Desktop/Laptop

• The General Purpose Computer In Your Pocket – Purism

  Computers have us surrounded. Just about every piece of consumer electronics these days puts “smart” in front of the name, which means they embedded a computer that runs specialized software. The “smart” trend started with “smartphones” which marketers started calling cellular phones once they got powerful enough processors to run a general-purpose operating system and applications. The name “smartphone” was intended to differentiate them from “feature phones” which had a limited set of additional applications (calculator, SMS application, possibly a music player or a limited web browser). Feature phones were designed to make phone calls and send text messages, but smartphones were actually general-purpose computers that happened to have a phone and SMS application on them.

  Today, a majority of people hardly ever use their smartphone as a phone and instead use it to chat, browse the web, and run applications–the same things they do on their desktop or laptop computers. Your smartphone is a pocket-sized general-purpose computer that’s more powerful than desktop computers from not that long ago, yet smartphones are prevented from realizing their full potential, are still marketed as special-purpose computers, and most people think of them that way. Why?

  One of the neatest tricks Big Tech ever pulled was convincing people that phones weren’t general-purpose computers and should have different rules than laptops or desktops. These rules conveniently give the vendor more control so that you don’t own a smartphone so much as you rent it. Now that the public has accepted these new rules for phones, vendors are starting to apply the same rules to laptops and desktops.

  [...]

  When you bought a computer starting in the `90s you generally expected to get operating system upgrades for the life of the computer. In the Windows world you normally could upgrade to the next version of Windows years later, and you’d only replace hardware after the OS upgrades and applications got so bloated (along with the spyware) that the computer was too slow to use. Of course, those “slow” computers then got a new life for many more years after installing Linux on them.

  Now imagine a computer that only lasted two or three years, after which you would no longer get OS and security updates. Even though the hardware was still fast enough to run the OS, if you cared about security you’d be forced to upgrade. That’s the situation we have with Android phones today. If you are lucky your vendor will let you update to the next version of Android at least once, and receive general updates for two years or three years. If you are unlucky your device may never upgrade to the next Android OS. Even flagship Google phones only promise OS updates three years from the date the phone first was sold and security updates for only 18 months after they stop selling a device. For instance, at the time of this article, Pixel 2 owners just lost guaranteed OS and security updates.

• Mac vs PC: The next major tech shift | INTHEBLACK

  There is another option for those with older systems – or even new Intel-based systems for that matter: move to Linux. This OS powers about 70 per cent of the world’s web servers. It is popular among software developers and other high-end users, though its overall share of desktop and laptop computers is tiny. Yet, this does not mean Linux is just for experts.

  Linux is free and open-source, with large communities of developers that provide regular updates. As a result, it is efficient, secure and offers plenty of choices, with hundreds of different versions (called “distributions”) available.

  Linux wasn’t always the friendliest OS to install and use, but mainstream distributions, such as Ubuntu and Fedora, are now much easier to install. There’s a choice of graphical user interfaces to choose from, including Elementary OS’s macOS-like experience. For those with old systems, the lightweight Ubuntu variant Xubuntu is one of many options. Businesses that need fast, guaranteed support can pay for it from the likes of Red Hat Linux.

  There are thousands of Linux applications to choose from. Many, such as office suite LibreOffice, either come bundled with distributions or are easy to install via “repositories”. Alternatively, a Linux tool called WINE can run many Windows apps – or you can dual-boot Linux with Windows or macOS.

  There is no denying that Windows and macOS users will face a learning curve, but at least they can try Linux first. Many versions are available as “live distributions”, meaning you can run them off a USB stick or DVD. Then, if you like one, you can install it on your computer. Just remember to back up your files first.

  Alternatively, you can buy a laptop or computer with Linux pre-installed from a speciality provider, such as Purism or Linux Now. Lenovo also has announced greater support for Linux on its systems.

Server

• Simply NUC mini data center > Tux-Techie

  Simply NUC, a leader in the minicomputer industry, has entered the data center market. The Simply NUC mini data center provides an Intel Xeon E-2286M processor, 350GB of system memory, and a 2 TB NVMe SSD. All of this power weighs in at 5 pounds with 5-liter chassis and has a typical power consumption of 200 watts. The systems ship with Ubuntu Linux installed and fully configured. To learn more about their offerings, you can check out their page here.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Scariest Movie Of This Year Or Any Year

  Coming to a computer near you, a film that is horrifying and reprehensible.

• Linux 5.10 | StarLink Beta & 5G | AMD 6000 Benchmarks

• Procs: Nothing Is Safe From A Rust Rewrite Not Even Ps – YouTube

  Today we’re looking at procs another rust rewrite this time it’s for the ps command, when I do these I try and look for something that does it for a productive reason and I think this one passes the test, it’s a bit different to the way that ps works works but it covers of what you’ll need to do.

Kernel Space

• Oracle Continues Building DTrace For Linux Atop BPF

  More than a decade ago Linux users tended to be envious of Sun Microsystems’ Solaris for ZFS and DTrace as the two most interesting technical selling points of the platform. In that time OpenZFS is now extremely vibrant for offering ZFS on BSD and Linux systems while DTrace is barely brought up these days. This tracing framework originally developed for Solaris was fantastic back in the day but over the years Linux has stepped up its game with various efforts. Now as we hit the end of 2020, Oracle engineers continue working on bringing better DTrace support to Linux.

  In recent years Oracle has been working on DTrace for Linux with a focus on DTrace for Oracle Linux / its “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel”. Their kernel-side work has never been upstreamed and while they do have a GitHub repository its usage doesn’t seem to be very prevalent outside of the Oracle ecosystem.

• Linux 5.10 Will Be a Long-Term Support Kernel

  Linux kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced that “#Linux 5.10 will be the next Longterm (aka LTS) #kernel (and thus supported for at least two years, but, in the end, it often is six).”

• The Arm64 memory tagging extension in Linux [LWN.net]

  One of the first features merged for the 5.10 kernel development cycle was support for the Arm v8.5 memory tagging extension [PDF]. By adding a “key” value to pointers, this mechanism enables the automated detection of a wide range of memory-safety issues. The result should be safer and more secure code — once support for the feature shows up in actual hardware.
  As one might expect, the Arm64 architecture uses 64-bit pointers to address memory. There is no need (yet!) for an address space that large, though, so normally only 48 of those bits are actually used by the hardware — or 52 bits if a special large-address-space option is enabled. So there are 12-16 bits that can be used for other purposes. Arm systems have long supported a “top byte ignore” feature that allows software to store arbitrary data in the uppermost byte of a virtual address, but the hardware designers have been busy coming up with other uses for those bits as well. The memory tagging extension (MTE) is one of those uses.

  Specifically, MTE allows the storage of a four-bit “key” in bits 59-56 of a virtual address — the lower “nibble” of the top byte. It is also possible to associate a specific key value with one or more 16-byte ranges of memory. When a pointer is dereferenced, the key stored in the pointer itself is compared to that associated with the memory the pointer references; if the two do not match, a trap may be raised. Keys can be managed by the application, or they can be randomly generated by the CPU.

  Four bits only allow for 16 distinct key values, but that is enough to do some interesting things. If a function like malloc() ensures that allocations that are adjacent in memory have different key values, then an access that overruns any given allocation will be detected by the processor. Use-after-free bugs can be detected by changing the key value immediately when a range of memory is freed. If each stack frame is given its own key, buffer overruns on the stack will also generate traps. An attempt to dereference a completely wild pointer (or one injected by an attacker) also has a good chance of being detected.

• 5.10 Merge window, part 1 [LWN.net]

  As of this writing, 7,153 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline Git repository for the 5.10 release — over a period of four days. This development cycle is clearly off to a strong start. Read on for an overview of the significant changes merged thus far for the 5.10 kernel release.

• Intel’s Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 Adds Windows Guest Support

  Intel has a shiny new feature release out of their open-source Cloud-Hypervisor that runs atop KVM and leveraging the Rust programming language.

  Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 comes with some prominent improvements for this increasingly used component in the open-source Linux virtualization stack. As mentioned, even Microsoft has been working with Cloud-Hypervisor among other IHVs and ISVs.

• Linux Frame-Buffer Console To Drop Accelerated Scrolling Since It’s Full Of Bugs – Phoronix

  The Linux kernel’s frame-buffer console (FBCON) is set to drop accelerated scrolling support since it isn’t widely used and now found to be “full of bugs” plaguing the code-base.

  Google’s Syzbot that continuously fuzzes the Linux kernel using Syzkaller recently began fuzzing the FBCON code within the kernel. As a result of that exposure, the developers are now well aware with “solid proof that it’s full of bugs.”

  The best solution from the developer perspective has been to delete the code / faulty features, such as with the recent deleting of soft scrollback support. Given the use-cases for FBCON and only a few drivers supporting accelerated scrolling, it’s the latest feature now slated for removal.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 out now, along with the 455.38 Linux driver

    After a delay, NVIDIA have now released the next-gen GeForce RTX 3070 along with a brand new Linux driver. The delay was supposed to give retailers more time to sort stock, and as expected they all sold out very quickly, most stores sold out within an hour. Trying to buy a new GPU on release day continues to be something of a fools errand.

    The GeForce 3070 is the current lowest end of Ampere, although we’ve seen leaks that other models will be coming which is expected just like they’ve done for all other generations. Although, you might want to check out what AMD just revealed with the Radeon 6000 series too.

  • Mesa 20.3 Lands Rewritten AMD Zen L3 Cache Optimization – Phoronix

    You may recall going back to 2018 that well known open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olsak was working on Mesa optimizations around the AMD Zen architecture. In particular, better handling of Mesa for Zen’s L3 cache design. A rewritten implementation of that has now landed along with some other improvements.

    Marek discovered his L3 cache topology code was incorrect and ended up rewriting it to “make Mesa on my AMD CPU faster.” The code is catering to AMD Ryzen processors but it’s also possible Xeon / multi-CPU systems could employ a similar optimization should anyone be interested in pursuing it.

  • RadeonSI Lands Optimization For Uber Shaders – Phoronix

    On top of the AMD Zen L3 cache optimizations hitting Mesa 20.3 today, Marek Olšák has also landed his RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code for optimizing OpenGL uber shaders.

    Marek added a “inline_uniforms” DriConf option to the RadeonSI driver that implements inlinable uniforms.

  • Intel starts publishing Vulkan Linux driver

    Intel’s open-source developers have begun publishing their patches enabling their “ANC” Vulkan Linux driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing.

    [...]

    Intel’s other big-ticket items still to come in the near-term include extending the ANV driver to support compiling and dispatching OpenCL kernels, new SPIR-V capabilities, and generic pointer support.

    Also needed is the actual support for compiling ray-tracing pipelines, managing acceleration structures, dispatching rays, and the platform support.

    Intel is not going to go much further until the Khronos Group has firmed up their VK_KHR_ray_tracing extension. However some of this Intel-specific Vulkan ray-tracing code may prove useful to Mesa’s Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver as well.

  • Intel Compute-Runtime 20.43.18277 Brings Alder Lake Support – Phoronix

    Intel Compute-Runtime 20.43.18277 is out this morning as the latest version of the company’s open-source graphics compute stack for HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support.

    It was the previous Compute-Runtime release two weeks back that brought OpenCL 3.0 for Broadwell through Ice Lake with Gen12/Tigerlake having already seen CL 3.0 support as a new platform. That OpenCL 3.0 support is in good shape with this latest release and the stack remains at a “pre-release” level for its oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 support.

  • llvmpipe is OpenGL 4.5 conformant.

    (I just sent the below email to mesa3d developer list).

    Just to let everyone know, a month ago I submitted the 20.2 llvmpipe
    driver for OpenGL 4.5 conformance under the SPI/X.org umbrella, and it
    is now official[1].

    Thanks to everyone who helped me drive this forward, and to all the
    contributors both to llvmpipe and the general Mesa stack that enabled
    this.

    Big shout out to Roland Scheidegger for helping review the mountain of
    patches I produced in this effort.

    My next plans involved submitting lavapipe for Vulkan 1.0, it’s at 99%
    or so CTS, but there are line drawing, sampler accuracy and some snorm
    blending failure I have to work out.
    I also ran the OpenCL 3.0 conformance suite against clover/llvmpipe
    yesterday and have some vague hopes of driving that to some sort of
    completion.

    (for GL 4.6 only texture anisotropy is really missing, I’ve got
    patches for SPIR-V support, in case someone was feeling adventurous).

    Dave.

  • LLVMpipe Is Now Officially Conformant With OpenGL 4.5

    Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation.

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: Invalidation

    I’ve got a lot of exciting stuff in the pipe now, but for today I’m just going to talk a bit about resource invalidation: what it is, when it happens, and why it’s important.

    [...]

    Resource invalidation can occur in a number of scenarios, but the most common is when unsetting a buffer’s data, as in the above example. The other main case for it is replacing the data of a buffer that’s in use for another operation. In such a case, the backing buffer can be replaced to avoid forcing a sync in the command stream which will stall the application’s processing. There’s some other cases for this as well, like glInvalidateFramebuffer and glDiscardFramebufferEXT, but the primary usage that I’m interested in is buffers.

    [...]

    Currently, as of today’s mainline zink codebase, we have struct zink_resource to represent a resource for either a buffer or an image. One struct zink_resource represents exactly one VkBuffer or VkImage, and there’s some passable lifetime tracking that I’ve written to guarantee that these Vulkan objects persist through the various command buffers that they’re associated with.

    Each struct zink_resource is, as is the way of Gallium drivers, also a struct pipe_resource, which is tracked by Gallium. Because of this, struct zink_resource objects themselves cannot be invalidated in order to avoid breaking Gallium, and instead only the inner Vulkan objects themselves can be replaced.

Applications

• 8 Best Free and Open Source Linux Documentation Generators

  documentation generator is a programming tool that generates documentation intended for programmers and end users, from a set of commented source code files, and in certain cases, binary files.

  This type of tool is designed especially for programmers who do not like writing documents with LibreOffice Writer or other types of word processor.

  By using these open source tools, developers can produce high quality technical documentation within a few minutes, and at no cost at all.

  To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 advanced Linux documentation generators. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to generate documentation.

• asciiworld – world map depicted in ASCII

  One of the great strengths of Linux is the whole raft of weird and wonderful open source utilities. That strength does not simply derive from the functionality they offer, but from the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with applications.

  The UNIX philosophy spawned a “software tools” movement which focused on developing concise, basic, clear, modular and extensible code that can be used for other projects. This philosophy remains an important element for many Linux projects.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to install FL Studio 20 on a Chromebook with Crossover 20

  Today we are looking at how to install FL Studio 20 on a Chromebook with Crossover 20. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

  This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

• [Older] LFCS System Performance

  With every system, especially servers, there is a need to find performance issues. The way to find the issues is to determine your system performance and monitor it over time. Seeing where and when issues arise can help you find solutions to the issues.

  If issues arise for low performance for a Network Interface Card (NIC), then you need to look into increasing network bandwidth to the system or even Load-Balancing among multiple systems. If issues occur at a specific time of day, then you may need to change the time of specific jobs. Certain system jobs may be occurring at intervals too closely together. Spreading out automated tasks or jobs can alleviate the system stress placed on a machine.

• How to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.10

  Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla is out now! It’s an exciting new release with a lot to love, like QR code WiFi sharing, improved fingerprint login support, better Thunderbolt port support, and much more!

  In this guide, we’ll go over how to upgrade your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system to the new Ubuntu 20.10. However, before we begin, please make a backup of your system, as it’s always good to have a backup before attempting a system upgrade.

• How To Install Apache Ant on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Ant on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Ant™ is a Java library and command-line tool whose mission is to drive processes described in build files as targets and extension points dependent upon each other. The main known usage of Ant is the build of Java applications. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to compile, assemble, test, and run Java applications. Ant can also be used effectively to build non-Java applications, for instance, C or C++ applications. More generally, Ant can be used to pilot any type of process which can be described in terms of targets and tasks.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Apache Ant on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How to install MongoDB Community Edition on Linux

  Mongo DB Community is the free edition of the Mongo database software. The Community edition is an excellent option for those that don’t want to pay for the “Enterprise” edition but still want to use excellent database software.

• How to Install Jira Agile Project Management Tool on Ubuntu 20.04

  JIRA is a project management tool developed by Atlassian which is used as an issue and bug-tracking system. It is a commercial tool and available as a Trial version for a limited time. You can use JIRA in Support and Customer Services to create tickets and track the status of the created tickets. It comes with a simple and user-friendly dashboard that helps you to track work progress and issues. It offers a rich set of features including, Bugs and defect management, Advanced reporting, Search and filtering, Customizable workflows, Customizable dashboards, Advanced security and administration and many more.

• How to Install YOURLS self-hosted URL shortener on CentOS 8

  YOURLS is a free, open-source and self-hosted URL shortener written in PHP. It is very similar to TinyURL or Bitly and allows you to run your own URL shortening service. It also allows you to add branding to your short URLs. It offers a rich set of features including, Private and Public link, Custom URL keywords, Historical click reports, Ajaxed interface, Jsonp support and many more.
  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install YOURLS on CentOS 8 with Let’s Encrypt SSL.

• Display Network Information In Linux Using What IP Tool – OSTechNix

  What IP is a simple graphical application used to display network information in Linux operating systems. Using What IP, anyone can easily find the IP address of local, public and virtual network interfaces. You can copy their IP addresses with a single mouse click.

  Not just the IP address, What IP can also get you the list of available ports listening on your system, and check if they are publicly accessible. In addition, it lists the network devices on your LAN.

  Another notable feature is it displays your geolocation based on the IP address. All details are displayed in a compact and simple graphical interface!

  What IP is an open source application written using Python 3 and GTK3 widget toolkit. The source code is freely available in GitLab under GPL3 license.

• Vdx – An Intuitive Commandline Wrapper To FFmpeg – OSTechNix

  Vdx is an intuitive commandline wrapper to FFmpeg. Using Vdx, we can do most common audio and video encoding and transcoding operations.

• Using the Midnight Commander to browse Linux directories | Network World

  Midnight Commander – the “mc” command – provides an easy way to browse directories and to view, move, delete, compare, change and edit files. Similar in some ways to ranger, mc makes it easy to move around directories and offers side-by-side file/directory listings that work independently of each other. In addition, it provides a very wide range of actions that you can take through simple menu choices.

  To start Midnight Commander, simply type “mc” in a terminal window. When you open mc, both the left and right sides of the display will look the same and will show the contents of whatever directory you started in. You can switch sides using the tab key or simply by clicking on a directory or file in the side of the display. You can select a file or directory simply by clicking on it. You can also browse directory contents using the up and down arrow keys.

• Tricks and treats for sysadmins and ops | Enable Sysadmin

  Are you ready for the scary technology tricks that can haunt you as a sysadmin? Here are five treats to counter those tricks.

• repair all mySQL/mariaDB databases

• How to install Ubuntu Kylin 20.10 – YouTube

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Kylin 20.10.

• How to Quickly Set Up a Mail Server on Debian 10 Buster With Modoboa

  Setting up a mail server on Linux from scratch is a pain in the neck. This tutorial is going to show you how to quickly set up your own email server on Debian 10 Buster with Modoboa, saving you lots of time and headaches. Modoboa is a free and open-source mail hosting and management platform designed to work with Postfix SMTP server and Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.

  Modoboa is written in Python, released under the terms of ISC license. At the time of writing, The latest version is v1.16.0, released on October 5, 2020.

• How to install and use Atom editor on CentOS 8 [Ed: caution needed as Microsoft-controlled]

  Atom is an open-source and free source code text editor that is used for macOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and provide support to different plug-ins written in Node.js. It has an embedded Git control that is developed by GitHub. It is a desktop-based application built using various web technologies.

• How to Install Xubuntu 20.04 LTS on VMware Workstation – SysAdmin

  This video tutorial shows how to install Xubuntu 20.04 LTS on VMware Workstation step by step. This tutorial is also helpful to install Xubuntu 20.04 LTS on physical computer or laptop hardware.

• How to use Unison to sync files on Linux machines across a network – TechRepublic

  With Linux there are so many ways to synchronize and/or backup files over a network. For many, rsync and scp are the de facto standard. There is, of course, another option–one you’ve likely never heard of. That option is Unison, a free, open source, cross-platform bi-directional file sync tool. Unison is used to store two replicas that are modified separately and brought up-to-date by propagating changes to each store.

