11.23.20

Internal Error: Unified Patent Court and Unitary Patent Incompatible With the Constitution and Basic Laws

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Internal Error: 500

Summary: The FFII has issued a statement for Members of the Bundestag, Members of the European Parliament, Members of the Council, German Presidency of the EU, Chancellor Merkel, Commissioner Von Der Leyen, Commissioner Reynders, and Battistelli‘s buddy Breton

TWO days ago we wrote about the latest claim from Team UPC, later pointing out that many scholars across Europe line up and stand in Team UPC's way. The EPO (Office) hardly even mentions the UPC and the Council barely touched the subject. Miraculous leaps of faith are required to “believe” in the UPC.

“Saying that UPC/A can still be ratified and be started is akin to saying (at this point) that Donald Trump will overturn the election results and remain President until 2024.”UPC won’t materialise for a lot of reasons, not just a list of constitutional complaints and withdrawals. Team UPC has a long tradition of lying about the UPC; it’s all about money and saving face (they made false promises to clients). Some “core people” of Team UPC are about to become unemployed and they know it. They just try to buy another month or two.

AceIs the UPC about to become a reality? Been there, done that, seen that… they always say it’ll come Real Soon™ or Almost There®.

How many times? Dozens if not hundreds.

Two years ago they told us it was imminent (just before the end of 2018).

It was a lie. Fabrication.

Just to be sure the lid stays shut, the following statement has just been published by the FFII (a few hours ago) to say:

FFII e.V. is a pan-European alliance of software companies and independent software developers, defending the rights to a free and competitive software creation since 1999. Over the years, more then 3,000 software companies accross Europe have supported our calls against software patenting, among which 1,100 German ones. With the Unitary Patent project, we are at the third attempt to validate software patents in Europe. The previous 2 first attempts to change the law (EPC2000 and the 2005 software patent directive) failed.

This Wednesday 25th november 2020, the Legal Affairs committee of the Bundestag will vote on the ratification by Germany of the Unitary Patent and its Court [ref1]. In a series of answers to questions asked by the Free Democratic Party (FDP) [ref2] [ref3], the German Ministry of Justice Christine Lambrecht (SPD) says that they are “no constitutional problems” with the Unitary Patent and its Court [ref4].

Firstly, on the 22nd of April 2020, the same Legal Affairs committee of the Bundestag voted [ref5] to participate in the legal proceedings in front of the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) in Karlsruhe, on cases related to the question inter alia of impossibility to sue the administration (the EPO) in front of the courts for maladministration. The possibility to sue an administrative body, such as the EPO, for maladministration before the courts is one of the fundamental pillar of our western democracies, also called the “Rule of Law” (TFEU art2) and is a categorical constitutional guarantee (i.e judicial review of administrative acts). This applies also to the institutional possibility, under the requisite constitutional system of separation of powers, to appeal acts and decisions of administrative bodies (e.g. the EPO), as it can be observed in all national systems and also at the EU level, as with the other intellectual property rights of trademarks and designs, where the decisions of the EUIPO are frequently appealed before the CJEU. In this respect, the constitutional mechanism that sustains the absolutely necessary separation of powers exists for intellectual property rights in the EU (trademarks and designs) but is spectacularly absent from the Unified Patent Court and Unitary Patent institutional arrangement. As they cannot provide such basic constitutional-democratic guarantees, they concern clear unconstitutional arrangements that deprive the patent system in Europe from adequate democratic control and undermine the whole system of the EU, as these constitute blatant constitutional failures that fly in the face of the whole institutional design and function of the EU and of the arrangements and understanding that member states have with the EU. On this basic issue there is now a pan-European academic initiative [ref6] from various EU member states, including from Germany, asking for a legal reform of the the Unified Patent Court in order to restore essential democratic safeguards in its operation, such as those seen in other areas of intellectual property, as pointed out above.

For example, one of those cases relate to the fact that the EPO examiners prefered to go watch a football match of the 2010 FIFA world cup in South Africa instead of hearing an appeal (Wallinger case) [ref7]. In 2012, our association also hit the same problem during our oral opposition at the EPO against Amazon’s One Click Gift patent [ref8]. The EPO refused to provide us a live translation in the language of our choice (spanish in the particular case) [ref9]. We came to the conclusion at the time that the EPO could not be sued for maladministration.

Nevertheless, despite these well known institutional anomalies, some members of the Bundestag and the Ministry of Justice want to go forward with this ratification project, even though there are obvious “constitutional problems”. The Bundestag is now part of the legal proceedings that are active before in front of the Constitutional Court and should have more insight about those particular cases. Those cases on the impossibility to sue the EPO for maladministration were on the agenda of the Court for 2020, but apparently they won’t be decided this year, but early next year in 2021.

As far as we know, FFII isn’t the only party prepared to torpedo the whole thing with another complaint. UPC is a dead thing because it’s simply not compatible with the law and key stakeholders have already walked away. Saying that UPC/A can still be ratified and be started is akin to saying (at this point) that Donald Trump will overturn the election results and remain President until 2024. █

The EPO is Using Hype Wave and Buzzword to Promote Illegal Software Patents in a So-Called “Digital Conference”

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Would be epic if not tragic if the ‘conference’ got called off due to a software patent troll lawsuit (over alleged violation)

Digital Numbers

Summary: The “HEY HI” or “AI” hype is misused by the Office; not just in person but also in webstreams, which basically serve as a vehicle for illegal agenda

EARLIER TODAY we noticed novice ‘Kat’ Sophie Corke advertising toxic agenda of the EPO. As might be expected from a blog that mass-deletes comments critical of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos (remember it’s run by totally different authors/editors now), there’s no mention of the inherent problems. It simply says: “Keeping with the conference theme, the European Patent Office is holding a digital conference on the role of patents in an AI-driven world on 17-18 December 2020. The full schedule and registration details are available here.”

“Read terms like “AI-related” as “computer-implemented” (in software).”They just keep posting puff pieces and ads for the EPO and for Battistelli (CEIPI) as if the ‘Kat’ is just another “media asset” of the Office. The cited page (warning: epo.org link) makes it very clear and unambiguous that EPO management promotes illegal software patents (not allowed in Europe) under the guise of “HEY HI” or “AI-related inventions”. The people doing this aren’t scientists but parts of Battistelli’s cabal. This is what they say:

AI is ubiquitous today. It is used to recommend online purchases, power virtual assistants, and even for predictive maintenance in smart factories. AI also presents two interesting questions for the patent system. The first asks to what extent AI-related inventions can be protected by patents.

Read terms like “AI-related” as “computer-implemented” (in software). They know exactly what they’re doing there and what agenda they are pushing. But long, long ago they quit caring about the law and about EPC conformance. █

Dutch Delegation and German Delegation at the Administrative Council of the EPO Upset at the Office for Secrecy, Working Behind the Scenes to Crush Productive Staff

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

They eventually got rid of one Benoît Battistelli, but will they remove another and overthrow the entire cabal?

Circus Elephant
There’s a new ‘elephant in the room’, treading carefully as pressure grows

Summary: Less than halfway through his term at the Office, Battistelli’s buddy already faces growing criticism and, according to the Central Staff Committee, he “was emotionally affected by the intervention such that he was not able to effectively reply to the questions of the delegates.”

FOUR weeks ago the Central Staff Committee of the EPO wrote to staff about the ‘meeting’ (videoconference) it had experienced remotely with people who are in theory supposed to supervise António Campinos. The experience was mostly positive, according to them, calling it “short” (“Yet another short meeting by videoconference”).

“As a reminder, the “New Normal” is just some fancy term for crushing the staff.”We don’t want to just throw the Council out the window or out with the bathwater because it might be the best chance staff has (albeit not last resort) if order is to be restored at the Office. The Office management is the most corrupt element; the problem with the Council is mostly complicity by toothlessness (or apathy caused by fear of ‘shaking the boat’).

Free elephantThe Central Staff Committee wrote about 4 weeks ago: “The virtual meetings of the Administrative Council are in marked contrast to the previous face-to-face meetings. The debates are much shorter, but some presentations are longer. The desire of many delegations for the possibility of informal meetings is well understandable. In particular, a discussion on the “New Normal” is also urgently needed.”

As a reminder, the “New Normal” is just some fancy term for crushing the staff. Never be misled by EPO euphemisms, which are all too common…

“We have every right to expect the President to come to staff’s defence,” the Central Staff Committee wrote, “especially in times of crisis. There are still opportunities for development here. The report of the Chairman of the Boards of Appeal shows that even self-critical statements are not taboo in the Administrative Council. Finally, we would like to pass on the thanks and congratulations which some delegations have expressed explicitly to the staff.”

We thought we’d pass along the full report, seeing there’s nothing sensitive in it (the ‘meeting’ wasn’t secret). There’s a mention of “progress report on the unitary patent” (albeit there’s none) and the software used was KUDO:

Munich, 22.10.2020
sc20161cp/en – 0.2.1/3.1

Report on the 164th meeting of the Administrative Council on 13 October 2020

Following an informal video conference on 25 March 2020 and the official meeting via video conference on 30 June and 1 July 2020, this was the third virtual meeting of the Administrative Council. The video conference platform KUDO is used, which now caused far fewer problems than in spring. However, many delegations said that they missed the informal exchanges that are usually held at face-to-face meetings.

The agenda was one of the shortest in the history of the Administrative Council. Only the President’s activities report together with the interventions on the matter took up more time. The few other items on the agenda, such as the report of the Chairman of the Boards of Appeal, the election of the new Chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee or the progress report on the unitary patent, became a minor matter.

President’s activities report

Interacting with all Vice-Presidents and his Chief of Staff, the President gave a presentation of about 50 pages, which was intended to highlight the situation of the Office during the pandemic and the status quo in the implementation of the Strategic Plan 2023. Unfortunately, the presentation was overloaded with so many details that the real achievement of the staff, namely maintaining in an impressive manner the functioning of the European Patent Office during this difficult period, was almost lost. Who would have thought with the enormous pandemic-related changes in spring, for example, that the number of patents published is now 6% above plan?

The interventions of the delegations thus focused more on the plans of the Office to assist national patent offices in IT development than on our core tasks. Apparently, the Dutch delegation and the German delegation were unpleasantly surprised by the previously hidden activities of the management on “New Normal”. In a diplomatic tone, they asked for early involvement in the Administrative Council and for more information on the survey results and on the building plans.

The Staff Representation referred to the great stress situation to which staff are currently exposed. In the midst of this emotionally charged period, especially for families, the President then announced reform plans for the education allowance and payment of school fees. As far as the plans for “New Normal” are concerned, the participation of the Staff Committee is long overdue in order to find sustainable solutions. Hurrying is not the order of the day, but pausing for a moment to take stock of the situation.

Unfortunately, the President then missed the opportunity to jump to the defence of staff and make up for the perhaps somewhat neglected appreciation. He used the rather awkward argument that he had talked to more colleagues than the staff representative who had taken the floor before thus knowing the situation better. It seemed that the President was emotionally affected by the intervention such that he was not able to effectively reply to the questions of the delegates.

President of the Boards of Appeal’s activities report 2020

The President of the Boards of Appeal limited himself to 15 clearly structured slides to present the activities in this year. He did not hesitate to mention also the downsides and the decline in productivity over the past months, which was well understood because of the few possible oral proceedings. However, his delight during the presentation of the pilot project of paperless working with iPads seemed a bit exaggerated.

The delegations expressed their appreciation. With regard to the points raised by the Staff Representation, the President of the Boards of Appeal showed his ability to take criticism and even reacted with appropriate humour.

Chairmanship of the Budget and Finance Committee

Pascal Faure (FR) was unanimously elected Chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee for a three-year term of office to replace Lex Kaufhold (LU). For the first time an online voting system was used.

Unitary patent and related developments – progress to date

The German delegation reported on the legislative process which is now well under way, looking back to the fact that in March 2020 the Federal Constitutional Court annulled the previously adopted law. As the German Federal Council had raised no objections, the intention was to have the draft law in Parliament by Christmas.

Conclusions

The virtual meetings of the Administrative Council are in marked contrast to the previous face-to-face meetings. The debates are much shorter, but some presentations are longer. The desire of many delegations for the possibility of informal meetings is well understandable. In particular, a discussion on the “New Normal” is also urgently needed.

We have every right to expect the President to come to staff’s defence, especially in times of crisis. There are still opportunities for development here. The report of the Chairman of the Boards of Appeal shows that even self-critical statements are not taboo in the Administrative Council.

Finally, we would like to pass on the thanks and congratulations which some delegations have expressed explicitly to the staff.

Your Central Staff Committee

Annex: Interventions of the Staff Representatives

On the President’s activities report

Dear Mr Chairman, dear delegates, dear Mr President, dear António, dear colleagues,

The Staff Representation thanks the delegations for recognising the huge efforts done by all staff during this ongoing pandemic and will transmit this message to them.

I would like to depict an additional view to the presentation given by the President on the last months. The numbers, honestly, look great! It shows the strong commitment of our staff to contribute to the results of the Office and all this during the biggest ongoing pandemic.

But what are the numbers omitting?
These numbers don’t reflect the feelings of staff!
How is staff actually feeling? Similar to the residents of your countries, EPO staff is juggling between reaching their goals at work and home schooling while adapting constantly to the new tools linked to digitisation.

I can tell you: staff is stressed, exhausted – the actual situation since mid-March is stressful, exhausting! Parents with young children are the hardest hit by this pandemic as they don’t have enough support to deal with the situation. Although we appreciate the flexibility put in place by the Office such as no more core hours, and working from home. However, the extended availability of the tools up to midnight may have a detrimental effect on the well-being of our staff. This is because our career is based on a competing factor: who can produce the most and more? and not a collaborative one. In the President’s activity report, the “Collaboration” Balanced Scorecard is at 52%, in the past this number was higher. Staff know that in order to even be eligible for a reward they have to reach the ever-increasing targets set be the management. How can a constant decreasing number of FOs and examiners produce every year more and more? And so, after putting the kids to bed rather than taking a break to regenerate many work until midnight to catch up! How long can this situation be maintained??? For how long is this situation sustainable? Parents feel left alone by the administration…

Because, as if this would not be enough to deal with, we, the Staff Representation and staff have been surprised by a survey on the New Normal which was conducted recently, while excluding the Staff Representation. The scenarios presented in the survey will possibly affect the whole structure of the Organisation. This uncertainty adds to the previous feelings of stress and anxiety of our colleagues.

Additionally, the administration presented end of July a reform on the childcare and education allowances foreseeing harsh cuts in these allowances for most of staff, including nationals, e.g. Dutch citizens working in The Netherlands. Although this reform is portraited as a measure of fairness towards our national colleagues, at a closer inspection it turns out to be another measure of saving money in the mid-term. The President assures us however that this is not the intention and we would like to believe him. However, the reform as it is designed now and the way the discussions are ongoing in the working group with the policy designer speaks a different story. And so, no wonder that the management and we are approached by hundreds and hundreds of desperate parents feeling extremely stressed, betrayed and frankly disrespected by the administration…

On social dialogue: we are very happy to hear that the administration is willing to solve the issue of the PhDs, but news reached us, just 30 minutes ago, that colleagues are receiving letters from the administration denying recognition of the PhD years.

This is only one example for the social dialogue.

Now, how can we turn into the right direction? How can we, all together, you, the President and Staff Representation, give support and space to breath to our colleagues? How can we reassure staff?

We, the Staff Representation, request:
- a constructive education and childcare allowance reform with site specific solutions,
- a slowing down of the definition of the New Normal to a time after the pandemic,
- a fair assessment with rewards for ALL staff, for their contribution in 2020,
- a career based on collaboration, with fair career advancement for all staff.

In the name of staff, we urge the Administrative Council to work together with the Staff Representation and the President of the Office to pave the way for a trustful and respectful future for the benefit of our staff and our organisation!

Thank you very much for your attention!

On the President of the Boards of Appeals’ activities report 2020

Der präsentierte Zwischenbericht ist eindrucksvoll und zeigt, daß die Kolleginnen und Kollegen in den Beschwerdekammern in den Zeiten der Pandemie Bemerkenswertes geleistet haben. Ich möchte drei Punkte herausgreifen, die aus Sicht des Personalausschusses im Bericht etwas zu kurz kommen.

Da ist erstens das Personal selbst. Nicht nur dadurch, daß nur wenige mündliche Verhandlungen stattfinden, mußten die Kolleginnen und Kollegen zahlreiche Arbeitsabläufe umstellen. Dies geschah oft von zu Hause aus mit der zusätzlichen Belastung durch die Sorge um Familie und Angehörige. Viele Kolleginnen und Kollegen sind bis an die Grenze der Belastbarkeit gegangen und manche sogar darüber hinaus. Wir sollten gerade jetzt besonders an die Gesundheit der Kolleginnen und Kollegen denken, um tatsächlich eine nachhaltige Anpassung an die neuen Umstände zu gewährleisten.

