Learn a little Postscript in this episode about **Ghostscript**.
One of the great things about attending in person coding conferences, such as PyCon, is the hallway track, where you can catch up with people you haven't seen for possibly a year, or maybe even the first time you've met in person.
Nina is starting something like the hallway track, online, on twitch, and it's already going, so check out the first episode of Python Tea.
Interesting coincidence is that this episode is kind of like a hallway track discussion between Nina and Brian.
Are Custom Linux Kernels Faster than Stock? Benchmarks are done and will be compared using phoronix test suite. We will be analyzing 3 kernels, Liquorix, Mainline, and Xanmod.
While the Linux 5.7 kernel is likely being released as stable today, the Reiser4 port to the Linux 5.6 kernel is out this weekend.
Edward Shishkin continues working on Reiser4 while also spearheading work on the new Reiser4 file-system iteration of the Reiser file-system legacy. Taking a break from that Reiser5 feature work, Shishkin has updated the out-of-tree Reiser4 patches for Linux 5.6.0 compatibility.
This weekend on SourceForge he uploaded the Reiser4 patch for upstream Linux 5.6.0 usage. This is just porting the existing 5.5.5-targeted code to the 5.6 code-base with no mention of any other bug fixes or improvements to Reiser4 in this latest patch.
One of the interesting new happenings in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver space is a Generic USB Display stack including a USB gadget driver that together allow for some interesting generic USB display setups. This work was motivated by being able to turn a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter.
The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the "strong preferred limit".
The Linux kernel like many long-standing open-source projects has a coding style guideline that lines of code be 80 columns or less, but now that while still recommended is no longer going to be as enforced.
This stems from Linus Torvalds commenting on Friday that excessive linebreaks are bad and is against ugly wrapped code that is strictly sticking to 80 characters per line. This is part of the broader trend that most are no longer using 80x25 terminals but with today's high resolution displays the terminal sizes are often larger though some preferring the default in order to allow more terminals to be displayed simultaneously on their nice displays.
Not necessarily.
Excessive line breaks are BAD. They cause real and every-day problems.
They cause problems for things like "grep" both in the patterns and in the output, since grep (and a lot of other very basic unix utilities) is fundamentally line-based.
So the fact is, many of us have long long since skipped the whole "80-column terminal" model, for the same reason that we have many more lines than 25 lines visible at a time.
And honestly, I don't want to see patches that make the kernel reading experience worse for me and likely for the vast majority of people, based on the argument that some odd people have small terminal windows.
If you or Christoph have 80 character lines, you'll get possibly ugly wrapped output. Tough. That's _your_ choice. Your hardware limitations shouldn't be a pain for the rest of us.
Longer lines are fundamentally useful. My monitor is not only a lot wider than it is tall, my fonts are universally narrower than they are tall. Long lines are natural.
When I tile my terminal windows on my display, I can have 6 terminals visible at one time, and that's because I have them three wide. And I could still fit 80% of a fourth one side-by-side.
And guess what? That's with my default "100x50" terminal window (go to your gnome terminal settings, you'll find that the 80x25 thing is just an initial default that you can change), not with some 80x25 one. And that's with a font that has anti-aliasing and isn't some pixelated mess.
And most of my terminals actually end up being dragged wider and taller than that. I checked, and my main one is 142x76 characters right now, because it turns out that wider (and taller) terminals are useful not just for source code.
Have you looked at "ps ax" output lately? Or used "top"? Or done "git diff --stat" or any number of things where it turns out that 80x25 is really really limiting, and is simply NO LONGER RELEVANT to most of us.
So no. I do not care about somebody with a 80x25 terminal window getting line wrapping.
For exactly the same reason I find it completely irrelevant if somebody says that their kernel compile takes 10 hours because they are doing kernel development on a Raspberry PI with 4GB of RAM.
People with restrictive hardware shouldn't make it more inconvenient for people who have better resources. Yes, we'll accommodate things to within reasonable limits. But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't "reasonable" any more as far as I'm concerned. People commonly used 132-column terminals even back in the 80's, for chrissake, don't try to make 80 columns some immovable standard.
If you choose to use a 80-column terminal, you can live with the line wrapping. It's just that simple.
And longer lines are simply useful. Part of that is that we aren't programming in the 80's any more, and our source code is fundamentally wider as a result.
Yes, local iteration variables are still called 'i', because more context just isn't helpful for some anonymous counter. Being concise is still a good thing, and overly verbose names are not inherently better.
But still - it's entirely reasonable to have variable names that are 10-15 characters and it makes the code more legible. Writing things out instead of using abbreviations etc.
And yes, we do use wide tabs, because that makes indentation something you can visually see in the structure at a glance and on a whole-function basis, rather than something you have to try to visually "line up" things for or count spaces.
So we have lots of fairly fundamental issues that fairly easily make for longer lines in many circumstances.
And yes, we do line breaks at some point. But there really isn't any reason to make that point be 80 columns any more.
Linus
"Yes, staying withing 80 columns is certainly still _preferred_," notes the official commit message for this change. "But it's not the hard limit that the checkpatch warnings imply, and other concerns can most certainly dominate. Increase the default limit to 100 characters. Not because 100 characters is some hard limit either, but that's certainly a 'what are you doing' kind of value and less likely to be about the occasional slightly longer lines.'"
I released version 2.2 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter.
NetworkManager 1.25.2-dev is the latest development version of this important Linux networking component in the road towards NetworkManager 1.26.
NetworkManager 1.25.2-dev was bumped this weekend as another milestone towards the upcoming 1.26 stable release of this widely used component for configuring wired and wireless networking on Linux and other platforms. Some of the changes building up so far for NetworkManager 1.26 include:
- A new "firewalld-zone" option that is enabled by default that will install a firewalld zone for connection sharing and put the IPv4/IPv6 shared mode interfaces in this zone.
Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser is finally reaching the stage where having both the X11 support and Ozone abstraction layer for Wayland can be enabled concurrently in the same build.
Thanks to the work by Google, Igalia, and others, the Chrome/Chromium code-base is nearly at the stage where the traditional X11 support can be built along with the Ozone platform support concurrently. Ozone is the platform abstraction layer being worked on for years for handling low-level input/graphics and necessary for Wayland support as well as various embedded use-cases and other platform abstraction capabilities. An overview of the Ozone code can be found here.
7. KDE Connect KDE Connect helps you to enable remote desktop sharing with the help of Android and Linux applications.
8. VNC Connect VNC Connect is a simple and secure remote desktop sharing tool for Linux. VNC Connect is equipped with 256 bit AES session encryption and it uses Remote Frame Buffer protocol to remotely control another computer.
RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
Newer Windows games/applications are making use of system call instructions from the application code without resorting to the WinAPI and that is breaking Wine emulation support. A Linux kernel patch is now being worked on for addressing this issue in the form of system call isolation based on memory areas while having a smaller performance hit than alternatives.
With newer Windows software executing system call instructions without going through the Windows API, Wine isn't able to intercept and emulate those system calls and thus breaking the support. Wine can't really rework its handling of every system call as that would thrash the performance. So a Linux kernel-based solution is being sorted out.
Back in January, word got out that Google and Valve were collaborating to bring some form of native Steam client to Chrome OS. Director of Product Management Kan Liu told Android Police that the project would leverage Crostini, aka Linux on Chrome OS. Because I spend a good portion of my days tinkering with Linux on my Chromebook, I hastily presumed that Steam would be delivered in some sort of Chrome OS-optimized Linux package. While that could still be a possibility, it appears that Valve may look to the Clouds in Steam’s next evolution.
Ritzl explained that moving Defold to an open source model can help build trust with developers, which is an important aspect of operating a game engine. By providing dev teams access to the source code, they also become more self-sufficient; being able to physically see the code should help them better understand how the engine works. Ritzl hopes that this understanding spills over into the greater development community as individuals share their findings with cohorts.
Established by King this month, the Defold Foundation’s primary function is to keep the Defold engine open source, and prevent third parties from monetizing it. Based in Sweden, the foundation will continue to update and support the Defold Engine by optimizing it for various platforms, systems, services, and technologies in coming months and years. Ritzl said that he hopes this will result in better accessibility for game developers, which will benefit the games industry as a whole.
“The foundation is an independent legal entity,” Ritzl explained. “It is in many ways similar to a corporation, but foundations have a separate legal status in Sweden. When a foundation is created, the founder sets a number of objectives for the foundation, and these objectives cannot be changed once the foundation is created. This makes it possible for a founder to ensure that donations given to a foundation is managed according to the wishes of the founder.”
Project Cars 2 running through Steam Play on Linux. Using my Logitech G29 which also worked as expected.
Recently we wrote about a new feature for Linux in the Steam Client Beta, where Steam can now sort out Vulkan shaders before running a game. With the latest build, it gets better.
The idea of it, as a brief reminder, is to prepare all the shaders needed for Vulkan games while you download and / or before you hit Play. This would help to stop constant stuttering seen in some games on Linux, mostly from running Windows games in the Proton compatibility layer, as native / supported Linux games would usually do it themselves. Just another way Valve are trying to get Linux gaming on Steam in all forms into tip-top shape.
