all hearings across the nation’s judicial system except for particularly “urgent cases,” though judges have enormous leeway€ here to decide what meets this threshold. Meanwhile, Russia's prison system has effectively locked down, and observers warn that we now even less know about what happens at these facilities than we did before.
As of the morning of April 17, 4,070 new coronavirus infections have been recorded in Russia, raising the total number of officially confirmed cases to 32,000.
COVID-19 has shown just how deeply interconnected people are. Now is precisely the time to be increasing global cooperation, not cutting funding to the WHO.
International relations scholar Richard Falk weighs in on the pandemic crisis and the global implications of neoliberalism, ecological illiteracy, and poverty as a global health issue.
The head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, was a senior capo for the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) gangster mafia that ruled Ethiopia from 1991-2018. During that time he served as Health Minister and Foreign Minister, cementing his credentials as a member of the inner circle of what was one of if not the most corrupt, brutal and genocidal regimes to set foot on this planet in the past 30 years.
We've been screaming from the rooftops about the need for more transparency regarding COVID-19, and tragically so many governments are going in the opposite direction. The latest is Iraq, where the nation's media regulator revoked Reuters' "license" for three months while also fining the organization ~$21,000 for daring to claim that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases was actually higher than the government was reporting. According to the Communications and Media Commission, this violated rules and would "have serious repercussions on societal health and safety."
"The United States is the€ richest country in the history of humanity.€ There's absolutely no reason why€ our frontline healthcare workers shouldn't have access€ to PPE."
Last week we wrote about attempts to repair much-needed ventilators for serious coronavirus cases being stymied by manufacturers' refusal to allow hospital technicians to carry out the necessary work. Trammell Hudson, who describes himself as "a programmer, photographer, frequent hacker and occasional watchmaker", has come up with another approach to supplying ventilators to hospitals. It involves taking the inexpensive and widely-used Constant Positive Air Pressure (CPAP) devices typically used for sleep apnea, and turning them into emergency ventilators suitable for COVID-19 patients. These are known as Bi-level Positive Airway Pressure (BiPAP) machines. BiPAP devices are more sophisticated than CPAP ones: they apply higher pressure when the patient tries to breathe in, and lower pressure when they start to breathe out. In investigating the popular Airsense 10 CPAP device manufactured by ResMed, Hudson made a remarkable discovery:
In many countries, what should have been a serious problem—COVID-19—quickly escalated into a crisis. Tracking and tracing capabilities were impaired or absent, central coordination was lacking, decisive actions were not taken, and lower-level staff were tasked with making life-or-death choices. This is a reflection of the US-British-led neoliberal form of capitalism that has infected the thinking of many world leaders and economists for the last 40+ years.
"To truly be resilient, our system must shift to one that relies on small and medium producers and independent, responsible operations."
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system, and just as importantly, cast out 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world.
President Donald Trump has laid out a three-phase approach for how states can end stay-in-place orders over the next several weeks or so, with hopes that doing so can help send people back to work, revitalizing an economy that has been significantly harmed by the spread of the coronavirus.
While the corona virus has focused much of the world on Europe and the United States, India promises to be the greatest victim of the disease. But other than a slick public relations campaign, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done little to confront the crisis. Indeed, a number of policy moves by Delhi have likely fed the spread of the dangerous virus.
"Through music, entertainment, and impact, the global live-cast will celebrate those who risk their own health to safeguard everyone else's."
On April 6, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed an executive order allowing “medically vulnerable” incarcerated people to be temporarily released on medical furlough for the duration of the state’s disaster proclamation. Furloughs are typically temporary releases from prison, usually for no more than 14 days. Pritzker’s executive order extends the order indefinitely during the pandemic; it is unclear whether people will be expected to return to prison once the pandemic is past.
The former Brazilian president joined a growing global chorus criticizing how the country's current leader has handled the public health crisis.
On March 31, Florida emergency room nurse Naomi Moya took a big risk. Though her hospital didn’t allow staff to wear N95 masks when treating patients who were not diagnosed with the coronavirus, Moya brought one from home and put it on to protect herself.
A supervisor noticed the N95 right away and ordered her to remove it.
It’s now clear that expansive, population-wide testing is part-and-parcel of every successful COVID-19 containment strategy. But US testing efforts, from the beginning of the pandemic until now, have been widely criticized as lacking. Perhaps as a direct consequence of this failure, the US now leads the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths. What are these tests and what’s our capacity to test; why is it important to test; how have the FDA and other administrative agencies addressed the issue; and what can we do about it?
[...]
New in vitro diagnostic tests—like those for COVID-19—are regulated by the FDA under the broad category of “medical devices,” with the level of scrutiny depending on the riskiness of the test. As Erika Lietzan has helpfully summarized, to circumvent the lengthy FDA review process in a public health emergency like this pandemic, the agency can use Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) on a product-by-product basis. The aim of EUAs is to make sure that the tests actually work, but to accomplish that review as quickly as possible. EUAs have been used successfully for past disease outbreaks like Zika and MERS-CoV. The FDA has issued EUAs for 33 in vitro diagnostic tests for COVID-19. Almost all are for the PCR tests to identify viral genetic material, but one serological test for antibodies has received an EUA.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency on January 31 and declared that “circumstances exist justifying” EUAs on February 4. Although intended to ease regulatory hurdles for bringing COVID-19 testing online, the FDA’s EUA guidance ended up slowing the process down. In general, the FDA doesn’t enforce its regulatory requirements for so-called “laboratory developed tests” (LDTs) that are developed and run in a single facility (such as a hospital that develops, makes, and then uses its own diagnostic test). However, when the FDA moved to an EUA regime for COVID-19, the agency announced that LDTs would not be permitted for COVID-19 tests; the only way to get approved was to request an EUA. At the end of February, the FDA modified its stance, allowing some laboratories to keep testing using their LDTs while they waited for their EUA to be approved. But as the New York Times recently detailed, this led to a “lost month” when “new tests sat unused”—including at Stanford, which had already used WHO protocols to deliver more than 250,000 tests around the world but was unable to use them in its own backyard.
