Just deployed a server? Here are some recommended things to do after installing Linux server to make it more secure. Automated script is also provided.
This week the DL Triforce discuss the great news of more Linux hardware from Lenovo but is there a twist to this discussion? Microsoft is bringing Edge to Linux! Is this the death of Firefox as we know it? In the Gaming section, Amazon has decided to join the Cloud Gaming Space. Is this a good move for Amazon or is Cloud Gaming ahead of its time? Later in the show we’ll give you our popular tips/tricks and software picks. Plus so much more, coming up right now on Destination Linux.
DemocracyLab connects tech for good projects with skilled volunteers. This non-profit sets out to empower people who use technology to advance the common good. Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett talk with Mark Frischmuth, the founder and Executive Director of DemocracyLab. They discuss how DemocracyLab is open to not just software developers but also designers, marketers, and financial analysts, which allows projects to get made and adapted by users. The talk about the importance of technologists stepping up and using their cognitive surplus to create a better world.
We embrace new tools to upgrade your backup game, securely move files around the network, and debunk the idea that Windows will ever be based on Linux.
In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.
I've been using Lf for quite a while now but I've always had Vifm just out of sight and I thought I should finally give it a shot, now it's obviously not perfect and there are some things to get used to compared to switching from ranger to lf but I think ultimately this terminal file manager deserves the praise that it gets.
The Fedora 33 Beta is out, and the BTRFS filesystem is the new default. Schykle thinks it's the way forward for ALL Linux distributions.
This week has been “a week of millions” for the Linux Foundation, with our announcement that over 1 million people have taken our free Introduction to Linux course. As part of the research for our recently published 2020 Linux Kernel History Report, the Kernel Project itself determined that it had surpassed one million code commits. Here is how we established the identity of this lucky Kernel Project contributor.
It may be a familiar story for a lot of office workers no matter where you live in 2020. Out of the blue, COVID19 showed up, and suddenly working remotely is the new norm – your company either allowing it or encouraging it. I am also in this situation, stuck for about 6 months at home, more or less. And with all changes, there’s positive and negative aspects. In my case, I have lost a comfortable setup in my workplace (multiple monitors, high resolution).
In order to make the best of working from home, I have purchased an ultra-wide monitor, which happens to be FreeSync compatible as well. But would it actually work on Linux? Especially on a non-AMD GPU configuration?
NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan sent out on Monday his latest "1GB PUD THP" patches in aiming to boost application performance on Linux for software making use of large amounts of RAM.
This 1GB transparent hugepage support for Linux x86_64 is designed to reduce translation overhead and allow for greater application performance for software with large memory footprints without needing any application changes. NVIDIA's motivation for this work is on the performance front with aiming to boost virtual memory performance via gigantic TLB entries without needing additional changes as imposed by HUGETLBFS pages. The PUD THP support would be disabled by default but can be toggled via sysfs under /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/.
NVIDIA's Linux Vulkan beta driver build has moved from the 450 series that it's been on for a while to the current 455 branch.
Earlier this month NVIDIA shipped the 455.23.04 Linux beta driver for RTX 30 series support being most notable for the R455 series. But there are also various other underlying improvements too in the jump from 450 to 455 like a new VkMemoryType that will help out some games, numerous fixes, support for the NGX Updater, and VDPAU additions.
NVIDIA have pushed out a fresh update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver series, here's the highlights and what's changed.
For starters it's now been rebased on top of their mainline 455 driver branch, which brings with it Ampere 30xx series support. So for anyone truly needing this series for all the brand-new Vulkan extensions and other Beta features, you should be good to go.
New features since v0.2.0:
* Copy & paste, thanks to Scott Moreau. * wayvnc now has a man page. * wayvnc now exits if authentication is enabled but fails.
Git commit history since v0.2.0:
Alexander Graul (1): Add openSUSE Tumbleweed installation instruction
Andri Yngvason (15): buffer: Fix buffer attribute comparison README: Use "yay" in archlinux installation instructions Exit if enabling auth fails Clean up config on exit Clean up aml on nvnc init failure data-control: Make offer handling asynchronous data-control: Don't free data-control-manager twice data-control: Clean up whole receive context in aml_free_fn data-control: Destroy data device on exit Don't init data_control if it's not supported by compositor Write a man page Generate and install a man page man-page: Fix wording FAQ: Remove outdated Q Release v3.0.0 Fix man page path
Jan Beich (1): shm: guard fallback on FreeBSD < 13 as well
Jony (1): add Void Linux install command to README.md
Scott Moreau (1): Add basic clipboard support
WayVNC 0.3 released today as the Wayland VNC server built atop the WLROOTS library.
The headline feature of WayVNC is... clipboard support! Yep, this popular Wayland VNC server can finally support copy and paste functionality. This clipboard support landed just last week and allows copy/paste of text to/from the host clipboard. On the Wayland side this clipboard support is making use of the wlr-data-control-unstable-v1 protocol. This WayVNC clipboard support was written by longtime Wayland contributor Scott Moreau.
MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple's Metal API.
MoltenVK 1.1 is out with Vulkan 1.1 support by exposing all core Vulkan 1.1 extensions and other relevant changes. There are also a number of other new Vulkan extensions supported by this release like KHR_multiview, KHR_external_semaphore, KHR_external_fence, and others.
Mir 2.1 has been released as Canonical's project around offering a set of libraries for constructing Wayland shells particularly with Snap confinement support and other Ubuntu-focused features.
With the Mir 2.1 release comes a --show-splash command line option, reduced locking within the KeyRepeatDispatcher code, support for the zwp_linux_dmabuf_unstable_v1 protocol within the GBM-KMS back-end, and support for the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell_v1 v3 and wlr_foreign_toplevel_management_unstable_v1 protocols. There are also X11 handling improvements too.
A batch of fixes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver were sent in today for Linux 5.9. While AMDGPU fixes this late in the kernel cycle tend to not be too notable, this time around there are some prominent items worth covering.
When it comes to the next-generation "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" Navi 2x graphics (RDNA2) support, there are continued updates in making the support in good shape for Linux 5.9 stable. This work includes additional Sienna Cichlid PCI IDs being added, fixing for building DCN 3.0 code with older versions of GCC, temporarily disabling GFXOFF capabilities for Navy Flounder until issues are resolved, and the kernel side bits for AV1 decode with these GPUs.