Valve developers have been working on Vulkan shader pre-caching with their latest Steam client betas to help in allowing Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders to compile ahead of time, letting them be pre-cached on disk to allow for quicker game load times and any stuttering for games that otherwise would be compiling the shaders on-demand during gameplay, especially under Steam Play.
It has been a busy two month since the last report again, KDE’s source code hosting is now using Gitlab, we got the 20.04 release out, notifications were significantly improved, and we are now leveraging OpenStreetMap in more places, with even more exciting things still to come. The global travel restrictions have been hampering field testing, but they have most certainly not slowed down the development of KDE Itinerary!
As the coding period of GSoC is going to begin in the next 2 days. In this blog, I am going to write all about what I did during the community bonding period.
During this period I have interacted with my mentors and finalized the multiple datasets of a few activities. Recently, the GCompris project has been moved to GitLab so I set up my account over there and also asked my mentors how can I push my branches to the server and everything else. I have also gone through the code of the memory activities and planned about the resources I will be using. I have also set up my environment as to how to test the GCompris on the android platform. I plan to start my work with the enumeration memory game activity so I have created a branch for it and pushed it to the server.
One of the bits of Calamares that I think is most terrible is the timezone selector. So I was very happy to read Volker’s ideas about timezone-mapping.
Calamares is a universal Linux installer, used by some dozens of Linux distro’s. It is built as a framework, customizable by downstreams to their liking. This is basically a service to the small-distro Linux community, and PRs are very welcome .. but I digress.
Part of installation is picking a timezone to put the system in. Calamares offers a map, and you click on it, and it picks a likely location, and off you go. The technology used is simple: there’s a PNG for each timezone (this sounds familiar). The user clicks on the PNG of the world map, and the mouse coordinates are mapped to a location (longitude and latitude), the location is mapped to a zone offset that gets mapped to a timezone image, and the image is drawn.
It has been almost a month, since the commencement of community bonding period and the phase was mostly good. I spent most of my time lurking over the IRC in passive reconnaissance mode, force of habit I mostly speak less and I know it is not a good one especially being part of an open-source community. I used to attend all the meetings and tried to get accustomed with the workflow of the community and got to know about everything hot and spicy that is taking place whether it is Krita finally on android or new contributors working on some bugs.
KDE India Conference 2020 was successfully organized in Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology. It was a three-day event, from Jan 17 to Jan 19. There were talks about Libre, Open Source Software and how software is developed using C++ and the Qt Framework. Hands-on workshops were also organized on C++, Qt and QML which gave attendees a good start on how to start their journey with C++ and Qt Framework. The conference was able to educate 200+ attendees throughout the conference. Refreshments were provided to all present for the conference on all 3 days. Every day of the conference concluded with dinner at various good places in Delhi with all the speakers, organizers and volunteers.
I am Shubham, a final year undergraduate student, pursuing B.E(Bachelor of Engineering) at BMS Institute of Technology and Management, Bangalore, India. I am an open source enthusiast and developer, mostly working with C++ with Qt framework. I also have decent knowledge of C, Java, Python, bash scripting, git and I love developing under linux environment. Previously I was selected as one of many GSoC students to be mentored by this amazing organization, which is KDE. This year also, I applied again to KDE as a student and was fortunate enough to get selected. I will be developing for Cantor project. Apart from coding, in my spare time I go for Cricket or Volleyball to keep myself refreshed.
Cantor is an application that lets user use their favourite mathematicalapplications from within a nicely KDE-integrated worksheet interface. It offers assistant dialogs for common tasks and allows users to share their worksheets withothers. Cantor is one of many KDE educational projects. It supports a variety of backends, be it Maxima, Octave, Python, R and many more and that too packed in a single intuitive GUI. The current version of Cantor does not have support for viewing backend's documentation inside the application itself. For example, to view Maxima’s documentation or help, the application provides an external link pointing to the Maxima’s official documentation page which is opened in a fresh browser window. This has the obvious drawback of requiring an active internet connectivity.
So today GSoC’s three months coding period officially begins. Last one month I spent bonding with my mentors and have tried to establish the prerequisites required for the rest of the project. My project for GSoC 2020 is to improve the MMS support to KDE Connect’s SMS app. During the community bonding period, the first challenge we had to face was to implement a way to send MMS messages from KDE Connect’s android app and it becomes more challenging when you will come to know that android’s MMS API’s are hidden and there is no documentation available for the same. This task alone becomes beyond the scope of a GSoC project. With the help of some luck, we found the Klinker library which is an opensource sm-mms library for android. I spent some time going through its implementation and after having the understanding of how it works, I started implementing it in KDE Connect and within two weeks I was able to send MMS messages through KDE Connect for the first time. I would say, It is a great library for third-party android developers who wants to implement similar functionality in their applications.
Our Litigators of the Week are a team from Shearman & Sterling led by litigation partners Matt Berkowitz and Kieran Kieckhefer and associate Joy Wang. Working pro bono for the non-profit GNOME Foundation, they won a victory for literally everyone in the world in a patent fight over free and open-source software.
Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), Nitrux 1.2.9 is here with some major under-the-hood changes, latest Maui apps, and all the newest KDE technologies for a modern desktop OS.
The biggest news is the move to Linux OEM builds instead of mainline builds, providing users with automatic updates. And this new stable version ships with the latest Linux 5.6 kernel series for better hardware support.
Also, starting with this release, users won’t have to reinstall the operating system when new Nitrux releases are available. “Updates to new releases will be provided through the package manager,” said developer Uri Herrera.
Linux Lite 5.0 Final Codename Emerald is now available for download and installation.
This is the most feature rich, complete Linux Lite release to date. This is the release many people have been waiting for. See below for details.
The Linux Lite 5.0 distribution is out now and looks to be the most feature-rich and complete release to date of this Ubuntu-based OS .
Based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system, Linux Lite 5.0 (codename Emerald) is here with a lot of goodies for fans of this lightweight GNU/Linux distribution.
Highlights include out-of-the-box UEFI Secure Boot support, a new “Integrity Check” feature during live boot to ensure your PC is in good state, a new update notifier that checks for updates twice per day, and no hidden telemetry.
The highly configurable FireWallD firewall has been included as well in this release to replace GUFW, but it isn’t enabled by default.
Windows 7 and Windows 10 aren't bad operating systems. In fact, they are both quite good. With that said, the newest version of Windows 10 has many bugs. Unfortunately, since Windows 7 is no longer supported, some of its users are stuck in a conundrum. They have to decide whether to use an unsupported Windows 7 or upgrade to Windows 10 that is full of telemetry and other "spying" that passes their information to Microsoft's servers.
Thankfully, there is another option -- switch to Linux. Yes, modern Linux-based operating systems will be supported (unlike the now-obsolete Windows 7) and most will run great on aging hardware (unlike Windows 10). Linux Lite is one of the best Linux distributions for Windows-switchers, as it is lightweight, modern, and familiar.
Whonix is being used by Edward Snowden, journalists such as Micah Lee, used by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Qubes OS. It has a 8 years history of keeping its users safe from real world attacks.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
The second RC build of the 11.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 11.4-RC2 amd64 GENERIC o 11.4-RC2 i386 GENERIC o 11.4-RC2 powerpc GENERIC o 11.4-RC2 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 11.4-RC2 sparc64 GENERIC o 11.4-RC2 armv6 BANANAPI o 11.4-RC2 armv6 BEAGLEBONE o 11.4-RC2 armv6 CUBIEBOARD o 11.4-RC2 armv6 CUBIEBOARD2 o 11.4-RC2 armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD o 11.4-RC2 armv6 RPI-B o 11.4-RC2 armv6 RPI2 o 11.4-RC2 armv6 WANDBOARD o 11.4-RC2 aarch64 GENERIC
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/11.4/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/11.4" branch.
A summary of changes since 11.4-RC1 includes:
o The wpa_supplicant.conf(5) file has been fixed in bsdinstall(8).
o An update to the leap-seconds file.
o An update to mlx5_core to add new port module event types to decode.
o SCTP fixes.
o LLVM config headers have been fixed to correctly add zlib support.
o The ena(4) driver has been updated to version 2.2.0.
o loader(8) fixes for userboot.
o Fixes for compliance with RFC3168.
o A ps(1) update to permit the '-d' and '-p' flags to be used mutually.
o A knob to flush RSB on context switches if the machine has SMEP has been added.
o A fix to Vagrant images requiring the shells/bash port.