According to ESET, "The intent was to collect Windows credentials (username/NTLM hash) of visitors by exploiting an SMB feature and the file:// prefix....The targeted information was NOT the visitor's credentials to the compromised websites, but rather the visitor's own Windows credentials." ZDNet explains that "NTLM hashes can be cracked to obtain a cleartext version of a user's Windows password."
The second-largest hospital in the Czech Republic was hit by a massive cyberattack in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak. The incident happened on Friday night, which prompted the authorities to close down the entire IT network, majorly disrupting the operation in the facility – staff were told not to turn their computers back on. Patients who turned up at the hospital were diverted to other establishments while it is figured out how to make the systems running again.
The March 26 malware (malicious software) attack took down a number of functions at Meadville Medical Center from email to electronic medical records, the Meadville Tribune reported.
The Czech Republic warned international allies on Thursday of a imminent wave of disruptive cyberattacks against the country’s hospitals and other parts of its critical infrastructure.
The country’s NUKIB cybersecurity watchdog said the attacks, designed to damage or destroy victims’ computers, were expected in coming days. Two officials with knowledge of the matter said they could begin as soon as Friday.
The Czech advisory is the latest sign that, while the novel coronavirus has strained health care systems around the world, some malicious [attackers] are trying to exploit the additional vulnerability.
“This appears to be a serious and credible impending attack,” said Beau Woods, a cyber safety innovation fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Attacks against Central and Eastern European countries can be leading indicators of future attacks elsewhere. U.S. organizations would do well to take action now without waiting for adversaries to begin targeting them.”
Brno University Hospital is currently recovering capabilities, although it is not yet fully operational. For example, there are still no means of storing data, meaning that medics have to write and transfer their notes manually, which slows processes and potentially endangers lives.
According to the researchers, the campaign began with malicious emails sent from a spoofed address mimicking the World Health Organization (noreply@who[.]int) that were sent to a number of individuals associated with the healthcare organization that's actively involved in COVID-19 response efforts.
The email lures contained a rich text format (RTF) document named "20200323-sitrep-63-covid-19.doc," which, when opened, attempted to deliver EDA2 ransomware by exploiting a known buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2012-0158) in Microsoft's ListView / TreeView ActiveX controls in MSCOMCTL.OCX library.
All of this including various other security concerns that have been raised have made doubts creep into the minds of its users who are now scared of using the platform. Many have even shifted to using different apps like Skype, Hangouts and more. If you have shifted to using a different app and do not want to use Zoom anymore, here’s how you can remove it completely from your device.
Faced with the increase in wages in Western countries which pushes the relocation of industrial activities to emerging countries, Denmark launched the REMODEL program to help its national companies to create economic models based on an open-source logic. An experiment was launched with ten Danish companies Jaime Arredondo shares the feedback from these pioneers. In 2016 the Danish Design Center, an agency of the Danish government, worked together to see how Denmark could position its industry faced with the problem of massive outsourcing of its production abroad, with the pressure that this implies for the labor market. How to respond to the challenges of having a small country that can no longer afford to manufacture at home because of the too high salary costs, but which has an extremely powerful design culture? The answer: helping Danish companies to develop with open source models that allow anyone to study, modify, reuse and even distribute a product as companies like the car manufacturer already do to varying degrees. Tesla, Baidu the Chinese giant which develops autonomous cars or Opendesk which sells furniture designed by its community of designers and manufactured by networks of fablabs.
Recently, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced that it’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted two projects - Argo and Dragonfly - as incubation-level hosted projects.
[...]
Argo, the GitOps framework for Kubernetes, was originally created in 2017 at Applatix, which was acquired by Intuit in 2018. A few months later, BlackRock, the financial planning and management company, contributed Argo Events to the Argo project. BlackRock collaborated with Intuit in developing and enhancing the Argo toolkit.
During lockdown I’ve been helping friends and neighbors get set up for remote work or just remote calls. If someone is in a bind they use what they have in front of them, or what they’ve been told to use, so it’s been an interesting step back into the world of disloyal devices and horrid software.
But even if your choices are limited, there is one basic step you can take to protect your privacy: create another account. Now is as good a time as any to say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got a new account now.”
Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization is a basic security technique. You make some boxes, say “Critical” and “Trivial”, you sort things into those boxes, and you treat the boxes with different degrees of care. You might already have a folder at home for financial statements or tax invoices. At the office, you might mark and store “Confidential” documents separately.
Remember when BlackBerry reported Advanced Persistent Threat groups have been infiltrating critical Linux servers for at least eight years? What's the lesson to be learned?
LinuxSecurity Founder Dave Wreski argues "Although it may be easy to blame the rise in attacks targeting Linux in recent years on security vulnerabilities in the operating system as a whole, this is simply not the truth. The majority of exploits on Linux systems can be attributed to misconfigured servers and poor administration."
A well-designed tool could offer public health benefit, but a poorly designed one could pose unnecessary and significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.
The GDPR is a mess. Still. After nearly two years of existence, it hasn't done much to improve the privacy of the millions of Europeans it affects. But it has made big tech companies even more dominant and generated a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
As if we needed any further evidence that Clearview is a terrible company. The web-scraping, facial recognition provider has been pitching its unproven tech to an assortment of law enforcement agencies, one-percenters, and questionable governments for a little while now. It shows no sign of slowing down either, no matter how many people (including members of Congress) are now aware of its business practices and cheerful exploitation of billions of images found all over the web.
We know that for almost 60 years the U.S. government has blockaded Cuba and, in the process, has damaged Cuba’s economy and threatened the health and safety of the Cuban people. We know that the Cuban people are now defending themselves against the COVID 19 virus and know too that COVID 19 often causes death.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, as we are grappling with this terrifying pandemic, the Trump administration is currently carrying out the largest military operation in Latin America in 30 years, and has made it clear that alleged Venezuelan “narco-terrorism” is the target. It’s worth noting that the last deployment of a similar size took place at the time of the 1989 US military intervention in Panama to remove General Manuel Noriega.
The famous 19th century fairy tale by the Danish writer, Hans Christian Anderson, could have been written about Donald Trump, a man-child who lives in a fantasy world of self-delusion and lies and who surrounds himself with sycophantic yes-people who value their positions and professional advancement over truth and justice. The damage caused by this corrosive mindset is limited when one is running an inherited family company but magnified and multiplied a thousand-fold when the same person is president of the United States during a global pandemic.
