Josh and Kurt talk about what 3rd party means in the current world. From 5G suppliers, to the Codecov and Solarwinds breaches. Is there anyone we can trust?
In this video, we are looking at UbuntuDDE Remix 21.04.
Today we are looking at UbuntuDDE Remix 21.04. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, the latest of Deepin, and uses about 1GB of ram (but it can become a lot more) when idling. Enjoy!
On this episode of This Week in Linux, NASA has successfully flown a Linux and Open Source powered craft on Mars! In Distro News, Ubuntu has released “Hirsuite Hippo” so if you’re an Ubuntu user you will certainly want to check out Ubuntu 21.04 or perhaps one of the 21.04 Ubuntu Flavours which have also been released. Then we’ll check out the latest release of the Arch Linux based EndeavourOS. In App News, KDE has announced the first release of the Application Suite after the renaming to KDE Gear with KDE Gear 21.04. We’ll also check out the latest version of the Geary Email Client and Jellyfin’s new media player. Then we’ll jump right into so Drama because IBM has been a little bit of hot water with some confusion over their employee development policies and it turns out Research Papers can get an entire university banned from Linux Kernel contributions. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Adblocking is one of those topics that people like apply a black and white mentality to, but I don't think it's as simple as ads are bad and they should be blocked or ads are inherentently good and blocking them makes you a bad person.
The University of Minnesota has been banned from the Linux kernel.
We'll share the history, the context, and where things stand now around the controversial research that led to the ban.
Plus Ubuntu 21.04 is out, and we try WSL's new GUI Linux app support.
I purchased a new printer and had some issues with the proprietary plugin. The folks on the openSUSE forum are incredibly knowledgeable and helpful.
University of Minnesota (UMN) assistant professor Kangjie Lu, along with graduate students Qiushi Wu and Aditya Pakki, apologized to the Linux community on Saturday for the controversial research into "hypocrite commits" that got the entire university system banned from contributing to the Linux kernel.
In an email to the Linux kernel mailing list, the trio said that the research in question, which sought to highlight one of the ways open source projects such as Linux can be undermined, was carried out in August 2020. The findings were published to GitHub on February 10; they didn't appear to attract much attention for several months.
Then last week, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux developer who oversees the stable release channel, banned UMN from contributing to the Linux kernel. He also said in an email to Pakki that he'd have to "rip out your previous contributions, as they were obviously submitted in bad-faith with the intent to cause problems."
This quickly became a hot-button issue among the Linux developer community, and the UMN Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) apologized for the incident a day later. But the need to double-check all of the university's contributions to the Linux kernel still raised the ire of many already-quite-busy Linux developers.
More than two months in the works, Linux kernel 5.12 is here with dynamic thermal power management mechanism, initial support for zoned block devices for the Btrfs file system, netfilter improvements, high compression LZ4 mode support for the F2FS file system, and support for non-uniform memory access (NUMA) systems for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture.
Kfence, a new memory-debugging tool, has been added as well in Linux 5.12, which now supports the open source ACRN reference hypervisor designed for embedded IoT development, Playstation 5 DualSense wireless game controllers, Nintendo 64 game controllers, and the the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet Gen 2.
Linux Kernel 5.12 is available for download. We give you a brief of the new features and how to install the latest Kernel.
After a week delay, the Linux 5.12 kernel was just released as stable.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the brief 5.12 announcement, "Thanks to everybody who made last week very calm indeed, which just makes me feel much happier about the final 5.12 release."
Thanks to everybody who made last week very calm indeed, which just makes me feel much happier about the final 5.12 release.
Both the shortlog (appended) and the diffstat are absolutely tiny, and it's mainly just a random collection of small fixes in various areas: arm64 devicetree files, some x86 perf event fixes (and a couple of tooling ones), various minor driver fixes (amd and i915 gpu fixes stand out, but honestly, that's not because they are big, but because the rest is even smaller), a couple of small reverts, and a few locking fixes (one kvm serialization fix, one memory ordering fix for rwlocks).
Anyway, this obviously means that I'll start the merge window for 5.13 tomorrow. But I'd ask that even developers champing at the bit to get their shiny new code merged please spend a bit of time running and checking out 5.12.
Despite the extra week, this was actually a fairly small release overall. Judging by linux-next, 5.13 will be making up for it.
Linus
Linux Kernel 5.11 was an impressive release with the support for new hardware that’s probably out-of-stock till the end of 2022.
Now, almost after 2 months of work and a week of delay for a release candidate version 8, Linux Kernel 5.12 is here.
The improvements span across many things that include processor support, laptop support, new hardware support, storage enhancements, and a few more essential driver additions.