A list of changes since 11.3-RELEASE is available in the releng/11.4 release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/11-RC2/relnotes/article.html
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 11.4-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/11.4-RC2/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
=== Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
eu-north-1 region: ami-0e03245dc3ecc5d35 ap-south-1 region: ami-0100269e4d1a56492 eu-west-3 region: ami-04d69369363a0d91f eu-west-2 region: ami-054fee32718b85ae0 eu-west-1 region: ami-0b4ed21ce2fcffb67 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0ab69ea831245c032 ap-northeast-1 region: ami-014ed1c7002845dae sa-east-1 region: ami-0779883a279143da5 ca-central-1 region: ami-03526c4e41fbc5c0c ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0a1526319c431a535 ap-southeast-2 region: ami-07b5f0fabb533a3ca eu-central-1 region: ami-0538d62ee3be9f769 us-east-1 region: ami-059d76ab6e6e4063a us-east-2 region: ami-0c46e32a6eb527e29 us-west-1 region: ami-0d46479f45e84d1f2 us-west-2 region: ami-04d001870b4236742
=== Vagrant Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can be installed by running:
% vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-11.4-RC2 % vagrant up
=== Upgrading ===
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.4-RC2
During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.
# freebsd-update install
The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.
# shutdown -r now
After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:
# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 11.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat11x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:
# shutdown -r now
Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:
# freebsd-update install
TL;DR: Worked on the OpenSMTPD 6.7 release; Did a lot of work on the new table API; Wrote several PoCs;
OMLx ’Rock’ (currently 4.1) is for users who want a stable system.
Please note that Rock system will receive only bug fixes and security updates.
The user wishing for the latest and brightest without having to wait for a new release may want to install ’Rolling’ instead, our new release branch which we are going to officially announce very soon.
By default, only /main repository is enabled in OpenMandriva releases. If you want to find out all the packages available please use Software Repository Selector (om-repo-picker) and enable additional repositories. Guide here.
From time to time we make available Rock snapshots that include fixes for bugs reported after release, and/or important new improvements.
A: We are at an interesting inflection point right now with computing. We went from physical hardware to virtual machines to containers and to concepts like serverless computing. And we’re asking questions like, “Can it get even smaller?”
We’re trying to make the underlying platform more powerful, but less and less visible. So if it’s invisible to developers, do we just stop caring about it?
But you could make the same argument with Linux, right? If the application is done well, and Linux is doing its job, you shouldn't care about it. It's just running, it’s fast, it’s scalable. Kubernetes probably follows that path more than anything.
The open source proposition has been embedded in Red Hat’s roots since the company’s founding in 1993 and has since remained at the core of its guiding principles, with Linux operating system (OS) at the heart of all its innovations. Vendor loyalty and clearly charted paths were the mantras many companies operated on for years, while “digital transformation” was barely on an enterprise’s short-term road map.
Then a decade ago, cloud adoption surged, creating the impetus to embrace more agile and flexible development models, and open source technologies emerged.
[...]
While the topic of COVID-19 did not overtly dominate the discussions or significantly color the overarching Red Hat messaging, it became clear that the ability to pivot rapidly, embrace change and remain flexible will underscore Red Hat’s efforts to successfully promote transformation amid the pandemic. Red Hat’s reputation has historically been predicated on its open and agile approach to development and deployment, long before such attributes were considered valuable, let alone essential.
When IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, it was considered the industry’s largest software acquisition. The synergy between the two companies led them to become one of the leading hybrid multi-cloud providers globally.
In most acquisitions, the acquired entity sometimes loses momentum and sheds some of its original luster. This does not seem to be the case with Red Hat.
The Open Source Initiative held their twice-annual multi-day 'face-to-face' board meeting — this time held virtually — and participated in the accompanying conversations on strategy, tactical and governance issues, as well as the usual discussions regarding licensing and policy (minutes pending). I also attended the regular monthly meeting for Software in the Public Interest (minutes).
The 5th monthly report of 2020 of the Sparky project:
● Linux kernel updated up to version 5.6.15 & 5.7-rc7 ● added to repos: Riot-desktop which replaces Riot-web, Xdman, RadioStation (a fork off Radiotray-Lite), Beaker Browser ● Sparky 2020.05 of the rolling line released ● Sparky 2020.05 Special Editions released ● new app: ‘spterm’ (Sparky Terminal) – a very simple terminal emulator (a fork of k3rmit) which will be used by Sparky tools ● new desktop: Openbox Noir – a variant of the Openbox, which provides dark and modern looks and feel of a lightweight desktop; by lami07
One of the things I maintain in Debian is OpenOCD. I say maintain, but it’s so far required very little work, as it’s been 3 years since a release (0.10.0). I’ve talked about doing a git snapshot package for some time (I have an email from last DebConf in my inbox about it, and that wasn’t the first time someone had asked), but never got around to it. Spurred on by some moves towards a 0.11.0 release I’ve built a recent snapshot and uploaded it to the experimental suite in Debian.
This month: * Command & Conquer * How-To : Python, LivePatch, and Rawtherapee * Graphics : Inkscape * Graphics : Krita for Old Photos * Linux Loopback * Everyday Ubuntu : Turbogfx 16 * Ubports Touch : OTA-12 * Review : Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Budgie 20.04 * Ubuntu Games : Eagle Island plus: News, My Story, The Daily Waddle, Q&A, and more.
Yesterday, I wrote about LilyGO TTGO ESP32-S2 WiFi IoT board, but one commenter mentioned it missed one of the key features of ESP32-S2 chip: a USB OTG port. While USB OTG is accessible through the header pins, it’s not the most convenient to use.
I also quickly mentioned Cucumber ESP32-S2 development board in that post, but I did not expand too much since I thought it should only ship within Thailand. But the board does include two USB Type-C ports, one for the usual USB UART connector, and the other for USB OTG, and I found out the board is available worldwide.
All ESP32-S2 boards I’ve seen so far were from Espressif Systems themselves including ESP32-S2-Saola-1 and ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1, but LilyGO TTGO ESP32-S2 is the first third-party board for sale so far.
The tiny board is somewhat similar to ESP32-S2-Saola-1 board and comes in two versions with a similar form factor, but a completely different pinout and the presence of a MicroSD card socket and a battery connector on one of the boards.
[...]
The boards are a bit more different than I expected at first look. Please note that specifications should be seen as preliminary, as there were obvious mistakes such as Bluetooth support (not available for ESP32-S2) which I did not included in the specs above, but there may be others which I missed.
In the early days of the pandemic, the first major challenge facing nations was a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. The former helps safeguard hospital personnel from potential contamination; the latter are necessary to keep the most critically ill patients breathing once the virus attacks their respiratory systems.
Ventilators are traditionally large and very costly devices; smaller ventilators—known as field emergency ventilators (FEVs) have been used in emergency settings, including combat missions and in Third World nations for decades to help keep patients alive as they await transport to hospitals for intubation.
Does it really take a team of rocket scientists to rapidly engineer a top-notch line of personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect against COVID-19 spread? And then to open source its production designs for the benefit of anyone with access to a 3D printer?
The answer: not necessarily, but it sure can help.
That’s the latest good news on the pandemic front from the technology and innovation team at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
NASA scientists as well as other innovators are busy developing alternatives to the traditional ventilator being used worldwide to treat severe cases of Covid-19. The movement is in response to growing evidence that in some cases ventilators can cause more harm than good in some patients with low oxygen levels. Statistics tell the story: 80% of patients with the coronavirus die on such machines.
This comes just a few months since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when U.S. healthcare providers said that they needed ventilators to accommodate the flood of new patients, and lots of them. The crisis triggered the Trump administration to activate the Defense Production Act so manufacturers including Ford, GM and GE could start ventilator production to produce these medical devices for the U.S. government.
We have over 200 booting devices now. Yes, booting is the operative word, with most of these ports you get more of a Raspberry Pi alternative than a functional phone experience with postmarketOS. Therefore, we started to categorize the devices. All existing device ports have been moved to the testing category, and can be moved to community or main depending on which features are working and how well maintained a port is. Only community and main devices will be cherry-picked to the stable branch.
Currently the only device in the main category is the QEMU virtual device. It doesn't have any special hardware like a modem or GPS, so it was easy to make it comply with the requirements for main. Once some minor changes are done to the PinePhone port, it can be moved from community to main as well.
There are also some devices pending to be moved into community from testing, like the Nokia N900, Xiaomi Redmi 4X, Motorola Moto G4 Play, Samsung Galaxy A3, Samsung Galaxy A5, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Value Edition and Wileyfox Swift. This is mostly possible, because they run a mainline Linux kernel already, or in case of the MSM8916, are currently being mainlined. The MSM8974 devices are also candidates, such as the Nexus 5, Fairphone 2, OnePlus One and the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Earlier concepts of a channel-agnostic pmdevices repository were scrapped. This would allow using the same device packages with both the edge and stable channels, but at the price of making the device packages more complicated. Instead of doing that, we will treat the device specific packages like other packages and cherry-pick only the rather risk-free patches to the stable branch.
  In many discussions of open source projects and community governance, people tend to focus on activities or resources like "speaking for the project" or "ownership of the web domain." While documenting these things is useful, they aren't truly governance matters. Alternately, others focus exclusively on technical matters like election rules, codes of conduct, and release procedures. While these might be the tools of governance, they're not governance itself.
So what exactly is open source project governance?
In short, governance is the rules or customs by which projects decide who gets to do what or is supposed to do what, how they're supposed to do it, and when.
This definition of governance can prompt important questions for open source communities seeking to evolve their governance models. Let's explore how.