Once again America is at war. In COVID-19, it has found a new enemy against which to marshal its not so vast resources. America needs its enemies, manufacturing them at will, just as it manufactures consent to combat them. But like most of America’s perpetual wars, the war on COVID-19 is actually a war of attrition on America itself, or more precisely on its communities of color.
The official also said that Pakistan would go to any lengths to continue with their proxy war with India. ISI linked operations are on in full flow not only in Pakistan but in Afghanistan as well. The JeM and the Lashkar-e-Tayiba have lined up nearly 200 of their terrorists along the border and are looking to infiltrate into Jammu and Kashmir, a report by the Intelligence Bureau also said.
We could see various synergies between the legacy of the Commonwealth countries and the needs of the Kosovan participants. As Kosovo has only recently had a war, it would be useful for them to see how Commonwealth countries have continued to commemorate war casualties over many generations. This could provide insights for Kosovans as they record and preserve their own history and experiences. Furthermore, as Albanian Kosovans have very distinctive names, it would be a very easy data matching activity to try and identify all the people with Albanian names who had served in the armed forces of any Commonwealth country, including the UK and Australia.
The Prizren hackathon had been entirely for programmers. For the Remembrance Day hackathon, we decided to include research activities for people who don't do programming as well as some data science activities. As I had recently looked at some of the data sources for my own research, it provided a solid base for me to prepare some coding tasks.
[...]
The Prizren hackathon had been entirely for programmers. For the Remembrance Day hackathon, we decided to include research activities for people who don't do programming as well as some data science activities. As I had recently looked at some of the data sources for my own research, it provided a solid base for me to prepare some coding tasks.
Once again, scraping was one of the major themes and that is how we have so many data sets for the Anzacathon.
The winners of the Remembrance Day hackathon, Leotrime Maxharraj and Xhejdi Coku, had created another Mural site for John Goddard, VK6JG, who perished in Operation Thesis, Crete. The honour roll of the Wireless Institute of Australia was one of the lists we used as a basis for the research.
Is Covid-19 that just-big-enough-but-not-too-big catastrophe that is finally going to scare or inspire enough people to take realistic and constructive action to confront the major challenge of our time. That would be climate change, a problem based in exploitation and inequality, with the potential to one day make Covid-19 seem like a picnic in the park.
NOAA was on the scene of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill from the earliest moments of the crisis in April 2010. Our scientists used data from satellites, aircraft, ships, buoys, and gliders to collect and provide mission-critical information to guide the emergency response to the spill, as well as the long-term assessment and restoration of the Gulf Coast.
Now, ten years later, we look at a few examples of how lessons learned during and research following Deepwater Horizon have better prepared the agency to provide expert scientific support for future events.
"We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts."
The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by climate change and nuclear war should have long ago—that the promises of normalcy will never deliver in the end.€
The massive global economic shutdown in response to COVID-19 is clearing the skies as less pollution is being emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, including emissions of fewer colorless greenhouse gases. But emitting fewer greenhouse gases alone will not cool Earth, only reduce extra warming that would have otherwise taken place. And counterintuitively, as fossil fuel pollutants are reduced, global average temperatures warm even more due to the loss of global cooling aerosols (air pollution) that are emitted alongside greenhouse gases when fossil fuels are burned.
It’s been a wild couple of weeks in the oil markets. Following a price war between major petrostates, the price of oil has tanked. Ever since, Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have been desperately trying to save a deeply indebted oil industry. We can all but expect a Trump-led bailout for Big Oil. Instead, our law and policy makers should let the oil producers fail, and devote resources to stave off the next crisis — the climate crisis — before it gets even worse.
The Washington Post recently published an article that repeated the old and flawed idea that ranching will “protect” the land and suggesting conservation easements are the solution to sprawl.
In the current election cycle, three things are clear. First, it is apparent that for the next four years, the President will, like me, be an old white guy (hopefully not named Trump). Second, the global biodiversity crisis, unfortunately, is not a campaign issue. And third, neither is human overpopulation – 7.8 billion and counting – the root cause of most environmental problems.
The issue here is not the importance of the dollar, but rather the reluctance of other major economic powers to directly challenge U.S. policy.
Yesterday morning, my academic “community” received an update from the Office of the President, announcing that, after rigorous, stressful planning, the president and the senior staff have decided to “furlough” 30 university staff employees as of this Friday (3 days notice). In the days leading up to yesterday’s announcement, the president and the provost convinced the Academic Senate to form a special committee of 6 faculty members to participate in “shared governance” by devising a plan over the next 4 months to “right-size” our academic programs.
Most of us, I suspect, have had the experience of walking into a darkened room we presume to be empty, only to find someone sitting silently in the shadows observing our movements. When this€ happens, it is, initially at least, an unnerving experience. Why? Because, though we don’t often speak about this,€ there are things we do, think about,€ and say to ourselves when alone that we would never allow ourselves to do, think about, or say to ourselves in the presence of others.
It’s hard not to be apocalyptic as the fatality curves rise and the threat of more waves of deadly infections dominate our thinking. Generalizations abound faster than a social-media talking-dog meme. Your ideas versus mine, your authorities versus mine, your “I told-you-sos” versus mine. But these are not the end times, although we may see a few economic end games before we’re done. Sadly, not all of us will be here to know which way the world went.
Conventional economic wisdom says a time of crisis is not the moment to enact tax increases. But, as Eric Toder at the Tax Policy Center recently pointed out: “[Tax experts] can begin to think of the time after the pandemic passes and how government should respond to massive increases in the public debt, and the new tax increases that Congress will need to enact to fund them.”
President Donald Trump late Thursday released a vague plan to reopen the U.S. economy that — in a retreat from his claim of “total” authority — puts the onus on states to decide when to lift coronavirus prevention measures and contains no national strategy for the kind of massive testing expansion that public health experts say is necessary before any safe return to normalcy.