Zweitens wird von einem Pilotprojekt über papierloses Arbeiten berichtet. Auch hier sollten wir nicht übertreiben. Zwar befürwortet der Personalausschuß, daß die Arbeit der Kolleginnen und Kollegen durch geeignete Tools unterstützt wird, allerdings ist die Technik noch nicht so weit, daß eine Arbeit ganz ohne Papier in naher Zukunft überhaupt denkbar ist. Fraglich ist in der Tat, ob die derzeit verwendeten iPads für papierloses Arbeiten überhaupt adäquat sind, so die Rückmeldungen von den Kolleginnen und Kollegen aus den Beschwerdekammern. Arbeit ausschließlich am Computer oder Tablet ist nicht gesund. Auch hier sollte die Gesundheit der Mitglieder der Beschwerdekammern ganz im Vordergrund stehen.

Drittens wird im Dokument von Arbeitsgruppen berichtet, die zu bestimmten Themen eingesetzt wurden, beispielsweise zu mündlichen Verhandlungen per Videokonferenz oder zu Qualitätsaspekten. Hier müssen noch Strukturen entwickelt werden, wie der Personalausschuß und repräsentativ gewählte Vertreter geeignet eingebunden werden. Denn gerade kritische Stimmen sind notwendig, um Veränderungen auch nachhaltig zu gestalten. Weder der Personalausschuß noch das Präsidium der Beschwerdekammern ist derzeit im Beschwerdekammerausschuß vertreten, wo zum Beispiel das Karrieresystem und die Arbeitsbedingungen der Patentrichter auf der Agenda sind. Dies ist noch ein Relikt aus der Battistelli-Zeit, und hier sollten wir baldmöglichst und unbedingt im Interesse der Europäischen Patentorganisation eine Änderung vorsehen. In diesem Sinne möchte ich abschließen und Ihnen versichern, daß der Personalausschuß auch weiterhin die Gestaltungsprozesse in den Beschwerdekammern aufmerksam beobachten und kritisch begleiten wird.

It’s very easy to relate to the bits about working parents with young children; the EPO has done just about nothing for them. We keep hearing those stories about young workers who sit on the computer working until midnight or even past midnight. Here’s a touching paragraph: “staff is stressed, exhausted – the actual situation since mid-March is stressful, exhausting! Parents with young children are the hardest hit by this pandemic as they don’t have enough support to deal with the situation. Although we appreciate the flexibility put in place by the Office such as no more core hours, and working from home. However, the extended availability of the tools up to midnight may have a detrimental effect on the well-being of our staff. This is because our career is based on a competing factor: who can produce the most and more? and not a collaborative one. In the President’s activity report, the “Collaboration” Balanced Scorecard is at 52%, in the past this number was higher. Staff know that in order to even be eligible for a reward they have to reach the ever-increasing targets set be the management. How can a constant decreasing number of FOs and examiners produce every year more and more? And so, after putting the kids to bed rather than taking a break to regenerate many work until midnight to catch up! How long can this situation be maintained??? For how long is this situation sustainable? Parents feel left alone by the administration…”

There’s meanwhile also the question about the illegality of oral hearings over video. This topic was covered repeatedly by SUEPO, citing the relevant laws being broken (pretty serious violations of human and labour rights).

Incidentally, days ago (November 18 2020) Max Walters wrote: “EPO president Campinos says the time is right for virtual hearings, while in-house counsel offer mixed views on the benefits of video conferences…”

Notice, as we’ve noted before that they never speak about the illegality of the whole thing. Almost never. What kind of journalism is that? One can see past the paywall here:

In-house counsel revealed mixed views to Managing IP on the benefits of video conferences this week – while the EPO’s president agreed that stalling tactics by some parties had denied access to justice.

The EPO announced last week that all hearings below appeal level – namely examination and opposition proceedings – would be virtual until September 2021.

Until now, virtual hearings had been permitted so long as both parties agreed. From January 4 2021, the need for both parties’ consent will be removed.

Miriam Colling-Hendelkens, head of patents in crop science at Bayer in Germany, suggests that the EPO’s decision is a bad one because it’s important for parties to be able to observe each examination/opposition division member’s reaction on the arguments provided.

She added: “The interpretation that opting for video conferences is a delay tactic might miss some additional real pain points and seems to be the underlying rationale in rare and very specific cases.”

So even some stakeholders are complaining, contrary to what the Office claims. “From January 4 2021,” it notes, “the need for both parties’ consent will be removed.” So they’re forced to do or participate in something illegal. █

Links 23/11/2020: GNU Guix 1.2.0, Evaluating Precursor’s Hardware Security, Kdenlive 20.08.3, Kodi 19.x Beta, Vulkan 1.2.162

Posted in News Roundup at 2:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Best Linux distros for Windows users in 2020

        Switching operating systems is no small feat. You have to learn to find your way around the alien environment, traverse a new applications menu, and navigate through the nooks and crannies of the system settings to set up your new digs as per your requirements.

        It can be an inundating experience, especially for people coming from proprietary operating systems like Windows. Linux distributions, thanks to their open source nature, offer a lot more access than their closed source cousins, which makes the transition particularly difficult for many users.

        This is where these specialized distros, designed for Windows users, come into the picture. Their objective is to allow users to experience the goodness of Linux while minimizing the learning curve that’s associated when switching to a different operating system. They all take various steps to ensure that the transition is as effortless as possible.

      • PinePhone becomes a DIY Linux laptop with this 3D printed keyboard

        The folks at Pine64 are designing an official keyboard accessory for their Linux-powered smartphone. Eventually you’ll be able to purchase a physical keyboard that snaps onto the phone by replacing the back cover, and which will allow you to type with your thumbs without covering the display.

        Or you could just 3D print your own keyboard for the PinePhone. That’s what one person seems to have done, and thanks to a series of design files posted a Thingiverse, you may be able to make your own… although there’s still some work required to make it fully functional.

      • Latest Chromium OS build for the GPD Pocket 1 and 2 brings hardware, software fixes for these mini-laptops

        The GPD Pocket and Pocket 2 are tiny laptops small enough to fold up and slide into (some) pockets… thus the name. With 7 inch touchscreen displays and QWERTY keyboards, they’re about as small as you can get while still supporting touch-typing on a laptop.

        GPD ships the Pocket mini-laptops with Windows 10 software, but independent developers have been porting alternate operating systems for years. You can run GNU/Linux distributions (there’s even a version of Ubuntu MATE designed for these little PCs). And developer Keith Myers has been offering up builds of Chromium OS for those that want to turn their GPD devices into tiny Chromebooks.

      • What Does the Penguin Say?

        I chalk this up to a few factors. First, Linux was practically born on the Web. In Linux’s infancy, Linus Torvalds not only made the kernel available online, but he attracted a throng of would-be contributors via Usenet who collaborated in Linux’s development. The Internet has been a significant distribution channel ever since, facilitating the obtainment and installation of desktop Linux distributions in the large majority of cases today.

        Second, since one could not easily purchase a computer with Linux preinstalled until around the last decade, online communities were essential for fielding the questions of Linux initiates. It is comforting to know there are veterans who can help when setting up an entirely new OS, especially one so off the beaten path. This has traditionally been, and remains, Linux’s main analog to customer support that competing OSes offer.

        Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Linux simply offers so many choices. Windows gives you Windows the Windows way. On Mac, you get Mac the way Mac was intended. Not so with desktop Linux. Why? Simply put, there is no one “desktop Linux.” With Linux, every distribution gives you a completely different suite of user programs built atop the kernel, sometimes with its own repackaging of the kernel itself.

        Not least of the cornucopia of options that the desktop Linux world offers is that of desktop environments. Most distros present a handful of curated desktop environments. Between all the Linux distros out there, one will encounter literally dozens of them. The only hope a humble Linux user has of figuring out which one they might want, aside from taking them all for a spin, is to ask around. Users also really get into advocating for particular desktops. This is nearly always good-natured, leading to amusing, if not informative, discussion threads.

    • Server

      • Istio 1.8 Released

        The Istio community has announced the latest iteration of the open source service mesh platform, Istio 1.8.

        To support open hybrid cloud architectures, the Istio 1.8 release adds new features that make Istio easier to upgrade, clearer information about maturity of each feature, better documentation, and tons of exciting experimental features.

        The latest release includes updates to clarify when to use in-place upgrades and when to use revision-based upgrades.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux 5.10 release might get messy around Christmas

        Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel, has expressed concern about the rate of changes in the current release, and how it might cause issues with the imminent holiday season.

        Torvalds noted his surprise at the uncharacteristically increasing number of changes and how it could lead to an issue in the release announcement for the fifth release candidate (rc5) of the upcoming v5.10 of the kernel.

        “The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink,” observed Torvalds.

      • Linux in 2020 [Ed: This is clearly conflating the kernel (Linux) with GNU, which predates it by almost one decade. It also perpetuates the myth that only Ubuntu brought GNU/Linux to the masses.]

        Hello. Today I would like to share with you, my perspective of Linux. Please take note that this is all my opinions and the way I see it. If you feel that I missed something very important or have a fact or two wrong, please let me know.

        So Linux was announced for the first time, on the 25 of August 1991 by a Finnish student, called Linus Torvalds. Little did he know, and the world knows that 30 years later the world would be using it on a daily basis.

        So From 1991, Linux has been maturing several Linux Distros (operating systems) came and went away, with a few of the first ones still around today. But it was mainly/only for those who are computer “geeks” and not for everyday users. But that all changed in October 2004, when the first version of Ubuntu was released.

      • Reiser5 Logical Volume Management – Updates
          Reiser5 Logical Volume Management - Updates


I am happy to inform, that Logical Volumes stuff has become more
stable. Also we introduce the following changes, which make logical
volumes administration more flexible and simple:


                  1. No balancing by default


Now all volume operations except brick removal don't invoke balancing
by default. Instead, they mark volume as "unbalanced". To complete any
operation with balancing specify option -B (--with-balance), or run
volume.reiser4(8) utility with the option -b (--balance) later.

This allows to speed up more than one operations over logical volume
being performed at once. For example, if you want to add more than one
brick to your volume at once, first add all the bricks, then run
balancing. There is no need to balance a volume between the addition
operations.


                    2. Removal completion


Operation of brick removal always includes balancing procedure as its
part. This procedure moves out all data block from the brick to be
removed to remaining bricks of the volume. Thus, brick removal is
usually a long operation, which may be interrupted for various reasons
In such cases the volume is automatically marked with an "incomplete
removal" flag.

It is not allowed to perform essential volume operations on a volume
marked as "with incomplete removal": first, user should complete
removal by running volume.reiser4 utility with option
-R (--finish-removal). Otherwise, the operation will return error
(-EBUSY).

There is no other restrictions: you are allowed to add a brick to
unbalanced volume, and even remove a brick from an unbalanced volume
(assuming it is not incomplete removal).

Comment. "--finish-removal" is a temporary option. In the future the
file system will detect incomplete removal and automatically perform
removal completion by itself.


                3. Balancing is always defined


Operation of volume balancing (regardless of its balanced status) is
always defined, and can be launched at any moment. If the volume is
balanced, then the balancing procedure just scans the volume without
any useful work.

It is allowed to run more than one balancing threads on the same
volume, however currently it will be inefficient: other threads will
be always going after the single leader without doing useful work.
Efficient volume balancing by many threads (true parallelism) is not a
trivial task. We estimate its complexity as 2/5.


          4. Restore regular distribution on the volume


Custom (defined by user) file migration can break fairness of data
distribution among the bricks. To restore regular (fair) distribution
on the volume, run volume.reiser4 utility with the option -S
(--restore-regular). It launches a balancing procedure, which performs
mandatory data migration of all files (including the ones marked as
"immobile") in accordance with regular distribution policy on the
volume. Moreover, when the balancing procedure encounters a file
marked as "immobile", its "immobile" flag is cleared up.


                         5. How to test


The new functionality is available starting with the kernel patch
reiser4-for-linux-5.10-rc3 and reiser4progs-2.0.4 (Software Framework
Release number of both is 5.1.3).
      • Reiser5 Stabilizing Its Logical Volume Functionality – Phoronix

        This New Year’s Eve will mark one year since the announcement of the in-development Reiser5 file-system. While the outlook for getting Reiser5 upstreamed into the mainline kernel remains murky given the out-of-tree status of Reiser4, Edward Shishkin does continue advancing this latest Reiser file-system iteration.

        Since last year’s initial Reiser5 announcement, more features continue to be ironed out for this evolution of Reiser4. The latest Reiser5 functionality hitting a point of stability is its logical volume management.

      • Graphics Stack

        • NVIDIA Releases Beta Driver With Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Support

          While NVIDIA has supported its own vendor-specific Vulkan ray-tracing extension on Windows and Linux since the GeForce RTX GPUs originally debuted, they are moving quick to support the Khronos ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan given the industry adoption and games coming to market likely opting for using the KHR version.

          This morning with Vulkan 1.2.162 the Vulkan KHR ray-tracing extensions were made official after being out in provisional form since earlier this year. NVIDIA has now released beta drivers for Windows and Linux that support these finalized versions.

        • Vulkan Ray Tracing becomes official with Vulkan 1.2.162 (updated) | GamingOnLinux

          The day has arrived, along with the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 being tagged in the Vulkan-Docs repository on GitHub the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions are now officially released. From being announced as a provisional set in March 2020, The Khronos Group formally announced it’s done.

          “Welcome to the era of portable, cross-vendor, cross-platform ray tracing acceleration!” – Daniel Koch, NVIDIA

        • Vulkan 1.2.162 Released With Ray-Tracing Support Promoted – Phoronix

          Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today’s Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support.

          The Vulkan ray-tracing support is now deemed final and out of the provisional guard. This includes the finalized versions of VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations.

    • Benchmarks

      • Radeon RX 6800 Series Performance Comes Out Even Faster With Newest Linux Code

        Last week we delivered AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT Linux benchmarks and the performance was great both for Linux gaming as well as the OpenCL compute performance. But for as good as those Big Navi numbers were on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, they are now even better.

        That launch-day testing was based on the Linux state in the second-half of October when the cards arrived and initial (re-)testing began in preparing for the Radeon RX 6800 series reviews — not only the Radeon RX 6800 series but re-testing all of the other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for the comparison too. Thanks to the rate of the open-source graphics driver progression and the newest code always being available, now just days after launch the numbers are even more compelling for Linux gamers with the slightly newer Linux 5.10 and Mesa Git compared to just weeks ago.

        In particular were the last minute NGG fixes and other Big Navi tweaks along with an important Radeon RX 6800 (non-XT) fix. There has also been other RADV improvements and more that accumulated in Mesa 21.0-devel this month. On the kernel side, Linux 5.10 is still at play. Both the old and newer Mesa snapshots were also on LLVM 11.0.

      • Intel: AMD Gimps On Battery-Powered Laptop Performance – But DPTF On Linux Still Sucks – Phoronix

        Again, all Windows data so Linux laptop users… But with my love for benchmarking, I do plan to devote some time over Thanksgiving with my limited selection of notebooks to carry out some similar tests on Ubuntu and see how the performance differs from AC to battery between AMD and Intel. I’ll be highly surprised if there is any big AMD vs. Intel battery performance difference on Linux.

        I didn’t expect them to have any Linux numbers at the presentation, but I dialed in so I could ask about DPTF being one of the few sore spots in their Linux support. While for nearly all areas the Intel Linux laptop support is in good standing from their side, it’s less than desirable with regards to Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework. That’s where many Linux distributions don’t even ship Intel Thermald and it’s not in an optimal configuration unless running the binary-only dptfxtract utility, etc. DPTF isn’t properly documented and the out-of-the-box support on Linux as a result is less than optimal. Weird DPTF tables on various laptops have caused performance regressions in the past under Linux as we’ve spotted as well as other performance issues.

        Take for example the recent issue of some HP laptops have been performing less than optimally on AC power on some Linux kernel versions due to DPTF handling issues. There have also been thermal throttling issues under Linux with Lenovo acknowledging is due to closed-source Intel DPTF settings. Earlier this year some work got underway outside of Intel on reverse engineering Intel’s DPTF adaptive policy but that didn’t seem to bear any dramatic improvements yet.

    • Applications

      • ympd – MPD Web based GUI

        Linux offers a mouthwatering array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.

        MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.

        I’ve covered a fair few MPD clients over the past year or so including Cantata, Ymuse, ncmpy, and ncmpc. My favorite of them is Cantata although Ymuse is a simple alternative. There’s lots of differences between these front-ends. For example, Cantata uses the Qt widget set, whereas Ymuse offers a GTK front-end. And ncmpy and ncmpc are terminal-based clients.

        ympd takes a different route. It’s a web-based client. This software lets you use your web browser to interact with MPD. ympd runs without a dedicated web server or interpreters like PHP, NodeJS or Ruby. It’s tuned for minimal resource usage and has minimal dependencies. The software uses Websockets and Bootstrap/JavaScript.

      • Kodi 19.x “Matrix” – Beta 1

        Lights! Camera! Action!

        … nearly. It’s Beta time for Kodi 19.x “Matrix”, so let’s take another step towards the Great Unveiling.

        As we now move into Beta, this release is much more about fixes than features: while there will be the odd new functionality, we’re concentrating very much more on getting everything working properly from this point.