Almanac, a cloud-based platform for professionals to create, collaborate and share open-source work documents, announced a $9 million seed round of funding on Thursday led by Mike Maples Jr., a Floodgate partner.
FreeDOS is, as its name allows us to guess, an heir to MS DOS. A free and free version If you are looking for alternatives to Windows pro, you don’t want multitasking or a graphical interface. Here you can run all MS-DOS programs and enjoy the classic adapted to the times. It receives continuous updates and works on any standard PC if you want to use any of the old code and classic operating system programs.
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Among the best alternatives to Windows is ReactOS and so much so that from their website they promise that you wouldn’t notice the change. It came in the late nineties to imitate the windows operating system and it is an open source system compatible with most Windows applications and drivers. It was launched in 1996 as a clone of Microsoft and now, more than twenty years later it is still a good free option and with continuous updates, with a window system … it may seem retro algo’And obsolete at times but it can be a good option if you are looking for something new. You can download it from its website and, like most of this list, you will find the instructions and all doubts about its operation from the website itself. community behind ReactOS.
Welcome to ChefConf Online week! On the surface, this year’s event looks a lot different than years past. While we’ve moved to a new online format, what hasn’t changed is creating the opportunity for the Chef community to gather in one place, learn about what’s new in the DevSecOps and Automation space, get best practices and expert guidance from your peers, and have some fun and celebrate what makes our community so special.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 23 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). This blog post was composed in the new Blogger interface, which works fine but is slower, so I'm going back to the old one. Anyway, there's no difference from the beta except for outstanding security fixes and as usual, if all goes well, it will go live Monday evening Pacific time.
Strapi, the company spearheading the development of the most popular open-source headless content management system (CMS), today announced the general availability of its Community Edition after 24 months of rapid iteration. The company also announced the availability of paid support for enterprises deploying Strapi in production and disclosed plans for an Enterprise Edition, which is currently in private beta testing with select companies.
The Strapi CMS is completely customizable using application programming interfaces (APIs) so that content from databases and files can be accessed for display on websites, smartphones, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Strapi works with all the JAMstack static site generators and front-end frameworks (like Gatsby.js, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Angular, React, Vue.js), provides support for both SQL and NoSQL databases and can be easily deployed anywhere: on-premises, in a PaaS (Platform as a Service) or any public cloud. The flexibility and extensibility of the Strapi CMS combined with the simplicity of creating powerful APIs in minutes give content creators and developers unprecedented easy access to content enabling them to build better digital experiences.
“Open Source Money,” a documentary series on a crypto firm fully financed with cryptocurrency will air on cable television in the United States.
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Since the publishing of Bitcoin’s (BTC) whitepaper in 2009, the public awareness of cryptocurrencies and blockchain has come a long way. From an obscure technology known only to information technology enthusiasts and cybercriminals, it has since gained adoption and recognition from major public figures.
Produced by Vision Tree Media, Open Source Money (pictured) will examine the history of the Disney-incubated blockchain technology company that was launched in 2017.
A young Dutch start-up says its innovative blockchain platform could put centralized exchanges out of business.
Hybrix offers an open-source protocol that allows value to be freely transported between all distributed ledgers. It is complemented by a token that is “technically borderless” and not confined to any single blockchain.
According to the company, it currently supports 32 blockchains and 387 tokens, including some of the industry’s best-known networks: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Zcash.
Today, San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin announced a $100,000 donation to open-source bitcoin payment processor project BTCPay Server.
The funding comes as part of the OKCoin Independent Developer Grant, which was launched last year. BTCPay Server’s product is free to use and its dependent on such contributions to continue operations.
On the internet there are many sites that perform an exchange function, exchange currency with a commission. In these spaces you can speculate on the oscillations. Once you buy in bitcoin then then does the coin become impossible to trace?
Yes and no: if I buy an asset whose value fluctuates and sell it with a profit, then it will be up to me to declare (or not) the capital gain. But once turned into bitcoin, isn't it money that is no longer traceable?
No, the exchange accounts are verified with an identity card and often with proof of residence, you are super-registered. Then, in the network there are various mixing systems - as it is called - that allow you to lose track of who bought what.
A new organization has been created called the SLP Foundation and it aims to bolster SLP development, growth, and common practices. The Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) is an easy-to-use system that allows anyone to create tokens on top of the BCH chain. The new SLP Foundation will be a nonprofit group and it has already been funded by many crypto proponents since the idea came to life.
Bitamp, an easy to use client-side open-source Bitcoin wallet, has recently launched its flagship product, a wallet that can send and receive BTC from anywhere, on any device. One can log in with their seed and private key or create a new wallet by recording a 12-word seed on the Company’s website.
Although Bitcoin mobile wallets are a dime a dozen, users may miss the simplicity of the simple web wallet which can provide the most anonymity and security for users on the go. Bitamp was recently launched to address this need.
The team behind Bitamp has created an easy to use Bitcoin web wallet that allows users to maintain access to their private keys. Users can send and receive BTC from anywhere without downloading a mobile app that may only be available on Android or iOS. The ability for users to access their wallets on any device creates the perfect conditions for maintaining anonymity.
As the world economy sets out on a long path to recovery, cryptocurrencies are expected to play a major role as a store of value during uncertain times. In such a scenario, having a reliable and trustworthy application that allows users to manage their cryptocurrencies in a safe and secure manner can be immensely helpful. Recently launched Bitamp’s Bitcoin wallet aims to be just that, and rightly so.
The developers behind new entrant Bitamp’s Bitcoin wallet have created an easy-to-use client-side open-source Bitcoin wallet to fill this need. The Bitamp wallet allows users to send and receive Bitcoin from anywhere, on any device. The interface also allows users to create new Bitcoin wallets in an instant by writing down a 12 word seed. Users who have generated seed phrases on other platforms such as Electrum, Mycelium, Ledger, can access their Bitcoin anonymously and securely via the Bitamp site.
With Bitcoin’s open source roots, it comes as no surprise that Bitamp’s product was developed as a web based open-source wallet free for everyone. The Company’s developments are funded by donations and the product is released under an MIT license.
Taylor English Duma LLP announced this week it has hired a veteran intellectual property attorney from Dykema Gossett PLLC who is experienced with open source software to the firm's intellectual property practice in San Antonio, Texas.
Van Lindberg joined Atlanta-based Taylor English as partner in March after serving as a member at Dykema Gossett for about three years, where he represented companies in high-stakes litigation and inter partes reviews.
Before that, Lindberg made his name in the open source community by serving as general counsel, vice president of technology and vice president of intellectual property at cloud computing service company Rackspace,...
Scale AI says COVID-19 has shown the value of autonomous vehicles for no-contact delivery. They're making real-world road data available to train machine learning models to this end.
Last week, Scale AI released PandaSet to the open-source community. According to Scale AI, PandaSet is the world’s first publicly-available machine learning dataset to include images from forward-facing solid-state LiDARs and mechanical spinning LiDARs. These two LiDAR technologies from Hesai will allow ML development teams to reap complex, real-world road data.
Nicolai Reith, Head of the Control and Communication department and advisor to the Mayor of Herrenberg, told Cities Today: “You don’t have to make a decision and then see [what happens]; you can see before you make the decision what the effect will be via the digital twin. This makes it easier to make the right decision for our city council, politicians, and citizens.”Herrenberg is already using the digital twin, which incorporates super-computing and technologies typically deployed in advanced aerospace, to visualize city data and citizens’ emotional responses to inform better decision-making.
There are now plans to develop the emerging area of virtual tourism for the town, which has a population of around 31,000.
“We have a very beautiful city center so tourists can explore it in a digital way with VR glasses before they come to Herrenberg, which is an interesting benefit for the future,” Reith said.
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The team then added in geographic information system (GIS) data and traffic control systems data to incorporate topography, road geometry , and detailed traffic flows. Using the open-source fluid dynamics code OpenFOAM — which is typically used for modeling fuel injector sprays or airplane aerodynamics —they also created realistic models of the movement of wind and emissions through the city.
Most of my readers will probably have an experience with the wide spread XML applications like RSS or Atom feeds, SVG, XHTML. For those well known XML applications you will find good library encapsulating the parsing for you. You just include existing parser in your project and you are done with it. However, what would you do if you cannot use it (think of license mismatch), or what would you do if there was no parsing library at all?
There are many XML applications around. Here comes a (probably incomplete) list of XML formats, I had to touch in my past life: Atom, DocBook, Office Open XML, OpenDocument (ODF), OSCAL, Rolie, RSS, SAML, SCAP (+dozens of sub-formats), SOAP, SVG, XMPP, Epub, WS-Policy, XHTML, XSLT.
If there’s one universal piece of advice for IT professionals, it’s “don’t get too comfortable.” The role or project you were hired for may quickly evolve or even become obsolete as the technology landscape changes. Your important title, such as scrum master or agile team lead, may lose its prestige if your organization someday gives up on agile practices.
In the ever-evolving IT industry, it’s up to individuals to stay adaptable. It’s also up to leaders to help each person on the team recognize the value they bring to the organization outside of their job description – and to reallocate, re-organize, and re-imagine talent as appropriate.
