Purism Launches Librem 14 Security-Focused Linux Laptop with a hardware kill switch for webcam, microphone, and WiFi.
Besides readfile() being simpler, the other intended use-case is for helping in performance due to less system calls. Greg does note that utilizing readfile should help performance, especially due to "syscall overheads go up over time due to various CPU bugs being addressed." A.k.a. Spectre, Meltdown, etc.
The readfile system call review is in this kernel thread. Hopefully it will be reviewed punctually and well to possibly make it into the Linux 5.9 cycle next month.
The new inclusive terminology documentation applies to new code being contributed to the Linux kernel but ultimately in hopes of replacing existing code with words deemed not inclusive. The exception being granted though is where changing the terminology could potentially break the user-space ABI given the kernel's longstanding guarantees on not breaking that interface.
These new guidelines for Linux kernel developers call for initially avoiding words including "slave" and "blacklist" to instead use words like subordinate, replica, follower, performer, blocklist, or denylist.
Following the drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next last week that exposes VRR ranges via DebugFS and other improvements, another round of DRM-Misc-Next material has now been sent in for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.9 cycle.
Back in April I wrote about patches for enabling FBC on the Intel 865 chipset nearly two decades after that chipset first shipped. Those patches didn't yet hit the mainline Linux kernel but they were revived again this week.
These patches are for enabling frame-buffer compression support on the Intel Extreme 2 Graphics found with the i865 "Springdale" chipset. Frame-buffer compression can yield performance and power efficiency advantages thanks to the reduced bandwidth. Newer generations of Intel graphics hardware have squared away their FBC support for a while but the i865 era support was overlooked until recent patches improving the state pushed it forward enough where it could finally be enabled by default.
Edward Shishkin continues pursuing development of new file-system functionality for Reiser5, the next-generation evolutionary advancement over the controversial Reiser4 file-system.
Reiser5 has been working on new features like local volumes with parallel scaling out, data tiering and burst buffers, and other new features. The latest feature being worked on by Shishkin for Reiser5 is selective file migration.
I just now released 0.2.0 of the dns-tor-proxy tool. The main feature of this release is DNS over HTTPS support. At first I started writing it from scratch, and then decided to use modified code from the amazing dns-over-https project instead.
Jitsi[-Meet] is a free open-source multi-platform voice, videoconferencing, and instant messaging applications for the web platform, Windows, Linux, and macOS, etc. This application is similar to Cisco Meet, Google Meet, and Zoom video conferencing. Also kindly take look at the Top 30 Sysadmin Blogs & Websites for System Administrators in 2020 to get popular posts from top sysadmins.
I currently maintain the OpenBSD changelog so I can talk shop, but working on mostly loaned equipment and not working in tech, I don't get enough practical experience. I have to keep notes about some odd things! But I was recently given a nice new laptop which should keep getting fresh updates for years to come. \o/ It has a brand new BIOS version, so let's slap that on here and write out how we did it.
Three years ago, the first Norwegian BokmÃÂ¥l edition of "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" was published. This was based on Debian Jessie. Now a new and updated version based on Buster is getting ready. Work on the updated Norwegian BokmÃÂ¥l edition has been going on for a few months now, and yesterday, we reached the first mile stone, with 100% of the texts being translated. A lot of proof reading remains, of course, but a major step towards a new edition has been taken.
Learn how to remove the background of an image and make it transparent using the free and open source Image editor GIMP.
Ah Sunday, that special day that's a calm before the storm of another week and a time for a community chat here on GOL. Today, it's our birthday! If you didn't see the post earlier this week, GamingOnLinux as of today has hit the big 11 years old! Oh how time sure flies by.
Onto the subject of gaming on Linux: honestly, the majority of my personal game time has been taken up by Into the Breach. It's so gorgeously streamlined, accessible, fun and it's also ridiculously complex at the same time. Tiny maps that require a huge amount of forward thinking, as you weigh up each movement decision against any possible downsides. It's like playing chess, only with big mecha fighting off aliens trying to take down buildings.