After the dot-com crash in 2000, economic policy aimed to “get us back to normal.” It sought to recreate or re-establish the U.S. economy as it was before the crisis hit. After the subprime mortgage crisis, economic policy likewise proceeded to “recovery.” That meant returning to how the economy was before 2008-2009. Now, as we sink into an economic depression by reacting so poorly to the coronavirus, Federal Reserve and Trump Treasury policies seek to return us to that “great economy” Trump boasted about before March 2020.
What awaits the U.S. when the coronavirus is contained? Will America’s great ideological glue – the belief in social mobility – be finally exposed as a caste system?
"Nobody can do anything. Nobody can apply. The system is crashed."
The new plan, says the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, "lacks critical details to confirm whether it will actually reach all who need it."
Some lawmakers want a remote Congress so they can remain AWOL and pretend to deal with the many crises remotely.
On April 7, the U.S. President Donald Trump took the stage for the White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing. In his speech, he targeted the World Health Organization (WHO) for mismanaging the Coronavirus pandemic. Trump criticized the organization for focusing too much on China, and accused its leadership of not being proactive enough in confronting the virus that led to its spread across the globe, culminating in a planetary pandemic that has so far (April 17) infected approximately 2 million people and claimed more than 125,000 lives globally. Defending his earlier steps to limit some travel to China that the WHO had criticized, President Trump, in essence, vilified the premier international health organization for the very failures that public health experts have identified in Trump’s response to the virus. The same experts have repeatedly criticized the President for his public denials of the dangers of the virus and his prioritization of the health of the U.S. economy over that of its people. Having exonerated himself of the guilt of having slowed the American response to the pandemic, including the scarcity of testing kits and protective gear, which turned the United States to the pandemic’s latest epicenter, Trump threatened with putting a hold on all U.S. funding to the WHO—the largest single source of money for the organization. In the midst of what a member of the White House Task Force, Adm. Brett Giroir, called the “peak death week,” Trump – the nation’s self-declared cheerleader – went back to his favorite topic, the economy, and cheered the U.S. public on...
It was not profitable for private capitalists within the medical-industrial complexes of modern capitalism to produce or stockpile the medical supplies needed to properly manage a viral pandemic.
Given the tensions in the country and the real possibility of violence, Trump's tweets rise to the level of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.
"My bill to cancel rent and mortgages isn't just necessary," says Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, "it's popular."
"In 2008, we bailed out Wall Street. This time, it's time to bail out the American people who are suffering."
Forty-five million Americans hold a whopping $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. Eight million of those individuals have defaulted on their loans.
We live on a crisis-struck planet where surplus lives are struggling to survive in the wastelands of a rapidly shrinking economic order. The specter of a wageless life now befalls the billions.
"Americans are in dire need of money to pay their rent and put food on the table—this is absurd."
"CFPB is continuing a deregulatory, anti-transparency, anti-accountability, anti-consumer protection rulemaking agenda, even in the face of Covid-19."
"The smoking gun has arrived."
This week on CounterSpin: Dozens of groups and state and local officials have just sent an open letter to Congress: The $150 billion designated for state, local and tribal governments as relief from the Covid-19 crisis is nowhere near what those governments will need—and not just that, but forcing them to cut budgets just as they need to be spending more is going to drive a cycle that only hurts more those already hurting. We’ll talk about what could be done instead with Naomi Walker, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network, working out of the Economic Policy Institute—who spearheaded the letter.
The Great Gray Hope has bowed out of the presidential primary race, leaving tottering Joe Biden as the last Democrat standing. What Bernie Sanders accomplished electorally was remarkable, revealing both how far a progressive can venture and the limits proscribing further advancement to the left within the Democratic Party.
The end of the Bernie Sanders campaign always had a destination that was not the White House.
Amidst all the talk about if the global Covid-19 pandemic will lead to an opening for socialism, or at least a reduction in the grip of neoliberalism, in the wake of capitalism’s failures, a more immediate question is if there is to be a reversal of the march of the Right in electoral politics.
Spring has sprung, but instead of renewal we have another year or more of social distancing and preposterously incompetent national leadership ahead of us, along with an electoral circus in which the greater evil party’s presidential candidate will yet again be the bastard off-spring of Roy Cohn and Norman Vincent Peale, a snake oil salesman who is making the corvid-19 crisis a lot worse than it could otherwise have been. Meanwhile, barring a miracle, the lesser evil party will be putting its worst food forward, fielding Joe Biden.
American conservatism—the so-called "culture of life"—worships annihilation.
A few weeks ago, a German women did something illegal. She bought a book called 1984 in a local bookstore. The bookseller was crying because he had not seen a customer for ages. Just a few months ago, these three rather unassuming sentences would have been a suitable beginning for a great book. In April 2020, this is the bitter reality in Germany. The Orwellian nightmare of an all controlling super police state is just around the corner, thanks to the seemingly relentless spread of the Coronavirus.
A misplaced fear of government action and a lack of trust in science have tragically weakened the U.S. response to the pandemic.
We need no-excuse absentee voting now—and that's the bare minimum.
As the presidential race grinds on, more blue-leaning voters are expressing worry that Trump will “cancel the election.”
As a conscientious voter who started this election cycle with clear standards of whom to support, I am left with no one from the blue side who meets my criteria. As 20 some candidates threw in their hats, I said a massive program to address climate change ( the Green New Deal) and single payer health care with no private insurance (Medicare for All) were the cleavers to divide the field. The early debate stages were split somewhat evenly between those who had at least one of my requirements and those who had none.
The Secretary General of the United Nations issued a plea to the countries of the world to declare an immediate ceasefire. “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war,” he said. “Let us dedicate ourselves to the real fight, which is not with each other, but is to protect our health and the health of our planet.” Can we heed his plea, acknowledge more fully than ever our profound and indisputable interdependence, and seize this perilous moment as an opportunity for broad and deep societal change? How much more evidence do we need? Borders and boundaries do not protect us. Position and privilege may not keep us from harm. No country or village is too far away. We are all vulnerable to this virus.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has prompted a major question about leadership in a time of crisis: how to balance the importance of public health with the respecting of individual liberty? The virus respects no borders. It cares little for how nations are run, whether through democratic governance or authoritarianism. But democratic governments have already used the virus to crack down on freedoms, while those regimes that were authoritarian to begin with have used the pandemic to grab even more power. Meanwhile in countries like the United States, the notion of freedom is being used to undermine public health. But freedom and public health are not mutually exclusive.
Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday unveiled legislation aimed at providing relief to “the millions of Americans currently at risk of housing instability and homelessness” by canceling all rent and home mortgage payments for the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When tenant activist Margot Black had her first “no-cause” eviction in which she was forced out of her apartment simply because she was not bound by a lease, she was 19 and a single mother of a 6-month-old daughter. When she saw her second no-cause eviction in 2012, Portland, Oregon, was an even less hospitable place. Housing prices had soared as tech jobs came in, and Portland was branded as the next hip place for urban professionals to relocate to — making the city increasingly unlivable for working-class residents.
Months after President Donald Trump promised to open FBI files to help families of the 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government, the Justice Department has doubled down on its claim that the information is a state secret.
Like others, I have thought from the first day of the Covid-19 pandemic that it was forcing us to awake from exponential life-system destruction by corporate ‘business as usual’ to our common life-ground.
Might the current Covid-19 situation make you think that the U.S. needed to immediately adopt some form of universal health insurance?
The end of the Bernie Sanders campaign always had a destination that was not the White House.
Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary.€ Now, I’m no operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or electability.€ It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make it visible.
The fact that President Donald Trump attacked the official US state broadcasting outlet, Voice of America, as an organ of Chinese government propaganda (NPR, 4/10/20) is a testament to just how important anti-China rhetoric is to his political strategy in regards to the Covid-19 pandemic. In context, VOA is simply not aggressive enough in pushing the narrative the administration wants to get out there. But the administration has other avenues.
An Assyrian Christian journalist currently living in Istanbul, Isa Karatus, has reported that gunshots were fired at his house in Mardin on the morning of April 14th. He does not regularly live at the Mardin house, and thus was not home when the attack occurred. An investigation is ongoing.
The State Duma has approved a law that would allow individuals to apply for Russian citizenship without losing their existing citizenship elsewhere.
Since 2018, residents of Russia’s Arkhangelsk region and Komi Republic have come out by the thousands to protest the construction of a landfill near the Shiyes railway station. The site would allegedly be used to store waste imported from Moscow. Earlier this month, the governors of both regions resigned.
Moscow police have arrested Pyotr Verzilov — again. Verzilov is a member of the punk protest group Pussy Riot and the publisher of the independent legal news website Mediazona. This time, police caught him wearing one of their own uniforms.
St. Petersburg’s city government may introduce a permit system for moving around the city outdoors, anonymous sources told the local outlet Fontanka.
"I lack words to describe how stupid and dangerous this is."
Moscow’s permit system for traveling the city by car or public transit amid the COVID-19 pandemic is gradually shifting from chaos into order. Still, the digital passes, which became mandatory on April 15, continue to pose significant problems and suffer from regular glitches. For example, until the evening of April 17, the status of certain essential workers remained unclear: while Mayor Sergey Sobyanin had ordered police to let judges, attorneys, military personnel, journalists, and civil servants travel using their work IDs rather than a special pass, traffic police didn’t know about the order and began preventing many of those workers from traveling if they couldn’t display a digital permit. There was at least one exception to those de facto restrictions: deputies and employees for the State Duma. Meanwhile, a special option on the permit website for media and government employees appeared — and then disappeared again.
A Texas judge said on Wednesday that all voters afraid of contracting the coronavirus should be allowed to cast absentee ballots in the coming election. Republicans immediately vowed to fight the ruling.
A federal judge in Brazil has ordered government websites to post a letter from the Kinja indigenous people for 30 days as part of their right to respond to racist rhetoric from the president's administration.
The Supreme Court is being asked to resolve a circuit split on the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The CFAA has done a lot of damage to security researchers and others who violate terms of service agreements. The "others" include everyday Americans who have no idea they might be violating federal law when they do things like give fake information to social media companies or use work computers for personal reasons.
What we should not take, though, is a press corps prepared to issue bold and incisive criticism of a raging sociopath, but when it comes to serious alternatives—actual, systemic change—well, let’s not get carried away.€ Workers devastated by the loss of their job and their healthcare at once? That’s just terrible. Medicare for all? Mmm, you know, that’s pretty radical, maybe an op-ed. Nurses, farmworkers and meatpackers on the front line? Deeply deserving of attention and sympathy. A livable, enforceable minimum wage that keeps pace with productivity? Well, you know, there are some very smart people who think that’s a bad idea. Restructuring the economy so disasters like Covid-19 don’t further immiserate those already struggling while scoring billionaires still more billions? What are you, a socialist?
In William Blake’s view prophesy was no more than projecting into the future consequences of what we were doing in the present. If we kept on doing what we were doing, we could predict with some reliability what might happen. Caveat here: if no chance events disrupted that causal chain, such as a hurricane, or a stock market crash, or a pandemic, or a 9/11. There are also conditions presently at hand — global warming, for one — which we know about and yet the clock of its consequences remains subject to chance, like the stock market itself.
"Now is the time to step up international solidarity for children and humanity."
The U.S. Postal Service plays a vital role in our nation’s health and stability at this time of crisis. Unfortunately, it’s financially strapped — and got just crumbs in the $2.2 trillion stimulus package recently passed by Congress.
"We now need Congress to tell Mnuchin, 'There will be no incentive package that you want without the Post Office in it.'"
Among the most prominent victims of the coronavirus financial crisis is the United States Postal Service, which could quite literally run out of money to operate if the federal government does not approve a rescue package for it soon. The Trump administration—which, like much of the GOP, has long advocated for cutbacks and privatization of the postal service—actively prevented the USPS from being bailed out in the CARES Act, even as Donald Trump has made a show of publicly thanking Fedex and UPS for their work. Not very subtle.
Besides highlighting the several modalities to be adopted by lawyers and litigants during hearings, the Supreme Court had also issued instructions for joining the hearings through its web-based video-conferencing system "VIDYO".
The Humane Society Legislative Fund was launched in 2004 as a political voice for three animal-protection groups: The Doris Day Animal League, The Fund for Animals, and, of course, The Humane Society of the United States. I’m a big fan of HSLF. I subscribe to their email blasts; I’ve used their legislator scorecards as the basis for a number of articles; and if they sold merchandise, I’d certainly rock it.