Linus Torvalds has released the 5.12 kernel. "Thanks to everybody who made last week very calm indeed, which just makes me feel much happier about the final 5.12 release." Headline features in 5.12 include the removal of a number of obsolete, (mostly) 32-bit Arm subarchitectures, atomic instructions for BPF, conditional file lookups with LOOKUP_CACHED, support for zoned block devices in the Btrfs filesystem, threaded NAPI polling in the network stack, filesystem ID mapping, support for building the kernel with Clang link-time optimization, the KFENCE kernel-debugging tool, and more.
The University of Minnesota researchers who have stirred up the kernel community with various types of bad patches have sent an open letter to the linux-kernel list.
The maintainer of the stable Linux kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman, has snubbed an effort by a group at the University of Minnesota to get back in his good graces, after the group submitted known buggy patches to him in order to write a paper based on it.
The two students who wrote the paper — Kangjie Lu and Qiushi Wu — and their instructor, Aditya Pakki, sent an "open letter to the Linux community" on 24 April, apologising for what they had done and claiming that they had noble goals for doing so.
But Kroah-Hartman gave them short shrift, saying: "As you know, the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board submitted a letter on Friday [23 April] to your University outlining the specific actions which need to happen in order for your group, and your University, to be able to work to regain the trust of the Linux kernel community.
Saturday University of Minnesota researchers emailed the Linux kernel mailing list apologizing for submitting buggy code as part of a research project to see whether it would be accepted.
A new version of Geary, the GTK email client for Linux, has been released — and it’s a substantial uplift!
Not that news of release will be “news” to some of you! A number of Linux blogs wrote about Geary 40 as soon as its source code hit the GNOME FTP. I chose to to wait until Geary 40 was up on Flathub as there’s nothing worse than reading about something cool that you can’t easily try!
So here it is: Geary 40.
The Geary email client 40.0 was released a few days ago with UI enhancements.
Like Gnome core apps, Geary has the similar version system. After v3.38, Geary 40 was released days ago with adaptive user interface that supports for half-screen, portrait and small displays. So it finally has a Linux phone friendly UI.
A proxy service aims to act on behalf of another. It could be to act on behalf of another person or behalf of another client machine or server. Hence, when we talk proxy servers, we have forward proxy servers or reverse proxy servers.
A forward proxy server is positioned at the edge of your network to regulate outbound traffic according to preset rules in a shared network. It is also used to disguise a client’s machine IP address and block malicious inbound traffic. Forward proxy servers keep track of requests, responses, sources, and destinations, allowing different clients to send out various requests to other servers through the forward proxy, intermediate for all of them.
The latest version of the free Kdenlive video editor for Linux and Windows can do speech to text conversion for subtitles or transcripts. Manual module installation is required, and kdenlive won't recognize them, so it won't do you any good. The online resource module which provides easy access to sound clips from Freesound and other sources has been rewritten, the Zoom bar has been improved and there are a lot of bug-fixes.
The latest version of the GNU GPL v3 licensed multiple digital currency miner XMRig adds one tiny fix for the assembly code used to mine uPlexa curency on the CPU. XMRig 6.12.0, released less than a week ago, added support for mining the uPlexa (UPX) currency on CPUs and GPUs, optimizations for the RandomX algorithm and a fix for showing the total hashrate correctly when it is compiled without OpenCL support.
The YaCy peer to peer search engine has been around to 2005. It works, sort-of. You can install it on your own desktop computer, or a home server or a NAS, and use it to search the web. It will produce search results, but they won't be very good when they eventually show up after what seems like forever if you are used to the very impressive search speed commercial search engines like Bing and Google, and Bing front-ends like Duck Duck Go and Ecosia, provide.
YaCy is written in Java, and the code-base is mostly ancient. What's worse is that it comes with, and relies on, a bundle of ancient and wildly outdated Java libraries. YaCy was pretty actively developed the first few years after it was released in 2005. Development kind of died out around 2010, with only sporadic minor changes now and then being added to the repositories. Development essentially died around 2016. That changed around March this year.
Written purely in Go programming language, duf ( Disk Usage Free utility) tool is a free and opensource command-line tool that is an alternative to the df command. It intuitively displays the disk usage statistics of the system in a tabular format with color-coded output. It can be installed on Linux, BSD, Windows, and even macOS.
This brief guide explains the steps to enable Packman repository in openSUSE and how to install multimedia codecs in openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed editions from Packman repository. Installing codecs is one of the essential things to do in your openSUSE desktop system after doing a clean installation. Many multimedia codecs are non-free, so they are not included in the openSUSE default repositories due to legal reasons. This is why we need to add some third-party repositories like Packman, which provides various non-free packages, restricted codecs and libraries.