  Unison is capable of synching directories on a local system or across a network. I want to show you how to use this tool and SSH to sync a directory on one Linux server to another. It’s incredibly simple to use and even has a GUI that can also be installed, for those who prefer graphical tools over the command line. I’ll be illustrating the command line version of Unison on two instances of Ubuntu Server.

• Ansible Playbook: Complete Beginners’s Guide

  In the previous tutorial, you learned how to use Ansible ad-hoc commands to run a single task on your managed hosts. In this tutorial, you will learn how to automate multiple tasks on your managed hosts by creating and running Ansible playbooks.

  To better understand the differences between Ansible ad-hoc command and Ansible playbooks; you can think of Ansible ad-hoc commands as Linux commands and playbooks as bash scripts.

  Ansible ad-hoc commands are ideal to perform tasks that are not executed frequently such us getting servers uptime, retrieving system information, etc.

• How To Install XAMPP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XAMPP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, XAMPP is open-source software that provides users with an out-of-the-box server experience. It is a complex, yet very easy-to-use AMPP (Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl) distribution that’s compatible with the Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. The best tool for those who want to install a fully functional web development environment.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of XAMPP on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How to rebase to Fedora 33 on Silverblue – Fedora Magazine

  Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update to Fedora 33 on your Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert things if something unforeseen happens.

Games

• Developer Brings Shadow of the Tomb Raider to Ubuntu, Outperforms DX11 In Windows 10 | Tom’s Hardware

  Feral Interactive, a company that brings windows games to Mac and Linux, has implemented its magic on Square Unix’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider and has it working in Ubuntu via the Vulkan API. YouTuber Penguin Recordings has compared performance results for both the Ubuntu and Windows 10 platforms side-by-side. The results are quite interesting.

  Because Linux cannot support any type of DirectX API, as it’s Microsoft-only, Feral Interactive has to use the Vulkan API to actively translate DX11 and/or DX12 calls to make them work on Linux. Fortunately, this method does work rather well, but performance will usually be slower than native DirectX due to the translation process.

  Spec-wise, Penguin uses a Ryzen 9 3950X alongside a GeForce RTX 3090 with 32GB of RAM to run his tests.

  Surprisingly, in DX12 mode for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Feral’s Linux version of the game could keep up with the Windows 10 platform quite well. Averaging between two to seven fps (and 10 fps above 100 fps) short of the Windows 10 version. The frame rate difference is so small it would be hard to notice without an fps counter visible.

• Difficult retro platformer Angry Video Game Nerd I & II Deluxe out now | GamingOnLinux

  Leaning heavily into nostalgia and something of a parody, the very difficult platformer series Angry Video Game Nerd has been re-released as a enhanced Angry Video Game Nerd I & II Deluxe.

  Truthfully, I’ve never followed Angry Video Game Nerd but they have a pretty clear cult following and they were a huge influence on the early lot of on-video game reviews being one of the first set of people to do it. They somewhat set the stage for the many thousands of others doing them regularly across YouTube and other sites today. There was even an Angry Video Game Nerd movie…

• Amnesia: Rebirth 1.1 is out, along with major rendering fixes for Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Frictional Games have released Amnesia: Rebirth 1.1 which is a very important upgrade for Linux fans as it fixes up some major problems.

  At the release, sadly the game was something of a mess for Linux with floating objects and at times everything vanishing. Thankfully, it seems the Linux graphical issues have been fully solved and you should now be able to play through. Nicely timed here by Frictional for Halloween.

• Come watch a Linux game get built up and packed during the Linux Application Summit | GamingOnLinux

  As we mentioned previously the Linux Application Summit will be happening online this November 12 – 14, and it seems one Linux game porter will be attending.

  The event, sponsored by open source consulting firm Collabora (who are doing some important Linux Kernel work for Windows game emulation) and co-hosted by the GNOME and KDE camps will be showing lots of panels on everything involving building for Linux and this includes: creating, packaging, and distributing apps, to monetization within the Linux ecosystem and much more.

  Game porter and FNA creator Ethan Lee, has announced a talk titled “Watch a Linux Game Get Built in Real Time”. Ethan Lee is responsible for over 50 Linux game ports including the likes of FEZ, Salt and Sanctuary, Pyre, Transistor, Dust: An Elysian Tail and the list goes on. During this talk happening on November 12, Ethan Lee will be showing how they all actually get built mentioning on Twitter that “There is no presentation, no slides, no nothing. Just me building games exactly as they run on your PC today”.

• Valve put their ‘Pressure Vessel’ container source for Linux games up on GitLab | GamingOnLinux

  Want to see the dirty innards of more Valve code? Well you’re in luck as they now have a lot of work involved in the Steam Runtime on GitLab including the Pressure Vessel container.

  Valve has for some time now had their own GitHub account, which is where they listed many different open source projects like GameNetworkingSockets, Proton and more. However, they’ve now added a bunch of other projects to their own hosted GitLab.

  You can now find the steamrt group on their GitLab, which contains projects for various parts of the Steam Linux Runtime, including the source for the much newer Pressure Vessel container system which according to Valve contractor Timothee Besset on Twitter was previously “only available as a tarball release” from their download servers.

• Atari VCS seeing supply shortages, not expecting full production until early 2021 | GamingOnLinux

  Here we go again, how many delays have we seen now? This time the Atari VCS team are saying that it’s so popular they don’t have enough components.

  Reminder: the Atari VCS is a modern-retro hybrid console, that runs a Linux OS and it can have any other operating system of your choice boot up on it. Originally crowdfunded on IndieGoGo in 2018 with multiple millions, it’s relying on some pretty heavy nostalgia.

  In a fresh Medium blog post, the team mentioned that they’re now looking at full retail production in January 2021. Instead of late October for the first lot of deliveries for backers, they’ve also now pushed that back further into mid-November. They said two issues have caused part of this which is a “critical” and “very scarce component” needed for the Classic Joystick along with “a specific part” needed for their AMD Ryzen CPU that they appear to be looking around to find more sources for. The January 2021 date still might not be hit, as they say they’re “assuming” what they need arrives in time and in the full quantity they need.

• This Halloween the Diretide event has finally returned to Dota 2 | GamingOnLinux

  Live now until December 22, Valve have finally revived and refreshed the big Diretide Halloween event for Dota 2.

  I almost can’t believe it, as this event hasn’t been run for 7 years. After the original event in 2012, there was something of an uproar in the Dota 2 community when it seemed Valve wouldn’t do it in 2013 but they eventually did. After that though? Nothing and it became almost a myth. It’s back though!

• Awesome 3D emulator for the NES ’3dSen PC’ adds more iconic game support | GamingOnLinux

  Still can’t believe my eyes as I try out games with 3dSen PC, with it converting classic NES games into 3D and it just feels like magic.

  Currently in Early Access, this amazing emulator is truly like no other. In real-time it converts your favourites into full 3D with a properly adjustable camera. In action it’s pretty incredible to see and far more than a fun gimmick, it really does make games look and feel different.

  Due to how it works, game support is limited as each needs to be setup so that 3dSen PC can understand what it needs although the list is growing. As of the latest release the developer has hooked up official profiles for Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Solomon’s Key and Fire ‘n Ice.

• The Sacrifices is an upcoming collection of seven interconnected stories set in Britain | GamingOnLinux

  Game dev studio Far Few Giants have announced The Sacrifices, a set of seven narrative adventures set in Britain.

  These short adventures are all connected in some way too, and the idea is that each of them put you into the “everyday lives of a diverse range of people as they navigate the toughest ethical moment of their life”. A politically charged set of games touching on immigration, extremism and more with it being made as “a direct response to the dystopian times we’re living in”.

• Difficulty retro platformer Angry Video Game Nerd I & II Deluxe out now | GamingOnLinux

  Leaning heavily into nostalgia and something of a parody, the very difficult platformer series Angry Video Game Nerd has been re-released as a enhanced Angry Video Game Nerd I & II Deluxe.

  Truthfully, I’ve never followed Angry Video Game Nerd but they have a pretty clear cult following and they were a huge influence on the early lot of on-video game reviews being one of the first set of people to do it. They somewhat set the stage for the many thousands of others doing them regularly across YouTube and other sites today. There was even an Angry Video Game Nerd movie…

  Anyway, they had two episodes of a difficult retro platformer out that have been bundled together, remastered and upgraded with new content in the Angry Video Game Nerd I & II Deluxe edition out now.

• Monochrome RPG is channelling 1920s animation into a comedy adventure | GamingOnLinux

  This is seriously cool. Monochrome RPG is an upcoming comedy adventure about a lone comedian with an art and animation style that looks like a 1920s animation.

  Monochrome RPG, they say, is a “pun-filled black and white 1920s cartoon-styled comedy narrative adventure series where you’ll perform on stage, entertain enemies, and build your own acting troupe”. In development by
  The Monochrome Workshop, they’re a global group of creatives working on it together while commissioning various others to work on different parts too.

• Steam Halloween Sale is now live, along with multiple game events | GamingOnLinux

  Running until November 2 at 5PM UTC, the Steam Halloween Sale event is now live. There’s plenty of great games going cheap, and multiple games running special events too.

• WHAT THE GOLF? parody game is now available for Linux | GamingOnLinux

  After being exclusive to the Epic Games Store (which doesn’t support Linux) for a year, WHAT THE GOLF? is now available on Steam. As of October 22 the Steam release went up, and since October 29 a proper Linux build has been put up too. This means that developer Triband has now completed what was originally promises on their Fig crowdfunding campaign from back in 2018.

  What actually is it? Well, it’s anything but Golf. Sort of, it’s something of a parody game made by “people who know nothing about golf” and it actually looks highly amusing.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Sugar: A Linux Desktop Environment and Learning Platform for Kids

  In this Desktop Environment review, we take a departure from the norm and focus on a very specialized desktop environment. Sugar is a desktop environment that’s designed for education and ease of use and is built very well for what it is. This articles goes over the Sugar Desktop Environment, its user experience, some notable features, and some recommendations on who should use Sugar.

  From the start, it is very obvious that Sugar is very specialized. I’m using the Fedora SoaS (Sugar on a Stick) Spin, which is designed to just be flashed to a USB stick and used that way, but the point stands. It’s clearly specialized and made to be used a particular way. Icons are large, the cursor is enormous, and it’s supposed to be easy to use for a young child.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • [Krita artist David REVOY] Where money goes?

    I used already the earning of the first 735 books sold to renew my computer (1100€ budget). I’ll detail the config I bought in a future blog-post (after I received and test it).

  • David REVOY: 1000!

  • Digital Painting App Krita 4.4.1 Released with Stability Improvements

    Just a few weeks after the release of Krita 4.4, the first point release Krita 4.4.1 now is out with various bug-fixes and stability improvements.

    For Android and Chrome OS, Krita now uses SDK v29 so it doesn’t need permissions to run anymore and can access external files more easily. There are also fixes to color picker, copy and paste on the platforms.

    [...]

    The Krita Lime PPA (check the link before getting started) contains the most recent software packages for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 20.10.

  • KDE.org migrated to Hugo

    KDE.org now uses the Hugo. Hugo is a fast and modern static site generator written in Go. It provides a few improvements over the old system that was using plain PHP. A large part of the work was done by Anuj during GSoC 2020. This was a massive work, converting the repository storing more than 20 years of KDE history.

    The website is now generated once and no longer use PHP to generate itself at runtime. This improves the loading speed of the website, but the speed boost is not significant, since the PHP code used before was quite small and KDE’s servers are powerful.

    But the biggest improvement is in terms of features. We are now working with markdown files instead of raw HTML files, this makes the life of the promo team much easier.

    The internalization of the website now creates a unique URL per language, this should allow Google to link to the version of the website using the correct language. A french, ukrainian, catalan, Dutch, and a few more languages are already available. There is also a proper language selector! We also don’t need to manually tag each string for translations.

  • KDE Plasma 5.20.2, bugfix Release for October

    Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.20.2 Plasma 5.20 was released in October 2020 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

  • Resource management in KDE

    Edmundson started by explaining that the job of a desktop environment is deliver applications to the user. Users “need to be in control”, he said. That role has become more complicated in recent years. Some time ago, when a user was running a web browser like Firefox or a chat application like Kopete, the management of running processes was easy. The user could run a ps command and would see just one line of output for each of those applications. This was easy to understand and self-explanatory.

    Now, the situation is “very different”. When a user opens a Firefox instance they can get a dozen processes; Discord in a Flatpak (“because it is cool now”) launches 13 processes. The ps output is unreadable; it consists of “random names doing random things”. Just understanding that output is difficult; aggregating the results to get an idea of how much CPU time or power the application is using has become even more challenging. There is thus a need to track processes properly in desktop environments, since the available data no longer means anything. We “need some metadata”, Edmundson concluded.

    Fairness is also an increasingly important issue. Edmundson gave an example of Krita, an advanced graphics application. It performs some heavy processing, all contained within a single process. On the other hand, Discord has those 13 processes, many of which will be making heavy use of the CPU “because it is written in Electron”. The system’s CPU scheduler will see those two applications as 14 opaque processes, not knowing what they correspond to. This means that Krita could get only 1/14 of the available CPU time, even though it represents half of the applications running. Metadata about running applications needs to propagate through the whole software stack to be available to the scheduler, he said.

    One of Plasma’s tasks is mapping windows to applications. More precisely, it tries to map windows to their associated desktop files — the configuration files containing metadata that are used, for example, to create menu entries. Applications open windows and “we hope we can match it all up”. The Plasma developers use a lot of hacks and heuristics to perform this matching, but “we do not like guessing”, he said. He made an example of a Firefox window being used to watch an Akademy talk like his. There is an audio icon inside that window, but this icon is not managed by the same process as the one controlling the outer window, he explained. Plasma needs to find the link between them, and “it is an arbitrary guessing game”.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Daniel Pocock: Lockdown: surviving small spaces

    With all conferences cancelled this year, one of the things I decided to do was trying an online course. After the first week, I was having trouble sleeping at night, with pain at the back of my eyes. I was almost going to give up. I made various adjustments to dramatically reduce lighting. I already had my monitor permanently in the mode for Low Blue Light. I combined this with the GNOME desktop’s Night Light mode and configured smart bulbs in my home to run dimmer and redder. After these changes, I feel the problem was almost immediately resolved.

    [...]

    With record numbers of people being infected, dying or simply losing jobs, the idea of throwing a party may not be the most sensitive thing to do. Nonetheless, if you do want to recreate the feeling of going out to a bar or nightclub, it has never been easier or cheaper to do so with various technologies you can buy online.

    Once again, the key theme is lighting. Smart bulbs can be configured for gradual changes throughout the work day. Some bulbs can be configured for more advanced effects coupled with music. One of my lights is a LED panel that can simulate a disco, candlelight, thunderstorm or even a police car to make the night complete. This means it can be anything from a night club in Berlin to a local pub in Ireland.

    For sound, seeking a larger diameter speaker sometimes makes a dramatic impact. A pair of oversized vintage speakers from an op-shop may produce better sound than the built-in speakers of most modern laptops, monitors and flat screen TVs.

    Once you’ve conquered light and sound, it is time for taste. An Air Fryer can make chips and there are plenty of recipes suitable for any level of cooking skills. Some of the best models are not available in every store and most of them are a lot cheaper online anyway. While they sound like a jet engine, there is no evidence that Air Fryers have been used in the astronaut diet.

  • Claudio Saavedra’s ChangeLog – October 2020

    In this line of work, we all stumble at least once upon a problem that turns out to be extremely elusive and very tricky to narrow down and solve. If we’re lucky, we might have everything at our disposal to diagnose the problem but sometimes that’s not the case – and in embedded development it’s often not the case. Add to the mix proprietary drivers, lack of debugging symbols, a bug that’s very hard to reproduce under a controlled environment, and weeks in partial confinement due to a pandemic and what you have is better described as a very long lucid nightmare. Thankfully, even the worst of nightmares end when morning comes, even if sometimes morning might be several days away. And when the fix to the problem is in an inimaginable place, the story is definitely one worth telling.

    [...]

    It all started with one of Igalia’s customers deploying a WPE WebKit-based browser in their embedded devices. Their CI infrastructure had detected a problem caused when the browser was tasked with creating a new webview (in layman terms, you can imagine that to be the same as opening a new tab in your browser). Occasionally, this view would never load, causing ongoing tests to fail. For some reason, the test failure had a reproducibility of ~75% in the CI environment, but during manual testing it would occur with less than a 1% of probability. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this post, the CI infrastructure was not reachable in a way that would allow to have access to running processes in order to diagnose the problem more easily. So with only logs at hand and less than a 1/100 chances of reproducing the bug myself, I set to debug this problem locally.

    [...]

    Something that is worth mentioning before we move on is how the WPEBackend-fdo Wayland display integrates with the system. This display is a nested display, with each web view a client, while it is itself a client of the system’s Wayland display. This can be a bit confusing if you’re not very familiar with how Wayland works, but fortunately there is good documentation about Wayland elsewhere.

    The way that the Wayland display in the UI process of a WPEWebKit browser is integrated with the rest of the program, when it uses WPEBackend-fdo, is through the GLib main event loop. Wayland itself has an event loop implementation for servers, but for a GLib-powered application it can be useful to use GLib’s and integrate Wayland’s event processing with the different stages of the GLib main loop. That is precisely how WPEBackend-fdo is handling its clients’ events. As discussed earlier, when a new client is created a pair of connected sockets are created and one end is given to Wayland to control communication with the client. GSourceFunc functions are used to integrate Wayland with the application main loop. In these functions, we make sure that whenever there are pending messages to be sent to clients, those are sent, and whenever any of the client sockets has pending data to be read, Wayland reads from them, and to dispatch the events that might be necessary in response to the incoming data. And here is where things start getting really strange, because after doing a bit of fprintf()-powered debugging inside the Wayland-GSourceFuncs functions, it became clear that the Wayland events from the clients were never dispatched, because the dispatch() GSourceFunc was not being called, as if there was nothing coming from any Wayland client. But how is that possible, if we already know that the web process client is actually trying to get the Wayland registry?

    To move forward, one needs to understand how the GLib main loop works, in particular, with Unix file descriptor sources. A very brief summary of this is that, during an iteration of the main loop, GLib will poll file descriptors to see if there are any interesting events to be reported back to their respective sources, in which case the sources will decide whether to trigger the dispatch() phase. A simple source might decide in its dispatch() method to directly read or write from/to the file descriptor; a Wayland display source (as in our case), will call wl_event_loop_dispatch() to do this for us. However, if the source doesn’t find any interesting events, or if the source decides that it doesn’t want to handle them, the dispatch() invocation will not happen. More on the GLib main event loop in its API documentation.

  • GSoD Weekly Summary 6

    Since last week, I have been working on the GNOME calculator app and I spent most of my time writing the docs for the different calculator modes.

Distributions

• BSD

  • NetBSD Switched Its Default Window Manager From TWM to CTWM

    NetBSD is one of the oldest BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution)-based Unix-like free and open-source operating systems. For more than two decades, it is still actively developed for several platforms such as servers, desktops, and embedded systems.

    From the beginning, NetBSD featured the X11 windowing system with the “classic” default window manager of TWM (Tab Window Manager). But now, the team has switched its default window manager from TWM to CTWM (Claude’s Tab Window Manager) in NetBSD-current.

    If you don’t know, NetBSD-current is a nightly distribution of the latest NetBSD development branch, which includes the latest features along with experimental changes and bugs.

  • Various software updates in FreeBSD

    On an average day, I make use of a few dozen or more Open Source projects, and contribute to one or two (notably Calamares and KDE, but it varies wildly). When I wear my FreeBSD packaging hat, I tend to drive-by contribute to many more projects because there’s compatibility or C++-style fixes to apply. And I try to keep up with releases, some of which I’ll highlight here.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • Zoom updated to 5.4.53350.1027 » PCLinuxOS

    Zoom, the cloud meeting company, unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and group messaging into one easy-to-use platform. Our solution offers the best video, audio, and screen-sharing experience across Zoom Rooms, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and H.323/SIP room systems.