The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU.
Adding to the many Panfrost open-source driver accomplishments this year is now support for the G72 as their latest support addition. The Mali G72 has been around since late 2017 and is making use of the second-generation Bifrost architecture. The Mali G72 is used by the likes of the Kirin 970, Samsung Exynos 9 9810, Exynos 7 9610, and Helio P60/P70 SoCs.
The sixth spin of Intel DG1 discrete graphics card patches have now been sent out for review, amounting to just about 700 lines of new driver code due to building off the existing DG1 work and more broadly the Gen12/Xe support that's been refined in mainline for months. With these patches it would appear the Intel DG1 is then in good shape under Linux but due to the timing is unlikely to be mainlined until a stable kernel release in early 2021.
Intel's Gen12 / Xe Graphics as found in Tiger Lake appears to be in good shape with the latest mainline code (soon to be tested at Phoronix) but for the DG1 discrete graphics card there have been patches lingering.
Just in time for the end of the quarter Intel's open-source multimedia team has released the Media Driver 2020.3 package for the Intel graphics accelerated media encode/decode component on Linux platforms.
The Intel Media Decode Driver 2020.3 is notable in that it rounds out the Gen12/Xe support. This support is not only for the Tiger Lake support now beginning to appear in shipping notebooks but also for DG1 and upcoming Rocket Lake and SG1 solutions as well.
Last week on the GNU toolchain side was initial work on supporting Intel Key Locker while this week Key Locker support has come to LLVM.
Intel Key Locker is a means of encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw key. Key Locker relies on converting AES keys into handles that are then used in place of the actual key, until revoked by the system. The goal with this feature is for preventing any rogue attackers from obtaining the actual AES keys on the system.
Ventoy is another awesome Bootable USB Creation Tool that can be used to boot and run multiple ISO files from USB. Its functionality is simple. Just Format your thumb drive using the tool, then drag and drop your chosen ISO files onto your flash drive. The ISO files are directly copied over and added to the boot menu. This should result in a ready to boot USB device. Ventoy is an Open Source tool, so everyone is welcome to dig in to see how it works. It supports legacy BIOS and UEFI boot options, and also works with UEFI Secure Boot. It is important to note that your flash drive can still be used for regular storage as well.
Running new hardware is always fun. The problems are endless. The solutions not so much.
So I've got a brand new ThinkPad X13 AMD. It features an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVME SSD. The internal type identifier is 20UF. It runs the latest firmware as of today with version 1.09.
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The system silently fails to boot a signed shim and grub from an USB thumb drive. I used on of the Debian Cloud images, which should properly work in this setup and do on my other systems.
The only fix I found was to disable Secure Boot alltogether.
OBS Studio 26.0, free open-source streaming and recording program, was released with many new features, improvements, and numerous bug-fixes.
The new released added Virtual Camera feature, allowing you to use the OBS output as a camera in other apps. So far, it’s only for Windows.
Free and open source video recording and live streaming software OBS Studio version 26.0 is out now.
Pretty much all you need to get going with video content, OBS Studio being cross-platform and open source opened up a lot of options for Linux users when it arrived a few years ago. It's been great to see it flourish.
What is the perfect setup for PC Gaming on the software side? Windows? Linux? or Both? Let's explore all the possibilities.
Arcane Fortune is a game we briefly highlighted at the start of August as one that is inspired by the likes of Civilization, SimCity and Dwarf Fortress and it's getting bigger again.
Quite an interesting experience already, with a lot of features and gameplay already there. You can even play it directly in your terminal - if you wish. However, it does also have a "proper" version that uses SDL2 with mouse support. With a new release that went up on September 27, not only has it pulled in new features, it's also now properly open source. The original release was under a creative commons license but now they've moved the code over to the AGPL.
SCS Software will be launching the American Truck Simulator - Colorado DLC at some point and while work goes on they've released a new teaser.
Here's one for you truckers, as Colorado has what some say is one of the most beautiful roads in America with the 'Million Dollar Highway' and it's going to be featured in the DLC. A pretty long stretch of road that runs from Bernalillo, New Mexico to Montrose, Colorado in the western United States. Sounds like the perfect place to go for a drive.
Black Tabby Games recently released the first episode of Scarlet Hollow, a horror visual novel and choice-driven adventure game set in the mountains of Appalachia. After the initial release, they put up a Linux version too!
It's made by the award-winning graphic novelist Abby Howard whose previously works include the comics of 2013: The Last Halloween, Junior Scientist Power Hour and The Last Halloween - all of which had very successful Kickstarter campaigns. Scarlet Hollow will have hand-drawn backgrounds mixed with animated sprites together with a "complex relationship system to bring to life an immersive world of charming (and terrifying) characters".
Transport Fever 2 is a much loved transport sim released with same-day Linux support in December 2019, and it's only going to keep getting better.
Gathering over seven thousand user reviews it has a Very Positive rating on Steam, so it's clear that this second edition from Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment has hit the mark. It has a lot of features, quite a lot of content and graphically it looks pretty good too.
However, it has just like the first game suffered some performance problems. They're aware, they've done a few updates to fix parts but more is needed. What's exciting here is that they announced in a post about upcoming macOS support that Linux and Windows will be getting an upgrade with Vulkan!
Space, sci-fi and farming - what more could you want? One Lonely Outpost is like Stardew Valley for fans who want something a little bit more out there.
The Kickstarter campaign which is now over ended on $123,195 pledged so there's clearly a lot of interest and that was way more than their $80,000 initial goal. Linux support is confirmed, and is listed very clearly for it too.
Several Foundation staff presented at GNOME Africa Onboard Virtual. Kristi Progri helped kick off the event with Foundation vice-president Regina Nkemchor Adejo. M de Blanc and Rosanna Yuen talked about the GNOME code of conduct. Melissa Wu reprised her session on What it’s Like to Be New to GNOME.
Rosanna will also be presenting at All Things Open. On October 20 at 3:30pm ET, you can catch “GNOME Foundation Then and Now — 20 years of bringing free software to the desktop.”
4MLinux 35.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
Today we are looking at Fedora 33 Beta. It comes fully packed with Gnome 3.38, Linux Kernel 5.68, and uses about 1.3-1.6GB ram when idling. It comes with Wayland and Btrfs File Manager by default and is a great Beta release. As seen in the video, it is not perfect yet, but I am sure that it will be fixed! Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Fedora 33 Beta. Enjoy!