[...]
I've also been quite disappointed in Crayta on Stadia, as it so far hasn't lived up to even my smallest expectations for the game maker. It just seems so half-baked, with poor/stiff animations and a lack of any meaningful content to start with. I'll be checking back on it in a few months but for now it's just not fun.
I began work on GNOME Gingerblue on July 4th, 2018, two years ago and I am going to spend the next four years to complete it for GNOME 4.
GNOME Gingerblue will be a Free Software program for musicians who would compose, record and share original music to the Internet from the GNOME Desktop.
The project isn’t yet ready for distribution with GNOME 3 and the GUI and features such as sound recording must be implemented.
At the beginning of the project, I felt like I needed to start from an "easy" part, in order to become more confident until I finally get to the point where I can completely rewrite some pieces of code. The layouts seemed like a good starting point, as they would be a nice and slow way to get started by refactoring some existing code, without touching the 'core' yet. I can say my general knowledge of the codebase (and my confidence, too), was growing fast, week by week. In the first week, for example, I remember struggling to create a simple button on the screen, because I was confused about how to add actors and how to display them. I've spent a lot of time reading code, reading the developers' documentation, and also making a lot of questions to Florian.
A couple of things that Computer Business Review has widely covered are important context for the security probe. (These won’t be much surprise to Fuchsia’s followers of the past two years.)
i.e. Fuschsia OS is based on a tiny custom kernel from Google called Zircon which has some elements written in C++, some in Rust. Device drivers run in what’s called “user mode” or “user land”, meaning they’re not given fully elevated privileges. This means they can be isolated better.
In user land, everything that a driver does has to go via the kernel first before hitting the actually computer’s resources. As Quark Labs found, this is a tidy way of reducing attack surface. But with some sustained attention, its researchers managed to get what they wanted: “We are able to gain kernel code execution from a regular userland process.”
Slackel 7.3 Mate beta1 has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.
Includes the Linux kernel 5.4.50, Mate-1.22.1 and latest updates from Slackware's 'Current' tree. Added support to do a real installation to an external usb stick or usb ssd or usb hard disk.
RISC-V based PolarFire SoC FPGA by Microsemi may be coming up in the third quarter of this year, but Ali Uzel has been sharing a few details about SAVVY-V advanced open-source RISC-V cluster board made by FOSOH-V (Flexible Open SOurce Hardware for RISC-V) community of developers.
It’s powered by Microsemi Polarfire RISC-V SoC MPFS250T with four 64-bit RISC-V cores, a smaller RV64IMAC monitor core, and FPGA fabric that allows 10GbE via SFP+ cages, and exposes six USB Type-C ports. The solution is called a cluster board since up to six SAVVY-V boards can be stacked via a PC/104+ connector and interfaced via the USB-C ports.
I’ve written before, in Contemplating the Cute Brick, that I’m a big fan of Intel’s NUC line of small-form-factor computers. Over the last week I’ve been having some unpleasant learning experiences around them. I’m still a fan, but I’m shipping this post where the search engines can see it in support of future NUC owners in trouble.
Two years ago I bought an NUC for my wife Cathy to replace her last tower-case PC – the NUC8i3BEH1. This model was semi-obsolete even then, but I didn’t want one of the newer i5 or i7 NUCs because I didn’t think it would fit my wife’s needs as well.
What my wife does with her computer doesn’t tax it much. Web browsing, office work, a bit of gaming that does not extend to recent AAA titles demanding the latest whizzy graphics card. I thought her needs would be best served by a small, quiet, low-power-consumption machine that was cheap enough to be considered readily disposable at the end of its service life. The exact opposite of my Great Beast…
The NUC was an experiment that made Cathy and me happy. She especially likes the fact that it’s small and light enough to be mounted on the back of her monitor, so it effectively takes up no desk space or floor area in her rather crowded office. I like the NUC’s industrial design and engineering – lots of nice little details like the four case screws being captive to the baseplate so you cannot lose them during disassembly.