        To recap, then, one of the main objectives of 19.x “Matrix” is to release a production version of Kodi with Python 3 addons as early in 2021 as we can. That can only happen with enthusiastic community support, lots of good humour and willingness to see the best in others – well, that and coffee/beer (delete as applicable), of course!

      • Kodi 19 Now In Beta With Python 3 Addons, AV1 Software Decoding

        The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is now up to a beta state for their big version 19 “Matrix” release.

        Kodi 19 is a big update for this open-source, cross-platform HTPC software. Kodi 19.0 is gearing up for release in early 2021 and features a wealth of improvements, especially at the low-level in that they have been working to gut out the EOL’ed Python 2 and replace it with Python 3 for the software’s add-ons. That Python 3 add-on conversion remains ongoing and with the help of the community should be in good shape by the time Kodi 19 is ready for its official release.

      • Richard Hughes: fwupd 1.5.2

        If you’re running 1.5.0 or 1.5.1 you probably want to update to this release now as it fixes a hard-to-debug hang we introduced in 1.5.0. If you’re running 1.4.x you might want to let the libcurl changes settle, although we’ve been using it without issue for more than a week on a ton of hardware here. Expect 1.5.3 in a few weeks time, assuming we’re all still alive by then.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How to Install and Configure Hadoop on Ubuntu 20.04 – TecAdmin

        Hadoop is a free, open-source and Java-based software framework used for storage and processing of large datasets on clusters of machines. It uses HDFS to store its data and process these data using MapReduce. It is an ecosystem of Big Data tools that are primarily used for data mining and machine learning.

        Apache Hadoop 3.3 come with noticeable improvements any many bug fixes over the previous releases. It has four major components such as Hadoop Common, HDFS, YARN, and MapReduce.

      • How to create a Cloudwatch Event Rule in AWS

        A near-real-time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources is delivered by CloudWatch Events. We can create a rule that matches events and route them to one or more target functions. We can use CloudWatch Events to schedule automated actions. These actions can be self-triggered at certain times using cron or rate expressions. We can have EC2 instances, Lambda functions, Kinesis Data Streams, ECS tasks, Batch jobs, SNS topics, SQS queues, and a few more services as target endpoints for CloudWatch Events. To know more about Cloudwatch events, visit the official AWS documentation here.

      • How to use Bash file test operators in Linux

        File Test Operators are used in Linux to check and verify attributes of files like ownership or if they are a symlink. Every Test operator has a specific purpose. The most important operators are -e and -s. In this article, you will learn to test files using the if statement followed by some important test operators in Linux.

      • How To Install Wireguard on CentOS 8 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireguard on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireguard is an open-source, dependable, advanced, VPN tunneling software you can install and use right now to create a secure, point-to-point connection to a server. It is cross-platform and can run almost anywhere, including Linux, Windows, Android, and macOS. Wireguard is a peer-to-peer VPN. it does not use the client-server model. Depending on its configuration, a peer can act as a traditional server or client.

        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 the Wireguard VPN on CentOS 8.

      • How To Install NVM on CentOS/RHEL 7 – TecAdmin

        NVM stands for Node Version Manager is a command-line utility for managing Node versions. Sometimes you required to deploy multiple node application with different-2 versions.

        Managing the multiple Node.js versions for differnt-2 projects are a pain for the developers. But NVM helped to easily manage multiple active Node.js versions on a single system.

        This tutorial will explain you to install NVM on CentOS/RHEL 7/6 systems and manage multiple Node.js versions.

      • How to install Kali Linux 2020.4 – YouTube

        In this video, I am going to show how to install Kali Linux 2020.4.

      • How to make your own personal VPN in under 30 minutes

        In the Distribution box, choose the newest available Ubuntu LTS release — as of the time of writing, that’s 20.04 LTS. Below that, pick the region you want your VPN to be located in. It’s possible to change the location later, but you’ll have to contact Linode support. For the plan, select ‘Nanode 1GB’ from the list of Shared CPU options. VPNs don’t need much processing power, so this low-spec option will work just fine.

      • Use nnn as a File Manager for Linux Terminal – Make Tech Easier

        If you have used the Linux terminal for an extended period of time, you probably know some of the useful commands, like cd to move into and out of folders, create new ones, and copy or move files. Still, you may prefer how desktop file managers are more user-friendly and quicker for some tasks. In that case, you’ll love nnn.

        nnn is the equivalent of a desktop file manager for the terminal. Although not an ultra-complex solution like Midnight Commander, nnn is light on resources, fast, and allows you to navigate your file system without having to type commands.

      • An introduction to Prometheus metrics and performance monitoring | Enable Sysadmin

        Use Prometheus to gather metrics into usable, actionable entries, giving you the data you need to manage alerts and performance information in your environment.

      • Why does Wireshark say no interfaces found – Linux Hint

        Wireshark is a very famous, open-source network capturing and analyzing tool. While using Wireshark, we may face many common issues. One of the common issues is “No Interfaces are listed in Wireshark”. Let’s understand the issue and find a solution in Linux OS.If you do not know Wireshark basic, then check Wireshark Basic first, then come back here.

      • How to Solve “Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)” In Ubuntu

        It’s not uncommon to run into an issue of broken packages in Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions. Sometimes, when you upgrade the system or install a software package, you may encounter the ‘Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code’ error.

        For example, a while back, I tried to upgrade Ubuntu 18.04 and I bumped into the dpkg error as shown below.

        [...]

        This type of dpkg error points to an issue with the package installer usually caused by the interruption of an installation process or a corrupt dpkg database.

        Any of the above-mentioned solutions should fix this error. If you have come this far, then it’s our hope that the issue has been successfully resolved and that you were able to reinstall your software package.

      • inttf NVIDIA Patcher [BASH Script] – If Not True Then False

        This is a BASH script, which download NVIDIA installer, extract it, patch it and make new patched installer package. This is very quickly tested alpha version so if you have any problems please let me know or if this works as it should you can also let me know. I use here currently Isaak I. Aleksandrov patches with my own modifications.

      • How to increase the size of your swapfile | Arcolinux.com

        Always think out of the box. Do not restrict yourself to just Arch Linux articles or ArcoLinux articles.

      • How to Install and Use PHP Composer on Linux Distributions

        The PHP composer is a dependency manager of the PHP framework that you can use on your Linux system to install PHP modules, applications, and packages. The PHP composer is a command-line based tool for Linux. If you are a programmer, you might know that different languages use different package dependency managers to install and update modules inside the system. Like, Python uses Pip, RUBY uses Bundler; in the same way, you can use the composer tool to install the PHP modules and packages on your system.

      • Synchronize Files Between Multiple Systems With Syncthing – OSTechNix

        In this step by step tutorial, we are going to learn what is Syncthing, how to install Syncthing on Linux, how to synchronize files between multiple systems in real time, and finally how to troubleshoot common Syncthing problems.

      • Install the XFCE desktop on your Raspberry PI – PragmaticLinux

        In this article you’ll learn how to install the XFCE desktop on your Raspberry PI. We’ll take a minimal install of the Raspberry PI operating system as a starting point. The XFCE installation on your Raspberry PI includes setting up all necessary building blocks, such as: display server, display manager, session manager, window manager and desktop environment.

    • Wine or Emulation

      • Wine 6.0 Release Preparations Begin In Two Weeks

        With Wine on an annual stable release cadence for shipping new stable feature releases generally at the beginning of each calendar year after a year’s worth of bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 6.0 is due for release around January.

        Following Friday’s Wine 5.22 release, Wine project founder and leader Alexandre Julliard sent out word this morning that the processes will soon begin rolling for that Wine 6.0 release.

        Two weeks from now for the next development release will also mark the start of the code freeze for Wine 6.0. Following that, the Wine 6.0 release candidates will continue until the official Wine 6.0.0 release is ready to ship.

    • Games

      • A chat with Trese Brothers Games about the upcoming cyberpunk Cyber Knights: Flashpoint | GamingOnLinux

        We have a chat with Trese Brothers Games who are currently developing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint following a successful Kickstarter campaign earlier in March 2020.

      • Big adventures ahead – Little Big Adventures

        Once upon a time in the past – around the year 1994 – a software company called Adeline Software International released a game titled “Little Big Adventure” or “Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure”. This game, a classic pseudo-3D action adventure game with an epic story set on a fantastic planet, has now entered the testing stage in ScummVM. Please, note that a few features of the original game are not implemented yet. However, we also added a few features which are new for the game.

      • The upcoming metroidvania RPG ‘Heart Forth, Alicia’ is looking gorgeous | GamingOnLinux

        Here’s a game I haven’t heard of for a few years. Heart Forth, Alicia is an upcoming modern Metroidvania RPG, filled with devious monsters, lethal dungeons, creative puzzles, lively towns & many uncharted wonders.

        “On the night of your coming of age trial, the sky rains fire over your village, scorching everything in its path. Soon, you’re catapulted into an ongoing war between the wizards of the forest and the desert army of the West. Desperate to reunite with your loved ones, you embark on a journey across the landscapes of a beautiful but threatening world, sculpted by the pulsing violence of its past.”

      • Have a short immersive narrative adventure with Beyond Your Window | GamingOnLinux

        A pretty apt game for 2020, as Beyond Your Window is a narrative game about what goes on outside as you look outside your window as you search for new stories to tell. Quite on-point, given the various lockdowns across the world thanks to the COVID19 pandemic.

        Developed by Italian studio Team SolEtude, it’s something of a visual novel / narrative adventure filled with wonderful art and relaxing chilled tunes. Divided up into four short-stories, with each giving you an epilogue that changes depending on your choices.

      • The modern retro adventure Alwa’s Legacy is now available on itch.io | GamingOnLinux

        Do you prefer to buy your games from the indie store itch.io? Good news, another quality game arrived with the platformer adventure Alwa’s Legacy. A good chance to remind you about this one, as it’s really good. Successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2019, it was released on other stores back in June 2020 and has gone onto receiving positive reviews overall.

      • Open source Linux game overlay manager GOverlay adds more customization | GamingOnLinux

        GOverlay helps you to manage Linux game overlays including MangoHud, the vkBasalt effects layer and also the ReplaySorcery screen recorder. A pretty useful application putting a bunch of sort-of related open source projects under one roof, giving you a few easy buttons and check-boxes to fiddle with instead of typing lines in configuration files.

        Recently the application moved over from GTK2 to QT for the toolkit it’s built with, along with the Fusion QT Style which means it should look the same across all Linux desktops. There’s also a bunch of new options, including the ability to quickly switch between a full and minimal readout for MangoHud. You also now get the ability to change the text colours of more titles right inside the app.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Kdenlive 20.08.3 is out

          The third and last minor release of the 20.08 series is out with the usual round of fixes and improvements. Focus is now set on finishing the same track transitions and the subtitler features for the next major release due in December. Please help test the Beta release and report any issues.

        • Kdenlive Devs Fix Multitude of Bugs in Latest Release

          Kdenlive 20.08.3 is the third and final update in the Kdenlive 20.08 series, a feature-filled run that launched earlier this year to plenty of positive feedback.

          Among issues ironed out by this update are correctly displayed frame rate values on monitor; opening project files with missing version numbers; and finesse to the Qtcrop video effect.

          The timeline ruler is now updated properly when switching profile, while project files with a single clip in the timeline are updated to reflect the correct duration.

          Finally, projecting archiving now checks if archiving is possible, and introduces the option to use zip instead of tar.gz; and a pair of crashes related to keyframes are now resolved.

        • Kdenlive Video Editor 20.08.3 Released, How to Install via PPA

          The third and last minor release for Kdenlive video editor 20.08 was released today with many fixes and improvements.

        • Plasma 5.20 & display scaling – Excellent

          Excellent results. I’m happy. And also annoyed. The real problem with Plasma 5.20 is that it’s not LTS, and that its superb features won’t be backported to either 5.12 or 5.18, which means I will have to wait YEARS before I finally get to enjoy the truly spectacular package that is the latest Plasma release. Until then, I’ll be forced to cope with various outstanding glitches and problems present in the earlier versions. Yes, the way things are, I’m not going to enjoy Plasma the way it ought be – scaling, Samba tweaks, looks – until Kubuntu 22.04.

          That’s the price I need to pay for expecting stability first. Which is great when you work with a complete, mature set of features in an operating system. But when Plasma evolves so quickly, including some erratic developments along the way, it’s rather hard to settle and enjoy only a subset of the things you need due to administrative partitioning. Perhaps one day, it will be possible to completely decouple the underlying system from the desktop and applications. Until then, I must praise Plasma 5.20 for its outstanding job and be sad that my LTS won’t be getting any of this sweet nectar. Back to our topic – scaling, job well done. Bye bye.

    • Distributions

      • Reviews

        • Review: ArchBang Linux 0111

          ArchBang Linux is a lightweight distribution based on Arch Linux. Using the i3 window manager, it strives to be fast, up-to-date and suitable for desktop systems. The current snapshots of ArchBang use an unusual versioning convention with a day & month combination. For example, 0811 is the snapshot for the 8th of November. Previous versions used a year & month combination so that a snapshot from January 2014 would be 2014.01.

          Apart from the shift in version numbers since the last time I tried ArchBang the distribution has also swapped out the Openbox window manager for i3 on the install media. I was curious to see how this would work. ArchBang has just one download option, a 914MB ISO file that runs on 64-bit (x86_64) machines.

          The live media boots and brings up the i3 window manager. The wallpaper displays a nice water-focused nature scene. There is a Conky status panel displayed to the right of the desktop. Under the status readout there is a listing for keyboard shortcuts we can use to launch some programs, access desktop settings, and start the install process.

      • New Releases

        • openmamba “light” with LXQt desktop

          The “light” version of openmamba is renewed by adopting the LXQt desktop environment which replaces the previous LXDE environment.

          Meanwhile, the main release continues to provide users with an always up-to-date KDE Plasma desktop environment.

          In the Downloads section all the supports are available to run in live mode and install openmamba on PCs (64 and 32 bit x86 compatible archs):

          openmamba livecd rolling – ISO for live execution and installation of openmamba with KDE Plasma environment

        • GParted Live 1.1.0-8 Stable Release

          The GParted team has released a new stable version of GParted Live.

          This release includes GParted 1.1.0, updated packages, and other improvements.

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • Xfce Virtual Machine Images For Development

          The openSUSE distributions offer a variety of graphical desktop environments, one of them being the popular and lightweight Xfce. Up to now there was the stable tested branch available in Tumbleweed already during install. Furthermore, for interested users the development OBS repository xfce:next offered a preview state of what’s coming up next to Tumbleweed.

          Xfce Development in openSUSE

          Thanks to the hard work of openSUSE’s Xfce team there is a third option: Xfce Development Repository aka RAT In a playful way, a rat is meant to represent the unpolished nature of this release: a rat is scruffy looking compared to a mouse (the cute and beloved mascot of Xfce). And the RAT repository provides packages automatically built right from the Git Master Branch of Xfce upstream development. The goal of this project is to test and preview the new software so that bugs can be spotted and fixed ahead of time by contributing upstream. The packages pull in source code state on a daily basis and offer a quite convenient way to test and eventually help development. So this is where the team builds and tests the latest and unstable releases of Xfce Desktop Environment for openSUSE.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • Order from chaos: Red Hat and Starburst come together to simplify data access

          Enterprises rely on data to bring order to their organizations through automation, business process management and optimization, and increased intelligence that leads to better decision making. Yet data can be difficult to access, especially when it exists in many places.

          Today, data can be found in data centers, the cloud, vendor environments, and in traditional and software-defined data sources. Data ingested from the network edge may be aggregated at remote locations, transactional databases and data warehouses typically live in the core datacenter, while cloud-native applications generally store data in a private and/or public cloud. Data stores can be found in distributed, hybrid cloud, traditional, and modern applications—in many cases within the same organization.

        • Extending choice for more flexible, more secure open hybrid cloud: Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS Outposts

          Linux and open hybrid cloud go hand-in-hand – the power, flexibility and scale of hybrid cloud is made possible by the foundation of the Linux operating system. The world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), already delivers this foundation across nearly every public cloud, server architecture and virtualized environment, but customer needs aren’t static. As new options for hybrid cloud computing emerge, we work to extend RHEL to meet these deployments, highlighted by support today for RHEL on AWS Outposts.

          While many organizations are able to reach outside of the confines of their datacenter to explore public and hybrid cloud options, some cannot due to unique security or compliance needs. Outposts bring the scale and power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to corporate datacenters in an appliance managed by AWS experts. Now, the organizations using Outposts can turn to RHEL to provide greater consistency across their IT estate, from traditional bare-metal servers, virtualized environments, private cloud infrastructure and their gateway to public cloud resources.

          [...]

          Our goal with RHEL is to deliver an operating system that spans the open hybrid cloud, regardless of the path that an organization takes or the tools that they choose to use. With this new support for AWS Outposts, we have continued to drive customer choice in how they build hybrid cloud deployments with a single common platform in RHEL.

        • Run serverless functions, Kubernetes ingress controllers comparisons, and more industry trends | Opensource.com

          As part of my role as a principal communication strategist at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends. Here are some of my and their favorite articles from that update.