Packman is the largest external repository that offers various additional packages for openSUSE. It contains all essential multimedia codecs, many audio and video player applications, games and also network related applications. Without Packman, you may not able to play many online or offline multimedia content.
Before adding a third-party repository, you must remember that the packages hosted in a third-party repository are neither tested nor supported by openSUSE development team. Use it at your own risk.
Cherrytree is a note-taking and syntax highlighting editor that can be used to collect and sort notes of all kinds. It offers a tree-based structure on the left side of the application to easily navigate through added notes collection. Each entry there represents a hierarchically sorted text page and is referred to as a “node”.
The program name refers to the use of different colored cherries to mark different levels. One of the strengths of the program is the included editor.
JetBrains DataGrip is an IntelliJ-based IDE (integrated development environment) for databases. It supports everything from MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Amazon Redshift, Sybase, DB2, SQLite, HyperSQL, Apache Derby, and H2.
The app is cross-platform and works on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. In this guide, we’ll show you how to get JetBrains DataGrip up and running on Linux. For more information on DataGrip, click here.
There are two ways to install Debian packages on OpenSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed, one is using SNAP to get Ubuntu-specific packages and the other by converting .Deb files into .RMP using Alien package convertor. We will show how to use both of them, here.
OpenSUSE uses the YMP file extension but also allows the installation of RPM packages, thus we can convert easily the Debian packages that are not available to install on this Linux. However, converting packages from one format to another is one thing, and installing the same is another. I am saying this because there is no guarantee that the converted packages will get installed without any error. In such a situation, Snapcraft can help a lot because it creates an isolated environment to install packages thus doesn’t depend on the type of Linux system you are using. All the available software on its repository are installable on OpenSUSE. If you don’t want to use SNAP the Flatpak is there, however, the numbers of software packages in it are low as compared to SNAP.
Today we are looking at how to turn on Linux Apps in Chrome OS 90 and newer on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
In Fedora and Red Hat enterprise, some arrangements allow you to use an Apache PHP server with MySQL. But you may not always find ways to install software stacks on Red Hat-based systems. It’s a bit tuff to find a convenient solution to get these kinds of stuff together in a repository. Moreover, sometimes you may also find it challenging to configure the httpd server on a Red Hat-based system. To solve all these issues, you can install and enable the Remi repository on your Fedora and Red Hat enterprise. After installing the Remi repository on your machine, you can easily pull applications on your computer through the repository.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx (Pronounce as Engine X) is a powerful web server software that can be used on your server. It is also known for its high performance and low memory usage which will allow fewer resources to be used but getting the job done efficiently. A popular setup is to use it as a proxy for Apache, which can then serve application requests.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Nginx on an AlmaLinux 8.
On Ubuntu, you may (for one reason or another) wish to view information about all USB devices connected to the system. Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t come with an official GUI USB tool that users can use to view this information efficiently.
Poking around in your Linux system files, you might have come across a file in the /etc directory named shadow. It may sound creepy, but it's really a safe, necessary, and useful file for system administration.
Today we'll take a closer look at the contents of the /etc/shadow file and what it can tell you about your system.
[...]
The shadow file really isn't mysterious at all. Remember, however, that if you want to change passwords and password rules, you should avoid editing the shadow file directly and instead opt to use tools designated for that purpose.
Whenever you add a new user to your Linux system, the /etc/shadow file is automatically modified to store the authentication information about the user.
The latest development versin of the popular Wine Windows API re-implementaiton has 44 mostly game and application-specific bug fixes, NetApi32, WLDAP32, and Kerberos libraries converted to portable executables, improved plug and play driver support and some new media foundation code under the hood. You still can't play Mario Kart DX12 with it.
[...]
Wine 6.7 fixes a crash of installation of multiple applications like Autdesk 3ds Max9 and Informix Database, a crash with NotImplementedException at IWebBrowser2.get_LocationName() that affected several bussiness related programs like SharpDevelop and Clarion Enterprise, fixes for several audio programs like Rekordbox 5.3.0 and Winamp and a crash fix for the immesily popular WeChat chat application from the China-based Tencent Holdings Ltd. Americans and Europeans are generally not familiar with WeChat, it is mostly used in Asia where it is a extremely popular way of sharing every aspect of your life with the Chinese authorities.
Raspberry Pi has been an exceptional platform to enjoy retro gaming, and 2021 has a lot to offer on the best emulators that can help in upgrading the experience to something enjoyable and worthwhile. Enjoying retro games is best fitted with a rightful emulator that bears a variety of tools that complement the feels of the good ole days.
When people say retro, the first thing coming to mind is old, and that is exactly what the function of emulators is for, as it relieves the games loved in the past to the modern world. The addition of the Raspberry Pi Pico device has been excellent in supporting this feature of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, as it promotes the use of Linux native language for its functions.