Also. Dammit, NUCs are pretty. I say dammit because I feel like this shouldn’t matter to me and am a bit embarrassed to discover that it does. I like the color and shape and feel of these devices. Someone did an amazing job of making them unobtrusively attractive.
[...]
When I asked if Simply NUC knew of a source for a fan that would fit my 8i3BEH1 – a reasonable question, I think, to ask a company that loudly claims to be a one-stop shop for all NUC needs – the reply email told me I’d have to do “personal research” on that.
It turns out that if the useless drone who was Simply NUC “service” had cared about doing his actual job, he could have the read the fan’s model number off the image I had sent him into a search box and found multiple sources within seconds, because that’s what I then did. Of course this would have required caring that a customer was unhappy, which apparently they don’t do at Simply NUC.
Third reason I know this: My request for a refund didn’t even get refused; it wasn’t even answered.
Binutils 2.35 was branched this weekend as this important component to the open-source Linux ecosystem.
Binutils 2.35 has been branched meaning feature development is over for this next version of this collection of GNU tools.
GNU Binutils 2.356 drops x86 Native Client (NaCl) support with Google having deprecated it in favor of WebAssembly, new options added for the readelf tool, many bug fixes, and an assortment of other changes albeit mostly on the minor side.
While the Arm Cortex-A77 was announced last year and already has been succeeded by the Cortex-A78 announcement, support for the A77 has finally been upstreamed to the LLVM Clang compiler.
The Cortex-A77 support was added to the GCC compiler last year while seemingly as an oversight the A77 support wasn't added to LLVM/Clang until this week.
As of yesterday, Rcpp stands at exactly 2000 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.
Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages last July 2016, 800 packages last October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017, 1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, 1500 packages in November 2018 and then 1750 packages last August. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of packages using Rcpp is available too.
This week both tasks had one thing in common i.e. pairing two or more list. In the past, I have taken the help from CPAN module Algorithm::Combinatorics for such tasks.
There are tons of tutorials on Internet that tech you how to use a web framework and how to create Web applications, and many of these cover Flask, first of all the impressive Flask Mega-Tutorial by Miguel Grinberg (thanks Miguel!). Why another tutorial, then? Recently I started working on a small personal project and decided that it was a good chance to refresh my knowledge of the framework. For this reason I temporarily dropped the clean architecture I often recommend, and started from scratch following some tutorials. My development environment quickly became very messy, and after a while I realised I was very unsatisfied by the global setup. So, I decided to start from scratch again, this time writing down some requirements I want from my development setup. I also know very well how complicated the deploy of an application in production can be, so I want my setup to be "deploy-friendly" as much as possible. Having seen too many project suffer from legacy setups, and knowing that many times such issues can be avoided with a minimum amount of planning, I thought this might be interesting for other developers as well. I consider this setup by no means better than others, it simply addresses different concerns.
As much as possible, advisers, faculty members, counsellors, and student services staff need to assess students’ needs and reach out with customised messages to individual students or more granular student segments. Part-time students have different concerns to full-time scholarship students. Science students have different concerns to business students. Many students need mental health counselling or other services.
NetBSD has a somewhat obscure tool named psrset that allows creating “sets” of cores and running tasks on one of those sets. Let’s try it: [...]
On 29 June, Scotland reported just 5 new cases, out of 815 for the UK as a whole, and announced no new covid-19-related deaths for the fourth day in a row. The nation could soon have days with no new confirmed cases. “Scotland’s weeks away from that,” says Sridhar. “England’s months away.”
Yet in practice, Scotland is unlikely to achieve full elimination in the near future, because it has a 154-kilometre border with England. “Many people cross that border every day,” says Sridhar. “I think we will probably never get, without England’s cooperation, to full elimination.”