        • Fedora 34 Change: Route all Audio to PipeWire (System-Wide Change)
        • Fedora 34 Might Try To Use PipeWire By Default To Replace PulseAudio/JACK

          Red Hat for several years now has been working on PipeWire to overhaul audio/video stream management on Linux while being able to fill the duties currently managed by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK and being engineered with Wayland and Flatpak security in mind among other modern Linux technologies. With Fedora 34 next spring they may try to ship PipeWire by default in place of JACK, PulseAudio, and even legacy ALSA.

          For a while now Fedora has offered PipeWire packages but not yet used by default when it comes to audio handling. A pending change proposal for Fedora 34 would now route all audio through PipeWire rather than the existing JACK and PulseAudio.

          With the proposed plan, Fedora 34 next spring with PipeWire would take over all desktop audio duties by default from PulseAudio. PipeWire provides a functionally compatible implementation of the PulseAudio daemon so existing Linux software should continue to work fine. Similarly, PipeWire would provide F34′s JACK support for professional audio needs. For legacy ALSA clients, an ALSA plug-in for PipeWire allows routing audio through it as well.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • FSF

        • GNU Projects

          • The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

            Four months later, Mattis and fellow University of California Berkeley student Spencer Kimball delivered what they described as software “designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations.”

            The software ran on Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HPUX 9.05, and SGI IRIX. The answer to the file format support question turned out to be GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and XPM.

            The rest is history. Richard Stallman gave Mattis and Kimball permission to change the “General” in its name to “GNU”, reflecting its open-source status. Today the program is released under the GNU General Public License. As the program added features such as layers, it grew more popular and eventually became a byword for offering a FOSS alternative to Photoshop even though the project pushes back against that description.

            The project’s celebration page says volunteers did their “best to provide a sensible workflow to users by using common user interface patterns. That gave us a few questionable monikers like ‘Photoshop for Linux’, ‘free Photoshop’, and ‘that ugly piece of software’. We still can wholeheartedly agree with the latter one only!”

          • GNU Guix 1.2.0 released

            We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.2.0, right in time to celebrate the eighth anniversary of Guix!

            The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

            It’s been almost 7 months since the last release, during which 200 people contributed code and packages, and a number of people contributed to other important tasks—code review, system administration, translation, web site updates, Outreachy mentoring, you name it!

            There’s been more than 10,200 commits in that time frame and it is the challenge of these release notes to summarize all that activity.

      • Programming/Development

        • 6 predictions for JavaScript build tools | Opensource.com

          Code used in production is different from development code. In production, you need to build packages that run fast, manage dependencies, automate tasks, load external modules, and more. JavaScript tools that make it possible to turn development code into production code are called build tools.

        • Perl/Raku

          • The mysterious case of the SVt_PVIV | The Incredible Journey

            The other day I wanted to send my friend some silly emojis on LINE and so I updated my flaky old Unicode browser to the new-fangled Unicode with values above 0×10000, so that I could fetch the Emojis, which start around here. The thing also features a perl script which fetches values from Unicode::UCD using the charinfo function. I also updated to Perl 5.32 around the same time. Now the funny thing was that I started getting all kinds of errors about invalid JSON in the browser console. My Perl script was sending something of the form {… “script”:Common …} from my module JSON::Create, which is not valid JSON due to not having quotes around Common, and obviously my module was faulty.

          • JSON::Create now features indentation | The Incredible Journey

            In version 0.27 of JSON::Create I added a new indentation feature. This was added basically out of necessity. Originally the purpose of the module was sending short bits of JSON over the internet, but I’ve been using JSON more and more for processing data too. I’ve spent quite a long time working on a web site for recognition of Chinese, and I’ve been using JSON more and more extensively. The basic data file for the web site is a 168 megabyte JSON file. Not indenting this kind of file makes for “interesting” problems if one accidentally opens it in an editor or on a terminal screen, a million characters all on one line tends to confuse the best-written text reading utilities. So after years of suffering the relief is tremendous, and now I have tab-based indentation in JSON::Create.

        • Python

  • Leftovers

    • Hardware

    • Health/Nutrition

      • 1 in 49 Coloradans contagious with COVID-19, says Polis

        In a Friday afternoon press conference, Governor Jared Polis continued to encourage Coloradans to avoid interactions with people outside of their household unless absolutely necessary. He also delivered the news that around one in 49 Coloradans are contagious with COVID-19.

        With an estimated population of 5.8 million people, that means that 118,000 Coloradans are contagious – roughly 2 percent.

        Data currently shows that each infected person is contagious for 9 days on average.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Security

          • Security updates for Monday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (cimg, golang-1.7, golang-1.8, krb5, mediawiki, mupdf, php-pear, samba, thunderbird, and zabbix), Fedora (chromium, krb5, microcode_ctl, pngcheck, and rpki-client), Mageia (librepo, postgresql, python-twisted, raptor2, tcpdump, and thunderbird), openSUSE (blueman, java-11-openjdk, moinmoin-wiki, python, rmt-server, SDL, and tcpdump), Red Hat (chromium-browser and thunderbird), SUSE (c-ares, ceph, dash, firefox, java-1_8_0-openjdk, postgresql10, postgresql12, postgresql96, u-boot, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (openldap).

    • Defence/Aggression

      • The New Humanitarian | Afghanistan’s donor summit: Aid cuts loom as emergency needs rise

        Donors and Afghan officials are meeting in Geneva for a key summit that could determine Afghanistan’s fiscal future, as aid groups warn of funding cuts and soaring humanitarian needs.

        The 23-24 November pledging conference, which is largely online, comes at a pivotal moment for aid-dependent Afghanistan. The country faces a second wave of COVID-19, warnings of widespread hunger in the coming winter months, political turmoil on home soil and abroad, and rising conflict violence – including a barrage of rockets that killed at least eight people and injured dozens in the capital, Kabul, on Saturday.

      • The New Humanitarian | Conflict hotspots in Ethiopia

        The conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has cost hundreds of lives and sent tens of thousands of people fleeing to Sudan over the past three weeks. But the region is just one of several in the country experiencing violent unrest amid a fraught political transition.

        Some analysts fear the conflict in Tigray – which pits the northern region’s heavily armed leadership against the authority and forces of the central government – could fuel conflict in other parts of the country, which is divided into 10 ethnically-based regions. Armed violence may increase due to opportunism or a heightened sense of grievance.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Acceptance Without Rancor: A Father-Son Conversation About Black Lives Matter

        It’s uplifting to hear my son, Jay, talk to reporters. They wanted to understand how Black Lives Matter protests had erupted in Missoula, Montana, soon after the murder of George Floyd. Jay was facing down pickup truck drivers who brandished guns and flew Trump flags. Between speaking through bull horns and vigorous chanting, my twenty-one-year-old son answered a journalist’s query about why he was there: Just being a Black man, there’s part of me that . . . I have to. For my own personal safety, and the safety of my friends and future generations. I feel like it’s my responsibility to be here. His words sounded calm, cool, and deliberative, but I thought they might also cloak an anger bubbling beneath the surface.

        There’s more complexity here than the typical dichotomy between “Black Lives Matter” protesters facing “Blue Lives Matter” counter-chants. It’s especially complex considering that though Jay is Black, his mother and I are white. He came to us in 1998 at just nine months old via the “Fost-Adopt” program championed by Hillary and Bill Clinton. It was intended to place kids likely to face a lifetime in foster care into adoptive homes. My wife’s father was abusive, and my father abandoned my mother and me; so we both agreed that blood had little to do with being a loving family. We also couldn’t afford a private adoption and felt there were too many kids without homes in the public system. We officially adopted Jay when he was four. Now that he was an adult helping to lead a BLM protest in Montana, I wanted to understand what drove him to this decision.
        So I called Jay up to find out. In what follows, his words are in italics, mine in regular type. You’ll notice that his voice becomes more dominant as we get closer to the present.

        Though we spent three years in New Jersey, our life as a family blossomed when we moved in 2001 to Athens, Ohio—a small college town in the middle of Appalachia. Jay spent his preschool years in a Head Start program. There we witnessed the white poverty the area is known for. My wife and I made a quick friendship with the only other couple who would turn up to volunteer. The void between our families was large. They lived paycheck to paycheck; we were a college professor and a stay-at-home (at least at that point) mother. We often talked about poverty with Jay, who probably didn’t really understand something so foreign to his own experience.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Remand with Guidance

          Modified opinion (underlined portion is the new part). The court also explained that the appellate panel “will not consider either Network-1’s alternative grounds for JMOL or its new-trial motion in the first instance.”

          In its briefing, HP explained its position that Network-1 had forfeited its right to make its renewed-JMOL motions on sufficiency of the validity evidence because Network-1 had failed to raise that particular challenge in its R.50(a) motion.

          [...]

          Network-1 had requested that the Federal Circuit order the district court to consider “Network-1’s previously asserted substantive grounds for JMOL” and did not mention the forfeiture issue. Although not entirely clear, it appears that this requested order might have overcome the potential waiver. The Federal Circuit was careful to require only examination of Network-1’s “entitlement to JMOL” without requiring that the merits of the motion be considered.

Links 23/11/2020: Linux 5.10-rc5, GIMP Turns 25, 4MLinux 34.2, Escuelas Linux 6.11, MPV Player 0.33

Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

  • GNU/Linux

    • The quest for a good AMD Ryzen Notebook with Linux support – Winner: Lenovo Thinkpad L15

      My personal quest was to find a solid notebook which I could use as a daily driver, but which essentially should not replace my desktop PC. My job requires me to travel frequently (yes, also in lock-down times), but only between 3 places where I don’t want to have the same desktop setups installed. Since Lenovo has been announcing that they “are bringing Linux certification to ThinkPads and ThinkStations” and further that they will be “launching Linux-ready ThinkPad and ThinkStation PCs” — for me that meant that I want a Lenovo system. The recent benchmarks of AMD 4000 and 5000 series CPUs have been fantastic — and more so the Linux Kernel, which has a substantial amount of AMD Radeon code (more than 10% of the Linux Kernel is from AMD) made me look for an AMD Ryzen Lenovo notebook. Waiting for quite some time, I finally received the Lenovo L15 AMD Ryzen.

    • 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: November 22nd, 2020

      The eighth installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here, for the week ending on November 22nd, keeping you guys up to date with the most important things that have happened in the Linux world.

      It’s been a really great week for Linux news, despite the fact that there weren’t any major announcements expected for this part of the year, so you can imagine my surprise. Of course, let’s not forget about all the cool new software releases and some distro updates, which you can check out below!

    • Linux Weekly Roundup #105

      Hello and welcome to this week’s Linux roundup of Linux Releases.

      We had a good week with Linux Releases, with Bluestar Linux 5.9.8 and KaOS 2020.11.

      We hope that you will have a wonderful week and please stay safe!

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • GNU World Order 381

        **rzip** , **sc** , **GNU Screen** , from the **ap** software series of Slackware.

      • youtube-dl Restored by GitHub, KDE PinePhone, Kali Linux, SUSE IPO? | This Week in Linux 126

        On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a great show packed with news. youtube-dl’s repo has been restored by GitHub. Pine64 announced a new KDE Community Edition of the PinePhone. We’ve got some distro news for Kali Linux, SUSE and a new Ubuntu Web Remix aimed at being an alternative to ChromeOS. We’ve got some Mozilla news to discuss with the latest release of Firefox 83 and their new DoH Rollout. We’ve also got a new image editor app to check out called LazPaint. All that and much more coming up right now on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

      • Linux Action News 164

        The details behind youtube-dl’s return to GitHub, our thoughts on the rumored SUSE IPO, and our concerns with Servo’s new home.

      • Tspeed: Reading Faster Than The Speed Of Sound – YouTube

        Speed reading is a concept that I had never heard of before I found this tool but the propents of it claim that it can massively boost their reading speed and tspreed this terminal speed reading app is one such app.

      • Why Do You Need All That Hardware? – YouTube

        I see this way too often in the comments of my videos and just browsing the Internet.

      • Episode 225 – Who is responsible if IoT burns down your house? – Open Source Security

        Josh and Kurt talk about the safety and liability of new devices. What happens when your doorbell can burn down your house? What if it’s your fault the doorbell burned down your house? There isn’t really any prior art for where our devices are taking us, who knows what the future will look like.

      • Full Circle Weekly News #191

        Getting Root on Ubuntu 20.04

        https://securitylab.github.com/research/Ubuntu-gdm3-accountsservice-LPE

        Intel Vulnerabilities in All Supported Ubuntus

        https://9to5linux.com/new-intel-vulnerabilities-now-patched-in-all-supported-ubuntu-releases

        Ubuntu Reverts Intel Microcode Flaws

        https://9to5linux.com/canonical-reverts-intel-microcode-update-in-ubuntu-due-to-boot-failures-in-tiger-lake-systems

        KDE Announces a Pinephone and Framework and an Update

        https://kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.76.0/

        https://kde.org/announcements/pinephone-plasma-mobile-edition/

        https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.20.3/

        Debian Has a New Theme

        https://bits.debian.org/2020/11/homeworld-will-be-the-default-theme-for-debian-11.html

        Feren OS November Snapshot Out

        https://medium.com/feren-os/the-feren-os-november-2020-snapshot-is-now-available-eeabf6806fb

        MX Linux 19.3 Out

        https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-19-3-now-available/

        CentOS 7.9 Out

        https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-November/035820.html

        Proton 5.13-2 Out

        https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Proton-5.13-2-Released

        System76’s Galago Pro Refresh Out

        https://9to5linux.com/system76-launches-new-galago-pro-linux-laptop-with-11th-gen-intel-core-cpus

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux 5.9.10
        I'm announcing the release of the 5.9.10 kernel.

All users of the 5.9 kernel series must upgrade.

The updated 5.9.y git tree can be found at:
	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.9.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

thanks,

greg k-h
      • Linux 5.4.79
      • Linux 4.19.159
      • Linux 4.14.208
      • Linux 4.9.245
      • Linux 4.4.245
      • F2FS With Linux 5.11 To Support Casefolding With Encryption – Phoronix

        For over one year the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has supported case-folding for optional case-insensitive file/folder support. The past number of years F2FS has also supported FSCRYPT-based file encryption. But now as we roll into 2021, support is finally seemingly ready for mainline in supporting casefolding with encryption enabled.

        The combination of having case-folding and encryption on the same data hasn’t been supported by F2FS. For the past number of months the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework leveraged by F2FS and other file-systems has been working on the case-folding with FSCRYPT and ironing out all those details.

      • Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

        IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.

        The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.

      • Linux Sees A Slew Of Point Releases Due To That Nasty IBM POWER9 Vulnerability – Phoronix

        Greg Kroah-Hartman has issued new point releases for all of the Linux kernel series he is still maintaining as a result of that IBM POWER9 processor vulnerability plus other random fixes that have accumulated.

        Made public on Friday was that IBM POWER9 processor vulnerability whereby the L1 data cache needs to be flushed when crossing privilege boundaries. To fend off the potential and improper leakage of L1 data if paired with other side channels, the Linux kernel by default is now set to flush the L1d when entering the kernel and on user accesses. As outlined in that prior article there are ways to disable that behavior but that is the new default on POWER9 processors. This is sure to hurt the performance and I’ll have up some performance tests soon.

      • Linux 5.10-rc5
        Hmm. The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big,
even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm
down and shrink.

There's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous, but in
pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we've had in the 5.x
series. Number of diff lines too, for that matter. And I can't even
claim that it's because previous rc's have been small and missing
stuff and we were just catching up.

Anyway, changes all over, and apart from it being a bit more than I'd
like, it all looks fairly normal. About half of the patch is drivers,
with the rest being fairly evenly spread out all over - architecture
fixes, filesystems, networking, self tests..

We'll have to see how this release shapes up, but I'm still hopeful
for things to calm down.   Otherwise we get into uncomfortable
territory for the next release with the holiday season coming up too.

So go forth and test,

             Linus
      • Linux 5.10-rc5 Released And It’s Still Seeing Too Much Churn – Phoronix

        Linux 5.10-rc4 last weekend was still rather heavy on changes but this evening now brings Linux 5.10-rc5 and unfortunately the situation has not improved…

        With Linux 5.10-rc5 it’s more bug fixing as usual for getting into the late stage of the cycle. But there are some additional changes this week to also note: AMD “Arcturus” GPU support is no longer experimental and the first product launched in the form of the AMD Instinct MI100, there is a regression fix for stress-ng that was causing as much as a 70% drop, and the POWER9 L1d cache flushing security change is in place for Linux 5.10 as well as the stable Linux series.

      • Kernel prepatch 5.10-rc5

        The 5.10-rc5 kernel prepatch is out. “The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink. There’s nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous, but in pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we’ve had in the 5.x series.”

      • Graphics Stack

    • Applications

      • Ardour 6.4 Free Digital Audio Workstation Released with Support for VST3 Plugins

        The biggest new feature in Ardour 6.4 is support for plugins in Steinberg’s VST3 plugin format. Yes, that’s right, you can now use VST3 plugins in Ardour, and they work on all platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

        To use them, go to Preferences > Plugins and click the “Scan Now” button, which will automatically discover all the VST3 plugins you might have installed in your system. If you don’t have them installed in the standard location, you can specify the folder where they’re installed.