Deno’s approach to ES Modules is generating a lot of debate around package management, especially concerning security. For example, will this prevent another left-pad incident? Regardless of your gut reaction, I highly recommend reading the docs.
I think the explicitness of import-from-URL will make developers think carefully about dependency management; however, I suspect many teams will handle this problem similarly to how they handle npm: with lock files, proxies, and white-listed internal registries.
A new version of drat arrived on CRAN overnight, once again taking advantage of the fully automated process available for such packages with few reverse depends and no open issues. As we remarked at the last release fourteen months ago when we scored the same nice outcome: Being a simple package can have its upsides…
Ruby is now in consistent decline, I have read people linking this to Twitter moving away from Ruby on Rails. My observation is that Ruby on Rails seems to have gone out of fashion in favor of lightweight server frameworks and I would suggest that Kubernetes has sidelined Puppet, so organizations aren't bring in Ruby via apps/frameworks they want to use.
I am curious that the Hack language (from Facebook) might be splitting the PHP community whilst PHP's killer apps are being eroded. Wordpress is still hugely popular, but in generally I observe that blogs have been replaced by social media (Facebook, Medium, etc), rather than running Wikimedia organizations seem in love with Confluence, and that SMB company websites are being captured by WIX, Shopify et al. Wikimedia was using HHVM but is not following it to Hack and Box had success with HHVM but I can't find any update.
I think that Go is taking share from Python and somewhat Java. Google itself is using Go internally which radiates outwards in terms of mindshare of their alumni. A range of software written in Go is currently vogue (Kubernetes, Docker etc Although Docker seem to have stumbled with Docker Swarm and Redhat is shipping their own) which means it will be in organizations via that software.
Converting a snake_case map keys to camelCase is a pretty common task in the snake-case-style languages working with the JavaScript frontend. Here are the basics in understanding how you can convert maps to camelCase style in Elixir.
Write a script that takes a list of email addresses (one per line) and sorts them first by the domain part of the email address, and then by the part to the left of the @ (known as the mailbox).
Note that the domain is case-insensitive, while the mailbox part is case sensitive. (Some email providers choose to ignore case, but that’s another matter entirely.)
If your script is invoked with arguments, it should treat them as file names and read them in order, otherwise your script should read email addresses from standard input.
Duck typing is the idea that instead of checking the type of something in Python, we tend to check what behavior it supports (often by attempting to use the behavior and catching an exception if it doesn't work).
Iterators are all over the place in Python. You can often get away without knowing and understanding the word "iterator", but understanding this term will help you understand how you can expect various iterator-powered utilities in Python to actually work.
I am a Python developer and I love writing and building awesome stuff for people to use.
This is a quick post for newbies about to dive into Django, here I'll give short summaries of my experience in learning Django and tips/advice on how to work with Django.
Contrast Security is one of those firms talking about the new breed of so-called self-protecting software, where AI and machine learning come to the fore with predictive functions make our infrastructure layers ever more autonomous.
The company is now focused on the open source programming language Python due to its widespread use in web application development.
As many readers will know, Python is a dynamic language equipped with built-in data structures and simple syntax – which makes it attractive for rapid application development as well as a scripting language.
In terms of use, Python is used by Netflix to stream videos to more than 100 million homes worldwide, power the photo-sharing site Instagram and aid NASA in space exploration.
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Contrast’s platform includes: Interactive application security testing (IAST), which is run in preproduction, detects vulnerabilities in both custom code and libraries during normal use by gathering data from running code.Software composition analysis (SCA), which analyses libraries to identify potentially vulnerable third-party and open-source components.
Splitwise is a free tool for friends and roommates to track bills and other shared expenses.
I created a telegram bot with which you can integrate your Splitwise account and can use Telegram for managing your expenses.
Oracle kicked off its celebration of Java's 25th anniversary, which arrived officially on Saturday, with ... you guessed it: online content. It's disappointing not to be able to celebrate the language and platform that is, let's face it, running world IRL. But Big Red mounted an able effort on its "Moved-by-Java" site with inspiring personal stories from its Java team and the larger Java community, many of which are genuinely inspiring. If you haven't already, be sure to check it out.
I was a bit ahead of the festivities last month when I talked with Rich Sharples, senior director of product management at Red Hat, about how Java had faired over the years compared with other technologies debuting in 1995. Feel free to check that out, too.
Did James Gosling and his team of developers ever predict the sheer breadth of complex challenges Java helps solve today? From helping build mobile apps, to managing the intricacies of delivering groceries through intelligent robotics and automation, here’s why Java is a key language we’ve chosen for our mission to transform the online grocery sector through intelligent software and automation technology.
The open source movement has changed the way we make software. The developer community always has access to publicly available code to edit and improve software quality.
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For example, as good as my Node.JS programming skills might be — and on a good day they can be quite good — do you really want me to have my way with the Docker engine source? First off, I don’t have any real expertise with Go — the language in which Docker and the Docker engine are written — beyond writing a Hello World. Second, even if I could program effectively in Go, I don’t have the proper understanding about the Docker engine required to make a useful contribution. But as the saying goes, give a developer a source code editor, a compiler and an internet full of documentation and the next thing you know, for better or worse, you’ll have code that wants to make its way into the world.
As I write this article in my home office in Beaverton, Oregon, a Portland suburb, I'm relying (and reflecting) on years of work that went into standards like TCP/IP, HTTP, NTP, XMPP, SAML, and many others, as well as open source implementations of these standards from organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation. The combination of these standards and technologies is literally saving lives, as many of us are able to work from home while "flattening the curve."
Nothing has dominated the news more in 2020 than COVID-19. Yet, in the midst of challenging time, I've found opportunities for personal and industrial renewal. By fortunate (some may say unfortunate) timing, I found myself switching roles in the middle of this crisis from helping to build and run Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) to becoming the executive director at OASIS Open, a standards development organization that is helping bring standards and open source together in practical and productive ways.
Looking through the many articles on Opensource.com related to standards (and there are quite a few), I went on an interesting journey through the different thought processes—and sometimes biases—that people involved in each community have. What stood out most was this: both standards professionals and open source advocates want the same thing—better technology that we all can rely on.
As I was transitioning to this new role at OASIS, some colleagues and friends in the open source world that I've been a part of for many years questioned my motivations for making this move. In explaining why I took this job, I reflected on the larger role I think the intersection of standards and open source can play, especially in the current crisis we all face.
"The question isn't: did the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 have a lawful excuse to do what they did. The question is, what's our excuse not to do more? What will rise us?"
The visa cancellation could affect at least 3,000 students, according to some official estimates. That is a tiny percentage of the approximately 360,000 Chinese students in the United States. But some of those affected might be working on important research projects.
This report explores what kind of education indicators are used by external quality assurance agencies, funding mechanisms and international university rankings and whether they are fit for purpose.
The late Gore Vidal once confessed, with characteristic rapier wit, "I love stupidity. It excites me." But the excitement and hilarity of human foibles and failures diminish rapidly when the consequences include more than 100,000 corpses.
Stupidity is a steadfast provider of humor and tragedy in Freedom Central, otherwise known as the United States. Recent highlights of American imbecility stretch from the creation of reality television to the election of a man that genre made famous, who boasted of his own intelligence with the claim, "I know words. I have the best words."
As stupidity reigns supreme in both culture and politics, irony searches for its audience. So do public health experts, virologists, doctors, nurses, professors and other much-maligned "elites" who have the audacity to try to save the lives of "real Americans" with the knowledge acquired through the treasonous instrument of formal education.
As communities reel from the devastating impacts of COVID-19, conservative politicians and lawmakers in an alarming number of states have capitalized on the fear and scarcity surrounding the pandemic. They are using legitimate health concerns as a smokescreen to enact anti-choice abortion bans. They have done so under the pretense of public safety, but their actions jeopardize the health and well-being of their communities.
Is Chester, Pennsylvania, the proverbial canary in the coal mine? Sure does look like it.
As COVID-19 kills thousands in Chicago and across Illinois, the opioid epidemic has intensified its own deadly siege away from the spotlight, engulfing one public health crisis inside another.
More than twice as many people have died or are suspected to have died of opioid overdoses in the first five months of the year in Cook County, when compared with the same period last year, according to a ProPublica Illinois analysis of medical examiner’s office death records. There have been at least 924 confirmed or suspected overdose deaths so far in 2020; there were 461 at this time last year. And much like the coronavirus outbreak, the opioid epidemic has disproportionately affected African Americans on Chicago’s West and South Sides.
The generic industry lobby, Association for Accessible Medicines (“AAM”), often represents the public interest. In the pharmaceutical industry, it challenges brand drug companies’ anti-competitive conduct. It fights for lower prices for consumers. And it has built up goodwill for its work in these areas.
But there is one glaring exception. Brand and generic companies often settle patent litigation. And sometimes they do so with the brand paying the generic to delay entry. To state the obvious, generics do well when brands pay them to stay off the market. But AAM’s fierce advocacy in favor of these “pay-for-delay” settlements has not received the attention it deserves.