We give you a list of GNOME 40 extensions that would make your desktop experience even better. Have a look.
Drawing is a free basic image editor supporting PNG, JPEG and BMP file types. It is similar to Microsoft Paint, but aiming at the GNOME desktop.
There are a lot of drawing apps for Linux, but most of them have a heavy focus on artists and are filled with sophisticated features. If you’re not interested in fancy features but want a simple drawing app, try Drawing instead.
Drawing allows you to draw or edit pictures with tools such as pencil, line or arc, selection, shapes, text insertion, resizing, cropping, rotating, and so on. The app is now part of the GNOME Circle initiative.
Manjaro Linux is an Arch-based distribution for x86_64 computers which features a graphical system installer (provided by Calamares) and pre-configured desktop environments. The latest snapshot of this rolling release project is Manjaro 21.0 which upgrades the default kernel to Linux 5.10 LTS.
Depending on which desktop edition of the distribution we choose to run we will get to see different new features and improvements. The Xfce edition upgrades the desktop to Xfce 4.16 and offers fractional scaling, as well as the ability to pause and resume file transfers in the Thunar file manager.
The KDE Plasma edition runs Plasma 5.21. The application menu offers two-pane navigation of program launchers. This release also reportedly ships with a new Plasma System Monitor tool and a settings module called Plasma Firewall for blocking unwanted network connections. The Plasma desktop's Wayland support has also been updated.
Manjaro's GNOME edition makes it possible to move application launchers and sort them into folders. GNOME 3.38 can run on multiple displays, each with their own refresh rate. The GNOME edition also offers parental controls through the user account manager.
I decided to try Manjaro's KDE Plasma edition which is a 2.7GB download. Booting from the provided media brings up a menu offering to start the distribution with open source drivers or non-free drivers. Either option loads the Plasma desktop.
Plasma features icons on the desktop for opening a PDF of a user guide and for launching the system installer. The guide includes detailed instructions for obtaining and installing Manjaro along with helpful screenshots. Across the bottom of the display we find a thick desktop panel. On this panel are buttons for opening the application menu, quick-launch buttons for the Dolphin file manager and Firefox, and a system tray.
Shortly after Plasma loads a welcome window appears. This window provides us with access to release notes, on-line documentation, and support forums. There is also a button for launching the distribution's installer.
4MLinux 37.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
The thirtieth installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending on April 25th, keeping you guys up to date with the most important things happening in the Linux world. If you missed last week’s 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup, you can check it out here.
We had another wonderful week in the world of Linux releases with Ubuntu 21.04 and Bluestar Linux 5.11.15.
Have a great week and stay safe!
My new NAS at home is running TrueNAS Core. So far, it has been excellent, however I struggled a bit setting up a NetBSD VM on it. Part of the problem is that a lot of the docs and how-tos I found are stale, and the information in it no longer applies.
TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI :) But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with one caveat (see below).
The improved GUI was released with Config::Model::TkUI 1.374. This new version is available on CPAN and on Debian/experimental). It will be released on Debian/unstable once the next Debian version is out.
uGet is a lightweight yet powerful Open Source download manager for GNU/Linux developed with GTK+, which also comes packaged as a portable Windows app.
[...]
KGet Integration captures the downloads to download them in KGet. This application is designed for Linux. This work was heavily based on the uGet Integrator. Most changes are the name, variables and icons. Plus the kget-integrator is smaller as KGet supports less features.
Got a new machine Lenovo ThinkCenter M75s gen2, and installed Debian on it. I wanted to try out the ryzen CPU. I haven't used a physical x86-64 Debian desktop machine since I threw away my Athlon 64 machine (dx5150), so that's like 15 years? Since then my main devices were macbooks and virtual machines (on GCE and Sakura) and raspberry pi. I got buster installed just fine. Finding the right keystrokes after boot was challenging because the graphical UI doesn't say anything.
wake on lan. I have not been able to get wake on lan working. I wonder if poweroff command is powering off the system too much and losing power on the ethernet too. Do I need to suspend?
Six months ago I was elected to the Ubuntu Community Council. After the first month, I wrote a text about how I experienced the first month. Time flies and now six months have already passed.
In the first few months we have been able to fill some of the councils and boards that needed to be refilled in the community. But even where this has not been possible, we have initiated new ways to ensure that we move forward on the issues. One example is the LoCo Council, which could not be filled again, but we found people who were given the task of rethinking this council and proposing new structures. This process of evaluating and rethinking this area will take some time.
There are some issues that we have on the agenda at the moment. Some of these are general issues related to the community, but some affects individual members of the community or where there are problems.