  • Opera Browser updated to 72.0.3815.186 » PCLinuxOS

    Opera is a multi-platform web browser for Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux operating systems developed by Opera Software. Opera is a Chromium-based browser using the Blink layout engine. It distinguishes itself from other browsers through its user interface and other features.

  • Calibre updated to 5.4.1 » PCLinuxOS

    Calibre is a cross-platform open-source suite of e-book software. Calibre supports organizing existing e-books into virtual libraries, displaying, editing, creating and converting e-books, as well as syncing e-books with a variety of e-readers. Editing books is supported for EPUB and AZW3 formats.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 – new horizons – SUSE Communities

    If data is the lifeblood of the modern business, then storage must be its heart. The preservation, safeguarding and management of exponentially growing volumes of data on a budget is one of the biggest business challenges today. Companies require scalable, robust and reliable storage solutions to retain their competitive edge.

    At SUSE, we are committed to delivering the best and latest technology to customers, and turn enterprise IT infrastructure into powerful tools that support your business growth and protect your data assets. In line with our focus on innovation and unwavering commitment to helping you succeed now while preparing you for the future, today we announce the highly anticipated release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 – one of the first industry products and leading enterprise-grade solutions based on the Ceph Octopus release.

    SUSE has been deeply involved in this release. Our engineers led the community development of its two major management modules, cephadm and the new dashboard graphic interface.

  • Digest of YaST Development Sprint 111 | YaST

    Another development sprint ended for the YaST Team this week. This time we have fewer news than usual about new features in YaST… and the reason for that may surprise you. Turns out a significant part of the YaST Team has been studying the internals of Cockpit in an attempt to use our systems management knowledge to help to improve the Cockpit support for (open)SUSE.

    But that doesn’t mean we have fully stopped the development of YaST and other parts of the installation process.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/44 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

    Week 44 brought, among many other things, an upgrade to Kernel 5.9.1. The feedback I had seen so far was good, so people can still do their work.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • IBM Red Hat vs. SUSE: How do these Linux distributions stack up?

    IBM Red Hat and SUSE are the leading vendors in the open source enterprise Linux market, but how do these two builds compare?

    Learn the history of IBM Red Hat vs. SUSE and compare numerous criteria — including the architectures each supports and how each distribution addresses the learning curve — as well as product support offerings, pricing and certifications.

    Like other Linux distributions, RHEL and SUSE both support a comprehensive set of commands. When comparing these two distributions, it’s worth noting that, although some commands are common to all Linux distributions, IBM Red Hat and SUSE also have their own command sets. Additionally, the commands these Linux distributions support tend to evolve over time.

    [...]

    Like any Linux distribution, SLES has a significant learning curve, particularly for those who are new to Linux OSes. However, SUSE does offer comprehensive training resources, including online and in-person classes.

    SLES is sold as a one- or three-year subscription. The subscription cost is based on the number of sockets or VMs, the architecture and the support option the organization selects. A one-year subscription for an x86/x64 OS running on one to two sockets or one to two VMs with Standard support starts at $799.

    SUSE offers two support options: Standard and Priority. Its Standard support plan includes assistance with software upgrades and updates, as well as unlimited technical support via chat, phone or web. Support is available 12 hours per day, five days per week, with a two-hour response time for Severity 1 issues and a four-hour response time for Severity 2 issues.

  • Upgrading to Fedora 33: Removing Your Old Swap File on EFI Machine | Groveronline

    Fedora 33 adds a compressed-memory-based swap device using zram. Cool! Now you can remove your old swap device, if you were a curmudgeon like me and even had one in the first place.

  • Fedora program update: 2020-44 – Fedora Community Blog

    Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. Fedora 33 was released on Tuesday! Join us for the virtual release party. Election nominations are open through 11 November.

    I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

  • Container Security Explained

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 adds roles, tunings, profiles, app streams, containers. That’s it.

    The world’s favourite grown-up headgear-themed Linux distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has reached version 8.3, Red Hat has announced. Identical in most respects to 8.2, the new version adds pre-packaged configuration, compliance and container options to ease the daily toil of devops in the modern IT environment.

    There are new Red Hat System Roles, which guide and automate OS configurations to speed installation by what RH charitably describes as those with ‘a wider range of skill sets’. New roles now include kernel settings, log settings, SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver and management.Tuned, a set of pre-configured, architecture-aware performance profiles, has also been updated.

  • RHEL 8.3 updates target digital transformation

    With an eye toward easing digital transformation projects, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes improved container tools, new security profiles and the addition of several System Roles, including ones for kernel settings, SAP HANA and NetWeaver.

    Red Hat also improved RHEL performance, adding updates to Tuned, which is a set of pre-configured profiles. Tuned allows IT shops to take better advantage of Red Hat’s multi-architecture, enabling software to run faster across a number of different hardware architectures. Also, Red Hat Insights continues to remain available by default for RHEL systems. As part of version 8.3, Red Hat added administrator views specifically for SAP HANA deployments.

    System Roles makes both common and complex RHEL configurations more consistent and accessible to a wider range of IT skillsets in large organizations.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 Announced With Updated AppStream

    Exactly three months after the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3, the Red Hat team has now announced a new stable version of the RHEL 8 platform called RHEL 8.3.

    The latest stable release aims to deliver more stability with cloud-native innovation by introducing new security profiles, enhanced performance capabilities, and updated container tools.

  • RHEL 8.3 Released With TSX Disabled By Default To Avoid Mitigation Overhead

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 is out today as the latest release of the RHEL8 platform.

    The latest stable release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, RHEL 8.3, is focused on expanded Red Hat System Roles support, updates to Tuned, new SCAP profiles, updated Application Streams, and other enterprise-minded stability enhancements. Some specific changes to note with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 include:

    - RHEL 8.3 is now disabling Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default. Disabling of TSX by default is done in the name of security and to remove the performance penalty of having TSX Asynchronous Abort mitigations for Xeon Cascade Lake processors. TSX can be enabled with the “tsx=on” kernel parameter.

    - New module streams for Ruby 2.7, Nginx 1.18, Perl 5.30, and Node.js 14. The streams for Python 3.8, PHP 7.4, and HTTPD 2.4.

  • Red Hat Pairs Innovation with Stability in Latest Version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Further Extends Linux as Foundation for Digital Transformation

    Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Generally available in the coming weeks, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 fuses the stability required by IT operations teams with cloud-native innovation, providing a more stable platform for next-generation enterprise applications. Already an established backbone for mission-critical computing, the latest enhancements to the platform bring new performance profiles and automation, reinforced security capabilities and updated container tools.

  • A post-COVID IT roadmap [Ed: By Mark Bohannon, vice president, government affairs at Red Hat]

    What began for almost all of us as a month-long work from home event looks like it will last a year or longer. When we return to the office, it will be a completely different experience, with most employees working staggered schedules, teams divided into groups and ever more reliance on technology to keep employees and customers connected and engaged.

    In recent weeks we have seen announcements from major technology companies, financial firms and others that support the forever-changed nature of the way we work. Understanding that, it’s time to start talking about the next steps we need to take to ensure that our IT infrastructure and tools can continue to support the remote workers, while providing state-of-the-art, timely customer service.

    The U.S. Department of Defense, prior to COVID probably one of the agencies in all of government most reluctant to support a remote workforce, has been without question one of the leaders in adapting to our “new normal.” DOD, through the adoption of work from home tools and improvements to its overall IT infrastructure, has moved nearly one million employees from a traditional office environment to a work-from-home posture. Despite its quick success, DOD is also a perfect example of the work that remains.

  • Show us your gear: Greg Gorman and an IoT command center for work and play – IBM Developer

    I admit it – I’m a total nerd when it comes to gadgets and toys, it’s pretty obvious looking at my desk! A quick scan of my network shows 39 devices on SmartThings, 92 that Alexa knows about (along with four Echos of various types) and 66 devices on my wi-fi and ethernet network! While some are work-related, many others are more about learning to hack on IoT devices as a side-hobby.

    [...]

    I set up a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to run it, and then I have a central hub that collects as much of the data as I can get my hands on.

  • The IBM Kubernetes Certification Process – IBM Developer

    Inside IBM, a large number of containerized software products are released every day. They are built with different personas, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift cluster requirements, and install technologies. These products need to be consistent and feel like they all came from the same company, but an industry standard for the design of production-grade, Kubernetes software does not exist. By creating the IBM Kubernetes Certification process, my team helps developers drive consistency, security, reliability, and good design across IBM products.

    If you develop containerized software, you likely relate to the importance of certification. All containerized software should complete a similar certification process since it gives a stamp of production grade readiness and security to customers.

  • Innovation with an open modular platform begins with automation

    Financial services institutions, by necessity, are embracing digital transformation and technology solutions to work more efficiently to maintain regulatory compliance, reduce risk, increase productivity, and exceed customer expectations. As part of the never-ending quest to participate in the development of industry-leading solutions, Red Hat has led the way in the demonstration of new forward-looking solutions, especially in this sector.

  • Open Liberty 20.0.0.11 brings Kerberos authentication and Thanos support in Grafana dashboards – Red Hat Developer

    This article is a quick look at two exciting updates in the new Open Liberty 20.0.0.11 release. First, you can now use the Kerberos authentication protocol to secure Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) data sources. I’ll introduce the new kerberos configuration element in Open Liberty’s server.xml and show you how to use the Kerberos protocol to secure a data source.

    We’ve also updated Open Liberty’s Grafana dashboard, which you can now use to visualize MicroProfile Metrics data from Thanos data sources. This new functionality benefits developers working in Kubernetes environments such as Red Hat OpenShift, where it is possible to use Thanos to query and store metrics data from multiple clusters. Keep reading to learn more about both of these updates in Open Liberty 20.0.0.11.

  • SmoogeSpace: RHEL-6/CentOS-6/SciLin-6/EPEL-6 End Of Life Notice 2020-11-30

    This is a short reminder that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 6 will enter ‘Extended Lifetime Support’ in about 30 days from when I am writing this. Extended Lifetime Support (ELS) is a specific contract with Red Hat for them to cover certain security fixes for some extended time to allow sites some time for last minute transitions.

    RHEL-6 was released in November of 2010, and was the first RHEL I got to work with/on after I returned to Red Hat in 2009. The release has seen 10 minor releases (1 less than RHEL-5), and has been in ‘extended’ mode since the last 6.10 release in June 2018.

    [...]

    Primarily, if you are going to be affected by the end of EL-6 services, you either need to get an ELS contract, move to another OS, or move to self-support. In order to self-support, you will need to mirror the source code from your distribution provider and learn the basics of RPM building. If you are on CentOS and find your servers not able to do yum installs anymore.. you will need to mirror the EL-6 from the CentOS vault somewhere locally and use that as your new ‘mirror’. Depending on time and energy, I will try to outline some of these steps in future blog posts.

• Debian Family

  • combining “apt install” and “get dist-upgrade”? « codeblog

    While it’s not much, this results in redundant work. For example reading/writing package database, potentially running triggers (man-page refresh, ldconfig, etc). The internal package dependency resolution stuff isn’t actually different: “install” will also do upgrades of needed packages, etc. Combining them should be entirely possible, but I haven’t found a clean way to do this yet.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Canonical Announces ETrace As New Linux Application Tracing For Performance/Debugging

    Canonical has announced ETrace as a new application tracing tool designed for debugging and performance profiling of Snap packages but can also be used with any Linux binary applications.

    Their new ETrace tool is written in the Go programming language and leverages ptrace for performance and debug analysis. Current functionality of ETrace allows monitoring the time it takes an application until its window is displayed, the files accessed during the duration of the program, and other common profiling/debug features.

  • Introducing etrace – a multi-purpose application profiling tool

    These days, the internal workings of Linux applications involve many different moving parts. Sometimes, it can be rather difficult to debug them when things go wrong or run slower than expected. Tracing an application’s execution is one way of understanding potential issues without diving into the source code. To this end, we wrote an app-tracing tool called etrace, designed to detect performance bottlenecks and runtime issues in snaps.

    In this article, we will be taking a look at etrace with an overview of the basic functionality of etrace, and highlight its usage through several representative examples.

  • What’s New in Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla? Why You Should Give Ubuntu Another Shot

    Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla is now available for download and install. If you’ve been away from Ubuntu for a while, is this the release to make you jump back on board the Canonical groove train? Here’s everything you need to know about Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla!

    [...]

    However, in recent years, even standard releases have become less ambitious and instead focused more on fine-tuning and polishing the Ubuntu experience than venturing into new territory.

    Ubuntu was once the default suggestion for novices interested in try Linux: its user-friendliness, supportive community, and just-works philosophy led to wide-spread adoption. And while it’s still one of the most popular distros, Ubuntu has lost some favor due to a number of missteps over the last decade—for example, bundling Amazon adware and radically redesigning the desktop.

    As a result, Canonical’s distro now battles Linux Mint, Manjaro, and MX Linux for the top spot in many distro review round-ups and user recommendations. So, in that light…

Devices/Embedded

• 27 Super Cool Raspberry Pi Zero W Projects for DIY Enthusiasts

  The projects featured here are only a tip of the iceberg. You can find many more projects if you look around on the internet. The versatility of the Raspberry Pi Zero is unprecedented, combined with its affordability it is one of the most used SBC by makers and tinkerers around the world.

  What did you build with the Raspberry Pi Zero ? Put it in the comments below along with your favorite projects

• Whiskey Lake embedded PC has dual hot-swap SATA

  Axiomtek’s fanless, rugged “eBOX630-528-FL” runs Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s 8th Gen UE-series with up to 32GB DDR4, 2x hot-swap SATA bays, 3x GbE, 6x USB, 4x COM, 2x HDMI, and 2x mini-PCIe.

  The eBOX630-528-FL may be the quintessential, mid-range Intel-based embedded PC of 2020. With a 15W TDP 8th Gen Whiskey Lake-UE processor that falls between the low-power Apollo Lake Atom and high-end, power-sucking Coffee Lake, the fanless, ruggedized system supports a wide range of embedded applications including smart production, machine automation, product testing, smart warehouse, and AIoT-related.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • SiFive readies the HiFive Unmatched, world’s first RISC-V-based desktop PC platform

    SiFive’s HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX platform is designed for DiY developers. It comes with a 5-core RISC-V processor complemented by 8 GB of onboard DDR4 RAM. Users can add an NVMe SSD, a wireless card and a dGPU or any other PCIe Gen 3 X8 expansion card. The platform is compatible with many popular Linux distributions and will soon be up for pre-orders at US$665.

    [...]

    This new platform is based around the SiFive FU740 64-bit processor that integrates 4x U74 cores plus an S7 core, and is marketed as a professional development solution. SiFive is making things easier for DIY developers, as the platform motherboard comes in a mini-ITX form-factor with ATX 24-pin PSU connector. The small motherboard also features 8 GB of onboard DDR4 RAM + 32 MB QSPI flash memory, and also comes with a microsSD card reader. Users can add a PCIe Gen 3 X4 NVMe SSD in the included M.2 2280 slot, and there is also a PCIe Gen 3 X8 slot for dGPUs or other expansion cards. Port selection includes 4x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 + microUSB connectors, along with a GbE jack. Additionally, the included M.2 Key E slot offers support for a wireless NIC.

  • HiFive Unmatched SBC showcases new FU740 RISC-V SoC

    SiFive has opened $665 pre-orders on a “HiFive Unmatched” Mini-ITX dev board that can power a PC. The SBC runs Linux on a penta-core, 64-bit SiFive FU740 SoC and offers 2x M.2 and PCIe x16 for graphics.

    In September when SiFive announced its FU740 (Freedom U740) SoC, the RISC-V chip designer said it would soon demo the SoC running a PC. At the time, we speculated that the demo would include a new HiFive dev board to update the Linux- and U540-driven, $999 HiFive Unleashed, which runs on the earlier Freedom U540 (FU540). Indeed, SiFive has now opened pre-orders on a $665 HiFive Unmatched Mini-ITX board due in the fourth quarter that runs Linux on a U74-MC.

  • Arduino Blog » This aerial system launches Nano 33 BLE Sense darts for data collection

    Sensor deployment via unmanned aerial vehicles is an interesting concept. Up until now, you’ve had two options: use a drone that drops sensors onto the ground, or one with some kind of manipulator to stick them in particular place. However, researchers at Imperial College London have been studying a third approach, which shoots sensor pods from an aerial platform like darts.

    The system utilizes a compressed spring, along with a shape-memory alloy (SMA) trigger to fling the sensor pods at a nearby surface, at up to a four-meter range. The actual sensor package used here is an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, allowing for a variety of measurements without extra hardware in hazardous environments or inaccessible locations.

    Several methods of attachment were proposed, including magnets and chemical bonding, but the experiment’s research paper focuses on dart-like wood attachment, since this would require the most force.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • All Android users can now save money on games, apps and movies in the UK Google Play Store

  • Keeping your Android device safe: From using Play Protect to installing security apps

  • CarDroid Dongle transforms Android Auto giving it full Android Super Powers

  • Philips Brings New Features to MediaSuite pro TVs with Major Android Update

  • 21 More Android Apps Part Of HiddenAds Campaign – 3 Still Available On Play Store

  • How to Connect PS5 DualSense Controller to PC & Android

  • How to add words to an Android device’s dictionary

  • Opinion: The Sub $250 US Android Smartphone Market Needs To Die

  • Google lays out the privacy benefits of electronic ‘Mobile Driving Licenses’ on Android

  • The budget Nokia 5.3 will soon get Android 11 update

  • Android 11 bug silences calls from starred contacts in DND, but there are workarounds

  • Canal+ Polska introduces new Android 4K box

  • How to erase personal data from a stolen or lost Android smartphone?

  • Best gifts for Android lovers

  • Android may eventually support the rumble features on some game controllers

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• RT-Thread launches developer event

  RT-Thread is an open source embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) providing a wide range of components along with more than 250 software packages (and counting) for the Internet of Things (IoT). In previous Opensource.com articles, the RT-Thread project has demonstrated how to code hardware with an RTOS and how to program for IoT using open source tools.

  Great things in open source are never done by one person; they’re done by a group of people working together. And if you want to get started with embedded programming or you’re looking for an RTOS for your embedded project, RT-Thread wants to collaborate with you!

  Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve teamed up with Programming For Beginners to hold a developer event. We’re looking for developers who have ideas, ambitions, and excitement for the open source hardware.

• Sandstorm: A Complete Open-source Platform with A Rich Ecosystem for Enterprise

  It’s a nightmare for many companies and enterprise technical departments to run the required apps separately, keep up with the maintenance, auditing logs and manage their updates. Especially the ones with low IT resources or complex structure.

  It’s not resources-effective approach neither secure. Despite it requires a dedicated team of DevOps to keep up, It is also a challenge for company identity management, access management and compliance.

  Here it comes Sandstorm, An open-source solution that is designed specifically to resolve these issue and boost enterprise, developers, DevOps and individuals productivity. In this article we will guide you through this amazing application, explaining how it works, listing its features and the best use-cases for it.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Dustin J. Mitchell: Taskcluster’s DB (Part 2) – DB Migrations [Ed: Mozilla as Microsoft proprietary software boosters]

      This is part 2 of a deep-dive into the implementation details of Taskcluster’s backend data stores. Check out part 1 for the background, as we’ll jump right in here!

    • Hacks.Mozilla.Org: MDN Web Docs evolves! Lowdown on the upcoming new platform [Ed: It's a shame that Mozilla is even outsourcing documentation to Microsoft's proprietary software trap]

      The time has come for Kuma — the platform that powers MDN Web Docs — to evolve. For quite some time now, the MDN developer team has been planning a radical platform change, and we are ready to start sharing the details of it. The question on your lips might be “What does a Kuma evolve into? A KumaMaMa?”

      For those of you not so into Pokémon, the question might instead be “How exactly is MDN changing, and how does it affect MDN users and contributors”?

      For general users, the answer is easy — there will be very little change to how we serve the great content you use everyday to learn and do your jobs.

      For contributors, the answer is a bit more complex.

      [...]

      Because MDN content is soon to be contained in a GitHub repo, the contribution workflow will change significantly. You will no longer be able to click Edit on a page, make and save a change, and have it show up nearly immediately on the page. You’ll also no longer be able to do your edits in a WYSIWYG editor.

