People regularly ask me to help them rescue Windows computers that have become locked or damaged. Sometimes, I can use a Linux USB boot drive to mount Windows partitions and then transfer and back up files from the damaged systems.
Other times, clients lose their passwords or otherwise lock their login account credentials. One way to unlock an account is to create a Windows boot disk to repair the computer. Microsoft allows you to download copies of Windows from its website and offers tools to create a USB boot device. But to use them, you need a Windows computer, which means, as a Linux user, I need another way to create a boot DVD or USB drive. I have found it difficult to create Windows USBs on Linux. My reliable tools, like Etcher.io, Popsicle (for Pop!_OS), and UNetbootin, or using dd from the command line to create bootable media, have not been very successful.
In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Today, I'll talk about software repositories
Before I used Linux, I took the applications I had installed on my computer for granted. I would install applications as needed, and if I didn't end up using them, I'd forget about them, letting them languish as they took up space on my hard drive. Eventually, space on my drive would become scarce, and I'd end up frantically removing applications to make room for more important data. Inevitably, though, the applications would only free up so much space, and so I'd turn my attention to all of the other bits and pieces that got installed along with those apps, whether it was media assets or configuration files and documentation. It wasn't a great way to manage my computer. I knew that, but it didn't occur to me to imagine an alternative, because as they say, you don't know what you don't know.
In the latest episode of my "Linux for Noobs" series, I go show ten distributions that you may want to consider installing. For each of the ten, I go over a few higher-level details to get you started, and then you can choose which you like most from the list and give it a try! I
I'm announcing the release of the 5.10.17 kernel.
All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.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
One of the platforms we have been working on at Collabora is VeriSilicon's Hantro Codec. This video IP is present on a number of popular SoCs (Rockchip, i.MX8, Microchip) and is marketed as a small and power efficient device, but it also has a feature that makes it specially attractive for open source developers: it is a stateless accelerator.
Stateless devices do not need firmware to operate, making them more robust and better suited for open source platforms, where having full control over the system is desirable. In this case, the support is split in two: a kernel driver (which is provided by a Video4Linux2 Hantro driver), and a userspace component (which can be provided by frameworks such as GStreamer and FFMPEG).
Intel on Tuesday night released the "microcode-20210216" package as the latest update to their collection of CPU microcode binaries. This time around the only changes to the Intel CPU microcode binaries are for Skylake server CPUs and Cascade Lake B-0/B-1 processors in order to address two vulnerabilities that came to light last year.
Ingo Molnar sent in the scheduler updates for Linux 5.12 today and it includes some notable additions, including PREEMPT_DYNAMIC, which allows changing the kernel's preemption mode at boot/run-time.
The CONFIG_PREEMPT_DYNAMIC option when enabled allows setting preempt= at boot time to either none/voluntary/full with full preemption being the default. Distributions can still set the standard PREEMPT controls but this dynamic option allows changing it at boot time without rebuilding the kernel or even at run-time via a DebugFS interface. The kernel relies on runtime patching for changing the kernel preemption mode on the fly.
Collabora informs 9to5Linux today about their contributions to the recently released Linux 5.11 kernel series, which will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions.
A new kernel is out the door, Linux 5.11, and it brings many goodies and better hardware support. Collabora is well known for their awesome contributions to the Linux kernel, and this cycle they continued to improve support for Chromebooks and modern Windows games.
Time continues to fly by and 2021 is finally here. A year that could be known as the year of Rust in Linux kernel! Ok, maybe we're ahead of ourselves here, but it's fun to think about that. In the meantime though, Linus has released v5.11, so let's look at what has been contributed by Collabora.
We are certainly living in very exciting times, working on a kernel that has never been more stable. Or at least, that's how one feels reading the recent discussions related to kernel version overflow.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux provides the latest open source innovations and key optimizations and security to enterprise cloud and on-premises workloads. It is the Linux kernel that powers Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine as well as Oracle Linux on 64-bit Intel and AMD or 64-bit Arm platforms.
UEK Release 5 maintains compatibility with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) and does not disable any features that are enabled in RHCK. Additional features are enabled to provide support for key functional requirements and patches are applied to improve performance and optimize the kernel.
[...]
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 5 (UEK R5U5) is based on the mainline kernel version 4.14.35. Through actively monitoring upstream check-ins and collaboration with partners and customers, Oracle continues to improve and apply critical bug and security fixes to UEK R5 for Oracle Linux. This update includes several new features, added functionality, and bug fixes across a range of subsystems.
XWayland 21.1 is moving forward as a standalone XWayland release separated from the X.Org Server. Given that X.Org Server 1.21 isn't moving toward release with no one stepping up to oversee that long overdue update, Red Hat engineers have devised the plan for standalone XWayland releases that are separated from the rest of the xorg-server code-base to at least get the updated X11 client on Wayland support out to users.
The XWayland code within the X.Org Server is one of the main areas still seeing activity on the X.Org Server Git code-base along with other components like xf86-video-modesetting. But short of organizing a new X.Org Server release, the XWayland release is being spun out from there for providing a more manageable, standalone release.
Per the schedule posted earlier, here's the first release candidate for the standalone Xwayland 21.1.0 release. The second release candidate is scheduled two weeks from now, on March 3rd.
Any and all testing of this release candidate would be greatly appreciated. Please report any issues at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues .
P.S. The shortlogs below include all changes since the 1.20 branch, not all of which are relevant for Xwayland.
The open-source, cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.2 is out today as the newest version of our automated, production-ready benchmarking software framework.
Building off last month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 quarterly feature release, Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.2 ships a few fixes and minor improvements before switching focus to Phoronix Test Suite 10.4 that is due out in Q2.
Over the years, one of the most emotive areas in the world of Linux is the choice of text editor. Some people are strong advocates of Vim, others prefer Emacs. And there’s tons of other text editors available with strong backing. Having robust opinions is the way the land lies in Linux.
Boop-GTK is different to the majority of text editors. It’s not a traditional text editor. Instead it’s promoted as a scratchpad designed to help developers work with code snippets. It’s cross-platform software running on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Boop-GTK is a clone of Boop, a macOS-only program. Boop-GTK seeks 100% script compatibility with Boop. Both apps offer a streamlined scratchpad. You won’t find formatting tools or other text frippery. Instead, there’s code highlighting and line numbering. How it works is that you start the program, paste some text, run scripts, and optionally copy the text out.
Press Ctrl+Shift+P to reveal the scripts that are available.
The Pencil2D team announced a new release of its 2D animation software with new feature and various bug-fixes.
Pencil2D is a free and open-source software to make 2D hand-drawn animations. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and works on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and FreeBSD. It supports both bitmap and vector graphics, and allows to seamlessly switch between the two workflows.
It’s easy to take a lot of things for granted when you’ve been using them for longer than you can remember. Coloured manual pages is one of those things.
By default, there’s no colours for the manual pages, which can makes it more difficult to distinguish parts and sections of the documentation than it has to be.
This article will let you walk through the commands to navigate through files and directories in the Linux operating system. You can manipulate directories and files. Some of the tasks are easy to do. When you are using commands for navigation, you have more power and flexibility as compared to using a graphical user interface. While the latter option is easy to perform and is suitable to execute simple tasks, you need the command line for pulling off complicated tasks. Copying HTML files from one directory to another is hard in a graphical user interface; however, it is easier to do in a command-line system. Before I move on to exploring the commands that you can use to manipulate files and directories, I will explain some special characters that you can use in Linux.
Today we are looking at how to install Doki Doki Literature Club 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.
Football Manager 2021 is a simulation management game developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega. In the game, the player is the manager of a football (soccer) team. The game was never released on Linux, but it is possible to play it on Linux thanks to Steam Play and Proton. Here’s how to do it.
7Zip is the most popular free-open source archiving tool for Windows. Using 7Zip, users can create a wide variety of compressed archives, and extract them. In this guide, we’ll go over how to get 7Zip working on Ubuntu.
It can be cumbersome to create and recreate lab or practice systems. Use LVM and a basic WebUI to quickly restore your Linux systems back to a golden image.
If you are using Manajro on VMware Workstation player and want to perform drag and drop feature to copy files and folders from host to Manjaro guest, then here are the steps to follow…
After installing Manjaro on Vmware Virtual machine, the first thing we would like have is the installation of VM tools, however, even after that sometimes we would face problem in sharing files or folder directly from host (WIndow, macOS, Linux) to Guest OS i.e Manjaro. Thus, first we have to install a tool and then need activate Vmblock service to make sure everything work smoothely.
In this video, I am going to show how to install OpenMandriva Lx 4.2.
AWS Transfer Family supports Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS), and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to transfer files to and from AWS S3 or AWS EFS(Elastic File System). In this article, we will see the steps to create an SFTP-enabled server on AWS which will be accessible publicly.