For some topics, we quickly realised that it makes sense to have contact persons at Canonical who can advance these topics. We were very pleased to find Monica Ayhens-Madon and Rhys Davies, two employees at Canonical, who support us in bringing topics into the organisation and also implement tasks. One consequence of this has been the reactivation of the Community Team at Canonical.
One topic that we have also come across, through the staffing of the board and the update of the benefits that you get as a member, is the Ubuntu Membership. At this point I would like to advertise the community and to show your community connection with Ubuntu through a membership. If you want to do this and know what benefits you are entitled to, you can read about it in the Ubuntu Wiki.
The PinePhone is an interesting Linux smartphone that has made waves in the Linux community over the past few months. A new device from Pine64, the company behind the handset, aims to enhance the utility of the plucky phone by turning it into a tiny Linux computer.
Pine64 showed off a new keyboard case for the phone that essentially transforms the PinePhone into a miniature laptop. The PinePhone supports a variety of Linux distros by default and can operate as a pseudo-desktop by hooking it up to a monitor and keyboard (also known as Convergence). The keyboard case is a more convenient option than plugging the phone into a USB-C hub and connecting a standalone keyboard and monitor.
However, considering the PinePhone’s minuscule 5.95-inch display and its low 1440x720 resolution, using the phone as a clamshell computer seems to be more of a novelty than anything. The utility of such a device is limited, especially when there are far better options for mini-laptops (like the GPD Pocket 2 Max).
Logo 1, is for Repair Preservation Group RPG is a nonprofit org with mission to make independent repair affordable, accessible and reliable for all people.
Logo 2, is for Fight to Repair — the legislative arm of RPG that is fighting legislative battles to further RPGs mission.
Rubik’s cubes have been mystifying and frustrating people for more than 40 years now. According to Forbes, 450 million Rubik’s cubes had been sold by 2020. But based on our very scientific estimates, only a small fraction of those have been solved. To avoid that difficulty, Stuart Gorman gave his Rubik’s cube chandelier the ability to unscramble itself.
This large 3D-printed chandelier looks exactly like the iconic cube, except that each section is lit by LEDs instead of covered with a sticker. Those are WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LEDs controlled by an Arduino Mega board. People usually choose the Mega when they need a lot of I/O pins, but in this case Gorman picked the Mega because it has lots of RAM to work with. That RAM is necessary for handling the complexity of the Arduino code that the lamp is running.
The lamp has a few different LED effects modes, which are selectable through a smartphone app that connects to the Arduino via a Bluetooth module. Static colors can be set to each face or it can flash random colors. But the exciting modes replicate traditional Rubik’s cube play. The first starts with a solved cube and then endlessly rotates random faces, like most people do when they attempt to solve a Rubik’s cube. The second mode will actually solve the cube, which it does by playing the first mode in reverse. This chandelier looks fantastic and is a lot of fun to watch in action.
The board of KDE e.V. sat down together (virtually) this weekend once again to do “board things” which means budgets, AGM planning, going over hiring and contracts, checking in with the working groups, and having a tiny bit of fun, too. The official song of this sprint is 2unlimited “Get Ready for This, but we made a playlist (see below).
Hey, it's already the last day at Penguicon2021 virtual event, and I'm taking a little break between panels to post the artworks I made.
[...]
The workshop was about the character design of a Penguin Wizard. I put a focus on black&white character creation, shapes and iteration to play between the archetypes (a set of features so the audience can directly identify the character as a penguin and as a wizard without the necessity of dialogues or backstory about it) and what will bring a hint of originality to the result. I want to thank here the participant for submitting their ideas during the livestream: the goat horns, the sachel and the cup of tea. This constrains helped to create this grumpy short penguin wizard, probably specialist in beverage made with herbs.
Here is a rendering I made of the character âËâcodenamed "Pengalf"âËâ developed during the workshop and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so feel free to reuse it:
The GNU project has released another fine version of the GNU Debugger (gdb). This release is the second bug-fix release for GDB 10.0 released in September 2020. It does not contain any new features.
gdb is a debugger that can handle programs written in C, C++, Go, Rust and a rather long list on other languages. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and many other operating systems running on a variety of architectures ranging form x86-64 to ARM to RISC-V.
GDB 10.2 is the second bug-fix release for the GDB 10.x branch released on September 13th, 2020. There are no new features in it, just bug-fixes.
Three weeks ago, I had a project idea while napping. I tried to forget it, but ended up prototyping it. Now I named it Hookbill and put it on GitLab.
Pollard, who has collaborated with Spike Lee, is a brilliant, prolific producer and director of documentaries, including episodes of PBS’s 1990 landmark Civil Rights series Eyes on the Prize and its 2008 sequel; 2003’s Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin; 2017’s ACORN and the Firestorm plus Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me, which aired on PBS’ American Masters series; Discovery Channel’s 2019 Why We Hate series; et al. No stranger to the fine art realm, Pollard also helmed HBO’s 2021 Black Art: In the Absence of Light.