      • GNU Parallel 20201122 (‘Biden’) released [stable]

        GNU Parallel 20201122 (‘Biden’) [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/parallel/
        No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
        Please help spreading GNU Parallel by making a testimonial video like Juan Sierra Pons: http://www.elsotanillo.net/wp-content/uploads/GnuParallel_JuanSierraPons.mp4
        It does not have to be as detailed as Juan’s. It is perfectly fine if you just say your name, and what field you are using GNU Parallel for.

      • MPV Player 0.33 Brings Nearly A Year’s Worth Of Improvements

        MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player based long ago off the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-base is out with a new feature release ahead of the holiday season.

        MPV 0.33 is the first release since MPV 0.32 that happened back in January, thus there are a lot of changes in store.

      • Musical Midi Accompaniment: Understanding the Format | Adam Young’s Web Log

        Saxophone is a solo instrument. Unless you are into the sounds of Saxophone multiphonics, harmony requires playing with some other instrument. For Jazz, this tends to be a rhythms section of Piano, Bass, and Drums. As a kid, my practicing (without a live Rhythm section) required playing along with pre-recordings of tunes. I had my share of Jamie Aebersold records.

        Nowadays, the tool of choice for most Jazz muscians, myself included is iReal Pro. A lovely little app for the phone. All of the Real Book tunes have their chord progressions been posted and generated. The format is simple enough.

        But it is a proprietary app. While I continue to support and use it, I am also looking for alternatives that let me get more involved. One such tool is Musical MIDI Accompaniment. I’m just getting started with it, and I want to keep my notes here.

        First is just getting it to play. Whether you get the tarball or checkout from Git, there is a trick that you need to do in order to even play examples: regenerate the libraries.

      • Flatpak’s New Repo Format For Greater Flathub Scalability, More Architectures To Come

        Flatpak and the Flathub “app store” and build service are rolling out a new repository format in order to scale better now that there are around one thousand applications on Flathub.

        Flathub continues seeing new Flatpak packages added to the service and thus better scalability is on the mind of developers, especially in wanting to support additional CPU architectures.

      • App Highlight of the Week: Compare Files and Folders Graphically in Linux With Meld

        The good old diff command may not be everyone’s cup of tea. On desktop Linux, you can use Meld GUI tool to compare files and folders for differences.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Setting up a ThinkPad x250 with Linux

        Two chapters in this article are Debian-specific, the rest is more or less Archlinux-specific. It never grew into the device-specific alround tutorial I envisioned and has been partially superseded by this article. The ThinkPad itself is in daily use. No regrets there!

      • Exploring ROS 2 Kubernetes configurations | Ubuntu

        Kubernetes and robotics make a great match. However, as we have seen, robots running ROS 2 can be tricky to set up on Kubernetes. This blog series has explored running ROS 2 on Kubernetes, set up a simple talker and listener, and distributed that demo across three machines.

        The configurations presented may not quite fit your implementation, and you may want to dig a bit deeper into network traffic when troubleshooting. This post addresses these concerns by demonstrating two general principles for setting up a ROS 2 system within Kubernetes….

      • Using GeoJSON with Apache Camel K for spatial data transformation

        In this article, we will define and run a workflow that demonstrates how Apache Camel K interacts with spatial data in the standardized GeoJSON format. While the example is simplified, you can use the same workflow to handle big data and more complex data transformations.

        You will learn how to use Camel K to transform data in common formats like XML and JSON. You will also see how to connect to a database and extract the data that you want from it. After we’ve defined the workflow, we’ll run the integration on Red Hat OpenShift.

      • A beginner’s guide to Kubernetes Jobs and CronJobs | Opensource.com

        Each of these features has its own purpose, with the common function to ensure that pods run continuously. In failure scenarios, these controllers either restart or reschedule pods to ensure the services in the pods continue running.

        As the Kubernetes documentation explains, a Kubernetes Job creates one or more pods and ensures that a specified number of the pods terminates when the task (Job) completes.

      • How To Install GNOME Desktop on Debian 10 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GNOME Desktop on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, By default, Debian 10 server installed as minimal without any Graphical Desktop support. Installing GNOME Desktop on the Debian system is fairly straightforward. Most Debian servers are run on CLI (Command-Line Interface) mode. But in some cases, one may need to have a desktop to install some applications with GUI (Graphic User Interface) mode. In this case, we will use GNOME, the most popular user-friendly desktop for any UNIX based system.

        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 GNOME Desktop Environment on a Debian 10 (Buster).

      • How To Install Akaunting on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Akaunting on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Akaunting is a free, open-source, and online accounting software designed for small businesses and freelancers. This tool is built with modern technologies such as Laravel, Bootstrap, jQuery, RESTful API, and others.

        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 Akaunting Self-Hosted Accounting Software 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.

      • Everything you need to know about flatpak | Arcolinux.com

        Flatpak is another way to install software on your ArcoLinux system. You can check out their website here.

        More importantly what packages can I install with flatpak.

      • Set Up ParseDMARC on Ubuntu 20.04 to Analyze DMARC Reports

        ParseDMARC is an open-source, self-hosted DMARC report analyzer. For those who don’t know, DMARC is an email security standard that can protect your domain name from email spoofing and also identify incoming spoofed emails to protect end users. In a previous article, we discussed how to create DMARC DNS record for your domain name and used a third-party tool called PostMark to analyze DMARC reports. In this tutorial, we are going to set up ParseDMARC on Ubuntu 20.04 server so we can analyze DMARC reports without having to share the data with a third-party.

      • Install Deepin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu [Simple Steps]

        Developed and maintained by the Wuhan Deepin technology, Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) is a stylish, visually appealing desktop environment that gives your system a splash of color and sophistication.

        While we have Deepin Linux which is based on Ubuntu and natively ships with Deepin Desktop environment, the Deepin Desktop environment can be installed on various Linux distributions to provide an amazing user experience. Additionally, you get additional Deepin applications such as Deepin terminal, Deepin screenshot, Deepin Image viewer, and Deeping voice recorder to mention a few.

        Here are easy steps with screenshots by which you can setup Desktop Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 20.04 and its derivatives like Linux Mint, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.

      • How to Install Cockpit Web Console on Debian 10

        Cockpit is free and open-source remote server management web console. Using cockpit web console one can do almost all day to day administrative tasks without login in server’s cli. Apart from administrative tasks, Cockpit provides real time RAM, CPU and DISK utilization report of your system. One of the major advantages of using cockpit tool is that it will not consume much resources from your system. In this article, we will demonstrate how to install and use cockpit web console on Debian 10 (Buster).

      • Mattermost Omnibus: How to install on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS linux server

        Mattermost is the open source collaboration platform that can be installed on Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 with just one Omnibus commnad.

      • Everything you need to know about snap

        Snapcraft from Canonical wants to provide the app store for Linux.

        Not all packages come from Arch Linux or AUR.

        There will always be packages that are (not yet) on AUR.

        In that case you can see if there is a snap package.

      • Removing a corrupted data pack in a Restic backup

        I recently ran into a corrupted data pack in a Restic backup on my GnuBee.

      • How to use NixOS Package Manager?

        The NixOS package manager is a system of its own. You can use it under any Linux Distribution.

        What does NixOS Package Manager do?

        Most package managers use a file that contains the executable or source code. They then calculate what it needs on the system and then make sure that it exists. In Nix, things work very similarly. The big difference is that Nix creates all the files, and compiles them if necessary, then put them in one place; the nix-store. The first question you have may be, “Will the files not have the same name?” The system avoids this by having one directory for each version AND naming all files with a hash. To make the application “feel at home”, all dependencies are then linked to their correct directories using ordinary symlinks. A profile keeps track of which version each user runs.

      • How to install Minecraft on Ubuntu 20.10

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Minecraft on Ubuntu 20.10.

      • How to replace multiple lines using the `sed` command – Linux Hint

        Sometimes it requires to replace multiple lines of a file with any particular character or text. Different commands exist in Linux to replace multiple lines of a file. `sed` command is one of them to do this type of task. The full form of `sed` is Steam Editor, and it is mainly used to read and convert the text in different ways by using a regular expression. How this command can be used to replace the multiple lines of a file in different ways are explained in this tutorial.

      • How to replace the last occurrence using `sed` – Linux Hint

        `sed` command is used in Linux for various types of text operations, such as insert, delete, replace, etc. Different types of replacement tasks can be done by using the `sed` command easily. Any replacement task can be done based on the searching text or pattern. The searching text or pattern may occur multiple times in the string or a file where the searching will be done. How you can replace the last occurrence of the searching text or pattern has been shown in this tutorial.

      • How to install PyCharm on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install PyCharm, 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 Copy and Paste in PuTTY

        Many PuTTY users complain about not being able to copy and paste shell commands to and from the app’s interface. PuTTY supports both these functions. However, the problem lies in the fact that the copy/paste process itself is different from other apps.

      • How to play Satisfactory on Linux

        Satisfactory is a simulation game that puts the player into a 3D open world and tasks them with creating a functioning factory. Satisfactory was developed and published by Coffee Stain Studios. It was released on Steam in early access, allowing it to run on Linux via Proton/Steam Play.

      • Encrypting directories with eCryptfs in linux – The Linux Juggernaut

        eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise-class stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. It is derived from Erez Zadok’s Cryptfs, implemented through the FiST framework for generating stacked filesystems. eCryptfs extends Cryptfs to provide advanced key management and policy features. eCryptfs is already included in the official Ubuntu repositories and encrypting directories is a simple matter of mounting them with the ecryptfs filesystem

      • [Quick Tip] How to Install Syncthing-GTK in Ubuntu 20.10 | UbuntuHandbook

        Syncthing-gtk, GTK3-based GUI and indicator for Syncthing, was removed from Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy’s main repository due to old Python library dependencies.

        For those sticking to this program, the Python 3 port now works in progress. It has been made into main repository for the next Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo. And you can download & install the package in Ubuntu 20.10.

      • How to scan QR codes from the Linux desktop

        Many people use their smartphones to scan QR codes that they see in various places. But what if you need to scan a QR code and you have your Linux PC and no smartphone? Use CoBang!

      • Encrypting files in linux – The Linux Juggernaut

        You may work for a super-secret government agency, or you may be just a regular citizen. Either way, you still have sensitive data in your linux system that you need to protect from prying eyes. For that, we can use GNU Privacy Guard to encrypt or cryptographically sign files or messages in our linux machine. GPG uses strong, hard-to-crack encryption algorithms and You can use GPG to just encrypt your own files for your own use

      • How To Install Brave Browser on CentOS 8 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Brave Browser on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, The brave browser is a free and open-source browser. it’s Fast, speed, security, and privacy by blocking trackers and still based on chromium so you have all the extension and features you might be looking for.

        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 the Brave Browser on CentOS 8.

      • Collect logs with journald in linux – The Linux Juggernaut

        You’ll find the journald logging system on any Linux distro that uses the systemd ecosystem. Instead of sending its messages to text files, journald sends messages to binary files. Instead of using normal Linux text file utilities to extract information, you have to use the journalctl utility.

      • How to Install Eclipse IDE on Debian 10 Linux – Linux Concept

        Eclipse is the most famous and widely used Java integrated development environment (IDE). It supports many plugins to enhance the capabilities to use for other programming language development environments such as PHP, C++, and JavaScript.

        You can install Eclipse IDE using your Debian repositories, but the Debian repositories’ installation package is outdated. If you want to use the latest Eclipse IDE package on your Debian 10 system, use a snappy packaging system.

        This tutorial will explain the process of installing the latest Eclipse IDE on the Debian 10 system step-by-step.

      • Linux log review with logwatch – The Linux Juggernaut

        You know how important it is to do a daily log review. But you also know how much of a drag it is, and that you’d rather take a severe beating. Fortunately, there are various utilities that can make the job easier. Of the various choices in the normal Linux distro repositories, Logwatch is a perfect tool that we can use for this task.

        To deliver its messages, Logwatch requires that the machine also has a running mail server daemon. Depending on the options you chose when installing the operating system, you might or might not already have the Postfix mail server installed. When Postfix is set up as a local server, it will deliver system messages to the root user’s local account.

        To view the Logwatch summaries on the local machine, you’ll also need to install a text- mode mail reader, such as mutt.

      • Install Terasology Minecraft-inspired game on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux

        A free Minecraft clone Terasology can easily be installed on Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 LTS Linux to get the block game like Minecraft with impressive graphics and simple gameplay.

        As we know Minecraft is quite a popular game that is also available for Linux systems, therefore, Terasology comes with the same model but to give the game a distinguish touch, the worlds generated by Terasology are much more impressive. However, visually there is hardly any difference but depth of field and flying blocks can easily make a play the game for hours.

        In terms of controls in Teraslogy are not the same as Minecraft but the players who already played have Minecraft would not take a long time to get used to it.

        If you want to try it on Ubuntu, CentOS, Linux Mint, Debian, RedHat, OpenSuse, MX Linux, Kali Linux, etc., then here is a quick tutorial to install Terasology.

      • Web server scanning with Nikto in Linux – The Linux Juggernaut

        Nikto is a special-purpose tool with only one purpose; that is, it’s meant to scan web servers, and only web servers. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and capable of doing a comprehensive scan of a web server fairly quickly.

        Nikto is built on LibWhisker2 (by RFP) and can run on any platform which has a Perl environment. It supports SSL, proxies, host authentication, attack encoding and more. It can be updated automatically from the command-line, and supports the optional submission of updated version data back to the maintainers.

      • Are you typing iso in the terminal and nothing happens – dev-rel and lsb-release | Arcolinux.com

        Starting from the September release of 2020 we went rolling and stopped using ‘versions’.

        Users mistakenly thought that the version was THE indicator to know if the operating system was up-to-date.

        The version number could not be less important. It is just a text file. A text file anyone can change to any version they like.
        It has no value what so ever.

      • Auditing network services with netstat in linux – The Linux Juggernaut

        The following are two reasons why you would want to keep track of what network services are running on your system…

      • Create Snapshot backups using Timeshift in linux – The Linux Juggernaut

        Timeshift is a linux application that we can use to create snapshots in our linux system,. If something bad happens to our linux system (For an example, all the system files and settings are deleted after cyber attack) we can use the snapshot that we create using timeshift to restore the system back and undo all changes that is made to the system. It provides functionality similar to the System Restore feature in Windows and the Time Machine tool in Mac OS. Timeshift can be configured to take incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored at a later date to u ando all changes to the system.

        Timeshift can also be used in a GUI mode. However, imagine a situation, where your video driver is broken due to some unstable update or maybe something terrible happens with your system and you are not able to use the Timeshift GUI version to rollback your system to the previous state, then you have only the Timeshift CLI option available.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Kubuntu is not Free, it is Free

          A common miss perception with Open Source software is the notion of free. Many people associate free in its simplest form, that of no monetary cost, and unfortunately this ultimately leads to the second conclusion of ‘cheap’ and low quality. Proprietary commercial vendors, and their corporate marketing departments know this and use that knowledge to focus their audience on ‘perceived value’. In some ways free of cost in the open source software world is a significant disadvantage, because it means there are no funds available to pay for a marketing machine to generate ‘perceived value’.

          Think, for a moment, how much of a disadvantage that is when trying to develop a customer/user base.

          Kubuntu is completely and whole contributon driven. It is forged from passion and enthusiasm, built with joy and above all love. Throughout our community; users use it because they love it, supporters help users, and each other, maintainers fix issues and package improvements, developers extend functionality and add features, bloggers write articles and documentation, youtubers make videos and tutorials. All these people do this because they love what they’re doing and it brings them joy doing it.

    • Distributions

      • The release cycle of a Zorin OS Linux distribution explained

        In this article, as part of my Zorin OS beginners course, I want to explain how Linux distribution releases work and why that could be important for you. Unlike many other Linux distributions, the Zorin OS developers focus on absolute reliability and stability and consciously choose not to be a leader in all bleeding edge developments. In order to do that, Zorin OS is always based on what is called an LTS, or Long Term Support, release. So in this short article I will explain in simple terms the release cycle of the Zorin OS Linux distribution.

        In my free Zorin OS tutorial series I explain in an accessible and beginner friendly way everything you need to know to get the most out of Zorin OS. Click below to see a complete overview of all chapters of my Zorin OS beginner course.

      • Educational Distro Escuelas Linux 6.11 Switches to Linux 5.9, Refreshes the Developer Pack

        Powered by the latest Linux 5.9 kernel series, Escuelas Linux 6.11 is packed with some of the most recent Open Source software for all your home office and educational needs during the lockdown created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

        Among the included apps, there’s the Blender 2.90 free and open 3D creation software, GeoGebra 5.0.613.0-1930 interactive geometry, algebra, statistics and calculus application, Inkscape 1.0.1 vector graphics editor, LibreOffice 7.0.3 complete office suite, as well as LiveCode 9.6.1 development and programming environment.

      • New Releases

        • KaOS 2020.11 Linux Distro Released With A New Plasma System Monitor

          Following the two months development cycle, KaOS team has announced a new stable version KaOS 2020.11 as the last release of 2020 series.