    • Mike Taylor: .www filename flags in web-platform-tests

      So like, if you ever need to load a page on a different subdomain to test some kind of origin-y or domainy-y thing, you can just name your test something amazing like origin-y-test.www.html and it will open the test for you at www.web-platform.test (rather than web-platform.test, or similarly, however your system or server is configured).

    • Contribute to selecting new Recommended extensions | Mozilla Add-ons Blog

      Recommended extensions—a curated list of extensions that meet Mozilla’s highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience—are in part selected with input from a rotating editorial board of community contributors. Each board runs for six consecutive months and evaluates a small batch of new Recommended candidates each month. The board’s evaluation plays a critical role in helping identify new potential Recommended additions.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 is ready for testing

    The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 is ready for testing!

    LibreOffice 7.1 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2021 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 7.1 started at the end of May, 2020. Since then, 5374 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 1100 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

    LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 can be downloaded from here for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

    In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

  • LibreOffice monthly recap: October 2020

    Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks…

  • [LibreOffice 7.1] Layout updates

    You know the LibreOffice community work hard on the LibreOffice 7.1 Christmas release. Did you know that LibreOffice has 7 different UI Layouts? With the next release, our uses will be informed after the installation. Thanks to Heiko for the new dialog.

  • Your typical errors when creating presentation templates. Part 1

    Try click somewhere on slide in area with rectangles. You can select any from these rectangles include the largest grey rectangle that author used as background for all composition. Its all are just shapes! This is an absolutely wrong way when you create a presentation template!

• CMS

  • WordPress 5.5.3 Maintenance Release

    WordPress 5.5.3 is now available.

    This maintenance release fixes an issue introduced in WordPress 5.5.2 which makes it impossible to install WordPress on a brand new website that does not have a database connection configured. This release does not affect sites where a database connection is already configured, for example, via one-click installers or an existing wp-config.php file.

    [...]

    These themes and plugins were not activated and therefore remain non-functional unless you installed them previously. It is safe to delete these features should you prefer not to use them.

    If you are not on 5.5.2, or have auto-updates for minor releases disabled, please manually update to the 5.5.3 version by downloading WordPress 5.5.3 or visiting Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.”

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • Video of EIRSAT-1 talk

      This followed by a detailed proposal as to how amateur radio operators can contribute to ground station operations via SatNOGs and gr_satellites GNU Radio

• Programming/Development

  • 5 Outstanding Open-Source Projects Which Have Just One Source File

    Programmers write code in different ways according to their preference and type of the particular project. If a software project is quite large and growing, we usually decompose the whole thing into several files to achieve maintainability. However, programmers often turn awesome ideas into single-file open-source projects amazingly.

  • Jussi Pakkanen/Nibble Stew: How to build dependencies as Meson subprojects using SDL as an example

    Today we released version 0.56.0 of the Meson build system. This is an especially important release as it marks the 10 000th commit since the start of the project. A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed their time and effort, this project would not exist without all of you. However in this post we are not going to talk about that, those interested can find further details in the release notes. Instead we are going to be talking about how to build your dependencies from source on every platform without needing anything other than Meson.

    Last month I had a lightning talk at CppCon about this way of managing dependencies:

    Since then there have been many improvements to the workflow for a smoother experience. To demonstrate this I upgraded the sample program to use SDL Mixer and SDL Image instead of relying on plain SDL.

  • Abstraction: The Journey from Memory Tubes to JavaScript Memory Management
    

    While reading George Dyson’s computer history book Turing’s Cathedral earlier this year, I was struck by how physical the act of programming was back in the 1940s and 50s, when the age of computers began. Take a close look at the lead image of this post, borrowed from Dyson’s book, which shows John von Neumann and the MANIAC computer in 1952. At hip level in the photo are a group of Williams cathode-ray memory tubes, each one storing 1,024 bits. There were 40 tubes, so the total capacity was 40,960 bits (5 kilobytes!)

    What’s even more remarkable than the fact that von Neumann could touch the memory tubes, is that he was also able to see what was happening inside the tubes. “In the foreground [of the photo] is the 7-inch-diameter 41st monitor stage, allowing the contents of the memory to be observed while in use,” wrote Dyson.

    When von Neumann and his colleagues programmed the MANIAC, they were acutely aware of what was happening inside the machine. They had to understand precisely how memory worked, in order to physically manipulate it. “Every memory location had to be specified at every step,” explained Dyson, “and the position of the significant digits adjusted as a computation progressed.”

  • A Journey Through Memory Management

    Since that time, MacManus notes, “we’ve gone from having to program instructions—using machine language, no less—into a cathode-ray memory tube, to 80% of the time copying and pasting reusable modules into an internet service (and having no idea where in the world it will actually get computed).

    [...]

    Since that time, MacManus notes, “we’ve gone from having to program instructions—using machine language, no less—into a cathode-ray memory tube, to 80% of the time copying and pasting reusable modules into an internet service (and having no idea where in the world it will actually get computed).

  • The accelerating adoption of Julia [LWN.net]

    The Julia programming language has seen a major increase in its use and popularity over the last few years. We last looked at it two years ago, around the time of the Julia 1.0 release. Here, we will look at some of the changes since that release, none of which are major, as well as some newer resources for learning the language, but the main focus of this article is a case study that is meant to help show why the language has been taking off. A follow-up article will introduce a new computational notebook for Julia, called Pluto, that is akin to Jupyter notebooks.

    Julia is a programming language that was first released in 2012; its implementation is released under the MIT license. It is a general-purpose language, but with a particular suitability for scientific programming and numerical work. Julia is a dynamic language, with an interactive mode and easy-to-learn syntax that is simple for novice programmers; it also has deeper layers of sophistication for the expert. The language allows introspection and metaprogramming, with Lisp-like macros, an optional Lisp syntax, and access to syntax-tree and assembly-language views of functions. It features a rich type system with performant user-defined types, multiple dispatch of functions, and several flavors of concurrent programming built in.

    Julia recently passed a kind of popularity milestone, breaking into the top 20 in the IEEE Spectrum list of programming languages. Beyond that, the language is being adopted in many new research projects, such as: the Climate Machine, the computational engine used by the Caltech Climate Modeling Alliance; a new space weather forecasting initiative, funded by the NSF; quantum machine learning; drug development; and a computational collaboration called Celeste to create a massive star map of the universe.

    Professor Mykel Kochenderfer is the creator of an international standard aircraft collision avoidance system, ACAS X. In an email interview, he told me that the Julia version of his system runs as fast as a previous version he wrote in highly optimized C++. Since he wrote the Julia version intending it to merely document the algorithm, this was a surprise. He was able to replace the C++ version with the easier to read and maintain Julia code.

    The recently concluded annual Julia conference, online this year, naturally, was a good indicator of the audience that Julia is attracting. The presentations (YouTube videos) that one would expect of various computer science topics were outweighed by talks about applications to scientific research in an impressive variety of fields. A recurring theme was the way that the language facilitated collaboration and code reuse, giving scientists an opportunity to take advantage of the packages and algorithms of others.

  • What is coming in PHP 8 [LWN.net]

    Recently, PHP 8 release candidate 2 was posted by the project. A lot of changes are coming with this release, including a just-in-time compiler, a good number of backward-compatibility breaks, and new features that developers have been requesting for years. Now that the dust has settled, and the community is focusing on squashing bugs for the general-availability release scheduled for November 26, it’s a good time to look at what to expect.

    [...]

    To a certain degree, PHP 8 represents a departure from the project’s past. Historically, the community has placed a high value on backward compatibility, even between major releases. This doesn’t seem to have been as much of a concern for this release, judging by the upgrade notes. With the scope and quantity of backward-incompatible changes, even relatively modern PHP applications will require a little tweaking to bring them up to speed.

    The community has expended considerable effort in making PHP 8 into a more consistent language, both in terms of behaviors and syntax. Four separate proposals with a focus on making PHP into a more consistent language — in terms of behavior and syntax — have been implemented. These changes generally concern themselves with edge cases or preexisting quirks of the language; there are, however, a few notable changes worth mentioning explicitly.

  • Remi Collet: PHP version 7.3.24 and 7.4.12

    RPMs of PHP version 7.4.12 are available in remi repository for Fedora 32-33 and remi-php74 repository for Fedora 31 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 7 (RHEL, CentOS).

    RPMs of PHP version 7.3.24 are available in remi repository for Fedora 31 and remi-php73 repository for Enterprise Linux ≥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).

  • How to Check If a Value Exists in An Array in PHP – TecAdmin

    Q. How do I check if a specific value exists in an array in PHP. Write a sample PHP program to check if a value exists in an array.

  • Python

    • Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

      We, the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct Enforcement Committee, issue a public apology to Jeremy Howard for our handling of the JupyterCon 2020 reports. We should have done better. We thank you for sharing your experience and we will use it to improve our policies going forward.

      We acknowledge that it was an extremely stressful experience, being summoned to an interview with several members of a committee, after a week had passed, and without knowing the nature of the complaint. We apologize for causing this stress and will work to improve our process to avoid this from happening in the future.

      To clarify a crucial miscommunication that we take responsibility for: At the time of the interview, the committee had not determined that there was a violation of the code of conduct, only that there were two complaints filed and being examined. We apologize for not communicating that clearly from the beginning. We have not recommended any enforcement actions. We had asked to postpone the posting of the talk to the JupyterCon shared space until the complaints are resolved. We realize now that we used overly charged language and miscommunicated the stage of the investigation when discussing the complaints, i.e. saying a violation occurred. We should have been clearer saying multiple complaints have been made and the alleged violation investigation had not been resolved.

    • Python Morsels: Data structures contain pointers

      Data structures in Python don’t actually contain objects. They references to objects (aka “pointers”).

    • Sending Invites – Building SaaS #77 · Matt Layman

      In this episode, I worked on the form that will send invites to users for the new social network app that I’m building. We built the view, the form, and the tests and wired a button to the new view.

      The first thing that we do was talk through the new changes since the last stream. After discussing the progress, I took some time to cover the expected budget for the application to get it to an MVP.

      Once we covered the budget, I talked about different strategies for sending invite emails and the tradeoffs between sending email in a request and response cycle versus using background workers.

    • Episode #33: Going Beyond the Basic Stuff With Python and Al Sweigart – The Real Python Podcast

      You probably have heard of the bestselling Python book, “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.” What are the next steps after starting to dabble in the Python basics? Maybe you’ve completed some tutorials, created a few scripts, and automated repetitive tasks in your life. This week on the show, we have author Al Sweigart to talk about his new book, “Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python: Best Practices for Writing Clean Code.”

    • How to Sort a Dictionary by Value in Python

      A dictionary in Python is a collection of items that stores data as key-value pairs. In Python 3.7 and later versions, dictionaries are sorted by the order of item insertion. In earlier versions, they were unordered.

      Let’s have a look at how we can sort a dictionary on basis of the values they contain.

  • Java

    • What’s new in Fabric8 Kubernetes Java client 4.12.0 – Red Hat Developer

      The recent Fabric8 Kubernetes Java client 4.12.0 release includes many new features and bug fixes. This article introduces the major features we’ve added between the 4.11.0 and 4.12.0 releases.

      I will show you how to get started with the new VolumeSnapshot extension, CertificateSigningRequests, and Tekton triggers in the Fabric8 Tekton client (to name just a few). I’ll also point out several minor changes that break backward compatibility with older releases. Knowing about these changes will help you avoid problems when you upgrade to the latest version of Fabric8’s Java client for Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift.

Better handling emergencies

We all know these situations when we receive an email asking Can you check the design of X, I need a reply by tonight. Or an instant message: My website went down, can you check? Another email: I canceled a plan at the hosting company, can you restore my website as fast as possible? A phone call: The TLS certificate didn’t get updated, and now we can’t access service Y. Yet another email: Our super important medical advice website is suddenly being censored in country Z, can you help?

Everyone knows those messages that have “URGENT” in capital letters in the email subject. It might be that some of them really are urgent. Others are the written signs of someone having a hard time properly planning their own work and passing their delays on to someone who comes later in the creation or production chain. And others again come from people who are overworked and try to delegate some of their tasks to a friendly soul who is likely to help.

Health/Nutrition

• Toward a Small Farm Future

  In the 1990s, Indonesian kopi luwak – civet coffee, made from coffee beans that had passed through a civet’s digestive tract – became a new luxury commodity among wealthy coffee-lovers. Market dynamics being what they are, local producers cashed in on the demand by capturing and caging wild civets, force-feeding them coffee beans and selling the produce as cut-price kopi luwak. Though cheaper, the resulting coffee lacked the quality of the original conferred by the civet’s discerning nose, and came at the expense of ecological and animal welfare (1).

  We live in a world of trade-offs. If you want genuine kopi luwak of good quality and low environmental impact you have to pay someone to comb through the forests looking for wild civet scat on your behalf. Humans can simulate the process and produce a similar product at lower cost, but it’s not the same.

• Written Description: What did we learn from last week’s FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting?

  On October 22, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met to discuss the development, authorization, and licensure of COVID-19 vaccines. The meeting was not focused on any particular vaccine candidate; rather, it gave the FDA an opportunity to seek more general guidance about the process from outside experts. In this post, we explain what advisory committees like VRBPAC do, what happened at the meeting last week, and what this means for the COVID-19 vaccine timeline.

  [...]

  On October 22, the VRBPAC held an open, online, public meeting concerning its standards for approving a vaccine against COVID-19. (The meeting was simultaneously broadcast on CSPAN and YouTube.) Prior to the meeting, the Committee made the agenda and briefing materials publicly available; the meeting featured presentations from Committee members, staff from the FDA, CDC, NIH, BARDA, the Reagan-Udall Foundation, and a variety of members from industry. Introductions alone took 23 minutes to complete; the meeting lasted almost nine hours.

  Somewhat surprising for lay observers was the absence of a discussion of any particular vaccine candidate, including the four currently in Phase III clinical trials in the US. Instead, the meeting focused on the standards of such trials and the legal authority (and limits) for approval. While a nine-hour meeting focusing on the particulars of vaccine safety and efficacy standards sounds…dense…there were a number of broader, important takeaways likely to be of larger interest.

  First, and most important, the VRBPAC gave a number of reassurances that it would advise the FDA to continue to uphold rigorous safety standards despite political pressure to quickly approve a vaccine. It was clear that even if an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)—a shortcut to the typical and more formal approval process—were available for a vaccine, it could not be used without the completion of a clinical trial (through Phase III). In addition, the Committee noted that it would strongly encourage the completion of ongoing trials even when another vaccine candidate is authorized or approved so that the Agency can track outcomes.

  Second, the Committee reaffirmed its commitment to safety follow-ups even after a vaccine is authorized or approved. The post-approval follow-up study envisioned by the VRBPAC would contain roughly 3,000 participants—enough, one hopes, to track any serious adverse events arising late from the vaccine. At the same time, however, the Committee noted that this post-approval follow-up would not necessarily conform to the diversity standards otherwise needed for the clinical trials; in clinical trials, these requirements are crucially important to ensure the vaccine works in a immunologically diverse population. Whether this limitation of post-licensure studies will prevent the discovery of adverse event information remains unseen—and will likely remain unseen until long after a vaccine has come out. But for now, the VRBPAC—to its credit—is laudably committed to following up on any licensed vaccine after it has been deployed in the wild.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Xen Summit Keynote: Your self-driving car is awesome. . .because of open source software like Xen – Xen Project

          In his keynote speech, Robin Randhawa, Technical Director at ARM, gives an overview of how many innovations happening in the automotive industry are made possible due to open source software, including Xen.

          Robin is part of the open source division within ARM. In his talk, Robin outlines how ARM’s place in Vehicle Autonomy, as well as the ecosystem around it and the role Open source software plays.

        • The Linux Foundation wants to help combat COVID-19 with free, open source apps to tell people when they’ve been exposed to the virus [Ed: Linux Foundation is an enemy of privacy. Linux Foundation actively helps companies that exploit a virus to push surveillance agenda.]

  • Security

    • Arduino joins the Open Source Security Foundation

      As an open-source project, Arduino has always considered security a top priority: making tools and products easy to use for our community has consistently been as important as making them secure.

      Today, we are excited to announce that Arduino has joined the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSFF), the collaborative cross-industry effort to secure the open-source ecosystem.

      Hosted at the Linux Foundation, the OpenSFF brings together the efforts of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and GitHub’s Open Source Security Coalition and is committed to working both upstream and with existing communities to advance the security of open-source software. The foundation will initially include technical initiatives and working groups that will address vulnerability disclosures, security tooling, security best practices, and the identification of security threats to the open-source project.

    • Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (dompurify.js, libsndfile, and openjdk-8), Fedora (python2), Mageia (tomcat), openSUSE (lout, pagure, php7, singularity, and tensorflow2), SUSE (graphviz, libvirt, pacemaker, python-Jinja2, samba, spice, spice-gtk, thunderbird and mozilla-nspr, xen, and zstd), and Ubuntu (fastd).

    • Securing military embedded systems is a giant challenge

      Updating and patching security vulner­abilities to limit the attack surface for the military’s embedded systems – especially legacy ones – can be a daunting task.

      Embedded systems used by the military, many of which were once considered to be standalone and secure thanks to air gaps – network security measures used on one or more computers to ensure that a secure computer network is physically isolated from unsecured networks – now require security. Demand for interconnectivity of embedded systems is increasing their attack surface, often necessitating updates and patches to thwart vulnerabilities.

      “It’s a huge challenge because there are a broad range of requirements and use cases for legacy embedded systems,” says Rich Lucente, principal solutions architect, DoD, for Red Hat North America Public Sector (Raleigh, North Carolina). “Some are either very isolated or surrounded by external mitigation measures that seemingly reduce the burden to secure the system, but in reality may provide a false sense of security.”

    • TrickBot Linux Variants Active in the Wild Despite Recent Takedown

      Efforts to disrupt TrickBot may have shut down most of its critical infrastructure, but the operators behind the notorious malware aren’t sitting idle.

      According to new findings shared by cybersecurity firm Netscout, TrickBot’s authors have moved portions of their code to Linux in an attempt to widen the scope of victims that could be targeted.

Defence/Aggression

• Ending Regime Change—in Bolivia and the World

  In the long history of U.S.-backed “regime changes” in countries around the world, rarely have a people and a country so firmly and democratically repudiated U.S. efforts to dictate how they will be governed.

• The Parallel Universe of Peace

  Those who are committed to peace and global equality are forced to work for it in a world that is seriously prejudiced in favor of war.

• War Wasn’t a Campaign Issue. What Does That Mean for the Next Presidency?

  During the last presidential debate, Donald Trump and Joe Biden sparred over the pressing domestic problems of racism, health care, climate change, the economy and the pandemic, along with the alleged Chinese, Russian and Iranian interference in the elections. But substantive discussions of foreign policy and the threat of nuclear war were off the table. The same was true in earlier debates, including the primaries. Moderators didn’t ask, and the candidates didn’t tell.

• Cameroon school killings, male rape in Rohingya camps, and 200 migrant deaths at sea: The Cheat Sheet

  Cameroon’s anglophone conflict reached a new low last week when gunmen killed eight children and injured 12 others at a school in the southwestern town of Kumba. Officials blamed anglophone separatists, who are demanding independence from the majority French-speaking country, though no group has claimed responsibility. Separatists have enforced an education boycott on English-speaking regions since 2017 as part of their three-year struggle against the government. Talks between the warring sides have taken place in recent months in Yaoundé, the capital. But hardliners from both camps are hampering efforts, and violence has increased on the ground, where more than 700,000 people are now displaced. On Tuesday, Kumba residents held a vigil outside the school, as injured children battled for their lives in hospital. “I have not eaten, I cannot sleep because of this war, this nonsense crisis,” one woman told France 24. “Why should we kill our own children?”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Transparency Is Important; Mandated Transparency Is Dangerous And Will Stifle Innovation And Competition

  While much of yesterday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing was focused on the pointless grievances and grandstanding of sitting Senators, there was a bit of actual news made by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. As we discussed earlier this week, Zuckerberg agreed for the first time that he was in support of Section 230 reform, though he declined in his opening remarks to specify the nature of the reforms he supported. And while the original draft of Jack Dorsey’s opening testimony suggested full support of 230, in the given remarks he also suggested that Twitter would support changes to Section 230 focused on getting companies to be more transparent. Later in the hearing, during one of the extraordinarily rare moments when a Senator actually asked the CEOs how they would change 230, Zuckerberg also focused on transparency reports, before immediately noting that Facebook already issued transparency reports.