If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it’s how quickly international travelers can carry a disease from one side of the world to the other. Potential treatments can travel quickly too, but that journey takes concerted action. When I spoke with Asiedu, who now works at the WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases, he told me that the new research in Australia could be beneficial to Africans, even if they were not its original focus. Thanks in part to Australian doctors’ experience with antibiotic treatment regimes, and following a successful clinical trial in Africa, the WHO will soon be recommending oral—rather than injectable—antibiotics, reducing the need for hospital stays in both Australia and Africa. Researchers at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization are also developing a new environmental test for Buruli ulcer that is based on RNA, which breaks down more rapidly in the environment than DNA. This makes it better suited for identifying places where the bacteria is alive and being actively transmitted.
On June 22, 2020, a bipartisan house bill—Make Medications Affordable by Preventing Pandemic Pricegouging Act (MMAPPP)—was introduced. Sponsored by Representatives Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Francis Rooney (R-FL), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), and Peter DeFazio (D-OR), the bill would prohibit excessive pricing of drugs used to treat any disease that causes a public health emergency by waiving exclusive licenses and compensating patent holders with a reasonable royalty. Additional provisions of the bill include: (1) prohibiting exclusive licensing of new, taxpayer-funded drugs that are used to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, or treat COVID-19 in order to ensure universal access to these drugs; (2) requiring the federal government to mandate reasonable, affordable pricing of any new, taxpayer-funded drug used to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, or treat COVID-19; and (3) ensuring transparency by requiring manufacturers to publicly report a specific breakdown of total expenditures on any drug used to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, or treat COVID-19, including what percentage of those expenditures were derived from federal funds. According to the release by Representative Schakowsky’s office, “[l]ower drug prices should not be a partisan issue. Our proposed reforms are long overdue, and drug price gouging is certainly not exclusive to COVID-19. It will take all of us—Democrats and Republicans—to stop drug manufacturers’ profiteering once and for all. The time for action is now.”
In recent weeks, consumers have started seeing a surcharge at local businesses. For example, at one Montgomery County, Maryland restaurant, diners found a disclaimer stating "[t]o help offset restrictions on our business resulting from the COVID 19 crisis, a 4% surcharge has been added to all guest checks." The disclaimer also stated that “[i]f you would like this removed, please let us know.” According to the President and CEO of the Restaurant Association of Maryland, "[s]ome businesses and restaurants have started utilizing a 'COVID-19 Fee' as they navigate operations during this precarious time. . . We understand operators may need to consider how they absorb the additional costs necessary to reopen as many have been struggling and will continue to struggle to keep their doors open." Maryland’s price gouging law, which applies to, among others, food and beverages, prohibits price increases of more than 10%, though some of the COVID fees in excess of that amount may be permissible to the extent they reflect actual cost increases.
To simplify a lot, a TLS certificate is a bundle of attributes wrapped around a public key. All TLS certificates are signed by someone; we call this the issuer. The issuer for a certificate is identified by their X.509 Subject Name, and also at least implicitly by the keypair used to sign the certificate (since only an issuer TLS certificate with the right public key can validate the signature).
A group of scientists funded by CZI wrote an open letter to the billionaire last month expressing concern over Facebook’s propagation of misinformation. The letter was just the beginning, organizers say, and the charity’s employees continued the discussion on ways they might push their boss to fix his social network’s hate speech problem.
“There’s a long history of misinformation at Facebook that has had a negative impact on democracy and society, not only in the U.S., but around the world,” said Martin Kampmann, a CZI-funded scientist who helped organize the letter to Zuckerberg, which now has 277 signees, including several of the charity’s employees.
But netizens have pointed out the data-sharing clause in JioMeet T&Cs, which has raised concerns and questions. If you're a privacy advocate, these clauses might seem worrisome. JioMeet's privacy policy clearly states that using the free app will grant Jio permission to use both personal and non-personal information with Reliance Jio. From accessing location to SD card contents, phone statistics, conferencing logs and history.
Jio also noted that it is open to sharing personal data with third parties for display advertising and promotional services and even allow external organizations in the following cases:
Laws are being drafted to give State agencies legal powers to intercept encrypted communications.