It has been an article of faith during recent crises that temporary measures must be taken to bring about a return to normalcy, at which point a longer view can prevail. Following 9/11, the national security state that had been waning with the end of the Cold War was revived and given new prominence. Later, the Obama administration ‘held its nose’ as it bailed out the large banks, with the result being that the institutions that caused the crisis were fully restored and the balance of power and nature of ‘the economy’ were permanently altered.
The organization's board of directors was due to decide today on whether to approve the $1.13bn sale of the .org domain from the Internet Society to private equity firm Ethos Capital, but a last-minute letter from California's attorney general Xavier Becerra appears to have upended the plan.
Rather than take a vote, the ICANN board debated the issue and ultimately decided to put off a decision until May 4 - the fourth such delay. The organization formally acknowledged the decision late on Thursday evening local time.
This puts ICANN in a tough position: If it allows the transaction, the state entity that regulates it might sue. If it denies the transaction, private equity buyer Ethos might sue.
This is ICANN’s own undoing. It assigned the .org contract to Public Interest Registry as a non-profit overseer of the namespace. Over time, it has changed the contract to make it more like an ownership structure. In an effort to streamline contracts, it changed many of the terms to reflect those of new top level domains that were “bought and paid for” by registry operators in the 2012 round. It removed price controls last year, shortly before Ethos Capital said it was buying the non-profit and turning it into a for-profit.
Attorney general Xavier Becerra's letter arrived at ICANN just hours before its meeting to decide on the sale of the .org domain. The letter urged the organization not to approve the sale as it “raises serious concerns that cannot be overlooked”.
For instance, Ethos Capital has an unusual corporate structure and its purchase of the .org domain involves six different companies that were all registered on the same day back in October of last year. The private equity firm has also refused to answer specific questions about its ownership.
We have agreed to extend the review period to 4 May 2020, to permit additional time to complete our review.
To that end, my office conducted an investigation of ICANN and its role in approving the transfer of the .ORG Registry Agreement from the Public Interest Registry (“PIR”)(the supporting organization tothe Internet Society(“ISOC”))to Ethos Capital. A key component of our review begins with ICANN’s articles of incorporationwhich states as follows:
[ICANN] is not organized for the private gain of any person...recogni[zing]the fact that the Internet is an international network of networks, owned by no single nation, individual or organization”and as such, ICANN will “pursue the charitable and public purposes of lessening the burdens of government and [...]
A few weeks back, the Trump FCC put on a big show about a new "Keep America Connected Pledge." In it, the FCC proudly proclaimed that it had gotten hundreds of ISPs to agree to not disconnect users who couldn't pay for essential broadband service during a pandemic. The problem: the 60 day pledge was entirely voluntary, temporary, and because the FCC just got done obliterating its authority over ISPs at lobbyist behest (as part of its net neutrality repeal), it's largely impossible to actually enforce.
March 23rd was the deadline for the parties in Interference No. 106,115 between Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad") and Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC"), to file their Reply Briefs to their opponents' Opposition to each parties Motions authorized by the PTAB last summer. See "CRISPR Interference Parties Propose Motions" and "PTAB Redeclares CRISPR Interference and Grants Leave for Some (But Not All) of Parties' Proposed Motions". CVC's Motion No. 2 was to be accorded the benefit of priority to three earlier-filed provisional applications contingent on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board granting the Broad's Motion No. 2 to Substitute the Count of the interference.
The interference rules (41 C.F.R. ۤ 42 et seq.) provide that a party can object to an opponent's evidence including testimony. Admissibility of evidence is governed by the Federal Rules of Evidence under 41 C.F.R. ۤ 42.152; expert testimony is governed by the Federal Rules and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579, 593-94 (1993). Here, CVC argues in its brief in support of Miscellaneous Motion No. 2 that four prior art references should not be considered by the Board because they were not cited in any of Broad's papers; declarations from several individuals, including some of Broad's inventors, are inadmissible as hearsay because these individuals had not been made available for deposition; and certain expert testimony fails the Supreme Court's Daubert test for expert testimony admissibility.
The brief deals summarily with the uncited references, relying on Fed. R. Evid. 403 and 41 C.F.R. ۤ 42.152.2.1 as being irrelevant for being uncited. Turning to hearsay under Fed. R. Evid. 804, the brief identifies two categories of such inadmissible evidence: declarations from prior proceedings (significantly, prior Interference No 106,048) that should be excluded according to CVC because the declarants were not made available for cross-examination. The other category comprises "two expert declarations that recite these hearsay declarations for the truth of the matters asserted therein, and serve as further conduits for presenting the inadmissible hearsay in these declarations."
With regard to the first category, CVC argues that Broad submitted declarations of three fact witnesses (Drs. Sanjana, Lambowitz, and Zhang) for "the truth of the matter asserted" (specifically, timing and success of experiments by Broad inventors) that were submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office during prosecution of involved Broad patents (Sanjana, Zhang) or was a third-party declaration (Lambowitz). CVC maintains that it objected to these declarations and Broad did not make these declarants available for cross-examination and thus their declarations constituted inadmissible hearsay, citing specifically Rose v. Frazer, Inf. No. 104,733 Paper 73 at 4 (B.P.A.I. Mar. 29, 2002), and 37 C.F.R. ۤ 42.51(c). The brief also cites Praxair Distrib., Inc. v. INO Therapeutics LLC, IPR2015-00529, Paper 33 at 2 (PTAB Dec. 22, 2015, and Mexichem Amanco Holdings S.A. de C.V. v. Honeywell Int'l, Inc., Case IPR2013-00576, Paper 36 at 3 (PTAB Sept. 5, 2014), for the proposition that declaration evidence not subject to cross-examination (or an offer for cross-examination) should not be considered by the PTAB in contested cases. The brief makes the appropriate representations that CVC requested these declarants be made available for deposition and Broad failed to make them available. In addition, CVC suggests that the accuracy, if not the veracity, of Dr. Sanjana's declaration testimony was uncertain.