Environment

• In ‘Road Map for a More Sustainable Future,’ NY Regulator Tells Banks to Consider Climate Risks in Planning

  “Climate change is happening now, and we have to take steps to manage the financial risks now,” said the state superintendent of banking regulation.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • ‘We Will See Them in Court’: Howls of Protest and Lawsuit Promised as Trump Takes Wolves Off Endangered Species List

    “Let’s learn from history: Removing legal protections is a disaster for gray wolves.”

Finance

• West Virginians Were Promised an Economic Revival. It Hasn’t Happened Yet.

  One year ago, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice promised business leaders that the state’s economy was on the verge of a boom. Continued growth in natural gas production was going to spark an industrial renaissance, bringing construction of a giant collection of spinoff factories.

  Speaking to the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, held as usual at the billionaire governor’s own luxury resort, The Greenbrier, Justice painted quite a picture of the land of plenty to come.

• He Made a Minor Mistake Filling Out an Unemployment Form. Then the State Demanded $14,990 From Him.

  Ahmad Ghabboun broke into a sweat. It was a late night in August and he had just discovered an unexpected $14,990 debt posted to the online portal he uses to access his account with Washington state’s unemployment agency. Since May, he had been receiving payments every week through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, newly established by Congress to support freelancers like him. The benefits replaced the paycheck he could no longer earn after the pandemic had grounded his work delivering packages for Amazon Flex and driving the occasional shift for Uber.

  Now, the agency, formally known as the Washington State Employment Security Department, was demanding he return every penny. The website provided no explanation.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• ‘Dangerously Authoritarian’: Trump Says ‘Hopefully’ Courts Will Stop States From Counting Ballots After November 3

  “He’s saying it out loud: he wants courts to block legally cast ballots from being counted.”

• Kayleigh McEnany’s New Shadow Role With Trump Campaign Riles Ethics Watchdogs

  President Donald Trump’s White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appears to have supplemented her government work with a new role as a senior adviser to the president’s re-election campaign.

• ‘An Inspiration to Progressive Forces’: Allies Stand in Solidarity With Jeremy Corbyn Following Labour Party Suspension

  Corbyn was suspended following his reaction to a watchdog report on how the party handled allegations of anti-Semitism within its ranks.

• Donald Trump’s Failed State

  America’s daunting New World and the coming election.

• Judge: Trump Denying He Raped Someone Was Not Part Of His Official President’s Duties

  Last month we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous situation in which the DOJ sought to insert itself into the long-running defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. As we noted, Carroll’s defamation claims seem fairly weak. They’re part of a pattern of somewhat sketchy defamation claims in which someone accuses someone of something awful, and then the accused person denies it — and the accuser says the denial is defamation.

• How to Follow a Local Political Race

  The 2020 congressional races may be standing in the shadow of presidential politics, and the coverage those races do get often focuses on competition between rival candidates while downplaying policies and platforms. Knowing how to decipher these “horse race” stories can help you understand what’s at stake for you.

  Think about it this way: The campaigns themselves are constantly watching certain signals — polls, fundraising, public opinion — to understand what’s going on in their races. They adjust their tactics accordingly. As a voter, you have the power to adjust your actions, too. Here are a few questions to ask.

Civil Rights/Policing

• ‘Disregard for Human Life Could Not Be More Blatant’: Despite Covid-19 Risks, Trump Increases Deportations to Haiti

  “I believe that they are trying to deport as many people as possible prior to the elections,” said one advocate for Haitian refugees.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Monopolistic U.S. ISPs Take Full Advantage Of The Covid Crisis

  We’ve noted for years that broadband usage caps are bullshit. Leaked ISP documents and public executive statements have repeatedly made it clear that usage caps and overage fees are just glorified price hikes on the backs of captive customers, only made possible due to industry monopolization (and the regulatory capture and Congressional corruption that lets them get away with it).

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• A Quick Bite Post Mortem For For Quibi: Hollywood Still Doesn’t Get The Internet

  So Quibi, the Hollywood dream of creating a new “professional” video streaming service by throwing $1.75 billion at Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and hoping they could create something, lasted all of 199 days before announcing that it was throwing in the towel (even though it apparently still has a chunk of that cash on hand, which it will be handing back to some investors). As we noted when it launched, Quibi is the perfect example of Hollywood thinking about the internet. It overvalued the content (and believed that you got the best content by throwing money at big names), and completely undervalued the internet and the fact that the killer application of the internet is community and communication.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • USPTO on “President Trump’s Leadership”

    Although USPTO Dir. Andrei Iancu is a political appointee nominated by President Trump, he has largely stuck to the tradition of avoiding partisan politics in his official role as Director. For instance, Dir. Iancu supported the re-appointment of Drew Hirshfeld as the Commissioner of Patents. Hirshfeld had been Dave Kappos’ Chief of Staff under President Obama.

    That said, the USPTO is catching a bit of flack for what appears to be its first overtly pro-Trump tweet coming less than a week before the elections…

  • FOSS Patents: Fourth patent injunction against Daimler in 11 weeks as Munich I Regional Court sides with Nokia in 3G SEP infringement case

    There’s no Happy Halloween for Daimler and its counsel, and the reason is not even COVID.

    The notorious patentee-friendliness of certain German courts is regrettable, and an increasing burden on the country’s economy. But let there be no doubt about the fact that the patent litigation firm of Arnold & Ruess has done some first-rate work for Nokia against Daimler. Today the team led by Cordula Schumacher and Dr. Arno Risse (“Riße” in German) obtained its second injunction against Daimler as the Munich I Regional Court held the Mercedes maker to infringe German patent DE60240446C5 on a “hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme with in-sequence deliver of packets” (case no. 21 O 3891/19). The 21st Civil Chamber of the Munich court (Presiding Judge: Tobias Pichlmaier) had not indicated an inclination at the late-July trial.

    On August 18, 2020, the Mannheim Regional Court found for Nokia in another standard-essential patent (SEP) infringement case against Daimler; that injunction hasn’t been enforced and possibly never will be.

    Several other Nokia v. Daimler cases have been put on hold over doubts concerning the validity of the patents-in-suit. Should any of those patents survive without being narrowed out of the scope of the specifications of the relevant cellular standard, they’ll do even better.

    Meanwhile, I’m wondering when Quinn Emanuel will get tired of losing. In the 11-week period between the aforementioned defeat in Mannheim and today’s Munich ruling in Nokia’s favor, Daimler and QE also lost two other cases as the Munich I Regional Court’s 7th Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge: Dr. Matthias Zigann) granted Sharp an injunction against Daimler (which triggered a settlement, see 1, 2), as did the 21st Civil Chamber in a Conversant v. Daimler case just one week ago. That’s four German SEP injunctions over the course of only two months and a half.

    Daimler and QE could take comfort in the fact, however, that computer maker Lenovo also lost in Munich (against Nokia, but over a codec–not wireless–patent) on the first day of the month.

  • Trouble In Plaintiff’s Paradise?

    There are signs that, despite Judge Albright’s best efforts, the rest of the world might not support turning the Western District of Texas into another NPE haven like the Eastern District in its glory days. After Judge Albright’s efforts to make sure Waco was “open for business for patent cases”, NPEs flocked to the Waco courthouse—in fact, one in five patent cases in 2020 will have been filed there, and 85% of those are NPE lawsuits.

    But in the past few months, there have been potential setbacks to NPEs’ project to turn the Waco Division of the Western District into their new hometown.

    [...]

    The result in MV3 isn’t the only thing that might concern plaintiffs. Over the past few months, the Federal Circuit appears to have taken an increasingly skeptical view of Judge Albright’s decisions.

    First, there was In re Apple, where the Federal Circuit—in the course of denying a motion for transfer—”question[ed] the propriety” of one of Judge Albright’s rulings, throwing doubt on whether he had applied the proper standard of decision. While that error was ultimately harmless, as the motion for transfer failed on other grounds, the Federal Circuit still felt the need to identify this error.

    Next, there was In re Adobe, in which the Federal Circuit found that Judge Albright had committed a “clear abuse of discretion” in refusing to transfer a case to California based primarily on an alleged ability to run cases more quickly in his courtroom. Even if that were true, the Federal Circuit noted that the congestion factor requires an appreciable difference, not simply a small difference in time to trial, that the general ability to set a schedule says nothing about the actual ability to try cases, and that court congestion alone cannot outweigh other factors, such as convenience of witnesses.

    Third, the Federal Circuit’s In re Sand Revolution noted that the district court “ruling was cursory.” While this alone was not sufficient to justify mandamus, the Federal Circuit was clearly signaling concern that Judge Albright wasn’t doing enough analysis to justify his decisions to keep cases moving in the Western District.

    And this week, the Federal Circuit issued its ruling in In re Nitro Fluids, finding that “the very cases relied on by the district court make clear that it had matters backwards.” And again, the Federal Circuit was forced to note that “the district court’s explanation in these respects is cursory” and “consist[ed] of two sentences, neither of which meaningfully discuss” the relevant issues.

  • Is the Commissioner of Patents a Principle Officer who Must be Appointed by The President?

    For most of the history of the US patent system, the Commissioner of Patents was the head of the Patent Office and was seen as an Officer of the United States appointed by the President.

    [...]

    In 1975, the job title was changed to “Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks” and the office name was changed to the “Patent and Trademark Office.” In 1999, Congress officially changed the office name to the “United States Patent and Trademark Office” and the position of “Director” (Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce) was created. At that time, the roles of Commissioner for Patents and Commissioner for Trademarks were pushed down as appointments by the Secretary of Commerce (with 5-year terms).

  • Software Patents

    • $2,000 for PerDeimCo Prior Art

      On October 30, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least Claim 1 of U.S. Patent 10,104,198. This patent is owned by PerDeimCo LLC, an NPE. The ’198 patent generally relates to to tracking information of a plurality of users and giving users different administrative privileges for maintaining information sharing and describing event condition. The ’198 Patent has been asserted at least against CalAmp Corp. and GPS Insight.

    • $2,000 for Hawk Technologies Systems Prior Art

      On October 30, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least Claim 1 of US Patent No. 10,499,091. This patent is owned by Hawk Technologies Systems, LLC, an NPE that focuses its assertions against various school districts (e.g., DeSoto County School District, 3:18-cv-00132 ND Miss.) and charitable organizations such as Goodwill (3:16-cv-00279 SD Miss.) for simply using a security camera.

    • $2,000 for Caddo Systems Prior Art

      On October 30, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 3, including all of the limitations for independent claim 1 of US Patent No. 10,037,127. The patent is owned by Caddo Systems, Inc. and is exclusively licensed to a company called 511 Technologies, Inc., an NPE. The ’127 Patent is part of a family of patents relating to navigating a hierarchical menu having active links..

    • $3,000 for KinectUs Prior Art

      On October 30, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $3,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least Claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,294,428. The patent is owned by KinectUs LLC. The ’428 patent generally relates to a system and method for establishing a communication between mobile device users that register with a collaboration system, which determines a match between profile data of the first registered mobile device and profile data of the second registered mobile device. It is currently being asserted against Bumble Trading, LLC.

• EPO

  • European Patent Office rules in favor of Sanofi and Regeneron concerning Praluent® (alirocumab)

    The European Patent Office (EPO) Technical Boards of Appeal has today ruled in Sanofi and Regeneron’s favor, invalidating certain claims of Amgen’s European patent (EP 2 215 124) directed to PCSK9 (proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9) antibodies relevant to Praluent® (alirocumab). Praluent will continue to be available in European countries where it is approved for use and for sale.

    “We are pleased with today’s decision by the European Patent Office, which upholds the rigorous standard for pharmaceutical patents that we argued for in this case, affirming that Amgen’s asserted claims against Sanofi in Europe are invalid,” said Karen Linehan, Executive Vice President, Legal Affairs and General Counsel, Sanofi. “This decision validates our years-long commitment to vigorously defending this case.”

  • Drugmaker In IP Fight With Mylan Calls EPO Ruling ‘Irrelevant’

    Neurim Pharmaceuticals’ lawyer told a London judge at the start of its trial against Mylan on Thursday it is “irrelevant” that a European Patent Office division revoked its insomnia medication patent, as it’s challenging that decision.

    Mylan has overemphasized a decision from a European Patent Office division revoking Neurim Pharmaceuticals’ insomnia medication patent, Neurim’s lawyer said Thursday. (Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Andrew Waugh QC of Three New Square said Mylan UK, which is poised to launch a generic version of Neurim’s insomnia medication, has overemphasized the decision by the division of the EPO responsible for handling patent opposition matters….

  • Xintela : receives ‘intention to grant’October 29, 2020Xintela receives ‘intention to grant’ decision from European Patent Office for stem cell product XSTEM#Regulatory

    Lund, Sweden, 29 October 2020 – Xintela announced today that the European Patent Office (EPO) has issued an ‘Intention to grant’ decision for the patent application covering the company’s stem cell product XSTEM®, consisting of integrin α10-selected mesenchymal stem cells.

    Using its unique marker technology and stem cell selection method, Xintela has developed a stem cell platform, XSTEM, for stem cell-based products. The company’s first focus is treatment of osteoarthritis in the knee and is preparing to start clinical studies in 2021. XSTEM is also being evaluated in a preclinical model for the treatment of ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome), a lung complication that affects seriously ill covid-19 patients.

  • Ecogensus Receives Notice of Allowance from European Patent Office for Waste-to-Fuel Process

    Ecogensus, LLC (“Ecogensus” or the “Company”), a leading technology company in the resource recovery and waste management industry, today announced the European Patent Office’s issuance of a notice that it intends to grant a patent for the Company’s process of converting solid wastes into fuel (European Patent Application No. 15 854 145.8).

    Ecogensus has a full suite of patents granted in the United States as well as countries in Asia and South America in the areas of waste recycling and resource recovery (“waste-to-value”). The new European patent covers the foundational process for conversion of solid wastes into a fuel, a process which enables diversion from waste from landfills and displacement of coal with Ecogensus’ waste-derived fuel.

• Copyrights

  • Twitch Marketing Promo Over Golden Emoji Goes Horribly Wrong After DMCA Nuclear Strike

    Mere days ago, we discussed the bonkers path Twitch chose for itself in dealing with a flood of DMCA takedowns issued by the RIAA. The whole episode screamed of panic. Rather than dealing with DMCA takedowns via the normal method — taking down the content, providing the content maker with a path for a counternotice, and then putting the content back if no lawsuit was filed — , Twitch, instead, took the extraordinary action of simply and permanently nuking the videos in question. It then, rather brazenly, informed the content maker it had done so and advised them to “learn about copyright law.” In fact, given its actions, there is some question as to whether or not this is all enough to have lost Twitch its safe harbor protections.

Audiocasts/Shows

• AMD Is NOT Messing Around | Radeon 6000 Reaction (And Concern) – YouTube

  Wow. AMD is not messing around! The Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards take the fight to Nvidia, but the question is: Will It Linux? Jason’s reactions, concerns, and some good news straight ahead in today’s video.

• Mark Your Indent With IndentLine For Vim – YouTube

  Today we’re checking out a fairly simple vim plugin called indentline which basically adds a line into vim that marks your level of indentation, while not being useful for every language if you care about your indentation this might be something worth checking out.

• PLUMBING the Linux depths with 7 EASY Commands! | Linux Literate – YouTube

• NixOS Is A Fascinating Linux Distribution – YouTube

  NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution that employs a powerful package management system that allows you to build the system from a single configuration file. NixOS supports atomic upgrades and rolling back to previous generations. In theory, it should be an unbreakable system.

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.11 To Land Optimization That Helps IO_uring Performance – Phoronix

  At the start of October we mentioned a kernel optimization that can help IO_uring performance. Now as we approach the end of the month, Linux 5.11 is poised to land the optimization that especially helps out with threaded workloads.

  The change to task_work to use TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL when available is queued as part of the tip.git core/entry code ahead of the Linux 5.11 merge window opening in December. Currently TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL is wired up for x86/x86_64 while Jens is working on adding this support to other CPU architectures as well. We’ll see how many architectures get supported in time for Linux 5.11 as once completing that work he’ll be able to move on with a set of clean-ups.

• Stupid RCU Tricks: Torturing RCU Fundamentally, Part III – Paul E. McKenney’s Journal — LiveJournal

  Even more reading of the Linux-kernel Documentation/RCU/Design/Requirements/Requirements.rst file encounters RCU’s memory-barrier guarantees. These guarantees are a bit ornate, but roughly speaking guarantee that RCU read-side critical sections lapping over one end of a given grace period are fully ordered with anything past the other end of that same grace period. RCU’s overall approach towards this guarantee is shown in the Linux-kernel Documentation/RCU/Design/Memory-Ordering/Tree-RCU-Memory-Ordering.rst file, so one approach would be to argue that these guarantees are proven by a combination of this documentation along with periodic code inspection. Although this approach works well for some properties, the periodic code inspections require great attention to detail spanning a large quantity of intricate code. As such, these inspections are all too vulnerable to human error.

  Another approach is formal verification, and in fact RCU’s guarantees have been formally verified. Unfortunately, these formal-verification efforts, groundbreaking though they are, must be considered to be one-off tours de force. In contrast, RCU needs regular regression testing.

• Stupid RCU Tricks: Torturing RCU Fundamentally, Parts IV and V – Paul E. McKenney’s Journal — LiveJournal

  The first guarantee is trivially verified by inspection of the RCU API. The type of rcu_read_lock(), rcu_read_unlock(), synchronize_rcu(), call_rcu(), and rcu_assign_pointer() are all void. These API members therefore have no way to indicate failure. Even primitives like rcu_dereference(), which do have non-void return types, will succeed any time a load of their pointer argument would succeed. That is, if you do rcu_dereference(*foop), where foop is a NULL pointer, then yes, you will get a segmentation fault. But this segmentation fault will be unconditional, as advertised!

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Navi “Blockchain” Card Support Being Added To Linux 5.10

    Last week we were first to report on a PCI ID being added for a Navi 1 “Blockchain” graphics card without display outputs and seemingly focused on cryptocurrency mining. This card wasn’t talked about at yesterday’s Radeon RX 6000 series launch but that support is now on the way to the Linux 5.10 kernel.

    The code sent out last week added the new Navi 10 PCI ID and disabled DCN/VCN support for that ID with this card not having video acceleration or display functionality. Aside from that patch, AMD hasn’t officially acknowledged this new part that is RDNA (1) and not to be confused with the forthcoming RDNA2 / RX 6000 series products.

Instructionals/Technical

• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Ansible Playbook

  This is the third chapter of RHCE Ansible EX 294 exam preparation series that deals with one of the most important and exciting feature of Ansible.

• Rmmod Command in Linux | Linuxize

  The core component of each Linux operating system is the Linux kernel. It manages the system’s resources, and acts as an intermediary between the computer’s hardware and software.

  The Linux kernel is a software that has a modular design. A kernel module, or often referred to as a driver, is a piece of code that extends the kernel’s functionality. Modules can be compiled as loadable modules or built into the kernel. Loadable modules can be dynamically loaded and unloaded in the running kernel on request, without the need to reboot the system.

  In this article, we’ll talk about how to use the rmmod command to remove modules from the Linux Kernel.

• Bastion host in AWS – Kernel Talks

  Everything you need to know about Bastion host in AWS infrastructure.

• How to forward SSH key in Putty – Kernel Talks

  A quick post on how to forward SSH key in Putty on Windows.

• AWS VPC Creation along with screenshots – Kernel Talks

  A quick article on AWS VPC creation along with screenshots.

• How to install Fedora 33 – YouTube

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Fedora 33.

• How to install IntelliJ Idea, community edition, on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install IntelliJ Idea, community edition, on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• How to install Zoom Desktop in Ubuntu 20.04 – YouTube

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Zoom Desktop in Ubuntu 20.04.