The Department of Justice told the Irish Examiner that the proposals “are being prepared” for the Minister for Justice and the Government.
Gardaí have been calling for powers to intercept and access encrypted devices in recent years. And in July 2019 a top judge told the Government that agencies reported that the current laws were “considerably out of date”.
A spike in cyber attacks from China was detected on May 19, targeting computer systems of the state-run oil refiner CPC Corp. Such activities are traditionally expected around the day of Taiwan’s presidential inauguration, which is intended to cause disruption to society through compromising government agencies, infrastructure facilities, and financial institutions.
The incident triggered an emergency response from Taiwan’s cybersecurity entities on the Cabinet level, leading to a series of self-defense measures. The counter-effort was spearheaded by the National Center for Cyber Security Technology, with IT experts from the private sector.
The European Union’s top diplomat disclosed Friday that he has received a letter from Iran's foreign minister that triggers a dispute mechanism in the 2015 nuclear agreement, complaining that Britain, France and Germany are not living up to their side of the deal.
The accord, which Iran signed with the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia, has been unraveling since President Donald Trump pulled Washington out in 2018, unleashing sanctions designed to cripple the Islamic Republic’s economy.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that in the letter Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif seeks redress under “the dispute resolution mechanism, as set out in paragraph 36 of the agreement.”
The boogaloo movement originally grew from the weapons discussion section (“/k/”) of the anarchic anonymous message board 4chan over the past several years. By 2019, its culture had disseminated across social media into a mix of online groups and chat servers where users shared libertarian political memes. In the past six months, this all began to manifest in real life, as users from the groups emerged at protests in what became their signature uniform: aloha shirts and combat gear. As nationwide unrest intensified at the start of the summer, many boogaloo adherents interpreted this as a cue to realize the group’s central fantasy—armed revolt against the U.S. government.
In Colorado earlier in May, then in Nevada in June, police arrested several other heavily armed self-identified boogaloo members, who the authorities claimed were on their way to demonstrations to incite violence. Disturbingly, the boogaloo movement is at least the third example of a mass of memes escaping from 4chan to become a real-life radical political movement, the first being the leftist-libertarian hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged in 2008; the second was the far-right fascist group of angry young men called the alt-right, which formed in 2015. (The conspiracy theory QAnon might be considered a fourth, but it is more than a political movement.)
At first glance, armed right-wing militants dressed in floral shirts may seem like another baffling grotesquerie in the parade of calamities that is 2020. However, their arrival can be explained by tracing their online origins. Similar to other right-leaning extremist movements, they are the product of an unhappy generation of men who compare their lot in life with that of men in previous decades and see their prospects diminishing. And with a mix of ignorance and simplicity, they view their discontent through the most distorted lens imaginable: internet memes.
Mary found some comfort in a Reddit group called QAnonCasualties, a support group for people whose loved ones believe in the conspiracy theory. It had nearly 4,000 members by June, nearly eight times the number three months earlier, when lockdowns were beginning around the world. One woman from New Jersey was planning to divorce her husband who she suspects became convinced of the conspiracy while at Alcoholics Anonymous – she reckons he swapped one addiction for another. Others talk about their baby-boomer parents whose belief in QAnon follows decades of devotion to other conspiracies. Finding the community has been helpful to Mary: “I’m not the only one dealing with a family member that is acting like this, who is pushing their family away without even realising it.”
The Arctic is feverish and on fire, or at least parts of it are, and that's got scientists worried about what it means for the rest of the world.
The thermometer hit a record of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Russian Arctic town of Verkhoyansk on 20th of June, a temperature that would be a fever for a person but this is Siberia, known for being frozen. The World Meteorological Organization said that it's looking to verify the temperature reading, which would be unprecedented for the region north of the Arctic Circle.
A new campaign is demanding these companies respect Indigenous rights and drop their coverage
Massive flooding seen above and below the Three Gorges Dam is putting its purpose and stability into question.