In this tutorial, we will guide you through the steps of installing Odoo 12 on Ubuntu 18.04. We will also install Nginx and configure it as a reverse proxy. Odoo (formerly OpenERP) is a simple and intuitive suite of open-source enterprise management applications such as Website Builder, eCommerce, CRM, Accounting, Manufacturing, Project and Warehouse Management, Human Resources, Marketing, and many more. Odoo comes in two editions, the Community edition which is free, and the Enterprise edition. In our case, we will install and use the Community edition.
Friendica is a free, open-source and decentralized social networking platform that helps you to build and maintain your own social networking projects. It has built-in support for ActivityPub including, Mastodon, Hubzilla, OStatus, Pleroma and more. It allows you to import your websites and blogs into your social stream via RSS/Atom feeds. It provides a powerful user and admin dashboard that helps you to manage your social network from any device.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Friendica with Apache and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04.
Ever seen a command with a long list of cryptic, one letter arguments that begin with dash / hyphen, and wanted a quick way to find out what each command line argument does? This article explains how to do this.
In part three of our Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) series, we're going to take a look at how DSE addressed some of its network issues that led to a major outage.
DSE Chief Architect Daniel Mitchell has been put in charge of Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) digital transformation. He's feeling pressure from management since the website crashed last month, and was down for 46 hours straight. Shifting from one-off configurations and into an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) model is now critical for DSE. It took a crisis, but management realized that procrastinating isn’t an option and have tasked Mitchell to lead various teams to modernize their infrastructure.
Sometimes a bit of testing saves the day if you can do it on a disposable Linux machine of some sort. That testing could include installing new software that might be a little invasive, installing lots of hidden, tiny files that would clog up your desktop machine, or maybe trying out unstable software that is not fully released, meaning that your desktop machine might not boot up post-installation. Equally, you might be writing system scripts that you need somewhere safe to run in case they break your other precious settings.
In this article, we will look at running a second Linux desktop, or virtual machine (VM), inside your main desktop. To do this, we will be using a fantastic piece of virtualization FOSS software called QEMU. It dutifully sits atop the second-to-none KVM, which provides a lower level of virtualization. If that sounds confusing, there's more information in this article.
Among the many benefits, one considerable advantage of using QEMU and KVM is that you have a wide range of Linux distributions that you can install on the second desktop, giving you lots of flexibility.
Archbox is a set of scripts that make it easy to install Arch Linux inside a chroot environment on other Linux distributions, and integrate it with your existing Linux installation.
Welcome to the latest installment in my neverending Plasma desktop games. Today, I want to talk to you about something that is both trivial and complex. The use of other languages on your computer. While I fully believe the only acceptable machine interface language ought to be English, I also understand and appreciate that other people speak and use other languages - after all, I do it myself, four or five languages. You see, I just bragged there.
On a serious note, sometimes one may need to use non-ASCII 127 keyboard layout. And when that need strikes, you want your operating system to give you friendly help. Well, in today's guide, I want to show you the clever way the Plasma desktop handles languages and keyboard layouts. Powerful, elegant, and follow me.
meta infos in jpg pictures can contain quiet a lot of sensitive data:
what date the picture was taken with what camera/phone (Samsung Galaxy S3 did that) maybe even: GPS info/location of the picture who/what tools processed the picture of course as always, this data can be put to good or bad use
privacy wise it would be probably the best to simply delete it all
I use a ton of services which either require or recommend 2fa as part of the authentication process. I used to use “Google Authenticator” then more recently “Authenticator Plus”. However Authenticator Plus seems to be no longer maintained. So while I have no problems with it, I think it is time to migrate to something else.
Step up, Aegis Authenticator, a free, open source authenticator app, available on the play store, and F-Droid.
The KDE team announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.21 with many new features. In this quick guide, we explain the steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.21 from 5.20. And give you a quick post update feedback.
Set to release with Linux support in March, Closed Hands from developer Passenger Games led by Dan Hett, is an experimental and political video game that explores the complex effects of extremism on a range of cultures and communities.
Announced for release on February 25, the next free update for all Civilization VI players will include some updates to the Barbarians with a new game mode.
No patch notes have been given out yet but they have just recently put up a new developer video, which goes over a bunch of what's going to be coming. The good news is that unlike some other free updates, it doesn't require you own any of the DLC. The Barbarian Clans mode is properly free for everyone who owns the base game. While it is an optional game mode, it sounds like a lot of fun. It gives Barbarians multiple clans, and allows them to evolve into City States along with new ways to interact with them like bribes to not attack you or raiding them for gold.
More customization is coming too with a new leader selection pool, like they added for city states, so you can remove those you don't like to face in the game or ensure you do meet those you want. A bunch of AI changes are also coming for air units and air combats, with the AI quite a bit smarter about it.
Want to revisit the classic GTA III and Vice City? You should take a look at re3 and reVC which not only provide the source code, they also upgrade the experience for both. Available on GitHub in a combine repository split across different branches for GTA III and Vice City, it has been tested by the team working across different systems including Linux.
Just like other game engine reimplementations, they do require the original data files so it needs a small amount of work to get each going. Considering the age of both though, the re3 and reVC projects are now probably the best way to play each of them on a PC.
Nebuchadnezzar is an isometric city builder styled like classic Impressions Games titles like Pharaoh and Zeus and it's out now across both GOG and Steam. Note: key provided by the developer.
This has been something of nostalgic joy for me, as someone who spent almost entire days playing the 1999 classic Pharaoh. It looks and feels very much like it, only with plenty of enhancements you would expect from a modern game. Considering that Nepos Games is made up of only two people, what they've achieved here is very impressive and if you're after that classic city-builder feel you can't really go wrong with it.
"Nebuchadnezzar is a classic isometric city builder game inviting players to experience the mysterious history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In the campaign, players get to rule over influential historical cities filled with magnificent monuments."
If, like me, you're a bit of an Anime fan you might want to keep an eye on Netflix as DOTA: Dragon's Blood has been announced for release in March. Yeah, I know, this is not your usual gaming news but it's gaming related and heck I'm excited about it.
The story will be centred around a Dragon Knight, with the synopsis being short and sweet "The sweeping fantasy series tells the story of Davion, a renowned Dragon Knight devoted to wiping the scourge from the face of the world. Following encounters with a powerful, ancient eldwurm as well as the noble Princess Mirana on a secret mission of her own, Davion becomes embroiled in events much larger than he could have ever imagined."
If you own one of the NZXT Kraken coolers you might want to check out the GKraken project to configure it under Linux. Another wonderful open source project for Linux hardware enthusiasts, where the original hardware manufacturer doesn't provide official tooling for Linux.
GKraken has actually been around for a little while, and the original developer Roberto Leinardi has placed it into a form of maintenance mode as they no longer have one. However, it is still being worked on and accepting code from others. A big 1.0.0 release just went up adding in support for the latest generation of NZXT Kraken devices from developer Guy Boldon.
Offering up a new way to play the game and unlock some cosmetic items, Northgard Expeditions is the 5th major expansion to the Viking strategy game and it's a free update too.
The free content drop adds an eponymous new quest format, wondrous rewards, and more than 50 craftable cosmetics earned from successful sojourns. You can now undertake Expeditions to amass treasure, with these events available in four varieties that have you follow certain quest-lines available as daily and weekly challenges with different difficult settings. Then you also have Discovery Expeditions that introduce Northgard's lands and emphasize core game mechanics, as well as Master Expeditions, one-time-only quests tied to story content, achievement unlocks, and the Conquest game mode.
Ready to try Imperator: Rome again? Paradox have been busy overhauling quite a lot of it, with it still being one of the worst rated Paradox titles by users overall.
They're committed to it though, clearly and a big free update is out now with Imperator: Rome 2.0 Marius.
The Italian PublicCode catalogue on Developers Italia is a searchable database of open source software that is either developed by Italian public institutions, or sourced from third parties, that can be used by Italian public insitutions.
Nowadays, Italian public institutions have to revise the catalogue when seeking software to cover their requirements and, only if there is no option that fits their needs in the catalogue, can they seek a proprietary alternative or develop a new one. And if they develop a new one, it needs to be open source and added to the catalogue.
I first learned about the concept at Akademy 2019, with the keynote by Leonardo Favario who presented the project. Recently, some discussions in the KDE community reminded me about it, and I finally decided to try and include GCompris in this catalogue.
In this video, we are looking at some of the new features and changes that stand out for me the most in KDE Plasma 5.21.
KDE Plasma packages have been updated to 5.21.0. Through rain, sleet or freezing snow, the packages must roll! It is recommended that you reboot after the update is complete so the new libraries can load.
Okay, that’s a bit of snark, vet no, it’s not because I hate!!1 GNOME Software. It is a very important tool tasked with many complex roles. It is a critical link in the Linux experience. No-one is knocking that.
But, and this is where some folks will take umbrage, GNOME Software does have a bit of ‘reputation’ among many users for being a bit …nonoptimal. Bloated? Memory hog? Slow? Ill-ordered? Constantly spitting error messages?