Vivaldi browser is a fast, private and secure browser that blocks ads and trackers. It puts you in control with unique features.
Get a faster, better browser. Opera’s free VPN, Ad Blocker, integrated messengers and private mode help you browse securely and smoothly.
Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customizability; its motto is “Your browser, Your way”. There are official releases for Linux. Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox with substantial divergence.
Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. It blocks ads and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content creators.
The Fedora Project's latest Linux distribution is now available in beta, bringing with it a new file system, a new GNOME environment and introducing official support for Raspberry Pi.
The Fedora 33 Beta comes ahead of a planned launch of the full distribution at the end of October. Alongside Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server, Fedora 33 Beta adds Fedora IoT as a supported edition for the first time. Fedora IoT supports low-power hardware platforms based on x86 and ARM64 architecture, which includes the Raspberry Pi and Pine64 boards.
The next version of the Fedora Linux Operating system - Fedora 33 Beta is released. Some massive updates coming up in this installment of Fedora.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.7. is generally available as of September 30, 2020.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
It’s that time again: the time we announce the latest updates and new features in Red Hat Runtimes. The latest release, now available, builds on the work we have done over the past year to create cloud-native, modern applications, with a focus on our work in advancing Java.
Red Hat Runtimes is a part of the Red Hat Application Services portfolio and is a set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications that offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices or serverless applications. We make updates on a regular basis to meet changing customer demands while providing them with the technology necessary to make business-critical decisions while remaining innovative, competitive and flexible. Check out the rest of the post to learn more about the most recent updates to Red Hat Runtimes.
This is a primer on the implementation of the ROLIE protocol. The purpose of this report is to recommend automated processes for information exchange of various security compliance and vulnerability management assets using the ROLIE protocol and its open source implementation, Golie.
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The ROLIE standard helps to discover and consume security content in a standard and automated way. A ROLIE implementation like the golie tool can be used by security vendors or regular users to consume vendor provided CVE content. It can be used as a way to submit checklists to benchmark validation organizations, or it can be used to host subscription-model services around security content.
Have ideas on where else the ROLIE standard or the golie tool can be used or enhanced? Want to get involved in the project? Please provide your input and ideas at the GitHub project. It is very important to note that the vision of the project and tooling is to be multi-platform and multi-vendor. Contributions in any way are always and very welcomed!
Note: The ROLIE standard is still in its early stages of development, and the format may change should the standard change.
It’s hard to believe that we introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) into the market more than six years ago. RHEL 7 balanced the enterprise need for stability and compatibility with that of tangible innovation. At general availability, we believe that we dispelled the myth that the operating system is "just a commodity" and redefined the Linux operating system.
The IBM Sterling suite offers solutions for supply chain and B2B collaboration. For complete product documentation, including information on how to extend the solutions, check out the following product Knowledge Centers.
For this year’s JupyterCon, which is held online October 5-17, we are excited to have the opportunity to share our experience with the Jupyter ecosystem and showcase some of the contributions IBM has made during the past year.
The GTK documentation for C # is not very up to date, I tried to use a button to change a label and I failed first time. The Fedora team could improve this to develop the development side. Here's what I've managed to do so far with GTK.
I am running Fedora on my desktop since started working for Red Hat. Kind of ‘eat your own dogfood’ style despite fact that I am not active in Fedora development for some time.
Fedora 33 reached Beta status so it was time to upgrade.
Version 4.16.0 of the RPM package manager has been released.
Project Thoth develops open source tools that enhance the day-to-day life of developers and data scientists. Thoth uses machine-generated knowledge to boost the performance, security, and quality of your applications using artificial intelligence (AI) through reinforcement learning (RL). This machine-learning approach is implemented in Thoth adviser (if you want to know more, click here) and it is used by Thoth integrations to provide the software stack based on user inputs.
In this article, I introduce a case study—a recent inspection of a runtime issue when importing TensorFlow 2.1.0—to demonstrate the human-machine interaction between the Thoth team and Thoth components. By following the case study from start to finish, you will learn how Thoth gathers and analyzes some of the data to provide advice to its users, including bots such as Kebechet, AI-backed continuous integration pipelines, and developers using GitHub apps.
The Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) team recently announced the release of their latest version, Tails 4.11 with several major security vulnerability fixes added on top the numerous security holes fixed in Tails 4.10.
The Debian-based, live distro with the sole purpose of providing users with Internet anonymity by directing Internet traffic through the Tor network and at the same time, providing built-in tools for a secure work environment just received its latest release which has the primary focus of squashing bugs and toughening security.
The distro has received fixes to numerous major security issues that existed in earlier versions and the developers strongly encourage users to upgrade their versions to the latest immediately.
The biggest news in Tails 4.11 is the fact that it comes with the latest Tor Browser 10 anonymous web browser preinstalled, which is based on the newest Mozilla Firefox 78.3 ESR (Extended Support Release) series and includes Tor 0.4.4.5, Tor Launcher 0.2.25, and NoScript 11.0.44.
On top of that, Tails 4.11 updates the Mozilla Thunderbird email client to version 68.12 and extends the Persistent Storage feature to also save the keyboard, language, and other settings from the Welcome Screen. Users will be able to restore these settings when they reinstall Tails, but only after upgrading to version 4.11.
Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.
Since announcing plocate, a number of major and minor improvements have happened, and despite its prototype status, I've basically stopped using mlocate entirely now.
First of all, the database building now uses 90% less RAM, so if you had issues with plocate-build OOM-ing before, you're unlikely to see that happening anymore.
Second, while plocate was always lightning-fast on SSDs or with everything in cache, that isn't always the situation for everyone. It's so annoying having a tool usually be instant, and then suddenly have a 300 ms hiccup just because you searched for something rare. To get that case right, real work had to be done; I couldn't just mmap up the index anymore and search randomly around in it.
I keep forgetting how to make presentations. I had a list of tools in a wiki from a previous job, but that's now private and I don't see why I shouldn't share this (even if for myself!).
So here it is. What's your favorite presentation tool?
This month I've worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project.
Here’s my (twelfth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Breaking news, right?
Hardly. But this icon switch does rectify an issue that I publicly opined on before the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Back in March Ubuntu’s community-led design team decided to swap its discernible Ubiquity installer icon (below left) for what I described at the time as: “Ubuntu being sucked up a hoover”...