In addition to generating electricity, one of the major stated purposes of the Three Gorges Dam was to help put a stop to the endless cycle of flooding seen along the Yangtze River for centuries. However, out of fears that this summer's floods upstream would overwhelm the mammoth showpiece project, its reservoir has been kept low by allegedly unleashing the sluicegates on lower reaches of the river, resulting in tremendous flooding below.
The White House is preparing to change its messaging on the coronavirus, to tell Americans it simply has to be lived with.
Below is an exclusive excerpt of the upcoming graphic novel Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy, published by First Second of Macmillan publishing and available July 7. Unrig, written by Daniel G. Newman with illustrations by George O’Connor, outlines key problems in U.S. democracy, proven solutions and stories of activists working to effect change. It documents the influence of money in politics, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the failings of the Electoral College, our current voting methods and more. The chapter below focuses on the history of voting rights in the United States and how to fight back against voter suppression.
Thiel was a vocal supporter of the president in 2016, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and donating $1.25 million that year to his campaign and other adjacent political groups and causes. Thiel, who earned his fortune co-founding PayPal before becoming one of the earliest Facebook investors, has no plans on donating any money to Trump’s campaign this year, the report says.
Liverpool John Moores University has apologised for asking staff to check with its communications team before using institutional social media accounts to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
The email, sent by head of corporate communications Ben Jones to LJMU social media account holders, urged “caution” when it came to liking, sharing or retweeting when attempting to engage with or show support for issues related to Black Lives Matter and slavery commemorations.
Many others followed suit. Parler, founded in August 2018, touts itself as an "unbiased" social media platform focused on "real user experiences and engagement." In recent weeks, it has become a destination for conservatives who have voiced their disapproval of how mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter moderate content.
But as with every other platform on the [I]nternet, Parler's free speech stance goes only so far. The platform has been banning many people who joined and trolled conservatives.
Wong said he believed the removal of the books was sparked by the security law.
"White terror continues to spread, the national security law is fundamentally a tool to incriminate speech," he wrote on Facebook, using a phrase that refers to political persecution.
Searches on the public library website showed at least three titles by Wong, Chan and local scholar Chin Wan are no longer available for lending at any of dozens of outlets across the territory.
An AFP reporter was unable to find the titles at a public library in the district of Wong Tai Sin on Saturday afternoon.
Hong Kong's Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which runs libraries, said books had been removed while it is determined whether they violate the national security law.
In what was described by free speech advocates as part of an ongoing assault on press freedom in Egypt, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation (SCMR) recently banned journalists and social media users from reporting on sensitive political and economics topics.
According to the regulator, print, online and TV media outlets, as well as social media platforms, will only be allowed to quote formal statements released by official bodies about the conflict in Libya, Sinai, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and the coronavirus pandemic.
Known for allegedly being controlled by the security authorities and the government, the council presents itself as an independent entity that monitors media performance in Egypt.
I know those last two names all too well. Almost a decade ago, while working for New Scientist magazine, I published an investigation into HGC’s prenatal paternity test. I spoke to women whose lives were upended by incorrect results and spent months dissecting the test’s serious scientific flaws. Shortly after my article was published in December 2010, HGC and its CEO, Yuri Melekhovets, sued for libel, setting up a long legal battle that finally came to an end in April this year.
In December 2018, I was vindicated in a ruling from a Canadian court. “No matter how damaging or disparaging it may be to the plaintiffs, the truth can never be actionable,” the judge wrote, concluding that the criticisms made in my original article were justified.
The Saudi trial was dismissed as "the antithesis of justice" by a UN Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard, who concluded that Khashoggi was "the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution" for which the Saudi state was responsible.
The survey found 98 per cent of those who responded flatly opposed the law. 87 per cent believed that freedom of the press would be “severely affected.” 90 per cent said journalists’ safety would be threatened, 93 per cent said that they feared media outlets would be punished for covering sensitive subjects, and 63 per cent said they were “very pessimistic” about the future of press freedom in Hong Kong.