Thankfully, work is underway to give the app a redo, iron out usability issues, and buff up its role in the GNOME Shell experience — as this (very lengthy) mockup of proposed changes to the default “Explore” page conveys...
Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (20.31%) Server Distribution of the Year - Slackware (32.93%) Live Distribution of the Year - Slackware Live Edition (41.55%) Database of the Year - MariaDB (53.18%) Browser of the Year - Firefox (54.82%) Desktop Environment of the Year - Plasma Desktop (KDE) (35.54%) Window Manager of the Year - Openbox (23.03%) Audio Media Player Application of the Year - VLC (29.34%\%) Digital Audio Workstation of the Year - Ardour (42.11%) Video Media Player of the Year - VLC (67.26%) Video Authoring Application of the Year - KDEnlive (44.44%) Security Hardening and/or Scanning Application of the Year - nmap (45.83%) Network Monitoring Application of the Year - Nagios Core (22.33%) IDE of the Year - Visual Studio Code (23.29%) Text Editor of the Year - vim (28.34%) File Manager of the Year - Dolphin (29.39%) Open Source Game of the Year - SuperTuxKart (15.05%) Programming Language of the Year - Python (31.14%) Backup Application of the Year - Timeshift (23.58%) Log Management Tool of the Year - Logstash (33.80%) X Terminal Emulator of the Year - Konsole (23.25%) Browser Privacy Solution of the Year - uBlock Origin (38.62%) Privacy Solution of the Year - GnuPG (33.33%) IRC Client of the Year - HexChat (44.83%) Single Board Computer of the Year - Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (58.59%) Virtualization Application of the Year - VirtualBox (53.76%) Container of the Year - Docker (60.58%) Linux/Open Source Podcast of the Year - Bad Voltage/Command Line Heroes/GNU World Order (13.59%) Secure Messaging Application of the Year - Signal (45.63%) Graphics Editor of the Year - GIMP (74.67%) Linux Desktop Vendor of the Year - System76 (52.99%) Linux Laptop Vendor of the Year - System76 (39.86%) Linux Server Vendor of the Year - Dell (31.58%) Email Client of the Year - Thunderbird (57.87%) Clipboard Manager of the Year - Klipper (52.73%) PDF Viewer of the Year - Okular (37.40%) Static Site Generator of the Year - Hugo (32.26%) Screen Recording and Streaming Tool of the Year - OBS Studio (37.21%) Media Server of the Year - Kodi (37.14%) Team Communication Application of the Year - Slack (38.24%) Music Collaboration Platform of the Year - SoundJack (32.00%)
I love a beautiful Linux desktop. There's just something about logging in to find a developer's work of art greeting you. It's refreshing and reminds you that anything is possible with enough time and effort.
With Linux, there have been so many desktops over the years that have absolutely "wowed" me. I believe the first to have ever done that was AfterStep, followed shortly by Enlightenment E16. After that, it was a rather drawn out dry spell of desktops to really evoke an "Huzzah!" from me. If I'm being totally honest, that honor most likely falls on Deepin Desktop. Since Deepin's arrival, I've fancied it the most beautiful desktop on the market.
Imagine my excitement when I found out that ExTiX Linux was to release a new version, based on Deepin Desktop; it was almost (but not quite) palpable. Without hesitation, I downloaded an ISO and spun up a virtual machine. The end result was a mixed bag of feels and disappointment. Let me explain.
A year in the making, Tiny Core Linux 12.0 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series and features up-to-date core components, including the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 10.2, GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.32, GNU Binutils 2.35.1, util-linux 2.36.1, and e2fsprogs 1.45.6.
Busybox 1.33.0 is included as well in this release, but it was patched by the Tiny Core Linux devs to load more than nine extensions and remove the “Module has invalid ELF header” error message. In addition, the busybox-aliases script received various additions.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.13.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This release includes a security update for openssl.
We are excited to announce the release of pfSense€® Plus software version 21.02 and pfSense Community Edition (CE) software version 2.5.0, now available for new installations and upgrades!
This is the first release of pfSense Plus software, formerly known as Factory Edition. For more details about the distinctions between pfSense Plus and pfSense CE, read the pfSense Plus Announcement. Customers running the Factory Edition of pfSense software version 2.4.5-p1 and older can upgrade in-place automatically to pfSense Plus software version 21.02 as with any other previous upgrade.
These versions are the result of an immense development effort taking place over the last several years. Over 550 issues are resolved, including bug fixes, new features, and other significant changes.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved plans for "Fedora Kinoite" as the newest spin to debut this autumn alongside Fedora 35.
Fedora Kinoite is basically an immutable desktop spin that is akin to Fedora Silverblue but making use of the KDE Plasma desktop rather than the GNOME Shell. Fedora Fedora Kinoite will make use of RPM-OSTree, Flatpaks, Podman, and other technologies employed by Fedora Silverblue, but it will be using the KDE desktop.
Despite the pandemic, the power of the open source community of developers working together virtually around the world has helped Project OWL (Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics) advance the ClusterDuck Protocol (CDP) wireless technology in the past year.
Lots of time has passed since the last status update, and Debian is going into pre-release freeze, so let us report a bit about the most recent changes: Debian/bullseye will have Plasma 5.20.5, Frameworks 5.78, Apps 20.12. Debian/experimental already carries Plasma 5.21 and Frameworks 5.79, and that is also the level at the OSC builds.
[...]
We are in soft freeze now, and only targeted fixes are allowed, but Bullseye is carrying a good mixture consisting of the KDE Frameworks 5.78, including several backports of fixes from 5.79 to get smooth operation. Plasma 5.20.5, again with several cherry picks for bugs will be in Bullseye, too. The KDE/Apps are mostly at 20.12 level, and the KDE PIM group packages (akonadi, kmail, etc) are at 20.08.
4. Partner Program – Ubuntu Linux: Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu Linux, says the company’s channel partner program has grown by 5X in three years. Moreover, Canonical’s partners have expanded Ubuntu’s global presence to several new markets, such as Russia, India and Africa, the company says. The partners, spanning all major industries, are building successful businesses around Canonical’s open source technology for the Internet of Things, data centers, private, public, and hybrid clouds, the company says.
Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced today that its channel partner program has grown by five times in three years and expanded its global presence to several new markets, such as Russia, India and Africa. These partners, spanning all major industries, are building successful businesses around Canonical’s industry-leading open source technology for the Internet of Things, data centers, private, public, and hybrid clouds.
The company also announced that Regis Paquette, Vice President Global Alliances, Public Cloud and Channels, has been included by CRN€®, a brand of The Channel Company, in its 2021 Channel Chiefs honor.
The impressive momentum of Canonical’s channels program is the result of four different initiatives. First, the deeper engagements with all major OEMs such as IBM, Dell EMC, Ericsson etc. to help them build solutions based on Canonical technologies.
Avnet has launched several Raspberry Pi-inspired MaaXBoard SBCs based on NXP i.MX processors through their Embest subsidiary starting in 2019 with MaaXBoard single board computer powered by an NXP i.MX 8M processor, and following by MaaxBoard Mini with NXP i.NX 8M Mini SoC in 2020.
The latest model is MaaXBoard Nano SBC with an NXP i.MX 8M Nano quad-core Cortex-A53 processor best suited to audio and edge IoT applications.
The IndieGoGo campaign for the F(x)Tec Pro1-X smartphone has received over $1 million in funding and the first units were shipped out to “super early bird” backers at the end of January. But now the team has run into supply issues.
Specifically, the Snapdragon 835 at the heart of the phone has reached the end-of-life stage and is no longer available, meaning no more phones can be built. This affects both the original Pro1 model (more on that in a minute) as well as the Pro1-X, which was designed for XDA-Developers (both are quite similar and use the 835 chipset).
The team has chosen the Snapdragon 662 as a replacement. It’s a mid-range chipset so some performance degradation is expected, though there are actually several upsides to going with a more recent chip (it was announced in January 2020). Some disadvantages as well, mind you, besides the performance drop.
For those either needing a well-built, fanless computer that can run fine as a Linux desktop or are looking for an industrial-rated edge computing system, the Helix 500 is an interesting product from OnLogic (formerly, Logic Supply) that fills the space for a dependable, petite PC and ships with Windows, Linux, or even no OS at all if just preferring to load your own operating system of choice.
I have been meaning to play around with MQTT for some time now, and finally decided to take the plunge one evening last week. I had three cheap home temperature and humidity sensors, and was bothered that they often didn’t agree. Surprisingly, while the analog one had a calibration adjustment in the back, I have no idea how to calibrate the two digital ones. I took this as a sign that it was time to learn MQTT and be able to install my own, accurate sensors. Of course, I began by ordering the cheapest sensors I could find, but I can always upgrade later on.
Avnet’s “MaaXBoard Nano” SBC runs Android or Linux on an i.MX8M Nano with 1GB DDR4, 16GB eMMC, GbE, WiFi/BT, MIPI-DSI/CSI, 4x USB 2.0, and 40-pin GPIO.