This essay addresses this gap. It analyzes AAM’s advocacy against congressional pay-for-delay legislation and its briefs in two recent cases involving a Federal Trade Commission challenge and California legislation. The essay concludes that in defending these blatantly anti-competitive deals, AAM does not represent the public interest.
Patent protection for several of the world’s best-selling and most promising drugs — biologics — has begun waning. Over the next few years, many other drugs in this category will lose critical patent protection. In principle, this should open the United States market to competition, as more manufacturers are now able to produce relatively cheaper versions of these expensive drugs, known as biosimilars. That, however, has not been the case. This Article examines this problem in the context of the articulation between anticompetitive behaviors and regulatory interventions in the biopharmaceutical arena, and argues for a novel solution: a timelier response provided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the form of license revocation when follow-on innovators fail to compete.
In one significant case, the FDA approved several biosimilar versions from different manufacturers that would in principle compete with the biologic drug Humira — the largest-grossing drug in the United States and worldwide — but the manufacturer of Humira entered into multiple agreements with biosimilar manufacturers to keep the drug out of the United States market until 2023, while making it available elsewhere from 2018 onwards.
An abundant stream of scholarship has examined the relationship between pharmaceutical markets and antitrust mechanisms to curb anticompetitive behaviors. This Article moves the debate in a new direction. Because antitrust responses generally face a time lag, the Article posits that an additional regulatory intervention is needed outside antitrust law, and it argues that the FDA is institutionally well placed to provide a first-line checkpoint for anticompetitive agreements that result in non-commercialization of approved drugs. While novel, this proposal incorporates a solution that has been hiding in plain sight: the FDA regulatory framework allows the Agency to revoke licenses under certain circumstances, including some forms of inaction on the part of the licensee. This Article shows that the FDA not only has the authority, but also the statutory obligation, to revoke the licenses of biosimilar manufacturers who deliberately fail to bring their products to market within a reasonable period of time.
Many of the biologics slated to lose patent protection in the first half of the 2020s are routinely used in the treatment of some of the most challenging medical conditions of our time, including certain cancers and auto-immune diseases. At a time when concerns over drug prices are at the forefront of political and social debates, finding ways to instill competition into post-patent markets remains a crucial task. The solution put forth in this Article furthers the interests of different parties, as it clears the pathway for motivated biosimilar manufacturers to bring their products to a profitable market while bringing down overall costs for health systems and, in particular, for patients in need of extremely expensive pharmaceuticals.
The heads of some of the world’s largest drug makers expressed a mix of confusion and resistance to a World Health Organization voluntary pool to collect patent rights, regulatory test data, and other information that could be shared for developing Covid-19 therapies, vaccines, and diagnostics.
The WHO effort reflects mounting concern that some Covid-19 medical products may not be accessible for poorer populations. By establishing a voluntary mechanism under the auspices of the WHO, the goal is to establish a pathway that will attract numerous governments, as well as industry, universities and nonprofit organizations. But not every executive likes the idea.
“At this point in time, I think it’s nonsense, and… it’s also dangerous,” said Pfizer (PFE) chief executive Albert Bourla in remarks at a forum Thursday organized by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations. Companies are “investing billions to find a solution and, keep in mind, if you have a discovery, we are going to take your (intellectual property), I think, is dangerous.”
Similarly, AstraZeneca (AZN) chief executive Pascal Soriot argued at the forum that intellectual property is “a fundamental part of our industry and if you don’t protect IP, then essentially, there is no incentive for anybody to innovate. What is important is for companies to volunteer to provide their products at no profit, like we’re doing right now in case of a pandemic or crisis, when it’s needed.”
The USPTO created a web-based platform (https://developer.uspto.gov/ipmarketplace/search/patents) that identifies patents that may be useful in the creation of technologies to combat the coronavirus/COVID-19 disease. The website lists various patents and patent publications, seven pages with about 24 per page, that include links to the patents or publications, Issue/Publication dates and other bibliographic information. There is also a column indicating if Licensing is available for the patents/patent applications listed. The patents and applications listed have been apparently asked by the patentee/patent applicant to be included (from the tab "About the Platform):
If you want to make your inventions available for licensing, the IP Marketplace Platform provides a centralized and easily accessible place to list U.S. patents and patent application publications. It offers to potential licensees a database of available technologies that permits searches using a variety of parameters.
In response to queries, Zoom pointed to its May 27 report that said its focus is to build the so-called end-to-end encryption for its meeting product, which may be later rolled out for its chat, phone and webinar offerings. “Only our paid users will have access to end-to-end encryption for their meetings,” it said. “However, all users will use the 256-bit GCM encryption on May 30 regardless of their license type.”
Zoom published a draft paper May 22nd outlining some of its encryption plans.
Once we have assessed this feedback for integration into a final design, we will announce our engineering milestones and goals for deploying an end-to-end encryption offering for Zoom users.
The company, whose business has boomed with the coronavirus pandemic, discussed the move on a call with civil liberties groups and child-sex abuse fighters on Thursday, and Zoom security consultant Alex Stamos confirmed it on Friday.
In an interview, Stamos said the plan was subject to change and it was not yet clear which, if any, nonprofits or other users, such as political dissidents, might qualify for accounts allowing more secure video meetings.
He added that a combination of technological, safety and business factors went into the plan, which drew mixed reactions from privacy advocates.
The new NHS test and trace programme is being undermined by hackers sending out phishing scams falsely warning the public they may have Covid-19.
Public Health England have warned potential contacts to check suspicious messages against the Government website after a flurry of reports of Britons being falsely informed they may have coronavirus.
India said it will publicly release the source code of its contact tracing app, Aarogya Setu, in a relief to privacy and security experts who have been advocating for this ever since the app launched in early April.
India is the only democracy among these six countries to keep the software source code of its Covid contact tracing closed to public scrutiny.
A week ago, Microsoft announced a new Windows Package Manager (winget) at Build 2020. It was one of the few unexpected reveals during the virtual developer conference. However, one developer now says Microsoft copied his technology and integrated it into Windows.
Keivan Beigi, who created a package manager called AppGet, says Microsoft showed a lot of interest in the tool last year. He says the company spoke to him and was interested in AppGet. Later, the company ghosted Beigi and he did not hear from Microsoft again.
Fast forward to Build, and Windows Package Manager arrives (winget) looking suspiciously like AppGet. Beigi says he was shocked to see winget copied so much from his solution.
Last week, Microsoft released its new Windows Package Manager, called WinGet. But as it turns out, they stole it: Keivan Beigi, the creator of a popular package manager called AppGet, describes how Microsoft wooed him last year and discussed employing him, only to later ghost him and release WinGet, which he says is basically identical to AppGet.
Keivan Beigi, developer of AppGet, has described how Microsoft nearly hired him to work on the open-source Windows package manager as an official feature, then went quiet for six months before announcing WinGet, which Beigi says is "very inspired by AppGet".
Microsoft unveiled WinGet at its Build virtual event earlier this month. At the time, Senior program manager Demitrius Nelon said: "What about insert any other package manager here? We think they are great... We have already talked with a few of the well-known package manager teams. Chocolatey has a vibrant community with a massive collection of applications, and a rich history supporting both open-source and enterprise customers. Scoop provides a convenient way to allow software to be installed without the UAC popups. Ninite keeps an eye on updates for all the apps it installed. There are many others like AppGet, Npackd and the PowerShell-based OneGet package manager-manager."
AppGet got a mention here, but only as a footnote. Beigi's account gives a different perspective. He says he was approached in July 2019 by a "high-level manager at Microsoft" from the Windows app deployment team. The manager thanked him for building AppGet and making "life so much easier" for Windows developers and asked to meet Beigi to "get feedback on how we can make your life easier building AppGet".
In March, an anonymous security researcher discovered open source software (OSS) supply chain malware, dubbed Octopus Scanner, in a set of repositories on the GitHub platform. The researcher, who goes by the name "JJ" and writes a security blog called DFIR IT, notified GitHub's security incident response team. "The malware is capable of identifying the NetBeans project files and embedding malicious payload both in project files and build JAR files," JJ wrote in the report to GitHub.
The beta version of KernelCare+ is now available for download for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CloudLinux OS 7, and CentOS 7. More distributions will be added in June 2020.
KernelCare extends live patching beyond the Linux kernel with KernelCare+. This new version of KernelCare adds detection and live patching for glibc and OpenSSL vulnerabilities.
KernelCare+ was created to ensure that critical glibc APIs and OpenSSL libraries stay patched, as well as the Linux kernel, and it’s now available for evaluation in beta.
At least for the workloads tested this round, when booting the new Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with the software-controlled CPU security mitigations disabled, the overall performance was elevated by about 6% depending upon the workload. Here is a look at the out-of-the-box security mitigations for this new Intel desktop CPU against foregoing the default CPU security mitigations and running an unprotected configuration to see what the pre-Spectre performance looks like.
Pacu is written in Python and maintained by Rhino Security Labs, a penetration testing provider.
Six servers Cisco uses to provide a virtual networking service were compromised by hackers who exploited critical flaws contained in unpatched versions the open source software service relies on, the company disclosed on Thursday.