Now that the text of the national security law has been released, the fears of the Hong Kong press corps have been proven right. While large portions of the law deal with the offences and penalties for secession, subversion, terrorist activities, collusion with foreign governments and external elements that all endanger national security, the text also has numerous areas that can be seen as enabling constraints on the free press.
Many of us are reflecting on what it means to engage critically within our own communities as a way of supporting and being accountable to broader movements for justice. In this moment, prioritizing community education — a process of learning and teaching together toward meaningful social change — is one of the many ways that those of us not directly targeted by anti-Black racism can collectively support and participate in movements to abolish policing, prisons, and all systems that profit off of and perpetuate anti-Blackness.
Every year people die in the custody of Illinois Department of Corrections, the vast majority due in part to overincarceration. COVID-19 is highlighting this fact because it is attacking the elderly and infirm, many of whom have spent decades enduring harsh prison conditions. They die lonely deaths for no other reason than incarceration politics, and in a vain attempt to satiate the insatiable appetite some people have for revenge.
More than 100 treaty defenders and other protesters gathered on a highway leading to Mount Rushmore on Friday ahead of President Donald Trump’s speech at the monument.
Racial justice protests are happening across the country during this Fourth of July weekend to challenge acts of police brutality perpetrated against Black people. These much-needed actions highlight not only modern-day police abuse but also the sordid history of white supremacy and racial violence in this country. Instead of celebrating a false narrative of American struggle for liberty and justice for all, we should be out in the streets protesting against the continued killings by the police of Black people and we should wrestle with this country’s true history of racial violence and oppression that has led us to this much needed reckoning.
From the beginning, policing in this country has primarily protected the powerful. Maybe now that can change.
Like many cities, New York City began equipping its police officers with body-worn cameras a few years ago. The footage is often invaluable evidence for the civilian agency charged with investigating complaints about NYPD abuses.
The Argus Leader reported on June 30 that another Sioux leader had joined calls to remove Mount Rushmore. Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said, "Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or treaty than the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore."
"We are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance, and fire, hoping our sacred lands survive," Frazier said. "This brand on our flesh needs to be removed, and I am willing to do it free of charge to the United States, by myself if I must."
Fighting game tournament organizer Evo has canceled Evo Online and removed its co-founder and president from the company after serious allegations surfaced about his past behavior. The long-running esports event had previously been scheduled to take place in a new online-only format starting July 4th due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Thus, as Trump's so-called policies kill tens of thousands of Americans, he's making the richest even richer.
Even as the death toll mounts, including any number of essential workers, the downdraft of Trump's Depression is kicking in. Remember all the hot air about premium pay for the essential workforce? According to the latest monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics, hourly earnings for private non-farm payroll shrank by 35 cents and hour, while nonsupervisory workers lost 23 cents an hour.
Phalane Mahlane writes that, as Africans, we demand our own style, flair and identity.
But that is often merely an empty euphemism reserved for Africa Day.
We have peculiar problems that only we as Africans have a fundamental responsibility to solve. No one else will come to our rescue.
This week’s case of the week deals with issues relating to obviousness and standing in a consolidated appeal of two final written decisions issued in inter partes review (“IPR”) proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”). The IPRs were brought by adidas, challenging two Nike patents directed to methods of manufacturing an article of footwear with a textile upper, both of which cover Nike’s Flyknit products. The PTAB held that adidas did not demonstrate the challenged claims were unpatentable as obvious, and adidas appealed. On appeal, the Federal Circuit found that adidas has standing and affirmed the PTAB’s decisions that adidas had failed to meet its burden of proof on obviousness.