In 2019, Avnet’s Embest unit launched a $60 MaaXBoard SBC featuring NXP’s i.MX8M and followed up last year with a similar MaaXBoard Mini based on the i.MX8M Mini. Now, the company has has opened pre-orders for a similarly Raspberry Pi-like SBC with the slightly lower powered, VPU-less i.MX8M Nano. Like the other MaaxBoards, this does not appear to ship with open specifications and community support, but images will be available for Android 9.0 and Linux.
The watch can be used as an IoT terminal controller, a wearable device, for STEM education, DIY project, and thanks to the addition of the microphone, voice interaction is now possible.
The watch ships with a 30cm Micro USB cable for charging and programming. Documentation and software support should have improved since last year and you’ll find both respectively on Readthedocs and Github (Arduino). It’s also possible to program the watch with MicroPython or the ESP-IDF, but there may be less documentation, and most people should probably stick to Arduino programming on this watch.
Fuchsia has always come across as a somewhat mysterious thing ever since its inception. Google has been secretly working on it since 2016, but it was only in May 2019 that the search giant acknowledged its existence, stating it’s nothing more than an experiment. Unlike Android and Chrome OS, which rely on the Linux kernel, Fuchsia uses a new microkernel called Zircon. Google describes Fuchsia as an open-source OS that’s “secure, updatable, inclusive, and pragmatic”.
Multiple theories are floating around what Google plans to accomplish with Fuchsia, with one of the most popular being Fuchsia eventually replacing both Android and Chrome OS. Seeing how this OS is still in its infancy compared to the established Android platform, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, though. However, if a new Google proposal (via Thurrott) is anything to go by, it appears that Fuchsia could add support for running native Android and Linux apps.
The LibreOffice team has been working on a port to browser-hosted WebAssembly, and hopes for a working demo by summer 2021. "It's the way the industry is heading," said Document Foundation board member Thorsten Behrens.
Browser-based versions of the open-source office productivity suite already exist in the form of Collabora Online and LibreOffice Online (LOOL), mainly developed by Collabora.
The Document Foundation, steward of the LibreOffice project, said that it is "not planning to develop and fund a cloud solution similar to existing products from Google and Microsoft" because this is "not in line with the original mission of the project."
Instead, it has provided the code for other providers to deploy, although the foundation added that this code is missing essential pieces, such as authentication, which are down to the provider.
GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them.
It’s clear that anyone is free to create derivative works based on all plugins and themes that are considered derivative works.
That said, the WordPress.org GNU Public License page acknowledges there may be legal gray areas about what is considered a derivative work.
Most people are using Windows as their main PC operating system. However, if you’re new to programming, you may see a lot of references to Linux byprofessionals in the field. This is also an operating system; in fact, one of the most popular, Android, according to the Linux official website, is powered by this OS.
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Linux boasts a closely-knit thriving community of programmers and developers. Being an open source-code operating system, it lets its users connect easily. They learn from each other and help one another whenever the system experiences any disruption.
The pull request is pending that would allow Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) to be enabled when building the Linux 5.12 kernel with this alternative compiler. The initial pull request has the compiler optimization work ready for the core infrastructure and 64-bit ARM (AArch64) while the x86_64 support isn't expected until the Linux 5.13 cycle.
Last month we outlined the Clang LTO ambitions for the mainline Linux kernel and it getting into position for 5.12. Clang Link Time Optimizations are being pursued for greater performance as well as being necessary for supporting Clang's Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) handling with the kernel.
LLVM 11.1.0 has been tagged as a special release to deal with ABI breakage on LLVM 11.0.
While these days LLVM's versioning scheme rarely sees a x.1.0 release with generally just sticking to bumping the major version number and squeezing in a point release or two per cycle, LLVM 11.1.0 is out today as a special release between LLVM 11.0.1 and the upcoming LLVM 12.0.
Now that all of the hardware has been considered, you need to figure out what software you will run on your new system. Of course, multi-booting is an option. But be sure to consider the cost of any operating systems or other software you wish to install in your overall budget.
In the first article in this series, I explained how the tech industry divides people and roles into "technical" or "non-technical" categories and the problems associated with this. The tech industry makes it difficult for people interested in tech—but not coding—to figure out where they fit in and what they can do.
If you're interested in technology or open source but aren't interested in coding, there are roles available for you. Any of these positions at a tech company likely require somebody who is tech-savvy but does not necessarily write code. You do, however, need to know the terminology and understand the product.
I've recently noticed the addition of the word "technical" onto job titles such as technical account manager, technical product manager, technical community manager, etc. This mirrors the trend a few years ago where the word "engineer" was tacked onto titles to indicate the role's technical needs. After a while, everybody has the word "engineer" in their title, and the classification loses some of its allure.
In my last post I once again struggled with augmenting classes from CORE. That struggle wasn’t needed at all as I didn’t change state of the object with the added method. For doing more advanced stuff I might have to. By sticking my hand so deep into the guts of Rakudo I might get myself burned. Since what I want to do is tying my code to changes the compiler anyway, I might as well go all in and decent into nqp-land.
Almost every Linux distribution comes with a version of Python included in the default system packages. But on occasion, due to some reasons, you might not find Python installed on an Ubuntu system.
Let's take a closer look at how you can install Python on Ubuntu, with a brief guide on updating the Python package as well.
Curious about how you can send an SMS message from Python for free? This article presents a ready-made Python function to send an SMS message. Simply copy-paste the function into your own Python program and voilà, you are all set. The demonstrated Python code to send an SMS, builds on the Textbelt web API. Textbelt allows you to send one SMS for free every day. Great for server monitoring purposes, where you do not expect issue on a regular basis.
On Linux and Unix-based operating systems, pipes are very useful since they are a simple way to achieve IPC (inter-process communication). When we connect two processes in a pipeline, the output of the first one is used as the input of the second one. To build a so called “anonymous” pipe, all we have to do is to use the | operator. Anonymous, or unnamed pipes last just as long as the processes they connect. There is, however, another type of pipe we can use: a FIFO, or named pipe. In this article we will see how named pipes work and in what they are different from the standard pipes.
Cranelift is a code generator written in the Rust programming language that aims to be a fast code generator, which outputs machine code that runs at reasonable speeds.
The Cranelift compilation model consists in compiling functions one by one, holding extra information about external entities, like external functions, memory addresses, and so on. This model allows for concurrent and parallel compilation of individual functions, which supports the goal of fast compilation. It was designed this way to allow for just-in-time (JIT) compilation of WebAssembly binary code in Firefox, although its scope has broadened a bit. Nowadays it is used in a few different WebAssembly runtimes, including Wasmtime and Wasmer, but also as an alternative backend for Rust debug compilation, thanks to cg_clif.
A classic compiler design usually includes running a parser to translate the source to some form of intermediate representations, then run optimization passes onto them, then feeds this to the machine code generator.
This blog post focuses on the final step, namely the concepts that are involved in code generation, and what they map to in Cranelift. To make things more concrete, we'll take a specific instruction, and see how it's translated, from its creation down to code generation. At each step of the process, I'll provide a short (ahem) high-level explanation of the concepts involved, and I'll show what they map to in Cranelift, using the example instruction. While this is not a tutorial detailing how to add new instructions in Cranelift, this should be an interesting read for anyone who's interested in compilers, and this could be an entry point if you're interested in hacking on the Cranelift codegen crate.
Go 1.16, the latest iteration of the programming language used in infrastructure projects like Docker and Kubernetes, has been released, and adds support for 64-bit ARM architecture on macOS as well as packages to facilitate file bundling and accessing metrics.
With no language changes present in the release, the embed package which is now part of the core library is amongst the more stand-out features of Go 1.16. Once imported, a program can use the package via the //go:embed directive followed by a variable declaration (string type, or a slice of a byte type, or FS) to embed files and work with their contents.
Today the Go team is very happy to announce the release of Go 1.16. You can get it from the download page.
The new embed package provides access to files embedded at compile time using the new //go:embed directive. Now it is easy to bundle supporting data files into your Go programs, making developing with Go even smoother. You can get started using the embed package documentation. Carl Johnson has also written a nice tutorial, “How to use Go embed”.
Go 1.16 also adds macOS ARM64 support (also known as Apple silicon). Since Apple’s announcement of their new arm64 architecture, we have been working closely with them to ensure Go is fully supported; see our blog post “Go on ARM and Beyond” for more.
Version 1.16 of the Go language is available. New features include an "embed" package, Apple Arm64 support, use of modules by default, and build-performance improvements; see the release notes for details.
The new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, is worth seeing, talking about and analyzing with a variety of historical lenses. The historical lenses include the history of Black Cinema, revolutionary cinema, African American history and the history of political repression in the US in general.