The technical hurdles crossed to bring Xen to Raspberry Pi 4 are detailed in a blogpost on The Linux Foundation Projects' website by Stefano Stabellini, tech lead of US semiconductor outfit Xilinx and creator of Xen on Arm, and Roman Shaposhnik, creator of the Edge Virtualization Engine, or Project EVE.
TechNexion’s rugged “EDM-G-IMX8M-PLUS” and “AXON-E-IMX8M-PLUS” modules run Linux on NXP’s 2.3 TOPS i.MX8M Plus with up to 8GB LPDDR4, 16GB eMMC, WiFi/BT, and starter kits. There are also new i.MX8M Mini and Nano EDM modules.
TechNexion has posted product pages for two compute modules that feature NXP’s i.MX8M Plus. The EDM-G-IMX8M-PLUS is essentially the same as the wireless enabled Wandboard IMX8M-Plus-4G module option on the sandwich-style Wandboard IMX8M-Plus SBC announced in August. However, it offers up to 8GB LPDDR4 instead of 4GB. The AXON-E-IMX8M-PLUS provides essentially the same capabilities but in TechNexion’s more rugged, 58 x 37mm AXON form-factor, which was used on the i.MX8M Mini-based AXON-IMX8M-Mini module.
Aaeon’s compact, $475 “Boxer-8222AI” embedded box runs Linux on a Jetson Nano along with 4x USB 3.1 Gen2, HDMI 2.0, RS-232, M.2, mini-PCIe, 40-pin GPIO, and 2x GbE ports, one with PoE/PD.
In April, Aaeon unveiled two compact systems: the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX-based Boxer-8251AI and similar Jetson Nano based Boxer-8221AI. At the time, the company mentioned an upcoming Boxer-8222AI, but without offering details. It has now launched the system, which runs the Ubuntu 18.04 based ACLinux 4.9 on the Jetson Nano.
Run a virtualized system using Alpine Linux with iSH, which is open source, but must be installed using Apple's proprietary TestFlight app
Designed by Brian Harms of NSTRMNT, Light[s]well is a beautifully crafted 4’x8ââ¬Â² light installation for a triple-height living room that’s voice-responsive thanks to the Arduino Alexa skill.
Light[s]well is constructed out of 80/20 extrusions and fasteners, with individually addressable LED strips embedded in the channels of the structure. 74 sheets of laser-cut cardstock make up the undulating light-diffusing wave pattern.
According to Harms, 30 LEDs per meter strips were used to give each gap in the cardstock two LEDs per structural metal beam, for a total of six LEDs per gap. The LEDs are controlled by a MKR1000 (via a logic level shifter) along with the Arduino IoT Cloud.
The Librem 5 is more than a phone, it’s a full desktop computer in your pocket designed to be just as mobile as you are.
Last week we introduced you to a premier workflow for film editors and videographers using free software and freedom-respecting hardware – the Librem Mini and a video editing suite called KDenLive. We also dived into the features of KDenLive and how to achieve certain tasks like using chroma key to remove backgrounds and place objects in new environments. In this article we are going to focus on another important video creation task: keyframe animations.
In the video below, we will demonstrate how we achieved a visual in a promo video displaying the workstation power of the Librem Mini, during a transition from a KDenLive screen recording and video footage of a colorful miniature train ride for children on display. Using an image of the minature train captured in a screenshot of the very first frame in the video, I was able to animate the train over the footage of the prior scene to create a captivating custom transition.
This is another incarnation of the software development progress for the Librem 5. This time for July and August 2020 (weeks 27-35).
Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea of this summary is so you can have a closer look at the coding and design side of things. It also shows how much we’re standing on the shoulders of giants reusing existing software and how contributions are flowing back and forth between upstream and downstream projects. This quickly gets interesting since we’re upstream for some projects (e.g. calls, phosh, chatty) and downstream for others (e.g Debian, Linux kernel, GNOME). So these reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm/ or to the upstream side (like e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).
New software releases have an extra section so if you’re using phosh, squeekbord, phoc, chatty, etc. outside of PureOS this section might be worth a quick look.
Although I'm only 20 years old, I've already had many opportunities to help build solutions for a better tomorrow. I've worked with open source technology, research publishing, media, and development. I have served as an administartor and mentor in Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In, and Google Season of Docs with Codeuino, Sugar Labs, Jboss Community, Terasology Foundation, and Open Collective. But my start in open source and technology was not very good.
In 2014, when I was only 14, I decided to participate in the Google Code-In (GCI) contest. I didn't really know what open source and GCI were before I started, but I was desperate to get the Google swag (a t-shirt, hoodie, and digital certificate) and tried to win the contest by availing the grand prize winner slot. But I didn't have any experience in coding, so I ended up copying much of someone else's work, which resulted in a frozen email account from the GCI program manager and disqualification from the contest.
The Open Source Definition (OSD), maintained by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), is a foundational pillar of the open source movement. The OSI's view is that software validly labeled "open source" must be made available in a manner that satisfies the 10 criteria set forth in the OSD, all but one of which pertain to licensing terms.
Through its license review process, the OSI determines whether a submitted license is OSD-conformant. Widely recognized as authoritative, the OSD is commonly invoked in contractual language and has been referenced in statutes and regulations. The OSD was drafted and adopted by the OSI shortly after its founding in 1998. It is essentially a rebranding of the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) with relatively minor changes. It has been amended only once, in 2002, with the addition of a tenth plank ("License must be technology-neutral").
I have discussed some of the best open-source eCommerce platforms to build shopping websites in the past. Recently, I came to know about a new platform called Bagisto. It’s built on Laravel, which is a free and open-source PHP framework.
On the first look, it’s impressive to find an open-source eCommerce solution that lets you craft beautiful shopping experiences. Hence, I decided to give a quick look on what it offers and if it’s something that you can try.
Following last week's news of Firefox Nightly flipping on their new JIT "Warp" update I was eager to run fresh benchmarks of the current Firefox releases compared to Google Chrome under Ubuntu Linux.
Warp was enabled last week for Firefox 83 nightly builds with this "Warp" just-in-time JavaScript compiler update having various improvements in an effort to provide greater responsiveness and faster page load speeds. Numbers cited by Mozilla engineers on their JavaScript/SpiderMonkey team were frequently in the 5~15% range. Even instances like Google Docs load times on Windows was around 20% faster with Warp.