• How to play World of Tanks Blitz on Linux

  World of Tanks Blitz is an action-packed PvP MMO game where players battle against each other in military tanks. In this guide, we’ll go over how you can get World of Tanks Blitz to work on the Linux platform.

• How to update CentOS – LinuxConfig.org

  In this tutorial, we take you through the process of updating CentOS Linux, including the entire system or on a per package basis.

• How to upgrade to Pop_OS 20.10

  Pop_OS, the operating system developed and maintained by Linux computer manufacturer System76 has a new release. It is Pop_OS 20.10, which is based on the new Ubuntu 20.10. Pop_OS 20.10 is the best update yet, packed with lots of improvements and new features!

• How to use Unison to sync files on Linux machines across a network – TechRepublic

  With Linux there are so many ways to synchronize and/or backup files over a network. For many, rsync and scp are the de facto standard. There is, of course, another option–one you’ve likely never heard of. That option is Unison, a free, open source, cross-platform bi-directional file sync tool. Unison is used to store two replicas that are modified separately and brought up-to-date by propagating changes to each store.

  Unison is capable of synching directories on a local system or across a network. I want to show you how to use this tool and SSH to sync a directory on one Linux server to another. It’s incredibly simple to use and even has a GUI that can also be installed, for those who prefer graphical tools over the command line. I’ll be illustrating the command line version of Unison on two instances of Ubuntu Server.

• How to Upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu 20.10 released, codenamed “Groovy Gorilla”; bringing yet another version of a remarkable operating system in the Ubuntu ecosystem, with the latest and some of the greatest open source technologies in a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

  Note that Ubuntu 20.04 is a long term support (LTS) release, which will be supported for 5 years. Ubuntu 20.10 is a non-LTS release, which means it will be supported for 9 months only, until July 2021. If you prefer stability over bleeding edge, then stick with Ubuntu 20.04.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 (focal Fossa) to Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla).

• How To Use pulseaudio-dlna To Stream Audio From Ubuntu 20.10 To Chromecast Devices – Linux Uprising Blog

  This article explains how to install and get pulseaudio-dlna to stream audio from Ubuntu 20.10 or Pop_OS! 20.10, to Chromecast devices.

• [Quick Tip] One Command to Get A Collection of Gnome Shell Extensions in Ubuntu | UbuntuHandbook

  This is a beginner’s guide shows how to easily extend functionality of GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 20.10.

  Ubuntu by default includes three extensions: Desktop Icons, Ubuntu AppIndicators, and Ubuntu Dock.

  Besides installing more from Gnome Shell extension website, you can run a single command to get a collection of extensions that provide additional and optional functionality.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • The Art of (Not) Painting Pixels – GNOME Shell & Mutter

    Being a compositor and a compositing window manager, the most important aspect Mutter and GNOME Shell is to paint pixels to your monitors with relevant content. A large part of this content is provided by applications themselves, but many elements still need to be rendered on top of them.

    Over the past few years, Mutter’s codebase has slowly but steadily been refactored, cleaned up, reorganized, and modernized. This includes the internal copies of Clutter and Cogl. With the beginning of the GNOME 40 development cycle, it all converged in a specially large and exciting set of changes which we’ll be talking about in this article.

  • GSoD Weekly Summary 5

    Before starting this week, I created an issue mentioning all the issues that I found and started completing them one by one while I kept adding new ones when required. So now the second task was to look again for the next issue which I found under “Using the Keyboard” there was a link missing which I added in the documentation.

    After this, the next task was to fix the subscript and superscript page style and add a link to it too. These changes I included with my previous PR.

Distributions

• 8 Tools to Easily Create a Custom Linux Distro

  When there are so many Linux distros out there, you are probably wondering why someone would want to create their own distro instead of getting a readymade one. While in most cases a readymade distro is fine, if you want to have a distro that is 100 percent tailored to your needs (or your mum or dad’s needs), you may have to create your own custom Linux distro.

  With the right tools, creating your own Linux distro isn’t as hard as it seems, though it takes time for sure. There are many tools for the purpose – some of them are universal, and some of them are distro-specific. Here are eight of them.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD 12.2: What You Need to Know and How to Upgrade | FOSS Linux

    The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the release and availability of FreeBSD 12.2 to the masses. It is the third and final release of the stable/12 branch. This post will cover the features and changes you can expect with FreeBSD 12.2 release. We will also give you a step-by-step guide on how to upgrade from your current version to FreeBSD 12.2.

    FreeBSD 12.2 Features

    FreeBSD by default doesn’t come packaged with a Desktop Environment like most of the Linux distributions. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t install one. Therefore, most of the features and updates are focused on the general system performance and not the user interface. Let’s dive in!

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Daniel Pocock: Nomination for Fedora Council Election 2020

    I’ve decided to nominate. More details about my platform will appear soon.

    Anybody meeting the eligibility criteria is free to nominate. Only one of us will be elected but every election is an opportunity to put forward new ideas and challenge existing practices. The quality of the debate depends a lot on the number and quality of candidates.

    The biggest evidence of the power of democracy is the effort that some free software organizations have made to eliminate democracy. When the FSFE community elected me as Fellowship Representative in 2017, FSFE incumbents didn’t just seek to remove me, they changed the constitution so that Fellows could not vote again. This wasn’t so much an insult to me as it was an insult to every volunteer who voted. If this was about something I had done personally, they never would have made such a permanent change to the constitution. If democracy scares certain people so much then you can be sure you are not wasting your time if you have a go at it.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 Adds Updated Container Tools, New Security Profiles

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • AdGuard Home: Another Brick in the Ad-Blocking Wall

    At the core of the emerging foundation that is Ubuntu Appliances is the aptly named Ubuntu Core, a slimmed-down Ubuntu operating system crafted with the IoT use case in mind. What distinguishes Ubuntu Core, which users can run as a standalone, and Ubuntu Appliances, is that each appliance comes preloaded with a featured service, and all the necessary programs are installed and managed via the Snaps containerized installation mechanism.

    With this structure, appliances are designed to just work “out of the box,” if we borrow that brick-and-mortar paradigm in the sense of post-flashing, post-booting, and post-configuration. Users will need to boot the appliance device and perform a token amount of local administration, provide it with an Internet connection with a static LAN IP address, and set up an Ubuntu One account if they don’t have one. A few web GUI prompts later, and the user is up and running.

    Ubuntu then does the rest, and that encompasses a lot of heavy lifting. Appliances will update themselves for a 10-year lifespan as long as they have Internet access. If all goes according to plan, users shouldn’t have to give a second thought to their appliance unless they want to change its configuration. Even then, all they have to do is enter the Web administration GUI, toggle a few switches, and close the tab.

  • Ubuntu Fridge | Call for nominations for the Local Communities Council

    The Local Communities (LoCo) Council has been vacant for some time and has not been restaffed due to a vacant Community Council. Since the Community Council has now been newly elected, a nomination for the LoCo Council is now being announced.

    The LoCo Council is a board of people who are in charge of empowering and helping out LoCo Teams worldwide. Their members have two-year terms, and we have seven open seats at the Council.

  • Canonical Drops etcd for Dqlite For MicroK8s

    MicroK8s is a lightweight and easy to use Kubernetes distribution designed to run in resource-constrained environments such as IoT and edge devices. As Canonical is eyeing enterprise use-cases it’s making Microk8s more resilient by adding high availability capabilities to it.

    Microk8s already has the clustering feature; with a single command, users can join multiple MicroK8s nodes in a cluster. With HA, as soon as users join three or more nodes, they get the Kubernetes control plane distributed across these nodes. If they join more nodes they get all the API services of Kubernetes available on all nodes and the control plane is still distributed on these nodes.

Devices/Embedded

• Stereoscopic cam board taps Raspberry Pi CM4

  StereoPi is going to Crowd Supply to pitch an open-spec “StereoPi v2” stereoscopic camera board that works with the Raspberry Pi CM4. The v2 adds a Type-C port and advances to GbE and 802.11ac.

  In Dec. 2019, Russia-based Virt2real found Crowd Supply success with a StereoPi stereoscopic camera board that works with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3). Now operating under the StereoPi name, the company has posted a Crowd Supply page for a second-gen model that uses the new Raspberry Pi CM4.

• Station P1 & M1 fanless mini PCs run media or desktop-optimized Android OS

  T-Chip has recently introduced two fanless “Geek” mini PCs under their Firefly brand with Station P1 & M1 respectively powered by Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor, and RK3328 quad-core processor.

  Both mini PCs can run Firefly’s Station OS in either desktop or media mode, as well as Android or Ubuntu. There are also some community efforts to port Armbian and LibreELEC to the devices.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • SiFive launches HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard for RISC-V PC’s

    After an increased demand for AI-focused RISC-V microarchitecture, targeting all applications from artificial intelligence, the internet of things, high-performance computing, and now even desktop PCs. SiFive Freedom U740 powered HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard comes with a complete development environment which allows developers to create RISC-V based applications from bare-metal to Linux-based systems.

  • PolarBerry is a Compact, Linux-capable RISC-V FPGA SBC and module (Crowdfunding)

    SiFive may just have announced a mini-ITX motherboard for RISC-V PCs, but if you’d like a RISC-V Linux platform in a more compact form factor, Sundance PolarBerry may better fit your requirements, albeit the board will target different use cases.

    Powered by Microchip PolarFire RISC-V SoC FPGA, PolarBerry is both a single board computer with Gigabit Ethernet and 40-pin GPIO header, as well as a system-on-module thanks to three Samtec board-to-board connectors.

  • YouTuber Jeff Geerling reviews Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

  • Digital making projects about protecting our planet

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android TV gets a Data Saver mode when connected to mobile hotspots (APK Download)

  • How to Enable Enhanced Safe Browsing on Chrome for Android

  • How to Remotely Control an Android Smartphone

  • Raspberry Pi 4 Gets Unofficial Android 11 Port

  • Upgrading to Android 11 will break your favourite apps

  • Raspberry Pi 4: OmniROM brings Android 11 to the popular single-board computer

  • Scrolling screenshots could come to Android in the most unlikely places

  • PUBG Mobile not blocked in India yet, still playable on Android

  • OnePlus 8T vs. OnePlus 8 Pro: Which should you buy?

  • These 21 Android Apps Contain Adware

  • Google certifies 12 more Android phones for ARCore support

  • Google is finally considering adding controller rumble support to Android

  • How to Legally Record Calls With Android 11′s Screen Recorder

  • How to forget a Wi-Fi network on an Android device

  • VPN by Google One: A VPN for Android, by Google

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• My journey to becoming an open source mentor

  I was just 16 when I made my first meaningful open source contribution. It was the first code contribution I ever made, and I learned a lot from it. I’m 20 now, and I’ve been strongly attached to free and open source software (FOSS) ever since. I strive to be a friend to my community colleagues and to help others continue growing, learning, and succeeding.

  I first heard about FOSS through the Google Code-In contest. I was 16, but I was already learning computer science fundamentals, the C++ programming language, and anything else about computers I could get my hands on. I was very excited about the contest—not just because of the free Google swag, but because it gave me the opportunity to work directly on codebases being used all around the world. I jumped into the contest feet-first and started trying to solve as many open source software tasks as I could in the code, design, documentation, and research.

• Everything curl in Chinese | daniel.haxx.se

  The other day we celebrated everything curl turning 5 years old, and not too long after that I got myself this printed copy of the Chinese translation in my hands!

  This version of the book is available for sale on Amazon and the translation was done by the publisher.

  The book’s full contents are available on github and you can read the English version online on ec.haxx.se.

  If you would be interested in starting a translation of the book into another language, let me know and I’ll help you get started. Currently the English version consists of 72,798 words so it’s by no means an easy feat to translate! My other two other smaller books, http2 explained and HTTP/3 explained have been translated into twelve(!) and ten languages this way (and there might be more languages coming!).

• CMS

  • News – WordPress 5.5.2 Security and Maintenance Release – WordPress.org

    WordPress 5.5.2 is now available!

    This security and maintenance release features 14 bug fixes in addition to 10 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

    WordPress 5.5.2 is a short-cycle security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.6.

    You can download WordPress 5.5.2 by downloading from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.

• Programming/Development

  • Perl/Raku

    • Amusewiki 2.500 | melmothX [blogs.perl.org]

      Well, well, today I released Amusewiki 2.500 and I noticed that time has passed since the last announcement here. This doesn’t mean that the Amusewiki development has stopped. On the contrary. The development pace has been steady, with new features, improvements and bug-fixes. In the meanwhile Amusewiki got a new logo as well!

    • Adventures in Perl

    • Adventures in Perl | Samir Parikh [blogs.perl.org]

      Just over one year ago, I wrote about how I had become enchanted with the D programming language as part of my journey in exploring new programming languages. I still really like D for all of the reasons I wrote about, but as I alluded to in the conclusion of that piece, I fully expected to “get distracted by the next new shiny thing that comes along.” Turns out that the next new shiny thing happens to be … Perl!

      That’s right: a language that Larry Wall first developed back in 1987 happens to have caught my fancy and I’m as surprised as anyone.

      When I first started learning Python over ten years ago, I would come across snippets of Perl in solutions submitted to things like Project Euler or in various forum threads. Perl programs had the most opaque and impenetrable syntax I had ever seen, filled with @ after & followed by more $ symbols than I could count. But the further I got into the bioinformatics problems on the Rosalind site, the more I started to understand the power, brevity and design of Perl. It was refreshing to see that regular expressions were treated as a first class citizen and that there were similarities to how Perl and Bash scripts were written (which, to some, could be a disadvantage!) And the more I read about it, the more I began to appreciate its rich heritage and its history alongside the development of Unix.

Standards/Consortia

• Interoperable medical data: the missing link for understanding COVID-19

  The main remaining limitation is the lack of controlled vocabulary or a medical ontology.

Some Advice for White People on Halloween

When I was 8 years old, I dressed up as Senator Ted Kennedy for Halloween. I remember strongly arguing for this costume. I don’t know why my parents let me do this, but it was the Reagan era and people were desperate. My parents got me a little blue suit, wrote ted kennedy on a faux briefcase, grayed out my hair, and off I went.

Health/Nutrition

• Kushner Tapes Reveal He Bragged Over Trump Taking Back Charge From “the Doctors”

  Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and senior adviser of President Donald Trump, privately bragged to journalist Bob Woodward in April about the president’s decision to shun the advice and opinions of health experts, just as the death rate from the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. was reaching peak levels.

• More Than 8 Million Have Been Forced Into Poverty Since COVID Relief Ended in US

  The massive $2 trillion CARES Act — which sent households one-time payments and boosted unemployment checks with an additional $600 a week through July — helped keep millions afloat, but more than 8 million people have been forced into poverty since the aid ended. “The relief was temporary, and much of it has now expired, so now we’re seeing poverty rise again,” says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. “We know that families can be protected again, but it does require action at the federal level.”

• Federal Court Ruling in Rhode Island Suit Targeting Polluters Called ‘More Evidence of the Momentum Behind Climate Accountability Cases’

  The appeals court decision dealt a blow to the fossil fuel giants named as defendants in the Ocean State’s historic climate liability lawsuit.

• As Covid-19 Soars Ahead of Election, Tapes Reveal Kushner Bragging About How Trump Wrestled Response ‘Back From the Doctors’

  “We know their handling of the pandemic was dictated by politics, and that’s a big part of the reason it was such an unmitigated disaster.”

• Health Workers Sue Trump Labor Secretary, OSHA Over ‘Unconscionable Delay’ of Protections Against Infectious Disease

  The Trump administration has refused to resume work on new federal regulations—tabled in 2017—despite the coronavirus pandemic.

• Red State Governors Still Flunk COVID Testing

  While they can take measures to limit the actual spread, such as longer and stronger lockdowns and mask requirements, many factors determining the spread are outside their control. By contrast, they do have control over the amount of testing, although legislatures can play a role, since they can appropriate or restrict funding. Testing has also become a political issue, since Donald Trump explicitly said that he wanted to see testing slowed so as to reduce the number of cases identified.

  I thought it was worth an update to see what the story looks like as the country is now experiencing a huge surge in infections. Here’s the more recent picture showing the ten states with the highest infection rates and the ten states with the lowest rates, based on the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 7-day moving averages. (Data are for October 26, 2020.)

• AIER likens anti-“lockdown” cranks to abolitionists. Hilarity ensues

  I’ve commented multiple times on how much COVID-19 pandemic denialists, those who deny the efficacy of masks and other public health matters to slow the spread of coronavirus, who try to downplay or deny the harm caused by the pandemic (particularly by claiming that the virus is not that deadly), and in general engage in conspiracy theories about this being a “plandemic” or an excuse to impose “forced vaccination,” resemble the antivaccine movement. Indeed, it’s no surprise that one of the very earliest conspiracy theories about COVID-19 dates back to January, when the pandemic was still mostly confined to China and had not yet made its presence known in the US (although it was already here), was the claim that China had purchased more influenza vaccine than usual and the flu vaccine had made the people of Wuhan more susceptible to the novel coronavirus. By May antivaxxers were prominent attendees at antimask and anti-lockdown protests, having already launched a preemptive disinformation campaign against any coronavirus vaccine that might be developed, and now they routinely show up at such events, along with QAnon believers. The reason, of course, is that, at its heart, antivaccine beliefs are rooted in conspiracy theories, producing a natural affinity between COVID-19 cranks and antivaxxers. There are many other characteristics antivaxxers share with COVID-19 cranks, one of which is a persecution complex. This brings me to today’s topic, this doozy of an article by Stacey Rudin of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) likening “resistance” to public health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 to abolitionists before the Civil War:

• My San Quentin Death Row Coronavirus Experience

  San Quentin’s initial flimsy attempt to thwart the virus was to issue face masks, pass out hand sanitizer, cancel all visiting, halt movement except for emergencies, and split the recreational yard in half in an effort to limit the number of prisoners in close contact. These measures would fail completely.

  In these early stages, rumors began circulating about outbreaks in other prisons, including The California Institute for Men (CIT), which turned out to be the epicenter of the California prison spread. But in early days, San Quentin was still relatively free of any Covid-19 cases. Unfortunately, under a court order, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on May 31 transferred 121 prisoners from CIT to an already overcapacity and overcrowded San Quentin.

• Policing the Pandemic: How the City of Albuquerque Criminalizes People Living on the Streets

  This pattern of enforcement predates the pandemic but has intensified in recent months. It violates COVID-19 guidance published by the Centers for Disease Control, which in March advised cities against “clearing encampments [of unsheltered people]” because the practice risks increasing “the potential for infectious disease spread.” Albuquerque advocates for the unsheltered agreed and advocated that the City stop evicting unsheltered people living in tents on public property. But the City’s deputy director of Family and Community Services, Lisa Huval, who oversees housing and homelessness and supervises outreach workers, refused to stop the practice of clearing camps, telling reporters that “it starts with one tent and over a few days increases to three tents, within a few weeks, if the city were simply to allow that encampment to establish, could grow quite large, [and] that presents other public health risks to that community.” Huval points to the City’s 450-bed shelter on the Westside with its COVID-19 protocols, as a safer option. Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller agreed, saying at a press conference that “We’re fortunate that in Albuquerque we have lots of good alternatives.”

  But many unsheltered people do not feel safe at the shelter. Local advocates surveyed folks on the street in April of this year and most said they felt safer on the streets. “I have tried to tell the city that going to the [shelter] is dangerous for me,” reported one woman in an April 2020 survey of unsheltered people performed by local advocates. She showed a large scar on her body and explained, “I was assaulted there and do not wish to go back because there are social structures there that are abusive to others.”

• While We All Sleepwalk Into A Human Rights Vacuum, The United Nations Is Facing Its Moment Of Truth

  Humankind has faced greater challenges than the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, we were already confronting a few of them as the world started to lockdown earlier this year. Now, more than ever, is the time we need a United Nations of purpose and resolve, writes Dr Lissa Johnson.

• Sherrod Brown: Covid Shows How Corporate ‘Free Trade’ Policies Threaten Public Health

  Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown wears a pin of a canary in a cage, recalling the days when coal miners carried the birds underground to detect poisonous gases.