In the decision of I-Admin (Singapore) Pte Ltd v Hong Ying Ting and others, the Singapore Court of Appeal introduced a new modified approach to breach of confidence claims. The appellant is in the business of payroll administrative data processing services and human resource information systems, and brought the claim against former employees and related parties (the respondents) for copyright infringement and breach of confidence.
From the execution of an Anton Piller Order, the respondents were found to be in possession (before the execution) of certain materials of the appellant, including the appellant’s source codes, databases, operational documents, client materials, pricing information and other business strategy materials, and implementation templates. The respondents circulated these materials among themselves in emails. The respondents also possessed personal data taken from clients of the appellant.
EP 1 511 198 is owned by Californian company Avago Technologies, now known as Broadcom. The company brought a case against Firecomms in 2014. The patent protects a technology that amplifies optical signals and suppresses interference, for use in fibre optic technology. However, the patent is not standard essential.
Avago accused Firecomms of infringing the patent with its optical receiver circuits. Then, in 2014, Avago filed infringement suits against the Irish company and its Chinese subsidiary at the Regional Court of Munich. The defendants responded with a nullity suit (6 Ni 14/15). The Munich judges suspended infringement proceedings pending the outcome in the nullity suit.
In 2017, the Federal Patent Court declared the property right partially invalid. The Regional Court Munich then resumed proceedings and dismissed the infringement suit in 2018 (case ID: 21 O 16494/14).
In the current appeals (case IDs: 6 U 1746/18 and 6 U 4094/18), the Higher Regional Court followed the arguments of the first instance court. The judges did not consider EP 198 infringed, because Firecomms’ chips did not make use of the essential patent claim. This is despite the Federal Court of Justice, in the parallel appeal against the nullity ruling, declaring the Avago patent fully valid in mid-2019.
The jury sided with Ericsson — holding that TCL willfully infringed the two asserted claims of Ericsson’s US7149510 and awarded $75 million in compensatory damages. Judge Payne then added an additional $25 million enhanced damages for the adjudged willfulness.
I previously wrote about Chrimar’s petition for writ of certiorari on the Federal Circuit’s unique doctrine of retroactive revocation of final judgments. The basics are: Once affirmed on appeal, a PTAB decision cancelling patent claims will effectively reverse and vacate any prior judicial final decisions of liability and damages so long as some aspect of the prior infringement lawsuit is still pending (typically in the form of a pending appeal on other grounds).
Less than two years ago, in Return Mail, Inc. v. U.S. Postal Service, 139 S. Ct. 1853 (2018), the Supreme Court held that a government entity -- in that case, the U.S. Postal Service -- is not a "person" under the America Invents Act, and therefore unable to avail itself of the AIA's post-issuance review proceedings. But the Court did not resolve whether quasi-governmental entities would be barred from post-issuance proceedings as well. Here, the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks brought covered business method (CBM) review proceedings seeking to invalidate two Bozeman Financial patents. And the Federal Circuit found, contrary to the Supreme Court, that they are "persons," entitled to do so under the AIA.
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The Federal Reserve Banks filed petitions for CBM review, challenging all 26 claims of the '640 patent and all 20 claims of the '840 patent. Bozeman Financial filed a fulsome response to the Federal Reserve Banks' arguments in relation to the '840 patent, but sought to incorporate those rejoinders by reference in relation to the '640 patent rather than making the arguments independently. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board rejected that attempted incorporation and found all of the claims of each patent invalid as drawn to ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101. The Board also found 22 of the 26 claims of the '640 patent invalid under ۤ 112.
Bozeman Financial appealed the Board's decisions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In doing so, it raised only the substantive grounds for the Board's subject matter eligibility decisions; it did not raise the Federal Reserve Banks' personalty. Instead, after the Return Mail decision was issued, Bozeman Financial filed a supplemental brief raising the argument that the Federal Reserve Banks are not "persons" under the AIA, and therefore the CBM reviews were void ab initio. In addition to disputing the merits of Bozeman Financial's argument, the Federal Reserve Banks argued that Bozeman Financial waived the issue by not raising it below or in its opening brief.
Judge Moore, writing for the Federal Circuit, started from the proposition that a federal appellate court generally does not consider any issue not decided below. Nor does it generally consider arguments that are not raised in an appellant's (or cross-appellant's) opening brief. There are, however, exceptional circumstances in which an appellate court will consider issues nonetheless, and the Federal Circuit found that this was one of those circumstances.
The Notice acknowledges that "since the general dislocation due to the pandemic continues in the Federal Republic of Germany, there is a need to further extend the periods". The previous Notice identified regions that the EPO considered "high risk" with respect to COVID-19. The most recent Notice acknowledges that the crisis now has no borders: "As of 10 April 2020 countries and regions are no longer classified as international risk areas. Due to pandemic spread, there is a global risk of acquiring COVID-19".
In the case, CardioNet sued InfoBionic for infringement (D.Mass.). The district court quickly dismissed the case for failure to state a claim under R. 12(b)(6) – ruling that the claims of CardioNet’s US7941207 are improperly directed at patent-ineligible concepts under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101.
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Majority Op. at 22. Judge Dyk argues that instead that “limiting the use of extrinsic evidence to establish that a practice is longstanding would be inconsistent with authority. No case has ever said that the nature of a longstanding practice cannot be determined by looking at the prior art.”
The Federal Circuit today denied two en banc rehearing petitions:
- Amgen Inc. v. Amneal Pharmaceuticals LLC. This decision focused on merely-tangential exception to the the prosecution-history-estoppel limitation on the doctrine-of-equivalents. The question for the petition is whether the district court must first identify the “rationale underlying [a narrowing] amendment” before deciding that the amendment is not merely tangential to the equivalent in question. - Mira Advanced Technology v. Microsoft Corporation. Whether the PTAB’s construction of the term “contact list” was “arbitrary and capricious.”
We've seen roughly a zillion trademark disputes and cases in the alcohol industries, but perhaps nothing quite like this. Jack Daniels, the famous liquor company, found itself in a prolonged court battle with VIP Products LLC. At issue? Well, VIP makes a doggy chew toy that is a parody of Jack Daniels' famous whiskey bottle and trade dress. See for yourself.