This round of benchmarking was done with Firefox 81, Firefox 82 Beta 3, and Firefox 83 Alpha 1 nightly as of last week after Warp landed. A secondary run of Firefox 83 nightly was also done with WebRender force enabled on Linux. Plus Google Chrome 85 was also tested as the latest stable release.
I mentioned earlier that documenting data science work is significantly different than documenting engineering work. One of they key differences is that data scientists tend to do more once-and-done work than engineers. Data science is a race against irrelevance. The world is changing around us and we need to deliver insights before our findings go stale.
It's impossible and inefficient to try to document all of this one-off work. Only a small portion of the resulting documentation would ever be used. Even worse, the useful documentation will be hidden in a sea of useless noise.
Instead, data scientists should focus on keeping good work records, contextualizing their analyses, and preparing themselves to backfill documentation later.
A few weeks ago, we mentioned that we were working on increasing extension support in the Firefox for Android Nightly pre-release channel. Starting September 30, you will be able to install any extension listed on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) in Nightly.
This override was created for extension developers and advanced users who are interested in testing for compatibility, so it’s not easily accessible. Installing untested extensions can lead to unexpected outcomes; please be judicious about the extensions you install. Also, since most developers haven’t been able to test and optimize their extensions for the new Android experience, please be kind if something doesn’t work the way it should. We will remove negative user reviews about extension performance in Nightly.
Currently, Nightly uses the Collections feature on AMO to install extensions. You will need to create a collection on AMO and change an advanced setting in Nightly in order to install general extensions.
The following text is in German, since we're announcing a regional user group meeting in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Python 3.4 added the asyncio module to the standard library. Asyncio allows us to run IO-bound tasks asynchronously to increase the performance of our program. Common IO-bound tasks include calls to a database, reading and writing files to disk, and sending and receiving HTTP requests. A Django web application is a common example of an IO-bound application.
We’ll demonstrate the usage of concurrent HTTP requests by fetching prices for stock tickers. The only third party package we’ll use is httpx. Httpx is very similar to the popular requests package, but httpx supports asyncio.
Changes Coming To Pip In October 2020: People who deal with Python: Changes are coming to pip, Python's package installation tool, in October 2020. Please share this migration guide and our video with your circles.
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I'm working on improving the Python packaging toolchain, foundational work that will (in the long run) make the whole Python experience way less confusing. In the short term this may mess with some people's workflows, so we want lots of people to hear about it now.
This article is based in this documentation page and this video where Mike Coleman takes us how to deploy a Django application on Amazon Lightsail. It was also considered two articles from Bitnami (Getting started with Django, and Deploy a Django project).
Python’s map() is a built-in function that allows you to process and transform all the items in an iterable without using an explicit for loop, a technique commonly known as mapping. map() is useful when you need to apply a transformation function to each item in an iterable and transform them into a new iterable. map() is one of the tools that support a functional programming style in Python.
In this Pandas tutorial, you are going to learn how to count occurrences in a column. There are occasions in data science when you need to know how many times a given value occurs. This can happen when you, for example, have a limited set of possible values that you want to compare. Another example can be if you want to count the number of duplicate values in a column. Furthermore, we may want to count the number of observations there is in a factor or we need to know how many men or women there are in the data set, for example.
Machine Learning is super powerful if your data is numeric. What do you do, however, if you want to mine text data to discover hidden insights or to predict the sentiment of the text. What, for example, if you wanted to identify a post on a social media site as cyber bullying.
The first concept to be aware of is a Bag of Words. When training a model or classifier to identify documents of different types a bag of words approach is a commonly used, but basic, method to help determine a document's class. A bag of words is a representation of text as a set of independent words with no relationship to each other. It is called a “bag” of words, because any information about the order or structure of words in the document is discarded.
Don't get me wrong, I really like virtualenv and it's pretty useful in some scenarios. But sometimes you have to deal with OS dependencies and that forces you to install new packages and it can get a bit messy in some scenarios.
According to official statistics, Russian-annexed Crimea identified its first coronavirus case on March 21. By the beginning of May, when morbidity rates were rising sharply all across Russia, Crimea had recorded 100 cases of the infection; Sevastopol, its largest city, had 85. At that time, the Primorsky Krai, Omsk Region, and Leningrad Region — Russian regions with populations comparable to that of the peninsula (about 2.3 million people) — had recorded 430, 116, and 929 cases, respectively.
One former aide said she saw "senior White House political staff actively undermine the doctors by attempting to manipulate scientific data on the virus and force changes to CDC guidances."
The lessons of Covid-19 are stark: tragedy, horror and loss for millions. They are eloquent on the climate crisis ahead.
Officials within the Trump administration sought to pressure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to downplay the risks associated with coronavirus in children in order to bolster the narrative that it was safe for schools to resume in-person instruction across the United States, according to The New York Times.
Progressive advocacy groups and labor leaders are urging Senate Republicans and the Trump White House to stop stonewalling and immediately approve a Covid-19 relief package unveiled late Monday by House Democrats that would renew the expired $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement, send another round of $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans, and provide aid to faltering state and local governments.
"We truly are setting an example for the nation on how to build an economy that works for all of us, not just a chosen few."
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, firefox, libvirt, and podman), Debian (firefox-esr and nss), Gentoo (bitcoind, chromium, cifs-utils, gpsd, libuv, and xen), Mageia (firefox, gnutls, mediawiki, samba, and Thunderbird), openSUSE (brotli and cifs-utils), Red Hat (audiofile, bluez, cloud-init, cpio, cups, curl, dbus, dnsmasq, e2fsprogs, evince and poppler, exiv2, expat, firefox, fontforge, freeradius, freerdp, glib2 and ibus, glibc, httpd, hunspell, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, libcroco, libexif, libmspack, libpng, librabbitmq, libsndfile, libsrtp, libssh2, libtiff, libvirt, libvpx, libwmf, libxml2, libxslt, mariadb, mod_auth_openidc, NetworkManager, nss and nspr, okular, OpenEXR, openldap, openwsman, pcp, python, python-pillow, python3, qemu-kvm, qemu-kvm-ma, qt5-qtbase, samba, SDL, spamassassin, squid, subversion, systemd, tigervnc, tomcat, unoconv, and webkitgtk4), SUSE (bcm43xx-firmware, nodejs8, pdns, python-pip, and xen), and Ubuntu (libapreq2, netqmail, samba, and tomcat6).