In his 2008 documentary James Castle: Portrait of an Artist, Wolf documented another marginalized painter who’s outside of the rarefied art world’s mainstream because he’s deaf. In this candid interview conducted via conference call with the filmmakers speaking in New York, Pollard and Wolf discuss that Alabama original, Bill Traylor; whether white filmmakers should direct productions about Blacks; what the heck executive producers do, anyway; the cycle of features and documentaries about African American dissidents being surveilled by the government; the state of the documentary medium; upcoming projects; and more.
The circumstances under which you watch a film invariably affect the experience. Watching Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979) in the middle of America’s COVID-19 pandemic as well as the race protests certainly shaped how I viewed what is, at first glance, a critique of Japanese culture’s tendency to blindly obey. Written by an American ex-pat and directed by a Japanese rebel filmmaker, it is a fascinating cultural hybrid. The two perspectives elevate the film to a breezy, angry and universal meditation on power and obedience.
The film follows Makoto Kido, a bored high school science teacher who seems to be sleepwalking through a lonely life in an overcrowded Tokyo. We first meet him with his face smashed against the window of an overflowing subway car. A bit of a Japanese Travis Bickle, one might say. Early on in the film we see him fiddling with an idea for what will eventually become his diabolical plan but based on the man’s lazy attitude, it feels like mere daydreaming.
He is best known for his groundbreaking DNS cache-poisoning research that prompted an industry-wide scramble to address a major weakness in the way the web worked.
The big security news of Summer 2008 has been Dan Kaminsky's discovery of a serious vulnerability in DNS. This vulnerability could allow an attacker to redirect network clients to alternate servers of his own choosing, presumably for ill ends.
This all led to a mad dash to patch DNS servers worldwide, and though there have been many writeups of just how the vulnerability manifests itself, we felt the need for one in far more detail. Hence, one of our Illustrated Guides.
"Who appointed this billionaire head of global health?" asked one critic. "Oh yeah, he did."
"Lowering the Medicare eligibility age is not only the right thing to do from a public policy perspective," stated a letter to Biden on Sunday, "it is also what the overwhelming majority of Americans support."
As NGOs, UN agencies and the governments of less affluent states call for the suspension of patents, the stakes could not be higher.
In some cases, personal desks are being replaced with “hoteling” workstations, also called hot desks, which can be used by whoever needs a place to touch down for a day.
In the early months of the pandemic, when it was believed that the coronavirus was spread via contaminated surfaces, hot desks got a hard no from office users. But that stance has softened with the recognition that the virus is transmitted mainly through the air. Protocols for wiping down tabletops before and after use have become the norm. So has reserving a hot desk ahead of time rather than simply showing up and grabbing a free spot.
Workers have often resisted the loss of their personal desks when companies sought to reduce their real estate footprint, but they may be more amenable to the idea now if the payoff is the ability to skip the commute and work from home.
This article mainly concerns the DRC, which has a population of 91 million. With a GDP of just $50 billion a year and an extreme poverty rate of over 70 percent, it is one of the poorest nations on Earth. The infant mortality rate is 66 per 1,000 live births—one of the worst in the world, life expectancy is 60 years, and per 100k people maternal mortality is over 690. Conflicts from 1996 to the present, plus the resultant malnutrition and disease, have killed six million people.
Like their Franco-Belgian predecessors, the main interest of U.S. imperialists in DRC, on which this article focuses is Katanga, the uranium- and coltan-rich, south-eastern region that borders Angola and Zambia.
Mr. Biden was the first American president to make such an announcement, breaking with predecessors who did not wish to antagonize Turkey, a NATO ally and a strategically pivotal country straddling Europe and the Middle East.
The announcement carries enormous symbolic weight, equating the anti-Armenian violence with atrocities on the scale of those committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the government would present a new law this week to toughen anti-terror measures, including increased use of computer algorithms to detect potential terror threats among [Internet] users.
Ricard said France is working with investigators in Tunisia, where Gorchene returned to visit family near the coastal city of Sousse earlier this year. Ricard said Gorchene received French working papers last year as a delivery man but appeared to have lived illegally in France for a long period before that.
Authorities are looking for other possible suspects or accomplices in the killing.
Tunisia was among the biggest exporters of jihadists to places like Syria and Libya a few years ago. Tunisian authorities have condemned the Rambouillet attack.
If only solving the world’s looming energy crisis was as simple as putting out a press release. Geoff Russell explains why the hype over hydrogen isn’t going to cool a warming world. At least not yet, and not thanks to Australia.
As earthly hazards grow—not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality—escaping to Mars is not option for humanity.