• The Questionable Line Items of Illinois’ COVID-19 Spending

  Last week, we published Grenades, Bread and Body Bags: How Illinois Has Spent $1.6 Billion in Response to COVID-19 So Far, a story and look-up tool that examines Illinois’ COVID-19 related spending.

  Given that we are in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic and billions of dollars in federal aid are being thrown at response and recovery efforts in Illinois, we thought you should know more about how your taxpayer dollars are being spent. Plus, we figured there’d probably be a few interesting needles in the haystack.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Nitro Software user database put up for sale on dark web

    A group that uses the name Shiny Hunters appears to have put up a database exfiltrated during a data breach of ASX-listed Nitro Software, a firm that offers a service to create, edit and sign PDFs and digital documents, on the dark web for sale.

  • Nitro breach was probably through cloud, claims cyber sec firm

    ASX-listed Nitro Software, a firm that had its origins in Melbourne and offers a service to create, edit and sign PDFs and digital documents, appears to have suffered a data breach through cyber criminals gaining access to the company’s cloud environment via a compromise of access tokens, the cyber security firm Cyble has told iTWire.

  • Why Microsoft has blocked hundreds of sites in Internet Explorer

    Once the site is actually redirected, Microsoft will also show a small banner indicating what steps have been taken, with the notice that “some websites no longer work with Internet Explorer.” There’s also a link to a supplementary webpage that offers just a brief explanation, as well as a link to running Internet Explorer within the new Microsoft Edge.

  • HS: Vastaamo [cracking] could turn into largest criminal case in Finnish history

    “As for the question of perpetrator, I can’t comment on that in any way. Whether the [cracker] and blackmailer are the same person is another thing we can’t give a solid answer at this point in time,” he stated to Helsingin Sanomat.

  • Security

    • OpenSSF and Linux Foundation offer 3 free courses on developing secure open source software – TechRepublic [Ed: OpenSSF already infiltrated and now headed by Microsoft (the NSA back doors giant ), so Linux Foundation is a total farce]

      Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), hosted at the Linux Foundation, announced on Thursday that it is offering free training for developing secure software as well as adding a new certification and providing program and technical initiatives.

      OpenSSF is a cross-industry collaboration to secure the open source ecosystem. Open source software is available across all industries and making sure it is secure is more important than ever before.

    • OpenSSF Introduces Free Courses On How To Develop Secure Software

      OpenSSF has also elected Kay Williams from Microsoft as Governing Board Chair. The election for the Security Community Individual Representative to the Governing Board is currently underway and results will be announced by OpenSSF in November.

      Ryan Haning from Microsoft has been elected Chair of the Technical Advisory Council (TAC).

    • Open Source Security Foundation launches a new certification program on edX

      One final note, the OpenSSF is incorporating the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) projects. CII has been working on securing older, popular open-source programs, which were not receiving enough funding. These programs include the CII Census, a quantitative analysis to identify critical OSS projects; CII Best Practices badge project; and the CII FOSS Contributor Survey, a quantitative survey of OSS developers. Both will become part of the OpenSSF Securing Critical Projects working group. These efforts will continue to be implemented by the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

    • SUSE joins OpenSSF as Trustworthy Security Drives Innovation

      Today, we’re proud to announce that SUSE has joined the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). As open source becomes the backbone of digital transformation, its security is ever more essential. In OpenSSF, the open source community collaborates on vulnerability disclosures and security tooling, and it creates best practices to keep all users of open source solutions safe.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • EFF Asks Government To Dump DHS’s Plan To Massively Expand Its Biometric Collections

        The DHS’s hunger for data cannot be satisfied by mandatory facial scanning at airports, cellphone scraping at border checkpoints, or the dozens of government databases crammed full of personal info it has access to. It needs more. So, it’s asking for more. More mandatory collection of biometric info from millions of people, including US citizens.

      • NSA refuses to spell out change to policy for planting backdoors

        America’s National Security Agency has dug its heels in and is refusing to provide information to Democrat Senator Ron Wyden as to whether it is still planting backdoors in commercial products as it was found to have done with Juniper Networks in 2015.

      • Senator Wyden Wants To Know If The NSA Is Still Demanding Tech Companies Build Backdoors Into Their Products

        It’s been more than a half-decade since it made headlines, but the NSA’s hardware manipulation programs never went away. These programs — exposed by the Snowden leaks — involved the NSA compromising network hardware, either through interception of physical shipments or by the injection of malicious code.

      • Fancy some contact tracing? That’ll be $4.12 million a pop

        It’s beginning to look like the Federal Government should avoid anything to do with technology following the revelation on Thursday that $70 million of taxpayers’ money was spent on the COVIDSafe app – and only 17 cases were detected through its use.

      • YouTube Revenue Up 32 Percent in Summer Quarter

        Alphabet does not break out YouTube’s non-advertising revenue, which comes from subscriptions and other entertainment transactions, like movie rentals. Those revenues are reported as part of the “Google other revenues” line item, which contributed $5.5 billion during the period.

      • Twitter Hits 189 Million Daily Users, Stock Price Falls

        Twitter saw its number of DAUs rise by 20 million to 186 million at the end of the second quarter, compared to the first quarter of 2020, leaving investors concerned that the second quarter was a one-time gain in usage not to continue during the second half of 2020.

      • Tech Q3 Earnings: Facebook, Google, Amazon Post Strong Revenue and Profit Gains

        Big tech companies continue to prosper in the time of COVID. Facebook, Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Amazon each reported solid growth for the third quarter of 2020 — results that reflect how people worldwide have upped their usage of [Internet] giants’ services during the pandemic.

      • Spy agency ducks questions about ‘back doors’ in tech products

        In at least one instance, a foreign adversary was able to take advantage of a back door invented by U.S. intelligence, according to Juniper Networks Inc, which said in 2015 its equipment had been compromised. In a previously unreported statement to members of Congress in July seen by Reuters, Juniper said an unnamed national government had converted the mechanism first created by the NSA. The NSA told Wyden staffers in 2018 that there was a “lessons learned” report about the Juniper incident and others, according to Wyden spokesman Keith Chu.

      • Bizarre Design Choices in Zoom’s End-to-End Encryption

        Upon hearing this news, I decided to be a good neighbor and take a look at their source code, with the reasoning, “If so many people’s privacy is going to be dependent on Zoom’s security, I might as well make sure they’re not doing something ridiculously bad.”

        Except I couldn’t find their source code anywhere online. But they did publish a white paper on Github…

Defence/Aggression

• Nuclear Weapons Will Soon Be Illegal Under International Law

  Of course, the reality is that despite this outlawing of landmines and fragmentation bombs by the UN, the US still uses them routinely and sells them to other countries, has not destroyed its stockpile of chemical weapons, and continues with controversial research on weaponized germs which critics say has a potential dual defensive/offensive utility and purpose (the US is known to have used illegal germ warfare against both North Korea and Cuba during the ‘50s and ‘60s).

  That said, the new treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, which the US State Department and Trump administration strenuously opposed and which it has been pressuring countries not to sign or to withdraw their endorsement of, is a big step forward towards the goal of abolishing of these horrific weapons.

• The Far-Right Militias Supporting Trump

  It was July 2017, a few weeks before the “Unite the Right” Charlottesville riots, when white men marched through the streets of that Virginia city protesting the planned takedown of a confederate statue and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” I was sitting at a coffee shop in my quiet town of Poulsbo in Washington state. I had set aside an hour away from my kids to do some necessary writing, while my husband, then second-in-command on a Navy ballistic missile submarine, sat suspended somewhere in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

• Right-wing Bolivian protesters refuse to accept election loss

• Wisconsin Republicans Say Hackers Stole $2.3 Million From Fund to Help Trump

  The Republican Party of Wisconsin (RPW) has fallen prey to a phishing scheme and as a result has had $2.3 million stolen from an account that was dedicated to helping President Donald Trump win the state in this year’s election, according to the party leader.

• France attack: Attacker arrived in Europe from Tunisia days ago

  Two other attacks took place on Thursday, one in France and one in Saudi Arabia.

• Woman Beheaded in Church, Two Others Killed in Knife Attack in Nice, France

  The suspect, who has not been named, struck inside the city’s landmark Basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice in what police say is a terror attack.

  A police source told Reuters that one woman was decapitated and two others murdered while several more were injured.

• Three dead, woman decapitated in terror attack in French city of Nice

  There were also unconfirmed reports of a second incident, in the city of Avignon. Local media said a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” had tried to attack police and was shot dead by armed officers.

• Erdogan has close links with terrorist organisations, including ISIS: Swedish Nordic Monitor

  Erdogan’s close associations with terrorist groups in Syria has been confirmed by various reports, the prime one being ISIS and their involvement in commercial deals with the terrorists and even the purchase of stolen oil from Syria and Iraq.

  Turkey, due to Erdogan’s actions, has become a breeding ground for terrorists who receive funding, support, and training on the country’s territory to commit crimes in Syria.

• Australia seeks Qatar response after female passengers strip-searched

  The searches came to light when Australian women spoke out. Women from other countries were also examined.

  All adult women on the Qatar Airways flight were required to disembark to be body-searched, two of the women told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

  Thirteen Australian women were taken to an ambulance on the tarmac and told to remove their underwear before being examined, reports said.

Environment

• Africa’s resistance grows as climate crisis worsens

  Battered by storms and droughts during a tough 2019, Africa’s resistance to the climate crisis left no room for passivity.

• Energy

  • Trump Admin to Give $1.4 Billion to Try to Revive the Nuclear Power Industry

    The nuclear power industry may be getting a new lease on life, thanks to a $1.4 billion taxpayer subsidy from the Trump administration.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • ‘Seismic Shift’ in World’s Approach to Land Use, Wildlife, and Climate Action Needed to Avoid New ‘Era of Pandemics,’ Study Says

    “The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment.”

  • Alliance for the Wild Rockies Challenges Plans to Log Grizzly Habitat

    The Forest Service estimates it will lose $5,122,000 on the Soldier-Butler logging and burning  project. That’s a direct subsidy of federal taxpayer dollars to the timber industry to seriously damage our dwindling intact national forests and wildlife for private profit.

    This is another ‘landscape scale’ logging and road-building project, encompassing 45,160  acres—more than 70 square miles. The area includes a portion of the Reservation Divide  Inventoried Roadless Area, supposedly protected by the Roadless Rule—a rule routinely ignored by the Trump administration’s anti-environmental, pro-extraction Forest Service.

  • Trump Throws Wolves Under the Bus

    Environmental groups—including WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, Cascadia Wildlands, Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, The Lands Council, Kettle Range Conservation Group, Klamath Forest Alliance, Wildlands Network, and Rocky Mountain Wild, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center—are gearing up to bring a legal challenge to the decision.

    “This is yet another example of the Trump administration ignoring science,” said Lindsay Larris, wildlife program director with WildEarth Guardians. “From climate change denial, to their gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, to rollbacks of environmental safeguards protecting clean air and water, this administration has proven time and time again that they’re only in it for themselves, even if it means ignoring and denying the facts.”

  • Wolves to Lose Protection

Finance

• The Senate Snowflake Grievance Committee Quizzes Tech CEOs On Tweets & Employee Viewpoints

  On Wednesday morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a nearly four hour long hearing ostensibly about Section 230 with three internet CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Sundar Pichai from Google, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter. The hearing went about as expected: meaning it was mostly ridiculous nonsense. You had multiple Republican Senators demanding that these CEOs explain why they had taken actions on certain content, with some silly “whataboutism” on other kinds of content where action wasn’t taken. Then you had multiple Democratic Senators demanding these CEOs explain why they hadn’t taken faster action on pretty much the same content that Republicans had complained some action had been taken on.

• Pandemic Poverty: The CARES Act Kept Millions from Going Hungry. Why Won’t the Senate Renew It?

  The massive $2 trillion CARES Act — which sent households one-time payments and boosted unemployment checks with an additional $600 a week through July — helped keep millions afloat, but more than 8 million people have been forced into poverty since the aid ended. “The relief was temporary, and much of it has now expired, so now we’re seeing poverty rise again,” says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. “We know that families can be protected again, but it does require action at the federal level.”

• As GDP Data Shows Economy Still in a Deep Hole, Trump Denounced for ‘Trying to Mislead the Public by Claiming an Economic Miracle’

  “Americans can believe what he says or they can believe their own eyes. Millions are unemployed—they know the economy is not booming.”

• The Stock Market is Not the Economy

  Before the 1980s, the main driver of profits and the stock market was economic growth. When the economy grew, profits and the stock market rose in tandem. It was a virtuous cycle: Demand for goods and services generated more jobs and higher wages, which in turn stoked demand for more goods and services. But since the late 1980s, the main way corporations get profits and stock prices up has been to keep payrolls down. Corporations have done whatever they can to increase profits by cutting jobs and wages. They’ve busted unions, moved to “right-to-work” states, outsourced abroad, reclassified workers as independent contractors, and turned to labor-saving automation. Prior to 1989, economic growth accounted for most of the stock market’s gains. Since then, most of the gains have come from money that would otherwise have gone into the pockets of workers. Meanwhile, corporations have used their profits and also gone deep into debt to buy back shares of their own stock, thereby pumping up share prices and creating an artificial sugar-high for the stock market.All this has made the rich even richer. The richest 1 percent of American households own 50 percent of the value of stocks held by American households. The richest 10 percent own 92 percent.But it’s had the opposite effect for everyone else. More and more of the total economy is going into profits and high stock prices benefiting those at the top, while less and less is going into worker wages and salaries.America’s CEOs and billionaires are happy as ever, because more and more of their earnings come from capital gains – increases in the prices of their stock portfolios.Meanwhile, the Fed has taken on the debts many corporations generated when they borrowed in order to buy back their shares of stock – in effect bailing them out, even as millions of Americans continue to struggle. So the next time you hear someone say the stock market is a reflection of the economy, tell them that’s rubbish! The real economy is jobs and wages.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• ‘It’s Not Just That You’re a Crook’: Watch Jon Ossoff Eviscerate Sen. Perdue Over Insider Trading, Covid Lies, and Healthcare Attacks

  “You’re attacking the health of the people that you represent,” the Democratic challenger said to Georgia’s incumbent GOP senator.

• Is Republican Attack on Social Media Giants Part of an Effort to Invalidate Election Results?

  Lawmakers grilled the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter just days before Election Day on how they moderate hate speech, extremist content and election disinformation, including tweets from President Trump. Republicans have long accused Big Tech platforms of censoring conservative views, but tech policy expert Ramesh Srinivasan says the argument is shaped around talking points that are aimed at invalidating election results. “What we see coming from the Republicans is this argument that lacks any evidence, frankly, that there are systematic biases in terms of censorship, as well as algorithmic biases that skew against conservative talking points,” says Srinivasan, a professor at UCLA, where he also directs the Digital Cultures Lab. “In fact, in reality, the opposite is exactly what is true.”

• “Drop Your Ballot Off”: Supreme Court Rulings on Mailed Ballots Sow Doubt on Which Votes Will Count

  A record 76 million people have already voted in the U.S. election, but the battle over the counting of mail-in ballots continues, with the Supreme Court issuing rulings on how long after Election Day ballots can be counted in the battleground states of Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. We speak with Mother Jones senior writer Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” who says the Supreme Court could yet decide who wins the presidency if a close result leads to legal challenges. “My message to voters in these states and other states is drop your ballot off,” says Berman. “Don’t leave it to chance that your vote could be thrown out.”

• ‘Drop It Off or Vote in Person,’ Advocates Plea as Supreme Court Suggests It Could Toss Out Late Pennsylvania Ballots After Election

  “Don’t leave your vote in the hands of the Supreme Court.”

• Was April 7, 2020 the Day That Sealed the Fate of America?

  Look at what they said and did. And look at when they said and did it.

• Susan Collins Backed Down From a Fight with Private Equity. Now They’re Underwriting Her Reelection.

  In late November 2017, Senate Republicans were racing to secure the votes for their sweeping tax overhaul. With no Democrats supporting the bill and even some Republicans wavering, Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, found herself with enormous leverage.

  The day before the vote, she offered an amendment to make the legislation, which lavished tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, more equitable. It expanded a tax credit to make child care more affordable. To pay for it, she took aim at a tax break cherished by the private equity industry.

• Disinformation Can Function as Voter Suppression. Organizers Are Fighting Back.

  Disinformation cannot be ignored or hoped away, it must be consistently disrupted. Earlier this week, participatory media organizations MediaJustice and the Disinfo Defense League launched a week of action to put good information and tools directly into people’s hands ahead of Election Day. Led by Black and Brown organizations, DisruptDisinfo offers a mixture of trainings, webinars, and other resources. ReFrame and PEN America developed a disinformation toolkit for organizers and advocates as a part of this effort.

• Trump Openly Voices Hope That Courts Will Intervene in Ballot Count

  President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again openly voiced hope that U.S. courts — now packed with his right-wing judges — will intervene and stop states from counting legally submitted ballots after November 3, remarks that came just before the U.S. Supreme Court suggested it could invalidate late-arriving Pennsylvania votes after Election Day.

• A Day After Man Sentenced to 10 Years for Violent Hate Crimes, Collins Says Maine Doesn’t Have Issue With Systemic Racism

  “We are very fortunate in the state of Maine because we have terrific members of law enforcement,” the Republican incumbent asserted. 

• Documents Reveal WH Officials Tried to Use $250 Million in Taxpayer Money on Covid Ad Campaign to Boost Trump Reelection

  Democrats on the House Oversight Committee accused HHS officials of engaging in a “cover-up to conceal the Trump administration’s misuse of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for partisan political purposes.”

• Why Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg Are So Adamant About the Imperative of Defeating Trump

  Defeating Trump is a crucial—and certainly insufficient—precondition for making possible the kind of changes in government policies that are desperately required for social decency.

• Facebook Choked Traffic to Mother Jones & Other Sites While Amplifying Right-Wing Misinformation

  Big Tech CEOs were grilled Wednesday about how they moderate election disinformation and extremist content, and were accused by Republicans of censoring conservatives. Overlooked were reports that Facebook designed changes to its news feed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites like Mother Jones. Mother Jones editors wrote in 2019 that the site had seen a sharp decline in its Facebook audience, which translated to a loss of around $600,000 over 18 months. “The fact that we are trying to do everything we can to get the truth out and Facebook is deliberately sabotaging our readership is so disturbing, at the same time that Facebook is spreading all of this dangerous information by conservatives, by President Trump,” responds Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones magazine, who has been reporting extensively on the 2020 election.

• Chile’s New Constitution, Wiping Away the Last Stains of Pinochet

  Though a change in its founding document is not on the ballot in the United States, we should, here in America, pay close attention to what just happened in that distant land at the end of the earth. Heartened and inspired by the sight of ordinary people forcing a small ruling elite to accept, against all odds, the need for radical reforms, we would do well to learn some valuable lessons from that Chilean experience.

  Sunday’s victory in Chile did not come easily or swiftly.

• This Land Is Our Land: Trump’s America, and Our America

  The Trumpian tragedy is doubly tragic because it makes so much sense. We can decide that Trump is an anomaly. But, in fact, Trump looks and acts a lot like America.

• ‘Reckless Incompetence and Intentional Cruelty’: House Issues Scathing Report on Trump Migrant Family Separation Policy

  The “inhumane” policy was “driven by an administration… determined to go to unthinkable extremes to deliver on political promises,” the report found. 

• On Trump’s Megalomania

  It’s as if, with Trump competing for the presidency, the country went into a frenzy: turning down Hillary Clinton, the first woman seeking the country’s highest office, and electing Trump the billionaire.

  Naturally, Trump lived up to his money reputation and opened the national treasury to fellow oligarchs. Americans naively thought nothing of it. Economists rushed to excuse tax cuts and subsidies to the super rich and polluting petroleum and chemical corporations. Their gospel says that is necessary for a more “efficient” economy and government.

• Trump and Biden: Cold-War Dinosaurs

  Thus far, the presidential and vice presidential debates have steered clear of foreign policy, despite the US’s age-long meddling representing a major problem globally and the source of growing opposition domestically.

  The claim was sourced from a report that alleged that Iranian hackers had sent out threatening emails to Floridian voters to vote for Trump, posing as the Proud Boys.