Last year, a CBP vendor suffered a data breach affecting more than 100,000 people who had crossed the border at checkpoints. The CBP refused to name the contractor involved in the breach, but internal documents indicated it was Perceptics. Perceptics provided and maintained the system that photographed cars and their occupants as they crossed the border.
War hero. Veterans advocate. Family man.
It was an image years in the making. Brian Kolfage had lost three limbs in an Iraq bomb blast in 2004, making him the most badly wounded airman to survive the war. He had become a motivational speaker, was the subject of sympathetic news profiles and was even a guest at former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in 2012.
If the international community is serious about finding lasting solutions, then responsibility sharing is key.
Many Afghans displaced outside their country are stuck in a state of perennial limbo, with no prospects for a genuine, safe return on the horizon. Yet the European Union and Afghanistan are negotiating the extension of a divisive agreement that repatriates failed asylum seekers to a country still at war.
The EU and Afghanistan signed the Joint Way Forward agreement (JWF) in 2016, in response to the so-called “refugee and migrant crisis”, when people from countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq sought shelter and better livelihoods in Europe. This deal was seen by many as an attempt by the EU to shy away from their protection responsibilities, and instead, facilitate the return of thousands of Afghan nationals. Set to expire next week, on 6 October 2020, the EU is currently negotiating a further two-year extension of this agreement.
While the JWF ostensibly offers a straightforward resolution to addressing the issue of irregular migration of Afghans to Europe, the deal fails to acknowledge two crucial factors: the impact of ongoing conflict, and the unequal burden Afghanistan’s neighbours have shouldered for years.
"As we all know, the world is in trouble," the 94-year-old conservationist says.
Countless studies have shown factory farming’s contribution to climate change, emitting more greenhouse gases than all the transportation in the world combined.
As climate change worsens wildfires each year, unhoused people in Oregon and Washington experience the worst of the smoke.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
The€ book, AS THE WORLD BURNS: The New Generation of Activists and the Legal Fight Against Climate Change, tells the stories of these young people who are part of a generation of youth fighting for their lives and their rights amidst the unfolding climate crisis. “AS THE WORLD BURNS is climate breakdown like you’ve never seen it — through the eyes of the young,” the book’s description notes.€
Global warming is ravaging forests throughout the world.
As communities across New Mexico deal with the deadly coronavirus pandemic, the federal government is attempting a massive land grab, offering millions of acres of public land near Chaco Canyon National Historic Park to oil and gas drillers for fracking. This plan has been slowed down before, but it needs to be stopped entirely.
1. If it isn’t disposable, it isn’t safe. So, for the supposed safety of a single generation of humans – us – we are poisoning the next thousand generations of our descendants and those of every other species. For our safety, soils and rivers and oceans are flooded more than ever before with plastic. To add infection to injury, the future is also being prime-pumped with antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which predictably spawn in the seas of sanitizers, seeping into watersheds all over the world. Our sanitized hands have blood on them.
In 11 of the 18 years examined, Trump paid no taxes at all.
Trump and Republicans wrote the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. To no one’s surprise, it added more ways for the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.
In a historic victory for unhoused people, Philadelphia city officials agreed to hand over 50 vacant homes to a community land trust, following months of organizing and protest encampments. We hear from one of the organizers and speak to Philadelphia-based Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who has written extensively about housing insecurity and says the direct actions there are applicable across the U.S. “This dynamic exists all over the country where you have both empty housing and houseless people, a completely irrational expression of what American capitalism means,” Taylor says. The sustained movement in Philadelphia established “a model for what all tenant organizing and activist groups should be taking up, which is occupy the space, occupy the properties and put political pressure on public housing authorities to do their job and house people that are unhoused.”
"What's truly shocking about the returns is what is legal, not what is illegal."
"The only thing saving him at this point is the Department of Justice's guideline that says you can't indict a sitting president."
Rather than privatizing, one economist argues the USPS should stop self-financing, return to being a "department of the federal government proper," and expand to offer other services.
"A good reminder to thank your letter carrier for the important work they do."
Ahead of the first of three presidential debates between President Trump and Joe Biden, we speak with David Cay Johnston, founder and editor-in-chief of DCReport.org, who says the bombshell New York Times report on Trump’s taxes highlights the existence of “two income tax systems, separate and unequal.” The Times reports that Trump paid no federal income tax in 10 of the past 15 years and just $750 in 2016 and 2017. In a follow-up report, the Times reveals Trump made $427 million in connection to the hit reality TV show “The Apprentice,” providing him a financial lifeline as other investments lost money. “People who own their own businesses, like Donald Trump, are under a different system,” says Johnston.
There's been a lot of buzz lately about the Netflix Documentary The Social Dilemma, which we've been told reveals to us "the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations." I know that the documentary has generated widespread discussion -- especially among those not in the tech space. But there's a problem with the film: nearly everything it claims social media platforms do -- manipulating people with misinformation -- the film does itself. It is horribly one-sided, frequently misrepresents some fairly basic things, and then uses straight up misinformation to argue that social media has some sort of godlike control on the people who use it. It's nonsense.
"This nominee would be no friend to the small businesses and workers who continue to struggle during the€ ongoing€ public health and economic€ crises."
President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court may rouse debate over the dubious Christian practice of “speaking in tongues,” or glossalalia.
Trump doesn’t decide who wins the election. We do.
Tonight’s first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden comes in the teeth of a lethal and still-growing pandemic, a shattered economy, cataclysmic climate-fueled wildfires, vehicle attacks committed by right-wing extremists against racial justice protesters, a looming Supreme Court placement with the fate of basic rights hanging in the balance, and a long-simmering presidential tax scandal detonating directly on the doorstep of the evening’s festivities.
Election Day this November rightly occupies the minds and hearts of American citizens, no matter what their political affiliations. The future of the republic itself is at stake. But the U.S. isn’t the only country in the world with an upcoming election, and where the system of government is at issue. Chile, the South American nation that runs along a narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, faces a national plebiscite on 25 October 2020, just two weeks before Election Day in the States.
We must see the GOP’s exercise of raw power for what it is and meet it with even greater force.