Every once in a while, an important political film gets released by a major Hollywood company, even though the company’s owners don’t fully grasp how the message of the film might detract from their usual class interests. In that context, Judas is like the 1973 film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Like Judas, Spook was produced by Black men who took it upon themselves to raise money, make the film against all odds and then approach Hollywood for distribution. In 1973, United Artist decided to back the film, thinking it could make money as a typical blaxploitation movie. Shortly after it was released and its political significance emerged, United Artists, with alleged encouragement from Hoover’s FBI, pulled the film (even though it was making money), destroyed all but one of the prints and stored the negative under a different name so it would be hard to find[1]. In 1973, as in 1969 when Chairman Fred and many other revolutionaries were murdered, the FBI was confident that it was winning. Today in 2021, law enforcement in general is having a crisis of identity, and the FBI in particular is far removed from the infallible G-man image that once appeared on TV, as portrayed by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Cointelpro no doubt exists under a different name, but more and more people are aware that the FBI and other law-enforcement are not above plotting political assassinations.
"If we continue with large ongoing emissions as we are at present, we will commit the world to meters of sea level rise over coming centuries."
The 104-page report also lays out “synergies” in space nuclear activities between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. military, something not advanced explicitly since the founding of NASA as a civilian agency supposedly in 1958.
The report states: “Space nuclear propulsion and power systems have the potential to provide the United States with military advantages…NASA could benefit programmatically by working with a DoD [Department of Defense] program having national security objectives.”’
In other words, what “Artificial Intelligence” really delivers is an ever growing decoupling of the ability to get something done as specified, from any need to be (humanly) intelligent to do so. I already covered this fact, explaining why robots can NEVER dance. GPT-3 is the latest, text-specific development in this decoupling process.
We've talked for years about how telecom monopolies like Comcast and AT&T have ghost written laws in more than twenty states, banning or hamstringing towns and cities looking to build their own broadband networks. We've also noted with COVID clearly illustrating how broadband is essential for education, opportunity, employment, and healthcare, such restrictions are looking dumber than ever. Voters should have every right to make local infrastructure decisions for themselves, and if big ISPs and armchair free market policy wonks don't want that to happen, incumbent ISPs should provide faster, cheaper, better service.
The South African variant has been given a few designations: 501Y.V2 or B.1.351.€ Within it lies a mutation –N501Y – which suggests a greater degree of contagiousness.€ Another, E484k, might bypass the human immune system, thereby blunting the effectiveness of the vaccines.
A study on the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against N501Y and E484k mutations found that the vaccine did still work, but with less efficacy.€ The authors of the study treaded carefully, making it clear that the study had made assumptions about levels of neutralisation.€ The biological functions of N501Y and other mutations also remained “to be defined for viral replication, pathogenesis, and/or transmission in animal models.”
"We're seeing more and more how the pesticide industry uses the U.S. government to aggressively push its agenda on the international stage and quash any attempt by people in other countries to take control of their food supply."
"This crisis is brought to you by deregulation."
I had been debating whether to write about something other than COVID-19 this week, given how thoroughly the pandemic has come to dominate the blog (at least my contributions), to the point where it seems that I write about little else. On the other hand, there’s a topic that’s been bugging me, a niggling annoying bit of antivaccine disinformation that I keep seeing as it pops up hither, thither, and yon in antivaccine social media and on antivax websites and blogs, to the point where I finally feel as though I have to break down and address it. Such is life.
The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it has signed a collaboration agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create open source software that accelerates United States government technology research and development innovation.
Under the agreement, DARPA and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella (US Government Open Programmable Secure (US GOV OPS) that allows United States Government projects, their ecosystem, and open community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, Edge, AI, Standards, Programmability, and IOT among other technologies. The project formation encourages ecosystem players to support US Government initiatives to create the latest in technology software.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openssl and ruby-mechanize), Fedora (chromium, jasper, roundcubemail, spice-vdagent, and webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (python-bottle), Oracle (dotnet, kernel, and Unbreakable Enterprise kernel-container), Red Hat (redhat-ds:11, RHDM, and RHPAM), SUSE (jasper, kernel, and screen), and Ubuntu (thunderbird and wpa).
We are proud to announce that DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, published a Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.
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Virginia: Speak Up for Real Privacy
The bill has passed through the House Committee on Technology, Communications, and Innovation and is headed to a floor vote in the House this week.
The US government has more power to violate constitutional rights at the border or within 100 miles of it than it does elsewhere in the country. This differentiation has long been used to violate the privacy of American citizens when they cross through the Constitution-exempt zone surrounding the United States and her airports. Importantly, this is a separate type of privacy violation than many arms of the government are actively participating in by buying location data and other data from citizens’ phones from third parties instead of obtaining it from the device itself.
The press release of the Council of the EU has a good summary of its main features. Importantly, the ePrivacy Regulation will cover not just electronic communications content, but also communications metadata. Also welcome is that the rules will apply to machine-to-machine data, for example generated by Internet of Things devices. Unfortunately, one of worst proposals in the new text concerns metadata. As is well recognized now, metadata is arguably richer and more revealing than even content, and therefore requires strict safeguards in order to preserve privacy. The Council of the EU wants to create a huge loophole that would allow companies to process metadata for a purpose other than that for which it was collected, even when this is not based on the user’s consent. This would be subject to a variety of vague “safeguards”, including the use of pseudonymization, which offers very little protection for privacy.
Signal has managed to gain a huge number of active users after Elon Musk’s tweet and numerous other recommendations from key personalities that also include Edward Snowden who usually recommends using Signal.
Undoubtedly, Signal is one of the most private WhatsApp alternatives available out there.
However, some recent events that involved some security researchers from the Anti-Censorship community reporting a critical flaw for Signal’s censorship circumvention technique for Iran has led me to think how Signal as a company responds and presents itself to the open-source community in general.
"If we want drug war reparations," said Drug Policy Alliance's executive director, "we need to identify ALL the ways the drug war intentionally harms our communities."
You may believe that abortion is murder but capital punishment is not. I believe that abortion is serious and tragic, but still it is better that it be safe, legal and rare. I believe capital punishment is cruel and unusual and has been too capriciously and unjustly applied.
I believe that the scientific method, posing a hypothesis and testing it to see if it is true, indicates we are in the midst of a human-caused global climate emergency that will take a new level of cooperation among all the nations in the world. You may believe that the science of climate shows inconsistencies and that warming and cooling are natural cycles independent of human activity.
Former US presidential son-in-law is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize over his role in Arab-Israeli normalisation.
The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta has published a new investigation into alleged extra-judicial killings carried out by security forces in Russia’s Chechnya. Reportedly, at least 27 people were killed in the region’s capital, Grozny, in January 2017. In the first part of the investigation, published on Monday, February 15, correspondent Elena Milashina references official documents allegedly obtained from the Chechen Interior Ministry, which indicate that law enforcement officers did in fact detain a number of the deceased. According to police officials in the region, however, these arrests never took place. Meduza summarizes the main findings from the investigation.
"I wanted the court to provide justice, to have mercy on us," the lead plaintiff in the case said following the ruling.
Ecuadorians went to the polls on February 7 to elect a new president, vice president and National Assembly. A week before the election, a widely reposted Reuters article (1/29/21) by Alexandra Valencia and Venezuela-based reporter Brian Ellsworth explained that “nostalgia for better times under former leftist president Rafael Correa has pushed one of his proteges into the lead.” The protégé in question is Andrés Arauz, a 36-year-old economist who was part of the Correa government’s economic team, including a stint as head of its central bank, during the ten years that it was in office (2007–17).
Ecuador’s presidential front-runner says the country is facing a “double crisis” of COVID-19 and austerity. “We need a renewal in our politics,” Andrés Arauz tells Democracy Now! The left-wing economist secured nearly 33% of the vote in the first round of Ecuador’s presidential election on February 7 but fell short of the 40% needed to win outright. He will face right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso or Indigenous candidate Yaku Pérez in a runoff election on April 11, depending on the results of a recount after both candidates secured just over 19% of the vote. Arauz has pledged to end austerity measures imposed by Ecuador’s outgoing right-wing President Lenín Moreno and is close to former President Rafael Correa, who led the country from 2007 to 2017 and has been credited with lifting over a million Ecuadorians out of poverty. Arauz served in Correa’s administration as director of the Central Bank and later as a minister. Arauz says he would seek to work with the Biden administration, if elected, and rejects attempts to interfere in Latin American affairs. “We need to talk about peace, democracy, development as the key issues in Latin America,” says Arauz. “We do not want foreign interference in our region. … We hope the Biden administration will stay away from trying to create division within the region.”
"The Progressive International stands with the people of Haiti, striking across the nation against the dictatorship of Jovenel Moïse."