          This November update contains upgraded packages for the KDE Plasma desktop, which include KDE Frameworks 5.76.0, Plasma 5.20.3, and KDE Applications 20.08.3.

          With a new Plasma desktop 5.20.3, KaOS offers a lot of new functions such as grouping behavior for the Task Manager, Notifications when the system is about to run out of space, and Highlight Changed Settings feature.

          Not just features, KaOS also has a new plasma-disk to see the status of all HDD or SDD using a new option available in kinfocenter app. Additionally, you can now use a swap file instead of a swap partition in the Calamares installer.

        • 4MLinux 34.2 released.

          This is a minor (point) release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel, which comes with the Linux kernel 5.4.70. The 4MLinux Server now includes Apache 2.4.46, MariaDB 10.5.6, and PHP 7.4.11 (see this post for more details).

          You can update your 4MLinux by executing the “zk update” command in your terminal (fully automatic process).

      • Debian Family

        • Debian Has Been Hosting A MiniDebConf Devoted To Linux/Open-Source Gaming – Phoronix

          For those looking for some technical open-source/Linux video content to enjoy this weekend, the Debian crew has been hosting a virtual MiniDebConf devoted to gaming and all of the material is online.

          This MiniDebConf running Saturday and today has included sessions on DRM-free games, gaming utilities to be found within the Debian ecosystem, open-source games like 0 A.D., open-source VR/AR with the likes of Monado, and engine talks like GemRB / Engine / Godot, and other Debian-minded gaming talks.

        • Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in October 2020 – gambaru.de

          Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in November) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Sometimes it’s best to use the official upstream versions of software

        There are a number of things that make this less alarming than it looks, somewhat mitigating the problems I pointed out. First, both Prometheus and Grafana actually do provide official binary builds, and in fact it’s the default way to use each project. That it’s the default way means that each project has a relatively strong motivation to make good releases (and fix problems promptly), especially when combined with the development pace. When a new Grafana or Prometheus release comes out, each project knows that a lot of people will be updating to their provided binaries and they cannot sort of wash their hands of any problems that show up.

      • Why should you work on free software (or other technology issues)? | Life on M

        A world in which all technology is just cannot exist under capitalism. It cannot exist under racism or sexism or ableism. It cannot exist in a world that does not exist if we are ravaged by the effects of climate change. At the same time, free software is part of the story of each of these. The modern technology state fuels capitalism, and capitalism fuels it. It cannot exist without transparency at all levels of the creation process. Proprietary software and algorithms reinforce racial and gender injustice. Technology is very guilty of its contributions to the climate crisis. By working on making technology more just, by making it more free, we are working to address these issues. Software makes the world work, and oppressive software creates an oppressive world.

      • FSF

        • GNU Projects

          • GIMP: This is 25

            Exactly 25 years ago, Peter Mattis wrote a message to several newsgroups announcing a new image editor called GIMP.

          • GIMP Turns 25 Years Old As Leading Open-Source Photoshop Alternative

            It’s been twenty-five years to the day since GIMP was started as an open-source image editor and in turn sparked the creation of the GTK tool-kit.

            There is no major news to share today for GIMP’s 25th birthday, but there is a brief highlight announcement at GIMP.org.

          • Happy 25th Birthday, GIMP — you make Linux a viable Windows 10 alternative

            I’m a big fan of Linux-based operating systems, and I try to convert people whenever I can, No, Linux isn’t right for everyone, and Windows 10 isn’t a bad operating system, but many computer users are better served by a Linux distro such as Ubuntu. After all, many people live in the web browser these days, so they don’t need the bloat of Windows. Not to mention, Linux is arguably more secure.

            Of course, there are always people that fight me on the benefits of Linux, and two pieces of software often enter the conversation — Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. Thankfully, I have some great ammunition in those arguments — LibreOffice and GNU Image Manipulation Program (aka GIMP). True, both of those programs are also available on Windows and not Linux-only, but still, they make Linux a viable Windows alternative for many.

      • Programming/Development

        • Built to Last

          As the catastrophe unfolded, several state governments blamed it on aged, supposedly obsolete computer systems written in COBOL, a programming language that originated in the late 1950s. At least a dozen state unemployment systems still run on this sixty-one-year-old language, including ones that help administer funds of a billion dollars or more in California, Colorado, and New Jersey. When the deluge of unemployment claims hit, the havoc it seemed to wreak on COBOL systems was so widespread that many states apparently didn’t have enough programmers to repair the damage; the governor of New Jersey even publicly pleaded for the help of volunteers who knew the language.

          But then something strange happened. When scores of COBOL programmers rushed to offer their services, the state governments blaming COBOL didn’t accept the help. In fact, it turned out the states didn’t really need it to begin with. For many reasons, COBOL was an easy scapegoat in this crisis—but in reality what failed wasn’t the technology at all.

        • Reducing Streams in Java

          Java 8 introduced streams, among other things, and one of my favourite features is the reduce() method. It combines a stream into a single method.

        • Humility

          Humility helps you respect the people you’re working with and see what they bring. We can’t genuinely respect them if we’re feeling superior; if we think we have all the answers.

          If we have compassion for our teammates (and ourselves) we will desire to minimise their suffering.

          We will want to avoid inflicting difficult merges on anyone. We will want to avoid wasting their time, or forcing them to re-work; having been surprised by our changes. The practice of Continuous Integration can come from the desire to minimise suffering in this way.

          We will want those who come after us in the future to be able to understand our work—understand the important behaviour and decisions we made. We’ll want them to have the best safety net possible. Tests and living documentation such as ADRs can come from this desire.

          We’d desire the next person to have the easiest possible job to change or build upon what we’ve started, regardless of their skill and knowledge. Simplicity and YAGNI can come from this desire.

          Humility and compassion can drive us to be curious: what are the coding and working styles and preferences of our team mates? What’s the best way to collaborate to maximise my colleagues’ effectiveness?

          Without compassion we might write code that is easiest for ourselves to understand—using our preferred idioms and style without regard for how capable the rest of the team is to engage with it.

          Without humility our code might show off our cleverness.

        • Python

          • 7 Best Free and Open Source Python Web Frameworks

            Python is an increasingly popular programming language. It ranks very highly on sites listing the popularity of programming languages, such as the TIOBE Index, IEEE Spectrum ranking, and the PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language.

            The prominence of Python is, in part, due to its flexibility, with the language frequently used by web and desktop developers, system administrators, data scientists, and machine learning engineers. It’s easy to learn and powerful to develop any kind of system with the language. Python’s large user base offers a virtuous circle. There’s more support available from the open source community for budding programmers seeking assistance.

            One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.

          • Python Throw Exception – Linux Hint

            An exception appears during program execution and changes its normal flow due to an error. An exception arises on account of an error. The main cause of an exception is a logical error. Like many other programming languages, Python provides several built-in exceptions, i.e., ZeroDivisionError, ImportError, EOFError, etc.; for instance, the ZeroDivisionError exception is raised when a number is divided by zero. The Python exceptions are handled by the try statement. We define a try block and put the code vulnerable code inside this block, which can raise an exception. Next, after the try block, we define an except block to deal with the exception. Besides all these built-in exceptions, sometimes we need to raise or throw an exception when we encounter a specific situation. The Python developer can throw a user-defined exception easily. We use the raise keyword for raising or throwing an exception. This article explains the Python raise keyword usage for throwing the exception with examples.

          • How to use nftables from python

            One of the most interesting (and possibly unknown) features of the nftables framework is the native python interface, which allows python programs to access all nft features programmatically, from the source code.

            There is a high-level library, libnftables, which is responsible for translating the human-readable syntax from the nft binary into low-level expressions that the nf_tables kernel subsystem can run. The nft command line utility basically wraps this library, where all actual nftables logic lives. You can only imagine how powerful this library is. Originally written in C, ctypes is used to allow native wrapping of the shared lib object using pure python.

            To use nftables in your python script or program, first you have to install the libnftables library and the python bindings. In Debian systems, installing the python3-nftables package should be enough to have everything ready to go.

            To interact with libnftables you have 2 options, either use the standard nft syntax or the JSON format. The standard format allows you to send commands exactly like you would do using the nft binary. That format is intended for humans and it doesn’t make a lot of sense in a programmatic interaction. Whereas JSON is pretty convenient, specially in a python environment, where there are direct data structure equivalents.

        • JavaScript

          • Vue.js Change Style – Linux Hint

            Vue.js is used to build User Interfaces (UIs) and Single-Page Applications (SPAs). It is easy to learn how to use Vue.js and the framework of freedom and comfort that is available while developing applications in this program because it has the best-combined features of Angular and ReactJS. That is why it is known for its easy-to-use and clean coding.

            Vue.js provides style binding that you can use to change the style dynamically. You can bind a variable to the style attribute in any HTML tag and change the style when the bound variable is changed. In this article, we will have a look at how to use style binding and change the styling of variables using vue.js.

          • Vue.js Conditional Rendering – Linux Hint

            Vue.js is an easy to learn and approachable library that we can start building web applications in it with the basic knowledge of web development. In Vue.js, developers love to code and feel freedom while developing applications.

  • Leftovers

    • How Reading and Meditation Extend Life

      It’s mindfulness that matters more than meditation here.

      Ideally we would combine the two—experiencing more through reading, and appreciating every experience through a practice of mindfulness.

    • Science

      • The Shadow of Physics

        Perhaps professional physicists would be more willing to admit that while our understanding of nature is vast and comprehensive, vast enough to allow humanity to easily manipulate energy and matter, the physical theories which underlie our understanding are necessarily incomplete because they rely on approximations and unproven axioms. This admission should not carry a negative connotation, nor is it meant to dismiss the civilizational progress which could have not been possible without a thorough understanding of nature. Physics has, as a historically situated web of researchers, institutions, publishers, governmental patrons, etc, produced the greatest technological achievements of mankind. Yet physics is not nature, it is an approximation of nature. It excels in its explanations of fundamental phenomena, in the creation of general laws, of beauty. Its practicality drops off rapidly for systems that are much too big or complex to be quickly, analytically probed with fundamental laws. There are some tricks, and there are many clever approximations that allow us to peek into that seemingly chaotic abyss, just ask Strogatz.

        However, very few analytical solutions for these complex systems are possible. The physicist must become a computer scientist, and create a program to run iterations of the Runge–Kutta method for distasteful differential equations. Still, the complexity of everyday life remains mysterious. It is theoretically predictable, yet these predictions are practically impossible. And at some point in their search for completely satisfying knowledge, the physicist must retire to chemistry, embracing the domain of less fundamental laws as a trade-off for incomplete yet physically incalculable knowledge. And then to biology, to neuroscience, to human behavior, to evolutionary psychology, sociology, politics, literature, and philosophy. It is in these domains that the physicist attaches an emotional meaning to Boltzmann’s constant times the log of the multiplicity, the equation inscribed upon the tombstone of the man who voluntarily ended his own life, a great mind battered down by the fear of failure and inaccuracy. He contained that noble spark which animated his furious theoretical probing, a spark which ignited the kindling of his mind and engulfed him, and swept him off his feet into a rope, hung on the ceiling of a picturesque Italian villa. It is for the psychologist to ask why so many in the field of statistical mechanics chose this fate, Paul Ehrenfest ended his life in a murder-suicide; Gilbert N Lewis injested hydrogen cyanide after not receiving the Nobel Prize, having been nominated 41 times previously.

    • Health/Nutrition

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Linus Torvalds wants Apple’s new M1-powered Macs to run Linux

          Earlier this month, Apple revealed its own ARM-based M1 processor, along with new MacBooks and a desktop Mac Mini powered by this chip. Reviewers across the globe have been praising Apple‘s first attempt, giving it high marks for performance and battery life.

          All this positive coverage has tempted many to take the plunge and buy one of the new machines — even if some apps are not running natively at the moment. Even Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel, wants one.

          [...]

          Linux support on MacBooks would’ve made it a more attractive bet for programmers. However, I don’t think any engineers at the Cupertino campus plan to make that happen anytime soon. Sorry, Linus.

        • New Microsoft chip will come with added costs, says ex-NSA hacker

          Microsoft’s new security chip, announced last week, will have an impact on hardware-only attacks, an American security professional says, adding that it could also assist in firmware security, but would result in added costs.

        • Pseudo-Open Source

        • Security

          • Privacy/Surveillance

            • Airbnb’s Chinese data policies reportedly cost it an executive

              Airbnb’s Chinese business is specifically mentioned in the S-1 filing the company made public Monday ahead of its planned initial public offering. “If [China’s rental] regulations or their interpretation changes in the future,” the prospectus reads, “we could be … forced to cease our operations in China.”

              American tech companies have had to navigate tricky relationships with China for years. China currently blocks major companies like Facebook and Google for not complying with government requests for information. Others like Apple turn a hefty profit in the country but are often criticized for making concessions to the country’s government.

            • Facebook, Instagram Will Switch White House Accounts From Trump to Biden on Jan. 20

              President Trump still refuses to publicly acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, but in any event he and his administration will lose access to the White House accounts on Facebook and Instagram in less than two months.

              Facebook confirmed that as of Jan. 20, 2021, when president-elect Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th U.S. president, the official White House accounts on both Facebook — including @WhiteHouse, @POTUS and @FLOTUS — and those on Instagram will be transferred to the Biden administration.

              Twitter also previously said that on Inauguration Day, @POTUS and other handles will be moved over to the Biden team.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • The Nature of Islamist Violence in France

        Several other assessments have illuminated the scale of France’s security troubles. In 2017, European Union anti-terror chief Gilles de Kerchove warned there were 17,000 militant Islamists living in the country. Following the December 2018 Christmas market attack in Strasbourg, France 24 reported that approximately “26,000 people who are believed to pose a danger to France are currently categorised as fiché S,” and “roughly 10,000 of those are believed to be religious extremists who have been radicalised, some in fundamentalist mosques, some online, some in prison and others abroad.” Upwards of2000 French nationals have reportedly joined the Islamic State and in 2016 the French government estimated that 1,400 prison inmates were “radicalized”.

      • Y’all Qaeda: Ex-Marines allegedly planned takeover of Michigan capitol and public executions of officials

        Two former Marines and the dozen other men charged with plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan purportedly planned to stage an armed takeover of the capitol building and conduct public executions of government officials, according to the state’s attorney general.

        ABC 7 Chicago reported that the 14 men planned drew up a ‘Plan B’ should their initial attempt to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer fail, a scheme that involved “a takeover of the Michigan capitol building by 200 combatants who would stage a week-long series of televised executions of public officials.”

        According to government documents, the group’s ‘Plan C’ involved torching the building and leaving behind no survivors.

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Smart Commentators Must Stop Minimizing Trump’s Ongoing Threat To This Election

        How far will Donald Trump go to stay in power, and how far will enough of his supporters—in Congress, in the military and police, and in the street—go to keep him in power?

      • Black Voters Saved Our Democracy

        Black voters waited in 10-hour lines to show up for Joe Biden. Now Biden needs to return the favor.

      • An American Amazon?

        An American Slave State in the Amazon

        The Baron of Rio Branco, Brazil’s boundary mastermind was well aware of long-standing American interest in Amazonia, due to his own time in the United States and US forays during the Imperial period when Rio Branco’s father was Foreign minister. At that time, Mathew Fontaine Maury, Maury’s brother-in-law William Lewis Herndon, Harvard Museum Director, Louis Agassiz, and their ally, the Brazilian statesman Tavares Bastos had to convince Emperor Pedro II of the virtues of allowing ships from any nation to travel on the Amazon and to let Americans settle there in large numbers.

      • Guatemalan President Reviewing Budget, Which Slashed Healthcare Spending, After Outraged Protesters Set Fire to Legislative Building

        “We are outraged by poverty, injustice, the way they have stolen the public’s money,” a psychology professor who attended the protests told the press. 

      • The 2020 Election and What We Should Do Now

        We shouldn’t give Biden any breathing room and wait to see what he does before acting. We need to build campaigns and social movements and mass action in the streets for progressive policies. 

      • Profiles in Cowardice

        Now America is being subject to a stress test to see if it has enough strength to withstand Trump’s treacherous campaign to discredit the 2020 presidential election.

      • What Trump’s Refusal To Concede Says About American Democracy

        That some Republicans won’t go along with the traditional niceties following a presidential election (like congratulating the victor from the opposing party) isn’t that important. But the sitting president’s refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat is worrisome, as it raises the prospect that he will not uphold a core tenet of democracy: Elections determine who is in power, and those who lose surrender power peacefully. The behavior of top Republican Party officials — subtly acknowledging that Trump must leave office on Jan. 20 but not openly rebuking his conduct — in some ways also violates that core value. And the combination of Trump’s and his party’s behavior raises a serious question: Is America’s democracy in trouble?

        Maybe. People who study democratic norms and values both in the United States and abroad say that the behavior of Trump and the Republican Party over the past week deeply concerns them. Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan says it’s important not to think of democracy in binary terms — that either a nation is or is not a democracy. Instead, Nyhan argues, democracy falls more on a spectrum, and based on how Trump broke with democratic values as president and how he is handling the end of his presidency, America does remain a democracy, but it is somewhat less democratic than it was pre-Trump.