Amid the bombshell coverage of Trump’s tax records, it might be tempting to believe the tide has turned and will drown his election hopes. But that's wishful thinking.
"House Democrats have again stepped up. Will McConnell and the White House ever do the same?"
Previously redacted portions of a 2006 intelligence assessment reveal the FBI predicted violent racists would infiltrate U.S. police departments.€
The Fourth Amendment says law enforcement needs probable cause to effect an arrest. Further probable cause is needed -- as determined by a neutral judge -- to continue holding this person. This isn't even controversial. It has been established law for years. And yet, when ICE goes hunting for people it wants to deport, the Fourth Amendment just kind of vanishes. This happens even when ICE is wrong, and the person officers want to eject from the country is actually a US citizen.
Karelia’s Supreme Court has overturned historian Yuri Dmitriev’s 3.5-year prison term and sentenced him to 13 years in prison under a criminal conviction for violent sexual acts. This was reported to Mediazona by Igor Perov, the lawyer representing Dmitriev’s foster daughter.
Just days after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the previous October 31 deadline for the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau late Monday released a one-sentence statement announcing that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross plans to shut down the once-in-a-decade count on October 5 in open defiance of court instructions.
We've noted a few times that while Space X's Starlink will be a very good thing for a limited number of rural customers out of the range of traditional broadband options, it's not going to truly disrupt the busted U.S. telecom market in any revolutionary way. The service should be a step up from traditionally expensive, capped, and sluggish old-school satellite broadband, since new low-orbit satellites can provide lower latency service at a price point Elon Musk insists will be competitive.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has been first in line to gleefully pump up the still-unsubstantiated-by-any-evidence claim that social media companies are "unfairly censoring conservatives." In fact, he's been very vocal about the idea that social media should not be blocking anyone for their political beliefs. Just a few months ago he attacked "conservative bias and threats to free speech on the internet," saying that "doing nothing is not the answer." He's complained loudly about when Twitter briefly banned an infamous Twitter troll/Republican political operative for harassment, saying (falsely) that it was "censorship on social media and an attempt by social media "gatekeepers" to "launch a war on memes so they can control the 2020 narrative." No, dude. It was Twitter following its rules against harassment.
On September 29, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Velos Media, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent No. 10,110,898 unpatentable. The ’898 patent, generally directed to video quantization techniques for limiting the data that results from the encoding process, represents one of the largest patent families known to be owned by Velos Media, LLC.
Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard. The family of the '898 patent, originally assigned to Sony Corporation, was transferred to Velos Media in 2018.
In Packet Intelligence LLC, v. Netscout Systems, Inc. the Federal Circuit reversed a jury determination for pre-suit damages, and vacated an enhancement of such damages, for Netscout’s infringement of U.S. Patent 6,665,725, U.S. Patent 6,839,751, and U.S. Patent 6,954,789, all owned by Packet Intelligence.
The patents at issue were all directed to monitoring packets exchanged over a computer network. The ‘798 patent includes system claims, and the ‘725 and ‘751 patents include method claims. It was important in this case that infringement of the various system and method claims have different requirements to qualify for pre-suit damages. Pre-suit damages for the system claims are controlled by the marking requirements of 35 U.S.C. €§ 287(a), whereas pre-suit damages for the method claims are not.
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Ultimately, the Federal Circuit reversed the determination for pre-suit damages and vacated the enhancement of such damages because Packet Intelligence failed meet its burden in showing that MeterFlow did not practice the invention for the system claims, and had insufficient support for its damage theory with respect to the method patents.
A district court recently dismissed a complaint for failing to properly allege direct infringement with the mobile device recited in the patent claims. Garrett v. TP-Link Research America (N.D. Cal.). An app for installation on a mobile device does not count as a mobile device or as using a mobile device for showing direct infringement, and when pleading indirect infringement, direct infringement by an end user must be alleged. Garrett’s complaint against TP-Link failed on these scores, so the court granted TP-Link’s motion to dismiss the complaint, without prejudice.
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The court granted the dismissal of the direct infringement claims because the app does not satisfy the claim elements requiring a mobile device. Under €§ 271(a), “whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States … infringes the patent.” According to the court, to “make” or “sell” the claimed system, TP-Link would have had to make or sell a mobile device. The app didn’t cut it: “An application to be installed on a mobile device is not the same thing as the ‘mobile device’ itself.” To “use” the claimed system, TP-Link would have had to use it in the manner of the end user. “Garrett alleges in the Complaint that the infringing products can be used in an infringing manner but does not allege that TPRA has ever ‘used’ a ‘mobile device’ or assembled the system with a ‘mobile device’ in an infringing manner.” Similarly, to infringe the claimed method, TP-Link would have had to use a mobile device in the same manner as the end user. “Because methods cannot be sold in the same way as devices, the sale of a product for performing a claimed method does not constitute direct infringement.”
In granting a motion to dismiss based on lack of patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 and the Alice/Mayo test, a court held that patent claims for multiple patents directed to “wireless surveillance systems for monitoring a target environment” are abstract ideas, and “merely implement[ing] the abstract idea of wireless communication and remote surveillance using well-known, generic computer components and functionalities” does not provide an inventive concept. Sensormatic v. Wyze Labs., No. 19-1543-CFC (D. Del. Sept. 3, 2020) (patents-in-suit are U.S. Patent Nos. 7,954,129; 7,730,534; 7,936,370; and 8,610,772)
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The court applied the two-step Alice framework to Wize Labs’ Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. The court found the asserted patents here are analogous to a patent invalidated by the Federal Circuit in Chamberlain Grp., Inc. v. Techtronic Indus. Co., because “‘[t]he only described difference between the prior art…systems and the claimed…system [wa]s that the status information about the system [wa]s communicated wirelessly, in order to overcome certain undesirable disadvantages of systems using physical signal paths.” 935 F.3d 1341 (Fed. Cir. 2019), alteration in original. Sensormatic argued that “the patents are not directed to the abstract idea of wireless communication because the asserted patents are directed to direct wireless communication…as opposed to indirect wireless communication.” However, the court disagreed because both direct and indirect wireless communication “merely takes information previously transmitted via a wire and transmits that information wirelessly,” and “both…were basic conventional forms of communication at the time of the invention.”