But so far a UN-wide cash crunch means the 16-member team, which has a mandate “to document alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by all parties in Libya since the start of 2016”, hasn’t actually done any investigating on the ground. The UN adopted a proposal in October to postpone the investigation due a lack of funds, and Olka Nakajo, the mission’s Geneva-based interim coordinator, confirmed to The New Humanitarian last week that it was still to really get underway for the same reason. “Due to the liquidity crisis [at the UN]... the mission has not yet started,” Nakajo said. “A start-up independent team has… initially identified key interlocuteurs, including civil society, regional organisations, and… contacts outside the country,” she said, adding that experts would be deployed to Tunis, where they will be based, as soon as money does arrive.
Wadah al-Keesh is used to handling dead bodies; fighters and civilians abandoned on Libya’s front lines. But a decade after the violent revolt that unseated Muammar Gaddafi – and after yet another year of fighting – recovering people from mass graves in a town notorious for brutal violence against civilians is different. “The first body I touched, I felt intimidated,” recalled 31-year-old al-Keesh, one of a 30-member government forensic team combing through Tarhouna’s fields and emptied prisons. “The body was so decomposed that if you didn’t carry it carefully, it would break.” It wasn’t just the fragility of the human remains – left out or buried longer than he was accustomed to – that startled him. It was the eerie emptiness of the town. During 2019 and 2020, Tarhouna became a strategic base for eastern forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, commander of the self-styled Libyan National Army, as they tried to take the capital, Tripoli, from the internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA). When al-Keesh arrived in June 2020, the clashes had just petered out. Around 16,000 people had recently fled Tarhouna – some 60 kilometres south of the capital – and its surroundings.
But Senator Bill Cassidy voting with the Democrats to convict Trump doesn’t represent a change in his patrician support of the fossil fuel€ industry.€
“Why is it that American politicians and the American media support citizen uprisings in China, Poland, South Africa, and throughout the world, but when an American citizen is killed during an uprising against a corrupt American government the citizens are at fault?” @DonBlankenship posted on€ Twitter.
If you think it’s a given that the phrase “Green New Deal” is toxic to Democrats in Republican-leaning districts, you might want to talk to Chloe Maxmin of Maine. In November, she unseated the state’s GOP Senate minority leader, Dana Dow, with 51 percent of the vote in rural, working-class District 13.
If you hadn't noticed, the United States isn't really prepared for climate change. In part because corporations and disinformation mills have convinced countless Americans a destabilizing climate isn't actually happening. But also because we were already perpetually underinvesting in our core infrastructure before the symptoms of an unstable climate began to manifest. It's a massive problem that, as John Oliver highlighted six years ago, doesn't get the same attention as other pressing issues of the day. You know, like the latest influencer drama or mortal threat posed by TikTok.
Isn't it time to stop creating dangerous crude oil infrastructure?
Opposition to fracking and fossil fuel pipelines "are the exact reasons Deb Haaland is the right pick for Interior secretary," said one advocacy group.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R.–Mo.), one of the right-wing ringleaders of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity (2/5/21) he is under attack—not by federal law enforcement, civil rights groups or ANTIFA, but by “woke capital,” a cabal of left-wing business elites using their commercial might to silence conservatives and promote cultural liberalism.
Immanuel Kant has the following quote we could apply to linking the Marxism of Proyect with the Marxism or Street: “The manifold of representations can be given in an intuition which is purely sensible, that is, nothing but receptivity; and the form of this intuition can lie a priori in our faculty of representation, without being anything more than the mode in which the subject is affected. But the combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses, and cannot, therefore, be already contained in the pure form of sensible intuition.”
What does this mean? Perhaps it is best explained through the concept of an integer, in its broadest sense. One item could arise from direct contact with our senses and our perception of the world around us. However the combination of items cannot come through the senses, rather it must be constructed, through the being who conceptualized each item individually. Not simple, but obvious enough.
"We have won $15 in cities and states across the country. And now, it is time to win $15 nationwide."
If we are to do anything about these human tragedies the first task is to not hide behind concepts and narratives that understate the problem.
"I'm gonna fight as hard as I can, and I believe that we will succeed in including the minimum wage in the reconciliation bill," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Whose rights matter in pandemic America? Not those of poor Americans, that's for sure.
"When will you give us a living wage?" asked one activist with the Poor People's Campaign.
Kathy Brenneman hears plenty of taxpayer horror stories in her receptionist’s job at a tax preparation service in Waldorf, Maryland. But this past year, the spiraling crisis at the Internal Revenue Service collided with her personal life as well.
Brenneman had filed an amendment to her 2018 taxes via snail mail, along with a $108 check to pay the balance due, in early March 2020, when the virus that causes COVID-19 was first spreading across America. A few weeks later, as the nation went into lockdown, Congress tasked the IRS with delivering $270 billion in economic impact payments. As the agency struggled to administer the unprecedented program during a pandemic, Brenneman’s tiny tax payment may have gotten lost in the shuffle.
Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
On Tuesday, February 16, St. Petersburg’s Third Court of Cassation allowed the 13-year prison sentence given to historian and activist Yuri Dmitriev to stand. Following this ruling, the investigative outlet Proekt released a report connecting Yuri Dmitriev’s persecution to presidential aide Anatoly Seryshev — the former head of the Karelian FSB.
On February 8, 2021, at the initiative of the Permanent Representation of Poland to the European Union, two of Alexey Navalny’s associates — Leonid Volkov and Vladimir Ashurkov — held a meeting with Western diplomats. According to Polish state radio network Polskie Radio 24, which published a report from the meeting, the ambassadors of Great Britain, the U.S., Canada, and Ukraine were also present, along with representatives of the EU’s diplomatic corps. According to Reuters, Volkov and Ashurkov spoke about the West’s policy towards Russia, including possible sanctions against individuals in Putin’s inner circle.
Introducing key members of his national security team, Joe Biden exulted, “America is back. Ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table. Ready to confront our adversaries, and not reject our allies.” In his confirmation hearings, Secretary of State Antony Blinken—said to have a “mind meld” with the president—echoed the sentiment: “America at its best still has a greater ability than any country on earth to mobilize others for the greater good.”
The 43 Republican senators who blocked the conviction of Donald Trump for the high crime of inciting insurrection to overturn the results of the 2020 election refused—for reasons of ideological delusion and blind partisanship—to hold a guilty man to account.
Donald Trump’s relentless campaign to overturn the election he lost culminated in the mob that invaded the Capitol. His abuse of power and dereliction of duty clearly merited impeachment and conviction. His guilt is not in question; the masterful presentation of the case in the Senate trial by House impeachment managers left no doubt.
"The problem with Trump and McConnell attacking each other is that they're both kinda right about each other," noted one observer.€
The blatant evidence of their scorn that irks me today is the most recent $600 “stimulus” payment. My objection may seem like a little thing, but it’s the little things that should tip us off to their distain, like when people briefly rolls their eyes when you offer an opinion. Not only do most nations (with less wealth than ours) offer their citizens medical care during this pandemic, but they also offer their people monthly checks, a UBI, so they don’t starve to death. So far, the U.S. has offered two payments, both woefully inadequate for even the month in which they were offered. Congress argues endlessly about these payments. They say they are not needed. They say they are too much. They say we should be looking to do other things other than pay citizens to survive. This is because the subtext of the discussion heralds back to the American myth that we are rugged individuals with bootstraps that we are responsible for pulling up (despite that violating Newtonian physics), and if we can’t do for ourselves…well, they don’t say it publicly, but if not, we can just fucking die. We don’t deserve to live unless we are elite, entitled million- or billionaires that graduated from Ivy League schools.
However, these are the large issues that should be obvious. The telltale sign, the eye-rolling moment, that signals just how much contempt our “representatives” feel for us regarding these payments, is that this $600 installment was issued in the form of a debit card rather than a paper check. Review the fine print that accompanied your “stimulus” card. If you wish to use it, unless you memorize the exact circumstances to avoid them, you will be charged fees. There is a fee for using certain ATMs. There is a five dollar fee if you want to shift it to your very own bank, though they will waive that fee the first time you do it.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has authorized a 9/11-style commission to further investigate the January 6 insurrection and the actions that led up to it, as calls grow for the criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump after his acquittal in his second Senate impeachment trial. The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal says House impeachment managers presented “a fairly compelling case for criminal liability” for Donald Trump over the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “I think there’s a case for indictment. I think we should at least try,” he says.
Mark Meckler has a long history of creating organizations to mobilize far-right activists.
On Monday Parler announced to the world that it was back with a new host (and a new interim CEO after the board fired founder and CEO John Matze a few weeks ago). The "board" is controlled by the (until recently, secret) other founder: Rebekah Mercer, who famously also funded Cambridge Analytica, a company built upon sucking up social media data and using it to influence elections. When Matze was fired, he told Reuters that the company was being run by two people since he'd been removed: Matthew Richardson and Mark Meckler.
If citizens do not have€ the€ basic knowledge to defend our democracy, they will be drawn to€ the€ delusional and irresponsible declarations and promises of immoral leaders who build their base by spinning lies.
What we saw Saturday was a profile in cowardice. Had there been a secret ballot, the Senate vote to convict Donald Trump likely would have been overwhelming.