      • Mnuchin denies trying to limit Biden’s economic options | Business | gazette.com

        Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin denied on Friday that he is attempting to limit President-elect Joe Biden’s options for reviving the pandemic-damaged economy by ending several emergency loan programs being run by the Federal Reserve.

        Mnuchin said the programs were not being heavily utilized and Congress can make better use of the money by re-allocating it toward small-business grants and extended unemployment assistance.

        “We’re not trying to hinder anything,” Mnuchin said in a CNBC interview. “We don’t need this money to buy corporate bonds. We need this money to go help small businesses that are still closed.”

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • ICANN Can Stand Against Censorship (And Avoid Another .ORG Debacle) by Keeping Content Regulation and Other Dangerous Policies Out of Its Registry Contracts

        The Internet’s domain name system is not the place to police speech. ICANN, the organization that regulates that system, is legally bound not to act as the Internet’s speech police, but its legal commitments are riddled with exceptions, and aspiring censors have already used those exceptions in harmful ways. This was one factor that made the failed takeover of the .ORG registry such a dangerous situation. But now, ICANN has an opportunity to curb this abuse and recommit to its narrow mission of keeping the DNS running, by placing firm limits on so-called “voluntary public interest commitments” (PICs, recently renamed Registry Voluntary Commitments, or RVCs).

        For many years, ICANN and the domain name registries it oversees have given mixed messages about their commitments to free speech and to staying within their mission. ICANN’s bylaws declare that “ICANN shall not regulate (i.e., impose rules and restrictions on) services that use the Internet’s unique identifiers or the content that such services carry or provide.” ICANN’s mission, according to its bylaws, “is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems.” And ICANN, by its own commitment, “shall not act outside its Mission.”

        Next time you hear someone blame Section 230 for a problem with social media platforms, ask yourself two questions: first, was this problem actually caused by Section 230? Second, would weakening Section 230 solve the problem? Politicians and commentators on both sides of the aisle frequently blame Section 230 for…

      • Free Press = Free Assange: Daniel Ellsberg, Marjorie Cohn, Joe Lauria Discuss the Julian Assange Affair

        A discussion presented by the Covid-19 Global Solidarity Coalition with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, former National Lawyers Guild president Marjorie Cohn, and Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria. (The first few minutes are cut off)

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

      • Journalists paying the price

        Journalists covering the presidential campaigns have faced the wrath of security forces on what seems to be targeted attacks on the media to scare them from covering the violence being meted out on Ugandans.

        Police and other security forces have unleashed violence on journalists especially those covering Opposition presidential candidates, Mr Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine of National Unity Platform (NUP) party and Mr Patrick Oboi Amuriat of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party.

      • Media bosses ramp up pressure on govt over news media code

        With Parliament having just another eight days to sit this year, the bosses of Australia’s media organisations have sought to pressure politicians into getting the promised news media code passed before they rise for the year on 10 December.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Iranian Anti-Hijab Activist Could Face 12 Years in Prison if Deported From Turkey

        “White Wednesdays” is a social media campaign against Iran’s forced headscarf law.

        In May 2019, Shemsai was arrested by the Iranian regime on various charges, including anti-regime activities and insulting sacred values in Islam. After six months in detention, the court released her on parole.

        Last May, Shemsai reportedly went to an Iranian prosecutor’s office, only to have her identification documents and personal belongings confiscated by the Revolutionary Guard. She was told at the prosecutor’s office about an impending 12-year prison sentence, prompting her to flee to neighboring Turkey through smugglers.

    • Monopolies

      • Toward the Peaceful Coexistence of Patent and Antitrust Law

        This chapter explores the interrelationship between these two basic provisions, both as a matter of general theory and through their development in case law over the past 130 years—which spans multiple eras of technological innovation. It is easy to find cases where patent law appears to move in one direction and antitrust law in the opposite. But as a general matter, this chapter defends the thesis that, as the Federal Circuit has written, “[t]he patent and antitrust laws are complementary, the patent system serving to encourage invention and the bringing of new products to market by adjusting investment-based risk, and the antitrust laws serving to foster industrial competition.” As a descriptive matter, today, this thesis is largely, but not uniformly, respected.

        More specifically, the central task of this chapter is to note how the concern with monopolization—explicit in the antitrust laws—plays a powerful, if somewhat concealed, role in the articulation of patent law as well. As is always the case, any concern with monopolization is a two-edged sword: It is always important to make sure that monopoly practices do not go undetected, but it is equally important that the doctrines of both patent and antitrust law do not impose penalties for supposed monopolistic practices that ultimately turn out to be procompetitive.

      • Tech sees opportunity for ‘asymmetric war’ in NPE antitrust suit

        Apple and Intel’s antitrust case against Fortress could have implications for patent aggregation and litigation financing

      • Podcast: IBM and Bird & Bird debate data and IP rights

        Panellists from IBM and Bird & Bird share their thoughts on whether new rights to encourage data collection would further entrench monopolies and stifle innovation.

      • Exclusive: Qualcomm litigation chief speaks out about FTC win

        Deputy general counsel Mark Snyder lays out what went into his firm’s landmark SEP victory at the Ninth Circuit, and what his department is focusing on now

      • Patents

        • EU SEP bombshell; BlackBerry portfolio sale latest; Samsung shops for wireless patents; Germany leads in EPO oppositions; Data is the new IP frontier; plus much more

          EPO opposition proceedings are on the increase, with German entities holding sway in representation instructions against a growing challenge from UK-based firms.

        • A deep dive into EPO opposition representation reveals Germany and the UK dominate

          Diego Alonso-Martinez and Wannes Weymiens of NLO review patentee and opponent nationalities in opposition procedures before the EPO during the 2017-2019 period

        • The fate of UK SPCs in the Brexit era

          The purpose of the SPC Regulation (Regulation (EC) No 469/2009) is to compensate a patentee for the lengthy process of achieving marketing authorisation for a medicinal product. SPCs are national rights that provide an additional period of protection for a medicinal product protected by a patent. The EU SPC Regulation provides a maximum of 5 years additional protection based on the first marketing authorisation for the product in the European Economic Area (EEA). A 2018 statutory instrument (secondary legislation) incorporated the provisions of the SPC Regulation into UK statute in preparation for Brexit.

          CIPA has provided some guidance on the fate of existing UK SPC rights and pending SPC applications. Put simply, UK SPCs will be governed by the EU SPC Regulation until the end of the transition period (31 December 2020). UK SPCs granted before the end of the transition period will remain in force after the transition period. After the transition period, UK SPCs will be governed by UK law. The Withdrawal Agreement (Article 56), 2019 amendment to the Patent Rules and related statutory instruments broadly incorporate the provisions of the EU SPC Regulation into UK law with minor amendments to make them UK specific.

          The self-professed aim of the UK government has been to retain the status quo on SPCs as much as possible. However, legal uncoupling is never straightforward, and SPCs are no exception to this rule. There are some important nuances in UK SPC law that will have potentially significant consequences for UK SPC right holders.

        • Italy jurisdiction report: A new route to protection [Ed: When they say "protection" they mean litigation]
        • European patent for treatment of bile duct cancer with the fimaChem technology

          PCI Biotech (OSE: PCIB), a cancer focused biopharmaceutical company, today announces that the European Patent Office (EPO) has informed the company that a new European patent has been granted. The European patent covers the intended use of fimaChem in combination with gemcitabine for the treatment of cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer).

          Per Walday, CEO, comments: We are very happy to see this patent granted in Europe, which provides an extended protection of the intended use of fimaChem lasting several years beyond the potential market exclusivity offered by the orphan designation. Our full focus is now on the successful delivery of the global pivotal RELEASE study.

        • Judge who made Canada’s virtual rules: ‘There’s no going back’ [Ed: Now we have "remote litigation"... for patents. Just what oligarchs wanted. Terrorising people without even having to face them...]

          Mr Justice Lafrenière, who oversaw Canada’s first virtual (patent) trial, describes his role in establishing remote litigation and makes the case for it to stay

        • Strategies patent defendants use to avoid injunctions

          An injunction is a legal remedy that can be awarded by a court to a property owner who proves that a property right has been infringed upon. An injunction is an equitable remedy that may be awarded when the court determines that a remedy available at law, such as monetary damages, is insufficient to cure the infringement of the property right. In the context of patent law, a court may award an injunction if a patent owner proves infringement and shows both that monetary damages are not an effective cure and that future infringement must be prevented.

        • COVID-19 IP update: EPO

          By way of an update, on 10 November 2020, the EPO has decided that all oral proceedings in opposition cases shall be held by videoconference as standard. Only if there are serious reasons preventing the use of video conference (e.g. if evidence needs to be taken directly), oral proceedings will be postponed until after 15 September 2021. It is important to note that the EPO will not allow mixed proceedings where one party attends in person and the other party attends by videoconference. However, contrary to the previous practice, it is no longer required that both parties need to agree to the videoconference.

          The Boards of Appeal have resumed the holding of oral proceedings, to a limited extent, at their premises in Haar from Monday, 18 May 2020. Contrary to the previous practice where parties were contacted to confirm that they expect to be able to attend in person and that they do not anticipate being affected by travel restrictions, the parties now have to indicate on their own motion if they are not able to attend the oral proceedings. The maximum attendance is 2 (!) persons per party. Parties and representatives will be asked to complete a simple screening questionnaire upon arrival. Any person replying to one of the questions in the affirmative will be denied access to the Boards of Appeal premises. The competent board will be informed accordingly and will decide whether the oral proceedings can be held without that person or whether they will need to be postponed. Access of the public will be allowed but only for a limited number of people.

        • Open COVID co-creator: compulsory licensing should be treasured sword

          Hisao Yamasaki explains why compulsory licensing should be used as a last resort and why he helped launch the Open COVID-19 Declaration

        • Plus ça change? How UK patents will be affected from 1 January 2021

          The grant and enforcement of UK European patents will be relatively immune to the end of the Implementation Period.

          This is because the system by which they are granted by the European Patent Office is governed by the European Patent Convention – which is an international treaty, not EU law.

          Consequently, the UK’s participation in the system by which the EPO examines and grants European patent applications centrally is going to remain unchanged.

          That means patents granted by the EPO will continue to be registered in the UK from 1 January 2021, if so designated, and will remain subject to potential opposition in the EPO within the first nine months of grant.

          It follows of course that the substantive law of the EPC, upon which much of the validity law in the Patents Act 1977 is based, also continues to apply in the UK.

        • The EPO embraces video conferencing to reduce the opposition backlog [Ed: Carpmaels & Ransford LLP's Emma Demetriades and David Holland neglecting to say that what #EPO does here is not lega]

          At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EPO introduced a pilot project for opposition oral proceedings to be held by videoconference (VICO) which was due to run until 30th April 2021. Under that pilot scheme, oral proceedings before Opposition Divisions could take place by VICO at the discretion of the Opposition Division and with the agreement of all parties.

          Given the current status of the global pandemic, the EPO has now taken the decision to extend that pilot program through to 15th September 2021. Furthermore, the EPO has now decided that all Opposition Division hearings will take place by VICO, unless there are serious reasons preventing this approach. This move aims to improve certainty for all parties and to prevent lengthy delays in decisions being reached on important cases.

          Under the earlier pilot project, patentees and opponents were each invited to confirm whether they consented to the oral proceedings taking place via VICO. If any one of the parties did not give their consent, the EPO had no choice but to postpone the proceedings to a later date when in-person hearings could resume. This often resulted in the last minute postponement of oral proceedings leaving parties uncertain as to if, and when, to file additional submissions in the run up to the oral proceedings, and unsure of when the hearing would finally take place.

        • FRAND licensing in an Unwired world (jurisdictional issues with global FRAND determinations, component level licensing, the “ND” prong of FRAND)

          What is the impact of the recent UK Supreme court Unwired Planet judgement? What is the current status of the component level licensing debate in Europe? How do courts currently construe the non-discriminatory prong of the FRAND undertaking and what is the role of such element from an economic perspective?

          These are some of the topics discussed in a recent online seminar held by Bocconi University, in the framework of their LL.M. in Law of Internet Technology, and introduced by Professor Laurent Manderieux. The high-profile panelists included Pat Treacy, Partner at Bristows and Deputy Judge at the High Court of England and Wales, Christian Donle, Partner at Preu Bohlig, and Kai-Uwe Kühn, Professor at the Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia, and former Chief Economist of DG Competition of the European Commission.

        • Farley on Patents and Power: Where Intellectual Property Law and Military Technology Meet [Ed: Some patents that literally kill spun using propaganda terms like “Intellectual Property”]

          How are patents and power intertwined? In their new book, “Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology,” Robert Farley and Davida H. Isaacs explore the linkages between intellectual property law (IP law) and the development of technology. Farley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce and longtime contributor to The Diplomat, discussed IP law, military technology, and innovation with The Diplomat’s managing editor, Catherine Putz.

        • Canadian Intellectual Property Office issues Practice Notice regarding patentable subject matter

          The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has issued updated guidance to its patent examiners on reviewing patent applications for patentable subject matter. This is of particular significance to computer-implemented, medical diagnostic and medical use inventions.

          This guidance is in response to the recent decision of Canada’s Federal Court in Choueifaty v. Canada (Attorney General), 2020 FC 837 (“Choueifaty”) – see our earlier article. In that decision, the Federal Court found that the problem solution approach in the Manual of Patent Office Practice (“MOPOP”), presently set out in sections 12.02.02d and 12.02.02e, was akin to using the “substance of the invention” approach which was resoundingly rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada in Free World Trust v Électro Santé Inc, 2000 SCC 66 (“Free World Trust”).

          The Attorney General did not appeal the Federal Court’s decision in Choueifaty and updates to the implicated sections of MOPOP are expected at some point in the future after a consultation process. CIPO has issued a practice notice in the interim titled “Patentable Subject-Matter under the Patent Act” that supersedes portions of MOPOP that have been overturned by Choueifaty.

          Prior to the Practice Notice, examiners would have addressed patentable subject matter by identifying a problem and a solution to the problem with guidance from an “examiner’s understanding of the common general knowledge in the art and by the teachings of the description”. In section 12.02.02e of MOPOP, the identification of the problem and solution is then used by the examiner to identify superfluous (non-essential) elements of the claim that are not involved with the identified solution. These superfluous (non-essential) elements would not be considered part of the invention according to MOPOP and thus would not be considered in determining whether the claim included patentable subject matter. This application of MOPOP resulted in many software oriented inventions being declared non-statutory under s. 2 of the Patent Act. As an example, a claim to an apparatus carrying out an innovative computer implemented invention may have all hardware elements involved in carrying out a computer implemented method be declared as non-essential elements leaving an algorithm which would be declared an abstract theorem. Subsequently, the abstract theorem would be objected to under s. 27(8) of the Patent Act as being non-patentable subject matter.

        • In re Nitro Fluids L.L.C. (Fed. Cir. 2020)

          Venue in patent cases has been a topic of recent Supreme Court (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC) and Federal Circuit (In re Cray) consideration. Last month, the Federal Circuit again considered venue with regard to a motion to transfer and defendant’s writ of mandamus challenging the District Court’s denial of its transfer motion, in In re Nitro Fluids L.L.C.

          The issue arose when plaintiff Cameron International Corp. filed suit against Nitro Fluids, LLC in the Southern District of Texas in 2018 over three patents; the opinion notes that both parties are headquartered there, making venue proper under 35 U.S.C. § 1404(a). The case lingered: by early 2020 (pre-COVID), there had been no claim construction performed nor trial date set. Cameron then filed suit against Nitro in 2020 in the Western District of Texas, raising patent infringement of two other patents and the same products. Nitro moved the Western District Court either to refuse jurisdiction or transfer to the Southern District for consolidation. The Western District denied the motion. In its reasoning, the District Court recognized that such motions are typically resolved under the first-to-file rule, wherein “the court in which an action is first filed is the appropriate court to determine whether subsequently filed cases involving substantially similar issues should proceed.” Save Power Ltd. v. Syntek Fin. Corp., 121 F.3d 947, 950 (5th Cir. 1997). But the District Court recognized another principle, that such a motion can be denied when there are “sufficiently compelling circumstances” to avoid applying the rule, citing Mann Mfg., Inc. v. Hortex, Inc., 439 F.2d 403, 407 (5th Cir. 1971). And those compelling reasons are determined by a balancing of the “traditional transfer factors” under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) and can result in denial of the transfer motion when they do not weigh in favor of transfer.

          The District Court supported its decision to deny the motion by saying that “two of the factors—the relative ease of access to sources of proof and the local interest in having localized interests decided at home— both favored transfer” while “the administrative difficulties flowing from court congestion weighed against transfer,” and the “practical problems factor” weighed “heavily against transfer” because Cameron had filed a co-pending suit against another defendant in the Western District and that could raise inconsistent claim construction issues as a result.