Spending by the world’s nine nuclear nations climbed to nearly $73 billion in 2019, nearly half of it by the United States alone. At the same time, the Trump administration has prioritized nuclear weapons in its defense budget while abandoning nuclear treaties, fumbling negotiations and confounding allies. The administration’s lack of coherent goals, strategies or polices have increased nuclear dangers, leaving the U.S. “blundering toward nuclear chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.” Those are the findings of two separate reports published in May that examine nuclear spending and strategy under Trump.
"Facebook has once again failed to act against an explicit violation of its own rules and has allowed the violent and racist post to remain up."
The standoff along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China would be resolved through diplomatic dialogue and India’s effort was also to ensure that tensions did not rise further, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Saturday, in the first comments by a member of the Cabinet Committee on Security on the almost month-long standoff.
“As of now, dialogue is on with China both at the military and diplomatic level,” Mr. Singh said in a television interview. India’s policy had been very clear that “we should have good relations with all neighbours.” Both India and China have resolved incidents that arose from time to time through dialogue and existing mechanisms, he said.
Calls to “cancel rent” are catching fire. First came a couple of tweets on Twitter. Then progressive firebrands like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed the #CancelRent movement. Now, millions are on a rent strike. Even presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has declared his support for rent and mortgage forgiveness. As millions of tenants mobilize to cancel rent, they are not asking nicely or relying on lip service from politicians. Rather, millions of tenants are taking action by using a powerful time-tested strategy: rent strikes.
It's critically important that media provide accurate reporting on what our governments are choosing to do, and what price we are likely to pay for their choices.
A mountain of studies on wealth inequality have shown its corrosive effect on social cohesion, with the more unequal a society gets, the less likely people are to see themselves as participants in a community and view others as a threat.
(By: Alan Macleod, Mintpress News) The extrajudicial killing of African-American man George Floyd by Police Officer Derek Chauvin sparked a storm of protests both in Minneapolis and across the country. These have included large peaceful demonstrations, but also arson, destruction of property and looting. Police have abandoned multiple precincts in the face of overwhelming popular rage.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. consistently argued that looting is the language of the unheard and oppressed, a physical manifestation of their marginalization. However, many in the establishment, particularly on the right, have not interpreted the events as such, and appear scandalized by them.
As we mentioned in our March issue, in late February France’s first instance commercial Court of Nanterre, which has jurisdiction over many banks and major corporations, issued a remarkable and highly publicized ruling involving the characterization of the nature of bitcoins (BTC) under French law.
BitSpread, a FinTech company offering investments services in alternative assets, had entered into several BTC loan agreements with the French cryptoassets exchange Paymium between 2014 and 2016. As a result of the hard fork splitting BTC with bitcoin cash (BCH) that took place in August 2017, BitSpread received 1,000 BCH. A few months later, at the end of the term of the loan agreements, BitSpread returned the original BTC loan amount to Paymium. However, Paymium also demanded the transfer of the BCHs.
It may be tempting to shrug off the president's spat with a social media platform, but we ignore such chilling conduct at our peril.
Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report.
The Comcast-owned media conglomerate will put broadcast and cable operations under a single executive, Mark Lazarus, while combining CNBC with NBC News and MSNBC under Cesar Conde. Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, will step down as a result.
In addition to disputing misleading claims made by US President Donald Trump about mail-in ballots this week, Twitter has added fact-checking labels to thousands of other tweets since introducing the alerts earlier this month, mostly on posts about the coronavirus.
The company does not expect to need additional staff for the undertaking, Twitter spokeswoman Liz Kelley said on Saturday. Nor is it partnering with independent fact-checking organizations, as Facebook and Google have, to outsource the debunking of viral posts flagged by users.
Sinclair Broadcasting President and CEO Christopher Ripley has one of the most powerful positions in the country when it comes to local news — and now sports, after the company’s $9.6 billion acquisition of the former Fox/Disney-owned Regional Sports Networks in August.
Sinclair also acquired a slice of the New York sports channel YES Network, in a partnership with Amazon. In a recent interview, Ripley talked about the upcoming presidential election, Sinclair’s “fair and balanced” news in light of broad criticism for airing "must-run" segments with conservative viewpoints, and the “sea of blood” that is the streaming wars. This interview has been edited for brevity.
At the August 28 rally, a banned separatist flag was raised as activists protested an incident that occurred against Papuans earlier that month in Surabaya in East Java. The Morning Star flag is a symbol of independence for West Papua.
“At a high level, these surveillance technologies should not be used on protesters,” Neema Singh Guliani, a senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, told BuzzFeed News. “The idea that you have groups of people that are raising legitimate concerns and now that could be subject to face recognition or surveillance, simply because they choose to protest, amplifies the overall concerns with law enforcement having this technology to begin with.”
According to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, more than 10 users with the Minneapolis Police Department had run more than 160 searches as of February. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the county that includes Minneapolis, had also conducted nearly 400 searches among 10 accounts. And the Minnesota Fusion Center — a specialized section of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that shares crime intelligence — had run almost 40 searches as of February.
Civil liberties advocates sounded the alarm Friday after reporting indicated Customs and Border Protection has been flying an unmanned Predator drone over Minneapolis as the city continues to roil with protest over the police killing of George Floyd earlier this week.
"I call upon our city and our nation to exercise great restraint even while this President continues to try to divide us," said DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser in response to president's comments.
Harvard University philosophy professor Dr. Cornel West appeared on CNN Friday night amid nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota and offered a searing indictment not just of white supremacy, the neo-fascism of President Donald Trump, and a criminal justice system that repeatedly brutalizes the poor and people of color—but also of a deep depravity that exists within the neoliberal capitalist system of the 21st Century in the United States that dominates both major political parties.
"I thank God people are in the streets," said the Harvard philosopher and activist. "Can you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people are indifferent? People don't care? People are callous?"
Societies that tolerate deep divides in income and wealth, new research suggests, invite pandemic disasters. And while President Donald Trump makes an obvious and deserving target, the real failures of our ruling order predate his troubled and reckless administration.
Noor was found guilty of third degree murder and manslaughter in the July 2017 shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond — and sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison.
Former Minneapolis police officer Mohammed Noor's two attorneys have asked for a new trial in the killing of 40-year-old Justine Ruszczyk Damond, according to a Friday court ruling
A social culture where perception of others is not conditioned by skin tone is obtainable. In the process of getting there, a system of law with no impunity for racism and with examplary punishment for agents of the state in contravention is essential.
To strangle George Floyd with his hands, officer Derek Chauvin would have had to look him in the face... The knee was a brutal coward's knee.
This epidemic of racism is more prevalent, more real, more tangible than even a virus that is taking lives seemingly overnight. When do Black people get to rest, to be safe, to breathe?
Instead of calls for things to simply calm down and "go back to normal," said New York Congresswoman, "let's create a new world—one where all people are held to the same standard of the rule of law."
‘To make a civil code of China’s own is the dream of generations of Chinese civil jurists’, said Professor Wang Liming, chairman of the Civil Law Division under the China Law Society, and executive vice president of the Renmin University of China.
The adoption of the CCC is a landmark event in Chinese civil legislation history. For decades, developing a comprehensive civil code appeared like a long-cherished wish to many. The first attempt to issue a civil code began as early as 1911, with the Draft Civil Code of the Great Qing Dynasty, and was accomplished with the help of Japanese scholars Yoshimasa Matsuoka and Kotaro Shida. Since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, four civil law codifications have been initiated (in 1954, 1962, 1979 and 2001, respectively), but all failed for various reasons.
In particular, during the 1980s, given the rapid and enormous changes in society, and the difficulties that followed China’s achievement of a social consensus on many issues closely related to people’s livelihood, legislators took a step-by-step approach by, namely, putting aside the adoption of a civil code as an end goal and starting from separate legislations (e.g. changing from wholesale to retail strategy). Several laws were promulgated at that time, such as the General Principles of Civil Law, the Contract Law, the Succession Law and the Marriage Law.
The doctrine of equivalents (DOE) allows a court to hold an accused infringer liable for patent infringement in spite of the fact that the accused product (or process) does not fall within the literal scope of the asserted patent claim(s). Prosecution history estoppel (PHE), which can be triggered by a narrowing amendment of a patent claim during patent prosecution, or by arguments made during prosecution, imposes significant constraints on the ability of a patentee to assert the DOE. The 1990s and early 2000’s saw a proliferation of legal commentary postulating that the DOE would play an important role in protecting inventions arising out of biotechnology, particularly biomolecules (i.e., proteins and DNA/polynucleotides), and stressing the need for biotechnology patentees to avoid amendments or arguments during patent prosecution that might trigger PHE. In fact, however, prior to 2019 the Federal Circuit does not appear to have issued an opinion finding infringement under the DOE in a case in which the relevant claim limitation recites a biomolecule. It finally happened in Ajinomoto Co. v. Int'l Trade Comm'n, with a divided panel of the Federal Circuit holding that a claim limitation reciting a DNA sequence, defined in terms of the amino acid sequence of a protein encoded by the sequence, was infringed under the DOE by a DNA sequence encoding a protein having a different (but similar) amino acid sequence and equivalent function. This article begins with a brief overview of the DOE and PHE, and explains why DOE was at one time seen as particularly critical for the enforcement of patent claims reciting biomolecules. It then summarizes and analyzes the results of a Westlaw search designed to identify any and all Federal Circuit decisions applying the DOE and/or PHE to a claim limitation reciting a biomolecule, including the court’s most recent decision Ajinomoto.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced another new initiative relating to COVID-19 to help encourage innovation for products and processes related to COVID-19. Starting on May 8th, micro and small entity status applicants can apply for the "COVID-19 Prioritized Examination Pilot Program", which offers expedited examination of eligible applications without an additional fee. This program will provide assistance to small and micro entities such as small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and Universities looking to bring potentially life-saving COVID-19 innovations to market as quickly as possible.