We either have a future based on lies, violence, and authoritarianism—or on unyielding truth, unshakeable civility, and democracy.
"Donald Trump needs to be held accountable for deliberately inciting and colluding with white supremacists to stage a coup, in his continuing efforts to disenfranchise African-American voters."
More than ever, many entrenched Democrats are worried about primary challenges from the left. Such fears are all to the good.
From what I can gather the greater number eschew this mythology but stubbornly maintain that the 2020 election was stolen. They don’t necessarily believe it was stolen by space aliens in collusion with the Venezuelan communists who controlled the voting machines. But it was surely stolen by somebody. This is a central unifying doctrinal point for the Trump community.
We’re talking people who appear rational in their daily lives, capable of grasping and accepting empirical research results when they’re at work, repairing their cars, balancing their checkbooks, making medical decisions. They can gauge distances and reverse park, and figure out their remote control devices. Their brains are normal. They realize there is an objective world outside their own minds. But they are unfazed by multiple vote recounts and court judgments. Their brains reject certain objective facts, as though programmed to shut them out.
Cautious international optimism toward Biden is very much based on his commitment to Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement, the JCPOA or nuclear agreement with Iran. Biden and the Democrats excoriated Trump for withdrawing from it and promised to promptly rejoin the deal if elected. But Biden now appears to be hedging his position in a way that risks turning what should be an easy win for the new administration into an avoidable and tragic diplomatic failure.
While it was the United States under Trump that withdrew from the nuclear agreement, Biden is taking the position that the U.S. will not rejoin the agreement or drop its unilateral sanctions until Iran first comes back into compliance. After withdrawing from the agreement, the United States is in no position to make such demands, and Foreign Minister Zarif has clearly and eloquently rejected them, reiterating Iran’s firm commitment that it will return to full compliance as soon as the United States does so.
In recent years, this tale has often been used to encourage social movements to maintain pressure on elected officials, even sympathetic ones, once these politicians assume power. There’s only one problem: The story isn’t true. Upon examination it has all the markings of an apocryphal legend, and it is highly unlikely that the meeting in question ever took place. Yet because the parable raises one of the most crucial issues of our current political moment — how those who voted against Trump should interact with the new administration — it is valuable to consider what the story gets right about the relationship between movements and presidents, and what it gets wrong.
As Joe Biden begins his first term in the White House, the stakes of this discussion are considerable. Far from welcoming outsider pressure, politicians committed to insider dealmaking have a long track record of dismissing and disparaging critics who push them to do better — and they have often preferred to demobilize the supporters who got them elected rather than face heat from potentially unruly movements. Organizers committed to stopping such demobilization must accept that it will likely earn them the ire of the White House.
Last summer, California's anti-SLAPP law gave MSNBC host Rachel Maddow an early exit from a bogus defamation lawsuit brought by one of the few "news" outlets that's farther to the right than Fox News, One America News.
Get your tickets for Section€ 230€ Matters before February€ 23rd€ €»
Out of the major foreign social media platforms used in Turkey, only Twitter has not appointed a local representative and subject itself to Turkish jurisdiction over its content and users’ policies. Coincidentally, Twitter has been drawn into a series of moderation decisions that push the company into direct conflict with Turkish politicians. On February 2nd, Twitter decided that three tweets by the Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu violated its rules about hateful conduct and abusive behavior policy. Access to these tweets was restricted rather than removed as Twitter considered them still in the public interest. Similarly, Twitter decided to remove and delete a tweet by the AKP coalition MHP leader Devlet Bahçel, where he tweeted that student protestors were “terrorists” and "poisonous snakes" “whose heads needed to be crushed”, as the tweet violated Twitter’s violent threats policy.
Yaman Akdeniz, a founder of the Turkish Freedom of Expression Association, told EFF€
As in many other countries, politicians in Turkey are now angry at Twitter both for failing to sufficiently censor criticism of Turkish policies, and for sanctioning senior domestic political figures for their violations of the platform’s terms of service.€
Last year Cloudflare was ordered to block access to the sites of customers who provided illegal IPTV services. The CDN provider appealed the injunctions, arguing that it's merely a neutral intermediary, but without result. Two separate orders released over the past several days confirm that Cloudflare must block domain names and IP-addresses of the pirate IPTV services.
Moscow’s Savelovsky District Court has dismissed the defamation lawsuit filed by Kremlin-linked oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin against Meduza and editor-in-chief Ivan Kolpakov, Dovod chief editor Ilya Kosygin, and politician Maxim Shevchenko.
Jailed Mediazona editor-in-chief Sergey Smirnov has filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), reports the rights organization Apologia Protesta. This comes after a Russian court sentenced him to 25 days administrative arrest for reposting a joke on Twitter.
A state prosecutor has asked Moscow’s Babushinsky District Court to fine opposition politician Alexey Navalny 950,000 rubles (nearly $13,000) for slandering a World War II veteran, Meduza’s correspondent reported from the courtroom on Tuesday, February 16.
“The emails we received raise many questions about what the LAPD wanted to do with this video,” said EFF Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia. “Police could have gathered hours of footage of people engaged in First-Amendment-protected activity, with a vague hope that they could find evidence of something illegal. LAPD should tell the public how many hours of surveillance footage it gathered around these protests, and why.”
EFF filed its public records request with LAPD after widespread complaints about police tactics during the protests in May and June of 2020. After receiving the emails in response to our request, we asked for clarification from the LAPD about what it was looking for and how much video it wanted. The agency said simply that it was attempting to “identify those involved in criminal behavior.”
“Outdoor surveillance cameras like Ring have the potential to provide the police with video footage covering every inch of an entire neighborhood. This poses an incredible risk to First Amendment rights,” said Guariglia. “People are less likely to exercise their right to political speech, protest, and assembly if they know that police can get video of these actions with just an email to people with Ring cameras.”
This rush of national regulations started with Germany’s 2017 “NetzDG” law, which compels internet platforms to remove or block content without a court order and imposes draconian fines on companies that don’t proactively submit to the country's own content-removal rules. Since NetzDG entered into force, Venezuela, Australia, Russia, India, Kenya, the Philippines, and Malaysia have followed with their own laws€ or been discussing laws similar to the German example.€
NetzDG, and several of its copycats, require social media platforms with more than two million users to appoint a local representative to receive content takedown requests from public authorities and government access to data requests. NetzDG also requires platforms to remove or disable content that appears to be “manifestly illegal” within 24 hours of notice that the content exists on their platform. Failure to comply with these demands subjects companies to draconian fines (and even raises the specter of blocking of their services). This creates a chilling effect on free expression: platforms will naturally choose to err on the side of removing gray area content rather than risk the punishment.€
Indonesia’s NetzDG variant—dubbed MR5—is the latest example. It entered into force in November 2020, and, like some others, goes significantly further than its German inspiration. In fact, the Indonesian government is exploring new lows in harsh, intrusive, and non-transparent Internet regulation. The MR5 regulation, issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (Kominfo), seeks to tighten the government’s grip over digital content and users’ data.€
US borders continue to be lawless places. Not because there's more criminal activity there, but because the Constitution that protects us away from borders (and international airports, etc.) barely applies at all within 100 miles of them.
Guatemala City— On January 18, hundreds of Guatemalan soldiers armed with batons and wooden poles, backed by the Guatemalan National Civilian Police, violently confronted and dispersed thousands of Honduran migrants and asylum seekers who had formed a caravan in the hope of reaching the United States.
According to emails obtained by EFF, the LAPD sent requests to Amazon Ring users specifically targeting footage of Black-led protests against police violence that occurred in cities across the country last summer. While it is clear that police departments and federal law enforcement across the country used many different technologies to spy on protests, including aerial surveillance and semi-private camera networks, this is the first documented evidence that a police department specifically requested footage from networked home surveillance devices related to last summer’s political activity.
A map of Ring-police partnerships in the United States. Clicking the map will bring you to an interactive version.
In May 2019, LAPD became the 240th public safety agency to sign a formal partnership with Ring and it's associated app, Neighbors. That number has now skyrocketed to more than 2,000 government agencies. The partnerships allow police to use a law-enforcement portal to canvass local residents for footage.
When a young Chuck Schumer arrived at Harvard in 1967 as a freshman, he joined the great political stirring of those years—who could resist it? But Abbie Hoffman he was not. “I was faced with what Alexander Hamilton called mobocracy,” Schumer recalled in his coauthored 2007 book Positively American. He became a College Democrat, canvassed for Eugene McCarthy, and eschewed the radicals. Campus members of the New Left’s Progressive Labor faction horrified him, and he felt “sickened” seeing protesters scream at cops. “The police weren’t pigs. They were the people I’d grown up with. They were my neighbors. My friends. They were the Baileys [imaginary Irish-American Long Islanders with whom Schumer consults on decisions].” Soon enough, Schumer’s party—the College Dems and, of course, their friends the non-college Dems—would pay the price. “By the late ’70s,” Schumer observed, “the Baileys did not trust the Democrats anymore, and the Democrats weren’t listening to the Baileys.”