        • You reap what you sow: Brazil participation in the Patent Prosecution Highway [Ed: Brazil giving special treatment, rolling out a red carpet to foreign monopolies with lots of patents]

          The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) program is a fast-track examination of a patent application; an applicant request this accelerated process in the national phase which originated on a foreign office and national patent examiners can use the opinion and preliminary examination from the foreign office. The program aims to promote sharing the work among patent offices but the decision of granting patents still remains under the national office. The program run among offices where they agree to share this practice (for more information see WIPO). Brazil does not form part of the Global PPH as its counterparts Chile, Colombia, and Peru; but since 2016, the office has had several bilateral PCT-PPH agreements: European Patent Office (EPO), PROSUR (pilot), Danish Patent and Trademark Office; United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office, Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, United States Patent and Trademark Office and Japan Patent Office.

          [...]

          INPI also praised that the average time for assessing priority processing requirements has decreased from an average time of 220 days (2018) to 104 days (2020). This is due to ‘simplifying the process flow and using new information technology tools ‘.

        • RF Venue Receives Important European Diversity Fin® Antenna Patent

          RF Venue, Inc., a global leader in antenna and RF wireless communication products, today announced that it has received notice from the European Patent Office that it will grant a new patent for the company’s innovative Diversity Fin® Antenna platforms stemming from an earlier filing.

        • Microbot Medical (MBOT) Secures Patents in Multiple Global Jurisdictions

          Microbot Medical Inc. (Nasdaq: MBOT) announced that it has received patents in multiple jurisdictions, further demonstrating the Company’s continued execution of expanding and protecting its Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio. The Company now has 40 issued/allowed patents and 23 patent applications pending worldwide.

          [...]

          Additionally, the European Patent Office (EPO) granted an EP Patent covering the Company’s guidewire technology for use with endo-luminal interventions, and related to the Company’s LIBERTYTM development. This is the second European patent granted for this unique technology and extends protection to include the device’s current development, having a double guidewire comprising a first hollow guidewire and a second guidewire deployed within the first guidewire, and an adjuster mechanism operable to displace the second guidewire longitudinally relative to the first guidewire between at least three states.

        • Software Patents

          • Patent Protection and Software Innovation: Evidence from Alice

            Although software innovations are the cornerstone in the modern economy, their patent-ability, as well as the social and private value of software patenting, have continued to be at the center of policy debates pertaining to the U.S. patent system. The landmark 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank had profound impact on software patenting as it drastically limited the scope of patent protection on software innovations. Using Alice as a natural experiment, we found that limiting software patents had no detectable downsides to the value of software firms. Instead, it was associated with improved sales, greater engagements in open source development, and tighter scope of individual patents. Our findings offer implications for the extent to which software firms pursue patenting as a strategy to protect innovation versus pursuing alternative appropriability mechanisms. They also have compelling implications for patent policies on software and software-related inventions, such as artificial intelligence, business methods, and other emerging digital innovations.

          • CIPO’s new guidelines on patentable subject matter explained

            The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) released new guidelines on patentable subject matter and a set of examples applying the new guidelines to computer-implemented inventions, medical diagnostic methods, and medical uses on November 3, 2020. These new guidelines supersede current guidance within the Manual of Patent Office Practice for determining patentable subject matter.

            These new guidelines and examples are in response to the recent decision of the Federal Court in Choueifaty v Canada (Attorney General), 2020 FC 837 [Choueifaty] which rejected CIPO’s previous “problem-solution approach” for determining patentable subject matter. The Commissioner of Patents opted not to appeal the Choueifaty decision. For more information on the Choueifaty decision and CIPO’s previous “problem-solution approach”, refer to our August 31, 2020 article.

            [...]

            Of particular significance, the new guidelines emphasize that the “actual invention” does not necessarily include every element identified to be essential at step 1 above. For example, a claimed element may be an essential element because an applicant intended it to be essential. But this claimed element may not form a part of the actual invention when it has no material effect on the working of the invention and does not cooperate with other elements of the claimed invention.

            The new guidelines and examples require the identification of the actual invention covered by a claim to be based on the essential elements of that claim. In this respect, the identification of the actual invention should be grounded in the purposive construction performed at step 1 above, should consider all essential elements identified at step 1 above which cooperate together to achieve the solution, and cannot be a determination that is not anchored in the language of the claim (and thus cannot be based on a determination of the “substance of the invention” as prohibited by Free World Trust). However, at the same time, the actual invention cannot be determined solely on the basis of a literal reading of the claim.

            This distinction between the “essential elements” and the “actual invention” does not appear to have firm basis in Canadian case law.

          • Patenting video games in Europe – the EPO’s Board of Appeal decide in favour of Nintendo (T1504/17)

            The video game industry is hugely competitive and finding success involves significant investment in innovation. Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series S and X have each been seven years in the making. As for the games themselves, blockbuster titles can now rival Hollywood films on budget and production time. You don’t even need a games console anymore, with the increasing popularity of smartphone gaming for titles such as Fortnite adding another layer of complexity to the market.

            Obtaining patent protection for innovative features is one way device makers and video game developers can help protect their innovations and stay ahead of the competition. But exactly what can be patented in the video game space? This recent Nintendo case, in which the Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) overturned a decision by the EPO’s Examining Division to refuse grant of a patent application, provides some useful guidance.

      • Trademarks

        • What AI means for brands

          Over the next three months, members of the MARQUES Cyberspace Team will publish a series of articles on artificial intelligence (AI). In this first post, Caroline Perriard introduces the topic.

          [...]

          A second article will cover damages caused by AI and the liability thereof. In other words, who is liable when AI gets something wrong? It may certainly not simply refer to the programmer/developer of the technology, or the manufacturer or deployer. But is the user or even the AI itself to blame?

        • One of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Most Famous Trademarks is in Limbo in China

          Created in 1968 as a luxurious take on the four-leaf clover, a timeless symbol of luck, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Alhambra jewelry collection is among its most well-known offerings. “The first Alhambra design was an opera-length necklace punctuated with 20 clover-shaped motifs crafted with the design’s signature beaded edges,” according to Sothebys. “As the 1960s made way for the 1970s, the design became hugely popular among celebrity clients, who layered many Alhambra necklaces of different sizes and with different gemstone combinations for the quintessential daytime look.”
          American actress-turned-Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly was among some of the “long-time devotees of Van Cleef & Arpels and collectors of Alhambra necklaces,” further helping to put the design on the map, one that has endured in popularity for more than five decades. In furtherance of such longstanding appeal and in light of the fact that the Alhambra line has (arguably) come to indicate a single source, Netherlands-based Van Cleef has sought legal protections for it across the globe, with one ongoing trademark quest – a back-and-forth in China – proving to be particularly interesting.
          On November 19, 2014, Van Cleef filed an application with the Chinese Trademark Office for a three-dimensional trademark (no.15736970) for its specific clover motif for use in class 14 on goods, including “watches; rings; bracelets; earrings; necklaces; jewelry; [and] watch cases.” Less than two years later, in January 2016, the Chinese Trademark Office gave the application the go-ahead, and issued a registration to Van Cleef for the little clover symbol.

        • This week in IP: EPO video policy ‘misses pain points’, UK changes address rules, INTA elects new president

          USPTO will raise trademark filing and TTAB fees next year

          On Tuesday, November 17, the USPTO set out new fee structures for trademark filings and proceedings at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. They will come into effect after January 2 2021.

          In its published Final Rule, the office has increased fees for the TEAS Plus option for an application from $225 per class to $250 per class, and raised the costs of the TEAS Standard option up to $350 from $275 per class.

          At the TTAB, petitions to cancel or oppose trademarks have been raised from $400 to $600 per class.

          New fees have also been introduced by the USPTO for letters of protest ($50 per application), requests for oral hearings ($500 per proceeding) and appeal briefs in an ex parte appeal filed through ESTTA ($200 per class).

          The new fee for deleting goods, services, and classes from a registration after submitting a Section 8 or 71 declaration, but before the declaration is accepted, will be $250 per class if filed through TEAS.

          The new fee for a second, and subsequent, requests for an extension of time to file an appeal brief in an ex parte appeal filed through ESTTA will be $100 per application.

          On LinkedIn, Kalamaras Law Office partner Stacey Kalamaras said those who have been thinking about filing a new trademark application might want to do so before the new year to save some money.

          This is the first time that the USPTO has adjusted trademark fees in the past three years.

      • Copyrights

        • Tom Scott’s video on copyright

          I still come back to JD Lasica’s Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation as my canonical source here. What is the legal purpose of suing people for the use of copyrighted work where clear financial losses can’t be demonstrated, if not to just extract money in an unethical way? What ends, and who, does this legislation serve? Should financial compensation even be the yard stick we use to measure this?

        • Youtube-dl Wins Reprieve But Deezer & Spotify Downloaders Are On Thin Ice

          The RIAA’s takedown of youtube-dl and its subsequent reinstatement by Github has generated hundreds of headlines and a fierce debate over the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. However, similar takedowns, including those that target Deezer and Spotify-focused tools, are still going ahead. Youtube-dl may have a reprieve but these downloading tools are on very thin ice.

        • Amazon Patents Technology to Track Down Streaming Pirates

          Amazon hopes to protect online streaming content with a newly awarded anti-piracy patent. The company has developed a technique where personally identifiable information can be dynamically added to streaming content, visibly or not. This is a relatively low-resource option to detect the source of pirated movies, TV-shows, and even live events.

        • Amendments to the Copyright Act: Hidden Consultations and the Missing Public Angle of Copyright Law – Part I

          A few weeks ago, NASSCOM had informed its members that the Copyright Office is seeking comments as to whether there was a need for amendments to be carried out to the Copyright Act. Subsequently, Medianama reported that the consultation process seeking opinions on whether to amend the Act seems to only include industry stakeholders. The updated deadline for sending in comments is November 30. It would seem that some law firms also have been invited to this process (for eg, see here). There does not however appear to be any public notice of such consultation process on the website of the Copyright Office. In this two-part post, I shall dissect the implications of this opaque closed-door consultative process adopted by the government in light of larger ramifications of copyright law. I shall then highlight some of the prominent subject areas that need special consideration while discussing any amendments to the Act.

        • Amendments to the Copyright Act: Hidden Consultations and the Missing Public Angle of Copyright Law – Part II

          The fair use principles (for ‘non infringing uses’) are carved out as exceptions and limitations to the rights of a copyright owner, premised on the idea that the societal benefits in allowing such use are larger than any possible loss suffered by the owner. The Copyright Act lays down this regime in Section 52 of the Act. They, in essence, promote innovation, creativity, and free speech and expression in general by allowing new works to be created without fears of repercussions. This becomes particularly important in the digital age with the growth of user generated content that is being published online, inter alia, on social media platforms.

          The provision, however, suffers from a severe inhibition in that it allows for this protection to be claimed only based on the exhaustive list of grounds it mentions. In doing so, it appears to confine the extent of creative permissible uses a work can be subjected to, without factoring the practical effects of the same. Take, for instance, the question of whether parody videos are protected as fair use if they borrow from the original work. The only ground that could cover it would possibly be Section 52(1)(a) wherein it has to be shown that the use was for the purposes of ‘criticism’ or ‘review’. While certain courts have indeed held parody to constitute fair dealing, it is quite possible that it would not pass muster in a different court, especially in the absence of any definition of what is meant by terms such as ‘criticism’ or ‘review’. For instance, as I have discussed on the blog earlier (here and here), though it might be possible to make a claim that sharing short sports clips could be covered by this provision, it is not difficult to imagine a court reaching a different conclusion. In such a scenario, two things become necessary: first, the existing categories of exceptions need to be clearly defined as to what they represent, and second, instead of limiting fair use protection to an exhaustive list, a shift to a broader inclusive model, such as that of the United States, with the presently enumerated exceptions as an indicative list, be made to ensure that uses that are hard to categorise in a particular head but should deserve protection are not excluded.

          [...]

          In this post, I have pointed out some of the major issues that need to be re-assessed under the Indian copyright regime. As highlighted, they have severe ramifications on the right to free speech and access to culture, among other things. A statutory treatment of these issues that have particularly arisen with the proliferation of the digital media is necessary and it cannot be left to the vagaries of inconsistent interpretations of high courts and district courts. They should thus be at the centre of any plans to amend the Copyright Act. Despite this large scale impact on the rights of the public, the move to push for closed door consultations with limited stakeholders raises questions as to the way in which the Copyright Office envisions copyrights. It, prima facie, appears to be a vision sans the public interest involved, and it can be hoped that the doors are opened for a transparent and deliberative consultation soon. Given the lasting impact such amendments might have, it would be great if more informed readers and affected stakeholders could share their thoughts on these issues and possibly highlight areas that the post might have missed.

How to Put on Airs of Professionalism Like a Boss

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 3:30 am by Guest Editorial Team

By M. “Figos” Unruh

Suits in motion

Summary: “Boardroom suits are not meant to be flashy, but to conform. Simple lines and smart ties — the opposite of what Richard Stallman would wear, show that you are either a well-machined cog or a serious adversary.”

There are times, as the head of an organisation or representative of a project, that you want people who care more about appearance than substance to take you seriously. To those people, this is “all the time”.

Behind the scenes you might be throwing chairs across the office, yelling about how your multi-billion dollar corporation will “kill Google” or jumping on stage like a monkey, although you want to avoid this becoming your entire image. You’re still wearing sandals to work, so this is an opportunity to gain a few tips.

Gent selecting a suitThe first step is to learn how to dress like a professional. For the price of a top-of-the-line gaming rig or two, you can have two or three sets of professional wear that suffice for looking like you actually do something, rather than having just returned from your bar or bat mitzvah.

Boardroom suits are not meant to be flashy, but to conform. Simple lines and smart ties — the opposite of what Richard Stallman would wear, show that you are either a well-machined cog or a serious adversary. Most of you can even go for a little of both, just to keep people guessing. You certainly won’t need your best suit for every meeting, it depends on who you are trying to impress.

“Argue only when it is either strictly necessary, or when you have a sufficient degree of confidence — let’s say 80% — that your argument will come out on top.”Everything should be tailored, but if you go “casual” in a polo shirt you want it to fit well. Be certain all dress shirts fit properly, you can get them tailored as well.

It goes without saying that everything should be clean, everything worn out should be replaced, neatly trim and clean under your fingernails. If you are female, simply learn to do your makeup (however little of it you will actually use) like other powerful women.

If you are male and have long hair, pull it back like you work security at an expensive casino. People will tell you to cut your hair, lose the ponytail; they won’t tell anything to to Richard Branson. Just don’t let it hold you back.

Once you are in proper costume, the next step is to learn your speaking role. Argue only when it is either strictly necessary, or when you have a sufficient degree of confidence — let’s say 80% — that your argument will come out on top. Use short, sharp phrases; they are designed to sound undeniably true.

The rest of the time, nod as if an idea was your own, and use agreement as a way of getting others to put their guard down. This makes people like you more and want to agree with you, even if they hate you and everything you stand for.

“Smile, but only when deliberately portraying an amicable stance or when it will unnerve people.”Occasionally, you can use stilted language as a means of projecting superiority and causing frustration in people you want to assert dominance over. Egotists will do this all the time, revealing a weakness in true confidence if you know how to spot it. Tech geeks will also do this, sometimes because they are egotists and other times, simply because they are nerds who don’t practice speaking often enough. All the same, play to your strengths.

Learn to couch the true meaning of what you say in metaphors and corporate dog whistles. Remember this isn’t your job most of the time, that’s what PR and marketing people are for. You can simply borrow some of their “tools” for when they’re most useful. Don’t try this on actual PR and marketing people, it’s like trying to convince a cow that you’re another cow by saying “moo.”

“The meeting is a stage, the performance is part dance and part martial arts, and the goal above all is to look like you know exactly what you’re doing.”All of this takes practice, but you can have games of “Boardroom” with your friends or project members where you pretend to speak like yes men, upper management and CEOs. In fact a good example of this is an activist group who call themselves the Yes Men.

Above all, be serious, be deadpan, and be a little more aggressive than assertive. Never be the first person in a conversation to go full Tom Cruise, overdoing it is the sign of an amateur. Smile, but only when deliberately portraying an amicable stance or when it will unnerve people.

Some people go into a boardroom or other meeting with the idea that they are going to collaborate, learn something, or come up with a real plan.

The reality is something closer to going into battle. You want to be certain you don’t step on the toes of anybody who can cut your head off, but you are there only for the appearance of collaboration, learning, or a real plan.

“If you have any doubts, simply take a good look at the people who make it to the top. They didn’t get there by their intelligence, integrity or ability to work with others. They got there by walking over the weak and impressing the strong, with just the right amount of bowing to the right people.”None of those things happen in a board room; they happen whenever and wherever they do. The meeting is a stage, the performance is part dance and part martial arts, and the goal above all is to look like you know exactly what you’re doing. If you consistently fake that better than the others in your corporate class, you win.

If you have any doubts, simply take a good look at the people who make it to the top. They didn’t get there by their intelligence, integrity or ability to work with others. They got there by walking over the weak and impressing the strong, with just the right amount of bowing to the right people.

If this is not your ambition, be sure to exit this game while you still have your ethics and part of your soul. Otherwise you may find yourself gradually turning into one of these actors, and the actor becomes the role they were playing. Be sure to turn it off before the switch disappears. █

© 2020 Figosdev All Rights Reserved. This article is available under a Creative Commons license: visit this page for details.

IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 22, 2020

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:34 am by Needs Sunlight

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