• The World Is Burning, but the Political Press Insists It’s a Horse Race

  This article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

• The World Is Burning, but the Political Press Insists on its Horserace

  In the few days that remain before the election and in the months that will follow, journalists must ask themselves if they’re truly conveying the gravity of the climate crisis to their audiences, as well as all the challenges and opportunities it entails.

• The Supreme Court Has Never Been on the Side of Working People

  The Senate’s obscene rush to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—in time to allow her, as Donald Trump has made clear, to assist his efforts to steal the election—should force even the most blinkered observer to acknowledge the deeply political nature of our judiciary. Coming after the Senate’s refusal to even grant Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing and its subsequent confirmation of Neil Gorsuch for that stolen seat, the latest Republican power play has done much to strip away the mystique that previously cloaked the deliberations of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. Despite their black robes, ritual use of Latin, and lifetime appointments, they’re simply fallible mortals with the same prejudices and predilections as the rest of us.

• If You Can’t Speak English, Good Luck Voting in Trump’s America

  Limary Ruiz Torres, a 51-year-old accountant in Lawrenceville, Ga., was eager to vote in this year’s presidential primary. But when Torres, who was raised in Puerto Rico and speaks limited English, received her mail-in ballot application in April, she felt shut out. “I cannot read the absentee ballot request I received this week,” she later told a federal court. Ultimately, she and another plaintiff, Albert Mendez, sued the county and state.

• Let’s Be Very Clear: Senate Republicans Have Failed Every Struggling American Family

  It is cruel, and bad economics, to withhold stimulus aid.

• In Key Cities, Activists Are Mobilizing Black Voters Biden Isn’t

  Detroit may be a car capital, but Wendy Caldwell-Liddell wants to meet at the bus station. The 29-year-old founder of Mobilize Detroit canvasses there regularly, because she knows she’s likely to meet people mainstream Democrats are failing to reach—people who have to go to work, or take care of their children, and are using a public service to get there. People, in her words, who are “on a mission.”

• What We Call Freedom Has Never Been About Being Free

  The political right today is marked by a deep conviction that its freedom stands imperiled everywhere. Social distancing measures and face mask requirements, conservatives argue, impinge upon their personal freedom; baking cakes for gay marriages or providing contraception insurance for employees violates their religious freedom; university safe spaces and political correctness censor their freedom of speech in the classroom; expanding health care undermines their liberty. Each of these ways of thinking about freedom is connected to the idea that the state must be curtailed in order to safeguard individual rights.

• The Final Stretch

  Is it possible that they know something that the rest of the world does not know, or is it that they hope to use some illicit subterfuge to win this election, handing Trump the presidency? The extent of the influence Russia used to achieve this result in the past election is unknown, but Russia’s past and present election meddling has been confirmed by the US intelligence agencies.

  Trump is smart, but he has a perverse intelligence, the result of his narcissism with sociopathic traits. Mary Trump, his niece and a clinical psychologist, makes a stark analysis of her uncle, whom she considers a fraud and a huge danger to the country and the world. Her assessment is born, in part, by Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which she calls a “mass murder”. Trump’s ignorance, his refutation of the opinion of his own scientific advisers, and dishonest and irresponsible actions have resulted in more than 8.35 million cases of COVID-19 and over 224,000 deaths to date in the U.S.

• For a Two-Week Grace Period So All Voters Can Be Counted

  First, the Republicans’ detailed criminogenic voter suppression strategy that creates delay, confusion, and discord in the handling of voters and their votes is proceeding with increasing intensity.

  Second, the number of election volunteers is likely to be seriously diminished because of Covid-19. Many elderly volunteers who staff voting precincts justifiably fear the potential for exposure to the Covid-19 virus. This problem could lead to closing precinct locations and a reduction in voter turnout.

• Trump’s Covid-19 Testing Czar Warns of ‘Draconian Measures’ to Come If Americans Don’t Mask Up

  As cases surge just before Election Day, studies show universal mask-wearing prevents outbreaks and could save tens of thousands of lives.

• Donald Trump Is a Superspreader of Many Terrible Things

  Trump, GOP dismiss the pandemic as Wisconsin cases spike.

• If Trump Doesn’t Win Pennsylvania, His Chances Crumble to 2 Percent

  For the second election cycle in a row, Pennsylvania’s 9 million voters will play a definitive role in choosing our next president. In 2016, Donald Trump eked out a victory in Pennsylvania by around 44,000 votes, or about 0.7 percent more than Hillary Clinton. The state’s 20 Electoral College votes were the vital piece to Trump’s eventual inside straight — Pennsylvania to Michigan to Wisconsin — which allowed him to win the White House while losing the popular vote.

• Placement Of Ballot Drop Boxes Far From Ideal In New Jersey. Some Voters Must Travel Miles To Reach One

• Worried Your Mail-in Ballot Still Hasn’t Arrived? Here’s How To Be Sure Your Vote Counts

• Get Out

• MAGA CRACKERs : New from Discomfort Foods!

  There’s no cracker like a WHITE LIES MATTER CRACKER! Take them along to superspreader rallies, voter intimidation operations, tiki-torch marches, and just about anywhere a good cracker is always appreciated.

  Discomfort Foods brings you a wide variety of products and recipes that create new memories. Each of our CRACKERs carries the thoughts (in edible ink!) of our Dear Leader President Trump, as conveyed to us by his Prophet Roger Marshall on a recent Keep Kansas Great Bus Tour—including old favorites like

• To Stop Trump Stealing the Election, Democrats Must Do These 3 Things

  The election is just days away, and it still seems likely that Trump will lose to Joe Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Biden will be sworn in as our 46th president.

• The GOP’s Education Extremism Is Alienating Moderate Voters

  Julia Pulver, a 36-year-old nurse who is running to represent Oakland County in the Michigan state legislature, can pinpoint the moment that the momentum in her race against Republican incumbent Ryan Berman shifted decisively. This spring, as Michigan was reeling from the pandemic and facing a collapse in revenue, Berman joined with a small group of Republicans to urge the state’s congressional delegation to reject federal funds meant to help Michigan recover. The backlash in Berman’s district, northwest of Detroit, was swift and furious, recalls Pulver. School leaders from the five school districts that lie inside the 39th district were outraged at what they saw as a deliberate effort by their elected representative to torpedo their efforts to safely reopen.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Facebook under fire for boosting right-wing news sources and throttling progressive alternatives

  Facebook is under fire once again for allegedly being biased toward conservative media outlets — only this time, it is also being accused of throttling left-wing media outlets in the process.

  When tweaking its newsfeed algorithm in late 2017, Facebook bowed to pressure from policy executives who were concerned that the new changes would hurt right-wing media outlets on the site like the Daily Wire, according to a report earlier this month by The Wall Street Journal. As a result, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved of plans for the company to tweak its newsfeed algorithm in such a way that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were allegedly disproportionately affected.

• France: Beheaded Teacher Interrogated by Police for ‘Thought Crimes’ Days Before Slaughter (Video)

  In the days following Professor Paty’s classroom debate, Brahim Chnina, the father of a student at Paty’s school posted a video and post on social media falsely claiming that Professor Paty ordered all Muslim students to leave the classroom prior to the free speech lesson. He falsely asserted that his daughter Zaina was suspended from the school when she refused to exit the classroom.

  The principal of the school clarified that the cause of Zaina’s suspension from school was erroneous. Her suspension was not the result of anything that transpired in Professor Paty’s class, but rather the result of her recurring tardiness to school.

• Meet the man who could lead the GOP’s war on platform moderation

  “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” The Republican senator from Texas was yelling at the Twitter CEO during a congressional hearing on speech moderation on Wednesday. According to Cruz, Twitter, Facebook, and Google represented “the single greatest threat to free speech in America and the greatest threat we have to free and fair elections.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• How Cops Who Use Force and Even Kill Can Hide Their Names From the Public

  In January 2019, a Dollar Tree employee in Masaryktown, Florida, called 911 after a homeless man stole $70 of beer, wine, candy and cookies. A sheriff’s deputy had little trouble finding him — the man had passed out drunk in a nearby ditch with an open box of Reese’s Pieces.

  The deputy took the man to the hospital, where he became irate. With his left wrist handcuffed to the bed, he started swinging his right arm wildly. To get the suspect “under control,” the deputy pepper-sprayed him in the face.

• Beyond Prisons Podcast: In Defense Of Looting Feat. Vicky Osterweil

  Vicky Osterweil joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss her new book, “In Defense Of Looting: A Riotous History Of Uncivil Action.”

  Our wide-ranging conversation includes Vicky’s analysis of the claim that “real” and legitimate protests are nonviolent by nature, while rioting and looting constitute an act of hijacking by malevolent outside forces. 

• Gonda man accuses 8 of forcing daughter to embrace Islam

  Eight persons were booked for allegedly coercing a 16-year-old girl in Gonda to embrace Islam with the promise of marriage. The teen’s father, who lodged the FIR with Kernalganj police on Tuesday, also accused the groupof-eight of delivering violent threats and brainwashing his daughter with grandiose marriage plans in Dubai.

• Is Xi losing sleep over the Buddha?

  The party’s nervousness about the growing clout of Tibetan Buddhism in the world and within China is reflected in the CCP’s recent actions. In 2007, the State Religious Affairs Bureau’s Order No. 5 issued a decree requiring the reincarnation of Tibetan Lamas to be approved by the communist government.

  The order was seen as a move to preside over His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation someday in a similar fashion as when they kidnapped and replaced the reincarnation of the 11th Panchen Lama with a Chinese puppet. The CCP has been asserting its right to recognize the future Dalai Lama, a thoroughly bizarre claim that has been duly slammed by all.

  The Tibetan administration in exile has passed resolutions entitling only Tibetans to carry out the traditional practice. The U.S. Congress has echoed the sentiments of Tibet and sent a clear message to China. Reincarnation is uniquely Tibetan and no other culture, least of all that of an occupying atheist nation, could ever preside over it with any trace of legitimacy.

• Report reveals ‘survival’ techniques used by women in Korean HE

  The latest of these analyses, which focuses on South Korean junior female academics (JFAs), was published this month in Higher Education.

  It shows that neoliberal management policies increased pressure on academics to publish prolifically, specifically in the first five years after completing a doctorate. However, deep-rooted gender imbalances also meant that JFAs were expected to perform as “good mothers and wives” and faced the burdens of childbirth, childcare, “patriarchal networks, limited job opportunities, gender-based division of labour and harassment”.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Tell Us How You Want to Modify and Repair the Devices in Your Life

  Have you tried modifying, repairing, or diagnosing a product but bumped into encryption, a password requirement, or some other technological roadblock that got in the way? EFF wants your stories to help us fight for your right to get around those obstacles.

  Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to circumvent certain digital access controls (also called “technological protection measures” or “TPMs”). Because software code can be copyrightable, this gives product manufacturers a legal tool to control the way you interact with the increasingly powerful devices in your life. While Section 1201’s stated goal was to prevent copyright infringement, the law has been used against artists, researchers, technicians, and other product owners, even when their reasons for circumventing manufacturers’ digital locks were completely lawful.

• Netflix Raises Price of Standard Monthly Plan in U.S. to $14 per Month

  According to Peters, Netflix doesn’t use any kind of algorithm to decide when to increase pricing. “We do an assessment: Do we believe that we’re really delivering more value to members?” he said, adding that “a North Star we hold close to our heart in this whole process is we think that we are just an incredible entertainment value — and we very much want to remain an incredible value as we continue to improve the service and grow.”

Monopolies

• Congress Fails to Ask Tech CEOs the Hard Questions

  The Senate Commerce Committee met this week to question the heads of Facebook, Twitter, and Google about Section 230, the most important law protecting free speech online. Section 230 reflects the common-sense principle that legal liability for unlawful online speech should rest with the speaker, not the Internet services that make online speech possible. Section 230 further protects Internet companies’ ability to make speech moderation decisions by making it clear that platforms can make those decisions without inviting liability for the mistakes they will inevitably make.

  Even President Trump has called multiple times for a repeal of Section 230, though repealing the law would certainly mean far fewer places for conservatives to share their ideas online, not more.

• Senator’s Report Finds Google and Facebook Have ‘Hijacked’ Local News and Undermined Journalism

  “These trillion-dollar companies scrape local news content and data for their own sites and leverage their market dominance to force local news to accept little to no compensation for their intellectual property.”

• Antitrust Suit Against Google is a Watershed Moment

  The antitrust lawsuit against Google filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and eleven state attorneys general has the potential to be the most important competition case against a technology company since the DOJ’s 1998 suit against Microsoft. The complaint is broad, covering Google’s power over search generally, along with search advertising. Instead of asking for money damages, the complaint asks for Google to be restructured and its illegal behavior restricted.This suit flows from investigations by the DOJ Antitrust Division that have been going on since last year. Although a large, bipartisan group of state attorneys general were reportedly working together on the investigation, just eleven states, all with Republican attorneys general, joined the suit. A group of Democratic-led states are reportedly preparing a separate lawsuit.

  The DOJ and states raised three claims in their suit, all under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits acquiring or maintaining monopoly power through improper means. The lawsuit alleges that Google illegally maintains monopoly power in three markets: “general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising.” In these markets, says the complaint, “Google aggressively uses its monopoly positions, and the money that flows from them, to continuously foreclose rivals and protect its monopolies.”

• Zuckerberg Says U.S. Election Will Be a Test of Facebook’s Work

  The company also created an ad archive and rolled out rules against misleading posts about voting. It sought to close loopholes in data-sharing that were revealed in the scandal over Cambridge Analytica, the consulting firm that in 2016 used targeting data improperly obtained from Facebook quizzes.

• Facebook, NYU researchers tussle over political ads on the social network

  The Ad Observatory site and database make it easier “for people to see who is purchasing ads on Facebook and in what volume, as well as trends in how they are deployed in major political races across the country,” says NYU’s Online Political Transparency Project. That’s important, it adds, because Facebook isn’t subject to the same federal rules that “govern broadcast and print ads and ensure they are accurate and disclose their source.”

• Biden campaign slams Facebook after thousands of ads blocked by platform’s pre-election blackout

  The temporary ban went into effect on Oct. 27, but the platform said it ran into “a number of unidentified issues” that caused ads to be paused that have already been running on Facebook, according to a Thursday blog post. The post went on to say that the technical glitch also prevented advertisers from making permissible changes to their ads.

• Microsoft prepares to avoid scrutiny under Biden

  Companies are prohibited by law from donating themselves. The contributions, according to OpenSecrets, were therefore made by the company’s political action committees (PACs), members of the PACs, or employees.

  A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has a history of engaging with presidential administrations on issues that matter to its business. “Our approach has been consistent: We’ll partner where we can, we’ll stand apart where we should,” she said, adding that the contributions were made by Microsoft’s employees, without offering more details.

• Microsoft Quietly Prepares to Avoid Spotlight Under Joe Biden

  Large technology companies including Microsoft have not emerged in the top 20 contributors list for the Trump candidate campaign committee. However, Microsoft’s Smith, whose donations have mostly helped Democrats, has made several contributions to Republicans, including a $15,000 (roughly Rs. 11,10,000) donation to the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to campaign finance records.

• Patents

  • CRISPR Housekeeping

    Since the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) rendered its decisions on Motions in Interference No. 106,115, Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, “Broad”) and Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) have filed a number of miscellaneous motions, and the Board has issued several Orders in response.

    [...]

    Finally, CVC requested that the Board permit CVC to subpoena discovery from Luciano Marraffini and Shuailiang Lin, neither of whom is a party to this interference. (Readers may remember that Dr. Marraffini, faculty at The Rockefeller University, was involved in a dispute over inventorship of certain of the Broad’s patents that resulted ultimately in some of the European counterparts of these patents to be revoked by the European Patent Office; see “The CRISPR Chronicles — Broad Institute Wins One and Loses One”). CVC proposes to pursue such subpoenas through application to U.S. District Court under 35 U.S.C. § 24.

  • Webinar Materials – The Rise of Patent Litigation Finance: Data & Trends

    While speaking on data and trends within patent litigation financing, we discussed how patent litigation financing works and who is providing the funding. We also discussed privilege and confidentiality issues, ethical issues, the impact of litigation funding to actual litigations, and other hot topic issues regarding patent litigation financing.

  • A stricter interpretation: the EPO and antibodies

    Is the grant of a reasonable scope for antibody-related inventions at the European Patent Office a phenomenon of the past? Joachim Wachenfeld and Florian Grasser of Vossius & Partner report.

    The invention of the antibody hybridoma technology by Nobel prize winners Georges Köhler and César Milstein in 1975 paved the way to the development of therapeutic antibodies.

    The first therapeutic monoclonal antibody obtained market approval in the US in 1986. Since then the market value of therapeutic antibodies has grown to approximately $115.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $300 billion in 2025.

    Along with this development, the number of patent applications seeking protection for therapeutic antibodies at the European Patent Office (EPO) has constantly grown and is growing further.

  • It’s Time to Kick Patent Trolls Out of the International Trade Commission

    The International Trade Commission, or ITC, is a federal agency in Washington D.C. that investigates unfair trade practices. Unfortunately, in recent years, it has also become a magnet for some of the worst abusers of the U.S. patent system. Now, there’s a bill in Congress, the Protecting America’s Interest Act (H.R. 8037), that could finally get patent trolls out of the ITC—a place they never should have been allowed in the first place.

    Patent owners can ask the Commission to investigate an allegation of infringement, in addition to their right to bring a patent infringement case into federal court. The ITC can’t award damages like a district court can, but the ITC can grant an “exclusion order,” which bans importation of the excluded item, and orders customs agents to seize products at the border.

  • Software Patents

    • TikTok sues rival app Triller in countersuit over patent infringement allegations

      TikTok and the video sharing app’s parent company ByteDance sued rival app Triller on Wednesday in a countersuit over patent infringement claims.

      Chinese-owned TikTok filed a complaint in San Francisco federal court that Triller’s lawsuit, filed over the summer, has “cast a cloud” over TikTok and ByteDance, “causing uncertainty” for the company.

      The complaint also denies Triller’s allegations that TikTok infringed on Triller’s patent.

    • Eko Asks Court to Prevent Sale of Turnstyle Tech in Quibi Dispute

      Then, in a complicating twist on Oct. 21, Quibi announced it would be shuttering less than six months after its launch. CEO Meg Whitman and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg wrote in an open letter to investors and employees that they “considered and exhausted every option available” but ultimately decided that Quibi was not attracting enough subscribers to continue to keep the business in operation. They are currently searching for buyers for Quibi’s library of shows and technology assets as they look to wind down the app by around Dec. 1.

      On Wednesday, Eko filed another request for emergency relief — this time asking the court to freeze certain Quibi assets related to the intellectual property at issue in the dispute. Effectively, Eko is asking the court to block Quibi from selling the Turnstyle tech or the related patent. It also wants to make sure Quibi keeps enough cash on hand to pay damages in the event that Eko prevails in the litigation.

• Copyrights

  • US Court Dismisses ‘Unique’ YTS Trademark Case Against Pirate Sites & Apps

    Anti-piracy lawyer Kerry Culpepper has failed to secure $250,000 damages claims against sites and apps that used the YTS trademark he obtained. The court dismissed the case as it lacks sufficient evidence to prove that the defendants purposefully targeted the US. Meanwhile, the trademark infringement claims shed an interesting light on related YTS cases that were filed recently.

  • RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms & Pirate Sites

    The RIAA is ramping up the pressure on a wide range of platforms allegedly involved in music piracy. Two DMCA subpoenas obtained against Cloudflare and Namecheap require the companies to hand over all information they hold on more than 40 torrent sites, streaming portals and YouTube-ripping services. Also included in the mix are several file-hosting platforms.

  • What’s Another Way Supporters of Mandated Facebook Media Payments Promote Their Position? Paid Facebook Advertising

    Despite the “stolen content” rhetoric, the willingness of the policy supporters to pay for links is evidence of their value. Further, in case it isn’t obvious, these ads actually are an example of Facebook commercially benefiting from links to news articles. Unlike typical posts of news stories – many of which come from the news publishers themselves and do not directly generate revenue – ad campaigns such as this one directly result in revenue for Facebook. Given their position on payments, it would be interesting to know whether Unifor Canada obtained a paid licence to link to the stories on the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, BBC, and other media sources as part of its ad campaign.