How is this in any way consistent with a government that campaigned on ensuring there is a greater voice for the people in Parliament? As Conservative MP Michael Kram told the House of Commons, “I think we could do Canadians a lot of good by withdrawing this bill and rewriting it from scratch to ensure that everyone is included in it and to ensure we have the best legislation we can for Canadians.”
The Northern District of Illinois had a surge in cases last year after creative efforts by the court and Chicago-based firms to fight counterfeiters
We're witnessing the third stage of Nokia's decline. First it failed to stay competitive in the handset business. Then its business model turned ever more trollish and its patent litigation strategies ever more abusive. The third and latest downturn is that Nokia is now abusing not only its patents, but also its procedural options in litigation.
Throughout almost 11 years of blogging about patent litigation, I have acknowledged on numerous occasions when parties played the litigation game smart. Very recently, I even gave automotive supplier Continental credit for an interesting strategy in a Delaware state court, even though I bashed them in 2019 for their U.S. antisuit motion (which indeed went nowhere). Up to a certain point, litigants--whether plaintiffs or defendants--are simply in their right to exercise their procedural rights for tactical purposes. But beyond that point, such behavior is no longer legitimate, even if it is still technically legal. For example, trolls that file dozens of cases against a single defendant over the course of a few months--or simultaneously sue hundreds of defendants--give patent assertion a bad name. I still have the greatest respect for the skills of Nokia's in-house litigators and outside counsel, but in recent months it has gone a bit too far with its withdrawals of cases just on the eve of trials or decisions.
In December, Nokia dropped two patent infringement cases against Daimler in Dusseldorf just before trial (at a point where the court presumably had already spent a lot of time studying the pleadings and preparing the trial), only to refile in Munich. And now, just before Presiding Judge Dr. Thomas Kuehnen ("Kühnen" in German) of one of the patent-specialized divisions of the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court was going to rule on Nokia's interlocutory appeal of the lower Dusseldorf court's preliminary reference to the European Court of Justice, Nokia has withdrawn its appeal. Today a spokesman for the Dusseldorf appeals court informed me by email (appellate case no. 2 W 21/21).
Nokia launched its standard-essential patent (SEP) assertion campaign against Daimler almost two years ago in hopes of gaining so much leverage that it could force Daimler to take a costly license either from Nokia itself or from the Avanci group. It took almost a year and a half before Nokia obtained its first injunction against Daimler, which was in fact its first German SEP injunction ever. On Friday, that one imploded as the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court's Sixth Civil Senate (Presiding Judge: Andreas Voss, "Voß" in German) allowed Daimler to prevent the enforcement by providing security to the amount of 75 million euros. The injunction was not enforced for even one day.
This blog has mentioned Judge Voss many times, but that was almost a decade ago, when he was the presiding judge of the Mannheim Regional Court's Seventh Civil Chamber. A few years ago he became an appellate judge, and with so many disputes being settled relatively early on, I haven't been to that appeals court even once. But Judge Voss's order to stay the enforcement of that Nokia v. Daimler injunction from Mannheim is an extremely important one, not only with a view to that particular dispute but also with a view to many other SEP cases.
[...]
While the injunction is stayed, Nokia is still allowed to enforce its claim for an accounting. If Nokia does so, Daimler has to provide a whole lot of documentation enabling Nokia to quantify its damages claim. That's a major administrative burden on Daimler, yet better than not being able to sell its Mercedes cars.
I may very well talk about this Karlsruhe decision again in the near term, and possibly translate some passages. One tidbit is worth sharing: when calculating the collateral Daimler as to provide, the appeals court mentions the possibility that it could take five years until a final decision--and in that context, the possibility of having to await the ECJ's decision on component-level licensing (as a result of the preliminary reference from Dusseldorf) is mentioned. I found that part very interesting. Nokia will not be amused.
The video call has been a staple of the pandemic, but it seems some European patent attorneys have had enough and want its use in EPO appeal proceedings reviewed.
At issue is whether the EPO is legally allowed to mandate parties to appear by video conference in appeal proceedings. The EPO ruled in December that it is, with the change taking effect on January 1, but a large chunk of European patent attorneys say it shouldn’t be. Just last week, it emerged that a German firm had asked an EPO Board of Appeal (BoA) to refer the issue to its Enlarged Board of Appeal.
In its December 2020 decision, the Federal Circuit sided with the PTO — upholding the PTAB conclusion that Mr. Earley’s claims were obvious based upon Earley’s own prior invention. The court has now also denied Early’s petition for rehearing. Earley represented himself pro se. His filings at the Federal Circuit were not pretty, and I expect that sealed his loss — even if he had a good underlying argument on the merits. Still his innovations are pretty interesting.
Earley’s pending application, APN No. 12/925,235, claims priority back to a 2009 filing date. His prior patent, PAT No. 6,949,842 reaches back to a 2001 provisional and issued as a patent in 2005 — so it was 102(b) prior art.
The north of Italy has a long industrial heritage. Factories and skyscrapers jostle for space along the skyline, which sweeps from the western city of Turin across to the metropolis of Milan, and down into the canals of Venice. This region, and Italy’s northernmost cities, is also home to some of the country’s – and increasingly Europe’s – most important patent courts.
The prominence of the intellectual property sector in this region is not surprising. A nation of inventors, Italy has a proud tradition of protecting its goods, and preserving its scientific and artistic heritage. Years of patent litigation surround its famed espresso coffee machine, first patented in 1884 by Angelo Moriondo in Turin.
But Italy has faced several obstacles conspiring to constrain future innovation in the region. The patent court system is fragmented. Italy’s smaller enterprises regularly appear in one of 21 IP courts to defend their products; legislation dictates each region must have a specialist IP court. Lawyers cite poor English language skills among Italy’s old guard of patent lawyers as strained at best. The economy, which has long fluctuated, has never particularly favoured advancing its IP sytem. At first glance, Italy’s future in patent litigation seems in disarray.
Attorneys say they fear more office actions and increased costs and time if guidelines are applied too strictly
Spain, February 2021. This is a story about rap, graffiti and law. And no, you are not meant to spot the odd one out.
We are in Barcelona, elections are approaching, street artists paint and authorities whitewash. Same old story? Possibly. But this time with music in the background and a freedom-of-expression-special-vibe.
Coming to the merits, last Sunday, Spanish artist Roc Blackblock reproduced on one of the walls of the Plaça de les Tres Xemeneias the face of the king emeritus surrounded by phrases in support of the controversial rapper Hasél, convicted of glorifying terrorism and insulting the crown. Quite interestingly, this work had been authorised by the relevant bodies. Still, less than 24 hours later, Blackblock’s graffiti was erased by a municipal cleaning team. Then, the City Council apologised for its mistake and asked the author of the graffiti to repaint it.
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In this sense, the US Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), which expressly regulates this aspect at its section 106 (d) (1) (B), attributes to the artist the specific right to “prevent any destruction of a work of recognised nature”. Applying this provision, in the famous 5Pointz judgment [Katpost here; 1709 Blog here], the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled in favour of a group of graffiti artists after G&M Realty, without warning, had whitewashed their works, which had been (authorised and) displayed on a collection of dilapidated warehouses in New York City.
However, at this stage, similar rulings are far from being adopted in Europe. Indeed, the right to object to the destruction of a copyright work can be inferred based on the right of integrity accorded under Art. 6bis of the Berne Convention (i.e. “the right to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation”) and national implementations thereof. In Spain, the relevant provision to look at is Article 14.4 LPI which, in line with Berne, states that this right is infringed not only by the deformation, alteration or modification of a work, but also by any "attack against it that would be prejudicial to its legitimate interests or detrimental to its reputation". In this respect, one of the more relevant decisions concerning street-art in this country is the ruling of 6 November 2006 of the Tribunal Supremo of Madrid in case no. 1082/2006 confirming that, in principle, the demolition of the wall on which the work is reproduced may constitute an infringement of the author's moral rights (but excluding it in the specific case “in view of the circumstances”- i.e. the poor conditions of the building). Quite interestingly, in its decision, the Tribunal expressly took into account the temporary character of street art, somehow implying that this would justify possible limitations to the scope of protection (“dada las características de la obra… no nace con vocación de perennidad, sino con una vida efímera”).
After more than nine years of legal battles, the staggering cost of the various copyright-related cases against Kim Dotcom and Megaupload have now been made public. Government lawyers in New Zealand have spent 40,500 hours working on cases related to Dotcom, in addition to burning through more than US$2.6 million in ancillary costs.
After consulting with our community, we’re excited to build on the success of last year’s virtual event and host the second-ever virtual CC Global Summit from 20-24 September 2021! Join thousands of leading activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, and more to discuss a range of topics, from the future of open and the unknowns of artificial intelligence to the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on open science.