Musk’s SpaceX just won a $2.9 billion NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Bezos.
The ruling could give a boost to untraceable campaign donations.
$10,260,000
Total Lobbying Expenditures, 2019
The Biden administration is “standing down” coordinated efforts by several key agencies to respond to recent major cybersecurity incidents including the SolarWinds hack, a senior administration official announced Monday.
Anne Neuberger, President Biden’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said the two unified coordination groups (UCGs) that were convened to respond to both the SolarWinds hack and recently discovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange Server would be scaled back.
Google spent $2.7 million on federal lobbying in the three months ending March 31, according to disclosures filed with Congress. That’s a 49% increase from the same period a year earlier, and comes as the company has been steadily increasing its Washington investments after a two-year decline. Global policy chief Karan Bhatia reorganized the Washington office when he took over in 2018.
[...]
Amazon boosted its lobbying spend by 11% in the quarter to $4.8 million, a company record and a reflection of the company’s sprawling business interests. The Seattle-based company said in its filing that it lobbied on a wide range of topics, from logistics to cloud-computing and a communications satellite program.
Women who express feminist views on social media have long been subjected to torrents of hateful comments. In China, not only do those views attract the attention of trolls, they can also lead to getting kicked off the platforms by furious users empowered by unlikely allies: the [Internet] companies themselves.
Several prominent Chinese feminists have had their accounts deleted from Weibo in the last two weeks following public complaints. According to the women, at least 15 accounts have been removed. The women say it is part of a growing online campaign to stamp out feminist voices in a country where the government controls the [Internet] and social movements are swiftly cut down. Two of the women have filed lawsuits against Weibo.
Wing wants to control its drone flights at a “central hub” from which the remote pilots can oversee operations without being in the aircraft’s operating area, the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday in a filing in the Federal Register.
The company also wants to launch drones from multiple locations within an operating area, and get FAA permission to receive less frequent checks from the regulator, the filing said. The agency posted the requests without saying whether it will approve them.
One young man said he thought Jeffrey Epstein did a great job as host. “He tried to bring everyone together, he tried to forget and act like we were not wearing face masks, that we’re not going through a pandemic,” he said. He wasn’t a big fan of Epstein’s singing, though. “I’m more of like a Michael Jackson person and stuff like that,” he said.
“You like Michael Jackson more than Jeffrey Epstein?” the producer confirmed. See, that’s why you do man-on-the-street interviews, for bizarre moments like that.
In reality, the Oscars are still forthcoming. The 2021 Academy Awards takes place Sunday, April 25 beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.
"I'm sorry," said one critic, "but Modi's authoritarian government can go to hell if they dare to silence the true human suffering."
D Young & Co European Patent Attorneys Simon O'Brien and Jennifer O'Farrell will provide an essential update and live Q&A on EPO biotechnology case law.
The Federal Circuit in Apple Inc. v. Qualcomm Incorporated handed down a decision on April 7, 2021 that provides guidance on the determination of standing for patent licensees who wish to contest the validity of a patent or patents in a licensed portfolio. The decision also provides further guidance to petitioners seeking appellate review after an unsuccessful validity challenge before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).
More specifically, the recent decision by the Federal Circuit reaffirms the requirement that a patent licensee show a specific ascertainable injury in fact associated with the challenged patent in order to have standing to raise a validity challenge in an Article III court. The Court clarified that an ongoing payment obligation under a broad licensing agreement involving the challenged patent does not suffice as such an ascertainable injury. Rather, the patent licensee must establish that the invalidity of the challenged patent will directly affect ongoing payment obligations under a licensing agreement.
The Court found that Apple did not prove that its contractual payment obligations under a licensing agreement would change if the challenged patents were held invalid, as would be required to prove an injury-in-fact. Accordingly, the Court found that Apple lacked standing and declined to address the merits of Apple’s invalidity arguments against the challenged patents in an appealed Inter Partes Review (IPR) decision.
Recent conversations about patent policy are increasingly incorporating themes of national security. In particular, the national security dimensions of “races” against technological superpowers such as China, in fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), fifth-generation (5G) mobile communications networks, and quantum computing, has given rise to a national dialogue on spurring domestic innovation, a dialogue into which patents naturally fit. As a result, national security has made a notable appearance in recent key patent policy situations, including the patent subject matter eligibility hearings in the Senate, the Apple–Qualcomm–Federal Trade Commission litigation over patents and antitrust, and the Verizon–Huawei patent licensing dispute. Many of these situations have given rise to an intuitively attractive though simplistic argument: If national security depends on rapid innovation and patents encourage innovation, then stronger patent protection enhances national security.