The Program's goal is to reach final disposition of applications in the program within twelve months, and potentially as quickly as 6 months, from the date prioritized status is granted. This is a significant acceleration as it can take years before obtaining a granted application under the normal procedure. The absence of an additional fee is also a welcome offering. Normally for expedited examination, the USPTO charges $1,000 for micro entities and $2,000 for small entities.
In any given patent dispute, the protections afforded by the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrines are foundational assumptions when documentation is created and client communications take place. The purpose of each doctrine is to encourage "full and frank communication" between lawyer and client, and afford attorneys the opportunity to permit thorough trial preparation without the fear that such material will become available to opposing counsel through discovery. Therefore, memorandum, e-mails and transcribed voicemails often contain sensitive information created based on the parties' belief that the sensitive information will not become available to opposing counsel. However, when creating such sensitive documentation, attorneys may not always carefully consider the fact that the sensitive material may later be displayed-larger than life-to a jury examining whether their client has engaged in willful patent infringement.
Apple Inc. was awarded over $2.3 million and Cisco Systems Inc. over $1.9 million in attorneys’ fees in California federal court for defending against a patent infringement suit that the court said should “never have been brought.”
Straight Path IP Group Inc. sued Apple, Cisco, and others for allegedly infringing four patents related to point-to-point internet communication. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidated the relevant parts of the patents, but the Federal Circuit reversed, finding the PTAB had construed a patent term too broadly. The PTAB upheld the patents’ validity on remand under the narrower construction, and the Federal Circuit affirmed.
[...]
But the court disagreed because Straight Path’s “exceptional claims were the but for cause of those fees.” Apple and Cisco “were entitled to mount a comprehensive defense” against “claims that (again) should not have been brought,” the court said.
“What goes around comes around, and not always in expected ways,” the court said.
Straight Path also argued it shouldn’t have to pay Cisco because the Patent Act doesn’t contemplate an award based on a flat-fee arrangement with attorneys instead of a reasonable hourly rate. The Patent Act “mandates no specific calculation method and does not foreclose reimbursement of an alternate billing scheme like Cisco’s,” the court said.
“One month shy of four years old, these suits—which should never have been brought—are finally put to rest,” the court said.
Judge William Alsup wrote the opinion.
Apple Inc. victories in two proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board were vacated and remanded by the Federal Circuit in a Thursday nonprecedential opinion after the owner of the challenged patent argued the PTAB judges were unconstitutionally appointed.
Personalized Media Communications LLC will get a new chance to save parts of U.S. Patent No. 8,559,635, covering a system for targeting broadcast communications to specific users, following the Federal Circuit’s decision in Arthrex Inc. v. Smith & Nephew Inc.
Apple Inc. and other tech companies convinced a patent office tribunal to invalidate claims in a wireless network patent owned by patent holding company Uniloc 2017 LLC.
Uniloc’s U.S. Patent No. 7,167,487 is obvious in light of another patent and previous publications, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board said in decisions entered Tuesday.
Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. LTD challenged the validity of the patent’s claims at the agency tribunal. Blackberry Corp. was also joined to the proceedings as a challenger to Uniloc. The parties had identified various proceedings in different federal courts between Uniloc and large tech companies that...
The doctrine of likelihood of confusion is the core infringement test for trade mark law. This book is the first comprehensive and systematic account of the EU confusion test – looking at its application by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), by national courts, and by the CJEU. The authors set out to articulate a clear set of rules that - they argue - are being consistently applied by European courts and tribunals, inclusive of the sub-factors that might be applied in specific circumstances.
Amiri “does not own any protectable trade dress rights” in a $1,150-plus style of jeans, Zara argues in its recently-field response to the lawsuit that the burgeoning Los Angeles-based brand filed against it early this year. Despite the federal trade dress infringement and unfair competition claims that Amiri makes in connection with the $3 million lawsuit that it filed against “serial infringer” Zara in a federal court in California in January, Zara claims that Amiri lacks the necessary rights in the alleged trade dress at issue, as the design of its MX2 jeans is not protectable. In the answer that counsel for Zara filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California late last month, the Spanish fast fashion giant admits that it began selling its $50 “Combination Skinny Jeans … in or about December 2019,” a style that Amiri claims has “the same distinctive pleated leather panel detailing, side zippered thigh pockets, zippered knee closures, and skinny fit washed denim” as its celebrity-favored MX2 jeans. But even if it did offer them up to consumers in its brick-and-mortar stores across the globe and on its e-commerce site, Zara denies that it is legally in the wrong for doing so.
[...]
More than that, Zara further argues that Amiri’s claims are barred by the (alleged) fact that while it asserts that it suffered damages “believed to be in excess of $3,000,000,” the brand did not actually suffer any damages as a result of Zara’s alleged infringement (i.e., its sale of inexpensive, lookalike jeans). The fast fashion giant also asserts that it is shielded from infringement liability in connection with its use of the design at issue amounts to fair use, a defense to copyright and trademark infringement. As for whether there is any merit to Zara’s claims, its assertion that Amiri’s purported trade dress lacks distinctiveness is an interesting one. While AMIRI’s MX2 pants have certainly been the subject of a fair share of unsolicited (i.e., not directly paid-for) media attention thanks to their adoption by celebrities, which bodes well from a secondary meaning perspective, it would be interesting to see whether AMIRI would actually be able to show that consumers link the trade dress at issue to a single source given that other, bigger brands, namely, Saint Laurent (under the direction of Hedi Slimane) and Balmain (in its halcyon Christophe Decarnin days), have showed similar style pants before the release of the MX2’s).
When the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions came into effect, the physical distribution and door step delivery of newspapers became affected. Faced with these constraints, most newspapers started offering free trials on their websites for e-papers and even free PDFs of the day’s paper.
This also led to a surge in e-papers getting forwarded on social media by individuals, rather than newspapers themselves. Newspaper Dainik Bhaskar then came out with a piece claiming that downloading and circulating PDFs of e-papers was illegal. This was perhaps a result of an alleged advisory issued by the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) to its members. The advisory took the position that downloading, modifying and/or circulating e-papers were illegal and members should take strict legal action against this.
IndiaToday did a fact-check on this. As per it, the Dainik Bhaskar claim was not entirely true because circulation of free PDFs was not illegal. Thus, the thrust of the IndiaToday fact-check was that as long as the e-paper was free, one could circulate it.
To what extent are the claims of Dainik Bhaskar and IndiaToday true?
Addison Cain was living in Kyoto, volunteering at a shrine and studying indigenous Japanese religion. She was supposed to be working on a scholarly book about her research, but started writing intensely erotic Batman fan fiction instead.
It happened almost by accident. It was 2012, and Ms. Cain — who grew up in Orange County, Calif., under a different name — was three years out of college, alone abroad with a lot of time on her hands. Her command of Japanese was halting, and English titles in bookstores were wildly expensive. So Ms. Cain started reading things she could find for free online, and soon discovered fanfic — stories by amateurs that borrow characters and plots from established pop-cultural franchises.
Ms. Cain began devouring works set in the world of Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy. She decided to write some of her own, featuring Batman’s nemesis Bane as a sexy antihero, and posted them for free online. She quickly developed a fan base, becoming something of a star in her sub-subgenre.
A few years later, she was living in Arlington, Va., and working as a bartender when she began to wonder if she could turn her hobby into a business. Her husband and parents discouraged her from pursuing something so impractical. Agents were equally dismissive, rejecting or ignoring Ms. Cain’s queries for more than a year. Then, a fellow writer helped Ms. Cain send a manuscript to Blushing Books, a small publishing house in Charlottesville. An editor read it overnight and sent her a contract the next day.
From just a few thousand flagged URLs per week the number of DMCA takedown notices Netflix sent to Google skyrocketed to over a million recently. The reason for this increase wasn't clear initially but Google now believes that it's dealing with a Netflix impostor, which could be a pirate site trying to downrank the competition.
A row over whether a judge should allow the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society to obtain the identity of someone who uploaded 'pirated' Jehovah's Witness videos to YouTube is effectively over. Concluding possibly one of the most foul-mouthed cases on record, the judge dismissed all claims of fair use while advising an anonymous movant that vulgarity in court filings "is not a good idea".