First, as to standing, Nike argued that adidas lacked standing to appeal because adidas could not establish the requisite “injury in fact” since Nike had not threatened to sue adidas for infringement of the patents at issue. The Court disagreed, explaining that an appellant need not face a specific threat of infringement to establish the required injury. Rather, adidas’s risk of infringement is concrete and substantial, and thus injury was established, because (1) adidas and Nike are direct competitors, (2) Nike previously accused adidas of infringing a different Flyknit patent, (3) Nike asserted one of the two patents at issue against a third-party product similar to adidas’s product, and (4) Nike had refused to grant adidas a covenant not to sue. The Court therefore found that adidas had standing to appeal the PTAB’s final written decisions.
Next, as to obviousness, in the IPRs, adidas challenged the claims of Nike’s patents as obvious in view of two prior art combinations. The PTAB held that adidas had failed to demonstrate that a person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the references. Certain challenged claims, called the Base Claims, are directed to a method of “mechanically-manipulating a yarn with a circular knitting machine … to form a cylindrical textile structure.” The method claimed by the Base Claims involves removing a textile element from the textile structure and incorporating it into an upper of the article of footwear. The PTAB construed the Base Claims as “encompass[ing] methods related to both pre-seamed and unseamed garments and garment sections.” Certain other challenged claims, called the Unitary Construction Claims, limited the Base Claims by requiring the textile element to be a single material element wherein portions of it have different textures and are not joined together by seams or other connections.
As to the first prior art combination, the PTAB found that adidas failed to show a motivation to combine because the “unitary construction” limitation excluded the type of seams taught by the primary reference, known as “pre-seaming.” As such, combining the two references would require altering the principles of operation of the primary reference, or would render it inoperable for its intended purpose. On appeal, adidas argued that substantial evidence did not support the PTAB’s findings because both references discuss knitting in multiple layers and a skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine the references to reduce waste. adidas further argued that the pre-seaming differences between the two references are irrelevant in view of the PTAB’s construction of the Base Claims. That is, in view of the PTAB’s construction of the Base Claims as including both pre-seamed and unseamed garments, adidas argued that all that was necessary was evidence of a suggestion to extend the teachings of the primary reference. The Court disagreed, explaining that the obviousness inquiry asks more than whether a skilled artisan could combine references, but instead asks whether they would have been motivated to do so. Because of the fundamental differences between the two references, the Court concluded that substantial evidence supports the PTAB’s finding that a person skilled in the art would not have been motivated to combine them.
Last week, MLex published a report by Khushita Vsant (not paywalled, though most MLex reports are available only to subscribers, which is why I rarely have the chance to link to them) on a "third round of questions" the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) expects automotive suppliers to answer sometime this week.
MLex says the questionnaire "also asks carmakers about 'have-made' rights in Nokia's license offers." An academic paper recently discussed the shortcomings of such "have-made rights", and I commented on it. The Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office of Germany) summarized the parties' positions, including Nokia's offer to grant "have-made rights," in its submission to the courts hearing Nokia's German patent infringement complaints against Daimler, but clearly wasn't persuaded that the availability of "have-made rights" would obviate the need for judicial clarification on the availability of a full component-level license affording suppliers freedom to operate.
On the one hand, it's a positive sign that Daimler's and its suppliers' antitrust complaints against Nokia are still being preliminarily investigated by DG COMP. On the other hand, the Commission's hesitance to launch formal investigations is in stark contrast to a variety of cases involving American companies (you name them).
"Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or treaty than the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore,” Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier said in a statement condemning Mount Rushmore and the Trump event.
Young has spoken out against Trump and the use of his songs at rallies in the past, writing an open letter earlier this year critiquing Trump's presidency and throwing support behind former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Pirate sites generally operate in secrecy but, in order to get noticed, they need some kind of promotional outreach. Streaming site YolaMovies has rediscovered a rather old fashioned but effective way to do so. Instead of going through social media, the site is using the Associated Press to issue several press releases which, with help from Google, result in plenty of eyeballs.
The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies says it will conduct an investigation into the financial business models of organized crime groups involved in illicit streaming. The project is being funded by the UK Intellectual Property Office, the MPA, and the Premier League, among others.