The Federal Circuit has modified a panel decision and denied a rehearing en banc in a closely watched ۤ 101 case, American Axle & Manufacturing v. Neapco Holdings. The original decision had found all the claims, which were directed to a method of manufacturing driveline propeller shafts, ineligible subject matter (previously covered in this post). The new panel decision maintained that result for two of the independent claims but remanded on a third independent claim. (Stay tuned for a follow-up post on the en banc denial, which revealed a fractured court with multiple concurrences and dissents and a 6-6 tie vote.)
Much of the controversy centered on the subject matter of the patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. 7,774,911—not software or medical diagnostics, as in most applications of €§ 101, but instead a purely mechanical invention. All three independent claims were for “a method for manufacturing a shaft assembly of a driveline system.” The patent focused on the problem of vibrations in the driveshaft, by making a liner to fit inside the driveshaft. Vibrations came in three flavors: bending mode, which involves vibrations curving the shaft along its length; torsion mode, twisting the shaft; and shell mode, flexing circumferentially around the axis of the shaft. The patent purported to attenuate two out of three modes, rather than just one. The court analyzed claims 1 and 22; claim 36, the final independent claim, is lumped in with claim 22.
The dissents were animated by the scope of possible harm from the panel decision. According to Judge Stoll, “the majority’s decision extends €§ 101 to place in doubt the patent eligibility of historically eligible mechanical inventions.” If a mechanical invention can be ineligible, then inventions in any field can be ineligible. Combined with the uncertainty generated by the court’s €§ 101 jurisprudence, the decision’s scope creates widespread disincentives to innovation. “The court’s rulings on patent eligibility have become so diverse and unpredictable as to have a serious effect on the innovation incentive in all fields of technology,” according to Judge Newman. She went on to cite several amicus briefs asserting that investment in technological development will decrease because of the panel decision. “It is essential to restore the incentive role of the system of patents, for technology is the foundation of the nation’s economy, trade, and strength.”
The concurrences disputed that the panel decision constituted a radical departure for the court. Rather, the decision was limited and grounded in precedent. Judge Dyk provided two string citations of Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions supporting the outcome, which together spanned three full pages. Judge Chen concluded that “the majority’s opinion in this case does not, and should not be read to, announce a new test for patent eligibility.”
Based on the emphasized language, the claim construction order found that “significant additional details” about how the interface control device 910 interacted with other structures were provided to a person skilled in the art. Accordingly, the claim construction order stated that the defendant had failed to prove” by clear and convincing evidence that the structure of the interface control device [910] is inadequately disclosed by the patent specification.”
Following trial, however, the court agreed with the defendant’s argument that the plaintiff had not proven “that the ‘means for mediating’ limitation is met by the accused products” because the defendant’s products do not use the described configuration registers. The plaintiff’s technical expert made one short statement on direct examination at trial that the accused products “need to be configured, so there’s always configuration information that they can be programmed with.”
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The court further agreed that “the record does not support a new trial.” The plaintiff had argued that it had provided further evidence relating to configuration registers. But this evidence was presented out of context, and at best, the plaintiff pointed to pretrial deposition testimony that configuration registers were “inside the chip[s] . . . everywhere.”
Conclusory legal statements that attempt to invoke a factual allegation do not sufficiently allege an inventive concept to satisfy patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101. Dropbox Inc., Orcinus Holdings, LLC v. Synchronoss Techs. Inc, 2019-1765, 2019-1767, 2019-1823 (Fed. Cir. June 19, 2020) (nonprecedential).
Plaintiff Dropbox asserted infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,178,505, 6,058,399, and 7,567,541 against Defendant Synchronoss. The patents are directed to data security and data uploading to websites and networks. The district court granted Defendant’s motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), holding that all three patents as ineligible under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. In particular, the district court held that Plaintiff failed to allege an inventive concept to satisfy the second part of the two-part Alice test.
The details of the specific patents would warrant their own posts, so we will focus on the Court’s discussion of Plaintiff’s factual allegations of an inventive concept. Some courts have held that sufficient factual allegations of an inventive concept can present an unresolved question of fact to survive Rule 12(b)(6) and that this should be the norm to better develop the factual record. Other courts, like the district court here, are perfectly happy to hold claims ineligible under Section 101 at the pleadings stage.
Representative claims of the other patents are not reproduced here in an attempt at conciseness, but can be found that the above links. For all of the patents, the Magistrate Judge determined they had a “plain focus” on improving “computer functionality,” rather than “on economic or other tasks for which computer is used in its ordinary capacity.” The District Judge disagreed with this conclusion, finding the patents failed step one of the Alice test as directed to the abstract idea of “the secure verification of a person’s identity.”
The ’539 patent, the court said, “is not materially different from the patent at issue in Prism Techs. LLC v. T-Mobile USA, Inc.,” (Fed. Cir. 2017). Similar to the claims there, claim 22 of the ’539 patent recited steps of receiving and processing a transaction request, including authenticating a user to a merchant without the merchant “obtaining knowledge of the customer’s identifying information.” Claim 22 therefore “is directed to the abstract idea of obtaining the secure verification of a user’s identity to enable a transaction.”
Alice step two could not save this claim. The patent itself acknowledged that all of the claim steps “are accomplished by implementing well-known methods using conventional computer components.” The patent owner argued that there was a saving innovation in allowing a transaction to be approved without a merchant obtaining account identifying information. The court’s response was that “sending data to a third-party as opposed to the merchant” was “insignificant post-solution activity” and “not a technological innovation.”
A patent claim directed to adjusting an individual gaming machine control parameter (i.e., the risk/reward level) based on aggregate gaming machine results was held patent-ineligible at summary judgment under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 and the Alice/Mayo test. Bot M8 LLC v. Sony Corporation of America, et al, No. C 19-07027 WHA (N.D. Cal., June 10, 2020.)
It's true that you don't often find us here siding with copyright holders in debates over copyright. It's not that there isn't a place for that sort of thing, of course. It's just kinda not our beat. Also, it's a bit of a dog-bites-man kind of thing. As folks who tend to think that ever-expanding copyright laws and a protectionist culture that has lost its way are bad for business, we typically focus more on artists who are doing exciting things in new business models, artists who are overstepping the purpose of copyright law and/or hurting their own causes through protectionism, and artists who choose to go the human and awesome route rather than pulling out the litigious nuclear bombs.