What would happen if I write a novel and keep the manuscript in the drawer of my study table? Would it have any copyright? Is infringement possible in such a scenario? What is term of copyright? When would it be considered as published? What is publication — if I give the manuscript for an innocuous reading/inviting comments to a friend, would it tantamount to publication? This post is an attempt to explore answers to these questions.
We’re pleased to bring to you a guest post by Priyanka Joshi, examining the liability of platforms like ShareChat for copyright infringement in view of the recent dispute between ShareChat and Lahiri Recording Company. Priyanka is the General Secretary at The Indian Music Industry (IMI), an association representing Indian music record companies.
In its judgment in C-18/18, the Court of Justice of the European Union concluded that injunctions including not only future identical infringements, but also similar infringements to the infringement in the initial proceeding do not constitute a general monitoring obligation and, as such, are not incompatible with the prohibition in Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive. Such broad-scoped injunctions have been on the rise as they have proven to be an effective enforcement tool to tackle online infringements.
This article focuses in particular on the concept of dynamic, which are ordinary injunctions with two possible dynamic add-ons: a dynamic-content and a dynamic-infringer part. Unlike their general counterparts, the content of a dynamic injunction is subject to change. All this can increase the enforcement possibilities for online infringements, as general blocking injunctions are easy to circumvent by infringers through re-uploading the infringing content to IP addresses or domain names that fall outside the scope of the injunction.
Based on the primary and secondary Union law limitations, the article concludes that dynamic injunctions to prevent infringements of intellectual property rights can include an obligation for an online intermediary to block access to active infringements and to monitor its service for and block access to all future identical infringements to these initial infringements, irrespective of the uploading party. Similar content can be included when the injunction properly defines such content, and the injunction does not effectively oblige an online intermediary to carry out an assessment of the infringing nature of the content. To avoid such an obligation to carry out a legal assessment of the content, and based on the way dynamic injunctions have been successfully applied in several Member States of the European Union, it is recommendable to require similar infringements to be blocked only after a rightholder’s notification. All this would be necessary to prevent the over-filtering of legal content and unduly transfer the burden of identification from the rightholder to the receiving intermediary.
Article 15 of the new DSM Directive establishes a neighbouring right for press publishers, allowing them to exploit the online use of their publications by "information society service providers". This provision is especially tailored to allow press publishers to charge news aggregation platforms, search engines and social media platforms for displaying their content in their compilations.
France transposed this provision in the French Act on Neighbouring Rights and the relevant amendment entered into force on 24 October 2019. In reaction, Google unilaterally decided to no longer display press publishers' contents in its search results unless the publishers authorize such display free of charge. If the publisher refuses to do so, only a headline and a link to the content will appear instead of the regular preview. In the view of French press publishers and the news agency AFP, this will almost certainly result in a loss of visibility and potential ad revenue.
In November 2019, the AFP news agency and the unions SEPM and APIG, which represent the interests of a large number of national and regional press publishers in France, together filed complaints with the French Competition Authority (FCA), claiming that Google's practice constitutes an abuse of a dominant position as well as an abuse of economic dependence. In addition to their submissions on the merits, the claimants requested that the FCA order Google, by way of interim measures and pending a decision on the merits, to enter into good faith negotiations.
In its decision of 9 April 2020, the FCA ruled on the request for interim measures and held that, in view of Google's market share of around 90% and the high barriers to entry and expansion in this market, Google is likely to have a dominant position on the French market for general online research services.
This, in a nutshell, is the question at the heart of the referral in Constantin Film v YouTube, C-264/19, currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
A few days ago, Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard ÃËe issued his Opinion, substantially answering in the negative (at least from an EU perspective).
The referral is important for two key reasons ... plus one.
First, because this is yet another case – recent instances being the 2019 Grand Chamber rulings in Funke Medien, Spiegel Online, and Pelham [Katposts here, here, and here] – in which the CJEU will be required to balance different fundamental rights: here it is, on the one hand, copyright protection under Article 17(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and, on the other hand, respect of private life under Article 8 therein.
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The Opinion of AG ÃËe is overall well-reasoned, though it appears too formalistic in both its substance and outcome.
Limiting the notion of ‘address’ to physical addresses might appear justified in light of the fact that other EU legislation that encompasses email and IP addresses expressly refers to them, though it is difficult to see how this could be regarded as proof that the Enforcement Directive limits the notion of 'addresses' to physical addresses.
Even more importantly, it is questionable that the everyday meaning of ‘address’ is only that of physical address. To support his conclusion, the AG referred to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, which defines ‘adresse’ ('address') as “the designation of the place where you can reach someone”.
But why can’t that 'place' be electronic rather than physical?
If one also consults other language dictionaries, it is indeed apparent that the notion of address might be also intended in this way.
The Supreme Court has rescheduled oral arguments in this big Copyright case until Fall 2020. I have mentioned previously that this case was likely to be the biggest patent case of 2020 — even though no patent questions were raised in the petition. The basic question is when software is copyrightable — the focus here is particularly at the interface-level (the the naming-convention for Java function calls). In the case, Google also suggests that if the naming-convention is copyrightable that any copyright should be so “thin” that fair use would readily apply in most situations.
The Pirate Bay returned to the clear web this week after a month-long hiatus. However, the structure of the infamous torrent index presented an access problem to users of the popular anti-malware software MalwareBytes, which persistently blocked an essential element of the platform due to the presence of "a few" cryptocurrency miners on a secondary domain.
Charter's request to dismiss the vicarious piracy liability claims of several major music companies has failed. The ISP argued that it doesn't directly profit from copyright-infringing subscribers and that it has no ability to control them. However, these arguments didn't convince the court, which denied the motion, noting that Charter could certainly have done more.
A man from the US became a hero last year when a video of him subduing a man who had headbutted someone in the face went viral. The video has been reposted numerous times since but is regularly taken down following bogus copyright complaints. However, the censorship efforts massively backfired this week when someone tried to delete a Reddit thread using a DMCA anti-circumvention notice. Duh...
The Pirate Bay's main domain returned with a new look last week. While the changes are relatively small, they are a source of frustration for some users. Copyright holders are perhaps even less pleased with the makeover. They now have to resend millions of takedown notices as the notorious pirate site has a new URL structure.