This Article challenges this logic on the relationship between patents and national security, in particular by considering that relationship from the lens of competition. It first turns to history, reviewing several instances in which patent protection has clashed with national security interests. These historical instances, which include pre–World War I torpedo development, the birth of the aviation industry, and post-9/11 bioterrorism responses, demonstrate how the competition-suppressing effects of aggressive patent assertion can diminish national security. Second, this Article considers the effects of diminished competition on cybersecurity, a critical component of modern national security. Economic research shows that competition can enhance cybersecurity, and thus patent-based limits on competition can weaken cybersecurity, both by generating economic incentives to make more secure products and by preventing the formation of technology “monocultures.” These historical and contemporary competition considerations thus lend to policy that balance patent incentives and the value of competition to drive forward security-sensitive technological development.
Justice Clarence Thomas is one of the most recognizable members of the United States Supreme Court. Many people recall his stormy Senate confirmation hearing and notice his fiery dissenting opinions which call on the Court to reflect the original public meaning of the Constitution. Yet observers have missed one of Justice Thomas’s most significant contributions to the Court—his intellectual property law jurisprudence. Justice Thomas has authored more majority opinions in intellectual property cases than any other Justice in the Roberts Court era and now ranks as one of the most prolific authors of patent law opinions in the history of the Supreme Court. Thus, at a time when intellectual property has become one of America’s most important assets, Justice Thomas has played an important role in the evolution of America’s innovation law and policy.
This article is the first to highlight the significance of Justice Thomas’s intellectual property jurisprudence. It considers how Justice Thomas emerged as the Roberts Court’s “chief justice” of intellectual property law, authoring more majority opinions than even colleagues known for their intellectual property law prowess. The article analyzes Justice Thomas’s key intellectual property opinions to understand their importance. It also highlights the distinguishing features of these opinions, including their faithful adherence to textualism, appreciation for the role of remedies, attention to technological and business context, awareness of the impact on intellectual property practitioners, and surprising unanimity. The article concludes that Justice Thomas’s deep respect for the constitutional separation of powers is at the heart of his intellectual property jurisprudence, as his opinions invite and sometimes nudge Congress to play its leading role in crafting intellectual property law.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the EU economy. They represent 99 % of all businesses in the EU, account for more than half of Europe’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employ about 100 million people . The positive association between economic performance and ownership of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is particularly strong for SMEs.
[...] SMEs can benefit from IP protection and seize business opportunities globally if their IP portfolio is managed effectively. A strong IP strategy also helps SMEs attract funds from potential investors, enabling them to internationalise in emerging markets. According to a joint report between the EPO and the EUIPO in 2019 , IPR-intensive industries generated approximately 45 % of the total GDP in the EU, worth EUR 6.6 trillion. Those sectors also accounted for most of the EU's trade with the rest of the world, comprising 96 % of goods exported from the EU.
Nokia and Lenovo have agreed a multi-year, multi-technology, patent cross-licence deal that will also see the Chinese company make a net balancing payment. Read more here
Apple has acquired at least 65 US patent assets from Panasonic, just weeks after picking up 24 more from the NPE Sun Patent Trust. Read more here
In an exclusive interview with IAM, former USPTO head Andrei Iancu amplifies his message that the US needs a national innovation policy and that policymakers need to wake up to SEPs. Read more here
A Vermont small business owner testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday about the nation’s slow and confusing patent process.
Georgia Grace Edwards, the co-founder of SheFly in Middlebury, spoke to the Intellectual Property Subcommittee about issues the female-led company faced through the U.S. patent system.
The Senate hearing was chaired by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy with an agenda of improving access and inclusivity in the U.S. patent system.
SheFly makes outdoor pants with a specially made zipper to allow women to answer nature’s call without exposing their skin to the elements or other people.
Edwards says the patent process is long, clunky and opaque. She said, at times, her company spent well over 50% of their revenue on legal assistance.
Personal electrocardiogram maker AliveCor is seeking to ban U.S. sales of Apple Watches after claims that the tech giant infringed on its patented technology.
The company announced this week it has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission alleging that Apple breached patent laws on three of AliveCor’s patented devices.
AliveCor asserts that Apple knowingly copied its patented technology in an effort to squash it as a market competitor.
Filing the complaint "is one step, among others, AliveCor is taking to obtain relief for Apple's intentional copying of AliveCor's patented technology – including the ability to take an ECG reading on the Apple Watch, and to perform heart rate analysis – as well as Apple's efforts to eliminate AliveCor as competition in the heart rate analysis market for the Apple Watch,” the company said in a statement.
The dead are more alive than ever. Thanks to social media and inherited 'intellectual property rights,' stars of the past enjoy digital immortality. Icons including Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Lennon remain active on blue-checkmarked social media accounts that are often controlled by for-profit corporations, which don't require a family tie to the deceased.
